The Evidence Against Her Page 12
Rivulets of soapy water trickled through the grime before the rags swiped through them, and Warren suddenly had the sensation of having the same overview of the shop floor that those two boys with their buckets and cakes of Bon Ami were privilege to—an airy glimpse of those men made small. And here—Warren discovered so young, mesmerized in that flat, bright light, in that muscular air—was the answer to the question he had always known existed but that no one had ever set out for him. Here was the answer to the question of what happened in the world. Warren had stumbled into the passionate opposite of romantic love or sexual longing. He had discovered a great cerebral enchantment, a deep fascination, an intellectual intrigue.
He looked to Lily and Robert to confirm the wonderment of it all, but for the first time in his life his glance wasn’t met with an answering expression of acknowledgment—of recognition of a shared idea. Neither of his friends turned Warren’s way in their usual conspiracy. Lily’s face was cast over with that glazed expression of courteous interest that meant her mind was a million miles away, and Robert was placidly looking on while Tut Zeller sketched quick, long lines and rough boxes in crude representations of machinery onto the floor.
Lily was all pulled together and poised in her disinterested tidiness—her hands clasped in front of her, her feet neatly together—while Warren had been craning upward, with his legs braced, canted backward from the waist, gaping at the soaring heights, the scurrying boys, the exciting busy-ness all around him. But that particular morning when he observed her grave separateness from himself, her prim, clean-limbed composure, and when he recognized Robert’s habitual studious absorption in whatever was going on around him, Warren was furious at the perceived rebuff.
“Why, you’re thinking something completely different than me!” Warren blurted out one second before the thought clearly formed in his head. Everyone but Tut Zeller glanced toward the three children for just a moment, because Warren’s voice was high pitched with outrage above the thud and gasp of the engine. But the adults turned back to the business at hand when they saw that nothing was amiss.
Robert looked at Warren for a moment, considering it. “How do you know that? What are you thinking?” Robert asked calmly, his hands in his pockets and his brows pulled together in a mild expression of inquiry, and Warren just gestured with a broad sweep of his arm.
“It’s so big,” he finally said.
“It is big,” said Robert pleasantly, and Warren appreciated that little bit of kindly intention in the face of all he could not possibly explain—in the face of Robert’s lack of wonder.
For her part, however, Lily had no idea that at age nine it was shocking to Warren to discover that they were separate enough that their thoughts diverged. To her way of thinking, it was unlikely that she and Warren would ever be considering exactly the same thing. She had been about to suggest that the three of them return to the office, which was cheerful and warm. She found the sound of the engine deafening and had no interest in the works. But she had seen Warren watching the boys scale the ladders and climb out onto the roof, and even at age nine she had felt what was almost a maternal gladness when she recognized his fascination. Lily would never interfere in a moment when Warren was wholeheartedly happy, so she stood just where she was between Robert and Warren, not minding the wait. It seemed natural to her that between Warren and herself whatever one of them might fail to notice the other would be bound to catch on to. She assumed that the two of them made up discrete parts of one whole. She would have been amazed and upset if she had known that he held against her the fact that she departed so astonishingly from his own self. She would have been desolate if she knew he held it against her as a betrayal.
• • •
After Warren and Robert graduated from Norbert-Halsey Academy in 1906, Robert went on to Harvard College, and Warren took a salaried position at the company, where he was assigned to travel with Sam Chalmers, the company’s chief field erection man, or sometimes with Hugh Gehrhart, as far south as Louisiana, helping to troubleshoot any problems that arose at an installation, learning to work out details on the fly.
Scofields’ blowing engines were shipped by rail and assembled on site, sometimes installed in furnaces chiseled out of solid rock and rising as high as seventy feet. Warren liked everything about this business. He would go along to watch the men inching the huge engines on skids down Grove Street to the railroad siding. And he would often take over one of the large crowbars himself, making a striking picture when he shed his coat and bent his tall, rangy frame to the effort. Sometimes the spectators who gathered to watch would shout encouragement to him, and a smattering of applause would break out.
Warren never complained about living rough at a site, pitching a tent in some muddy field or straggling woods. And, in fact, everything about the enterprise appealed to all the pent-up romance of Warren’s nature. He lived in a state of suppressed elation, bowled over with the rugged fellowship, delighted with his inclusion in the whole world of what seemed to him a great endeavor. He was as happy as he had been in his life, absorbed and interested in everything he ran into, and enamored with the novel grittiness of it all.
In early spring of 1907, Warren was put in sole charge of overseeing the installation of a Scofield horizontal compressor combination at a site in West Virginia, in the middle of fields and fields of corn where oil and natural gas had been discovered. There was no town or hotel within an easy distance of the site, but Warren secured a place for himself and the engineer, Hugh Gehrhart, to get a good night’s sleep, even though they had to bed down each night in the attic of a suspicious country woman who granted them access to the room only up a ladder propped against the side of her locked house.
