by Jodi Picoult
But then there is a ripping, and I am too shocked to even cry. I watch the blood soak the front of my nightgown and the cuspid that cuts like a knife. A scaled snout stretches through the hole it has made in my skin; then a clawed foot, a reptile belly, a tail. The alligator that finally hunches between my legs looks up and smiles.
“Miz Pike . . .”
It is the voice of someone who’s come to watch me be devoured whole. The alligator’s jaw ratchets shut on my thigh.
“Miz Pike . . . Lia!”
It is this, my secret name, which makes the alligator disappear. When I blink I see Ruby standing in front of me in her nightgown, and we are in the middle of the hall at the Plaza Hotel. Her eyes are as sad as a canyon. “You need to go back to bed.”
I have been sleepwalking again. And Ruby has been keeping watch, as she was brought along on this trip to do. She leads me to our suite, opens the door, and averts her eyes from Spencer, who sleeps undisturbed in the bed. “No one ever gets a good night’s rest away from home,” Ruby whispers, bravely making excuses. She pulls back the covers and helps me settle, as if she is the elder between us.
I swallow hard and make my eyes adjust to the darkness. I keep my feet folded up beneath me, just in case that gator is still swimming beneath the sheets.
From the program of the Third International Eugenics Congress:
I: Introduction and Welcome: Dr. H. F. Perkins, President of the American Eugenics Society
II. “The Biological Screening of Immigrant Populations”: Prof. Jap van Tysediik
III. “Prevention of the Collapse of Western Civilization”: Dr. Roland Osterbrand
IV. “The Disappearance of the Old American: A Study in Human Race Improvement”: Dr. Spencer A. Pike
The Third International Eugenics Congress has convened at New York’s Museum of Natural History, and I have been invited by default. Even with my father attending the event, and Spencer the featured speaker, I might have been allowed to stay home and fend for myself, if not for the fact that mere weeks ago I had taken a blade to my skin, and gotten myself in trouble with Abigail Alcott.
We are sitting near the lecture hall, in a room that has been converted into a private lounge for the bigwigs at the conference. Spencer is getting ready for his presentation; my father reads the program notes. Ruby is quiet as a ghost in one corner, her lips moving silently as she knits.
We are the only ones left; the others have gone out to give their presentations, or to join the audience. So far we have met the pioneer of Michigan’s sterilization program, and a Cuban physiologist who blessed me in his mother tongue and said it was the duty of gifted women like myself to rescue the world by having more children. A New York physician who smelled of garlic spent an hour with Spencer, arguing about the annual expense of caring for the offspring of two feebleminded families ($2 million) versus the onetime cost of sterilizing the parents ($150).
I peel an orange and watch through the window as visitors to the museum hurry up the stone steps. A man loses his hat in the wind, and it blows into the arms of a panhandler. A toddler sits down on a step three-quarters of the way up and begins to kick her feet with such force that her panties show, pink as a rose petal. And my father and husband argue about what, exactly, Spencer should cover in his presentation.
“I don’t know, Harry,” Spencer says, pacing around a long chart unrolled like a hound’s tongue across the floor. “We’ve backed away from the pedigrees in the past year.”
Spencer’s shoe brushes the edge of the pedigree chart. It is a long genetic octopus, a family tree with arms and legs that tangle and cross, as do those of most degenerate families. Spotted throughout are symbols, keyed on the side. A dark black circle signifies Insane. A hollow circle means Feebleminded. Black squares for those who were sent to reform school, white squares for those who were sexual offenders. This particular chart is as dotted as a leopard.
Professor Pike made the decision to stop heralding the pedigree charts as the main thrust of the Vermont eugenics movement when he, Spencer, and my father were sitting at dinner and realized that three influential swing-voting members of the legislature had unwittingly showed up on their charts, descended from some of the most degenerate families in the state. Even the lieutenant governor was linked to one notorious family by marriage. They agreed to focus instead on the best way to encourage the Old Vermont stock to reproduce, and set up another subdivision of the VCCL—the Committee for the Handicapped—to do the dirty work, advocating legislation to prevent these people from marrying and breeding. This way, any controversy that swirled over the Sterilization Bill would not be associated with the three of them, personally.
That night, we served turtle soup for dinner, which made me queasy, and I had to leave the table.
“We did what we needed to, Spencer, to get the public support necessary to pass the sterilization law. But that’s done. It’s time to go back to the fundamentals.” My father walks over to me and takes a slice of orange, which he pops into his mouth. He waves his fingers in front of Spencer’s face. “Smell that? You can’t see it anymore . . . but you know it was there. You don’t have to mention the charts if you don’t want to, Spencer. Hell, you can burn them if it makes you feel better. But everyone in that room remembers the work we did to survey those families five years ago. Everyone is going to know what you’re not saying.” Then he walks out of the room.
Spencer looks down at the chart. “What do you think?” he asks, and I nearly fall out of my chair.
“What do I think?” I am so shocked to have been asked for my opinion that I can hardly find the words to give it. I think of the Gypsy whose son had been taken away by the welfare agencies. Of Gray Wolf, assuming I had come to ruin his life, simply because of the color of my skin.
Reputations, once they’re made, precede you.
“I think the damage has already been done,” I reply. Through the open doorway comes Spencer’s name, and a volley of applause.
