Ruth thought about the birth of psychoanalysis. Had that been in the 1890s? No, 1880s, she was fairly certain.
She tried to picture Annie Oakley, just under five feet tall, reclining on a couch in her long skirt and black boots, waist pinched by a severe corset, long brown hair fanned out on some fussy little bolster or pillow. She was thinking about Annie’s various trips to Austria and Germany—where she had supposedly shot the end of a cigarette held by the German Crown Prince Wilhelm II, at his request—and whether the sharpshooter had mentioned anything about scientists or cures of any sort. It was highly improbable, but not impossible.
In his email, Nieman, as he called himself, had presented the journal as “Annie Oakley’s true account, in her own words.” If he’d asked for money, Ruth would’ve been suspicious. Instead, he expected answers and insights, quid pro quo, claiming urgency. He was willing to share materials no scholar had ever seen, but only because he needed her help ascertaining their authenticity. He didn’t mention why he’d chosen Ruth for this task or how he had gotten her contact information, though of course it wasn’t hard to track anyone down these days.
His instructions had been: Read it first. I don’t want to color your impression in any way. Then email me and I will send you my questions. Answer the questions and I may be able to provide you with more documents—a letter collection, which I haven’t properly seen and can only obtain after a significant investment, which I won’t make unless your answers suggest it is worthwhile.
Ruth wanted more pages, the continuation of Annie’s therapy sessions, if that was what these were.
Annie, what next? Where did you go?
Of course, she still didn’t know if it was the real Annie Oakley, whose name had never once been used. But the other details pointed all too obviously: sharpshooting, feather-filled balls, the train accident, Frank, and—though they weren’t explicitly named—the Wolves.
When I was in an unpleasant situation, as a child. Removing myself, as I believe many people have done, in situations of discomfort or shame.
The unnamed analyst had put his finger on the sensitive spot: a “spontaneous neurosis.” A “fixation” that preceded the traumatic neurosis of the train accident, by many years.
This either was someone meant to be Annie, or it was Annie.
Therefore, to make things simple: Annie.
But only for about seven pages.
Then, no more.
Ruth wanted to read the journal from the beginning again, to look for more clues to the analyst’s identity that she might have overlooked. But first, quickly, she texted Reece, just to be polite and perhaps slow the arrival of the next slew of messages. His most recent had been: I looked up Uncanny. Commonly used in AO’s time. Not a red flag after all.
Now she texted back: Good job. How’d you figure that out?
Google Ngram.
Good. Did high-schoolers use that? It wasn’t flawless for establishing word popularity over time, but it would do.
You don’t think it’s a reporter’s account, but given she’s describing accident and you said Wild West show sued the train company, maybe written up by lawyer? Testimony?
Better than the reporter theory. Ruth smiled and replied, Not impossible, based on the part we read together.
Ruth hadn’t yet decided how much she’d share with Reece, but already, her inclination was shifting. She hadn’t written anything in a year; she’d been out of teaching for twice as long. Since her breakup with Scott, she’d had no one who would walk in the door, ready to hear about her latest discovery. And besides, the kid was desperate in the same way she’d once been desperate. To be a part of something. And perhaps to get away from something else.
Ruth texted, The rest makes it clear. He’s an early psychoanalyst.
OK! So. Freud?
Not Freud, I don’t think, but will investigate all options.
A minute passed before Reece replied. Wiki says AO was a famous hysteric written about by Freud. Is this her?
Let’s not go calling anyone a hysteric, thought Ruth. But she wasn’t going to thumb-type a lecture on the misdiagnosis of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Different AO, she texted. That’s a code name for Bertha somebody.
Reece had the answer quickly. Pappenheim. From Vienna. Never mind about Freud. Wasn’t her therapist. But . . . AO, not Annie Oakley?
Coincidence. This journal calls her ZN. A code. One letter back. Bertha P became Anna O. This Annie Oakley became ZN. If it’s real.
Easy code.
No one guessed who Bertha was for decades as I recall, so OK code evidently. Not our problem.
Weird coincidence, two Annas.
Not so weird, Ruth replied. Many women named Ann/Annie/Anna in this period.
But two AOs?
Let’s not get stuck on that.
It was something that Scott might have said to her, or even Dr. Susan, except that Ruth’s psychotherapist would have used the term “apophenia,” the false perception of connections and meaning in the presence of unrelated phenomena. One was supposed to ignore that little echo in one’s head, or the tingle, or the voice that said, This! Pay attention to this! Fortunately or unfortunately for Ruth, historians were pattern seekers. Yet it was equally important to remember: a pattern was only a tool for discovering truth, not truth itself.
Reece texted, When can I read the rest?
More to find out first. Which wasn’t an answer. Bye.
She pulled her laptop closer and composed a quick, neutral greeting to Nieman, thanking him again for entrusting her with the journal. Then she got to the point.
You mentioned the seller allowed you to see one letter from the collection you’re thinking of buying. I presume it is a letter from “ZN” to the doctor, to continue their relationship by correspondence, as he suggested. Do you intend to include it? Is the analyst not named or addressed? Do you have anything else that connects Annie Oakley directly to this journal? I wouldn’t want to waste your time by offering an uninformed opinion if you have another document that will answer the question or at least narrow down the options. With the letter as opposed to the journal (if I am correct in my hypothesis regarding its presented authorship), we would at least have known handwriting to examine and compare.
