SIBLING RIVALRY
One of the most persistent themes in the world’s literatures is that of twins whose identical appearance leads to mistaken identities, substitutions, and farcical or tragic human interplays. Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Jupiter and Leda, moved from Roman mythology to wheel overhead as the constellation Gemini. And in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare turns his plot on the identical twins Viola and Sebastian. “My Sister and I,” in turn, plays a remarkable new variation on this ancient theme which is as compelling as it is unexpected. Jean L. Backus has been a professional writer most of her adult life and a teacher of writing for the past several years. She writes mainstream novels (Dusha) under her own name, and spy-thrillers (Troika, Fellow-Traveller, Traitor’s Wife) under the pen name of David Montross. - J.G.
Some twins are truly identical and some are not; some are early friends and grow into jealous enmity at a later date. And then consider my sister Celia and me, two girls so mutually dependent we hardly ever thought of ourselves as individuals. Naturally there were some differences, mostly of temperament, for Celia was imaginative, while I had a better mind. But in most respects we got along well enough. Nobody ever made mental demands on either of us, and certainly we had everything material with which to be comfortable and happy.
Our situation was privileged because of family standing and wealth, and we grew up with servants and a gardener to care for the great park that surrounded the old Mason house on the city’s edge. Because we had each other and Father, plus constant attention from Eleanor, our nurse and governess, we hardly missed the pleasures of going to school and making friends.
Father was a dear man. I could imagine him before our mother died when we were born. At that time he would have been about twenty-eight, a young and vigorous veteran of the Korean War, a member of various social and fraternal organizations, and a senior partner in Mason and Heathly because our grandfather had founded the profitable investment firm. Probably our parents had entertained a good deal. He was the only surviving member of the socially attractive Mason family, and she, although an orphan, came from people as acceptable if not as wealthy. But all that changed nineteen years ago when we were born, and he was left a widower with a pair of daughters on his hands and no relatives to help him out.
Apparently his loss was greater than the compensation he might have found in us. He hired Eleanor who was a registered nurse, and he resigned his active partnership, though the business continued to bear his name and pay him a handsome income. He might have traveled, but instead his vitality must have diminished for he became something of a recluse, only leaving the house once a week after lunch when he would drive into the city to dine with friends. Or at least Celia and I assumed that’s what he did. He never came home and told us what a good dinner he’d had, or how nice it had been to see this or that old acquaintance.
Otherwise he spent a good deal of his time in the study, writing letters abroad for church and public records to be used in the compilation of the Mason family history.
I don’t mean to say he isolated himself entirely, not at all. We ate our meals together, and on fine days he would drive us around the grounds in a pony cart; when it rained he would often read aloud to us. We never expressed a desire for a toy or book or dress that he didn’t supply it, and last year when Eleanor suggested it might be time for her to move on, we were terrified and begged so hard to have him make her stay that he doubled her salary. She positively bloomed after that, while he seemed both relieved and more content. Consequently, it never occurred to me that he might have grown restive under his own restraints until Celia called it to my attention a month ago.
“Clara,” she asked, “have you noticed how preoccupied Father always is after his day out on Thursday?”
“Yes. What about it?”
“It’s Eleanor’s day off too.”
“What of it? She goes away in a taxi as she always has, and he drives off alone.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Celia said. “I’m sure they meet later.”
“What if they do? If he thought of it, he’d invite her to ride into the city with him. Why shouldn’t he? What are you getting at?”
“I think she proposes to marry him. I think she’s just recently told him.”
I was shocked into silence. Eleanor had been with us since before I could remember, first as our nurse, then governess, and since last year as our housekeeper-companion. As far as I was concerned, she was our mother. She wasn’t a woman to give her own feelings away, but underneath her quiet manner was the reliable assurance that whatever happened, she was ready to hand out punishment or affection with such tactful justice that neither of us had ever complained of partiality. She dressed quietly, moved unobtrusively about the house on various domestic errands, and never forgot the exact nature of her relationship to us or to Father.
Now I realized that being stupid, self-centered little beasts, we knew almost nothing about her, where she’d come from, or who her family was, or what she did on her days off. Maybe her parents were still alive, maybe she visited relatives or friends, or went shopping or alone to a movie. I’d never thought about what she did, only how uneventful Thursday always was because she wasn’t there to make it interesting.
