Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (20 page)

“…you do have an unusual sense of responsibility, Catherine—infinitely stronger than Jen's was…” As though Jen had been frivolously irresponsible in dying, as Aunt Catherine had so often implied.

“…as you know, there are many people I could appoint as their guardian, but…”

“…But after all, Walter, who would
care
as much as a blood relative?”

“Exactly my point, Catherine. Naturally, I hope Lucresse will be of age at the time, but if she isn't…”

“Walter, you know you can count on me to take care of them.”

“There'll be money, and goods. You won't have to worry about the financial aspect of it…”

“Oh, I
thought
so, Walter! With all the stuff you have—and one thing I must say, Walter Briard always took care of his children
financially
!” She was already talking of him in the past tense!

Another time—

“…you're sure Joe wouldn't mind if they stay with you during vacations from school?”

“Why, of course not, Walter! When I think of all these years, with me coming to visit you, and not once you all staying over with
us
…”

He told her the name of the man at his bank, who would be the executor of his estate. From among the people he hadn't yet looked up, he gave her the name of the one who would be his lawyer from now on. On only two scores did he run into any criticism from her.

He had never carried any insurance—he had considered his merchandise a form of insurance—and now it was too late in life for him to hope to buy a policy at a decent premium. She said she
thought a man—not necessarily him, but any man—who didn't carry insurance from the second he got married was seriously inconsiderate.

Then, though apparently she wasn't fazed by the thought of “the inevitable,” as she referred to it, she put her hands over her ears when he arranged over the telephone, in a steady, somewhat ironic tone, for his own cremation.

When Aunt Catherine said good-bye to us, she threw her arms around my father as though she would never see him again, and in a frenzied burst of emotion, expressed a sentiment to Ben and me that she'd never voiced before: “Remember, you have a wonderful father. He wants to care for you from his grave…I mean, from…well, just remember that, children.”

Ben and I were frantic. “He's
got
to talk to us about it,” Ben said. “We've listened to what he had to say long enough.”

We cornered him in the library. His satchel was open at his feet and he was looking at an unset diamond he held with pincers. A jeweler's loupe was in his eye.

“This one won't bring as much as the Peddicord, but in some ways, it's more beautiful,” he said, dropping his glass into his hand. “However, it'll probably be enough to put you through college, Ben. And there are two more that'll pay your tuition, Lucresse.”

“I only want to go to college two years; then I'm going to drama school. I've told you that,” Ben said.

“Drama school costs money too, unless you don't have any or you're a genius.”

“Maybe I'm a genius.” Ben smiled. “What makes you think you're going to die?”

“You
feel
all right,” I said firmly.

“Sit down, both of you. Anyone can die. Everyone does.” He acted as if this were a comforting fact. “I must make provisions for you in case you're not old enough to make them for yourselves. That's all.”

“You
do feel
all right?” I said—this time a question.

My father grew impatient. “Yes, I
feel
all right.”

“But I don't
like
your provisions,” Ben said. “It may be all right for Lucresse, but I don't want to stay with Aunt Catherine, ever.”

“It's not all right for me either,” I said.

“There isn't anyone else,” my father offered quickly. “She's right. I, and you, suffer from a lack of consideration on my part. I should have thought of this years ago and found someone better suited. But I didn't. I didn't think of myself as dying, the way young people don't. But let's be charitable, to me. Perhaps I'm more of a case of arrested development than lack of consideration.”

He seemed so self-satisfied about it that I was angry. “You're not going to die soon; there's no reason you should. And we're not going to Aunt Catherine, ever!” I said.

“I hope you're right.” He stuck his glass back up under his eyebrow.

Ben and I left the library. We were nowhere near the right path in our mutual search for escape from impending disaster.