The engine was an ugly thing, a huge, inefficient, and complicated two-cylinder, double-acting machine, and Warren ran into resistance from the workmen, who disdained the inelegance of this particular piece of machinery as much as Warren did. Warren wrote to Uncle Leo in a fit of pique that it had such a slow action it put him in mind of his uncle George leaving the plant on an errand. “The piston goes out on Monday and comes back sometime late Tuesday afternoon.”
But Warren was good at his job. He managed to minimize the inevitable discord between the engineer and the labor force he’d had to hire locally by pretending to enough ignorance of how the thing should be stabilized and regulated that Hugh Gehrhart became more patient. Warren would show up at the site and come to a slow halt, gazing at the construction this way and that. Taking off his hat and slapping it against his thigh in a show of bewilderment. “Now, Mr. Gehrhart, you’ve got to explain this to me again,” he would say. “I know you said the frame will sit straight across here, but I don’t see how in the world it’s going to support the bearings.” And when the engineer walked it all over once again, the workmen were satisfied that this was the best design they could hope for, ungainly as the thing would be, and they were also reassured that no one was asking anything unreasonable of them.
Toward the end of the year, though, his uncle Leo pressed him to go on to college, a small school in western Massachusetts just over the mountains from Lily, who was at Mount Holyoke, in South Hadley. Warren would never in his life think of disagreeing with Uncle Leo, but he sat in his uncle’s office terribly disappointed at the prospect. His own father wasn’t so enthusiastic either, but Leo thought it made good sense in every way. “A man needs to take up all sorts of ideas, John. Warren’s got some experience in the field now, but you know he can do more good for us in management than running all over the country. It would be a good thing for him. And now Harry Garfield’s there as president, I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the Company either.”
“Ah, Leo,” said his father, “I don’t see that. What difference does it make that Garfield’s there?”
“Well, he’s a good man. A thinker. He’s got in mind some good ideas. And we’ve got to start thinking about Europe. Garfield’s talked about bringing men from all over the world to tha
t little college. An International Institute, or something of the sort. I don’t know what his aim will be exactly. And, of course, who knows? Who knows what will come of that? But we’ve already got an agreement with Fours-Stein of France. We need to be looking ahead. And I don’t think it would be a bad idea for Warren to make some connections back east,” Leo said, while Warren sat listening without comment.
“It’s fine with me if Warren goes off to college, Leo, though his mother’s going to hate it like the plague. But whatever you might think about how I do business . . . Well! I’ll tell you, you’re not the man to make a sale, Leo! It offends you altogether to try to persuade someone to buy these fine engines we build! You think some customer is just going to discover all by himself that he needs a Scofield engine—a Scofield engine in particular! When he’s being courted every minute by Fitch? Or Westinghouse? You’ve got far too fine a nature for a bit of trade, Leo!”
John Scofield had risen from his chair and leaned across the desk toward his brother, his whole posture aggressive, but his tone had grown soft, nearly menacing with restrained anger. “Let me tell you something,” he went on, though in his whispery fury he was hardly asking permission, and Leo sat on impassively. “There is not a single mill, not even the smallest textile company—not a businessman, either, in any part of the northeast—in Boston and even New York—that doesn’t know me by sight! Who isn’t glad to see me! And that’s what’s selling these engines, Leo. Because everyone and his brother has his foot in this market. But I remember the names of their secretaries, Leo! I remember the names of their wives. Their children. Great God! I remember the names of their dogs! You don’t need to worry any little bit about our connections!” John was so angry that he turned his back on his brother and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
Warren was astounded and embarrassed. His father had always adopted a slightly edgy jocularity toward Uncle Leo, but Leo was eight years older than his father—had essentially been his father’s guardian since his father was twelve and Leo was twenty—and Warren had always thought that Uncle Leo seemed more paternal than fraternal toward his younger brother. Warren hadn’t understood until that moment in Uncle Leo’s office that there was a deeper resentment at the heart of his father’s manner.
Neither brother spoke for a moment, then John turned back to Leo, a good bit calmer. “And what puts you in such a mind to please the Garfields one way or another?” John asked.
“You’re determined to take me wrong, John!” Leo said, and he seemed vexed, although not angry. “I tell you, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of it. You’re trying mighty hard to imagine I’m insulting you. There’s no one better at sales than you are, and there’s not anyone at the Company who’d say otherwise. It was you who told me you’d never met a man who’d been at Williams College that you didn’t like,” said Leo. “Lily’s just flourishing back east. And Robert Butler’s off at Harvard. Maybe Warren would rather think of going there. But you know I’m serious about keeping ties with Harry Garfield. The Garfields have been good to know when we’re doing business in Cleveland. He’s a good man, and naturally his connections in Washington—”
“It’s fine. It’s fine,” John interrupted, and he sat down abruptly, stretching backward, running his broad hand across his face and massaging his forehead in a gesture of weariness. “Just don’t decide you think Warren ought to go off to Princeton,” he added, with a conciliatory laugh. “Now that I really couldn’t abide.” Leo and John smiled at each other across the expanse of Leo’s broad wooden desk. “We’ve got something we do need to sort out, though, Leo. We’ve got a problem in Hiram. I’m going to need Sam Chalmers or Hugh to come along out there with me.” And he and Leo turned their attention to business.