Then on that Thursday night a month ago, Celia added, “Remember when Eleanor told us about marriage and all that stuff? Clara, she said something then I’ll never forget.”
“What did she say?”
Being a clever mimic, my sister went on in Eleanor’s normal tones: “Marriage and the family are changing institutions, girls, but there will always be certain women who hold out for legal status. Illicit affairs may be good enough when a woman is young, but there comes a time when she can’t keep it up. And then she demands marriage, if only for children of her own and security in her old age.”
As soon as Celia said the words, I could see Eleanor’s face twisting as she spoke that day, her hands twining one about the other in her lap. Now I knew she’d been describing herself, letting her secret desires for once overcome her reticence. Because of course she wasn’t anybody’s wife, and she wasn’t anybody’s mother.
Celia’s suspicion upset me. I didn’t often think of marriage because it was one more experience we’d have to forego, and since nothing could change us, there was no use worrying about it. Now, thinking about Eleanor’s lecture that day, and the book she’d handed us in answer to our questions, and thinking about her with Father, I grew hot and anxious, even disgusted.
Celia said, “They’ve been having an affair, they’ve been making love together for at least a year, Clara, I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be?”
“Because of how she tried to leave us. Remember she said certain women get too old for an affair and demand marriage? Well, she’s not getting any younger. Pretty soon she’ll be too old for babies.”
“Oh, Celia, don’t talk like that. It’s horrible.”
“But we have to be realistic. I don’t understand why you’re so shocked. When men and women are in love, they want to sleep together. There’s nothing horrible about it. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about making love.”
I wouldn’t answer that. I said, “How did you guess about Father and Eleanor?”
“Oh, Clara, whatever is wrong with you? I didn’t guess. We overheard them in the lower hall just before lunch today. Weren’t you listening? You know how the stairwell acts as a sound conductor. Didn’t you hear her say, ‘I’ll meet you at the motel as usual, darling’?”
“She didn’t!”
“She did too. I heard her.”
“I heard their voices,” I said, thinking back. “I didn’t pay any attention to the words. And they didn’t come home together.”
“They’re being clever,” Celia said. “But I’m convinced she’s given him an ultimatum. I wonder how we can break it up.”
I had to stop and think before I answered. Why should we break it up? Eleanor was attractive, Father was charming, and we loved them both. What would change? What difference would their marriage make to us?
“I ask you, Clara, how can we break them up? Short of murder.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say. Would it be so awful if they married?”
“Awful,” Celia said into the darkness of our bedroom. “She’s still young enough to have babies, and we don’t want anyone else to share whatever money’s left when Father dies. Do we?”
I thought about that for a minute and said slowly, ‘‘No, I guess not.”
“You’d better guess not,” she said. “And we’d better do something before it’s too late. Start thinking, Clara, and I will too.”
I did try, but it wasn’t easy. Always before when we wanted something we’d gone to Father. This time we couldn’t. Not possibly. The best I could come up with was a plan to drive Eleanor away, make it so unhappy for her she’d give up and leave of her own accord.
Celia hooted when I reluctantly offered my plan. “You are stupid,” she said. “She’s paid to accept whatever we do, no matter how bad it is. Anyway, she’d twist Father until he’d desert us before he did her.”
“I don’t believe it. Celia, you’re a beast. I’m back to thinking there’s no truth in what you suspect. I don’t believe they’re in love at all. And I don’t care if they are.”
“We may both be stupid,” my sister said, “but you’re worse than I am.”
I wanted to hit her for insisting without any more proof than what she claimed to have overheard. Instead, I proposed we listen at the stairwell whenever Eleanor went down. And for three weeks we sneaked around and spied and discussed the problem. We got nowhere, having heard not one word that wasn’t perfectly normal and innocuous.
Another week went by, and today being Thursday we were on the job early, making ourselves conspicuous, apparently, because at lunch Eleanor asked if we weren’t feeling well.
“I wonder if I ought to go out this afternoon,” she said. “You girls have been jumpy and unsettled for the past month. Is anything wrong?”
