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Prologue
. Imagine you're a sixteen-year-old girl growing up in a small community where everyone you knew and who knew you was aware that your mother had murdered someone when she was your age and was now and has been in a mental institution ever since.
Imagine knowing that whenever people were looking at you and whispering, they were probably wondering if you had inherited sin and madness so that eventually you would do something terrible, too.
Imagine wondering about it yourself every time you looked at yourself in a mirror.
Imagine trying to have a best friend, to be accepted and trusted, but never succeeding because everyone's parents were afraid you would somehow contaminate their children.
Imagine waiting, like someone listening to a time bomb ticking away inside you, waiting for the explosion, when suddenly, without any sort of warning, the evil genes inside you finally joined into some genetic whip and snapped, sending you out in the night to do something horrendous, and in doing so confirming what everyone had thought--that despite all the warmth and love you were given, you could not deny being your mother's daughter. You could not deny yourself and your own destiny.
If you can imagine all that, you might be able to understand who I was and who I tried to be.
And why it took me so long to grow my own wings and fly away.
My Mother's Daughter
I sit by the window in the attic that looks out on the wooded area behind the Doral House, just the way I imagined my mother had done more than sixteen years ago when she was about my age. This year heavy March and early April rains had turned the trees and foliage so plush and thick in upstate New York that sunlight was barely able to reach the forest floor. While I sit here, I try to envision and understand what it was like to feel like a bird in a cage, especially a bird that had flown into the cage deliberately and then locked the door behind her, for that was what my mother had done. However, unlike a bird, she couldn't sing or flutter about too noisily.
My mother had turned herself into a silent prisoner, mute and ghostly, and even though I was created up in this attic, fathered by my grandparents' son, Jesse, while he and my aunt Zipporah hid my mother in this attic after she had killed her stepfather, Harry Pearson, I was, for all practical purposes, born without parents.
Almost from the first day I was nurtured and began my relationship with the people caring for me, the people who were supposed to love me and whom I was supposed to love, I understood them to be Grandma and Grandpa, not Mommy and Daddy.
Neither pretended to be anything more. Of course, I can't remember exactly when I heard the words Mama and Papa, Mother and Father, Mommy and Daddy. Maybe I first heard them watching television, watching other little girls and boys my age being cared for by younger people. Even then I began to feel I was different and began to understand that someone else, someone very important, was missing from my world, my life. Now, years later, I still feel like someone who had part of herself amputated even before she was born.
I imagine a child psychologist would have a field day with all this. He or she might even decide to do an article about me for some therapy magazine. My classmates--and even my teachers--would not be surprised if my picture appeared on the front page of Child Psychology or some such publication. I'm sure I don't do myself any good or change their minds either by keeping so much to myself or, especially, by the way I dress. I can't help being drawn to darker colors and blouses, skirts and shoes that detract from my appearance. I wear clothing usually a size or two too big, things women my grandmother's age would wear. In fact the other girls call my wardrobe Granny clothes. They bob their heads and cluck like hens about me whenever I walk by in the school hallways.
I've always deliberately kept my hair cut a little too short, and, unlike most girls my age, I never wore lipstick, trimmed my eyebrows or used any makeup. I had no mother or older sister to show me how, and my grandmother has never offered to do so, but I'm sure
I've refrained from doing any of those things for other reasons, too.
I readily admit one reason to myself. I am fully aware that I have made choices that will keep boys from noticing me or caring about me, including deliberately wearing clothing that makes me uninteresting. The reason is simply that I wish I really was invisible or at least slowly disappearing, and being ignored helps me feel as if I am. I know all this contributes toward why people think me somewhat weird, so in a real sense, I suppose I am at fault. I am a bit mad.
And it isn't just my fellow students who remark about me. Over the past sixteen years, I probably heard some adult whisper something like "That girl should see a psychiatrist" a dozen times if I heard it once, and even if people didn't say it, they surely thought it. I could see it in their eyes as they followed me along while I walked with my head down, skulking through the village of Sandburg or to the Doral House.
It was interesting to me that I could not refer to where I lived as home. To this day I call it the Doral House, as if I knew instinctively that I was living in a place that was as temporary for me as the various small hotels and tourist houses in this New York mountain area were for vacationers.
Other girls and boys my age would say they had to get home, whereas I would say, "I have to get back to the Doral House." I made it sound like a safe haven, like my private embassy where I had diplomatic privileges and immunities. Once I was shut up inside it, no one could bother me, no one could send any accusatory darts from his or her eyes, and none of their dark whispers could penetrate the walls.
In a very true sense, then, my mother, the woman I had yet to meet, had turned me into a prisoner as well. That was why it wasn't all that difficult for me to spend so much time alone up here and why I would sit by this attic window for hours looking out at the world the way she had. The questions I would ask myself from the moment I understood the story, as well as the questions I knew to be on everyone else's minds, were, What else did she pass on to me? What similar demon hovered under my breast? What would I become? Would I end up in an attic of my own making?
As I imagined her doing, I would sprawl and put my ear to the floor to listen to the muffled sounds and voices below to try to picture what everyone was doing. I wanted to feel exactly the way she had felt. For most of her day, this was her only contact with anyone. I thought the loneliness would have been enough to drive her mad, even if she had come up here in a clearly sane state of mind.
The only pictures I have of my mother were the pictures my aunt Zipporah had of the two of them. If looking at these pictures could wear the image down, they would have disappeared long ago. It was like studying the Mona Lisa to see what clues I could find in that smile, those eyes, the turn of her mouth, the way she held her head. I even studied how my mother cupped her fingers against her hip in one picture. Did she always do that? Did it mean she was always tense, afraid? Who was she? What was her voice like? Was mine at all similar? What about her laugh? Was it short and insecure like mine, or was she totally uninhibited?
Babies cling so firmly to all those magical little things about their mothers. They are reassured by their mothers' smiles. Their mothers' love and the melodic flow of their mothers' praises help them feel safe, comforted, but, most important, never alone. I had to imagine all that, pretend I had heard it. Was it part of my madness that I thought I could hear her whispering up here or thought I had caught a glimpse of her dressed in a shadow's movement caused by the sun and clouds and especially the moon? Or was it all just my desperate need to know?
