The Truth of the Matter (22 page)
Agnes didn’t hear much of anything Lavinia was saying, but, in spite of herself, she experienced a surge of pleasure at having the children told that they looked like her. She had grown weary of the endless remarks about how much the children resembled their father, and it hurt her feelings that her children were delighted to be told that they resembled no one so much as they resembled Warren.
“I always notice that people who grow up together don’t really know what the others look like,” Lavinia went on. “I mean, they might tell you that . . . Well, in my family everyone is always saying that our French ancestry is impossible to miss. But I don’t really think any of us look French. I don’t know enough people to know if the French even have a particular look.” Lavinia spoke in a musing tone of deliberation, so that it was hard to know if she was making a statement or asking a question. “And I’ve always thought that somewhere along the line, one of my forefathers—or my foremothers, for all I know—had a wandering eye for one of the house servants, or maybe the cook. I think my family just preferred to think of itself as French. I guess the French are thought of as . . . oh . . . as olive-skinned. Like Joseph Cotten. The actor? He’s from an old Virginia family, too. Horse country. Orange, Virginia. Right around there, anyway. His family was there before the Revolutionary War. Which explains his looks, of course.”
The nine or ten people within range were dumbfounded, but Lavinia finally got to the point she intended to make. “So, since your father was tall with light hair, it’s just natural that you all assume he’s the one you took after. And you probably all do look like your father. But you all have your mother’s huge, round eyes—just the same color brown, too—and her high cheekbones. Your expressions are so much alike. . . . I’ve noticed that that happens in families, too. Do you think it’s because people automatically take on the expressions they see around them? I think it must be inherited, because no matter how long people are friends, I’ve never noticed that they take on each other’s expression.”
Howard had assumed the responsibility of filling a plate for Lavinia, who fascinated him, and he and Betts guided her away from the porch and settled her at a table next to Trudy. Howard had to hurry off to help Sam Holloway organize the fireworks.
Dwight was in charge of the corn, but he refused to cook it until everyone had served themselves and settled on the grass or at tables set out on the lawn. He wound his way through the crowd of neighbors and friends and his own family, dispensing buttered corn on the cob. “Three minutes!” he declared as he made the rounds. “It’s got to be boiled in half milk, half water.” He was cooking it in batches, because Trudy and Betts had shucked seventy-five ears of Will’s fresh-picked corn.
Claytor and Lavinia’s little girl, Mary Alcorn, and Dwight and Trudy’s daughter, Amelia Anne, were busily digging under the trees with teaspoons, their heads bent together, with Bobbin lying no more than three feet from them, alert to any threat to his small flock. One of the girls now and then earnestly explained to the other something about the elaborate tunnels and ravines they were excavating. Even one glance at Mary Alcorn and Amelia Anne made it clear that their acquaintance had immediately been a profound connection. Now and then that happens with young children, but more often than not there’s a long period of shy suspicion and negotiation.
Trudy looked up as Agnes settled between her and Lavinia at one of the cloth-covered card tables that Agnes had borrowed from the church along with plenty of folding chairs. “Aunt Agnes, I’m afraid they have two of your silver spoons. But I’m keeping an eye on them. I’ll be sure they aren’t lost.”
“But look how well they get along,” Agnes said. “Isn’t that a nice thing?”
“I think they’re going to get sleepy all at once,” Trudy commented, and Lavinia glanced at Trudy without indicating whether she agreed or not, but neither of them seemed unduly concerned.
“Howard’s helping Sam Holloway with the fireworks,” Lily said, as she pulled up a chair and joined them. “He says Sam won’t start the show until the fireflies can’t be seen except for their light.”
“Howard’s been the safest person with fireworks—Claytor and Dwight, too—since little Eddie Parsley blew off his hand that time,” Trudy said. “When was that? Howard was out of grammar school, I think.”
By now it was easy to see the glimmering of the fireflies as they rose in the woods at a distance, but up close they were still visible in their unglamorous brown insect bodies. Agnes excused herself and went to turn off all the lights in the house and on the porch, and also to make coffee and set out the cakes and pies and slice the melons. She was arranging things on the porch when the first brilliant explosion illuminated the sky, and she stood still for a few minutes as, one after another, the rockets and Catherine wheels and shooting stars followed each other into the air in a spectacular sequence. It turned out that Sam Holloway had spent one summer in New Orleans helping produce a nightly fireworks show at an amusement park, and he and Howard had gone off to buy some other types of rockets Sam suggested and that Howard hadn’t known about.
