The Evidence Against Her (30 page)

John drew himself up and looked at Tut in surprise. “Ah! Well, you can put that idea right out of your mind, Tut. You shouldn’t entertain such a thought at all. Why, just because a cat has her kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits!”

Nearly everyone in Washburn was pleased to see John Scofield devoted to those little boys, and Agnes never said a word about it one way or another. Her father-in-law spent hours of his day wherever she might be if the boys were with her. Now and then his hand would stray to her waist, if he drew her aside to show her something or other. Or he would lean forward and brush her hair out of her face while she held one or the other of the children so that she couldn’t free her hands. Agnes had only once been entirely alone in a room with John Scofield, in the early days of her marriage. He had come up quietly over the carpet behind her, reached around her waist, and cupped her breasts in his hands. Agnes had twisted away from him, but she didn’t say a word.

Her mind went blank. She hadn’t wanted to allow anything to blot the lovely clean slate of her life at Scofields. And Agnes continued to impute any impropriety on his part to inadvertence or mistake, to accident, because she didn’t want to define herself in any way that was at odds with her notion of her ordinary life. But she was very cautious in the company of her father-in-law. Once she released a dish she was passing to Warren’s father before he could cover her hand with his own in the act of accepting it and she spilled peas all over the table and was mortified.

Both Lily and Lillian Scofield noticed John Scofield’s behavior. Lillian felt dreadful shame and real anger unfairly aimed in Agnes’s direction, and Lily was peculiarly angry, too, when she remembered her uncle John teasing her, always referring to her as the runt of the litter. But Lily thought her uncle was simply falling apart.

She had heard her own father despairing of John, who didn’t even go to the office anymore, who had, in fact, borrowed against his shares in the company. He had been delighted to accept a loan from Arthur Fitch, whose Fitch Enterprises in Pennsylvania was Scofields & Company’s largest privately owned competitor. Lily’s father couldn’t stand the man, who had several times approached Scofields & Company about a merger.

“I don’t know what John’s thinking,” Leo had said when only his wife and Lily were in the room. “Fitch’ll never give up those shares. Of course, Lillian’s income is separate, and Warren will be a partner soon enough. But I feel that John’s got some fury . . . I would’ve been glad to extend a loan. He knows that. He knows I want this kept in the family. But I think it’s me he’s maddest at. And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I practically raised him.”

•  •  •

By the time Agnes was pregnant once more, she and Warren had taken up residence in the house George Scofield had built for himself but which he was happy to give over to his nephew in order to move in with John and Lillian, where the household would be looked after without any effort on his part. Robert and Lily were just next door to Warren and Agnes, where they lived with Audra and Leo Scofield.

Agnes found herself living a life that absolutely amazed her whenever she stopped to consider it. At the age of twenty-four she was in charge of a bustling household in which she had achieved a ferocious domestic order. She had paid close attention to the management of her mother-in-law’s house all the while she and Warren and the babies lived there. Agnes’s own household was even more organized. Any little bit of disorder made her frantic, because she had in mind an existence that would be clean and spare, that would run as efficiently as a machine. No heartbreaking disorder, no desperate sorrow, no surprises at all. She moved through the serene rooms of her house at Scofields ignoring any evidence that she hadn’t achieved it.

Agnes had incorporated and improved upon all the exactitude of day-to-day arrangements her mother-in-law instituted in her own house—her careful planning, her extraordinary attention to the details of housekeeping—because Agnes would do whatever was necessary to keep her children from ever having to explain anything at all about their lives. She was determined to provide reliability of the domestic seasons. When her children raced off to Lily’s, where something was always afoot—golf games, charades, partially done jigsaw puzzles to contend with, Uncle Leo’s garden to investigate—Agnes knew they could leave their own household knowing exactly what they would find when they came home. It was the greatest luxury Agnes could think to give them.

