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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  VIII

  She has been his lawful wife, now, for twenty-eight years. He had married for the second time when he himself was forty-eight, and Margaret twenty-three. He had amused her with percentages. In two years she’d be half his age; three years before she had been, Judah calculated, forty-four percent, and eight years earlier—with her fifteen and him forty—she’d been thirty-eight-percent. Therefore she was catching up but would never truly catch him; last year, for example, she was sixty-seven percent.

  He had thought their marriage would continue. He had been a gambling man and thought it worth the bet. He had known the odds against them and been lectured on the odds—though not aloud; they’d not dared that; he’d been instructed instead, in the bars, by his friends’ backslapping hilarity, then lectured by his sister’s noisy silence, and Samson Finney’s attention to detail when it came to rewriting the will. It was a good deal more expensive than betting an inside straight or drawing to two pair. He knew it was a deal more risky than bluffing on a four flush; he needed no lecture from Finney, or reminding of the odds. Instead the lawyer grinned and said, “Judah, you were always unlucky at cards,” and rewrote the will.

  With Ian and Seth born, he thought his gamble won. Ian had been born the third year of their marriage, and Seth two years thereafter. Meg would spend glad hours with them, suckling, crooning, contained in the enclosure of her sons’ small reach. She bent above them, hair cascading like some hay bale with the twine untied. He reclaimed Daniel Sherbrooke’s cradle from the storeroom; it was birdseye maple, and had spools for slats. She sang: “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’; Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.” She made the song an incantation, using only that verse. He watched her, never breaking the motion of rocking or the rhythmic chant. Ian kicked and squawled and raked his nails across his face, they had to cut his nails repeatedly and glove his hands at night.

  “He’s got your spirit,” Judah said.

  “Your stubbornness.” She smiled.

  “I hope he gets your looks, leastways.”

  “And brains, don’t forget about brains.”

  “He’ll get them also, Maggie, if he’s got a brain in his head.”

  It hadn’t all been prideful then, or easy rearing, or companionable banter while she gave the baby suck. But he remembers it mostly that way. She would sing “Mama’s little baby,” and his sons’ eyes would glaze over with that same distant stare their mother had when beneath him, in bed. Judah is relieved by now they had no daughter. She would have been, continually, a torment; she would have been echo and shadow and an adversary always who called his four-flush bet.

  “What about Ian?” he’d asked her, the first time.

  “What about him?”

  “You can’t run away like this.”

  “I’m not,” she said, “I’m taking him, I wouldn’t leave him here a minute longer than I had to. Not one day.”

  Yet when she left the Big House Maggie took a single suitcase only; she could, when it came down to it, travel light. He forced himself to keep from her closets, or from ransacking her bureau drawers to find out what she took. And Judah could guess anyway, could rub between his empty fingers the silks and lace she would have been wearing so as to have them torn off . . .

  “Bring fine clothing,” Peacock wrote, “when you come to settle here since Coarse Cloth is available, and Linens. When you travel through the Isthmus, I should advise wool Underwear, because it proves more healthful even in the heat. And make certain to embark before the Rainy season, if Providence and Planning permit, since April is the time when Vapors do not cling to the commercial Pilgrim as more than a Miasm of the coming Storm. But June is Tempest Weather for that which you consign to Cargo Ships, & you must hazard Cargos and be sanguine of their quick Arrival, else the brine encrust our Bounty, as with so many ventures before. The Land Grant Commission, Judge Hall presiding, has made good my claim on the two thousand acres at San Rafael. It is a healthful Place.”

