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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  One day he adds a saw and a scythe and a twelve-pound sledge and a wrecking bar and hammers to the toolbox in the truck. He does this offhandedly, on impulse, but has been deciding to do so for weeks. It is August seventeenth. He makes his way to what he thinks of now not as the “haunted” or “honeymoon,” but Anne-Maria’s house. He drags the few sticks of furniture free. He has trouble with the mattress; it collapses on him, sighing, as he lifts it through the door.

  There are two cane chairs, a packing crate that served as table, and, inexplicably, a lamp. Ian scythes a clearing in the high weeds by the house. There he spreads out the mattress, then adds the lamp and crate and chairs. He takes his wrecking tools into the entrance hall and commences to clear the place out.

  This is slow work. There are nails to watch for, and glass shards, and great chunks of plaster that come away in sections. He satisfies himself that the “best parlor” wall is not a bearing wall, and attacks that, accordingly, first. The plaster shreds in his fingers; the lath is dry enough so that it also crumbles; he finds horsehair and corncobs throughout. The posts bristle with nails. He pries free the nails that tie the posts to flooring, then takes his sledge to the post-base and knocks the columns onto the diagonal. They hang from the ceiling, then drop. He carries these posts to the pile. The day is bright and hot; the downstairs windows and the door blow plaster dust at him like smoke. He waits for it to settle, but it does not settle—remaining suspended, seemingly, and thickening the air.

  Ian labors through the afternoon. His arms and clothes are white. When he catches himself in a window, hair stiff with the white dust, it is as if he sees his father’s face. He takes pleasure in this business of leveling, bringing down two walls and the ceiling that first day. At six o’clock he knows he will be late for dinner at the Conovers, but continues anyhow. When it grows too dark for him to work in safety—hands and legs trembling, eyes uncertain in the wreckage—he piles his tools by the fireplace wall.

  “You’re late.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wasn’t near a phone.”

  “What were you doing? Or should I ask”—Sally asks, her voice flat—“with whom were you doing it?”

  “I was alone,” Ian says.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “No.”

  “You selfish son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, baby, be easy,” he says.

  “What for, when we expected you? Why?—give me one good reason.”

  He is placatory. “Because I didn’t mean it. I just got distracted.”

  “Two hours late . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I did want to see you.”

  “Well, I called to tell the Harrises that Ida wasn’t feeling well and that we’d have to cancel. The Fisks are coming Saturday; come then. Or you could come alone right now . . .”

  “I’ll do that,” Ian says.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on,” she wheedles. “Where were you?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he says.

  The trouble with plays is the third act, Ian thinks; what do you do when the hero goes home or is dead? There’s room on room of vacancy he’s planning to fill full. He would tell Judah if he could that all of this has been badly arranged; he hadn’t planned to be fatherless so early, and now’s the time they’d get along; now everything is ready for the recognition scene. Except the road crew struck the set; they’re packed and waiting in production trucks, and even Stage-Door Annie has gone home. So Ian has to play his reconciliation scene alone. Judah should be hale or turned from stone to flesh to greet him or emerge barely changed from the woods. He should fling back his greatcoat, revealing true identity, and they would fall into each other’s arms, and all would be forgiven and each mystery revealed.

  As the weeks pass and his mother withdraws, Ian finds himself often alone. The elms are dying, and tent caterpillars breed in the pin cherry tree. The rot is generative, however; things spawn behind each stone. He discovers, in a book of lists, that five thousand five hundred mothers out of every million in Albania are over fifty—or so the government claims. He shows her pictures of a sixty-year-old woman holding her baby. Maggie fails to find instruction in such facts.

  She has been halving beans. He watches her cut off the stems, then slice them French style, expertly. What bothers him, he tries to say, is how she plays no music now, how the pianola and the upright piano fail to add up to the burned concert grand. She makes a small, dismissive gesture. “It’s the strangest case of rivalry,” he says. “Twenty-six years between siblings, and we fight over who gets the crib.”

  “Go on,” Maggie says. The knife is Japanese. You sharpen it, he knows, by wiping the blade with paper.

  His vision blurs; he blinks. “I’m not exactly joking.”

  “No.” She studies him.

  “Let me help you.”

  “I’m finished now, it’s done.” She fetches a colander and pot; her hands seem green. “This isn’t easy for you, is it?”

  What wells up in his throat is something he must swallow. “Boats in bottles,” Ian says. He makes a mound of the discarded stems, then scrapes them off the table into his left palm. “That’s what I’ve been building all my life.”

  “The taxes,” Finney tells him, when they meet at Morrisey’s. “You can’t keep on forever. They’ll assess you into bankruptcy.”

  The aisles are narrow and the light above them flickers. Outside, it rains.

  “Your father knew about it,” Finney says. “He was so pigheaded stubborn he chose not to listen, is all. He made the kind of will that’s just an invitation to disaster.”

  “You drew it up.” Ian has been buying beer.

  “Don’t remind me. I did exactly what he asked me to. But this is the twentieth century, boy; like it or no, it’s a fact.”

  “All right.”

