The Truth of the Matter Page 9

  “But, you know, Agnes, the year or so before your mother had Dwight—oh, you were probably still at Linus Gilchrest—John was just full of how beautiful your mother was. He claimed no woman north of the Mason-Dixon line ever could have her kind of beauty. He’d say that anytime. Of course, his own wife was considered a beauty all over Marshal County. Lillian, and Leo’s wife, too. Audra. The Marshal sisters . . . I used to hear people who hadn’t even seen them talk about how good-looking they were thought to be.

  “I went with John and your mother—and two of your brothers, I think—out to Judge Lufton’s to watch the harness racing. We went a few times. John was right about your mother. She was a beautiful woman.”

  “She was. She certainly was,” Agnes agreed. “It’s nice to think of Mama going to the races. She loved them. Before Warren and I were married, he and Lily took me and Mama and Edson out to Judge Lufton’s. But I don’t remember Warren’s father being there. I guess he might have been. I always thought later that it might have been the happiest day of Edson’s life. Lily made a big fuss over him. That must have been nineteen seventeen. And, you know, neither Mama nor Edson lived even another year.” Edson had died just two days after he came down with the flu, the very day after Agnes’s mother had given birth to Dwight. Not much more than a week later Catherine died of the same thing. She had never even held her youngest son. In fact, Agnes wasn’t sure her mother had ever understood that she had given birth to him.

  “Yes. Of course I know that. I remember that,” George said. “It was a terrible time. John was drinking too much by then, and carrying on. Although it was your mother he raved on about. I’ve been remembering it more than I like, Agnes. John was out at your place whenever he could get away. He wouldn’t come into the office, and Leo would be beside himself. And his poor wife. Poor Lillian. But I don’t believe Warren had any idea. Neither did your father. He was making a name for himself in the legislature then. He wasn’t at home much, of course.”

  Agnes leaned back in her chair and looked out at the light as it had narrowed to a slant in just the time of their conversation. She carefully noted the crisp edges of the shadow of the house as it elongated over the yard. And she tried not to think of anything else except the tall chimneys, as their shadows lengthened disproportionately across the lawn in contrast to the softer, mutable shadows of the trees.

  “Oh . . . ,” she finally said in a long, downward-falling breath of dismay. “Oh! You can’t think that my mother and John Scofield! Mama wouldn’t . . .” But Agnes felt a flickering ignition of anger at her careless, careless mother, and also a reawakening of fury at her lecherous father-in-law, John Scofield. “Well. I don’t believe anything at all happened between my mother and John Scofield! I just don’t believe it. I don’t even remember her mentioning John Scofield! I don’t know if she even knew he existed! Mama was so . . . She wasn’t connected to the town, really. To any people . . . She didn’t ever like living here, and she pretty much disapproved of anyone who did like living here. She counted it as a mark of . . . oh . . . of mediocrity,” Agnes said.

  “Besides,” she went on, after a pause during which she waited for Uncle George to recant what he had just said, to say that of course she was right, that now he saw it much more clearly. But George didn’t say a thing. “Besides! Uncle George, you’re just wrong! You’re just wrong about all this, and it’s truly unbecoming of you to tell me you suspect my mother . . . suspect her and your own brother! You never should have imagined a thing like that. It makes me really angry. . . . You know it can’t be true. It would mean Trudy and Dwight . . . why, they’d be related, too. It’s only Trudy and Claytor who’re cousins, Uncle George. It’s beyond me to understand why in the world you told me about it. Trudy and Dwight are married! Of course they’re not cousins! Otherwise why not Claytor and Trudy . . . ?”

  “Well, you’re right about all that, Agnes. I do think that John . . . I know that John carried on a flirtation with your mother. But it could have been that it was entirely platonic. It’s certainly possible that Dwight and Trudy aren’t connected by anything but circumstance. Well, and now by marriage, of course. It’s all conjecture, after all. Not worth worrying about. No one ever knows why two people get married, anyway. Claytor and Trudy probably grew out of their whole romance. And even if Dwight and Trudy have children . . . Well, I don’t think it’ll make a bit of difference.”

