Second Glance (23 page)

PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY: Prof. H. F. Perkins. Lecture course with conference and report exercises covering the principles of elementary embryology, the physical basis of inheritance, principles of breeding experiments, and eugenics, the practical application of heredity to mankind. Text used: Newman’s
Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and
Eugenics.

—
University of Vermont Bulletin,
1923–24

For years now, I have been fascinated by Harry Houdini. I’ve read every biography written since his death in 1926; I keep a scrapbook of newspaper articles about his amazing feats. It is not just the obvious—that, like him, I know of ties that bind and chains that keep one rooted to a certain place, or that, like him, I sometimes wish to disappear. No, what is more intriguing to me is Houdini’s obsession with the spirit world.

Did I mention that Houdini, too, lost his mother?

The new book I’m reading chronicles the long war between Houdini and Margery, the Boston medium. During her séances, her voice would appear from different parts of the room, a spirit bell would ring, a megaphone was wont to fly across the table—all while others held the medium’s hands. Houdini, convinced that she was a hoax, built her a fraud-preventer cabinet and challenged her to hold a séance from inside it. But during the séance, a folding ruler was found at the medium’s feet—something Margery and Houdini each claimed the other had planted. In the end, Houdini died discrediting her, and swore that if a spirit were ever to return from the other side of the veil, it would be him.

Although séances have been held on Halloween, now, for five years, he hasn’t come back.

This is what I think about Mr. Houdini: if he hadn’t been so desperate to contact his departed mother, he wouldn’t have fought so fiercely against Margery. He denounced the spirit world because he feared it was the one space from which he could not escape.

I feel like a fool, hiding here in my bedroom closet. It’s where I’ve gone for privacy, dragging in a little card table that is jammed up against my belly. Table tipping is something else I have read of; it’s a way of contacting the spirits. I should have more people sitting here with their hands linked, but I certainly could not tell Spencer what I am doing, and I don’t know what Ruby would make of it.

The silks of my dresses brush my shoulders. I press my palms against the table, close my eyes. “Mama?” I whisper.

Suddenly, a hand touches my side. I jump, and then realize that the fingers are on the inside of my skin—it’s this baby, trying to push away for all he is worth. “Hush, now. We’re trying to talk to your grandma.”

If I can find her, if I can open a door . . . then maybe even after I die I will be able to find my way back.

I take deep breaths to concentrate. I focus all my energy on that table. “Mama, if you can hear me, let me know.”

The table, beneath my hands, remains perfectly still. But then I hear a creak. I open my eyes in time to see the doorknob of the closet turning by itself. The brightest light appears, growing wider and wider until it silhouettes the figure of a woman.

“Miz Pike,” Ruby asks, “what on earth are you doing in
here
?”

My heart is pounding so hard that it takes a moment to answer. Pretending it is perfectly normal to be found sitting inside a closet, I say, “What did you need, Ruby?”

“Your lunch with the professor . . . you’re going to miss it if you don’t hurry.”

My lunch . . . I have forgotten. Spencer and I have a standing summertime date, a picnic on the university grounds after his Wednesday morning graduate school lecture. We sit beneath the oaks and speak of the things that matter: Spencer’s research, his most promising students, names for a son.

Ruby has already packed a basket with grapes and cold meats, sesame rolls, macaroni salad. “Thank you,” I say, taking one last glance inside the closet before I close the door.

Spencer walked to work today—three miles to the university— and left me the car. A Packard Twin 6 with a 12-cylinder engine, it’s his pride and joy. It has suicide doors, named so because they open backward and can rip you out of the car if unlatched during transit.

I’ve thought about it.

Spencer’s graduate lecture is being held in a small classroom that smells of linseed oil and philosophy. At the front, Spencer stands with his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled up in deference to the heat. Lantern slides of skulls have been projected onto a screen behind him. “Notice the difference between the dolichocephalic and the brachycephalic in the Negroid skull,” Spencer says. “The prognathous jaw, the flattened nose, the apelike similarities . . . these all are signs of a degraded race.”

A hand shoots up. “How primitive are they?” a student asks.

