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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Yes. A good point there. I see what you’re driving at. But it’s a false analogy, if you’ll permit me, Mrs. Sherbrooke. The point is really one of snapping like a string.”

  “Well, what about Rubinstein?” she asked.

  “Now, him. Now, Artur. He’ll bend and stretch forever but he’ll never snap. That’s my considered opinion; he’ll be playing piano till he’s ninety-five years old. And enchanting the audience too.”

  “There’s so much hair oil there.” She laughed. “There’s ever so much lubrication for the moving parts.”

  Judah snapped his wineglass. He had tightened his hand on the stem. The crystal shattered and his red wine spilled.

  “Darling”—his wife had half-risen—“are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  He watched the wine stain spread.

  “You’re certain you didn’t get cut?”

  “Yes. The goddamn stuff’s so thin you break it just by breathing.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “Don’t mind me, folks. Just pay me no mind.”

  So she would ring for another glass and bottle and the maid would bring them to him and pour salt on the stain. He would note with satisfaction how the gossip lagged. The piano teacher’s windy exuberance would slacken, and Margaret would focus on her plate, and Andrew Kincannon would go thoughtful, toying with his cutlery and glass.

  “You were saying?” Judah prompted.

  “We were talking,” his wife said, “about concert careers. We had been discussing that. But we don’t have to, really, there are other subjects. We could discuss, for instance, the quality of shit you spread this morning on the fields.”

  She was feisty; he granted her that. She had had more balls than all of her suitors combined. That was why he spared them, not bothering with the knife; they were just accessories, like hats she tried on and discarded or lace mantillas stored against some dress-up occasion. She sat at the table’s far head, lit by candle glitter, and was his equal adversary—crystal he could neither warm nor crush.

  “My cup runneth over,” he said—and proposed it as a toast to both his wife and guests.

  Now he reaches the lumber trail’s end, or not its end so much as evanescence, the track of it faded, those wheel bruises finally healed where first they leveled trees then leveled the undergrowth, hauling trees down. All Judah sees is second growth, or even third growth maybe, the biggest standing tree his body’s girth only, trunk congruent to trunk. He thinks of the gigantic labor it once was to raze these hills and how his great-great-grandfather’s logging teams had spent the summer cutting and the winter using ice sleds, clearing, season by year till the mountain shed growth like a man going bald and was its rock face only, with streams for the blood lines and high white patches and the skull showing through fuzz. Daniel Webster spoke once, Maggie discovered, at Glastonbury, the confluence of valleys that was the Woodford Mountain Pass, and forty thousand men came to hear him, she said, and even if she multiplied by twentyfold his true attentive audience, even if there’d be no man without a megaphone who could make himself heard, no matter how high the soapbox or how high-pitched his bellow, over the stertorous breath of the wind; even if she multiplied by forty how spellbound he held them and how long without coughing or pausing to swallow he spoke, the speech presumed vitality where all was death-thralled now, and absence, no living thing beyond Judah’s voice range but sparrow or sparrow hawk, squirrel and deer (there were mountain men he’d heard of who ranged these hills still, toothless, unlettered, begetting new idiot-get). So he bears left from the lumber trail and finds the beaver bog he recollected, dams intact, the three beaver houses seeming empty but trim, and knows them therefore not empty but that his crashing passage through the undergrowth signaled the beavers to take shelter and wait this his alien presence out in their wet safety, remembers having ridden there with Maggie (she was the better rider, really, though he could stick to any horse he’s known or force it to yield to his own unyieldingness, who had been thrown often enough but not beaten, who clambered back grinning and clamped his legs to that shallow-breathing belly like glue—though that was not the point for Maggie, never at issue somehow; the horse would be completed by her, suddenly intact, so that when once again riderless it would look halved, bereft, deprived of that airy and sweet-smelling weight it had been released by, not burdened) taking picnics, with maybe a chicken and wine in the hamper, and hard-boiled eggs and cheese and fruit, and they’d clear themselves an area and tether the horses and spread out the blankets, then use the blankets both as a table and bed—“A jug of wine,” she’d said to him, “a loaf of bread, and thou.” “What’s that?” he had asked her, incurious. “And thou beside me in the wilderness,” she’d said. “That’s poetry, you dodo, that’s the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám.” “Makes a pitiful picnic,” he’d said, and she flailed at him, laughing, pummeling, till he folded both her fists in his one hand and held. So Judah torments himself, returning, looking for the flattened grass where last they’d lain, a score of years before, where a century previous maybe Daniel Webster also took his pleasure, the beaver bog a streambed then, with limpid and inviting pools to slake the body’s thirst, and falls to his knees in the thicket and is assaulted by mosquitoes and the branches lash his arms as he scrabbles beneath them for some sort of signal, her trace.

