The Truth of the Matter Read online

  Everything Will said made Agnes miserable. It was so unlike anything she thought herself. And, too, she felt peculiarly embarrassed for him, because he had revealed a kind of sentimental sanctimony that made him seem a little foolish to her. Agnes remained resolute in refusing to discuss it further, and Will didn’t stay over. She knew she was at least a little like the woman she thought she was; it was Will who was not the person he believed himself to be. He hadn’t thought out all the dailiness of marriage, he had only considered the propriety. His sense of honor annoyed her, even made him seem less attractive altogether. She supposed that made her less virtuous, certainly, than Will was, but Agnes realized that she wasn’t especially concerned with honor. Or at least she wasn’t interested in preserving the sort of respectability imposed by society. She had never thought of herself as dishonorable in the slightest, although, now that she considered it, the idea was unexpectedly exhilarating.

  The most seductive aspect of seeing Will—the marvel of the sex between them in the face of a long-standing and dispassionate friendship—was that no one knew about it. It wasn’t only another ordinary thing; it wasn’t what people ever thought about if they saw either Agnes or Will just walking down the street alone, or even together. Or if the two of them ate dinner at the Monument Restaurant on Sunday night, greeting so many acquaintances. The knowledge that she was walking along in a tidy dress, her coat buttoned, her gloves adjusted, her hair combed, a little powder on her nose, when perhaps a half hour earlier she had been in bed with Will—well, it delighted her over and over again.

  She did know that Will meant to save them from becoming a scandal. Of course she understood that she and Will were walking a fine line between respectability and licentiousness just by crossing the square together. She also knew, though, that if they were discovered, it would be she who would be held accountable. And it was that very tinge of edginess—the constant risk of being discovered and disapproved of—that was all that came between her and the hopeless feeling of inconsequence that had befallen her when she was standing on that chair in her schoolroom decorating the corkboard.

  After the first few years of Agnes and Warren’s marriage, Lily had thought Agnes was unbecomingly attuned to Warren. “Just let him pull himself together,” Lily said. “Of course it upsets you. It worries me and Robert, too. Warren’s a grown man, though. I don’t think it helps if you indulge these . . . these spells of gloominess.”

  But Agnes resented Lily’s implication that she had the inside track on Warren’s nature, and, too, that Agnes was incapable of wrenching her attention away from Warren if he removed himself from her—or from the household itself—emotionally and sometimes actually. Getting up one morning and, out of the blue, hastily packing for a trip, for instance, and telling her very little about it. “You know I promised Uncle Leo I would go out to Chicago,” he would finally reveal, as Agnes trailed behind him while he gathered shirts and ties.

  “But we planned . . . What should I say to Lily and Robert about Thanksgiving?” And her voice would become plaintive.

  “If that’s all you’re worried about . . . Good God, that’s not like you, Agnes! Don’t nag at me like that. . . . Damn! I don’t have my ticket. I’ve got to get going. . . . Oh, I’ll be back by then.” And Agnes would watch him escape once more from his own house. When the children asked where he was, she adopted Warren’s strategy, because otherwise she was too vulnerable; otherwise it might seem to the children that their father was running away from her.

  “He had to go out to Chicago. Uncle Leo depends on him. . . . Your father is very good at the sort of diplomacy . . . could talk the birds right out of the trees. . . .” They never asked further; they were never especially worried, only curious. When he remained at home but fell into weeks at a time of a paralysis of sorts, Agnes had a harder time altogether. During those spells Warren was less irritable, but it was as if every word he spoke had to be dredged up from a well, and his mouth seemed too stiff to properly fashion the few sentences he managed to articulate. He often retreated to his office at the Company until late at night, but now and then he was unable to do even that. He would stay in bed and sleep on and off through several days and nights.

  During those sieges, Agnes simply said to the children that their father wasn’t feeling well, or that he had too much responsibility, had been working too hard. She was left, however, caught in the middle of pity for and fury at him, and her unspecified anxiety vibrated through the household like a plucked wire.

  It was during these occasional episodes that Agnes would astonish and frighten the children with a sudden outburst of inexplicable rage. She became crazed over some little thing so insignificant that the children scattered, if they could, and let her wear herself out roaming up and down the stairs because, say, all the umbrellas had disappeared. She would be seemingly inconsolable that none of the children had put them back in the umbrella stand beside the front door. And how could they possibly know that their perceived forgetfulness made her feel betrayed? How could they know that under duress their mother considered them her only allies against the rest of the world?

  Agnes lost track of how young the children were, forgot that even if they had been outside with the umbrellas, they would certainly have been under her supervision. Or under some adult’s watchful eye. Dwight and Claytor were each separately grief-stricken when Agnes fell into these odd spells of enraged despair. Betts only became angry and indignant herself and persistently complained about the unfairness of it all.

  “I never took an umbrella, Mama! I never did!” She would follow Agnes all around the house until Agnes acknowledged her.

  “Well, all right, Betts. I know you didn’t mean to lose it, and you probably don’t even remember. . . .”

  Howard, since he was so young and had the three older children translating his experience for him, generally didn’t realize that anything unusual was going on.