It was the best show Agnes had ever seen, planned with care so that each sputtering, gleaming light rose higher than the one before, and the colors were extraordinary counterparts to each other, combining in arcs of unusual aqua and brilliant pinks as they showered umbrella-fashion back to earth. Sam Holloway was an unusual man, Agnes thought. Maybe he and Betts would be interested in each other. Who would have thought that a man like Sam Holloway would be an expert on fireworks shows? He seemed too worldly, too sophisticated somehow to be taking part in so universal and simple a diversion. But then, Agnes thought, you rarely ever find out all the things a person can do or that he cares about.
The morning of July fifth, all over town the people who had been at Scofields the night before discussed the picnic, the fireworks show—it had been at least twenty minutes long. And, of course, they discussed Claytor Scofield’s wife and little stepdaughter. Lavinia Scofield was a puzzle. No one knew quite what to say about her; they were still surprised from the night before. She wasn’t like any other person they had ever met. On the other hand, she had just arrived that afternoon and must have been terribly tired; perhaps it was too soon to know what she was like. But imagine telling the Scofields that they all looked like cows—beautiful or not. It was hard not to think of that as being rude on her part.
And so, on the morning following the Fourth of July celebration, all over Washburn, the Scofields’ previous night’s guests pondered Lavinia’s meaning. But in the case of her ancestry, the subject was only alluded to obliquely. Could she possibly have meant that she suspected one of her forebears of miscegenation? Did she honestly mean to imply that she might have Negro blood in her family? And what was all that about Joseph Cotten?
“Do you think Claytor’s wife looks French?” Mrs. Drummond asked her husband and her oldest daughter, who was home with her husband for a visit.
Even Lily was perplexed as she sat at breakfast with Robert, drinking her second cup of black coffee and smoking a cigarette. “What do you think Lavinia could have meant, Robert? Do you think she meant to insult everyone? That would be such a strange thing to do when you’re a new member of the family.”
Robert smiled and then gave a short laugh. “I don’t think she meant to insult anyone at all. I think she meant it as a compliment. You mean when she said that Warren’s children all looked like Agnes? That they looked like beautiful cows? I’ll tell you, I looked around and saw that she was exactly right. Most people underestimate—have never noticed—the beauty of cows.”
And Uncle George Scofield had awakened before dawn, hastily gotten dressed, and headed over to his Civil War museum, where he kept several boxes of diaries and scrapbooks he had collected over the years. He pored over photographs of Southern families taken before the Civil War, and a great deal suddenly became clear to him.
Across town, in her cramped apartment, which had been hastily eked out of the small upstairs of their landlady’s house, Nancy Turner Fosberg was saying to her husband that she thought it was going to take some time to get used to Claytor Scofield’s wife. Nancy and Betts had both had Washington romances—Nancy’s not so passionate as Betts’s—but Nancy had come home from Washington and almost immediately married Joe Fosberg, whom she had been in love with all the while she was in high school. “She’s awfully pretty,” Nancy said, “Lavinia Scofield is. Although she’s so pregnant that it’s hard to tell what she really looks like. But I never am sure what she’s talking about. I suppose it’s because of her being Southern and being French,” she said to Joe. But he had slept late and was eating a quick breakfast; she was standing at the sink and didn’t see him nod in hasty agreement, but she wasn’t really expecting him to answer her, anyway. Like almost everyone else who had stayed too late at Scofields the night before, he was already late for work.
C
LAYTOR’S FAMILY STAYED ON with Agnes even after their daughter Julia was born early on the morning of September 13, 1947. All over the country, housing was scarce, and Claytor had very little income while he finished his residency in Cleveland. He shared a rented room with another student and came home to Washburn whenever he could, but it was a long trip by train, and especially unpleasant by bus. Betts and Howard, too, had taken up their lives again from home base.
