Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)

by Robinson, Edna

  Thank you for downloading this Infinite Words eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Strebor Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  No matter what the clocks and calendars say…

  The years between forty and fifty seem to take one.

  From thirty to forty takes two; twenty to thirty, three.

  From nine to nineteen takes twenty.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The visions of my mother perched on a black iron chair with a quilted back, in the upstairs “study” of our custom-designed Ed Barnes house, are burned into my childhood memory. The flat-roofed, square-box, unheatable construction, with huge picture windows, no curtains, and a kitchen the size of a closet bore no resemblance to the traditional homes on our dead-end street.

  It was my mother’s dream house, commissioned after she discovered photographs of Edward Larrabee Barnes’s designs in the Museum of Modern Art. Feeling as if she’d found her soul mate, she called him up. Charmed by her guileless admiration, this world-famous architect not only agreed to design our house, but he and my mother collaborated to such an extent that, in my mother’s telling of it decades later, they fell in love. But she was married, as was he, and it was probably a fantasy of perfect love anyway. So, she remained a “good girl.”

  I can see her now, seemingly in a trance in front of her big, wooden desk, an oversized green and black stoneware cup of black coffee going cold on the side of it, as she alternately pauses and erupts in furious typing. It was the late fifties, and now that I am old enough to be her mother at the time, now that I too am a writer, as well as a book editor, I look back on her strangeness, passion, absence, and burning—albeit frustrated—ambition with painful understanding.

  Circa 1957 she wrote a short story, “The Trouble with the Truth,” that became the first chapter of this novel. When it was published in the 1959 edition of the New World Writing book series, selected as one of the “most exciting and original” stories of its time by editors who had previously introduced the work of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, and John Wain, it seemed as if her fantasy of becoming a successful novelist was at hand. Here is her bio from that publication:

  Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Edna Robinson was graduated from Northwestern University in 1943. For a few years, after college, she wrote advertising copy, as well as a variety of radio and television shows; she has only recently turned to fiction. She lives in Briarcliff Manor, New York, with her husband and three small children. This is her second published short story.

  She soon found an agent, completed the novel that you are about to read, and in a writer’s worst nightmare of bad timing, it was optioned by Harper & Row just before To Kill a Mockingbird blew the literary world apart—whereupon her editor dropped the option because there just wasn’t room for another period book about a single father with two peculiar children.

  Life changed, another baby was born, a marriage exploded, and making a living became my mother’s priority. By the seventies, she was sober and stable. By the early eighties, I was living the life I suspect she’d secretly longed for (but would not have liked if she’d had it)—writing without the constraint of dependents—and when I found an agent for my own first novel, I insisted she submit her book to him. She handwrote revisions on the yellowing, heavy bond paper with elite type from her manual Olivetti, retyped on her pica-fonted Selectric, photocopied, and when my agent rejected the manuscript, once again returned it to its crushed brown box. In 1987, my mother and I became partners to write movies after we received a Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowship that I insisted we apply for as a team. Here is the bio she wrote to try to sell our scripts:

  Edna Robinson lived all over the U.S. and attended twenty- seven schools. Early on, she wrote for radio soaps and small-town newspapers’ “Society News.” Later, in addition to co- heading a company that imported Argentinian Miniature Horses, she wrote comedy material for television, several of the best-known advertising lines [“Navigators of the world since it was flat”; “A kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo first…”; “Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Cookies”] while on the staff at large and small ad agencies, feature articles for horse magazines and Sports Illustrated, children’s books for Hallmark, and short stories for adults.

  Life changed, jobs changed, sickness came, and on March 26, 1990, my mother succumbed to leukemia and emphysema. She never got to publish this novel, or the one she was working on when she died. She left all her manuscripts to me, and, sadly, the second novel was mostly in her head. But this one survives.

  Things are very different from the days when Edna Robinson sat on her black iron chair at her big wooden desk in an unheatable house near the banks of the Hudson River. I now make my living as an editor and, embracing the ways of twenty-first-century book production, I’ve decided to present my mother’s 1957 novel—retyped and edited—to an unknown world of digital readers.

  “A fantasy,” she called it. “Oh, Betsy, it’s so dated,” she’d say when I asked her about it in the late eighties. “It was what I imagined a good father to be.”

  Fantasy, yes. My mother never experienced the kind of love you are about to read. But what a grand story.

  We hope you enjoy it.

  —Betsy Robinson

  CHAPTER ONE:

  THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

  My father’s reason for keeping my brother, Ben, and me with him—that we were his children—was incomprehensible to our only other living relative, Aunt Catherine Tippet. In the marrow of her well-fleshed and corseted bones, she was convinced that the arrangement was inflicting irremediable harm on us, and that it was another positive indication that Walter Briard, my father, was crazy. Had she been honestly willing to take us into her own home in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, and had not Walter Briard’s eccentricities been of a variety she feared would reflect unflatteringly on the memory of her poor dead sister Jen, our mother, she would have tried to have him declared unfit.

