usually do. in his case somestrange genetic damage. Then, when you add
in the factthe gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his
sister You might expect there's a high chance the offspring will be a
freak of some kind." Frank made a low sound, then sighed. They all
looked at him, but he was still detached. Thou his eyes blinked rapidly
for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled
from the right corner of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.
Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank's face,
he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie's
reaction.
"So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to
me, and she was pregnant," Fogarty said.
"They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it
didn't ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just
watching how they were with each other. She'd tried to conceal the
pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely
during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior;
it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day. By
the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question. Hell, she
was in the early stages of labor." The longer he listened to Fogarty,
the more it seemed to Bobby that the air in the library was foul and
growing fouler, thick with a humidity as sour as sweat.
"Claiming that he wanted to protect Cynthia as much as possible from
public scorn, Yarnell offered me a pretty fat fee if I'd keep her out of
the hospital and deliver the baby right in my office, which was a little
risky, in case there were complications. But I needed the money, and if
anything went really wrong, there were ways to cover it. I had this
nurse at the time who could assist me-Norma, she was pretty flexible
about things." great, Bobby thought. The sociopathic physician had
Just found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in
the social swing of things among the medical staff at Dachau or
Auschwitz.
Julie put a hand on Bobby's knee and squeezed, as if the contact
reassured her that she was not listening to a mad doctor in a dream.
"What came out of that girl'
"You should have seen it, Fogarty said.
"A freak it was, just as you'd expect."
"Wait a minute," Julie said.
"I thought you said the baby was Roselle. Frank's mother."
"It was," Fogarty said.
"And she was such a spectacular little freak that she'd have been worth
a fortune to any carnival or sideshow willing to risk the anger of the
law to exhibit he He paused, enjoying their anticipation.
"She was an hermap rodite.
For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said,
"You don't mean-she had both sexes, male and male?"
"Oh, but that's exactly what I mean." Fogarty bounced frorp his chair
and began to pace, suddenly energized by conversation.
"Hermaphroditism is an extremely rare birth defect in humans, it's an
amazing thing to have the opportunity to deliver one. You have traverse
hermaphroditism, wherehave the external organs of one sex and the
internal ofother, lateral hermaphroditism... several other types. But
one thing is... Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the
complete internal and external organs of both sexes." He pluck a thick
medical reference book from one of the shelves a handed it to Julie.
"Check page one forty-six for photos ofkind of thing I'm talking about."
Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as ifthought it was a
snake.
Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopen The last thing
he needed, with his imagination, was the ass tance of clinical
photographs.
His hands and feet had gone cold, as though the blood had rushed from
his extremities to his head, to nourish his bra which was spinning
furiously. He wished that he couldthinking about what Fogarty was
telling them. It was gro But the worst thing about it was, judging by
the physicia strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus
was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meatyet to come.
Pacing again, Fogarty said,
"Her vagina was about who you'd expect, the male equipment somewhat
displaced. Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared
rep ductively complete."
"I think we get the picture," Julie said.
"We don't need the technical details." Fogarty came to them, stood
looking down at them, and eyes were as bright and lively as if he were
recounting a chaing medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of
delight companions at dinner parties over the years.
"No, no,z x must understand what she was, if you're going to understand
all that happened next." THOUGH HER OWN Mlnd was split into many
parts-sharing the bodies of Verbina, all the cats, and the owl on
Fogarty's porch roof-Violet was most acutely aware of what she was
receiving through the senses of Darkle, as he perched upon the
windowsill outside the study. With the cat's sharp hearing, Violet
missed not a word of the conversation, in spite of the intervening pane
of glass. She was enthralled.
She seldom paused to think about her mother, although Roselle was still
in this old house in so many ways. She seldom thought about any human
being, for that matter, except herself and her twin sister-less often
Candy and Frank-because she had so little in common with other people.
Her life was with the wild things. In them emotions were so much more
pnmitive and intense, pleasure so much more easily found and enjoyed
without guilt. She hadn't really known her mother or been close to her;
and Violet would not have been close, even if her mother had been
willing to share affection with anyone but Candy.
