The Evidence Against Her Page 13

  But when he held Robert’s letters in his hand and thought of Robert and Lily married—thought of Robert’s usefulness now and the couple’s life as it would sail on after the war—he fell into unhappy reflection. He wondered what he was doing and what in the world it was he wanted. He thought of girls he had courted, of Celia Drummond, for instance, and Estella Eckart, nice girls he only liked very much.

  He thought of Marjorie Hockett, who was the girl Lily had picked out for him. And Lily had been right. When he finally met Marjorie, when he joined Robert and Lily in Maine, he had been drawn to her right away. She was a tall, handsome girl with very blue eyes and a pale sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He’d been pretty quickly convinced that he was in love with her, but Marjorie had come to find him one day when he was sitting out on the rocks reading. She had sat down companionably beside him, leaning against his arm, shoulder to shoulder.

  “I just realized what Lily’s up to,” she said. “I just realized it, and she ought to know better. I guess she just won’t ever understand. And when Lily decides on something she’s like a dog herding sheep. She’s just determined not to have any of her flock stray. But I knew the first year at Mount Holyoke that there might not be another person in the world I’d ever be able to fall in love with.” She smiled at him when he turned to look at her to see what she meant.

  “There’s just Lily for me, Warren. And nothing I can ever do about it. But it isn’t right that I not tell you.”

  It was a moment when he felt unsure and especially unsophisticated. He wasn’t clear what she could mean by what she said to him, and he didn’t want to press her. He was grateful to her for letting him down easily, and she was still someone he liked immensely. He and Marjorie kept up a lively correspondence.

  But now he wondered why he never had been in love, and he marveled at his long infatuation with the Company. It made him angry to think that he had ever been so starry-eyed, so naive. He had a vague suspicion that somehow he had been tricked, even deceived, although that feeling was just an ongoing, brooding discontent. He never thought it out carefully enough to decide just who it might have been who had led him astray.

  By the time he was twenty-nine years old, Warren was weary to the point of cynicism and disappointed to the point of grief. And the Saturday afternoon in late September when he sat in Dwight Claytor’s parlor, Warren found himself entirely bereft of a single passion in all the world.

  As he sat trying to persuade Dwight Claytor to consider reopening a marginal coalfield, Warren was all at once so affected with the most peculiar, flat feeling of exhaustion that his face froze in its pleasant expression; he could not speak. He looked to Lily for help, but she was chatting enthusiastically to Mrs. Claytor, and even though Warren had begged Lily to come along and be entertaining, he was filled with disgust just watching her. In that split second he transferred all his disenchantment and dissatisfaction with his own situation onto the idea of Lily—what she represented. She was the epitome of “Scofieldness,” and yet that very charm she possessed that was characteristic of them all, Warren suddenly perceived as a dire and fundamental superficiality. And if it was business that had substituted for any bit of spirituality in Warren’s nature, the idea of being part of his own extended family—of being a Scofield— had defined his connection to the world.

  He watched out of the corner of his eye as Lily bent forward to engage Mrs. Claytor’s attention. He saw Catherine Claytor’s face take on an uncertain expression and then close in upon itself as she retreated into her own thoughts, no longer trying to follow the conversation. Her large, pale eyes grew vague, and she reclined in her chair, baffled and just sunk by intimidation when confronted with all of Lily’s polished edges. Warren knew what it was like to be undone by Lily’s assurance in the world, by her small, crisp, blonde person, her quick blonde mind, her fair, generous, lucent thoughts. Lily was alert and shrewd and witty as she glided through her life unencumbered by self-doubt, and all at once he could hardly stand it. For a little while Warren could hardly stand his connection to all the people he had loved for his whole life.

  And it was that afternoon when he and Lily were taking their leave that Warren was caught entirely off guard by Catherine Claytor’s daughter, Agnes. He was standing in the Claytors’ yard in the fair Ohio countryside in that time of year when the fields have gone beige, when just the outer leaves of the walnut trees gleam butter yellow while the inner branches are still green, as if the trees are struck with sunlight even on an overcast day. He was making a polite farewell to Catherine Claytor while Lily said good-bye to Mr. Claytor when he felt the blow of that apple where it struck him just between the shoulder blades. He turned in surprise and spotted Agnes, who seemed to him, just then, to embody everything that was genuine, although he had scarcely noticed her when they were sitting in the parlor. But he looked her way in surprise and realized that there was nothing about her that was artful or disingenuous.

