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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  She rose again, of course. Folks rise, he told her, sententious; can’t keep a good man down. That’s a dirty joke, she wants to tell him, it’s only manly boasting. That’s the sort of purblind optimism she’s earlier embraced; all it is is turning; all it is is evil, evil chance.

  Maggie tells herself to think of other things. She will not think of Seth or any of the accoutrements of beauty nor her vanished own. She will instead think about cats. She’ll concentrate on cats and dogs and raining cats and dogs and dog days and dog pounds and penny wise, pound foolish. But the word that sidles up and lodges next to foolish is careless, and the word next to careless is love, careless love. And so she is word-trammeled, circling, caught in the web he’s spun that is this bed. She studies the brown leather chair and the three photos of her son. Judah lies like a vast spider next to her, at home in his intricate tangle—and all she herself can manage is a set of nonsensical songs. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, she sings; come fly with me, let’s fly away; away in yon valley, in a low lonesome place . . .

  That had been Judah’s verse. That had been his courting tune, and he sang it with a plangent grace that never failed to move her. It overpraised his ear to call it tin. She didn’t know if there were cheaper alloys even than tin; she could call his ear aluminum foil, she supposes, or plastic, or claim it was made out of mud. But he sang “Saro Jane” with an emotion that beggared complaint—believing it, believing he was some rejected rancher and she, Maggie, had elected comfort while he rode the range.

  Range was home on; range was kitchen; kitchen was the place she came from when he called. The distraction succeeds. Maggie sighs. She is carried from this evil room to her apartment’s kitchen, or memories of Judah with his caterwauling earnestness, or how she’d seen Gene Autry at the circus once, his belly all over his pants.

  “That’s better.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “That’s what I want from you,” he says and turns to face her.

  “Your servant, sir.”

  “For better or for worse,” he says, only half mocking. “In illness as in health.”

  (He had wanted, he told her, to offer a no-nonsense speech. He had been straightforward in the taking, as in asking, “Will you be my wife?” That was honorable discourse, and she should know it for a New Englander’s plain speaking, without embroidery. Generations of Sherbrookes had gone to their knees and cracked their joints before generations of soon-to-be-Sherbrookes, he joked. He’d not get off his knees, he said, till she said yes.

  “Is that a threat or promise?”

  “A promise to keep.”

  “You’ll hurt yourself”—she bent above him—“down there on that hardwood floor.”

  But she had looked down at him swaying, not so composed as all that, not certain if he meant what he never would ask without meaning.

  “It doesn’t surprise you,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You’ve known it was coming, likely.”

  “I thought so, maybe.” Maggie opened her eyes.

  “Well, what did you think”—he rocked back on his heels—“when you thought it was coming?”

  “I thought I’d tell you yes.”

  He put his hands on her knees. She stooped above him, then knelt where he was kneeling and smiled and said, “That’s settled then.” He kissed her, elated, pleased she had accepted him and only told her afterward she’d taken the words from his mouth.)

  So it had happened offhand finally, after all his preparatory scheming, his traps and teasing preludes—happened as she knew it would, looking back, coterminus with her not caring that it happened anymore, with his decision that the legacy was trivial and separation trivial and who cared how he handled it or fouled or let fall the reins: Jude kept his seat, was graceful as he’d been when in his riding prime, was mastering that comic turn the world calls circumstance and giving his wife what she’d anyhow always possessed—his house, his lands, his body to dispose of in the way that she saw fit. “Thanks anyhow,” she told him, “but no thanks. It’s kind of you to offer but I’m otherwise engaged.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “I do.”

  Later still he tells her, “Take it,” and she says, “All right.” She takes it with the negligence she’d always shown to favor, as if a debt redeemed.

  “So tell me where you’ve been,” he asks.

  “New York mostly. San Francisco.”

  “New Orleans?”

  She smiles at him. “A little.”

  “To visit your cousins?”

  “To visit the queen.”

  “Do you have an apartment?” he asks. “A house?”

  “It’s still the same apartment. In New York City. On the river. In just about the exact middle of town.”

  “You’ve said that before,” Judah says.

  “I know. Which is why I repeated it.”

