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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Yes,” Hattie says. “Indeed I can. Mrs. Judah Sherbrooke had so many other names I’d never know which one to call her—Maggie, Megan, Meg. Margaret. They’re peas in a pod,” she continues. “I noticed it right off.”

  “Well,” Elizabeth says. She pulls out her handkerchief. The meeting comes to order. Orvis Thatcher beats his gavel on the rolltop desk—hard, proudly, so often you’d think it would crack. “Is that a compliment?”

  “Beg pardon?” Hattie asks.

  “I’m glad you think my niece is like the present Mrs. Sherbrooke. Whatever she calls herself now.”

  That finishes it; she puts her fingers to her lips and hisses, “Hush.”

  Her doctor says he wants her eyes checked; he has urged her to make an appointment. He mentions specialists and words like macular degeneration and depth of field and cataracts and remedial elective surgery, but Hattie barely listens. She is a specialist in darkness anyhow these days. She puts her whole hand on the table, first, in order to find the right fork.

  “That glass,” says Ian. “Watch it.”

  “Watch what?”

  “It’s chipped, I think. Here, let me see.”

  She has been preparing to drink. He reaches over the table, taking her water glass away.

  “I’m sorry,” Hattie says. “I didn’t notice.”

  “No.”

  “It must be a trick of the light.”

  She holds her hand out for the glass, runs her thumb around the edge until she feels the crack. She goes to the pantry to fetch a replacement and, coming back, watches him watch her. “Crystal,” Hattie says. “It always needs replacing.”

  “Yes.”

  “One of these days”—she smiles at him—“we’ll buy a whole new set.”

  “Are you all right?” asks Maggie.

  “Never better. Yes, of course.”

  Evenings, Hattie reads to them from the ancestral papers, pointing out which of Peacock’s ventures succeeded and which few failed, using the present tense. “He’s a stubborn sort of man,” she’d say. “Just like certain other Sherbrookes that we all could name. He’s got a willful way about him, old Daniel Sherbrooke the dreamer.”

  She believes her brother met his end the way John Garfield did—in the arms of a hired fancy woman, and in bed. This was true of Garfield and English barons by the wagonload and many men in power, she is certain. They die with their boots on, perhaps, but wearing nothing else and in a sinful embrace. So Judah purchased Maggie’s charms and paid the price of pleasure, expiring of love. She is his legal wife, of course, but Hattie thinks there ought to be another kind of law. Maggie killed him with her beauty’s edge as surely as if she had whetted an ax-blade or sickle or scythe. Facing her, he’d come to have the stunned look of a cow who doesn’t even know it’s dead, whose skull has been crushed by a twelve-pound maul but doesn’t yet feel it—standing there blinking, feet splayed, head lowered, eyes up.

  Judah said that sort of blow is merciful; the animal won’t know. But she knows what hit him, all right, as surely as she knows that her Redeemer liveth since He willingly gave up the ghost, not like some dumbstruck Angus dreaming of clover, then smashed. Hattie has observed it. She witnessed such slaughtering often. And she therefore has no trouble seeing how his eyes would glaze, would tilt and ride back in their sockets when his lawful wife advanced on him, her skirts raised like a hammer and his heart just not up to the shock.

  They haven’t discussed it, of course. There are certain things you can’t ask a person, no matter if you know the answer off by heart. But the woman reeks of guilt as once she used to reek of perfume, and Hattie thinks she maybe ought to sue. There ought to be a law that says you cannot take advantage of those feebleminded, great-limbed men who have been disadvantaged by lust. She would win the lawsuit if there were justice on earth.

  But justice is a matter for lawyers and judges and newspapermen, and no doubt they’d act precisely as Judah had acted before. One day in court and Maggie would have each of them agreeing with her, licking the salt from her palm. No matter how you try, you cannot legislate equality before the law courts in this life. Every dog will have her day, and Maggie’s the queen of the pack.

  So Hattie keeps her dignity before the law. But it’s been pure plain torture not to say what she’s screaming to say and what the woman ought to hear: You killed him. He was healthy when you came to town and dead not six months after, and who’s the cause of that? You made him your plaything. You made him humble himself to you, making him kneel—you, who weren’t ever good enough to lick his boots!

