Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)

by Robinson, Edna

  I hadn’t realized the change that had come over my father until he greeted this news with, “Good. Catherine has better sense than I do about some things.”

  “Aunt Catherine?” Ben said.

  “Yes, and don’t you forget it.”

  In the following days, I began to watch him, pay closer attention to the things he was doing, as if he were a puzzle I’d thought I’d known how to solve but suddenly found was still perplexing.

  Most of the time, he wore the same sullen look as the men being hurtled to the eight twenty-six each morning. He spent whole mornings cleaning his desk. In a curt, thoroughly executive manner, he called an employment agency and commanded they supply yet another household worker—a man this time, who could oversee all his affairs, one who preferably didn’t talk too much, and who could hire capable people for the various chores who didn’t talk too much either. He didn’t care what he’d have to pay him.

  Hubert Peterman, former manager of a country club dining room, having struck out and failed in his own catering service, arrived. There was never a less aggressive, more inaudible, man who wasn’t dead. Hubert was a widower of fifteen years, who was content to act out the stereotype fixed in his mind of what sort of person a widower should be. He came equipped with an old photograph album which he told me was his diversion in the evenings, when he was used to “sitting and reminiscing.” By his second day, he had hired a maid away from the club who, in a silent trance of consideration for his widowerhood, did our cleaning and laundry. He did the ordering by telephone, softly, and cooked, if uninspiredly, to my father’s order of “use lots of butter, and there’s hardly anything we don’t like.”

  Except for the paintings and tapestries that hung on most of the walls, most of the odds and ends of my father’s collection began to disappear from sight. My father thought Hubert ideal for us, and quickly began to disappear into long silences very like his. He didn’t seem to look forward to anything except Aunt Catherine’s visit.

  Once, Ben asked him for the third time if he could try out his new interpretation of Hamlet on him, and my father answered listlessly, “All right. But if it’s as tumultuous as I think it’s going to be, don’t practice it when Catherine comes. You know Shakespeare isn’t her greatest interest.”

  Ben paused. “When are you going to look up all the people you know here?” Usually by this time, three-and-a-half weeks after moving into a new residence, he was disappearing daily for meetings with people we never met.

  “When we’re settled.”

  “He’s getting creepy,” Ben said to me privately.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I didn’t like having to agree with him.

  “Then why is he so glad Aunt Catherine is coming? And this guy Hubert is like a ghost. I’ll be glad when school starts.”

  “Me, too. Ben, I wish Fred was here.”

  “Don’t say that to him.”

  The next morning, my father went out to the airport to meet Aunt Catherine and escort her back. “Remember, I want you to do everything you can to please her,” he warned us on his way out. “You don’t see your aunt very often.”

  After he left, Ben gave orders. No one was to turn on a faucet or flush a toilet for the first half hour she was here.

  “What happens if she has to go to the bathroom?” I said.

  “You leave the room with her and break the news to her gently beforehand.”

  We didn’t know why we were doing it, but following my father’s lead, from the moment of her arrival early that afternoon, we paid court to Aunt Catherine. In response, she blossomed with good cheer and hearty conversation, told us seemingly endless anecdotes of doings in the retail drugstore business and the inside information about the rummage sale her church’s Ladies’ Guild held recently. She said she’d never seen a house of ours look neater and gave effusive credit to my father’s good judgment in engaging Hubert. She said “that it was a shame about Alfred.”

  “Alfred?” we all said at once.

  “Dear me! Fred, of course! It’s just that every time I think the name Fred, I think of our Alfred Judd at home. He’s always called Fred too, but I’ve always called him by his real name, Alfred.”

  My father nodded understandingly. I couldn’t understand why her mistake didn’t pierce his heart as it did mine. Fred was Fred, and how could anyone refer to him as Alfred? Who knows where he even was now, out in the middle of an ocean on a slow ship to a place I’d only read about in books! How dare she call him Alfred? But my father didn’t seem the least wounded, not even pricked.

  “Catherine, how long can you stay?” he said. “We have many things to talk about.”

  She said she could stay five days, and during those days, my father didn’t deviate from the “things” he wanted to discuss. There was actually only one—the eventuality of his own death. His remarks and questions, and certainly their answers, demanded that Ben and I interrupt at times, but he wouldn’t permit it. We listened to my father and Aunt Catherine’s incessant conversations, staggered by the change in his attitude.

  “…you do have an unusual sense of responsibility, Catherine—infinitely stronger than Jen’s was…” As though Jen had been frivolously irresponsible in dying, as Aunt Catherine had so often implied.

  “…as you know, there are many people I could appoint as their guardian, but…”

  “…But after all, Walter, who would care as much as a blood relative?”

  “Exactly my point, Catherine. Naturally, I hope Lucresse will be of age at the time, but if she isn’t…”

  “Walter, you know you can count on me to take care of them.”

  “There’ll be money, and goods. You won’t have to worry about the financial aspect of it…”

  “Oh, I thought so, Walter! With all the stuff you have—and one thing I must say, Walter Briard always took care of his children financially!” She was already talking of him in the past tense!

