Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  “Could you do that?”

  “I’ve always felt that my father knew something more, and that was why he was so concerned about my reading it. This might be it. Some things are better left buried.”

  “It can’t possibly matter now, can it? Malcolm Foxworth and his wife are dead, and Corrine is probably still in the loony bin. If we gave this to the district attorney, he’d file it away somewhere under ‘Why waste my time?’ ”

  “I suddenly just had a terrible chill,” I said, hugging myself.

  He got up quickly and sat beside me, hugging me and rubbing my shoulder and my back, kissing my hair, my forehead, and my cheeks.

  “It’s not the kind of chill that comes from being in a cold room, Kane. It’s the kind of chill that comes from deep inside you.”

  “Take a deep breath. It’ll pass,” he said.

  “Suddenly, I’m really frightened for both of us,” I said.

  He smiled. “Kristin, this is just someone’s diary. It doesn’t burn our fingers to hold it. Nothing terrible has happened to either of us because we’re reading it or to anyone we love. There’s no such thing as a curse. You’re acting like those fools who go up to Foxworth on Halloween and scare each other.”

  “Because we’re reading this diary, you’ve told me things you’ve never told anyone else, right?”

  “So?”

  “There’s something about it, something more than it just being a diary about a terrible thing being done to children.”

  “Whatever you think about it is coming from you, not from the diary. I probably would have told you things about myself anyway, because I trust you and I care more for you than any other girl I’ve met. Okay, it’s magical. It brought us more closely together. I’ll give you that but nothing more,” he said. “We’ve got to go on. If I were really Christopher, I’d want you to go on.”

  I looked into his eyes. Yes, maybe he was right, I thought. I nodded softly. He smiled and kissed me and hugged me again, holding me tightly for a few moments. Then he rose and returned to the chair. I would never look at that chair again without thinking of these days, without hearing his voice, and without envisioning the Dollanganger children. My father was right. Things, furniture, mementos, all do take on a life of their own and become far more than wood, metal, plastic, and paper. Nothing deserves to end up in a junkyard along with other lost memories. I recalled him once saying, “We hold on to things we were given and things we shared with loved ones because we don’t want to die.”

  You die a little more with everything you leave behind, discard, and destroy. That was why he clung so hard to his old truck, why he despised the idea of people building and owning homes as investments. Homes weren’t another form of commodity to him. They were filled with family, with the aromas of their favorite foods, with the echo of their laughter and the rumbling of their unhappiness, still damp with their tears. “When someone moves into someone else’s home, despite the new paint and even the new appliances, they’re putting on someone else’s old socks,” he told me.

  “But can’t they make it their own, too?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But it gets crowded.”

  My father, I thought, there was no one like him.

  I took a deep breath. So did Kane, and he opened the diary, turned the blank page, and continued.

  I couldn’t get the book with the sexually explicit pictures out of my mind. Whenever it was time for me to venture out to search for more money, I had to admit to myself that I was drawn to look at that book almost as much as I was drawn to look for the money we needed for our escape. I confessed that to Cathy, and then I described what had nearly happened on my latest visit to Momma’s bedroom and what I had overheard. It wasn’t until I described it to her that I realized what she had done and how close to revealing us she had come.

  I was looking at the book when I heard voices and realized it was our mother and her new husband. I had no time to slip out, so I went into our mother’s closet and crouched. While I was in there, I heard Bart Winslow complain about missing money. He was blaming it on the servants, but Momma wasn’t very interested. They argued about going to a play, and fortunately for me, Momma won the argument, but then Bart Winslow described his dream.

  “What dream?” Cathy asked.

  As I related it to her, it was a dream about some young girl with long golden hair sneaking into their room while he was asleep and kissing him on the lips. I had a suspicion he was talking about Cathy, and as I told her about it, I could see in her face that I was talking about her.

