by Jodi Picoult
“The Hardings,” I lie.
“Cal Harding?” This will impress Spencer; our neighbor is a stickler for detail. “Did they check his references?”
“Spencer, he’s patching a roof, not signing on as the nanny.”
From a distance comes the clatter of things being moved in too small a space. “I don’t like him,” Spencer says.
“Well,” I answer. “I do.”
Eugenics is the scientific projection of our sense of self-preservation and our parental instincts.
—O. F. Cook, “Quenching Life on the Farm: How the Neglect of Eugenics Subverts Agriculture and Destroys Civilization,” from a review by E. R. Eastman in the Journal of Heredity, 1928
As a child, I used to go to my father’s office at the university and pretend his big leather desk chair was a throne, and I was the Queen of Everything. My subjects—pencils, paperweights— lined up at attention on the desk to hear me speak and watch me twirl in circles. My court jester, a typewriter carriage with a bell at each return, sat at my elbow. I was only three-and-a-half feet tall, and I pretended I could fill this space with as much command as my father.
He is sitting at the desk, laboring over a legal pad, when I let myself inside. Seeing me, he puts down his work. “Cissy! This is a nice surprise. What brings you to town?”
For the past few days, my belly has been stretched to breaking, my skin on the verge of splitting. “Your grandson wanted to pay a visit.”
He sees me looking at his chair, and he smiles slowly. “Did you want to take a spin, for old time’s sake?”
Ruefully, I shake my head. “I wouldn’t fit.”
“Of course you would. I’ve seen Allen Sizemore stuff his considerable, er, assets into that seat.” When I don’t laugh along with him, he stands and reaches for my hand. “Tell me what’s the matter.”
Oh, God, where would I even start? With the way I look at a blade as a silver opportunity? With the nightmares I have of my own father and Spencer, pulling this baby out from between my legs? Or should I appeal to him as a scientist: Hypothesis—fear is a room six feet by six feet, without any windows or doors.
What comes out of my mouth instead is a single word. “Mama,” I whisper.
“She would have been so proud of you. She would have loved to see this baby.” He pauses. “It’s perfectly natural to worry. But Cissy, you’re a different woman from your mother, God rest her soul. You’re stronger.”
“How do you know?”
“Because part of you came from me.” Suddenly he tugs me into his leather chair. He spins it slowly, a carousel.
“Daddy!”
“What? Who’s here to see?”
So I lean my head back and try to find the eye at the center of the cyclone. My feet fly out in front of me, my hands rest heavy on the armrests. “That’s my girl,” my father says, and he brings me to a stop. “I might come out to your place this afternoon. I hear you’re having some work done by a Gypsy.”
“Yes.” I wonder what else Spencer has told him.
“Never hired one, myself.” My father leans against the desk. “There was an Indian in grade school with me. Linwood . . . good God, I can’t believe I remember his name. This kid was as Indian as the Indian on a buffalo head nickel. Braids and all. Of course, every boy back then played cowboys and Indians. The highlight of the summer was heading up to South Hero, where there would be Indians at camp to teach us to make trails in the woods and such . . . but that was all for play, you know. Linwood, though . . . he lived it. He could actually trap and hunt and shoot a bow. Hell, he could make a bow.” There is a strange tone of admiration in my father’s voice. “He wore moccasins to school,” he says faintly. “He did all sorts of things the rest of us couldn’t do.”
I wonder if something as simple as this could have been the raw splinter that stuck in my father’s mind, the one that brought him to eugenics in the first place. A chance meeting that means nothing at the time might bloom into an event of enormous importance. You don’t think twice about an Indian boy’s coveted leather shoes, but you may never forget them. You ignore the man staring at you across the stage of a July 4th historical pageant, until it seems he was fated to be there.
I study his face. “What about Mama? Did she know any Indians?”
The light leaves my father’s eyes. “No,” he answers. “They scared her to death.”
June 13, 1933
Miss Martha E. Leighton
Agricultural Extension Building
City
Dear Miss Leighton:
I think I shall choose “Registered Human Stock” as the topic for discussion with the 4-H older boys the last of the month.
Sincerely yours,
Henry F. Perkins
—Correspondence from H. F. Perkins, ESV and VCCL papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT
The town diner looks the same, a squat clapboard eyesore sitting like a blister on the lip of the town. What makes no sense, though, are the odd things surrounding it. There are more cars than I have ever seen in all of Burlington, in the sleekest of shapes. A boy with wheels on his feet rattles past me. When I turn the corner, the long-haired man stands up, and he hands me his heart.
Waking abruptly, I stir in Spencer’s arms. “What is it?” he murmurs.
“A dream.”
“What were you dreaming?”
I have to think about this for a moment. “The future, I think.”
Spencer’s hand splays over our son. “That’s a start,” he says.
Styla Nestor, a cousin by marriage to Gray Wolf Delacour, relates his heavy periodic drinking and sex immorality to his Gypsy-like travel, due most likely to the fact that overseers and townspeople wanted to get rid of him. The only semi-permanent address she could recall for her cousin, in fact, was the State Prison.
