Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (10 page)

“It's just part of learning,” he said, more philosophical than comforting. “When we get home, take a hot bath.”

“Felicity rides very well, doesn't she?” I said after a time.

“She's worked at it.”

“Do you think she's beautiful?”

It was not easy to surprise my father. He took the figments of people's imaginations, the infinite variety of weaknesses and deceits and unexpected kindness rampant in humanity as a matter of course. But I could tell my question was a jolt.

“No,” he answered with inordinate emphasis. “I don't think Felicity is beautiful.”

I was surprised. “She once won a beauty contest. Did you know that?”

“There is no such thing as a beauty contest,” he said, vexed. “Beauty is noncompetitive. Beauty of any kind stands alone, unmatched, inimitable, uncontested. Felicity isn't a work of nature, Lucresse. She's a contrived work, shaped by mediocre tastes and much suffering.”

He was just talking, or lying to me, I decided, or he was just too old to see Felicity as the girls and particularly the boys I knew, and their younger fathers, would see her. “I think her hair is pretty,” I persisted.

“I think it's hideous.”

Now he must be joking,
I thought. For some patronizing reason, he didn't want me to know how much he admired Felicity's looks, so I gave up trying to make him discuss the subject.

In the distance, Felicity and Ben were riding back to find us.

“Ben hasn't ridden any more than I have,” I said. “I wonder why
he
hasn't fallen off.”

My father concentrated on Ben trotting toward us. Ben's heels were down, his hands low and quiet. He was sitting to the trot. In pace with him, Felicity was posting with perfect, easy rhythm. But she seemed to be making much motion compared to Ben's stillness.

“Ben has an uncanny sense of how it would be to be a horse,” my father answered.

When Ben and Felicity rejoined us, my father gave me a leg up to my horse. “Now, one, two, jump!” he ordered, holding my left bent foreleg. With his boost and the spring I made off my right foot, I shot up so violently that I almost fell over the other side of the horse.

“I guess I'm still groggy from that terrible fall,” I said loud enough to be sure Ben heard, as I struggled to find my seat and stirrups.

My father laughed. “I think
your
hair is very pretty. When you don't have sand in it.”

I rode ahead beside Ben, with my father and Felicity following. I was glad for the chance to describe what had happened in my own way. “It's just lucky I wasn't killed,” I told Ben as my perilous steed trudged along, head bobbing in semi-sleep. “This dumb thing bucked and reared and nobody, not even a cowboy, could have stayed on.”

“What did you think on the way down?” Ben asked excitedly. “When you knew you were going to hit the ground?”

“I thought, ‘how would it be to be a horse?' ”

“What? Weren't you scared?”

“Of course—in a way. I knew I might be dead in a second. But, Ben, you never know what can come into your mind when you're facing death until it happens to you.”

Ben looked back at my father. “It couldn't have been as bad as all that. He doesn't seem upset.”

“I don't understand him at all,” I said bitterly.

“Why? Because he isn't carrying on like Aunt Catherine after you ‘faced death'?”

“No, it's not
just
that, Ben. It's just that…well…”

“What?! Honestly, Lucresse, you're the most irritating person I've ever met.
What
don't you understand?”

A quaking alarmed feeling went through me. I hadn't really meant to discuss explicitly what was bothering me. I wasn't sure there were
words to explain the number of confusing images popping into my mind.

The nighttime Felicity was as enervated as the afternoon one was energetic. She was listless, sorrowful—sometimes, as much so as the first night we'd spent together—almost maudlin. She and my father never went out. Night after night, week after week, we spent séance-like interludes lying around the living room. When Ben and I went up to bed, Felicity always seemed more tired than we. Not much later—I lay awake listening for them—they would come up the steps, slowly, sleepily, not trying to smother their footsteps. Rarely were they talking. Not for fear of disturbing Ben and me, but seemingly because the act of retiring hardly disturbed the reverie we'd left them in. As I fell asleep, after I heard their doors close, I dwelt on the easy access they shared through the bathroom between their rooms. I wondered at the pattern her gold hair would make falling across his white-thatched head on the whiter pillowcase.

