DURING THE EARLY YEARS of the success and expansion of Scofields & Company, even before it became Washburn’s primary employer, the town as a whole conferred upon the Scofield family a particularly American idea of nobility, which had to do with an ill-defined combination of power, money, good looks, and temperament, and almost nothing to do with heredity. And, even though other industries had grown up in Washburn and were flourishing, the Scofields’ prominence, in particular, remained an integral part of the identity of the town.
The Scofield family engaged the imagination of the people of Washburn. After all, Leo, John, and George had humble enough beginnings, but they had managed to develop an enterprise that began as no more than a small foundry into a major engine manufacturing company. And then, too, Leo and John had married the beautiful Marshal sisters, whose family had settled the area that was now Marshal County, which encompassed the town of Washburn. The communal legend was that Leo Scofield had been shrewd and incomparably wise, whereas his handsome brother, John, was a notorious but endearing scoundrel, although anyone who had dealt with one of those two brothers in the flesh had come to terms with each man’s complexity. But any myth is contingent upon generalities, and the town had taken custody of the characterization of those early Scofields.
The largely affectionate regard in which the members of the Scofield clan were held relied largely on the townspeople’s knowledge of the details. Leo Scofield, for instance, had maintained that all the Scofields were born on the ides of the month, just as he had been. Just as his youngest brother, George, had been. It was of no consequence to anyone that John Scofield’s birthday fell on February fifth. That was an inconvenient fact that was either ignored or reinterpreted. After all, birth records of the early nineteenth century, as far west as Ohio, were notoriously unreliable. Somewhere along the way John’s birthdate may have been mistranscribed. Lily and Warren had been born on September fifteenth, within eight hours of each other, as had Robert Butler—born before either of the others but on that same day in 1888—which conferred upon him a tentative Scofieldness in the communal subconscious of Washburn, which Robert unwittingly legitimized when he married Lily Scofield.
In the next generation the same coincidence had proven true in every case except for Claytor Scofield, who had just barely missed being born on the fifteenth of April. He arrived two days earlier on the thirteenth. But everyone in town said that he was clearly so much a Scofield that it was probably just the case that he was born early. Everyone knew that Scofields were born on the ides, and no one took any account of those two days. No one except Claytor as he grew older, and birthday after birthday, he was reminded by the other children in the house that he couldn’t be a real Scofield, which was what he suspected, anyway, with Dwight always right there ahead of him, accomplishing everything with brilliance. Of course, Claytor was only being teased—fondly, his mother insisted—but he dreaded the celebration of each new year of his life.
Certainly there were other families far wealthier and also closely watched, but the Scofields were so numerous and more attractive en masse—more interesting altogether. And because of their collective charisma, this second generation of children contended with more than average attention even from relative strangers, but they were also the subjects of collective pride of a sort. The people of Washburn expected them to excel—expected them to be far more publicly successful than any children from the prominent families of Coshocton, for instance, or Palmyra, or Centerburg. Those children living in the Scofield compound incurred the same variety of loyalty in the community as did the Washburn High School Wildcats, who were counted on year after year to have a winning season at the very least. It was simply assumed that Dwight and Claytor, Trudy and Betts, and Howard would be respectably accomplished—the boys, at least—and that Betts and Trudy would be uncommonly attractive and make wonderful marriages. All of them were expected to live productive and happy—though virtuous—lives.
In April of 1943, however, when word spread that Dwight and Trudy had gotten married, those very townspeople proprietarily rooting for the welfare of those children were quick to be appalled by that union. It was unthinkable that first cousins would marry. People wondered to each other if the marriage would even be recognized in Ohio, where it was, in fact, illegal to form so close an alliance. Trudy and Dwight had gotten married somewhere in Texas, and, well . . . Texas wasn’t even as respectable as, say, Charleston or Savannah. No one in Washburn knew anyone who was held in particularly high regard who also lived in Texas.
