The Truth of the Matter (12 page)

Agnes went about the days with certainty and maintained an efficient household in which there were no untoward surprises. There were never the sorts of amusing disasters in Agnes’s house that befell the Butler household, and with which Lily often regaled the rest of the family. The time, for instance, when Robert and Lily had been out of town and their housekeeper, Mrs. Harvey, had taken it upon herself to remove and dust all the books and thoroughly clean the bookshelves. She hadn’t reshelved those books alphabetically, however, as Lily and Robert had arranged them; Mrs. Harvey had set them back on the spotless shelves in order of height and color. “So,” Lily said, “if I’m looking for a short, green book, I know exactly where it’ll be, but if I don’t know what the book looks like . . .” She made a helpless, palms-up gesture. “We can’t find a thing! And neither of us has worked up the energy or, really, the courage to rearrange them.”

Dwight and Claytor, who remembered Warren Scofield, thought of him as the keeper of all there was about their family that was not tangible—the idea of them all, the epitome, somehow, of their very “Scofieldness,” for which they were much celebrated in Washburn, Ohio. Betts had bits and pieces of memories of her father, but Howard had no recollection of him at all, so the younger two counted on Dwight and Claytor as interpreters. And now and then they also picked up a nuance from some casual reference Aunt Lily or Uncle Robert might make, or their great-uncle George, all of whom reinforced the notion of glamour and dash with which they had imbued the idea of their father.

Their mother, of course, never hesitated to speak of Warren, always amiably but without a hint of any emotion they could discern. The older three children weren’t aware that they held Agnes’s apparent serenity against her, as if it were an insult to Warren Scofield himself. Howard didn’t think much about it one way or another—Dwight Claytor filled the bill for Howard as an example of an admirable man, as did Claytor to a lesser degree. But the very fact of Agnes’s relative silence on the subject made Dwight and Claytor and Betts wary and defensive. Without ever acknowledging it to each other, the older three were alike in not wanting to know whatever Agnes might have to say. They already knew from scraps of conversations picked up here and there among the adults of the three houses that with Warren Scofield’s death, his family had been unexpectedly strapped financially.

Dwight and Claytor remembered vividly how relieved their mother had been to get her job teaching school. Those two boys didn’t want it to be the case that Warren Scofield had let her down, had put any of them at risk. Certainly Agnes had never implied such a thing, but, nevertheless, Dwight and Claytor and Betts, too, held against her the possibility that it might be true.

The children of Agnes’s household certainly believed they loved and admired her, but it had occurred to the older three separately that a woman like Agnes, lacking any hint of underlying sensuality, a woman who had watched the housepainter like a hawk, who kept a cynical eye on the coal deliveries, the plumber, and the yardman, a woman who kept such a tight rein on trivial particularities, well, they thought a woman like that might not be a reliable witness on the subject of their charismatic father.

Their mother’s low-to-the-ground practicality, her determined frugality, the little snap of satisfaction with the dailiness of her life—a brisk nod of her head as she matched coupons to her shopping list or balanced her checkbook—was not at all what the children considered Scofield-like. They were enthusiasts; she was a skeptic; they were very nearly greedy in their anticipation of the future, whereas she seemed no more than resigned to it.

Those children had spent a great deal of energy, of course, courting Agnes’s affection and approval; they were in full flight, though, from the idea of “taking after her.” And this whole notion of theirs was reinforced around town, where early on most people had forgotten that Dwight wasn’t, in fact, a Scofield at all and took to calling those two little boys—Dwight and Claytor—the “Scofield twins.” There was rarely a time when the boys were out in public at age four, or five, or six years old, with only five months’ difference in their ages, that some adult didn’t bend over them admiringly and exclaim at just how remarkably the two of them resembled their father.

