The Truth According to Us

  “Nice?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said wryly. “I’ll tell you all the high points later. Won’t take long. Put this inside.” He pressed some money into her hand. “I got to go downtown for a bit.”

  She glanced at the bills. “Come home for supper.”

  He nodded solemnly, patted his hat back in place, and walked away.

  June 14, 1938

  Dearest Lance,

  I am here, and you were right about the coal mines. There aren’t any. According to local informants, I am in apple, cow, and sock country, never ever to be mistaken for coal country. My ignorance is already a scandal, and I only got here three hours ago.

  I was greeted by a reception committee composed of one sweaty little girl. I don’t know what I expected—an official from the project? A respectable club woman in a flowery hat? A brass band? Whatever I was secretly hoping for, it was not what I got. After the train hurtled away, I stood on the platform, trying to look as if I didn’t care that no one was there. Then I persuaded myself that the furtive man by the bench had come to meet me but had been paralyzed with shyness. Unfortunately, the furtive man noticed my encouraging glances and began to whistle “I like the girls and the girls like me,” which forced a decision. I took one step toward the station and nearly jumped out of my skin as I felt a tap on my back.

  “I am Miss Bird Romeyn. Are you Miss Layla Beck? I presume.” She did look like a bird, too, a scrawny little thing with big blue eyes and curls popping out around her head. I said yes, I was Layla Beck, sounding stiff even to myself.

  “Miss Layla Beck,” she corrected me. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  We were obviously working our way through a page in an etiquette book, so I tried to respond in kind, and she inclined her head graciously. “I shall accompany you to our abode, if you please.” She held out an arm for me to take, which I did, though I had to stoop to hold it. “We will inform the man where your trunks must be sent,” she said grandly.

  I mumbled something about it being only a few suitcases. “Miss Layla Beck,” she said, “do not concern yourself.”

  I was trying desperately to keep up my end and not laugh when suddenly the page was finished. “Hold on,” she said. “I’ll go tell Mr. Herbaugh. You stay here.” And she bounced off into the station.

  We walked home (strange to use that word) through a maze of charmless streets. I do believe you were the one who told me I would be entranced by the natural beauty of the Shenandoah Valley. You may be right, but in downtown Macedonia, natural beauty has been crushed by red-brick buildings and splintery storefronts, punctuated every now and then by a limestone monstrosity with Latin on its cornice. The Depression here seems more than ever a depression, a sag. The center of town is tired and ugly and dismal, with crumbling, dusty sidewalks and knots of men in worn overalls. My little scout pointed out a fountain in the barren town square as a great attraction, but I have no idea why. We wound along empty streets half-melted in the heat, and I noticed that every business—even the closed ones—was shaded by an identical green awning, each bent in the identical spot. Did the awning salesman gleefully break them, one by one, as he left town with his pockets bulging?

  After six or seven blocks of this, I succumbed to despairing visions of my destination—it was going to be a tawdry boardinghouse with broken stairs, dirty windows, and a single threadbare sofa in the front room. Dead flies in the corners. An oleograph of George Washington crossing the Delaware hung crookedly in the hall. Oh, dear, it depresses me to think of it—and, as it turns out, I needn’t think of it, because the Romeyn house is nothing at all like that. At some invisible border, the red brick stopped, and the streets got wider and more shady. The houses began to retreat from the sidewalk until they got to quite a respectable distance, and I could practically feel ladies taking their afternoon naps inside the houses.

  We rounded a corner, and Bird announced, “That there’s our dogwood.” I would have said a silent hallelujah at the sight of the house—white-brick and gracious—except that I was temporarily distracted by the crowd of people milling about on the front walk. I don’t know how to describe the Romeyns—in fact, I’m not entirely sure which milling people were Romeyns and which were bystanders. They were gathered around a girl—Willa, I believe her name is—who was bleeding profusely into her socks and hopping up and down, while a woman shrieked that the poor child had the stigmata. At the sight of me, she went silent, but do you suppose that I’ve fallen in among a family of revivalists? What will I do if there are prayer meetings after supper? Or, worse, before supper? And what—I know it’s not possible, but still—what if the child actually does have the stigmata? What’s the etiquette for boarding with one who bears the wounds of Christ? Surely I’ll be in the way if pilgrims arrive.

