“Not a game,” Tony said. “At least it wouldn’t have been a game to them. They would have thought of it as a desperate, dangerous necessity.”
“You’ve lost me,” Joshua said.
To Tony, Hilary said, “I knew you were working on an idea when you started asking Mrs. Yancy about the babies having cauls and about how Katherine reacted to that.”
“Yes,” Tony said. “Katherine carrying on about a demon–that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle.”
“For God’s sake,” Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, “stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand.”
“Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud.” Tony shifted in his seat. “Okay, look. This will take a while. I’ll have to go back to the beginning…. To understand what I’m going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I’m theorizing is … a family in which madness has been … sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest.” Tony shifted in his seat again. “Let’s start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn’t have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they’re in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change–but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy.”
“It’s a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they’ll satisfy some perverse desire–to molesting your own child,” Joshua said.
“But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years,” Tony said. “So it mustn’t have been a big step in Leo’s eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy’s girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights–and with an extremely liberal definition of the word ‘property.’ He’d have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions–‘my child’ instead of ‘my child.’ To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used.”
“I’m glad I never met the son of a bitch,” Joshua said. “If I’d ever shaken hands with him, I think I’d still feel dirty.”
“My point,” Tony said, “is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of anything, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner’s loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It’s possible, even likely, that he wasn’t just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There’s a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo’s case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes–and a lot of it with Katherine. We’ve got to figure that he didn’t merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after absolute control. Once he’d broken her physically, he wouldn’t have been satisfied until he’d broken her emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy’s place to have her father’s baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again.”