Fortunate Lives (37 page)

“And on the ides of the month, John,” Leo said. “It’s an amazing thing! All the Scofields are born on the ides of the month.”
Leo’s birthday was March fifteenth, and his youngest brother George’s was the fifteenth of October. John’s birthday was February
fifth, when he would turn thirty.

“Well, but this is September, Leo. The ides of the month was on Thursday. On the thirteenth, this month.” But Leo wasn’t paying
close attention, and John himself, not born on the ides, was just as happy to be a little disburdened of “Scofieldness.” He
followed along, helping his brother. “But this is really something, isn’t it, Leo?” John said. “Here we are. Two
papas
. Only three days ago, Leo—three
days
ago!—we were… fancy-free. We were just
not
papas.”

Leo glanced sharply at John but didn’t reply for a moment. John was a tall, elegant figure among the little sloping trees,
which were leaning this way and that. Leo himself was one of those men no more than average height who are somehow imposing
because they possess an inherent certainty, a lack of hesitancy, an easy assumption of authority. “No, you’re right about
that, John. You’re right about that. Three days ago we were only two
husbands.”

John had squatted to secure the burlap around the spindly trunk of one of those young trees, and he aimed a considering look
Leo’s way and finally grinned, acknowledging the edge of chastisement in his brother’s voice and feeling a genuine joyousness
spike through him at all his sudden connection to the wide world. “Ah, Leo. Don’t you think this’ll make a good husband of
me? Don’t you imagine I get a clean slate now? The first baby… Leo, that nearly killed Lillian. And me, too.” John’s ebullience
abruptly fell away. “But Lillian was just… It was like she had broken. That was it. That was what she must have been feeling,”
he mused. “But I was so stupid. I was just scared to death. I didn’t know what it took… That poor little boy. Poor Harold!
I couldn’t
do
anything to help, though, Leo! It nearly drove me crazy to see Lillian so sad.

“But this one’s so… he’s so
lively
, Leo. Why, he hardly stays still a minute. Healthy as a horse! And I haven’t even raised a glass to toast their health. I
haven’t touched a drop, Leo. And I won’t. I won’t.” Then John fell back into his usual wry tone, which signified that it was
at the listener’s own peril to take him entirely seriously. “I’ll start all over with the lovely Lillian. And I can, you know.
Because at least
she
loves me more than you do,” he said, but with a lilting, teasing cadence.

Leo watched John a moment as he stooped to hammer in a stake at an angle that would pull the rope tight, and he thought that
even in so small a task his brother was graceful in the uncommon way with which he was at ease in his own body. “There isn’t
anyone in the world who doesn’t love you, John. But that might not be such a good thing,” he said, and he was quite serious.

“You’re harder on me than anyone, Leo. Even Dan Butler’s not so stern!” John straightened up and exhaled a short laugh, leaning
his head back to take in the pale sky. “You’ll have to go a little easy on me, you know. I’ve got to get used to it, still!
It’s wonderful that they’re all healthy. As strong as can be. Lillian… and Audra and Martha Butler… everyone doing so well.
All
of them,” he said. “I can hardly believe it!” They moved along, carefully wrapping the tender trunks before they looped and
staked the guide ropes.

Leo had left the planting late because it had been an edgy summer and so dry that he had to haul water until the middle of
November to irrigate that double row of saplings. The memory of June, July, and August merged into a blur of heat. The days
had stretched out dry and hot, eventually falling into unsettling yellow green evenings preceding night after night of crackling
thunder and hailstorms that lingered over the town with great bluster but produced very little measurable rainfall.

It had been a season that was not much good for planting, and a season that had produced a sort of communal unease, transforming
the nearly simultaneous births in mid-September of Lillian Marshal Scofield, Warren Leonard Scofield, and Robert Crane Butler
into an event that seemed less remarkable than inevitable. And the unwavering alliance of those three children took on the
same quality of inevitability. Lily and Robert and Warren were rarely apart from one another during all the waking hours of
their early youth.

