Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498)

by Robinson, Edna

  Her eyes were pained. “I know, Lucresse. I know that feeling.”

  “And I found out I can. You don’t think that makes any sense, do you?”

  “Nothing makes any sense,” she said sweetly.

  I grasped her hand again. “You know, I haven’t cried once. Death isn’t any change at all. He didn’t go any place. It’s just as if he was still alive, only I can’t see him.”

  “Then there is a change, Lucresse.”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand the truth!” I snapped. “You’re just like Aunt Catherine.” And for the rest of the trip I treated Felicity as though she was a not particularly attractive stranger I’d been forced to sit next to. My civilities were too civil and I wouldn’t offer another word having to do with the reason we were traveling together.

  In the long hours of our silences, I closed my eyes, pretending to doze, and spoke to my father in my head. I told him I understood that he wouldn’t be with Ben to meet us and how Felicity had changed.

  “She’s still better to take care of things for a while than Catherine, don’t you agree?” he said. “Aren’t you glad I arranged things this way?”

  I had to agree, and smiled in my feigned sleep.

  • • •

  The body had been cremated as I’d expected. The house was still neat. Hubert padded about in his customary way. The faucets weren’t a decibel less shrill; the doors still complained. Even Ben was, as I’d expected him to be—authoritative in his report, contemplative for moments at a time, but then, as interested in his own world as ever. He got Felicity to try his barbells and was gratified at how “all right” I was.

  “Of course I am,” I said evenly.

  Suddenly, he looked alarmed. “You’re too all right.”

  “I know things you don’t.”

  Felicity gave a long sigh.

  “About what? About Dad?” he pressed.

  “It’s the same as if he was still here—because I don’t believe all the stuff Aunt Catherine does, and you both probably do. He’s not flying around somewhere with wings, or jumping over live coals somewhere else.”

  “So what?” Ben said angrily.

  “So, if he’s nowhere else, he might as well be here. Don’t you understand either? He is, to me.”

  I felt I was saying too much, yet I didn’t care. It was time somebody understood—somebody besides Mrs. Dunhamly whom I might never see again.

  “Lucresse, he’s gone, don’t you realize that?” Ben said.

  “All right, where did he go?” I said defiantly.

  “I don’t know,” Ben boomed. “But you’ve got to realize, he’s gone. Dead. Forever.”

  “Those are just words. They don’t mean anything, if you don’t believe in heaven or hell. And Daddy didn’t.”

  “I don’t either, but there’s such a thing as facing the facts.”

  “Yes,” Felicity said heartily.

  They were trying to corner me. I met the challenge head on. Triumphantly, I told them, “I’ve talked to him since yesterday, and he’s answered me.”

  Ben and Felicity stared at each other. For a moment I was the outsider in the room. Then, in a flash, I knew that I, and Mrs. Dunhamly, were perhaps the only insiders on Earth where death was concerned. The billions of Christian and Jewish faithful, and all the Moslems, Hindus, Mohammedans, and Indian-lorers, and for all I knew, the Bens and Felicitys and Aunt Catherines, were the outsiders.

  “I’m going to my room and talk to him now,” I said. And I left them with spring in my step and new freedom in my heart, now that there was no need to hide what I knew.

  Felicity had planned to stay with us for only a few days. Two days later, she changed her mind. I couldn’t understand it. Though she’d been long finished with a motion picture career, she’d become entrenched as a resident of Beverly Hills and had achieved an estimable reputation as a hostess par excellence and an active participant in community affairs. “Don’t you want to go back?” I asked.

  “I’ve more important things to do here,” she answered.

  “We’re all right. Mr. Askew at the bank is in charge of everything.”

  “He’s not in charge of how you feel,” she replied.

  “I feel fine, Felicity. You can see that. And Ben’s okay.”

  “Yes, Ben is.”

  Three boys from Ben’s class and Louise Loder came over that evening to “pay their respects,” as Louise’s mother must have told her to say. They paid them with such gravity that I couldn’t tolerate their attitude.