  The notion, though, that John Scofield and her mother might have conceived that baby—that infant who was Dwight—took away any other words Agnes might have said to George Scofield, who didn’t seem to expect conversation as he sat alongside her for another ten minutes or so. She was speechless with anger at him, not because he was the messenger, but because all at once it was clear to Agnes that George Scofield’s love of history, his pursuit of artifacts, stemmed from his own lack of involvement in life as it was lived day in and day out. She decided in those few minutes that she had never really liked him after all; he seemed to her now no more interesting than a person whose sole obsession was collecting butterflies, chloroforming them and arranging them carefully in exhibition cases. There was a morbid quality about collecting; she was appalled at the thought of the isolated, secret, prurient glee Uncle George must have felt when he discovered Adelaide Murry’s signed and dated jar of peaches.

  Finally he began to gather himself together to go home. “People make such a mess for themselves,” Uncle George said, with no particular emphasis, just as an observation. “You know, in the South people often marry cousin to cousin. To keep the land. Or to gain more land. Not the Negroes, though. Even when they were slaves. It’s against what they believe. It’s a taboo. And, of course, as you say, your father was at home now and then. Maybe there’s nothing to it at all, Agnes.” He stepped cautiously down the stairs onto the grass. “In any case we’ll never know one way or another. But it didn’t seem right not to tell you once it was in my head. It seemed you ought to know of the possibility, at least. But I guess we ought to assume things are just as they appear to be.”

  Agnes looked after him as he made his way tentatively along the path of stepping stones. She was shockingly enraged; she didn’t dare allow herself to say a word, but when he was all the way across the yard, Agnes noticed the jar of peaches still sitting on the table. She picked up the jar and examined it once more, turning it in her hand. And then she just let it fall to the paving stones—she did not fling it—and it made a satisfactory crack and gurgle when it hit the ground, although it also gave off such a sweet and concentrated odor of decay that Agnes turned away and went inside.

  When Dwight Claytor was assigned as a navigator with a B-17 bomber crew and was eventually stationed in England, at Deopham Green, no one except Agnes thought any more about Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, except to be surprised that Trudy didn’t come home when she was pregnant or even after she gave birth to a daughter. Trudy had decided to share an apartment in New York with the wife and baby of one of Dwight’s crew members so that the two of them could trade off nursery duties, and she took a secretarial job at Merriman Oil Corporation.

  By the time the war ended, their marriage seemed always to have been the way things were. Trudy and Dwight had a little girl, Amelia Anne Claytor, and Trudy was pregnant again by the time Dwight was finally demobilized. By then Claytor, too, was married, although no one had been able to attend the wedding because he was only briefly stationed in Biloxi, where he met his wife, and which was too far to travel during the war.

  By the end of the war, Betts and Howard, too, had both had enough adventures of their own that they thought their childhood was behind them, and they thought their growing up was comprised entirely of those years they had lived at Scofields under Agnes’s supervision. All of them but Dwight—who wanted nothing more than to take his family home—were wearied by the prospect of adjusting once again to the naïveté, the provincialism, of their hometown. They were uncomfortable with the pity they felt for those people they loved who had spent
the years of the war just going along as usual. They felt sorry that they could never explain real life to their parents or their aunts and their uncles, who no doubt believed that the important things that happened to them were whatever had happened in Washburn, Ohio.

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  DURING THEIR CHILDHOOD, and when they were away during the war, Dwight and Claytor, Howard and Betts, and even Trudy Butler considered the houses and grounds and fences and sheds of Scofields to be entirely Agnes’s domain. Robert Butler tended his garden but was otherwise taken up with his writing and teaching, and he was frequently invited to take part in literary conferences, and sometimes to receive honorary degrees or a prize of some sort. Lily saw to her own house in a sort of slapdash way, an easiness with her household that her nephews and niece admired.