  As I stepped up the walk, every single one of them turned to glare at me. Perhaps they were looking into my sinful heart. I got an awful shrinking feeling and couldn’t summon up a word, and I suppose we would have stood there until doomsday if Mr. Romeyn hadn’t come along and welcomed me like a gentleman. He shook my hand and introduced himself while the rest of them gaped at me. Can they all live here? The one certainty is Miss Romeyn, because I have a letter telling me she’s the owner of the house. But who is Mr. Romeyn? A brother? I suppose there is a resemblance between them—they’re both dark—but she’s rather cold, while he has charming, civilized manners. Besides him, there were two other women—identical twins, can’t tell them apart, can’t remember their names, am terrified they board here, too—and the children, as well as a mute (perhaps he’d come to be healed). Where do the children come in? Could Miss Romeyn have a lurid past? Doubtful. She seems too austere for such shenanigans.

  My room is better than I dared hope, though there isn’t much in it. Just a big creaking bed, a towering dresser with drawers that stick, and a table. No, there’s an armchair, too, by the window. And now that I’m looking, I see there’s a spindly little side chair shoved in a corner. My God, there’s one of those hair pictures on the wall. What shall I do?

  Love,

  Layla

  P.S. It’s after dinner now, and I’ve retired to my room to pace like a caged tiger. It’s dreadfully hot, and I can hardly breathe up here, but I can’t go for a walk because I’m certain to get lost if I do, and, besides, I can’t bear to face the Romeyns again. They’re kind, but I’m horribly out of place here. I wore a silk dress to dinner and looked like a fool, but how was I to know what to do? Lance, I’m sure I’d be entranced by the natural beauty of the Shenandoah Valley if you showed it to me. Couldn’t you pay me a visit? I expect there’s a hotel somewhere in this town. Shall I find out? I’m sorry to be such a weakling, but I can’t help feeling as though I meant nothing at all to anyone. I’m terribly lonely. How will I bear this for three more months? Today alone has lasted years.

  4

  Ladies don’t smoke in public, Jottie said. In public included a lot of places, even our front room because of all the windows, so Jottie smoked like a stack in the kitchen. Bird and I liked to watch her stirring at pots, frowning through a curtain of blue smoke swirls. Her hands were busy with spoons and chopping and saucepans, so it was rare that she touched her cigarette. Mostly, she tucked it into a corner of her mouth and left it alone. We’d watch without even breathing hard as the ash grew long: Would it fall? Would she catch it? She never seemed to pay it any mind, but just as the dead gray cylinder began to crumple, her hand would flash up and tap it, one-two, into a coffee cup. She never had an ashtray. What was the use of an ashtray, Jottie said, when she didn’t smoke?

  In all the years I watched Jottie charge around that kitchen with her head tilted back to cast up the smoke, I only once saw the ash fall wrong, and that was when Minerva came in to tell her that Mr. Hannaway’s bed had fallen right through his bedroom floor into his front parlor. “Huh,” Jottie grunted around her cigarette. “Can’t blame the bed for trying.” Minerva gave a whoop, and then Jottie started l
aughing, and after that they were both bent over double and slapping their hands on the table, and when they came up for air, the cigarette was missing. We found it in the corn bread, and Jottie scooped it out, leaving just a little hole in the middle of the yellow.

  The day Miss Beck arrived, Jottie seemed distracted in her cooking. For instance, she lit a second cigarette while the first one was still in her mouth. I’d seen her smoke two at once before, but only for a joke on my uncle Emmett, who said smoking was bad for you. “Silly,” muttered Jottie. “I’m a silly old lady, Willa.” She stubbed out the second cigarette gently, so she could light it again from the end of the first one.

  “You’re not an old lady,” I said.

  “Yes, I am. I’m thirty-five years old. Double thirty-five, what do you have?”

  I pretended I didn’t hear her. I hated doing math in my head.

  “What’s double thirty-five, Willa?” she insisted.

  “Seventy,” I mumbled.

  “And that’s hardly likely, is it?” Jottie asked. “With Mother dead at fifty-five and Father at fifty-nine. No, I’ll be lucky to make sixty-two, which means I’m more than halfway done with life. That’s old.”