But during the first months following his daughter’s birth, when the heat finally loosened its grip and September led into
one of those autumns of rare clarity in which everything seems to be in perfect balance, Leo made grand plans for his garden.
In late November he stood in the wagon yard on a chilly but glorious day so dazzlingly clear that the air itself was charged
with a blue translucent brilliance. He stood still and imagined the plot transformed. He became lost in the idea of abundant
flowers, blooming bushes, towering trees.

The catalpas stood in fragile regulation, spare sticks once their leaves had dropped. They looked forlornly tenuous on the
clear-cut acreage where the Scofield brothers had built their three houses. But by the time Lily was seven months old the
following spring and those shoulder-high saplings finally budded and then leafed out, Leo privately exulted at their survival
of the unusually brutal, snowless winter.

Leo Scofield was a good businessman, always a little skeptical, a trifle suspicious by nature. But he wasn’t at all prone
to melancholy; his brooding followed a more pragmatic course—he might fret persistently, for instance, about a minor innovation
to a Scofield engine or an antiquated valve design. But it was quite in character, in late April of 1889, when he was a year
closer to forty years old than to thirty-five, that the notion of the future flying toward him was only exhilarating. He wasn’t
at all troubled by the idea of his own mortality. He walked the rutted track between those newly planted trees and imagined
his daughter’s wedding procession making its way along a raked gravel avenue beneath the catalpas’ eventual leafy canopy under
an overarching clear blue sky.

And during the years of Lily’s childhood it was a great pleasure for him on the hottest summer days to sit in his fledgling
garden, stunned by the Ohio heat and the salty yellow scent of cut grass, with her light, fluting voice ringing out above
her playmates’ as she directed her cousin, Warren, and little Robert Butler in some game she had devised.

Leo was continually surprised by and enamored of the solace of the domesticity he had happened into, and in a span of twenty
years he transformed that scrubby patch of land into his idea of a replica of an English garden made up entirely of plants
native to Ohio. The catalpa trees, however, didn’t mature exactly as he had hoped. In fact, he realized three years too late
that he had intended to plant an avenue of yellow poplars—stately, flowering trees known locally as tulip trees. But when
he had firmly fixed on the idea of his garden, had planned the east yard entrance, and had described the tree he had in mind,
asking
around town where he might find it, it was probably in the description of the tree’s flowers that he had gone wrong. Leo never
gave up the private notion, however, that the misinformation he had received was purposeful, that there might be someone in
the world who was amused at his expense, and with solicitous pruning he coaxed the catalpas to assume a more elegant shape
than was their unbridled inclination.

As the years passed, Leo came to like the pungency of a blooming catalpa, which was heavily sweet but elusive at a distance,
drifting over the garden unexpectedly. He admired the tree’s soft green, heart-shaped leaves, its abundantly frilled flowers,
as showy as a flock of tropical birds in the rolling landscape of central Ohio. Daniel Butler, who had done missionary work
in Brazil and Cuba, said that in midsummer, when the vining trumpet creeper overran the arbor, dripping with deep-throated
red-orange blossoms, the entire garden took on a look of the tropics. Leo had nurtured that flowering vine from a single cutting
he had taken from a plant growing on a pasture fence—just a slip of stem cut on the diagonal and wrapped in a handkerchief
he had moistened in the ditch alongside the road. The afternoon he had rounded a bend and come upon the glorious trumpet vine
cascading over an unpainted board fence, he had paused for a long time before he had stooped to dampen his clean handkerchief
in the brackish water. He was careful of his dignity, and his fascination with and cultivation of his flower garden was the
only frivolity he allowed himself.

Even though Leo had forced the sturdy trunks of the catalpas to extend straight up about nine feet before they branched, each
tree assumed the self-contained shape of a softened, rounded obelisk. Their crowns didn’t form the leafy vault he had hoped
for—the branches didn’t
arch
, didn’t intermingle overhead, really, as he had envisioned. And each year, when the catalpas’ fringed and ruffling flowers
bloomed and produced their startlingly phallic, cigar-brown fruit, and when those flowers began to shed in stringy drifts
of petals and oily pollen
so that guests arrived showered with residue from the burgeoning branches, Audra would declare that the trees should be taken
out.

