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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  He moves; she shifts accordingly, and he wonders is this what they mean by a picture window? He scans the room; he thinks how many times how many in his family had no doubt done such staring from the reaches of the porch. He sees a second pair of legs and hands in the leather chair that Judah used—a block chair with a headrest: umber, huge.

  The chair is canted sideways from him, and the woman within does not stir. He wonders how he knows the hands and feet are female—since she wears no nail polish, is wearing pants and boots. He asks himself why it is so certainly his mother in the chair. Then she bends forward, firelit, as if in instinctual response, and he asks himself why ever he needed to ask. She is fifty-two years old. He is half that age, has been around the world and with more women than he can count or name; she is beyond compare. Hattie says something, her lips moving now in counterpoint to the motion of her yellow needles and blue wool. And Maggie, bending forward to answer, offers her hair and profile and arms as if for Ian’s inspection. He starts for the Big House door.

  II

  “May I come in?” he asks.

  “Who is it?”

  He has opened the door; now he knocks.

  “Just a minute,” Maggie calls.

  “Who is it?” Hattie asks again.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who’s me?”

  “Ian.”

  Hattie’s voice is querulous. “Speak up! We can’t see you in the dark.”

  “Ian Sherbrooke,” Ian says.

  His mother is beside him. “Darling! Welcome home!”

  She is nearly his height. He kisses her on both cheeks, in the European fashion.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “Fine, I’m fine. How are you doing?”

  “It’s so good to see you. Such a surprise.”

  “I just got east . . .” He trails off, irresolute. They are like conspirators, he thinks, whispering in the hallway.

  Hattie approaches. “I never . . .”

  “How are you?”

  “I never in all my born days.”

  As she limps toward him, he removes himself from Maggie and steps forward to embrace his aunt. She still holds the knitting needles, and wool unravels behind her.

  “Ian Sherbrooke! You rascal!”

  He bends to kiss her also; she smells of caraway. The powder on her cheek adheres to his lips thickly.

  “What a surprise!” Hattie says. “Margaret, turn that light on. Let’s get a proper look at him.”

  The chandelier ignites. He remembers when it held candles, not bulbs. The hall clock strikes resoundingly: eight.

  “You’ve eaten?” Maggie asks.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not true,” says Hattie. “He could down a piece of pie, I’ll bet. Look how skinny you’ve gotten . . .”

  “I’d have room for that.”

  “Pumpkin,” Hattie crows. “You know it’s just about a miracle you’re here. We do have pumpkin pie. I never take a bite but I remember how you used to take three helpings and then look around and see who hadn’t finished theirs. Just yesterday, I guess it was, I said to Helen Bingham they don’t sell pumpkin worth buying anymore. You remember when we used to keep them on the porch? When you got so scared of jack-o’-lanterns we used to have to blow the candles out? Maggie, go get him a piece.”

  “Not just now. Let me look at him.”

  Yet Hattie is insistent, garrulous. “He’s starving, you can see his ribs. He ought to have a piece of pie. I’ll get it; you’d cut it too small. Coffee?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve had some,” he lies.

  “Doesn’t do to drink too much of that. Not after lunchtime, anyways. I never take a cup but Sanka now. They tell you it doesn’t make a difference, but it does. You’re right. A piece of pumpkin pie, a nice cold glass of milk.

  So Hattie bustles out, and they have a minute alone.

  “Hello.”

  “Don’t mind her, darling, she’s just so excited to see you. I haven’t seen her skip like that in months. You’ll have to eat the pie.”

  “I’ll manage,” Ian says.

  Now there is silence between them. He studies his mother’s face. The chandelier is less generous to her than was the firelight, or his previous distance; she does show the traces of age. There is a network of lines at her eyes. The centers of them—that he’d always thought of as blue lakes, so clear she’d see him in Kabul, or when he’d had hepatitis those months in Tunis—have leached away. The bones of her nose are pronounced; the cheekbones he’s inherited are bound less tightly in their skin. It is as if the whole flesh-wrapping has gone slack, gotten weary; Maggie stands less straight. She bulks a little at the waist. She appears to be supporting something almost alien by the set of her bent knees.