And, too, hadn’t it always been the case that it was Claytor and Trudy who were in each other’s company all through their teens? Each a shadow of the other? If first cousins could marry . . . what had happened behind everyone’s back? It was upsetting and hurtful not only to people who knew the family well but even to people who had never met them. And the two had gotten married so far away from home—and no wonder! In the South almost anything was legal between family members. Dwight and Trudy’s families hadn’t even known until two days before the ceremony when Trudy telephoned her father to break the news, and then Dwight called his family. Trudy was on an extended visit to a friend from Mount Holyoke who lived in Austin, Texas, near Randolph Field, where Dwight was stationed.
In Washburn the main sticking point was probably the confusion caused by those two boys’ names. Agnes and Warren Scofield had settled on the idea of using Agnes’s maiden name for their first son before Agnes’s little brother, Dwight Claytor, was even born. When Agnes had her own child, only five months later, it hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind to worry about future misunderstandings, when Dwight Claytor’s last name was also Claytor Scofield’s first name. After all, they were still infants to whom no surname yet adhered.
Since most people in Washburn hadn’t considered the nature of the Scofield-Butler-Claytor connections for years and years, it took more than a week for everyone finally to conclude that Dwight and Trudy were not, after all, the first cousins they had come to be thought of. In fact, it seemed to be the case that they weren’t related in any way at all. It took a few weeks more for most people to unravel the exact relationship between Dwight Claytor and Trudy Butler—as it had been previous to their marriage, of course. Dwight Claytor was Trudy’s mother’s—Lily Scofield Butler’s—first cousin Warren’s wife’s brother! No one could sort out if that made Dwight some sort of distant uncle or cousin by marriage to his own bride, but most of the furor died down when everyone decided it was certainly not a blood relationship.
The whole upheaval might have been resolved much sooner, though, if the older generation of the family hadn’t remained silently uneasy about the marriage themselves. For one thing, they all remembered very well that during their adolescence it had been Claytor and Trudy who had spent hours and hours together. “But it was because they simply were complements of each other,” Lily insisted. “Like ice cream and cake. Or . . . rhubarb and strawberry. Like peaches and cream.”
“Well, now,” Robert said, “you’re whetting my appetite for a little something sweet. I believe we ought to have some dessert.” Lily, Robert, and Agnes were seated around the Butlers’ table after supper, and Robert was merely making an effort to lessen the sense of urgency about what was, after all, a fait accompli. But Lily waved him off with only a whiff of a smile.
“But when you think of it? Isn’t that the way you see it?” Lily asked, leaning forward with determination. “Trudy and Claytor would talk for hours about nothing at all, but I never thought it was anything romantic between them. Did you? They were like brother and sister. Don’t you think so? I mean it always seemed to me just good luck that Trudy had a cousin she liked so much.”
Neither Agnes nor Robert commented, though. For a while, when the four older children entered the highly charged years of their teens, it had been impossible to be in the same room with Claytor and Trudy and not feel the physical attraction between them, no matter what they were talking about. Once Agnes had passed Claytor on the staircase, where he was standing at the window of the first landing, and it was clear to her that he hadn’t even realized she was in the vicinity. He had been standing very still, with his fists pressed against the glass panes on either side of the one through which he was gazing as if he had been frozen in place.
Upstairs Agnes had looked out her own window in the same direction. Across the way, Trudy and Betts were lying on the porch roof outside Trudy’s bedroom, sunbathing. The girls had talked about it earlier, because Betts wanted to try her theory that if each of them put a rubber band around her feet to hold them together—so that they would stay upright without any effort on the girls’ part—it would make it possible to tan the fronts of their legs.
They were in their bathing suits lying on separate blankets. Betts had still looked like a girl growing up. She appeared to be tenuously connected, as if she might fly apart, might not hold fast at the joints; she had the thin, attenuated look of a praying mantis, and she was holding a book up over her head so she could read. She had gotten bored with the effort of vanity and wanted to get back to Villette. Trudy lay next to her, and the contrast was startling. Trudy was all of a piece, rounded and sleek like a little house cat; she was so still she almost appeared to be asleep as she lay with the straps of her bathing suit unhooked and her arms lying lax at her side. Her skin had turned golden after weeks of summer, and her state of seeming entirely self-contained and quiet—while Betts shifted this way and that, fidgeting and clearly uncomfortable—made even Agnes want to reach out and touch Trudy. Grasp her wrist, tap her lightly on the shoulder, in order to become the object of her reflective, particular attention.