  She is accustomed to dismissal, to being someone’s maiden sister, then sister-in-law, and aunt. She knows what Ian does with Sarah Conover is not her business, really, nor her duty to control. She had hoped the girl would prove enticing, and her wish has come only too true. Make certain you know what you’re asking before you ask for it, the fairy godmother warns; don’t buy a pig in a poke. She’d hoped that Ian would return and settle in and maybe settle down, but he is so much Judah’s son and Maggie’s look-alike there seems no end of trouble to her granted wish. He comes home at all hours or sleeps in what he says are fields; he reminds her, sometimes, of her reckless first beau, Jamie Pearson. With his liquorish gallantry and high-stepping ways, Ian sure as sure is riding for a fall—and she, Hattie, tries to warn him off. She tells him how Jamie Pearson died: in an alley, in the winter, behind the Village Inn. His liver just plain quit. There had been no one left to watch him when he froze.

  “Hospitality,” says Ian. “It’s what people here don’t understand. They don’t know what it means to take a person in.”

  “That’s not true,” Hattie says.

  “It is. Believe me. Try and find a bed in this town if you weren’t born here.”

  “We always give a helping hand . . .”

  “To those who don’t need help.” Maggie speaks up on Ian’s behalf. “To anyone who’s a neighbor, why we might prove neighborly. But it’s not what he means.”

  “What is then?” Hattie asks.

  “Soup for the starving,” he says. “A bed for Jamie Pearson if he’s sleeping in the gutter. Your daughter for a black man, and maybe a junkie to boot.”

  “You’re just being foolish.”

  “No. Extreme. If you won’t give up your daughter to a hophead then you don’t know hospitality.”

  “I myself have got no daughter”—Hattie has their measure now—“and if I did I’m sure she’d know a good deal better by herself. Than ever you imagine, Ian Sherbrooke.”

  “You get my point,” he says.

  “No, and I’m not sure I want to, besides.”

  He turns to his mother. “Do you?”

  “He’s saying,” Maggie says, “that if we didn’t own this town he’d have trouble getting gas. Or making it past the stop sign where Thatcher’s looking out for license plates.”

  “We do not own this town!”

  “Well, half of it, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d say”—Hattie sniffs—“the Sherbrookes own what they paid for and have a right to keep. In the face of taxes and developers and young do-nothings like yourself. I don’t exclude you, Ian, it’s a fact.”

  Next he tells them that the house should be transformed. “Turn it into a museum,” Ian says. “Charge ten cents a visit, or a dollar fifty; do it for free. Whatever. You can show the strangers every instrument of torture, every hassock Peacock bought on mail order, those lamps that never worked. Every rug his children scuffed their shoes on, the paintings bought in job lots. And even the ormolu clock,” he finishes.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “You’re not, and Mother’s not. If you were sorry you’d change it from feeling like a crypt,” he says. “A place for embalmed attitudes. It’s no sort of house.”

  “You show me how to change it,” Maggie offers, “and I promise you we’ll change.”

  “A box of matches,” Ian says. “That’s what we need.”

&nb
sp; Hattie is shocked. He seems to know, however, that he’s gone too far and doesn’t mean it; he takes her hand and strokes it gently, telling them, “But then we’d start again.”

  Now Hattie sees a thing she had not noticed. You live with someone every day and take them so for granted you forget to look. She sees (and triumphs noticing, since the woman was always pole-slim and perfect before, even at fifty-two, even eating too much pie—yet there is regret mixed in, since one of the things she has lived with is beauty in the Big House) her sister-in-law in the chair. Things change; somebody tilts the hourglass while she isn’t watching, and sand runs the other way. Maggie has grown fat.

  VI

  She cannot quite believe it. It took her weeks to admit to herself, then weeks to think it possible, then weeks more to articulate to Ian—as if saying were being, was proof. It was like see-no-hear-no-speak-no-evil, or like the ostrich principle; stick your head far enough in the sand, and nothing seems a threat.

