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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Now he raises himself and sits upright. He does this with a smooth swivel motion, shifting his hips. It is the gesture of a farmer—rolling out under the tractor or carrying a feed sack or vaulting over the gate.

  “Hey,” Maggie says. “I thought you would be sleeping.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What woke you?”

  “I don’t ever sleep these nights. I give myself twenty minutes. It’s a way to let Hattie get rested, see, to tell her I sleep straightway through. And”—he moves his mouth—“to give me some left-alone time.”

  “I can take a hint.”

  “I didn’t mean that. Not from you.”

  “You want a dance band?” Maggie stands. “You just moved like you’ve been practicing.”

  “What do they call it? The Twist?”

  “It’s the Black Bottom,” she jokes. “That’s what’s in fashion today.”

  “I knew you’d know the name of it. You’d know every one of those dances. Be in on the latest.”

  “The Black Bottom isn’t the latest,” she says. “It’s been replaced.”

  “The Yellow Belly, then. You’ll know them all.”

  “If you only want to argue, Judah, why did you let me come back?”

  “You’re my wife. You’re not some money-grubbing climber come to lick my hand and bite it when they think I’m sleeping; you’re not that.”

  This is said in accusation and with a spitting venom that makes Maggie stare.

  “You wouldn’t show up smiling just to wish me dead now, would you; you’d not quit the house then come back smiling when there’s money in the wind. When I’ve got a will written out for notaries to stamp. There’s others who might do that, but not you.”

  Seth had suckled at her; his perfect hands had ten perfect fingers with perfect crescent nails. They fitted themselves to the curve of her breast and were a perfect fit. His eyes were blue as blue could be and he shut them in appreciation while he drank. They stayed that way. Then the suction lessened; then his lips stopped working; then the action of his throat, in its turn, ceased. He slept.

  “You let me come. You asked me to.”

  “No. Finney did.”

  “You haven’t got to wreck it, Mr. Sherbrooke. We could maybe like each other.”

  “Don’t take me for a fool,” Judah says. “It isn’t too much to ask, now is it, just don’t take me for a fool.”

  “I won’t,” she says. “I never have.”

  “Miss Black Bottom. Miss Yellow Belly,” he derides her. “Maggie the Queen of the hop.”

  Then Judah shuts his eyes. There is a regularity in his breathing that makes it seem to be sleep. She imagines husbands a century or so before who’d leave for seven years and go to cross a continent or ocean. Gone to make a fortune or shore up failing fortunes, they would come back wearing earrings maybe, and carrying parrots or malacca canes, smoking strangely fashioned pipes. Or centuries before that, even, bounding home to tell of wondrous voyages, and three-legged natives wearing palm fronds for shoes, and nothing else but musk oil to disguise their animality. There would be news to give and get, and the oil lamps would have flickered and the windows misted over just the same way for that pair of strangers, those fraudulent avatars also . . .

  Old sons would visit mothers who had lost their sense and sight. Sons would come home to fling themselves after the last handful of earth strewn on a new-dug grave. They would return, Maggie imagines, with a week’s hard ride, with no chance to favor their horses or thank the ferryman sufficiently (who was not used to night trips, who didn’t like the weather and was half-deaf anyhow, who heard no apologies therefore and waved the tip away in a gesture of derision, muttering about horse pucky on his loading ramp). Sons returned without left legs or six inches taller or bearded or bald, returning through malarial swamps and taking the shortcut past the tamaracks where two thousand died that first August—skirting the bogs and rapids, but losing their packhorses anyhow to gopher holes, a kind of indignity always attendant, mosquitoes rampant and the storm-felled oaks impassable, the message (“Come Home if you Can; Mother Faring poorly and would like to see you Once”) deciphered, worried over endlessly, the paper of it worn and rubbed dull with folding, edges furled . . .

  “I’m dying,” Judah says.

  She makes no answer.

  “You know that.”

  “No.”

  “Finney must have told you. You got to know that much tonight.”

  She takes his hand.