—From the files of Abigail Alcott, social worker
The afternoon sun is a cat, tickling me beneath the chin. Bolting upright in bed, I check the clock, and then check it again. I am shocked to have slept so late; I wonder why Ruby has not come in to wake me.
I wash and dress and run a comb through my hair, in a hurry to get outside. The steady beat of the hammer overhead tells me Gray Wolf is already working on the roof, and there is so much I want to ask him.
“Coffee?” Ruby asks, as I come into the kitchen.
“Not now.”
“Miz Pike—” she says, when I am already halfway out the back door.
I shade my eyes with a hand, heading in the direction of the noise. “Gray Wolf?” I call, and nearly lose my footing when my husband’s face peers over the edge of the roof instead. “Spencer, what are you doing here?”
“Finishing what I should have done myself. I don’t have to teach until this afternoon.” He tucks the hammer in the back loop of his belt and begins a careful climb down to the porch, leaving the ladder propped against the house near the sealed bedroom window. “I fired him,” he says, when we are facing each other.
“What . . . what did he do?”
“What didn’t he do, Cissy?” Spencer hands me a paper from his pocket. It is a carbon copy of a court conviction from nearly two decades ago, in which John “Gray Wolf” Delacour was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail for murder. Stapled to it is a second page—the paroled release of Gray Wolf from the Vermont State Prison, dated July 4th of this year.
“He was here alone with you and Ruby, for God’s sake!”
“He isn’t like that,” I blurt out.
“Cissy. Did he tell you he’d served time in prison?”
My gaze slides away. “I didn’t ask.”
Spencer’s hand cups my cheek. “That’s why you have me.”
John “Gray Wolf” Delacour is alleged to be the grandchild of Missal Delacour, the old Gypsy. John does not show the colored blood quite as dark as his ancestor, but has the loose, shambling walk of the Gypsy. He is considered by his own relations to be arrogant, ignorant, and immoral, although he has managed
to learn to read and write. If you are interested in Evolution you won’t have to trace back very far from John Delacour to find the Missing Link.
—From the journals of Abigail Alcott, social worker
As anyone who’s ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream. Maybe this is why it comes so easily to me—the fabrication of a doctor’s appointment to check the progress of the baby, the hurried drive into town, the turn I take to bring me to the camp on the edge of the lake.
This time as I walk through the labyrinth of tents, I notice the color. A woman steps outside to shake wrinkles from a rainbow-ribboned coat, brilliant silks spilling like paint across the dust. It is Madame Soliat, I realize—the fortune-teller from the Exposition on the Fourth of July. A few tents away an old woman hunches over a stool, lashing a thin ash splint to a wide-lipped basket. A calico cat plays at her feet; a splash of canary sits on her shoulder. Men who work the carnival circuit pack their wares in brightly painted boxes, loading up for the next journey to a country fair. My whole life, it seems, is pale by comparison.
When I walk up to the basket weaver she pretends she can see right through me. “Excuse me,” I say. Her cat yowls, and runs away. “I’m looking for Gray Wolf. John Delacour?”
Maybe it is my advanced pregnancy; maybe it is the wildness in my eyes—but this old woman gets to her feet and plucks the canary from her shoulder to sit on the back of her chair. Leaving the unfinished basket on the ground, she begins to limp toward the woods.
We walk for several minutes, past the point where the Gypsy tents thin out. The old woman points me toward a copse of pine trees that grow up the base of a steep hill, and she leaves me to my own devices. My legs begin to burn with exertion; I am not certain I will make it. I am even beginning to have doubts that this woman understood who I was looking for, when suddenly the forest opens into a small clearing. The ground is uneven, as if the earth is boiling just under the crabgrass. In the middle of these mounds sits Gray Wolf.
He gets up when he sees me coming and a smile washes over his face. “I didn’t know when I would get to see you,” he says, relieved.
Uneasy, I fold my arms across my stomach. “You lied to me. Spencer found out that you were in jail. And my father says that my mother never knew you. That she was terrified of people like you.”
“People like me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m not the one here who was lying?”
“What reason would they have to lie?”
“Why does anyone?” he says. “Down by the river, you go ask any of those people who they are, and they’re gonna tell you they’re dark French. Or that they’re cousins, six times removed, from someone Irish or Italian. I know one family that passes themselves off as Negro or Mohawk, because even that’s not quite as bad as being Abenaki. You should understand, Lia, that there can’t be any Indians around. Because that would mean someone lived here before all those old Vermonters who think they came first.”
“That has nothing to do with going to prison for murder,” I argue. “You don’t get convicted of a crime if you didn’t do it.”
“No?” He takes a step toward me. “Did Spencer tell you about the man I killed? He was a supervisor at the granite quarry, and he was beating a man for not hauling stone fast enough. A man who was seventy-nine years old, and who happened to be my grandfather, and who died in front of my eyes.”
I recall Abigail’s reports: John Delacour is an absolute liar . . . it is impossible to get the truth out of him. “A jury would understand that.”
