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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  In his mind’s eye he sees the letter to his son. Its edges curl because the envelope is larger than the paper it contains. Finney has a new secretary, and she insists on folding things twice, the letter turned in on itself, when a single fold would do. She has, Finney tells him, advantages. She can take shorthand faster than he talks, and her typing is acceptable, and she has many talents in the field. In the hayfield, Judah jokes, and Finney—as if he could manage to make hay in hayfields nowadays—winks. The letter has been postmarked March 30th. It says Please Forward If Necessary on it, but Ian leaves no forwarding address. It requests him to contact his father or his father’s lawyer and be present at discussions of the terms of the estate. It suggests such presence would be vital to the nature of the settlement, and proposes a per diem allowance and, of course, that travel expenses would be furnished at the estate’s expense.

  The envelope is cream white. Finney’s title and address are printed in green ink, on the upper left-hand corner. He employs an IBM Selectric typeface for Ian’s address, but resists a postage meter as a mark of the impersonal. There’s not so many letters, Finney says, that you can’t lick and stamp them by hand. They’ve tried, Lord knows, says Judah, to haul him home before. It lies on a hall table, under magazines. In time the dust will form a diagonal consistent with the left upper edge of Popular Mechanics that lies athwart it, protective. The table, Judah imagines, is a plain pine table with walnut stain. Its two front legs are on the hall runner, its two back legs on the floor. There is therefore a slight downward tilt to the angle of the whole (though not above an eighth of an inch) since the table weighs sufficiently to mark the purple runner, and the runner’s threadbare anyhow. Ian’s off to sea, he thinks, and in this seaport town the mildew happens quickly. It’s as if the envelope was sweated on, or steamed; it’s as if the formal furtive language is a circular, and any lost son everywhere is welcome home.

  The stairwell is another matter, since it gives on the library door. He would be discovered, and his sham would be exploded and his illness turn to health. He considers the parapets and windows, and of the back servant stairs. But they lead past Hattie’s room, and he knows her far more wakeful, even sleeping behind a shut door, than his careless wife. So he turns toward the elevator shaft. He pads to the door and pulls it open carefully and peers within; the cage is there.

  Judah shuts the door again; it is solid oak, and squeaks. The door to the library, too, is solid and windowless oak. They are in the library, discussing him, he is certain. The elevator reeks; it is memory’s confinement and a box for invalids. Still, it fits his spying purpose and will make little noise.

  Pleased with his contrivance, he rests for the count of ten. Then he pulls the door open and steps inside and unscrews the elevator’s lamp. Next he feels in the new darkness for the button, pushes, and feels himself fall. There is a soft whirring and complaint from the elevator cables, but he knows they cannot hear him or distinguish this new sound from the surrounding noise of the house—the furnace, for example, or water in the pipes. He settles himself for his vigil, breathing carefully to ten.

  (“Count to a hundred,” Ian had said, “before you start to look for me. And keep your eyes closed or it’s cheating.”

  “I won’t look,” Judah said.

  “But keep your eyes closed. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Now count to a hundred,” he yelled, distancing.

  “I’m counting. One one hundred, two one hundred, three”—and Judah leaned his head against the wall and listened for his son. Ian hid in closets or would bang doors then shut them without running through, and early on he’d fitted underneath the couch.

  “Oley, oley infree; ready or not here I come.”

  What, he wonders now, does “oley oley infree” mean; how had he clambered over furniture, shouting “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmum,” in pursuit of that elated boy he could not locate now? Then they played “Thing in the Room,” and Ian chose an object and Judah guessed which one it was by circling and pointing, while Ian cackled. “Getting cold. Ice cold. A little bit warmer. Getting warm now getting hot, getting hot as a person can get.” So Judah, nosing up to the vase, would know it was the vase and turn on his heels and point to the painting of oranges. He would step past the still life and the mantelpiece and Ian would pretend to freeze and shiver, beating his elbows and saying, “Brr-r it’s cold in here. So cold.”)

  “Though there be severall who think it improper,” Peacock wrote, “we will not heed the world’s scurrility but take our bounden pleasures in that almost-Eden whence my thoughts continually fly. Oh to be in Vermont where the first green things this week will testify to spring and to His ceaselessHusbandry Who watcheth over all. I seem to see the Easter lambs at their frolics, and freshening cows, and the season’s wheel which here on this Pacific Coast seems not to turn, or grudgingly, though th’Inhabitants call it healthful and breathe this salt-slime down. Had they one taste of Mountain air, once filled their lungs as I have with the sweet pine-scent of our beloved pasture-land, they would choke with every inhalation or keep Cambric pressed to the nose. There is profit to be made here in the better class of lace . . .”