Under the GI Bill, Howard had managed to work out an arrangement affording him tuition at Harcourt Lees College, and even the expense of books and student fees was covered, since he could live at home and waive the cost of room and board. Except at supper, Agnes rarely saw him when he wasn’t just about to miss the bus to Harcourt Lees or rushing to catch a ride with Robert Butler. In fact, Agnes’s house teemed with people who were running late.
Betts took up where she’d left off at the Mid-Ohio Civil War Museum, just next door, although she only worked until Uncle George came in after lunch. Group tours were scheduled for the mornings, and George Scofield spent the afternoons reassessing his collection, evaluating its strengths and weaknesses, and generally just browsing about. With Dwight and Trudy and Amelia Anne at Lily and Robert Butler’s, George enjoyed the peacefulness of settling into a comfortable chair in a room filled with the artifacts he had spent his life collecting. Betts was always there by eight-thirty and ready to open at nine, but she worked a second job at WBRN in the afternoons, making a dash to get to the radio station on time, begging a car or a ride from Agnes or Lily or anyone she could find at the moment.
Every Saturday morning, when Agnes sat down at the dining-room table to sort through her coupons and make out a shopping list, she studied the calendar she kept next to the telephone, where everyone in her household had been asked to record their comings and goings for the upcoming week. Now and then someone had penciled in something or other, but generally on Saturday morning Agnes would look at the squares of deceptively virginal days lined up neatly across the page and feel vanquished. She envisioned those days as opaque rectangles through which she would pass, closing the door of each evening firmly behind her while carrying leftover meat loaf or the rest of a baked ham along with her as she moved through the week.
The only day about which she was thoroughly sanguine was Thursday, when she and Lily played bridge, and Agnes unapologetically made her double-boiler dinner. A whole meal, using only the two interlocking pans! No one looked forward to it, including Agnes, but there it was, a complete dinner responsibly prepared. She had clipped the recipe from an advertisement for cream cheese:
The Savvy Career Woman’s New England Boiled Dinner
1) Boil, covered, for one hour, in largest half of a double boiler, one head green cabbage, outer leaves removed.
2) Save cooking liquid. Remove cabbage and cut into segments. (One per serving. Cannot serve more than eight.)
3) Place segmented cabbage in smaller insert of double boiler.
4) Add one frankfurter per serving to cabbage broth.
5) Remove wrapping from one block Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Place cheese on cabbage segments, cover, and replace insert on top of double boiler. Return to stove.
6) Boil frankfurters for twenty minutes, or until cheese has melted. Serve frankfurters arranged over cabbage and cheese sauce.
One of those Thursdays Sam Holloway had given Betts a lift home from the radio station, and she invited him to come in and have supper. Agnes added another frankfurter to the pot, but when she brought the platter of cabbage and frankfurters to the table and passed the bread, Sam looked up at her after serving himself. “Good Lord, Agnes!” he said. “This . . . Why, you just can’t serve this to a Cajun. To anyone from Louisiana. Or even Mississippi. You let me see what’s out in the kitchen, and I’ll turn this into something with a little spice. A nice gumbo. Or jambalaya if you have some rice. And if we get rid of the cabbage . . .” Sam was already up and collecting plates from Mary Alcorn and Lavinia.
“Oh, you’re no more Cajun than I am! I’ll grant you this isn’t anyone’s favorite meal,” Agnes said, “but I’m leaving in half an hour for duplicate.”
“I’ll leave your plate then, and pray for your soul,” Sam said. “But the rest of you folks come help me turn this into something edible! We need to get rid of this cabbage and add something. Maybe some tomatoes . . .”
Since the day he had arrived in Washburn, Sam and Agnes had been as relaxed around each other as though they had a shared history, but the fact that they knew almost nothing about each other—that they never had to backtrack in order to interpret or explain how they had come to be where they were—only strengthened their alliance.
“Mama, you’d think Sam Holloway was some long- lost cousin,” Betts had said. “Or even a brother. He’s here more than your own family.” Agnes looked at her daughter curiously, because she sounded indignant, and Agnes had thought that at least a flirtation would spring up between Betts and Sam. In fact, Betts
had
developed a slight, unreciprocated crush on Sam. He apparently thought of her in the same way he thought of her brothers, and it annoyed her to think that he found her mother just as interesting as he found her.