Agnes moved away from the window and experienced a long, clear moment of recognition. She remembered being unable even to look at Warren without thinking of all the ways his body could accommodate her. She literally couldn’t take his hand without a sort of swoon washing through her, and it had been miraculous to Agnes that Warren had been subject to the same obsession with her. But until she had seen Claytor gazing fixedly at Trudy, Agnes had never thought to imagine lust from a man’s point of view. Trudy was so petite. She was small and delicate and completely feminine. Claytor would want to protect her at the very same instant he would want to have sex with her, and there’s nothing dainty about having sex. The contradiction of Claytor’s imagination where Trudy was concerned would be considerable. The tension of those opposing desires, Agnes thought, would be uncommonly erotic.
And, in fact, Claytor did feel protective of Trudy just in everyday life at Scofields. She was so slight among the tall Scofields, so easily lost track of in the muddle of family. She was subdued in the face of debates and arguments and opinions that flew freely among Dwight and Claytor and Betts, and eventually Howard, if they were all sitting in Trudy’s garden after a tennis game, for instance, or if they were out at the lake, swimming. Among all the light-haired, fair-skinned family, Trudy’s dark hair and olive skin made her seem foreign. Her quietly observant composure seemed mysterious, seemed to be a kind of indulgent wisdom with which a foreigner would observe a clutch of noisy Americans. And probably not the least of the attraction between Claytor and Trudy was the fact that each was the other’s forbidden country.
The only person Claytor confided in was Dwight, when they happened both to have retreated to the porch to read one summer afternoon. The second summer they were home from college, Dwight headed out to the porch with a stack of assigned reading on a perfect day. One of those rare days the family always referred to as “Goldilocks” days—a family shorthand that stemmed from Betts’s childhood observations. He found Claytor already in the swing with a book propped on the armrest so that he could look down from his slouched position and read.
Dwight put his small stack of books on the table beside the rocker. “Looks like you’re reading for the pleasure of it,” Dwight said, gesturing to the books he had just put down along with a notebook and a fistful of sharpened pencils.
“No, not really. Well, I guess I am,” Claytor said. “This book’s assigned, but I’ve gotten interested in it. Probably I’m going to have to read it again. I forgot to take notes about forty pages ago.” Claytor righted himself, closing his book by grasping it so that one finger held his place. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He was earnest and spoke softly as if he might be overheard. “Can I ask you something? Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” Dwight said. “Fire away. I don’t know that I’ll be much help, but I’ll be glad to give it a shot.”
“It’s just that I don’t know what to do, Dwight. Probably I can’t do anything. I don’t think there’s anything to do!” Claytor admired Dwight more than any other man he knew, with the possible exception of Uncle Robert. And Claytor was wrung out by the several years of his secret, overwhelming devotion to and desire for his cousin Trudy Butler.
Dwight listened with careful attention and was surprised. “But you haven’t even been dating anyone else! I’d been wondering why. You aren’t giving yourself a chance. You need to give yourself a chance to . . . overcome this. Well, I suppose that’s a little dramatic. After all, it’s only Trudy. Good Lord! You’ve known her all your life. We all love Trudy. But I think you’ve confused perfectly natural feelings for her. . . . There’re some terrific girls at school. There’re some terrific girls right here in town.”
Claytor looked at Dwight despairingly and moved his head just enough to signify the impossibility of what Dwight proposed.
