The Evidence Against Her (13 page)

The air not only had flavor but was discernible to the eye in its slow, mote-filled turbulence, and the children lagged behind Leo and John and George Scofield as they joined Henry Topp and the group of men who moved with busy efficiency in the lee of that great, clacking engine. Warren was awestruck and overwhelmed by the beauty of the thing itself, with its heavy rope drives extending from one floor to another, its sturdy braces looking as fragile as threads. The whole effect was a peculiar one of spidery delicacy and elegant efficiency combined with the astounding, churning power of that relentlessly moving engine.

Everything about his first sight of the works was, to Warren, entirely marvelous, and he moved across the floor with an odd feeling of buoyancy, which lasted long enough that he thought he had achieved an improbable lightness—that he was floating just above the floor—impossible but real. At the same time he thought with some outrage: We never
knew
about this! No one ever
told
us about this! Although, naturally, there had been endless talk around the tables of the houses at Scofields about every aspect of the Company: all the problems at the works, the worry of unionization, the complications with the field offices in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and even the amazing reliability of that great Corliss engine.

Warren was galvanized by the sight of Tut Zeller, his sleeves rolled up above his short forearms, hands braced on the railings of the metal stairway as he swung himself down two steps at a time, clambering from his overlook to sketch out a pattern with a stubby piece of chalk—right there on the shop floor—of the idea he had been trying to communicate to the tall, angular Mr. Topp. Anyone in the way fell back to give Tut enough room, while others came forward to take note of what he was doing.

Everyone was attentive, looking on with gravity at the fierce, stocky little man with his fiery round face, a shock of sandy hair standing straight up above his brow, his bow tie crisp but his shirt rumpled under his suspenders. Here were Warren’s father and his uncles in their dark suits and polished shoes, and the shop foreman and a few other men, stooping a little with their hands on their knees, craning forward to watch Tut Zeller diagram an innovation that he clearly thought was so obvious an improvement he could scarcely contain his impatience while he labored to translate it.

And, all the while, the business of tending that great engine went on around them. Several men moved among the wheels and gauges without urgency but with enviable authority. Two rangy boys, a good deal older than Warren and Robert, swarmed up three stacks of ladders that zigzagged along an interior wall to the window hatch. Each boy slung his bucket over his shoulder before scrambling out onto the roof, where the two of them set to work washing the skylights. Warren stood on the floor below, watching as the boys methodically polished the broad glass panes with slow, circular sweeps of their cleaning cloths.

Rivulets of soapy water trickled through the grime before the rags swiped through them, and Warren suddenly had the sensation of having the same overview of the shop floor that those two boys with their buckets and cakes of Bon Ami were privilege to—an airy glimpse of those men made small. And here—Warren discovered so young, mesmerized in that flat, bright light, in that muscular air—was the answer to the question he had always known existed but that no one had ever set out for him. Here was the answer to the question of what
happened
in the world. Warren had stumbled into the passionate opposite of romantic love or sexual longing. He had discovered a great cerebral enchantment, a deep fascination, an intellectual intrigue.

He looked to Lily and Robert to confirm the wonderment of it all, but for the first time in his life his glance wasn’t met with an answering expression of acknowledgment—of recognition of a shared idea. Neither of his friends turned Warren’s way in their usual conspiracy. Lily’s face was cast over with that glazed expression of courteous interest that meant her mind was a million miles away, and Robert was placidly looking on while Tut Zeller sketched quick, long lines and rough boxes in crude representations of machinery onto the floor.

Lily was all pulled together and poised in her disinterested tidiness—her hands clasped in front of her, her feet neatly together—while Warren had been craning upward, with his legs braced, canted backward from the waist, gaping at the soaring heights, the scurrying boys, the exciting busy-ness all around him. But that particular morning when he observed her grave separateness from himself, her prim, clean-limbed composure, and when he recognized Robert’s habitual studious absorption in whatever was going on around him, Warren was furious at the perceived rebuff.

