As soon as possible I was going to inform him differently. But . . . even as Toni left the room, I sat on and on, thinking of Bart and how sad it was that he couldn’t hold on to love once he had it. Did he deliberately destroy love, afraid it would enslave him as he often accused me of having enslaved Chris, my own brother?
The endless days crept by. No longer did Toni’s eyes follow Bart with wistful yearning, pleading mutely with him to love her again as he had in the beginning. I began to admire the way she could keep her poise regardless of some of the insulting innuendoes Bart made during meal times. He took her former love for him and turned it against her, making it seem she was loose, depraved, immoral and he’d been wrongfully seduced.
Dinner after dinner, sitting there and watching the two drift further and further apart, driven there by all the ugly words Bart found so easy to say.
Toni took my place and played the games I used to entertain Jory with . . . only she could do so much more to light up his eyes and make him feel a man again.
Bit by bit the days began to mellow, the brown grass showed spikes of fresh green, the crocus came up in the woods, the daffodils blossomed, the tulips fired into flame, and the Grecian windflowers that Jory and I had planted everywhere the grass didn’t grow turned the hills into paint-smeared palettes. Chris and I stood again on the balcony watching the geese return north as we stared up at our old friend and sometimes enemy, the moon. I couldn’t take my eyes from the winged skein as they disappeared beyond the hills.
Life grew better with the coming of summer, when the snow couldn’t keep Chris away during the weekends. Tensions eased now that we had the great outdoors to escape to.
In June the twins were one year and six months old and able to run freely anywhere we would permit. We had swings from which they couldn’t fall hung from tree limbs, and how happy they were to be swung high . . . or what they considered high enough to be dangerous. They pulled the blossoms off the best of my flowers, but I didn’t care—we had thousands blooming, enough to fill all the rooms with daily fresh bouquets.
Now Bart was insisting that not only the twins should attend church services but Chris and I and Jory and Toni as well. It seemed a small enough thing to do. Each Sunday we sat in our front-row pews and stared up at the beautiful stained-glass window behind the pulpit. The twins always sat between Jory and me. Joel would don a black robe as he preached fire-and-brimstone sermons. Bart sat beside me, holding my hand in such a tight grip I had to listen or have my bones broken. Next to Toni, deliberately separated from me by my second son, was Chris. I knew those sermons were meant for us, to save us from eternal hellfires. The twins were restless, like all children their age, and didn’t like the pew, the confinement, the dullness of the overlong services. Only when we stood up to sing hymns did they stare up at us and seem enchanted.
“Sing, sing,” encouraged Bart, leaning to pinch tiny arms or tug on golden locks.
“Take your hands off my children!” snapped Jory. “They will sing or not sing, as is their choice.”
It was on again, the war between brothers.
Autumn again, then Halloween when Chris and I took the twins by their small hands and led them to the one neighbor we considered “safe” enough not to recriminate us or our children. Our little goblins timidly accepted their first Halloween trick-or-treat candy, then screamed all the way home with the thrill of having two Hershey bars and two packs of chewing gum of their very own.
Winter came, and Christmas and the New Year started without anything special happening, for this year Cindy didn’t fly home. She was too busy with her budding career to do more than call long distance or write short but informative letters.
Bart and Toni now moved in different universes.
Perhaps I was not the only one who guessed that Jory had fallen deeply in love with Toni, now that all attempts at restoring a brotherly relationship with Bart had failed. I couldn’t blame Jory, not when Bart had taken Melodie and driven her away and was even now trying to hold fast to Toni just because he could detect Jory’s growing interest. To keep Jory from having her, he was turning again toward Toni . . .
Loving Toni gave Jory new reasons for living. It was written in his eyes, written on his new zeal for getting up early and beginning all those difficult exercises, standing for the first time, using parallel bars we’d had put in his room. As soon as the water was warm enough, he swam the length of our large swimming pool three times in early mornings and late evenings.
