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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Then Maggie advances toward him. Her face is the pattern of comfort. “Poor darling. You’re tired.”

  He yields his glib assurance and his inward mockery: whatever is coming must come. He falls upon her neck and whispers, “Out on my feet.”

  “Glad we got you,” Hattie says.

  “I’m glad to be back,” Ian says.

  III

  In the days that follow, however, he does notice change. Where first he found things constant and his recollection consistent with the aspect of the place, he soon observes how much has been abandoned. Remembrance is a trick time plays; what Ian sees as shabby he had thought of as ornate. His bed creaks. It sinks on its springs in the center, folding the mattress around him so there is no extra space. The plaster pineapples on the ceiling look bulbous; the marble fireplace-facing has cracked. Last year’s oak leaves litter the path; the flower beds are choked. His mother is weary, neglectful. She takes no pleasure in the maintenance that had been his father’s passion, hires no one to keep the house up. He asks her why they have no help and she says they have a cleaning woman, Mrs. Russell, every Thursday, and between times she and Hattie rinse their dishes, make their beds, and don’t kick up all that much dust.

  The gutters have sprung leaks. He watches the downspout in the first hard rain; it is clogged. The parquet has splintered; the carpets seem threadbare; the chandelier that cast its glow upon their first encounter has six broken bulbs. He hunts the reason all this worries him. It isn’t that he’s used to luxury the house no longer represents; even run-down and in desuetude, it’s much more elegant than where he’s been living these years. Neither is it that he’s come back home to see the myth debunked; the house is exactly the cavern and canyon, a grandeur clogged with bric-a-brac that Ian left behind. Nor, since the days he could not remember of his infant brother’s death, had there ever been much entertaining in the halls.

  He is not disconcerted by the silence of the place. Its pretension does not shock him, or its shabbiness. He fears no daylight ghost. Rather, some picture intervenes—some notion of the legacy this structure had been built to serve. One night, attempting sleep, he remembers what they called the Rana palaces of Kathmandu. Enormous private houses—on a scale that dwarfed the Big House as the Big House dwarfed the Toy House—they had bedrooms for seventy wives. The Rana palaces had been converted to the Nepalese government buildings and hospitals and hotels. He had been invited to dinner in one of them once; the walls had fat-armed archers aiming their arrows at breasts. The ceilings were murals of sunset and clouds; the peak of Saga-Marta was a pottery motif. The ambition of the Rana nobles was to build the largest private houses in the world. In this they had succeeded, yet their legatees were clerks.

  Maggie has changed. He pretends, for the first days, that all is as it was. She asks him to play music for her and he does so, clumsily, on the upright piano in the solarium. There had been a Steinway Grand; then that piano was destroyed and Judah bought a player piano to replace it. He tells her that his instrument, the few times that he’s played these years, has been the bass. She lies in a chaise longue, eyes shut, face drawn. He cannot play the pieces she requests. He plays Jelly Roll Morton, and ten minutes of Art Tatum. Her silence is restless, resistant.

  “What’s the matter?” Ian asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “I can stop, if this isn’t what you want to hear. Or how you want to hear it.”

  “No.”

  He pulls the squared lid out, then down. “Tell me,” he urges.

  “I would if I could,” Maggie says. “If there were anything simple to tell.” She shuts her eyes and turns from him; sun stripes the flesh of her arms.

  “Is it too hot for you?” he asks.

  “The model son.”

  “We do what we can,” he acknowledges, making it a joke.

  “You’re so goddamn solicitous,” she says. “Did you know that? Your father dies; for six months we don’t hear one single syllable and suddenly it’s ‘Mother, are you warm enough; could I adjust the Venetian blinds; may I fluff up your pillow?’ It’s surprising, Ian, it takes some getting used to . . .”“I’m sorry,” he offers.

  “You’re not. You’re so proud of yourself you’re bursting. Whatever else you’re thinking, I’m not an invalid.”

  “No.” He places both feet on the pedals and pretends they belong to a car, not a piano. He accelerates straight through the gearbox, reaching fourth.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie says. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just I’m not used to attention. I’ve forgotten what it means to answer a question like ‘What are you thinking?’ Or ‘What do you want to do today; which kind of music would you prefer to hear?’ ”

  “It can’t be all that bad,” he says.

