The Evidence Against Her

by Robb Forman Dew

  It had never crossed Lucille’s mind to imagine the impossibility of finding sixteen mature, matched catalpa trees growing randomly out in the country, much less the hopelessness of the task of transplanting them. But had anyone confronted her about her misrepresentation of the events surrounding Lily Butler’s wedding, Lucille would have shrugged it off, discounted it, been sorry to have a grand story ruined, and Agnes would have been disappointed as well.

  In Lucille’s house it was in relation to her that her parents and sisters warned one another—sometimes with a slightly supercilious air—that little pitchers have big ears. And that was because even as a young child Lucille had been prone to repeat the most outlandish details she overheard, repeat them to utter strangers with a blunt and rather contentious insistence. She had been forced to make sense of fragments of whatever stories she happened to interrupt; she snatched up scraps of conversations here and there. As the youngest of four daughters, she was always faced with people ending sentences midway through when she appeared, or turning away and speaking in a hush, adopting cautious expressions of restraint and, Lucille thought, an air of smug superiority. It was maddening, but by necessity Lucille had developed a strong intuition and a remarkable imagination.

  Agnes and Lucille had become good friends almost as soon as they met on their first day at the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls. Each one instinctively relied upon the other, because the world Lucille described to Agnes was so much more fraught with eventfulness than Agnes, as the oldest child in her family, ever discerned on her own. And for Lucille’s part, she was nearly always eventually relieved when Agnes turned her pragmatic attention toward some notion of Lucille’s that was getting dangerously out of hand and, in Agnes’s oddly appealing, steely little voice, deflated Lucille’s wildly spinning, free-floating fancy to the essential flat facts of its ordinariness. Agnes generally had difficulty recognizing drama even when she was in the middle of it, while Lucille had a tendency to invest the most everyday event with extravagant import, and they were useful to each other in managing between them to find a reasonable interpretation of the world.

  The Claytors, Dwight and Catherine, and their four children, lived out Newark Road, where Dwight Claytor’s grandparents had farmed comfortably, mainly growing corn but also running a good-size dairy. Dwight eventually joined his father’s law practice in Zanesville, although he kept his grandparents’ place and managed the dairy, which, by the time Agnes started school, was only about three miles or so north of Washburn, since the town had grown so much.

  But even before Agnes was born, the majority of that vast, slightly rolling acreage had been given over strictly to the growing of corn for a mass commercial market. Her father had built a new house farther from the road under the shelter of a nice stand of walnut trees that shaded the southern-facing rooms in the summer. By the time Agnes left lower school and began to attend the Linus Gilchrest Institute for Girls, the Claytor farm was so extensive that the Claytors were never really thought of as farmers.

  In fact, her father had hired a manager for the property and become deeply involved in state politics. He had been pressed to run for and had been elected to the state assembly on the Democratic ticket to represent Marshal County in 1913, and he had worked hard to ensure the reelection of Atlee Pomerene to the U.S. Senate in 1916. He was often in Columbus for weeks and sometimes more than a month without a visit home. And when he was at home, a great deal of time was taken up by people who came and went to discuss the business of politics with Dwight Claytor, who remained publicly courteous but who sometimes got closed-faced with anger—a tense flattening of expression—although perhaps only his children realized it. He kept his voice under tight control and even sustained a cordial tone, a flexibility of timbre that belied his displeasure. His children knew it well; their father rarely raised his voice, but they could always tell when he was disappointed or irritated or really angry.

  Now and then his restraint drove his wife to distraction. “There’s nothing kind about not saying what you mean!” she said to him. “It just leaves the children walking around feeling terrible. Not knowing what in the world they’ve done wrong.” And this was true enough, although it surprised her children that she knew it. “My father always said . . . he always said that he would never trust a man who wore a beard or any man who never showed his temper. He said it was the sign of a stingy heart.”