  “You’ve got a memory.”

  “No. It’s you who used to quote it—that thing I said the day we met. I wouldn’t have remembered.”

  But she controls herself. She is creature-comforts Maggie who knows her way around. She is mistress to the house and wife to the man in the bed. He holds her, vehement. She is fifty-one years old and, without much adjusting, a blond. She had, she tells herself, been asked for help by him who’d never asked before—though much of that begging seemed malice and some of it certainly fake. She thinks of the endless demands on devotion that devotion, once constituted, makes: it isn’t a question of manners, or habit, isn’t a question of needing to hurt what seems so vulnerable now; it is for Maggie simply that she doesn’t know how to refuse him this night; what he asks of her she gives because for years she gave or gave in or gave over.

  “I don’t need charity.”

  “This isn’t charity,” she says.

  Yet she is startled by his near-divination of her thought. He always had been generous—with that offhand largesse of the rich who need no money since it all was earned before. She used to tell him he threw checks at foundations like scraps at the bluetick hound, only with less careful aim. He’d not even read the brochures.

  “You’re wasting it,” she’d say. “These people use ninety percent of their funding for office space. None of it goes to the needy.”

  “I give a tithe to the first takers; it’s simpler first come and first serve.”

  “But unfair,” she’d protested. “Immoral.”

  “Then slip your envelopes on top of the stack,” Judah said. “It won’t make any difference. But if it makes you glad . . .”

  So she selected and directed his charity for years. He’d spent less on himself than anyone; she granted that. He wore the same old coats and boots till they were worn to patches, and then he had them patched. His car was always ten years old (though he’d flung that Packard at her, and tried for furs, and the Steinway concert grand). It wasn’t self-denial or a planned austerity, just that he had no use for what she labeled useful. Somewhere Judah must have heard that men who loved their women gave their women gifts—that husbands who could manage it would manage a fur coat, or car, or diamond rings. So when he remembered he took her out shopping—rampaging through George Jensen’s with pockets full of hundred-dollar bills, and emptying those pockets out, floor by floor, as she trailed behind him, protesting. It was luxurious, of course, but not her sort of luxury since he paid more attention to the cattle at an auction barn than to the silver service, or the goblets he bought her, or plate. His gift-giving was so dutiful it undermined desire—and he’d thank her, frowning, for her own few gifts to him, then fold and store them away. It was a frown of puzzlement more than reproof; he just didn’t know what to do with a second overcoat, or a carryall with stamped initials on the flap.

  “I got no need of charity,” he mutters at her now.

  “No,” Maggie says. “You’re self-sufficient, darling. I know that.”

  “Correct. One hundred percent.”

  “I’m
not dispensing charity. I hate that word. I’m glad to be here and glad you let me come.” She wonders, is that true? “Truly. And grateful for the house.”

  “You’re not”—he twists his mouth—“the lying kind.”

  “Be quiet,” she commands him. “You’ll tire yourself with this talk.”

  And then he is obedient and she takes his flesh between her hands. She prods and rubs and massages his shoulders, feeling him quicken then ebb. He is a white-haired elder lying at her side, and she dispenses charity. She soothes and strokes her husband, making circling motions on his lower back. Maggie rises above him, not mindful now of the sheets, warm with this familiar exertion, watching her breasts sway and dangle as she works.

  “That feels fine,” he mumbles. His mouth is in the pillow.

  “Hush. Don’t talk.”

  She labors like this for some time. She finds herself caressing him and making for his buttocks like an alien, secret place.

  “It’s good to be here,” she whispers.

  He makes no answer.

  “Judah.”

  He shifts his head.

  “J.P.” She hears herself whispering, hoarse. He draws his hands down to his sides.

  “Jude, are you listening?”

  Ponderously, he draws up his knees.

  “It’s good to be back, do you hear?” She touches herself, expectant. “It is.”

  He pushes himself up on his hands. He is on all fours in the bed and turns to face her, focusing. She watches him watching her. He licks his lips.

  “That’s not polite. You shouldn’t stare so”—and places his hand on her left breast and lets it settle. “Touch me, Judah.”

  He balances. She feels his hand veer.

  “Please.”

