Second Glance Read online

  He holds my hand. It makes me think of being a child, hanging onto my father to cross Church Street. I married Spencer when I was seventeen; he became the next adult to keep me safe. As I lay on my side with the bulk of my belly swelling over my thighs, it strikes me that I have never had the chance to grow up.

  “You feeling better?” Spencer asks, and he smiles so sweetly something inside me breaks loose.

  I love him. The smell of his hair and the bump of his nose that supports his glasses; the long lean muscles you would never expect to find beneath his pressed shirts and jackets. I adore the way he looks at me sometimes, as if love is a quantity he cannot measure scientifically, because it multiplies too quickly. I wish that we had met, however, on a busy street in New York City, or on a neighbor’s porch in Iowa, or even during a transatlantic crossing—any circumstance at all that would make my relationship with Spencer separate from his relationship with my father.

  He puts his hand over my stomach, and I close my eyes. It is impossible to not think of Spencer’s Committee on the Human Factor, which advocates the careful selection of a mate. But I was picked because I am Harry Beaumont’s daughter, not because I am myself.

  I wonder how Spencer feels, to have made such an informed decision, and to still have wound up with something defective.

  “How did I get here?” I ask, many questions at once.

  “You fainted at the Exposition.”

  “The heat . . .”

  “Rest, Cissy.”

  I feel fine. I want to shout this, even though it isn’t true. There were times as a child I would climb to the roof of this very house, stand spread-eagled and yell until the whole of Comtosook heard me. It was not that I had anything important to say, but rather, that my father wanted me quiet.

  I see this streak as a black curl in my blood, moving through my system and surfacing when I least expect it. Like now, with Spencer fussing over me. My smoking. This afternoon, at the fortune-teller’s tent. Or last night, when I cut myself.

  Sometimes I wonder if I inherited it from my mother.

  “I’ll send Ruby in to you.” Spencer kisses the crown of my head. “You’ll be fine.”

  If Spencer says so, it must be true.

  Ruby hovers at the door, waiting to be invited in. Our house girl is fourteen, close enough to my age for a friendship, and yet we are leagues apart. It is not just that she is French Canadian—I am so much older than she is, and not just chronologically. When she thinks no one can see, Ruby dances between the white sheets she hangs out on the line—pirouettes and the lindy hop and even a little Charleston. Me, I never forget that at any time, someone might be watching.

  She comes bearing a brown-wrapped package. “Miz Pike,” she says, “look what came in the mail.”

  She sets the package down beside me and makes an unsuccessful attempt to ignore the bandage on my wrist. Ruby, of course, knows what happened. She held a bowl of warm water for Spencer, as he cleaned the cut and bound it tightly to heal. She is part of the conspiracy of silence.

  Ruby works the twine free and unwraps the box. Inside is a Sears, Roebuck order—a pair of half-boots just like the ones Spencer has removed from my feet. These are a size bigger, and maybe will not pinch so much, like all my shoes do now that I am so pregnant. Glancing over the edge of the bed, I stare at Ruby’s shoes. “You wear about a size six, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why don’t you take them? I don’t imagine my foot’s going to get smaller again.” Ruby holds my old boots in her hand as if they are a treasure. “My sister, she used to give me hand-me-downs.”

  “You have a sister?” How can I have lived with a girl for a year, and not have known this?

  “Not anymore. Diphtheria.” Ruby busies herself unpacking the rest of the box. Tiny sweaters and socks and miniature undershirts in all the hues of white spill over the bedclothes, a Lilliputian bounty. These clothes seem too little to fit on a doll, much less a baby.

  “Oh,” Ruby breathes, picking up a lacy cap between her thumb and forefinger. “Have you ever seen anything so fine in your life?”

  Ruby wants this baby more than I do. It’s not that I am not pleased by the thought of his arrival—it is just that no one seems to understand that I will not survive this birth. Spencer taught me well; this defect is in my germ plasm. If I don’t manage to kill myself first, then the day this baby is born is the day I’m going to die.

  Spencer has showed me numerous obstetrical texts to convince me otherwise; he has made me speak to the best of doctors. I nod, I smile, sometimes I even listen. Meanwhile, I plot my suicide. But then I feel the baby’s small feet running the curve of my ribs, as if he knows by instinct where to find my heart, and I realize I am lost.

  “Oh, no, Miz Pike,” Ruby says; until then I am not aware that I’ve begun to cry. “Should I get the professor?”

  “No.” I use the edge of the sheet to wipe my eyes. “No, I’m fine. Just tired. Really.”

  Last night, I thought that if I cut deep enough, I might be able to see all the way down past blood and bone and marrow to the place where it aches all the time. Spencer, when he bandaged my wrist, said I must think about my baby. I have two months left before I am due to give birth, after all. He does not understand that I was thinking of my son. I was trying to spare him the weight I have carried all my life: the knowledge that he was the reason for my death.

  I know that my actions don’t follow logic; that harming myself puts my infant in danger too. But somehow, when it is just me and the dark and the night and a blade, reason never counts. I have tried to tell this to Spencer, many times. “But I love you,” he says, as if that should be enough to keep me here.

  Now, with Ruby beside me, I try to find words to explain the impossible. “Did you ever walk through a room that’s packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?”

  She hesitates, then nods slowly. Cocking my head, I look at her, and wonder if she might not be quite as young as I’ve thought. “Miz Pike,” Ruby whispers shyly. “Maybe we could pretend to be sisters.”

  Ruby, a servant girl, and me, the wife of one of greater Burlington’s most esteemed citizens. “Maybe,” I answer.

  PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY: Prof. H. F. Perkins. Lecture course with conference and report exercises covering the principles of elementary embryology, the physical basis of inheritance, principles of breeding experiments, and eugenics, the practical application of heredity to mankind. Text used: Newman’s Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics.

  —University of Vermont Bulletin, 1923–24

  For years now, I have been fascinated by Harry Houdini. I’ve read every biography written since his death in 1926; I keep a scrapbook of newspaper articles about his amazing feats. It is not just the obvious—that, like him, I know of ties that bind and chains that keep one rooted to a certain place, or that, like him, I sometimes wish to disappear. No, what is more intriguing to me is Houdini’s obsession with the spirit world.

  Did I mention that Houdini, too, lost his mother?

  The new book I’m reading chronicles the long war between Houdini and Margery, the Boston medium. During her séances, her voice would appear from different parts of the room, a spirit bell would ring, a megaphone was wont to fly across the table—all while others held the medium’s hands. Houdini, convinced that she was a hoax, built her a fraud-preventer cabinet and challenged her to hold a séance from inside it. But during the séance, a folding ruler was found at the medium’s feet—something Margery and Houdini each claimed the other had planted. In the end, Houdini died discrediting her, and swore that if a spirit were ever to return from the other side of the veil, it would be him.

  Although séances have been held on Halloween, now, for five years, he hasn’t come back.

  This is what I think about Mr. Houdini: if he hadn’t been so desperate to contact his departed mother, he wouldn’t have fought so fiercely against Margery. He denounced the spir