The hymn ended. Automatically the twins went down on their knees and placed their small palms beneath their chins. They seemed cherubs--or lambs for the slaughter.
Why was I thinking that? This was a holy place.
"And lo, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil . . ." spoke Bart, now on his knees. "Repeat after me, Darren, Deirdre."
"And lo, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil," obeyed Deirdre, her high-pitched, small voice leading the way for Darren to follow.
"For thou art with me . . ." instructed Bart. "For thou art with me . . ."
"Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me."
"Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me."
I stepped forward. "Bart, what the devil are you doing? This is not Sunday, nor has anyone died."
His bowed head raised. His dark eyes met mine and held such sorrow. "Leave, Mother, please."
I ran to the children, who jumped up. I gathered them into my arms. "We don't like it here," whispered Deirdre. "Hate here."
Joel had risen to his feet. He stood tall and lean in the shadows, with colors from the stained glass falling on his long, gaunt face. He said not a word, just looked me up and down--scathingly.
"Go back to your rooms, Mother, please, please."
"You have no right to teach these children fear of God. When you teach religion, Bart, you speak of God's love, not his wrath."
"They have no fear of God, Mother. You speak of your own fear."
I began to back away, pulling the twins with me. "Someday you are going to understand about love, Bart. You are going to find out it doesn't come because you want it, or need it. It's yours only when you earn it. It comes to you when you least expect it, walks in the door and closes it quietly and when it's right, it stays. You don't plot to find it. Or seduce to try and make it happen. You have to deserve it, or you'll never have anyone who will stay long enough."
His dark eyes looked bleak. He stood, towering up there; then he advanced, taking the three steps down.
"We are all leaving, Bart. That should delight you. None of us will come back to bother you again. Jory and Toni will go with us. You will have come into your own. Every room of this mammoth lonely Foxworth Hall will be all yours. If you wish, Chris will turn over the trusteeship to Joel until you are thirty-five."
For a moment, a brief illuminating moment, fear lit up Bart's face, just as jubilance lit up Joel's watery eyes.
"Have Chris turn the trusteeship over to my attorney," Bart said quickly.
"Yes, if that's what you want." I smiled at Joel, whose face then turned. He shot Bart a hard look of disappointment, confirming my suspicions--he was angry because Bart would take what might have been his . . .
"By morning we will be gone, all of us," I whispered
"Yes, Mother. I wish you godspeed and good luck."
I stared at my second son, who stood three feet from me. Where had I heard that said last? Oh, oh . . . so very long ago. The tall conductor on the night train that brought us here as children. He'd stood on the steps of the sleeper train and called that back to us, and the train had sounded a mournful goodbye whistle.
It came to me as I met Bart's brooding gaze that I should speak my parting words now, in this chapel of his building, and forget about saying anything tomorrow when I was likely to cry.
He spoke first. "Mothers always seem to run and leave the sons to suffer. Why are you deserting me?"
The tone of his throaty voice, full of pain, filled me with suffering. Still I said what I had to say. "Because you deserted me years ago," I answered brokenly. "I love you, Bart. I've always loved you, though you don't want to believe that. Chris loves you. But you don't want his love. You tell yourself each day you live that your own natural father would have been a better father--but you don't know that he would have been. He wasn't faithful to his wife, my mother--and I wasn't his first dalliance. I don't want to speak disrespectfully of a man whom I loved very much at the time, but he wasn't the same kind of man Chris is. He wouldn't have given you so much of himself."
The sun through the windows turned Bart's face fire-red. His head moved from side to side. Tormented again. At his sides his hands clenched into tight fists. "Don't say one word more!" he shouted. "He's the father I want, have always wanted! Chris has given me nothing but shame and embarrassment. Get out! I'm glad you're leaving. Take your filth with you and forget I exist!"
Hours passed, and still Chris didn't show. I called the university lab. His secretary said he'd left three hours ago. "He should have been there, Mrs. Sheffield."