And now he'd said he thought her hair was hideous.

For several years I'd had a transcendent interest in sex relations. Other girls' interests were mild—giggling, social. So far as I knew, Fred's interest was nonexistent, and my father's was severely limited—to great loves in literature, humorous aspects of sexual desire, as revealed in reminiscences he and his friends found unfathomably funny, or, to unstimulating clinical explanations during the rare times when the subject came up. When we were much younger, Ben and I had speculated repeatedly about what men and women do, or might do. But not at all in the recent past. Nevertheless, Ben's interest was intact, I knew, and maybe even almost as profound as my own. He looked at, and over, girls, especially well-developed ones, with open pleasure. They, in turn, didn't seem to notice or find it important, as I did, that his ribcage extended only an eighth as far as his face indicated he imagined it had grown, and that his neck and legs were scrawny.

There on the horse, it occurred to me that the more Ben had learned about sexual activity, the less he talked about it with me.

“I don't understand why Daddy doesn't think Felicity is beautiful…” I said. My unspoken thought—if he wants to make love to her—still stuck in my throat.

Ben stiffened and swiveled in his saddle. “How do
you
know he doesn't think she's beautiful?”

“He told me so. I asked him.”

Ben seemed appalled and unaccountably wounded. “What
right
did you have to ask him a thing like that?” he almost yelled. “He probably lied to you.”

“I don't think so. He said she was a ‘contrived work,' whatever that means. But he meant she isn't beautiful, and he said that her hair is ‘hideous.' That's exactly what he said, Ben.”

“He doesn't appreciate her,” Ben said belligerently. “But a kid like you has no right to know that.
I've
known it from the beginning.”

We rode for a few more paces. “Do
you
think she's beautiful, Ben?”

“Felicity is the most beautiful, wonderful woman in the world,” pronounced Ben. “Lucresse, do you have any money?”

In addition to his other duties, Fred was keeper of the funds in our household. Wherever we lived, on the first day of residency, my father opened a bank account in the local bank, and Fred visited it every Monday morning to withdraw cash for the week. Fred kept it cached in a bilious-green tin box on a shelf in the closet in his room and doled it out to my father, Ben, and me, as requested. My father's requests were meager; he spent more than we did, but he charged everything. He needed cash only for tips and occasional periodicals. My requests were spasmodic, depending on passing whims and the time of the month. Ben's were the most frequent and depleting. He always had something to buy, in addition to the usual school lunches and notebook paper.

Fred's early youth supplied him with visions of a life endured in
dark mines consequent to too-free spending, and he chafed at what he considered Ben's extravagance. Ben stopped asking him directly for funds and instead approached my father, who wasn't overly concerned about the extent or reasons. But my father had to ask Fred. It got so that, in return, Fred would ask if my father wanted the money for himself or for Ben.

It was at that junction, only a few months before we moved to Palm Beach, that, at Fred's suggestion, allowances were instituted for us. Though Ben's was four dollars, twice the amount of mine, I always had more on hand than he. I was always lending him money. And while we habitually bet a thousand or ten thousand or a million dollars on any subject of dispute, and the debts engaged in were never paid or meant to be paid, I felt serious about the dollar forty-five or eighty cents he owed me week to week. My father said I took after Fred.

But now, Ben's appeal for a loan was more sudden and urgent than usual. I knew books or an upcoming movie were not involved.

“Why do you want it?” I demanded.

“You wouldn't understand,” he said. “How much do you have?

“Seven dollars and twenty cents.”

“That might do it. I've got three. Are you going to let me have it or not?”

“All of it? What do you want it for, Ben?”

“If you must know, I've got to talk to Felicity, alone. I'm going to take her to lunch tomorrow.”

“During lunch period?”

