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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “You’ll spoil me, Dan,” she warned.

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re spoiled already.”

  “Spoil me worse,” she said.

  “What’s worse than worst?”

  “You’ll spoil me for the others.” She laughed her throaty laugh.

  “That’s my intention, chicken. It’s my idea, Bella Moor.”

  So Maggie imagines them courting, with her hardened heart softening to him, and his visits frequent and always on soft sheets. She supported herself on his arm while they brazened their way past Peacock’s office building on Montgomery Street. He displayed her like his cuff links, and there were many who took umbrage, but none who dared take umbrage to his face. He had been a crack shot. He was famously quarrelsome and could shoot fish heads from a seal on the Pacific rocks without injuring the mouth of the seal, using only his handgun and not bothering to aim.

  Daniel Jr. stayed in San Francisco when his father traveled east. He was written out of the will. He set up Belle Amour in private apartments and spent his leisure hours there—and since all his time, they said, was leisure time, the two were seldom separate or gone from love’s lush bower; their laughter would mingle with the sound of ice in glasses, and the glittery tinkle of jewels. “This ain’t half bad,” he’d say, approving, and she’d always answer, “Dan, it ain’t half good.” He would cackle and slap at his sides.

  If she bore him children, they went unrecorded. There were deaths at birth and deaths in childhood often enough in that city and those years. San Francisco, Peacock wrote, though it be a city on the waters, was a city of the plains; “Sodom and Gomorrah were seats of Equity and Faith when held against th’ Invidious Standard of the Present time, and the lewd deportment of the women on the docks.”

  She has shown no lewd deportment. She had been surprised by grief when Judah died; she ought to have prepared for it and had thought herself prepared. The reason she came back, indeed, was that he lied he was dying, and had had Finney call to offer his Boy Scout’s motto: “Be prepared.” Yet she stands accused in the eyes of the neighbors and remaining family, since she never has worked off that first accusation: You’re Judah’s whore: you’re money- and man-hungry, go back to your bed by the docks.

  In those last six months, however, Maggie tended her husband unstintingly. It had taken half a year before his lie proved truth, before the heart attack he’d faked to bring her up from New York City was actual and fatal and permitted her return. Except she did not leave. By that time New York seemed an alien place (it would have been leaving, not going home, she explained to those who asked her; it would have been beside the point). She did go twice in order to pack up her things and have them shipped north. She gave up the apartment. The second time (standing on the balcony, barefoot, watching the East River and deciding not to take the window boxes) she felt something like regret.

  The moving men arrived. They gathered her accoutrements in only three hours—picking the place clean. They asked, “Is that all, lady?” and she told them yes. It would take a company a month or more to pack up the Big House, and all of its vans. Her own few objects, however, added nothing to the bulk of where they were delivered—and Maggie, in her empty rooms, felt elegiac in advance for how she’d traveled light. There was an upright piano, a record collection, some photographs and books and plates and watercolors, and six suitcases of clothes. The seven years she’d lived apart from Judah were canceled by the smallest truck Neptune could provide.

  The way her husband took her back had been on his own terms, of course. It meant those years could not exist—that he never mentioned New York City or their time apart. It meant if she referred to streets or concerts or friends he had not shared with her, his face would tighten and his fingers curl; his silence would be absolute or right hand rise to his chest. She had known something about that already, arriving to play hostage to the collapse of his health; she knew she was his prize possession ransomed back.

  But in the six months since his death she’d come to understand such separation—how the sections of her life remained disjunct. It was maybe a function of age—that she could remember her ten- or twenty- or thirty-year previous self as some alien someone in some other place. Or the Big House did to her what it had done to Judah—its boundaries became the limits of her easy ranging, its rooms became the only rooms where she could take her ease.

