The Evidence Against Her (23 page)

But Agnes paid no attention to anything much that was going on in her house. When her mother made a cautious, anxious allusion to the secrets the two of them had exchanged on Agnes’s birthday, Agnes deflected the subject. If Catherine tried to discuss what would look best for Agnes to wear on her wedding day, or what she might try to do with her unmanageable hair while she was traveling, Agnes turned icy and left the room.

And Agnes had yet to show a single ounce of remorse for the strain Catherine had put herself through when they bathed and groomed Bandit or even any concern for Catherine’s welfare in the wake of all that overexertion. Catherine found herself frightened by her daughter’s indifference. She felt unaccountably lonely and longed for Agnes to recognize her as a confidante. She had no idea why she was suddenly entirely irrelevant to her daughter’s life, as though she were in some way her daughter’s enemy. Catherine’s feelings were as deeply hurt as they had ever been in her life, because on the day of Agnes’s birthday Catherine had had a wonderful time, more fun than she had had since she was very young.

Now and then, as she lay in bed gazing out the window, a flicker of the moment in the parlor when she had flown at her own husband to protect her daughter flashed through her mind. Just a fleeting remembrance of rage, a remembrance of the surprise of a protective maternal fury shot through her otherwise bitter musings.

The whole idea would flatten her there against her pillows and also leave her baffled by Agnes’s coolness. And Catherine was genuinely anxious for her daughter, making this marriage to a man so much older, so much handsomer than poor Agnes would ever be pretty. Catherine knew that nothing good would come of it, that her daughter would never be happy, and yet Agnes wouldn’t tolerate any conversation on that front either. Catherine gave herself over to an exhausted and sorrowful resignation.

And, as it happened, no one in Washburn, Ohio, was much enthused about the idea of the marriage of Agnes Claytor and Warren Scofield. No one except Agnes’s friend Lucille Drummond. In fact, the townspeople felt shortchanged somehow, since nobody had anticipated the match at all. Even Agnes’s closest friends—except Lucille, in whom Agnes had finally confided—hadn’t known she was seeing Warren Scofield. All around town people agreed that it was an odd alliance, and it was all so sudden.

The kindest idea was that Warren Scofield had finally resigned himself to the marriage of his cousin Lily, and his closest friend, Robert Butler, and had acted impulsively for one reason or another. Celia Drummond and Estella Eckart concluded that Agnes had simply been in the right place at the moment Warren had made up his mind to try to overcome his devotion to Lily.

“Agnes is a nice girl,” Celia said to Estella, “but I can’t think it’s going to be easy for her with all the Scofields. They’re all so
attached
to one another . . . and the Butlers, too. She’s too young, I think. Of course, I really hope they’ll be happy, but it seems to me . . . I don’t know how it can work out. She’s Lucille’s best friend, you know.”

This fact did confer a little importance on the whole Drummond family for the few days after the announcement of the engagement, although even then Lucille didn’t break Agnes’s confidence. Lucille pretended to be as surprised as everyone else, and she went so far as to wonder aloud at the dinner table if Warren Scofield was good enough for her friend. “Agnes is the smartest girl in the class,” she said. “I thought we would go off to school together. Bernice Dameron addressed the assembly about ‘Women at Oberlin.’” But the rest of her family didn’t pay much attention.

All of the Drummonds were fond of Agnes, though, and they spoke kindly of her. “Her mother is from the South, you know,” Mrs. Drummond said. “No one knows very much about her . . . . Now,
Dwight
Claytor’s really becoming fairly important. But I can’t see Warren Scofield . . . He went east to school. Some school in Massachusetts. But it wasn’t Harvard, I remember. That was Robert Butler. Let’s see. Something with a
W . . .
Williams and Mary, I think. But anyway, everyone thought the Company might be planning to open an office in New York. Well, that’s neither here nor there. What I mean to say is that Warren Scofield’s been all over the place. He’s a
sophisticated
man. I just hope Agnes Claytor isn’t jumping in over her head. Of course, it’s a lucky match for her, I suppose. When you think about it.”

