The Evidence Against Her (29 page)

When Agnes had settled into her in-laws’ house with the baby, Warren’s mother had been sympathetic and even helpful, but she had mostly steered clear of the whole situation. Agnes had scarcely slept in days, agonizing over the baby’s habit of saving his loudest complaints for the middle of the night, when Agnes was certain it kept her mother- and father-in-law awake. There was a period between one and four in the morning when nothing Agnes could do had any effect on the baby’s loud unhappiness, and she became panicky with helplessness. Occasionally she had brief periods of exhausted, desperate fury at the baby himself, at John and Lillian Scofield, whose annoyed sleeplessness Agnes assumed, and especially at her own mother for leaving her in such a fix. She was done in by her pretense of competency in caring for her mother’s child.

She shifted the baby gingerly as she stood up, and for a moment Warren and the baby exchanged a glance as Agnes moved to put him down in his bassinet. The baby stared at Warren with a startled expression. He had beautiful, long-lashed, golden brown eyes, which Warren had never seen in the face of an infant.

Agnes settled the baby, who went down quietly enough, and moved toward her husband with a wistful look of longing. There was no chance at all that they would have any time alone. She put her arms around Warren’s neck and leaned into him, her cheek resting on his shoulder, and Warren bent his head against her hair.

“I’m so sorry about everything, Agnes. I’m sorry you were by yourself through all this. I know nothing can ever make up for what’s happened . . . .” But he stopped abruptly and made a low murmur of disapproval, moving his head from side to side and further disarranging Agnes’s hair. “Well, I don’t mean to say that. It’s the kind of thing I hate to hear other people say. People mean well. They mean to comfort someone. But of course nothing can make up for this. Nothing will be the same. Everything I mean to say sounds simpleminded. When I came in just now I didn’t know what to expect. But you looked exactly right. You and the baby facing the light from the window. Have you ever had that feeling? I knew that everything was just as it should be. That’s how you looked. When I saw you in the rocking chair I thought, well, at least there’s the baby. He
is
a handsome boy, Agnes. He’s bound to be some comfort to you, I think. And to me, too.”

Warren couldn’t see his wife’s face, but, in fact, with her head still resting on his shoulder, Agnes opened her eyes and blinked slowly in surprise. She didn’t even like the child who had been placed in her care. She was terrified of him—of her inability to know what he wanted. And he would be brought up in the Claytor household, anyway, and she would be at Scofields, and she
would
come to like him—to love him, of course. He was her brother, after all. But Warren’s admiration of her with the baby was too flattering to dispute just at the moment. “He
is
a pretty baby,” she said. “He looks just like Mama, I think.”

Warren leaned his head back to see her face, and he smiled indulgently. “Oh, maybe so. You might be right. But to me he looks more like a Scofield. He has such dark eyes, and your mother’s were light. But you might be right. Who knows how he’ll turn out? Aunt Audra always says that babies generally surprise you one way or another.”

“Well, I guess that’s true,” Agnes said. “I guess they almost always do.”

•  •  •

When Agnes gave birth to her first child, though, she was far more than surprised; she fell into a state of maternal devotion so at odds with her experience and expectations that she was privately a little alarmed by her own emotion. Claytor Edson Alcorn Scofield was born on April 13, 1919, five months after little Dwight’s birth. Claytor Scofield was a red-faced newborn, long and thin and with all his features tightly pinched together in the middle of his face as if he were angry. And, as it happened, for the first three weeks of his life he was close to inconsolable, and Agnes was very nearly crazed with anxiety and empathic grief when she couldn’t solace him.

Warren got home only twice before his son’s birth, once just after Robert Butler returned in January, and again the first of February, at which point Lillian Scofield had the crib brought down from the attic and placed in the little nursery for Dwight. It was apparently going to be quite a while before the nursery out at the Claytor place could be put to rights. When Mrs. Longacre’s cold had turned into pneumonia, Audra Scofield had arranged for Evelyn Harvey’s niece, Evie Bowers, to come in during the week and on Saturday afternoons to look after little Dwight. And the only word that came from the Damerons’ house was that Mrs. Longacre was recovering but was confined to bed. Dwight Claytor, though, was a happy baby, and he turned to the sound of Agnes’s voice, he beamed when she came into sight, and generally only she or her father-in-law, John Scofield, could assuage Dwight’s occasional bouts of discontent.

After Christmas, Agnes had been confined to the house when the weather got bitter, but Lucille Drummond visited often, and Sally Trenholm when she was home from school. Lily came over every afternoon, and Robert Butler often visited as well, and other than Lucille, it was Robert whom Agnes most liked to see. He was a pleasant man in every respect. He was nice looking but not dashing, interesting but not intimidating. It was clear every moment he was near her that he was devoted to Lily, and Agnes liked him very much for that. Agnes found that it was an entirely uncomplicated and happy coincidence that he and she liked each other immediately. She was surprised to be so comfortable with him as soon as they met, but she supposed that there was no more accounting for immediate friendship than there was for falling in love.

She had developed a suspicion of Robert Butler since she first began to hear his friends and family talk about him. He was so highly thought of, and not one person had even implied anything unfavorable about him. Agnes had begun to resent him and think he must not be very interesting, since he was universally and tediously described as a good and decent man. His first book of poems had been published while he was in France, and she had read it but didn’t have any idea what the poems were about. Well, they were about God, but she couldn’t tell exactly what he was getting at. No one had thought to tell Agnes, however, about Robert’s quiet humor or his nearly eccentric courtliness.

When Claytor was born, Robert presented him with a lovely little music box he had bought in France—had bought, in fact, intending it as a gift for Lily. But when he asked Lily if she thought it might not be a more suitable gift for Agnes and her new baby, Lily had seemed enthusiastic about his idea.

“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?”