It was like pulling teeth to get Dad to tell me anything. If I brought home another tidbit and persistently asked him about it, he would finally say, “I wouldn’t swear to any of it being true. As your mother used to say, exaggerations grow faster than mold in a wet basement around here. I told you, Kristin, forget about all that. Just thinking about it could poison your mind.”
Just thinking about it could poison my mind? No wonder the Foxworth property was an ideal Halloween hangout, populated with ghosts and moans and screams. But how could I help wanting to know more? I didn’t tell Dad about it because I knew it would upset him, but on many occasions when new kids were introduced at school or at parties, someone would say something like, “You know, Kristin is related to the famous Foxworth children on her mother’s side.”
Inevitably, the new kid would ask, “Who are the famous Foxworth children? Why are they famous?”
Then someone would go into one of the versions of the story, with everyone looking to me to tell them more. They were very skeptical when I said, “I don’t know any more than you do about it, and half of what you’re saying is surely the product of distorted imaginations.” I’d walk away before anything else could be said to me, not as if I wanted to hide anything but acting more like I was bored with the subject. Of course, I wasn’t.
Why should I be? Everyone is interested in his or her family background. It’s only natural. I’d been in many of my girlfriends’ homes for dinner when their parents brought up memories of their grandfathers and their uncles and aunts and cousins. Pictures of relatives were hanging on walls. I couldn’t imagine my mother ever putting up a picture of Malcolm Foxworth or Olivia Foxworth, not that she’d had any. She had some very old photographs of relatives, but to this day, I didn’t know who was who, and if I asked Dad about any of them, he would claim he couldn’t remember. Maybe he was telling the truth, or maybe he was just avoiding it.
Everyone’s family had black sheep, but also relatives they were proud to mention. My family background on my mother’s side had this big, gaping black hole full of terror and horror. Was it a good idea to try to fill it, or was it better just to cover it up and forget? Forgetting about it was just not very easy, at least not for me.
It was like everyone knew that your cousin many times removed was Jack the Ripper. Despite the distance in relationship, they were always looking for some sign, some indication that you carried the germ of evil. Instead of Typhoid Mary, I was Madness Kristin. Get too close to me, and you might become a blabbering idiot.
Dad was already outside checking something on his truck engine. The truck was practically a member of our family. I couldn’t remember him not driving it. When I asked him why he didn’t buy a new one instead of constantly tinkering with it, replacing parts, and filling in rust spots, he replied in one word, “Loyalty.” When I looked confused, he continued, reciting one of his favorite lectures. “Problem with the world today is everything in people’s lives is temporary. It spreads from their possessions to their relationships. They throw away their marriages as easily as they dump their appliances. This truck’s never let me down. Yes, it’s old, and it ain’t pretty, but it’s used to me, and I’m used to it.”
Fortunately, once I got my driver’s license, he had decided that I should have a modern car with all the safety bells and whistles. However, when he had to trade in my mother’s car to get mine, he was almost as upset as he was the day she died. To this day, he refused to give away her clothes and shoes. They were all stored in our attic with some of her other things like hairbrushes, curlers, and perfume. It was almost as if he hoped she would turn up at the door, smile, and say, “My death was a terrible mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be taken yet, so I’m back.” That was why he loved watching the movie Heaven Can Wait.
More than once, I caught him staring at an empty doorway or listening keenly for the sound of her footsteps on the stairway.
People never really die until you forget them, I thought.
I couldn’t ever blame him for believing she might return somehow. From what I remember and from what people tell me, no one expected my mother to die like that. She was a very healthy-looking thirty-four-year-old woman. They called it a cranial aneurysm. Something just exploded in her head, and she keeled over one day at work. She didn’t die right away. Dad had a very difficult time talking about it for years, but when he did talk to me about it, I could see he was always amazed at how well she had looked in the hospital bed.
“It’s why I couldn’t believe the doctors,” he told me. “I sat there thinking any moment she would wake up and bawl me out for putting her into the hospital to start with. That was your mother,” he would add. He would add that to almost anything he told me about her, “That was your mother,” signifying in his mind and mine that she was a very special person.
I had good memories of her, but a girl of almost five and a half certainly hadn’t experienced her mother long enough to know her as well as she should. Without her now, I could hear nothing much about her side of the family. She was an only child. My maternal grandfather died very young from heart failure, and my maternal grandmother, who also had health problems, died when I was only seven, so I didn’t get to know them that well, either.
