Second Glance (27 page)

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 high on the praise of his colleagues, I did not tell him where Ruby and I had been. I didn’t even put up a fuss when he told me he’d made an appointment with this physician, the best in the Northeast for high-risk pregnancies. It is as simple as this: the decision has been taken out of my hands. I
know
what is going to happen, so there’s no reason to fight it.

My father once invited the state medical examiner to dinner when I was a child. I remember him cutting blithely into the breast of a chicken to illustrate the nature of drowning. The horror, he said, pointing between the ribs with a knife, comes the moment you feel that your lungs will burst. But then you gasp and go under and inhale water. After that, all you feel is peace.

I have gone under for the third time. I will lie on my back on the sandy bottom, and watch the sunset through a mile of sea.

“Mrs. Pike,” the nurse says, poking her head through the doorway. “They’re waiting.”

“Of course.” When I turn, I am wearing the smile I’ve pulled from my sleeve.

She leads me down the hall. “You have that glow.”

Maybe the radiance in pregnancy does not come from the joy of motherhood. Maybe we all think we are going to die.

Dr. Craigh’s office is dark, paneled, male; a timeless cabin you might find on a clipper ship, clouded with the smoke of cigars. “Gomez pitched a shut-out last night,” Craigh is saying. “Between Lefty and Ruth and Gehrig, it’s a lock this year.”

Spencer, who does not like baseball, surprises me. “The Athletics are looking pretty good again, if you ask me.”

“Gehrig finished last season with 184 RBIs. You can’t seriously believe—oh, Mrs. Pike. Sit down right over there.” He gestures to the chair beside my husband.

Spencer takes my hand and we both turn expectantly, like children called before the principal. “Good news,” Craigh announces. “Your pregnancy is as healthy as any I’ve ever seen.”

Beside me, Spencer relaxes. “You see, Cissy?”

“I completely understand your concerns, given your mother’s experience in childbirth. But based on her medical records, which your husband took the liberty of mailing to me, the complications of her pregnancy were related to her slight frame and the size of the baby. You may be carrying small, Mrs. Pike—but your hips are rather built for childbearing. Luckily, you must take after your father.”

I think of my father’s tall, lean, narrow body; nothing like my own. But I smile back at him.

“Not only are you going to deliver this baby safely and without incident,” Dr. Craigh continues, “but I will expect you to bring him back here to meet me.”

I wonder how much Spencer has paid him, in advance, to lie to me.

We stand and begin the round-robin of shaking hands. Spencer helps me down the three flights of stairs. “Craigh’s considered an expert,” he says. “Everyone, and I mean
everyone
, knows his name. You say the word
baby
, and someone mentions Craigh. So, really, I’d be quite comforted by his diagnosis.”

He stamps a quick kiss on me. His arm slides around the thick of my waist; his other hand opens the door so that we can be swallowed by the city again. The sun is too bright; I can’t see a thing. I have to bring my hand up to shield my eyes; I have to let Spencer take me where I’m going.

We know what feeblemindedness is, and we have come to suspect all persons who are incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly of being feebleminded.

—Henry Goddard,
Feeblemindedness: Its Causes
and Consequences,
1914

In the end, I want to do it somewhere familiar. I think about it during the long train ride home. I am nearly giddy with what is to come. “I knew it,” Spencer says to my father in our private train car. “I knew this trip would be good for her.”

By the time we arrive at home, it is nearly midnight. Peepers sing to us as we get out of the Packard, and the yellow eyes of a runaway cat watch me from the porch of the icehouse. When Spencer opens the door to our home, it sounds like a seal being broken.

“Ruby, you can unpack in the morning,” Spencer orders, as we climb the stairs to the second floor. “Sweetheart, you too. You ought to be in bed.”

“I need a bath,” I tell him. “A few minutes to relax alone.”

At that, Ruby turns slowly. Her mouth is round with a question I do not let her ask. “You heard the professor,” I say, clipped. After weeks of camaraderie, these cold, sharp words are a weapon to drive her away. She hurries up the steps to the servants’ quarters, ducking her head and trying to understand what has gone wrong between us.

In our room I gather a crisply folded nightgown and wrapper from my armoire. I wait outside the bathroom door until Spencer emerges. “I drew the bath,” he says, and smiles ruefully at my belly. “Are you sure if you get in, you’ll be able to get out?”

I am committing to memory the keel of his smile, the landscape of his shoulders. All of the reasons I fell in love with Spencer swell at the base of my throat, so that I cannot say anything at all for a moment. “Don’t worry about me,” I answer finally, and I mean this for forever.

