The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! (145 page)

“It’s fine,” said Mom testily. (She hated for people to question her about her knee.) “I only notice a little pain when it rains.”

“And how is Paul? It’s been so long since I saw him last. I remember after you married him I felt so angry I never wanted to see you again, and I gave up teaching for a few years.” Again she glance at the portrait of Dad. “And does your brother still live with you?”

Silence came and burdened the air as Mom studied the smiling portrait of my stepfather Chris. What brother was she talking about? Mom didn’t have a brother anymore. Why did Madame look at Dad when she asked about Cory?

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Mom, making me puzzled as to what she meant. “Now tell me all about Greenglenna and Clairmont. I want to hear about everybody. How is Lorraine DuVal? Whom did she marry? Or did she go on to New York?”

“He never married, did he?” pursued Grandmother with her eyes narrowed.

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

“No, he hasn’t married yet,” answered Mom, again testy. Then she was smiling. “Now, Madame, I have a big surprise for you. We have a daughter now and her name is Cindy.”

“Hah!” snorted Madame, “I already know about Cindy.” There was a strange gleam in her eyes. “But still I would like to see and hear more about this paragon of all little girls. Jory writes she may have some dancing abilities.”

“Oh, she does, she does! I wish you could see her in her
little pink leotards trying to imitate Jory or me—I mean when I could dance.”

“Your husband must be getting along in years by now,” Madame said, disregarding photographs Mom tried to show her of Cindy, who was already in bed for the night.

“Did Jory tell you I’m writing a book? It’s really fascinating. I didn’t think it would be when I first started but after I mastered transitions I really surprised myself, and now writing is more fun than work. Just as satisfying as dancing.” She smiled and fluttered her hands about, plucking at lint on her blue pants, tugging down her white sweater, fiddling with her hair, shuffling papers to tidy her desk. “My room is a mess. I apologize for that. I need a study, but in this house we don’t have the room . . .”

“Is your brother making hospital rounds too?”

I sat there, not understanding who this brother was. Cory was dead. He’d been dead for years. Though nobody laid in his grave, nobody at all. Little headstone beside Aunt Carrie and nobody there. . . .

“You must be hungry. Let’s go into the dining room and Emma can heat up the spaghetti. The second time around it’s always better . . .”

“Spaghetti?” snapped Madame. “You mean you eat that kind of junk? You allow my grandson to eat starches? Years and years ago I warned you to stay away from pasta! Really, Catherine, don’t you ever learn?”

Spaghetti was one of my favorite dishes—but we’d had leg of lamb tonight in Madame’s honor, fixed the way Momma thought she liked it best. Why had she said spaghetti? I gave my mother a hard look and saw her flustered and breathless, looking as young as Melodie, as if she were terribly afraid something might go wrong—and what could?

Madame M. wouldn’t eat at our house, wouldn’t sleep there either, for she didn’t want to “inconvenience” us. Already she’d found a room in town, close to Mom’s dance
school. “And though you haven’t asked me, Catherine, I’ll be delighted to stay on and replace you. I sold out my school the moment Jory wrote and told me of your accident.”

Mom could only nod, looking queerly blank.

*  *  *

A few days later Madame looked around the office that had been Mom’s. “She keeps everything so neat, not like me at all. Soon I’ll have it looking like my own.”

I loved her in an odd kind of way, the way you love winter when you’re hot in summer. And then when winter was shivering your bones, I wished it would go away. She moved so young and looked so old. When she danced she could almost make you think she was eighteen. Her black hair came and went according to which day of the week it was. I’d learned by now she used some color rinsed that was shampooed in and soon came out to darken the teeth of her white comb. I liked it best when it was white, silvery under the lights.

“You are everything my own Julian was!” she cried, smothering me with too much gushing affection. Already she’d dismissed the young teacher Mom had hired. “But what makes you so arrogant, huh? Your momma tell you that you are sensational? Always your momma thinks the music is what counts most in the dance, and is not,
is not.
It is the display of the beautiful body that is the essence of ballet. I come to save you. I come to teach you how to do everything perfect. When I am done with you, you will have flawless technique.” Her shrill voice lowered an octave or two. “I come too because I am old and may soon die and I do not know my grandson at all. I come to do my duty by being not only your grandmother, but also your grandfather and your father too. Catherine was a big fool to dance when she knew her knee could fold any second—but your mother was always a big fool, so what’s new?”

