I said what I could to comfort her but I felt so inadequate. I knew she watched my every movement and compared my proportions to hers. She realized I was very much in proportion and how much she was constructed grotesquely.
If I could have given her a part of my height, gladly I would have done so. Instead, I gave her my prayers. Night after night, I too went down on my knees and prayed to God, “Please let Carrie grow! Please, God, she’s so young, and it hurts her so much, and she’s been through so much. Be kind. Look down, God! See us! Hear us!”
One afternoon Carrie went to the only one who could deliver almost everything—so why not size?
Paul was sitting on his back veranda, sipping wine, nibbling cheese and crackers. I was at ballet class, so I heard only Paul’s version of what happened.
“She came to me, Cathy, and asked if I didn’t have a stretching machine to pull her out longer.”
I sighed when he told me.
“‘If I had such a machine,’ I told her”—and I knew he’d done it with love, kindness and understanding, not with mockery—“‘it would be a very painful process. Have patience, darling, you’re taller than you were when you came. Time will make you grow. Why, I’ve seen the shortest young people suddenly just shoot up overnight after they reach puberty.’ She stared at me with those big blue haunted eyes and I saw her disappointment. I had failed her. I could tell from the way she ambled off with her shoulders drooping and her head hung so low. Her hopes must have ridden high when those cruel kids at her school chided her about finding a ‘stretching machine.’”
“Isn’t there one thing modern medicine can do to help her grow?” I asked Paul.
“I’m looking into it,” he said in a tight voice. “I’d give my soul to see Carrie reach the height she wants. I’d give her inches of my height, if only I could.”
Momma’s Shadow
We had been with our doctor for one year and a half, and what exhilarating and baffling days they were. I was like a mole coming out of darkness only to find the brilliant days weren’t at all like I had supposed they would be.
I’d thought once we were free of Foxworth Hall and I was almost an adult life would lead me down a clear and straight path to fame, fortune and happiness. I had the talent; I saw that in the admiring eyes of Madame and Georges. Madame especially harped on every little flaw of technique, of control. Every criticism told me I was worth all her efforts to make me not only an excellent dancer but a sensational one.
During summer vacation Chris obtained a job as a waiter in a café from seven in the mornings to seven in the evenings. In August he would leave again for Duke University where he would begin his second year in college. Carrie fiddled away her time playing on the swing, playing with her little girl toys, though she was ten now and should be outgrowing dolls. I spent five days a week in ballet class, and half of Saturday. My small sister was like a shadow tagging after me when I was at home. When I wasn’t she was Henny’s shadow. She needed a playmate of her own age but she couldn’t find one. She had only the porcelain dolls to confide in now that she felt too old to act the baby with Chris and me, and suddenly she stopped complaining about her size. But her eyes, those sad, sad yearning eyes, told how she longed to be as tall as the girls we saw walking in the shopping malls.
Carrie’s loneliness hurt so much that again I thought of Momma and damned her to everlasting hell! I hoped she was hung over the eternal fires by her heels and prodded by imps with spears.
More and more often I was writing Momma short notes to torment her sunny life wherever she was. She never settled down in one place long enough to receive my letters, or if she did she didn’t respond. I waited for the letters to come back stamped ADDRESS UNKNOWN but none ever did.
I read the Greenglenna newspaper carefully every evening, trying to find out just what my mother was up to and where she was. Sometimes there was news.
Mrs. Bartholomew Winslow left Paris and flew on to Rome to visit Italy’s new chic couturier. I cut out that clipping and added it to my scrapbook. Oh, would do when I met up with her! Sooner or later she’d have to come to Greenglenna and live in that home of Bart Winslow’s which was newly repaired, redecorated and refurbished. I cut out that news article too and stared long and hard at a photograph which was not flattering. This was unusual. Customarily she could put on a brilliant smile to show the world how happy and contented she was with her life.