  Agnes had fallen back into dependable stability after Warren’s death, and she mistakenly believed that her children would remember serenity and competence as clearly, and for as long a time, as they would remember injustice or grief. By the time the children were grown, Agnes didn’t even recall having been angry at or ever behaving with less than the best intentions for the children. She assumed that her children would never forget how much fun they had in their parents’ house. There was no one in the world who was as much fun as Warren often was, Agnes thought, in spite of whatever dark moods occasionally overcame him. And her children would have agreed with her, but Agnes did realize that his popularity had come at the expense, to some degree, of her own reputation within the family. After all, she was still there at Scofields, whereas their father had long ago become someone mythical.

  After Will first brought up the subject of marriage, he kept at it; he pointed out all sorts of benefits that he thought perhaps she had neglected to consider, and when she failed to succumb he was annoyed. “You’re not being reasonable, Agnes.” Agnes never admitted to Will that for months she pondered exactly that notion, thinking that Will might be right. Perhaps she was unreasonable. There was no question that Will was an easier person than Warren. Will always went along pretty much on medium speed; he was dependable and good-hearted. Being married to Will would be much easier than being married to Warren had been, but she dreaded the idea of all the unsurprising days they would spend alone together.

  In any case, no matter how much she worried at the bone of that idea, she always concluded that she didn’t love Will, really, even in the way she did love Lily and Robert. She liked Will, but she didn’t worry about him. She wished him well in every way, but her own happiness wasn’t contingent upon his welfare, and, she thought, as good-natured as he was, he was also a little boring. Nevertheless, the continuing fact of the otherness of the people she and Will became when they were in bed made Agnes feel as if she were visiting somewhere exotic without even leaving home.

  Chapter Four

  DURING THE EARLY YEARS
of the success and expansion of Scofields & Company, even before it became Washburn’s primary employer, the town as a whole conferred upon the Scofield family a particularly American idea of nobility, which had to do with an ill-defined combination of power, money, good looks, and temperament, and almost nothing to do with heredity. And, even though other industries had grown up in Washburn and were flourishing, the Scofields’ prominence, in particular, remained an integral part of the identity of the town.

  The Scofield family engaged the imagination of the people of Washburn. After all, Leo, John, and George had humble enough beginnings, but they had managed to develop an enterprise that began as no more than a small foundry into a major engine manufacturing company. And then, too, Leo and John had married the beautiful Marshal sisters, whose family had settled the area that was now Marshal County, which encompassed the town of Washburn. The communal legend was that Leo Scofield had been shrewd and incomparably wise, whereas his handsome brother, John, was a notorious but endearing scoundrel, although anyone who had dealt with one of those two brothers in the flesh had come to terms with each man’s complexity. But any myth is contingent upon generalities, and the town had taken custody of the characterization of those early Scofields.

  The largely affectionate regard in which the members of the Scofield clan were held relied largely on the townspeople’s knowledge of the details. Leo Scofield, for instance, had maintained that all the Scofields were born on the ides of the month, just as he had been. Just as his youngest brother, George, had been. It was of no consequence to anyone that John Scofield’s birthday fell on February fifth. That was an inconvenient fact that was either ignored or reinterpreted. After all, birth records of the early nineteenth century, as far west as Ohio, were notoriously unreliable. Somewhere along the way John’s birthdate may have been mistranscribed. Lily and Warren had been born on September fifteenth, within eight hours of each other, as had Robert Butler—born before either of the others but on that same day in 1888—which conferred upon him a tentative Scofieldness in the communal subconscious of Washburn, which Robert unwittingly legitimized when he married Lily Scofield.

  In the next generation the same coincidence had proven true in every case except for Claytor Scofield, who had just barely missed being born on the fifteenth of April. He arrived two days earlier on the thirteenth. But everyone in town said that he was clearly so much a Scofield that it was probably just the case that he was born early. Everyone knew that Scofields were born on the ides, and no one took any account of those two days. No one except Claytor as he grew older, and birthday after birthday, he was reminded by the other children in the house that he couldn’t be a real Scofield, which was what he suspected, anyway, with Dwight always right there ahead of him, accomplishing everything with brilliance. Of course, Claytor was only being teased—fondly, his mother insisted—but he dreaded the celebration of each new year of his life.

  Certainly there were other families far wealthier and also closely watched, but the Scofields were so numerous and more attractive en masse—more interesting altogether. And because of their collective charisma, this second generation of children contended with more than average attention even from relative strangers, but they were also the subjects of collective pride of a sort. The people of Washburn expected them to excel—expected them to be far more publicly successful than any children from the prominent families of Coshocton, for instance, or Palmyra, or Centerburg. Those children living in the Scofield compound incurred the same variety of loyalty in the community as did the Washburn High School Wildcats, who were counted on year after year to have a winning season at the very least. It was simply assumed that Dwight and Claytor, Trudy and Betts, and Howard would be respectably accomplished—the boys, at least—and that Betts and Trudy would be uncommonly attractive and make wonderful marriages. All of them were expected to live productive and happy—though virtuous—lives.

