“Another year came, and that summer Momma didn’t even visit us at all! Then, in October she showed up again to tell us she’d married a second time and had spent the summer touring Europe on her honeymoon! I could have killed her! She could have told us, but she’d gone away and not said a word to explain! She brought us expensive gifts, clothes that didn’t fit, and thought that made up for everything, when it didn’t make up for anything! Finally I was able to convince Chris we should find a way to escape that house and forget about inheriting a fortune. He didn’t want to go, because he thought that any day the grandfather might die, and he wanted to go to college, then medical school and become a doctor—like you.”
“A doctor like me . . .” said Dr. Sheffield with a strange sigh. His eyes were soft with sympathy, and something darker too. “It’s a strange story, Cathy, and hard to believe.”
“Wait a minute!” I cried. “I haven’t finished. I haven’t told you the worst part! The grandfather did die, and he did write our mother into his will so she’d inherit his tremendous fortune—but he added a codicil that said she could never have children. If it were ever proven she’d given birth to children by her first husband, she’d have to forfeit everything she’d inherited and everything she’d bought with the money!”
I paused. I glanced at Chris who sat pale and weak looking, staring at me with hurt and pleading eyes. But he needn’t have worried; I wasn’t going to speak of Cory. I turned again to the doctor. “Now that mysterious, elusive factor you can’t put your finger on—the thing wrong with Carrie that makes her throw up, and us too sometimes. It’s really very simple. You see, once our mother knew she could never claim us and keep the fortune, she decided to get rid of us. The grandmother began to add sugared doughnuts to the basket. We ate them eagerly enough, not knowing that they were coated with arsenic.”
And so I’d said it.
Poisoned doughnuts to sweeten our imprisoned days as we stole from our room by using the wooden key Chris had fashioned. Day by day dying for nine months while we sneaked into our mother’s grand bedroom suite and took all the one- and five-dollar bills we could find. Almost a year we’d traversed those long, dim corridors, stealing into her room to take what money we could.
“In that one room, Doctor, we lived three years and four months and sixteen days.”
When I’d concluded my long tale the doctor sat very quietly staring at me with compassion, shock, and concern. “So you see, Doctor,” I said to finish, “you can’t force us to go to the police and tell our story! They might throw the grandmother and our mother in jail, but we’d suffer too! Not only from the publicity, but also from being separated. They’d put us in foster homes, or make us wards of the court, and we’ve sworn to stay together, always!”
Chris was staring at the floor. He spoke without looking up. “Take care of our sister. Do whatever is needed to make her well again, and both Cathy and I will find a way to meet our obligations.”
“Hold on, Chris,” said the doctor in his slow, patient way. “You and Cathy have been fed arsenic too and will need to undergo many of the same tests I order for Carrie. Look at the two of you. You’re thin, pale, weak. You need good food, rest and plenty of fresh air and sunshine. Maybe there is something I can do to help.”
“You’re a stranger to us, sir,” Chris said respectfully, “and we don’t expect or need anyone’s charity or pity. Cathy and I are not that weak or sick. Carrie’s the one most affected.”
Full of indignation, I spun about to glare at Chris. We’d be fools to reject help from this kind man just so we could salvage some of our pride that had already gone down in defeat so many times before. What difference did one more time make?
“. . . Yes,” continued the doctor, as if both Chris and I had already agreed to his generous offer to help, “expenses are not as high for an ‘out’ patient as for an ‘in’ patient—no room and no board to pay. Now listen, this is only a suggestion which you’re free to refuse, and travel on to wherever you have in mind—by the way, where are you going?”
“To Sarasota, Florida,” Chris said weakly. “Cathy and I used to swing from the ropes we tied to the attic rafters, so she thought we could become aerialists, with some practice.” It sounded silly when I heard him say it. I expected the doctor to laugh, but he didn’t. He just looked sadder.
