Child Bride (3 page)

Ann and the Wagners spent a desperate Saturday night and all day Sunday hoping, praying, for word from Jimmy. At 5:30
P.M.
on Sunday they received a curt telegram from the navy informing them that James Wagner had been killed in an airplane crash on Saturday, “further details being sent by telegraph and letter.”

Jimmy and his copilot had flown into a heavy snowstorm as they approached the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains near Wingdale, New York, where they became lost in a fog. A hunter who lived in the area saw the two-seater crash upside down against East Mountain on Saturday morning, strewing fragments of the plane across the mountainside. It took New York State
Police and local residents until Saturday night to make their way through the snow and underbrush to recover the bodies of Jimmy and his copilot, an ensign from Columbia, Tennessee, named S. R. Caulk. The plane had crashed just half a mile from the Connecticut state line.

“Anna was in a stupor,” her cousin Margaret recalled. Lorraine Iversen called that Sunday, asking Margaret to come over and comfort her daughter. The house was like a tomb. “Nobody said too much. What can you say?”

The Iversens, who had softened toward Jimmy since the wedding, gathered in Titusville with the Wagners for the funeral. The local paper noted that Jimmy had attracted the largest number of mourners ever to call at the Flanders-Arnold Funeral Home. Priscilla’s father’s memorial service befitted a military hero. James Wagner was buried in a white uniform, encased in a metal casket sealed by the government and draped with the flag of his country, saluted by a firing squad. Kathryn Wagner was inconsolable. Jimmy was her heart, her soul—her favorite son. The sort of boy who held down three part-time jobs in high school and still found time to call on an elderly widow for whom his smiling face was “like the sun coming out,” as she put it. “Jimmy was … well, he was just about perfect,” his mother took to saying. “Too perfect for this earth.” She took some solace in a letter she received after the funeral, informing her that the pilot who took Jimmy’s place on the
Roosevelt
that week went down in his plane on takeoff near Rio de Janeiro and was lost at sea. It was, it seemed, Jimmy’s time to die.

After the memorial, Ann and Priscilla stayed on in Titusville for almost three months, living with the Wagners past New Year’s. “I think she wanted to give comfort to my mother,” Gene said of Ann, “and I think she … realized that if she had left and taken the baby, my mother would have nothing.” Having their daughter-in-law and granddaughter near them was a source of great consolation to Jimmy’s parents. “Ann and the baby were here for Priscilla’s first Christmas,” Kathryn Wagner recalled. “We had a Christmas tree and made things as nice as possible. But there was a deep grief on both sides. Very, very bad.”

As far as the Wagners were concerned, everyone in the household got along beautifully. “I dearly loved the girl,” Kathryn Wagner remarked later. Gene and Ann grew particularly close. At nineteen, Ann was just two years older than Jimmy’s brother, who was then a senior in high school. The two played cards
together in the kitchen, often talking and laughing. “I couldn’t have asked for a better sister-in-law,” related Gene. Priscilla, at eight months, was the apple of everyone’s eye—more so than usual, perhaps, because she was their lifeline to Jimmy.

By the middle of January 1946, it was time for Ann to return home. She had lived with the Wagners in a state of suspended emotion. “She was a bride, a mother, and a widow, within a year’s time,” as Fay pointed out. It was time to think about the future—hers and her child’s.

She and the baby moved in with her parents, while Ann sleepwalked through a series of dead-end jobs. “She was lost for a long time,” her cousin Margaret reflected. Ann often wrote to Kathryn Wagner, filling her in on Priscilla’s progress, but also complaining of dizzy spells, weight loss, and deep depression. “Rooney was a very vibrant person,” recalled her friend Fay, “and she had a terrible time accepting the fact that Jimmy had died.” She would pull out photographs of him, according to Margaret, and play and replay a tape recording of his voice, “and she’d get real down and cry.”

That year Ann took a secretarial course, realizing, as she wrote Mrs. Wagner, that she was responsible for supporting Priscilla. By the spring of 1947, the Iversens could no longer afford to maintain the run-down, rambling house they were occupying with Ann and their granddaughter, so the family moved to a small apartment in Niantic. By summer, Ann had recovered from the extremes of her depression, and she rallied when she found a clerical job in the business office of the University of Connecticut at Fort Trumbull.

It was a dismal denouement for the spirited Rooney, the girl who had once fancied herself a model.

