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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Do unto others,” he said.

  “That’s not the golden rule,” she said. “It’s cruelty, pure cruelty.”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Nothing you do now surprises me.”

  The conversation is wrong. He had had the advantage and she takes advantage from him, pressing where he yielded and compliant whenhe pressed.

  “I meant no harm,” he said.

  “You did. You do,” and she was racked with tears and on his shoulder, trembling.

  “There.” He stroked her. “There. I’m sorry. Come into the house.”

  “Yes.”

  “Megan. Maggie. Whatever you call yourself nowadays.”

  “Meg. Mrs. Judah P. Sherbrooke,” she smiled.

  “Welcome what the cat dragged in. Margaret, welcome home.”

  Pleased with his imaginings, he climbs into the bed. The ceiling pattern is familiar; there are plaster cracks the shape of a spring-tooth harrow. He courts sleep. Tonight, he tells himself, he will have most need of it. He puts his arms behind his head and presses his elbows back as far as they will go and lies there breathing, stretching, remembering the license-plate numbers of every car he’s owned. He chops the second willow down—the one by the pond that’s dying anyhow, and killing tamaracks to boot—and sees, in his mind’s eye, how he will notch it and in which direction it should fall. Then he chops the limbs off and segments the trunk and then chops the trunk into log lengths and splits and stacks the wood. Willow wood is stove wood, no good for burning by itself but useful in a mix. He turns to his right side.

  Meantime he occupies himself, singing “Begin the Beguine.” The word “beguiled” sticks to him like a burr. He would beguile the time until she arrived, as she had been beguiling and he had been beguiled. There were guileful people and there was the town of Guilford and there were wiles and guiles. Giles Cavendish had lost his arm in Normandy on D-Day, and that reminds him of Maria and “dead in the ditches of France.” He had taken catnaps standing, though Maggie called them “horsenaps.” She had complained he wasn’t horizontal ten minutes, ever, before she heard him snore. She would lie reading, or brushing her hair with the silver-handled brushes that had belonged to his mother, and he would look at her and shut his eyes; he had coveted wakefulness, once, as now he covets sleep.

  “Jude,” she whispers at him. “Judah P.”

  He makes no answer.

  “Judah. Jude, I say.”

  He turns.

  “Come a little closer. Just this close.”

  There are rocks. She positions herself on the high forward rock. She is combing out her yellow hair. It cascades.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, J.P. I’ll tell you something I’ve never told to anyone.”

  “Not anyone?” He finds his voice.

  “Not anyone. And I’ll never tell it ever again. Not to anyone but you.”

  She employs an amber comb. He has presented it to her. Her hair is amber also, and has teeth.

  “Come closer, Jude. Come here till I tell you.”

  He advances. There is water. He swims.

  “It’s not the sort of thing,” she says, “one ought to beg to say.”

  He flails his arms and flutters his legs and is advancing.

  “Not to a gentleman . . .”

  He rises.

  “Judah, darling.” She exhorts him. “Judah P.”

  She bends and holds her hand out and her hand is at sixty degrees. He reaches for it but she is receding.

  “Try,” she sings. “Try harder. Husband.”

  There is water in his mouth. There is water as well in his nose and eyes and, catastrophically, water in his ears.

  “Lover,” she calls out to him. “Love.” But he is unable to hear.

  “I wish a cupola to Crown the house,” Peacock wrote, “and be its Glittry Diadem werewith to catch the Morning Sun and honor Him who made it, as He created light and every living Creature. There must be variegated glass, and of as many colors as was Joseph’s Coat. I see a Signal Beacon to the footsore traveler or pilgrim Pelerinating with his eyes cast up at dusk to catch the fading warmth and certify Direction. He shall see our constant Rainbow and take his bearings thus and know, I do devoutly think, heart’s ease. It is no small consolation to see a Steeple rising at the forest’s rim. Often have I lingered at the Path’s fell turning, with such the final sight. It affords no little Comfort to hear the mellifluous church-chime breast the Tempest’s howling like some Sturdy Swimmer with consistent stroke. And surely every Mariner must say a Thankful prayer when he spy the lighthouse winking in the Blackamoor and minstrel face of Night. What tho the dawn will scrub the nigger Visage clean, and each Ship prove its goodly Harbour and traveler attain his Resting-place, yet would I have our Cupola be th’unchanging Watchman, a twelve-sided sentry of the Soul . . .”

