Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “No. What?”

  “Been thinking I should take her back.”

  He had not known how to say it, had not known how it sounded but knows it for the truth.

  “Her. Who?”

  “My wife. Margaret Sherbrooke.” He looks at Harriet. She colors.

  “That’s a name,” she says, “I thought we’d agreed not to use.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s over.” Judah stands. “The agreement. I’ll take her back when she comes.”

  “What makes you think she’s coming? What makes you so certain?”

  “She’ll come,” he pronounces, “by suppertime. She’s making the four-forty bus.”

  Hattie slides her spoon along the cup rim. “I mention Maggie Coburn and you bite my head off.”

  “That’s different. It isn’t the same.” He edges his chair to the table again. “I got to get some rest.”

  Jude, he tells himself. Keep on. You’ve done it up properly now. Seven lean years and sixty-nine fat. He shuts the dining-room door behind him and makes for the hall, performing his familiar calculus. There’s a Rhesus monkey twenty-seven inches long that hangs from a branch by both hands. It drops and you have to shoot it, and it’s ten feet from the ground. Where do you aim to be sure of hitting; ask the doctor that.

  The wind slaps at the Big House shutters and he hears it in the chimney, humming. He would wet his finger, sometimes, and circle a glass rim till it sang; the wet wind rimes the chimney now with that low single note. There had been omens enough. He’d known when Lawyer Finney said, “It’s five years since you seen her, Jude. And seven since she left. You want to change the will?”

  So when the letter came two mornings back, he had not been surprised. He’d recognized her script at once, and the mocking deference with which she’d written, “J. P. Sherbrooke, Esq.” There’d not been a return address, though the postmark was Grand Central Station, New York. She’d used a three-cent and a ten-cent stamp that said: “It all depends on ZIP code,” and showed planes and mail trucks and trains. The stamp was multicolored and, Judah decided, expensive to print. The plane and parcels were yellow, and the train two shades of red. She’d used no zip code for him, not even his post office box, but only “The Big House.”

  He sliced the letter open, using his right hand. It was folded over, twice. He smoothed and held the letter, waiting for his breath to quiet. She had used blue ink. Her hand had been the last hand on this paper, he reflected, and she’d tongued the envelope flap. He has watched her at it often: she’d tear the stamp from the stamp roll, not abiding by the perforation and tearing half a head off presidents, then licking the stamp and placing it at the envelope’s edge. “Jude”—he peered at the inscription. “I’ve been away. I’ll keep this letter short because I’m not certain you’ll read it.”

  He switched on the light. He’d burned her early letters, or flushed them down the toilet, torn into eighths, unread. He’d refused the ones with postage due or written on them: Return to Sender. Addressee Unknown. “But there are things I have to tell you and things I have to ask. You’d do me a kindness to let me visit soon. As you know, I’m not one to beg. I’ll be at the Bus Station Wednesday, arriving at 4:40 from New York. If you meet the Greyhound Bus, I’ll be happy to get off; if not, I’ll understand. Or try to. But please do meet the bus, for auld sake’s sake if nothing else; it’s more than auld acquaintance surely, and we owe each other that. I’ll not ask another time. I’ll travel on to Rutland and not bother you ever again. But I come in hopes the love I bear you and you said you bore me once will alter your opinion of the proper way to act. I hope this finds you well. Meg.”

  He takes her signature for a good omen, and the tense of “bear.” He takes her memory of his catchphrase, “For auld acquaintance sake,” and the fact she’s used blue ink. It had been Monday. Monday was the day they married, and Wednesday the day they first met. “I’m not, as you know, one to beg.”

  Ian was a breech birth, and difficult. Maggie had her first contractions Friday night, and she had gone into the garden and pinched and staked and bound up tomatoes all next morning.

  “Don’t overdo it,” he warned.

  “I’m not overdoing it. I’m doing it, that’s all.”

  “You’re in pain.”

  “I want to do it.” She was flushed with bending and had a sweat moustache.

  “Well, do what you want,” Judah said.

  “Yes.”

  “I worry about it, is all.”

