The Truth of the Matter (3 page)

But Agnes was left stranded in a financially tenuous situation, because there had been nothing to inherit at all. The house had belonged to Warren’s mother, of course, but after her husband’s death in 1926, Lillian had the carriage barn just behind the main house converted into a cottage for herself, and Warren’s family moved into the main house. Lillian had long ago given it over to Warren and his wife. That familiar and comfortable old house, though, generated a host of expenses all on its own, just sitting there through the seasons. It never crossed Agnes’s mind to move, however; the house was where her children lived.

Lily had hurried to assure Agnes that she intended to make a gift to Betts of the tuition for the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, and Agnes accepted with gratitude on Betts’s behalf. Robert had helped Agnes find a job teaching at Jesser Grammar School, but her salary was modest, and she wasn’t paid in the summer. Agnes had a little money from her mother’s estate, and after the sudden deaths of Warren and Leo Scofield, when her father and his second wife had been in Washburn for the funeral, he had sat down with Agnes in private to see what would be best to do.

Agnes’s father’s youngest son and namesake, Dwight Claytor, was also, of course, Agnes’s youngest brother, but since his birth he had also been the oldest child in Agnes and Warren Scofield’s house. He had been handed over to Agnes the moment he was born, during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918, just as the war was drawing to a close. His and Agnes’s mother, Catherine Claytor, died of the flu less than two weeks after Dwight’s birth, as had Agnes’s younger brother Edson. Agnes hadn’t even had sufficient time to contemplate the situation, nor had she had time to grieve. Not only had she found herself solely responsible for the baby, but she had also been pregnant herself with her and Warren’s first child.

Eleven years later—right after Warren’s death—Agnes hadn’t even considered the fact that her youngest brother, Dwight, had a father of his own, that he had a safe welcome elsewhere and could certainly leave her household. Agnes’s father suggested that perhaps that would be a help. “There are good schools in D.C.,” he said. “Lots of things going on . . . Dwight and Claytor always enjoy visiting. And, of course, your brothers are in and out of town, and Camille likes having young people . . .”

Agnes seemed puzzled, at first, and then her expression took on a flat, shocked look as her understanding of what he was suggesting settled over her. He changed direction before she expressed outrage or dismay, which was the last thing he intended to cause. After all, the older Dwight Claytor had been away when little Dwight was born, away when so much misfortune befell his family. He had never seen his youngest son at a time when he was not under Agnes’s care, settled comfortably, and made much of in the Scofield compound in Washburn. “In any case,” he said, holding out his hands in a gesture of appeasement, “I had thought that it would be a help if I contributed a little more to your finances, Agnes. It’s expensive to have a growing family, I know. Surely you could use some help?”

It was years later when she realized that if he had not stepped in, she would have been forced to sell the house, and it was largely through his help that Dwight and Claytor had financed their undergraduate college expenses. Even through her spells of resentment and anger toward her father—primarily on her mother’s behalf—Agnes did appreciate his generosity to her and to all her children, not only to his son Dwight. With his help and Robert and Lily’s emotional and sometimes financial support, Agnes got by pretty well, although there was never a time that a need for money was not on her mind.

Dwight and Claytor were gone by late January of 1941, and Betts graduated from high school that same year. She accepted a job offered to her by her great-uncle George Scofield, to manage his suddenly popular Mid-Ohio Civil War Museum, which—as silly as both Betts and Agnes thought the whole enterprise to be—was a fairly demanding undertaking. Betts lived at home in order to save money, and she and her mother fell into a surprisingly pleasant domesticity. Whoever got home from work first would get something started for dinner and often put together a little plate of Ritz crackers with peanut butter, or celery stuffed with pimento cheese. Agnes loved smoked oysters or sardines on crackers with a little lemon juice. They both indulged themselves now and then by roasting pecans or walnuts, which Betts liked sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon but which Agnes preferred plain with salt, so they split the batch and made both. When the other one got home, they would sit together and have a cocktail or a glass of sherry.