But now Violet was riveted by what Fogarty was telling them, not because
it was news to her (which it was), but because anything that had
affected Roselle's life this completely also had profound effects on
Violet's life. And of the countless attitudes and perceptions that
Violet had absorbed from the myriad wild creatures whose minds and
bodies she shared, a fascination with self was perhaps paramount. She
had an animal's narcissistic preoccupatior. with grooming, with her own
wants and needs. From her prnt of view, nothing in the world was of
interest unless it served her, satisfied her, or affected the
possibility of her future happiness.
Dimly she realized that she should find her brother and tell him that
Frank was less than two miles away from them. Not long ago she had
heard the wind-music of Candy's return.
FOGARTY TURNED away from Bobby and Julie and circled behind his desk
again, where he walked along the bookshelf snapping his finger against
the spines of the volumes to punctuate his story.
As the physician spoke of this family that had seened genetic
catastrophe, Julie could not help but think how Thomas's affliction had
been visited upon him t
hough his parents had lived healthy and normal
lives.
played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty.
I think Ya 'When he saw the baby's abnormability he would have killed it
and thrown it out with the garbage at least put it in the hands of an
institution. But she wouldn't part with it, she said it was her child,
deformed or not, and she named it Roselle, after her dead grandmother. I
suspect she wanted to keep it largely because she saw how it repulsed
him, and she wanted to have Roselle around as a reminder to him of the
consequences of what he forced her to do."
"Couldn't surgery have been used to make her unable to have another?"
Bobby asked.
"Easier today. Harder then." Fogarty had stopped at the desk, where he
had removed a bottle of Wild Turkey and a glass from one of the side
drawers. He poured a few ounces of bourbon for himself and recap the
bottle without offering them a drink. That was fine with Julie. Though
Fogarty's house was spotless, she wouldn't have felt clean after
drinking or eating anything in it.
After taking a swallow of the warm bourbon, neat, Fogarty said,
"Besides, wouldn't want to remove one set of organs to discover that, as
the child grew older, it proved to look and act more like the sex you
denied it than like the one it was born with. Secondary sex
characteristics are visible in infants of course, but not as easily
read-certainly not in 1946. Anyway Cynthia wouldn't have authorized
surgery. Remember I said-she probably welcomed the child's deformity
weapon against her brother."
"You could have stepped between them and the bar BObby said.
"You could've brought the child's plight to attention of the public
health authorities."
"Why on earth would I want to do that? For the psychological well-being
of the child, you mean? Don't be naive." He drank some more bourbon.
"I was paid well to make the delivery and keep my mouth shut about it,
and that was fine by me. They took her home, stuck to their story about
the itinerant rapist.
Julie said, "The baby... Roselle... she had no serious medical
problems?"
"None," Fogarty said.
"Other than this abnormality, she was as healthy as a horse. Her mental
skills and her body developed right on schedule, like any child, and
before long it became obvious that, to all outward appearances, she was
going to look like a woman. As she grew even older, you could see she'd
never be an attractive filly, mind you, more on the sturdy side than a
fashion model, thick legs and all that, but quite feminine enough."
Frank remained vacant-eyed and detached, but a muscle in his left cheek
twitched twice.
The bourbon apparently relaxed the physician, for he sat behind his desk
again, leaned forward, and clasped his hands around the glass.
"In 1959, when Roselle was thirteen, Cynthia died. Killed herself,
actually. Blew her brains out. The following year, about seven months
after his sister's suicide, Yarnell came to the office with his
daughter-that is, with Roselle. He never called her his daughter,
maintaining the fiction that she was only his bastard niece. Anyway,
Roselle was pregnant at fourteen, same age at which Cynthia had given
birth to her."
"Good God!" Bobby said.
The shocks kept piling one atop another with such speed that Julie was
almost ready to grab the whiskey bottle off the desk, drink straight
from it, and never mind that it was Fogarty's booze.
Enjoying their reactions, Fogarty sipped the bourbon and gave them time
to absorb the shock.
