Garden of Shadows (19 page)

lights. The shadows held at bay rushed in, dropping a
wall of blackness between Alicia and her sleeping
child, who would wait for her in the world of light and
life without.
I moved swiftly down the hall until I came to
the rotunda. From the sounds below, I knew that
Malcolm was still downstairs, probably in the library
at his desk. I imagined him sitting there staring
hatefully at the doorway, maybe in expectation of my
arrival.
But I had no more interest in conversation with
him tonight. All that had to be done was done. I was
tired myself. I started for my bedroom, but stopped at the doorway of the trophy room. Something occurred to me, something I found deliciously vengeful and satisfying. I opened the door, snapped on the lights, and went to the desk behind which Malcolm often sat when he came up here to be by himself. I put the shawl filled with Alicia's cut hair, at the center of the desk and untied the knot so that the pile of beautiful
chestnut strands lay open and exposed.
Then I turned, went back to the door, looked
back at the sight of her amputated hair on his desk,
smiled to myself, and snapped off the lights. I stood
there for a few moments listening to the sounds of the
house. Tonight every creak seemed amplified. The
wind wrapped itself around the great mansion,
whirling madly, tying it in a chilled rope. It would
take days of warm summer sunlight to defrost the icy
wall over this house, I thought. And throughout that
summer, Alicia would sit in a dark, stuffy room below
the great attic, waiting for the birth of a child she had
not wanted and would not be a mother to. It was truly
a prison sentence and I was truly a warden.
I did not cherish the role, but Malcolm had cast
me in it and I knew the only way to defeat him was to
perform it far better than he ever could have expected.
He would live to regret this night, I thought, to regret what he had done to me and what he would make me
do to her.
I went to my bedroom quickly and rushed
myself to sleep, which had become the only true
escape from the madness of Foxworth Hall,
something that was ironically true for both of us,
Alicia and me.
The weeks passed as I had predicted they would
pass for Alicia--painfully, slowly. Every day, the
minute I entered the room, she begged me to bring her
Christopher.
"If not here," she pleaded, "at least let him
stand outside my window so I can peek at him, see
him--I can't stand this any longer."
"Christopher has finally adjusted to your
leaving. Why upset him now? If you really loved him,
Alicia, you'd let things be."
"Let it be? I'm his mother. My heart is breaking.
The days only seem to get longer. A week in here is
like a year!"
In the mornings she complained about being
nauseated. In the afternoons she wept for Christopher.
She was always tired, and more often than not, I
would find her lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Her once rosy cheeks paled, and even though I insisted she eat everything I brought to her, her face began to take on a gaunt look. After two months shut away in that room, dark circles formed around her
eyes.
She usually kept a shawl over her head. After I
had come in a dozen times and found her wearing it
each time, I asked her why.
"Because I can't stand the sight of myself with
my hair like this every time I pass in front of the
mirror," she said.
"Why don't you just cover the mirror," I told
her. I knew every woman had vanity, but I also knew
that women like her had much, much more. Despite
the fact that she had no cosmetics and her hair had
been chopped away, I imagined that she still sat
before the mirror pretending she was back in her
beautiful bedroom suite preparing for an evening out
with Garland, or planning what she was going to do
with herself once her hair did grow back and she was
free of this place.
Eventually, she took my suggestion and draped
a sheet over the mirror. The dissipation of her beauty
was a part of harsh reality that she would now rather
avoid. However, when I walked in with her tray of
food and I saw the sheet there, I didn't remark about
it. She looked up at me from her bed, her eyes
bright with tears of boredom and anger. She no longer
wore the shawl; there was no reason for it since the
mirror was covered.
"I thought you had forgotten my dinner," she
accused me. There was a new sharpness in her words.
Her rage caused her to pronounce the consonants with
exaggeration and her voice dropped in tone, almost
sounding manly.
"Dinner? This is your lunch, Alicia," I said. The
realization brought surprise and horror to her face. "Only lunch?" She looked at the small clock
housed in an ivory cathedral on the dresser. "Only
lunch?" she repeated. She sat up slowly and looked at
me with frightened, frozen blue eyes. I knew that she
had come to see me as her jailer. Whenever she
thought of something new to do, she had to ask my
permission. Her life was no longer her own.
