I moved swiftly down the hall until I came to the rotunda. From the sounds below, I knew that Malcolm was still downstairs, probably in the library at his desk. I imagined him sitting there staring hatefully at the doorway, maybe in expectation of my arrival.
But I had no more interest in conversation with him tonight. All that had to be done was done. I was tired myself. I started for my bedroom, but stopped at the doorway of the trophy room. Something occurred to me, something I found deliciously vengeful and satisfying. I opened the door, snapped on the lights, and went to the desk behind which Malcolm often sat when he came up here to be by himself. I put the shawl filled with Alicia’s cut hair at the center of the desk and untied the knot so that the pile of beautiful chestnut strands lay open and exposed.
Then I turned, went back to the door, looked back at the sight of her amputated hair on his desk, smiled to myself, and snapped off the lights. I stood there for a few moments listening to the sounds of the house. Tonight every creak seemed amplified. The wind wrapped itself around the great mansion, whirling madly, tying it in a chilled rope. It would take days of warm summer sunlight to defrost the icy wall over this house, I thought. And throughout that summer, Alicia would sit in a dark, stuffy room below the great attic, waiting for the birth of a child she had not wanted and would not be a mother to. It was truly a prison sentence and I was truly a warden.
I did not cherish the role, but Malcolm had cast me in it and I knew the only way to defeat him was to perform it far better than he ever could have expected. He would live to regret this night, I thought, to regret what he had done to me and what he would make me do to her.
I went to my bedroom quickly and rushed myself to sleep, which had become the only true escape from the madness of Foxworth Hall, something that was ironically true for both of us, Alicia and me.
The weeks passed as I had predicted they would pass for Alicia—painfully, slowly. Every day, the minute I entered the room, she begged me to bring her Christopher.
“If not here,” she pleaded, “at least let him stand outside my window so I can peek at him, see him—I can’t stand this any longer.”
“Christopher has finally adjusted to your leaving. Why upset him now? If you really loved him, Alicia, you’d let things be.”
“Let it be? I’m his mother. My heart is breaking. The days only seem to get longer. A week in here is like a year!”
In the mornings she complained about being nauseated. In the afternoons she wept for Christopher. She was always tired, and more often than not, I would find her lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her once rosy cheeks paled, and even though I insisted she eat everything I brought to her, her face began to take on a gaunt look. After two months shut away in that room, dark circles formed around her eyes.
She usually kept a shawl over her head. After I had come in a dozen times and found her wearing it each time, I asked her why.
“Because I can’t stand the sight of myself with my hair like this every time I pass in front of the mirror,” she said.
“Why don’t you just cover the mirror,” I told her. I knew every woman had vanity, but I also knew that women like her had much, much more. Despite the fact that she had no cosmetics and her hair had been chopped away, I imagined that she still sat before the mirror pretending she was back in her beautiful bedroom suite preparing for an evening out with Garland, or planning what she was going to do with herself once her hair did grow back and she was free of this place.
Eventually, she took my suggestion and draped a sheet over the mirror. The dissipation of her beauty was a part of harsh reality that she would now rather avoid. However, when I walked in with her tray of food and I saw the sheet there, I didn’t remark about it.
She looked up at me from her bed, her eyes bright with tears of boredom and anger. She no longer wore the shawl; there was no reason for it since the mirror was covered.
“I thought you had forgotten my dinner,” she accused me. There was a new sharpness in her words. Her rage caused her to pronounce the consonants with exaggeration and her voice dropped in tone, almost sounding manly.
“Dinner? This is your lunch, Alicia,” I said. The realization brought surprise and horror to her face.
“Only lunch?” She looked at the small clock housed in an ivory cathedral on the dresser. “Only lunch?” she repeated. She sat up slowly and looked at me with frightened, frozen blue eyes. I knew that she had come to see me as her jailer. Whenever she thought of something new to do, she had to ask my permission. Her life was no longer her own.
