Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

  That buoyed my confidence and sent me back to yes, but then, almost immediately, I wondered if I was becoming another one of those ostriches my father often pointed out to me, people who wouldn’t face unpleasant realities or admit to weaknesses in themselves or others they trusted.

  “You can’t simply will things to happen the way you want them to, Kristin,” my dad had warned me. “The night owl knows sunrise is coming, and there is nothing he can do to stop it, no matter how much he enjoys the darkness.”

  Wisdom often dripped from his lips like honey, always kindly, always sweet. Right now, I had to answer him truthfully about Kane.

  “Yes, Daddy. It’s a little serious between Kane and me,” I replied.

  He nodded and then, turning away, added, “Let me know if a little turns into a lot.”

  “Why?” I demanded with a little more fervor than I had intended. Was he already suspicious about what I was going to share with Kane? Would he be upset if I had strong feelings for someone besides him?

  “I’m just kidding, Kristin. I don’t expect you to run off and elope or anything. Uh-oh,” he added, putting up his hands to surrender when I didn’t respond. Then he hummed the theme from Jaws as if a big shark was approaching a swimmer, and he stepped back.

  “What?”

  “I think I just entered that world I’ve been warned about.”

  “What world?”

  “The world of sensitive teenage girls, otherwise known as bedlam.”

  “Very funny, Daddy. The world of teenage boys is more dysfunctional, if you ask me.”

  “Probably so.” He returned his attention to the pancakes on the stove. “But at least that’s waters I’ve swum in myself. I know what to expect and when to expect it. Teenage girls are more like an earthquake.”

  He flipped a pancake. Right after being in the navy, where he got into cooking, he had been a short-order cook in a diner-type restaurant off I-95. This was before he met my mother and got into the construction business. When I was little, he actually would juggle a couple of pancakes with two spatulas. It made my mother and me laugh. He would flip one so it fell perfectly on my plate. Somehow all that juggling made them even more delicious.

  “And so for me, with a teenage daughter,” he said, bringing over my pancakes, “it does feel like swimming in shark-infested waters.”

  “I promise, I’ll warn you ahead of time before I bite,” I said as he poured out just the right amount of maple syrup and added banana, which he had sliced for me. He would do all that even when I was married and had children of my own, I thought.

  “I’ll appreciate the warning. Oh, by the way, I might be running late every afternoon this week,” he said, sitting across from me. “Scheduling all these building inspectors, dealing with different contractors, meeting with the architect. This owner is taking a very detailed interest in all the construction, too. He’s a nice guy, but lately, now that this is really happening, it feels like he’s breathing down my neck sometimes. He slips in behind me like a ghost stepping back into the world.”

  “Don’t most new homeowners take that sort of interest in what you’re doing?”

  “Not like this,” he said. “Sometimes I get the feeling someone’s looking over Arthur Johnson’s shoulder, too.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “I told you he ran a hedge fund and made a lot of money. I know as much about him as I have to, I guess. But between you and me, I think it’s ridiculous for a man that young to retire, even if he can. He’s married to a woman about twelve years younger. I picked that up. Her mother apparently worked for his father. I sort of got the impression that—” He suddenly clamped his lips together and scrunched his nose the way he would when he was about to utter a secret or a nasty comment about something or someone in front of me and stopped himself.

  “What?”

  He looked at me oddly, obviously hesitant to tell me what he was thinking.

  “I’m not a child anymore, Dad. You don’t have to worry about offending my innocent little ears.”

  “Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself. Anyway, you’ve heard worse and read worse, I’m sure,” he added, raising his eyebrows.

  “Worse than what?”

  “I picked up that Arthur Johnson’s father got romantically involved with Arthur’s mother-in-law after her husband died. Right after,” he added. I guess I didn’t react enough, so he said, “Minutes after. Understand?”

  “Oh. She might have picked up with him a little before her husband had died?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And maybe not just a little before. His wife had died just a year or so earlier, not that her still being alive might have stopped him anyway.”

  The disapproval on his face was blatant. I knew he was thinking of his own tragedy and wondering how much in love with his wife Arthur Johnson’s father had been if he could move on to another woman so quickly. And wondering about it even more so when he learned about Arthur Johnson’s mother-in-law. For many reasons, a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet never drifted too far from my memory after we had read it in English class: “A second time I kill my husband dead, when second husband kisses me in bed.”

  It was only natural for me to wonder if my father would fall in love with someone again. When would he be ready, if ever, to kiss another woman in his bed? It was painful for me to think about it, but I didn’t want to wish him endless loneliness, and I was especially worried about what his life would be like when I was out of the house. I had been filling out applications for college. An acceptance would come soon and ring a bell in this house. I wondered how often he thought about that. I knew he did. Maybe he had his own timetable for when he would fall in love again, and it would start when that bell rang; or maybe he was determined never to love again. Maybe he knew that line in Tennyson’s poem: “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

  “Anyway,” he continued, now that he had committed to revealing the story, “afterward, Arthur Johnson met and spent time with his future wife because of their parents’ relationship, and both parents were pleased when they became engaged. Then they decided to do the same thing, get engaged and get married. It was a double wedding. His father married his wife’s mother at the same ceremony.”

