The Truth of the Matter Page 16

  “You’ll have to wait till I’m outside before you leave, Will. And then please go out the side door in the sitting room,” she said. “No one ever uses that door, and it only opens onto that little path beside the hedge.”

  “You know there wasn’t anything going on to scare that little girl,” Will said, and Agnes nodded her head and made a hum of agreement around the hairpins she held between her teeth, but she didn’t turn around and address Will. She concentrated on her hair, which was still damp at the roots with sweat. She was merciless in straightening and clamping it at the back of her neck, but her bangs were still not long enough to be held back, and they settled over the front of her head and her forehead in a curly pouf. Once more, as she regarded herself, she resolved never, never again to allow anyone else to cut her hair. She could always do a better job herself, despite Lily’s opinion, and it was Lily’s hairdresser who had left Agnes feeling that she looked like a clipped poodle. When she had said so to Lily, Lily hadn’t even disagreed.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Lily had said, moving around Agnes to see the cut from all sides. “Well, it was only that I thought it would be easier for you. . . . And, really, Agnes, your hair grows so fast . . .”

  When Agnes was satisfied that she had done the best she could, she turned around on the bench and gazed at Will, who had pulled on his pants but was bare-chested. She suppressed her impatience at the inefficiency of the way Will always got dressed, although she had so often wanted to tell him to—for goodness sake—put his shirt on first. Dwight and Claytor and Howard, at least when they were little boys, and Warren as long as she’d known him, had all followed exactly the same illogical procedure, but today she found it maddeningly unforgivable.

  When Lily had first read Freud and explained to Agnes the notion of penis envy, Agnes had just laughed. As close as Lily had been to Robert and Warren, she hadn’t grown up with brothers, hadn’t had sons, and had never been aware of the anxiety that overtakes a little boy at about age three or four when he suddenly becomes conscious of the external vulnerability of his own genitalia. Agnes had assumed that her brothers—whether they ever considered it or not—would have envied the elegant efficiency of her own discreet interior arrangement. Perhaps, then, a naked man would feel more secure getting his pants on before worrying about the rest of himself, before even remembering that he would have to tuck his shirt in.

  “I really want you to leave, Will. I mean, I want you to go home. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking.”

  “Ah, God, Agnes. That’s ridiculous. Why don’t we just get married?”

  “I’d never marry you, Will. It wouldn’t really work out. I’ve thought about it, and we’ve been over all this before. And, really, Will, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this afternoon I’d be so much more comfortable if you’d go home.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so mad. All right. This afternoon was my fault, and it was a bad idea. I’m sorry. I am sorry. But you’re acting like it’s the end of the world. Like you never want to see me again. You’ve blown this all out of proportion, and you’re making a mistake.”

  “I never do want to see you again, but I just hadn’t realized it,” Agnes said. She glanced up at Will and realized how unkind she sounded. “Oh, I don’t mean I never want to see you again. Of course we’ll see each other all the time. But all this . . . this is just over, Will.”

  Will himself was suddenly angry. “All right. I’ll go. I’ll certainly go. But I’m not going to hide out up here and sneak away. Explain it any way you want to, Agnes, if anyone sees me. I don’t think you understand how much I care about you. How much you care about me. I don’t think you’re in any state of mind right now to make this kind of decision.” But by then he was dressed, and he didn’t storm out of the room; he simply walked down the stairs, out the kitchen door and drove out Coshocton Road, past his old house and up the long drive to the handsome old farmhouse that had been built by Agnes’s grandfather. A few people had noticed Will leave. In fact, Betts had been in the kitchen when he passed through, but no one thought twice about it among all the comings and goings of so many people in and out of the house.

