The Truth of the Matter (31 page)
And, too, although no one liked to admit it, it had been impossible not to notice that Trudy and Dwight’s younger daughter, Martha, was a far prettier child than Claytor and Lavinia’s little girl, Julia. In fact, most of the Scofields’ friends thought—even though at a distance the two older girls looked so much alike they were often mistaken for twins—that, up close, Lavinia’s older girl, Mary Alcorn, wasn’t nearly as pretty as her cousin, Amelia Anne Claytor, who was a true Scofield.
Ostensibly the town of Washburn would be in a perpetual state of celebration from the weekend before the Fourth of July through Saturday, July fifteenth. In the exhaustion she fell into after the wedding, Agnes didn’t think she could bear it. One afternoon, when Lily and she were sitting in Agnes’s back parlor discussing the arrangements for the town’s Fourth of July picnic, which was traditionally held on the grounds of Scofields, Agnes said sharply, out of the blue, “Why are we always celebrating these sesquicentennials? Every year is a hundred and fifty years after something.” Lily looked up from the notes she was making and nodded her agreement with Agnes about the impending commemoration and all the fuss it would cause.
But Agnes began to brood privately about the upcoming occasion, and she realized that there had not been one single celebration in her life that she had enjoyed. Especially Betts’s wedding, which was the most recent. She hadn’t even enjoyed her own wedding. But then, as Lily often said, weddings were ridiculously overwrought in any case. But any celebration, it seemed to Agnes, required endless diplomacy. They were filled with emotions that got out of hand. They were laden with an imperative, forced glee that generally led to disappointment. Even birthdays. Especially birthdays in her household.
Claytor’s eighth birthday party, for instance, had been one of the worst occasions she could remember. As always on one of their birthdays, Claytor and Dwight had been edgy through the morning. Dwight teasingly reminded Claytor that real Scofields were born on the ides of the month—on the fifteenth, not the thirteenth—and Claytor, so determined always to have Dwight’s approval, never countered by reminding Dwight that Dwight wasn’t a real Scofield, no matter when he was born.
Every year when those boys were young, they had gone through this, and it upset Agnes and took her aback each time. Dwight and Claytor had the happiest friendship she had ever seen between two children living in the same house. Except on either of their birthdays. Each year she was convinced that it would go smoothly, since the previous year she had taken each boy aside and given him an earnest little lecture on never, ever, purposely hurting people by saying things that caused them pain and—in Claytor’s case—on not allowing oneself to be hurt by words that were only meant jokingly and with affection.
But when Claytor turned eight years old, the boys masked this inevitable twice-yearly tension by racing around the house in a hectic, overly excited, high-pitched game they had fallen into while waiting for the party to unfold. And on that particular birthday, while Agnes was in the kitchen frosting the cake, Claytor rushed around the corner of the back sitting room and didn’t see the footstool that sat at an angle to Agnes’s usual chair. He went stumbling over it, was unable to regain his balance, and cut his forehead as he fell against the marble mantelpiece.
The sudden spurt of blood terrified him and Agnes, too. Warren swept him up and pressed a handkerchief against the wound, handing him over to Agnes, who settled Claytor on the stairs with his head tipped back to stop the bleeding while she went to get iodine and gauze and tape. Warren stood looking at his son, who was shaken and pale, with blood saturating the handkerchief and seeping in a trickle down his cheek. It was hard to tell if Claytor had also hurt his eye, and Warren was as anxious as Agnes. He glanced at Dwight for a moment, who was frozen in place and equally pale and appalled. Warren made a slow, dramatic turn, appraising all the rooms of the house that were visible from the front hall and from the stairs where Claytor sat. Warren announced loudly and absolutely that they would have to put a stop to all this.
“We just can’t have this sort of thing going on!” Both Claytor and Dwight were filled with apprehension; neither could stand to fall under the weight of Warren’s disapproval. “I mean it! This behavior has got to stop this minute! This day! And this year. I’ve put up with it for too long. We’ve all put up with it for too long!” Warren stepped into the parlor and snatched up the little wooden stool he had made years earlier for his mother, when he was hanging around the Scofields & Company shop and Tut Zeller set him to work and showed him how to do a bit of carpentry.
