Turning to go, Madame glanced around the room, allowing her eyes to linger longest on the thick stack of papers on Mom's small desk. "You'll see things my way," she said in a soft cat's purr. I pity you Catherine, as I pity your brother. I pity Bart too, savage as the little monster is. I pity everyone in your household, for all will be hurt. But I won't let my compassion for you, and my understanding of what made you the way you are, hold back my hand. Jory will be safe with me, with my name, not yours."
"GET OUT!" screamed Mom, who had lost all control. She picked up a vase with flowers and hurled it at Madame's head! "YOU RUINED YOUR SON'S LIFE AND NOW YOU WANT TO RUIN JORY! YOU WANT HIM TO BELIEVE THERE IS NO LIFE BUT IN THE BALLET, DANCING,
DANCING-- BUT I AM LIVING! I WAS A DANCER, AND STILL I AM SURVIVING!"
Madame looked around the room again, as if she too would like to hurl some object, and slowly she bent over to pick up the broken vase at her feet. "I gave you this. How ironic that you would hurl it at me." Something brittle and hard seemed to crack as she looked at Mom with softness, and she spoke with rare humility. "When Julian was a boy, I tried to do for him what was best, just as you try to do for yours what is best . . . and if my judgment was wrong, it was done with the best of intentions."
"Isn't everything?" said Mom with bitterness. "Always the intentions are so right, so reasonable-- and in the end even the excuses ride the waves of indignation like that fabled straw everyone tries to grasp to keep from drowning. It seems all my life I've been grasping for straws that don't exist. I tell myself each night, before I climb into bed with my brother, that this is the reason I was born, and for every wrong I have done I have consoled myself by saying I have balanced the scales with the right decisions. I have finally given my brother the only woman he can love, the wife he so desperately needed. I have made him happy--and if that is wrong in your eyes, and in the eyes of the world, I don't give a damn I don't give a damn what the world thinks!"
My grandmother just stood there, with conflicting emotions torturing her aged face. I could tell she, too, was hurting. I watched her thin, heavily veined hand reach to touch my mother's hair, but she drew it away and kept her eyes blank and her voice under control: "Again I say, I pity you, Catherine. I pity all of you, but most of all I
pity Jory, for he is the one with the most to lose."
Quickly I backed away and hid as she hurled herself out of Mom's bedroom and strode down the back hall, bypassing Bart, who stabbed at her with his unsheathed knife.
"Witch, old black witch!" he snarled, pulling back his upper lip in a frightful way. "I hope you never come back, never, never!"
I was miserable enough now to want a hole to crawl into and die. My mother was living with her brother. The woman I'd loved and respected all my life was worse than any mother I'd ever heard of. None of my friends would believe, but when they did, I'd be so shamed, ridiculed, I'd never be able to face them. Then it hit me. Dad was my real uncle. Not just Bart's but mine too. Oh, God, what did I do now? Where did I run? It was not a platonic brother-sister relationship, a fake marriage for appearances sake, it was incest. They were lovers. I knew! I'd seen!
Suddenly everything was too sordid, too ugly, too shocking. Why had they allowed their love to start? Why hadn't they stopped it from happening?
I wanted to get up and go and ask, but I couldn't bear to look at Mom, or Dad either when he came home. In my room I fell on my bed, with the locked door making me feel safer. When I was called to dinner I said I wasn't hungry. Me, who was always starving. Mom came to the closed door and pleaded: "Jory, did you overhear anything your grandmother said to me?"
"No, Mother," I answered stiffly. "I think I'm coming down with a cold, that's all. I'll feel fine in the morning, just fine." I had to say something to explain why my voice was husky.
Somewhere in all those tears I shed I lost the boy I was earlier today. Now I had to become a man. I felt old, cold, like nothing mattered very much anymore, and for the first time I knew why Bart was so confused and peculiar acting--he must know too.
I sneaked to watch Mom writing in her fine blue- leather journal, and when I had the chance, I stole into her room and read every word she'd written, as dishonest as that was. I was becoming just like Bart. But I had to know.
