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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  William Ellison’s day-long drink-in took place on a Friday, however, and on the following Monday he did not report for work. He claimed it was a family matter, then admitted he was indisposed, then checked into the hospital for tests. “I’ve got sick leave coming,” he told Miles. “And I’m overworked. Can’t you give a guy a break?”

  Disease-control and prevention experts arrived from Burlington. They too sampled the water, but under laboratory conditions and not by drinking it. Miles gave front-page play to the story, quoting Ellison’s excuses, running the photos of a test tube and of the suspect eight-ounce glass on adjacent columns.

  Then Peacock’s aqueduct was unearthed. They found the moss-grown, perfectly arched viaduct on Cold Spring Road; it testified to masons’ skills a hundred years before. Peacock had wanted water closets on the fourth floor. Since his house crested the highest hill for miles, he had had to bring the water down from Woodford Mountain. It worked. When Joseph added wells, however, the aqueduct was disconnected in 1921.

  Now, experts claimed it would prove serviceable still. Jim Brockway, who’d retired from the Army Corps of Engineers, said the line could be cleaned up. Hank Woburn, the dowser, said the apple trees on Cold Spring Road were stunted for one reason only: they headed down to where the water was. Walt Newcomb, who built the dam up at the reservoir and had had to take his chain saw to it during dredging, said if Jim and Hank agreed on water, only a fool disagreed. When Ian got a haircut, Vito the barber, speaking for the selectmen, said the selectmen concurred: it would be worth a feasibility study. They needed his permission, said Vito—busy with the razor he was stropping—but they figured they had his support. You could say, said Vito, we’ll trade you off the water for that exit ramp.

  Then the town’s water cleared up. They diagnosed a case of colitis in William Ellison; they said the decomposing dog contaminated nothing, and likewise the dead floating deer. So the selectmen turned elsewhere, and the feasibility study was dropped. It would have cost three thousand anyway, said Vito, it would have been throwing worse money after bad.

  “Most people using that expression say ‘Good money after bad,’ ” he said, “but you notice I say ‘worse money after bad.’ Because it’s a question of worse after bad, not better after bad, it’s a question of cutting your losses—what all of us are doing in these parts. Vermont’s a place,” said Vito, “where everything becomes a problem lately of worse after bad.” He shook his head, confiding; he doesn’t understand how any of them stand it; he himself will be in Naples by this time next year.

  That was a threat he’d made since Ian could remember, and had made to Judah since the end of the Second World War. But Vito loved winter, and the alpine slide at Bromley. He hung a sign on the door every Wednesday that read: “Gone Sliding Down Bald Mountain. Had to Shut up Shop!” His daughter who did greeting cards—the one who stayed at home because the leg brace made her shy—painted it. The first letter of each word had red-and-white stripes, and the exclamation point after “Shop!” looked like a barber pole.

  Yet whether Vito goes or remains, whether they hook up to the aqueduct or not—whether the selectmen endorse the bypass and the shopping mall or oppose them—makes small difference finally. Now, holding out means mostly holding on. Ian is the last male Sherbrooke, and the first male Sherbrooke settled before Houston or Los Angeles had names. And he has to face New England’s decline: had Peacock kept that acre of Montgomery Street in San Francisco where he worked, the single acre would be worth far more than these thousand acres he retained.

  “Stucco on a postage stamp,” says Morrisey. “I tell you I seen it. The price of property out there.” He has returned from Disneyland, and postcards of Pluto are taped to the cash register. “A ‘For Sale’ sign in California”—he shakes his head. “Either you’re a millionaire or don’t even botherto knock.”

  This is a cold region, and they’re pouring warm water on ice.

