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! (113 page)

Nothing was ever my fault. Behind me lay a trail of dead men. But I wasn’t responsible for the death of even one, was I? No, of course not. It was a wonder Chris had the nerve to climb in the car and sit beside me, heading his car west. Behind us, we trailed a U-Haul with all our worldly goods inside. Going west like the pioneers to seek a new future and find different kinds of lives. Paul had left everything he owned to me, including his family home. Though his will had stated, if I decided to sell, he wanted Amanda to have the final bid.

So at last Paul’s sister had their ancestral home she had always wanted and schemed to get—but I made sure it was at a steep price.

Chris and I rented a home in California until we could have a custom-designed ranch house built to our specifications, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths. Plus we had another bath and bedroom for our maid, Emma Lindstrom. My sons call my brother Daddy. They both know they have other fathers who went on to heaven before they were born.
So far, they don’t realize Chris is only their uncle. A long time ago. Jory forgot that. Maybe children too forget when they want to, and ask no questions that would be embarrassing to answer.

At least once a year we travel east to visit friends, including Madame Marisha and Madame Zolta. Both make a great to-do about the dancing abilities of Jory, and both try with fervent zeal to make Bart a dancer too. But so far, he doesn’t have the inclination to be anything but a doctor. We visit all the graves of our beloved ones, and put flowers there. Always red and purple ones for Carrie, and roses of any color for Paul and Henny. We have even sought out our father’s grave in Gladstone, and paid our respects to him too with flowers. And Julian is never overlooked, or Georges.

Last of all, we visit Momma.

She lives in a huge place that tries unsuccessfully to look homey. Usually she screams when she sees me. Then she jumps up and tries to tear the hair from my head. When she is restrained, she turns the hatred upon herself, trying time after time to mutilate her face, and free herself forever of any resemblance to me. Just as if she no longer looked in the mirrors that would tell her we no longer look alike. Remorse has made of her something terrible to see. And once she’d been so very beautiful. Her doctors allow only Chris to visit with her an hour or so, while I wait outside with my two sons. He reports back that if she recovers, she won’t be faced with a murder charge, for both Chris and I have disclaimed there ever was a fourth child named Cory. She doesn’t fully trust Chris, sensing he is under my evil influence, and if she lets go her facade of being insane, she will end up with a death penalty. So year after year passes as she clings to her calculated fallacy as a way to escape also the future with no one who really cares for her. Or perhaps, more truly, she seeks to torment me through Chris and the pity he insists on feeling for her. She is the one issue that keeps our relationship from being perfect.

So, the dreams of perfection, of fame, of fortune, of undying, ever-abiding love without one single flaw, like the toys and games of yesteryears, and all other youthful fantasies I have outgrown, I have put away.

Often I look at Chris, and wonder just what it is he sees in me. What is it that binds him to me in such a permanent way? I wonder too why he isn’t afraid for his future and the length of it, since I am better at keeping pets alive than husbands. But he comes home jauntily, wearing a happy grin, as he strides into my welcoming arms that respond quickly to his greeting, “Come greet me with kisses if you love me.”

His medical practice is large, but not too large, so he has time to work in our four acres of gardens with the marble statues we brought along from Paul’s gardens. As much as possible we have duplicated what he had, except for the Spanish moss that clings, and clings, and then kills.

Emma Lindstrom, our cook, our housekeeper, friend, lives with us as Henny lived with Paul. She never asks questions. She has no family but us, and to us she is faithful, and our business is our own.

Pragmatic, blithe, the eternal, cockeyed optimist, Chris sings when he works in the gardens. When he shaves in the mornings he hums some ballet tune, feeling no trepidations, no regrets, as if long, long ago he had been the man who danced in the shadows of the attic and had never, never let me see his face. Did he know all along that just as he had won over me in all other games it would be him in the end?

Why hadn’t I known?

Who had shut my eyes?

It must have been Momma who told me once, “Marry a man with dark, dark eyes, Cathy. Dark eyes feel so terribly intense about everything.” What a laugh! As if blue eyes lacked some profound steadfastness; she should have known better.

I should know better too. It worries me because I went yesterday into our attic. In a little alcove to the side, I found
two single-size beds, long enough for two small boys to grow into men.

