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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  She tested this. She fought her frightened certainty, in the months before they married, by returning to New York on some shopping pretext and sleeping with the lover she had left. Dan was wistful, a photographer, twenty-six years old. He said, “Megan, since I’ve seen you, Life bought a picture. Skyscrapers at sunset, the first big break; it’s a beginning, isn’t it?” But when she took the bus back north, it was if nothing had happened; she remembered having the hiccups in bed.

  And later, when they married and the marriage was a battle, she’d been unfaithful to him in the effort to break free. He exaggerated this, of course, suspicious as a watchdog sniffing prowlers. He had had his hackles raised. But it wasn’t any contest, never was. The Judah-current was too strong; she pretended to escape from him but knew it for pretense. She’d lie on beach towels sunning on some other suitor’s beach, but behind the membrane of her eyelids Judah flamed. She tried to say, and could not: “I love you, Bill, I love you, Sam, I love you, Dan.” It had no chance of working, never could. She had had to laugh.

  So when she returned to the Big House—to Hattie’s disapproval, Ian’s puzzled pleasure if she’d gone alone—it was always with fear and relief. Judah would wait by the fireplace, maybe, or whistle from the Toy House roof (she remembers him looming above her that way, hand extending into hammer, black against the snow-colored sky) or come in from sugaring. He took no notice of her. He pretended that her absence meant no more to him than presence, that she’d visited some cousin or been at a conference for one of her committees.

  And when she left for Sutton Place, taking Ian with her, it was as if they both had disappeared for Judah—been swallowed up. He did allow them to come north but refused to travel south; she wrote him that Manhattan’s East Side was not a world away, that she’d be glad and Ian grateful if he came to visit sometime. He dealt with her like fencing: something to cut and patch up.

  Therefore, until her son was grown, she fought a losing battle with a dawning certainty: her passion equaled his. She came to admit that, in time. “Your oversized and undereducated farmer,” Andrew said. “Your Lawrentian gamekeeper. What was his name, Mellors? Who happens to own the lodge.”

  “Me too,” she told him. “Me too.”

  He thought she meant “joint ownership,” Maggie supposed. But what she was saying to Andrew—who turned away, half satisfied, having heard an explanation that made his kind of sense—was that Judah owned her, lock and stock. She belonged to him as helplessly as land. And because her every instinct battled with such ownership, there was carnage in their bedroom: lamp oil and long yellow hair on the carpet, the ribs he broke while squeezing and the thumb she dislocated once when pushing him away. His sleigh bed was a captor’s tent; his hands would weight her wrists until she feared they’d crack. Judah was her lover, first and last.

  The next day dawns wetly, and she prowls the corridors of the Big House, more restless than she can remember having been in months. The rooms cannot hold her, nor her work on the layette. When they meet at lunchtime, Maggie cannot eat. “Why don’t we go driving instead?” she asks. “I’ll suffocate in here.”

  “Sure,” Ian says. “Any particular place?”

  She wants to tell him. Anywhere. Just out of this huge prison, into air. Instead she offers, shyly, “Why, no place in particular. Unless you’ve got an errand. And just for an hour,” she says.

  So he gets the Packard and they set off together, Maggie in her raccoon coat to mock the fifties feel of it, and her own elegiac sense of what she’d wear with Judah in a windy fall. Also because it’s a shapeless enclosing disguise—she makes herself recognize that. “I haven’t been outside these gates for weeks. Three relics,” Maggie says. “This car, this coat, this dame.”

  “Where would you like to go, really?”

  She casts about for a plausible answer—some end that would give purpose to her sudden need for flight. She is, she wants to tell him, without destination. She wants to go no public place or any of their ancient haunts; she had tramped around enough the day before. “Just drive,” Maggie says. “How about that?”

  “It’s apple-picking time,” says Ian. “Let’s go to Bullitt’s orchard. Maybe up that hill if it’s clear. We’ll get some cider anyhow.”

  “Perfect!”