Warren held it up to illustrate what he was saying. “How dare this puny, splintery piece of wood leap up and attack my own dear heart! My own son. On the very day of the celebration of his birth. We can’t have it! We can’t have all the furniture getting ideas! Ambushing us in our own home. Why, the next thing you know, that fancy dining-room table’ll just walk right over to me on its prissy legs and give me a kick in the shins!” Claytor’s color began to return, and Dwight laughed with relief, hoping that perhaps this accident wouldn’t turn out to be his fault.
“The piano bench will get it into its head that it can be wherever it wants. It’ll just go wheeling itself away when someone gets ready to sit down—boom! Your mother could end up sitting flat on the floor while the bench goes whizzing around wherever it likes!”
Warren wrenched apart the two side supports of the little bench, so that the stool was almost flattened and certainly no longer of any use, and he flung open the door and tossed that ruined piece of furniture far out into the yard. “Why, that footstool just began to take itself too seriously. Tried to get the upper hand. The upper foot! But it won’t be stepping out anymore!” He turned in a circle once more, addressing the furniture. “Don’t think for one minute that you can get away with this . . . this mutiny! Why, you,” he said, glaring at the sofa, “I know just exactly what you’re thinking. Don’t forget for a minute that you’d have to squeeze yourself through this door, and if we find you trying . . . Well! . . . You’d make a fine blaze, and the fireplace is right behind you!”
The two boys were delighted, but Betts was so young that, although she was intrigued, she was also frightened. And Agnes was almost ill with apprehension. Warren was giving the boys a way out of their predicament, but she noticed in her husband’s words the exact moment his voice inflated with unreasonable and zealous gusto. She had learned that these ebullient swings of mood often left Warren depleted in a way she couldn’t fathom but that frightened and eventually infuriated her. It was as if his spirit became unavailable to him, locked away from his own ability to temper it—and that he had been allotted a finite amount. When he overspent it, he paid the debt in long, bleak days and weeks with no reserve to tide him over.
On his eighth birthday, Claytor ended up with eight stitches to close the gash on his forehead, and Warren made much of that coincidence. “That’s your lucky number from now on,” he said to his son. In fact, Claytor still had a scar over his eyebrow, like a thin silver thread that was only visible if the light hit his face at a certain angle.
Agnes fell out of that gloomy memory straight into the immediacy of self-pity. She was still upset that Betts had believed that her mother would conspire against her. Agnes had so often been taken by surprise whenever one of her children’s grudges against her came to light. Most of all she was amazed that they vividly recalled moments that she didn’t believe had ever happened. In fact, just the morning after Betts’s wedding, Claytor had started breakfast before anyone else was up, but when he heard Julia suddenly begin that desperate sort of crying that signifies furious exhaustion, and then when Mary Alcorn’s voice floated downstairs in high-pitched indignation, he turned the gas off under the skillet of eggs he was scrambling and went to give Lavinia a hand.
He entered the kitchen once more with Mary Alcorn in tow just as Agnes was irritably scraping the eggs into the garbage. “That’s just a waste. You can’t start eggs, Claytor, unless you’re certain you won’t be interrupted,” she said briskly, clearly annoyed. She was in a terrible mood, and the crying set her teeth on edge. She would have given almost anything to have breakfast by herself.
But Claytor laughed. “Mother, you never change! It’s one of the few absolutes in my world these days. You remember when I brought home my long-division practice test from Miss Cotton’s class? I’d been sitting at the table working on it for about an hour—terrible! I was terrible at math. Not even good at simple arithmetic. And you took one look at my answer sheet and tore it into little bits. ‘It’s no use going on with something you’ve gotten wrong from the beginning,’ you said. I’ll never forget it. I sat down and started all over again. You were right. I was just getting more and more confused. Wronger and wronger,” he said in Mary Alcorn’s direction, smiling.