  PART II

  I

  He is at the depot, in the increasing dark. He stands by the green metal bench, in front of the soft-drink machine. Descending, she sees Judah and misses the last step; her ankle twists in. So Maggie limps toward him, transferring the bag to her left hand for balance; she had expected Finney, or a taxi sent to bring her to his bed.

  “Well, hello,” she says. “Should you be here?”

  “Who else?” He takes a step toward her. “Let me help you with that.”

  And reaches and takes the bag and hefts it with a strength that does not seem a dying man’s, and she who has prepared for shock is shocked that there is nothing changed, is suddenly back from a weekend’s excursion and not seven years.

  “So,” Judah says. “You made it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been raining this last hour,” he gestures. “First, snow. Like it can’t make up its mind what weather we’re having tonight.”

  “You’re up and about,” she says.

  “As you see me.”

  “I can’t quite believe my eyes. I thought . . . ”

  “Believe them,” he tells her—slipping into his protective condescension, opening the car door for her, shepherding her in. “I’m here.”

  Sitting, she asks, “When you got my letter, were you surprised?”

  He starts the car. “Power steering helps.”

  “Were you expecting it? Or was it a shock to you?”

  He drives with both hands on the wheel, and the attentive caution of the aged.

  “. . . But once you get a problem in the power steering unit, it’s harder than all hell to fix. Might as well walk.”

  She settles back; she knows he won’t answer till ready to talk. Her father thrives. Judah, give or take a year, is her father’s age. “How’s Finney?”

  “Fine,” Judah tells her. “He’s coming over for dinner.”

  “And Hattie?”

  “The same.”

  “Ian? Have you heard from him?”

  “Not likely.”

  Things are familiar, not strange. So this is it, she tells herself, this squalid litany; how’s the grocer’s nephew with the harelip; how’s Elvirah—she marvels at her memory for all of this inconsequence—Elvirah Hayes?

  “And you?” Judah asks.

  “I’m as you see me.”

  He signals for a left turn at the Library. “Pretty.”

  “We’re none of us immortal,” Maggie says.

  “Pretty always.”

  “Flatterer.”

  Remembrance is a trick time plays; the world is déjà vu and everything repeats itself, with nothing new under the sun. Elvirah Hayes and Lucy Gregory live in that brick cottage to her right, behind the picket fence.

  “Why did you come?”

  “Why not? What else is one supposed to do?”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” he says.

  Embarrassed, she looks out the window—seeing sleet and the huddled houses. They relax, she thinks, with summer—they sprout awnings and porch furniture and the accoutrements of easy weather. “I’m not. I wasn’t laughing.”

 
“Maggie,” her husband pronounces. “Is that what they call you these days?”

  “Whatever you want. Mrs. Sherbrooke.”

  “You’re being nice,” he says. “You’d never been this well-behaved before you took that bus.”

  “I’m a little surprised to see you.”

  “Don’t be,” Judah says.

  He has the possessor’s vanity; her vanity had been to do without the claims of ownership. His love had been exclusive, but hers had been inclusive: all of God’s chillun got wings. So Maggie had opposed him term for term—insisting jealousy was shopworn, and marriage a convenience; her dream had been of liberty, his of unfettered constraint.

  “We’ll take the long way round, through town. That way we’ll miss the hill.”

  “Is it very slippery?”

  “I wouldn’t want to lose you now you’re here.”

  He says this with such force she takes it for the first true note of all his praise and banter; she raises her left hand and rubs it on his cheek. “Feel Daddy’s scratchy face,” she says. “That’s from Pat the Bunny. I remember Ian used to raise that fist of his before we even turned the page, before we’d get to Peekaboo.”

  “Hide-and-seek. Seems like every game there is is one we tried to play.”

