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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Don’t be impatient,” she said.

  “Long calls,” he said. “Long-distance calls. That’s all I get these days.”

  “I’m just around the corner.”

  “Far enough.”

  In the ensuing silence he heard children in the room. Amy and Kathryn were shouting; he shifted the receiver so it nestled in his neck. Jeanne said, “I want to see you.”

  “Yes.”

  He would spend his life in this kitchen, he said, preparing meals and chatting with people whose lives were led elsewhere. He felt so full of pity for the figure in the pantry mirror—darkened and sent back to him by the glass pane above the sink—that he lifted his hands to deflect it. He laughed.

  “I don’t find this funny,” she said.

  “No.”

  “And I do want to see you again.”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ve said all this before,” she said, “I just can’t wipe away ten years. Or all those years before we were married—I’ve known him so much of my life.”

  “I understand,” said Ian.

  “Do you? Kathryn, stop that! Right now or you go to your room.” Jeanne shifted pitch and returned to the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What were you saying?”

  It occurred to Ian that the modulation for courtship was just as pat and standard as the one employed for children: with him her voice was soft and low, when scolding it went shrill. “We were discussing avoidance,” he said. “And telephones. I can’t romance Ma Bell.”

  “That’s the reason I stay home.”

  “Agreed. We’ve been saying good-bye since we first said hello.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good-bye.”

  He imagined her with Miles. Miles picked his feet and picked his nose and did not clean the bathtub drain; Miles was getting corpulent and going nowhere fast. Yet it had been no contest, never was. Ian played the handsome stranger in this script of his devising, but the home that he was welcome to would not be Jeanne’s. He imagined her house; he peered at them through the calico curtains and eavesdropped when they woke. Miles made breakfast on the weekends, Ian knew, and they shared an English muffin. He preferred jam on his muffin, whereas Jeanne liked cheddar cheese. He buttered their muffins, then spread his own section with jam. He used the same knife for her cheese, and the trace of raspberry on cheddar drove her wild; it had driven her wild now for years. She suggested remedies, since problems like these could be fixed. There were several ways. She could make the muffins as she made them every weekday; they could use separate knives. He could slice her cheese before he spread the jam. He could use a different sponge to clean the counter from the one he used for cutlery, he could separate the garbage so the paper bag for cans and paper would not get soaked and split. There was a plastic garbage bag and a separate garbage pail for everything that leaked.

  Miles promised to reform. He would pay attention for days. But his habits were deeply ingrained and her remedies were not. Soon enough she’d clean the second pail or wash utensils twice or throw out her muffin section in a mild wildness that failed to persuade. He said they could afford two plastic garbage bags. They had two pails, and he saw no point in division; they did not have a compost heap, and everything was thrown together anyhow outside the house. He was forgetful, he admitted that. But the gesture was what counted, and the thought behind the gesture, and he offered her her breakfast out of kindness not unkindness; she should give him credit for the thought behind the deed. She gave him that. He liked his eggs over easy, and she liked them sunny-side up. She could not stand a broken yolk, and he preferred it sometimes or never seemed to mind. She liked her coffee weak and fresh; he liked his own so strong it tasted bitter.

  Ian took his parka from the mud room and went out. The wind was high. It battered at him, freezing, and he made for the ruined burned barn. The charred stumps of beams had been stacked and lashed down; the tarpaulin that covered them was piled high with snow. Such opposition, Ian knew, was a domestic argument that argued domesticity; the Fisks would stay together while he remained apart. One doorframe was standing, though the section behind it was gone. The door itself was useless, tilting crazily from one sprung hinge; snow adhered. The structure gave on nothing. Ian wrote it down. He would reconstruct it. He walked through this door to the haymow that was and would be.

  III

  When Judah had been fifty-five, Maggie had been Ian’s age, and Ian had been Jane’s. But she was Judah’s trophy wife, and if neighbors raised their eyebrows they did so in silence, or snickering. Tongues wagged, of course; she knows that. Yet there was half-respectful envy in the jokes about old Sherbrooke and his pretty city girl; September–May marriages are countenanced, and a widower will often take an ambitious youthful bride. Particularly if he’s rich; particularly if he’s powerful in town; particularly if he’s been the local catch, that aging bachelor will be expected to be caught by some slip of a thing in a half-slip and heels. It’s what they expect in these hills.