  There is comfort in that, Maggie thinks. Things do not alter if you have the money and time to preserve them; things stay as they once were. But every once in a while she’d felt so suffocated by the present way of living in Vermont that she embraced the headstrong past—went dancing or to concerts to console herself for her husband’s death. When she packed up Sutton Place she spent the night at Andrew Kincannon’s, and they played their lust-parts clumsily again. They heard a Schumann symphony, then ate a light postconcert supper at the Russian Tea Room; they walked to his apartment hand in hand as if it were a decade previous or when they’d started their affair, with his first wife in Barbados in—she calculated—1959.

  “You’ve ruined me,” said Andrew. “Do you know that?”

  “How so?”

  “For all other women.” He raised his eyebrows and sighed. “For any earthly happiness, my angel.”

  “Oh, Andrew . . .” She released her hand.

  “Oh, Andrew, what?”

  “You’re being theatrical.”

  “Just properly dramatic, Meg.”

  “Im-properly. Most people would be happy with such ruination. You’re richer now than then.”

  “Don’t mock me,” Andrew mourned. But his tone was so sepulchral that she knew he meant it as a joke, and that their practiced coupling soon to come would be something to grin at, not mourn.

  Still, the following morning, he had wanted her to remain. They ate Sara Lee croissants. She told him no; he asked why not, she said because she had to follow Neptune north; he asked her, please, to stay. This time he sounded serious and so she teased him, saying, “You can’t mean it, Andrew. Not after all these years.”

  “I mean it. What else do we have?”

  “What else I have is solitude,” she said.

  “You’re being romantic. First you call me melodramatic and then you offer your own secondhand sentiment. From a third-rate novel.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Have some orange marmalade.”

  “To sweeten my disposition.” She smiled at him. He understood, he seemed to be saying, that this was the last time they’d meet. It was—Maggie hunted the word—indecorous; two aging spangled acrobats on all fours in the net. When she returned to the Big House, she would be its mistress alone.

  Yet the habit of companionship dies hard. One of the things that died with Judah was someone’s near body at night. She missed it, missing him. Then too, men had thought of her as a man’s woman for so long that she came to think of herself that way also—half of some sexual whole that required a male for completion. She had been an ornament, so practiced in the fashions of flirtation that she draped her solitude around her like a peignoir. She wore it like a housedress with nothing underneath.

  It wasn’t a question of liberation; she had been a “liberated woman” since long before the term. But what that meant to men was promiscuity; what that signaled was the willingness to wager her freedom in some sort of contest, to make it the stakes of the game. And many men did battle with her or were suitors for her dangling hand or brought their spears and drinking gourds to the Big House parlor like lazy preening aspirants. They loitered in the door. They expected to be fed and made much of and flattered, or to warm themselves by the marble-fronted fireplace as soon as they hauled in the wood. They thought she would beg for the chance. She joked about herself that way—calling herself Penelope beset by preening suitors while she darned her absent husband’s socks and dithered on whom to select.

  Only it did seem a second-rate joke; Odysseus was dead and in the family plot. Telemach
us was traveling and hadn’t been back to the Big House in years, nor had she seen him lately. The theme was old, fidelity irrelevant, and all Maggie wanted was peace. There were blue-tick hounds around to play at being Argus, and Hattie could serve as the faithful retainer—she gave it up; she wasn’t some contemporary queen who undid every night each day’s artistic industry; she was a fifty-two-year-old with all her bridges burned. Moats and drawbridges and golden hair let out of towers were not now the point.

  She tended the greenhouse instead. She grew hothouse grapes. She read old Sherbrooke journals, or the laundry lists of maiden aunts, or Anne-Maria’s fanciful phrasing from her missionary trip. She drank coffee to begin the day and wine to go to sleep.

  “Dear brother,” she would read, “I need not tell Over the perils we passed, the Sea’s vast surge about us for these Weeks or school you once again in how the Flying Fish were sure Harbingers of Mercy, seeming to relish company in such trackless Waste. I speak personally; it appeared trackless to me who never could discern the Wind nor which direction Tides Elected, having all I could manage to distinguish Dawn from Dusk, therefore the East from the Westering Sun. And yet those sturdy Mariners who manned the ship were cheery and steadfast in Persuasion, recognizing Rock-face or Tide-Pool or Variety of Water when it all seemed confusion to me, a blank Map.