  What is it he hunts there, he asks himself, circling, and answers with what he can’t find. First, and predictably, the ground has shifted, grown over so that he won’t even know (except this is the southern bank, their chosen exposure) if the patch of earth he picks is near the one they sunned and spawned on, if that tree had been the sapling at the center of her Morgan’s forage circle, if the brackish water before him has receded or advanced, making the lakebed their bed. Second, he remembers losing nothing and strewing nothing that lasts (stowing the wine bottle back in the hamper, though empty, forgetting neither shoes nor watch nor anything corporeal, but everything, he whispers now, every single thing that matters) for chicken bones won’t make a chicken, nor cheese rinds the cow nor eggshells the egg, the fruit pit turned to humus maybe but surely not an orchard. Third, his memory’s gone fitful and he can no longer distinguish the dream from remembrance, so she torments him only incarnate as mosquitoes, the flesh he presses flaccid, long since slack. Yet Judah makes obeisance and rims his poor perimeter with stone and kneels facing in the four directions, arms at a northwest axis and feet splayed, pointing south-southeast, and shuts his eyes and bends his head and rends her garments gently, kissing the breast-dust.

  IX

  She came for her old love of him, she says. She came for her continued love, and because he’d let her.

  “Come running when I call?” he says. “That isn’t like you.”

  “No. But it’s been some time.”

  “Yes.”

  She smiles at him, attempting to kindle an answering smile. “Since last you called, I mean.”

  “I didn’t have no telephone number. Finney did.”

  “You could have whistled.” She bats her eyes, slipping back into their mockery like camphored clothes.

  “Ayup.”

  “You still got all your teeth.”

  He purses his lips.

  “You’re a handsome old goat, Mr. J. P. Sherbrooke, even if you are my husband . . .”

  “I thank you, Mrs. Sherbrooke.”

  He inclines his head, and she watches him carefully. He does so out of weariness, Maggie decides, and plays their courtship game indifferent to the rules.

  “Don’t take it as a compliment,” she finishes. “Take it as the truth.”

  She sits beside him, takes his hand in hers and traces the lines on his knuckles. There are crosshatchings and little white hairs. There is dirt in the pores. Always, no matter how hard she had scrubbed at him—or he for her—with soap and pumice stone and nail brushes, there had been dirt in the pores. It was, he said, cleanly dirt.

  “That’s a contradiction,” Ma
ggie had argued. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “There’s dirty dirt,” he said. “Not all of it’s sweet-smelling.”

  “Well, it’s distinctive filth, I grant you that.”

  They argued then for conversation’s sake and not because it mattered, not because she meant it or would hold to her argument’s side. Had he apologized, saying Maggie, I’m sorry, I just can’t get rid of it, she would have told him, why should you, it’s honest and justified dirt. The house is built with bricks and wood, and both of them come out of the earth; why try to hide where you come from or what you did today?