  “To save money?”

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling. “When you question why someone rich looks for bargains, he always tells you that’s how he became rich. The women shopped for gowns together, and the men bought tuxedos together. They probably did get deals. They even bought similar wedding rings from the same jeweler. He gave away his son at the altar, and she gave away her daughter, and then vice versa. It was a ceremony conducted in mirrors.”

  “Must have looked weird with them switching places and all.”

  “I would think so, but he seemed proud of it when he talked about it. ‘I got a new mother, and she got a new father the same time we got each other,’ he told me. Families replacing families instantly,” he said, shaking his head. “Goes on a lot more these days. People accept almost everything when it comes to relationships, exes marrying exes of friends, widows marrying widowed husbands of best friends, stepbrothers marrying stepsisters. Anything goes, it seems.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Who?”

  “Arthur Johnson’s young wife.”

  “Yeah, once. Pretty girl. I shouldn’t say ‘girl.’ They have a fourteen-year-old son and a twelve-year-old daughter. Both attend a private school in another state and live in dormitories. Maybe they’re just not built to raise children. More bird in them.”

  “Bird?”

  “You know. Hatching the eggs is one thing, getting them out of the nest as soon as possible is another.”

  “Bird,” I repeated, and shook my head. “You are a character, Dad.”

  He shrugged. “I call it like I see it. And if you ask me, you can learn a lot about people by watching and observing so-called lower animals.”

  “I gu
ess you learn a lot about the people you build or redo houses for.”

  “Nothing reveals as much about people as the home they live in,” he said. “And their children are products of all that, too, often through no fault of their own.”

  I wanted to ask, What if you were brought up in a mansion with parents from hell like Corrine Foxworth? Would that excuse her behavior after her husband died? But I didn’t. I started to clear off the table.

  “Only odd thing,” Dad added, sounding more like he was talking to himself than to me.

  “What?”

  “Huh? Oh. The only odd thing was the feeling I got that both Johnson and his wife—her name’s Shannon—that both knew a lot more about both the original and the restored Foxworth Hall than Johnson first revealed.”

  “How do you mean? Knew what?”

  “What it looked like in detail, inside and out. He makes references to it from time to time. Where windows were and what they looked out on, stuff like that. Although it’s a different architecture, with all sorts of technological updates, he wants to be sure some things are the same.”

  “Well, there have been pictures of it. What’s the surprise?”

  “No. It was as if they had been there when it was in its heyday.” He thought a moment and then shook his head. “Probably just my imagination. Anyway, don’t let my blabbering make you late for school.”

  I had been late once before because of reading the diary late into the night and then oversleeping. One time was a warning, two was a detention and a demerit, and with my pursuit of class valedictorian, any misbehavior could affect a close decision if my final grades and someone else’s were practically the same, which, right now, was the case. But it wasn’t just that. Ever since my mother had died of a cerebral aneurism and my father and I were the only immediate family we had, disappointing him in any way, even with something as relatively minor as a tardiness demerit, was abhorrent to me. It was as if since my mother’s death, both he and I felt things more, especially sad and disappointing things.

  I once heard my father say that the death of someone as close as a wife or a husband strips away the bark. “The rain, even a sharp breeze, stings more.”

  “I won’t be late. I have someone making sure of it, remember?”

  “Oh, right. Okay. I left a meat loaf in the fridge. You just have to warm it up. Don’t wait dinner on me,” he said, and gave me a kiss. He held on to me just a few seconds longer than usual.

  “Don’t worry about this bird. I’m not leaving the nest so quickly, Dad,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Have a good day, Kristin.”

  “You, too, Dad.”

  I turned back to the sink but paused to think. What had my father meant by people accepting more when it came to relationships these days? Would they easily accept Christopher’s father and mother marrying even though he was her half-uncle? According to Christopher Jr., that’s what Corrine had finally revealed, making it sound so romantic and inevitable that she expected her children would accept it. There was a time when parents actually wanted their children to marry within the family, marry cousins, believing it kept their blood purer or something, and no one thought of it as incest back then.

  I glanced at the clock and finished cleaning up quickly. By the time I had my hands wiped, Kane was sounding his horn. One long beep and two short beeps, like he was sending Morse code or a spy message. Why are we all so dramatic at our age? I thought. When we were older, would we look back and laugh at the little things that made us cry or laugh, sad or happy? When had I become so damn analytical? Maybe because of the way Christopher described Cathy, I was thinking more about everything I did. I was finding myself blaming more of what I thought and felt on my reading of the diary. Was that a bad omen?

  I scooped up my books, flicked my dark blue hooded jacket off the hanger in the entryway, and shot out the door as if I was being chased. I slammed it behind me, the echo reverberating like a gunshot. It jerked me out of my deep thoughts as effectively as a slap on my face.

