Secrets of Foxworth Read online

  “So that’s why we’re leaving so quickly, tonight,” I said. “You’re afraid he’ll die before . . .”

  “Before I win back his love? Yes, Christopher. You’re so bright. You understand. Thank goodness I have you,” she said, and kissed me on the forehead.

  I looked at Cathy. She seemed even angrier now. I knew it was because I was understanding and seeing things from Momma’s point of view and not hers. I knew that in her mind, it was some sort of betrayal.

  “There is one final little detail,” Momma continued. “Your real name is Foxworth, not Dollanganger. Dollanganger was a name your father chose for us. It comes from some ancestor.”

  “What?” Cathy practically pounced. “Why would he want to change an easy-to-spell name?”

  “It’s all very complicated,” she said, falling back into her chair. “I haven’t time to explain every little detail. We have so much to do quickly. Let’s just get on with it. We can think about other things later.”

  “You’ve gone over everything carefully, right, Momma? We have no choice anymore, correct?” I asked. “You’ve spoken to Daddy’s attorney?”

  I looked at Cathy when I asked the questions so she would listen carefully and see why I was willing to go along with what our mother wanted.

  “Everything, Christopher, twice and again just in case. Trying to find another way has nearly exhausted me. Trust me,” she said. She started to cry, telling us how she had tried to think of every possible solution, how disgusted she was with herself for not being able to simply take up the reins and take care of us herself. Through her tears, she again described how much we could have if she succeeded in getting back into her father’s good graces.

  “My mother assures me he will probably only last a few more months,” she said, to drive home how important it was for us to get started immediately. Cathy began to complain again about all she was leaving behind.

  I seized her hand. “Enough!” I said. “Let’s get to packing.”

  I looked at Momma. She was smiling at me through her tears. I was truly her little man. I was no longer just a son and a brother. I was the father we had lost.

  I set the diary down for a moment.

  Their real name was Foxworth, and Dollanganger was an assumed name? This would explain some of the confusion with the way the stories about them were told over the years. But how could Corrine be Malcolm and Olivia’s daughter and her husband be a Foxworth, too? How closely were they related? The point was, they were related. That part of the rumor was accurate, then.

  Were they close enough to be considered incestuous? Was that why my father said Malcolm Foxworth was unforgiving? Vicious and hateful? It certainly might explain why Corrine was written out of her father’s will and disowned by both her parents.

  These poor children, I thought. They were caught in the middle of it all, and so was this new widow with no means of supporting them. What else could she do but throw herself on the mercy of her parents? How did people who had the most reason to love each other grow to despise each other so much? Surely, Malcolm Foxworth and Olivia Foxworth weren’t that cruel. Surely, once they saw their grandchildren, they would soften. Uncle Tommy’s source of information had to be wrong. How could their grandfather enjoy them suffering so much, locked up in an attic?

  I heard Dad come home and instantly, almost instinctively, slipped the diary under my pillow. He was moving through the house. Once again, I had lost track of time and not done anything to prepare for our dinner. I hurried out of the room, but he was standing at the base of the stairway looking up.

  “Working on your homework?” he asked.

  I think I’d rather have a tooth pulled than lie to my father. I saw the concern in his face and told myself that if I didn’t lie, he would be more upset. “Yes. Sorry. Intense math. Pasta night, right?” I started down the stairs. I tried to avoid his eyes, which I knew was a mistake.

  He didn’t say anything, but he was hurt. “How was school today?” he asked instead. He always made some reference to it, but lately, he was too occupied with so many other things to ask standard questions.

  “Great. Oh. I have a party Friday night. Kane’s house.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We might have some celebrating to do this week, too.”

  “What?”

  “The live one is now a real one, and yours truly will probably get the cleanup contract to start.”

  “Foxworth is sold?”

  “Looks that way,” he said. “I hope the first thing the new owner does is name it something else and then build something so beautiful no one ever thinks of those horrid stories anymore,” he added pointedly.

  I nodded and went into the kitchen to make a salad and get the table set. Dad went upstairs to shower and change. As I worked, I felt a trembling inside me. There was no question in my mind now that the diary wasn’t simply the ramblings of some disturbed child. Christopher Dollanganger or Foxworth was a very bright young boy who was more than simply what my friends might call book smart. From what he was writing, I thought he was much more. I could tell that he was good at reading both people and books. Furthermore, he was not blinded by his love of his mother and his father to the extent that he refused to acknowledge and write about their weaknesses.

  Was it cold for a child to look so clearly and closely at his own parents? He obviously had loved his father very much, but he was not hesitant to criticize him for having more children while he was struggling to provide for the two he had. More important, he now realized his father was more of a dreamer than an achiever. Anyone else would have been so shocked and disturbed that he couldn’t go on. Whom could he believe in? Maybe only himself. Maybe that was enough for him, but it certainly wouldn’t be for me, I thought.

  In fact, I was so deep in thought about it all that I didn’t realize Dad was standing in the kitchen doorway watching me.

  “How many times are you going to cut the same carrot?” he asked.

  “Oh.”

