Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  When Kane stopped reading and lowered the diary, he saw that I had covered my face with my hands. It was as if the tears in my eyes were so heavy that I couldn’t keep my head up. He rushed over to me, kneeling beside me. I lifted my face away from my hands slowly, the tears still trickling down my cheeks. He rose slowly and started to kiss them away, petting my hair as he did so.

  “Cathy, Cathy,” he said. “Don’t cry. I can’t stand it when you cry.”

  At first, I thought he wasn’t serious, calling me Cathy, but when I looked into his eyes, I saw he was, and it gave me a chilling feeling for a moment. He was really into it now, and it both frightened and excited me. I realized he was just as into it as I was, and it was natural for him to call me by her name at that moment. I took a deep breath and nodded. Crying for them now wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  “Their grandmother was so cruel. I could feel Cathy’s pain with what Christopher described as a seemingly endless whipping,” I said, my teeth clenched with the rage I felt toward that evil old woman who justified her cruelty with biblical quotes. Religion cloaked her sadism, I thought. Someday I’d like to know what turned her into this dreadful person, not that any of that would justify what she was doing to her own grandchildren. Maybe nothing did. Maybe she was simply born that way, and that was what my mother’s distant cousin liked about her.

  “And I felt his pain. I really did, but I also felt how it brought them closer,” Kane added, and he kissed me softly, the way a father or mother might kiss away a bruise or a sad moment. “Their pain and suffering drove them to be more to each other,” he said, his voice a whisper now. “We can understand that, can’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They desperately needed to feel each other beside them, to comfort and love each other, especially at that moment, no matter how it might look to us,” he said, his face full of intensity to drive home his conclusion.

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  I held on to his shoulders. I felt like he was trying to bring me the same comfort Christopher brought to Cathy. Surely, she would have drowned in her sorrow and agony otherwise. I could easily imagine her curling up in a ball in the corner of that attic, refusing to eat or drink, fading away and dying as would any flower without the sun, which in this case was the love of a mother who had apparently deserted them.

  Kane brought his hands down to my waist, and we turned together on the sofa bed. His fingers moved up to the buttons on my blouse. After he slipped it off me and undid my bra, he raised himself and took off his shirt. I knew what he was doing, I knew what we were going to reenact, and I didn’t try to stop it. We had been naked together in the shower, but somehow, up here in the attic, turning ourselves into Christopher and Cathy at this precise moment in the diary, it seemed like the first time.

  As he moved himself so I could feel his erection where I should, I could tell he was waiting for me to say it, almost as if it was a line I had rehearsed many times in a scene we could finally perform.

  “Stop, Christopher. This is what she thinks we do, making love.”

  He laughed the way I saw Christopher laughing when Kane was reading. “Should I describe what making love involves, too?” he asked.

  “If you can, but the way Christopher did,” I challenged.

  He turned to lie on his back. I rested the palm of my left hand on his chest, feeling the quickened beat of his heart, and looked at him. He tried so hard not to be comical about it, to explain it the way Christopher might have. He was doing a very good job of it, too, when I finally had to stop him.

  “You read up on this, memorized some textbook or something, didn’t you?”

  “Sort of,” he admitted. “I’m pretty good in science, you know. That’s my best subject, just as it was Christopher’s. It’s funny now, but when I read things in the science text, I actually imagine Christopher explaining them and think I should be able to do that, too, sound as confident of my explanations. When I answer questions in class, Mr. Malamud looks more impressed these days. How did I just sound to you?”

  “Too good. Too clinical and definitely not romantic,” I replied, at first to tease him.

  “But wasn’t that what Christopher really wanted to do at that moment? He was avoiding being anything like romantic with his sister, right? I think doctors hide behind their facts in order not to get too emotional over a patient. It’s a technique Christopher’s already mastered because of the circumstances. That was what he wanted, right?”

  Suddenly, we were like two drama students discussing a scene we had just seen performed. It was like someone throwing a pail of cold water over me. “I’m sure,” I said, then turned away and began to dress.

  He watched me for a moment and then began to dress, too. I thought he would protest. Now that we were moving away from what had been a very passionate few moments, I was surprised he had given up so easily, surprised and maybe a little disappointed that the heat of passion had cooled in him.

  Perhaps this was exactly what had occurred between Christopher and Cathy at that moment. We were too loyal to the attic world we had decided to enter and respect. If it didn’t happen there and then, it wouldn’t happen here and now.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “I have to do something before we have dinner with my sister and her boyfriend later.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve got to see my father at the Mercedes dealership. He wants me to start working weekends there. Until now, I’ve done a good job of avoiding it.”

  “How are you going to get out of it now, assuming you still want to?”

  “Oh, I want to. I don’t want to have anything to do with his dealerships, and we go around and around about it at least once a week. I’m going to claim that schoolwork demands my free time. I’m failing math.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I deliberately failed two important tests this quarter. I have the exams in the car to show him. I can’t fail math and graduate. Solution? Being tutored by the girl who’s mostly likely to be valedictorian.”

