Sure, I knew who he meant, but I could only lie there, feeling my own sort of numb shock that made me speechless.
"So," Chris went on in that deadly monotone that didn't show that he was concerned, frightened, surprised, "while I hid behind the sofa, and put my head down on my arms and closed my eyes and tried to make my heart stop beating so damned loud, John and the maid began to get really serious with each other. I heard their little movements as he began to take off her clothes, and she began to work on his clothes."
"They undressed each other?" I asked. "She actually helped him off with his clothes?"
"It sounded to me that way," he said flatly.
"She didn't scream or protest?"
"Heck, no. She was all for it! And by golly, it took them so everlastingly long! Oh, the noises they made, Cathy--you wouldn't believe it. She moaned and screamed and gasped and panted, and he grunted like a stuck pig, but I guess he must have been pretty good at it, for she shrieked at the end like someone gone crazy. Then, when it was over, they had to lie and smoke cigarettes and gossip about what goes on in this house--and believe me, there's little they don't know. And then they made love a second time."
"Twice in the same night?"
"It's possible to do."
"Chris, why do you sound so funny?"
He hesitated, pulled away a bit, and studied my face. "Cathy, weren't you listening? I went to a great deal of pains to tell you everything just as it happened. Didn't you hear?"
Hear? Sure, I'd heard, everything.
He'd waited too long to rob Momma of her hoard of hard won jewelry. He should have been taking a little all along, like I'd begged him to do.
So, Momma and her husband were off on another vacation. What kind of news was that? They were always coming and going. They'd do anything to escape this house, and I can't say I blamed them. Weren't we prepared to do the same thing?
I screwed up my brows and gave Chris a long questioning look. Obviously he knew something he wasn't telling me. He was still protecting her; he still loved her.
"Cathy," he began, his voice jagged and torn.
"It's all right, Chris. I'm not blaming you. So our dear, sweet, kind, loving mother and her handsome young husband have gone off on another vacation and taken all the jewelry with them. We'll still get by." Say good-bye to security in the outside world. But we were still going! We'd work, we'd find a way to support ourselves, and pay doctors to make Carrie well again. Never mind about jewelry; never mind about the callousness of our mother's act, to leave us without explaining where she was going, and when she was coming back. By now we were accustomed to ugly, harsh, thoughtless indifference. Why so many tears, Chris--why so many?
"Cathy!" he raged, turning his tear-streaked face to lock his eyes with mine "Why aren't you listening and reacting? Where are your ears? Did you hear what I said? Our grandfather is dead! He's been dead for almost a year!"
Maybe I hadn't been truly listening, not carefully enough. Maybe his distress had kept me from hearing everything. Now it hit me fully for the first time. If the grandfather was truly dead--this was stunning good news! Now Momma would inherit! We'd be rich! She'd unlock the door, she'd set us free. Now we didn't have to run away.
Other thoughts came flooding, a torrent of devastating questions--Momma hadn't told us when her father died. When she knew how long these years had been for us, why had she kept us in the dark, waiting always? Why? Bewildered, confused, I didn't know which emotion to feel: happy, glad, sorry. A strange paralzying fear settled the indecision.
"Cathy," whispered Chris, though why he bothered to whisper I don't know. Carrie wouldn't hear. Her world was set apart from ours. Carrie was suspended between life and death, leaning more toward Cory every moment she starved herself and abandoned the will to live on without her other half. "Our mother deceived us deliberately, Cathy. Her father died, and months later his will was read, and all the while she kept quiet and left us here to wait and rot. Nine months ago we would all have been nine months healthier! Cory would be alive today if Momma had let us out the day her father died, or even the day after the will was read."
Overwhelmed, I fell into the deep well of betrayal Momma had dug to drown us in. I began to cry.
"Save your tears for later," said Chris, who had just cried himself. "You haven't heard everything. There's more. . . much more, and worse."
