Brave Old World

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” Mother said to me the morning she died.

Yes, we were a witty family when the mood struck us, but my mother’s words weren’t a deathbed utterance marked by droll humor. She spoke quite literally in that moment. In which case, you might think my mother was having a dream within a dream, visiting the Manderley in Alfred’s Hitchcock’s adaptation of the novel Rebecca (if you watch bootleg movies or read banned novels). 

Both the movie and the book open with the protagonist’s voiceover saying, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” But my mother meant her own Manderley, an estate her family built in the decade following the book’s publication. This grand undertaking had been at my great-great-grandmother Lilian’s request. Untouched by the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the family’s wealth could indulge such architectural whims. Dreaming about Manderley was about all my mother and the protagonist of Rebecca had in common, though. Born into an elite family, my mother never experienced the upward class mobility of the story’s main character, who starts as a low-skilled American companion for a rich woman and then abruptly becomes a rich woman herself after a monied British aristocrat falls in love with her, marrying beneath his social station and then whisking his bride off to the family estate Manderley, where everything comes to an incendiary end. A cautionary tale for our times. 

Sitting on California’s north Pacific coast, our family’s Manderley rivaled the size and magnificence of William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon. Unlike Hearst Castle, though, Manderley kept a low profile. Our family never held open houses for the public, although my great-grandmother hosted high-society fundraising balls at the estate to support her favorite causes, environmental conservation topping the list. Like the Manderley of the book and the movie, our Manderley went up in flames too, consumed by wildfire, along with so many other lushly landscaped properties along the Pacific Coast Highway. If only the sea levels had risen earlier, our Manderley wouldn’t have burned, becoming instead an Atlantis in the Pacific. But rise the sea levels eventually did, engulfing the Pacific Coast Highway, saltwater intruding into the Central and Salinas valleys, sounding the death knell for California agriculture. And so California moved to Montana, where the growing season has lengthened considerably in the 150 years since my family built Manderley. 

Mother’s mother was the last generation to see Manderley. Mother’s recurring dreams transported her to a Manderley that she had never actually viewed in person, conjured from old family photos and video archives. The First Great Migration was already underway by the time of Mother’s birth. The chosen families moved after the government established the necessary infrastructure, a brave new world, the only one Mother and I ever knew apart from the very occasional movies we had access to, black-market purchases Mother made without my father’s knowledge and shared with me, along with banned books (also hidden from Father), once I reached adolescence. 

One of the first movies we watched together was Hitchcock’s Rebecca. I immediately recognized Mother’s reference to the movie that last morning of hers. A moment after she made the reference, she said, “I am going now.” I didn’t follow. Going where? To Manderley? She hadn’t been well that past month, suffering from a vague but aggressive illness that caused her to lose considerable weight and clouded her thinking. But that particular morning she didn’t seem groggy, despite having just woken up. In a voice of purposeful clarity, she said, “But before I go, there is a secret you must know.” Her voice quickly fading, I brought my face close to hers, squeezing the frail but insistent hand that she pressed into mine, listening... and then she was gone.

“It’s the only way we’ve managed to conserve our natural resources through the end of the 21st century,” my father says, his authoritative voice snapping me back to the present. 

“A commendable job,” remarks the Central European ambassador. A pause. “I wonder, however, whether there might be a less extreme alternative.”

“Anarchy, bloodshed, mass starvation — that’s the alternative,” my father replies, prepared for this question, as ever. “Having far more people than natural resources is not sustainable. Measures must be taken. Our nation took them, continues to take them. Look, I won’t whitewash this — the first wave was tough. The stories my grandfather and father would tell… Grandad helped steer the First Great Migration. He descended from a long line of environmentalists, visionaries, men ahead of their time. They saw what was coming. My late wife’s family too — big environmentalists going way back, all the way to Teddy Roosevelt’s time. Her family, my family, we were part of a historical movement that came to its logical apex with the Migrations, resulting in the work you see us doing here today.”

“And what exactly is the work you do here — I mean, in thisparticular facility?” the ambassador asks politely.​

Lately, the ambassador’s own country, though landlocked, hasstarted experiencing seawater backing up into rivers and seepinginto deep-ground aquifers, causing shortages in drinkable water and irrigation for crops. His government has sent him to consult with my father, America’s Minister of Resource Deployment, about best practices for balancing limited natural resources with human demand. 

My father sidesteps the ambassador’s question. I am meant to keep the visitor from noticing (that used to be Mother’s job), and so I ask him if I might refill his water glass. So far, so good. The ambassador’s question was expected, but Father isn’t done topic-framing. One thing at a time. The ambassador accepts my offer of more water, thanking me.

“Nowadays,” Father says, gesturing toward the window overlooking the great hall below us, “with our mid-century birth rates nearly cut in half, and the population much smaller than before, our country is not only surviving resource scarcity, but thriving!” 

The ambassador accompanies Father to the window, where they survey the activity below. I trail quietly behind. I’ve witnessed this scene countless times, ever since I first pressed my cheek against the window’s glass as a toddler and gazed with wide eyes at the uniform lines of women waiting to be processed.

“So many problems once plagued our country,” Father beams at us. “Poverty, homelessness, hunger. Too many people but not enough usable land and food to satiate them all! Now we have enough for everyone. And more than that — we’ve even eradicated class warfare, ending the national nightmare known as the American Dream, where everyone scrambled over each other, trying to reach the top.”

