“I’m not feeling threatened. I just don’t find it funny.”
But threat was never far from him, nor the guises of challenge or menace. She threatened his possessiveness, she knew. She was the last best challenge to his habit of control. They locked in mortal combat that was nothing like the comic “battle of the sexes” she saw in musicals and that ended, always, in bed. It was a kind of struggle that continued on past pleasure, a question of dominion and boundaries cut back.
Now Maggie inspects the house. She walks through each of its floors. The kitchen calendar shows deer in snow, standing alert while Santa flies above them; the white-tail deer wear comical expressions. They stare from the lower left corner at the reindeer apparition that is harnessed and stepping in unison across the clouds like turf.
There is no light left outside, and Maggie moves from room to room without adjusting lamps. If there is a switch nearby she turns it on and leaves it on; if she cannot find the light, she does without. Sometimes she cannot remember; reaching for switches that do not exist. Her hand’s assurance alters. She brushes at plaster and wood, certain that the room will come illumined instantly. It does not. She has no purpose, surveying, other than to walk the house entirely, from room to hall to stairwell to the cupola. She can remember waiting for him, earlier, in the gathering half-dark, whispering Jude, darting from some thicket or the barn door when he walked home after work. And there would be fireflies and thick odor in the air, and she would feel herself electric to her very fingertips. Then there was no question of juggling, or light; then she’d needed none to know her way around their world; then she’d been, he joked with her, his Eveready battery and charge.
They’d walk home that way, or she’d lead him back into the barn. In those years she could name the constellations and the times of night they’d appear, and in which sector of the sky. Now Orion merged with Cassiopeia, the North Star with a planet, and all she’d recognize for certain were the drinking gourds; now she’d identify satellites, or radio stations, or planes.
Maggie consults her watch. It is nearly seven o’clock; she has dawdled in the halls. Dinner is to be at seven; she must wash. Descending, she feels light-headed nearly, as if a maiden once again and holding the hymnal, singing till she hyperventilates and thinks herself transcendent: walks in beauty like the night, bedecked with flowers and later with straw where her lover lay with her, and all that’s best of dark and bright, the aspect and the eyes of it; when he asked her if she’s tired she said she’s short of breath.
The two women meet in the second-floor hallway. Visibly, Hattie masters herself. The one thing Sherbrookes sometimes fail in is politeness; she will do the proper thing.
“You’re welcome here,” she says.
“I thank you,” Maggie says.
“You’re welcome.”
Then there is silence between them. Hattie peers upward. “You’ve not changed,” she offers.
“Oh, but I have,” Maggie says. “It’s been seven years.”
“Not so you’d notice.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“I meant it that way.”
“Thank you, then. You’re looking well.”
“Now that’s a compliment,” says Hattie. “But I look like something that could crack a mirror.”
The women laugh.
“My goodness,” Hattie finishes. “It’s been a while since there’s been laughter in this house.”
“How is he?”
“Him?” She drops her voice.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t change much, either. You travel light,” she says. “You just brought that one bag?”
The hall ends in a west-facing bay; there is a sudden single lance of light. The sun is red, is going. Dust dances in the beam.
“So Jude’s all right?” Maggie asks.
“Or maybe you’ve got luggage coming?”
“No.”
“Well, anyhow your things are here. They need a bit of airing.”
Maggie wears high two-inch heels. For Hattie, she imagines, this must be adding insult to injury and make her seem six feet tall. She bends down to her sister-in-law. “What do the doctors say about it?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Doctors”—Maggie says again. “How bad do they think it is?”
“What? Judah’s health?”
“Yes.” She is impatient. Hattie no doubt wants to tell her the stuff of decency is patience; the young must wait their turn and take their proper place in line. “Has it changed?”
“Not so you’d notice.
“Would he tell you if it’s gotten worse? His heart? I don’t mean would the doctors tell . . .”
