The Truth of the Matter

by Robb Forman Dew

  “Betts! Just think about it for a little while! At least a few months. You can’t . . . Will is a nice man, but he’s not the right person for you. Betts, Will is my age!”

  “I knew that’s what you’d say! I knew Dwight would say the same thing. Now do you see why I hate to have my family involved in my life? Everyone feels they have the right to give me advice! But if I don’t care about our age difference, then it just isn’t anybody else’s business!”

  Betts suddenly felt the release of tension across her shoulders; it was a relief, she realized, not to keep this secret. She reminded herself that her mother had known Will her whole life, and it was unlikely in those circumstances that she would ever see him as he was now. Prominent not only in the community but depended upon even by the government. He was an authority on the newest developments in agriculture, often traveling to Washington to speak to one committee or another.

  “I should have said something, Mama. I just hate it, though, when everyone knows my business. I just hate it when everyone thinks they can say the rudest things to me and disguise it as advice!”

  “Betts! I’m not trying to disguise anything! I’ve known Will all my life, and he just isn’t the right person for you. He’s a man who . . . Why, he’s perfectly nice. He’s an attractive man. But he’s a man who —”

  “Who what, Mama? I thought Will and I should just go get married. I didn’t see any need to get anyone’s approval. In fact, if Will didn’t have such an old-fashioned idea about what’s proper . . . I really wanted to just go get married and not bother with all this. I know this family . . . Dwight and Claytor . . . even Howard! None of you would have been anything but polite if we’d just come in the door already married. You don’t worry about insulting me, but God knows you wouldn’t ever have been rude to anyone outside the family. Not one of you would have said to Will’s face that you didn’t approve!”

  “Betts, it’s . . . I don’t approve or disapprove except that he’s just not the right person for you.” Agnes stopped herself for a few seconds to consider what she was saying, to consider what she might say. Just briefly—just in a flash of a thought—Agnes questioned her own possible motives for discouraging the marriage. But, no, she concluded, she certainly wasn’t jealous, and her own involvement with Will seemed to have been so long ago and under such different circumstances that for all intents and purposes it hadn’t happened in the real world. Agnes was certain that nothing but good intentions were at the heart of her objection.

  “Betts, really! He’s the sort of man, oh, you know . . . the sort of man who says . . .” She realized Betts’s patience was about to give way, and Agnes finally just plunged ahead. “He’s the sort of man who’s always telling you what sort of man he is! He’ll say, ‘I’m the sort of man who doesn’t approve of that language,’ or ‘I’m the sort of man who doesn’t like seeing a woman smoke cigarettes.’ He’s not as sophisticated as you are, Betts! You’d get bored. . . . He’s not as smart as you are!”

  “Mother! I never would have guessed you’d be such a snob! Will’s smart as a whip! He’s just . . . It’s just that he’s straightforward. It’s just that he’s a very smart man from Ohio. He doesn’t care about impressing other people. Being clever at anyone else’s expense. You can’t imagine how provincial people are! People from New York! Or Boston . . . or even Charleston, South Carolina. People who come from Los Angeles. You’d think anyone from Ohio was a lumbering, blond oaf of some kind with a blade of grass between his teeth. Will doesn’t pretend anything. I’ve had enough of mysterious, I’ll tell you. More than enough of romantic men. . . . I got sick to death of what passes for sophistication when I was in Washington!”

  Agnes stood up from where she’d been sitting on the bed and started rummaging through Betts’s closet, finally reaching up and taking down Betts’s train case and extracting a pack of Lucky Strikes and a book of matches.

  “Mother! I knew —,” Betts began, but Agnes waved her off and lit a cigarette, handing the pack and the matches to Betts.

