The Evidence Against Her (7 page)

By the time she was fourteen, Agnes had sometimes been so unhappy that there had been moments she had wished that she did not exist at all. Sometimes she had been sad enough to let her thoughts wander tentatively over the possibility of giving up altogether, but also by the time she was fourteen and fifteen she had become fairly fascinated by the drama of her own self. And, too, she had invested a good part of herself in the world beyond her own household, so by and large she was glad to draw another breath. If she had considered it one way or another, she would have conceded that even at the worst of times she would choose to continue to occupy a place on the earth. And therefore she was necessarily devoted to the place where she lived. It was where she was as she shaped her expectations of the world, and it was a landscape she embraced because it inescapably defined and contained her, heart and soul.

None of the Claytor children, however, was entirely immune to Catherine’s contempt for Washburn, Ohio—a contempt that in some way conferred upon her children a little superiority. Agnes sometimes said to her friends, unaware that she had taken on a certain air of condescension, that it was too bad to be stuck in a place of so little distinction. A town as little known as Washburn. And then it was her good friends who brooded privately over such an insult to the place their families had chosen, for whatever reason, to live. To the place where they were becoming who they were to become. And then any one of those friends—Lucille Drummond, say, or Sally Trenholm—at home and vexed by some request denied or desire made light of, might blurt out some remark to her own parents. Sally or Lucille might say something along the lines of how could her parents possibly understand the need for something finer than plain cotton serge for a new dress, given that—as Agnes Claytor said—they lived in such a backwater.

But by 1917, Agnes was old enough to be healthily self-involved, and Howie and Richard had each other as a protective frame of reference. It was only ten-year-old Edson Claytor who occasionally glanced darkly out at the unforgivable everlastingness of the rolling fields of Ohio with dismay, a bitter sorrow overtaking him when he considered that his mother had to bear up under conditions so unlike the soft, kind climate, the amiable environment, of her childhood home in Natchez, Mississippi.

It was quite a ripple that Catherine’s stone had made when she tossed it unthinkingly into the clear water of her young children’s sensibilities. It was quite a ripple, and in such a small pond that eventually it broke against her own shore. Catherine Claytor was held in great suspicion among the parents of her children’s friends and never was able to form any easy alliances. But her children understood that this landscape where she was so hard-pressed to eke out a single satisfactory hour was infinitely inferior to her own territory. And that territory was a place they believed they had never been. They had yet to make the connection between the actual geography of Natchez, Mississippi, and that wondrous place their mother always referred to as home.

Three times in her life Agnes had visited Natchez with the rest of her family. She remembered the trips a little bit, although often if she mentioned some particular detail she was told by one or the other of her parents that it never had happened or that what she thought she had seen did not, in fact, exist. It had been hot forever, Agnes said, in the backseat of the car with Howie and Richard pressed against her. No, her father said, it had been chilly, and the three of them had been wrapped in an old feather quilt.

It had frightened her to watch their automobile float away across a river on a raft that seemed to evaporate. Agnes remembered that she had thought the car was proceeding across the water all on its own, growing smaller as it moved away. Yes, indeed, her mother said, it had not been a good idea at all to take that crossing. No, her father said, it had only been a creek, no matter of any consequence, and they had remained in the car as the ferryman hauled them across by rope, hand over hand.

Her cousins had not liked her, Agnes thought. And her mother said it wasn’t true at all, it was just that Agnes seemed strange to them. “It was only your accent,” she said. “They think you’re a little Yankee.” Celeste and Peggy Alcorn were older than Agnes by several years, and she remembered that they had given her a piece of chocolate candy she had bitten into only to discover that it was a flat patty they had fashioned out of mud. But she didn’t mention this to either one of her parents because it was not so out of line with the general perils of childhood. She hadn’t ever, but might have considered pulling such a trick on one of her brothers. It wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility. She remembered the wide porch where she sat and cut pictures out of a magazine her grandmother Edson gave to her, and she remembered that Celeste had helped her and that they had had fun until Peggy turned up.