  I should’ve said No, no, you’re young, but I didn’t. I was worried she was going to ask me what fraction of her life was over. Fractions were worse than anything. Even Bird was better at fractions than I was.

  Thank the Lord, Bird clomped into the kitchen just then. “What’re we having?”

  “Ham, fried apples, string beans,” said Jottie. Her knife slit into an apple.

  “Couldn’t you make something fancy?” Bird asked. I wouldn’t have dared.

  “No, I could not. It’s a good country ham, anyway.”

  “We having rolls or just store bread?” Bird went on.

  Jottie closed one eye and glared at Bird with the other. “I’m going to poison you all.” She always said that when we complained about her food. “I bet if I cry, the sheriff’ll believe I did it by mistake.” She heaved a sigh. “It won’t be easy, though. I’ll have to think of a dead puppy.”

  I giggled, but Bird was stubborn as a mule. “Miss Layla Beck looks like she lives pretty fancy.”

  “Yes, she does, but she’s on relief, just like half the people in this town,” said Jottie.

  “I’ve never seen a suit like that in the poor barrel.” It was Mae, leaning against the doorjamb. She looked put out.

  Jottie sighed again, for real this time. “I don’t know. Mrs. Cooper asked me did I have room for a new boarder and I said yes, who, and she said a new girl on the WPA. Fine, I said, seven dollars and fifty cents a week, and that’s all I know.”

  “How’d Mrs. Cooper get her?” Mae pressed.

  “She’s got some cousin down in Charleston, works on the Writers’ Project.”

  “Humph.” Mae settled herself into a chair. “I guess the WPA pays better than I thought. How much you think a suit like that costs?”

  “Maybe she sews,” said Jottie. None of us sewed. A few times a year, when it looked nice with her dress, Mae brought out a pillowcase she’d been embroidering for as long as I could remember. She’d take a few stitches in it and then lay it down in her lap. “We could learn how to sew,” Jottie added.

  “Even if we did, we couldn’t make that suit,” said Mae. “There’s sleeves.”

  “You want me to ask her where she got it?” asked Bird. “I know her the best.”

  Jottie wheeled around so quick that smoke rose up from the back of her head. “Don’t go asking her personal questions, Bird. You know better than that. You just behave nice and polite, and we’ll all mind our own business.” She looked hard at Bird and then turned away to put some bacon grease into the skillet.

  “I never know what’s a personal question,” grumbled Bird. “They’re all personal.”

  “You just ask yourself how you’d like it if someone asked you that question,” said Mae. “That’s how you know.”

  “I don’t mind any questions,” said Bird.

  “That’s because you don’t answer any,” I said.

  Mae reached over to slide a cigarette out of Jottie’s pack.

  “They’re bad for you, you know,” said Jottie.

  “Stella said she saw Emmett eating a club sandwich at Petersen’s last Saturday,” said Mae. “I wonder why he didn’t come by.”

  Jottie glanced up from her apple stack. “He wasn’t with a girl or someone?”

  “No. Stella didn’t say. She would have said if he’d been with a girl.”

  Jottie scraped the slices into the skillet. “How about you string those beans, Mae?”

  “Where’s Minerva?” Mae asked, her lips streaming smoke.

  “I don’t know. How about you do it? And get the tea from the icebox, would you? Here, Bird, you stir this.”

  I slipped off my chair. I knew what was next. As I slid into the front room, I heard Jottie say, “Where did that child get to?”

  —

  Miss Layla Beck was standing in the front room, just standing. Now she was wearing a silk dress, of all things. It had brown roses on it. There are no such things as brown roses, but she looked like a princess. And maybe she is, I thought suddenly. Maybe she is a crowned head of Europe forced to flee for her life. It was possible. They were having a lot of trouble back in Europe; I had read about it. This was exactly the kind of thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me before the parade, and I congratulated myself on my keen observing. If you’re going to unearth hidden truths, keen observing is your shovel. I had to admit that it hadn’t helped me unearth much of anything yet, since, for all my efforts, I had been unable to discover any answers to the questions that had antagonized me so at the parade. Mr. McKubin was just a man who worked at American Everlasting, and Jottie said she didn’t know any ladies who wore Jungle Gardenia perfume. But now here was Miss Beck in her silk dress, radiating mystery. She was a mysterious stranger. What a stroke of luck! A mysterious stranger was liable to change everything, and that was a thrilling thought. Of course, I wasn’t silly; I knew it wasn’t likely that she was a princess. But she was exotic and beautiful and wonderful, and I could hardly wait to gain her trust and then find out every last thing about her.

