The Truth of the Matter Read online

  He stopped in to have lunch at the Monument Restaurant and then crossed the street to sit in the square, slouching a bit against the wooden slats, stretching his arm along the back of the bench and enjoying the sun. He looked straight up into the heavy canopy of tall trees through which the cloud-puffed sky flickered and formed momentary patterns, as if he were turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope. He thought that not enough good could be said about this agreeable and prosperous community.

  In the afternoon, while Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne resettled themselves in Lily and Robert Butler’s house, Betts Scofield drove Sam around the countryside, showing him Harcourt Lees College and driving back the long way around, where the new Green Lake Golf Course and Tennis Club was going in. “But it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Betts explained. “I guess people might play golf when they come out to the lake, but it’s quite a drive. I think most of the people in town who play golf are still going to play at the country club, even though it’s only nine holes.” And at that moment, Sam Holloway began thinking about the town’s other needs and if there might be the possibility of implementing ideas he’d been considering during the time he had spent in Washington.

  Agnes insisted Sam remain at Scofields until the end of the month, when he would be moving to a room he had arranged to rent in a house on the corner of Main Street and Vine, just a block off the square. He sent a telegram redirecting his trunk and several other boxes to the Vine Street address instead of to his mother’s house in Alexandria, Louisiana.

  Sam Holloway had been on the lookout for a good job opportunity since the day he had returned home to Alexandria, after his third year at Vanderbilt, in 1935. Without a penny in his pocket he had taken a taxi from the train station to his house, run up the steps while the cab waited, greeted his mother with a quick kiss on the cheek, and asked her for fifty cents to pay the driver.

  “Well, Sam. We don’t have fifty cents,” his mother said.

  “No. Come on. Come on. I’m serious. The man’s waiting out there. I don’t have any money left,” he had said.

  “I’m serious, too,” she said. “We don’t have fifty cents.” Finally Sam had turned his little sister’s savings bank upside down—had literally shaken it for all it was worth—and managed to pay the driver, but the income from the investments his father had left his mother had evaporated, and Sam’s college days were over, as they were for nearly half of his class.

  He ventured into New Orleans and managed through a friend to find a job at Wohrley’s, a local grocery store chain. Since he owned a dinner jacket, he was able to volunteer in the evenings as an usher at the theater, or the opera, or the ballet, where he could generally slip into an empty box seat and enjoy the performance. More often than not he ran into old friends of his family and was invited to all sorts of events once it was discovered that he was living in town. He was living the life of a popular and sought-after young bachelor while spending his days cutting the rotten parts out of last week’s cabbages and wiping the white, slimy mold off wieners.

  Eventually he found a better job working at Teche Greyhound Lines, which was certainly a step up from sorting and arranging the inventory at Wohrley’s, and early in 1937, Sam was transferred to Natchez, Mississippi, to manage the bus station there. Sam expected to miss New Orleans, but Natchez turned out to be a big party town, and he enjoyed himself. Even though he was just the boy at the bus station, Sam was invited to everything, since he was attractive and amusing and came from a good family.

  He was disappointed the following year to be put in charge of the new, larger bus station in Baton Rouge, because by now Sam knew that even if he became the president of Greyhound Lines, it was a job he couldn’t tolerate forever. He had always managed to land on his feet, and, within less than a month, he happened into a sales position at a new radio station in Baton Rouge, WJBO, that had only been on the air since 1934. He had agreed to a salary of twenty dollars a week, which was less than he made from Greyhound, but he was delighted to leave the bus business behind forever.

  One mild December day when he had the day off, he had driven to Alexandria to spend the day with his mother, and the two of them were having lunch on the enclosed sunporch when his sister arrived in a rush, still dressed for church. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor,” she said, “and Bobby thinks that’s where his cousin Lawrence is stationed!”

  “I’d better get back to Baton Rouge,” Sam said. “It’ll be coming in on the wires.” He was already up and around the corner when he turned back to give his sister, Joan, and his mother a kiss. Then he was off again, only turning back briefly. “Joan, where is Pearl Harbor?” he called from the yard, but with a shrug and a shake of her head, Joan pantomimed ignorance.

