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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Jane had been incurious as to their mismatched paternity; it still sufficed to tell her that Judah Sherbrooke was dead. Since Ian had no father, and she has no father, their no-father was the same; she has been willing to leave it at that. She thinks of him as partway father anyhow, and he is more than old enough. Maggie said one parent and one brother is a multitude; family means family, it is a plural word.

  Now he returns to the pantry. He takes out place servings for four. Ian pictures Judah at the table’s head when they were four for supper—his father and Hattie and Maggie and he—pouring wine and cutting meat and passing salad, not making small talk because the business of eating was a full-time occupation for the time you sat to eat. Good manners meant you didn’t talk with your mouth full; good manners meant you ate what was before you and asked for second helpings but did not simply reach for them and wiped your mouth before you drank and used the proper fork. His aunt had paid attention to proper place settings and plates. She hated stains and crumbs, waging a one-woman war on bad manners; the place for stains is napkins, Hattie used to say. Their tablecloths were linen, and she said no linen tablecloth ever looks entirely the same if it has soup stains or gravy, no matter how soon afterward you clean it and use bleach. It could hang on the line in the sun for two days and she would always know—when the time came to iron and fold the cloth back—who had been sitting where.

  She hated wine stains worst of all. If someone at a dinner party spilled wine, Hattie would make clucking noises in her throat till she could not restrain herself, saying, “Excuse me,” and getting up. She would walk with the saltcellar to the offending spot and cover it attentively, outlining the perimeter in crystals. She did this once too often, Judah said. He called for wine at a party when she’d covered Samson Finney’s stain, and started to pour and kept pouring till the liquid splashed over the glass’s rim and onto the table till the bottle was empty and the wine spread everywhere. His hand had been unwavering. Hattie started out of her seat, reaching for salt until she realized his intention and sat back and stared at the heavy red bottle tilting, the ruination of her cloth and pride of second place; Judah finished the bottle and, shaking it, said, “When.”

  There had been many such scenes. He remembers his father’s fierce temper, and Maggie’s continual watchfulness, and the way that Judah whetted knives preparatory to carving; he’d run his thumb along the blade and stare at Maggie’s guests. Ian pictures (the last time he remembers Andrew Kincannon in the house) an argument with Maggie’s piano teacher. They were discussing the techniques of Rubinstein and Horowitz and Artur Schnabel. Andrew insisted that Schnabel had more musicianship than either of his piano-playing rivals. He claimed that the greasy elision of Rubinstein’s reading—in the key passage in the second movement—debased the line’s raw elegance. Ian still can remember the phrases “greasy elision” and “raw elegance,” and the piano teacher’s disagreement while Judah sharpened his knife.

  He wonders, now, just how much Judah knew of Maggie’s infidelity. It had been a rumor in town. Tinkers and tailors and pot-bellied plumbers would joke about old Sherbrooke’s wife; the lank-haired stuttering attendant at the Getty place would swear he’d seen her bare-naked in the middle of the cow barn, and not milking neither. There had been no truth in it, of course. She had been selective in her forays from the house. The men she chose were not of Judah’s circle, and surely not his farmhands, and the gossip was ill-founded as such gossip always is—the envy of the clumsy-fingered for beauty out of reach.

  He takes six twelve-inch tapers from the candle drawer. He inserts them in the candelabra, then sets out wine and water glasses. Ian thinks of this as, plausibly, their final meal together. For months his mother has eaten alone, or at the kitchen counter, nibbling at some salad like a rabbit, or squirreling sunflower seeds. She had seemed to swallow air. A cracker and a cigarette sufficed for her food for the day—with possibly the remnant of Jane’s alphabet soup, or the leavings of a banana. She lost weight. Her face had that drawn-in expectancy of someone near starvation: flesh clarified like butter, ears transparent, eyes enlarged. The symmetry is absolute: he himself will sit in Judah’s place, and Maggie and Andrew Kincannon will have a child between them wondering who leaves with whom.

  “I’m thirteen,” he had insisted to Judah. “I can make up my own mind.”

  “You can’t,” his father said.

  “I can.”

  “Not legally. Not for five more years. You haven’t got a mind.”

