He slammed the door and left me, and I soon fell asleep to dream of Bart Winslow, my mother’s second husband. We were waltzing in the grand ballroom of Foxworth Hall, and upstairs, near the balcony balustrade, two children were hidden inside the massive chest with the wire screen backing. The Christmas tree over in the corner towered up to heaven, and hundreds of people danced with us, but they were made of transparent cellophane, not of the healthy flesh, blood and muscle that was the beauty of Bart and I. Bart suddenly stopped dancing, and picked me up to carry me up the broad stairs, and down on the sumptuous swan bed he laid me. My beautiful gown of green velvet and softer green chiffon melted beneath the touch of his burning hands—and then that powerful male shaft that entered me and wound about me started shrieking, screaming, and each loud cry sounded exactly like a telephone ringing.
I bolted awake . . . why did a telephone ringing in the dead of night always have such a threatening sound? I sleepily reached for the receiver. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Julian Marquet?”
I came awake a bit more, and rubbed at my eyes. “Yes, this is she.”
She named a hospital on the other side of town. “Mrs. Marquet, would you please come as quickly as possible? If you can, have someone else drive you. Your husband was in an auto accident, and is even now in surgery. Bring with you his insurance papers, identification, and any medical history you have. . . . Mrs. Marquet . . . are you there?”
No. I wasn’t there. I was back in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, and I was twelve years old. Two state troopers were in the driveway, with a white car parked . . . and swiftly they were striding to interrupt a birthday party to tell us all that Daddy was dead. Killed in an accident on Greenfield Highway.
“Chris! Chris!” I screamed, terrified he might have gone.
“I’m here. I’m coming. I knew you’d need me.”
* * *
In that dim and lonely hour that comes before dawn, Chris and I arrived at the hospital. In one of those sterile waiting rooms we sat down to wait and find out if Julian would survive the accident and the surgery. Finally, around noon, after hours in the recovery room, they brought him down.
They had him laid out on what they called a “fracture bed”—a torturous looking device that strung up his right leg which wore a cast from his toes to his hip. His left arm was broken, and in a cast, and strung up in a peculiar way too. His pale face was lacerated and bruised. His lips, usually so full and red, were as pale as his skin. But all of that was nothing compared to his head! I shivered to look! His head had been shaved and small holes drilled for metal calipers to be hooked in to pull his head up and backward! A leather collar lined with fleece was fastened about his neck. A broken neck! Plus a leg fracture, and a compound fracture of his forearm—to say nothing of the internal injuries that had kept him on the operating table three hours!
I cried out, “Will he live?”
“He is on the critical list, Mrs. Marquet,” they answered so calmly. “If he has other close relatives, we suggest you contact them.”
Chris made the call to Madame Marisha, for I was deathly afraid he’d pass away any moment, and I might miss the only chance to tell him I loved him. And if that happened, I’d be cursed and haunted all through the rest of my life.
* * *
Days passed. Julian flitted in and out of consciousness. He stared at me with eyes lackluster, unfocused. He spoke but his voice came so thick, heavy and unintelligible I couldn’t understand. I forgave him for all the little sins, and the big ones too, as you are apt to when death is around the corner. I rented a room in the hospital next to his where I could catch naps, but I never had a full night’s rest. I had to be there when he came to, where he could see and know me, so I could plead with him to fight, to live, and, most of all, say all the words I’d so stingily kept from his ears. “Julian,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from saying it so often, “please don’t die!”
Our dancing friends and musicians flocked to the hospital to offer what consolation they could. His room filled with flowers from hundreds of fans. Madame Marisha flew up from South Carolina and stalked into the room wearing a dreary black dress. She gazed down on the unconscious face of her only child without any expression of grief. “Better he die now,” she said flatly, “than to wake up and find himself a cripple for life.”
“How dare you say that?” I flared, ready to strike her. “He’s alive—and he’s not doomed. His spinal cord wasn’t injured! He’ll walk again, and dance again too!”
