Again she was bathing Jory's arms and chest. "Jory would never say such ugly things, no matter what I did. Sometimes he looks fierce, but even then he's thoughtful enough to say nothing to damage my ego. I never knew a man so thoughtful and
compassionate."
"Are you saying now that you love Jory?" I asked, wanting to believe she did but afraid her disappointment was rebounding and making Jory only a substitute love.
She blushed and bowed her head. "I've been in this house almost two years, and I've seen and heard a great many things. In this house I found sexual satisfaction with Bart, but it wasn't romantic or sweet, just exciting. Only now am I beginning to feel the romance of a man who tries to understand me and give me what I need. His eyes never condemn. Never do his lips shout out terrible things, when I haven't done anything I think is terrible. My love for Bart was a burning hot fire, kindled to a blaze the first day we met, while my feet stayed in quicksand, never knowing what he wanted, or what he needed, except he wanted someone like you . . ."
"I wish you'd stop saying that, Toni," I objected with discomfort. Bart still disliked himself so much he feared a woman turning away from him first, and to keep that from happening, he discarded Melodie before she had the chance to turn against him. Later, he turned his self-loathing against Toni before she could hate him and leave him. Again I sighed.
Toni agreed never to discuss Bart with me again, and then she began with my help to slip a clean pajama jacket onto Jory. We worked together as a team while the twins played on the floor, shoving little cars and trucks along just like Cory and Carrie had done.
"Just be sure which brother it is you love before you hurt both of them. I'm going to talk to my husband and Jory again, and I'm doing my damndest to see that we move out of this house just as soon as Jory recovers. You can go with us if that is your choice."
Her pretty gray eyes widened. She looked from me back to Jory, who had rolled on his side and was murmuring incoherently in his delirium. "Mel . . . is that our cue?" I think he was saying.
"No, it's Toni, your nurse," she said softly, caressing his hair and brushing it back from his beaded brow. "You have a very bad cold . . . but soon you'll feel just fine."
Jory stared up at her in a disoriented way, as if trying to distinguish this woman from the one he dreamed about every night. During the day he had eyes only for Toni, but in the night, Melodie came back to haunt him. What was there about the human condition that made us hold on to tragedy with such tenacity and easily forgo the happiness we could reach readily?
He began to cough violently, choking and pulling up huge wads of phlegm. Tenderly Toni held his head, then threw away the soiled tissues.
Everything she did for him she did with tenderness, fluffing his pillows, massaging his back, moving his legs to keep them supple even if he couldn't control them. I couldn't help but be impressed with all that she did to make him comfortable.
I backed off toward the door, feeling I was an intruder during.a very important private moment as Jory's eyes came into focus enough for him to pick up her hand and meet her eyes. Even as sick as he was, something in his eyes spoke to her. Quietly I caught hold of Darren's hand, and then Deirdre's. "Got to go now," I whispered even as I watched Toni tremble before her head bowed.
To my surprise, just before I closed the door, she put his hand to her lips and kissed each of his fingers. "I'm taking advantage of you," she whispered, "at a time when you can't fight back, but I need to tell you what a fool I've been. You were here all the time, and I never saw you. Never saw you at all when Bart stood in the way.
Weakly Jory answered, his eyes warm as they drank in the sincerity of her words and most of all, her loving, warm expression. "I guess it's easy to overlook a man in a wheelchair, and perhaps that alone was enough to make you blind. But I've been here, waiting, hoping . . ."
"Oh, Jory, don't hold it against me because I let Bart dazzle me with his charm. I was overwhelmed and sort of flabbergasted that he found me so desirable. He swept me off my feet. I think every woman secretly wants a man who refuses to take no for an answer, and pursues her relentlessly until she has to give in. Forgive me for being a fool, and an easy conquest."
"It's all right, all right," he whispered, then closed his eyes. "Just don't let what you feel for me be pity--or I'll know."
"You're what I wanted Bart to be!" she cried out as her lips neared his.
This time I did close the door.
