Second Glance Read online

  “What’s your population?” Abigail asks.

  “Nine hundred ninety-seven,” Stanley says, then notices a nurse leading a girl with angry eyes up a flight of stairs, an orderly following with a small suitcase. “Nine hundred ninety-eight.” The doctor gestures toward a doorway that leads into a large sunny room, one again overrun with patients. “I believe in industrial work. Idle hands breed idle minds.” At tables, women sit weaving reeds into mangled baskets or assembling clothespins. They look up at me and see a rich lady in fashionable maternity clothing. They don’t realize that I am one of them.

  “We sell the crafts,” Stanley says proudly. “Use the proceeds for patient entertainment.”

  And do they come with a stamp on the bottom? Made reluctantly, by an individual who could not cope in the real world.

  The superintendent leads us further down the hall to a shut door. “Unfortunately, not all of our patients are cooperative,” Dr. Stanley says. He glances at me. “I don’t know if a woman in your condition should—”

  “I’m fine.” To prove this, I open the door myself.

  And then I wish I hadn’t.

  Two burly men stand on opposite sides of a tub of water, their hands pressing down the shoulders of a naked woman.

  Before she goes under, I notice that her lips are blue and her breasts have puckered like fruit dried on a vine. Over her head a steady stream of water runs from a tap. Beside her, another woman lies facedown on a table with a sheet covering her upper body. A nurse pumps a large bulb of water through a tube threaded into the patient’s rectum. “Hydrotherapy and colonic irrigation have been quite beneficial for disruptive patients,” Stanley says. “But I brought you in here to see something else. Ladies, I’m proud to present the first patient to undergo voluntary sterilization at our institution. She’s right back here.” He leads us to the rear of the room. “The salpingectomy was done when she came into the infirmary for treatment of an irritable bowel. She comes from one of the original ten families studied in the survey, one with a long genetic history of depression and disruptive behavior. Dr. Kastler and I provided the two necessary signatures.”

  We stop at another table, beside which sits an attendant in a white coat like Dr. Stanley’s. A woman lies on top, shivering. “She’s quite healthy now,” the psychiatrist says enthusiastically. “All this fuss . . . ” here he waves his arm vaguely, “has nothing to do with the procedure.” The attendant wraps a cold, soaked sheet around the patient, mummifying her as her teeth chatter. “Wet packs tend to work on the difficult ones,” Dr. Stanley says.

  “What did she do?” I hear myself ask.

  “Attempted suicide. For the third time.”

  I see, now, that her wrists are poking through the wet pack, and are bandaged. There but for the grace of God go I. If my father were not Harry Beaumont, if my husband were not Spencer Pike, would I be lying on that table?

  “I . . . excuse me . . .” Turning past Dr. Stanley, I push out of the room and into the corridor of the hospital. I hurry past the crowded common room and the girl tied to the bench and turn the corner blindly only to collide with a patient. She is small and dark, with hair plaited in greasy braids. Her arms are scratched from shoulder to wrist. “They’ll take away your baby, too,” she says.

  My arms cross protectively over my belly. As she reaches out to touch me, I turn my back and run as quickly as I can through this labyrinth to the entrance of the hospital. Throwing open the doors, I gasp in as much air as my lungs will hold and sit on the stone steps. After a few moments I pull up the sleeve of my blouse and unravel the bandage Spencer tied on my wrist. The cut still looks angry, a slash of a mouth across skin.

  It is true what Spencer says, after all—some women are meant to be social workers, and I am not one of them. I am supposed to be the mother of his children, and I cannot even get that right.

  This is how Abigail finds me fifteen minutes later. I can’t meet her gaze; I am that embarrassed by my behavior. She sits down beside me. I see her notice my scar, but she does not comment. “The first time I watched therapy here,” Abigail confesses, “I went back to the office and handed in my resignation, telling my boss I didn’t have the heart for a career in public welfare. Do you know what he told me? That this was exactly why I had to do it. So one day there would be fewer and fewer people who had to suffer.”

  Put into those words, it makes sense. It is social welfare in a nutshell—do what you can today so that you can change the world tomorrow. And yet I wonder if anyone asked the patient before they strapped her down why she no longer wanted to live. I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that she cannot have babies anymore.

  Mostly I wonder why Abigail and Dr. Stanley would advocate sterilizing that patient, but not allow her to take her own life. Either act would keep her from passing her genes along to offspring. So why not give her the choice?

  “You didn’t quit,” I comment.

  Abigail shakes her head. “Neither will you,” she says, not unkindly, as she pulls down my sleeve. “Tomorrow, eight A.M. Meet me at the office on Church Street.”

  Q. Why sterilize?

  A. To rid the race of those likely to transmit the dysgenic tendencies to which they are subject. To decrease the need for charity of a certain form. To reduce taxes. To help alleviate misery and suffering. To do what Nature would do under natural conditions, but more humanely. Sterilization is not a punitive measure. It is strictly protective.

  —American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  By the time I drive home the sun is low enough in the sky to meet my gaze head on and to grace the black-eyed Susans lining Otter Creek Pass with gilded crowns. I am so filled with the need for it to be tomorrow that I might burst.

  I park the car and climb the steps of the porch. As I hurry to the door, my boot knocks aside something small and light. Looking down, I find a basket no bigger than a fist. Unlike the work of the patients I saw today, these sides are intricately twisted and the weaving is neat and tight.

  I slip it into the pocket of my dress and enter the house. “Cissy?” Spencer’s voice draws me like a magnet. I find him in the doorway of his study, holding his afternoon scotch. “Here I rush home from the university to apologize to my lovely wife for standing her up at lunchtime, and she’s gone and left me.”

  “Only temporarily,” I say, kissing his cheek.

  “And what put you into such a fine mood?”

  I notice Ruby, standing like furniture in the distance, listening when she should not be. “The Children’s Aid Society,” I lie. “I had a meeting.”

  Ruby’s eyes slide away. I would have told her if there were a meeting; I always do. I give her my movements and my location at all times, just in case Spencer wants to know.

  “Good news?” he asks.

  “Everything,” I say, “is looking up.”

  Ruby follows me to the bedroom and begins to unbutton my dress in the back, places I can no longer reach. “I know what you’re thinking,” I say. But she remains silent as she pulls the fabric over my head and hands me a comfortable cotton sundress to put on for dinner. She ties it loosely and begins to hang up my fancy dress. The basket falls out of its pocket.

  I pick it up, set it in the drawer of my nightstand. She is curious about this too, I can see, but I pretend not to notice. I do not owe her any explanations—not about the basket, not about my earlier whereabouts. And right now, I am too excited about tomorrow to worry about what might happen when Spencer realizes what I’ve done today.

  Then I notice that Ruby is wearing my hand-me-down shoes. She steps into the closet to hang up the dress—the closet she has cleaned up since my morning séance—and walks toward the bed. Sliding her hand beneath the pillow she hands me back the biography of Mr. Houdini that she has hidden on my behalf.

  It is her way of telling me that my secret is safe from Spencer. Our eyes meet. “Thank you,” I murmur.

  “Do you believe it, Miz