Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (3 page)

“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 embarrassed.

“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 Aunt 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.

A general laugh broke out and I could see my father and Fred glance about them, openly hostile. How desperately I regretted not somehow keeping them from coming.

“Either kind,” said Miss Lyle, smothering her own amusement.

“Oh,” I said loftily, unwilling to be grateful, and I spelled the word faultlessly.

Miss Lyle continued down the line, eliminating ten of the twenty-
five of us. Mentally, I spelled correctly all the words asked, except “ocean” and “cupboard.” This time, in my mind, I left out “cupboard's”
B
. I passed my next turn with ease, on “basket,” the next with “charge,” and only four of us remained. Wally Noonan had left the ranks on the previous round, dragging his feet. He now sat with his good-sport parents, glaring at me. Two more turns passed and two of my quartet were counted out. Only I and a quiet, bony boy I had never spoken to were left. I stared at my feet to avoid Wally's undeviating gaze as well as the embarrassingly happy faces my father and Fred presented now, while my partner spelled “circus” without a hitch. Then it was my turn again.

“ ‘Believe,' ” Miss Lyle said distinctly.

Convulsively, I began. “
B-E-
” in a tone that would dispel any doubt that the word began with those letters. Then, dumbfounded, I stopped. For the life of me, I couldn't remember whether it was
I-E
or
E-I.
I squinted the way Wally did habitually and pretended to look off into space, thinking.

The pause became noticeably long. “Yes?” said Miss Lyle. “
B-E-
?” and my opponent shifted, raptly hopeful.

Movement in the back of the room attracted my eye. Fred, apparently having some sort of mad fit, was pounding the sides of his shiny head with his fists. He did it again and again, with such force that he knocked off his glasses. They went clinking to the floor, and when he bent to retrieve them, to my horror, my father took up the same lunatic behavior. Aghast, I watched, weighing whether I should scream at them, “What's the matter with you?” or turn around and run home as fast as I could and get Aunt Catherine, when all at once the meaning of what they were doing struck me: they were imitating Aunt Catherine's reaction to the word “lie.” I gulped and shouted,
“L-I-E-V-E!”

My opponent was either shaken into forgetfulness by the disappointing
drama of my recovery, or as fortune had it, he drew a word he didn't know. “Recess” defeated him on his next turn, and I stood alone, the declared winner.

Out of respect for the truth now—and I still sometimes have as much trouble being faithful to it as anybody else—I don't recall exactly what happened next. Somehow we all got from the classroom to the cafeteria, where I broke away from my father and Fred to accept the more important congratulations of some of my classmates. Wally Noonan approached, on the verge of tears. “My dad is gonna give the prize,” he said.

I hadn't known that, but it made sense. Mr. Noonan, being the second assistant foreman of the fire department, was probably the highest- ranking civilian among the parents involved or the town officials available for the honor.