Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (7 page)

“We will sing ‘My Country 'Tis of Thee,' ” Miss Bunce announced, digging her heels into the stage floor. “You are invited to join in.”

She about-turned, stopping herself with her heels again, and Ben began the song, in his own most comfortable key. Miss Bunce, I, the leaves and blue bells, and the audience went into “sweet land of liberty” in the same key.

As “Le-et free-dom ring,” died out, I heard a burst of laughter that was all too familiar. My father.

“I wonder what
he
thinks is so funny,” Miss Bunce remarked as the curtains swept closed in front of us.

Ben and I let her get embroiled with the mob, and we made our way down to the auditorium, where my father was still laughing. All his top teeth were showing; there were tears glittering in his eyes.

“You both did very well,” he explained, “but Fred almost caused an international incident here.”

“Yes, you did very well indeed,” Fred said quickly. “Jolly good.”

“When everyone else sang ‘Let freedom ring,' ” my father choked back laughter, “Fred rang out, ‘God Save the Queen'! He's rarely been in such fine voice.”

My father and Fred drove us back to our school, trailing the buses filled with our classmates and Miss Bunce. In the schoolyard, Fred said innocently, “You ought to go in with the children, don't you think, Mr. Briard? To compliment Miss Bunce. She worked so well with Ben and Lucresse.”

It was my father's turn to be embarrassed. “That's her business,” he said abruptly.

The inside of our car was the closest he got to the inside of our San Francisco school.

The next day, Ben's cold was gone. A note, in tiny, delicate handwriting, incongruous with her physiognomy, came to Mrs. Walter Briard from Miss Bunce, thanking her for her fine contribution to the costume committee and saying that Ben and I were a fine pair of youngsters and that she thought the program went off fine. She told our class the program could have been better, and it wasn't mentioned again until the day, two months later, that Ben and I picked up our further handled transfer cards.

When she heard we were leaving, Miss Bunce said she'd be thinking
of us the next time they had an exchange program and she bid us good luck. And at the end of our last school day, Janet, who had become one of my closest friends and whom Ben ignored since the occasion of her stampede-instigating bathroom break, stopped me in the corridor. “I didn't want to tell you before,” she said, “but at the end of the program when you came up on stage, I could see right through your dress. And my mother says she just despises kids that show off, like your brother.”

We left the upright concert grand in the leaky house, and Ben deliberately explained to the empty-eyed old woman in charge of the admissions office at our next school that I rightfully belonged back in the fourth grade. That was mean and foolish of him, because, in that school—between Hulbert and Edmondson in Arkansas (my father's client had a holiday ranch across the border outside of Memphis)—it wouldn't have mattered which grade I was in. Every class had boys and girls, with queer haircuts and queerer speech habits, as old as seventeen.

There was one general store that also housed the post office and the one-man police-fire–chief's headquarters. Marijuana grew under its back windows. The older boys in my class picked it on their way to Sunday school, the Sabbath being the only day that the police officer wouldn't catch them since he went to the church earlier than they, being the Sunday school teacher, too.

We didn't stay there long. Fred offended the storekeeper to the point of open enmity by asking the last name of his young, black helper and thereafter addressing the fellow as “Mr.” My father took to correcting my English almost every time I opened my mouth. Ben got embroiled in a ferocious argument with a fifteen-year-old boy in his class over whether boxing was an art or a science; I don't know which side Ben represented, but he came home with a cut lip. And
his opponent, continuing the fracas, stole our car that night. The police chief recovered it and confiscated it as evidence for a week. It was certainly useful evidence. We saw him drive past our house in it on his way to his office every morning.

Even Aunt Catherine, who visited us there for a long weekend, didn't think this town the ideal place for us to settle down—not that she had any real hope that we would settle anywhere. The “community life” appeared to her to be limited compared to Sapulpa's; there was no Kiwanis club for my father.

He sold whatever it was he wanted to sell to his Tennessee client without prolonged negotiation, and we left. For Macon, Georgia, I think. But I'm not positive.