  “He’s going to believe that?”

  “Maybe he won’t believe it, but he’ll put up with it. He has enough grief coming from my mother and her complaints about Darlena this week.”

  We rearranged the attic, and he put his wig and my scarf in the same trunk before leaving. I followed him down to the front door, thinking more about what he had said. These days, we were thinking more about Cathy and Christopher than about ourselves. I was afraid of losing a grip on reality.

  “What do you want to do, to be, Kane, if you don’t want to take over your father’s car dealership empire?” I asked him before he stepped out.

  He smiled. “Empire? Yeah, that’s what it is. I don’t particularly feel like anyone’s emperor, though. Parents often think that if they’ve built something, you should be grateful and become part of it, but what about building something yourself, for yourself?”

  “So what do you want to build for yourself?”

  I could easily predict I’d get that Kane Hill shrug and smile. “I don’t know.” He stopped smiling. “Maybe I should think seriously about becoming a doctor,” he said. “Like Christopher.”

  I closed my mouth when he leaned in to kiss me. “You’re not serious enough for that,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get serious. I’ll return about six thirty, okay? We’ll meet them at the restaurant.” He started for his car. “Let me know what you want to do about going to Tina’s party afterward. We’ll do whatever you want,” he called back before he got into his car.

  After he left, I thought about what I would do with the rest of my day and decided to go pay my father a visit at the site. We hadn’t spent that much time together this week. Maybe it was also because Kane had gone off to spend time with his father, too, and that reminded me that I should spend time with mine. I put myself together quickly and headed for the Foxworth property.

  The deeper we got into the diary, the more intense were my fee
lings of tension whenever I approached the property now. It was as if I was returning to a place where I really had spent a great deal of time, unhappily and tragically. Something in me constricted in fear and disgust with every mile I drew closer. Even in broad daylight, I anticipated seeing ghosts, hearing voices, crying, and pleas for freedom.

  It was my father who put the idea into my head that places, especially houses, took on the identities of those who lived there. “After all,” he’d said, “wasn’t that a prime reason why whoever bought someone else’s home wanted to redo so much of it? It’s like not wanting to wear someone else’s clothes. Lucky for guys like me who rip down the old and rebuild the new.”

  How many people in construction thought so deeply about their work as my father did? No wonder he had even deeper feelings about Foxworth Hall.

  * * *

  When I got up there, I realized it was a little warmer than it had been. It was mostly sunny, with just a slight breeze from the south. I knew my father wanted to get as much of the exterior work done as possible before winter came rushing in full-blown on what he called “the skirts of the dropping jet stream.” I’d told him that from the way he could predict the weather, he could have just as easily been a farmer. “When I retire, that’s what I’ll do,” he’d replied.

  I was surprised to see just how far along he and his team had gotten with the construction of the new house. Everything unusable from the restored Foxworth Hall had been hauled away. The part of the old foundation that was visible and utilized was freshly painted with an off-white waterproof material. The framing of the two stories was completed, with the upstairs floor laid. It was easy to envision it now even without having seen the plans.

  Behind it and to the right, two bulldozers continued to expand the grounds by driving out the overgrowth and cutting back the forest of birch, maple, and oak saplings. I could see that the plans for this new property created what was going to be an even larger and more elaborate landscaping than what had been done for the development of the original and the restored Foxworth Hall. The bulldozers had already moved and flattened much of the ground. Footings for fountains and the setting of tile or cement pathways was to follow. The scent of fresh earth permeated the air. What had once been more like a rotting corpse of a property now had the look of something fresh and new, full of promise and potential beauty.

  My father and Todd were standing back and observing the crew constructing the pool, which looked like it would be at least as long and as wide as the one in our school. Todd had his arms folded across his chest the way my father had his. If he could, he’d walk in my father’s footsteps all day, I thought. He saw me first and nudged my father to turn my way as I drove up and parked. They both watched me approach.

  “What’s up?” Dad asked. I think ever since my mother took ill and died, every time something or someone surprised him, his first reaction was always to tighten up and prepare himself for some sort of bad news. Running through his mind was surely that someone had called the house with some.

  “I thought I’d come up to see if you’ve been working as hard as you’ve said or just jawin’ up a sweat,” I replied. It was his favorite way to kid fellow construction workers.

  With relief, his face quickly softened into a broad smile. He looked past me at my car. “By yourself?” he asked, even though it was quite obvious. It was his way of asking where Kane Hill was.

  “Yes. Kane has a meeting with his father, and I wanted to see what was already done up here.”

  “Well, you must be bored,” Todd said.

  “Don’t you think your work is exciting?” I fired back, and he shook his head and looked to my father to save him.

  “Todd’s good at holding in his feelings,” my father said, and Todd laughed. My father studied me a moment and nodded to himself, thinking. “Come on,” he said. “Since you came here, I’ll show you something.”

  He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me back toward the house. I was a little nervous. The last time he had brought me to the remains of the Hall, we’d discovered Christopher’s diary. Had he found something else to do with the Foxworths?