"How is my Christopher? Does he miss me
terribly? Does he ask about me every day?" she
inquired, hanging on my responses.
"Sometimes," I said. "The boys help to distract
him."
She nodded, pathetically trying to conjure up his image in her mind. I thought of him myself, beautiful golden-haired Christopher, his face regaining its happy joy after the first few months of sadness at being separated from his mother. His eyes sparkled once again as I read him his favorite story every night before bed. Truly, I was beginning to think of him as one of my own. He and my two boys played so well together in the nursery. Mal and Joel adored him. He seemed to carry all the sunshine of his mother in her happier days. But that sunny joy wasn't seductive and lustful, it was bright and open, compassionate and innocent. He was more
affectionate than either of my children. Sometimes I feared it was because both Mal and Joel had Malcolm's blood in them. Every morning he would run to me screaming, "I want hundreds of kisses. I want hundreds of hugs, o-weee-a!" Only yesterday, when I put him down for his nap, his beautiful blue eyes looked up at me and he asked, "Can I call you Mommy sometimes?" Of course I did not tell Alicia any of this. Instead, I kept the conversation always
focused on her.
"You look unclean today, Alicia. You should
take better care of yourself," I said, reprimanding her. She turned abruptly on me, speaking through
clenched teeth.
"I'm this way because I live from day to day in
this . . . this closet."
"This is bigger than a closet."
"And the only sunlight I get to see is the
sunlight that comes through the windows here and
upstairs. Yesterday I sat in the rays until the sun
moved on and left me in shadows. I feel like a flower
hungry for the nourishment of the sun, a flower
withering in a closet. Soon I will be dried and dead
and you can press me into the pages of a book," she
said, her voice a mixture of anger and self-pity. "You won't be in here that much longer," I said.
"It won't do you any good to sit and churn up your
frustration day in and day out," I added in a matter-offact tone of voice. That only infuriated her more. "Maybe I should go outside for a quick secret
walk. You can take the boys away from the house and
. . ."
"But, Alicia, the servants. How could I explain
if they saw you? From where would I tell them you
came? Who would I tell them you were? And if the
boys heard about it . . . don't you see? What you are
asking is impossible, just impossible." She nodded. "I
do feel sorry for you," I said. "I hope you see that. Do you?" She looked up at me with scrutinizing eyes and then nodded. "No one is enjoying this, least of all me. Keep thinking about the future and you will survive the present," I advised. Suddenly a new idea came to
her.
"Send all the servants away," she said, her face
filled with the excitement of a new and, as she
considered it, clever idea. "Give them a holiday, just
for a weekend. That's all I would need, one or two
days of fresh air. Please."
"You're speaking ridiculous thoughts. I would
advise you to get a hold of yourself," I told her,
gathering my own resolve. "You will only get
yourself sick and maybe lose the baby. Now, feed
yourself and the child within you," I added, and left
the room before she could say another thing about it. When I returned to bring her her dinner that
night, she did seem changed. She had bathed and
dressed herself in a pretty blue chemise. However, she
was sitting on her bed as if she were in the back of a
car and on a journey.
"Oh," she said when I came in, "here we are at
the restaurant. What shall we have to eat?" She was
pretending to be in a car with Christopher. I was
amazed, but I said nothing.
She looked at me with expectation, hopeful that
I would become part of the fantasy. I put the tray
down on the table and watched as Alicia continued to
create an imaginary situation for herself, getting up
and approaching the table as if it were a table in a
restaurant. She did look brighter, happier.
Alicia referred to me as she would refer to a
waitress in a restaurant. Suddenly, I realized there was
something strange about it all. She wasn't pretending
just for the fun of it; she was actually experiencing
this journey.
She rattled on and on as if I weren't there, or as
if I were really some stranger. I didn't like it, but I
didn't know what to do about it.
