I laughed shakily and drew her closer. "Look around you, Carrie. Many other people are smaller than you. You aren't a midget or a dwarf, you know that. Even if you were, which you aren't, still you would have to accept it and make the best of it, just as many do who consider themselves too tall, or too fat, or too thin, or too something You have a beautiful face, sensational hair, a lovely complexion, an adorable figure with everything where it should be. You have a beautiful singing voice, and you've got a brilliant mind; look at how fast you can type and how well you take shorthand and keep Paul's books, and you can cook twice as well as I can. You are also a much better housekeeper than I am, and look at the dresses you sew. They look better than anything I see in a store. When you add all that up, Carrie, how can you think you aren't good enough for Alex or any other man!"
"But, Cathy," she wailed, stubbornly
unappeased by what I'd said, "you don't know him like I do. We went by an X-rated movie theater and he said anybody who did any of those things was evil and perverted! And you and Dr. Paul told me sex and making babies was a natural, loving part of living-- and I'm bad, Cathy. Once I did something very wicked."
I stared at her, taken by surprise. With whom? It was as if she read my mind, for she shook her head while tears streamed down her cheeks. "No . . . I've never had . . . had . . . intercourse, not with anybody. But I did other things that were wicked, Alex would think so, and I should have known it was evil."
"What did you do, darling, that was so terrible?"
She gulped and bowed her head in shame. "It was Julian. One day when I was visiting and you weren't home he wanted to do . . do something with me. He said it would be fun and wasn't real sex, the kind that made babies--so I did what he wanted, and he kissed me and said next to you he loved me best. I didn't know it was wicked just to do what I did."
I swallowed over the huge, aching lump in my throat, smoothed her silken hair from her fevered forehead and wiped away her tears. "Don't cry and feel ashamed, darling. There are all kinds of love and ways to express love. You love Dr. Paul and Jory and Chris in three different ways, and me in another--and if Julian convinced you to do something you feel was wicked, that was his sin, not yours. And mine too, for I should have told you what he might want. He promised me never to touch you or do anything sexual with you, and I believed him. But if you did it, don't be ashamed any longer--and Alex doesn't have to know. Nobody will tell him."
Very slowly her head lifted, and the moon that suddenly came into view from behind dark clouds shone in her eyes full of self-torture. "But I'll know."
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She began to sob, wild, hysterical sobs. "That's not the worst thing, Cathy," she screamed, "I liked doing what I did! I liked him wanting me to do it--I tried not to let my face show I was feeling any pleasure for God might have been watching. So you see why Alex won't understand? He'd hate me, he would, I know he would! And even if he never knows, I'll still hate myself for doing it and liking it!"
"Please stop crying. What you did isn't that bad, really. Forget our grandmother who kept talking about our evil blood. She's a bigoted, narrow-minded hypocrite who can't tell right from wrong. She did all kinds of horrible things in the name of righteousness and nothing at all in the name of love. You're not bad, Carrie. You wanted Julian to love you, and if what you did gave him pleasure and you pleasure, then that's normal too. People are made to feel sensual pleasure, made to enjoy sex. Julian was wrong and he shouldn't have asked you, but that was his sin, not yours."
"I remember lots of things you don't think I do," she whispered. "I remember the funny way Cory and I used to talk to each other, so you and Chris couldn't understand. We knew we were the Devil's issue. We heard the grandmother. We talked about it. We knew we were locked up because we weren't good enough to be out in the world with people better than us."
"Stop!" I cried. "Don't remember! Forget! We did get out, didn't we? We were four children not responsible for the actions of our parents. That hateful old woman tried to steal our confidence and our pride in ourselves--don't let her succeed! Look at Chris, aren't you proud of him? Weren't you proud of me when I was on stage dancing? And one day, after you and Alex are married, he will change his mind about what is perverted and what isn't--for I did. Alex will grow up and stop being overly righteous. He doesn't know yet the pleasures love can give."
Carrie pulled from my arms and went to stare out of the windows at the dark and distant mountains, and at the quarter moon that sailed as an uptilted Viking ship through the black seas of night. "Alex won't change," she said dully. "He's gonna be a minister. Religious people think everything is bad, just like grandmother. When he told me he was going to give up the idea of being an electrical engineer, I knew it was all over between us."
"Everybody changes! Look at the world about us, Carrie. Look at the magazines and the movies that decent people go to and enjoy, and the stage plays with everyone naked, and the kind of books being published. I don't know if it's for the better, but I do know people aren't static. We all change from day to day. Maybe twenty years from now our children will look back to our time and be shocked, and maybe they will look back and smile and call us innocents. Nobody knows how the world will change--so if the world can change, so can one man named Alex."
"Alex won't change. He hates today's lack of morals, hates the kinds of books being published, the movies that are dirty and the magazines with couples doing wicked things. I don't think he even approves of the kind of dancing you used to do with Julian."
I wanted to yell out, To hell with Alex and his prudery! Yet I couldn't slander the only man Carrie had found to love. "Carrie, sweetheart, go to bed. Go to sleep and remember in the morning that the world is full of all sorts of men who would be delighted to love someone as pretty, sweet and domestically oriented as you are Think of what Chris tells us always, 'things always happen for the best.' And if it doesn't work out for you and Alex, then it will work out for you and someone else."
She threw me a quick glance of deepest despair.
"How was it for the best when God made Cory die?" Dear Lord, how to answer a question like that? "Was it for the best when Daddy was killed on the highway?"
"You don't remember that day."
"Yes I do. I've got a good memory."
"Carrie, absolutely no one is perfect, not me, not you, not Chris, not Alex. Not anybody."
"I know," she said, crawling into her bed like a good little girl obeying her mother. "People do bad things and God sees them and punishes them later on. Sometimes he uses a grandmother with her whip, like she beat you and Chris. I'm not dumb, Cathy. I know you and Chris look at each other in the way Alex and I look at each other. I think you and Dr. Paul were lovers too--and maybe that's why Julian died, to punish you. But you're the kind of woman men like and I'm not. I don't dance; I don't know how to make everybody love me. Only my family loves me, and Alex. And when I tell Alex he won't love me or want me."
"You won't tell him!" I ordered sternly.
She lay with her eyes fixed on the ceiling until finally she drifted off to sleep. Then I was the one left to lie awake, hurting inside, still astonished by the effect one old woman had on the lives of so many I hated Momma for taking us to Foxworth Hall. She'd known what her mother was like and still she took us there. She'd known her mother and father better than anyone and still she married a second time and left us alone, so she had the fun and we had the torture. And it was us who were still suffering while she had the fun!
Fun that would soon be over, for I was here and Bart was here, and sooner or later we would meet. Though how he had managed to avoid me so far I wasn't to learn until later.
I comforted myself with the thoughts of how Momma would be suffering soon too, like we had suffered. Pain for pain, she'd learn how we had felt when she was left alone and unloved. She wouldn't be able to cope . . . not again. One more blow would be her undoing. Somehow I knew that--perhaps because I was so much like her.
"Are you sure you're all right?" I asked Carrie a few days later. "You haven't been eating well. Where has your appetite gone?"
She said quietly, her face expressionless. "I'm just fine. I just don't feel like eating much. Don't take Jory with you today to your dance studio. Let me keep him all day. I miss him when he goes away with you."
I felt uneasy about leaving her all day with Jory who could be a handful, and Carrie didn't look like she was feeling well. "Carrie, be honest with me, please. If you feel unwell, let me take you to a doctor.