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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “We knew our father as a man of Strong Belief. That he did not know the Prophet greatly grieves me, since I think it likely he would have found both light and truth. ‘It is impossible for a man to be saved in ignorance,’ and I have lately come to terms with what his everlasting apostasy portends. Still, what though he spat on it, I pray he comes to be enlightened in the tenets of our Church. This is not impossible. Willard concurs. There is the possibility of conversion, brother, after death. Time and Eternity continue, so why should not our father have the chance, though mortal clay, to constitute himself again in what our leader cites as the Authoritative Way?

  “It vexes me, a muddleheaded woman. I cannot sort the matter out. There is Doctrine for it also, but I am less well instructed in the issue than my husband would wish. What of those who—according to their own lights—found salvation, but did so in apostasy? Should we deny them reprieve? Ought we dash ambrosia from their lips and bleed them till the final drop of ichor spill? I trust you will answer on this.”

  Maggie thinks it gibberish. She holds neither Peacock’s nor Anne-Maria’s belief. But there is something in the conviction of the woman, some urgency that signals her to turn the yellowed pages with their perfect fading penmanship until she finds some meaning in the century-old preachment, “Men are, that they might have joy.” She will never be a convert; she has embraced no faith. But as her world goes inward—as even her son, returned and intimate and everything she’d hoped for, becomes a callous stranger—she thinks what she has feared as madness is the need to know her own worth.

  She has been prized all her life. She has been praised and courted and counted on until courtliness and praise are both beside the point. She runs through the kitchen and, seeing Ian, stops. She is in disarray. “You’re still here,” Maggie says.

  “I promised, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. So you did.”

  “And promises are made to keep,” he pronounces, with that sententious air of his, that whiff of Sunday school . . .

  “I’m glad.”

  “You were running. Be careful,” Ian says.

  They come to tea with Hattie, or to dinner and bridge. Hiding, she will not descend. Her pregnancy would be the town’s chief morsel, and they would gobble it whole. Sometimes Maggie wonders if she’s being unfair; she’s tempted to make herself public and find out. There might be Samaritans amongst them—those who’d wish her well. But when she studies their faces from the landing, or hears the shrill clatter beneath her, she knows it isn’t likely, and it’s sensible to hide.

  Within the thousand acres, within the Big House and her upstairs chamber, it is no problem for Maggie; there is space enough around her, and company enough. She thanks her luck for Ian, since she might not have made it alone. Instead she fixes on him with a grasping fixity she knows he is embarrassed by but cannot contravene. She fears she is becoming a reclusive older sister; she will provide him with a child he might as well be father to, in age. And therefore Maggie waits like some self-tormented spinster in this tower of her building, patting her round stomach and dreaming that straw strands are gold.

  X

  Fat is not the word for it; she’s bulging, Hattie sees. She’s got a lump beneath her breasts the size of what in other women Hattie would have to call twins. And Maggie’s face is pinched, drawn in; there’s nothing plump in any other part of her. She can’t and won’t believe her sister-in-law is pregnant; she’s unmarried and too old. So there must be something wrong with what she eats, and Hattie tries to warn her off of pies. Or her digestive process has gone wrong, and everything gets stuck in the upper intestine. Or it’s hysterical pregnancy—Hattie has heard about those. She’s seen it, once or twice, in dogs. After the Willis’s spaniel was spayed, she blew up just like Maggie—a pathetic balloon where her babies should be and would never ever arrive. The spaniel lay around all day, bloated, breathing heavily. Ellen Willis said it would have been better to just let her breed; this breaks my heart to see.

  She’s heard about a woman up in Shaftsbury—Greta Harrington’s cousin, what was her name? Hattie hunts it: the one who married Nickerson over by the Old East Road—who swelled up just like this. They thought it was overmuch candy and water; they gave her pills and put her on a diet, but she kept right on growing. They thought it was glandular, then something in her blood, and then Agnes—that was it, Agnes Nickerson, the one with the strawberry birthmark—went pure plain crazy and they had to send her to the Brattleboro Retreat. There the doctors told her that what she had was cancer, not the child she swore she had been carrying; what she was birthing was death.

