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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  It has no sex. It is neither he nor she, but it, unnameable. Her life’s blood is its drink. She eats for nourishment, not pleasure, and remembers how, when half this age and carrying her second son, she had been ravenous. Judah bought her raspberries, and she ate two pints at a sitting, with cream. He’d bring her garden produce, and she’d go through a whole plate of greens. Now Maggie’s appetite is gone; now there seems no room inside her for food, and she keeps it down just long enough for it to eat. She is, continually, ill. Hattie notices at last but thinks it is some past-due change, some retribution for the way she used to guzzle but put on no weight. “You’re eating too much pie,” the old woman says, and Maggie dares not reveal that she bakes pie for the Boudreaus but cannot take a bite. If she makes it till her seventh month, she knows, the baby will likely survive.

  But seven months means September and an eternity away. The summer has grown hot. The house is well shaded by maples, but there’s never air. July has been so wet, she hears, that the corn’s drowning. Her room in daylight is an incubation cell. At night, with the electric fan and lying on top of the sheets, Maggie can find fitful rest—six hours of surcease. She never sleeps longer than that. She leaves the Big House only to drive to the doctor’s house, and only once every two weeks. He is solicitous—talkative and watchful both at once. By August she knows love for him is only for his office—that it has become her safe haven. He has not seen her in her slender previous integrity; he is not shocked. The room is white. There’s a photograph of Everest and one of llamas and a woodcut that he tells her represents the dancing Krishna. He tells her that she must relax her mind, okay, and for the rest of August she fears not her body but mind.

  She finds herself walking the house. It is not truly sleepwalking, since she does not sleep. But in a kind of trance she finds herself in laundry rooms, or in the greenhouse they emptied last winter, or in the back halls and attic. The cellar is a comfort, even with troublesome pumps. Water beaded on the walls where it had always beaded, and dry rot on the support beams of the cellar (she recognizes the traces now, since Judah had pointed them out) still leaves enough support to hold three times the weight. She knows the flooring—cement or dirt or, in the laundry rooms, linoleum tile—is backed on solid ground.

  But the attic is a trial. There everything has been jumbled together, and crates strewn every whichway, with spiders and bats in the eaves. Attics are the place, says Hattie, closest to God and most heaven-aspiring. It behooves a person to maintain a cleanly attic, because otherwise a person is in secret disrepair. Yet the Big House attic is not beyond reproach; Hattie reproaches herself for that; she was always promising to make sense of the storage bins and organize the shelves.

  For Maggie feels herself discarded, up in the heights of the house. She fingers instruments that no one plays or tennis rackets with strings snapped and even their wood presses warped and everything askew. She uncovers baseball gloves. Their webbings have been torn. She finds newspapers and magazines retailing early, simple times when nothing was a relic yet that now she moves past gingerly, her head against the beams. There are music stands and curtain rods and Venetian blinds. The closet is a receptacle, a space to fill with litter that is only not-quite waste. There are swallows’ nests. She hunts their skeletons and can find none; they must have followed a favoring wind right out the eyebrow vents.

  Once, the previous winter, when she and Hattie went to tea at Helen Bingham’s, there had been a break-in at the house.

  “Why don’t you join us this afternoon?” Hattie had asked. “Helen would be pleased to have you, and we could drive over together.”

  Maggie, though she despised such gatherings—the wax floral centerpiece, the women cackling over someone else’s troubles and clucking over their own—had just this once agreed. The snow was powder-pure. They stayed till dark and followed a snowplow back home.

  There had been tracks on the porch. The kitchen door was broken, and one chair pulled near to the potbelly stove. Nothing had been stolen and nothing else touched; she liked to think of some cold traveler, meticulous but needing rest, grateful for the kitchen’s dark quiet—apologetic, really, about that single smashed lock.

  Hattie wanted to call the police. “We’ll catch him, sure. It’s easy to track fugitives in snow.”

  But Maggie refused. “Breaking and entering. That isn’t such a sin.”

  “It is,” Hattie told her. “He ought to spend the night in jail. He had no business here.”

  “How do you know it was ‘he’?”

  “A person knows.”

  “Well, what if it was Ian? Or somebody like him?”

