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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  He saw her again that summer, at the summer’s end. There was a carnival in town, and Judah went the final day. Samson Finney said the carnival strongman held the world’s weight-lifting record for the two-handed curl and press. And maybe it was so and maybe wasn’t so, but any man who’d lift that fat bearded lady was strong—and any man who’d do it more than once was, Finney joked, a world-class jerk.

  Judah shot at sitting cardboard ducks. He studied the construction of the carousel. There were eleven horses on the outside ring, and seven on the inside ring—painted, in alternating patterns, brown and pink and white. The horses rose and dipped—he calculated by the pole’s rubbed sheen—four feet. The carousel began. The music was the music of the Sheik of Araby. She clattered past him, wearing red. Her hair was in a cap, and plaited, and he knew her but not how he knew her. She swooped and circled, not sidesaddle, but riding as a man would ride, flourishing her cap. She was there with friends, he decided, and playing Calamity Jane. He drifted to the ball toss where they tossed for kewpie dolls. His aim was inexact. He found—he said to Finney—this particular carnival dull. There was a time this sort of thing seemed cause for celebration, and he’d down a bottle of applejack brandy on anybody’s say-so to celebrate the world.

  “Let’s do it,” Finney said. “Let’s celebrate the world.”

  “It’s going to hell in a handcart.”

  “All the more reason. All the greater opportunity for this little drink.”

  “There’s not any reason not to,” Judah said.

  He took a pull from Finney’s flask. He was standing there, tasting it, feeling the heat course through him when she waved—he’d got her name now, Maggie, and the circumstance (though he hadn’t been sure at the carousel’s gate-edge and wasn’t over-certain now—was thinking of that mad housepainter in Munich and his chances for wrecking the planet, was thinking of the sluiceway his intestines made, how the applejack dispersed out even to his elbows, was calculating the profit at a nickel a ride, and eighteen people to the ride, assuming the carousel full, assuming the barker could fill it fifty times a night . . .)

  “Good evening,” the girl said.

  “Good evening. Maggie.”

  “Mr. Judah Porteous Sherbrooke.” She smiled. She shook back her plaits.

  “You’ve got a memory.”

  “I never thanked you properly. I inquired your name. You never told me ‘Porteous’—I asked after that.”

  “You thanked me,” Judah said.

  “I’m going to New York tomorrow. I’ve had a lovely summer. I’ve got to go now, but thanks.”

  She bobbed and moved off, quickening. He knows the child is father to the man. The wish is father to the thought, and necessity the mother of invention. Her propriety and laughter was a seed then, germinant. White clover, Judah knows, stays in the ground upwards of seventy years. She planted something in him (though he would not know it, would forget her name once more, and this their second encounter until she reminded him, later, in their proper courtship, of how he’d rocked back on his heels and neglected to acknowledge how she’d grown, was growing, had won a picture of George Washington at bingo—would plow his bedfields under, repeatedly, and labor enough in his time to tire of it, nearly; would reconcile himself to widowerhood, and bachelorhood, the two indeterminate, fusing, since his first wife had died early on) that took a decade to sprout.

  The ordination of the chromosomes, he thinks, that’s my true ministry. That’s what I ought to preach. From that first spawning instant, the sex and size and wit of his sons was ordained.

  Maggie had been twenty-three. She called herself, then, Megan. He met her at Morrisey’s Grocery, selecting cheese. She was studying the label and the price on Camembert. He had taken Camembert from the same counter two days before, and the cheese had been inedible. He had returned it, of course. He complained to Morrisey that the stuff was so damn overripe the cow that produced it was ten years buried, and the cowhide wallet worn away with all those doctor bills. “Matter of fact,” Judah said, “I shouldn’t wonder if this was the milking that killed it.”

  Morrisey had laughed and credited him and produced a new Camembert cheese. Judah told this story to the girl at the cheese counter, and she turned to face him and was familiar.

  “I know you,” Judah said.

