by Jodi Picoult
Lily Robinson Beaumont died in apparently premature childbirth, having slipped into unconsciousness after forty hours of labor. She held John’s name between her teeth to take with her. She did not know that John would, one day, come back—even after he learned from bribing a prison guard that his love had gone to the spirit world. She did not know that the daughter she left behind, Cecelia, had golden hair, and skin as white as a miracle.
A great deal is known about human heredity—enough to make eugenical sterilization a safe policy, provided the standards for sterilization apply only to the most patently degenerate individuals who are definitely demonstrated to be cacogenic. In the future, as more is learned about heredity, the standards can be shifted to include those individuals who now constitute situations described as “border-line.”
—Excerpt from a letter dated September 24, 1925, from H. H. Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, to Harriet Abbott
In my dreams I give birth to the Devil, to Jesus, to a Titan that tears me apart. I bleed from my pores and wake to find the sheets wet with sweat. For several nights, Spencer tries, unsuccessfully, to raise the stuck window in the bedroom. I cannot bear to look at him.
Tonight when I startle out of sleep Spencer doesn’t wake with me. I inch back the covers and get out of bed, careful to walk around the few floorboards that gossip. The carpet runner muffles the sounds of my steps down the stairs. Spencer has left the door to his study open.
I turn on the green accountant’s lamp. A thousand times I have come into this room, but never with the intent of finding something. Where would Spencer keep it?
On his desk are neat piles of papers—letters he has received from colleagues in the field of eugenics, books in several languages, photographic slides scattered like cards across an illuminated table. His blotter is covered with illegible notes. I read some of the words: twins, custodial, epidemic. As I maneuver around the desk, I bump into the corner and send a paperweight crashing to the floor. Immediately, I freeze and look up at the ceiling, waiting with my heart in my throat. When there is no answering sound, I take a deep breath and inch toward the long table pushed against the wall.
One genealogy map is partially unrolled on its surface, a family with a surname I don’t recognize. I scan the thick lines that link one insane relative to another, profligates to prostitutes, reform school students to convicts. I follow one trail of family members, seemingly unaffected by any degeneracy for an entire generation. And yet the children of these children have all landed in the industrial school, at Waterbury, in the state prison—they are as depraved as their grandparents were. How many times have I heard Spencer say it? Inherited traits might skip a generation . . . but blood eventually tells.
My hands steal over my belly, which freezes up hard beneath my hands. False labor, it is called. I force myself to sift through the scrolls of other pedigree charts tucked into an umbrella stand beside the table. They are labeled Delaire, Moulton, Waverly, Olivette—there is no Delacour to be found. Could my father—my father?—have logged the survey of Gray Wolf’s family under a different surname?
Weber/George.
This tag leaps out at me. With great care I pull the chart from the stand and unroll it over the table. It is not hard to find Ruby’s name among those at the bottom; Spencer has marked it with red ink. There are mathematical calculations and notes in his narrow hand, speculating on Ruby’s chance at turning out as badly as the rest of her family.
Her beloved sister, the one who died, has a mark as dark as a brand next to her name. Sx, for Immoral.
It is the same symbol, I realize, that would have been given to my mother.
“Cissy.”
Spencer’s voice is so quiet it simply tips into my mind, and yet I jump a foot. He stands in silhouette in his dressing gown, watching me. Taking a step inside, his gaze falls to the table.
For one excruciating moment when he looks at me, I think he knows exactly what I have been searching for. But for whatever reason, Spencer’s face smooths into a mask. “Sweetheart, you’ve been sleepwalking again.”
“Yes.” I clear my throat.
He offers me his arm and escorts me out of the office, locking the door behind us. “Blame it on the baby,” Spencer says, his eyes never leaving my face.
We are speaking two conversations at once, and we both know it. “No,” I answer. “Not him.”