  Sam enlisted in January of 1942, but he wasn’t called up until the following year, and he filled in at WJBO, doing a little bit of everything, and he had decided during that year that radio might be the career he wanted. By Tuesday afternoon, June 10, 1947, within only two days of arriving in Washburn, Ohio, Sam found a job at the town’s first radio station, WBRN, which only had authority to broadcast during daylight hours.

  The little station was in a hopeless competition for listeners with KDKA in Pittsburgh, although Sam pointed out that WBRN was the only station that covered local news for eleven counties as well as Marshal County, and he and the owner, Clifford DeHaven, resolved to secure the authority to broadcast around the clock.

  Sam was immediately popular, and various young women developed crushes on him. He was very attractive, although—or because—he wasn’t run-of-the-mill handsome. He had a quirky kind of appeal. He was one of those men about whom a childhood self could scarcely be imagined, which gave him an air of world-weariness that was engaging. He was nothing at all like someone who had grown up in Washburn.

  Almost everyone in town assumed that Betts Scofield and this new fellow, Sam Holloway, would gravitate toward each other, although there was another school of thought that held to the idea of a lost romance, a broken heart, Sam’s need for a new start. As much as the people of Washburn were pleased to live where they did, it seemed strange to some that Sam chose to avoid the region of his youth, his own family, or even Chicago or New York, with their inherent excitement and adventure.

  Betts Scofield and Sam were often together, but the thought of a romance with Betts never crossed Sam’s mind, and, for Betts’s part, she was still reeling from an intense wartime love affair. She did find Sam attractive, however, and they were thrown together so often that they began to take each other’s company for granted.

  Shortly after Betts and Nancy Turner had arrived in Washington, where they stayed temporarily with Nancy’s aunt, the two of them and Evelyn Ramsdale, who worked in the same office as they, finally found a cramped but decent enough apartment they could afford to share. Betts had insisted that they treat themselves to a celebratory dinner at Bob and Jake’s Restaurant and Club, which was considered pretty swanky. “As top-notch as any restaurant is in Washington,” Betts had said, having caught on to the fact that people from New York City, and Los Angeles, and even Chicago, considered Washington, D.C., distinctly unsophisticated.

  A group of officers arrived and were seated several tables away, still in the middle of a lively discussion of something or other, and Nancy was sitting facing their table. “There’s a good-looking group of men I wouldn’t mind meeting,” she said. “But almost all the men I see in uniform look handsome to me. They look so earnest and sure of themselves. It would be fun to have someone to dance with, though. I miss the parties at home.”

  “Do you really want to meet them?” Betts asked.

  Both Evelyn and Nancy laughed and said there was no way to do that without being considered too forward. But Betts bet them each a dime that she could get those officers to seek out their company. “And we’ll be so taken aback and modest. Our reputations won’t suffer a bit.”

  Betts had on her beautifully fitted blue linen suit and a wide-brimmed hat tipp
ed down over her forehead, and she thought briefly of her mother’s dictum that clothes should show off the woman, not the other way around. She looked like a sophisticated young woman from what must surely be a family of some consequence, and she knew she looked older than she was and very pretty. She spared a brief, kind thought for her mother. Betts was delighted not to look like a girl who had recently arrived from the wilds of Ohio.

  She leaned across the table to consult Nancy. “Which one is the best-looking? Where’s he sitting? Lean across toward me and act like you’re telling me a secret! Something private . . . serious.”

  Nancy did lean closer to Betts, although she was smiling without the least bit of solemnity. “Stop that, Nancy! If you want me to get those men to introduce themselves.” Nancy did her best to appear serious, and Betts turned her head to see the man Nancy chose, and, just as Betts imagined would be the case, all the men at the table were clearly aware of the three young women across the room. Betts glanced obviously but briefly at each man at the table with her mouth slightly open in the expectant beginnings of a smile, but then an expression of disappointed resignation settled over her face, and she turned back to Nancy, shaking her head so that her thick pageboy swung from side to side. “No, it’s not Dwight, Nancy.”

  “Well! Of course not!” Nancy began, “I would have known . . . Oh! Are you sure, Betts? Are you absolutely positive it’s not Dwight or Claytor?”