  It threw me into a rage. How could she risk our lives like that? Was he so handsome, her need so much greater than mine? I knew she was frustrated, but so was I, and I didn’t go off and do anything that crazy. She could say nothing to defend herself.

  I mumbled about how lucky I was that Momma had insisted they leave, which made it possible for me to sneak back out. Then I turned away from her and sulked about it on my own bed. I don’t know how much time passed before I calmed down enough to look back at her, but she was gone. She had gone to sit by the window in the moonlight.

  I stood there looking at her, looking at how the moonlight outlined her breasts, her thighs, and the small of her stomach through the thin nightshirt. She sensed my presence and looked at me, unmoving, tempting me with her innocent new beauty. I told her she looked beautiful sitting there and that because of the moonlight, she was as good as naked. She didn’t move to cover herself up.

  Suddenly, I thought of her not as my young sister, Cathy, but as some far more sophisticated young nymph, a temptress who had so much confidence in herself that she would dare sneak up to a grown man sleeping and kiss him softly on his lips, wanting to taste those lips, wanting to satisfy her own sexual need. Well, didn’t I need and want that? All I could think, which blinded me from thinking any other thought, was that she would have willingly given herself to Bart Winslow if he had awakened and reached for her. He would take her on that damn swan bed. She would know another man’s love, not mine.

  I was overcome with rage about that. I have no other way to explain it right now. I shot forward and seized her and accused her again of risking everything and wanting him. I told her she could never be anyone else’s but mine, and I was determined to make her see that. I admit to losing complete control of myself. I shoved her down on the mattress. She struggled, fought for a little while, and then suddenly, she gave up. She returned my kiss and opened herself to me. I knew that because we were both virgins, it wouldn’t be easy, it wouldn’t be the wonderful experience it was meant to be for all those who were truly in love, but I could not stop what I had started. She cried, but she clung to me as if she was afraid I would retreat. She dug her fingers into me, and I pushed on and into her.

  We’re damned, I thought almost immediately afterward.

  Our dreadful grandmother was right.

  We’re the devil’s spawn.

  Kane lowered the diary slowly. He didn’t look at me immediately. He stared ahead. We were both so quiet we could hear the heat in the pipes and the sound of a car horn way in the distance. It sounded desperate, like a lost goose calling for its flock.

  Both of us had liked and admired the young Christopher who was telling us their story. Despite how frustrated we were by the way he tolerated and believed his mother, we respected his efforts to keep himself and his siblings safe. He was, after all, thinking only about their future. From the beginning, he understood how desperate a situation they were in. He loved his father, but he was angry at him for leaving them lost and vulnerable, so much so that they had to tolerate their tortured incarceration in that great house. Cathy’s skepticism had so far proven to be more accurate than Christopher’s unyielding love for his mother.

  Even though Kane looked as shocked as I was at what he had just read, I doubted that he would deny having anticipated it. I could shout at him now, if that was what would make me feel better. I could scream that I had told him so, that when he came upon t
hat blank page, we should have done what I suggested. We should have stopped and left the rest of it buried, but I didn’t, because I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to know just as much as he wanted to know.

  Neither of us felt like talking about it immediately. He finally turned to me. “I’m thirsty,” he said. “We should have brought something to drink up with us.”

  I looked at my watch. “We could have some lunch now, anyway.”

  He nodded. Neither of us would admit that we weren’t that hungry, but both of us needed the break. He rose to start after me.

  “Leave it up here,” I said, nodding at the diary in his hands.

  He put it on the chair, and we left the attic.

  We descended silently. I think neither of us knew quite how to begin this conversation. I talked instead about what to eat, and we both decided I’d make some toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches. He watched me start by neatly cutting the tomato the way my father had taught me years ago, and then Kane went out to the living room and stood there the whole time looking out the window at the street and the trees. He didn’t turn when he heard me come to tell him our sandwiches were ready. He continued staring ahead.