He gave the window a quick staccato rap with his knuckles, half-militant, half-mirthful.

“So much simpler now. Crop-pickers remain crop-pickers. Their offspring follow in their footsteps. Same for unskilled factory laborers and their offspring. Same for clerical workers. And so on. Everyone has a predetermined genetic capacity for the kind of work they’re best suited to, and they’re happiest if they focus on fulfilling that particular capacity. The self-made man and class mobility are nothing but foolish myths that America fed its citizens for far too long, leading to unfulfilled hopes.”

I know this spiel well, our national dogma, fed to me by Father, teachers, family friends. The world before the Migrations, before the 21st-century Dust Bowls, before the constant fires and floods, when New York City and Los Angeles weren’t underwater, and Texas was more than a burnt crisp. Back when Manderley was still standing. Mother didn’t contradict this spiel, but she didn’t reinforce it, either. I follow suit. Let men do the talking.

The ambassador tries another tack. “Your country’s population has decreased so dramatically in just half a century. Surely that can’t be due solely to better access to contraception and abortion. The Winnowing, as I’ve, er, heard it called… What did that entail, exactly? A combination of deportation and— 

“Before my time,” my father quickly deflects. “But without question, hard choices had to be made in the beginning for the welfare of society overall. But now, thanks to a systematic program of government-controlled family planning, we no longer have to make such choices.”

Father trains his gaze on the lines of young women below. Dressed in drab brown jumpsuits, the women assigned to farm labor walk single-file into the hall, lining up between rows of blue-clad women assigned to factory work and gray-garbed women assigned to clerical jobs. 

“All of these women have given birth to one child,” Father explains to the ambassador, “the government-mandated limit. The child is weaned after six months, with the mother then sterilized and sent to the appropriate work camp. That’s what these women are lining up for now, their work camp deployment.”

“And what becomes of the children?”

“Sent to education camps appropriate to their social class.”

​

They never see their mothers again. It wasn’t always like that, but about 10 years ago the government judged that working-class family ties promoted a tendency to misdirect loyalty away from the state and toward kin, to the potential detriment of the nation. We in the upper class, Father always stressed, with our higher intellects, could make the necessary distinction and judgement calls. The lower classes, on the other hand, lacking self-control, bred like rabbits before the Winnowing and Great Migrations,overtaxing our natural resources, Father said. They brought the current system upon themselves.

He steers the ambassador to another window, this one on the opposite side of the observation room and looking out onto broad green plains that roll up into deep-purple mountains. “But we took the proper steps,” my father says, “and look at us — we have enough now, the right amount of land for a right-sized population.”

Tense, I push a clenched hand into my jacket pocket, scanning the young women below as Father and the ambassador continue talking. At a glance, the workers look indistinguishable from one another in their uniforms. And then suddenly I see her, a dozen women down from the front of the farmhand line. My hand tightens around a small, oval object in my pocket, a locket my mother insistently pressed into my hand moments before she died,and which I’ve carried with me ever since. I look sideways toward my Father, then down at the locket, which I’ve removed from my pocket. 

Surreptitiously, I open the locket, peeling back the picture of myself that faces the oval holding Mother’s photo: There she is again, behind my peeled-back image. She is the same person as the young woman a dozen heads down the farmhand line, except now she’s in her twenties, not in her teens, as she must have been when the locket photo was taken. I’d half-thought it was a parting fairytale from Mother, a fanciful story of a long-lost sister cast out by a cold, unrelenting father. But it was true, she existed: my father’s unacknowledged bastard daughter. 

Close to death, my mother had been rapidly slipping away whenshe pressed the locket into my hand, too weak to give me the details about where my illegitimate sister’s pregnant mother, who’d been our household gardener, disappeared to when her pregnancy began to show. Mother merely managed to tell me that the woman had snuck onto our property when the girl was about sixteen, giving my mother the photo and asking her to please help her daughter avoid forced sterilization and deportation to a labor camp. “Don’t tell your father we know,” Mother whispered, clutching my hand in those final moments. “We women must help each other by keeping men in the dark.” But now the girl suddenly needs more help than that, and fast.

My father fully engrossed with the Ambassador, I slip out the door of the observation room and down the stairs. The guard at the great hall’s entrance recognizes me and steps aside, tipping his cap. I tell him that Father has asked me to bring up one of the young women to present to the ambassador. I point to my presumed half-sister and say, “Her. That’s the one.” I walk to where she stands on line. 

“Armida?”

She looks at me, startled, and then nods.

“Come with me,” I say.

She steps off the line and follows me out of the hall.

“Your mother sent me,” I whisper to her once we’re well past the guard. Don’t say a word. Just follow my lead.”

Father’s driver is parked out front in his habitual spot. He gets out and opens the car door when he sees us approach. I instruct him to take us to the house. Once there, we’ll have to make haste. Father will notice my absence, ask where I’ve gone, hear about the abduction — except that he won’t immediately regard it as an abduction. He’ll take some hours to riddle out the possibilities. By then, Armida and I will have made it through the estate’s privateunderground tunnel connecting upper Montana with Canada, feeling our way along in the dark, carrying cash and jewels from Mother’s safe. 

Safe. 

Is Canada safe?

I don’t know.

Maybe we’ll head west until we reach the Pacific Coast, rowing a raft down to Manderley island, my motherland, land of my sister’s fairy godmother. 

Get ready for us, brave old world.