Then came the pity and disbelief to shimmer her jet eyes—and then she was in tears. She who’d boasted she never cried, never showed grief, wept in my arms. “Say it again, that he’ll dance—oh, don’t lie, he’s got to dance again!”
Five horrible days came and went before Julian could focus his eyes enough to really see. Unable to turn his head, he rolled his eyes my way. “Hi.”
“Hello, dreamer. I thought you were never going to wake up,” I said.
He smiled, a thin ironic smile. “No such luck, Cathy love.” His eyes flicked downward to his strung-up leg. “I’d rather be dead than like this”
I got up and went to his fracture bed that was made with two wide strips of rough canvas slipped over strong rods, and a mattress was beneath this that could be lowered enough to allow a bedpan to be placed in position. It was a hard, unyielding bed to lie on, yet I stretched beside him very carefully, and curled my fingers into his tangle of uncombed hair—what he had left. My free hand stroked his chest. “Jule, you’re not paralyzed. Your spinal cord was not severed, crushed, or even bruised. It’s just in shock, so to speak.”
He had an uninjured arm that could have reached to hold me, but it stayed straight at his side. “You’re lying,” he said bitterly. “I can’t feel one damn thing from my waist down. Not your hand on my chest either. Now get the hell out of here! You don’t love me! You wait until you think I’m ready to kick off, and then you come with your sweet words! I don’t want or need your pity—so get the hell out, and stay out!”
I left his bed and reached for my purse. Crying, even as he cried and stared at the ceiling. “Damn you for wrecking our apartment!” I stormed when I could talk. “You tore up my clothes!” I rampaged, angry now, and wanting to slap his face that was already bruised and swollen. “Damn you for breaking all our beautiful things! You knew how painstakingly we chose all those lamps, the accessories that cost a fortune. You know we wanted to leave them as heirlooms for our children. Now we’ve got nothing left to leave anyone!”
He grinned, satisfied. “Yeah, nothing left for nobody.” He yawned, as if dismissing me, but I was unwilling to be dismissed. “Got no kids, thank God. Never gonna have any. You can get a divorce. Marry some son of a bitch and make his life miserable too.”
“Julian,” I said with such heavy sadness. “Have I made your life miserable?”
He blinked, as if not wanting to answer that, but I asked him again, and again, until I forced him to say, “Not altogether miserable—we had a few moments.”
“Only a few?”
“Well . . . maybe more than a few. But you don’t have to stay on and take care of an invalid. Get the hell out while you can. I’m no good, you know that. I’ve been unfaithful to you time and again.”
“If you are again, I’ll cut your heart out!”
“Go ‘way, Cathy. I’m tired.” He sounded sleepy from the many sedatives they fed into him and shot into him. “Kids are not good for people like us anyway.”
“People like us . . . ?”
“Yeah, people like us.”
“How are we different?”
He mockingly, sleepily laughed, bitterly too. “We’re not real. We don’t belong to the human race.”
“What are we then?”
“Dancing dolls, that’s all. Dancing fools, afraid to be real people and live in the real world. That’s why we prefer fantasy. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t know. I always thought we were real.”
<
br /> “It wasn’t me who ruined your things, it was Yolanda. I watched, though.”
I felt sick, scared he was telling the truth. Was I only a dancing doll? Couldn’t I make my way in the real world, outside the theater? Wasn’t I, after all, any better at coping than Momma?
“Julian . . . I do love you, honest I do. I used to think I loved someone else, because it seemed so unnatural to go from one love to another. When I was a little girl, I used to believe love came only once in a lifetime, and that was the best kind. I thought once you loved one person, you never could love another. But I was wrong.”
“Get out and leave me alone. I don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say, not now. Now I don’t give a damn.”
Tears coursed my face and dropped down on him. He closed his eyes and refused to see, or listen. I leaned to kiss his lips, and they stayed tight, hard, unresponding. Next he spat, “Stop! You sicken me!”
