The Evidence Against Her Read online

  “Poor Lillian,” she mused on, “and that quiet, quiet baby. Harold never fussed at all. She never even knew if he was hungry. . . . Oh, why, Warren! It was such a relief when you were born. You were just full of life from the very minute you saw daylight. You were one of those long, wriggly babies. The doctor just laughed.” And Aunt Audra laughed, too, in remembering, and her tone lost its rising urgency.

  “When they put you down in the nursery, Dr. Peabody said you were just as mad as a March hen because your cousin Lily had gotten there first. You wanted to let her know she had company, he said. ‘This one’s going to cause you no end of trouble,’ he said to your mother. Oh, Dr. Peabody was excited. . . . Well! He was downright thrilled with himself! I couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘Lillian and Martha Butler and I were talking just last week,’ I said to him, ‘and we decided you’d spent too much time over the summer going off fishing. Too much time sitting under some tree along the river trying to get out of the heat. We thought you needed something to keep you busy.’

  “He laughed a little, but I tell you, he’s really quite . . . oh . . . just filled up with his own importance. Well, just a vain man, really, I suppose. And that brought him up short. When I teased him. He did smile, but you could see that he truly did think he’d done it all himself. I should say! He didn’t like being reminded that Martha or Lillian or I had anything to do with the three of you being born. And, oh! On the ides of the month, too. Why, when that got around it had people all amazed. Your uncle Leo had a grand time quoting Shakespeare everywhere he went.” Aunt Audra laughed and continued on across the yard slowly, not hurrying Warren, and radiating a sense of satisfaction as she reminisced.

  Warren lagged a little in her wake, enveloped in the tender, prickly scent of grass and the familiar, sharply sweet, medicinal smell of the sachet that perfumed Audra Scofield’s clothes. He moved along at her side under the soothing sound of her voice and the heat of that day that beat right down on the top of his head. He was not quite six years old, and the quality of his listening was not yet separate from all his other senses. Later in his life he had a visceral memory of that afternoon—it remained one of those remembrances in which sound and scent are preserved, but no objective context. He could never see himself as the conversation wound out in his head. He had been too young to be other than receptive, too young to separate sensation from intellect.

  Halfway across the yard, when his aunt came to an abrupt halt, turning and bending toward him slightly, her hand at her waist in a characteristic gesture of distress, and when her voice rose and thinned with sudden strain, his every perception was heightened as he tilted his head back once again to observe her. Even though Audra Scofield was only a little over five feet tall, and Warren eventually towered over her, he retained the image the rest of his life of her anxious face slanting down at an angle, her eyebrows slightly raised in concern as she regarded him. “But your mother can’t help but think of Harold now, since the new baby . . . He wasn’t even a day old, you see. Poor James.”

  Audra made the mistake so many people did with Warren; she really did take him at face value, and he had a precociously wise, unchildlike manner that was misleading. “I know how terrible this sounds,” she went on, “and I shouldn’t even think it— maybe I don’t really mean it—but sometimes I think it would have been better if Harold hadn’t lived so long. Eight months and he never even sat up. Never thrived. Your mother was just . . . heartbroken, I believe. I never even thought people could be heartbroken until I saw Lillian . . . .” Aunt Audra clasped her hands and pressed them to her chest, and Warren stood still and watched her cautiously.

  “Finally,” Aunt Audra said, “she wouldn’t even speak. She would look at me as if she needed to tell me something. Had something she might say, but she couldn’t . . . she couldn’t . . . force it out. Sometimes it seemed to me that anything she wanted to say—it was like the words she was trying to get at were at the bottom of a well! She was just too tired to haul them up.”

  The tremor of restrained tears in his aunt’s voice froze Warren where he stood. “She couldn’t tell me anything. Not anything! She didn’t—couldn’t— say a word for nearly three weeks. Even to me! Even to me!” His aunt closed her eyes for a moment, and then her pinched expression loosened and she slowly opened her eyes and took a little breath.

