The Evidence Against Her Read online

  Agnes hadn’t been back since they had gone to Mississippi after her grandmother died, just a little while after Edson was born. Her mother and Edson had traveled by train to Natchez when he was four, but Agnes and the other two were in school and had stayed in Washburn under Mrs. Longacre’s care. Peggy Alcorn had traveled back to Ohio with Catherine Claytor and Edson, but Agnes had the hardest time really believing that the tall, pale, weak-chinned girl who drifted around the Claytor house could possibly be the same person who had instilled such dread in her only four years earlier. Peggy had stayed with them for two months, sharing Agnes’s room, and Agnes couldn’t, during all that time, form any fixed impression of her. She seemed to Agnes not to have much personality at all, although her mother said Peggy had beautifully cultivated manners.

  Whatever Catherine Claytor did or didn’t understand about the delicate agreement with Mrs. Longacre, it was when she had consented to take over as the Claytors’ general housekeeper that the older three children, even at their young ages, began the complicated business of leading a multilayered life. They became duplicitous by default. It had nothing to do with how they felt about Mrs. Longacre; they liked her well enough but kept their minds open to doubt out of loyalty to their mother. They couldn’t possibly have sorted out all the complexities of their new arrangement. For one thing, Mrs. Longacre’s grandchildren were their playmates, and her oldest grandchild, Bernice, had been three years ahead of Agnes at school.

  The Claytor children, though, deduced some sort of unspoken but deep embarrassment on the part of both their parents, and, too, those children had a certain, inherent sense of propriety and an easily tapped reservoir of shame. The older Claytor children were filled with unnatural cheer and goodwill toward Mrs. Longacre. They behaved with astonishing decorum under her rather brusque supervision and often took it out on one another in her absence. After all, a united front doesn’t hang together very well in the absence of the enemy.

  Edson alone—clearly Mrs. Longacre’s favorite of the Claytor clan—maintained a scrupulously polite but distinctly restrained manner toward her. He never told her jokes, as Howie or Richard often did, sometimes earning a stiff smile. Edson never asked for her advice or told her stories of his day at school. He never begged a special treat or enthused over the plates of cookies or a cake she sometimes prepared. He always thanked her solemnly, but he saved all his secrets—any newly discovered ardor about one thing or another—to tell his mother, to seduce his mother’s elusive attention. Mrs. Longacre was merely dependable; his mother, in those moments when her concentration was caught and aimed his way . . . well, his mother was magical.

  By 1917, Mrs. Longacre was a fixture in the life of the Claytor household, and the Claytor children were no longer even aware of the careful fusion of all the layers of their lives. There were so many separate, secret, unadmitted elements to the one instinctive, collective presentation of their adherence as a family that it would have required a sort of emotional archaeology to bring them all to light. By that Sunday evening in September when Agnes was carefully picking bits of glass from the dining-room carpet, it was more reassuring than not that Mrs. Longacre would be arriving at eight o’clock the next morning.

  Agnes woke up off and on during the night to the sounds of doors opening and closing, of her mother’s steps, sometimes stealthy, sometimes clattering on the front stairs, of a general stirring about within the house. The whole of Agnes’s night had a nervous, streaky quality; she endured a shivery, pale restlessness and never had the satisfaction of falling away into the deep blue-black of heavy sleep. Edson woke her, though, from a state of near unconsciousness so early in the morning that only a barely discernible lightening of the sky seeped around the edges of her window shade.

  “I don’t know what Mama’s doing, Agnes. I don’t know what she’s doing.” He was bending over, shaking her shoulder, his hair still spiked from his pillow and his face shiny and luminous in the dark room, his eyes silvery with restrained tears.

  Agnes only looked at him a moment, coming into wakefulness and bunching her pillow under her head to prop it up a bit. “What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. Where is she, Edson?”

  “She’s in the pantry. But I don’t know what she’s doing! She’s cutting up all her dresses. She’s got piles and piles of clothes. For the poor, she says. She says we’re not to think of her at all. That what happens to her, as old as she is, just doesn’t matter. That it’s her birthday, after all, and that she’s too old for all those bright dresses.” Edson implied his mother’s speech—the emphasis, the strained timbre infused with desperation—in his own despairing boy’s voice.

