The Truth of the Matter (7 page)

During their childhoods Agnes hadn’t encouraged the children to have pets of any kind, although there was always some sort of creature in residence. Ernie Mullins’s dog, though, was the first pet Agnes had ever chosen on her own. He came right along into the kitchen with her and briefly investigated the downstairs rooms, and she fed him the rest of the sardines mashed with some saltines and an egg.

About nine o’clock she put him outside, but ten minutes later he gave out one quick, anxious bark at the back door, and she let him in again. When she went upstairs to bed, he followed tentatively but determinedly behind her in an odd sort of crouch and with hesitant, nervous footing. Agnes watched him take the last two stairs up the staircase and was surprised that his effort left her choked up and teary-eyed. In all probability, she realized, he had never been up a staircase before, but she was baffled to find that idea touched off such an emotional response on her part. She left her door ajar, but after standing at the threshold for a moment and wagging his tail, Pup had the good manners to choose Claytor’s room just across the hall. He stretched out full length on the single bed against the wall.

Chapter Three

I
N THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Agnes was both embarrassed and irritated by the consternation awakened on her behalf because of the company of the dog. One evening Robert came over after supper to drop off the newspaper and her mail, and the dog stood between the two of them, canted across the sill as Agnes greeted Robert at the door.

“Move away, now, Pup!” Agnes admonished but without any spirit of command, and the dog stood his ground.

“I have to say, Agnes, that appears to be a mighty fine dog. He’s not going to let any strangers walk into this house.” Agnes relaxed her tense hold of the door and swung it wide to invite Robert in, and as soon as she gave an indication of welcome, the dog eased back and lay down in the hallway with his chin between his paws.

“Can you come in for a cup of coffee, Robert? I’ve just made some. Or would you like a drink?”

“I’d like that. A glass of that good sherry.”

“I’ve got Scotch and bourbon, too. Will brought it back from Cleveland.”

“Bourbon, then. Bourbon and just a splash of water. With ice if it’s not any trouble.” Robert handed her the paper and mail and a package wrapped in butcher paper.

Agnes led the way through the house with Pup close behind. “Lily’s off to her Ladies Aid meeting,” he said, “but she sent along what she tells me are very good soup bones she thought the dog might like.”

“She won’t want them herself? For soup?”

“Oh, I imagine Lily was very glad not to tackle it.”

Robert and Agnes smiled in mutual acknowledgment of Lily’s grudging, harried attitude toward cooking, for which, in fact, she had developed a real talent over the years of her marriage. “My mother always told me that a person would love the things he did well,” Lily had once said to Agnes, when they were putting up preserves in Lily’s steamy kitchen. “But it’s not true! It’s never been true for me, anyway. Not with mathematics and not with cooking.”

Robert took his place where he always sat, in the brown velvet curved-back rocking chair next to the radio, both of which Agnes had moved into the kitchen once she occupied all the rooms of the house by herself. She gave Robert his drink and poured another cup of coffee for herself. It was laced with chicory because of the shortages, and it was pungently acrid, but she had developed a passion for it, and it was all she could get, anyway. She savored the dry, clean, ashy feel of her mouth after she swallowed. Robert went through the little ritual of filling and lighting his pipe and settled back comfortably.

He shifted in the rocker as he reached for his drink and studied it a moment before he took a sip. “Lily and I have been wondering if it might not be hard for you to keep a dog with the food shortages. The rationing and so forth? It’s pretty safe around here, I believe. I wouldn’t think you’d have much need for a dog.”

Agnes was surprised. Will Dameron kept the houses of Scofields fairly well supplied from the farm with poultry and eggs and even a nice roast of pork or beef now and then, although Robert so disapproved of Lily accepting these gifts during rationing that Agnes became the conduit through which all sorts of things made their way into Lily’s household. And she and Lily had always put up plenty of fruit and vegetables from the garden Robert had tended with absorbed passion since long before the war began. In fact, one summer day she and Lily had been so engrossed in a two-handed game of canasta that, until they finished and moved from Lily’s screened porch into the kitchen, they hadn’t realized that the top had blown off the pressure cooker, plastering the ceiling and walls with bits of peeled tomatoes. But maybe Robert really didn’t know that Agnes had ample food for herself and one medium-size dog.

