The 19th Wife (43 page)

“No idea.”

“She was one of Brigham’s wives. She lived here for a while, before she divorced him. She always said he put in this window so his spies could find her house, but there’s no proof that’s true, but that’s what makes it pretty well-known today. Anyway, she went on to become a crusader in the fight to end polygamy.”

“I guess she failed.”

“No, not at all. She played a big part in forcing the church to give it up.”

The tour was over and we were back in her office, sitting around waiting for the director to show up. “How long have you worked here?”

“Actually, I’m just a volunteer. I’m here full-time in the summer, and two days a week during school. I’m getting my master’s at BYU. In history. Women’s studies.” She said it with a touch of pride, or rebellion. “It’s how I got involved with this place. I’m writing my thesis on Ann Eliza Young. That’s how I first heard about what was going on with polygamy today. I had no idea—I mean, I heard the stories about places like Mesadale and everything, but I never really thought it was as bad as everyone said. At the time I was really immersed in my research. Because I’m writing about the nineteenth century, it’s all old documents and texts, you know—rummaging around the archives. I was learning a lot, but one thing I was having a hard time understanding was her rage—Ann Eliza’s, I mean. She was really mad at Brigham and the LDS Church over polygamy. Not mad like pissed off, but mad like she was waging spiritual battle. Over the years a lot of Saints, they’ve just kind of dismissed her as this angry ex-wife, but this was more than that. This was a woman on a mission, so to speak. It had become her faith, which was a really interesting idea to me, you know, to give up one faith for another, one that’s so opposite to what you used to believe.

“Then I thought—you know, the best way to understand what Ann Eliza was feeling, to actually understand why she was so outraged, was maybe to truly comprehend what polygamy was like for her. At first I just couldn’t wrap my head around it—I mean, I’m just your average LDS girl with a mother and a father and an older brother and a younger sister and a dog named Lily. Sure I saw the world when I was on my mission—here, that’s me in New York, which I totally loved. Maybe it was my time on mission that helped me realize that the only way to understand people is to listen to them. So anyway, I decided I had to meet someone who had come from that world, someone who could help me get what she’d gone through. Eventually I found the website
19thwife.com
and arranged an interview with a plural wife.”

“You should’ve called me.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s a joke. Not funny. You were saying—”

“I met this woman in a coffee shop not far from here. I took my tape recorder, my notepad, and I felt, you know, almost like a detective. It was very exciting because usually historians, we only meet people through documents, never in person. Then this woman walks in and she was very thin and very frightened, and very young, younger than me by a couple of years. Her eyes were red—I’ll never forget how red they were—but she wasn’t crying. That’s when it hit me: This isn’t a research project, these are people’s lives, people’s lives ruined by this doctrine that is a by-product of
my
church. Of course I knew that before, but it’s one thing to know something intellectually, it’s another to meet it face-to-face. This woman, she sat opposite me in the booth and her back was very rigid and she just began to tell me about her husband and her twelve sister wives, very quietly, very methodically, as if she had practiced it over and over. Eventually she ran away, eventually she decided that if this life was what God wanted for her, then she didn’t want God, but what was killing her, the reason she wanted to talk to me in the first place, was she had to leave her kids behind, a boy and a girl. You should’ve seen her—she just kind of crumpled as she said she decided the only way to save her kids was to leave them and come back for them later, but you could just tell it was one of those terrible decisions a mother shouldn’t have to make, but she made it, and there she was. Now she wanted to get them out, but she really didn’t have any way of doing that. I mean, they talk about the disenfranchised, but this woman had nothing, not even her faith. Eventually she took my hand and said, ‘Can you help me?’ I’ll never forget how cold her hand was, like a claw of ice.

“It was then I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit in my library carrel and read through all my texts and take my seminars and write a master’s thesis that was full of ideas but empty on people. Of course, that’s what the department wanted me to do, but I couldn’t, and fortunately my adviser, Professor Sprague, she totally understood what I was talking about and sort of sponsored me. So I got an internship here and that was two years ago. And now I just try to help out women like that, and the kids. This whole experience has changed my life.”

Kelly looked at the clock. “The director should be back soon.”

“So this lady you were talking about?”

“The lady I interviewed?”

“No, the lady this place is named after. What’d you say she did?”

“She really helped bring an end to polygamy. She went around giving lectures, telling everyone what it was really like. People all over the country went to see her, and for a while there she was as famous as, I don’t know, a rock star or someone on tv, but this was in the 1870s. Eventually she went to Congress and described polygamy and met President Grant and told him all about it. After her visit to Washington the government finally started putting some teeth into the antipolygamy laws. She got the ball rolling, and eventually the church had to give it up. She called us on it, and she won.”

“How do you know so much about her?”

“I’ve spent the last two years of my life reading everything I can about Ann Eliza Young. There’s a lot out there, she wrote this really famous book called
The 19th Wife,
and there are diaries and letters and all these records by people who knew her and the more I read, the more I want to know. You know what’s funny, even today a lot of members don’t like her. She fought Brigham pretty hard in their divorce, and she said lots of nasty things about the church in her book, some of which were misleading and completely biased, but she also made us see the truth about something very important. She saved the church, in her own way, you know, by forcing us to give up polygamy. There’s no way I could believe in a church that supported that, especially now that I’ve seen it for myself. I feel like I owe her so much—my faith, it’s the most important thing I have, along with my family, of course, but I love my church as much as I can love anything. I’m just really glad she put us through that, and flushed it out of our system.