  “Oh, no, Edson! Her birthday! Is it? What’s today? Oh, Eddie, it is! It’s the first of October. Oh, no! Oh, and Papa didn’t remember. You know he didn’t.” Agnes threw off the blankets and got out of bed, cinching her tangled hair away from her face with her hands. “Go get dressed, Edson. Get dressed for school, and we’ll go down together. Where’re Howie and Richard? Go wake them up and tell them I said to wash up and get ready for school. Tell them it’s Mama’s birthday and that I said for them to get up right now. Tell them I mean right now! And you be sure to comb your hair, Eddie. Get it really wet first. I don’t have time to help you with it.”

  Agnes was the first dressed, pulling on her white stockings while hopping first on one foot and then the other, wrenching on her skirt and middy blouse, scraping her brush mercilessly through her mass of wiry hair, which she fastened tightly in a tortoiseshell clip with a slightly wilted navy blue bow attached. She scarcely took time to observe the effect—even the bow was school regulation—she only checked to be sure she was all straight, and then she hurried down the stairs in a rush to find her mother before Mrs. Longacre arrived. But she slowed to a saunter as she crossed the kitchen.

  The sight of her mother was alarming. Catherine’s hair had come loose on one side and fell against her cheek as she stood with her bare feet slipped into her nice black buckled shoes, but otherwise she was dressed only in her wrapper and poised over a jumble of clothes—dresses, blouses, petticoats, hats, gloves, strewn everywhere—wielding her pair of long seamstress’s shears.

  “Mama, what are you doing up so early? What are you doing awake before the sun’s even up? And on your birthday? The boys and I were going to surprise you with breakfast before Mrs. Longacre got here.” Agnes’s voice was artificial and tense with feigned cheer, but Catherine cast a disinterested glance at her daughter and bent and snipped, bent and snipped, curiously birdlike.

  “Mama, what are you doing? You aren’t dressed yet. Aren’t you too cold?”

  Catherine worked steadily for a moment more on a blouse whose sleeves hung forlornly to the floor as she held the bodice draped over one hand, and then she cast it aside and turned to Agnes, displaying a handful of buttons she had cut away, beautiful, intricate pierced bone, some of them, others of filigreed silver, of shiny brass, and some only plain shell. She was triumphant. “Now won’t your father see how thrifty I can be,” she said, elated. “He’ll be awfully pleased, you know. Why, he has no idea how a household can work!”

  “But Mama! All your clothes . . . Won’t he be upset? What about your clothes?”

  “Oh, these are all for a young woman. A girl! For a girl, I think. I’m sending them to the church, but I’ve saved the buttons, you see. And some of this trim, so when Cleo comes to do your hems she can start cutting my dresses, and I’ll have all the buttons she needs. And this nice lace collar. Hat trims. Ribbons, you see. I refuse to be foolish! I won’t be thought of as a woman who doesn’t even know any better than to dress her age. Oh, not for a minute! Not on any account will I be one of those awful, foolish old women!”

  Foolish, foolish, was all Agnes could think as she looked at the ruin of her mother’s wardrobe—Catherine had cut away lace cuffs, had unseamed sleeves, had removed tulle insets— and Edson stood beside Agnes, stricken. “But Mama. Your dresses are so pretty,” he said. “Can�
��t Cleo put the buttons back? Can’t you fix them back?” Both he and Agnes knew that this was one of those acts on their mother’s part that might enrage their father.

  Although they never spoke of it to one another, none of Dwight’s children was ever entirely surprised late in the night to come awake to a distant bark of anger somewhere in the dark interior of the house. They had all four awakened separately some weeks before on a stifling hot night when the windows of the house were open to catch any shift of damp, warm air. They had awakened to their father’s voice, in the dark yard, raised in hollow, nasal, high-pitched, prolonged fury that flattened without resonance in the humid air, overriding the plaintive upward climb of some complaint their mother, who must have followed him outside, made.