  “I’m shocked,” Hattie said, “that you could even think a son of yours would do such things. That you’d harbor such a criminal.”

  “Don’t let’s call. They’d never catch him anyway. You’d just be sending the police all over creation in this weather.”

  “If it’s what you want.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mollycoddling criminals . . .”

  Maggie—so giddy with elation she almost wished the intruder were upstairs, in some closet and not, as the tracks on the porch plainly showed, gone—raised her hands. “You got me dead to rights,” she said. She tells herself she welcomes each invasion and escape.

  Boudreau trims lawns; he circles their house like a drone. And when he mows the meadow grass he attaches a wagon to the tractor and sucks and spits up weeds with what Maggie thinks of as a giant vacuum cleaner. Judah had invented it years back. He’d built a wire housing on a wagon to hold the catch, and she delighted seeing the green swaths he cut through thistle. In the early mornings now, or at dusk when she knows she might wander unnoticed, Maggie walks by the tamarack and willows and through the river-birch stand. The air is palpable—so thick with gnats and pollen that it feels like netting parting where she walks. There are odors in the air she feels she might swallow or drink. Sprinklers chirrup at the flower beds, and everything enchants her with its hot somnolence. The stone walls of the property appear to her as if they are both parapets and moat.

  Then Finney calls. “I haven’t seen you.” He coughs, as if announcing himself at an untended counter. “Not all these weeks.”

  “No.”

  “Months, it feels like.”

  “And you’re just checking in,” Maggie prompts.

  “Yes. Something like that.”

  “Well, we’re fine. Don’t worry on our account, Samson; you’ve got more likely candidates for sympathy.”

  “I don’t doubt. How’s Ian?”

  “Fine, we’re fine. Is there something you wanted to ask?”

  There is silence on the phone. She pictures him, considering, tamping down his pipe or rearranging stacks of sheets within the rolltop desk. “I only thought I ought to warn you,” Finney says at last. “I’m a small-town lawyer. Licensed in Vermont. I don’t know what they do down there in that fancy Manhattan of yours—though if you ask me they don’t either, if you push us to it we’d get ourselves a verdict half the time. That’s my opinion, anyhow—put small-town savvy at the bench with big-city smarts, and small-town savvy can win. That’s how I’ve lived my life. Or tried to.”

  Maggie waits.

  “But I have to admit it, I’m stumped.” His voice has a queer weariness, as if admitting to confusion has confused him further. “Judah was—well, I don’t need to tell you—he was adamant about divorce. Which meant remarriage, far as he saw it. So that carried over, Maggie, and he didn’t want you marrying after he was dead. Now this could be challenged, I daresay”—his voice cracks, and she hears him sigh, exhaling—“by one of those lawyers, who’d no doubt be glad for a cut. But it boils down to loyalty—stay Mrs. Judah Sherbrooke and you keep the whole estate. Get married and it’s gone.”

  “How could I have signed that?” Maggie asks.

  “You didn’t have to. It was Judah’s signature we needed.”

  “Well, how could he?”

  In Los Angeles, Maggie fi
nds herself remembering, there were Santas slung from palm trees and a sleigh with reindeer rigged above the boulevard. She sat in a car in Bel Air, warm, watching joggers, waiting at an intersection for the light to change. She mentioned that it did seem strange: a plastic Santa leapfrogging traffic. Her companion said, “Yeah, that’s California,” and put his car in gear.

  “You take my meaning,” Finney says.

  “Not really. No.”

  “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Maybe,” she tells him. “It’s not what you think, Samson, I’m not planning to marry just now.”

  “What I think doesn’t matter. My opinion doesn’t count.” He breathes so that she hears it, as if inhaling probity. Maggie senses he behaves this way in the courthouse, and the claim of weakness is a move he makes by habit, falling back. He makes his counter-claim. “But there’s rumors going round. Things people see and say.”

  She remembers, also, a woman in a sable coat. The woman wore leg braces and blue hair. She was sitting on a park bench with two tethered Pekingese.

  “What kind of rumors?” Maggie asks.

  “That Judah has a baby coming. Just a little late. I don’t deny or confirm it, you understand, I know nothing about it at all. But I do believe you should know,” Finney says.