  But Maggie will not discuss it, so Hattie keeps her peace. She yearns to be of use, awaiting her dead brother’s child, if that’s what Maggie’s hatching like a broody hen. It would be a miracle, the Good Lord giving what he took; she’d go down on her knees and give thanks. Yet you don’t speak till spoken to; she’s long ago learned that. So it’s a strange strained family they make these days—Ian out at all hours and Maggie never leaving the house, who’d been a gadabout before. They eat in silence if they eat together, and Hattie excuses herself by eight o’clock or at the latest eight thirty and shuts herself into her room.

  The days are shortening; there’s heavy dew most mornings and it grows darker sooner at night. She puts up peas and beans and corn and pickles; she cans tomatoes and makes jam. It’s more than they need; she knows that. The pleasure has gone from preserving, and she works with a bone-weariness she hasn’t known before. Morning after morning, week by month, she’s been at the kitchen counter, chopping and boiling and putting things by. Sometimes, when she sees the asparagus patch or the berries they’d planted, or horseradish—things that are perennial, that last, so you couldn’t say, “This season let’s just not bother; let’s forget about the garden this once”—sometimes she yearns to tell Boudreau to plow the whole thing under.

  But you couldn’t do that—or she, Hattie, couldn’t; there’s been too much love and labor expended on the asparagus patch. There’d been too many years it mattered to have homegrown food. Not because they couldn’t always buy whatever they wanted; not because it was ever a question of need. But for all those years Hattie’d known what she ate—known when it was planted and cultivated and who had been in on the tending. It is a satisfaction. She’s tasted the fruits of her labor, which is a taste no supermarket or Morrisey’s can sell. You sow and thin and prune and stay up nights all summer for the satisfaction of such tasting when the world gets wintry later on. You do it for the future’s sake, and not for present gain.

  “Good night,” she says.

  “Good night.”

  “Night, Aunt.” Ian scarcely looks up.

  “Sleep well.”

  “You too, Hattie.” Maggie consults the clock. “It’s early yet.”

  “We could play cards,” she offers. “We could invite somebody in for a fourth.”

  “No,” Maggie says.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not in the mood. Not tonight.”

  “You never are, lately.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, is there a good reason for that?”

  Then Ian intrudes. He puts his foot right in his mouth where it has no business being. “She does mind your asking.”

  “Well, I’ll be off to bed then, thank you very much.”

  “Okay. Good night,” Maggie says.

  “You two.” She bets they cackle together now, playing two-handed rummy, misunderstanding, thinking she’d told them, “You too.”

  She yawns in her room, purposive. She’s heard that yawning is contagious. If you yawn a’purpose you can set a whole supper party to sleep. If you raise your voice, the others at the table raise their voices also, and soon there’ll be a din and clamor and people shouting to be heard. If you drop your voice, however, the person talking to you will drop her voice in turn, and you have a mannerly gathering with no need to shout.

  It doesn
’t work. She isn’t sleepy. Hattie itches to be down in the kitchen, or already at the silver chest that had been tomorrow’s project. There are coffee spoons and serving knives and ladles she hasn’t polished in months; she keeps a list in the chest’s inside lid of how many pieces the service contains, and when they last were cleaned. She is shamefully behind. Maggie wouldn’t notice, and if she noticed would anyhow not care or mention it—but Hattie is responsible and doesn’t want the silver service tarnishing. It would have helped to pass the time; she should have thought to bring the chest with her, and silver polish and rags.