"More?" What more could he tell me? Our mother was proven a liar and a cheat, a thief who'd stolen our youth, and killed Cory in the process of acquiring a fortune she didn't want to share with children she no longer wanted, or loved. Oh, how well she explained to us what to expect that night when she gave us our lit- tle litany to say when we were unhappy. Did she know, or guess, way back then, that she would become the thing the grandfather would make of her? I toppled over into Chris's arms, and lay against his chest. "Don't tell me anymore! I've heard enough . . . don't make me hate her more!"
"Hate . . . you haven't begun to know what hate is yet. But before I tell you the rest, keep in mind we are leaving this place, no matter what. We will go on to Florida, just like we planned. We'll live in the sunshine and make our lives the very best we can. Not for one moment are we going to feel ashamed of what we are, or what we've done, for what we've shared between us is so small compared to what our mother has done. Even if you die before I do, I'll remember our lives up here and in the attic. I'll see us dancing beneath the paper flowers, with you so graceful, and me so clumsy. I'll smell the dust and the rotting wood, and I'll remember it as perfume sweet as roses, because without you it would have been so bleak, and so empty. You've given me my first taste of what love can be.
"We're going to change. We're going to throw out what's worse in us and keep what's best. But come hell or high water, we three will stick together, all for one, one for all. We're going to grow, Cathy, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Not only that, we're going to reach the goals we've set for ourselves. I'll be the best damned doctor the world's ever known and you will make Pavlova seem like an awkward country girl."
I grew weary of hearing talk of love, and what the future held, possibly, when we were still behind a locked door, and death was lying beside me curled up in fetal position, with small hands praying even in sleep.
"All right, Chris, you've given me a breather. I'm prepared for anything. And thank you for saying all of that, and for loving me, for you haven't gone unloved, or unadmired, yourself." I kissed him quickly on the lips, and told him to go on, to hit me with his knockout blow.
"Really, Chris, I know you must have something perfectly awful to tell me--so out with it. Keep holding me as you tell me, and I can stand anything you have to say."
How young I was. How unimaginative--and how confidently presuming.
Endings, Beginnings
. Guess what she told them," Chris continued on. "Name the reason she gave for not wanting this room cleaned on the last Friday of the month."
How could I guess? I'd need a mind like hers. I shook my head. So long ago the servants had stopped coming to this room, I had forgotten those first horrible weeks.
"Mice, Cathy," Chris said, his blue eyes cold, hard. "Mice! Hundreds of mice in the attic, our grandmother invented .. . clever little mice that used the stairs to steal down to the second floor. Devilish little mice that forced her to lock this door, leaving in the room--food covered over with arsenic."
I listened and thought that an ingenious, marvelous story for keeping the servants away. The attic was full of mice. They did use the stairs.
"Arsenic is white, Cathy, white. When mixed with powdered sugar, you cannot taste its bitterness."
My brain went spinning! Powdered sugar on the four daily doughnuts! One for each of us. Now only three in the basket! "But, Chris, your story doesn't make any sense. Why would the grandmother poison us bit by bit? Why not give us a sufficient amount to kill us immediately and have done with it?"
His long fingers went through my hair to cup my head between his
palms. He spoke in a low voice: "Think back to a certain old movie we saw on TV. Remember that pretty woman who would keep house for older gentlemen--rich gentlemen, of course--and when she'd won their trust, and affection, and they had written her into their wills, each day she fed them just a little arsenic? When you digest just a fraction of arsenic each day, it is slowly absorbed by your entire system, and each day the victim feels a little worse, but not too much so. The small headaches, stomach upsets that can easily be explained away, so that when the victim dies, say in a hospital, he already is thin, anemic, and has a long history of illnesses, hay fever, colds, and so forth. And doctors don't suspect poisoning--not when the victim has all the
manifestations of pneumonia, or just plain old age, as was the case in that movie."
"Cory!" I gasped. "Cory died of arsenic poisoning? Momma said it was pneumonia that killed him!"
"Can't she tell us anything she wants? How do we know when she's telling the truth? Maybe she didn't even take him to a hospital. And if she did, obviously the doctors didn't suspect any unnatural cause of death, or else she'd be in jail by now."
