Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (11 page)

As innocently as I could, I inquired about what had happened—lighting the fuse to the extra store of dynamite in Felicity's heart.

“He
told
me he had to talk to me, alone!” she exploded. “Naturally I thought it was about some crazy thing about acting or something. He wanted to make it an event, so I said, ‘Sure, Ben, I'll meet you for lunch,' and I wasn't s'posed to say anything about it so I didn't. How was I s'posed to know what was on his mind? The poor kid thinks he's in
love
with me!
That's
what's happening!”

She had referred to Ben as a “poor kid” twice too many times for me to now admit that I knew about their rendezvous. But I couldn't have interrupted her if I'd wanted to.

“He thought I was in love with him, only I didn't know it yet, he said. He wanted me to go away with him! We'd be happy together the rest of our lives—”

“Touring in
Candida
no doubt,” my father interjected.

“I'm some type to play
Candida
!” bellowed Felicity. “Walter! Maybe
that's
it! Has he been reading
Candida
?”

“I don't know. But it's not convincing enough to trigger this,” he said.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“We don't know,” moaned Felicity. “I tried to set him right, but I guess I can't set anybody right. He ran out of the restaurant at ten of
one and he didn't go back to school. I checked. Fred's out looking for him now.”

“He'll find him,” my father said. “He can't have gone far. He didn't have much money.”

An unpleasant throbbing spasm seized my heart. “He borrowed seven dollars and twenty cents from me yesterday,” I confessed. “And he already had three of his own.”

“Then he had ten dollars and twenty cents,” said my father. “That couldn't get him any further than Titusville, by bus, with eating.”

“Did he pay for lunch, Felicity?” I asked.

“No. And he didn't eat his. That's another thing—Ben needs to put on weight.
Nothing
bothers you, Walter. Ben is too
thin
!”

“But Ben wouldn't want to go to Titusville,” continued my father as though no one had spoken. “Even transported by desire, he wouldn't head for Titusville.”

“Oh where
would
he go?” moaned Felicity. “The sweet little damn fool. I should've told him he and me were meant for each other and brought him back home! Lucresse, stop standing there.”

I was confused.

“Put down your books!” she bellowed.

I carried my books to the laden table behind the sofa and moved the day's mail to make room for them. The mail hadn't been opened, and one letter caught my eye. The familiar deliberate penmanship and address: “Mr. Walter Briard & Family.” It was Aunt Catherine's monthly communication. I opened it and read it to the accompaniment of Felicity and my father talking, but not to each other—just thinking aloud in each other's presence. From the violet stationery, I could hear Aunt Catherine's voice punctuating their soliloquies with irrelevant remarks:

—Joe has had a terrible cold ever since the last week in September. And I've been thinking of you all in sunny Florida. That's a good place
to be for anybody that's given to taking colds and I hope you've all found it real happy there…

“Where would he
go
?” wailed Felicity. “A kid like that, after a knock like that?”

…Joe and I have hardly gone out anywhere, what with his cold, sneezing and coughing and getting him up in the nights, except to Tulsa for the Legion dinner last Saturday night, and we had to go to that 'cause Flo Daggett was chairman of food. I told you about her last month. She's the one that thinks she makes the best potato pancakes in the whole world?…

I didn't recall Daggett or pancakes, but Aunt Catherine's letters always abounded with references to local personalities who were strangers to us.

“Ben watches Ben,” my father declared. “He isn't foolish. Whatever he does, he does well. He'll take disappointment well.”

…Anyways, Joe thinks what with how things have been, and me doing all the work getting Flo to let Lucy Cummings make the potato pancakes, who really makes them so much better and keeping old Mrs. Dunhamly out of the way—of course it's time I got out of this dreary winter weather for a spell…

“You go
mashugana
the first time you think you're in love,” Felicity said. “With me, it was Leon Rosenblatt. He was a great big healthy, shy boy. He played basketball and was going to night school to be an accountant. I used to daydream that he loved me and his name was different and he played polo, and I told my mother I wouldn't spit on him.”

