The Truth of the Matter (17 page)

She leaned across the table to consult Nancy. “Which one is the best-looking? Where’s he sitting? Lean across toward me and act like you’re telling me a secret! Something private . . . serious.”

Nancy did lean closer to Betts, although she was smiling without the least bit of solemnity. “Stop that, Nancy! If you want me to get those men to introduce themselves.” Nancy did her best to appear serious, and Betts turned her head to see the man Nancy chose, and, just as Betts imagined would be the case, all the men at the table were clearly aware of the three young women across the room. Betts glanced obviously but briefly at each man at the table with her mouth slightly open in the expectant beginnings of a smile, but then an expression of disappointed resignation settled over her face, and she turned back to Nancy, shaking her head so that her thick pageboy swung from side to side. “No, it’s not Dwight, Nancy.”

“Well! Of course not!” Nancy began, “I would have known . . . Oh! Are you sure, Betts? Are you absolutely positive it’s not Dwight or Claytor?”

“
Who
do you think it is?” Evelyn asked. Evelyn was from Oklahoma and hadn’t yet mastered the names of Betts’s and Nancy’s various siblings. Betts turned so that her profile was to the table of crisp-looking officers.

“Oh, Nancy thought one of those men was my brother,” Betts confided to Evelyn.

“Really? Which one?” Evelyn asked, glancing toward the table across the way, and Betts, too, turned to regard a tall, brown-haired major for a solemn moment, and then she shook her head slightly as she turned back to Evelyn. “Don’t look at their table again,” she instructed Evelyn and Nancy. “Just sit back in your chairs and look concerned and . . . look like you’re let down. Like you thought something nice was going to happen but that you were wrong. You’re disappointed.”

And Nancy and Evelyn played their parts; those three pretty girls somberly ate their dinner with the most exquisite manners, buttering their rolls on their plates and breaking off just a morsel at a time to pop into their mouths, spooning up their soup away from themselves, carefully bringing it to their mouths without bending forward, without a sound, and with their other hand demurely in their laps. They used just the corner of their napkins to dab away a nonexistent crumb, and they bent toward each other now and then, talking softly. They were each startled when they were interrupted by the very polite major whom Nancy had mistaken for Betts’s brother.

Betts demurred when Major Henry Abernathy introduced himself and asked if any one of them would care to dance. Would they allow him to introduce them to his friends? It was the Billy Horace band, he said. That’s why he and his friends had come.

“Thank you, Major Abernathy, but I don’t think —”

“Oh, Betts! I hardly think we have to give up dancing!” Nancy said. “We were just saying how we missed all the parties back home. . . . And goodness knows the place is full of people. It would be fun to . . . relax a little. Nice not to worry about anything else for an hour or so.”

“You see,” Betts explained to the major, “my friend mistook you for my brother. But he’s stationed in England, and suddenly we all thought about our brothers and cousins, and . . . Well!” Betts made a frantic plea to fate that she and Nancy hadn’t traitorously brought down a curse on Dwight by invoking his genuine peril for a frivolous cause. After all, Betts thought, she did worry about him. She adored Dwight and Claytor and Howard.

Eventually Betts more or less moved into Major Henry Abernathy’s apartment, and they had lived as though he didn’t have a wife and two teenaged children waiting for him in California. On Sunday mornings Hank went out for coffee and whatever pastries or doughnuts he could find and all the newspapers, and they often sat in bed without even getting dressed and read the news. They ate the rolls Hank had brought back and drank their coffee and eventually became uninterested in the sections of newspapers strewn across the bed. Now and then Betts would find a readable sentence of newsprint on the back of her thighs, or on her forearms, and Hank found they were both printed upon in unusual places, which amused them both.

He was a career army man, and when the war in Europe ended and he was reassigned, he bought Betts a lovely, gold-link bracelet inscribed with the words “Forget Me Not,” but it was he who broke down when he gave it to her. “I’m almost twenty years older than you are, Betts. You’d be bored in ten days. And I love Judith. I do. And the girls. . . . We knew this was temporary.”

