The Evidence Against Her

by Robb Forman Dew

  Edson was thrilled. He kept quiet while he tried to gauge his mother’s and his sister’s moods, but after Agnes left the room he couldn’t contain himself. “Oh, Mama! Howie and Richard and I’ll be able to go to the Company anytime we want to. Even to the works. And maybe the races out at Judge Lufton’s . . .”

  “Oh, hush, Edson!” His mother cut him off with a wave of her hand. “That’s all nonsense! Don’t spread that idea around. It’ll make Agnes look like a fool. It’s some . . . It’s just some pipe dream of hers. Agnes told me herself . . . Well, when William Dameron . . . Never mind, never mind, Edson. Now don’t go talking about it and embarrass us all!” She didn’t pay much heed to the whole idea. Catherine was thinking of the silly song she had made up about Agnes and William Dameron.

  Edson, of course, as soon as he left his mother’s company, rushed off to find his brothers, and he did tell Howie and Richard, but all three boys were wary of Agnes lately, and they certainly knew better than to press their mother about anything that was unpleasant to her.

  Warren Scofield called formally when their father was home, and Dwight Claytor seemed pleased enough, but Catherine felt as though she had somehow been betrayed. She found all of it hard to think about; she found the whole stir in the household unnerving, and she was baffled by Agnes’s refusal to be drawn in once more to what could have been an exclusive and feminine intrigue in the Claytor household, which was otherwise all male. “I asked Mrs. Longacre to unpack my wedding dress, Agnes,” she said to her daughter one afternoon. “I wanted to do it myself, it’s so fragile. But I can’t go up those stairs. But I looked it over. It is still perfectly beautiful, and there’s no damage. And even with your skin . . . The fabric’s really a cream color, not a flat white. It will be fine with your coloring. And I’m sure we can fix the problem of the fit. It’s for a different sort of figure, you know. Taller and . . . Taller. But of course the hem’s not any problem to change. And you’re . . . The bodice is . . . Well, it’s narrow. A pleated dropped waist in the front, but I don’t see why . . .”

  “No, Mama. I’m going to wear my blue suit and hat that I can travel in. I don’t want a fuss over a wedding dress. And anyway, it would be a terrible shame to alter your dress. Aunt Cettie designed it just for you. She sewed every stitch by hand! Oh, even cousin Peggy talked about your wedding when she stayed with us, and she hadn’t even been born yet. No one had ever seen such a bride as you, Mama! And the ceremony! Four hundred guests. The azaleas in bloom. The gardenias! And under the live oaks at Dunleith. Everyone was still talking about it at Christmastime of that year. All through the delta. And you remember? It was seven years before Elsie Hanchett’s wedding became as much talked about! But Aunt Cettie always said that was really because Elsie had those twelve attendants. And those lavender sashes they wore! You told me Aunt Cettie said it didn’t have much to do with Elsie Hanchett at all.”

  Catherine was struck dumb with an odd combination of outrage and shame. She sat straight up against her pillows and had nothing at all to say to her daughter. Had she said all that to Agnes so often? Catherine had only ever mentioned her wedding to establish the fact—even in her own mind—that she had once been celebrated, had once been remarkably lovely. She had not always been the stringy wife of a Midwestern farmer.

  Edson laughed, because he thought Agnes was doing an imitation of their mother, an imitation that was fondly meant. Agnes had softened her voice and fallen into the yielding elisions of their mother’s Southern accent. Edson assumed Agnes was repeating word for word something their mother must have said some time or other.

  “You might end up with a granddaughter who could do that dress justice, Mama,” Agnes went on. “Or maybe one of the boys’ brides, even. But I wouldn’t think of having it altered on my account.” Agnes and Catherine held a long look between them, and Edson saw that somehow his mother had been routed. She finally blinked slowly and looked away from her daughter, and Agnes smiled kindly in her direction. “But it’s nice of you to think of it, Mama. It is a beautiful dress. You just know, though, there’s no one who could ever really wear it well but you.”

  In Agnes’s case being in love had proved not to be particularly ennobling. She was no longer burdened with imagining her mother’s point of view; Agnes made no bones about speaking out and laying claim to her own life. Not only had she fallen into a deep, romantic reverie, she had also discovered the earthbound satisfaction of her own burgeoning eroticism. These days she scarcely imagined what anyone else might be thinking— apart from Warren, that is. She was nearly obsessed with the possibilities of what he might be thinking.

  Agnes’s mind was simply crowded with sensation. Not once since that afternoon when Warren had leaned forward and kissed her, then brushed aside her damp hair from around her face and kissed her again, had it even crossed Agnes’s mind to be the least bit coy. It never occurred to her to pretend to some maidenly idea of modesty or morality that would have been entirely false once she had discovered the astonishment of her own lust.

  She and Warren spent long afternoons—when no one had any idea they were even in each other’s company—stretched out on a cot in a shack that was used in the fall by duck hunters out at Brewers Pond. The first time Warren had undressed her, she had reached up to stop his hand as he began unbuttoning her shirtwaist, only because she was afraid he would find her figure coarse—not for a minute because she was worried about the propriety of it. But finally she so much wanted him to touch her that she didn’t bother to protest, and Warren only murmured to her that she was so beautiful. So beautiful! It was heady to ponder. Agnes was absorbed with the new and surprising delight of simply being flesh and blood.

  Catherine was increasingly affronted, and when Agnes turned down Catherine’s offer of her exquisite wedding dress, it was Edson who received the brunt of his mother’s dismay at Agnes’s ingratitude. “I’ll tell you, Edson, I hope you won’t ever know how hard it is to see that your own children have no idea . . . lose even their charity toward their own mother . . . don’t even bother to pretend . . . to pretend or even care one way or another. Why, I don’t believe she even remembers all the trouble I took to make her birthday a real occasion. None of the rest of the family . . . Turning eighteen is important, though. I wanted it to be one of those birthdays that a girl never forgets.”

  As the day of the wedding approached, Catherine became increasingly restless and querulous in Edson’s company, because she had found she was met with an outright dismissal if she broached the subject of the marriage itself or even the ceremony to Agnes. Her brothers steered clear of Agnes, too, since she was unpredictably prickly these days. They never knew when something they said would cause her to fly off the handle—as much as Agnes ever did fly off the handle: She would fix them with her round-eyed glare, and her voice would drop into a dangerous, raspy range. Only Edson, though, was constantly a party to his mother’s outraged indignation. He sat stoically alongside her while she rustled impatiently.

  “Now, what do you think went on, Edson? When I think about it I remember that the day Dr. Hayes came out here Agnes came home looking like something the cat dragged in.”

  “I don’t know, Mama. Well, Agnes had a bad fall from Bandit, she said, and Mr. Scofield brought her home.” But his mother didn’t seem to hear him. Her voice thinned out as if it were reverberating over a wire.

  “Her hair flying around like it does, and her skirt just ruined,” she said. “Why, she didn’t get home till nearly evening. And she knew I wasn’t well. And now . . . Oh, you can imagine it’s not a good thing. Marrying Warren Scofield! Why would he . . . I know her, and I never thought . . . Why, she’s sly, Edson! To tell you the truth, sometimes I just can’t stand to look at her, knowing what she’s been up to!” His mother went over this almost once a day, and when her voice eventually sank into a dark, furious timbre, Edson could hardly bear it. He didn’t leave her, though; he sat on patiently, reassuring his mother, although he didn’t know exactly why all th
is business disturbed her so much.

  “Agnes’ll be all right, Mama. They’re going to New York and Boston after the wedding!”

  But the one time he said that, it sent Catherine right over the top into a damaging rage. “She’s a little sneak! Think how bad William Dameron’s going to feel when he gets wind of this! Stringing him along . . . Oh! Your sister is . . .! Oh, all that about her class book! The class playwrights’ meetings. Oh, yes. I guess she thinks I was born yesterday. She thinks I couldn’t imagine what she’s been up to . . . .”

  Edson was frantically distressed every time his mother became so angry. She would practically fling herself out of bed and pace the room, and he would try to distract her from her furious muttering, from her scandalized resentment.

  “Can’t you just see her simpering along with her hand—oh, her stubby, inelegant little hands! Her hand just latched right through Warren Scofield’s arm . . . . She’ll just be trailing along beside him like a little puppy. Nothing refined about her! What can she be thinking? And I’ll tell you, she doesn’t care a bit what happens to any of the rest of us. She never did, you know. She never really cared about you at all, Edson. Before you there was Howie and Richard, but they knew better. The two of them were too much for her. She couldn’t win them over!”

  “Not me either, Mama. Agnes didn’t win me over either!” he would finally say desperately, wanting her to admire his resistance to his sister as much as she admired his brothers’, although he didn’t know what being won over by Agnes entailed.

  “Oh, yes, Edson. You adored her! When you were little . . . you trailed after Agnes like a little shadow. Well, she’s so bossy. You were thoroughly smitten with her when you were a little boy. And she can pretend—oh! to your father, too—to be just as sweet as honey. You never can trust that. You never can trust someone being that nice when they don’t have any real reason for it. You were just a little pet for her until she got involved in other things. All that business about schoolwork. A teacher’s pet. But now look . . .”

  And Edson did eventually begin to see that Agnes hadn’t ever cared much about her brothers, and that she had caused her mother to be astonishingly miserable. His mother’s words would slow down into deliberate, careful, considered anger, and he, too, began to conceive a belated fury at Agnes, who had caused all this trouble, who moved around the house already as though she weren’t part of the family.

  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.