Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)

by Robinson, Edna

  Her words rattled out faster and faster, more and more in earnest. My knowledge of being drunk was limited to a few movie scenes and Aunt Catherine’s censorious opinion of the ingestion of alcohol, but I recognized that Felicity was “under the influence,” as Aunt Catherine referred to the condition, and was, by the moment, getting deeper and deeper into it.

  She gulped the last drop in her glass, again, and Ben, without a signal from my father, refilled and returned it to her.

  “At the same time,” she continued, “I want you to tell me what you want to sell of mine.”

  “That ring you carry around,” my father said. “The Peddicord diamond.”

  “That figures. A couple of months ago, a man from Van Cleef and Arpels tried to buy it from me. He had a bad boil on his neck, but he was more interested in my ring. Now is that normal, I ask you?” Without giving any of us time to reply, she went on. “I said no. Y’see, I was still pretending it was kinda a family heirloom. Now I don’t feel that way—but why should I sell it to you? You couldn’t want it as much as I did when I got it.”

  “I want it simply because it will give me a great deal of money,” my father said. “And I don’t know how to live without a great deal of money. I don’t need family heirlooms. I could have had all of those I wanted, if I’d wanted them. Instead, I collected a lot of other families’ heirlooms. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Sort of. I’ve had a fifth by now. Walter…? Walter Briard. You have a beautiful name. Anyhow, what I’m saying is, the man with the boil—and another one—he had a sick-looking face, like he knew he wasn’t much good anyplace—they didn’t have a chance. Because this ring meant something to me more than money. I used up most of my life getting it. Not that Mead would of cared if I’d sold it, any more than he cares now. You know why he married me? For just as screwy reasons as I married him…because I’d be a freak in his family. He got a charge out of throwing it in their faces that the shapely Miss Goldstein, who had to learn to talk English, was the owner of the diamond that had been in their family for five generations without them ever talking about it. He loved it when I’d do cheesecake shots for the fan magazines with the ring on. He didn’t know those shots made my blood crawl as much as his mother’s.”

  “You don’t want the ring anymore, do you, Felicity?” my father said.

  “I don’t know what I want now. I don’t need the money. I’ll be getting plenty in the divorce. I never needed money, really. My father was manager of the raincoat department in a store downtown until he died. The trouble was he could of owned the store and that wouldn’t of made any difference to my mother. She didn’t want just a mink coat or to live on Central Park West like her friends. She wanted us all to have been born with a name like Peddicord and her to be sleek and charitable on the society page and me to be presented at court. So nothing he could do or I could do was good enough. Poor woman! The nearest she got to her dream was making a sloppy part-time maid answer the telephone, ‘Mrs. Goldstein’s residence.’ She didn’t care if the dust got bushy under the radiators, long as that girl said, ‘Mrs. Goldstein’s residence.’ ”

  Fred appeared and announced that dinner was served. All through it, I wondered and picked at my food. Felicity devoured hers. Then, sobering, she said, “Walter, give me one good reason why I should sell it to you. I only need one, because you don’t have a boil and you’re not pale.”

  “I’ve already given it to you, Felicity. I want money. If the ring gives you pleasure, then certainly that reason isn’t good enough.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Walter!” she said, shaking her head tempestuously, making her bright hair toss. “Pleasure! The ring’s a thing—like Mead. Neither one does anything to me. That funny bell you have out there does more to me. Lucresse does something to me. You do. But the ring…?”

  “How about me?” Ben asked plaintively.

  “You, too,” she said without breaking her tempo, “but really, Walter, I thought you knew me better than that.”

  She stopped, her eyebrows raised in surprise at what she’d said. How well could anyone know anyone else in an hour? Intellectually, the idea that we all knew each other intimately was ridiculous, but, emotionally, we felt it was true. I’d met people my father was fond of saying he had known for “thirty odd years,” and I hadn’t felt that he knew them as well as we knew Felicity. Also, I had the feeling that the Peddicord diamond had little to do with it and wasn’t even important anymore to my father or to her.

