Petals on the Wind

  She gave me the strangest long look, then lowered her eyes to the floor. "Will you be here if he comes to dinner?"

  "Why, of course I will." Only then did it dawn on me. Oh, God! I drew her into my arms. "Look, sweetheart, I'll ask Paul to come up this weekend, so when Alex sees I go for older men he won't even glance my way. Besides, you saw him first and he saw you first. He won't want an older woman with a child."

  Happily she threw her thin arms about my neck. "Cathy, I love you! And Alex can fix toasters, steam irons. Alex can fix anything!"

  One week later Alex and Paul were at our dinner table. Alex was a nice-looking young man of twenty- three who complimented my cooking. I was quick to point out that Carrie had prepared most of the meal. "No," she denied modestly, "Cathy did most of it. I only stuffed the chicken, made the dressing, mashed the potatoes, made the hot rolls and the lemon meringue pie--Cathy did the rest." Suddenly I felt I'd done nothing but set the table. Paul winked to show he understood.

  When Alex took Carrie to the movies and Jory was snug in bed with his favorite stuffed toys, Paul and I settled down before the fire like an old married couple.

  "Have you seen your mother yet?" he asked.

  "They're here, my mother and her husband," I said quietly. "Staying in Foxworth Hall. The local newspaper is full of their comings and goings. It seems my dear, stone-eyed grandmother has suffered a slight stroke, so the Bartholomew Winslows will now make their home with her--that is, until she is dead."

  Paul didn't say anything for the longest time. We sat before the fire and watched the red coals burn down to gray ashes. "I like what you've done with this house," he said finally "It's very cozy."

  He got up then and came to sit close by my side on the sofa. Tenderly he drew me into his arms. He just held me, with our eyes locked. "Where do I fit in?" he whispered. "Or don't I fit anywhere now?"

  My arms tightened about him. I'd never stopped loving him, even when Julian was my husband. It seemed there wasn't any one man who could give me everything.

  "I want to make love with you, Catherine, before Carrie comes back."

  Quickly we shed our clothes. Our passion for each other had not lessened in all the years since we'd first met in this most intimate way. It didn't seem wrong. Not when he could murmer, "Oh, Catherine, if there is one thing I wish for, it is to have you as mine all my life through, and when I die, let it be after such as this, with you in my arms, your arms about me, and you will be looking at me as you are now."

  "How beautiful and poetic," I said. "But you won't be fifty-two until September. I know you'll live to be eighty or ninety. And when you are, I pray passion will still rule both of us as it does now."

  He shook his head. "I don't want to live to eighty unless you're with me and still love me. When you don't love me, let my time on earth be over." I didn't know what to say. But my arms spoke for me, drawing him closer so I could kiss him again and again. Then the phone was ringing. Lazily I reached for it--then bolted straight up in the bed.

  "Hello, my lady Cath-er-ine!" It was Chris. "Henny had a friend over when I called Paul, and her friend gave me your phone number. Cathy, what the hell are you doing in Virginia? I know Paul is with you--and I hope to God he can persuade you not to do whatever it is you've got on your mind!"

  "Paul is much more understanding than you are. And you are the one who should know best why I'm here!"

  He made some noise of disgust. "I do understand, that's the worst of it. But you'll be hurt, I know that. And there's Momma. I don't want you to hurt her more than she already hurts, and you know she does. But more than anything I don't want you to be hurt again, and you will be. You're always running from me, Cathy, and you can't ever run far enough or fast enough, because I'll be right at your heels, loving you. Whenever anything good happens to me I sense you by my side, clinging to my hand, loving me as I love you, but refusing to recognize it because you think it's sin. If it is a sin, then hell would be heaven with you."

  I felt a terrible sense of panic, as I hastily said good-bye and hung up, then turned to cuddle close to Paul, hoping he wouldn't know why I trembled.

  In the dead of night, with Paul deeply asleep in the tiny third bedroom, I woke suddenly. I thought I heard the mountains calling out, Devil's spawn! The wind through the hills whistled and shrieked and added its voice to call me unholy, wicked, evil and everything else the grandmother had named us.

