The Truth of the Matter

by Robb Forman Dew

  Betts had been taller than all of her friends during most of high school, and she had been angular and extravagant in her movements, her broad gestures, her long strides across a room. She had been an awkward girl, careening around Washburn as though she were herding her group of petite friends as they moved around town in a cluster. Trudy Butler was probably Betts’s closest friend, and Trudy was considered very attractive, although Agnes had never thought she was particularly pretty. Trudy was small and dark-haired, with a complicated, pointed face which was serenely composed. Her emotions didn’t fly across her features the way they did across the faces of all the other Scofields. All of Betts’s friends were pert and vivacious, seeming even lovelier than they were, in fact, simply because of all the possibilities ahead of them. Betts could never be pert. Her gestures were wide and bony; her voice ungirlish, with a steely note running straight through her sentences, grounding her words in the category of drama rather than flirtation.

  Agnes had worried about her, but Betts never seemed to care about her popularity one way or another; she was doted on by Dwight and Claytor—who were referred to as the “Tarleton twins” by all those friends of Betts’s who had crushes on them, after the loutish but handsome young brothers in Gone with the Wind who rushed heedlessly off to war. Trudy objected to that. “The Tarleton twins were just dolts!” Trudy said. “Handsome, but stupid and coarse. That’s not a thing like Dwight and Claytor!” Trudy always rose to the bait, but Betts just laughed and let it go, since it was teasingly meant as a compliment.

  All through high school Betts was at the center of whatever was going on, and if there was no particular boy paying attention to her, it was true that all the boyfriends of the other girls liked and admired Betts. She was as talented an athlete as her aunt Lily had been, and she understood that games were never frivolous, which very few of the girls at school seemed to realize. And, too, she was witty and very smart, which always ensures popularity for anyone who is also endowed with some degree of social grace.

  But not long after she graduated from the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, Betts seemed to come into possession of her own height; she began to acquire synchronization. All of the separate parts of Betts suddenly fell into place. She was dramatic all of a sudden, with her blond hair and her characteristically Scofield large, dark brown eyes. She even appeared to move differently through the rooms of the house, across the yard—anywhere Agnes happened to catch sight of her. Everything about Betts’s gestures and expressions had always seemed larger than life, had seemed amplified, somehow. But what had once seemed awkward now seemed sinuous, like the oddly sensual overanimation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  In fact, once Betts knew she would be leaving for Washington, and word of her eventual departure spread, she was in great demand. She rarely had time to join Agnes for a drink before dinner; Betts had dates night after night and attended one farewell party after another for other friends who were departing. Agnes missed her daughter very much even before she left, and, simultaneously, Agnes wished Betts were already gone, because the two of them had fallen back into the habit of being exasperated with and prickly toward each other.

  Since there really wasn’t an extra penny, and she had a good bit of time on her hands, Agnes spent her evenings sewing what she considered a career girl’s wardrobe for Betts to take to Washington. Agnes had bolts of unused fabrics, some from as long ago as when they were her mother’s and even some she had inherited from her great-aunt Cettie. Wonderful material that was no longer available anywhere and that was a pleasure to work with. Agnes was a passionate seamstress, and since she was making these clothes as a gift, she took the liberty of making wardrobe choices for her daughter.

  She made two beautifully tailored suits for Betts. One a soft dove-gray wool and one of dark blue linen. Agnes took great pains to make the suits look like they had been bought at a fine dress shop. She knew about and even endorsed Betts’s worry of seeming unsophisticated, a country girl at large in the chaos of Washington. Agnes spent a great deal of time blocking the padded shoulders over a wood form and steaming the sleeves into a beautiful drape from the seam.

  “These are just amazing, Mama. I could never have found suits so well made anywhere. Or that ever fit me like this. But I’ll be about as colorful as a sparrow!”

