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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “You’ll break my heart,” she told him.

  “There’s nothing to break,” Jamie said.

  “You’re cruel. You’re being unfair.”

  “All right,” he had leered at her, stinking of gin-sweetness. “Show me your heart. Let’s have a look.”

  So, breathless, not daring to breathe, not knowing why she did it but knowing that she had to, once, not knowing how she dared but knowing his juniper-berry fueled bravado was a dare she had to take, she took off her blouse and unlaced her chemise. She had been cold. There were goose pimples on her arms. She dropped her chin because he might still put his rough hands on her neck, and there was a chill wind blowing that made her naked neck contract. There were willow trees. They stood in a bower the green branches made, and he reached out and twined his fingers in the willow strands.

  “Keep going,” Jamie said. “All I can see is ribs.”

  Her brassiere was white. It had lace eyelets and four hooks. She reached around and fumbled with the clasps and closed her eyes to concentrate so she would not be fumble-clumsy, and because the cold wind hurt her eyes.

  “Jamie?”

  “A-yup.”

  “James Pearson-person,” she said.

  “Keep going.”

  “I’ve got a heart,” she finished and dropped its final protective layer and stood there shivering. She screwed her lids tight shut. Her heart was in her throat. “Well, haven’t I?”

  “That’s all you got,” he said and laughed and turned on his two heels and left her in the willow’s shadow and crashed across the stream still laughing, whistling. She hated him implacably. She wanted to put out his eyes.

  Harriet closes the bathroom door. It squeaks, requiring oil. The door drinks oil, it seems, the way Judah drinks whiskey; no matter how well lubricated, it soon enough dries up. That had been Maggie’s joke. Most of the wit and levity within the household had been hers; she, Harriet, grants that. But there is such a thing as too much levity, as jokes in bad taste following the jokes in good. Their mother had a saying: “There are six senses,” she said.

  “Which?”

  “How many do you know about?” her mother asked. “How high can you count?”

  “To five. One two three four five.”

  “And what are the five senses?”

  “Sight and sound and smell and touch and taste,” Harriet said.

  “That’s right. And then there’s good taste, darling: the sixth sense.”

  So Harriet would chant while bouncing, “Sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and good taste,” or skip rope to the rhythm of it, counting six. There was a sixth sense she learned of later that meant you saw for distances you couldn’t possibly see. It meant you heard things too far away for sound to carry, and smelled smoke when there was something burning, though you couldn’t smell the smoke. It happened to her, Harriet, sometimes; she walked into a room and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and the clock started to chime. She shivered when she heard Fred Rowley’s name and learned, next day, that Fred Rowley had died in a car crash twenty-four hours before. She saw a painting on the Millers’ wall (of the Connecticut River, with an Indian poised on the bank, wearing war paint and feathers and a loincloth) and decided she didn’t much care for it and the instant she made her decision the oil painting fell.

  That was coincidence, maybe; she’s willing to grant that. But she had run out screaming from the Wittens’ parlor at the very minute of the day her mother died. She’d known (though in the Library, attending to the Periodical Shelves) when her nephew Seth was born. It was her day to volunteer, and Judah said, “Go on, we’ll manage without you. We’ve managed before,” and Maggie said, “If this one’s half as long in coming as the last, why, there’ll be plenty of time.” So she had been arranging National Geographic and marking down the issues missed or out of order. They had a complete second set. There was no smoking in the Library, of course. She herself had never smoked. But suddenly her lungs filled up, and there was the smell of Judah’s cigar smoke, and she had known beyond coincidence there was a baby born.

  Harriet arranges herself in the sheets. She uses an electric blanket, but also a hot-water bottle, since she does not trust the blanket while she sleeps. There could be short circuits or a defect in the wiring or faulty connections she would not notice till the morning, till too late. Hilda Thornhill had suffered first-degree burns on her back. If the hot-water bottle broke, Harriet thought, all she would wake up was wet.

