The Truth of the Matter (24 page)

She had been very pleased with herself, for instance, during the rationing, when she had hit upon a tidy way to combine the end of a bottle of ketchup or honey with its replacement so that every bit was saved. Lily had been impressed, too, when she discovered Agnes using the cylinder of a tin can—from which the top and bottom had been removed—to encompass and hold stable a jar of newly opened honey on top of which a nearly empty jar of honey was inverted. Agnes stuffed newspaper into the empty spaces of the can in order to keep the bottles steady.

“By the end of the day,” Agnes had explained to Lily, “the old jar will be empty. Though honey doesn’t work in the winter. But all sorts of things . . . syrup, even some preserves. And I don’t have to prop the bottles in a corner. They never slip apart, either, and dribble down the side.” Agnes knew full well that there was nothing remarkable about what she’d engineered, but it was one of those instances when a tiny, unimportant, but happy revelation affords any housekeeper a smug moment of satisfaction. Agnes had taken up Lily’s technique, for instance, of storing onions in a discarded, laddered stocking, each onion tied off before adding the next. In the basement of both their houses, knobby hosiery full of onions and potatoes hung from the beams like strings of beads.

But now and then one or another of her children would be driven to distraction by some perfectly ordinary habit of Agnes’s. At dinner one night Betts had presented her mother with four bottles of ketchup—each tied with a white bow—with a flourish and a laugh. “Mother, I can’t stand to see that bottle contraption set up on the kitchen table anymore. It’s disgusting! With the old ketchup all crusty around the top! So this is the first installment of my gift of a lifetime supply of ketchup. I’ll replenish it as need be if you just won’t try to save the last drop!” Everyone at the table had laughed, and Agnes laughed, too, although she understood perfectly well—even if Betts did not—that the whole idea was about more than saving ketchup.

Agnes even managed to annoy Howard for no reason that made sense to her. One afternoon when he had just come in after classes at Harcourt Lees, she asked him how far along he was in
Moby Dick,
which rested on top of the books and notebooks he had put down on the kitchen table.

“Mama, you ask me that every time I come in the door,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. “Why do you care one way or another?”

“Why . . . oh, I don’t care exactly, Howard. It’s just that I liked that book so much myself, but none of my friends . . .” But Howard hadn’t waited for her answer; he was bending into the refrigerator and asked her if she wanted a glass of iced tea.

“I’ll pick some of that fresh mint by the back door,” he added as a sort of apology in case he had sounded cross.

Agnes had been looking forward to hearing what Howard thought of that novel, though, which had mesmerized her when she had read it in her senior year, but which her friends had bemoaned being forced to read. Before Howard came in she had been sitting in the kitchen marking her students’ workbooks, but when Lavinia and Mary Alcorn and the baby returned from a walk, and Lavinia and Howard fell into an animated discussion of that great white whale and what it symbolized, Agnes collected her stack of booklets and retreated to the desk upstairs in her bedroom.

Her own mother had been so different than Agnes believed herself to be that she had no yardstick with which to judge her own situation. She did believe that her children loved her in the way that her friend Lucille had loved her family and presumably loved them still. Even though they had often irritated or hurt her feelings, Lucille had extended to her parents and to her three sisters an unconsidered loyalty, a sort of devotion, that Agnes had observed all the years she and Lucille were growing up together.

But Agnes was beginning to understand that, at least for the time being, her children weren’t much interested in what she thought or said, and, in fact, they didn’t even seem to like her very much, although she didn’t believe they were conscious of that dislike; she knew they didn’t name it aloud. It was a situation she tried hard not to brood about, but they lived in such close proximity to one another that it was hard to ignore. And, too, Agnes found that she was even more disheartened when the children were overtly and patiently kind to her, as though she was so removed from the issues they cared about that she was slightly pitiable.