This time Hattie interrupts. Now it’s her turn, it appears, to lose patience. “He wouldn’t need to. Not to me.”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Some people, maybe. Some would have to get a phone call, I don’t doubt. Or read about it in the papers. Some people come on up with just one little suitcase, thinking that’s how long he’ll last, that’s all the time it’s going to take. I’m eighty-one years old,” she finishes, “and Judah’s a sight stronger than I ever was. I never . . .”
Maggie reaches out and takes her wrist. Her fingers make a bracelet over bone. “Don’t be offended,” she says. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“What way then?”
“Of course you’d know,” she says. “You’d be the first. And they wouldn’t have to tell you anything,” says Maggie. “You could tell the doctors all about it if they thought to ask.”
Therefore she seems mollified. “What ails my brother,” Hattie says, “isn’t for doctors to fix.”
They reach the stair’s crest. Hattie returns to her room; “I’ll just get ready for dinner,” she says and withdraws. Maggie gathers herself. Her skirts fill as if they were sails. “Why, Jude,” she cries, descending, “it’s so very pleasant to be back.”
Lately her dreams have been troubling: she knows herself in woods but lost. Men chitter at her from the trees like monkeys, and all the elms are blighted, falling, and she stands beneath their rain of leaves as once she stood beneath a waterfall. She’d pressed against the rock and breathed in the air the air pocket made within the water’s arch, wet enough just from the spray, but knowing she’d have to pass through the loud solidity and liquid pounding anyhow. (“Why?” she asked. “Why do I have to do it?” and the answer was “Because.” She’d said that wasn’t any sort of answer, that wasn’t reason enough, and all they repeated was “Because . . .”) Because, she knew, they’d laugh at her; because the water on the pool side was limpid and quiet and like, they said, a puddle; because the waterfall might shift its crescent arc, descending, or with a strong enough wind. Then she would get cold at night, ensorcelled by the white wet arc; because her parents would miss her; because there never was a dare she hadn’t dared to take; because Sammy Underhill was waiting, watching, and she’d jump through hoops for him if hoops were what he wanted—dreams now the elm is slippery elm and excellent for chewing, what time she had to sweeten breath before he sucked it out of her, dreamed illustrations in the trees and her husband dying, disconsolate, his trunk the elm’s girth easily but yielding to disease.
IV
Judah met her first in 1938. He remembered the influenza scare of twenty years before. “You opened the window, and in flew Enza”—that had been a chant of the time. Maggie flew into his window at thirteen. She knocked on the Big House side door. She was up for the summer, she said, and out riding her bicycle for the afternoon and would be late for supper and was lost. Judah had been balancing accounts. He liked the work: it had a neatness of notation and there had been that summer a deal more black than red, so he looked up not unkindly to set this girl stranger straight. She stood in his door like a stork. Long-legged already, she was rubbing her left leg with her right instep where it itched above the ankle. She was fighting back crying, he saw, and had grass stains and dirt and burdock down the side
of her dress.
“You take a spill?” he asked.
“Yes.” She pulled at her left side.
“Hurt much?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “But not now.”
“Well, where are you going to?”
She told him, and he knew the place and was impressed by her cycling diligence; give or take a couple, she’d traveled twenty miles. Later, when he’d married her and they had children and the birth announcement was a picture of a stork, he remembered how she could have been his own child then, was more than young enough, her angularities just bone and raw-lunged stridency. She rounded off, in time. The stridency diminished and became contempt. The bone fleshed out, and the twenty-five-year difference between them was a quarter of a century, not years. He’d lived through “years,” and first they were to his advantage and then his disadvantage, and “years” was a word they worried at like dogs disputing ownership of some cow’s cooked rib. But “quarter of a century” had no age implication; it did not implicate him; you couldn’t strip or splinter it or lie in the chair’s shade, digesting. It was a time-lump, single, simple, and Maggie swallowed it whole.
Only then she was swallowing dust; he’d offered her something to drink.
“I’d like a glass of water, please,” she’d said.
“We can do better than that. Have root beer. Have some cider.”
“I’d like water, please.”
He went to the kitchen and let the cold tap run and drew a glass of water for her, seeing the glass bead. “You come on in,” Judah said. “You can use the telephone if they’ve got a number to call.”
