Child Bride by Suzanne Finstad Page B

more closely. The face of the stranger in the photo was her own. She had stumbled onto her personal Pandora’s box. “And I kept finding more pictures and finding more pictures, and finding certificates,” she recalled, several decades later. A birth certificate. Baptismal records. “Finding my
life
, you know, in front of me! That was
different
from what I knew.”
    Priscilla sat in front of the trunk, unable to move, cognizant that in her hand was the solution to the riddle of her childhood, that she was face-to-face with the secret. She was not who she had thought she was: It was both her greatest fantasy and her deepest, darkest fear. “First you go into denial it’s somebody
else.
And then you go into shock. That you’ve been betrayed. That someone has lied to you. You have so many different emotions that peak.
I
was in hysterics.” Priscilla telephoned her mother at the party, “begging her to come home. Because I needed an explanation. I needed somebody to tell me the
truth.
What was this I was discovering?”
    Ann Iversen Wagner Beaulieu raced home to her daughter, alone. She did not tell Paul Beaulieu she was leaving the party or where she was going. After years of denial, the call may have been almost a relief.
    Ann arrived at the house to find Priscilla half crazed. She calmed her daughter, and then told her the truth about their past: She had been married to a handsome pilot named James Wagner who died in a plane crash, and he was Priscilla’s real father. “And [she said] that he was wonderful,” recalled Priscilla. “He loved me, he was coming home to see me. And that I was his
life
, and her
life.
And that she met my father [Paul Beaulieu] a few years later and married him. And that
he
was my father. He adopted me.”
    As her mother was talking, an image suddenly flashed in Priscilla’s head—the vision of her mother on stage, one of the recurring images that had tormented her since she was five or six. “And I started realizing, Oh, my God! That was the
party
I wentto! I remembered I was in my grandmother’s lap, and I remembered seeing my mother—to me it was like on a stage—but it was in a church, it was at the Catholic church, a very big Catholic church. Everything was so big! My mind went right to the picture of that church. And all those flashbacks from when I was three started to make sense.”
    It was “very bizarre,” Priscilla later acknowledged. The seeming delusions that had confused her since early childhood began to crystallize. “And it made sense to me why we had lived with my grandmother then, that there was no man in my life. That was why my grandmother took care of me. All the [pieces of the] puzzle were starting to fit now.” She understood, finally, where her unearthly beauty had come from: “My
real
father. I look
exactly
like him!”
    Priscilla would later say that discovering the truth about her identity from a hidden trunk at the age of thirteen was a devastating blow. In the hierarchy of family secrets devised by John Bradshaw, concealing a child’s real parent is the second most dangerous, just below incest. For Priscilla, the
discovery
of the lie was almost worse than the lie itself. Her mother, the person she trusted most, had betrayed her, deceived her, was not who Priscilla had thought she was. Who did that make Priscilla?
    Ann tried to console her daughter, telling her that she had been “haunted” by the secret all these years, that she had wanted to tell her beautiful daughter the truth, but that she’d been afraid. The critical word was “fear”—fear of upsetting the apple cart, fear of upsetting Paul.
    “The big fear was my father,” Priscilla admitted. “I don’t think my father ever really
accepted
the fact—he really looked at me as his daughter. And now to have my real father come up … it was very important to my mother protecting
him
[Paul], protecting his feelings, his sensitivity.” Ann Beaulieu still feared the consequences of