Immediately thoughts of my own father came to torment me. An accident on the highway. Were we duplicating our mother's act in reverse, running away from, not to, Foxworth Hall? Tick-tock went the clocks. Thumpity-thump-thump went my heartbeats. Nursery rhymes I had to read so the twins would sleep and stop asking questions. Little Tommy Tucker, sing for your supper . . . When you wish upon a star . . . dancing in the dark . . . all our lives, dancing in the dark . . .
"Mother, please stop pacing the floor," ordered Jory. "You rub my nerves raw. Why this grand rush to leave? Tell me why, please say something."
Joel and Bart strolled in to join us.
"You weren't at the dinner table, Mother. I'll tell the chef to prepare a tray." He glanced at Toni. "YOU can stay."
"No, thank you, Bart. Jory has asked me to marry him." Her chin lifted defiantly. "He loves me in a way you never can."
Bart turned betrayed, hurt eyes on his brother. "You can't marry. What kind of husband can you make now?"
"The very kind I want!" cried Toni, striding to stand beside Jory's chair and putting her hand lightly on his shoulder.
"If you want money, he doesn't have one percent of what I have."
"I wouldn't care if he had nothing," she answered proudly, meeting squarely his dark, forbidding gaze. "I love him as I've never loved anyone before."
"You pity him," stated Bart matter-of-factly.
Jory winced but said nothing. He seemed to know Toni needed to have it out with Bart.
"Once I did pity him," she confessed honestly. "I thought it a terrible shame such a wonderful man with so much talent had to be handicapped. Now I don't see him as handicapped. You see, Bart, all of us are handicapped in one way or another. Jory's is in the open, very visible. Yours is hidden--and sick. You are so sick, and it's pity I feel now--FOR YOU."
Seething emotions contorted Bart's face. I glanced at Joel for some reason and saw him staring at Bart, as if commanding him to stay silent.
Twisting about, Bart barked at me, "Why are you all gathered in this room? Why don't you go to bed? It's late."
"We are waiting for Chris to come home."
"There was an accident on the highway," spoke up Joel. "I heard the news on the radio. A man killed." He seemed delighted to give me this news.
My heart seemed to drop a mile--another Foxworth downed by an accident?
Not Chris, not my Christopher Doll. No, not yet, not yet.
From far away I faintly heard the kitchen door open and close. The chef leaving for his apartment over the garage I thought--or maybe Chris. Hopefully I turned toward the garage. No bright blue eyes, no ready smile and arms outstretched to hold me. No one came through the door.
Minutes passed as we all stared at each other uncomfortably. My heart began to throb painfully; it was time he was home. Time enough.
Joel was staring at me, his lips cocked in a peculiarly hateful way, as if he knew more than he'd said. I turned to Jory, knelt beside his chair and allowed him to hold me close. "I'm scared, Jory," I sobbed. "He should be home by now. It couldn't take him three hours even in the winter with icy roads."
No one said anything. Not Jory, who held me tight. Not Toni. Not Bart or even Joel. The very show of all of us being together, waiting, waiting brought back only too vividly the scene of my father's thirtysixth birthday party and the two state policemen w
ho'd come to say he'd been killed.
I felt a scream in my throat ready to sound when I saw a white car heading up our private road, a red light spinning on the top.
Time turned backward.
NO! NO! NO! Over and over again, my brain screamed even as they spilled out the facts about the accident, the doctor who'd jumped out of his car to help the injured and dying victims laid on the roadside, and as he ran to cross the highway, he'd been struck by a hit-and-run driver.
They carefully, respectfully put his things on a table, just as they'd dumped my father's possessions on another table in Gladstone. This time I was staring at all the items that Chris usually carried in his pockets. All this was unreal, just another nightmare to wake up from--not my photograph in his wallet, not my Chris's wristwatch and the sapphire ring I'd given him for Christmas. Not my Christopher Doll, no, no, no.
Objects grew hazy, dim Twilight gloom pervaded my entire being, leaving me nowhere, nowhere. The policemen shrank in size. Jory and Bart seemed so far away. Toni loomed up huge as she came to lift me to my feet. "Cathy, I'm so sorry . . . so terribly sorry . . ."
