Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (7 page)

“But what about your family?” I asked. “You didn’t want them blown away.”

“Not my sister, Meg. But the rest? It would be okay. I love Meg, though.”

Eppitt’s parents had seven children, all pale and slack with fatigue, a slouching crew, phlegmy and phlegmatic, often fevered. He was the worst off of the bunch. In the family photograph—he had only one—they hunched together by a puny tree. Eppitt was the only one to fix his eyes on the camera, to puff his chest proudly, as out of place as a parakeet. They ignored him, except Meg, who was three years older. “Meg is the only one worth anything.”

The last in a long line, he was named Eppitt, after an uncle, although the Clapps already had a cat by that name. They didn’t choose to have cats. The cats simply slunk in, and Eppitt’s mother, accustomed to feeding hungry mouths, would offer scraps and, eventually, a name.

She stayed in bed as long as she could after Eppitt’s birth. The previous births had been mired in complications—breeches, noosed umbilical cords, excessive swelling and bleeding. Eppitt, on the other hand, had slipped out like a greased pig. Recovery was her only time to be treated gently. She took her due.

One time she barked from bed, “Eppitt needs milk.”

“And my father,” Eppitt told me, “all bent up from years of work, reached down to put fresh milk in the cat’s bowl, but it was full so he shouted at her. And my mother said, ‘No, no, the baby needs milk. Don’t you hear it crying?’ And so they started calling me Baby so they could tell me apart from the cat. It became a family joke, and they didn’t even like jokes.” He looked at me squarely and said, “Why couldn’t they have just called the cat Cat?”

“No one calls you Baby here, though,” I said.

“Nope.”

“I like Cat. I can call you Cat.”

And he leaned over and kissed my cheek.

“Why did you do that?” I said.

“Meow.”

I started to scramble out from under the Duck Porch, but he grabbed my ankle. “You should live with me in my house.” It was like this for Daisy and Weldon in the underground burrow they built for the talking sparrows. He wanted her to stay with him there forever.

“It’s only got dirt floors,” I said.

“And a cat named Cat. Meow.”

“Eppitt Clapp,” I said, but I didn’t say it like I was scolding him or even like I was about to ask him something. I said it like I was thinking about how important those two words were in my mouth. Eppitt Clapp—those two words changed everything. “There’s God in me,” I said. “Mrs. Funk told me so.”

“I could have told you that, Harriet. There’s God in all of us.”

The floorboards creaked overhead. The first sickly child was being wheeled back inside. I was half out from under the Duck Porch as the nurse pivoted the cane wheelchair and the kid restrained within it saw me. I couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl. The child had puffed red cheeks, mumps-like, and looked at me, and I stared back. And I saw God, just like that.

“Eppitt Clapp,” I said again, barely a whisper.

And once more, from under the Duck Porch, he said, “Meow.”

Young love is a consumption. It drills into your bones, burrows into your brain. It lives in your breath and your blood—forever. Because it’s the first love to arrive, the train car is empty and airy, and love swells to fill the entire space.

Eppitt and I worked doubly fast among the girls in the laundry, scrubbing stains with wire brushes, soaking the urine-drenched sheets in scalding tubs, pinning clothes in the sun. We didn’t talk in front of the other girls—boisterous with kettle-whistle voices echoing against the high ceiling.

I loved Eppitt’s decrepit lungs because they kept him in the laundry—freshly steamed lungs were better than lungs packed with quarry dust.

Under the Duck Porch, Eppitt and I built a home. “This is the kitchen. This is the dining room…” We listed tables, chairs, chests of drawers, curtains, and plates with blue-flowered edging. “One day, we’ll find it for real,” he promised. According to Eppitt, we had a destiny to catch up to. He would lie back, hands behind his head, in the bedroom under the Duck Porch, and I would put my head on his chest. “Our
sheaven.
”

“Shared heaven,” I’d translate aloud with my head on his chest.

He convinced me we would have this, and we would, in a way, years and years later, but not how we thought. Sheaven.