  “Felicity once taught us how to do a time step. Let’s turn on some music and she can teach you,” I said.

  “You sure you want to?” Louise said, surprised.

  “Sure. My father would love it.” I urged everybody up as I switched on the radio.

  Felicity cooperated, but after the company left, she pointed her finger at me. “I wish you were plain shicker or plain mashugana, the way you’re acting. But I know you’re not either. All I can say is, I’m glad I’m here.”

  I don’t know how many days passed. The duration of times of unusual emotion is always indistinct. However, I know that, for a while, I knew a mood of peace unduplicated in my life. Felicity and Ben and Hubert existed in the cloudy fringes of my attention. Much more defined was my father’s voice. It began to sound without my summoning it. At odd times it summoned my replies.

  Felicity was searching high and low for the keys to his jewelry satchel, preparatory to turning it over to a dealer designated by Mr. Askew. As I watched her rummage through his desk for the third time, he told me, “They’re in the breast pocket of my brown suit.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said aloud. “I’ll tell her.”

  “What?” Felicity said.

  “Daddy told me they’re in the breast pocket of his brown suit.”

  She gave me a startled look and stomped upstairs to his closet. She took the keys out of the breast pocket and whirled at me. “Sit down!”

  I sat on his bed.

  “You remembered that he kept them in that pocket, whether he was wearing that suit or not.”

  “No!”

  “Ben!”

  Ben ran in from his room, the script he’d been memorizing still in his hand.

  “Tell him,” Felicity commanded, her big brown eyes sparkling frantic.

  “Felicity doesn’t believe I didn’t remember where Daddy’s satchel keys were. I didn’t remember. He told me.”

  “Do you think I ought to phone my old head man?” Felicity asked Ben.

  “Lucresse,” Ben said, “I hate to do this to you, but it’s got to be done. Come here.”

  He led me and Felicity downstairs to the spot in the living room where the marble-topped table had been.

  “I’ll be Dad,” he said. “We were bending over the table this way. I was approximately where Felicity is…” Felicity moved to the sofa and leaned against its arm. “Hubert was on the long end, over there. We lifted once, about two inches. His face got red, and he gasped…”

  Ben’s head jerked back, as though thrown by the force of the rushing air he gulped in. His resemblance to my father was uncanny. Even his trousers looked baggy.

  “I let down my end and said, ‘Are you all right?’ He started to lift again…”

  “Ben, stop!” Felicity cried.

  I drew my breath with difficulty.

  Ben didn’t stop. “He dropped his end, just let go… it’s a wonder the whole top didn’t crack in two. His hands just fell, didn’t even try to break his fall. He collapsed right about here…”

  Ben, reverting to Ben, indicated a body’s length area on the floor.

  “We carried him to the sofa. His suit jacket dragged on the floor… I stepped on one of the buttons as we carried him. Hubert ran to the phone and called a doctor. I kept squeezing his face. He looked sick to his stomach, but he didn’t vomit. Without opening his eyes, he said, ‘Get Felicity to bring Lucresse back. Be nice to her, Ben…”

  A
shudder swept through me. Ben’s voice was too the same as the voice I’d known all my life, the voice that had never stopped speaking to me.

  “Then it was over. In an hour, the doctor had been there, I had called Mr. Askew, who called the men from the crematorium. They took him out…I didn’t go.

  “Before I called either of you, two fellows came with the transport truck and crated the table top. They lifted it with no trouble at all. And that was all. It was gone. And he was gone. Now, do you understand?”

  My hands dug into my temples, trying to make my brain understand. “If I could have seen him…” I said.

  “Be glad you didn’t.”

  Felicity touched my arm and said to Ben, “No, you’re wrong.”

  She took me to my room. “Rest a while,” she said. “We’re going out later.”

  I didn’t ask where. I didn’t care. Whatever she wanted to do was all right with me, as long as she’d leave me alone now so I could talk to my father and get back my bearings. I closed my door after her, with a slam.

