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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes.”

  She makes a pile of pine needles. “Why?”

  “There’s just no place to go. Or hadn’t you noticed?” he asks.

  In one swift, heart-stopping gesture she lifts the dress above her head and stands before him naked. “That’s better,” Sally says.

  A shaft of sunlight lights her. She waits with both hands at her sides, the left hand holding the dress, motionless, as if the impulse—if it had been impulse, Ian thinks, and not preplanned—has exhausted her inventiveness, and the next move must be his. Dust dances between them. He is irresolute. He advances on her, takes the dress, yet does not want to put it on the grass. He folds it into her bag.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sally says. “That dress.”

  “I’ve been using you, you know. Faking it. It’s this dream of escape we share.”

  “All right.”

  “All right to what?”

  “All right we’re using each other. You didn’t seem to mind.”

  He looks at her—this lean totem, offering so nakedly what is not his to take. And he remembers with a kind of love—a passionate nostalgia—what it had been like to be uncertain, trembling-fingered, full of the foretaste of adventure that first evening when they met.

  “I’ll say it,” Ian says, “as clearly as I can. There’s nothing you need that I’m able to give. There’s no way—not now, not these weeks, at any rate—I’m going to provide it. This town”—he waves his arms, encompassing . . .

  “You’re not really leaving,” she says. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  She hesitates. “You know those creatures—water skates—who stay on the surface of things? The ones with feet that float? Well, that’s what we’ve been doing.” She lifts her eyes. “On ponds.”

  “My cup runneth over,” he says.

  “I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve been married and divorced, I’m here in limbo waiting for some sign of feeling from you. Something real . . .”

  He places his hand on her thigh. She removes it. “No,” Sally says. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  But he reads dismissal as its opposite: please stay. Please fascinate me further. Compare the still life that we make to Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Or try for Omar Khayyám; make me laugh.

  “ ‘A jug of wine,’ ” Ian pronounces. “This picnic tableau. ‘And thou beside me.’ ”

  “Stop it!”

  “. . . ‘In the wilderness.’ The wardrobe mistress ain’t been busy overtime.” He winks. “Fine costume, though . . .”

  “Stop it!”

  He obeys. Yet the litany continues in him, with his escapist impulse, loaf of bread. Let us mourn together, Ian thinks, the disappearance in this nation of literacy, plain dealing, and the garter belt. There’s gain and loss in every act, and the point of this encounter is just to stick with gain. He takes a stick and snaps and quarters it.

  Leaves fall. The bones in Sally’s feet are working as if she ran in place.

  “I’m sorry,” Ian says. He reaches for her hand.

  “I need a cigarette.”

  He offers one, then lights it. Her hand shakes.

  “It seemed so easy—so automatic, almost, that we’d get together.” Her voice is low. “But it didn’t turn out that way, did it?”

  “No.”

  She studies her cigarette ash. “Why?”

  He makes no answer.

  “What kept it from working, Ian? Are we so different, such . . .”

  “Similar,” he says. “So similar.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  “We’ve been trained.” The breeze shifts and he smells perfume. Sally’s nipples have puckered, are brown. “Ever since I got here I’ve been following directions. That’s what it feels like, anyhow. You know. Some other Sherbrooke’s part. Playacting.”

  “You’ve been very good at it.”

  “You too.”

  This makes her smile. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I’ve never felt so close to you. Not once. And it’s all over, isn’t it? You want what you can’t get.”

  He cannot speak. After a moment she strokes his hair with the flat of her hand, as one might soothe a dog. In Kyoto or Izmir he had felt this way as well: the signs were in a language he could not comprehend, the characters indecipherable, and the natives knew a language he would never know. Ian thinks of those improvisations (done so ardently in acting class, with partners or as solo) that have to do with sensory impairment: be a blind man painting or a deaf one at a concert or a paralytic playing basketball . . .

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  He shakes his head; he smells cigarette smoke.

  “Tell me.”

