The Truth of the Matter (20 page)

Agnes hurried after her, but Mary Alcorn was at the front door by the time Agnes recovered and reached the landing, where she stopped and realized she was standing barefooted and wearing nothing but her nylon slip. By the time the little girl had wrestled with the latch of the front door, she was hopping from one foot to another in terror and emitting frantic little bleats of fear.

“Mary Alcorn? Mary Alcorn? Honey! It’s just me! Sweetheart . . .”

But by then Mary had managed to pull the big door open enough so that she slid through, and she sustained a sirenlike sound of alarm as she ran across the grass toward the group of people still gathered on the lawn. The Drummonds’ grandchildren were playing some loud game, and the adults weren’t distressed by Mary Alcorn’s sudden shriek once they glanced around and saw that no one was imperiled. But Mary ran full-throttle toward her father, who was turned away from her, and finally she threw her arms around his knees, too winded to make another sound. He automatically bent to scoop her up while he was still talking, and he braced her beneath her knees in the crook of his arm. He turned his head to smile at her, and she looked straight into a face that was not Claytor’s. It was not her father! She was too appalled even to exclaim, because this man moved like her father, bent toward her in exactly the same way her father did, and his eyes and his hair were exactly like her father’s. Mary understood then that something had shifted in the world, and she went limp, simply dropping her head against the man’s shoulder.

And, as it happened, Dwight Claytor was more than happy to shoulder the temporary burden of Phillip Alcorn’s little daughter. The Alcorns were cousins of his on his mother’s—Catherine Claytor’s—side, and he and Phillip had found themselves stationed together briefly in Texas. In fact, it was Dwight who had urged Claytor to look up Lavinia after Phillip had been killed in a car accident on the base.

Claytor smiled and reached out to take Mary Alcorn, whom he had noticed racing toward them apparently rejuvenated, full of energy. Claytor wrapped Mary Alcorn in both arms, and she didn’t resist. “Good Lord, Dwight! Scofields is brimming with babies,” he said, gesturing with a tip of his head toward Trudy and Lavinia, both obviously pregnant, who were standing together talking. “We’ve got to be careful. We’re like a bunch of rabbits! Pretty soon there’ll be a Scofield under every bush.” Dwight nodded and smiled. The atmosphere within the Scofield compound on that hot, hot day was heavy with fecundity. Claytor carried Mary Alcorn off toward the house so he could give her a bath before dinner, now that she seemed to have recovered from their long trip.

Chapter Eight

J
UST IN THAT SHORT BIT OF TIME she stood watching Mary Alcorn’s back receding down the stairs, watched her struggle frantically with the heavy door and make her escape, Agnes’s notion of where she fit in the world swung around full circle. As she turned back toward her bedroom, passing through the shaft of sunlight falling through the high window, the new status of her own life clarified itself: She was the custodian of her children’s frame of reference; she was the keeper of the house; she alone was the authority on the nature of her children’s childhood. The idea her children had of who they were was partly in her hands. She neither desired nor shied away from that role; she merely recognized it.

What on earth was she doing, then, in light of her matriarchy, carrying on with Will Dameron? He simply didn’t belong anywhere in the context of the definition of Warren and Agnes Scofield’s family. He was still in bed, half sitting, with his arms crossed behind his head and a rueful smile aimed in her direction. Agnes sat down on the vanity bench and peered at herself in the mirror, beginning the task of working a comb through the tangle of her hair. She didn’t have a thing to say, and Will’s smile faded. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and began to get dressed.

“You’ll have to wait till I’m outside before you leave, Will. And then please go out the side door in the sitting room,” she said. “No one ever uses that door, and it only opens onto that little path beside the hedge.”

“You know there wasn’t anything going on to scare that little girl,” Will said, and Agnes nodded her head and made a hum of agreement around the hairpins she held between her teeth, but she didn’t turn around and address Will. She concentrated on her hair, which was still damp at the roots with sweat. She was merciless in straightening and clamping it at the back of her neck, but her bangs were still not long enough to be held back, and they settled over the front of her head and her forehead in a curly pouf. Once more, as she regarded herself, she resolved never, never again to allow anyone else to cut her hair. She could always do a better job herself, despite Lily’s opinion, and it was Lily’s hairdresser who had left Agnes feeling that she looked like a clipped poodle. When she had said so to Lily, Lily hadn’t even disagreed.