Priscilla was her salvation. She had been blessed with a beautiful child, Jimmy’s legacy to her. Ann channeled her grief into complete absorption with her daughter. She fussed over Priscilla’s clothes and hair like a Parisian couturiere, dressing her in frilly frocks and Gibson girl blouses, arranging her baby-brown hair in a Kewpie curl. Priscilla seemed born to play the part. “Isn’t she a little doll?” strangers would remark.

Ann’s devotion gradually turned to ambition. She took Priscilla to a photographer for studio portraits, and avidly studied the results. Soon she was entering her daughter in baby contests, then children’s beauty pageants. With her own glamorous dreams beyond her reach, Ann focused her ambition on Priscilla. The
resulting mother-daughter relationship was intensely symbiotic, and both knew that the key to their success was Priscilla’s appearance. The lesson for Priscilla was clear: looking pretty was her raison d’être.

By the spring of 1948, Ann was no longer working at the university. She wrote her mother-in-law that she was disgusted with drifting from job to dreary job and frustrated that two-and-a-half-year-old Priscilla had no yard to play in. She was longing to stay at home so she could devote herself full-time to her daughter.

Around this time she met a former marine who was taking a business course at New London Junior College. His name was Joseph Paul Beaulieu (pronounced “Bow-lee-eu”) Jr. Paul, as he was usually called, came from a Catholic family in the neighboring town of Groton, where his father operated a floor resurfacing business. Ann, who had not dated much since Jimmy died, began keeping company with Paul Beaulieu.

She did not mention her new suitor to the Wagners when she visited them that May to celebrate Priscilla’s third birthday. Ann and Priscilla were regular guests at Jimmy’s parents’ house—so much so that the neighbors across the street named
their
baby girl Priscilla. Jimmy’s little daughter charmed everyone in sight. When her mother and grandmother took Priscilla downtown to buy her a pinafore for her birthday, Mrs. Wagner recalled that “right in the store there she did a little jig. This little beret that she had on would keep slipping down, and she would give it a push to get it out of her eyes.… She performed just like a little actress.”

Perhaps Ann avoided talking to the Wagners about the new man in her life because Paul Beaulieu, according to her favorite cousin, “was jealous of Jimmy.” Ann confided this piece of information to Margaret after she and Paul began dating. Jimmy Wagner, by everyone’s account, was the great love of Ann’s life. Her relationship with Paul Beaulieu was different. “I
guess
she was in love with him,” Margaret mused. “But, you know, after Jimmy, Paul just couldn’t compete. Paul’s
Paul.”
Physically, he was not in the same league with James Wagner, Ann’s beau ideal. He was tall and dark but decidedly average-looking, with brown eyes and heavy brows that drooped slightly, giving him a basset-hound quality. What Paul Beaulieu did offer was security, stability, and an opportunity for Ann to quit her job and focus on Priscilla. He gave Margaret the impression “he wanted
to be something important.” Paul Beaulieu particularly enjoyed having Ann’s little daughter by his side. “He liked the attention he got being with Priscilla,” Margaret noted, “because she was so beautiful.”

Ann wrote to Kathryn Wagner in August that she planned to remarry, but she did not say whom or when. Jimmy’s mother responded immediately: “Be sure and bring your husband and come visit us, and bring Priscilla.…”

Ann Wagner married Paul Beaulieu on September 11, 1948, in a big Catholic wedding in Groton. Priscilla’s paternal grandparents did not receive an invitation; in fact, unknown to them, the Wagners were being systematically eliminated from the lives of their granddaughter and Ann. There was an unwritten clause in Ann Beaulieu’s marriage vows, a hidden condition. She had made a Faustian pact with her jealous fiancé in exchange for her newfound security: She agreed to obliterate all evidence of her first marriage. It was to be as if Jimmy Wagner had never existed. His family, by extension, would cease to exist as well.

Ann began lying to her daughter, telling Priscilla that Paul Beaulieu was her father. Paul basked in the association. Jimmy Wagner, her true love, became a dark secret that Ann had to keep from everyone, even his own daughter. Priscilla attended the bridal shower and was a guest at the wedding of her “parents” at Sacred Heart Church. Ann and Paul assumed that Priscilla, at three and a half, was too young to know the difference.