“Oh! Claytor! That’s not true! I would never have done anything like that in my life! How can you even imagine that happened? Why, it’s not . . . You couldn’t . . . It’s something you dreamed. I wouldn’t have been so mean.” Agnes was crushed. “Claytor, I was just going to start over with these eggs because they were scorched. They would have had that taste eggs get. Like burnt foam. That smell . . . I wouldn’t for the world have torn up your schoolwork.”
“Well, I turned out to be a whiz at long division,” he said. Mary Alcorn was pressing him to let her make toast in the pop-up toaster, and Agnes didn’t say anything more about it, but she didn’t believe that incident had ever happened. It hurt her feelings and mystified her that her children latched on to these ideas of her as a generally inept—often unkind—parent, as though she had bungled the whole business of being responsible for their lives, even though here they were, still thriving. Surely they understood the awful despair she had felt on behalf of any one of them when she couldn’t alleviate some misfortune that befell them.
Of course, Agnes did remember that she had sometimes been unfairly angry at the children, had often been frantic and desperate herself. She hadn’t been perfect in any way. But surely that was balanced out by how genuinely she had loved—did love—those children. Certainly by now it was clear to her children that any misdirected anger she had ever displayed toward them was one of the very things that plagued her with regret. Why, Dwight and Claytor had children of their own; at one time or another, Agnes had heard each of them lash out unfairly at one or the other of those little girls, and of course Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn would grow up knowing their fathers had always only wished them well.
The thing that Agnes failed to grasp, however, was that what might have seemed like nothing at all to her—an inadvisable cross word, a brief spell of unsuppressed anger—had often pierced the armor of one of her children at a particularly vulnerable moment. Agnes didn’t remember that anyone’s memories of childhood are exactly like the first appearance of dandelions each spring. Agnes was always delighted to glance out the window and see the grass studded with the overnight emergence of the brilliant gold asterisks embedded in the lawn. But year after year, she failed to temper that initial gladness with the knowledge that those cheerful yellow buttons strewn across all of Scofields would grow tall and leggy, would become unappealing whiskery white globes that drifted off in the slightest breeze, leaving their thin, watery-pink stems tall and naked against the grass. They were simple weeds, after all, and it was impossible to know if or where any of their feathery seeds would take root.
I
N EARLY JUNE, Robert was to take part in a symposium at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore: André Gide, Richard Blackmur, Benedetto Croce, and a few others, including Robert’s great friends Red Warren and Allen Tate, had agreed to participate in a discussion of the nature of criticism. Robert planned to go from there to Bloomington, Indiana, where he would be involved in discussing the future of the Harcourt Lees School of English. The three-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation had expired, and Robert had been entertaining an invitation from Indiana University not only to relocate the School of English but also to accept a tempting offer himself, which would allow him far more time for his own work.
Lily decided not to go with him. The Tates had visited right after Christmas, and she felt no obligation to see them so soon again, and she certainly didn’t want to influence Robert’s decision about the job at Indiana. She didn’t know anything about Bloomington, Indiana, and she thought the best thing she could do was to have no opinion about it one way or another. Besides, Lily had been thinking that the month of June might be the perfect time to open the house in Maine, which the Scofield family had rented for years and finally bought from Lily’s great friend Marjorie Hockett. Marjorie and Lily had remained close friends since they first met at Mount Holyoke, and Marjorie had held on to—and still summered in—her parents’ handsome old house in Port Clyde, Maine. Lily was very much in the mood for a dose of Marjorie’s vinegary charm. “Agnes and I could go up for a few weeks,” she said to Robert. “Jesser Grammar closes mid-May this year because of the new cafeteria construction, so the timing would be perfect,” she added.
“I think the whole wedding business took the wind right out of Agnes’s sails. Betts being so sick. And then the rush to get everything done at the last minute,” Lily went on. “And with little Julia at that cranky stage. . . . Why, you know, we could take Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn. That would be nice for them. Nice for their mothers. Don’t you think it would give Agnes some time to recover before all this business coming up in July?” And Lily added that with both of them—and with some busywork for the little girls—along with whoever they could hire in Port Clyde to help them, she and Agnes could probably get the house opened up and sorted out before they came home for the increasingly elaborate Fourth of July and sesquicentennial celebrations.