  As it was, she contented herself with the performance of lesser Christian duties. Once each month she wrote a long advisory letter to all of us (on the same day she went over the accounts of her husband Joe’s drugstore; “he just never had the luck the others did, in oil”), and once each year she came by bus or train—God didn’t mean for her to fly—to visit us for four or five days. Since Aunt Catherine was a woman whose remarkable natural alertness was usually devoted to such tasks as making worn-out bath towels into usable washcloths, she must have welcomed these inspection trips with their implicit opportunities for travel. From the time of my birth in 1921 through my first nine years, we lived in twenty different places. Aunt Catherine reconnoitered, and worried, in at least ten of them.

  She’d arrive early in the morning with a cheap black pocketbook full of laxatives and a nervous eye for a messy desk (my father’s) or hair that needed washing (mine). Ben, whom she often called “my little businessman” in a complimentary, encouraging way, would vanish and hardly reappear for the remainder of her stay except to eat and sleep. My father, after greeting her with his wrinkliest, most insincere smile, would hear from some long-lost customer he hadn’t seen since his expatriate days who suddenly turned up a half-day’s drive away and insisted on seeing him daily. Fred, our Welsh houseman, would have to drive him. Fred’s bald head and beaked nose with the silver-rimmed glasses perched on it, and his immaculate dress made him appear rather chilly-formal. But in truth, he was warmly sentimental, almost childishly so. He loved t
o drive my father, had been doing it for thirty years or more, through the decades of my father’s bachelorhood, and he would sprint to get the chauffeur’s cap he had long ago purchased himself. So I was the one who spent the most time with Aunt Catherine.

  Invariably she began our conversations by sympathizing with me. “Lucresse dear, you have such a cross to bear.” She meant, I knew, because her sister Jen had died giving birth to me. Nonetheless, I’d let her go on, hoping she’d tell me more about my mother than that. My hopes were never fulfilled. Aunt Catherine always spoke of a young girl Jen and a young woman Jen. I knew my mother would be about as old as my father—they had married when he was fifty-two and she forty-six—and I wanted help in visualizing her, with him, when I was a possibility. Eventually, I learned that Aunt Catherine hadn’t seen her sister after Jen left Sapulpa, at twenty-one, to study art in New York and subsequently in Paris, where she “met up with” my father.

  Our conversations usually ended when, out of an urge to communicate on a more realistic level, I’d let slip, “When we lived in such-and-such a town…” Aunt Catherine would wave her head and sigh, “That man Walter Briard!” and clam up. I had a vaporish idea why she disapproved of him. It had to do with the word “moral” and what he did for a living and the way we lived.

  I’m not sure there is an accurate term to describe what my father did professionally. “Art-objects-investor-dealer-junkshop-keeper” might be near. Or “one-man-mobile-Tiffany & Company-Bettman Archives-Wildenstein Gallery-and any side-street antique-shop” could be nearer. For “father’s occupation” on the entrance forms Ben and I brought home one of the times we entered a new school, my father wrote “merchant.” But he was in a whimsical mood, not yet being able to look seriously upon our academic careers. Actually, he had a multitudinous collection of priceless paintings, sculptures, books, gems, and mediocre artifacts that had attracted him during his affluent, roaming young manhood. And at this time in his life, he was engaged in selling these things, piece by piece, for very high prices indeed, to carefully sought clients who happened to reside in widely distant communities across America. Major sales required weeks—in some cases, months—of his personal consultation. And so naturally, Ben, Fred, and I went with him.

  We never lived in a hotel. My father despised them, having spent so much of his life in them. We thought of our recurrent upheavals as “moving.” A day would come every so often—always a surprise day—and a crew of bulky men would arrive and pack up everything we owned, except my father’s velvet-lined satchel of precious stones. That, my father allowed Ben to carry to the car. Fred oversaw the entire operation like a harried, but very polite, credit manager, and then happily donned his chauffeur’s cap and took the wheel of our black, seven-passenger Buick. And we would precede the vans, bulging with household effects and merchandise, to our destination. Sometimes we would have enough room there for all the stuff. But most times, living room chair space was yielded for crates of Dresden china and Danish glassware and stacks of original editions supported by ornate silver candlesticks and clocks and gilt-framed nudes and landscapes and Chinese flowers. We lived in old, large houses with dozens of dim, badly placed cupboards and in small houses with no closets at all, in dry houses and leaky ones, ones on hilltops and ones in valleys. Some my father rented, others he borrowed. Occasionally, he bought one to resell it later. A few times, because a friend or client talked persuasively of his own projects, after many drinks and conferences with architects, a house was designed just for us. Those always sported a curved staircase with niches at various heights along it for my father’s favorite pieces of sculpture—the ones he didn’t intend to sell.

  Aunt Catherine saw all this as a haphazard, nomadic, and certainly unhealthy life that was bound to produce criminal offspring (Ben and me) or, at best, adults even more strange than our father.

  Our father did not extend himself for us in the customary American sense. He didn’t play games with us. He didn’t have any interest in what we ate—we ate what he ate. It didn’t occur to him to buy a baseball for Ben or a doll for me. He never took us to kiddie-lands. He simply shared with us whatever entertained him. He read to us from Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Chaucer (my name, Lucresse, came out of The Legend of Good Women). He took us to regular adult movies and to operas in New York and to plays and museums all over the nation, to foreign restaurants and to the magnificent imitations of European tourist sites that were the homes of his clients. Still, Aunt Catherine’s dark suspicions were not completely invalid.