  There where he keeps his ladle the stream runs all summer long; the ladle is tin and large enough for two to drink from—not together, though they’ve tried that too, her head butting his, their noses opposed, but one after the other, his wife going first—and in April or June he only has to dip, not even bending, to fill the cup full; later it tastes of metal, and then of leaves with a flavor not so much the residue as presage of decay, the maple and oak leaves thickening the streambed banks, and clogging the rock sluice he’d chosen. Nearby he built a salt lick and an apple stand, building it at Maggie’s urging and high enough to clear the snow so that the deer might have unimpeded winter access, and when they snowshoed in to see they saw that the apples were gone and the salt lick troughed hollow by tongues, so she laughed and held him and said, “There, we’ve helped that many at least,” and he didn’t answer, “For a week maybe. For the dogs to kill,” but only pressed her where she held him and said, “You’ve eaten those apples. They’re in your cheeks,” and she answered, “Lordy. Lord, I married a romantic. The last of the red-hot romantics,” and he scooped the snow’s crust back and dug till he uncovered the stream and thrust through the crystalline surface to the sluggish trickle beneath—the ladle’s cup was snow-stuffed and he knocked the powder back and filled the cup with icicles and chill white water and drank and made her drink: the tin adhered to her lips and, tearing the ladle free, she shredded her lips’ flesh.

  He has tried to reach Ian by phone. He called the last numbers he knew. There had been no answer or the phone was disconnected or the parties that he reached had never heard of Ian Sherbrooke and couldn’t be bothered to look. He didn’t really blame them. It wasn’t a question of blame. But he had known that Maggie knew where Ian could be reached, and tried the phone in Wellfleet and hung up on her father when he heard the first “Hello.”

  He thought of telegrams and about taking out ads. He tried to send a letter but the words evaded him. Maggie had been fluent, and she would have found the language, but his own stock phrases stuck. He could not bring himself, he knew, to beg for what was his by right and what each man could anyhow expect: a son beside him in his house. He imagined protestations that would haul his son back, hat in hand, protesting that he also left for love. He imagined Ian reconciled and by his bed, saying, “Why didn’t I understand sooner? What a fool I must have been!”

  “Not foolish,” Judah would say. “Just a bit stubborn, that’s all.”

  “A willful piggish fool,” Ian would accuse himself, and the tears would blind him. “How can you ever forgive me?”

  “No need. Just stay here is the only thing I ask.”

  “Done,” Ian said. “You didn’t have to ask for that. My stuff is at the station, Dad. I’m here to stay.”

  When Judah comes to, there is silenc
e. He does not recognize the space; it reeks of lemon oil. The air is bad. He breathes and stretches and opens his eyes but is in blackness nevertheless. Stretching, he touches two walls. He remembers, then, his place and purpose and gathers himself to his feet. He reaches for the light switch, and finds it and presses and remembers he unscrewed the bulb. He takes mincing, sideways steps around the floor’s perimeter and toes the bulb in the last corner and leans to retrieve it, then rests again. There is silence in the library; he feels for matches in his hunting pockets. Patting at the pockets, he drops the bulb and hears it bounce and shatter. He curses himself for a loose-fingered fool, and continues. There are empty shotgun shells and a handkerchief and sand grit and a penknife in his pocket also, but nothing like light. He sighs. He hears his breathing echo. He decides to ascend and presses the button for the second floor but does not move. He thinks perhaps he’s pressed the wrong button and fingers each button beside him, then presses his palms against the instrument panel entirely. There is silence. There is not even a boiler below him, or any sort of clanking in the elevator chains. Hattie had been claustrophobic. She had feared just such a breakdown, she told him, just such a short in the lines. What if I’m riding, she asked him, between one floor and another, and lightning comes and knocks the power out, what then? You pays your money and you takes your choice, Judah said, not wanting to coddle her fears. For every fire, he maintained, there’s twenty false alarms.

  So he collects himself and breathes again—the air denser this time, acrid—and counts to ten. He shrugs himself out of his coat. The insides of his arms are wet; his right foot itches. He wants to sneeze. He can always, he tells himself, open the door. He tries the door. It does not give. He tries again, leaning his weight on the slab. He knows enough of circuitry to know the circuit holds. It clicks and does not give. He had known, somehow, in the dream from which there’s no escape, that the door too would be locked. There is air and space and time in abundance, he tells himself; there are people in the house to find him when he calls.

  He blames himself, at times. It isn’t a question of taking the blame or whether he deserves it so much as whether he is willing to admit the possibility. Judah admits the possibility. He could have bent a little who had been unbending, could have guessed the way the wind would blow and made his own adjustments. He should have checked on Seth that night and should have checked on Maggie on a hundred nights. But he’d thought that not reacting was a reaction also: a man of his stamp sits and takes it till there’s nothing left to take. Lately he’s suspected that his nothing done or doing was to blame; “You can’t take it with you” was a fool’s compliance. He would take it with him since there was nothing to take.

