The Evidence Against Her Page 6

  Dwight Claytor wasn’t a sentimental or doting sort of father, but he solemnly held her dining chair for her—and all the other businessmen or politicians stood politely, looking on with real or feigned indulgence—until he assured himself that his daughter was comfortably seated. And Agnes was so careful in her best dress and uncomfortable dress-up shoes to be well-behaved, to keep her elbows off the table, to place her knife and fork exactly right on her plate when she was done, that the other men relievedly forgot about her and leaned forward on their elbows, jabbing at the air with an index finger—or a cigar streaming pale curls of smoke—to make a point.

  In the middle of one heated conversation in the hotel dining room, silence fell over the table as coffee was served, and even at age six Agnes was aware of the tension in the pause during the general rustle of resettling. Finally Agnes felt compelled to speak up in that palpably hostile silence, “President Roosevelt never will reduce the tariffs or do anything about banking reform.” And the men leaned back in their chairs with explosive and admiring laughter all around, all except her father, who nodded at her thoughtfully. The others looked at her earnest, round eyes in her serious six-year-old face surrounded by masses of curly black hair and peppered the two Claytors with murmurings of approval.

  “Aha! Like father like daughter . . .”

  “. . . should get the vote . . .”

  “. . . cute as a bug and smart as a whip!”

  Whenever Agnes rode alongside her father in the buggy or in his motorcar he discussed these things with her. He had laid out the need for a railroad-regulation bill. Her father was angry about what he felt was the president’s failure to see the urgency of satisfying the Middle West’s desire for more control of corporations, or to understand the region’s need for direct election of senators. And on that issue, her father told her, Roosevelt really didn’t grasp the mood of the Far West, either.

  On those long rides her father also asked her about her own life. He wanted to know what she liked in school, and he listened with grave attention—he listened without one bit of condescension. Once, when she named the birds of Ohio that she had learned from a book at school, he pulled up on Newark Road and dexterously folded a bird out of a flat sheet of newspaper to illustrate to her how it achieved flight. And although Agnes failed to grasp the principle, she never, ever forgot the sight of her father loping along the dusty road with the paper bird raised above his head to show her how its wings would work as it lifted off the ground.

  When she returned home with him from these outings, however, her mother would stalk and find her alone somewhere. Catherine would be beside herself. “He only takes you along because it makes a good impression. It’s only that it amuses people now. It hasn’t got a thing to do with you. He doesn’t take you with him because he cares one bit about how you feel. You ought to know that. You’ll find that out soon enough!”

  “Don’t say that, Mama!” Agnes would plead. “Don’t say that!” But even though her mother never recanted, Agnes didn’t entirely believe her. When she had been Edson’s age—even younger than that, in fact—Agnes would watch for her father from her window in the afternoons when she knew he was due home. He would heave shut the barn door and then take a moment to adjust his coat, straighten his collar, carefully adjust his hat—make himself ready to face his own life. He would cross the yard deliberately, keeping to the path, and he would cough exactly two times midway to the door. Agnes would race down the back stairs to meet him, because he seemed to her somehow so sadly solitary. It had been impossible, too, for her not to court the one of her parents who seemed to like her best. But she spent long, agonized hours at night, awake in her bed, longing for her mother. Recounting any instance that might be interpreted as evidence that her mother loved her or at least approved of something about her.

  The day after Lily Butler and Warren Scofield’s visit, Dwight Claytor left early for Columbus, where he kept rooms at the Curtis Hotel while the legislature was in session, and Catherine Claytor grew restless in the waning hours of that Sunday afternoon in September. Edson followed worriedly in her wake as she drifted from room to room through the tail end of the day. At supper, when she was lost in some remote musing all her own, he became overly animated in anxiety, and when he knocked his water glass off the table, Agnes and the other two simply kept their heads down, but Catherine didn’t take much notice. “Just leave it, Edson. Don’t cut yourself. Mrs. Longacre will get Betsy to take care of it in the morning,” she said, and her older three children were—each one separately— ashamed to have felt a clutch of panic when the glass had shattered on the carpet in a series of subtly ringing, fragile little chinks.

  And, in fact, Agnes swept it up after she cleared the table, because she knew that Mrs. Longacre didn’t like any of the Claytors much except her father and perhaps Edson. Agnes never let herself browse for long in that particular region of her own deep shame. It had been she, when she was nearly ten years old, who had been so inept at taking care of Edson that when her father arrived home earlier than usual late one afternoon he had come into the house looking for his wife and had found Agnes desperately trying to quiet the baby. Agnes had been trying to coax Edson quiet through the bars of his crib, sitting back on her haunches to be at his level, holding up offerings of toys, but he had only turned his head back and forth frantically, with loud whoops of angry despair. Finally she had climbed into the crib with him, meaning only to rock him, because she wasn’t tall enough to lift him over its high sides, but she had resorted to a desperate jostling as his crying crescendoed in direct proportion to her efforts to calm him.

  She hadn’t even heard her father come up the stairs and had let out a shriek herself as he had clasped her by her upper arms, lifted her straight up over the railings, and set her on the floor. He had leaned down close to her face. “What are you doing to the baby, Agnes? What in the world are you doing? Where’s your mother?”

