Cutler 03 - Twilight's Child

Sue wasn't around; I could never forgive her for what she had done with Christie. I let it be known that I thought it had been cruel and sick. Of course, she continued to deny she had done it. Whenever she did return to the hotel for a weekend the following fall, she didn't miss an opportunity to mock my upcoming marriage to Jimmy.
    "Is he going to get married in his uniform?" she taunted one day, "and say 'Yes, sir' instead of 'I do'?"
    One of her favorite things was to belittle my engagement ring. "It looks like a piece of glass," she would say, "but I'm sure Jimbo thought he was buying a diamond."
    "Don't you dare call him Jimbo," I flared, my eyes full of fury. She would just throw her hair over her shoulders, laugh and saunter away, satisfied she had gotten a rise out of me.
    I thought she grew meaner and meaner with each passing day, and I found it hard to accept that we shared any blood at all. True, we had similar hair color and eyes, and there were characteristics in both our faces that resembled Mother's facial features, but our personalities were like night and day. And Clara Sue continued battling her weight. Though her figure was fuller and more voluptuous than mine, if she wasn't careful, she put on extra pounds. She had no self-control when it came to sweets and was constantly on a diet. She never lacked interest from the opposite sex, and because of her increasingly promiscuous behavior—so I heard—she had a following of boys at school.
    Philip rarely came home. He was doing exceedingly well at college, making the dean's list, becoming president of his fraternity and captain of his rowing team. Occasionally, when Mother decided to act like a mother, she would show me and Mrs. Boston some of the clippings about him in the college newspaper.
    Neither Philip nor Clara Sue seemed concerned or interested in their father's increasingly bizarre behavior and physical degeneration. I could tell that they both viewed him as an embarrassment. I tried bringing him out of his depression by asking him to do real work from time to time and bringing-him real problems, but he rarely completed any task, and eventually someone else had to do it.
    The only time he seemed to snap out of the doldrums was when Sissy or I brought Christie around to see him. He would permit her to crawl around his cluttered office and touch everything. By the time she was fourteen months old she was picking things up and holding them out, saying, "Waa?" We all knew that meant she was asking, "What is this?" Randolph had great patience for her. I realized she was providing him the only respite in his otherwise dark and dreary day. He would answer every time. She could spend hours in his office questioning him about every single item, from a desk weight to a small baseball trophy he had won in high school. He would sit there and talk to her as if she were twenty years old, explaining the history behind everything, and Christie would stare at him, wide-eyed, her body still, listening as if she understood.
    Mr. Dorfman had been right about the hotel running itself. It was as if Grandmother Cutler had tossed a ball into space and it continued to fly under that initial momentum. Of course, guest after guest pulled me aside to tell me how much he or she missed her. I would have to pretend I did, too. What did interest and fascinate me were some of the stories the old-timers told about her. Some of these guests went back thirty years or more at the hotel.
    The woman they described was clearly a different person. Their descriptions were filled with adjectives like "warm" and "loving." Everyone talked about how she made that extra effort to make him or her feel at home. One elderly lady told me that coming to Cutler's Cove was like "visiting with my own family." How could she have put on one face with these people and another, drastically different face with me and with Mother? I wondered.
    Despite my distaste for her, I couldn't help being intrigued, and I would often spend hours thumbing through papers in the file cabinets, reading letters from guests and copies of letters she had sent to guests, searching for clues, for an understanding of the woman who loomed so hatefully in my mind even now, nearly two years after her passing.
    No one except Randolph—not even Mrs. Boston—had gone into Grandmother Cutler's room upstairs in the family section of the hotel after her death. Her things remained just as they had been the day she had died—her