  “Careful,” he said, as we stepped through the front door framing. There were loose wires threaded through boards and lots of nails and sawdust scattered about, which was nothing unusual and didn’t surprise me. I had been to many of his building sites, even as a little girl when my mother was alive. We paused in what I knew from the plans was to be the living room.

  Two men from many other jobs my father had done were constructing the fieldstone hearth for the fireplace, working meticulously, as if they were creating an artistic masterpiece. It probably would be. The stones were taken from an old fieldstone wall on the property, which, like so many in our area, was constructed in the nineteenth century and had remarkably stood the test of time. From what I understood of Malcolm Foxworth, he wouldn’t have wanted those fieldstone walls destroyed. He would have had Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” mounted on his wall and chanted “Good fences make good neighbors.”

  When I had first approached the rubble and the foundation of the burned-down restored Foxworth Hall on the day we found Christopher’s diary, I had seen where the fireplace was, but it was charred, covered with debris, and, although large, otherwise unremarkable standard brick seen in many houses. It was one of the things left from the original mansion. Now the stone floor within had been scrubbed clean. It was clear to me that the guts of the original fireplace were still there, but the fieldstone replaced the bricks, and its design ensured that it would be wider and more elaborate.

  The men paused and turned to us.

  “You remember my daughter, Kristin, don’t you, Butch?” my father asked the older of the two. I remembered now that Butch Wilson worked with his younger brother Tommy. They were master stone craftsmen, specializing in fireplaces, but did lots of other stonework around homes. I didn’t think my father had ever worked on a project that required stonework without them, as long as I could remember. Strangely, they both had that flaxen-blond hair that distinguished the Dollanganger children.

  “Sure. Growing faster than a radish. She’s looking more and more like your wife,” Butch said.

  “Lucky her,” Tommy added, smiling impishly.

  My father laughed. “You won’t get any argument about that from me,” he said. He urged me on to approach the fireplace. “I wanted to show her what you found.”

  The two stood up and moved back. Butch nodded at the stone floor of the fireplace.

  “Check it out,” my father said. I knelt down and looked closely. At first, I saw nothing, but when I leaned in closer, I saw the initials CF, a heart, and then another CF, all a bit crudely engraved in the stone. I reached in and touched it and then looked up at my father. I was surprised that he wanted me to see it. He knew that I knew what it meant. It was obvious Butch and Tommy didn’t.

  “So?” Tommy asked. “Your father says he can’t make head nor tail of it.”

  “It’s got something to do with the nutty family who lived here,” Butch said.

  I looked at my father. Did he want me to tell them? Was he testing me to see how much I really had learned from reading Christopher’s diary? He was stone-faced. After a moment, he stepped closer and nodded at the stone.

  “Butch thinks the devil might have engraved it there,” he told me. “Butch’s grandfather worked on the construction of the original Foxworth Hall.”

  “That’s right, and he never had a nice word to say about the Foxworths, either. The old man counted every minute my grandfather worked here and didn’t pay him a nickel over the hourly wage. He put in this hearthstone with the old man or his wife looking over his shoulder the whole time. Neither would have tolerated this defaming of it,” he said, nodding at the initials. “If he had seen it, he’d have had my grandfather back to grind it out, unless he was told to leave it.”

  “Who would tell him that?” I asked, curious to hear what else he knew.

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sp; “Satan, who else?” Butch said, and Tommy nodded.

  I looked at my father. He still wasn’t smiling. He nodded at me, turned, and started out. I glanced at Butch and Tommy and saw that they really believed what they were saying. Afterward, when they told friends what they had found here, they’d surely add to the Halloween image of what had gone on at Foxworth Hall years ago.

  I caught up with my father. “Why didn’t they use a new hearthstone instead of the one from the original mansion, Dad?”

  “The owner wanted it kept,” he said. He stood there watching my reaction. “At least, who I think is the owner.”

  “But did he know what was carved into the stone?”

  “Maybe. You know whose initials they are, don’t you?”

  “Christopher Foxworth and Corrine Foxworth,” I replied.

  He nodded and kept walking toward Todd.

  “They changed their name,” I said. “At least, Christopher did.”

  “And why did he do that?”

  “They didn’t want anyone to know that they were related.”

  “Have you finished reading that diary, Kristin?”

  “No.”

  “I want you to promise me you’ll get rid of it when you do.”

  “Why, Dad? You don’t believe what they said, do you? You don’t really believe the devil was in that house?”

  “In one way or another, maybe he was and moved right back in when it was previously restored,” he replied. “Whatever. The less we have to do with what went on there, the better off we’ll be.” He looked back at the structure. “Something in me didn’t want me to take this job, but the money’s so good I couldn’t refuse. It’ll pay for your entire college education.”

  “Then that’s the way to look at it, Dad. Something good can come from it. Period, end of sentence,” I said.

  I was expecting him to look upset with me because of how firmly I said it, sounding like I was the one giving the orders in this family. Maybe he’d even get very angry and finally show it, I thought, but instead, he looked amazed and then smiled. It threw me off.