Shortly after marrying Ann, Paul Beaulieu enlisted in the air force and started advanced pilot training, just like Jimmy Wagner. That December, for Priscilla’s fourth Christmas, Kathryn Wagner sent her granddaughter a bundle of gifts, though she hadn’t heard from Ann since receiving a telegram over a year earlier notifying the Wagners of her remarriage.

Ann, perhaps regretful of her need to cut all ties with Priscilla’s grandparents, sent Mrs. Wagner a thank-you note for the Christmas gifts and a card announcing the birth of her second child, Donald Paul Beaulieu, born December 30, 1949. “Priscilla is crazy about him,” she wrote Kathryn Wagner, “and she is quite a little helper.” It was in this letter that Ann told Jimmy’s mother they were moving to Texas, where Paul would be stationed as a navigator-bombardier. In closing, she thanked Kathryn for the Christmas gifts and promised to write again soon.

Kathryn Wagner never heard from Ann again.

Ann Beaulieu was driven by fear. Fear of how Paul Beaulieu
would react if she mentioned Jimmy or his family. The fear intensified when she and Paul had their first child; Ann was concerned, she would say later, that Priscilla might not be treated the same as the baby. Was that all there was to the story?
What
was Ann so afraid of? Whatever the real reasons were, Ann kept them to herself, but the fear was there and it was powerful—so powerful that Ann made a decision soon after Donald was born: She would never again contact the Wagners, depriving her daughter of her paternal grandparents and separating Jimmy’s parents from their only grandchild. Priscilla’s real father—Ann’s true love—was a forbidden subject as long as Paul Beaulieu lived.

On April 17, 1950, a few months after Ann sent Donald’s birth announcement to Jimmy’s mother, Paul Beaulieu formally adopted Priscilla Ann Wagner. The perfect porcelain doll was now his. It had to torment him that her face, the face everyone commented upon, belonged to his dead rival.

The Wagners had no idea their son’s only child was now Priscilla Beaulieu, or that they had been deliberately expunged from her life. They were simply confused by Ann’s silence. Kathryn Wagner tried to send a baby gift to little Donald, but had no idea where in Texas Paul Beaulieu was stationed. Letters she wrote to Ann at her last known address were returned unanswered. Months passed with no word from Ann. “We were always in hopes that maybe she just was busy and didn’t write. Every time the mail came, ‘Well, maybe we’ll get a letter today.’ ”

Jimmy’s mother tried writing Ann in care of her parents in Connecticut, “to see if they would tell me where she was. We worried and worried and didn’t know what to do. But I didn’t receive any answers.” Several years passed, and the Wagners grew desperate. “We didn’t know for sure whether Priscilla was living or not,” explained Kathryn Wagner. “They just seemed to disappear.”

The Wagners decided, finally, to consider legal action to resume contact with their missing granddaughter. They made an appointment with an attorney, but the night before the consultation, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. The God-fearing Wagners took that as a sign. “Everything seemed to be against us,” recalled Mrs. Wagner. “It seemed to me that we just were not to know. We thought, There’s a reason for this. If we’re supposed to meet her or hear from her, we will.”

The Wagners, who considered Priscilla “kidnapped,” carried
on with their lives, heartbroken. They had already lost Jimmy; now their darling grandchild, the living link to their son, had been ripped from them. For Jimmy’s mother, the hardest part of losing Priscilla was “the little things.” She thought of her granddaughter happily running through the house on her third birthday, her sweet smile. “But I have those good memories,” she would console herself. “I have those.” And she had the other Priscilla, the little girl across the street named after her granddaughter.

Kathryn Wagner also had a premonition, “a feeling that some way, somehow, I would know where she was.”

O
utwardly, Priscilla Ann Beaulieu was a typical six-year-old. She started first grade in New London in September of 1951. Her father had advanced to the rank of captain in the air force. Her mother tended the family. She adored her little brother, Donny, almost two.

The inner Priscilla, however, the Priscilla no one knew, was in turmoil, haunted by flashbacks to an earlier childhood that seemed both familiar and strange: recurring visions of her mother in church, on a stage, wispy memories of a big party, intermittent recollections of time spent with her grandmother Iversen while her mother was working and her father was nowhere around. All of these were pieces of an hallucinatory puzzle that Priscilla couldn’t put together, parts of a past denied. The flashbacks confused and tormented her, but she kept them to herself. Like her mother and the entire Iversen clan, Priscilla had learned, by the age of six, to suppress her emotions.