Betts remained cool-headed. “I know. I believed we could do that at the beginning. I thought I was so sophisticated. . . . I thought how romantic you were, and that what harm could it do. But I don’t think this will be temporary, Hank. I just don’t think it’ll be possible.”

And Betts saw him off, feeling certain she would one day be together with him for good. Hank Abernathy harbored the same secret belief and yearning all the way across the country until he was met on the base by his pretty wife and his two gangly teenaged daughters. His memories of Betts Scofield slowly dwindled in intensity, and he wasn’t at all proud of himself whenever they came to mind. It had never occurred to Betts that to be remembered guiltily by a nice man was almost certainly the fastest way to be put out of his mind entirely.

Chapter Seven

I
N JULY OF 1947, Mary Alcorn was only a few months past her fourth birthday, too young, still, to be able to make abstract comparisons, too young to know she was hot in the backseat of the car, on the third and final day of the trip from Texas to Ohio. It had been ninety-six degrees when they got under way at eight in the morning. Even the idea of a trip had escaped her three hours into the first day, and by now the motion of the car had become an existence in itself; she had closed down her other sensibilities.

The heat had made them all three nearly mute for the past few hours. Claytor rested his elbow in the open window and steered with one hand while he smoked one cigarette after another, and Lavinia lifted her heavy hair and dabbed at the nape of her neck with her handkerchief, which she had soaked with cologne. Both the cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5 swept out the front windows and into the backseat, where they rendered Mary limp with nausea, but she had lapsed into a mindless endurance and gave no thought to singling out the various sources of her discomfort.

Claytor sang bits and pieces of songs, humming mostly to himself, but then he glanced back at Mary and made his voice bigger, louder, infusing it with amusement to indicate Mary’s inclusion:

“To Grandmother’s house we go,

To Grandmother’s house we go,

Heigh-ho the Derry-o,

To Grandmother’s house we go!”

He made the song a kind of joke in an attempt to engage her, in the same way he would come and find her in the mornings and say, “Give me a kiss, Mary! I’m off to the horse-pee-tal!” That always struck her as outrageously funny—for a grown-up to say such a thing. But with the wind whipping through the car, she scarcely even heard him. She remained stuporously quiet with her head flung back against the seat where she sat next to the galvanized tub that held a block of ice that was beginning to wallow in its own puddle.

A narrow ring of dirt encircled Mary’s neck just where her flesh creased when she bent her head forward, and there was a thin tracery of grit in the bend of each elbow. In an effort to cool the car, Claytor bought a fresh block of ice each morning before they set out, but within an hour or so it was furrowed and gray where the dusty, incoming air rushed over it as they drove across the country.

When they stopped for gas, Lavinia moved to the backseat, and Mary scooted over. “We’ll be there in about six hours,” her mother said. “That doesn’t seem so long, does it? It seems like nothing after driving this far.” Mary didn’t reply; she didn’t realize that her mother had asked her a question.

When they were back on the road a while, Lavinia poured black coffee into the cup of the thermos, and Claytor turned on the radio and sang along now and then. “. . . just say good night but not good-bye . . .” Snippets of lyrics drifted into the backseat over the rush of wind. “. . . fireflies and the moonlight’s glow . . .”

Lavinia finished her coffee, recapped the thermos, and lit a cigarette, looking out the window as they passed through a small town with tree-lined streets that seemed appealingly cool; the houses had deep front porches with ceiling fans. She shifted in her seat, finally, turning to sit slantwise against the window. “Mary,” she said to her daughter, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.” But she was still working out exactly what she was going to say. Lavinia had read here and there in Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams,
had just read the new book by Dr. Spock, had thought a great deal about sibling rivalry.

She had read enough to be convinced that if she approached this issue the wrong way, it could be terribly damaging to Mary. Her daughter’s sense of security might be ruined. The ramifications of Lavinia’s getting this wrong might be felt throughout Mary’s whole life. Might possibly shape Mary’s own maternalism, perhaps even affect her idea of her own sexuality, although Lavinia couldn’t remember exactly why that was so. She respected her daughter’s intelligence but also believed that anyone aged four had a necessarily limited sophistication. Lavinia had considered for some time how to broach the subject, and Mary recognized her mother’s gravity and dredged up a drowsy attentiveness.

