The Truth of the Matter (15 page)

Agnes had come downstairs in the quiet house about five o’clock in the morning with the idea of getting breakfast under way before she left for school. She had just started the bacon and begun to set out the ingredients for pancakes when a convertible turned into the long drive that ran along the back of the Scofield property, branching off in the three separate driveways that disappeared discreetly behind hedges planted around what had originally been unplanned parking areas. By now no one even remembered that they hadn’t always been there, and every year, fresh stone was put down, the hedges trimmed, and the brick borders reestablished if need be.

Agnes leaned forward at the kitchen window and admired the sight of the creamy-yellow convertible and the glamorous woman in dark sunglasses who was behind the wheel, driving slowly and steering with only one hand while she ran her fingers through her blond hair, trying to untangle it where it was windblown. Even after Agnes had been surprised by the fact that the car turned into her own drive, it was at least another minute before she realized that the woman driving that car was Betts. Agnes hadn’t expected Betts to be able to get home at all for the rest of the month.

She pulled into the parking area but left the motor running while she leaned over to check her face in the mirror, applying lipstick and taking a comb from her handbag to attempt once more to untangle her hair. While Agnes still stood gazing at her from inside the house, Pup was outside and regarding this development with extreme suspicion, dancing with urgency as he barked at the peculiar vehicle. He was using every tactic he knew to frighten it away, dodging toward it with ferocious intentions and then retreating with a yip when the thing didn’t move. Betts gave up the struggle with her hair, turned off the engine, and began gathering various things together, looking at Pup and laughing with her wide grin that called forth a responding smile from Agnes, whose senses finally came back into the moment.

She headed out to corral Pup so Betts wouldn’t be afraid to get out of the car, but it wasn’t necessary; Betts simply stepped confidently into the drive, leaving the door wide open, while she rushed toward the dog, startling him into silence. She kneeled to embrace him. “Oh! You’re a fierce boy! Don’t you remember me? No one’s going to sneak inside this house while you’re on the job. What a handsome boy! I bet you were glad to meet Amelia Anne. Let’s go find her! Let’s go find Amelia Anne!” She stood up abruptly and swiveled toward the house, nearly colliding with her mother, whom she hugged exuberantly, explaining her unexpected arrival as the two of them made their way to the kitchen, having to dodge Pup, who was completely won over and euphoric as he bounced along beside and in front of them across the stepping stones.

Although everyone but Agnes was asleep, Betts darted through the house, waking them all, followed by Pup, who had given up the idea of protection and become ecstatic. “I just can’t wait, Mama!” she called over her shoulder when Agnes tried to stop Betts, who rushed through the kitchen and down the little hallway to Howard’s room, where Sergeant Sam Holloway was sound asleep with the sheets drawn up around his head, until Betts tickled his ribs through the bedclothes. He grasped her hard by the shoulders in the same instant he sat up, and they were face-to-face for a bewildering moment.

“Ah!” She was kneeling on the side of the bed, and she drew back in retreat, although he was still holding her tightly by the shoulders. “You aren’t Howie!”

“No. No. I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, because it felt to him as though not being the person she expected him to be was rude, and when he realized he was still holding on to her, preventing her from moving, he let her go immediately and apologized again, but she had backed out of the room before it occurred to him to explain who he was. She looked so much like Dwight that it was no mystery to him who she was.

Betts was undaunted; she had grown up in a houseful of boys and had long ago redefined the bounds of modesty. She hurried up the stairs, looking for Dwight and Trudy and Howard, wanting to see her niece Amelia Anne for the first time. “I couldn’t wait!” she said as she burst into the rooms, hugging anyone she could find. And in no time everyone was milling about in pajamas, although Sam Holloway had gotten up and was fully dressed and standing off to the side, trying to stay out of the way. Trudy had slipped a robe over her nightgown and was holding Amelia Anne, who looked on blankly, her face still creased from her pillow.

It seemed to Agnes as if the household as a whole moved in accord with Betts’s tidal pull as she approached, broke over them, and then receded. She deposited a cage containing two lime-green parakeets on a table in front of a south-facing window in the front room. “Don’t worry, don’t worry! These are a gift for Aunt Lily,” she said to whoever might hear her as she dashed back and forth to the car to retrieve things she remembered she had brought home for her mother or little Amelia Anne, perfume for Trudy, or something she needed herself.