We took turns lying on each other, kissing—always fully dressed. We were touch-hungry, neglected, both of us, but me more so. I hadn’t known a breast, a fist of hair, a warm neck, an ear to a chest, a heartbeat other than my own. My childhood was a starvation. I’d have died of it, if not for Eppitt. At first, my body felt needled, but once my skin came alive, I couldn’t get enough.

Eppitt said, “Will you marry me?”

I said, “Yes, Cat. I will.” 
Sometimes I called him Cat.

One day, amid the outdoor laundry lines, I pulled the white sheet to my head, a veil.

He pulled out a piece of string—industrial-strength thread stolen from the sewing room. As we stood, face to face, and pressed our left hands together, Eppitt loosely wound them with the string. He told me to put my right hand on my heart. He did the same.

“Are you my wife?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you my husband?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re married?” I asked.

“We are,” he said.

We kissed. The sheet shifted in the breeze. I held it tightly, but it tugged away in the wind anyway and flew up, revealing us. When we looked around, only the sick children wheeled to the Duck Porch, out for their daily airing, were near enough to see us. Angels who didn’t speak, only gazed. Maybe their eyes grazed us—a blessing.

Eppitt gave me the small circle of string. “Keep it.”

I told him I would. Later, I pasted a piece of paper around the string and wrote “E. C. and H. W. 1913. Marriage.”

That’s how all weddings should be.

Eleanor and George’s wedding was formal. We were strapped into our fitted clothes. Suits were worn by all. Even Eleanor and her sole bridesmaid wore tailored jackets, skirts, and matching hats. The reception consisted of a few waltzes, cookies and punch, photo flashes, cigars, a few guests pelting them with rice. Hooray. It was doomed. Maybe Eleanor was unsuited for marriage. She likes short conversations; marriage is a long one. She held on to George’s arm—not for love’s sake, but like he was a buoy and she didn’t want to die alone at sea.

I promised to try to write without imagining an audience, but maybe I’ve asked too much of myself (or too little). Eleanor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry to describe your wedding this way. And I’m sorry I let you go into that marriage and never said a word. Not that you’d have listened. I thought,
What’s worse than a bad marriage? Perhaps no marriage.
We learn through our failures. And I wanted you to have children, to have something that, when you clamped onto it, would clamp onto you in return. You have your girls, and they, too, have God in them.

My pact with Eppitt, that slip of string—it was the start.

What did I understand of the world while at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children? Very little.

I went out once. When gum rot exposed a nerve that made me cry out, Nurse Oonagh took me to the dentist. She had a tooth that needed looking at as well—probably the only reason
I was placated. Normally, I kept the marriage pact tucked inside the small box beneath my cot, but I slipped it in my pocket—to help me not die.

We went by wagon. The roads were pitted. I saw a hedgerow, and then a house, a fenced dog, chimney smoke, shutters, a carpet being beaten on a line, baby prams, a man carrying a ladder. We were carted through the streets of Baltimore, toward the harbor. Children with mothers and fathers—they still existed! They hadn’t all been sent to asylums. They bobbed in open air!

Together, Nurse Oonagh and I had three molars pulled. Pain can be mistaken for comfort.

On the way home, her hands occasionally fluttered around her bulging cheeks. She prayed—a whine through her nose—but I cast my starving eyes out the window. With my mouth cotton-clotted, my head bundled shut—this was the way the world preferred me: mute, behind glass, passing through. I was sure of that.

Some visitors brought glimpses of the world outside too. Parents visited rarely, but they sometimes brought their other children with them. These kids moved differently, as if their bodies were built of fibers foreign to me. Sometimes a child left at the Maryland School because of destitution was picked up after a change in fortune. I watched them go until the backs of their heads were just dots, and then gone.

Eppitt’s parents weren’t coming for him. Angry bull-chested debt collectors had come round his house on Sparrows Point constantly to threaten his father. “Baltimorons,” his father called them after they were gone, his hands shaking.

