Joshua said, “He was taking quite a chance, letting her out from under his thumb for so long.”
“Apparently, he didn’t think so,” Mrs. Yancy said. “And he was proved right. In all those months without him around, she never began to come out of his thrall. She never told anyone about the things he’d been doing to her. She never even considered telling anyone. She was a broken spirit, I tell you. Enslaved. That’s really the word for it. She was enslaved, not like a plantation worker or anything like that. Mentally and emotionally enslaved. And when he came back from Europe, he made her drop out of college. He took her back to St. Helena with him, and she didn’t resist. She couldn’t resist. She didn’t know how.”
The mantel clock chimed the hour. Two measured tones. The notes echoed softly from the parlor ceiling.
Joshua had been sitting on the edge of his chair. Now he slid back until his head touched the antimacassar again. He was pale, and dark rings circled his eyes. His white hair was no longer fluffy; it was lank, lifeless. In the short time that Hilary had known him, he appeared to her to have aged. He looked wrung-out.
She knew how he felt. The Frye family history was an unrelievedly grim tale of man’s inhumanity to man. The more they poked around in that mess, the more depressed they became. The heart could not help but respond, and the spirit sagged as one awful discovery followed another.
As if talking to himself, getting it straight in his own mind, Joshua said, “So they went back to St. Helena, and they picked up their sick relationship where they’d left off, and eventually they made a mistake, and she got pregnant–and no one up there in St. Helena ever suspected a thing.”
Tony said. “Incredible. Usually a simple lie is the best because it’s the only kind that won’t trip you up. The story about Mary Gunther was so damned involved! It was a juggling act. They had to keep a dozen balls in the air at once. Yet they brought it off without a hitch.”
“Oh, hardly without a hitch,” Mrs. Yancy said. “There was certainly a hitch or two.”
“Such as?”
“Such as–the day she left St. Helena to come to my place to have her baby, she told people up there that this imaginary Mary Gunther had sent word that the baby had arrived. Now that was stupid. It really was. Katherine said she was going to San Francisco to pick up the child. She told them Mary’s message mentioned a lovely baby, but neglected to say whether it was a boy or a girl. That was Katherine’s pathetic way of covering for herself, since she couldn’t know what her baby’s sex was until it was born. Dumb. She should have known better. That was her only mistake–saying that the child was born before she left St. Helena. Ah, I know she was a complete nervous wreck. I know she wasn’t thinking straight. She couldn’t have been a very well-balanced woman after all that Leo had done to her over the years. And being pregnant, having to hide it under all those girdles, then Leo’s death coming at a time when she needed him most–that was bound to drive her even further over the edge. She was out of her head, and she didn’t think it out well enough.”
“I don’t understand,” Joshua said. “Why was it a mistake for her to say Mary’s baby had already been born? Where’s the hitch?”
Stroking the cat, Mrs. Yancy said, “What she should have told the people in St. Helena was that the Gunther baby was about to arrive, that it hadn’t been born yet, but that she was going to San Francisco to be with Mary. That way she wouldn’t have been committed to the story that there was one baby. But she didn’t think of that. She didn’t realize what might happen. She told everyone that it was just one baby, already in hand. Then she came to my place and gave birth to twins.”
Hilary said, “Twins?”
“Damn,” Tony said.