After many years had gone by, and his brother and both his sisters were long dead, after his family’s fortune had, finally (as long predicted) fallen into ruin, after he became so senile that even tabloid reporters wouldn’t interview him because it made them feel ashamed, Cyprian St. John would tell anyone who would listen (and that was almost no one) that, after all that had been perpetrated against him (the fantastic trajectory of his life that had started out so bright, the famously public fall of the St. Johns), he blamed all of his unhappy luck on his blood.

* * *

The St. John estate had once been magnificent, vast, the quintessence of American royalty; E. W. St. John dubiously made his fortune thanks to underhanded Mafia dealings and a preternatural ability to win at card games. By working the gambling circuit on riverboat cruises, E.W. made his first thousand and bought himself a new suit. Six months later, wearing this same suit (charcoal gray, with a smart crease down each leg), he proposed to Ms. Clara Fairbanks, the daughter of a prominent Mississippi riverboat pilot. Ms. Clara promptly accepted E.W.’s proposal, and three days later she and her fiancé stole away under cover of darkness—though Ms. Clara was perfectly happy to marry E.W. and his growing fortune, her father was not. In the years that E.W. worked and won on gambling cruises, he earned himself a reputation as being less than honest in the way he played his hand.

Thus the couple, young and uprooted, worked their way around the country. E.W. cheated, stole and drank, but they were beautifully, undeniably happy together. As their fortunes improved, so did their affection for one another. However, two years after their marriage at a church in Reno, Mrs. Clara St. John realized, to her consternation, that she was pregnant. E.W. found himself with a problem unlike any other he had faced in his twenty-three years: suddenly, and without his consent, responsibility was expected of him.

So they settled on an expansive tract of land in upstate New York that happened to habitat a sprawling manor house. There, E.W. unhappily watched his pretty wife grow bigger as the months went by (she was carrying twins), and then, after his sons were born, watched her seem to fade under the constant attention two infants required. At his heart, E.W. was a selfish, jealous man. Clara’s affections being continually stolen by the twins, Theodore and Cyprian, he found himself loathing the children. He began to make himself absent more and more from the estate, finding ever more ridiculous reasons why he should remain away.

On one such trip, E.W. received a frantic telephone call from Clara. “It’s Cyprian,” she sobbed into the phone. “He’s hurt himself, he won’t stop crying. I’ve called the doctor. Please come home.” Paternal instinct did not compel E.W. homeward. Instead, it was anger at the child Cyprian for upsetting his young wife that drove him to the train station, and then down the long lane to the sprawling manor house.

There he found the boy, nearly two, lying in his crib with the doctor standing by the bedside explaining to Clara that the child had a clotting disorder not unlike hemophaelia, that she must be extremely careful to keep him from being too active, that he would likely not live long. E.W. strode into the room then, placing his arms protectively around Clara (she was holding the other boy, Theodore, in her arms) and said, Thank you, doctor. We appreciate your help. E.W. saw the tears, fresh on Clara’s face, and knew that for her sake he must try to love his children, because she did. He could not, however, find it in himself to feel anything but a kind of heavy dislike for the sick boy who made his wife so unbearably sad.

The frequency of E.W’s trips away from the estate slowed, though they never went away, and two more children were born to him and Clara: a daughter, Judith, when the twins were nearing three, and a year later their youngest, Ophelia. Of the four St. John children, only Cyprian was afflicted by the clotting disorder. E.W found that as his children grew (and after a nanny was hired) he was able to tolerate, and then even enjoy their presence in his home, with the exception of Cyprian.

Theodore reminded E.W. of himself as a boy, strong and fast, but a bully. As a young man, Theodore became the glamorous face of the St. Johns in the public eye, gambling in Monte Carlo and spending summer holidays in Spain. He inherited E.W.’s love of games but not his knack for winning them. It would be a bad financial deal orchestrated by Theodore that destroyed the St. John fortune. Judith was Theodore’s female counterpart, shrewd and sharp, cunningly intelligent but brutally cruel. She was not a natural beauty, and when she grew older no man would marry her. She had no children, but she did keep a pack of small snippy dogs that she carried with her whenever she traveled.

By temperament, Ophelia and E.W. were complete opposites—he thought she was a strange, queer girl who wasted her time drawing in the woods. He found himself attracted to Ophelia for her physical resemblence to her mother. E.W. liked Ophelia best when she was sitting quietly in a pretty dress, because it was at those times that she most reminded him of what Clara had been before life and children interfered with her. In actuality, Ophelia was a gifted artist and writer, endlessly inspired by the natural scenic beauty of the St. John estate and its surrounding area. She was the constant devotee to her older brother Cyprian, living with him at the estate long after their parents had died, and Theodore and Judith had moved away.

Cyprian was a pale, sickly, and sometimes morose child, but an exceedingly talented musician. His first instrument was a violin that had been his mother’s, but Cyprian soon mastered it and moved on to the rest of the string family. As he grew older, he became extremely handsome—the better, truer, and more polished copy of his twin brother. He loathed card games, traveling, and his father and preferred to stay on the estate with his mother and Ophelia, roaming the grounds and avoiding, whenever possible, Judith’s dogs.

The St. John children grew, and when the twins were nineteen, their father died. Theodore, taking much of the money left to him in his inheritance, took off for Europe and wasn’t seen for three years. Soon after, Judith left for New York City to attend college. And so Clara, together with her sickly musician son and her much devoted younger daughter, found herself for the first time in many years truly alone on the estate. Together, the three closed off a large portion of the manor house, knowing that they would not need it with E.W., Theodore, and Judith gone. They lived relatively happily, occasionally holding dinner parties at the request of some old time friend of E.W.’s or in honor of some academic honor Judith had won. They followed Theodore’s exploits in Europe through the many magazines that reported on the young playboy, until one morning when Clara woke to a pounding on door. Theodore had come home to them, and after him, though she shut the door quickly, entered the cause of the great ruin that an elderly Cyprian would always, always blame on his blood.