The Evidence Against Her Read online

  “That’s just silly,” Lucille said at once. “It’s just her looks. She’s very stylish. It’s just that she seems sophisticated to you, Agnes. It’s just because she went east to college.”

  “No, it’s not, Lucille. She’s interested in everything. And she’s so . . . enthusiastic. There’s nothing ordinary about her.”

  “Well, she’s beautiful in an unusual sort of way, I guess,” Lucille said, but Agnes listened carefully, because she was miserably jealous of Lily Scofield Butler and Lucille seemed censorious. “I’ve heard about Lily Butler my whole life, because everybody likes her. All those men in love with her. But I truly don’t think she’s nearly as pretty as any of my sisters.”

  But Agnes didn’t appear to be considering the comparison. She didn’t comment, and Lucille was miffed, because she really thought she herself was much prettier than Lily Scofield Butler.

  “People do think she’s pretty, though,” Lucille finally acknowledged, to regain Agnes’s attention. “And she’s an awfully good sport, Celia says. Celia’s wild about the Butlers. Well, I think she’s pretty crazy about Warren Scofield, too. They used to go about together pretty regularly. But Celia wouldn’t ever admit it, because that would have been a hopeless cause. The Butlers have wonderful parties at Scofields. They even have a special dressing room just for when they play charades. All sorts of clothes to put together for costumes. Celia helped collect them from all their friends. And my father says Lily Butler’s probably the best horsewoman in Marshal County!” Lucille was less grudging now, and had warmed to her subject. “He says she has a lot of spunk. You know that after she went away to college she came home and made them put in a golf course?”

  But Agnes hadn’t taken up any of Lucille’s enthusiasm. “People do think she’s beautiful? There are other men in love with her?”

  “Well, Agnes! Of course! There’s Warren Scofield, for one. Everybody knows that. But they’re first cousins, so that was always doomed,” Lucille said, drawing out and elongating the mournful depths of that word. “And he and Robert Butler are best friends, anyway. But Celia says that before Lily Scofield decided she’d marry Robert Butler she turned down at least two other proposals. One fellow was a classmate of Warren Scofield’s who wanted her to move to Wyoming with him! Where his family was.”

  Agnes didn’t say anything.

  “It’s just silly to suppose that any of the Scofields would ever live anywhere else but Washburn,” Lucille offered eventually, tired of her own indignation and thinking that this time she must have said something that offended Agnes. But still Agnes didn’t reply.

  Agnes had listened calmly to Lucille, but she had fallen far past any state of real serenity and found her spirits weighed down by the thought of Warren Scofield’s adoration of the lovely Lily Butler. It was such a waste, and it even made Agnes a little angry and sullen. She was filled with a disappointment that left her too listless to respond, too tired to make even cursory conversation with Lucille.

  The late-afternoon light slanted across the grounds of the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls and cast a lustrous triangle on one half of the high glass transom above the table where Agnes and Lucille sat, leaving the rest of the window dark and suddenly opaque. Agnes had tilted her head back and let her mind go blank, and for a moment her attention was caught by the phenomenon of the light falling as it did. Her interest was mildly piqued at the little puzzle of why only part of the window was illuminated. She was preoccupied for a moment with that immediate, visual absorption. And suddenly, in less than no time, all the sticky days of her life at home and all the hundreds—thousands—of comparatively clear, translucent, ordered days of school just fell away.

  Just for an instant it was as though she were brand-new, and every detail of the world possessed clarity outside of its circumstance; every detail was extraordinary and exquisite. But this compelling, startlingly acute perception of her surroundings was painfully keen and weighed down with the nearly unbearable idea of her lone appreciation of it. She was mesmerized by the complex articulation of the many-legged small beetle crawling over the windowpane, the singularity of each leaf of the tree beyond it, every separate blade of grass, and she was simultaneously overcome by the high, yeasty, sour scent of chalk overriding the waxy undertone of polished floors, the school-dusty air grainy against her skin. But it was the notion of her solitary observation of it all that hit her like a bolt of lightning. It was wearisome to her in some way that she had never before experienced. It was heartbreaking to her to understand the tragedy of her loneliness, the calamity of never being able to explain herself to a single other soul who would understand what she had discovered.

