Mrs. Frier shouted, How can we help, Eleanor?
And others joined in. Do you need a shove?
No, we should pull her out!
There were sirens in the distance. Trilling.
How many people are out there? my mother asked. She couldn’t see them as she was half ingested by the house.
I started counting.
Never mind, she said. Everything’s changed, Tilton. Can’t you feel it? We’re doomed. There aren’t even any more toaster ovens, Tilton!
But I pointed to the one on the card table that I’d fixed just the week before.
Listen to me. I can feel it. And my mother started to cry. Send them away, Tilton!
More people were showing up. The sirens were louder.
My mother’s crying turned into laughter. She was laughing so hard that her body jiggled in the window. Vibrations. She said, I have to…
What is it?
I have to…
Yes?
Well, dear, I’m going to pee. This was what my mother said. I’m going to pee my pantsuit in front of our entire neighborhood! And…and…
And then she grabbed her shoulder. Her face went taut with fear.
I bent down and touched her moist face. I asked, And then what? What happens next? It felt like a story and she always knows the ending.
She said, Protect the house. Bar the door!
But the doors were already locked, which was how everything went wrong.
Firemen trudged across the lawn, like bears carrying axes.
And then I don’t remember. And then I do. Walking the empty house, alone, because my mother was taken away.
My thumb has stopped bleeding and I’m sitting in the upstairs tub now, scrubbing the blood from my nightgown. I have the saltshaker. Salt helps with a stain. I use cold water. I wonder if Ruthie knows these things that I’ve learned from my mother.
The water goes down like when I bleed from below with my period—pink swirl.
Will tomorrow be like today? The Eldermans’ youngest son lost his job and is back. You know what time of day it is when he opens his door—3 p.m. His legs swing like a metronome. The sheers glow bright these days. They don’t ripple like in winter when the wind seeps through the window seams. The Eldermans’ youngest son has his own beating heart and pumping lungs.
I’ve looked up the heart weight as a percentage of total body weight for your typical human: 0.42 percent. Our hearts are very small in comparison to our whole body. They take up one small corner. The ruby-throated hummingbird has a heart that takes up 2.37 percent of its whole.
I have two hearts.
I once ate the ancient heart of a mongrel king on display at a museum of antiquities when I was young—on purpose but also by accident. This isn’t something I should talk about now. But I have two hearts, as a result. You don’t have to understand it. Wee-ette understands, though.
What will be true tomorrow?
Mrs. Gottleib appears in the bathroom. Maybe she’s been in the house the whole time since my mother was taken away in the ambulance. She asks me what I’m doing, but I don’t answer.
Mrs. Gottleib tells me that my mother would want me to spend the night in Mrs. Gottleib’s house. I raised seven kids in that house, she says.
I want to remind her that one of those kids is dead now. This is not good for her statistics. And her husband is dead. That house is a death trap, I want to say, and you know it!
I don’t move.
Mrs. Gottleib’s upper arms are covered in very loose skin with extremely fine wrinkles. Her skin is tanned and scaly, like the skin on the feet of certain birds, the kind of skin they share with reptiles.
Fine, she says. Fine. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take you to see your mother in the hospital.
I tell her my mother wouldn’t want me to leave the house, and she really really really doesn’t want me to go to a hospital. That’s where people die!
Mrs. Gottleib says, Let’s hope that’s not true in your mother’s case.
I scrub my gown with my knuckles and salt.
You better prepare yourself, Mrs. Gottleib says. You might get the big call. Do you understand?
The big call will be someone telling me my mother is dead. Wee-ette died at home, asleep in her high bed. I sat Indian-style beside her. My mother put her head on her mother’s chest. She heard the last beat, the last breath. And then my mother rubbed Wee-ette’s arms and legs, which were splotched with age spots; her feet, which were pale as a new garden statue; and then her bony hands. My mother was trying to keep her warm and she was crying. She said that Wee-ette’s body would turn to dust and ash just like the pages of the seventh book—Wee-ette’s book.