  “Silver threads among the gray.”

  “The gold,” he offers, gallant.

  “Gray.” She takes his inspection with grace. “It doesn’t bother me, you know. It’s not important.”

  “Beauty?”

  “That too,” she says. “It loses its importance. A winter in this climate and you forget about beauty.”

  “So what do you remember?”

  “The hospital telephone number. The oil burner emergency number. The way to turn your wheel when skidding; the school bus route along the roads, so you know which ones get plowed.”

  He is compelled; he spreads his hands. “How did Judah die?”

  “Not now,” she says. “I’ll tell you later. Hattie will be back in just a minute.”

  “Of a long illness; of a brief illness; suddenly,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what they do in the newspaper files. You fill in the appropriate blank; you only have to check the box.”

  She turns from him and enters the library.

  “I’m sorry.” Ian follows her. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I know I’m sounding stupid, but it’s—well, it’s funny to be back.”

  “Funny strange or funny ha-ha?” This had been his childhood dis-tinction.

  “Both. A friend of mine works for a newspaper. Writing obituaries. They have boxes for at home, in such-and-such a hospital, or where the accident took place.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” Maggie says.

  “All right.”

  “It isn’t much more pleasant than the topic of my beauty.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  “Don’t be. You have the right to ask. It’s only that I thought you’d forfeited your membership.”

  “In what?”

  “We have a club.” She turns to him. Her eyes have lost nothing, are dry. “It’s called the family. You have to pay up on your membership dues. Then they send you proxy votes, newsletters every two or three weeks, requests for your opinion every month. Subscription blanks, circulars, everything . . . Oh, I know it’s not a membership that anyone can forfeit, not the sort of club we let you quit.” She drains the glass of water on the table by her chair. “But you did a better job of it than I ever managed, darling, you’ve been what we call ‘inactive.’ An ‘Associate Member,’ maybe, and it’s just a little much to hear you at the annual meeting—so full of questions all of a sudden, so anxious to know what you might have been asking me all winter long. It’s not funny ha-ha. It’s strange.”

  Hattie returns. She carries a thick slice of pie, a bowl of cream, and a glass of milk. She has a napkin rolled in what he knows will be his napkin ring. The silver platter has handles in the shape of fruit that curve to form an S.

  “You eat this. You look half starved,” she says. “Pecan, I guess it was. Your favorite.”

  “Maybe he’d prefer a drink.”

  “Not till he’s taken nourishment. Not till you’ve eaten every little bit of this here pie. And then we’ll see,” Hattie offers. “We might just celebrate.”

  She loves him; he knows that. She took up his education when Maggie was away and Judah in the fields, or sullen; she read him bedtime stories while they
argued down the hall. Her voice would go strident with emphasis, Ian remembers—but never quite cover the din in their room or the following fierce silence. She had tried to fill the breach his parents made in love. Judah said, “You watch it, boy, you’re buying her notions whole hog now. But you’re buying a pig in a poke.”

  First the houses down the hill were outsize castles that he couldn’t run around. There were neighbor moats and enemy ambushes, and woods and deserts and fortified walls all through the town. But then Hattie taught him comparative size: they were none of them big as the Big House, and his was the top of the heap.

  His mother never noticed, even, that those other houses existed; he’d tell her he was going to the Frasers or the Andersons or Sloans, and she’d say, that’s nice, dear, where do they live; that’s good, do you need a ride? Later he knew it her leveler’s instinct, that no one made her smile or notice if she didn’t find them worth it, and Maggie’s sense of worth was not the world’s. But back then Ian had believed it meant what Hattie meant instead, that we’re too fine to notice; our family was sitting here when theirs came up in wagons, and they took their shoes off when they came into our parlors, and it was a shoe that still fit.