  Maggie left town driving, taking the Packard. He subdues the memory but cannot quite erase it—her soft-brimmed hat angled toward him, the Packard spraying gravel as she pitched it down the drive and himself at the French doors, holding to the handle so as not to put his hand through glass, thinking he could be in two strides at the railing and ten more at the car. Maggie would lift her foot, surprised, and the Packard would sputter, throttled, and he’d reach in through the window or break it if need be, reaching, and take the keys and throw them over the roof. But even then he’d known enough to let her go, knowing it was best though worst to let her be, and locking the door handles therefore, holding himself at attention, biting on his pipestem till it shattered, then spitting the black fragments out, praying: God deliver me. Deliver me from this witch-woman and her beauty spell. Let her drive the car to Nevada or to Mexico and buy whatever it is they sell there that passes for a severance, a sundering in Your sight.

  The chandelier behind him had been lit. He stood, not seeing anything, not moving till the dust of her departure settled and aroused again, the wind rigadooning so that even her tire tracks were erased. All else will be, he had promised, erased. He brought his nose to the pane’s nose, and pressed.

  They call it, Judah knows, the green-eyed monster. It had a wintry aspect, but the man who courted jealousy was skating on thin ice. There was a joke about Canucks. One Canuck went ice fishing, but he was so stupid he never cut his ice hole and stood there freezing for hours, catching nothing. A friend passed by on a snowmobile and called “Hey, Pierre, any luck?” Pierre said, “No. Not a bite.” So the second Canuck pointed to his snowmobile and said, “Hop on. We’ll go trolling.”

  He told that joke repeatedly. He liked to think of the two men zigzagging over the ice floes, slapping their arms as they fought with the reel, cursing at the weather and the fish that would not bite through ice. He told the joke to Finney, and Finney got hiccups from laughing.

  There were jokes about jealousy also, but Judah never laughed. There were jokes about husbands with horns on their head, and faithless wives, and the inefficacy of chastity belts. He knew it silly not to laugh, knew the joke about chastity belts and the queen with quadruplicate keys was as funny as the joke about ice fishing. But he had no stomach for that kind of humor—has never had, not even with the tables turned and himself the lover of some faithless married woman who had married and deceived somebody else. He stomached it no better than Hattie brooked jokes about family pride. There were certain things you held on trust, and certain things you trusted in, and he trusted in the notion of fidelity, once wed. There were jokes about men in closets, and stories about the milkman or television repair man, but anyone who knew him, Judah, knew not to tell those jokes.

  He remembers Maggie in the rope hammock strung between two apple trees. He sat beside her on the grass, and she used her horsehair riding crop to ward off flies.

  “You’ve got nothing to complain of,” she had told him. “Not any single thing.”

  “The thought’s the deed”—he pressed her. “You’ve sinned in thought and that’s as bad as deed.”

  “Come off it, darling,” she said.

  “I’m not accusing you. I’m just observing that the thought’s the deed.”

  “You’re positively biblical.” She pushed the ground with her left leg and started the rope hammock swinging.

  “No.”

  “Yes. It has to be Sunday today.”

  He watched her body’s pumping motion—the whole of her rhythmic, suspended.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, it’s Sunday, and yes, you’re vengeful and jealous and biblical, and no, you have nothing to complain of.”

  (“Jude-ass,” they’d called him once. He’d broken the right arm of the boy who started that. It had been Billy Harrison, and they were both thirteen, with Judah half a head taller but fifteen pounds less fat. He’d taken Billy’s arm and twisted it behind his back and elevated it till Billy shouted “Uncle!”


  “Uncle what?” Judah asked.

  “Uncle Jude-ass,” Billy said, and Judah took his arm and raised it to the shoulder blades until he heard the crack.)

  She was wearing riding boots. He helped her pull them off.

  “You’ve got to trust me.” Maggie splayed her toes. “Just like your bank”—she grinned at him. “Bankers’ Trust.”

  So he had worked at and endeavored trust. It had seemed plausible then. She rubbed his cheek with the black horsehair crop.

  “All right?”

  “All right.”

  “All right as rain?” she cajoled him. “Or just all right all right?”

