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! (191 page)

Cindy at last handed Joel the gift she had for him. He accepted it tentatively as he’d taken all our gifts, as if we were heathen fools who didn’t know the real meaning of a Christmas that didn’t need gifts. Then his eyes were bulging at the white nightshirt and the peaked sleeping cap Cindy must have really hunted to find. Definitely he would look like Scrooge wearing those things. Included was an ebony walking stick, which he hurled to the floor along with the nightshirt and cap. “Are you mocking me, girl?”

“I only wanted you to have warm sleeping garments, Uncle,” she said demurely, her sparkling eyes downcast, “and the walking stick would hurry your steps.”

“Away from you? Is that what you mean?” He stooped painfully to pick up the stick and brandished it wildly in the air. “Maybe I will keep this thing after all; great weapon in case I’m attacked one night when I stroll the gardens . . . and long corridors.”

Silent for a moment, not one of us could speak. Then Cindy laughed. “Uncle, I thought of that in advance. I knew one day you’d feel threatened.”

He left the room then.

Only too soon all the gifts were unwrapped, and Jory was staring worriedly at the litter on the floor, then scanning all around the room. “I didn’t forget you, Bart,” he said with concern. “Cindy and Dad helped me wrap it once, but then I undid the wrapping, touched up again, wrapped it myself the last time after Cindy helped me lift it in.” He kept looking through the rubble of discarded foil and ribbons. “Early this morning, before the rest of you were up, I came down here and I put it under the tree. Where the hell did it go, I wonder? It’s
a huge box, wrapped in red foil, tied with silver ribbons—and by far the largest box under the tree.”

Bart didn’t say a word, as if he’d grown accustomed to disappointments and the lack of Jory’s gift was of no importance.

Of course I knew Jory had worked for months and months to finish the clipper ship that had ended up three feet in length and just as tall, with all its fragile riggings exactly right. He’d even sent for special copper fittings and a solid brass wheel for the helm. Desperately Jory looked around. “Has anyone seen the big box wrapped in red foil, with Bart’s name on the tag?” he asked.

Immediately I was on my feet and scrambling through the piles of boxes, papers, ribbons, tissues, with Chris soon joining me in the search. Cindy began her own search on the other side of the room. “Oh,” she cried out. “Here it is, behind this red sofa.” She carried it to Bart and put it on the floor near his feet, bowing in mocking obeisance. “For our lord, our master,” she said sweetly, backing away. “I think Jory’s a fool to give it to you after all the hard work he put into this thing, but maybe you’ll be appreciative, for once.”

Suddenly I noticed Joel had slipped back into the room to observe Bart. How strange his expression, how strange.

Bart dropped his sophistication like an unwanted garment and became childishly eager to open this particular gift. Already he was tearing into the package Jory had so beautifully and carefully wrapped. He glanced up at Jory, his smile warm, wide, and happy, his dark eyes lit with boyish anticipation. “Ten to one it’s that clipper ship you made, Jory. You really should keep that yourself . . . but thanks, thanks a heap—” He paused, then sucked in his breath.

He stared down into the box, paling before he looked upward, his happiness vanished. Now his eyes were full of bitterness. “It’s broken,” he said in a dull tone. “Smashed to small pieces. There’s nothing in this box but broken match-sticks and tangled rigging.”

His voice cracked as he stood up and dropped the box to the floor. Violently he kicked it aside before he threw a hard look at Melodie, who hadn’t said a word even when she opened her gifts, only thanked us with nods and weak smiles. “I should have known you would find the perfect way to repay me for sleeping with your wife.”

Stunned silence rumbled louder than thunder. Melodie sat on, bleakly staring, seeming an empty shell, even as she mumbled on and on about how much she hated this house. Jory’s eyes went starkly blank.

Had he guessed all along? All of Jory’s color vanished before finally he could force his eyes to look at Melodie. “I don’t believe you, Bart. You’ve always had a nasty, hateful way of kicking where it hurts most.”

