The Evidence Against Her (4 page)

Warren hated being in the company of his parents when his father’s tone implied an extenuating and intimate connection between them. Lillian Scofield would soften and laugh a little, and Warren would be embarrassed for and even unreasonably angry at his mother, surprised each time at the evidence of her credulity. As an adult, Warren, too, objected to any criticism of Lily, but when he was a little boy it had been impossible for Warren not to be relieved to know his father favored him over his cousin.

Nor did Lily’s lighthearted self-incrimination appeal to her mother-in-law, Martha Butler, who, pregnant and frighteningly seasick, had traveled with her husband to Brazil and then Cuba, where he had been entirely ineffective at the mission of founding Methodist schools for girls, but where she had given birth to Robert’s two older siblings, both of whom were engaged in similarly unnerving work in South America. She believed— but couldn’t pin the idea down enough even to mention it to her husband—that in some way Lily was tossing off her mother-in-law’s own desperate housewifery in those hot and foreign places as an unnecessary—a foolish—sacrifice. She always thought that Lily was making an oblique disparagement, was indirectly—and, of course, unwittingly—belittling her.

“It’s amazing to me that I could be even
distantly
related to someone who knowingly took a risk like that! Just sailing off to who knows where,” Lily would carry on, and when the conversation got that far Martha Butler would look down at her hands folded in her lap and find herself restraining tears. “Leaving everything familiar behind. Well! And for that matter, someone who shouldered on even then—even after reaching land—to the wilds of Ohio!” Lily hadn’t noticed her mother-in-law’s dismay, but it was true that Lily had never forgiven Mrs. Butler for the subtle disapproval she had aimed Lily’s way when Lily was just a little girl, unable to make a case for herself as a suitable companion for Mrs. Butler’s last and favorite child.

It was Warren and Robert who were pressed about details of what became their most popular story, since Lily’s role in it seemed so unlikely. The two men had come back from a daylong hike along the rocks, clear around Herring Gut Point to the lighthouse, where they got soaked by spray and had very nearly been trapped by the tide. They had returned to the farmhouse to discover that Lily and Marjorie had spread a cloth in the yard under the trees and set out a picnic of cold fried chicken and a miraculous lemon meringue pie. “Well, we were mighty glad to see that chicken,” Robert said. “We were as sorry for ourselves and just as pitiful as two wet dogs.”

Warren teasingly described the pie, the height of the meringue, its peaks of browned gloss, the unparalleled lightness and delicacy of the crust. “By then,” he said, “we had blueberries coming out of our ears. There’s not enough good that can be said for a fine, tart lemon pie.” And Lily smiled indulgently.

“But Lily never wanted to cook anything in her life,” her mother always interjected. “She was such a little tomboy. You mean to tell me Lily dressed that bird? Cut up and fried a chicken? You mean to tell me Lily made a pie?” her mother always asked, in a voice full of disbelief and a kind of tender musing.

The three of them described taking the little white mail boat to Monhegan Island, the beauty of the coast seen from the water. And to Lily’s mother’s horror, they described what they claimed were extraordinary meals prepared for them by the woman the Hocketts had found at Leo’s behest to come in and clean and fix supper for the newlyweds and any guests they might have. Cod tongues and sounds and cheeks, Lily and Robert and Warren insisted, were delicacies indeed, although it made Audra Scofield shiver to hear about it. And finnan haddie. Why, it was wonderfully delicious, smoked over an alder fire under a hogshead. “I don’t believe I ever knew there were as many things to do with fish,” Robert declared, amused a little at his own landlocked bias.

“And thank goodness for that,” his mother-in-law murmured.

One morning Marjorie had arrived in her father’s big Regal auto with a picnic basket packed, but she and Lily ended up driving over muddy roads for miles, Lily said, while Warren and Robert devised a game of chess without a chessboard, drawing out and studying each successive move on a piece of paper. “The only time that afternoon I could persuade them to do a bit of sightseeing was when we all had to pile out while one or the other of them fixed a flat tire,” Lily said with feigned disgust. “And I’ve never seen such roads. Why, we drove through small
lakes,
it seemed to me. But we went along the cove road and ate lunch at a spot where we could watch the beautiful sloops. Oh, they’re sleek! They move like arrows through the water. We could see all the way to Matinicus!”

