I couldn't take my eyes off that bent old man with his watery blue eyes. Something about his smile, his thinning hair with broad streaks of silver, those eyes with startling dark lashes. Daddy!
He looked as our father might have looked if he'd lived to be as old as this man before us--and had suffered through every torment known to mankind.
My daddy, my beloved handsome father who'd been the joy of my youth. How I'd prayed to see him again some day.
The stringy old hand was grasped firmly by Chris, and only then did the old man tell us who he was. "Your long-lost uncle who was, ostensibly, lost in the Swiss Alps fifty-seven years ago."
Quickly Chris said all the right words to cover the shock that obviously showed on both our faces. "You've startled my wife," he politely explained. "You see, her maiden name was Foxworth . . . and she has believed until now that all her maternal family was dead."
Several small, crooked smiles fleeted like shadows on "Uncle Joel's" face before he pasted on the benign, pious look of the sublimely pure in heart. "I understand," said the old man in his whispery voice that sounded like a faint wind rustling unpleasantly in dead, fallen leaves.
Deep in Joel's watery cerulean eyes lingered shadows, dark, troubled shadows. I knew without speaking that Chris would tell me my imagination was working overtime again.
No shadows, no shadows, no shadows . . .
but those I created myself.
To lift myself above my suspicions of this old man who claimed to be one of my mother's two older and dead brothers, I gazed with interest around the foyer that had often been used as a ballroom. I heard the wind pick up velocity as the thunderclaps drew ever closer and closer together, indicating the storm was almost directly overhead.
Oh, sigh for the day when I'd been twelve and stared out at the rain, wanting to dance in this ballroom with the man who was my mother's second husband and would later be the father of my second son, Bart.
Sigh for all that I'd been then, so young and full of faith, so hopeful that the world was a beautiful and benign place.
What had seemed to me impressive as a child should have shrunk in comparison to all I'd seen, since Chris and I had traveled all over Europe and had been to Asia, Egypt and India. Even so, this foyer seemed to me twice as elegant and impressive as it had when I was twelve.
Oh, the pity of that, to still be overwhelmed! I gazed with reluctant awe, a strange aching beginning in my heart, making it thud louder, making my blood race fast and hot. I stared at the three chandeliers of crystal and gold that held real candles. Each was fully fifteen feet in diameter, with seven tiers of candles. How many tiers had there been before? Five? Three? I couldn't remember. I stared at the huge mirrors with gold frames that lined the foyer, reflecting the, elegant Louis XIV furniture where those who didn't dance could sit and watch and converse.
It wasn't supposed to be this way! Things remembered never lived up to expectations--why was this second Foxworth Hall overwhelming me even more than the original?
Then I saw something else--something I didn't expect to see.
Those dual curving staircases, one on the right, the other on the left of the vast expanse of red and white checkered marble. Weren't they the same stairs? Refurbished, but the same? Hadn't I watched the fire that had burned Foxworth Hall until it was only red embers and smoke? All eight of the chimneys had stood; so had the marble staircases. The intricately designed banisters and rosewood railing must have burned and been replaced. I swallowed over the hard lump that lodged in my throat. I'd wanted the house to be new, all new . . . nothing left of the old.
Joel was watching me, telling me my face revealed more than Chris's. When our eyes locked, he quickly looked away before he gestured that we were to follow him. Joel showed us through all the beautiful first-floor rooms as I remained numb and speechless, and Chris asked all the questions, before at last we settled down in one of the salons and Joel began telling his own story.
Along the way he'd paused in the enormous kitchen long enough to put together a snack for our lunch. Refusing Chris's offer to help, he had carried in a tray with tea and dainty sandwiches. My appetite was small, but as was to be expected, Chris was ravenous and in a few minutes had dispatched six of the tiny sandwiches and was reaching for another as Joel poured him a second cup of tea. I ate but one of the miniature tasteless sandwiches and sipped twice from the tea, which was steaming hot and very strong, expectantly anticipating the tale Joel would tell.
His voice was frail, with those gritty undertones that made it seem he had a cold and speaking was difficult. Yet soon
I
forgot the unpleasant sound of his voice as he began to relate so much of what I'd always wanted to know about our grandparents and our mother when she was a child. In no time at all it became clear that he'd hated his father very much, and only then could I begin to warm up to him.
"You called your father by his Christian name?" My first question since he'd begun his story, my voice an intimidated whisper, as if Malcolm himself might be hovering somewhere within hearing.
