The Truth of the Matter Page 11

  After all, this was Agnes presiding over the property; this was the one person to whom he felt entirely known, and here she was, preoccupied with some strange dog. This was the person he thought of as his mother but who was inviting people to dinner left and right on Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne’s first day home, not considering the fact that they might be tired, that the three of them might only want to see the family. And what did it signify that—upon close inspection—the house had a worn, disheveled look about it, that the yards had gone to seed?

  Agnes seemed to have let the rooms become shabby, even threadbare. And although the children had dreaded Agnes’s persistence when she got a bee in her bonnet about getting some little chore attended to, Dwight was disturbed that so many things around the place appeared to need repair. Trudy glanced at him curiously when he spoke to Agnes with a clear note of petulance.

  “You know, Mama, you never wrote a thing about getting a dog. How old is he? He can’t be a puppy! How long have you had him? I’m surprised Aunt Lily never mentioned it . . . or Uncle Robert. You never said a thing.”

  “I didn’t? I imagine I just never thought of it when I wrote you. Well, it wasn’t important, Dwight.” But he still looked at her expectantly.

  “Oh, well . . . a pupil of mine was moving and had to get rid of his dog. . . . Pup’s probably about . . . Well, I didn’t even ask. I never thought about it, but I don’t think he’s very old. . . .” The dog became agitated when Dwight’s attention shifted his way once more. “Hush, now, Pup!” Agnes said. “Hush!” And, once again, when he heard the real annoyance in her voice, he subsided.

  Agnes cocked her head up toward Dwight with an unself-conscious smile of deep pleasure. She had been astounded at the sight of him, the tall, blond sweep of him. She was so surprised by her own intense joy that she knew it had made her shy and foolish. She was amused, too, by Dwight’s determination to know about the dog. It was exactly like him to run some fact to ground. Even when he was a little boy, his face would take on that insistent expression—his mouth drawn out straight and his eyebrows slightly raised. She finally reached toward him and grasped his arms just above the elbow so that she could hold on to him, so that she could take a good look at him.

  “I’m so glad to see you!” she said, still gripping his arms, still watching his face, while Trudy looked on, Amelia Anne sucked her thumb, and the dog momentarily relinquished his vigil and sat down to see what would happen. But Dwight was unnerved by her ingenuous delight—all his life it seemed to him her affection had had to be caught on the fly. It had seemed reasonable to him that it was bound to be Claytor whom she favored. And Claytor was so likable, so easy in his idea of who he was, where he belonged; never considering his entitlement to a place within Scofields. Dwight had always kept in mind that although Agnes Claytor Scofield had mothered him all his life, she was not, in fact, his mother. It would be nearly impossible, he always thought, not to love your own child most of all.

  Dwight smiled, too, but with a tightness around his mouth that he couldn’t overcome. She released him and turned away, and the dog began to bark once more. Dwight was relieved to see Agnes’s expression lose its oddly threatening and fond intensity. But she did give a brief, soft laugh and trailed a little poem behind her as she led them into the sitting room:

  “James James

  Morrison Morrison

  (Commonly known as Jim)

  Told his

  Other relations

  Not to go blaming him.

  James James

  Said to his Mother,

  ‘Mother,’ he said, said he:

  ‘You must never go down to the end of the town

  without consulting me.’”

  Dwight had bent to pick up Amelia Anne, who was finally overtaken by weariness and was sitting on Trudy’s feet. With the dog barking again intermittently, Dwight didn’t hear all of whatever his mother was saying. “What’s that, Mother?”

  “— if you want to put Amelia Anne down for a nap,” Agnes was saying to Trudy. “I’ve got a cot and a crib, too, set up in the sewing room. She must be tired. Oh, Dwight. Don’t you remember that? It’s just a poem you used to like. It suddenly popped into my head. You know it! It’s in one of those Christopher Robin books,” she said. “It’s just that little poem. About the little boy who’s so cross at his mother? His mother gets into all sorts of trouble—gets lost, I think—because she doesn’t consult him? You and Claytor loved all those books. Lucille Drummond sent them from England on her wedding trip. Don’t you remember? I’ve still got them packed away somewhere. Mostly they were about Christopher Robin?”