  I smiled winningly. “Hello,” I said.

  She jumped. “Oh!” and then, “Hello. It’s—it’s Willa, isn’t it?” She spoke in an elegant way, each word clear and nice, like tapping on a glass.

  “Yes’m.”

  She smiled on-off. “Miss Romeyn told me dinner was at six?”

  If she wore silk dresses, she was probably used to butlers and silver trenchers. I glanced through the archway to our table. We had silver knives and forks with my grandmother’s initials on them, but our plates were chipped. “Well.” I was reluctant to expose our shoddy ways. “Jottie doesn’t really mean six when she says six. She means close to six.” Our dining room wasn’t very nice, now that I looked at it. “I can ring a bell to call you, if you want.” I thought that might make her feel at home.

  She didn’t seem to care about the bell. “Jottie?” she asked. She didn’t know who I was talking about.

  “Jottie—that’s Miss Romeyn.”

  “And she’s…?” It was a refined way to ask questions, with just your voice. “She’s your…?”

  “Jottie’s my aunt. So’re Minerva and Mae, too.”

  “Minerva and Mae?” She did it again!

  “Oh. Minerva—you met her; she’s Mrs. Odell. And Mae is Mrs. Saubergast. They live here. During the week, anyway.”

  “Oh.” She looked confused. “My.” Then she said, “And Mr. Romeyn?”

  “That’s my father.” She peered into my face then, finding the ways I looked like him. I stood up straight, proud that I looked like Father, and like Jottie, too. “He’s Jottie’s brother,” I added helpfully.

  Suddenly Father was there, stepping in from the hallway. “Someone talking about me?” he asked. He always did that way, appearing out of the blue. He moved
fast, and by the time you heard him, he was already there. He was famous for it. My great-aunt Frances Tell had once fainted dead away when he popped up at her elbow, holding a plate of yams.

  I reached out to touch his sleeve. I was glad he was back, but I knew better than to make a big fuss over him. He didn’t like it when people fussed.

  “Good evening, Miss Beck,” he said, putting his hand to his head like there was a hat to lift. “Oh,” he said, and then turned, smiling, to me. “How’s the knee, sweetheart?”

  “It stopped bleeding. It was the back.” I turned to show him.

  “Mm,” he grunted, looking. “That is a mighty big scrape.” He brushed his hand over my hair. He knew I loved that. “All settled in, Miss Beck?”

  “Yes, thank you. My suitcases arrived from the station very quickly.”

  “Does the room suit?”

  “Oh. Yes. It’s very nice. I like the—the wallpaper.” She blushed pink. She looked even prettier when she blushed.

  Bird came out of the kitchen, her face screwed up with trying not to drop the ice-teas she was carrying. Three of them. She always tried to carry three at once.

  Father made a special soft whistle—he said it was his Bird-call—and Bird looked up, smiling. “Daddy!” she cried. “You’re home!” All three of us—Father, Miss Beck, and I—jumped to save the tea. We each grabbed one, and Father laughed even though Bird had almost shattered glass all over the room. Bird scowled. “I was doing fine,” she said. “I wasn’t dropping them.”

  “Not yet you weren’t,” he said. Carefully, he set the glass he had rescued on the table and turned back to Miss Beck. “As soon as she can balance them on her head, we’re packing her off to the circus,” he said.

  Miss Beck looked confused again.

  “I’m joking,” he said. Then she knew to smile, but she still looked confused.

  The ice-tea sweated cold in my hand as I watched Miss Beck. I didn’t suppose a princess would lift a finger to save a glass of ice-tea, but I wasn’t ready to rule it out altogether. One thing I knew for sure, though. She’d never been in a house like ours before.