Everyone listened to these stories with real attention. At the heart of the abiding interest in every detail, of course, even among slight acquaintances, was the fact that Warren Scofield had joined the Butlers on their wedding trip, and that neither Robert nor Lily nor Warren ever satisfactorily explained the reason why. The people of Washburn silently pitied poor Warren Scofield, clearly so grieved by the loss of his cousin Lily— the love of his life—to the bed of his closest friend. And it was tacitly agreed that Robert and Lily Butler had pitied him, too, and had offered him the sad consolation of joining them for a visit after they had spent the first ardent weeks of their marriage alone. The situation was still fraught with the possibility of further developments. And trifling as they were, the stories the three of them told were incorporated in the town’s communal, unrecorded history as a point of reference, to be reconsidered, if need be, in case anything else in the lives of those three became mysterious. Because Lily and Robert and Warren were young then, and anything might happen.

A
GNES CLAYTOR had just turned fourteen years old at the time of Lily Scofield and Robert Butler’s marriage, and although her family had been guests at the wedding, it might be that her parents were the only two people in the area on whom nothing of the little drama of that ceremony registered, nor would they have been interested in the details of the wedding trip. And at age fourteen, neither had Agnes thought much one way or another about Lily Scofield’s wedding.

Early on that hot June day of 1913, Agnes had been buttoned up in a long-waisted organdy dress not pastel but so gently colored that it was as though the cloth held only a suggestion of the color blue. At first she was delighted with the romance of the airy flounce of its skirt. When she had slipped the freshly ironed, still warm dress over her head, the roof of her mouth prickled with the clean, scorched smell of the starched, fragile fabric, and her mind’s eye filled with a vision of herself as a graceful and delicate creature. But during the ceremony, when the dress wilted and drooped in the heat, making her uncomfortable with its damp scratchiness around her neck, that happy idea evaporated, and she lost interest in the whole affair.

She had turned to watch the procession as the bridesmaids and flower girls and finally Lily and her father came down the aisle, but Agnes hadn’t noticed Warren Scofield’s reaction. Certainly she had heard the incident recounted many times in the weeks following the wedding, but since it wasn’t a story that anyone told to her directly—was simply one of those anecdotes that are loose in the air of a community—she had let any intricacy of detail just drift right by her.

A year later, though, by the time Agnes was fifteen and her friends at school began to be interested in everything about
any
wedding, what impressed Agnes most was when Lucille Drummond told her that Mr. Leo Scofield had imported forty-five dozen roses, that he had them shipped from New York in a special rail car just to be woven into the arbor under which Reverend Butler had performed the ceremony. “That would be five hundred and forty roses,” Lucille pointed out, “just for that one day. But they wilted almost before the end of the ceremony. By the end of the day they were just as limp as string.”

Agnes was also impressed when Lucille reminded her of the terrible heat of the week of the wedding. “So Mr. Scofield had sixteen full-grown trees dug up from out in the country—they were
huge,
and they all had to be just the same height! They had to match exactly!” Lucille said. “He had them planted in two rows so that his daughter wouldn’t have to have that sun full on her in the hottest part of the day. Not on the bridesmaids, either, of course. And Lily Butler had
two
little flower girls. Well . . .” Lucille’s voice became solemn. “She’s Mr. Scofield’s only child, so even if he
did
overdo it a little . . . It took more than twelve men working for three full days just to get everything ready on time!”

Lucille’s family had only moved to town a few months before the wedding and hadn’t really done more at that point than make the acquaintance of the Scofield family, but Lucille remembered that her father had sent a team and wagon over to Scofields on the Tuesday of the week of the wedding and hadn’t gotten the return of them until Sunday, the day after the ceremony, although Lucille did say his mules had been well taken care of.

And, really, Lucille was not lying. Everything she described was as clear in her head as if she had seen it herself. The idea she had of the Scofield-Butler wedding was vivid and was made up of any number of bits of conversations, vague impressions, grand reinterpretations of various occasions. Lucille’s sister Celia, for instance, had once told the tale of a friend of hers whose fiancé had arranged for a crate of oysters and three dozen roses to be shipped to her by train from Philadelphia. And Mr. Drummond
had
sent a team and wagon around Monument Square to help out when the Scofield wagon had become mired in mud one spring with its burden of a new piano for Audra Scofield, although Lucille had been in Columbus visiting her sister Grace at the time. Also, of course, Lucille had heard her sisters rehashing various accounts of Lily Butler’s wedding: the bumblebees under the arbor, the overlong bridal procession as Lily and her father made their way beneath that avenue of trees while the guests sweltered in the garden.