"But, Chris," I objected, "Momma wouldn't allow the grandmother to feed us poison! I know she wants that money, and I know she doesn't love us now as she did once--but still she would never kill us!"
Chris turned aside his head. "Okay. We've got to make a test. We're going to feed Cory's pet mouse a bit of powdered-sugar doughnut"
No! Not Mickey, who trusted and loved us--we couldn't do that. Cory had adored the little gray mouse. "Chris, let's catch another mouse--a wild one that doesn't trust us."
"C'mon, Cathy, Mickey is an old mouse, and lame, too. It's hard to catch a mouse alive, you know that. How many have lived after the cheese was nibbled on? And when we leave, Mickey won't survive when we set him free--he's a pet now, dependent on us."
But I was planning on taking him with us.
"Look at it this way, Cathy--Cory's dead, and he hadn't even begun to live. If the doughnuts aren't poisonous, Mickey will live, and we can take him with us, if you insist. One thing for certain--we have to know. For Carrie's sake, we've got to be positive. Look at her. Can't you see she's dying, too? Day by day, she's losing ground--and so are we."
On three well legs, he came staggering to us, dragging the lame leg, our sweet little gray mouse that nibbled trustingly on Chris's finger before he bit into the doughnut. He took a small piece and ate it, trustingly, believing in us, his gods, his parents, his friends. It hurt to watch.
He didn't die, not right away. He grew slow, listless, apathetic. Later on he had small fits of pain that made him whimper. In several hours he was on his back, stiff, cold. Pink toes curled up into claws Small black bead eyes, sunken and dull. So now we knew . . . for sure. God hadn't taken Cory.
"We could put the mouse in a paper sack along with two of the doughnuts and take it to the police," said Chris tentatively, keeping his eyes averted from mine
"They'd put the grandmother in jail."
"Yeah," he said, and then turned his back.
"Chris, you're holding something back--what is it?"
"Later . . . after we've gone. Right now I've said all I can say without throwing up. We'll leave early tomorrow morning," he said when I didn't speak. He caught both my hands in his and squeezed them tightly. "As soon as possible, we'll get Carrie to a doctor--and ourselves too."
Such a long day to live through. We had
everything ready and nothing to do but stare at the TV for the last time. With Carrie in the corner, and the two of us on separate beds, we watched our favorite soap opera. When it was over I said, "Chris, soap people are like us--they seldom go outdoors. And when they do, we only hear about it, never see it. They loll about in living rooms, bedrooms, sit in the kitchens and sip coffee or stand up and drink martinis--but never, never go outside before our eyes. And whenever something good happens, whenever they think they're finally going to be happy, some catastrophe comes along to dash their hopes."
Somehow I sensed someone else in the room. My breath pulled in! There stood the grandmother. Something in her stance, in her cruel, hard, gray-stone eyes showed her mocking scornful contempt, and infoimed me she'd been there for some time.
She spoke, her voice cold: "How sophisticated the two of you have grown while locked away from the world. You think you jokingly exaggerated the way life is--but you didn't exaggerate. You forecast it correctly. Nothing ever works out the way you think it will. In the end, you are always disappointed."
Chris and I stared at her, both chilled. The hidden sun took a nose-dive into night. She'd had her say, so she left, locking the door behind her. We sat on our separate beds, with Carrie slouched over near the corner.
"Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us down again. Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we are doomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of finding perfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won't be disappointed."
If a little hill of happiness would satisfy Chris, good for him. But after all these years of striving, hoping, dreaming, longing--I wanted a mountain high! A hill wasn't enough. From this day forward, I vowed to myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, not God, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, or dominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, to take what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself. I'd been kept prisoner, held captive by greed. I'd been betrayed, deceived, lied to, used, poisoned . . . but all that was over now.
I had been barely twelve years old when Momma led us through the dense piney woods on a starry, moonlit night, .. . just on the verge of becoming a woman, and in these three years and almost five months, I'd reached maturity. I was older than the mountains outside. The wisdom of the attic was in my bones, etched on my brain, part of my flesh.
