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! (184 page)

At bedtime, I stealthily put away all the razors and everything with which he could harm himself. I slept on the couch in his room that night, fearful he was so despondent he might try to end his life just to give Melodie freedom to leave without guilt. His moans reached me even as I dreamed.

“Mel . . . my legs ache!” he cried out in his sleep. I got up to comfort him. He wakened and stared at me in a disoriented way. “Every night my back and my legs ache,” he answered sleepily in reply to my questions. “I don’t need sympathy for my phantom pains. I just want a full night’s rest.”

All through the night he writhed in agony. The legs that he couldn’t feel during the day by night tormented him with
constant pain. The lower part of his back stabbed him with repeated jabs.

“Why do I feel pain at night, when I feel nothing during the day?” he cried out, sweat pouring down his face, sticking his pajama jacket to his chest. “I still wish I had the nerve my father did—that would solve all our problems!”

No, no, no. I clung to him, covering his face with kisses, promising him everything and anything to make him cling to life. “It will work out, Jory, it will! Hang in there. Don’t give up and lose the greatest challenge of your life. You have me and you have Chris and sooner or later Melodie will come around and be your wife again.”

Bleakly he stared at me, as if I spoke of pipe dreams made of nothing but smoke.

“Go sleep in your own room, Mom. You make me feel more like a child by staying here. I promise not to do anything to make you cry again.”

“Darling, be sure and ring for your father or me if you need anything. Neither one of us minds getting up. Don’t call for Melodie, for she might trip and fall in the dark now that she’s kind of unsteady on her feet. I’ve always been a light sleeper, and it’s easy for me to fall asleep again. Are you listening, Jory?”

“Sure, I’m listening,” he said with his eyes blank and remote. “If there’s one thing I’m good at now, it’s listening.”

“And soon the physical therapist will come to start you on the road to recovery.”

“Recovery, Mom?” His eyes looked tired, very shadowed and dark. “You mean that back brace I’ll be fitted for? Indeed, I am looking forward to using that thing. The leg braces are going to be a real joy to wear. Isn’t it fortunate I won’t feel them? And I’m not even going to mention that harness contraption that will make me think of myself as a horse. I’ll just think it will keep me from falling . . .” He paused, covered his face with his hands briefly, threw back his head and sighed.
“Lord, give me strength to endure—are you punishing me for having too much pride in my legs and body? You’ve done a damned good job of bringing me low.”

His hands came down. Tears shone in his eyes, streaked his cheeks. In a moment he was apologizing. “Sorry about that, Mom. Tears of self-pity aren’t very manly, are they? Can’t be brave and strong all the time. Got my moments of weakness just like everyone else. Go back to your room. I’m not going to do anything to cause you and Dad more grief. I’ll see this thing through to the end. Good night. Say good night to Melodie for me when she comes in.”

I cried in Chris’s arms, causing him to ask a thousand questions that I refused to answer. Frustrated and more than a bit angry, he flipped away. “You can’t fool me, Catherine. You’re holding something back, thinking it will add another burden, when not to know what’s going on is the heaviest of all burdens!”

He waited for me to reply. When I didn’t, he quickly fell asleep on his side. He had the most irritating habit of being able to sleep when I couldn’t. I wanted him awake, forcing me to answer the questions I’d just avoided. But he slept on and on, turning to embrace me in his sleep, burying his face in my hair.

Every hour I was up and checking to see if Bart had brought Melodie home, checking to see if Jory was all right. Jory lay on his bed with his eyes wide open, apparently waiting, as I did, for Melodie to come home.

“Has the phantom pain eased up?”

“Yes, go back to bed. I’m fine.”

I met Joel in the hallway outside Bart’s room. He flushed to see me in my lacy white negligee. “Joel,” I said, “I thought you changed your mind about living under this roof and went back to that small cell over the garage . . .”

“Used to, Catherine, used to,” he muttered. “Bart ordered me into the house, saying a Foxworth shouldn’t be treated like
a servant.” His watery eyes reproached me for not objecting when he’d informed us he liked the garage cell better than the nice room in Bart’s wing of the house.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be old and lonely, niece. I’ve suffered from insomnia for years and years, troubled by bad dreams, with vague aches and pains that kept me from ever reaching that deep sleep I yearn for. So I get up to tire myself, I roam about . . .”