  “My father looks forward to winter. He’s a good skier. My sister’s a good skier. I can ski passably well, but I’m not crazy about it. My mother likes going to ski lodges and sitting by the fireplaces drinking her Cosmopolitans. She has the best ski lodge fashions, all that white fur stuff and those fancy soft leather winter boots that hardly ever see any snow. My father took us on our first family ski trip when I was just six. He had a ski pro teach me on the children’s slope. In those days, my sister and I shared a room. Separate beds, of course, but the same room. She would complain about it, but my father saw no reason to spend money on another room for a six-year-old.”

  “Did you want to be in the same room with your sister?”

  He turned quickly. I thought he was going to say something nasty, but he looked like he was giving my question deep thought. “I wasn’t afraid of being alone or anything like that. Maybe in those days, I was closer to her than I am now. I mean, when you’re six, you’d hate to hug your sister, but at this age, when we hug, I’m well aware of how beautiful she is. Whatever . . . you’ve got me questioning my own feelings.”

  “Me?”

  “Christopher, then. You ever go skiing?” he asked, eager to change the topic. I wasn’t going to oppose it. These thoughts felt too heavy right now.

  “No. When my father looks to recreate, he favors swimming in the ocean. We used to take long weekends in Virginia Beach, I remember, but we haven’t done that since . . . for a long time. He says he gets enough exercise at work.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Kane said.

  “Sandwiches are ready.”

  He followed me into the kitchen. I poured us both some chocolate milk, and we sat across from each other at the kitchenette table and ate.

  “What did you do to make this so good?”

  “I put a little avocado in it. My father does that, and he uses real butter.”

  “Do you think he’d mind if I moved in?” he asked, smiling.

  “Probably not, as long as you did KP duty.”

  “I keep forgetting he was in the navy.”

  “Yes. He doesn’t have any tattoos.”

  Kane laughed. “Neither does my father. He used to ask my sister and me if we knew any college graduates with tattoos. It was his way of telling us never to get one.”

  “Suzette brags about the one she has on her rear end, a hummingbird. Ever see it?”

  “Good try,” he said. “No, and I don’t want to, either.”

  We both finished our sandwiches, but neither of us stood up. The long pause seemed deafening.

  “He was always in control when they were alone,” I began. “It wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t lose control of himself.”

  “I’m not disagreeing, but somehow I don’t hate him for it. I’m not even disgusted about it. I’m just a little shocked is all. I mean, I don’t want to go into any deep psychological analysis about it. It happened. They were trapped at just the wrong time in their development, their sexuality. But that doesn’t excuse it,” he quickly added.

  “Do you think it destroyed them?”

  “They’ve survived so much. Why not that, too?”

  “Their parents were incestuous by definition, and then they were. The old lady thinks it’s inherited evil.”

  “Why wouldn’t she? She believed in original sin. She blamed men more, but it wasn’t Adam who screwed up in the Garden of Eden. It was Mrs. Adam.”

  I finally felt a smile on my face. “Right. You guys are the victims from day one,” I said, and cleared the table.

  “We’ve got to finish it now, Kristin,” Kane said. “Neither of us will sleep tonight if we don’t.”

  “I know,” I said. I glanced at the clock. “We should be able to do that.”

  “I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll meet you upstairs,” he said.

  I rinsed off the plates and glasses and put everything in the dishwasher. Then I went up to my bathroom. I had the strangest urge when I came out. I don’t know if I could ever explain it or why I did it, but in my mind, it was my effort to tell both Cathy and Christopher that I was still all right with them. I even thought Kane knew that when I entered the attic, dressed only in one of my sheer nightgowns.

  But he also knew it wasn’t my only reason.

  * * *

  Is there a point when a girl says to herself, It’s my time, a time when you might tell yourself what the poets say, “The stars are perfectly aligned”? When you start to date, you know that behind every small, tentative kiss, even behind holding hands, he’s thinking about the possibility, supposedly more than you are. In all the novels I’ve ever read, especially the ones written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls supposedly didn’t think as much about having sexual intercourse, certainly not before they were married. In some books, especially those set in the Victorian era, they were practically asexual.