  I got up and padded over to the windows to stare at the shadowy, dark peaks in the distance. The same mountain peaks I'd gazed on so often from the attic windows. And yes, just like Cory, I could hear the wind blowing and howling like a wolf searching for me, wanting to blow me away too, just as it had blown Cory and made him into only dry dust.

  Quickly I ran to Carrie's room and crouched by her bed, wanting to protect her. For it seemed to me, in my nightmarish state, it was more likely the wind would take her before it got me.

  Carrie's Bittersweet Romance

  . Carrie was twenty now, I was twenty-seven, and this November Chris would be thirty. That seemed an impossible age for him to be. But when I looked at my Jory it hit me hard how quickly time moves as you get older.

  Time that had once moved so slowly speeded up, for our Carrie was in love with Alex! It sparkled from her blue eyes and danced her tiny feet around the room as she dusted, ran the vacuum, washed the dishes or planned menus for the next day. "Isn't he handsome, Cathy?" she asked and I agreed, though honestly he was just an average, nice-looking boy of five eight or nine with light brown hair that ruffled up easily and gave him a shaggy-dog appearance that was somehow appealing, for he was so neat in other ways. His eyes were turquoise and his expression that of someone who has never once had an ugly, unkind thought.

  Carrie thrilled to hear the phone ring. She bubbled with excitement for so often the call was for her. She wrote Alex long, passionate love poems, then gave them to me to read and stored them away without mailing them off to the one who should read them.

  I was happy for her and for myself too, for my ballet school was progressing nicely and any day Chris would be coming home! "Carrie, can you believe it? Chris's extended course is almost up!" She laughed and came running to me, as she had when she was a little girl, and in my outstretched arms she flung herself. "I know!" she cried. "Soon we will be a whole family again! Like we used to be. Cathy, if I have a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes, guess who I'll name him after." I didn't have to guess, I knew. Her firstborn, blond, blue-eyed son would be called Cory.

  Carrie in love was pure enchantment to watch. She stopped talking of her small size and even began to feel she wasn't inadequate. For the first time in her young life she began to use makeup. Her hair was naturally wavy, like mine, but she had it cut shoulder length and there it curled upward in a wild tumble.

  "Look, Cathy!" she cried when she came home from the beauty parlor with her new, smarter hair style. "Now my head doesn't look so big, does it? And have you noticed how much taller I've grown?"

  I laughed. She was wearing shoes with threeinch heels and two inches of platform! But she was right. The shorter hair did make her head look smaller.

  Her youth, her loveliness, her joy all touched me so much my heart ached in the awful apprehension that something might happen to spoil it for her.

  "Oh, Cathy," said Carrie, "I would want to die if Alex didn't love me! I want to make him the best possible wife. I'll keep his house so clean dust motes won't dance in the sunlight. Every night he'll eat the gourmet meals I prepare--never frozen TV junk. I'll make my own clothes and his and our children's. I'll save him loads of money in lots of ways. He doesn't say much; he just sits and looks at me in that special, soft way. So, I take what I can from that and not what words he says--for he hardly says any."

  I laughed and hugged her close. Oh, I did so long for her to be happy. "Men don't talk as freely about love as women do, Carrie. Some like to tease you, and that's a pretty good indication you've got their interest, and it can
grow into something larger. And the way you find out how much they care is by looking into the eyes-- eyes never learn how to lie."

  It was easy to see that. Alex was enchanted with Carrie. He was still working part-time as an electrician for a local appliance store while he took summer courses at the university, but he spent every spare minute with Carrie. I suspected he either had asked or was about to ask her to marry him

  I woke suddenly a week later to see Carrie sitting before the bedroom windows and staring off toward the shadowy mountains. Carrie who never had insomnia as I often did. Carrie who could sleep through thunderstorms, a tornado, telephone shrills a foot from her ears and a fire across the street. So naturally I was alarmed to see her there. I got up and went to her.

  "Darling, are you all right? Why aren't you asleep?"

  "I wanted to be with you near," she whispered, her eyes still riveted on the distant mountains, dark and mysterious in the night. They were all around us, boxing us in like they used to do. "Alex asked me to marry him tonight." She told me this in a flat, dull tone and I cried out, "How wonderful! I'm so happy for you, Carrie, and for him!"

