The Truth of the Matter (2 page)

Warren turned toward her, and the light from the kitchen illuminated his almost sheepish smile. “I think that maybe for a little while we’re unaware. . . . Ah, well. No. I guess I don’t believe that, exactly. I guess it wouldn’t be possible. But I do think that we all have a private nature—not like any other person’s. I don’t mean just that we’re all separate personalities. I mean the thing about us that I suppose some people think of as our soul. The essence of ourselves. Our whole lives are really just an effort to fulfill a sort of quest of that essential self. Don’t you think the good things—any bit of apparent altruism, I mean—don’t you think that’s always suspect? I think everything we do is self-centered. Not on purpose. I just think it’s a condition we can’t escape,” he said, but the note of persuasion had gone out of his voice.

“But it does take a lot of strategy, ” he said, but without his earlier urgency. “I mean to live to the very end of your life without killing yourself? Just to avoid the
fear
of dying. It’s so tempting when you know you could outfox your own death. You could keep it from sneaking up on you. You could win, you see. Don’t you think so?”

“Uhmm. Well, though. That doesn’t strike me as much of a victory,” Agnes said. She thought that Warren intended to be ironic, that he was teasing, but it made her uncomfortable. “Killing yourself. Why, no. I don’t think that’s ever a natural human instinct. Or a natural animal instinct. Though I remember Mama saying they had a cat who just decided to die after her father died. I don’t suppose that’s the same thing, though. It was passive. He wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t even drink water. But how else
could
a cat kill himself? I wonder if it’s possible.” She paused for a moment to retrace her thoughts; Agnes often seemed to stray from the subject, but it was a logical progression, and by now Warren knew how she had gotten from one thought to another. He didn’t interrupt her.

“Killing yourself would be something you’d be bound to think about, I guess,” she said, “if you were in terrible pain, or . . . oh . . . knew that you were going to die in some horrible way. But otherwise . . . why in the world would that be an alternative? What makes you say a thing like that?”

Warren was quiet for a little while, and then he turned more solemn. “Oh, I don’t know, Agnes. I think it’s sort of like what you said about flying. About it not being as easy as just soaring through the air. Living is a lot more tiring than people realize when they begin it.”

“Oh,” she said, eager to drop the subject, “I don’t really think anyone has any expectations at the beginning,” Agnes said. “And besides! Tiring compared to
what?
”

During the following few days, however, Agnes did remember feelings of grief and some variation of defeated resignation or exhaustion that had made her indifferent to her life for hours—even days—at a time. She never forgot her solitary flight; nor did that conversation with Warren ever slip her mind.

For as far back as she could remember, Agnes had managed to slide out from under the turbulence of thoughts that descended upon her as soon as she settled in bed for the night and tried to go to sleep. As a child, she had learned to construct bits of circumstances—not necessarily related to one another—and pile them one upon another until they became a narrative that encompassed her entirely, so that she was led from consciousness directly into a sort of waking dream and then, eventually, into sleep. When she was very young she had delivered herself to the vivid landscape of fairy tales: deep, dark woods, sudden, brilliant pools of water, ominous stone castles, or thatched-roof cottages, every object saturated with its own color to a degree not possible in the real world.

In her early teens, she distracted herself from the accumulated anxiety of the day by concentrating on all the aspects of the ongoing political complexities of her school life. Or she recounted time spent with her friends, in which she was free of worry about the sad domestic life of her household. Her unhappy parents and the fragile peace—like the delicate net of a spider web—that just barely held her family together.

As Agnes got older still, she took her mind off real life by imagining the man she would marry—never anyone she had met thus far—and the exhilaration of being desired by him. Once, she awoke horrified to remember that she had been walking across the field from the Damerons’ house on the way home and had spotted Will Dameron’s head over the crest of the creek embankment. He had heard her coming and climbed up the bank to meet her, seemingly unaware that he was stark naked. He was telling her something or other, and she stood listening casually as if he were fully dressed. She woke up dreading the moment when he would realize he didn’t have on a stitch of clothes.