  There are other reasons, of course. The odds on conception for women past forty are small; the odds against pregnancy for a widowed fifty-two-year-old are high indeed. Far more likely, Maggie knows, that what was wrong is menopause—and the changes she’s been going through are the “change of life.” Or even hysterical pregnancy—she’s not discounted that. Nor were her periods regular. Nor, in her two previous pregnancies, had she been quick to conceive.

  So logic argued inattention; it meant she didn’t have to take her bodily promptings for fact. Of all the jokes time played, this would have been the crudest—and she chose to ignore it, not laugh. Of all the ridiculous problems, this would have been the worst—the widowed Mrs. Sherbrooke standing at a small-town small-time carnival, her face framed in the cardboard picture of some sort of clown, her belly pressing up against the backdrop while neighbors fling pie at her face.

  Still, she woke up queasy. Still, she felt that quickening separate life inside her she’d not known for a quarter of a century. She’d felt it with Ian, then Seth. She told herself it is this pitiless mansion that makes a parody of how she’d been in her blithe wifehood, young. By the third year of their marriage, Ian had been born; two years later, Seth was born and then was dead in his crib. In one way or another, everything is repetition and empty echo since. She’d known it all along, of course; we all are born to die.

  So Maggie would wake with her hands on her stomach, sweating already, going faint as she stood by the stove or in the middle of some meal with Hattie, or chatting on the phone. The world would take up its giddying motion while she stood rooted and still. Or it was she who was twirling, feet crisscrossed, toes down, arms raised, but the world neglected its rotation. So she had headaches and backaches and could not hold her food down, but was gaining weight.

  She knew it wasn’t ulcers; people with ulcers don’t gain. She knew it wasn’t cancer or colitis or peritonitis or any of the wasting diseases that might cause a woman trouble with digestion. One of the problems in this town was whom to use for a doctor—someone in whom to confide. She had Fred Wiggins over for supper, since he’d been her husband’s friend and doctor and she had known him ever since Seth. But the man was ponderous—Hattie’s speed, not hers. He had the face of a Basset hound; his hands were damp with too much washing, and his last medical textbook was probably Gray’s Anatomy—or Galen, or Hippocrates, whoever wrote the first.

  She asked around. She met Dr. Fifield at the Harrises’ for cocktails, and asked what were the symptoms, for instance, of cancer of the womb. He said that wasn’t a “for instance,” that if she had any suspicions she should turn herself in straightway for testing. But then he said that hysterectomy was overpracticed in this country, if you wanted his opinion. If he were a vet, the doctor said, most any farmer would forbid him to perform a mastectomy on cows, but the selfsame farmer was ready to cut off his wife’s teats, for instance, at the slightest trouble; begging your pardon, he said to Maggie, but I’m a plain-speaking man. She told him the analogy was only too plain, and sexist, and he might try in the future not to draw too pat an equal sign between women and cows. He blushed, fiddled with his pocket watch, and tried a joke. “You know the one,” he asked her, “about architects and doctors? Architects cover their mistakes with ivy. Doctors just do it with sod.”

  “And women,” Maggie said. “You forgot that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The third part of the joke. You’re supposed to say, about women, they cover their mistakes with mayonnaise.”

  There are, in this little town, no doctors she can trust.

  For weeks, therefore, she lived with her suspicion of disease. Then that too faded from her, and she suspected the presence of life; she needed an obstetrician and gynecologist, not a stomach doctor. She thought of going to New York, but lately had feared traveling as much as Judah ever did, and Hattie needed her, and besides her New York gynecologist had moved to Santa Fe.

  Then she heard, at a dessert party it was their turn to give, of an East Indian doctor who had just settled in. “He’s devilishly handsome,” Helen Bingham said. “Catch me letting my daughter take off her clothes in front of him!”

  “Not likely,” Ruth Whiting said.

  “They want him for the hospital.”

  “He’s Pakistani, is he?”

  “No, Indian,” said Helen Bingham. “You learn how to tell them apart.”

  “Is he married?” Hattie asked.

  “Mm-mn. I do believe his wife is always with him in the examining room. Less risky that way,” giggled Ruth.