  So then the hill’s houses looked small. Then he only noticed they had fewer rooms than his, and his property consisted of a thousand acres, which was hundreds of times more acres than any other house. He was, his aunt assured him—not quite saying it aloud—a prince. He let himself out of the gate like a drawbridge, and the ditch was protected by sharks; no one would dare approach his castle without an invitation, and he drifted down the hill to school like a general making the rounds.

  Hattie understood all this and seemed content—seemed to want him, Judah joked, for the youngest member of the D.A.R. But Maggie was a careless mother; occupied with other things, she scarcely would notice if Ian wore socks, and let him wear his Levi’s till the seams and knees were ripped. So Hattie made certain his clothes had been pressed, his buttons on, and that he was awake in time for Sunday school. She made sure the cooks and housemaids wore proper uniforms and did not smoke or swear. When he started in to smoke and be raucous and fight and whistle and swear, she said, “Boys will be boys.”

  Judah held him by the hand. His father’s hand was huge, enfolding, and it manacled his wrist. Ian did not dare pull back, nor haul so hard in opposition that his bones would give—but neither did he help. The roof was steep. Slate has to have a certain pitch, Judah explained. Otherwise the snow gets in and then it melts and freezes and you’ll lose a roof in just one winter, since when water freezes it expands. Take a look at ice cubes; fill the tray to almost full and by the time it’s frozen the ice will be over the top.

  So Ian clambered heavily after his surefooted father; Judah leaned sideways against the roof’s pitch; Ian crouched. His sneakers slipped. They were on the Toy House roof but not so high you couldn’t jump, since the Toy House was a replica of the Big House, its cupola and windows cut to scale. That winter there had been leaks. There were fragments and sections of slate on the ground. This was something you attended to before it got away.

  “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever fall?”

  “From where?”

  “From here?”

  “Not that I remember. But it’s like horses; you got to fall so often you learn not to care, you can’t remember even when you took the tumble.”

  “Would it hurt?”

  “Depends. You bend your knees; you tuck and roll; let your body be a spring. No point in fighting it; you’d telescope your legs.”

  “From how high?”

  “Any distance if you do it wrong. From falling down a step.”

  “Thirty-two feet per second,” Ian offered. He shut his eyes. He looked up; he had learned the speed of free fall and the force of gravity that week.

  “You should have seen,” said Judah, “Billy Eakins drunk and falling. Believe you me, he did so from a sight higher than this, though he slowed up once or twice bumping his way down. Well, we left him lying there until he slept it off.”

  Ian pondered the story. Did it mean a drunk should climb on roofs, or you’d best be a drunkard to fall? Judah took replacement slates from the pile on the scaffold; he demonstrated how to nail them neither too tight nor too loose.

  “Lean back. Get yourself some purchase.”

  “How?”

  “If you’re going to hold on with both hands, boy, what’ll you do with the hammer? You’ll fall for certain like that.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll want some space to breathe,” said Judah, and he took Ian’s hand again and forced him out over the roof. Now Ian knows it wasn’t force, it was a calculated angle and small risk, but then—in the dizzying rush of it all, in the instant that he dropped his hammer and watched it bounce on the paving below—he felt himself a lamb in eagle’s claws. The eagle has a wingspan larger than the lamb; it can pick its victim up and, great talons curved in the already-broken neck, flap to some unattainable eyrie and settle there to feed. Eagles drowned, he’d read, rather than give up the salmon they’d caught; they struck terror in the hearts of herds with just their shadow overhead. So Ian bit and fought for air till Judah said, “Okay. All right. I just wanted to show you it’s nothing to be scared of.”

  Then he stood upright again, feet planted square on the scaffolding board, one rung higher than his father and therefore the same height. And with absolute assurance, having ascertained the angle—thirty-two feet per second meaning it would take him maybe three quarters of a second if he chose to land feet first, then tuck and roll, providing he had legs to tuck and arms to roll and shoulders that would take the weight—he jumped.

