A Cruel Legacy

ISBN-13: 9781499709308 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 326 str.

Peggy Lins

Opis

Behind a locked bedroom door, Molly Foster wrestles with another bout of melancholy and despair. In the early twentieth century, few residents of her rural Missouri community understand the nature of her suffering. Her "spells" said by most to be the result of an itinerant woman's curse leveled on her and her descendants when she drove the beggar from her door. Others believe her actions to be deliberate. Only her husband, Tom, and her doctor believe she is ill. Through the ensuing years, Tom, their son Clint, and daughter Pearl deal with isolation and shame brought about by the illness. A promising student, Clint aspires to greatness away from the farm. When his friend and confidante, Red, dies suddenly, he internalizes his feelings fluctuating between guilt and anger. After his high school is destroyed by fire, Clint leaves home and moves from job to job in a relentless drive to find himself. Enrolling in the Army during World War I, he is stationed in France where he falls in love, only to be betrayed. After the war, Clint settles in Chicago, marries Nell and fathers three children, Jack, Mona and Kate. He loses his job during the Depression and returns to Missouri to farm with his dad. Plagued by restlessness, sleepless nights and depression, Clint wonders if he, too, is victimized by the curse. A tempestuous relationship with his son Jack, drives the teen to leave home and seek fame and fortune in theater. Mona, a nurse, is Clint's ally, defending him at every turn, while explosive Kate overcomes her propensity to anger, and along with Aunt Pearl becomes the voice of reason the family doesn't heed. After Jack returns home to recover from a serious illness and Nell dies of a ruptured appendix, Mona moves to take control of her dad, fighting his doctors to keep him alive when, due to old age, his condition deteriorates. Finally, as he begs to die in peace, she utilizes her training as a nurse to try to alleviate his pain and prolong his life. Mona's reaction to Clint's eventual death is to harm herself. Unnecessary surgeries, suicide attempts, including slashing her wrists, are means she uses to cope. Throughout, Kate tries to bring peace to the family. Unmarried after turning down a proposal of marriage from the man she loves, she plans never to have children, lest they, too, be victimized by the family legacy. In a time of religious intolerance, ignorance and superstition, bi-polar disorder, Munchausen's syndrome and clinical depression plague the family as they seek for answers to their dilemma. "Is it a curse, or is it the belief in the curse that caused the illness to affect us?" Kate asks in a final diary entry. The answer, she concludes, is in the mind of God. s.