“Honestly, Chris, I would hate to see you and Cathy risk your lives like that, and as a doctor I feel I can’t allow you to go as you are. Everything in my personal ethics and professional ones too refuses to let you go on without medical treatment. Common sense tells me I should keep my distance and not give a damn about what happens to three kids on their own. For all I know that horrendous story may just be a pack of lies to gain my sympathy.” He smiled kindly to take the sting from his words. “Yet, my intuition tells me to believe your story. Your expensive clothes, your watches and the sneakers on your feet, your pale skin and the haunted look in your eyes all testify to the truth.”
Such a voice he had, hypnotizing, soft and melodious, with just a bit of Southern accent. “Come,” he said, charming me, if not Chris, “forget about pride and charity. Come live in my home of twelve lonely rooms. God must have put Henrietta Beech on that bus to lead you to me. Henny is a terrific worker and keeps my house spotless, but she constantly complains that twelve rooms and four baths are just too much for one woman to care for. Out in the back I have four acres of garden. I hire two gardeners to help, for I just can’t devote as much time to the garden as I need to.” At this point he riveted his brilliant eyes directly on Chris. “You can help earn your keep by mowing the lawns, clipping the hedges and preparing the gardens for winter. Cathy can help out in the house.” He shot me a questioning, teasing look with his eyes twinkling. “Can you cook?”
Cook? Was he kidding? We’d been locked upstairs for more than three years, and we’d never even had a toaster to brown our bread in the mornings, and no butter, or even margarine!
“No!” I snapped. “I can’t cook. I’m a dancer. When I’m a famous prima ballerina I’ll hire a woman to do the cooking, like you do. I don’t want to be stuck away in some man’s kitchen, washing his dishes and fixing his meals and having his babies! That’s not for me.”
“I see,” he said, his expression blank.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” I explained. “I will do what I can to help out Mrs. Beech. I’ll even learn how to cook for her—and you.”
“Good,” he said. His eyes were laughing, full of sparkling lights as he templed his fingers beneath his chin and smiled. “You are going to be a prima ballerina, and Chris is going to be a famous doctor, and you are going to achieve all of this by running away to Florida to perform in the circus? Of course I’m of another stodgy generation and I can’t fathom your reasoning. Does it really make good sense to you?”
Now that we were out of the locked room and the attic and in the full light of reality, no, it didn’t make good sense. It sounded like foolish, childish and unrealistic folly.
“Do you realize what you’d be up against as professional aerialists?” the doctor asked. “You would have to compete against people who’ve trained from early childhood, people descended from long lines of circus performers. It wouldn’t be easy. Still, I’ll admit there’s something in those blue eyes that tells me you two are very determined young people, and no doubt you’ll get what you go after if you really want it badly enough. But what about school? What about Carrie? What’s she going to do while the two of you swing from trapezes? Now don’t bother to answer,” he said quickly when my lips parted. “I’m sure you can come up with something to convince me, but I must dissuade you. First you have to tend to your health and Carrie’s. Any day the two of you could come down as swiftly as Carrie and be just as sick. After all, didn’t all three of you exist under the same miserable conditions?”
Four of us, not three, was the whisper in my ears, but I didn’t speak of Cory.
“If you meant it about taking us
in until Carrie is well,” said Chris with his eyes shining suspiciously, “we’re extremely grateful. We’ll work hard, and when we can we’ll leave and repay you every cent you spent on us.”
“I meant it. And you don’t have to repay me, except by helping out in the house and the yard. So, you see, it isn’t pity, or charity, only a business arrangement to benefit all of us.”
A New Home
That’s the way it started. We moved quietly into the doctor’s home and into his life. We took him over, I know that now. We made ourselves important to him, as if he hadn’t had a life before we came. I know that now too. He made it seem we were doing him a favor by relieving him of a dreary, lonely life by adding our youthful presence. He made us feel that we were being generous to share his life, and oh, we did want to believe in someone.
He gave Carrie and me a grand bedroom to share, with twin beds and four tall windows facing south, and two windows facing east. Chris and I looked at each other with a terrible shared hurt. We were to sleep in different rooms for the first time in ever so long. I didn’t want to part from him and face the night with only Carrie, who could never protect me as he had. I think our doctor may have sensed something that told him to fade into the background, for he excused himself and drifted toward the end of the hall. Only then did Chris speak. “We’ve got to be careful, Cathy. We wouldn’t want him to suspect. . . .”
