Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  “Better go. You wouldn’t want to be stuck here overnight.”

  “No,” I admit, and then realize what I’ve said. Cheeks reddening, I meet his gaze. “How do you say ‘I’ll return?’”

  It is a challenge, and he accepts it. “N’pedgiji.”

  “Well, then. N’pegdiji.”

  He bursts into laughter. “You just told me you’ll fart.”

  If possible, I blush even harder. “Thank you for the language lesson, Mr. Wolf.”

  “Wli nanawalmezi, Lia.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He smiles slowly. “Take good care of yourself.”

  I hurry up the hill as best I can, lumbering under the weight of my baby. Chijis. On the drive home, I listen to Abigail tell me stories of second cousins who killed others in bar fights, of a rampant outbreak of venereal disease among a strain of Delacours. “Did you learn anything?” she asks finally, when she has run out of things to say.

  How to speak their language. And maybe, how to listen. “Nothing you’d consider important,” I reply, and am silent for the rest of the ride home.

  John Delacour, aka Gray Wolf, is of particular notoriety even for this clan. He has a history of heavy drinking, sex offense, nomadism, and criminality, and has been known to change his name several times. He was arrested in 1913 for hitting a man over the head with a brick. In 1914, he was sent to prison for a murder conviction. There is mention from several relatives about his illegitimate children. John is an absolute liar and very evasive. For this reason it is absolutely impossible to get the truth out of him.

  —From the files of Abigail Alcott,

  Department of Public Welfare social worker

  When I come home, Ruby is waiting at the door with her heart in her eyes, and Spencer is a step behind. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roars, slamming the door behind me. He grabs my upper arms so hard I know it will leave bruises.

  “I can explain—”

  “Explain this, Cissy. Explain why I got a call from my secretary saying that you’d been to the office to meet Abigail Alcott. Explain why my wife, who is seven months pregnant with my firstborn son, would be stupid enough to visit a state hospital for the insane where she could have been seriously hurt. And for Christ’s sake, to be traipsing around some Gypsy camp—”

  “It isn’t some Gypsy camp, Spencer, and I’m fine.” I try to pull away from him, but he will not let me go. “I wanted to see what it is that holds you and my father in so much thrall. Is that a sin?”

  “You are in no condition to—”

  “I’m pregnant, Spencer, not feebleminded.”

  “Is that so?” Spencer explodes. “Jesus Christ, Cissy, how can you expect me to trust you with your own judgment, when you try to kill yourself one night and the next day you’re off at an insane asylum—”

  “That’s unfair,” I say, my eyes stinging already.

  “Unfair? Try imagining what it’s like to sit here, thinking that your wife might be injured, or God forbid, killed by some lunatic. Abigail is trained to do what she does; you are not. And you will stay in this house, goddammit, until I tell you otherwise!”

  “You can’t do that to me.”

  “Can’t I?” Spencer grabs my wrists hard enough to make me cry out. He pulls me up the stairs. The only room in the house that locks from the outside is our bedroom, and Spencer drags me into it. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

  “Whose good?” I challenge.

  Spencer pales, as if I have slapped him. “Sometimes, Cissy,” he whispers, “I don’t know you.”

  My husband walks stiffly out of the bedroom. Inside me, the baby twines tighter. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and the only answer I receive is the sound of the lock being turned.

  Q. Which counts for more, heredity or the environment?

  A. They are interdependent. This question is almost the equivalent of “Which is more important, the seed or the soil?”

  —American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  In the middle of the night the key turns. Even from here, I can smell the alcohol on Spencer. He slips into bed and presses his front to my back, “God, I love you,” he says, the words settling over my skin like steam.

  On our honeymoon, Spencer and I went to Niagara Falls. One night we camped out in a tent, and made love beneath the night sky. The water beat like my blood and when he moved inside me, I could swear that the stars connected in the shape of our initials.

  Now Spencer pulls up the edge of my nightgown, fits himself between my thighs. We are both crying and pretending not to. When Spencer comes inside me he presses his wet face against my spine, and I imagine his features being branded there, a version of a death mask that will always be one step behind me.

  He falls asleep with his arms around the breadth of my middle, hands not quite touching, as if he cannot contain me anymore.

  I think we can safely say that in the sixty-two families we have studied . . . “blood has told,” and there is every reason to believe it will keep right on “telling” in future generations.

  —H. F. Perkins, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont:

  First Annual Report, 1927

  Blood is raining from thunderclouds. Roses burst into bloom at midnight. Water doesn’t boil; words slide from the pages of books. The sky is the wrong color. And as I walk through this strange world, the ground is frozen beneath my feet.

  “Cissy. Cissy!”

  Hands on my shoulders. Breath on my neck. “Spencer?” I say, my voice sanded and drowsy.

  Gradually I become aware of the owls bearing witness in the trees, the mud on the heels of my feet and the edge of my nightgown, the summer night fermenting. I am in the woods behind our house, and I have no idea how I got here.

  “You’ve been sleepwalking,” Spencer explains.

  Sleepwalking, yes, that’s what it must be. And yet this other place I have visited . . . I feel as if I can still trail my fingers along its edge. Spencer embraces me, sighs against my skin. “Cissy, I only want you to be happy.”

  A small sob catches in my throat. “I know.”

  And I am a failure, to have all this—a good home, a healthy pregnancy, a man like Spencer—and still feel as if something is missing. “I love you,” my husband says. “I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

  “I love you too,” I tell him. I only wish it were that easy.

  “Why don’t we go back to bed,” Spencer suggests, “and forget about all of this?”

  Like we forget about everything else. Because when you don’t admit out loud that something awful has happened, who is to say it ever did?

  But habit holds me tight. So I nod, and follow Spencer back to the house. I keep looking over my shoulder; I cannot shake the feeling that there is something here for me to find. After we climb onto the porch, he holds the door open for me, wiping the slate clean.

  It is not until I am in the bathroom, washing the dirt from my feet, that I realize I am clenching something in my left hand. I open my fist like a flower: soft and supple and honey-colored, these are the tiniest pair of moccasins I have ever seen.

  SIX

  August 21, 1932

  From an exhibit at the Third International Eugenics Congress:

  THIS LIGHT FLASHES EVERY 31 SECONDS. Every 31 seconds, State taxpayers paid $100 for maintenance only of Insane, Feebleminded, Epileptic, Blind and Deaf, in State Institutions, Only in 1927.

  In the middle of the night there is a cramp low in my belly. It wakes me; it makes me look across the ocean of mattress to Spencer, who sleeps as if this hotel bed fits him. I try to ignore the teeth eating me from the inside out.

  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 one-time 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 through 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 Rub
y 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.