The Apple Falls Near

I did as she instructed. As the years rolled backwards in the album, both she and my father got younger and younger. When she was at about 15 years old and he about 30, another face suddenly appeared in the pictures. It was another woman. A woman closer to Father's age. I continued turning the pages further and further back in time. Mother grew younger with every image, as did Father and this other woman. There were more images of this strange woman and Father, fewer of Mother. More and more years peeled back until it was clearly evident that this woman was actually my grandmother- their wedding pictures said it all. I'd never known her. I didn't even know that she existed or what she looked like. I'd never thought to ask, I guess, and Mother had never bothered to inform me... until then.

I then turned the pages in the reverse direction, going back forward in time. They were all happy and loving in every picture, that much was evident. When my grandmother stopped being in the pictures, there was a look in both my father's and mother's eyes that I hadn't noticed before. It was a look of strained happiness, of pain that was slowly abating and only being assuaged by their closeness and love. A few years of them being alone, however, and a new look filled their eyes. The happiness had returned, only now it was just them. Mother was older in those pictures, about 18 years old perhaps, and when pictures of me as an infant began to appear, I could see that the love in their eyes was a love that they shared for each other.

The penny finally dropped and I slammed the book closed in shock. I did not jump up from my chair or fly off into histrionics; I simply stared at my mother in stunned silence as the full import of what those pictures had shown me sank in. We stared at each other for a very long time in that silence, her watching me think and me thinking about how I should view her.

Finally, she broke the silence. "I've been wanting to tell you this for a long time, Conrad, but I never could figure out how to say it. I think, now, this is the best way. Your father, Conrad, was also MY father." She took a pensive breath and waited for me to blow up. When I did not, she exhaled slowly, clearly in relief. "THAT is why I never dated anyone after he... after he left. For all my life, he was the only man I ever knew and loved. I loved him from the moment I was born, I loved him when Mom passed away and I loved him when I came of age to know the touch of a man. For all my years, he was my father, my friend and my husband and he was ALWAYS there. Until he wasn't.

"I thought about seeing other men, but realized that I couldn't bring myself to do it. First, yes, there was you to consider, but not in the way that you might think. Your... OUR father loved us both very, very much and the short time that you got to spend with him was special. I didn't want your memories of him to somehow be supplanted by new memories of some other man. And the memories I had with him were just as precious. I found that I had no interest in brining another man into my life. The one who made me and who'd also made you... he was man enough. And then there was you, in a whole other sense. As you grew older, you became the man in my life, son. Take another look at those pictures if you like, the ones where he and Mom are younger. You'll see yourself in those pictures. You are like him in so, so many ways that, at times, it's almost like he never left at all. You never knew him in the way that I did, son, but you know him in the way that you are, in the way that you live. He shines out through your eyes and actions on a daily basis. So... in a way, he never really left us. So why would I even need or want another man, when I had him... and then you?"

I let that sink in for a moment and then finally found my voice. "How... how did it begin?" I asked.

Mother closed her eyes in concentration. She didn't speak for several seconds and then it all rattled out of her. "When I was just getting into my teens, Mother started getting sick. It wasn't like your normal illness, either. She began feeling weak and drained, like just a few hours of being awake for everyone else was like being awake for days on end for her. She couldn't lift as much, move as fast or think as clearly. Everything about her was... slowing down, I guess. Father and I didn't know what to make of it until she started having fainting spells. She'd be standing up, talking to us about one thing or another, and suddenly she'd just collapse in a heap. Father took her to the hospital in town for a few days of testing. I was here, all alone for those few days, not knowing what was happening. When they returned, they finally had an answer for what was wrong. It was cancer.

