Out of the Attic Page 4

  When he didn’t answer, I leaned over and whispered in a hoarse voice. I realized my throat was aching from all the screaming I had done.

  “Do you hear me?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell your mother you’re sorry, Malcolm,” Dora said. “Please.”

  “Don’t beg him to be good, Dora,” I snapped at her.

  She looked down quickly.

  I was almost as angry at her. Why she had so willingly accepted this added responsibility caring for Malcolm puzzled me. She had enough to do caring for me and helping her aunt, Mrs. Steiner. Why didn’t she want to marry and have a child of her own, a house of her own, and a life of her own? Maybe she had a hidden desire to become a nun.

  I shook the belt in front of Malcolm’s face.

  “I’m not done with you, young man. I want you to get up right now and go to my bedroom. You take out every page you tore out of the wedding album, and you straighten it out. Get up!” I screamed.

  He didn’t move.

  “I’ll fix it, ma’am. I’ll iron the pages. He can’t do that,” Dora said.

  I looked at her and then at him. She would never see it, I thought, but there was that smug little smile forming on his lips, a smile just like his father’s. He was getting away without having to repair the damage he had done. His sense of entitlement would grow bigger than his father’s and his grandfather’s. It was terrible, but when I looked at my own son now, I saw only the Foxworths, the arrogant and insensitive Foxworths captured in portraits forever.

  “He doesn’t leave the room, then,” I repeated with more emphasis, turned, and paused to recapture my demeanor. “Go get my packages down in the entryway first and bring them up, Dora.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and started out. I followed her. Mrs. Steiner stood back in the hallway as if she really feared I would explode.

  I looked back at Malcolm from the doorway. He still hadn’t moved.

  “Someday,” I said, “you’ll be very sorry you treated your mother like this, Malcolm. You’ll cry for your mother’s love. Nothing and no one can replace it. You grew inside me, no one else.”

  I stepped out and closed the door behind me. Mrs. Steiner nodded and hurried away like someone glad to escape.

  I could hear Dora descending the stairway quickly. They’d all talk about this for days. I suddenly felt terribly exhausted. My heart was still pounding as hard as it had been on the attic stairway. After glancing back at Malcolm’s door, I started for the Swan Room. A voice inside me asked why I should be at all surprised at how my son treated me. What part of being a mother had I honestly assumed? Why would he have an ounce of love for you? I asked myself. Your final speech to him probably sounded like a foreign language. How empty those threats and predictions probably had seemed.

  Despite how my mother had treated me when I was younger, I never thought of her as anything but my mother, and I always longed for her love. She was there at least for my basic needs. I never thought of anyone else as a mother. But Malcolm… I rarely fed him or dressed him. Whenever we all sat together at dinner, he looked to Dora for instructions.

  But whose fault was that? From time to time, I tinkered with letting Dora go. Maybe I was simply jealous of the affection my son showed her but not me. It wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t help resenting her sometimes. I’d look for a way to find fault with her. She was too young to be someone’s lifelong personal servant and a nanny. Instead of blaming myself, I constantly blamed her.

  Where were her self-pride, her ambitions? Her poor self-image always annoyed me. She should be out there meeting people her own age and eventually finding herself a husband. She never asked for a vacation. Her idea of a day off was sitting in her room and reading. Malcolm would still go to her with his problems and requests even on her day off.

  However, I knew that Dora had a special, mysterious place in my husband’s life as well. She had whispered it to me days before I was becoming Mrs. Garland Foxworth. She had sworn that there was nothing sexual going on. I really didn’t understand what it was or what it meant, but during those early days, I sensed that if I pursued it any further, everything would explode in my face, especially my wedding and therefore my future.

