The Evidence Against Her (6 page)

Agnes didn’t comment. She thought he was being melodramatic in spite of himself, and she was embarrassed for him. “In fact, I expect you’ll be married by the time I get back,” he said, less like a statement than a question, although his tone didn’t register on Agnes because she was so surprised. She didn’t say anything for a moment; she just studied him to see if he was serious.

“William! Married! Oh, for goodness sake! You
know
I’m thinking about going on to Oberlin, too. . . . I don’t know, though. . . . Mama thinks it’s just a waste of time. . . .” Agnes lost track of their conversation for a moment, twisting the ropes of the swing as she turned in the direction of the house. But then she came back to the moment and let the swing come around again so that she was facing William. “Married!” She frowned in concentration as she looked up to see if she could read his expression—to see if he was teasing her. “I’m not likely to be getting married, William,” she said with a little sarcasm, in case he was making fun of her, “since I don’t even have a beau.”

“That may be,” William said, “but it’s just because none of the girls at Gilchrest pay any attention to boys. Agnes, I don’t think the war will be over very soon. It might be years.” Even though they hadn’t seen much of each other in the past few years day to day, Agnes still thought of William as her good friend, and he was so grave just now that he seemed to Agnes to be imitating a grown-up. He sounded suspiciously self-important. “Someone will snap you up in no time while I’m gone, I bet. You’re the prettiest girl in your class at Gilchrest.”

She pushed off gently with her foot so that the swing moved back and forth a few feet each way, and peered up at him with annoyance. “Oh, William, don’t be silly! Please don’t say anything like that.” She waved her hand in a signal of dismissal. “I don’t like to think about any of that. . . .” And she meant it absolutely—it made her uncomfortable since she knew that what he said couldn’t be true. On the other hand, a little corner of her mind was curious to know who he thought was prettier than she in some
other
class at Linus Gilchrest Institute. “Anyway, I’m not a jar of
peaches,
you know. To be snapped up off a shelf or something.”

And at that William finally fell right out of the earnest air of solemnity that had made Agnes a little scornful—it was absurd, somehow, in this friend of her childhood. He grinned widely. “Hah! Close enough. And a
lot
more tempting.”

She wasn’t flattered; she was shocked and also suspicious, and she stopped the swing abruptly and hopped off. She stood right in front of him, looking up at his face. He had a loose, smiling expression that she hadn’t seen before, and she was angry at suddenly feeling uneasy. “Oh, William!
Please
don’t talk like that.” She watched as he glanced away, and she was interested to realize that he was nice looking. All the Damerons, she thought, were rangy and nice looking, with square, regular faces and sandy brown hair.

“Well, I was only teasing you,” he said apologetically, and then he grinned. “I never even
liked
put-up peaches. I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “You know what, though, Agnes? This
is
just what I think makes sense for me to do. I’m not
sorry. . . .
But last night just sitting at the table eating dinner I realized how long it might be before I got back. I’m
ready
to go. . . . I can hardly wait to get into an airplane! I’ll tell you that! But last night I wanted
not
to be going, too. I knew you’d be the only person I could tell that to. I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.” She was embarrassed now, herself, to see that he was moved by his own plight.

“Oh, William, you’ll be fine,” she said, surprising herself with the nervous sound of her enthusiasm. “If anyone can take care of himself it’s you. You should hear Richard and Howie talk about you. They’d give anything to be doing what you’re doing. Everyone is proud of you. Oh, everyone thinks it’s brave of you!” That wasn’t true; Agnes’s father thought William was being reckless, thought he was foolish to hurry into action. “He’ll have plenty of time to get killed for his
own
country,” her father had said just the night before, without heat; in fact his voice had been subdued.

But Agnes was simply saying what seemed appropriate to the occasion while simultaneously taking account of what William had said about her, and her head filled up with new considerations and possibilities about herself as he saw her. She wanted time to turn this over in her mind, to go over every word, sift through every syllable. Agnes got so wrapped up in this new and tempting image of herself that William Dameron walked home across the fields just as horrified by the rash action he had taken as when he had set out to find her that afternoon. Any admiration of him on her part might have been reassuring, might have put a stop to the jangling onslaught of second thoughts. He went off to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, and eventually to fight in France, with no more than a cheerful good-bye and good wishes from Agnes.

