The Evidence Against Her (26 page)

Agnes did the best she could in the outdated farmhouse kitchen and with the ingredients she could find. When she was finished she left the kitchen immaculate, and she stopped to admire the really beautiful meringue that topped the pie she had made. Mrs. Longacre had told her the secret was a copper bowl and cream of tartar, both of which she had no trouble finding on the open shelves. The meringue hadn’t wept or cracked, it was high and lapped with glossy brown peaks. And for a little while that afternoon she was enormously gratified by the surprise of everyone who slowly gathered on the back lawn. Warren and Lily and Marjorie were suitably complimentary. Agnes’s mother-in-law and Audra Scofield and Mr. and Mrs. Hockett, who had come back from Port Clyde with them, were really and truly impressed.

“Why, Agnes, I had no idea you could cook like that. And how nice of you, dear,” Lillian Scofield said to her, truly proud of her son’s wife. “You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble . . . . Now
you
must cut it. I don’t want to be the one who cuts into that beautiful meringue.” Agnes had cut and served the pie, having to parcel out rather small slices since, with Mr. and Mrs. Hockett, they were eight.

“I should have made two pies, but there weren’t very many eggs,” she said, meaning to spare the Hocketts the possibility of feeling responsible for the portions’ being so small, but by then Mr. Hockett was telling a tale of a trip to Brazil he and his wife had made. “. . . we always made a run with a cargo of ice and apples and hoped to arrive before Christmas. It’s warm then in Rio, you see . . . .”

So Agnes took her own smallest piece along and sat with her husband and Marjorie and Lily on a blanket spread out on the grass. Agnes took a careful bite, and decided it was quite good and glanced up with relief, only to see that Warren and Marjorie were lost in amusement. Marjorie had flushed deep red with the effort not to laugh while trying to swallow. And Warren did laugh. “This certainly isn’t anything like
your
pie, Lily,” he said.

“No, no,” Marjorie said, her eyes actually tearing with the effort of repressing her laughter. “You still hold the crown, Lily. Now, if Agnes wants to try her hand at fried chicken . . .”

Agnes’s emotions were tender; they were right under her skin; she was supersensitive, and without remembering there were other guests present, without giving a thought to her mother-in-law or the Hocketts or Audra Scofield, Agnes rose stiffly to her feet. She loomed over Warren and Marjorie and Lily, who was smiling, too, with a little quirk of irony in her expression. But Agnes took no account of that; she was humiliated. “Well!” she said, her voice quavering a little in spite of herself. “It was just that there was only one lemon. But I think it’s just as good . . .” There was sudden silence in the yard, and everyone turned to look at her, surprised. “And I don’t believe it! I don’t believe
anyone
can make a crust better than mine, but I had to add vinegar because there weren’t . . . I didn’t have . . .” She had to stop because she felt her eyes fill and she couldn’t stop tears from brimming over.

Marjorie’s amusement evaporated, and she spoke up right away. “Oh, no, Agnes. The pie is
delicious!
It’s just that Lily . . . She never did . . .”

But Agnes had turned and headed toward the house, mortified, wiping her eyes as furtively as possible when she turned away. Warren jumped to his feet. “Ah, God! I can be the greatest fool,” he said, suddenly tense with regret and hurrying after his wife up the incline to the doorway. All of Lily’s gentle, self-deprecating smile vanished. She turned to look after Warren bounding up the hill, and her expression was transparently bleak. Lily felt at that moment—with Robert off in a dangerous place where there was nothing she could do to protect him, and with Warren moving away from her without a second thought—more heartsick than she had ever felt in her life. Marjorie leaned over and tucked her arm through her friend’s.

“I think that was my fault,” she said to Lily. “I thought she knew that silly story.” She watched Lily make the effort to hide real grief as Warren disappeared into the house. Lily tried earnestly to assume an expression of fond indulgence. Marjorie smiled at Lily with a rueful look of her own, catching Lily’s eye and shaking her head gently to signify the futility of Lily’s forlorn yearning, and poor Lily bent her head forward and put her hands briefly to her temples.

“I don’t know if I can stand it,” Lily said so softly that Marjorie gently leaned her head against Lily’s to hear what she was saying. “I just don’t know if I can. And I don’t want to envy her. I don’t know how I can manage it, though. I don’t think I can stand it.”

