WASHBURN, OHIO, was officially incorporated in 1800, and in December of 1949, the Washburn Observer ran an editorial asking point-blank if there would or would not be a sesquicentennial celebration. One way or another, Dwight Claytor, who was the newly elected president of the Washburn Historic Preservation Society, became the de facto director of the event, and he was wearied by the project within a few weeks. Eventually, in late February of 1950, after many separate and, finally, joint meetings with the two garden clubs, the Knights of the Eagle, the Knights of Fithian, the Masons and their sister lodge—which was planning the dedication of its newly built Home for the Elderly Women of the Eastern Star—as well as the Marshal County Chamber of Commerce, Dwight was able to announce that Washburn’s sesquicentennial celebration would extend to all of Marshal County and would also encompass Washburn’s Dan Emmett Days celebration, which hadn’t been observed since 1939.
Dwight had called upon every ounce of his patience and his burgeoning skill at diplomacy in order to extract an agreement from all concerned that the events would commence on Saturday, July first, encompassing the Fourth of July, and would come to a close at the Sesquicentennial Ball Saturday, July fifteenth. What had finally tipped the balance in a disagreement between the Chamber of Commerce and the Knights of the Eagle was Dwight’s reminding all concerned that the downtown merchants would have their stores stocked with back-to-school inventory and that the festivities were bound to bring a great many people to town. “I didn’t want the Eagles to be unhappy,” he said to Trudy, “but they really didn’t have a leg to stand on, since they don’t have a marching band. Now, the Knights of Fithian are another matter —”
“Dwight! You sound like . . . oh, I don’t know. Some small-town businessman engaged in boosterism. Like you’re a man in a bad suit with a big smile. How did you end up being in charge of all this?” Trudy wasn’t particularly interested in any of the local events; she had thrived in New York City, even though she had found her job tedious, and even though it meant trading off child care. After the war, though, she had been perfectly willing to come home to Scofields with Dwight, who had offers from several law firms elsewhere but who clearly, and increasingly as the war went on, had longed to be back in Washburn.
“It seems like heaven to me at the moment,” he had written to her from his base at Deopham Green:
The clean streets and all the well-kept houses. I miss what I think of as the common-senseness of it all, the predictable problems of any small town. It seems to me now that that’s a reasonable goal to aim for. I always thought that Leo Scofield was admired in part because he understood that the lives of people are ordinary wherever they live. He believed that being responsible within a community is probably the greatest good that most men can do. I think your father believes the same thing, only he’s chosen the community of letters. I’ve seen acts of courage and sacrifice here, but war brings out the most ruthless instincts of survival, too. I have met a few men who have become good friends, but in general I think that the war brings out the worst in people.
You would be amazed to see London. I took a walk around the city to see what had happened, and I was ill at ease the whole time, which probably seems like a natural reaction. But I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me besides the obvious, the destruction and waste. Then I realized that somehow the day was too bright. What I could see was sad and private and seemed to me to be too exposed. Children’s toys, not even damaged. That wasn’t really the worst, because I had heard people talk about being especially upset by the randomness of the damage. Like when I saw a lamp with a fringed shade standing upright in the middle of fallen bricks and dust. On that same street there was a woman’s ball gown hanging in a closet that was the only remaining structure in a house that had been turned to rubble. I kept wondering, why just that gown? Where were her other clothes? The light was so bright that it almost made me angry. I wanted to protect the privacy of whoever had been living in those houses. I could see too much, if that makes any sense. Then I realized that the trees had been blasted away. They were simply gone. I don’t know why that hit me so hard. Maybe there had never been trees on that street. Trees will grow again anyway, of course, but more than anything, it made me want to be back sitting in Monument Square under the shade of those big oaks.
Trudy had been touched by that sentiment and had thought it perfectly understandable, although she hadn’t known that Dwight had written that letter after returning from a mission during which his plane was so badly shot up and low on fuel that the pilot had considered landing in Sweden. The crew had jettisoned guns, ammunition, anything they could to lessen the weight, and the plane made it just across the channel to Kent. Communications were so bad that, by the time they finally managed to make their way back north to Deopham Green, every man on the crew found that any of his possessions that might be of use to someone else had been pilfered from his tent, although none of them took it personally. Photographs and letters, and even old and tattered magazines, had been scrupulously left behind. Their wing commander was only two days away from notifying the families of Dwight’s flight crew that the men were missing in action.