I think she said more. But I tore from her grip and ran, ran as if all the nightmares I'd ever dreamed in my life were catching up with me. Seek the tarnish and you shall find.
On and on running, trying to escape the truth, running until I reached the chapel where I threw myself down in front of the pulpit and began to pray as I'd never prayed before.
"Please, God, you can't do this to me, or to Chris! There's not a better man alive than Chris . . . you must know that . . ." And then I was sobbing. For my father had been a wonderful man, and that hadn't mattered. Fate didn't choose the unloved, the derelicts, the unneeded or unwanted. Fate was a bodiless form with a cruel hand that reached out randomly, carelessly, and seized up with ruthlessness.
They buried the body of my Christopher Doll, not in the Foxworth family plot, but in the cemetery where Paul, my mother, Bart's father, and Julian all lay under the earth. Not so far away was the small grave of Carrie.
Already I'd given the order to have the body of my father moved from that cold, hard, lonely ground in Gladstone, Pennsylvania so he, too, could lie with the rest of us. I thought he would like that, if he knew.
I was the last of the four Dresden dolls. Only me . . . and I didn't want to be here.
The sun was hot and bright. A day for fishing, for swimming, for playing tennis and having fun, and they put my Christopher in the ground.
I tried not to see him down there with his blue eyes closed forever. I stared at Bart, who spoke the eulogy with tears in his eyes. I heard his voice as if from a far-far distance, saying all the words he should have said when Chris was alive and he could have appreciated hearing those kind, loving words.
"It is said in the Bible," began Bart in that beautiful, persuasive voice he could use when he wanted, "that it is never too late to ask for forgiveness. I hope and pray this is true, for I will ask of this man who lies before me that his soul will look down from Heaven and forgive me for not being the loving, understanding son I could and should have been. This father, that I never accepted as my father, saved my life many times, and I stand here, shafted to my heart with all the guilt and shame of a wasted childhood and youth that could have made his life happier."
His dark head bowed so the sun made his hair and his falling tears gleam. "I love you, Christopher Sheffield Foxworth. I hope you hear me. I hope and pray you forgive me for being blind to what you were." Tears flowed down his cheeks. His voice turned hoarse. People started to cry.
Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart.
"Doctor Christopher Sheffield denied his surname of Foxworth," he went on when he found his voice again. "I know now he had to. He was a physician right up to his last moment, dedicated to doing what he could to relieve human suffering, while I, as his son, would deny him the right to be my substitute father. In humiliation, in remorse, and in shame, I bow my head and say this prayer . . ."
On and on he went while I closed my ears and turned away my eyes, gone numb from grief.
"Wasn't it a wonderful tribute, Mom?" asked Jory one dark day. "I cried, couldn't help it. Bart humbled himself, Mom, and in front of that huge crowd. I've never seen him humble before. You have to give him credit for doing that."
His dark blue eyes pleaded with me.
"Mom, you've got to cry, too. It's not right for you to just sit and stare into space. It's been two weeks now. You're not alone. You have us. Joel has flown back to that monastery to die there with that cancer he says he has. We'll never see him again. He wrote his last words, saying he didn't want to be buried on Foxworth ground. You have me, you have Toni, Bart, Cindy and your grandchildren. We love you and need you. The twins are wondering why you don't play with them. Don't shut us out. You've always bounced back after every tragedy. Come back this time. Come back to all of us--but come back mostly for Bart's sake, for if you allow yourself to grieve to death, you will destroy him."
For Bart's sake I stayed on in Foxworth Hall, trying to fit myself into a world that didn't really need me anymore.
Nine lonely months passed. In every blue sky I saw Chris's blue eyes. In everything golden I saw the color of his hair. I paused on the streets to stare at young boys who looked as Chris had at their ages; I stared at young men who reminded me of him when he was their age; I gazed longingly at the backs of tall, strong- looking men with blond hair going gray, wistfully hoping they'd turn and I'd see Chris smile at me again. They did turn sometimes, as if they felt the yearning hot blaze of my eyes, and I'd turn away my eyes, for they weren't him, not ever him.
