The Evidence Against Her Read online

Lily and Robert traveled east for their wedding trip. Lily wanted to go to the galleries and museums in New York, where she had missed the sensational opening of the Armory Show in February. Several of her friends who lived in New York had written her about it, and Robert had thought it was astonishing. They spent several days in South Hadley, Massachusetts, visiting friends and teachers of Lily’s, and then they went on to Boston so Lily could meet some of Robert’s friends she didn’t yet know.

  Robert’s circle of Harvard friends, an educated but unknowingly provincial bunch, sitting around a table at Madson’s in Cambridge, listening to Lily and watching her small, slender hands fly as she spoke, eagerly promised to visit Robert and Lily in Washburn once they were settled. Robert had been offered and had accepted a teaching position in the English department at Harcourt Lees college. Robert’s friends—just like the girls who first encountered Lily at Mount Holyoke—were surprised to find themselves mesmerized by this glittery-bright girl from the middle of nowhere, and they inevitably concluded that Ohio must be a far more sophisticated and delightful place than they had imagined.

  Three weeks after their departure, Robert and Lily wired Warren. They sent the telegram the morning of the day they took the Boston packet to Tenants Harbor, Maine. The family of Lily’s maid of honor, Marjorie Hockett, who was Lily’s dearest friend from college, had offered the newlyweds the use of their empty farmhouse through the end of August. The note Lily and Robert sent was a clever sort of message:

  HAVE TOO MUCH FUN STOP YOU MUST USE SOME UP STOP

  DO NOT HESITATE STOP WE ARE LOST STOP

  It bore Lily’s stamp of airy playfulness, and she later claimed that she had had her fill of culture and was sure that Robert would want more company than she was interested in providing to investigate the natural wonders of the Maine coast. Of course she didn’t say—even to herself in any organized way—that she had been taken aback by Robert’s passionate interest in her. She was flattered, and sometimes taken by surprise by simple physical pleasure, but by and large she found so much attention a little tedious, often absurd. It wasn’t entirely unlike the one time at Mount Holyoke that Marjorie Hockett had leaned over—as they sat on Lily’s bed studying—and kissed Lily lightly on the neck just behind her ear. A sizzling sort of thrill had shot through Lily, and she turned her head toward Marjorie, who kissed her lips very gently. But all of a sudden Lily had thought: What’s this? For goodness sake! This is only Marjorie!

  With Robert she often had to battle down the same notion, and she sometimes thought she would enjoy all of lovemaking much more if she were with an utter stranger. Familiarity bred in Lily a peculiar kind of self-consciousness. But she never let these thoughts coalesce; she never let them come into sharp focus. And she really did believe Robert would enjoy Warren’s company. She thought it would be a good thing to have Warren among them. It would be a distraction, and Warren would love to go along with Robert for all the exploring he wanted to do. Also, Lily had great hopes of Warren and Marjorie getting to know each other even better. They had enjoyed each other’s company during all the business of the wedding.

  As she had explained to Robert’s friends, and as she declared with slight variations when she and Robert returned to Ohio, “I love a game of golf, you know. Or tennis or croquet. Any sort of cards. Oh, I’ll play just about anything. It doesn’t matter to me if I’m any good at it. I like almost any sort of competition. But I don’t think I possess a single bit of adventurousness,” she said of herself ruefully.

  “If it had been up to me I’d still be standing on my one wretched square foot of earth somewhere in England, struggling to subsist on whatever pitiful things I could coax from the kitchen garden. I’ve always liked the sound of that—a kitchen garden—and I’m going to be sure to have one of my own. Well! I probably already do. If there’s a garden to be planted, I’m sure my father will have done it!” This bit was left out in her retelling back home in Washburn, but she had made great characters of her delightful parents in the little stories she spun out for her school friends and any of Robert’s acquaintances who gathered around the couple during their stay in Boston.

  When Lily and Robert and Warren returned to Washburn the first week of September, the three of them were filled with amusing anecdotes, sitting out in Leo’s garden, where Lily and her mother had strung Japanese lanterns. Once back home, Lily merely turned the tables and with quick, clever verbal twists managed to portray even the least interesting of their East Coast friends as wonderful characters, full of endearing idiosyncrasies. Lily told a good tale, and Robert always sat looking on with a little smile of contentment.

