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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “No.”

  “If you’re restless here . . .”

  He shakes his head.

  What is it then? she wants to ask, but Ian veers off to the kitchen, peeling a banana. He seems much younger than his years, more of a child every month; fecundity has mocked her and is doing so again.

  “It is not a barren labour we here do. It is bound to yield up dividends to an Accounting for our Lord. But brother, dare I confess it, there are days I think Arithmetic is senseless, that each soul on the positive side of the ledger must be counterbalanced by some subtracted soul. My recovery, for instance, might mean your disease. This is heresy and, what is worse, unfair to my husband, who Labours unceasingly, albeit now he sleeps. It is what they call dark night; I write to you though perhaps I will think better of sending these secrets. At this hour I am barren; I do not any longer believe.”

  XIII

  Ian drinks at Merton’s Hideaway. The waitress went to grade school with him, and he recognizes faces from the grocery and bank. Solitary by habit, he keeps to himself; he’s too young to be a regular and, at twenty-six, too old to be just passing through. Hattie says they say he’s uppity, but she tells them he’s just being shy. Miles Fisk appears and hails him, then brings his bourbon over and sits down.

  “Mind if I join you?” asks Miles.

  “No. Glad for the company.”

  “We never see you at the house.”

  “No.”

  “Drop by some evening,” Miles says. “Don’t be a stranger.” He loosens his tie. He discourses on the problems here with zoning, the Rotary Club’s attitude to senior citizens, and the possibilities for solar energy investment in Vermont. Miles is a firm believer in coal; were he the speculating sort he’d speculate in stocks that deal with solar energy or delivery systems for coal. Because it’s not so much a question of mining equipment as equipment for delivery, and that includes the railroad system and the barge canals; it isn’t a question of whether, but when. By comparison, Miles says, the Alaska pipeline is an expensive mistake. We’re just getting over the summer, he says, and no one understands we’re in the middle of a full-fledged energy crisis; or what would happen if the Arabs organized a full-fledged boycott next time through. Never underestimate the power of a boycott, Miles maintains—why even his advertising revenue goes down each time he runs an editorial that advocates surveillance of the price of oil. It’s common sense. He’s not a trust-buster, mind you, he’s not even advocating price control—just a sort of watchdog attitude and wariness and full-fledged utilization of this country’s coal and oil shale and solar energy resources. There’s only so much oil to drill before the well goes dry; there’s just so often you can dip a bucket in.

  “That’s true,” says Ian.

  “Yes. I thought you’d say so. I knew we’d see eye to eye.”

  His stare is baleful now, unblinking.

  “About this?” Ian asks.

  “Oh, everything. I knew you for a man of education and good taste. You went to Harvard, didn’t you; I knew we’d agree.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “Not maybe. For sure,” Miles says. He stands and slaps five dollars down. “My pleasure talking to you, Ian. I’ll tell the wife I saw you. She’ll be pleased.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “I’ll do that. Do drop by.”

  He leaves with the decisive stride of a courier whose message is delivered. Ian dawdles, staring at the worn brown booth in front of him; he orders a third drink. The cashier asks him, “Been here long?”

  “Not long,” he says.

  “How long?”

  “Three months or so. Maybe more.”

  The man makes change, incurious. “What brings you to these parts?”

  “I was born here.”

  “That so? Whereabouts?”

  Ian jerks his head. “Back up that hill.”

  “Which house?”

  “The one at the top. The Big House.”

  This conversation ends as do the others—in silence, a nodding withdrawal, a separating out. They think him a liar or a Sherbrooke, and in either case exclude him; their world is not his world.

  He tries to leave. It is the beginning of leaf season; the roads are full. He drives the Packard into town, needing to buy Sheetrock tape and nails and a tub of patching plaster. On Route 7, however, and because the hardware parking lot is clogged, Ian swings north. He settles back to drive, settles in, and has made a hundred miles before he asks himself in which direction he’s heading, or why. He empties his mind, travels east. In New Hampshire he fills up again and checks the oil and transmission fluid; the attendant admires the car. “Don’t see too many like this one,” he says, cleaning the windshield with care.