  “. . . and you can’t . . . if you leave me here again,” she was saying, “all alone I won’t . . .” But her words were drowned out by a simultaneous and furious declaration of their father’s, unintelligible to them word by word but terrifying in the clarity of its fury:

  “—are the ruin, are the ruin, the total ruin of my life, my whole life, of everything I know! Wrecked! All a shambled wreck! Wrecked!”

  “Stop . . . Dwight . . . stop . . .”

  “. . . never helped me, never listen to what I tell you!”

  And each emphasis was accompanied by the unmistakable smack of a blow.

  “Stop it . . . don’t don’t don’t . . .” Their mother’s voice muffled finally, and there was the soft falling-to of the kitchen screen, the door slamming as she retreated indoors followed by the clunk of the bolt being thrown and—in a little bit—the rasp of the barn door heaved open. Each child stayed still in bed, frozen with dread, until their father’s automobile sputtered to life and finally couldn’t be heard any longer after it rounded the bend on Newark Road. They found their mother folded angularly into a kitchen chair, with her hair loose and falling forward over her face, which she had lowered into her cupped hands on the table, and they huddled around her, trying to get her back to her bedroom.

  “You see . . .” She exhaled in a long, hissing sigh, raising her head like a wraith in her flowing white nightgown. “Just see what kind of husband I have. . . . Look what he does.” She lowered her head again gently into the palms of her hands and wept in long sweeps of expended air and shuddering gasps in an effort to catch her breath, her mouth dark in her pale, shocked face.

  Agnes and Howie and Richard and Edson couldn’t help but look; they couldn’t help but see. They were overcome with desperation and embarrassed sorrow and pity, and they were overwhelmed with unspecified shame, as well. But the older children hated their mother a little, too, for her terrible baffled sadness. Only Edson moved forward and attempted to embrace her. “Oh, Mama! Mama! Mama!” he said as he patted her head awkwardly.

  Agnes and Howie and Richard hated her in the days that followed for the dark bruises that appeared on her cheek and along her arm where it was exposed beneath her sleeve. In spite of themselves they held her misery against her; it was such thoroughly irrefutable evidence of failure on all their parts, somehow. “Look at this,” their mother would say in apparent bewilderment, raising and turning her arm in surprise. “How could this happen? How could this happen to me?” she would ask her children when she came across them as she wandered though the house after Mrs. Longacre had gone. “Why, look at what your father’s done,” she would say mildly, perplexed herself. The older three would glance away, would refuse to contemplate her lament, but Edson would study his mother in despair and take himself off to his own room, where he flung himself out flat on his bed and wept silently with fury and sadness. Their father was gone for days and days, and Agnes heard Mrs. Longacre say to Edson that sometimes people were bound to get what they deserved.

  On the morning of her birthday, though, Catherine was positively jaunty, straightening up, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Oh, I think your father can afford to buy me a few sober dresses . . . a hat with a plain brown velvet band, I think . . . ,” she said in a dreamy, thoughtful voice, putting the shears down on the bench where most of the clothes lay in disarray. “I think that won’t be too much to spend on his old wife. This old lady needs some new clothes for her birthday!” And she seemed triumphant, as though she had put one over on somebody. But Edson shivered in misery beside Agnes, and Howie and Richard were behind them looking on.

  “Well, don’t you four look like death warmed over?” their mother said, reaching up with both hands to fasten her hair securely, although her wrapper fell open as she raised her arms, revealing the sharp wings of her collarbone, the shadowed hollows of her breastbone, and the tops of her slack breasts. Agnes moved in closer to block her from view, though Catherine took no notice. “But you can just wipe off those gloomy faces. We’re going to have a wonderful day! We’re going to have a picnic. Anything we like we’ll take along and nothing, nothing we don’t long for with all our hearts! We’re going to make ice cream, too, when we get home.