But after she met Warren Scofield, when he had come out to the house on Coshocton Road to talk over some business with her father, Agnes had begun to anticipate sliding beneath her blankets for the night and imagining all sorts of moments when Warren would reveal to her that there was no one as lovely to him as she was. That he liked her looks despite her unruly hair, her sallow complexion, her short, full figure that made her look coarse, her mother often said. Even though Agnes’s waist was small, she had the obvious figure of someone of bad breeding, Catherine Claytor remarked now and then, in despair over everything in her own life but taking aim that moment at her daughter’s looks.

But in Agnes’s imagination none of that mattered to Warren Scofield. He didn’t notice her flaws, and, in fact, he implied that she was beautiful, and that he was deeply in love with her. The tale became far more seductive than any sleep, and she often had dreams from which she awoke mortified, unable for a moment to believe they were confined to her unconscious self. It took several long, anxious minutes before she could convince herself that she was alone in her own room without witnesses to the lazy, sensual pleasure of her dream of Warren. She also found herself peculiarly embarrassed at having dreamed various sexual experiences she wasn’t at all sure could actually happen.

After they were married, Agnes would find that she might be at a perfectly civilized social gathering of some sort, but if she happened to glance at Warren wherever he might be—sitting with their hostess, perhaps, accepting a cup of coffee or tea—she would notice his long legs and remember the flex of muscle along his thigh, and she was helpless against the heat that climbed her throat and turned her face a blotchy red. She would duck her head in an effort to become invisible, flushed as she was with the idea of sex.

Sometimes at the family dinner table she would lose her appetite completely when she looked across the tablecloth at her husband. What are we doing? she would think, helpless against her ridiculous outrage, wasting our time with lamp chops. Bothering with lima beans, with a plate of cake? The two of them made love whenever they could, and Agnes generally fell asleep contentedly sated. The intensity of that lust never dissipated, except during Warren’s black moods, which nothing could permeate, but those bleak spells only made sex between them less frequent, never less ardent.

After Warren died, though, Agnes was unable to fall asleep in their bedroom for months and months. She couldn’t divert her thoughts, and she would move to another room or wander the house in the dark, waking at dawn and finding herself huddled in a chair in the sitting room, or, in that first summer after his death, when it was so hot for so long, she sometimes found herself out on the porch, curled comfortably in the swing. It was no good turning her thoughts toward the children, because Dwight and Claytor had been eleven and ten years old respectively when Warren died, Betts just shy of six, and Howard barely three. To consider those children and her sole responsibility for them made her frantic and furious and also scared to death.

In early February of 1930, Warren Scofield and his uncle Leo were on their way to Arbor City, Pennsylvania, to work out the details of the merger of Scofields & Company with Arthur Fitch and Sons. Warren was driving Leo’s big car, and he had rounded a descending curve in the mountains of Pennsylvania when he either hit a patch of ice or swerved, perhaps, to miss an animal. For whatever reason, that shiny black Packard had gone hurtling out of control across the brittle winter grass toward the precipice until it hit an old maple tree growing along the verge. Both men were thrown from the car.

Leo’s youngest brother, George Scofield, and two of Scofields’ top engineers were about a half an hour behind them. Every member of the family had heard George say, at one time or another, that just for a moment, when he came around the curve, he thought his older brother, Leo, and his nephew were playing a trick or had decided to rest, to stretch out and nap. George thought that Warren had braced himself against the trunk of the tree and fallen asleep. The Packard sat with its doors hanging open, canted toward a sheer drop off the mountain, but, except for a dent in the fender and a smashed headlight, it appeared undamaged. For one brief instant George thought Warren had parked it there. That’s how surprised he had been; that’s how peaceful Leo and Warren had looked as they lay where they had died among the fallen brown leaves and withered brush.

Not long after that, Uncle George had said to Agnes that if only Warren had lived a little longer, he might have turned into enough of a scoundrel that they wouldn’t all miss him so much. And a few months or so after Warren died, Lily Butler, whose father, Leo Scofield, had also been killed, of course, swooped down on Agnes from her house next door and fetched her up like an owl snatching a field mouse by the scruff of its neck.