Dwight tried not to sound annoyed. “You’ll get over it. Trudy will, too. After all, you hardly see each other except over school breaks. You probably shouldn’t come home so often. You could find some sort of summer job at school. Don’t brood about it! Nothing’s worse, and it’s just Trudy, anyway. It’s probably mostly a habit —”
“It’s not a habit,” Claytor interrupted. “If you’d ever felt this way about anyone, you’d know that it’s about as far from being a habit as anything can be. It’s nothing I could change by just making up my mind to do it. I thought you’d pretty much fallen for Cleo Morris. You spend a lot of time —”
“Oh, Lord, Claytor! Cleo’s just . . . She’s just a friend. We’re just friends. We like each other, but not . . . I don’t want to feel the way you do about Trudy! I like so many girls. Any girl with a sense of humor. A girl to flirt with. To have fun with. I don’t want to feel serious about a girl right now. Good God! And I don’t want any girl to feel serious about me. I don’t have time. I have so much debt. . . . And it seems to be pretty miserable, anyway. It doesn’t seem to me that you and Trudy are having any fun.”
Claytor considered this for a little while and sighed. “I guess you’re right. I should stay away from here when Trudy’s home. And you’re right, too. We’re not having fun. Not fun, exactly.” Claytor sat quietly for a moment, still perplexed, but then he smiled a defeated thanks at Dwight and went back to his book.
Dwight, however, had trouble concentrating on his own reading. Trudy as an object of desire had never crossed his mind, and as he sat on the porch reading, trying to break through to the meaning underneath the clotted text of Peterson’s Honor or Justice in America: The Making of American Law, his mind drifted back to the idea of Trudy and Claytor. It was an impossible situation; he couldn’t think of any satisfactory resolution to offer Claytor. And, oddly enough, the rest of that summer, Dwight could scarcely keep his attention from resting on Trudy whenever she was among them. He had never thought of her as someone who was more than attractive, but she was, he came to see, quite lovely in an unusual way. “Pretty” wasn’t exactly right, because it was everything about her manner and looks taken in context that was so compelling. She was a dark, inflexible exclamation point set down in the middle of all the wheeling blond asterisks of the rest of her family.
Over that summer and through the next year, Dwight found that he, too, was enormously attracted to Trudy, although he would never reveal it; he wouldn’t cause either Claytor or Trudy any further worry or unhappiness. He was taken aback and ashamed of himself. By necessity, he adopted an avuncular attitude toward her, which—to his surprise—allowed him absolute freedom to seek out her company. When he came home for Christmas, for instance, he stopped first to greet Agnes and Betts and Howard, putting their presents under the tree, and then went off to deliver his gifts to the Butler family. Dwight had come home without Claytor, who had accepted an invitation to spend Christmas with a friend in St. Louis. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without finding out what sort of situation Aunt Lily’s gotten herself into now,” Dwight said.
Betts and Howard and even Agnes urged him—for heaven’s sake!—to hurry on to the Butlers’, in a high-spirited bit of teasing, because Dwight was alluding to the year before: he and Claytor had arrived at the Butlers’ house when only Lily was at home. She had called loudly for them to come in. Had told them to hurry. They had found her in the sitting room decorating the Christmas tree, but trapped stock-still in a swath of spun-glass angel hair caught all around her. “If you two don’t get me out of here soon, I’m going to wet my pants! Robert won’t be home for at least two hours, and Trudy’s off somewhere.”
Christmas of 1939, though, Dwight had scrupulously bought both Betts and Trudy the same gift, a large stuffed bear with an Oberlin sweater and pennant. Trudy was delighted to see Dwight, delighted when she opened her present, embracing the bear and sinking her face into its warm fleece. Before Dwight could stop himself, he spoke up. “I wouldn’t mind trading places with that bear just now.”
Trudy raised her face to gaze at him in surprise, and then she laughed. “You’re already missing whatever girl you’re in love with right now, aren’t you? Honestly, Dwight! You’ve probably been pinned to every pretty girl at Oberlin by now.” Dwight showed up at home off and on with one girl or another, while Claytor came always on his own. And it was a great relief to Trudy to have Dwight as a confidant, although she never mentioned Claytor at all unless it would have seemed strange if she remained silent. And, even then, she changed the subject as soon as she could. Dwight began to think that she wasn’t much interested in Claytor anymore, and he wrote Claytor that reassuring news as tactfully as possible.
