On Off (41 page)

Fascinated, Carmine found himself wondering if what Danny Marciano reckoned was right. Had brother and sister been lovers?

“You disliked your mother very much,” he said.

“I loathed her!
Loathed her!
Do you realize,” she went on with sudden fierceness, “that from Charles’s thirteenth to his eighteenth birthday he lived in the closet under the stairs?” The rage evaporated; a frightened spark flickered in her eyes, vanished as her hands went up to fumble with her tongue. “Oh. I didn’t mean to say that. No, that was something I didn’t mean to say. It got past me. Past
me!”

“Better out than in,” said Carmine easily. “Go on. You may as well now you’ve said it.”

“Years later Charles told me she’d caught him masturbating. It sent her into a frenzy. She shrieked and screeched and spat and bit and punched — he never would fight Mama back. I fought back all the time, but Charles was the rabbit under the cobra’s spell. She never spoke to him again, which broke his poor heart. When he came home from school or from Bob Smith’s, into the closet he went. It was a big closet with a lightbulb in it. Oh, Mama was
so
considerate! He had a mattress on the floor and a hard chair — there was a shelf he could use as a table. She passed in a tray with his meal and removed it when he’d finished. He made water and had his bowel motions in a bucket he had to empty and wash out every morning. Until I left for Cleveland, it was my duty to give him meals, but I wasn’t allowed to speak to him.”

Carmine was gasping. “But that’s ridiculous!” he cried. “He went to a very good school — it had counselors, a principal — all he had to do was
tell
someone! They would have acted at once.”

“To tell wasn’t in Charles’s nature,” Claire said, chin up. “He adored Mama, he blamed Daddy for everything. All he had to do was defy her, but he wouldn’t. The closet was his punishment for a dreadful sin, and he chose to take his punishment. The day he turned eighteen, she let him out. But she never spoke to him.” A shrug. “That was Charles. Perhaps it enables you to see why I still refuse to believe that he did any of those terrible things. Charles could never have raped or tortured, he was too passive.”

Carmine straightened, flexed his fingers, a little numb from gripping the rail too tightly. “God knows I have no wish to add to your sorrows, Miss Ponsonby, but I do assure you that Charles was the Connecticut Monster. Were he not, your fresh start in Arizona or New Mexico would not have been funded by Major F. Sharp Minor.” He moved to the steps. “I must go. No, don’t get up. I thank you for all that, it solved a puzzle that’s tormented me for months. Their names are Louisa and Emma Catone? Good. I know where they’re buried. Now I’m going to give them a monument. Do you know if Mrs. Catone professed any religious beliefs?”

“Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool policeman, Captain. Yes, she was a Catholic. I suppose I ought to contribute to the monument, as Emma was my half sister, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t.
Arrividerci.”

Thus had the sharing begun. Charles thought of the Catone Room as a surgeon’s paradise a thousand feet in the air. Whereas Morton knew the Catone Room was the tunnel’s orgasmic flowering under the silent heaviness of the ground. Morton, Morton, on, off. Blind worm, blind mole in the darkness, digging away with a magic button in his mind that could switch his eyes on or off. On, off, on, off, on, off. Diggety-dig, on, off.

After she killed him Mama transferred the trunks to her car; we looked inside them and stole them while her clothes and the baseball bat were burning merrily. While I hid them in my tiny appendix of a tunnel, Charles began a tunnel more to his liking, burrowing into Mama’s mind. Over and over he whispered to her that the Catone affair was a figment of her imagination, that she hadn’t killed Daddy, that Catone rhymed with atone and Emma was a book by Jane Austen. When she needed money we gave it to her, though we never told her where the trunks were. Then after that traitor Roosevelt abolished the gold standard in 1933, we took Mama and the trunks to the Sunnington Bank in Cleveland, where, since her family owned the bank, we had no trouble exchanging the old bills for new ones. In those Depression days many people preferred to hoard their money in cash. And by then she was the helpless puppet of two demure boys scarcely into adolescence.

Getting the money home again wasn’t easy, on, off. Someone in the bank talked. But Charles masterminded our strategy with all his extraordinary brilliance. When it came to logistics and design, Charles was a genius. How am I going to replace him? Who will understand except a brother?

Home again, Charles’s tunnel into Mama’s mind concentrated on the money, how Roosevelt had stolen it to fund his plot against everything our America stood for, from liberty to letting Europe stew in its own well-deserved juice. Yes, both our tunnels grew, and who is to say which of them was the more beautiful? A tunnel to insanity, a tunnel to the Catone Room, on, off.

Mama never had a little girl. Just three boys. On, off, on, off. But she craved a little girl, and what Mama wanted, Mama got. So she dressed the last one of us as a girl from the day of his birth. People believe what their eyes tell them, on, off. Up to and including you, Captain Delmonico. We Ponsonby boys all look like Mama: we make passable females but namby-pamby males. None of Daddy’s thrusting masculinity. Oh, how he used to give it to Mrs. Catone! Charles and I watched them through a hole in the wall, on, off, on, off.

Dearest Charles, always thinking of ways to serve my needs. It would have been so much harder after Claire went blind if he had not been inspired to dress me in Claire’s clothes and send me to Cleveland, on, off. As soon as I arrived there, he put a limp rubber pillow over Claire’s face and Morton the Mole became Claire the Blind. On, off, on, off.