  “Ben’s a pretty good actor,” I said. “You always said so.”

  My father’s voice was weaker than before. “I always said he’d be a success.”

  “Sometimes I can’t tell whether he’s acting or not.”

  “Good acting always has some truth to it.”

  “Was he telling the truth just now?”

  “People can only tell the truth as they see it. And everyone sees it differently.”

  “Then I’d have seen it differently. I do see it differently,” I said victoriously.

  Felicity knocked at my door and came in before I could admit her. “Do you have a hat?” she asked excitedly.

  “No.”

  “We’re going somewhere where you need one.” She disappeared and returned with a fourth-moon black straw piece with a short veil. “Wear this, and something dark.”

  Again I didn’t ask where we were going.

  Ben drove us to a church at the bottom of the hill, near the station. No one said anything on the way except Felicity’s, “Lucky there was one today. I hope we aren’t late.”

  All the people entering the church were smiling sadly to each other. A somber attendant ushered us to a back pew without asking who we were. Centered on the altar was an open coffin. A bald minister appeared at the lectern behind it. He monotoned some responsive readings, and more energetically, sailed into a lengthy eulogy. We sat in silence. Though I listened carefully, I didn’t feel that I knew any more about the body in the coffin at the end of his speech than I’d known at the beginning, except that it was a man’s. I wanted to leave.

  Ben held me back. “We’re going to see it,” he whispered.

  My arms became bumped with tiny, tingling pimples in the warmth of the consecrating hall. I thought of Mrs. Dunhamly. This was the kind of spectacle she found rewarding enough to be almost enjoyable.

  Ben nudged me and I got into line behind Felicity to stroll with the crowd up to the bier. I raised the veil on my hat.

  There was an astonishing display inside the coffin. The face facing mine wasn’t old, wasn’t young, it wasn’t any age. It wasn’t happy, wasn’t sad, wasn’t peaceful or sleepy; it wasn’t even definitely male or female. It was ageless, genderless, a grotesque creation of some artless beautician. Suddenly, it assumed my father’s features—only his features, none of his life. No matter who it had been, a stranger or my father, it was what Mrs. Dunhamly meant by the Nothing of Death.

  “You haven’t gone anywhere else,” I pled into the gaping box.

  “Move on,” Felicity said, pulling at my sleeve.

  I moved on, and had to wait behind Felicity for a woman way ahead and another much older woman to move before everyone else. They were the family. I wondered if they recognized the occupant of the coffin as having been someone they’d known.

  We went home, in silence again. In my room, I implored, “Daddy, you couldn’t be like that…”

  There was no answer.

  Maybe Aunt Catherine had been right: maybe Mrs. Dunhamly was a poor soul—unable to accept the misery in living—and I wasn’t sure how harmless she was. But maybe she wasn’t harmful. This was too confusing. I tried once more.

  “Daddy, did Ben tell the truth?”

  Again, there was no answer. And no answer. And no answer.

  An hour was a long time ago, way back when I was innocent—as innocent and self-deceiving as bad actors like Aunt Catherine or good ones like Ben. Actors who told only some of the truth: black-or-white and here-or-there half-truths, truths like the “everywhere” I used to handle the truths of “not here” and “nothingness” without sobbing.

  I walked through the house, ignoring Felicity and Ben, knowing I would never talk to my father again, and that I’d never be free from the knowledge that he was no longer here.

  I walked upstairs. Then I walked downstairs. I walked and walked and walked till I roared. Then I roared till I sobbed.

  Then I wept into Felicity’s lap through half that night.

  AFTERTHOUGHTS

  It may seem that Ben and I were bequeathed a harder heritage than many, without the cushions of faith and family to dull the sharp surfaces of the adult world we were moving into. Nevertheless, we moved into it faster than most. We had the Winding Hill noisy house to come home to until I finished college, and Ben completed two years each of college and drama school. Then, with no regrets, we entered other, separate worlds.

