The Truth of the Matter (10 page)

They were in their bathing suits lying on separate blankets. Betts had still looked like a girl growing up. She appeared to be tenuously connected, as if she might fly apart, might not hold fast at the joints; she had the thin, attenuated look of a praying mantis, and she was holding a book up over her head so she could read. She had gotten bored with the effort of vanity and wanted to get back to
Villette
. Trudy lay next to her, and the contrast was startling. Trudy was all of a piece, rounded and sleek like a little house cat; she was so still she almost appeared to be asleep as she lay with the straps of her bathing suit unhooked and her arms lying lax at her side. Her skin had turned golden after weeks of summer, and her state of seeming entirely self-contained and quiet—while Betts shifted this way and that, fidgeting and clearly uncomfortable—made even Agnes want to reach out and touch Trudy. Grasp her wrist, tap her lightly on the shoulder, in order to become the object of her reflective, particular attention.

Agnes moved away from the window and experienced a long, clear moment of recognition. She remembered being unable even to look at Warren without thinking of all the ways his body could accommodate her. She literally couldn’t take his hand without a sort of swoon washing through her, and it had been miraculous to Agnes that Warren had been subject to the same obsession with her. But until she had seen Claytor gazing fixedly at Trudy, Agnes had never thought to imagine lust from a man’s point of view. Trudy was so petite. She was small and delicate and completely feminine. Claytor would want to protect her at the very same instant he would want to have sex with her, and there’s nothing dainty about having sex. The contradiction of Claytor’s imagination where Trudy was concerned would be considerable. The tension of those opposing desires, Agnes thought, would be uncommonly erotic.

And, in fact, Claytor did feel protective of Trudy just in everyday life at Scofields. She was so slight among the tall Scofields, so easily lost track of in the muddle of family. She was subdued in the face of debates and arguments and opinions that flew freely among Dwight and Claytor and Betts, and eventually Howard, if they were all sitting in Trudy’s garden after a tennis game, for instance, or if they were out at the lake, swimming. Among all the light-haired, fair-skinned family, Trudy’s dark hair and olive skin made her seem foreign. Her quietly observant composure seemed mysterious, seemed to be a kind of indulgent wisdom with which a foreigner would observe a clutch of noisy Americans. And probably not the least of the attraction between Claytor and Trudy was the fact that each was the other’s forbidden country.

The only person Claytor confided in was Dwight, when they happened both to have retreated to the porch to read one summer afternoon. The second summer they were home from college, Dwight headed out to the porch with a stack of assigned reading on a perfect day. One of those rare days the family always referred to as “Goldilocks” days—a family shorthand that stemmed from Betts’s childhood observations. He found Claytor already in the swing with a book propped on the armrest so that he could look down from his slouched position and read.

Dwight put his small stack of books on the table beside the rocker. “Looks like you’re reading for the pleasure of it,” Dwight said, gesturing to the books he had just put down along with a notebook and a fistful of sharpened pencils.

“No, not really. Well, I guess I am,” Claytor said. “This book’s assigned, but I’ve gotten interested in it. Probably I’m going to have to read it again. I forgot to take notes about forty pages ago.” Claytor righted himself, closing his book by grasping it so that one finger held his place. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He was earnest and spoke softly as if he might be overheard. “Can I ask you something? Do you have a minute?”

“Sure,” Dwight said. “Fire away. I don’t know that I’ll be much help, but I’ll be glad to give it a shot.”

“It’s just that I don’t know what to do, Dwight. Probably I can’t do anything. I don’t think there’s anything
to
do!” Claytor admired Dwight more than any other man he knew, with the possible exception of Uncle Robert. And Claytor was wrung out by the several years of his secret, overwhelming devotion to and desire for his cousin Trudy Butler.

Dwight listened with careful attention and was surprised. “But you haven’t even been dating anyone else! I’d been wondering why. You aren’t giving yourself a chance. You need to give yourself a chance to . . . overcome this. Well, I suppose that’s a little dramatic. After all, it’s only Trudy. Good Lord! You’ve known her all your life. We all love Trudy. But I think you’ve confused perfectly natural feelings for her. . . . There’re some terrific girls at school. There’re some terrific girls right here in town.”

Claytor looked at Dwight despairingly and moved his head just enough to signify the impossibility of what Dwight proposed.