  “I’ll die if I sleep here alone,” he says.

  “We’ll watch over you.”

  “How can I be sure of it?”

  “I promise.” She spreads his fingers with hers. She strokes his palm.

  “How do I know you won’t leave me?”

  “You don’t.”

  “You always have.”

  “I always came back,” Maggie says.

  They are adept at this gambit also, and she marvels at how quickly she resumes their ancient play. Men return from wars or bounty expeditions or mental hospitals; their parents say, hey, boy, fix me this gatepost, hey, boy, go brush your teeth.

  “Don’t leave me. Don’t run out.”

  “I won’t.”

  “How can I trust you?”—he stares at her, unblinking. She waits for him to blink.

  “You can,” says Maggie.

  “Come sleep with me.”

  “All right,” she says. “I’ll get an extra blanket. I’ll be back with pillows.”

  “No,” Judah says. “In this bed.”

  He releases her hand and pats the space beside him.

  “I need someone to hold me. When I die.”

  He would, she knows, spare her nothing; he has worked out his punishment in every fierce particular. “If you ask me, Mr. Sherbrooke, you’re a mighty lively corpse.”

  “I’m not asking your opinion, I’m asking for your help. For charity’s sake.”

  Her hands are shaking. Her voice shakes. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.”

  “Or send up someone who’ll do what I ask. Find me some other lady.”

  “No,” Maggie tells him. “I’ll stay.”

  He looks at her. She could swear he smiles. It is a grin he turns—she could swear intentionally—into a cough.

  “Go,” he says. “I’ll manage. Just find me somebody else.”

  “Who else would have you, Judah? I’m your wife.”

  So now she tries to comfort him, who has little comfort to spare. She says the world is full of things that frighten her, because you’re never certain where they hide at night. Best keep the closet doors open, she whispers; best keep chest-drawers pulled out. Best close your eyes; best pluck your brows; best wish upon and blow the lash that falls.

  “You win.” He lifts his hands in submission.

  “And you.”

  “I’m tired,” Judah says. “Let’s both of us get into bed.”

  She sits beside him. She has felt the same way, sometimes, after drinking too much or not good enough wine. Her very bones have stiffened; nothing works. No single limb or digit makes its customary motion.

  “Get in,” he says. “Under the covers.”

  “It’s hot here,” Maggie says.

  “Not for me,” he tells her. “It’s as cold as that night was we slept out in the winter. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get yourself here next to me.”

  She commences.

  “Not that way,” Judah says. “If you’re so hot and I’m your husband anyhow, take off your clothes.”

  She is sweating.

  “I’m not hot,” Maggie says.

  “Of course you are. You’re sweating. You’re a furnace.”

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  “No,” Judah says. “Take off your clothes.”

  She tells herself it doesn’t matter—that this is her husband in health, not sickness; in his prime, not mad old age. She unbuttons her blouse.

  “I�
��m dying,” Judah says. “Tonight. You’ll see.”

  “Please,” Maggie says, “Don’t say that. Please.” She drops her blouse to the chair by the bed.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” he says.

  “But you’re succeeding, Judah.”

  “The skirt. What about taking off that?”

  And so he wheedles and coaxes her out of her clothes. She lies rigid beside him, watching the gooseflesh on her arms prickle and subside. It is, she tells herself, a caricature scene: Death and the Maiden or perhaps Virginity Defended and Preserved. But there is only his breathing, and she had yielded up her maidenhood thirty-four years earlier, in the changing room of the cabana in Alan Seligman’s family’s Easthampton beach house.

  “Hold me,” Judah says.

  She holds him. She busies herself with memories: the way that Alan Seligman’s swim trunks’ elastic intaglioed his stomach, and the burnished gold his body was above the line contrasting with the flaccid fish pallor below. He had pretended competence but was a virgin also, and they fumbled and poked at each other. Maggie shuts her eyes. Alan Seligman had been eighteen and won the freestyle relay and was flexing his pectoral muscles and biceps and triceps for her; they went steady afterward and improved their shared technique.