  She uncoils the black cord, then twists it again.

  “And remember you can’t remarry or the Big House goes on the block. Dismantled. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says, “but there’s two options that I see. Providing there’s a grain of truth in what we’re discussing. In which case, of course, it’s something to celebrate, right? You mustn’t mind me saying this, but—well; it’s either a Sherbrooke or bastard. Correct?”

  “You accept the rumors?”

  “You haven’t let me visit.” His voice is steady now, official. “I’m talking hearsay, not eyewitness evidence. If it’s the prior instance—Judah Sherbrooke’s child—then it may be tongues will wag; there may be a few difficulties—but no legal problems, follow?” He pauses. “At least not in this state. At least not in this town. No objection I can foresee. If it’s the second instance, however,” Finney says, “the testament obtains.”

  She tries to pay attention as he talks about the options consequent on birth. He wants the child to be Judah’s; he is willing to believe it, because that’s how Sherbrookes behave. She is not shocked. She wants to feel—or simulate—shock, but knows he’d take her protestations for guilt. What’s guilty in the land’s law is, for Sherbrookes, innocence. Though she could sue to keep the place, and the presumptions and precedents are in her favor, says Finney, there are certain battles it seems smarter not to fight. “ ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ is my motto,” he says. “Or pass it on to Ian while you can.”

  So once again, thinks Maggie, she’s being controlled by her husband and is bending to his will. If she raises the child in the Big House, it has to be called Judah’s child. She supposes that this happened with some frequency in 1500, on feudal estates; women lied about their children’s parentage. But this is not 1500, or feudal estates, and she’s trying against odds to have what’s hers to hold.

  It could have been wind chaff, or sperm in a bathtub; she reads of a mother who claimed to be a virgin, and that she’d been impregnated by some total stranger’s emission in the swimming pool. There are those who swear to virgin births; an egg is activated by a needle, Maggie knows. It had been inadvertent. She could have slept with Andrew or not slept with Andrew, could have told him or not told him how they had conceived. She tells herself that Andrew was the swimming pool, or needle; the child is hers alone. With every week and month she waits, the temptations of her privacy increase.

  Then Judah rises from his testament like a gray ghost, canny, canceling her independence from his deathbed as in life. He claims prior possession. He still possesses the Big House since her own ownership is revocable and based on good behavior. He speaks in the tongues of townspeople, and in the name of the law.

  Returning from her father’s funeral, Maggie stopped for gas in Taunton. A street fair had started up, and a fat black man in a chef’s hat was barbecuing chicken. He offered her a section. “On the house,” he chortled. “Compliments of the chef.” He was splendidly astream with sweat; he mopped his neck and chins with the apron’s underside, then fed the fire with a stack of paper plates. “Nobody’s here,” he announced. “You’re the first customer I’ve had; seems like we can’t get rid of chicken in this town.”

  “I’m not much of a customer,” she said.

  “Pretty woman like you are hadn’t ought to pay.”

  She thanked him and tried the charred meat. He licked his lips in pantomime, then said, “Excuse me a second, will you. I got things to attend to inside. If anybody happens past, just give them a chunk. On the house.” He laughed again, hugely happy. “You follow? On the house.”

  So Maggie waited in the street, finishing her chicken, wiping both her hands. A girl with lank black hair and wearing what looked like a nightgown appeared. She had rope sandals and carried a net bag; she wore fingerless gloves. “Everybody’s at the races,” the girl said. “Believe it, the dog track. I should have set up there.”

  “Would you like a piece of chicken?”

  The girl eyed her doubtfully.

  “Free.” Maggie said. “On the house.”

  “In that case . . .”

  “Help yourself.”

  So then they ate together, watching the street. There was a ring-toss stall opposite, and a table with four chairs. “I tell people’s fortunes,” the girl said. “I’m a palmist, mostly, but I also do the cards.”

  “Do mine,” said Maggie. “Please.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes, shook her head. “They tell you what’s important. It’s no game, believe it.”

  “I believe that,” Maggie lied.

