The Evidence Against Her Read online

  It was a dark, ominously glistening oil painting, larger than life-size, of a stiff-looking young woman with worrisomely pink skin, a very green dress, and hands that blurred into the folds of her skirt. It never dawned on any of her children that it was not at all a good painting and bore only a slight resemblance to their mother; they took Catherine at her word that it was a fair representation of herself as a handsome young girl. It never occurred to them not to believe wholeheartedly in her former beauty. But neither Catherine herself, as she stood before the mirror hastily pinning her hair in a loose knot, nor Agnes, nor either of the middle boys, as they glanced at their mother to gauge the temperature of her mood, thought much about what she looked like in the moment.

  The two middle Claytor children, Richard and Howard, were such a united front—only thirteen months apart—that they managed pretty well to be sufficient unto themselves; they wanted nothing to do with their mother. They had grasped her unreliability as a safe harbor, and they were far more likely to count on each other in any case. But Agnes and Edson were weighed down with a sense of their mother’s mysterious, inexorable, free-floating grief; they were unhappily aware of her fragility and vulnerability, and, therefore, their connection to her was a stickier business altogether. Agnes felt responsible for her mother, but in 1917, Edson, at ten years old, was too young not to be tantalized by the infrequent evidence of his mother as a woman to whom he was dear. He was heartbroken by and infatuated with what seemed to him the tragedy of his mother’s life.

  And also at age ten he was suddenly disenchanted with his sister, Agnes. Whenever his mother was driven into a rage at Agnes’s flamboyance—at the attention she drew to herself when she served coffee to her father’s guests, for example— Edson counted it against his sister, too. It seemed to him that she was forever bringing trouble down upon their heads. All three of her brothers thought Agnes was bossy. Their mother was often truly frightening, but Agnes just made them mad.

  Agnes knew why those men loitering on the porch paid attention to her; she had discovered that she was at an age that attracted attention. But she wasn’t sure if she was pretty or not, although she knew that neither of her parents thought so. If her mother was in one of her dark moods, she muttered over Agnes’s hair, blaming Agnes for its coarse, dark, curly profusion, saying she didn’t know how Agnes could bear to be seen in public with hair exactly like some gypsy or colored girl and skin the color of pea soup.

  Her mother’s disappointment in her only daughter’s looks had been a theme in Agnes’s life as far back as she could remember, and she had long ago accommodated her deep shame at her exuberant hair and the awful, yellowish cast of her skin. She bound her breasts with a length of muslin beneath her camisole in an effort to deflect attention, in a hopeless attempt to shape her figure into one of long-limbed, willowy elegance her mother would approve. She reminded herself to be guarded around the girls at school who seemed to admire her, because she knew that they must be insincere. Agnes knew that she would seem foolish if she ever appeared to believe in or rely on her own attractiveness. And she was grateful sometimes, in softer moments, when her mother was less direct and seemed to find Agnes’s appearance tolerable.

  She eventually discounted entirely the opinion of William Dameron, whose father managed the Claytor farm and who was two years older than she. They had been playmates outside of school all during their childhood; they had established a secret meeting place beneath the willows beside the creek, had spent hours constructing camouflaged hideouts where they could elude “the others”—William’s older sister, Bernice, and all their younger brothers, none of whom was particularly interested in finding them. Agnes and William Dameron spent many concentrated hours of their young lives together, but William retreated to little more than a distant sort of cordiality when he reached his teens, and Agnes didn’t think much about it because she had new involvements herself once she started school at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls.

  But William had sought her out the day before he left for Canada to join the RCAF in the summer of 1916 and found her outside sitting in the swing by the croquet court. She had visited the Damerons’ house with her family a few days earlier to wish him good-bye and good luck. Mrs. Dameron had served cake, and the occasion had been fairly festive, but Agnes hadn’t had a chance to speak to him alone, and she was glad to see him. They talked about his sister Bernice, who was at Oberlin College and hadn’t been at home when the Claytors visited. William asked her about what she planned after her last year at school, and they just talked comfortably for a little while.