  She claimed to her family and friends in Ohio that she couldn’t have endured alone so much nature as they encountered in Maine. She knew Robert would want company, she said, on his hikes and outings, but she wanted to enjoy the scenery—at least when Marjorie Hockett visited—from the comfort of a chair set out under the trees. The Hocketts lived nearby, in a handsome old house overlooking the village and harbor of Port Clyde, where Lily had visited them several times during her years at Mount Holyoke.

  “Oh, no! I would never have made an explorer,” she insisted when her Washburn friends protested that they didn’t know anyone more likely than she to relish a hike through the wilderness, a chance to discover a mysterious cove, some out-of-the-way place. “I might have been quite shocking, say, insisting on playing polo—having a pony of my own.” And the company in the garden laughed at the idea of tiny little Lily on some great horse, swinging a huge mallet about determinedly, with that peculiar air of insistence with which she went at any game.

  “Or taking a turn at cricket,” she added, to further laughter. “I can’t ever resist trying something if there’s any chance in the world that I might win. But I’d never have had the courage to venture into foreign territory. You know, I think it would be really frightening not to know the country. The customs and . . . well, it would be tedious, too. But anyway, I simply know I wouldn’t have the patience or the forbearance or the courage. If I’d been born whenever the first Marshals emigrated I would have had to be orphaned. Staying behind and begging crusts of bread in the street. I wouldn’t ever have set foot on any one of those little ships.”

  Lily was cheerfully self-deprecating. Everyone who knew her became fondly possessive of the shortcomings she found in herself, translated as they were into her own particular and amusing eccentricities, which she confided unabashedly and with charming chagrin. Everyone but her uncle John, who had never been fond of his brother’s daughter. Who always said to his wife or to Warren that she reminded him of nothing so much as a scrawny hen that won’t lay. “Pecking about and squawking, but not worth the feed it takes to keep her.”

  It was one of the few provocations that elicited a sharp rebuke from Lillian Scofield, whose namesake Lily was. “I won’t have you say such a thing! Not another word!” Lillian never did realize that when she faced her husband down he backed off, just as he always did regarding his niece.

  “Well, Lillian! Of the three of them . . . Even you’ve got to admit she’s the runt of that litter, and . . .”

  “I’ll leave the room! I really will not hear another word of this, Mr. Scofield! You’re speaking unkindly of someone very dear to me. . . . Why, John! She’s my namesake! She’s Audra’s daughter. She might just as well be my own daughter!”

  And Warren would notice that under the force of his mother’s genuine pique his father would immediately become his most beguiling, his voice softening into a melodious wheedling. “Ah, my,” he would sigh. “Well, Lillian. I suppose I ought to work harder at being a charitable man. But that girl is just slippery. . . . All right. All right. But my lack of . . . gallantry . . . well, it’s truly your fault.” And he would hunch his shoulders in a shrug of helplessness, hands spread wide apart and palms outward to illustrate the uselessness of any attempt to behave otherwise. “I do have to say that any woman has a hard time winning even a bit of my heart in comparison to
you. You haven’t changed since the day I met you. Won’t you forgive me? Isn’t there anyone in my own household who loves me just a little? Unkind—plain stupid—as I may be?”

  Warren hated being in the company of his parents when his father’s tone implied an extenuating and intimate connection between them. Lillian Scofield would soften and laugh a little, and Warren would be embarrassed for and even unreasonably angry at his mother, surprised each time at the evidence of her credulity. As an adult, Warren, too, objected to any criticism of Lily, but when he was a little boy it had been impossible for Warren not to be relieved to know his father favored him over his cousin.

