Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (18 page)

“Do you have any money with you now?”

“No.”

“Gee, that's a shame. We could've gone somewhere to eat too.”

“Yes, it's a shame.”

“I know where. Let's go!” he said like a slow explosion that had been contained for a long, long time.

“Where?”

“To
my
house! There's food. And nobody's there!”

We hurried. Arthur, because having an idea of his accepted, or, just having an idea, seemed to invigorate him. I, because the idea provided a temporary needed refuge, ensuring that I wouldn't be home before Ben.

Sitting in Arthur's kitchen, we fixed ham and cheese sandwiches. Arthur gulped his. I nibbled, chewing very slowly to let as much time go by as I could. I made eating take twenty minutes by Arthur's grandmother's mother's kitchen clock, and the slower the seconds seemed to tick, the less point there was to being there at all. I was tired and couldn't think of anything to talk about.

“I guess I'd better go home now,” I finally said dejectedly.

Arthur's face grew dark. He stood up and came over to me. Standing in front of me, he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed his face very close to mine. “We didn't come here just to
eat
,” he said emphatically. “I
told
you, nobody is here…”

His face, above mine and bearing down on me, frightened me. His fingers began to hurt at the nobs of my shoulders. “I want to go home,” I said with a sudden burst of spirit.

He took one step back and allowed me stand up. Backward, I moved, until the door of the icebox stopped me. He followed and caged me against it on either side of my neck, his big hands flat against the icebox door. His eyes—both of them—were bright with anger as he drew near me again. “I've tried every which way to be nice,” he said breathily. “But you don't act as if you like me.”

“
I
like you, Arthur.” My new voice was almost-adult, but in that mysterious place behind my eyes, the place where Felicity had once seen me, the place that I worked so hard to hide—even from myself—the place that had dropped into my stomach like a stone the night of the robbery about a million years ago, another voice was screaming: “Get out
now!
”

As Arthur moved in further, his nose bent into my cheek, banging my head back into the solid icebox door. His mouth on mine was stiff as his jawbone, and though the voice in my head was roaring, I couldn't make a sound…because I couldn't breathe. The furious kiss seemed never-ending. I tried to think. I wondered if he could breathe.
For a second, I couldn't remember who he was. But then I remembered, and I didn't want to hit him or kick him, but I didn't want to suffocate to death even more. As the voice in my head went silent, all thinking ceased, and it was like my brain was in my body instead of my head. In one fast motion, I bent both knees sharply, dipping into a stooped position, and scuttled under the bridge of his left arm. His pressing-forward head slammed into the door and he let out a cry like a huge, wounded animal.

“I'm sorry,” I gasped from the kitchen doorway. “Really, I didn't mean…”

But it was as if he didn't hear me. Because this wasn't Arthur. It was that big animal I'd sensed when I'd first seen him. This big, stupid, unimpetuous animal that I'd tamed and trained to my whim now prowled toward me as I backed into another room. This animal held one hand to its forehead as it approached, and there were tears in its eyes. I knew that both his head and his feelings were hurt, but I didn't care. Where was I? It was the living room. Without taking my eyes off him, I sensed for an outside door.

“ ‘Call me at six; call me tonight; we'll take a walk,' ” he said in a hurt, mimicking tone. “You've fooled around with me long enough! Everybody always thinks they can tell me what to do. Well, they can't!” he nearly sobbed.

There was a door—I'd found it through my peripheral vision—and it was wide. It was off a narrow hall off the far end of the living room. I backed in its direction and bumped into the arm of an old-fashioned sofa. I spoke slowly, as though he had difficulty understanding English. “I don't want to tell you what to do, Arthur. I only told you what
I
wanted to do. And I want to go home now. That's all.”

“But for once we're going to do what
I
want first,” he said, still coming toward me.

“Arthur!” I shouted, surprising even myself. “Do you really think Ben is a good actor?”

If he heard what I said he might have asked “Who's Ben?” or “What's an actor?” in his immediate, animal state. But he didn't hear and he didn't say anything. He just kept coming, his crafty eye and his guileless one achieving the same expression—driven, purposeful, blazing—focused on me.

