Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  That night, we served turtle soup for dinner, which made me queasy, and I had to leave the table.

  "We did what we needed to, Spencer, to get the public support necessary to pass the sterilization law. But that's done. It's time to go back to the fundamentals." My father walks over to me and takes a slice of orange, which he pops into his mouth. He waves his fingers in front of Spencer's face. "Smell that? You can't see it anymore . . . but you know it was there. You don't have to mention the charts if you don't want to, Spencer. Hell, you can burn them if it makes you feel better. But everyone in that room remembers the work we did to survey those families five years ago. Everyone is going to know what you're not saying." Then he walks out of the room.

  Spencer looks down at the chart. "What do you think?" he asks, and I nearly fall out of my chair.

  "What do I think?" I am so shocked to have been asked for my opinion that I can hardly find the words to give it. I think of the Gypsy whose son had been taken away by the welfare agencies. Of Gray Wolf, assuming I had come to ruin his life, simply because of the color of my skin.

  Reputations, once they're made, precede you.

  "I think the damage has already been done," I reply. Through the open doorway comes Spencer's name, and a volley of applause.

  Once, as a little girl, my father had taken me to a similar, smaller convocation of eugenicists in San Francisco, where I survived a small earthquake. We were told to stand in a doorway until it passed, and I tried to come to terms with the fact that something as solid as the ground beneath my feet was not quite so secure after all.

  When five hundred people clap at once, it sounds like the earth is breaking to pieces all around you. Spencer rolls the pedigree chart up, tucks it under his arm, and strides into the lecture hall on this summon of thunder. "Ladies and gentlemen," he begins, and I don't have to listen anymore to know what he is going to say.

  I stand up and walk out of the room, hurrying down the stairs into one of the exhibit halls. Children and their nannies are dwarfed by an enormous re-creation of a brontosaurus. The pin of its head is so small and distant I can barely make out the hole of its eye socket. Its brain, I believe, was no bigger than my fist. Intelligence belonged to the tyrannosaurus across the way, with its formidable jaw and fence of teeth.

  And yet both of these creatures, the so-called inferior plant-eater and the ferocious carnivore, died out because of a change in the climate, or so Spencer has told me. In the end, it didn't matter who was brighter or stronger or better or could reproduce the most efficiently. Bad weather, a circumstance beyond their control, had the upper hand.

  There is a distant rumbling, and I realize it is coming from overhead, as the audience applauds something Spencer has said.

  I turn to Ruby, who of course has only been a few steps behind me all along. "Let's take a walk," I suggest.

  Rosabelle--answer--tell--pray, answer--look--tell-- answer, answer--tell.

  --Code devised by Harry Houdini and his wife, based on an old vaudeville mind-reading routine, to prove his return as a spirit after his death.

  New York City, in the summer, cannot be so different from hell. The smell of sweat mixed with the brine from the pickle barrels of vendors, the tight press of a hundred people who look right through you, the newsboys selling tragedy for a nickel, the fumes of the taxis rising like wraiths--this is an underworld, and anyone in it can point you toward an escape hatch. In fact, it is the little girl living under an awning with her mother who rolls my dollar bill like a cigarette, tucks it behind her right ear, and leads Ruby and me to a brownstone three blocks away. A small, engraved sign hangs above the buzzer: HEDDA BARTH, SPIRITUALIST.

  The woman who opens the door is smaller even than Ruby, with long white hair that passes her shoulders. "Ladies," says Hedda Barth, Medium of the Century. "What can I do for you?"

  If she is truly psychic, then she ought to know. I am about to back down the stairs when I feel Ruby push me from behind. "We might as well go all the way," she whispers.

  Madame Hedda has been written up in the papers. She sparred with Houdini; she conjured the departed great-uncle of Mayor Walker. The chances of me being here again, and able to meet with her, are virtually nonexistent. "We were hoping to hold a seance, with your help," I say.

  "But you have no appointment."

  "No." I raise my chin, the way I have seen my father do, in order to make her feel this was an oversight on her part, rather than mine. And sure enough, she steps aside to let us in.

  She leads us up a short staircase and holds out her hand to open the door. I wonder if I am the only one who notices that her fingers never touch it, that the knob swings open of its own accord.

  A hexagonal table waits for us in the dark. "There's the small matter of payment," Hedda says.

  "Money," I answer, "is no object."

  So Hedda instructs us to take seats and join hands. She scrutinizes my face and Ruby's. "You've both suffered a loss," she announces.

  Once I read a criticism of the spiritualist movement, in which a Parisian scientist offered free horoscope readings to passersby. Ninety-four percent of those given a reading found it personally accurate. In fact, each person had received the same horoscope, belonging to one of France's most notorious mass murderers.

  We believe what we want to believe; we hear what we want to hear. What Hedda Barth has told me anyone could have guessed; why else would Ruby and I have come?

  But suddenly the table begins to shudder and rock, lifting up on two of its legs like a rearing stallion. Hedda's eyes roll back in her head, and her mouth gapes open. I glance at Ruby, unsure of what to do, if this is normal.

  "Ma poule." The voice is higher than Hedda's, with a ribbon of lisp. My heart begins to pound on the roof of my mouth, and the baby kicks to be free.

  "Simone?" Ruby's word is just barely that, the quiet puff of shock. I recognize, now, where I have heard that cadence before--it is Ruby's own French Canadian, which creeps out when she is not careful or is tired or both.

  "Cherie, you tell your friend, there's nothing to be scared of, no. We are all here waiting on her."

  "That's my sister," Ruby says wildly. "Simone. She's the only one who ever called me that--ma poule. My little hen."

  The one who died from diphtheria. But her message, it's lost in the translation. Waiting could signify so many things. Are they attending to my mother? Or are they expecting me?

  Suddenly the baby goes limp inside me. My arms fall to my sides; my worries dissolve on my tongue. This must be how people feel the moment before their automobile crashes into a tree. This is the white light we hear talk of; this is the quiet coming.

  This is something my own mother felt.

  There are so many questions I have--Will I ever see my son, or is that asking too much? Will he remember me? Will it hurt? Will I know when it's going to happen? But right now, it is enough to have confirmation, to know that my instincts have been right.

  Madame Hedda is coming out of her trance. A line of drool curls down the left side of her mouth like a comma. I place a ten-dollar bill on the table, one I will tell Spencer that I lost. "Come back," she says, and I realize that she means from the other side.

  A comprehensive eugenics survey needs to locate, first, the inadequate in the state; second, to find out, if possible, why they exist.

  --Excerpt from a letter dated October 8, 1925, from H. H. Laughlin, Director of the Eugenics Record Office, to Harriet Abbott

  Dr. Craigh's office is on Park Avenue, and as I finish buttoning my blouse I stare out the window at this street trying to be something it is not. Those trees, they are not fooling anyone; it is still the heart of a city, a place where pavement has triumphed over grass. The obstetrician himself dries his hands on a towel, just as unwilling to make eye contact with me after the exam as I am with him. "Mrs. Pike," he says gruffly, "why don't you join us in the office when you're finished?"

  When I returned to the museum, where Spencer was still riding h