He offered her the water, and she sniffed and swirled it, then drank. He watched her watching him. He saw her yellow bike propped against the fence. He was feeling generous (and knew the generosity not typical, knew even then it was compounded of the afternoon’s accounts, and the honeysuckle smell in that soft air, the chill of his right hand’s wet palm and the suspicion she had evidenced about the glass he gave—her city manners nicely according with this new country necessity—knew that he liked the bravura about her, not tears she had been fighting back, but not not-tears either, and the distance she’d traveled since breakfast; knew also he could circle back by Harry Nickerson’s and settle up about the silo and visit with Harry and find out what was happening to Tim, knew suddenly the house had held him for too long and why not break a habit and accommodate this once, since she too was mistrustful and polite . . .) and offered her a ride.
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too much trouble,” she said.
“Going that way anyway . . .”
“I’ve got my bike.”
“I got a truck. We’ll haul it.”
“I couldn’t,” Maggie said. “Thanks anyway. And for the water.”
“Put that glass down.”
He stepped around her and down off the porch and picked her bike up and slung it in the truck bed and tied it to the crossbar, then laid it on burlap so it wouldn’t scratch. “Get in,” he said. “We’re going,” and climbed into the cab.
She had obeyed him, of course. She edged the door shut, and he told her to slam it. She did. Yet there was something peremptory in her submission, a kind of acquiescence that made the favor conferred seem not his favor but hers. She accepted compliments as he’d seen some men take insults—as though it was the rightful portion, properly bestowed. Praise was her rightful portion, even then. Later she would enter rooms as though she knew he’d rise, expectant, and would walk to the room’s door knowing some man would sweep it open. Beauty was conferred on her, he understood, and was its own authority (though at thirteen the conferral had been tentative, mawkish, a first rehearsing only of the spectacle to come—and she sat there stork-legged, voluble, pitching her voice high against the engine din.) He asked her name; she announced it. “Margaret Cutler.”
“Where you from?”
“From New York City. Manhattan Island.”
“Where in New York City?”
“Eighty-Third Street,” Maggie said. “In the just about exact middle of town. Between Park Avenue and Madison. Do you know where that is?”
“Close enough,” he said.
“Well, I think it’s the very nicest part of New York City. Because there’s a museum there and I’ve a real bike, not like that one”—she tossed her head—“and I ride it to school if I’m late, or Mary doesn’t feel like walking, or for any reason mostly, as long as I wait for the lights.”
“And don’t get lost?”
“You can’t, really. Not in Manhattan. You’d know that if you knew it well. There’s Central Park. There’s the East River to the east and the Hudson to the west, and the even-numbered streets run east . . .”
He cut across Route 7 and took the old East Road. She chattered while he watched her, idly, and he’d forgotten now (if indeed he had ever remembered, had then seen fit to remember or had listened even to her singsong litany of how to get to where you’re going, and her game of naming trees) what else she had told him or asked. She asked though, he remembered, to be let off two miles from her house.
“My mother would be angry,” she explained. “At me making you come all the way. I can make it back from here, really. Really and truly. I take the first left turning, and then it’s just down that hill. Please.”
He stopped the truck. The clutch was giving out; they settled, lurching. She smiled at him (the images coincident again, girl become woman, though practicing, and with her bite plate still) and pedaled off. He was not sorry. He started up and turned at the fork and made for Nickerson’s. She’d known enough, he knew, not to bring some stranger back and maybe knew enough to work the sweat and dust up on her on her trip’s last leg—arriving breathy, cheerful, just in time for supper and not admitting how she’d lost her way or found it, giving a fair imitation of hunger and hungry enough anyhow to do justice to the soup.
(He taxed her with that later. “Why me?” he’d ask. “Why me?”
“You’re fishing for compliments, darling.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged. “What made you pick me then?”
“When?”
“The first time. Later. Whenever.”
She smiled at him, showing her teeth. She had had a toothache in her right incisor, he knew, and touched it with her tongue.