“I’m not lying,” lashed out Bart, disregarding the pain he was inflicting on Jory, on me and Chris. “While you lay on your hospital bed, inside your cast, your wife and I shared one bed, and eagerly enough she spread her legs for me.”

Chris jumped to his feet, his face angrier than I’d ever seen it. “Bart, how dare you say such things to your brother? Apologize to Jory and Melodie, immediately! How can you hurt him like this, when already he’s hurt enough? Do you hear me? You tell him every word you just said is a lie! A damned lie!”

“It’s not a lie,” raged Bart. “If you never believe anything I say again, believe me when I say that Melodie was a very cooperative bed companion.”

Cindy squealed, then jumped up to slap Melodie’s stricken white face. “How dare you do that to Jory?” she screamed. “You know how much he loves you!”

Then Bart was laughing, hysterically laughing. Chris thundered, “
STOP THAT!
Face up to this situation, Bart—the loss of the clipper ship is not a good excuse for trying to destroy your brother’s marriage. Where is your honor, your integrity?”

Almost instantly Bart’s laughter faded. His eyes turned
crystal hard and cold as they surveyed Chris from head to toe. “Don’t
you
talk to me about honor and integrity. Where was yours when it came to your sister? Where is it now when you continue to sleep with her? Don’t you realize yet that your relationship with her has warped me so that I don’t care about anything but seeing the two of you separated? I want my mother to finish out her life as a decent, respectable woman . . . and it’s you who keeps her from that!
You
, Christopher,
you!”

His face full of disgust and no remorse, Bart spun on his heel and left the room.

Left us all in the shambles of our Christmas joy.

Eager to do the same, Melodie rose awkwardly, stood trembling with her head bowed, before Cindy yelled, “Did you sleep with Bart? Did you? It isn’t fair for you to just say nothing when Jory’s heart is breaking.”

Melodie’s darkly shadowed eyes seemed to sink deeper into her skull even as they grew larger and larger, her pupils dilating as if with fear. “Why can’t you leave me alone?” she cried pitifully. “I’m not made of the same iron as the rest of you! I can’t take one tragedy after another. Jory lay stricken in the hospital, unable to ever walk or dance again, and Bart was here. I needed someone. He held me, comforted me. I closed my eyes and pretended he was Jory.”

Jory fell forward in his chair. I ran to hold him, only to find him gasping so rackingly he couldn’t even control his shaking hands. I held him in my arms as Chris tried to stop Melodie from running up the stairs. “Be careful!” he called. “You could fall and lose your baby!”

“I don’t care,” came back her pitiful wail before she disappeared from sight.

By this time Jory had gained enough control to wipe away his tears and find a weak smile. “Well, now I know,” he said in a cracked voice. “I guessed a long time ago that she and Bart had something going on, but I hoped it was only my suspicions working overtime. But I should have known better. Mel
can’t live without a man beside her, especially in bed . . . and I can hardly blame her, can I?”

Stricken to the bone, I began to pick up the wrappings that had been so carefully applied and so ruthlessly ripped off. Like life, and how carefully we tried to maintain our illusions when things were seldom what they had appeared to be.

Soon Jory excused himself, saying he needed to be alone.

“Who could have smashed that wonderful ship?” I whispered. “Cindy helped Jory wrap that gift the last time he touched up the paint, and I was there watching. The ship was carefully put in a special plastic foam shell to hold it upright. It shouldn’t have had one crack, one thing broken.”

“How can I ever explain what goes on in this house?” answered Chris in a throaty voice full of pain. He looked up to see Bart standing in the doorway, his long legs spread wide, his fists on his hips as he glared at me. In a louder tone Chris addressed Bart. “What’s done is done, and I’m sure it’s not Jory’s fault the clipper ship was broken. He meant well. All along he told us he was putting that ship together for your office mantel.”

“I’m sure Jory did mean well,” said Bart evenly, his control regained. “But there is my dear little adopted sister who hates me and no doubt wants to punish me for giving her boyfriend what he deserved. Next time it will be
her
I punish.”