  Her husband turned a cold eye on her for a long moment that was suddenly quiet with the caught attention of all four children. “I won’t be insulted in my own home by my own wife, Catherine. My father always said to be careful what you wish for.” And then the tension ebbed a little as he relaxed and drew his fingers over his jaw from cheek to chin. “Besides, I haven’t ever worn a beard, Catherine,” he said to her, his expression mildly amused, but she whirled around with her hands clenched at her sides, her face wide with contempt.

  “Why, I just hope you can see that your father can be mean!” she said in the direction of her children, not speaking to Dwight directly. “Oh, I tell you, he can be mean as a snake! The things he says . . . the way he’ll say things to a person . . .” Her voice rustled furiously, and the children distracted her, asked her questions, begged special favors. They drew her away from their father however they could; Catherine never would let go of an argument on her own.

  As it happened, though, when Catherine had first met Dwight Claytor, what had originally caught her attention were the clean, round, unrancorous Midwestern vowels that shaped his voice as he politely defended some political position at dinner one evening. He had come to Natchez, where Catherine had lived all her life, to pay a visit to their mutual cousins, the Alcorns, and tidy up some family business, and he had become involved in an amiable debate with her father.

  Catherine had listened as he maintained his support of prohibition against the subtle derisiveness of her father. She hadn’t had an opinion about prohibition—hadn’t thought about it one way or another. But she liked the seemingly innocent unassailability of Dwight Claytor’s voice as it was pitched against the elegantly flat, sardonic questions and declarations her father put forth.

  “Well, sir,” Mr. Claytor said, “I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of industry in my section of the country. New enterprises springing up everywhere. And it certainly is true that industry, at any rate, has a large interest in the prohibition of drunkenness. It’s not a bit good for productivity, as you can imagine. The Anti-Saloon League is a powerful political ally for any man with aspirations. I suppose it could reach a point where there’s some danger in their intolerance.”

  “But I can see that you don’t worry as I do, Mr. Claytor,” her father replied, leaning back in his chair and pivoting slightly, crossing one leg over the other in an attitude that signified good temper and leisurely amusement, “that this whole thing might conspire against a man’s pleasure. It doesn’t seem to you to be the idea of preachers and unhappy women?”

  This was meant as a bit of lazy teasing, but Dwight Claytor frowned in consideration. “I don’t believe I know many of either,” he answered pensively. “But speaking simply for myself— as to pleasure, anyway—I can say that prohibition would have no effect whatsoever.” What he said was so straightforward it was clear that he was unaware of her father’s assumption of a little ironic conspiracy between the two of them. Her father was taken aback, and Catherine was peculiarly satisfied.

  Dwight Claytor had seemed to possess a placid sort of reasonableness. His tone never slid into the patronizing, slightly nasal, descending trill that she was so used to hearing in her father’s voice in any conversation. Mr. Claytor was a handsome man, compact and dark, with wide-set brown eyes, but it was really little more than the sound of his voice that secured him such a sought-after bride. It was his agreeable, unflustered articulation of his own point of view that was exactly why Catherine Alcorn Edson married Dwight Albert Claytor in April of 1898, when she was twenty years old. It was the reason Catherine came to be es
tablished on the wide, rolling farmland in the middle of Ohio.

  By 1916, though, Catherine had lost track of how she had arrived at where she was. She occupied a large new house with no idea of managing it, so that she was always surprised when each day she was confronted with the details of it, asked to make decisions about this or that. She had no idea of giving direction to Betsy Graves, the young woman her husband had hired to come in every morning to do domestic work—the two women stayed out of each other’s way, each one uneasy, and nothing much ever did get done. And Catherine was the mother of four children whom she often yearned after with a terrible, lonely soul-sickness. They moved through the hours as though they inhabited time apart from the way she understood it. Their days seemed to hurtle along all ordered and precise so that even her children’s everyday progression somehow excluded her. Sometimes she was mystified by the actuality of them and sometimes enraged.

