The next morning, with Hubert’s silent assistance, Ben took a quarter of a baked ham and made four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He wrapped them in waxed paper and put them in a paper bag, and, commenting as an afterthought, “Louise might be hungry,” he added a bottle of milk and a pint of ice cream.
I didn’t see him again until five o’clock. Before he came home, Mrs. Loder called to make sure my father was resting and to say that Louise had had a “lovely time.” Ben’s cheeks were flushed when he came in and his greeting to my father was perfunctory. Then he called me into his room and closed the door.
Back and forth, back and forth he paced. “We don’t have much time,” he said intensely. “I saw her twice—when I called for Louise and when I took her home. And I’d swear she has ideas now about Louise and me. But that doesn’t matter. I talked to Louise for two hours. The ice cream helped. She’s a nice kid. She’s on our side.”
“Did she have any ideas?”
“I got the ideas—from what she told me.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Her mother has it all planned—down to the school she’s picked for you and Louise, after she’s busy running this house. That’ll take all her time, with the repairs she wants to do. So you and Louise are going to boarding school. She hasn’t figured out what to do with me yet.”
“What!?”
“You heard me. What’s more, she’s in a hurry. She’s already on the lookout for somebody to sublease the Hunter house from her in January. But we’ll see about that.”
“How, Ben?”
“The less you know about it, the better. You’re no good at this sort of thing. I only hope Louise doesn’t get scared again.”
I asked “about what” several times, but all he would say was, “When the time comes, just don’t interfere.”
I began to realize “the time” had come the next afternoon when Mrs. Loder arrived for tea. Ben was more than friendly; he was excited by her presence.
She responded in kind, exuding interest in him and his interests. After he had run in and out of the room, bringing his barbells for her to see, she chirped, “Goodness! I never saw a boy with so much energy!”
“He’s getting more every year,” my father said.
Ben hoisted the barbells to his chest and shouted, “Ginny, you inspire me!” Then, letting the weights drop to the floor with a wall-shaking thump, he sprang over to her and crouched at her feet. “Tell me, Ginny, why do you inspire me?”
Her laugh filled the room.
A little satiric, a little self-consciously boyish, Ben said, “Tell me all about yourself, Ginny—what you like, what you want. Can’t you see, you fascinate me?” He could have been half-joking or all-joking; he was such a good actor you really couldn’t tell.
She trilled another laugh, winked at my father, and tousled Ben’s hair. “The girls better watch out for you, Ben, you say such pretty things.”
“I’m serious, Ginny,” Ben continued, his voice almost choking with emotion. “Please, let’s talk of serious things.”
“All of us?” I said, unable to contain myself.
“We never have—all of us, like this together,” Ben reasoned. “Why not?”
“I’ll have a scotch and soda,” my father said.
“It’s time for your nap,” said Mrs. Loder.
I wanted to join in. “What serious things are you thinking about, Ben? What serious things should we all discuss?”
Giving me a warning look, Ben stood. “I’ll get Dad the scotch first,” he murmured and hurried to the pantry.
“A dutiful son,” my father said.
“And a charmer,” Mrs. Loder added while Ben was gone.
Ben returned, handed the drink to my father, then resumed his crouch at Mrs. Loder’s feet. “Are you happy…truly happy?” he crooned up at her.
“Yes, my dear. I’m happy. Truly,” she said softly, perhaps a bit embarrassed.
“I’m not,” I said suddenly, determined to be included in this play.
“No one asked you,” Ben said, and then to Mrs. Loder, “But you could be happier, right?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“There must be something you want,” persisted Ben, still in that same crooning tone of great concern. “Everybody wants something.”
“I want you and everybody else to stop telling me when I’m allowed to talk,” I volunteered.
“I want your father to take his nap,” Mrs. Loder said lightly.
“I want to know what Ben’s point is,” my father said between sips of his highball.
“All I want is for Ginny to be as happy as possible,” Ben began, but the doorbell interrupted him. He smiled at Ginny with enormous compassion, then sprinted to answer it. When he returned, it was with Louise and he was talking to her animatedly, bringing her up to date on the “discussion” at hand. Louise smiled nervously and replied to Ben’s explanation, “But I don’t know anything about my mother’s happiness,” and she plopped the great weight she no longer carried into a chair.
“Your mother won’t answer. Please, you tell us, Louise. What would she like above all else?” said Ben.
Louise held her breath for an instant, then she managed, “Oh, a lot of things, I guess.”
“Really?” Mrs. Loder was somewhat taken aback.
“Yes,” said Louise with conviction. “Really.”
“We could talk about something else,” suggested Mrs. Loder, not nastily.
“I must know,” insisted Ben of Louise. “What would she like?”
The girl exchanged a glance with her mother that was no less frightening because it was fleeting. Then Louise smiled, her twitches gone.
“I suppose one must listen to a child’s opinion, now and then,” Mrs. Loder said to my father.
I could tell that this remark rubbed him the wrong way. He didn’t look at her, and instead addressed Louise. “What is your opinion, Louise?”
“I think,” began Louise, “well…I think she’d like everything to be the way it was for her before she got messed up with my father and me.”
