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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  He grins at her and says, “That’s the little lady. That’s the one I married.”

  “Why serve us this?”

  “Because I need to see just how much shit the others will swallow,” he says, and touches her arm, conspiratorial. “Because there’s no limit to what certain people can eat.”

  “Judah,” Hattie says. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “These slops”—he gestures. “These pig leavings. This crap I had prepared for you to watch you at the trough.” He sweeps his plate backhanded and it crashes against the fireplace wall and falls and spills but does not break. They watch it teeter. “I been waiting,” Judah says, “for one of you to say just one thing all this meal. Just once to tell me what you thought of what we put before you. Every step of it’s been planned.”

  “Fine,” Maggie says. “So you serve us a second-rate dinner . . .”

  “Who in heaven’s name cares?” Hattie asks.

  He had been making it, was faking weariness and sickness when it came to him that she needed someone young and hale as he, Judah, was once; he presses his legs together and feels his pants’ fabric compress. He does not move. He hears his heart’s pulse amplify and echo from his chest to ears, then wrist. He is his own best audience, the kid who gapes forever at the card trick that he never learned, the one who always says “Again, again,” and sits there openmouthed, letting flies feed off his tongue. He says four queens, hell, that’s terrific, hell, I could have sworn—when every second card’s a queen, except he doesn’t know it; riffle the deck in the other direction and it’s only queens; his legs go weak. His lungs are weak. His arms that had been tempered steel (“Like a sword,” she’d say. “You draw your arms out from that undershirt like some proud swordsman”) are rust-riddled, breakable. He can remember toting water to the house; the wells went bad one summer, and he had to fetch and carry everything they drank. With clarity now for the first time he feels that what he’d faked is real, that all the fraud was worthless since it also stood for truth, and Judah is in mortal straits, is mortal, is cut out to die.

  They draw back from the table. He says he’ll sit a little while; it isn’t all that often you give the world away. Maggie leads Finney into the room’s far alcove, then turns to him, speaking softly. “What is it you’re after, Samson?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You understand what I’m asking. Just tell me what’s the point of this and I’ll know how to play.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “It’s not all that serious either.”

  “For Judah,” Finney acknowledges, “the point is that you’re here.”

  “One bus trip. One afternoon. I didn’t even have to change at Albany; they’ve improved the service.”

  “Yes.”

  “One one-way ticket, it’s nothing to fuss about, Samson. What’s the fuss?”

  “The will,” he says. “You heard him.”

  “Yes, it’s mine. I’ve said my thank-yous; I’ll say them again. So what?”

  He stares at this quicksilver creature and thanks God he never married. There were times, he wants to tell her, when he’d been tempted to get on his knees and there’d been candidates enough for Mrs. Finney, in case she thought the opposite, in case she didn’t know. He eats a Ritz cracker, no cheese, and the crunching sound seems loud.

  “You haven’t answered me,” she says.

  “It’s a legal document—or will be once I get it witnessed.”

  “And then?”

  “It’s watertight, like seeing snow on the ground and deducing it snowed. Which would stand up in court . . .”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Been thinking how best to explain it,” Finney says. “You get the place lock, stock, and barrel once it’s notarized.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What?” He pops his tongue. He selects a second cracker from the bowl.

  “Someone.”

  “Not that I know of. It’s provided for. I’m sorry about Ian, but it’s the way he wanted it.”

  “I’m not talking about Ian.”

  “Seems your boy wanted it this way. He’s the one who didn’t show. If he’d only come . . .”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Maggie says.

  Now it’s his turn to stand there quizzical, awaiting explanations. Finney runs his tongue across his teeth.

  “It’s Judah you’re forgetting.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He’s got to die first, Samson. That’s what makes it legal and a—what did you call it?—binding document.”

  He focuses. He had taken off his glasses when they sat to table.

  “Until that time”—she nears him—“it’s a piece of paper, right? Just a statement of intention, am I right?”

  “Well.”

  “I could give it all away, correct? I could give it all to Ian, for example.”

  “In your turn,” he starts to say—but she is hissing at him, so near now he smells the perfume.

  “Correct?” she says.

  “That’s true. There’s no proviso . . .”

  “But after. Not till after. While Judah lives it’s his and I am his and he can rearrange it anytime. Just call you in one afternoon and say, for instance, today my wife forgot to squeeze the orange juice, I want her out of the will. She talked back to me this noon and I don’t like her yellow dress so I’m writing her out, understand? He’s done it before; he did it this evening to Ian, so who’s to say he won’t again?”

  “People don’t just . . .”

  “Judah does,” she finishes. “There’s nothing changed here, Samson. So I ask you one more time, what’s all the fuss?”

  He swallows his answer since Judah approaches. She puts her index finger to her lip and kisses it, then blows him the kiss. “Why, darling,” Maggie says, and crosses to her husband. “How lovely you were well enough to eat with us. How nice you could come down.”