Once, as a little girl, my father had taken me to a similar, smaller convocation of eugenicists in San Francisco, where I survived a small earthquake. We were told to stand in a doorway until it passed, and I tried to come to terms with the fact that something as solid as the ground beneath my feet was not quite so secure after all.
When five hundred people clap at once, it sounds like the earth is breaking to pieces all around you. Spencer rolls the pedigree chart up, tucks it under his arm, and strides into the lecture hall on this summon of thunder. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, and I don’t have to listen anymore to know what he is going to say.
I stand up and walk out of the room, hurrying down the stairs into one of the exhibit halls. Children and their nannies are dwarfed by an enormous re-creation of a brontosaurus. The pin of its head is so small and distant I can barely make out the hole of its eye socket. Its brain, I believe, was no bigger than my fist. Intelligence belonged to the tyrannosaurus across the way, with its formidable jaw and fence of teeth.
And yet both of these creatures, the so-called inferior plant-eater and the ferocious carnivore, died out because of a change in the climate, or so Spencer has told me. In the end, it didn’t matter who was brighter or stronger or better or could reproduce the most efficiently. Bad weather, a circumstance beyond their control, had the upper hand.
There is a distant rumbling, and I realize it is coming from overhead, as the audience applauds something Spencer has said.
I turn to Ruby, who of course has only been a few steps behind me all along. “Let’s take a walk,” I suggest.
Rosabelle—answer—tell—pray, answer—look—tell—answer, answer—tell.
—Code devised by Harry Houdini and his wife, based on an old vaudeville mind-reading routine, to prove his return as a spirit after his death.
New York City, in the summer, cannot be so different from hell. The smell of sweat mixed with the brine from the pickle barrels of vendors, the tight press of a hundred people who look right throug
h you, the newsboys selling tragedy for a nickel, the fumes of the taxis rising like wraiths—this is an underworld, and anyone in it can point you toward an escape hatch. In fact, it is the little girl living under an awning with her mother who rolls my dollar bill like a cigarette, tucks it behind her right ear, and leads Ruby and me to a brownstone three blocks away. A small, engraved sign hangs above the buzzer: HEDDA BARTH, SPIRITUALIST.
The woman who opens the door is smaller even than Ruby, with long white hair that passes her shoulders. “Ladies,” says Hedda Barth, Medium of the Century. “What can I do for you?”
If she is truly psychic, then she ought to know. I am about to back down the stairs when I feel Ruby push me from behind. “We might as well go all the way,” she whispers.
Madame Hedda has been written up in the papers. She sparred with Houdini; she conjured the departed great-uncle of Mayor Walker. The chances of me being here again, and able to meet with her, are virtually nonexistent. “We were hoping to hold a séance, with your help,” I say.
“But you have no appointment.”
“No.” I raise my chin, the way I have seen my father do, in order to make her feel this was an oversight on her part, rather than mine. And sure enough, she steps aside to let us in.
She leads us up a short staircase and holds out her hand to open the door. I wonder if I am the only one who notices that her fingers never touch it, that the knob swings open of its own accord.
A hexagonal table waits for us in the dark. “There’s the small matter of payment,” Hedda says.
“Money,” I answer, “is no object.”
So Hedda instructs us to take seats and join hands. She scrutinizes my face and Ruby’s. “You’ve both suffered a loss,” she announces.
Once I read a criticism of the spiritualist movement, in which a Parisian scientist offered free horoscope readings to passersby. Ninety-four percent of those given a reading found it personally accurate. In fact, each person had received the same horoscope, belonging to one of France’s most notorious mass murderers.
We believe what we want to believe; we hear what we want to hear. What Hedda Barth has told me anyone could have guessed; why else would Ruby and I have come?
But suddenly the table begins to shudder and rock, lifting up on two of its legs like a rearing stallion. Hedda’s eyes roll back in her head, and her mouth gapes open. I glance at Ruby, unsure of what to do, if this is normal.
“Ma poule.” The voice is higher than Hedda’s, with a ribbon of lisp. My heart begins to pound on the roof of my mouth, and the baby kicks to be free.
“Simone?” Ruby’s word is just barely that, the quiet puff of shock. I recognize, now, where I have heard that cadence before—it is Ruby’s own French Canadian, which creeps out when she is not careful or is tired or both.
“Cherie, you tell your friend, there’s nothing to be scared of, no. We are all here waiting on her.”
“That’s my sister,” Ruby says wildly. “Simone. She’s the only one who ever called me that—ma poule. My little hen.”
The one who died from diphtheria. But her message, it’s lost in the translation. Waiting could signify so many things. Are they attending to my mother? Or are they expecting me?
Suddenly the baby goes limp inside me. My arms fall to my sides; my worries dissolve on my tongue. This must be how people feel the moment before their automobile crashes into a tree. This is the white light we hear talk of; this is the quiet coming.
This is something my own mother felt.
There are so many questions I have—Will I ever see my son, or is that asking too much? Will he remember me? Will it hurt? Will I know when it’s going to happen? But right now, it is enough to have confirmation, to know that my instincts have been right.
Madame Hedda is coming out of her trance. A line of drool curls down the left side of her mouth like a comma. I place a ten-dollar bill on the table, one I will tell Spencer that I lost. “Come back,” she says, and I realize that she means from the other side.
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.