  In April of 1943, however, when word spread that Dwight and Trudy had gotten married, those very townspeople proprietarily rooting for the welfare of those children were quick to be appalled by that union. It was unthinkable that first cousins would marry. People wondered to each other if the marriage would even be recognized in Ohio, where it was, in fact, illegal to form so close an alliance. Trudy and Dwight had gotten married somewhere in Texas, and, well . . . Texas wasn’t even as respectable as, say, Charleston or Savannah. No one in Washburn knew anyone who was held in particularly high regard who also lived in Texas.

  And, too, hadn’t it always been the case that it was Claytor and Trudy who were in each other’s company all through their teens? Each a shadow of the other? If first cousins could marry . . . what had happened behind everyone’s back? It was upsetting and hurtful not only to people who knew the family well but even to people who had never met them. And the two had gotten married so far away from home—and no wonder! In the South almost anything was legal between family members. Dwight and Trudy’s families hadn’t even known until two days before the ceremony when Trudy telephoned her father to break the news, and then Dwight called his family. Trudy was on an extended visit to a friend from Mount Holyoke who lived in Austin, Texas, near Randolph Field, where Dwight was stationed.

  In Washburn the main sticking point was probably the confusion caused by those two boys’ names. Agnes and Warren Scofield had settled on the idea of using Agnes’s maiden name for their first son before Agnes’s little brother, Dwight Claytor, was even born. When Agnes had her own child, only five months later, it hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind to worry about future misunderstandings, when Dwight Claytor’s last name was also Claytor Scofield’s first name. After all, they were still infants to whom no surname yet adhered.

  Since most people in Washburn hadn’t considered the nature of the Scofield-Butler-Claytor connections for years and years, it took more than a week for everyone finally to conclude that Dwight and Trudy were not, after all, the first cousins they had come to be thought of. In fact, it seemed to be the case that they weren’t related in any way at all. It took a few weeks more for most people to unravel the exact relationship between Dwight Claytor and Trudy Butler—as it had been previous to their marriage, of course. Dwight Claytor was Trudy’s mother’s—Lily Scofield Butler’s—first cousin Warren’s wife’s brother! No one could sort out if that made Dwight some sort of distant uncle or cousin by marriage to his own bride, but most of the furor died down when everyone decided it was certainly not a blood relationship.

  The whole upheaval might have been resolved much sooner, though, if the older generation of the family hadn’t remained silently uneasy about the marriage themselves. For one thing, they all remembered very well that during their adolescence it had been Claytor and Trudy who had spent hours and hours together. “But it was because they simply were complements of each other,” Lily insisted. “Like ice cream and cake. Or . . . rhubarb and strawberry. Like peaches and cream.”

  “Well, now,” Robert said, “you’re whetting my appetite for a little something sweet. I believe we ought to have some dessert.” Lily, Robert, and Agnes were seated around the Butlers’ table after supper, and Robert was merely making an effort to lessen the sense of urgency about what was, after all, a fait accompli. But Lily waved him off with only a whiff of a smile.

  “But when you think of it? Isn’t that the way you see it?” Lily asked, leaning forward with determination. “Trudy and Claytor would talk for hours about nothing at all, but I never thought it was anything romantic between them. Did you? They were like brother and sister. Don’t you think so? I mean it always seemed to me just good luck that Trudy had a cousin she liked so much.”

  Neither Agnes nor Robert commented, though. For a while, when the four older children entered the highly charged years of their teens, it had been impossible to be in the same room with Claytor and Trudy and not feel the physical attraction between them, no matter what they were talking about. Once Agnes had passed Claytor on the staircase, where he was standing at the w
indow of the first landing, and it was clear to her that he hadn’t even realized she was in the vicinity. He had been standing very still, with his fists pressed against the glass panes on either side of the one through which he was gazing as if he had been frozen in place.

  Upstairs Agnes had looked out her own window in the same direction. Across the way, Trudy and Betts were lying on the porch roof outside Trudy’s bedroom, sunbathing. The girls had talked about it earlier, because Betts wanted to try her theory that if each of them put a rubber band around her feet to hold them together—so that they would stay upright without any effort on the girls’ part—it would make it possible to tan the fronts of their legs.

  They were in their bathing suits lying on separate blankets. Betts had still looked like a girl growing up. She appeared to be tenuously connected, as if she might fly apart, might not hold fast at the joints; she had the thin, attenuated look of a praying mantis, and she was holding a book up over her head so she could read. She had gotten bored with the effort of vanity and wanted to get back to Villette. Trudy lay next to her, and the contrast was startling. Trudy was all of a piece, rounded and sleek like a little house cat; she was so still she almost appeared to be asleep as she lay with the straps of her bathing suit unhooked and her arms lying lax at her side. Her skin had turned golden after weeks of summer, and her state of seeming entirely self-contained and quiet—while Betts shifted this way and that, fidgeting and clearly uncomfortable—made even Agnes want to reach out and touch Trudy. Grasp her wrist, tap her lightly on the shoulder, in order to become the object of her reflective, particular attention.