I call your attention to the fact that the number of our insane and feebleminded is constantly increasing with a corresponding increase in the burden cast on the community and the State. We are doing our duty about the care of these unfortunates, but practically nothing to prevent a further increase in their number. Medical science points out some definite course which has been followed successfully in some states. . . . You will do well to give this matter serious consideration.
—From Governor Stanley Wilson’s inaugural message to the Vermont General Assembly, Journal of the Senate of the State of Vermont, 1931
The next morning I am sitting at the dressing table in front of my mirror when Spencer leans down to kiss my neck. “How are you feeling?” he asks, as if last night never happened.
I set down my brush. “Fine.”
Spencer’s hand steals down my robe, onto the swell of our son. “And how’s he feeling?”
“Heavy.”
We are a beautiful couple. Somehow the long lines of Spencer’s jaw and the pale blue behind his glasses is the perfect complement to my heart-shaped face and honey-brown eyes. Our child, a combination of the best of us, should be stunning. Except that he might not look the way Spencer is expecting him to look.
“Spencer,” I whisper, a beginning. “We have to talk.”
But he has slid his hands down my arms by now, and his gentle fingertips are playing over the healing ridge of skin at my wrist. With his head bent, in silence, it is simple to read his mind: if he didn’t love me, this would be so much easier.
Then again, he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even really know who I am. If Spencer is too ashamed to admit to a wife who cannot manage to keep herself alive, how will he feel about a wife who is half-Indian?
Would he add my name to the bottom of the Delacour genealogy chart? Or would he burn it? Spencer has done an admirable job of hiding the truth about me from his friends and colleagues. Maybe he could continue to do so. All babies, I could tell him, look dark and round-faced when they are newborn.
“You know,” Spencer says, “I don’t think we should talk. Talking . . . thinking . . . that’s what gets your mind in knots, Cissy.” His fingers smooth my brow in tiny circles. “What you need is a distraction. A task to keep you busy.” He takes a small piece of paper from his pocket, inscribed with the names of ten couples, and sets it beside my bottle of French tea-rose perfume. “A dinner party. A pre-birthday, maybe, for our baby. You and Ruby can come up with a menu, decorations, a theme.” He kisses my cheek. “What do you think?”
I smooth the list of names with one hand and tuck it into the corner of my mirror. We will have rib roasts and sweet potatoes in maple syrup and candied carrots. We will drink red wine and laugh at jokes that aren’t funny and toast a baby who will break my world in half. “I’m not supposed to think,” I say.
We are so careful in breeding our cattle to get good breeds yet we give this human procreation no thought.
—Mrs. Bickford, of Bradford, quoted in the Burlington Free Press on March 21, 1931, during the debate in the Vermont State House regarding the Sterilization Bill
I begin to create complications. Each morning I say there is something else bothering me about this pregnancy—a pinched nerve, a lack of fetal movement, a heartburn so severe it makes me weak. My nervousness about giving birth feeds this fire, and so Spencer does not question me when I tell him I am headed to Dr. DuBois’s office every other day. Better him, I am sure he is thinking, than me.
Instead of going into town, however, I go down to camp on the lake. After several days of seeing me in Gra
y Wolf’s company, the people who live there have stopped staring. Some know me by name. “This,” Gray Wolf says when he introduces me, “is my daughter.”
The familiar Abenaki phrase for “my father” is N’Dadan. Spoken, it sounds like a heartbeat.
Today, it is raining. We sit in Gray Wolf’s tent at a scarred table. While he reads the sports page of the newspaper, I sift through a small cigar box. A cameo, a violet hair ribbon, a lock of hair—these are the things my mother left him. Each time I come I study them, as if they might hold a clue I haven’t yet discovered. Sometimes I think of Houdini; of what more one could possibly need to return from the other side.
He tells me I can have all of these, if I would like them. He says he doesn’t need things to recall her, because unlike me, he met her. I do not know how to tell him that what I really want is something of his—something to remember him by, just in case.