She dismissed me by saying, "You can take
those now," referring to the dirty dinner dishes. She began to feed her imaginary Christopher,
telling him that after they left the restaurant, they
would drive to the park, where they would see
animals and go on the merry-go-round. I understood
that the attic was to be envisioned as the park. She
was wearing the nicest of all the dresses I had
permitted her to bring. Her stomach was not quite
swollen enough to prevent it, and she had torn a strip
off a beige slip and tied it like a ribbon in her short
strands of hair.
"Are you all right?" I asked her. She interrupted
herself.
"Pardon me, Christopher," she said to the empty
chair beside her. "The waitress wants to know something. What was it, waitress?" she asked, singing the
question.
I pulled in the corners of my mouth and
straightened my back. She was smiling madly. Did
she think I was going along with this charade? I didn't
repeat my question. Instead, I turned and carried the
tray of dishes to the door.
"She said they are out of ice cream," Alicia told
her imaginary son. "But don't worry. Perhaps we'll see
an ice cream parlor at the park, and we'll never come
back to this restaurant again, will we?"
I heard her laugh as I closed the door behind
me. Madness, I thought, and for the first time since
she had been brought back to Foxworth Hall, I
couldn't wait for her to leave again.
.
The pretending continued. The room at the end
of the north wing became Alicia's world of illusions.
Sometimes when I entered, she and her imaginary son
were in a car; sometimes they were on the ferry. A few times they were up in the attic. She was playing her Victrola and they had supposedly gone to see a puppet show. She made two hand puppets with her
socks and used an armoire as the puppet stage. Every time I entered, she called me something
else. Either I was the waiter, the ticket taker at the
puppet show, an engineer on a ferry boat . . whatever;
but never was I Olivia: I no longer saw any fear in her
face when I arrived. She looked at me with a smile of
anticipation on her face, waiting to see how I would
react to her new inventions.
It went on and on like this, and then one day I
came in and found that she had taken the sheet off the
mirror. It no longer bothered her to look at herself and
what she had become because she did not see that
image. She saw whatever she imagined. With a brush
in her hand she was standing in front of the mirror and
stroking the air as if there were strands down around
her shoulders.
The ironic thing about all this was that her
complexion returned to its former peaches-and-cream
richness. I knew that some women flourished during
pregnancy. I had not been one of those women, but
Alicia had remained quite beautiful during her
pregnancy with Christopher. The same thing was true
of this pregnancy, now aided by her illusions. "What are you doing?" I asked her, and she
turned away from the mirror. She hadn't heard me
enter.
"Oh, Olivia. Garland said Venus herself
couldn't have more beautiful hair than mine. Can you
imagine? Men can be so extravagant with their
flattery. They don't know what it can do to a woman. I
let him go on. Why not? Whom does it harm?
Certainly not Venus." She laughed, but her laugh was
as rich and as full as her laugh used to be when
Garland was alive.
She is going mad, I thought. Being locked up
and pregnant, she is being driven into insanity. But it
wasn't my fault, I concluded. It was another sin for
Malcolm to bear. Perhaps he had known this would
happen; perhaps he had expected it. She would give
birth to his baby and he would have the child. But she
would be so unstable, he couldn't turn over the large
fortune to her. In fact, she flight have to be
committed. He would have it all--the child, the
money, and good riddance to Alicia. We would adopt
Christopher.
Such a scenario enraged me. Once again
Malcolm Neal Foxworth would get his way, defeating
everyone, even me. I couldn't allow it.
"Alicia, Garland is dead. He couldn't have told
you that now. You must stop this, stop all of this
ridiculous pretending before it drives you insane. Do
you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?"
She stood there, her smile unchanged. She heard only
what she wanted to hear.
"There's nothing he won't buy for me, nothing
he won't do for me," she said. "It's terrible, I know;
but all I need do is mention something I see or want,
and the next day, the very next day, he will have it
delivered. I'm so spoiled, but I can't help it.
"Anyway," she went on, turning back to the
mirror and brushing the air, "Garland says he likes to
spoil me. He says it gives him pleasure to spoil me