The Evidence Against Her Page 9

  “You can play with Mama and Howie just as soon as you do your alphabet animals,” Agnes said. Their mother made no objection, and so the Claytor boys discovered that in many instances Agnes was in charge of them. By the time Agnes was eighteen and Richard and Howie were fifteen and fourteen respectively, it didn’t even cross their minds to object to this relatively minor irritation.

  “Now, look here!” She handed them the mock-up she and Edith had done for the cover of the class book, and she read aloud from the little bit of the introduction they had worked out. It was only a rough draft; she and Edith had made a stab at getting the general tone they wanted:

  THE LINUS GILCHREST INSTITUTION FOR THE INSANE

  REPORT FOR 1918

  DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF THE INSTITUTION

  * * *

  The grounds of the Linus Gilchrest Institution for the Insane occupy over four acres of land in the center of the bustling city of Washburn, Ohio, and are covered with grass which may not be walked upon; with shrubs and trees which may not be handled; with any number of native plants and flowers which may not be harvested even to be used as gifts from the patients to the presiding physicians of the Institution. The site supports four white clapboard buildings and a fine stone structure where a few of the patients are hospitalized and where all are treated to afford a general improvement of their mental condition.

  Her father had wandered into the parlor to read the newspapers he had brought from town, and he had asked to have a look at what she was doing, but he had passed it back to her after only a cursory glance.

  “Agnes, this is a silly business. I’m surprised you would waste your time on this kind of foolishness. I thought you were such a sensible girl. You have a good mind. This sort of foolishness is a waste of your time. This . . . I thought you would be doing some sort of work that’s worthwhile. With the war . . . people near starvation in Europe and the wheat blight here . . .”

  Agnes had quite docilely taken back her papers as he held them out to her, but she had been dumbfounded by the severity of her hurt feelings when he spoke with such casual dismissiveness to her. She worked hard to earn her father’s approval, and she had always secretly thought that he prized her in the same way Lucille’s father simply doted on his four daughters. Agnes thought that her own father would never be so undignified as Mr. Drummond—Dwight Claytor would never be so foolishly smitten with anything. But she had tucked away and cherished every compliment, every kind word her father ever said to her.

  When the Claytor children started school—especially the two middle boys—Catherine Claytor had seemed baffled at such a turn of events. She seemed to think of the whole endeavor as a sort of unexpected rivalry for their affection and attention, and for the first few months of each child’s first-grade year the contest entirely captured her attention.

  Catherine spent those very early school days brooding through the mornings, anxious on behalf of the unhappy child who had just been dispatched to his first day of school and planning wonderful games and surprises to console him when he was finally set free and sent back to her. She would range around the property, discovering a copse of trees where a new fort could be built; she would browse through The Burgess Book of Games of Fun and come up with all sorts of ideas and even new card games: high tide, round the town. Or she would rustle through the boxes of books she had brought from Natchez from her own childhood and find a splendid old favorite to read aloud. But Agnes was always quick to step in.

  And Agnes stepped in because she herself had been seduced by her mother’s delighted greetings when she came home every afternoon in the first few months of the first grade. Agnes would come into the house after the long walk home to sit in thrall to her mother’s enthusiastic distraction from and dismissal of the drudgery of homework.

  “So silly, Agnes,” she had assured her daughter. “Why, being who you are, the last thing you need to worry about is doing all this make-work. Let’s play one more game of king’s cross!”

  But when Agnes had failed to receive a gold star beside her name on the class graph posted in the schoolroom—failed to receive one in several categories, including Diligence in Work Completion—she had closed her ears to the siren call of her mother’s afternoon enchantments, and Catherine had been terribly put out and her feelings deeply hurt. She was mystified, because clearly her daughter was learning everything she needed to know. She was well ahead of her class in almost every subject.

  “Why, Agnes, you just want to be a little teacher’s pet!”