  “Oh, you’re right, Betts. And it’s certainly not for anyone else to decide. I’m sorry,” she said, sitting down again and leaning against the headboard, exhaling a long sigh of wispy smoke. “Of course, you understand that there isn’t a man any mother thinks is good enough for her daughter.” But that sounded absurd coming from her as soon as the words left her mouth. Agnes knew that no one would ever think of her as that sort of woman, a sentimental mother. “Will’s seemed like part of the family for years. Now we can make it official. I do think he’s a nice man, Betts, but you can’t blame me for being surprised. I’ve known him since I was born. . . . It’s impossible to imagine your daughter marrying a man who . . . Well. Who you know so well! I was in school with Sally Trenholm, you know. She was one of my best friends, and it’s hard to think of my daughter . . . But I do think that Will is the sort of man you could trust with your life.”

  Chapter Ten

  SAM HOLLOWAY FIRST MET Dwight Claytor in 1944, at Deopham Green when they discovered they had mutual acquaintances, but they had become friends over a long, boozy conversation at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where they had been surprised to run into each other. The weather over Europe was bad and expected to remain too cloudy for bombing runs for six or seven days, and each of their crews had been given a three-day pass. Dwight and Sam had headed separately to London.

  Sam was staying at the Dorchester, and Dwight had been waiting at the bar for an old friend who never showed up. Dwight didn’t know where he was sleeping that night, since he had had such short notice to make arrangements and every hotel was filled to the gills. Sam insisted he take the other bedroom of the suite that had been put at his disposal by Douglas Boatwright, who owned the radio station and both of the newspapers in Baton Rouge and had been Sam’s boss at WJBO. Mr. Boatwright was in London serving as the head of the Department of Censorship, although he was often away for one thing or another.

  “He left word with the Dorchester,” Sam explained to Dwight, “that whenever I was in town, I was to have the use of his suite. I couldn’t see any reason not to take advantage of it. So, the first chance I get, I call up the hotel, called from the base, and I say, ‘This is Sergeant Holloway, and I’ll be coming to London on such and such a day.’ I explain that Mr. Boatwright has offered me the use of his suite. But the fellow I was speaking to seemed uncertain about that. Handed the telephone to someone higher up. So I begin to explain all over again, and by now I’m feeling like a fool. Wondering if Mr. Boatwright had forgotten to notify the hotel and if the manager thought I was some sort of cocky American flyboy. I’m trying to explain, but the manager interrupts me and says that of course they were delighted Mr. Boatwright had made his suite available, and so forth . . .”

  Sam paused for a moment and smiled. “So finally there I am, in the lobby, introducing myself, and the doorman seems glad to see me. Tells me he’ll have my things delivered to the suite. Hopes I’ll enjoy my stay with them. All that sort of thing. And then he says, ‘Please notify me if you require any assistance, Lieutenant Holloway.’

  “I thought it was odd that he called me ‘lieutenant.’ The way they pronounce it: lefttenant. Maybe I had misunderstood or he was confused . . . but, you know, I didn’t want to embarrass him. And I was in a hurry, too.

  “But the next morning when I go out—when I say good morning to him—he says, ‘Good morning, Lieutenant Holloway. I hope you were comfortable last night.’ So this time I think I need to straighten this out. And I say I was very comfortable, thank you. But I tell him that there’s some sort of misunderstanding. ‘It’s Sergeant Holloway, I’m afraid,’ I say.

  “‘Oh, no sir. I’m certain you’re mistaken about that. The Dorchester, you see, doesn’t take enlisted men.’ At first I didn’t understand what he was telling me. But then I had to laugh. And I go on my way and don’t complain again about getting a promotion.” Dwight and Sam had moved to a table, and Dwight was delighted to have discovered a g
ood storyteller. Someone he enjoyed listening to.

  He and Sam sat up for hours, trading stories and absurdities. Dwight told Sam about a diplomatic mission he had been on to the Ukraine after the split between Stalin and Hitler. It had been a hare-brained scheme from the start, Dwight had always thought. And he went on to recount the tale of the whole squadron being stranded in the Ukraine with their planes shot up and being unable to avoid their Russian hosts’ efforts to entertain them by playing balalaikas and insisting that the Americans join them in what seemed to be hours of rigorous dancing.

  “We didn’t know if we were stuck there for the duration,” Dwight said. “And every day we would ask if this was the day someone was going to come get us, and every day they would say, ‘Uncle Joe say no.’”

