The Truth of the Matter by Robb Forman Dew Page A

summer, Dwight could scarcely keep his attention from resting on Trudy whenever she was among them. He had never thought of her as someone who was more than attractive, but she was, he came to see, quite lovely in an unusual way. “Pretty” wasn’t exactly right, because it was everything about her manner and looks taken in context that was so compelling. She was a dark, inflexible exclamation point set down in the middle of all the wheeling blond asterisks of the rest of her family.
    Over that summer and through the next year, Dwight found that he, too, was enormously attracted to Trudy, although he would never reveal it; he wouldn’t cause either Claytor or Trudy any further worry or unhappiness. He was taken aback and ashamed of himself. By necessity, he adopted an avuncular attitude toward her, which—to his surprise—allowed him absolute freedom to seek out her company. When he came home for Christmas, for instance, he stopped first to greet Agnes and Betts and Howard, putting their presents under the tree, and then went off to deliver his gifts to the Butler family. Dwight had come home without Claytor, who had accepted an invitation to spend Christmas with a friend in St. Louis. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without finding out what sort of situation Aunt Lily’s gotten herself into now,” Dwight said.
    Betts and Howard and even Agnes urged him—for heaven’s sake!—to hurry on to the Butlers’, in a high-spirited bit of teasing, because Dwight was alluding to the year before: he and Claytor had arrived at the Butlers’ house when only Lily was at home. She had called loudly for them to come in. Had told them to hurry. They had found her in the sitting room decorating the Christmas tree, but trapped stock-still in a swath of spun-glass angel hair caught all around her. “If you two don’t get me out of here soon, I’m going to wet my pants! Robert won’t be home for at least two hours, and Trudy’s off somewhere.”
    Christmas of 1939, though, Dwight had scrupulously bought both Betts and Trudy the same gift, a large stuffed bear with an Oberlin sweater and pennant. Trudy was delighted to see Dwight, delighted when she opened her present, embracing the bear and sinking her face into its warm fleece. Before Dwight could stop himself, he spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind trading places with that bear just now.”
    Trudy raised her face to gaze at him in surprise, and then she laughed. “You’re already missing whatever girl you’re in love with right now, aren’t you? Honestly, Dwight! You’ve probably been pinned to every pretty girl at Oberlin by now.” Dwight showed up at home off and on with one girl or another, while Claytor came always on his own. And it was a great relief to Trudy to have Dwight as a confidant, although she never mentioned Claytor at all unless it would have seemed strange if she remained silent. And, even then, she changed the subject as soon as she could. Dwight began to think that she wasn’t much interested in Claytor anymore, and he wrote Claytor that reassuring news as tactfully as possible.
    In 1943, however, in light of Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, Robert and Lily Butler, and Agnes Scofield, too, separately revisited memories of various childhood incidents involving Dwight Claytor, Claytor Scofield, and Trudy Butler. Possible misinterpretations of past events popped into their heads at odd hours of the day or night. But eventually each concluded that it was inconceivable that either Dwight or Claytor would ever in his life knowingly do anything that might cause the other so much distress—and certainly not something as momentous as marrying a girl the other was in love with. Lily’s and Robert’s anxiety was for Trudy, herself, who was the soul of moral propriety—not of virtue necessarily, but of honor. She would never have put herself between two men she had always been fond of.
    The whole thing, though—the surprise of the marriage, what seemed to be its