“You see, after you were born, Mary . . . Well, you and your father and I were very happy. We were so glad to be together.” She paused to be sure Mary was listening, and then she continued, gazing just past Mary’s shoulder and collecting her thoughts. “Well . . . now . . . I want you to think of us all—the three of us—sitting on a park bench. And we’re so lucky. What I mean is . . . just think about the Armenians, and the French, now, of course, and poor England . . . Well. Anyway, the bench we get to sit on is in a beautiful park with fountains and gardens everywhere. And maybe a reptile house. Right near the zoo. We’ve all been walking through the park together, your daddy and me and you. We’ve been to see the animals, and we’ve been through all the gardens. You got to ride on the merry-go-round.” Lavinia had become entranced with her own idea, and she spoke rapidly and with enthusiasm, leaning toward her daughter and gesturing with her hands to describe the images she conjured up in the rushing air of the backseat.

“On a blue horse with a gold mane . . . then, well, we were all pretty tired. We decided to sit down on a bench. One of those green benches with the wrought-iron armrests . . . Anyway, we sat down in the sun. Just the three of us. The ice-cream man came by . . .”

Lavinia noticed her daughter’s expression and paused. Mary had that swollen-lidded look she always had if she was feverish, and Lavinia reached across her and soaked a handkerchief in the ice water and then wrung it out. She gently wiped Mary’s face and neck and then took up her daughter’s hands and cleaned them front and back with the cool cloth, trying to make Mary more comfortable.

“Of course,” Lavinia continued, curbing the urgency in her voice, “you don’t remember your daddy, because he was in the war. He died when you were just two months old. You remember I’ve told you about your daddy? About Phillip? Tall and awfully good-looking? All the Alcorns are good-looking. And, oh . . . he could dance! The first time I met him, we’d come with different dates, but we danced at least every other dance with each other.”

Lavinia was assailed by the sudden notion that perhaps she had married Phillip because he was such a wonderful dancer. Could that possibly be true? Was that the one final thing that tipped the balance? Being in love was much different than being married. And Claytor! There were all sorts of reasons she had fallen for him, but one of those reasons was Claytor’s idea of what she was like. He had been delighted when they first met and had ended up sitting together at the Officer’s Club for hours discussing books, defending their favorites and discouraging the other’s enthusiasm if they didn’t agree. And, then, the first night she’d gone out with him, he’d picked her up in a borrowed car, and they’d stopped to give a ride to a soldier hitchhiking in the pouring rain. The radio was on, and a romantic piano concerto blared against the onslaught of weather in the desolate, flat Texas landscape.

“Now, that’s nice,” the soldier had said into the clammy silence of the front seat, where they were all three crushed together. “You don’t hear music like that where I come from. It’s a nice piece.”

“It is,” Claytor said, to make conversation. “I don’t know what it is . . .” After another silence fell among the three of them, Lavinia finally spoke up. “Well, I think it might be Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number Two in C Minor.”

And both men glanced at her in frank admiration when the announcer gave that very title after the piece ended. She had thought to herself, What are the odds of that ever happening again in a single lifetime? Lavinia didn’t know much of anything about music. She had only been able to identify that particular piece because, after she had flunked out of Wellesley and was living at home in Charlottesville, an earnest and dreary beau had made it his mission to improve her mind, in part by playing and explaining that particular Rachmaninoff concerto over and over. She could tell Claytor was proud of her intellectualism, which, in turn, pleased and emboldened her, even though she knew her reputation was counterfeit. But, after all, who knows why anyone gets married?

Lavinia brought her attention back to the matter at hand. “It was Sidney Bechet’s band playing that first night I met your father, Mary. And the crowd . . . Well, that’s not important. After your daddy died, though, you see, he couldn’t sit on the bench with us anymore.”

Whenever her mother began to introduce the subject of her father, Mary’s attention lapsed; she had never connected any part of the story to herself. But just now her mother’s voice was suddenly dramatic and surprised, as if she had just found out something new, and Mary sharpened her wits and listened carefully to what her mother was saying.