  They stand there attentive, awaiting him, eyes left, though what they see he can only question, seeing in their stance the marines at Iwo Jima, scaling the rock face to plant a bronze flag—or perhaps the imitation of a statue he saw once in school, the Laocoön, an old man muscled as is he, Judah, surrounded by sons and a snake that surrounds them. His eyes are blood-engorged and blind with possibility—mottled with effort, the rock-veins bulging—and so they clasp each other and embrace with a concentrated fury that proves this combat mortal, proves the opposition absolute of arm to arm, knee-knee. His right knee fused with his opponent’s left, the fulcrum there where one must surely topple, go flailing full-length out over that rockbed as base. Once spread-eagled, Judah asks himself, once felled and pinioned and made to cry mercy, what variety of mercy might be his to beg—since he had asked no quarter nor offered any ever—mercy not his strong suit, never his strong suit, and not the kind of quality to outrank justice—or not in his ranking, at least. Put them in a scale and he’d put on his thumb for punishment, weighing it with probity and willing to accept and pay whatever was assessed as his fault’s due—and at the door’s unyielding handle thinks collapse a kind of comfort, the promise not threat of thirst finally slaked. Perhaps “The Kiss” is the statue he sees, or one of those headless, handless statues that Maggie made him study while she enthused about proportion and he waggled his toes in museums, trying to see what she saw. Or some time-blunted frieze of centaurs raging, drunk with undiluted wine, through courtyards where the women cower yet—does he imagine it?—exult. He is exultant anyhow in the knowledge of completion, and finality inhering, whatever it is this is it. Nor will the lazy circling birds bother to investigate who surfeit on the easy scavenge and are heavy-bellied by noon, those legs that were so pliant now rigor-stiff, unbending—men in the streets with naked swords, the swords aloft and wavering, seeking that unguarded entrance to palpitant flesh, or ambushed, upended in wells, the well-throats stuffed with this wet clot of carrion. Judah shifts his stance just slightly, imperceptibly rocking on his toes and heels to make minute adjustments, the motion imperceptible to those who watch, if any might, except only perhaps as the witnessing eye’s nictation, or the sun glinting off some new flesh facet, or a sudden breath drawn, and offers and acknowledges and yields up his arrogant shame . . .

  Then there is light. Then he sees himself naked, holding his duck-hunting jacket, and there is blood on his foot. There is no light in the elevator, but there is light in the room, and he is in the room since the door-latch had released. He has fallen forward as the door gave way. It opened without warning, since his weight was on the door. He has not harmed himself. He stands. There is no one in the room. There are fire remnants. There is the smell, still, of cigarette smoke, and he wonders has she been blowing smoke rings and did Finney admire her pursed-lip dexterity. It is—he considers the grandfather clock—two twenty-three. The minute hand moves slightly backward, always, before it moves the minute forward; Judah thinks of springs uncoiling to advance.

  The blood has dried. He broke the bulb; he recollects that. He turns again to the elevator, propping the door back, and retrieves his locust stick. The mess is negligible. The door should be oiled, he reminds himself, and the lock system changed. He hears house sounds above him, but they have not opened his door. He has not been found. Fleetingly he wishes he had been discovered—here, sprawled on the landing, bleeding, blinded by the sudden light burst, a hero spat back. She would have bent above him and been solicitous. She would cradle his head in her arms. She would ask if he were hurt, and he would answer not too badly, and then she’d say, in a low voice to Finney: “Run for the doctor. Quick.”

  Finney, less solicitous, would pause. “Do as I say,” Maggie would order. The man would scuttle off and she would bend above him once again, protective. Now Judah stands half naked in the room he fears she’s fled forever. He breathes. He walks, without disguise or limping and precaution, to the mud room. He takes three rights and one left. There he pulls on his brown wool pants and a red shirt, and his walking boots. He replaces his hunting jacket, stuffing himself through the sleeves, but leaves his cane.

  “We none of us,” Peacock had written his daughters, “should forego the Pleasure and Profit of Travel. There is instruction in the temples and the Pagan mosques where no man has a pew to call his own, nor can he keep his shoes on in the sight of God. For whatsoever they name Him He is immanent, as if Allah or Buddah or Thor be the nick-name childishly put on by youthful Pleasantry, until we learn that Nick himself is but the Devil’s label, and there prove one proper appellation only. Just so with methods of Food preparation and marriage and ornament and all the Customary appurtenances of this life. First custom seems peculiar then it seems but quaint then regular then normal then the rule, and by these slow succeeding ventures we who were Parochial become what now they call Cosmopolites. It is a stage, as any Other, to endure.”

  II

  First he walked with Ian or took him pickaback. His son was long-legged even then, and Judah made him stretch his legs. He tried to teach him pace. But Ian would bustle and dart along and get tangled up in grapevines or make a game of puddles, jumping, stomping flat-footed into the deep center to see how much water it sprayed.

  “Don’t do that,” Judah said.
r />   “Why not?”

  “Because it gets your pants all wet.”

  “They’re not all wet,” said Ian.

  “OK. Because it gets me wet.”

  “You’re not either. It doesn’t.”

  “Because your mother would be angry.”

  “It’ll dry. I promise.” Ian jumped three feet across the flagstone path and landed like a geyser in the mud.

  “Because I tell you to,” said Judah.

  “It’s not a reason.”

  Judah leaned and lifted him and held him up, spread-eagled, eight feet above the ground. “This’ll dry you off.”

  “Carry me, Daddy.”

  “Not wet like this.”

  “I’ll dry, I promise. Please.”

  So Judah eased his son’s soaked legs around his neck; he held to Ian’s ankles and they continued.

  “Giddyap. Let’s canter. Let’s jump that old fence.”