Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  “Good. I’m home in an hour. I feel like Charley’s. Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for anything more formal. My father liked Charley’s Diner because it was his chance to meet some of his old friends and toss around stories and their form of gossip. Charley’s was a sort of hangout for men involved with the construction industry.

  It was designed like an old 1950s diner, with faux-leather red booths with pleated white centers and chrome edges and base tables. There was a long counter with swivel barstools, lots of Formica and chrome, but there were also a dozen retro dinette sets, again with lots of chrome and Formica. The floor was a black and white checker, and although some of them didn’t work, there were miniature jukeboxes at the booths and on the counter. Consequently, there was always music but nothing anyone my age would appreciate. Actually, I never saw any of my school friends there.

  Charley Martin was the original owner. He was well into his seventies, although he looked ten years younger, with his full head of salt-and-pepper hair swept back and on the sides as if he had just run a wet washcloth over it, maybe with a little style lotion. He was stout, with the forearms of a carpenter, both arms stained with tattoos he had gotten in the Philippines when he was in the navy. Dad called him Popeye. He pretended to be annoyed, but I could see he liked it.

  “Is it just the two of us?” my father asked cautiously, obviously assuming that the note of sadness he had heard in my voice had something to do with Kane. Perhaps my little romance had crashed on the rocks like a little sailboat.

  “Yes. Kane went home. His sister is arriving for her Thanksgiving break tonight,” I quickly added to wash away his suspicions.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I’m going to cook up a storm for us.” I knew what he was thinking now. Kane’s family’s preparations for a family get-together on Thanksgiving would remind me of the hole in my heart, too. “See you soon.”

  After I hung up, I went to get into some of my homework so there wouldn’t be much when we returned. I had left Christopher’s diary on the bed. When I picked it up to put it under my pillow, I was so tempted to open to the page where we had left off. Maybe it was a good idea to read ahead now, I thought. I would know what to expect and how to react to the way Kane would react, especially after seeing the way he was today. That was a good rationalization for it, but then I feared he would know I had read ahead and that would break our trust. Besides, I really had to get into my homework. My father could linger at Charley’s.

  And linger we did. Everyone there wanted to hear about the new construction on the old Foxworth property. I listened politely as they debated some of the new materials and techniques versus the old tried-and-true. I didn’t want to interrupt or complain that we were staying too long. I could see how happy my father was talking shop with some of the men he’d known since he had first begun in Charlottesville. With any reference to my mother, even a passing one, he would shift his gaze to me and then find a way to change the topic. Finally, he was tired himself, and we left.

  “Some of those guys are so set in their ways they’re like petrified trees,” he joked on our way home in Black Beauty. It rode rough, but he kept the engine purring.

  He hadn’t mentioned this at Charley’s, but as we drew closer to home, he decided to tell me.

  “The darndest thing,” he said, “but I was given quite a challenge today. ’Course, there’s enough time to adjust things, and I suppose it works with the architecture. No structural problems with the roof.”

  “What is it?” I asked, wondering if he would ever say.

  “Oh. There’ll be no attic. I mean, there’ll be a crawl space but no actual attic. ’Course, lots of houses don’t have attics today. Wasted space for most. Things go to these storage places you rent or just get given away. No one wants memories.”

  “So why is it so weird?”

  “Oh, it’s not so weird. It’s just that the original plan had a sizable attic, and then this new order came down the pike,” he said. “But how does that saying go? Ours is not to reason why . . .”

  He didn’t finish the line, and I didn’t want to finish it for him: “Ours is but to do and die.” Either he didn’t want to mention it or he really didn’t care to make the connection, but eliminating an attic in the new structure suggested to me that the new real owner didn’t want even the idea of an attic on that property, and yet other things were shared with the old structure in this new one, like views from windows; it was a puzzle.

  When we got home, I went right to finishing my homework and studying a bit for a history quiz. Unlike on most nights, my father didn’t fall asleep in front of the television. He did some paperwork, then decided to turn in early and stopped by to say good night.

