Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

“Mine did. Big-time.” He looked down and then walked back to his chair. I thought he wasn’t going to say any more about it, but he looked at me and said, “I’ve never told anyone.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I was caught between my curiosity and my desire not to hear anything unpleasant to add to what we were reading together. I felt overwhelmed with sadness and anger as it was.

“I never knew anyone I wanted to tell it to,” he said. He glanced at the diary. “Maybe when you open up someone else’s secrets, your own pour out whether you like it or not.”

“Kane . . .”

“No, it’s all right. It’s supposed to be good to get things out, things that have been eating away at you for a long time, right? Don’t all psychologists tell people that? Revelation therapy.”

I stared at him, waiting. Seeing how determined he was, I didn’t want to stop him and make him feel any worse about whatever it was he was going to tell me.

“How come your parents never had another child? I mean, you were about eight when your mother died. Her death didn’t have anything to do with her being pregnant or anything, did it?”

“No. My mother had a bad miscarriage when I was four, and the result made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to have another child.”

“But they wanted one, right?”

“Yes, very much. My father once told me they were toying with adopting.”

He nodded, looked away and then back at me. “After my parents had my sister, my mother didn’t want any more children.”

“Oh, so you were an accident?” I asked. A few of our classmates had revealed that they had been, but that didn’t seem to have made much of a difference in their lives. I imagined no one liked to be thought of as an accident, but if the end result was being loved just as much as a planned child, what difference did it make in the end?

“I wish,” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. You’re not adopted, are you?”

“Hardly. I’m really more like my mother than I care to admit and even more like my father at times, even though he acts as if I had been left on his doorstep. No, for years, I knew nothing, of course. I was too young to understand, anyway. My parents always made it seem like everything that happened was as normal as it was for any couple. My mother became pregnant, and I was born, and lucky for them, I was a boy. My father wanted a boy to carry on the Hill empire.”

“So? Where’s the lie?”

“The lie was that my mother wanted me. She was very upset at how long it took her to regain what she called only ninety percent of her beautiful figure after Darlena was born. Motherhood was an annoyance. Both Darlena and I had nannies up the wazoo. My parents battled for some time over having another child. Finally, my father bought me. That’s the truth, even though I was actually never told it by either of them. Darlena overheard a conversation, an argument between them.”

“Bought you?”

“He gave my mother five hundred thousand dollars for her own personal account if she agreed to get pregnant. So here I am, the five-hundred-thousand-dollar baby. Of course, considering inflation and all, I might not be worth that now.”

“I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say. What child would want to learn that his mother was bribed into having him? Once he learned that, what sort of relationship would he have with his mother? Every time she got angry at him, his mother’s eyes would reveal how much she really didn’t want to have a child.

And would the child ever do anything that made her regret her resistance, make her proud to have had that child? It was horrible enough being with friends who couldn’t care less if you were there, but being with a mother who never really wanted you had to be very difficult, especially while you were growing up and you saw how loving other mothers were with their children.

Suddenly, I understood so much more about Kane. His indifference, the way he made so much in his life seem trivial, that shrug and offbeat smile, his otherwise cool casualness about all that happened to him and around him, which had made him so attractive to so many, seeing him as the calm rebel—it was all really his cry for help and attention. He never took himself very seriously, because he believed there was nothing serious about him. If his mother wasn’t so into herself, she wouldn’t have taken the offer, and he would never have been born.

Afterward, he was merely an obligation. She solved ninety percent of that by hiring nannies and by permitting his sister or assigning to her so much responsibility for him when he was young. No wonder that closeness had developed.

“I appreciate that you trust me enough to tell me that, Kane,” I said.

“You trusted me with this,” he said, lifting the diary. “Revealing what we consider secret about ourselves draws us closer. My parents keep secrets from each other. Most of the time, they lie to each other.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m used to it by now. And you know something? So are they. They’re comfortable with it. Reality and truth are painful. So when I told you that Christopher might be lying to himse

lf or refusing to believe his mother was lying, I was talking about myself, you see. My mother makes a great show of caring for me in front of friends, and I soak it up.”

“Surely she still cares about you now,” I offered.

“Yes, but not to the extent she pretends to care. You know yourself; you can sense that. I let her toss her loving smiles at me, kiss me supposedly affectionately, ask me the questions parents are supposed to ask their children about school or their after-school activities, friends, girls, any of it, and I give her satisfactory answers most of the time so that we both pass the test, especially in front of other people, but . . . my mother never came to comfort me when I had a bad dream. I had a nanny or Darlena for that, and once, when I had a cold close to pneumonia, she simply hired a private nurse.”