The Time of Her Life Read online

  Leo had left the planting late because it had been an edgy summer and so dry that he had to haul water until the middle of November to irrigate that double row of saplings. The memory of June, July, and August merged into a blur of heat. The days had stretched out dry and hot, eventually falling into unsettling yellow green evenings preceding night after night of crackling thunder and hailstorms that lingered over the town with great bluster but produced very little measurable rainfall.

  It had been a season that was not much good for planting, and a season that had produced a sort of communal unease, transforming the nearly simultaneous births in mid-September of Lillian Marshal Scofield, Warren Leonard Scofield, and Robert Crane Butler into an event that seemed less remarkable than inevitable. And the unwavering alliance of those three children took on the same quality of inevitability. Lily and Robert and Warren were rarely apart from one another during all the waking hours of their early youth.

  But during the first months following his daughter’s birth, when the heat finally loosened its grip and September led into one of those autumns of rare clarity in which everything seems to be in perfect balance, Leo made grand plans for his garden. In late November he stood in the wagon yard on a chilly but glorious day so dazzlingly clear that the air itself was charged with a blue translucent brilliance. He stood still and imagined the plot transformed. He became lost in the idea of abundant flowers, blooming bushes, towering trees.

  The catalpas stood in fragile regulation, spare sticks once their leaves had dropped. They looked forlornly tenuous on the clear-cut acreage where the Scofield brothers had built their three houses. But by the time Lily was seven months old the following spring and those shoulder-high saplings finally budded and then leafed out, Leo privately exulted at their survival of the unusually brutal, snowless winter.

  Leo Scofield was a good businessman, always a little skeptical, a trifle suspicious by nature. But he wasn’t at all prone to melancholy; his brooding followed a more pragmatic course—he might fret persistently, for instance, about a minor innovation to a Scofield engine or an antiquated valve design. But it was quite in character, in late April of 1889, when he was a year closer to forty years old than to thirty-five, that the notion of the future flying toward him was only exhilarating. He wasn’t at all troubled by the idea of his own mortality. He walked the rutted track between those newly planted trees and imagined his daughter’s wedding procession making its way along a raked gravel avenue beneath the catalpas’ eventual leafy canopy under an overarching clear blue sky.

  And during the years of Lily’s childhood it was a great pleasure for him on the hottest summer days to sit in his fledgling garden, stunned by the Ohio heat and the salty yellow scent of cut grass, with her light, fluting voice ringing out above her playmates’ as she directed her cousin, Warren, and little Robert Butler in some game she had devised.

  Leo was continually surprised by and enamored of the solace of the domesticity he had happened into, and in a span of twenty years he transformed that scrubby patch of land into his idea of a replica of an English garden made up entirely of plants native to Ohio. The catalpa trees, however, didn’t mature exactly as he had hoped. In fact, he realized three years too late that he had intended to plant an avenue of yellow poplars—stately, flowering trees known locally as tulip trees. But when he had firmly fixed on the idea of his garden, had planned the east yard entrance, and had described the tree he had in mind, asking around town where he might find it, it was probably in the description of the tree’s flowers that he had gone wrong. Leo never gave up the private notion, however, that the misinformation he had received was purposeful, that there might be someone in the world who was amused at his expense, and with solicitous pruning he coaxed the catalpas to assume a more elegant shape than was their unbridled inclination.

  As the years passed, Leo came to like the pungency of a blooming catalpa, which was heavily sweet but elusive at a distance, drifting over the garden unexpectedly. He admired the tree’s soft green, heart-shaped leaves, its abundantly frilled flowers, as showy as a flock of tropical birds in the rolling landscape of central Ohio. Daniel Butler, who had done missionary work in Brazil and Cuba, said that in midsummer, when the vining trumpet creeper overran the arbor, dripping with deep-throated red-orange blossoms, the entire garden took on a look of the tropics. Leo had nurtured that flowering vine from a single cutting he had taken from a plant growing on a pasture fence—just a slip of stem cut on the diagonal and wrapped in a handkerchief he had moistened in the ditch alongside the road. The afternoon he had rounded a bend and come upon the glorious trumpet vine cascading over an unpainted board fence, he had paused for a long time before he had stooped to dampen his clean handkerchief in the brackish water. He was careful of his dignity, and his fascination with and cultivation of his flower garden was the only frivolity he allowed himself.