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. You have any plans yet?” he asked.

  “Nothing for Friday yet, but expect to,” I replied. “Tina Kennedy is having a party Saturday night, which we might attend, but tomorrow night there’s a new movie we both want to see. I guess we’ll go for something to eat first. Are you working till the same time?”

  “With daylight savings time, it gets dark now, not much choice,” he replied. “Don’t worry about me. Have a good time.”

  “I can do both,” I said, and he laughed.

  I had a message from Kane on my voice mail. He just said to call him when I could.

  “Problems for Darlena?” I asked as soon as he answered. I was thinking of their first dinner with Darlena’s boyfriend.

  “No, not really. My mother was cordial, as cordial as a queen might be to a servant, but we got through it. My father grilled him as if he had come to ask for a job. Darlena should get herself and him through the maze and return to college after the holiday with only minor scars.”

  “Is your mother really that bad?”

  “Let’s just say when she’s seventy, she’ll be a leading candidate for the Olivia Foxworth award.”

  “Oh, stop,” I said, and he laughed.

  “What I really wanted to tell you was I’m all right. I could see you were a little concerned when we said good-bye today, but don’t worry about me reading the diary. I’m not usually that emotional about anything.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “You’re good, angel, you’re real good.”

  “I know. Are we going to the movies tomorrow night? I told my father we might.”

  “Sure. After we—”

  “Do our session in the attic. I know. I can’t believe I was once more enthusiastic about this than you were.”

  “Were you?”

  “I’ve got to go to sleep. I have a test tomorrow.”

  “You can practice your answers on me in the morning,” he said. “I’ll go to sleep counting the minutes until I see you.”

  In the morning, my father told me that he had forgotten to mention that my aunt Barbara wouldn’t be coming to our Thanksgiving after all. It wasn’t because she felt she had to go to her boss’s dinner. She had come down with a bad chest cold. I saw that he was quite disappointed, enough to suggest that we might visit her in the spring. He wasn’t fond of going to New York. He claimed he was too much a small-town boy.

  This was going to be the ninth Thanksgiving for us without my mother. There would always be that gaping hole in our holiday happiness. Aunt Barbara’s presence would have helped us get through it a little, so I shared my father’s disappointment. Feeling this way brought back the terrible Thanksgiving the Dollanganger children had soon after they were brought to Foxworth Hall. For them, there would never be another with their father, and that first time, they didn’t even have their mother. Just like mine, their holidays would be forever a mixture of sadness and joy, no matter how fast their freedom was returned and how rich they would all be.

  When Kane arrived in the morning and we started for school, most of his conversation was about his sister and her boyfriend, Julio Lancaster. Kane told me he was named after his maternal grandfather. He was the fo
urth of four children, with two older sisters and one older brother.

  “How is he taking your parents?” I asked.

  “My sister prepared him well. He’s overly polite. I have to believe he went overboard on his conservative appearance, too. He has a haircut like my father’s, wore a tie to dinner, wore shoes with a shine better than my father’s, and had sharp creases in his pants. He looked like he had taken a graduate course in dinner etiquette, too. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was satirizing my mother especially. I loved the way she pronounced his name: Jewel-o. Darlena kept correcting her, and he kept saying, ‘It’s all right. My father’s mother calls me Jewel-e.’ Even my father had to laugh at that.”

  “Why is it I suspect your sister might be going with him and brought him home just to get at your mother?”

  Kane smiled. “Could be, but he’s not bad-looking, and he is a bright guy. Slim, swimmer’s build, about six foot one, with those sexy dark Spanish eyes and a voice as melodic as Julio Iglesias’s, whose singing my mother likes, by the way. It’s like those racists who watch Oprah regularly.”

  “Hearing you talk about your mother helps me to understand why you’re so ready to condemn Corrine Dollanganger,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know, but something keeps me from all-out condemning her. But I can’t help believing she’s going to break Christopher’s heart.”

