Familiar Stories
27th of December 2006 A.D.
"What was it like growing up in Boston?" you ask after a moment, curious about a part of your mother's life she had never spoken about before. Much different from the stories Dad would tell about growing up with Grandma Grandpa Uncle Pete and Aunt Sally you would guess and not just from what you know of the story's end.
"Lonely," the word slips without a moment's thought. "I was an only child, my father James, James Hamilton Jr., was always busy with this company or that, he was, maybe still is, what's called an activist investor, someone who takes over companies to make them run better and then sells at a profit. My mother Regina Hamilton nee Winthrop no doubt still is a socialite and philanthropist. I grew up in the city in a condo by the Old Harbor. Mother would complain about how cramped it was sometimes, personally I found it all intimidatingly large and shinny. I spent a lot more time around tutors and au pairs..." she cuts herself off. "God, I had not thought out that word in years,
nannies basically, foreign ones supposedly so I would learn French and Italian, but really it was just snobbery pure and simple."
"Sounds a lot less fun than the Sound of Music somehow," you offer gently.
She huffs, startled but obviously also amused at the comparison. "As it turns out this isn't the eighteen hundreds when 'the help' stays on the manor, people move out, they move on. When you are talking about the most recommended staff they tend to specialize by age group as well. I wasn't... no one mistreated me, in some ways I was a remarkably sheltered child. I think the first time anyone raised their voice at me in anger I was ten and doing remarkably bad at tennis. That was the other thing, father believed in structured time, in
efficiently, after all that is what he did for a living. After school studies, socializing, sports, clubs everything in its place, even the car ride to and fro was accounted for. Thinking back on it now I'm surprised I didn't rebel try to break out of it all sooner, but it is... hard to separate that from what came afterwards. I think it is just that I did not find it that remarkable at the time."
"What about friends, from school or all the after school stuff?"
"A few, there was one girl I partnered up for fencing a lot of the time Alexandra, Alex for short...." She stops to think, a look of sadness stealing across her face. "I can't remember her name last name anymore. She was very passionate about swords not just the foil, I think that is where I caught the bug from even if I didn't stick with swords in the end. I remember she was distantly related to the Tsars of Russia and thirteen year old me thought that was the coolest thing, so much better than stogy old Governor
John Winthrop. I actually said that to my mother. To be honest I am not sure if it was out of spite or because I wanted to get some kind of reaction out of her."
The more she talks about her parents the less like parents they seem. It's just weird and creepy. You scoot over closer on the bed to ask: "What did she say?"
"She said not to use the word cool, called it uncooth and said I had 'a better vocabulary than that'." Her tone had gone utterly flat. "That was he first time I stole money out of her purse for movie tickets. Two days later me and Alex skipped out on fencing, we went to see
Grease. My parents pulled me out of fencing the next day. I never saw Alex again after that."
Lost 2 Essence -> Now at 9/15 (Empathy Excellency and ATB)
As she goes quiet you are not sure what to do with yourself, what to ask. That is not the kind of confession you had expected out of your mother. A lot of pieces you did not even know
were pieces start falling into place, why she had never done more than argue about the piercings even though they annoyed her, why she had never said you couldn't talk to Nelson or Rosie just argued, sometimes very loudly why you
shouldn't.
"Because you took the money?" you finally manage.
"Oh no, I don't thinks he ever noticed ten dollars were missing, it was because I didn't follow the scheduale. It was very inconsiderate, that is all she cared to say. So I started doing it more often, I got better at it, by the time I was sixteen she did not care as much, but I had far worse friends and I was doing more than going to the cinema, but then I had
the episode and everything changed."
"Are you sure you 're good talking about this?" you interrupt, reaching out to intertwine your fingers with hers on the bed.
"It's a long,
long time ago now sweetie, more than half my life," Mom says with a shake of the head and a smile, mostly though not entirely for your benefit. "It was at a retirement party for one of Father's friends, they had dragged me into it and I hated the idea so much I tried to pretend I was sick." She looks you up and down a moment, taking a deep breath before launching herself into the rest of the story. "Tried to make myself sick, took some pills and brandy, one of my friends said it would look like a stomach flu and I'd be fine in the morning. It didn't work out that way. I was nauseous, shaky, but nothing Mother, much less Father would accept as a reason a reason to excuse myself so I went. I don't remember anything of that night, but I was told later by the doctors that I hallucinated, something about a giant bat covered in blood. I hit a man in the head with a punch bowl and had to be dragged out of the room."
"The Sight," you murmur. "Altered states of consciousness can trigger it."
She nods, unsurprised."Since that night I started seeing more
things, I didn't know what it was, my parents didn't know what it was. My mother finally cared about something I did, she was horrified, terrified of it. Father was angry, though I am not sure if it was at me for seemingly going insane or at the humiliation I had caused. Pills made it worse, doctors couldn't make heads or tails of it so they stared changing doctors to ones who said they could fix me, less—" a long rattling breath— "
reputable ones. I tried to lie my way out of it, claim it was gone. But it would always come back with something worse, rotten things and twisted things and turns out I was not as good a liar as I thought I was, not when people were looking for it. All the while I thought that if I could just hold out until I was an adult, hold out to eighteen I'd be free. I overheard them talking about having me committed...
not with my ears. That was when I decided to test if it was real. I mentioned to Father that I had seen a brochure for the clinic they had been talking about in the trash. He asked me what I was doing rooting around in the trash, but I knew then, that it was real, that I had to run."
Even though you had known the gist of this already from Dad, but hearing the careful way she picks her words, covering pits of rage and grief makes you want to go hit something or
someone.
Mom is talking faster now, as bad as things had been before this is the part she really does not want to talk about. "I took what money I had managed to squirrel away, went right to a Salvation Army thrift store for a few changes to clothes and I tried to just live, make it to eighteen. I looked for a job as a tutor, of course that was never going to work, but what did I know? Finally managed to get a job waiting tables at a club in Roxbury, not that I was any good at it, I think the lady who owned it just felt bad for me. There was an attack... they blamed the Hell's Angels, wasn't that. I could see their faces, they weren't human. One of them reached for me. I jumped out though a window, a
closed window but I didn't get hurt. By then I wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't. I thought the monsters had come after me, maybe I was right, maybe not. I was too scared to try again, didn't want other people to get hurt from being around me. Things got bad, then
Gregor found me and they seemed to be looking up for a little while, he had answers or seemed to at least...."
This time the pause he longer and heavier. When you remind her that you know the rest Mom nods, relief in her eyes, as you hug her wordlessly. The two of you sit like that for maybe a full minute before she speaks again: "My parents are not terrible people, not good maybe, but there's much worse to be found out there, we both know that. If you talk to them or go meet them here—" she pulls out one of the paper she had set aside on the end table. "This is a list of everyone I remember from the family, as well as what addresses I could recall though after all this time some of them probably won't be good. I'm sure you can figure that stuff out on the computer."
Do you want to speak to your grandparents after what you learned?
[] Yes, they are family and like Mom said there are worse out there, some of which you have spoken to and allied
[] No, they don't deserve to be part of your family after what they did to Mom
[] Write in
OOC: For anyone interested in the genealogies in this quest Robert C. Winthrop had a son with his second wife Laura which lead to the branch of the family that eventually produced Charity. The dates work out, just barely since they married with she was 35, although it would have been pretty uncommon for the time. I spent way longer researching old Bostonian families trying to find one to use as a jumping off point than I would have liked, but I wanted to use a PoD far enough in the past to be able to insert a reasonably long and varied family history. 