One Thursday evening Sam showed up with his usual bags of groceries and a cardboard box enclosing two straggly gray kittens just past their round cuteness and grown into a long-legged, stringy adolescence. “I thought maybe you could keep these, Agnes. Their mother disappeared. Probably hit by a car. Here they are! Just scraps of flotsam and jetsam left to drift by themselves in an unkind sea,” he teased as he opened the box in which the two kittens cowered. Sam had discovered them outside Giamanco’s Market in Columbus, where two boys had them in a laundry basket, selling them for twenty-five cents apiece. Sam had been a witness to Bobbin’s desertion of Agnes about three days after he had arrived in Washburn. He thought it was probably because he had still been so much an outsider at the time that he recognized Agnes’s false cheerfulness immediately and knew the poor dog had hurt her feelings.

“Oh, well, Sam . . . I don’t know. With the baby in the house . . .”

“Nothing’s better with babies than a cat,” Sam said.

Although Agnes hadn’t thought she wanted a cat, and especially not two cats, every night when Flotsam stealthily crept under the covers and settled himself firmly in the curve of Agnes’s lower back, she was gratified despite herself. Jetsam was always neatly tucked on the end of the bed when she woke up, but she had no idea where he spent his time when she was asleep. During the days she surprised herself now and then by laughing out loud at the drama with which Flotsam and Jetsam invested their mock fights, or their battle against a roll of toilet paper or a simple empty paper bag. You don’t expect anything at all from cats, she thought, whereas people and dogs can always let you down. She didn’t want that ever to happen to her again; she would be more protective of her affections.

During the fall of 1948 and all through 1949, when veterans—by themselves or with new families in tow—returned in droves from far-flung places, Will Dameron discovered that he was relieved Agnes had been thinking clearly for both of them. He was fond of Agnes, but it seemed to him that their affair—or whatever it had been—had existed in some other world. A drearily sparse season of wartime, during which the two of them had huddled together for comfort. But now, with all the young families out and about all over the place, the notion of settling down with Agnes in a companionable second marriage for them both was so predictable that Will finally understood it was a stale idea, would have been, in fact, a tip of their hats to defeat.

He envied the energy—the heat generated by all the couples wrestling with their expectations, coming to grips with their new lives. He thought of his wife, Sally, often, and the few years they had been married, but he couldn’t remember the feeling of their enthusiasm for rushing headlong into whatever their lives might be. Now and then he came across proof that they, too, had brimmed over with ambitions for themselves as a couple: half-filled scrapbooks, old letters exclaiming over what now seemed to be perfectly ordinary events, a list the two of them had put together sometime or other of all the places in the world they wanted to visit. In a chest of drawers in the attic, he turned up a meticulous notebook Sally had kept, detailing menus and plans for holidays and social events. She had noted the dress she had worn, the gift she and Will had given if the occasion had required one.

But Will simply could not recall the urgency they had felt about getting on with things. He developed a deep yearning to anticipate the future with curiosity once again, to look forward to finding out what would happen next. The next day, the next month, the next year.

Late morning of Christmas Eve 1949, Agnes was in the dining room polishing the silver, annoyed at herself for not having done it sooner, when the Lambert’s Furniture truck pulled up in the semicircle of the front drive that served all three houses in the compound. The driver got out and was clearly trying to match the directions on his work sheet with one of the houses, which weren’t numbered. Agnes hastily threw a coat on over her housedress and crossed the front yard to direct the driver to the parking area in back, and eventually she agreed to accept delivery of a big Du Mont television set tied with a red bow. The driver didn’t know who had sent it, and Agnes was still uncertain if hers was the house for which it was intended. But she scurried upstairs to get dressed while the driver and his helper retrieved it from the truck.

By the time she was back downstairs, the two men had hefted the television, carried it straight through the front hall, and set it down next to the Christmas tree in the room Agnes had first known as Lillian Scofield’s front parlor. Lillian had given pride of place to all the furnishings that filled the room, and the television sat in odd juxtaposition to the cherry hutch, the sternly upholstered horsehair sofas, and the inlaid piecrust tea tables, the tops of which folded down against their tri-footed bases and stood flat against a wall to be whipped out and opened whenever they might be needed, although they were notoriously unstable. The cabinet of the big Du Mont television was a dark, heavily carved wood box that looked Chinese, as did its squat latticework base with inward curving, chunky legs.

