But he expected nothing; they were strangers now. He had seen Maggie, of course, but neither Finney nor Judah nor Hattie for years. He felt as if his own heart were beating in his head; blood pulsed there so loudly it echoed.
“Your mother’s all right,” Finney said.
“When’s the funeral—what time?”
“Eleven. We put it off as long as we could. The whole town will be there. I’ve been hunting you to hell and gone. Chicago—there’s a connection out of Albany . . .” Finney trailed off.
He rubbed his ankle where it itched. He inspected the skin of his feet. Flocks settled on the wires, so he picked his words with care. “If I didn’t see my living father,” Ian asked, “why do you suppose I’d come to see his body? What makes you think I’d visit now he’s dead?”
“It’s not . . .”
“It is. Judah’d take no pleasure in the kind of thing you’re after. He was ceremonial all right, but not for this sort of ceremony. I’m working here, I’ve got a job.”
“You sound just like your father. Did you know that?”
“People used to tell me,” Ian said. “But nobody here knows his name.”
“Passata la festa,” Finney pronounced. “That’s what you said, isn’t it? I was in Italy during the war, and I understand the expression. We have a saying in America, you know. We say, ‘Water under the bridge.’ ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk.’ ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ we say.”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I’d be there in the morning if I could. But this is how it stands for now. I’ll call Maggie and explain.”
At five o’clock that afternoon the lights had been on in the street below, the traffic loud; he sat in the increasing dark while Finney’s protestations turned to curiosity—what was he doing in Chicago? how long had he been there, on what sort of job? how long was he planning to stay?—and wondering, was he in truth like Judah? would Judah have refused to come to his, Ian’s, funeral, and should he prove a point by going? would his mother be glad? would she consider his return a victory or capitulation—and for whom, to whom? So Finney had questions and Ian had questions; he hung up and turned on the light. He could see his own reflection in the room’s one window—adrift, legless, surrounded by smoke. Judah had used a toast Ian proposed—lifting his hand to the mirroring window, invoking the thick, deep-voiced ghost: “May you live all the days of your life.”
“You’ve been cut out.”
“Of what?”
“The will,” Maggie told him. “You’d have gotten everything if only you’d arrived.”
“When? For the funeral?”
“No—when he sent that letter. When he asked us both to come, six months ago.”
This phone was white. He had called her collect from Detroit. His company, he told her, was the bus-and-truck road show for Excalibur; next month they would start a swing south. They had been in touch before, but now the will was filed.
“He so much wanted you to visit,” Maggie said. “We both did. You’ll get what Finney calls a handsome settlement.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the service.”
“We didn’t expect you. Not really.”
Ian stretched the telephone cord, then watched it spring back, coiling. “What letter?”
It was eight o’clock at night, the day after Judah’s funeral. He was standing in the cloakroom of the theater bar. There was so long a silence that he thought they’d been cut off. Finally she said, “You didn’t get it?”
“What?”
“The letter Finney sent.”
“Not that I remember.”
“Try to.”
“No.”
“I knew he was incompetent,” said Maggie. “I never believed him dishonest.”
The cloakroom attendant was dressed like a French maid—black mesh stockings and a short white skirt, high heels and a black bow. She was forty, however, and fat.
“Who?”
“Finney. Not your father.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ian said. “I might have opened it and thrown the thing away.” The cloakroom attendant tapped at her watch. She raised her eyebrows, shook her head. “It makes no difference.”
“Darling . . .”
“I’ve got to go now,” Ian said. “Entertain the troops.”
“Do keep in touch.”
“I will,” he promised and hung up. He did not call again.
Arriving at the Big House, therefore, he tells himself it’s unplanned. He could have kept on driving, could make it up to Burlington or Montreal by nightfall, or any of the towns between: Rutland, Middlebury, Montpelier. He could find a friend or make a friend or buy a bed to lie in—but that would have been avoidance. Though he’s managed to avoid this corner of Vermont for years, he finds himself unwilling to tuck his tail under and run. Habits are for breaking, Judah said. And Ian knows the road; his two hundred forty horses know the way.