  “February 6. Rain for the first time this winter. Temperature at six, thirty-six degrees. Mercury falling, however, and already I see sleet. Aunt Anne-Maria died this morning—or rather I learned of her death by this morning’s post. She was by all accounts a virtuous woman, one whom it would have been worthwhile and a pleasure to know. Her wanderings took her far afield, to Surinam and Guatemala and even, if I remember rightly, Siam. This is recollection at second remove, since I have nothing but the haziest personal image of her (nor do I know if I remember the woman or remember having been urged to remember). When she married Willard Sheldon, she found the Mormon Faith and was lost to us entirely. The memory I do have is of Father reading her letters aloud—sent from Surinam or Guatemala or perhaps Siam—shaking his head. It deeply grieved him, I believe, to feel at so wide a remove. Proximity and distance are riddles we must learn to solve: the very objects on this writing desk attest within a four-foot reach to oceans and deserts traversed. In its leather parts the blotter is Italian, the pen French. The meerschaum comes from Holland, the tobacco from Virginia—and so on and on around the girdling globe. There is no collector’s volition at work, nor the conscious purpose of catholicity—but I am perforce more near to the savage digging roots and fashioning this ink than was my father to his sister once she traveled to her tropics in an alien belief. If my daughter has a brother when our second child arrives, may it not prove so with them!”

  Ian turns on the entrance hall lights. He sets the pianola roll to “You Are My Sunshine.” He unlocks the storm doors that give onto the front porch. He picks three china oranges from the display bowl on the sideboard and spends some minutes juggling. Then he replaces the fruit. If Andrew arrives, he tells himself, they will have a consultation; pleased by the near-rhyme of “confrontation-consultation,” he repeats this several times. He listens for Maggie and Jane. In the “Hudson River Valley Dawn” attributed to Bierstadt that he looks at, inattentive, a horseman emerges from pines. Ian has not noticed this before. He looks at it more closely and sees the man’s black hatbrim, the ocher gleam of saddlebags, and the brown withers of the horse. The horse’s neck is wet with sweat; the man may carry oil paints in his pack. He sits the horse as if they have been traveling some distance, his body in a practiced slouch, the rifle protruding at thirty degrees. There is nothing to do now but wait.

  PART II

  I

  “February 17. Ten o’clock p.m. Train prompt. Felt unwell at supper, discarded cigar. Must see Bill Robinson—not half so decent as Joe Miller, but more than twice the doctor. Came across a letter from Anne-Maria this morning. She lost a child in infancy amongst the Andean tribes. She wrote my father that they butchered her with knives, and she never again could conceive. Her husband Willard Sheldon seemed insensible to grief. He did not leave off work. But nowhere was it written that a missionary’s wife need prove equally insensible or, dare I breathe it, unbending. I am ignorant of burial procedure amongst the Mormons overseas—if indeed they have a burial procedure—but will cause a stone to be erected in the infant Sherbrooke’s honor. This should be done in private. In the orchard, not the churchyard, where such stones are ours to ordain. The death is unrecorded and more than twenty years old: my phantasmal cousin. A gravestone fails to mark the place of the body’s abiding. That place is in the heart.”

  Downstairs, a door slams. The noise there increases. Maggie remembers Judah’s song, the one she’d overhear him whistling and would urge him to put words to, but he’d claim he couldn’t sing or didn’t know the words, till finally—half-shy, his voice sticking, uncertain, deep in his throat, and higher than she’d ever think that bass of his could travel, Judah sang: “Way down in yon valley, in a low lonesome place, where the wild beasts do whisper, and the winds they increase . . .”

  She’d tease him, her head on his shoulder or in his lap, saying, “That’s not how it goes, that isn’t the verse.” He’d try again: “Way down in yon valley, in a lonesome low place, where the wild beasts do whimper, and man seeks his peace . . .” It was a song, she knew, about a wande
ring laborer who loved a woman, Saro Jane. She loved him too but wanted land, and therefore she was going to marry some rich landowner with servants, houses, security. The singer understood, and got on his horse and went west.

  Her memory of Judah will not fade. He stands there, increasing, solid as the flesh he was and intervening always in her hope of breathing space, her ranging through the Big House rooms and up to the stone gates. He will not let her leave. He is her guardian in death as much as ever in his life, except that she accepts this now and does not seek release. She’d failed to take his measure at the time. She’d taken him on her own terms, or tried to anyhow, opposing his possessiveness with years of dispossession, assuming when she went away she could leave Judah behind.

