Charley Martin was the original owner. He was well into his seventies, although he looked ten years younger, with his full head of salt-and-pepper hair swept back and to the sides as if he had just run a wet washcloth over it, maybe with a little styling lotion. He was stout, with the forearms of a carpenter, both arms stained with tattoos he had gotten in the Philippines when he was in the navy. Dad called him “Popeye.” He pretended to be annoyed, but I could see he liked it. They loved exchanging navy stories.
By now, my father’s tight community of construction workers, electrical and plumbing employees, and people who worked in Deutch’s lumberyard, the one Dad favored, all knew about “The Foxworth Funeral Project,” as it rapidly had been labeled. When I thought about it, I realized, what else could it be called?
It was inevitable, I guess, that new work on the property would revive the legends and stir up the stories, some quite exaggerated over the years since it had burned down a second time. Some spoke about old man Foxworth constructing a private church in the mansion that rivaled the church his evangelist ancestor had built to house his own form of preaching the gospel. Ray Pantel, whose family-run company did a great deal of the electrical work and repairs in the first mansion, said his father had told him Olivia Foxworth had skirts put on the piano legs because she believed naked piano legs were too suggestive. That set them all trying to outdo one another with stories describing the Foxworths’ fanatical Bible thumping, which somehow always returned to Olivia and Malcolm’s sexual repression.
“I heard they only made love enough times to have their children, and always in the dark at that,” Jimmy Stark, a retired plumber, said. Everyone laughed.
“No wonder their daughter ran off,” Billy Kelly, the manager of Deutch’s lumberyard, declared. “From what I was told, she was practically forbidden to look at any boy, much less go out on dates. She might even have been forced to wear a chastity belt.”
“She ran off with a good-looking young man,” Jimmy said. He was at least fifteen years older than my father but had the genes of an immortal, as my father would say. He looked younger than men twenty years younger than he was. “My father saw a picture of him once. He had to go down into the basement to work on a water heater when Malcolm was still alive and saw this damp, rotten carton with some photos in it. The old lady found out he saw the pictures and threw the whole damn carton full into the furnace. That was the last time they called him to do any work for them.”
Everyone mumbled and complained about how the most recent inhabitant had gone outside of the Charlottesville community for all his labor when he rebuilt the mansion. Ray said his father had told him that the nutcase had located the original plans and tracked down the builder’s company outside of Richmond.
“Probably didn’t want any local people snooping around. Who knows, maybe they found that little boy’s body but were all sworn to secrecy.”
I could see my father was starting to get annoyed with the discussion. At any moment, someone was going to ask him, as so many had, if my mother had mentioned any of this, and he might just explode. He glanced at me.
“Let’s change the subject,” he said, nodding in my direction. “Not everyone here has ears full of grime and grit and doesn’t mind rusty garbage flowing into their head.”
That worked, and they were back to talking about the hopeful surge in new housing, the economy, and politics. Gradually, they all peeled off to go their separate ways while Dad and I had our slices of Charley’s famous apple pie.
“They can be a bunch of old women sometimes,” Dad muttered, sipping his coffee and looking in the direction his friends had taken. Jimmy was still at the counter having his coffee.
“I resemble that remark,” I said, imitating him whenever I said something with which he might disagree. “Why not call them a bunch of old men?”
He nodded. “You’re right. Chauvinistic. Anyway, that’s why your mother hated gossip. Something begins with a nibble of the truth, and by the time it gets to where it’s getting, it’s as far from the truth as could be. Let’s hope once I level what I have to and rebuild what Arthur Johnson wants, what I’ve always hoped happens.”
“Which is?”
“That Foxworth dies a long-needed death.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t ready to go to that funeral, and he knew it. His eyes got smaller as he squinted and leaned in toward me. Here it comes, I thought.
“I won’t stop you from reading that diary, Kristin, but I will be very unhappy if you talk about it, especially with other kids at school who might get their families talking about it all again and bring attention back to us, just when I don’t want that. Understood?”
“Another warning? You couldn’t have made it clearer if you wanted to,” I said with a half smile.
He smiled, too. “I promise. I won’t talk about it anymore,” he added, raising his right hand.
I knew I should have been happy about that, but there was something about being alone with that diary and the story that made me tremble when I least expected it.
When we got home, I returned to my homework. I had the feeling I was rushing through it to give myself time to get back to Christopher, especially after hearing all those stories and rumors at Charley’s. I tried to resist, telling myself I needed a good night’s sleep. I set my alarm and got into bed, but moments later, as if Christopher was calling me through the pillow, I turned over, pulled out the diary, and turned the page. How could I not? They were all in such pain.
It wasn’t until Momma got herself together and, all stunned, we were calm enough to listen to her that Cathy and I fully understood who we were. I hesitate to write “what we were,” for everything I knew and understood about good and evil in this world kept me from accepting that we were as our grandmother saw us, spawn of the devil, creatures inclined to be sinners.
