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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Judah had been drinking. He clattered off the porch, into sun that made him squint. His mouth felt like the bottom of a birdcage, and by the time he reached the truck he was sweating; by the time he backed it out he had the shakes. It was July. The maples had a sleeve of dirt; the bottom of their leaves went brown with his raised dust. So he got out and pumped up water and drank. He soaked his red bandana, rolled it tight and tied it to his neck. He turned back to the truck and raised his hand to the door handle and saw it shaped an arrow in the center of a heart she’d drawn. He could not rub it out. When he sold the truck the next day on a trade-in for a Ford it was there still: fading, smudged, a Valentine with the rust-pitted chrome latch to prove where his heart cracked.

  Names stick. You name a thing and that’s the shape it takes. His grandfather’s father, writing from California (where he had gone to practice law and ended up railway-rich, crony to Frémont and Stanford, sporting fur and silver in the oil portrait Judah possesses), had named it the “Big House.” “I have always maintained and will maintain,” he wrote, in his elaborate left-handed scrawl, “that Vermont is where you find it. It being the true repose of the soul, whereas this Western paradise delights the flesh exceedingly.”

  Judah has the letters. He has every laundry slip or bill his ancestors received. They were pack rats, all of them, and assiduous in accumulation and transaction-proud, and he sometimes thinks he and Hattie keep the mansion just for storage space. “Yet we return from Babylon, though these be not waters to weep near but praise, and in our private coach, I wish the latest architect arrived from London to be retained, on an appropriate retainer, and set to building us a Big House against our soon retirement. I dream in these long nights of family and friends from school-time clustered to the several hearths, of faces flushed with God’s exertion, not the demon rum. I wish the house to be of a pleasing façade, yet particular in shape. The fashion of the time is ornament, a glass to grandeur. We shall be fashionable only in restraint.”

  Nothing Judah knows of Daniel Sherbrooke accorded with restraint; his Vermont kin called him “Peacock” and were by turns awed and outraged. The construction process took six years. Sherbrooke was meticulous, in his transcontinental planning, with an attention to detail that others might call interference but he called the key to success. He made all the final designer’s decisions and gave the final go-ahead—from problems of siting to patterns on the parquet floors—but never traveled east.

  An architect was hired and brought from New York. “I wish him godly yet mondial,” the magnate wrote, “and with some comprehension of our local stuffs.” The architect built scale models of country houses in the Cotswolds and shipped them, according to Sherbrooke’s instructions, to Vermont. “Peacock’s” answering letters were hortatory, full of praise, but each would mention some new wing that “might be an addition of some slight extent. The House needs be a meeting house; I must have space wherein to meditate upon the narrow final confine we each of us inhabit. How but by contrast might the shelter prove exemplary, or offer to the wearied Spirit its adequate reach?”

  Therefore porticos were added, and porches and trellised walkways and even, at Sherbrooke’s insistence, a widow’s walk.

  “Though two-hundred miles from the ocean,” he wrote, “and sheltered from its ceaseless surge nor yet an intimate of watr’y Storm, I wish continual reminder of the souls gone screaming down in ships-wrack, and their attendants on shore. These are Pleasing Protuberances, with grillwork that testifies to the vigilance of watchers in God’s sight. I wish the widow’s walk to circumnavigate the cupola and gables and be of ornamental iron painted black.”

  His pious architectural injunctions, over time, produced the largest and most lavish house in the region. It looks, Maggie said, like that prose style of his; it’s crazy and ornate and out-of-date. Neighbors dubbed it “Peacock’s Palace” or “Sherbrooke’s Showplace” or “Pride’s Peak.” But the first became the final name and it was always now, only, the Big House. There are stained glass windows in the tower, and a ballroom on the second floor, and a central staircase that is foot for foot the equal of the central staircase in Mark Hopkins’s home. It is a Victorian extravaganza, with four flights of servants’ quarters that Judah’s father leveled, raising a greenhouse instead. Maggie tended the greenhouse in winter, loving the luxuriant heat and the profusion of blossoms where she stood—except for that one width of glass—waist-deep in the wet snow.