"You have to understand, back then, it was the 60's. In those days, cancer was a dirty word. No one spoke it, like just saying the word would somehow inflict you with it, like the very mention of cancer would strike a loved one down. People died from it left and right. Doctors knew what it was, but they had no clue how to treat it, let alone fight it. It was like that new virus they're talking about in Africa, the one that caused that scare in Reston, Virginia last year. Ebola. The going theory was that being diagnosed with cancer was a death sentence. Out of thousands, only a handful survived, and no one knew how or why. Frankly, it scared the hell out of everyone. When Mom and Dad came back with the news, it was like all of the life and laughter and happiness in our home had been replaced by everything cancer-related in a matter of days. Pain. Doubt. Fear. Those took up residence here while all the good things seemed to have gone on vacation.

"It took about a year for Mom to finally die. We tried our best to keep her comfortable, but back then our options were kind of limited. Being rich didn't seem to make a difference where cancer was concerned. Medical science simply hadn't caught up with it enough to matter for ANYONE. So Mom just... slowly wasted away to nothingness. By the end, I think both Dad and I were just glad that it was over for her. We hated seeing her in pain and not be able to do anything about it. It was a few months before she passed, though, when she had finally become bedridden, that she brought both of us into her room and talked to us. She told us that she loved us both deeply and she could see the effects her illness was having on us. She didn't want us to suffer any more than we wanted her to suffer. Dad was at his wit's end and I was at a loss for words. But she kept on talking. 'I want you two to be there for each other,' she told us. 'Whatever happens to me, I want to know that you will always love and support each other through everything. You've both been a gift to me and, eventually I will pass on. When that happens, I NEED for you two to learn how to be a gift to each other.' I'll never forget those words for as long as I live."

Mother took a deep, calming breath as she collected herself. A couple of tears escaped the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away before they could trace down to her thin, delicate jaw line. Then she pressed on. "So, when she passed, we were glad for her sake, but Dad and I were just a wreck. Due to... the way we live, all we had to rely on was each other. It took us a few years to manage it, but we did our best to honor her wishes. With her gone, I was the woman of the house. I picked up where she left off. At the beginning of her illness, after we found out that it was cancer, she began teaching me how to manage a home and gave me the reins when she couldn't do it anymore. By the time she passed, I had everything down to a science; she was a very, very good teacher. So that part of it was easy. But, as with me, Dad couldn't bring himself to take a new woman into his life. His heart just wouldn't let him do it- and, believe me, he tried. The results were disastrous, so he stopped. It was just him and me. I was coming into my late teens when I realized that Dad seemed restless and distracted all the time. I didn't understand it at first, but the light bulb in my head finally turned on. By the time I was eighteen years old, I had figured out that, even though he couldn't bring himself to date other women, he was still a man with needs. Sexual needs. And I was the only woman around.

"And he was the only man in my life. I was so busy with taking care of the house and looking after him that I didn't really have anything even remotely like a social life, forget about a love life. HE was my life. And I was genuinely glad of it, don't think otherwise for a second! So I got to thinking. In almost every way but one, I was living with my father as his wife. We ate our meals together, which I cooked, I did his laundry, we had conversations, we... well, to be honest, Conrad, we lived pretty much the way you and I live.

"Just before she died, Mom gave me the photo album that's sitting in front of you. She, however, didn't give me any kind of explanation. She was too weak at the time and I was probably too young to really understand anyway. At the time, all I saw were just some old pictures of what I guessed were family members. It wasn't until my eighteenth birthday that I found myself looking back through that album and started noticing... peculiarities. So, finally, I asked Dad about them, about the people in them. And, a lot like the conversation you and I are having now, Dad told me HIS story. And the story of his twin sister, whom he loved more than the moon and the stars, the sister that he would eventually take as his wife and have a beautiful daughter with."

And that caused my mouth to drop open. "You mean... wait, let me get this straight... your mother and father were actually brother and sister. They had you. Then your mother died, leaving you and your father alone. Then you and your father had ME? So that makes you, what? My mother AND my sister?"

Mother stared at me with a bland look. "Well, yes. That about sums it up."

"But he was your father!"

Mother smiled sweetly, almost wistfully. "Oh, honey, no. He was so much more than that. Son, he was the love of my life. Like you are, now."