Back in my own rooms, I sat down near the telephone waiting for Chris to call in response to my many urgent messages. On the verge of sleep, with the twins tucked neatly in my bed for their naps, the phone rang. I snatched up the receiver, said hello. A deep, gruff voice asked for Mrs. Sheffield, and I identified myself.
"We don't want you and your kind here," said that frightening, deep voice. "We know what's going on up there. That little chapel you built don't fool us none. It's a sham to hide behind while you flaunt God's rules of decency. Get out--before we take God's will into our own hands and drive every last one of you away from our mountains."
Unable to find a clever reply, I sat stunned and very shaky before he hung up. For long moments I just sat there with the receiver in my hand. The sun broke through the clouds and warmed my face . . . only then did I hang up. I looked around me at the rooms I myself had decorated to please my own taste, and found, much to my surprise, that these rooms no longer reminded me of my mother and her second husband. In here were only remnants of the past that I wanted to remember.
Cory and Carrie's baby pictures in silver frames on my dresser, placed next to those of Darren and Deirdre. They were look-alike twins, but when you knew them well, you could see they weren't the same. My eyes moved to the next silver frame, and there was Paul smiling at me, and Henny was in another. Julian sulked, in a way he used to think sexy, from a gold frame, and I also had a few snapshots of his mother, Madame Marisha, framed to keep near her son. But nowhere did I have a photograph of Bartholomew Winslow. I stared at the picture of my own father, who'd died when I was twelve. So much like Chris, only now Chris looked older. Turn around, and the boy you knew so well was a man. The years flew by so swiftly; once a day had seemed longer than a year did now.
Again I looked at the two sets of twins. It would take only someone very familiar with both sets to recognize the slight differences. There was a hint of Melodie in Jory's children, a vague resemblance. I stared at another picture, with Chris and myself, taken when we still lived in Gladstone, Pennsylvania. I'd been ten, he'd just turned thirteen. We stood in three feet of snow beside the snowman we'd just finished, smiling at Daddy as he took yet another picture. A photograph turning brown, one that our mother had put in her blue album. Our blue album now.
Little snippets of our lives were caught in all those little squares and oblongs of slick paper. Frozen forever in time, that Catherine Doll who sat on an attic windowsill, wearing a flimsy nightgown as Chris in the shadows took a time-lapse photo. How had I managed to sit so still, and hold that expression-- how? Through the nightgown I could see the tender form of young breasts--and in that girlish profile all the wistful sadness I'd felt back then.
How lovely she was--I'd been. I stared at her hard and long. That frail, slender girl had long ago disappeared in the middle-aged woman I was now. I sighed for the loss of her, that special girl with her head full of dreams. I tried to tear my gaze away; instead, I got up to pick up the picture that Chris had carried with him to college, to medical school. When he was an intern, still he had this photograph with him. Was it this paper in my hand that had kept his love for me so strong? This attic face of a girl of fifteen, sitting in the moonlight? Longing, always longing for love that would last forever? I no longer looked like this girl I held in my hand. I looked like my mother the night she burned down the original Foxworth Hall.
Shrill telephone rings startled me back to the here and now. "I've had a flat tire," said Chris on hearing my small voice. "I had driven to another lab and s
pent a few hours there, so when I came back I saw all those messages from you about Jory. Jory can't be worse, can he?"
"No, darling, he's no worse."
"Cathy, what's wrong?"
"I'll tell you when you get here."
Chris reached home an hour later and rushed in to embrace me before he hurried to Jory. "How's my son?" he asked even as he sat on Jory's bed and reached to feel his pulse. "I hear from your mother that someone opened all your windows and the rain soaked you."
"Oh!" cried Toni. "Who could have done such an awful thing? I'm so sorry, Doctor Sheffield. It's my habit to check on Jory, I mean Mister Marquet, two or three times during the night, even if he doesn't call for me."
Jory grinned at her in a happy way. "I think you can stop calling me Mister Marquet now, Toni." His voice was very weak and hoarse. "And this happened on your day off."
"Oh," she said, "that must have been the morning I drove into the city to visit my girlfriend."