In 1943, however, in light of Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, Robert and Lily Butler, and Agnes Scofield, too, separately revisited memories of various childhood incidents involving Dwight Claytor, Claytor Scofield, and Trudy Butler. Possible misinterpretations of past events popped into their heads at odd hours of the day or night. But eventually each concluded that it was inconceivable that either Dwight or Claytor would ever in his life knowingly do anything that might cause the other so much distress—and certainly not something as momentous as marrying a girl the other was in love with. Lily’s and Robert’s anxiety was for Trudy, herself, who was the soul of moral propriety—not of virtue necessarily, but of honor. She would never have put herself between two men she had always been fond of.
The whole thing, though—the surprise of the marriage, what seemed to be its furtiveness—left Agnes and the Butlers and Uncle George Scofield unsettled, even when they factored in the difficulties of transportation and the uncertainties of wartime life. None of them spoke of their misgivings, however, because it would have been traitorous in some way they couldn’t quite pin down. Claytor and Trudy wouldn’t ever have married each other in any case, since they were related. But none of the family knew if Claytor had transformed his infatuation with Trudy into no more than a cousinly affection.
A month or so after the news of the marriage, Uncle George approached Agnes where she sat alone on the small side porch, doing nothing at all other than trying to stay cool one hot afternoon. George was the last of his generation of Scofields still living, and he was the only Scofield of his generation with whom Agnes had ever been comfortable.
She had admired Warren’s uncle Leo but had always felt shy in his company, and she had done her best to stay out of the way of Warren’s father, John Scofield, whose attentions toward her had been secretively sly and lecherous, disguised by a pretense of affectionate teasing. But George Scofield, the youngest of those three brothers, with his eccentricities, his gentle curiosity, his elegance—Agnes had always liked him. When she saw him crossing the wide yard in her direction, carrying with him some object or other, her spirits lifted. She looked forward to being distracted from the heat by one of Uncle George’s reimaginings of a Civil War battle or some new intrigue he had inferred. He often brought along items from his collection of memorabilia to illustrate one or another of the incidents he described. This afternoon he carried an old jar of some viscous, murky brown substance.
“It’s just a jar of peaches,” he said when he was about ten feet away and saw her look with apparent apprehension at what he was carrying. “Can I join you here for a little while?” he asked, just as Agnes had gotten up to dust off and reposition an old wooden rocker that had been abandoned to the elements.
“Would you like some lemonade, Uncle George?” But he was declining even as she asked.
“No, no. Just some shade. I don’t require another thing. Don’t trouble yourself.” He put the jar on the table between them. “A jar of peaches put up by Adelaide Murry in June of eighteen sixty-one,” he said. “They were in the basement of a farmhouse that was right in the middle of the battle of Gettysburg. Now that’s a fantastic thing, isn’t it? Her husband was a captain in the Union Army. But he was with Grant’s men, fighting in Mississippi. Out in Tennessee, as well.”
“You’d think it would have been broken somewhere along the way,” Agnes said. “That is amazing.” She gazed at the peaches that had turned to a muddy sludge over their eighty-odd years, and she reminded herself that she and Lily needed to rotate the fruit and tomatoes they put up every year so they would use up the older ones first.
“When I used to be able to travel more easily . . . while Leo and John stayed home making my fortune . . . Well, Leo did, anyway, though John was the best salesman I ever knew in my life. Because he liked to listen to people. Liked to hear all the stories they wanted to tell about themselves. At least for a while. . . . Well. I spent all my time searching those battlefields. . . . But, in any case, on one of my last forays I came upon these peaches. And I found out the story of Adelaide and Edward Murry. It’s always interested me. I haven’t ever been able to decide in the end if it’s a happy or a sad story.”
