She didn't for a moment imagine they wouldn't tell—that wasn't the point. The way in which she had told them ensured that they wouldn't be taken seriously. Any adult who listened to their tales about fairy enchantments would smile indulgently, and when those same adults mentioned the children's wild talk about how her skin turned blue when she slept, she could laugh it off and say that Wanda and Pietro had been very impressed when they saw her with a blue beauty pack on her face.
Then, too, there was the language barrier. The twins spoke no English when she first took them in; like all small children, they picked it up quickly, but for a while, once they were home in Santa Monica, she was the only person they could speak to besides one another. That helped.
For a few weeks, life with her children was picture-perfect. They listened so hard to all she told them, making great strides in table manners and good behavior. Even Madelaina and Fritz, her Swiss 'houseboy'—at fifty-two, he was hardly a boy—who did the cooking, the cleaning, and drove when she did not care to—said that Wanda and Pietro could hardly have been better behaved or more grateful.
Then the honeymoon was over. Almost overnight, she learned why the twins had gone through five orphanages. It began when Fritz complained of an ant infestation and of a foul odor. The exterminator he called in discovered that they had pulled up the flooring in their playroom and hidden food in there—sugar cubes, dinner rolls, and slices of meat, grown green and white and furred thickly with mold. Further searching turned up other caches of food in their rooms. When the food was thrown out, the twins became hysterical. 'Robin' took them into the kitchen, threw open every cupboard and showed them all the food, telling them there was plenty of food, there would always be plenty of food—but two days later, Madelaina turned up bread in the bottom of Wanda's closet again.
Their table manners disappeared almost overnight, they broke toilet training, picked bouquets of flowers for her—from other people's gardens or in the park and threw temper tantrums when asked to do anything. They cried when she reprimanded them. She cried afterward, when she was alone.
She consulted book on child-rearing, which didn't help, and a child psychologist, who did.
"The food-hoarding is easy to explain," said the doctor, a middle-aged woman with sympathetic eyes. "Given their history, they know that food is not always going to be there when they are hungry, and it may well take years before they can relax about it. I suggest you allow them to keep non-perishables, well-wrapped, of course, in a special place designated for it. That way they have the security which comes from knowing it is there, and you retain control of the situation.
"As for the disappearance of their table manners, and other such 'bad' behavior—you have to realize what they want most of all in the world is you—your love and your attention. When you were teaching them table manners, no doubt you gave your full attention to every bite they took, correcting the way they held their spoons, demonstrating how to use a knife and fork, and praising them when they got it right Once they learned how, you stopped paying them that kind of close attention. So they are doing what they can to get it back—even if that means you glare and scold them. All attention is good attention—when you've never had any."
"So what do I do?"
"When you sit down to dinner next, make a game of it. Have a special prize for the one who has the best table manners. It doesn't have to be anything large. Praise them when they get it right—and if their manners are too atrocious, tell them you can't eat dinner with people who have such bad manners. Then get up and leave them to eat alone.
"The same holds true with other forms of attention-getting behavior. Pay them attention when they're good, and deprive them of it when they're being bad. When they learn behaving badly gets them less of your attention, they'll come around. And never tell them they're bad children. Tell them they've done something bad, but not that they themselves are bad."
It took a while, but it worked.
Not perfectly, and not all the time, but it worked.
It even helped with what she couldn't tell the child psychologist about—that the children were like her. They were different than most people, even if they looked like any other children. She loved them even more for that. How strange and wonderful that as lonely and isolated as she was even in a crowd of friends, she should have found and adopted two children who were kin to her in a way even giving birth to them could not equal.
Pietro could move faster than the eye could track, faster than a cheetah could run. When small objects around the house disappeared—like car keys or earrings—she knew to catch Pietro around the waist, lift him up off the floor, and check his pockets.
Wanda—made things go wrong. Disastrously wrong—such as the car breaking down just before 'Robin' had to go to the studio, or a brand new bottle of Chanel Number Five exploding all over every single pair of evening gloves she owned right before a very important party after all the stores were closed for the day.
