Only the Beautiful

Praise for Only the Beautiful “ Only the Beautiful is an emotional journey of grief, hope, and second chances… Meissner pulls no punches in comparing America’s treatment of people with disabilities with the Nazis’ actions a few years later, leaving the reader with the emphatic message that everyone has a moral obligation to speak out against governments doing horrible things. This one resonates.” – Historical Novels Review “ Susan Meissner is a master of the genre…[ Only the Beautiful ] is set in 1930s California and explores our country’s brief but troubling fascination with eugenics via the story of Helen.” – San Diego Union-Tribute " Uncovers the horrors of eugenics movements through the stories of two women in 20th-century America.” - PopSugar “ The lives of two women intersect in this powerful tale about the love between mothers and daughters.” – BookBub “ Meissner delivers a nuanced and heartbreaking tale; expect to read through tear-filled eyes as the story concludes.” –Library Journal (starred review) “ Meissner unfurls an emotionally rich narrative… Readers will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “ Richly drawn characters and heartbreaking, historically accurate situations combine to make a powerful reading experience.” –Booklist Susan Meissner is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper and an award-winning columnist. She is the USA Today best sellingxa0author of The Nature of Fragile Things, The Last Year of the War, As Bright As Heaven, A Bridge Across the Ocean, Secrets of a Charmed Life, A Fall of Marigolds , and Stars over Sunset Boulevard, among other novels. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Sonoma County, CaliforniaFebruary 1939The chardonnay vines outside my open window are silent, but I still see in my mind the bursts of teal and lavender their summer rustlings always called to my mind. That sound had been my favorite, those colors the prettiest. The leafless stocks with their arms outstretched on cordon after cordon look like lines of dancers waiting for the music to start—xadfor spring to set their performance in motion. Looking at them, I feel a deep sadness. It might be a long time before I see again these vines that had for so long been under my father’s care, or hear their leaves whisper, spilling the colors in my mind that belong to them alone.Perhaps I will never see this vineyard again.The Calverts won’t welcome a future visit from me. Celine Calvert has already made it clear that after today she is done with me. Done.For a moment the words if only flutter in my head, but I lean forward and pull the window shut. What is to be gained by wishing I could turn back the clock? If I had that power, I would have done it before now. I wouldn’t even be living with the Calverts if I had the ability to spin time backward. I’d still be living in the vinedresser’s cottage down the hill with my parents and little brother.The doorbell rings from beyond the bedroom. Shards of heather gray prick at the edges of my mind. I hear Celine cross the entry to open the front door and invite the visitor inside.Mrs.xa0Grissom is here to take me away.It’s almost a year to the day since I first met Mrs.xa0Grissom on the afternoon my whole world changed, just like it is changing now. On that day my father’s truck got stuck on the railroad tracks outside Santa Rosa. In one blinding instant, he and my little brother, Tommy, were snatched away from this life. The next, I was sitting in a ghostly white hospital room for the handful of minutes before my mother slipped away to join them.“Rosiexa0.xa0.xa0.” Momma’s voice was threaded with the faintest colors of heaven as I sat in a cold metal chair next to her bed. She lay in a sea of bandages seeping crimson.“I’m here.” I laid my hand across her bruised fingers.“I am soxa0.xa0.xa0. sorryxa0.xa0.xa0.” Her voice sounded different from what I’d always known. Low and weak.Tears, hot and salty, slid down my cheeks and into my mouth.“Promise mexa0.xa0.xa0. Be happyxa0.xa0.xa0. for mexa0.xa0.xa0. and bexa0.xa0.xa0. careful.” She nodded as if to remind me of a past agreement between us. “Be careful, Rosanne. Promisexa0.xa0.xa0.”“Momma, don’t.”“Promisexa0.xa0.xa0.”A sob clawed its way out of my mouth as I spit out the words: “I promise.”