The Truth of the Matter Read Online Free PDF

better than to say so.
    Agnes cleared the table and scraped the plates while Betts searched up and down the stairs for those red shoes. The household had grown accustomed to weathering these scenes. And, to be fair, Betts was equally effusive when she was happy. Once, as Warren tried to restrain his three-year-old daughter, who was very nearly in a full-blown tantrum because she couldn’t open the heavy front door for herself, he had said to Agnes that Betts would grow up into an adult who would be genuinely surprised to realize that many people considered emotional restraint a virtue. He had made that remark, but he had made it with fond exasperation; he had adored Betts, had adored all the children.
    Betts finally appeared wearing her new dress and the respectable blue pumps, and she was so angry she didn’t look at her mother. “I know you’ve hidden those shoes, Mama. Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know that.”
    Agnes had her hands in the dishwater, busy with the cups and saucers and dinner plates. She lifted her chin slightly, and her mouth was grimly set. She didn’t make any reply at all, and, just then, Hal Railsback arrived. He had been Betts’s favorite date for the last month or so, and Betts hurried to meet him at the door and leave the house before Howard invited Hal to come in.
    Howard carried the garbage out to the compost heap before he left on his own date for the evening, and Agnes didn’t even give a thought to that pair of red shoes, firmly wrapped in newspaper and at least three days buried under coffee grounds and orange peels. She couldn’t bear to let Betts make a fool of herself, but Agnes had conscientiously slipped the full cost of the shoes—not even the marked-down price Betts had paid for them—into Betts’s sequined evening bag. She would discover it when she went to the formal dance at the Eola Arms the following weekend. So, as it turned out, Agnes reasoned, Betts had profited from the situation.
    The morning of Betts’s departure had been predictably exhausting, and yet Howard and Agnes and Betts were all taken by surprise by the irritation each one felt at the other two by the time they got Betts packed and ready to go. Howard carried countless boxes downstairs and then was sent by Betts to retrieve them. Agnes tried to refold Betts’s freshly ironed clothes using tissue paper to prevent their wrinkling, but that had only served to send Betts into a frenzy of anxiety. How would she manage? Would she seem as green as grass with her homemade Washburn wardrobe?
    Agnes considered reminding Betts that she had declared she was going to Washington to help the war effort, to do her part. Betts had indulged herself in the idea of self-sacrifice. But Agnes knew that Betts’s attack of uncertainty and her desire to do her part in the drama of the time could certainly exist simultaneously, and she kept quiet. When Nancy Turner and her father finally arrived to collect Betts and her luggage, Betts and Agnes were both teary-eyed with dismay and frustration, and it was with some relief as well as sorrow that they embraced and said good-bye.

Chapter Two
    I
T SEEMED TO AGNES SCOFIELD that the children left home all at once. By the end of the school year of 1944, only Howard was still in Washburn, but he and several of his friends arranged to take courses straight through the summer in order to graduate by January of the following year. They, too, wanted to enlist before they were called up. Howard and his friends presented their eagerness to enlist as the lesser of two evils, the alternative to being drafted.
    The day after Christmas of 1944, when Agnes and Lily and Robert Butler saw Howard off on the afternoon bus to Columbus, where he would catch the train to Pennsylvania for basic training, Agnes came home to the empty house. She stood in the large center hall, taking off her hat and coat and gloves with an unnerving sense of being a tourist in her own home. Every familiar object