  And when Agnes was adamant that her brothers do the same, Catherine was disdainful. “Oh, Agnes, you’re already a twelve-year-old old maid,” her mother sulked, and Howie or Richard and even Edson would glare at their sister disgustedly, but they all did what she said. Even Mrs. Longacre didn’t interfere, although at home she said to her grandson William, “That one’s a bossy little puss! I wouldn’t want to tie up with her.”

  But all four of the Claytor children were exceptional students and leaders of their classes. Any teacher at the grammar school who looked at her class list was delighted to find a Claytor enrolled for the following year. And that’s what Agnes had figured out was necessary the moment she took account of that large graph posted for all the world to see and found herself unstarred. She had understood at that instant that school was essentially a competition, and that it was absolutely necessary for her sake and the sake of her whole family that she and her brothers excel.

  Her father had always expressed enthusiastic approval of his children’s stellar academic performance. Agnes had even heard him speak of their achievements with pleasure and satisfaction to his constituents who came by the house—the businessmen and farmers who gathered in the parlor or sat out on the porch discussing politics. It enhanced his reputation to be the father of such exemplary students, she thought. It seemed to Agnes that his children’s respectable behavior bestowed upon her father and their family an element of admirable conformity.

  Agnes courted her father’s approval and reinterpreted or shut out any evidence against him. Occasionally she descended to a level of obsequiousness when she was around him that sent her mother into a raging despair. Agnes was desperate for his approbation. But the afternoon he was derisive of her efforts when he glanced over the little sketch of the introduction Edith and she had worked out so arduously, she made no effort at all to explain herself, to persuade him into admiration, to appease him, to court his favor. She only looked straight into his face with her expression drawn in, unyielding.

  He looked at her a moment but not quite long enough to register her uncharacteristic hostility, and he settled peacefully into his reading. Agnes swept off upstairs to her room, and Howie and Richard had caught enough of her expression— Agnes’s “round-eyed look”—not to press their luck. They didn’t pursue her; they practiced their hitting, but they fielded for themselves. She retreated to the privacy of her room near tears, astounded by her father’s failure to congratulate her on her cleverness. It amazed her that he didn’t understand that she had achieved quite a social victory in her life away from home.

  The Claytor children had no idea—nor did their parents— that the community as a whole admired Agnes, liked Howie and Richard, and cherished Edson to such a degree that the townspeople brushed aside gossip and speculation and even genuine concern, accepting the family’s presentation of itself at face value. For the most part, the Claytor family was granted the concession of concocting its own legend.

  Agnes didn’t know, though, that Mr. and Mrs. Drummond often worried over her to each other, or that Mrs. Longacre had for years, and with a flinty affection, referred to Edson as “that poor little boy.” The Claytor children tried with all their might to maintain a benign myth of family serenity, to offer a single, auspicious idea of their household to the community.

  Certainly Agnes and her brothers were not miserable all the time, but underlying any fun they had was the dreary anticipation of unhappy endings. The older three h
ad come to distrust almost any single moment of pleasure. All during any day at home, for instance, especially any sort of celebration, there lurked chaos in the very next moment, and so day after day Agnes leaned in full force to her time at school, as did her brothers.

  By the time she had reached her senior year at Linus Gilchrest, Agnes could walk out her front door, shuffling her arms into her coat with her mother’s fury flying at her back, or she could leave her house with contempt strung out between her parents like the tension of an ice-laden wire, and arrive forty-five minutes later at school to become instantly absorbed in the issue of the day. She had learned to take up the daily and serious drama of her public life all the while knowing that as soon as she set foot on the walk home she would have to begin the heavy work of keeping her head above despair.

  It was school itself that was the work of Agnes’s life thus far, and it was a realm in which she and her friends possessed some measure of power, the only sphere open to them in which they could lay claim to some degree of authority. As it happened, Agnes, Lucille, Sally, and Edith, those four girls, all of them, had proved to be especially good at going to school, good at the business of surviving it.