Oh, my God! I thought, who did this? I would never lock away my two sons, even if Jory did remember one day that Chris was not his stepfather but his uncle. I wouldn’t even if he did tell Bart, our youngest. I could face the shame, the embarrassment, and the publicity that would ruin Chris professionally. Yet . . . yet, today I bought a picnic hamper, the kind with the double lids that open up from the center; the very same kind of hamper the grandmother had used to bring us food.

So, I go uneasily to bed and lie there awake, fearing the worst in myself, and struggling to keep firm hold of the best. It seems, as I turn over, and snuggle closer to the man I love, that I can hear the cold wind blowing from the blue-misted mountains so far away.

It’s the past that I can never forget, that shadows all my days, and hides furtively in the comers when Chris is home. I do make an effort to be like he is, always optimistic, when I am not at all the kind who can forget the tarnish on the reverse side of the brightest coin.

But . . . I am not like her! I may look like her, but inside I am honorable! I am stronger, more determined. The best in me will win out in the end. I know it will. It has to sometimes . . . doesn’t it?

I
n the late evening when the shadows were long, I sat quiet and unmoving near one of Paul’s marble statues. I heard the statues whispering to me of the past I could never forget; hinting slyly of the future I was trying to ignore. Flickering ghostly in the pale light of the rising moon were the will-o’-the-wisp regrets that told me daily I could and should have done differently. But I am what I have always been, a person ruled by instincts. It seems I can never change.

I found a strand of silver in my hair today, reminding me that soon I might be a grandmother, and I shuddered. What kind of grandmother would I make? What kind of mother was I? In the sweetness of twilight I waited for Chris to come and join me and tell me with the true blue of his eyes that I’m not fading; I’m not just a paper flower but one that’s real.

He put his arm about my shoulder and I rested my head where it seemed to fit best, both of us knowing our story is almost over and Bart and Jory will give to both of us, either the best or the worst of what is yet to be.

It is their story now, Jory’s and Bart’s, and they will tell it as they knew it.

W
henever Dad didn’t drive me home from school, a yellow school bus would let me off at an isolated spot where I would recover my bike from the nearest ravine, hidden there each morning before I stepped onto the bus.

To reach my home I had to travel a winding narrow road without any houses until I came to the huge deserted mansion that invariably drew my eyes, making me wonder who had lived there; why had they deserted it? When I saw that house I automatically slowed, knowing soon I’d be home.

An acre from that house was our home, sitting isolated and lonely on a road that had more twists and turns than a puzzle maze that leads the mouse to the cheese. We lived in Fairfax, Marin County, about twenty miles north of San Francisco. There was a redwood forest on the other side of the mountains, and the ocean too. Ours was a cold place, sometimes dreary. The fog would roll in great billowing waves and often shrouded the landscape all day, turning everything cold and eerie. The fog was spooky, but it was also romantic and mysterious.

As much as I loved my home, I had vague, disturbing memories of a southern garden full of giant magnolia trees dripping with Spanish moss. I remembered a tall man with dark hair turning gray; a man who called me his son. I didn’t remember his face nearly as well as I remembered the nice warm and safe feeling he gave me. I guess one of the saddest things about growing bigger, and older, was that no one was large enough, or strong enough, to pick you up and hold you close and make you feel that safe again.

Chris was my mother’s third husband. My own father died before I was born; his name was Julian Marquet, and everyone in the ballet world knew about him. Hardly anyone outside of Clairmont, South Carolina, knew about Dr. Paul Scott Sheffield, who had been my mother’s second husband. In that same southern state, in the town of Greenglenna, lived my paternal grandmother, Madame Marisha.

She was the one who wrote me a letter each week, and once a summer we visited her. It seemed she wanted almost as much as I did, for me to become the most famous dancer the world had ever known. And thus I would prove to her, and to everyone, that my father had not lived and died in vain.

By no means was my grandmother an ordinary little old lady going on seventy-four. Once she’d been very famous, and not for one second did she let anyone forget this. It was a rule I was never to call her Grandmother when others could overhear and possibly guess her age. She’d whispered to me once that it would be all right if I called her
Mother,
but that didn’t seem right when I already had a mother whom I loved very much. So I called her Madame Marisha, or Madame M., just as everyone else did.

Our yearly visit to South Carolina was long anticipated during the winters, and quickly forgotten once we were back and safely snuggled in our little valley where our long redwood house nestled. “Safe in the valley where the wind doesn’t blow,” my mother said often. Too often, really—as
if the wind blowing greatly distressed her.