The Evidence Against Her Read online

  The two middle boys would look on sullenly, and Edson would offer up a comment now and then, envying Agnes’s ability to earn their father’s serious regard. Catherine could hardly stand it. “Oh, the two of you! I wouldn’t be surprised in the dead of night to hear you trying to decide if the sun was shining. You talk and talk and talk. So self-important, Agnes! But so dreary! So dull! My father always said that politics were simply vulgar, Dwight.”

  Sometimes Catherine’s complaints would draw her husband’s fury to the fore again, and Dwight would fall into a terrifying rage toward her that would throw the household into a scramble. With luck, though, if Catherine was in a mood to disparage everything about her husband’s occupation, he and Agnes would become even more deeply involved in their conversation, and Catherine would finally drift off in a sulk.

  Agnes hadn’t an inkling that her mother and all three of her brothers believed she was the only one among them who had earned Dwight Claytor’s admiration. She had no idea that they counted it against her, too. That they believed she purposefully wooed his favoritism with unnatural—with affected— interest in the subtleties of setting corn prices, that she pretended to be mesmerized by the ins and outs of political intrigue. And she had no idea that lately—in the face of her cool disinterest— her father had begun to believe he had lost his primary ally within his own family.

  Agnes was utterly preoccupied, and a portentous atmosphere fell over the Claytor household. Terrifying possibilities—of which she was genuinely oblivious—arose under Agnes’s inattention. She had given herself over to the lovely yearning that ran beneath the surface of her everyday thoughts, and which she could tap into whenever she wanted. It didn’t even occur to her to budget her luxurious despondency.

  Warren Scofield and Lily Butler came out to the house together when Dwight Claytor was at home one Wednesday evening in October, and Lily invited Mr. and Mrs. Claytor and Agnes to join them for the harness races on Saturday. Dwight declined, since he had to be in Columbus, but Warren asked if the ladies might like to come along anyway. Catherine had been both panic-stricken and excited at the idea, and she lowered her great, hooded eyes and studied her hands, but Edson asked if he could go, too, and it had been settled.

  Lily and Warren collected them Saturday morning, and they drove south to Judge Henry Lufton’s Lakeview Farm to watch the first races at the new half-mile track the judge had built. He had constructed a little section of three-tier viewing stands where Warren and Catherine sat while Lily took Agnes and Edson off to look at the horses and see the judge’s new, lighter-weight sulky. Warren sat next to Catherine in a posture of kindly attentiveness. Straight backed but turned toward her just a little bit in case she might have something to say. And for the first time in years, Catherine Edson Claytor, from Natchez, Mississippi—renowned throughout the Delta as a belle—felt utterly pleased with her plight in the world.

  Warren never thought much at all about how he looked, but Catherine Claytor had thought long and hard about beauty. She understood its power and all its shades and subtleties, and she had a merciless eye. She was alert to all the vast gradations of feminine attractiveness. She could spot the traces of former beauty retained in the face of an older woman. She could distinguish mere pertness—which was really no more than an arresting manner, a self-confident briskness—from the enchantment of sheer prettiness apart from personality. And she was always aware and in awe of the gravity of real beauty. Her own loveliness was the only means of gaining approval and admiration she had ever understood.

  All at once, as she sat next to a man whose good looks matched hers at their height, she lapsed into a deep embarrassment at no longer being the girl she once was; she was humiliated at no longer being a great beauty; she was mortified to think how tedious her company must seem to Warren Scofield. And since Catherine was not the least bit curious about anything or even anyone—was handicapped by a crippling self-absorption—she had never grasped the art or understood the pleasure of conversation.

  “Do you like the races, Mrs. Claytor?” Warren asked, bending closer, and she gazed back at him in some alarm. Her poor mind was so busy with some little narrative of its own that she had fallen into the demure hesitation of a young girl. She was too flustered to answer him, and he filled in for her as the silence lengthened. “I suppose you like to ride, though. You have a nice stable. Or are you as happy as my mother is now that she doesn’t ever have to depend on a horse again?” He laughed a little, trying to put Mrs. Claytor at ease by conveying an impression of fond amusement at his mother’s adamant determination never again to have anything to do with horses or any other animals if she could help it.