“What a day,” Agnes might say if she came in after Betts was already stretched out on the sofa with her feet up. “I tell you, I sometimes think Bernice doesn’t have a brain in her head. All during recess . . . She was telling me something about a package she’d had from Will. I still don’t have any idea what that was all about. She got off track trying to remember what she was wearing when she went into town to pick it up. ‘Now, I had on my old brown coat, because my green coat needs new buttons. Or maybe I did have on my green coat, because I did sew on those buttons Wednesday . . .’” Agnes shook her head in exasperation and took a sip of sherry. “Sometimes I just want to shake her! But then she’ll come into my classroom if she hears things getting out of hand. Just as if she happened to be passing by. Today she managed to suggest a new seating arrangement for reading aloud. Putting the good readers next to the ones who are going slow—it made such a difference.” Bernice Dameron taught the third-grade class across the hall from Agnes, and although Bernice wasn’t particularly beloved by the students, she was admired and respected. Agnes often resorted to a persuasive but cowardly charm to keep order in her classroom, and she was wildly popular but well aware that Bernice was the best teacher in the school.

Sometimes Betts would tell her about unusual visitors to the museum. “A woman came in today who’s working on her doctoral dissertation. I don’t think I know a woman who has a doctorate. She’s mostly interested in the letters and diaries, though. I set her up in that little room Uncle George furnished like it would have been during the war. There’s a desk, but I had to chase down a lamp. She’ll be in and out all week. Maybe I’ll see if she’d like to come to supper.”

Howard was generally involved in something after school until almost seven, and then the three of them sat down to dinner. Their domestic regimen had a little of a make-believe aspect, as though they were playing house, establishing their small rituals, as they adapted to the absence of Dwight and Claytor. Of course, Dwight and Claytor had been away at school for years, but Agnes and Betts and Howard hadn’t felt separated from them in the same way they did now that Dwight and Claytor were in the army. Now there was an entire official bureaucracy between those boys and their own family.

Everyone shifted roles a little bit, and life at Scofields carried on pretty much as usual until Betts began planning to leave. After a year working at the museum, she was heading off with her friend Nancy Turner to Washington, D.C., where Nancy’s uncle, who was with the Office of Price Administration, had helped them find secretarial jobs in the mushrooming business of going to war.

Betts spent a few weeks putting things in order for Uncle George at the museum. She made up a calendar with dates and times of upcoming school tours, several garden club visits from around Marshal County, and the evening the Knights of Fithian were holding a banquet, catered by the Eola Arms Hotel, in the original dining room. Uncle George had urged her not to cancel any visits already scheduled—he would conduct those tours himself—but he had asked her not to arrange any further visits.

For the duration of the war, the museum would be open to the public whenever Uncle George could be available. It was housed in the building across from Monument Square that had originally been built in the 1880s as George’s residence, where it was assumed he would live with a family of his own, but he never married, and since he traveled so much, he didn’t set up housekeeping for himself but had always lived with one or the other of his older brothers. After Leo’s death, George lived with his niece, Lily, and her husband, Robert Butler. He kept a bedroom furnished for himself in his own house, but otherwise he had turned his own residence entirely over to the display of his collection. He was toying, though, with the idea of inhabiting his own house permanently, just to keep an eye on things.

All the while Betts made arrangements for leaving, she was dishearteningly agreeable and cooperative and subdued. Hers was a gravity that did nothing to conceal the underlying current of her euphoria. In truth, she was genuinely thrilled with the legitimate and communal notion of being swept up into the full force of a solemn cause. But all at once the rooms felt vast to Agnes, even when she only imagined Betts’s absence. Agnes began to study her daughter more carefully—to memorize her—when they were having coffee in the morning, when they were in any room together.

Betts had been taller than all of her friends during most of high school, and she had been angular and extravagant in her movements, her broad gestures, her long strides across a room. She had been an awkward girl, careening around Washburn as though she were herding her group of petite friends as they moved around town in a cluster. Trudy Butler was probably Betts’s closest friend, and Trudy was considered very attractive, although Agnes had never thought she was particularly pretty. Trudy was small and dark-haired, with a complicated, pointed face which was serenely composed. Her emotions didn’t fly across her features the way they did across the faces of all the other Scofields. All of Betts’s friends were pert and vivacious, seeming even lovelier than they were, in fact, simply because of all the possibilities ahead of them. Betts could never be pert. Her gestures were wide and bony; her voice ungirlish, with a steely note running straight through her sentences, grounding her words in the category of drama rather than flirtation.