Agnes hadn’t been back since they had gone to Mississippi after her grandmother died, just a little while after Edson was born. Her mother and Edson had traveled by train to Natchez when he was four, but Agnes and the other two were in school and had stayed in Washburn under Mrs. Longacre’s care. Peggy Alcorn had traveled back to Ohio with Catherine Claytor and Edson, but Agnes had the hardest time really believing that the tall, pale, weak-chinned girl who drifted around the Claytor house could possibly be the same person who had instilled such dread in her only four years earlier. Peggy had stayed with them for two months, sharing Agnes’s room, and Agnes couldn’t, during all that time, form any fixed impression of her. She seemed to Agnes not to have much personality at all, although her mother said Peggy had beautifully cultivated manners.

Whatever Catherine Claytor did or didn’t understand about the delicate agreement with Mrs. Longacre, it was when she had consented to take over as the Claytors’ general housekeeper that the older three children, even at their young ages, began the complicated business of leading a multilayered life. They became duplicitous by default. It had nothing to do with how they felt about Mrs. Longacre; they liked her well enough but kept their minds open to doubt out of loyalty to their mother. They couldn’t possibly have sorted out all the complexities of their new arrangement. For one thing, Mrs. Longacre’s grandchildren were their playmates, and her oldest grandchild, Bernice, had been three years ahead of Agnes at school.

The Claytor children, though, deduced some sort of unspoken but deep embarrassment on the part of both their parents, and, too, those children had a certain, inherent sense of propriety and an easily tapped reservoir of shame. The older Claytor children were filled with unnatural cheer and goodwill toward Mrs. Longacre. They behaved with astonishing decorum under her rather brusque supervision and often took it out on one another in her absence. After all, a united front doesn’t hang together very well in the absence of the enemy.

Edson alone—clearly Mrs. Longacre’s favorite of the Claytor clan—maintained a scrupulously polite but distinctly restrained manner toward her. He never told her jokes, as Howie or Richard often did, sometimes earning a stiff smile. Edson never asked for her advice or told her stories of his day at school. He never begged a special treat or enthused over the plates of cookies or a cake she sometimes prepared. He always thanked her solemnly, but he saved all his secrets—any newly discovered ardor about one thing or another—to tell his mother, to seduce his mother’s elusive attention. Mrs. Longacre was merely dependable; his mother, in those moments when her concentration was caught and aimed his way . . . well, his mother was magical.

By 1917, Mrs. Longacre was a fixture in the life of the Claytor household, and the Claytor children were no longer even aware of the careful fusion of all the layers of their lives. There were so many separate, secret, unadmitted elements to the one instinctive, collective presentation of their adherence as a family that it would have required a sort of emotional archaeology to bring them all to light. By that Sunday evening in September when Agnes was carefully picking bits of glass from the dining-room carpet, it was more reassuring than not that Mrs. Longacre would be arriving at eight o’clock the next morning.

Agnes woke up off and on during the night to the sounds of doors opening and closing, of her mother’s steps, sometimes stealthy, sometimes clattering on the front stairs, of a general stirring about within the house. The whole of Agnes’s night had a nervous, streaky quality; she endured a shivery, pale restlessness and never had the satisfaction of falling away into the deep blue-black of heavy sleep. Edson woke her, though, from a state of near unconsciousness so early in the morning that only a barely discernible lightening of the sky seeped around the edges of her window shade.

“I don’t know what Mama’s doing, Agnes. I don’t know what she’s doing.” He was bending over, shaking her shoulder, his hair still spiked from his pillow and his face shiny and luminous in the dark room, his eyes silvery with restrained tears.

Agnes only looked at him a moment, coming into wakefulness and bunching her pillow under her head to prop it up a bit. “What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. Where is she, Edson?”

“She’s in the pantry. But I don’t know what she’s doing! She’s cutting up all her dresses. She’s got piles and piles of clothes. For the poor, she says. She says we’re not to think of her at all. That what happens to her, as old as she is, just doesn’t matter. That it’s her birthday, after all, and that she’s too old for all those bright dresses.” Edson implied his mother’s speech—the emphasis, the strained timbre infused with desperation—in his own despairing boy’s voice.