“How is my Christopher? Does he miss me terribly? Does he ask about me every day?” she inquired, hanging on my responses.
“Sometimes,” I said. “The boys help to distract him.”
She nodded, pathetically trying to conjure up his image in her mind. I thought of him myself, beautiful golden-haired Christopher, his face regaining its happy joy after the first few months of sadness at being separated from his mother. His eyes sparkled once again as I read him his favorite story every night before bed. Truly, I was beginning to think of him as one of my own. He and my two boys played so well together in the nursery. Mal and Joel adored him. He seemed to carry all the sunshine of his mother in her happier days. But that sunny joy wasn’t seductive and lustful, it was bright and open, compassionate and innocent. He was more affectionate than either of my children. Sometimes I feared it was because both Mal and Joel had Malcolm’s blood in them. Every morning he would run to me screaming, “I want hundreds of kisses. I want hundreds of hugs, o-weee-a!” Only yesterday, when I put him down for his nap, his beautiful blue eyes looked up at me and he asked, “Can I call you Mommy sometimes?” Of course I did not tell Alicia any of this. Instead, I kept the conversation always focused on her.
“You look unclean today, Alicia. You should take better care of yourself,” I said, reprimanding her.
She turned abruptly on me, speaking through clenched teeth.
“I’m this way because I live from day to day in this … this closet.”
“This is bigger than a closet.”
“And the only sunlight I get to see is the sunlight that comes through the windows here and upstairs. Yesterday I sat in the rays until the sun moved on and left me in shadows. I feel like a flower hungry for the nourishment of the sun, a flower withering in a closet. Soon I will be dried and dead and you can press me into the pages of a book,” she said, her voice a mixture of anger and self-pity.
“You won’t be in here that much longer,” I said. “It won’t do you any good to sit and churn up your frustration day in and day out,” I added in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. That only infuriated her more.
“Maybe I should go outside for a quick secret walk. You can take the boys away from the house and …”
“But, Alicia, the servants. How could I explain if they saw you? From where would I tell them you came? Who would I tell them you were? And if the boys heard about it … don’t you see? What you are asking is impossible, just impossible.” She nodded. “I do feel sorry for you,” I said. “I hope you see that. Do you?” She looked up at me with scrutinizing eyes and then nodded. “No one is enjoying this, least of all me. Keep thinking about the future and you will survive the present,” I advised. Suddenly a new idea came to her.
“Send all the servants away,” she said, her face filled with the excitement of a new and, as she considered it, clever idea. “Give them a holiday, just for a weekend. That’s all I would need, one or two days of fresh air. Please.”
“You’re speaking ridiculous thoughts. I would advise you to get a hold of yourself,” I told her, gathering my own resolve. “You will only get yourself sick and maybe lose the baby. Now, feed yourself and the child within you,” I added, and left the room before she could say another thing about it.
When I returned to bring her her dinner that night, she did seem changed. She had bathed and dressed herself in a pretty blue chemise. However, she was sitting on her bed as if
she were in the back of a car and on a journey.
“Oh,” she said when I came in, “here we are at the restaurant. What shall we have to eat?” She was pretending to be in a car with Christopher. I was amazed, but I said nothing.
She looked at me with expectation, hopeful that I would become part of the fantasy. I put the tray down on the table and watched as Alicia continued to create an imaginary situation for herself, getting up and approaching the table as if it were a table in a restaurant. She did look brighter, happier.
Alicia referred to me as she would refer to a waitress in a restaurant. Suddenly, I realized there was something strange about it all. She wasn’t pretending just for the fun of it; she was actually experiencing this journey. She rattled on and on as if I weren’t there, or as if I were really some stranger. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
She dismissed me by saying, “You can take those now,” referring to the dirty dinner dishes.
