Saturday, April 18, 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
Liz would not have begun to believe her mother’s story at all—of the circus, the reformatory, the Home, the woman Grace who’d rescued her from under the shrubbery—had she not seen that photograph in Cecily’s drawer that day two months ago when Cecily had fallen. The handsome young man in profile: Lucky. The father of Cecily’s child!
“You had a baby,” Liz said now, “and they told you it died, and then you found out they had sterilized you?” True, she’d had her suspicions that her mother may have given a baby up for adoption. But this? (This—this unequivocally meant Cecily was not Liz’s mother!)
Liz could not accept it. No. No!
Cecily’s lipstick had worn off. She was sitting up in bed, a hopeful look on her face. “Is my baby really alive?”
“It seems that may be true,” Molly said, her voice sounding, to Liz, very far away.
And then came Cecily’s voice: “Where is he? Do you know where to find him?”
“Wait,” Liz broke in, as if trying to wake from a bad dream. “Mom. How could this be? Why—you’re not my mother! What on—I don’t . . . Why would they have sterilized you?”
“They did it to a lot of girls at the time. Girls who were considered low-class or ‘feebleminded.’”
“But—but you’re not feebleminded!” Liz—even as her head pounded in a steady, skittering rhythm (my mother is not my mother; my mother is not my mother)—was beginning to understand why Cecily had not wanted to share her story. Why she’d seemed almost desperate not to.
Cecily’s mouth was thin. “Yes, well, they didn’t like for girls to have sex outside of marriage, and any girl who ‘couldn’t control her impulses’ was defined as feebleminded. Plus, in my case, the court had it on record that I’d slept with a Black man. Which was against the law. Once a girl crossed that line, she was considered irredeemable.”
“God! How horrible!” Molly said.
Liz could not catch her breath. My mother is not my mother. “But wait. Then how did you end up in Rhode Island? What happened? If you loved this ‘Lucky’ so much, did you ever really love Dad?”
Cecily’s eyes crumpled. “Of course I loved your father. Please, won’t you tell me about my baby?”
It flashed in Liz’s mind, then, the pie chart of her DNA: 92 percent German, no Norwegian.
(Is my father truly not my father?)
“I’m sorry, Mom, but this just doesn’t make sense!”
Cecily sat up straighter, temper flaring. “It was the height of the eugenics movement, Liz! You know, the idea—which some people actually believed!—that it would be a good thing to engineer society to create citizens with so-called ‘desirable’ characteristics. So, state governments would sterilize the people who they didn’t want to procreate—it was what inspired the Nazis!”
“I’m not talking about history, I’m talking about you. You lying to me all my life and telling me that you were my mother!”
“Mom!” Molly objected.
Cecily sank back into her pillows, blinking away tears. “I am your mother, Liz. And you are not being very nice to me right now. I need to hear about my baby.”
Liz glanced at Molly, who was looking at her aghast. Right—Liz needed to get a hold of herself. Trying, she turned back to Cecily. “Mom, please, I’m sorry,” she said, wiping away tears of her own. “But this is a shock. I need for you to tell me everything.”