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! (138 page)

She didn’t say anything, just kept running her hand over the smooth cap of Cindy’s short-short hair. She looked more like a boy in her coveralls, though Emma had tried to tie a ribbon in a short tuft of her hair. I guessed Dad had told Mom what Bart had done to Cindy, for she didn’t ask questions.

Later on in the evening when Bart was in bed, I ran for a book I’d left in the family room and heard Mom’s voice coming from “her” room. “Chris, what am I going to do about Bart? I tried to show love and affection for him, and he rejected me. Look what he did to Cindy, a helpless child who trusts that no one will hurt her. Did you spank him? Did you do anything to punish him? Does he show respect to any of us? A few weeks in the attic might teach might teach him a thing or two about obedience.”

Hearing Mom talk like this made me feel depressed. So sad I had to hurry away and hurl myself onto my bed and stare at the walls with the posters of Julian Marquet dancing with Catherine Dahl. This wasn’t the first time I’d wondered what my real father had been like. Had he loved my mother very much? Had she loved him? Would my life have been
happier if he hadn’t died before I was born?

Then there was Daddy Paul, who came after that tall man with the dark hair and eyes. Was Bart really Dr. Paul’s son—or was he . . . ? I couldn’t even finish the question, it made me feel so disloyal for doubting.

I closed my eyes, feeling in the air around me a dreadful tension, as if an invisible sword were held, ready to hack all of us down.

*  *  *

Early the next evening, I cornered Dad in his study and burst out with all I’d held back until now.

“Dad, you’ve just got to do something about Bart. He frightens me. I don’t see how we can go on living with him in the house, when it seems he is going mad—if he isn’t already there.”

My dad bowed his head into his hands. “Jory, I don’t know what to do. It would kill your mother if we had to send Bart away. You don’t know all she’s been through. I don’t think she can take too much more . . . another child gone would destroy her.”

“We’ll save her!” I cried passionately. “But we have to prevent Bart from going to visit those people next door who tell him lies. He goes over there all the time, Dad, and that old lady holds him on her lap and tells him stories that make him come home acting queer, like he’s old, like he hates women. It’s all her fault, Dad, that old woman in black. When she leaves Bart alone he’ll go back to where he was before she came.”

He stared at me in the strangest way, as if something I’d said had triggered thoughts in his head. As always he had places to go and patients to see, but this time he called his hospital and told them he had an emergency at home. And he did, you bet he did!

I often looked at my mother’s third husband and wished
he were my own blood father, but at that moment when he canceled his appointments to save Bart—and Mom—I knew in all the ways that counted that he was my true father.

That evening, shortly after dinner, Mom went to her room to work on her book. Cindy was in bed and Bart was out in the yard when Dad and I donned warm sweaters and slipped out the front door.

It was murky with fog, cold with damp as we strode side by side toward the huge shadowy mansion with its impressive black iron gates. “Dr. Christopher Sheffield,” said Dad into the black box attached to the side of the gates. “I want to see the lady of the house.” As the gates swung silently open, he asked why I’d never learned the woman’s name. I shrugged, as if she didn’t have a name, and as far as I was concerned, didn’t need one. Bart had never called her anything but Grandmother.

At the front door Dad banged the brass knocker. Finally we heard shuffling noises in the hall, and John Amos Jackson admitted us.

“Our lady tires easily,” said John Amos Jackson, his thin, long face hollow-cheeked, gaunt-eyed, his hands trembling, his narrow back bent. “Don’t say anything to upset her.”

I stared at the way Dad looked at him, frowning and perplexed as the bald-headed man shuffled away, leaving us to enter a room whose door he’d opened.

The lady in black was seated in her rocking chair.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Dad, staring at her intensely. “My name is Dr. Christopher Sheffield and I live next door. This is my eldest son, Jory, whom you have met before.”

She seemed excited and nervous as she gestured us in and indicated the chairs we were to use. We perched tentatively, not intending to stay very long. Seconds stretched by that seemed like hours before Dad leaned forward to speak: “You have a lovely home.” He glanced around again at all the elaborate chairs and other fine furnishings, and he stared at the paintings, too. “I have the strangest sense of
déjà vu,”
he murmured almost to himself.