When Agnes brought home the highest marks of anyone in her class, her father said to her that he was glad to see she was developing a good character, that she was becoming a sensible girl. He said that there was nothing more admirable in a young woman. “Even if you’ll never be the beauty your mother was,” he said, which didn’t faze Agnes at just that moment when she was so gratified by a bit of praise, but which, curiously, caused her mother’s temper to darken into fury. Catherine Claytor roamed the house in such a bleak state of undirected anger that her children scattered and stayed out of the way. “Not the
beauty!
Not the
beauty!
” Her mother lengthened and scorned every nuance of the word—“
bee-yew-tee
”—exulting in her own bitter articulation. “None of you have the slightest
idea . . .
” Their father, though, had his mind on other things, and Catherine’s angry fluster blew all around him but left him untouched.

Agnes kept to herself the memory of the moment she had stood to recite at school and Miss McCrory had commented that Agnes was like nothing so much as a blossoming rose. Whenever she thought of it she reminded herself that the other girls in class had looked on amiably with no evidence of disagreement. Agnes knew she was fairly well liked, but this remarkable vision Miss McCrory had conjured up was a piece of evidence about herself that she tucked away to be examined later. She had made an effort not to give any sign of the deep pleasure she felt at the possibility of her own prettiness.

In fact, though, Agnes was not anything at all like a rose— at least nothing like the popular hybrid teas, so difficult to grow. She wasn’t tall, nor was she elegant, nor in any way stately. At eighteen her figure was full-blown and so were her features— wide-set and large, with flaring eyebrows so that her round, dark eyes were startling. She was more like a peony, perhaps, uncommonly lush and vivid, although very few people would ever think to compare Agnes to a flower, because there was something about her appearance that was blunt and absolute and that negated the notion of fragility associated with anything floral. She didn’t resemble anyone in her family, and sometimes when she studied herself in the mirror she thought she might be beautiful in a way that no one else recognized; other times she thought she was grotesque. The Claytor sensibility on the subject of physical beauty was shaped entirely by Catherine, and in her household there was short shrift given to any idea of a middle ground.

One Saturday in late September of 1917, Warren Scofield and Lily Butler visited the Claytor place and stayed on for some time, sitting in the front parlor. The two of them had ridden out on horseback, because Lily Butler loved to ride and needed an outing. Her husband was overseas, stationed in France, she said, at the field artillery training base in Saumur.

Lily was animated and chatty, but it wasn’t really a social visit; Warren was particularly anxious to discuss the needs of Scofields & Company now that they were under incessant pressure from the War Department to increase production, and he also had business to discuss in his capacity as a representative of the Fuel Administration. He had come to raise the possibility of reopening the coalfields on land Dwight Claytor owned near Zanesville, where Warren’s grandfather had worked as a young man in the 1830s, digging and hauling coal, in an enterprise that had eventually evolved into Scofields & Company. The Fuel Administration had pegged the price of coal at a high level, and Warren hoped to persuade Dwight Claytor that not only the price but the political capital gained by such an undertaking would make it worth the complicated and time-consuming logistics entailed.

Warren had been required by the War Department to remain in Washburn, Lily told them, in order to oversee the conversion of Scofields & Company to the exclusive manufacture of high-capacity presses to forge large guns and other war matériel. The fact that Lily herself was so familiar with the operation was enormously impressive to Agnes, who did think to slip out of the room for a moment to organize some refreshments.

The discussion had become technical and grave, though, and Agnes eventually grew tense and anxious on behalf of her mother, who had nothing to contribute to the conversation. Even with the furor everywhere over the war, it remained an abstraction to Catherine Claytor, and although she didn’t seem bored, Agnes took note of her mother’s placid expression, unanimated even by disdain. Agnes was pained at her mother’s beige passiveness in the face of Lily Butler’s startlingly clever blondness, and Agnes was also worried that her mother might perceive her own social ineptitude, as Lily’s quick hands sketched neatly through the air illustrating whatever she said. In later years, whenever Agnes remembered that afternoon, she wondered how it was that Warren Scofield had not caught her attention when he was no farther away than across the room from her, and she generally put it down to Lily’s nearly aggressive liveliness and intelligence.

Agnes had escaped the room as soon as she could without being rude, counting it a strike against herself that she was deserting her mother. She wandered outside and sat in the swing that hung from the big oak at the edge of the croquet court and watched her brothers set up the wickets under the cloud-streaked pale blue sky. She pushed the swing idly, just enough motion to flutter her skirt a bit. She was dreamily watching her own feet as she stepped them in patterns in the sparse grass beneath the swing.

“Agnes!” Edson was standing under an apple tree on the other side of the court. “If you won’t play then it won’t be any fun. We want to play partners.”

