The Truth of the Matter (16 page)

But Betts spoke above them both. “Dwight, look who’s fallen in love with your daughter,” she said, nodding toward Pup, who had settled on the floor and was gazing soulfully up at the little girl. “He’s such a good-natured dog. A good watchdog, too.” As she reached down to scratch the dog’s head, her voice immediately dropped into the same note of wheedling endearment she had used when speaking to Amelia Anne. “Yes, you are! Good dog . . . you’re a good dog!”

Agnes slipped away, retreating to her room to put on a skirt and blouse to wear to school, and then she just moved around the edges of the kitchen, packing a lunch for herself. Even Pup didn’t get up as she edged out the back door, trailing behind her the information that she would borrow a cot from Inez Jordan or Bernice Dameron so that Howard could share the downstairs bedroom with Sam Holloway and that Betts should go on and move into her own room.

Only Howard, though, sitting near the door, heard what she said and grinned up at her. “I’ll get my things out of Betts’s way, Mama. Don’t worry about a cot, I can sleep on the sofa. I’ll get Betts to let me pick you up in that yellow car she brought home —”

“That’s not mine, of course. A friend loaned it to me,” Betts interjected.

“We’ll leave the top down and impress the whole school with how glamorous you’ve become!” Howard finished, and Agnes tried to smile gamely at the fun he was pretending that would be.

Dwight was putting plates of pancakes in front of Sam Holloway and Howard. “I’m making another batch. Betts? But you know what, Betts? I didn’t even know Mother
had
a dog —”

“No pancakes for me, for God’s sake! But coffee. Coffee. Real coffee! Can you pour me a cup? If I don’t watch my girlish figure . . . Well, who else will? But could one of you hand me a cup of coffee? I don’t want to disturb anyone here,” she said, indicating Amelia Anne, whose head was nodding drowsily against Betts’s shoulder.

Agnes’s spirits sank even lower at Howard’s good cheer toward her, his kindliness, but she stepped out the back door with a quick nod and a smile in his direction. For the first time since she had brought him home, Pup was not alongside her, so she rounded the house and took a shortcut along the alley behind Lily’s house. It was a shortcut she avoided with Pup along, because generally there were cats sunning themselves on back steps and a few dogs who protested Pup’s infringement on their territory. She clicked along down School Street with the sudden realization that her house was at last returned to what she had long considered normal, and yet she held that idea at arm’s length, approaching and retreating from it, slightly astonished and worried at having gotten what she thought she wanted.

Before the war, the growth of the town of Washburn, Ohio, had been unplanned but predictable; new houses or commercial buildings went up where they were needed, so that, for instance, when BHG Glass consolidated their West Virginia and Ohio operations in Washburn, several new buildings went up at the manufacturing site on River Road, and houses sprang up nearby, extending a neighborhood that was already established. Gradually a residential area had grown near the industrial section of town between Mulberry Street and River Road in tidy rows, exactly as if the houses had been set down in their locations by a giant typist who came to the right-hand margin and flung the return lever—setting the roller one space down and moving the carriage back to the left to start all over on a new line. But that growth was gradual enough that very little attention was given to it as a trend or a particular phenomenon. Mulberry Street was eventually paralleled by Hickory Street, then Walnut, Maple, and, finally, Chestnut.

The most desirable neighborhoods remained those anchored on Monument Square by big, old two- or three-story houses built in the late 1800s or the early years of the 1900s. For decades those houses were the idea of home that everyone in Washburn held on to no matter where else in town he or she actually lived. After the war, however, the grown children returning to the area found they no longer yearned to acquire or to remain in the spacious, shadowy rooms of those tall houses standing among even taller trees. Shrouded in shady repose, those handsome buildings embodied an old-fashioned approach to living one’s life that nullified the clean rush of postwar urgency. The clipped gables, the spear of a conical tower, the vari-patterned, beautiful but brittle old slate roofs, the gingerbread of a Victorian porch—all the elaborate details—bespoke careful consideration and a ponderous progression that put a damper on a newly roused enthusiasm for getting on with things.