Chris left for college in August, two weeks before I went back to high school. In late January I would graduate. I couldn’t wait to be finished with high school so I studied like mad.
* * *
The autumn days flew swiftly by, so much in contrast to other autumns when time had crept monotonously while we grew older and youth was stolen from us. Just keeping track of my mother’s activities kept me busy, and then when I really put my nose on the trail of Bart’s family history I used up more of my precious time.
In Greenglenna I pored for hours over old books written about the founding families of Greenglenna. His ancestors had arrived just about the same time mine had, back in the eighteenth century, and they too had been from England, settling down in Virginia in the part that was now North Carolina. I looked up and stared into space. Was it just a coincidence that his ancestors and mine had been part of that “Lost Colony”? Some of the husbands had sailed back to England for more supplies only to return much later and find their colony abandoned, with not one single survivor to tell why. After the Revolution the Winslows had moved to South Carolina. How odd. Now the Foxworths too were in South Carolina.
* * *
Not a day passed as I shopped and traveled on the busy streets of Greenglenna that I didn’t expect to see my mother. I stared after every blond I saw. I went into expensive shops looking for her. Snobbish salesladies would come up silently behind me and inquire if they could help. Of course they couldn’t help. I was looking for my mother, and she wasn’t hanging from a clothes rack. But she was in town! The society column had given me this information. Any day I would see her!
One sunny Saturday I was rushing to do an errand for Madame Marisha when I suddenly spotted on the sidewalk ahead of me a man and a woman so familiar my heart almost stopped beating! It was them! Just to see her strolling so casually at his side, enjoying herself, put me in a state of panic! Sour gall rose in my throat. I dared to draw nearer, so I was very close behind them. If she turned she’d be sure to see me—and what would I do then? Spit in her face? Yes, I would like to do that. I could trip her and make her fall and watch how she lost her dignity. That would be nice. But I didn’t do anything but tremble and feel ill as I listened to them talk.
Her voice was so soft and sweet, so cultivated and genteel. I marveled at how svelte she still was, how lovely her pale, gleaming hair that waved softly back from her face. When she turned her head to speak again to the man at her side I saw her profile. I sighed. Oh, God, my mother in that expensive, rose-colored suit. The beautiful mother I had loved so well. My murdering mother who could still take my heart and wring it dry, for once I had loved her so very much and trusted her . . . and deep inside of me was that little girl, like Carrie, who still wanted a mother to love. Why, Momma? Why did you have to love money more than you loved your children?
I stifled the sob that she might have heard. My emotions raged out of control. I wanted to run up and scream accusations before her husband, and shock him and terrify her! I also wanted to run up and throw my arms about her, cry out her name and plead that she love me again. But all the tempestuous emotions I felt were submerged in the tidal wave of spite and vengeance I felt. I didn’t accost her, for I wasn’t ready to face her yet. I wasn’t rich or famous. I wasn’t anybody special and she was still a great beauty. She was one of the wealthiest women in the area and also one of the luckiest.
I dared much that day but they didn’t turn to see me. My mother was not the type to look behind her or stare at passers-by. She was accustomed to being the one who drew all the admiring
glances. Like a queen among peasants she strolled as if no one was on the street but her and her young husband.
When I had my fill of viewing her, I looked at her husband and drank up the special kind of virile, pantherlike handsomeness that was his. He no longer sported a huge thick mustache. His dark hair was waved smoothly back and was styled modishly. He reminded me a bit of Julian.
The words my mother and her husband exchanged weren’t particularly revealing. They were discussing what restaurant they should dine in, and did he think the furniture they’d shopped for this afternoon could be bettered if they shopped in New York? “I do love the breakfront we chose,” she said in a voice that brought back my childhood. “It reminds me so much of the one I bought just before Chris was killed.”
Oh, yes. That breakfront had cost two thousand five hundred dollars and was so needed to balance one end of the living room. Then Daddy died on the highway and everything unpaid for was repossessed, including the breakfront.
