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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “But no one knows what happened. You’re not responsible.”

  “We’re all of us responsible.”

  Maggie said nothing, of course. It would have been simpler to dowse for water in the desert than to find the source of tears in her, or to strike a rock and make it gush. She cast no aspersions and said nothing bitter and named nobody by name. But she was tormented by guilt. Hattie herself was unable to sleep and sat awake as now she sat, hearing lamentation fill the corridor. Wherever Maggie stood or rocked there was the sound of weeping; when she, Hattie, went down to breakfast her sister-in-law would be in the kitchen already, wide-eyed, staring, fixing coffee.

  “Did you sleep?” Hattie asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” she’d answer. “I only just now came down.”

  So they kept up appearances. They pretended—as Judah too pretended—that nothing was so badly wrong it couldn’t be set right. What the doctor called crib death, he said, cannot be predicted and therefore by care or precaution avoided: it’s water gone under the bridge. And therefore Baby Seth was scrabbling at the walls and windows—still waiting for a proper burial ceremony and the proper mourning period—at her sight’s outer edge.

  Lately she has dreamed day-waking dreams. Thomas Sherbrooke tumbles, in her vision, through the ocean’s depths and whirlpools the way washing does in a fluff-dry cycle. He spins past her, sleeve over leg. His sleeve is empty and unbuttoned but does not flap; it waves. This gravestone lies if it says that it marks the place of my burial, Thomas Sherbrooke says. She, Hattie, hears him out. He is mourning the sweet sun and how his eyes were eaten by the barracuda, and how he’d been undutiful.

  “You see me, Hattie,” Thomas Sherbrooke says, “in Davy Jones’s lock-up. You see me ’twixt the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she pleads. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Whose, then? Who was it went to make his fortune on the bounding main?”

  “Put it out of your mind, Thomas, if only for my sake. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “The devil spar,” he burbles at her, inconsolable. “That’s what I’m tied to, me hearties. That’s where I spend my time. Forever and ever and ever and . . .”

  “Don’t. I can’t bear to hear it.”

  He silences. He raises his leftover arm at her with all the sweet grace of Ian, and he doffs his cap. Striped fish swim at his ears. “I’ll have this dance,” he says. “If you’ll permit me, Miss Harriet. It’s written on the dance card.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “It’s what we call a hornpipe jig,” he says.

  She waits, collecting her breath. It is difficult to breathe. “I can’t swim,” Hattie tells him, but he guides her through shoals. The water, once she holds his waist, does nothing to her garments, and they spin together, laughing. He murmurs compliments. He says she is a natural-born dancer, and she says he lies. He protests his whole life now is spent in the service of truth.

  “That’s right and proper,” she commends him. “That’s as it should be.”

  Pilot fish maneuver past. He points to them: “It means there’s a big one nearby. A killer whale, most likely. Some kind of shark.”

  She struggles, in over her head. He whispers courteous things to her, and his manner does not change—but what had seemed a dance transforms itself to writhing. She falters, loses step. She opens her mouth and the water roars in and she swallows, choking, while Thomas weaves himself around her like a willow branch, or weeds.

  “Your manners, Mr. Sherbrooke,” Hattie pleads.

  He continues dancing, swimming, smiling his death smile.

  “Please.”

  His hair, she sees with horror now, is water moccasins.

  “A gentleman needs no reminding when to take a lady home.”

  But he is oblivious, as she knew he would be; his arm is an electric eel. His legs are octopus legs.

  The death of Seth that night in his crib had been, she understands, the beginning of the end. There had been trouble beforehand, of course; every marriage has some trouble, and this May–September marriage was slated for its share. Still, she’d thought it for the best and thought they’d handle difficulty when difficulty came; they’d talk it out and fix it the way they discussed what’s for supper. In the first years of their marriage, they gabbled over weather and the news and music and what Maggie was planning to do for the day and what Judah’d planned for the morning and, later, what Ian did or was about to do. They chattered and whispered and told the same stories until it seemed they’d wear the language out. They wore their tongues out, surely, what with kissing each other and licking their lips. Those early years were hard, of course, but if she’d been a betting woman and been asked to bet she’d have plunked her money down on luck and love enduring; she too forgot humility and dreamed no ill-omen dreams.