  I nodded, and Kane changed the topic. He described how his close buddies were teasing him about me. Already, he had been seeing me longer than he had any other girl in our school.

  “I’m losing my playboy reputation. It’s even caught my mother’s attention.”

  “Oh? Is she upset?”

  “No, but she quipped that I might have to bring you around to introduce you to her if my ‘new fling’ continues much longer. I think some of her trusted gossips mentioned it to her. Brought up like a princess, you naturally assume you’ll be queen.”

  “If you keep talking about her like that, I’ll be terrified of meeting her.”

  “That’s the idea. She likes people being a little terrified of her.”

  “Stop it,” I said, and he laughed. The difference between him this morning and the way he had been when he was leaving my house the day before was like night and day.

  The school day always seemed to go faster on Fridays. Maybe it was because of how hard we wished for the final bell and the beginning of the weekend. Tina Kennedy tried to up the excitement for her party by revealing that her parents had agreed to pay for a disc jockey. Her family had a large ranch-style home with a beautiful five acres just outside of the city in the opposite direction from ours. Besides the adult bar, her father owned five Burger King franchises and a number of triple-net properties renting to drugstores and two supermarkets. Tina liked to brag about all this in front of Kane, as if she was giving him another reason they belonged together. She practically came out and said, “The rich belong with the rich,” the implication being that Kane certainly didn’t belong with the daughter of a middle-class construction worker.

  Despite how hard she tried to get him to commit to attending her party, Kane held out the possibility that we might not be able to make it. He kept the reason vague and was so convincing he had most, if not all, of my girlfriends believing it and tugging at me to tell them what we would be doing instead. I hadn’t done a very good job of hiding my lack of interest in her party, anyway.

  “I can’t say, because it might be a surprise,” I told them, which only intensified their curiosity.

  Suzette suggested that it might have to do with Darlena. She knew Darlena had brought her boyfriend home from college. Her mother was a member of Kane’s mother’s gossip club. “Maybe they’re going on a double date,” she told the others.

  Going on a double date with a college junior and senior probably seemed very sophisticated to them. It set off a flurry of conjectures and more questions, but neither Kane nor I offered any further details. At the end of the day, we both hurried out of the building, laughing about the buzz we had created.

  “My phone will be ringing all day tomorrow,” I said.

  “I’ll just have to keep you too busy to answer,” he replied, and we drove off to my house.

  Right from the beginning, I believed that reading the diary together would either draw us closer or drive us apart. Seeing how he had reacted and knowing how I had been reacting did make sharing it something special between us, as he had said. Would I have felt this strongly about him if he had never found the diary and we had never started this? Maybe, I thought, but I would always be carrying the deep secret of the diary inside me, and he would wonder if my silences, my drifting back into something I had read, meant I was getting bored and losing interest in him. He might have pursued the reason, and that probably would have driven me away from him in the end.

  Christopher, I thought, you never dreamed you would do this, that you would become a bridge between a boy and a girl, taking them across to a place they would fear and despise and yet be attracted to, maybe even in their special way cherish. You had no reason to believe that all that you felt and experienced would be understood and shared as if it belonged to someone else, maybe to everyone.

  Kane and I walked up the stairs, now more than ever feeling like two explorers traveling to another country inside themselves. He went right to the trunk. I thought he had cast the wig aside, maybe feeling foolish about it, but I was wrong. He put it on and smiled. “Hi, Cathy,” he said, and began to read.

  So much of what we did and how we lived the following year was the same as the first year that I can simply say another year passed.

  Never in my wildest imaginings did I see us living in that small room and this attic for this long. Every day, I awoke the same way, with the same thought: Today, our grandfather will die, and we will return to the world. And every day, he lived on.