•  •  •

As bread lines lengthened around the country and construction came to a shrieking halt, my father's trade in priceless art objects remained strangely unaffected, and our life plodded on. Ben perfected his imitations of Bing Crosby and both Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald. As a comfortable child among children with unemployed parents, I continued to feel on the outside of whatever life we were inhabiting. And Fred dealt with our constant upheavals by developing his own unique cause, to which he devoted insistent energy—even threatening to strike. He was determined to persuade my father to have dinner at the same time every evening. True to his character, my father never did succumb to regularity, and Fred never did strike.

In the year I was twelve and Ben was thirteen, I refused to have boys to my birthday party and Ben wouldn't invite girls to his. Our attitudes died hard. The last party we had, before insisting that we were too old for such celebrations, was a double production when I was nearing thirteen. I invited only girls and he only boys. The sexes giggled at and insulted each other and had a fine time. Then suddenly
Ben and I were a lot taller, though still straight and narrow-bodied, and we were fourteen and fifteen, and on our way to Palm Beach, Florida.

Ordinarily when we moved, neither Ben nor I, nor Fred, knew the specific reason. We were used to people floating in and out of our lives and long-distance phone calls that led us to pick up and move someplace else.

The move to Palm Beach was different. Perhaps I was more interested than before in the exact nature of our propelling force. My father was excited. He had been commissioned by a jewelry firm in New York to buy the Peddicord diamond for them. And the Peddicord diamond, one of the largest in the world, belonged to Mrs. Mead Peddicord, Jr., who was in Palm Beach at the time.

Mrs. Peddicord, Jr., better known as the motion picture actress Felicity Gorham, had so far resisted every offer of purchase.

This presented a challenge my father found titillating. He enjoyed the flattery implicit in the New York company appointing him to achieve by personal contact what they couldn't, as much as he liked the prospect of the fee agreed upon for his successful service, a small percentage of the gem's value, a sum close to $100,000. I've never known a more tumultuous winter.

The house my father was able to buy by remote decision through an agent was unimpressive. Bright, blond stucco on the outside, dim, pocked plaster inside, vaguely Spanish, with mosaic-tile floors. But it was adequate to house us and our goods. The goods, as usual, hung around and leaned around wherever space offered itself. And we each had a room—my father, two. Fred's was belatedly built—an addition to the garage reached via a staircase off the kitchen. Ben's and mine were off the second-floor hall and shared a bathroom situated between them. My father had a duplicate of our layout off the opposite side of the hall.

Felicity Gorham, from what the butcher told Fred and some refound, old acquaintances told my father, was in a seafront mansion. Once we were there, he didn't look her up right away. He seemed to be in no hurry. After a few weeks—time enough for Ben to become his tenth-grade speech teacher's favorite and for me to become familiar with my ninth-grade homeroom teacher's right name (it was Wyatt, and I kept getting it confused with a Wyle and a Wyant I'd once had)—when he'd still made no attempt to meet her, he met her by accident, through Ben and me.

On weekends and occasionally after school, we had swimming lessons at the pool of one of the most elaborate resort hotels. After each lesson, I liked to linger in the calm water no higher than my chin and pretend to perform an accomplished crawl. Ben's instruction had been more fruitful. He preferred to practice his stroke and unfearful breathing in the more turbulent ocean. There was a daily argument as to whether we'd go to the beach or the pool. Usually my father settled the dispute by taking me to the pool, where, after one swim back and forth, he donned a robe and sat at a table on the surrounding patio nodding approval of my efforts as he sipped a highball. And he permitted Ben to go to the beach, so long as he was with friends, or, if friends weren't available, Fred.

I couldn't understand why, when friends weren't available, Ben accepted Fred's company without protest—until the first time I was compelled to go to the beach too because my father was keeping an appointment with a young architect whose ideas for a small, modern house near the shore interested him temporarily.