  “You mustn’t worry, darling. I need some distraction. I’ll stop when it’s time to stop. Promise.”

  He wondered what would prove to her that it was time to stop. He put his hand on her stomach and felt the muscle band.

  “It feels like the world’s biggest girdle.”

  “The tightest, leastways,” he acknowledged.

  “Oh, Judah P,” she sucked down her breath. “It hurts me so much when it hurts.”

  He took the green twine from her, and the scissors. She exhaled. Later, eating or staking tomatoes, assaulted by their pungency, he would remember her nest-building bravado and the way she’d distributed weight. She smiled at him, hands on her hips.

  “It’s better now. He’s got the hiccups, maybe. But he’s got an elephant kick.”

  When Ian came he did come kicking. There were forceps creases on his head. Judah heard her (down the hall, he could swear it, and one flight up, bellowing for him, her husband, telling the doctors there’d been some mistake, and she could go home now, go quickly, he, Judah, was waiting and she wasn’t ready for delivery at this particular moment, he’d endow a hospital, and where was the promise they’d made her, where the nurses’ estimate that it’d be over by noon, then three, then seven, then eleven, and where was the gas they’d promised to give, where the injections, the relief since she’d rather be shot) screaming: “Please! Please stop it. Please.”

  They stopped it at dawn. Ian Daniel Sherbrooke weighed eight pounds. He was a solemn baby and lay and mused for hours, wide awake. He cried without rage, dutifully, flailing his arms and legs as if he knew that’s how an infant cried—but out of choice, not instinct, and not out of need. His mouth distended later in what was more a rictus than a grin. Judah, watching, cooing, understood that things were serious and life no laughing matter—no matter how much Maggie laughed. She had had levity scooped out of her with that first wailing son—as if all body blitheness was ejected with the afterbirth. Sheep eat the afterbirth. Sows eat their farrow, given the chance. There are nutrients a mother needs and loses when she loses the fetal food sack. He’d have taken that placenta gladly, had they thought to offer it. He’d have separated out the waste lines from the veins for humor and for body blitheness, and made Maggie swallow them back.

  Now he ascends. His father had had the elevator shaft constructed when his mother was bedridden with phlebitis. The machinery is in the attic, underneath the cupola. When she was sick with more than phlebitis and too weak to close the doors—too weak, even, for the buttons, though he put her hand on the buttons and helped push—she nonetheless insisted on a ride each morning. She had had nurses, of course. But she depended on him—“Only Judah’s strong enough,” she’d say.

  So he would wheel her on the tour. The upstairs halls were long and narrow, and he grew adept at maneuvering through rooms. She’d point to bedspreads or curtains that needed cleaning and say: “You must note that. Inform Maria. It’s outrageous what has happened to the house. She’ll sweep that carpet by tomorrow or she’ll be dismissed.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “Don’t yes me like that, Judah, or take me for a fool. I know what’s happening here. There’s laxness and corruption and I know what made that bedspread dirty. Just don’t take me for an idiot. Maria cleans that carpet or hey-presto out she goes.”

  Maria swept the carpet. She had been engaged to Harry Jackson who left his job in the lumber mill and died in the ditches of France. She us
ed that expression “died in the ditches of France” to amplify her grief, and Judah would watch wide-eyed while she bent to unlace herself, sobbing. He had been seventeen. His mother, the next morning, accepted the guest room carpet and curtains but pointed to the hanging lamp; the lamp needed polish, she said.

  So he manipulated her through storage closets and in bathrooms and along the upstairs landing. “Oh, Judah,” she would say. “Don’t suffer this indignity. I wouldn’t wish indignity like this on my worst enemy. They take me for an idiot, forgetting I have eyes. Forgetting I know what I know.”

  He held his breath in the oak box. The front and back were doors. The doors alternated on each floor, so he could wheel his mother in and stand behind her, hands on the chair rim, and then continue pushing in the same direction. She hated to be pulled. When she had made the full inspection and he consigned her again to her room (“Don’t leave me, Judah,” she would say. “Don’t forget your mother. And don’t take me for an idiot or think I don’t have eyes.”), he’d jump the steps three at a time and run to the stables and saddle up and drop his head to the horse’s flank and breathe deeply, cinching the girth. He would inhale the smell of oats and animal expectancy, then swing himself up and be at a canter by the time he’d cleared the barn.