He leaned back in the rocker, stretching his long legs out almost to the edge of the porch, crossing his arms comfortably over his chest. Even now George Scofield was the handsomest man Agnes had ever seen. Tall and lean and patrician to such a degree that his good looks had never had any emotional or visceral effect. It was as though he had been so perfectly invented that his appearance didn’t engage the observer’s imagination. Or that’s what Agnes concluded. It was how she’d always felt, and George had never had any romantic involvement as far as she knew; he had never married.
“What is the story, Uncle George? What happened to them? The Murrys, I mean. Not the peaches.”
“Oh, well . . . I wouldn’t say it’s exactly that something happened to them. But it was three years that Edward Murry was in the war before he was wounded pretty badly and had to make his way home in the summer of sixty-three. Adelaide had put up these peaches two years earlier.” He picked up the jar and turned it in his hand to read the label she had affixed. “You see here,” he said, holding it out to Agnes so she could see it for herself. “‘Pickled Peaches, June, eighteen sixty-one,’” he said aloud and then turned it back to read it again himself, pondering it a moment before he put it down again.
“Those peaches were waiting for her husband—no one had opened them when Edward Murry came home from the war . . . when he walked up the steps, crossed the porch, and didn’t stop to knock on his own front door. Even though he’d been wounded, Agnes, just imagine the sort of gladness he was feeling! Then, the story goes, he was greeted by his wife, who was right at that moment nursing her infant baby.”
Agnes was looking out at the hot, thick light beyond the porch, waiting for him to continue. She gave a start when she realized he hadn’t said a thing for some moments and that she had nearly dozed off.
“Ah! Well! It’s a happy story, then,” she remarked.
“Oh, I don’t think anyone can know that. Who knows what happened when Edward met that baby? But he seems to have adopted him as his own child. I did check the documents in the courthouse. That baby, Duncan Murry, was born April of eighteen sixty-three. No other child was born to the Murrys as far as I could find out, and it was a Duncan Murry who eventually sold the place, so he must have inherited it. The parts of the story I turned up do seem happy enough. Adelaide and Edward lived there with little Duncan—eventually with Duncan and his wife—almost twenty-five years longer. But that baby was born in eighteen sixty-three. Edward was out west then. He’d been out west with Grant for two and a half years.”
Agnes turned her attention to Uncle George’s expression, but it gave no hint of whatever he was getting at. “Well, then he must have been glad to be home, Uncle George,” she finally said, thinking that he was waiting for her to draw a conclusion. But he didn’t say anything, and he, too, merely gazed out at the waning day.
“Wasn’t he?” she asked. “I don’t—Oh! Oh, you mean you don’t think the baby could have been Edward Murry’s son? But that’s just silly. One of those stories! Edward Murry could have come home on a furlough . . .”
“He may well have. I couldn’t find a record of it.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Agnes said, eager to change the subject, which she found distasteful and melancholy. “I think that whatever had happened, Adelaide and Edward just never even mentioned it at all. I think Adelaide jumped up to meet him as he came in the door and that Edward Murry was delighted to have a son! He had lived through those battles. He had seen men die . . . he had killed men. What difference would it make where that little boy had come from?”
“I hope you’re right. I hope that’s how it was. I wish I knew a man that would feel that way. Well, though, Agnes, the reason I’ve been thinking about it . . . I’ve been turning it over in my mind since Dwight and Trudy got married. I want you to consider this, because all sorts of trouble can come of people not knowing things. Then again, I think that sometimes ignorance . . . Well, I wouldn’t say it’s bliss, but sometimes you might say that ignorance is required to sustain contentment. And I don’t plan to mention any of this to anyone but you.”
“For goodness sake! What? What is it, Uncle George? Is there something serious that’s happened?”