•  •  •

During late Thursday night and early Friday morning, September 14 and 15, 1923, in Washburn, Ohio, and over much of Marshal County, a freakish storm moved in from Canada, and over seven inches of snow accumulated. It was the heaviest snowfall ever recorded for that month in Ohio, and Lily Scofield Butler awakened on the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday a little after dawn with a sharp ache in her back more intense than it had been when she went to bed. The night before, Robert had rubbed her back and loosened the tight muscles enough so that she had fallen asleep still in some pain but much comforted. When she came awake, Robert was sound asleep and lying flat on his back with his arms and legs straight. Lily had been sleeping in her own room across the hall during the last few months of the first pregnancy she seemed likely to carry to term, and Robert seemed to have admonished himself even in his sleep not to move about and disturb her.

She turned on her side, trying to ease the tightness in her lower back, tucking her knees up and laying her head against Robert’s shoulder for comfort. She lay there for long minutes waiting for the spasm to abate and fighting against panic—this didn’t feel like any of the times she had miscarried, but nonetheless she was over eight months pregnant and terrified that she would lose this baby, too. Finally she got up and slipped downstairs as quietly as she could, moving with great care, as though she might break if she made any but the most cautious motion. There was only a sliver of pale gray at the curtained windows, and no one else stirred anywhere in the house.

She slipped into the dark parlor and opened the drapes and was astonished at the glistening landscape. The leaves were heavy with the burden of snow, and the branches flexed dangerously and swooped low to the ground. It was extraordinarily beautiful and exciting—the inherent tension of the early snow weighing down the full-blown trees, the hedges and blooming bushes. Snow on the honeysuckle and the trumpet vine, still lush with deep orange flowers. It was startling, the contrast. As if someone had strung Christmas decorations in her father’s garden.

She stood for a long time, her sensibilities gone passive, the white, white light brightening as the sun rose. And she sat down on the window seat and felt better, her thoughts effervescing half formed, while the sky acquired a flat brightness. She was cold sitting near the glass, but the chill was distracting, and she was more comfortable sitting than she had been lying down.

Across the way Agnes emerged wearing mittens and galoshes and a scarf she must have tied on hastily, because her hair escaped in all directions. She was smiling while she helped the two little boys, who were so bundled up they couldn’t flex their arms and legs. She settled Dwight and Claytor on a sled with much flailing about and jockeying for position on their part. Lily watched closely with her lips slightly pursed and her head tilted forward in concentration—as though she were studying the behavior of another species—as Agnes pulled Dwight and Claytor across the lawn, walking backward facing the little boys, with an expression as exuberant as her mass of curly, unbound hair escaping her red wool scarf.

Agnes was four months pregnant herself, but already she had had to leave her coat unbuttoned except at the neck, and Lily realized Agnes had pulled on a pair of Warren’s trousers over her nightdress and turned up the cuffs in her hurry to get outside into the snow before it melted. In her wake she left a trammeled disturbance in the serene white sweep of lawn.

For just a moment Lily felt it keenly, a plummeting sense of despondency and envy. She stood watching, though, as Agnes and Dwight and Claytor crossed her line of vision, vivid and bright faced, disturbing the visual hush of the early morning, then Lily turned away and went upstairs to get dressed. She could hardly stand to witness Agnes’s happiness. Lily knew it was disgraceful to give in to such envy, and on this birthday— and Robert’s and Warren’s—she wasn’t going to allow herself any more time for loose-minded musing.

Nevertheless, the nature of her envy had evolved over the years. Lily had Robert back, and Warren was close at hand, but to her surprise it was somehow
she
who was left out. Only Lily herself perceived it—the other three would have been surprised that Lily felt in any way excluded. They would have been surprised that she pondered the thought at all. After all, it was still Lily who animated any occasion when they were together, but Agnes and Warren and Robert shared a kind of mutual regard and affection that Lily simply could not extend to Agnes. Agnes had everything in the world she wanted; there was not a single need of hers that Lily could fulfill.

But Lily tried to shake off her resentment of Agnes’s unwitting rebuff—Agnes’s casual independence. And, in any case, she was genuinely fond of little Dwight Claytor and also Warren’s little boy, both of whom sought out and delighted in her company, and who were happy, good-natured children.