  The magnate, Peacock Sherbrooke—for that name also stuck—journeyed east in 1869 to die in his ancestral town and newly finished house. His voyage had been arduous, even with a private railway car, and a retinue that filled it of servants and daughters and his son-in-law.

  “He suffered from a wasting fever,” the daughter, Anne-Maria, later wrote, “but was upright and upstanding to the last. What wrack it was I dare not think nor scarcely venture to recall that caused the sweat to form upon his noble brow. That brow that frowned at each Malignity but lightened at the footfall of some loving tread. So pity us who watched him and could prove no comfort save the Book we read from and provided him to touch and kiss continually, which is of course Sufficing comfort & abundant recompense. We brought him from the station on a kind of litter, bundled as an infant ’gainst the Weathers importuning, and the rude shocks I myself was sensible of administered by these towpaths and oxtrails they call roads. My father as you amply know was a man of Sunny Countenance & also Determination & Will, but I who witnessed saw the Sun bedimmed by Rain clouds that started from his staring Eyes, as Will & Can may sometimes war, the latter in ascendance. We attained the gate at four forty-seven o’clock; I remember he queried the Time.

  “There were Workmen standing, caps in hand, on either side of the Approach drive, nor did he stint to thank them with the hand that shook with palsy but was firm in Christ’s close Grip. We made a grim Processional, that had thought to be a glad. For when the Big House rose before us, starting from the Maple trees that garlanded it greenly, and in the gathring dusk that was the Dark he voyaged through before—I do profess it—entering Eternal & Absolute Light, then did he raise himself upon an elbow and commend His works. I thought for an instant my father intended the architect’s accomplishment, not Christ’s, and turned to make some slight rejoinder, adding praise to praise, but saw his dear Orbs sightless and his Head cast back. His last words were—as sev’rally attested—‘I pronounce myself content.’ ”

  II

  At nine o’clock that morning, he’d left the Toy House for a haircut—and it proved a gauntlet to run.

  “Long time no see, Mr. Sherbrooke.” The barber welcomed him, “A pleasure to see you again.”

  “Yes. Well. I’ve been busy,” Judah said. He took the middle chair.

  “At what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I don’t mind,” Judah said—but did: minded the habit of gossip, minded the ease of the flourish and that oversize napkin he had in his collar, minded the man’s name even, Vito. There was a Playboy calendar tucked in the mirror’s edge and not even registering April but only a girl on a picnic blanket, serving up herself instead of food.

  “Nice weather we’ve been having,” Vito said.

  He held to his silence.

  “They say it’ll snow later on.”

  “Ayup.”

  “We’ve had too much snow already,” Vito said.

  The room was empty. There were three chairs.

  “Well, what’ll it be?” Vito snapped his scissors like a soldier coming to attention, and his left hand brandished the comb.

  “Just trim.” Leaning back, he shut his eyes, remembering the manicure jobs of his youth. When they took you in the back room there it meant you bought whatever they were selling; there was whiskey in the lotion bottles and gin labeled “Shampoo.”

  “A head of hair like this,” said Vito. “Makes you look like nobody’s been caring for you. Not enough, Mr. Sherbrooke.”

  He opened his right eye. The white shocks ab
out his ears were on his shoulders now. The thatch had been reduced. Vito bustled behind him, snipping. He hoped the family was well; he had seen Miss Harriet inside the Stitches Shoppe. He hoped the town would vote against the trailer ordinance and vote for one with teeth; there were so many regulations it was a wonder you could spit in your own driveway nowadays, not to mention what he had to do with towels to keep his license to cut hair, so why not rules for trailers, Vito asked. Would you believe the washing-down and mopping-up he had to go through; would you care for some hairspray this morning?

  “I would not,” Judah said.

  Next he walked to Morrisey’s and ordered ten pounds of sirloin.