I followed where they led, daring fate to let them see me. They were here, living in the home of Bart Winslow. As I tagged along, full of vengeful schemes, despising her, admiring him, I planned which way to hurt her most. And what did I do—I chickened out! I did nothing, absolutely nothing! Furious with myself I went home and raged in front of the mirror, hating my image because it was her all over! Damn her to hell! I picked up a heavy paperweight from the special little French provincial desk Paul had bought me and I hurled it straight at the mirror! There, Momma! You’re broken in pieces now! Gone, gone, gone! Then I was crying, and later a workman came and replaced the glass in the mirror frame. Fool, that’s what I was. Now I’d wasted some of the money I was planning to use for a wonderful gift for Paul’s forty-second birthday.
Someday I’d get even, and in a way in which I wouldn’t be hurt. It would be more than just a broken mirror. Much, much more.
A Birthday Gift
Medical conventions ruined many a plan of mine, as did patients. On this unique day I skipped ballet class to rush straight home from high school. I found Henny in the kitchen slaving over a gourmet menu I had planned—all Paul’s favorite dishes. A Creole jambalaya with shrimp, crabmeat, rice, green bell peppers, onions, garlic, mushrooms and so many other things I thought I’d never finish measuring out half teaspoons of this and that. Then all the mushrooms and other vegetables had to be sautéed. It was a troublesome dish I wasn’t likely to make again.
No sooner was this in the oven than I began another cake from scratch. The first was sunk in the middle and was soggy. I covered up the hollow with thick frosting and gave it to the neighborhood kids. Henny bustled and bumbled around, shaking her head and throwing me critical glances.
I had the last rose squeezed from the pastry tube when Chris dashed in the back door bearing his gift. “Am I late?” he asked breathlessly. “I can’t stay longer than nine o’clock; I have to be back at Duke before roll call.”
“You’re just in time,” I said, all flustered and in a flurry to get upstairs and bathe and dress. “You set the table while Henny finishes up with the salad.” It was beneath his dignity, of course, to set a table, but for once he obliged without complaint.
I shampooed my hair and set it on large rollers, and polished my nails a glowing, silvery pink, my toenails too. I painted my face with an expertise born of hours of practice and long consultations with Madame Marisha and the beauty assistants in the department stores. When I was done no one would have guessed I was only seventeen. Down the stairs I drifted, borne aloft by the admiration that shone from my brother’s eyes and by the envy from Carrie’s and a big grin that split Henny’s face from ear to ear.
Fussily I arranged the table again, changing around the noise-makers, the snappers and the colorful, ridiculous paper clown hats. Chris blew up a few balloons and suspended them from the chandelier. And then we all sat down to wait for Paul to come and enjoy his “surprise party.”
When he didn’t show up and the hours passed, I got up to pace the floor as Momma had done on Daddy’s thirty-sixth birthday party when he never came home, not ever.
Finally Chris had to leave. Then Carrie began to yawn and complain. We fed her and let her go to bed. She slept in her own room now, especially decorated in purple and red. Next it was only Henny and me watching TV as the Creole casserole kept warming and drying out, and our salad was wilting, and then Henny yawned and left for bed. Now I was left alone to pace and worry, my party ruined.
At ten I heard Paul’s car turn into the drive and through the back door he strode, bearing with him the two suitcases he’d taken to Chicago. He tossed me a casual greeting before he noticed my fancy attire.
“Hey, . . .” he said, throwing a suspicious glance into the dining room and seeing the party decorations, “have I somehow managed to spoil something you planned?”
He was so damned casual about being three hours late I could have killed him if I hadn’t loved him so much. Like those who always try to hide the truth, I lit into him, “Why did you have to go to that medical convention in the first place? You might have guessed we’d have special plans for your birthday! And then you go and call us up and tell us what time to expect you home, and then you’re three hours late—”
“My flight was delayed—” he started to explain.
