On each of her five days at the Bram, week after week, Miss Imogene Blackthorn chose to wear dresses so similar to one another that they might have been the same frock. They were not the same, however, for she was fastidious, obsessed with personal cleanliness; she owned multiples of what she felt should constitute the uniform of a tutor and nanny, though the terms of her employment did not include a dress code. She laundered and ironed a garment after she wore it once, no less faithfully than she shampooed and conditioned her lustrous auburn hair every day. Only rarely did she dare use the blackboard during instruction, because chalk dust on a black dress required immediate attention with an artist’s brush of soft, fine hairs that would not work the pale powder deeper into the fabric.
The morning following the Clyde Tombaugh Club’s meeting with Chef Lattuada, Miss Blackthorn breezed into the schoolroom at 7:55, according to the large wall clock. Because the siblings were almost always at their desks in anticipation of her arrival, she did not glance their way as she crossed the threshold but called out, “Good morning, all, good morning,” as she let the door fall shut behind her and pivoted to the freestanding coatrack on her left. She hung her purse by its strapsand her coat over the purse. When she turned and saw me in a side chair brought from the main house, sitting in line with her three students, she appeared to be surprised but not concerned. “Alida! What brings you here on this fine morning?”
“The need to learn,” I said. “Izzy, Gertie, and Harry were telling me about something that sounds so very smart and important. I can’t believe I know nothing about it. They say the subject is over their heads, they can’t explain it, so I thought you wouldn’t mind having a fourth student for a day.”
Rounding her desk, Miss Blackthorn said, “If it’s about Albert Einstein’s theory, I only mentioned it in passing, to stir up their imagination. I’m afraid I don’t understand it myself, at least not well enough to teach even ten minutes on it.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of Mr. Einstein’s theory, ma’am. I don’t know anything about it, zero, but I’m pretty sure I don’twantto know anything. It sounds like brain-busting stuff. I’m not up to that. I’m talking about making a perfect world of peace and light. It’s only twelve years since one world war ended, but people are saying another and bigger one is coming. I get scared when I think about it, so many people maybe dying. Something’s wrong with the world, with people, how they think—and I want to know what it is that’s gone wrong, how to fix it—if there is a fix. I want to live in a world of peace and light.”
After a hesitation, Miss Blackthorn said, “Peace and light and plenty. That’s the promise.” Turning her attention to the children, she said, “We agreed you wouldn’t talk to anyone about this. Some people won’t let themselves understand it, and they get angry, even some people as smart and kind as your parents.”
Isadora said, “We promised not to tell Mother and Father, and we didn’t. We told only Alida because she’s one of us. She’s already one of us in every way. We can keep a thousand secrets from everyone in the world, but the four of us can’t keep even a single secret from one another.”
Miss Blackthorn rolled her chair from behind the desk and sat close to us. She smiled warmly at the siblings. “Sometimes, I’ve felt that when I talk about this, it goes in your left ears and immediately out your right ears, that none of it sticks. I’m so pleased if that’s not the case. I only want what’s best for you, what will make your lives much happier, make the world a better place for you.”
With the full force of her elfin charm, Gertrude said, “Gee whiz, Miss Blackthorn, don’t you worry about sticky. Everything you tell us is sticky. It all sticks between our ears because we trust you and love you. Izzy and I love you and even Harry loves you, though he won’t admit it because he’s a boy.”
Harry made a sound of disgust and looked down at his desk, as if too embarrassed to meet Miss Blackthorn’s eyes, as boys do when it is revealed that they have some feelings as mushy as any emotions that girls entertain.
Suddenly it seemed my three friends were natural-born thespians who could do a passable job performing in anything written by the Bard of Avon.
Miss Blackthorn’s eyes filled with unshed tears. Her mouth softened. She sounded sincere when she said, “You’re all so special. I’m so blessed to be at the Bram, to be part of your lives. When I’m old and gray, I’ll count my life a success if I’ve helped you find your way through the dark times to the wisdom that’ll ensure your happiness.” She scooted her rolling chair closer and leaned forward, wrapping us in a thrilling cloak of high-minded conspiracy. “There are always people who think they know everything and their way is the best way. They are the Closed Minds, and the tragedy of humanity is that the Closed Minds often rule the rest of us. Thirty years ago, wiser people who understood the importance of eugenics needed to conceal their commitment to work secretly for a better world. But year by year, the cause has gained believers and become respectable. Children your age, however, remainoppressed by adults who think you’re too weak-minded to be told certain hard truths.”
Miss Blackthorn focused primarily on me, because I was the one who purported to know nothing about the topic, while the siblings had long been propagandized. She spoke of Charles Darwin’s cousin, Mr. Francis Galton, who founded the eugenics movement with the intention of improving the human gene pool by identifying people of the best genetic stock and encouraging them to procreate. Soon eugenicists wanted to redirect human evolution more aggressively by forcibly sterilizing the “unfit” to prevent them from reproducing. This proposal was endorsed by the finest universities, the brightest journalists, the wealthiest philanthropists, and by the federal government. President Theodore Roosevelt supported it. Mandatory sterilizations began.