  “Oh, well, Betts. With your blond hair . . . with your coloring! My mother always said that clothes should fit perfectly and show you off. That it shouldn’t ever be the other way around! Mama didn’t have a very happy life, you know . . . but she was famous for being so stylish. So beautiful. You remind me of her. She was tall and with blond hair, too. Well, of course, you’ve seen pictures. . . . But you have her look of . . . oh . . . of elegance, I guess. As if she were a member of some grand aristocracy. You’ve got that, too, Betts.”

  But Betts and her mother didn’t agree about clothes. Betts loved brilliant colors and any sort of exaggeration of a style. She was always coming home triumphantly with great bargains she had found. “Betts,” Agnes had said two weeks earlier, when her daughter came home with two pairs of open-toed, sling-back shoes—one pair a bright red leather and the other black patent—“the reason you can get these marked down so much is that no one else in Washburn would be caught dead in them. What I think . . . It just seems to me, Betts, that open-toed shoes are so . . . trashy!”

  But Betts’s enthusiasm remained unsquelched. The Saturday afternoon that Agnes had finished running up a simple pattern for Betts of a navy sailor-type dress with a white collar and red piping, Betts was overjoyed when she tried it on. “I’ll wear this tonight!” She turned sideways and was delighted at how the dress nipped in at the waist, flattering her figure and drawing attention to her long legs, since the dropped-waist skirt was cut on the bias and had a slight flutter at the hem when she walked. “I look wonderful in this,” she said. “Thank you, Mama! I love this dress, and we’re going out to the lake for a dance to see John Hart and Billy Oliver off.”

  “You do look pretty, Betts. You’ll leave a trail of broken hearts.” And Betts grinned because she knew it might be true. Not broken hearts, but a few crushes that some of the boys in Washburn had developed when all of a sudden they looked around and found that Betts Scofield was a beauty. She had always been around town, but all at once she was mysteriously glamorous.

  That evening, though, when Betts was dressing, she wailed from upstairs while Agnes and Howard were still at the dinner table. “My new red shoes! My new red shoes with the open toes! The sling-backs! Where have they gone? They aren’t anywhere! Oh, Mother!” And Howard and Agnes had exchanged a wary glance.

  “You’ve hidden them, Mother! Mama! I know you’ve hidden them!” But Agnes wondered how on earth Betts could ever find anything in her room. She was extravagantly untidy.

  “I won’t have you saying such things to me, Betts,” Agnes had said. But Betts searched the house in vehement indignation, even taking the cushions off the couch, looking on the high shelf in the broom closet. Agnes thought that the navy blue pumps Betts had worn to work would be much more suitable, anyway, although she knew better than to say so.

  Agnes cleared the table and scraped the plates while Betts searched up and down the stairs for those red shoes. The household had grown accustomed to weathering these scenes. And, to be fair, Betts was equally effusive when she was happy. Once, as Warren tried to restrain his three-year-old daughter, who was very nearly in a full-blown tantrum because she couldn’t open the heavy front door for herself, he had said to Agnes that Betts would grow up into an adult who would be genuinely surprised to realize that many people considered emotional restraint a virtue. He had made that remark, but he had made it with fond exasperation; he had adored Betts, had adored all the children.

  Betts finally appeared wearing her new dress and the respectable blue pumps, and she was so angry she didn’t look at her mother. “I know you’ve hidden those shoes, Mama. Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know that.”
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  Agnes had her hands in the dishwater, busy with the cups and saucers and dinner plates. She lifted her chin slightly, and her mouth was grimly set. She didn’t make any reply at all, and, just then, Hal Railsback arrived. He had been Betts’s favorite date for the last month or so, and Betts hurried to meet him at the door and leave the house before Howard invited Hal to come in.

  Howard carried the garbage out to the compost heap before he left on his own date for the evening, and Agnes didn’t even give a thought to that pair of red shoes, firmly wrapped in newspaper and at least three days buried under coffee grounds and orange peels. She couldn’t bear to let Betts make a fool of herself, but Agnes had conscientiously slipped the full cost of the shoes—not even the marked-down price Betts had paid for them—into Betts’s sequined evening bag. She would discover it when she went to the formal dance at the Eola Arms the following weekend. So, as it turned out, Agnes reasoned, Betts had profited from the situation.

