In Providence, Rhode Island, I picked a credulous, motherly-type little girl to tell that I was in secret communication with Ghostland. I was sort of a queen to its inhabitants. They adored me from afar and wept over my messages and longed for me to come rule over them. My confidante assumed that my family belonged to some weird religious cult. And, knowing my father’s antipathy to all organized religious bodies, I was compelled to threaten that I’d make a child- Ghostlander of her with a wallop on her head if she repeated that derisive assumption. I never used that lie again.
But then it was always more rewarding to think up new ones, test one set of lies against another on different audiences, dispensing with a control group. My timing was fairly good; we nearly always moved before boredom, sophistication, or a more potent attraction eclipsed my magnificence. I was found out and exposed only once and, ironically, that experience, which provoked a virtual earthquake in the foundations of deceit upon which my happiness was built, began when I told the truth.
• • •
Wally Noonan, a stocky boy with squinty eyes, whose father was second assistant foreman of the local fire department, had been bedded with the measles when we settled in his town in northern Texas. Wally was the only one of my new fourth-grade classmates to miss my ice-breaking and cake-cutting party—my third that year. By the time he recuperated and came back to school, I was pretty well established. I had dispersed the information that I walked in my sleep (unhappily, that had occurred for several nights running after each of our last four moves) and that you could stick pins in me and I didn’t wake up. (Not so. Ben, into whose room I usually walked, gave me a punch on the shoulder that unfailingly woke me, causing me to flail in all directions in furious retaliation.) Also, I had released my most elaborate story to date, to a mousey little girl who had a “best friend” who was cruelly extroverted and friendly with practically every other little girl in the class. I whispered that my brother and I, and a sister, had been welded together before our birth. Ben was bigger than I was since our sister and I were so weak from fighting with him to get free, that when we had broken off, we had to be stuffed back into our mother for another year and a half. After that interlude, we started to wiggle out again, but my sister proved to be still too weak, and by this time, so was our mother. Tragically, they had both perished during the struggle. I could just barely remember how they had screamed and prayed—in some mysterious gypsy dialect—as they died. With rounded eyes, my timid new friend said how “luck, luck, lucky” my brother and I had been to have survived such a terrible ordeal.
The Friday that Wally Noonan recovered from the measles and returned to his desk, in front of mine, we were studying about money. I was finding the problems very difficult, not having had the preparatory lessons in fractions and percentages. The teacher, Miss Lyle, asked me three questions that morning, and I answered all three with a puzzled, suffering silence. Wally, one of the quickest arithmeticians in the class, was openly contemptuous. During recess, when he found that others were willing to forgive my ignorance because of my remarkable history—someone told him about my sleepwalking—he was downright angry.
“Most mothers don’t want nobody to know they got a crazy kid that walks around asleep,” he said, squinting at me with dark, resentful pupils. “You shouldn’t talk so much.”
“I don’t have a mother,” I countered.
“You don’t know much either. You don’t even know how many cents is in a dollar.”
“That might be ’cause she’s part of triplets,” my withdrawn little chum offered from the sidelines.
“Triplets!” Wally was intimidated by the credulity on the surrounding faces. “Well, so what? She still don’t know nothin’ ’bout money!”
All the children looked at me to brace their wavering certainty about my tragic history.
“I do so know about money.” Not entirely untrue as I had heard my father mention figures occasionally, usually in the hundreds and thousands. Money was something I guessed he had a great deal of, and that I’d never been the least interested in, until that moment. With my heart jolting me, I said, “I may not know about parts of money. But I know about great, big, huge amounts of it. There’s a painting over my bed that cost four thousand dollars.”
Wally let out a disbelieving “Haw!” and the others, except for my mousey friend, followed suit and moved away snickering the good- natured, disdainful snickers of in-the-know folk who are too smart to be fooled.
Two relevant things happened that afternoon. Miss Lyle announced that the annual class spelling bee would be held the following Tuesday after school, and that we should invite our parents to it; and Aunt Catherine, having arrived midday for once, was there when I got home. “Jen would be so happy to know we’re together,” she was saying to my father when I burst in.
My father called Fred and told him to bring a highball for him and a cup of tea for Aunt Catherine.
“Didn’t the painting over my bed cost four thousand dollars?” I demanded.
“What?” said Aunt Catherine.
“No,” said my father. “Seven. It cost me four. I sold it last week. Which reminds me, I wonder when that chap means to pick it up. I never did like it very much. But why did you ask?”
“I wonder too,” said Aunt Catherine, looking at me the way she did when she suspected that I had a fever.
“No reason,” I said and escaped.
The following Sunday morning, my father personally awakened Ben and me early. “You are going to church,” he announced. “Today. In half an hour.”
“Why?” we whined, astonished.
Fred had taken us a few times, to whichever one was nearest, professing each time that we were going for a short drive. It was a standing joke between him and my father—that he had put one over on Mr. Briard.
But this time, my father was proposing it. “Think what a nice surprise it’ll be for your aunt when she gets up,” he said.
We dashed into our clothes. The joke was being turned on Aunt Catherine! She, who deprived herself of going to worship when she was at our house, as she couldn’t take us without a good deal of discussion, was to discover that the infidels were more godly than she was this Sabbath!