  So when his mother died he closed the elevator up. They inspect the hoist rig every six months and keep the wires oiled. Margaret made him love her in the elevator once. “I want to do it,” she whispered, “in every single nook and cranny of this whole house. In each individual bed. In every place you’ve ever been, my darling, or anyone has ever been. There. Here.” She’d rubbed against the dust-dulled walls and brought them to a sheen.

  His son is his principal rival, he knows: the reason Maggie left. “I’ll not abandon him,” she’d said.

  “Sooner or later you’ve got to.”

  “No. It’s hard enough . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Finish what you started,” Judah said.

  “Ian is my only son,” she said. “I think about Seth always. That’s as it should be and I’m not complaining but I won’t lose Ian also; he’s worth the world to me and you’d better know it, Jude.”

  “I do.”

  “Not really. Not deep down.”

  “He’s my son too.”

  “Then how could you imagine that I’d let him live here, hating it? There’s a world outside. There’s high school to finish and college to go to and maybe law school and medical school and all sorts of people to meet. Musicians. Women. Politicians.”

  “Whoever,” he said.

  “And the point is Ian’s young and needs to get outside these walls. He’s like a prisoner here, Jude. You can’t invite the world.”

  “If he’s lonely . . .”

  “I know: ‘Let’s invite some friends up for the weekend.’ That’s not it. He’s got to learn that city life means more than Rockefeller Center and a boat trip on the Hudson and the Empire State Building. He wants to go and I’m taking him with me since it’s what you’d call abandonment to stay.”

  Judah’d tried to warn her she should leave Ian alone. He’d tried to make it clear: the Sherbrooke place was world enough for two and it could hold their son. Go and you take yourself with you, he’d said; that’s the thing about departure; leave but don’t ever come back.

  “It is important,” Peacock wrote, “that the stair-crest be sufficing Broad. I wish it an Adequate Perch for the announcement of Arrivals, and jollity to be surveyed by the Provider thereof. But let there be currents of air. Else the pestilential vapors will foregather and Accumulate as unwelcome guests at such festivity, and rioting in secret in that lecherous Enclosure soon make their noxious Presence known, infecting the Host unawares. There shall be Crimson Carpeting in the center of each stair-tread, which Carpet is to be secured by a Brass Rail.”

  “Good afternoon,” he calls to Harriet.

  “Good afternoon.” She is at the stairwell, watching.

  “Sleep well.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She too takes an afternoon nap. “Give Tommy Sherbrooke my best,” he says.

  “I’ll rest,” she says. “I’ve had two cups of Sanka but it doesn’t trouble me.”

  “That’s good. You’ve got a clear conscience. That’s good.”

  “I hope I’m not the only one.” She squints up at him, meaningful. “I hope your conscience is clear.”

  “As mud,” he says. “As always. Happy dreams.”

  “I’m not reproachful, brother. I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

  “Then don’t reproach me, Hattie.”

  “I can see,” she calls to him, “that the subject is closed.”

  “What subject?”

  “You know very well. The one you raised.”

  “No. Which?”

  “The subject of your wife,” she ventures. “Margaret.”

  “I raised so many subjects,” Judah turns again. “You’re right. Yes, the subject’s closed, and she’ll be here on the four-forty bus. And yes, my conscience is clear.”

  “Happy dreams.”

  “And when the subject opens up again it’s her and me who’ll open it. All right?”

  “I’m not being reproachful. Don’t think that.”

  “I don’t,” he concludes. “I don’t think about it at all.”

  But that’s not true, he tells himself, ascending. Reproachfulness is all we think of. And recrimination. There’s nothing openhanded in the house.