  Sam Holloway had spent much of 1943 in Salt Lake City, Utah, training with the other nine men assigned to the same B-17 flight crew. They practiced bombing runs and night flights, and in the spring of 1944, they flew to Goose Bay, Labrador, then to Iceland, and from Iceland to Ireland, where they left their plane and were ferried across to England.

  Eventually they were stationed in East Anglia at Deopham Green and told not to worry, that their first flight would be little more than a milk run. Sam thought they would probably be flying an easy mission to acclimate the crew, perhaps just across the channel.

  But their first mission, it turned out, was Berlin. They flew in formation in a great, dark cloud of B-17s in broad daylight, and at least sixty of those heavy, lumbering bombers were shot down that day, each with a crew of ten. Sometimes Sam saw chutes open, and sometimes not, and so many planes went down on either side of him that Sam thought he wasn’t likely to live through the day, much less the war. In fact, he never understood why his crew had survived that first mission or even how he himself had survived hour after hour of unremitting and horrified disbelief all alone, kneeling in the tail of the plane, connected to the rest of the crew by intercom, able to breathe because of his oxygen mask, and kept from freezing only by plugging in the underlayer of his flight suit. He had done all this before, time and again, but it had always seemed to him melodramatic, cumbersome, and in some way slightly ridiculous. For the first time, on that mission and under fire, however, his connections seemed not cumbersome, not melodramatic, but wretchedly tenuous and vulnerable.

  At first he had been overwhelmed with empathetic horror as a plane skewed out of formation: my God my God my God they’re all going to die! But soon, even on that first run, he shut down his imagination. By the time he flew his third mission, he had fallen into a calm detachment and even a sort of fascination as one after another of those B-17s went down. He looked on as an observer of an ill-thought-out game; he couldn’t have withstood it if he had looked on from the point of view of a participant. And he shut away his certainty that there wasn’t enough luck in the world to allow him to survive. Those Flying Fortresses flew at such high altitude most of the time that, even when he was firing at enemy planes, he remained curiously indifferent. Throughout the war he never saw a person killed; he only saw planes go down.

  In the end, he only remembered all the details of his first mission of the required thirty-two; the others ran together if he made any effort to distinguish one from another. Only that first flight and, naturally, his last flight. Every man in the Corps remembered his last flight, certain that having gotten that far, he wouldn’t survive it. But by the time of Sam’s final flight, the Luftwaffe had pretty well been destroyed and their oil supplies wiped out. Sam’s last flight—his thirty-second and final flight—was a mission to drop supplies to the French Resistance fighters in Savoie, near Switzerland. The weather was perfect; the air had such clarity that it seemed to Sam to have substance and depth, appearing to thicken in the distance to a pure, gelid, translucent blue. And the sunlight was all-encompassing and apparently without a source, as though it would not come and go with the hours; it illuminated every object, every vista, equally.

  The chutes that were dropped from the squadron of B-17s were color-coded: red, for instance, for medical supplies, yellow for food, green for ammunition, and other colors for other things. There was something playful about the blossoming parachutes floating to earth, their cargo swinging gently from side to side, with the Alps in the background and cloudless skies above Lake Geneva. It was as though they had happened upon a new and perfect amusement park ride. A wondrous thing, a diversion that would more than meet the expectations of any eager child, unlike the disappointing tedium of a pretty carousel or the terrifying sway of the flag-flying Ferris wheel. And, although the plane itself vibrated with the noise of its engines, the aspect of the big gray airplanes casting shadows over the valley and the hundreds of parachutes drifting through the air was one of silence. They were flying at relatively low altitude, unhampered by oxygen masks and untethered to a power source, and below them the Resistance fighters waved their arms in acknowledgment, signaling V for victory.

  Sam looked out at the panorama as it unfolded and was unable to keep his guard up against the seduction of relief. He had been puzzled, had put his hand to his face and discovered a wash of tears, although he hadn’t been aware he was crying. In fact, he wasn’t crying in any sense of the idea he had ever had; it was more as if he were simply overwhelmed at having to accommodate once again the idea of after. After the war. He had driven it from his mind, and suddenly there it was again, the prospect of his life going forward.