  Finney makes excuses. He has his work to do; the bowling league started at eight. He likes the weekly routine of the league—the feel of his personalized ball and the friendly competition and the beer. Sometimes, with his second glass swallowed, he stares at his shoes on the sheen of the alley, watching the pattern his teammates make when running. The red-and-blue striped shoes tumble forward, and he thinks the laminated wood beneath him is a triumph of carpentry. This is all there is, he sometimes thinks; this is ballet, war, law, friendship, everything that counts: the rush and release and the clatter of pins. He has a one-hundred-and-sixty-three-point average for the last ten games; that’s just this side of bad, says Finney, but preening, plucking at his coat sleeve, meaning just this side of good.

  Judah says don’t go just yet, let’s smoke one good cigar.

  It has been simple for Maggie, a kind of acquiescence, not revolt—and that the path of least resistance happened also to be primrose is a lucky break admittedly, but not her intention or fault. It has been natural, this sitting down to supper with her husband and lawyer and sister-in-law; fortune comes full circle like a wheel.

  And there were surprises. She had watched him chew, bone-weary, head to one side and mouth making preparatory motions, as a blind man might. The attentive way he paused to swallow, the effort that it clearly was for Judah to down anything who when she met him gorged on flesh—the weakness in him fortified some fierce protective tenderness she might as well call love.

  “Should we talk about it?” Maggie asks.

  He makes no answer.

  “About how long I’m staying?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “As long as you need to.”

  “Which is why I want to talk about it.”

  “The doctors . . .” Hattie begins, but Judah is impatient, spitting smoke.

  “Doctors know shit from shinola. As long as they collect the fee it’s operation successful, patient dead. If you’re lucky you come out no worse than you went i
n.”

  “I wanted to tell you . . .” Maggie says.

  “What? What? Don’t tell me lies about doctors.”

  “That I’m here,” she offers. “As long as you want me to stay.”

  So the seven lean years succeeded seven fat; so she sojourned in what Hattie would call wilderness. Yet the Big House and its owner have not changed. “You are,” he said, “my only prized possession. My prizewinning entry at the fair.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “You’re sweet.”

  “I’m being truthful,” he said.

  “You flatter me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. What a generous comparison. The best homegrown turnip.A cow.”

  “My prizewinning entry,” he repeated.

  “Impossible”—she spread her hands. But he was impervious, possessing her, as he had been impervious to cows. He said they’ll treat you how you treat them, and you get as good as you give. Now Sam, for instance, had no use for Ayrshires. And they know it and can use their horns; they’re mean cows, Ayrshires are, and he’s got to watch them all the time, not like with Jerseys, they’re sweet. I mean there’s more than half a ton of cow, and you don’t want it disliking you . . .

  “That isn’t my point,” Maggie said.

  “What is, then?” He contrived surprise. “What am I saying that’s wrong?”

  “Oh, Jude,” she said.

  “Tell me and I’ll fix it”—he spread his hands, palms out. His lifeline was black.

  “I was trying to be serious. There’s ways and ways.”

  “I’ll mend my ways,” Judah said.

  So he joked and parried with her, inattentive. She never could touch him with words. He paid no heed to speech but heeded her motion and shape. She had been angry at that; it was what they called sexist now—the body’s degradation via compliment. Maggie fell back on body claims and was angry with herself and angrier with him for forcing that language upon her—language she’d learned since puberty, or since her first pink sheets. She had grown facile, using it, and fluent in her limbs’ articulation when she walked. She knew that, where she walked, men watched. They followed her with their eyes or in imagined deed and some men followed her actually. She swiveled her hips, she sometimes thought, in comic counterpoint to the way their heads would swivel—or advanced across the room in order to elicit an advance. But she’d been at it long enough and—she remembered Judah’s expression about the game of baseball—had retired undefeated, hanging up her spikes.

  She could delight him, at first. She pleasured him in simple ways, but they were a complex delight. She wore no underwear, for instance, beneath her evening gown. She perfumed herself and smacked her lips when watching him approach in the hot candlelit dark. She kept her stockings and garter belt on and lay down like one of those magazine pinups, Judah told her; when he entered her, she gasped and was appreciative and wanted, she would whisper, to be his garden of earth-ly delights.

  “You’ve got the house now,” Hattie says.

  “Yes.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May you have much joy in it. I wish you that.”

  “Don’t be so serious, Hattie. Nothing’s changed.”

  “That’s not how I see it,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re thirty years younger than I am. You can laugh.”

  “I wasn’t laughing,” Maggie says.

  The phone rings. Hattie goes to it. “Hello,” she answers. “Sherbrookes.”

  There is silence.

  “Sherbrookes,” Hattie says again. “Who is it?”

  Their mother had said, “Sherbrooke residence” is for the maids to say, but you never just answer the phone with “hello.” “Hi” is a way of measuring height, and “yes” is short for “Yes, who may I say is calling, please?” So Hattie had settled on “Sherbrookes” as a way to answer, and she says it a third time.

  “Hello”—her voice goes querulous. “Is anybody there?”

  In the instant it takes for her to cradle the receiver, Judah divines that the caller is Ian, calling his mother in code.

  “Nobody there,” Hattie says. “Just breathing.”

  “Maggie’s back,” he says.