She dredged up her own vanity as a weapon against her current despondency, forcing herself out of her indulgent lapse into self-pity. Lily prided herself on being nothing if not a good sport, and she was generally disdainful of this sort of floundering about in personal reflection and maudlin regret. Nevertheless, it was terribly hard not to begrudge Agnes the children’s awed faces as they looked up at her with excitement, crediting her with the world’s soft, white dazzlement.

M
ARTHA GERTRUDE BUTLER was born to Lily and Robert Butler the day after her parents’ thirty-fifth birthday, September 16, 1923, in the middle of the most unusual spell of early snow and ice storms ever to sweep over the region. And, as it happened, five months later, February 15, 1924, Agnes gave birth to a little girl—named Catherine Elizabeth Scofield but immediately known as Betts—in the warmest February on record for Washburn, Ohio. Temperatures rose into the sixties in that usually frigid month. But there wasn’t much notice paid to this small coincidence of those two girls’ being born almost on the same day of separate months and each in untimely weather. There were a good many young children and new babies in Washburn by 1924, after the war, as people settled down and started families.

William Dameron and his wife, the former Sally Trenholm, had two children, and Lucille Drummond was married and living in Columbus with her husband and little boy. Agnes’s father was married again, to a widow who had two children of her own who were at the Sperry School, and Howie and Richard Claytor were both attending Ohio State University. Whenever they came to Washburn they stayed with Warren and Agnes, because their father lived in Columbus, and the house out on Newark Road was rented.

By the summer of 1926, Agnes was once again pregnant, with the baby due in the late fall. Betts was two and a half years old, and she and the Butlers’ daughter, Trudy, were thrown together much of the time, although theirs was a fractious alliance. One moment they were happy as clams and the next they were in tears of indignation, one at the other.

Betts was a mystery to her mother; Agnes was a little in awe of her. She was nothing at all like Agnes had been as a child. Betts didn’t possess one ounce of faintheartedness or timidity or a single bit of caution. She was much admired; Warren liked the way she just dashed head-on into her life. Someone was always having to race after Betts, who popped out of her bed and down the stairs and right out into the morning and across the yards of Scofields if no one had remembered to lock the door. Even when she was sitting with her father while he read her a story she gave the impression of being ready to go someplace else—even when she had the attention of Claytor and Dwight, if they helped her, for instance, build a castle with her blocks. Betts never appeared to be concentrating on just one thing at a time.

Lily’s daughter, Trudy—equally mysterious to her mother— was the older of the two girls by five months, but she was a smaller, rather delicate and more earnest little person. She was a child who was greatly absorbed by one thing at a time as the hours of the day unfolded, whereas Betts rushed through each moment hardly noticing its passage and certain that whatever would satisfy her was just about to happen. Trudy was adored by her father; he doted on her in his own way, quietly, and with a courteous restraint. But Lily was trapped in a frustrating state of maternal anxiety. With any other children she was spontaneous and daring, but she was always concerned about Trudy: Might she fall, might she catch cold, might she not thrive? Lily didn’t like the sort of person she became when she was with her daughter. Lily had always disdained that very nagging sort of mother she herself turned into when Trudy was within her realm. But Trudy was a quiet, self-possessed, easy child who, even as a toddler, kept her own counsel and didn’t chafe much at any restrictions Lily imposed on her.

John Scofield was sixty-seven years old in 1926, and he had made himself nearly a permanent fixture in his son’s house. Almost every morning he arrived at the front door impeccably dressed, a lean, elegant, still-handsome man. He arrived ostensibly to join Warren on his way to the office, but he would sit down at the breakfast table and accept a cup of coffee. “We ought to be getting along, Warren. I’m already late, and if I’m not on my way soon I might as well give up this day and go over to the fairgrounds to see how they’re getting on unloading the horses.”