“I love you, Julian,” I sobbed, “and I’m sorry if I realized it too late, and said it too late—but don’t let it be too late. I’m expecting your baby, the fourteenth in a long line of dancers . . . and that baby is a lot to live for, even if you don’t love me anymore. Don’t close your eyes and pretend not to hear, because you are going to be a father, whether or not you want to be.” He rolled his dark, shining eyes my way, and I saw why they shone, for they were full of tears. Tears of self-pity, or tears of frustration, I didn’t know. But he spoke more kindly, and there was a tone of love in his voice. “I advise you to get rid of it, Cathy. Fourteen is no luckier a number than thirteen.”
* * *
In the room next door, Chris held me in his arms all through the night.
I woke up early in the morning. Yolanda had been thrown from the car in that accident, and today she would be buried. Cautiously I eased from the fold of Chris’s arms, and I arranged his nodding head more comfortably before I stole away to take a peek into Julian’s room. He had a night nurse on duty, and she was sound asleep beside his bed. I stood in the doorway and watched him in the dim, greenish light from the lamp covered by a green towel. He was asleep, deeply asleep. The intravenous tube that led to his arm ran under the sheet and into his vein. For some reason I fixed my eyes upon that bottle with the pale yellow liquid that seemed more water than anything else, so quickly it was being depleted. I ran back to shake Chris awake. “Chris,” I said, as he tried to pull himself together, “isn’t that IV supposed to just trickle into his arm? It’s running out very quickly—too quickly, I think.”
Hardly were the words out of my mouth when Chris was up and running toward Julian’s room. He snapped on the ceiling light as he entered, then wakened the sleeping nurse. “Damn you for falling asleep! You were in here to watch him!” By the time he had that said, he’d pulled back the covers and there was Julian’s casted arm with the opening for the needle—and the needle was still inserted, and taped in position—but the tube had been cut! “Oh, God,” sighed Chris, “an air bubble must have reached his heart.”
I stared at the shiny scissors held so loosely in Julian’s slack right hand. “He cut the tube himself,” I whispered, “he cut the tube himself, and now he’s dead, dead, dead. . . .”
“Where did he get the scissors?” snapped Chris, while the nurse began to tremble. They were her small embroidery scissors she used to cut her crochet thread. “They must have fallen out of my pocket,” she said weakly. “I swear I don’t remember losing them—or maybe he took them when I was leaning over. . . .”
“It’s all right,” I said dully. “If he hadn’t done it this way, it would have been another. I should have known and warned you. There was no life for him if he could never dance again. No life at all.”
* * *
Julian was buried next to his father. On the headstone, I made sure Madame Marisha agreed to the name I added: Julian Marquet Rosencoff, beloved husband of Catherine, and thirteenth in a long line of Russian male ballet stars. Maybe it was ostentatious and gave away my own failure to love him enough while he lived, but I had to let him have it the way he wanted—or as I thought he wanted.
Chris, Paul, Carrie and I paused at the foot of Georges’s grave too, and I bowed my head to show respect to Julian’s father. Respect I should have given him too. Graveyards with their marble saints, angels, all so sweetly smiling, so pious or sober—how I hated them! They patronized we who lived; we who were made of fragile tissue and blood, who could grieve and cry while they would stand there for centuries, smiling piously down on all. And I was right back where I’d started.
* * *
“Catherine,” said Paul when we were all seated in the long black limousine, “your room is still as it was, all yours. Come home and live with Carrie and me until your baby is born. Chris will be there too, doing his internship at Clairmont Hospital.”
I stared over at Chris who was seated on the jumpseat, knowing he’d won a much better position in a very important hospital—and he was interning in a small, unimportant one. “Duke is so far away, Cathy,” he said with his eyes avoiding mine. “It was bad enough traveling when I was in college and med school . . . so if you don’t mind, let me be somewhere near so I can be here the day my nephew or niece arrives in the world.”
Madame Marisha jolted so her head almost struck the ceiling of the car. “You carry Julian’s child?” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me before? How wonderful!” She glowed, so the sadness dropped from her like a gloomy cloak. “Now Julian’s not dead at all—for he will father a son, who will be exactly like him!”
