The Truth of the Matter (11 page)
“What is the story, Uncle George? What happened to them? The Murrys, I mean. Not the peaches.”
“Oh, well . . . I wouldn’t say it’s exactly that something happened to them. But it was three years that Edward Murry was in the war before he was wounded pretty badly and had to make his way home in the summer of sixty-three. Adelaide had put up these peaches two years earlier.” He picked up the jar and turned it in his hand to read the label she had affixed. “You see here,” he said, holding it out to Agnes so she could see it for herself. “‘Pickled Peaches, June, eighteen sixty-one,’” he said aloud and then turned it back to read it again himself, pondering it a moment before he put it down again.
“Those peaches were waiting for her husband—no one had opened them when Edward Murry came home from the war . . . when he walked up the steps, crossed the porch, and didn’t stop to knock on his own front door. Even though he’d been wounded, Agnes, just imagine the sort of gladness he was feeling! Then, the story goes, he was greeted by his wife, who was right at that moment nursing her infant baby.”
Agnes was looking out at the hot, thick light beyond the porch, waiting for him to continue. She gave a start when she realized he hadn’t said a thing for some moments and that she had nearly dozed off.
“Ah! Well! It’s a happy story, then,” she remarked.
“Oh, I don’t think anyone can know that. Who knows what happened when Edward met that baby? But he seems to have adopted him as his own child. I did check the documents in the courthouse. That baby, Duncan Murry, was born April of eighteen sixty-three. No other child was born to the Murrys as far as I could find out, and it was a Duncan Murry who eventually sold the place, so he must have inherited it. The parts of the story I turned up do seem happy enough. Adelaide and Edward lived there with little Duncan—eventually with Duncan and his wife—almost twenty-five years longer. But that baby was born in eighteen sixty-three. Edward was out west then. He’d been out west with Grant for two and a half years.”
Agnes turned her attention to Uncle George’s expression, but it gave no hint of whatever he was getting at. “Well, then he must have been glad to be home, Uncle George,” she finally said, thinking that he was waiting for her to draw a conclusion. But he didn’t say anything, and he, too, merely gazed out at the waning day.
“Wasn’t he?” she asked. “I don’t—Oh! Oh, you mean you don’t think the baby could have been Edward Murry’s son? But that’s just silly. One of those stories! Edward Murry could have come home on a furlough . . .”
“He may well have. I couldn’t find a record of it.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Agnes said, eager to change the subject, which she found distasteful and melancholy. “I think that whatever had happened, Adelaide and Edward just never even mentioned it at all. I think Adelaide jumped up to meet him as he came in the door and that Edward Murry was delighted to have a son! He had lived through those battles. He had seen men die . . . he had killed men. What difference would it make where that little boy had come from?”
“I hope you’re right. I hope that’s how it was. I wish I knew a man that would feel that way. Well, though, Agnes, the reason I’ve been thinking about it . . . I’ve been turning it over in my mind since Dwight and Trudy got married. I want you to consider this, because all sorts of trouble can come of people not knowing things. Then again, I think that sometimes ignorance . . . Well, I wouldn’t say it’s bliss, but sometimes you might say that ignorance is required to sustain contentment. And I don’t plan to mention any of this to anyone but you.”
“For goodness sake! What? What is it, Uncle George? Is there something serious that’s happened?”
“It’s Warren’s father I’ve been thinking about, Agnes. Ever since Dwight and Trudy got married. I wonder about him every time my eye falls on this jar of peaches. John was my brother, and there were times when I was young that there was no one else in the world I liked so much. Leo seemed awfully stern, you see. John was full of . . . oh . . . energy. Full of fun. But, then, you knew him, too. He turned into a man who seemed to be trying his best to make himself miserable. By the time he was your father-in-law, I don’t think there were any traces left of his . . . well, I can’t think how to describe it. He wasn’t ever able to get back his happiness. He couldn’t handle his drinking. It was a sad thing, because he wasn’t even good at enjoying it. His drinking and all that carousing, I mean. By the time he died, I had been thinking that it was only a matter of time, anyway. . . . I was sorry about it, of course. No. No, I was sad. I missed him so much the way he’d been when I was growing up. But I have to say that when I think back about it, now, I was relieved, too. I didn’t know I’d been expecting something terrible to happen to him. But when it did I thought, Oh, yes. Well, now we’ve crossed that bridge,” George said, stretching his legs so that the rocking chair canted backward alamingly.