  “What’s got you so deep in thought, Kristin? I hope it’s not something you read in that diary.”

  “No, no, I’m okay, Dad. Don’t you know that teenage girls have a lot on their minds?” I offered. It was unfair, I knew. I used that whenever I wanted to sidestep something or take advantage. I knew my father regretted that there wasn’t another female in the house to offer me advice, so it was an easy way out for me, but I never used it without feeling guilty.

  “Boy troubles?”

  “I’m trying to avoid that,” I said. I paused and looked at him. “You know, you never told me if you had a serious girlfriend before you met Mom. Did you?”

  “Oh, boy,” he said. “I asked for it.”

  “Well, it’s not fair. You can ask me about my relationships, but I can never know about yours.”

  “Let me put it to you this way, Kristin. When I met your mother, every woman I had met before slipped out of my memory like melting icicles. There was no longer any room for any of them in my thoughts.”

  I waved my knife at him. “You’re very good, Dad. I’d put you up against any CIA interrogator.”

  He finally laughed. “Look who’s talking, Miss Sidestep,” he replied, and went into the kitchen to start his pasta dish.

  He did talk about his early dates with my mother and how afraid he was of doing or saying something that would turn her off. When he talked like this, he looked so much younger to me. It was as if by resurrecting his good memories, he could actually go back in time, have a boyish smile on his face, and have dazzling eyes.

  “So you believe in love at first sight?” I asked.

  He paused and thought a moment. “Not for everybody,” he said. “Only the lucky.”

  “What about the rest?” I followed.

  “A shot in the dark at best,” he said.

  Now he was the one falling into deep thought. I watched him work. He was preparing spaghetti carbonara, working as carefully as a surgeon on his sauce, not out of necessity but out of love fo
r what he could do. He always said, “When you prepare a meal for someone you love, you love the meal.”

  I went to set the table. Usually, when we had pasta lately, he would open a bottle of wine and let me have some. He said he was happy I was old enough now to partake with him, because there was nothing lonelier than drinking good wine alone.

  What he had told me about him and my mother got me thinking about Christopher’s parents, Corrine and Christopher Sr. Surely, they had to have fallen in love at first sight and so strongly and completely that they would defy whatever rules or morality stood in their way, not to mention her parents. It had to have been so strong a love for Corrine, in fact, that she would give up great wealth. At one point in her life, then, she wasn’t obsessed with expensive jewelry and clothes and other luxuries, or perhaps she had so much faith in Christopher Sr. that she wasn’t afraid to risk it.

  Yet from what I had read so far, even though she must have known they were struggling financially, she didn’t appear to have any regrets. She was even willing to have more children. Had she changed, or was Christopher Sr. so good at filling her with hope and deceiving her about what they had and would have soon that she would put aside her own demands? Christopher hadn’t come right out and said it yet in his diary, but maybe his mother was very gullible and far more naive than she acted.

  Without my even reading another word, it was clear that something changed in her, because she was willing to hide her children in a small bedroom and an attic while she worked on winning back her father’s love. Was she fooling herself again, justifying that by believing she could soon give them far more? How did it all turn so ugly? Why?

  All my friends seemed to live in fairly uncomplicated families compared with the Dollangangers. Certainly, I did.

  Then again . . . maybe they didn’t. Maybe everyone had deep secrets that appeared as soon as they closed their doors. Maybe they spent most of the time pretending those secrets and troubles didn’t exist.

  At dinner, I got Dad to talk more about his work, what he believed could be built on the Foxworth property this time, and some of his company’s other jobs. I could tell that he knew I was doing everything I could to keep him from asking me any more about the diary. I could see it in his eyes and his soft smile, but for now, at least, he stepped back.

  I would wonder later if I wished he hadn’t.

  After dinner, I watched a little television with him and then went upstairs to do some other reading in my history text. I still liked being ahead of the class. He looked in on me and saw that was what I was doing and then said good night.

  I thought I would go to sleep myself, but then I remembered I had put the diary under my pillow. I took it out slowly, glanced at the clock, and told myself I’d read maybe a little more, just until I got tired.

  Boy, was that a mistake.

  The train ride was bizarre. We got off in the middle of the night in seemingly nowhere. There wasn’t a house in sight, and I had overheard the conductor say we were a good hour’s ride from Charlottesville. We certainly couldn’t walk there. The twins were exhausted as it was. I should have realized that there was something very strange going on when the conductor called my mother “Mrs. Patterson,” but after we disembarked, there was another big clue. Momma had left her luggage on the train, claiming the conductor was going to put it in a locker for her to get later. When I asked her about that, she said she wanted to be able to greet her father in the morning first, without us. She said she had it all worked out with her mother.

  “Tonight you’ll all be in a bedroom, and then we’ll see,” she said.

  We walked on, finally seeing some houses and then the dark, enormous mansion silhouetted against the purplish mountains and sky. Momma said that when we saw it in the daytime, we would realize what a grand palace it truly was. As strange as it all seemed, that filled me with some hope. I saw how frightened and disgusted Cathy was, so I kept talking, asking Momma about fun things we could do here like ice skating. She told us about a lake not far away from the house, actually on her parents’ property. In the summer months, we could swim in it. I flashed a smile at Cathy and she seemed to calm down some, now just as interested as I was in what was in the house and what our grandparents were like.