Yet the roads have altered. What had been dirt is tar now; where the pharmacy once stood is a McDonald’s. They’ve put a highway through, and when he noses past what used to be the Parker place he sees a concrete overpass. There are cloverleafs for trucks; there’s a pink haze in his rearview mirror that he assumes is sunset till he sees the sun off to the west. Shocked, he reconnoiters; the village is a township now, creating its own evening light; the Sherbrookes’ thousand acres have been bordered by cement.
He drives the land’s perimeter. He knows the access routes and is unreasoningly pleased to see them blocked. There are No Trespass and Private Property signs, and locked gates everywhere, there is a high stone wall for half a mile, then a four-strand barbed-wire fence. He stops the car on the edge of the road, gets out and locks it, and decides to enter the grounds of the Big House on foot. As his father might have done, he checks the tight-strung wire. Finding a rusty stretch with give to it, he holds the bottom strand down with his shoe, lifts the second strand up, and slides through. There is snow on the north-facing slope in front of him, but the earth is soft and wet. It is early April, and he smells things breathe and thaw. Someone has been spreading manure on what he calculates must be the Shed field to his right; the breeze comes from the east.
Ian leans against a silver birch and collects his breath. It’s not that he’s short-winded, but his belly’s in his throat, there’s more to this, he tells himself, than he bargained for. He’d been a city boy the last half of his life. Yet it’s like swimming or riding, he thinks, once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget. You grow stiff with disuse or lose the edge that practice gives, but you know the silver birch from beech, and recognize that oak tree there in front of you, at the edge of the stand of split-leaf maple. A freight train down by Eagle’s Bridge gives four pulls on the whistle as it shunts across the roadbed; it’s a sound that heralds bedtime, as it did when he was six.
So Ian sits. He finds a boulder to sit on and pulls his knees up and supports his elbows on his knees. He rests his chin on his hands. He faces the house a half mile away and summons up his education to do battle with the breath-stopping, summoning glow of it all. This is absurd, he tells himself: the Prodigal Returned. You can’t go home again; home is where they have to take you in; what goes around comes around—it’s every cliché in the book.
This does not work, however; he cannot make such fun or mockery of homecoming as to make it simple to go home. He sits wreathed to himself on a cold April night (the very picture of his mother in a man, Hattie used to say, but a chip off the old Sherbrooke block) and fights for breath as once when he had asthma, and inhales for the count of eight and holds. He sits there for some time.
“Don’t go.”
“We’re going.” Maggie had taken his hand.
“Don’t.”
“You come too, Judah. Or visit us at least.”
“No.”
“Please . . .”
“Leave and you take yourself with you,” his father said. “Go, but don’t ever come back.” Judah, not quite pleading
, would plead for his young wife’s attention, and she gave him that but never what he truly asked for, never let herself be bound by what Hattie called tight marriage ties and she a hangman’s noose. Though Ian had not understood the terms of the discussion, he heard the words and saw them argue and knew it was more than a matter of language. Their argument had been impersonal, nearly—as if they liked each other well enough, loved each other always, but stood up for ways of being that could not be wed.
Maggie was flirtatious, Judah stern; she was gay where his father was grim. Although they owned the largest house and holdings in their corner of Vermont, her vanity had been to do without possessions. He was tight-fisted and she open-handed; he was white-haired and Maggie a blonde. She took pleasure in cities her husband abhorred, the art and music he derided or refused to discuss. When telling Ian about Woodstock or “the summer of love” or the civil rights movement, for example, she had been sympathetic. Judah’s politics, his wife declared, were to the right of Attila the Hun; he had never met a piece of legislation he believed was worth the fuss.