For Trudy’s part, though, during the time Dwight was overseas, politics had become an abiding passion—endlessly fascinating as she began to grapple with the big ideas and issues of the day. Her father had arranged for her to meet various literary friends of his, poets and writers who lived in the city, and she had fallen in with a group of those friends’ children and students and assorted young writers and artists. And she, too, was caught up in their passionate progressivism. That very February morning that the Washburn newspaper announced the plans for the sesquicentennial, Trudy had a letter from a friend in the morning mail, reporting that the case of Dennis et al. v. United States was pretty certainly headed to the Supreme Court. As they sat at breakfast, she had tried to read the letter aloud to Dwight, but Amelia Anne had interrupted off and on, and little Martha, too, was agitated and cranky, and finally Trudy handed the letter to Dwight so he could read it for himself.
He skimmed over it and then returned to its first page and read it again, shaking his head. “Ah, God,” he said. “This is a shame. Well, it’s hysteria,” he added, handing the letter back to her. But in light of his reaction to such serious news, Trudy was baffled by Dwight’s having thrown himself full force into the insignificant details of planning so trivial an event as the sesquicentennial celebration of Washburn, Ohio.
Having weathered the scare of Betts’s illness, Agnes had become increasingly enthusiastic about Betts and Will’s upcoming marriage. They had seemed exactly like a happily married couple when Will sat with Betts in the evenings when she didn’t even feel well enough to chat. Will sat with the paper, now and then reading an interesting item aloud to Betts. There was no mistaking the remarkable compatibility of the two. And now that Betts was up and about, Agnes threw herself wholeheartedly into the preparations for the wedding itself.
As the middle of May grew closer, however, Betts had become indifferent to it all, had become uninterested and hard to pin down about any decision concerning the choices of buttons or trims. “Really, Mama . . . it doesn’t matter. Whatever you think looks best.”
Agnes, herself, was entranced by the exotic fabrics now available to her, and sometimes she would unfold a length of cloth she had splurged on and lay its transparent paper pattern on top, so that she could envision the garment it would become. She was having far too good a time creating Betts’s wardrobe to be particularly bothered by what she imagined was the inevitable listlessness that followed an illness.
Betts was preoccupied with her health. She tilted the mirror of her vanity to various angles and spent hours at a time studying her reflection. She had thought Dr. Caldwell was an old fool when he warned her of the consequences of smoking, and when she phoned Claytor, he said he hadn’t heard of anything like that. But Betts had been so worried about hearing a grave answer that she hadn’t been as forthright about her anxiety as she might have been. She had phoned Claytor, in fact, on the pretext of inquiring about a doctor to recommend to Will, who hadn’t been impressed with Dr. Caldwell.
“And you know, Claytor,” she said over the phone, “I’m not fond of him at all! Do you know that he told me one of my arms was shorter than the other? Because of smoking!”
“Everybody’s arms are different lengths, Betts,” Claytor had told her. “Who knows why? But I tell you, I think Frank Pierce is probably a good man to see. Will should give him a call. Is there something particular Will’s worried about?”
“No, no. Just . . . well, really, just someone in case we need a doctor.” Betts hadn’t told him that Dr. Caldwell had said she was suffering from progressive atrophy. It was plain enough to Betts when she looked in the mirror that her right arm had become a scant bit shorter than her left. At least a half inch shorter, she thought. Maybe even an inch.
And even though it was smoking that was at the root of the affliction, whenever Betts considered her situation, she ended up scrabbling through her purse, searching for her Luckys and a book of matches. She had rarely in her life needed a cigarette more. She was as unnerved as when she was living in Washington and seeing Hank Abernathy and one month thought for sure that she was pregnant. Was it, in fact, immoral, she brooded, not to tell Will about this disease?
She hadn’t said a word about any of this to her family. It seemed to her only fair that if she told anyone at all, it should be Will. But what, if anything, should she tell him? She might well be misjudging him. He had a powerful sense of integrity, after all. She sat on the end of her bed near the open window, able at last to think clearly as she smoked a cigarette, and she considered the possibility that telling Will about her predicament might be interpreted by him as an insult to his honor. Insulting to imply that he might reject her for something so removed from the reason he had fallen in love with her. He would probably be hurt that she had imagined such a thing. On the other hand, she and Will had talked about having children. Was it possible that hers was an affliction passed down through generations?
She tried and tried not to smoke; it irritated her throat and often brought on a fit of coughing. But even the day she left Dr. Caldwell’s office after he broke the news to her that cigarettes and coffee were causing slight atrophy of her right arm—that if she kept smoking, the effect could be that her right arm would appear shortened and she might very well lose some of its strength—she had stopped at a bench on the hospital lawn and had a cigarette, taking a long, shaky drag to calm herself down. And since then, whenever her condition came to mind, the only comfort she could find was having what she swore to herself was just one last cigarette.
