“You mean that until then he’d been — well, normal?”
“Quite normal, Captain, though he hadn’t yet gone to school — Mama didn’t let us start until we were eight. But after that day Morton never spoke another word. Or admitted that the world existed. Oh, the rages! Mama was afraid of nothing and no one. Except for Morton in a rage. Rabid, uncontrollable.”
“Did the police come?”
“Of course. We said that Mama had been at home with us, in bed with a migraine. When they told her that Daddy was dead, she went into hysterics. Bob Smith’s mother came over, fed us, and sat with Mama. A few days later we found out that our money had gone in the crash.”
Carmine’s knees were aching; the chair was far too low. He got up and took a turn around the confines of the porch, saw out of the corner of his eye that Claire Ponsonby was indeed ready to go. The back of the station wagon, parked in the driveway, was overstuffed with bags, boxes, a matching pair of small trunks that dated to an era of more leisure and style in travel. Not wanting to sit down again, he leaned his rump against the rail.
“Did you know that Mrs. Catone and Emma died that night too?” he asked. “Your mother used the baseball bat on all three.”
Claire’s face froze into a look of absolute, genuine shock; the foot that had been teasing the dog flew up as if it jerked in a seizure. Carmine poured a glass of the lemonade, wondering if he should try to find something stronger. But Claire drank the contents of the glass thirstily and recovered her composure.
“So that was what became of them,” she said slowly, “and all the while Charles and I continued to wonder. No one ever told us who the other two were, just talked of a gang of hoboes who went on a killing spree. We assumed Mama used their activities to hide her own deed, that the other two were gang members.”
Suddenly she lurched forward in her chair, held out a hand to Carmine imploringly. “Tell me all of it, Captain! What? How?”
“I’m sure you were right in thinking that your father told your mother he was leaving her to start a new life. Certainly he had found Mrs. Catone and Emma, but when he went to meet them at the railroad station it was for the first time because the Catones were derelict. No money, not even any food. The two thousand dollars he was carrying probably represented all he could rake up to make that new start,” Carmine said. “They were hiding out in the snow, which makes me think that your mother did have the ability to frighten people badly. Poor man. He told your mother too much, and three people died.”
“All these years, and I never, never knew…Never even suspected…” Her eyes turned to his face as if they could see, gleaming with emotion. “Isn’t life ironic?”
“Would you like me to get you a drink drink, ma’am?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She drew up her legs and tucked them under her chair.
“Can you tell me a little about your life after that?”
One shoulder went up, the mouth went down. “What would you like to know? Mama was never the same again either.”
“Did no one on the outside try to help?”
“You mean people like the Smiths and Courtenays? Mama called it sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. A few doses of Mama’s rudeness worked better than castor oil. They stopped trying, left us alone. We got along, Captain. Yes, we got along. There was a small income that Mama supplemented by selling land. Her own people helped, I think. Charles went to the Dormer Day School, so did I, and she paid the fees regularly.”
“What about Morton?”
“Some education officer visited, took one look at him and never came back. Charles told everyone he was autistic, but that was for the benefit of the stickybeaks. Autism doesn’t happen the day your mother murders your father. That’s a psychiatric horse of a profoundly different color. Though we were fond of him, you know. His rages were never directed at Charles or me, only at Mama and any strangers who came calling.”
“Did it surprise you when he died so unexpectedly?”
“Better to say that it shocked me witless. Until this one, 1939 was the worst year of my life. I’m sitting at my books studying and a grey wall comes down — wham! I’m blind for life. One visit to the eye doctor, and then I’m on a train to Cleveland. No sooner do I get to the blind school than Charles calls me to say that Morton is dead. Just — fell down dead!” She shuddered.
“You seem to imply that your mother wasn’t quite mentally stable before January of 1930, but obviously she hid it well. So what happened at the end of 1941 to trigger real dementia?”
Claire’s face twisted. “What happened just after Pearl Harbor? Charles said he was getting married. All of twenty years old, but approaching his majority. In pre-med at Chubb. He met some girl from Smith at a dance and it was love at first sight. The only way Mama could break it up was to pull out all the stops. I mean, she went stark, raving mad. The girl fled. I volunteered to come home to look after Mama — almost twenty-two years, as it turned out. Not that I wouldn’t have done even more for Charles than a tedious thing like that. Don’t assume I was Mama’s slave — I learned to control her. But while she lived Charles and I could not indulge our love of food, wine, music to the full. Between you, Captain, you and Mama have ruined my life. Three precious years of having Charles all to myself, that’s the sum total of my memories. Three precious years…”
Fascinated, Carmine found himself wondering if what Danny Marciano reckoned was right. Had brother and sister been lovers?
