On the outside.
But inside?
She wondered. She watched, waited, feared the worst.
After all these years, Ellen still wasn’t sure what to think of her
children.
It was a hell of a way to live.
Sometimes she was filled with a fierce pride and love for them.
She wanted to take them in her arms and kiss them, hug them. Sometimes
she wanted to give them all the affection that she never had been able
to give them in the past, but after so many years of guarded feelings
and continuous suspicion, she found it virtually impossible to open her
arms to them and to accept such a dangerous emotional commitment with
equanimity. There were times when she burned with love for Joey and
Amy, times when she ached with a surfeit of unexpressed love, times
when she wept at night, silently, without waking Paul, soaking her
pillow, grieving for her own cold, dead heart.
At other times, however, she still thought she saw something
supernaturally wicked in her progeny. There were terrible days when
she was convinced they were clever, calculating, infinitely evil beings
engaged in an elaborate masquerade.
Seesaw.
Seesaw.
The worst of it was her loneliness. She could not share her fears with
Paul, for then she would have to tell him about Conrad, and he would be
devastated to learn that she had been hiding a checkered past from him
for twenty years.
She knew him well enough now to understand that what she’d done in her
youth would not upset him a tenth as much as the fact that she’d
deceived him about it and had kept on deceiving him for so very long.
So she had to deal with her fear by herself.
It was a hell of a way to live.
Even if she could make herself believe, once ,L’ and for all, that they
were just two kids like any other two kids, even then her worries
wouldn’t be :- at an end. There was still the possibility that one of
Amy’s or Joey’s children would be a monster like Victor. This curse
might strike only one out of every two generations–the mother but not
the child, the grandchild but not the great-grandchild. It might skip
around at random, raising its ugly head when you least expected to see
it. Modern medicine had identified a number of genetically transmitted
diseases and inherited deficiencies that skipped some generations in a
family and struck others, leapfrogging down the decades.
If she could only be sure that her first, monstrous baby had been the
product of Conrad’s rotten, degenerate spermatozoa, if she could just
be certain that her own chromosomes were not corrupted, she would be
able to lay her fear to rest forever. But of course there was no way
she could determine the truth of the matter.
Sometimes she thought that life was too difficult and much too cruel to
be worth the effort of living it.
That was why, now, standing in the kitchen on the night of the day that
she had learned of Amy’s pregnancy, Ellen tossed down the last of the
drink that she had mixed only minutes ago, and she quickly poured
another. She had two crutches: liquor and religion. She could not
have withstood the past twenty-five years without both of those
supports.
Initially, the first year after she left Conrad, religion alone was
sufficient to her needs. She had gotten a job as a waitress, had
become selfsupporting after a rocky start, and had spent most of her
spare time in church. She had found that prayer soothed her nerves as
well as her spirit, that confession was good for the soul, and that a
meager Communion wafer taken on the tongue during Mass was far more
nourishing than any six-course meal.
At the end of that first year on her own, more than two years after she
had run from home to join the carnival and to be with Conrad, she felt
fairly good about herself. She still suffered from bad dreams most
nights.
She was still wrestling with her conscience, trying to make up her mind
whether she had sinned terribly or had merely done God’s work when she