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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  There was another riddle. “Brothers and sisters have I none, yet this man’s father is my father’s son.” Hattie mouths it; she turns off the tap. The answer to that one—she puzzles it out for a moment—is “my father’s son” means “me.”

  Now she studies her half-smile in the mirror. She adds a coat of lipstick, pats it dry. What business could she possibly have reciting schoolgirl riddles and amusing herself with no care in the world when the world turns upside down? She makes a mouth. And as she brushes back her hair, half-singing, giggling, she understands the reason is that Judah would applaud. He would have found it funny, would be glad to solve a riddle like their “father’s son.”

  “Are you all right in there?” Helen inquires.

  “Mm-mn. Just freshening up.”

  “Well, that’s fine then. You had me worried. That tooth.”

  Iniquity abounds, of course, and she’d not countenance or be related to iniquity. Yet the result will be a Sherbrooke child—born out of Judah’s test tube or late or slow or because of bull serum or his son; it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, she thinks—and how to keep Judah alive. She comes larking out of the washroom so full of fun she doesn’t remember, when Helen asks if her tooth still hurts, to blame the sticky bun. It’s the one way that Maggie will stay. The Big House will take root and blossom once again, and the halls will be full of children she prays—devoutly, snickering, telling Helen that she has to go and can’t remain for supper—will look the way her brother looked. When the century was young and they were young together, he was just the most beautiful baby; she can see him in the bath.

  “My land, I’d no idea how late it was,” she says. “You’d better call me a taxi—I’m way overdue at the house.” Consulting her watch, pretending she’s expected, she’s the oldest of the Sherbrookes at the oldest of their games: outlasting time.

  Hattie knows, of course, that Ian arrived too late to make this baby; the months don’t work out right. But who’s to say they didn’t meet in New York City earlier, or when Maggie went to her own father’s funeral? She wouldn’t put it past them. The evening Ian first came home, neither of them acted like it was a surprise. Maggie met him at the door almost as though she had known he’d be coming, and they’d made the agreement before. So just because he wasn’t in Vermont didn’t mean he wasn’t there when she got pregnant; he’d go where the wind blew, that Ian. He’d follow the favoring breeze.

  And since they lied by habit, who’s to say she hadn’t lied about the month of birth? Who’s to say she’s not protective of a son who could be jailed? Hattie guesses that he could be subject to arrest. She sees their bigheaded baby, sitting naked in the dust, licking flies from his idiot’s face. If the conjoined Sherbrooke blood went bad with age and incest, Hattie thinks, she’ll have them all in jail. If what they did meant weakness in the baby’s head or body, then she’ll let them know no quarter from the law.

  But she cannot imagine a Sherbrooke born weak. She sees splay-legged shaking children at the candy rack in Morrisey’s: boys as fat as pudding, girls who slaver and suck thumbs. Ida Conover says the reason for it all is lead. She declares lead poisoning is bringing Vermont to its knees. It destroyed the Roman Empire, she says; that’s why all those emperors went mad. They drank from lead-lined cups and were proud of their plumbing’s lead pipes. They drank from aqueducts that had lead lining also, and therefore the nation was crazy.

  Ida says the same thing’s happening here in Vermont: Those old pipes have poisoned the wells. And where you have town water then some Communist shovels in lead. It’s why you see those girls in pigtails rocking, humming everywhere, and why New Hampshire’s safer if you want to die half sane.

  “Their parents love them anyhow.”

  “Who?”

  “The handicapped,” says Ida.

  “I suppose.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. They just stay in diapers forever.”

  “Imagine.”

  Judah had a similar theory, she remembers, about Ireland and potato blight. He said what really caused the war there was the way potatoes were rotten, and poisonous, and what can you expect of Catholics and Protestants who’ve got mashed potatoes for brains? But with a proper diet and Mountain Spring Water to drink, Hattie’s certain the child will be fine. It’s a gift for her old age. It’s a present Maggie makes, and she will attempt to be grateful. She knows they’ll name it Judah, if a boy.

