The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! (105 page)

The library was easy to find. Lessons learned at an early age and under miserable conditions could never be forgotten. Oh, such a library! Clairmont didn’t have a library with so many fine books! Bart’s photograph was on the ponderous desk that had been my grandfather’s. Many things were there to indicate that Bart often used this room for his study, and to keep his mother-in-law company. His brown house-slippers were beneath a comfortable-looking chair near the immense stone fireplace with a mantel twenty feet long. French doors opened onto a terrace facing a formal garden with a fountain to spray water into a bird bath formed by a rock garden of steps, with the water trickling down into a pool. A nice, sunny place for an invalid to sit, protected from the wind.

At last I’d seen enough to satisfy my curiosity, harbored for years, and I sought out the heavy door at the far end of
the library. Beyond that closed door was the witch-grandmother. Visions of her flashed through my mind. I saw her again as she’d been the first night we came, towering above us, her thick body strong, powerful, her cruel, hard eyes that swept over us all and showed no sympathy, no compassion for fatherless children who had lost so much, and she couldn’t even smile to welcome us or touch the pretty round cheeks of the twins who had been so appealing at age five.

The second night flashed, when the grandmother ordered our mother to show us her naked back striped with red and bleeding welts. Even before we’d seen that horror she’d picked Carrie up by the hair and Cory had hurled himself against her, trying to inflict some pain with his small white shoe that kicked her leg and his small sharp teeth that bit—and with one powerful slap she’d sent him reeling. All because he had to defend his beloved twin who had screamed and screamed. Again I saw myself before the mirror in the bedroom without a stitch on, and her punishment had been so harsh, so heartless, trying to take from me what I admired the most, my hair. A whole day Chris had spent trying to take the tar from my hair and save it from the shears. Then no food or milk for two whole weeks!
Yes!
She deserved to see me again! Just as I’d vowed the day she whipped me that there would come a day in the future when she would be the helpless one and I would be the one to wield the whip and keep the food from her lips!

Ah, the sweet irony of it—that she would gloat to see her husband dead, and now she was in his bed and even more helpless—and alone! I took off my heavy winter coat, sat down to tug off my boots, and then I put on the white satin
pointes
. My leotards were white and sheer enough to let the pink of my skin show through. I unbound my hair so it fell in a luxuriant, golden cascade of rippling waves down my back. Now she would see and envy the hair the tar hadn’t ruined after all.

Get ready, Grandmother! Here I come!

Very quietly I stole to her door. Then carefully I eased it open. She was on the high, high hospital bed, her eyes half-closed. The sun through the windows fell upon her pink and shining scalp, clearly revealing how nearly bald she was. And oh, how old she looked! So gaunt, so much smaller. Where was the giantess I used to know? Why wasn’t she wearing a gray taffeta dress to whisper threats? Why did she have to look so pitiful?

I hardened my heart, closed out mercy, for she’d never had any for us. Apparently she was on the verge of sleep, but as the door opened slowly, slowly her eyes widened. Then her eyes bulged. She recognized me. Her thin, shriveled lips quivered. She was afraid! Glory hallelujah! My tune had come! Still, I paused in the open doorway, appalled. I had come for revenge and time had robbed me! Why wasn’t she the monster I recalled? I wanted her that way, not what she was now, an old, sick woman with her hair so scant most of her scalp showed, and the hair left was pulled to the top of her head and fastened up there by a pink satin ribbon bow. The bow gave her a ghoulish-girlish look, and even bunched together as they were, the thin wisps were no wider than my small finger—just a tuft like a worn-out, bleached brush for watercolor painting.

Once she’d stood six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds and her huge breasts had been mountains of concrete. Now those breasts hung like old socks to reach her puffy abdomen. Her arms were withered old dry sticks, her hands corded, her fingers gnarled. Yet, as I stared and she stared in complete silence as a small clock ticked relentlessly on, her old despicable personality flared hot to let me know her outrage. She tried to speak to order me out.
Devil’s issue, she’d scream
if she could,
get out of my house! Devil’s spawn, out, out, out!
But she couldn’t say it, any of it.