Maybe Toni was still waiting for Bart to make her his wife, though she often denied this. “No, Cathy, I don’t love him now. I only pity him for not knowing who or what he is and, more importantly, what he wants for himself but money and more money.” It occurred to me that, inexplicably, Toni was as rooted here as any one of us.
The Sunday church services made me nervous and tired. The strong words shouted from the weak lungs of an old man brought back terrifying memories of another old man I’d seen but once. Devil’s issue. Devil’s spawn. Evil seed planted in the wrong soil. Even wicked thoughts were judged the same as wicked deeds—and what wasn’t sinful to Joel? Nothing. Nothing at all.
“We’re not going to attend anymore,” I stated firmly to Chris, “and we were fools to even try to please Bart. I don’t like the kind of ideas Joel is planting in the twins’ impressionable young heads.” True to Chris’s agreement, he and I refused to attend “church” services or allow the twins to hear all that shouting about Hell and its punishments.
* * *
Joel came to the play area in the gardens, under the trees where there were a sandbox, swings, a slide, and a spin-a-round that the twins loved to play on. It was a fine sunny day in July, and he looked rather touching and sweet as he sat between the twins and began to teach them how to do cat cradles, twining the string and intriguing the curious twins. They abandoned the sandpile with the pretty awning overhead and sat beside him, looking up at him in bright anticipation of making a new friend out of an old enemy.
“An old man knows many little skills to entertain small children. Do you know I can make airplanes and boats out of paper? And the boats will sail on the water.”
Their round eyes of amazement didn’t please me. I frowned. Anyone could do that.
“Save your energies for writing new sermons, Joel,” I said, meeting his meek, watery eyes. “I grew tired of the old ones. Where is the New Testament in your sermons? Teach Bart about that. Christ was born. He did deliver his Sermon on the Mount. Deliver to him that particular sermon, Uncle. Speak to us of forgiveness, of doing unto others as you would have done unto you. Tell us of the bread cast upon the waters of forgiveness returning to us tenfold.”
“Forgive me if I have been neglectful of our Lord’s one truly begotten son,” he said humbly.
“Come, Cory, Carrie,” I called, getting up to leave. “Let’s go see what Daddy is doing.”
Joel’s lowered head jerked upright. His faded blue eyes took on heaven’s deeper blue. I bit down on my tongue to observe the twisted smile that Joel displayed. He nodded sagely. “Yes, I know. To you they are the ‘other twins’—those born of evil seed planted in the wrong soil.”
“How dare you say that to me!” I flared.
I didn’t realize then that by occasionally calling Jory’s twins by the names of my beloved dead twins I was only adding fuel to the fire—a fire that was already, unknown to me, sending up small red sparks of brimstone.
Comes a Morning Dark
A storm threatened a perfectly lovely summer day with dark ominous clouds, forcing me to hurry outdoors to cut my morning flowers while they were still fresh with dew. I drew up short when I saw Toni snipping yellow and white daisies that she brought to Jory in a small milkglass vase. She put them near the table where Jory was working on another watercolor showing a lovely dark-haired woman very much like Toni picking flowers. I was hidden by the dense shrubbery and could take a peek now and then without either one seeing me. For some strange reason,
my intuitiveness warned me to stay quiet and say nothing.
Jory thanked Toni politely, gave her a brief smile, swished his brush in clean water, dipped it in his blue mixture and added a few touches here and there. “Never can seem to mix the exact color of the sky,” he murmured as if to himself. “The sky is always changing . . . oh, what I could give to have Turner for my teacher . . .”
She stood watching the sun play on Jory’s waving blue-black hair. He hadn’t shaved, and that made him look twice as virile, although not as fresh. Suddenly he looked up and noticed her overlong stare. “I apologize for the way I look, Toni,” he said as if embarrassed. “I was very anxious to be up and busy this morning before the rain sets in and spoils another day for me. I hate the days when I can’t stay outside.”
Still she said nothing, only stood there, the peekaboo sun glorifying her beautifully tanned skin. His eyes drifted over her clean, fresh face even before he briefly dropped his eyes and took in the rest of her. “Thank you for the daisies. They’re not supposed to tell. What is the secret?”