Roam about? Spying, that’s what he did! Then, looking at him more closely, I felt ashamed. Standing there in the gloom of the hall, he appeared so frail, so sickly and thin—was I being unfair to Joel? Did I dislike him only because he was Malcolm’s son?—and had that detestable habit of muttering to himself incessant quotes from the Bible to take me back in time to our grandmother, and her insistence that we learn a quote each day from the holy book.

“Good night, Joel,” I said with more kindness than usual. Still, as he continued to stand there, as if to win me to his side, I thought of Bart, who had said many a painful thing to me when he was a boy, but not since he’d been an adult. Now he, too, was reading the Bible, using the words written in there to prove some moot point. Had Joel helped bring life back to what I thought was dormant? I stared at the old man, who edged away from me almost fearfully.

“Why do you look like that?” I asked sharply.

“Like what, Catherine?”

“Like you’re afraid of me.”

His smile was thin, pitiful. “You are a fearsome woman, Catherine. Despite all your blond prettiness, you can sometimes act as hard as my mother.”

I started, stunned that he could think that. I could not possibly be like that mean old woman.

“You also remind me of your mother,” he whispered in his thin, brittle voice, drawing his old bathrobe more tightly about his skinny frame. “And you seem far too young to be in
your fifties. My father used to say the wicked always managed to stay young and healthy longer than those who had a place waiting for them in Heaven.”

“If your father went on to Heaven, Joel, then I will gladly go in the opposite direction.”

He eyed me as if I were a pitiful object who just didn’t understand before he ambled away.

Once I was back beside Chris, he woke up long enough for me to spill out the scene between Joel and me. Chris glared at me in the dimness. “Catherine, how rude of you to talk to an old man like that. Of course you can’t drive him out. In a way he has more right here than all of us, and it is Bart’s home legally, even if we do have lifetime residency privileges.”

Anger filled me. “Can’t you recognize that Joel has become the father figure Bart has been looking for all his life?” And there I’d gone and hurt him. He stiffened and turned away from me.

“Good night, Catherine. Perhaps you should stay in bed and mind your own business for a rare change. Joel is a lonely old man who is grateful to have a champion like Bart and a place where he can live out the rest of his life. Stop imagining you see Malcolm in every old man you meet, for eventually, if I live long enough, I’ll be another old man.”

“If you look and act like Joel, I’ll be glad to see the end of you as well.”

Oh, how could I say that to the man I loved? He shifted farther away, then refused to respond to my touch on his arm. “Chris, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” My hand caressed his arm, then moved to slip inside his pajama jacket.

“I think it best if you keep your hands to yourself. I’m not in the mood now. Good night, Catherine, and remember, when you look for trouble, you usually find it.”

*  *  *

I heard a distant door close. My illuminated wristwatch read three-thirty. Drawing on a robe, I slipped into Melodie’s room and sat down to wait. It was four before she managed the long trip from the garage to her bedroom. Did she and Bart stop to embrace and kiss? Did they whisper love words they couldn’t save for tomorrow? What else could be talking her so long? Faint hints of dawn approaching showed over the rimming mountains. I paced the floor of her room, growing terribly impatient. Finally I heard her coming. Stumbling in the door of her room, Melodie held her high-heeled silver slippers in one hand, and in her other hand she held a small silver clutch.

She was six months pregnant, but in her loose-fitting black dress it was hardly noticeable. She jerked when she saw me rise from a chair, then choked as she backed away. “Well, Melodie,” I said cynically, “don’t you look pretty.”

“Cathy, is Jory all right?”

“Do you really care?”

“You sound so angry with me. You look at me so hard—what have I done, Cathy?”

“As if you don’t know,” I said to her with angry emphasis, forgetting the tact I’d intended to use. “You slip out on a rainy night with my second son, and you come home hours later with red strawberry marks on your neck, with your lipstick smeared and your hair unbound, and still you ask,
what
. . .
have
. . .
you
. . .
done
. Why don’t you tell me . . .
what
you have done.”