  His plan is ready, his trap set. He will call them together about him and announce it: he’d little time left, the doctor had warned, and could wake up any morning dead and before that he desires to settle up accounts. Let no one say he left them owing, or he’s been ungenerous. His room is the fourth on the right. Their room had been fourth on the left, at the hall’s opposite extension, facing south. There is one leather chair in his room, an oil lamp, a water pitcher and a drinking glass. There are gilt-framed standing photographs of Ian on the bedside table, but nothing on the walls. The walls are green. The floor is parquet squares. There are no rugs or curtains nor any ornamentation beyond the ornamental moldings and the single-sleigh bed. The bed is gray, its tracery is green. He removes his boots laboriously and sits on the bed, facing out. Winded, he sets the alarm for three thirty, in case. Snow eddies past, so lightly that he thinks (what with the lamp’s reflected glare, and the day’s chill reckoning, and whiskey) it is his eyes.

  He shuts his eyes. The snow continues. He puts his right hand out and touches the window and, opening his eyes again, tracks the pane’s frost filigree. His fingertips stick to the glass. He runs his index finger across his gums and teeth. When she forsook their plush sunlit room, he thinks now, leaning back, she perhaps relinquished comfort also. She was in Grand Central Station, maybe, with only the price of a stamp.

  There is the afternoon to get through. There had been the night before and Tuesday night and this day’s dawn and morning and noon since her letter arrived. There have been the ten days since Finney told him she’d come. Judah has till the four-forty bus and still can change his mind. He thinks of not meeting it but driving to Rutland instead. She would look out the window and scan the station and wait two minutes and maybe get out and ask at the desk if there were any messages for her, Margaret Sherbrooke, and the attendant would say no, and she would ask if he were certain, and he’d riffle through his notepad and check the board again. “No, ma’am, nothing,” he’d say and she’d turn and exit and climb back on the bus (it would be snowing, maybe, or the snow would turn to rain, and just a single taxi and pickup truck that she’d know at a glance wasn’t his. Still she’d check, irresolute, because he might have bought another pickup, because he might well have hired a taxi—but knowing all the time, knowing from the instant of arrival, and while the driver cut the motor and opened the doors, he, Judah, wouldn’t dream of showing and what had she been dreaming of, and why?)


  The tarmac would be wet. There would be slush on her window. The air would have that bone chill that passes for spring in Vermont. (“You know what they say,” he used to joke. “About the weather here. Nine months of winter and three of poor sledding.” She, Margaret, had laughed but later on insisted he take her to New Orleans . . .) The bus would shudder, starting. “Next express stop, Rutland,” the attendant would announce. “Arriving at five fifty-two. All aboard for Rutland, please. Next stop.”

  So there she’d be, abandoned, who had abandoned him once. She’d watch the roadside markers and the motels and restaurants in town. There would be half-glimpses of a car or face she thought she knew, but soon the bus would gain momentum in the gathering half-dark. It would run through the gearbox and clatter out onto Rte. 7 and she’d settle back. She was marked “Return to Sender” and had not been claimed.

  Judah smiles. He feels himself smile. There would be tinted windows and the bus would have its lights on as it bowled north through Manchester. His wife, Mrs. Margaret Sherbrooke, would put dark glasses on—and maybe her neighbor would notice and think it strange since outside it was more than halfway dark, though the weather would be clearing, though the storm clouds emptied somewhere short of Equinox, and there, to the west, was the moon, scudding through the sky beside them—and bend to the window, throat working, shoulders hunched. “Are you all right?” her neighbor would ask—would think of asking, rather, since the woman brooked no interference, even in discomfiture, and was forbidding now as she had been forbidding the whole trip from New York. “Yes, quite all right, I thank you,” would be the answer surely, glacial and inviolate and false.

  So Margaret, his second wife, would be delivered to the Rutland bus depot. She would deposit herself on the tarmac again, this time with her canvas bag. She’d tighten her cloth coat. She’d breathe and blink and find him, Judah, there before her, grinning at the game he’d played and won. There would be explanations but no need of explanation, and she’d be in his arms again, unstrung.

  “How could you do it, Jude?”

  “Do what?”

  She sobbed but would not let him see her sob and inclined her face away.