  He looks at her. She tosses her hair. It is a gesture that seems practiced, as if she knows her hair shows to advantage when swirling. The engine of the pickup is still ticking, cooling on the path where he left it. He listens to that, then the birds. A woodpecker batters a tree.

  “I’ll miss you,” Sally whispers.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Yes.”

  “More than you imagine.”

  “Maybe. I wanted what you wanted,” Sally says.

  “No.”

  “Yes. I want what you want right now.”

  “Leave. Please go.”

  “Good-bye.”

  In the clearing now, alone, he confronts his empty house. Sally has moved off, naked, accumulating grace with distance, not looking back over her shoulder. It is early afternoon. He wants to call to her, to court and cover her, but keeps his precarious peace. He wonders where she will present herself at three. Obscurely, he feels jealous and whistles to catch her attention—three low notes, deliberate, spaced. She does not turn. Soon he loses sight of her and enters the house once again.

  You get in a boat, Ian thinks, or on horseback or jump a freight or plane. Or maybe what you choose to do, he tells himself, is live alone in empty space. After insulation comes the Sheetrock; after Sheetrock comes the tape, then paint, then hanging pictures, then the choice of furniture to match. You borrow twelve dining-room chairs. He sees it in anticipation, as if already done: he’d take the straight-backed oak chairs six by six in the back of the pickup; he’d buy an oval table, set up portraits of his ancestors, inherit the hall chandelier. So he’d replicate the Big House and the Toy House and be a pilgrim washed back up like flotsam to the starting point; it isn’t worth it, Ian thinks, not without a woman there, not this afternoon.

  He has imagined himself on the edge of the woods, repairing as a craftsman might what had been long untenanted. But now it seems beyond him—past his energy or competence or enduring interest to build. He gathers up his tools and places them, their handles touching and the tools’ extensions radii—so that the wrecking bar and crosscut saw oppose the hammer and ripsaw and drill—in a circle on the bedroom floor. He has no power tools, and, therefore, nothing he fears will be taken. Ian leaves these ancient implements where he had wanted his bed. He does not lock the door.

  XIV

  Images afflict her; she cannot keep them from coming. They inflict themselves upon her eyes like headlights in a mountain pass at night. For survival’s sake, Maggie has to peer ahead. She sees clouds that seem like smoke, are smoke, billowing about the house. Judah stands in the firelit center, fists black with coal, his forearm muscles knotted as he grinds the lumps to dust. He blames her, Hattie says, and they huddle in the kitchen. But since he will not voice his rage—has lost his voice, she fears, is strangling in there, his vocal cords cut—she herself accepts no blame.

  So when the house explodes it is in a dream of vengeance, not justice, he’s dreamed. He appears surrounded by fire—has always been. Once she told him, joking, that he’d missed his calling and should have been an arsonist, but Judah only stared at her, his maul and wedges in one hand, three split ash logs in the other, wondering,
was that a joke? He’d deliberated so; he pondered all her offhand levity and wrecked it, laughing late.

  She sees her infant, Seth, caught in the same explosion while he choked for air. In the final passage, Maggie knows, the infant has to be ejected quickly so that it suffers no brain damage from scant oxygen within her—but has to shoot forth gasping, filling its lungs. So she dreams a tunnel dream—like crossing the Lincoln Tunnel or through the Simplon Pass when there’s a traffic jam and smoke fills her eyes with cinders, with New Jersey or Switzerland up ahead like bright salvation: sun. Seth died in his sleep—which is saying, she tells the doctor, that you die of life, that something starts in killing you the instant of that starting breath. You die of death; it doesn’t tell you anything; you die of crib death, crib death, crib death like an auctioneer’s recital: going once, going twice, going, gone.

  She sees herself in flight. Air and water are her elements, as Judah owned fire and earth. Therefore she took planes and boats with abandon, confident that where she went would prove a welcoming shore. Her father, the fierce mariner, never had ventured to sea. He took slow tacks about the Wellfleet harbor, under sail or with the outboard, while Maggie goaded him to enlarge ambition. “Jeremy Point,” she’d say. “The whole of Cape Cod Bay. It’s not enough. Dad—let’s get where the waves are; let’s try for Nova Scotia.”