  William lounged against the tree with his arms folded across his chest. “I hope you understand about my joining up,” he said to her, and she looked back at him pleasantly enough; she didn’t say that she hadn’t given it much thought one way or another. “You know, it’s not that I especially want to get into the war, Agnes, but America’s going to be in it soon enough. It makes sense to me to sign up while I have a chance to get into flying. They’ll take anyone who’ll sign up. What I mean is, I don’t have any experience, but it won’t matter. I’m good with engines. I’ll get the chance to train to be a pilot right off the bat! But it’s not like these fellows who just want to get into the war because it seems like an adventure. Or that they . . . Well, I don’t know what they’re thinking, of course, but what I mean is that I don’t have some grand idea about the whole thing. I didn’t want you to think that. I didn’t just decide out of the blue. It wasn’t some sort of idea of being a hero. I do think it’s important. I think it’s the right thing to do. But now that I’m about to leave it’s hard to know what will happen. It’s hard to know when I’ll see my family again. Or when I’ll see you, either.”

  Agnes didn’t comment. She thought he was being melodramatic in spite of himself, and she was embarrassed for him. “In fact, I expect you’ll be married by the time I get back,” he said, less like a statement than a question, although his tone didn’t register on Agnes because she was so surprised. She didn’t say anything for a moment; she just studied him to see if he was serious.

  “William! Married! Oh, for goodness sake! You know I’m thinking about going on to Oberlin, too. . . . I don’t know, though. . . . Mama thinks it’s just a waste of time. . . .” Agnes lost track of their conversation for a moment, twisting the ropes of the swing as she turned in the direction of the house. But then she came back to the moment and let the swing come around again so that she was facing William. “Married!” She frowned in concentration as she looked up to see if she could read his expression—to see if he was teasing her. “I’m not likely to be getting married, William,” she said with a little sarcasm, in case he was making fun of her, “since I don’t even have a beau.”

  “That may be,” William said, “but it’s just because none of the girls at Gilchrest pay any attention to boys. Agnes, I don’t think the war will be over very soon. It might be years.” Even though they hadn’t seen much of each other in the past few years day to day, Agnes still thought of William as her good friend, and he was so grave just now that he seemed to Agnes to be imitating a grown-up. He sounded suspiciously self-important. “Someone will snap you up in no time while I’m gone, I bet. You’re the prettiest girl in your class at Gilchrest.”

  She pushed off gently with her foot so that the swing moved back and forth a few feet each way, and peered up at him with annoyance. “Oh, William, don’t be silly! Please don’t say anything like that.” She waved her hand in a signal of dismissal. “I don’t like to think about any of that. . . .” And she meant it absolutely—it made her uncomfortable since she knew that what he said couldn’t be true. On the other hand, a little corner of her mind was curious to know who he thought was prettier than she in some other class at Linus Gilchrest Institute. “Anyway, I’m not a jar of peaches, you know. To be snapped up off a shelf or something.”

  And at that William finally fell right out of the earnest air of solemnity that had made Agnes a little scornful�
��it was absurd, somehow, in this friend of her childhood. He grinned widely. “Hah! Close enough. And a lot more tempting.”

  She wasn’t flattered; she was shocked and also suspicious, and she stopped the swing abruptly and hopped off. She stood right in front of him, looking up at his face. He had a loose, smiling expression that she hadn’t seen before, and she was angry at suddenly feeling uneasy. “Oh, William! Please don’t talk like that.” She watched as he glanced away, and she was interested to realize that he was nice looking. All the Damerons, she thought, were rangy and nice looking, with square, regular faces and sandy brown hair.

  “Well, I was only teasing you,” he said apologetically, and then he grinned. “I never even liked put-up peaches. I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “You know what, though, Agnes? This is just what I think makes sense for me to do. I’m not sorry. . . . But last night just sitting at the table eating dinner I realized how long it might be before I got back. I’m ready to go. . . . I can hardly wait to get into an airplane! I’ll tell you that! But last night I wanted not to be going, too. I knew you’d be the only person I could tell that to. I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.” She was embarrassed now, herself, to see that he was moved by his own plight.