“No, Eddie. I’m too lazy.”

She continued to push the swing languidly, in slow circles, when she noticed that Howie and Richard were stuffing their pockets with fallen apples behind Edson’s back. She stood and began to amble casually along her side of the croquet court, stooping now and then to gather a handful of small green apples herself. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the boys and at just the right moment wheeled and pelted Howard and Richard with perfect aim. Richard ducked behind a tree. They shouted in protest: Agnes could throw like a bullet, and apples came flying in her direction while she scrabbled for more ammunition, exclaiming and protesting.

“No fair! No fair!” she called. “It’s three against one!” She ran back toward the house and slipped behind a tree herself, having managed to grab only four more apples before being bombarded. She glanced out at her brothers and leapt back as they took aim.

For the rest of her life Agnes could recall even the scent of those apples at the moment when she had turned and noticed Warren Scofield, perhaps twenty yards away, standing at an angle to her, saying good-bye to her parents. At a distance he was a sweep of yellow hair and dark brows as he briefly pivoted on the porch steps after shaking hands with her father. Before she gave it a second thought, Agnes drew her arm back and released a searing shot that caught him right between his shoulder blades.

Warren turned in surprise and stared at her, and then he bent and picked up that hard, green apple and inspected it before polishing it on his sleeve. He took a bite with a somber expression, and the working of his mouth and throat, for nearly a minute on that last Saturday of September in 1917, was the only motion in the world as far as Agnes knew.

I
N THE CLAYTOR HOUSEHOLD it had always been perfectly clear that Agnes was her father’s daughter, that Richard and Howie were aligned more with each other than with either of their parents, and that Edson remained besotted with his mother. All the children had gone through a time of yearning after their mother, who had lavished affectionate attention on each one of them now and then, but Agnes’s happiest idea of her childhood involved her father. By the time she was five or six years old, he had often taken her along with him to business or political meetings at the Eola Arms Hotel in Washburn. She was thrilled to be included and had no idea that her excited leave-taking had been perceived by her mother as a bewildering rejection of herself.

Dwight Claytor wasn’t a sentimental or
doting
sort of father, but he solemnly held her dining chair for her—and all the other businessmen or politicians stood politely, looking on with real or feigned indulgence—until he assured himself that his daughter was comfortably seated. And Agnes was so careful in her best dress and uncomfortable dress-up shoes to be well-behaved, to keep her elbows off the table, to place her knife and fork exactly right on her plate when she was done, that the other men relievedly forgot about her and leaned forward on their elbows, jabbing at the air with an index finger—or a cigar streaming pale curls of smoke—to make a point.

In the middle of one heated conversation in the hotel dining room, silence fell over the table as coffee was served, and even at age six Agnes was aware of the tension in the pause during the general rustle of resettling. Finally Agnes felt compelled to speak up in that palpably hostile silence, “President Roosevelt never
will
reduce the tariffs or do anything about banking reform.” And the men leaned back in their chairs with explosive and admiring laughter all around, all except her father, who nodded at her thoughtfully. The others looked at her earnest, round eyes in her serious six-year-old face surrounded by masses of curly black hair and peppered the two Claytors with murmurings of approval.

“Aha! Like father like daughter . . .”

“. . .
should
get the vote . . .”

“. . . cute as a bug and smart as a whip!”

Whenever Agnes rode alongside her father in the buggy or in his motorcar he discussed these things with her. He had laid out the need for a railroad-regulation bill. Her father was angry about what he felt was the president’s failure to see the urgency of satisfying the Middle West’s desire for more control of corporations, or to understand the region’s need for direct election of senators. And on that issue, her father told her, Roosevelt really didn’t grasp the mood of the Far West, either.

On those long rides her father also asked her about her own life. He wanted to know what she liked in school, and he listened with grave attention—he listened without one bit of condescension. Once, when she named the birds of Ohio that she had learned from a book at school, he pulled up on Newark Road and dexterously folded a bird out of a flat sheet of newspaper to illustrate to her how it achieved flight. And although Agnes failed to grasp the principle, she never, ever forgot the sight of her father loping along the dusty road with the paper bird raised above his head to show her how its wings would work as it lifted off the ground.

When she returned home with him from these outings, however, her mother would stalk and find her alone somewhere. Catherine would be beside herself. “He only takes you along because it makes a good impression. It’s only that it
amuses
people now. It hasn’t got a thing to do with
you.
He doesn’t take you with him because he cares one bit about how you feel. You ought to know that. You’ll find that out soon enough!”