“You disliked your mother very much,” he said.
“I loathed her! Loathed her! Do you realize,” she went on with sudden fierceness, “that from Charles’s thirteenth to his eighteenth birthday he lived in the closet under the stairs?” The rage evaporated; a frightened spark flickered in her eyes, vanished as her hands went up to fumble with her tongue. “Oh. I didn’t mean to say that. No, that was something I didn’t mean to say. It got past me. Past me!”
“Better out than in,” said Carmine easily. “Go on. You may as well now you’ve said it.”
“Years later Charles told me she’d caught him masturbating. It sent her into a frenzy. She shrieked and screeched and spat and bit and punched — he never would fight Mama back. I fought back all the time, but Charles was the rabbit under the cobra’s spell. She never spoke to him again, which broke his poor heart. When he came home from school or from Bob Smith’s, into the closet he went. It was a big closet with a lightbulb in it. Oh, Mama was so considerate! He had a mattress on the floor and a hard chair — there was a shelf he could use as a table. She passed in a tray with his meal and removed it when he’d finished. He made water and had his bowel motions in a bucket he had to empty and wash out every morning. Until I left for Cleveland, it was my duty to give him meals, but I wasn’t allowed to speak to him.”
Carmine was gasping. “But that’s ridiculous!” he cried. “He went to a very good school — it had counselors, a principal — all he had to do was tell someone! They would have acted at once.”
“To tell wasn’t in Charles’s nature,” Claire said, chin up. “He adored Mama, he blamed Daddy for everything. All he had to do was defy her, but he wouldn’t. The closet was his punishment for a dreadful sin, and he chose to take his punishment. The day he turned eighteen, she let him out. But she never spoke to him.” A shrug. “That was Charles. Perhaps it enables you to see why I still refuse to believe that he did any of those terrible things. Charles could never have raped or tortured, he was too passive.”
Carmine straightened, flexed his fingers, a little numb from gripping the rail too tightly. “God knows I have no wish to add to your sorrows, Miss Ponsonby, but I do assure you that Charles was the Connecticut Monster. Were he not, your fresh start in Arizona or New Mexico would not have been funded by Major F. Sharp Minor.” He moved to the steps. “I must go. No, don’t get up. I thank you for all that, it solved a puzzle that’s tormented me for months. Their names are Louisa and Emma Catone? Good. I know where they’re buried. Now I�
��m going to give them a monument. Do you know if Mrs. Catone professed any religious beliefs?”
“Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool policeman, Captain. Yes, she was a Catholic. I suppose I ought to contribute to the monument, as Emma was my half sister, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t. Arrividerci.”
Chapter 33
Claire Ponsonby continued to sit on the porch long after Captain Carmine Delmonico had gone.
Her eyes roamed over the trees that surrounded the house, remembering how Morton spent the hours upon hours of his unschooled days. He dug a tunnel because he knew that one day a tunnel would come in handy. While he worked he thought, his body developing the skinny toughness of one who worked harder than he ate well. Oh, Charles loved him! Loved him even more than he had loved Mama. Taught him to read and write, gave him genuine erudition. Charles, a brother who understood the ineluctable completeness of brotherhood. Sharing the books, trying valiantly to share the labor. But Charles feared the tunnel so much that he couldn’t bear to be in it for very long. Whereas Morton was never more alive than when in the tunnel, digging, gouging, burrowing, dragging out the soil and stones which Charles spread around the trees.
Thus had the sharing begun. Charles thought of the Catone Room as a surgeon’s paradise a thousand feet in the air. Whereas Morton knew the Catone Room was the tunnel’s orgasmic flowering under the silent heaviness of the ground. Morton, Morton, on, off. Blind worm, blind mole in the darkness, digging away with a magic button in his mind that could switch his eyes on or off. On, off, on, off, on, off. Diggety-dig, on, off.
Now let me see…That oak was where we buried the Italian from Chicago after he laid our terrazzo floor. And that maple is sucking up syrup from the plumber’s plump remains; we hired him in San Francisco. The carpenter from Duluth is moldering near what must be the last healthy elm tree in Connecticut. I can’t remember where we buried the rest, but they don’t matter. What an excellent servant is greed! A secret job for cash in hand, everybody happy. Nobody happier than Charles as he doled out the cash. Nobody happier than me, taking it back after I swung the mallet. Nobody happier than both of us poking and prying through the cooling orifices, channels, tubes, cavities.