…So he's been after and after me, till finally he made me see my way clear to taking out for a visit with all of you in the near future. Let's hope all goes well—with the drugstore I mean, and Joe's cold—and I'll plan on being there on December the eight…

“It won't take him long to stop hating us,” my father said. “The real problem is to figure out where he'd go to work on it.”

“Walter, why don't we call up some of his friends or that dramatics teacher of his?” Felicity begged.

…It always does my heart good to think of seeing poor Jen's loved ones. Did I tell you they're thinking of building a new airport here? Right across from the cemetery? Well, did Joe and me put up an argument! Some people just have no respect for the dead…

“More likely he'd be talking to strangers right now,” my father said.

“If he was
my
boy,” Felicity ranted, “I wouldn't leave him to talk his heart out to strangers. I wouldn't let him meet up with a woman like me for his first crush.”

…so it's still up in the air what they're going to do. I did want to tell you all though, Jen's grave is the prettiest one there, and the little holly hedge around it is green as can be even in the bad weather we've been having…

A car in the driveway arrested all voices. Car door slammed. Front door banged open. It was Fred. Alone. No one—at the bus terminal, railroad station, airlines, or at three classmates' houses—had seen Ben.

Fred was close to frantic. “Mr. Briard, it is five o'clock,” he said, trembling. “I do hope the lad hasn't gone strolling near the docks. There is just no telling what villain he may have encountered—” Fred's antipathy to sun and sea extended to the entire segment of mankind with anything to do with either. Such people—dock workers, fishermen, boatmen, and their near-laced relatives—had potentialities of evil unguessed by more civilized folk.

“You have a very good point there!” My father perked up—surprisingly, because for years, he had been disputing Fred's opinion of sea-faring people, always insisting that they were no better or worse than anybody else.

Fred's next thought was too terrible to speak aloud. “You don't think he's been
shanghaied
?” he whispered.

“No,” said my father emphatically.

“Then what, for God's sake?” Felicity shouted, loud enough to hurt my head.

Unhearing due to the drama in
his
head, Fred blinked and elaborated. “Bound head and hand to foot in the bottom of a boat,” he lamented.

“Oy gevalt!
” Felicity moaned. “What're you gonna do, Walter? Wait till it's too late? Call the
cops!
”

“Use your head, Felicity!” My father pointed at her angrily. “It's possible to figure out
some
things in life by
thinking!
” He pounded his own head with the finger he'd used to scorn hers. “Ben's not on the way to Cuba!”

“How the hell do
you
know?!” she blazed back at him.

“Call it an educated guess!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “If Fred and I aren't back by dinnertime, you two eat!” And he and Fred were out the door.

•  •  •

After the sound of the car faded, Felicity was odd—distraught, but quietly so. For the love of Ben, the walls had resounded with screaming, and now, for the same reason, I could hear the rustling of the palms outside and the low hum of the icebox three rooms away.

Felicity sat stone-still, dark eyes blank with misery, hands fallen in her lap, ostensibly unaware that she wasn't alone. All for the love of Ben. I told myself that she needed my comfort.

But what I said was far more truthful. “Don't worry like that, Felicity. Ben's all right. I'm sure he is. He's
always
all right.
Ben
never gets in trouble he can't get out of.”

Very slowly, her lids lifted until her eyes were looking into mine. It was as though her eyes could see through mine into an area inside that was mysterious even to me.

“Don't worry so much about
yourself
, Lucresse,” she said. “He may have hurt your feelings now and then—”

“Now and
then
?” I exploded, the mysterious area suddenly exposed in a flood of light. I was so angry I could taste it—at Ben for being the focus of her and everyone's attention and, even more confusing, at Felicity…for what?

“…but he loves you,” continued Felicity. “And now
his
feelings have been hurt.”

I tried to switch the light off fast. “And Daddy's hurt
your
feelings. That's what I really meant. He had no right to be so mean to you.”