  It’s an enormous endeavor, getting through school. And for those four girls the academic work itself was the least of it: accommodating new ideas, committing great chunks of information to rote memory, mastering complex mathematics. There it was, all that knowledge, laid out and presented in sequence, so that it was for them a relatively simple matter to master one thing in order to understand the next bit coming along. Naturally it required effort and concentration, but there was nothing ambiguous about the process.

  As a matter of fact, to those four bright girls, the pure, clean intellectual stretch to grasp some new concept, or even the hours of deadly memorization required for Latin or French, had a pristine aura as opposed to the murky and demanding challenge of being popular, of being perceived as admirable, of all the slippery subtleties of social success to be deciphered.

  Now, with only Saturday and Sunday having intervened since Friday’s discordant meeting of the senior playwrights, Lucille had arrived at school reinforced by her sisters’ continued enthusiasm for the piece they had worked out and by their concurring indignation at Agnes’s blunt and public disapproval. “Why, I’m amazed that Agnes would say such a thing to you!” Celia had exclaimed. “I’m surprised that Agnes would ever be so rude to anyone, but the two of you have been such friends now for years and years. She’s almost one of the family. But who knows, of course. All the problems . . . well, her mother. And then, too, she has to worry about her little brother. . . . Don’t let it worry you, Lucille. After all, she counts on you almost as family.”

  And it was true that the Drummonds thought of Agnes as being a sort of cousin, because she stayed in town at their house often during the long school year if the weather was bad, or if there was a school event in the late afternoon or evening. There were always several girls from outlying districts boarding at the Gilchrest Institute, and Lucille’s family were an exuberant, extroverted lot who each year insisted that those girls, too, feel free to come and go as they pleased in the Drummonds’ big three-story house on the south side of Monument Square. It was one of the few places where Agnes was completely at ease, and generally she would have realized over the weekend that she needed to make amends to Lucille. She would have been ashamed of herself and known that what she had said to Lucille would have been uncommonly hurtful in light of the special and reciprocated loyalty between herself and Lucille, and the whole Drummond family.

  But in those same two days, just in that bit of time that had elapsed during the last weekend of September, Agnes had developed an indifference to the whole business of the senior pageant. Lucille had spent Saturday and Sunday fretting over and readying the case she wanted to make for her own idea, but that Monday afternoon when the two of them were the first to arrive at the playwrights’ meeting, she found she was disappointed when Agnes said it really didn’t matter to her. Whatever Lucille wanted to do would be fine. Agnes said she did still wish the whole thing could be a more lighthearted affair, but that she would go along with Lucille and Sally and Edith’s decision. And it was while Lucille and Agnes were waiting for the other two that Agnes initially brought up the subject of the Scofields.

  “Well, and, say, speaking of the Scofields,” she said, after Lucille had answered Agnes’s question of what were the facts behind all the rumors of those coincidental births, “Lily Scofield Butler and her cousin came out to the house Saturday afternoon. Mr. Scofield wanted to talk over some business about fuel—something about the war—with my father,” Agnes said, just as a matter of fact, since she had killed off any further discussion about the pageant, at least for the time being. But Lucille didn’t comment one way or another.

  “My mother thinks,” Agnes finally remarked, “that all that business about those Scofield children and Robert Butler being born on the same day is nonsense. Just foolishness. She thinks it’s only a tempest in a teapot. People don’t have anything else interesting to talk about in a town like this, she says. And I guess I would have to agree that she’s right. I imagine it’s just a way to make things seem more important than they are,” Agnes maintained, sounding almost accusatory, even a little petulant, as if she didn’t believe Lucille had told her all she might.

  “Oh, well! If you don’t believe me you should ask my father about that year before those babies were all born!” Lucille said. “And then you would understand how terrible it was. And it was the year just after the locusts had eaten everything above ground!”

