Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  His skin was the color of the polished piano she played for her mother's friends at teatime; his hair was longer than hers. His eyes were as sharp as a hawk's, and sometimes when she was in the privacy of her bedroom with the curtains closed she knew that he could still see her. When she brought water out to the Indian workers--the only contact she was allowed--she could feel him swimming through her veins.

  She had spent seventeen years being an exemplary daughter. She had attended finishing school; she crossed her legs at the ankles; she washed her face each night with buttermilk to make it glow. She was being groomed to be an exemplary wife, something she had known all along, but now the concept seemed like a fancy coat tucked away in a hope chest: trying it on after all these years, it did not fit quite as well as she had expected.

  One day in the field, he was the last one to turn in his tin cup. Sweat ran down his bare chest, and there was a streak of dirt across his brow. He smelled of the blueberries he'd been picking. His teeth seemed too white when he spoke. "Who are you?" he asked.

  She could have said, Lily Robinson. Or, Quentin Robinson's daughter. Or, Harry Beaumont's intended. But that wasn't what he had been asking. For the first time in her life she wondered why she defined herself as part of someone else.

  He began to leave her small gifts on the porch: a pair of tiny moccasins; a sweetgrass basket; a sketch of a running horse. She learned that his name was John.

  On their first date, she lied and told her parents that she was spending the night at a girlfriend's. He met her halfway down the road into town. He took her hand, as if they had been doing that forever, and told her that his home was the world, that the sky was its roof. They walked to the edge of the river and pulled the stars close as a blanket. When he lay her down to kiss her, his hair fell over their faces, a curtain for privacy.

  He was a year younger than she was, and nothing like the Gypsies she'd been hearing of her whole life. John wasn't dirty or stupid or dishonest. He understood how it felt to be boxed in by a label someone else had slapped on you. Lily started to live her days only as a means of getting to the nights. She talked back to her father and ignored her mother. She began to dream in rich reds and blues. And on the evening that John fit himself to her and taught her how to bloom, Lily cried because someone loved her, not the person she was supposed to be.

  Her first mistake, when she became pregnant, was to see it as an opportunity instead of a crisis. She hovered like a hummingbird outside her father's study while John, wearing a collared shirt and tie he had borrowed for a dime, asked permission to marry her.

  What happened after that Lily could not remember, or maybe she could not let herself remember. There was John, unconscious and beaten bloody, being dragged out of her father's study. There was her father's fist shaking above her as he ordered her to play the whore again by marrying some unsuspecting fool. The stiff kiss that sealed her engagement to Harry Beaumont; the awful moment at the church where she almost told her new husband the truth; the joy on his face later when she told him, instead, that she was expecting.

  She tried to find John, but it was difficult to locate someone who had no permanent address. She heard rumors that he worked at a bar in Vergennes, that he had become a horse thief, that he was a quarry laborer. By the time she realized this last tale was true, John Delacour was no longer employed there. He was in jail pending trial for the murder of a supervisor.

  She wrote him one letter, a small square of paper that he folded and wore in a pouch around his neck. It did not mention her marriage, or her health, or the child. It said simply, Come back. John did not write in return; he knew better. After the first month, Lily stopped waking up with the taste of him on her lips. After three months, she could no longer remember the wood-smoke in his voice. After six months, she began to have nightmares that her baby would arrive with hair dark as a crow's wing, with cinnamon skin.

  Lily Robinson Beaumont died in apparently premature childbirth, having slipped into unconsciousness after forty hours of labor. She held John's name between her teeth to take with her. She did not know that John would, one day, come back--even after he learned from bribing a prison guard that his love had gone to the spirit world. She did not know that the daughter she left behind, Cecelia, had golden hair, and skin as white as a miracle.

  A great deal is known about human heredity--enough to make eugenical sterilization a safe policy, provided the standards for sterilization apply only to the most patently degenerate individuals who are definitely demonstrated to be cacogenic. In the future, as more is learned about heredity, the standards can be shifted to include those individuals who now constitute situations described as "border-line."

  --Excerpt from a letter dated September 24, 1925, from H. H. Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, to Harriet Abbott

  In my dreams I give birth to the Devil, to Jesus, to a Titan that tears me apart. I bleed from my pores and wake to find the sheets wet with sweat. For several nights, Spencer tries, unsuccessfully, to raise the stuck window in the bedroom. I cannot bear to look at him.

  Tonight when I startle out of sleep Spencer doesn't wake with me. I inch back the covers and get out of bed, careful to walk around the few floorboards that gossip. The carpet runner muffles the sounds of my steps down the stairs. Spencer has left the door to his study open.

  I turn on the green accountant's lamp. A thousand times I have come into this room, but never with the intent of finding something. Where would Spencer keep it?

  On his desk are neat piles of papers--letters he has received from colleagues in the field of eugenics, books in several languages, photographic slides scattered like cards across an illuminated table. His blotter is covered with illegible notes. I read some of the words: twins, custodial, epidemic. As I maneuver around the desk, I bump into the corner and send a paperweight crashing to the floor. Immediately, I freeze and look up at the ceiling, waiting with my heart in my throat. When there is no answering sound, I take a deep breath and inch toward the long table pushed against the wall.

  One genealogy map is partially unrolled on its surface, a family with a surname I don't recognize. I scan the thick lines that link one insane relative to another, profligates to prostitutes, reform school students to convicts. I follow one trail of family members, seemingly unaffected by any degeneracy for an entire generation. And yet the children of these children have all landed in the industrial school, at Waterbury, in the state prison--they are as depraved as their grandparents were. How many times have I heard Spencer say it? Inherited traits might skip a generation . . . but blood eventually tells.

  My hands steal over my belly, which freezes up hard beneath my hands. False labor, it is called. I force myself to sift through the scrolls of other pedigree charts tucked into an umbrella stand beside the table. They are labeled Delaire, Moulton, Waverly, Olivette--there is no Delacour to be found. Could my father--my father?--have logged the survey of Gray Wolf's family under a different surname?

  Weber/George.

  This tag leaps out at me. With great care I pull the chart from the stand and unroll it over the table. It is not hard to find Ruby's name among those at the bottom; Spencer has marked it with red ink. There are mathematical calculations and notes in his narrow hand, speculating on Ruby's chance at turning out as badly as the rest of her family.

  Her beloved sister, the one who died, has a mark as dark as a brand next to her name. Sx, for Immoral.

  It is the same symbol, I realize, that would have been given to my mother.

  "Cissy."

  Spencer's voice is so quiet it simply tips into my mind, and yet I jump a foot. He stands in silhouette in his dressing gown, watching me. Taking a step inside, his gaze falls to the table.

  For one excruciating moment when he looks at me, I think he knows exactly what I have been searching for. But for whatever reason, Spencer's face smooths into a mask. "Sweetheart, you've been sleepwalking again."

  "Yes." I clear my throat.

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