"I guess you're right." His eyes narrowed before he sighed, and again he reached inside his jacket for that same cigarette case. Again he absentmindedly looked around for an ashtray. "It just occurred to me that Troy put Leigh on a pedestal and compared all other women to her, and it seems only you can measureup.
Heat flushed my face. My hands rose to my throat. "You're talking nonsense. Troy loved my mother, yes, he's told me that. But not as a man loves a woman. He loved as a lonely, needing little boy who had to have someone for his very own. And I'm glad to be that someone. I'll make Troy a good wife." And as much as I'd tried to keep the pleading from my voice, I was pleading. "He needs someone like me who has not lived inside a cultured pearl, who has everything and still can't enjoy. I have been deprived, starved, beaten, burned, humiliated, and shamed, and still I find life rewarding, and under no circumstances would I give up my life. teach him the same thing."
"Yessss," he said slowly, "I suspect you would be good for him, and have been good for him. Until you went away and left him, I've never seen him look better, or more contented. I thank you for that. However, you can't marry him, Heaven. I can't allow it."
There it was, what I'd feared!
"You said you liked me!" I cried, again stunned. "What have you found out? If you are thinking of the Casteel part of me, you must remember I also have VanVoreen genes!"
His eyes filled with pity, and it seemed he aged a little as he sat and stared at me with so much regret. "How lovely you are in your tragic wrath, how very beautiful and appealing. I can understand why Troy loves you and wants you. The two of you have so much in common, although you don't know the connection. I don't want to tell you the connection. Just tell me you will go to him, and as gently as possible, with sensitivity for his feelings, break your engagement. Of course you can't keep on living here, so accessible, but see to your financial welfare. You'll never want for anything, I promise."
"You want me to break my engagement to Troy?" I repeated with incredulity. "You and your great concern for his welfare! Don't you know the last thing in the world he needs is for me to disappoint him? He feels he's found the one woman in the world who can understand him! The only one who will stay and love him until the day he dies!"
He stood up, looking around, refusing to meet my eyes. "I am trying to do what I think is best." His calm underlined the passion I had displayed. "Troy is the only heir I have. The Tatterton Toy Company will pass into his hands when I die, or into the control of his son. It has been this way for three hundred and fifty years, from father to son, or brother to brother . . that's the way it has to be. Troy has to marry and produce a son--for I have a wife too old to bear children."
"There is nothing physically wrong with me! I can have children! Troy and I have already discussed that and have decided on two."
His look of abstraction became more profound. He stood, leaning heavily on his desk. "I was hoping to save myself some embarrassment. I prayed you would withdraw politely. I see now that it isn't possible. But I'm going to try one more time. Just believe it when I say you cannot marry Troy. Why don't you just leave it like that?"
"How can I? Give me one good reason why I can't marry him? I'm eighteen, I'm of legal age. No one can stop me from marrying him."
He sat down again, heavily sat down. He shoved his chair from his desk, crossed his legs, and moved his foot back and forth. And for the life of me I couldn't understand how I could still admire his polished shoes and the kind of dark socks he wore. His voice sounded different when he spoke again. "It's your age that has brought this all about. You see, I thought you were younger than you are. I didn't know your true age until one day while you were gone Troy casually mentioned it. Not once did any suspicions cross my mind until then. I'd look at you and you'd be all Leigh, but for your hair. Your mannerisms are very like hers when you are happy and when you feel at ease in your surroundings, but there are other times when you remind me of someone else." He stared again at my hair, which during the summer had taken on streaks of brighter brown, with reddish highlights. "Have you ever worn your hair short?" he asked, quite out of context.
"What has that got to do with anything?" I almost shouted.
"I suspect the weight of your hair pulls out the natural curl, and that's why your hair 'frizzes' as you say, when it rains."
"What has that got to do with anything?" I again shouted. "I'm sorry my hair isn't platinum like my mother's hair and like Jillian's! But Troy likes my hair. He's told me so many times. He loves me, Tony, and it took him so long to tell me that. He had given up on life until I came along, he told me that, too. I've convinced him that his precognition of his own death doesn't have to happen."
For the second time he rose, like a cat undulating and stretching until he leaned to crease his trousers between thumb and index fingers. "I confess I'm not partial to dramatic confessions such as this. I would prefer all dramas to be confined to the stage or to movie screens. I am an even-tempered person, and I have to admire someone like you who can ignite and explode so easily. Perhaps you don't know this, but Troy has the same kind of temper, only he is a slow burn, and when he explodes it turns inward on himself. That's why I'm trying to be careful. If I never speak another true word the rest of my life, I say again I love my brother more than I love myself. He is like my son, and because of him I honestly confess I've never truly wanted my own son, who would disinherit Troy. You see, or I guess you've already seen, Troy is the genius behind Tatterton Toys. He is the one who creates, designs, and invents, while I fly about the world as a glorified sales rep. I am a figurehead ruler. If given ten years I couldn't come up with one original idea to create a new toy or board-game, yet Troy originates without effort; he suggests themes for games, indoor and out, like he invents those eternal sandwiches he loves."