  That night, at dinner, watching the way Ian tends to his mother—how he fusses over her, making no obvious fuss, but attentive the way a watchdog might be, or leashed like a Seeing Eye dog (Maggie in her blindness sits half asleep at table, toying with the broccoli, rearranging the food piles but making no dent in them, humming)—Hattie is convinced of it: Judah dies, Ian returns. The interval had been an empty one; the house was plain, blank space. Nothing could be born or come out of such emptiness; Maggie needed Sherbrookes to conceive.

  So whether it is Judah’s child or Ian’s makes no difference, she tells herself, and attempts to say so: “There’s worse fates.” She butters her bread.

  “Than which one, Aunt?”

  “This.”

  “Sherbrook whiskey,” Ian is telling his mother. “You know, I sent a bottle up here once.”

  “When?”

  “A long while back,” he says. “For Christmas. I found it in some cut-rate store and thought maybe Judah’d be grateful.”

  “He never mentioned it,” says Hattie.

  Ian takes a second slice. “I wouldn’t expect so.”

  “Why not?” asks Maggie, rousing.

  “Because it’s not that tasty. And because I never put on a sender’s label or a Christmas card.”

  Hattie drinks. What sort of message has no name attached, she wonders; what kind of gift don’t you claim?

  “Sherbrook,” he says. “Without an e. The cadet branch, understand.”

  Maggie ignores the salad. She will not touch a leaf. Hattie returns to the subject; she wants them to know, she announces, that for her part she’ll welcome the patter of small feet. She hopes they can trust her; she’s kept her own counsel and will continue to keep it, but if they’d like her opinion, all they have to do is ask. Maggie seems asleep again, ruminant, and Ian starts in on some story about the way Miles Fisk could fix his perfectly good newspaper, and the problem with New England is a boom-or-bust mentality, where the southwest sets the standard but the northeast has water and wood. Ian thinks wood and water are on a pendulum; eighty percent of New England is wooded now, and half could be cut without ecological harm, to the area’s benefit even. He hates to think what will happen to Phoenix when the water table sinks; like those boom towns turned to ghost towns since the Gold Rush, this one is a failure describing itself as success. He looks at her, expectant. He cocks his head with Judah’s gesture, saying “Well?” Hattie gives it up. If he wants to change the subject, why that’s all right with her; if he wants to act like this is high-school debating class, let him pretend what he wants. Maggie’s child has made him childish, though he’s its father also; he’s a baby in the bulrushes, kicking at the basket to see if it will float.

  She considers the layette. She knows that Maggie gathers up old baby clothes and blankets, and the whole house smells of mothballs for a week. Hattie will not interfere, and she won’t help until asked. She could fix frayed bunting in the dark, with both hands behind her back. But she’s not inclined to lift a finger until Maggie shows she’s helpless and at least admits to that. The curtains in the child’s room should be washed. The paper in the room has faded, and if things were done correctly they’d repaper the walls. Her right eye flutters, aching, in what had been Seth’s room.

  But she’s superstitious. The whole house holds its breath. She won’t say that it can’t be fixed, has never liked to think that way, won’t let herself be frightened by the unproved-say-so possibility of things. And she’s got no use for moodiness—can’t understand, for instance, how some people say they’r
e positively evil till they have a cup of coffee. She wakes up every morning feeling just the way she felt before and will feel tomorrow morning, thank you very much.

  And it’s the same with opinions; consistency counts. She’s always said and will repeat that Ian has the sweetest disposition you could ever hope to have. She won’t account for moodiness. It’s like those girls with oversize glasses—you think you see their eyes, but instead they’re wearing two round moons made out of mirrors. The Conover girl wore a pair. If she looked at blue sky, then her eyes were blue; if she turned toward you, you saw yourself watching; if she studied the porch floor her eyes—the windows of the soul, no less—went blank and brown. Hattie understands how some women might prefer such glasses for protection. So she can’t blame Sally Conover; it’s a cosmetic blankness, though Hattie suspects that there’s nothing behind it, no signifying glance to let you know what’s what.

  But that is the girl’s business, not hers. If hiding from the world is what she calls attractive, then let her hide from the world. What worries Hattie is Ian. That reflecting blankness—that gaze which has nothing behind it but mirrors: his eyes have the same flat stare. He looks at you like a wall, looks through you like a wall; if eyes are the soul’s window then his soul has blinders, shutters on, and the shade has been pulled down.