  “But Lucille,” Agnes was almost plaintive in her simultaneous need to know whatever she could about Warren Scofield and Lily and Robert Butler and her reluctance ever to let someone get away with such a flight of fancy, “your family didn’t even move here until more than twenty years after that.” Agnes made her voice solicitous, a wheedling plea for reason, but Lucille was affronted nevertheless.

  “Oh, Agnes! That doesn’t have anything to do with knowing what happened! My father has heard everyone talk about it. You have no . . . I don’t know why you bother to ask me anything at all, since you never believe me or approve of anything I do. You always think I exaggerate too much. But you’re like a . . . like some stone! Sometimes I think you don’t have a whit of imagination! And to tell you the truth, Agnes, I think you would . . . understand more if you would use your imagination now and then! You’re too logical about everything.”

  “I don’t know if anyone can be too logical,” Agnes put in mildly.

  “That’s just exactly what someone who is too logical . . . too scientific about everything . . . so literal minded . . . would say. Agnes, you don’t have a romantic bone in your body!” Lucille had heard her sister Grace say this once about their mother.

  “Well, you certainly have—”

  “But after those three babies were born—Robert Butler was the first one, and you can tell it, too, just by the way he is. My sister says he has a natural dignity. But it wasn’t till after that day they were all born that those terrible hailstorms stopped. Lightning and hail, but the ground was as hard as a rock. Finally, after that, the town got some rain, and farmers could put their crops in. My father says it’s uncanny. That it’s even in Shakespeare. ‘Beware the ides of March!’ That’s the day they were born, you know. Until then, though, not a single thing would grow.”

  “March! Lucille! What in the world would be growing before March?”

  Lucille looked away from Agnes and considered for a moment. “It might be May,” Lucille said. “Beware the ides of May,” she tried out. “But that’s not what’s important, anyway. The thing is, it’s not what my father says. It’s what everyone says. Everyone says that everything changed after those three children were born all on the same day.”

  “I haven’t ever met Robert Butler,” Agnes said, letting the argument drop, “but Lily Butler and Mr. Scofield stayed almost four hours Saturda
y afternoon. There’s a lot of pressure on Scofields and Company from the War Department. That’s why Warren Scofield had to stay at the Company and couldn’t enlist. My father said that old Mr. Scofield—Mr. Leo Scofield—is worn out with all this, and that his youngest brother, George Scofield, has never really been involved in the management of the business. And he says that Mr. Scofield’s other brother—that’s Warren Scofield’s father, John—ought to be the one in charge but that he was out of town so much. In charge of the sales division, my father said.”

  What Dwight Claytor had, in fact, said was that John Scofield stayed out of town as much as possible or in some tavern or other filling the workmen’s heads with all sorts of dangerous ideas. But Agnes knew not to repeat that in public. “Anyway,” she went on, “my father said it sounded to him as if Warren Scofield was pretty much overseeing the conversion of the Scofield company to munitions production.”

  Agnes looked at Lucille across the table in the little room eked out of a storage space and given over to the editors of the 1918 class book and the senior playwrights, and saw that Lucille was annoyed and not really paying attention. She was absorbed in sketching a border of flowers around the edges of a piece of paper. Sally and Edith had still not arrived, so Lucille and Agnes were just idling away the time.

  Agnes hadn’t meant even to mention Warren Scofield, although she could scarcely force the thought of him out of her mind, and the saying of his name worked on her like a spell once she had allowed herself to utter it. She kept circling back to form the sound once more until at last she forced herself to in-hale when her lips began to purse into that breathy W. She turned any further mention of his name into a deep breath and exhaled it in a long sigh, slumping back in her chair. For all her supposed hard-nosed common sense, when Agnes spoke again her voice was wistful and musing. “Robert Butler is stationed in France, you know. So I didn’t meet him. But I think Lily Butler must be the most interesting woman I’ve ever met,” she said, with tactless admiration.