Julianna Baggott's latest novel, The Miss America Family,

© Pocket Books

has just made The Boston Globe's bestsellers list.

Baggott received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991. The recipient of fellowships from the Delaware Division of Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she has placed poems and short stories in dozens of literary journals including Poetry, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Ms. Magazine as well as the acclaimed anthology Best American Poetry 2000.

Girl Talk, her first novel,

© Pocket Books

also published by Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books, was a national bestseller and is now out in paperback.

Baggott is also the author of the poetry collection This Country of Mothers,

© Southern Illinois Press

published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Her third novel, The Madam, will be published by Simon and Schuster's Atria Books in August 2003.

She lives in Delaware with her husband, poet David G.W. Scott and their three young children.

The Mysterious Life of Eppitt Clapp:
An All-True False Biography
An Excerpt

Julianna Baggott

Chapter One:
Boy Eats Heart of King

In the end, Eppitt Clapp wore his insanity like a conspicuous top hat, a bee beard, a demo fire suit in flames. He had stopped trying to buttonhole it, because when he did, he only found himself stuffing the buttonhole with a boutonniere and then in minutes a garden of his own craziness was blooming, heavy with perfume, weeping on his chest.

And when he was trying to stay "in-tact," as he called it, he was so nervous, he would bleed, a family trait.

Before he was shot to death in his bed at the age of 31 in 1972, Eppitt charged into Baltimore Public with ice cream for the librarians, one Susan Mollet in particular. Imagine the push-ups softening in their canisters, the Rocketeers turning to mush in the chilled cardboard box, but Eppitt was victorious, flushed, gleaming with sweat, a mad man at the circulation desk. He died for love, a fact that would have made him supremely happy. 

Inventor of the Big Girl, a bold renovation in the vacuum cleaning industry, Eppitt Clapp was, in fact, a millionaire. He was also a lover of the Dime Museum, a poet, and a clipster extraordinaire filling forty-seven volumes with newspaper articles. He suffered from mania, thermaphelia (a love of heat), compulsions. He claimed to have two hearts. He was quite crazy, yet, in his own way, brilliant. And, as he said in an interview with The Boston Globe, Isn't craziness how we are doomed and blessed?


Eppitt Clapp was raised by his mother, Milda, a soft spoken, yet matter-of-fact beauty, who worked in Sheppard Pratt, a mental institution, and his grandmother, Alice Clapp, a caldron of a woman. Round and steely, she was disliked by most everyone who knew her. She ran a small ring of coin-operated laundromats and was notorious for not refunding any money even when her machines broke down and resorted to chewing garments. But she was soft with Eppitt, her soul moist and tender for that boy like the inner muscle of an oyster.

They lived in a one-bedroom efficiency in Baltimore, 114 York Road. Eppitt slept between his rotund grandmother and his slender mother in a double bed until he was twelve. He had no father. And when Eppitt would ask about him—because at some point in his life he realized that he had to have had a father, somewhere, once upon a time—his grandmother would say, "You are a bastard, Eppitt Clapp. And there's nothing wrong with that."

This would happen while his grandmother was stuffing quarters into stiff rolls, an interminable task in the coin-op business, and his mother was cooking dinner, perhaps scraping beans that had burned, sticking to the bottom of a pot, while the smoke alarm trilled violently overhead. (Mrs. Clapp was one of the first to have a smoke detector.) Milda was a terrible cook, but her mother refused to spend time in the kitchen. She didn't like the gas burner's open blue-ringed flame. Her husband had died in a fire at the Avis Dorman High School where he was a teacher, and she often smelled smoke, had the habit of patting herself down, stemming from a fear that she was, suddenly, inexplicably burning. And so the cooking fell to Milda.

"In fact," Eppitt's mother would go on, "when the psychologists in the ward ask the grown men about their fathers, the men will usually say that they were never sure if they were loved by their fathers. They cry like babies. You don't have to worry about such things. Your father never knew you existed. How could he have scarred you by not loving you?"

His grandmother, her fat-puffed finger lost packing down the roll, would say, "In this way, you'll see that you have an advantage."

"Yes," his mother would finish, cutting the burner off, "you've been done a great service."

Milda Clapp believed in service. She wasn't a psychiatrist. She wasn't a nurse either, although they let her wear a kind of formal pink uniform. She filed and cleaned, but considered herself knowledgeable in the workings of the human mind. She was fired from Shepard Pratt in 1962 after being caught having a sexual relationship with a patient, Arnold Pinter. Her only comment was that she felt it was beneficial for his therapy. It was rumored that this was not an isolated incident, however, and that Milda had a long, sordid history of prescribing and providing this kind of sexual therapy.

It was a lie that Eppitt's father didn't know he existed, a sweet lie, woven around the back and forth answer that the two women had practiced to cloying perfection. (Lying about paternity wasn't new to Alice Clapp.) Sworn to a pact, they wrapped Eppitt in the lie and bundled him around his childhood.    

Eppitt had the charm of a doted-on child. He was cocky, scrawny. His dark eyes had a wily shine. He was already particular about his food it could never mix and he only ate pale colors, nothing green or orange or red, nothing loud. He would say as an adult, "Food shouldn't scream at you!" And his clothing couldn't bind or chafe. His mother cut the feet off of his pajamas, the tags from his shirts, and let him wear his neck ties on Sundays so loose that he looked like a pencil-necked drunk.