While I could greet her pleasantly, “Good afternoon,
dear
Grandmother. How very nice to see you again. Remember me?
I’m Cathy, one of the grandchildren you helped hide away, and each day you brought us food in a picnic basket—every day by six-thirty you were there, with your gallon thermos of milk, and your quart thermos of lukewarm soup—and canned soup at that. Why couldn’t you have brought us hot soup at least once? Did you deliberately heat that soup to only warm? I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. And only then did she see the willow switch I’d hidden behind my back.

Casually I tapped the switch on my palm. “Grandmother,” I said softly, “remember the day you whipped our mother? How you forced her to strip in front of her father, and then you whipped her, and she was an adult—a shameless, wicked, evil deed, don’t you agree?”

Her terrified gray eyes fixed on the switch. A terrible struggle was going on in her brain—and I was
glad
, so
glad
Bart had told me she wasn’t senile. Pale, watery, gray eyes, red-rimmed and crinkled all about with deep crow’s feet, like cuts that never bled. Thin, crooked lips now shrunken to only a tiny buttonhole and puckered about by a radiating sunburst of deep lines, etching beneath her long hooked nose a spiderweb design of crosshatch lines. And, believe it or not, to the high and severe neckline of that yellow cotton jacket was fastened
the
diamond brooch! Never had I seen her without the brooch pinned to the neckline of her gray taffeta dresses with the white crocheted collars.

“Grandmother,” I chanted, “remember the twins? The dear little five-year-olds you enticed into this house, and not once while they were here did you ever speak their names—or any of our names. Cory’s dead, and you know that—but did my mother tell you about Carrie? Carrie is dead too. She didn’t grow very tall because she was robbed of sunlight and fresh air in the years when she needed it most. Robbed too of love and security and given trauma instead of happiness. Chris and I went onto the roof to sit and sun ourselves, but the twins were afraid of the high roof. Did you know we went
out there and we’d stay for hours and hours . . . no, you didn’t know, did you?”

She moved a bit, as if trying to shrink into the thin mattress. I gloated to see her fear, rejoiced that she could move a little. Her eyes now were as mine used to be, windowpanes to reveal all her terrified emotions—and she couldn’t cry out for help! At my mercy. “Remember the second night, dearest, loving Grandmother? You lifted Carrie up by her hair, and you must have known that hurt, yet you did it. Then you sent Cory spinning with one blow, and that hurt too, and he was only trying to protect his sister. Poor Carrie, how she grieved for Cory. She never got over his death, never stopped missing him. She met a nice boy named Alex. They fell in love and were going to be married when she found out he was going to be a minister. That shook Carrie up. You see, you made us all deeply fearful of religious people. The day Alex said he was going to be a minister Carrie went into a despairing depression. She had learned the lesson you taught very well. You taught us that no one can ever be perfect enough to please God. Something dormant came to life the day Carrie was weakened by shock, depression and the lack of the spirit to go on. Now listen to what she did—because of you! Because you impressed on her young brain that she was born evil and she’d be wicked no matter how much she sought to be good! She believed you! Cory was dead. She knew he had died from the arsenic put on sugared doughnuts. . . . So when she felt she could no longer put up with life and all the people who expected perfection, she bought rat poison! She bought a package of twelve doughnuts and coated them with that rat poison full of arsenic! She ate all but one—and that had a bite mark. Now . . . shrink into your mattress and try and run from the guilt that is yours! You and my mother killed her as much as you killed Cory! I despise you, old woman!”

I didn’t tell her I hated my mother more. The grandmother had never loved us, so anything
she
did was to be expected. But our mother who had borne us, who had cared for us, who had
loved us well when Daddy lived—that was another story—an unbearable horror story! And her time would come!

“Yes, Grandmother, Carrie is dead now too, because she wanted to die in the same way Cory had and be with him in heaven.”

Her eyes squinched and a small shudder rippled the covers. I gloated.

I brought from behind my back the box containing a long length of Carrie’s hair that had taken me hours to arrange and brush into one long, shimmering switch of molten gold. At one end it was tied with a red satin bow, and at the other, a bow of purple satin. “
Look old woman
, this is Carrie’s hair, some of it. I have another box full of loose, tangled strands, for I can’t bear to part with a piece of it. I saved it to keep not only for Chris and myself, but to show you and our mother . . . for the two of you killed Carrie as surely as you killed Cory!”