  “Succeeded in playing,” she says. He tries to kiss her hand—still staring forward, still driving, and misses and smacks his lips.

  There had been purple martins by the pond. Judah wanted purple martins to keep mosquitoes back. They rarely settled this far north, and had to be enticed. Before she married him he coaxed the birds with houses set up on poles, the proper distance from the pond and built to Amos Sandy’s satisfaction; Amos said they liked their houses just so. He had waited for three seasons, with no luck. Then Maggie settled in and with her came the purple martin families; they settled that fourth season and returned. They skimmed and flitted across the pond, and she took them—the first evenings, so swift was their flight—for bats. Maggie joined him in the evenings on the Big House porch, and they watched the swooping birds and heard them in the trees.

  “An owl,” she’d said. “A wise old owl.”

  “A mourning dove.”

  “This time of night?” she asked him. “Wouldn’t it likely be owls?”

  “It’s not that kind of morning. It’s what you do with sorrow, not the time till noon.”

  Maggie could feel herself color. “I never knew that,” she said. “I thought it was morning a.m.”

  “They’re nothing like you think them”—Judah was expansive. “They’re fierce birds, matter of fact, and even in a cage. Put two turtle doves together, they make fighting cocks look tame.”

  Oh don’t you see yon turtle dove

  Who flies from pine to pine;

  He’s mourning for his own true love

  As I will mourn for mine—S

  She sang to him. He complimented her with the condescending kindliness she had heard in Hattie when the choice of a fabric or color reflected well upon her own astuteness in the choosing. “Keep at that song, it’s fine.” He believed her, said her husband; he had taken the stanza for truth. He figured purple martins were as good a sign as any that his luck would change, and then not change again.

  In any case she sang:

  As I will mourn for mine

  Believe me what I say.

  You are the darling of my heart,

  Until my dying day.

  Now it all seems foreordained. It makes sense, looking back. Of course she would work as a model and hate it; of course come to the Big House hunting some father surrogate (as she’d told her analyst long since, but been bored with the pat equation even in the telling) some memory of a male presence to dandle and comfort and change her. Of course he, Judah, would fit that bill in every particular: titanic and comfortable both.

  “A thing done that’s worth doing,” he said, “is worth admitting you’ve done it.”

  “What if nobody asks?”

  “Then nobody’s any the wiser. And that’s all right.”

  “But what about being sworn to silence?”

  “There’s some things we don’t talk about,” he grinned at her. “And some we talk about doing and some we only just do.”

  Maggie loves her father, wanly, still. He lives alone in his retirement home in Cape Cod, and she would spend stray weekends there, dutiful, admiring his seashell collection. He is full of sea lore but has never been to sea. He’d pace the Wellfleet wharf or the trails to Great Island for all the world like a retired admiral, jaunty, sheltering his pipe. He limps and somehow manages to suggest it is a sailor’s roll, and that his parquet flooring is a pitching deck. He sports yachtsman’s caps. She hears him out but hears within the babble only, “Help. Meg, not the man I was. Have some sort of patience, it’s holiday season; it’s the way we used to be, remember, in a southwest gale off Hatteras, the tuna sinking everything in sight . . .”

  She walked with him where fishing boats weathered the winter—swept up to the wharf as though by an outlandish tide and stranded there on cinder blocks and jacks. She lagged behind. The prows were huge, rotting, barnacle-streaked. Boats with names like Mudlark and Norman Scott and Li-Burt-E towered above her, their cabins painted jaunty colors and their decks piled high with nets. Her father spoke of basking sharks the size of whales and how the whales would dance around the boats. There would be ice on the dock. He picked his way with care: an old man in the wind. Maggie listened to him with a familiar yearning—that he not be consigned to muttering his tales alone. She leaned her head on his shoulder, but was too tall to make the gesture more than mawkish, embarrassing them both. She straightened. “I’ve been to New Orleans, Dad. And San Francisco since I saw you last.”