  She feels Ian is correct. He has severed himself from their lives with a finality so absolute he can even afford to be kind. His postcards are cheery, always, as is his voice on the phone. She wonders how he knew so much so early—knew to get out when the going was possible, since the Sherbrooke knots around him would tighten, not loosen, with time. She knows no context for him and therefore has various dreams. Always his eyes are the same glacial gray; always he calculates odds. Seth remains her suckling infant, doomed by crib death to consistency, but Ian is the principle of change. She dreams of him sometimes, resplendent, in rodeos or bank board meetings or in the Himalayas, coiling rope. He sends her cards from Mallorca and Dakar and calls from Albuquerque or, once, collect from a hotel lobby in Bombay. She too has many addresses, and sometimes she wonders if Ian is trying to reach her, needy when she is unreachable—sometimes worries that he’ll fetch up penniless or sick.

  By contrast her own separation felt sham. She had maintained it urgently, knowing anyhow for certain she’d see her husband again. His hand is heavy. She hefts it. They are in his chosen room, though she had expected he would lie in their shared bed and not on this single gray relic with its cotton sheets. His weight impedes her; she finds the phrase “dead weight.”

  “Husband?”

  He makes a sound in his throat.

  “You warm enough?”

  He coughs again.

  “Or maybe too warm?”

  “Just right.”

  “Tell me whenever it changes, OK? If you get too cold or hot.”

  His fingers move. They have their own volition. They cramp and curl.

  “I’ll tell you that,” he says.

  “Hattie would blame me, don’t you think? I’d catch it good and proper if you get a chill.”

  “She’s a taskmaster, yes.”

  Maggie asks herself, this night, what is she trading for what? Put safety in the scales against the sweet wine of risk; put roots against pure rootlessness, the determined creature against the self-determined. She looks back for turning points that she’d not seen when turning—for what their poet called two paths within a single wood. There had been options, of course. But Maggie understands (in this first year of her sixth decade; who was it, she tries to recall, which friend that said the first years of any decade are the difficult ones, so she’s spent time preparing, through the last five years or so, for being fifty, can handle it, is managing nicely, I thank you) the way nostalgia trumps truth.

  Therefore she tests herself in mirrors and men’s eyes. The mechanics of flirtation are easy for her still, as the gearshift is simple for garage attendants and the heating system for the fuel oil man. She knows which strings to pluck and how to strike the tonic note and, bending over her husband, which card to play.

  The water is warm. Maggie is swimming at night, in phosphor; it is their honeymoon. Her feet and arms are wands. He snorts and wallows while she noses through the incandescent water, igniting galaxies of diatoms. She has brought a mussel steamer and they are hunting mussels on the water-covered rocks. There are weeds and kelp and crabs attached, and she separates them carefully; she distrusts free-floating mussels, she says, because one mussel filled with mud and not meat can spoil the entire concoction. Nor should there be grit in the brine. He says, “You know about salt water,” and means it, not scornful of her shoreline certainties. She takes it, however, not as a compliment and says: “I’ve lived here, you know. Always by the sea in summers—with one exception, that timein Vermont.”

  Their honeymoon house is on stilts. He likes to lie face down on the porch, watching the landscape through slats. The gray sand eddies beneath him, and the spear grass traces perfect circles; he cuts his feet on the sharp spear-grass points.

  (“Are you glad about it?” he asks.

  “About what?”

  “That single exception? That time they hauled you to the mountains.”

  “Kicking and screaming.” She smiles.

  “And giving you a bicycle.”

  “I’m glad,” she says. “I wasn’t at the time, you know. I wanted a canoe.”

  “We’ll get you one.”

  “Oh, Jude, you promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Not hope to die,” he says. “But cross my heart.”

  For which she rewards him by kissing his hands, then putting his hands on her breasts. “Cross mine instead,” she says.)

  “You’ve been hearing from him.”

  “Who?”

  “Ian. Our son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I never denied it,” she says.

  “How often?”

  “He sends his best. He wants you to know he’s thinking about us together.”

  “It’s big of him.”

  “He’s busy now. He’s got a life to live.”

