Secrets of Foxworth (14 page)

“Okay,” she said. “Since we're being deserted by what family we have, we'll form our own. Christopher, you're now the father. I'm the mother.”

I looked at Cory and Carrie and saw how the idea gave them some relief. There was a chance to have fun after all and get their minds off this dreadful situation. Our grandmother had typed out a list of rules for us to follow, and it was pretty clear from them that she was either a nutcase or simply sexually repressed. I found them so ridiculous that I read them aloud, imitating her voice and growly face.

“No being undressed in front of each other.”

“Boys and girls cannot use the bathroom together.”

The one that got me most was “No handling or playing with private parts.”

The most ridiculous one was “Do not look at the opposite sex unless absolutely necessary.”

I could see I was going to have a time of it explaining to Cory and Carrie what private parts were. Cathy had that self-satisfied grin on her face, enjoying my efforts to make it sound more scientific than sexual.

There were actually twenty-two rules, mostly to do with cleanliness and obedience. She threatened to add more as time went by. Despite my satire and my imitation, Cathy stopped smiling. She
looked around and then burst out with all her pent-up frustration, bemoaning how much we were hated for something we didn't do, whatever it was, and declaring that this was all going to be a disaster. I remained calm and assured her that our mother would look after us and our demented grandmother would settle down.

She calmed. “You're right,” she said. “Momma won't let this go on much longer.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, but something inside me warned that this was only the first of many crises to come.

I set the diary aside for a moment and thought about their grandmother's rules. Christopher had suspected early on that his grandmother was sexually repressed. I knew what a sexually repressed person was, but I doubted, even from the little I had read so far, that Cathy would have known at her age. Their grandmother would probably cut herself off completely from the outside world if she were still alive today and saw how we all dressed, what we read, what we watched on television, and how many of us were sexually active, not only before we had graduated high school but also in middle school. For sure, there were still people like her, who thought a liberated woman was simply promiscuous.

How did Christopher's mother grow up in such a household? Was she permitted to go on dates at least by my age? What kind of clothes did they force her
to wear? What books and magazines were forbidden, and what about movies and television? Was makeup forbidden? Was she permitted to go to parties? Who wouldn't understand why she had an affair and ran from the world she was in? I was sure she felt more like a trapped animal.

Despite my aunt Barbara's willingness to teach me the facts of life when I was younger and her occasional phone calls, without a mother or an older sister, I had to fend for myself when it came to what I would call street sophistication. Aunt Barbara wasn't around every day or even every month, and I felt funny as time passed and I got older calling her for advice or intimate talk. I think she knew that, too, and during one of our last talks, she said, “You're pretty sophisticated for your age now, Kristin. I have faith in you always doing the right thing.”

Maybe she did, but I wasn't convinced.

At nearly seventeen, I was still far from the most experienced and worldly girl in my class, especially when it came to relationships. Some of the girls had been going out with older boys since they were fourteen, and as we all knew, those boys weren't going to be satisfied holding hands and just kissing in the backseats of cars when they could really
be alone
. Some of them were from broken homes, but even those who weren't seemed to be on a long leash, staying out later than the rest of us. I imagined that their mothers, like Cathy's mother, were more absorbed with themselves.

Like any other girl, I guess, I wanted to see how
many bells would ring and how much control I would still have when those famous female hormones began calling. Both Lana and Suzette were still virgins. We talked about it almost every time the three of us were together at one of our houses. Even though they had mothers to advise them all the time, I suspected they didn't know much more about their own impulses and desires than I did. They thought that just because I was the best student in the class, maybe even in the whole school, I would know more than their mothers.

I smiled to myself recalling how I answered some of their questions, because I thought I sounded or replied the way Christopher would. I was almost as scientific. I also got the feeling that if I told them how little sexually I had done with Kane or how far I might go, they would find it a justification for doing the same. I didn't want to take responsibility for their actions, but they would surely come back at me with “Well, you did it.”

Responsibility, I thought to myself—look at how it was thrust onto Christopher. Maybe it was just a game at first for him to play daddy, but it wasn't difficult to see how he would really have to be like a daddy. I knew that kids our age who lived in war-torn countries or in poverty had to grow up so quickly that childhood was a fantasy. But for a boy who came from a middle-class family, who once had all the advantages, to be dropped into this situation had to be mind-shattering. I knew how difficult it had been for me to lose my mother, but the way this was turning out, he and his brother and sisters were more like instant orphans.

I picked up the diary reluctantly this time. It was making me angry and depressed. I was developing a love/hate relationship with it. It was intriguing, yes, but also enraging. Dad might be right, I thought. It could make me bitter and cynical. Right now, it made my stomach churn the way it did just before I had to do something unpleasant, like go to the dentist, but I turned the page anyway, feeling that it was almost as necessary as having my teeth checked.

Our first foray up to the attic was like exploring another country. It was vast, probably the entire length of the mansion, and filled with endless antiques, leather-bound trunks with travel labels, giant armoires containing both Union and Confederate uniforms, and rows and rows of men's old fashions, women's clothing, dress forms, not to mention dozens of birdcages, rakes and shovels, and piles of framed photographs.

“These might be our relatives,” I said. “Ancestors.”

Cathy grimaced until she saw a pretty girl who was maybe eighteen. It was hard to tell. Both women and men in the nineteenth century looked older at our ages. I thought she was quite sexy, with her bosom rising out of a ruffled bodice. I saw how fascinated Cathy was with her.

“I'm sure you'll have a figure like that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“From the way you're developing already,” I said, and she looked at me so strangely. “It's all
right for me to notice, you know, despite what our monster grandmother says.”

Cory and Carrie started to complain about the heat and stuffiness. I managed to open a window, and then I made a new discovery, a room that was half decent, with school desks. Cory found a rocking horse, and Cathy put Carrie on it, too. For the time being, we had plenty to occupy ourselves. Cathy and I gazed out the window at the view.