“You don’t have time for all this, Agnes. You’re only thirty years old! You’ve got such a long time ahead of you—you’ve got happy surprises ahead of you, too! You’ve got to get things in order. We’re all grieved! I loved them, too! I loved them, too! My father . . . Oh, and Warren . . . but you’ve got to raise these children. And Robert and I will do anything in the world to help, but you’ve got to pull yourself together.”

And that’s what Agnes did. She had fallen into a state of guilty brooding and second-guessing, wondering if she could have prevented Warren from making that trip on such an icy day. She was miserable with regret and sorrow, as though she were bruised from head to foot, although when Lily confronted her, Agnes was embarrassed not to have better hidden her despair. She knew from experience the embarrassment another person’s legitimate desolation calls forth, and she made a fairly successful effort simply to close down part of her sensibility.

Her grief, though, was a separate thing altogether. It was a gradual education, really, that served to delineate her by eliminating solace, paring away any mitigating circumstances of her life—the existence of her children, for example, was not a comfort in the immediate aftermath of Warren’s death. Their inevitable transience in the world had been summarily brought to her attention. The ballast of her life had been jettisoned, and occasionally she had a brief glimpse of where she stood, now. In the first few years, it wasn’t only Warren’s absence that rendered her hopeless; nor was it only a crisis of mortality; it was also her newfound understanding of the loneliness of living all the way through the rest of her life.

By the time Dwight and Claytor were finishing high school and Agnes was in her late thirties, she lay in bed at night courting sleep by imagining the children’s futures. How grand their lives would be with their good looks, their wit and charm and intelligence. Howard and Betts, too, although whenever Agnes began to imagine Betts’s future, she got off track and began to worry once more. Nevertheless, her renewed and optimistic dreams for her children carried her through the years the older two boys were away at college and even the years Dwight and Claytor were in law school and medical school respectively.

The war in Europe hung over Scofields just as it hung over every household in the country, and as soon as Claytor received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, he enlisted in the army, where he was made a captain after he finished basic training. Dwight, too, left in the middle of his second year of law school, in 1941, in order to enlist as an officer in the Army Air Corps. A college degree assured them an officer’s rank, and each felt it would give him more control over his life than if he waited until the Selective Service began calling people up.

Of course, Agnes had anticipated Dwight’s and Claytor’s leave-taking—all over town families were seeing their sons off to various branches of the armed services. The two older boys had come home in order to go away again. Leaving home was something they thought they had already accomplished. While they were away at school, however, Agnes was always prepared for them to return—one or both for Christmas, for long weeks of summer; they hadn’t departed for school in the same way that they were suddenly gone when they enlisted, and Agnes didn’t allow herself to think of what might happen when or if either one was sent to Europe.

Agnes turned her nighttime reveries to imagining what she could do for Howard and Betts if only there were any extra money. She could send Howard off to college without any of the worry that had attended the financial arrangements she had made for Dwight and Claytor. Betts had no desire to spend any more years at school, but Agnes was drowsily specific, as she settled into sleep, in dreaming up the sedate and beautiful wardrobe she could furnish her daughter if only there were enough money to splurge a little. She would buy a soft blue wool coat with a fur collar to frame Betts’s face, for instance. And Betts would be so surprised. Betts would see right away the sort of aristocratic good looks she could attain.

Agnes lulled herself to sleep night after night by imagining that out of the blue she had inherited a nice little sum of money. Because, to everyone’s surprise, when Warren and Leo Scofield died, it turned out that not only had Warren’s late father, John, sold some shares of his stock to Arthur Fitch, John had mortgaged most of his share of the company to him for a sizable amount of money—far more than it was worth at the time. He had sold to Fitch instead of giving Leo first refusal or, in fact, even consulting his brothers or his son. After his father’s death only Warren had been informed of the situation by his father’s lawyer, and he hadn’t revealed it to anyone; he had been struggling to pay off the loan himself.