Read Online Willow by V. C. Andrews - Free Book Online Page B

most of the night, pausing occasionally to take a breath, to cry, to laugh. Often, I lifted my eves from the pages to ask myself again and again, were these my father's words? Were these the words, the descriptions, the utterances of the man I knew?
    The author of these words did not seem like a man who saw the world through a doctor's clinical eves. This wasn't the organized. at times unemotional man I knew, the man who was afraid to hug me, to hold my hand, to kiss my cheek, the man I never saw cry, not even at my adoptive mother's funeral.
    The man in these pages was a man who could feel things deeply, whose emotional roller coaster went from deep melancholy to utter ecstasy, whose pronouncements of love brought a blush to my cheeks, whose words rivaled the pages of the best romance novel.
    He moved quickly into a warm, detailed description of how he fell in love with his patient Grace Montgomery, and even how he began to make love to her. The clinic, which to me had seemed a cold, bare world, suddenly took on the ambience of a romantic escape. He actually wrote: I couldn't wait to get there every morning. It was as if I had found the doorway to paradise.
    Daddy's descriptions of the views of the river running behind the clinic, even the halls and the rooms in the evening, the music he used to calm patients-- all of it took on a beauty and warmth I never knew existed for him.
    When you're with someone you love, he wrote, the most mundane things suddenly become wonderful.
I found myself falling in love with my father through his wonderful expressions of love, through his obvious joy and his renewal of youth and excitement.
Daddy explained how he kept Grace
Montgomery at his clinic far beyond what was necessary and how happy she was, because not only was she just as much in love with him as he was with her, but she had reasons to avoid hurrying home to Palm Beach, Florida. He never got into those reasons.
It surprised me at first that Daddy would have permitted her to become pregnant, that he wouldn't have taken the proper precautions, but the love affair he described and their times together rang with spontaneity, with the sort of impulsive action more often associated with much younger people. It was truly as if their love affair had rejuvenated them both, brought them both back to a time when they were hardly more than teenagers.
They discussed abortion. but Grace
Montgomery fervently wished to give birth to the child she believed embodied their great love. At first, he was opposed, but soon he gave in to the idea, and then he made plans to adopt the child-- who, of course, was me.
He elaborated on the deception and then revealed that he had made an agreement with my adoptive mother. In exchange for allowing him to take in this foundling, he gave her money and autonomy. She could go anywhere she wanted, do anything she wanted, and have anything she wanted. All those discussions they used to have over changes in the house or their lives were more show than substance because the outcome was determined at the start. She would get her way no matter what. He was permitted only to attempt to give her some reasons to change her mind, but she rarely did.
Her aloofness from me and her criticism of me made far more sense now. She did not know that my father was my real father, but that did not change her resentment of me and of his determination to keep me and make me a member of the family. In the beginning, she offered to try to mold me into what she considered an acceptable child and young woman. It was, according to my father, something of an interim peace agreement.
No matter how much he reassured her that there was no terrible madness gestating in me, she clung to the belief that I would someday prove to be
unbalanced. It was why he was so instrumental in acquiring Amou. He knew from the beginning that she would be more of a mother to me than my adoptive mother would want to be or could be.
He then went into a long explanation