  But Ian as her consort is the subject of suspicion. He settled in as might a young husband and father: doing the shopping, making supper, spending hours with Jane every day. Strangers would have thought them to be three generations, not two; that’s why Maggie stays at home. She used to feel that way when Judah took Ian out to the fields—as if her presence between them was a function of biology, no other kind of need. She herself had been irrelevant, an instrument required so that Judah could have sons. He had denied this, of course. He pointed to his sister, how he’d lived alone for years, how he’d had no children before and not felt the need. He’d wanted her for reasons that had nothing to do with the making of sons, the way you pick a horse to ride and not as a broodmare.

  “That’s some compliment,” she said. “You might find another example.”

  But Judah said he meant it as a compliment, and that’s what she should hear. When their second son died of crib death and she was inconsolable, and life that was so joyful once seemed empty, hollow, tasting of tin, he said we have each other, we’re a family of three. Ian had been Jane’s age. The boy paid no attention and didn’t much mind; soon enough the memory of Seth became, for him, like a memory of pet cats run over or dogs dying old—inextricably bound up with other memories of loss in a time of youthful gain.

  Yet Maggie felt shunted aside. What went on between father and son wasn’t pretty; they were at loggerheads often as not, and Ian disappeared for Judah’s final years. Sometimes she thinks her boy will leave her also in the end, when she’s old and homebound by necessity, not choice; it’s in his blood. He’ll prove the prodigal again, she tells him, wait and see.

  Meantime however he is with her, an intervening male between the women of the house. He says he isn’t leaving, and she says he mustn’t think of it, he has to promise not to, ever; calm yourself, he says. She musters a semblance of calm. She says all right, I didn’t mean to worry you, let’s open the house to the public—some kindly handsome stranger will no doubt come along.

  Maggie steps into her skirt. She examines herself in the mirror. One thing about anxiety, she thinks; it’s caused her to lose weight. No diet could have done better; she’s back to what she weighed before she married Judah and bore a pair of boys. She had been doing part-time modeling. She sat beneath a hair dryer, smiling at the photographer in an advertisement for—she cannot remember the product she had been supposed to sell. Perhaps it was for beauty parlors; perhaps for a cosmetics line; perhaps she had been selling the metallic-blue dryer itself. She remembers an advertisement for vacuum-cleaner parts, and how she fitted the stem into the steel-ribbed hose smiling, always smiling, bending over at the waist; it was mail-order catalog work. But now she would be hired as the matron, whereas then she was the young homemaker; then she was skinny, now gaunt.

  When Seth died in his crib the world went bad. It has taken her years to see and say so, but it is as simple as that. Sons die in war; they die in ships or of liquor or drugs; more of them die on the high
ways each year than were citizens of Athens when Athens had been in its prime. Sons die as suicides or by mistake; they die when changing tires on their honeymoons. Helen Ferguson’s son-in-law got out of the car on a mountain road in order to change the left front flat, and a truck coming past him crumpled the door where he stood. They die in their teens and their twenties and thirties, with mothers watching helplessly; some women have to bear five sons in order to have one survive.

  So Maggie knows it’s selfish, self-regarding, and improper to mourn a single death. Her husband and her father both have died. Yet she does not mourn them equivalently; they lived to ripeness and desiccation, and then their lifelines snapped. It would have been wrong to continue: the fig still hanging from its tree, the apple turned to rot in snow, the fruit ignored by harvesters sent north from Jamaica or Mexico as a team in autumn.

  But Seth died in his crib. When the time came for Jane to be established in a separate room, Maggie chose the room right next to hers—not down and diagonally across the hall, in what had been the nursery space before. She attempted to ignore that room for years. But you cannot ignore what you know; she is not ignorant and knows beyond question the world has gone bad. She struggles with that knowledge—denying or disproving it, or trying to, seeming rich and well-favored and well. Strangers tell her she looks lovely; they admire her good humor in the face of recent trouble and the loss of her husband and sister-in-law. They see merely surface-truth. The reality is death.