After the war, too, it was not so easy to find a woman who would take a job cooking or cleaning in another woman’s house. New industries had moved to Washburn, which had gained a reputation for having a skilled workforce, and any women who did want jobs could generally find secretarial or clerk positions in the low-slung brick administrative offices of BHG Glass, or Hazelman & Company, out past Marion Avenue, as well as at the Bestor Nellmar Flexible Packaging Company, which employed nearly seven hundred people, and, of course, there were jobs to be had at Scofields & Company, too.

But even though those tall old houses—the sweeping lawns to be maintained, the tall, groomed hedges and flower gardens, the beautiful brickwork often in need of tuck-pointing—were relics of another world altogether, Sam Holloway enjoyed the hospitable impression they made. He relished the notion of resting on a shaded porch or seeking out the tower room to peer down upon the town through the tops of trees. He spent his second day in Washburn touring the town and admiring those old neighborhoods. It was a hot and sunny Monday morning, and he strolled the downtown streets on his own, taking note of the good-natured bustle of the thriving business area.

He stopped in to have lunch at the Monument Restaurant and then crossed the street to sit in the square, slouching a bit against the wooden slats, stretching his arm along the back of the bench and enjoying the sun. He looked straight up into the heavy canopy of tall trees through which the cloud-puffed sky flickered and formed momentary patterns, as if he were turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope. He thought that not enough good could be said about this agreeable and prosperous community.

In the afternoon, while Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne resettled themselves in Lily and Robert Butler’s house, Betts Scofield drove Sam around the countryside, showing him Harcourt Lees College and driving back the long way around, where the new Green Lake Golf Course and Tennis Club was going in. “But it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Betts explained. “I guess people might play golf when they come out to the lake, but it’s quite a drive. I think most of the people in town who play golf are still going to play at the country club, even though it’s only nine holes.” And at that moment, Sam Holloway began thinking about the town’s other needs and if there might be the possibility of implementing ideas he’d been considering during the time he had spent in Washington.

Agnes insisted Sam remain at Scofields until the end of the month, when he would be moving to a room he had arranged to rent in a house on the corner of Main Street and Vine, just a block off the square. He sent a telegram redirecting his trunk and several other boxes to the Vine Street address instead of to his mother’s house in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Sam Holloway had been on the lookout for a good job opportunity since the day he had returned home to Alexandria, after his third year at Vanderbilt, in 1935. Without a penny in his pocket he had taken a taxi from the train station to his house, run up the steps while the cab waited, greeted his mother with a quick kiss on the cheek, and asked her for fifty cents to pay the driver.

“Well, Sam. We don’t have fifty cents,” his mother said.

“No. Come on. Come on. I’m serious. The man’s waiting out there. I don’t have any money left,” he had said.

“I’m serious, too,” she said. “We don’t have fifty cents.” Finally Sam had turned his little sister’s savings bank upside down—had literally shaken it for all it was worth—and managed to pay the driver, but the income from the investments his father had left his mother had evaporated, and Sam’s college days were over, as they were for nearly half of his class.

He ventured into New Orleans and managed through a friend to find a job at Wohrley’s, a local grocery store chain. Since he owned a dinner jacket, he was able to volunteer in the evenings as an usher at the theater, or the opera, or the ballet, where he could generally slip into an empty box seat and enjoy the performance. More often than not he ran into old friends of his family and was invited to all sorts of events once it was discovered that he was living in town. He was living the life of a popular and sought-after young bachelor while spending his days cutting the rotten parts out of last week’s cabbages and wiping the white, slimy mold off wieners.

Eventually he found a better job working at Teche Greyhound Lines, which was certainly a step up from sorting and arranging the inventory at Wohrley’s, and early in 1937, Sam was transferred to Natchez, Mississippi, to manage the bus station there. Sam expected to miss New Orleans, but Natchez turned out to be a big party town, and he enjoyed himself. Even though he was just the boy at the bus station, Sam was invited to everything, since he was attractive and amusing and came from a good family.