  By the time Catherine Claytor was in her thirties the ragged, cluttered corners of her mind were filled with the wheedling neediness of children, their boisterous games, their loud humor, their endless appetites and curiosity. It was constantly surprising that they required so much of her. Having settled some business or other with them, she was never, ever prepared for still another concern to crop up. She never grasped the fact that no matter what she did they would need something from her yet again. And all this—all the requests and demands and elation and dismay spilling out into the rooms of her house, spiraling out over the yard, overlaying the incessant drone of the news of the world as it was related and debated by visitors and remarked upon by her husband—it was bewildering. Catherine was often overwhelmed by the turmoil of her own life and desperate in the face of the publicly impassive, forbearing nature of her husband’s attention.

  After Atlee Pomerene’s reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1916, the Claytor place became something of a political center. A good many men were pressing Dwight Claytor to consider a run for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in two years. They wanted him to challenge DeMott in the primary, in any case, with the hope of establishing a name for himself and winning the seat in 1920. Catherine no longer paid very much attention.

  When her husband launched into a careful explanation of some business that troubled him, she settled back in her chair, her expression politely attentive. She gazed at him intently while her mind toyed with and turned over the seductive sounds of the exotic names she caught up out of his little discourse as though she were plucking threads out of her needlework—Carrizal, Chihuahua, Carranza, Pancho Villa.

  She was equally detached when the talk turned to the war in Europe. So much impassioned rhetoric was cast into the atmosphere of her Ohio house that it affected her as if it were a sudden shift in weather: It brought on a constant, low throbbing in her head. She often lay in bed with the curtains drawn against the light late into the afternoon. By early 1917, the talk about the role the country should take in the war had gone on for months and months, had moved across the porch, invaded the sitting room, and resounded around her dining table. The idea of war had become so large on the horizon that it was no more urgent in her life than the idea of God, inevitable and unquestioned. The endless belaboring of the subject was tiresome to her and even baffling, and she often left the room without explanation, waving her hand in dismissal as the men began to rise from their seats when she stood to make an escape.

  President Wilson called for a War Resolution before a joint session of Congress on April 2. By the time the Senate had approved it on April 4, and the House had concurred two days later, Catherine was beyond the reach even of the most simplistic patriotism. She let all the political agitation waft right by her, and she became so peculiarly vague and abstracted that it made Agnes uneasy, but it was probably the happiest season so far of Agnes’s youngest brother’s childhood. At first Edson was cautious, but he became emboldened and gregarious and a great favorite of all the company, some of whom visited with fair regularity.

  When her mother’s attention drifted and she failed to notice that some bit of hospitality was called for, Agnes often stepped in as a sort of hostess. She was regularly in the vicinity of the men who congregated on the long, shaded porch or in the parlor and eyed her not so covertly with an unsettling interest. “Why, that’s a healthy-looking girl you have there, Dwight!” Her father never replied except with a vague nod, involved in a discussion about hog and wheat prices and the Lever Act.

  But her mother would always find her later, Catherine’s attention suddenly caught hard and apparently concentrated by intense disgust. “How can you let those men gawk at you like that? How can you be so vulgar? At least you could bind your breasts! You . . . you flounce around the table like some . . . You have all the delicacy of one of the dairy cows! Like someone coarse! You don’t have any instinct . . . not an ounce of blood from my side of the family. No air of . . . subtlety. Refinement! And here we are in this wilderness!”

  “Oh, Mama, please don’t,” Agnes would say softly. “Please don’t say things like that about me.” She could not bear to reveal that those furious images flung out into the air cut her to the quick and filled her with self-consciousness and mortifying shame of everything about herself. Instead Agnes would dredge up a teasing sort of jocularity.