  The morning of Betts’s departure had been predictably exhausting, and yet Howard and Agnes and Betts were all taken by surprise by the irritation each one felt at the other two by the time they got Betts packed and ready to go. Howard carried countless boxes downstairs and then was sent by Betts to retrieve them. Agnes tried to refold Betts’s freshly ironed clothes using tissue paper to prevent their wrinkling, but that had only served to send Betts into a frenzy of anxiety. How would she manage? Would she seem as green as grass with her homemade Washburn wardrobe?

  Agnes considered reminding Betts that she had declared she was going to Washington to help the war effort, to do her part. Betts had indulged herself in the idea of self-sacrifice. But Agnes knew that Betts’s attack of uncertainty and her desire to do her part in the drama of the time could certainly exist simultaneously, and she kept quiet. When Nancy Turner and her father finally arrived to collect Betts and her luggage, Betts and Agnes were both teary-eyed with dismay and frustration, and it was with some relief as well as sorrow that they embraced and said good-bye.

  Chapter Two

  IT SEEMED TO AGNES SCOFIELD that the children left home all at once. By the end of the school year of 1944, only Howard was still in Washburn, but he and several of his friends arranged to take courses straight through the summer in order to graduate by January of the following year. They, too, wanted to enlist before they were called up. Howard and his friends presented their eagerness to enlist as the lesser of two evils, the alternative to being drafted.

  The day after Christmas of 1944, when Agnes and Lily and Robert Butler saw Howard off on the afternoon bus to Columbus, where he would catch the train to Pennsylvania for basic training, Agnes came home to the empty house. She stood in the large center hall, taking off her hat and coat and gloves with an unnerving sense of being a tourist in her own home. Every familiar object upon which she cast her eye seemed to her as deceptively placed and misleading as if it had been arranged in a museum to illustrate an example, say, of a house in which Americans might have lived in the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

  Lily had invited her for supper, but Agnes had begged off, and about eight o’clock that evening she realized she had forgotten to eat anything at all. Finally she made a sandwich and carried it with her as she roamed the rooms, but there was nowhere in the house where she could remain settled. Something was amiss, and it awakened her vigilance. It was she who knew every nook and cranny of this house that had been built for her father-in-law, John Scofield, almost sixty years earlier. Ever since it had fallen under her care, she had made it her business to be on the lookout for evidence of its slow and inevitable decline, and then it was she who shored it up again, stopping any single bit of disintegration in its tracks. She tried to stay one step ahead; she tried to anticipate, but always there was unexpected deterioration nipping at her heels.

  She had the pulleys replaced, for instance, and all the weights rehung in every one of the forty-six window casements, even though at least half of them hadn’t yet broken. And while the carpenter was in the basement he had discovered a rotting bearing beam. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head in defeat even as he spoke. “Why, I just stuck this pencil all the way through. I’d been wondering why the things in that cupboard in the dining room shake so much. That corner of the floor’s not resting on a thing. Might as well be sitting on a matchstick. I think you folks shouldn’t walk anywhere around that north corner. That floor could let go anytime.”

  For almost a year Agnes directed everyone in the house to tread softly anywhere in the dining room, until she could afford to have the beam replaced. She found a fellow who could carve duplicates of the several rotting balustrades on the side porch, but he drew her attention to the fact that the latticework under the porch was in bad shape. She simply had to let it go for a while, and that winter, a family of skunks moved in, although they didn’t cause any trouble. She oversaw the mason who tuck-pointed the old brick around the chimney where ice had blown it apart. “This mortar . . . Well, look here!” the mason said to her. He dislodged a rain of sandy mortar between the bricks beneath the window to illustrate. “It’s not going to hold. Water’ll get in and then if we have a hard freeze . . .” He continued to displace the crumbling mortar with the end of his pencil.

  “Bert! Don’t let’s hurry it along!” Agnes said, and he stuck the pencil in his pocket and grinned in agreement. “I can’t afford to do a thing about it until after Christmas. Let’s hope the weather stays mild.” Agnes lived in a state of waiting for the next little bit of reconstruction to become necessary.