  Another time—

  “…you’re sure Joe wouldn’t mind if they stay with you during vacations from school?”

  “Why, of course not, Walter! When I think of all these years, with me coming to visit you, and not once you all staying over with us…”

  He told her the name of the man at his bank, who would be the executor of his estate. From among the people he hadn’t yet looked up, he gave her the name of the one who would be his lawyer from now on. On only two scores did he run into any criticism from her.

  He had never carried any insurance—he had considered his merchandise a form of insurance—and now it was too late in life for him to hope to buy a policy at a decent premium. She said she thought a man—not necessarily him, but any man—who didn’t carry insurance from the second he got married was seriously inconsiderate.

  Then, though apparently she wasn’t fazed by the thought of “the inevitable,” as she referred to it, she put her hands over her ears when he arranged over the telephone, in a steady, somewhat ironic tone, for his own cremation.

  When Aunt Catherine said good-bye to us, she threw her arms around my father as though she would never see him again, and in a frenzied burst of emotion, expressed a sentiment to Ben and me that she’d never voiced before: “Remember, you have a wonderful father. He wants to care for you from his grave…I mean, from…well, just remember that, children.”

  Ben and I were frantic. “He’s got to talk to us about it,” Ben said. “We’ve listened to what he had to say long enough.”

  We cornered him in the library. His satchel was open at his feet and he was looking at an unset diamond he held with pincers. A jeweler’s loupe was in his eye.

  “This one won’t bring as much as the Peddicord, but in some ways, it’s more beautiful,” he said, dropping his glass into his hand. “However, it’ll probably be enough to put you through college, Ben. And there are two more that’ll pay your tuition, Lucresse.”

  “I only want to go to college two years; then I’m going to drama school. I’ve told you that,” Ben said. />
  “Drama school costs money too, unless you don’t have any or you’re a genius.”

  “Maybe I’m a genius.” Ben smiled. “What makes you think you’re going to die?”

  “You feel all right,” I said firmly.

  “Sit down, both of you. Anyone can die. Everyone does.” He acted as if this were a comforting fact. “I must make provisions for you in case you’re not old enough to make them for yourselves. That’s all.”

  “You do feel all right?” I said—this time a question.

  My father grew impatient. “Yes, I feel all right.”

  “But I don’t like your provisions,” Ben said. “It may be all right for Lucresse, but I don’t want to stay with Aunt Catherine, ever.”

  “It’s not all right for me either,” I said.

  “There isn’t anyone else,” my father offered quickly. “She’s right. I, and you, suffer from a lack of consideration on my part. I should have thought of this years ago and found someone better suited. But I didn’t. I didn’t think of myself as dying, the way young people don’t. But let’s be charitable, to me. Perhaps I’m more of a case of arrested development than lack of consideration.”

  He seemed so self-satisfied about it that I was angry. “You’re not going to die soon; there’s no reason you should. And we’re not going to Aunt Catherine, ever!” I said.

  “I hope you’re right.” He stuck his glass back up under his eyebrow.

  Ben and I left the library. We were nowhere near the right path in our mutual search for escape from impending disaster.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  GAMES

  Over the following weeks, Ben, my father, and I wrote a long collective letter to Fred about all of our house help, all of the problems, and all of our longings (at least, that part, I did, even though Ben told me that under no circumstances should I tell Fred I missed him so bad that it hurt). Fred wrote back—in a not displeased mood—that he was well, but getting accustomed to feeling tired, and that we should not despair finding suitable help since “you Briards need a bit of getting used to.” He also said, in the letter’s sole sad passage, that he was so used to us that his most arduous task was getting used to life without us.

  Every few weeks after that, one of us wrote to him, and Fred’s answers indicated that he was indeed gradually adjusting to life without us; he had come to love his sister’s flower boxes and his slow, same walk to the village every twilight.

  I became fifteen soon after entering Winding Hill High School. I thought of having a party, though it would be retrogressing toward the dim past. So I decided not to. I was being distant with the girls I knew and sacrosanct with the boys—perhaps a delayed reaction to my last date with Arthur. It felt as if I had always been fifteen going on sixteen, but I didn’t really look forward to becoming sixteen. It was the future, and I was afraid to expect.

  In one week, my father, who had never visited a doctor in my memory, kept voluntary appointments with three—a heart specialist, an ophthalmologist, a dentist. They found his heart, eyes, and teeth in unusually excellent condition for a man of seventy. The teeth man wanted to write up a detailed history of his eating and brushing habits. My father rejected the idea, but his mood of resignation didn’t change.

  He became selling-happy. The inferior Cellini tray disappeared. The French tapestry came down off the wall for good. A small marble Madonna he’d always cherished vanished from its pedestal.

  Ben took to lifting barbells. The Winding Hill gym teacher had decreed that he was too light for the second-string football squad, and Ben was concerned about the possibility of someday being called upon to play a football player. But he was even more concerned and enthusiastic about learning to “throw away” lines, an acting technique of delivering dialogue that was new to him, but a favorite with his new Winding Hill after-school speech teacher.