Madame Marisha visited today and brought with her all the nightmares that haunt my days. I have other nightmares for sleeping. When she was gone I felt panic throbbing so loud my heart sounded like a jungle drum beating out the rhythm of the last battle. I wanted to run and hide as we used to hide when we were locked away in Foxworth Hall. I ran to Chris when he came home, and clung, clung, unable to tell him anything. He didn't notice my desperation. He was tired from a long exhausting day.
Then he kissed me, and was off for his evening rounds, and I sat alone in my room, both of my sons silent and locked behind their bedroom doors. Do they know that soon our world is coming to an end?
Should I have let Madame take Jory and keep him safe from the scandal and humiliation? Was I selfish to want to hold fast to him? And Bart, what about Bart? And what would happen to Cindy if our secret were revealed?
Suddenly I felt I was back in Charlottesville, with Chris and Carrie, and again we were on our way to Sarasota. My memory seemed like a movie as that huge black woman struggled to board the slow bus with all her bags and bundles. Henrietta Beech. Dear, dear Henny. It's been so long since I last thought of her. Just to remember her broad beaming smile, her kind eyes, her gentle hands and a certain peace steals over me, like she is taking me again to Paul, who would save us all.
But who will save us now?
Tears were in my eyes when I put her journal away. I stole into Bart's room and found him sitting on the floor, in the dark, hunched over like an old man. "Bart, go to bed," I said. But he didn't get up. He seemed not to hear me.
The Gates of Hell
. Knew it, just knew it. Jory had to spy and check up on what deviltry I was up to. Pretended not to notice. Soon as his room was dark, I pulled out the last pages of Momma's story. Knew it was the end for she'd written her initials and address near the bottom of the page.
Didn't know why I was crying. Malcolm wouldn't feel pity for her and my daddy. Now I'd have to grow tough, mean, pretend nothing could hurt me nearly as much as it hurt others.
Morning came and I went into the kitchen where Momma was helping Emma do little
housekeeping chores, making cookie dough, talking about cakes. The woman thought evil could go on unnoticed forever. Unpunished forever. She should know better.
I sat in my corner, hunched over on the floor, my knees pulled up under my chin, my shins wrapped with my arms. Bony arms. Getting skinnier by the day. I stared at Momma, at Daddy, hoping to look into their minds and find out what they really thought of me, of themselves and what they were doing. I closed my eyes. Behind my lids I saw Momma dancing like she used to before she hurt her knee. Last summer, not so long after I came home from the hospital and I had trouble falling asleep, I'd stumbled into the kitchen to rob the fridge while nobody could see. I wanted them all to worry and think about me starving to death. But before I could gobble down all the cold chicken legs, Momma had danced into the family room wearing a little white tutu with hardly any top, and Daddy had trailed along behind. He didn't even see me. Couldn't see anybody but her.
She'd looked pretty in that costume, whirling around, always smiling and flirting with the man who stood in the shadows watching her. She teased him by tugging at his tie, pulling him out into the center of the room, forcing him to turn around and around, and trying to make him dance that ballet stuff. But he'd grabbed her in his arms and pressed his lips down on hers. I'd heard the sound, wet and mushy. Then her arms tightened around his neck. I stared to see him unhooking all those little dark things that held her tutu on! It slipped and fell to the floor at her feet, and she was wearing nothing but white leotards that he soon tugged off. Naked. He made her naked. Next he lifted her in his arms, and while her lips were still pressed to his, he carried her off to their room--and all the time he'd been her brother.
Oh, no wonder John Amos said they had to be punished. No wonder. Whore! Bitch! Sinners with my own blood! They wouldn't get away with this. They'd have to burn, burn--burn like my daddy, like my real daddy named Bartholomew Winslow.
I read all her story. I know how ugly and mean some mothers could be. Hiding her four children, making them stay upstairs in one room, forcing them to play in a hot miserable attic that was freezing in the winters. All those years locked up, whipped too, and starved-- and tar in my mother's beautiful golden hair. I hated Malcolm, who'd done so many wicked things to his own grandchildren. I hated that old lady next door who put arsenic on their sugared doughnuts. What kind of crazy nut was she? Had she put poison on my ice cream, my cake and cookies too? I shivered and felt queasy in my stomach. Why hadn't the police locked her up until they dragged her to the electric chair to burn, burn?