Everything she did for him she did with tenderness, fluffing his pillows, massaging his back, moving his legs to keep them supple even if he couldn't control them. I couldn't help but be impressed with all that she did to make him comfortable.
I backed off toward the door, feeling I was an intruder during.a very important private moment as Jory's eyes came into focus enough for him to pick up her hand and meet her eyes. Even as sick as he was, something in his eyes spoke to her. Quietly I caught hold of Darren's hand, and then Deirdre's. "Got to go now," I whispered even as I watched Toni tremble before her head bowed.
To my surprise, just before I closed the door, she put his hand to her lips and kissed each of his fingers. "I'm taking advantage of you," she whispered, "at a time when you can't fight back, but I need to tell you what a fool I've been. You were here all the time, and I never saw you. Never saw you at all when Bart stood in the way.
Weakly Jory answered, his eyes warm as they drank in the sincerity of her words and most of all, her loving, warm expression. "I guess it's easy to overlook a man in a wheelchair, and perhaps that alone was enough to make you blind. But I've been here, waiting, hoping . . ."
"Oh, Jory, don't hold it against me because I let Bart dazzle me with his charm. I was overwhelmed and sort of flabbergasted that he found me so desirable. He swept me off my feet. I think every woman secretly wants a man who refuses to take no for an answer, and pursues her relentlessly until she has to give in. Forgive me for being a fool, and an easy conquest."
"It's all right, all right," he whispered, then closed his eyes. "Just don't let what you feel for me be pity--or I'll know."
"You're what I wanted Bart to be!" she cried out as her lips neared his.
This time I did close the door.
Back in my own rooms, I sat down near the telephone waiting for Chris to call in response to my many urgent messages. On the verge of sleep, with the twins tucked neatly in my bed for their naps, the phone rang. I snatched up the receiver, said hello. A deep, gruff voice asked for Mrs. Sheffield, and I identified myself.
"We don't want you and your kind here," said that frightening, deep voice. "We know what's going on up there. That little chapel you built don't fool us none. It's a sham to hide behind while you flaunt God's rules of decency. Get out--before we take God's will into our own hands and drive every last one of you away from our mountains."
Unable to find a clever reply, I sat stunned and very shaky before he hung up. For long moments I just sat there with the receiver in my hand. The sun broke through the clouds and warmed my face . . . only then did I hang up. I looked around me at the rooms I myself had decorated to please my own taste, and found, much to my surprise, that these rooms no longer reminded me of my mother and her second husband. In here were only remnants of the past that I wanted to remember.
Cory and Carrie's baby pictures in silver frames on my dresser, placed next to those of Darren and Deirdre. They were look-alike twins, but when you knew them well, you could see they weren't the same. My eyes moved to the next silver frame, and there was Paul smiling at me, and Henny was in another. Julian sulked, in a way he used to think sexy, from a gold frame, and I also had a few snapshots of his mother, Madame Marisha, framed to keep near her son. But nowhere did I have a photograph of Bartholomew Winslow. I stared at the picture of my own father, who'd died when I was twelve. So much like Chris, only now Chris looked older. Turn around, and the boy you knew so well was a man. The years flew by so swiftly; once a day had seemed longer than a year did now.
Again I looked at the two sets of twins. It would take only someone very familiar with both sets to recognize the slight differences. There was a hint of Melodie in Jory's children, a vague resemblance. I stared at another picture, with Chris and myself, taken when we still lived in Gladstone, Pennsylvania. I'd been ten, he'd just turned thirteen. We stood in three feet of snow beside the snowman we'd just finished, smiling at Daddy as he took yet another picture. A photograph turning brown, one that our mother had put in her blue album. Our blue album now.
Little snippets of our lives were caught in all those little squares and oblongs of slick paper. Frozen forever in time, that Catherine Doll who sat on an attic windowsill, wearing a flimsy nightgown as Chris in the shadows took a time-lapse photo. How had I managed to sit so still, and hold that expression-- how? Through the nightgown I could see the tender form of young breasts--and in that girlish profile all the wistful sadness I'd felt back then.
How lovely she was--I'd been. I stared at her hard and long. That frail, slender girl had long ago disappeared in the middle-aged woman I was now. I sighed for the loss of her, that special girl with her head full of dreams. I tried to tear my gaze away; instead, I got up to pick up the picture that Chris had carried with him to college, to medical school. When he was an intern, still he had this photograph with him. Was it this paper in my hand that had kept his love for me so strong? This attic face of a girl of fifteen, sitting in the moonlight? Longing, always longing for love that would last forever? I no longer looked like this girl I held in my hand. I looked like my mother the night she burned down the original Foxworth Hall.
Shrill telephone rings startled me back to the here and now. "I've had a flat tire," said Chris on hearing my small voice. "I had driven to another lab and s
pent a few hours there, so when I came back I saw all those messages from you about Jory. Jory can't be worse, can he?"
"No, darling, he's no worse."
"Cathy, what's wrong?"
"I'll tell you when you get here."
Chris reached home an hour later and rushed in to embrace me before he hurried to Jory. "How's my son?" he asked even as he sat on Jory's bed and reached to feel his pulse. "I hear from your mother that someone opened all your windows and the rain soaked you."
"Oh!" cried Toni. "Who could have done such an awful thing? I'm so sorry, Doctor Sheffield. It's my habit to check on Jory, I mean Mister Marquet, two or three times during the night, even if he doesn't call for me."
Jory grinned at her in a happy way. "I think you can stop calling me Mister Marquet now, Toni." His voice was very weak and hoarse. "And this happened on your day off."
"Oh," she said, "that must have been the morning I drove into the city to visit my girlfriend."
"It's just a cold, Jory," said Chris, checking his lungs again. "There's no hint of fluid in your lungs, and from your symptoms you don't have the flu. So swallow your medicine, drink the fluids Toni brings you and stop fretting about Melodie."
Later, sprawled in his favorite chair in our sitting room, Chris listened to everything I had to say. "Did you recognize the voice?"
"Chris, I don't know any of the villagers well enough. I do my damndest to stay away from them." "How do you know it was a villager?"
That thought had never occurred to me. I'd just presumed. Nevertheless, as soon as Jory was well enough, we both determined to leave this house.
"If it's what you want," said Chris, looking around with some regret. "I like it here, I must admit. I like all the space around us, the gardens, the servants who wait on us, and I'll be sorry to leave. But let's not flee too far. I don't want to leave my work in the university."
"Chris, don't worry. I won't take that away from you. When we leave here, we will go to