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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Andrew turns to Jane. He changes the subject, pointedly. “Do you go to school yet?”

  She nods.

  “What kind of school—nursery school?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Kindergarten?”

  “Play group,” Ian says.

  “Has it occurred to you?” asks Maggie—of no one in particular, of the space between the two men, bisecting it, interrogating air—“That maybe I know what I’m doing? That grief is—what would you two call it—an appropriate posture?”

  Ian ignites the front burner. “I’m making supper,” he says. “Jane made the salad dressing.”

  “The madness of our parents,” Maggie mocks him.

  “Trout.” Ian has his back to her. “That’s what we’re having.”

  “When?”

  “In half an hour.”

  “Fine,” Maggie tells them. “I’ll pack.”

  In her room again, alone, she does begin to pack—pulling out a matched set stamped LV and opening the luggage on her bed. She turns on the overhead light, then empties her six bureau drawers. Maggie works for several minutes with efficient inattention—not sorting things or folding them but stuffing each valise until it barely shuts. She fills her cosmetics case also. Holding the hair dryer, however—having trouble with the cord, attempting to bend and wrap it so the slipcase is positioned properly—Maggie sees herself reflected in the bathroom-vanity console.

  She pats her face as might a blind person, feeling its contours. The cheekbones are sharp. She wiggles her nose. Maggie has to concentrate; she snaps the cosmetics case shut. In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. But whom would he choose for a consort, she wonders, the blindest of the blind or the one who can distinguish dark from light? This is assuming, of course, that all the women are equally young, equally rich and attractive and adept in bed. She presses the lobes of her ears. The parable does not make this explicit, but it is implicit: the terms of success are sight and sight only—therefore all else must be equal.

  Or perhaps the one-eyed man in the region of the blind is damned, not saved by sight. Perhaps he alone can see devastation, how the landscape around them grows withered and sere. He in all that countryside must meditate on blight. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder has no eyes, then how might such beauty survive? She tries to remember and cannot remember if the phrase is “country of the blind” or “kingdom of the blind.” She busies herself, remembering. If she does not remember, the men in the kitchen conferring beneath her will win; her problem these past years has been retentiveness.

  Maggie smiles. She touches her teeth. She is retentive enough, Lord knows, but what she retains makes no sense. She remembers a man in a diner who wore a thick cord sweater and ordered coffee next to her, closing his hands on the mug. He turned to her and confided how he liked sugar first, then cream. That way the sugar could dissolve at leisure in the hot brew above, and all he needed was a spoon for stirring. Most people prefer to have their coffee poured first, and then they add cream and sugar. But his practice was the reverse. He had had to explain this, always, to waitresses or people who offered him coffee. She remembers his theory in detail, and the sensuality with which he praised the sugar’s diffusion—the way it rose to the surface, permeating everything from the bottom up. For the life of her, however, Maggie cannot recollect the man’s name—or the diner, or whether they arrived together or ever met again. Perhaps it was no diner but a restaurant or airport lounge; perhaps the stranger was a dream-transfigured lover or man in a TV commercial.

  She does not know. She does not need or care to know; it is a composition without frame. But she wakes up with the taste of sugar, the coffee so thick it is viscous, her mother telling her to have some manners and not to pile her spoon so high or take a second spoon. The amount of sugar that she seems to need is appalling; it’s probably a sugar imbalance, or maybe it’s pure gluttony and will make her fat. Her father tells them never mind, it’s good for the folks in Jamaica, and he brings her sugar cane to chew.

  The Cutlers have maids from Jamaica. Maggie’s childhood is an unbroken memory of maids—all wearing white frilled aprons and green uniforms that button at the neck. Their names are Netty and Alice and Gladys and Bess; they meet her in the hallway when she comes home from school. Later, they tell her their troubles. They have glass in their thumbs or pins in their hips or seventeen cousins in Runaway Bay, and problems with men and rheumatism in the winters in this city made out of steel and cement; she might not believe it yet, but soon enough she’ll learn. Steel and cement soak up water like nobody’s business, and when the winter comes it gives that dampness back, that’s how a city breathes, that’s why it’s smart to wear rubber-soled shoes. She sits at the kitchen table, on a stool the twin to that which Jane possesses now, head cocked, winding spaghetti around her fork and smearing the pasta with ketchup. Or she’s ladling Netty’s special sauce that’s orange and milky and just how she likes it; her mother tries on Saturdays but never can equal the taste or consistency—so Netty makes up a batch on Fridays and they keep it in the freezer, just in case.