  “How’s that, Jude?” the grocer asked.

  “Ten pounds. And wrap it in one chunk.”

  “You’ve got a party?”

  “I got a black eye, Alex, from walking in that door. I’m told that sirloin steak is just the thing.”

  “All right.” Morrisey busied himself with his apron. “Ten pounds. Ain’t sure I got that much in sirloin.”

  “You used to,” Judah said.

  “Not in one slice. Never.”

  “Well, cut it up then. And get me some Camembert cheese.”

  “Yes, sir.” Morrisey was mock-deferential to cover his true deference. “Coming right up.”

  “And have them send it to the house. But not before lunchtime, hear? Not till three o’clock.”

  So he who geared himself for battle never got to fight. He’d donned his manhood’s armor at fifteen. He had been, Judah decided, witless to begin with—a giant of a rich boy who would rather be a farmer because lock, stock, and barrel it had been his father’s farm. Then he filled out. It had been perceptible: a lengthening, a thickening, an equality with field hands who came to hay or pick. And once the line was crossed you couldn’t backtrack or beg for delay; you didn’t notice, passing it, that there’d been a rite of passage. But the world about you noticed and the upstairs maids would giggle and the field hands tell a different sort of joke.

  And because it had been owned outright he was able to keep what he owned. “I’m a gentleman farmer,” he’d say. “But not much of a gentleman and nothing of a farmer.” Still, he fought a rearguard action and held on. There has been some work to that—what with supermarkets and tax laws changing and roads going up on the land’s perimeter, and his neighbors selling out to make motels. He’s held on sixty years. He had been old enough for the Great War just when the war was over, and the Second World War came too late. He could have joined up somehow, he supposed, but they’d have given him some desk job in Montpelier or D.C., and if he couldn’t fly or man a tank he’d rather, he decided, shuffle lumber mills and farms around than some stack of papers. The farms and lumber mills were useful, and Judah expanded their output fivefold.

  So the wars went on without him, and stock-market fortunes won or lost were not his fortunes, really, and the cities prospered or went bankrupt somewhere else. It had been sentry play. He stood and watched while men went out with bayonets or wire clippers and came back triumphant or dead. They came back on their comrade’s shoulders or in their comrade’s arms or sometimes slung in a fireman’s carry, already a carcass and stiff. And he, who was weaker than no man and stronger than most, stayed home to mind the store. He minded the storekeeper’s wives. He fought mostly holding actions, while the world was in that flux about him they called progress and advance. Then (sudden as the one before, he crossed a second line that said: this far, no farther, boy, take off your chain-mail suit) it was retreat. Then his manhood fled from him, and sentry play was too much work for one winded codger with a heart condition. Then he laid his armor by and shriveled into winter clothes and shivered cutting wood and stacking it and shivered feeling it burn.

  He hears a plane. He hunts it, squinting, and sees it off by Woodford Valley, catching the bright light. Will Carr owned a Cessna, and once they flew to Brattleboro and circled back above his land and Judah recognized it all, knowing which way the drainage ran and where the sumac needed clearing, knew all of it in March because the leaves were down and nothing green or growing yet, but Will declared come August he’d be baffled. Can’t tell the Green Mountains from the Alps or Burma, he said, and Judah wondered why he didn’t say the Allegheny Mountains or the Adirondacks. “You’ve been there, I suppose,” he asked, “flown over them?” and Will said no, but I can imagine; I see them clear as that set of foothills there. Imagination, Judah thinks, is like a hand shaking in the plane’s loud clatter, with what looks like an old Boy Scout ring on Will’s fourth finger where the wedding band would be, and some vague comparison tricked up as truth that lies.