Her black-veiled head bowed low. Her hands spread expansively, supplicating, it seemed, for his understanding for her lack of words. I knew she spoke English perfectly well. Why was she faking?

Except for those aristocratic hands with all the glittering rings she sat so still, but her hands fluttered, knotted the pearls I knew she wore beneath her black dress. His eyes shot her way, and quickly she sat on her hands.

“You don’t speak English?” Dad asked in a tight voice.

Vigorously she nodded, indicating she could
understand
English. His brows knitted. Puzzled-looking again, “Well, to get to the point of our visit, my son Jory has told me you and my youngest son Bart are very familiar. Jory says you give Bart expensive gifts and feed him sweets between meals. I’m sorry, Mrs. . . . Mrs. . . . ? He paused, waiting for her to give her name. When she didn’t he went on: “When Bart comes again I want you to send him home unrewarded. He’s done a number of ugly things that deserve punishment. His mother and I cannot have a stranger coming between Bart and our authority. When you indulge him here we face the consequences.” All this time he was doing his darnedest to see her hands—as she did her best to keep them hidden.

What was this all about? Why did Dad want to see her hands? Was it all those fabulous rings that held his fascination? I’d never guessed he liked things like that, since Mom had an aversion for jewelry of any kind but earrings.

And then, when Dad seemed to be looking toward another of her original oil paintings, her hands came into view and fluttered up near her throat to the magnet of her hidden pearls.

His head jerked around. Dad spoke then out of context, startling me, startling her. “Those rings you wear—I’ve seen those very rings before!”

When she too obviously shoved her hands inside her full sleeves, Dad jumped to his feet as if thunderstruck. He stared
at her, spun around once more to survey the sumptuous room, and once more nailed her with his eyes. She cringed.

“The . . . best . . . that . . . money . . . can . . . buy,” Dad said slowly, separating each word. I caught his bitterness, though I didn’t understand. It seemed lately I never understood anything.

“Nothing too good for the elegant and aristocratic Mrs. Bartholomew Winslow,” he said. “Those rings, Mrs. Winslow—why didn’t you have the good sense to hide them away? Then your disguise might have worked, though I doubt it. I know your voice, and your gestures too well. You wear black rags but your fingers sparkle with your status symbols. Do you forget what those symbols did to us? Do you think I’ve forgotten those endless days of suffering from the cold or heat, from the loneliness—all our pain symbolized by a string of pearls and those rings on your fingers?”

I was shocked and bewildered. Never before had I seen Dad so upset. He wasn’t easily provoked—and who was this woman he knew and I didn’t? Why had he called her Mrs. Bartholomew Winslow—the very name of my half brother? Could it be true she really was Bart’s grandmother—and Bart might not be the son of Daddy Paul?

Dad railed on. “
Why
, Mrs. Winslow,
why?
Did you think you could hide here and we wouldn’t find out? How can you fool anyone when even the way you sit and hold your head betrays your true identity? Haven’t you done enough to hurt me and Cathy? Do you have to return to do more? I should have guessed that you were behind Bart’s confusion—behind his weird behavior. What have you been doing to our son?”

“Our son?” she asked. “Don’t you mean, more correctly,
her
son?”

“Mother!” he raged before he looked at me guiltily. Looking from one to the other of them, I thought, how wonderful and how strange. At last his mother was free from the loony bin and she really was Bart’s grandmother after all. But why
did he call her Mrs. Winslow? If she was his mother and Dr. Paul’s mother, then she’d have to be Mrs. Sheffield—wouldn’t she?

I was thinking all of this even as she said, “Sir, my rings are not that exceptional. Bart has told me you’re not his real father, so please leave my home. I didn’t come to harm him—or anyone.” It seemed she gave my father a warning look. I guessed she was giving him a road out on account of me.

“My dear mother, the game is up.” She sobbed, then covered her veiled face with her hands. He shot out with no regard for her tears, “When did your doctors release you?”

“Last summer,” she whispered. Her hands lowered so she could use her voice better for pleading. “Even before I moved here I had my lawyers do what they could to help you and Cathy buy whatever piece of land you selected. I ordered them to keep me anonymous, knowing you wouldn’t want my help.”