“Why, you’re thinking something completely different than me!” Warren blurted out one second before the thought clearly formed in his head. Everyone but Tut Zeller glanced toward the three children for just a moment, because Warren’s voice was high pitched with outrage above the thud and gasp of the engine. But the adults turned back to the business at hand when they saw that nothing was amiss.

Robert looked at Warren for a moment, considering it. “How do you know that? What are
you
thinking?” Robert asked calmly, his hands in his pockets and his brows pulled together in a mild expression of inquiry, and Warren just gestured with a broad sweep of his arm.

“It’s so big,” he finally said.

“It
is
big,” said Robert pleasantly, and Warren appreciated that little bit of kindly intention in the face of all he could not possibly explain—in the face of Robert’s lack of wonder.

For her part, however, Lily had no idea that at age nine it was shocking to Warren to discover that they were separate enough that their thoughts diverged. To her way of thinking, it was unlikely that she and Warren would ever be considering exactly the same thing. She had been about to suggest that the three of them return to the office, which was cheerful and warm. She found the sound of the engine deafening and had no interest in the works. But she had seen Warren watching the boys scale the ladders and climb out onto the roof, and even at age nine she had felt what was almost a maternal gladness when she recognized his fascination. Lily would never interfere in a moment when Warren was wholeheartedly happy, so she stood just where she was between Robert and Warren, not minding the wait. It seemed natural to her that between Warren and herself whatever one of them might fail to notice the other would be bound to catch on to. She assumed that the two of them made up discrete parts of one whole. She would have been amazed and upset if she had known that he held against her the fact that she departed so astonishingly from his own self. She would have been desolate if she knew he held it against her as a betrayal.

•  •  •

After Warren and Robert graduated from Norbert-Halsey Academy in 1906, Robert went on to Harvard College, and Warren took a salaried position at the company, where he was assigned to travel with Sam Chalmers, the company’s chief field erection man, or sometimes with Hugh Gehrhart, as far south as Louisiana, helping to troubleshoot any problems that arose at an installation, learning to work out details on the fly.

Scofields’ blowing engines were shipped by rail and assembled on site, sometimes installed in furnaces chiseled out of solid rock and rising as high as seventy feet. Warren liked everything about this business. He would go along to watch the men inching the huge engines on skids down Grove Street to the railroad siding. And he would often take over one of the large crowbars himself, making a striking picture when he shed his coat and bent his tall, rangy frame to the effort. Sometimes the spectators who gathered to watch would shout encouragement to him, and a smattering of applause would break out.

Warren never complained about living rough at a site, pitching a tent in some muddy field or straggling woods. And, in fact, everything about the enterprise appealed to all the pent-up romance of Warren’s nature. He lived in a state of suppressed elation, bowled over with the rugged fellowship, delighted with his inclusion in the whole world of what seemed to him a great endeavor. He was as happy as he had been in his life, absorbed and interested in everything he ran into, and enamored with the novel grittiness of it all.

In early spring of 1907, Warren was put in sole charge of overseeing the installation of a Scofield horizontal compressor combination at a site in West Virginia, in the middle of fields and fields of corn where oil and natural gas had been discovered. There was no town or hotel within an easy distance of the site, but Warren secured a place for himself and the engineer, Hugh Gehrhart, to get a good night’s sleep, even though they had to bed down each night in the attic of a suspicious country woman who granted them access to the room only up a ladder propped against the side of her locked house.

The engine was an ugly thing, a huge, inefficient, and complicated two-cylinder, double-acting machine, and Warren ran into resistance from the workmen, who disdained the inelegance of this particular piece of machinery as much as Warren did. Warren wrote to Uncle Leo in a fit of pique that it had such a slow action it put him in mind of his uncle George leaving the plant on an errand. “The piston goes out on Monday and comes back sometime late Tuesday afternoon.”