  One afternoon, I was in my room doing homework and wondering if I’d been too inflexibly aloof since moving to Winding Hill—I didn’t yet have a best friend and couldn’t be counted among the most popular girls who didn’t resort to best friends—when my reflection was interrupted by my father calling me, to meet a visitor.

  Mrs. Virginia Welch Loder. Soft gray hair that looked blue in the late afternoon sunset shining in the windows from across the river. Narrow oval fingernails. She used her hands gracefully and a lot. Her father had built this house—a house that, we learned, had exchanged owners several times since Mrs. Loder had married and moved away from Winding Hill. Her blue-gray eyes shone when she spoke of her father, her calm voice modulated with pleasure. She was delighted to meet me, hoped that her daughter, Louise, who was a lovely girl too, and I would become good friends now that, after her husband’s recent death, she and Louise had come home to Winding Hill. They had the little “Hunter” house, and Mrs. Loder smiled at the idea that she, a Welch, was now newer in Winding Hill than we were.

  We showed her through the house. Everything about her drew me and made me sorrowful. She knew her way more surely than I. My room had been hers through her child- and girlhood, and her eyes roaming over it made it seem rightly hers still.

  Ben came home. The four of us chatted in the living room. Hubert turned on a faucet in the kitchen and embarrassment filled my heart. No doubt the plumbing had been more polite when she’d lived here—her father wanted everything to be so “right” for her and her mother.

  My father asked about her husband. Had he posed such a question to Aunt Catherine—even about a husband of a friend of her friend—she wouldn’t have spared a detail of retching or muscular ineptitude in a clinical account of his demise. Mrs. Loder barely sighed—it was more an extended exhalation—and said, “We were lucky. He didn’t have time to get used to being an invalid. There was one stroke—and then the other.”

  She then turned the subject to my father. She was glad it wasn’t necessary for him to travel to and from the city every day—the wearing routine of so many Winding Hill men. Such a shame. Winding Hill was created to enjoy. If a man saved one disease-ridden tree on his property, wasn’t he doing something more worthwhile than he’d do in an average business day in an office? She had to go, but she emphatically told us how glad she was to have come and what a lovely time she’d had. She shook hands warmly with all of us, and we all looked warmly understanding.

  “She’s like a lost little girl,” said my father, “who’s finally found home, and found she can’t go in.”

  I knew, and hoped, that wasn’t the last we’d see of Mrs. Loder.

  Making no sense at all, Ben said, “Yes, she’s naïve. Not like Felicity.”

  Felicity. The thought of her filled my heart with lovingness, pushing out all the pity I’d been feeling for Mrs. Loder. Though I hadn’t seen Felicity in a long while, she was instantly real—as real as if she were in the room with Ben and my father. Felicity. She might as well have been standing beside me, whispering in my ear. “Caution,” she said. Sometimes she made as little sense as Ben. “Caution,” I heard again in the place behind my eyes where she had once seen me. Why? No caution was necessary with Felicity. Anybody could tell from half a block away that her hair was an artifice. All her artifices were blatantly apparent, so you knew what was what. “Caution,” I heard again. And this time I thought of the pretty blue glints in Mrs. Loder’s hair in the sunset. One had to look hard to see that it wasn’t real. And Mrs. Loder’s gladness about us—did one have to look hard at that, too?

  “There’s only one thing about her that bothers me,” I said. “Everybody she knows is ‘lovely.’ ”

  My father’s reprimand was immediate. “As I recall, she didn’t say that about more than three or four people, and you were one of them, Lucresse.”

  “But I wouldn’t call more than two people I’ve met in my whole life ‘lovely.’ That’s all.”

  His voice reverberated the way it did other times in my defense. “Maybe, Lucresse, you don’t look for the goodness in people. I have no reason to suspect that Mrs. Loder
herself is anything other than lovely. One of the most realistic, sensible, feeling people I’ve met in my whole life, which has been a little longer than yours.”

  “I didn’t mean anything against her exactly.”

  “Then exactly what did you mean?’ ”

  “Just that, well, everybody can’t be lovely. Do you think I’m lovely, Ben?”

  “No,” Ben said, as I was sure he would.

  “I don’t think so, either, right now,” my father huffed. “You have no cause to criticize a woman who’s shown us nothing but friendliness. And remember, she’s had sorrow, and she’s alone.”

  I wanted to say those were not good enough reasons for me to be convinced she was lovely, but I didn’t dare.

  Ben tried to placate us both. “I don’t see why you’re arguing. She’s a nice woman. We hardly know her.”

  But we got to know her better, quite fast it seemed. My father invited her for tea a few days later, and now they were calling each other Virginia and Walter. She couldn’t bear the thought of him taking the village taxi to the station and the train to New York when he went. Several times she picked him up and drove him to the station; several times he accepted her offer to drive him all the way to the city, and they spent long days together. She suggested, with her smooth hand on my shoulder, that I call her Ginny. “Thank you,” I said, for want of another reply, and held back the “Mrs. Loder.”

  “And do promise me you’ll look up Louise in school,” she said.