  Yet all those years he’d kept her on a leash. She’d broken free, of course, but only in terms of geography; in all the ways that counted she’d held back. Maggie learned to love confinement, though she called the house a cage. She’d come when he whistled, tail wagging, nails clipped, for all the world like some prize apricot poodle groomed for a dog-show display. He’d petted her, made much of her, and she’d been puppy-eager for the feel of his hand on her neck. She took a photograph of Judah holding the keys to the truck. His face had been in shadow, but sunlight glinted from the key ring in his fist. It was fat as a jailer’s, she’d teased him, bristling with duplicates, with keys that opened doors and trunks he’d long since left unlocked, or junked cars, or tractors traded away, though he kept a second set in case. “In case of what?” she’d ask, and he’d tell her if the Nickersons were fools enough to lose their keys or leave the tractor in some ditch he’d have to help them haul it from, or maybe he’d be standing by the icehouse, not planning to have opened it but needing to get out the ax.

  Judah was wearing his corduroy jacket. The earflaps on his cap were down since it was early April. She can remember standing on the porch steps shivering, come back for good—not ten feet away from him and not five years ago. He bent to the key ring, attentive. She sees him this way, finally: an old man in love with exactness. There’s nothing that he needs to lock, no one for miles who’d trespass and no robbery she’s heard of in these parts. Yet Judah knew what opened what and rested secure in the knowledge; he’d make his rounds like Keeper Dan at feeding time in the book Jane liked.

  “My love, she won’t have me,” he’d sing, “and I understand”—not understanding how she kept him with her always, and the landowner she wanted was him, and the winds that increased where the wild birds do whistle were in their own green valley, here, not lonesome since she still was lying by her only husband’s side, not lonesome even now because of Jane.

  “We knew Mr. Sherbrooke,” says Lucy Gregory. She drops her voice, confiding. “Your father was a perfect gentleman. He used to bring us pears.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” says Elvirah Hayes. “We thought it’s time to say hello. It’s been so long.”

  “Too long. We never once entered this house.”

  They introduce themselves to Ian. Before the switch to automation, before the phones were worked by computer, they worked the village phones. Now they have been retired with no more than a by-your-leave, a handshake for their years of service—fifty-three if you put them together, addingLucy’s twenty-nine to Elvirah’s twenty-four. Never sleeping through the night if somebody’s youngster was poorly, answering questions, delivering messages so that generally speaking, says Lucy, and taking turns working the night shift, they spoke for the whole town. Before he, Ian, knew how to talk they’d heard folks talk about him; they must have made connections with every corner of America the morning he was born. So what they hope he understands is how much they miss Judah, how his father used to bring them bushels of the fruit they couldn’t grow at home. Home was Church Street, the third house down, the one on the south side with brown trim and the knocker in the shape of a Dalmatian. He shouldn’t be a stranger—now that they’ve been to the Big House, why they’ll expect him in theirs.

  There is a third visitor. Examining titles, he stands by the bookshelf. He has gone directly to the books.

  “So anyway,” says Lucy. “Here we are.”

  They used to raise Dalmatian dogs; his father took an interest in the breed. He knew the finer points of breeding, Judah Sherbrooke did; when he walked through a kennel, it was as if you invited a judge. You couldn’t hope to have a keener eye. He’d spot a problem with the hip before there was a problem; once he said he smelled distemper clear across the yard. They ask Ian if he keeps dogs now, and shake their heads when he says no; Lucy says those were just the most marvelous pears.

  “We knew your aunt too,” says Elvirah. “Of course.”

  Harriet Sherbrooke was her age exactly, Lucy says, though Elvirah’s five years younger, and for fifty years they lived a mile apart—since she, Lucy, moved to Church Street from where she was raised in Londonderry, and Harriet never budged. They’d met fifty times if they’d met once; though not exactly what you’d call friends they were not exactly strangers, my land no, says Lucy, let no one imagine that. For half a century she’d not set foot inside this house but it wasn’t for lack of intending to—just the right time somehow never came up; we belonged to different choirs, understand, a different church, and played bridge with a different crowd. The term for it if Ian knew dogs is “run with a different pack.”