"But you're not having sex with me!"

Mother shrugged indifferently. "It's not like I hadn't given the idea some thought," she said casually.

And that brought me up short. My mouth worked up and down as I fought for logic to settle back into my head. Her words had jarred me completely. When I got my mental balance back, my brilliant reply was, "What?"

"Conrad, have you not been paying attention to what I've said, after all? Let me recap: my father and I fell into a loving relationship that brought you into this world. Since his passing, I haven't been with another man. YOU have been the only man in my life, since your- OUR father died. You look, walk, talk and act every bit like he did. You are, practically speaking, his clone. You've seen the pictures yourself. You could be him, at the age of nineteen, maybe twenty-one. Have I thought about seducing you? Certainly! But I haven't. Because no matter how much you may look like your- dammit, OUR father, you are NOT him. You never will be. And it would be unfair for me to try and seduce you just so that I could satisfy my own selfish desires. And, make no mistake, son, a woman has needs every bit as much as a man does. I haven't been with another man in the fourteen years since our father's death, but it has been by no means easy."

"But it's incest," was my lame comeback. And it didn't come out in the heated, impassioned and disgusted manner most others would say it. Coming out of my mouth, it sounded more like confused recognition of a fact. Like someone would see something astounding and then say, "But it's science."

Mother was unflappable. "That's the word, yes."

"Isn't it against the law?"

"In most states, yes," she answered. "It is in this one. Which is part of the reason you were raised as you were. Our father was no fool. He knew that what we were doing, what our family has been doing going back for several generations, would have Society running at us with torches and pitchforks. Your great-grandfather's wealth has made it possible for us to hide from Society, to carry on as we always have without intrusion or interference."

"So, what? You expect me to pick up where Dad left off?" I asked incredulously.

Mother didn't miss a beat. "Do you want to?"

"I- what?"

"It's very simple, son. Do you want to pick up where our father left off? I promised myself that I would not seduce you. To my way of thinking, that would be too much like taking away the choice and free will to make your own decisions. I will not lie to you, however: if you decide that you desire me, I won't turn you away. Tonight, for the first time in your life, you've taken a moment to see me as every other man sees me. You said so yourself, that you could not deny what your friend said about me, that I'm beautiful. You think I don't know that about myself? Father made sure that I understood just how attractive I am. And, if that wasn't enough, other men have made it very clear, too. We don't get out into town very much, but when we have, didn't you ever notice how other men would stare at me? I certainly did. I don't flaunt it, I don't actively TRY to accentuate the beauty that comes to me naturally, but I am supremely aware of it. And it's been very, very tempting for me to just go out and get my rocks off with some dolt who just thinks I'm beautiful. But I haven't and I won't. Because, at the end of the day, I love our father too much."

"But with me it's somehow okay?"

Mother's gaze softened. "Absolutely. Yes."

"How?" I asked in bewilderment. "How could it be okay to take your own son to bed, but not another man?"

And then she hit me with a truth that I'd known all along but didn't have the courage to face on my own. "Because I love you... and I know that you love me. And if you're going to have sex with someone, with ANYONE, you should love that person completely FIRST, before you even so much as touch a hair on her head. No one will love you as much as I do. And no one will love me as much as you do. It's just that simple, son." She stood up, walked over to me and planted a soft, loving kiss on the top of my scalp, the way she'd done countless times as I was growing up, the way any mother would kiss her son good night.

"Keep the album for a little while if you like," she said from above me as the synapses in my brain fused. "And finish your cake. If you want to come join me in bed tonight or tomorrow night or any night in the future, you're welcome there and I will teach you all that I know about all the things I couldn't teach you before." She gave me another kiss, exactly like the first and then walked out of the kitchen. When she passed through the doorway, she said over her shoulder, "You're a man now and a man has to choose his own way. Our father taught us both that."