Over the following weeks, Ben, my father, and I wrote a long collective letter to Fred about all of our house help, all of the problems, and all of our longings (at least, that part, I did, even though Ben told me that under
no
circumstances should I tell Fred I missed him so bad that it hurt). Fred wrote back—in a not displeased mood—that he was well, but getting accustomed to feeling tired, and that we should not despair finding suitable help since “you Briards need a bit of getting used to.” He also said, in the letter's sole sad passage, that
he
was so used to us that his most arduous task was getting used to life without us.

Every few weeks after that, one of us wrote to him, and Fred's answers indicated that he was indeed gradually adjusting to life without us; he had come to love his sister's flower boxes and his slow, same walk to the village every twilight.

I became fifteen soon after entering Winding Hill High School. I thought of having a party, though it would be retrogressing toward the dim past. So I decided not to. I was being distant with the girls I knew and sacrosanct with the boys—perhaps a delayed reaction to my last date with Arthur. It felt as if I had always been fifteen going on sixteen, but I didn't really look forward to becoming sixteen. It was the future, and I was afraid to expect.

In one week, my father, who had never visited a doctor in my memory,
kept voluntary appointments with three—a heart specialist, an ophthalmologist, a dentist. They found his heart, eyes, and teeth in unusually excellent condition for a man of seventy. The teeth man wanted to write up a detailed history of his eating and brushing habits. My father rejected the idea, but his mood of resignation didn't change.

He became selling-happy. The inferior Cellini tray disappeared. The French tapestry came down off the wall for good. A small marble Madonna he'd always cherished vanished from its pedestal.

Ben took to lifting barbells. The Winding Hill gym teacher had decreed that he was too light for the second-string football squad, and Ben was concerned about the possibility of someday being called upon to play a football player. But he was even more concerned and enthusiastic about learning to “throw away” lines, an acting technique of delivering dialogue that was new to him, but a favorite with his new Winding Hill after-school speech teacher.

One afternoon, I was in my room doing homework and wondering if I'd been too inflexibly aloof since moving to Winding Hill—I didn't yet have a best friend and couldn't be counted among the most popular girls who didn't resort to best friends—when my reflection was interrupted by my father calling me, to meet a visitor.

Mrs. Virginia Welch Loder. Soft gray hair that looked blue in the late afternoon sunset shining in the windows from across the river. Narrow oval fingernails. She used her hands gracefully and a lot. Her father had built this house—a house that, we learned, had exchanged owners several times since Mrs. Loder had married and moved away from Winding Hill. Her blue-gray eyes shone when she spoke of her father, her calm voice modulated with pleasure. She was delighted to meet me, hoped that her daughter, Louise, who was a
lovely
girl too, and I would become good friends now that, after her husband's recent death, she and Louise had come home to Winding Hill. They
had the little “Hunter” house, and Mrs. Loder smiled at the idea that she, a Welch, was now newer in Winding Hill than we were.

We showed her through the house. Everything about her drew me and made me sorrowful. She knew her way more surely than I. My room had been hers through her child- and girlhood, and her eyes roaming over it made it seem rightly hers still.

Ben came home. The four of us chatted in the living room. Hubert turned on a faucet in the kitchen and embarrassment filled my heart. No doubt the plumbing had been more polite when she'd lived here—her father wanted everything to be so “right” for her and her mother.

My father asked about her husband. Had he posed such a question to Aunt Catherine—even about a husband of a friend of her friend—she wouldn't have spared a detail of retching or muscular ineptitude in a clinical account of his demise. Mrs. Loder barely sighed—it was more an extended exhalation—and said, “We were lucky. He didn't have time to get used to being an invalid. There was one stroke—and then the other.”

She then turned the subject to my father. She was glad it wasn't necessary for him to travel to and from the city every day—the wearing routine of so many Winding Hill men. Such a shame. Winding Hill was created to enjoy. If a man saved one disease-ridden tree on his property, wasn't he doing something more worthwhile than he'd do in an average business day in an office? She had to go, but she emphatically told us how glad she was to have come and what a
lovely
time she'd had. She shook hands warmly with all of us, and we all looked warmly understanding.

