“Of course.” The old lady gulped air and felt it painful inside her. “I intended Joshua to find you together and throw him out, and forbid him ever to come here again.”
Caroline sat down as if her legs had given way, her skirts all squashed around her.
“Why? What has he ever done that you should even dislike him, let alone do something. . so. .” She was lost for words, and her voice trailed off helplessly. She looked as if all understanding had fled from her.
There was no alternative. Caroline had to know. It would only be harder if she left it. Now was the time. Half a century of secret pain was about to be opened up without comfort or mercy.
“Because he knows. He must!” the old lady said hoarsely. “I thought I couldn’t live with that. Now I am going to have to.”
“Knows?” Caroline shook her head a little. “Knows what? What could he possibly know that would be worth. . that?”
Finally the nightmare was real, something no longer private. It was fixed inescapably, dragged from the darkness of the inner soul and spread wide open. Even if the old lady could forget it, even for a day, others would always remember. Somehow she had lost control of it.
Caroline leaned forward in her chair, crushing her skirt further. “Mama-in-law! What is it you think Samuel knows?” She moistened her lips. “Were you not married to Father Ellison?”
The old lady wanted to laugh. That would have been shameful- of course it would-and it would mean both her children would be illegitimate. But somehow it looked almost trivial compared with what she would have to tell Caroline.
“Yes, I was married to him. He divorced Alys perfectly legally, and I knew of her existence. My father saw to all that.”
“Then what?” Caroline demanded. “It obviously has to do with Alys, or Samuel could not know about it.”
“Yes it has. It has to do with why she left. Have you never wondered why she did something so extreme, so dangerous, and both legally and socially unacceptable?”
“Yes, of course I have,” Caroline said instantly. “But I could hardly ask. I assumed she ran off with someone, and then he abandoned her, and of course she would not then go back to Grandpapa. She must have left before she knew she was with child. No one could doubt Samuel is Grandpapa’s.”
“That is what one would assume,” Mariah agreed very quietly. “It is not what happened.”
There must have been something in her voice which struck Caroline in a new way, more deeply, and with a stab of tragedy. She barely moved, but there was a gentleness in her eyes, an attention which no longer made judgments.
“Why did she go?” she said in little more than a whisper.
This was the moment. It was like plunging into black, stinking water, ice-cold to take the breath away.
“Because he forced her into unnatural practices-painful, degrading things no human should do. .” It was like hearing someone else’s voice.
Caroline drew in her breath as if she had been struck. Her face was white to the lips, her eyes hollow. She started to speak, then faltered and fell silent. She began to shake her head in short, sharp little movements.
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me,” the old lady said quietly. “No one would. It is not something you can tell. . not anyone. . not ever.”
“But. . but you didn’t know Alys!” Caroline protested. “Samuel didn’t tell you. .” Again she stopped. She stared fixedly into the old lady’s eyes. In all the years they had known each other they had never met in a look so honest. Caroline took in a long, shaking breath and let it out in a sigh. “You mean. .” She put her hand up to her lips as if to stifle the next words. “You mean he. . you. .”
“Don’t say it!” Mariah pleaded. This was absurd, futile. She ached to be believed, and here she was begging Caroline not to give words to the truth.
“Un. . natural?” Caroline struggled with the word.
Mariah shut her eyes. “I believe men do it to each other. . at least some men do. It is known as sodomy. It is more painful than you can imagine. . against your will. It is your pain which. . which gives him pleasure.” The rage and humiliation of it poured back over her, bringing her body out in sweat. “He made me strip naked, on my hands and knees, like an animal-”
“Stop it!” Caroline’s voice was high and shrill. “Stop it! Stop it!” She put up her hands, palms outward, to push it away.
“You can’t imagine your father-in-law like that, can you?” Mariah whispered. “Or me? Together on the floor like dogs, me weeping with pain and humiliation, wishing I could die, and him more and more excited, shouting, unable to control himself until he was finished.”
“Stop it!” Caroline moved her fingers to her mouth. “Don’t!”
“You can’t listen?” The old lady was shaking so violently with the memory of it she could hardly speak without stuttering. “I l-lived with it. . for years. . all my married life. He died of a stroke like that, naked, on the floor, without his clothes. I’d prayed for him to d-die. . and he did! I crept away from him and washed myself-he often made me bleed-then went back to look at him. He was still dead, lying on the floor on his face. I washed him, and put his nightshirt on him before I called anyone.”
There was horror in Caroline’s eyes, but denial was slowly being replaced by the beginning of pity.
“You always said. . you said you loved him. .” she began. “He was so. . such a wonderful man. . you said you were so happy!”
The old lady felt the bitter heat of shame in her cheeks. “What would you have said?” she asked. “The truth?”
“No. .” There were tears in Caroline’s voice. “Of course not. I don’t know. . I don’t know what I would have done. I can’t imagine it. . I can’t. . I don’t know. It. .” She did not say it was not true, but it was there in her voice, her face, the stiff, tight angle of her shoulders.
“You can’t believe it!” It was a challenge, laying bare her own humiliation and her cowardice all those years. No one would believe that Alys left, her courage, her dignity, and Mariah remained, to be used like an animal.
“I. .” Caroline stopped, lifting her hands helplessly.
“Why didn’t I go. . as Alys did?” The words were torn out, like barbed wire. “Because I am a coward.” There it was, the lowest ugliness of all, the loathing, the self-disgust, not just that she had been reduced to bestiality, her human dignity stripped from her, but that she had stayed and allowed it to go on happening. She made no excuses. There were none. Whatever Caroline thought of her, it could not equal the contempt she had for herself.
Caroline looked at the old woman’s face, tight and crumpled with pain and years of bitterness. The self- hatred was naked in her eyes, and the despair.
She rejected the idea. It was obscene. And yet it made a hideous sense. Part of her believed it already. But if it was true, it shattered so much of her world, the ideals and the people she had trusted. If behind the self- composed manner, the smile and the Sunday prayers, Edmund Ellison had been a sexual sadist, submitting his wife to humiliating cruelties in the secrecy of their own bedroom, then who, anywhere, was what he seemed? If even his familiar face hid ugliness so appalling her imagination refused to grasp it, then what was safe. . anywhere?
And yet looking at the old woman in front of her, she could not push the truth of it away. Something terrible had happened to her. Something had precipitated the years of anger and cruelty she had exercised on her family. The hatred she seemed to feel for the world, anyone and everyone, was really for herself. She saw the worst in others because she saw it in her own heart. And for years she had despised her inability to fight against it, to defend her humanity from degradation and pain. She was a coward, and she knew it. She had submitted, and endured, rather than run away into the dangerous and unknown as Alys had done, alone, penniless, with nothing but her courage and her desperation. No wonder Samuel admired his mother so profoundly.
Mariah had stayed with her husband, living with it, night after night, putting on a brave, smooth face every day, then going up to her bedroom knowing what would happen. . and it had, year after year, until he had finally died and set her free. Except that she was not free, she was as much imprisoned as when he had been alive, because the memory and the loathing were still there, locked inside her.
“Did you really think Samuel would tell anyone?” Caroline said gently, not knowing why these words came to her lips.
There were tears in the old lady’s eyes, although no one else would ever know whether they were grief, rage or self-pity.
“He knew. . at least. .” Suddenly her eyes were hollow with doubt. “I think he did. He might have told, but I
