Second Glance (21 page)
July 4, 1932
Running water purifies itself. The stream of germ-plasm
does not seem to.
—H. F.
Perkins,
Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont
:
First Annual Report
, 1927
T
he day after I try to kill myself, Spencer says we are going to a celebration in Burlington. He tells me this even as he is wrapping my wrist again, where I cut myself so deep that, for a moment, I could tell exactly where I hurt. “There are going to be fortune-tellers, Cissy,” he says. “Fire-eaters, and historical pageants. All sorts of trinkets for sale.” He ties off the bandage, and then gets to the point of why we’re going to town for the Fourth of July festival. “Your father,” Spencer says, “is meeting us there.”
Although it is so hot outside that the dandelions and black-eyed Susans have gone weak-kneed, he helps me into a long-sleeved white blouse, because this way the bandages won’t show. “No one needs to know this happened,” he says quietly, and I stare at the pink part in his hair until the shine of it makes me turn my face away. “You were sleepwalking, that’s all. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
For Spencer, the face you show to the world is more important than what’s underneath. The end justifies the means. That is what Charles Darwin is all about, after all, and in my opinion Spencer would pray to Mr. Darwin if he didn’t think it would make the biddies at the Congregational Church regard him as some kind of heathen. Spencer’s long fingers curve around my jaw. “Come on, Cissy,” he coaxes. “Don’t disappoint me.”
I would not dream of it. I smooth my face into a smile. “All right,” I answer.
What I want to say is:
Don’t call me Cissy. That’s the name
of a coward, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and look at where it’s gotten
me.
What I want to say is:
My mother named me Cecelia, which
is beautiful, a river of syllables.
Once, with my head spinning from blackberry wine I’d sipped at a faculty dinner, I told my husband I wanted to be called Lia. “Leah?” he said, mistaking me, shaking his head. “But that’s the one Jacob
didn’t
want.”
He helps me stand, because my pregnancy is a condition that Spencer can accept. It’s the other affliction we do not speak of. Spencer’s work, dovetailing as it does with mental hygiene, keeps us from admitting that I have anything in common with those holed up in the state hospital at Waterbury.
I cannot explain to someone like Spencer what it is like to look in a mirror and not recognize the face inside it. How there are some days I wake up and it takes everything inside me to put on a mask and walk through my life like someone else. I have sat beside him, digging my nails into the skin of my palm, because if I bleed, then I must be real.
I think of what it would be like to push off on a raft in a vast ocean, fall asleep under a full sun: sweat, burn, never wake up. Believe it or not, there’s a relief to that vision that feels like a cold sheet settling. If I’m going to die, I’d rather choose the where or when.
After so many years of being dismissed, it is easy to believe the world would be better off without me in it. Spencer says it’s because of my condition, chemicals in my body and brain blown out of proportion, but I know better. I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend does not exist, except it is
all
I am, all of the time.
And yet. There is a baby in me who never asked for any of this. And if taking my own life means taking his as well, then I will have twice killed someone I should have had the chance to love.
Spencer is wise; he uses this truth as a bargaining chip. He teases me and flirts, so that by the time we have left the house and started for town, I find myself looking forward to this celebration. I can smell the sear of fireworks on the air; I can hear the lazy pomp of a parade. My baby rolls like the silver fish in Lake Champlain, and without thinking about it I settle my hand on my stomach. Spencer sees, and covers my fingers with his own, smiling. All the way down Otter Creek Pass I think about this fortune-teller; if she’ll find my mother’s face in her crystal ball, or just the abyss I see when I try to do her job.
Q. What is the most precious thing in the world?
A. The human germ plasm.
Q. How may one’s germ plasm become immortal?
A. Only by perpetuation by children.
Q. What is a person’s eugenical duty to civilization?
A. To see that his own good qualities are passed on to future generations provided they exceed his bad qualities. If he has, on the whole, an excess of dysgenic qualities, they should be eliminated by letting the germ plasm die out with the individual.
—
American Eugenics Society,
A Eugenics Catechism
, 1926
The heat makes the streets ripe as fruit, pavement bruising beneath my shoes. Men in summer suits and women in smart linen dresses hold hands. There are hawkers selling lemon ices, and red-white-and-blue pinwheels. Everyone’s smiles seem too wide.
“I heard there was a boxing exhibition this morning,” Spencer says. “A soldier from the fort got trounced by an Irishman from New York City.” He steers me toward the edge of a large crowd of people, and cranes his neck to look over everyone’s heads toward the Hill, where my father lives now that Spencer and I have moved into the house where I grew up. “It’s not like Harry to be late,” Spencer murmurs. “Do you see him?”
But Spencer is nearly a head taller than I am, and he wears glasses. I try to see what he sees, but instead I notice the barefoot boy kneeling beside a puddle of manure to pick out a handful of pennies that have fallen from someone’s purse. He is part of a world I do not know—people who live in the North End tenements, two hundred yards away and a world apart.