But Warren was good at his job. He managed to minimize the inevitable discord between the engineer and the labor force he’d had to hire locally by pretending to enough ignorance of how the thing should be stabilized and regulated that Hugh Gehrhart became more patient. Warren would show up at the site and come to a slow halt, gazing at the construction this way and that. Taking off his hat and slapping it against his thigh in a show of bewilderment. “Now, Mr. Gehrhart, you’ve got to explain this to me again,” he would say. “I know you said the frame will sit straight across here, but I don’t see how in the world it’s going to support the bearings.” And when the engineer walked it all over once again, the workmen were satisfied that this was the best design they could hope for, ungainly as the thing would be, and they were also reassured that no one was asking anything unreasonable of them.

Toward the end of the year, though, his uncle Leo pressed him to go on to college, a small school in western Massachusetts just over the mountains from Lily, who was at Mount Holyoke, in South Hadley. Warren would never in his life think of disagreeing with Uncle Leo, but he sat in his uncle’s office terribly disappointed at the prospect. His own father wasn’t so enthusiastic either, but Leo thought it made good sense in every way. “A man needs to take up all sorts of ideas, John. Warren’s got some experience in the field now, but you know he can do more good for us in management than running all over the country. It would be a good thing for him. And now Harry Garfield’s there as president, I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the Company either.”

“Ah, Leo,” said his father, “I don’t see that. What difference does it make that Garfield’s there?”

“Well, he’s a good man. A thinker. He’s got in mind some good ideas. And we’ve got to start thinking about Europe. Garfield’s talked about bringing men from all over the world to that little college. An International Institute, or something of the sort. I don’t know what his aim will be exactly. And, of course, who knows? Who knows what will come of that? But we’ve already got an agreement with Fours-Stein of France. We need to be looking ahead. And I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Warren to make some connections back east,” Leo said, while Warren sat listening without comment.

“It’s fine with me if Warren goes off to college, Leo, though his mother’s going to hate it like the plague. But whatever you might think about how I do business . . . Well! I’ll tell you, you’re not the man to make a sale, Leo! It offends you altogether to try to persuade someone to buy these fine engines we build! You think some customer is just going to discover all by himself that he needs a Scofield engine—a Scofield engine
in particular!
When he’s being courted every minute by Fitch? Or Westinghouse? You’ve got far too fine a nature for a bit of trade, Leo!”

John Scofield had risen from his chair and leaned across the desk toward his brother, his whole posture aggressive, but his tone had grown soft, nearly menacing with restrained anger. “Let me tell you something,” he went on, though in his whispery fury he was hardly asking permission, and Leo sat on impassively. “There is not a single mill, not even the smallest textile company—not a businessman, either, in any part of the northeast—in Boston and even New York—that doesn’t know me by sight! Who isn’t glad to see me! And that’s what’s selling these engines, Leo. Because everyone and his brother has his foot in this market. But I remember the names of their secretaries, Leo! I remember the names of their wives. Their children. Great God! I remember the names of their
dogs!
You don’t need to worry any little bit about our
connections!
” John was so angry that he turned his back on his brother and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Warren was astounded and embarrassed. His father had always adopted a slightly edgy jocularity toward Uncle Leo, but Leo was eight years older than his father—had essentially been his father’s guardian since his father was twelve and Leo was twenty—and Warren had always thought that Uncle Leo seemed more paternal than fraternal toward his younger brother. Warren hadn’t understood until that moment in Uncle Leo’s office that there was a deeper resentment at the heart of his father’s manner.

Neither brother spoke for a moment, then John turned back to Leo, a good bit calmer. “And what puts you in such a mind to please the Garfields one way or another?” John asked.

“You’re determined to take me wrong, John!” Leo said, and he seemed vexed, although not angry. “I tell you, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of it. You’re trying mighty hard to imagine I’m insulting you. There’s no one better at sales than you are, and there’s not anyone at the Company who’d say otherwise. It was you who told me you’d never met a man who’d been at Williams College that you didn’t like,” said Leo. “Lily’s just flourishing back east. And Robert Butler’s off at Harvard. Maybe Warren would rather think of going there. But you know I’m serious about keeping ties with Harry Garfield. The Garfields have been good to know when we’re doing business in Cleveland. He’s a good man, and naturally his connections in Washington—”