Agnes’s closest friend, Lucille Drummond Hendry, was visiting Washburn for Betts’s wedding, staying at the Drummonds’ house across the square, and she was finally able to make her way over to Trudy and Lavinia and the two little girls, who had both been stricken dumb with shyness. Martha buried her head in Trudy’s lap under direct scrutiny. Lucille smiled broadly at Lavinia especially, since she hadn’t yet met Claytor’s wife, and introduced herself. “My family didn’t move to Washburn until I was . . . oh . . . I guess I was about fourteen. It was just before Lily Scofield and Robert Butler got married. That wedding! The rose arbor . . . Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about it from everyone. But here are these two little girls! I remember when I got the news. When Agnes telephoned about these babies. I had to laugh,” she said.
“All of you people are born in batches,” Lucille teased both Trudy and Lavinia. “How on earth will we ever keep everyone straight? All born under a full moon or something,” she exclaimed delightedly, although she was struggling against nearly overwhelming remembrance and grief at having to endure one more celebration in the lives of her sisters’ or her friends’ children. Lucille hadn’t recovered from her daughter’s death during the war, although she went for days at a time, now, without thinking of it. Or, at least, without brooding over it, but only taking it into account as she went about an ordinary day. She smiled the smile of a sweet, still faintly pretty, rather daffy aunt, which was a role she had assumed unthinkingly so that her sisters and her friends wouldn’t pity her, and so that she could conceal what she knew was occasional and unreasonable bitterness.
“Well, not exactly,” Trudy said, smiling up at her. “Not under a full moon. We’re all supposed to be born on the ides of the month.”
“Oh, yes. I knew it was something . . . Lavinia, you must be surprised to have it all be true. I sent a telegram to my sister when Agnes called me with the news. Celia telephoned me from California. She said you could have knocked her over with a feather. All the Scofield coincidences! That Claytor’s wife—and Dwight’s, too—had had their babies on the same day! She asked me to send her very warmest —”
“Martha and Julia were only born in the same month,” Trudy interrupted once again. “Not the same day. But it’s nice for each of them to have a cousin the same age.”
“I was surprised!” Lavinia said, and Mrs. Hendry leaned forward so she could hear her more clearly. “I was surprised,” Lavinia repeated, raising her voice a little, “that Julia was born on the ides of the month. My other daughter, Mary Alcorn, from my first marriage. She was born on the ides, too.”
“I’m so sorry, dear. I can’t quite hear you. Who was it you said was born?”
“Oh, I was only saying that both my daughters were born on the ides of the month,” Lavinia said loudly so that Mrs. Hendry could hear, but it was at a moment when a lull in the conversation had fallen, and everyone either turned to look directly at Lavinia or furtively glanced her way. “I hadn’t heard about the Scofields and the ides. . . . And, of course, it turns out that almost none of them were born on the ides. . . .” Mrs. Hendry nodded at her and smiled, having no idea what Lavinia was saying now that she had lowered her voice once more.
After the general flurry of seeing the bridal couple off, greeting friends, and meeting new spouses and the two new children, conversation became a little quieter and eventually turned into a discussion of all the various complications that had already cropped up in regard to the sesquicentennial celebration. The two garden clubs were very seriously jockeying for position as to which one would select the queen. Thomas P. Stamp had already been persuaded to be the queen’s escort in the guise of Daniel Decatur Emmett, and he was letting his beard grow out.
“Well, though,” Dwight said, “the children will love it. Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn are old enough to have a great time. You remember, Claytor? I think we must have been about ten years old, and we thought we would die having to listen to the speeches—right out there in the square,” he said, gesturing toward the front windows to illustrate what he was saying, “on a platform set up under the Dan Emmett statue. Before we could go out to Hiawatha Park —”
Trudy suddenly interrupted him in a sharp voice, abruptly and with clear irritation. “That’s not Dan Emmett, Dwight! You never pay attention to a single thing I say. . . . Oh,” she said, turning to Lavinia, “when you’re married to a Scofield, Lavinia! Well, don’t ever, ever imagine you’ll get him to admit he’s wrong about anything in his life!” She tried to lighten this last bit into sounding like no more than fond exasperation, but she didn’t succeed, and the room was uncomfortably quiet. There was no way to imagine that Dwight and Trudy had had a happy morning.
All of a sudden Lavinia spoke up softly, with her mystifying but characteristic air of indifference, of seeming not to have been paying attention to the conversation that was already under way. “I don’t have any idea who Dan Emmett is,” she said, as though the thought had just occurred to her, which, in fact, was the case. “I’d never heard of him until I came here. I keep forgetting to ask someone to tell me who he is. Who he was. Did he found Washburn? Something like that?”
And everyone answered at once.
“Oh, Lavinia —”
“But I thought you came from the South —”
“It was your side that made him famous —”
“My side of what?” Lavinia asked, genuinely curious.
It was Dwight who answered her, and it seemed to be the case that everyone in the room had assumed he would take charge and straighten this out. “Daniel Decatur Emmett. That’s probably the name you know him by. His older brother, Lafayette, read law under Columbus Delano. He left Washburn. Well, in fact, he eventually became a State Supreme Court Justice in Minnesota.”
Lavinia gazed at Dwight solemnly but didn’t make any remark.
“Well, and Dan Emmett was a vaudeville star,” Dwight continued. “He performed all over the country. Toured for a while with Bill Gibson. . . . Dan Emmett wrote ‘Dixie.’”
But Lavinia continued to watch him lazily, not realizing that he thought he had fully answered her question.
“The song ‘Dixie,’” Dwight said. And when Lavinia still looked on at him expectantly, he said, “I’m sure you know that song!
Wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten . . .”
“Oh! Well, of course, I know that song,” Lavinia said, nodding. “But why would someone from Ohio write ‘Dixie’? I don’t understand exactly why a statue of Daniel Emmett would be in Washburn —”
“Oh, God!” Trudy snapped. “There’s no statue, Lavinia! That statue is of a Union soldier! Facing south!”
Lavinia turned to look at her, and for the first time since she had arrived at Scofields, a stricken look of hurt feelings crossed her face and disturbed her usual impassive expression. Lavinia and Trudy had become fairly good friends, and it baffled Lavinia that Trudy spoke to her with such obvious irritation.
“Well, that’s what Lavinia means, Trudy,” Howard said, unexpectedly championing Lavinia before Claytor even thought to speak up. It looked to Howard as though Lavinia might cry, and his voice took on a languid, jocular note in an effort to ease the conversation into a more temperate zone, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why anyone cared one way or another about Daniel Emmett. “I have to say I’ve always wondered about that myself. Washburn fought for the Union. Why do we celebrate Dan Emmett Days? I’m always happy to celebrate anything, but it seems strange. . . .”
The three hostesses, though, Agnes and Lily and Bernice Dameron, interrupted with trays of coffee and sugar and cream, and the day’s festivities came slowly to a halt. People began to collect their wraps and take their leave. But no one who had been there was comfortable about that afternoon. When they thought of it in the next few days, they finally concluded that Lavinia Scofield was an unwittingly disturbing presence. After all, imagine not having any idea who Dan Emmett was. The state
of Ohio had even placed official historical markers on Highway 4—at both the entry and exit for Washburn—that declared that Daniel Decatur Emmett, author of “Dixie,” had been born and had died there. Also, Lavinia had been so determined to let people know that both her daughters were born on the ides of the month!
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.”
The Truth of the Matter Page 24