The Truth of the Matter

by Robb Forman Dew

  Agnes hurried down the back stairs just as Betts dashed in through the screen door, hurried through the kitchen into the hall, and put the phone back on the hook.

  “Oh, good,” Betts said. “There you are. No one’s anywhere, Mama! Mr. Drummond called to speak to his wife, and I’d just seen her in the front yard. But when I went to call her to the phone, I ended up going across the square to her house. Mr. Drummond was still in the front hall, holding the phone, because he’d gotten worried that the turkey was getting overdone. But Mrs. Drummond had gone home and was in the kitchen checking on the turkey! He didn’t know she was in the house, because she’d gone around the back way. I can’t find Howard. I don’t know where Amelia Anne has gotten off to. I thought she was taking a nap on the sleeping porch. Oh, and I feel just awful! I left Claytor’s little stepdaughter waiting for me at the foot of the stairs and forgot all about her. I just saw her tearing across the yard, so I guess she’s all right. Maybe Trudy has Amelia —”

  “I didn’t mean to leave all this to you, Betts. I’m sorry —”

  “There’s no reason for you to be sorry, Mama. After all, now that we’re all home, I guess I’m as responsible for being the hostess as you are. I need a chance to freshen up, too, though. I’m going to run upstairs and change clothes, but I’ll be back in just a second.”

  The table was set up on the long, screened side porch, and Dwight and Claytor came inside, still involved in an earnest discussion, glancing quick smiles at their mother. “I’ve gotten used to a really good edge,” Claytor was saying. “I take all the knives into the hospital once a week —”

  “I’ll get just as good an edge with the steel,” Dwight interrupted. “It was one of the first things Daddy taught us. Do you remember that? As soon as we got tall enough.”

  One of the Drummond sons-in-law was crossing the square, carrying one of his mother-in-law’s elaborate silver platters, on which sat the turkey, partially draped with a linen towel. The ham sat at the other end of the table, resplendent with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries. Someone had done a pretty job of tucking parsley and dill among the pieces of fried chicken arranged on one of Agnes’s own silver platters, and Trudy and Lily went back and forth retrieving dishes of green beans, potato salad, cole slaw, fruit salad, and plates of biscuits. Each dish was divided between two separate serving platters so that the guests could help themselves from either end of the table without jostling or crowding one another and before the food got too warm, in the case of the jellied fruit salad, or too cold, in the case of the ham and the turkey.

  Gradually people began to drift toward the porch in clusters, continuing their conversations as they stood a moment, assessing the table before serving themselves. Agnes joined the company on the porch, where Trudy had taken charge of the occasion and where Lavinia moved around the outskirts of the group, proffering the platter of fried chicken, which had proved hard to reach at the center of the table. Agnes came up beside her to relieve her of the chore. “That’s a good idea,” Agnes said. “I should have put a platter at each end, but I didn’t think so many people would want chicken. You go on and visit, now, Lavinia,” she had said. “You shouldn’t have to be a hostess on your first day at Scofields.”

  “I’m glad to do it,” Lavinia said, which was absolutely true. She felt shy among this group of people so well known to each other; it was a relief to have a job to do.

  Howard had materialized right behind her, and he spoke up just to make conversation. “It’s got to be hard to remember who we all are,” he said kindly. “Sometimes I think it’s hard even for Mama. All four of us look exactly like our father. I don’t remember him. I never knew him in any way I can remember. But you can see the resemblance from any picture of him. The others got the good parts! I just got the height! I was interested in an awfully pretty girl when I was stationed in Missouri, and she always said I made her think of Ichabod Crane.” Lavinia didn’t know the Scofields well enough yet to realize that one of their greatest charms was a genuine and good-humored self-deprecation.

  Lavinia had no choice but to give the large platter of chicken to Agnes, and she folded her hands on top of her stomach, hoping to stop the baby from kicking while she appraised Howard. “You know, that’s not true,” she finally pronounced. “Your whole family is good-looking. Which is always lucky, I think, because it would be so hard on the one who wasn’t good-looking. My first husband’s family was the same way except for one younger sister who was just sort of ordinary. Not homely or anything, but just someone you wouldn’t notice one way or another. She’s nice enough . . .”