  “Stop it, Jude,” said Maggie. “That’s unfair.”

  “Who started it?”

  “You’re making this much harder than it has to be.”

  Judah turned. “One way to make it easy is don’t go.”

  “Stop persecuting us.” She reached for Ian’s hand. “All we’re doing is taking a place in the city. There’s nothing criminal in that. Oh, Judah, why don’t you see?”

  “I see my wife who’s leaving. Who’s taking my one son.” The edge of menace nickered in his voice like flame at paper: something that flared up, then fell. “Who’s making him choose between us. And who won’t be welcome back.”

  Then too Junior Allison was waiting at the door; he was to be their escort to New York. He barely knew the way. The upholstery was black. Ian remembers their departure as a kind of prearranged escape: he’d been sure that Judah would pursue them, in his pickup or the Packard or maybe even on horseback, fists raised.

  Maggie sat on the stiff leather, motionless. She’d left the Big House often enough and taken him along with her on the shorter forays. But when they left for New York that time the severance seemed final, the sundering complete. It comes to Ian now (while he is distributing the napkin rings, the silver serving implements, and the trivet and ashtrays and candlesticks and salt and pepper shakers) that the departure he prepares is also a reprise: a second setting-out.

  Returning to the kitchen, he takes three speckled trout from the freezer and unwraps the foil; he’d caught them last autumn in the Battenkill over by Shushan. For some minutes he busies himself with butter and lemon and almonds, making a final feast for Maggie in the house. Judah did not cook; Hattie used to claim he would have burned boiling water and couldn’t manage an egg. Women had cooked for him all through his life; he had relatives or wives or hired cooks. But Ian learned to love cuisine and would prepare truite almandine; both of them are powerless to halt this one woman’s escape.

  Nor does he wish to, finally. There is this difference, at least: he has called Andrew, not Junior. If Maggie leaves she may return, but if she stays she’ll die. He puts it to himself this way, taking comfort in the flat phrased urgency: if he loses her he’ll find her, if she goes she can remain.

  “March 24. Temperature at six o’clock, thirty-two degrees. It is possible the drunk who died here recently was engaged in a confidence game. He might well have taken me in. At the end of his tether, he would have nonetheless had strength sufficient for impersonation. I have heard of such cases before. He would have come to town and noted the name of the Bank, would make covert inquiries as to the age and nature of its president. Then, satisfied with what he would construe to be my gullibility in matters of this sort, he set about to make himself familiar with the Sherbrooke past. There are few enough of us. Of Peacock’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren there is little to know; except for Daniel Jr., we are an open book. That page, however, is blank. Thus he would have fastened on the figure of my uncle, finding pistols with initials that might well have been incised there, say, by someone boasting to be a Dead Shot. There are explanations. It takes small wit to guess how small he deemed my wit. Yet I would have called him cousin and dear brother had he lived.

  “Lavinia is come to term. I write this while she labors, in the quiet interval. Bill Robinson insists I busy myself elsewhere, as if there were sufficient distance in the house or in the village limits or the whole state of Vermont. I could travel the continent’s breadth and not be at a hair’s-bre
adth distance—they assure me all is well but I hear her down the hall. My hand is weak, my pen leaks black blood, my eyes cannot focus. Eleven-fourteen. I pace like a caricature husband, smoking like a chimney, wearing circles in the rug.”

  “They’re coming down,” Jane says.

  “Good.”

  “Mommy isn’t hungry.”

  “We’ll make her eat anyhow, right?”

  “Right. I’m still hungry.”

  “You can have trout.”

  Jane makes a face. “She says she might be hungry soon, but not just now, it’s early.”

  “Is Andrew with her?”

  She nods. He sets out the ingredients for salad dressing. She can handle salt and pepper, but the vinegar and olive oil require his assistance; he moves her stool till it touches the counter, then hoists her up. Jane begins work immediately, frowning, undoing tops, and pronouncing the word “ingredients.” She chews her lower lip. He peels three garlic cloves, then helps her use the garlic press—squeezing not her hand but the handles. Lamplight casts a circle where they work.