  “As rain,” Judah said. She’d blandished the pants off of him often enough, and no doubt she’d done it with others and no doubt could do it again. He acknowledged that. She’d have taken him at poker for every cent he was worth, or sold the Brooklyn Bridge twenty times over with such cajolery. She’d smile and stare at him and he’d forget his witness proof, would twist to her finger like string.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “I’ll give them to you free.”

  “A penny anyway. They’re worth that much.”

  She twisted, set the hammock jumping and reached for the pocket of her riding breeches. They were tan, and tight.

  “I can’t quite make it,” Maggie said. “Not from this position. You reach in and take what you find.”

  “I’m thinking,” Judah acknowledged, “this isn’t the worst way to be.”

  He cupped his hand on her and pushed. She swung away from him, then back to his hand’s shield.

  “What’s better?” his wife asked.

  “What’s better is believing what you tell me to believe.”

  “Believe it, Judah P. You’ve got no right,” she’d say, “to worry me like this.”

  “It’s me who’s worrying.” He was an old, fond, foolish man, with nothing to mourn for and nothing amiss.

  “You’ve got no right to that either. You’ll give yourself ulcers, darling.”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “No more are ulcers,” she teased him. “My darling Judah P.”

  So he took the bait she was, and every love hook and the crookedness. She said he was a bigmouth bass, just waiting in the shallows for her to flit by near enough. He would lie there, Maggie teased, disguised as some mild mud stick till he lunged. He had thought himself the catcher but was caught.

  Judah had been married once before. But looking back he can scarcely remember the two years spent with Lisbeth McPherson when they were both beginning; he has put her out of his mind. Yet he consults her portrait sometimes, seeing, yes, she’d had brown eyes and a firm-fleshed face which would, he thinks, have ripened and rotted in time. She wears amethysts. It is a strand his mother gave her, set in gold and imitating a basket of fruit—so one amethyst is pear-shaped, one shaped like an apple or banana and one with gold tooled around it in order to resemble grapes.

  Lisbeth would have made him, Judah supposes, a proper wife. Their courtship had been proper, and the engagement no surprise, and the marriage ceremony had been a sort of contract for the families to sign. It had been their wedding, not his. It was, somehow, the two families’ idea. He had married the McPherson place, and the McPherson’s second daughter and together they established a company called McPherson-Sherbrooke. But when she died it was no flesh loss or any sort of amputation; they had not known each other long enough for him to know how to mourn. She’d been soft-spoken, dutiful, and no doubt kept her eyes shut when he came to her in darkness and no doubt had them lowered when she crossed the street. Therefore Lisbeth noticed nothing when the truck jumped lanes and swerved to miss her, missing her by maybe five feet but instead hitting a tree that hit the power line that fell—snaking, making a murderous skip rope she caught her ankle on and tripped.

  Yet the loneliness when Maggie left was absolute. It was as if his fingers were divided down the center, nail from knuckle—as if his arm were wrenched from its socket and he walked one-legged. There was nothing of his body that had not been their body, so he falls back on arithmetic. One is not a fraction; it’s indivisible. Integrity means, he tells himself, oneness, wholeness, a prime number, the number as it is . . .

  Lisbeth sewed. She constructed lavish dresses that she dared not wear. She knew her place, as Hattie said, and kept it at the bottom end of the table, and when she left there was no absence, nothing to replace. So for twenty-five years Judah said he had been married but would not marry again. He missed nothing notable. He’d learned about the nuptial state and wedded bliss and what they called uxoriousness; he’d learned about other men’s wives. Nothing of it mattered much and he felt no need or wish to double his integrity. She had had dark brown hair that, when he came to her in darkness, framed her face.

  Still, there are memories. There is the time he found her in the summer kitchen, with an armful of flowers for drying. He said those flowers weren’t good enough for drying, and Lisbeth bent her head, submissive, and he took her in his arms to take the edge off insult. She’d seemed entirely compounded of lilac fragrance then.