Slowly, as if the words were coming up from her gut, regurgitated like sour milk, Momma began to tell her story. She spoke in almost a whisper, first describing how horrid her youth was, not only for her but also for her brothers who had died. Her parents wouldn’t permit her and her brothers to be normal people. They couldn’t go swimming because they would show too much of their bodies. They couldn’t go to dances because they’d be too close to the opposite sex.
Cathy’s eyes widened with every illustration Momma drew up.
“You and your brothers were like prisoners,” I said, not ignoring the irony that prisoners were what we were right now.
“Worse. Prisoners could have their thoughts. My parents would look at me and tell me I was having sinful, dirty thoughts. She would listen in on my phone calls, read notes I wrote in my notebooks for school, read any card or letter addressed to me that came to the house first, and if she didn’t like a word or something, she would burn it before I saw it. I would find out later that someone had sent me a birthday or holiday card. You can be sure if any boys did, I never saw them. I was never permitted to have a girlfriend in my room alone with me, and if any boy dared come to our house, he and I had to sit in the entryway. I couldn’t even bring him into the living room.”
“And your father put up with all this?” I asked.
“My father?” She laughed. “First, he would never challenge anything my mother said to us or did to us, and second, my father was cruel even to his own, seizing control of his father’s estate when he died and cutting his father’s second wife and son out of their inheritance. When she died years later, her son was brought to live with us, Garland Christopher Foxworth IV, but my parents wouldn’t permit him to be called anything but Christopher or Chris,” she said, and put her arm around me. She smiled. “Do you know who I mean?”
My mind was spinning. It was finally being brought home to us with details. Of course, Garland Christopher was my mother’s half-uncle. They would still be considered close blood relatives. The word screamed and echoed in my mind: incest. We were the children of incest! It was true. All the innuendos and sly comments made sense now. This was
the horrible sin my grandparents saw our mother and father committing. I looked at Cathy. She was not grasping it as quickly as I was, or else she didn’t want to grasp it.
Momma continued, describing our father’s arrival at Foxworth Hall, telling us they fell in love at first sight. Both of them knew it. Her face brightened when she described that feeling.
“Goodness knows, we needed love in our house. I needed to feel some love, some happiness. My brothers were already dead from accidents. Neither of my parents smiled or laughed much at all. For a while, that changed when your father came to live with us.”
She told us that her parents treated our father like a son because of the sons they had lost. That, I realized, must have only cemented and intensified their fury over the romance she would have with my father. To my grandparents, he wasn’t only her half-uncle; he had become a son, in their minds, a brother to her.
“Didn’t you realize they would be upset, Momma?” I asked her.
“Of course. We both did, but someday you’ll see and understand how real love can blind you to anything else but the one you love. Nothing else matters but your and his or her happiness. Please try to understand, even though I know you’re both too young to realize the power of romantic love. Please don’t think of us as anything but two lovesick young people. Not only didn’t we think of the sin my parents accused us of committing, but neither of us would ever say that word. We never believed anything bad could come of a love so strong and pure.”
I could see from the way she was looking at me that she was worried that I, especially, would condemn her, not from a biblical point of view but from a scientific one. From what I had read, children of incest could suffer genetic side effects. Perhaps there were things that would happen to us as we grew older, but right now, none of us looked less than perfect. With Momma at such a low point, I couldn’t even let myself think of any of that. But I knew that I would, if not right away, then later when I had more time to consider it all.
Again, I glanced at Cathy. She looked like she was hearing a Romeo and Juliet story now. The pain, the suffering, and even the immorality of what our parents did were romanticized. I saw that dreamy, far-off look of fantasy in her face. Was it just a girl’s characteristic? Momma didn’t really pay attention to the stories Cathy brought home from school, but I knew she was already talking about boyfriends.
Maybe Momma’s story was more of a Cinderella story than Romeo and Juliet. Our father was like a prince when he arrived and considering the way her parents were treating him. Their love was that magic carriage that would turn into a pumpkin if they let it happen. I suppose our mother saw romance and marriage to our father as an escape from a horrid life. Never would she permit herself to imagine that she would have to return to it and bring us along. She was fitted with a pair of rose-colored glasses early in her life, and now I could see that she never took them off.
Once disaster struck, she went on about her plan to get her father to forgive her and reverse her disinheritance. She vowed to do anything he wanted to get herself back into his good graces. I wanted to believe it was not for herself as much as for us. Then she looked at me again, suspicious of my “thinking eyes,” as she sometimes called them. She insisted that there was nothing wrong with her marriage to our father, and despite all her father’s predictions, we turned out to be so beautiful and perfect. Yes, I thought, we were the Dresden dolls. Both our parents always believed that.
I assured her that I had no contrary thoughts and that if God had condemned her and our father, we wouldn’t be as healthy as we were.
“Maybe your mother is angry that we’re not deformed and ugly,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes, she is having trouble accepting that the four of you are the result of our love. She mumbles that the devil always makes evil look attractive, but I can see that she is having trouble believing herself.”
“And we won’t do anything to make it easy for her to,” I said. “I can promise you that.”