“Don’t say that, Mama!” Agnes would plead. “Don’t say that!” But even though her mother never recanted, Agnes didn’t entirely believe her. When she had been Edson’s age—even younger than that, in fact—Agnes would watch for her father from her window in the afternoons when she knew he was due home. He would heave shut the barn door and then take a moment to adjust his coat, straighten his collar, carefully adjust his hat—make himself ready to face his own life. He would cross the yard deliberately, keeping to the path, and he would cough exactly two times midway to the door. Agnes would race down the back stairs to meet him, because he seemed to her somehow so sadly solitary. It had been impossible, too, for her not to court the one of her parents who seemed to like her best. But she spent long, agonized hours at night, awake in her bed, longing for her mother. Recounting any instance that might be interpreted as evidence that her mother loved her or at least approved of something about her.

The day after Lily Butler and Warren Scofield’s visit, Dwight Claytor left early for Columbus, where he kept rooms at the Curtis Hotel while the legislature was in session, and Catherine Claytor grew restless in the waning hours of that Sunday afternoon in September. Edson followed worriedly in her wake as she drifted from room to room through the tail end of the day. At supper, when she was lost in some remote musing all her own, he became overly animated in anxiety, and when he knocked his water glass off the table, Agnes and the other two simply kept their heads down, but Catherine didn’t take much notice. “Just leave it, Edson. Don’t cut yourself. Mrs. Longacre will get Betsy to take care of it in the morning,” she said, and her older three children were—each one separately— ashamed to have felt a clutch of panic when the glass had shattered on the carpet in a series of subtly ringing, fragile little chinks.

And, in fact, Agnes swept it up after she cleared the table, because she knew that Mrs. Longacre didn’t like any of the Claytors much except her father and perhaps Edson. Agnes never let herself browse for long in that particular region of her own deep shame. It had been she, when she was nearly ten years old, who had been so inept at taking care of Edson that when her father arrived home earlier than usual late one afternoon he had come into the house looking for his wife and had found Agnes desperately trying to quiet the baby. Agnes had been trying to coax Edson quiet through the bars of his crib, sitting back on her haunches to be at his level, holding up offerings of toys, but he had only turned his head back and forth frantically, with loud whoops of angry despair. Finally she had climbed into the crib with him, meaning only to rock him, because she wasn’t tall enough to lift him over its high sides, but she had resorted to a desperate jostling as his crying crescendoed in direct proportion to her efforts to calm him.

She hadn’t even heard her father come up the stairs and had let out a shriek herself as he had clasped her by her upper arms, lifted her straight up over the railings, and set her on the floor. He had leaned down close to her face. “What are you doing to the baby, Agnes? What in the world are you doing? Where’s your mother?”

Agnes didn’t know why she had been taking care of Edson at that moment or where her mother had been. She only remembered that her father had scooped the baby out of the crib, holding him with one arm, and taken hold of her own arm once more just above the elbow so that she straggled along with him down the stairs and out the front door. They went along the frailly established dirt path across the yard, catty-cornered over the field and through the vegetable garden of their old house, where the farm manager, Jerome Dameron, lived with his family, which included his mother-in-law, Mrs. Longacre. She was alone in the kitchen snapping peas when Dwight Claytor rapped at the back door.

“We need some help up at our house, Mrs. Longacre,” her father said. That’s all Agnes remembered: the precision of each word as her father spoke in a soft, courteous, but chillingly brisk voice, and she never forgot Mrs. Longacre’s lengthy, inquiring, pursed-mouth scrutiny as she took a long look at Agnes and the baby.

It was Mrs. Longacre who taught Agnes, and her brothers, too, when they were a little older, just the right way to make their beds so that the sheet didn’t come loose in the middle of the night. And it was she who tore all the bedclothes off any child’s bed left unmade and dropped them for that child to find in a tumbled heap on the floor as she made her morning rounds through their rooms, straightening up and putting away the ironing that Betsy Graves left each evening in the pantry. It was Mrs. Longacre who was appalled when the Claytor children came trundling into the front hall with their shoes still muddy, and it was she who, Monday through Friday, imposed as much regulation as was possible on Mr. Claytor’s household.

It was also Mrs. Longacre’s sudden presence in the household that seemed to quell any possibility of joy Catherine Claytor still harbored. She was sullen and broody in the company of this other woman, insisting to her husband and her children that Mrs. Longacre was robbing them blind, that she had made off with two of Catherine’s grandmother’s silver spoons.