Ruth hadn’t been sure about the last line, which was really just a cheap bid for him to cough up the letter so she could see it firsthand. Just as she’d told Reece, handwriting analysis was an ever-weaker tool in the digital age.
It seemed ridiculous to push forward with more research until Nieman got back to her. Was he testing Ruth by withholding the letter, or was he intentionally hobbling her efforts?
He was hiding something, she decided. But who didn’t hide their most treasured secrets? The woman in the journal, “ZN,” hadn’t seemed forthright; the analyst wasn’t either. He hadn’t told his anxious new client that he believed her experiences to be pure hallucination.
And Ruth? In the depths of her illness, she had lied on a regular basis.
Ruth put on the kettle, selected an Earl Grey tea bag and stood with the spoon in her hand, staring at the sugar bowl on the counter, still wondering why she’d been chosen to receive this journal. Why had it shown up today, not two years ago, when Ruth had needed it most? Why in the presence of this young stranger as stubborn and argumentative as Kennidy, her own kid sister, had been?
Perseverating was often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, especially with certain types of brain injury. She had talked through strategies with Dr. Susan Joy Hovsepian—or Dr. Susan, as Scott and Ruth had always called her—such as setting a firm time limit for thinking about any given topic or image. By which I don’t mean dwelling on something for a week, Ruth. I mean ten minutes. Use a timer.
Three Years Earlier
8
Ruth
After the accident, everything had changed for Ruth—not only her work and her intimate relationships, her daily routines, her body and her brain, but even the way she saw the world. Her life, formerly quiet and mostly fulfilling, had been turned inside out. But it would be wrong to say that life before the accident had been trouble-free.
Her mother, Gwen, was in her final months of terminal breast cancer when Ruth dropped out of grad school in Iowa City and moved back home to Minnesota to be with her. Even before she started dating Scott, the only good thing that happened that dismal winter and spring, Ruth had come up with the idea of salvaging part of her unfinished dissertation about Annie Oakley and converting it into a slim, nonacademic book.
Scott encouraged her. It’ll be good for your CV. Maybe it’s your way into a museum job. Her adjunct teaching certainly wasn’t paying the bills. It doesn’t have to be brilliant. It’s just a good old story about a historical figure people already like, told in a fresh way.
None of that seemed convincing enough once Ruth was in the office of Laura Boyd. Was the editor stifling a yawn, or was the sun in her eyes? They were seated around a small round table in a room dominated by enormous picture windows framing a reed-edged pond. It was a fall day: brilliant blue sky, dazzling light bouncing off every glass and metal surface. Ruth looked across the room to the editor’s corner desk, above which hung family photos, two diplomas and a shot of Boyd herself next to a canoe and a Labrador retriever.
“Tell me again,” the editor prompted. “Why does this book matter now?”
Ruth took a sip of water, as if she’d only been warming up. “Gun culture. A new Annie Oakley book will deepen our understanding of American gun culture.”
The editor was gazing out the window at a flock of geese taking flight from the pond. For the first time, she settled back in her chair and looked at Ruth with real, unhurried interest.
“Tell me more about that.”
It was one of several themes in the book proposal, but here, in person, Ruth could expand and improvise in response to Boyd’s cues. The editor was familiar with Oakley’s fame as a celebrity performer and her cheerful go-get-’em reputation, familiar to Americans since the inaccurate and irrelevant 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun. But she hadn’t known about Annie’s work as a serious gun advocate. She hadn’t realized how fervently Oakley had promoted the use of firearms to women—up to twenty thousand of them—as a way to protect themselves.
Boyd asked, “Did you know Eleanor Roosevelt packed a pistol?”
Ruth hesitated. “She was amazing, wasn’t she?” Ruth had once seen a photo of the First Lady’s gun permit. She wasn’t convinced that this meant the first lady carried or shot a gun frequently, but she knew gun-rights advocates enjoyed thinking it was so.
They talked at length about Annie’s early years, when she was already a traveling performer. But only briefly about the years before that. When Ruth mentioned Annie’s troubled childhood, Boyd’s eyes didn’t light up.
“I think people overemphasize the importance of childhood experiences,” the editor said. “It’s tiresome after a while, don’t you think? Everyone’s had hard times, especially in the old days. We have a book about Lincoln coming out next spring. Did you know his father rented him out as a servant? ‘Ten to thirty-one cents a day,’ evidently. To do whatever people wanted. Log-splitting, farm work, whatever. Lincoln’s own words: ‘I was a slave.’”
“That’s . . . surprising.”
“Yes.” Boyd beamed. “A slave! But here’s the thing. He rarely talked about it. In the book, we give it maybe a quarter of a page. His father was domineering, semiliterate, didn’t want Lincoln to get an education, and I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he knocked him around—and let the neighbors knock him around, too. I mean, if they were paying, right?”
Ruth took another sip of water.