“It’s Warren’s father I’ve been thinking about, Agnes. Ever since Dwight and Trudy got married. I wonder about him every time my eye falls on this jar of peaches. John was my brother, and there were times when I was young that there was no one else in the world I liked so much. Leo seemed awfully stern, you see. John was full of . . . oh . . . energy. Full of fun. But, then, you knew him, too. He turned into a man who seemed to be trying his best to make himself miserable. By the time he was your father-in-law, I don’t think there were any traces left of his . . . well, I can’t think how to describe it. He wasn’t ever able to get back his happiness. He couldn’t handle his drinking. It was a sad thing, because he wasn’t even good at enjoying it. His drinking and all that carousing, I mean. By the time he died, I had been thinking that it was only a matter of time, anyway. . . . I was sorry about it, of course. No. No, I was sad. I missed him so much the way he’d been when I was growing up. But I have to say that when I think back about it, now, I was relieved, too. I didn’t know I’d been expecting something terrible to happen to him. But when it did I thought, Oh, yes. Well, now we’ve crossed that bridge,” George said, stretching his legs so that the rocking chair canted backward alamingly.
“But, you know, Agnes, the year or so before your mother had Dwight—oh, you were probably still at Linus Gilchrest—John was just full of how beautiful your mother was. He claimed no woman north of the Mason-Dixon line ever could have her kind of beauty. He’d say that anytime. Of course, his own wife was considered a beauty all over Marshal County. Lillian, and Leo’s wife, too. Audra. The Marshal sisters . . . I used to hear people who hadn’t even seen them talk about how good-looking they were thought to be.
“I went with John and your mother—and two of your brothers, I think—out to Judge Lufton’s to watch the harness racing. We went a few times. John was right about your mother. She was a beautiful woman.”
“She was. She certainly was,” Agnes agreed. “It’s nice to think of Mama going to the races. She loved them. Before Warren and I were married, he and Lily took me and Mama and Edson out to Judge Lufton’s. But I don’t remember Warren’s father being there. I guess he might have been. I always thought later that it might have been the happiest day of Edson’s life. Lily made a big fuss over him. That must have been nineteen seventeen. And, you know, neither Mama nor Edson lived even another year.” Edson had died just two days after he came down with the flu, the very day after Agnes’s mother had given birth to Dwight. Not much more than a week later Catherine died of the same thing. She had never even held her youngest son. In fact, Agnes wasn’t sure her mother had ever understood that she had given birth to him.
“Yes. Of course I know that. I remember that,” George said. “It was a terrible time. John was drinking too much by then, and carrying on. Although it was your mother he raved on about. I’ve been remembering it more than I like, Agnes. John was out at your place whenever he could get away. He wouldn’t come into the office, and Leo would be beside himself. And his poor wife. Poor Lillian. But I don’t believe Warren had any idea. Neither did your father. He was making a name for himself in the legislature then. He wasn’t at home much, of course.”
Agnes leaned back in her chair and looked out at the light as it had narrowed to a slant in just the time of their conversation. She carefully noted the crisp edges of the shadow of the house as it elongated over the yard. And she tried not to think of anything else except the tall chimneys, as their shadows lengthened disproportionately across the lawn in contrast to the softer, mutable shadows of the trees.
“Oh . . . ,” she finally said in a long, downward-falling breath of dismay. “Oh! You can’t think that my mother and John Scofield! Mama wouldn’t . . .” But Agnes felt a flickering ignition of anger at her careless, careless mother, and also a reawakening of fury at her lecherous father-in-law, John Scofield. “Well. I don’t believe anything at all happened between my mother and John Scofield! I just don’t believe it. I don’t even remember her mentioning John Scofield! I don’t know if she even knew he existed! Mama was so . . . She wasn’t connected to the town, really. To any people . . . She didn’t ever like living here, and she pretty much disapproved of anyone who did like living here. She counted it as a mark of . . . oh . . . of mediocrity,” Agnes said.
“Besides,” she went on, after a pause during which she waited for Uncle George to recant what he had just said, to say that of course she was right, that now he saw it much more clearly. But George didn’t say a thing. “Besides! Uncle George, you’re just wrong! You’re just wrong about all this, and it’s truly unbecoming of you to tell me you suspect my mother . . . suspect her and your own brother! You never should have imagined a thing like that. It makes me really angry. . . . You know it can’t be true. It would mean Trudy and Dwight . . . why, they’d be related, too. It’s only Trudy and Claytor who’re cousins, Uncle George. It’s beyond me to understand why in the world you told me about it. Trudy and Dwight are married! Of course they’re not cousins! Otherwise why not Claytor and Trudy . . . ?”