“But, you know, Agnes, the year or so before your mother had Dwight—oh, you were probably still at Linus Gilchrest—John was just full of how beautiful your mother was. He claimed no woman north of the Mason-Dixon line ever could have her kind of beauty. He’d say that anytime. Of course, his own wife was considered a beauty all over Marshal County. Lillian, and Leo’s wife, too. Audra. The Marshal sisters . . . I used to hear people who hadn’t even seen them talk about how good-looking they were thought to be.
“I went with John and your mother—and two of your brothers, I think—out to Judge Lufton’s to watch the harness racing. We went a few times. John was right about your mother. She was a beautiful woman.”
“She was. She certainly was,” Agnes agreed. “It’s nice to think of Mama going to the races. She loved them. Before Warren and I were married, he and Lily took me and Mama and Edson out to Judge Lufton’s. But I don’t remember Warren’s father being there. I guess he might have been. I always thought later that it might have been the happiest day of Edson’s life. Lily made a big fuss over him. That must have been nineteen seventeen. And, you know, neither Mama nor Edson lived even another year.” Edson had died just two days after he came down with the flu, the very day after Agnes’s mother had given birth to Dwight. Not much more than a week later Catherine died of the same thing. She had never even held her youngest son. In fact, Agnes wasn’t sure her mother had ever understood that she had given birth to him.
“Yes. Of course I know that. I remember that,” George said. “It was a terrible time. John was drinking too much by then, and carrying on. Although it was your mother he raved on about. I’ve been remembering it more than I like, Agnes. John was out at your place whenever he could get away. He wouldn’t come into the office, and Leo would be beside himself. And his poor wife. Poor Lillian. But I don’t believe Warren had any idea. Neither did your father. He was making a name for himself in the legislature then. He wasn’t at home much, of course.”
Agnes leaned back in her chair and looked out at the light as it had narrowed to a slant in just the time of their conversation. She carefully noted the crisp edges of the shadow of the house as it elongated over the yard. And she tried not to think of anything else except the tall chimneys, as their shadows lengthened disproportionately across the lawn in contrast to the softer, mutable shadows of the trees.
“Oh . . . ,” she finally said in a long, downward-falling breath of dismay. “Oh! You can’t think that my mother and John Scofield! Mama wouldn’t . . .” But Agnes felt a flickering ignition of anger at her careless, careless mother, and also a reawakening of fury at her lecherous father-in-law, John Scofield. “Well. I don’t believe anything at all happened between my mother and John Scofield! I just don’t believe it. I don’t even remember her mentioning John Scofield! I don’t know if she even knew he existed! Mama was so . . . She wasn’t connected to the town, really. To any people . . . She didn’t ever like living here, and she pretty much disapproved of anyone who did like living here. She counted it as a mark of . . . oh . . . of mediocrity,” Agnes said.
“Besides,” she went on, after a pause during which she waited for Uncle George to recant what he had just said, to say that of course she was right, that now he saw it much more clearly. But George didn’t say a thing. “Besides! Uncle George, you’re just wrong! You’re just wrong about all this, and it’s truly unbecoming of you to tell me you suspect my mother . . . suspect her and your own brother! You never should have imagined a thing like that. It makes me really angry. . . . You know it can’t be true. It would mean Trudy and Dwight . . . why, they’d be related, too. It’s only Trudy and Claytor who’re cousins, Uncle George. It’s beyond me to understand why in the world you told me about it. Trudy and Dwight are married! Of course they’re not cousins! Otherwise why not
Claytor
and Trudy . . . ?”
“Well, you’re right about all that, Agnes. I do think that John . . . I know that John carried on a flirtation with your mother. But it could have been that it was entirely platonic. It’s certainly possible that Dwight and Trudy aren’t connected by anything but circumstance. Well, and now by marriage, of course. It’s all conjecture, after all. Not worth worrying about. No one ever knows why two people get married, anyway. Claytor and Trudy probably grew out of their whole romance. And even if Dwight and Trudy have children . . . Well, I don’t think it’ll make a bit of difference.”