  Audra glanced down at her nephew’s attentive face and unclenched her hands, reaching down to take his once again, and they moved on slowly. “But she’s much better now, of course. When she sees you so lively, Warren . . . Oh, Harold never, never was . . . . And, of course, James. She didn’t know him, really. And your father is so . . . Well, I don’t know. Restless? I’ll tell you, sometimes it seems to me—and I can hardly stand it—it really seems to me that he’s almost bored. You know how John’s such a . . . graceful man. But it looks to me sometimes like he isn’t even paying attention. Just at ease in a chair. Just . . . one arm just flung out and his eyes sort of lazy while Lillian watches him like a hawk. Oh, sometimes I’d like to shake him . . . .”

  Audra stopped still once more and pressed her free hand over her mouth as she suddenly recalled herself and looked down to find Warren attuned to every word, so alert that his whole body keened upward to hear what she was saying. She studied his face, but he didn’t appear to her to be upset or to have registered her consternation, and she moved along, leading him more briskly along the path.

  “Well, don’t listen to me. For goodness sake don’t listen to me! All of it upsets me, and I’m not making a bit of sense. Your uncle Leo says your father can’t stand to know a thing he can’t do anything about. Just can’t stand it. I suppose he didn’t want to know . . . didn’t want to think about it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I shouldn’t say. What can he do about any of it, anyway? But all those ridiculous presents he brings her . . . those gaudy things from New Orleans. Those hats! As if she’d ever be off to any affair where she could wear them . . . That hair comb with garnets . . .”

  Audra Scofield’s deep suspicion of the nature of the remarkably handsome, silvery-seeming man who had married her sister was clear in her voice. Of course, he was her husband’s brother, but he wasn’t at all like Leo, she thought. Not in the least like Leo, who had such dignity—and who was nice looking, certainly, but not handsome in such an . . . overwrought way. Audra had always thought that John Scofield’s good looks were somehow tasteless in their excessiveness, and as charming as he always was to her, he made her uneasy.

  Her reservations about Warren’s father suffused her voice, and although Warren didn’t know precisely what she was talking about, he caught every nuance of condemnation and was overwhelmed by a fiercely defensive love for his father. In just such a way—just a careless shading of voice, an incautious arched brow signifying disapproval—by such subtle direction are the complex and mysterious loyalties within a family determined. Audra finally heard the accusatory note in her own voice and switched gears.

  “But your father’s so much better, too, of course. It was awfully hard on him, too. But he really is back to his old self. Now, there’s a man who can charm the birds right out of the trees, that handsome father of yours. And aren’t you exactly like him?” she said fondly, really meaning it, suddenly forgiving her brother-in-law for being less griefstricken than his wife, and repeating an observation that Warren had heard many times. It was a comparison that signaled a jolly, amiable, bantering sort of conversation within which Warren knew he was safe.

  “And of course, my dear, you’re the apple of their eye,” she added. “It was just too silent . . . . That whole house was too quiet when Lillian lost your little brother. Oh, it was very bad . . . so bad when your mama lost James.” Warren and his aunt continued across the yard between the houses, Audra preoccupied and Warren at once appallingly frightened and deeply ashamed at this confirmation of the carelessness of his mother. His mother who had so wrongly accused him and even discarded such a gift as the arduously harvested green onions he had
brought her.

  Lily was up from her nap, and she came darting out of the house to meet them. Aunt Audra dropped his hand and stooped to catch her daughter around the waist to stop her from hurtling headlong into them. But Lily did run headlong into her mother, briefly flinging her arms around her mother’s waist just as Audra bent to catch her, and the unselfconscious affection in that brisk, laughing, spontaneous embrace, with Lily wriggling to get free, stung Warren unexpectedly. It was so ordinary, so clearly unexceptional, this easiness between his aunt Audra and Lily. He was extraordinarily tired in the blazing heat of the afternoon, as Lily jittered with energy in the sunshine.