Julie said,
"Yarnell raped the daughter he had fathered by his own sister?"
Fogarty waited a little longer, savoring the moment. Then: "No, no. He
found the girl repellent, and I'm confident he wouldn't have touched
her. I'm sure what Roselle told me was the truth." He sipped more
bourbon.
"Cynthia had developed quite a religious streak between the time she
gave birth to Roselle and the day she killed herself, and she had passed
on that passion for God to Roselle. The girl knew the Bible backward
and forward. So Roselle came in here, pregnant. Said she'd decided she
should have a child. Said God had made her cial-that's what she called
hermaphroditism, specie bmause she was to be a pure vessel by which
blessed child could be brought into the world. Therefore she had colled
the semen from her male half and mechanically inserted it in her female
half." Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had stuck
him, and he grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey from the desk.
"You have another glass?"
Fogarty pointed to a bar cabinet in the corner, which Julie had not
noticed before. Bobby opened the double doors, revealing not only more
glasses but additional fifths of Wild Turkey Evidently the physician
kept a bottle in his desk drawerso he would not have to walk across the
room for it. Bobby poured two glasses full, with no ice, and brought
one back to Julie.
To Fogarty, she said,
"Of course, I never thought Ros was barren. She did bear children, we
know that. But I sumed you meant the male part of her was sterile."
"Fertile as a male and as a female. She couldn't actually join herself
to herself, so to speak. So she resorted to,artificial semination, as I
said."
Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when he had tried to
explain how traveling with Frank was like a sled ride off the edge of
the world, Julie had not really understood why he was so unnerved by the
experience. Now she thought she had an inkling of what he had meant,
for the of the Pollard family's relationships and sexual identities. Her
skin crawled and filled her with a dark suspicion that nat was even
stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than had feared.
"Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was fairly lucrative
sideline in those days, though illegal and kept hushed. But the girl
had hidden her pregnancy from him for seven months, as he and Cynthia
had tried to hide a pregnancy fourteen years earlier. It was much too
late for an abortion then. The girl would've died, from hemorrhaging.
Besides, I would no more have aborted that fetus than I'd have shot
myself in the foot. Imagine the degree of inbreeding involved here:
hermaphroditic child of brother-sister incest impregnates herself. Her
child's mother is also its father. Its grandmother is also its
great-aunt, and its grandfather is its great-uncle! One tight genetic
line-and genes damaged by Yarnell's use of hallucinogenics, remember.
Virtually a guarantee of a freak of one kind or another, and I wouldn't
have missed it for the world." Julie took a long swallow of the
bourbon. It tasted sour and stung her throat. She didn't care. She
needed it.
"I'd become a doctor because the pay was good," Fogarty said.
"Later, when I gravitated toward illegal abortions, the pay was better,
and it became my main business. Not much danger, either, because I knew
what I
was doing, and I could buy off an authority now and then if I had
to. When you're getting those fat fees, you don't have to schedule many
office visits, you can have a lot of free time, money and leisure, the
best of both worlds. But having settled for a career like that, what I
never figured was that I'd encounter anything as medically interesting,
as fascinating, as entertaining as this Pollard mess." The only
consideration that caused Julie to refrain from going across the room
and kicking the crap out of the old man was not his age but the fact
that he would leave the story unfinished and some vital piece of
information unrevealed.
"But the birth of Roselle's first child wasn't the event I'd thought it
would be," Fogarty said.
"In spite of the odds, the baby she produced was healthy and, from all
indications, perfectly normal. That was 1960, and the baby was Frank."
In the wingback chair, Frank whimpered softly but remained in his
semicomatose condition.
STILL LISTENING to Doc Fogarty through Darkle, Violet sat up and swung
her bare legs over the edge of the bed, dispossessing some of the cats
from their resting places, and eliciting a murmur of protest from
Verbina, who was seldom content to share just a mental link with her
sister and needed the reassurance of physical contact. With cats
swarming at her feet, seeing through their eyes as well as her own and
therefore not blinded by the darkness, Violet started toward the open
door to the lightless upstairs hall.
Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place Page 50