The day before her wedding, Betts was in a fragile state of mind off and on all day. Lavinia came upon her at the window of the staircase landing and stopped for a moment. Betts had her back to the stairwell, bracing her hands on the windowsill and leaning forward to gaze out at the yard below, and Lavinia peered over her shoulder to see what had caught her attention. Then she realized Betts was near tears.
“I know just how you’re feeling,” Lavinia said. “I remember . . . It suddenly seemed to me that I was pinning myself down for the rest of my life just before I married Phillip Alcorn. It wasn’t so bad with Claytor. I already knew. You just can’t take it too seriously. I mean, you might stay madly in love the rest of your life. How can anyone know that, though? But it’s not the end of the world one way or another. Well, because you never know what might happen. You could always get a divorce these days, or Will might die. . . . Don’t think of yourself as trapped,” she advised. Lavinia wasn’t ever likely to give someone a spontaneous hug, but she did pat Betts lightly on the shoulder and then hurried on her way to spare Betts any further embarrassment.
That day, too, Agnes finally corralled Betts into the sewing room to make any last-minute alterations and to pin up the hem of Betts’s linen suit. Agnes thought it boded well that it was an unusually pleasant day, moderate in every aspect, and she said so as she helped Betts step up and stand on the old, sturdy farm table her own mother had used as a pedestal where someone could turn slowly so that a pinned-up hem could be checked at eye level and adjusted to be sure it was even all the way around.
All at once the memory of Warren attempting to pin the hem of a dress she was fitting on herself came back to Agnes. The weather had been equally unobtrusive, and the two of them had at first become silly, as Warren had tickled her ankles and the backs of her knees, and then had run his hands under her skirt all the way to her waist. Eventually they had ended up together on the same sagging sofa that still sat against the wall, making love. They had spent the whole afternoon, until the light had faded, simply enjoying themselves. Agnes couldn’t remember where the children had been, or her mother- and father-in-law, but she had always thought it was that afternoon that Betts was conceived.
“You know, Betts, I’ve never told anyone this. . . . Well, here you are! Right where you started,” but Betts only murmured listlessly; she wasn’t paying attention but only standing still in the manner of a well-behaved schoolgirl.
“Ah. The suit looks beautiful on you,” Agnes said. “Here . . . turn a quarter-way round,” she directed, and Betts obliged, but her peculiar sullenness was beginning to annoy Agnes. It cast a gloomy spell over the pleasant day. Betts had been moping about for days, and it was one thing to have second thoughts, if that was what was going on. If that was the case, then Betts should just say so and be done with it. It was quite another thing, Agnes thought, to put a damper on the mood of everyone in the house.
“I made the prettiest blue dress for myself in this room,” Agnes chatted on. “Pale, pale blue with a darker blue pattern embroidered on the bodice. Like Queen Anne’s Lace. Well, delicate. Embroidered around the hem, too.” But Betts didn’t respond. “Your father always said it looked like someone had aimed a blueberry pie at me. But, really, he liked that dress, too. I’d gotten so tired of dropped waists that I used one of my mother’s patterns. It was your father who pinned up that hem for me, but it never was quite straight.” Agnes glanced up at her daughter’s face, but it was as inexpressive as if Betts were no more than a dress form.
“But I tell you what, Betts,” said Agnes, her voice overanimated with bouncy cheerfulness. “This has certainly always been a lucky place for you.” Finally Betts looked down at her mother as though she were surprised to hear her voice. “You can step down now,” Agnes said. “I’ve got the hem basted. This is literally where you started off, you know. When your father was pinning the hem of that blueberry-pie dress. We certainly did get distracted. Why, I’d bet my life that was the exact time that you became more than a glimmer in your father’s eye. On that very sofa —”
“Mother! My God, Mama. Parents don’t tell their children . . . That’s not the sort of thing you should ever say to me! Why did you tell me that?” But Agnes only shook her head, a little bit amused by Betts’s priggishness. Betts appeared to be truly shocked, to be appalled, and she struggled to get out of the jacket of the suit, getting tangled in her hurry.
“Oh, wait, Betts,” Agnes said. “Just let me get a quick measure of the sleeves. . . .”
And, at that, Betts went rigid, stepping away from her mother, crossing her arms corpse-fashion over her chest.
“Oh, God. I have to talk to Will. I can’t go through with this. It’s just wrong. It’s not fair.”
“Betts? I’m so sorry, Betts. Has something happened? What—Well, sit down a minute, Betts. You look like you might faint. Sit down! These things happen all the time. Maybe you just need some time to think.”
“Oh, God, Mama,” Betts said, “it’s not right. I can’t get married in my condition.”