Oh, but there are things that my mother herself doesn’t know. This house is like the bones of bird wings, airy inside, used for breath and flight. There is no seventh book except that there is. Is it the one that Harriet Wolf fans want? Is it the one my mother would like to auction off so that we can have money forever?
Neither.
I don’t know Harriet Wolf the writer. I’ve never read the Wonder Series books about Daisy and Weldon. My mother wanted to have one pure spot among us, someone who could see clearly the world without the clutter of lies. But I know what the seventh book contains because Wee-ette told me while I brushed her hair. And we have a pact—only to tell the location of the seventh book if the family is in crisis. I have the wound string of that pact too, hidden in a spot that Wee-ette thought would be good. Wee-ette knows hiding places. She’s an expert at secrets.
Is this a crisis?
I ask Mrs. Gottleib if the firefighters broke down the door. I don’t recall because I think I ran and hid.
Mrs. Gottleib says they opened the window and got my mother out. They were very professional. Then her voice goes bright as a happy jaybird: Looks like your mother finally broke down and got a TV. I brought it in for you.
It’s supposed to be a toaster oven, I tell Mrs. Gottleib, and then I ask her if Mrs. Devlin’s daughter is getting married again.
Patty Devlin? Mrs. Gottleib says. I never heard that. I’m good friends with her mother.
I tell Mrs. Gottleib to shut her piehole! Just like that. Just like my mother might.
And she does. She says she’ll see me tomorrow and leaves.
I stopper the tub, take a bath in my nightgown. I can still feel in my hand my mother’s sweet warm face, wet with tears and sweat. I’ll go to the hospital and tell her that I took a bath in my nightgown and my thumb hurts and I need her.
My mother said, Everything’s changed, Tilton. Can’t you feel it? We’re doomed.
If everything has changed, if all is different, then Ruthie is too. Even my father, George Tarkington, has changed. They don’t yet know it, but they have.
Maybe things that weren’t possible are. My mother must be thinking this too. Her brain is connected to my brain is connected to Wee-ette’s brain is connected to Ruthie’s and back again in every order. A forest of minds bound by birdcalls, like hummingbirds, beak-dipping, the dusted stamen of one thought to another’s flower head. When one of us realizes something, loud and shrill, the others must hear an echo, even if they can’t make out the words.
And my father too? Yes, maybe. Even though I don’t remember him and wouldn’t know him if he came to the door with or without a bicycle and asked my mother if she’d accepted Jesus as her personal lord and savior.
I won’t tell Ruthie to prepare herself for the big call. Our mother isn’t going to die, not in a hospital. She would never do that.
I turn off the faucet. My nightgown puffs with air and then it takes on water. It looks like a bird with damp wings. When I turn, it twists. When I stand, it clings.
Chapter Four
The Bleeder of Stump Cottage Meets Eppitt Clapp
Harriet
I was famous at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children—especially in the laundry. Nose bleeders tend to be famous in laundries, and I had been christened the
Bleeder of Stump Cottage.
But how to explain it all? The truth this time, stark and true; it’s like learning to write all over again.
If anyone is reading this, it’s because Tilton and I made a pact and the time has come. If, say, the money from my books has run out or there is some family emergency that I didn’t foresee, then Tilton has handed this over. If there is no need, if this family soldiers on, then she has let these pages turn to dust.
This might all be dust.
(But Tilton, my Tilton. You always understand me, even when I don’t say a word. Pale golden skin and luminous hair—silken girl. You know me even though you haven’t read a word of mine. Tilton, my girl, you are a piece of my own soul returned to me.)
