Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (24 page)

Out of a generous impulse that he could scarcely avoid, though it
was sustained longer than I anticipated—for the entire last week of school—Ben drove me to school every morning. We had almost nothing to say to each other, as though we'd never known each other very well. After school, he and his car vanished before I could get to the parking area. He, and it, and Lois were together every afternoon, most dinnertimes, and during every evening until the morning hours began.

The day after Ben graduated—a ceremony my father and I attended, but tactfully, Lois did not, and in which Ben had shallow interest—I decided I must demand an explanation from my father for rewarding Ben's behavior with a car. I didn't expect him to take it away, only to admit that it was a grave error.

After trying to stay awake so late on many nights waiting for Ben, I myself slept quite late the morning after Ben's graduation. And when I got up, I was forced to weigh the intelligence of talking seriously to anyone in our household, when I was accosted by three voices coming from separate locations throughout the house, all ranting from separate worlds.

“The play's the thing,” boomed Ben from his room, “wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.”

“Who
told
him to put them away?” my father was saying in an attacking tone, contrapuntal to the bang of doors and the scrape of furniture in the living room. “The man can't keep his hands off anything in sight!”

“He says there were fourteen,” came Hubert from downstairs, his ordinarily hushed voice at a wild, high pitch. “I put away only ten! If there are just three lying around, it is not my fault. I
told
him they'd go lost if they weren't hung or put away!”

The sound of Hubert speaking that way magnetized even Ben away from his royal role, and he and I sped to the living room to get an explanation from my father. But the sight of us supplied my father
with a target for his attack. “Did
you
take one of the watercolors?” he accused both of us.

“No!” I said.

“I wouldn't want one of them,” Ben said. “You don't have to yell at
me
.”

“I don't have a chance to
talk
to you lately,” my father said angrily.

“Not since the convertible!” I snapped, my sleepiness transformed by self-righteous rage.

My father ignored me. “One of the watercolors has disappeared.”

“Maybe…” I began, hoping to think of a question that wouldn't compound his anger, but would instead instantly make him respect my ruthless truth-telling about Ben and that stupid car.

But any reaction was deflected by Hubert's meek entrance carrying the rolled-up missing painting. “It was in the hall closet.
I
didn't put it there, Mr. Briard.
You
were going to take this one to New York—do you remember, sir?”

My father took the roll from him, saying, “There's been too damn much hiding things around here,” and he waved Hubert away.

“I
haven't been hiding anything,” I said piously.

“I want to go over a couple of speeches before I pick up Lois,” Ben said, all open and above board, scowling at me. He was so intent on putting me in the place he wanted me to keep, the empty space out of his affairs, that my father's next remark caught him off guard.

“You've accepted her hospitality so often recently, why don't you invite her over here to dinner tonight?”

“I don't know…” Ben said.

“Is Mr. Carrington back?” my father asked, as if it made no difference to him whether the answer was yes or no.

“No, but…”

“Then I insist. Hubert's not too put out to fix a decent meal.”

Ben didn't argue. He left without going over the Shakespeare again.
My father wouldn't explain this latest move to me; he just looked aggravatingly secretive and happy when I asked about it, and I had to wait—again—for dinnertime.

When Lois arrived, my father seemed excessively glad to see her. Like a fond uncle, he took both her hands in his, saying with old-world civility, “Welcome, my dear.” He called her “my dear” frequently, an address he'd never applied to me. Before dinner, he offered her a drink, and to my and Ben's sharp surprise, he offered Ben one too. But to all appearances, no one was more important than Lois Carrington. My father's attentiveness, and the drink, kept her talking.

By the time Hubert served dinner, she'd become a little loose- moving. I noticed that she dropped a mouthful of potatoes off her fork as she said, “Mr. Briard, if my father had been anything like you, I wouldn't have…” and stopped.

“Wouldn't have what, my dear?” said my father kindly.