  Warren picked up the apple she had flung at him and gazed frankly at her as he polished it on the sleeve of his coat. She seemed to him to be everything sturdy and earthy that his lithe, blonde cousin Lily was not. There Agnes stood in her blue middy dress, with wispy tendrils of hair escaping from the clip at the nape of her neck into a smoky halo around her head. He bit into the sour green fruit, and she grinned at him. She was an exotic, stolid, brunette presence in the pale end of that day, and he felt a slight lessening of the odd weariness that had plagued him. Everything else that disturbed him in the world—even the uneasy, wheeling sky, the unsettling soapy fleck of the three-quarter moon as it barely crested the horizon—was temporarily resolved in the sight of her. As the tart taste of that apple prickled his mouth and Agnes stood still under the trees, Warren began to recover just a little bit of his optimism.

  Chapter Six

  ALL OF A SUDDEN, in the fall of 1917, almost everything in the world made Agnes Claytor cross. She was so busy in her own head that the slightest distraction made her snappish, and her friends didn’t know what had come over her. Her family, even Catherine, suddenly walked on eggs around her— everyone except her father, who didn’t notice. Agnes practically bristled with irritability. At school Edith and Sally, and especially Lucille, were hurt, and they fell back a little, waiting to see if this was a permanent change that had come over her.

  Agnes, though, didn’t know she was behaving in any particular way. In the afternoons she sat with her brothers at the table in the kitchen doing her schoolwork without worrying whether or not her brothers got all their homework done. When she was eighteen, Agnes rarely interfered with them one way or another anymore, and they were less relieved than they had imagined they’d be. Agnes wasn’t so interested in whether they got their schoolwork done, or if they remembered to take their lunches to school, and that was mostly a relief to them. On the other hand, she no longer intervened on their behalf in the stormy confrontations with their mother that each one of them happened into now and then in brief, dramatic disturbances that swept through the house unsettling everyone. Agnes found some errand away from the sudden verbal brutality inflicted on Edson or either of the other two if her mother’s day took a bitter turn and her rage sought an object.

  Agnes no longer allowed herself to understand—or she really didn’t remember—the awful grief of being a child who continues to hope he or she might be loved. And she no longer put herself between Edson and her mother, receiving a slap in his stead, or, as had happened once when she was twelve, being yanked by the hair all the way across the room where her mother, raging after them, had caught up with them just as Agnes was lifting the four-year-old Edson over the windowsill so he could run away across the yard.

  By the fall of her last year at school, Agnes sat there in the kitchen—where Mrs. Longacre presided—without a whit of her usual deferential amiability. She didn’t even ask about William Dameron and if Mrs. Longacre’s family had had a letter from him. Mrs. Longacre was always so grudging in giving out
any little bits of cheering news to Agnes or her mother that Agnes was finally fed up. She was so put out with everything in her life that she stopped pretending to be interested in anyone else at all.

  Even her father was surprised when he asked Agnes at supper one night where the Dameron boy was stationed. If his letters came through from Europe. But it was as if her father’s words reached Agnes several seconds after the sound of his voice stopped, as if she heard them only after a delay. Agnes slowly turned her round, black glance at her father, her brows drawn up into imperious inverted V’s in a long, serious assessment, and then she sighed. “Well, how would I know that, Papa? I don’t have any idea. I suppose Mrs. Longacre would tell us if he’d been killed . . . or injured.” Her father stared back at her with the idea that she had been impertinent, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly how. For a moment he looked as if he might say something to her, and she gazed straight at him with scrupulous attention, but he gave it up and went back to his dinner.