  Lavinia dragged herself back into the moment. “But, Howard,” she said, “I think you’re probably the most interesting looking of all of you. Your face—your features, really. That slight droop of your eyelid and the way your mouth is a little crooked. You don’t have a cookie-cutter face,” she said, and Howard couldn’t think of any reply at all. “But all four of you look like your father?” Lavinia asked, and Howard nodded. “I don’t see how that could be,” she went on. “Now Dwight and Claytor! Those two do look alike! Mary Alcorn scared herself to death when she mistook Dwight for Claytor.”

  “Well, that’s what we’ve been told all out lives by every living soul in Washburn,” Howard said. “People in town used to call Dwight and Claytor the ‘Scofield twins,’ although it must just be something about their manner. When you look at them up close, their faces aren’t really all that much alike. At least I never thought so. It’s just something about the eyes and the coloring, I think.”

  “But anyone who saw all of you together couldn’t possibly mistake the fact that you’re all your mother’s children,” Lavinia insisted.

  “Really? Do you think so?” Howard asked, and everyone in the vicinity—all of whom had picked up a word or two—paused to hear what Lavinia was saying. George Scofield was particularly intrigued and held his empty plate by his side as he leaned in closer to her.

  “Oh, of course they would!” she said. “Why, your faces . . . Anyone can see it. And your eyes . . . Why, you know, you’re all exactly like beautiful cows. Your cheekbones. All of you look like your mother. I don’t know what your father looked like, though, except what Claytor’s told me.” Lavinia was picturing the lush eyelashes and the hollow-cheeked faces of the cows they had passed on the long drive across the country. The cows who leaned with bovine delicacy—which Lavinia had never before taken into account—to dip their caramel heads into the long, sweet grass on the other side of whatever sort of fence contained them. She was remembering how they lifted their eyes to gaze at her from under their lashes as the car passed, and how she had thought it was odd that she had never noticed how elegant these common creatures were.

  Agnes didn’t hear much of anything Lavinia was saying, but, in spite of herself, she experienced a surge of pleasure at having the children told that they looked like her. She had grown weary of the endless remarks about how much the children resembled their father, and it hurt her feelings that her children were delighted to be told that they resembled no one so much as they resembled Warren.

  “I always notice that people who grow up together don’t really know what the others look like,” Lavinia went on. “I mean, they might tell you that . . . Well, in my family everyone is always saying that our French ancestry is impossible to miss. But I don’t really think any of us look French. I don’t know enough people to know if the French even have a particular look.” Lavinia spoke in a musing tone of deliberation, so that it was hard to know if she was making a statement or asking a question. “And I’ve always thought that somewhere along the line, one of my forefathers—or my foremothers, for all I know—had a wandering eye for one of the house servants, or maybe the cook. I think my family just preferred to think of itself as French. I guess the French are thought of as . . . oh . . . as olive-skinned. Like Joseph Cotten. The actor? He’s from an old Virginia family, too. Horse country. Orange, Virginia. Right around there, anyway. His family w
as there before the Revolutionary War. Which explains his looks, of course.”

  The nine or ten people within range were dumbfounded, but Lavinia finally got to the point she intended to make. “So, since your father was tall with light hair, it’s just natural that you all assume he’s the one you took after. And you probably all do look like your father. But you all have your mother’s huge, round eyes—just the same color brown, too—and her high cheekbones. Your expressions are so much alike. . . . I’ve noticed that that happens in families, too. Do you think it’s because people automatically take on the expressions they see around them? I think it must be inherited, because no matter how long people are friends, I’ve never noticed that they take on each other’s expression.”

  Howard had assumed the responsibility of filling a plate for Lavinia, who fascinated him, and he and Betts guided her away from the porch and settled her at a table next to Trudy. Howard had to hurry off to help Sam Holloway organize the fireworks.