  Who could blame me for blindly accepting the way things were back then? After all, I was just a little more than sixteen, and despite my bravado and the confidence I portrayed to my girlfriends, who had come to believe I was more sophisticated than women much older than I was, I knew in my heart that I had miles to go before I came anywhere near to knowing what was truly in the heart of a grown man, especially a man of the world like Garland Foxworth. I really had no idea even how to begin to explore it. So much of it was deeply hidden behind his smiles.

  Except for my own father and some young boys I had tormented with promises of love, what experience with men did I have? What insights or visions did I really possess? I was successful in putting myself into the body of someone older, even much older, but inside I was still a little girl at heart, a teenage girl who imagined herself a femme fatale. I convinced myself that I was ready to understand and confidently twist a grown man around my thumb.

  Perhaps I had never fallen in love with Garland. Perhaps I was always too in love with myself. Such a woman didn’t even know how blind she really was. I had been in frightening darkness in the attic of Foxworth Hall. But the truth was, I was always in some darkness here.

  The question I couldn’t answer now and perhaps never would was, would I ever step out of it? To do that, I had to get better at understanding everything there was to understand about my own husband. I tried to make it seem ordinary, expected. I told myself that any woman would have to do that, wouldn’t she?

  Yes, Garland Foxworth was a wonderful target for my seductive smiles. He was everything I dreamed I’d find for myself. How could I not capture him and instantly know what I had to know to win his heart forever? His love for me was deep and complete. I was so sure that was what I had seen in those beautiful eyes that first night at the Wexler anniversary gala. I had convinced myself that, like any other man, he was easy to read.

  I didn’t know it then, but in Garland Foxworth’s case, I would never know what was looming behind those beautiful eyes.

  And in the end, that would be tragic for me and perhaps for Malcolm, too.

  Right after we had made love for the first time during my ten-day stay at Foxworth to prepare for our wedding, I thought I had seen a ghost going into Garland’s mother’s bedroom, but it was Dora in one of his mother’s dresses. I confronted Dora about it, and she revealed that Garland made her wear his mother’s clothes and lie in her bed. He then entered the room and spoke to her as if she were his mother.

  It might have taken much longer to learn more about those strange rendezvous if we had, as Garland had promised, taken a wonderful, long honeymoon. But right before our ceremony, Garland had told me that he was too busy to take me on a formal honeymoon. He promised he would very soon, but for the time being, we would have our honeymoon at Foxworth Hall.

  “How can you have a honeymoon at your home?” I asked, smiling. Surely he didn’t mean it.

  “You have scratched only the surface of Foxworth Hall, Corrine,” he said. “For you it’s as new and exciting as any place I might take you for ten days. And although I will be working daily, I will be with you most every night. We’ll have wonderful dinners with champagne and wine, wines I have brought back from France, wines you wouldn’t find at any honeymoon resort in America right now.

  “When I have a spare afternoon, weather permitting, we’ll go out on the lake, maybe picnic in the boat. I’ll have musicians here playing for us often before and after dinner. I’ll take you on carriage rides whenever possible. If I break down and decide to share some of my precious time with you with one or two of my closer business associates and their wives, we’ll have small dinner parties. It will be good for you to begin becoming a formal dinner hostess as soon as possible, too. Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Stein
er will help you with that. You want to do everything properly and live up to expectations. In years to come, an invitation to dinner at Foxworth Hall will be as valuable as an invitation to the governor’s mansion, even the White House.

  “Believe me, my sweet, you’ll see the first ten days as a honeymoon, and,” he added with that coy, sexy smile, “I’ll have you in my bed most every night.”

  I couldn’t help being a little taken aback. All of the married women I had met and known, even my mother’s boring friends, bragged about their honeymoons. Here I was marrying one of the wealthiest men in the state, apparently, and he was suggesting, no, telling me, we would have a poor man’s honeymoon and stay at home. Despite the fact that this home was a mansion, except for the few times I had been driven to Charlottesville to do some shopping, I basically had been stuck here for ten days preparing for “the wedding of the century.” And now I was to be stuck here again for who knew how long. Was it possible to have cabin fever in such a place? I’m sure my face reflected my disappointment at what he was saying about our honeymoon, but rather than changing his mind, he looked peeved at me.