“What? What do you mean? I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t understand. This isn’t . . . Have you changed your mind? About Will? Oh, Betts,” Agnes said, her voice going soft with somberness. “You aren’t pregnant, are you? But that’s no reason —”
“Mama! No! Of course I’m not pregnant! I think Will’s wonderful! I’d love to be married to Will!”
“Well, Betts . . . What’s the matter? You’re sure? It isn’t that you’re wondering if you’ll be happy? I mean if you get married. You still want to have the wedding?”
“But I just can’t,” Betts said. “I can’t. It would just be selfish, Mama! And it would be like playing some kind of trick. . . . I can’t do that. I’ve got this condition I haven’t said anything about. My right arm. Progressive atrophy. I haven’t told anyone. I haven’t told him—How could I ever do that? Marry him without —”
“Oh, my Lord, Betts. Oh, my Lord!”
“Well, I know. The whole thing is upsetting. But I don’t do much with my right —”
“But it’s not true! It isn’t true, Betts. Everyone’s arms are different lengths!”
“That’s what I said to myself, and that’s what Claytor said —”
“No, Betts! You don’t understand what I’m telling you,” Agnes interrupted. “Betts, it really isn’t true! Dr. Caldwell . . . I saw him on the street. He stopped me on the street. He was worried about your bronchitis. About your smoking. He . . . oh, he thought you wouldn’t listen!”
“You knew about my arm?” Betts asked.
“Yes! Of course! Well, no! I told him . . . He thought you wouldn’t take him seriously. Something like that. I was in such a hurry. It’s not true! But I never thought . . . I didn’t know . . . Betts, there’s not anything at all wrong with you!”
Betts’s expression was tense, and her voice flat. “Dr. Caldwell told you that my arm was getting shorter, and you didn’t —”
“No! Of course not. He was only going to tell you that your arm would get shorter if you kept smoking. . . . Oh, he had some bee in his bonnet about vanity! I wasn’t paying much attention. I was trying to find buttons. . . . He thought that if you believed smoking was —”
“Dr. Caldwell told you that he was going to tell me a lie about some terrible thing happening to me, and you thought that was all right because it might stop me from smoking?”
Agnes looked up at Betts, whose expression was hawklike with her eyebrows raised in arched wings and her eyes brilliant and focused. All sorts of ways to explain the situation flew through Agnes’s mind, but she realized that in many ways Betts had it right.
“Oh, not exactly, Betts,” she said. “I never even remembered it till now —”
Betts stood up and moved stiffly toward the door. “I just can’t believe you’d let him tell me something like that. And then . . . My God! To tell me about having sex with my own father! I don’t know why you’d do that! And I have no idea why . . . I know you can’t stand it that I’m marrying Will. I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened —”
“Don’t say another word!” Agnes said, in a tone so authoritative that it stopped Betts in midsentence and surprised Agnes herself. “Not another thing! You really have no idea about my life. Don’t say anything else! Don’t say something that you can never take back!”
Betts shed the linen skirt of her suit as quickly as she could and let it drop to the floor. “I can’t be around you right now, Mama. I don’t care what I wear to get married in, but I can’t stay here in this room with you even for another minute!”
Agnes stood dumbfounded for a few moments, and then she gathered up the skirt, spread it carefully on the ironing board, and sank down on the sofa, exhausted and so sorry. She was full of regret. Was it her vanity, Agnes wondered, or even some sort of spite, a misguided declaration of her own existence, that had prompted her to conjure up for Betts the actuality of her own mother’s sexuality? Had she really thought that she and her own daughter could ever be on such equal footing? That the two of them could ever discuss anything so intimate and powerful?
Betts Scofield and Will Dameron were married the next day, Saturday, May thirteenth, 1950. Betts made a beautiful bride in the linen suit and the sweeping wide-brimmed hat. The weather had turned gray and unseasonably cool, and they weren’t able to use the Butlers’ garden for the reception as they had planned, but Lily and Agnes and Bernice Dameron hastily cobbled together an indoor seating arrangement with the caterers from the Eola Arms.
After the cake was cut, Betts and Will made their departure with kisses for everyone and a shower of rice. Will had practically lifted Agnes off her feet with an ecstatic embrace, but Betts had managed to reach Agnes only in time to give her mother a perfunctory peck on the cheek. They hadn’t spoken since the day before, although Agnes hadn’t intended for that to happen. She had left the freshly pressed suit hanging on the banister right outside Betts’s bedroom door, and she assumed Betts would come show her how she looked before they went downstairs. But Betts had gotten dressed and left without a sound, going with the Butlers to the church, leaving Agnes to follow along with Claytor and Lavinia and Mary Alcorn.