  “Lord,” she murmurs. “Save my brother Judah from the ravages you visit on us all. Preserve my nephew Ian according to the love we bear him, and his just deserts . . . ”

  She cannot continue. The prayer does not soothe her, nor is she composed. The junket had been excellent, she knows. It was just the right consistency, and neither too tart nor too wet. The Sanka did not trouble her—not even that second cup. She, Harriet, breathes with a sweet and inoffensive breath. Judah can tease or ignore her or flaunt her need for maraschino cherries, but her teeth are much better than his. She wonders what sort of wood George Washington used for his incisors. She imagines Martha Washington held in the crook of her husband’s right arm, face tilted back and breathing deeply, but breathing in the smell of cedarwood, not Crest.

  “Hey, Missie Sherbrooke. You there! Hey, my maiden lady.”

  Her next suitor, Samuel Powers, was bluff about her chastity and found it a fine joke.

  “Don’t shout,” she’d said to him. “I hear you.”

  “So you ain’t deaf?”

  “No.”

  “Not deaf to entreaty, neither?” He chuckled. “What about that?”

  “You hush up, Mr. Sam,” she said.

  “Not deaf to my proposals? Not deaf to argument?”—he winked at Judah hugely.

  “No,” she said. “Not all that deaf. You’d wake the sleeping dead with that bellow.”

  “OK,”—he slapped his sides, delighted. “All right then. OK.”

  “But hush your mouth and mind your manners, Mr. Sam.” She was reading Southern novels then. She dropped a curtsy to him from her imagined carriage height but also dropped her handkerchief.

  “Accidental a-purpose.” He pounced. He gathered up her handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and kissed the handkerchief. “Hey, Judah,” he bellowed. “Looky here. Look at this moo-chwower.”

  “Mouchoir,” she had corrected him.

  Her brother laughed, sardonic.

  “It’s mine, you unmannerly man. Give it back.”

  She stomped her foot in what she hoped was a heroine’s coquettish fashion. He crumpled up her handkerchief and put it in his waistcoat pocket, covering the watch fob and the silver chain.

  “Not likely,” Vice President Powers declared. “I found it and I’ll keep it. To console me, Missie Sherbrooke.” He winked at her this time, and she checked to see if Judah was watching—then saw her brother at the fireplace, back turned.

  “This memento,” Powers continued. “This fragrant memory, if I may so describe it”—his chest and belly shook with pleasure. “This, this, this moo-chwower.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and bit the end of it. She turned away to hide her tongue’s sudden pain (like burning it on gravy or licking at the sharp edge of a piece of paper) and he resumed his chat with Judah as to railroad stocks. They were engrossed in a prospectus by the time she turned again, and he flung her compliments like bones.

  “Hey, Missie Sherbrooke,” Powers said. “Sashay this way, why don’t you? Do a poor fellow a favor.”

  He and her brother swapped stories. They slapped each other’s backs. Grimacing in the corner, they huddled over balance sheets and toted up credits and debits. They bickered together the way old friends bicker, and she was only an accessory, she knew. Widower Powers consoled himself with whiskey and gin rummy and poker and cigars. There were other forms of consolation, no doubt, to judge by his burbling smug whisper when he came back from Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  “There�
�s things”—he grew expansive—“things to see there. Yes.”

  “What sort of things?” she asked.

  “I can’t hardly begin to describe them. Don’t know as it’s proper in—saving your pardon—mixed company.”

  “Why, Sam,”—she fluttered, letting her voice break—“you’ve learned something after all. After all these weeks.”

  “A-yup,” he chortled, nudging Judah. “You can say that again.”

  “Bridgeport, Connecticut,” she continued. “It’s on the water, correct?”

  “Right. Leastways I think so.”

  “You didn’t notice?”

  “Nope. Not me.”

  “I thought you said you saw things there.”

  “Hattie,” Judah intervened, “he never got out of his room.”

  And she was tired suddenly, tired of their self-delighting schoolboy antics. She was weary of their glib obscene fraternity in lust. Powers would be boastful. “I’ve joined in the amorous lists,” he would say. “I’ve entered the fray. I’ve thrown my gauntlet down and plan to be a-jousting soon”—he winked—“in amorous lists.”

