William Dameron and his wife, the former Sally Trenholm, had two children, and Lucille Drummond was married and living in Columbus with her husband and little boy. Agnes’s father was married again, to a widow who had two children of her own who were at the Sperry School, and Howie and Richard Claytor were both attending Ohio State University. Whenever they came to Washburn they stayed with Warren and Agnes, because their father lived in Columbus, and the house out on Newark Road was rented.
By the summer of 1926, Agnes was once again pregnant, with the baby due in the late fall. Betts was two and a half years old, and she and the Butlers’ daughter, Trudy, were thrown together much of the time, although theirs was a fractious alliance. One moment they were happy as clams and the next they were in tears of indignation, one at the other.
Betts was a mystery to her mother; Agnes was a little in awe of her. She was nothing at all like Agnes had been as a child. Betts didn’t possess one ounce of faintheartedness or timidity or a single bit of caution. She was much admired; Warren liked the way she just dashed head-on into her life. Someone was always having to race after Betts, who popped out of her bed and down the stairs and right out into the morning and across the yards of Scofields if no one had remembered to lock the door. Even when she was sitting with her father while he read her a story she gave the impression of being ready to go someplace else—even when she had the attention of Claytor and Dwight, if they helped her, for instance, build a castle with her blocks. Betts never appeared to be concentrating on just one thing at a time.
Lily’s daughter, Trudy—equally mysterious to her mother— was the older of the two girls by five months, but she was a smaller, rather delicate and more earnest little person. She was a child who was greatly absorbed by one thing at a time as the hours of the day unfolded, whereas Betts rushed through each moment hardly noticing its passage and certain that whatever would satisfy her was just about to happen. Trudy was adored by her father; he doted on her in his own way, quietly, and with a courteous restraint. But Lily was trapped in a frustrating state of maternal anxiety. With any other children she was spontaneous and daring, but she was always concerned about Trudy: Might she fall, might she catch cold, might she not thrive? Lily didn’t like the sort of person she became when she was with her daughter. Lily had always disdained that very nagging sort of mother she herself turned into when Trudy was within her realm. But Trudy was a quiet, self-possessed, easy child who, even as a toddler, kept her own counsel and didn’t chafe much at any restrictions Lily imposed on her.
John Scofield was sixty-seven years old in 1926, and he had made himself nearly a permanent fixture in his son’s house. Almost every morning he arrived at the front door impeccably dressed, a lean, elegant, still-handsome man. He arrived ostensibly to join Warren on his way to the office, but he would sit down at the breakfast table and accept a cup of coffee. “We ought to be getting along, Warren. I’m already late, and if I’m not on my way soon I might as well give up this day and go over to the fairgrounds to see how they’re getting on unloading the horses.”
And Dwight and Claytor would at once begin a campaign to go along with whatever adventure John had thought up for that day. Agnes didn’t like it, but Warren remained delighted by his father’s interest in the little boys. “I’ve never seen my father sentimental about anything in his life. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”
Warren and Leo were relieved and grateful to have John occupied. But Agnes often saw him slip into the pantry in the morning and pour a shot of whiskey from a flask into his coffee; she saw him too jovial by lunchtime, but she did realize that his affection for Dwight and Claytor was real. She had watched countless times as he sat with the two little boys and showed them over and over, with infinite patience, how to fold a hat or a sailboat out of a sheet of newspaper, or, with a piece of string, taught them the basic rudiments of making a cat’s cradle, or time after time helped the boys tie and retie their shoelaces. He spent hours diligently helping them build miniature forts with glue and matchsticks. And he listened to them without any hint of adult condescension; he attended whatever they had to say with genuine gravity, and she appreciated that on their behalf. Even though John Scofield made her uneasy, she knew better than to do anything that might undermine the high esteem with which Mr. Scofield and Dwight and Claytor regarded one another.