  He would adjust the sheets and check the wind and pretend not to hear her, preparing. “Ready aboot,” he would say; or, suddenly, “Jibe, ho!”

  Maggie kept him company. But left alone at the tiller of his Rhodes 19 (“The perfect day-sailor,” he’d say, “for an old codger like this one, a length one man can handle, and not too much upkeep besides”), she would head directly for the outer channel and bay. There, where things were treacherous, she felt alive; she was her daredevil thirty-year-previous self. Fish slapped at the water around her, and the winds were various, and rocks she’d had no notion of loomed fifty feet to port. Judah was an inland person, and her father lived along the shore, but Maggie dreams unbroken sea or depthless, cloudless air.

  Yet always there is this house like an anchor. There is an albatross called Hattie to wear around her neck. There is a baby on an umbilical windlass within her, and her belly is a cargo hold, since she’s become fat as a blimp. “Oh, Ian,” Maggie wants to say. “It used to be so easy; it used to be just going, going, gone.”

  Therefore she lives with images that dance upon the countertops like something in a windstorm or whirlpool or bird that’s blundered somehow into the Lincoln Tunnel or the Simplon Pass. She sees Judah ringed by flame, Seth in his receiving blanket, then herself at Hattie’s age, anticipating visits from her wastrel unborn child. It is Ian’s look-alike but mute.

  The six months she shared with Judah until he died were equable; it was as if they’d used up all their squabbling frenzy years before. They’d grown so used to silence in the seven years apart they could keep a companionable silence together once she returned. People are like puzzles, Maggie thinks; it’s a question of fitting edges together, of sanding the sharp corners smooth. It worked; they’d worked at it. He who had been threatening made no threats against her, nor reproaches or demands. She nursed him without stint. So now, looking back, she sees their marriage in its final light—a calm thing, placid nearly, and without menace. Judah would take both her hands in his one hand and squeeze. The flesh was liver-spotted, flaccid, and his grip felt weak. She could remember when his hands would pinion her and how she feared he’d crack her bones as easily as turkey legs or, with one swift motion, wring her neck. But that was nightmare history, and never came to pass. When he died, on the late afternoon of November seventeenth, 1976, it was a gentle death. She had been by his side. He breathed more slowly, gently, relinquishing, and she never knew the instant when his breathing ceased.

  There is a pileated woodpecker she hears like a drum roll each day. It has settled on the property—somewhere in the pine lot to the east; it beats its beak like fists against a tree. She feels her ears’ membranes stretched taut. She feels she has to find the bird and answer its summoning call.

  So Maggie sets out on a walk. It is a clear October noontime, and she takes pleasure in the exercise—pleasure also in the possibility of tracking such a noise. She knows that pileated woodpeckers are common to the South. She knows—or believes—that it is among the oldest living species, in direct descent from the pterodactyl. She allows for a degree of echo and magnification in sound. But the woodpecker that manages this huge tattoo must be of no common variety; Judah said he saw one once, and she will try to today.

  The woods are wet. There are mosquitoes about, and she startles fat squirrels and toads. She remains on the path that last she rode with Ian; the bird calls every two minutes or so, and she pictures it in the interim, digesting its speared grubs. From the regularity with which the call resounds, Maggie assumes that the bird does not move—has picked a single tree and will stay till the trunk-meal is done.

  Yet distance confuses her; the sound seems now to come from every direction, not east. She asks herself why should she wander so far from the house, so perilously close to term, in search of one bird with a beak. She crosses a long pasture—hayed now, its gates open—where the Holstein herd had grazed. She remembers when the herd was Ayrshire, and how they used to chase her for the sheer sport and curiosity of watching this yellow thing run. The fencing has rusted; weeds choke the third strand of wire. She mourns so much life lost.

  Beyond this field, and rising again till it dips to the river, Maggie sees a hill with a dead standing tree. Then she hears that summoning tattoo, that single havoc-wreaker wrecking what she thinks was maybe once a beech. She stops, keeps still. The pounding resolves itself off into echo while she peers up and across. It is, she thinks—and knows herself foolish even in the superstition, even in this formulating instant—a sign.