  So when he married that redhead from Bridgeport, Connecticut, Harriet was not surprised. Instead she felt, perceptibly, relief. She was relieved of Samuel’s importunities (smoothing his hair past the bald spot, crinkling up his eyes in heavy-handed laughter at some heavy-handed joke, clinking the silver together in his side pants pocket, fist working at the coinage, cloth-swaddled, huge) and at peace.

  Nor did she feel embittered by Judah’s teasing title, “Spinster.” She selected it herself. It was an honorable name—the spinning sister—and her chosen fate. Time passed, and the passage was simple. She gave up on vanity. She had been young, then youthful, then a woman in her prime, then middle-aged, then past her prime, then old. She had eaten sweets and then forsaken sweets in order to preserve her figure and now ate sweets again. She had tried, persistently, to battle her increasing age, but it had been a losing battle and better not to fight. Time was, she joked, the perfect diet; time has brought her weight back down to what she’d weighed when seventeen. She’d thought her girth irrevocable—but it was time-revoked.

  Nor did she feel requital when Powers and his wife died on their way to the Bahamas in a charter plane. She had not wished him—as she wished Jamie Pearson—dead. She bore no grievance that would demand requital in some coral reef off Nassau in the Bahamas. Harriet has never been to Nassau in the Bahamas, nor, for the matter of that, to water warm enough for coral reefs. But she owns coral necklaces and bracelets, and she had seen photographs in National Geographic of the Great Barrier Reef. Magic fish and eels can snout their way through coral, whereas men would flay themselves on contact with the pointed nubbins of the rock. Their skin would shred and bleed and sharks would follow the blood trail and make a noonday snack of Samuel Powers and his bride. She wonders, idly, if sharks eat human hair. She wonders if they’d lop off his wife’s head entirely, or leave the strands of orange hair to coil through the coral like weed.

  Now she feels sleep slipping up. She has twenty minutes to rest. She switches off the electric blanket; “Lord forgive them their trespasses,” she prays, “as I would ask forgiveness of my own.” She thinks of Thomas Sherbrooke, whose knowledge of ships had been meager; he had piloted a rowboat once, on Parrin Lake. He had learned to swim and had bought boats in bottles, she imagines, and watched the firelight gleam off their rigging and sails. He would have watched for hours, his elbows on the desk.

  Whales would spout to starboard. Dolphins would follow the ship. He lay on the forward deck, thinking of home, noting how the water underneath him was moving so much faster than water in the near distance, or at the horizon. There were bands of water. He knew the waves were demarcation points. (“Dear mother and father,”—he had sent one letter home—“Forgive me if you can. I’m off on what we sailors call the ‘Bounding Main.’ I have no regrets or uncertainty in making my fortune this way, and sure I am to do it because the ship runs four boats and is fitted out with 3500 barrels and for a voyage of 3 years. We are going ‘round Cape Horn and to the South Pacific Ocean in a voyage after sperm whales with a crew of 27 men, and very pious Officers. I am satisfied with my situation and Prospects except only in the grief I caused by the manner of my leaving but you must not worry for me, not you particularly mother. There were contrary winds and averse currents but we weathered them and recruited off Payta as also recruited off Tecamur and stand now at a full compliment of men. Tell Daniel to be a good boy and not to do as I have done unless he wishes also to be a burden to his parents. Tell him remember me.”)

  She pictures her ancestor, gold-haired, blue-suited, laying down his quill pen to breathe and sigh and stare and brush away hot tears. The ship would heave in the windless swell; the smell of rum was rank. She pictures him rereading—as she herself has countless times reread—his single letter: “It is impossible to describe the misery of the slaves both here and at Rio in particular you would hardly conceive that with all its fine palaces and grand houses with the King of Portugal riding in his splendid Gilt Coach and officers attending him there could be so much misery but while your eyes would be dazeled with all the splendor you will turn them away and see twenty or thirty poor slaves chained together bearing heavy burdens. Your soul sickens at the sight. But I am forgetting my story I went while there to see the place where the slaves were whiped there was one about to be Punished as he was tied to the post his back stripped and 150 lashes given him he uttered not a groan and when the horrible scene was finished the blood lay in pools at his feet and his body was so mangled and torn that he could not rise but lay senseless until he was carried away. Give my love to all the children tell them to forgive my faults and if possible to forget them. Give my love to all my relations and friends if I have any. I hope to be a steward shortly in the Captain’s mess, and share his rations and musick what time he has musick to share . . . ”