My father rubbed his eyes as though he had difficulty focusing them.
Mrs. Loder nearly shrieked, “Louise! What a thing to say! I’ve never been ‘messed up.’ ”
“You know what I mean,” Louise said calmly.
“I certainly do not!” rat-a-tat-tatted Mrs. Loder. Then, decrescendoing, “I was married to your father for seventeen years, and I never complained.”
“No,” Louise said. “You hardly ever talked.”
My father started to say something that began, “Virginia, I’m sorry,” but she interrupted with an explanation…or defense…“George Loder was not a very talkative man!”
“He talked to me,” said Louise.
“Louise—my sweet—the way you put it makes what you’re saying open to misinterpretation,” Mrs. Loder said carefully. “You know I didn’t spend seventeen years in silence. Didn’t I talk to you too? You know I did.”
“Mostly about how great life used to be when you weren’t his wife or my mother—back in Winding Hill, in this house,” Louise said in a breathless monotone.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you!” Mrs. Loder exploded.
“I don’t either.” Louise was suddenly puzzled by her own behavior.
“Courage,” Ben offered.
“The devil,” Mrs. Loder said. “Actually, none of this makes sense. I’m as confused as all of you must be.”
We all let that last sentence linger in the air, unanswered, but Mrs. Loder, reddening, couldn’t let it die unacknowledged.
“I’m sure you, Ben—and you, Lucresse—would never have maligned your mother like this,” she said.
I found my voice. “That was different. She didn’t have a chance to tell us how unhappy she was.”
“Lucresse, that wasn’t necessary,” my father said.
“Once and for all, I wasn’t unhappy. I’m not unhappy,” Mrs. Loder said.
Louise poked her face forward, self-doubt gone. “And I suppose you don’t want this house back more than anything, oh no.” She spoke with outsized adolescent sarcasm.
Mrs. Loder turned into a tigress. “What are you trying to do to me?” she roared. “I’ve tried to make you happy, Louise. I’ve even tried to make you attractive!”
Ben and I held our breath, controlled witnesses to the mother and daughter finally confronting each other with no control. To tell you the truth, it was exhilarating and we were content—in fact, anxious—to let the scene develop to whatever heights it could reach. But my father’s most pressing wish was obviously directly opposed to ours.
“One person’s salvation is not necessarily another’s,” he said gently.
Mrs. Loder’s anger shifted to him. “What do you mean, salvation?”
“There’s no reward in being attractive to people who aren’t attractive to you,” he said kindly.
Mrs. Loder shook her shoulders as if to throw off some great burden. “All this nonsense! Happiness and salvation! All anyone can do is get as much as possible out of life, and there are no further rewards.” She shot a bitter glance at Louise. “Sometimes I think there are no rewards.”
Ben’s tone was hard and incredulous. “You didn’t say a word about making someone else happy, Mrs. Loder.”
She turned on him with wrath. “Ben, you are a rotten, nasty boy!”
“ ‘Ruthless’ is a better word,” my father said quietly.
“Walter, you ought to do something about that boy.” Without looking at any of us, Mrs. Loder gathered her purse and gloves.
“Come, Louise,” she muttered at the door, and Louise, with an untypical spring in her step, followed her out.
As the house reverberated with the door sounds, my father stared at Ben with a docile, wondering expression.
“Okay, Dad,” Ben finally said. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to apologize to her, too?”
“No-o-o,” my father said, drawing out the little word. “If you did, I’d have to apologize to you, and I’d hate that.”
It was his only admission that Ben had been right, and all he had to say on the subject, except, “Poor Louise…poor Louise.” He didn’t take a nap and he had two more highballs before dinner.
Mrs. Loder called the next morning to ask if she could drive him to the station, but he said he wasn’t going to the city that day, and he didn’t invite her to tea.
Ben bounced back to his normal elated, energetic state. “He knows he misjudged her, and that’s all we wanted,” he told me. “And he’s not angry with me.”
“No, he’s always known you could be ruthless,” I said admiringly.
A few days later, Louise and I had a talk in the girls’ room in school. “Is she still furious with you?” I asked.
“No. The funniest thing happened. We had a real run-in after we left your house, but since then, she and I are getting along much better. It’s like the pressure is off, if you know what I mean. She knows I know how she really feels about everything, and she doesn’t have to pretend she doesn’t. How’s your father?”
I was thinking so hard about how nice it must be to be ruthless if you felt ruthless, or to have somebody else know how you really felt, or to know yourself the truth of how you felt that I almost didn’t hear the question. “Oh, my father? He’s the same as ever,” I said comfortably. “When you’re his age, you don’t change much.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
THE STRATEGISTS
The removal of Mrs. Loder from our lives—oh, my father saw her now and then, but not as frequently as he began to see other people—imbued us with fresh vitality. Without being aware of it, I smiled more. Boys in my class invited me to football games and parties, and once in a while the movies on Saturday night. The nearest theater didn’t sport a midnight show, and I was satisfied to be seen often enough among the girls who were partnered.
