and met my eyes. His fifteenth birthday had come and
gone, with a bakery cake, and ice cream to mark the
occasion as special. Gifts--they came every day,
almost. Now he had a polaroid camera, a new and
better watch. Great. Wonderful. How could he be so
easily pleased?
Didn't he see our mother wasn't the same
anymore? Didn't he notice she no longer came every
day? Was he so gullible he believed everything she
said, every excuse she made?
Christmas Eve. We had been five months at
Foxworth Hall. Not once had we been down into the
lower sections of this enormous house, much less to
the outside. We kept to the rules: we said grace before
every meal; we knelt and said prayers beside our beds every night; we were modest in the bathroom; we kept our thoughts clean, pure, innocent . . . and yet, it seemed to me, day by day our meals grew poorer and
poorer in quality.
I convinced myself it didn't really matter if we
missed out on one Christmas shopping spree. There
would be other Christmases when we were rich, rich,
rich, when we could go into a store and buy anything
we wanted. How beautiful we'd be in our magnificent
clothes, with our stylish manners, and soft, eloquent
voices that told the world we were somebodies . . .
somebodies who were special . . . loved, wanted,
needed somebodies.
Of course Chris and I knew there wasn't a real
Santa Claus. But we very much wanted the twins to
believe in Santa Claus, and not miss out on all that
glorious enchantment of a fat jolly man who whizzed
about the world to deliver to all children exactly what