The reception moved along at just the right pace, so that when Betts made her exit, Lily suggested that if the girls were awake, perhaps all of the Scofields’, the Damerons’, and the Claytors’ assembled families and friends would like to meet little Martha Claytor and Julia Scofield, who had not attended the small ceremony. Sounds of agreement and enthusiasm went around the room, because some of the guests were truly eager to see the newest additions to the family, and others would never have been so rude as to say that admiring children who aren’t one’s own is an exhausting business.
Lily settled Trudy and Lavinia on a sofa with Martha and Julia, and various guests made their way over to sit for a moment and congratulate the mothers and compliment their children. Claytor and Lavinia Scofield’s daughter, Julia Agnes Scofield, had been born early on the morning of September 13, 1947, and Dwight and Trudy Claytor’s daughter, Martha Lillian Claytor, was born on the afternoon of September 25, only twelve days later. In fact, for two days Trudy and Lavinia had shared a room at the hospital before Lavinia was allowed to go home. But that was less a coincidence than it seemed on the face of it; Trudy next shared the room with Sygny Peck, from Trudy’s class at Linus Gilchrest, who had just delivered her second child. Everyone in the world was having babies.
Agnes’s closest friend, Lucille Drummond Hendry, was visiting Washburn for Betts’s wedding, staying at the Drummonds’ house across the square, and she was finally able to make her way over to Trudy and Lavinia and the two little girls, who had both been stricken dumb with shyness. Martha buried her head in Trudy’s lap under direct scrutiny. Lucille smiled broadly at Lavinia especially, since she hadn’t yet met Claytor’s wife, and introduced herself. “My family didn’t move to Washburn until I was . . . oh . . . I guess I was about fourteen. It was just before Lily Scofield and Robert Butler got married. That wedding! The rose arbor . . . Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about it from everyone. But here are these two little girls! I remember when I got the news. When Agnes telephoned about these babies. I had to laugh,” she said.
“All of you people are born in batches,” Lucille teased both Trudy and Lavinia. “How on earth will we ever keep everyone straight? All born under a full moon or something,” she exclaimed delightedly, although she was struggling against nearly overwhelming remembrance and grief at having to endure one more celebration in the lives of her sisters’ or her friends’ children. Lucille hadn’t recovered from her daughter’s death during the war, although she went for days at a time, now, without thinking of it. Or, at least, without brooding over it, but only taking it into account as she went about an ordinary day. She smiled the smile of a sweet, still faintly pretty, rather daffy aunt, which was a role she had assumed unthinkingly so that her sisters and her friends wouldn’t pity her, and so that she could conceal what she knew was occasional and unreasonable bitterness.
“Well, not exactly,” Trudy said, smiling up at her. “Not under a full moon. We’re all supposed to be born on the ides of the month.”
“Oh, yes. I knew it was something . . . Lavinia, you must be surprised to have it all be true. I sent a telegram to my sister when Agnes called me with the news. Celia telephoned me from California. She said you could have knocked her over with a feather. All the Scofield coincidences! That Claytor’s wife—and Dwight’s, too—had had their babies on the same day! She asked me to send her very warmest —”
“Martha and Julia were only born in the same month,” Trudy interrupted once again. “Not the same day. But it’s nice for each of them to have a cousin the same age.”
“I was surprised!” Lavinia said, and Mrs. Hendry leaned forward so she could hear her more clearly. “I was surprised,” Lavinia repeated, raising her voice a little, “that Julia was born on the ides of the month. My other daughter, Mary Alcorn, from my first marriage. She was born on the ides, too.”
“I’m so sorry, dear. I can’t quite hear you. Who was it you said was born?”
“Oh, I was only saying that both my daughters were born on the ides of the month,” Lavinia said loudly so that Mrs. Hendry could hear, but it was at a moment when a lull in the conversation had fallen, and everyone either turned to look directly at Lavinia or furtively glanced her way. “I hadn’t heard about the Scofields and the ides. . . . And, of course, it turns out that almost none of them were born on the ides. . . .” Mrs. Hendry nodded at her and smiled, having no idea what Lavinia was saying now that she had lowered her voice once more.
After the general flurry of seeing the bridal couple off, greeting friends, and meeting new spouses and the two new children, conversation became a little quieter and eventually turned into a discussion of all the various complications that had already cropped up in regard to the sesquicentennial celebration. The two garden clubs were very seriously jockeying for position as to which one would select the queen. Thomas P. Stamp had already been persuaded to be the queen’s escort in the guise of Daniel Decatur Emmett, and he was letting his beard grow out.