  Now Jamie Kerr enters. He is wobbly-drunk, he appears to have swallowed his teeth. His cheeks have white stubble, his hair is uncombed. He stares at them as if through smoke, his eyes are watery. “A fine house,” he says.

  Ian moves in front of Jane.

  “Quite a place. Nice.” Kerr points in the direction of the kitchen table. “Mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer he scrapes out the nearest chair, folds himself upon it, puts his elbows on the table and his chin in his two hands. He squints at them. “You don’t remember me, do you? I mean, not before this afternoon.”

  “No,” Ian says.

  “Time flies. That’s what I always say.”

  Ian indicates the clock. “It’s late.”

  “Mm-mn. I knew your father, understand. I knew him when the person here her size was you.” His fingers tremble, pointing, and he cups his chin again. Then he extracts a paper napkin from the holder on the table and, loudly, blows his nose.

  “You live in town?” Ian asks.

  “Used to be,” says Jamie, “this house was harder’n all hell to visit. Dogs.” He fends off the air. “Used to be this place was like a bank on Sunday. No Trespassing.”

  “Could I get you a ride? The others have gone.”

  “I’m going, never mind. I’m not about to incommode you.” He says “incommode” with emphasis, as though the word has lain in storage and is being aired. Jane watches him wide-eyed; he whistles and wiggles his ears. “No cause to worry,” he says.

  Caught between politeness and the impulse to throw the man out, Ian returns to his task. He selects two onions, peels and slices them. Slicing, he tries to have patience; when he opened the doors that afternoon, he tells himself, he had invited just such wheezing fretfulness to enter. “Mind if I smoke?” Kerr asks. He fumbles in his pants for matches, takes a single cigarette from his shirt pocket, unbends and licks and lights it, then leans back. He sighs; he has tobacco on his chin. Jane does not seem frightened now and shakes the salad jar. Ian runs warm water over the cold trout.

  Jamie Kerr remembers how the Big House had had concert guests one year for Maggie’s birthday. Judah’d penned the dogs that day so he lay out beneath the elms and listened to the sound of it, the music and the laughter and the clink of ice in glasses; just the sweetest sound, he says, you’d ever hope to hear. He used to come this way often. He remembers Hal Boudreau, and many nights they’d walk together downriver or across to Eagle’s Bridge, discussing what it would be like to try potato farming—Hal discussing it, that is. As far as he, Kerr, is concerned, there’s no percentage in that kind of work, no point in playing hostage to the seasons in a state like Maine—a place so godforsaken lonely by the Alagash even Indians don’t want it. So they’re hunkering along the shore with fifty million tourists and a Wigwam Lobster Roll Motel every ten feet, along what’s mostly rock by now and tar and traffic jams. You ask him, Jamie, he thinks God’s country still is this one where when it’s snowing there’s always a fire in somebody’s chunk stove, and you know you’re welcome if you wipe your feet. He’s been a traveling man. He’s been to Arizona, which is where you go for lung trouble; “Airizona” is what his friend Merriwether Lewis Shillington had called it. He’s been more places than Ian could guess, has been to eighteen countries in the Second World War courtesy of Uncle Sam. He rode camels, for example, in Africa. You don’t believe me, probably, he says, but there was a time he flew to Nairobi, Kenya, with the mail. There were girls of good family there waiting to greet him, he has photographs: East Indian girls, they were; he’s seen the Pyramids.

  Jamie Kerr sighs. He studies his hands. They are cracked and red, and his fingers are nicotine-stained. He has many memories about the Sherbrooke family—though always at a distance, nothing personal, no reason to make that girl there nervous; she looks the spitting image of her mother for a fact. In twenty years, you mark my words, says Jamie Kerr, she’ll be the only other thing ever to compare for looks with her mother hereabouts. They broke the mold, he’d thought, but somehow glued it back. Sometime he’ll tell Ian how their old aunt Harriet was young once also and went dancing. He’ll tell how Judah’s charity was secret so you never knew who paid for what until you knew you didn’t know and therefore understood it must have been Judah—Judah Sherbrooke who’d donated trucks to the rescue squad, food for the hospital fund-raising square dance, books to the Library. He provided clothing to those who otherwise would go without, supported the Old People’s Home up in Woodford where Jamie resided these days. And once a year or every other year or every five years maybe, it didn’t matter when you got to be his age, he, Kerr, would feel so cut off from the world he’d wander into it and greet the survivors, the Sherbrookes who continue.