“Lovexa0.xa0.xa0. youxa0.xa0.xa0.”I don’t know if she heard me say I loved her, too.The moments after she left me seemed at the time made of the thinnest of tissue paper. I remember being allowed to sit with Momma after she’d passed. I remember being told my father and brother had been taken to the morgue straight from the crash and that I’d have to say good-xadbye to them in my heart.And then I was meeting Mrs.xa0Grissom, a woman from the county who’d arrived at the hospital sometime during that stretch of shapeless minutes. She’d asked Celine—xadwho had brought me to the hospital—xadif she knew of any next of kin who could take me in. There weren’t any. She’d asked if Celine would please consider speaking to Mr.xa0Calvert about the two of them taking on the role of legal guardians for me since I’d lived the entirety of my sixteen years on their property anyway. The county had a terrible shortage of foster families willing to take older children, and the nearest orphanages were full. It wouldn’t have to be for forever. Just for the time being. And they had already raised their son, Wilson, so they had experience.The two women were speaking in the hallway, just outside the room where I sat with my mother’s body. I couldn’t see Celine’s face, but I could sense her hesitation.“Oh, I suppose,” Celine finally said. “I guess that makes sense. Truman and I do have that bedroom off the kitchen available. The poor thing can stay with us. At least for now.”And Eunice Grissom said she’d approve the emergency placement that very day so that I could return home with Celine, and the rest of the paperwork could follow.I’ve only seen Mrs.xa0Grissom twice since then. Once two days after my family was laid to rest—xadCeline and Truman had paid for the arrangements and the simple headstones—xadand a few weeks later when she came by to let the Calverts know the temporary guardianship had been approved.And now Mrs.xa0Grissom is here again.I hear her step farther into the house and closer to where I wait in the little room beyond the kitchen.“I’m so very sad and disappointed about all this,” Mrs.xa0Grissom says. “And here I thought it had been going so well here for all of you.”“Yes. It’s very sad.” Celine’s voice is toneless. “Extremely disappointing.”“I’ve been asking a lot of questions on my end since your visit with me on Tuesday, and it seems everyone I’ve talked to agrees,” Mrs.xa0Grissom says, “if what you’re saying is true.”“I assure you, it’s true.”“Well then,” Mrs.xa0Grissom says. “We will leave this with those who can help her best.”“Yes,” Celine replies. “Wait right here. I’ll get her.”A home for unwed mothers, then. That’s where I’m headed, since apparently no one else will take me the way I am. Seventeen. Orphaned. Pregnant.At least it will be a home. At least it will be a place where this tiny life inside me will be protected. It scares me a little how much I am already starting to care for it. This child is the only family I have now. Surely some unwed mothers are allowed to keep their babies. Surely some do.The sound of a lock turning yanks me from this daydream, and the door to my bedroom opens. Celine stands at the doorframe, her gaze on me like arrows.“Mrs.xa0Grissom is here for you,” she says, and then quickly turns from me.“Where is she taking me?”Celine doesn’t turn to me when she answers. Her voice looks an icy blue—xadlike rock crystal. “Where you belong.”She walks away, back through the kitchen and dining room to the entryway, where Mrs.xa0Grissom waits.I don’t reach for the bag I packed—xadCeline has already taken that—xadbut instead for a sweater I placed on the bed next to a maid’s uniform that is no longer mine.Tears brim in my eyes as I move through the kitchen, and I think of Momma as she lay dying, whispering the words “Be happy, be careful.” I have failed her on both accounts.I walk to the tiled entry, where Mrs.xa0Grissom stands with my travel bag by her feet. I see her gaze drop to the slight mound at my waist. She frowns and sighs. It’s true, then, the sigh seems to say. The orphan girl kindly taken in by the Calverts let a boy into her bed.“Come, then, Rosanne,” Mrs.xa0Grissom says, shaking her head. “We’ve somewhere to be.”I know it’s pointless to apologize, but I turn to Celine anyway.“I’m sorry, Mrs.xa0Calvert.”“Good-xadbye, Rosie,” she says flatly, her words heavy and gray.“Thank you for doing what you could for her, you and Mr.xa0Calvert.” Mrs.xa0Grissom hands Celine a piece of paper from the top of the clipboard she is carrying. No doubt the record of the Calverts’ relinquishment of me. “The county is grateful.”“Yes,” Celine says.I walk out to the passenger side of Mrs.xa0Grissom’s Buick and place my travel bag on the back seat and then get in the front. Celine pulls her front door shut even before I am fully inside the car. Mrs.xa0Grissom starts the engine, and as she eases slowly past the Calverts’ house, I reach with one hand for the necklace at my throat, feeling for my mother’s cloisonné pendant and the little key resting behind it. One is a tether to my past and the other to my future.I look longingly at the vines as we pass them on the gravel drive, rows and rows of them. I love all the colors of this place, and the chuffing of nearby tractors and the neighbor’s roosters and my father’s whistling. They’d always been such happy sounds, happy colors. Oh, how I will miss them.As we turn onto the road to Santa Rosa, I reach for my bag and lift it over the seat to make sure all that I put inside it is still there: the few items of clothing that still fit me, my worn copy of The Secret Garden, the photograph of me and Tommy and my parents, my cigar box full of my savings, the baking soda tin with the amaryllis bulb and the instructions on how to care for itxa0.xa0.xa0. It’s all there except for the bundle of Helen Calvert’s letters inside the cigar box. My money is still inside it, but the letters from Truman’s sister are gone.Before I can even begin to mourn their loss, Mrs.xa0Grissom asks me why of all things I have a dirty old turnip in my travel bag.I turn to stare at her. “You looked in my bag, too?”