  “So tell us where you’ve been?” Hattie asks.

  “How did you get here?” asks Maggie.

  “I could use a maraschino cherry now,” his aunt says, as if offhand.

  “Let’s celebrate.” Maggie winks at Ian, doles out two.

  The pink stain spreads across the china plate. Hattie picks up the cherry between her thumb and middle finger, letting it drip. “Artificial coloring.”

  Then, while Ian picks and pours from decanters on the sideboard, his aunt describes her ills. It is a catalog of ailments—fear of cataracts, blood pressure way, way up. She can’t see in the dark these days, and the house is dark. She limps; she doesn’t sleep; she’s frightened of sleepwalking and the stairwell; if she ever has to get on too much medication, she appoints him, Ian, a committee of one to take it away. She wouldn’t want to go the way some members of their family have gone.

  “What do you mean by that?” Maggie asks.

  “You know.”

  “No. What?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. And who,” says Hattie, purse-lipped, contentious, and he wonders has he caused this fight or do they jockey for position always anyhow.

  “Not perfectly well, no. You flatter yourself. Tell Ian. Do you mean the way that Judah died?”

  “He went as he was bound to go,” the old woman says. “I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying then? Implying?”

  “Ladies!” Ian says. “I thought this was a celebration.”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . .”

  He has his back to the fireplace now. He plants his feet in what he also knows had been his father’s stance. He raises his full glass to each of the women in turn, then drinks to the discordant interval between them. “Let’s celebrate,” he says.

  He is twenty-six years old by now and not a child; if only by default, Ian tells himself, he is the man of the house. Yet he finds himself thinking of onions where you peel and peel and find no core; just layers of transparency, a shapeliness adhering to itself. He feels that way. He tries to explain this to his mother, telling her how actors take on borrowed personality, and it’s a habit for bad actors also—an accent, posture, a gesture that falls short of true. Or take dubbers, Ian says: the better you
are, the less someone hears you; the perfect dubbing job is something that nobody knows has been done. You work till you’re not noticed; notice the lighting designer, and he’s failed to do his job.

  “All right,” she says. “I grant you.”

  Mummery: it’s what he used to call his work—the half-derisive, half-defensive way he’d termed what working men call make-believe and not a profession at all. But memorization and ranting and mimicry are outworn notions, he explains. When the world stopped being a stage, it became a three-ring circus, and he’d turned to Living Theater, Open Theater, theater in the streets. Only that too faded, he still had to organize not improvise road tours and do the advance work and paper the house. If the Grand Lama of Tibet were suddenly to visit us, he tells his mother, you’d be putting on the dog. His Worshipful Holiness would still be hunting contributions for the cause, and there’d be someone on ahead to slap up handbills and do the radio spots.

  “We don’t keep dogs,” says Hattie. “Not any longer. There’s nobody to exercise them.”

  He has not planned to stay, Ian says, but has nowhere urgent to go to; he’s, as they say, “between jobs.”

  “Just try and leave,” says Maggie. “Now that we’ve got you.”

  “Where we want you,” his aunt joins in, and he feels them fashioning alliance as once they might have done with Judah in the room. The bickering is over, anyhow; he smiles. He sees himself in the mirror with gilt Cupids, and pulls at his right ear. “If that’s how you feel about it . . .”

  “Yes,” Maggie says. “We do.”

  “We most certainly do. Didn’t I tell you, Margaret? Wasn’t I right for once?”

  “Um-mn.”

  Hattie flushes with the pleasure of her verified prediction. “I told you so. I always was certain you’d come on back home.”

  He picks up the fireplace brush. “You know how it feels when the plane drops too fast? Or the elevator stops climbing, or you thought there was an extra stair and you make adjustments, brace for it? Except there isn’t anything.” The bristles are black. He turns to Maggie. “No extra step, I mean. That’s what I feel all the time.” He yawns. His palms are wet.