  Sitting in the schoolroom in that exhausted hour of the day, with the light turned syrupy and hypnotic, Agnes was caught unawares by the shattering vividness of the world. In that otherwise unremarkable moment in the stuffy, made-over storage room in the basement of the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, on an autumn afternoon when she was eighteen years old, Agnes Claytor was smitten full force by the clarification of her own desires. She fell headlong into a desperate yearning toward the glimmering blond idea of Warren Scofield, whom everyone in Washburn, Ohio, knew had always been hopelessly in love with his own first cousin, Lily Butler.

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  THERE HAD BEEN MOMENTS very early in his life when all that defined Warren Scofield was the full sweep of his hatred of his cousin Lily. It was an awful feeling whenever it came over him—rage overlaid by self-reproach—because there were other times when there was no one else he believed he cared for more. And he had spent long, involved hours of childhood play without being conscious of the fact that his and Lily’s and Robert’s sensibilities were in any way separate at all. From the time he was a toddler of two and three years old until he was nearly seven, those inexplicable spells of resentment and real loathing of his cousin merely made him sulky and remote. As he got older he instinctively covered those spates of jealousy with a kind of noisy rowdiness that was put down by any adults in the vicinity as being no more than just a natural boyishness.

  Sometimes at night, though, even in adolescence—even far away in New Hampshire at Norbert-Halsey Academy—he had lain in bed brooding over something or other that he held against Lily. He would lie awake in the dark, nurturing some example of an inequity he had suffered simply because of her existence, and all at once he would be miserably ashamed of himself, because it was unreasonable for him to begrudge Lily any of the pleasures of her life. It was worse than ungenerous; it was foolish. After all, there was no one else in the world, perhaps, who knew or loved him better.

  Warren lived at his cousin Lily’s house for almost the entire two years he was five and six years old. His aunt Audra would remind him every day as she led him across the yards of Scofields to visit his mother that he must remember to sit still and to keep his voice down. Aunt Audra instructed him to remember that her sister, Lillian, was too tired to cope with the energy of little boys. Warren didn’t know why he was only allowed to visit his mother. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, and he often worried that she might die. He also knew that it would be shameful to beg to stay with her, unthinkable to ask for information from Aunt Audra or Uncle Leo. But Warren’s unrequited yearning for his mother—for her full attention, for her genuine curiosity—made him fidgety whenever he was with her. He became anxious and silly, full of chatter and a desperate, whining eagerness.

  Warren and Lily and generally Robert Butler, too, spent the mornings together, usually under the supervision of the Scofields’ housekeeper, Mrs. Downs. On summer days she would carry a bowl of string beans to snap, or peas to be shelled, out onto the long back porch and keep an eye on the children while she occupied herself with one thing or another. Sometimes she sat with her sewing basket and some mending to get done, and she often suggested games for the children to play. She set out an assortment of mismatched plates and cups, odds and ends of utensils and containers, so t
hat they could play at an endless game of their own devising that they called Robinson Crusoe and that entailed having been stranded after a shipwreck.

  Bernadette Downs enjoyed having the children in her care because they were nicely behaved—she was fond of each one of them—and the mornings seemed to fly by. On the rare days when they couldn’t come up with anything to do, she would set them on a search for something special that Warren could take to his mother on his afternoon visit. One morning, for example, the three children discovered a patch of yard that was full of four-leaf clovers, and they gathered them in a jar of water that Mrs. Downs provided. They collected more than two dozen, and Mrs. Downs mixed in some violets and bristly stalks of asparagus fern and wrapped the canning jar in plain brown parchment paper, which she tied in place with a nice length of green grosgrain ribbon. She thought it looked very pretty and would make a nice presentation for poor Lillian Scofield.