  Then Seth died a crib death and was gathered up by God. Then the banter ended, and there was silence at meals. Judah could talk with his mouth full, she told herself, relenting; he could mumble nonsense all he wanted to at suppertime, just so he shared some of his bereavement and lightened it by sharing with those who were also bereaved. Ian took no notice or, if he noticed, didn’t much mind. That was understandable; he was only three years old and too young to care. But there was selfishness abounding in the silence of the Big House, and it made a breach too wide to fill.

  “He’s the strong but silent type,” Maggie complained. “Know why? Your brother has nothing to say.”

  “Still waters run deep,” she had said.

  “Come off it, Hattie, still waters don’t run. They sit there and stagnate, that’s what they do. They get covered over with weeds.”

  Soon Maggie started traveling, who’d been a stay-at-home. She’d say where she was going and take a trip and visit friends to fill up the silence-breach. First she’d stay the day away, and then the day and night, and then stay days at a time. To begin with, Maggie took her son along and he’d come back from Concord, Massachusetts, or Mystic, Connecticut, or New York City with stories to tell of every ship they boarded and each museum and what the grizzly bear looked like, standing on its hind legs in the hall. Then, with him, at summer camp, she went off alone. Judah would be in the fields or at his accounts or off at auction somewhere, and she’d back the Packard up and race away and should never, Hattie thought, have been permitted to drive.

  But she had always known her sister-in-law would return. She knew it as she’d known that time on School Street when the collie ran after the bus. Hattie saw it coming though she’d seen the dog go after cars and trucks and buses every morning for what seemed like years, and veer and fade off barking. She’d known it a part of the morning’s arrangement, part of the proportion of things that the bus would angle left because the Oldsmobile in front of the Carters was parked a foot farther away from the curb, and the collie would maybe lose footing or maybe scent something for once on the wind or off the tire’s rim that wasn’t danger but delight, would hurtle ahead as the bus shifted gears (the driver so used to this noisy assault he’d not even bothered to check, certain the dog was in sham earnest only, more worried about Oldsmobiles than someone’s pet in any case and not overly worried about either, worried most about his watch, which if it wasn’t running fast was telling him he’d better). The pattern held; she’d seen it; the dog was entirely crushed.

  The chills were mortal here in April, what with the weather changing and snowing the one day and raining the next and then being sixty degrees. So there is also, Hattie knows, the question of her brother’s health. He shouldn’t get over-excited; he shouldn’t tire himself. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she warned.

  “Don’t baby me,” Judah responded.

  “I wasn’t,” Harriet said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I only said you ought to be more careful.”

  “There you go again.”

  “All right. I didn’t mean it badly.”

  “Again,” Judah said. “Again.”


  So she’d wished him vanquished who had lately been invincible, and is glad now (she decides, scrubbing her teeth and then using dental floss and then mouthwash) that Maggie has returned. Teeth are the mark of class distinction, Harriet maintains. They are the surest yardstick in these times of changing measure. No poor people have adequate teeth, and if poor or ignorant people have adequate teeth they are the exceptions that still prove the rule. She likes her sweets; she will not gainsay that. She keeps mints and toffee candy by her bed. But she attends to her dental hygiene and scrubs and rinses with a scrupulous regularity after every meal. She will die without a false tooth in her, and only a few teeth removed.

  It is raining loudly now; snow funnels from the eaves. She can remember building snowmen with Maggie and Ian and maybe one of his friends. They gathered and rough-shaped the snowman while she fetched the props: a scarf and porkpie hat and carrots and old coat and coal. Ian rolled his snowball down the hill, enlarging it, and by the time he reached them the snowball was up to his shoulders. The friend did the same and brought them what would serve as the snowman’s round white head. They hoisted it up and smoothed the balls together and Maggie said, “We need a belt. Hattie, is there a belt for this big-bellied man?”

  “We need arms,” Ian said. “We have to give him arms.”

  “And shoes,” said Ian’s friend. What was his name, she asks herself; was it the Harrison boy?

  “That isn’t possible. He’d melt.”