  When we approached a rear entrance, a tall elderly lady opened the door as if she had been standing there waiting for us all night. She wasn’t wearing anything expensive. I thought we were being greeted by one of the servants. Without speaking, she ushered us into the house and up a steep staircase. We had no time to look at anything. We were hurried down a long hallway, past many rooms, until she finally thrust open a door to a large bedroom with heavy drapes shut tight on the windows.

  “Quickly,” she ordered when we hesitated. “Get them ready for bed. And do everything quietly.”

  Momma nodded and began to undress Carrie. Cathy helped with Cory. Both twins were so tired and dazed they barely made a sound. I put one of our suitcases on the bed and started to open it to get out their pajamas.

  “Not on the bed, you fool,” the old lady said. “On the floor.”

  I put the suitcase on the floor and looked at Momma in disbelief. She was trying to smile, but her lips looked frozen tight.

  “Well, you were right about your children being beautiful, but are they intelligent, or were they born stupid and ill?”

  “They’re perfect, Mother.”

  Cathy looked at me with probably the same expression of shock that was on my face. This ugly, grotesque, awkward, and stern-looking woman was our grandmother? Momma set Carrie on one bed, and Cathy placed Cory beside her. Then we turned and looked at our grandmother and our mother. I had trouble seeing any resemblance and hoped that she was indeed not really a blood relative; maybe she was a stepmother.

  “You can’t have boys and girls sleeping together,” our grandmother said.

  “They’re only innocent children. Why do you think such evil thoughts, Mother?”

  The old lady’s cold smile put a chill down my spine and definitely froze Cathy.

  “Why do I think evil thoughts? Innocent children? That’s what your father and I used to think about you and your half-uncle. Surely, they’ve inherited that impurity.”

  Momma suggested that she give us separate bedrooms, and that was when things became even more puzzling. The old lady went on and on about how important it was that no one, not even the servants, knew we were here. I kept looking at Momma for some more explanation, but whatever defiance and spirit she had had when we first arrived seemed to have evaporated. I thought I might protest, but before I could open my mouth, our grandmother stepped toward Cathy and me, towering above us.

  “You’re older. You’ll keep the other two quiet, or else,” she said. “When your mother and I leave, I’m locking the door.”

  “Locking the door?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened with fury at my merely questioning something she had said. “You must not move around this house. You will stay here until your grandfather dies. Until then, you don’t exist.”

  “Don’t exist?”

  “Stop repeating everything I say like some idiot!” She looked like she wanted to slap me.

  Momma shook her head at me, so I bit down on my lower lip. The old lady went on and on about why we had to be kept locked up in the north wing but said that on the last Friday of the month, we were to go up another stairway and hide in the attic. She made it sound like nothing, but Cathy looked at me and mouthed, “The last Friday of the month?” I knew why she was shocked. That was weeks away.

  Our grandmother explained that she would be the one to bring us food. Finally, Momma started to get us into bed, whispering constantly, her eyes teary, that this was only temporary, a few days, maybe a week, but we had to be obedient and not get our grandmother upset.

  “It’s our only hope, Christopher,” she whispered in my ear.

  I nodded. “Don’t worry, Momma,” I said, which brought her first real smile. She kissed my cheek and ros
e. I could see how reluctant she was to leave us. “We’ll keep the twins entertained and quiet.”

  She looked at her mother, who only scowled back.

  “I’ll be back in the morning,” our grandmother said. She practically pushed Momma out the door. We heard the lock snap shut.

  “What was that?” Cathy asked. “Godzilla’s mother? She was huge and awful. How can she be our real grandmother?”

  “Cool it,” I told her. “Don’t say those stupid things in front of the twins, or we’ll have a helluva time keeping them quiet. It will be hard enough as it is.”

  “What did the old lady mean when she said ‘you and your half-uncle’? Who was Momma’s half-uncle?”

  “Let’s not think about anything,” I said. “Let’s just get some sleep. It’s not that bad in here. Besides, what’s one or two nights?”

  She looked hard at me, searching to see if I was just placating her or really believed what I had said. It was getting harder and harder for me to fool her. She shook her head, said her prayers, and curled up beside Carrie.

  I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling. The house was not completely quiet. We couldn’t hear anyone talking or moving about, but I could hear creaks and groans as if the mansion was trying to warn us: Get out. Get out while you still can.

  As if I had made the train journey and the walk in the night with them, I felt my eyelids slowly closing. I put the diary under my pillow and turned off the side table lamp. Almost immediately, I saw Olivia Foxworth in my mind, towering above the twins, Cathy, and Christopher. How could a grandmother be so hard and mean to young children who were obviously exhausted and frightened, especially her own grandchildren? I tried to push her out of my mind, and when I finally did fall asleep, I woke once in the middle of the night, imagining her standing beside my bed, looking down at me, and saying, “Don’t you dare read another page!”