I could only stare at him. Why was he telling me all of this now? Why now?
"It's Troy who deserves to be president, not any son I might have. So please, ease out of his life with little to-do. I'll stay to see him through. You can go to your boyfriend Logan what's-his-name, and I'll put in your bank account two . . . million . . . dollars. Think about it. Two million. People kill for that much money."
He smiled at me charmingly, winningly, pleadingly. "Do it for Troy. Do it for yourself and the career you want. Do it for me. Do it for your mother. Your beautiful, dead mother."
I hated what he was doing to me! "What has she got to do with this?" I screamed, terribly angry that he would have the bad taste to bring her up at a time like this.
"Everything . . ." and his voice was growing louder, angrier, as if my passion were consuming the air and putting fire under his feet.
Twenty My Mother, My Father
.
"WHATEVER IT IS, I WANT TO KNOW!" I CRIED, TWISTING in my chair and leaning forward. Tony's tone of voice turned hard. "This isn't
easy for me, girl, not easy at all. I am trying to do you
a favor, and in so doing I am not serving myself well
at all. Now keep your silence until I've finished . . .
and then you may hate me just as I deserve." Those cold blue eyes glued my tongue. I sat
without moving.
"From the very beginning of my marriage to
Jill, Leigh seemed to hate me. She could never forgive
me for taking her mother away from her father. She
adored her father. I tried to win her affections. She
wanted none of that. I didn't do a thing to harm her,
and eventually I stopped trying to win her over. I
knew she blamed me for her father's desperate unhappiness.
"I came home from my long honeymoon with
Jill disillusioned. Horribly disillusioned. I tried not to
let anyone see it. Jill isn't capable of loving anyone
more than she loves herself and her everlasting
youthful image. My God, how that woman loves to
look in mirrors!
"
I grew disgusted seeing the way she had to
have every hair in place all the time, always glancing
to check on the shine on her nose, checking for
lipstick smudges."
His smile was crooked, bitter. "And so I came
to realize too late that despite all the beauty Jill possessed, no man could love Jill for anything other than
her facade. Jill has no depths. She's just a shell of a
woman. Everything sweet, and thoughtful and kind
went into her daughter. I began to be more aware of
Leigh in a room than I was of her mother. Soon I was
noticing a lovely adolescent girl who seldom glanced
in any mirror. A girl who loved to wear simple, loose
garments that fluttered when she moved, and her hair
was long and loose and straight. Leigh waited on
Troy, with pleasure and joy she waited on Troy. I
loved and admired her for doing that.
"Leigh was sensual without knowing she was.
She radiated health that exuded sex. She moved with
undulating hips, her small breasts jiggling unfettered
beneath those fluttery garments. And Leigh was
always angry with her mother, resenting me, until
finally she discovered one day that her mother was
very jealous. And that's when Leigh began to play up to me. I don't think it was malicious, it was just her revenge against a mother she thought had ruined her
father's life."
I knew what was coming!
I just knew it! I pulled back and raised my
hands to
ward off his words, wanting to cry out and say no, no!
"Leigh began to flirt with me. She dared to mock and
tease me. Often she danced around me tugging at my
hands, taunting me with words that often stung, for
they hit the mark so often. 'You married a paper doll,'
she'd chant to me time and again. 'Let Mother go back
to my father,' she pleaded, 'and if you do, Tony, and if
you do, I'll stay! I'm not in love with myself like she
is.' And God help me, I wanted her. She was only
thirteen years old and she had more sexuality in one
small, white finger than her mother had in her entire
body."
"Stop!" I screamed. "I don't want to hear any
more!"
He went on relentlessly, like a river of melted
snow that had to flood and destroy. "And one day
when Leigh had taunted and teased me ruthlessly, for
it was her game to punish me as much as she punished
her mother, I grabbed her by her arm and pulled her into my study and locked the door behind me. I planned only to frighten her a little bit and make her realize she couldn't play a girl's game with a man. I was still just twenty years old, thwarted and angry, disgusted with myself for falling so witlessly into the trap Jill had set. Before we married, Jill had her lawyer draw up papers that would put half my gross worth into her hands if ever I sued her for divorce. And that would mean I could never divorce her and hope to salvage anything for Troy. And so when I slammed and locked that door, I was punishing Jill for cheating me, and punishing Leigh for making me so
aware of my stupid mistakes."
"You raped my mother . . . my thirteen-year-old
mother?" I asked in a low, hoarse whisper. "You, with
your background and your education, acted like some
scumbag hillbilly?"