  Judah keeps his ear cocked although she thinks him heedless, and keeps his right eye open behind the lashes’ web. He is peeking out at Maggie like a schoolboy, inching the curtain aside. She would be his audience and join in the applause, be stomping her feet in the aisle. There are others. It is dark. The footlights flare at them, not him. He will leap to her side with agility—and not be caught in the bedclothes or crippled, or spavined by arthritis like some out-to-pasture Clydesdale collapsed with its own weight. You have to be quick-footed to steal a march on Jude.

  He feels a man’s life signifies; it matters how he walks upon this earth. He has been schooled from childhood to believe that actions ramify, a Sherbrooke’s more than most. He says the Lord giveth and taketh away, but so does the federal government, and so can any man who’s self-willed, self-reliant, self-defined. Therefore he will give his house and barns and land for love; therefore he withdraws from anxious husbandry. His world is the visible world. He owns everything he sees of it, and that has been enough. Lying beside him—two feet to the side, and half a head shorter, she looks at a different world. It’s only natural, he tells himself, it’s one of the laws of perspective. But he owns all she sees to boot—even lying, feigning sleep, in the bedroom of the house he fingered in its replica that morning. He can confer it, and does so. She takes it as her due.

  X

  Hattie finds herself with slogans now when what she wants are words. She despises supermarkets and the jingles she finds herself singing in supermarket aisles. They pipe in music from every corner, and she is pursued while hunting rope or camphor or tomato juice or corn. In those newly built and lavish emporiums, Hattie feels her age. She stumbles down the corridors of canned goods and household supplies, pushing her pushcart as once she pushed her mother’s wheelchair, but with a deal less agility. She—who’d admit to many faults but never indecisiveness—is assaulted by competing claims and labels and products and stands there indecisive, trying to sort matters out. Like as not she’d reach for camphor and there’d be mothflakes and mothballs and mothcakes to choose from, and when she’d choose at last and reach she’d knock the whole stack down, or scatter cans. She did the bulk of their shopping at Morrisey’s, or had it done by Judah—but once a month, maybe, or once every three weeks she negotiates the shopping plaza, tormented by such opulent look-alike choice. Soda water, for instance, would be marked at thirty-five cents the bottle. There were five-or-ten-cent additional deposits to pay. So she’d accumulate bottles at forty or forty-five cents the bottle, arranging them in her cart and checking the stamped price each time. Once she found a bottle marked at eighty-five cents and pointed out the error to the girl at the checkout machine.

  “Look here,” she said. “Someone marked eighty-five cents.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here,” said Hattie, pointing. “Right at the spot where my fingernail is. On the cap.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll only charge you for thirty-five cents.”

  “I expect so,” Hattie said.

  But her point would be lost, and her precision wasted—except for the fifty cents saved, and that was hardly saving. The girl would sweep her goods along, and someone else would pack them, and Hattie would be out of there before she even knew it, sorting the change. She’d be out on the tarmac, hunting the taxi she’d ordered, still hearing the loudspeaker bray organ music behind her and taking her first deep breath and breathing in gas fumes and heat and the smell of hamburger fat from the restaurant section.

  Judah cursed modernity and every tinsel accomplishment; they were salvaging nothing important, he said, although they saved some time. “A stitch in time saves nine” had been her motto, but he asked her if she truly thought they required this frugality, and what did it save anyhow—nine stitches or nine times?

  “Nine stitches,” she had said, “and please don’t forget who does the stitching.” He granted her her point but said she should throw the old clothes and sheets and tablecloths away.

  “If I did that,” she said. “We’d see how long you’d let me do it.”

  “Long enough.”

  So she hoarded their history’s leavings; she is like a magpie, he complains, lining her room with silk scraps. “A penny saved earns pounds,” she said. “Waste not, want not,” she urged. Then Judah told her they earned more each year than they knew how to spend. She said that wasn’t possible, and he explained to her that money made money without half trying; funds accumulated on the trust funds and investments, and even after taxes there was all they’d ever need. “Necessity’s a difficult teacher,” she reminded him, and mended the living room curtains where he didn’t see they needed mending, and wouldn’t have cared if they did.

