On, Off

“There was a screaming fight. Daddy struck Mama, then ran out of the house. He didn’t return for – days? Weeks? A long time. Mama paced a lot, I remember. Then Daddy did come back. He looked ghastly, wouldn’t even speak to Mama, and if she tried to touch him, he struck her or flung her off. The hate! And he – he cried. All the time, it seemed to us. I daresay he came home because of us, but he dragged himself around.”

“Do you think that your father went looking for Mrs. Catone, but couldn’t find her?”

The watery blue eyes looked into a blind infinity. “Well, it’s the logical explanation, isn’t it? Divorce was quite condoned even then, yet Daddy preferred to have Mrs. Catone as a servant in his house. Mama for keeping up appearances, Mrs. Catone for his carnal pleasure. To have married a mulatto from the Caribbean would have ruined him socially, and Daddy cared about his social status. After all, he was a Ponsonby of Holloman.”

How detached she is, Carmine thought. “Did your mother know that the money had gone in the Wall Street crash?”

“Not until after Daddy died.”

“Did she kill him?”

“Oh, yes. They had the worst fight of all that afternoon – we could hear it upstairs. We couldn’t make out all that they shouted at each other, but we heard enough to realize that Daddy had found Mrs. Catone and Emma. That he intended to leave Mama. He put on his best suit and drove away in his car. Mama locked the three of us in Charles’s bedroom and left in our second car. It was beginning to snow.” Her voice sounded childish, as if the sheer force of those memories was pushing her backward through time. “Round and round, snowflakes swirling just the way they do inside a glass ball. We waited for such a long time! Then we heard Mama’s car and started banging on the door. Mama opened it and we rushed out – oh, we were dying to use the bathroom! The boys let me go first. When I came out, Mama was standing in the hall with a baseball bat in her right hand. It was covered in blood, and so was she. Then Charles and Morton came out of the bathroom, saw her, and took her away. They undressed and bathed her, but I was so hungry I’d gone down to the kitchen. Charles and Morton built a fire on the old hearth where the Aga is now, and burned the baseball bat and her clothes. So sad! Morton was never the same again.”

“You mean that until then he’d been – well, normal?”

“Quite normal, Captain, though he hadn’t yet gone to school – Mama didn’t let us start until we were eight. But after that day Morton never spoke another word. Or admitted that the world existed. Oh, the rages! Mama was afraid of nothing and no one. Except for Morton in a rage. Rabid, uncontrollable.”

“Did the police come?”

“Of course. We said that Mama had been at home with us, in bed with a migraine. When they told her that Daddy was dead, she went into hysterics. Bob Smith’s mother came over, fed us, and sat with Mama. A few days later we found out that our money had gone in the crash.”

Carmine’s knees were aching; the chair was far too low. He got up and took a turn around the confines of the porch, saw out of the corner of his eye that Claire Ponsonby was indeed ready to go. The back of the station wagon, parked in the driveway, was overstuffed with bags, boxes, a matching pair of small trunks that dated to an era of more leisure and style in travel. Not wanting to sit down again, he leaned his rump against the rail.

“Did you know that Mrs. Catone and Emma died that night too?” he asked. “Your mother used the baseball bat on all three.”

Claire’s face froze into a look of absolute, genuine shock; the foot that had been teasing the dog flew up as if it jerked in a seizure. Carmine poured a glass of the lemonade, wondering if he should try to find something stronger. But Claire drank the contents of the glass thirstily and recovered her composure.

“So that was what became of them,” she said slowly, “and all the while Charles and I continued to wonder. No one ever told us who the other two were, just talked of a gang of hoboes who went on a killing spree. We assumed Mama used their activities to hide her own deed, that the other two were gang members.”

Suddenly she lurched forward in her chair, held out a hand to Carmine imploringly. “Tell me all of it, Captain! What? How?”

“I’m sure you were right in thinking that your father told your mother he was leaving her to start a new life. Certainly he had found Mrs. Catone and Emma, but when he went to meet them at the railroad station it was for the first time because the Catones were derelict. No money, not even any food. The two thousand dollars he was carrying probably represented all he could rake up to make that new start,” Carmine said. “They were hiding out in the snow, which makes me think that your mother did have the ability to frighten people badly. Poor man. He told your mother too much, and three people died.”

“All these years, and I never, never knew…Never even suspected…” Her eyes turned to his face as if they could see, gleaming with emotion. “Isn’t life ironic?”

“Would you like me to get you a drink drink, ma’am?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She drew up her legs and tucked them under her chair.

“Can you tell me a little about your life after that?”

One shoulder went up, the mouth went down. “What would you like to know? Mama was never the same again either.”

“Did no one on the outside try to help?”

“You mean people like the Smiths and Courtenays? Mama called it sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. A few doses of Mama’s rudeness worked better than castor oil. They stopped trying, left us alone. We got along, Captain. Yes, we got along. There was a small income that Mama supplemented by selling land. Her own people helped, I think. Charles went to the Dormer Day School, so did I, and she paid the fees regularly.”

“What about Morton?”

“Some education officer visited, took one look at him and never came back. Charles told everyone he was autistic, but that was for the benefit of the stickybeaks. Autism doesn’t happen the day your mother murders your father. That’s a psychiatric horse of a profoundly different color. Though we were fond of him, you know. His rages were never directed at Charles or me, only at Mama and any strangers who came calling.”

“Did it surprise you when he died so unexpectedly?”

“Better to say that it shocked me witless. Until this one, 1939 was the worst year of my life. I’m sitting at my books studying and a grey wall comes down – wham! I’m blind for life. One visit to the eye doctor, and then I’m on a train to Cleveland. No sooner do I get to the blind school than Charles calls me to say that Morton is dead. Just – fell down dead!” She shuddered.

“You seem to imply that your mother wasn’t quite mentally stable before January of 1930, but obviously she hid it well. So what happened at the end of 1941 to trigger real dementia?”

Claire’s face twisted. “What happened just after Pearl Harbor? Charles said he was getting married. All of twenty years old, but approaching his majority. In pre-med at Chubb. He met some girl from Smith at a dance and it was love at first sight. The only way Mama could break it up was to pull out all the stops. I mean, she went stark, raving mad. The girl fled. I volunteered to come home to look after Mama – almost twenty-two years, as it turned out. Not that I wouldn’t have done even more for Charles than a tedious thing like that. Don’t assume I was Mama’s slave – I learned to control her. But while she lived Charles and I could not indulge our love of food, wine, music to the full. Between you, Captain, you and Mama have ruined my life. Three precious years of having Charles all to myself, that’s the sum total of my memories. Three precious years…”

Fascinated, Carmine found himself wondering if what Danny Marciano reckoned was right. Had brother and sister been lovers?

“You disliked your mother very much,” he said.

“I loathed her! Loathed her! Do you realize,” she went on with sudden fierceness, “that from Charles’s thirteenth to his eighteenth birthday he lived in the closet under the stairs?” The rage evaporated; a frightened spark flickered in her eyes, vanished as her hands went up to fumble with her tongue. “Oh. I didn’t mean to say that. No, that was something I didn’t mean to say. It got past me. Past me!”

“Better out than in,” said Carmine easily. “Go on. You may as well now you’ve said it.”

“Years later Charles told me she’d caught him masturbating. It sent her into a frenzy. She shrieked and screeched and spat and bit and punched – he never would fight Mama back. I fought back all the time, but Charles was the rabbit under the cobra’s spell. She never spoke to him again, which broke his poor heart. When he came home from school or from Bob Smith’s, into the closet he went. It was a big closet with a lightbulb in it. Oh, Mama