His parents had dropped Eppitt at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children on a Sunday shortly before I met him. They’d prayed on it. The Word was clear. His mother didn’t cry.

“You’ll come back for me?” he asked.

“Yes,” his mother said. “You keep that in your heart.”

When she turned her back, Eppitt’s father looked at him and shook his head. They weren’t coming back. Eppitt appreciated his father’s honesty, and there was little to appreciate about the man.

Eppitt told me this in the empty laundry room one evening after everyone had emptied out of the Custodial Building for Girls. I sat on the floor, relieved for a moment that I didn’t really know my parents. There was nothing untrue to keep in my heart.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Eppitt.

“It’s fine,” he said. “We
’
re family now. We’ll get out of here and have babies and our own house.”

But this wasn’t necessarily possible. The year was 1913. We were morons, remember, harboring the criminal element. The boys were taken care of—a mysterious problem with the penis, a sedative, an operation in the laboratory. Our deformities, even the unseen ones in our soul, had to be kept in check. (Girls too, though I’d never had the operation, perhaps because my father had told Brumus not to, or perhaps because Brumus alone chose to spare me.)

Dr. Brumus was the man with the scalpel in the operating room, instructed by a board of volunteers who sometimes walked the grounds, whispering. But he must have believed in his civic duty.

I’ve since put it in historical perspective. You see, Brissaud and Griffiths were performing vasectomies on rabbits and dogs as early as 1884. Steinach experimented on senile rats.
Vasectomies were used to treat bladder stones and TB, as well as for the proper benefits of
“rejuvenation.” Sigmund Freud and W. B. Yeats were said to have had vasectomies to rejuvenate themselves. In 1899, the year before my birth, Ochsner published a paper on performing vasectomies on habitual criminals. Eugenics was revved! In 1907, Indiana passed a bill “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles,” in other words, sterilization. Twenty-nine states joined in. When Eppitt arrived at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, Sharp had already published a piece called “Vasectomy as a Means of Preventing Procreation in Defectives” and was urging sterilization in all state institutions. (We were surely defectives.)

Enter the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Before Hitler’s chancellorship started, a
Reich
sterilization law was drafted. Those who weren’t deemed fit to marry were tried in the hereditary health courts, where the enforcement of sterilization laws led to three hundred and twenty thousand people being sterilized from 1933 to 1945. Worse crimes happened in those dozen years, but there’s a bit of history.

Eppitt knew.
Held steady by a guard’s elbow, b
oys limped bowlegged across the field to their cottages. Girls, at some point after their first period, disappeared for an afternoon, returning wobbly, pale. Brumus was nicknamed Dr. Snip-Snip. There were rumors that a few of the older male guards had volunteered for the procedure. Even Brumus himself was said to have had it done by another doctor in town.

The girls knew what it meant: no pregnancy, no children. A few said they wanted the operation—girls from big families, like Eppitt’s, who’d been left because they cost too much to feed. They’d seen their mothers swell again and again, screaming bloody babies into the world, and then staggering through the house, slack with exhaustion. Or some tough girls wanted to be with boys and not bother with babies. Some had trysts with not only the boys but also the guards.
Eppitt’s favorite, Gillup, was said to be a rounder. Spry and handsome, he had favorites, a pecking order. But even the girls who claimed to want the operation were different after it, mute when the snip-snip came up in conversation, their faces blank with a watery glint to their eyes.

I wanted to have a baby one day. There was a secret nursery at the Maryland School—children weren’t supposed to be accepted until age seven. But there were a few clandestine cribs; one of them had been my own. Eppitt and I deserved babies. This became my motivation for learning how to read—to get into Brumus’s files and mark that Eppitt was already sterile, operation done.

I had a facility for reading that startled the Owl. At one point, she asked Brumus if her task of teaching me to read was a joke. “Harriet can already read. She gets it as soon as I say it.”

Brumus, in disbelief, pulled a book from his desk, opened it, and pointed to a paragraph. “Read it!”

It was a bit about the heart. “I don’t know all of these words,” I said, skimming it.