  Dwight was in charge of the corn, but he refused to cook it until everyone had served themselves and settled on the grass or at tables set out on the lawn. He wound his way through the crowd of neighbors and friends and his own family, dispensing buttered corn on the cob. “Three minutes!” he declared as he made the rounds. “It’s got to be boiled in half milk, half water.” He was cooking it in batches, because Trudy and Betts had shucked seventy-five ears of Will’s fresh-picked corn.

  Claytor and Lavinia’s little girl, Mary Alcorn, and Dwight and Trudy’s daughter, Amelia Anne, were busily digging under the trees with teaspoons, their heads bent together, with Bobbin lying no more than three feet from them, alert to any threat to his small flock. One of the girls now and then earnestly explained to the other something about the elaborate tunnels and ravines they were excavating. Even one glance at Mary Alcorn and Amelia Anne made it clear that their acquaintance had immediately been a profound connection. Now and then that happens with young children, but more often than not there’s a long period of shy suspicion and negotiation.

  Trudy looked up as Agnes settled between her and Lavinia at one of the cloth-covered card tables that Agnes had borrowed from the church along with plenty of folding chairs. “Aunt Agnes, I’m afraid they have two of your silver spoons. But I’m keeping an eye on them. I’ll be sure they aren’t lost.”

  “But look how well they get along,” Agnes said. “Isn’t that a nice thing?”

  “I think they’re going to get sleepy all at once,” Trudy commented, and Lavinia glanced at Trudy without indicating whether she agreed or not, but neither of them seemed unduly concerned.

  “Howard’s helping Sam Holloway with the fireworks,” Lily said, as she pulled up a chair and joined them. “He says Sam won’t start the show until the fireflies can’t be seen except for their light.”

  “Howard’s been the safest person with fireworks—Claytor and Dwight, too—since little Eddie Parsley blew off his hand that time,” Trudy said. “When was that? Howard was out of grammar school, I think.”

  By now it was easy to see the glimmering of the fireflies as they rose in the woods at a distance, but up close they were still visible in their unglamorous brown insect bodies. Agnes excused herself and went to turn off all the lights in the house and on the porch, and also to make coffee and set out the cakes and pies and slice the melons. She was arranging things on the porch when the first brilliant explosion illuminated the sky, and she stood still for a few minutes as, one after another, the rockets and Catherine wheels and shooting stars followed each other into the air in a spectacular sequence. It turned out that Sam Holloway had spent one summer in New Orleans helping produce a nightly fireworks show at an amusement park, and he and Howard had gone off to buy some other types of rockets Sam suggested and that Howard hadn’t known about.

  It was the best show Agnes had ever seen, planned with care so that each sputtering, gleaming light rose higher than the one before, and the colors were extraordinary counterparts to each other, combining in arcs of unusual aqua and brilliant pinks as they showered umbrella-fashion back to earth. Sam Holloway was an unusual man, Agnes thought. Maybe he and Betts would be interested in each other. Who would have thought that a man like Sam Holloway would be an expert on fireworks shows? He seemed too worldly, too sophisticated somehow to be taking part in so universal and simple a diversion. But then, Agnes thought, you rarely ever find out all the things a person can do or that he cares about.

  The morning of July fifth, all over town the people who had been at Scofields the night before discussed the picnic, the fireworks show—it had been at least twenty minutes long. And, of course, they discussed Claytor Scofield’s wife and little stepdaughter. Lavinia Scofield was a puzzle. No one knew quite what to say about her; they were still surprised from the night before. She wasn’t like any other person they had ever met. On the other hand, she had just arrived that afternoon and must have been terribly tired; perhaps it was too soon to know what she was like. But imagine telling the Scofields that they all looked like cows—beautiful or not. It was hard not to think of that as being rude on her part.

  And so, on the morning following the Fourth of July celebration, all over Washburn, the Scofields’ previous night’s guests pondered Lavinia’s meaning. But in the case of her ancestry, the subject was only alluded to obliquely. Could she possibly have meant that she suspected one of her forebears of miscegenation? Did she honestly mean to imply that she might have Negro blood in her family? And what was all that about Joseph Cotten?