  Even though Leo had forced the sturdy trunks of the catalpas to extend straight up about nine feet before they branched, each tree assumed the self-contained shape of a softened, rounded obelisk. Their crowns didn’t form the leafy vault he had hoped for—the branches didn’t arch, didn’t intermingle overhead, really, as he had envisioned. And each year, when the catalpas’ fringed and ruffling flowers bloomed and produced their startlingly phallic, cigar-brown fruit, and when those flowers began to shed in stringy drifts of petals and oily pollen so that guests arrived showered with residue from the burgeoning branches, Audra would declare that the trees should be taken out.

  “They’re a nuisance, Leo. I always think that if you want a flowering tree you can’t go wrong with a dogwood. Dogwoods won’t get so tall, of course, but they are such beautiful trees. And more restrained when they’re in bloom. Oh, and sometimes in the spring when the dogwoods bloom early, it looks to me like the whole tree has burst into white lace.” But the catalpa trees remained, and Leo’s garden and the wide yards of Scofields became the geographical context of the childhood of each of those three children born coincidentally on September 15, 1888.

  Robert Butler was a ruddy, brown-haired child, and Warren Scofield, too, was sturdy and round limbed. They were little boys who seemed all of a piece, whereas Lily’s pale, attenuated arms and legs, her fragile neck, her knobby wrists and ankles seemed flimsy, as if, in her always hectic activity, she might fly apart, although for a long time it was clearly Lily who was the center and star of that inseparable threesome. At four or five or six years old, Robert wouldn’t have known how to articulate the impression that sometimes, in the blue or brassy light of any given day, a word Lily spoke—just the plain, flat sound of it—exploded cleanly into the moment, like a brilliant asterisk glinting through the atmosphere. Nor could he have explained that occasionally Lily’s movements, a sweep of her arm, an abrupt turning of her head, would break through some ordinary instant with a flicker of blank white clarity.

  And, of course, Robert had no way to know that his was a kind of perception lost to adults and older children. His mother was happier to see him only in Warren’s company. Mrs. Butler didn’t dislike Lily; it was only that it gave her a sense of satisfaction to see those two healthy boys absorbed entirely in the company of each other. Robert and Warren appeared to strike a natural balance between them that was disturbed when little Lily was with them, directing them to do this or that, dreaming up fantastic games with evolving rules that were played out for days at a time.

  One summer afternoon Mrs. Butler was in the yard of the parsonage cutting flowers for a bouquet and inspecting the rosebushes for disease when the three children came tearing through the yard brandishing sticks, their heads wrapped turbanlike in white damask napkins, with Lily bringing up the rear, urging the boys on in her high-pitched voice. “Gallop, Warren! Gallop, Robert! We must not let them escape! We must run! We must run like the wind!”

  Martha Butler’s good mood was spoiled as she watched them race across the lawn and down the slope toward the creek. When she mentioned it to her husband that evening—menti
oned that the two little boys never had a chance to play together without Lily—he wasn’t interested, said he couldn’t see what difference it made. And Martha herself couldn’t puzzle out her objection, couldn’t understand why their threesomeness disturbed her. “It isn’t natural, somehow, Daniel,” she said to her husband. “Three never works out. There’s always someone left out. Though, I don’t know, not with those three…. But it doesn’t seem at all right… not healthy in some way. Well, I just don’t know.” And she let the subject drop.

  But Robert’s mother’s censure emanating from the vicinity of the rosebushes that afternoon had overtaken and enveloped Lily as she herded their band onward, and she hesitated at the edge of the creek while the boys forged ahead. She was stricken for the first time in her life with self-consciousness. She unwrapped the napkin from around her head and was never again able to lose herself entirely in an imagined universe. She sometimes cringed in embarrassment when she remembered urging Robert and Warren to “run like the wind.” She had only been eight years old, but for the rest of her life she could not forgive herself that moment of blatant melodrama.