  Ian continues. By four that afternoon he reaches Maine, coming in sight of the sea. There are roadside stands for shells and saltwater taffy and Lobster-in-the-Ruff. There are Katch-Your-Own and Reddy-Packed and Lobster-Roll huts. North of Mount Desert Island he pulls still farther east, through pine lots to a village harbor that is a dead end, boardwalked, doubling back on itself. He works his way out to the bight. It is high tide, and he picks his way over the rocks. A cold fog envelops him; he watches the few houses go hazy, indistinct. His boots are wet. Ian asks himself now why it is the Sherbrooke home became a charmed confinement, and what it is that holds him when he could so readily escape. There are shells at his feet. Gulls circle, screaming, where two draggers ride at anchor out at the edge of the visible. He squinnies up his eyes and hears their engines cease. He wants a drink. He wants a smoke. He wants some sort of clarity where everything instead has shifted and is smudged.

  The harbor slips are vacant; green spume batters the pilings. His hair is wet; he breathes fish-reek. This is as far as you get to, he says to himself; this is all there is until it’s Labrador or Ireland or maybe Portugal. He does his Porky Pig stutter for the absent audience: “Da-d-dats all, folks, dere ain’t no more.” He cuts a caper, clicks his heels, and turns back to the car.

  Returning, Ian is weary. He drives south through Boston, then follows Route 2. It is after midnight by the time he comes to Athol, and he stops for coffee at a diner, then climbs into the back seat of the Packard, stretches out, and sleeps. His sleep is fitful, brief, and at first light he heads home again. Twenty-four hours after his departure, he pulls up to the hardware store—the Packard clicking like clockwork—and buys the Sheetrock tape.

  He has been, he tells himself, in pursuit of something all these years; now he recognizes he has also been pursued. Judah was the hunter and Ian the quarry who’s trapped. Things change. He’d come to make his obsequies and peace, like his mother one year previously, although she with the living and he with the dead. He can lie in the haymow smoking, dangling naked from the rafters like the kid he never was, to fall on all fours in the prickly softness of the threshing floor. Therefore, to establish manhood means to slay his childhood’s guardians, go to dinner parties where they serve iced tea, build again the crumbling house on the outskirts of their land.

  He understands three things. First, Judah’s sense of self was rooted like the maples back beyond the carriage house—it would go as far as wind would take it, or seeds on the seat of the carriage, but insentient, insensate, not in conscious quest. Second, he himself had been a wanderer whose travel term has come full circle to the place where he began. Third, his choice is to acknowledge how he’d had no choice.

  “Let me put it this way,” Finney says. “I was in Buffalo last week. The motel was—I don’t know how to put it exactly—like a sound box, a sort of echo chamber. So I had trouble sleeping and pulled out the Gideons’ Bible; there was nothing else to read. And what do you think I see on the flyleaf; what do you think some other customer had written there in pencil?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Ian says.

  “ ‘The chambermaid fucks.’ That’s what they tell you on the first page of the King James version nowadays. ‘The chambermaid fucks.’ ” He winks. He wags his
head. “I’m not an idiot, understand, I know it’s a message worth getting—but in the Bible, Ian, right there on the first page? Hell in a handcart, that’s where.”

  They are in his office, at the rolltop desk. “You’ve heard about the foolishness,” Finney continues. “All over town. At Page’s place, for instance. It’s a wonder they’re not selling tickets for where the old fool got stuck in a tree. Or where she rigged her bushel basket, fixing to brain him with apples. Or the time old Jim MacKeever died, and his wife—who hasn’t so much as talked to him for twenty years, who wouldn’t answer any of his letters anyhow—no sooner is he dead than she’s up at the house changing locks. Can you imagine?”