  “It’s the law,” said Helen. She had been a registered nurse.

  “Well, anyway . . .”

  “This is excellent cake,” Maggie said. Hattie had provided it, and she changed the topic to the quality of eggs.

  “I declare,” Ruth Whiting said, “it’s criminal the way they make those laying hens stay up. You can taste it, too, in a factory farm; they just never get any exercise or a chance to rest.”

  Maggie heard enough to seek the doctor out. He was sufficiently a stranger and good enough to have been courted by their hospital, despite what the board of directors would think of as his handicap of race. She made an appointment next day.

  His office was in his house. He received her at the front door, beaming, full of exaggerated courtesy about the pleasure of her visit and apologies that things were not quite up to adequate yet with reference to furnishings; he had a singsong, high-flown rhetoric she thought of as a comedy routine. He said “okay” continually, as a concession to slang. He wore white shoes, white pants; his face was round and brown and soft, with a rabbit’s quick twitching alertness; she found him neither devilish nor handsome and felt at her ease.

  He introduced her to his wife; they came from Orissa, they said. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, and Dr. Rahsawala praised the tradition of arrangement, since he said—his wife beaming, short and boneless by his side—that no decision he had ever taken on his own had been so marvelously correct as the decision their families took. “Now what, is the problem, okay?” he inquired. “What are you wanting to examine, okay, this afternoon?”

  She had long since grown indifferent to physical examination and some stranger’s dispassionate probing. But now she felt as secretive as when, nineteen, she had been fitted for a diaphragm: as full of shrinking sin. Maggie settled to the stirrups as if onto a rocking horse; she closed her eyes and pictured Ian riding. Then she limned his features—focusing on the nose and its resemblance to her dead husband’s—then thought she’d take him riding on the property. She pictured him in Technicolor next, as Dr. Rahsawala’s gloved fingertips pressed and prodded and stretched her. She told the doctor she suspected pregnancy; he nodded, not amazed. He asked her for the first urine of tomorrow’s morning, and told her he would have the answer by next night. Habitually evasive, she had had to face it then; she drove home, slept well, but woke up feeling giddy and sick. She took him the sample and left it with his wife; she was, she realized, as old as the two
of them put together, since Rowhena was nineteen. Maggie did not return to the Big House directly. She drove along the Old East Road, hunting memories of Judah and how this came to pass.

  There is a family legend of the golden-hearted whore. Peacock’s elder son, they said, ate up his substance with loose women, and there were opportunities abounding in the city by the sea. Peacock was an upright man, one of the fledgling community’s pillars: “The strong right arm of Probity,” Anne-Maria wrote, “had no firmer sinew than Daniel Sherbrooke our father. We honored him daily alive as we honor now his dear departed Memory, secure in the availing grace of his person and Thought.”

  Yet Daniel Sherbrooke, Jr., was an errant son. The letters mention him often, then rarely, then not at all. He mocked his father’s piety and gambled and rutted and drank. His I.O.U. was good at expensive gaming tables, since Peacock would honor the note. His name sent thrills of expectancy through the bars or whorehouses, since the drink would be abundant and the custom lavish and lavishly rewarded. He was, they said, prodigious in the consumption of women and pink gin and hundred-dollar chips.

  Maggie imagines him. He would have had Jude’s height. He would have wax mustachios and pearls on his vest and a pearl-handled revolver and a diamond stickpin in his tie. His teeth would glint in firelight and his belly-laugh would shatter glass; he would be expert at dancing. He could kick his heels three times in succession in the hornpipe jig. There was an octoroon, they said, who became his sporting favorite. “High yaller and high-spirited and low-life to beat all,” he boasted. “That’s my girl.”

  She styled herself “Belle Amour.” He asked her what that meant and she said, “Guess.”

  “I know what Bella means,” he said, “I know about the moors.”

  “You don’t know French,” she chided him.

  “Not worth mentioning.”

  “Well, Belle Amour is French.”

  “Oh, pardon me. Pardonnez-moi.”

  She pardoned him and they went waltzing and later he performed his hornpipe jig. “My lady of the Indies,” Maggie imagines him calling her. “My precious golden calf.”