  He stands in the whaleboat, balancing. There are harpooners behind him. The harpoon is intricately carved, and the blade has a green sheen. It is polished. There is blubber and blood and, astonishingly, reefs that rise like candelabras from the troughs of waves. (“I have hopes you will forgive the rash step your son taken, signing on at Falmouth for which I am undutiful but repentant, and if ever I return again which God grant I shall endeavour to make good in esteem but no more for the present it is too much . . . I get in common with the rest of us the 1.75 lay or one barrel out of 1.75 . . . ”)

  The harpoon shaft rests on his shoulder, and the shoulder acts as a fulcrum; it is tattooed. She peers at the tattoos but is unable to decipher them—they do not signify. They are black and red and bulbous. They are changing, self-wreathed shapes. His shoulder aches. He weeps. He fingers the tattoos. She knows there is a message there, but not for her to read.

  VI

  They eat. He eats in silence, mostly, while Harriet makes conversation. “I want you to remind me,” she says, “to have them plant shallots this spring. Shallots would be wonderful with meat like this, and I can’t buy them anywhere—not Morrisey’s, not anywhere. We could have them every day all winter long. They keep.”

  Finney has brought the three wills. He has followed Judah’s instructions; they are alike and brief. Hattie has her constant portion, and there are bequests. The charities amount to one hundred thousand dollars—ten of them each getting ten. The principal beneficiaries, however, change; one testament allots the bulk of the estate to Ian, one to Maggie, and one to an agreed-upon division, half and half of an assessment of the whole. There are copies in the briefcase Finney carries. He will be one witness and will take them to his office for a second witness and to have them notarized and filed.

  The lawyer has learned not to offer advice. Some clients want his opinion, but it’s wasted time with Judah and not worth the fuss. He knows that Ian has no chance, that this entire dispensation ceremony is no more than a charade. He had been tempted, almost, to try to track Ian down. He had w
anted to see Judah’s face if both of them arrived—but then Finney thought that this too might have pleased his client. And then he thought that Maggie might inform her son, or maybe the letter would anyhow reach him; then he thought the simplest thing is do what Judah asked. He bills for his time, whichever way, and each of them will be a legal binding document once signed. If pressed to it, he’d say that Judah’s crazy like a fox. “Ours not to reason why,” he reminds himself, “ours but to do and do it properly.” He’d set the briefcase by the sideboard and received a Scotch from Judah and ventured a joke: “It’s your funeral,” he’d said.

  Finney drinks. He requires the hair of the dog. He needs an entire kennel, based on what transpires here, based on what these people think is sensible; he swirls the whiskey in his glass, watching the water separate out from Scotch. The Big House isn’t big enough to contain Margaret Sherbrooke; the state of Vermont isn’t big enough, and he’s heard she’d flown the coop as far as San Francisco, figuring the whole East Coast wasn’t sufficient, thinking maybe she’d try for Hawaii. Finney knows the type. He knows the ones who go to court with a black eye from a door or maybe some Italian who obliged them, and wail and say it was their husband and can they please have everything he owns. He knows the ones who sign on late then want to leave early, taking fifty percent of the whole. But though he heaps them all together—with the ambulance chasers and the malpractice people and the ones who run to Canada, then ask for amnesty—Maggie is one of a kind. Finney figures her at fifty, and maybe a year or so past it, but you’d never know by looking and you’d have to do the arithmetic twice. She’s playing Florence Nightingale tonight. She is all smiles and chatter and hot compresses and sympathy; Judah’d got what he wanted by getting her back. But Florence Nightingale contracted syphilis, Finney knows, and died in the Crimea of a dose. That was the hell of a thing—he finishes his drink and jangles the ice cubes and figures maybe he’d best pour the second go-round himself. You pick a model of charity and decency and selflessness, and make her a model for nurses, and she gets the clap.