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 shd 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 bind 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."