  “How’s Ian?” Hattie faces Maggie. She drops her voice.

  “Who?”

  “Ian. Have you heard from him?”

  “Yes,” Maggie says. “Last week in fact. He’s fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “You don’t have to whisper.”

  She points to where the two men are puffing cigars. “I wouldn’t want Judah . . .”

  “What?” Maggie says. “I’m sorry but I just can’t hear you.”

  “Do you hear from him often?”

  “Yes. Well,” she pauses, judicious. “Not all that often.”

  “How often?”

  “It’s not that he’s been too busy to call,” Maggie says. “You understand that.”

  “I don’t,” Hattie tells her. “I do not.”

  “Well, your brother does.”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “I wasn’t shouting.”

  “You were,” Hattie tells her. “You are.”

  “This is silly,” Maggie says. “We can do better than this. He doesn’t ever call me, if that’s what you’re wanting to hear.”

  “I thought so,” Hattie triumphs. “He’s run out on every last one of us, I do so hope he’s well.”

  Maggie believes, and tried to tell her husband this for years, that joy’s a thing to share. You spread it around. You do that with butter, he says, not land. Good fences make good neighbors. She knows what he’s saying, she says, but he doesn’t hear her when she declares the opposite, bad fences make bad neighbors; and why should he mistrust this idea of neighborliness anyhow, why isn’t everybody in the same house always, sharing everything? A goddamn hippie commune, he says, in the days they used to argue; nobody gets in my bed but the lady I put there, you hear? I hear you, Judah, Maggie says; I get the message. Loud and clear, he asks her, and she cups a hand to her head like an earphone, tilts it, saying, “Eh?”

  But it isn’t always comical, Finney knows that; it’s been a bone of contention between them as long as he remembers. If pushed to it he’d say, indeed, that’s been the rock they foundered on, the bedrock of the squabble where belief enters in, saying enough’s enough. They’re peas in a pod, as he sees it, two of a kind.

  “You’ll excuse us,” Judah says, not making it a question. “I want to talk with my wife.”

  “Yes,” says Finney.

  “Good night.”

  “Night.” Released, he gathers his things.

  “You can go now,” Judah says. “Hattie.”

  “I’m not the one who’s tired,” she says. “You mustn’t mind me.”

  “I don’t. I want to talk to this one who’s come all the way from New York City.”

  “Good night then,” Harriet says.

  “Good night.

  “He’ll try to fool you,” she insists to the room. “He’s tireder than he lets on. I promise you that.”

  “Hattie, you can leave us now.”

  “I’m leaving. It isn’t so easy”—she turns to Maggie. “I sit all day in that chair. And you can’t imagine how it bothers the sciatica, how it irritates the nerve. It’s probably a pinched nerve, Ida Simmons says. But the courtesy to let me take my time going, is that too much, plain gratitude, a simple thank you . . .”

  “Hattie,” Judah says, and this time is commanding. Finney takes her arm; they make their way. And as Maggie turns to follow Judah, smiling at him, Finney, with a captive’s sheepish smile who nonetheless would wash the feet of captors and dry them with her hair, the lawyer feels that Maggie wanted company not for the celebration but its mournful aftermath, not the night but day. She would cross that bridge when the bridge came; she would make the mountains come to meet her, shifting on their axis as the
world continually shifts.

  VII

  Lately, Hattie has been seeing things. She walks into a room and the walls whir. Cats flash across the edges of her sight. Sometimes she sees birds there also, flitting, with that quick lift and shift of direction that mean they sense an obstacle, and sometimes no beast she can name. She would rather call them “cat” and “bird” than nameless changeling presences because her eyes are weak.

  Tonight, however, she can name the ghost she saw. It is—she was sure of it—Seth. The Big House is not haunted, but her dead infant nephew is a presence at the windows and outside every wall. She would not voice her fear to Judah or ask if he sensed something too, but she is certain—in a way that beggars doubt—the crib death was no accident. It would not have happened to another family or in another house. It had not been vengeance so much as retribution for what they’d failed to learn. The lesson was humility; they’d scanted that. They’d thought themselves above ill luck, but all the time it had been brewing, always there in some dark corner, fermenting, heating up.

  The Sherbrookes had been fingered by a finger dipped in blood. That moving finger moved across the village, Hattie knows, hovering above the roofs and chimneys, sparing firstborn sons and families that lived with due humility. But above the Big House it wavered and then pointed down, like applewood for water, or any dowser’s stick. She sees forked lightning that way, sometimes, as if it were God’s dowsing stick, eradicating what it touched in order to point to the depths.

  Seth had been a candle snuffed out before its time, is what they said at the service: a brightly burning light. And she had been bereaved. She’d mourned and wailed in silence for as many months as Seth had lived—neither daring to commiserate with her sister-in-law nor comfort her brother out loud. Judah had studied gain and pride, not the difficult lessons of loss. His wife proved his equal in that.

  “I’m sorry, Maggie,” Hattie would venture. “If you must make me say it.”

  “For what?”

  “For what happened to Seth. For the way it happened.”