“Just five minutes, please. It’s serious.” I hear myself saying the words.
And then, Oma. In German. Screaming at me to listen. “I said they sterilized her, Leni. They took her away and they cut something out of her and then they brought her back. Do you hear me? They did all that to Miriam’s sister and then they brought her back!”
She’s yelling at me in two languages, calling out numbers and years, talking about quotas and doctors competing with one another to meet them. The only numbers I remember are fifty thousand, and one.
Fifty thousand operations in one short year.
Somehow, and I don’t think I’ll ever know how, my hands work the papers back into the envelope. Then I drop it on the desk into the pool of colored light, as if holding on to the paper for even one second longer might burn me. I’m already burning with shame for doubting my own grandmother.
“I hear you, Oma. I hear you.”
“You need to come home, Liebchen. You and Freddie. You both need to come home before something terrible happens.”
“Sure, Oma. I know.” I’ll just click my magic shoes, I think, feeling the room start to spin around me. I hand the phone over to Freddie. “Go on,” I say in a dry voice. “Say hello to your Oma.”
While they talk, it’s all I can do to sit up straight in this chair inside this bright and formal office where a few sheets of paper wait to be mailed.
My left hand reaches forward. I could take it, I think, this envelope with its evil, bloodcurdling message. I could hide it away and hope no one catches me, and then destroy the hateful thing. But another envelope would take its place, reach its destination, be opened by hands and read by eyes. I could take one page, though. One would be enough if I could deliver it to the right people.
Freddie watches me open the envelope a second time and slide out the most damning page, folding it into thirds, and then into thirds again before tucking it up my sleeve. “Don’t say anything about this,” I whisper to her. “Not to anyone.”
She nods.
And the door creaks open.
I’m going to be caught.
Freddie starts crying, putting the waterworks into full gear. I can hear Oma through the phone, telling her everything’s going to be fine.
“Sorry,” Underwood says and slips out again.
She’s smart, my daughter.
In the seconds before Martha Underwood comes back into her office for the final time, I lick the gummed strip on the envelope, press it shut, and arrange it cockeyed on the desk. Freddie tells her great-grandmother a tearful goodbye.
“I’m sorry,” Underwood says, standing next to me. “It’s always hard to hear bad news.”
Yes. It is.
On the way back to my apartment, after hugging Freddie and feeding her another set of reassurances that I won’t be able to fulfill, I study the barred windows on the dormitory building. If what I’ve read is right, soon there won’t be a need for bars. Or state schools or yellow buses or Q scores. Within a few generations, everyone will be perfect.
The unanswerable question I ask myself when I enter the faculty building is whether I would have believed Oma if I hadn’t seen the contents of that envelope.
FIFTY-SIX
Everything about the puzzle that’s been slowly piecing itself together is wrong: the shape of its parts, the ugly picture beginning to form, the sinister sounds of its individual words, the numbers of Q scores, test grades, colored armbands on children.
The apartment is empty when I return. Only a note from Lissa and a heavy book with generic brown library binding are on the kitchen table. Read p. 460, the note says. Back soon.
I open the book to the page Lissa marked and start to read. The section header is long and rambling, but its message is simple.
Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off