It had never crossed Lucille’s mind to imagine the impossibility of finding sixteen mature, matched catalpa trees growing randomly out in the country, much less the hopelessness of the task of transplanting them. But had anyone confronted her about her misrepresentation of the events surrounding Lily Butler’s wedding, Lucille would have shrugged it off, discounted it, been sorry to have a grand story ruined, and Agnes would have been disappointed as well.

In Lucille’s house it was in relation to her that her parents and sisters warned one another—sometimes with a slightly supercilious air—that little pitchers have big ears. And that was because even as a young child Lucille had been prone to repeat the most outlandish details she overheard, repeat them to utter strangers with a blunt and rather contentious insistence. She had been forced to make sense of fragments of whatever stories she happened to interrupt; she snatched up scraps of conversations here and there. As the youngest of four daughters, she was always faced with people ending sentences midway through when she appeared, or turning away and speaking in a hush, adopting cautious expressions of restraint and, Lucille thought, an air of smug superiority. It was maddening, but by necessity Lucille had developed a strong intuition and a remarkable imagination.

Agnes and Lucille had become good friends almost as soon as they met on their first day at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. Each one instinctively relied upon the other, because the world Lucille described to Agnes was so much more fraught with eventfulness than Agnes, as the oldest child in her family, ever discerned on her own. And for Lucille’s part, she was nearly always eventually relieved when Agnes turned her pragmatic attention toward some notion of Lucille’s that was getting dangerously out of hand and, in Agnes’s oddly appealing, steely little voice, deflated Lucille’s wildly spinning, free-floating fancy to the essential flat facts of its ordinariness. Agnes generally had difficulty recognizing drama even when she was in the middle of it, while Lucille had a tendency to invest the most everyday event with extravagant import, and they were useful to each other in managing between them to find a reasonable interpretation of the world.

The Claytors, Dwight and Catherine, and their four children, lived out Newark Road, where Dwight Claytor’s grandparents had farmed comfortably, mainly growing corn but also running a good-size dairy. Dwight eventually joined his father’s law practice in Zanesville, although he kept his grandparents’ place and managed the dairy, which, by the time Agnes started school, was only about three miles or so north of Washburn, since the town had grown so much.

But even before Agnes was born, the majority of that vast, slightly rolling acreage had been given over strictly to the growing of corn for a mass commercial market. Her father had built a new house farther from the road under the shelter of a nice stand of walnut trees that shaded the southern-facing rooms in the summer. By the time Agnes left lower school and began to attend the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, the Claytor farm was so extensive that the Claytors were never really thought of as farmers.

In fact, her father had hired a manager for the property and become deeply involved in state politics. He had been pressed to run for and had been elected to the state assembly on the Democratic ticket to represent Marshal County in 1913, and he had worked hard to ensure the reelection of Atlee Pomerene to the U.S. Senate in 1916. He was often in Columbus for weeks and sometimes more than a month without a visit home. And when he was at home, a great deal of time was taken up by people who came and went to discuss the business of politics with Dwight Claytor, who remained publicly courteous but who sometimes got closed-faced with anger—a tense flattening of expression—although perhaps only his children realized it. He kept his voice under tight control and even sustained a cordial tone, a flexibility of timbre that belied his displeasure. His children knew it well; their father rarely raised his voice, but they could always tell when he was disappointed or irritated or really angry.

Now and then his restraint drove his wife to distraction. “There’s nothing
kind
about not saying what you mean!” she said to him. “It just leaves the children walking around feeling terrible. Not knowing what in the world they’ve done wrong.” And this was true enough, although it surprised her children that she knew it. “My father always said . . . he
always
said that he would never trust a man who wore a beard or any man who never showed his temper. He said it was the sign of a stingy heart.”

Her husband turned a cold eye on her for a long moment that was suddenly quiet with the caught attention of all four children. “I won’t be insulted in my own home by my own wife, Catherine.
My
father always said to be careful what you wish for.” And then the tension ebbed a little as he relaxed and drew his fingers over his jaw from cheek to chin. “Besides, I haven’t ever worn a beard, Catherine,” he said to her, his expression mildly amused, but she whirled around with her hands clenched at her sides, her face wide with contempt.