She made me furious. “Don’t you talk like that about my mother. She’s not a fool. She’s never been a fool. She does what
she feels she must—so I’ll tell you the truth and you let her be. She danced that last time because I pleaded and pleaded for her to dance at least one time with me professionally. She did it for
me
, Grandmother, for
me,
not herself!”

Her small dark eyes turned shrewd. “Jory, take lesson number one in my philosophy course: Nobody ever does anything for anyone else unless it gives them even more.”

Madame swept all the little mementos Mom cherished into the trashcan, like they were so much junk. Next she hauled up a huge beat-up satchel, and in minutes had the desk more cluttered with her junk than it had been before.

Immediately I knelt to take from the trashcan all the things I knew my mother loved.

“You don’t love me like you love her,” complained Madame in a gritty voice of self-pity that sounded weak and old. Startled at the pain in her voice, I looked up and saw her as I’d never seen her before—an old woman, lonely and pitiful, clinging desperately to the only meaningful link to life she had—me.

Pity flooded me. “I’m glad you’re here, Grandmother, and of course I love you. Don’t ask if I love you more than anyone else, only be happy that I love you at all, as I’m happy you love me for whatever reason.” I kissed her wrinkled cheek. “We’ll get to know each other better. And I’ll be the kind of son you wanted my father to be—in some ways—so don’t cry and feel alone. My family is your family.”

Nevertheless, tears were in her eyes, streaking her face, making her lips quiver as she clutched at me desperately. Her voice came cracked and old: “Never did Julian run to me like you just did. He didn’t like to touch or be touched. Thank you, Jory, for loving me a little.”

Until now she’d been just a summer event in my life, flattering me with too much praise, making me feel special. Now I was uncomfortable to know she’d be here always, shadowing all our lives—perhaps.

Everything was going wrong in our lives. Maybe I could put all the blame on that old woman next door. Yet there was another old woman in black, ten times more trying than Bart’s grandmother, more dominating, too. Bart was a kid who needed some control, but I was almost a man and didn’t need more mothering. With some resentment I pulled away from her clutching, clawlike hands and asked, “Grandmother, why is it all grandmothers like to wear black?”

“Ridiculous!” she snapped. “Not all do!” Her jet eyes were like stones of black fire.

“But I’ve never seen you wear any color but black.”

“You will never see me wear another color.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve heard my mother say you wore black before my grandfather died, before my father died. Are you in perpetual mourning?”

She sneered scornfully. “Ah, I see. You feel uncomfortable around black clothes, yah? Makes you feel sad, yah? Makes me feel glad. It makes me different. Anyone can wear pretty colors. Takes someone special to be pleased with only black clothes—and besides, it saves money.”

I laughed and drew away farther. I was sure it was more the money she saved than anything else.

“What other grandmother you know who wears black?” she asked, her eyes very narrow and suspicious.

I smiled and backed away more; she frowned and drew closer. My face took on a broader smile as I neared the door. “It’s great having you here, Grandmother Madame. Be especially nice to Melodie Richarme. I’m going to marry her someday.”

“Jory!” she yelled. “You come back here! Do you think I flew halfway around the world just to replace your mother? I came for one reason only. I am here to see that Julian’s son dances in New York, in every major city in the world, and achieves all the fame and glory that was due his father. Because of Catherine he was robbed, robbed!”

She made me angry, she made me want to hurt her as her words hurt me, when only a moment ago I’d loved her. “Will my fame and glory help a father who lies dead in his grave?” I shouted back. I wasn’t putty for her to mold—I was already a great dancer and my mother had done that for me. I didn’t need her to teach me more about dancing—I needed her to teach me more about learning to love someone hateful, old, and bitter. “I know how to dance already, Madame, my mother has taught me well.”

Her look of contempt made me blanch, but she surprised me when she got up to drop to her knees and put her hands in prayer position beneath her chin. She tilted her thin face backward and seemed to stare God straight in his face.

“Julian!” she cried passionately, “if you are up there looking down, hear the arrogance of your fourteen-year-old son. I will make a pact with you today. Before I die I will see your son is the most acclaimed dancer in the world. I will make of him what you could have been if you hadn’t cared so damned much for cars and women, to say nothing of your other vices. Your son, Julian—through him you will live to dance again!”

