Madeline Usher's Tale

Chapter Three

“[Roderick] entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off.”

                                                                     Chapter Three

 Once I hit the age of ten, I began to notice changes in my mother.

Ever since that day I had overheard the two women talking, I had feared something awful might happen to my own family. At first I believed Roderick. I took hold of his opinion that those women were starved for gossip to keep their days more entertaining.

But once I began to see something new alight in my mother’s eyes, I reverted back to my stance that the women were telling the truth.

The first year in our new house functioned as normally as it had like in our old house. Roderick and I continued to have private tutors, though I hated learning French. I was forced to talk to Roderick in French after my tutor deemed me well prepared to attempt the language with another person. Of course Roderick had to outshine me in French. He spoke fluently to me in long sentences that I couldn’t even follow. I kept a mental checklist of what was considered normal in our household, and Roderick’s teasing was one of them.

After we first moved to Usher Manor, my father spent a few weeks with us to make sure everything was running as it should. By the end of our first month he headed back to his law firm, worried that things were running amok due to his absence. But his absence created tension within the household. Since his firm was a three day journey back into the city, my father rented out a room somewhere in the city so that he could stay there weeks, even months, at a time. He would try to escape every few weekends, but even then, he was worried that his absence from the firm would cause distress among his employees.

When Roderick turned eighteen, my father decided it was time for Roderick to learn the family trade. Roderick was eager to leave and excited to join in on the family business now that he was of age. Instead of my father being absent, Roderick was now taken away from my mother and I, leaving us only with our household staff and no man to protect us, save for our old gardener.

I felt oddly lost without Roderick constantly by my side. There was never a day that he wasn’t with me. It was if I had lost a part of myself. He may have annoyed me at times, even pointed himself out as superior to me, but I still missed him more than I missed my father.

With both her husband and son gone, I should have realized sooner that my mother was sinking into herself. She used to take me to the nearest local town where we would shop for new clothes or a new doll to prop amongst my many others to keep ourselves busy and active. After a while, she started to complain of headaches, resting a hand over her eyes to cover the sunlight even when it was cloudy day.

Soon, we stopped going out altogether. I often begged kind Mrs. Franklin to take me out, but she often couldn’t due to getting our meals done for the day. I then had to rely on my maid, Letty, but I always felt guilty asking her to chaperone me since I knew she had more important things to do rather than take a bored child out to shop.

I had no one to talk to and craved every weekend that Father and Roderick would come home. My sense of normality was decreasing as the first year in Usher Manor turned into the second year. And because of my mother’s constant illness, normality seemed to be slowly vanishing.

My mother locked herself in her bedroom day in and day out. The only time I ever saw her was when I begged Mr. Franklin to let me take my mother her food. I would knock on my mother’s door, carefully balancing the tray in one arm as I opened the door. Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I always found my mother in her favorite chair, staring out the window.