“Not when there were people who wanted to get rid of me,” Gray Wolf says. “People jurors listen to.”
Immediately, I think of my father, dining with Governor Wilson shortly before the passage of the Sterilization Bill in the legislature. Of Dr. DuBois, who could not convince Spencer to send me to an institution . . . and who would dare not breathe a word to the community about Professor Pike’s suicidal wife. “You didn’t serve your whole sentence,” I realize.
“No. Believe it or not, I finally had something they wanted, something I could bargain with.” He looks down and stamps at a patch of grass with his heel. “The warden, he was real excited about the new sterilization law. Inmates who volunteered for a vasectomy got to shave five whole years off their time. For me, that was freedom.”
It is one thing to have Spencer talk of sterilization in the abstract; it is another thing entirely to discuss a vasectomy with a man who has had one. “But at what cost,” I murmur, my cheeks flaming.
“I wasn’t thinking of what they would do to me, or of the family I’d never have. I was thinking that if I got out, I might get to meet the child I already knew about, the one born after I went to jail.” Gray Wolf lifts my chin. “Lia,” he says, “you were worth it.”
SEVEN
September 1, 1932
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia, in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which upheld the sterilization of a “probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring.”
Once upon a time, when my mother was my age, she fell in love. Not with one of the long-faced boys who held their straw boaters like wheels in their hands, boys who walked down from the university clutching bouquets, boys who called my imposing grandfather Sir. Not with Harry Beaumont, a young professor who stood first in line for the prize that was my mother; a scientist nearly ten years older than she was who spoke of love and natural selection in the same sentence. My mother was courted by Harry and these other young men on the porch, and meanwhile she looked over their shoulders at a Gypsy laborer who worked in their fields.
His skin was the color of the polished piano she played for her mother’s friends at teatime; his hair was longer than hers. His eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s, and sometimes when she was in the privacy of her bedroom with the curtains closed she knew that he could still see her. When she brought water out to the Indian workers—the only contact she was allowed—she could feel him swimming through her veins.
She had spent seventeen years being an exemplary daughter. She had attended finishing school; she crossed her legs at the ankles; she washed her face each night with buttermilk to make it glow. She was being groomed to be an exemplary wife, something she had known all along, but now the concept seemed like a fancy coat tucked away in a hope chest: trying it on after all these years, it did not fit quite as well as she had expected.
One day in the field, he was the last one to turn in his tin cup. Sweat ran down his bare chest, and there was a streak of dirt across his brow. He smelled of the blueberries he’d been picking. His teeth seemed too white when he spoke. “Who are you?” he asked.
She could have said, Lily Robinson. Or, Quentin Robinson’s daughter. Or, Harry Beaumont’s intended. But that wasn’t what he had been asking. For the first time in her life she wondered why she defined herself as part of someone else.
He began to leave her small gifts on the porch: a pair of tiny moccasins; a sweetgrass basket; a sketch of a running horse. She learned that his name was John.
On their first date, she lied and told her parents that she was spending the night at a girlfriend’s. He met her halfway down the road into town. He took her hand, as if they had been doing that forever, and told her that his home was the world, that the sky was its roof. They walked to the edge of the river and pulled the stars close as a blanket. When he lay her down to kiss her, his hair fell over their faces, a curtain for privacy.
He was a year younger than she was, and nothing like the Gypsies
she’d been hearing of her whole life. John wasn’t dirty or stupid or dishonest. He understood how it felt to be boxed in by a label someone else had slapped on you. Lily started to live her days only as a means of getting to the nights. She talked back to her father and ignored her mother. She began to dream in rich reds and blues. And on the evening that John fit himself to her and taught her how to bloom, Lily cried because someone loved her, not the person she was supposed to be.
Her first mistake, when she became pregnant, was to see it as an opportunity instead of a crisis. She hovered like a hummingbird outside her father’s study while John, wearing a collared shirt and tie he had borrowed for a dime, asked permission to marry her.
What happened after that Lily could not remember, or maybe she could not let herself remember. There was John, unconscious and beaten bloody, being dragged out of her father’s study. There was her father’s fist shaking above her as he ordered her to play the whore again by marrying some unsuspecting fool. The stiff kiss that sealed her engagement to Harry Beaumont; the awful moment at the church where she almost told her new husband the truth; the joy on his face later when she told him, instead, that she was expecting.
She tried to find John, but it was difficult to locate someone who had no permanent address. She heard rumors that he worked at a bar in Vergennes, that he had become a horse thief, that he was a quarry laborer. By the time she realized this last tale was true, John Delacour was no longer employed there. He was in jail pending trial for the murder of a supervisor.
She wrote him one letter, a small square of paper that he folded and wore in a pouch around his neck. It did not mention her marriage, or her health, or the child. It said simply, Come back. John did not write in return; he knew better. After the first month, Lily stopped waking up with the taste of him on her lips. After three months, she could no longer remember the wood-smoke in his voice. After six months, she began to have nightmares that her baby would arrive with hair dark as a crow’s wing, with cinnamon skin.