  “Now, Mama, you were exactly my age when you were presented at the Regimental Ball, weren’t you? What was that like? I know all the men there wanted to dance with you! What was your dress like? Was that the dress with the green sash?” Agnes knew how to do this, but she was always abashed and peculiarly embarrassed and humiliated for her mother and for herself, too. Because almost at once her mother’s fierce regard would lose its intensity; she would become reflective as Agnes’s questions took hold, and she might settle down and begin to reminisce, or she might wander off in a reverie.

  But sometimes Catherine couldn’t be diverted, and any question only deflected her outrage. She would search out Edson and hector and badger him about one thing or another until he broke down, weeping and pleading with her to let him be. “Leave me alone, Mama! Leave me alone!” he would chant, his hands over his ears so that he could only hear his own voice as she lashed out at him—maddened somehow by any evidence of her children’s successful engagement with the world— calling him a sycophantic little fool. He only knew how terrible that must be because of its hissing sibilance. Nothing could stop her once she swung full force into her fury—not even the objection of his two brothers and certainly not any word from Agnes.

  Catherine’s rage was less directed when her husband was at home, although all four children could sense it just simmering under the surface, manifesting itself in a sliding glance of scorn as she passed a bowl of mashed potatoes, or in a cautious, disdainful stiffening if a child brushed by too close. On days like those, her children sat at the table hoping that some other notion would distract their mother before they were—any one of them—alone in her company.

  “Oh, you’re so pleased with yourself!” she rasped at Edson, bending over him as he leaned away from her, bearing down on him as he dissolved in misery. “But I’ll tell you, you’re too pretty for my taste! Too charming altogether! Oh, exactly like, exactly like your granddaddy. Ahh! And so polite! ‘Why, Mrs. Claytor, what a good little boy you have!’” she said in an enraged, high-pitched parody of some unctuous guest. “But I tell you what I think. You’re too sweet by far! Too good by half! A little mama’s boy! But not mine! Not mine! Not this mama. Sometimes I don’t know where you come from! I can’t imagine you’re any child of mine!”

  None of her children had any memory of a long stretch of time during which Catherine Claytor had been easy spirited or even content, but this new and sustained frenzy was baffling. All of their lives Agnes and her youngest brother, Edson, were most likely to try to smooth out any situation that might dismay their mother. And it was Agnes and Edson who were generally the primary targets of her arid rages, her thin, long-limbed flurry through the rooms. But there were other
moments of their growing up when it was one of the two of them around whom she spun a cocoon of gentle intimacy, her long fingers unexpectedly intertwining with their own while she invented long, mesmerizing, magical stories all about the adventures of a character named Uncle Tidbit.

  She had reeled those tales off her tongue like songs, so unlike the clotted sputtering of her invective. Leaning forward eagerly, widening her eyes as the story became comic or exciting, she would look at Agnes or Edson with a gleefully beseeching glance, entreating them to share her delight. She still wound out these stories for Edson, and he would sit transfixed by this woman whose head canted forward on her long neck in affectionate inclusion, whose every word and gesture indicated her deep and dreamy pleasure in his company.

  Sometimes, too, in a less rarefied atmosphere, just on any day, she would search out one or the other of them to repeat some compliment. She was matter-of-fact but betrayed her pride in them by dwelling on some attribute in exacting detail. All the examples of the fact that Agnes was smart as a whip, that it had been no surprise to Catherine to hear from Miss McCrory that Agnes was the brightest girl in her class. Or she might remind Edson that his great-aunt had said that he certainly was a real Alcorn, already tall for his age, and so handsome. So clever. A real charmer through and through.

  Now and then, out of nowhere, she confided startling intimacies to one or the other of them. She disclosed some triumph of her early life, a beau who had adored her, the trim of a hat she had designed and that had turned out to be exactly right, the astonishing beauty she had possessed—and on this point she was particularly adamant, determined that they believe her. Catherine would become urgent in her intensity, agitated as she insisted on the evidence of old photographs or urged them to study the large portrait of her hanging in the parlor. “You see?” she said. “See there?”