  “Oh, William, you’ll be fine,” she said, surprising herself with the nervous sound of her enthusiasm. “If anyone can take care of himself it’s you. You should hear Richard and Howie talk about you. They’d give anything to be doing what you’re doing. Everyone is proud of you. Oh, everyone thinks it’s brave of you!” That wasn’t true; Agnes’s father thought William was being reckless, thought he was foolish to hurry into action. “He’ll have plenty of time to get killed for his own country,” her father had said just the night before, without heat; in fact his voice had been subdued.

  But Agnes was simply saying what seemed appropriate to the occasion while simultaneously taking account of what William had said about her, and her head filled up with new considerations and possibilities about herself as he saw her. She wanted time to turn this over in her mind, to go over every word, sift through every syllable. Agnes got so wrapped up in this new and tempting image of herself that William Dameron walked home across the fields just as horrified by the rash action he had taken as when he had set out to find her that afternoon. Any admiration of him on her part might have been reassuring, might have put a stop to the jangling onslaught of second thoughts. He went off to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, and eventually to fight in France, with no more than a cheerful good-bye and good wishes from Agnes.

  When Agnes brought home the highest marks of anyone in her class, her father said to her that he was glad to see she was developing a good character, that she was becoming a sensible girl. He said that there was nothing more admirable in a young woman. “Even if you’ll never be the beauty your mother was,” he said, which didn’t faze Agnes at just that moment when she was so gratified by a bit of praise, but which, curiously, caused her mother’s temper to darken into fury. Catherine Claytor roamed the house in such a bleak state of undirected anger that her children scattered and stayed out of the way. “Not the beauty! Not the beauty!” Her mother lengthened and scorned every nuance of the word—“bee-yew-tee”—exulting in her own bitter articulation. “None of you have the slightest idea . . .” Their father, though, had his mind on other things, and Catherine’s angry fluster blew all around him but left him untouched.

  Agnes kept to herself the memory of the moment she had stood to recite at school and Miss McCrory had commented that Agnes was like nothing so much as a blossoming rose. Whenever she thought of it she reminded herself that the other girls in class had looked on amiably with no evidence of disagreement. Agnes knew she was fairly well liked, but this remarkable vision Miss McCrory had conjured up was a piece of evidence about herself that she tucked away to be examined later. She had made an effort not to give any sign of the deep pleasure she felt at the possibility of her own prettiness.

  In fact, though, Agnes was not anything at all like a rose— at least nothing like the popular hybrid teas, so difficult to grow. She wasn’t tall, nor was she elegant, nor in any way stately. At eighteen her figure was full-blown and so were her features— wide-set and large, with flaring eyebrows so that her round, dark eyes were startling. She was more like a peony, perhaps, uncommonly lush and vivid, although very few people would ever think to compare Agnes to a flower, because there was something about her appearance that was blunt and absolute and that negated the notion of fragility associated with anything floral. She didn’t resemble anyone in her family, and sometimes when she studied herself in the mirror she thought she might be beautiful in a way that no one else recognized; other times she thought she was grotesque. The Claytor sensibility on the subject of physical beauty was shaped entirely by Catherine, and in her household there was short shrift given to any idea of a middle ground.

  One Saturday in late September of 1917, Warren Scofield and Lily Butler visited the Claytor place and stayed on for some time, sitting in the front parlor. The two of them had ridden out on horseback, because Lily Butler loved to ride and needed an outing. Her husband was overseas, stationed in France, she said, at the field artillery training base in Saumur.

  Lily was animated and chatty, but it wasn’t really a social visit; Warren was particularly anxious to discuss the needs of Scofields & Company now that they were under incessant pressure from the War Department to increase production, and he also had business to discuss in his capacity as a representative of the Fuel Administration. He had come to raise the possibility of reopening the coalfields on land Dwight Claytor owned near Zanesville, where Warren’s grandfather had worked as a young man in the 1830s, digging and hauling coal, in an enterprise that had eventually evolved into Scofields & Company. The Fuel Administration had pegged the price of coal at a high level, and Warren hoped to persuade Dwight Claytor that not only the price but the political capital gained by such an undertaking would make it worth the complicated and time-consuming logistics entailed.