“Well, though,” Dwight said, “the children will love it. Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn are old enough to have a great time. You remember, Claytor? I think we must have been about ten years old, and we thought we would die having to listen to the speeches—right out there in the square,” he said, gesturing toward the front windows to illustrate what he was saying, “on a platform set up under the Dan Emmett statue. Before we could go out to Hiawatha Park —”
Trudy suddenly interrupted him in a sharp voice, abruptly and with clear irritation. “That’s not Dan Emmett, Dwight! You never pay attention to a single thing I say. . . . Oh,” she said, turning to Lavinia, “when you’re married to a Scofield, Lavinia! Well, don’t ever, ever imagine you’ll get him to admit he’s wrong about anything in his life!” She tried to lighten this last bit into sounding like no more than fond exasperation, but she didn’t succeed, and the room was uncomfortably quiet. There was no way to imagine that Dwight and Trudy had had a happy morning.
All of a sudden Lavinia spoke up softly, with her mystifying but characteristic air of indifference, of seeming not to have been paying attention to the conversation that was already under way. “I don’t have any idea who Dan Emmett is,” she said, as though the thought had just occurred to her, which, in fact, was the case. “I’d never heard of him until I came here. I keep forgetting to ask someone to tell me who he is. Who he was. Did he found Washburn? Something like that?”
And everyone answered at once.
“Oh, Lavinia —”
“But I thought you came from the South —”
“It was your side that made him famous —”
“My side of what?” Lavinia asked, genuinely curious.
It was Dwight who answered her, and it seemed to be the case that everyone in the room had assumed he would take charge and straighten this out. “Daniel Decatur Emmett. That’s probably the name you know him by. His older brother, Lafayette, read law under Columbus Delano. He left Washburn. Well, in fact, he eventually became a State Supreme Court Justice in Minnesota.”
Lavinia gazed at Dwight solemnly but didn’t make any remark.
“Well, and Dan Emmett was a vaudeville star,” Dwight continued. “He performed all over the country. Toured for a while with Bill Gibson. . . . Dan Emmett wrote ‘Dixie.’”
But Lavinia continued to watch him lazily, not realizing that he thought he had fully answered her question.
“The song ‘Dixie,’” Dwight said. And when Lavinia still looked on at him expectantly, he said, “I’m sure you know that song!
Wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten . . .”
“Oh! Well, of course, I know that song,” Lavinia said, nodding. “But why would someone from Ohio write ‘Dixie’? I don’t understand exactly why a statue of Daniel Emmett would be in Washburn —”
“Oh, God!” Trudy snapped. “There’s no statue, Lavinia! That statue is of a Union soldier! Facing south!”
Lavinia turned to look at her, and for the first time since she had arrived at Scofields, a stricken look of hurt feelings crossed her face and disturbed her usual impassive expression. Lavinia and Trudy had become fairly good friends, and it baffled Lavinia that Trudy spoke to her with such obvious irritation.
“Well, that’s what Lavinia means, Trudy,” Howard said, unexpectedly championing Lavinia before Claytor even thought to speak up. It looked to Howard as though Lavinia might cry, and his voice took on a languid, jocular note in an effort to ease the conversation into a more temperate zone, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why anyone cared one way or another about Daniel Emmett. “I have to say I’ve always wondered about that myself. Washburn fought for the Union. Why do we celebrate Dan Emmett Days? I’m always happy to celebrate anything, but it seems strange. . . .”
The three hostesses, though, Agnes and Lily and Bernice Dameron, interrupted with trays of coffee and sugar and cream, and the day’s festivities came slowly to a halt. People began to collect their wraps and take their leave. But no one who had been there was comfortable about that afternoon. When they thought of it in the next few days, they finally concluded that Lavinia Scofield was an unwittingly disturbing presence. After all, imagine not having any idea who Dan Emmett was. The state of Ohio had even placed official historical markers on Highway 4—at both the entry and exit for Washburn—that declared that Daniel Decatur Emmett, author of “Dixie,” had been born and had died there. Also, Lavinia had been so determined to let people know that both her daughters were born on the ides of the month!
And, too, although no one liked to admit it, it had been impossible not to notice that Trudy and Dwight’s younger daughter, Martha, was a far prettier child than Claytor and Lavinia’s little girl, Julia. In fact, most of the Scofields’ friends thought—even though at a distance the two older girls looked so much alike they were often mistaken for twins—that, up close, Lavinia’s older girl, Mary Alcorn, wasn’t nearly as pretty as her cousin, Amelia Anne Claytor, who was a true Scofield.
Ostensibly the town of Washburn would be in a perpetual state of celebration from the weekend before the Fourth of July through Saturday, July fifteenth. In the exhaustion she fell into after the wedding, Agnes didn’t think she could bear it. One afternoon, when Lily and she were sitting in Agnes’s back parlor discussing the arrangements for the town’s Fourth of July picnic, which was traditionally held on the grounds of Scofields, Agnes said sharply, out of the blue, “Why are we always celebrating these sesquicentennials? Every year is a hundred and fifty years after something.” Lily looked up from the notes she was making and nodded her agreement with Agnes about the impending commemoration and all the fuss it would cause.