  “But the comparison is just. Even so do some of us wander like innocents abroad upon the Map of Faith, not knowing that the paths we tread are well-worn Stages indeed. Even so perhaps do you peer out of the House portals, making nothing of what seems to me significant. God’s Sign. I trust that this will change.”

  VII

  Then, when she no longer coveted surprise, Maggie had been taken by surprise. It has always been that way and will be, she thinks; she herself married too early and become pregnant too late. You fill the freezer full with garden produce—having worked all summer storing, canning, amassing—and the machine breaks down. You let your guard down lazily, luxuriously, and that’s when they throw the cream pie.

  In his last years, Judah had relinquished his own attempt at farming and rented out the land. The crops and cows belonged to someone else. There had been a succession of tenants, she learned, since Judah was irascible and watchful and knew the place inside out. Once Sammy Underwood’s prize bull was penned in the wrong enclosure and broke into the vegetable garden. Judah made the farmer—right in the middle of haying, when he had no time to spare or waste—repair the pen and paint the chicken-house siding that faced it and tie back four rows of beans. Sammy Underwood gave notice then that, come season’s end and as far as he was concerned, the arrangement was over; the chicken house had needed painting anyhow, and he never signed on for painting. “You can save yourself the trouble,” Judah said, “in case you didn’t know. I wasn’t about to let you have it next time around.”

  Will Banner’s Jerseys ate his watercress; they forded the stream behind the duck pond—not in front of it, where Judah’s herd had always gone—and that finished that. Willis Reed planted corn in the shed field and then his wife got sick and he spent the fall having to cook and clothe the kids and never got to plow it under or seed the acreage down. Judah made him harvest the thistles the following spring—when he’d intended to be seeding bottom land. Finally they let the place lie fallow and he hired Hal Boudreau just to do the haying and keep the barns in shape. Hay was a dollar a bale; they did better that way anyhow, he said.

  Boudreau worked for Judah for years. He was sure-footed and careful enough to satisfy the old man’s particularity, but without ambition of his own. You don’t want a man drinking up his wages, and this one has a liquor problem, Judah said. Give him any money and he’s done for; give him cigarettes and food and a roof for his head and all’s well.

  Hal Boudreau was married and had had four children. One son was killed in Vietnam, one daughter worked in the state mental home, and one lived in Arizona. Maggie inquired what she did there, and Hal was reticent. She made jewelry, he said; she peddled some sort of turquoise trash the Indians produced. His fourth child, Harry, was eleven and lived in the trailer and helped out with the chores. What Maggie noticed first about them was how alike were the father and son: their coloring looked similar and their sauntering walk was the same.

  This caused her to think about Ian and Judah—how she wished they might have shared some sort of occupation. Harry had the feet and hands of someone who would shoot up soon—the gap-toothed grin that shortly would be stained with nicotine, just like his father’s, the ears thatprotruded and mouth that turned down. She saw them at the pump. Hal worked the handle, his breath steaming in December air, until a trickle, then a rush of water came out, while Harry held the pails. What was it, she asked herself later; what aspect of their labor could have compelled her attention?

  “Morning.”

  “Morning.” Hal tilted his cap’s visor back.

  “You could use the tap, you know.”

  “Lines froze,” he said.

  “Where? Here?”

  “No. Up to our place.”

  “Oh.” Maggie paused. They watched her. They wore hunting caps. Hal had a deer license still pinned to the back of his red wool shirt. “Well, can’t you run a line?”

  “Ground’s froze.”

  “A hose?”

  “Ain’t got one,” Harry said.

