The 19th Wife (57 page)

Alexis Richland provided much needed editorial guidance on an early draft. Her thoughtful response helped solve some problems that had lingered in my mind for years. Mark Nelson read several drafts, each time raising important questions in need of resolution. His fierce intelligence improved the novel in every sense. I’m grateful for the many hours he devoted to this book, and for his unyielding friendship and support. Daryl Mattson, who has never tired of listening to me gab about almost anything, served as a sounding board for a number of ideas in this book, even when he wasn’t aware of it. The name of the Internet café in St. George, A Woman Sconed, comes from him.

For ten years Elaine Koster has been a formidable agent, insightful editor, and loyal friend. Her unflagging encouragement helped bring this book from an early idea to the pages you now hold. I owe her much.

Lots of thanks are due to Marianne Velmanns and her colleagues at Transworld. They are the kind of publisher every writer hopes to have.

The thanks I want to offer Random House are vast. So many people there have helped me over so many years that any list of names is bound to forget someone crucial. So I’ll make a blanket but sincere expression of gratitude to everyone at 1745. I know how books are published, and I know that each of you played a part. I hope you’ll forgive me for not printing the company roster. But I must thank my editor, Kate Medina. She is a brilliant reader, and her wise pencil made this book better in many, many ways. Frankie Jones and Jennifer Smith shouldered the burdens of turning a manuscript into a book; each did so with grace and generosity. Jynne Martin, publicity-goddess: it’s an honor to be on your roster. And to my publisher, Gina Centrello, thank you for your support, which has shown itself in so many ways.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D
AVID
E
BERSHOFF
is the author of two novels,
The Danish Girl
and
Pasadena,
and a short-story collection,
The Rose City.
His fiction has won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award and has been translated into ten languages. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University and is an editor-at-large at Random House. He lives in New York City.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Pasadena