Fred considered exposure of the skin to direct sunrays uncivilized. Once, years before, at Brighton, when he had evidently already become bald, he had lain for only twenty minutes, he said, unshielded from a summer sun, and had to salve every inch of his fair-complexioned, so mistreated body, including his tortured skull, every hour on the
hour for two weeks with a vile-smelling, medicated slime. Now he was unshakable in his distrust of tropical sun, his dislike of sand, and his repulsion to moving salt water.

To accompany Ben and me to a place replete with these abominations, Fred geared himself with a long-sleeved shirt, Bermuda shorts, high socks, a wide-brimmed straw hat, a jar of Noxzema, one blanket, and three bed sheets. Ben and I carried our own towels. At the edge of the pavement where the sand shore began, Fred removed his shoes, wrapped one sheet, Moslem style around his waist, making sure it skirted his legs to his toes. He laid another sheet, half-unfolded, over the top of his hat, and warning us not to step on crabs or shells, hobbled and hopped in the soft, despicable sand to the nearest spot he could get us to encamp. There, he spread the blanket flat and covered it with the last sheet, in hopes of barring the entrance of the powderiest grain of sand through his floor, and he sat down in the very center of his tiny stronghold of civilization, cross-legged, with his Noxzema jar in his lap. He unfurled the sheet balanced on his hat and draped it from its middle fold over his entire person, like a tent. He then arranged the smallest possible aperture, no more than the width of his glasses, between the sheet's meeting edges, as a sighting spot from which he could fulfill his duty as potential rescuer of human life from the vicious ocean.

When he thought Ben was out too far—beyond the nearest breaker—(I gave him no cause for that worry), he poked a shrouded arm upward, making a pointed knob in his tent. For every five times I thought Ben was too far out, Fred's signal went up only once. So most of the time the temptation to close his sighting gap and shelter the bridge of his nose must have won out over his sense of duty, which explained Ben's passive attitude about having him along.

It was I who was waving wildly to Ben to come in closer when Felicity Gorham entered our lives. She appeared at my side from
somewhere way down the beach. Ben was bobbing up and down, and from shore, you couldn't tell if his open mouth was joyous or desperate.

“What the devil is that dope doing?” she said in a voice almost as low as Ben's, when his didn't break in a girlish squeak that had been causing him severe anguish.

“I guess he's all right,” I said. “He's my brother.”

When I turned to look at her, my first impression was of movement—an illusion created by color and wind, since she was standing still, one hand on her hip. She was wearing a white, feathery one-piece bathing suit; the breeze blew its soft, fuzzy surface this way and that. Her hair, blowing above, was a startling halo, each individual hair a brilliant, sundown gold, not one casting a shadow on another. A ring on the fourth finger of her hand at her hip did a patter dance of its own as it caught the sun. It was a rectangular diamond that reached from her knuckle almost to the middle joint and made you think it must take effort for her to lift her hand.

Her eyes were very round and large and deep brown, incongruous with her dazzling hair. And her nose was another surprise—unusually thin, a perfect concave curve from bridge to tip. It was a controlled, fragile, questioning nose, at odds with the personality her bathing suit, hair, and voice described. I turned back to Ben.

“I don't want to
call
him,” I said. “I don't want to get Fred up. He's supposed to be watching us.” I indicated the sheet-tent thirty yards away.

“That's
somebody
?” she asked.

“Our father's man. He hates the sun.”

“Well, I'll call the kid. What's his name?”

“Ben.”

She held out her left arm, the unweighted one, parallel to her shoulder, and with a commanding sweep, brought it past her full bosom to
her right shoulder, calling at the same time in a voice that was a worthy adversary to the ocean's roar, “C'mon in, Ben!” and added, under her breath, “Damn it.”

Fred's curtains sprang apart, knocking off his hat. He risked broiling his skull for a moment. “Ben? Ben? Ben, come
out
!”

Ben surged up, cognizant of us all, and without another bounce, his head moved closer and closer. Fred recovered his hat and retrenched.

Ben approached us, smiling. “I was having a good time,” he said to my companion. He planted himself in front of us, standing abnormally straight in the constantly wetted sand.