  “Surely you see no problem with any of this. There is so much more for you to learn about Foxworth Hall. The sooner the better for you. I know you want that, too.”

  One thing I was going to understand and understand quickly about my new husband was that he was not an easy man to contradict. It was nearly impossible to turn down any request he had made of me, not because he would pout or make my life miserable otherwise but because he always sounded right and he always made it seem as if I was just as much a part of the idea he proposed. I would look foolish opposing him, and a newly married young woman, especially one constantly on a stage, did not want to look foolish. I did feel like I was on display most of the time. Unless I locked myself in my room, and even then, because I’d have to be waited upon, I lived with an audience. The eyes of one of the servants followed me almost everywhere I went, looking for ways to please me.

  One would think that in a mansion this large, there were places I could go to spend an entire day alone, especially if I wanted to pout. There were, but if I was alone too long, someone would be worried and soon appear with water or fruit or simply to ask how I was. I was piqued, but I couldn’t be visibly annoyed or nasty. I understood that Garland had left an overriding commandment hovering above everyone in this house whenever he was gone after our marriage and home honeymoon. It was to watch over me very closely. They all knew I was pregnant, but keeping a Foxworth secret was expected. It was months more before anyone in the mansion would dare to mention my pregnancy, even to me.

  But I could see that realization in their faces. Right from the first day after my marriage, I felt eyes on me whenever I started down the stairs or went outside. If I stumbled, caught my foot on something, no matter where I was or how alone I thought I was, I heard an audible gasp and soon saw Dora, Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Steiner, Olsen, or Mr. Wilson rushing to see if I was all right.

  Months later, during my pregnancy, I was naturally tired more often than I usually was. I’d fall asleep on the settee or chaise in the grand room and wake to find a blanket over my lap. As if my eyelids set off a bell when they closed, Dora was at my side, and if she wasn’t able to be there instantly, Mrs. Steiner would be there.

  Dr. Ross left instructions about what I could and couldn’t eat and drink, the amount of weight I could carry, and how much sleep I should have. I was not to go too far from the house, but he did say that I could go for a walk, should go for a walk, but he left strict orders that I should never go alone. Dora had to accompany me, and with her limp caused by one leg being shorter than the other since birth, I always felt I had to walk slower and not go too far, even though she could move as quickly as I could.

  But walking with someone wasn’t simply walking. You talked, told stories, and enjoyed each other’s company. I missed my intimate discussions with Daisy Herman and some of the other girls. Conversation with Dora wasn’t at all interesting, and almost anything I told her about myself shocked her, which after a while made me feel so uncomfortable that I stopped talking.

  Dora, after all, was a young woman who had never had any romance, who had been in a servant’s role her entire short life, waiting hand and foot on her parents and then her brother. She was about as naive as any of the girls who had attended my special private gatherings in Alexandria, where I would explain and tutor them about everything from flirtation to intercourse. She had nothing to add that would interest me.

  However, I couldn’t avoid her. Dora was truly like another shadow for me in those early days. She would bring breakfast to my bed, and wherever I had ended up sitting after I had risen, dressed, and gone downstairs, that was where she would bring me lunch. In my seventh and eighth months, whenever Garland wasn’t coming home for dinner, she brought it up to me. I never asked her to stay while I ate. It was more interesting to flip through a book or stare out the window and dream.

  During those last few months, I fell into some pools of depression despite the attention and the gifts Garland sent along with flowers and candy. He made sure to have magazines and newspapers delivered so I could see any new fashions, and he arranged for me to have every new musical rendition on the Edison gramophone. By this time Dr. Ross forbade my riding in the carriage because the roads were too bumpy, and he even restricted the distance I could go for a walk.

