“I’d forgotten that you have that handsome marquetry box, Lily,” Robert had said. “This little box. It’s not very fine, I know. But it does play a lullaby, and I thought . . .”
“Oh, yes. Yes, Robert. What a good idea,” Lily said, with her brightest smile.
When Warren got back for a week’s visit after his son’s birth he brought a pretty christening dress for the baby, and for Agnes a dresser scarf of intricate cutwork, a pale rose silk bed jacket, and beautiful monogrammed linen handkerchiefs—all those things nearly impossible to come by with the ban on German imports. He was elated to be home; he was relieved more than he could ever have imagined to see Agnes so healthy. He had been quietly terrified—ever since Agnes’s mother had died— that Agnes, too, would die, even though Catherine Claytor’s death had been completely unrelated to having given birth.
But when Warren first looked down at his two-week-old son he was overcome with a surge of relieved glee that made him nearly giddy. He smiled broadly. “Robert, look here! Lily! Why, Agnes. Our little boy looks to me just exactly like a butternut squash! His head’s so much bigger than the rest of him.” He was speaking fondly. In fact, he was making an enormous effort not to reveal how shaky he felt. Warren was fearfully astonished and had the same feeling of near nausea that he had had as a child when he was excited beyond his ability to express his emotion in language. He thought he might cry. “An exasperated squash, though,” he said, when Claytor’s features drew in and he burst into a mighty complaint. Claytor was loud with distress. Warren’s face drew in, too, with sympathetic misery, and he turned to look to Agnes for instruction.
But Agnes was already bending over and scooping up her son, and Warren didn’t see her expression. He had no idea that she was teary eyed and deeply injured on behalf of this infant who couldn’t make any case for himself, who couldn’t ward off his own father’s amusement. Warren assumed that he and Agnes were still in this together; it never occurred to him that she wouldn’t infer the passion behind the facade of his amiable teasing. He was certain she knew how profoundly he felt his connection to this tiny living being. But, of course, Warren was entirely mistaken. It was in that exact moment that Agnes was locked into a ferocious and lifetime advocacy of Claytor Edson Alcorn Scofield against all others, although she herself wasn’t aware of the long-term aspect of her immediate but unspoken indignation.
Little Dwight Claytor was five months old when the new baby entered the household, and by then no one remembered the frantic late nights of his first few weeks’ dismay. At the Scofield house he had become a child adored by the whole extended Scofield family, especially Warren’s father. John Scofield haunted Agnes’s days and was the one obstacle to her heady amazement at the life she was living. He had set himself up as Dwight’s protector in the face of what he saw as Agnes’s favoritism of her own child over her helpless little brother.
Within several months of his birth Claytor Scofield was every bit as handsome a baby as Dwight Claytor had been. Claytor’s dark hair had gone, and by the time he was one year old he and Dwight had the same white blond, silky hair, which Lillian Scofield called angel feathers. All the Scofield children had had hair like that, she said. And as they grew into toddlers Dwight Claytor and Claytor Scofield came to be known all over town as the little Scofield twins, which continued to perplex Agnes. She didn’t think the two children looked anything at all alike, and she was puzzled and disturbed, as they reached their first and then their second birthdays, whenever she was out with the two of them for a walk and a passerby would comment on her pretty twins. “Oh, no,” she said at first, “the older one’s my youngest brother.”
She didn’t know that there were people around town who thought it terribly unkind that she and Warren had named one of the twins Dwight, for Agnes’s father, but had not named the other John, for Warren’s father. “John Scofield’s in a bad way, too,” said Evie Bowers’s mother to her neighbor, whose husband was a foreman at the Company and worked under Tut Zeller. “That’s what I hear. But he’s just wild about those boys. Especially Dwight. You know, they aren’t identical twins. Oh, but they do look so much alike it’s hard to tell them apart. Dwight’s a little bigger. He’s the sturdy one. And Evie tells me John Scofield’s downright foolish about him.
“Of course, those boys were born just after the death of Mr. Claytor’s wife and his youngest son . . . Edward? Edwin? A nice little boy, but the flu . . . But you can see that Mr. and Mrs. Scofield might have chosen names from her side of the family because of that.” The subject was sad and complicated, and very few people sorted it out, anyway. Now and then, even within Scofields, the two boys were casually referred to as the twins.
Only Agnes, and also Lily, didn’t think of the two as brothers, but neither woman said anything, and those two children were entirely connected to each other. They measured themselves for better or worse against the other, and it never crossed their minds that they had not always been two parts of a whole. They did not know any way to consider their actions and desires except in reference to the other. They were scarcely ever apart, and as they got older nearly everyone was pleased to see them wherever they went. Two healthy, towheaded little boys with big brown eyes and those dark eyebrows that all the Scofields had. The sight of them pleased almost everyone. Only Lily sometimes felt breathless with a pang of jealousy when she saw the two, racing across the yards, or sitting quite still with their heads together considering one thing or another. It seemed to her that Agnes had everything in the world. And then she would struggle to repress that notion. She would try and try to wish Agnes well.
John Scofield was often with those little boys. And he remained certain that Agnes and Warren favored Claytor. He was fond of Claytor, too, but Dwight had about him a seriousness of purpose—a quality of earnestness—that astonished John. Claytor had a natural ease and a childish charm, and he wasn’t nearly so intense as Dwight. John suspected this was the reason Agnes favored Claytor. He was convinced that she didn’t fully appreciate Dwight’s intelligence. He didn’t hesitate to declare this notion to anyone at all. When Tut Zeller stopped by one afternoon looking for Warren, he found John Scofield and Evie Bowers out in the yard with the little boys, and he stood chatting with both of them for a bit, and said to John what fine-looking boys they were. A fine addition to the family.
“Well, they are, Tut. They certainly are. Now, their mother favors Claytor, but I think Dwight’s the one to watch. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him become an important man, someday. He thinks about things. Considers them, you see. Maybe he’ll go into politics. He’s not a carefree sort of boy. Not at all.”
“He’s like his father, then,” said Tut.
John had been watching the little boys digging an elaborate system of tunnels with spoons Evie had given them, and he slowly turned to regard Tut. “What do you mean? Warren had his fill of politics during the war. But I don’t believe Dwight is as restless.” He gestured toward Dwight, who was just a little over four years old, but who was earnestly working at a rocky patch, determined to burrow through while Claytor was digging around it. “See there. He doesn’t have Warren’s temperament.”
“Well, now,” Tut replied after a moment, “that little boy’s a Claytor, isn’t he? Born out at the Claytor place just before his mother came down with the flu?”
John drew himself up and looked at Tut in surprise. “Ah! Well, you can put that idea right out of your mind, Tut. You shouldn’t entertain such a thought at all. Why, just because a cat has her kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits!”
Nearly everyone in Washburn was pleased to see John Scofield devoted to those little boys, and Agnes never said a word about it one way or another. Her father-in-law spent hours of his day wherever she might be if the boys were with her. Now and then his hand would stray to her waist, if he drew her aside to show her something or other. Or he would lean forward and brush her hair out of her face while she held one or the other of the children so that
she couldn’t free her hands. Agnes had only once been entirely alone in a room with John Scofield, in the early days of her marriage. He had come up quietly over the carpet behind her, reached around her waist, and cupped her breasts in his hands. Agnes had twisted away from him, but she didn’t say a word.
Her mind went blank. She hadn’t wanted to allow anything to blot the lovely clean slate of her life at Scofields. And Agnes continued to impute any impropriety on his part to inadvertence or mistake, to accident, because she didn’t want to define herself in any way that was at odds with her notion of her ordinary life. But she was very cautious in the company of her father-in-law. Once she released a dish she was passing to Warren’s father before he could cover her hand with his own in the act of accepting it and she spilled peas all over the table and was mortified.