  “It’s just that I have to think about it, Walter. Wanting this stone, and the name that went with it, took up so much of my time. I’ve changed from the way I was then, but I don’t know what I’ve changed to yet.”

  “You are a lovely person,” he said. “There’s no hurry about this, Felicity. You can always sell the ring—there’ll always be somebody who won’t be satisfied until he, or she, gets it. Forget about my offer for now. It will always be there, too.”

  A tired peace descended on us. For the rest of the meal and afterward, there seemed little need to talk. And when we did, the talk was disconnected and spotty. Felicity lay on her side on the sofa. I sat, feet curled under me as hers had been before, at the other end. My father leaned back in his chair, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. I could see the scraped, worn soles of his shoes. Ben lay on his stomach on the tile floor, reading Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Felicity and my father each had a snifter of brandy that neither drank with much desire. One of us said something only every now and then, sleepily. I asked her if she had worn lipstick when she was fourteen; she said she wouldn’t have been caught dead without it, but that I shouldn’t. She asked my father where he had gotten the Greek cowbell; he replied in a small town in southern France, at an auction, where he’d impetuously bought everything being sold. Ben read aloud a speech beginning, “Truly, this passion / Jealous and terrible, which sweeps me on, Is love indeed, with all its mournful madness!” I’d never heard him read it with such whispered conviction. Felicity clapped twice and muttered to an invisible enemy, “Just try to sign that boy up, you schlemiel. I got him on a twenty-year contract, if I don’t dump him in six months.”

  She told us about an aunt of hers who’d held it over her family’s heads that she lived in “the country”—Flushing, New York—who made peanut butter sandwiches so parsimoniously that you could see the bread through the spread. I told her about Aunt Catherine, who’d never made a sandwich for me, but who always apologized for accepting an average portion of food from Fred’s filled platters. My father elaborated that Aunt Catherine was “visiting morality.”

  Ben offered to read another speech of Cyrano’s. I dozed off, and awakened as he was saying, “—I ne’er knew woman’s kindness…”

  Felicity was face-down, sunk into the sofa, fast asleep. My father’s eyes were closed, but his legs were moving, drawing back and stretching outward again. His eyes opened and focused on the mantel clock. “It’s ten thirty,” he said. “Ben and Lucresse, go to bed.”

  We went reluctantly. And when we got up in the morning, Felicity was still there, on the sofa, covered with a blanket.

  At sometime during the hours I was in school, she returned to the loathed lonely castle she’d rented, packed a suitcase, and returned to our house to occupy the room across the bathroom from my father’s. Her title was “house guest.”

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  LOVE

  We all regarded Felicity’s presence as a sensible arrangement; we all wanted to spend a lot of time with her. I regarded it as a wondrous opening-up of my life.

  In such proximity, we soon learned that there were several Felicitys. The morning one was sleepy, sweet, slow-talking, anxious that Ben and I ate enough breakfast. She wore silk pajamas and a matching kimono and no makeup. She looked tired and both older and younger than the afternoon and night Felicitys. She spoke in a crooning voice—“Why the hell can’t they start schools at a decent time, like noon? I always hated to get u
p in the morning.” Ben and I pleaded with her not to get up when we had to—my father didn’t. But she never missed padding down the stairs as we sat down to breakfast and giving us soft kisses on the cheek when we left.

  The afternoon Felicity was buoyant, flamboyant, bursting with vitality. It was remarkable how many things she knew how to do, wanted to do, did. With Fred’s or Ben’s or my cooperation, she scraped all the cracking paint off the iron supports for the staircase rail, taught Fred how to make matzo-ball soup, taught Ben and me how to do a tapping time step and waltz. She taught Ben how to drive the car and both of us how to ride horses. She even succeeded in persuading my father, the nonparticipating audience for most of these activities, to ride with us a few times. His ability to do so astonished Ben and me more than his agreeing to do so, until he explained that though he hadn’t ridden in more than three decades, at one time he’d ridden often and quite well. The old wrinkled-leather, but polished, boots, and formal riding habit he unearthed from a long-packed trunk and the relaxed way the inside of his calves gripped the horse testified to his truthfulness. Still, the first time he rode with us, one Sunday dusk, was a happy surprise and lingers in my memory with echoes of the horse hooves on the trail beating rhythm to his words.

  “When I was a boy—a hundred years ago—I had a tutor,” he told me. “He was my employee and was a friend only of the scholars. I had a father who was my advisor and was a friend only to the figures on his monthly statements; he dealt with money, not people. I had a mother who became one only through the mad, inscrutable ways of nature. She was a friend to institutions, libraries, museums, homes for the homeless; two of them got named for her. My father went to his meetings—fourteen miles to Philadelphia. My mother was carried to her meetings—all meetings were very important—in a carriage, pulled by a horse, of course. In addition to my tutor and the household staff, we housed three carriage horses and, by sheer circumstance, not conscious desire, two saddle horses. They were my friends.

  “The idea in those days, at least my father’s idea, was that a young man of means should see the world, travel, before he came back to settle down for the rest of his life. I never went back. And the only living beings I missed, for a while, were those two saddle horses.”

  After a moment, Felicity and Ben cantered ahead of us. My father and I were content to keep to a walk. My horse gradually lagged behind his. I shook the reins and slapped his flanks with my ankles, but he refused to catch up.

  “Use your heels, Lucresse,” my father said, slowing his horse.

  I tried it, gently, to no effect.

  “Harder. Kick him.”

  “It won’t work. He knows he’s bigger than I am.”

  “But you’re smarter than he is. You have to make him know that.”

  I didn’t quite see the connection between my brain and my boot, but I angled my foot and swung it full force, knifing the heel edge into the thick horse flesh. The connection between the animal’s side and his brain, however inferior to mine, became instantly apparent. With the speed of a thunderbolt, he misinterpreted the scope of my order and took off at a gallop. After three dizzying leaps that threw the world and my father suddenly behind me, out of focus, I heard him shout, “Pull on your reins, Lucresse!” Simultaneously, the reins jerked out of my hands, I lost both stirrups, was whirling free in the air, and bumped hard against the invisible, immovable earth.

  Next thing I knew, my father was lifting me at my armpits. “Can you stand up?” he asked. “Stand up!”

  I was certain my wormy legs wouldn’t hold me. And it was deliciously gratifying to have him literally supporting me. This was the first time in a long time that he and I had been alone together. “I feel so weak,” I said sorrowfully.

  Turning me around to face him, still holding onto my upper arms, he instructed, “Roll your head around.”

  Languorously, I let my head fall frontward, backward, and to each side.

  “Move your arms up and down.”

  Smiling piteously, I slowly, gracefully lifted and lowered my arms. “I don’t suppose they’re broken,” I said, hoping he was worrying that they were.

  With no forewarning, he released my arms. “Walk.”

  The shock made my startled legs come to life and action. I walked over to a fence post bordering the trail, angry at myself for not having collapsed at his feet.

  “All right. Sit down for a minute.” He went after our horses that were contentedly nibbling at clumps of weeds nearby. He then hitched them to the post and sat on the sandy trailside next to me.

  “It’s just part of learning,” he said, more philosophical than comforting. “When we get home, take a hot bath.”

  “Felicity rides very well, doesn’t she?” I said after a time.

  “She’s worked at it.”

  “Do you think she’s beautiful?”

  It was not easy to surprise my father. He took the figments of people’s imaginations, the infinite variety of weaknesses and deceits and unexpected kindness rampant in humanity as a matter of course. But I could tell my question was a jolt.

  “No,” he answered with inordinate emphasis. “I don’t think Felicity is beautiful.”

  I was surprised. “She once won a beauty contest. Did you know that?”

  “There is no such thing as a beauty contest,” he said, vexed. “Beauty is noncompetitive. Beauty of any kind stands alone, unmatched, inimitable, uncontested. Felicity isn’t a work of nature, Lucresse. She’s a contrived work, shaped by mediocre tastes and much suffering.”

  He was just talking, or lying to me, I decided, or he was just too old to see Felicity as the girls and particularly the boys I knew, and their younger fathers, would see her. “I think her hair is pretty,” I persisted.

