The Truth of the Matter (30 page)

“
Mama!
No! Of course I’m not pregnant! I think Will’s wonderful! I’d love to be married to Will!”

“Well, Betts . . . What’s the matter? You’re sure? It isn’t that you’re wondering if you’ll be happy? I mean if you get married. You still
want
to have the wedding?”

“But I just can’t,” Betts said. “I can’t. It would just be selfish, Mama! And it would be like playing some kind of trick. . . . I can’t do that. I’ve got this condition I haven’t said anything about. My right arm. Progressive atrophy. I haven’t told anyone. I haven’t told
him—
How could I ever do that? Marry him without —”

“Oh, my Lord, Betts. Oh, my Lord!”

“Well, I know. The whole thing is upsetting. But I don’t
do
much with my right —”

“But it’s not true! It isn’t true, Betts. Everyone’s arms are different lengths!”

“That’s what I said to myself, and that’s what Claytor said —”

“No, Betts! You don’t understand what I’m telling you,” Agnes interrupted. “Betts, it really isn’t true! Dr. Caldwell . . . I saw him on the street. He stopped me on the street. He was worried about your bronchitis. About your smoking. He . . . oh, he thought you wouldn’t listen!”

“You knew about my arm?” Betts asked.

“Yes! Of course! Well, no! I told him . . . He thought you wouldn’t take him seriously. Something like that. I was in such a hurry. It’s not true! But I never thought . . . I didn’t know . . . Betts, there’s not anything at all wrong with you!”

Betts’s expression was tense, and her voice flat. “Dr. Caldwell told you that my arm was getting shorter, and you didn’t —”

“No! Of course not. He was only going to tell you that your arm would get shorter if you kept smoking. . . . Oh, he had some bee in his bonnet about vanity! I wasn’t paying much attention. I was trying to find buttons. . . . He thought that if you believed smoking was —”

“Dr. Caldwell told you that he was going to tell me a lie about some terrible thing happening to me, and you thought that was all right because it might stop me from
smoking?
”

Agnes looked up at Betts, whose expression was hawklike with her eyebrows raised in arched wings and her eyes brilliant and focused. All sorts of ways to explain the situation flew through Agnes’s mind, but she realized that in many ways Betts had it right.

“Oh, not exactly, Betts,” she said. “I never even remembered it till now —”

Betts stood up and moved stiffly toward the door. “I just can’t believe you’d let him tell me something like that. And then . . . My God! To tell me about having sex with my own
father!
I don’t know why you’d do that! And I have no idea why . . . I know you can’t stand it that I’m marrying Will. I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened —”

“Don’t say another word!” Agnes said, in a tone so authoritative that it stopped Betts in midsentence and surprised Agnes herself. “Not another thing! You really have no idea about my life. Don’t say anything else! Don’t say something that you can never take back!”

Betts shed the linen skirt of her suit as quickly as she could and let it drop to the floor. “I can’t be around you right now, Mama. I don’t care what I wear to get married in, but I can’t stay here in this room with you even for another minute!”

Agnes stood dumbfounded for a few moments, and then she gathered up the skirt, spread it carefully on the ironing board, and sank down on the sofa, exhausted and so sorry. She was full of regret. Was it her vanity, Agnes wondered, or even some sort of spite, a misguided declaration of her own existence, that had prompted her to conjure up for Betts the actuality of her own mother’s sexuality? Had she really thought that she and her own daughter could ever be on such equal footing? That the two of them could ever discuss anything so intimate and powerful?

Betts Scofield and Will Dameron were married the next day, Saturday, May thirteenth, 1950. Betts made a beautiful bride in the linen suit and the sweeping wide-brimmed hat. The weather had turned gray and unseasonably cool, and they weren’t able to use the Butlers’ garden for the reception as they had planned, but Lily and Agnes and Bernice Dameron hastily cobbled together an indoor seating arrangement with the caterers from the Eola Arms.

After the cake was cut, Betts and Will made their departure with kisses for everyone and a shower of rice. Will had practically lifted Agnes off her feet with an ecstatic embrace, but Betts had managed to reach Agnes only in time to give her mother a perfunctory peck on the cheek. They hadn’t spoken since the day before, although Agnes hadn’t intended for that to happen. She had left the freshly pressed suit hanging on the banister right outside Betts’s bedroom door, and she assumed Betts would come show her how she looked before they went downstairs. But Betts had gotten dressed and left without a sound, going with the Butlers to the church, leaving Agnes to follow along with Claytor and Lavinia and Mary Alcorn.