He was disappointed the following year to be put in charge of the new, larger bus station in Baton Rouge, because by now Sam knew that even if he became the president of Greyhound Lines, it was a job he couldn’t tolerate forever. He had always managed to land on his feet, and, within less than a month, he happened into a sales position at a new radio station in Baton Rouge, WJBO, that had only been on the air since 1934. He had agreed to a salary of twenty dollars a week, which was less than he made from Greyhound, but he was delighted to leave the bus business behind forever.

One mild December day when he had the day off, he had driven to Alexandria to spend the day with his mother, and the two of them were having lunch on the enclosed sunporch when his sister arrived in a rush, still dressed for church. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor,” she said, “and Bobby thinks that’s where his cousin Lawrence is stationed!”

“I’d better get back to Baton Rouge,” Sam said. “It’ll be coming in on the wires.” He was already up and around the corner when he turned back to give his sister, Joan, and his mother a kiss. Then he was off again, only turning back briefly. “Joan, where
is
Pearl Harbor?” he called from the yard, but with a shrug and a shake of her head, Joan pantomimed ignorance.

Sam enlisted in January of 1942, but he wasn’t called up until the following year, and he filled in at WJBO, doing a little bit of everything, and he had decided during that year that radio might be the career he wanted. By Tuesday afternoon, June 10, 1947, within only two days of arriving in Washburn, Ohio, Sam found a job at the town’s first radio station, WBRN, which only had authority to broadcast during daylight hours.

The little station was in a hopeless competition for listeners with KDKA in Pittsburgh, although Sam pointed out that WBRN was the only station that covered local news for eleven counties as well as Marshal County, and he and the owner, Clifford DeHaven, resolved to secure the authority to broadcast around the clock.

Sam was immediately popular, and various young women developed crushes on him. He was very attractive, although—or because—he wasn’t run-of-the-mill handsome. He had a quirky kind of appeal. He was one of those men about whom a childhood self could scarcely be imagined, which gave him an air of world-weariness that was engaging. He was nothing at all like someone who had grown up in Washburn.

Almost everyone in town assumed that Betts Scofield and this new fellow, Sam Holloway, would gravitate toward each other, although there was another school of thought that held to the idea of a lost romance, a broken heart, Sam’s need for a new start. As much as the people of Washburn were pleased to live where they did, it seemed strange to some that Sam chose to avoid the region of his youth, his own family, or even Chicago or New York, with their inherent excitement and adventure.

Betts Scofield and Sam were often together, but the thought of a romance with Betts never crossed Sam’s mind, and, for Betts’s part, she was still reeling from an intense wartime love affair. She did find Sam attractive, however, and they were thrown together so often that they began to take each other’s company for granted.

Shortly after Betts and Nancy Turner had arrived in Washington, where they stayed temporarily with Nancy’s aunt, the two of them and Evelyn Ramsdale, who worked in the same office as they, finally found a cramped but decent enough apartment they could afford to share. Betts had insisted that they treat themselves to a celebratory dinner at Bob and Jake’s Restaurant and Club, which was considered pretty swanky. “As top-notch as any restaurant is in Washington,” Betts had said, having caught on to the fact that people from New York City, and Los Angeles, and even Chicago, considered Washington, D.C., distinctly unsophisticated.

A group of officers arrived and were seated several tables away, still in the middle of a lively discussion of something or other, and Nancy was sitting facing their table. “There’s a good-looking group of men I wouldn’t mind meeting,” she said. “But almost all the men I see in uniform look handsome to me. They look so earnest and sure of themselves. It would be fun to have someone to dance with, though. I miss the parties at home.”

“Do you really want to meet them?” Betts asked.

Both Evelyn and Nancy laughed and said there was no way to do that without being considered too forward. But Betts bet them each a dime that she could get those officers to seek out their company. “And we’ll be so taken aback and modest. Our reputations won’t suffer a bit.”

Betts had on her beautifully fitted blue linen suit and a wide-brimmed hat tipped down over her forehead, and she thought briefly of her mother’s dictum that clothes should show off the woman, not the other way around. She looked like a sophisticated young woman from what must surely be a family of some consequence, and she knew she looked older than she was and very pretty. She spared a brief, kind thought for her mother. Betts was delighted not to look like a girl who had recently arrived from the wilds of Ohio.