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And at age fourteen, neither had Agnes thought much one way or another about Lily Scofield’s wedding.
    Early on that hot June day of 1913, Agnes had been buttoned up in a long-waisted organdy dress not pastel but so gently colored that it was as though the cloth held only a suggestion of the color blue. At first she was delighted with the romance of the airy flounce of its skirt. When she had slipped the freshly ironed, still warm dress over her head, the roof of her mouth prickled with the clean, scorched smell of the starched, fragile fabric, and her mind’s eye filled with a vision of herself as a graceful and delicate creature. But during the ceremony, when the dress wilted and drooped in the heat, making her uncomfortable with its damp scratchiness around her neck, that happy idea evaporated, and she lost interest in the whole affair.
    She had turned to watch the procession as the bridesmaids and flower girls and finally Lily and her father came down the aisle, but Agnes hadn’t noticed Warren Scofield’s reaction. Certainly she had heard the incident recounted many times in the weeks following the wedding, but since it wasn’t a story that anyone told to her directly—was simply one of those anecdotes that are loose in the air of a community—she had let any intricacy of detail just drift right by her.
    A year later, though, by the time Agnes was fifteen and her friends at school began to be interested in everything about
any
wedding, what impressed Agnes most was when Lucille Drummond told her that Mr. Leo Scofield had imported forty-five dozen roses, that he had them shipped from New York in a special rail car just to be woven into the arbor under which Reverend Butler had performed the ceremony. “That would be five hundred and forty roses,” Lucille pointed out, “just for that one day. But they wilted almost before the end of the ceremony. By the end of the day they were just as limp as string.”
    Agnes was also impressed when Lucille reminded her of the terrible heat of the week of the wedding. “So Mr. Scofield had sixteen full-grown trees dug up from out in the country—they were
huge,
and they all had to be just the same height! They had to match exactly!” Lucille said. “He had them planted in two rows so that his daughter wouldn’t have to have that sun full on her in the hottest part of the day. Not on the bridesmaids, either, of course. And Lily Butler had
two
little flower girls. Well . . .” Lucille’s voice became solemn. “She’s Mr. Scofield’s only child, so even if he
did
overdo it a little . . . It took more than twelve men working for three full days just to get everything ready on time!”
    Lucille’s family had only moved to town a few months before the wedding and hadn’t really done more at that point than make the acquaintance of the Scofield family, but Lucille remembered that her father had sent a team and wagon over to Scofields on the Tuesday of the week of the wedding and hadn’t gotten the return of them until Sunday, the day after the ceremony, although Lucille did say his mules had been well taken care of.
    And, really, Lucille was not lying. Everything she described was as clear in her head as if she had seen it herself. The idea she had of the Scofield-Butler wedding was vivid and was made up of any number of bits of conversations, vague impressions, grand reinterpretations of various occasions. Lucille’s sister Celia, for instance, had once told the tale of a friend of hers whose fiancé had arranged for a crate of oysters and three dozen roses to be shipped to her by train from Philadelphia. And Mr. Drummond
had
sent a team and wagon around Monument Square to help out when the Scofield wagon had become mired in mud one spring with its burden of a new piano for Audra Scofield, although Lucille had been in Columbus visiting her sister Grace at the time. Also, of course, Lucille had heard her sisters rehashing various accounts of Lily Butler’s