  "He told me something, Cathy. He's decided he wants to be a minister." Pain and sorrow were in her voice, and I didn't understand at all.

  "Don't you want to be a minister's wife?" I asked, while I was so frightened underneath. She seemed so remote.

  "Ministers expect people to be perfect," she said in that deadly, scary tone, "especially their wives. I remember all the things the grandmother used to say about us. About us being Devil's issue and evil and sinful. I didn't used to understand what she meant, but I remember the words. And she was always saying we were wicked, unholy children who should never have been born. Should we have been born, Cathy?"

  I choked, overwhelmingly frightened, and swallowed over the lump that rose in my throat. "Carrie, if God hadn't wanted us to be born He wouldn't have given us life in the first place."

  "But . . . Cathy, Alex wants a perfect woman-- and I'm not perfect."

  "Nobody is, Carrie. Absolutely nobody. Only the dead are perfect."

  "Alex is perfect. He has never done even one bad thing."

  315

  "How would you know? Would he tell you if he had?"

  Her lovely young face was darkly shadowed. Falteringly she explained. "It seems Alex and I have known each other for a long, long time, and until recently he didn't tell me much about himself. I've talked my head off to him, but I've never told him about our past, except how we became wards of Dr. Paul's after our parents died in an auto accident. And that's a lie, Cathy. We aren't orphans. We still have a mother who is alive."

  "Lies are not deadly sins, Carrie. Everyone tells little lies now and then. "

  "Alex doesn't. Alex has always felt drawn toward God and religion. When he was younger he wanted to become a Catholic so he could be a priest. He grew older and learned priests have to live lives of celibacy, so he decided against being a priest. He wants a wife and children. He told me he's never had sex with anyone because he's been looking all his adult life for just the right girl to marry--somebody perfect, like me. Somebody godly, like him And Catheee," she wailed pitifully, "I'm not perfect! I'm bad! Like the grandmother was always telling us, I'm evil and unholy too! I have ugly thoughts! I hated those mean little girls who put me on the roof and said I was like an owl! I wished them all to die! And Sissy Towers, I hated her more than any other! And Cathy, did you know Sissy Towers drowned when she was twelve? I never wrote and told you, but I felt it was my fault for hating her so much! I hated Julian too for taking you away from Paul, and he died too! You see how it is; how can I tell Alex all of that and then tell him our mother married her half- uncle too? He'd hate me, Cathy. He wouldn't want me then, I know he wouldn't. He'd think I would give birth to deformed children, like me--and I love him so much!"

  I knelt by the side of her chair and held her close as a mother would. I didn't know what to say, and how to say it. I longed for Chris and his support, and for Paul who always knew how to say everything just right. And remembering this I took his words, said to me, and I repeated them to Carrie, even as I felt a terrible wrath against the grandmother who'd implanted all these crazy notions in the head of a fiveyear-old child. "Darling, darling, I don't know how to say everything right, but I'm going to try. I want you to understand that what is black to one person is white to another. And nothing in this world is so perfect that it is pure white, or so bad it is pure black. Everything concerning human beings comes in shades of gray, Carrie. None of us is perfect, without flaws. I've had the same doubts about myself as you have."

  Her teary eyes widened to hear this, as if she considered me, of all people, perfect. "It was our doctor Paul who set me straight, Carrie. He told me long ago, if a sin was committed when our parents married and conceived children, it was their sin and not ours. He said God didn't intend to make us pay the price for what our parents did. And they weren't that closely related, Carrie. Do you know in ancient Egypt the pharaoh would only allow his sons and daughters to marry a brother or sister? So you see, society makes the rules; and never forget, our parents had four children and not one of us is a freak--so God didn't punish them, or us."

  She glued her huge blue eyes to my face, desperately wanting to believe. And never, never should I have mentioned "freak."

  "Cathy, maybe God did punish me. I don't grow; that is punishment."