Dwight tried not to sound annoyed. “You’ll get over it. Trudy will, too. After all, you hardly see each other except over school breaks. You probably shouldn’t come home so often. You could find some sort of summer job at school. Don’t brood about it! Nothing’s worse, and it’s just Trudy, anyway. It’s probably mostly a habit —”

“It’s not a habit,” Claytor interrupted. “If you’d ever felt this way about anyone, you’d know that it’s about as far from being a habit as anything can be. It’s nothing I could change by just making up my mind to do it. I thought you’d pretty much fallen for Cleo Morris. You spend a lot of time —”

“Oh, Lord, Claytor! Cleo’s just . . . She’s just a friend. We’re just friends. We like each other, but not . . . I don’t want to feel the way you do about Trudy! I like so many girls. Any girl with a sense of humor. A girl to flirt with. To have fun with. I don’t want to feel serious about a girl right now. Good God! And I don’t want any girl to feel serious about me. I don’t have time. I have so much debt. . . . And it seems to be pretty miserable, anyway. It doesn’t seem to me that you and Trudy are having any fun.”

Claytor considered this for a little while and sighed. “I guess you’re right. I should stay away from here when Trudy’s home. And you’re right, too. We’re not having fun. Not fun, exactly.” Claytor sat quietly for a moment, still perplexed, but then he smiled a defeated thanks at Dwight and went back to his book.

Dwight, however, had trouble concentrating on his own reading. Trudy as an object of desire had never crossed his mind, and as he sat on the porch reading, trying to break through to the meaning underneath the clotted text of Peterson’s
Honor or Justice in America: The Making of American Law,
his mind drifted back to the idea of Trudy and Claytor. It was an impossible situation; he couldn’t think of any satisfactory resolution to offer Claytor. And, oddly enough, the rest of that summer, Dwight could scarcely keep his attention from resting on Trudy whenever she was among them. He had never thought of her as someone who was more than attractive, but she was, he came to see, quite lovely in an unusual way. “Pretty” wasn’t exactly right, because it was everything about her manner and looks taken in context that was so compelling. She was a dark, inflexible exclamation point set down in the middle of all the wheeling blond asterisks of the rest of her family.

Over that summer and through the next year, Dwight found that he, too, was enormously attracted to Trudy, although he would never reveal it; he wouldn’t cause either Claytor or Trudy any further worry or unhappiness. He was taken aback and ashamed of himself. By necessity, he adopted an avuncular attitude toward her, which—to his surprise—allowed him absolute freedom to seek out her company. When he came home for Christmas, for instance, he stopped first to greet Agnes and Betts and Howard, putting their presents under the tree, and then went off to deliver his gifts to the Butler family. Dwight had come home without Claytor, who had accepted an invitation to spend Christmas with a friend in St. Louis. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without finding out what sort of situation Aunt Lily’s gotten herself into now,” Dwight said.

Betts and Howard and even Agnes urged him—for heaven’s sake!—to hurry on to the Butlers’, in a high-spirited bit of teasing, because Dwight was alluding to the year before: he and Claytor had arrived at the Butlers’ house when only Lily was at home. She had called loudly for them to come in. Had told them to hurry. They had found her in the sitting room decorating the Christmas tree, but trapped stock-still in a swath of spun-glass angel hair caught all around her. “If you two don’t get me out of here soon, I’m going to wet my pants! Robert won’t be home for at least two hours, and Trudy’s off somewhere.”

Christmas of 1939, though, Dwight had scrupulously bought both Betts and Trudy the same gift, a large stuffed bear with an Oberlin sweater and pennant. Trudy was delighted to see Dwight, delighted when she opened her present, embracing the bear and sinking her face into its warm fleece. Before Dwight could stop himself, he spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind trading places with that bear just now.”

Trudy raised her face to gaze at him in surprise, and then she laughed. “You’re already missing whatever girl you’re in love with right now, aren’t you? Honestly, Dwight! You’ve probably been pinned to every pretty girl at Oberlin by now.” Dwight showed up at home off and on with one girl or another, while Claytor came always on his own. And it was a great relief to Trudy to have Dwight as a confidant, although she never mentioned Claytor at all unless it would have seemed strange if she remained silent. And, even then, she changed the subject as soon as she could. Dwight began to think that she wasn’t much interested in Claytor anymore, and he wrote Claytor that reassuring news as tactfully as possible.