And Agnes never said a word; she was perfectly comfortable the first time Dwight had looked up at her from his crib and said “Mama.” It never crossed her mind to instruct him to call her anything else. Of course Agnes had explained to Dwight that his parents—who were her own parents, as well—were the older Dwight Claytor and the deceased Catherine Alcorn Claytor. When Dwight was growing up he saw very little of his father, and whenever the older Dwight Claytor and his second wife, Camille, were visiting, the children in Agnes and Warren’s house all referred to them as Granddad Dwight and Aunt Cammie, which suited everyone just fine.

Agnes couldn’t see any particular merit in insisting that Dwight continually grasp the idea of who his parents were, as long as he knew the truth of the matter. Even though she had been terrified when the responsibility for Dwight had been so matter-of-factly thrust upon her immediately after his birth, to all intents and purposes he
was
her and Warren’s first child. By the time she gave birth to Claytor five months later, she was ferociously protective of Dwight, even resenting the new baby the first few days of his life for usurping Dwight’s place as the center of Scofield attention.

And, as it happened, Dwight had not incorporated the idea of who his parents
were
as much as he understood who they were not. Day to day he did think of Agnes as his mother and of Warren as his father, but as a little boy, whenever his guard was down—in that elongated trance between wakefulness and sleep, for instance—Dwight grieved deeply for that self he protected so arduously, the self who was an orphan within his own clan. Being part of his own family—being, in effect, the archetype of a Scofield—was a task he had instinctively undertaken when he was no more than two or three years old.

When Claytor became more than an infant, when he began to walk, and then to talk, and then to have opinions and desires, Dwight understood—with far more certainty than would a mere sibling—that he had no choice at all but to relinquish some part of his place in the family to Claytor. Dwight never acknowledged or allowed himself later to investigate those occasional spells of fury toward Claytor so overwhelming that, even when he was very young, he had known to suppress them. In fact, he realized instinctively that the only recourse open to him was to cultivate what was, as it turned out, genuine affection for Claytor. As a result, of course, during his childhood Claytor practically worshipped the ground Dwight walked on. There was so little apparent rivalry between those two boys that it was often remarked upon by members of the family and the family’s close friends.

“They’re devoted to each other! Those two!” Uncle George Scofield often said when the boys were little. “They put me in mind of Warren, when he was a boy, and Robert Butler. They were just as close, and Lily was always tagging along with them, too. They were more like brothers than friends. But they didn’t look so much alike. Sometimes I see Dwight and Claytor at a distance—not far, just across the yard, say—and, I tell you, I can’t tell the one from the other. And do you know what? They do look like Warren, but more than that, they look like my brother John. They look more like Warren’s father, really, than they look like Warren himself.”

Tut Zeller, whenever he came by, and Mrs. Drummond, across the square, and her daughter Lucille, naturally, when she was in town, and Sally Trenholm Dameron, Will’s wife and Agnes’s old school friend, when she was still alive—anyone who visited Agnes and Warren’s house, or saw the boys out and about—remarked upon their resemblance to one another as well as their likeness to Warren Scofield. Almost everyone, too, generally commented on their unusual, endearing, and unshakable camaraderie.

When Agnes and Warren had a daughter, it was just assumed around town that she would favor her mother, but by the time Betts Scofield was no more than two years old, she—and little Howard, too, a few years later—looked like the Scofield side of the family through and through. As a result of being told so often how much they were like all the other pale-haired, brown-eyed Scofields who had gone before them, not one of the children in Agnes’s house compared him or herself to her. They didn’t even see Agnes, really, since she was always right there.

In fact, if they had been pressed to describe their mother, they would have named the ways in which she was unlike the Scofields. She was small, like Aunt Lily was small, but Agnes had a round, softer figure as opposed to all the Scofields’ lanky, athletic frames. Nor did Agnes have the fair Scofield skin that burned so easily, and she claimed that the unruliness of her dark and curly hair was the bane of her existence. The children could have said that much, but otherwise they only knew her as their mother; they had never had occasion to consider that perhaps that wasn’t her sole identity. Around town many people considered Agnes Scofield quite pretty and remarkably sensual even as she aged, but Agnes’s allure, in particular, was something her children didn’t even notice. Agnes’s maternity, like her cautious householdery, was taken for granted and had generally been dependable but never particularly seductive.

