“You and your brothers were like prisoners,” I said, not ignoring the irony that prisoners were what we were right now.
“Worse. Prisoners could have their thoughts. My parents would look at me and tell me I was having sinful, dirty thoughts. She would listen in on my phone calls, read notes I wrote in my notebooks for school, read any card or letter addressed to me that came to the house first, and if she didn’t like a word or something, she would burn it before I saw it. I would find out later that someone had sent me a birthday or holiday card. You can be sure if any boys did, I never saw them. I was never permitted to have a girlfriend in my room alone with me, and if any boy dared come to our house, he and I had to sit in the entryway. I couldn’t even bring him into the living room.”
“And your father put up with all this?” I asked.
“My father?” She laughed. “First, he would never challenge anything my mother said to us or did to us, and second, my father was cruel even to his own, seizing control of his father’s estate when he died and cutting his father’s second wife and son out of their inheritance. When she died years later, her son was brought to live with us, Garland Christopher Foxworth IV, but my parents wouldn’t permit him to be called anything but Christopher or Chris,” she said, and put her arm around me. She smiled. “Do you know who I mean?”
My mind was spinning. It was finally being brought home to us with details. Of course, Garland Christopher was my mother’s half-uncle. They would still be considered close blood relatives. The word screamed and echoed in my mind: incest. We were the children of incest! It was true. All the innuendos and sly comments made sense now. This was
the horrible sin my grandparents saw our mother and father committing. I looked at Cathy. She was not grasping it as quickly as I was, or else she didn’t want to grasp it.
Momma continued, describing our father’s arrival at Foxworth Hall, telling us they fell in love at first sight. Both of them knew it. Her face brightened when she described that feeling.
“Goodness knows, we needed love in our house. I needed to feel some love, some happiness. My brothers were already dead from accidents. Neither of my parents smiled or laughed much at all. For a while, that changed when your father came to live with us.”
She told us that her parents treated our father like a son because of the sons they had lost. That, I realized, must have only cemented and intensified their fury over the romance she would have with my father. To my grandparents, he wasn’t only her half-uncle; he had become a son, in their minds, a brother to her.
“Didn’t you realize they would be upset, Momma?” I asked her.
“Of course. We both did, but someday you’ll see and understand how real love can blind you to anything else but the one you love. Nothing else matters but your and his or her happiness. Please try to understand, even though I know you’re both too young to realize the power of romantic love. Please don’t think of us as anything but two lovesick young people. Not only didn’t we think of the sin my parents accused us of committing, but neither of us would ever say that word. We never believed anything bad could come of a love so strong and pure.”
I could see from the way she was looking at me that she was worried that I, especially, would condemn her, not from a biblical point of view but from a scientific one. From what I had read, children of incest could suffer genetic side effects. Perhaps there were things that would happen to us as we grew older, but right now, none of us looked less than perfect. With Momma at such a low point, I couldn’t even let myself think of any of that. But I knew that I would, if not right away, then later when I had more time to consider it all.
Again, I glanced at Cathy. She looked like she was hearing a Romeo and Juliet story now. The pain, the suffering, and even the immorality of what our parents did were romanticized. I saw that dreamy, far-off look of fantasy in her face. Was it just a girl’s characteristic? Momma didn’t really pay attention to the stories Cathy brought home from school, but I knew she was already talking about boyfriends.
Maybe Momma’s story was more of a Cinderella story than Romeo and Juliet. Our father was like a prince when he arrived and considering the way her parents were treating him. Their love was that magic carriage that would turn into a pumpkin if they let it happen. I suppose our mother saw romance and marriage to our father as an escape from a horrid life. Never would she permit herself to imagine that she would have to return to it and bring us along. She was fitted with a pair of rose-colored glasses early in her life, and now I could see that she never took them off.
Once disaster struck, she went on about her plan to get her father to forgive her and reverse her disinheritance. She vowed to do anything he wanted to get herself back into his good graces. I wanted to believe it was not for herself as much as for us. Then she looked at me again, suspicious of my “thinking eyes,” as she sometimes called them. She insisted that there was nothing wrong with her marriage to our father, and despite all her father’s predictions, we turned out to be so beautiful and perfect. Yes, I thought, we were the Dresden dolls. Both our parents always believed that.
I assured her that I had no contrary thoughts and that if God had condemned her and our father, we wouldn’t be as healthy as we were.
“Maybe your mother is angry that we’re not deformed and ugly,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes, she is having trouble accepting that the four of you are the result of our love. She mumbles that the devil always makes evil look attractive, but I can see that she is having trouble believing herself.”
“And we won’t do anything to make it easy for her to,” I said. “I can promise you that.”
How she beamed. She embraced and kissed me, thanking me for being so understanding and giving her the strength to do what she had to do for us all. My words seemed to energize her. It was as if she no longer felt any pain from that whipping. Even the twins seemed impressed with how quickly she had recuperated.
She made us join hands and promise never to think of ourselves as ugly or evil, but I wondered why she had brought us to such a terrible place with such a horrible woman to rule over us. We might have been better off living in semipoverty. She knew what her parents were like, how rigid and cruel they could be.
“Didn’t you anticipate all this?” I couldn’t help but ask.
She smiled. “You sound so much like your father sometimes, Christopher. Of course, I knew how cruel they could be, but I thought that after all these years, being alone, having no family, they would realize what they had lost and they would have changed.” She went on to explain how her mother’s letter had filled her with optimism, but, she said, smiling at me, “I know what’s really eating away at her.”
“What?” Cathy demanded. Maybe she hoped something was literally eating away at her and she would disappear completely.
Momma held her smile on me like a spotlight. “Once she looked at Christopher, she saw his handsome father, and once she looked at you, Cathy, she saw me, and her rage came rolling back like thunder over the hills.”
“Then she’ll always hate us,” Cathy said, throwing up her hands. “Why bother? Let’s go.”
Momma nodded reluctantly. For a moment, I thought she was going to pack us up and take us out of this hellhole. I could see Cathy thought the same and looked excited, hopeful, but instead, Momma came up with her plan.
She decided she would go to secretarial school and learn all the skills she needed to get a decent job and find us a big enough apartment. Then we could move out and not want for the basic things, at least. In the meantime, she wanted us to amuse ourselves, care for the twins, and put up with her mother’s insane rules. Like the dreamer she could be when our father was alive, she drifted into her visions of the future, a future in which we would all realize our dreams. Of course, I knew that even if she did get a good job and a decent place for us to live, what we wanted to do for ourselves would take a great deal of money.
Nevertheless, I was happy, of course, to hear that she wanted to take us out of here. For a while, I feared that she didn’t see how difficult all this was for us or that she was ignoring and pretending. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dream along with her, but Cathy was suddenly the more realistic one, asking her how long it would take.
“It won’t take me that long. Maybe a month.”