  Ben’s was fame and fortune, acting in the theater and movie and TV studios. But he married a girl who admired him more when he wasn’t acting than when he was. He truly wanted what he had. I chose a fellow who had all my own insecurities and wonder, even though his family had lived in one house all his life. I suppose I, too, got what I wanted. We’ve already moved three times, once for each of our children. Ben and his wife and two boys live in a number of places, wherever he’s working. We all call it traveling, not moving. Perhaps that reflects the trouble with the truth we still have on some subjects.

  Felicity visits or calls on special occasions and when she gets the yen. Fred, who’s ninety-three, miraculously made it through the war years fairly unscathed and still walks once each day, very slowly now, to the statue in the center of his village square. He writes to me or Ben every few months—in a sweet, scolding tone that makes us feel like children again. Every December 22nd, we each receive a Christmas card from Aunt Catherine with a squeezed, worried note on the plain side above the imprinted price mark. And I think of her visits over the years.

  I don’t often see anybody who reminds me of Sled-boy or Miss Bunce or Arthur Frith, or Mrs. Loder or Lois Carrington. Unless I happen to be thinking of them.

  But everywhere I see people who remind me of my father. “People can only tell the truth as they see it” were his last words to me. And I see my father everywhere. So, thinking of what I just wrote, maybe I have no trouble with the truth after all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since Edna Robinson died in 1990, I—her daughter, editor, and friend, Betsy—would like to acknowledge Edna for this beautiful book. I acknowledge her talent, her furious determination, and her courage to go on, no matter what it took—to survive, to live joyfully, and, most of all, to change.

  I would like to thank Stephen Camilli for being excited by my first lunatic pitch of this book when he happened by the Editorial Freelancers Association booth at BookExpo America. Thank you for being such an open, honest, and loving person. And thank you, Sara Camilli, for being my agent and finding this book a home.

  There is no way to fully express my gratitude to Infinite Words for doing what publishers never do—accepting a book by a dead author.

  And thank you to all the readers. Even though Edna is no longer in body, I believe she is dancing and laughing and maybe giving you a hug.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Credit: Courtesy of Betsy Robinson

  Edna Robinson (1921–1990) lived all over the U.S. and attended twenty-se
ven schools before the eighth grade. Early on, she wrote for radio soaps and small-town newspapers’ “Society News.” After graduating from Northwestern University in 1943, she headed for New York City, and in the pre-Mad Men days of advertising, she became not only one of the first female copywriters, but one of the only Jewish copywriters. When directed to the typing pool, she simply refused to accept that being a secretary was her only option and she declared her intention to write. Fortunately her first boss found such hubris charming and he became her mentor. While working at ad agencies, she developed a number of well-known advertising lines (“Navigators of the world since it was flat”; “A kid’ll eat the middle of an Oreo first…”; and “Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Cookies”) and developed new products. She also wrote feature articles for horse magazines and Sports Illustrated, children’s books for Hallmark, and short stories for adults. She had a lifelong love of music that began at the age of twelve, when she wandered into a piano teacher’s house, saw a piano, and declared that she just knew she could play it. This turned out to be true, and after studying piano for fifteen months, Edna began concertizing and was lauded as a child prodigy. About a year later, she stopped playing when she moved away from her beloved teacher. She was the mother of four children.

  Betsy Robinson is a freelance editor, novelist, journalist, playwright, and former actor. Her novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, winner of Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize, was published in September 2014. In 2001, her novel Plan Z by Leslie Kove was published by Mid-List Press, as winner of their First Novel Series award. In her late twenties, Betsy and her mother, Edna, became best friends and eventually writing partners. In 2011, Betsy published a book of letters between herself and her dead mother, Conversations with Mom: An Aging Baby Boomer, in Need of an Elder, Writes to Her Dead Mother. She had teamed with Edna to write screenplays under a 1987/88 Writers Guild East Foundation Fellowship and was elated to relive the partnership through imagined letters and, even more viscerally, through her work on The Trouble with the Truth. Learn more at www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.