  “Who do you think it is?” Evelyn asked. Evelyn was from Oklahoma and hadn’t yet mastered the names of Betts’s and Nancy’s various siblings. Betts turned so that her profile was to the table of crisp-looking officers.

  “Oh, Nancy thought one of those men was my brother,” Betts confided to Evelyn.

  “Really? Which one?” Evelyn asked, glancing toward the table across the way, and Betts, too, turned to regard a tall, brown-haired major for a solemn moment, and then she shook her head slightly as she turned back to Evelyn. “Don’t look at their table again,” she instructed Evelyn and Nancy. “Just sit back in your chairs and look concerned and . . . look like you’re let down. Like you thought something nice was going to happen but that you were wrong. You’re disappointed.”

  And Nancy and Evelyn played their parts; those three pretty girls somberly ate their dinner with the most exquisite manners, buttering their rolls on their plates and breaking off just a morsel at a time to pop into their mouths, spooning up their soup away from themselves, carefully bringing it to their mouths without bending forward, without a sound, and with their other hand demurely in their laps. They used just the corner of their napkins to dab away a nonexistent crumb, and they bent toward each other now and then, talking softly. They were each startled when they were interrupted by the very polite major whom Nancy had mistaken for Betts’s brother.

  Betts demurred when Major Henry Abernathy introduced himself and asked if any one of them would care to dance. Would they allow him to introduce them to his friends? It was the Billy Horace band, he said. That’s why he and his friends had come.

  “Thank you, Major Abernathy, but I don’t think —”

  “Oh, Betts! I hardly think we have to give up dancing!” Nancy said. “We were just saying how we missed all the parties back home. . . . And goodness knows the place is full of people. It would be fun to . . . relax a little. Nice not to worry about anything else for an hour or so.”

  “You see,” Betts explained to the major, “my friend mistook you for my brother. But he’s stationed in England, and suddenly we all thought about our brothers and cousins, and . . . Well!” Betts made a frantic plea to fate that she and Nancy hadn’t traitorously brought down a curse on Dwight by invoking his genuine peril for a frivolous cause. After all, Betts thought, she did worry about him. She adored Dwight and Claytor and Howard.

  Eventually Betts more or less moved into Major Henry Abernathy’s apartment, and they had lived as though he didn’t have a wife and two teenaged children waiting for him in California. On Sunday mornings Hank went out for coffee and whatever pastries or doughnuts he could find and all the newspapers, and they often sat in bed without even getting dressed and read the news. They ate the rolls Hank had brought back and drank their coffee and eventually became uninterested in the sections of newspapers strewn across the bed. Now and then Betts would find a readable sentence of newsprint on the back of her thighs, or on her forearms, and Hank found they were both printed upon in unusual places, which amused them both.

  He was a career army man, and when the war in Europe ended and he was reassigned, he bought Betts a lovely, gold-link bracelet inscribed with the words “Forget Me Not,” but it was he who broke down when he gave it to her. “I’m almost twenty years older than you are, Betts. You’d be bored in ten days. And I love Judith. I do. And the girls. . . . We knew this was temporary.”

  Betts remained cool-headed. “I know. I believed we could do that at the beginning. I thought I was so sophisticated. . . . I thought how romantic you were, and that what harm could it do. But I don’t think this will be temporary, Hank. I just don’t think it’ll be possible.”

  And Betts saw him off, feeling certain she would one day be together with him for good. Hank Abernathy harbored the same secret belief and yearning all the way across the country until he was met on the base by his pretty wife and his two gangly teenaged daughters. His memories of Betts Scofield slowly dwindled in intensity, and he wasn’t at all proud of himself whenever they came to mind. It had never occurred to Betts that to be remembered guiltily by a nice man was almost certainly the fastest way to be put out of his mind entirely.

  Chapter Seven

  IN JULY OF 1947, Mary Alcorn was only a few months past her fourth birthday, too young, still, to be able to make abstract comparisons, too young to know she was hot in the backseat of the car, on the third and final day of the trip from Texas to Ohio. It had been ninety-six degrees when they got under way at eight in the morning. Even the idea of a trip had escaped her three hours into the first day, and by now the motion of the car had become an existence in itself; she had closed down her other sensibilities.