  Agnes didn’t ask after Mrs. Longacre’s granddaughter Bernice, who had been ahead of Agnes at Linus Gilchrest and who was now in her third year at Oberlin College, and toward whom for years Agnes had politely affected an air of humble admiration. Agnes no longer made the slightest effort to seduce Mrs. Longacre into liking not only her but anyone else in her family. She didn’t even think about whether any of them had Mrs. Longacre’s approval.

  In fact, she shot a sharp glance at Mrs. Longacre— seemingly holding her responsible—if the least bit of teasing and roughhousing broke out between Howie and Richard, or if Edson even gave a hint of some cranky complaint. Sometimes no more than the rustle of papers other than her own sent Agnes upstairs to her room in exasperation. She would spread her work on the little table by the window or on her bed and get it done with ill-natured dispatch. She needed to free up time for more urgent things.

  Agnes’s disaffection with ordinary life was causing quite a crisis at Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. “Oh, for goodness sake!” she had said, leaning her chin into her hand with her elbow propped on the table at the playwrights’ meeting when Edith Fisk and Lucille disagreed once more about who should be asked to play the part of Truth in the pageant. “What in the world does it matter? Don’t any of you pay attention to a single thing in the world? We’re in the middle of a war! And here we are. Doing these silly things. It’s just an embarrassment to me. I don’t even like to talk about it!”

  The following day the faculty class book sponsor, who was also Agnes’s favorite teacher, Miss McCrory, asked Agnes to stay after class, and Agnes came to her desk when the other girls had gone. “I think you should know, Agnes, that you’re causing a great deal of unhappiness among your friends. You’re one of the leaders of the school, and we count on you to be a good example. I don’t agree at all with your ideas about the senior-year activities.” She looked carefully at Agnes, trying to decide what tack to take.

  “I know that you’re terribly distressed about the war, Agnes. So many boys have gone. But we are all concerned, you know. It’s unkind of you—and, Agnes, I was truly surprised to hear how you had criticized your friends. I’ve always thought you were a more perceptive girl than most, and I was surprised that you wouldn’t realize how unkind it was to lecture Sally and Lucille. And Edith. They’re doing the best they can, Agnes. I know how frustrating it is to be able to do so little. To know that all those socks, mittens . . . all that knitting . . .” Miss McCrory’s voice trailed off. She sat perfectly still for a second or two before she spoke again more firmly. “If you want to do your part in the war effort, my dear, you need to help keep spirits up at home. A good many of the girls have brothers or uncles or fathers who’ve been sent overseas. Poor Edith Fisk was in a state this morning, you know. She has two older brothers in the army. So it’s no help to anyone for you to belittle her effort to keep going along as always.”

  Edith Fisk’s brothers were only doing basic training no farther away than Kansas, but Edith was insufferably anxious about it all. Agnes spoke before she considered what she was saying. “But Miss McCrory! Edith’s brothers aren’t even in France!”

  “Agnes—” Miss McCrory looked away from Agnes and out her classroom window at the school grounds. “You should never make light of the reason for another person’s dismay. I’ve always thought that was something you understood without being told.” Miss McCrory spoke to the air, in a musing tone, and Agnes watched her and suddenly was deeply ashamed of herself. She was so surprised by the reprimand—and so embarrassed by its accuracy—that she couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment.

  “Oh, Miss McCrory, I’m very sorry.” And indeed Agnes was filled with anguish. “I don’t know why I didn’t see that I might hurt Edith’s feelings. My brothers are all too young to be in any danger. Of course I can’t even know how Edith must feel about Burton and Donald both leaving on the same train.” She was so sincere that tears came to her eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. I never meant to do that at all. I’m very sorry Edith’s upset.” And she was deeply sorry while she stood talking with Miss McCrory, who advised Agnes to speak privately to Edith. Agnes eagerly agreed and was simply overcome with good intentions there in Miss McCrory’s classroom.

  But Agnes’s belated and incessant fascination with everything about her own self overcame her sympathy and altruism even as she stepped out into the long school corridor with the big round clocks at either end. She couldn’t even keep the idea of the war in her head for more than a bit at a time.