  “No.”

  “I’ve seen you before.”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “Yes. Not lately.”

  “No. I haven’t been here”—she calculated, lifting her index finger—“since 1938.”

  “I knew you then,” he said, recollecting. “You lost your way on that bike.”

  There was nothing timorous about her now, no trace of that thin supplicant. She was model-slim still (was indeed, she told him later, working as a model in New York—but hated it, hated the hair dryers she sat beneath for hair dryer ads, the vacuum-cleaner parts she assembled and disassembled for vacuum-cleaner catalogue ads, the people that she worked with, and their whole notion of chic—).

  “Have dinner with me,” Judah said. “We’ll have to fatten you up.”

  “I can’t,” she responded—but speculative, smiling. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “You’re kind to ask . . .”

  “For auld acquaintance sake,” he said, and wondered why he pestered her and why he felt persistent.

  “I’m with friends.”

  “Well, bring them.”

  She replaced the Camembert cheese. “My name”—she held her right hand out—“is Megan.”

  “And mine is Judah Sherbrooke, Megan. Maggie. Welcome back.”

  “I’m passing through,” she said. “I’ll tell the others.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re waiting outside. I’ll be back. Mr. Judah Porteous Sherbrooke.”

  She turned, with her hair swirling, and he watched her out the door.

  “Look at that,” Morrisey said.

  “I’ll take ten pounds of sirloin,” Judah said. “Now get behind that meat shelf and behave. You ought to be ashamed.”

  Morrisey wolf-whistled. “I am, lawsie mercy. I am.” He listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy and was working on the accent. “Lawsie mercy. I’se gosh-all get-out ashamed.”

  Judah stood by the cereals shelf. He remembers wishing, for a moment, that she’d get back on her bike—or car, or motorcycle, whatever conveyance she used now, or some second stranger’s pickup truck—and leave him to his evening’s plan (a walk, a meal, a smoke, the solitude he broke from only in his aimless grazing). She said to him later that week: “Three coincidences. That’s one too many to take for granted.”

  “How else do people meet?”

  “Through introductions,” she said. “Because of school friends or through family or work.”

  Her friends had come and stayed for drinks, then left (were never present really, were moustachioed absences between the bookcase and the standing lamp, were twittering there like magpies, wearing cameras, asking for gin). He asked her to remain. He barbecued ten pounds of sirloin and dropped the whole thing on her plate. It dwarfed the plate’s circumference, bleeding out onto the cloth.

  “You’re joking,” Megan said.

  “No.”

  “You’ll spoil me with that kind of joke.”

  “Spoiled rotten”—he sat down. “If you haven’t spoiled already. Like that cheese.”

  He leaned back, pleased with himself. He studied her gestures, engorging. She sliced and chewed with delicacy, theatrical. She would eat his life.

  Even across the continent’s span, Peacock felt himself a native of Vermont. He sent ten thousand dollars home, as his subscription to the cost of levying troops. “We pay John Chinaman,” he wrote, “so why should not the Slave receive like Wages and proud Liberty? All bondage—lest it be to Christ—is heinous in His sight.”

  They stand there poised on the shore’s brink, reflected, wavering, in an immobility that is motion arrested f
or the instant only. She is in the ocean, of it, turned three-quarters to Ireland, the sun in front of her so that Judah, squinting, sees the foam-nimbus smudge her body’s edge—the outline of her indistinct in that spume halo, and all of it shifting, her feet hunting purchase, the sand floor accreting (so that he no sooner puts his foot down than he finds it swallowed up, is up to his ankle in silt), the tide continual and treacherous (though this too seems a code to crack; waves come in sequence, he has learned; there’re maybe seven big waves, maybe nine, then nothing much—as if the trough and crest were components of a level whole, the subtraction of one water mass massed up against the next). Then there are riptides, she tells him, and crosscurrents and circle currents that they call a sea puss, lazily coiling, and though he’s not afraid of it, can subdue what fear he has and enter the water behind her grinning, thumping, dominating the waves, he never thinks of it as better than an armed standoff or some sort of watchful truce: not his element, nor one in which he takes his ease, though the marble quarry up at Danby made a fine place for swimming, and he’d stand in some streambed for hours, snagging trout. But she has wished it and her wish, he jokes, is his command, and therefore they have driven to this coastal outcrop and she is in her element, disporting like some glad sea otter, though he’s never seen an otter and doubts they wear pink two-piece suits; still, Megan loves lobster and oysters and clams, and he promises to have a seaplane bring them lobster. Still she laughs that he’s like some forlorn stranded Neptune who’s forgotten how to swim, standing there on that rock jetty, needing only a pitchfork for trident—huge, she teases him, and cranky and bedraggled as a soft-shelled crab.