“Why, I just hope you can see that your father can be mean!” she said in the direction of her children, not speaking to Dwight directly. “Oh, I tell you, he can be mean as a snake! The things he says . . . the
way
he’ll say things to a person . . .” Her voice rustled furiously, and the children distracted her, asked her questions, begged special favors. They drew her away from their father however they could; Catherine never would let go of an argument on her own.

As it happened, though, when Catherine had first met Dwight Claytor, what had originally caught her attention were the clean, round, unrancorous Midwestern vowels that shaped his voice as he politely defended some political position at dinner one evening. He had come to Natchez, where Catherine had lived all her life, to pay a visit to their mutual cousins, the Alcorns, and tidy up some family business, and he had become involved in an amiable debate with her father.

Catherine had listened as he maintained his support of prohibition against the subtle derisiveness of her father. She hadn’t had an opinion about prohibition—hadn’t thought about it one way or another. But she liked the seemingly innocent unassailability of Dwight Claytor’s voice as it was pitched against the elegantly flat, sardonic questions and declarations her father put forth.

“Well, sir,” Mr. Claytor said, “I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of industry in my section of the country. New enterprises springing up everywhere. And it certainly is true that industry, at any rate, has a large interest in the prohibition of
drunkenness.
It’s not a bit good for productivity, as you can imagine. The Anti-Saloon League is a powerful political ally for any man with aspirations. I suppose it could reach a point where there’s some danger in their intolerance.”

“But I can see that you don’t worry as I do, Mr. Claytor,” her father replied, leaning back in his chair and pivoting slightly, crossing one leg over the other in an attitude that signified good temper and leisurely amusement, “that this whole thing might conspire against a man’s pleasure. It doesn’t seem to you to be the idea of preachers and unhappy women?”

This was meant as a bit of lazy teasing, but Dwight Claytor frowned in consideration. “I don’t believe I know many of either,” he answered pensively. “But speaking simply for myself— as to pleasure, anyway—I can say that prohibition would have no effect whatsoever.” What he said was so straightforward it was clear that he was unaware of her father’s assumption of a little ironic conspiracy between the two of them. Her father was taken aback, and Catherine was peculiarly satisfied.

Dwight Claytor had seemed to possess a placid sort of reasonableness. His tone never slid into the patronizing, slightly nasal, descending trill that she was so used to hearing in her father’s voice in any conversation. Mr. Claytor was a handsome man, compact and dark, with wide-set brown eyes, but it was really little more than the sound of his voice that secured him such a sought-after bride. It was his agreeable, unflustered articulation of his own point of view that was exactly why Catherine Alcorn Edson married Dwight Albert Claytor in April of 1898, when she was twenty years old. It was the reason Catherine came to be established on the wide, rolling farmland in the middle of Ohio.

By 1916, though, Catherine had lost track of how she had arrived at where she was. She occupied a large new house with no idea of managing it, so that she was always surprised when each day she was confronted with the details of it, asked to make decisions about this or that. She had no idea of giving direction to Betsy Graves, the young woman her husband had hired to come in every morning to do domestic work—the two women stayed out of each other’s way, each one uneasy, and nothing much ever did get done. And Catherine was the mother of four children whom she often yearned after with a terrible, lonely soul-sickness. They moved through the hours as though they inhabited time apart from the way she understood it. Their days seemed to hurtle along all ordered and precise so that even her children’s everyday progression somehow excluded her. Sometimes she was mystified by the actuality of them and sometimes enraged.

By the time Catherine Claytor was in her thirties the ragged, cluttered corners of her mind were filled with the wheedling neediness of children, their boisterous games, their loud humor, their endless appetites and curiosity. It was constantly surprising that they required so much of her. Having settled some business or other with them, she was never, ever prepared for still another concern to crop up. She never grasped the fact that no matter what she did they would need something from her yet again. And all this—all the requests and demands and elation and dismay spilling out into the rooms of her house, spiraling out over the yard, overlaying the incessant drone of the news of the world as it was related and debated by visitors and remarked upon by her husband—it was bewildering. Catherine was often overwhelmed by the turmoil of her own life and desperate in the face of the publicly impassive, forbearing nature of her husband’s attention.