  The only thing Agnes thought about much at all anymore was Warren Scofield. She thought about him with thrilled despair, about his beautiful head, gleaming silver yellow as he turned in the afternoon to see that she had struck him with that apple. She thought about his broad hands, large but very finely made; his long fingers, articulated with elegant precision. She dwelled on the image of her mother’s transparent Spode teacup, which had glowed with a radiant creaminess when it was struck through with the light from the parlor window as Mr. Scofield raised it to his lips to sip his tea—the idea of the fragility of that bit of china in his careful grasp. She thought about Warren Scofield’s wide, square shoulders, his long legs, his beautiful, straight back as he had sat his horse when he and Lily Butler had disappeared around the bend of Newark Road. She thought of his making a hold with his cupped hands and laced fingers for Lily Butler’s foot so she could mount her big Appaloosa. Every thought in Agnes’s head was blond and dangerous unless she forced her mind in some other direction.

  Agnes had not considered the fact or even consciously formed the notion that by the time of their last year at Linus Gilchrest Institute an unspoken conspiracy is required among those eighteen- and nineteen-year-old girls to remain fully engaged in the world of school. After Miss McCrory spoke to her Agnes did try, though, not to disparage the interests of her friends. But Agnes no longer remembered how to pretend to be much interested in the senior pageant, the work on the class book, her place in the choir. Other than her academic classes, all her time at school seemed to her frivolous, and she was tactless in saying so quite bluntly to her best friend, Lucille, who slowly came to give up the idea of her own importance in the grand scheme of things.

  Agnes’s indifference broke through the protective chrysalis of the Linus Gilchrest Institute and exposed the girlish concerns of the reigning hierarchy of the school to comparison with the great, wide worries of the encroaching adult world. From the moment her father had made light of her work on the class book, Agnes had had to make an effort to believe in the importance of any of this last bit of her youth. Now that her mind was caught up in a whirl of blond thoughts of general and specific Scofields, her lack of interest in any daily enterprise cast a pall over the last school year of her closest friends.

  Agnes lived for the evenings of the week and the days of the weekend when her father was home from Columbus, because Warren Scofield almost invariably drove out to discuss the
business of the property in Zanesville and some other land Dwight Claytor owned near Coshocton, where a second coalfield might be opened.

  Agnes knew, of course, that she must seem like no more than a schoolgirl to Mr. Scofield, and that, in any case, Warren would never love anyone at all but his glamorous cousin Lily. Agnes knew that she was far too young for Warren Scofield. But there was nothing she could do that could keep her mind from wandering back to thoughts of him. And although she was downright disagreeable to everyone in her family, and they wondered what in the world was wrong with her, she was actually happier in this torment of romantic misery than she had ever been before in her life. In her case, in fact, this was the first time since her infancy that she was not distracted by anything else from full-blown solipsism; it was the first time her anxiety about the workings of the household were utterly eclipsed by the luxury of self-involvement.

  Agnes spent hours on end contemplating the hopelessness of her lovesick longing. It was perfectly real—this unhappiness— but it had a quality of languor and fullness that overrode the melancholy of her domestic vigilance. The best she had ever been able to do to save her family from itself—a salvation neither recognized nor sought after by them—was to offer a distraction the way the killdeer mimes an injury to draw a cat or hawk away from its nest. When her father entered a room just so—his shoulders stiffly squared, his mouth a straight, humorless line, his expression flat and with an aggressive air of deliberation—all the family but Catherine would tense in apprehension. Their mother seemed to her children hopeless at anticipating danger.

  But of the four children only Agnes had learned to pretend a sweet unawareness of the threat to the whole family’s tentative equanimity if any tension between her parents were to escalate. Agnes would pepper her father with bright questions about his day, about farm prices, about a bill moving through the legislature. And whatever fury had been roused against his wife would fade as at first he clipped off quick answers to his daughter and finally became interested in whatever subject she had thrown in his way. Then he would hold forth for some time, inquire about Agnes’s opinion, perhaps, and explain whatever issue was under discussion in further detail. The two of them would often become quite absorbed in a little disagreement or in differing interpretations of one thing or another.