And, too, Warren was so miserable if Agnes made known any complaint against his father that she simply kept John Scofield’s sly advances—his relentless attempts to fondle or touch her—to herself. She had never said a word about it to Warren; she had only mentioned to Warren her father-in-law’s occasional lapses into rough language around the children. “But Agnes, there’s no protecting them from everything. When they’re down at the works . . . and you know how they love to go along. But the men don’t notice them. Don’t change their language. And, I’ll tell you, it can singe your ears. My father may lapse into the same thing now and then, but as long as they understand that they’re never to repeat what they hear . . .” And John was cagey; Warren never saw any impropriety.
Agnes had long ago been unable to continue to ignore her father-in-law’s advances, however, and she had once gingerly brought up the subject with Lily, who she hoped might advise her. But Lily seemed almost annoyed.
“Oh, Uncle John’s always been full of trouble. I can’t tell you the times he’s nearly driven my father around the bend. But, you know, Agnes, I think the best thing to do is just to stay out of his way.” All this business seemed to Lily to be—perversely— an odd sort of compliment to Agnes, and one more bit of proof that John Scofield still thought that Lily herself was a poor specimen. “I can’t see any way to bring it up that won’t hurt poor Aunt Lillian. And Warren, too. After all, it’s his own father. If I were you I’d just keep out of his way.” Which wasn’t much help to Agnes, who was already adept at escaping any room John Scofield entered. But, although Agnes never let herself dwell on it, as John Scofield aged, Agnes thought him more and more grotesque in his lechery.
The fact was that John Scofield and Agnes simply didn’t like each other, which was perfectly understandable on Agnes’s part. But there wasn’t any woman John held in very high regard; he viewed them with suspicion and hostility and a deep, uninvestigated resentment at the idea that they should receive societal gratitude, societal deference, merely because they gave birth, merely because every man had a mother. He was one of the few people not charmed by little Betts as she flew about Scofields, although he was astute enough to know he couldn’t let all his irritation at her coalesce into apparent dislike. Nor was he particularly fond of Trudy Butler, who seemed to him a dull-natured child with no spunk.
It wasn’t really any sort of lust that drew him to his daughter-in-law; it was a variation of contempt, although he was long past any chance of understanding that. He took a childish pleasure in thwarting her. She was a bossy thing, he thought as he sat at her table. In subtle ways she had taken charge of the household and brooked no interference in her agenda, even from her husband. And John could see that Warren didn’t even know he was shaping his life to his wife’s domestic schedule. Warren was naively happy to have the household run like clockwork.
Warren wouldn’t hear a word against Agnes, but the little boys were more amenable to considering the disadvantages of Agnes’s unreasonably inflexible householdery. “Now, I know this is the day your mama has the porch washed down. If it weren’t, though, why, we could have a fine time with this handsome set of soldiers I came across at Flint’s, downtown.” Agnes would tuck in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes would widen in an owlish expression as she suppressed her annoyance when Dwight and Claytor began to implore her to let them use the porch. But Warren would grin at Agnes in amused complicity. He had no idea that there were much larger issues at stake. He had no idea that his father was attempting to undermine or make irrelevant his wife’s authority.
“Oh, certainly, Mr. Scofield,” Agnes would answer swee
tly. “But, now, you don’t mean to leave out Betts and Trudy, do you? They would just be heartbroken. Why, they worship the ground you walk on, and the boys are so patient with them. Dwight and Claytor are so grown-up for their ages that they’re always sweet to the little girls.” And Dwight and Claytor would be so impressed with themselves and their remarkable maturity—both seven years old in the summer of ’26—that they agreed immediately that Trudy and Betts should be included. Only Agnes and John Scofield knew that a battle had been joined. It was tiresome, though. It was she who quietly bore the brunt of John’s determined self-destruction, and, in spite of his obvious loneliness and genuine affection for children she also loved, she could not muster any pity for him at all.