  There was a certain spot in Agnes’s bedroom, between the bed and the tall desk with its glass-doored bookcase, where, in the summer, the light from the bay window fell a certain way, and where—early in the morning, or if she’d napped in the afternoon—she often found herself standing stock-still, looking out at the yard as if she were watching scenes from novels through the window panes. It was a trancelike state from which she would emerge slowly, reorienting herself to the real world after a momentary lapse in which all but the most basic self-consciousness fell away. In the moment itself she had no thoughts at all. She thought of these small fugues as being slippery wisps of time, empty of context, that now and then enshrouded her, reducing her to her essential self—entirely unaware of time or place. She was only alive; she was no one’s daughter, no one’s wife, no one’s sister, no one’s mother, although even those non-connections were merely a way she could understand or describe the sensation after the fact.

  She had been subject to these short-lived spells as far back as she could remember; they weren’t alarming to her anymore, but as she came back into the world, everything had a flattened look; even light and air seemed to exist as flat parallelograms. Everything she saw seemed only to be images moving across a wavering screen. For just a little while people and objects were familiar to her but lacked dimension.

  Warren had been fascinated. “It must be like just being born,” he said. “Maybe it’s a memory of being born. Or maybe of before you were born. Sorting out how you became aware. Of when you first started to compare one thing with another. I am this; I am not that. I’ve never had a feeling like that. I’ve had the feeling of walking into a place I know I’ve never seen before and being convinced that it’s familiar. I’ll discover that I have an intense memory of a place I know for a fact I’ve never been. Even the smell, the colors. Déjà vu. I’ve had that happen twice that I remember, but never any state as . . . unlimited as what you’re describing.”

  The afternoon of this Fourth of July 1947, however, when she realized she had momentarily been caught up in just such a spell, she came back to the moment with her hand still clutching the spring-loaded window shade that she had coaxed upward. She looked out at the people shifting about in the yard below, and it was exactly like looking at a glossy page of an expensive book depicting people enjoying themselves on a summer day. It seemed to her that the scene must have come from something she’d read—not seen before but deeply known to her. Maybe that poem of Robert’s about Sweetwater. Children under trees. And adults as well, floating over the grass, the shirts and dresses and pants far more discernable in the ebbing light than the features of the people who wore them. Or she could be witnessing a bit of life that had already happened in this very place, with Dwight and Claytor and Betts playing out under the towering, trembling catalpa trees. Trudy and Howard as well. Only rushing inside now and then to get a glass of water.

  Warren had often taken Dwight and Claytor along to his office on a Saturday morning when they were three or four years old to pick up the mail or on some other errand, and the little boys would telephone her from the offices of Scofields & Company, although Warren dialed the number.

  “May I speak to Mrs. Scofield, please,” came a shy voice when she answered the ring.

  “Yes. This is she,” Agnes would answer in her telephone voice.

  “This is me, Mama.”

  “Oh? I hope you’re well today. But I’m very sorry to tell you that I think you must have the wrong number. I don’t believe I know anyone by the name of ‘Me.’”

  There would be a moment of excited laughter and solemn conferences on the other end. “No, Mama. This is your son. Claytor Scofield.”

  “Oh, well! Hello, Claytor. How nice to hear from you. How old are you now? Let me see. . . . Yes, you must be thirty-five years old by now. Are you m
arried? Are you calling me from far away? Are you phoning me from California? You sound so far away. Is the weather nice where you live?”

  “I’m not married. No! Mama! I’m not thirty-five! I’m not in California!” And then Dwight might take the phone.

  “How are you, Mama? This is Dwight Claytor. We aren’t in California.”

  “Oh, no? Well, you do sound awfully far away. Are you in Kissimmee, Florida? Or Joliet, Illinois? Are you calling me from Kalamazoo, Michigan? Or maybe Damariscotta, Maine? Oh, I know! I bet you’re calling from Natchitoches, Louisiana.”

  “Nooo! Mama! Why are you saying that? We aren’t anywhere! We’re here, Mama. How are you today?”

  “Well, I tell you, it’s surprising that you should ask me that just now, Dwight. Because I’m really not feeling a bit well. I’m awfully weak and shaky.”

  That would be met with baffled silence, and then Agnes would carry on. “I was just going to call your father to see if he could stop and buy some ice cream. And maybe some chocolate syrup. Maybe even half of one of the small cakes from the bakery if they’ve got cake today. I think that would be just the thing to put me back on my feet. But I don’t know where your father is. I’m afraid he must be lost somewhere. I had thought that maybe some cake and ice cream —”

  “— and whip cream!” Dwight would interject.

  “Oh, yes. That would be exactly what I need. But I don’t know where your father’s got to, so I guess I’ll see if castor oil is any help. I feel very strange.”

  “No! Mama! Don’t take castor oil! It’s horrible. It never makes you feel better. I know where Daddy is.”

  “But Dwight, you’ve never had castor oil. It might be just the pick-me-up I need.”

  He was quiet for a moment, considering the truth of this. “Don’t take castor oil, Mama. It smells horrible. I know where Daddy is . . .”

  “I’m so glad to hear that. Castor oil does smell bad. I’d much rather have ice cream.”

  “— right here! He’s right here.”

  Warren, though, had been there so short a time in their lives. So short a time in her own life. She stood looking out the window and realized that by now she had been without Warren longer than she had been with him, but that bit of her life was more vivid to her than when she recounted something that happened the day before yesterday. She thought that was probably because within the twelve years of her marriage to Warren, she had unknowingly been at the very heart of the slow swirl of her lifetime, awash in sensations that she had never had before. New babies. Unimagined and indescribable passions and joy and fear and despair. For those years she had been at an emotional extreme on every front; she had been fervent in every direction, and in retrospect she found the idea of her younger self exhilarating. She had often been filled with conflicting passions.

  Nothing in her life then had been bleached of color; every new experience was a bluntly shocking slash of red or yellow, a glistening blue—always primary colors, whereas now she thought of her existence as continuing in a far more subtle palette and done in watercolors. Often lovely, but never as intense. That notion neither pleased nor distressed her; it struck her as the way an ordinary life played out, and there was something to be said for both stages.

  She did sometimes miss the unusual sense of being important, busy at the center of the universe that, for a while, had been the houses of Scofields in Washburn, Ohio. She had been the most important person in Warren’s life; he had often told her so, but she had never doubted it, anyway. It was the only time she had believed herself entirely secure in someone else’s affection. And, of course, he had certainly been the most important person in her life. She didn’t think that was a coincidence that happened very often. Lily and Robert, for instance, each loved the other. There was no mistaking that, but neither one was in need of any assurance that he or she was loved. She and Warren had fallen into that rare coincidence of being exactly the person the other needed. She knew that it was she whom Warren had considered the protagonist of his life—other than himself, of course. That’s what he had been for her and what he would always remain in whatever versions of their childhoods her children told themselves. But she also fell sometimes into a brooding bitterness whenever she came hard up against the fact that ultimately she and Warren had each failed the other.

  It was now and then enraging to Agnes to know that—with the exception of Lily and Robert—all the people of Washburn were certain that what they had first considered an unlikely alliance between Agnes Claytor and Warren Scofield had turned out to be the perfect match. An ideal marriage against which other unions were measured. Sometimes Agnes longed to say to the children, at least, that their father was no saint. That no one had any idea . . . but then she would be overtaken by a sense of Warren, of his huge and occasional unhappiness that she couldn’t appease, and she was silent out of loyalty. Besides, the whole household had also been swept up in the long spells of Warren’s remarkable ability to enjoy every moment of some days, his enthusiasms and euphoria.

  Over the years, whenever Agnes began brooding, those times when she fell into states of mild self-pity and wondered if, knowing at nineteen what she knew now, she would still have married Warren—well, she never even bothered to carry on the thought. Considering the idea that she might not have married Warren was as impossible and irrelevant as trying to imagine God or as getting a grip on the idea of the universe. The moment you thought you had succeeded, you failed.