She stared at me with huge eyes of disbelief, half-blended with guilt, with shame, but there was some element of hope there as well. “You’ve been like my mother, Cathy,” she cried, her eyes tearing as they pleaded for my understanding. “Please don’t fail me now—now when I need a mother more than I ever have before.”

“But you forget, I am Jory’s mother first and foremost. I am also Bart’s mother. When you betray Jory, you betray me.”

Melodie cried out again, pleading with me to listen to her.

“Don’t turn away from me now, Cathy. I have no one but you who will understand. Certainly you of all people have to understand! I love Jory, I’ll always love him—”

“And so you go to bed with Bart? What a fine way to show your love,” I interrupted. My voice sounded cold and hard.

Her face lowered into my lap as her arms wrapped around my waist. She clung to me. “Cathy, please. Wait until you hear my side.” Her face lifted, already stained with tears, black tears because of her mascara. Somehow this served only to make her look more pitifully vulnerable. “I’m part of the ballet world, Cathy, and you know what that means. We are the dancers who take music into our bodies and souls and make it visible for all to see, and for that we pay a price, a heavy price. You know the price. We dance with our souls bared for all to view and criticize if they will, and when the dance ends, and we hear the applause, and we accept the roses, and take the bows and the curtain calls, and hear the calls of
bravo! bravo!
finally we end up backstage to take off the makeup, to put on everyday mundane clothes, and then we know the best of what we are isn’t real, only fantasy. We float on wings of sensuality so powerful nobody can realize as we do the pain of all that’s so insensitive and cruel and brutal in reality.”

She hesitated to gain the strength to go on, while I sat stunned with her acuteness, for I knew the truth when I heard it—who would know better than I?

“Out there in the audience they think most of us are gay. They don’t realize we’re borne on the music, sustained by the music, made bigger than life by the sets, the applause, the adulation, and least of all do they realize that lovemaking is all that keeps us really nourished. Jory and I used to fall passionately into each other’s arms the minute we were alone and only then could we find the release we needed to wind down enough to fall asleep. Now I have no release, nor does he. He won’t listen to the music, and I can’t turn it off.”

“But you have a lover,” I said weakly, fully understanding
every word she’d said. Once I, too, had flown on the joyous wings of music, and drifted downward, sick because there was no one to love me and lend reality to the fantasy world I loved best of all.

“Listen, Cathy, please. Give me a chance to explain. You know how boring it is in this house, with no one ever visiting, and the only time the phone rings it’s Bart they want. You and Chris and Cindy were always in the hospital with Jory, while I was a coward and hung back, scared, so scared he’d see my fright. I tried to read, tried to entertain myself with knitting like you do, but I couldn’t do it. I gave up and waited for the telephone to ring. Nobody from New York ever calls me. I took walks, pulled weeds from the garden. Cried in the woods, stared at the sky, watched the butterflies, and cried some more.

“Several nights after we found out that Jory would never walk or dance again, Bart came to my room. He closed the door behind him and just stood there looking at me. I was on the bed, crying as usual. I had ballet music playing, trying to recreate the feeling of how it had been with Jory, and Bart was there, staring at me with those dark, mesmerizing eyes. He stood waiting, just looking at me, until I stopped crying and he came closer to wipe the tears from my face. His eyes turned soft with love when I sat up and just stared at him. I’d never seen his eyes so kind, so full of tenderness and compassion. He touched me. My cheek, my hair, my lips. Shivers began to race up and down my spine. He put his hands in my hair, stared into my eyes, and slowly, ever so slowly he inclined his head until his lips brushed over mine. I’d never guessed he could be so gentle. I’d always presumed he’d take a woman by brutal force. Maybe if he had touched me with rough, uncaring hands I would have turned away. But his gentleness was my undoing. He reminded me of Jory.”

Oh, I didn’t want to hear anymore. I had to stop her before I felt pity and sympathy for her, for Bart.

“I don’t want to hear anymore, Melodie,” I said coldly, jerking my head so I didn’t have to look at the love marks that Jory might notice if she went to him now. “So now when Jory needs you most, you intend to fail him and turn to Bart,” I said bitterly. “What a wonderful wife you are, Melodie.”