  He falls upon her and is a great weight; she flattens herself and supports him.

  “Talk to me,” she says.

  He does not move.

  “Say something, won’t you? Anything.”

  Still he is silent. She listens for his breathing and does not hear but feels it, in concert with hers. She holds her breath. He does not breathe.

  “Jude?”

  She feels the panic’s edge again and tries to force him off her, but he does not move. She scissors her legs shut. His cold leg moves in consonance, and he lies atop her two closed legs.

  “Are you asleep?”

  He does not answer.

  “Sleepy, darling? That’s all right. We’ve plenty of time in the world,” Maggie says. “Rest.”

  His hair is lank. She reaches to brush it back from his forehead, then stays her hand. She holds it there suspended, shaking, and shuts her eyes again. Now panic enfolds her utterly and fills her mouth and pours itself into her ears. It stops her nose and fingers her and runs rough fingers down her body, squeezing. She drops her hand. It holds her hands. It plays upon her spine as though her spine were something like a xylophone, but with no sheathing for the hammers, with nothing to cushion her; there are no blankets; she shakes. Panic is efficient; it tongues her without haste. It licks its chops and tastes her and is not perfunctory; she vises her legs against it but it pries her easily apart. It has a throat and makes percussive noises in its throat. She weeps but keeps her eyes closed, screams but keeps her lips together and is dry-eyed, soundless. She cries out, “Judah, Jude.” She has a sudden memory of Ian, eight months old, with a flu and croup and fever that reached one hundred and five degrees in the first two hours; Judah took their son and plunged him in the bath, with ice and cold water, and Ian screamed and shivered while they brought the fever down. She remembers Jude’s huge hands, the size of Ian easily, and how they held and tormented their son, but helpful, but healing, and she tries to marry panic and embrace it now. It enters her. It is practiced. It penetrates her with a thick rigid member of ice. It scrapes her womb and fills her mouth and reams her asshole out. It ejaculates everywhere, grunting, spewing ice. Its sperm is like sea spume where even the tideline has frozen. Ian was blue in the face. He spat and had been mottled and outraged. Panic assaults her, stiffening, where there is no pleasure left. It continues. She lay beneath her ancient husband, and he knew her not.

  PART III

  I

  Judah wakes, as he always does, quickly. He is asleep, then wakeful, with no intervening period. He focuses on the pillow beneath him, then the sheet above his head. There is light in the room. The dials of his alarm clock are luminous, radioactive, though Hattie said that if you wear a wristwatch with radioactive dials you get cancer of the wrist. He shakes his head. He disagrees with her, disproving it by proving how many men wore wristwatches with dials like that for how many years. No cancer has ever been reported, to his certain knowledge, that anyone has ever traced to radioactive dials.

  It is like strychnine, he said. Swallow a small dose and you build up resistance; swallow a big one without any practice, and it’s your final dose. She had been adamant. What about sciatica, she asked; what about that? They thought they knew about it ever since the word was invented, and here they’d been using it wrong all along and now they’d swear on Bibles what they gainsaid just last week. She made him swear to wear only his uncle’s gold vest watch, with its slipcase and chain. She’d made him send back Finney’s Christmas gift, which illuminated the date. He’d promised, to humor her, and had been out of the habit of timepieces anyhow. He raises himself to joke to Maggie about her sister-in-law’s grim insistence, and how time flies if you throw your watch out the window. There is a janitor at Smith College, he jokes, who’s worked for thirty years. When the girls ask him what he wants for a retirement present, he says, I wanna watch. So they let him. He chortles and slaps at his side. He turns to see how Maggie takes the joke. She is not there. He swivels, scanning the room. There is a bloated form beside him, its breath laborious, and he shrinks from it because his wife was always whippet-lean and a light sleeper. He had not dreamed her, did not dream. He cannot remember his dreams. She has slipped away again, and that is once too often in this life.

