The Truth of the Matter

by Robb Forman Dew

  Lily was startled at being caught out in wondering why in the world anyone would have so many children. “Oh! No, I was just thinking . . . Well, I was just thinking that they’re beautiful children,” she said to Carolyn. “And they’re exactly the opposite of these two. Both Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn have dark eyes and light hair,” she went on, with her hands on Amelia Anne’s shoulders as she slumped back against her grandmother. “Your boys have such blue eyes . . . such dark hair . . .”

  “Probably some Irish in there somewhere,” Marjorie said.

  “Now that’s a coincidence!” John Hupper said to Agnes, but Agnes looked blank. “The little girls? They’re twins, too, aren’t they?” he asked.

  “Aunt Marjorie!” his wife said, speaking simultaneously. “I know you love to bait me! You know all the Huppers are Scots. On both sides of John’s family!”

  Lily and Agnes carried a few of their suitcases and bags upstairs and helped Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn choose the bedroom each wanted. Agnes tried to convince them that they should take a bath and rest before joining the others, but they were fragilely stubborn, their elation transparent over their deep exhaustion, and Agnes decided they wouldn’t rest whether they stayed upstairs or not.

  Marjorie had thrown a quilt over the old picnic table and also spread blankets under the trees, and Dora had set out a feast. Food far more exotic than any Sam had yet prepared, Lily and Agnes agreed, explaining all about Sam’s weekly dinners in a way that also complimented Dora’s efforts. Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn didn’t venture beyond the mown backyard; they were euphoric and giddy, but they had seen at once that all those little boys were entirely acquainted with the landscape, which was still a foreign country to them.

  They sat together on one of the blankets, with Bobbin cowed and huddled between them; Flotsam and Jetsam had made themselves scarce inside the house as soon as they were released. Lily brought the girls each a plate of various treats she thought they might enjoy, or at least be tempted by, since she knew it was unlikely they would eat much at all with this unexpected excitement. The clutch of little boys eventually straggled back for sustenance, lagging about the table familiarly, leaning into some adult’s lap, only casting an occasional glance toward the girls on their blanket, and finally Marjorie left the table and ushered all the children around the side of the house to the barn, where two bicycles, a croquet game, a badminton set, and a host of other amusements were stored.

  “Jamie,” she said to the tallest of the boys, “these girls have never been to Maine before. I know you’ll all be friends! They’re going to be here for at least two weeks. Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn are exactly your age, and, Daniel, you’re just a year younger. Why don’t you find something in the barn and play a game? Or the bicycles are over there. . . . But they may need oil. . . .” She was slipping away as she directed them, hoping they would entertain each other so the adults could say more than two sentences to each other without being interrupted.

  At the table John and Carolyn Hupper were regaling Agnes and Lily with what seemed to be a comparative tale of traveling with their children. “I’ll gladly swap,” Carolyn was saying, “because nothing could settle him down, and the captain threatened to make him walk the plank. The thing is, Jamie believed him. . . . We couldn’t find him anywhere. John says they’re like wine. That they don’t travel well. Oh, the crew had the dory in the water and were about to cast off. . . . I wasn’t so calm myself. Finally he turned up. . . .”

  In no more than twenty minutes, the children’s angry voices reached them from the front yard. Lily and Agnes got up. “I’ll go,” Agnes said to the company at large. “I know the girls are tired . . .” But Lily and John Hupper trailed along as well, while the other three stayed behind and began making a halfhearted attempt to put things in order. Jamie and his younger brother Daniel had commandeered the bicycles for themselves and were flying over the drive and the lane that ran in front of the house, and Agnes thought that must the trouble. But then she realized that Mary Alcorn and Amelia Anne were faced off toward each other in a caricature of children arguing. They had their hands on their hips and stood far enough apart that each girl leaned toward the other, like enraged parentheses.

  “You do too have two names! You do, too. And there isn’t anything silly about my name,” Amelia Anne was shouting furiously at Mary Alcorn.

  “I don’t! That’s just stupid! ‘Alcorn’ is my last name! I don’t have two names. Besides, it was Jamie who said —” By then the boys had gathered to see what was going on.

  “I didn’t say ‘silly’!” Jamie protested. “I just said it was too much trouble —”

  “I think it’s silly,” one of the smaller boys said, but Carolyn had come around the corner, swooped in, and was herding her children into a flock, circling and shushing them, so that as a group they moved in increments across the grass in the direction of Marjorie’s car.

  “Your last name is ‘Scofield,’” Amelia Anne said, her eyes full and puffy with restrained tears, and Mary Alcorn faced her straight on with an expression of shocked outrage.

  “It’s not either! It’s not! My father died! You can ask my mother! Mary Alcorn isn’t two names like Amelia Anne. . . .”

  Lily caught Agnes’s eye above the fray. “Let’s get these two apart,” she said in a regular tone of voice, which no one except Agnes heard. “I’m putting Amelia Anne in the tub,” she said in Agnes’s direction, and Agnes nodded and took Mary Alcorn’s arm and, guiding her a little distance away, then crouched to the little girl’s height so she could talk to her.

  “You and Amelia Anne shouldn’t argue,” she said calmly, as though she hoped her tone would be catching. “Here, you come along with me,” she said, “and we’ll go get a treat for everyone.”

  “But Jamie’s the one who said our names were silly because we have two names. I don’t have two names. . . .” Her voice was whiny with heat and petulance, and Agnes led her along to Lily’s green Buick, put her in the front seat, and backed out right over the lawn in order to skirt Marjorie’s car.

  “Put your window all the way down,” she told Mary Alcorn, “and you’ll feel better right away.” They made the twenty-mile drive to Dorman’s Dairy Dream, which Agnes had first visited with Warren over thirty years ago. She was relieved to find it open and also to find an empty parking space under the trees. She and Mary Alcorn stood in line, waiting for their turn. When they were back in the car once more, each with an ice-cream cone and two pints of Dorman’s Dairy Dream’s famous ginger ice cream packed in a sturdy bag with crushed ice, Agnes was beset with exhaustion and melancholy. It was no one’s fault, of course, that she had traveled so far but hadn’t managed to escape anything, after all. In fact, the images and ideas of Warren Scofield as he had been when he and Agnes were together at this very spot so long ago were urgently vivid once more, and Agnes was plagued with guilt and grief.

  Mary Alcorn began to regain her composure. She and Agnes sat in the car and watched through the front window while a man on a ladder labored to refurbish the Dorman’s Dairy Dream billboard, bit by bit, adding one panel of the picture after another, pasting the puzzle pieces of paper to the backboard with the sweep of a long-handled brush.

  Mary Alcorn had a double-scoop vanilla cone, which she had initially attacked from the top down, but now, Agnes noticed with dismay, she had bitten off the bottom of the pointed cone and was holding it above her head, letting the ice cream melt drop by drop into her open mouth. Agnes leaned against the door frame and tilted her head back against the window, still watching the workman slowly fashioning a picture of what was shaping up to be a banana split. But the billboard was so big. Briefly it seemed to Agnes that he would never finish, that his was a hopeless task. She had the dreary feeling that all the time in the universe waited implacably for him, and for her, and even for Mary Alcorn, right outside in the dusky twilight of the Dorman’s Dairy Dream parking lot.

  Their fatigue was so great that the first few day
s in the rambling, creaky farmhouse moved along with a sort of laxity, one day falling into another in unstructured domesticity. Of course Lily and Agnes looked after Mary Alcorn and Amelia—who refused to answer to the familiar “Amelia Anne” forever after. But the little girls required very little other than food and baths. No one took charge, and since Marjorie Hockett had hired two women from Port Clyde to get the house in order before Agnes and Lily had even arrived, there was very little that needed to be seen to. Lily had a telephone installed, and she had a wide swath mown through the meadow all the way to the ocean, where there was a rather rickety set of stairs leading down the cliff to the rocks, and they all settled there for hours. Lily and Agnes read and watched the waves come in with the high tide; the girls crouched over the tidal pools among the enormous, smooth boulders, collecting shells and starfish and beautiful bits of colored glass that had been tumbled into jewel-like shapes by the abrasion of the waves over who knew what length of time.

  “For all you know,” Lily said, “Christopher Columbus may have dropped a bottle of cherry soda over the side of his ship,” Lily told them, and that produced a hail of corrections and laughter. Lily promised to have bracelets made up of the girls’ glass gems.

  The Huppers and all their little boys had departed for the summer, and Lily and Agnes were often joined by Marjorie and Dora, who, it turned out, spent her vacations from her job as dietician at Bowdoin College at Marjorie’s big house in Port Clyde, which had been built and lived in by Hocketts for over a hundred years. In return, Marjorie had a room in Dora’s little cottage on the Bowdoin College campus during the academic year, where she was an instructor in the biology department.

  Agnes hadn’t given herself over with such abandon to reading since she was in school, and if she wasn’t careful, she felt guilty. She had pulled Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children off the shelves in the house, and she found a nook in the rocks that was warm and remarkably comfortable. She could recline with a pillow beneath her head and another across her lap, where she rested her book, and she was entirely absorbed in the hair-raising world of Henny and Sam Pollit. Marjorie and Dora brought books, too, as well as often appearing with a wonderful lunch for everyone.

  The few days it rained they played cards or Scrabble. Lily usually built a fire. By the middle of their second week, none of them even pretended that they were visiting Maine in order to get things in shape; they drifted through the days without any order, doing what they liked whenever they wanted to do it, and for Mary Alcorn and Amelia, when impressions of that first trip to Maine came back to them over the years, each remembered it as dreamlike; it had been so gentle and easy that the days they spent there seemed outside the ordinary chronology of their lives.

  “Listen, Agnes,” Lily said one night after the girls had gone upstairs to bed and she and Agnes were settled reading. “I honestly don’t think I can stand that trip home. That drive! Why don’t we go by train? Bobbin and the cats could travel in the baggage car. If we have crates, I think they could. I bet Marjorie’ll know where we can find crates.”

  Agnes didn’t respond for a moment. “It seems so soon,” Agnes said. “It doesn’t feel like I’ve been away much time at all. What about the car?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. None of us is ever going to want to drive this distance again, and we’re always going to need a car here, anyway. I thought I’d ask Marjorie where we could store it. There’s room in the barn, but I think we’re supposed to take off the tires or something. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make a trip that long in a car that’s over ten years old, anyway. Oh, you know, if we didn’t have the animals, we could fly home. From Boston or New York.”

  Dora and Marjorie showed up the next day with a picnic hamper, and the whole group wandered disorganizedly toward their accustomed place on the rocks. It was the first day that the weather wasn’t pleasant. The rain hadn’t bothered any of them, but this Thursday before they departed was heavy with humidity, and instead of sitting in the sun, they clustered under the trees. Marjorie was knitting, but in a moment of uncharacteristic frustration she tossed the whole bundle into her knitting bag. “My hands are sticky in this air. And in that wool. I think I’d better go home and cool off.”

  They were all ready to retreat to the relative cool of the indoors, and Lily and Agnes also started to gather their belongings and the little girls’ discarded sandals and sweaters. In the middle of all that, though, they were interrupted by a man’s voice “helloing” down the meadow and calling Lily’s name. They stopped in the middle of shaking out blankets and replacing items in the hamper in order to peer up the rise to see who it was, but Mary Alcorn and Amelia were the first to realize it was Sam Holloway. They rushed up the hill, and he caught them up and came the rest of the way down the path, carrying both of them, one in each arm, and complaining that he could hardly stand up, what had they been eating. It was the perfect tonic, Sam’s company, and after Marjorie and Dora were introduced, the whole group settled back down again, and everyone offered Sam something to eat.

  “Did you know you can get here by boat?” he said, then he laughed. “Well, nothing like stating the obvious. I’ve never been to Maine, though, and I thought that since you all were here . . . And I liked the thought of taking a break. When I found out I could take the mail boat from Boston, I thought, Why not? I had to be in Framingham. At Cardinal Homes’ headquarters,” he explained. “I think I finally straightened out the problem that was holding up our shipment. You’d be amazed at how much has been done,” he said to Lily and Agnes. “The construction site is finished. It looks pretty good.”

  That evening Sam listened to the tale of Lily and Agnes, Mary Alcorn, and Amelia’s endless odyssey to reach Maine, and he got on the phone right after dinner. In no time he had arranged for Lily and Agnes and the girls to fly home—he would see them off himself—and he offered to crate the pets and have them moved by rail or perhaps by air cargo. He knew a man who raised purebred horses and was familiar with shipping live animals. The prospect of traveling home in an airplane overcame any qualms Amelia or Mary Alcorn might have had about leaving Bobbin and the cats behind. In one fell swoop, Sam had made them thrilled to be going home again, and the next day, they stayed occupied packing for and planning their Saturday departure.

  But Agnes wasn’t ready yet to go home, and she and Lily talked it over. “If you don’t mind being in charge of the little girls,” Agnes said, “I’ll stay on for a little while longer and then travel on the same train with Bobbin and the cats. I’ll get Sam to tell me who to get in touch with. . . . I don’t know what it is,” she said, “but I really would like to stay on a little longer, if you don’t mind.” Lily had no objection at all; in fact, she was gratified. She had hoped Agnes would enjoy getting away, and when Sam heard about it, he thought it was a good idea.

  “Agnes, your house is the headquarters for making the sesquicentennial queen’s float. It’s pretty much a madhouse,” he said. “I’m staying on a few days, too, at the Ocean House in Port Clyde.”

  “Why?” Lily asked. “Why wouldn’t you just stay on here? . . . Oh, Sam! For goodness sake! I don’t think you have to worry about proprieties!” And Agnes was startled by the idea that Sam even considered observing such formal decorum when it hadn’t even crossed her mind; she thought of Sam Holloway as family. On Saturday morning Lily and the girls, with Sam escorting them, were off to Boston. It was the first time Agnes had been in the big house all by herself, and she trailed through the rooms absorbing the atmosphere.

  At Scofields she had been unable to stop dwelling on the ways in which she had disappointed her children, especially in light, just recently, of poor Betts. No letters for anyone had come from Betts or Will, who were on their honeymoon, after all, and Agnes chose to see that as a good sign. If Betts wasn’t writing anyone . . . If Will hadn’t been in touch with Sam . . . And, too, Agnes discovered that she was suddenly feeling grieved—almost bitter—at the ways in which her chi
ldren had disappointed her: that she knew they struggled between irritable dislike and great fondness toward her, the fact that she had glimpses of the possibility that one or another of them wasn’t happy in his or her job or marriage or circumstances.

  It seemed to Agnes very cruel that her own children wouldn’t spare her the pain of that knowledge, when they also wouldn’t ever act on her advice. On the other hand, she often suspected that they kept most of what they felt secret from her. How could all this time of her life have passed and still she hadn’t straightened out or pinned down the way to spend whatever was left? When she was younger, she would never have guessed a fifty-year-old woman could be so at sea.

  Agnes had never admitted to anyone the thing she deemed the greatest failure of her life. She had realized that there had only been a little time—perhaps nine years per child, seventeen years altogether—when she had thought she was essential to the lives of the children who grew up in her house. Seventeen years should be enough, she thought. Seventeen years is great good luck. But somehow or other, as she had been forced to reevaluate her own life in light of her grown children’s presence, she had come to understand quite clearly that there were so many ways she had failed them as far as playing any sort of heroic role in their lives.