  Agnes didn’t know why she had been taking care of Edson at that moment or where her mother had been. She only remembered that her father had scooped the baby out of the crib, holding him with one arm, and taken hold of her own arm once more just above the elbow so that she straggled along with him down the stairs and out the front door. They went along the frailly established dirt path across the yard, catty-cornered over the field and through the vegetable garden of their old house, where the farm manager, Jerome Dameron, lived with his family, which included his mother-in-law, Mrs. Longacre. She was alone in the kitchen snapping peas when Dwight Claytor rapped at the back door.

  “We need some help up at our house, Mrs. Longacre,” her father said. That’s all Agnes remembered: the precision of each word as her father spoke in a soft, courteous, but chillingly brisk voice, and she never forgot Mrs. Longacre’s lengthy, inquiring, pursed-mouth scrutiny as she took a long look at Agnes and the baby.

  It was Mrs. Longacre who taught Agnes, and her brothers, too, when they were a little older, just the right way to make their beds so that the sheet didn’t come loose in the middle of the night. And it was she who tore all the bedclothes off any child’s bed left unmade and dropped them for that child to find in a tumbled heap on the floor as she made her morning rounds through their rooms, straightening up and putting away the ironing that Betsy Graves left each evening in the pantry. It was Mrs. Longacre who was appalled when the Claytor children came trundling into the front hall with their shoes still muddy, and it was she who, Monday through Friday, imposed as much regulation as was possible on Mr. Claytor’s household.

  It was also Mrs. Longacre’s sudden presence in the household that seemed to quell any possibility of joy Catherine Claytor still harbored. She was sullen and broody in the company of this other woman, insisting to her husband and her children that Mrs. Longacre was robbing them blind, that she had made off with two of Catherine’s grandmother’s silver spoons.

  “Catherine!” their father had exploded one evening, as she fell once again into this litany, and the c
hildren froze at his tone. It was in the first year Mrs. Longacre had taken over the running of the house. “What on earth can you be thinking? She has no use in the world for your silver spoons! She has plenty of silver spoons in her own house! And if you don’t understand that you must treat her with courtesy . . . She’s agreed to run this house, Catherine. I don’t know what we’ll do if she decides to leave! Her family are fine people. . . .” He sounded helpless for a moment, impatient, and dangerous with frustration. “You don’t seem to understand that it took some persuading. . . . She agreed to work for us, Catherine, but Mrs. Longacre is not your servant!”

  Catherine turned her head away, her eyes shocked, her mouth trembling, and the children—who just moments earlier had been hating the sound of their mother’s every word—at once turned mutinous against their father. Not one of them said anything, but they had all aimed stunned and reproachful faces his way—even the baby had looked up at him somberly in a dark surveillance. Dwight Claytor took them all in at a glance and slammed out the front door.

  However they felt about her one moment to the next, Catherine’s children did all understand early on that their mother was a victim of circumstance. Howie and Richard certainly believed her when she apologized for and tried to explain some injustice she had visited upon them. She would approach them somberly, bending her serious face to theirs, and wave her arm in a vague gesture and murmur on about this place, this wretched countryside.

  But neither Richard nor Howie remembered a time when he was not primarily connected to the other as an ally or an enemy. Both Agnes and Edson, however, had spent several years as tourists in their own family, isolated simply by their own childhoods, and they had a keener understanding of the fact that their mother resided in a foreign country. And all four of those children had learned from their mother that every square inch of the godforsaken state of Ohio was loathsome. There was simply nothing good that could be said about it.

  “This whole place,” Catherine once said to Agnes with ferocity when Agnes was just a little girl, “is just exactly as skinned looking as a peeled grape. It’s just a hateful place. All bare. The fields . . .” She had gestured widely outward to indicate the land rolling away beyond the yard. “Corn and corn and corn, and the trees as naked as jaybirds! It’s no surprise to me to meet the people who live here. It’s no surprise at all. Flat-minded people. No idea of graciousness in the world. Just to think of the sort of people—any people who would live with such weather . . .”

  Her mother had spoken to her conspiratorially, inclusively, but nevertheless, it had been an injury of a sort to Agnes, even then, and as she got older she understood it as one more indictment of her own personality. Because, of course, Agnes was a person who lived here, and Agnes suspected that her own thoughts and motives were very likely as insufficiently complicated—as flat and direct—as those of all the other Midwesterners at whom Catherine scoffed.

  Agnes did her best to honor her mother’s desperate grudge against the vast, blank idea of the region, but each year as the seasons changed, she was overtaken time and again by the drama of all the extraordinary Midwestern contrasts of hot and cold. The first morning each year when Agnes looked from her upstairs window at the bare, intricate, curly black branches of the old trees traced with snow that had accrued overnight without her knowledge, it astonished her.

  But Catherine Claytor hated the snow, and she would mutter through the house, personally affronted, so Agnes kept quiet. Nevertheless, and in spite of herself, Agnes never failed to be elated to find she had gone to sleep when the earth was camouflaged in subtle shades of gold and beige and brown, and had awakened in a world that shimmered silver. Agnes would stand and gaze out of her window as long as possible while the sun rose and the temperature warmed enough to liberate the snow-burdened evergreen branches, so that all around the yard they sprang free one by one, sending glistening sprays of snow dazzling across the air.