  “It isn’t now. It can be, though. It was.”

  Ian wishes manhood were a line to draw. He has a birth certificate and passport to prove he’s no longer a child. The definitions vary—he stiffens his pectorals, flexes his thighs—but by most definitions he’s a man. He has lost one parent and lived alone for years; they call him “Sir” in restaurants. Friends get divorced or die.

  Yet there’s been no rite of passage, no moment when things changed. Little by little he grew up, thickened out; he repeated jokes, and then the jokes were stories of his own receding past. He had seemed to suck in worldliness at Maggie’s side, they called him “little man,” since he was Judah Sherbrooke’s boy. He wishes there had been some sort of test: something to prove that manhood was a line to toe, then cross.

  He knows a man who made six million dollars by the age of thirty. He’d invested carefully, then gambled on coffee futures, and both the reticence and recklessness paid off. The man had a beautiful wife and two fine children, and purchased an apartment on Central Park South. One day he was riding in the park; his horse shied, and he fell and hit his head on a rock. From that moment on, he had been an infant. They thought the concussion might pass; they thought perhaps it was amnesia or a state of nervous shock. But he wept when left alone, wept from fear at the doctor’s arrival into the room where they kept him, in a private hospital north of White Plains. His wife was loyal and hopeful and brave; she took a small apartment in the suburbs, so as to be near him for her daily visit.

  Ian drove there with her once. This had been going on, Muriel told him, for twenty-three months; she was at the end of her rope. They visited her husband’s ward together; his room had bright bay windows and a picture of Roy Rogers taped to the side of the color TV.

  The occasion made no sense. The man’s face was impossibly handsome still, the jaw smooth-shaven, eyes keen. Yet they showed no hint or flicker of interest in Ian, and, largely, distrust of his wife. All the patient could manage, in the stiff intervals of conversation (how have you been and how are things going, Ian asked, do you remember me; I’m the one who bobbled that grounder at shortstop when you were playing second, remember; I’m the one who dropped spaghetti sauce all over that flower arrangement), was “Peeps. Peeps. I need to make a peeps.”

  “You know what they say,” said Muriel, departing. “ ‘What the Lord giveth He taketh.’ Can you imagine that? Some people find comfort in thinking that way. I wish I could.” She squeezed his hand. “Dear Christ, how I wish I just could!”

  So Ian has been busy stripping skins. He picks at the flesh of his feet. He feels that he can slough off skin like garments, and that accent makes the man. He had worn an actor’s motley till he recognized true talent in an actor playing Iago while he stood by hefting spears. He had professed romantic passion till he found out passion’s spasm was an act of discipline, like learning how to land a jab or sink a left-hand hook shot fading away from the net. What do you do, he asks himself, when the dragon gives up and turns tail? There’s a padded lair it lives in and the armchair seems to fit; there’s whiskey waiting in decanters, a fire set and banked back just the way you like it, and the maiden you’ve been asked to rescue seems to be enjoying her predicament. The
tournament director has taken his knights and split south.

  One morning, after breakfast, he explores the carriage barn. The storage room has sliding doors, and he puts his shoulder to them, since they stick and creak. Inside, it is dark. Ian shivers in the sudden gloom and rolls down the sleeves of his shirt. The air is stale and wet. There is a jumble of carriages and sleighs. He peers into the dusty dark, wondering how it could have happened that he’d been at home these weeks and forgotten or neglected what had been his treasure cave when young. This was his secret place. It is where he ran to hide or dream, pretending to be a nobleman or highwayman or just his great-great-grandfather, driving the team four-in-hand.

  The brass has dulled. The leather has gone moldy, and cobwebs festoon the windows of the winter coach. The wood of the sleighs feels wet to the touch, and Ian finds a bird’s nest on the high seat where he perched. Swallows flit away from him, frantic, enraged, and he hears the quick startled flurry of mice. Still, he takes comfort in these stacked, packed remnants as a stay against confusion: in the dark bottom of the carriage barn things are as they had been.