  Catherine finally glanced at him and spoke in the soft Southern accent that he admired. “Well, I don’t ride very much, Mr. Scofield. Not these days. I wouldn’t ride cross-saddle. But I ride out sidesaddle . . . . Oh, well, it’s been months, I guess. My daughter rides . . . Agnes rides off into the hills wearing her brother’s clothes . . . . Oh, in the summer she’ll ride out into the country wearing the bloomers the girls at Linus Gilchrest wear in gymnasium class! She’s just as stubborn as a mule, and I can’t convince her . . . . She learned to ride aside. She had a sidesaddle even when she was little. She uses mine sometimes now. It’s a beautiful saddle. Sometimes Agnes will take Bandit out . . . . But the girls like to ride cross-saddle . . . when Agnes and Lucille compete . . .” Her voice faded into soft incoherence so that he couldn’t catch what else she said, and then she straightened and leaned toward him, opening her huge eyes wide and apparently waiting for an answer or a reply.

  He blinked under her steady gaze and regarded her with caution. He wasn’t sure what she was getting at, and her expression was so intense that she appeared to Warren to be slightly dazed. But Warren wasn’t much fond of her husband, who was quick, who was quite intelligent, and who had been very accommodating, but who was impervious to charm, or at least to the easy bonhomie that Warren generally fell into when he was doing a bit of business. Warren was suddenly exceedingly sorry for Mrs. Claytor, and more than anything he wanted to keep her from realizing that she had not yet uttered a single complete sentence to which he could respond.

  He smiled broadly, as though she had said something wonderfully entertaining. “Oh, yes. I see!” he said with enthusiasm. “Oh, now look there. Lily’s looking for us, I think.” The group standing against the boards had turned to look their way as the stands filled up. “I know she wants you to see Judge Lufton’s new sulky. Lily loves the races. Of course, she’s a real horsewoman. Well, Lily likes anything to do with competition. And you can’t find a game she doesn’t enjoy,” Warren said, only because he couldn’t think of anything else, and he rose from his seat and offered his arm to Catherine Claytor. Her face suddenly lit up in a smile, and she stood and hooked her hand through his elbow with a purposely exaggerated little bow of acknowledgment.

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Scofield,” she said. “We have a beautiful day for the races.” They moved off together, and he spent a strained but fairly pleasant afternoon in her company, although he had less time alone with her daughter than he had hoped.

  The next morning, when Agnes was getting dressed for church, her mother appeared wraithlike in her doorway. “I want you to take this along with you. You might see Mrs. Butler and Mr. Scofield at church.” Catherine had nothing but scorn for the Episcopal church in Washburn, even though she’d been raised Episcopalian, and she wouldn’t go to the Methodist church, where Reverend Butler was pastor and which her husband and children attended. When her husband was in Columbus on a Sunday, Catherine often railed at the children that the only reason her husband went to church at all was because most of the businessmen in town went to Park Street Methodist.

  “He was brought up in the Episcopal Church,” she would insist to Howie and Richard. “Though if you grew up here it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Why, you sit through a service and you might as well be a Methodist. These people don’t understand the impor
tance of ritual . . . oh, the beauty of the altar banked with flowers . . . the robes and the incense. When I was a little girl my mama said that she could always count on the incense to make me drowse off . . . .”

  But by then her children were no longer paying any attention. Howie and Richard realized that they wouldn’t be made to go to church at all that day, and they would wander away quietly, so as not to draw their mother’s eye. When Edson was very young he avoided being dragooned by Agnes into going along with her by simply lying down on the floor at his mother’s feet, arms and legs flung out like a gingerbread boy’s—an audience of one flattened by his mother’s reveries but spared the tedium of accompanying his sister and the Damerons and Mrs. Longacre to church.