  Their mother had always been finicky about domestic things: making slipcovers for the furniture to protect it from the summer sun, worrying over the shabbiness of the curtains—waiting until fabric went on sale and then sewing new ones herself for weeks of evenings, during which she was defensive and irritated, as if she had been wronged somehow, as if her children had commented on the state of the draperies, or, in fact, had even noticed them.

  Agnes went about the days with certainty and maintained an efficient household in which there were no untoward surprises. There were never the sorts of amusing disasters in Agnes’s house that befell the Butler household, and with which Lily often regaled the rest of the family. The time, for instance, when Robert and Lily had been out of town and their housekeeper, Mrs. Harvey, had taken it upon herself to remove and dust all the books and thoroughly clean the bookshelves. She hadn’t reshelved those books alphabetically, however, as Lily and Robert had arranged them; Mrs. Harvey had set them back on the spotless shelves in order of height and color. “So,” Lily said, “if I’m looking for a short, green book, I know exactly where it’ll be, but if I don’t know what the book looks like . . .” She made a helpless, palms-up gesture. “We can’t find a thing! And neither of us has worked up the energy or, really, the courage to rearrange them.”

  Dwight and Claytor, who remembered Warren Scofield, thought of him as the keeper of all there was about their family that was not tangible—the idea of them all, the epitome, somehow, of their very “Scofieldness,” for which they were much celebrated in Washburn, Ohio. Betts had bits and pieces of memories of her father, but Howard had no recollection of him at all, so the younger two counted on Dwight and Claytor as interpreters. And now and then they also picked up a nuance from some casual reference Aunt Lily or Uncle Robert might make, or their great-uncle George, all of whom reinforced the notion of glamour and dash with which they had imbued the idea of their father.

  Their mother, of course, never hesitated to speak of Warren, always amiably but without a hint of any emotion they could discern. The older three children weren’t aware that they held Agnes’s apparent serenity against her, as if it were an insult to Warren Scofield himself. Howard didn’t think much about it one way or another—Dwight Claytor filled the bill for Howard as an example of an admirable man, as did Claytor to a lesser degree. But the very fact of Agnes’s relative silence on the subject made Dwight and Claytor and Betts wary and defensive. Without ever acknowledging it to each other, the older three were alike in not wanting to know whatever Agnes might have to say. They already knew from scraps of conversations picked up here and there among the adults of the three houses that with Warren Scofield’s death, his family had been unexpectedly strapped financially.

  Dwight and Claytor remembered vividly how relieved their mother had been to get her job teaching school. Those two boys didn’t want it to be the case that Warren Scofield had let her down, had put any of them at risk. Certainly Agnes had never implied such a thing, but, nevertheless, Dwight and Claytor and Betts, too, held against her the possibility that it might be true.

  The children of Agnes’s household certainly believed they loved and admired her, but it had occurred to the older three separately that a woman like Agnes, lacking any hint of underlying sensuality, a woman who had watched the housepainter like a hawk, who kept a cynical eye on the coal deliveries, the plumber, and the yardman, a woman who kept such a tight rein on trivial particularities, well, they thought a woman like that might not be a reliable witness on the subject of their charismatic father.

  Their mother’s low-to-the-ground practicality, her determined frugality, the little snap of satisfaction with the dailiness of her life—a brisk nod of her head as she matched coupons to her shopping list or balanced her checkbook—was not at all what the children considered Scofield-like. They were enthusiasts; she was a skeptic; they were very nearly greedy in their anticipation of the future, whereas she seemed no more than resigned to it.

