Echoes of Dollanganger (20 page)

“I guess not.”

“Whatever thoughts Christopher has and whatever he does with his sister are not his fault, even though the situation isn't the same. I mean, he knows she's his sister, but it's as if they're on a desert island or something, just when things are happening to them, to their bodies.”

“I'm not blaming them for anything, Kane,” I said. He was acting as if he thought condemnation was on the tip of my tongue. “It's too soon to be judgmental.”

“Right,” he said, nodding.

Look how important it is for him to defend Christopher
, I thought. I wanted to smile, but something kept me from introducing even an iota of amusement into it.

“If there's anyone to blame for anything, it's Corrine and, despite her high-and-mighty moral attitude, Grandmother Olivia. Right?”

“You don't have to convince me, Kane,” I said.

“Yeah, well . . . yeah,” he replied, and put his wig on.

Momma had been gone more than two months now. Every time the door opened, all of us would stop whatever we were doing and shift our eyes quickly to see if it was finally Momma, but it was always our grandmother, silent, looking like she was tiptoeing through a field of snakes, eager to get in and get out. Neither Cathy nor I had the courage to ask her where our mother was. Besides a tirade of threats and horrible predictions for us, she might add the one thing I think both of us feared to hear: “Your mother has run off. She realized what evil she brought into the world.”

Cathy would look away quickly, and when she looked to me, I would turn away and focus on something I was doing, as if our disappointment didn't matter, but oh, how it did. The little ball of anger rolling around inside me night and day was like a rock gathering moss. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, the rage inside me so hot and strong my teeth were clenched and my jaw ached.

Cathy talked endlessly about escaping. Our swimming adventure had crystallized the possibilities for her. I wouldn't deny that I still savored every second of that time at the lake, that wonderful sense of freedom we had walking hand in hand through the darkness, seeing the stars, and feeling the cool night breeze. It was as if we had come back to life again.

Every afternoon, I would go to the window,
sometimes twice a day, to see the train pass by, the same train that had brought us here years ago. Sometimes it sounded mournful, like a train carrying a famous dead person, like Lincoln's train, and sometimes it was more like it was calling me directly, telling me it was there. It would be there for us to take us away from all this. It bounced back and forth from being a train that reminded me of our situation, growing more horrid every day, every week, to being the sound of hope, the call to a new future, a new life, and a place where we would all grow naturally again.

Cathy could sense this mix of feelings inside me. The longer Momma was away, the more stridently she pleaded for our escape. “You're always watching for that train,” she said. “You know you want to be on it, want all of us to be on it.”

Her constant prodding and nagging were wearing down what resistance I had left in me. Why would we wait for a mother who had neglected us so long? Why would we wait for an old man to die if it hadn't happened in all this time? How would we know if he had without Momma being here? Would our grandmother come rushing up, happy to unlock the door and bring us into the bosom of her home? Would she say, “Now you can be my grandchildren, and you can forget all the terrible things I had to do to you”?

Hardly, I thought. I had no good answers for her. Maybe it was cruel to do it, but I fanned her dreams, her hope.

“Where would you go if we did get out of here?” I asked.

She talked about going farther south, being on beaches, soaking up the sunshine like someone who had been dying of thirst and crossing a desert. I let myself daydream aloud, too, and talked about things I'd like to be doing out there, the fun I'd like to be having. Those were weak moments for me. Cathy pounced on them. “Why are we staying? You hate it as much as I do.”

Of course I did. I hated every moment, actually, but I reminded her how important money was in this world and how the old man had to die soon. It was just logical. He was sick. We saw him in the wheelchair. He couldn't live much longer, he just couldn't, and then we'd have the money. I reminded her how important it was for me to become a doctor and how expensive that education would be. “Without money, I'll never be anything. What job could I do to keep us alive out there? Who'd even give me a job? Whatever I could manage wouldn't pay enough to keep the four of us alive.”

Of course, Cathy promised to take any job to help. We were going back and forth about it. The train was coming again. And then our grandmother appeared and told me to get away from the
window. I tried to defy her. When she called me “boy,” I told her to call me by my name.