  Agnes had fallen into the habit of going to church with the Damerons whether her father was in town or not. She liked the feeling of inclusion, of important seriousness as she made her way among the clusters of people greeting one another, the children in their tidy clothes and the women in their nicest hats standing on the shady sidewalks and then breaking away to hurry up the steps as the church bells pealed. And she was particularly eager to go to town that Sunday after visiting Judge Lufton’s farm.

  Agnes had been filled with delight all through the night, waking and falling back to sleep in half-remembered, half-dreamed pleasure that wasn’t specific but was thorough. It was a vast idea of alert contentment, of clever observations casually made, easy conversation that had a brisk, cheerful sophistication. And the amazing, feathered sky, the bright colors worn by the sulky drivers. It was a glimpse of comfortable sociability and adult freedom, and she was hoping to see Warren Scofield and Lily Butler at church. Lily and her parents and Mrs. John Scofield were always there, and occasionally Warren Scofield came along with them, although Agnes couldn’t remember ever seeing Warren’s father at church.

  But Sunday morning here was her mother in some sad straits once more, and Agnes simply couldn’t tolerate the bitterness she felt at having to deal with her. It put an end to Agnes’s entirely happy mood.

  “Mr. Scofield would be interested in this, I think,” her mother was saying. “He was so curious to know if I liked to ride. I never went in for it the way you do. And Lucille, too. We wouldn’t have liked that sort of competition. We wouldn’t have made a show of ourselves. And in those awful hats. He wanted to know if I liked to ride, and I expect he would like to see this picture. Oh, it’s very . . . Well, it’s lovely, I think. It’s a lovely photograph. I’ve slipped it out of the frame so you can take it with you.” Catherine had not slept at all. She had been awake all night, rustling through boxes of clippings and scrapbooks she had brought back from Natchez after her mother’s death. She had paused for long moments whenever she looked up and caught her reflection in the mirror, and finally she had slipped softly down the stairs and extracted the photograph from its little easel frame on a table in the chilly parlor.

  Catherine Claytor still had in her mind the gentle offer of Mr. Scofield’s arm as she rose to move away from the viewing stands at Judge Lufton’s farm; she still turned over the poignant memory of his little bit of gallantry. It wasn’t that she wanted to instruct Warren Scofield about who she was as a forty-year-old woman, it was only that when she thought of walking along beside him she fell into a state of peculiar agitation at the need to have him know that she was once someone taken seriously by the world.

  Agnes moved over to look down at the picture her mother held carefully in her hands, holding it just along the edges with the tips of her fingers. It was the familiar photograph of her mother when she was about Agnes’s age, wearing a small, dashingly cocked hat with a long feather arching backward from the band. She was perched elegantly on her horse with the draped skirt of her habit artfully arranged, and Agnes always wondered how they had gotten the cooperation of the horse.

  “Well, Mama?” Agnes took the photograph but didn’t look at her mother. She tried to make her mind as flat as a sheet of shiny paper. The Damerons would be by to pick her up any minute. “Why don’t you just leave it in the parlor in its frame? I’m sure Mr. Scofield and Lily Butler probably noticed it already.”

  It was true that the picture of the young Catherine Alcorn Edson, from Natchez, Mississippi, was a seductive portrait. Catherine’s beautiful face and slightly tentative expression seemed to bode well. Every good thing in the world seemed possible for the bashfully serene young woman gazing from that photograph. Once when the whole family had been sitting in the parlor and their father had suddenly become enraged at some word of his wife’s and in one swift bound had crossed the room from his chair to the little couch where Catherine sat, had seized her arms just above the elbows and given her a rough shake like a rag doll, Howie had grabbed that photograph and held it in front of his father’s face—between his parents’ angry heads.

  “Look at her, Papa!” he had shouted. “Look at her!” And he brandished the image of his lovely mother at his father almost as a threat. See! the gesture said. See who she is!

  “Don’t you hurt her, Papa!” Howie had ordered. “Don’t you ever hurt her anymore!” Howie had been a gangly twelve year old, and their father had turned ferociously toward him for a moment but then let go of Catherine and left the room without another word.