As you might imagine, I didn't sleep much that night. I lay awake well past midnight, thinking about the implications of what I'd just learned about my family. She'd said that incest had been going on in my family for many generations. The implication was that all I'd ever learned about incest must be totally wrong. With my grandmother being the only exception I knew of, we had no history of illness or... defectives in our family. If anything, we were the exact opposite of the image held by Society of what an inbred family might look like. The males were all hale and hearty, leaning towards Adonis-like, while the women (from the pictures I saw in the family photo album) all appeared to become more beautiful with every generation. It was like sex appeal was being bred INTO us rather than out of us.

I was reminded of Hitler's personal mission of creating the "perfect" race- blonde hair, blue eyes, fit to tackle bears, that sort of thing. He had used a breeding technique called "eugenics", which is basically selecting the most ideal human beings possible and mating them in the hopes that their offspring would result in something closer to his ideal. Sometimes he would even resort to inbreeding as part of his experiments and, while it shocked the world, his efforts had some merit in a purely scientific sense. The thing with inbreeding, however, was that you had a limited gene pool. If that gene pool has members in it who have a tendency to get sick more frequently than others in that gene pool, then inbred offspring will tend to follow that particular genetic trend. Therefore, you'd have to cull the sickly family member from the gene pool, so that they don't pollute it. Ideally, the only people in that gene pool would be perfectly healthy individuals with no genetic faults whatsoever. The trick, though, is that once you reach homeostasis within an inbred gene pool- that perfect zone where all offspring meet whatever criteria you're looking for- you can't let others into it. Otherwise, you risk having it polluted again.

This realization opened my mind up to a whole new slant of thoughts and questions. Was my family part of a similar "experiment" or were they even aware of what they were doing? If they WERE aware of it (and how could they not be if they've been at it for generations?), what were they working towards, if anything? I'd met only a handful of my family members over the years- purported cousins, aunts and uncles whose names I could barely remember- but none of them seemed particularly nefarious or dastardly, certainly not evil by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them definitely seemed a bit odd, but what family members don't?

Were my cousins sexually involved with each other or their parents? How many generations does this go back? If I didn't feel comfortable with it, would I be disowned and have to never return to my family? Dozens more questions filled my head and I desperately wanted to have them answered, but I was not about to go marching into my mother's room and start rattling them off. First of all, I didn't want to get her hopes up, thinking that I was there to have sex with her. Secondly, she'd raised me to have good manners and it would just be plain rude to wake her (if she was indeed asleep by that point) with such probing questions that even she may not be able to answer.

And thinking about her, about the possibility that she might expect me to accept her offer if I did just barge into her room, got me to thinking in a whole different direction. I was still a teenage boy, mind you, and still prone to hormonal influence. Having realized just how gorgeous my mother was and thinking about her in a sexual context, I naturally had an involuntary reaction. It was with morbid, but not altogether unexpected, surprise that I developed an erection, thinking about my mother. I was still a virgin, but I was not totally unaware of what happened beneath the sheets when the lights went off and a man and woman were in bed together. I'd read any number of books with sex scenes in them (Heinlein says a lot without revealing much) and even though we didn't get out much, I saw plenty of movies growing up. I knew just enough about sex that it was a mystery without being a totally alien concept. I knew what went where and why things felt good when done in certain ways; I knew what the ultimate purpose of sex was (to make babies) and that it felt good in order to make us WANT to make babies; I knew why things were sexy and appealing; but I had absolutely no frame of reference. I hadn't even kissed a girl yet, unless you count kissing my mom goodnight when I was a child. I'd discovered masturbation in my early teens and had gotten good enough at it, but the fantasies I used to accompany my masturbatory sessions were probably tame by normal Society's standards. But now, armed with what my mother had just told me, my fantasies suddenly took on a whole new and different tone. I wasn't just thinking about "some" woman in my sexual fugue, but about someone very specific, someone who would be a willing outlet to my sexual urges and even encourage me, someone who would welcome me with open arms and teach me all I ever needed or wanted to know about sex: my own mother. Who was also my sister. And, now that I think about it, she was also my aunt and cousin, too.