The Evidence Against Her (3 page)

“Why, Lily,” he said, “Lily? I wonder if you’d ever think of marrying me?” Lily’s expression was no longer vexed; she had assumed a placid look of waiting as she gave him her full attention. She wasn’t exactly assessing him, but he saw that she was waiting to hear more. He was still catching up to what he had already said. He hadn’t had any idea that he was going to ask Lily to marry him, although he didn’t have a single qualm now that the words had been said. In fact, all the disparities and loose ends of his life suddenly seemed to cohere and his world to settle into its proper orbit.

“You’re the smartest girl I know, Lily,” he went on, in an attempt to explain. “It’s not long before you realize that the world’s full of pretty girls. Everyone I knew at school seemed to have a sister. A pretty cousin . . . but none with a mind like yours. Or your sense of . . . honor. In all the time I’ve known you—well, my whole life—I’ve never heard you say an unkind thing about a single person! You’d be surprised to hear a girl say terrible things about someone who’s supposed to be her dearest friend.” But Lily still stood quietly, looking at him with a mildly curious expression, so he tried to make it clear even to himself.

“There’s no other girl I’ve ever met who I could ever care so much about. I must have always been in love with you.” And though he was startled to hear himself say it he knew at once that it was the truth—so vigorous and absolute that suddenly the possibility of her refusal became dreadful. “I don’t know that I’d ever be happy if I thought I’d go through my whole life and you wouldn’t be with me. I think that all my life . . . Well, I can’t imagine there would ever in the world be anyone else I would ask to marry me.”

Lily continued to gaze at him in frank appraisal of his earnest brown head, his pleasant and familiar face. She tucked her arm through his and moved them along down Church Street toward Stradler’s clothing store. “Of course I’ll marry you, Robert. I’ve always thought I would.”

In May of 1913, Robert returned from Boston, and, in late June, Warren traveled back from a branch office of Scofields & Company in Pennsylvania to serve as Robert’s best man. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 28, Warren stood next to the groom in the oppressive two o’clock heat of Leo Scofield’s garden and looked on placidly with a polite air of expectation.

Lily’s mother had arranged for the prelude and wedding music to be performed by a string quartet and a singer from the College of Music of Cincinnati, and although the strings were muted by the heat, the soprano’s voice was vivid. Lily’s five attendants and the two flower girls, sprinkling rose petals from a basket they carried between them, made their way along the shady aisle beneath those tall trees and emerged blinking in the sudden dazzle of sunlight in the garden, proceeding in traditional hesitation step along the freshly raked gravel path dividing the rows and rows of chairs set out upon the grass.

One by one they arranged themselves across from the groomsmen on the other side of the trellised arbor where huge, clumsy-seeming bumblebees drank from the throats of the trumpet flowers, causing a little uneasiness among the bridesmaids. Robert’s father stood directly beneath the arbor, smiling solemnly, ignoring the bees, and waited to perform the marriage ceremony.

But when Lily emerged on Leo’s arm from the shadows of the fervidly blooming catalpa trees, Warren startled visibly, lifting his hand and splaying his fingers across his chest. His gesture expressed not only surprise but dismay, and it appeared to a few of the onlookers that Warren hadn’t believed until that moment that it was a
marriage
that was about to take place. It caught the attention of the assembled guests particularly, of course, because Warren was playing out a role that generally fell to the groom. It was Robert, though, who grasped Warren’s arm to steady him. Nevertheless, just for a moment Warren’s attitude was stripped bare of any pretense, as if he were a man who had lost any possibility of comfort in the world.

Lily saw nothing of that momentary drama. But Warren had been taken unawares by this clear bit of evidence that his youth was over. That he and Robert and Lily had become adults. It was the moment when he understood for the first time—grasped the clean, severe truth of the fact—that the three of them had become who they had become, and from now on the association of their youth would be relegated to nostalgic musings and remembrances. It was the first moment that Warren looked back at the years of his childhood and thought that they seemed to have flown by so fast.

