Book Review: Only the Beautiful

Synopsis:

California, 1938 The daughter of the vinedresser’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Rosie has lived her whole life on a beautiful Sonoma County, California vineyard. When she loses her parents and younger brother in a horrific accident, she is taken in by the owners of the vineyard, Celine and Truman Calvert. She moves into their spacious house where Celine puts her to work as their maid. Rosie has a secret, however. She sees colors when she hears sound and promised her dying mother she’d never reveal her little-understood ability to anyone.

But a remembered conversation she had long ago with the Calverts’ son, Wilson, when Rosie was just six or seven years old, and the weight of her grief, isolation, and loneliness weaken Rosie’s resolve. She not only breaks her vow to her mother, but she also becomes pregnant. Banished from their home by Mrs. Calvert, Rosie believes she is bound for a home for unwed mothers. Having lost her family, she treasures her pregnancy as her chance to build a new one with her child. But she soon finds herself confined to a place far worse than any she could ever have imagined.

Austria, 1947 Having witnessed firsthand Adolf Hitler’s brutal pursuit of hereditary purity — especially concerning “different children” — Helen Calvert, Truman’s sister, is ready to return to America for good. After decades spent working abroad as a nanny, she arrives at her brother’s peaceful vineyard and is shocked to learn what happened nine years ago to the vinedresser’s daughter, a girl Helen befriended years earlier.

Helen is determined to find Rosie, but her search reveals that even though America won the war in Europe, there are still terrifying battles to be fought at home.

Review:

Susan Meissner is a native Californian who grew up in the San Diego area. To date, more than three-quarters of a million copies of her books have been sold with several titles receiving starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and BookList. Meissner says she was a storyteller as early as the age of four and was presented with a red journal by her second-grade teacher in which to record her stories. “My wiring is to create something out of words,” Meissner says. “I think I was meant for this.” But it wasn’t until she was in her thirties that Meissner realized her endeavors were more than just a hobby to keep for herself but were meant to be shared with others. She began her writing career as a journalist and tackled writing her first novel, Why the Sky is Blue, when she was in her forties.

Meissner says Only the Beautiful focuses on “a movement in history that has been all but forgotten.” The eugenics movement led to state laws authorizing the sterilization of institutionalized citizens who had conditions deemed to result from genetic flaws for the purpose of “race betterment.” Not only were persons with disabilities discouraged from having children in the name of “making better, healthier babies.” Those adjudicated unable to make their own medical decisions were forcibly sterilized. Many of them were labeled “feeble minded” or “imbeciles,” but even persons with epilepsy and alcoholism were subjected to the irreversible medical procedure against their will.

When Meissner began her research for the book, she had only passing knowledge of the eugenics movement. While conducting research to pen The Nature of Fragile Things, she happened upon photographs from the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, one of which depicted an exhibit touting eugenics. She continued researching and when she learned about the tragic case of Carrie Buck, she “toyed with” the idea of fictionalizing her story but abandoned the notion because she realized Buck’s story “was just too sad.” Although Buck earned average grades in school, she lived in poverty and was targeted as an “imbecile,” largely because her mother was institutionalized. While a foster child, she was assaulted and impregnated by the foster family’s nephew. At just eighteen years of age, she was the first person involuntarily sterilized in Virginia pursuant to a statute which was, unbelievably, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell. The Court found that sterilization of institutionalized persons who were deemed to suffer from a hereditary form of insanity or imbecility was within the power accorded states under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sadly, Virginia was not the only state seeking “race betterment.” The Buck case permitted laws to be enacted in all fifty states that remained in effect for decades and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty thousand men and women. California, which has for many years provided the broadest civil rights protections of any state, was actually the worst offender. Between 1909 and 1964, the highest number – more than twenty thousand — of involuntary sterilizations were performed in the state and the law permitting the procedure was not repealed until 1979. It wasn’t until 2003 that the State issued a formal apology and $7.5 million was earmarked for reparation payments to victims in 2021.

Meissner determined to tell a story built around fictional characters, but based on actual historical events that would encompass “powerful, hopeful moments.” She succeeded. Only the Beautiful opens in 1938. Meissner tells the tragic story of Rosie, who grew up in a loving family on a beautiful vineyard in Sonoma County. But school was always difficult for her because she was born with a hereditary condition – synesthesia. For synesthetes, stimulation of one of the senses produces an involuntary reaction in another sense. In her first-person narrative, Rosie explains that sounds cause her to see colors and shapes, and numbers, names, and places all correlate with specific colors. At that time, synesthesia was not yet understood by the scientific and medical communities. Her parents warned her that she perceived the world differently than other people and must keep her experiences secret. She convinced her parents to let her quit school when she turned sixteen because the “colors in my mind were always fighting for my attention, and there were so many sounds at school. Too many. It had been so hard to concentrate.” Math was particularly difficult. Indeed, Meissner notes that, in those days, synesthesia was considered a “flaw to be removed and definitely not to be passed on,” even though her research revealed that many synesthetes find their condition is “beautiful. It adds depth and dimension to their lives. They see colors in the periphery of their mind,” despite the fact that, like fictional Rosie, many of them struggle in school.