  He smiled at her vaguely, obsessed. “But when a whale is sickly,” he continued, “and the herd knows it’s a goner—this is true for dolphins too, mind you, and seals, and anything with the slightest spark of compassion or instinct for decency, mind you—then they shove it in to shore. That way it can go in peace; that way the sharks won’t get at it; it’s the fish equivalent for burial at sea.”

  And suddenly she knew she’d answer Judah if he called. Suddenly she made a covenant: The Golden Rule. Do unto others. If somebody watches over my father, anyone, she told herself, I’ll watch out for my husband forever and ever, amen. An ancient Dodge appeared. She heard it the length of the dock away, noticed its shape in the far distance. It made for them; she made out a man at the wheel. He was sitting erect, using both hands to steer down this wide and empty avenue; his car had been repainted, black, and he brought it to a halt. Gulls wheeled above them, dropping and shattering clams. He rolled down the window, rolling it all the way, using his entire arm to crank. Polite, he doffed his cap. “Hey, Harry,” he said. “You fortunate man. Who’s this young lovely with you?” There was rheum at his eyes’ pouches and a red waxed moustache. “Must be your daughter? Afternoon, miss.”

  “Not so young,” said Maggie. “But thanks just the same.”

  The chromium was pitted; she put her hand on the headlight’s bright abrasions. They “geezerized” for minutes—it was her father’s word for conversation—in the wet wind. She would go to Judah when he called.

  Maggie had spied on him once. She had been in Providence but came back unexpectedly, telling Junior Allison who drove the cab to let her off at the gate. The night was dark, and clouds obliterated what she guessed was a half-crescent moon. The mountain ash trees had bloomed in her brief absence; she was thirty-two years old. She believed in psychic age, though she thought her own had shifted and might shift again. Men were born a certain age and stayed that way; Judah, for example, in her mind’s eye was always forty-five.

  Dogs barked at her, then quieted. She walked on the driveway’s grass rim. It was not spying exactly, she told herself, stepping out of her shoes. It was looking at the life her husband lived without her, in her absence; it was hunting some new access point to his walled enclosure.

 
“How long will you be off?” he’d asked.

  “A week,” she said. “Maybe less.”

  “And maybe more?”

  “Maybe, I doubt it. Ten days at the most.”

  “Your uncle needs your help?” It was a question really, but she took it as his answer.

  “Yes, there’s so much furniture. There’s so much we’ve got to decide.”

  “Don’t bring it here,” Hattie warned her. “We don’t need anything else.”

  “His ladder-back chair,” said Maggie. “Maybe the rolltop desk.”

  “Ship what you like,” Judah said.

  She stepped, therefore, secretly onto the porch. The watchdogs wagged their tails. Later she would tell him how the cousins divided up family spoils. She needed nothing and had taken nothing but her uncle’s ladder-back chair. Later she would tell him how she missed him there in Providence, walking in the chill bay wind and seeing the house lamps light up. The living room lamps, here, were lit. Judah sprawled in the green leather chair. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and she saw the white hairs riffle on his arm. He bent above the yellow stoneware plate to eat a sandwich, leaning forward, mouth making swallowing motions, and something about that gesture—a weary domesticity, the time he’d taken to make and arrange his sandwich, adding lettuce, a sweet pickle—touched her, moved her as none of his elaborate courtesy could, nor any of the regal meals she had pictured him consuming.

  He was six feet from her, maybe, with glass and gauze intervening, but she saw his head in profile as though he slept beside her on the pillow. He sucked on his cheek. He wore his brown corduroy pants. She had mended them more times than she would care to count, and offered to buy him a new pair, but he said not until I wear it through, but thanks, but what about this button, can you manage that?

  Later she would tell him that she hated Providence. They were crows over carrion, she’d say. They’d argued over furniture and even stamp collections, like a flock of crows. It’s good, she’d say, to be back home where nothing was in question or out of its accustomed place or on some sort of auction block, with legatees bidding. Judah moved. He looked at her. He craned his head to the left and was staring at her, she could swear, staring through her at the willow. She flattened herself. “I’m crazy about you, mister,” she whispered. “Crazy mad.”