  Lily and Warren’s uncle George returned from a business trip to New York one year with a remarkably fine set of marionette puppets for his niece and nephew’s tenth birthday. George was an elusive and therefore romantic figure to the children and such a favorite of their parents because of his various endearing eccentricities that neither Leo and Audra nor Warren’s parents, John and Lillian, let him know that such intricate toys were far too complicated for Lily and Warren. But as it turned out, the marionettes were immediately popular with Lily and Warren and Robert, too, and for the next five years or so they mounted numerous and increasingly elaborate shows. Robert wrote the plays, Warren took on the most difficult roles, and Lily kept everything organized and filled in wherever she was needed. All during their growing up, Lily relieved Robert and Warren of the effort of choreographing their own childhoods. Lily was forever keeping them from careening off on some tangent or another. It was clear to her that without her guidance they would not progress. And she loved Robert Butler always and thought of herself as one half of the whole of herself and her cousin Warren.

  For Warren’s part, his whole idea of himself until he was about eleven years old was as one third of this triumvirate. Answering Mrs. Butler’s question, for instance, as to what the three of them had been up to all day, he knew instinctively to turn and weave all their disparate activities into a narrative that satisfied adults. Although he often interchanged the actions of any one of their threesome with those of another, he wasn’t even aware of it; he was only reacting to some parent’s slight uneasiness—only shifting the details of the truth to ensure serenity all around.

  One afternoon when the three of them arrived at Robert’s house dripping wet, Warren gave an enthusiastic account of his failed plan to build a fort and laboratory in the big low-branching cherry tree over the horse pond.

  “A laboratory! Well, a laboratory. That’s where so many of my canning jars have disappeared to, I guess!” Mrs. Butler said, but her initial alarm at the sight of them had softened. Later Robert reminded Warren that the whole thing had been Lily’s idea. Robert was surprised that Warren had taken the credit, but Warren only looked at Robert, perplexed. Warren knew intuitively that Robert’s mother would never have been pleased with the actual account of their afternoon’s enterprise. Lily was their inspiration; Robert was their conscience; Warren was their ambassador to the outside world. So deeply was each child connected to the other two that each one’s loyalty was unconsidered, their mutual devotion fundamental.

  But as they grew older, and by the time they were putting on their puppet shows for children’s birthdays and at the county fair, Robert himself was unable to recall or name the quicksilver charisma Lily possessed that had captured his sensibilities. As an adult, whenever he thought back about his childhood, he remembered Lily always in motion, full to the brim with ideas and energy, but he lost the ability to remember the incandescence with which she had imbued the long hours of his early days. And Warren, too, as he grew older, translated all the emotion of their passionate connection into a manageable version of nothing more than a warm childhood friendship. Only Lily, left behind at the age of twelve when the boys went off to boarding school, understood that it was she alone who was likely to lose the underpinnings of the pleasure of her life, and she was single-minded in her determination that nothing of the sort would happen.

  Lillian Marshal Scofield and Robert Crane Butler were married in her father’s garden in an extravagant ceremony on a very hot Saturday in the summer of 1913. In spite of the heat and a long dry spell that caused the broad catalpa leaves to lose their lazy flutter, to pucker and droop a bit; in spite of a succession of cloudless, dusty days that dulled the glisten of all the foliage in the garden, the wedding was as splendid as Leo Scofield had hoped it would be.

  There is a way in which a town the size of Washburn, Ohio, with perhaps six thousand residents, comes to a collective judgment, and communally the town had become fond of Lily, who had been in residence all year round when she attended the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. She was among them as she gradually lost her childhood look of frailty and took on a wiry athleticism. Nevertheless, even during her late adolescence, Lily was eclipsed by the celebrated beauty of her mother and aunt—the former Marshal sisters—and by her distinguished and handsome father, her two tall, striking uncles, and especially by her constant summer companions, Robert Butler and her astonishingly good-looking cousin Warren.