But now the task at hand. How to make real the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children itself? The galling notion of it might be so outdated that no one can believe it ever existed. You might think I’m being fictitious. Fair enough. I myself was once afraid that I’d made the school up—the ravings of my childish brain, a severely imaginative thing. But to make sure it existed—in its massive horror, in its breathless details of stink and misery swabbed with bleach and hapless miracles (there would be many)—I went back one time. It was now called the Rosewood State Training School. This florid name change had happened while I was still there, but went unnoticed by those on the inside. I walked the gusty grounds, saw the children here and there, through windows and tottering by in rows amid the expansive buildings. This was in 1940, a few years after Leo Kanner (the psychologist who discovered autism, previously known as Kanner syndrome) exposed an illegal operation of selling the children—mostly the girls—into slavery, a ring that was overseen by, coincidentally, one Harry B. Wolf, esquire (no relation). But this was well before the Baltimore Sun dubbed the place “Maryland’s Shame,” before the series of investigations into abuse and neglect, and long before the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in and the older buildings were, mercifully, condemned. I imagine the enormous, pillared, mansion-sized homes, boarded up and sashed in asbestos warnings.
As I held Eleanor, just a baby, while touring the grounds, the shame was still hidden away. I held her tightly to my chest, as if she could be ripped away from me, though there was barely a need to hold Eleanor. Some babies cling. Eleanor clamped. She still holds tightly to what’s hers—especially Tilton. (Hello, Eleanor. If your eyes are on this page, I’ve written much of this for you. Long, long overdue. I owe you. I owe and owe.) I had to go there while Eleanor’s brain was still a teacup-sized muscle, before she was old enough to remember the trip. I was determined to recite a rosier childhood, to erase her father too.
When Eleanor was little and looking for fairy tales, my childhood resurfaced—in distortion, yes, but there it was. That’s how I wrote the first book, odd and otherworldly. I would like to say that I made up all of the books, invented everything, even how darkness sometimes twists into light and heats up dust motes till they are a million flares, fragile chests of fire; that I had no heartache, but seemed to know just the same how to write love; that my brain is a little god churning out worlds. But really I’m more like the addled priest who wakes each morning and picks up his wicker basket to fill with every dirty thing he finds, and then spends his nights hunched over, polishing buttons and spoons. I looked around in my mind, I riffled through memory, so much freight, found what I found, and got out my own writerly tub of polish.
I handed these things over to the reader, all distortion, but maybe truer than if I’d had to face the truth. It was my brain, trying to string distorted pearls.
No, not pearls. Never pearls. Not something precious or cultivated.
My childhood is a necklace of fleshy beads, the warped faces of freaks.
During my visit back to the grounds, I asked a secretary if I could take a look through the records. I stole a photograph of children in front of the administration building, and when I held a magnifying glass to it, I found my own narrow, blurry face. “Blurry” is accurate. I was small and blurry at five. I couldn’t be seen clearly for the person I was until Eppitt Clapp looked at me when I was thirteen—that moment with my bloody sheets bundled in my arms in the laundry.
My small nostrils were often clotted with tissue, and I was deeply pale. Even in summer I held on to a whiteness, a bluish tint beneath my eyes, a pale vein on either temple. I wasn’t lit from within like Tilton. I worried my own inner light—held the bushel basket over it. Hands knotted together even with the laundry in my arms, I was in a state of constant prayer—a simple chorus of God, God, God much like a cowbell’s tok, tok, tok! (There were cows in the surrounding fields, fenced.)
We, the children at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, were referred to as “inmates.” A few of us were turbulent, others vacant. But families also dropped off their slight deformities. I will never forget: Arturo of the uneven limbs, Helen of the skittering walleye, and my own Eppitt, his sputtering lungs. He had no perceptible flaw except for a stammer and the way he collapsed two words into one—a tic more than a condition and far from a debilitating disease. Families feared contamination or stigma—or, in my case, pending death. (My death is still pending; pending death happens to be a life sentence. There’s only one cure.)
In addition to the very sickly—epileptic and tubercular as well as the severely retarded, with swollen heads and tongues; these were my angels (oh, how they watched over us from the porch and doled blessings!)—there were other, mostly hale but blurred children like me who shuffled along, trying not to be seen. And there were categories: the idiot, the imbecile, the moron. I was a moron, which meant that there didn’t necessarily appear to be much wrong with me, but because I had been dumped here, I was “a disturbing element,” if examined properly, with the possibility of becoming “vicious and immoral.” We morons needed to be “segregated very early in life” to be saved from “crime or a life of degradation.” (In addition to the photograph, I took a copy of the biennial report of 1911, which I’ve kept all these years as it clarifies my own precious girlhood.)