Dad fell into a chair, bent over to rest his elbows heavily on his knees.

Why wasn’t he happy to see his mother free from that place? She was living nearby, and he’d always wanted to visit her. Didn’t he love his own mother? Or was he afraid she might go crazy any moment? Did he think Bart might have inherited her madness?—or her insanity might infect Bart like a physical disease? And why didn’t my mother like her? I looked from one to the other, wanting answers to my unspoken questions, and so afraid I might learn Paul wasn’t Bart’s father at all.

When Dad lifted his head I could see his drawn face, the deep lines that etched from his nose to his mouth. Lines I’d never seen before.

“I cannot in good conscience call you Mother again,” he said dully. “If you helped buy the land my home sits on, I thank you. Tomorrow I’ll see that a
For Sale
sign is put up, and we’ll move far away if you refuse to move first. I will not allow you to turn my sons away from their parents.”

“Their parent,” she corrected.

“The only parents they have,” he said in return. “I should have known you’d come here. I’ve called your doctor and he told me you’d been released, but he didn’t say when, or where you went.”

“Where else do I have to go?” she cried pitifully, wringing her bejeweled hands like pale limp rags. It was as if she reached out and touched him then, even as she restrained herself from reaching for him. Each word she said, each look she gave him, said she loved him—even I could tell.

“Christopher,” she pleaded, “I have no friends, no family, no home—and nowhere to go but to you and yours. All I have left is you and Cathy and the sons she bore—my grandsons. Would you take them from me too? Each night I pray on my knees that you and Cathy will forgive me and take me back and love me as you once did.”

He seemed made of steel, so unreachable, but I was on the verge of crying.

“My son, my beloved son, take me back and say you love me again. And if you cannot do that, then just let me live where I can see my grandsons now and then.”

She paused then, waiting for him to respond. When he refused, she went on: “I hoped you could be lenient if I stayed over here and never let her know who I was. But I’ve seen her, heard her voice; heard yours, too. I hide behind the wall and listen. My heart throbs. My chest aches with longing. Tears fill my eyes from holding back my voice that wants to cry out and let you know I’m sorry! So terribly sorry!”

Still he didn’t say anything. He wore his detached, professional look.

“Christopher, I would gladly give ten years of my life to undo the wrong I’ve done! I’d give another ten years just to sit at your table and feel welcomed by my own grandchildren!”

Tears were in her eyes, in mine too. My heart cried for my father’s mother even as I wondered why he and Mom hated her.

“Christopher, Christopher, don’t you understand why I
wear these rags? I cover my face, my hair, my figure, so she won’t know! But all the time I keep hoping, praying that sooner or later both of you can forgive me enough to let me become a member of your family again! Please, please, accept me as your mother again! If you do, perhaps then she can too!”

How could he sit here and not feel the same pity for her that I did? Why wasn’t he crying like I was?

“Cathy will never forgive you,” he said tonelessly.

Strangely, she cried out happily, “Then you will? Please say it—you forgive me!”

I trembled as I waited for him to speak.

“Mother, how can I say I forgive you? By saying that I would betray Cathy, and I can never betray her. Together we stand and together we will fall, still believing we did right, while you stand guilty and alone. Nothing you say or do can undo death. And every day that you stay here sees Bart more and more deranged. Do you realize he is threatening our adopted daughter Cindy?”

“No!” she cried, shaking her head so the veils swung violently. “Bart would not hurt his sister.”

“Wouldn’t he? He hacked off her hair with a knife, Mrs. Winslow. And he’s threatened his mother as well.”

“NO!” she yelled more passionately than before. “Bart loves his mother! I give Bart treats because you are too busy with your professional life to give him all the attention he needs. Just as his mother is too busy with her life to care if he has enough love. But I cater to his needs. I try to take the place of the peers he doesn’t have. I do everything I can to make him happy. And if feeding him treats and giving him gifts makes him feel better, what harm can I do? Besides, once a child has all the sweets he can eat, soon he loses the taste for them. I know. Once I was like Bart, loving ice cream, candy, cookies, and other sweets . . . and now I cannot tolerate them at all.”