  She had considered his death so often that she knew exactly what had happened, although she never revealed what she believed to anyone else. Warren had been in a terrible way before that trip to Pennsylvania, and so had Leo Scofield, ever since his wife, Audra, had died the previous summer. “Just after the catalpas bloomed,” Leo said repeatedly. He had planted those trees as saplings the week before Lily was born, in 1888, to line either side of the entrance from the street to the garden. But Leo had thought he was planting tulip trees, which flowered beautifully.

  “Audra hated those damned catalpas! They were pretty for about a week in late spring, but then they began to stink to high heaven and dropped pollen all over anyone who came in through the garden. Wouldn’t you think I could have made the time to take them out? To have them taken out? Audra wanted dogwoods in their place, and I always thought, well, next year . . .”

  Agnes should never have let the two of them leave early that morning, with Warren driving Uncle Leo’s big black car. But it was the first time Warren had been determined to leave the house in nearly two and a half weeks, and she had been sick of his bleak mood. Tired of walking on eggs whenever she was around him. In the aftermath of his death, however, Agnes had considered the incident with nearly obsessive intensity, had thought it out in such detail that it took on the quality of narrative. She might as well have been in the car with them. She knew exactly what had happened: a shroud of hopelessness had enveloped Warren just as Uncle Leo said to him—across the distance of the front seat of the big Packard—that there was never a time that he wanted to go home again, now that Audra wouldn’t be there to greet him. Warren had been unable to respond, because he himself was fighting his way out from under the debilitating idea of eventual and permanent sorrow.

  Agnes knew that Leo’s articulated loneliness had hovered between them in the car for a moment or two, had then seized Warren in an instant when he needed only that bit of proof to complete a state of such desolation that it finally captured him after stalking him all his life. Agnes always winced—and the impulse to call out a warning caught in her throat—each time she envisioned Warren easing his hands off the steering wheel, letting that big car drift off the road like a slow, ponderous sailing ship, the tires whispering over the sere grass, and for one long, blank, hollow moment no other sound at all in the world as that big automobile went sailing out of control. Nothing but the brittle grass shattering under the tires until the car veered toward a sturdy tree at the edge of the drop, producing no more than a heavy thud of sturdy meta
l giving way a little bit, preventing the machine from disappearing into the brush-filled gorge.

  Finally Agnes blocked this familiar story and refused to allow her imagination to carry her further. She wrenched her thoughts back into the world of 1947 and the party assembling in the yard below. When she looked at her watch, she realized how late it was, and she turned away from the window and made an effort to shake herself out of her fuzzy-headed disorientation. She began to search for something cooler to wear than the gauzy voile. She took a crisp cotton shirtwaist from the closet and began briskly to tick off a list of what still needed seeing to before she could set out supper. She could smell the ham, and Mrs. Drummond was bringing a turkey. . . . The ham could go at one end of the table, the turkey at the other end, and the fried chicken in the middle. She buttoned her dress as she made her way toward the stairs.

  She wanted to check on Mary Alcorn, who had been so terrified. Agnes realized with relief, though, that the little girl had only been frightened because she had somehow gotten herself lost in the house and didn’t know yet exactly who Agnes was. Mary Alcorn hadn’t expected to come upon a person in the quiet room, and Agnes was certain that the little girl hadn’t even taken into account that anyone else was in the same bed. And Agnes deplored her own thankfulness at the fact that even if Mary Alcorn had noticed Will, she wouldn’t know that was unusual; she wasn’t familiar enough with all these people to have any idea who belonged with whom.

  Agnes was deeply embarrassed, with that dreadful sense of personal mortification that made her blush even though she was all by herself. How had she become a person who was able to give herself over entirely to lust despite everything? Despite the fact of her children’s return, and even though this was the first day they had all been in the same place since before the war? What in the world was she doing in the late afternoon of this Fourth of July—which had turned into the reunion she had anticipated for so long—spending any time at all entangled in bedsheets, having sex with a man her family thought of as an old and trusted friend. Even if she had been in love with Will . . . Even if they had been planning to get married . . . There were no circumstances in which her behavior was excusable.