“That’s the idea.” Ivy laughed and handed it back to her.
Elsa didn’t feel like laughing. She felt like she was going to be sick.
“Come on, let’s hit the dining room before the breakfast crowd. Want to?” Ivy slipped her feet into her pumps.
“You go on ahead,” Elsa told her. “Bring me back a blueberry muffin and cheese, though, would you?” She didn’t want to admit that her interest in these files wasn’t the only reason she wasn’t up for breakfast today. Sparing herself the jaunt to the dining room may make the walk to work a little easier.
“You got it.” Ivy left the room.
Standing, Elsa kneaded her fists into the small of her back, stretched her leg, then went to refill her coffee, all the while trying not to think of how she might score in a contest devoted to the perfect human product.
She shuddered.
Back at the desk, she opened the curtains before sitting again. Light spilled through the window and landed on the folders Linus had been hiding from his wife.
Elsa moved the folder from the bottom of the stack to the top and opened it to find several blank forms titledIndividual Analysis Card.They were two-sided, with room to record medical history and physical, mental, and temperamental traits. The last section was for the description of physical appearance.
Odd.
Linus van Tessel had been an explorer and collector in his prime, not a doctor or researcher—as far as Elsa knew, at any rate. Was eugenics a hobby he picked up when he was too old to gallivant about the globe? Maybe the Eugenics Records Office, or ERO, had recruited him to gather information for their files.
With his bent toward capturing and studying birds, he had an obvious affinity for biology, and she’d seen a copy of Darwin’sOn the Origin of Speciesin that secret den. Perhaps his interests included anthropology, too.
Elsa fanned through the blank forms until she saw one with fields filled in. At the top of the page, Linus had written “my copy,” which she could only assume meant that he’d filled in another one just like it and submitted it to the ERO. Before she had time to wonder why he’d complete one for himself, she saw the name: Danielle Petrovic.
Elsa skimmed over the first couple of sections, which contained her basic information, noting that her parents were listed as “Croatian with unknown pedigrees” and that “frequent earaches” and “visual avoidance” were recorded. Under theMentalandTemperamentheadings, the form contained lists of adjectives that the recorder was meant to either cross out if they did not apply to the individual or underscore if they did. But it was Linus’s handwritten comments that stopped her.
Child cannot speak at the age of nearly four years old. Fixates on certain objects she must have with her at all times. Subject is painfully shy and quiet but also demonstrates episodes of manic outbursts during which she screams, hits her head, pulls her hair, makes repeated inhuman noises, or sustains a groan for an inordinate length of time. She will kick and bite and has struck her own parents with no reasonable provocation.
Subject demonstrates complete lack of intelligence and inability to learn. Feebleminded at best, with a likely trajectory toward insanity or even criminality, given subject’s reaction to not getting her own way.
Burden on society.
Mother not likely to bear more children given her age.
Elsa sat back, stunned, and read the file one more time. Danielle, a burden? What did that mean, exactly? What had been Linus’s intention when he completed this form and, presumably, sent a copy to the ERO?
Danielle was not a typical child. Anyone would notice that during their first interactions with her. And even Tatiana had said her younger years had been difficult and admitted she wouldn’t speak to anyone aside from her and Birdie until sometime after she turned four. But there was no way she could be called feebleminded now. She was as sharp as a hatpin. So what if her interests were narrow? And as for wanting things to go her own way, didn’t that describe all children?
Elsa glanced at the date on the form and wondered if Linus had filled out another one later to better reflect who Danielle was, if indeed that could be done in a reduction of phrases and multiple choices. But no other forms in the folder carried Danielle’s name.
The one on the bottom, however, held that of Sarah van Tessel, the baby he didn’t want her own mother to see.
Goosebumps lifted on Elsa’s skin. Almost afraid of what shewould learn, she read each line slowly. UnderIndividual History, Linus noted that Sarah’s mother, Bernadette van Tessel, had “physical defects in her family lineage, undisclosed at time of marriage.” The baby’s father owned a perfect pedigree.
Of course he did.
A note referenced Linus’s family tree, charted in a different document.
Elsa kept reading Sarah’s card. UnderPhysical, he’d written
Born with a cleft lip and palate.
Surgery unsuccessful.
Died in infancy.
The poor baby. Poor Birdie. Elsa’s vision blurred as she considered the unspoken depth of grief carried between such short lines. Linus had written this of his own child years after Sarah had lived and died, but Elsa still wondered how it had felt for him to record it so clinically.