  She attempts to find instruction in such scenes. She knows that in Manhattan she will seek help, and the help will ask her, at sixty-five dollars an hour, to conjure up that full-time help to whom her parents might have paid sixty-five dollars a week. These are the facts of inflation, not value. Maggie packs her boots. She takes four pairs. She evaluates her parents’ absence. It had been easy enough, in the years when she wanted to exorcise Judah, to label him some father-surrogate, some ratified totem of incest with no sexual taboo. It had been easy but untrue; the two men were the same age but otherwise unlike.

  She knows an analyst might argue that their very opposition is proof of similarity; she’s picked her father’s opposite number out of a kind of ambivalence. But the truth is the two men were fond of each other; they would have gotten along. Maggie remembers, still, the contrast at her wedding: Judah huge and rumpled, Mr. Cutler slight and neat. He sported a Thomas E. Dewey moustache that he later enlarged to a beard.

  Judah did not travel, and her father was unwilling to intrude. He had tried to avoid taking sides. And since their marriage was continually a question of which side to take, he’d kept to the sidelines and covered his eyes; he had welcomed Maggie when she fled from Judah, first, but urged her to return.

  Her mother had been dead by then—having had an aneurysm at fifty-six. There had been no warning. Maggie remembers picking up the phone, and her father’s choked announcement, and her disbelief: her mother died at luncheon, drinking tea. “She never knew what hit her,” was the phrase he used. Maggie can remember how she pictured some crazed waiter wielding the teapot as a truncheon, wreaking havoc in Le Pavillon and scattering the customers like chaff. She herself is fifty-five. She thinks perhaps the women of her family are doomed to early death. Her mother had been prudent and had paid attention to her diet and gone to exercise class. She had been (she liked to say, with a self-deprecating moue) “well preserved.” And they had not been intimate—so that Maggie, thinking back on it, thinks possibly what troubles her now is retrospect and augury, a punishment for her at-the-time indifference to her mother’s death. She had worn mourning, of course; she comforted her father and played the dutiful daughter for months. Still, the quick of her remained untouched; she could not help half smiling at a term like “well preserved”; it was redolent of candied yams and pickles and vegetable permanence, not health. She had broken from her mother with a break so absolute it had appeared to heal.

  Yet nothing is that simple, she knows now. No such fracture mends. The image of her mother—stern-seeming, brittle, sitting with her long legs crossed and reading the New Yorker their one summer in Vermont (when first, at thirteen, she’d met Judah; when her family elected once to take an inland holiday but hated it, hated the heat and the flies and lack of salt water and seafood; “We tried,” her mother said. “We gave it every opportunity. You have to give
us that.”)—is an image of life lost.

  And although she now might see herself as her mother’s look-alike and has tried to offer Jane what she herself never received, her father was not Judah—never was. She loved him without reservation, but he made her smile. Even in his final years, living in retirement in Wellfleet and careless of his clothing, fixated on his Rhodes 19, even in his deathbed rantings (paranoid in the Hyannis hospital, convinced the doctors were trying to torture him, trying to make him yield the secrets of the Bounty’s mutiny and whether he had been responsible, had horsewhipped Fletcher Christian, had given a sufficient ration of the shipmates’ bonus rum), the man was more comic than fierce. The Cutler in her had been banished when she married Judah Sherbrooke, and she wanted it that way. She put all that behind her when she entered the Big House.

  Maggie walked on marble then. Peacock’s walkways had been marble, brought from the quarries at Danby or Proctor, and the path he laid out through the grounds would shine beneath the moon. The village, too, had had marble sidewalks. North Street and West Street and Main Street used the broad slick stone for paving—and since there were no streetlights, such a sheen was an advantage. She remembers the bright reach of it like wake behind a boat, the feel of her heels in the slight corrugations, and how the facing had pocked.

