Hear? Sure, I'd heard, everything.
He'd waited too long to rob Momma of her hoard of hard won jewelry. He should have been taking a little all along, like I'd begged him to do.
So, Momma and her husband were off on another vacation. What kind of news was that? They were always coming and going. They'd do anything to escape this house, and I can't say I blamed them. Weren't we prepared to do the same thing?
I screwed up my brows and gave Chris a long questioning look. Obviously he knew something he wasn't telling me. He was still protecting her; he still loved her.
"Cathy," he began, his voice jagged and torn.
"It's all right, Chris. I'm not blaming you. So our dear, sweet, kind, loving mother and her handsome young husband have gone off on another vacation and taken all the jewelry with them. We'll still get by." Say good-bye to security in the outside world. But we were still going! We'd work, we'd find a way to support ourselves, and pay doctors to make Carrie well again. Never mind about jewelry; never mind about the callousness of our mother's act, to leave us without explaining where she was going, and when she was coming back. By now we were accustomed to ugly, harsh, thoughtless indifference. Why so many tears, Chris--why so many?
"Cathy!" he raged, turning his tear-streaked face to lock his eyes with mine "Why aren't you listening and reacting? Where are your ears? Did you hear what I said? Our grandfather is dead! He's been dead for almost a year!"
Maybe I hadn't been truly listening, not carefully enough. Maybe his distress had kept me from hearing everything. Now it hit me fully for the first time. If the grandfather was truly dead--this was stunning good news! Now Momma would inherit! We'd be rich! She'd unlock the door, she'd set us free. Now we didn't have to run away.
Other thoughts came flooding, a torrent of devastating questions--Momma hadn't told us when her father died. When she knew how long these years had been for us, why had she kept us in the dark, waiting always? Why? Bewildered, confused, I didn't know which emotion to feel: happy, glad, sorry. A strange paralzying fear settled the indecision.
"Cathy," whispered Chris, though why he bothered to whisper I don't know. Carrie wouldn't hear. Her world was set apart from ours. Carrie was suspended between life and death, leaning more toward Cory every moment she starved herself and abandoned the will to live on without her other half. "Our mother deceived us deliberately, Cathy. Her father died, and months later his will was read, and all the while she kept quiet and left us here to wait and rot. Nine months ago we would all have been nine months healthier! Cory would be alive today if Momma had let us out the day her father died, or even the day after the will was read."
Overwhelmed, I fell into the deep well of betrayal Momma had dug to drown us in. I began to cry.
"Save your tears for later," said Chris, who had just cried himself. "You haven't heard everything. There's more. . . much more, and worse."
"More?" What more could he tell me? Our mother was proven a liar and a cheat, a thief who'd stolen our youth, and killed Cory in the process of acquiring a fortune she didn't want to share with children she no longer wanted, or loved. Oh, how well she explained to us what to expect that night when she gave us our lit- tle litany to say when we were unhappy. Did she know, or guess, way back then, that she would become the thing the grandfather would make of her? I toppled over into Chris's arms, and lay against his chest. "Don't tell me anymore! I've heard enough . . . don't make me hate her more!"
"Hate . . . you haven't begun to know what hate is yet. But before I tell you the rest, keep in mind we are leaving this place, no matter what. We will go on to Florida, just like we planned. We'll live in the sunshine and make our lives the very best we can. Not for one moment are we going to feel ashamed of what we are, or what we've done, for what we've shared between us is so small compared to what our mother has done. Even if you die before I do, I'll remember our lives up here and in the attic. I'll see us dancing beneath the paper flowers, with you so graceful, and me so clumsy. I'll smell the dust and the rotting wood, and I'll remember it as perfume sweet as roses, because without you it would have been so bleak, and so empty. You've given me my first taste of what love can be.
"We're going to change. We're going to throw out what's worse in us and keep what's best. But come hell or high water, we three will stick together, all for one, one for all. We're going to grow, Cathy, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Not only that, we're going to reach the goals we've set for ourselves. I'll be the best damned doctor the world's ever known and you will make Pavlova seem like an awkward country girl."
I grew weary of hearing talk of love, and what the future held, possibly, when we were still behind a locked door, and death was lying beside me curled up in fetal position, with small hands praying even in sleep.
"All right, Chris, you've given me a breather. I'm prepared for anything. And thank you for saying all of that, and for loving me, for you haven't gone unloved, or unadmired, yourself." I kissed him quickly on the lips, and told him to go on, to hit me with his knockout blow.
"Really, Chris, I know you must have something perfectly awful to tell me--so out with it. Keep holding me as you tell me, and I can stand anything you have to say."
How young I was. How unimaginative--and how confidently presuming.
Endings, Beginnings
. Guess what she told them," Chris continued on. "Name the reason she gave for not wanting this room cleaned on the last Friday of the month."
How could I guess? I'd need a mind like hers. I shook my head. So long ago the servants had stopped coming to this room, I had forgotten those first horrible weeks.
"Mice, Cathy," Chris said, his blue eyes cold, hard. "Mice! Hundreds of mice in the attic, our grandmother invented .. . clever little mice that used the stairs to steal down to the second floor. Devilish little mice that forced her to lock this door, leaving in the room--food covered over with arsenic."
I listened and thought that an ingenious, marvelous story for keeping the servants away. The attic was full of mice. They did use the stairs.
"Arsenic is white, Cathy, white. When mixed with powdered sugar, you cannot taste its bitterness."
My brain went spinning! Powdered sugar on the four daily doughnuts! One for each of us. Now only three in the basket! "But, Chris, your story doesn't make any sense. Why would the grandmother poison us bit by bit? Why not give us a sufficient amount to kill us immediately and have done with it?"
His long fingers went through my hair to cup my head between his
palms. He spoke in a low voice: "Think back to a certain old movie we saw on TV. Remember that pretty woman who would keep house for older gentlemen--rich gentlemen, of course--and when she'd won their trust, and affection, and they had written her into their wills, each day she fed them just a little arsenic? When you digest just a fraction of arsenic each day, it is slowly absorbed by your entire system, and each day the victim feels a little worse, but not too much so. The small headaches, stomach upsets that can easily be explained away, so that when the victim dies, say in a hospital, he already is thin, anemic, and has a long history of illnesses, hay fever, colds, and so forth. And doctors don't suspect poisoning--not when the victim has all the
manifestations of pneumonia, or just plain old age, as was the case in that movie."
"Cory!" I gasped. "Cory died of arsenic poisoning? Momma said it was pneumonia that killed him!"