But she believed the government could prove a force for social good, and was worth respecting. Judah, a New Englander, voted for Republicans; she was a Democrat. Ian heard workmen in the fields or coming out of bars or barns tell jokes about old Sherbrooke’s young bare-naked wife. He merely had to show himself to silence their backslapping hilarity, but this happened often. Maggie admired those who shared things, while her husband was retentive; she had hoped to travel; he to stay at home. She had been beauty incarnate, and they gossiped in the town.
Yet there is much he does not, cannot understand—how leaving and loving, for instance, are two sides of the one coin. For Maggie came back in the end. A year ago exactly she had returned to the Big House and settled in again. She who proposed a different kind of sharing had shared in her husband’s last months. They had lived apart for seven years, but hadn’t once mentioned divorce. Then Judah bought her back. If Ian has not been what others would call dutiful, it is in part because his mother occupies the place she hauled him from and made him think of as a golden prison-cage.
He wonders why she came. Was it for safety only, for some shibboleth of duty and the Golden Rule, or to collect what Judah put up for grabs? He wonders why he’s come. He tells himself reunion is not always reconciliation, and it’s as good a place as any to return to. He’s not estranged, he tells himself; they’re simply out of touch. They need to catch up on old times.
A hoot owl flies across the clearing, so close that he can feel the susurration of air beneath its wings. “Polly want a cracker?” she had said to him on Sutton Place. “No matter how you play it, that’s the song we sang. You can tie a bunch of ribbons on; it’s still a gilded cage.”
So Ian is nobody’s son. He’s learned the lessons of withdrawal better than his teacher, been rootless while Maggie returned to take root. He’s held no job that counted, been in no city or country he’d come to call home, lived with no one he’d nurse through their six final months. He is twenty-six years old, a sometime stage manager and bit-part actor with a private income. Sometimes he plays backup bass. Once he wore a moustache and three times sported a beard; once he shaved his skull entirely and walked the Cordilleras for a month.
He had attended Exeter, then Harvard. He wrote a freshman essay on The Masses and the men who founded it. He admired what he learned about Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, John Reed, and Lincoln Steffens; he wanted to be big and bluff, to travel and write poetry and articles that shake the world. It was 1969. So after two years at Harvard he spent two years being—as he called it then—political. He knew he was riding the ebb of a tide, on a bandwagon that had slowed down. Yet Ian joined a dojo and trained himself in unarmed combat and the use and maintenance of guns. He renounced his piano playing as a mark of caste. He spent those hours that he once would spend at music on the streets instead. In Texarkana, however, he saw bodies in the wreckage of a fire-bombed Mercury Monterey coupe and became a pacifist. He returned to Adams House, was graduated in 1973 cum laude in government, and hit the road in earnest for four years.
The hoot owl shifts and settles, opposite. It is deep dark now; Ian stands up. He will rehearse his history for the women in the house; he has been to several continents since he saw them last. He knows Fats Waller’s repertoire and a good deal of Shakespeare by heart. He has had trouble with his teeth and finds it harder now to kick the habit of cigarettes than, two years previously, he found it to kick cocaine. “You have an addictive personality,” one woman said to him once. Her name was—Ian lifts his arms and stretches, remembering—Alison Clark. She was a social worker who used jargon when he angered her or failed to stay the night or praise her crabmeat salad. “You’ve got a character disorder, did you know that? Your surround just doesn’t make it, baby; you’re not a person to trust.”
He starts down the hill to the house.
“You’re spoiling him.”
“No.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve got him tied so tight to you he’ll strangle on those apron strings.”
“You’re wrong, Judah.”
“Prove it.”
“It isn’t a thing you can prove. There’s no such thing as too much love; it isn’t how children get spoiled.”
So then they’d squabble over their son; he’d furnish their argument’s text. He’d be the leverage they used in the seesaw bickering that made their separation a relief. Yet if Maggie spoke harshly to her husband and bitterly about him, she tolerated no dispraise from others and no single nagging syllable when in that separation Ian had attempted to console her by attacking Judah. She had the right, she seemed to say, to quarrel with her life’s one mate; he’d earned no equivalent right. If he had nothing kind to say, she’d rather hear nothing at all.