  “Oh, that’s what we always did back home for my birthday! I always asked Ida to make fried chicken and my daddy made his famous ginger ice cream. Mama couldn’t cook to save her life, of course, but she always was just so much fun! We’d go out the Trace to the Indian mounds, and Mama would bring along big sheets of cardboard. We’d use them like sleds. We’d go flying down from the top of those mounds. Just flying down. And they seemed so high to me, but they weren’t at all, you know. She’d settle everyone under the trees, and they always made me take a nap before we had dinner. It almost killed me! Lying there with my eyes closed, listening to everyone laughing and talking.” She was a little brittle with excitement, hurtling through the words and beaming, but then she slowed down and fixed them with a look of mock reproach. “In Natchez, you see, I didn’t have to deal with such a bunch of spoilsports and sourpusses.”

  “Mama, you’d better go get dressed,” Agnes said to her mother with discouraging deliberation, and her mother’s expression began to lose its animation. “Mrs. Longacre will be here any minute. We have to get to school, Mama. We can’t go on a picnic today. But we can have fried chicken for dinner if you’ll just tell Mrs. Longacre. And we can make ice cream, too. Hadn’t you better go get dressed?” She spoke kindly enough, but she was no longer cajoling. Her mother made a childish, bitter face at her.

  “Hah! Mrs. Longacre makes fried chicken I wouldn’t even feed to a bunch of Yankee soldiers! Boils it first! It truly does amaze me! Honestly, it does! These people have no idea how to cook. I tell you, I’ve seen Ida take a couple of handfuls of dandelion greens and a little bacon fat and turn it into the finest . . . oh, well, the most delicate salad you can imagine. But in this godforsaken place . . . Ugh! Disgusting!” Then her voice slipped into a tone of supplication. “But you can stay home from school today. You all have my permission. It’s just one day. Just one day.”

  “Mama, you know we can’t do that. We’ll miss enough being sick. It’s too hard to catch up. I’ll fix griddle cakes and we have cane syrup, too, that Peggy sent from New Orleans. You get dressed and we’ll have a celebration.”

  But as they walked along to school in the crisp air, Edson lagged behind his two older brothers, and Agnes was yards behind him, having stayed on to speak to Mrs. Longacre. Richard and Howie joked with and elbowed each other, walking for a while with each one trying to push the other into the ditch alongside the road while the other strained mightily to keep his balance. The rule between them was that you could try to unbalance the other in any way except tripping or using your hands.

  “You two stop it right now,” Agnes called ahead to them, over Edson’s head. “You’ll get wet and have to wear those shoes all day.”

  Howie turned around and walked backward for a little while, miming someone about to lose his balance, arms flailing wildly, fingers splayed, pretending to teeter along. “Well, Agnes, if I fall in, maybe I couldn’t go to school at all. Like Mama said. I have her permission! Why, I could just go right home and go on Mama’s picnic!�
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  He stopped still and struck a pose with one hand on his canted hip in ridiculous exaggeration and gestured to Richard with a sweep of his arm, adopting a silly falsetto voice and copying his mother’s Southern accent, the words sliding away before they ended: “Now you just go grab a handful of those cattails and a bucket of lard, and I tell you, Ida’ll make you the daintiest dish you ever did see! Don’t you know, Ida could fry up a batch of chicken, and we could all run out and slide down the Indian mounds. Just fly down those hills,” he mimicked. “Oh, my, they’re so tall! And if I have to take a nap before dinner, why, I’ll just die!”

  But then he let his voice fall back into its own pitch. “And I think Mama was just about to celebrate her birthday in her birthday suit!” And this just knocked them out, he and Richard, it was so scandalous a thing to say—to imagine. They fell against each other in delighted embarrassment and illicit glee. Agnes didn’t reprove them, and Edson studied the ground as he walked, not looking at them but flushed red with repressed laughter and overwhelmed with an ache like homesickness. They were mean, all so mean, to their mother.

  Of Catherine’s four children, only Edson, at age ten, still carried in his head on the morning of his mother’s fortieth birthday an image of her remarkable face, the high, wide, rounded brow and long straight nose of a great beauty. He had no idea of comparisons, of judging her against any other person at all. In fact, he didn’t even know that what she looked like had any bearing on his sorrowful recollection of her face. The consequence of apprehending beauty, however, is truly mysterious, and Catherine Claytor was not merely attractive, not just pretty, but powerfully lovely. In the same way that—regardless of circumstance—horses are beautiful and camels not, she possessed beauty out of context.