“Kidding,” her editor said. “Where Lincoln’s involved, everyone gets way too serious. That’s the problem with most popular history: too serious.”
The press was publishing less about the Civil War and Native Americans, even while they’d added some coffee-table-size books on historic gardens and pioneer cooking. They were even beginning to package books as gift sets: a small baking book sold with a miniature cast-iron pan, a book on early American brewing sold with a set of mason-jar drinking glasses. Ruth had a creeping suspicion Laura Boyd didn’t really care for history at all—neither the public nor the personal kind.
“In our forthcoming book,” Boyd continued, “the slave comment isn’t the jumping-off point to explain how Lincoln became Lincoln. People grow up. They get over things. It’s just a brief anecdote.”
Ruth pictured Abe Lincoln’s somber face. She’d like to read more, actually, about whether Lincoln’s views on slavery and his willingness to go to war might have owed something to this early experience, or what he’d been thinking when he’d chosen to use that word, “slave,” knowing how it would resonate with the day’s most pressing controversy. But Ruth also knew better than to question a point emphatically made by the woman who would decide whether to publish her.
So the door to childhood trauma was closed, and they were back to straight gun talk again, navigating together as they reviewed the presidential assassinations during Oakley’s lifetime: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. One could say that Americans’ fascination with guns and the belief in solving problems with physical force had led to some unfortunate consequences. One could also say that guns were part of America and had always been. Ruth would tie this fact to the uplifting story of a well-known woman with a positive outlook, someone easy to admire.
Responding to Laura Boyd’s unmistakable leanings, Ruth used words like empowerment.
The one word she never used was revenge.
Ruth wrote the book chronologically, unsatisfied with the childhood years, the part that interested her the most and Laura Boyd the least. The material was scant. Born in 1860, Annie—born Phoebe Ann Mosey—grew up in western Ohio, the fifth of seven surviving children. Following overexposure during a blizzard, which led to pneumonia, her father died. Soon after, Annie started trapping. At the age of eight, without permission, she lowered an old gun from the wall of her family’s cabin in order to shoot game. Legend had it she was a bizarrely talented shot from day one. Annie continued hunting, feeding her family and selling extra game to a local buyer. It wasn’t enough.
Annie was sent to the Darke County Infirmary, a poor farm where the superintendent and his wife liked their young ward, but not enough to keep her. Annie was then lent out to a farm family, new parents who needed help with child-minding, pumping water and all the other chores of farm life. They promised to pay and educate her, promises never kept. Instead, they beat her. Whipped her. Possibly worse.
The Wolves. That was what Annie had called them just before her death in the autobiography she’d never finished writing. One source suggested that Miss Oakley was just trying to protect them “kindly.” Not so. There was no reason to believe that Annie felt the need to be “kind” or forgiving of the couple who had abused her. Other early biographies failed to mention this part of Annie’s life at all.
Two years or a little more. Age nine to eleven or twelve. Those were the years that Ruth refused to allow to pass in a single sentence or a sparse paragraph.
How do you write about what you don’t know, what you can’t prove?
Ruth found herself dwelling on what was known and unknown about the Wolves, imagining those early episodes. Driving back and forth to her job as an adjunct at the community college forty minutes away, she caught herself daydreaming at stoplights, playing imaginary scenes like a movie in her mind. The false promise of fifty cents a week and an education, the lonely Ohio cabin, the infant Annie was made to care for, the endless physical chores, the beatings and whippings that left scars on her back, the blizzard in which Annie was made to stand outside shoeless
, the despicable woman who turned a blind eye to her husband’s cravings.
Sexual abuse—if that was what Annie had experienced—was both tragic and arresting, a car wreck you couldn’t help but stare at but that made you sorry when you did, because the images would never leave you. At the same time, Ruth already knew her editor was uninterested in this aspect of Annie’s story, as well as any other part of the story not in service to a simple inspirational theme.
There were two small foundations and a limited number of American museums that referred to Annie Oakley. On their websites and in their most visible public interpretations, some made mention of the Wolves. Some did not.
Ruth decided to tackle the question directly. She called Laura Boyd.
“How’s this,” Boyd said. “Cover the childhood episode, keep it very short, and name the Wolf. Most of the older biographies don’t, isn’t that right?”
“Because it’s not certain. A few names have been suggested, none a perfect fit.”
“Then give readers the options.”
“You’re not worried about me naming an innocent man?”
Boyd laughed. “Five years ago, I would have been worried. But the culture has changed. Men who are still living and famous are being called out on social media all the time without evidence. You’re talking about naming a possible child abuser who has been dead for, what, a century?”
“Possibly a hundred and fifty years.”
None of Ruth’s best guesses satisfied her, and she started to explain to Boyd about a man named Boose or maybe Bosse, another named Rannals or maybe Reynolds, and an entirely different family named the Studabakers, just to start.
“Ruth,” Boyd interrupted. “You’re losing me in the weeds here, which doesn’t bode well. These men are long dead. Their great-grandchildren are long dead. One did something, another maybe didn’t, or perhaps nobody did anything that wasn’t considered normal behavior. Weren’t plenty of young girls forced to chop wood and carry buckets of water in those days?”
Annie and the Wolves Page 6