Therefore silence was their rule, and Ian held his tongue. On the question of spoilage, for instance, he learned that there are many ways to spoil a broth. You can add too little seasoning, too much, or have too many cooks. You can have too thick or thin a stock and she—who was a first-rate cook—had shown him the trouble with watering down.
The spruce tree Judah planted in honor of his birth would have been taller than he as an infant; then Ian remembers looking down on it from the height of his young vantage; now it’s grown at least a foot for every year of his life. So the tree that had seemed small is tall, and not yet fully grown. The poplars he is walking past had seemed to scrape the sky. They were enormous, heaven-aspiring, the biggest four trees on the place. The house that huddles beneath him grows larger as he nears. His grandfather’s grandfather built it—Daniel “Peacock” Sherbrooke—arranging its grandiose proportions all the way from California in letters sent by sea mail and the railroad he helped to complete.
It is part of Ian’s legacy. He knows the terms of Peacock’s injunctions by heart. The magnate, too, had aspirations to heaven, but he praised the Lord in a complicated manner, passing ammunition to the envious and letting them take potshots at the inordinate house. Four stories high, surmounted by a cupola, with a servant’s wing that once held thirty and outbuildings that housed thirty more, “Peacock’s Palace” used up one whole quarry’s seasonal production of black roofing slate and—so the legend had it—all of Woodford Mountain’s hardwood for its paneling and floors. There are fourteen fireplaces, marble walkways, and a mile-long circuit that surrounds the buildings of the compound—the carriage barn and hay and cow barns and sugaring house and stables and the Toy House where his father used to sit.
Peacock Sherbrooke, who ordained all this, died on the day he came home. Like some latter-day commercial Moses who speculated on the promised land and lived to see it reached, built, tenanted—but not by him—he expired at the entrance gate in 1869. He had had pneumonia on the journey east. But in some fashion Ian only partway comprehends, his own father completed Peacock’s venture by never venturing forth. Judah’s was a holding action, and it held. The thousand acres he’d inherited remained the farmland that i
t first had been, though ringed with superhighways and gas stations and motels. He threatened those who left the house—even his wife and son—with expulsion, extirpation, the biblical language of exile. He treated the mile circuit as a magic circle, and those who went beyond it had to do so without his protection.
So Ian put it all behind him when he left. His mother had been family enough. New York City had been world enough, and then there was the world to see and inward voyages to take with the help of his white powder. In college, he met classmates with names that were grander thanSherbrooke and houses that made his seem small. He contrived a kind of willed forgetfulness, and soon that contrivance was fact.
“Ian Sherbrooke, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Hello? Is this Mr. Sherbrooke?”
“He’s not here.”
“Would you know where we might reach him?”
“No.”
“Might we leave a message, then?”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Would you tell him Samson Finney’s office—he’s got the number—is trying to contact him? And we’d be grateful if he’d call.”
“How do you spell it?”
“Finney?”
“Yes.”
“F as in Frank, i, double n as in nobody, e, y. Finney.”
“I’ll do that,” Ian said.
There is a fire in the library; he sees it as he nears. The room flickers at him, beckoning; there are open drapes. The Big House has a porch that runs the length of its southern and western exposures; he climbs the side steps lightly; still, they creak. He edges past the wicker rockers—set out already in April, he notes, so there must have been a thaw and the snowfall would have been recent, or perhaps they’re careless now and leave furniture out all year long. Ian steps past the green plush glider. He stands by the library window, in the shadow of the drapes.
Hattie is knitting. He has not seen her in years. She has a skein of blue wool at her side and a shape on her lap that enlarges—something, he thinks, like a shawl. She sits ten feet away, beneath a reading lamp, her glasses on a chain around her neck; she who once seemed large to him has shrunk. His aunt purses her lips in concentration, making motions with her mouth that correspond to her fingers’ knitting motion, and the way she works suggests a frail rigidity.
Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) Page 23