“Call me Christopher, or don't call me at all.”

I thought she would rant and deliver another punishment, maybe starve us again for a week, but she smiled coldly at me instead and went into what I could only call her rationalization for how she was treating us, how she had treated our mother. She hated my name because of what she said our father had done to her and her husband. She claimed she was the one who got her husband to take in his half brother when he had no one, and how did he repay them? He ran off with our mother to get married. He had the nerve to come back, as if they could ignore that he had married his own niece. When our grandfather threw them out, he had his first heart attack, so his terrible health was their fault, my mother's fault. She did this to her own father. She was so passionate about the story she seemed to lose her breath.

Both Cathy and I were shocked at the outburst. I thought, okay, they did that to you, but why take it out on us? I told her we weren't to blame.

Then she went into how sinful we were in this small room.

I challenged her and blamed anything that had happened or would happen on her, on her locking us away. How could she think of herself as good and pious if she would starve little children? I didn't know where the strength for my rant came
from, but it came, and I let it all out with as much venom as she directed at us.

Cathy kept pleading with me to stop, but it was too late. Our grandmother ran out. I thought, okay, she'd find a way to punish us, but maybe it was worth it.

To my surprise, she came back instantly, with a green willow switch in her hand. She had it so fast I knew she always kept one nearby. She ordered me to strip down and said that if I didn't, she would starve us again, starve the twins. I had to submit to her whipping me in the bathroom.

Afterward, because Cathy was screaming and crying, she did the same to her, only she went wild, breaking the switch on Cathy's naked body. I could hear Cathy's defiance, which I knew would only drive the old lady to be crueler. She pounded her so hard with a hairbrush that she finally knocked her unconscious.

She left her there on the floor and came out, her bosom lifting and falling, her face still red with rage. I was in great pain, but I didn't cry.

“God sees everything you do,” she said. She had said that before.

It was on the tip of my tongue to reply, “Then you will surely go to hell,” but I said nothing. I looked down. I was terrified now for the twins. Would she turn on their small bodies? She did look at them, clinging to each other.

“The devil's spawn,” she muttered, and walked out.

I got the twins to go up to the attic to play so they wouldn't see how bad Cathy was. Then I carried her out of the bathroom and began to treat her wounds. When she woke up, I told her I was worried she might have a concussion. She sobbed, and we held each other. We were both still naked, and I couldn't help it. I had to kiss her. The feel of her body against mine seemed, for the moment, to make me forget the pain. We had never held each other naked. I could see it was affecting her as much as it was me.

She felt my erection and whispered, “Stop, Christopher. This is what she thinks we do, making love.”

“Making love involves more, Cathy,” I said. I smiled at her, and I described it in as much detail as I could. Her expression went from fascination to fear and then to guilt for even imagining it.

“We can't. We won't. We never will, right?” she asked.

I didn't say anything. I wanted to say no, but at the same time, I didn't trust fate or my own emotions anymore. So much had happened to us and between us over the years that we were confined, so much of what I would never, even in my wildest dreams, have imagined. All brothers and sisters have a deep love for each other, even if they're close in age and go through sibling rivalry. I had read so much about this, even before we left our home. As all my teachers knew, I read and
understood on a level at least three grade levels above my age.

But that love had a different nature to it. It came from being part of something greater than yourself, your family. An attack on your sister or brother was an attack on your family. Protecting and cherishing your sister or brother was a way to protect and cherish your family, especially your parents. When another sort of feeling even suggested itself, you instantly retreated from it, were ashamed of it, and forced yourself to bury it. You didn't nourish it.

Could I say I wasn't doing that now?

I continued to attend to her wounds and then had her attend to mine. Neither of us mentioned again how close we were to doing exactly what our grandmother believed we had been doing.

Later, I kissed her good night after we had put the twins to sleep—kissed her, I hoped, the way my father would have kissed her good night. She held my hand for a moment, as if she wanted another kiss or to kiss me back, and then she let go and turned away.

But it was too late, I thought. We had touched each other in ways I was sure we had both begun to imagine we might.

And now we had to live with whatever dreams might come of it.

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?”