  But the elders of the village thought such grandeur commonplace; you couldn’t give marble away. It was slippery when wet. It made Elvirah Hayes so nervous she walked in the mud by preference. Agnes Nickerson fell down in front of Morrisey’s and cracked her knee open and fractured her hip. Samson Finney said that marble had three uses only: it’s useful for statues and tombstones and sinks.

  So two years after Maggie came they cracked up all the paving or levered it off to the side. They joined the state sidewalk program, getting crosswalks and poured-cement slabs. That was an improvement, Finney said, though not so good for lawsuits or the tourist trade. Then trains stopped coming too. When Maggie first arrived there had been nine trains heading north per day, and nine trains heading south.

  The village is a losing proposition; Samson tells her why. The price of fuel oil and the price of gasoline is prohibitive and getting worse; real estate’s too high. Industry goes south or west, or simply goes bankrupt and quits; the Route 7 bypass won’t work. It will take tourists past the town, not cause them to stop off and visit; our industry is tourists now, he says. Half the state is paying for the other half to live on welfare; it used to be seventy-thirty, but now it’s fifty-fifty. He’s seen breadlines before and he’ll see them again if he lives. I’m telling you the truth, he says, as if she might not otherwise agree; you’ll see fighting in the streets before you see our welfare system fixed.

  Samson has aged. He comes to visit once a month and calls her every week; his visits are ceremonial always, and he brings a gift for Jane. He is her only visitor and one authentic guest. He sits and reminisces in the leather block chair Judah liked, the strongest link to Judah left, telling his widow how they would carouse, drinking Irish whiskey neat, and patting his lips with his tie. “To hell in a handcart,” he says. “It was Judah’s expression. Or mine. I’m not sure I recall which one of us began it—but every time I’d use the phrase, he’d say you mean handcar, not handcart, and we’d argue over that. Or maybe it was me who’d say handcar and him who’d say handcart, I can’t remember.” Finney blinks. “It doesn’t matter anyhow, it’s just an expression. The world’s gone to hell in a handcart is what we used to say.”

  His suits are threadbare now, his socks are at his ankles, and he walks with an umbrella as a cane. In the chair across from her, he scratches at the armrest. “Nothing’s what it seems like anymore. You build a road, it hadn’t ought to be a one-way proposition, not only be a bypass and take you somewhere else. You mark my words,” he says, “I’m telling you God’s truth.” Main Street won’t be any use to anyone but bicyclists, weeds will make it to the middle line and daisies push up through the cracks. What the state can do to pasture if it puts a highway through is only one side of the coin, says Finney; they’ll be grazing off of Main Street soon enough. He can remember when the airport was a cabbage field—thirty acres planted in red and white alternate sections. Up there from Mount Wayne it looked like Frederick Matteson was playing checkers with a giant, he had it planted so perfect. So when the runways crumble, it can be a cabbage field again.

  The town’s been good to him; he isn’t saying otherwise, and he’s settled something on Jane. It won’t make her rich, Finney says. She doesn’t need it anyhow, but it makes him feel like when he’s gone he’ll keep on going with that girl; she, Maggie, mustn’t mind. Old men are forgetful, he says, but one thing they remember is mortality. He, Finney, recollects that clear as clear. One thing he remembers is the way she looked in ’38, her Calamity Jane outfit on and riding that merry-go-round like it was an actual horse.

  Andrew comes to the door. “Can I help?” he asks.

  “What did Ian say to you?”

  Andrew hesitates. “Not much.”

  “But enough,” Maggie says. “When he called . . .”

  Andrew nods. She hears his hesitation as if it were speech.

  “You needn’t have worried, mister. I’m not about to jump just yet.”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  “I did. I’ve not been”—Maggie pauses—“well.” Her tongue is thick. It fills her mouth. “Not well. So frightened, Andrew, so anxious all the time. You say it’s easy to leave, but nothing has been easy. Ian does the shopping. I don’t even go out shopping.”

  “What keeps him here?”