  He hopes he hasn’t intruded. He thinks Ian ought to crack the spines on that John Greenleaf Whittier. He came this way some winters back and wanted to pay his respects. But everyone was out. He’d sat in this kitchen, in this chair, not wanting to disturb the house or walk through without permission. After half an hour maybe he’d stoked the stove and banked it, then departed. History repeats itself, they say, says Jamie Kerr. And maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but one thing’s true for certain in this land of milk and honey—where the milk gets confiscated and you have to shoot the cows, or strontium 90 wrecks the bones of everyone who drinks it, and the honey’s made from saccharine and artificial sweeteners and costs more than a swarm of bees to package in cellophane anyhow—you blink your eyes and blow your nose and what was up in front of you is way-back-when behind. It happens in an instant, in the winking of an eye. It’s like riding a train and sighting some tree and standing up to get a closer look at it and in that standing-instant you find you’ve missed the tree. He himself would rather walk. The tree’s still there, of course, and if you’re walking or on snowshoes or even in the desert on a camel, why you’ll have a chance to study it, to name the kind of tree it is and whether its planting was luck or intention, the way that stand of walnut grew, or the hackberry out by the pond. He’s done that; he’s walked through the house. He’s had his cup of kindness—six of them, to be exact, and tasty too, and just the thing to oil the joints and make an old man supple as the boy he was. He bids them good night and goes out.

  “March 25. Temperature at six o’clock, forty-two degrees. No wind. I drink my coffee peaceably; train prompt. We are in the maelstrom’s center but it feels like peace. A poor sort of pilgrim, content to mind shop and spread the butter thickly on his raisin toast. The quartermaster might not seem important to those on the front line, yet without him the troops starve. May my son know just such peace, and may my daughter grow up beloved. It is a worldly prayer but the single thing I pray. Harriet and Judah. May their manners be courtly yet frank. May they have physical health, and long life, and sufficient comeliness to please the eye but not bedazzle it. May their learning be solid not showy, and their skills precise. May his work engage him;
may they multiply. Let them continue in this house, as I have continued, and after their departure may they welcome the thought of return.”

  II

  “You’ve got it all worked out,” says Maggie. “Haven’t you?”

  Jane runs to her. Maggie puts her hand, splay-fingered, on her daughter’s head. The curls are thick.

  “Are you proud of yourself?” she asks Ian.

  “No.”

  Andrew lifts his coffee mug. “The sun is past the yardarm, I believe. It’s cocktail time.”

  “I could use a drink,” says Ian.

  “We all could, couldn’t we?” Andrew is proprietary. He turns to Maggie. “What are you drinking?”

  “Vodka,” Ian answers for her. “Just vodka and ice.”

  “Show him where the ice is,” Maggie says. “He might not be able to find it alone.”

  “There was a man here, Mommy. He just left, he sat in that chair.”

  “I’ll find the ice,” says Andrew. “It’s the vodka that’s giving me trouble.”

  “Here.” Ian produces a bottle. There are glasses in the drainboard, and he sets out three. “If you’re still drinking bourbon, it’s in that decanter.”

  “Kincannon Associates.” Maggie turns to Andrew. “You know, I never really thought of you as management before. But that’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? You and your associate here—managing me. Bringing me around.”

  Andrew has extracted ice from the freezer. He holds the tray in his hands, uncertain where to crack it.

  “Maybe I don’t want a drink,” she says. “Maybe I don’t want to go to New York. Maybe the patient’s not supposed to notice how she’s being treated with patience. Handled. You and your associate should think this through again.”

  “There’s no collusion,” Andrew says. “We haven’t handled you.”

  She hears herself protesting that the deck is stacked, the game unfair; her very act of protest proves their point. It’s the old trick of asking what cannot be answered, and then taking silence as the evidence of guilt. If she is docile they’ll call it depression; she can’t win for losing, she says.