  Warren had been required by the War Department to remain in Washburn, Lily told them, in order to oversee the conversion of Scofields & Company to the exclusive manufacture of high-capacity presses to forge large guns and other war matériel. The fact that Lily herself was so familiar with the operation was enormously impressive to Agnes, who did think to slip out of the room for a moment to organize some refreshments.

  The discussion had become technical and grave, though, and Agnes eventually grew tense and anxious on behalf of her mother, who had nothing to contribute to the conversation. Even with the furor everywhere over the war, it remained an abstraction to Catherine Claytor, and although she didn’t seem bored, Agnes took note of her mother’s placid expression, unanimated even by disdain. Agnes was pained at her mother’s beige passiveness in the face of Lily Butler’s startlingly clever blondness, and Agnes was also worried that her mother might perceive her own social ineptitude, as Lily’s quick hands sketched neatly through the air illustrating whatever she said. In later years, whenever Agnes remembered that afternoon, she wondered how it was that Warren Scofield had not caught her attention when he was no farther away than across the room from her, and she generally put it down to Lily’s nearly aggressive liveliness and intelligence.

  Agnes had escaped the room as soon as she could without being rude, counting it a strike against herself that she was deserting her mother. She wandered outside and sat in the swing that hung from the big oak at the edge of the croquet court and watched her brothers set up the wickets under the cloud-streaked pale blue sky. She pushed the swing idly, just enough motion to flutter her skirt a bit. She was dreamily watching her own feet as she stepped them in patterns in the sparse grass beneath the swing.

  “Agnes!” Edson was standing under an apple tree on the other side of the court. “If you won’t play then it won’t be any fun. We want to play partners.”

  “No, Eddie. I’m too lazy.”

  She continued to
push the swing languidly, in slow circles, when she noticed that Howie and Richard were stuffing their pockets with fallen apples behind Edson’s back. She stood and began to amble casually along her side of the croquet court, stooping now and then to gather a handful of small green apples herself. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the boys and at just the right moment wheeled and pelted Howard and Richard with perfect aim. Richard ducked behind a tree. They shouted in protest: Agnes could throw like a bullet, and apples came flying in her direction while she scrabbled for more ammunition, exclaiming and protesting.

  “No fair! No fair!” she called. “It’s three against one!” She ran back toward the house and slipped behind a tree herself, having managed to grab only four more apples before being bombarded. She glanced out at her brothers and leapt back as they took aim.

  For the rest of her life Agnes could recall even the scent of those apples at the moment when she had turned and noticed Warren Scofield, perhaps twenty yards away, standing at an angle to her, saying good-bye to her parents. At a distance he was a sweep of yellow hair and dark brows as he briefly pivoted on the porch steps after shaking hands with her father. Before she gave it a second thought, Agnes drew her arm back and released a searing shot that caught him right between his shoulder blades.

  Warren turned in surprise and stared at her, and then he bent and picked up that hard, green apple and inspected it before polishing it on his sleeve. He took a bite with a somber expression, and the working of his mouth and throat, for nearly a minute on that last Saturday of September in 1917, was the only motion in the world as far as Agnes knew.

  Chapter Three

  IN THE CLAYTOR HOUSEHOLD it had always been perfectly clear that Agnes was her father’s daughter, that Richard and Howie were aligned more with each other than with either of their parents, and that Edson remained besotted with his mother. All the children had gone through a time of yearning after their mother, who had lavished affectionate attention on each one of them now and then, but Agnes’s happiest idea of her childhood involved her father. By the time she was five or six years old, he had often taken her along with him to business or political meetings at the Eola Arms Hotel in Washburn. She was thrilled to be included and had no idea that her excited leave-taking had been perceived by her mother as a bewildering rejection of herself.