Fred drove us, to the Methodists’ edifice this time, and let us out. He had to get back to serve Aunt Catherine’s breakfast. She loved everything about that—the silver coffee pot, Fred’s little bow when he poured for her from it, the broad exaggeration of his normal, slightly Welsh accent that he used to satisfy her notion of British speech.
“Now go in and mind your manners,” he said to us. “I’ll come fetch you at twelve.”
Ben and I looked in, feeling the tenor of the place. I saw only one face I knew. Wally Noonan was edging into a pew between two young grownups. He spied me at the same time I saw him and pantomimed his scornful “Haw!”
“I’m not going in.”
“I don’t want to either,” Ben responded, for reasons that I was willing to leave unexplored.
We walked around to the back steps of the church, facing the congregation’s private cemetery, and sat down. For a while we practiced belching, and then we argued about which end of a piece of spaghetti was the beginning. After that, we argued about the way people pronounced the word “here” in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And then we got on to the subject of what we wanted to do when we grew up.
“I definitely want to be an actor,” Ben declared. “I decided yesterday.”
I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to be or do. “I’ll probably just get older and bigger and die.”
Then, staring at the acre of gravestones glinting in the sun in front of us, we talked about death, concluding that it wasn’t so bad. When you were dead, you didn’t know you were dead. And then, though we didn’t say so, we both thought of our mother, who neither of us could remember, and all of a sudden we were holding hands. We sat there like that, sorry and wondering, in that odd, compatible way, for several minutes before we got embarras
sed.
“I think you should play Juliet,” Ben said suddenly.
Not this again, I thought. I had been violently opposed to this every time he’d persuaded me before—to play Juliet in his own wild version of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy. Every few weeks he’d get a yen to be Mercutio, and go slinging around a twig for a sword. He’d play all the roles himself, except for the titular ones; he’d make Fred and me do those. Our father was always the audience. I, the one sorehead, always put up a vehement battle. In my opinion, Juliet was hopelessly stupid—to knife herself over anybody as unromantic looking as our hairless, bespectacled Fred.
This time Ben’s proposition was more imprecatory than ever before. He wanted to do the play with all of us in Chinese makeup, which he had practiced applying recently with yellow chalk and burnt matches. I was categorically refusing when there was a babble of voices from the front of the church—people were coming out. So we abandoned our quarrel and ran around front to look for Fred. He wasn’t there yet, so we waited, jumping on and off the curb.
“Hey, are you her brother?” snarled Wally, emerging from the church ahead of his parents.
“Yes,” Ben admitted with slight disgust.
“You older than her?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’re not twins, are you?”
“Of course not,” Ben said, from Olympian heights of effrontery.
“You were never triplets either then, were you?”
Just then, Fred pulled up and we scurried into the car, Ben laughing and shouting over his shoulder, “It’s a good thing you’re not triplets, lamebrain! So long!”
I didn’t try to explain Wally’s questioning on the way home. I just said that I knew him, that he was in my class, and that I thought he was loony, too. Also, that I would play Juliet in Chinese makeup after all, if Ben still wanted me to.
Aunt Catherine exuded approval on our return. We had been communing with her intimate friend, the Lord. And Fred had, probably at my father’s suggestion, brought back the current issues of three ladies’ magazines, and presented them with her coffee. Her good humor didn’t evaporate even when Ben sprang his news about becoming an actor. But I was never more miserable. For the rest of the day—even while mincing about as the Oriental Juliet—I worried about how I could disprove Wally’s verbal proof that I was not a triplet.
Late that night, awake in bed, I concluded that I couldn’t. Yet, humiliation was a feeling I could not endure. Since the triplets story couldn’t be recalled, and neither could any of the others that were probably now also open to doubt, I would have to reinstate my veracity some other way. Wretched, without a single idea, I fell asleep: perchance to dream—or walk.
The next morning in school, Wally’s adamant expression made it plain that he didn’t intend to allow me expiation. When Miss Lyle left the classroom, trusting us on our honor not to look up from our arithmetic workbooks, he muttered, “Triplets!”
I didn’t answer.
“Walking asleep!” he hissed.
The muffled giggling around me melted my insides, but still I kept quiet.
“Painting that cost four thousand dollars…haw, haw, haw!” he said right out loud.
“It cost seven now,” I squeaked.
At this, the whole class unloosed the happy whoops that had been choking them, and Miss Lyle returned at a gallop with a tranquilizing dirty look at me—how did she know?
“Enough!” she declared, distributing sheets of paper from a pile she had just fetched. “You’ll see I’ve given you each a list of the hundred words we’ve learned this semester. Many of them—maybe all—will be asked in the spelling bee tomorrow. You may take your lists home and refresh your memories this evening so that you’ll all have an equal chance of winning.” She smiled and recommended again that we invite our parents. There would be punch and cookies in the cafeteria afterward, and a new five-dollar bill would be awarded to the winner.