“We had to make sure you weren’t taking anything that wasn’txa0.xa0.xa0.” Her voice drifts off.“Mine?”“Safe.”“It’s not a turnip.” I turn back to the window. “It’s an amaryllis bulb.”“A what?”“An amaryllis. A flower bulb.”“But why do you have it?”I don’t want to explain why I have it. And I don’t feel like telling her the dirty little turnip is not what it looks like. It is more. It is something beautiful, hidden but there. Helen Calvert, who lives far across the sea, wrote words like those about the amaryllis bulb when she gave it to me. I’ve held on to them and the bulb because I’ve needed to believe they are true.“Because it’s mine,” I say. “And so were those letters I had in my bag.”“They weren’t addressed to you. Mrs.xa0Calvert said they were hers and Mr.xa0Calvert’s.”“Not all of them were. Some of them were mine. And they had given the others to me. Those letters were mine.”Mrs.xa0Grissom is quiet for many long moments.“Care to tell me how you got into this mess?” she finally says, as though it doesn’t matter who the rightful owner of those letters is. We aren’t going back for them.“No.” I reach again to touch the little key hiding behind the pendant. I don’t care to tell her. I won’t.“Things would go easier if you told me the truth aboutxa0.xa0.xa0.” She glances at the slight bump at my waist. “You know. How this happened.”“Would it change where you’re taking me?”“Well, no.”“It happened the usual way, Mrs.xa0Grissom.”The county worker sighs, shakes her head, and turns her attention fully back to the road.I remove the tissue-xadthin paper of instructions on how to care for an amaryllis from within the baking soda tin—xadwhich Celine obviously missed when she went through my bag—xadand place the only letter from Helen left to me inside the cigar box where all the others had been. I return the bag to its place on the back seat.We drive into Santa Rosa, then through it, and then we pass over to rolling hillsides on its other side, blanketed with vineyards and scattered sycamore and bushy acacia trees.“Is it a nice place? Where you’re taking me?” I ask as we turn onto a road I have never been down before.Mrs.xa0Grissom purses her lips before answering. “It’s a respected place for people who need help, Rosanne. You need help and that’s what’s important. I suppose in its own way it’s nice.”It will be something like a boardinghouse, I imagine, run by tsking older women who will look down on me in disapproval. I’ll be rooming with other fallen girls who have gotten themselves in trouble, and we will surely be reminded daily of our failure to make good choices. Why aren’t there places like that for fallen men, I wonder, where they are tsked and told every day that their recklessness has led to disaster?Mrs.xa0Grissom slows and turns onto a sloping driveway. I see a high fence surrounding a multistory brick building with white trim and flanked by lawns just starting to come back to life after the winter. It looks like a school or college. On either side of the gated entry are two oak trees with limbs that reach well over the top of the fence. A sign etched in stone on the outside of the gate reads sonoma state home for the infirm. Below that in smaller letters are the words: caring for the mentally encumbered, the epileptic, the physically disabled, and the psychopathic delinquent.A cold burst of alarm surges in my chest. “Is this where we’re going?”“It is.” Mrs.xa0Grissom doesn’t look my way as she stops in front of the closed gate. An attendant emerges from a small gatehouse.“This can’t be right, Mrs.xa0Grissom. Didn’t you see the sign? This is some kind of hospital forxa0.xa0.xa0. for sick people.”The smiling attendant comes around to the driver’s side and Mrs.xa0Grissom rolls down her window.“Eunice Grissom with County Human Services. This is Rosanne Maras.”“Mrs.xa0Grissom!” I shout. “This isn’t the right place. I’m not sick. I’m notxa0.xa0.xa0. infirm.”Mrs.xa0Grissom tightens her grip on the steering wheel and says nothing.“You can drive on up,” the attendant says. “They’re expecting her.”Expecting me? Expecting me?“No, wait!” I call out to him. But the attendant is opening the gate wide so that the car can pull through. I turn to Mrs.xa0Grissom. “I am not staying at this place!”She begins to drive slowly forward. “You need to trust the people who have been charged with your care and well-xadbeing, Rosanne.” Read more