  She wondered, were they teasing her; she remembered that Hal was a drunk. His nose and cheeks were red so that they blended with his beard and all his face was ruddy, glowing, but she knew herself too flame-faced from the winter wind, and told them they could take and keep whatever hose they found. They had snowshoes; they padded away. For weeks thereafter Maggie kept the image of the two black shapes, their backs to her, holding pails and hose and shuffling up the hill to their tinny retreat; she wondered, was Hal still married?

  He was; she found that out. His wife showed the effects of age—heavy with the diet that, like Jack Sprat’s, left Boudreau lean. Maggie met her at the grocery and, as the woman commenced to haul her shopping bags on foot back up the hill, offered a lift. Mrs. Boudreau was voluble—“Amy,” she said, “that’s my name, that’s what they’ve called me ever since I can remember anyhow, though my real name’s Amelia, it’s French.” She was French Canadian and had met Hal in Maine. They were both potato farming near theAlagash, that’s the nearest river Mrs. Sherbrooke would have heard of anyhow, and she, Amy, was a Catholic and a Democrat and that’s why no one talked to her in this whole town. There were other reasons. There were Democrats enough in the woodwork; you found that out come election time, except no one admitted it, not till then, and not too many Catholics were serious, if Mrs. Sherbrooke understood what serious Catholicism meant.

  Maggie rolled down the window, wanting air. “How’s Hal?” she asked. “How’s Harry?”

  “The boy’s fine. Leastways as good as you can hope for with those kidneys. But that husband of mine—I know you’ve befriended him, I know you’re not the sort to take this wrong—well, he’s a cross to carry. He’s my own burden to bear. Oh, I wouldn’t want it known, you know, that I’d be caught complaining, but it’s why we got no car. Give him enough money for a tankful and it goes to fill him up instead. At that wicked, wicked place.” She nodded at the Village Arms they were passing, on their left. “We lost two cars besides. One on payments and one because he hit a tree; if he hadn’t been inebriate—it’s the word for it, Mrs. Sherbrooke, pardon my French but I call a spade a spade, inebriate is what he was, three sheets to the wind, if you follow my meaning—why the good Lord knows what injuries he would have had from the crash. We found him there, sleeping it off.”

  “I’ve never seen him that way,” Maggie said.

  “No. You mustn’t mind me telling you these things.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said. She drove through the Big House gates.

  “It’s the other reason no one talks to us in this whole town. But your husband understood, he never lifted his voice once against my Hal. H
e might not have been a Catholic, but Judah Sherbrooke was a proper Christian, and don’t ever let anybody tell you different. It’s why we stayed. It’s why we got this trailer here backed up on your land; he paid in heat and clothes and cigarettes but never once in money, or only to me; he’d let me charge the groceries and suchlike against wages; it’s a cross to carry, let me tell you, if your husband drinks every red cent.”

  Maggie eased to a stop. “Do you want help with those?”

  “No. We’re managing, I thank you. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. I’m so relieved you’re back. Mrs. Sherbrooke, we always wondered if you’d decide to stay—you know, it’s what everybody wondered, though none of my own business, and you can tell me that.”

  In the weeks that followed she saw Hal often; he was always at a distance, tinkering, polite. She came to make a point of walking past the barns, of bringing him a morning thermos of black coffee and watching while he wiped his hands and pulled his cloth cap back off the red tangle, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He’d be meticulous, deferential, and she saw no trace of drunken wildness in him; he wore blue coveralls. Hal had filled the barns with hay that fall and was waiting for a bidder, he explained; meantime he’d tend to the tractors and balers and spreaders, doing it for her dead husband’s sake, since Judah always kept the things in apple-pie order, and why not continue.

  She complimented him. “You know what you’re doing.”

  “All my life,” he answered. “Two weeks behind the crops. Seems like I spent every minute of my childhood under some machine. Seems like there’s nothing you can’t fix with chicken wire and twine.”

  “And patience,” Maggie said.

  His deliberateness pleased her; after washing he used bay rum. He was fifty-two years old, he told her, and she said, “Why, that’s just exactly my age!”