  Nonetheless they set to it, smoothing and adjusting him and inserting the coals for his buttons and the carrot for his nose. She went back in the house to carve potato ears, then fetched a pair of Judah’s boots and an old dressing gown sash.

  “His feet are fat,” the friend declared.

  “And flat,” rhymed Ian. “His feet are fat and flat.”

  They skipped with the pure pleasure of it, fashioning the snowman until their gloves were soaked. Their noses, Maggie said, were just as red as any carrot, and dribbled a good deal more. “His feet are fat and flat,” they chortled and placed Jude’s boots, Charlie-Chaplin style, pointing out wide-angled at the snowman’s base. Maggie tilted the hat down at a rakish angle, so that it shaded one eye.

  “Now let’s do Mrs. Snowman,” Ian said.

  “Mrs. Snowlady, you mean,” Maggie said.

  “Let’s do you, Mommy.”

  “Snowladies,” the friend—Joey Harrison?—said. “What do they getto wear?”

  “Well,” Maggie said. “Coal and carrots and potatoes, like the others. Then maybe an apron and bonnet. You know, something housewifely, so no one gets confused.”

  “I’ll get them,” Hattie offered. “I know where.”

  “And don’t forget the lipstick,” Maggie said. There had been an edge in her voice.

  “We’ll build you, Mommy,” Ian said. “From the bottom up. We’ll give you straw for hair.”

  So they set to work again and fashioned the snowman’s companion. Hattie fetched an apron and a broom. The house was hot, or maybe it was the temperature change, or the afternoon which before had been cloudless was suddenly cloud-shadowed and her energy was spent; maybe it had been the vengeance with which Maggie shaped and jammed on breasts and buttressed her ice hips—but what had been a game was earnest now, and not much fun, and she told Ian that she’d lost the stomach for it.

  “But where’s the bonnet?” Ian asked. “You promised.”

  “I couldn’t find one,” she said.

  It had been evil, obscene. Her breasts were melon-large and pendulous already, dripping with the heat of hands, and Maggie forced the broomstick in between and said, “Well, what do you think? Do you think that should satisfy Mr. Snowman? The lord and master here.”

  Another argument was when the Toy House was repaired, and Maggie asked, why bother with those pygmy slates; why mullion the windows just so? She called the structure an extravaganza, saying it wasted both money and time. But Judah told her it isn’t so much a bother as duty, and if he had had the patience he would build a dollhouse inside the Toy House, and a midget dollhouse inside the dollhouse and so on. There are ivory elephants, Judah said, that split down the center to disclose further ivory elephants; he’d seen one set of eleven white elephants—the first ten hollow and segmented. They ranged from the size of his two hands to the size of his thumbnail—and all of them hand-carved. Now why bother doing that, he asked; why worry over imitation and repeating shapes?

  “There’s a difference,” Harriet had said—still siding with Maggie back then—“between what maybe takes one Indian man a week to carve in his spare time, when he’s got nothing better to do. And setting Albert Wills at a Toy House this whole summer, when you’ve got no toys. When there’s no little girl to love it as a place to play.”

  Lord knows where Ian has gone off to, and she, Hattie, certainly doesn’t and doubts that Judah knows. It is the gypsy in him, Hattie said. There were gypsies enough in the Sherbrooke generations, without adding Maggie’s portion—his legs just built for running, his hand to wave good-bye. “You take yourself with you,” she’d warned him, “wherever you travel. Ian. There’s nothing you don’t carry when you go.”

  “A backpack, Aunt. A single suitcase, maybe.”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel,” she said. “It’s foolishness to think you travel light.”

  He has always been her darling. Now they mention him in anger, if they mention him at all, and she maintains to Judah that it’s pure plain calumny. “If you’ve got nothing good to say, don’t say it,” she had said. “If there’s no kindness in you for that poor forsaken boy.”

  “The kindest thing is say nothing,” Judah said. “That’s right. He about doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Well, there’s trouble where he’s living, that’s for sure,” her brother said. “There’s floods and earthquakes and general uprising.”