Curiously enough, that turned out to be a plus, as 'Robin', desperate and furious, put her mind to work on the problem—and reasoned out that as she could already change the color and texture of her skin, she could make it appear as if she had gloves on, both to the eye and to the hand. It was a great success, and much more comfortable than wearing a layer of kidskin or silk. When she had leisure, she planned to explore that new aspect of her powers and see how far she could take it.
'Robin' soon came to recognize the approaching disaster by the look on Wanda's face, and how to redirect it, making a scarecrow for the child to blow up and putting it in the barbecue pit. When it wasn't possible to hustle her down there, a firm look and a "Wanda, don't." usually handled the situation.
It seemed as though she was coping. Now, six months later, as she looked at that magazine, with the stupid, made-up captions and the mostly-artificial posed photos showing a perfect, glossy life which was nothing like their real ones, she could reflect on the difference. It wasn't as smooth and pretty as Photoplay made it look.
It was much better than that.
She flipped through the other pages of the magazine, looking at the people she knew, the ones she didn't, the ones she liked and those she detested, when she came across an article which made her shudder. 'The Mutant Menace' It was illustrated with photographs of the deformed and the bizarre, and it told of those with strange and mysterious powers who lived among real human beings.
She had never before had a word to describe what she was—and what Pietro and Wanda were. Mutants. After reading the article twice—which took less than fifteen minutes—she called the local bookstore, and asked them to set aside for her anything and everything they had on mutants. Her education was deficient, and she was about to make up for that.
Erik Lensherr's education in the films of Roberta Rowan was deficient, and he was about to make up for that. He looked up the movie listings, and found that two of her films were playing in local theatres—Don't Look Back, a crime drama, and Crimson Lips, a retelling of Dracula.
Leaving the café, he went to the nearest movie house currently showing one of her films, the crime drama, which turned out to be a surprisingly stylish re-telling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orrin Ellhouse was a jazz musician and an alcoholic, Eulalie, Roberta Rowan's character, his singer-girlfriend. Orrin missed their wedding because he was still drunk after the bachelor party, and Eulalie stormed off into the arms of the King of the Underworld, the married Harry Derwood, whose wife, Persis, was pathologically jealous. Harry, the 'Hades' character, owned a nightclub, and made Eulalie the headline act.
Orrin got wind that Persis planned to kill Eulalie, and was on the way to warn her, but he stopped for a drink first—the equivalent of Orpheus looking back before he had Eurydice clear from the boundaries of Hell. One drink became a dozen, and the hapless drunk arrived at the nightclub only to find Eulalie dead. Grief-stricken, he gives up drinking forever, only to die in an a drunken driving accident with his next girlfriend, Maddie—the 'Maenad'.
While only the black-and-white 'B' picture following a Technicolor 'A'-list movie with Jane Russell which was completely forgettable, Don't Look Back had better directing in its favor—more interesting camera angles and visuals, a more memorable story and script—a phenomena Erik had noticed before—because the studios had less invested in their 'B' pictures, they paid less attention to them, and directors were free to do more or less as they pleased.
It also had Roberta Rowan, who, he had to admit, was good. She could act, which was rare, and she had that indefinable quality the camera loved, that which made a few—a very few—people stars, which was rarer. 'Muy guapa!" murmured a local man a few seats away, when she made her first entrance. 'Very sexy.' It was true. When she was on screen, it was difficult to look anywhere else. Her death scene had several audience members gulping into their handkerchiefs.
He left the theater with a new sense of respect for the young actress—whatever else she was, she had earned the accolades bestowed on her by the press.
That did not mean she was a proper and fit person to bring up his children, however. He meant to get full custody of them, and soon. But curiously enough, he found he was also looking forward to meeting this elusive, heavenly creature of flickering light from the silver screen, this woman named Roberta Rowan.