“It's like looking at a television with the picture stuck on something beautiful. You can't get tired of something beautiful,” I told her.

She shook her head. “You're impossible, Christopher. You see something good in everything, even this. Why does our grandmother look at us and see nothing but sin? What have we done? We're just kids.”

“I don't know how she's thinking yet,” I told her. “Don't worry about it, anyway. We won't be here that long.”

Carrie and Cory began to complain again, demanding that we take them outside.

“Now what, oh great optimist?” Cathy asked, and I quickly came up with some new games to play.

“We'll turn the attic into our own garden with a swing!” I declared, and spent hours building one for them. It kept them occupied for only a little while before they were screaming to go out again.

This wasn't going to work, I thought. We couldn't keep them locked up as long as Momma envisioned. Cathy looked at me and saw the
momentary weakness and doubt in my eyes, but I quickly recuperated, chastised them like a father should for whining and screaming so much, and then gratefully accepted Cathy's declaration that it was lunchtime.

These were early days, I told myself. Surely, it would be worth it. This was a mansion, and they were obviously very rich people to own so much land. If we were able to share just a small part of it, we'd be well-off, too, and coming from the disaster we were in, this had to be a great idea, an opportunity.

I could hear my father say, “Chin up, chest out, shoulders back. You're in the Dollanganger army, boy.”

When I heard my father coming up the stairs, I shoved the diary under my pillow and grabbed my history text. The moment after I made the change, I felt terrible guilt. My father had such trust in me. Deceiving him again, even with something most people would call very minor, gave me a sick feeling.

How did people deceive the people they love or are supposed to love? I wondered. From what I had read so far and from what was common knowledge, I knew that Corrine Foxworth would keep her children locked in the attic for years, yet according to Christopher, she had told them they would be there a few days, maybe a week, all the while knowing it would have to be much longer. All parents tell their children little white lies to keep the peace or keep them from
being afraid or impatient, but this was different. This was cold, hard deception. In a real sense, she was betraying them, betraying those she should have loved the most.

I already had a bad feeling about Corrine willingly shutting up her children in rooms far away from the servants and the grandfather. I didn't like the fact that the door was actually locked. What if there was a fire or something else terrible happened, like an appendix attack or an injury? How long would it take to get them help and assistance? How could a mother go to sleep at night knowing this?

I tried to think like Christopher and understand that Corrine was in a desperate place, practically penniless with four children, and in her way of thinking, this was a small enough sacrifice to make in order to gain the security and future for her children and herself that she envisioned. I told myself that I had to remember she had once enjoyed this opulent lifestyle, living in this large mansion with its beautiful grounds and the lake. Who could blame her for dreaming of being rescued?

It caused me to wonder about what sacrifices my father had made in his life after my mother's death, sacrifices he made for my benefit. I was sure that many evenings, he lay awake in his and my mother's bedroom, alone, looking into the darkness, unable to sleep, and probably dreaming of getting away from it all, fleeing the crisp memory of her movements beside him, her laughter resonating in the halls and rooms, the scent of her perfume still lingering around her
vanity table and in her closet, perhaps the discovery of a strand of her hair. After her passing, every reminder was like a scratch on a scab, a wound. How much easier it would be to move to another city, into another house, and make new friends, friends in whose faces he wouldn't see the sorrow and the pity or the reflection of my mother in their eyes and hear the fragility of their words. Everyone was always afraid he or she might say something painful and vividly resurrect my mother's dying breath. I knew. I saw the fear in his face and felt it in my own heart.

Despite what he would tell me about being tied to the house and his work, about being comfortable where he was, and about being too old to start anew, I was well aware that he was holding on to it all for me. He didn't want my life disrupted. He didn't want me to have to find new friends and get used to new teachers and new surroundings. “People my age and younger are moved about this country like checkers on a board,” he would say.

Being young is supposed to mean you're strong enough to be shaken up, even periodically, yet students like that don't do as well, and yes, they probably have many emotional and psychological issues, but they live. I would have lived through it, too.

And what about another woman, another wife?

Was it really impossible for him to take on another companion, or was he avoiding it just to please me? Yes, I hated the thought of another woman looking into my mother's mirror, working in her kitchen, putting her clothes in my mother's closet, and greeting
my father with a kiss at the end of his workday. It was like losing my mother all over again, and yes, that was painful even to consider, but it was also selfish of me not to want it to happen.

My father, like any other man, had needs. I couldn't share everything with him. How many times had he turned down an invitation because he didn't think I would be comfortable accompanying him? How many times had he looked at another married couple laughing, holding hands, having dinner in a restaurant, or simply talking softly somewhere and felt the great emptiness and pain in his heart? Maybe he would never love anyone as much as he had loved my mother, but he would have someone on his arm, someone else to come home to. He was still a young man. It had to be difficult having no one to embrace in bed, no shoulder to kiss, no warmth to soothe him when he felt terribly alone. There was a wide hole in his heart, in his life, and I couldn't fill it completely. We were still a family, yes, but he was a man alone at times and places when he shouldn't be.

Who was making the sacrifices here?

Not me.

And certainly not Corrine Foxworth!

He knocked on my door.

“Come in, Dad.”

“Just want to give you a heads-up on something,” he began. “Herm Cromwell just told me that the
Charlottesville Catch-all
, that weekly paper, is doing a lead article on the Foxworth story because of the
real estate sale. They're going to rake up the legendary horror for sure. Herm knows the editor, and there's going to be a mention of the fact that we're, through your mother, the only living Charlottesville relatives of the Foxworths now. You're not to talk to anyone from that newspaper about it,” he added, as sternly as he ever said anything to me.