The Truth of the Matter

by Robb Forman Dew

  The only day about which she was thoroughly sanguine was Thursday, when she and Lily played bridge, and Agnes unapologetically made her double-boiler dinner. A whole meal, using only the two interlocking pans! No one looked forward to it, including Agnes, but there it was, a complete dinner responsibly prepared. She had clipped the recipe from an advertisement for cream cheese:

  The Savvy Career Woman’s New England Boiled Dinner

  1) Boil, covered, for one hour, in largest half of a double boiler, one head green cabbage, outer leaves removed.

  2) Save cooking liquid. Remove cabbage and cut into segments. (One per serving. Cannot serve more than eight.)

  3) Place segmented cabbage in smaller insert of double boiler.

  4) Add one frankfurter per serving to cabbage broth.

  5) Remove wrapping from one block Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Place cheese on cabbage segments, cover, and replace insert on top of double boiler. Return to stove.

  6) Boil frankfurters for twenty minutes, or until cheese has melted. Serve frankfurters arranged over cabbage and cheese sauce.

  One of those Thursdays Sam Holloway had given Betts a lift home from the radio station, and she invited him to come in and have supper. Agnes added another frankfurter to the pot, but when she brought the platter of cabbage and frankfurters to the table and passed the bread, Sam looked up at her after serving himself. “Good Lord, Agnes!” he said. “This . . . Why, you just can’t serve this to a Cajun. To anyone from Louisiana. Or even Mississippi. You let me see what’s out in the kitchen, and I’ll turn this into something with a little spice. A nice gumbo. Or jambalaya if you have some rice. And if we get rid of the cabbage . . .” Sam was already up and collecting plates from Mary Alcorn and Lavinia.

  “Oh, you’re no more Cajun than I am! I’ll grant you this isn’t anyone’s favorite meal,” Agnes said, “but I’m leaving in half an hour for duplicate.”

  “I’ll leave your plate then, and pray for your soul,” Sam said. “But the rest of you folks come help me turn this into something edible! We need to get rid of this cabbage and add something. Maybe some tomatoes . . .”

  Since the day he had arrived in Washburn, Sam and Agnes had been as relaxed around each other as though they had a shared history, but the fact that they knew almost nothing about each other—that they never had to backtrack in order to interpret or explain how they had come to be where they were—only strengthened their alliance.

  “Mama, you’d think Sam Holloway was some long- lost cousin,” Betts had said. “Or even a brother. He’s here more than your own family.” Agnes looked at her daughter curiously, because she sounded indignant, and Agnes had thought that at least a flirtation would spring up between Betts and Sam. In fact, Betts had developed a slight, unreciprocated crush on Sam. He apparently thought of her in the same way he thought of her brothers, and it annoyed her to think that he found her mother just as interesting as he found her.

  Sam often dropped by on a weekend afternoon to sit on the porch and listen to the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Indians. Sometimes Agnes set up dual radios if the teams were being broadcast simultaneously. Usually other people joined them—Howard and Dwight and Claytor were all Cleveland fans, as were Trudy and Betts, and Lavinia liked the game but was maddeningly loyal to whatever team happened to be the underdog. It proved impossible to make clear to her the concept of fan loyalty. The little girls were in and out, needing one thing or another, a glass of water, a Band-Aid. People came and went, and it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

  And since that evening of the Career Woman’s Boiled Dinner, Sam arrived at the house with Betts every Thursday night with exotic groceries he had picked up when he was in Columbus, perhaps at a tiny German butcher shop, or at the small Italian or Asian markets where the owners barely spoke English and where he could buy fresh garlic, fresh or dried mushrooms, gingerroot, and coconut milk. He enlisted everyone’s help in creating the meals he planned. He cooked garlicky Bolognese sauce with fresh sautéed mushrooms, and he threw together various kinds of curries and served them with a short-grained rice that smelled like popcorn. From nothing more than corn meal and water Sam produced a creamy-textured dish that he let Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn take turns stirring before he spread it in a pan to bake.