  No one knew how or why Lily Scofield and Robert Butler decided, in December of 1912, that they would marry the following summer when he returned from New England, where he had gone to college. He had stayed on as an instructor at Harvard to continue his studies and to teach for several academic years. No one knew the details, but, on the other hand, no one was particularly surprised. Lily had gone east to college, too, to Mount Holyoke in western Massachusetts, but had been at home again for almost three years, courted by several hopeful suitors, and she was nearly twenty-five years old.

  In fact, Robert had come home for a week that Christmas, and one morning he asked Lily to come along with him to Stradler’s Men’s Clothiers and help him select a gift for his father. He wanted to ask her advice about the right tack to take with a young woman he had seen a good deal of in Cambridge who was his good friend David Musgrave’s sister. The weather was crisp but not cold for December, and Lily had on a dark green suit and a brimmed hat that dipped over her face so that Robert could only catch glimpses of her expression. She carried a small, sleek brown muff from which she withdrew one hand or the other to illustrate some point. The muff intrigued him, with Lily’s pretty hands plunged into the brown fur, and then he caught sight of her wide orange-brown eyes under the hat brim and stopped still, putting his hand on her arm to make her hesitate. She turned back to glance at him, perplexed, peering out from under her dark, winged Scofield brows, which were so striking in contrast to the puff of bright blond Scofield hair beneath her hat. She was telling Robert all about her father and mother’s recent trip to Chicago, where everything had gone amiss.

  But Robert interrupted her. “Ah, well, Lily. Your father wouldn’t care if he was stranded in the middle of a desert as long as your mother was with him. I’ve never known a man to admire his wife as much as your father admires your mother,” Robert said. “With plenty of reason, of course,” he added. “But I don’t know when I’ve ever been in his company for very long without hearing him talk of those ‘Marshal girls.’ Of the day he first met your mother. Their ‘blue gaze,’ he calls it. I’ve always remembered that phrase.”

  Claire Musgrave had wide, sweet blue eyes. But as he gazed at Lily it suddenly seemed to him that there was no glance more engaging than Lily’s warm, golden brown consideration. He was disconcerted for a moment thinking of himself and Claire Musgrave closed away together in a tall house somewhere in Cambridge or Boston whil
e Lily carried on, both participating in and wryly observing the familiar life around her. He stood there with Lily and all at once found himself bereft at the idea of being always away from her.

  “Why, Lily,” he said, “Lily? I wonder if you’d ever think of marrying me?” Lily’s expression was no longer vexed; she had assumed a placid look of waiting as she gave him her full attention. She wasn’t exactly assessing him, but he saw that she was waiting to hear more. He was still catching up to what he had already said. He hadn’t had any idea that he was going to ask Lily to marry him, although he didn’t have a single qualm now that the words had been said. In fact, all the disparities and loose ends of his life suddenly seemed to cohere and his world to settle into its proper orbit.

  “You’re the smartest girl I know, Lily,” he went on, in an attempt to explain. “It’s not long before you realize that the world’s full of pretty girls. Everyone I knew at school seemed to have a sister. A pretty cousin… but none with a mind like yours. Or your sense of… honor. In all the time I’ve known you—well, my whole life—I’ve never heard you say an unkind thing about a single person! You’d be surprised to hear a girl say terrible things about someone who’s supposed to be her dearest friend.” But Lily still stood quietly, looking at him with a mildly curious expression, so he tried to make it clear even to himself.

  “There’s no other girl I’ve ever met who I could ever care so much about. I must have always been in love with you.” And though he was startled to hear himself say it he knew at once that it was the truth—so vigorous and absolute that suddenly the possibility of her refusal became dreadful. “I don’t know that I’d ever be happy if I thought I’d go through my whole life and you wouldn’t be with me. I think that all my life… Well, I can’t imagine there would ever in the world be anyone else I would ask to marry me.”