At the time, I didn’t know these words were used to describe us, but we all felt that we were despised for our burdensomeness and, once grown, to be feared. We were loathsome. We had no virtues, no promise or talent, no future.
But, sturdy enough, we were put to work.
Unlike Sheppard Pratt, a mental institution bent on being curative through a certain normalcy and cheeriness (light Swedish gymnastics, bowling, billiards, ornament making)—this was where I would spend some time in my late teens—the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children seemed to believe that hard work was the pathway to redemption, albeit not a cure. There would be no curing us—not even by God Himself, regardless of what Mrs. Funk, the headmistress of our ward, whispered to us of God and Jesus and Mary. (The name “Funk” is German, derived from the word “spark.”) The biennial report of 1911, put forward by the board (overseen by its president, Herman Stump), clearly states, “No one, except the very ignorant, believe that the feeble-minded can be cured and returned to the community as normal citizens.”
Boys worked the farm. The 1911 report tallied 20,069 pounds of pork, 42 tons of wheat straw, 9,408 heads of cabbage. They dug potatoes and hauled coal. They excavated new buildings and a powerhouse. They laid pipe, broke stone, and helped with livestock, including 109 hogs, 20 cows (tok, tok, tok!), and one bull.
We weren’t taught to read or do simple mathematics. (I would be allowed to later only by a twist of fate.) The girls sewed. In fact, according to the report, from 1909 to 1911, we sewed $2,250 worth of articles, including 848 dresses, 393 petticoats, 954 drawers, 222 men’s shirts, 235 boys’ shirtwaists, 496 bibs, 87 rubber sheets, 34 rubber pillow slips, 123 ham bags, and two awnings for the Duck Porch. I remember the Duck Porch awning specifically, the heavy guttural chug of the machines trying to pump through the coarse material. I worked both the foot-pump and wheel-crank machines, nonelectric of course. Because the needles would snap, we were forced to
stitch by hand. If I was tired, I had only to prick a finger. I’d be told not to bleed on the fabrics and I’d be given a break. On a stool off to the side, I’d pump the blood to the fingertip instead of staunching it and I’d let my mind drift. I was a dreamy moron.
Shortly after I was freed from the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children when I was fourteen, the girls began sewing kimonos. Reading these documents ages later, I caught myself thinking: Oh, I missed the kimonos! I would have liked that!
In addition to being seamstresses, the girls worked as cooks, waitresses, dishwashers, and maids. To this day, I make a taut and tidy bed. In fact, according to the 1911 biennial report, eight girls in the kitchen equaled four women, at $12 per month for two years, saving $1,152. And the sixty-three girls who cleaned the cottages equaled sixteen women, at $10 per month for two years, saving $3,840.
Sometimes the boys’ heads were shorn because of lice. But the girls weren’t. Perhaps the guards feared they wouldn’t be able to tell us apart if all were shorn. Our heads were doused with oil. We picked nits with fine metal tines. If summer, we sat in the sun with our oiled heads—the skull made warm. If winter, our cold oily heads were still nitpicked outdoors. I was good at nitpicking: sharp eyes, nimble fingers. I knew to check well behind the ears, the crown.
Although the population was approximately 350 when I was there, it swelled to 3,500 at one point in the school’s history. This simple fact makes my chest pound and my eyes sting with tears.
There were rules against babies being dropped off at the school, but I was an exception made by Brumus himself. I was raised in a series of cottages. That sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But these weren’t cottages at all, really. They were massive stone buildings with multiple chimneys, large windows, pillared porches—Thom Cottage, Pembroke, King, and Stump, plus a school building and the Custodial Building for Girls. The administration building had tall ionic pillars of Southern-plantation graciousness, with a sitting parlor filled with lamps and rugs and sofas.