  Generally, by the time Lily and Agnes got home from bridge, everyone was still around the table swapping stories. Lily or Agnes would briefly report on the outcome of their evening at cards and accept a glass of sherry or one last cup of coffee before the group finally dispersed.

  In the early months of 1948, George Scofield set up a succession of meetings with the trustees of the Civil War museum at his lawyer’s office, which was in the Ohio National Bank building. George was eager to get the legal future of the museum fully clarified, and he had asked Betts to represent the rest of the family.

  In late February, Betts hurried to meet her uncle at the bank building after she was finished with her dentist appointment, and just as she was rushing up the long flight of marble steps, she caught sight of a beautifully dressed man just ahead of her. He caught her eye because she hadn’t seen a suit so well tailored or wool of that quality since she had lived in Washington. But these weren’t clothes held over from before the war; the jacket was fashionably cut, and the man was wearing a handsome hat with the new rakish tilt and dimpled crown. She continued to watch him as he passed through the doors, but when she entered the lobby she realized, with an actual shiver of surprise, that the man she had been admiring was Will Dameron.

  “Will!” she said. “Where have you been keeping yourself? You haven’t been to the house in . . . oh . . . I don’t even know. It seems like years. It’s been so long that I swear I didn’t even recognize you just now. I generally see you when you’re not so decked out. You’re looking like some big-time executive come to visit your country cousins.”

  “Ah, I have another meeting in Chicago. Tying up the loose ends of the board is turning out to take more time than getting it under way ever did. You look wonderful! It’s funny you should say you didn’t recognize me. Just the other day you were coming down the steps of the post office, and I thought, My God, who is that? I was across the street and I thought you must be some movie star in town for some reason or other. Dan Emmett days. A concert. Something.” Will had turned to face her with a grave expression, tense with the desire to explain exactly what he meant, and Betts was surprised.

  “Will —”

  “I’m not even the kind of man who can tell one movie star from another, but I thought, well, I’ve seen her in some movie or in a magazine somewhere. You looked familiar, you see. And then I realized who you were. When did all this happen? I don’t imagine you’re going to find any shortage of suitors these days, with all our heroes coming home.”

  Betts was taken aback, because he wasn’t teasing her, and he seemed to be waiting for her to answer him. “Well, what a nice thing for you to say to a girl! That’ll put me on cloud nine for at least a week.” She smiled at him to indicate that she knew he was exaggerating, but he was determined.

  “No, I’m serious. When did it happen?” He looked at her with a perplexed frown, as if she were being obtuse, and Betts settled back a little on her heels and considered him carefully.

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking me.”

  “Oh . . . I was just . . . well, I guess I don’t even know what I’m asking. When I saw you, it felt to me almost like you’d played a trick. . . . I remember faces, but I honestly didn’t have any idea who you were for almost . . . oh . . . maybe for as much as three minutes.” Betts laughed, and Will realized he was being far too serious—too earnest for the occasion—and he smiled an apology at her.

  “I haven’t played any trick,” she said. “It’s just me. I think I just got older, Will.”

  “I suppose so. Well, but we all did that. You just managed to do it better than anyone else. Say, I don’t suppose you could spare the time to have lunch? Just over at the Monume
nt. My train’s not till three o’clock, but it would be a real pleasure to catch up on everything. How your family’s doing. What you’ve been up to.” Betts agreed right away and forgot all about the meeting with her uncle. She and Will were still chatting over coffee when he realized he just had time to get to the train station.

  He paid the check and helped Betts on with her coat, and before they headed off on their separate ways outside, Betts had insisted that Will join the family for Thursday dinner. “You never know what there’ll be to eat, but Sam almost always comes up with something good. Better than my mother’s New England Boiled Dinner, but that’s not so hard to do.” He thanked her and was still smiling as he turned away, and Betts watched him with a kind of attention she had never paid to him before. She thought he didn’t seem any older than he ever had and that he was a wonderful-looking man. Something in the way he moved—his lack of self-consciousness and assumption of authority—put her in mind of Hank Abernathy.