  Judah extends himself from the bed. It is no distance to the closet, nor any real accomplishment to stand. He acknowledges, departing, that the shape beside him is in fact his wife. She owns the house now and will not leave. It is his turn to go. He will gather up his errant son and they will leave together; Maggie lies there in the bed as bait, for his new quarry will be Ian, and the trap is this woman lying in the middle of the house. He turns his attention to his son, attending to that. There are rings on Ian’s fingers and bells on his toes. He will track and seek his lost son out and force him to return. Ian has a banjo, possibly, or a beer bottle to whistle in or guitar or Jew’s harp or piano; he makes music wherever he goes.

  The oil lamp by his bedside gutters down. The shape on the bed rearranges itself. Judah chooses a duck-hunting jacket to clothe his nakedness and stands there hefting it in the closet’s warm oblivion. He fits his arms into his sleeves. The sleeves are thick. He rests, standing as he used to stand in duck blinds in the darkness, a piece of the surrounding space. His coat has the stench of raw health. He needs no boots. He has his cane and body-cunning and will find whoever lies with Maggie where they lie.

  Then he makes his way into the hall. He pads down the center of it, secretive. It is a thing he’d noticed early on that men go down the centers of streets, or skulk on the paving, or can’t make up their mind and cross the road at puddles or for the sake of the sun. But early on he’d chosen to walk each walkway’s center. He’d give way to cars, of course, or a team and cart, but not concede dominion to some engineer’s idea of who should walk in which direction when. It is a habit now he won’t break for the sake of stealth, although he walks on tiptoe, without shoes.

  “They’re giving out tickets in New York City, Mr. Sherbrooke,” Sam Burgess said. Sam Burgess lost the use of his left arm in a driving accident, so they made him stand outside the elementary school, whistling and waving at cars.

  “What for?”

  “Jaywalking’s what they cal
l it. It costs you fifteen dollars to cross between the green.”

  “I call it freedom of movement,” Judah said. “I call it my own skin.”

  “I wanted to warn you,” Sam said.

  “You’ve done that. But there’s no car coming, and we got no traffic light.”

  “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you if you get to New York City and they throw you in the clink . . .”

  “Not likely,” Judah said. “But thanks all the same.” And anyhow it is his hall, and anyhow they’d see him if they chanced to look.

  There was a riddle Ian asked one morning, after school. “Hey, who’s the strongest man in the world?”

  “I don’t know,” Judah said. “What’s your opinion on that?”

  “Superman. You’re supposed to answer ‘Superman.’ ”

  “Superman.”

  “Wrong again,” his son crowed. “A traffic cop. Know why?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Because he holds up a hundred cars with just one hand.”

  “Except it’s all he has,” said Judah. Ian veered off to the kitchen to try the riddle out on Mrs. Sattherswaite.

  (Judah Sherbrooke lies, they whisper, on his deathbed now that was his marriage bed. He believes he can hear the doctors consulting. We could schedule a quadruple bypass next week, they say, or give him mustard poultices. We could make him take his morning constitutional and see whether yogurt would help. It’s the mitral valve, they say, it’s an infarction; it’s all of that beefsteak for all of those dinners for years. He lies, he hears them say, in splendor, in great pain, in peace. They lie. He is merely husbanding his strength. Bears hibernate, and ducks go torpid in the wintertime, and many beasts are sluggish until heat quickens them. The bedsprings creak and complain. The frame’s securely jointed, he knows about that, but the rails of the sleigh bed need sanding. There where he flings his legs to the floor, or sits at the bed’s edge winding his watch, the inside of his legs has rubbed the edges smooth. There’s nothing like the action of the flesh; it gives a sheen to wood no varnish can accomplish. It’s endocarditis, they say, it’s angina certainly, all his sins upon him at long and final last. What can’t he shoulder by bearing; which trick or two remaining is the trick to play? He asks himself who let the doctors in, the lawyers out, and where is Maggie, and why should they whisper if he hears them anyhow whispering. It’s blockage on blockage, they say, the LAD, the widowmaker, enough to fell an ox. Nonsense, he winks, no such luck. Come here till I tell you: there’s caterpillars coming out of moths. There’s beasts in air and water that will walk upon this earth. It took him three shots through the head to kill one snapping turtle, and the jaws were moving even after that. He’d hunkered in the long grass by the pond, sighting, waiting for the thing to surface, and it surfaced not six feet from him and was an easy shot.)