  There is a memory of mourning clothes, her stiff-faced family about him and the oak box she lay in. He had gripped the coffin rail in order to feel something, anything, he told himself, whatever it is that bereaved husbands feel, and made his knuckles white with gripping and popped the seam on his shirt. There was music; there were the comforts of faith. There were professions of sorrow, and Judah waited in the parlor, in the stillborn center of his infant marriage, professing sorrow with his upright silence and hearing them tell him: “Too much. It’s just too much to take.” Even then they’d called it freakish, calling the accident a freak, saying somehow something intervened to blight his purpose and thereafter bring him to his knees who stood a head taller than anyone else, who cohabited on the top floor of the highest house on that high hill. They whispered, Judah knew, that the Sherbrookes had had their comeuppance, and it was a long time coming. Add it up, they whispered later; he marries a twenty-three-year- old because he lost one earlier; it all of it adds up.

  And, in a sense, this was so. Yet his comeuppance came with Maggie; he’d learned about loss and bereavement with a living wife. He sometimes thinks there is a Woman’s League, a kind of bluestocking alliance to get even every single way now they’ve got the vote. So Maggie was the last, best version of Lisbeth—though Judah had thought them opposed. He’d elected blond for brown and tall for short and hard for soft, forthright instead of retiring and fire over smoke. And he had been watchful, watching Maggie at the door or on the carousel or, ten years later, at the cheese counter where she shopped in Morrisey’s. But what he watched, he knows now, was his passionate embrace of error, their last best chance to bring him down.

  So Maggie is Lisbeth incarnate and their shared revenge. When his first wife jerked like a puppet on that electrified string, convulsive to her very hair-ends and he felt no sympathy, or when he was convulsed atop her, emitting what he thought was life into that doomed receptacle—when he stood unbending by her open grave to wonder what was closing now (What stops, he’d asked himself, what ends with this beginning?), Judah had broached rules. The rule is do unto others; the rule is where there’s smoke there’ll be a fiery second wife to flame at you from every recess of the Big House and the Toy House and the barns. The rule is press dry lilacs and they turn into perfume, and men will lap that scent up from behind your wife’s earrings like dogs; scorn not lest ye be scorned.

  Later, Maggie flaunted faithlessness in front of him, bringing what he knew were suitors to the house. Still, he had restrained himself. The meat knives trembled in his hand, sharp-honed enough, and he dreamed of carving up her dinner guests. Ian had admired and then emulated his precision with the carving tools. “You keep your brush hook sharp,” Judah had said. “And sickles. And your ax blade and your hatchet, right? So do the same with knives.”

  He, Judah, would simply lean across the
table and take the piano teacher or Cousin Alexander or Andrew Kincannon by the throat and, holding them with his left hand, slice off their earlobes with his right. He’d use downward strokes on the right-hand side and, inverting his wrist, upward strokes on the left. Then he’d release his choke hold and they’d cover their faces, moaning, and try to stanch the blood while he’d reach down and geld them, removing the creased, cloaked parcel that had sought its pleasure between his wife’s spread legs. They had rooted at her, and he would stick them like pigs. He’d put their mangled, fabric-swaddled manhoods on the salad plate.

  “It used to be a delicacy”—Judah had worked out his speech. “Leastways some of us present believed so.” He’d impale the shriveled testicles on the fork-tines or his knife. “Take a bite. We’re ever so proud of the blood sauce, though you might prefer the stuffing. My wife preferred it, once.”

  They made conversation. The subject was a long career, and who was up to it or bound to stop; Margaret was asking if Horowitz would play again.

  “I don’t think so,” her piano teacher said. Judah cannot remember his name. “That’s my opinion.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s only my opinion, mind you, but a considered one. I think there’s a limit to the pressure. We go so far and snap, if you see what I’m driving at, like a string, say—yes, just like a string. We replace it, do you see, we don’t knot it up and start again.”

  “We tune a piano,” Margaret said. “It’s a question of degree.”