Howard had benefited from coming last and being raised as much by the older children as by his mother. He and she had enjoyed solitary hours together during which Agnes told him stories about Uncle Tidbit and Miss Butterbean—stories her own mother had told her, she said. But he, too, subscribed to the idea that their mother would conspire against her own children whenever possible to make their lives ordinary and tediously safe. They counted on her for it.

After their father’s death it was Uncle Robert with whom the older children discussed at length their sudden, sometimes sweeping reinterpretations of the world as they grew into it. Or they sought out Aunt Lily to tell her about some grand scheme that occurred to one or the other of them, and with which he or she was infatuated for a time, each in turn assuming that such an idea had never before been considered. The nature of evil: Did it exist at all? Wasn’t it dependent on context? And was that idea itself only relative or was evil an absolute? Could there ever
be
evil intention? Or religion, for instance. Each of the older boys wrestled with the idea and with the nature or existence of God. Dwight and then Claytor had served as crucifer at the Episcopal church. It pleased Agnes a great deal to see either one of those boys proceed solemnly down the aisle, carrying the cross and leading the processional.

At some point, though, each of them—and Betts, too, when she wanted not to attend church any longer—had tried to determine how seriously Agnes took all this. She didn’t argue the point with Betts; Agnes was perfectly willing to let her attend church or not. And to Dwight and Claytor she only answered lightly, along the lines of saying that having to go to church was the only incentive for her to get all the ironing done by Saturday afternoon, or that it was reassuring to see people on a Sunday morning on their best behavior. “No matter whatever else is going on in their lives,” she remarked, “they get up and brush their hair and put on their best clothes. At least for a few hours all the people at church have to behave as if they’re the people they mean to be every day. It feels so safe, I always think. So calm.” It didn’t occur to Agnes that she was being asked about the nature of God or of religious belief—hers or anyone else’s.

Uncle Robert, though, listened to any of the children with deep consideration, responding to their ideas thoughtfully, even as early as when they were only seven or eight years old. He never interrupted a child who was struggling to put words to an idea; he listened with the same deliberate courtesy he extended to his students at Harcourt Lees College. Robert Butler was the son of a Methodist minister, but he and Lily rarely went to church at all. As the children got older and their questions more complex, he told them he would never deny any man his comfort, but that, for himself, he couldn’t say that he was traditionally religious. Although, certainly, he said, he believed in religiousness.

He cautioned Betts against intolerance when she declared that she didn’t think that any intelligent person could really believe in God. He assured her that wasn’t the case and advised her to keep that opinion to herself. “Religion is the most controversial subject I know of,” he said to her. “I think it should be a subject that’s entirely personal. Not bandied about as if you’re discussing . . . oh . . . taxes or politics, Betts. You don’t want to seem to be insulting people.” His daughter, Trudy, kept her own counsel and rarely asked him any questions that weren’t simply factual.

Those boys debated and mulled over Uncle Robert’s idea—the notion of not being religious oneself but believing in religiousness—off and on for years, and each one considered it a startlingly frank, profound, and generous answer. An answer so sophisticated was a remarkable concession, a courtesy, and a great compliment to a child. Neither of them realized that Uncle Robert’s careful, articulate explanation and the reasons for going to church that Agnes had offered were essentially the very same thing.

Neither Dwight nor Trudy had been back to Washburn since their marriage, and as they came into town, Dwight slowly drove twice around the full hexagon that was Monument Square, taking note of any changes and suddenly being struck with amusement at the statue of Daniel Emmett in the center of the square. It seemed to him endearingly ridiculous that the author of the song “Dixie” was the most celebrated citizen of what had been a Union Army town. He remembered the excitement of the first “Dan Emmett Days,” when he and Claytor were about ten years old, and the thrill of the inauguration of Hiawatha Park out on the edge of town with its Ferris wheel and swimming pool. All the concerts and speeches—a few made at the foot of that statue. “I’ve even missed old Dan,” he said to Trudy.