“Rudimentary,” Spencer explains. “Think of them as children. Like children, they’ll be fond of bright colors. Like children, they are capable of forming base friendships.” He glances at the clock on the wall, and his eyes skim over me, lighting briefly. “Next week we’ll be outlining the classification of all humanity into five distinct races,” he promises, as the class gathers their books and disperses. Smiling, Spencer walks down the aisle toward me. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“It’s Wednesday,” I remind him. “Our lunch.” As illustration, I swing the basket out from behind my back, where I have kept it hidden.

A small
V
forms between Spencer’s brows. “Damn, Cissy, Harry Perkins asked to meet with me this afternoon. I don’t have time for lunch.”

“I understand,” I tell Spencer.

“That’s my girl.”

“Spencer?” I call after him. “Should I wait?” But he does not hear me, or else he chooses not to. Sighing, I put down the picnic basket and walk to the front of the classroom. My boot heels click like teeth, and when I get close, my body makes a bulbous silhouette against the white screen. I hold up my hand and make a shadow puppet, a wolf. Then I send it swooping and diving along the jutting brow of a dolichocephalic specimen.

“Mrs. Pike?”

Caught in the act, I whirl around to find Abigail Alcott watching me. A wide-eyed woman in her late twenties, Abigail is a social worker currently employed by the Department of Public Welfare. She is dressed for work in a smart navy skirt and a pleated white shirt. Of late, she has been meeting with Spencer to discuss the ESV records, which she uses in her investigations. Her job involves assessing which degenerate families are turning around, versus which will benefit from the new sterilization law.

“Hello, Abigail,” I say with as much poise as I can, given that she is older than I, and has a true education, instead of two years in a finishing school.

“Is the professor here?” She checks her wristwatch. “We’re supposed to be driving out to Waterbury this afternoon.”

So I am not the only person Spencer disappoints. I wonder what they are planning to do at the State Mental Hospital. I imagine her walking beside my husband, pulling threads of scientific conversation from thin air to make a verbal bouquet she might hand him—one that by its very topic is irresistible to Spencer. In this, I have always been the outsider—I do not know as much about eugenics as my father or my husband. What would it be like to sit at the dinner table with them, to say something relevant, to watch them look at me as someone to be considered, instead of something to be dismissed?

That sweet coil of insurrection swims in me. I am ten again, and climbing to the roof to shout down to the good people of Comtosook. “Didn’t he tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About the meeting with Professor Perkins?” There, that much is not a lie. “Spencer was going to send you a note . . . but then he gets so preoccupied, you know . . .”

“Mrs. Pike,” Abigail interrupts. “What note?”

“The one about me going to Waterbury in his place.”

Abigail stares at me, but she is too polite to say what she is thinking: that I have never been trained in social work, that being born into a family of eugenics scholars doesn’t automatically make me one. Her eyes settle on the swell of my abdomen. “Spencer was quite sure it was safe,” I add.

That, ultimately, is what clinches it: Abigail would rather cut off her right arm than question Spencer’s judgment. Her lips set in a thin line, she assesses me, and nods. “Well, then,” she says, “let’s go.”

Vermont needs a mental survey which will locate every case of mental defect within our borders and facilities for thorough psychiatric examination of all dependent and delinquent individuals.

—Asa R. Gifford, “Report of the President,” Vermont Children’s Aid Society Second Annual Report, 1921

The Vermont State Hospital for the Insane was built in Waterbury in 1890, to ease the overcrowding at the Retreat down in Brattleboro. Dr. Stanley, the superintendent, had once come to our home for dinner when I was thirteen, after he’d testified in support of the 1927 Sterilization Bill that did not pass. I remember circles of sweat around his collar, the fact that he did not eat brussels sprouts, and the way he stood too close to me while making small talk.

“You would think that the group represented in highest concentration at Waterbury was the Huntington’s chorea family, because of the inherited mental illness,” Abigail says as we walk up the street from our parking spot. Now that she has taken it into her mind to educate me on all I’ve missed to date leading up to this meeting, she is chatty—friendly, almost. “But no, it turns out there are plenty of Pirates and Gypsies too.”

