The Life You Longed For (12 page)

A
t the annual United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation conference in Minneapolis two years before, Grace had shared a hotel room with Kempley Trapman. They had met through the mitochondrial Listserv and had been e-mailing almost daily for eight months, though they had never spoken. Kempley lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. Grace had been in the Charlotte airport once and remembered the rows of white rocking chairs in the terminal, with passengers sitting on them as if on the veranda of a great plantation. She had imagined Kempley would be Southern and blond and would preface the beginning of her sentences with “y'all.” Instead she found a blue-eyed, dark-haired Yankee with a Boston accent. A history professor at Queens College.

On the last night of the three-day conference, a group of women from the mitochondrial e-mail group congregated in their hotel room, reviewing the talks they'd attended earlier: discussions about dietary and high-dose vitamin therapy, end-of-life care, long-term research goals, networking groups. There was another lecture at eight: Laboratory Evaluation for Disorders of Energy Metabolism.

“Let's skip it,” Kempley said. “Do something fun.”

“
Fun?
Is that some kind of enzyme or coefficient or something?” Grace said. “I don't believe I'm familiar with that term.”

Anne Marie, who had come from Seattle, laughed. “Oh, God, me either.”

“Exactly,” Kempley said. “We've talked about nothing but mito disease for three days straight.” Even late at night, sitting in the hotel's Jacuzzi and drinking cosmopolitans, they were still discussing what they had learned. A stranger overhearing them talk of “oxidative metabolism” and “acyl carnitine” and “complex IV deficiencies” would have thought
they
were the medical doctors.

“But that's why we're here,” Lydia said. “To learn all we can about the disease.” Lydia's six-year-old son was the most recently diagnosed of their kids. She took copious notes in the conference handbook, dominated the question-and-answer sessions, and couldn't stop telling the story of all she'd been through, of how devastated she was, to anyone who would listen. Her fingertips were wrapped in Band-Aids because she chewed the skin around her nails until it bled. None of the women liked her, in part, Grace knew, because Lydia reminded them too much of those months when each of them first found out that their children were sick—that panicked, unmoored feeling that they would never get beyond what this disorder, this mitochondrial disease, would do to their lives.

Outside their motel room, the sky was dark, illuminated by the neon signs of chain hotels, fast-food restaurants, and gas stations. A lighted hot pink bowling pin blinked from the bowling alley/rollerskating rink across the highway. Grace glanced at Kempley, then followed her friend's gaze to the flashing “Skate Here.”

“Oh no,” she laughed. “Absolutely not.”

“Come on, “Kempley said. “We'll get some exercise.”

 

Scholars of seventeenth-century American history, Grace had come to learn, were familiar with Kempley Trapman's name. Apparently, it took effort not to be. Kempley was the sort of academic who inspired both envy and admiration: a master's from Yale, a PhD from Columbia, regular articles even as a graduate student in
American Historical Review, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, American Quarterly.
By the time she was forty, she had written three books on the Salem Witch Trials. Critics referred to her work as gutsy, controversial, and thorough. It was the last adjective that mattered the most to her. Too often, Kempley believed, history was presented as the grand gesture, operatic in scale: a story of martyrs and tyrants and complicated plots set against elaborate stage sets. A drama that distorted by eclipsing—a word that once meant “abandon”—the ordinary choices made by ordinary people.

At the mito conference, Grace and Kempley had sat up late each night, drinking Sambuca and talking. It was then that Grace learned that Kempley had grown up in Salem, Massachusetts, where each October during Salem's month-long “Haunted Happenings” Kempley had witnessed her small town of only forty thousand people transform, swelling to accommodate more than a quarter million tourists and generating nearly fifty million dollars. In the summers she had worked in one of the town's numerous souvenir shops, selling broomsticks and stuffed black cats, coffee mugs shaped like cauldrons, pounds of coffee in bags marked “Witches Brew,” T-shirts with slogans like “Stop by for a
spell
in Salem” or “Just
hanging
around in Salem” or “The top ten reasons to visit Salem: Reason #1: Your wife couldn't find a pointy enough hat at the mall…”

Kempley thought nothing of this until her senior class trip to Washington, D.C., when after a day of visiting the monuments and memorials along the Mall she realized there were no jokes and no T-shirts with David Letterman lists of top ten reasons. At the recently dedicated Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she observed men weeping as they touched the name of a friend, a brother, an uncle:
Daniel Piotrowski, Tommy Lee Hawkes, Harry Smith
. Who were these men who had died? she wondered as she surreptitiously studied the faces of those who had come to grieve for them. Even the little school kids were oddly silent as they stood in front of the dark wall, staring somberly at the reflections of their own faces juxtaposed over the names:
Clifford Jenkins, Frank DaVila, Ollie Sands
.

Watching the other tourists that day, Kempley thought of the fourteen women and five men who had been hanged in her hometown all those years before, of the mothers and wives, sisters, daughters, husbands, fathers. Of Giles Correy pressed to death by stones. And suddenly, it made no sense: Why had
that
tragedy become a joke?

Reason #2: Your wife has become overly attached to the broom.