And that was the general consensus. On the whole, everyone pretty much agreed that Warren Scofield could make a better match than a local girl just out of school, and that Agnes might be happier with someone from a less high-powered background.

•  •  •

Agnes Claytor and Warren Scofield were married on Friday afternoon, June 14, 1918, just a little over a month after her graduation from the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, in a small ceremony in the Claytors’ front parlor. The occasion was inauspicious. It rained steadily, and the guests arrived bedraggled and remained subdued in the watery gray daylight of the room. The bride and groom were off immediately after the ceremony in order to make their train connections, and the little reception at the Claytors’ was not a particularly celebratory affair.

Agnes had hoped to have the service in town, either at church or outdoors in Warren’s uncle’s luxuriant garden, under the arbor, which was nearly obscured in June by the thick foliage of the trumpet vine. But since Agnes’s mother was forbidden even to make the trip to Washburn, the wedding guests assembled in the Claytors’ front parlor, and the Reverend Butler officiated.

Agnes’s father gave her away, and her brothers stood by as groomsmen—Edson’s expression turned bleakly on his sister; he did not want her to go, nor did he want her to stay. Whatever Agnes did would make his mother miserable. Howie and Richard, though, were pleased with the whole thing and their inclusion in it, and Dwight Claytor was formal and dignified and grave. Agnes’s school friends Lucille Drummond, Sally Trenholm, and Edith Fisk were informal attendants.

But it was during the war. Lily and her mother and Lillian Scofield couldn’t find reliable transportation back to Ohio at such short notice, and Robert Butler was still in Europe. A packet of letters had finally arrived that dated back over the past four months, delayed mysteriously but reporting him well and in good spirits. As a result, nothing about Warren and Agnes’s wedding was elaborate. Travel in the States was so difficult now that one of the reasons Warren and Agnes had not delayed their wedding was so they could take advantage of Warren’s War Department pass to go to New York, where he had some business to attend to, and then on to Boston for several days, and finally to Maine, where his mother and Aunt Audra and Lily had arranged to take the same big farmhouse for the months of July and August that Lily and Robert Butler had stayed in on their wedding trip.

The bride and groom, each separately, had been glad to depart the Claytor house and be on their way. Agnes had kept a weather eye on her mother all during the ceremony itself, and Warren had been uneasy about his father, who had turned up at Scofields staggering drunk at five o’clock in the morning. Catherine sat serenely through the ceremony, though, and John Scofield had been solemn and, in fact, fragilely dapper in the company of his brothers, Leo and George. Warren slowed the big Hudson, which Uncle Leo had lent him, in the Claytors’ drive as they came in sight of the little crowd of well-wishers who stood out on the covered porch to see them off through the rain. He and Agnes waved, and then they were off.

Warren and Agnes’s wedding trip had been uneventful as well, as far as having any stories to tell upon their return. Otherwise, though, it had pretty much put Agnes in a trance. Once she was married she had been fairly crazed with the luxury of licit sex. She had awakened the morning after their night on the train to find Warren’s head turned toward her on the Pullman pillow and found it nearly impossible to believe that this was allowed—to believe that this was not only perfectly legal but even expected. During their honeymoon she often caught herself eyeing other couples—or any women with children in tow—and thinking that it simply wasn’t possible that they all took for granted the astonishing loss of self-consciousness, the remarkable
nakedness
of sex.

When they were in Maine, for instance, and she would see a local fisherman’s haggard wife with children hanging on her skirts, Agnes would think that it just couldn’t be. No telling where those children came from, but Agnes simply didn’t believe that the woman with them had ever in her life done what Agnes and Warren had done, sometimes lazing about for hours in bed.

And although Agnes knew it was an absurd idea, she found it hard even to imagine Lily—so tidy, so
busy
with her clean, bright movements through the day—ever giving herself over to the inherent disorder and carelessness of sex. Well, Lily
didn’t
have children, of course . . . . And then Agnes would force her thoughts elsewhere and castigate herself for dwelling on what was none of her business. But she could only occupy her mind with other concerns for very short spells at a time. She was in the throes of a nearly obsessive longing for lovemaking, for being touched, for pleasure so intensely physical that the sly observer who usually resided in some part of her mind—that censorious sensibility—was temporarily obliterated.