He makes a small sound of dismay. “Sox just blew their chance at the Series,” he sighs. “It’s the Curse of the Bambino. The worst trade in history since we swapped Manhattan for a few shells and beads.” I stand up and pretend to wander around the small tent. I touch his shaving brush, his razor, his comb. With his back to me, I take a pipe from his nightstand and slip it into my pocket.
“I thought you preferred cigarettes,” he says, without turning around.
I whirl. “How did you know?”
He glances over his shoulder. “I can smell how nervous you are. I would have given the pipe to you if you’d asked.” Grinning, he says, “My daughter’s a thief. Must be all that Gypsy blood in her veins.”
My daughter. Once again, the title makes me feel as if I have swallowed a star. “You haven’t asked me,” I point out, “if I’m going to tell Spencer or my . . . Harry Beaumont.”
Gray Wolf studies his newspaper. “That isn’t my choice to make. I didn’t tell you so I could claim you. Nobody belongs to anyone else.”
I think of him in prison, making the decision to be sterilized so that he would be free to search for me. Whether he wants to admit it or not, people do belong to each other. Once you make a sacrifice for someone, you own part of his or her soul. “But you must want me to.”
When he looks up at me, I take a step back; there is that much passion in his eyes. “I wanted you. On any terms. I was willing to trade anything just to see you. Would I like to hear you say you’re my daughter, to have you shout it to anyone who’ll listen? God, yes, there’s a part of me that says that’s why I did what I did. But there’s a bigger part of me that only wants to make sure you’re safe.” He folds the sports page, pleats it neatly, as if he will be judged on the result. “And if you go out and tell people about me, they won’t hear how proud you are. All they’re gonna hear is that you’re Indian.”
“I don’t care.”
“That’s because you’ve never been one. You haven’t spent years wearing someone else’s clothes, taking someone else’s name, living in someone else’s houses, and working someone else’s jobs to fit in. And if you don’t sell out, then you run away . . . proving you’re the Gypsy they said you were all along.” He shakes his head sadly. “I want you to have a better life than the one I had. Even if that means keeping your distance from me.”
The baby does a slow roll inside me, unsettled. “Then why would you bother to look for me? Why didn’t you just stay away?”
He stares at me for a long moment. “How could I?”
“Then how,” I say, “can you ask me to?”
He looks out the flap of the tent, into the rain. “You’ll understand, when that baby is born. There’s an old phrase, Awani Kia. It means, ‘Who are you.’ Not your name, but your people. You hear it a lot when you move from place to place. Every winter, when I go up to Odonak and someone asks me, I get to tell him about my great-grandfather, who was a spiritual leader. Or my Auntie Sopi, who was the best healer in her day. Every winter when I answer I remember that it doesn’t matter what people call me, as long as I know who I really am.” He hesitates. “This winter, I’ll tell them about you.”
It is the first time he’s talked about his departure from the camp. He is a wanderer, an itinerant—I have always known this. But for the first time I realize that when he leaves for Canada, he will be leaving me.
“What if I come?” I blurt out.
“To Odonak? I don’t think you’d be happy there.”
“But I’m not happy here.”
“Lia,” he says quietly. “I won’t tell you not to go; I’m too selfish for that. But the minute you get to Canada, you’ll be thinking about what you left behind here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?” He glances at the table, at my mother’s cameo. “A person can’t live in two worlds at once.”
“But you just found me!”
Gray Wolf smiles. “Who said you were lost?”
I duck my head. Without being conscious of it, I rub my fingers over the scars at my wrist. “I’m not as brave as you,” I say.
“No,” he answers. “You’re braver.”
No one has a right to become a parent who has so sinned that their children must suffer.
—Mr. Harding, of W. Fairlee, quoted in the Burlington Free Press on March 21, 1931, during the debate in the Vermont State House regarding the Sterilization Bill
In the billiards room, the balls strike each other with precision. “Spencer,” my father laughs, “you’re not going to let an old man beat you!”
“Harry, shut up and take your turn, will you?”