  Nor did Lily’s lighthearted self-incrimination appeal to her mother-in-law, Martha Butler, who, pregnant and frighteningly seasick, had traveled with her husband to Brazil and then Cuba, where he had been entirely ineffective at the mission of founding Methodist schools for girls, but where she had given birth to Robert’s two older siblings, both of whom were engaged in similarly unnerving work in South America. She believed— but couldn’t pin the idea down enough even to mention it to her husband—that in some way Lily was tossing off her mother-in-law’s own desperate housewifery in those hot and foreign places as an unnecessary—a foolish—sacrifice. She always thought that Lily was making an oblique disparagement, was indirectly—and, of course, unwittingly—belittling her.

  “It’s amazing to me that I could be even distantly related to someone who knowingly took a risk like that! Just sailing off to who knows where,” Lily would carry on, and when the conversation got that far Martha Butler would look down at her hands folded in her lap and find herself restraining tears. “Leaving everything familiar behind. Well! And for that matter, someone who shouldered on even then—even after reaching land—to the wilds of Ohio!” Lily hadn’t noticed her mother-in-law’s dismay, but it was true that Lily had never forgiven Mrs. Butler for the subtle disapproval she had aimed Lily’s way when Lily was just a little girl, unable to make a case for herself as a suitable companion for Mrs. Butler’s last and favorite child.

  It was Warren and Robert who were pressed about details of what became their most popular story, since Lily’s role in it seemed so unlikely. The two men had come back from a daylong hike along the rocks, clear around Herring Gut Point to the lighthouse, where they got soaked by spray and had very nearly been trapped by the tide. They had returned to the farmhouse to discover that Lily and Marjorie had spread a cloth in the yard under the trees and set out a picnic of cold fried chicken and a miraculous lemon meringue pie. “Well, we were mighty glad to see that chicken,” Robert said. “We were as sorry for ourselves and just as pitiful as two wet dogs.”

  Warren teasingly described the pie, the height of the meringue, its peaks of browned gloss, the unparalleled lightness and delicacy of the crust. “By then,” he said, “we had blueberries coming out of our ears. There’s not enough good that can be said for a fine, tart lemon pie.” And Lily smiled indulgently.

  “But Lily never wanted to cook anything in her life,” her mother always interjected. “She was such a little tomboy. You mean to tell me Lily dressed that bird? Cut up and fried a chicken? You mean to tell me Lily made a pie?” her mother always asked, in a voice full of disbelief and a kind of tender musing.

  The three of them described taking the little white mail boat to Monhegan Island, the beauty of the coast seen from the water. And to Lily’s mother’s horror, they described what they claimed were extraordinary meals prepared for them by the woman the Hocketts had found at Leo’s behest to come in and clean and fix supper for the newlyweds and any guests they might have. Cod tongues and sounds and cheeks, Lily and Robert and Warren insisted, were delicacies indeed, although it made Audra Scofield shiver to hear about it. And finnan haddie. Why, it was wonderfully delicious, smoked over an alder fire under a hogshead. “I don’t believe I ever knew there were as many things to do with fish,” Robert declared, amused a little at his own landlocked bias.

  “And thank goodness for that,” his mother-in-law murmured.

  One morning Marjorie had arrived in her father’s big Regal auto with a picnic basket packed, but she and Lily ended up driving over muddy roads for miles, Lily said, while Warren and Robert devised a game of chess without a chessboard, drawing out and studying each successive move on a piece of paper. “The only time that afternoon I could persuade them to do a bit of sightseeing was when we all had to pile out while one or the other of them fixed a flat tire,” Lily said with feigned disgust. “And I’ve never seen such roads. Why, we drove through small lakes, it seemed to me. But we went along the cove road and ate lunch at a spot where we could watch the beautiful sloops. Oh, they’re sleek! They move like arrows through the water. We could see all the way to Matinicus!”

  Everyone listened to these stories with real attention. At the heart of the abiding interest in every detail, of course, even among slight acquaintances, was the fact that Warren Scofield had joined the Butlers on their wedding trip, and that neither Robert nor Lily nor Warren ever satisfactorily explained the reason why. The people of Washburn silently pitied poor Warren Scofield, clearly so grieved by the loss of his cousin Lily— the love of his life—to the bed of his closest friend. And it was tacitly agreed that Robert and Lily Butler had pitied him, too, and had offered him the sad consolation of joining them for a visit after they had spent the first ardent weeks of their marriage alone. The situation was still fraught with the possibility of further developments. And trifling as they were, the stories the three of them told were incorporated in the town’s communal, unrecorded history as a point of reference, to be reconsidered, if need be, in case anything else in the lives of those three became mysterious. Because Lily and Robert and Warren were young then, and anything might happen.

