October PrepMo 2015

Minor #2

I am Margaret Emille Danbury-Reinhardt, I am 75 years old and my grandfather was the great and wondrous Francis Danbury. My siblings and I grew up knowing what a great man and a terrible father he was. My father often talked about how bad he felt for his mother who never knew happiness except for the last few years of her life when she lived in France. There was even a bitterness in himself for feeling as if he was less important than the rest of his siblings and often felt as if he didn't exist. Though, considering a lot of the craziness associated with the name, Danbury, maybe he was better off.

I grew up during a horrible time for our country, but where we lived and how we lived, we never realized it. Never as a child did I see the horror, the sadness, the ugliness of what was going on. Life was perfect and I had a nanny and tutors and was sent off to a boarding school in France until the ugliness of WWII would send me back. We lived in a ritzy beautiful neighborhood about an hour north of New York City. My father wanted nothing to do with Pleasantgate Point and none of us knew it even existed until much later in life.

Our mother was a beautiful and resourceful woman who knew how to rule without any of the men realizing it. I envied that and if there is one thing I took from her, it was that. Women were (and are) considered the weaker sex, the idiots, that we're only good for pleasure and producing heirs to one throne or another. Growing up I wanted to be a scientist! To be smart and create things from the simplest matters on Earth and yet I was told so often that I was a woman and a woman has a duty to her home, to her husband, to her children, that I realized that was all I was good for.

When I was twenty years old, I would marry a man twelve years older than myself, whom I had courted for nearly two years. We loved each other in a respectful way, but never in the careless abandon that I'd read in novels or that even the regular people got to enjoy. I never was unhappy, but there was never excitement or enjoyment in our marriage. We did produce six of the most beautiful children, even if I am a bit bias. My daughters grew up knowing that they could be whatever they wanted. My husband fought me on it for the longest time, but I kept my foot down and didn't waiver. I regretted not defying my parents and I wanted my daughters to have the opportunity.

There are times when I'd remember my father talking about my grandfather, usually with his siblings. Us children weren't allowed to talk about 14 Curves...or rather 13 Curves. It was expressly forbidden. My brother, Charles, God rest his soul, was trying to scare the rest of us (since he was the eldest) with horrible stories and legendary atrocities that had happened inside the walls of 13 Curves and when father heard him...Oh Charles had gotten the supreme wrath that day.

I've heard the stories, the claims, but I try not to think of them. It's hard to think that you might have come from something like that. As hard as it is to try and live a normal life, it's sometimes more difficult when you share the family name. I even carry it to this day, refusing to totally give up the Danbury name as when I was married I felt it was a badge of some kind of honor to keep it. To show I wasn't afraid of whatever lie behind the 13 Curves door. Now, I'm just too old to bother.

I would by lying if I didn't say I wasn't curious about what really happened. If there was any kind of merit to the stories. I'd love to hear it, even though there's a part of my soul that trembles knowing that there is some merit to it and that my life would be better off not knowing. Even so....