  Finney shakes his head. The lines in his brow furrow; not quizzical, Ian thinks, not even outraged, just tired. “He hasn’t been buried yet, and this woman and her New York City lawyer take a drive on up to change the locks. The whole thing—lock, stock, and barrel.” He sighs. “MacKeever never did divorce her, so she’s got the right.”

  Ian furrows his brow also, lowering his right eye, then the left.

  “So anyhow,” says Finney, “they lock the cleaning woman out. Augusta—you remember her—a redheaded woman, portly, the sister-in-law of Dick Rudd, the one who lives over by Bailey’s? Anyhow, it doesn’t matter; they locked her out, you see. And she’s left her portable radio inside. The one she brings to work on Wednesday, only this particular Wednesday MacKeever has a heart attack, so, understandably enough under the circumstances, Augusta leaves her radio behind. You follow? All she wants is the radio back; she isn’t even asking for her pay.” Finney sighs again, soundingly. He studies his hands, then wiggles them. “So I’ve got to go to court, asking Alice MacKeever for permission to recover a portable radio.”

  His voice trails off. He broods on this, letting Ian savor the indignity, letting him have time to comprehend the impropriety of it. He, Samson Finney, doesn’t hunt for clients now. He’s on the verge of retiring, but still in a position in the Small Claims Court to take on New York City lawyers and beat them hands down or talk to a standstill; don’t count old Finney out. Except he has to spend his time on radios that won’t cost twenty dollars to replace. He’s asking for punitive damages, court costs, and the like, when he’d rather be out bowling or at the nineteenth hole.

  “It does seem silly,” Ian says.

  “This town. I’m glad you agree.” He nods at the window shade: ocher, half rolled, the pull on it raveling. “What I wanted to tell you is this. You think it’s foolishness, that story about the MacKeevers? You think the James Page people won’t likely appeal? Wait until they get around to you, my boy. Just wait.” He sighs again, squints, taps his pencil on the Formica between them. “The trouble with family lawsuits is you almost never get to settle out of court. Else they wouldn’t have gotten to court in the first place, if you follow.”

  “I follow,” Ian says.

  “I’m not naming names, understand. But maybe that’s the trouble with the whole damn thing. Your father’s will. When the state highway people start asking permission, don’t say I didn’t tell you. When they’re working on putting Route 7 through the barn. They’ll put a goddamn Indian on the road crew, understand; they’ll say he’s the grandson of the nephew of the grandson of the squaw who sold the thing to Peacock way back when. They’ll say it’s his by quitclaim right, and all you Sherbrookes have been doing is squatting on the state’s own land this century. You mark my words”—he snaps his yellow pencil—“hell in a handcart, that’s where.”

  He reads about his college classmates in the pages of Newsweek or Time. They are makers and doers and movers and shakers, becoming prominent. Or some girl that he’d slept with once, who’d shaved her pubic hair in order to do the chorus kick more decorously, now has her own TV series and stares at him from the cover of Coronet, by the cash register. Or Morrisey’s nephew—the one with the cleft palate that they never fully fixed—is M.I.A. in Vietnam and they mount a statewide petition to find out his fate. It’s curious, he thinks; it’s the years’ tricks played upon his grade-school pals, who now are older than their teachers who seemed old.

  Ian lacks ambition, Hattie says; why, Helen Mattock’s husband is an advertising executive who flies all over the world. He was invited just last month by the South African government to play golf with Gary Player and other executives. Imagine, she says, taking all those pretty women to Madrid or Venezuela or wherever they advertise Coke; imagine being paid for that and calling it a job. She cannot imagine, she says.

  His father, too, had lacked ambition; he’d exalted staying power where other men praised change. He’d held what he was born to hold, and that seemed enough. So Ian watches forward motion from his sideways vantage, and the fuss and bustle of it make him sad. For himself, perhaps, who has so little envy in him, yet such a share of jealousy; for others, certainly, who run along a treadmill they construe as track.