Her brothers traipsed after her, trying to lend a hand. But finally Betts wheeled at the top of the stairs, her eyebrows raised in astonishment as she put a hand to her hair, and stopped her mother and brothers, who were trooping up the steps in her wake, carrying various boxes and pieces of luggage. Agnes was halfway up the stairs, carrying Betts’s little train case.

“Oh, Mama, that’s what I need!” She swooped down two stairs to take the case in which her toothbrush and shampoo and cosmetics were packed. “A bath! Good Lord! I must be a mess. I drove all night, you know,” she said with mildly surprised indignation, as though she had just found this out herself. “About four-thirty, when it started getting light, I stopped to put the top down. Oh, Lord, I need my cigarettes and a good long bath. I must look a wreck . . .”

“Well . . . Oh, goodness, Betts!” Agnes said. “Your hair does —”

“Nope! Betts, you look like a million dollars! You look like you own the place!” Dwight laughed, edging past his mother to deposit Betts’s suitcase on the landing. “I’d say you’re a sight for sore eyes. Our own Baby Betts!”

Dwight suddenly adopted a caricature pose, like a vaudeville singer, his arms spread, his torso canted back, and launched into song:

“Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,

Beautiful beautiful browwwn ey-ey-eyes.”

He infused the notes with exaggerated vibrato. Howard laughed and joined in, singing harmony:

“Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes,

I’ll never love blue eyes again.”

Their father had established the tradition of
Beautiful Brown Eyes
being Betts’s theme song, so to speak, and it had stuck. Dwight and Claytor had cajoled and teased Betts all through her childhood, in the midst of one of her tantrums, or just out of the blue, singing the song at the drop of a hat and sending Betts into enraged but irrepressible fits of laughter. Lifting her out of her darkest moods.

“Oh, stop it!” Betts said. “And Howie! For God’s sake! Parading around in your pajamas. Mother, make these boys get dressed!” she said, mock scoldingly, and Agnes realized she herself was being teased, and she smiled a little, unexpectedly remembering her own bafflement so long ago at the seeming knowingness of all the other students on that first day she had arrived at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls when she was thirteen years old. But she told Betts where to find fresh towels.

“And just put your things in my room, Betts,” she said. “We’ll get everyone sorted out later on —”

“I can sleep on the couch —,” Howard began, at the same moment Trudy spoke.

“Aunt Agnes, Dwight and Amelia Anne and I can certainly go next door if —”

It was almost an hour after Betts’s unexpected arrival that Agnes got back to thinking of breakfast. Even though she had turned the flame off before going out to greet her daughter, the kitchen was filled with the bitter scent of burned bacon. The heavy skillet had retained enough heat to thoroughly blacken the edges of the thick slices. She contemplated the greasy mess in the brightening day, and all at once fatigue caught up with her. She recognized the first tiny deflation of what had been this early morning’s energetic contentment; she recognized the fragility of what she imagined was her reputation for bounteous, easy, competent hospitality.

She had no idea that the children and her daughter-in-law never thought of Agnes’s hospitality one way or another; they were merely at home. Whenever they came home, the sheets were always crisp and fresh, meals were served with dependability, clean towels were folded and plentiful. There were always new bars of soap, talcum powder, extra toothbrushes, any toiletries anyone had forgotten. Just as it had been all of their lives. They would only have noticed if this had not been the case.

Dwight appeared over her shoulder while she was considering what was left of the slab of bacon and trying to decide if there would still be enough for everyone. “You let me fix breakfast!” he said. “I know you have to get to school. I’ll give that knife a good edge, and, I tell you, you’ll be able to read the paper through a slice of that bacon.”

Agnes moved aside, unnerved a bit. She had forgotten Dwight’s way of teasing: an authoritative, good-natured sort of bantering. “Listen, I’ve become an old hand at this,” he said. “Trudy’ll tell you that pancakes are my specialty. Well, waffles, really. We use that waffle iron Aunt Lily gave us all the time. But I’ve perfected them. I know the secret now. You see, you can’t beat the batter so much. It’s better to leave some lumps. These’ll be light as a feather!” So Agnes sat down uneasily at her own table.