Agnes didn’t know what to say. Her mother-in-law had once explained to her with timid pride that she had ordered the heavy brocade drapery material in that front parlor all the way from Paris via New York. In fact, when Agnes remembered the afternoon she and Warren’s mother had gone through the house, while Dwight was asleep in his crib and Agnes was pregnant with Claytor, she realized that it had been a shy attempt on Mrs. Scofield’s part to make Agnes feel included in the household.

Mrs. Scofield had meant those solemn bits of information about the silver service (never, never put a rubber band around sterling) and the crystal, the provenance of each cabinet or intricately carved table, to be an indication that she was ceding them to Agnes; that, other than Warren, here it was: the chief accomplishment of Lillian Scofield’s life. Here her influence within her immediate family was manifest: this particular order she had imposed; here was the context in which her husband and son had registered the events of the world. At the time, though, Agnes had found the house tour of that long afternoon almost intolerably stultifying. Nevertheless, after Lillian Scofield’s death in 1933, and even though the front parlor was Agnes’s least favorite room, she had maintained it scrupulously. It disturbed her to see the television sitting in front of those carefully dressed windows, and she said so to the men from Lambert’s Furniture.

“I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to put it in the back parlor . . . not so formal. I’m not at all sure you’ve brought this to the right house, although maybe Lily . . . though I don’t know why . . . This is far too much money to spend.”

“Ma’am, if you want it moved, we’ll have to come back after Christmas. We have three more stops to make, and one’s a washing machine, so we have to meet the plumber.” The driver looked over his delivery schedule. “All it says here is ‘Scofields.’ You say next door’s the Butlers? And the other side’s the war museum?”

“That’s right,” said Agnes, “but, you see, Mrs. Butler is really a Scofield. I think this must be a gift to her from her husband. I was Agnes
Claytor.
From out Newark Road?”

“If it turns out we got the wrong place, just call Mr. Lambert and he’ll find the invoice. But, I’ll tell you, as I always say to my wife, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Why, this set! I’ve never seen one like it. It’s the Manchu model.” He grinned at her. “Maybe you have a secret admirer. Or maybe it’s from Santa Claus!”

As it turned out, the television set was a gift from Will Dameron. Howard had called Lambert’s to find out, and when he told his mother, his tone had been teasing and fond. “I don’t know what’s been going on around here, Mama. I can’t think of anyone I care about enough that I’d give them a television!”

“Howard, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. But Agnes was baffled. Will had evolved into a family friend. He and Betts were teaching Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn to ride, and Betts boarded her horse at his stables. Claytor hadn’t wanted to ask any more of his grandfather, who had helped him through college, and he had finally asked Will for a loan that would carry him through his residency. But Agnes scarcely ever saw Will, except when he joined the family for Sam’s Thursday dinners, and even then she and Lily left early to meet their bridge club.

Will arrived early for the Scofields’ annual Christmas Eve dinner. He caught up with Agnes in the kitchen. She was dreading the conversation. “I wanted a chance to talk to you if you have a minute,” he said, leaning against the door frame with his hands in his pockets, trying to stay out of the way.

“Yes, me, too. I mean, I wanted to have a word with you, too, Will. It was such a generous idea, but you know I can’t accept a gift like that . . .”

“Oh. Oh, no, Agnes. I hope you won’t give it a second thought! It’s for the whole family. It’s the least I could do. Why, you give me a fine dinner every week of the year. I had a case of the best bourbon I could find sent over to Sam’s house. And a mixed case of wine. If you’d rather have that . . .”

Agnes smiled and Will went on. “People are beginning to think I’m awfully refined for a country farmer. You should see me in a huddle with the owner of Fine Wine and Spirits, down in Washington. He can hardly stand to see such an uncouth fellow make off with his best wines. He can hardly let me out the door.” Will approximated a foreign accent. “‘Remember, Mr. Dameron, the sweet wines—the Gewürztraminer—you don’t drink that with your roast beef!’ I generally check with Sam before I go, so I’m getting to know a little bit,” he said. “Anyway, I thought the little girls would enjoy a television . . . Lavinia. And Claytor, too, when he’s home. Howard. And you, too. But there’s something else I was hoping to talk to you about. I know you’re busy . . . I won’t keep you long?” he pleaded.