There’s an audible gasp, and I realize the sound is coming from me. I reread the second part of the title: Cutting off the defective germ-plasm in the human population.
Defective.
Germ.
Human.
Cutting off.
I’m expecting to see a list of names with “Grand Dragon” or “Imperial Goblin” next to them, those ridiculous ranks of America’s premier racist club, the Ku Klux Klan. That, maybe, I could swallow. It would taste like shit, but I could handle it. I’m not expecting three out of the five committee members of the American Breeders’ Association’s eugenic section to be medical doctors.
“Jesus,” I say to the walls, and I let my eyes roam over the page, reading aloud. “Doctor. Professor. Judge. Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton. Columbia.” All men, of course, except for the single female listed next to Woman’s Viewpoint. She was Mrs. So-and-So from Hoboken.
I turn to the front pages of the book. Lissa’s copy is old, yellowed with time, and frayed at the edges. The article on page 460 is relatively short, only one of thirty-some papers delivered at the First International Eugenics Congress held in the summer of 1912. Not in the backwoods of some underpopulated town in the middle of nowhere. In London. I scan the table of contents, my mouth dropping at every fresh theme: education before procreation, new social consciousness, healthy sane families, the influence of race on history. It reads like something from the Third Reich, but it isn’t. The authors are French, English, Italian, Belgian.
Eight of them are American.
My fingers fly through the brittle pages, hurrying back to the chapter where I began. There’s another list, ten lines of blurred, black ink headed by a single word:
Remedies
Number eight, unlucky and unhappy and foul-smelling number eight, stands out.
I’m not a sociologist. I don’t know shit about economics or labor forces or how to manage population dynamics. I know, though, about animal shelters. Any mother with a pair of young girls dying for a puppy does.
Euthanasia.
Like an unwanted dog. I think I say it out loud—I don’t know.
The world begins a slow spin, gaining momentum. It’s the feeling of being drunk and high and sick all at the same time. I fall back, but I don’t sink deeper into the chair. I go straight to the hard tile floor of the kitchen, breaking the fall with my head.
FIFTY-SEVEN
THEN:
Malcolm wouldn’t have any of it. Between the threat of fleas and the inconvenience of twice-daily walks, he had zero enthusiasm in us getting a dog. I took Anne and Freddie to the local SPCA anyway, behind their father’s back.
This was a major life mistake.
Inside the barn-sized building were rows and rows of kennels, each one the temporary—and, in some cases, extremely temporary—home of an animal no one wanted. While Anne and Freddie ran up and down the corridor in search of fluffy little beasts with big eyes and paws they hadn’t yet grown into, I counted the pit bulls, the thin hunting hounds that had been turned in (or—more often—discovered starving in the woods) when they lost their scent or their sight, the street dogs with ribs rippling underneath flesh. There were scabrous old Labs, once-handsome German shepherds with eyes that said, Don’t kick me. Please don’t kick me, when my shoes clicked on the concrete floor. There were barks and yelps and whines. One sign said Queenie. Twelve years. No further information available.
Queenie. Someone had named this dog Queenie once.
Queenie had been deposed.
“There aren’t any puppies, Mom,” Anne said. “How come there aren’t any puppies?” She had gone from gung ho to bored in the space of a few minutes, finally stomping out to the entry room, where she sat with her arms crossed and a frown as long as a rainy Saturday afternoon plastered on her face. “Not one single good dog.”
She was right. There weren’t any good dogs, not the kinds of dogs people wanted. I took Freddie’s hand and led her away from the world-weary—and, apparently, kick-weary—shepherd.