Read Online The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins by Dean Jensen - Free Book Online

right in the back of the tent that they were being shown in, and they were driven straight back … to where they were staying, and were never seen.” 9
    Moore said that as a child, he always wondered when, if ever, Daisy and Violet had a chance to rest. He remembered another rule by which the sisters had to abide: If they were not on stage performing, they were either being drilled by Edith in dancing or singing two-part harmonies, or they were cracking school books and memorizing the names of U. S. presidents or the capital cities of the world. “When you went in (their tent), their books were right there,” Moore said. “They were studying. The girls were quite well educated and they were talented. They had charming singing voices.” 10
    It may have been Mary, more than Myer, who was insistent that the girls receive rigorous tutoring in reading, writing, geography,and history. Freaks were common enough, she told them daily. She expected them to be something more. She said she expected them to be more intelligent, more talented and more socially skilled than any classroom full of
wunderkinder
. “I want you to be the smartest Siamese twins in the world,” she commanded. 11
    By November 13, 1916, the World’s Greatest Shows traveled to Phoenix for a six-day booking at the Arizona State Fair. In the three months that the family had been traveling with the carnival, Myer had seen dozens of towns and cities in six or eight different states. There was something about Phoenix, however, that seemed to have placed him under a spell. The town had sprung up in the desert as a supply point for cowboys and miners. Its population wasn’t quite 15,000. Everywhere on Phoenix’s streets there were cowhands in sweat-stained Stetsons and scuffed boots. The look of the town, along with the searing heat, probably reminded Myers of the frontier towns that had pushed up in Australia’s bush country as watering holes for the sheep and cattle men.
    Following its appearance at the Arizona State Fair, the Wortham carnival was scheduled to play a few more engagements before ending its 1916 season and rolling back to El Paso, Texas, its winter quarters. This time when the show train left for its next stand the Royal English Twins were not aboard. Myer, Edith, and Mary had decided to establish a home in Phoenix. The family took up residence near the downtown district in a house at 1220 East Jefferson Street. 12
    The Myers and Mary weren’t quitting the life of carnival gypsies permanently. With the fast and easy riches they had started to enjoy in America with the grown-together twins, that would have been foolish. But Edith was pregnant with her first child. It was time for the family to suspend its peregrinations and settle in one place until the new baby arrived.

Seven

STRANGELY WISE AND FILLED WITH UNVOICED THOUGHTS
    T he delivery took place in the family’s rented house in Phoenix. Mary, of course, coached Edith through her labor. Of the hundreds of births at which she presided in her many decades as a midwife, this one was the most profoundly affecting. As she later recounted, “All them other babies were just practice. Today I got to assist in my own multiplication.” She was made all the happier when Edith and Myer christened the infant Therese Mary, a name that would always remind the child of her maternal grandmother.
    “That little baby, as near as I could tell, became the entire focus of Myer’s dreams,” Jim Moore observed. “Therese Mary was still sucking on her mother’s teats, and Myer was saying he was going to buy her a pony and he was going to build her a playhouse and fill it with dolls. Of course he was counting on Daisy and Violet to provide all the things he wanted for his daughter. They were the geese that laid golden eggs for the family.” 1
    As emotionally detached from Daisy and Violet as Myer and Mary always had been, they became even more distant after the arrival of Therese Mary. In fact, they never