  Amelia Anne was reluctant to be picked up as Dwight lifted her, pushing away from him, stiff-armed, turning this way and that when he tried to calm her. “I’ll show you where we’ll put our little Orphan Annie, here,” he said to Trudy. “Come on, Ammi-Annie, Ammi-Annie-Nannie, come on, Annie,” he crooned to his daughter, who finally gave in and went limp, her legs hanging slack and her sandals bumping against his side. But when Dwight approached the doorway, the dog stood firm once more, barring his way, and suddenly Dwight’s voice inflated with exhausted frustration.

  “Out, Christopher Robin! Out! Out! Get out of the way! Now! Out of the way!” And Pup moved backward in surprise. “Mother, maybe you could put the damned dog outside until he’s used to us!”

  Trudy followed Dwight up the stairs, glancing an apology toward her mother-in-law, and Pup looked toward Agnes doubtfully, his whole skeleton giving way under the weight of his own inherent uncertainty. He sank in upon himself, looking overflexible and cowed, his head hanging in consternation and humiliation, and Agnes suddenly found herself fighting back tears, as if it were she upon whom Dwight had unleashed his unasked-for, patronizing, absurdly proprietary disapproval. She tilted her head back fractionally in a slow inhalation of the musty air of the sitting room and carefully unclenched her hands, stretching her fingers out into upward arcs so that she could feel the tendons pull as she cautiously released her held breath.

  “Come on, Pup! Come to the kitchen while I make sandwiches.” But the dog lagged back, and Agnes knelt down and wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her cheek against the top of his head, which gave off a clean scent, like warm wheat. “You’re a good dog, Pup,” she said, embarrassed to hear her voice break tearily. She held on to the dog and spoke softly. “You’re a good dog! You’re my good dog, Pup.” She hugged Pup to herself—swaying back and forth as though she were comforting a child—for a long moment on the slightly gritty, old Persian rug. And when she rose and moved along toward the kitchen, the dog went with her, reassured.

  Pup had settled down by the time Amelia Anne got up from her nap, and he became enamored of and devoted to Dwight and Trudy’s daughter as she moved around the house or ran across the yard, calling to him delightedly. “Bobbin!” she said. “Here Bobbin! Come here! Bobbin-Bobbin-Bobbin!”

  “She can’t quite handle ‘Christopher Robin,’” Trudy explained to Agnes, who didn’t reply for a moment.

  “Oh, no. Of course she can’t. Well, Christopher Robin’s not his name, anyway. I never could get around to giving him a name. Just ‘Pup.’ I just call him Pup. That’s what Warren always was good at. Just the right name, so that you knew from the sound of it . . . Well, I always thought whatever name Warren came up with had just been hanging out there in the air waiting for the person or the animal to come along and have it.” She paused a moment, suddenly thinking not to dwell on Warren. Not to say to her own daughter-in-law, even though it was only Trudy, whom she had known since the day Trudy was born, that Warren had said to her one night, just after they were married, as he lay over her, most of his weight supported on his hip, but his head propped on his hand as he looked down at his wife, that she wasn’t ever meant to be an Agnes. “You should be . . . uhmm . . . Celeste,” he said. “Or maybe Guinevere. Or Lady Elaine! Those heroines I imagined when I read The Knights of the Round Table. Or Marian from Robin Hood. A beau
tiful maiden who would give you her scarf to tuck in your sleeve as you rode off to battle.”

  Agnes didn’t say anything about Warren; she turned her attention to Amelia Anne. “But whatever Amelia Anne wants to call him, it looks to me like Pup will follow her.” Trudy smiled and nodded, but she hadn’t really heard what Agnes said, because Amelia Anne and the dog were heading toward the screen door, and Trudy moved at once to follow them outside so she could keep an eye on her daughter.