Both Lily and Lillian Scofield noticed John Scofield’s behavior. Lillian felt dreadful shame and real anger unfairly aimed in Agnes’s direction, and Lily was peculiarly angry, too, when she remembered her uncle John teasing her, always referring to her as the runt of the litter. But Lily thought her uncle was simply falling apart.
She had heard her own father despairing of John, who didn’t even go to the office anymore, who had, in fact, borrowed against his shares in the company. He had been delighted to accept a loan from Arthur Fitch, whose Fitch Enterprises in Pennsylvania was Scofields & Company’s largest privately owned competitor. Lily’s father couldn’t stand the man, who had several times approached Scofields & Company about a merger.
“I don’t know what John’s thinking,” Leo had said when only his wife and Lily were in the room. “Fitch’ll never give up those shares. Of course, Lillian’s income is separate, and Warren will be a partner soon enough. But I feel that John’s got some fury . . . I would’ve been glad to extend a loan. He knows that. He knows I want this kept in the family. But I think it’s me he’s maddest at. And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I practically raised him.”
• • •
By the time Agnes was pregnant once more, she and Warren had taken up residence in the house George Scofield had built for himself but which he was happy to give over to his nephew in order to move in with John and Lillian, where the household would be looked after without any effort on his part. Robert and Lily were just next door to Warren and Agnes, where they lived with Audra and Leo Scofield.
Agnes found herself living a life that absolutely amazed her whenever she stopped to consider it. At the age of twenty-four she was in charge of a bustling household in which she had achieved a ferocious domestic order. She had paid close attention to the management of her mother-in-law’s house all the while she and Warren and the babies lived there. Agnes’s own household was even more organized. Any little bit of disorder made her frantic, because she had in mind an existence that would be clean and spare, that would run as efficiently as a machine. No heartbreaking disorder, no desperate sorrow, no surprises at all. She moved through the serene rooms of her house at Scofields ignoring any evidence that she hadn’t achieved it.
Agnes had incorporated and improved upon all the exactitude of day-to-day arrangements her mother-in-law instituted in her own house—her careful planning, her extraordinary attention to the details of housekeeping—because Agnes would do whatever was necessary to keep her children from ever having to explain anything at all about their lives. She was determined to provide reliability of the domestic seasons. When her children raced off to Lily’s, where something was always afoot—golf games, charades, partially done jigsaw puzzles to contend with, Uncle Leo’s garden to investigate—Agnes knew they could leave their own household knowing exactly what they would find when they came home. It was the greatest luxury Agnes could think to give them.
• • •
During late Thursday night and early Friday morning, September 14 and 15, 1923, in Washburn, Ohio, and over much of Marshal County, a freakish storm moved in from Canada, and over seven inches of snow accumulated. It was the heaviest snowfall ever recorded for that month in Ohio, and Lily Scofield Butler awakened on the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday a little after dawn with a sharp ache in her back more intense than it had been when she went to bed. The night before, Robert had rubbed her back and loosened the tight muscles enough so that she had fallen asleep still in some pain but much comforted. When she came awake, Robert was sound asleep and lying flat on his back with his arms and legs straight. Lily had been sleeping in her own room across the hall during the last few months of the first pregnancy she seemed likely to carry to term, and Robert seemed to have admonished himself even in his sleep not to move about and disturb her.
She turned on her side, trying to ease the tightness in her lower back, tucking her knees up and laying her head against Robert’s shoulder for comfort. She lay there for long minutes waiting for the spasm to abate and fighting against panic—this didn’t feel like any of the times she had miscarried, but nonetheless she was over eight months pregnant and terrified that she would lose this baby, too. Finally she got up and slipped downstairs as quietly as she could, moving with great care, as though she might break if she made any but the most cautious motion. There was only a sliver of pale gray at the curtained windows, and no one else stirred anywhere in the house.
