Flowers In The Attic

When Chris gets sick, Cathy is forced to go on her stealing mission alone. When she enters, she sees that her stepfather, Bart, is there sleeping. His youth and beauty appeal to her, and she dares to kiss him lightly on the lips. She is resentful of her mother who has not only splendid riches but the means to attract such a gorgeous younger man, while her children merely have “broken dreams, shattered promises, and unending frustrations” (355).

Chris goes back to increase their spoils a few times, but on one foraging mission, Bart and Corrine return to the room prematurely, forcing him to hide in the closet. Bart complains about missing money, and wanting to leave and move to another home, while Corrine tries to tell him that they need to stay there for a while. Then, Bart talks about his “sweetest dream” of the “lovely young girl” who came in to kiss him (362). Chris instantly knows that Bart is talking about Cathy, and is furiously jealous. Chris is able to escape when the couple decide to spend the night in a hotel.

Chris later finds Cathy, who is dancing in the attic, and savagely declares that she is his, and that “you will always belong to me” (364). The two fall to the floor, and though she “tried to fight him off” (364), he rapes her. They are both ashamed, having done “what we both swore we’d never do” (364). Cathy is worried about both pregnancy and torment in hell, and Chris apologizes, saying that this was the one occasion when he was not able to overcome temptation. Cathy, meanwhile, blames herself for parading around in skimpy clothes before a sexually frustrated man.

Chris, who notices the twins’ deteriorating health, vows that the next time he visits his mother’s room, he will steal her jewelry and pawn it off so that they can take the twins to doctors. 

Cathy remembers how Chris confessed to her that he is certain that he will never love any other woman but her. Cathy, on the other hand, insists that nothing will happen between them again, and that nothing would have happened if there had been other available partners.

They plan to escape when Corrine next goes out for the evening. However, Cory begins to vomit repeatedly and sickens rapidly. When grandmother and Corrine arrive, Cathy furiously insists that they take Cory to a hospital. Corrine seems wracked with indecision, but grandmother accepts that Cory should go to a hospital. Although Cathy, who is more like Cory’s real mother, would wish to accompany him, it is grandmother and Corrine who do so. Cathy feels guilt-stricken over her and Chris’s incestuous encounter, and tries to bargain with God to save Cory.

However, when grandmother and their mother return, after having taken Cory to a faraway hospital and given him a false name, it is too late, as Cory had already died of pneumonia. They buried him in a private grave. Following Cory’s death, Chris explains that the rest of them must leave as soon as they can, because their lack of contact with the outside world has made them all weak. Cathy dreams vividly of Cory encountering her father. When Chris wakes her, because she has been talking in her sleep, it strikes her how much he looks like her father. She feels at peace following her dream, and the thought of a better place after death. 

Chris goes to rob the jewelry which will secure their freedom. He is gone for so long that Cathy begins to worry. When he returns at dawn, he tells her that Corrine and Bart escaped, leaving nothing at all behind. However, Corrine left behind a picture of her first husband and her wedding jewelry, which Chris took. Chris then went past grandmother’s room, where he found her in prayer, asking God to forgive her for her sins. He then went past grandfather’s room, which was also empty. Then, Chris decided to go to the library, where a big landscape painting covers a safe. He finds a way to unlock the combination lock, and makes it into the library.

When he gets there, a maid, Livvy, and a butler, John, are in the library, and he has to hide behind a sofa. John and Livvy are in the process of making love, but in-between, talk about noisy “mice in the attic” (399), and about grandfather, who has been dead for almost a year. They mention that Corrine has run off with grandfather’s fortune, while grandmother only has her own fortune in the house. Chris relates that Corrine has deceived the children, keeping quiet about grandfather’s death, so that they will “wait and rot” (403). Chris confirms that they will escape to Florida, and achieve their dreams of medicine and dancing; however, he holds Cathy close, as he explains that he has not told her the worst part of the story. 

Chris reveals that their grandmother invented the reason of mice for not wanting the attic to be cleaned on Fridays, and that she needed to head upstairs with a basket of food covered in arsenic to kill them. Chris tells Cathy that arsenic is white and tasteless when mixed with sugar, as it was on the doughnuts grandmother fed them, and that it poisons its victims “bit by bit” (406). Cory likely died of arsenic poisoning rather than pneumonia; however, he would have likely been so thin and weak when he entered that the doctors at the hospital would not have known any better. In order to prove grandmother’s crime, the children feed Mickey, Cory’s pet mouse, the powdered doughnut, and he dies. They plan to present the evidence to the police.

Cathy and Chris plan their escape, despite Carrie’s extreme physical weakness and their fears that grandmother might catch them. Before leaving, Cathy goes up to the attic and writes on a chalkboard: “we lived in the attic, Christopher, Cory, Carrie, and me, Now there are only three” (413). The three survivors head to a train depot and Charlottesville. The house is visible from the train, as is grandmother’s form through the window. In Charlottesville, they buy tickets to Sarasota and head south. Chris reveals that he has been holding back another secret from the time he eavesdropped on John and Livvy. He overheard the pair saying that immediately prior to grandfather’s death, “he had a codicil added to his will” stating that if Corrine was proven to have children by either her first or second husbands, she would have to “forfeit everything she inherits” (419).

Chris thinks that it was Corrine, and not grandmother, who began to lace the doughnuts with arsenic, because they appeared nine months ago, from around the reading of the will. Chris points out that grandmother has her own money, and that only Corrine benefits from grandfather’s will. Chris then puts a bag with arsenic-poisoned Mickey and the two doughnuts into Cathy’s hands and says that if they had acted on her intuition and taken her vivid dreams as prophecies, they could have saved Cory. Cathy wants to have revenge on Corrine, and imagines sending her to prison. Cathy dumps the bag with the incriminating evidence into the trash, deciding that the best revenge will be to go into the world and make themselves “somebodies” (421).

Cathy in her epilogue and teaser for the next book, Petals On the Wind, claims that although the children managed to escape Foxworth Hall and work towards their goals, their lives “were always to be tempestuous” and that the tale of their survival was “another story” (423).