“Maybe Jory dropped the box,” said Joel in a saintly way. I stared at that old man with his glittering weak eyes and waited my opportunity to say what I had to when no one else was around.

“No,” denied Bart. “It had to be Cindy. I have to admit my brother has always given me fair treatment, even when I didn’t deserve it.”

And all the while he said this, I was staring at Joel with his smirky face, his glittery, satisfied eyes.

Just before retiring, I had my chance. We were in a back second-floor hallway. “Joel, Cindy wouldn’t have destroyed
all Jory’s work and ruined Bart’s gift. But you like to drive wedges between members of our family. I believe it was
you
who smashed the ship, then rewrapped it.”

He said nothing, only put more hatred in his unrelenting stare.

“Why did you come back, Joel?” I shouted. “You claim you hated your father and were happy in your Italian monastery. Why didn’t you stay there? Certainly in all those years you made a few friends. You must have known you wouldn’t find any here. My mother told me you always hated this house. Now you walk through it as if you owned it.”

Still he said nothing.

I followed him into his room and looked around for the first time. Biblical illustrations on his walls. Quotes from the Bible put in cheap frames.

He moved so that he was behind me. I felt his wheezy warm breath on my neck, smelling old and faintly sick. I sensed when he moved his arms he meant to choke me. Startled, I whirled about to find him inches away.

How silently and quickly he could move. “My father’s mother was named Corrine,” he said in the sweetest possible voice, enough to make me doubt my reasoning. “My sister had the same name, given to her as a form of punishment, a constant reminder to my father of his unfaithful mother, proving to him again and again that no beautiful woman could be trusted—how right he was.”

He was an old man, in his eighties, yet I slapped him, slapped him hard. He staggered backward, then lost his balance and fell to the floor.

“You’ll regret that slap, Catherine,” he cried with more anger than he’d as yet shown. “Just as much as Corrine regretted all her sins. You, too, will live long enough to regret yours!”

I fled his room, fearing what he said was only too true.

O
n Christmas night our dinner was served around five in order to give the family plenty of time to prepare for the big event that would begin at nine-thirty. Bart wore a glow of happiness. His warm hand reached to cover mine, sending a shock of pleasure though me, for so seldom did he show affection by touching. “If I can’t have all my wealth right away, then I should have at least all the prestige due the owner of this house.”

I smiled and covered the hand that held mine with my free hand. “Yes, I understand, and we’ll do everything possible to see that your party is a huge success.”

Joel sat nearby, sending out invisible vibes. He was smiling cynically. “Lord help those fools who deceive themselves,” he muttered half under his breath. Bart closed his ears and pretended not to hear, but I was worried. Someone had broken Jory’s clipper ship, which had been meant as a reconciliation gift to Bart. It had to be Joel who had heartlessly ruined that ship that Jory had slaved over for months and months. What else would he do?

My eyes met Joel’s. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how
Joel looked at this moment, except sanctimonious. He daintily picked at his food, cutting his fruitcake into tiny morsels that he picked up with his long fingers. These he chewed with intense concentration, using only his front teeth, much as a rabbit ate a carrot.

“I’m going to bed now,” announced Joel. “I don’t approve of tonight’s party, Bart, you might as well know that. Remember what happened at your birthday party, and you should have known better. Again I say it’s a waste of good money entertaining people you don’t know well enough. I also disapprove of people who drink, who cavort and act wild on a day meant for worship. This day belongs to the Lord and his son. We should all go down on our knees and stay there from dawn until midnight, like we did in my monastery, as we gave silent thanks for just being alive.”

Since not one of us said a word, Joel went on. “I know drunken men and women will eventually try to fornicate with someone other than whom they came with. I remember your birthday party and what went on. Sinful modern life makes me realize how pure the world was when I was young. Nothing is the same as it used to be. People knew how to act decently in public then, no matter what they did behind closed doors. Now nobody cares who sees them do what. Women didn’t bare their bosoms when I was a boy, nor pull up their skirts for every man who wanted them.”