• • •
Audra Scofield had arranged to take the farmhouse in Maine for June, July, and August, and had persuaded her sister, Lillian, to join her. Audra was increasingly worried about her sister. Lillian showed all the signs of falling prey to another spell of the despair and lethargy that she had been prone to since she was first married. Audra privately thought that John Scofield was at the root of Lillian’s despondency, and in making their plans Audra made a great fuss of her concern that John not be away from all his various business concerns. John and the rest of the family would join them for the last few weeks of August. Warren and Agnes had arranged to rent a little cottage near the farmhouse in Tenants Harbor for the month of August, and only Robert wouldn’t be able to get away. The Harcourt Lees faculty convened on August 9. He hoped, though, to get some good work done without the pleasant distractions of his wife and daughter.
But, as always happened when his wife was away, John Scofield’s fragile hold on some semblance of decorum shattered entirely as soon as she left. He didn’t get up in the mornings; he didn’t dress or shave. Finally Evelyn Harvey approached Warren and told him that she wouldn’t come in anymore until Mrs. Scofield was back, but that she expected to be paid in full or she would have to give up working there altogether. Warren had been worried about his mother, too, and he certainly wasn’t going to wire her for instruction, nor did he feel inclined to involve his uncle Leo, who disapproved of John as it was.
George Scofield lived in John’s house, but when he wasn’t at the Company he spent his time traveling—sometimes great distances—to search out relics from the Civil War. Just a week after Audra and Lillian Scofield had departed for Maine, George had returned from Pennsylvania, where he had done some business, but where he had also obtained two bullets that were said to have met midair in the battle of Gettysburg. The coincidence entranced George. “Why, right here,” he had said to John, who was collapsed in a chair in the parlor, “right here’s a story,” he went on, holding the bullets head to head to illustrate their collision. “Right here you might have a picture of how two lives were spared. That’s what it might be.” He hadn’t even noticed his brother’s state of disarray. John was sitting unshaven in his trousers and his undershirt, with his suspenders hanging around his waist.
It was just then, while Evelyn Harvey stood in the doorway drying her hands on her apron, that she made up her mind she wasn’t going to stay on in this situation. It was too upsetting. She went straight over to Warren and Agnes Scofield’s house, but she waited in the kitchen with her niece Evie until Mr. Scofield got home. Even though she liked Warren Scofield’s wife well enough, and as distressed as she was, she still wasn’t going to say anything unfavorable about the family to someone who wasn’t a Scofield.
Warren asked her to take a few days off and then give his father another chance. “I’ll see if I can’t get him feeling better, Mrs. Harvey. I’ll have him stay with us for a few days, and I think he’ll be back to himself pretty soon. You know how fond he is of the children. I think he’ll want to be on his best behavior. But I thank you for all you’ve done, and I apologize. He has a hard time whenever my mother travels.”
When John was installed in the downstairs bedroom at Agnes and Warren’s, he did behave with more propriety. Warren gave over any chores that would normally fall to the head of the house to his father, and it did have the effect of sobering John Scofield up and pulling him back from the brink of dissolution. Dwight and Claytor, and even Betts, were delighted to have him in the house. He was always full of plans and ideas.
It was only Agnes who felt that to share a household with Mr. Scofield once again might tax her beyond the endurance of her courtesy. Warren had no idea that his wife didn’t like his father, but the children knew it quite well. They could tell just by how she drew herself in slightly when Mr. Scofield entered a room, or how she spoke to him with frightening politeness, a chilly little formality in her voice. The two boys each thought privately that she wasn’t being fair. They couldn’t understand her antipathy, and in a roundabout way both felt injured that Agnes didn’t like this man who loved them so much. Her unspoken dislike tarnished the wonderful fact of his affection for them. They were a little bit angry.
When Agnes roasted a nice chicken for Sunday dinner, she put it down in front of John Scofield, who had made fresh lemonade for the children that morning and still had his own glass in his hand. He placed the glass carefully on the tablecloth, with a precision that unnerved Agnes, and he took up the carving knife and fork and began ineffectively to carve the bird, managing, finally, to dislodge it from the platter, so that the chicken lay forlornly on its side, soiling the crisp tablecloth. Agnes made a breathy and irritated little exclamation of surprise, and John looked down sadly at what he had done. He put his head in his hands, and for the first time since she had known him, Agnes felt sorry for him. She had never seen him express remorse, but she found that there was nothing about his dismay that was gratifying. She started to rise from her place, “Don’t bother about any of this—” she was saying, just as Claytor spoke up.