“Oh, my goodness,” Lily had said, moving around Agnes to see the cut from all sides. “Well, it was only that I thought it would be easier for you. . . . And, really, Agnes, your hair grows so fast . . .”

When Agnes was satisfied that she had done the best she could, she turned around on the bench and gazed at Will, who had pulled on his pants but was bare-chested. She suppressed her impatience at the inefficiency of the way Will always got dressed, although she had so often wanted to tell him to—for goodness sake—put his shirt on first. Dwight and Claytor and Howard, at least when they were little boys, and Warren as long as she’d known him, had all followed exactly the same illogical procedure, but today she found it maddeningly unforgivable.

When Lily had first read Freud and explained to Agnes the notion of penis envy, Agnes had just laughed. As close as Lily had been to Robert and Warren, she hadn’t grown up with brothers, hadn’t had sons, and had never been aware of the anxiety that overtakes a little boy at about age three or four when he suddenly becomes conscious of the external vulnerability of his own genitalia. Agnes had assumed that her brothers—whether they ever considered it or not—would have envied the elegant efficiency of her own discreet interior arrangement. Perhaps, then, a naked man would feel more secure getting his pants on before worrying about the rest of himself, before even remembering that he would have to tuck his shirt in.

“I really want you to leave, Will. I mean, I want you to go home. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking.”

“Ah, God, Agnes. That’s ridiculous. Why don’t we just get married?”

“I’d never marry you, Will. It wouldn’t really work out. I’ve thought about it, and we’ve been over all this before. And, really, Will, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this afternoon I’d be so much more comfortable if you’d go home.”

“I don’t see why you’re so mad. All right. This afternoon was my fault, and it was a bad idea. I’m sorry. I am sorry. But you’re acting like it’s the end of the world. Like you never want to see me again. You’ve blown this all out of proportion, and you’re making a mistake.”

“I never do want to see you again, but I just hadn’t realized it,” Agnes said. She glanced up at Will and realized how unkind she sounded. “Oh, I don’t mean I never want to
see
you again. Of course we’ll see each other all the time. But all this . . . this is just over, Will.”

Will himself was suddenly angry. “All right. I’ll go. I’ll certainly go. But I’m not going to hide out up here and sneak away. Explain it any way you want to, Agnes, if anyone sees me. I don’t think you understand how much I care about you. How much you care about me. I don’t think you’re in any state of mind right now to make this kind of decision.” But by then he was dressed, and he didn’t storm out of the room; he simply walked down the stairs, out the kitchen door and drove out Coshocton Road, past his old house and up the long drive to the handsome old farmhouse that had been built by Agnes’s grandfather. A few people had noticed Will leave. In fact, Betts had been in the kitchen when he passed through, but no one thought twice about it among all the comings and goings of so many people in and out of the house.

There was a certain spot in Agnes’s bedroom, between the bed and the tall desk with its glass-doored bookcase, where, in the summer, the light from the bay window fell a certain way, and where—early in the morning, or if she’d napped in the afternoon—she often found herself standing stock-still, looking out at the yard as if she were watching scenes from novels through the window panes. It was a trancelike state from which she would emerge slowly, reorienting herself to the real world after a momentary lapse in which all but the most basic self-consciousness fell away. In the moment itself she had no thoughts at all. She thought of these small fugues as being slippery wisps of time, empty of context, that now and then enshrouded her, reducing her to her essential self—entirely unaware of time or place. She was only alive; she was no one’s daughter, no one’s wife, no one’s sister, no one’s mother, although even those non-connections were merely a way she could understand or describe the sensation after the fact.

She had been subject to these short-lived spells as far back as she could remember; they weren’t alarming to her anymore, but as she came back into the world, everything had a flattened look; even light and air seemed to exist as flat parallelograms. Everything she saw seemed only to be images moving across a wavering screen. For just a little while people and objects were familiar to her but lacked dimension.

Warren had been fascinated. “It must be like just being born,” he said. “Maybe it’s a memory of being born. Or maybe of before you were born. Sorting out how you became aware. Of when you first started to compare one thing with another. I am this; I am not that. I’ve never had a feeling like that. I’ve had the feeling of walking into a place I know I’ve never seen before and being convinced that it’s familiar. I’ll discover that I have an intense memory of a place I know for a fact I’ve never been. Even the smell, the colors. Déjà vu. I’ve had that happen twice that I remember, but never any state as . . . unlimited as what you’re describing.”