Swooping down, she picked up a few sketches he’d tossed at the wastebasket and missed. Before she could drop them in the can, she gave the subjects her attention, and then her lovely face flushed. “You’ve been sketching me,” she said in a low tone.
“Throw them away!” he said sharply. “They’re no good. I can paint flowers and hills and make fairly good landscapes, but portraits are so damned difficult. I can never capture the essence of you.”
“I think these are very good,” she objected, studying them again. “You shouldn’t throw away your sketches. May I keep them?”
Carefully she tried to flatten out the wrinkles, and then she was placing them on a table and stacking heavy books upon them. “I was hired to take care of you and the twins. But you never ask me to do anything for you. And your mother likes to play with the twins in the mornings, so that gives me extra time, time enough to do many things for you. What can I do for you?”
The brush dripping with gray colored the bottoms of clouds before he paused and turned his chair so he could look at her. A wry smile moved his lips. “Once I could have thought of something. Now I suggest you leave me alone. Crippled men don’t play very exciting games, I’m sorry to say.”
Appearing weary with defeat, she crumpled down on a long, comfortable chaise. “Now you’re saying to me what Bart does all the time—‘Go away,’ he shouts, ‘Leave me alone,’ he yells. I didn’t think you’d be the same.”
“Why not?” he asked with his own bitterness. “We’re brothers, half-brothers. We both have our hateful moments—and it’s better to leave us alone then.”
“I thought he was the most wonderful man alive,” she said sadly. “But I guess I can’t trust my own judgment anymore. I believed Bart wanted to marry me—now he yells and orders me out of sight. Then he calls me back and begs forgiveness. I want to leave this house and never come back—but something holds me here, keeps whispering that it’s not time for me to go . . .”
“Yes,” said Jory, beginning to paint again with careful strokes, tipping the board to make his washes run and create “accidental” blendings that sometimes worked out beautifully. “That’s Foxworth Hall. Once you enter its portals, you seldom are seen again.”
“Your wife escaped.”
“So she did; more credit to her than I believed when it happened.”
“You sound so bitter.”
“I’m not bitter, I’m sour, like a pickle. I enjoy my life. I am caught between Heaven and Hell in a kind of purgatory where ghosts of the past roam the hallways at night. I can hear the clank and clonk of their restraining chains, and I can only be grateful they never appear, or perhaps the silent tread of my rubber-rimmed wheels scares them off.”
“Why do you stay if you feel that way?”
Jory shoved away from his painting table, then riveted his dark eyes on her. “What the hell are you doing here with me? Go to your lover. Apparently you like the way he treats you, or easily enough you could escape. You aren’t chained here with memories, with hopes or dreams that don’t come true. You aren’t a Foxworth, nor a Sheffield. This Hall holds no chains to blind you.”
“Why do you hate him?”
“Why don’t you hate him?”
“I do sometimes.”
“Trust your sometime judgment and get out. Get out before you are made, by osmosis, into one of us.”
“And what are you?”
Jory drove his chair to the rim of the flagstones, where the flowerbeds began, and stared off toward the mountains. “Once I was a dancer, and I never thought beyond that. Now that I can’t dance, I have to presume that I am nothing of importance to anyone. So I stay, thinking I belong here more than I belong anywhere else.”
“How can you say what you just did? Don’t you believe you’re important to your parents, your sister, and most of all to your children?”
“They don’t really need me, do they? And my parents have each other. My children have them. Bart has you. Cindy has her career. That leaves me the odd man out.”
Toni stood, stepped behind his chair and began to massage his neck with skillful fingers. “Does your back still bother you at night?”
“No,” he said in a hoarse voice. But it did, I knew it did, I knew it did. Hidden behind the shrubs, I went right on snipping roses, sensing they didn’t know I was there.
“If ever your back aches again, buzz for me and I’ll give you a massage to take away the pain.”