  Those children had spent a great deal of energy, of course, courting Agnes’s affection and approval; they were in full flight, though, from the idea of “taking after her.” And this whole notion of theirs was reinforced around town, where early on most people had forgotten that Dwight wasn’t, in fact, a Scofield at all and took to calling those two little boys—Dwight and Claytor—the “Scofield twins.” There was rarely a time when the boys were out in public at age four, or five, or six years old, with only five months’ difference in their ages, that some adult didn’t bend over them admiringly and exclaim at just how remarkably the two of them resembled their father.

  And Agnes never said a word; she was perfectly comfortable the first time Dwight had looked up at her from his crib and said “Mama.” It never crossed her mind to instruct him to call her anything else. Of course Agnes had explained to Dwight that his parents—who were her own parents, as well—were the older Dwight Claytor and the deceased Catherine Alcorn Claytor. When Dwight was growing up he saw very little of his father, and whenever the older Dwight Claytor and his second wife, Camille, were visiting, the children in Agnes and Warren’s house all referred to them as Granddad Dwight and Aunt Cammie, which suited everyone just fine.

  Agnes couldn’t see any particular merit in insisting that Dwight continually grasp the idea of who his parents were, as long as he knew the truth of the matter. Even though she had been terrified when the responsibility for Dwight had been so matter-of-factly thrust upon her immediately after his birth, to all intents and purposes he was her and Warren’s first child. By the time she gave birth to Claytor five months later, she was ferociously protective of Dwight, even resenting the new baby the first few days of his life for usurping Dwight’s place as the center of Scofield attention.

  And, as it happened, Dwight had not incorporated the idea of who his parents were as much as he understood who they were not. Day to day he did think of Agnes as his mother and of Warren as his father, but as a little boy, whenever his guard was down—in that elongated trance between wakefulness and sleep, for instance—Dwight grieved deeply for that self he protected so arduously, the self who was an orphan within his own clan. Being part of his own family—being, in effect, the archetype of a Scofield—was a task he had instinctively undertaken when he was no more than two or three years old.

  When Claytor became more than an infant, when he began to walk, and then to talk, and then to have opinions and desires, Dwight understood—with far more certainty than would a mere sibling—that he had no choice at all but to relinquish some part of his place in the family to Claytor. Dwight never acknowledged or allowed himself later to investigate those occasional spells of fury toward Claytor so overwhelming that, even when he was very young, he had known to suppress them. In fact, he realized instinctively that the only recourse open to him was to cultivate what was, as it turned out, genuine affection for Claytor. As a result, of course, during his childhood Claytor practically worshipped the ground Dwight walked on. There was so little apparent rivalry between those two boys that it was often remarked upon by members of the family and the family’s close friends.

  “They’re devoted to each other! Those two!” Uncle G
eorge Scofield often said when the boys were little. “They put me in mind of Warren, when he was a boy, and Robert Butler. They were just as close, and Lily was always tagging along with them, too. They were more like brothers than friends. But they didn’t look so much alike. Sometimes I see Dwight and Claytor at a distance—not far, just across the yard, say—and, I tell you, I can’t tell the one from the other. And do you know what? They do look like Warren, but more than that, they look like my brother John. They look more like Warren’s father, really, than they look like Warren himself.”

  Tut Zeller, whenever he came by, and Mrs. Drummond, across the square, and her daughter Lucille, naturally, when she was in town, and Sally Trenholm Dameron, Will’s wife and Agnes’s old school friend, when she was still alive—anyone who visited Agnes and Warren’s house, or saw the boys out and about—remarked upon their resemblance to one another as well as their likeness to Warren Scofield. Almost everyone, too, generally commented on their unusual, endearing, and unshakable camaraderie.

  When Agnes and Warren had a daughter, it was just assumed around town that she would favor her mother, but by the time Betts Scofield was no more than two years old, she—and little Howard, too, a few years later—looked like the Scofield side of the family through and through. As a result of being told so often how much they were like all the other pale-haired, brown-eyed Scofields who had gone before them, not one of the children in Agnes’s house compared him or herself to her. They didn’t even see Agnes, really, since she was always right there.