In 1943, however, in light of Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, Robert and Lily Butler, and Agnes Scofield, too, separately revisited memories of various childhood incidents involving Dwight Claytor, Claytor Scofield, and Trudy Butler. Possible misinterpretations of past events popped into their heads at odd hours of the day or night. But eventually each concluded that it was inconceivable that either Dwight or Claytor would ever in his life knowingly do anything that might cause the other so much distress—and certainly not something as momentous as marrying a girl the other was in love with. Lily’s and Robert’s anxiety was for Trudy, herself, who was the soul of moral propriety—not of virtue necessarily, but of honor. She would never have put herself between two men she had always been fond of.

The whole thing, though—the surprise of the marriage, what seemed to be its furtiveness—left Agnes and the Butlers and Uncle George Scofield unsettled, even when they factored in the difficulties of transportation and the uncertainties of wartime life. None of them spoke of their misgivings, however, because it would have been traitorous in some way they couldn’t quite pin down. Claytor and Trudy wouldn’t ever have married each other in any case, since they were related. But none of the family knew if Claytor had transformed his infatuation with Trudy into no more than a cousinly affection.

A month or so after the news of the marriage, Uncle George approached Agnes where she sat alone on the small side porch, doing nothing at all other than trying to stay cool one hot afternoon. George was the last of his generation of Scofields still living, and he was the only Scofield of his generation with whom Agnes had ever been comfortable.

She had admired Warren’s uncle Leo but had always felt shy in his company, and she had done her best to stay out of the way of Warren’s father, John Scofield, whose attentions toward her had been secretively sly and lecherous, disguised by a pretense of affectionate teasing. But George Scofield, the youngest of those three brothers, with his eccentricities, his gentle curiosity, his elegance—Agnes had always liked him. When she saw him crossing the wide yard in her direction, carrying with him some object or other, her spirits lifted. She looked forward to being distracted from the heat by one of Uncle George’s reimaginings of a Civil War battle or some new intrigue he had inferred. He often brought along items from his collection of memorabilia to illustrate one or another of the incidents he described. This afternoon he carried an old jar of some viscous, murky brown substance.

“It’s just a jar of peaches,” he said when he was about ten feet away and saw her look with apparent apprehension at what he was carrying. “Can I join you here for a little while?” he asked, just as Agnes had gotten up to dust off and reposition an old wooden rocker that had been abandoned to the elements.

“Would you like some lemonade, Uncle George?” But he was declining even as she asked.

“No, no. Just some shade. I don’t require another thing. Don’t trouble yourself.” He put the jar on the table between them. “A jar of peaches put up by Adelaide Murry in June of eighteen sixty-one,” he said. “They were in the basement of a farmhouse that was right in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg. Now that’s a fantastic thing, isn’t it? Her husband was a captain in the Union Army. But he was with Grant’s men, fighting in Mississippi. Out in Tennessee, as well.”

“You’d think it would have been broken somewhere along the way,” Agnes said. “That is amazing.” She gazed at the peaches that had turned to a muddy sludge over their eighty-odd years, and she reminded herself that she and Lily needed to rotate the fruit and tomatoes they put up every year so they would use up the older ones first.

“When I used to be able to travel more easily . . . while Leo and John stayed home making my fortune . . . Well, Leo did, anyway, though John was the best salesman I ever knew in my life. Because he liked to listen to people. Liked to hear all the stories they wanted to tell about themselves. At least for a while. . . . Well.
I
spent all my time searching those battlefields. . . . But, in any case, on one of my last forays I came upon these peaches. And I found out the story of Adelaide and Edward Murry. It’s always interested me. I haven’t ever been able to decide in the end if it’s a happy or a sad story.”

He leaned back in the rocker, stretching his long legs out almost to the edge of the porch, crossing his arms comfortably over his chest. Even now George Scofield was the handsomest man Agnes had ever seen. Tall and lean and patrician to such a degree that his good looks had never had any emotional or visceral effect. It was as though he had been so perfectly invented that his appearance didn’t engage the observer’s imagination. Or that’s what Agnes concluded. It was how she’d always felt, and George had never had any romantic involvement as far as she knew; he had never married.