Whirling his chair around in a full about-face, Jory confronted her fiercely. She had to jump back out of the way or be knocked down. “So, it seems if you can’t get one brother, you’ll settle for the other—the crippled one who can’t possibly resist your many charms? Thanks, but no thanks. My mother will massage my aching back.”
Slowly she drifted away, turning twice to look back at him. She didn’t know that she left him staring after her with his heart in his eyes. She closed a French door behind her quietly. I stopped cutting roses for the breakfast table and sat on the grass. Behind me the twins were playing “church.”
Following Chris’s instructions, we were doing what we could to increase their vocabulary daily, and our instructions seemed to be working wonders.
“And the Lord said to Eve, go forth from this place.” Darren’s childish voice was full of giggles.
I turned to look.
Both children had removed their brief sunsuits and taken off small white sandals. Deirdre stuck a leaf on her brother’s small male organ, then stared down at her own private place. She frowned. “Dare . . . what’s sinning?”
“Like running,” answered her brother. “Bad when you’re barefoot.”
They both giggled and jumped up to run toward me. I caught them in my arms and held their soft, warm, nude bodies close, raining kisses on their faces. “Have you eaten your breakfast?”
“Yes, Granny. Toni fed us grapefruit, which we hate. We ate everything but the eggs. Don’t like eggs.”
That was Deirdre who did most of the talking for Darren, just as Carrie had been Cory’s voice most of the time.
“Mom—how long have you been there?” called Jory. He sounded annoyed, a bit embarrassed.
Rising, I held the naked twins in my arms, and headed for Jory. “I found Toni in the pool teaching the twins how to swim, so I took over and asked her to look in on you. They’re doing very nicely in the water now, paddling all around with confidence. Why didn’t you join us this morning?”
“Why did you keep yourself hidden?”
“Just snipping my morning roses, Jory. You know I do that every day. It’s the one thing that makes this house cozy, the cut flowers I put in every room the first thing in the mornings.” Playfully I stuck a red rose behind his ear. Quickly he snatched it away and stuffed it in with the daisies Toni had brought him.
“Jory, when I am outdoors in August knowing September isn’t far away, I just grab each moment and value it for what it is. The ro
se scent is in my nostrils, making me think I am in Heaven, or in Paul’s garden. He had the most beautiful gardens. All kinds. He divided sections into those that held English gardens, Japanese, Italian—”
“I’ve heard all that before!” he said impatiently. “I asked if you heard us?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did hear every fascinating thing, and when I had the chance, I peeked above the roses to watch the two of you.”
He scowled very much like Bart as I moved to put the twins on their feet, then gave their bare bottoms small spanks, telling them to find Toni, who would help them dress. They scuttled away, little naked dolls.
I sat down to smile at Jory, who glowered at me accusingly. He seemed even more like Bart when he looked angry. “Really, Jory, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I was there before either of you came out.” I paused and looked at his frowning face. “You love Toni, don’t you?”
“I don’t love her! She’s Bart’s! Damned if I want to take Bart’s leavings again.”
“Again?”
“Come off it, Mom. You know as well as I do the real reason why Mel left this house. He made it plain enough, and so did she that Christmas morning when the clipper ship was mysteriously broken. She’d have stayed on here forever if Bart had kept his position as replacement for me. I think she fell in love with him inadvertently, while trying to satisfy her need for me and the sex we shared. I used to hear her crying in the night. I’d lie on my bed, wanting to go to her but unable to move, feeling sorry for her, sorrier for myself. It was hell then. It’s hell now. A different kind of hell.”
“Jory—what can I do to help?”
He leaned forward, meeting my eyes with such intensity I was reminded of Julian and the many ways in which I had thwarted him.
“Mom, despite all this house represents to you, it’s grown to feel like home to me. The halls and doorways are wide. There’s the elevator to take me up and down. There’re the swimming pool, the terraces, the gardens, and the woods. Actually, a kind of paradise on earth—but for a few flaws. I used to think I couldn’t wait to get away. Now I don’t want to go, and I don’t really want to worry you any more than you already are, yet I must speak.”
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 153