The afternoon of this Fourth of July 1947, however, when she realized she had momentarily been caught up in just such a spell, she came back to the moment with her hand still clutching the spring-loaded window shade that she had coaxed upward. She looked out at the people shifting about in the yard below, and it was exactly like looking at a glossy page of an expensive book depicting people enjoying themselves on a summer day. It seemed to her that the scene must have come from something she’d read—not seen before but deeply known to her. Maybe that poem of Robert’s about Sweetwater. Children under trees. And adults as well, floating over the grass, the shirts and dresses and pants far more discernable in the ebbing light than the features of the people who wore them. Or she could be witnessing a bit of life that had already happened in this very place, with Dwight and Claytor and Betts playing out under the towering, trembling catalpa trees. Trudy and Howard as well. Only rushing inside now and then to get a glass of water.

Warren had often taken Dwight and Claytor along to his office on a Saturday morning when they were three or four years old to pick up the mail or on some other errand, and the little boys would telephone her from the offices of Scofields & Company, although Warren dialed the number.

“May I speak to Mrs. Scofield, please,” came a shy voice when she answered the ring.

“Yes. This is she,” Agnes would answer in her telephone voice.

“This is me, Mama.”

“Oh? I hope you’re well today. But I’m very sorry to tell you that I think you must have the wrong number. I don’t believe I know anyone by the name of ‘Me.’”

There would be a moment of excited laughter and solemn conferences on the other end. “No, Mama. This is your son. Claytor Scofield.”

“Oh, well! Hello, Claytor. How nice to hear from you. How old are you now? Let me see. . . . Yes, you must be thirty-five years old by now. Are you married? Are you calling me from far away? Are you phoning me from California? You sound so far away. Is the weather nice where you live?”

“I’m not married. No! Mama! I’m not thirty-five! I’m not in California!” And then Dwight might take the phone.

“How are you, Mama? This is Dwight Claytor. We aren’t in California.”

“Oh, no? Well, you do sound awfully far away. Are you in Kissimmee, Florida? Or Joliet, Illinois? Are you calling me from Kalamazoo, Michigan? Or maybe Damariscotta, Maine? Oh, I know! I bet you’re calling from Natchitoches, Louisiana.”

“Nooo! Mama! Why are you saying that? We aren’t anywhere! We’re here, Mama. How are you today?”

“Well, I tell you, it’s surprising that you should ask me that just now, Dwight. Because I’m really not feeling a bit well. I’m awfully weak and shaky.”

That would be met with baffled silence, and then Agnes would carry on. “I was just going to call your father to see if he could stop and buy some ice cream. And maybe some chocolate syrup. Maybe even half of one of the small cakes from the bakery if they’ve got cake today. I think that would be just the thing to put me back on my feet. But I don’t know where your father is. I’m afraid he must be lost somewhere. I had thought that maybe some cake and ice cream —”

“— and whip cream!” Dwight would interject.

“Oh, yes. That would be exactly what I need. But I don’t know where your father’s got to, so I guess I’ll see if castor oil is any help. I feel very strange.”

“No! Mama! Don’t take castor oil! It’s horrible. It never makes you feel better. I know where Daddy is.”

“But Dwight, you’ve never had castor oil. It might be just the pick-me-up I need.”

He was quiet for a moment, considering the truth of this. “Don’t take castor oil, Mama. It smells horrible. I know where Daddy is . . .”

“I’m so glad to hear that. Castor oil does smell bad. I’d much rather have ice cream.”

“— right here! He’s right here.”

Warren, though, had been there so short a time in their lives. So short a time in her own life. She stood looking out the window and realized that by now she had been without Warren longer than she had been with him, but that bit of her life was more vivid to her than when she recounted something that happened the day before yesterday. She thought that was probably because within the twelve years of her marriage to Warren, she had unknowingly been at the very heart of the slow swirl of her lifetime, awash in sensations that she had never had before. New babies. Unimagined and indescribable passions and joy and fear and despair. For those years she had been at an emotional extreme on every front; she had been fervent in every direction, and in retrospect she found the idea of her younger self exhilarating. She had often been filled with conflicting passions.