And Dwight and Claytor would at once begin a campaign to go along with whatever adventure John had thought up for that day. Agnes didn’t like it, but Warren remained delighted by his father’s interest in the little boys. “I’ve never seen my father sentimental about anything in his life. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”

Warren and Leo were relieved and grateful to have John occupied. But Agnes often saw him slip into the pantry in the morning and pour a shot of whiskey from a flask into his coffee; she saw him too jovial by lunchtime, but she did realize that his affection for Dwight and Claytor was real. She had watched countless times as he sat with the two little boys and showed them over and over, with infinite patience, how to fold a hat or a sailboat out of a sheet of newspaper, or, with a piece of string, taught them the basic rudiments of making a cat’s cradle, or time after time helped the boys tie and retie their shoelaces. He spent hours diligently helping them build miniature forts with glue and matchsticks. And he listened to them without any hint of adult condescension; he attended whatever they had to say with genuine gravity, and she appreciated that on their behalf. Even though John Scofield made her uneasy, she knew better than to do anything that might undermine the high esteem with which Mr. Scofield and Dwight and Claytor regarded one another.

And, too, Warren was so miserable if Agnes made known any complaint against his father that she simply kept John Scofield’s sly advances—his relentless attempts to fondle or touch her—to herself. She had never said a word about it to Warren; she had only mentioned to Warren her father-in-law’s occasional lapses into rough language around the children. “But Agnes, there’s no protecting them from everything. When they’re down at the works . . . and you know how they love to go along. But the men don’t notice them. Don’t change their language. And, I’ll tell you, it can singe your ears. My father may lapse into the same thing now and then, but as long as they understand that they’re never to repeat what they hear . . .” And John was cagey; Warren never saw any impropriety.

Agnes had long ago been unable to continue to ignore her father-in-law’s advances, however, and she had once gingerly brought up the subject with Lily, who she hoped might advise her. But Lily seemed almost annoyed.

“Oh, Uncle John’s always been full of trouble. I can’t tell you the times he’s nearly driven my father around the bend. But, you know, Agnes, I think the best thing to do is just to stay out of his way.” All this business seemed to Lily to be—perversely— an odd sort of compliment to Agnes, and one more bit of proof that John Scofield still thought that Lily herself was a poor specimen. “I can’t see any way to bring it up that won’t hurt poor Aunt Lillian. And Warren, too. After all, it’s his own father. If I were you I’d just keep out of his way.” Which wasn’t much help to Agnes, who was already adept at escaping any room John Scofield entered. But, although Agnes never let herself dwell on it, as John Scofield aged, Agnes thought him more and more grotesque in his lechery.

The fact was that John Scofield and Agnes simply didn’t like each other, which was perfectly understandable on Agnes’s part. But there wasn’t any woman John held in very high regard; he viewed them with suspicion and hostility and a deep, uninvestigated resentment at the idea that they should receive societal gratitude, societal deference, merely because they gave birth, merely because every man had a mother. He was one of the few people not charmed by little Betts as she flew about Scofields, although he was astute enough to know he couldn’t let all his irritation at her coalesce into apparent dislike. Nor was he particularly fond of Trudy Butler, who seemed to him a dull-natured child with no spunk.

It wasn’t really any sort of lust that drew him to his daughter-in-law; it was a variation of contempt, although he was long past any chance of understanding that. He took a childish pleasure in thwarting her. She was a bossy thing, he thought as he sat at her table. In subtle ways she had taken charge of the household and brooked no interference in her agenda, even from her husband. And John could see that Warren didn’t even know he was shaping his life to his wife’s domestic schedule. Warren was naively happy to have the household run like clockwork.

Warren wouldn’t hear a word against Agnes, but the little boys were more amenable to considering the disadvantages of Agnes’s unreasonably inflexible householdery. “Now, I know this is the day your mama has the porch washed down. If it weren’t, though, why, we could have a fine time with this handsome set of soldiers I came across at Flint’s, downtown.” Agnes would tuck in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes would widen in an owlish expression as she suppressed her annoyance when Dwight and Claytor began to implore her to let them use the porch. But Warren would grin at Agnes in amused complicity. He had no idea that there were much larger issues at stake. He had no idea that his father was attempting to undermine or make irrelevant his wife’s authority.

“Oh, certainly, Mr. Scofield,” Agnes would answer sweetly. “But, now, you don’t mean to leave out Betts and Trudy, do you? They would just be heartbroken. Why, they worship the ground you walk on, and the boys are so patient with them. Dwight and Claytor are so grown-up for their ages that they’re always sweet to the little girls.” And Dwight and Claytor would be so impressed with themselves and their remarkable maturity—both seven years old in the summer of ’26—that they agreed immediately that Trudy and Betts should be included. Only Agnes and John Scofield knew that a battle had been joined. It was tiresome, though. It was she who quietly bore the brunt of John’s determined self-destruction, and, in spite of his obvious loneliness and genuine affection for children she also loved, she could not muster any pity for him at all.