“Oh, Mama!” he said, with real sorrow in his voice. “Mama. Look! Look what happened. You must have got the wrong kind of chicken today, Mama.” John Scofield had been so delighted he had fallen right out of mortification and into a state of careful charm right before their eyes. And the tale became a staple of the Scofield clan.
Warren told and retold this little vignette fondly, embellishing it as he went along, enhancing Claytor’s precociousness sometimes, his wit at others. And, of course, with no culpability attributed to anyone, because Warren would never have found any of it amusing if he had understood that there was blame to be allotted. He saw it merely as one of those mishaps that are comical in retrospect, and he also thought it illustrated a hopeful kind of optimism on the part of his son, who interpreted the whole incident as the fault of the chicken and not any clumsiness of his grandfather’s. Over the years other family members recounted the story—the “wrong chicken” story— at Thanksgiving or some other occasion. Agnes never held Claytor’s betrayal of her against him, but she generally managed not to remain in the room whenever the story began.
• • •
Washburn, Ohio, planned to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Independence Day on July 5, 1926, since the Fourth of July fell on a Sunday. But all the Scofields & Company workers and their families were invited to a picnic at Scofields on Sunday, the afternoon of the Fourth. The Scofields & Company Band and the Silver Cornet Band would give a public concert that evening at the bandstand on Monument Square, and then the Fife and Drum Corps of the Washburn Post of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Sons of Union Veterans would perform. Following the musical performances, the entertainment committee had planned a reenactment of the dedication of the Civil War monument. It had originally been erected and given to the town under the aegis of Mrs. Marcus Dowd, whose husband, Colonel Marcus Dowd, had died at Petersburg. His daughter, Mrs. Carter Hutcheson, was coming from Philadelphia to participate in the ceremony. Mrs. Hutcheson would say a few words and read the poem from which the inscription on the monument was taken.
Leo and John and George Scofield were in rare accordance on the planning of the picnic. John had arranged for Charlie
Peel at the Eola Arms Hotel to set up a bounteous buffet on long tables on the grounds and porches of Scofields, and George proposed to display an exhibit of his Civil War relics, which to his surprise was an offer matter-of-factly accepted by John and Leo.
In the absence of her mother and her aunt, all questions of logistics involving the Scofield compound were referred to Lily, and she got into the swing of things right away. She asked Dwight and Claytor to be her lieutenants—that very phrase— which they agreed to enthusiastically. Lily and the boys scouted the yards for the best place to set the stake for horseshoes and searched for level ground for the three badminton nets. They roamed the lawns, with Trudy and Betts in their wake, sorting out where to locate the children’s refreshment booth, deciding where some comfortable chairs could be placed for those who might be uncomfortable on picnic blankets on the ground. The children were very nearly overwrought with anticipation for days.
Agnes did her best not to be involved. She was the only person at Scofields who was not looking forward to the occasion. It seemed to her that any sort of celebration—of anything at all—was an opportunity for the fragile order of a safely regular day to fall apart. To her mind it was only that hard-won and carefully observed routine that marked the fine line between serenity and turmoil. She alone within her family never looked forward to birthdays, or Christmas, or any holiday that was filled with the possibility of disappointment and even sorrow.
She never said aloud to her family a single word about her particular dread of any of the festivities cherished by the rest of them. She couldn’t account for it herself and worried that there was something stingy in her nature. It certainly wasn’t that she begrudged the pleasure of her children and Warren, Lily and Robert and little Trudy, her in-laws, or her brothers at any sort of celebration; it was just that the whole experience felt dangerous and slippery to her.
The Evidence Against Her Page 28