  And yet the whole idea of young girls being chaperoned all the time suggested to me that there was a fear that if they weren’t, they would succumb quickly, maybe even eagerly. The chaperone wasn’t there only to watch the man’s behavior. It was the unspoken secret everyone knew: girls were just as interested in and excited by the prospect of making love.

  I remembered that old joke a comedian told on television when he was recalling his youth and thinking about his parents making love. To a little boy and a little girl, the concept of how it was done seemed like a big “Ugh!” How could you find pleasure in that place on your body that seemed reserved only for peeing? The comedian said that when he thought about it then, he thought, “My father, yes, but my mother . . . never.”

  If all those adults who pretended or convinced themselves that girls were essentially different from boys when it came to all this could be flies on the wall in our girls’ bathrooms or locker rooms and could listen to the conversations there, they would revise and rewrite the whole thing.

  At this moment, I pushed aside all denial. Later I would find a dozen different reasons for that, the leading one being that I was as much in love with Kane as I expected I would ever be with anyone, and I trusted that he loved me, too. Dumb romantic excuse? Maybe, but it worked, at least for now. Another reason that loomed high in my rationale was the fear that it might happen some other time with someone I had half as much feeling for. I’d be a little drunk or go just a little too far to stop, and the result of that would be horrible regret to follow me all my life. Avoid that at all costs, Kristin Masterwood, I told myself. This is your chance to prevent that from ever happening.

  And of course, this was very special. Kane and I had shared so much these past days and weeks. We had invaded those places in ourselves that were locked away from everyone else, even those we were so close to in our lives. Christopher’s diary had brought us here. We were in our own attic wo
rld, and we were ready to step into that place where we would no longer be able to carry our childhood fantasies with us. We would have different eyes. We would recognize those who had entered with us and those who hadn’t.

  I could almost feel myself lifting the little girl inside me who clung around my neck away and then placing her behind me. I reached out. Kane took my hand and moved so slowly toward me that it was as if he was maneuvering through a very narrow path between jagged rocks. There was that awareness in his eyes. Carefully, like someone concerned that one wrong gesture, one move too quick, would shatter the moment, he undressed. He had what he needed to keep us from suffering serious regret. We were, after all, thoughtful lovers. We knew where unbridled animal passion could lead. We would not step on that path.

  Because we wanted this to last a lifetime in our library of memories, we were moving in exaggeratedly slow motion, each kiss sculpted like a work of art, each touch plotted strategically. There was to be nothing sloppy and awkward here, not now. There was no way we would later claim we had stumbled into it, simply gone too far to turn back, and blame it on a rush of passion. That would reduce it all to some blunder and have nothing to do with our deeper feelings for each other.

  I remember thinking to myself that girls like Suzette never knew a moment like this, and absent that, their lives would take a different turn. They would never know love the way I would, even if it was to be with someone else later on. I would always fall in love through this moment, through Kane.

  With as much gentleness as we could manage in the throes of our building excitement, we both “crossed the Rio Grande,” but safely, with him wearing a condom. I wasn’t a girl child. I didn’t suffer any real pain. Wave after wave of delicious excitement flowed up and over my breasts, up my neck, and into my flushed face. When I was crying with joy, I remembered having the flashing thought that Cathy Dollanganger would never know this beauty. For her, it was almost a savage leap out of childhood.

  There were tears streaming down my cheeks when we were done. Kane kissed away some and held me until the trembling in my body stopped. We didn’t talk about it. There were some moments in your life that you didn’t want to analyze and review. They happened, and that was all there was. Don’t tempt conscience, I thought. Don’t go measuring yourself against someone else’s ruler of good and bad deeds. What you feel is good is good. That was all there was to think and believe if you had faith in the goodness inside you.