  Warren often brought his mother bouquets of flowers that Mrs. Butler or Uncle Leo offered from their gardens, or bunches of wild black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. In October he brought branches of brilliant autumn leaves and cattails that Aunt Audra arranged as artfully as she could. Warren’s earnest courtship of his mother was never communally acknowledged, although Martha Butler and her husband, Daniel, and Lillian’s two brothers-in-law, Leo and George Scofield, and her sister, Audra, too, all thought that it was Warren, more than anyone, whose company was likely to snap his mother out of the debilitating grief she had fallen into after the death of the baby. The death of John and Lillian Scofield’s third child.

  John himself was edgy in his wife’s company, and his brothers thought it stemmed from his own grief. Audra Scofield and Martha Butler never said so to each other, but they thought it was more sinister, a peculiar kind of indifference. They both thought that John Scofield was disapproving of his wife’s despair and held it against her. Martha and Audra had been sitting together in Audra’s parlor when John had come into the front hall muttering bitterly to Leo that it was tragic—the death of her own child—but far better in the long run. “Far more merciful . . . Why, Leo! How can she mourn like this? She’s thinking of a child that never was!”

  Martha and Audra each concluded separately that John resented his wife’s grief primarily because it excluded him. They each thought he was angry at his wife for her failure to love him more than she grieved for her child. They each were offended, too, to differing degrees, by John’s inability to imagine his wife’s despair.

  Well, men don’t, Martha thought.

  John can’t, thought Audra, whose own husband, Leo, was nearly as grieved as his sister-in-law.

  But after overhearing that little snatch of conversation, neither of those women ever again had any pity to spare for John Scofield.

  No one but her own husband questioned the legitimacy of Lillian Scofield’s long, drawn-out despondency or ever held it against her—if for no other reason than the unspoken idea that to judge Lillian Scofield harshly might call down some equal misfortune upon themselves. But, also, the Marshal sisters, Lillian and Audra, had been enormously popular young girls and the daughters of a prosperous and much-respected family—the original Marshals of what had become Marshal County. Lillian, particularly, had always been a sweet, kindhearted, remarkably gentle person. Everyone liked her, even though she was so pretty—truly lovely in contrast to her sister Audra’s sensible handsomeness. Her good looks might have been a liability as far as compassion toward her was concerned, but Lillian Marshal had never been a conceited girl; she had never been vain, nor had she ever possessed a particularly assertive personality. She hadn’t earned anyone’s envious malice, and there was no one in Washburn, Ohio, who didn’t wish her well.

  One morning, when she was still so unwell, Warren and Robert and Lily pulled dozens of wild green onions as a gift to make to her. They found them growing along the verge of the grassy drainage ditch where they found cattails in the fall. Mrs. Downs wrapped the white bulbs with their long wands of dark green leaves in a dampened linen napkin, and Warren presented them to his mother that afternoon when his aunt Audra took him to visit.

  His mother generally sat on the settee in her big upstairs bedroom and often read him stories, and Warren was mesmerized as she read, watching her pale sleeves rustle over the paper when she turned the pages. The afternoon of the onions, however, his mother was still lying in bed, barely propped up against her pillows, and her hair was loose and untended. In fact, Mrs. Harvey had told Audra when she and Warren arrived that Mrs. Scofield had a fever and seemed to have caught a cold, so Audra meant only to stay a moment and let Warren pop in just to say hello.

  But when Warren placed the damp parcel of onions on his mother’s bed, she had taken them into her hands and her whole face had drawn up in a grimace of dismay, as if someone had yanked a basting thread that puckered all her features. “Oh, no! Warren! What have you done? Oh, no! What have you done? Oh, my lilies! They would have bloomed soon. I spent so much time . . . Oh, how could you have done it? Warren? How could you ruin my borders? My little garden? Your father brought those bulbs all the way from Philadelphia. They remind him of me, he always says. ‘The blooming of a thousand Lillians,’ that’s what John says every spring. Oh, Warren! Who told you that you could do this? You’ve pulled up my beautiful lilies!” Her voice was breathy, and she leaned back into her pillows away from him.