  Agnes finally turned to study her mother on this particular Sunday morning, hoping to avoid a scene. “Oh, I do like that picture, Mama. Everyone always notices it. But I don’t think I ought to take it to church.” Confronted with Agnes’s refusal, however, her mother’s air of beseechment disappeared and her expression became eerily petulant.

  “Oh, Agnes. You don’t understand a single thing. Why just look at this! Just look at this! Have you ever seen a more beautiful girl? Have you ever—in this place—seen anyone at all who could compare? I’ve begun to think it’s the sort of face that Yankees can just never have. Something in the breeding. Everyone up here has such . . . pointy faces. Don’t you find it frightening, Agnes? Don’t you? Why, look at Lily Butler and her needle chin! Mama would say she’s got a face as sharp as glass. But look at this face! Look here!” And she brushed her hand over the photograph Agnes was holding.

  “Mama! Mama! But that’s your own face!” Agnes’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper, and she was frightened by the numbing pity and fear that overwhelmed her as she was swept up in the crisis of her mother’s unfathomable desperation.

  Her mother only stepped back and squinted her eyes at her daughter in exasperation. “Well, certainly. It is! It is my own face!” And the two of them regarded each other with mutual bewilderment.

  “I’ll just slip it into my book, then, Mama,” Agnes finally said, “so that it won’t get creased.” And her mother followed her downstairs and beamingly buttoned Agnes into her coat in an exaggerated, joking way, pretending that Agnes was about five years old. “What a good girl you are!” Catherine said, purposefully mocking the cadence of the doting mother of a young child. “You look all nice for church! Don’t forget to wear your mittens!” Agnes smiled in acknowledgment of her mother’s little effort at frivolity and went off to meet the Damerons with the photograph tucked into her Book of Common Prayer. She walked right out of the house not allowing herself to contemplate anything at all. She didn’t allow herself to imagine what her mother was thinking; Agnes was determined not to care.

  • • •

  During the winter Agnes had the chance to chat with Lily Butler and Warren Scofield now and then, in town sometimes, and often at church. Just before Christmas she had run into Warren at Lessor Brothers, where she had gone with Lucille to see if the yarn Mrs. Drummond wanted had come in. Agnes spotted his gleam of blond hair across all the rows of goods and knew immediately from the angle of the neck and shoulder that it was Warren Scofield, although his back was to her. It was so unexpected that for a scant second she was frozen in place just inside the door, and Lucille looked around to find her. “They’ll have it at the back, Agnes. This way! Mother said if it came in this morning it woul
d be wrapped and ready for me to pick up.” Agnes followed along the aisle that would lead her right past Warren, and he turned and saw her.

  “Why, Agnes!” he said, but she was wretched about the fact that she was in her awful school uniform with her hair flying loose from its clip all around her head. She was too unnerved even to remember to greet him, and no one spoke for a moment. “And . . . it’s Miss Drummond, I know,” Warren added. “Celia’s sister, but I’m not sure . . . ,” he said, and Lucille smiled.

  “I’m Lucille,” she said. “Are you shopping for Christmas presents, Mr. Scofield?” she asked him, and Agnes was nonplussed until she realized that he had been peering over a display of linens: handkerchiefs, dresser centerpieces, cluny-edged scarves, doilies, tray covers, and the like.

  “Yes, I am. I’m not much good at buying presents. When I’m traveling and I see something in a shop that seems to me to be just right for someone . . . well, then I enjoy it. Then I feel as though I was meant to be going along just that way. Walking down that street. I like finding something by accident that will be the right thing.” He was speaking in a rush, and Agnes was sure they were holding him up, but she was unable to do anything about it. “You’d think,” he went on, “that I’d have the willpower to hang on to it. Put it away in a drawer so I’d have it at the right time. But I never can. I get home and I’ve been just imagining how pleased Uncle George or Lily . . . Well!” And he laughed. “You can see I’m stumped. I guess I was hoping for a nice distraction.” He looked straight at them with an expression of pleasure, and Lucille smiled back at him, but Agnes was still trying to catch up with herself and had not even said hello.