The Rose City

The Danish Girl

FOOTNOTES

^*1
The authoress would like to assert that many eyewitnesses have left similar accounts of an inexplicable vision and that Elizabeth Webb was not unique in seeing that which could not be seen. Even some thirty years later, my mother still claims she experienced the supernatural on that summer day in Nauvoo.
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²
In 1999, not long after the rebuilding of the Nauvoo Temple began, Church historians were excited to discover a time capsule buried in the original Temple’s foundation. The capsule itself is a granite box, measuring three feet long and two feet wide and one and a half feet tall. An inscription on its stone lid describes the contents to be the Testimonies of Faith, or personal statements of belief, written by a number of Saints departing Nauvoo for Salt Lake in 1846. When Church historians and leaders opened the time capsule at the rededication of the Nauvoo Temple on June 27, 2002, they were disappointed to discover that water had destroyed, or partially damaged, a number of Testimonies, including an estimated twelve pages of the Testimony written by Elizabeth Churchill Webb. While frustratingly truncated, the surviving fragments of Elizabeth’s Testimony provide many insightful glimpses into her outlook during this historic period (1844–1846). Today the document is held in the Family History Center in Nauvoo.
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³
Unless otherwise stated, my source is Elizabeth Churchill Webb’s Testimony. General information about early Mormon history and Nauvoo comes from personal research conducted during my recent spring break trip there.
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⁴
Her real name was Elizabeth Taft, but they called her Lydia to avoid confusion.
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⁵
See Taft, Lydia, Letters (Family History Library).
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⁶
Chauncey would end up building between 1,000 and 1,500 wagons used at various stages of the Exodus.
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⁷
Much of my general information about Brigham comes from
Brigham Young: American Moses
by Leonard J. Arrington (Knopf, 1985).
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⁸
To me, this younger Brigham looks a lot like Russell Crowe.
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⁹
Brigham to Brigham Jr., November 3, 1855.
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¹⁰
Although the Saints were preparing to abandon Nauvoo, hundreds of laborers continued to erect the Temple until their last days in Illinois. This effort always strikes me as a profound symbol of their faith in both their Church and Brigham.
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¹¹
In
The 19th Wife,
Ann Eliza writes about many events in her parents’ lives that took place either before she was born or when she was too young to remember them. According to her public lectures, she wrote about her parents by interviewing her mother and her half-brother, Gilbert, while preparing her manuscript.
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¹²
The 19th Wife.
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¹³
See Webb, Gilbert, Diary (Family History Center). Gilbert Webb, Ann Eliza’s half-brother, was an eloquent but infrequent diarist. He is best remembered for his written deposition provided in Ann Eliza’s divorce against Brigham Young in 1873.
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¹⁴
“The Other Wife in Pioneer Homes: Recollections of Joy & Sorrow,” edited by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers (1947).
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¹⁵
The most conservative estimate of Brigham’s total number of wives at the time of his death (August 29, 1877) is nineteen. The most liberal estimates are about fifty-six. Many LDS historians have settled on the number twenty-seven.
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¹⁶
At the end of
The 19th Wife,
Ann Eliza poignantly describes returning to Nauvoo to see the Temple ruins.
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¹⁷
According to a University of Chicago study by Professor Kwang-Sun Lee, “Infant mortality rates in the nineteenth century were in the range of 130 to 230 for every 1,000 births. The main causes were diarrhea, respiratory illness, and infectious diseases such as scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, smallpox, diphtheria, and croup.” For the mid-nineteenth-century mother, parturition in any situation could be dangerous; on the wagon trail it was especially hazardous.
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¹⁸
For years LDS scholars have noted Ann Eliza’s obvious bias and political agenda in
The 19th Wife.
Yet for this paper, whenever I could check her version of events against another source I found general agreement. To my surprise, I have come to the opinion that Ann Eliza’s memoir, at least in the depiction of her mother’s life and her family’s years in Nauvoo and journey to Zion, is for the most part factually reliable, although her emphasis on certain matters, while skipping over others, can at times leave the reader with a distorted impression of early Church history. Whether or not the entire memoir is factually correct, especially the passages concerning her relationship with Brigham Young, will be part of my future research.
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¹⁹
I would like to thank the Department, especially Professor Sprague, for the generous work-study grant supporting my upcoming internship at the Ann Eliza Young House, which I’m really excited about.
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²⁰
This was Brigham Young’s first public acknowledgment of polygamy. In laying out these arguments, he provided the Latter-day Saints with the spiritual/political armament to defend the practice for the next forty years.
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²¹
The authoress wishes to point the more serious reader to the archives of the
Laramie Union
should he care to read their substantial review of my appearance. The same is true of the local newspapers of all the cities I appeared in as I journeyed to Washington (with, of course, the exception of New York).
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²²
Transcripts of the documents I have studied have been placed in the WRI’s archives.
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²³
A final note on numbers: My research shows Ann Eliza was most likely Brigham’s 52nd of 55 wives. As far as I can tell, she was called the 19th because removed from the total tally were the wives who had died, who were barren, or whom Brigham no longer had sexual relations with. This discrepancy in marital accounting speaks volumes about Brigham’s complicated relations with his spouses and polygamy’s moral corrosion. If anyone still wonders why Ann Eliza was so ticked off, they need only consider this footnote.
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²⁴
Transcripts of these interviews are in the WRI’s archives.
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This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by David Ebershoff

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The illustration on
BACK AT THE MOTEL GRAYBAR
, based on the original by Stanley Fox, is copyright © 2008 by Catherine Hamilton and is used with her permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ebershoff, David.

The 19th wife : a novel / David Ebershoff.

p.                                     cm.

1. Mormons—Fiction. 2. Utah—Fiction. 3. Young, Ann Eliza, b. 1844—Fiction. 4. Polygamy—Utah—Fiction. I. Title. II. Nineteenth wife.

PS
3555.
B
4824
A
615 2008

813'.54—dc22                                                                 2008000074

www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-748-8

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