“To some she was a real hero. But a lot of Saints, even today, they’re angry at her. Some people, like some of Brigham’s descendants, won’t even say her name. A few years ago they put out a book of remembrances about Brigham, you know, collecting old letters and other papers by Brigham’s children and grandchildren describing Brigham at home, what kind of father he was, and in the back there’s a list of his wives. They completely left her off. Edited out of history! Thankfully not everyone’s like that. This house, it was started by a group of LDS members who felt the need to do something about polygamy today. It wasn’t very hard to raise the money to buy it and fix it up. A lot of people wanted to help. They see it as I do, as our duty, you know, because in some ways it’s part of our legacy.”

“I know I need to talk to the director,” I said, “but can you tell me how this whole thing is going to work for Johnny?”

“Sure, first she has to meet him and make sure he’ll fit in. This is a community, and we can’t have someone destructive or violent or what have you.”

“He’s not like that.” Which wasn’t exactly true.

“Of course there are rules, which we’re real strict about. Among the many things these kids need is discipline. No drinking and drugs, no stealing, no weapons of any kind—any signs of those and you’re immediately out. It’s a no-tolerance zone. Before he’s admitted Johnny will have to sign a statement saying he won’t break the rules. It’s an important step, making a commitment and keeping it. Last but definitely not least, there’s a lot of paperwork, filing with the various agencies, but that can happen after he checks in. We try to spare the kids from the bureaucracy. How do you think he’ll feel about all that?”

“He’s a bit, I don’t know, unpredictable.”

“Usually the longer they’ve been on their own, the less they want to stay. They’re scared they’re going to be kicked out again. It’s perfectly natural. Whenever I think about what these kids have gone through”—Kelly looked up and her face darkened, as if it had been slapped—“it makes me really mad. You see, I finally understand what Ann Eliza was so outraged about. It’s the kids. These men, in their search for an unlimited supply of women, they end up destroying a lot of kids.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You know what makes me the angriest? That someone has put them through this in the name of God. That’s the saddest part, these kids come out and they’ve been robbed of everything. Their childhoods, their families, but, worst of all, they’ve been robbed of God. And most of them never find him again.”

“That’s not the worst part,” I said. “The worst part is you come out of there and it’s pretty much impossible to ever love anyone again.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But I think we’re talking about the same thing.”

I told Kelly it was fine if she had something to do, she didn’t have to wait with me, but she said she didn’t have anything else to do. “So this lady,” I said, “Ann Eliza Young? She was like wife number what?”

“It depends.”

“On?”

“Who’s counting.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Then I don’t know. She was commonly known as his nineteenth wife, but everyone agrees that she was at least his twenty-seventh. But there’s a lot of evidence that suggests Brigham married more women than that. With all the secret weddings, the numbers get pretty screwy.”

“They always are.”

“That’s one of the things I’m researching. Not what number she was, because to tell the truth I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. I’m more interested in what it meant to a woman to not even know her position in her family. It’s one of those things that gets brushed over and a lot of scholars say, Well, what difference does it make? But I think it must’ve had a huge psychological impact on these women to not know their number.”

“My mom. She’s a nineteenth wife.”

“Come again?”

And so I told her. Everything. It just came out, and it took a long time, but I told her like I’ve just told you.

At the end of it Kelly said, “I wish there was something I could do.”

“You can help Johnny. He won’t make it if he stays with me.”

We stopped talking. There was so much to think about. I can’t tell you what Kelly was thinking, but I was thinking, Look at this girl. LDS through and through. BYU rah rah rah.
Rise, all loyal Cougars and hurl your challenge to the foe.
No coffee, no tea, no Diet Coke, never a drink or a smoke or a hit, temple garments as white as Wasatch snow, Relief Society chick, missionary missy—where was it she went in New York? Times Square? Blond, banged, sharp-nosed Kelly Dee bringing the word of the Restoration to New York City, bringing the news of the Prophet to 42nd Street? Two years with her companion, Sister Kimmie probably, or Sister Connie or Sister Meg or someone, the two of them always together, never apart, smiling, talking, chatting, helping, maybe handing out a book, maybe not, Sister Kelly never tiring, never giving up, never getting angry or disappointed or dispirited when someone on the street said Joseph Smith can suck my dick, just continuing firm in her belief, never once thinking, I’m better than this, never once thinking, I’m better than
you.
Here she was, Kelly Dee, of hearty Pioneer stock, always well loved, always loving, three years from marriage, four from motherhood, Sister Kelly, who probably plans for weeks in advance when it’s her turn to stand up in church and bear witness, Sister Kelly, who probably keeps a to-do list clipped to her fridge, who probably spends Sunday nights shampooing those waves of blond hair, so clean, so hardworking, a human honeybee, she of the chosen people, of the desert kingdom, of the Saints. Yes, here she was, sitting in a crappy office chair helping kids like me. And not just helping, because there are people who are like,
Oh, you poor thing,
and cluck their tongues, and maybe give you a dollar, but they don’t understand and don’t want to understand. And then there are people who are like,
Oh, you poor thing, now come and meet my God, He is the only way.
But not Kelly—she wasn’t just helping, assisting, offering a hand. No, she was researching, reading, learning, talking, understanding. Working hard to understand, wanting to understand, telling herself that’s the most important thing she can do. And it meant more to me than anything else. She got it. I could see it in her blue-as-a-Deseret-morn eyes. She got me. She knew I had been completely totally royally screwed. She knew religion had fucked me, like that nasty john who paid me fifty bucks to shove his arm up my ass. And she also understood there’s a point when you have no choice but to get up and move on. And, oh boy, there I went, more of those goddamn tears, I couldn’t believe I was cracking up in the Ann Eliza Young House. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I didn’t come here for this.”

Kelly handed me a tissue. “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand. I completely understand.”