As the story opens, Rosie loses her entire family – her parents and younger brother – in a tragic motor vehicle accident and, with no other relatives to care for her, the owners of the vineyard on which she has spent her entire life, Truman and Celine Calvert, take her in. Truman, a World War I veteran, is quiet, reserved, and deferential to his domineering wife who requires Rosie to serve as the family’s maid to prepare her for life beyond the vineyard when she becomes an adult. The arrangement works well for a time, until the Calverts’ son, Wilson, returns for a visit. He brings up a long-ago conversation with Rosie during which he thought she said she could see ghosts. She, of course, denies that, but later confesses the truth to Truman.

At age seventeen, Rosie becomes pregnant, and when she can no longer hide her condition, Celine is incensed. She demands not only that Rosie leave their home immediately but uses her knowledge of Rosie’s synesthesia to see to it that Rosie suffers a fate she never knew was imaginable. She believes that she will be sent to a home for unwed mothers until her baby is born and has no intention of relinquishing her child for adoption. Instead, the county social worker transports her to the Sonoma State Home for the Infirm (modeled after the real Sonoma State Home). Naturally, Rosie protests but quickly learns that objections result in punishment.

Rosie’s story is harrowing, particularly when read with an understanding that it is based upon the experiences of actual victims of prejudice against and misunderstanding of not just synesthesia, but myriad other conditions, as well. Meissner heightens the power of the tale by relating it in Rosie’s own words and from her perspective. She credibly describes her shock about her circumstances, regret about having failed to keep her condition a secret, the horrific living conditions and abuse to which she is subjected in the institution, and her determination to be released and build a meaningful life for herself.

Part Two of Only the Beautiful is told in the first-person by Helen Calvert, Truman’s sister. It opens in 1947 in Lucerne, Switzerland as Helen, at sixty-two, is returning to California after decades spent working for various families as a nanny in Europe. Helen became acquainted with Rosie when she was a young girl growing up at the vineyard, and the Calverts made it a point to share her letters with Rosie over the years. For Rosie’s first Christmas without her family, Helen sent her an amaryllis plant to cheer her, and Rosie treasured it and all it represented.

Helen is understandably weary. She opted to remain in Europe when war broke out, rather than return to the United States. She relates her experiences with the Maier family in Austria, the last family for whom she served as a nanny. She was particularly fond of their youngest child, seven-year-old Brigitta, who was born prematurely and struggled to reach developmental milestones. The Germans invaded and annexed Austria in 1938, and Johannes Maier was forced to serve as an officer in a panzer division while his wife, Martine, remained at home with the children and Helen. But even the family of a Nazi officer was not immune from the atrocities of the Adolf Hitler regime.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, he did not immediately begin constructing concentration camps in which to imprison and murder Jews. His quest to create a “master race” began with measures designed to alter the genetic makeup of the German population through “racial hygiene” or eugenics, relying on ideas that had already been adopted by the mainstream medical community. The Nazis started by involuntarily sterilizing persons they believed should not procreate. The sought to eradicate persons with disabilities, referring to them as “useless eaters.” They did not just target adults. Children were forcibly removed from their parents’ care and transported to special “hospitals” like Am Steinhof and Hartheim Castle where they were subjected to experimentation and murdered.

Helen describes her wartime experiences, and the heartbreakingly unthinkable events Meissner includes are difficult to read about, based upon actual events. Helen never had children of her own, but in her role as a nanny, cared for her charges as though they were her own. But she was, like most people, naïve and could never have envisioned the evils the Nazis were capable of. Wracked with guilt, regret, and remorse, she resolves to save as many children as she can.

And when she returns to California and has a visit with Celine, she is appalled and outraged to learn what transpired in her absence and the fate that befell Rosie. She is determined to find Rosie’s child and enlists her good friends, one of whom is a lawyer, to assist her. Of course, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the internet did not exist, and it was much more difficult to find people . . . and adoption records were sealed.

The actions of the Nazi regime “shown a light on eugenic legislation,” illustrating how such laws led to catastrophic abuse. “It was kind of a defining moment in our history, and it’s being forgotten,” Meissner laments. Only the Beautiful is a compelling and credible story, set against the backdrop of the monstrous agenda of the Nazis and the abhorrent eugenic movement that gained traction in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Through the tragedies that befall her characters and the challenges they face, Meissner illustrates the intersection and similarities of the two, emphasizing their far-reaching and tragic consequences.