  There are bats in the dining room chimney. They’ve been nesting there since summer, and she cannot smoke them out. First she thought it had been thunder, but the sky was clear. Then she thought it was chipmunks or squirrels, but they wouldn’t nest this early. Then she thought it was maybe a trapped starling; there’d been owls in the chimney before. But slowly—from the rave and squeak and way their wings would worry at her eardrums, flapping—she concluded it had to be bats.

  Her own room is above the dining room, and the chimney passes through the wall. All night she scarcely sleeps; the creatures hunker just behind that double course of brick like what she used to think was Seth’s unearthly presence; like some small but terrible avengers they survey her through the plaster, she is sure. There are spaces in the brick just broad enough for bats to pass through, folded, and then unfold their wings. She knows they keep mosquitoes down. But no matter how she reasons with herself, no matter how many Manhattans with a maraschino cherry she might swallow before sleep, the sweetness furled inside her throat, she cannot find repose. Her ghosts are unrelenting and she cannot smoke them out.

  So she decides to ask her nephew to help her with the bats. Hattie unlocks the door again and steps down the hall to the elevator shaft, deciding to save herself the trouble of the staircase. Inside she flutters her fingers against the oak walls, imagining herself a nocturnal creature with its wings outstretched. Their mother had used the elevator, in her final sickness, for inspection tours. She would patrol the house in her wheelchair, hunting evidence of slackness in the maids. Hattie remembers watching that shrunken old lady she cannot believe is her junior by now—that image of shriveled age who died seventeen years previous to the age she, Hattie, at present possesses, bedridden, allowing the nurses to lift her to the chair or chamber pot, but allowing only Judah to carry her out of the room—and thinking, “Persistence. Do unto others. Good taste. Those are the rules I have lived by, and where does it get me?”

  She presses the elevator button, descending, holding on. If they catch her, she decides, she’ll tell them that she’s only come to fetch her knitting or for a drink of water or to gather up the tarnished silver from the silver chest. If Ida and Elizabeth and Sally Conover—three generations of women who, after all, are used to decent silver—accept for teatime on Thursday, then it’s best to be prepared.

  Therefore she remains immobile inside the hollow oak cube; she presses it open a fraction. Excluded, scarcely breathing, she listens to the two inside the room. There is just enough air; she can hear them conversing, alone.

  “How long now?” Ian asks.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “One more month, maybe. Forty days. But it doesn’t feel that far away.”

  “It’s not a guessing game,” he says. “You ought to have a pretty good idea.”

  Then there is silence between them. Hattie holds her breath.

  “Maggie, I’ve been thinking . . .”

  His voice trails off; she waits.

  “I could be married. For all you know, I have been married,” Ian says, “and for all that anyone here knows, I could have had a wife.”

  “All right.”

  “If that’s so”—Hattie edges the door a fraction wider—“then she could have had a child.”

  Maggie waits. Hattie waits behind them, breathless.

  “I mean a lawful child. My wife and I had this one child, but she died in labor.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Why not?” Ian raises his voice. “She died in labor and the baby was premature and I sent it off to the in-laws so that I’d have time to be alone with my grief. That’s why I came back home—we could say something like that. I dealt with it by coming home and now we’re ready, now we want to raise the child up here. In the Big House where it belongs.”

  “She didn’t die in labor,” Maggie says.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make you nervous. Only it occurred to me . . .”“I know what you’re thinking. It makes no sense.”

  “But no one in this whole town knows you’re pregnant,” he persists.

  “Finney tells me there are rumors. Hattie knows. So everybody will.”

  “She won’t object,” says Ian. “All she wants is to preserve the family name.”

  “The family.”

  “No. The family name. There’s a difference.”

  She closes her eyes in the box. They bury the poor in mass graves. Undertakers are arrested, Hattie knows, for taking money from the state, then burying poor children by the dozen in a box. This box is a mass grave for Sherbrookes; they are buried with her, soundlessly, in tiers on the oak walls.