The notion, though, that John Scofield and her mother might have conceived that baby—that infant who was Dwight—took away any other words Agnes might have said to George Scofield, who didn’t seem to expect conversation as he sat alongside her for another ten minutes or so. She was speechless with anger at him, not because he was the messenger, but because all at once it was clear to Agnes that George Scofield’s love of history, his pursuit of artifacts, stemmed from his own lack of involvement in life as it was lived day in and day out. She decided in those few minutes that she had never really liked him after all; he seemed to her now no more interesting than a person whose sole obsession was collecting butterflies, chloroforming them and arranging them carefully in exhibition cases. There was a morbid quality about collecting; she was appalled at the thought of the isolated, secret, prurient glee Uncle George must have felt when he discovered Adelaide Murry’s signed and dated jar of peaches.
Finally he began to gather himself together to go home. “People make such a mess for themselves,” Uncle George said, with no particular emphasis, just as an observation. “You know, in the South people often marry cousin to cousin. To keep the land. Or to gain more land. Not the Negroes, though. Even when they were slaves. It’s against what they believe. It’s a taboo. And, of course, as you say, your father was at home now and then. Maybe there’s nothing to it at all, Agnes.” He stepped cautiously down the stairs onto the grass. “In any case we’ll never know one way or another. But it didn’t seem right not to tell you once it was in my head. It seemed you ought to know of the possibility, at least. But I guess we ought to assume things are just as they appear to be.”
Agnes looked after him as he made his way tentatively along the path of stepping stones. She was shockingly enraged; she didn’t dare allow herself to say a word, but when he was all the way across the yard, Agnes noticed the jar of peaches still sitting on the table. She picked up the jar and examined it once more, turning it in her hand. And then she just let it fall to the paving stones—she did not fling it—and it made a satisfactory crack and gurgle when it hit the ground, although it also gave off such a sweet and concentrated odor of decay that Agnes turned away and went inside.
When Dwight Claytor was assigned as a navigator with a B-17 bomber crew and was eventually stationed in England, at Deopham Green, no one except Agnes thought any more about Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, except to be surprised that Trudy didn’t come home when she was pregnant or even after she gave birth to a daughter. Trudy had decided to share an apartment in New York with the wife and baby of one of Dwight’s crew members so that the two of them could trade off nursery duties, and she took a secretarial job at Merriman Oil Corporation.
By the time the war ended, their marriage seemed always to have been the way things were. Trudy and Dwight had a little girl, Amelia Anne Claytor, and Trudy was pregnant again by the time Dwight was finally demobilized. By then Claytor, too, was married, although no one had been able to attend the wedding because he was only briefly stationed in Biloxi, where he met his wife, and which was too far to travel during the war.
By the end of the war, Betts and Howard, too, had both had enough adventures of their own that they thought their childhood was behind them, and they thought their growing up was comprised entirely of those years they had lived at Scofields under Agnes’s supervision. All of them but Dwight—who wanted nothing more than to take his family home—were wearied by the prospect of adjusting once again to the naïveté, the provincialism, of their hometown. They were uncomfortable with the pity they felt for those people they loved who had spent the years of the war just going along as usual. They felt sorry that they could never explain real life to their parents or their aunts and their uncles, who no doubt believed that the important things that happened to them were whatever had happened in Washburn, Ohio.
D
URING THEIR CHILDHOOD, and when they were away during the war, Dwight and Claytor, Howard and Betts, and even Trudy Butler considered the houses and grounds and fences and sheds of Scofields to be entirely Agnes’s domain. Robert Butler tended his garden but was otherwise taken up with his writing and teaching, and he was frequently invited to take part in literary conferences, and sometimes to receive honorary degrees or a prize of some sort. Lily saw to her own house in a sort of slapdash way, an easiness with her household that her nephews and niece admired.
Their mother had always been finicky about domestic things: making slipcovers for the furniture to protect it from the summer sun, worrying over the shabbiness of the curtains—waiting until fabric went on sale and then sewing new ones herself for weeks of evenings, during which she was defensive and irritated, as if she had been wronged somehow, as if her children had commented on the state of the draperies, or, in fact, had even noticed them.