  Momma wasn’t visiting us as frequently. A heavy wave of resignation settled over Cathy and me. We were the twins’ parents now, caring for their every need, teaching them what we could, amusing them every way we could, healing them when they had colds or bruises and cuts, and comforting them when they had nightmares. Nevertheless, it was good that they had each other. I didn’t tell Cathy this, because I knew she would go into some sort of rage, but I found an old book on the care and breeding of dogs. It was highly recommended that there be at least two if the owners were not going to be able to pay them enough attention. Children were certainly no less than dogs. They needed company.

  For Cathy and me, expanding our territory somehow became paramount. I realized that on Thursdays especially, when the servants left for town, she and I could crawl out onto the roof and sun ourselves. It became our outing, our little trip to someplace else. We went there during the day and during the night. It gave us the desperately needed sense of some freedom.

  Time wasn’t simply marked off on calendars. We had three, one dedicated to the death of our grandfather, because that was supposed to be the birth of our freedom and new life. Time was also marked by our own physical maturing. Cathy was far more aware of hers than I was of mine. Girls usually mature faster in so many ways. I knew she was intrigued about it because of her constant questions, the answers for some of which I had to research.

  What happened next was my fault more than Cathy’s. One day, I found her gazing at her naked body, exploring the changes in her breasts, the curves in her figure, even touching herself between her legs. Suddenly, she sensed my presence and turned to look at me. I must have looked fascinated, because she didn’t rush to cover herself. Then she reached for her dress, and I said, “Don’t.” She held the dress but made no effort to put it on.

  I kept thinking I shouldn’t be doing this, but I was so drawn to her sex, and I could see she was realizing her power over me. She didn’t tease me. At least, I don’t think she did, but all she said was, “You shouldn’t.”

  I tried to explain myself, to compliment her on her growing beauty, and then we heard the d
oor being unlocked. She rushed to put on her dress, but she didn’t get it on fast enough to avoid our grandmother’s startled eyes. We watched as she gave a cold, satisfied smile. At last, she said, she had caught us.

  Caught us doing what? I protested. I knew what she was going to accuse us of doing, but Cathy had no idea what she meant when she said she was positive now that Cathy had been permitting me to use her body. She made it seem like Cathy’s body, her beautiful hair, were all designed for sin. Of course, Cathy had no idea what she meant by “using her body.” Suddenly, our grandmother left.

  Fortunately, the twins weren’t down from the attic to see and hear this. When they came down, I heard our grandmother returning and told Cathy to get into the bathroom, but she was in and on her too fast. She had brought a pair of scissors and said she was going to cut Cathy’s hair down to her scalp.

  Cathy and I refused to let her, and she threatened that until Cathy cut her own hair, we all would have no food, even the twins. I thought it was an empty threat. Momma would be around soon, anyway. She left the scissors behind and shut the door. We had a little food left. The twins, of course, were so terrified they trembled. By now, Carrie had come to call Cathy “Momma,” and she often crawled into bed with her so Cathy could embrace her and comfort her. Cory always looked a bit stunned to me, his little mind twirling in confusion. How unnatural it all seemed even to one as little as he.

  I didn’t know how long this terrible situation would last, and I had no idea that it would get even worse. The following morning, I awoke late and discovered that during the night, our grandmother from hell had snuck in, injected Cathy with some sedative she had probably taken from our grandfather’s medicine so that Cathy wouldn’t wake, and then poured tar into her hair. When Cathy realized it, she started to scream. I calmed her so that the twins wouldn’t be even more terrorized, and then I tried to shampoo it out while she sat in the tub. It didn’t work, no matter how hard I scrubbed. Hair was coming out in my fingers. I tried mixing some chemicals from a professional set Momma had brought me to keep me occupied with my scientific studies, but nothing worked. The twins kept asking about it. Cathy pretended she had done it to herself. She didn’t want them to know how horrible our grandmother was. It would give them even more nightmares and cause her presence to send cold shivers of fear through their little bodies. They trembled enough as it was for some reason or another every day.