  On the first floor, there are new arrivals. Ian hosts a gathering that has its own momentum. The visitors are neither attentive nor calm; they mock his vision of an orderly processional through the downstairs rooms. He discourses on the carriage entrance and the porte cochere, how a mansion of this size would have had at least two entrances, and how the habit of a social call has been supplanted by the telephone; one dials one’s visits today.

  They ignore his explanations; they sit on spindle-backed dining-room chairs as if awaiting soup. The goldfish bowl in the front hall has tissue paper wadded in between the dollar bills. When the lights flicker and fade, Elvirah says, “I told you so.”

  The light returns. Samuel Coffin is triumphant. “If there’s anyplace to be on a Thursday in a snowstorm, folks,” he says, “it’s here.”

  The porch door slams. The cold air, entering, seems spatial; it feels distinct from the surrounding acrid air. A tall man enters, stamping. Finger by finger, he peels off his gloves. Ian recognizes him but is half-hidden in the music room, and Andrew Kincannon approaches Miles Fisk. “Never thought I’d make it,” he remarks, and offers a hand. “This last part was the worst.”

  Miles shakes it, cordially. “Name’s Fisk,” he says. “Miles Fisk. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Andrew covers what must be confusion. He coughs, unbelts his Burberry. “I believe I met your wife outside.”

  As Ian advances, Miles turns. “All right to use the phone?” he asks. “It’s in there, right? I should call the office.”

  “Long time no see,” Andrew says.

  “Yes. I’m glad you made it.”

  Andrew scans the living room. “I’m not the only one, it seems. You’ve got quite a party.”

  “The power’s out all down the hill.”

  “Does Maggie know I’m here?”

  “No. She’s upstairs.”

  Andrew examines his hands. “The trip was slow, this last part especially. Should I go up?”

  “I’m taking the whole crew up there. It’s part of the package—open house.”

  “I could use something hot to drink. Or isn’t that part of the package?”

  “It isn’t,” Ian says. “But we make exceptions.”

  Andrew asks for black coffee, with sugar. Ian gets a coffee mug and, in the kitchen, pouring, says, “I do think we should talk before you see my mother.” He hesitates, then pours a second cupful for himself. “Or Jane.”

  “Jane?”

  “My sister. I recognize you.” Ian drinks. He has carried the family’s weight for so long he feels light-headed, giddy at the prospect of dividing it; his resentment of Kincannon bulks less large than his relief.

  “And Jane,” Andrew asks. “Does she know I exist?”

  Ian wets his finger and circles the mug’s rim. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I’ve given it all up, nearly. You have to understand it takes some getting used to.”

  “What does?”

  “Help. The idea of somebody else in the house.”

  Andrew raises his eyebrows; the eyebrows are white. “I don’t exactly live here, Ian. I took a day off from work.”

  “Yes.”

  “Seven hours in a snowstorm—eight.” Andrew balances his coffee mug, concentrating on it, frowning. “Let me meet your sister Jane.”

  “February 21. A night of fitful dreams, light sleep. Temperature at six o’clock, thirty-three degrees. Thawing, wind due east. Lavinia is restless these mornings also, and has peculiar hungers. Strawberries and cream for dinner, veal for breakfast. Argument with cook. Cook thinks she should be given adequate notice of what to prepare, thinks—though she dare not say it quite so openly—a child indulged thus in the womb will likely prove captious and spoiled.

  “Train prompt. If he were actually my cousin, bastard or no, would it have been a kindness so to acknowledge him—would our consanguinity have bridged so wide a gulf? His ways are not our ways. The sores upon his cheeks and hands were loathsome, scabrous things. He appeared not wholly sane. All these are arguments advanced against such harboring, such wanton embrace of a man claiming kinship—and therefore I emptied the safe and paid for the pistol with what was contained there: a small sum that to him seemed large. I saw his drinker’s greed tabulating revels with the exchange I proffered, and said the pistols would be loaded if he dared return. He left as quietly as entered. My conscience reproaches me since. I do not know his name.”