"It's just a cold, Jory," said Chris, checking his lungs again. "There's no hint of fluid in your lungs, and from your symptoms you don't have the flu. So swallow your medicine, drink the fluids Toni brings you and stop fretting about Melodie."
Later, sprawled in his favorite chair in our sitting room, Chris listened to everything I had to say. "Did you recognize the voice?"
"Chris, I don't know any of the villagers well enough. I do my damndest to stay away from them." "How do you know it was a villager?"
That thought had never occurred to me. I'd just presumed. Nevertheless, as soon as Jory was well enough, we both determined to leave this house.
"If it's what you want," said Chris, looking around with some regret. "I like it here, I must admit. I like all the space around us, the gardens, the servants who wait on us, and I'll be sorry to leave. But let's not flee too far. I don't want to leave my work in the university."
"Chris, don't worry. I won't take that away from you. When we leave here, we will go to
Charlottesville and pray to God nobody there will know that I'm your sister."
"Cathy, my dearest, sweetest wife, I don't think even if they knew, they'd give a damn. And besides, you look more like my daughter than my wife."
Wonderfully sweet as he was, he could say that with honesty in his eyes. I knew, then he was blind when he looked at me. He saw what he wanted to see, and that was the girl I used to be.
He laughed at my doubting expression. "I love the woman you've become. So don't you go looking for the tarnish when I deliver to you eighteen-karatgold honesty. I'd say twenty-four karat, but you'd then say it was too soft and therefore useless functionally. So I give to you the best there is: my eighteen-karat love that truly believes you are beautiful inside, outside, and in between"
Cindy flew in for one of her whirlwind visits, breathlessly gushing out every detail of her life in exquisite minute detail since last she'd seen us. It seemed incredible that so much could happen to one girl of nineteen.
The instant we were inside the grand foyer, she raced up the stairs, hurling herself into Jory's arms with such abandon I thought she might tip over his chair. "Really," he laughed, "you weigh more than a feather, Cindy." He kissed her, looked her over, then laughed. "Wow! What kind of outfit is that, anyway?"
"The kind that is going to fill the eyes of a certain brother named Bart with horror. I picked this out just to annoy him and dear Uncle Joel."
Jory turned solemn. "Cindy, if I were you, I'd stop deliberately baiting Bart. He's not a little boy anymore."
Unknown to Cindy, Toni had stepped into the room and stood patiently waiting to take Jory's temperature.
"Oh," said Cindy, turning to see Toni. "I thought after that terrible scene Bart made in New York that you'd see him for what he really is and leave this place." The look in Toni's eyes made Cindy glance again at Jory, then back to Toni again, and she laughed. "Well, now you've got good sense! I can read your eyes, Toni, Jory. You're in love! Hooray!" She rushed to hug and kiss Toni before she settled down near Jory's chair and stared up at him with adoration. "I met Melodie in New York. She cried a lot when I told her how pretty the twins are . . . but the day after your divorce went through, she married another dancer. Jory, he looks a lot like you, only not nearly as handsome, and he doesn't dance as well, either."
Jory kept his small smile, as if Melodie had been put on the shelf and there she'd stay. He turned his head to grin at Toni. "Well, there goes my alimony payment. At least she could have let me know."
Again Cindy was staring at Toni. "What about Bart?"
"What about me?" asked a baritone voice from the open doorway.
Only then did we all notice that Bart was in the doorway, lounging insolently against the frame, taking in all we said and did as if we were specimens in his special zoo of family oddities.
"Well,"_ he drawled, "as I live and breathe, our breathless little imitation Marilyn Monroe has come to thrill us all with her stagey presence."
"That's not how I'd describe my feelings on seeing you again," Cindy said with her eyes flashing. "I'm chilled, not thrilled."
Bart looked her over, taking in her skin-tight gold leather pants, her striped cotton knit sweater of white and gold. The horizontal stripes emphasized her breasts, which jiggled freely each time she moved, and knee-high gold boots decorated her feet and legs.
"When are you leaving?" asked Bart while he stared at Toni sitting on Jory's bed and holding his hand. Chris sat next to me on a love seat, trying to catch up on some mail that had been delivered to the house and not to his office.