  Aunt Audra took the bulbs from her and held them up to the light from the window. “No, no, Lillian,” she said. “These aren’t your lilies. Lillian. Lillian. Dear, these aren’t your lilies. These are lovely new spring onions. They’ll be so sweet. They’re just lovely, Lillian. The children spent all morning collecting them down by the creek. Look here, Lillian. Look here! This one’s still flowering. Flowers that I always thought were like little stars—not lilies, dear. Lillian, look here! These aren’t the lilies John brought from Philadelphia.” But Warren’s mother still shrank back from her sister and her son, making an odd humming sound of dissent—a low, moaning negative against her teeth, shaking her head in despair.

  Audra turned to Warren and told him to take the onions along to the kitchen and ask Mrs. Harvey if she would chop them up for him and put them on some nice buttered bread. “And a little salt and pepper. Umm. That’ll be a delicious treat. And she can give you some lemonade, too. You go along, and I’ll be down directly, Warren.”

  But Warren was terrified by the expression on his mother’s face. For a little while he was sick to his stomach with the shock of her anger at him, and he only went downstairs and sat in the hallway, holding the bedraggled heap of onions on his lap. He slumped on a straight-backed chair next to the tall clock, and the longer he waited the more keenly he felt the unfairness of it, and the more deeply he felt the desolation of not being cherished by his own mother.

  Audra Scofield had had a full plate that long year, and she simply didn’t remember how fragile was the dignity of children. Warren’s aunt Audra was upset by Lillian’s outburst and sat on with her for some time. For at least an hour or so Audra didn’t give much thought one way or another to Warren, who was just a little boy, after all, and this sort of thing rolled right off children like water off a duck’s back. And besides, she assumed he was off in the kitchen visiting with Mrs. Harvey. But Warren was stranded in a state of heartsickness as he sat in the sunshine that fell through the lights above the broad front door. It shone down in elongated rectangles over the polished hall floor and glinted off the clock’s glass, behind which the pendulum swung in an even ticktock, ticktock.

  The sound was disheartening in the hushed foyer. It emphasized the surrounding quiet of the musty rooms, and Warren was so overwhelmed with loneliness and sorrow and the true, deep anger of grief that he simply shut away all his longing for his mother. He had a formidably flinty self-possession, and he closed off his desperate, sorrowing need for her. Warren could no longer survive the humiliating indignity—the self-inflicted insult—of his relentless yearnin
g. It was too bad, because it was one of the few times that his mother was ever at all careless of his feelings, but the rest of her life she was unable to woo him back to her. He loved her, of course. What choice did he have? But that afternoon, when he was age five, and she shrank away from him and berated him for his careful gift, he gave her up entirely as the great romance of his early life.

  Warren was silent in the terribly hot afternoon as they walked back to Uncle Leo’s along the path, but Aunt Audra held his hand in a companionably firm clasp. He didn’t realize that his aunt was speaking to him until she stooped down and fixed his attention on her by cupping his chin for a moment.

  “Don’t worry when your mama seems sad, Warren. It hasn’t got anything to do with you. You know she’s been so sick, and I’m afraid today we caught her when she has a bad cold. It’s still going to take some time for her to get well. I expect sometimes she’s so happy to see how big and healthy you are that it makes her think of your little brother. And probably of the first baby, too. Poor Harold. But at least James didn’t linger.

  “Oh, Warren, you were such a lively little baby!” she said, her voice warming and then floating above him as she straightened and took his hand again and they continued across the yard. “Harold was never so sturdy.” Her words tumbled down on his head, trilling around his ears in combination with the rustle of his shoes through the heat-crisped grass, the buzz of insects, the fussy chittering of birds in the hedges.