“Darling,” my father says from behind us. He kisses my cheek. “Sorry, Spencer,” he says, shaking hands. “I took in the boxing match. Amazing, really. If you look at the physiology of some of the immigrant stock . . .”
Science is a foreign language to me, but one with which I was raised. My father, Harry Beaumont, is a professor of biology at the University of Vermont. Spencer, a professor of anthropology, shares many of his convictions about Mendelian genetics. They are disciples of another professor, Henry Perkins, who more or less introduced Vermont to eugenics—the science of human betterment through genetic improvement. Professor Perkins once headed the Eugenics Survey of Vermont—a privately funded study of Vermont families. He now volunteers under the vast umbrella of the Vermont Commission on Country Life, just like my father and Spencer. Over the years their Committee on the Human Factor has worked on a Key Family Study, tracing degenerate Vermont families to see whether a town’s social and economic success is related to the type of people who settle it. Their pedigree charts are available to social workers and probation officers to help with case work. Between that and the new sterilization law, Vermont is joining other states that are already models for the country.
It’s a progressive reform movement, a thrilling one. Spencer always says it isn’t about taking Vermont forward, but back—to the pastoral landscape everyone imagines when they say the word
Vermont
: a town green, a white church, a hillside stippled with fall color. My father and Spencer were among the first to realize that this picture dims when strong Yankee stock is replaced by weaker strains. Their Key Family Study sent field workers out to selected towns, to see if social and economic status had any correlation to the quality of their founding families. It was no surprise that the towns in decline were full of families whose members kept cropping up at the state mental hospitals and reform schools and jails. Recessive genes like feeblemindedness and criminal tendencies, of course, get passed on to offspring—it is all there in the pedigree charts my father used to unroll across our dining room table. By targeting these populations and intervening before they propagate, Vermont could recapture its picturesque image.
“The Ideal Vermont Family,” that’s what Spencer always says his field workers are looking for. “People like us.”
Since my marriage, I have tried to do my part. I’ve served on the board of the Children’s Aid Society, I’m a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I’m the secretary of the Ladies’ Auxiliary at church. But these women, with their bobs and their shoulder pads and seamed stockings, speak the same words; they make the same suggestions; sometimes their features even blend together. And I am not one of them.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened, had I not married Spencer but rather gone off to college and joined the eugenics survey as a field worker, like Frances Conklin and Harriet Abbott. Would I have been happier? These women, they were part of a movement that would sweep Vermont into the future. They made a difference.
Spencer says that some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don’t want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can’t comfortably fit.
My father slides an arm around my shoulders. “How’s my grandson?” he asks, as if this baby’s sex is something we might know.
“Strong as an ox,” Spencer says. “Kicks Cissy all day long.”
Everyone beams. No one mentions my mother, although her name hovers at the edges of our conversation. Had I been strong as an ox, before I was born? Had that been the problem?
Sweat runs between my breasts and down the line of my spine. Under my hat, my scalp itches. In the distance I hear the low-throated hum of barges on the lake, quivering to leave. “Ma’am,” says a voice to my left. “Are you all right?”
It is a young man wearing a suit, a red-tipped carnation threaded through the lapel. His hair, neatly combed to the side, is the color of molasses. His hand rests on my elbow.
“You look a little peaked.” He smiles. “Lovelier than anything I’ve seen here today, but fading fast.”
Before I can answer Spencer cuts between us. “Did you have something to say to my wife?”
The man shrugs. “I’ve got something to say to the whole crowd.” As he steps up onto a small platform, he winks at me.
“Maybe next year
you
can fight the Irishman at the boxing exhibition,” my father says to Spencer.
“I will if he keeps carrying on with Cissy.” Then Spencer’s voice is drowned out by the commanding baritone of the very man he is discussing.
“Ladies and gentleman,” the orator announces, “The Legend of Champlain!”
The crowd gathers to watch the historical pageant. Musicians play Indian chords as four braves stalk about, the menacing Iroquois. They are half-dressed, in the manner of savages, with broad marks across their faces and chests. When Champlain and his Algonquin warriors arrive, a single shot from his rifle kills all of the enemies in one fell swoop. “A dark era of savage power,” intones the orator, “ended in that steadfast hour. As mighty Champlain crossed the water . . . and from great chaos, brought great order.”
There is a round of applause as the actors take their bows and everyone begins to disperse. “What shall we do next?” Spencer asks. “There’s an exhibition baseball game, and a motorboat race. Or the Exposition, maybe?”
Through the weaving limbs of people I can see across to the other side of the stage, where a man is looking at me. He is as dark-skinned as the Indians hired to play in the pageant, and his eyes are so black they could only be a trap. He does not smile, or politely pretend that he is not staring. I can’t seem to turn away, not even after Spencer touches my shoulder. I cannot tell what holds me more fascinated: the sense that this man might hurt me, or that he might not.
“Cissy?”
“The Exposition,” I say, and hope this is an appropriate response.
When I turn back toward the opposite side of the stage, he is gone.
Freedom and Unity.
—
The Vermont State Motto