"You don't understand," he said in a desperate
kind of voice. "I had thought only to tease her,
frighten her, believing she'd be more sophisticated and
laugh and call me a fool, and then I wouldn't have
been able to perform. But she excited me with her
fright, with her panic, with her innocence that was so
appalled by the thought of what I planned to do. I told
myself she was pulling an act, for the girls of Winterhaven are notoriously open about sex. Yes, I raped
your mother. Your thirteen-year-old mother." "You beast! You horrible man!" I yelled,
jumping up and throwing myself at him and striking
his chest. I tried to scratch his face, but he was quick.
"No wonder she ran away, no wonder! And you drove
her into my father's arms so the hills and the cold and
the hunger could kill her!"
I kicked at his shins, so he released my hands to
back off, and then I ran back at him, to strike again at
his face. "I hate you! You killed her! You drove her
from here into another kind of hell!"
He easily seized my fists and held me off, his
cynical smile growing more ironic. "She didn't run
after the first time. Nor did she run after the second or
the third. You see, your mother found out she enjoyed
our forbidden lovemaking. It was exciting, thrilling.
For her, and for me. She'd come to me, stand in the
doorway, and wait. And when I advanced, she'd begin
to shiver and quake. Sometimes tears would streak her
face. When I touched her she'd fight and scream, but
she knew no one could hear her screams, and in the
end she'd succumb to my lovemaking like the
promiscuous child she was beneath all that angelic
sweetness."
The flat of my palm found his face this time! The sting of my slap left a red stain there. I
curled my fingers and tried to scratch his eyes from
his face!
"Stop it!" he commanded, thrusting me away so
I staggered backward. "I won't have it! I meant never
to tell you."
Again I threw myself at him, striking at his
face. He held me firmly by my shoulders and shook
me until my hair flew wild. "Until I heard your birth
date I didn't count the months. Now I have. Leigh ran
from this house on the eighteenth day of June. And
you were born on the twenty-second of February.
That's eight months. She had lain with me at least two
months off and on, and so, I have to presume there is
a strong possibility that you are my daughter." I stopped flailing my arms in useless efforts to
inflict some further harm to him. My blood drained
from my face. A tingling started behind my ears, and
my knees went weak. "I don't believe you," I said
brokenly. I felt bruised, beaten. "It can't be true. I'm
not Troy's niece, I can't be!"
"I'm sorry, Heaven, so sorry. For you would
have been perfect, the very one to save him from
himself. But I have sat here this evening and heard your story of how Leigh met Luke Casteel, and heard the day of their marriage, and there is no way you can be Luke Casteel's daughter, unless you were born prematurely. Did your granny ever hint that you came
early?"
Backing off from him, I shook my head
numbly. I wasn't Pa's daughter. Pa. A scumbag
Casteel.
"You said your father hated you, hated you
from the day you were born. Heaven, it is entirely
possible, Leigh being what she was, that she told your
father she was pregnant before she married him. And
now I am certain about who you are. It's your hair,
Heaven, and your hands. Your hair is the same color
and texture as Troy's, and your hands and fingers are
shaped like his. Like mine. We both have the Tatterton fingers."
He spread his hands, displaying his long,
tapering fingers, before I gazed down at mine. They
wer
e the same hands I'd seen all my life, small with
long fingers and long oval nails--and half the women
in the world had hair my color. Nothing exceptional.
And I'd always believed Granny's hands would have
looked like mine if she hadn't kept them working
slavishly most of her life.
Stunned and aching, sickened almost into
vomiting, I turned and left his office. Stumbling up
the stairs and into my room, I threw myself on my bed
and cried.
Not a Casteel? Not a no-good, rotten, scumbag
Casteel with five uncles imprisoned for life? Tony strolled into my bedroom without
knocking, to perch lightly on the foot of my bed, and
this time his voice was soft and kind: "Don't make it
so difficult, darling. I'm so sorry to ruin your romance
with my brother. Though I am delighted to have you
for my daughter. Everything will work out, you'll see.
I know I have shocked and hurt you, and despite all
that I've told you, I did love your mother. She was
only a kid, and still I can't forget her. And in my own
way I love you. I admire you and what you have done
for my brother. I will be more than generous, so keep
that in mind when next you see Troy. Tell him
anything that will sound plausible. Don't give him
pain that would drive him to end his life. For don't
you know that's what his dreams are all about? He
was born self-destructive! He is disappointed in the
world, in everyone who died or went away and failed
him, and so he seeks to escape."
He moved to lay his heavy hand briefly on my shoulder before he got up and half turned toward the door. "Be good to him, for he's fragile, not like you or me or Jillian," he said in a choked voice. "He is an innocent in a world of vultures. He doesn't know how to hate. He only knows how to love, so he can later suffer and feel inadequate. So give to him the best you have in you, Heavenly, the very best you have to give.