The Truth of the Matter Read Online Free PDF Page B

upon which she cast her eye seemed to her as deceptively placed and misleading as if it had been arranged in a museum to illustrate an example, say, of a house in which Americans might have lived in the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.
    Lily had invited her for supper, but Agnes had begged off, and about eight o’clock that evening she realized she had forgotten to eat anything at all. Finally she made a sandwich and carried it with her as she roamed the rooms, but there was nowhere in the house where she could remain settled. Something was amiss, and it awakened her vigilance. It was she who knew every nook and cranny of this house that had been built for her father-in-law, John Scofield, almost sixty years earlier. Ever since it had fallen under her care, she had made it her business to be on the lookout for evidence of its slow and inevitable decline, and then it was she who shored it up again, stopping any single bit of disintegration in its tracks. She tried to stay one step ahead; she tried to anticipate, but always there was unexpected deterioration nipping at her heels.
    She had the pulleys replaced, for instance, and all the weights rehung in every one of the forty-six window casements, even though at least half of them hadn’t yet broken. And while the carpenter was in the basement he had discovered a rotting bearing beam. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head in defeat even as he spoke. “Why, I just stuck this pencil all the way through. I’d been wondering why the things in that cupboard in the dining room shake so much. That corner of the floor’s not resting on a thing. Might as well be sitting on a matchstick. I think you folks shouldn’t walk anywhere around that north corner. That floor could let go anytime.”
    For almost a year Agnes directed everyone in the house to tread softly anywhere in the dining room, until she could afford to have the beam replaced. She found a fellow who could carve duplicates of the several rotting balustrades on the side porch, but he drew her attention to the fact that the latticework under the porch was in bad shape. She simply had to let it go for a while, and that winter, a family of skunks moved in, although they didn’t cause any trouble. She oversaw the mason who tuck-pointed the old brick around the chimney where ice had blown it apart. “This mortar . . . Well, look here!” the mason said to her. He dislodged a rain of sandy mortar between the bricks beneath the window to illustrate. “It’s not going to hold. Water’ll get in and then if we have a hard freeze . . .” He continued to displace the crumbling mortar with the end of his pencil.
    “Bert! Don’t let’s hurry it along!” Agnes said, and he stuck the pencil in his pocket and grinned in agreement. “I can’t afford to do a thing about it until after Christmas. Let’s hope the weather stays mild.” Agnes lived in a state of waiting for the next little bit of reconstruction to become necessary.
    “Mama, I think you’re just making all these things up—forty-six windows repaired!” Howard once joked. “I think there’s something going on. I think you have designs on one of those workmen.”
    “It certainly would be cheaper if I could just get one of them to marry me,” Agnes replied, but it was clear she wasn’t particularly amused. There was nothing much fun about the effort and expense of maintaining the house.
    So in that early dark of December 1944, she investigated the rooms—looked into the corners, put her hand against the limestone hearths of all the fireplaces to test for dampness, but everything seemed to be all right. She put on her boots and took a flashlight outside to see if the gutters had backed up, because something in the house was not right. Finally she retraced her steps, shining the beam along the foundation, but she found nothing at all remarkable. Once inside again, though, she was disturbed still more, and this time she narrowed in on