  “What kind of crab is that?” he asked.

  “The kind that’s good for eating.” She licked her lips. “The kind that steams up pink and ain’t as tough as it looks.”

  “A hermit crab. That’s what.”

  “A god of the sea”—she touched him—“who loves his water sprite.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “Very much.”

  “And likes to watch her swim.”

  “Considering the tasty morsel she herself might make.”

  “Yum yum.” She put her fingers in his mouth. “Old Neptune’s hungry again.”

  He’s forty-eight years old, he tells her, and not the sort of person to joke with or make jokes about; she pulls her fingers from his mouth, salutes, and dives from the rock jetty cleanly, into the crest of the waves.

  “Since we cannot take Material Substance with us,” Peacock wrote, “I am persuaded that a Christian man must make display whilst still in the Possession of Appreciative Faculties, and health. The fireplaces shall be marble, not Parian marble nor the stuffs of Italy, Carrara and suchlike, but from our neighbor quarries in Vermont.”

  He had traveled home via the Isthmus. The train across the Isthmus was a train he scorned. There were blockades in the Mexican Gulf, but they were under escort and out of danger’s reach. They took a steamer up the Hudson and a train from Troy.

  Peacock fulminated against imprecision in trains. His mine trains had a gauged wheel that could hold the track in snow or rain or ice. If he could keep, he argued, twenty tons of ore from falling off of mountain passes, why couldn’t this rattletrap conveyance arrive on time? “The camel finds the Needle’s Eye,” he wrote, “more readily than I find easement for what they call Pneumonia. Strait is the gate . . .”

  Through his law practice, Sherbrooke had acquired real estate and mining properties; he accepted notes in lieu of salary and was a paper millionaire by 1852. He bought Montgomery Street. He was, a letter-writing wit observed in the Alta California, “Golden tongued. There be a stream of language issuing forth from Lawyer Sherbrooke’s mouth with its proportionate amount of fool’s gold, but by all accounts worth panning at sixteen dollars the ounce. His opponents would wish him dried up. His admirers say the vein is inexhaustible and will run on to the Supreme Court and dwarf the Mother Lode. Myself I do account him a natural asset to our fair state, babbling as the stream does babble or rumbling as the mine-shaft when it buries some unfortunate within. I propose a monument to Lawyer Sherbrooke’s weighty words and will be thereof the first subscriber. I herewith pledge two pounds of pebbles for our Demosthenes’ mouth . . .”

  “If the mote is in thy neighbor’s eye,” Peacock wrote, “pluck out the mote in thine own. Thus do we learn the gentleman’s comportment—since I never yet knew scoundrel but could bandy reputations with the best. Truly to learn humility is, I think, the Christian’s highest art—for many’s the mock-humble man who thrives on Pomp and Praise. I pride myself on nothing half so much as this: that never have I claimed as due more than the bond’s redeemable Value, nor ever left notes unredeemed.”

  There is Italian marble everywhere, and columns that his father ordered shipped from Greece. The house is what he labeled sizeable and others call huge. Judah moves through it with habit’s ease, not noticing the glitter or the gimcrack elegance his mother had insisted on as comme il faut. He’d asked her what that meant, and she said, “What it means is place. It’s knowing your position in this town, and how to keep it up.”