“Oh, no, Edson! Her birthday! Is it? What’s today? Oh, Eddie, it is! It’s the first of October. Oh, no! Oh, and Papa didn’t remember. You know he didn’t.” Agnes threw off the blankets and got out of bed, cinching her tangled hair away from her face with her hands. “Go get dressed, Edson. Get dressed for school, and we’ll go down together. Where’re Howie and Richard? Go wake them up and tell them I said to wash up and get ready for school. Tell them it’s Mama’s birthday and that I said for them to get up right now. Tell them I
mean
right now! And you be sure to comb your hair, Eddie. Get it really wet first. I don’t have time to help you with it.”

Agnes was the first dressed, pulling on her white stockings while hopping first on one foot and then the other, wrenching on her skirt and middy blouse, scraping her brush mercilessly through her mass of wiry hair, which she fastened tightly in a tortoiseshell clip with a slightly wilted navy blue bow attached. She scarcely took time to observe the effect—even the bow was school regulation—she only checked to be sure she was all straight, and then she hurried down the stairs in a rush to find her mother before Mrs. Longacre arrived. But she slowed to a saunter as she crossed the kitchen.

The sight of her mother was alarming. Catherine’s hair had come loose on one side and fell against her cheek as she stood with her bare feet slipped into her nice black buckled shoes, but otherwise she was dressed only in her wrapper and poised over a jumble of clothes—dresses, blouses, petticoats, hats, gloves, strewn everywhere—wielding her pair of long seamstress’s shears.

“Mama, what are you doing up so early? What are you doing awake before the sun’s even up? And on your birthday? The boys and I were going to surprise you with breakfast before Mrs. Longacre got here.” Agnes’s voice was artificial and tense with feigned cheer, but Catherine cast a disinterested glance at her daughter and bent and snipped, bent and snipped, curiously birdlike.

“Mama, what are you doing? You aren’t dressed yet. Aren’t you too cold?”

Catherine worked steadily for a moment more on a blouse whose sleeves hung forlornly to the floor as she held the bodice draped over one hand, and then she cast it aside and turned to Agnes, displaying a handful of buttons she had cut away, beautiful, intricate pierced bone, some of them, others of filigreed silver, of shiny brass, and some only plain shell. She was triumphant. “Now won’t your father see how thrifty I can be,” she said, elated. “He’ll be awfully pleased, you know. Why,
he
has no idea how a household can work!”

“But Mama! All your clothes . . . Won’t he be upset? What about your clothes?”

“Oh, these are all for a
young
woman. A girl! For a girl, I think. I’m sending them to the church, but I’ve saved the buttons, you see. And some of this trim, so when Cleo comes to do your hems she can start cutting my dresses, and I’ll have all the buttons she needs. And this nice lace collar. Hat trims. Ribbons, you see. I
refuse
to be foolish! I
won’t
be thought of as a woman who doesn’t even know any better than to dress her age. Oh, not for a minute! Not on any account will I be one of those awful, foolish old women!”

Foolish, foolish, was all Agnes could think as she looked at the ruin of her mother’s wardrobe—Catherine had cut away lace cuffs, had unseamed sleeves, had removed tulle insets— and Edson stood beside Agnes, stricken. “But Mama. Your dresses are so pretty,” he said. “Can’t Cleo put the buttons back? Can’t you fix them back?” Both he and Agnes knew that this was one of those acts on their mother’s part that might enrage their father.

Although they never spoke of it to one another, none of Dwight’s children was ever entirely surprised late in the night to come awake to a distant bark of anger somewhere in the dark interior of the house. They had all four awakened separately some weeks before on a stifling hot night when the windows of the house were open to catch any shift of damp, warm air. They had awakened to their father’s voice, in the dark yard, raised in hollow, nasal, high-pitched, prolonged fury that flattened without resonance in the humid air, overriding the plaintive upward climb of some complaint their mother, who must have followed him outside, made.

“. . . and you can’t . . . if you leave me here again,” she was saying, “all alone I won’t . . .” But her words were drowned out by a simultaneous and furious declaration of their father’s, unintelligible to them word by word but terrifying in the clarity of its fury: