He pours. He is here to safeguard the Sherbrooke interests. Heavily, he toasts her; she smiles up at him sideways, batting her eyes. But she is a Sherbrooke also, and an interested party, and Judah’s never even entertained the notion of divorce. He himself suggested it, and Hattie no doubt suggested it often. But Finney got a flat-out no, and Hattie probably got worse, a mind-your-own-business-not-mine.
“Are you happy to be back?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Does it still feel like home to you?”
“Of course it does.”
“Why did you leave then?” Judah asks, interrupting them.
“You know.”
“No, really . . .
“Let’s not start that, Jude,” Hattie says. “Not now.”
“Why not? No time like the present . . .”
“I never heard you say that,” Maggie says.
“All right. What brings you here?”
“The love I bear you.” She says this with the precision of a prerehearsed recital, looking at Finney instead.
“Bore,” Judah says.
“Bear.” She cites her letter to him. “And you said you bore me once.”
“How was the trip?”
“When did you get my letter?”
“Monday.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Tore it up,” he lies. “Flushed it down the toilet. Gave it to Hattie instead.”
She turns to her sister-in-law, but Harriet asks for the salt.
It had happened to him with his son. Feeding Ian, watching how his baby learned to swallow or stick out his tongue, inserting the small spoon with its quotient of apricot or carrot or banana mush, Judah remembered feeding his mother—with her on her final bed, drooling. Lavinia Sherbrooke lingered for months, force-fed by him or one of the nurses—eating from china, and with the best silver and crystal. But she ate only mush or a boiled egg maybe on a strong morning, with maybe a sip of champagne. She ate with the witless deliberation that signaled bodily function and not her spirit’s purpose; her intention, she declared, had been to call it quits.
Judah fed his mother patiently, announcing how the egg was fresh; he’d plucked it from the chicken coop five minutes before boiling. “It should set up,” she said. “There’s such a thing as over-fresh.” She said the glass she drank from stank, and that it smelled of onions, or possibly garlic or scallions, she wasn’t certain which. He brought her day-old eggs, and she said they were too old.
Still, the room is peopled. There had been birthday celebrations and dinners for the Governor, when the Governor came south. There had been eighteen servants quartered in the servants’ wing. Directly above his bedroom, in a third-floor storage hall, dresses hang. His grandmother had had the habit of preserving the year’s most beautiful dress and selecting it on Christmas Eve. She would give the rest away to charity or servants or nieces—or, if she were fond of the fabric but not style, would have the dress remade. The storage hall was cedar-lined, and the commodes and chests were cedar, and therefore the clothes stayed moth-free; Harriet strewed camphor on the floor. His grandmother, commemorating, would pin a note to the left shoulder of the dress—so Judah, holding a yellow lace-embroidered flaring full-length gown would read: 1882. June 25th The Adams Ball. I danced till 2 a.m. In 1883 she wrote: January 23. Reception for Anne Watts—and chose a dress that was predominantly violet, an oriental-influenced arrangement of silks. There were ball gowns and picnic outfits and gowns she wore to christenings, but after 1907, with her husband dead, she wore only black. It pleased him, sleepless, to think of his grandmother’s portly promenading form, and the grave gaiety of Christmas Eve, when she made her selection. There were hats and riding habits and gloves and shawls in profusion. There were mantillas on pegs.
“I, Judah Porteous Sherbrooke, being of sound mind and body, hereby declare . . .”
“Don’t,” Hattie says.
“I do declare,” Maggie mocks him. The women lean together.
“And dispose as follows . . .”
“Jude,” she says. “Remember the day we got married? You flustered the J.P. so—what was his name again, Thompson? We were married in this very room—Paul Thompson, that was it.”
“Yes,” Hattie says. “He lived in Eagle’s Bridge. He ran for Sheriff, later, but he lost, remember, and every time he did a marriage he warned about breaking the law.”
“What I remember”—Maggie reached around the glasses and put her hand on his—“was when he came to the part about goods. I still don’t know if it’s ‘earthly’ or ‘worldly’ because you had him flustered . . .”
“You did,” Judah says.
“What I remember, anyway, is how he mixed the two together and came up with ‘worthly goods.’ ”
She will not leave off teasing, Judah knows. She takes his declaration on her terms.
“And then we were all out on the porch. And he said he’d take the wedding picture and you focused it for him and came to stand beside me and he must have sneezed or something because when we developed it he’d missed the two of us entirely.”
“Legs,” Finney says, “He got those.”
“So what we have is ‘worthly goods’ and a bunch of steps that needed painting. That’s what I remember,” Maggie says.
“Are you finished?”
“No. You don’t have to announce,” she says, “every little thing you’re planning. It works out different, anyhow, it’s never the way we expect.”
“Amen to that,” Finney says.
“He’s got the papers,” Judah says. “There in that briefcase. It’s yours.”
It is water, always, that he works his way through—water where she sports and luxuriates, the liquid that surrounds her so she is of, not in it.
“Ninety-eight percent of our body, Jude,” she’d said to him, “is water.”
“Fact?”
“True fact. And every single body cell is mostly water too. We come from it and swim in it our first nine months”—she pointed to her stomach—“like little Ian-Betsy is swimming in there now.”
He managed swimming well enough and had been a strong swimmer. He flailed at the Battenkill, going upriver, and didn’t give ground to the current. But it had been assertion always, and not relinquishing, not lazing on his back. He gauged his progress by the river snags and branches and rocks on the bank; she made no effort he could see but wriggled and flipped her way past him with slithering ease.
“You’re fighting it, Judah,” she’d say.
“Talking of onions,” Harriet says, “we’re mostly out of them. There’s water in the cellar now three inches deep. It doesn’t seem that way above ground, not the worst mud season ever, but it’s bad enough below, I tell you, and very lucky I looked.”
“The wet went deep,” he offers.
Maggie fiddles with the cutlery. “What else can you tell me?” she asks.
He says, of course, no question; it has been in his mind all along. It had been the first thing he intended to discuss. But somehow he got sidetracked, someway it was hard to raise the subject: Do what you want with the house. Judah has no wishes, none that count. Mouse droppings on the carpet she had prized so highly, and squirrels using insulation for their nests—what happens happens anyhow; a stitch in time saves nothing; anyhow the fabric rends. No question, Judah said, he’d been meaning from the first to make some fitting dispensation and quittance for all claims.
That’s why he summoned her; that’s why he’d wished each heir and legatee to come. Ian, of course, failed to show. Ian has been busy with whatever busies him. Finney had no address they were sure of; nor did they try much more than middling hard to notify that missing person of the chance he’d missed. You couldn’t put a wanted poster up, you couldn’t have the post office print an announcement: Ian Sherbrooke, come on home; collect your proper inheritance, your parcel of the acreage and floor of the house and three hundred thousand dollars at the ticket window, please. That’s what drove him o
ff to start with, and it wouldn’t haul him back and if it did he wasn’t worth the finding anyway.
So everything gets sidetracked, he tells her; every talk they had would trail off into bickering. You get to telling someone how jade plants require water. You tell him how the axle on Harry Turley’s Packard split like a toothpick that time. It was like the differential was all teeth, like murder with malice aforethought when the front end dropped. You get to tracking little live things every which way, busy in the scurry of it, keeping up your prattle and dispensing Kaopectate to the very young or elderly, and there is somehow nothing left, no time and not much inclination for the rolltop desk and settling up accounts. You’ve worked your way through balance sheets before. You do it to your satisfaction, toting up a deal more black than red, then looking up and squinting to see an angel of some sort of mercy or death hover stork-legged in the hallway, waiting for your verdict as to which is suitable, water or the undiluted wine.
He himself was open-handed. He’d said why not, what the hell, there’s plenty more and he’d elected wine, saying come along, step on it, Maggie, hop in, we’re going for a hop-step-drive along the Old East Road. There are potholes. There is Harry Turley’s Packard to remember. There is, Judah tells himself, every blunder that you ever made or might still be about to make, rankling so your ears would hum; there is this creature telling you Manhattan Island is a better place for bikes. It isn’t memory. Your memory is good, is maybe better than most. They told you that in school or at the auction barn, and you never lost a number series once you learned it. And anyhow he needs no reminding, knows the present forms the future and is a kind of prophecy that will be history when the future is also the past. I meant to tell you, baby, it’s been in my mind all along. There is yon valley and her pursed lips on him and her hand and her thin cheeks puckered, and the strands of her hair on her cheeks, the way the sweat adheres to skin; there is the jingle of adieu and whatever I do.
“Please pass the salt,” Finney says.
“Yes.”
“These are excellent potatoes.”
“Pepper? Butter? What else can I get you?”
“Are you still taking seconds?” Hattie asks her sister-in-law. “I remember you shoveled in heaps of food and never put on weight.”
Judah hears them hunting comfort in the topic of the food. He has his chin to his chest. He stares at his wife, seeing where she has coarsened, sees the lines around her neck that had been seamless once. They talk about him now as if he cannot hear.
“I’ve been tending to him,” Hattie says.
“Yes.”
“Night and day.”
“I’ll bet he takes some tending to.” He takes this as a compliment.
“Seven days of the week,” Hattie says.
“I’m glad I’m here. I hope to be some help.”
“I’ve not needed help,” Hattie says, “I’ve done it night and day these seven days a week. He just needs attention is all.”
“I do know that.”
“You simply can’t imagine,” Hattie continues. “I look at him sometimes in church. And it’s just the saddest face; you let him settle down and think there’s no one watching and it’s the saddest face you’d ever want to see.”
“I wouldn’t want to see that,” Maggie says.
“No. Of course not. Not if you can help it.”
“We . . .”
“He may have been your husband once, but”—and there is sniffing virulence in his sister’s face again—“let me tell you, he’s changed.”
Judah shaves with a strop razor; that is consistency in change. What he touches has grown pliable and takes on his palm’s sweat. The blue spruce tree he planted to signal Ian’s birth was higher than Ian to start with, then smaller since it grew less quickly, then taller since it continued to grow. He wonders why he has no memory of pain. He would will himself into remembrance or anticipation, but the pain is not corporeal, any more than pleasure is corporeal when done. Judah is glad about that. If he could balance pain and pleasure off, he figures pain would weight the scale considerably; he’d have to have been sporting fifty or five hundred times to cancel out one broken leg.
He’d heard the heart stopped beating in three different ways. It stopped, Doc Wiggins said, when you sneezed or climaxed or died. You only die once, Judah said, and you come maybe five thousand times, or if you’re lucky ten. In the oblivious intervals he tended to his business—not pleasure and not pain.
“Well, what about sneezing?” asked Wiggins. You could sneeze six times in succession if you breathed back hay chaff, say, and it would take a lot less energy than sporting; it would wring him dry a whole lot more efficiently. So one was pain and one was pleasure and one was by and large indifferent, and he would choose, if forced to choose, that heart-stopping sneeze as the best way to go.
Wiggins recited his ditty, “I sneezed a sneeze into the air. It fell to earth I know not where. But hard and cold were the looks of those, in whose vicinity I snoze.”
Judah laughed. “Still and all,” the doctor winked at Judah. “Still, judging by available receptacles, I’d a deal sooner hope to empty myself by that other device for emission. If you take my meaning.”
“Yes,” Judah said. “I do. You piss-ant simple son of a whore. I take it well enough.”
“What did you call me?”
“If recollection serves,” said Judah, “a piss-ant simple son of a whore. But I meant it kindly,” and he grinned at Wiggins who backed off, bristling, abject.
“Jude.”
“Yes?”
“Jude, I say.”
“I hear you,” Judah says.
“Judah, are you listening?”
“I heard you the first time,” he says.
“What was I saying?”
“Well, what was I saying,” he mimics, word-perfect.
“Before that?”
“Jude-boy, are you listening?” His voice rises, parroting hers.
“You never listen to me,” Maggie says. “You don’t hear a thing I tell you.”
“I’m listening,” he says.
Why does she counter him, she asks herself; what drives her to it, drove her north and to his side like a night nurse who prefers hot mustard poultices to balm, who uses rubbing alcohol to staunch each wound; why not submit if all he needs for peace is her enforced submission? The guises multiply and then persist and then it isn’t clear which one is truthful, which a disguise; age cannot wither, she remembers, nor custom stale. But age does wither and custom does stale and there’s no infinite variety to what she’s learned or where (has said this to her analyst also—that she’d left Sarah Lawrence after two years, not seeing the point of it, not wanting to call Bronxville the Athens of the Bronx, wanting real grape arbors and not the hundred yards of trellised walkway they thought of as a conduit to universal learning, not needing little needy men to tell her there were large ones once, nor willing to believe her breathless labored whirling would be the future of dance); her grasp and reach an octave only, not enough.
So she argues with him just to keep her hand in: forgive but don’t forget. That’s her motto, she tells Judah, you say tomato and I say tom-ah-toe; you say potato and I say pot-ah-toe, salad days, the wilted scrap of what had seemed to be love’s feast. We’re old-time adversaries, husband, and I’d rather disagree with you than agree with most.
Now each of them wonder, is this all? Is habit’s hold unbreakable and will they sit to supper forever and ever, as if betrayal and revenge were topics like the quality of meat? Good manners, Hattie said, mean never discuss what you’re eating. You can compliment the cook, but that’s as far as it goes; you should never talk about the food being tasted at table. There had been stews, she’d heard, in which men were served up their sons. The proper thing to do would anyhow be compliment the cook and then, when you learn what you’ve eaten, to provoke a duel.
So politeness is the order of the day. Politeness means that Maggie serves Finney, and no one
hurries Judah’s carving when he drops the knife. No one says, “Here, let me help,” or “Would you like to let me try?” or any of the phrases that might make things bearable (his shaking pronounced now, the blood leaking out of the undercooked steaks—not rare, not raw even, just bloody and expensive pulp, the blade making scant progress against that ten-pound fibrous lump, and none of them hungry anyhow, none of them able to do justice to Morrisey’s best). No one refuses potatoes when the white slop sticks to the spoon; nobody mentions that the carrots should have been washed and peeled. It has to be deliberate, Maggie tells herself; it has to be a parody of meals they shared before. Yet Judah eats with concentration, chewing on his mouthfuls like something in a stable, shifting it from side to side in the forefront of his mouth. She herself—she answers Hattie—has no appetite.
“Why’s that?” the old woman asks. “You always used to eat.”
“I ate on the bus,” Maggie says.
“They’ve got nothing there.”
“In Albany,” she says. “At the terminal. There’s a cafeteria and I wasn’t sure what time we’d be eating.”
“Correction,” Judah says. “You weren’t sure you’d get to eat.”
“What does that mean?” Finney asks.
“It means she didn’t know for certain I’d be there. It means she worried where her next square meal was coming from, that’s what.”
Candles flare. In the soft light and flicker, his skin smoothes. Hattie toys with her food. She arranges it in segments on her plate, then shifts the right-hand portion to the left, the left right. She mashes her potato, the fork tines giving slightly when she forces. She makes a pyramid of meat.
“You’re not eating,” Judah says.
“Yes I am,” says Hattie. “It tastes good.”
“You’re lying,” Judah says.
“We call it table manners,” Maggie says.
So they attempt to please him, bending to their plates again, and suddenly this seems to Maggie the story of her history: a supervised consumption when all appetite is gone. She straightens, rejecting her food. “Jude, I’ll be sick if you force me to finish this.”
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