She began to feed her imaginary Christopher, telling him that after they left the restaurant, they would drive to the park, where they would see animals and go on the merry-go-round. I understood that the attic was to be envisioned as the park. She was wearing the nicest of all the dresses I had permitted her to bring. Her stomach was not quite swollen enough to prevent it, and she had torn a strip off a beige slip and tied it like a ribbon in her short strands of hair.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. She interrupted herself.
“Pardon me, Christopher,” she said to the empty chair beside her. “The waitress wants to know something. What was it, waitress?” she asked, singing the question.
I pulled in the corners of my mouth and straightened my back. She was smiling madly. Did she think I was going along with this charade? I didn’t repeat my question. Instead, I turned and carried the tray of dishes to the door.
“She said they are out of ice cream,” Alicia told her imaginary son. “But don’t worry. Perhaps we’ll see an ice cream parlor at the park, and we’ll never come back to this restaurant again, will we?”
I heard her laugh as I closed the door behind me. Madness, I thought, and for the first time since she had been brought back to Foxworth Hall, I couldn’t wait for her to leave again.
* * *
The pretending continued. The room at the end of the north wing became Alicia’s world of illusions. Sometimes when I entered, she and her imaginary son were in a car; sometimes they were on the ferry. A few times they were up in the attic. She was playing her Victrola and they had supposedly gone to see a puppet show. She made two hand puppets with her socks and used an armoire as the puppet stage.
Every time I entered, she called me something else. Either I was the waiter, the ticket taker at the puppet show, an engineer on a ferry boat… whatever; but never was I Olivia. I no longer saw any fear in her face when I arrived. She looked at me with a smile of anticipation on her face, waiting to see how I would react to her new inventions.
It went on and on like this, and then one day I came in and found that she had taken the sheet off the mirror. It no longer bothered her to look at herself and what she had become because she did not see that image. She saw whatever she imagined. With a brush in her hand she was standing in front of the mirror and stroking the air as if there were strands down around her shoulders.
The ironic thing about all this was that her complexion returned to its former peaches-and-cream richness. I knew that some women flourished during pregnancy. I had not been one of those women, but Alicia had remained quite beautiful during her pregnancy with Christopher. The same thing was true of this pregnancy, now aided by her illusions.
“What are you doing?” I asked her, and she turned away from the mirror. She hadn’t heard me enter.
“Oh, Olivia. Garland said Venus herself couldn’t have more beautiful hair than mine. Can you imagine? Men can be so extravagant with their flattery. They don’t know what it can do to a woman. I let him go on. Why not? Whom does it harm? Certainly not Venus.” She laughed, but her laugh was as rich and as full as her laugh used to be when Garland was alive.
She is going mad, I thought. Being locked up and pregnant, she is being driven into insanity. But it wasn’t my fault, I concluded. It was another sin for Malcolm to bear. Perhaps he had known this would happen; perhaps he had expected it. She would give birth to his baby and he would have the child. But she would be so unstable, he couldn’t turn over the large fortune to her. In fact, she might have to be committed. He would have it all—the child, the money, and good riddance to Alicia. We would adopt Christopher.
Such a scenario enraged me. Once again Malcolm Neal Foxworth would get his way, defeating everyone, even me. I couldn’t allow it.
“Alicia, Garland is dead. He couldn’t have told you that now. You must stop this, stop all of this ridiculous pretending before it drives you insane. Do you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?” She stood there, her smile unchanged. She heard only what she wanted to hear.
“There’s nothing he won’t buy for me, nothing he won’t do for me,” she said. “It’s terrible, I know; but all I need do is mention something I see or want, and the next day, the very next day, he will have it delivered. I’m so spoiled, but I can’t help it.
“Anyway,” she went on, turning back to the mirror and brushing the air, “Garland says he likes to spoil me. He says it gives him pleasure to spoil me and I have no right to take that pleasure away from him. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I’ve brought you the maternity clothes, Alicia,” I said. I thought that if I confronted her with that, I might be able to snap her back to reality quickly. I placed the pile of clothes on the bed. “Go through and sort them out. You can’t wear those things any longer.”