  Thursday dinners at Agnes’s became a fixed occasion, with the extended family and often various family friends at Agnes’s house. Betts invited Will, and he, too, became a regular guest. Agnes was glad enough to see him; he was a pleasant man as long as she wasn’t responsible for his being there. Robert had taken to bringing wine, although the choice at the state liquor store in Washburn was limited to red wine or white wine, both American and too sweet. Will sometimes brought back French and Italian wines when he made a trip to Washington or Cleveland. Agnes and Lily always drank coffee through dinner, as did Lavinia and Betts most of the time, but Trudy enjoyed a glass of wine, although she chilled even the red Californian wine to cut its syrupy sweetness.

  One afternoon Sam arrived with all the items he said he needed to make a paella. “Pie-AY-yah,” he explained after he spelled it. No one else had any idea what the dish entailed, which Sam said was a good thing, since the only seafood he had been able to buy was some shrimp that had been shipped fresh to a restaurant in Columbus whose owner he knew.

  “Mary Alcorn! Amelia Anne! Look at this!” He rubbed a small, dry thread of something between his fingers and opened his hand out flat for them to see that it had turned his skin a brilliant yellow. “This is saffron. It always reminds me of being on the swim team in high school. It smells like chlorine. If you don’t have saffron, though, there’s no point in making paella.”

  Mary Alcorn had proved not to be the shy little girl she had seemed on the day of her arrival; she had only been cautious for a little over a week. Once she had sorted things out, she chattered all day long, full of questions. It was Amelia Anne who looked on serenely, much like her mother had done as a child, Agnes thought. Much like Trudy still did, really. Both little girls were well mannered, but Mary Alcorn lived in Agnes’s house and asked endless questions about everything. She climbed up to kneel on a wooden stool so she could lean her elbows on the counter to watch Sam unpack all his treasures.

  Sam was the only person who had ever allowed Mary Alcorn to taste vanilla extract, and he didn’t know that in doing so he had gained her grave, five-year-old’s respect. Her mother and Agnes had both discouraged her, and so had her father. “It just smells good, sweetie,” Claytor said to her. “You wouldn’t like it.” But how could Mary Alcorn believe that? There wasn’t anything that smelled better, and Sam unhesitatingly let her tip a little bit from the bottle into a spoon and looked on while she tested it on her tongue.

  They had all been right, all those people who had told her it wouldn’t taste good, but she did discover that it tasted like it smelled. “You know what?” she said to Sam. “I bet this is how Mama’s perfume would taste.” And the next time Sam was in the house, Mary Alcorn brought Amelia Anne over from next door, because Mary Alcorn hadn’t been able to persuade Amelia Anne that vanilla extract was very bitter.

  Everyone counted it as great good fortune that Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne, along with their own new baby, Martha, born only twelve days after Lavinia and Claytor’s little daughter, lived right next door with Lily and Robert Butler and Uncle George Scofield. Mary Alcorn and Amelia Anne were together all day long and, for the most part, were happy in each other’s company. Bobbin had moved next door as well, in spite of the fact that Lily didn’t want a dog in the house. He was devoted to Amelia Anne and rarely left her side. But now that Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn were five years old and spent the morning at St. James Episcopal Church’s kindergarten program, Bobbin returned to Agnes’s back door and stood gazing at her while she hastily put her lunch together. She just had time to get to her own classroom before the first bell rang.

  She let him in, though, knowing that there were plenty of people in the house who could let him out again. Agnes had maintained a cheerful pretense of amusement in the face of the dog’s treachery, but she sighed when she watched Bobbin circle round and round, then finally settle into his accustomed place under the kitchen table. “Oh, Pup! I miss you . . .” She had depended on the dog; she hadn’t understood that before he deserted her. But she gathered her wits and forced herself to look at him with a cold eye. “But just so we’re straight about this, Pup. I’m not taking you up when you’re on the rebound. You’re happy as a clam at Lily’s. And, after all, you made your own bed. . . .” Then she stopped speaking aloud, because Betts or Howard might be up and about, or Lavinia might show up with the baby at any moment, and Agnes also stopped speaking because she felt the pressure of tears rising in her throat and thought to herself how ridiculous she was.

