Second Glance Read online

  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.

  He offers me his arm and escorts me out of the office, locking the door behind us. “Blame it on the baby,” Spencer says, his eyes never leaving my face.

  We are speaking two conversations at once, and we both know it. “No,” I answer. “Not him.”

  I call your attention to the fact that the number of our insane and feebleminded is constantly increasing with a corresponding increase in the burden cast on the community and the State. We are doing our duty about the care of these unfortunates, but practically nothing to prevent a further increase in their number. Medical science points out some definite course which has been followed successfully in some states. . . . You will do well to give this matter serious consideration.

  —From Governor Stanley Wilson’s inaugural message to the Vermont General Assembly, Journal of the Senate of the State of Vermont, 1931

  The next morning I am sitting at the dressing table in front of my mirror when Spencer leans down to kiss my neck. “How are you feeling?” he asks, as if last night never happened.

  I set down my brush. “Fine.”

  Spencer’s hand steals down my robe, onto the swell of our son. “And how’s he feeling?”

  “Heavy.”

  We are a beautiful couple. Somehow the long lines of Spencer’s jaw and the pale blue behind his glasses is the perfect complement to my heart-shaped face and honey-brown eyes. Our child, a combination of the best of us, should be stunning. Except that he might not look the way Spencer is expecting him to look.

  “Spencer,” I whisper, a beginning. “We have to talk.”

  But he has slid his hands down my arms by now, and his gentle fingertips are playing over the healing ridge of skin at my wrist. With his head bent, in silence, it is simple to read his mind: if he didn’t love me, this would be so much easier.

  Then again, he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even really know who I am. If Spencer is too ashamed to admit to a wife who cannot manage to keep herself alive, how will he feel about a wife who is half-Indian?

  Would he add my name to the bottom of the Delacour genealogy chart? Or would he burn it? Spencer has done an admirable job of hiding the truth about me from his friends and colleagues. Maybe he could continue to do so. All babies, I could tell him, look dark and round-faced when they are newborn.

  “You know,” Spencer says, “I don’t think we should talk. Talking . . . thinking . . . that’s what gets your mind in knots, Cissy.” His fingers smooth my brow in tiny circles. “What you need is a distraction. A task to keep you busy.” He takes a small piece of paper from his pocket, inscribed with the names of ten couples, and sets it beside my bottle of French tea-rose perfume. “A dinner party. A pre-birthday, maybe, for our baby. You and Ruby can come up with a menu, decorations, a theme.” He kisses my cheek. “What do you think?”

  I smooth the list of names with one hand and tuck it into the corner of my mirror. We will have rib roasts and sweet potatoes in maple syrup and candied carrots. We will drink red wine and laugh at jokes that aren’t funny and toast a baby who will break my world in half. “I’m not supposed to think,” I say.

  We are so careful in breeding our cattle to get good breeds yet we give this human procreation no thought.

  — Mrs. Bickford, of Bradford, quoted in the Burlington Free Press on March 21, 1931, during the debate in the Vermont State House regarding the Sterilization Bill

  I begin to create complications. Each morning I say there is something else bothering me about this pregnancy—a pinched nerve, a lack of fetal movement, a heartburn so severe it makes me weak. My nervousness about giving birth feeds this fire, and so Spencer does not question me when I tell him I am headed to Dr. DuBois’s office every other day. Better him, I am sure he is thinking, than me.

  Instead of going into town, however, I go down to camp on the lake. After several days of seeing me in Gra