  “We ought to talk about it. You should have some legal recourse. A procedure we agree on, that we plan . . .” Finney coughs. He keeps his voice low, standing at Ian’s elbow in the checkout line. “I mean about taxes. For the eventuality. In case it should eventuate . . . You studied political science?”

  “I’ll stop by your office. We’ll talk.”

  Ian works at the house, thereafter, with a fixity of purpose that takes him by surprise. He is compelled. Whatever it was that had made him lethargic now makes him unable to sleep. He wakes at dawn and sets out for the site, hauling the tools he thinks he’ll need from Judah’s old toolshed by the sugarhouse. He is excitable, jumpy; his nerve ends feel filed. Yet the procedure he follows is methodical; he guts the whole house in two weeks. Each morning, on arrival, he sets fire to the accumulated refuse of the day before—saving out and setting apart the wood that might serve to rebuild. He has a childhood fear of rusty nails, since lockjaw means you’ll never talk again. And he remembers how Ray Bolger as the Tin Man needed oil to move, how tetanus can stiffen all your joints.

  So he is careful, laboring. He pulls the nails from every piece of wood he saves, and keeps that stack free of the ground. He cuts the cracked panes from the windows and gathers up the glass. He removes the rotted sills. When he leaves he chokes the fire embers with plaster; where he works he sweeps. He had had, Judah told him, no skill with his hands; he had been all thumbs. Therefore the simplicity of gutting the rooms is a comfort; he exults in his precision and has all the time in the world.

  Upstairs, he leaves things intact. Where the plaster has already fallen he removes a section; where the ceilings belly down he pulls them down entirely. He loves that last suspended instant prior to collapse—it is as if the wood holds back and the plaster bands together, as if their opposition to his leveling act is animate. He works in silence, but humming, happy in the house.

  Now his image of Judah grows huge—not shrunk-shanked like Finney, or manageable. He knows, of course, how memory enlarges: Jud
ah might in fact have been less sizable than in the stories about him. Long after Adam left Eden, he knows, the light in their shared house burns on. The way that Maggie looked at him was not how a mother should look. When she said, “They think you’re the father,” her laugh had not been guiltless. Was she embarrassed at a white lie that she helped to foster, or at its plausible truth? Had she countenanced the rumor, or simply turned blushing away? He needs to know, he tells himself, he has to find out what they’re saying, and who said it first.

  So he attempts to locate the true father of her child. Ian assumes the man is married, unavailable. He imagines candidates. He thinks of the men who came and went on Sutton Place when he last shared her life. There was a flutist from the Philharmonic, a real-estate broker, a professor of law. He remembers their names. They brought flowers and wine to the apartment, and sometimes stayed the night. More often they did not remain. At eighteen, he remembers, he took a cruise with his mother and Sam Elliot to the Caribbean for two weeks. The boat was Dutch; they stopped in Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, Jamaica, and Aruba, he remembers how the trade winds bent the trees in Aruba at ninety degrees. He remembers the name of the tree—divi-divi—and how the taxi driver in Aruba spoke five languages. The three of them drank rum swizzles and played games of shuffleboard; Sam Elliot wore flowered shirts and bought him a watch at the duty-free port; he called Ian “son.”

  “I’m not your son,” he protested, and Sam said it was just an expression, a word. They had been lying in deck chairs by the ship’s saltwater pool. Sam did leg-raisers and sit-ups before accepting broth. He said, “Your mother’s marvelous,” and Ian said, “I know.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Sam said, “if you see what she’s been going through.”

  Ian flexed his stomach muscles, but did not raise his legs.

  “You’re my chief rival, understand. I wonder if you’re cognizant of that.”

  “I do have a father.”

  “Yes. Well. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

  “It’s hot. I need a swim.”

  Maggie joined them, glistening. She wore a pink scarf on her hair, and her profile, Ian thought, looked like a raised medallion. “Whew,” she said. “If it wasn’t for this sea breeze . . .”

  “There’s no breeze,” Sam said. “It’s just the forward motion. Ian and I were getting acquainted. We’ve reached agreement, you might say.”

  She found her dark glasses. “On what?”

  “On nothing. On the fact that you’re marvelous, Mom.”

  “That isn’t nothing,” she said. “I thank you, gentlemen.”

  He dove into the pool’s green depth and swam the length of it without surfacing, shutting his eyes against salt. Sam Elliot ate turtle steak near the dock in Kingston. All through the homeward journey he complained of stomach cramps; he took rumba lessons, and tried to teach Ian the steps.

  Charley Strasser was a psychologist with the White Institute. He spoke about the virtues of Sullivanian group therapy, and proffered books by Harry Stack Sullivan. “But you’ve got to want it,” Charley said, “or it’s just a waste of time. You’ve got to work at confronting the self. It’s hard work, let me tell you. By comparison, I’m telling you, digging ditches is a breeze.”

  He, too, wore flowered shirts—open-necked, with a moonstone pendant and a bracelet of jade beads. He told Ian that encounter groups were where it’s at this season, but to accept no substitute for the painful private thing. “I’m involved with your ma, kid, you’re hep to that. Or I’d take you on myself. But that would be unprofessional. The best I can do is refer . . .”