  Agnes left Bobbin in the house so he wouldn’t follow her to Jesser Grammar School. But all the while she walked along the alley, past the backyards of the houses on Church Street, she fought down an unreasonable melancholy. She did really love the dog; she had recognized it in surprise once again that very morning, but she was afraid she was losing the ability to love the people in her life. It seemed to her that the protective passion that had governed her existence for all the years the children were growing up had just evaporated into thin air. And, too, although she had never thought that she expected reciprocity for what was simple, instinctive maternal love, she continued to be surprised every time she saw a look of annoyance cross one of her children’s faces when she said something—recounted a fond story, even, from their childhood—that implied a particularly intimate knowledge of their personalities.

  Of course, even if the nature of her affection for her children had changed, she was still as bound to them as she had ever been. Whenever she picked up a hint of discontent or unhappiness from any one of those children, she herself was thrown into a low mood. Part of the difference between her feelings about her children when they were young as opposed to her affection for them now was that they had become more pinned down in the world, and she was more clearly aware of their quirks and weaknesses.

  And it was increasingly clear to her, too, that they had always believed she had plenty of faults of her own; they counted against her many things that she had considered her strongest attributes. Perhaps she was only melancholy, she thought, because she had failed to imagine that her children’s adulthoods would be a foreign country where she wasn’t even fluent in the language. She was tired of exercising diplomacy, tired of always being caught up in a round of negotiations.

  Sometimes she felt besieged by her children’s opinions flying around the room, lodging in the corners, absolute and unwavering but not always in agreement with each other. Dwight and Claytor’s irresolvable difference of opinion about bombing Hiroshima, for instance, and the anger it sometimes generated throughout her house and Lily’s, too. Agnes had once interrupted yet another version of the same subject when Lavinia and Trudy and Howard began to take sides. “For goodness sakes, Dwight! Claytor! Why can’t the two of you just agree to disagree?” Agnes said, but the conversation had become too passionate already, and no one paid any attention to her objection.

  When the whole family was at Lily’s one evening, though, Robert spoke up. “I’d say you two are in treacherous waters here. Why,
some of the world’s greatest thinkers—artists, poets, philosophers—have come to unshakable but opposing conclusions about the great arguments of their day. And yet they remained the other’s staunchest ally. You boys are a step behind. You’ll have to take it as a given that you each have a valid point. I’d say, in fact, that thoughtful disagreements are the single impetus for rational progress.” That notion did catch Dwight’s and Claytor’s attention, because it put them on an appealing intellectual footing, as opposed to their mother’s implication that they were little more than quarreling schoolboys. The conversation enlarged and turned to a discussion of politics in general.

  In her own house, though, Agnes still treaded softly during moments of sudden discord or explosions of hilarity about something or other that seemed to her devoid of any trace of humor. She was isolated by the fact that she was, through no fault of her own, the authority in residence, the curator of long-established traditions. Her own children were often unwittingly rude in their offhand comments, and Agnes was fully aware that in part it was because it never occurred to them that a criticism of anything in the household—the old-fashionedness of the refrigerator, the faded wallpaper in the back parlor—was an indictment of her.

  She had been very pleased with herself, for instance, during the rationing, when she had hit upon a tidy way to combine the end of a bottle of ketchup or honey with its replacement so that every bit was saved. Lily had been impressed, too, when she discovered Agnes using the cylinder of a tin can—from which the top and bottom had been removed—to encompass and hold stable a jar of newly opened honey on top of which a nearly empty jar of honey was inverted. Agnes stuffed newspaper into the empty spaces of the can in order to keep the bottles steady.