She didn’t turn around.
“Alicia!”
“Last night Garland said, he said … Alicia, don’t ask me for the moon or I will go mad trying to get it for you.” She laughed. “Should I ask him for the moon, Olivia?”
“The maternity clothing, Alicia,” I repeated. She continued to ignore me. Finally, I left the room, expecting she would confront the clothing herself and eventually realize what had to be done.
That evening, however, I lay there in my bed thinking about her insane ramblings. Of course, her pretending would have to be taking place in the present tense, I thought; but there was something about the way she referred to Garland that was more than just madness; it was eerie, as if he indeed had been visiting her nightly.
Suddenly a frightening thought occurred to me. What if Malcolm had disobeyed my orders and visited her? And what if she had looked at him and called him Garland? What if he were taking advantage of her madness and going to her in the middle of the night after I had gone to sleep? She would not realize that the man she embraced was not Garland but Malcolm. The possibility kept me from sleeping.
Sometime during the night I thought I heard footsteps in the hallway. By the time I looked out, Malcolm could have very well slipped around the corner in the hall and gone on to the north wing. I went back to my bed, put on my robe and slippers, and left my room very quietly. I was going to go to the north wing and merely open her door, but something better occurred to me. If he were in there, I would not want to give him the opportunity to get out of her bed. He could hear me coming down the hallway or move quickly before I had turned the key in the lock.
I went down to the front entrance to the attic instead. I put on the small light illuminating the stairway, closed the door softly behind me, confident that neither Malcolm nor any of the servants would hear me, and started up the stairway. My intention was to go through the attic and down the small stairway that opened into Alicia’s room. I would watch them for a while in the bed and then I would confront them.
But when I was in the attic, vaguely lit by the small stairway light, the light suddenly went out and I was plunged into complete darkness. I hesitated, not sure whether I should go forward or retreat. Driven by my original intenti
on, I went on, groping my way carefully through the attic.
I thought I remembered it well enough to make my way in the darkness. Then I heard loud scampering off to the right. Panic rose in my chest. I was sure it was rats, rats I could imagine running over my feet, causing me to fall, running over my face and body. Suddenly I felt as if I might faint. The scurrying seemed to whirl in my head. I had to get out of there!
I turned abruptly into a person standing there in the shadows! I barely subdued my scream, when I recognized an old dress form, but I had jumped back so abruptly that I tripped over a trunk and fell against a rack of old clothing, sending it toppling to the floor. Trying to regain my footing, I ran my hands over the floor. I touched something furry! A rat! My panic rose and I rushed forward on my hands and knees, knocking over a stack of old books. It was so hot, I could barely breathe.
I got to my feet, but I had lost my sense of direction. Everywhere I turned seemed to be a dead end. The darkness closed in around me, tightening its hold on me until I was unable to move to the right or to the left. Terror froze me. My feet felt leaden, my legs tied together. I willed myself to move, but I couldn’t take a single step. I began to sob silently.
The rats went wild, rushing over furniture, in and out of trunks and armoires. The entire attic seemed to be alive with hideous beasts. I imagined the shadowy forms of Malcolm’s ancestors scratching their way out of the walls, awakened by my turmoil. This was a house that tolerated no weakness or fear. When they smelled it on you, they sought to destroy you.
I turned to the nearest wall and began to feel my way down it in the direction of what I hoped was the front stairway. Frantically I bumped into old furniture and birdcages, and tripped over trunks. My hands clutched things that turned into pulsating, blood-warm creatures, even though somewhere I knew I was touching only articles of clothing or the arms of old chairs. Then my hair got caught by the tiny opened door of a birdcage and the cage came falling toward me. When I caught the pole in my hands, it felt like a long, dark snake. Everything here had become alive and sinister.
Garden of Shadows (Dollanganger) Page 19