"Dear brother, say what you will, I don't care. I've come to see my parents and the rest of my family. I'll be leaving soon enough. Chains of steel couldn't keep me here longer than necessary." She laughed and stepped closer and looked up into his face. "You don't have to like me, or approve of me. And even if you open your mouth and say something insulting I'll just laugh again. I've found a man to love me that makes you look like something drug up from the Dismal Swamp!"
"Cindy!" said Chris sharply, putting down his unopened mail. "While you are here, you will dress appropriately, and you will treat Bart with respect, as he will treat you. I'm sick of these childish arguments about nothing."
Cindy looked at him with hurt eyes, making me say apologetically, "Darling, it is Bart's home. And sometimes I would like to see you in clothes that aren't too small."
Her blue eyes changed from those of a woman to those of a child. She wailed, "You're both taking his side--when you know he's nothing but a crazy creep out to make us all unhappy!"
Toni sat uncomfortably until Jory leaned to whisper something in her ear, and then she was smiling. "It doesn't mean anything," I heard him say in an undertone. "I believe Bart and Cindy enjoy tormenting one another."
Unfortunately Bart's attention was drawn from Cindy to take notice of Jory with his arm about Toni's shoulders. He scowled, then beckoned to Toni. "Come with me. I want to show you the inside of the chapel with all its new additions."
"A chapel? Why do we need a chapel?" asked Cindy, who had not been informed of the newest room transformed.
"Cindy, Bart wanted a chapel added to this house." "Well, Mom, if anybody ever needed a chapel close at hand, it's the creep of the hill and the Hall." My second son didn't say a word.
Toni refused to go with him. She gave him the excuse of needing to bathe the twins. Anger lit up Bart's eyes before it died, leaving him standing there, strangely desolate looking. I got up to take his hand. "Darling, I'd love to see what new additions you've made in the chapel."
"Some other time," he said.
I watched him covertly at the dinner table as Cindy taunted Bart in rather ridiculous ways that might have made the rest of us laugh if he could only see the humor she displayed. However, Bart had never been able to laugh at himself, more the pity. He took everything so seriously. Her grin was triumphant. "You see, Bart," she teased, "I can put away my childish foibles, even physical ones. But you can't put away anything
that sours your guts and chews away on your brain. You're like a sewer, ready to hold all that's stinking and rotten and never give it up."
Still he said nothing.
"Cindy," spoke up Chris, who'd remained quiet during our evening meal, "apologize to Bart."
"No."
"Then get up and leave the table, and eat in your room until you can learn to speak pleasantly."
Her eyes flashed balefully again, this time at Chris. "ALL RIGHT! I'll go to my room--but tomorrow I'm leaving this house and I'm never coming back! NOT EVER!"
Finally Bart had something to say. "The best news I've heard in years."
Cindy was in tears before she reached the dining room archway. I didn't jump up to follow her this time. I sat on, pretending nothing was amiss. Always in the past I'd shielded Cindy, chastised Bart, but I was seeing him with new eyes. The son I'd never known had facets that weren't all dark and dangerous.
"Why don't you go to Cindy, as you always have in the past, Mother?" asked Bart, as if
challenging me.
"I haven't finished my dinner, Bart. And Cindy has to learn to respect the opinions of others."
He sat staring at me as if completely taken off guard.
Early the next morning, Cindy stormed into our room without knocking, catching me wrapped in a towel, fresh from my bath, and Chris was still shaving. "Mom, Dad, I'm leaving," she said stiffly. "I won't enjoy myself here. I'm wondering why I even bothered to come back. It's clear you've decided to take Bart's side on every issue, and if that's the case, then I'm finished. I'll be twenty next April, and that's old enough not to need a family."
Her eyes smeared with the tears that came unbidden. Her voice turned small and broken. "I want to say thanks to both of you for being wonderful parents when I was little and needed someone like both of you. I'm going to miss you and Daddy, and Jory and Darren and Deirdre, but every time I come here, I leave feeling sick. If ever you decide to live somewhere far from Bart, maybe you'll see me again . ... maybe."