  “All the lighting fixtures were originally gas. Peacock was a daring man to put his faith in gas—before that were candles and kerosene lamps. He purchased the Levi-Stevens Patented Gas Machine: it produced a carbon gas that was piped to the fixtures directly.” Ian points to a wall socket, and switches on a light. He has continued the tour; he and Andrew and the others form a group. “At the turn of the century, however, the Big House was electrified. That’s when they stained this chestnut here to make it look like mahogany. And when they converted that coal-burning fireplace to make a proper parlor. Burning wood. Because the rooms have been continually occupied, it’s a question now of preservation, not restoration.”

  “What’s the difference?” asks Elvirah, an obedient schoolgirl at eighty.

  “The house has been altered,” he says. “The inhabitants made alterations all along. Like getting rid of the old steam furnace and installing oil. Like those velvet drapes; they would have come with ‘modernization’ in 1900 also. But the tassels came later, you see. It has something to do with the presentness of things, of living history, not living in it . . .” He gives his practiced half-smile of apology. “That sounds arrogant, I know. But it’s why this place is worth preserving, or why I think it is.”

  “We knew your grandfather’s maid,” says Lucy Gregory. “The kitchen maid, that Swedish one.”

  “It never was,” says Samuel Coffin—to Andrew, but loudly so that Ian overhears—“what you’d call a proper farm.”

  “Not the one your father fancied,”—Lucy squints, remembering—“the girl your grandmother kicked out. But Inger, Ingeborg, that was her name. Who couldn’t speak a word of English when she got off the train. Not a single blessed word. And ended up marrying Huntington’s boy, the pharmacist—you know, the one at the four corners.” She puts her hand on Ian’s arm, retaining him, and turns to Elvirah to ask: “Am I right or am I right? That Swedish girl who married Huntington . . .”

  “Swedes.” Elvirah is noncommittal. “Can’t say I remember which was which.”

  “Mind I’m not saying,” Samuel says, “they never farm
ed it. That’s another thing. But only as a sideline until Judah come along.”

  “I remember,” says Elvirah. “Used to be a family of Swedes in town every time you turned around. But she wasn’t Swedish, not that one, not the one Mrs. Sherbrooke dismissed. Your grandmother Lavinia.” She nods at Ian, sagely. “French was more like it. Remember how her fiancé was dead in the ditches of France?”

  “Your grandmother,” says Lucy. “She knew what was what in this house.”

  Her door is an oak Christian door. Slowly she approaches it, concentrating on the cross and where the wood needs painting, seeing how the painter last time filled the cracks—overfilled them, really, since the paint itself has ridged and welted, layer on layer imposing its own pattern on the pattern of the wood. For a minute Maggie stands there, focusing on this white space where once again the barn burns, Hattie drowns, and Jane is born: the figures balletic, in motion. Hal Boudreau extinguishes himself, guttering out like a candle in its own puddle of wax. Then Ian says, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and the doctor beams at her, a brown moon saying, “Just imagine. By this time tomorrow you’ll have another child”—as if that were encouragement, as if she could endure twenty-four more minutes, not hours, of such explosiveness, the sheets slimed beneath her, this pain—and by the time she understands he’s not predicting the length of her labor but making conversation, by that time she’s lost control of her breath and control of the contraction, and she screams.

  “Hush,” Ian says. “It’s going to be fine.” They shout beyond the window as if at the Rutland State Fair, and the volunteer firemen get free tickets for this sideshow, her. The rescue squad applauds and whistles and claps their smoke-blackened hands while she writhes behind the window on display. It’s not true, Maggie knows, it isn’t possible to see her where she spreads herself upon the bed, soaking the sheets and bleeding through the mattress-cover to the mattress, where much later she will find a heart-shaped stain the size of her daughter, ineradicable, the brown afterbirth imprinted on the Sealy Posturepedic; not true they stamp their feet for her or fondle themselves in the dark.