“They’re a nuisance, Leo. I always think that if you want a flowering tree you can’t go wrong with a dogwood. Dogwoods won’t
get so tall, of course, but they are such beautiful trees. And more restrained when they’re in bloom. Oh, and sometimes in
the spring when the dogwoods bloom early, it looks to me like the whole tree has burst into white lace.” But the catalpa trees
remained, and Leo’s garden and the wide yards of Scofields became the geographical context of the childhood of each of those
three children born coincidentally on September 15, 1888.

Robert Butler was a ruddy, brown-haired child, and Warren Scofield, too, was sturdy and round limbed. They were little boys
who seemed all of a piece, whereas Lily’s pale, attenuated arms and legs, her fragile neck, her knobby wrists and ankles seemed
flimsy, as if, in her always hectic activity, she might fly apart, although for a long time it was clearly Lily who was the
center and star of that inseparable threesome. At four or five or six years old, Robert wouldn’t have known how to articulate
the impression that sometimes, in the blue or brassy light of any given day, a word Lily spoke—just the plain, flat sound
of it—exploded cleanly into the moment, like a brilliant asterisk glinting through the atmosphere. Nor could he have explained
that occasionally Lily’s movements, a sweep of her arm, an abrupt turning of her head, would break through some ordinary instant
with a flicker of blank white clarity.

And, of course, Robert had no way to know that his was a kind of perception lost to adults and older children. His mother
was happier to see him only in Warren’s company. Mrs. Butler didn’t dislike Lily; it was only that it gave her a sense of
satisfaction to see those two healthy boys absorbed entirely in the company of each other. Robert and Warren appeared to strike
a natural balance between them that was disturbed when
little Lily was with them, directing them to do this or that, dreaming up fantastic games with evolving rules that were played
out for days at a time.

One summer afternoon Mrs. Butler was in the yard of the parsonage cutting flowers for a bouquet and inspecting the rosebushes
for disease when the three children came tearing through the yard brandishing sticks, their heads wrapped turbanlike in white
damask napkins, with Lily bringing up the rear, urging the boys on in her high-pitched voice. “Gallop, Warren! Gallop, Robert!
We must not let them escape! We must run! We must run like the wind!”

Martha Butler’s good mood was spoiled as she watched them race across the lawn and down the slope toward the creek. When she
mentioned it to her husband that evening—mentioned that the two little boys never had a chance to play together without Lily—he
wasn’t interested, said he couldn’t see what difference it made. And Martha herself couldn’t puzzle out her objection, couldn’t
understand why their
threesomeness
disturbed her. “It isn’t natural, somehow, Daniel,” she said to her husband. “Three never works out. There’s always someone
left out. Though, I don’t know, not with those three…. But it doesn’t seem at all right… not
healthy
in some way. Well, I just don’t know.” And she let the subject drop.

But Robert’s mother’s censure emanating from the vicinity of the rosebushes that afternoon had overtaken and enveloped Lily
as she herded their band onward, and she hesitated at the edge of the creek while the boys forged ahead. She was stricken
for the first time in her life with self-consciousness. She unwrapped the napkin from around her head and was never again
able to lose herself entirely in an imagined universe. She sometimes cringed in embarrassment when she remembered urging Robert
and Warren to “run like the wind.” She had only been eight years old, but for the rest of her life she could not forgive herself
that moment of blatant melodrama.

Lily and Warren’s uncle George returned from a business trip to New York one year with a remarkably fine set of
marionette puppets for his niece and nephew’s tenth birthday. George was an elusive and therefore romantic figure to the children
and such a favorite of their parents because of his various endearing eccentricities that neither Leo and Audra nor Warren’s
parents, John and Lillian, let him know that such intricate toys were far too complicated for Lily and Warren. But as it turned
out, the marionettes were immediately popular with Lily and Warren and Robert, too, and for the next five years or so they
mounted numerous and increasingly elaborate shows. Robert wrote the plays, Warren took on the most difficult roles, and Lily
kept everything organized and filled in wherever she was needed. All during their growing up, Lily relieved Robert and Warren
of the effort of choreographing their own childhoods. Lily was forever keeping them from careening off on some tangent or
another. It was clear to her that without her guidance they would not
progress
. And she loved Robert Butler always and thought of herself as one half of the whole of herself and her cousin Warren.