  Evenings, and in order to protect against intruders, she locks herself in. By the time she is inside her room Hattie means to stay inside and unmolested, thank you very much. A man’s home is his castle, and a woman’s home is twelve by twelve, but there should be a drawbridge to that too. She leaves the key in the lock. They could rattle at the door and pound on it and ask, “Is everything all right?” They’d be concerned and speculative and insisting that she answer, but she’d press her hand to her mouth while the perturbation in the hall increased.

  It increases everywhere; the town has gotten shabby and they ought to hose it down. There are no typhoons or tornadoes in this section of Vermont, but Hattie nearly wishes for just such fearsome ruination. It’s just as well, she sometimes thinks, that Judah didn’t live to watch the world decay. There are exceptions, of course. She could set her watch, still, by the way Ted Fraser walks from the bank to the post office at nine and, come nine fifteen, walks back. There might be carpenters with pigtails who you’d swear had sworn a holy oath against deodorant; gas station attendants who spit on your window or use their filthy sleeves for rags; there might be girls wearing nothing under T-shirts that advertise beer—not to mention what they’ve done to where Bill Saunders used to live, piling their junk up like some sort of flag, keeping twenty cars out back behind the Bar-B-Kew, or how the elms are dying so that Main Street is a scandal—still, rain or shine, Ted Fraser will come walking by to get the morning mail.

  “Let’s have the Conovers to supper.” She tries that gambit too.

  “Ian?” Maggie asks. “How do you feel about that?”

  He shrugs his shoulders, indifferent-seeming. Hattie says, “He’d love it. He’s only playing hard to get.”

  “I can speak for myself, Aunt.”

  “Then do so. We’re waiting.”

  “How do you feel, Mom?” he asks.

  She also shrugs. It is amazing how they are look-alikes, peas in a pod.

  Hattie says, “I thought it might be nice, is all. Have some people over, since you don’t ever want to go out. Not that I want to butt in—you know, intrude.”

  “You’re not intruding,” Maggie says.

  “Ida Conover and I’ve been friends since before you were born, Ian. Since before either one of you were born, practically. We’ve worked together on the Library Committee and heaven knows what else for thirty years, and I only thought for once in my life I might return an invitation. Just because that girl’s in town—Sally, Sarah, whatever you call her—just because she’s visiting her relatives doesn’t mean I can’t invite my old friend to the house. Ida’s not to blame.”

  “For what?” Ian asks.

  Hattie arranges her shawl. It has gotten cool these nights; soon enough there’ll be first frost. “For anything. For what her daughter’s niece does or doesn’t do.”

  “Nobody’s blaming her,” says Maggie.

  “Well.”

  “Invite them if you feel like it.”

  “And what does Mr. Sherbrooke say?”

  “Whatever you want,” Ian says.

  It is amazing how they band together against her, how they fashioned an alliance and make her feel three is a crowd. She had been sarcastic, calling Ian Mr. Sherbrooke, but he took it as his due. It reminds her of those autumn nights thirty years back, when Judah and Maggie had scarcely been able to wait to be alone together till the dinner table was cleared. There’d been no decent interval till they’d go up to their room. They pawed at each other in corners, in every empty bed and corner of the house. No doubt the straw on Maggie’s clothes had come from their meeting in barns.

  Hattie knows it’s possible. If Judah died the way she imagines he died, this child could be his child. There’s no use pretending the sun rises in the west. There’s no purpose in denying what her eyes see plain as plain: Maggie is pregnant again. And since everything gets slowed down with a woman in her fifties, since it took them more than twenty years to make another baby, why shouldn’t this baby be slow? She remembers Judah talking about baby banks, where you keep a child in test tubes, on crushed ice. He’d been joking with Finney about it; Hattie remembers the joke. “Hey, Samson,” Judah asked. “You hear about the tests they’ve done? On test-tube babies?” Judah was expansive, clicking his teeth. “Turns out that they don’t work as well—don’t make as much sense, anyhow—as babies made in bed.”