A house settles like a fat man falling asleep: first there are light twitches in the walls and floorboard, the ceiling sighs, finally there is a great rolling heave of the atmosphere, and then everything goes still. The bathroom is heavy with steam; I peel off my clothing and let the mist settle over me. My heart beats so fast I am sure that I can see it beneath the skin—but when I look, the mirror has fogged. Instead of swiping it clear, I press my hands to the glass, leaving a mark. With one finger, I scrawl a single word: H . . . E . . . L . . . P. I picture what will happen when I am found, still and white as a marble statue. I think of how everyone will say the nicest things about me; how they will look at me with nothing but regret and love.

By one in the morning, the bathwater has gone cold. My legs are drawn up on either side of my domed stomach; my wrists are balanced on my knees.

Spencer’s straightedge sits on the lip of the tub.

I pick it up carefully, and press a line just below the elbow. Blood wells up and I touch it with my finger; rub it on my mouth like lipstick. It tastes sticky, salty, like a penny left on the tongue. It is no surprise to find out I’ve gone bitter to the core.

When that raw cut stops aching, I press the razor down again, a half-inch lower.

Two parallel lines. My life, and my son’s. They will save him from the shell of me, and it will be a better life. Otherwise, from the moment he leaves my body, he will belong to someone else—Spencer, and my father. And one day, he will look at me the way they do—like someone who cannot understand the science they create; someone naïve enough to believe that a quantity as immeasurable as love might have the same combustible power as dynamite.

And if, by some miracle, this baby turns out to be a girl, I think it will be worse. I will have failed, because Spencer is expecting a boy. Not only will I have to watch him treat her the way he has treated me . . . I will have to watch her make all the same mistakes I have: fall in love with a man who loves her because of what she is, not who she is; marry for companionship, only to see it makes her more lonely; bear a child, only to realize that she will never live up to what it deserves.

Another line, and another. Blood swirls in the water of the tub, dreamy and pink. I have a railroad track on my arm. I am finally going somewhere, because there is nothing left for me here.

My last cut, on the wrist, is the deepest. The pattern for this gash is already there, a blue chalked line beneath the surface.

There will be one more knife, slicing me down the middle to save this baby. Doctors will finish the work I started here, peeling me open. They will stop and scratch their heads, stunned to discover how empty I am inside.

A beating buzzes in my ears. It takes too much now, to keep my head erect. My body, big as it is, sinks under the water.

The door bursts open, then, and Ruby leans into the tub, screaming in my face for me to hang on. She holds me when I cannot hold onto her. She is slick with my blood but somehow manages to heave me over the lip of the tub, so that I collapse wet and naked and bleeding on the bathroom floor as she shouts for Spencer. He appears in the doorway and hurries toward me. “Cissy, God,
no.
” He wraps a towel around my wrist, and when it soaks through immediately, turns white and runs out of the room. “You stay with her, you hear?” he cries to Ruby, who is too terrified to move. In the distance I hear him yelling into the phone for the doctor.

With the only strength I have left, I reach out for Ruby and draw her close by fisting my hand in her nightgown. “Save the baby,” I beg, hoarse, but she is sobbing too hard to hear me. So I curl my good hand around her neck. I kiss her on the lips, so that she can taste my pain. “Save my baby,” I whisper. “Promise!”

Ruby nods, her eyes locked on mine. “
Promise.
”

“All right then,” I say, and I let those waves close over my head.

The rights of the individual cannot be fully safeguarded when he is being compelled to support in the midst of his community the lawless, the immoral, the degenerate, and the mentally defective.

—H. F. Perkins,
Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont:
First Annual Report,
1927

Everything is white. The ceiling, the light, the tattoos on the backs of my eyes. The bandages, which are laced so tight up my arm from shoulder to hand that I can feel my pulse under the skin, as if I need to be reminded that I am alive in spite of it all.

The bedroom is too hot. For as long as I can remember the window has been stuck; we make do with an electric fan. But even that doesn’t help, and when I kick back the bedclothes I notice them—Spencer, and Dr. DuBois, standing in front of the door. “Joseph,” Spencer says, “I know this will stay within these walls.”

Dr. DuBois is the most prominent physician in Burlington. He delivered me; he will no doubt deliver my baby. “Spencer . . .”

“Please. I’m asking as a friend.”

“There are places, you know, in the country, where she’d be looked after. All rolling meadows and wicker rocking chairs—we’re not talking Waterbury.”

“No. I can’t do that to her.”

“To Cissy? Or to yourself?” Dr. DuBois shakes his head. “It’s not about you this time, Spencer,” he says, and then he lets himself out.

Spencer sits down on the edge of the bed and stares at me. “I’m sorry,” I manage.

“Yes, you are,” he answers, and in spite of the brutal heat in this bedroom, a shiver runs down my spine. Once again, Spencer has found me lacking.