The reception moved along at just the right pace, so that when Betts made her exit, Lily suggested that if the girls were awake, perhaps all of the Scofields’, the Damerons’, and the Claytors’ assembled families and friends would like to meet little Martha Claytor and Julia Scofield, who had not attended the small ceremony. Sounds of agreement and enthusiasm went around the room, because some of the guests were truly eager to see the newest additions to the family, and others would never have been so rude as to say that admiring children who aren’t one’s own is an exhausting business.

Lily settled Trudy and Lavinia on a sofa with Martha and Julia, and various guests made their way over to sit for a moment and congratulate the mothers and compliment their children. Claytor and Lavinia Scofield’s daughter, Julia Agnes Scofield, had been born early on the morning of September 13, 1947, and Dwight and Trudy Claytor’s daughter, Martha Lillian Claytor, was born on the afternoon of September 25, only twelve days later. In fact, for two days Trudy and Lavinia had shared a room at the hospital before Lavinia was allowed to go home. But that was less a coincidence than it seemed on the face of it; Trudy next shared the room with Sygny Peck, from Trudy’s class at Linus Gilchrest, who had just delivered her second child. Everyone in the world was having babies.

Agnes’s closest friend, Lucille Drummond Hendry, was visiting Washburn for Betts’s wedding, staying at the Drummonds’ house across the square, and she was finally able to make her way over to Trudy and Lavinia and the two little girls, who had both been stricken dumb with shyness. Martha buried her head in Trudy’s lap under direct scrutiny. Lucille smiled broadly at Lavinia especially, since she hadn’t yet met Claytor’s wife, and introduced herself. “My family didn’t move to Washburn until I was . . . oh . . . I guess I was about fourteen. It was just before Lily Scofield and Robert Butler got married. That wedding! The rose arbor . . . Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about it from everyone. But here are these two little girls! I remember when I got the news. When Agnes telephoned about these babies. I had to laugh,” she said.

“All of you people are born in batches,” Lucille teased both Trudy and Lavinia. “How on earth will we ever keep everyone straight? All born under a full moon or something,” she exclaimed delightedly, although she was struggling against nearly overwhelming remembrance and grief at having to endure one more celebration in the lives of her sisters’ or her friends’ children. Lucille hadn’t recovered from her daughter’s death during the war, although she went for days at a time, now, without thinking of it. Or, at least, without brooding over it, but only taking it into account as she went about an ordinary day. She smiled the smile of a sweet, still faintly pretty, rather daffy aunt, which was a role she had assumed unthinkingly so that her sisters and her friends wouldn’t pity her, and so that she could conceal what she knew was occasional and unreasonable bitterness.

“Well, not exactly,” Trudy said, smiling up at her. “Not under a full moon. We’re all supposed to be born on the ides of the month.”

“Oh, yes. I knew it was something . . . Lavinia, you must be surprised to have it all be true. I sent a telegram to my sister when Agnes called me with the news. Celia telephoned me from California. She said you could have knocked her over with a feather. All the Scofield coincidences! That Claytor’s wife—and Dwight’s, too—had had their babies on the same day! She asked me to send her very warmest —”

“Martha and Julia were only born in the same month,” Trudy interrupted once again. “Not the same day. But it’s nice for each of them to have a cousin the same age.”

“I was surprised!” Lavinia said, and Mrs. Hendry leaned forward so she could hear her more clearly. “I was surprised,” Lavinia repeated, raising her voice a little, “that Julia was born on the ides of the month. My other daughter, Mary Alcorn, from my first marriage. She was born on the ides, too.”

“I’m so sorry, dear. I can’t quite hear you. Who was it you said was born?”

“Oh, I was only saying that both my daughters were born on the ides of the month,” Lavinia said loudly so that Mrs. Hendry could hear, but it was at a moment when a lull in the conversation had fallen, and everyone either turned to look directly at Lavinia or furtively glanced her way. “I hadn’t heard about the Scofields and the ides. . . . And, of course, it turns out that almost none of them were born on the ides. . . .” Mrs. Hendry nodded at her and smiled, having no idea what Lavinia was saying now that she had lowered her voice once more.