I smile and press my hand to the small of my back. At the sideboard in the adjoining hall, I am counting the silver. Spencer has me do it once a month. We never come up short, but he says you can never be too careful.
I am on the seventh teaspoon when I hear the word Gypsy.
“Actually,” Spencer responds, “I had to finish the job myself.”
“Can’t say it’s any surprise.” There is a neat click as my father hits another ball with his cue. “Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.”
“Well, this one also happened to have served time for murder.”
“Good God—”
“Exactly.” Spencer scratches, curses. “I’m all for believing in the rehabilitation of criminals, but I’d rather not test the theory at the expense of my own wife.”
There is a sharp crack, a muffled click, and then the sound of my father racking up the balls for another game. “The problem with the Sterilization Law is that it doesn’t get rid of the degenerates that have already been born,” he says. “That’s what needs to be addressed next.”
All the blood drains from my head. He does not say this with malice; for his statement to be hateful he would actually have to know some of the people he wants to eliminate. He and Spencer, they are only trying to change the world, to make it a better place for their children.
By getting rid of someone else’s.
I stare at them through the open doorway; it is like seeing a saucer of milk go sour before your eyes. Spencer grins amiably. “Genocide’s not legal.”
“Only if you get caught,” my father laughs, and he picks up his cue again. “Stripes or solids?”
Before I know it I have pushed myself into the doorway. I am white as a sheet; Spencer’s cue rattles to the ground and he is at my side in an instant. “Cissy?” he says frantically. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
I manage to shake my head. “The baby . . . is fine.”
My father frowns. “Darling, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Maybe I have, because I have just watched something that clearly has been here all along, even if I was too blind to bear witness before. Spencer pries the teaspoons from my hand. “You aren’t up to this. That’s why we have Ruby, isn’t it? Come. Let’s get you off your feet.”
“I don’t want to be off my feet,” I say, my voice escalating. “I don’t want . . . I don’t . . .” As I push Spen
cer away, the teaspoons clatter to the floor. I burst into tears.
My father grasps my shoulders firmly. “Cissy, you’re overwrought. Sit down, now.”
“Listen to your father,” Spencer agrees.
The problem is, I have been. And I no longer know who I am.
“Call Dr. DuBois,” Spencer says quietly to my father, who nods and lifts the telephone receiver.
Spencer kneels beside me and puts his arm around my shoulders. What does one do with an insane wife? “Cissy?” he says, his bewilderment twisting my name like ribbon candy.
Silver winks at me, a conspiracy at my feet. “Oh, Spencer,” I sob. “Look at what you’ve done.”
Every woman in the Vermont House, with the exception of Mrs. Farr of Monkton, who was absent, favored the [passage of the 1931 sterilization] bill.
—Burlington Free Press, March 25, 1931
Dr. DuBois sets his stethoscope in his ears. As I lay back on my pillows, he shields me with his body for privacy and begins to unbutton my blouse. I remember too late that I am still wearing the medicine pouch Gray Wolf gave me.
My eyes meet the doctor’s. Before he can touch the pouch I grab the edges of my blouse and pull them together. I shake my head once, sharply, staring hard at Dr. DuBois, whose brow has furrowed in a frown. Without breaking my gaze, I slide the buttons back into their holes, and wait for him to make the next move.
He is Spencer’s puppet, but I am his patient, and to my surprise, that actually counts for something. Dr. DuBois tugs his stethoscope from his ears and hangs it around his neck. His eyes pose a question I have no intention of answering. “Well, your baby is fine,” he says briskly. “I think all you need is a good rest.” He shakes two sleeping pills from a medicine bottle and watches carefully as I put them into my mouth and take a drink from the cup of water he’s holding out. “That’s a good girl. You should feel better in no time. But you know, Cissy, that you can call on me whenever you have anything you need to . . . ask.”
With that, he rises and approaches Spencer, hovering in the doorway. As they begin to speak quietly, I roll onto my side and spit out the pills I’ve tucked high in my cheek. I slip them into my pillowcase.