  At that moment Sam was conscious—for the first time in his life—of what it was like to be happy. Of course, he often had been happy, but he had been literally careless and had taken it for granted in the same way that, before the depression, he had discarded pennies, leaving them in a dish on his bureau, because they were inconvenient to carry. Years later he realized that the only thing of value he had come away with from the war—other than his life—was the occasional ability to be guiltlessly and unapologetically glad. It wasn’t a complicated sentiment; it was merely an exuberant acknowledgment of being responsible only for life as he was living it in the moment. Every now and then he was able to recognize that there was nothing he could do about the miseries of the world; and in that instant of liberation, his self-ness was triumphant and overwhelming.

  And even though gladness—joy, perhaps—wasn’t a complicated emotion, it was rare. When he boarded the bus from Columbus, Ohio, to Washburn, in June of 1947 and gazed out the window at the rolling hills planted with corn, which he recognized, and other sweeping, cultivated fields of crops he couldn’t identify, he began to feel the tension of pleasurable anticipation, though he couldn’t think why. Sam had taken advantage of seeing the countryside wherever he happened to find himself when he was in the Army Air Corps. For four days in Tehran and several more in Cairo, for instance, he had been interested in everything and gone out to see whatever he had time to investigate, whereas his crewmates remained uninterested and stayed behind, playing endless card games and keeping out of the sun.

  He had gone to some trouble to see the pyramids and had attempted to summon a sense of awe, although it wasn’t until after he had survived his tour that he was able to think back on them with wonder. He had surely tramped over half of Ireland and much of Scotland, as well. And he’d spent lots of time in London. Certainly he hadn’t expected to be affected one way or another by the countryside of the state of Ohio.

  But when the bus pulled into the little station in Washburn, across from the square, which was shady and dark green on a very hot, bright day, Sam was unexpectedly overtaken by a welling up of euphoria, very nearly exactly the feeling he had experienced on that final mission looking out at the bright parachutes floating to earth on a beautiful day. Although he had jotted down Dwight’s address and had been told how to get there, he headed off in another direction for a brief stroll along the limestone sidewalks and across the old brick streets. He passed nicely groomed houses and two churches that stood in handsome opposition to each other, catty-cornered across an intersection that was
also deeply shaded by fine old trees that appeared to have stood forever on each of the four corners where High Street and Vine intersected.

  He had expected to walk off his unreasonable joy, to stretch his legs and tamp down this odd fervor, but, in fact, his sense of well-being only intensified. The town of Washburn affected Sam with the same surge of lightheartedness he had experienced on that final run. Here was everything, Sam thought, but all of it in moderation. The countryside was rolling, though not mountainous, and there were fine old houses, though not particularly grand ones, and small bungalows, but no signs of real poverty. It seemed to Sam a place in which one’s life could be ordered to the shape of his true nature, as opposed to living in an extreme atmosphere, like New Orleans, or New York, or San Francisco, or even Natchez, Mississippi, where it was too easy to surrender one’s character to the prevailing climate of the place. When, eventually, he returned to the bus station to retrieve his duffel, Dwight and his wife, Trudy, were waiting for him, and the three of them walked together across the square to Scofields.

  Although Sam had officially been hired only as the program director of WBRN, he worked at the radio station in nearly every capacity. He did a show at five in the afternoon in which he summarized the local news from the townships in Marshal County, and eventually news from other counties, as well. He gave a brief account of the national news that came in on the wire, read the weather predictions, and announced upcoming events. He had a knack for divulging information in a kind of lazy chatter that made even the worst news sound manageable and the least interesting information seem worth knowing. He was good at stimulating local interest in an upcoming play or a concert. He talked about the program or the plot a little bit, seeming to have a surprised but simultaneously low-key interest in the occasion. And he did gain listeners, although the network programs were the station’s bread and butter.