  The north wall of the space is stacked with steamer trunks. He had pried them open when young, or worked the padlocks free. They seldom had been locked, but the moment he opened the trunks was full of expectation and delight. He had come to know their contents over time. And later on he came to think of that expectant lifting, that thrill of confirmation when he pulled open the trunk lid, as some sort of cognate to sex. He loves the act’s preliminaries—the unbuttoning, opening out. There is an oxcart and plow. There are the blades of a windmill Judah had planned to repair. He climbs inside a curricle and sits on the stiff red leather where when he was twelve years old he used to picture Ellen Portis naked beside him, whispering endearments.

  She left the village first, to go to boarding school. The school was in Concord, Massachusetts, and once he drove to Boston with his mother and they passed a sign for Concord and he thought of Ellen, free, a foreigner. They visited the State House and the ships in Boston harbor, and his mother introduced him to her cousin Jack. “He’s a distant cousin,” Maggie said. “So you won’t remember him, probably. We’ll just drop by for a minute.”

  Jack lived on Beacon Hill, where the sledding was terrific as soon as the cobbles got iced. In the wintertime, Jack said, there isn’t any hill in Massachusetts that can beat out Beacon Hill. They call it that, he said to Ian, because it’s where we hoisted beacons when the redcoats came a’calling; when Johnny Redcoat came to town this was the place we saw it from, and signaled Paul Revere.

  So Paul Revere had saddled up and ridden off to Lexington and Concord, where Ellen Portis went to instead of the sixth grade. She would learn Latin there. She returned, tormenting him with Latin and Pig Latin and stories of the way they all smoked cigarettes in Concord, just behind the cannon, after dark. Later she returned with friends and flounced her way toward him, giggling; later still her face got splotchy and sallow and Ian also left. So she never sat beside him on the red leather chair.

  As Hattie had predicted, he does become the town’s prize. They welcome Ian at parties as if he’s come back from war. When he mentions Portugal or Bali or France they make him feel like Marco Polo—an intrepid trader returned to share the spoils. He tells the truth or makes up tales and it makes no difference; as Sherbrooke’s son he is eligible everywhere, a catch.

  “Watch out that they don’t eat you up,” Maggie warns. “They’ll serve you up in little chunks. In cream sauce.”

  “How’s that?” Hattie inquires, approaching.

  “I’m telling him to take it easy. He doesn’t want to wear out his welcome.”

  “Nonsense. People are glad.”

  “About what?” Ian asks.

  “That you’re back. That someone’s here who’s been away but decided to return. You’re showing your family feeling; you’re putting down roots, Ida says.”

  “Well, Sally Conover is pleased to have a dinner partner anyhow. We can’t really blame her,” says Maggie.

  Hattie sniffs. “She must just thank her lucky stars that Ian’s come to town.”

  “Whoa,” Ian says. “Hold your horses. May I remind you, ladies, we haven’t even met?”

  Maggie refuses invitations that ask her to accompany her son. After his return, however, he finds her in the kitchen, waiting up. She prepares warm milk and honey for him, and they talk. He tells her who was there and what they had been wearing and does imitations of the hostess till his mother laughs. She has the best of both possible worlds, Maggie declares; she has the pleasure of the parties, but doesn’t have to sit there being bored.

  He goes to dinner at the Conovers that Saturday. Ida Conover calls Hattie and suggests that Ian come; her grand-niece Sally has offered to cook supper and it’ll be potluck for all of them, so why not Ian too? At the last minute, however, Hattie pleads a stomach cramp and sends him off alone. He finds the house and rings the bell and waits in the entryway, stamping. The girl who answers is tall. She wears a blue jumpsuit with a red line where the zipper runs, and has dark brown hair. She greets him with a sense of prearranged alliance, as if they are not strangers but long-established friends. Her hand is cold. “A crazy climate, isn’t it?” she asks. Her eyes are brown, lips full. She wears three strands of pearls; the pearls are varicolored and irregular.

  Miles Fisk arrives next. “Our babysitter’s late. The wife will be along shortly.” He nods at Ian. “You must be Sherbrooke. Welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Fisk’s my name,” he says. “Miles. It means soldier, not how far you travel.”