  “Mama, I think you’re just making all these things up—forty-six windows repaired!” Howard once joked. “I think there’s something going on. I think you have designs on one of those workmen.”

  “It certainly would be cheaper if I could just get one of them to marry me,” Agnes replied, but it was clear she wasn’t particularly amused. There was nothing much fun about the effort and expense of maintaining the house.

  So in that early dark of December 1944, she investigated the rooms—looked into the corners, put her hand against the limestone hearths of all the fireplaces to test for dampness, but everything seemed to be all right. She put on her boots and took a flashlight outside to see if the gutters had backed up, because something in the house was not right. Finally she retraced her steps, shining the beam along the foundation, but she found nothing at all remarkable. Once inside again, though, she was disturbed still more, and this time she narrowed in on an odd scent in the air. Almost like stale smoke; a little bitter, like ashes tamped down and extinguished, but with a peculiarly sweet overtone.

  She went up the stairs and into every room of all three floors, and then she realized that all through the house was the lingering odor of finally completed chores: clothes ironed, wool sweaters blocked and dried, then put away with moth balls, books packed up, shelves wiped down. It wasn’t the smell of a temporarily empty house, where there would be dirty clothes waiting to be laundered, oranges or apples left out for the taking, the oddly pleasant banana scent of shoe polish and brushes left lying by a bedroom chair, the medicinal odor—which Agnes always tasted as well as smelled—of fingernail polish remover. The clothes were clean and starched and ironed, the shoes polished, the fruit eaten, the books gone—what had caught Agnes’s attention was the vaguely sweet but sooty scent of her house from which the longtime occupants had permanently departed.

  That particular night it had been so new to Agnes that she had searched for its source. But for months her children’s absence manifested itself now and then through a waft of perfume from a drawer, closets that emanated a chilly drift of mothballs and damp wool. Even the scent of talcum from the nursery-cum-storage room occasionally wound its way through the upstairs hall and down and around two flights of stairs to startle Agnes as she was winding the tall clock in the front hall.

  About eight o’clock on New Year’s Eve 1944, Agnes realized that she had been sitting stone-still in the kitchen for almost an
hour with a bowl of tomato soup and a turkey sandwich on a plate in front of her. She set herself briskly into motion before self-pity could catch hold of her, pushing back her chair and hurrying to the hall to telephone Will Dameron. “I know I thought I would just have a quiet night, Will, but now I’m feeling awfully sorry for myself. I begged off supper and bridge with Lily and Robert, too. Is there any chance we can still see each other tonight? All I can offer you is some dry sherry to toast the new year, but it’s good dry sherry. I’ll tell you, the house feels enormous to me—so empty! I’d really like to see you. I’ve got dry wood in. I could get a nice fire going.”

  In the bay window of the chilly front parlor she sat and watched for his car, only allowing her thoughts to browse across the glistening yard, where the snow had melted in the morning’s sun and refrozen during the cloudy, windy afternoon into a pattern of flattened, overlapping waves. The tall trees lining the street had been painted white halfway up so that in blackout conditions drivers could see them, even with the top half of their headlights painted over. It had become a matter of civic pride that Washburn, Ohio, was one of the first targets the Germans would hit because of the production of Scofield engines, and the Civil Defense warden was very strict about even a sliver of unnecessary light escaping into the camouflage of darkness. Agnes couldn’t imagine how German planes were expected to reach Ohio, and Robert said it was just a way to keep up morale, to let people feel as though they were doing something useful.

  Gazing out the window, though, Agnes decided that it couldn’t have been the local Civil Defense warden who thought it would be a good idea to paint the trees. It must have been someone in a place where it never snowed who had come up with that notion, because, with the white ground beneath them, the trunks of the trees disappeared, and their leafless crowns seemed to be suspended spiderlike in the night sky. Will’s car pulled in, and even without lights the radiance of the snow illuminated him clearly as he bent to retrieve something from the backseat.