“Catherine!” their father had exploded one evening, as she fell once again into this litany, and the children froze at his tone. It was in the first year Mrs. Longacre had taken over the running of the house. “What on earth can you be thinking? She has no use in the world for your silver spoons! She has
plenty
of silver spoons in her own house! And if you don’t understand that you must treat her with courtesy . . . She’s agreed to run this house, Catherine. I don’t know what we’ll do if she decides to leave! Her family are fine people. . . .” He sounded helpless for a moment, impatient, and dangerous with frustration. “You don’t seem to understand that it took some persuading. . . . She
agreed
to work for us, Catherine, but Mrs. Longacre
is not your servant!
”

Catherine turned her head away, her eyes shocked, her mouth trembling, and the children—who just moments earlier had been hating the sound of their mother’s every word—at once turned mutinous against their father. Not one of them said anything, but they had all aimed stunned and reproachful faces his way—even the baby had looked up at him somberly in a dark surveillance. Dwight Claytor took them all in at a glance and slammed out the front door.

However they felt about her one moment to the next, Catherine’s children did all understand early on that their mother was a victim of circumstance. Howie and Richard certainly believed her when she apologized for and tried to explain some injustice she had visited upon them. She would approach them somberly, bending her serious face to theirs, and wave her arm in a vague gesture and murmur on about this place, this wretched countryside.

But neither Richard nor Howie remembered a time when he was not primarily connected to the other as an ally or an enemy. Both Agnes and Edson, however, had spent several years as tourists in their own family, isolated simply by their own childhoods, and they had a keener understanding of the fact that their mother resided in a foreign country. And all four of those children had learned from their mother that every square inch of the godforsaken state of Ohio was loathsome. There was simply nothing good that could be said about it.

“This whole place,” Catherine once said to Agnes with ferocity when Agnes was just a little girl, “is just exactly as skinned looking as a peeled grape. It’s just a hateful place. All bare. The fields . . .” She had gestured widely outward to indicate the land rolling away beyond the yard. “Corn and corn and corn, and the trees as naked as jaybirds! It’s no surprise to me to meet the people who live here. It’s no surprise at all.
Flat-
minded people. No idea of graciousness in the world. Just to think of the sort of people—any people who would live with such weather . . .”

Her mother had spoken to her conspiratorially, inclusively, but nevertheless, it had been an injury of a sort to Agnes, even then, and as she got older she understood it as one more indictment of her own personality. Because, of course, Agnes
was
a person who lived here, and Agnes suspected that her own thoughts and motives were very likely as insufficiently complicated—as flat and direct—as those of all the other Midwesterners at whom Catherine scoffed.

Agnes did her best to honor her mother’s desperate grudge against the vast, blank idea of the region, but each year as the seasons changed, she was overtaken time and again by the drama of all the extraordinary Midwestern contrasts of hot and cold. The first morning each year when Agnes looked from her upstairs window at the bare, intricate, curly black branches of the old trees traced with snow that had accrued overnight without her knowledge, it astonished her.

But Catherine Claytor hated the snow, and she would mutter through the house, personally affronted, so Agnes kept quiet. Nevertheless, and in spite of herself, Agnes never failed to be elated to find she had gone to sleep when the earth was camouflaged in subtle shades of gold and beige and brown, and had awakened in a world that shimmered silver. Agnes would stand and gaze out of her window as long as possible while the sun rose and the temperature warmed enough to liberate the snow-burdened evergreen branches, so that all around the yard they sprang free one by one, sending glistening sprays of snow dazzling across the air.

It never occurred to Agnes to dislike one season or another. She didn’t mind the deep and treacherous mud of early spring, miring machinery in the fields, sucking at the heels of her sturdy boots. And unlike poor Catherine, Agnes never dreaded the summer onslaught of brutal weather. She was stirred by the first peppery scent of an oncoming storm; she even relished the storm itself, coming in so fast that once she had had to dismount her horse and flatten herself in a ditch as lightning struck all around her. She had lain facedown with her hands clasped over the back of her skull, her elbows cradling her temples as though she were waiting out enemy bombardment. She had been terrified, her mind filled with nothing else but one long plea— Dear God Please Dear God Please Dear God—as she felt the concussion of thunder and closed her eyes against lightning so pervasive that it was a constant, flickering white illumination. But later, dripping wet, traipsing after her horse, her hair and skirt trailing weedy grasses, and still shuddering from shock, she had also been deeply thrilled.