Fortunate Lives (38 page)

For Warren’s part, his whole idea of himself until he was about eleven years old was as one third of this triumvirate. Answering
Mrs. Butler’s question, for instance, as to what the three of them had been up to all day, he knew instinctively to turn and
weave all their disparate activities into a narrative that satisfied adults. Although he often interchanged the actions of
any one of their threesome with those of another, he wasn’t even aware of it; he was only reacting to some parent’s slight
uneasiness—only shifting the
details
of the truth to ensure serenity all around.

One afternoon when the three of them arrived at Robert’s house dripping wet, Warren gave an enthusiastic account of his failed
plan to build a fort and laboratory in the big low-branching cherry tree over the horse pond.

“A laboratory! Well, a laboratory. That’s where so many of my canning jars have disappeared to, I guess!” Mrs. Butler said,
but her initial alarm at the sight of them had softened. Later Robert reminded Warren that the whole thing had been Lily’s
idea. Robert was surprised that Warren had taken the credit, but Warren only looked at Robert, perplexed. Warren knew intuitively
that Robert’s mother would never have been pleased with the actual account of their afternoon’s enterprise. Lily was their
inspiration; Robert was their conscience; Warren was their ambassador to the outside world. So deeply was each child connected
to the other two that each one’s loyalty was unconsidered, their mutual devotion fundamental.

But as they grew older, and by the time they were putting on their puppet shows for children’s birthdays and at the county
fair, Robert himself was unable to recall or name the quicksilver charisma Lily possessed that had captured his sensibilities.
As an adult, whenever he thought back about his childhood, he remembered Lily always in motion, full to the brim with ideas
and energy, but he lost the ability to remember the incandescence with which she had imbued the long hours of his early days.
And Warren, too, as he grew older, translated all the emotion of their passionate connection into a manageable version of
nothing more than a warm childhood friendship. Only Lily, left behind at the age of twelve when the boys went off to boarding
school, understood that it was she alone who was likely to lose the underpinnings of the pleasure of her life, and she was
single-minded in her determination that nothing of the sort would happen.

Lillian Marshal Scofield and Robert Crane Butler were married in her father’s garden in an extravagant ceremony on a very
hot Saturday in the summer of 1913. In spite of the heat and a long dry spell that caused the broad catalpa leaves to lose
their lazy flutter, to pucker and droop a bit; in spite of a succession of cloudless, dusty days that dulled the glisten of
all the foliage in the garden, the wedding was as splendid as Leo Scofield had hoped it would be.

There is a way in which a town the size of Washburn, Ohio, with perhaps six thousand residents, comes to a collective judgment,
and communally the town had become fond of Lily, who had been in residence all year round when she attended the
Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. She was among them as she gradually lost her childhood look of frailty and took on a
wiry athleticism. Nevertheless, even during her late adolescence, Lily was eclipsed by the celebrated beauty of her mother
and aunt—the former Marshal sisters—and by her distinguished and handsome father, her two tall, striking uncles, and especially
by her constant summer companions, Robert Butler and her astonishingly good-looking cousin Warren.

No one knew how or why Lily Scofield and Robert Butler decided, in December of 1912, that they would marry the following summer
when he returned from New England, where he had gone to college. He had stayed on as an instructor at Harvard to continue
his studies and to teach for several academic years. No one knew the details, but, on the other hand, no one was particularly
surprised. Lily had gone east to college, too, to Mount Holyoke in western Massachusetts, but had been at home again for almost
three years, courted by several hopeful suitors, and she was nearly twenty-five years old.

In fact, Robert had come home for a week that Christmas, and one morning he asked Lily to come along with him to Stradler’s
Men’s Clothiers and help him select a gift for his father. He wanted to ask her advice about the right tack to take with a
young woman he had seen a good deal of in Cambridge who was his good friend David Musgrave’s sister. The weather was crisp
but not cold for December, and Lily had on a dark green suit and a brimmed hat that dipped over her face so that Robert could
only catch glimpses of her expression. She carried a small, sleek brown muff from which she withdrew one hand or the other
to illustrate some point. The muff intrigued him, with Lily’s pretty hands plunged into the brown fur, and then he caught
sight of her wide orange-brown eyes under the hat brim and stopped still, putting his hand on her arm to make her hesitate.
She turned back to glance at him, perplexed, peering out from under her dark, winged Scofield brows, which were so striking
in contrast to the puff of bright blond Scofield
hair beneath her hat. She was telling Robert all about her father and mother’s recent trip to Chicago, where everything had
gone amiss.

But Robert interrupted her. “Ah, well, Lily. Your father wouldn’t care if he was stranded in the middle of a desert as long
as your mother was with him. I’ve never known a man to admire his wife as much as your father admires your mother,” Robert
said. “With plenty of reason, of course,” he added. “But I don’t know when I’ve ever been in his company for very long without
hearing him talk of those ‘Marshal girls.’ Of the day he first met your mother. Their ‘blue gaze,’ he calls it. I’ve always
remembered that phrase.”

Claire Musgrave had wide, sweet blue eyes. But as he gazed at Lily it suddenly seemed to him that there was no glance more
engaging than Lily’s warm, golden brown consideration. He was disconcerted for a moment thinking of himself and Claire Musgrave
closed away together in a tall house somewhere in Cambridge or Boston while Lily carried on, both participating in and wryly
observing the familiar life around her. He stood there with Lily and all at once found himself bereft at the idea of being
always away from her.

“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.

House of Women

by Lynn Freed

“An unusual and unusually satisfying novel…. Elements of not one but many fairy tales provide an irresistible—ravenous—undertow
for Lynn Freed’s
House of Women
.”
—Kathryn Harrison,
New York Times Book Review

“A strange, compelling story of obsessive love…. Riveting, right from the start.”
—Colleen Kelly Warren,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Gospel of Judas

by Simon Mawer

“A superior novel…. A noteworthy achievement…. An intellectual thriller of uncommon substance.”
—Chauncey Mabe,
Boston Globe

“Mawer’s prose is admirably lyrical, playful, and precise. His greatest strength, however, is in crafting probing, puzzlelike
narratives that yield compelling dramas of the mind and heart.”
—Michael Upchurch,
Atlantic Monthly

The Sheep Queen

by Thomas Savage

“A beautiful novel…. It contains a depth of riches sufficient to give every reader pleasure and illumination.”
—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post Book World

“A fine novel…. Mr. Savage is a writer of the first order, and he possesses in abundance the novelist’s highest art—the ability to illuminate and move.”
—
The New Yorker