  They’d looked at each other, they’d looked at the snow. They had nothing else to occupy this Thursday afternoon. If he doesn’t mind their asking, asks Elvirah, would his mother be about? He blows his nose. He wonders, should he offer to return their entrance fee? The third visitor—bent, white-haired, of indeterminate age—from across the room is saying, “This complete John Greenleaf Whittier you got. The spines ain’t even been cracked.”

  “And what about your little sister?” Lucy asks. “We were hoping we might get a glimpse. A chance to pay our compliments.”

  “We brought her a present,” says Lucy, “It’s three years late in coming, but better late than never. A person can always use scarves.”

  “She knitted it,” Elvirah says. “She’s too modest to admit it, but it’s her handiwork.”

  Lucy dips into her bright-green bag and pulls out wool. It is thick and pink, with fringes. He cannot tell, by its length, if it has been intended for Maggie or Jane. She rolls it up again. “On a day like this one,” Lucy says. “I myself always wear scarves.”

  “Thank you. I’ll give it to her later. I’ll tell her you made it.”

  “We were hoping . . .”

  “When was this place wired?” The stranger in the corner points to the light switches. He pulls at his ear. “When did they put plumbing in this house?”

  Ian offers information. He talks about the chandelier, the parquetry, the steam-heat system Peacock bought that seemed so dangerous insurance underwriters refused to underwrite it. The system prospered, Ian says, as did everything that Peacock touched—the man was a Midas for silver. When he touched rock, the rock split open and, hey presto! what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Comstock Lode. He sees himself in the dining-room mirror, expatiating, gracious, and thinks maybe Maggie is right: this isn’t worth it, he needn’t make Jane curtsy for a scarf.

  Yet these are chosen visitors, the ones who come in when it storms. He should maybe offer them coffee. Ian points out plaster ornaments, and the tooled-leather peacocks on the walls. He shows them where the speaking tube emerges in the butler’s pantry, and how each bedroom in the house is numbered so the maids could know who wanted them where. He says, as if for the first time, trying to sound unrehearsed: “One way or another, we all make a museum out of our past. My family just happened to retain it more than most.”

  The dried hydrangea in the pot are evidence of shape inhering, how the lifeless residue of what had once been vital holds for wintry seasons what it had burgeoned into seasons previous, how what has faded here is neither shape nor size but color, the white integuments turned to ocher, not the texture bu
t the tint of watered silk. Maggie stares at the nine blossoms massed beside her bed. She counts them repeatedly, making certain that the ninth though short-stalked is actual, not imagined. Hattie called them snowball bushes, that’s what we call them in these parts, she said, not hydrangea; hydrangea bloom in June and July, but snowball bushes come along in August and September. So even the name of the flowers by her bedside is uncertain, even their number from her vantage changeable; she studies the deep-blue cone beneath that has a crack so it would hold no water, were water requisite.

  Hattie said they ought to chuck it out. Her expression had been grim. She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything her brother owned, so instead consigned this relic to her bookshelf, saying well why not, there’s room enough, what difference does it make? Judah used to say that what you give a gift in is as important as the gift, part of it, so when he brought back flowers, they were in a vase to keep.

  Then, months after Hattie’s death, cleaning the bookshelf, Maggie saw her own face staring back at her in the ultramarine glaze. Her reflection was foreshortened as it might have been in water, she picked up the vase and dusted it and traced the hairline crack positioned to the rear. A network of spiderweb-thin filaments in the patina fanned out from thatcentral one. She remembered how the water beaded on it, then was a ribbon, then a small puddle beneath. Hattie had been shocked, disbelieving that a thing so simple could make such a complicated mess, thinking probably she’d overfilled the vase or tilted it when setting it down, or the cleaning lady, Mrs. Russell, had been careless dusting.

  Maggie stands. The blue-and-ocher shape beneath her now looks like a blossom-ball. She should roll it downstairs. She should make an entrance scattering crockery and petals all over the staircase. They would fall to their knees, collecting shards, apologetic, gathering the remnants of what was her regal nine-sided bouquet, but find no water, hunt for it, expecting that the oak treads would be slick with droplets, the carpeting soaked. She would tell them: “Rise”—descending, insouciant, stepping on flowers and clay.