“Arthur!” I yelled again. “I didn't tell you the truth about that boy who tried to commit suicide—he didn't. My father almost killed him, that's what really happened. My father has a terrible temper.”

“That kid should've killed
you
, that's what
should
have happened,” he growled.

Whirling away from the sofa, I dashed down the hall for the wide door, threw it open, and gasped. It was a dark, musty-smelling closet! There was another narrower door with four glass panes in its upper half on the opposite wall that couldn't be seen from the living room. I leapt for it, but simultaneously Arthur leapt at me. We clashed just as I clutched the door's brass knob.

How often in my life I'd felt like hitting someone, but I never did—except with Ben. When we were much younger, now and then one of us took a swat at the other and initiated a wrestling match. But those erratic explosions were governed by an unwritten, undiscussed set of rules: the one on his (or generally, her) back was the defeated and the opponent ceased and desisted; we could not cry for help or Fred would scurry to the scene and stop the battle, which imposed a measure of self-control on each assailant not to injure the other too severely. And after the first propelling anger had dissipated, either party could end the fight at any time by the traditional declaration, “I give up,” or the same idea camouflaged as a suggestion of something else to do.

Here, now, in this narrow hallway, there were no rules and no cry for help would be heard by anyone. As Arthur grabbed my left arm near the elbow with his right hand and pulled me away from the
door, the animal that was me seized his swinging left hand with my right, shoved it in my mouth and bit into the soft cushion of the upper palm with the grip of an alligator.

A prolonged animal “Iuhh-uhh!” erupted out of his throat as his grip on my arm weakened. I bit deeper still. I bit till my upper and lower teeth were no more than a bone apart and I could taste the warm salt of blood. Only then, I released the hand, punched both my fists into the middle of his torso, causing him to lurch back, cradling his bleeding hand in front of his nose as he tried to examine it. His eyebrows were high, surprised, unbelieving. Funny almost—like that first appearance of puppet robbers or Aunt Catherine confronting lies or maybe me when I decided to be a woman of the world.

Despite his suddenly human response, I wasn't sure the mind behind the eyes was in operating shape again, and I yanked open the door and slammed it closed from the outside.

“Soak it in cold water!” I yelled. “My father has a worse temper than mine!” And I broke into a gallop in the direction of the estate.

“Iuhh-uhh-ohhh,” he called back. “I hate you!”

Halfway to our house, I dropped to a jogging trot, slowed less by breathlessness than by an overwhelming a sense of failure. In the movies, the heroines resisted inevitable attacks on their virtue with a light slap on the face. They didn't resort to references to their fathers or brothers. They didn't get into fist fights and try to bite somebody's hand off. A femme fatale should be capable of paralyzing an army with the lift of one disapproving eyebrow.

The night, three thirty in the morning, was black-dark, warm, and breezy. Each breeze sent shivers through me, and as I mourned my failure as a seductress, I gradually lost all touch with the mysterious place behind my eyes that, knowing the truth of what had almost happened, had roared.

All the lights were on in our living room—I could see them from a
block away. Utter hopelessness retarded my steps as I tried to choose between the explanations that came to mind as to where I'd been and what I'd been doing during the last hour. I couldn't explain to myself how an affair that was intended to have something to do with love had turned out more to do with murder, so I forgot about it. Then I braced myself to face my father's quiet interrogation and Ben's righteous indignation.

No one was in the lighted front rooms when I entered our house. Voices, muttering low, urgent, broken-off phrases, incomprehensible, but alarming in their tones, and a sound of strangled moaning that was even more alarming were coming from the back.

I swept through the kitchen to the full view through Fred's open door: all three of the men in my life were in a position so foreign to any I could have imagined that for a wavering second, I almost laughed. My father, Fred, and Ben were all in their pajamas. My father was sitting on Fred's bed, holding Fred on his lap, rocking him to and fro as if he were a baby.

Fred's glasses weren't on. His hands were clasped together, and shaking, in his own lap. His bare feet dangled and kicked spasmodically, in rhythm with the motion of the rocking.