“What’s that?” Father looked up from his lemon pie. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s an uneasy feeling I have, Mr. Mason. The girls have been unlike themselves for days now, and I’m worried.” Eleanor’s expression was as concerned as I’d seen it hundreds of times when she treated us for a cold or gave us a pill for cramps or to make us sleep. And her manner was as formal with Father, as if she’d never mentioned a motel to him or called him darling in Celia’s hearing if not in mine.
Father’s hair had been gray for years although he wasn’t fifty yet, but his lined, pale face was very sad and old at the moment. “You must do as you think best, Eleanor,” he said without looking at her. “Although it seems a shame for you to miss your day off.” Then he looked at us, which we always accepted as painful for him. “Is something wrong, Clara?”
“No, Father,” I mumbled, looking at my plate because his expression hurt me, although I sympathized. My sister and I took care never to look directly at each other either if we could help it.
“Celia?”
“Not a thing, Father.” She stared at him defiantly. “I can’t imagine what’s got into Eleanor, making a fuss about nothing. We’re fine.”
Eleanor sighed. “All right then, but I’m going to give you both a tranquilizer, and in the future I want you to promise to tell me if anything bothers you.”
‘‘We will,” Celia and I said together.
Eleanor went up from lunch to the medicine cabinet in her bathroom where she kept all the salves and ointments and pills we might need, and she stood over us while we swallowed the capsules she handed out.
“That should do it,” she said. “You’ll settle down quietly for a nap, and when I come home tonight, I’ll give you a sleeping pill if you need it.”
Then she closed the cabinet and got her things and went off in a taxi. An hour or so later Father waved to us as he drove down to the gates in the wall around our grounds.
I was already more tranquil than I’d been for the past month, and I told Celia what I’d decided. “This uncertainty is too much for me,” I said. “Tomorrow we’re going to Father and ask him if he wants to marry Eleanor. He’ll tell us if it’s true. He’s always been honest with us.”
Inadvertently I met her eyes and looked away. I had always felt Father had been too honest about our prospects. Now I wondered if that same resentment was driving Celia to make trouble.
“He wouldn’t be honest about this,” she replied. “It’s too disgusting.”
“Well, I don’t care. I don’t like spying. I don’t like being upset. I don’t like what you’re doing. And even if we got a lie from him, I’d feel better. Wouldn’t you? Really?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Because he’d either marry Eleanor at once or he’d send her away, whatever he told us. Then we’d be in for a miserable time.”
“But I’m miserable now. Anyway, I want her to stay. I want them to be happy. I love Eleanor.”
“As a stepmother?” Celia asked with scorn. “Having babies to dilute whatever fortune Father will leave?”
“I don’t care about the fortune. Or the babies either. Anyway, there isn’t anything else we can do. We just have to shut up and see what happens.”
“I won’t do that,” she said. “If I knew where to get some poison, I’d give it to her. If I knew where to get a gun, I’d shoot her.”
I caught my breath. “That’s terrible! You shouldn’t say things like that. You shouldn’t even think them.”
“I’ll think what I please,” Celia said. “I’ll do what has to be done. Nobody’s going to take Father away from me. Not Eleanor, not you, not anybody. He’s mine, and I won’t ever let him go.”
I moved compulsively, wondering at my blindness. Celia didn’t care about the stepmother bit, she didn’t care about the babies or the diluted fortune. Celia was insanely jealous of Eleanor, she was insanely in love with Father.
Horror filled me, and for the first time, loathing. Always before I’d accepted the fact that we were too close to each other, and always I’d ignored it. But I couldn’t any longer, I simply could not. Eleanor’s safety, her life, depended on whatever I did now. And of course there was no way for me to do anything. Nothing at all.
Unless…
Murder and suicide. And the quicker the better, before I thought it over, although I doubted I’d change my mind. I was only nineteen, and in addition to Eleanor’s danger, there were still many barren and hopeless years stretching ahead.
“Come along, Celia,” I said, lightheaded already. “Let’s go explore Eleanor’s medicine cabinet.”
“Yes, let’s,” she agreed. “I knew you’d see it my way.”
Sleeping pills, I was thinking to myself, a whole handful taken in secret as a distracted Celia hunted eagerly for a bottle of poison.
Poor Father. He’d never understand. Or maybe he would. Anyway, he and Eleanor would console each other.
Linked eternally by our common circulatory system, my sister and I moved steadily up the stairs and along the hall—with equal determination, if on different errands…