  But Maggie had spent money like she spent herself on everything—flat-out. It was as hard to hold to, Judah said, as a greased squealing pig. Not that he minded it, either; there was as much fun spending as there was in getting, and he lavished gifts on her. He gave her earrings and bracelets and cars and would have given a fur coat if she tolerated furs. “I can’t abide it,” Maggie said.

  “What?”

  “Shooting and trapping and poisoning those animals. A seal for a sealskin coat, a lamb for lambswool. Leopards.”

  “They ain’t defenseless. And some of them is pests.”

  “Don’t play the trapper, please. Did you ever notice that you put your bumpkin accent on whenever you’re not certain?”

  “Sartin,” Judah pronounced. “Shorely.”

  “Well, I don’t want a coat that comes from killing. Thanks anyway. No thanks.”

  Hattie listened, envious. Words were a kind of coinage they melted down from slogans; Ivory Snow is a dish soap, and Gleam and Crest are toothpastes, and Joy is a detergent, not a state of mind.

  Now, moving with caution, soundlessly, she readies her own bed. It is a tester bed, not canopy, because there is nothing inside it to cover, no shameful goings-on; the fringe around the bedposts is pink eyelet lace. She allows herself that much. It is an extravagance, of course, and frilly the way little girls dream about frills. Sometimes, staring past the bed’s frame at the rectangle of ceiling, Hattie thinks maybe that’s how you get to heaven, that’s what ascension means. Maybe you go through a space that’s called a tester shape because it doesn’t close you in and is a trial. There’s tribulation inside, and pleasure for the best part of a quarter of your life. Lately she’s been sleeping poorly, but still she calculates six hours on the average for, say, sixty years. She’s done better than that to begin with, and nowadays does worse, but it all evens out. Along the way there’s been temptation that came in many guises—call it luxury, then restlessness, then sloth. The eyelet lace would be a comfort-temptation and test, but h
er soul would hurtle past it into the cold space beyond and butt against the ceiling and knock for admittance. It would be smoke without a chimney, lifting to the topmost part of rooms to hover, coil, and dissipate—or birds caught in a barn or, like the bluejay in the entrance hall that time, battering at windows, seeing only the blue sky beyond. It was like the way heat rises to cool upper air, or the way she went lightheaded after bending and straightening up and thought she’d grown six inches. Everything would rise about her, and what seemed like plaster with a crack in it would be, entirely, smoke. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but this would be a screen to shield her from impurities and smoke the hellish remnants out and leave her in the perfect welcoming empyrean, breathing without luxury or sloth.

  Hattie smiles. She permits herself day-waking dreams if the visions are not harmful, and no one could claim daydreams of heaven ever did anyone harm. Her heaven is snow-white but warm. It is a storm of miracles, with everything unblemished and intact. Vermont is her heaven on earth. It is a kind of paradise, free from the disasters that beset the countries she reads of and almost every other state. It has no tidal waves or hurricanes because it has no ocean; it has no poisonous snakes. There are no earthquakes and no one dies of jungle fever, and no one ever dies because of rabid bats. There are rabid bats, all right, behind the Big House shutters, and she hears them squeak and rave but knows they will not bite her if she offers nothing to bite. There are no floods worth mentioning, or not enough to kill you, and few drought years in Vermont. It is Eden on earth except for a blizzard that maybe could cause you to freeze. But even then you had to be improvident and not amass the firewood, and there are no avalanches like she’s seen on TV in Canada. Men fire off their guns and mountains fall. There are wood ticks in abundance that Judah picks off the dogs, but they do not carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever. He’d sit there squeezing and applying rubbing alcohol or matches to the ticks, and she’d be appalled at their blood-sucking tenacity—but it is not fatal in Vermont.