  Chapter Six

  IN RETROSPECT, when she tried to sort it out, it seemed to Agnes Scofield that her children had come home for good from their years away all at the same time. There had been a wave of children, friends, and family returning in the summer of 1947. Dwight and Trudy and their little girl, Amelia Anne, arrived in June, and Howard and Betts had shown up unexpectedly that same month. Claytor had been home briefly on leave at Christmas of 1946, but his wife and her daughter hadn’t been able to accompany him and meet the rest of his family until the annual Scofield Fourth of July picnic the following year. Agnes had lived in the house by herself since 1944, and all at once, there was scarcely room for everyone to find a bed. It seemed to her a jumbled, shortened rush of time that brought Dwight and Claytor and their families back to Washburn permanently, and Betts and Howard, too, more or less.

  Dwight and Trudy, of course, had both grown up at Scofields, and Agnes hadn’t imagined that their return would be much different from any other of their homecomings, although, naturally they would have their little girl to worry about. Not until they arrived, however, had she recognized that it was altogether different to adjust to Dwight and Trudy as a couple, bracketing little Amelia Anne with a family’s focused intention, as opposed to having them around as separate entities, each with his or her own idea of what was entailed by being at home. And then there was Betts, back and forth in stages, arriving on the bus and often bringing a friend along, or borrowing a car to come home for a few days at a time. Howard was still serving out his tour of duty, although even he was home on leave with some regularity.

  Her household had emptied gradually, and Agnes had looked forward to the return of all the children since the dreary December afternoon in 1944 when she had seen Howard off to Pennsylvania for basic training. She had come back to the empty house at Scofields, longing for nothing more than Dwight’s and Claytor’s, Betts’s and Howard’s return; she had now and then been sick with yearning for their company, or even for the knowledge that they were around town, in and out of the house, arguing, joking, eating, sleeping, breathing. But when there was a sudden convergence of nearly everyone—some of whom she didn’t even know—on the very day she had expected only Dwight and Trudy and little Amelia Anne to arrive, Agnes found herself nearly overwhelmed. Howard had appeared unexpectedly, arriving just after lunch, having caught a ride with another soldier who lived in Zanesville, but Howard insisted that the fellow stay through dinner at least, and Agnes was in bed before he left. He seemed quite nice, but Agnes hadn’t expected to be feeding so many, or to be rushing to hastily make beds—borrowing sheets and towels from Lily’s house. Agnes certainly hadn’t expected the day to turn into an event so burdened with slap-dash hospitality.

  Late on the afternoon of that same day, Sam Holloway, an army friend of Dwight’s, had called to say he was in Columbus on business and had missed his train connection and would be staying over until he could make other arrangements. He hoped Dwight and his wife would be able to join him for dinner. Dwight urged him to get on the first bus to Washburn. “There’s one leaving every two hours,” he said. “There’s plenty of room to put you up.”

  Agnes declared she was delighted, of course, when Dwight told her Sam was arriving—Dwight had written that Sam knew his and Agnes’s mother’s family, the Alcorns, some of whom still lived in Natchez. Agnes looked forward to hearing all about it, she told Dwight, and that was true enough; she wasn’t uninterested in what her cousins had been up to in Mississippi; they had lost touch with each other even before the war. But Agnes had to rethink the accommodations, and she put Howard in Betts’s old room on the second floor and Sergeant Holloway in Howard’s bedroom, down the little hall off the kitchen. He would have more privacy there, and if he and Dwight, and the fellow from Zanesville—if any of them—wanted to stay up late catching up with the others, they wouldn’t wake Amelia Anne.

  Howard and Dwight and Sam Holloway—along with Bob Treadway, before he set out near dawn to reach his parents’ house in Zanesville by breakfast time—did sit up long after Agnes and Trudy had made their excuses and gone up to bed. Agnes could hear the low rumble of their conversation off and on all night as she made a futile attempt to get to sleep. They weren’t keeping her awake; it was only that she couldn’t stop herself from trying to rearrange all the plans that needed changing in the next few days in order to accommodate the unexpected guests.