“There is nothing to suspect. It’s over,” I answered, but I didn’t meet his eyes, guessing, even then, that it would never be over. Oh, Momma, look what you started by putting the four of us in one locked room, and leaving us there to grow up, knowing how it would be! You of all people should have known!
“Don’t,” Chris whispered. “Kiss me good night, and there won’t be any bedbugs here.”
He kissed me, I kissed him, we said good night, and that was all. With tears in my eyes I watched my brother back down the hall, still holding his eyes on me.
In our room Carrie let out a loud howl. “I can’t sleep in no little bed all by myself!” she wailed. “I’ll fall off! Cathy, why is that bed so little?”
It ended up with Chris and the doctor coming back so they could take away the nightstand that separated the twin beds. Then they shoved the narrow beds so close they appeared one wide bed. This pleased Carrie enormously, but, as the nights passed, somehow the crack between our beds grew ever wider until I, the restless sleeper, finally woke up with one leg and one arm in the crack and Carrie being pulled along with me to the floor.
I loved that room Paul gave us. It was so beautiful with its pale blue wallpaper, and matching curtains. The rug was blue; each of us had a chair with lemon-yellow cushions and all the furniture was antique white. It was the kind of room a girl should have. No gloom. No pictures of hell on the wall. All the hell I had was in my mind, put there by thinking back much too often. Momma could have found another solution if she’d really wanted to! “She didn’t have to lock us up! It was greed, avarice, that damned fortune . . . and Cory was in the ground because of her weakness!”
“Forget it, Cathy,” said Chris when we were again saying good night.
I was terribly afraid to tell him what I suspected. My head bowed low against his chest. “Chris, it was a sinful thing we did, wasn’t it?”
“It won’t happen again,” he said stiffly, then broke away and almost ran down the hall as if I were chasing. I wanted to lead a good life and hurt no one, especially Chris. Even so, I had to leave my bed around midnight and go to Chris. While he slept I crawled in the bed beside him. He wakened when he heard the bedsprings squeak. “Cathy, what the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s raining outside,” I whispered. “Just let me lie beside you for a moment or so, and then I’ll go away.” Neither of us moved, or even breathed. Then without even knowing how it came about, we were in each other’s arms and he was kissing me. Kissing with such ardent fervor it made me respond when I didn’t want to. It was evil and wrong! Yet I didn’t really want him to stop. That sleeping woman inside of me woke up and took over, wanting what he felt he had to have, and I, the thinking, calculating part, pushed him away. “What are you doing? I thought you said this would never happen again.”
“You came . . .” he said hoarsely.
“Not for this!”
“What do you think I’m made of? Steel? Cathy, don’t do this again.”
I left him and cried in my own bed, for he was down the hall and not there to waken me if I had a nightmare. No one to comfort me. No one to lend me strength. Then my mother’s words came to haunt me with a horrible thought—was I so much like her? Was I going to be the kind of weak, clinging-vine female who always needed a man for protection? No! I was sufficient unto myself!
I believe it was the next day that Dr. Paul brought me four pictures to hang. Ballerinas in four different positions. For Carrie he brought a milk-glass vase filled with delicate plastic violets. Already he’d learned about Carrie’s passion for all things purple or red. “Do what you can to make this room yours,” he told us. “If you don’t like the color scheme, we’ll have it changed in the spring.” I stared at him. We wouldn’t be here, come spring.
Carrie sat holding her vase of fake violets while I forced myself to speak up and say what I had to. “Dr. Paul, we won’t be here in the spring, so we can’t afford to let ourselves become too attached to the rooms you’ve given us.”
He was in the doorway, ready to depart, but he halted and turned to look back at me. He was tall, six two or more, and his shoulders were so wide they almost filled the doorway.
“I thought you liked it here,” he said in a wistful tone, his dark eyes gone bleak.