How she beamed. She embraced and kissed me, thanking me for being so understanding and giving her the strength to do what she had to do for us all. My words seemed to energize her. It was as if she no longer felt any pain from that whipping. Even the twins seemed impressed with how quickly she had recuperated.
She made us join hands and promise never to think of ourselves as ugly or evil, but I wondered why she had brought us to such a terrible place with such a horrible woman to rule over us. We might have been better off living in semipoverty. She knew what her parents were like, how rigid and cruel they could be.
“Didn’t you anticipate all this?” I couldn’t help but ask.
She smiled. “You sound so much like your father sometimes, Christopher. Of course, I knew how cruel they could be, but I thought that after all these years, being alone, having no family, they would realize what they had lost and they would have changed.” She went on to explain how her mother’s letter had filled her with optimism, but, she said, smiling at me, “I know what’s really eating away at her.”
“What?” Cathy demanded. Maybe she hoped something was literally eating away at her and she would disappear completely.
Momma held her smile on me like a spotlight. “Once she looked at Christopher, she saw his handsome father, and once she looked at you, Cathy, she saw me, and her rage came rolling back like thunder over the hills.”
“Then she’ll always hate us,” Cathy said, throwing up her hands. “Why bother? Let’s go.”
Momma nodded reluctantly. For a moment, I thought she was going to pack us up and take us out of this hellhole. I could see Cathy thought the same and looked excited, hopeful, but instead, Momma came up with her plan.
She decided she would go to secretarial school and learn all the skills she needed to get a decent job and find us a big enough apartment. Then we could move out and not want for the basic things, at least. In the meantime, she wanted us to amuse ourselves, care for the twins, and put up with her mother’s insane rules. Like the dreamer she could be when our father was alive, she drifted into her visions of the future, a future in which we would all realize our dreams. Of course, I knew that even if she did get a good job and a decent place for us to live, what we wanted to do for ourselves would take a great deal of money.
Nevertheless, I was happy, of course, to hear that she wanted to take us out of here. For a while, I feared that she didn’t see how difficult all this was for us or that she was ignoring and pretending. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dream along with her, but Cathy was suddenly the more realistic one, asking her how long it would take.
“It won’t take me that long. Maybe a month.”
I looked at Cathy quickly. A month? Stuck here? I gave her my best “keep it to yourself” look, and she didn’t start to rant and rave. Momma promised that in the meantime, she would have enough money to buy us things and bring them to us. Just before she left, she told us she was just as much a prisoner as we were, even worse, because she was under her father and mother’s close scrutiny.
“If I just breathe wrong, they’ll pounce.”
I knew her technique so well. She hoped that if we felt sorry for her, we wouldn’t feel as sorry for ourselves. I didn’t say anything. Momma was who she was, I thought. I loved her more than any child could love his mother, but I wasn’t blind to her weaknesses. I had to tolerate them. She needed me to be strong for her and for us all, now more than ever.
When we went to sleep that night, I persuaded Cathy to think only good thoughts. I teased her the way I used to and promised her that she would be the dancer she dreamed of being. I called her “Cathy Doll,” which was the stage name she hoped to have. It worked. Yes, I was like Momma. I knew how to get my sister to cooperate, and together, I thought we could handle the twins. I’d start by teaching them things they should be learning in school. We’d make it through this, I told myself. We’d give Momma the time she needed.
I thought they had all fallen asleep finally, but when I looked at Ca
thy, I saw her eyes were still wide open. She was thinking too hard.
“What?” I asked her. “What are you thinking so hard about?”
“We could have been born with horns and tails.”
“No, that’s ridiculous.”
She sat up and looked at me. “But this is why we all have blue eyes and golden hair.”
“There are scientific reasons for hair and eye color based on genetics, what you inherited. The scientific information isn’t perfect yet.” I said. I was tired now myself, very tired. Thinking can exhaust you, too.
“Still,” Cathy said, pushing hope into herself. “If we follow her rules and she thinks we’re good, she’ll treat us like she should treat her grandchildren.”
“Sure,” I said.
She lay down again. “It will be all right,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.
I looked at the locked door and then at my little brother and sister curled in fetal positions, dreaming good dreams the way children their age should.
I wanted to whisper, “It will be all right,” to myself, too.
But my lips wouldn’t let me.
Nor would my heart.
What a mistake reading Christopher’s diary before I went to sleep was becoming. I spent a night tossing and turning, picturing the four of them shut up in that mansion and believing that their mother would find a way to rescue them. Normally, Christopher was too smart to buy into his mother’s fantasies, but this time, lying right beside his intelligence was his hope. It was weaker, thinner, but he clung to it. What choice did he have? They were too young and needy to be able to do anything more for themselves. How would even three of them survive all this?
The more I thought about them, the more questions I had, and those questions were like tiny balls of hail pounding at my brain, making sleep almost impossible. I finally did fall asleep, but only a couple of hours before I had to get up, and thank goodness, this time, I had remembered to set my alarm.