With my first date, I was curious, slightly on guard. But after a few experiences, smiling in a conspiratorial, comradely way at the other escorted girls, I learned how to handle the customary good-night kiss, affectionately if not passionately. I bought more clothes and Ben and my father came to accept the facts of my more active social life.
At almost seventeen, I was confident enough to choose the boys I would kiss with more discrimination. Ben, ready to be graduated from high school, had promoted himself from the lead roles in school plays to bit parts in the county’s Little Theatre productions. My father didn’t talk of dying anymore. He was again buying nearly as much as he was selling; newly purchased antique vases and a collection of water colors helped restore our living room’s cluttered appearance, despite Hubert’s best efforts. Hubert had spoken perhaps twenty sentences more during the previous year than he had the year before. We were living in what none of us recognized as a hiatus between stirring events.
The first one to develop started after the first performance of the Little Theatre’s rendition of Liliom, Ferenc Molnár’s classic drama about a wife-beater whose wife so adores him that she claims at the end of the play that “someone may beat you and beat you and beat you—and not hurt you at all.” Ben played the Second Policeman with a particularly rich, menacing air. The dressing room shared by the male supporting members of the cast was crowded with actors and visitors. Still, one couldn’t help noticing Lois Carrington when she came in.
From the back or three-quarter view, she looked about eighteen, the young, country-eighteen of popular fiction. She had a small, rounded figure with firm upper arms and a straight neck. Yet it was her pinafore dress and braided reddish-brown hair that helped mostly to create the eighteen impression. When she turned about full face, you realized from the tiny hollows in her cheeks and under her eyes that she was nearer forty.
I was there to tell Ben that my father and I had enjoyed the show, that we had a ride home, and that if he didn’t want to come with us, he could walk. But it was hard to deliver the message. Lois Carrington was hard to interrupt and she was saying, of the father of three who was playing Liliom, “In all honesty, I do think Carl could be more bitter, more biting, in the third scene. Don’t you think so, Ben?”
Ben was removing his makeup. He prefaced his answer with a wry, superior smile. “I’d play the whole thing differently.”
“I know you would. I just knew it. I’ve been watching you at rehearsals, Ben, and I must say, I’ve thought all along, you’re the only one who’s really in the play, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
I butted in. “Ben?”
“Oh, Lucresse…how did Dad like it? This is my sister. Lois Carrington, actress and treasurer extraordinaire.”
“Hello. Daddy liked it fine. So did I. It was all right.”
“So you’re Ben’s sister! Ben, you didn’t tell me you had a sister!”
“Daddy wants to know if you’re coming home with us, or walking,” I said, ignoring her.
“Ben, you’re not going right now, are you? I have my car,” said Lois.
Ben didn’t even look at me. “Tell Dad I’ll be along later. And here. Take these socks with you. And wash them, will you? They’re the only black ones I have.”
“I’ll leave them on your dresser for you to wash,” I replied. And I about-faced.
My father and I played gin rummy until Ben got home—after two o’clock.
“Did I seem tough enough to you? Did I convince you?” Ben asked my father immediately.
“Yes, you convinced me,” my father said. “Who is Lois Carrington?”
Ben lifted his eyes, and his guard, at me. “She’s the treasurer of the company. She could have been a fine actress if she hadn’t married the man she did.”
“Carrington…Carrington…” my father mused. “I think I know him. I rode into New York with him on the train a couple of times. Has his own accounting firm, a man about my age.”
“I don’t know her husband,” Ben said shortly.
“He let me kn
ow he had a very young wife.” My father was unquelled. “Seemed the fact was his special pride.”
“Since you’re both so interested, she’s thirty-three or thereabouts,” Ben said.
“Or thereabouts,” I said.
“I didn’t see old Carrington there tonight,” my father said blithely.
“He never goes anywhere she goes, not that that’s any of our business,” Ben said.
“See that you don’t make it your business,” my father said.
“All I’m interested in is the role I’m playing.” Ben’s mouth was wrathful.
“Rather, that’s what you’re most interested in,” my father returned.
“I’m glad you enjoyed the performance so much you couldn’t stop talking about it,” Ben said bitterly.
My father met Lois the very next morning. Crisp, with a Peter Pan collared blouse and a dirndl skirt, she dropped in to give Ben what she called with a merry, little-girl laugh, “a small present of something every man should have more than one pair of.” The package contained three pairs of black socks.
Her attention then turned to me. “Are you going into the theater too, Lucresse? It was my first love.”
Many years later, I learned something relatives of famous people know, unless they’re asses: how to distinguish between people who are interested in them because their relatives are famous, and sincere people. But this was my first round with someone who wanted to know me because I was Ben’s sister, and Ben was not yet famous. I was suspicious, but not wholly antagonistic.
“No, I don’t like to act.” I oddly felt as if I were lying.
“How odd,” she might have commented, from her expression, but my father didn’t leave her the opportunity.
“I think I’m acquainted with your husband. He’s an accountant, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said.
“A nice man. A very nice man.”
She mouthed a cordial, flattered smile. “That’s what most people say when they mean the fatherly type.”
Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) Page 17