The last announcement drew titillated “Mmms!” and “Oh boys!” and at dismissal, the chatter revolved around the glorious prize and speculations about what each aspirant would buy if he won: a case of Dr Peppers, a BB gun, a Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys Banjo. One girl even said a share of Mid-Continent Oil Co. stock. Clearly, the winner was going to be a hero or a heroine.
I caught Wally’s arm as he was leaving the cloakroom. “I am going to win the spelling bee,” I said.
For an instant he looked dumb, as though paralyzed, then he recovered. “Haw!” He broke away.
“I am too going to win!” I hollered after him for all to hear. “You’ll see!” Clutching my word sheet with all my might, I started to cry. I cried all the way home.
It took fifteen minutes on my father’s lap, a fourteen-ounce glass of iced tea (to which he would have added a thimbleful of scotch, I knew, had Aunt Catherine not been there), the expulsion of Ben from the house, and the first harsh words I’d ever heard my father say to Aunt Catherine, who, in response to my emotional hurricane had just remarked that I seemed unhappy, to hear the words necessary to console me.
“Catherine,” snapped my father, “you are gifted with astounding powers of observation!”
Chastised, Aunt Catherine controlled her compassion and remained silent as I explained about the spelling bee and the absolute necessity of my winning it.
“In that case,” my father said, unwrinkling my wadded word sheet, “we must see that you know all these words. But tell me, why do you absolutely have to win?”
“Because I said I would and that’s got to be the truth.”
“And why does that ‘got’ to be the truth?” he said, slower and lower.
Aunt Catherine shook her head despairingly at the conclusive evidence that Walter Briard didn’t value the truth as much as she did. Fred seated himself, in readiness for a lengthy session. And I began to sob again.
“Because I lie and they know it!” I wailed. “I told the biggest lie I ever told.”
“You told what?” gasped Aunt Catherine.
“A lie. L-I-E! And Wally Noonan found out it was a lie and told them all it was a lie!”
Lie, lie, lie. At the repetitive confession, Aunt Catherine mouthed the word in horror, her hands leaping to her temples, pointy elbows at right angles to her head. She resembled a modern dancer projecting distress to the last row in the balcony, or a penguin in an animated cartoon. She could no more inhibit the gesture than I could my tears, but she earned a scathing glance from my father for it, and she left the room murmuring, “Poor Jen…poor Jen.”
Remarkably, my hysteria seemed to depart with her. I blew my nose with finality, and my father dumped me off his lap. “Now, not that it matters much,” he said, “but we can’t help being curious. What was the lie you were caught perpetrating?”
In answer, I recounted the entire saga of the triplets.
“Implausible,” he remarked when I was finished. And we all burst out laughing.
Then we got down to work on the immediate problem, the word list. We quickly discovered that I knew how to spell most of the words on it, although I didn’t know how I knew. There were only about fifteen whose construction was unfathomable to me, and those we reviewed over and over. By dinnertime, I had memorized nearly all of them successfully enough to shout back their spellings a split-second after being given the words. Only two, “cupboard” and “believe,” continued to stump me. My mind developed an immovable block against them. After being corrected ten times, “cupboard” still came out minus its P and the I-E sequence in “believe” remained inverted. After dinner, we went over the words again. And again I missed them as often as I got them right.
“It isn’t likely that you’ll be asked these particular two anyway,” my father said. “So don’t worry. Get to bed. And remember, Fred and I will be there to give you moral support.”
At the time, I didn’t realize what a brave promise that was for my father to make—what misgivings he must have anticipated. He was as sensitive as Aun
t Catherine (from an altogether disparate set of principles, of course) to his position as an aging father of motherless young children. And he was as uncomfortable at any gathering of usual parents and youngsters, especially in schools, as she would have been at a dice table. This was why he stood in the shadows at our birthday parties, why he delegated Fred to enroll us in new schools, why he rarely set foot in them unless his presence was essential. This time he felt it was, and he must have steeled his courage for the task.
Wishing me good-night, he promised again, twice, “Don’t worry, Fred and I will be there. We’ll be there.”
“But don’t let her come,” I said, knowing he’d like to hear it.
“I won’t,” he assured me tenderly. “Sleep well, dearest Lucresse.”
Indeed, the next day the two men sitting among the other parents in the rows of chairs set up for the occasion did seem like a pair of ancient classics misplaced on a shelf of best-selling paperback thrillers. From the place I took at one end of the line of my classmates in the front of the room, hoping Miss Lyle would begin the questioning at the other end, I saw their white and bald heads nod to me, and a recrudescent lie almost escaped me—remarking to the girl on my right that those were my two grandfathers. But the girl had been to my party and had seen them before, so I forced it back and tried to concentrate on what some of the words on the list had been. My hands were sticky and cold, and I couldn’t remember one.
The twitter died down and Miss Lyle said, “All right, we’ll begin with you, Lucresse. ‘Pound.’ ”
Though that was one of the words I’d known right off, I went into a state of open-mouthed shock—at the monumental error in my calculations. Why on earth did I stand at this end of the line?
“ ‘Pound,’ Lucresse,” repeated Miss Lyle, smiling encouragingly.
“You mean the ‘hit’ kind or the ‘weight’ kind?” I blurted.
Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) Page 2