Oh, I was near mad with hate. Revenge blazed my eyes, my temper, and shook my hands. I could see Carrie as she lay near death, turning old, withered, bony until she was only a little skeleton covered by loose, pale skin, so translucent all her veins showed—and the remains had to be sealed quickly in a box of pretty metal to shut away the stench of decay.

I stepped nearer the bed and dangled the bright hair with its gay ribbons before her wide and frightened eyes. “Isn’t this beautiful hair, old woman? Was yours ever so beautiful, so bountiful?
No!
I
know
it wasn’t! Nothing about you could ever have been pretty,
nothing!
Not even when you were young! That’s why you were so jealous of your husband’s stepmother.” I laughed to see her flinch. “Yes, dear Grandmother, I know a lot more about you now than I did. Your son-in-law has told me all the family secrets my mother told him. Your husband Malcolm was in love with his father’s younger wife, ten times more beautiful and sweeter than you ever were! So when Alicia had a son, you suspected that child was your own husband’s, and that’s why you hated our father, and why
you sent for him, deceiving him into believing he’d found a good home. And you educated him and gave him the best of everything so he’d have to taste of the good, rich live and to more hurt and disappointed later on, when you threw him out and left him nothing in your wills. But my father fooled you instead, didn’t he? He stole your only daughter, whom you hated too, because her father loved her more than he loved you. And half-uncle married half-niece. Yet how wrong you were about Malcolm! She fought him off time and again—and the baby she had was not your husband’s son! Though he would have been, if Malcolm had had his way!

Blankly she stared at me, as if the past was of no importance to her now. Only the present mattered, and the switch in my hand. “I’m going to tell you something now, old woman, that you need to know. There was never a better man born than my father or more honorable woman than his mother. But don’t lie there and think I’ve inherited any of Alicia’s or my fathers godly traits—for I am like
you!
Heartless! I never forget, never forgive!
I hate you for killing Cory and Carrie. I hate you for making of me what I am!”
I screamed this, out of control, forgetful of the nurse napping down the hall. I wanted to feed her arsenic by the handfuls and sit and watch her die and rot before my eyes, like Carrie had. I pirouetted round the room to release my frustrations, lashing my legs, showing off my fine young body, and then I drew up short and snapped in her face, “All those years you locked us up, and you never said our names, never looked at Chris because he was our father all over again—and your husband too, when he was young, and before you made him evil too. You blame everything wrong with human beings on their evil souls, and ignore the truth.
Money
is the god who rules in this house! It’s
money
that’s always made the worst things happen! You were married for your money and you knew it! And greed brought us here, and greed locked us up and stole three years and four months from our lives, and put us at your mercy and you didn’t have
any, not even for your grandchildren, the only grandchildren you’d ever have, and we never touched you, did we? Though we tried in the beginning, remember?” I jumped up on the bed and lashed at her with the length of Carrie’s golden hair. A soft whip that didn’t hurt, though she cringed from the touch. Then I tossed Carrie’s precious hair to her bedside table and snapped the switch before her eyes. I danced and whirled on her bed, over her frozen body, displaying my fine agility as my long hair flared in a golden circle.

“Remember how you punished our mother before we grew to hate her too? I owe you for that,” I said, legs apart and straddling her covered body. “From your neck down to your heels, I owe you that, plus the whip lashes you gave Chris and me, I owe you that too. And all the other things, each one of them is etched in my memory. Didn’t I tell you there would come a day when I held the switch in my hand, and there would be food in the kitchen you’d never eat?
Well . . . that day is here, Grandmother.”

The sunken gray eyes in her gaunt face sparkled hate, malicious and strong. Daring me to strike her—daring me!

“What shall I do first,” I said as if to myself, “shall it be the switch, or the hot tar in your hair? Where did you get the tar, old woman? I always wondered where you got it. Did you plan it way in advance and wait for an excuse to use it? I’m going to confess something now you don’t know. Chris never cut off all my hair, only the front part to fool you into thinking I was bald-headed. Beneath that towel I wrapped on my head was all the long hair he saved. Yes, old woman, love saved my hair from being cut off. He loved me enough to work for hours and hours to save what hair he could—more love than
you’ve
ever known, and from a brother.”