  Warren stood by, suddenly bereft and faced with the torrent of enthusiasm Lily let loose as she pulled free of Aunt Audra and flung herself toward him to tell him her plans for their afternoon. He went numb with the impossibility of uttering a single word to her ever again in his life. When he was two months shy of six years old, and in the heat of that Ohio day in the summer of 1894, Warren Scofield was momentarily crushed by a dreadful burden of secret envy and rage and genuine hatred directed solely at Lily. It was the most passionate moment of his life to that point, and he never regained a single moment of wholly simple and uncomplicated affection for her.

  For most of his childhood Warren thrived on and gravitated toward the pace of the life that was led at his cousin Lily’s house, where his aunt Audra’s easy-natured stewardship was bent to the casual unfolding of the days, and where Uncle Leo was a thorough participant in the happily uneventful domesticity of the household. In fact, from the moment his uncle Leo took the time to explain to Warren the phenomenon of the sundial, Warren knew that it was from Uncle Leo’s house, at the exact place where the sundial stood in the garden, that time itself originated.

  “Now, look here,” Leo said, bending forward a little so that he could illustrate his point. “From right here to here is the noon mark.” Uncle Leo had hoisted him up so he could get an overall view, and Warren even remembered resting his cheek against the dense nap of his uncle’s overcoat while gazing down on the sundial. Warren remembered Uncle Leo’s gloved hand moving over its stone face. “Today the shadow will fall almost exactly in the middle. Right here.” And he showed Warren where that would be. “There’s not a cloud in the sky, so at twelve o’clock noon exactly the shadow will fall straight down the center. And it’ll be just about then,” Leo had said, “that old Saint Nick will be finishing up a good meal at the North Pole before he makes his rounds. He’ll be having a nice piece of ham and some good buttered biscuits—light as a feather—and he’ll be wondering what to put in your stocking. Might not be more than a lump of coal, you know. Although I’ll bet he has at least some little surprise for you. And if you bundle up enough, why, I imagine your mama will let you watch the hour come around.”

  Whenever Warren recounted this tale as an older child, and even when he was fully grown, Uncle Leo and Aunt Audra and even Lily, who had no recollection of it whatsoever and was sure she would have been included, swore he couldn’t possibly remember it. He would only have been four years old—the Christmas before his brother James was born. Surely it was an idea of his formed by tales someone had told him, images he had constructed from other people’s remembrances. But Warren knew it was his own distinct recollection.

  It was as clear as day to Warren, as he had paid careful attention to his uncle, that minute by minute time accrued against the blunt wedge of the stone gnomon until finally it spilled over to open outward across the rest of the world. And in spite of years of education, despite his travels, despite age and experience, it was a perspective he was unable to shake for the rest of his life.

  • • •

  From about the age of eight years old on, Lily and Warren and Robert Butler, too, if he was with them, were allowed the run of the main office of Scofields & Company, which was housed in a small two-story building where the three Scofield brothers, Leo, John, and George, had grown up. The ground floor had originally comprised the whole of the business, and the family had lived upstairs. Lily, especially, had a proprietary love of the efficient tumult of the place, with various clerks coming and going from other buildings, clattering up and down the stairs. All three of the children liked visiting the offices, but Lily was thrilled at the idea of her legitimate connection to all the brisk bustle of the place. The rooms were overcrowded, with file cabinets lining the hallways, and the offices buzzed with a cheerful air of urgency and prosperity.

  The amiable young Mr. Adams, who presided over the main office, sitting at his desk, or sometimes perched on its corner, briskly sorting documents as though he were dealing cards, was a great favorite of Warren and Lily and Robert’s. He kept an assortment of hard candies in his top drawer, and he always fished some out to offer the children, never failing to remember that Lily preferred butterscotch and Warren and Robert peppermint.

  “Won’t you have a boiled sweet?” he would ask, mimicking a high-toned accent and tipping his head back so he could look down his nose at them as though he were some sort of ludicrously refined gentleman. Each piece was wrapped in a twist of white paper that had collected traces of dust in its creases, and the candy itself always had an intriguing graininess. The three of them knew that their mothers would never have let them have any, but neither Lily nor Robert nor Warren would have refused it even if they hadn’t liked it, because they were all three delighted to be so well known at the Company, which was the main employer in the town of Washburn, Ohio, when they were growing up.