Meissner’s characters are fully developed, multi-layered, and empathetic. Rosie, in particular, easily slips into readers’ hearts. A minor, powerless to make decisions about her own life and health, she is ensnared in the custody of the county, victimized by a vengeful, angry, and bitter woman and her weak, despicable husband who claim to care about Rosie, and confined to an institution by medical personnel who fail to listen to her or understand that she is not “inform” or afflicted in any way that makes her incapable of competently parenting. Rosie discovers in the most painful ways that her “parents were right to fear the colors. They are dangerous. People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.”

Helen is also intriguing and sympathetic. She refuses to acquiesce when evil forces come to power, intent on doing whatever she can to help as many children as possible and, perhaps, atone for one innocent, but horrible mistake.

The pace of Only the Beautiful never slows as Meissner’s poignant narratives alternate between past and present before melding seamlessly. Although some plot details are gut wrenching and deeply upsetting, their inclusion is critical to the characters’ motivations and development, as well as the message Meissner seeks to convey. There are times “in our history that we ought not to forget. If we forget our history, we are more apt to repeat it, aren’t we?” Meissner provides an emotionally satisfying conclusion to her riveting story, demonstrating that despite all the cruelty and misguided quests for power and dominance that people are capable of, there are also “people who will stand up for those who can’t stand and speak for those who cannot speak and it’s their bravery that encourages the rest of us to do the same.” In other words, there is always cause for hope.

Moreover, given that reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are again at issue in the United States, with increasingly restrictive laws being passed in many states and critical political races poised to hinge on candidates’ positions on the subject, Only the Beautiful is a decidedly timely and contemporary work of historical fiction. The book lends itself to discussion and debate about who has the right and should be empowered to make decisions about bearing and raising children, government overreach into decision-making, and how best to ensure that the dark and shameful historical events Meissner depicts are never permitted to recur.

Excerpt from Only the Beautiful

SONOMA COUNTY

February 1939

The 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—for 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. Grissom is here to take me away.

It’s almost a year to the day since I first met Mrs. Grissom 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.

“Rosie . . .” 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 so . . . sorry . . .” 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 me . . . Be happy . . . for me . . . and be . . . careful.” She nodded as if to remind me of a past agreement between us. “Be careful, Rosanne. Promise . . .”

“Momma, don’t.”

“Promise . . .”

A sob clawed its way out of my mouth as I spit out the words: “I promise.”

“Love . . . you . . .”

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-bye to them in my heart.

And then I was meeting Mrs. Grissom, a woman from the county who’d arrived at the hospital sometime during that stretch of shapeless minutes. She’d asked Celine—who had brought me to the hospital — if 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. Calvert 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. Grissom twice since then. Once two days after my family was laid to rest— — Celine and Truman had paid for the arrangements and the simple headstones— — and a few weeks later when she came by to let the Calverts know the temporary guardianship had been approved.

And now Mrs. Grissom 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. Grissom 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. Grissom says, “if what you’re saying is true.”

“I assure you, it’s true.”

“Well then,” Mrs. Grissom 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. Grissom 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—like rock crystal. “Where you belong.”

She walks away, back through the kitchen and dining room to the entryway, where Mrs. Grissom waits.

I don’t reach for the bag I packed—Celine has already taken that — but 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. Grissom 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. Grissom 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. Calvert.”

“Good-bye, Rosie,” she says flatly, her words heavy and gray.

“Thank you for doing what you could for her, you and Mr. Calvert.” Mrs. Grissom 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. Grissom’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. Grissom 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 it . . .

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. Grissom 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’t . . .” 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. Calvert said they were hers and Mr. Calvert’s.”

“Not all of them were. Some of them were mine. And they had given the others to me. Those letters were mine.”

Mrs. Grissom 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 about . . .” 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. Grissom.”

The county worker sighs, shakes her head, and turns her attention fully back to the road.

I remove the tissue-thin paper of instructions on how to care for an amaryllis from within the baking soda tin—which Celine obviously missed when she went through my bag—and 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. Grissom 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. Grissom 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. Grissom 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. Grissom. Didn’t you see the sign? This is some kind of hospital for . . . for sick people.”

The smiling attendant comes around to the driver’s side and Mrs. Grissom rolls down her window.

“Eunice Grissom with County Human Services. This is Rosanne Maras.”

“Mrs. Grissom!” I shout. “This isn’t the right place. I’m not sick. I’m not . . . infirm.”

Mrs. Grissom 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. Grissom. “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-being, Rosanne.”