  “What are you drinking?” Sally asks.

  “Whatever’s on offer. But lots of it.” Miles winks. He wears rimless glasses and a tan corduroy vest.

  “Ian.” She touches his sleeve. “Would you do the honors, please? The bar is in the pantry.”

  “What’s whatever?” Ian asks.

  “Bourbon. Wild Turkey by preference. Water and no ice, okay? Just a splash.”

  “Of water, or bourbon?”

  “The man’s got a sense of humor,” Miles announces. “Sally, my congratulations. Just a splash of water, please.”

  In the pantry, she detains him. “Don’t mind Miles. He’s such a tease. Being the local editor . . .” Sally touches his tie. “And promise me two things.”Ian measures, pours.

  “First”—she drops her voice—“that you won’t hold all this against me.”

  He looks at her. “All right.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s a second thing.” She runs her tongue around her lips, then smiles at him. “That you won’t look at his wife.”

  Samson Finney arrives. His neck has thickened, and his eyes have glazed. His hair has gone; there is hair in his nostrils and ears. He takes Ian’s hand and pumps it, saying “My boy” several times.

  “Mr. Finney,” Ian asks, “are you still drinking whiskey?”

  “What a memory! The answer is affirmative!” He rumbles over to Elizabeth Conover’s chair. A big, bluff man wearing suspenders, he seems Judah’s image, though dim. They talk about the weather, the mobile home zoning ordinance, the incidence of swine flu since Legionnaire’s Disease.

  Jeanne Fisk enters the living room, and Ian takes her coat. She calls to her husband, “Betty Boop was doing homework. I couldn’t blame her, really; that’s why she came late. Or the excuse she gave . . .”

  “What may I get you?” Ian asks.

  “It doesn’t matter. Red wine, if you have it. Thanks.”

  “How are the children?” Finney asks.

  “Fine. Kathryn lost her bicuspid. I was the tooth fairy and I gave her a whole dollar—inflation, you see. I remember being pleased if the tooth fairy forked over a quarter.”

  Sally appears with cheese. It has been cut into bite sizes, and toothpicks protrude from the segments like quills. “Do help yourselves.”

  “She’s so proud,” Jeanne Fisk
continues, “she calls it her ‘gap.’ She keeps pointing to the space and saying, ‘See my gap!’ ”

  “And—what’s the other one’s name?” Finney asks. “Amy?”

  “Yes, jealous enough to knock her own teeth out. Or tie them to a doorknob.”

  At dinner, Sally keeps him by her right-hand side and tells him her own story. She’d lived in Paris for two years, taking whatever jobs were on offer, hoping to break into films. But that meant teaching English to the children of the upwardly mobile; it meant being a gardener’s assistant in the gardens of the rich. Her boss, she says to Ian, was a male model who pulled only the fanciest weeds in Passy; they’d be invited in to cocktails, often as not, and she’d take off her gardener’s smock and pretend to be at home. It was one way to practice French and also earn your keep.

  Then after that she’d gotten bit parts riding in the movies; she’d been a stand-in for a starlet ill at ease with horses, and she rode a roan mare six straight days in the mist in the Bois de Boulogne. The movie was never released. They laugh about this, comparing notes, and Ian says that by and large she’d done better in the world of entertainment than had he. Still, Sally says, you understand what made me want to do it, what made me need a life like that. I understand, he says.

  They compliment the lamb. Then Finney toasts the wanderer come back. “The Good Lord threw away the mold when He made your father. Sometimes I tell myself that that’s a reason to be grateful because two of Judah Sherbrooke would be more than one small state like ours could handle. He’d fill a room so full you had to leave the windows open just to get some air.” Finney raises his glass. “Absent friends.”

  Ian walks the Big House rooms; slowly he charts the four floors. He remembers childhood games along the halls, and which closet was the better hiding place because you could hear all the way to the kitchen, through the dumbwaiter behind it. One afternoon, in Maggie’s room—he is not prying, just passing through, curious about what kind of bird is building in the copper beech outside—he sees a book. It is bound in red vellum, and a marking pencil lies on the open page.