By now we have reached the front door of A Building, the new ward where many of the female patients are kept. Abigail turns to me, her eyes glowing. “What is it like to wake up beside a man who has such . . . such
vision
?” she asks, and then her face goes as red as the brick of the building.

A memory: I am at the Eugenics Survey Office on Church Street, come to tell Spencer that we are going to have a baby. I open the door to his office and find him with Abigail, laughing up at something Spencer has said. She sits on the edge of his desk and her hand is on his forearm. “Cissy!” he calls out, and he is smiling, and I don’t know if it is because I have arrived, or because she has been there.

Suddenly the door of the institution opens. We are sucked inside, because hell is a vacuum. Nurses wearing white hats creased like Japanese paper cranes move silently, seemingly unaware of the patient sobbing at the administration desk, or the one who dashes naked across a corridor, her wet hair streaming out behind her. A filthy girl not much older than Ruby sits on a bench, wearing a shirt that secures her arms to the wooden slats behind her. Beneath the bench is a puddle; I think it must be urine.

“Miss Alcott!” Dr. Stanley approaches in his pristine white coat. I wonder how he can keep it so clean in an environment such as this. He turns to me, too close for comfort. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure . . .”

“You have,” I say, extending my hand. “Cecelia Beaumont Pike.”

“Cissy? Cissy! You’re certainly grown up.” He glances at my swollen abdomen. “And out, I might add. Congratulations apparently are in order.”

“Thank you.”

“Mrs. Pike is standing in for the professor today,” Abigail explains.

Dr. Stanley hides his surprise well. “Excellent. Well, if you’ll follow me, we can speak more privately in my office.” He walks down the hall, leaving us to follow. Abigail moves in his wake immediately. I find myself rooted to the spot by the vacant stare of the woman on the bench.

“Mrs. Pike!” Abigail prompts sharply, and I force myself to turn away.

Dr. Stanley, seeing an opportunity to impress Spencer via me, decides to take the long route. There are spots where the halls are so congested with inmates that we have to walk single file. “The legislature just approved the construction of a new building for the acutely disturbed female patients. You can see how overcrowded we are here.”

“What’s your population?” Abigail asks.

“Nine hundred ninety-seven,” Stanley says, then notices a nurse leading a girl with angry eyes up a flight of stairs, an orderly following with a small suitcase. “Nine hundred ninety-eight.” The doctor gestures toward a doorway that leads into a large sunny room, one again overrun with patients. “I believe in industrial work. Idle hands breed idle minds.” At tables, women sit weaving reeds into mangled baskets or assembling clothespins. They look up at me and see a rich lady in fashionable maternity clothing. They don’t realize that I am one of them.

“We sell the crafts,” Stanley says proudly. “Use the proceeds for patient entertainment.”

And do they come with a stamp on the bottom? Made reluctantly, by an individual who could not cope in the real world.

The superintendent leads us further down the hall to a shut door. “Unfortunately, not all of our patients are cooperative,” Dr. Stanley says. He glances at me. “I don’t know if a woman in your condition should—”

“I’m fine.” To prove this, I open the door myself.

And then I wish I hadn’t.

Two burly men stand on opposite sides of a tub of water, their hands pressing down the shoulders of a naked woman.

Before she goes under, I notice that her lips are blue and her breasts have puckered like fruit dried on a vine. Over her head a steady stream of water runs from a tap. Beside her, another woman lies facedown on a table with a sheet covering her upper body. A nurse pumps a large bulb of water through a tube threaded into the patient’s rectum. “Hydrotherapy and colonic irrigation have been quite beneficial for disruptive patients,” Stanley says. “But I brought you in here to see something else. Ladies, I’m proud to present the first patient to undergo voluntary sterilization at our institution. She’s right back here.” He leads us to the rear of the room. “The salpingectomy was done when she came into the infirmary for treatment of an irritable bowel. She comes from one of the original ten families studied in the survey, one with a long genetic history of depression and disruptive behavior. Dr. Kastler and I provided the two necessary signatures.”