I roamed the woods, the hills, feeling him beside me, just out of reach, but still beside me.
As I walked on and on alone, but for Chris's spirit, it came to me that there was a pattern in our lives, and nothing that had happened was coincidental.
In all ways possible Bart did what he could to bring me back to myself, and I smiled, forced myself to laugh, and in so doing I gave him peace and the confidence he'd always needed to give him a feeling of value.
Yet, yet, who and what was I now that Bart had found himself? That feeling of knowing the pattern grew and grew as I sat often alone in the grand elegance of Foxworth Hall.
Out of all the darkness, the anguish, the apparently hapless tragedies, and pathetic events of our lives, I finally understood. Why hadn't all of Bart's psychiatrists realized when he was young that he was testing, seeking, trying to find the role that suited him best? Through all that childhood agony, throughout his youth, he'd chiseled at his flaws ruthlessly, backing off the ugliness he believed marred his soul, steadfastly holding onto his credence that good eventually won over evil. And in his eyes, Chris and I had been evil.
Finally; at long last, Bart found his niche in the scheme of what had to be. All I had to do was turn on the TV on any Sunday morning and sometimes during midweek and I could see and hear my second son singing, preaching, acknowledged as the most mesmerizing evangelist in the world. Rapier-sharp, his words stabbed into the conscience of everyone, causing money to pour into his coffers by the millions. He used the money to spread his ministry.
Then came the surprise one Sunday morning of seeing Cindy rise and join Bart on the podium. Standing beside him, she linked her arm through his. Bart smiled proudly before he announced, "My sister and I dedicate this song to our mother. Mother, if you are watching, you'll know exactly how much this song means not only to both of us, but to you, as well."
Together, as brother and sister, they sang my favorite hymn . . . and a long time ago I'd given up on religion, thinking it wasn't for me when so many were bigoted, narrow-minded and cruel.
Yet, tears streaked my face . . . and I was crying. After all the months since Chris had been struck down on that highway, I was crying dry that bottomless well of tears.
Bart had hacked off the last rotten bit of Malcolm's genes and had left only the good. To create him, the paper flowers had bloomed in the
dusty attic.
To create him, fires had burned houses, our mother had died, our father, too . . . just to create the leader who would turn mankind away from the road to destruction.
I switched off the TV when Bart's program was over. His was the only one I watched. Not so far away, they were building a huge memorial honoring my Christopher.
THE CHRISTOPHER SHEFFIELD
MEMORIAL CANCER RESEARCH CENTER, it was to be called. In Greenglenna, South Carolina, Bart was also the founder of a grant for struggling young lawyers, and this was called THE BARTHOLOMEW WINSLOW LEGAL GRANT.
I knew Bart was trying to return good for the evil he'd done by denying the man who'd tried his best to be his father. A hundred times I reassured him that Chris would be pleased, very pleased.
Toni had married Jory. The twins adored her. Cindy had a film contract and was a fast-rising star. It seemed strange, after living a lifetime of giving, first to my mother's twins, then to my husbands, and my children and grandchildren, not to be needed, not to have a place of my own. Now I was the odd one out.
"Mom!" Jory told me one day, "Toni is pregnant! You don't know what that does for me. If we have a boy, he will be called Christopher. If we have a girl, she will be Catherine. Now don't you say we can't do that, for we will anyway."
I prayed they'd have a boy like my Christopher, or my Jory, and one day in the future, I prayed Bart would find the right woman to make him happy. And only then did I realize that Toni had been right, he was looking for a woman like me, without my weaknesses, wanting her to have only my strengths, and perhaps with me as a living model--he'd never find her.
"And Mom," Jory had gone on during that same conversation, "I won my first prize, in the watercolor division . . . so I'm on my way to another successful career."
"Just as your father predicted," I answered.
All of this was in my mind, making me vaguely happy for Jory and Toni, happy for Bart and Cindy, as I turned toward the dual winding staircase that would take me up, up.
I had heard the wind from the mountains calling me last night, telling me it was my time to go, and I woke up, knowing what to do.