“I do like it here!” I quickly answered. “We all like it here, but we can’t take advantage of your good nature forever.” He nodded without replying and left, and I turned to see Carrie staring at me with a great deal of animosity.
Daily the doctor took Carrie to the hospital with him. At first she’d wail and refuse to go unless I went along too. She made up fantastic stories about what they did to her in the hospital, and complained about all the questions they asked her.
“Carrie, we never tell lies; you know that. The three of us always tell the truth to each other—but we don’t go around telling everybody about our past lives upstairs—understand ?”
She stared up at me with those big, haunted eyes. “I don’t tell nobody Cory went away to heaven and left me. I don’t tell nobody but Dr. Paul.”
“You told him?”
“I couldn’t help it, Cathy,” Carrie buried her head in her pillow and cried.
So now the doctor knew about Cory, and how he was supposed to have died in a hospital from pneumonia. How sad his eyes were that night when he questioned Chris and me, wanting all the details of Cory’s illness that ended in his death.
Chris and I were huddled up close on the living room sofa when Paul said, “I’m very happy to report that arsenic has not done any permanent damage to any of Carrie’s organs, as we all feared it might have. Now don’t look like that. I haven’t let out your secret but I had to tell the lab technicians what to look for. I made up a story about how you’d taken the poison accidentally, and your parents were good friends of mine, and I’m considering making you three my legal wards.”
“Carrie’s going to live?” I whispered, drowning in relief.
“Yes, she’ll live—if she doesn’t go swinging on trapezes.” He smiled again. “I’ve made appointments for the two of you to be examined tomorrow—by me—unless you have some objections.”
Oh, I had objections! I wasn’t keen about taking off my clothes and having him go over me, even if a nurse was there. Chris told me I was silly to think a doctor of forty would get any erotic pleasure from looking at a girl of my age. But when he said it, he was looking the other way, so how could I tell what he was really thinking? Maybe Chris was right, for when I was on that examination table, naked and covered by a paper robe, Dr. Paul didn’t seem the same man who
se eyes followed me around when we were in the “home” side of his house. He did to me the same things he’d done to Carrie, but asked even more questions. Embarrassing questions.
“You haven’t menstruated in more than two months?”
“I’ve never been regular, really! I started when I was twelve, and twice I skipped from three to six months. I used to worry about it, but Chris read up on the subject in one of the medical books Momma brought him, and he told me too many anxieties and too much stress can make a girl miss. You don’t think . . . I mean . . . there isn’t anything wrong with me, is there?”
“Not that I can tell. You seem normal enough. Too thin, too pale, and you’re slightly anemic. Chris is too, but because of his sex not as much as you are. I’m going to prescribe special vitamins for all three of you.”
I was glad when it was over and I could put on my clothes and escape that office where the women who worked for Dr. Paul looked at me so funny.
I raced back to the kitchen. Mrs. Beech was preparing dinner. Her smile shone big and wide when I came in, lighting up a moon face with skin as slick as oiled rubber. The teeth she displayed were the whitest, most perfect teeth I’d ever seen. “Golly, am I happy that’s over!” I said, falling into a chair and picking up a knife to peel potatoes. “I don’t like doctors poking me over. I like Dr. Paul better when he’s just a man. When he puts on that long white jacket, he also puts a shade over his eyes. Then I can’t see what he’s thinking. And I’m very good at reading eyes, Mrs. Beech.”
She grinned at me with teasing devilry, then whipped out a pink notepad from the huge square pocket of her starched white apron. With the apron tied about her middle she resembled nothing more than a rolled-up goosedown comforter, waddling about speechless. By now I knew she had a congenital speech defect. Though she was trying to teach Chris, Carrie and me to understand her sign language, as yet none of us had caught on enough to carry on a quick conversation. I think I enjoyed her notes too much—notes she could write lightning-fast in a very abbreviated style. Doctor says, she’d written, young people need lots of good fresh fruit and vegetables, plenty of lean meat, but go easy on starches and desserts. He wants to put on you muscle not fat.
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 42