  I laughed shakily and drew her closer. "Look around you, Carrie. Many other people are smaller than you. You aren't a midget or a dwarf, you know that. Even if you were, which you aren't, still you would have to accept it and make the best of it, just as many do who consider themselves too tall, or too fat, or too thin, or too something You have a beautiful face, sensational hair, a lovely complexion, an adorable figure with everything where it should be. You have a beautiful singing voice, and you've got a brilliant mind; look at how fast you can type and how well you take shorthand and keep Paul's books, and you can cook twice as well as I can. You are also a much better housekeeper than I am, and look at the dresses you sew. They look better than anything I see in a store. When you add all that up, Carrie, how can you think you aren't good enough for Alex or any other man!"

  "But, Cathy," she wailed, stubbornly

  unappeased by what I'd said, "you don't know him like I do. We went by an X-rated movie theater and he said anybody who did any of those things was evil and perverted! And you and Dr. Paul told me sex and making babies was a natural, loving part of living-- and I'm bad, Cathy. Once I did something very wicked."

  I stared at her, taken by surprise. With whom? It was as if she read my mind, for she shook her head while tears streamed down her cheeks. "No . . . I've never had . . . had . . . intercourse, not with anybody. But I did other things that were wicked, Alex would think so, and I should have known it was evil."

  "What did you do, darling, that was so terrible?"

  She gulped and bowed her head in shame. "It was Julian. One day when I was visiting and you weren't home he wanted to do . . do something with me. He said it would be fun and wasn't real sex, the kind that made babies--so I did what he wanted, and he kissed me and said next to you he loved me best. I didn't know it was wicked just to do what I did."

  I swallowed over the huge, aching lump in my throat, smoothed her silken hair from her fevered forehead and wiped away her tears. "Don't cry and feel ashamed, darling. There are all kinds of love and ways to express love. You love Dr. Paul and Jory and Chris in three different ways, and me in another--and if Julian convinced you to do something you feel was wicked, that was his sin, not yours. And mine too, for I should have told you what he might want. He promised me never to touch you or do anything sexual with you, and I believed him. But if you did it, don't be ashamed any longer--and Alex doesn't have to know. Nobody will tell him."

  Very slowly her head lifted, and the moon that suddenly came into view from behind dark clouds shone in her eyes full of self-torture. "But I'll know."
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  She began to sob, wild, hysterical sobs. "That's not the worst thing, Cathy," she screamed, "I liked doing what I did! I liked him wanting me to do it--I tried not to let my face show I was feeling any pleasure for God might have been watching. So you see why Alex won't understand? He'd hate me, he would, I know he would! And even if he never knows, I'll still hate myself for doing it and liking it!"

  "Please stop crying. What you did isn't that bad, really. Forget our grandmother who kept talking about our evil blood. She's a bigoted, narrow-minded hypocrite who can't tell right from wrong. She did all kinds of horrible things in the name of righteousness and nothing at all in the name of love. You're not bad, Carrie. You wanted Julian to love you, and if what you did gave him pleasure and you pleasure, then that's normal too. People are made to feel sensual pleasure, made to enjoy sex. Julian was wrong and he shouldn't have asked you, but that was his sin, not yours."

  "I remember lots of things you don't think I do," she whispered. "I remember the funny way Cory and I used to talk to each other, so you and Chris couldn't understand. We knew we were the Devil's issue. We heard the grandmother. We talked about it. We knew we were locked up because we weren't good enough to be out in the world with people better than us."

  "Stop!" I cried. "Don't remember! Forget! We did get out, didn't we? We were four children not responsible for the actions of our parents. That hateful old woman tried to steal our confidence and our pride in ourselves--don't let her succeed! Look at Chris, aren't you proud of him? Weren't you proud of me when I was on stage dancing? And one day, after you and Alex are married, he will change his mind about what is perverted and what isn't--for I did. Alex will grow up and stop being overly righteous. He doesn't know yet the pleasures love can give."

  Carrie pulled from my arms and went to stare out of the windows at the dark and distant mountains, and at the quarter moon that sailed as an uptilted Viking ship through the black seas of night. "Alex won't change," she said dully. "He's gonna be a minister. Religious people think everything is bad, just like grandmother. When he told me he was going to give up the idea of being an electrical engineer, I knew it was all over between us."