His thin lips moved to twist into a grotesque mockery of a smile. "Of course. My brother Mel was four years older than I, and we'd always referred to our father by his given name, but never in his presence. We didn't have that kind of nerve. Calling him Daddy seemed ridiculous. We couldn't call him Father because he wasn't a real father. 'Dad' would have indicated a warm relationship, which we didn't have and didn't want. When we had to, we called him Father. In fact, we both tried not to be seen
or
heard by him. We'd disappear when he was due home. He had an office in town from which he conducted most of his business and another office here. He was always working, seated behind a massive desk that was to us a barrier. Even when he was home, he managed to keep himself remote, untouchable. He was never idle, always jumping up to take long distance calls in his office so we couldn't overhear his business transactions. He seldom talked to our mother. She didn't seem to mind. On rare occasions we'd seen him holding our baby sister on his lap, and we'd hide and watch, with strange yearnings in our chests.
"We'd talk about it afterward, wondering why we'd feel jealous of Corrine, when Corrine was often just as severely punished as we were. But always our father was sorry when he punished
her.
To make up for some humiliation, some beating, or being locked in the attic, which was one of his favorite ways to punish us, he'd bring Corrine a costly piece of jewelry, or an expensive doll or toy. She had everything any little girl could desire--but if she did one wrong thing, he took from her what she loved most and gave it to the church he patronized. She'd cry and try to win back his affection, but he could turn against her as easily as he could turn toward her.
"When Mel and
I
tried to win gifts of consolation from him, he'd turn his back and tell us to act like men, not children. Mel and I used to think your mother knew how to work our father very well to get what she wanted. We didn't know how to act sweet, or how to be beguiling, or demure."
Behind my eyes I could see my mother as a child, running through this beautiful but sinister home, growing accustomed to having everything lavish and expensive, so that later on when she married Daddy, who had earned a modest salary, she still didn't think about how much she paid for anything.
I sat there with wide eyes as Joel went on. "Corrine' and our mother didn't like each other. As we grew up, we recognized the fact that our mother was jealous of her own daughter's beauty, and the many charms that enabled her to twist any man around her fingers. Corrine was exceptionally beautiful. Even as her brothers we could sense the power she would be able to wield one day." Joel spread his thin, pale hands on his legs. His hands were gnarled and knotted, but somehow they still maintained a remnant of elegance, perhaps because he used them gracefully, or perhaps because they were so pale. "Look around at all this grandeur and beauty--and picture a household of tormented people, all struggling to be free of the chains Malcolm put on us. Even our mother, who'd inherited a fortune from her own parents, was kept under stringent control.
"Mel escaped the banking business, which he hated and had been forced into by Malcolm, by jumping onto his motorcycle and racing away into the mountains, where he'd stay in a log cabin he and I had constructed together. We would invite our girlfriends there, and we did everything we knew our father would disapprove of deliberately, out of defiance for his absolute authority.
"One terrible summer day Mel went over a precipice; they had to dig his body out of the ravine. He was only twenty-one. I was seventeen. I felt half dead myself, so empty and alone with my brother gone. My father came to me after Mel's funeral and said I'd have to take the place of my older brother and work in one of his banks to learn about the financial world. He might as well have told me I'd have to cut off my hands and feet. I ran away that very night."
All about us the huge house seemed to wait, very quiet, too quiet. The storm outside seemed to hold its breath as well, although I could glimpse the leaden gray sky growing more and more swollen and turgid. I moved slightly closer to Chris on the elegant sofa. Across from us in a wing-back chair, Joel sat silently, as if caught in melancholy memories, and Chris and I no longer existed for him.
"Where did you go?" asked Chris, putting down his teacup and leaning back before he crossed his legs. His hand reached for mine "It must have been difficult for a boy of seventeen on his own . . ."