I stared as she fell exhausted into the swivel deskchair again, sprawling her powerful legs before her. “Damn Catherine for marrying a doctor years and years older. Where was her common sense?—where was his? Though to give credit where credit is due, he was handsome years ago and appealing enough, but she should have known he’d be old before she even reached her sexual maturity. She should have married a man nearer her own age.”

I stood before her, baffled, trembling, beginning to feel closet doors in my mind opening—creakily opening, reluctantly. No, no, my mind kept saying, keep quiet Madame. I watched her jerk upright, her dark stabbing eyes riveting me to one spot so I was unable to leave when what I wanted most was to run, and run fast.

“Why do you tremble?” she asked. “Why do you look so strange?”

“Do I look strange?”

“Don’t answer questions with questions,” she barked. “Tell me about Paul, your stepfather, how he fares, what he does. He was twenty-five years older than your mother, and she’s thirty-seven now. Doesn’t that make him sixty-two?”

I swallowed over an aching lump that came to clog my throat. “Sixty-two is not so old,” I said meekly, thinking she should know that; she was in her seventies.

“For a man it is old; for a woman life is only beginning to stretch out.”

“That is cruel,” I said, beginning to dislike her again.

“Life is cruel, Jory, very cruel. You snatch from life what you can while you are young, for if you wait for better times to come tomorrow, you wait in vain. I told Julian that time and again, to live his life and forget Catherine, who loved that older man, but he refused to believe any girl could prefer a middle-aged man to someone as handsome and vibrant as he was, and now he lies dead in his grave, as you just said. Dr. Paul Sheffield enjoys the love that rightly belonged to my son, to your father.”

I was crying tears she couldn’t see. Hot scalding tears of disbelief. Had my mother lied to Madame and made her believe Daddy Paul was still alive? Why would she lie? What was wrong about marrying Dr. Paul’s younger brother Christopher?

“You look ill, Jory. Why?”

“I feel fine, Madame.”

“Don’t lie to me, Jory. I can smell a lie a mile away, see a lie from across three thousand miles. Why is it Paul Sheffield never accompanies his family to his own hometown? Why is it your mother always brings only her children and that brother, Christopher?”

My heart was pounding. Sweat glued my shirt to my
skin. “Madame, have you never met Daddy Paul’s younger brother?”

“Younger brother? What’s that you say?” She leaned forward and peered into my eyes. “Never heard of any brother even during that awful time when Paul’s first wife drowned their son. That was spread all over the newspapers, and no younger brother was mentioned. Paul Sheffield had only one sister—no brother, younger or older.”

I felt sick, ready to throw up. Ready to cry out and run and do something wild and painful to myself, like Bart did when he was hurt and disturbed. Bart—for the first time I was feeling what it was to be like Bart. I stood on unsteady ground, afraid everything might crumble if I dared to move.

Through my mind kept running the steady stream of age, years and years of age difference, and Dad wasn’t that much older than Mom, only two years and a few months. She was born in April, he was born in November. And they were so much alike in coloring, in background, they spoke without even saying a word, just a glance and they understood.

Madame was sitting coiled, ready, so it seemed, to spring upon me—or Mom? Deeper lines etched around her narrowed eyes, her grim-thin lips. She pursed her lips and reached into some hidden pocket of her drab outfit for her pack of cigarettes. “Now,” she said as if to herself, seemingly forgetting I was still there, “what was it Catherine gave as an excuse the last time Paul didn’t come? Let’s see, she called first, long distance, explaining Chris would come with her because Paul was too ill with his heart trouble to travel. She was leaving him in the care of his nurse. Thought that odd at the time, that she’d leave him when he needed a nurse, and travel with Chris.” She bit down on her lower lip, chewed it unconsciously. “And last summer no visit because Bart hated ole graves and ole ladies—and I suspect,
me
in particular. Spoiled brat. This summer they don’t come again because Bart has driven a rusty nail into his knee and develops blood-poisoning or something
similar. Damn kid is more trouble than he’s worth—serves her right too for playing around so soon after my son’s death. And Paul has heart trouble, on and on he has heart trouble, yet he never has a fatal attack. Every summer she gives me that same worn excuse. Paul can’t travel because of his heart—but Chris, he can always travel, heart or no heart.”