After the general flurry of seeing the bridal couple off, greeting friends, and meeting new spouses and the two new children, conversation became a little quieter and eventually turned into a discussion of all the various complications that had already cropped up in regard to the sesquicentennial celebration. The two garden clubs were very seriously jockeying for position as to which one would select the queen. Thomas P. Stamp had already been persuaded to be the queen’s escort in the guise of Daniel Decatur Emmett, and he was letting his beard grow out.

“Well, though,” Dwight said, “the children will love it. Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn are old enough to have a great time. You remember, Claytor? I think we must have been about ten years old, and we thought we would die having to listen to the speeches—right out there in the square,” he said, gesturing toward the front windows to illustrate what he was saying, “on a platform set up under the Dan Emmett statue. Before we could go out to Hiawatha Park —”

Trudy suddenly interrupted him in a sharp voice, abruptly and with clear irritation. “That’s not Dan Emmett, Dwight! You never pay attention to a single thing I say. . . . Oh,” she said, turning to Lavinia, “when you’re married to a Scofield, Lavinia! Well, don’t ever, ever imagine you’ll get him to admit he’s wrong about anything in his life!” She tried to lighten this last bit into sounding like no more than fond exasperation, but she didn’t succeed, and the room was uncomfortably quiet. There was no way to imagine that Dwight and Trudy had had a happy morning.

All of a sudden Lavinia spoke up softly, with her mystifying but characteristic air of indifference, of seeming not to have been paying attention to the conversation that was already under way. “I don’t have any idea who Dan Emmett is,” she said, as though the thought had just occurred to her, which, in fact, was the case. “I’d never heard of him until I came here. I keep forgetting to ask someone to tell me who he is. Who he was. Did he found Washburn? Something like that?”

And everyone answered at once.

“Oh, Lavinia —”

“But I thought you came from the South —”

“It was your side that made him famous —”

“My side of what?” Lavinia asked, genuinely curious.

It was Dwight who answered her, and it seemed to be the case that everyone in the room had assumed he would take charge and straighten this out. “Daniel Decatur Emmett. That’s probably the name you know him by. His older brother, Lafayette, read law under Columbus Delano. He left Washburn. Well, in fact, he eventually became a State Supreme Court Justice in Minnesota.”

Lavinia gazed at Dwight solemnly but didn’t make any remark.

“Well, and Dan Emmett was a vaudeville star,” Dwight continued. “He performed all over the country. Toured for a while with Bill Gibson. . . . Dan Emmett wrote ‘Dixie.’”

But Lavinia continued to watch him lazily, not realizing that he thought he had fully answered her question.

“The song ‘Dixie,’” Dwight said. And when Lavinia still looked on at him expectantly, he said, “I’m sure you know that song!

Wish I was in the land of cotton

Old times there are not forgotten . . .”

“Oh! Well, of course, I know that song,” Lavinia said, nodding. “But why would someone from Ohio write ‘Dixie’? I don’t understand exactly why a statue of Daniel Emmett would be in Washburn —”

“Oh,
God!
” Trudy snapped. “There’s
no statue,
Lavinia! That statue is of a Union soldier! Facing south!”

Lavinia turned to look at her, and for the first time since she had arrived at Scofields, a stricken look of hurt feelings crossed her face and disturbed her usual impassive expression. Lavinia and Trudy had become fairly good friends, and it baffled Lavinia that Trudy spoke to her with such obvious irritation.

“Well, that’s what Lavinia means, Trudy,” Howard said, unexpectedly championing Lavinia before Claytor even thought to speak up. It looked to Howard as though Lavinia might cry, and his voice took on a languid, jocular note in an effort to ease the conversation into a more temperate zone, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why anyone cared one way or another about Daniel Emmett. “I have to say I’ve always wondered about that myself. Washburn fought for the Union. Why do we celebrate Dan Emmett Days? I’m always happy to celebrate anything, but it seems strange. . . .”

The three hostesses, though, Agnes and Lily and Bernice Dameron, interrupted with trays of coffee and sugar and cream, and the day’s festivities came slowly to a halt. People began to collect their wraps and take their leave. But no one who had been there was comfortable about that afternoon. When they thought of it in the next few days, they finally concluded that Lavinia Scofield was an unwittingly disturbing presence. After all, imagine not having any idea who Dan Emmett was. The state of Ohio had even placed official historical markers on Highway 4—at both the entry and exit for Washburn—that declared that Daniel Decatur Emmett, author of “Dixie,” had been born and had died there. Also, Lavinia had been so determined to let people know that both her daughters were born on the ides of the month!