  The machine shops and the manufacturing plant, however, were off limits. The children had never had more than a glimpse through an open door of the buildings that housed the works themselves, or the fabricating or pattern shops, where the actual labor that necessitated so much administrative flurry was carried on. None of them had given it much thought; they hadn’t been particularly curious about those tall, bleak, glass-eyed brick buildings ranged along the river with smoke billowing from their many chimneys.

  It was a chilly, drizzly day when they were nine years old that the three children were first allowed to enter the newly constructed power plant, trailing across the vast floor after all three Scofield brothers, who needed to see about some problem that had come up. Tut Zeller, the chief engineer, was leaning against the railing of the catwalk outside his high office, barking out instructions over the hollow, reverberating din to the shop foreman, Henry Topp, standing just below, who had crossed his arms tightly over his chest and was stubbornly shaking his head to signify disagreement.

  It seemed to Warren ever after that the interior of the building had been brighter than the world outside. The great flywheel of the two-hundred-ton Corliss engine rose more than three men high at the crest of its soaring arc, its huge pistons at least as wide as Warren was tall. The engine churned with a noise like a slowly oncoming train, gleaming dark silver in the flat light from the towering, multipaned windows and skylights, and under the yellow glow of the arched, swan-necked lamps high along the walls. The pale wood floor seemed to stretch out forever, and the various brass wheels and gauges glittered against the steel backdrop of that mammoth engine like jewelry flung out carelessly across the room. Warren’s throat closed, and the roof of his mouth tingled with the sudden sweet combination of the smell of machine oil and the tang of metallic dust.

  The air not only had flavor but was discernible to the eye in its slow, mote-filled turbulence, and the children lagged behind Leo and John and George Scofield as they joined Henry Topp and the group of men who moved with busy efficiency in the lee of that great, clacking engine. Warren was awestruck and overwhelmed by the beauty of the thing itself, with its heavy rope drives extending from one floor to another, its sturdy braces looking as fragile as threads. The whole effect was a peculiar one of spidery delicacy and elegant efficiency combined with the astounding, churning power of that relentlessly moving engine.

  Everything about his first sight of the works was, to Warren, entirely marvelous, and he moved
across the floor with an odd feeling of buoyancy, which lasted long enough that he thought he had achieved an improbable lightness—that he was floating just above the floor—impossible but real. At the same time he thought with some outrage: We never knew about this! No one ever told us about this! Although, naturally, there had been endless talk around the tables of the houses at Scofields about every aspect of the Company: all the problems at the works, the worry of unionization, the complications with the field offices in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and even the amazing reliability of that great Corliss engine.

  Warren was galvanized by the sight of Tut Zeller, his sleeves rolled up above his short forearms, hands braced on the railings of the metal stairway as he swung himself down two steps at a time, clambering from his overlook to sketch out a pattern with a stubby piece of chalk—right there on the shop floor—of the idea he had been trying to communicate to the tall, angular Mr. Topp. Anyone in the way fell back to give Tut enough room, while others came forward to take note of what he was doing.

  Everyone was attentive, looking on with gravity at the fierce, stocky little man with his fiery round face, a shock of sandy hair standing straight up above his brow, his bow tie crisp but his shirt rumpled under his suspenders. Here were Warren’s father and his uncles in their dark suits and polished shoes, and the shop foreman and a few other men, stooping a little with their hands on their knees, craning forward to watch Tut Zeller diagram an innovation that he clearly thought was so obvious an improvement he could scarcely contain his impatience while he labored to translate it.

  And, all the while, the business of tending that great engine went on around them. Several men moved among the wheels and gauges without urgency but with enviable authority. Two rangy boys, a good deal older than Warren and Robert, swarmed up three stacks of ladders that zigzagged along an interior wall to the window hatch. Each boy slung his bucket over his shoulder before scrambling out onto the roof, where the two of them set to work washing the skylights. Warren stood on the floor below, watching as the boys methodically polished the broad glass panes with slow, circular sweeps of their cleaning cloths.