“He wasn't being mean, Lucresse. He was making me feel better. Trying to believe
himself
that there are no consequences, serious consequences, for what I did.”

“But, Felicity, you didn't
do
anything,” I said, truly believing it and completely forgetting my feelings of two seconds before.

“I moved in here, didn't I? So it was fine for me to have you all help me get rid of Mead, wasn't it? But did I think how it was for a little boy that didn't know his mother? A boy all spiffed up ready and dying for a woman?”

“But Ben and
you
…” I said, unable to fit the combination into any context.

“If anything has happened to Ben…” she said, drifting off, her eyes dull and despairing again.

“Nothing has,” I insisted, all at once hoping that nothing had—and suddenly it didn't matter that Ben was the apex of everyone's attention.

It was six o'clock. Sometime after that, I asked Felicity if she'd let me help her fry a chicken that was quartered and ready in the icebox. She said no, and I ate a banana and two bowls of chocolate pudding. She wouldn't eat a thing. She smoked about fourteen cigarettes and wouldn't even answer when I asked if she wanted a drink.

It was past seven the next time I looked at the clock, and all I know is that, from then on, life turned into a tornado of sound and motion that had no counterpart in my experience. Peak emotion, no holds
barred, no inhibitions respected, no word or action withheld. Doors slammed—the car was in the front—feet scuffled, dragged, and kicked as Fred and my father lugged a roaring drunk, flailing Ben into the house. Bodies jammed and banged and dropped as they lifted and pushed and shoved him up the staircase, knocking into each other, with Felicity and me following cautiously behind. Ben's hair hung wet over his streaming eyes, his shirt was open and torn. And the whole time, at the top of his lungs, he sang, “Laugh, Clown, Laugh,” and screamed, “Let me go!” while punching the closest body or wall or air with loose, aimless fists.

My father yelled. So did Fred.

“Oh, Ben! Oh, Ben!” wept Felicity at each step, and with her own fists, threatened the Fates in Yiddish for Ben's inebriated state. Then, in a mixture of Yiddish and English, she raged at my father for taking so long, but thanked God and him for finding Ben.

My father boomed directions to Fred, swatted back at Ben, and yelled a disjointed explanation to Felicity and me about how and where they'd recovered Ben.

Struggling with his part of the writhing load, Fred dodged Ben's and my father's blows and prattled comforting understatements in a shrill singsong: “Only two more little steps, my boy… There now, you're not so bad off, are you? …Only two more little, now… Here we go, see? You're already looking better. Just a dash of a tub and you'll be fit as a fiddle…whatho?… Now, one more little step; righto, my boy?…”

Finally, they got Ben into the bathroom between his and my room and lowered him into the tub. Fred held him down while my father turned on the shower. Ben bubbled and sputtered and screamed, “Gi'me liberty or gi' me death!” and finally quieted. Fred remained holding him, making soothing noises, the same ones he'd made when we'd suffered the falls and bruises of early childhood. And my father and Felicity and I adjourned to Ben's bedroom.

“My God, Walter, how much do you think he's had?” said Felicity, unwilling to risk a guess.

“In the shack called the Dock-Rest, where he was, ten dollars and twenty cents could have bought him seventeen. But the captain—the barman who owns the place—told me he bought two rounds for the regular crew that hang around all the time. They number four or five, so Ben probably hasn't put down more than nine or ten himself.”

“Ten!” exclaimed Felicity. “I'm an old hand and five leave me shaking.”

“You know,” my father said, “Ben has real stick-to-it-iveness. He became quite sick around four o'clock, but he came right back for more, the captain told me. He's a good man—in spite of what Fred thinks. He was prepared to put Ben up for the night.”

There was a moan, a splash. Fred opened the door and Ben's voice, muffled and mixed with running water and Fred's running chatter, came clearly: “I'm cold…it's cold in here…I'm shivering. If Dad had one ounce of warmth in his heart, I wouldn't be freezing this way! Oh, Felicity…Felicity! You don't know how I'm freezing.”