“Can I be dreadfully frank?” She dropped her fork in the mound of mashed potatoes.

“Of course,” he said with enormous sympathy.

“If my father had been like you, I wouldn't have married Leland Carrington.”

“You wanted a father, so to speak? Someone to take care of you?” my father responded, with great interest and compassion.

“You're so understanding.”

I stole a curious glance at Ben. He avoided it.

“But surely you know, my dear, few mistakes are irrevocable?” my father said.

Ben's eyes rose slowly. We all stared at my father, who, I knew from experience, was plunging into one of his philosophical moods.

“You're still a very young woman,” he continued. “Certainly you will rectify this error soon?”

The shadow of deep feeling vanished from Lois's face. Her eyes on my father were clear and curious.

“There are no rules about
when
one must find happiness,” he went on. “I, for example, didn't meet my wife until we were both a number of years older than you.”

Lois shook her head hopelessly, indicating that she considered his past so far removed from her own present that there was no possibility of comparison.

“Don't close your mind, my dear, out of misplaced kindness. Look at it this way—what a lucky accident it was that you and Ben met when you did.”

“What?” Ben said, and his lips didn't close immediately after pronouncing the
T
.

“It seems apparent that Ben has the assets you want and need,” my father continued. “In spite of his years, he's mature. I'm sure he'll take care of you…”

“What?” Ben repeated, shifting in his chair.

My father's words came faster. “It goes without saying, he won't be able to provide many of the material advantages for a while. However, after he finds a place for himself in the theater, which shouldn't take
too
many years after he's had adequate training—and during that time you could be carving a niche for
yourself
, as an actress, something you've always wished to do…”

“Dad!” Ben said.

Lois's face stiffened. “Mr. Briard,” she said coolly, “you've rushed to conclusions.” Gathering her thoughts rapidly, she softened her face. “I couldn't leave Mr. Carrington.”

My father looked to Ben.

“Of course not,” Ben said.

“Oh. It was I who made the mistake.”

“Ben has a car now,” I said, hoping to revive the conversation. They all glared at me.

“It's only that I
assumed
,” my father said with deep embarrassment. “I hope you don't think I was trying to order your lives.”

“Not at all, Mr. Briard,” Lois said, sending a twinkling smile to Ben. “We can't always have what we want.”

Ben didn't smile back. My father compensated for that with a grin that was abnormally intense. “Not always,” he said. “Still, we usually want what we
have
.”

Ben took Lois home early, and for once returned immediately after dropping her off. When he came in, he couldn't contain himself. “Dad, you might have gotten me into a lot of trouble,” he exploded.
“I
didn't want to
marry
her.”

“What
did
you want, Ben?” asked my father.

“I don't know…”

All three of us knew this truth. It was naked and unconfused.

Ben jumped to surer ground. “The point is now you've ruined everything. You scared her half to death.”

“Any alliance that doesn't have a future is automatically at its end,” my father said soberly.

Ben nodded. “You say the most obvious things and make them sound important.”

My father didn't attempt to conceal how pleased he was with himself.

“I get to keep the car, don't I?”

“Certainly,” my father said. “It's only a small part of what you really want.” His sense of winning and well-being exploded in a hearty laugh. “And we
all
know what that is!”

“I don't see what's so funny about it.”

My father laughed till he roared. Without intending to, I laughed too. Last of all, Ben started. The truth was so obvious, so ruthless, so funny that it reinfected all of us and we in turn reinfected each other, and none of us could stop laughing for a long, long time.

Once again, life was normal, and once again, after a couple of months, I had the feeling that nothing interesting ever happened. It was at the height of this mood, in the middle of the summer, that Aunt Catherine's monthly, but this time unique, letter arrived. In it, she invited us all to visit her house in Sapulpa.

The immediate collective reaction to the invitation was intense surprise; she had not issued such an invitation before, and a visit from her to
us
was long overdue. My father's and Ben's reactions were undiluted with not so much as a drop of acceptance. Two semi-major parts were in the offing for Ben before he was to leave for college in the fall. And my father didn't consider going for a moment.