  The heat had made them all three nearly mute for the past few hours. Claytor rested his elbow in the open window and steered with one hand while he smoked one cigarette after another, and Lavinia lifted her heavy hair and dabbed at the nape of her neck with her handkerchief, which she had soaked with cologne. Both the cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5 swept out the front windows and into the backseat, where they rendered Mary limp with nausea, but she had lapsed into a mindless endurance and gave no thought to singling out the various sources of her discomfort.

  Claytor sang bits and pieces of songs, humming mostly to himself, but then he glanced back at Mary and made his voice bigger, louder, infusing it with amusement to indicate Mary’s inclusion:

  “To Grandmother’s house we go,

  To Grandmother’s house we go,

  Heigh-ho the Derry-o,

  To Grandmother’s house we go!”

  He made the song a kind of joke in an attempt to engage her, in the same way he would come and find her in the mornings and say, “Give me a kiss, Mary! I’m off to the horse-pee-tal!” That always struck her as outrageously funny—for a grown-up to say such a thing. But with the wind whipping through the car, she scarcely even heard him. She remained stuporously quiet with her head flung back against the seat where she sat next to the galvanized tub that held a block of ice that was beginning to wallow in its own puddle.

  A narrow ring of dirt encircled Mary’s neck just where her flesh creased when she bent her head forward, and there was a thin tracery of grit in the bend of each elbow. In an effort to cool the car, Claytor bought a fresh block of ice each morning before they set out, but within an hour or so it was furrowed and gray where the dusty, incoming air rushed over it as they drove across the country.

  When they stopped for gas, Lavinia moved to the backseat, and Mary scooted over. “We’ll be there in about six hours,” her mother said. “That doesn’t
seem so long, does it? It seems like nothing after driving this far.” Mary didn’t reply; she didn’t realize that her mother had asked her a question.

  When they were back on the road a while, Lavinia poured black coffee into the cup of the thermos, and Claytor turned on the radio and sang along now and then. “. . . just say good night but not good-bye . . .” Snippets of lyrics drifted into the backseat over the rush of wind. “. . . fireflies and the moonlight’s glow . . .”

  Lavinia finished her coffee, recapped the thermos, and lit a cigarette, looking out the window as they passed through a small town with tree-lined streets that seemed appealingly cool; the houses had deep front porches with ceiling fans. She shifted in her seat, finally, turning to sit slantwise against the window. “Mary,” she said to her daughter, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” But she was still working out exactly what she was going to say. Lavinia had read here and there in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, had just read the new book by Dr. Spock, had thought a great deal about sibling rivalry.

  She had read enough to be convinced that if she approached this issue the wrong way, it could be terribly damaging to Mary. Her daughter’s sense of security might be ruined. The ramifications of Lavinia’s getting this wrong might be felt throughout Mary’s whole life. Might possibly shape Mary’s own maternalism, perhaps even affect her idea of her own sexuality, although Lavinia couldn’t remember exactly why that was so. She respected her daughter’s intelligence but also believed that anyone aged four had a necessarily limited sophistication. Lavinia had considered for some time how to broach the subject, and Mary recognized her mother’s gravity and dredged up a drowsy attentiveness.

  “You see, after you were born, Mary . . . Well, you and your father and I were very happy. We were so glad to be together.” She paused to be sure Mary was listening, and then she continued, gazing just past Mary’s shoulder and collecting her thoughts. “Well . . . now . . . I want you to think of us all—the three of us—sitting on a park bench. And we’re so lucky. What I mean is . . . just think about the Armenians, and the French, now, of course, and poor England . . . Well. Anyway, the bench we get to sit on is in a beautiful park with fountains and gardens everywhere. And maybe a reptile house. Right near the zoo. We’ve all been walking through the park together, your daddy and me and you. We’ve been to see the animals, and we’ve been through all the gardens. You got to ride on the merry-go-round.” Lavinia had become entranced with her own idea, and she spoke rapidly and with enthusiasm, leaning toward her daughter and gesturing with her hands to describe the images she conjured up in the rushing air of the backseat.