“She's like a lost little girl,” said my father, “who's finally found home, and found she can't go in.”

I knew, and hoped, that wasn't the last we'd see of Mrs. Loder.

Making no sense at all, Ben said, “Yes, she's naïve. Not like Felicity.”

Felicity. The thought of her filled my heart with lovingness, pushing
out all the pity I'd been feeling for Mrs. Loder. Though I hadn't seen Felicity in a long while, she was instantly real—as real as if she were in the room with Ben and my father. Felicity. She might as well have been standing beside me, whispering in my ear. “Caution,” she said. Sometimes she made as little sense as Ben. “Caution,” I heard again in the place behind my eyes where she had once seen me. Why? No caution was necessary with Felicity. Anybody could tell from half a block away that her hair was an artifice. All her artifices were blatantly apparent, so you knew what was what. “Caution,” I heard again. And this time I thought of the pretty blue glints in Mrs. Loder's hair in the sunset. One had to look hard to see that it wasn't real. And Mrs. Loder's gladness about us—did one have to look hard at that, too?

“There's only one thing about her that bothers me,” I said. “Everybody she knows is ‘lovely.' ”

My father's reprimand was immediate. “As I recall, she didn't say that about more than three or four people, and you were one of them, Lucresse.”

“But I wouldn't call more than two people I've met in my whole life ‘lovely.' That's all.”

His voice reverberated the way it did other times in my defense. “Maybe, Lucresse, you don't look for the goodness in people. I have no reason to suspect that Mrs. Loder herself is anything other than lovely. One of the most realistic, sensible,
feeling
people I've met in
my
whole life, which has been a little longer than yours.”

“I didn't mean anything against her exactly.”

“Then exactly what did you mean?' ”

“Just that, well,
everybody
can't be lovely. Do you think
I'm
lovely, Ben?”

“No,” Ben said, as I was sure he would.

“I don't think so, either, right now,” my father huffed. “You have no
cause to criticize a woman who's shown us nothing but friendliness. And remember, she's had sorrow, and she's alone.”

I wanted to say those were not good enough reasons for me to be convinced she was lovely, but I didn't dare.

Ben tried to placate us both. “I don't see why you're arguing. She's a nice woman. We hardly know her.”

But we got to know her better, quite fast it seemed. My father invited her for tea a few days later, and now they were calling each other Virginia and Walter. She couldn't bear the thought of him taking the village taxi to the station and the train to New York when he went. Several times she picked him up and drove him to the station; several times he accepted her offer to drive him all the way to the city, and they spent long days together. She suggested, with her smooth hand on my shoulder, that I call her Ginny. “Thank you,” I said, for want of another reply, and held back the “Mrs. Loder.”

“And do promise me you'll look up Louise in school,” she said.

Louise was in the other junior group and I'd not met her yet.

“Sometimes Louise is a trifle shy about making new friends. She hasn't moved around as much as you. I must get you girls together.”

Dutifully, I did seek out Louise Loder the next noon. I asked her homeroom teacher to point her out to me in the cafeteria. She resembled her mother, in height and small features, but her hair was brown and her stance wholly opposite: shoulders held as though to guard her caved-in chest, buttocks shoved under so that the abdomen thrust outward. She was thin, especially thin-legged, but she walked as if she were made of iron from the hips down. She was wearing a tweed skirt, a fussy blouse, ankle socks, and low, dirty sneakers. I expected her voice to be hard to hear. Instead, it was quite loud and little nasal.

“I'm Lucresse Briard,” I told her. “Your mother is a friend of my family's.”

“You mean Walter Briard?”

“Yes. He's my father.”

“She's his friend, all right.”

In spite of her rather curt way of accepting my introduction, I felt that she didn't object to me. Her way was just more direct than most girls'. I didn't like or dislike her. Her directness was intriguing.