“It may be a girl, Madame,” Paul said softly, while he reached for my hand. “I know you long for a boy like your son, but I long for a little girl like Cathy and Carrie . . . but if it’s a boy, I won’t object.”
“Object?” cried Madame. “God in his infinite wisdom and mercy will send to Catherine the exact duplicate of Julian! And he will dance, and he will reach the fame that was waiting just around the corner for the son of my Georges!”
* * *
Midnight found me all alone on the back veranda, rocking back and forth in Paul’s favorite chair. My head was full of thoughts for the future. Thoughts of the past conflicted and nearly drowned me. The floorboards squeaked faintly; they were old and had known grief like mine before; they sympathized. The stars and moon were out; even a few fireflies came to bob about in the garden darkness.
The door behind me opened and closed quietly. I didn’t look to see who it was, for I knew. I was good at sensing people, even in the dark. He sat in the chair next to mine, and rocked his chair in the same rhythm as I rocked.
“Cathy,” he said softly. “I hate to see you sitting there with that lost and drained expression. Don’t think all the good things in your life have passed you by and nothing is left. You’re still very young, very beautiful, and after your baby is born, you can quickly whip yourself back into shape, and dance until you feel you’re ready to retire and teach.”
I didn’t turn my head. Dance again? How could I dance when Julian lay in the ground? All I had was the baby. I would make the baby the center of my life. I would teach my child to dance, and he or she would reach the fame that should have been Julian’s and mine. Everything that Momma failed to give us I would bestow on my child. Never would my child be neglected. When my child reached for me, I would be there. When my child cried out for Momma, he wouldn’t have to make do with only an older sister. No . . . I’d be like Momma was when she had Daddy. That was what hurt the most, that she could change from someone loving and kind into what she was, a monster. Never, never would I treat my child as she’d treated hers!
“Good night, Paul,” I said as I stood to go. “Don’t stay out here too long. You have to get up early, and you looked tired at dinner.”
“Catherine . . . ?”
“Not now. Later. I need time.”
Slowly I ascended the back stairs, thinking of the baby in my womb, how I had to be careful and not eat junk food; I had to drink plenty of milk, take vitamins
, and think happy thoughts . . . not vengeful ones. Every day from now on I would play ballet music. Inside me my baby would hear, and even before he or she was born a small living soul would be indoctrinated to the dance. I smiled, thinking of all the pretty tutus I could buy for my little girl. I smiled even more to think of a boy like his father with a wild tumble of dark curls. Julian Janus Marquet would be his name. Janus for looking both ways, ahead and behind.
I passed Chris who was ready to come down the stairs. He touched me. I shivered, knowing what he wanted. He didn’t have to say the words. I knew them backward and forward, inside and out, upside down, or right side up; I knew them . . . as I knew him.
Though I tried diligently to think only of the innocent child growing within me, still my thoughts would steal to my mother, filling me with hate, filling me with unwanted plans for revenge. For somehow she had caused Julian’s death too. If we’d never been locked away in the first place and needed to escape and run, then I would never have loved Chris, or Paul, and perhaps Julian and I would have met inevitably in New York. Then I could have loved him as he needed and wanted to be loved. I could have gone to him “virgin pure, brand new.”
And would that have made any difference, I asked over and over. . . . Yes! Yes! I convinced myself it would have made all the difference!
Interlude for Three
As my baby grew within me, I began to find the identity I had lost, for the ballet kept the real me always in an embryo state, enclosed by my desire to dance and succeed. I was now standing firmly on the ground with the fantasy of glamorous life pushed to the background. Not that I didn’t still crave the stage and the applause now and then. Oh, I had my sorrowful moments—but I had one sure way to shut them out. I turned my thoughts on my mother, on what she’d done to us. Another death on your record, Momma!
Dear Mrs. Winslow,
Are you still running away from me? Don’t you know yet you can never run fast enough or far enough? Someday I will catch up, and we will meet again. Perhaps this time you will suffer as you made me suffer, and, hopefully, thrice the amount.
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 68