But Agnes began to brood privately about the upcoming occasion, and she realized that there had not been one single celebration in her life that she had enjoyed. Especially Betts’s wedding, which was the most recent. She hadn’t even enjoyed her own wedding. But then, as Lily often said, weddings were ridiculously overwrought in any case. But any celebration, it seemed to Agnes, required endless diplomacy. They were filled with emotions that got out of hand. They were laden with an imperative, forced glee that generally led to disappointment. Even birthdays. Especially birthdays in her household.
Claytor’s eighth birthday party, for instance, had been one of the worst occasions she could remember. As always on one of their birthdays, Claytor and Dwight had been edgy through the morning. Dwight teasingly reminded Claytor that real Scofields were born on the ides of the month—on the fifteenth, not the thirteenth—and Claytor, so determined always to have Dwight’s approval, never countered by reminding Dwight that Dwight wasn’t a real Scofield, no matter when he was born.
Every year when those boys were young, they had gone through this, and it upset Agnes and took her aback each time. Dwight and Claytor had the happiest friendship she had ever seen between two children living in the same house. Except on either of their birthdays. Each year she was convinced that it would go smoothly, since the previous year she had taken each boy aside and given him an earnest little lecture on never, ever, purposely hurting people by saying things that caused them pain and—in Claytor’s case—on not allowing oneself to be hurt by words that were only meant jokingly and with affection.
But when Claytor turned eight years old, the boys masked this inevitable twice-yearly tension by racing around the house in a hectic, overly excited, high-pitched game they had fallen into while waiting for the party to unfold. And on that particular birthday, while Agnes was in the kitchen frosting the cake, Claytor rushed around the corner of the back sitting room and didn’t see the footstool that sat at an angle to Agnes’s usual chair. He went stumbling over it, was unable to regain his balance, and cut his forehead as he fell against the marble mantelpiece.
The sudden spurt of blood terrified him and Agnes, too. Warren swept him up and pressed a handkerchief against the wound, handing him over to Agnes, who settled Claytor on the stairs with his head tipped back to stop the bleeding while she went to get iodine and gauze and tape. Warren stood looking at his son, who was shaken and pale, with blood saturating the handkerchief and seeping in a trickle down his cheek. It was hard to tell if Claytor had also hurt his eye, and Warren was as anxious as Agnes. He glanced at Dwight for a moment, who was frozen in place and equally pale and appalled. Warren made a slow, dramatic turn, appraising all the rooms of the house that were visible from the front hall and from the stairs where Claytor sat. Warren announced loudly and absolutely that they would have to put a stop to all this.
“We just can’t have this sort of thing going on!” Both Claytor and Dwight were filled with apprehension; neither could stand to fall under the weight of Warren’s disapproval. “I mean it! This behavior has got to stop this minute! This day! And this year. I’ve put up with it for too long. We’ve all put up with it for too long!” Warren stepped into the parlor and snatched up the little wooden stool he had made years earlier for his mother, when he was hanging around the Scofields & Company shop and Tut Zeller set him to work and showed him how to do a bit of carpentry.
Warren held it up to illustrate what he was saying. “How dare this puny, splintery piece of wood leap up and attack my own dear heart! My own son. On the very day of the celebration of his birth. We can’t have it! We can’t have all the furniture getting ideas! Ambushing us in our own home. Why, the next thing you know, that fancy dining-room table’ll just walk right over to me on its prissy legs and give me a kick in the shins!” Claytor’s color began to return, and Dwight laughed with relief, hoping that perhaps this accident wouldn’t turn out to be his fault.
“The piano bench will get it into its head that it can be wherever it wants. It’ll just go wheeling itself away when someone gets ready to sit down—boom! Your mother could end up sitting flat on the floor while the bench goes whizzing around wherever it likes!”
Warren wrenched apart the two side supports of the little bench, so that the stool was almost flattened and certainly no longer of any use, and he flung open the door and tossed that ruined piece of furniture far out into the yard. “Why, that footstool just began to take itself too seriously. Tried to get the upper hand. The upper foot! But it won’t be stepping out anymore!” He turned in a circle once more, addressing the furniture. “Don’t think for one minute that you can get away with this . . . this mutiny! Why, you,” he said, glaring at the sofa, “I know just exactly what you’re thinking. Don’t forget for a minute that you’d have to squeeze yourself through this door, and if we find you trying . . . Well! . . . You’d make a fine blaze, and the fireplace is right behind you!”