“Well, you’re right about all that, Agnes. I do think that John . . . I know that John carried on a flirtation with your mother. But it could have been that it was entirely platonic. It’s certainly possible that Dwight and Trudy aren’t connected by anything but circumstance. Well, and now by marriage, of course. It’s all conjecture, after all. Not worth worrying about. No one ever knows why two people get married, anyway. Claytor and Trudy probably grew out of their whole romance. And even if Dwight and Trudy have children . . . Well, I don’t think it’ll make a bit of difference.”
The notion, though, that John Scofield and her mother might have conceived that baby—that infant who was Dwight—took away any other words Agnes might have said to George Scofield, who didn’t seem to expect conversation as he sat alongside her for another ten minutes or so. She was speechless with anger at him, not because he was the messenger, but because all at once it was clear to Agnes that George Scofield’s love of history, his pursuit of artifacts, stemmed from his own lack of involvement in life as it was lived day in and day out. She decided in those few minutes that she had never really liked him after all; he seemed to her now no more interesting than a person whose sole obsession was collecting butterflies, chloroforming them and arranging them carefully in exhibition cases. There was a morbid quality about collecting; she was appalled at the thought of the isolated, secret, prurient glee Uncle George must have felt when he discovered Adelaide Murry’s signed and dated jar of peaches.
Finally he began to gather himself together to go home. “People make such a mess for themselves,” Uncle George said, with no particular emphasis, just as an observation. “You know, in the South people often marry cousin to cousin. To keep the land. Or to gain more land. Not the Negroes, though. Even when they were slaves. It’s against what they believe. It’s a taboo. And, of course, as you say, your father was at home now and then. Maybe there’s nothing to it at all, Agnes.” He stepped cautiously down the stairs onto the grass. “In any case we’ll never know one way or another. But it didn’t seem right not to tell you once it was in my head. It seemed you ought to know of the possibility, at least. But I guess we ought to assume things are just as they appear to be.”
Agnes looked after him as he made his way tentatively along the path of stepping stones. She was shockingly enraged; she didn’t dare allow herself to say a word, but when he was all the way across the yard, Agnes noticed the jar of peaches still sitting on the table. She picked up the jar and examined it once more, turning it in her hand. And then she just let it fall to the paving stones—she did not fling it—and it made a satisfactory crack and gurgle when it hit the ground, although it also gave off such a sweet and concentrated odor of decay that Agnes turned away and went inside.
When Dwight Claytor was assigned as a navigator with a B-17 bomber crew and was eventually stationed in England, at Deopham Green, no one except Agnes thought any more about Dwight and Trudy’s marriage, except to be surprised that Trudy didn’t come home when she was pregnant or even after she gave birth to a daughter. Trudy had decided to share an apartment in New York with the wife and baby of one of Dwight’s crew members so that the two of them could trade off nursery duties, and she took a secretarial job at Merriman Oil Corporation.
By the time the war ended, their marriage seemed always to have been the way things were. Trudy and Dwight had a little girl, Amelia Anne Claytor, and Trudy was pregnant again by the time Dwight was finally demobilized. By then Claytor, too, was married, although no one had been able to attend the wedding because he was only briefly stationed in Biloxi, where he met his wife, and which was too far to travel during the war.
By the end of the war, Betts and Howard, too, had both had enough adventures of their own that they thought their childhood was behind them, and they thought their growing up was comprised entirely of those years they had lived at Scofields under Agnes’s supervision. All of them but Dwight—who wanted nothing more than to take his family home—were wearied by the prospect of adjusting once again to the naïveté, the provincialism, of their hometown. They were uncomfortable with the pity they felt for those people they loved who had spent the years of the war just going along as usual. They felt sorry that they could never explain real life to their parents or their aunts and their uncles, who no doubt believed that the important things that happened to them were whatever had happened in Washburn, Ohio.