  The photograph album of my memory is monotonous: First, me—skinny, stringy-haired at various ages, but always pale with fear—standing in front of some strange woman’s desk, offering a progressively dirtier, more cluttered card of transfer. Then, me—in a party dress, hostess at a birthday party—smiling emphatically into the half circle of my small guests, whose faces I had seen once before in my life. My father’s recipe for blending us quickly into each community was to throw a birthday party for Ben or me, and invite our whole class the day after we joined it. Some years Ben and I celebrated as many as four birthdays apiece.

  I can see my father now at these affairs. In his early sixties, he was a heavy, solid man with all his own beautiful, even teeth, though his face was deeply lined. He had thick, white hair that somehow refused to stay combed, and he wore suits that had been made twenty years before to last for twenty-five. They didn’t look shabby, just a little too big for him. He would stand against a wall, behind the table of paper-hatted children, with his hands fidgeting behind his broad back. He remained each time, silent and smiling, for only a short interval, until after Fred, with tears shimmering behind his glasses, carried in the antique silver tray with cake. Party after party, on Fred’s arrival, our newest acquaintances burst into song, and Ben or I truly believed for the musical moment that this was our natal day, and these were our lifelong pals. And, what with the rubbery social code that governs childhood relationships, the guests did become our staunch friends and enemies for the ensuing weeks.

  In a way, we owed all of these relationships to Aunt Catherine. At least I did; Ben was gregarious enough to find his place in the neighborhood gang within hours after we explored each of our latest quarters. It was Catherine who pressured my father into letting us attend school in the first place. Public school—private too, for that matter—was among a number of popular causes he did not believe in for us. My father had been instructed by tutors, and when I was five and a half and Ben nearly seven, he engaged one for us. The young man was extraordinarily handsome, in a passionate Sicilian manner, a dedicated artist who wanted to earn his keep while painting nudes. My father turned the skylighted upstairs hallway of that particular house into a studio-bedroom, and got his protégé a morning job in a local gas station. Every morning, Fred, wearing his beloved chauffeur’s cap, drove the young man to work and called for him at noon. After lunch, Ben and I trailed him up to his studio, where he let us feel his muscles and watch him mix colors. He set large pieces of drawing paper on the floor for us and tested his mixtures on them, making big, startling letters for us to copy. For years after, in my mind, A had to be fiery orange, B a sad misty blue, and C a spirited green.

  Aunt Catherine’s visit that year occurred a couple of weeks into our lessons—we were up to weathered-gray U. After kibitzing one of our sessions, she decided that we were learning little else but the anatomy of the human body, a subject in which we were already more than sufficiently instructed, she felt. She was doubly shocked to hear that this constituted Ben’s first formal educating experience and she initiated a shrill campaign to get my father to send us both to regular school. He met it with tranquil, heedless smiles and soft reminders that Hui Tsung, Caesar, Cellini, Buddha, and Jesus Christ had never attended academic institutions.

  Ben was thrilled with the idea, even though it had come from Aunt Catherine, and I acted favorably disposed to it too, to be a member of the majority. Our nagging campaign was reinforced by A
unt Catherine’s weekly letters marked “Important” assuring my father that in twentieth-century America, a “decent” education for the young was compulsory by law, and that if he persisted in denying one to his own flesh and blood, it would be her patriotic duty to report his negligence and irresponsibility to the “proper authorities.”

  The following September, our handsome tutor found a studio elsewhere, and Ben and I began—me in the first grade, Ben in the second—our pilgrimages to the brick shrines of elementary learning.

  To this day, at half a block, I can detect the salty, musty odor of chalk-dust, child-dirt, disinfected washrooms, steamy gymnasiums, and hot-soup cafeterias; in a very few years we spent time in approximately eighteen sources of this odor, and in an effort to make each new one “mine” as fast as possible, I perfected my own technique for instant blending—a supplement to my father’s opening-party maneuver: I lied. This got me noticed and, at its most effective, admired with dispatch.

  In one rusted-brick building, outside of Detroit, I confided to an eager, but slow, boy in my second-grade class that one of my eyes was false. I wouldn’t say which one, and I glowed for the remaining weeks we were there at the interested, curious stares from the desks near mine. On the playground of a brick structure in Macon, Georgia, I told a yellow-headed little girl that I was really a twenty-three-year-old midget—surely she must have guessed having seen at my birthday party how old my father was? In one of my third grades, near Topeka, where I learned to count to twenty in French without knowing from the teacher’s flat Midwestern accent that it was the same language my father spoke fluently and Ben and I understood haltingly, a sizable clique looked upon me with terrified envy. Its members had been led to believe that I was actually two people, only one of which they could see, the other being an invisible witch who carried a poisoned comb at all times. My visible personality won enormous respect…that Lucresse was courageous and kindly, to keep the other Lucresse from killing off everybody with a sudden vicious touch of her comb.