“Oh, then you should pity me! Robert will be back, Lily. I’m sure of that. I’m sure he’ll be all right. Just hang on. You’ll find it’s not so bad after a while. I’ve watched you now for years, and I’m bearing up pretty well. I know there’s no chance of your loving me, Lily, but I’m glad just to be where you are. You’re going to feel that way, someday, about Warren. But until Robert
does
get back . . . And, you know, you might be confusing such an intense shared history with romance, with the
emotion
of romantic . . .”

But Lily raised her head and shook it slowly to signify the impossibility of what Marjorie was suggesting, finally closing her eyes and moving her head back and forth in despairing resignation.

“Well,” Marjorie said, “I have to say that Warren is great fun. He’s one of my favorite people in the world. And I do like Agnes, too, Lily. But I can understand . . . And even
I
can’t find a way not to love Robert!”

“I want so
much
to be fond of Agnes! And I miss Robert . . . .” She was quiet for a moment, fighting back tears. “But Warren! Warren’s part of my . . . Well, Marjorie! It’s true.
Both
of them and you, too! You’re the only other one, and the two of them . . . . Robert and Warren and you are part of my
soul!
” But she finally laughed when Marjorie fixed her with a look of blatant skepticism.

“Oh, please, Lily. Let’s don’t discuss your soul ever, ever again. At least not while we’re eating. I’ve had my fill of drama for today.”

•  •  •

Agnes had rushed up the stairs and sat huddled on the edge of the bed, miserably embarrassed and astonished at herself. She had never before in her life let her guard down in public. But Warren sat beside her and gathered her next to him with his arm around her. “Agnes, it wasn’t anything to do with your pie. It was delicious. Marjorie and I were laughing . . . It was because Lily never even
made
any pie! She never in her life made a pie. She got the whole spread done up by Mrs. Rupert, who cooked for us sometimes. And Robert and I always pretended we believed Lily had done it herself. But, Agnes! Lily couldn’t boil laundry! None of us were laughing at you . . . .” Agnes and Warren didn’t come down for supper that evening.

Warren did come downstairs to make their apologies, explaining that Agnes wasn’t feeling very well. But by then the Hocketts had gone home, and Lily and his mother and Aunt Audra were playing cards. He didn’t even notice that Lily was utterly silent and her face was blank. His mother said to thank Agnes for the lovely pie and went back to studying her cards. But Lily didn’t say a word. She was still shocked with distress. For all intents and purposes, Lily Scofield Butler had been deserted by a man who didn’t understand that he should always be hers alone.

And during Agnes and Warren’s entire stay it never occurred to Agnes—or to Warren either, for that matter—that night after night in the bedroom just beneath hers and Warren’s, Lillian Scofield lay awake nearly driven to distraction by the unequivocal sounds above her head. Neither did either one of them ever think about the fact that just on the other side of the bedroom wall, Lily Butler lay with her pillow over her ears until finally she pushed her bed to the other side of the room, the headboard against an outside wall, even though with this new arrangement the doorway was partially blocked and she had to edge her way in and out of her bedroom. She lay night after night all by herself, trying to think of nothing at all, but generally she only slept fitfully in her solitary, lumpy feather bed.

Warren’s mother had assumed that in her own house in Washburn the two would be less giddy, less delighted with each other, at least in the company of the rest of the family. But when they all got settled back at Scofields there was no change at all. In fact, the familiarity of her own house somehow increased Lillian’s discomfort, and she began to feel affronted. Agnes should know better. Any well-bred girl should certainly know better.

When Lillian went next door each afternoon to visit her sister, Audra, she would spin out her woes obliquely as the two of them settled in Audra’s little sitting room off the parlor. “I don’t
begrudge
them . . . . It isn’t that there’s anything wrong about it. Oh, I know that, Audra. I don’t want to sound as if I don’t approve . . . or that I
do . . .
Well, I just don’t know! It makes me so uncomfortable. It’s more than I should know . . . more than is any of my business about Warren’s marriage.”

Audra laughed, and Lillian was irritated. Her sister couldn’t know the strained atmosphere of the household. Every encounter with any other person was peculiarly fraught with self-consciousness in the face of the heavy atmosphere of sexuality that lurked throughout the rooms, almost as though it were corporeal, murkily drifting like ground fog in the stairwells and through the shadowy hallways.