  “You may be right,” the woman says. “She thinks you’re the father, you see.”

  There is silence. Then Ian says, “You’re joking.”

  “No. I wish I was. Or she was, anyhow.”

  They laugh, and Hattie hears the madness in their laughter—chittering, high-pitched. She presses her eyes shut, but opens them again; nothing changes; nothing’s changed; this is her nightmare’s truth.

  “Even better,” Ian says, “if we do it my way. Then the child is mine and you’re its grandmother, not mother. A proper Sherbrooke baby.”

  “They’d believe that,” Maggie says. “It does make more sense.” But then her voice shifts register, goes flat. “And what about the baby? Would you tell the baby you’re its father?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought it out.”

  “Of course you did. The child grows up not knowing who’s its mother, not knowing who its father was; you have an extra added burden, darling, on those broad, broad shoulders; it’s a splendid plan. I’m the one who’s being unreasonable, I know that.” She pauses; Hattie needs to sneeze. She presses her hand on the bridge of her nose, fiercely. “Just a muddleheaded woman who thought this baby’s hers. And had a right to stay that way.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ian says.

  “Who didn’t want to lie. Tip-top,” Maggie says. “A-okay.”

  It is possible, Hattie thinks, that the elevator shaft is—what’s the word for it? She concentrates, reaching for it at her tongue’s tip like a cherry—conical. That would mean the square she sits in sits within a circle. That would explain why she whirls. That would mean there’s world enough, a sufficiency unto the day; it’s why she’s twirling on the bottom of this shaft like rings on a raveling string. You tie a string to your finger and tie it to the wedding ring and hold your hand perfectly still. This pregnancy test never fails; it’s a guessing game she’s made young women play forever, and in fifty out of fifty she’s guessed right. If the ring twirls left, why it’s a
boy, but if the ring twirls right, then it’s a girl. She’s hanging on like that, although the cables are steel. A hangman’s noose has thirteen knots; she presses the button, ascends.

  XI

  They take a second cutting from the fields in August. Ian helps Hal Boudreau. There’s not much talk between them, since they are behindhand and would have to shout—but they catch each other’s rhythm, stacking hay. One man unloads; the other piles and places it, and when a wagon’s empty they sit in the barn’s shade and smoke. Hal has theories about the weather’s worsening, that it’s either drought or too much rain and all because of polar ice caps and nuclear bombs.

  “The government’s been studying,” he says. “I heard about it just the other day. They figure we’re in for fifty years of trouble. You know; floods . . .”“Still, fifty years,” says Ian. “That’s hard to predict.”

  “The ozone belt . . .” Hal falls silent, considering. “I recollect we used to walk through head-high snow when I was a kid. You can’t say it hasn’t warmed up.”

  “The Van Allen radiation belt . . .”

  “Well,” Hal says. He flicks his cigarette. “Your dad’d have us working a whole lot harder. We ain’t exactly busting ass, now are we?”

  “Listen—that farmhouse. The one at the edge of the place—over by Bailey’s. You know about that?”

  “The honeymoon house.”

  “That’s what they call it?”

  “I don’t imagine your father did. But it’s the way it was intended.”

  “For whom?”

  “Can’t say as I’ve been there in years.”

  “You used to, though?”

  “Everybody did.” He has left his bite-plate out and grins without teeth. “Half the county anyways, one time or another . . .”

  His voice fades. He swings to the tractor and starts it up. “You coming?”

  “Not this load,” says Ian. The other waves and winks at him, then clatters off.

  Each story starts, “A stranger came to town.” Or maybe it’s that someone leaves for points unknown, then learns to know and conquer strangers or is instead enslaved. What we have here, folks, thinks Ian, is the oldest two-bit tale: it’s come on back and find your father dead, your lands lying fallow, and mother again in the family way. He is astonished at how easily his previous world fades; he steps into his childhood bedroom, scarcely breaking stride. He makes a phone call, writes a letter, returns the rented car. He has few friends to notify, and no permanent address to change. He was between jobs anyhow, he tells his aunt, when she inquires if they’re missing him at work. “Regression,” Maggie calls it, and he tells her, “No. Progression. I’m starting all over again.”