Second Glance Read online

  “Better go. You wouldn’t want to be stuck here overnight.”

  “No,” I admit, and then realize what I’ve said. Cheeks reddening, I meet his gaze. “How do you say ‘I’ll return?’”

  It is a challenge, and he accepts it. “N’pedgiji.”

  “Well, then. N’pegdiji.”

  He bursts into laughter. “You just told me you’ll fart.”

  If possible, I blush even harder. “Thank you for the language lesson, Mr. Wolf.”

  “Wli nanawalmezi, Lia.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He smiles slowly. “Take good care of yourself.”

  I hurry up the hill as best I can, lumbering under the weight of my baby. Chijis. On the drive home, I listen to Abigail tell me stories of second cousins who killed others in bar fights, of a rampant outbreak of venereal disease among a strain of Delacours. “Did you learn anything?” she asks finally, when she has run out of things to say.

  How to speak their language. And maybe, how to listen. “Nothing you’d consider important,” I reply, and am silent for the rest of the ride home.

  John Delacour, aka Gray Wolf, is of particular notoriety even for this clan. He has a history of heavy drinking, sex offense, nomadism, and criminality, and has been known to change his name several times. He was arrested in 1913 for hitting a man over the head with a brick. In 1914, he was sent to prison for a murder conviction. There is mention from several relatives about his illegitimate children. John is an absolute liar and very evasive. For this reason it is absolutely impossible to get the truth out of him.

  —From the files of Abigail Alcott,

  Department of Public Welfare social worker

  When I come home, Ruby is waiting at the door with her heart in her eyes, and Spencer is a step behind. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roars, slamming the door behind me. He grabs my upper arms so hard I know it will leave bruises.

  “I can explain—”

  “Explain this, Cissy. Explain why I got a call from my secretary saying that you’d been to the office to meet Abigail Alcott. Explain why my wife, who is seven months pregnant with my firstborn son, would be stupid enough to visit a state hospital for the insane where she could have been seriously hurt. And for Christ’s sake, to be traipsing around some Gypsy camp—”

  “It isn’t some Gypsy camp, Spencer, and I’m fine.” I try to pull away from him, but he will not let me go. “I wanted to see what it is that holds you and my father in so much thrall. Is that a sin?”

  “You are in no condition to—”

  “I’m pregnant, Spencer, not feebleminded.”

  “Is that so?” Spencer explodes. “Jesus Christ, Cissy, how can you expect me to trust you with your own judgment, when you try to kill yourself one night and the next day you’re off at an insane asylum—”

  “That’s unfair,” I say, my eyes stinging already.

  “Unfair? Try imagining what it’s like to sit here, thinking that your wife might be injured, or God forbid, killed by some lunatic. Abigail is trained to do what she does; you are not. And you will stay in this house, goddammit, until I tell you otherwise!”

  “You can’t do that to me.”

  “Can’t I?” Spencer grabs my wrists hard enough to make me cry out. He pulls me up the stairs. The only room in the house that locks from the outside is our bedroom, and Spencer drags me into it. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

  “Whose good?” I challenge.

  Spencer pales, as if I have slapped him. “Sometimes, Cissy,” he whispers, “I don’t know you.”

  My husband walks stiffly out of the bedroom. Inside me, the baby twines tighter. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and the only answer I receive is the sound of the lock being turned.

  Q. Which counts for more, heredity or the environment?

  A. They are interdependent. This question is almost the equivalent of “Which is more important, the seed or the soil?”

  —American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  In the middle of the night the key turns. Even from here, I can smell the alcohol on Spencer. He slips into bed and presses his front to my back, “God, I love you,” he says, the words settling over my skin like steam.

  On our honeymoon, Spencer and I went to Niagara Falls. One night we camped out in a tent, and made love beneath the night sky. The water beat like my blood and when he moved inside me, I could swear that the stars connected in the shape of our initials.

  Now Spencer pulls up the edge of my nightgown, fits himself between my thighs. We are both crying and pretending not to. When Spencer comes inside me he presses his wet face against my spine, and I imagine his features being branded there, a version of a death mask that will always be one step behind me.

  He falls asleep with his arms around the breadth of my middle, hands not quite touching, as if he cannot contain me anymore.

  I think we can safely say that in the sixty-two families we have studied . . . “blood has told,” and there is every reason to believe it will keep right on “telling” in future generations.

  —H. F. Perkins, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont:

  First Annual Report, 1927

  Blood is raining from thunderclouds. Roses burst into bloom at midnight. Water doesn’t boil; words slide from the pages of books. The sky is the wrong color. And as I walk through this strange world, the ground is frozen beneath my feet.

  “Cissy. Cissy!”

  Hands on my shoulders. Breath on my neck. “Spencer?” I say, my voice sanded and drowsy.

  Gradually I become aware of the owls bearing witness in the trees, the mud on the heels of my feet and the edge of my nightgown, the summer night fermenting. I am in the woods behind our house, and I have no idea how I got here.

  “You’ve been sleepwalking,” Spencer explains.

  Sleepwalking, yes, that’s what it must be. And yet this other place I have visited . . . I feel as if I can still trail my fingers along its edge. Spencer embraces me, sighs against my skin. “Cissy, I only want you to be happy.”

  A small sob catches in my throat. “I know.”

  And I am a failure, to have all this—a good home, a healthy pregnancy, a man like Spencer—and still feel as if something is missing. “I love you,” my husband says. “I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

  “I love you too,” I tell him. I only wish it were that easy.

  “Why don’t we go back to bed,” Spencer suggests, “and forget about all of this?”

  Like we forget about everything else. Because when you don’t admit out loud that something awful has happened, who is to say it ever did?

  But habit holds me tight. So I nod, and follow Spencer back to the house. I keep looking over my shoulder; I cannot shake the feeling that there is something here for me to find. After we climb onto the porch, he holds the door open for me, wiping the slate clean.

  It is not until I am in the bathroom, washing the dirt from my feet, that I realize I am clenching something in my left hand. I open my fist like a flower: soft and supple and honey-colored, these are the tiniest pair of moccasins I have ever seen.

  SIX

  August 21, 1932

  From an exhibit at the Third International Eugenics Congress:

  THIS LIGHT FLASHES EVERY 31 SECONDS. Every 31 seconds, State taxpayers paid $100 for maintenance only of Insane, Feebleminded, Epileptic, Blind and Deaf, in State Institutions, Only in 1927.

  In the middle of the night there is a cramp low in my belly. It wakes me; it makes me look across the ocean of mattress to Spencer, who sleeps as if this hotel bed fits him. I try to ignore the teeth eating me from the inside out.

  But then there is a ripping, and I am too shocked to even cry. I watch the blood soak the front of my nightgown and the cuspid that cuts like a knife. A scaled snout stretches through the hole it has made in my skin; then a clawed foot, a reptile belly, a tail. The alligator that finally hunches between my legs