  So the Big House is ornate in ways he only sees when seeing it as others do: Maggie, for instance, batting her eyes at him, staring at the mirror that had silver Cupids at the top. They had married three months later, in the upstairs ballroom. They had a civil service, with a justice of the peace presiding, and only a handful of relatives and friends. Her parents motored north from New York. Her father was his, Judah’s, age and none too pleased about it—but not, when he arrived and saw the farm, any too displeased. They got along. They got through a bottle of sour-mash whiskey that first afternoon. He remembers Maggie’s father with affection—a dapper man wearing pinstripe suits and a moustache like Thomas E. Dewey’s moustache.

  “We could go the whole hog,” he had offered his bride. “If you’d prefer.”

  “No. This is between us, not them.”

  So they’d stripped the guest list back and made no fuss about it, keeping private covenant and swearing private marriage vows and saving the parties for later. There would be parties enough.

  V

  “Hattie,” James Pearson called. “Hey, Hattie.”

  “Yes,” she’d said.

  “Come on over here.”

  “Why?” she inquired.

  “Why not?”

  “Not till you ask more politely, Mr. James Pearson, sir,” she’d reprimanded him, smiling. “Not till you ask the way a gentleman would ask it.”

  “Please.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Come on over here, hey, Hattie, please.”

  His face was red. His hair was red. He flamed at her from the room’s dark corner.

  “Well,” she acquiesced. “Since you insist. Parce que vous insistez.”

  “I do,” he said. “I do.”

  She’d taken that as augury and walked toward him, blushing. He reached out his right hand.

  “Say please,” she’d chided him.

  “Please.”

  His hand was freckled, and the knuckles sprouted hairs.

  “Say pretty please”—she took his hand—“with a cherry on top.”

  “Pretty please with a cherry on top.”

  “Say pretty please with a cherry on top, and marshmallow dressing, and sugar.”

  He placed his left hand on her waist.

  “Pretty please,” he’d whispered. “With a cherry on top, and marshmallow dressing, and sugar.”

  “No,” Harriet pouted, withdrawing. “I don’t like marshmallow dressing.”

  This completed their routine. She had learned it when learning the way to jump rope. This was her posed, phrased resistance, and now she let him fondle her and gave herself up to his arms. He smelled of licorice. He pressed and mauled at her for minutes, for what seemed like hours though she kept close track of time. He disarrayed her clothing, and she let him paw the disarray. Then Harriet pulled back and kissed his freckled chin
and said, “No, please. We mustn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Pretty please.”

  The licorice transmuted and became the smell of gin.

  “Why not?” He had turned sullen.

  “Mr. James Pearson”—she chaffed him—“you know the answer to that.”

  “Christ, Hattie . . .”

  “Don’t blaspheme.”

  Later, when she met him by accident—Jamie, just come from propping up the Drop-Inn bar, whose nose had gone bulbous and stomach distended and red hair lost its fullness and sheen—she had reconsidered. She thanked her lucky stars. She watched him shuffling down Main Street, doffing his engineer’s cap to women in comic obscene deference, doing a jig on streetcorners as he waited for the light to change—and thanked her luck he did not see her or doff his cap when she passed. Obscurely, she had been offended that Jamie stayed in town. He should have vanished from the streets and bars when he vanished from her embrace. He had sworn to. “Hattie, I’m leaving,” he said. “I can’t stay around here like this.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “I know when I’m not wanted.”

  “Please stay,” she said, not meaning it and he knew she didn’t mean it and, to spite her, stayed. He weaved and hiccuped past her as an emblem of decorum lost; he lost his job at the bank. She noticed, when he did the hornpipe, he clicked his heels twice in the air. Therefore she wished on him, in retribution for her broken heart, a broken leg. He should, she thought, twist an ankle at least and not prove so monkey-agile, capering.