Then she sent the crew away and called the county authorities. Mrs. Dolarhyde had suffered a stroke, she explained.
It was dark when the welfare workers came for the patients in a school bus. Francis thought they would take him too. He was not discussed.
Only Marian and Francis remained at the house. She sat at the dining-room table with her head in her hands. He went outside and climbed a crabapple tree.
Finally Marian called him. She had packed a small suitcase with his clothes.
“You’ll have to come with me,” she said, walking to the car. “Get in. Don’t put your feet on the seat.”
They drove away in the Packard and left the empty wheelchair standing in the yard.
There was no scandal. The county authorities said it was sure a shame about Mrs. Dolarhyde, she sure kept things nice. The Vogts remained untarnished.
Grandmother was confined to a private nerve sanatorium. It would be fourteen years before Francis went home to her again.
“Francis, here are your stepsisters and stepbrother,” his mother said. They were in the Vogts’ library.
Ned Vogt was twelve, Victoria thirteen, and Margaret nine. Ned and Victoria looked at each other. Margaret looked at the floor.
Francis was given a room at the top of the servants’ stairs. Since the disastrous election of 1944 the Vogts no longer employed an upstairs maid.
He was enrolled in Potter Gerard Elementary School, within walking distance of the house and far from the Episcopal private school the other children attended.
The Vogt children ignored him as much as possible during the first few days, but at the end of the first week Ned and Victoria came up the servants’ stairs to call.
Francis heard them whispering for minutes before the knob turned on his door. When they found it bolted, they didn’t knock. Ned said, “Open this door.”
Francis opened it. They did not speak to him again while they looked through his clothes in the wardrobe. Ned Vogt opened the drawer in the small dressing table and picked up the things he found with two fingers: birthday handkerchiefs with F.D. embroidered on them, a capo for a guitar, a bright beetle in a pill bottle, a copy of Baseball Joe in the World Series which had once been wet, and a get-well card signed “Your classmate, Sarah Hughes.”
“What’s this?” Ned asked.
“A capo.”
“What’s it for?”
“A guitar.”
“Do you have a guitar?”
“No.”
“What do you have it for?” Victoria asked.
“My father used it.”
“I can’t understand you. What did you say? Make him say it again, Ned.”
“He said it belonged to his father.” Ned blew his nose on one of the handkerchiefs and dropped it back in the drawer.
“They came for the ponies today,” Victoria said. She sat on the narrow bed. Ned joined her, his back against the wall, his feet on the quilt.
“No more ponies,” Ned said. “No more lake house for the summer. Do you know why? Speak up, you little bastard.”
“Father is sick a lot and doesn’t make as much money,” Victoria said. “Some days he doesn’t go to the office at all.”
“Know why he’s sick, you little bastard?” Ned asked. “Talk where I can understand you.”
“Grandmother said he’s a drunk. Understand that all right?”