  “Like them races.” She waggled one finger. “I could handicap them wicked if I wanted. Greyhounds and a mechanical rabbit. I ask you . . .” The girl sat down and shuffled the deck. Suddenly formal, she pulled back a second chair. “If you’d care to take a seat.”

  A truck went past, backfiring. Maggie smelled the gas.

  The girl spread out her cards in silence. Then, exhaling, she declared, “Death. There’s lots of death here. Jesus. This is wicked difficult to read.”

  “What’s difficult?”

  “You got to get rid of it, lady, that’s the point.”

  Maggie was shaken. “How do I do that?”

  “The cards don’t give advice.” The girl crossed her arms, rubbed her elbows and looked, Maggie thought, like a raccoon. “It isn’t like they tell you ‘Fire the chauffeur’ or ‘take a long sea journey’ or any of that shit. It isn’t fortune-cookie shit, it’s where your life is at.” She bent her head, assessing the frayed diagram: there were towers and princes and cups. “Big changes, lady. Let loose.”

  Still, Judah proved hard to dismiss. His weight was on her when she slept; his will endured. She thinks perhaps the reason that he seemed so gentle those last months was that he’d known he’d trapped her and had claimed full possession: take me and mine, he seemed to be saying, but nothing when you go. It is not avarice. She has no need of what wealth he provided, nor the trappings of the house. If she wanted to be greedy, there’d been occasions for greed. Rather, Maggie tells herself, it’s how she’s grown to love the place, to feel at peace within its walled perimeter. The single thing her husband asks is that she call the bastard his; then the protection extends. He wouldn’t have put it that way, of course. He’d envisioned her remarriage, not a child. No one envisioned that. But this is what it comes to, Maggie thinks: tell the little white lie that it’s Judah’s; let the lawyers do arithmetic and fudge a figure here or there, relinquish your own independence and call this madness sanity and all is as before.

  Are these, she asks herself, the arguments of death? What kind of child would be born of a corpse; what womb-wrenching injury derives from such a covenant? Would she r
ather yield paternity to Andrew than her husband, get a second husband in the bargain and therefore leave Vermont? For days and weeks she waits.

  Now the madness proves its guile. It turns the walls around. The memory of pain is fleeting as the aftertaste of pleasure; it is impersonal. She comes to think of herself as something separate, an entity within the house that sometimes bears her name. Once, in the New York apartment, she had painted Ian’s room. It had been winter, and she left the window shut and all morning long inhaled paint fumes. Only when she left the space did Maggie lose her balance—feel the world whirling, the East River vertical—and the iron grillwork of the balcony seemed suddenly strawlike, light, bent.

  She kept away from the railing and stayed carefully inside. Nausea too seemed wavelike and impersonal; she vomited without implication in the action of her throat. Systole and diastole—she found the words and chanted them, feeling her stomach constrict. Systolic, diastolic—everything was foreordained, mere muscularity, a structure she’d be part of till it spat her free. It did; she rose. She had been ready for Ian when he returned from school. He had noticed nothing but the newly painted wall.

  But mostly she distrusts herself; her silence comes from fear, not shame. She consults her horoscope in magazines, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! She finds she’s not even close to the age of the oldest woman to give birth, yet that is scarcely a comfort. Few of her friends have children still home, and none of them had babies past the age of forty-five. She’d been old before her time, she thinks, and now is young too late.

  “I send you The Pearl of Great Price. It is our testament, brother, with revelations given to Moses and vouchsafed to Joseph Smith. There are writings of Abraham also. Happiness is, we believe, the Proper Lot of Men. The Book of Mormon says, and I urge the point upon you, ‘Men are, that they might have joy.’ Willard speaks to heathens here of the dispensation of the fulness of times. I would do likewise with you. There will in that fulness be Order provided, and all that seems but Accidental now or foolish must make sense; do not therefore glut yourself or Block your senses with whiskey and smoke, for fear the Sanctified Processional will pass your way and you will be incompetent to join it, since as with so many here the drunk and debauched men sleep, their slatterns beside them in the fields where wastes the Food that properly requires Harvest if virtue pass not out of the kernel in the Corn. To everything there is a season, as you know. Why not then store Sobriety against the Winter’s ravages, and the Importuning Fingers of the frost that even in this southern clime must chill us all?