  It never occurred to Agnes to dislike one season or another. She didn’t mind the deep and treacherous mud of early spring, miring machinery in the fields, sucking at the heels of her sturdy boots. And unlike poor Catherine, Agnes never dreaded the summer onslaught of brutal weather. She was stirred by the first peppery scent of an oncoming storm; she even relished the storm itself, coming in so fast that once she had had to dismount her horse and flatten herself in a ditch as lightning struck all around her. She had lain facedown with her hands clasped over the back of her skull, her elbows cradling her temples as though she were waiting out enemy bombardment. She had been terrified, her mind filled with nothing else but one long plea— Dear God Please Dear God Please Dear God—as she felt the concussion of thunder and closed her eyes against lightning so pervasive that it was a constant, flickering white illumination. But later, dripping wet, traipsing after her horse, her hair and skirt trailing weedy grasses, and still shuddering from shock, she had also been deeply thrilled.

  By the time she was fourteen, Agnes had sometimes been so unhappy that there had been moments she had wished that she did not exist at all. Sometimes she had been sad enough to let her thoughts wander tentatively over the possibility of giving up altogether, but also by the time she was fourteen and fifteen she had become fairly fascinated by the drama of her own self. And, too, she had invested a good part of herself in the world beyond her own household, so by and large she was glad to draw another breath. If she had considered it one way or another, she would have conceded that even at the worst of times she would choose to continue to occupy a place on the earth. And therefore she was necessarily devoted to the place where she lived. It was where she was as she shaped her expectations of the world, and it was a landscape she embraced because it inescapably defined and contained her, heart and soul.

  None of the Claytor children, however, was entirely immune to Catherine’s contempt for Washburn, Ohio—a contempt that in some way conferred upon her children a little superiority. Agnes sometimes said to her friends, unaware that she had taken on a certain air of condescension, that it was too bad to be stuck in a place of so little distinction. A town as little known as Washburn. And then it was her good friends who brooded privately over such an insult to the place their families had chosen, for whatever reason, to live. To the place where they were becoming who they were to become. And then any one of those friends—Lucille Drummond, say, or Sally Trenholm—at home and vexed by some request denied or desire made light of, might blurt out some remark to her own parents. Sally or Lucille might say something along the lines of how could her parents possibly understand the need for something finer than plain cotton serge for a new dress, given that—as Agnes Claytor said—they lived in such a backwater.

  But by 1917, Agnes was old enough to be healthily self-involved, and Howie and Richard had each other as a protective frame of reference. It was only ten-year-old Edson Claytor who occasionally glanced darkly out at the unforgivable everlastingness of the rolling fields of Ohio with dismay, a bitter sorrow overtaking him when he considered that his mother had to bear up under conditions so unlike the soft, kind climate, the amiable environment, of her childhood home in Natchez, Mississippi.

  It was quite a ripple that Catherine’s stone had made when she tossed it unthinkingly into the clear water of her young children’s sensibilities. It was quite a ripple, and in such a small pond that eventually it broke against her own shore. Catherine Claytor was held in great suspicion among the parents of her children’s friends and never was able to form any easy alliances. But her children understood that this landscape where she was so hard-pressed to eke out a single satisfactory hour was infinitely inferior to her own territory. And that territory was a place they believed they had never been. They had yet to make the connection between the actual geography of Natchez, Mississippi, and that wondrous place their mother always referred to as home.

  Three times in her life Agnes had visited Natchez with the rest of her family. She remembered the trips a little bit, although often if she mentioned some p
articular detail she was told by one or the other of her parents that it never had happened or that what she thought she had seen did not, in fact, exist. It had been hot forever, Agnes said, in the backseat of the car with Howie and Richard pressed against her. No, her father said, it had been chilly, and the three of them had been wrapped in an old feather quilt.

  It had frightened her to watch their automobile float away across a river on a raft that seemed to evaporate. Agnes remembered that she had thought the car was proceeding across the water all on its own, growing smaller as it moved away. Yes, indeed, her mother said, it had not been a good idea at all to take that crossing. No, her father said, it had only been a creek, no matter of any consequence, and they had remained in the car as the ferryman hauled them across by rope, hand over hand.

  Her cousins had not liked her, Agnes thought. And her mother said it wasn’t true at all, it was just that Agnes seemed strange to them. “It was only your accent,” she said. “They think you’re a little Yankee.” Celeste and Peggy Alcorn were older than Agnes by several years, and she remembered that they had given her a piece of chocolate candy she had bitten into only to discover that it was a flat patty they had fashioned out of mud. But she didn’t mention this to either one of her parents because it was not so out of line with the general perils of childhood. She hadn’t ever, but might have considered pulling such a trick on one of her brothers. It wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility. She remembered the wide porch where she sat and cut pictures out of a magazine her grandmother Edson gave to her, and she remembered that Celeste had helped her and that they had had fun until Peggy turned up.