But that was hardly something she could later confide to Lucille, or sit in Leo Scofield’s garden beneath the Chinese lanterns and expand upon in great detail, the way Lily Scofield Butler had entertained her friends and family with amusing details of her own wedding trip. It wasn’t something Agnes even discussed with Warren himself. It was all she really brought back with her, though, from that trip: New York and Boston were just a blur of buildings and people, and Maine was fixed in her mind as green and cool, with a constant breeze ruffling the gauzy curtains in the dim light of their bedroom. And she recalled the scent and sound of the ocean and the unnerving squawk of gulls. She returned in late August from her wedding trip convinced that she had discovered something that she honestly didn’t believe anyone else could possibly know.

•  •  •

In early October of 1918, the town of Washburn banned public meetings, including church services, and declared the schools closed because of the influenza epidemic. Athletic events were postponed indefinitely, although the Washburn High School football team did play one last game against Oxenberg, because there was no quarantine in Holmes County. Richard and Howie Claytor both played football for Washburn High. Richard was the left end on the varsity team, although Howie played halfback on the junior varsity. But since some boys’ parents refused to let them go, both Claytor boys traveled with the varsity team.

It never crossed Catherine’s mind that she should consider their relative safety, and Dwight Claytor was preoccupied with the business of the war. American troops were heavily engaged in France, and there were more and more constituents to visit whose sons had been killed or wounded. Those were terrible afternoons for Dwight Claytor. The light faded earlier and earlier as the fall progressed, and Dwight would sit in the darkening front parlor of some family’s house, on their nicest furniture, and accept the offer of a cup of coffee—a piece of pie, a slice of cake—from a family clinging to courtesy in the face of shattered expectations, in the face of learning how to forgo hope. As it happened, two days before Washburn High School’s last football game at Oxenburg, Mrs. Longacre had come over to tell the Claytors that her grandson William Dameron had been reported wounded in France, where he flew a Camel fighter plane in the Canadian Air Force.

“That’s all the news we can expect to get for a while,” Mrs. Longacre said to Dwight, who had happened to be downstairs when she came in. She was carefully withdrawing the hat pin from her hat. “I won’t stay but an hour or so this morning, Mr. Claytor. We had a telegram, and when I spotted little David Wheatley on that old dray horse coming up the lane . . . Well. For a minute I felt like I might faint. That’s not like me. Not at all like me.” She turned and looked directly at Dwight Claytor and held his glance until it occurred to him to nod in acknowledgment. Then she looked down at her hat, which she held in her hands, and studied it carefully for a moment. “Now I can’t get used to the idea that William isn’t dead. That’s what I thought when I saw David Wheatley.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that, Mrs. Longacre. I’m so sorry.” He thought of adding some reassuring words about knowing at least that William was out of the fighting, but he looked at Mrs. Longacre’s careful, rigid expression and picked up his own hat from the table. “I’m just as sorry to hear that as I can be,” Dwight said. “Let me run you back home. I’d like to step in for a minute and say a word to Jerry and Louise. And if Bernice is home . . .”

“She’ll be home day after tomorrow,” Mrs. Longacre said. “They’ve closed the college because of this flu that’s all around. But she doesn’t know about William yet.”

As he brought the car around to the front of the house, Dwight was overwhelmed with rage—an imprecise fury. At William Dameron himself, who had
chosen
to join up early. But then, Dwight was also enraged at the ruthlessness of the draft, at the boastful nonsense of his own sons, who longed to get into the war. At his fear that Richard probably
would
end up overseas. And finally he found himself maddened by what he considered the hysterical reaction to this influenza epidemic. The whole thing incensed Dwight Claytor in the face of the war casualties. Of course any untimely death was terrible. But surely death from illness fell within the realm of all the dangers of living one’s life. It was not imposed on anyone. By contrast, the draft was in full swing, and Dwight was approached daily by families who shamefacedly sought his help in keeping their sons out of the war. He could do almost nothing to help them unless the family had already suffered such loss that he often wondered at their capacity for continuing to care about anything at all.