Something wrenched inside Kempley then, she told Grace later, and she felt what she would later think of as her first true adult emotion—this grief that had nothing to do with her own small life. She wrote a paper about it for her AP history class, submitted it to a national essay contest, and won. “On History, Lies, and Laughter.” Six years later, it evolved into her master's thesis, then her first book. It got people's attention. “
Would you laugh at a T-shirt with the slogan ‘What's cooking in Auschwitz?'”
she dared to ask in the first sentence. In the second edition, she added, “
What about a bumper sticker that reads ‘Got bombed last night in Oklahoma City?'”
She became an expert on public memorials, which was how she came to think of her books. Landscapes of remembrance. She wanted people to read her words and respond as those veterans and their families had responded to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. With reverence or silence or a sense of loss or anger. With curiosity. With tears. But not humor. She wanted people to feel history, to care about it.

Kempley told Grace about the morning when, sitting in the Essex Institute in Salem on a gorgeous Saturday in May, paging through transcripts of the trials, she came across the testimony of Joanna Childin, who on June 2, 1692, testified against her neighbor, thirty-eight-year-old Sarah Goode. Joanna claimed that Sarah's specter had appeared to her in the night, along with Sarah's deceased child, who claimed Sarah had murdered her.

“It made no sense,” Kempley said. “Why would Joanna, why would
any woman,
make such a preposterous claim against another woman, especially one who was poor, unkempt, had recently lost her child, and who
wasn't
in a position of power? I kept thinking that if I could just understand Joanna, I could understand the rest of it.” She'd spent hours searching the transcripts for other references to Joanna, but found only one vague reference. “And then I realized it didn't matter,” Kempley said. “Even if I could figure out this one woman, I still had no idea why all this had happened
then
,
that
winter of 1692 and not five years earlier or five years later. And I kept returning to two facts: one, the winter of 1691–1692 was unbearably bitter, which meant that the infant mortality rate for the tiny town would have been higher than usual, and two, at the time of Joanna's accusation, Sarah Goode was pregnant again.”

So, Kempley wondered: Did Joanna have any children of her own, and had any of them died? And if so, was accusing another woman of murder the only way she could express her grief and rage? Because if her own child had died, Joanna would not have been allowed to grieve: this would have suggested that she was questioning
God's
plan,
God's
desire, and how
dare
she doubt
God's
wisdom? It would have made sense that Joanna needed someone to blame.

Or: maybe she didn't have children, couldn't have children, and wanted them more than anything. In this case, seeing Sarah Goode, who was pregnant again, might have struck Joanna with pain in her chest so sharp that it doubled her over. And maybe, because it was too terrifying to accept that these feelings stemmed from her own desire and jealousy, Joanna instead decided she had been cursed, and blamed it on the woman who had caused it simply by walking by.

Maybe
.

Either way, this was the history Kempley sought to understand in her second book. And because the trials began with the unexplained illness of a child, and because over half of the indictments against witches involved the sickness or deaths of children, Kempley began by studying the effect of child-loss on a community. She interviewed women whose children had died, asking them how this loss had affected their friendships, their faith, their marriages, their sense of self. She talked, as well, to the friends and family of these women and tried to understand
their
guilt,
their
helplessness,
their
fear. Less than a year after finishing these studies, Kempley's twin daughters were diagnosed with mitochondrial disease, and Kempley would reflect bitterly that if she'd waited, she could have saved herself a lot of time and effort on research. Her own children were dying and in one lousy sickening car crash of a minute she knew more about how this felt than she ever wanted to, than three years of research and interviews ever could have told her. She didn't write for six months. She felt nothing but rage, self-pity, grief, and guilt.

And then by accident, reading an unrelated biography, she, who had been studying the trials for years and who had lived in Salem all her life, discovered that Cotton Mather, one of the ministers who had interrogated and condemned the accused of Salem, had fathered fifteen children, all but two of whom died young. Kempley had been sitting in her daughters' hospital room that day, in a strange rain-drenched city where they'd gone for tests and answers and hope, and reading that sentence, she felt as if a pane of glass had just cracked inside her.
All but two.
And one of the judges in the trials, Judge Sewell, had lost
all but three
of his fourteen children. She stared at the rain beading on the window, and she knew that the words altered everything. Why had this never been mentioned? How could it
not
have been? To lose one child was horrendous, but thirteen? Eleven? How could these men not have been furious, terrified, and desperate—above all desperate—to find a reason, something—or someone—to blame?

The book Kempley began writing again was a far different book from the one she'd originally intended. She understood, as perhaps no other historian of the Salem witch trials could, how losing a child so annihilates your sense of how the world should be that nothing—
nothing
—makes sense. There is no reason, no understanding, no rational explanation for why one child gets sick and dies and another does not, and in the absence of this fundamental logic, of this basic way of perceiving the world, the trials became understandable to Kempley. No longer was there even a pretense of objectivity in her writing.
Not
being objective was the whole point. It became her mantra. Nothing in history was irrelevant, she told her students, including their own.

Now, on the first day of her research seminars, she told Grace, she began by piling on her desk milk crates full of books about the trials. “This is only a fraction of what has been written,” she would begin, “about an event that occurred over three centuries ago, lasted less than a year, and as one critic aptly said, ‘had no long-term impact on the future of Puritan New England.'” She paused, reading her students' implacable faces, wanting them to be outraged by this, wanting them to care:

At most, though, all she might see was a flicker of surprise, a raised eyebrow. Still, it was a start.

“So two questions,” she would continue: “One, why should yet another historian devote time and energy to this subject, and two, assuming you can answer that, what can
you
possibly add to what we know?” She didn't wait for answers. “The most important questions you can ask yourself as a historian are: Who am I? and Why do I care?”