The two boys were delighted, but Betts was so young that, although she was intrigued, she was also frightened. And Agnes was almost ill with apprehension. Warren was giving the boys a way out of their predicament, but she noticed in her husband’s words the exact moment his voice inflated with unreasonable and zealous gusto. She had learned that these ebullient swings of mood often left Warren depleted in a way she couldn’t fathom but that frightened and eventually infuriated her. It was as if his spirit became unavailable to him, locked away from his own ability to temper it—and that he had been allotted a finite amount. When he overspent it, he paid the debt in long, bleak days and weeks with no reserve to tide him over.
On his eighth birthday, Claytor ended up with eight stitches to close the gash on his forehead, and Warren made much of that coincidence. “That’s your lucky number from now on,” he said to his son. In fact, Claytor still had a scar over his eyebrow, like a thin silver thread that was only visible if the light hit his face at a certain angle.
Agnes fell out of that gloomy memory straight into the immediacy of self-pity. She was still upset that Betts had believed that her mother would conspire against her. Agnes had so often been taken by surprise whenever one of her children’s grudges against her came to light. Most of all she was amazed that they vividly recalled moments that she didn’t believe had ever happened. In fact, just the morning after Betts’s wedding, Claytor had started breakfast before anyone else was up, but when he heard Julia suddenly begin that desperate sort of crying that signifies furious exhaustion, and then when Mary Alcorn’s voice floated downstairs in high-pitched indignation, he turned the gas off under the skillet of eggs he was scrambling and went to give Lavinia a hand.
He entered the kitchen once more with Mary Alcorn in tow just as Agnes was irritably scraping the eggs into the garbage. “That’s just a waste. You can’t start eggs, Claytor, unless you’re certain you won’t be interrupted,” she said briskly, clearly annoyed. She was in a terrible mood, and the crying set her teeth on edge. She would have given almost anything to have breakfast by herself.
But Claytor laughed. “Mother, you never change! It’s one of the few absolutes in my world these days. You remember when I brought home my long-division practice test from Miss Cotton’s class? I’d been sitting at the table working on it for about an hour—terrible! I was terrible at math. Not even good at simple arithmetic. And you took one look at my answer sheet and tore it into little bits. ‘It’s no use going on with something you’ve gotten wrong from the beginning,’ you said. I’ll never forget it. I sat down and started all over again. You were right. I was just getting more and more confused. Wronger and wronger,” he said in Mary Alcorn’s direction, smiling.
“Oh! Claytor! That’s not true! I would never have done anything like that in my life! How can you even imagine that happened? Why, it’s not . . . You couldn’t . . . It’s something you dreamed. I wouldn’t have been so mean.” Agnes was crushed. “Claytor, I was just going to start over with these eggs because they were scorched. They would have had that taste eggs get. Like burnt foam. That smell . . . I wouldn’t for the world have torn up your schoolwork.”
“Well, I turned out to be a whiz at long division,” he said. Mary Alcorn was pressing him to let her make toast in the pop-up toaster, and Agnes didn’t say anything more about it, but she didn’t believe that incident had ever happened. It hurt her feelings and mystified her that her children latched on to these ideas of her as a generally inept—often unkind—parent, as though she had bungled the whole business of being responsible for their lives, even though here they were, still thriving. Surely they understood the awful despair she had felt on behalf of any one of them when she couldn’t alleviate some misfortune that befell them.
Of course, Agnes did remember that she had sometimes been unfairly angry at the children, had often been frantic and desperate herself. She hadn’t been perfect in any way. But surely that was balanced out by how genuinely she had loved—did love—those children. Certainly by now it was clear to her children that any misdirected anger she had ever displayed toward them was one of the very things that plagued her with regret. Why, Dwight and Claytor had children of their own; at one time or another, Agnes had heard each of them lash out unfairly at one or the other of those little girls, and of course Amelia Anne and Mary Alcorn would grow up knowing their fathers had always only wished them well.
The thing that Agnes failed to grasp, however, was that what might have seemed like nothing at all to her—an inadvisable cross word, a brief spell of unsuppressed anger—had often pierced the armor of one of her children at a particularly vulnerable moment. Agnes didn’t remember that anyone’s memories of childhood are exactly like the first appearance of dandelions each spring. Agnes was always delighted to glance out the window and see the grass studded with the overnight emergence of the brilliant gold asterisks embedded in the lawn. But year after year, she failed to temper that initial gladness with the knowledge that those cheerful yellow buttons strewn across all of Scofields would grow tall and leggy, would become unappealing whiskery white globes that drifted off in the slightest breeze, leaving their thin, watery-pink stems tall and naked against the grass. They were simple weeds, after all, and it was impossible to know if or where any of their feathery seeds would take root.