“But think about it, Lillian.” Audra infused her voice with enthusiasm in an effort to invoke the same emotion in her sister. “They must be happy together. And it seems likely to me you’ll have a grandchild pretty soon. I wish I could say the same for myself. I think it’s been hard on Lily and Robert. And, Lillian,” she said, her voice less bright, “when you remember losing Harold and poor James . . . Warren and Agnes have plenty ahead of them they’ll have to get through. If they’re being foolish now . . . Oh, and I remember how much Leo and I longed for children.” She smiled at her sister, and the inflection of her voice lightened. “I have to say I think it’s much easier to be hoping for grandchildren!”

But Lillian snapped at her. “Oh, well!” she said. “If I were you I’d be careful what you wish for!” Lillian didn’t consider herself straitlaced, but there seemed to her something unnerving and overcharged about the playing out of Warren and Agnes’s intense early lust. And, too, inevitably the unbridled sensuality at loose in her household seemed to her somehow to be an indictment of herself. She had seen her husband glance after Agnes whenever she came or went, and Lillian wanted to shake him, to say to him that the girl transgressed decorum, to tell him that Agnes should be more discreet, that in some way his daughter-in-law was flaunting herself. But even as Lillian thought it she knew it wasn’t true; Agnes was unaware of anything amiss in her new household. And then Lillian would be embarrassed on her husband’s behalf and worried that Warren might also have noticed his father’s unbecoming interest in the nineteen-year-old girl among them.

Lillian Scofield was convinced, as well, that Warren and Agnes’s ardor was defined by such obvious physical urgency that surely it was a barrier to genuine affection, was an obstacle to an
emotional
connection. She didn’t dislike Agnes: Lillian assured herself of that very fact several times a day. After all, she hardly knew her daughter-in-law. But her son’s marriage seemed to her an oddly shaky affair. She didn’t say so, though, even to her sister, because she knew that even the thought was a kind of disloyalty. It wasn’t something she could speak of even with Audra. And besides, it was an unorganized idea that she didn’t hold and examine. It was just that she felt strangely defensive through all the day except the hour or so she spent in the tranquil air of her sister’s house. Then, with a dreary sense of resignation, Lillian would head back slowly across the lawns of Scofields to take up the task of overseeing dinner and the long evening ahead.

•  •  •

By mid-October, Agnes was certain she was pregnant, and Warren was delighted. Agnes’s mother-in-law had urged her—as soon as Warren and Agnes announced the news—to stay at home, not to be out and about. At Fort Sherman, near Chillicothe, hundreds of troops were stricken with the flu, and the camp was quarantined. The
Washburn Observer
reported ten to twenty new cases in Marshal County every day. Celia Drummond had come down with a case that turned out to be relatively mild, but in October, when the schools were closed and public meetings canceled, it was Lily Butler who first urged Agnes to remove herself from danger.

Even Warren wanted her to go, and so by the last week in October, Agnes was installed once more in her old bedroom in the quiet countryside with only her mother and Edson for company. But Agnes wasn’t happy about it, and neither was her mother, nor was Edson, who knew his mother felt slighted by his sister.

Since her marriage, whenever Agnes had visited her family out on Newark Road she had been full of news of the Scofield household and all its refinements, its exotic regulation. Catherine was convinced that in Agnes’s praise of her mother-in-law’s efficient management there was an indictment of her own housekeeping. Following any visit from her daughter Catherine would turn over in her mind all of her own failings that she felt Agnes had categorized simply by naming Lillian Scofield’s numerous virtues, then Agnes would be off. She would blithely and unintentionally leave her mother sunk in an even deeper melancholy and filled with shame. Nothing in Catherine’s life changed, of course, because she was helpless against the chaos that enveloped her, given her particular misunderstanding of the world. And, naturally, any sense of her own failure eventually turned to a deep resentment of Agnes, who—she declared to Edson—had conveniently forgotten that she had any connection to the Claytor family whatsoever.

But there Agnes was, suddenly, a permanent presence, bustling about with a sense of familiarity that her mother, in particular, truly begrudged her. Howie and Richard were with their father in Columbus, and Catherine Claytor felt unusually intruded upon, with Agnes bringing to bear on their fragile realm the sensibility of all the rest of the world. Agnes had always been so bossy!