Warren did go off to Williams College in September of 1908, and made quick work of the business of school, graduating in the class of 1911. He was well liked at college, although after working in the field and keeping company with the engineers it seemed to him a tame existence he led in that little valley in the Berkshires. He was a fine student, but his intellectual devotion had been secured when he was nine years old, and he was often bemused by the earnest, meandering conversations, the amiable debates of his fraternity brothers or that Robert and Lily indulged in during the long summer vacations.
Warren had been delighted to get back to work at the Company. Leo wanted him in management, and he sometimes made short business trips with his uncle or his father, but he also still traveled in the field with Sam Chalmers or Hugh Gehrhart and was often away for weeks at a time. In the summer, if he got back to Scofields in the late afternoons, he would find Robert and Lily with a group of friends—usually Celia Drummond, Ollie Powers, and Charles Eckart and his sister Estella—ranged around Uncle Leo’s garden, having just returned from a spur-of-the-moment round robin of tennis or a game of golf.
Whenever Warren came upon the group they were already in animated conversation, because Robert loved a debate, loved the exercise of civilized banter. He would latch on to some amorphous idea or other and deftly delineate two points of view—even if it was quite a stretch either to broaden or narrow whatever topic was at hand. The company would generally fall into two amiably opposed camps. The impassioned fervor of their arguments—ranging from the merits of the sport of golf versus that of tennis to the possibility of an American sensibility as opposed to that of the European—was a puzzle and a fascination to Warren.
He had visited Robert in Cambridge and sat among Robert’s group of friends at Harvard, where Robert brought the same sort of energy to a discussion of literature or philosophy, and what intrigued Warren was the pleasure Robert and Lily and all the rest of them took in their efforts to persuade one another. Lily and Robert inevitably took opposing points of view, and Warren was bemused by Lily’s obvious delight in their sparring matches. It was almost embarrassing, now and then, to be in their company, because the two of them so relished their disagreement that their passionate discussions seemed curiously intimate.
• • •
Early in 1917, Harry Garfield, in his capacity as fuel administrator for the Wilson Administration, prevailed upon Warren Scofield to help coordinate the industrial conversion to the manufacture of munitions and other war matériel in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Illinois. Harry Garfield knew the Scofield brothers were widely respected in manufacturing circles, and he had been impressed with Warren some years earlier when he was a student at Williams College.
Leo Scofield saw the request as a great compliment to Warren and a move that would be bound to benefit the Company one way or another. And in any case the request was a formality. Warren had no choice but to accept the position in the Fuel Administration, but he was disappointed. Robert Butler had already been promoted to captain in the infantry and was stationed in France, and Warren had been eager to get overseas. It seemed to him from Robert’s letters that the war was a good deal like living rough in the field, using simple cunning to adjust to unexpected difficulties and not having the energy to worry over much of anything other than the job at hand:
. . . so we’re up every morning at 5:15 and haven’t any curiosity all day even to know what time it is. Not until taps at 10:00 P.M. do I realize another day has passed. In the way the time goes by it is much like being a child again, but not even when I was a child did I spend days and nights on end without having a single moment of reflection.
. . . and I know you wonder how I get along without a good long discussion now and then, but about the most the men talk about here at any length is how the beans should be cooked. The Southern boys want them cooked up with fatback and the Easterners want them with sugar. Either way I have to say they’re better than any I ever had at home, where they mostly tasted to me just like dirt.
There was no glory in any of this, though Warren knew that Robert would have thought it indiscreet—unseemly—to describe any heroics he might have witnessed or been part of. But what Robert did reveal was exactly what Warren loved so a
bout being in the field—the mind-filling physicality of being alive. Warren knew the invigorating pleasure of taking on whatever assortment of tasks fell one after another in rapid succession throughout a long day, and he craved the unambivalent satisfaction of doing a job all the way through, from beginning to end. Warren envied Robert Butler.
In fact, Warren Scofield hated the business of the business of war. He hated being bogged down in the inevitable pettiness— the niggling small-mindedness—of bureaucracy. But he had learned in the field that he had a gift for wheedling discipline from a group of men discouraged by the daily tedium of routine, and he had discovered in the oil and gas fields of Indiana and Pennsylvania that he excelled at wrenching order from chaos. He thought he would be brilliant at leading a soldier’s life.
At nine years old, Warren had invested the bustling world of the Company with a spiritual dimension. Tut Zeller strutting about, Henry Topp remaining laconically coolheaded, the great harnessed power engendered by the gleaming wheel of the Corliss engine, the reams of paper passed from hand to hand to document all the intricacies, the arcane complexities, the history of progress—well, in Warren’s mind it had been tantamount to a religion. He thought that he had discovered the whole point—what to shoot for, the goal toward which one’s life advanced. Just as he felt sure that time marched forward from the sundial in Uncle Leo’s garden, he had also concluded that when he began to lead his real life it would be as dependable, meticulous, and elegant—as satisfying—as the working of a complex machine.