  “Judah,” she protested. “He’s your son.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  He had been teasing, she knew. Ian was a chip off Judah’s block. He looked the spitting image of his mother, and therefore those who didn’t know him thought he came mostly from her, and even whispered sometimes, leaning to their cups or in their cups and insinuating, that maybe he was straight out of Maggie with no intervention, or maybe intervened with by some other blue-eyed blond whose last name wasn’t Sherbrooke by marriage or birth. They had candidates. They listed them, though Hattie wasn’t listening. Such talk was simple foolishness, for Ian was as like her brother as son had been to father since the start of time. He was look-alike with his mother, she said, all surface angles and skinny and fair, but inside he was pure plain Sherbrooke to the core.

  And so his enmity with Judah was the enmity of near and dear, not strangers. They knew each other’s thoughts so well there was no need of talking, and those who heard only silence thought there’s nothing between them to say. It was a man in a mirror, not needing to articulate what he tells the shaving mug, or how he feels that morning, but plain as the nose on his face. It was the prodigal’s story all over again; there were those who left and those who stayed at home, and the stay-at-homes were wayfaring strangers when the stranger-son returned.

  “Well, anyway he’s growing up,” she said.

  Her brother drew air in his nose.

  “Twenty-five years old he’d be.”

  “Thereabouts,” Judah said, “I forget.”

  “You can’t have forgotten.”

  “Why not? It’s not like there’s been birthday cake.”

  “Whose fault is that?” she flared.

  “Nobody’s,” Judah said. “Twenty-five. I remember now, because that was the year the Jerseys ran milk fever, and we lost every single lamb at lambing time.”

  They were peas in a pod, she maintained; they were spitting images which is why they spat. She remembered when Ian had the whooping cough, and Maggie nursed him until she too fell sick with the flu, and the boy’s cough got worse. The doctor s
aid keep him quiet, keep him easy since we mustn’t strain his heart, that’s the danger with babies, and fever—so Judah sat by his bedside three nights running, not shutting his eyes and not letting anyone else use the washcloth or thermometer but only insisting on beef-marrow broth and grated apple and toast. She’d wondered where he learned that gentleness, and how he has forgotten it since—but knows he’s not forgotten, really, only learned to lock it in when he locked Maggie out . . .

  So she had known at lunchtime—what with his long delays and haircut and the way he’d fumbled with her maraschino cherries—that Judah had an announcement. He made preparations with each shift and set and motion of his mouth. She’d heard him out often enough. He’d talk and talk and what would matter was the single thing unsaid.

  She’d tried it out by naming Margaret Coburn—and knew, by his reaction, that she’d gauged the tide drift right. Margaret had called, indeed, but not to ask Judah to be the honorary chairman of the Library Committee Funding Drive; she’d white-lied though not really lied about that. Margaret had called to say his thousand-dollar pledge was welcome, as it had been welcome every year since she, Harriet, joined the volunteer staff. And surely Margaret Coburn would have been daunted had Judah (who rarely set foot in the building, who didn’t read worth mentioning and then only agricultural circulars or histories he took six weeks to finish, then forgot) been willing to serve. It would have meant a pledge hike and Margaret called about that. The Library expenses had increased. There was inflation everywhere, and books were hard-hit by inflation and magazine subscription prices, and the cost of heat. She explained these things to Hattie—who had known them anyhow—and also knew that Judah would maybe increase his pledge but not serve as an honorary chairman of the Funding Drive.

  So she’d sounded Margaret’s name—calling her “Maggie” a-purpose, not risking much. He exploded as she’d thought he might explode. She remembers their father’s dead face. It had a smile upon it past the art of any undertaker; it must have been the hand of God that turned the corners up. So natural, she’d said to Judah, so like him to the life. She’d prayed that he would leave this world with all his limbs and wits about him, able to walk without assistance the path to Heaven’s gate. Their mother had had to be wheeled. She wished their father Joseph in the full possession of his strength. And that wish has surely been granted, Hattie knows; she’d laid red roses on his chest, and he’d seemed to settle in the coffin, dapper, smiling lightly, in the middle of a dream it was too good to leave. The cuckoo sounds ten times, then pauses, then sounds once on a higher note; it is ten-fifteen.