Ben, kneeling before them by the side of the bed, was trying to catch one foot, then the other, and when he was successful, he rubbed the pale, white skin with his hands with a circular movement.

“Hold on, hold on,” was what my father was saying in a sing-song chant as he swung Fred backward and forward.

It was Fred who was moaning, also in rhythm with the rocking. At the end of each moan, he said, clearly, “Hold me; hold me.”

My father held him tighter. The rocking, the moaning, the rubbing, the repeated plea, went on for another minute as I stood stricken and hardly breathing at the doorway.

Once Ben looked up, straight at me, without pausing in his massaging, and didn't appear to care that I was there or not.

As I watched, Fred's clasped hands flew apart with force enough to undo my father's protective arms and Ben's grasp on one foot, and Fred fell to the floor. He gasped once with a great tremor, seemed to hold his breath for an elongated moment, and finally breathed again quietly.

What I remember after that is disconnected, the way only brilliant fragments are recalled out of a long nightmare. A man with a doctor's satchel came. Without asking who he was, I led him back to Fred's room. He spent a long time in there. He told us that Fred was to be moved to a hospital and he made a telephone call. Two other men arrived and carried Fred out of the house on a stretcher; they didn't bump into a wall or a doorframe on the way out. My father followed them, leaving Ben and me by ourselves. We waited and waited, not speaking to each other very much. And when we did speak, it was with the cool politeness of strangers.

It had been daylight for quite some time when my father returned. He looked tired, but unmistakably happy.

“It was a bad attack,” he said with an incomprehensible smile. “But it was lucky. A warning. He's going to be all right.”

“When? When will he be back?” we wanted to know.

My father's smile disappeared. “He needs several weeks of complete rest—then, partial rest. He
won't
be back—with
us.”

Before Ben or I could question this, he said emphatically, “But the point is, he's going to be all right. The doctor assured me. He'll have to go home…”

“Home?” I cried. Fred's home was our home.

“To his maiden cousin in Wales,” said my father. “His destination every time he threatened to leave all these years.” My father smiled again. “But you should have heard the protest he put up when he heard the doctor and me talking about it. Even under sedation, he made a frightful squeal. When I realized what he was thinking, I said, ‘Fred, you know you won't rest with
us
. Would you rather take a chance on dying?'

“He said, ‘I might die, sir. That's what I think.' I said, ‘But not soon, if you go to your cousin's.' Nevertheless, the son-of-a-gun insisted that I look over his will.”

With us trailing along, my father took an old leather briefcase from Fred's closet, brought it to the dining room table, and opened it. From it, he withdrew a thin letter and three large, brown paper envelopes.

One contained a clipped-together stack of French francs. Another had a bunch of United Kingdom pound notes. The fattest held a thick stack of pre-war German marks. My father didn't add them up. “He never did believe we weren't going back,” he commented as he unfolded the letter. It was dated ten years before, and he read it to us. (I have it on my desk now.)

The last Will and Testament of Frederick Straun Holly. I hereby bequeath all monies to be divided equally between my cousin, Elizabeth Holly Hooks, Benjamin Briard, and Lucresse Briard. All personal effects to same. Except for my chauffeur's habit, including visored cap, in which it is my wish that my body be dressed for burial. It is my earnest desire that the site of said burial be beside the grave of Mr. Walter Briard, wherever that may be, if such is at all possible…

My father looked up in astonishment. “Why…he always assumed that I'd go first! The son-of-a-gun!”

“Is Fred younger than you?” Ben asked.

“He'd never say. But I think he's three or four years older.” My father resumed reading.

…At the time of my demise, should the remains of the aforementioned Mr. Walter Briard have been cremated, as Mr. Briard has voiced a preference for rather than for a decent burial, I herein implore those in concern to please try to arrange a resting place for me in a cemetery near the scene of said cremation. I humbly suggest, in such circumstances, that a clergyman of any faith might be of assistance, even though one with whom my legatees (herein named) have had no previous contact may
prove to be a bit sticky. Therefore, I beg that they consider this second suggestion—that they offer the available man of the cloth whatever monetary gratuity necessary, to be taken from the monies of my estate, for the accomplishment of said service.