“Oh, the dog won’t make any difference. You know that! Not a bit. I always have leftovers.”

“Well, Agnes.” He sat at ease for a few moments, drawing on his pipe. “But a dog can be a good deal of trouble. They can get so attached to a person. You might find that he’ll want to follow along with you anywhere you go.”

“That’s true. That’s exactly what he did this morning. I felt like Mary and her little lamb! I didn’t even know he’d followed me, and I don’t have any idea how he got into the school. I suppose he slipped in behind one of the children. When he found me in the office, where I was turning in the midterm attendance . . . the evaluations, too, I had to explain to Mrs. Daniels that he’d had a bath before I even gave him breakfast. And that’s a good deal more than she could say for most of my pupils. But it was peculiar, Robert . . . he doesn’t want to play with the children. He didn’t even go outside with them at recess.” She was perplexed once more, as she remembered it. “Not even little Ernie Mullins. You know that family? They live down toward the end of May Street? They’re moving in a few days. He was Ernie’s dog, you see. But Ernie didn’t even seem to notice the dog was in the classroom. Well, Ernie’s not very noticeable himself. He doesn’t have much character . . . or substance, I guess I’d say. To tell you the truth, there’s not much to Ernie one way or another. He’s not any trouble. In fact, I have to remind myself to call on him now and then. Oh, I always have a child or two like that. Transparent children. I really think the dog wasn’t attached to that family a single bit. He just came right away with me without any sort of persuasion. Just came along as if he’d been expecting to go somewhere.”

They both glanced over at Pup, who was watching them talk about him with his ears flat back in entreaty, and who thumped his tail and looked out from under his brow imploringly.

Robert had done the best he could. Lily had charged him with persuading Agnes to return the dog to wherever it had come from or at least to give it to a family with children. “I’m afraid it will end up running wild around Scofields,” Lily had said at breakfast. “I don’t know what’s the matter with Agnes. Except for her horses when she used to ride . . . I never thought she had any patience for animals. Pets. I can’t imagine why she brought that dog home. It’s not like her. She’s never been . . . You remember it was always Warren who was bringing home some pet or other. I always thought it was the only time Agnes ever was really annoyed with him. Well, angry. But he always thought it would be wonderful for the children. And then he’d be off traveling and Agnes would end up dealing with one disaster after another. Why would she borrow trouble for herself?”

Robert had agreed with her. Agnes was a practical woman; she never struck him as sentimental. But after another drink and a comfortable, wide-ranging conversation in Agnes’s company, Robert thought he had said all he could say about the dog within the bounds of good manners.

After Robert went home, Agnes lit the last cigarette she would allow herself for the day and savored the little shiver of guilt that accompanied that first, lovely inhalation. She hadn’t made much of an objection when first Dwight and then Claytor had taken up smoking; all the college boys seemed to smoke. But she and Betts had had tearing arguments about it when Betts—still in high school—brazenly sat with her brothers, casually holding her own cigarette.

“No nice girls smoke, Betts! You have no idea how you look. I know you think you’re as glamorous as anything, but you just look . . . cheap!” Which wasn’t exactly how Betts looked; it was more that she looked silly, but Agnes would never be so cruel as to tell her so. Betts started smoking when she was still awkward, her elbows sharp angles, her collarbone too prominent. She looked like a student in a school play pretending to be a woman who smoked as she gestured exaggeratedly with her cigarette, and Agnes was embarrassed for her. “Why would you want people to think of you as fast?”

“Mother, I swear to you I’m not going to disgrace the family! I won’t run off with the milkman or turn into a home wrecker. I’m almost eighteen years old. I should be allowed some privacy in my own life. And don’t think I don’t know that you throw away my cigarettes whenever you can find them! Don’t think I don’t know that!”