  Finney said, no, he hadn’t heard. “Which only goes to prove,” said Judah, “spare the rod and spoil the child!” They laughed together, cozily, thinking Hattie hadn’t heard. She’d heard, all right, and it wasn’t funny and hadn’t been funny the first time she heard it. She scorned their pridefulness, while they chortled in the corner over Scotch. They talked about bull hormones, and she wouldn’t be surprised at all if Judah’d left a test tube for his wife and widow to use.

  Or possibly the woman is further along than she shows. Or possibly the child is small, or will be stillborn. Perhaps it lies embalmed in the amniotic fluid that should have given life. She doesn’t like to think that way, but has to think it through. She wants to say to Maggie, “Do you feel the baby kicking?” or “Are you gaining enough weight?” or “How does little Sherbrooke seem to be feeling this morning?”

  But Maggie smiles that dazzled, inward smile of hers, which means she’d make no answer to the question if she heard it, and likely wouldn’t hear. She is carrying the family heir, and either it is drowned in there or studying the proper time to come out wailing in this world; she, Hattie, has to prepare.

  Therefore she drops a hint or two at bridge games that the Sherbrooke line seemed over, but is maybe beginning again. The branch would sprout new shoots. They think she means Ian, of course. The women ask who Ian has his eye on and if she approves, but she says the whole thing’s a secret, he’ll have to announce it himself. She drops the hint that Judah died with a trick or two remaining, and nothing is quite what it seems. “It won’t be Sally Conover,” she says, “you mark my words.” She makes ready for the baby’s birth as though they could be proud.

  “That Ian,” Helen Bingham says. “He’s a deep one. Quiet.”

  Hattie agrees.

  “You’d have thought he had his eye on no one but his mother,” Helen says.

  Hattie quarrels with that. She says, “Still waters run deep. He’s just the flirt he always was.” But in the very instant that she bites on Helen’s sticky bun, the way keys turn in locks, she knows what half her mind has anyhow been thinking all along: she’s right. That’s why they’re always in those corners, whispering, eyes for no other living soul, with laughter that’s exclusive, not inclusive. The roof of her mouth is gummy with Helen’s concoction; she swallows. The way to explain it is incest: Maggie’s carrying a Sherbrooke from the Sherbrooke who’s her son. It’s Judah’s child and grandchild both at once.

  This stops her. Helen asks, “What’s the matter, is something wrong?” and Hattie says no, she’d just bit her tongue. The filling in her right front molar acted up. “You ought to see the dentist,” Helen says.

  She excuses herself. She goes to the washroom and locks the door and stands, staring in the mirror, not even seeing herself, but only the gilt fixture behind: a deer whose antlers hold washcloths and towels, the monogram stitched just so in the center of each fold. Helen keeps a proper house. Then Hattie thinks, What if Ian fathers his own brother on his mother, what sort of Sodom does it mean we live in? She t
ries to work up rage. She watches the white wingtips of her nose flare and redden, clenching her teeth. She stamps her foot, but softly, so as not to alarm Helen in the living room, then turns the cold tap on full. She squinches up her eyes and stares at herself in the mirror: the son would be father and child.

  This fails. She can’t be angry at the notion; she wants to smile instead. She remembers a riddle that Ian once asked: “If Moses is the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, then Moses is the daughter of Pharaoh’s son.” He’d needed to know, “How come?” He’d repeated the question and cocked his head, waiting for her explanation as if she were his grammar teacher, not aunt. She’d known the answer, anyhow. There’s nothing complicated if you write it down, but say the sentence aloud and it seems like gibberish, making Moses both daughter and son. It’s a question, she told Ian, of the possessive apostrophe; he had been learning punctuation marks in school. The “daughter of Pharaoh’s son” means the son of the daughter of Pharaoh, not what it sounded like; you have to watch for the possessive, Hattie said. So Moses could be both the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and the daughter of Pharaoh’s son; he was all those things when still only a baby, floating in the bulrushes in a wicker basket with fine linen. He was what he was, all at once.