  Therefore, when Maggie tells him that she’s willed the house and grounds to him and him alone, Ian takes it as his due. She might die in childbirth, she says; she might not be free from entailment—it’s best to be prepared. She mentions the estate and property and inheritance taxes. She tells him Finney is fearful they will be bankrupt soon. Her testament explicitly leaves the whole house to him, and not to be divided by claimants or alternate heirs. “It’s what Judah wanted,” she says.

  Love—Ian distrusts the word; it has become emptied of meaning except perhaps as echo or as mockery. The spirit of adventure is, for Sally, the spirit of intrigue. When he enters the honeymoon house, she is there.

  “Hello.” She stands in the living room’s center.

  “Hello.”

  “It wasn’t locked.”

  He carries plywood sheeting and rests it on the banister.

  “Are you surprised to see me? I was just . . .”

  “Yes.” He straightens, faces her. “A little bit.”

  “You thought I was going?”

  He nods.

  “I am. I’ll leave you alone. After this. Don’t be nervous.”

  Her perfume is so strong he smells it from his ten-foot distance.

  “It’s coming along, your construction.” Sally lifts her arm. “Our house.”

  There is sawdust at his feet. He spreads it with his foot.

  “I always thought of it that way. It’s funny now. Imagine. Our house.”

  “You look beautiful,” he offers.

  “Do I? You didn’t know that, did you? How I thought this place was ours.”

  He rearranges the plywood. He lays a two-by-four as anchor at the pile of sheeting’s base.

  “Don’t be nervous,” she repeats. Her dress pattern is of climbing roses; they are red and yellow and the leaves and stalks are green. The fabric gathers at her breasts and then falls free.

  “No. It’s hot in here.”

  “Yes. Hot.”

  “We don’t have air conditioning. Sorry . . .”

  “Don’t be.” She releases her hair.

  “I’ve been framing windows. They’re nailed shut.”

  “Let’s go outside.” She walks in front of him—four feet ahead, her shoulder blades pronounced—and settles in the clearing. He sits beside her; she kicks off her sandals and draws up her knees. To quiet his own breathing, Ian inhales for the count of eight, then holds for the same count of eight, then exhales. He makes the ground a sounding board and beats out three against four.

  “I’d like to have heard you play music . . .”

  He stirs circles in the uncut grass. “Shabby.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Ian pulls at the raspberry bushes behind them. “Alexander’s ragtime band. I was lead boy for the tympanist. You know: playing piano on a flatbed truck for funerals.”

  “You didn’t!” Sally claps her hands.

  “That’s right, I didn’t. But ask about Duluth. Tallahassee. St. Louis; Reno; ask me if I’ve been there with seventeen overworked dancers, one stand-up comic, and forty-
two suitcases.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Well, there we were,” says Ian. There are goosebumps on her arm, and all down the length of her legs. “Seventeen overworked dancers, one stand-up comic, and forty-two suitcases. Not counting the timpani, of course. Not including cellos and the makeup bags and Angel’s pet ocelot; you should have been there. You would have loved it. Tallahassee. In a snowstorm. The second one this century.”

  She edges away from him, chastened. “Why are you so secretive?”

  “Because I have nothing to hide.”

  Now even in the instant of his glib rejoinder, Ian recognizes truth in it and feels ashamed. Keeping silent, he has kept her interest—making mysteries where little of value was hidden, with his penny-ante expertise at pretending there’s a rabbit in the hat. They are both enacting fantasy; he knows that too. He knows she half-expected sex and that she carries underclothing in her Halston carryall; she had planned to go back afterward to what they call “the big bad world.” There, with his semen leaking out of her, she would continue to function, as he would continue to function, and they would think themselves the secretive elect.

  The maples in the clearing have exploded: every color he has ever seen in trees.

  “Except this can’t go on.” He had not known he’d say it, but knows it to be true.