  “I think it’s hideous.”

  Now he must be joking, I thought. For some patronizing reason, he didn’t want me to know how much he admired Felicity’s looks, so I gave up trying to make him discuss the subject.

  In the distance, Felicity and Ben were riding back to find us.

  “Ben hasn’t ridden any more than I have,” I said. “I wonder why he hasn’t fallen off.”

  My father concentrated on Ben trotting toward us. Ben’s heels were down, his hands low and quiet. He was sitting to the trot. In pace with him, Felicity was posting with perfect, easy rhythm. But she seemed to be making much motion compared to Ben’s stillness.

  “Ben has an uncanny sense of how it would be to be a horse,” my father answered.

  When Ben and Felicity rejoined us, my father gave me a leg up to my horse. “Now, one, two, jump!” he ordered, holding my left bent foreleg. With his boost and the spring I made off my right foot, I shot up so violently that I almost fell over the other side of the horse.

  “I guess I’m still groggy from that terrible fall,” I said loud enough to be sure Ben heard, as I struggled to find my seat and stirrups.

  My father laughed. “I think your hair is very pretty. When you don’t have sand in it.”

  I rode ahead beside Ben, with my father and Felicity following. I was glad for the chance to describe what had happened in my own way. “It’s just lucky I wasn’t killed,” I told Ben as my perilous steed trudged along, head bobbing in semi-sleep. “This dumb thing bucked and reared and nobody, not even a cowboy, could have stayed on.”

  “What did you think on the way down?” Ben asked excitedly. “When you knew you were going to hit the ground?”

  “I thought, ‘how would it be to be a horse?’ ”

  “What? Weren’t you scared?”

  “Of course—in a way. I knew I might be dead in a second. But, Ben, you never know what can come into your mind when you’re facing death until it happens to you.”

  Ben looked back at my father. “It couldn’t have been as bad as all that. He doesn’t seem upset.”

  “I don’t understand him at all,” I said bitterly.

  “Why? Because he isn’t carrying on like Aunt Catherine after you ‘faced death
’?”

  “No, it’s not just that, Ben. It’s just that…well…”

  “What?! Honestly, Lucresse, you’re the most irritating person I’ve ever met. What don’t you understand?”

  A quaking alarmed feeling went through me. I hadn’t really meant to discuss explicitly what was bothering me. I wasn’t sure there were words to explain the number of confusing images popping into my mind.

  The nighttime Felicity was as enervated as the afternoon one was energetic. She was listless, sorrowful—sometimes, as much so as the first night we’d spent together—almost maudlin. She and my father never went out. Night after night, week after week, we spent séance-like interludes lying around the living room. When Ben and I went up to bed, Felicity always seemed more tired than we. Not much later—I lay awake listening for them—they would come up the steps, slowly, sleepily, not trying to smother their footsteps. Rarely were they talking. Not for fear of disturbing Ben and me, but seemingly because the act of retiring hardly disturbed the reverie we’d left them in. As I fell asleep, after I heard their doors close, I dwelt on the easy access they shared through the bathroom between their rooms. I wondered at the pattern her gold hair would make falling across his white-thatched head on the whiter pillowcase.

  And now he’d said he thought her hair was hideous.

  For several years I’d had a transcendent interest in sex relations. Other girls’ interests were mild—giggling, social. So far as I knew, Fred’s interest was nonexistent, and my father’s was severely limited—to great loves in literature, humorous aspects of sexual desire, as revealed in reminiscences he and his friends found unfathomably funny, or, to unstimulating clinical explanations during the rare times when the subject came up. When we were much younger, Ben and I had speculated repeatedly about what men and women do, or might do. But not at all in the recent past. Nevertheless, Ben’s interest was intact, I knew, and maybe even almost as profound as my own. He looked at, and over, girls, especially well-developed ones, with open pleasure. They, in turn, didn’t seem to notice or find it important, as I did, that his ribcage extended only an eighth as far as his face indicated he imagined it had grown, and that his neck and legs were scrawny.