never be an attractive filly, mind you, more on the sturdy side than a
fashion model, thick legs and all that, but quite feminine enough.”
Frank remained vacant-eyed and detached, but a muscle in his left cheek
twitched twice.
The bourbon apparently relaxed the physician, for he sat behind his desk
again, leaned forward, and clasped his hands around the glass.
“In 1959, when Roselle was thirteen, Cynthia died. Killed herself,
actually. Blew her brains out. The following year, about seven months
after his sister’s suicide, Yarnell came to the office with his
daughter-that is, with Roselle. He never called her his daughter,
maintaining the fiction that she was only his bastard niece. Anyway,
Roselle was pregnant at fourteen, same age at which Cynthia had given
birth to her.”
“Good God!” Bobby said.
The shocks kept piling one atop another with such speed that Julie was
almost ready to grab the whiskey bottle off the desk, drink straight
from it, and never mind that it was Fogarty’s booze.
Enjoying their reactions, Fogarty sipped the bourbon and gave them time
to absorb the shock.
Julie said,
“Yarnell raped the daughter he had fathered by his own sister?”
Fogarty waited a little longer, savoring the moment. Then: “No, no. He
found the girl repellent, and I’m confident he wouldn’t have touched
her. I’m sure what Roselle told me was the truth.” He sipped more
bourbon.
“Cynthia had developed quite a religious streak between the time she
gave birth to Roselle and the day she killed herself, and she had passed
on that passion for God to Roselle. The girl knew the Bible backward
and forward. So Roselle came in here, pregnant. Said she’d decided she
should have a child. Said God had made her cial-that’s what she called
hermaphroditism, specie bmause she was to be a pure vessel by which
blessed child could be brought into the world. Therefore she had colled
the semen from her male half and mechanically inserted it in her female
half.” Bobby shot up from the sofa as if one of its springs had stuck
him, and he grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey from the desk.
“You have another glass?”
Fogarty pointed to a bar cabinet in the corner, which Julie had not
noticed before. Bobby opened the double doors, revealing not only more
glasses but additional fifths of Wild Turkey Evidently the physician
kept a bottle in his desk drawerso he would not have to walk across the
room for it. Bobby poured two glasses full, with no ice, and brought
one back to Julie.
To Fogarty, she said,
“Of course, I never thought Ros was barren. She did bear children, we
know that. But I sumed you meant the male part of her was sterile.”
“Fertile as a male and as a female. She couldn’t actually join herself
to herself, so to speak. So she resorted to,artificial semination, as I
said.”
Late that afternoon, in the office in Newport, when he had tried to
explain how traveling with Frank was like a sled ride off the edge of
the world, Julie had not really understood why he was so unnerved by the
experience. Now she thought she had an inkling of what he had meant,
for the of the Pollard family’s relationships and sexual identities. Her
skin crawled and filled her with a dark suspicion that nat was even
stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than had feared.
“Yarnell wanted me to abort the fetus, and abortion was fairly lucrative
sideline in those days, though illegal and kept hushed. But the girl
had hidden her pregnancy from him for seven months, as he and Cynthia
had tried to hide a pregnancy fourteen years earlier. It was much too
late for an abortion then. The girl would’ve died, from hemorrhaging.
Besides, I would no more have aborted that fetus than I’d have shot
myself in the foot. Imagine the degree of inbreeding involved here:
hermaphroditic child of brother-sister incest impregnates herself. Her
child’s mother is also its father. Its grandmother is also its
great-aunt, and its grandfather is its great-uncle! One tight genetic
line-and genes damaged by Yarnell’s use of hallucinogenics, remember.
Virtually a guarantee of a freak of one kind or another, and I wouldn’t