Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell by Michael Conniff Page A

bastard, too, Eleanor, and his father was Thomas Edison. That makes him and me both real bastards, because my father was Thomas Cushing, a real son of a bitch, and Atomic Tom’s father was John Patrick Cushing, the son who raped me. But you’re not a bastard, are you?” I tell her to tell me something I don’t know.
     
October 31, 1970
    Outside there are little children in costumes, ghosts and devils and superheroes in capes, but inside Mother is in her own world. “You need to know what really happened,” she says. “Because you need to go back.” Why would anyone go back to that awful town? “To show the world,” Mother says, without saying why.
     
November 9, 1970
    I need to know more, I need to know everything, but today Mother never wakes up.
     
    December 6, 1970
    Mother is sleeping (again) so I kill time. There are pictures everywhere in her penthouse, all of them posed, pictures of Mother and Father together in front of our fireplace, then each of them alone, then each of us alone, pictures of all of us together outside The Big House in Southampton. In front of my own eyes I turn 10, then 12, then 17. Tom’s hand on my shoulder in the picture makes me shiver, as if I’ve seen a ghost.
     
December 13, 1970
    Is she trying to say goodbye? Mother asks that all of us, even Tom, come together for the first time since God knows when. Rebecca comes early to take pictures. She labors over the lighting, staring at dials that ring her neck. Diana arrives, breathless. She is now a senior editor at Imagine , sure one day to ascend to the editorial throne, and she reeks of perfume and the pitter-pat of petty talk. Tom comes late and last and none of us say a word to him. He has become huge, gargantuan, a bear upright in the woods, broad across the shoulders and the beam, a bristle of hair cut like a brush across the top, his skin scrubbed and gleaming, his shirt so tight across his chest it looks like the buttons might explode. We crowd into Mother’s matchbox room. She sits up in bed, her white hair fine and roped behind her, like a fuse, her face the hard mask that means someone is in trouble. “I know what you’ve done to the girls,” Mother says to Tom. “And I hope you rot in hell.”
     
December 25, 1970
    “She’s not so good today,” Sliv says. “She’s never so good around Christmas.” Shouldn’t you be home Christmas Day? I say. “I had to make sure Missus O’Kell was all right,” Sliv says. “She hasn’t been so good around the holidays, not so good at all. And nobody should be alone for Christmas.” Least of all your own mother, I tell him.
     
    January 8, 1971
    I tell Mother for the first time about my rape by Tom. In my own words. For the first time we cry together.
     
    January 9, 1971
    It’s like Mother’s come alive, as if my news about Tom and the bomb put the taste of blood back in her mouth. I need you to start at the beginning, I say. “Oh, I was beautiful in the beginning, Eleanor, so beautiful, more beautiful than I could even believe. I had this beautiful chestnut hair, big hanging hanks of it, and there was nothing I couldn’t do with my life in the beginning.” And then? “Think of it, Eleanor! To be raped by a Cushing, by John Patrick Cushing! I had to marry your father so that I could have that child, your own misbegotten half-brother Tom, a baby born with too much Cushing by half. After that I wasn’t the woman I should have been, could have been, would have been. Life itself leaked out of me, Eleanor. Can’t you smell the stink of it?”
     
    January 10, 1971
    I try to imagine what it was like for my mother to be in that bakery, with John Patrick Cushing, her half-brother, having at her, with everything changing in a blink, the way it changed for me after Tom, the color going out of life, life itself going out of life, Mother carrying Thomas Cushing’s grandson on both sides to term, then giving birth to the twisted creature who grew up to be Atomic Tom. I try