  She offers an archaic phrase. “Filial duty, perhaps.”

  “He said he was working on something.”

  “Yes. I’m glad he told you.”

  “That’s all he said,” Andrew says.

  The stubble on his chin is gray. She sees this with relief. He draws his hand across his eyes and starts to speak, then stops.

  “We’ll leave with you,” she says. “If you’ll still have us, now you’ve seen the—what would you call it?—situation. We don’t have much choice.”

  “Where I come from,” he says, “we call it common sense.”

  “Where do you come from, Andrew?”

  “We can spend the night in Westport. We could make it back.”

  “That isn’t an answer.”

  “It is. Let’s get you packed.”

  Maggie looks at him in the diminished light. The storm is over, anyhow; she hears cars pass on North Street out beyond the gate. She had not thought him generous and is unsettled by his presence in the doorway. “I’ll be right down,” she says. “You go and keep them company.”

  He will provide for Jane.

  She sits. Her luggage tilts toward her, and she steadies it. She remembers finding Judah on the night of her return. They’d been apart for seven years; then he informed her he was dying, and she took the bus north and stayed. That night he tried to sleep with her and failed. She fell asleep beneath him and woke to find him gone. His departure had been noiseless, and her first waking thought (who had lain alone for seven years, or mostly, staying with her lovers only on occasion, with Andrew for a week or two, living with no one but Judah though she lived on Sutton Place and he never visited) was that she’d been dreaming. The room had the dim light of dream. When she realized that the weight that breathed on top of her, the dead weight pressing on her breasts was Judah’s proved reproof—when she realized that he’d left her bed but had been an actual presence, she dressed herself and followed him and went to set things straight.

  He was not in the house. She tried every room, from basement up to cupola, not wanting to rouse Hattie or signal her alarm. But she had been alarmed. She switched on the lights of the house. She looked in every closet, in the elevator and the basement, leaving only Hattie’s room unlit. The place seemed huge, illimitable, a cave in which she hunted him but knew there’d be no trace.

  Maggie tried the pantry last. The storm door t
o the back porch had been insecurely fastened; the door had slipped its latch. Then she knew on the instant how Judah escaped; he’d done what he used to do often, leaving the Big House behind, walking off the heat or shame or argument or airlessness of life within such walls. He was out on the land where she never could track him, and his privacy endured. He had invited her into the mansion—invited her in 1938 when first they met, when she was lost; invited her again a decade later when they met at Morrisey’s by seeming-accident that they soon enough, in the talkative sessions of their new nakedness together, agreed to call fate; invited her to marry him and enter countless times thereafter, to come back from Providence, Boston, New York, to come back again in April, 1976, and have the house declared—in Ian’s absence, Finney’s acquiescent presence, Hattie’s powerless abiding—her own.

  Yet the land remained utterly his. She owned it outright also, but she could not bring herself alone to roam its thousand acres as she did when at his side. So all through the dawn of her first day’s return she waited by his exit door, wearing her traveling clothes, drinking coffee in the kitchen and huddled to the stove. The world might be no merry-go-round, nor memory a carousel—but Maggie was assailed by circularity. He had been as lost to her as she had been to him before, when fled south to Manhattan. At eight o’clock that morning, while Hattie was stirring above, while she was on her third cup of coffee and her stomach would not settle, Judah walked in from the porch. His step was slow. His lips were blue. His boots were unlaced, and bits of straw clung to his duck-hunting jacket.

  “Still here, I see,” Judah said.

  “Still here.”

  “Sleep well?”

  “No, I didn’t. Did you?”

  He made no answer but blew on his hands. She rose and poured him his coffee.

  “I thank you.” His hands had been raw. He folded his hands around the mug so she could not see the mug, and steam rose from his thumbs. They made a kind of peace together, drinking, silent, and it lasted. Later that morning she did go outside. She found hay bales drawn up on the ground, and some of them were loosened where he’d made the hay his pallet for the night. And Maggie had known (again on the instant, not needing to confirm this by the matchbook lying there, the few charred stalks and shocks) that Judah had endured the April watch by the barn, relinquishing the house to her for what would prove forever.