The Bible said, as Chris quoted one memorable day, there was a time for everything. I figured my time for happiness was just ahead, waiting for me.
Where was that fragile, golden-fair Dresden doll I used to be? Gone. Gone like porcelain turned into steel--made into someone who would always get what she wanted, no matter who or what stood in her way. I turned my resolved gaze on Carrie, who slumped in the corner, her head so low her long hair covered her face. Only eight and a half years old, but she was so weak she shuffled like someone old; she didn't eat or speak. She didn't play with the sweet little baby who lived in the dollhouse. When I asked if she wanted to take along a few of those dolls, she kept on hanging her head.
Not even Carrie, with her stubborn, defiant ways would defeat me now. There was no one anywhere, much less an eight-year-old, who could resist the strength of my will now.
I strode over and picked her up, and though she fought weakly, her efforts to free herself were fruitless. I sat down at the table and forced food into her mouth, and made her swallow when she would spit it out. I held a glass of milk to her lips, and though she clamped those lips together, I pried them apart and forced her to swallow the milk too. She cried out that I was mean. I carried her into the bathroom, and used tissue when she refused even to do that.
In the tub I shampooed her hair. Then I dressed her in several layers of warm clothing, just as I dressed myself. And when her hair was dry, I brushed it until it shone and looked somewhat like it used to look, only far thinner, and less glorious.
All through the long hours of waiting, I held Carrie in my arms, whispering to her of the plans Chris and I had for our future--the happy lives we'd live in the golden, liquid sunshine of Florida.
Chris was in the rocker, fully clothed, and was strumming idly on Cory's guitar. "Dance, ballerina, dance," he softly chanted, and his singing voice wasn't bad at all. Maybe we could work as musicians--a trio--if Carrie ever recovered enough to want a voice again.
On my wrist was a fourteen-karat-gold watch, made in Switzerland, that must have cost Momma several hundred dollars, and Chris had his watch,
too; we weren't penniless. We had the guitar, the banjo, Chris's Polaroid camera and his many watercolors to sell--and the rings our father had given our mother.
Tomorrow morning held escape for us--but why did I keep thinking I was overlooking something very important?
Then suddenly I realized something! Something both Chris and I had ignored. If the grandmother could open our locked door, and stand quietly for so long before we noticed her. . . had she done this on other occasions? If she had, she might now know of our plans! She might have made her own plans to prevent our escape!
I looked over at Chris, wondering if I should bring this up. He couldn't hesitate this time and find a reason to stay . . . so I voiced my suspicion. He kept picking on the guitar, apparently not disturbed in the least. "The minute I saw her there, that thought flashed into my mind," he said. "I know she puts a great deal of trust in that butler, John, and she might very well have him waiting at the bottom of the stairs to prevent us from leaving. Let him try--nothing and no one are going to stop us from leaving early tomorrow morning!"
But the thoughts of the grandmother and her butler waiting at the bottom of the steps wouldn't go away and leave me peace. Leaving Carrie on the bed asleep, leaving Chris in the rocker and strumming the guitar, I wandered up to the attic to say good-bye.
Directly under the dangling lightbulb, I stood and looked around. My thoughts went flashing back to the first day we came up here. . . . I saw us, all four, holding hands, staring around, overwhelmed by the gargantuan attic and its ghostly furniture and clutter of dusty junk. I saw Chris up high, risking his life to hang two swings for Carrie and Cory to use. I ambled into the schoolroom, looking at the old desks where the twins had sat to learn to read and write. I didn't glance at the stained, smelly mattress to picture us sunbathing there. That mattress put other memories in my head. I stared at the flowers with sparkling centers--and the lopsided snail, the menacing purple worm, the signs Chris and I had lettered and through all the maze of our gardens and jungle, I saw myself dancing alone, always alone, except when Chris stood in the shadows watching, making his ache my ache. For when I waltzed with Chris, I'd made him someone else.
Flowers in the Attic Page 38
