Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

He looked at my mother’s wardrobe. “Maybe there’s something in there.”

I hesitated.

“I’m overdressed, too,” he said, and sat up to take off his pants.

My heart began to race. I could feel a warm sensation of excitement building in the pit of my stomach and spreading like tepid water just beneath my skin, into my thighs. I rose quickly and went to the wardrobe. Two nightgowns were hung on the right. I plucked one out and began to undress. He was in his underwear, lying back, watching me and waiting. With my back to him, I went down to my panties and slipped the nightgown over my head. Smoothing it down, I returned to the sofa bed and lay beside him, placing my head on his chest. He ran his fingers through my hair and then began to read.

There was no longer a doubt in my mind.

We were in the Foxworth Hall attic.

In the short silence that passed between us, I felt my sister’s warmth in a way I never had felt it. It’s difficult to explain, but perhaps because of our circumstances, all that had happened, the emotional roller coaster we were on, I wasn’t thinking of her as my sister. I was sensing her more as a girl, young, of course, somewhat frightened, but also desperate for my touch, my warmth. It aroused me in ways I hadn’t expected.

I started babbling about everything, defending Momma again, and talking about how we had all changed. She perked up, now interested in how I thought she had changed. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her she was more mature, she was even prettier, but something kept me from saying it. I was afraid to say it.

Instead, I started to talk about what I had discovered when I had snuck out. I told her I heard the party winding down and went to spy on them and that many of them looked drunk. I saw the nurse wheel out our grandfather. Moments after, I saw Momma come up the stairs with Bartholomew Winslow, who asked to see her special bed. I thought it was just a clever way to get into her room with her. I hesitated to tell Cathy any more, but she insisted. I had to tell her about how they kissed and how he touched Momma. I knew it would make her angry but not angrier than it made me. I told her how he still insisted on seeing the famous swan bed, which I had overheard had been our great-grandmother’s. To get off the topic, I described wandering into a trophy room with dozens of animal heads on the walls and the portrait of our grandfather, Malcolm Neal Foxworth. She didn’t want to hear any of that.

Again, I hesitated, but I had promised I would tell her everything I saw, so I couldn’t leave it out, even though I knew it was going to disturb her. I described what I had seen of Momma’s suite of rooms, with that enormous swan bed, when the door opened. There was no way not to say it; it was the bedroom of a princess.

Momma was living in luxury, while we were wallowing in a small room and an attic full of antiques, dust, and no sunshine. The air was stale. We were shut away and drawing closer to each other daily to find the comfort and the hope anyone our ages should have the moment he or she opens his or her eyes. Maybe legally we weren’t orphans, but the only thing that separated us from them was a second death certificate—our mother’s.

Darkness was never darker; silence was never deeper. We were in a world where it was futile even to cry. Who would hear us? Who would wipe away our tears? How different we were already from the children who had been brought here. We were frightened, and we were unhappy, but we had been dressed in hope. Momma’s voice had been so full of promise. Really. Where else could we have gone but to her to find a reason to continue, to grow, to dream again of any future for ourselves?

Kane stopped reading and turned to me. “If I were really there with her in that bed, I would say, ‘More and more, it’s looking like we’re going to have only each other, Cathy.’?”

“Their mother does seem so deceptive, complaining about how difficult it is for her and telling them how patient they have to be.”

“I think Christopher knows that but can’t say a word. You can understand how alone they must feel, locked away. I can see a mother unconcerned about them in the interim, but those two little ones.”

“Yes.” I could feel the tears coming into my eyes, and he could see them. He leaned toward me and gently kissed my eyes, his lips feeling like slightly damp tissues. Then he kissed my cheeks with small pecks, as if he was exploring and finding his way to my lips. I wasn’t terribly experienced at it, but I could sense that Kane was a very good kisser. He pressed just so hard and held his lips on mine just long enough to keep the tingling lingering after we parted.

“And we can understand why they would need more from each other, more comfort, more love,” he whispered, his lips just under my ear and just close enough to graze the peach fuzz on my cheek. He caressed my breasts, lifting my left breast gently, and with his left hand, he reached down to get under the hem of my mother’s nightgown, sliding it softly but quickly up my thigh to my waist and turning me to him more for another long and passionate kiss that seemed to draw the last drops of resistance from me.

When he started to draw back, I was the one who pursued, bringing my lips back to his. Then I stiffened when his hand reached my breasts, naked under the nightgown. His fingers nudged my nipple as he lowered his mouth to my neck. I was surprised at how I suddenly stiffened and pulled back. I could feel myself sliding down that dangerous slope my aunt Barbara had described, when she had come to visit and play the role of a mother educating her daughter about her own sexuality.

“It’s all right,” Kane said, kissing my forehead and trying again to bring his fingers to my erect nipples, but I moved back even farther.

“They wouldn’t do this,” I told him. I knew it was a strange thing to say the second after I said it.

He smiled. “Right, right. We’ll continue this downstairs. I think we’ve done enough today, anyway,” he said, and rose. He looked down at me to see if I would follow, if I wanted to continue. The candles he had lit inside me were still flickering and did not go out. So many places on my body still longed to be touched. Now it felt like I had suffered sunburn. My skin tingled.

I nodded and started to get up. As he dressed and then began to put everything back to the way it was, I dressed, too, and rehung my mother’s nightgown. I closed the windows, and then we left the attic, both of us pausing first to look back at it, me to be sure it didn’t reveal what had been happening in it and him looking back with the expression of someone who was remembering having been there for years and finally leaving.

He took my hand. The passion that had blossomed between us was still as heavy as honey on our lips. My body still tingled, and both of us were as flushed as the moment we had touched and caressed. Neither of us spoke. We were hurrying down to my bedroom, where I was almost certain now I would do what my girlfriends and I jokingly referred to as “crossing the Rio Grande.”

We had just gotten down the stairs and started toward my room when I heard the front door open and close. We both froze for a moment. Without speaking, I hurried him to my room.

“Does anyone else have the key to your house?” he asked.

“No. It has to be my father,” I said, slipping the diary under the pillow and flopping onto the bed with my history text open to where I was actually supposed to be reading.

Obviously frustrated, Kane reluctantly took his books out of his bag and slapped his math text onto my desk. “If there’s anything that could keep you from feeling romantic, it’s studying math,” he muttered.

We could hear my father coming up the stairs. I brushed back my hair and gave my clothes a once-over just before he knocked.

“Hey,” I called, and he opened the door.

He peered in at us. Kane turned as if he hadn’t heard him coming because he had been so entranced with his intermediate algebra.