Despite the family propaganda that he had a leg up by being fatherless, he still wanted a father, and he had a vague notion that his father was tall, bookish and so extremely prestigious, that the man had gotten caught up in some kind of high-ranking position that took all of his time. So distracted by the giant matters of the grown-up world, his father had had sex with Eppitt's mother, but forgot to check back with her on the outcome of that intercourse.

Eppitt knew about sex at a young age. When he was six, his mother and grandmother took him on a bus to a novelty museum one stuffy summer afternoon. It was outside of Baltimore, out Joppa Road, a large house on a farm, not really a museum at all. There were wild peacocks barking in the yard, along with mangy dogs. Eppitt would recall one legless dog, bending his ear toward his jiggling stump, but unable to scratch, and a statue of St. Francis, stained with brittle, blue bird droppings. There was a small sign "Welcome. Museum of Antiquities. Free to the Public." Alice Clapp, Eppitt's grandmother, knew the owner, an old man, lispy and gimp from a stroke. He was few years older than she was, but she didn't mention knowing him, and he didn't seem to recognize her.

"This museum is not appropriate for that age," he said in a marble hallway, pointing at Eppitt with a long finger on his good hand. "He won't understand."

"He understands everything," the stern, rotund Alice Clapp countered. "Don't you, Eppitt?"

"I do," Eppitt said.

The old man took them around his house, pointing out paintings and pulling ancient curios from behind glass-front hutches. He hobbled up the stairs and took them to the room of his conception and birth.

He said, "This is where my parents had relations and I began to take root in my mother, growing inside of her until I was a mere six pounds two. And here on this bed, I was pushed out of her and into the world."

Eppitt poked out from behind his grandmother's rump and giant handbag. "What does that mean, had relations?"

There were no other guests in the room or in the house. The old man glared at Milda, as if to say I told you so, and rolled his eyes in disgust.

Then Eppitt's grandmother turned to the boy. "Oh, it's nothing Eppitt. A man gets with a woman. He becomes herky jerky like that mechanical pony in front of Woolitzers, grunts a bit and then a baby begins to grow." Alice Clapp had been disenchanted in the matters of love, although she recalled one Mr. Gillheny, a science teacher, a romantic, the floor of his cramped office, and one time with her husband, Martin, when it had all been quite different, shortly before he died in the fire.

"You make it sound so tempting," the old man said, sarcastically.

And Eppitt's grandmother said, "Eat your heart out."

Eppitt whispered to his mother. "Is that how it's done? Is that how there's a mother and a father?"

"Yes, hush," Milda said, grabbing his hand and hurrying him to the next room.

It was just a coincidence that the old man then brought the family into the guest room which contained his prize possession: the supposed heart of a British King. Here the story is muddled. Milda recalls it was King Louis the XIV's heart and Alice angrily disputes that it was an earlier Louis's heart. The old man pulled out a silver box, green from a lack of polish, and opened it. He told them that tombs had been ransacked but the heart had been kept separate.

"One of my heirs absconded with the heart before it was lost in the tumult."

The heart, a leathery prune of an object, lay in the velvety box. The old man held the box out with his good hand, the other was wizened and pinned tightly to his side, his curled fingers covering his own frail chest, protectively.

Eppitt was confused, of course. He wanted a father. He'd heard his grandmother tell the man to "eat his heart out" and he'd asked his mother if that was, in fact, how a mother and father came to be. She said yes. And here was a heart.

Before anyone could stop him, Eppitt reached inside of the box, popped the wizened heart into his mouth and choked it down. It was, at least, no longer bright red as he'd seen in pictures of hearts, and so it was okay to eat, by Eppitt's strict definitions.

Eppitt's mother gasped, "Eppitt, spit it up. Eppitt!" She hit her son on the back and rattled him by the arm. "Eppitt! Eppitt!"

When questioned years later by a pretty young reporter for the Baltimore Sun why he'd never married, Eppitt would answer that the heart is a leathery thing, tougher than you'd thing and very hard to chew.

The old man was ashen. "Who, who would do such a thing?"

Eppitt's grandmother picked Eppitt up and held him to her chest like a baby, although he was six years old. "How dare you offer such a thing to a child? You are a sick man! A sick man, indeed! To offer a heart to a young boy like it's a candy!" Alice Clapp was accustomed to turning things around on people. How many times had she accused someone standing in front of her with a shredded garment of breaking her machines?

And so Alice marched out of the house with Milda scurrying beside her, Eppitt clamped so tightly to her chest that he could only see out of one wide terrified eye. They walked down the long driveway to await the bus, which after a mute hour or two, appeared in a whirling cloud.

So the first article that Eppitt ever snipped and pasted into a white-paged book—a gift from his grandmother—was about himself. There was a photograph of Eppitt standing on the steps of his apartment building, his mother's and grandmother's skirts the only background as he smiled broadly. He recalls the flare of the flash. His grandmother, always thinking fire, let out a small gasp.

The reporter was shaggy, his necktie, worn like Eppitt's, more a loose leash. In fact, his face was jowly and his eyes round and wet like a dog's. He asked, "Did you really do it?"

"Yes, sir."

"But why?"

"It's hard to explain." Eppitt stared up at him, wide-eyed. "Are you staying for dinner?"

"No."

"Oh," he said, "I thought you wanted to stay."

"I've got to write this up."

"Oh."

It was a failure, this second heart. It didn't create a father. The caption read: Boy Eats Heart of King. And so Eppitt Clapp had two hearts, one hopeful, one a memory of failure, and he claimed he could always hear both of them beating.

© Julianna Baggott