When Howard joined them, scissoring around the room, his long legs and new height startled her as she watched him carefully navigate the same space that had held him comfortably all his life. Every few moments she winced inwardly, wanting to warn him that he was about to hit his head on the door frame, knock a glass off the table, step on the dog. But Howard was, in fact, quite graceful, just as he always had been. The best athlete among her children, a gangly child and then a lanky man who moved with an unexpected, elastic ease, as though his hands and feet caught on to his intention in far less time than it took other people to achieve coordination.

Agnes looked on while her children milled about, as unfamiliar with these people as if it were she who was the newcomer among them. Amelia Anne wandered in, tentatively trailing after Betts, whose wet hair was wrapped turban-style in a towel. Sergeant Holloway came to the table spruced up and carefully polite, and finally Trudy appeared. “Amelia Anne! There you are!”

Agnes made a quick count and realized there wasn’t enough room at the kitchen table; she had planned to serve breakfast in the dining room, but it was no longer in her hands. She vacated her own place, and Sam Holloway scraped back his chair and stood when she rose, but her children didn’t notice. They were all talking at once, engaged in an immediate, familiar, and passionate conversation about all sorts of things. Agnes paused for a while, out of the way of all the commotion, looking on from the doorway.

Pup sat alertly at Betts’s feet when she finally came to rest on the edge of the chair where Agnes had been sitting. Howard settled next to Betts, his long legs stretched out under the table all the way to the other side, taller than all of them now. He had been a little under six feet when he left Washburn, and he was nearly six feet four inches when he returned. Betts had only seen him once during the war, and she couldn’t get over it. “You’re taller than God, Howie!”

“For goodness sakes, Betts . . . ,” Agnes objected from where she stood in the doorway, but Betts didn’t hear her. She lit a cigarette, restlessly rustling the paper between her long fingers as she exhaled.

“Oh, you look wonderful! Like a good-looking pole bean,” she said. “Long and lean . . . you’ve turned into one of those interesting, angular men. I know you’ve got girls falling all over you!”

Howard just laughed, and Betts cocked her head at Sergeant Holloway, who was probably ten years older than she was and very attractive himself in a mismatched way. He looked as though his face had been assembled too quickly, so that head-on his angular features didn’t quite match up side to side, but the whole effect gave him a jaunty, amused expression. But then Betts was off again—there was no interrupting her when she was on a run. She was leaning over, petting the dog while collecting Amelia Anne with her other arm and giving her a hug, although Amelia Anne was intimidated by Betts’s wide movements and dramatic pronouncements and stood transfixed but rigid within her aunt’s embrace.

“But here’s this sweet thing! You are our beautiful brown eyes, sweetie. Just look at you!” And Betts’s voice dropped, becoming gentle and almost seductive. “Your aunt Lily—your grandmother Lily, I guess. She must think she’s looking in the mirror, you know. Looking at her own scrapbook. Now, she was the great Scofield beauty. People came from all over the world for her wedding,” Betts went on while Amelia Anne studied her intently. “You just can’t imagine!” Betts said. “Her father had an avenue of flowering trees planted to keep the sun off her skin—it’s as fair as yours is—just to protect her during her wedding procession and for the ceremony in the garden! And Aunt Lily is so much fun. Let her show you the silver bird that lives on her mantel and comes to life! He’s full of ridiculous advice, but he always brings you at least a quarter. Sometimes a present.”

“They’re at a literary conference in New Mexico,” Trudy explained. “My parents haven’t seen Amelia Anne since they visited after she was born. She was only about six months old. They’ll be back day after tomorrow.” Amelia Anne ducked her head and smiled a little. Dwight, who was making pancakes, smiled, too, and Trudy was relieved. She had thought that Amelia Anne looked alarmed enough that she might burst into tears.

Betts edged back in her chair and hoisted Amelia Anne onto her lap, where the little girl settled back unresistingly, sucking her thumb. “Ami-Annie, Ami-Annie,” Dwight sang out softly from the stove. “Orphan Annie! Don’t suck your thumb, sweet pea,” he said to his daughter from across the kitchen. “Don’t ruin those pretty pearly whites, Annie Fannie.” Amelia Anne didn’t pay any attention, and Trudy said, “Oh, Dwight, one of those silly nicknames is going to stick . . .”