  Everett Armstrong was a banker with a private plane. He took Ian flying in the Catskills and over the Hudson, telling him, “It’s just the thing for morning-after headaches, or to clear your head. Up in the blue empyrean. That’s how I like to describe it, you see. That’s what it feels like, not sky: the blue empyrean.”

  Maggie asked him if he minded what she called her “gentlemen callers.” “Because if you’d rather I don’t see them,” she said—“it isn’t any problem when you’re home from school. I’d rather see you anyhow, of course.”

  “The penalty for incest in the State of California is fifty years’ imprisonment.”

  “That’s useful to know. What else can you tell me?”

  “I worry about Judah,” Ian said.

  She turned to him. “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “A little late to say so . . .” Smiling, she touched his arm. She studied him as if his were the one face she ever saw, the single voice she hears. Maggie retains—has always had—the gift of concentration. Judah must have reacted to it; Ian does so now, and feels, if not identity, the same vein beating in his temples, the same pulse-quickening anger that Maggie has been shared. It’s what men do with beauty, he thinks; it’s why they hoard and lock it up and nail No Trespassing signs on the gate; it’s how they end up mastered by what they’d planned to own.

  He confronts her anyway. “Who’s the father?”

  “You asked me before.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “And won’t. It’s not important, Ian, surely you know that.”

  “Is it that you don’t know or aren’t telling?”

  “We’re not playing twenty questions either, and I haven’t been planning to offer up clues. The point is this baby is mine.”

  “You don’t know,” Ian says.

  “I do. But as soon as I gave you his telephone number, you’d be on the phone. It would be easy enough. All you are is curious; all you want is answers to a crossword: Fill in the blanks. What Hattie wants is the assurance that the man’s a Sherbrooke, or at least of the same class. And all I want, my darling, is to be left alone.”

  “By him or me?”

  “By you both. By everybody’s neediness; by everyone who’s staking claims. I claim this child. Okay?”

  Still, the paradox of ownership is that he must relinquish things in order to have earned them. He’d been born with silver spoons that left the taste of tin. So now he practices rebuilding a deserted home with his two hands, no power tools, and being someone’s son who had been fatherless before. It is not that he hopes to be Judah’s replacement or to replicate the past. It is as if the past had been unfinished business, a creditor whose note is due—some debt he has to settle with in order to begin.

  And Maggie seems disorderly; she has a craving for frog’s legs, she says; could he possibly find frogs? She wants them with garlic butter and parsley, pure, the way she used to eat them at La Grenouille. She asks repeatedly. He visits the town’s supermarkets, and Morrisey’s, to see if they sell frozen frog’s legs. “I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk in the Grand Union says. “It’s just not a popular item.”

  His mother is disappointed. She wonders if the local restaurants have frog ponds, and he says no local restaurant he’s been to offers frogs. She’s had such trouble eating and her appetite for frog’s legs is so keen, she confesses, that she wonders if he’d mind fetching their very own batch. Now that the Pekins are gone, the frogs are multiplying, and anyhow they keep her up at night. So Ian takes his waders and a net. He catches half a dozen with little difficulty—fat outraged swimmers, scissoring jerkily through the green slime. The first two jump out of the pail. He catches them again and weights his shirt across the top and, in fifteen minutes, accumulates her meal.

  But preparing them is Maggie’s job; he leaves them by the sink. When he comes back from the mud room—having hung up his waders and replaced the net—the frogs are on the floor. One of them is cut in half; it wriggles. His mother has a cleaver in her hand. Her face is white and strained. “I just can’t manage,” Maggie says. “You have to skin them and slice them up, and cut off the feet. That’s what you’re supposed to do, then soak them in water—it just isn’t worth it. I’m sorry . . .”

  He has always been what Hattie calls a ladies’ man; he has returned, he tells himself, to walk down a street where he’s kno
wn. Yet there is nothing he now wants to share with the prying villagers. They see in him just Judah Sherbrooke’s prodigal, just the soon-head of the house. And the Big House sets a standard that is not his to follow, its beds and halls and silver make demands. Each antimacassar signifies—or does so to Hattie, who would have him take his place as the reverential guardian of the family estate. Maggie has no reverence, but requires him there also, as a kind of guard. It’s not his place, he wants to say, it’s for the ancestors or heirs and assignees to come.

  Therefore this shell on the shore of their holdings; therefore he will try to live within the Sherbrooke acreage, but in an abandoned house. Sometimes, in the village bars, he watches men come in to fight for the exercise—having had a drink or two and nothing else to do. They shout and swear and maybe break a chair and, in the morning, pay for it, and nothing’s gained or lost.

  One day he finds a cornered cat in the carriage barn, spitting at him, snarling, its eyes like agates and its every rib protuberant; he leaves the sliding door ajar and hopes it might depart. Next day the cat is dead.

  “I don’t have to stay here,” says Sally.

  “No.”

  “It’s a bullshit town,” she says. “If I opened that boutique I’d sell one dress a month.”

  “With luck.”

  She taps her chin backhanded, then spreads the fingers. “Up to here. I’ve had it, Ian.”