  It was during those last months of my pregnancy, when I was most depressed about myself, depressed about how my life had changed and about the world of Foxworth that twirled around me, that I most resented what went on secretly between Dora and Garland. Everything was bothering me, but this especially. He wouldn’t sleep with me because he said Dr. Ross told him it was too dangerous to make love to a woman this far along in her pregnancy. He always seemed uncomfortable visiting me in the Swan Room and often stepped in no farther than inches from the doorway. I felt like I was contagious.

  After a while I was convinced he avoided me as much as he could because of my big belly and my bloated face. I hated how I looked and imagined he hated it as well. But he always had a nice smile for Dora. Surely it had to do with their secret meetings in his mother’s bedroom. It was then that I came the closest to confronting him and demanding to know why that was happening and, whatever the reason for it, demanding it to stop.

  But Garland was still battling with all sorts of economic issues, still raging about incompetent employees and even at one point snapping at all our servants, including Dora. I was afraid to speak, much less complain about anything or pursue his secrets. He looked like walking dynamite, his eyes bloodshot, pacing in his library and office and rushing out to do this or that at all times day and night.

  After Malcolm was born and I felt whole and strong again, Dr. Ross gave me a follow-up examination and then gave Garland his approval to resume sexual activity with me. Garland asked me to his room just the way he always had, in a whisper at dinner or when we were sitting together in the living room or library, each time making it seem like a forbidden tryst. Sometimes he was so convincing about how secretive we had to be that I truly wondered if he really wanted it to be kept hidden. Of course, anyone would ask, from whom? The ghosts of his ancestors, especially the ghost of his mother? What Dora had told me Garland made her do in the past never left my thoughts. I had been hoping that since our marriage, that had ended. Whatever comfort he needed he now got from me.

  However, a number of times during our “Foxworth Honeymoon,” after we had made love and I had returned to the Swan Room, I had heard Garland’s footsteps in the hallway just as I had begun to close my eyes. By the time I rose to see where he was going, he was gone; but one time, I hadn’t gone right to bed. I was fidgety and even contemplated going down to the kitchen to make myself a glass of warm milk. As I was putting on my bathrobe, I heard his footsteps and went to my door, opening it just a little to look out. He passed by, wearing his nightdress. I started to call to him until I saw he was movin
g like someone in a trance, his eyes almost closed and his steps methodical, with his arms at his sides.

  I stepped out of the Swan Room and watched him continue down the dimly lit hallway toward what had been his mother’s bedroom. He paused before it, knocked gently, and, after a moment, opened the door and went in. Why, I wondered, was he really going in there? Was Dora lying to me when she said there was nothing sexual between them?

  I waited in the hallway by my room, and when he didn’t come out, I approached his mother’s bedroom slowly. Almost there, I heard what was distinctly sobbing. It sounded like the sobbing of a little boy, just as Dora had described.

  With trembling fingers, I opened the door slowly, an inch at a time, and peered through the crack and indeed saw Dora dressed in one of his mother’s nightdresses just the way she had been when I had gotten that glimpse of her before my wedding and thought I had seen a ghost.

  The room was so dimly lit it was almost impossible to see anything, but gradually my eyes adjusted to the weak light and the shadows enough for me to see that Dora was sitting back against the oversized pillow. Garland was on his knees beside the bed and leaning over her legs. She had her hand on his head and gently stroked him while he uttered these sobs. He was saying something in between them, too low for me to understand it. I wanted to thrust the door open and ask what was happening, but my heart was pounding, and I was quite terrified by the scene. It was one thing to hear her vaguely describe it but another to see it, so I closed the door softly and retreated.

  I lay in bed trembling until I heard his footsteps again. He was walking faster now. When I rose and peeked through the slightly opened door, I saw him slip into his own bedroom. I looked back at his mother’s room when I heard that door open. Dora, now in her own clothing, walked down the hallway to the stairway and descended. I wanted to intercept her, but I hesitated too long, and she was gone.