•  •  •

Audra Scofield had arranged to take the farmhouse in Maine for June, July, and August, and had persuaded her sister, Lillian, to join her. Audra was increasingly worried about her sister. Lillian showed all the signs of falling prey to another spell of the despair and lethargy that she had been prone to since she was first married. Audra privately thought that John Scofield was at the root of Lillian’s despondency, and in making their plans Audra made a great fuss of her concern that John not be away from all his various business concerns. John and the rest of the family would join them for the last few weeks of August. Warren and Agnes had arranged to rent a little cottage near the farmhouse in Tenants Harbor for the month of August, and only Robert wouldn’t be able to get away. The Harcourt Lees faculty convened on August 9. He hoped, though, to get some good work done without the pleasant distractions of his wife and daughter.

But, as always happened when his wife was away, John Scofield’s fragile hold on some semblance of decorum shattered entirely as soon as she left. He didn’t get up in the mornings; he didn’t dress or shave. Finally Evelyn Harvey approached Warren and told him that she wouldn’t come in anymore until Mrs. Scofield was back, but that she expected to be paid in full or she would have to give up working there altogether. Warren had been worried about his mother, too, and he certainly wasn’t going to wire her for instruction, nor did he feel inclined to involve his uncle Leo, who disapproved of John as it was.

George Scofield lived in John’s house, but when he wasn’t at the Company he spent his time traveling—sometimes great distances—to search out relics from the Civil War. Just a week after Audra and Lillian Scofield had departed for Maine, George had returned from Pennsylvania, where he had done some business, but where he had also obtained two bullets that were said to have met midair in the battle of Gettysburg. The coincidence entranced George. “Why, right here,” he had said to John, who was collapsed in a chair in the parlor, “right here’s a story,” he went on, holding the bullets head to head to illustrate their collision. “Right here you might have a picture of how two lives were spared. That’s what it might be.” He hadn’t even noticed his brother’s state of disarray. John was sitting unshaven in his trousers and his undershirt, with his suspenders hanging around his waist.

It was just then, while Evelyn Harvey stood in the doorway drying her hands on her apron, that she made up her mind she wasn’t going to stay on in this situation. It was too upsetting. She went straight over to Warren and Agnes Scofield’s house, but she waited in the kitchen with her niece Evie until Mr. Scofield got home. Even though she liked Warren Scofield’s wife well enough, and as distressed as she was, she still wasn’t going to say anything unfavorable about the family to someone who wasn’t a Scofield.

Warren asked her to take a few days off and then give his father another chance. “I’ll see if I can’t get him feeling better, Mrs. Harvey. I’ll have him stay with us for a few days, and I think he’ll be back to himself pretty soon. You know how fond he is of the children. I think he’ll want to be on his best behavior. But I thank you for all you’ve done, and I apologize. He has a hard time whenever my mother travels.”

When John was installed in the downstairs bedroom at Agnes and Warren’s, he did behave with more propriety. Warren gave over any chores that would normally fall to the head of the house to his father, and it did have the effect of sobering John Scofield up and pulling him back from the brink of dissolution. Dwight and Claytor, and even Betts, were delighted to have him in the house. He was always full of plans and ideas.

It was only Agnes who felt that to share a household with Mr. Scofield once again might tax her beyond the endurance of her courtesy. Warren had no idea that his wife didn’t like his father, but the children knew it quite well. They could tell just by how she drew herself in slightly when Mr. Scofield entered a room, or how she spoke to him with frightening politeness, a chilly little formality in her voice. The two boys each thought privately that she wasn’t being fair. They couldn’t understand her antipathy, and in a roundabout way both felt injured that Agnes didn’t like this man who loved them so much. Her unspoken dislike tarnished the wonderful fact of his affection for them. They were a little bit angry.