Lily stepped from the filtered light into the blinding sunshine, her hand resting lightly on Leo Scofield’s arm, so that she paused for a moment when he did while he waited to get his bearings in the bright day. For just an instant while she hesitated alongside her father she had a cursory glimpse of the waiting bridal party. She caught the gleam of her cousin Warren’s fair hair in juxtaposition to Robert’s darker head, and a hazy, amorphous happiness clarified itself in one swift thought before she stepped forward once again: Here we are together. The three of us. Here we are again at last. And then she remembered to move forward with care in order to accommodate her heavy satin train. She considered the next step and then the next, her mind fully concentrated on her progress. But in those few seconds, that fragmentary passage of time, she had satisfied herself that Robert Butler and Warren Scofield were both hers once again and ever after. And everyone looking on had seen—just during that tiny hesitation as she had stepped from the shadows into the sudden, shimmering, metallic illumination, in her pale dress and with her yellow hair—that Lily was as shocking and slender and brilliant with potential as the blade of a knife.

It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable, if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.

•  •  •

Lily and Robert traveled east for their wedding trip. Lily wanted to go to the galleries and museums in New York, where she had missed the sensational opening of the Armory Show in February. Several of her friends who lived in New York had written her about it, and Robert had thought it was astonishing. They spent several days in South Hadley, Massachusetts, visiting friends and teachers of Lily’s, and then they went on to Boston so Lily could meet some of Robert’s friends she didn’t yet know.

Robert’s circle of Harvard friends, an educated but unknowingly provincial bunch, sitting around a table at Madson’s in Cambridge, listening to Lily and watching her small, slender hands fly as she spoke, eagerly promised to visit Robert and Lily in Washburn once they were settled. Robert had been offered and had accepted a teaching position in the English department at Harcourt Lees college. Robert’s friends—just like the girls who first encountered Lily at Mount Holyoke—were surprised to find themselves mesmerized by this glittery-bright girl from the middle of nowhere, and they inevitably concluded that Ohio must be a far more sophisticated and delightful place than they had imagined.

Three weeks after their departure, Robert and Lily wired Warren. They sent the telegram the morning of the day they took the Boston packet to Tenants Harbor, Maine. The family of Lily’s maid of honor, Marjorie Hockett, who was Lily’s dearest friend from college, had offered the newlyweds the use of their empty farmhouse through the end of August. The note Lily and Robert sent was a clever sort of message:

HAVE TOO MUCH FUN STOP YOU MUST USE SOME UP STOP
DO NOT HESITATE STOP WE ARE LOST STOP

It bore Lily’s stamp of airy playfulness, and she later claimed that she had had her fill of culture and was sure that Robert would want more company than she was interested in providing to investigate the natural wonders of the Maine coast. Of course she didn’t say—even to herself in any organized way—that she had been taken aback by Robert’s passionate interest in her. She was flattered, and sometimes taken by surprise by simple physical pleasure, but by and large she found so much attention a little tedious, often absurd. It wasn’t entirely unlike the one time at Mount Holyoke that Marjorie Hockett had leaned over—as they sat on Lily’s bed studying—and kissed Lily lightly on the neck just behind her ear. A sizzling sort of thrill had shot through Lily, and she turned her head toward Marjorie, who kissed her lips very gently. But all of a sudden Lily had thought: What’s this? For goodness sake! This is only
Marjorie!

With Robert she often had to battle down the same notion, and she sometimes thought she would enjoy all of lovemaking much more if she were with an utter stranger. Familiarity bred in Lily a peculiar kind of self-consciousness. But she never let these thoughts coalesce; she never let them come into sharp focus. And she really did believe Robert would enjoy Warren’s company. She thought it would be a good thing to have Warren among them. It would be a distraction, and Warren would love to go along with Robert for all the exploring he wanted to do. Also, Lily had great hopes of Warren and Marjorie getting to know each other even better. They had enjoyed each other’s company during all the business of the wedding.

As she had explained to Robert’s friends, and as she declared with slight variations when she and Robert returned to Ohio, “I love a game of golf, you know. Or tennis or croquet. Any sort of cards. Oh, I’ll play just about anything. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m any good at it. I like almost any sort of competition. But I don’t think I possess a single
bit
of adventurousness,” she said of herself ruefully.