  Forgetfulness: he covets it, has lived the life most men would live, has kept some standards up with what—depending on the mood of it—he’d call stubbornness or mulishness or fierce determination; which standards has he kept, he asks himself, and comes up with a wash of words all meaning loyal, all meaning live with what they call fidelity or die; he’s sidestepped less than most. The record players now boast high fidelity; there’s a marching band that marches right across the living room. And when the violin comes at you it comes from a speaker where you don’t hear flutes; he’d swear he tells the left hand from the right hand when the radio plays piano music, when he goes to shut it off. He uses his right hand. In Arab countries, Judah’s heard, you use one hand for eating and one for wiping yourself, and it’s a mortal insult to offer the wrong hand to a stranger; he thinks fidelity is eating-hand; high-fidelity is shit.

  His sister stands in the hall. She wears a thick-ribbed red sweater and the shawl he gave her; she has been preparing, she announces, to wind the gong again.

  “Shut that door,” says Harriet. “It’s cold.”

  “It ain’t that bad.”

  “The radio says snow.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  “It’s too cold for almost May.”

  “April seventh,” he reminds her.

  “You had a haircut, finally. Is that the reason why you didn’t hear the gong?”

  “I heard it.”

  “Where were you then? There’s some sort of bird in the chimney, and I don’t dare light the fire; there’s feathers all over the logs.”

  “Just put down a piece of bread to catch the drippings,” he jokes. “What are you having to drink?”

  They are in the study, and Judah pours. Measuring her Manhattan, he reflects he’s made it past the front parlor with boots on. He has left his blanket by the door.

  “You don’t believe me? About the birds?”

  “I believe you. But there’s wire on that chimney, sister. Your health.”

  “Your health. Where were you at this morning you didn’t hear the gong?”

  “I heard it,” Judah says. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I’ll have them look at the chimneys. You’ll want a second cherry?”

  “To sweeten my disposition”—Harriet makes their old joke.

  “Sweets to the sweet,” he says. The cherry stem stains his fingernail pink.

  “I thank you, brother.” Harriet is eighty-one, five years his senior, and accepts such gallantry as due her age, not sex.

  “What did you do this morning?” He is anxious to appease her because of his plan; he has intended to announce their afternoon surprise at lunch.

  She lists telephone calls. She embarks upon the history of Ida Simmons’s health, and who was right with regard to sciatica, and which shots helped and for how long; she, Harriet, knows there is no remedy for sciatica, but doesn’t want to tell poor Ida or be the bearer of discouraging news, since Lord knows Ida’s discouraged enough, considering her boy’s arrest and the way they’re building the highway right past her pantry door.

  Trailblaze. That was it, Judah thinks. That was the name of his horse. Fourteen hands high and dappled musculature, fat with proper feeding and curried till he shone. The two of them would take the day and spend it on the land’s far reaches, hunting or mending fence or just on the say-so, asleep
. The herd was Ayrshire then. Now the herd, or what is left of it, is Holstein and nowhere near as difficult to keep. He caught trout in abundance in the river’s shallows, and the smell of trout in his tote bag—mingled with the sweet pine air, and Trailblaze, and his saddle’s wet leather—is a smell he still can smell.

  “Maggie called,” Harriet says.

  “What?”

  “She called.”

  “Who? When?”

  “Margaret Coburn,” Harriet says, redeeming her error by blushing. “At eleven o’clock. She wants to ask you not to just join the Library committee, but to be its honorary chairman.”

  “Tell her no,” Judah says.

  “She wanted to ask you herself.”

  “Tell her no. Tell her not ever to call.”

  It’s a kind of blasphemy, he tells himself. One time it sings on your tongue. One time it’s the loveliest name that ever was invented, and for the loveliest woman, and now it’s for some blue-haired bitch who’s drumming up attendance for her rummage sale. Take that name in your mouths again, he threatened the men at the bar, and I’ll take all your teeth out and the tongues that do the licking: I’ll split you back to front and leave you for the crows to clean. They’re used to filth in their beaks—he finished, his excitement spent. The men looked down at their drinks.

  “She meant no harm,” Harriet says.

  “And she’ll accomplish none.”

  “I meant no harm by it either.”