Agnes had worried about her, but Betts never seemed to care about her popularity one way or another; she was doted on by Dwight and Claytor—who were referred to as the “Tarleton twins” by all those friends of Betts’s who had crushes on them, after the loutish but handsome young brothers in
Gone with the Wind
who rushed heedlessly off to war. Trudy objected to that. “The Tarleton twins were just dolts!” Trudy said. “Handsome, but stupid and coarse. That’s not a thing like Dwight and Claytor!” Trudy always rose to the bait, but Betts just laughed and let it go, since it was teasingly meant as a compliment.

All through high school Betts was at the center of whatever was going on, and if there was no particular boy paying attention to her, it was true that all the boyfriends of the other girls liked and admired Betts. She was as talented an athlete as her aunt Lily had been, and she understood that games were never frivolous, which very few of the girls at school seemed to realize. And, too, she was witty and very smart, which always ensures popularity for anyone who is also endowed with some degree of social grace.

But not long after she graduated from the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, Betts seemed to come into possession of her own height; she began to acquire synchronization. All of the separate parts of Betts suddenly fell into place. She was dramatic all of a sudden, with her blond hair and her characteristically Scofield large, dark brown eyes. She even appeared to move differently through the rooms of the house, across the yard—anywhere Agnes happened to catch sight of her. Everything about Betts’s gestures and expressions had always seemed larger than life, had seemed amplified, somehow. But what had once seemed awkward now seemed sinuous, like the oddly sensual overanimation of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

In fact, once Betts knew she would be leaving for Washington, and word of her eventual departure spread, she was in great demand. She rarely had time to join Agnes for a drink before dinner; Betts had dates night after night and attended one farewell party after another for other friends who were departing. Agnes missed her daughter very much even before she left, and, simultaneously, Agnes wished Betts were already gone, because the two of them had fallen back into the habit of being exasperated with and prickly toward each other.

Since there really wasn’t an extra penny, and she had a good bit of time on her hands, Agnes spent her evenings sewing what she considered a career girl’s wardrobe for Betts to take to Washington. Agnes had bolts of unused fabrics, some from as long ago as when they were her mother’s and even some she had inherited from her great-aunt Cettie. Wonderful material that was no longer available anywhere and that was a pleasure to work with. Agnes was a passionate seamstress, and since she was making these clothes as a gift, she took the liberty of making wardrobe choices for her daughter.

She made two beautifully tailored suits for Betts. One a soft dove-gray wool and one of dark blue linen. Agnes took great pains to make the suits look like they had been bought at a fine dress shop. She knew about and even endorsed Betts’s worry of seeming unsophisticated, a country girl at large in the chaos of Washington. Agnes spent a great deal of time blocking the padded shoulders over a wood form and steaming the sleeves into a beautiful drape from the seam.

“These are just amazing, Mama. I could never have found suits so well made anywhere. Or that ever fit me like this. But I’ll be about as colorful as a sparrow!”

“Oh, well, Betts. With your blond hair . . . with your coloring! My mother always said that clothes should fit perfectly and show you off. That it shouldn’t ever be the other way around! Mama didn’t have a very happy life, you know . . . but she was famous for being so stylish. So beautiful. You remind me of her. She was tall and with blond hair, too. Well, of course, you’ve seen pictures. . . . But you have her look of . . . oh . . . of elegance, I guess. As if she were a member of some grand aristocracy. You’ve got that, too, Betts.”

But Betts and her mother didn’t agree about clothes. Betts loved brilliant colors and any sort of exaggeration of a style. She was always coming home triumphantly with great bargains she had found. “Betts,” Agnes had said two weeks earlier, when her daughter came home with two pairs of open-toed, sling-back shoes—one pair a bright red leather and the other black patent—“the reason you can get these marked down so much is that no one else in Washburn would be caught dead in them. What I think . . . It just seems to me, Betts, that open-toed shoes are so . . . trashy!”