  Kane was laughing at me as I hurried to the driveway, putting my jacket on as I went.

  “What?” I asked, getting in.

  “You should see me when I get up in the morning and stumble into the kitchen for some breakfast. I have to feel my way to the table. You look so alert, so ready to go,” he said, and he gazed at the front of the house for a few seconds to see if my father might be looking out the window, then leaned over to kiss me quickly. “Hi.”

  “I’m not raring to go. Don’t remind me how tired I am,” I said. “I didn’t sleep that well.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  He carefully backed out of the driveway. It was a mostly cloudy day. Before this, I had barely noticed the chill in the air. If it had ever smelled like snow was on the way, it did this morning. Already I missed the songbirds and the sweet scent of freshly cut grass. Our short Indian summer was gone. The leafless trees looked stunned. The surrounding woods had become the sleeping forest, hibernating, and the fields of dry grass looked like faded yellowish-green carpets, corpses of hay. With the weather so unpredictable, it was difficult to know confidently what it would be like tomorrow, much less next week or next month. Normally, we didn’t have heavy snowfalls this early, but there were also many Christmases without snow at all.

  Kane was only in a long-sleeved khaki shirt and jeans despite the cool air. Sometimes I thought he must have ice in his veins. He could be indifferent about the weather. I thought he was that way about almost everything. Whenever I’d complain about something, he’d simply nod, shrug, and give me that “what’s the difference?” smile. What’s the difference what I wear, what I say, even what I think? Just move along, and if anything, just laugh. Laugh at the changes in the weather, laugh at the nervousness before exams, laugh at the school rules, and especially laugh at the drama of growing older and closer to being totally responsible for yourself. Just laugh.

  “Did you read any more of the diary without me?” he asked as we drove off to school. He narrowed his eyes with suspicion when he turned to me. “Is that why you didn’t sleep well?”

  I didn’t answer him. I was still thinking about reading the diary in the attic, with him playing Christopher and me being Cathy. He was so casual about everything. Why should I believe he’d take the diary as seriously as I did? This is too big a risk, I told myself. You’ll regret it.

  “What’s wrong?” His hazel eyes darkened with concern. “Did you read something that bothered you, something terrible? I really want to do it with you. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” He looked about as sincere as he ever was about anything.

  This was it, I thought. I would either deliver my fabrication and end the diary reading or go on with it. I had to take that big risk. I had to believe in someone else besides my father, didn’t I? Otherwise, I’d lock myself in a different kind of attic, but it would still be avoiding the world. I had to go on with it. I really wasn’t a good liar, anyway. I was often compared to a fish in a bowl, with all my thoughts visibly swimming about. My father bragged about that, telling people, “Deceit’s not comfortable sitting on her face.” That was certainly not true for Corrine Dollanganger, I thought. If anything, she was certainly a good liar. Were selfish people naturally better liars?

  “Nothing’s wrong. I didn’t read any more of the diary.”

  “Good. That gives me a chance to catch up. What about this afternoon? What time does your father usually come home? How much time will we have?”

  “He’s going to be late today, maybe the rest of the week.”

  “Perfect. Isn’t it?” he asked when I didn’t say anything.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Kane, really sure?”

  “What? How can you ask? Absolutely. I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night. I’m excited. Besides, I remembered that I always thought my father might know more about what happened at that original Foxworth Hall fire than he admits. He’s learned lo
ts of things about Malcolm Foxworth and his family from his older customers. I just never cared much about it until now.”

  “Did you tell him about the diary?” I asked, my voice on the verge of panic.

  “No, no. I promised I would tell no one, and that’s that. I won’t.”

  “What do you mean, your father might know more than he admits?” I asked, sitting up more. “What does he know? How do you know it’s more?”

  “Easy,” he said, smiling. “My father and mother know we went up to Foxworth to have that picnic.”

  “So?”

  “He asked me about the site, what your father was doing, and I asked him what he really knew about the original fire. This was before you told me about the diary. He said what he heard was that the first fire definitely wasn’t accidentally caused by a servant or some electrical malfunction or gas leak. He said that the story of how it happened that some firemen describe was right.”

  “Which story?”

  “The one about the daughter deliberately setting the fire. She had gone mad and deliberately set the fire. He said she was whisked away before anyone could ask any more questions and apparently put in an insane asylum or something.”

  “He definitely said ‘the daughter’? He believes that to be true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask him her name?”

  “I didn’t want to ask him too many questions and get him suspicious.”

  “That was probably a good idea. Why would she have done that?”

  “Who knows? Considering how long ago that was, I’m not surprised there are so many theories and so few facts. He said no one really cared that much about them or what had happened to them. He said from what old-timers told him, Malcolm and Olivia Foxworth weren’t particularly liked and were considered rich, raving, religious maniacs. It was easy to believe they were capable of doing weird things to their children and grandchildren. That’s why what you found is so exciting, Kristin. We’ll know the truth. We’ll learn all the secrets, secrets more than fifty years old.”