Second Glance Read online

  “The Hardings,” I lie.

  “Cal Harding?” This will impress Spencer; our neighbor is a stickler for detail. “Did they check his references?”

  “Spencer, he’s patching a roof, not signing on as the nanny.”

  From a distance comes the clatter of things being moved in too small a space. “I don’t like him,” Spencer says.

  “Well,” I answer. “I do.”

  Eugenics is the scientific projection of our sense of self-preservation and our parental instincts.

  —O. F. Cook, “Quenching Life on the Farm: How the Neglect of Eugenics Subverts Agriculture and Destroys Civilization,” from a review by E. R. Eastman in the Journal of Heredity, 1928

  As a child, I used to go to my father’s office at the university and pretend his big leather desk chair was a throne, and I was the Queen of Everything. My subjects—pencils, paperweights— lined up at attention on the desk to hear me speak and watch me twirl in circles. My court jester, a typewriter carriage with a bell at each return, sat at my elbow. I was only three-and-a-half feet tall, and I pretended I could fill this space with as much command as my father.

  He is sitting at the desk, laboring over a legal pad, when I let myself inside. Seeing me, he puts down his work. “Cissy! This is a nice surprise. What brings you to town?”

  For the past few days, my belly has been stretched to breaking, my skin on the verge of splitting. “Your grandson wanted to pay a visit.”

  He sees me looking at his chair, and he smiles slowly. “Did you want to take a spin, for old time’s sake?”

  Ruefully, I shake my head. “I wouldn’t fit.”

  “Of course you would. I’ve seen Allen Sizemore stuff his considerable, er, assets into that seat.” When I don’t laugh along with him, he stands and reaches for my hand. “Tell me what’s the matter.”

  Oh, God, where would I even start? With the way I look at a blade as a silver opportunity? With the nightmares I have of my own father and Spencer, pulling this baby out from between my legs? Or should I appeal to him as a scientist: Hypothesis—fear is a room six feet by six feet, without any windows or doors.

  What comes out of my mouth instead is a single word. “Mama,” I whisper.

  “She would have been so proud of you. She would have loved to see this baby.” He pauses. “It’s perfectly natural to worry. But Cissy, you’re a different woman from your mother, God rest her soul. You’re stronger.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because part of you came from me.” Suddenly he tugs me into his leather chair. He spins it slowly, a carousel.

  “Daddy!”

  “What? Who’s here to see?”

  So I lean my head back and try to find the eye at the center of the cyclone. My feet fly out in front of me, my hands rest heavy on the armrests. “That’s my girl,” my father says, and he brings me to a stop. “I might come out to your place this afternoon. I hear you’re having some work done by a Gypsy.”

  “Yes.” I wonder what else Spencer has told him.

  “Never hired one, myself.” My father leans against the desk. “There was an Indian in grade school with me. Linwood . . . good God, I can’t believe I remember his name. This kid was as Indian as the Indian on a buffalo head nickel. Braids and all. Of course, every boy back then played cowboys and Indians. The highlight of the summer was heading up to South Hero, where there would be Indians at camp to teach us to make trails in the woods and such . . . but that was all for play, you know. Linwood, though . . . he lived it. He could actually trap and hunt and shoot a bow. Hell, he could make a bow.” There is a strange tone of admiration in my father’s voice. “He wore moccasins to school,” he says faintly. “He did all sorts of things the rest of us couldn’t do.”

  I wonder if something as simple as this could have been the raw splinter that stuck in my father’s mind, the one that brought him to eugenics in the first place. A chance meeting that means nothing at the time might bloom into an event of enormous importance. You don’t think twice about an Indian boy’s coveted leather shoes, but you may never forget them. You ignore the man staring at you across the stage of a July 4th historical pageant, until it seems he was fated to be there.

  I study his face. “What about Mama? Did she know any Indians?”

  The light leaves my father’s eyes. “No,” he answers. “They scared her to death.”

  June 13, 1933

  Miss Martha E. Leighton

  Agricultural Extension Building

  City

  Dear Miss Leighton:

  I think I shall choose “Registered Human Stock” as the topic for discussion with the 4-H older boys the last of the month.

  Sincerely yours,

  Henry F. Perkins

  —Correspondence from H. F. Perkins, ESV and VCCL papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT

  The town diner looks the same, a squat clapboard eyesore sitting like a blister on the lip of the town. What makes no sense, though, are the odd things surrounding it. There are more cars than I have ever seen in all of Burlington, in the sleekest of shapes. A boy with wheels on his feet rattles past me. When I turn the corner, the long-haired man stands up, and he hands me his heart.

  Waking abruptly, I stir in Spencer’s arms. “What is it?” he murmurs.

  “A dream.”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  I have to think about this for a moment. “The future, I think.”

  Spencer’s hand splays over our son. “That’s a start,” he says.

  Styla Nestor, a cousin by marriage to Gray Wolf Delacour, relates his heavy periodic drinking and sex immorality to his Gypsy-like travel, due most likely to the fact that overseers and townspeople wanted to get rid of him. The only semi-permanent address she could recall for her cousin, in fact, was the State Prison.

  —From the files of Abigail Alcott, social worker

  The afternoon sun is a cat, tickling me beneath the chin. Bolting upright in bed, I check the clock, and then check it again. I am shocked to have slept so late; I wonder why Ruby has not come in to wake me.

  I wash and dress and run a comb through my hair, in a hurry to get outside. The steady beat of the hammer overhead tells me Gray Wolf is already working on the roof, and there is so much I want to ask him.

  “Coffee?” Ruby asks, as I come into the kitchen.

  “Not now.”

  “Miz Pike—” she says, when I am already halfway out the back door.

  I shade my eyes with a hand, heading in the direction of the noise. “Gray Wolf?” I call, and nearly lose my footing when my husband’s face peers over the edge of the roof instead. “Spencer, what are you doing here?”

  “Finishing what I should have done myself. I don’t have to teach until this afternoon.” He tucks the hammer in the back loop of his belt and begins a careful climb down to the porch, leaving the ladder propped against the house near the sealed bedroom window. “I fired him,” he says, when we are facing each other.

  “What . . . what did he do?”

  “What didn’t he do, Cissy?” Spencer hands me a paper from his pocket. It is a carbon copy of a court conviction from nearly two decades ago, in which John “Gray Wolf” Delacour was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail for murder. Stapled to it is a second page—the paroled release of Gray Wolf from the Vermont State Prison, dated July 4th of this year.

  “He was here alone with you and Ruby, for God’s sake!”

  “He isn’t like that,” I blurt out.

  “Cissy. Did he tell you he’d served time in prison?”

  My gaze slides away. “I didn’t ask.”

  Spencer’s hand cups my cheek. “That’s why you have me.”

  John “Gray Wolf” Delacour is alleged to be the grandchild of Missal Delacour, the old Gypsy. John does not show the colored blood quite as dark as his ancestor, but has the loose, shambling walk of the Gypsy. He is considered by his own relations to be arrogant, ignorant, and immoral, although he has managed