“I won't go back for the afternoon. This is more important than school. I may never go back.”

“Ben!”

“I know you're too young to understand this, Lucresse, but can you keep a secret, for a little while anyway? Until tomorrow night?”

“I swear, Ben.”

“I'm in love with Felicity. Insanely. Forever. And I know she's in love with me. The only thing that's been keeping us apart is Dad. I thought he was in love with her too. And I'm sure she thought so. Now are you going to give me the seven twenty or not?”

I stared at him.

“I told you you wouldn't understand,” he said. “You're too immature. Well, are you going to give me the money and keep quiet, or not? You swore.”

“I'll give it to you, but you've got to pay it back.” I was overcome by the idea of a fifteen-year-old boy escaping from the school cafeteria to keep a rendezvous with a thirty-eight-year-old woman—a rendezvous meant to be never-ending. Ben's jaws were set with determination. His legs never looked so sticklike.

Except for “Good girl” when I gave him the money at home later, Ben said no more to me. During the evening, and in the morning, Felicity's behavior toward us all was no different than usual, and I was afire with curiosity and undirected pity. I didn't know whether I should feel sorry for my father because Felicity didn't love him, even though he didn't love her, or have a womanly compassion for her because she was to be informed that he didn't care for her as she'd thought he did, even though she didn't love
him
. I decided to focus my sympathy on my father. Whether he loved Felicity or not, whether he thought her hair hideous or not, he'd welcomed her as a warm companion of sorts. And wouldn't it surprise and humiliate him to discover that she wasn't satisfied to be of that value? And worse, that she'd found fuller fulfillment in his son?

The only one I didn't feel sorrow for was Ben. He was to be triumphant in the triumvirate. As always—I remembered his soloing in
Flowers of Spring
—he'd get what he wanted. I marveled at him. On the way to school the next morning, if he'd said he was going to
make snow fall from the bright Florida sky, I would have believed he could. All I dared ask was, “
Is
Felicity going to meet you for lunch? Did you ask her?”

“Of course,” he said. His thoughts seemed far away.

After a moment, I tried some more. “Ben, suppose your teacher asks me where you are? What should I say?”

“Say you don't know. You
won't
know.”

“But, Ben—”

“Don't worry about it, Lucresse. I'm going to have to make a lot of arrangements. I'll check out of school myself, my own way. I
told
you, I have to speak to Felicity. And that's
all
I'm going to tell you.”

“When are you going to tell Daddy?”

“As soon as possible, if Felicity agrees. Just remember, it's not up to you to tell him anything.”

“When you've arranged everything, will you tell
me
?” I said anxiously.

“You'll hear about it.”

•  •  •

Later that day at lunch period, I scanned the cafeteria for Ben. He wasn't there. I didn't even look for him after school. Instead I ran all the way home, expecting to find him already halfway through a heated, crucial three-way discussion of the future with my father and Felicity. She'd be holding Ben's hand. My father would be unable to look at them. The lines in his face would be deeper. Fred, having overheard everything, would be muttering to himself in the kitchen.

When I burst in, Fred was not there. Neither was Ben. My father and Felicity were in the living room. More accurately, he was in the living room, in his chair, very still, eyes cast down as I'd imagined, and Felicity was barging back and forth across the room, into the dining room, circling the table, and back into the living room, as though borne by a tornado, hair and hands flying, talking at the top of her voice.

“But where
is
he, Walter? Don't you understand that the boy is tortured! He
knows
I'm telling you about it! Who the hell knows what he's doing! And you
sit
there!
Hello
, Lucresse!”

“Where's Ben?” I asked.

“He'll come back,” said my father.

“My God, Walter. I wish I was as sure as you. Haven't you ever been a
boy!?
”

“Not like Ben. I was a baby until I was forty.”

I didn't think it possible for Felicity's voice to get louder, but it did. “This is no time for jokes, Walter! That poor kid might do anything. You should of seen him when he left me.”