She slipped into the dark parlor and opened the drapes and was astonished at the glistening landscape. The leaves were heavy with the burden of snow, and the branches flexed dangerously and swooped low to the ground. It was extraordinarily beautiful and exciting—the inherent tension of the early snow weighing down the full-blown trees, the hedges and blooming bushes. Snow on the honeysuckle and the trumpet vine, still lush with deep orange flowers. It was startling, the contrast. As if someone had strung Christmas decorations in her father’s garden.
She stood for a long time, her sensibilities gone passive, the white, white light brightening as the sun rose. And she sat down on the window seat and felt better, her thoughts effervescing half formed, while the sky acquired a flat brightness. She was cold sitting near the glass, but the chill was distracting, and she was more comfortable sitting than she had been lying down.
Across the way Agnes emerged wearing mittens and galoshes and a scarf she must have tied on hastily, because her hair escaped in all directions. She was smiling while she helped the two little boys, who were so bundled up they couldn’t flex their arms and legs. She settled Dwight and Claytor on a sled with much flailing about and jockeying for position on their part. Lily watched closely with her lips slightly pursed and her head tilted forward in concentration—as though she were studying the behavior of another species—as Agnes pulled Dwight and Claytor across the lawn, walking backward facing the little boys, with an expression as exuberant as her mass of curly, unbound hair escaping her red wool scarf.
Agnes was four months pregnant herself, but already she had had to leave her coat unbuttoned except at the neck, and Lily realized Agnes had pulled on a pair of Warren’s trousers over her nightdress and turned up the cuffs in her hurry to get outside into the snow before it melted. In her wake she left a trammeled disturbance in the serene white sweep of lawn.
For just a moment Lily felt it keenly, a plummeting sense of despondency and envy. She stood watching, though, as Agnes and Dwight and Claytor crossed her line of vision, vivid and bright faced, disturbing the visual hush of the early morning, then Lily turned away and went upstairs to get dressed. She could hardly stand to witness Agnes’s happiness. Lily knew it was disgraceful to give in to such envy, and on this birthday— and Robert’s and Warren’s—she wasn’t going to allow herself any more time for loose-minded musing.
Nevertheless, the nature of her envy had evolved over the years. Lily had Robert back, and Warren was close at hand, but to her surprise it was somehow she who was left out. Only Lily herself perceived it—the other three would have been surprised that Lily felt in any way excluded. They would have been surprised that she pondered the thought at all. After all, it was still Lily who
animated any occasion when they were together, but Agnes and Warren and Robert shared a kind of mutual regard and affection that Lily simply could not extend to Agnes. Agnes had everything in the world she wanted; there was not a single need of hers that Lily could fulfill.
But Lily tried to shake off her resentment of Agnes’s unwitting rebuff—Agnes’s casual independence. And, in any case, she was genuinely fond of little Dwight Claytor and also Warren’s little boy, both of whom sought out and delighted in her company, and who were happy, good-natured children.
She dredged up her own vanity as a weapon against her current despondency, forcing herself out of her indulgent lapse into self-pity. Lily prided herself on being nothing if not a good sport, and she was generally disdainful of this sort of floundering about in personal reflection and maudlin regret. Nevertheless, it was terribly hard not to begrudge Agnes the children’s awed faces as they looked up at her with excitement, crediting her with the world’s soft, white dazzlement.
Chapter Twelve
MARTHA GERTRUDE BUTLER was born to Lily and Robert Butler the day after her parents’ thirty-fifth birthday, September 16, 1923, in the middle of the most unusual spell of early snow and ice storms ever to sweep over the region. And, as it happened, five months later, February 15, 1924, Agnes gave birth to a little girl—named Catherine Elizabeth Scofield but immediately known as Betts—in the warmest February on record for Washburn, Ohio. Temperatures rose into the sixties in that usually frigid month. But there wasn’t much notice paid to this small coincidence of those two girls’ being born almost on the same day of separate months and each in untimely weather. There were a good many young children and new babies in Washburn by 1924, after the war, as people settled down and started families.
The Evidence Against Her Page 27