  So Maggie waits immobile in the middle of the haying field for the bird to batter out its signal once again. She attempts, in the near distance, to distinguish tree from bill, the shape of that survivor from the branch it thunders on.

  Her baby shifts position. She folds her hands upon her lap, though standing, and warms it; something moves across the edge of the field to her right. A crowlike shape resolves itself from the highest branch and she hears a laughing, leisurely caw. Maggie steps forward to see. In sudden silence and with a quick lift, the bird—a pileated woodpecker?—flies off. It makes for the thick pine lot behind, and all she manages to see is the span of its retreating wings. There are berry bushes all around her, and she notices how they have scratched her legs. Again she hears the bird’s slow call, but now is not tempted to follow; she turns.

  Head down, oblivious, not fifty yards away, a naked woman walks across the field. Because there are thistles and she wears no shoes, she picks her way with care; Maggie stares at the retreating form. It is a brown-haired image of herself when young—the same straight back, thin hips, and long-legged gait. Now Maggie discerns a leather bag slung dangling from her forward shoulder—within which, she assumes, the woman must carry her clothes. Sun dapples the field with cloud shapes, but floods it like bright water where she walks. The breeze is at their backs; therefore her footfalls make no sound. The woman appears deep in thought. Her body is a single shade—sienna, Maggie thinks. Next, from the field’s far edge, a whistling comes. The woman lifts her head to listen, but refuses an answering note. Her pace increases, though she does not hurry. Maggie is elated, watching, though she cannot name or place the stranger’s grace; they are acquaintances possibly, but the woman wears her nakedness like a disguise. She diminishes, walks on. The angle does not change. Without breaking stride then, suddenly, she breaks into a run. Maggie starts to follow, then stops short. It is an apparition; she exhales. It makes a purposive diagonal from what she now remembers is the maple stand that shelters the abandoned house she’d stumbled on with Ian months before. It flees from her son.

  “What did you do today?” she questions him t
hat night.

  “The usual.” Ian smiles at her. “Nothing worth mentioning.”

  “No?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I just wondered. How you pass your days these days.”

  “A little of this, little of that.”

  “It’s the that I was asking about. How’s the house?”

  He studies her, suspicious. “Coming along,” Ian says.

  “Don’t you want some help with it?”

  “No.”

  “Not my help, for heaven’s sake.” She laughs. “But we could hire . . .”

  “No. In fact, I think it’s finished. For the time being, anyhow . . .”

  “I didn’t mean to grill you.”

  “You weren’t.”

  She studies the decanter between them. It is a glass pyramid; the stopper is an octagon of cloudy glass. “It’s just,” Maggie says, “I get around so rarely. I would like to visit that house. To see what you’ve accomplished.”

  “You’re welcome,” he says. “I’ll take you there. Tomorrow?”

  “If it’s a nice day. Not raining.”

  “It won’t rain,” Ian says.

  The first time she slept with Judah, he was more than twice her age. She told herself she’d wearied of the younger generation and consequently ought to give the middle-aged a fling. Yet the truth was, Maggie knew, that he touched some nerve in her that only he rubbed raw. Behind the muddle of emotions she tried to explain by means of Freud, reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle as if it were a code to solve, some unslaked impulse to marry her father, so that her life with Judah was the “future of an illusion” and her sweat-soaked agony beneath him a compound of pleasure and pain—beyond all such reductiveness was passion she could not reduce.

  She fought it in several ways. She fought his grim unyieldingness with laughter, saying, “Where’s that feather mattress?” when he covered her in barns. On the mattress, in their nightly rampage, she felt as if her body were a field he’d determined to clear. If she brought him lunch or coffee where he was plowing, or cutting back brush, he’d lean her up against a tree and say this was what he wanted, the only break worth taking in a day. She wore no underclothing, and loose skirts. She ached, continually. He was big-muscled, blockish, and the mass of him insistent in a way that made all other flesh seem light.