Agnes was always caught trying to save Betts from herself and then being shocked at Betts’s ease in confronting her. Shocked at Betts’s utter failure ever to accede gracefully to anything at all Agnes might say. It was clear to Agnes that often Betts debated an idea with her that, had it been put forth by Dwight or Claytor, or either one of the Butlers, Betts wouldn’t even have remarked upon. It was hurtful, and when Betts accused her mother of confiscating her cigarettes, Agnes had merely lifted her head slightly and pressed her lips together in an expression of exasperation.

She hadn’t thought she owed Betts any answer in the face of such rudeness, but, in fact, Agnes never threw those cigarettes away; she simply thought that if they were out of Betts’s sight, they would also be out of Betts’s mind. At first Agnes only hid them in a hatbox in her closet with the vague idea that she would return them to Betts eventually. Then she had taken to smoking a cigarette now and then when she couldn’t sleep, or when her students had been especially tiresome that day in school, or just to relax after having the whole family to Sunday dinner. Usually she would stand at her window in the dark, but sometimes she would steal a moment in broad daylight, slipping from the kitchen out to the shed, or strolling along the alley beyond the hedge at the bottom of the garden.

Lily smoked, and no one thought twice about it. When Robert remarked once that smoking might be bad for her health, reminded her that the doctor had warned her of “smoker’s cough,” Lily, of course, pointed to the fact that he smoked a pipe himself. And she always said airily that she never inhaled, anyway, that she just enjoyed the opportunity to do nothing; she liked the excuse of a cigarette. “It’s one of the greatest pleasures of life!” she said. And Agnes had no real reason to hide her own habit of smoking, except that she would lose the high ground in her ongoing struggle with Betts, and Agnes also truly savored her surreptitious and inconsequential rebellion.

With the house empty, though, Agnes had no need of any subterfuge. Pup sprawled on his back under the kitchen table, and she poured herself another cup of coffee, sitting on in the kitchen for a little while, just leaning her head back against her chair, doing nothing at all for the time being but inhaling and exhaling.

Without ever discussing it between themselves, Agnes and Will fell into the habit of his arriving late at night at least two or three times a week and staying over. Either he left before dawn, so that no one would notice his car, or he waited until midmorning and delivered freshly dug new potatoes or a nice plucked hen to the Drummonds’ house, too, across the square, and no one thought anything about his comings and goings. Pup no longer barked when he heard Will come in the back door after the Scofield houses appeared to be shut up for the night. Lily had said to Agnes once that Will was the sort of man you only had to look at to know he liked dogs—to know that he liked animals, liked children. There was something about his ease within his own body; he moved with confident efficiency, no nervous hesitations. Agnes was always glad to see him, and he always had a treat in his pocket for Pup.

Agnes had been surprised to discover that in her early forties she experienced the same full-fledged lust that she had during her marriage, but she was far less concerned about Will’s opinion of her. She never bothered to pretend anything with Will. In fact, some of the most sensual moments in her life were those she spent smoking a cigarette with Will while they were both still lazy and sated with sex. Or just before he touched her, as she undressed, when she insisted that she wanted just a moment to relax—it was mysteriously thrilling to her to light a cigarette while wearing nothing more than her plain white slip. And thrilling to him, too, even though he didn’t approve of women smoking.

Once, when she had finished taking her hair down while sitting at her vanity and lit a cigarette before carefully unbuttoning her blouse and sliding it off onto the back of her chair, he had said she should at least come over and keep him company where he was stretched out on the bed. As soon as she was near enough, though, he slid his hand between her thighs and she stood still exactly like she was, with her feet slightly apart. He had held her there—long after her cigarette had dropped and burned a long scar in the floor—stroking her, but not letting her move toward him or away from him, and she had been near tears but also ecstatic by the time he released her. She was privately ashamed of her own arousal—which seemed wrong, somehow self-abasing, and she never got herself into that situation again, but she was helpless against the memory of it.

Agnes enjoyed sex with Will, and she enjoyed his company in the evenings well enough, but she was distressed more than she allowed herself to say when he began talking about getting married. In fact, she was surprised at the depth of her own consternation. She had made a light supper and they were sitting together at the table in the kitchen, taking their time over coffee and listening to the news, the first time he brought it up.