Joel jerked back to the present, seeming startled to find himself back in his hated childhood home. "It wasn't easy. I didn't know how to do anything practical, but at music I was very talented. I caught a freight steamer and worked as a deckhand to pay my way over to France. For the first time in my life I had calluses on my hands. Once I was in France, I found a job in a nightclub and earned a few francs a week. Soon I grew tired of the long hours and moved on to Switzerland, thinking I'd see all the world and never return home. I found another job as a nightclub musician in a small Swiss inn near the Italian border and soon was joining skiing parties into the Alps. I'd spend most of my free time skiing, and in the summer, hiking or bicycling. One day good friends asked me to join them on a rather risky trip, to downhill ski from a very high peak. I was about nineteen then, and the four others ahead were laughing and yelling at each other and didn't notice when I lost control and went tumbling headlong into a deep ice crevice. I broke my leg in the fall. I lay down there a day and a half, partly in shock, when two monks traveling on donkeys heard my weak cries for help. They knew how to get me out--but I don't remember much about that, for I was weak with hunger and half out of my mind from pain. When I came to, I was in their monastery, and smooth, bland faces were smiling at me. Their monastery was on the Italian side of the Alps, and I didn't know a word of Italian. They taught me their Latin as my broken leg healed, and then they used my slight artistic talent to help them paint wall murals and decorate handwritten scripts with religious
illustrations. Sometimes I played their organ. By the time my leg was healed so I could walk, I found I liked their quiet life, the artwork they gave me to do, the music I played at dawn and sunset, the silent routine of their uneventful days of prayers and work and self-denial. I stayed on and eventually became one of them. In that monastery, high in the mountains, I finally found peace."
His story was over. He sat looking at Chris, then turned his pale but burning eyes on me.
Startled by his penetrating gaze, I tried not to shrink away and show the revulsion I couldn't help feeling.
I
didn't like him, even though he faintly resembled the father I'd loved so well, and certainly
I
had no reason to dislike him I suspected it was my own anxiety and fear that he'd know that Chris was really my brother and not my husband. Had Bart told him our story? Did he see how Chris resembled the Foxworths? I couldn't really tell. He was smiling at me, using his own kind of failing charm to win me over. Already he was wise enough to know it wouldn't be Chris he had to convince .. .
"Why did you come back?" asked Chris.
Again Joel tried to smile. "One day an American journalist came to the monastery to write a feature story about what it was like to be a monk in today's modern world. Since I was the only one there who spoke English, they used me to represent all of them. I casually asked if he'd ever heard of the Foxworths of Virginia. He had, since Malcolm had made a huge fortune and was often involved in politics, and only then did I learn of his death, and that of my mother. Once the journalist had gone, I couldn't stop thinking about this house and my sister. Years can easily blend one into the other when all days are alike, and calendars weren't kept in sight. Finally came a day when I resolved that I wanted to go home again and talk to my sister and get to know her. The journalist hadn't mentioned if she had married. It wasn't until after I came to the village, almost a year ago, and settled into a motel that I heard of how the original house had burned one Christmas night and my sister had been put away in a mental rest home, and all that tremendous fortune had been left to her. It wasn't until Bart came that summer that I learned the rest--how my sister died, how he inherited."
His eyes lowered modestly. "Bart is a very remarkable young man; I enjoy his company. Before he came, I used to spend a lot of my time up here, talking to the caretaker. He told me about Bart and his many visits to talk to the builders and decorators, how he had expressed his desire to make this new house look exactly like the old one. I made it my business to be here when Bart came the next time. We met, I told him who I was, and he seemed overjoyed . . . and that's the whole of it."
Really? I stared at him hard. Had he come back thinking he'd have his share of the fortune Malcolm had left? Could he break my mother's will and take away a good portion for himself? If he could, I wondered why Bart wasn't very upset to know he was still alive.
I didn't put any of my thoughts into words, just sat on, as Joel fell into a long, moody silence. Chris stood up. "It's been a full day for us, Joel, and my wife is very tired. Could you show us to the rooms we are to use so we can rest and refresh ourselves?"
Instantly Joel was on his feet, apologizing for being a poor host, and then he was leading the way to the stairs.
"I will be happy to see Bart again. He was very generous to offer me a room in this house. However, all these rooms remind me too much of my parents. My room is over the garage, near the servants' quarters.
Just then the telephone rang. Joel handed me the telephone. "It's your older son calling from New York," he said in that stiff, gritty voice. "You can use the phone in the first salon if both of you want to talk to him."
Chris hurried to pick up another phone as I greeted Jory. His happy voice dispelled some of the gloom and depression I was already feeling. "Mom, Dad, I've managed to cancel a few commitments, and Mel and I are free to fly down and be with you. We're both tired and need a vacation. Besides, we'd like to get a look at that house we've heard so much about. Is it really like the original?"
Oh, yes, only too much so. I was filled with joy that Jory and Melodie were coming to join us, and when Cindy and Bart arrived, too, we'd be a complete family again, all living under the same roof-- something I hadn't known in a long time.