“Of course I'm better off here,” he said. “But, Lucresse, it might do you, and Catherine, a lot of good if
you
went for a couple of weeks.”

“How?” I asked, unwilling right off to admit that my reaction was more open to persuasion than theirs.

“You've never spent a night away from home,” said my father. “And Catherine can feel she's reciprocating for all her visits to us.”

“But what would I
do
there?”

“If I know Catherine, she'll find enough for you to do.”

While making it clear that I protested, I let myself be talked into it rather easily. Winding Hill was comfortable, but it had long since lost the charm as well as the anxiety of a new place. I had been wondering
for a long time what Aunt Catherine's home was like and what she was like in it.

“Don't you want to come, too?” I entreated Ben. “Aren't you curious?”

He said he was, but he was more curious about whether or not he'd get one or both roles he'd tried out for.

•  •  •

Though I could imagine Sapulpa, I'd never been there. And going meant I could tell my friends about the contemplated trip in bored, yet glowing, terms. Those who were also contemplating trips this summer weren't going to go alone—like I was—and the fact that they would be vacationing in cooler spots than Winding Hill and I was going to a hotter one didn't affect their envy of, or my pride in, my independence. The largest triumph was when Ben almost changed his mind about going after my father bought my plane ticket for my first flight.

Considering the extravagance of my expectations, the flying experience was bound to be a disappointment. Except for the take-off and the landings en route, the sense of vibrating stillness in air that all land animals experience was plain dull.

But my excitement was renewed when Aunt Catherine, meeting me at the Tulsa airport with her husband, Joe, kept saying, “Are you all right, Lucresse? She's all right, Joe.” Joe repetitively bobbed his thrilled, mute face. He took my bag, and driving to Sapulpa, recovered his voice, saying an agreeable, “Uh-huh, sure thing,” every little while all the way.

Sapulpa was as flat as Winding Hill was curved, and more blistering hot than Chicago had been in my one summer's stay there. But neither Sapulpa nor Aunt Catherine had anything to do with the fact that Sapulpa is where I started my way to what might have been—to this day, I really couldn't tell you for sure—madness.

Aunt Catherine's little house, like all the others on the block, had the curtains drawn against the burning sun. Inside, it was dark and stifling.

“This time of day everybody smart's takin' a tepid bath,” Aunt Catherine informed me. “But theys'll be along here later to meet you. I told 'em, after supper.”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” echoed Joe. “We all sure heard about you and yours for a long time from her here.”

“Now do you have to go say everything you ever heard?” Aunt Catherine affectionately reprimanded him.

The ten or twelve people who came over, fanning themselves, had two things in common: they all were Aunt Catherine's age or older, and they all remembered her sister, Jen. “Poor Jen,” they echoed Aunt Catherine's reference to her, and the Jen that appeared to me out of their minds was a girl not much older than me. Only one of Aunt Catherine's friends, a scrawny, old lady with a frizz of white curls and a perpetual, secretive smile, a Mrs. Dunhamly, speculated as to the Jen of later years who had become my mother.

She gave my arm a startlingly tight squeeze and hissed at me through a wheezing laugh, “Don't you make no mistake about it, girl—from all their sadness and sighs. That Jen was a right happy Miss. She done just as she pleased, and they aren't as sorry about her as they let on. They just feel they gotta act sorry about anybody that's died, 'cause they're so scared of bein' dead.” She coughed a giggle.

I glanced around at the other people talking to each other, and back at Mrs. Dunhamly. She was older than all of them. I thought of how old Fred was…and the night he almost died…and how the shock of it obliterated everything else that had happened that night all because of me acting any way I pleased—to the point where the box of time that it all fit in no longer
was
, which meant
it
no longer was, which is why I'd never spoken of it.