“Imagine, Alida, we started at last to stop breeding by the feebleminded, paupers, drunkards, criminals of all kinds, even petty criminals, epileptics, the insane ... the blind, the deaf, the mute. They have been doing the same in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, especially in Germany. Many of those people who put civilization at risk by their bad behavior, their foolish theories, by their weakness, have been prevented from infecting future generations. Hundreds of famous artists, writers, actors, and educators have endorsed eugenics. George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Clarence Darrow, Woodrow Wilson, on and on.” Miss Blackthorn became a little breathless with excitement. “By 1920, four hundred universities and colleges offered courses in eugenics. In 1927, after the Supreme Court approved of legally mandated sterilization of unfit people, thirty-six thousand were no longer able to procreate. We hoped for at least a hundred thousand in 1928, two hundred thousand the year after. We could have been on our way to peace, light, plenty, a world with no crime, with a smarter population, arriving at Utopia in ten or twenty years. But there has been a backlash. For all its undeniable success, eugenics has been condemnedby know-nothings of various kinds. People who understand the rightness of eugenics, the shining promise of it, are slandered. Lies are told about their motives. If we care about the future, we must never give up the struggle, but in the current environment, we need to work for our ideals behind the scenes. Wisdom, courage, and shrewd planning are required. Do you want a better world? I do. Oh, I so much want it. I want it for you. I will surely have passed away before we achieve Utopia, but I want it for you.”
“A world without criminals,” I said, “the poor eliminated, a lot less sickness, no foolish people doing stupid things, no bad people at all, only smart people, onlyverysmart people. Who could be against that? These backlash people, jeez, they must be very dumb or wicked or maybe both. Probably both. I have just one question. One thing I don’t understand. When you were listing those who ought never to reproduce, you hesitated between ‘the insane’ and ‘the blind.’ Between ‘insane’ and ‘blind,’ who did you leave out?”
Miss Blackthorn was morally adrift, perhaps morally bankrupt, in a swoon of mad ideology, a godless religion—but she wasn’t stupid. The moment I asked my question, she knew that I wasn’t an innocent seeker of knowledge, that I had an agenda. The list was in an anti-eugenics book in Bramley Hall’s library. As her face paled, her eyes became a more intense blue. In some circumstances, silence can be a weapon; she’d decided it was the only one she possessed, and she looked as though she wished it could cut like the tempered steel of a sword. For her, the children ceased to exist; she gave them not a glance, not a word.
I said, “I’ve read the list, you see. Between ‘the insane’ and ‘the blind,’ there appear ‘genetically unfit communities’ and ‘the deformed.’” I thought surely she would be tormented by at least a small measure of guilt, enough to make her glance at our Gertie’s deformed hand. However, it was becoming clear that Miss Blackthorn lacked the self-awareness to imagine she was capable of a wrong thought or bad deed.I said, “The dead birds, the mice, the little rabbit—that was to draw the children into a mystery. But then Martin Leveret, François Le Clerc,Darkmoor Lane—what was your point? What did you hope to achieve?”
Her pallor darkened into a blush, not of embarrassment but of righteous anger. “They need to know, don’t they? Why should they grow up believing their parents are doing meaningful work, only to discover one day that it’s all trash? A man died in a fight during one of their productions. Oh, yes, it was Le Clerc who did it, but they went right on filming. They released the picture and made their money. They always make their money.” As a teacher, she seemed to have little regard for reason. “They always make money because they make lowbrow entertainment, not art. They don’t make motion pictures with the important themes, issues, policy positions, the politics that inspire true artists. They make pabulum, the movie equivalent of Gerber’s baby food, and they’re blind to their lack of substance. They cater to morons, fools, the unfit, when the world needs to be rid of those useless people, not cater to them, beridof them.”
She rose from her chair. Perhaps she meant to leave. It was then the door to the school lavatory opened. Luigi Lattuada, there as a witness, stepped into the classroom, followed by Loretta and Franklin. The chef’s dazzling smile was less warm than usual, for he knew to what “unfit” group she would assign him. The Fairchilds were not smiling at all.
Twenty-Two
School having been canceled, the children and I gathered in the pavilion with cold bottles of Coca-Cola, though it was early in the day for such an indulgence. Twenty-four years earlier, cocaine had been deleted from the soft drink and replaced with caffeine, but kids of all ages still speculated that traces of the drug remained in the formula.
“If you drink enough bottles quick, one after another,” Harry warned, “say forty bottles, you would be jacked up.”
“Or spewing like Vesuvius,” Gertrude said.
Harry persisted. “And if you got that way just twice, you’d be addicted for life, a pathetic cocaine dope fiend with no way out except off a bridge.”
Gertrude said, “You better drink those forty bottles right there on the bridge.”
“Why would I drink on a bridge?”
“If you drink all of it here at home, then on your way to the jump, you’ll have to stop every three minutes to pee. You’ll never get to the bridge.”
“Then I’d go on the roof of the Bram and dive headfirst into the terrace below.”
Gertrude made a sound of disgust. “And who’s going to clean that up? No one who works here signed on to deal with a sickening pile of pee-soaked boy jelly.”
“Just to be done with this subject,” Isadora said, “I promise I’ll clean up the remains. It’ll be an honor and a pleasure.”