  Chapter Two

  AGNES CLAYTOR had just turned fourteen years old at the time of Lily Scofield and Robert Butler’s marriage, and although her family had been guests at the wedding, it might be that her parents were the only two people in the area on whom nothing of the little drama of that ceremony registered, nor would they have been interested in the details of the wedding trip. And at age fourteen, neither had Agnes thought much one way or another about Lily Scofield’s wedding.

  Early on that hot June day of 1913, Agnes had been buttoned up in a long-waisted organdy dress not pastel but so gently colored that it was as though the cloth held only a suggestion of the color blue. At first she was delighted with the romance of the airy flounce of its skirt. When she had slipped the freshly ironed, still warm dress over her head, the roof of her mouth prickled with the clean, scorched smell of the starched, fragile fabric, and her mind’s eye filled with a vision of herself as a graceful and delicate creature. But during the ceremony, when the dress wilted and drooped in the heat, making her uncomfortable with its damp scratchiness around her neck, that happy idea evaporated, and she lost interest in the whole affair.

  She had turned to watch the procession as the bridesmaids and flower girls and finally Lily and her father came down the aisle, but Agnes hadn’t noticed Warren Scofield’s reaction. Certainly she had heard the incident recounted many times in the weeks following the wedding, but since it wasn’t a story that anyone told to her directly—was simply one of those anecdotes that are loose in the air of a community—she had let any intricacy of detail just drift right by her.

  A year later, though, by the time Agnes was fifteen and her friends at school began to be interested in everything about any wedding, what impressed Agnes most was when Lucille Drummond told her that Mr. Leo Scofield had imported forty-five dozen roses, that he had them shipped from New York in a special rail car just to be woven into the arbor under which Reverend Butler had performed the ceremony. “That would be five hundred and forty roses,” Lucille pointed out, “just for that one day. But they wilted almost before the end of the ceremony. By the end of the day they were just as limp as string.”

  Agnes was also impressed when Lucille reminded her of th
e terrible heat of the week of the wedding. “So Mr. Scofield had sixteen full-grown trees dug up from out in the country—they were huge, and they all had to be just the same height! They had to match exactly!” Lucille said. “He had them planted in two rows so that his daughter wouldn’t have to have that sun full on her in the hottest part of the day. Not on the bridesmaids, either, of course. And Lily Butler had two little flower girls. Well . . .” Lucille’s voice became solemn. “She’s Mr. Scofield’s only child, so even if he did overdo it a little . . . It took more than twelve men working for three full days just to get everything ready on time!”

  Lucille’s family had only moved to town a few months before the wedding and hadn’t really done more at that point than make the acquaintance of the Scofield family, but Lucille remembered that her father had sent a team and wagon over to Scofields on the Tuesday of the week of the wedding and hadn’t gotten the return of them until Sunday, the day after the ceremony, although Lucille did say his mules had been well taken care of.

  And, really, Lucille was not lying. Everything she described was as clear in her head as if she had seen it herself. The idea she had of the Scofield-Butler wedding was vivid and was made up of any number of bits of conversations, vague impressions, grand reinterpretations of various occasions. Lucille’s sister Celia, for instance, had once told the tale of a friend of hers whose fiancé had arranged for a crate of oysters and three dozen roses to be shipped to her by train from Philadelphia. And Mr. Drummond had sent a team and wagon around Monument Square to help out when the Scofield wagon had become mired in mud one spring with its burden of a new piano for Audra Scofield, although Lucille had been in Columbus visiting her sister Grace at the time. Also, of course, Lucille had heard her sisters rehashing various accounts of Lily Butler’s wedding: the bumblebees under the arbor, the overlong bridal procession as Lily and her father made their way beneath that avenue of trees while the guests sweltered in the garden.