“If it had been up to me I’d still be standing on my one wretched square foot of earth somewhere in England, struggling to subsist on whatever pitiful things I could coax from the kitchen garden. I’ve always liked the sound of that—a kitchen garden—and I’m going to be sure to have one of my own. Well! I probably already do. If there’s a garden to be planted, I’m sure my father will have done it!” This bit was left out in her retelling back home in Washburn, but she had made great characters of her delightful parents in the little stories she spun out for her school friends and any of Robert’s acquaintances who gathered around the couple during their stay in Boston.

When Lily and Robert and Warren returned to Washburn the first week of September, the three of them were filled with amusing anecdotes, sitting out in Leo’s garden, where Lily and her mother had strung Japanese lanterns. Once back home, Lily merely turned the tables and with quick, clever verbal twists managed to portray even the least interesting of their East Coast friends as wonderful characters, full of endearing idiosyncrasies. Lily told a good tale, and Robert always sat looking on with a little smile of contentment.

She claimed to her family and friends in Ohio that she couldn’t have endured alone so much
nature
as they encountered in Maine. She knew Robert would want company, she said, on his hikes and outings, but she wanted to enjoy the scenery—at least when Marjorie Hockett visited—from the comfort of a chair set out under the trees. The Hocketts lived nearby, in a handsome old house overlooking the village and harbor of Port Clyde, where Lily had visited them several times during her years at Mount Holyoke.

“Oh, no! I would never have made an explorer,” she insisted when her Washburn friends protested that they didn’t know anyone more likely than she to relish a hike through the wilderness, a chance to discover a mysterious cove, some out-of-the-way place. “I might have been quite shocking, say, insisting on playing polo—having a pony of my own.” And the company in the garden laughed at the idea of tiny little Lily on some great horse, swinging a huge mallet about determinedly, with that peculiar air of insistence with which she went at any game.

“Or taking a turn at cricket,” she added, to further laughter. “I can’t ever resist trying something if there’s any chance in the
world
that I might win. But I’d never have had the courage to venture into foreign territory. You know, I think it would be really frightening not to know the country. The customs and . . . well, it would be tedious, too. But anyway, I simply know I wouldn’t have the patience or the forbearance or the courage. If I’d been born whenever the first Marshals emigrated I would have had to be orphaned. Staying behind and begging crusts of bread in the street. I wouldn’t ever have set foot on any one of those little ships.”

Lily was cheerfully self-deprecating. Everyone who knew her became fondly possessive of the shortcomings she found in herself, translated as they were into her own particular and amusing eccentricities, which she confided unabashedly and with charming chagrin. Everyone but her uncle John, who had never been fond of his brother’s daughter. Who always said to his wife or to Warren that she reminded him of nothing so much as a scrawny hen that won’t lay. “Pecking about and squawking, but not worth the feed it takes to keep her.”

It was one of the few provocations that elicited a sharp rebuke from Lillian Scofield, whose namesake Lily was. “I won’t have you say such a thing! Not another word!” Lillian never did realize that when she faced her husband down he backed off, just as he always did regarding his niece.

“Well, Lillian! Of the three of them . . . Even you’ve got to admit she’s the runt of
that
litter, and . . .”

“I’ll leave the room! I really will not hear another word of this, Mr. Scofield! You’re speaking unkindly of someone very dear to me. . . . Why, John! She’s my namesake! She’s Audra’s daughter. She might just as well be my
own
daughter!”

And Warren would notice that under the force of his mother’s genuine pique his father would immediately become his most beguiling, his voice softening into a melodious wheedling. “Ah, my,” he would sigh. “Well, Lillian. I suppose I ought to work harder at being a charitable man. But that girl is just slippery. . . . All right. All right. But my lack of . . .
gallantry . . .
well, it’s truly your fault.” And he would hunch his shoulders in a shrug of helplessness, hands spread wide apart and palms outward to illustrate the uselessness of any attempt to behave otherwise. “I do have to say that any woman has a hard time winning even a bit of my heart in comparison to you. You haven’t changed since the day I met you. Won’t you forgive me? Isn’t there anyone in my own household who loves me just a little? Unkind—plain stupid—as I may be?”