  “So where is he living it at?” Judah asks. He picks out a thread from the coverlet. The thread is brown; he winds it around his index finger, tight.

  “In New York mostly.”

  “Where?”

  “He’d tell you, Jude, I’m certain.”

  “I’m his father,” Judah says. “In case you’ve forgotten I’m fifty percent of his family. I’ve got a right to know.”

  “No one’s denying that.”

  “You are. You both of you have got it figured so he’ll be a stranger when I die.”

  She lifts her eyes. He reverses the spool on his finger and jerks it so it snaps.

  “Tell me what he says,” says Judah.

  “I’ve already told you. He sends his best wishes.”

  “For a speedy recovery, right?”

  “For everything.”

  “Well, where’s my card? Where does it say ‘Get Well Soon’? Why doesn’t he call us just once?”

  “That’s his business,” she says.

  “It’s what you put him up to. Why can’t he just come visit?”

  “He’s not a child now anymore. It’s his choice, his decision.”

  Judah, she knows, has set traps. His enticement is his legacy, the house and land and wealth. Whoever wants, he seems to be saying, to get into this house of mine must eat the fish head at its center; whoever backs in can’t back out.

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing I’m aware of,” Maggie says.

  “They all of them want something. They’re sniffing around this place.”

  “For what?” she says.

  “For real-estate development. For the state highway extension.”

  “Don’t let them do it,” she says.

  “High-rise dwellings, I believe they call it. Condominiums. Museums. Doesn’t matter what they call it, they all of them want something.”

  “Not me,” she says. “I don’t even want to be questioned.”

  “Why not? If you’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “It isn’t a crime yet to visit your husband.”

  “Why did you leave?” he asks her, insistent. “And why did you come back?”

  She tells him that she loves the place, making her mouth work. She had had, that afternoon, to change the bulb in her bathroom; the light burned out. She went to the pantry and selected the right size—and standing there, among the insignia of some strange family order, in her chill shuttered seclusion (the tomato soup next to the peanut butter where she,
Maggie, never would have placed it; the lightbulbs stacked by salad oil and aluminum foil) she felt at home.

  “You look well.”

  “Thank you, Judah.”

  “Every compliment I paid you was the truth,” he says. “You do look well.”

  “My goodness.” Maggie smiles at him. “You’ve gone and gotten courtly.”

  “Just paying dues,” he says. “Giving out praise where it’s due.”

  “You didn’t used to do that.”

  “I would have,” he tells her, triumphant. “You just didn’t used to deserve it.”

  There was a hole he dug and covered over carefully, with brush laid crosswise and long grass and leaves. It looked to be substantial ground, but was a pit with thorns. There was a net he slung and covered with branches and leaves and when his prey ran through, Judah chopped the net’s drawlines and hoisted his catch. There were decoys to set and red herrings to drag on the trail. There were chipmunks who would tackle musk-melon rind, if the winter up ahead looked difficult enough.

  “The time is past,” she ventures, “when we should beg for favors from each other. When everything you have the right to ask for is denied.”

  “It isn’t my intention,” Judah says, “to beg.”

  “No.”

  “There’s things I own and things it’s mine to give away. And there’s been a pack of them after it, believe you me.”

  “I believe it.”

  “You see them off in corners whispering, or dickering about the best approach. Which way to sidle up to Uncle Jude . . .”

  “It can’t be pretty to watch.”

  “No,” he tells her, triumphing. “Not half so pretty as you.”

  All through the autumn squirrels hoard, and chipmunks, and the black bears accumulate fat; so everything about him, that had slept a dull slow season, stirs and is grasping and trapped. Judah hears them plotting; they rooted for his leavings and shat tomato plants. They were mistaken, he told the town planners, to think they could reap what he sowed; a man’s entitled to the distance he can travel in a day, on one horse and in one direction; then take that line as radius and cast it in a circle, not forgetting mountains, not forgetting riverbanks and the valley that they fashioned, not forgetting trees.