  “Do you think Claytor’s wife looks French?” Mrs. Drummond asked her husband and her oldest daughter, who was home with her husband for a visit.

  Even Lily was perplexed as she sat at breakfast with Robert, drinking her second cup of black coffee and smoking a cigarette. “What do you think Lavinia could have meant, Robert? Do you think she meant to insult everyone? That would be such a strange thing to do when you’re a new member of the family.”

  Robert smiled and then gave a short laugh. “I don’t think she meant to insult anyone at all. I think she meant it as a compliment. You mean when she said that Warren’s children all looked like Agnes? That they looked like beautiful cows? I’ll tell you, I looked around and saw that she was exactly right. Most people underestimate—have never noticed—the beauty of cows.”

  And Uncle George Scofield had awakened before dawn, hastily gotten dressed, and headed over to his Civil War museum, where he kept several boxes of diaries and scrapbooks he had collected over the years. He pored over photographs of Southern families taken before the Civil War, and a great deal suddenly became clear to him.

  Across town, in her cramped apartment, which had been hastily eked out of the small upstairs of their landlady’s house, Nancy Turner Fosberg was saying to her husband that she thought it was going to take some time to get used to Claytor Scofield’s wife. Nancy and Betts had both had Washington romances—Nancy’s not so passionate as Betts’s—but Nancy had come home from Washington and almost immediately married Joe Fosberg, whom she had been in love with all the while she was in high school. “She’s awfully pretty,” Nancy said, “Lavinia Scofield is. Although she’s so pregnant that it’s hard to tell what she really looks like. But I never am sure what she’s talking about. I suppose it’s because of her being Southern and being French,” she said to Joe. But he had slept late and was eating a quick breakfast; she was standing at the sink and didn’t see him nod in hasty agreement, but she wasn’t really expecting him to answer her, anyway. Like almost everyone else who had stayed too late at Scofields the night before, he was already late for work.

  Part Three

  Chapter Nine

  CLAYTOR’S FAMILY STAYED ON with Agnes even after their daughter Julia was born early on the morning of September 13, 1947. All over the country, housing was scarce, and Claytor had very little income while he finished his residency in Cleveland. He shared a rented room with another student and came home to Washburn whenever he could, but it was a long
trip by train, and especially unpleasant by bus. Betts and Howard, too, had taken up their lives again from home base.

  Under the GI Bill, Howard had managed to work out an arrangement affording him tuition at Harcourt Lees College, and even the expense of books and student fees was covered, since he could live at home and waive the cost of room and board. Except at supper, Agnes rarely saw him when he wasn’t just about to miss the bus to Harcourt Lees or rushing to catch a ride with Robert Butler. In fact, Agnes’s house teemed with people who were running late.

  Betts took up where she’d left off at the Mid-Ohio Civil War Museum, just next door, although she only worked until Uncle George came in after lunch. Group tours were scheduled for the mornings, and George Scofield spent the afternoons reassessing his collection, evaluating its strengths and weaknesses, and generally just browsing about. With Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne at Lily and Robert Butler’s, George enjoyed the peacefulness of settling into a comfortable chair in a room filled with the artifacts he had spent his life collecting. Betts was always there by eight-thirty and ready to open at nine, but she worked a second job at WBRN in the afternoons, making a dash to get to the radio station on time, begging a car or a ride from Agnes or Lily or anyone she could find at the moment.

  Every Saturday morning, when Agnes sat down at the dining-room table to sort through her coupons and make out a shopping list, she studied the calendar she kept next to the telephone, where everyone in her household had been asked to record their comings and goings for the upcoming week. Now and then someone had penciled in something or other, but generally on Saturday morning Agnes would look at the squares of deceptively virginal days lined up neatly across the page and feel vanquished. She envisioned those days as opaque rectangles through which she would pass, closing the door of each evening firmly behind her while carrying leftover meat loaf or the rest of a baked ham along with her as she moved through the week.