“I’ve been slaving to make you a cake that tastes as good as your mother’s,” I interrupted, “and then you don’t show up!” I brushed past him and pulled the casserole from the oven.
“I’m ravenous,” said Paul humbly, apologetically. “If you haven’t eaten, we might as well make the most of what looks like it could have been a very festive and happy occasion. Have mercy on me, Cathy. I don’t control the weather.”
I nodded stiffly to indicate I was at least a little understanding. He smiled and lightly brushed the back of his hand over my cheek. “You look absolutely exquisite,” he breathed softly, “so take the frown off your face and get things ready, and I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
In ten minutes he had showered and shaved and changed into fresh clothes. By the light of four candles the two of us sat down at the long dining table with me to his left. I had arranged this meal so I wouldn’t have to hop up and down to serve him. Everything that was needed was put upon a serving cart. The dishes that had to be served hot were on electrical heating units, and the champagne was cooling in a bucket. “The champagne is from Chris,” I explained. “He’s developed a liking for it.”
He lifted the champagne bottle from the ice and glanced at the label. “It’s a good year and must have been expensive; your brother has developed gourmet taste.”
We ate slowly and it seemed whenever I lifted my eyes they met with his. He’d come home looking tired, mussy; now he looked completely refreshed. He’d been gone two long, long weeks. Dead weeks that made me miss his presence in the open doorway of my bedroom as I practiced at the barre, doing my warm-up exercises before breakfast to beautiful music that sent my soul soaring.
When our meal was over I dashed into the kitchen, then glided back bearing a gorgeous coconut cake with miniature green candles fitted into red roses made of icing. Across the top I’d written as skillfully as I could with that pastry tube, Happy Birthday to Paul.
“What do you think?” Paul asked after he blew out the candles.
“Think about what?” I questioned back, carefully setting down the cake with twenty-six candles, for that was the age he appeared to me, and the age I wanted him to be. I felt very much an adolescent, floundering in the world of adult quicksand. My short, formal gown was flame-colored chiffon, with shoestring straps and lots of cleavage showing. But if my attempts to look sophisticated had succeeded, inside I was in a daze as I tried to play the role of seductress.
“My mustache—surely you’ve noticed. You’ve been staring at it for half an hour.”
“It’s nice,” I stammered, blushing as red as my gown. “It becomes you.”
“Now ever since you came you’ve been hinting
how much more handsome and appealing I’d be with a mustache. And now that I’ve taken the trouble to grow one you say it’s nice. Nice is such a weak word, Catherine.”
“It’s because . . . because you do look so handsome,” I stumbled, “that I can find only weak words. I fear that Thelma Murkel has already found all the strong words to flatter you.”
“How the hell do you know about her?” He fired this at me as he narrowed his beautiful eyes.
Gosh, he should know—gossip—and so I told him this: “I went to that hospital where Thelma Murkel is the head nurse on the third floor. And I sat just beyond the nurse’s station and watched her for a couple of hours. In my opinion she’s not quite beautiful, but handsome, and she seemed to me terribly bossy. And she flirts with all the doctors, in case you don’t know that.”
I left him laughing with his eyes lit up. Thelma Murkel was a head nurse in the Clairmont Memorial Hospital and everyone there seemed to know she had her mind set on becoming the second Mrs. Paul Scott Sheffield. But she was only a nurse in a sterile white uniform, miles and miles away, and I was under his nose, with my intoxicating new perfume tickling his senses (as the advertisement had said, a bewitching, beguiling, seductive scent no man could resist). What chance did Thelma Murkel, age twenty-nine, have against the likes of me?
I was giddy from three glasses of Chris’s imported champagne and hardly alert at all when Paul began to open the gifts Carrie, Chris and I had saved up to buy for him. I’d embroidered for him a crewel painting of his gingerbread white house with trees showing above the roof and a part of the brick wall to the sides with a little of the flowers showing. Chris had sketched it for me and I’d slaved many hours to make it perfect.
The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! Page 54