“Why not? No reason not to. It was such a lovely house.”)
Now Judah knows, with bitterness, her talent for deceit. He wonders if he’d been a part of her sin-schooling then, and source to some white half-lie or omitted truth. He’s watched her late arrivals often enough. He wonders how many doors she’s knocked at, or been asked to enter, and how many times he himself has waited two miles from her drop-off point, consulting his watch. Her appetite was checked. She’s reined it in too many years to give it its head now. So she’d arrive—not cheerful, not breathless to get at her plate—and ring for wine and have a cigarette. He hated cigarettes. They slaked her hunger, she said, as a glass of chill white wine would slake her thirst. She could puff out smoke rings and did so, coolly, while he watched. She was the only woman ever to dare to smoke rings in his house. She crossed her legs and sat there smoking, drinking, in pure opposition. He knew she used the smoke stink to cover up her body’s stench from love. He broke or hid the ashtrays, and she dropped her matches and ash on the floor. It hadn’t been an accident, he came to decide, that she knocked on the Big House door—and not at some farmhouse or barn.
Yet what he calls deception she had called tact. She was a reed bending before him, pliant, at first even obsequious in public, but Maggie never broke. She took the Big House over as if it was a toy house, something manageable. She charmed them all—just sitting there, crossing and uncrossing her legs, engaging in discussions as to Adlai Stevenson (“Christ,” he had asked her. “Who’s this Adlai Stevenson to get so worked up over? An egghead with egg on his face. A politician like the others, but a bit less expensive to buy . .
.”) or practicing her scales. She read aloud. In the evenings she would read him Tennyson or John Greenleaf Whittier or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he found himself suspecting there were messages in what she read, some code he failed to crack. She read them with a deference that was kissing cousin to mockery. She read of babbling brooks in a voice that made him think of babbling brooks. She read of leafy copses and the azure empyrean in a way that made him see both woods and sky.
Yet she did so—he hunted the term—holding back. She was always holding back. Even in her hurtling run, or the way she came at him headlong, or the ferocity she showed him when he had her cornered—there was something inside her inviolate. It was like those Chinese boxes on the windowsill. There was Meg inside of Megan, and Megan inside Margaret. But inside Maggie—his final pet name—in the epicenter of her, impenetrable, there was a stranger he could not touch or name. He had gone clumsy-fingered at the end. He could not pick that lock. Even penetrating his wife, with her beneath him pinioned and Judah at his full extent, there was some final love veil that he could not lift. She stared at him, eyes hooded, and he never knew for certain what she, tilting, glazed, had seen.
Nor did he want to know. He was nearly, for the one time of his manhood, fearful. He had loved her, nearly, for the limitation of her love for him—he who had been limitless in love. It was that hooded glare he feared, her head thrown back, neck arched, and the veins in her neck working while he worked above her. He had power in reserve. He had his wealth and history of women in reserve. He had had, for the first years, the advantage of years. So he pitted his battering strengths against her receptive inertia; he pitted his heat and her chill. It was a standoff mostly, though he sometimes thought he won, exulting in the warmth of her—then found it reflected, or fox fire, maybe heat she got in Providence those weeks she spent there with what she said was her cousin, maybe heat from a mazurka, or valse polonaise.
So Judah traded off his leverage and gave her cars, or permission to smoke cigarettes, or not to visit with him when he visited their son at elementary school. He knew he looked the clown. He knew what they said of him in the village, and what his sister must think. He guessed what “Cousin” Alexander said of him, in that pitch-pine-wainscoted third-floor walk-up in Providence, on Benefit Street. He knew what the dairy hands said, even, and Margaret’s own mother—although none of them would venture, in his impeding presence, a syllable aloud. It didn’t matter anyhow; he shrugged off gossip like flies. He always had done so, and would, though envy and malice abounded. What mattered was her laughter at Alexander’s jokes; what mattered was the way she kept no protective distance when talking to the dairy hands, or watching Artur Schnabel; what mattered was decorum gone, the love veil peeled away.
Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) Page 8