  Sam Holloway and Dwight Claytor had been assigned to separate bomber crews, but they were both stationed at Deopham Green, and they had first met each other simply because of the small-world syndrome, which occurred so frequently in the armed forces that it had become a morale booster of sorts. It often created instant camaraderie, but more than that—and illogically—it heightened the notion of being part of a huge but unified force. If a man you met in the service knew someone you knew yourself, for instance—or came from somewhere with which you were familiar—and yet neither of you had even had an idea of the other’s existence, well, then, who in the world was not fighting your same fight, enduring the same boredom and terror and surprise?

  Agnes and Dwight’s mother had been born and had grown up in Natchez, and remnants of her family remained there still, where Sam, too, had lived for a year or so. Sam and Dwight knew many of the same people. It was the damnedest thing! But then, as they remained friends, they also realized that, after all, it wasn’t really that unusual, and eventually they rarely thought about their original connection.

  After the war in Europe, Sam Holloway was stationed in Washington, D.C., assigned to the Office of Housing, which sought to ease the shortages of living quarters for soldiers who were streaming back into the country with enough money to own a place to live but who had no choice but to move their new wives and children into their parents’ houses—if the parents were willing—all of them crammed together like sardines. Some men couldn’t find any place at all to live, and, all over the country, there were veterans living out of their cars, veterans and their families making do in Quonset huts that had been hastily thrown up before the war to house soldiers during basic training.

  Sam became fascinated as he traveled here and there to assess conditions. There were new ideas popping up all over. By the time he telephoned Dwight Claytor, he had been demobilized and was in Columbus to see about a job with Lustron Homes, with whom he had worked when he was assigned to the Office of Housing. He was in town at the request of Carl Strandlund, the company’s founder. Sam planned only to see what the prospects for a job at Lustron looked like before he headed south, following his worldly possessions home to his mother’s house in Louisiana, and he and Dwight and Howard, as well as Bob Treadway, who had been a mechanic in the service, stayed up late discussing what they were thinking of doing in the future. Trying out ideas as they spoke and bouncing possibilities off one another, and all of them were increasingly delighted by the plans they made with each beer they drank. When Agnes came downstairs in the morning, Sam and Dwight had only gone to bed two hours earlier, and Sam was dead to the world. He didn’t hear a thing, even though his bedroom was no more than ten feet from where she was starting breakfast in the kitchen.

  Agnes had come downstairs in the quiet house about five o’clock in the morning with the idea of getting breakfast under way before she left for school. She had just started the bacon and begun to set out the ingredients for pancakes when a convertible turned into the long drive that ran along the back of the Scofield property, branching off in the three separate driveways that disappeared discr
eetly behind hedges planted around what had originally been unplanned parking areas. By now no one even remembered that they hadn’t always been there, and every year, fresh stone was put down, the hedges trimmed, and the brick borders reestablished if need be.

  Agnes leaned forward at the kitchen window and admired the sight of the creamy-yellow convertible and the glamorous woman in dark sunglasses who was behind the wheel, driving slowly and steering with only one hand while she ran her fingers through her blond hair, trying to untangle it where it was windblown. Even after Agnes had been surprised by the fact that the car turned into her own drive, it was at least another minute before she realized that the woman driving that car was Betts. Agnes hadn’t expected Betts to be able to get home at all for the rest of the month.

  She pulled into the parking area but left the motor running while she leaned over to check her face in the mirror, applying lipstick and taking a comb from her handbag to attempt once more to untangle her hair. While Agnes still stood gazing at her from inside the house, Pup was outside and regarding this development with extreme suspicion, dancing with urgency as he barked at the peculiar vehicle. He was using every tactic he knew to frighten it away, dodging toward it with ferocious intentions and then retreating with a yip when the thing didn’t move. Betts gave up the struggle with her hair, turned off the engine, and began gathering various things together, looking at Pup and laughing with her wide grin that called forth a responding smile from Agnes, whose senses finally came back into the moment.