The only uncle and aunt I had were on my father’s side. My father’s younger brother, my uncle Tommy, lived in California, where he worked as an agent in a talent agency. He never married or had children. Dad had a younger sister, Barbara, who was also unmarried and worked at a bank in New York. Dad’s father had been killed in a car accident. He was only in his early fifties at the time. My paternal grandmother had lived with Dad’s younger sister, Barbara. She eventually succumbed to emphysema and then pneumonia. She had been a heavy smoker, as was Dad’s father. Dad wouldn’t permit anyone who worked for him to smoke in his office or on any of his jobs. He actually made them sign an agreement and did fire a young man who smoked on a site.
I spoke to my aunt Barbara occasionally and visited with her in New York City last summer, which was one of my best trips without Dad. She was constantly inviting me to return so she could take me to shows and wonderful restaurants. Of course, she invited Dad, too, but he hated big cities.
“I’m just a small-town boy,” he would say. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” I kidded him often about being stuck in his ways. He never denied it. “I am who I am,” he would say. “One size Burt Masterwood fits all. Besides, you’ll do all the traveling and discoveries in this family, Kristin. I did enough when I was in the navy.”
Would I travel and make discoveries? I would go to college, but I still had no definite idea what I wanted to become. For a while, I thought about being a teacher. Lately, I considered going into medicine, maybe research. Perhaps it was because I had lost my mother when I was so young, or maybe it was because of the Foxworth legend that hovered over me, but sometimes I felt I was lost in a fog, the most difficult thing to know being my future. I dreamed of marrying someday and having my own children, but that also seemed more like a vague dream, something coming sometime, somehow, like a handsome prince riding in from some mysterious place.
“?’Bout time,” Dad said when I popped out of the house and closed the door. “Let’s go.”
He closed the truck hood with the same gentleness he employed whenever he did anything on his truck. He did treat it like some revered old friend, full of mechanical arthritis but still ambulatory. Sometimes I would catch him just looking at it and stroking it affectionately, lost in some memory or maybe just thinking about my mother sitting beside him.
“What’s wrong with Black Beauty today?” I asked as I opened the door to get in. The black leather seats were creased and faded, but there wasn’t a tear in either of them, and the carpeting on the floor was always kept up or replaced.
“Got to change her spark plugs. She reminds me every morning. Just like a woman, nag, nag, nag,” he said, and started the engine. He listened to it and nodded. “Spark plugs,” he repeated, and then backed out of our driveway.
We had a modest two-story Queen Anne–style home with recently renovated aluminum siding, black shutters, and panel windows in the bay Dad had built in the living room. All the bedrooms were upstairs, the wall paneling redone. Recently, Dad replaced the balustrade on the stairway with a rich dark mahogany, saying that it was something my mother would have liked. He was still doing things he knew would have pleased her. I was so used to him being able to fix and refurbish everything in our home that I grew up thinking every man could do that. I would smile incredulously when my girlfriends’ fathers had to call a repairman to repair a window casing or a plumber to fix a toilet. Besides being a licensed general contractor, Dad was a licensed plumber and electrician.
“I’m a hands-on man,” he would tell me proudly. “Your mother wasn’t above bragging to her friends about me, making me out to be Mr. Fix-It. But that’s how she was.”
Our house was on a side road next to a working horse and cattle farm. We were nearly twelve miles outside the city of Charlottesville in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. All of my friends were within what Dad called “striking distance,” so I never felt any more isolated than anyone else, although I did especially enjoy spending time with Missy Mey
er, whose father, Justin Anthony Meyer, was an important attorney and who lived in a classic 1900s brick Victorian home in the Belmont neighborhood of Charlottesville. It was only a block away from the Pedestrian Mall. Dad had done some renovation work for Mr. Meyer, laying down new pine floors and later redoing a bathroom.
“How many people died in the first Foxworth fire, Dad?” I asked once we were on our way, hoping to get him to start talking more about it.
“Far as I know, only two, the old lady and her son-in-law.”
“That attorney who had an affair with one of the granddaughters?”
He looked at me. I could see he was making a decision. Until now, it was clear that he didn’t want to contribute any more to the dark details that surrounded my mother’s cousins and the events that had occurred in that grand old mansion. He had scared me when he’d said that just thinking about them could poison my mind, but now that I was older, maybe it wasn’t as dangerous.