Not that we needed to take the cash back. What we spent on the Catone Room over the endless years while we waited for Mama to die was a pittance compared to the amount of cash Mama brought back from the railroad station in two small, elegant trunks that January of 1930. Daddy, fool enough to lose all his money in a stock market crash? Hardly. His investments had been converted to cash well before that. He installed a little bank vault (its door came in handy later on) in the wine cellar and put the cash into it until his detective found Mrs. Catone. Thank you, dear Captain Delmonico, for filling in the spaces! Now I know why he emptied the vault, put its contents into those two trunks, and loaded them aboard his car for the trip to the railroad station.
After she killed him Mama transferred the trunks to her car; we looked inside them and stole them while her clothes and the baseball bat were burning merrily. While I hid them in my tiny appendix of a tunnel, Charles began a tunnel more to his liking, burrowing into Mama’s mind. Over and over he whispered to her that the Catone affair was a figment of her imagination, that she hadn’t killed Daddy, that Catone rhymed with atone and Emma was a book by Jane Austen. When she needed money we gave it to her, though we never told her where the trunks were. Then after that traitor Roosevelt abolished the gold standard in 1933, we took Mama and the trunks to the Sunnington Bank in Cleveland, where, since her family owned the bank, we had no trouble exchanging the old bills for new ones. In those Depression days many people preferred to hoard their money in cash. And by then she was the helpless puppet of two demure boys scarcely into adolescence.
Getting the money home again wasn’t easy, on, off. Someone in the bank talked. But Charles masterminded our strategy with all his extraordinary brilliance. When it came to logistics and design, Charles was a genius. How am I going to replace him? Who will understand except a brother?
Home again, Charles’s tunnel into Mama’s mind concentrated on the money, how Roosevelt had stolen it to fund his plot against everything our America stood for, from liberty to letting Europe stew in its own well-deserved juice. Yes, both our tunnels grew, and who is to say which of them was the more beautiful? A tunnel to insanity, a tunnel to the Catone Room, on, off.
I hope Captain Delmonico is satisfied with my tale of love gone wrong and mania run amok. A pity that woman of his turned out to be so resourceful. I was so looking forward to a special session with her, flaying her Olympian heights while she watched it happen in a mirror. You can’t keep your eyes closed all the time, Desdemona, on, off. Still, who knows? Maybe some day, one day, it will happen. I would never have settled on her had I not conceived such a fascination for Carmine the Curious. But since for all his curiosity he isn’t prescient, on, off, he never asked the questions that might have turned the key in his dogged brain.
Questions like, why were they all sixteen years old? The answer to that is simple arithmetic, on, off. Mrs. Catone was twenty-six and Emma was six and that makes thirty-two but we only wanted one Catone so divide by two and the number is — sixteen! Questions like, what could lure a young do-gooder to her delicious fate? The answer to that lies in the quality of mercy. A blind woman weeping over her guide dog’s broken leg. Biddy does a wonderful broken leg act. Questions like, what is the significance of a dozen? Sun cycles, moon cycles, motor cycles…The answer is asinine. Mrs. Catone had a habit of saying “Cheaper by the dozen!” as if it were an illumination at least as blinding as God. Questions like, why did we leave it so late in our lives to start? An answer trapped in the web of Oedipus, of Orestes. Killing Catones may be cheaper by the dozen, but no one can kill his mother. Questions like, how could Claire be a part of it, yet who else was there than Claire? The answer to that lies in appearances. Appearances are everything; it is all in the eye of the beholder, on, off.
Mama never had a little girl. Just three boys. On, off, on, off. But she craved a little girl, and what Mama wanted, Mama got. So she dressed the last one of us as a girl from the day of his birth. People believe what their eyes tell them, on, off. Up to and including you, Captain Delmonico. We Ponsonby boys all look like Mama: we make passable females but namby-pamby males. None of Daddy’s thrusting masculinity. Oh, how he used to give it to Mrs. Catone! Charles and I watched them through a hole in the wall, on, off, on, off.
Dearest Charles, always thinking of ways to serve my needs. It would have been so much harder after Claire went blind if he had not been inspired to dress me in Claire’s clothes and send me to Cleveland, on, off. As soon as I arrived there, he put a limp rubber pillow over Claire’s face and Morton the Mole became Claire the Blind. On, off, on, off.
Darkness at last. My true milieu, on, off. Time for Morton the Mole to seek a fresh field to tunnel in.
eBook Info
Title:On, Off
Creator:Colleen McCullough
Date:2006
Type:novel
Format:text/html
Identifier:ISBN 0-7432-9323-1
Source:PDF
Language:en
Relation:None
Coverage:None
Rights:Copyright © 2006 by Colleen McCullough
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