  In the refracted light of her passenger window she sees herself reflected: a wild-haired, puffy-faced person in motley, fluffed up in ridiculous fur. She used to drive like royalty, the top down, waving at the world. Judah had offered true fur coats, but she hated both the slaughter and the affectation of it, keeping only this memento of what was anyhow a pest. The apple orchards span the hills that lead to Woodford Mountain; the road is deeply rutted, but they raise no dust. Ian drives attentively, so she keeps a grateful silence by his side. Up here, these few hundred feet higher and ten miles north of the Big House, the trees are nearly bare.

  “The old people’s home,” Ian says. He points, and she follows his finger—seeing what nestled at the orchard’s base—a long, low clapboard structure where they keep the county poor. It is wet weather still, so the porch rockers are full. She sees them sidelong as they hurtle past: the companionable relics, waving caps.

  “Have you ever been inside?” he asks.

  “Not yet.” She manages a smile. “But we used to drive this way often. Have you?”

  “No. How many does it hold?”

  “This home? Twenty, maybe. Twenty-five.”

  “It’s half the size of ours,” he says. “Not even. They must keep close quarters.”

  “Yes.” Maggie closes her coat. The apple trees in ranked rows now appear around them; Maggie scans the hill’s far reaches where the pines make a green mist. She is again in terror’s grip; she struggles to name and dispel it, says, “Stop!”

  He looks at her, surprised.

  “Please!” Maggie begs. “Just for a minute. It’s just I need some air.”

  “Of course.” He brakes and cuts the motor, then is out the door and opening hers. She puts her forehead to his hand and feels its heat. She shuts her eyes, inhales the orchard air, and feels the tensile quickening of Ian holding her. She sees black tractor tires stuffed with marigolds. They circle the old people’s house. There is a pile of empty tires and a stack of firewood for sale. There is an American flag. The clapboard has been painted white, but the window trim and door are red; there are brooms and, prematurely, a snow shovel by the door. The screens are off the windows and storm windows wait, ready for mounting, beneath the northerly eaves; there are ladders in readiness also. How could she have seen so much, she asks herself, in that brief instant driving by; why does she picture it still?

  And knows the answer and her terror’s source at once, and says to Ian, “Go back, I have to see that house.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one we passed. The retreat. Oh, hurry, and I’ll tell you why. Please!”

  He responds to her shrill urgency and turns. A half mile down the hill she tells him “Stop!” again and clambers out the door to stare down at the home. There is sunlight upon it; the roof is of slate. There are ventilation pipes and chimneys and she focuses so closely she can see the birds’ nest in the gutter. Now Maggie shifts her gaze to the men on the porch. She stands with clenched fists, fervent, waiting while the jumble there comes clear.

  “Is it someone we know?” Ian asks.

  She ignores him, staring.

  “Mother . . .”

  “Ssh-sh.” And lets him think whatever he chooses about her whims or pregnant madness; she walks down the dirt road and waits. Maggie displays herself on the hill’s first turning.

  An old man disengages from the white wicker rocker, laboriously. He clambers down the four steps of the porch. He is fat and short, and wears a bright red hunting jacket. He has on a white cap, black waders, andappears to be wearing a scarf. As he nears her she determines that the scarf is his white beard, its ends tucked into the collar of his thick woolen shirt, He wears rimless glasses; his forehead a
nd hands are pink. No other flesh is exposed to the air, but in the sudden sun the afternoon is hot. She grins, awaiting him.

  The man strides purposively up the hill, and with a practiced gait. He does not seem to notice her. Watching from the slope above, Maggie asks herself if the figure who approaches might be blind. His eyes are red-rimmed, bulbous, huge. From her fifty-foot distance, she lifts her right hand in greeting, but he does not respond. It is as if this ancient takes his constitutional in wind or weather, regardless. Maggie waves. Then everything changes and is rearranged—the man stops, smiles, rocks back on his heels, hoists his cap.

  He does this as a puppet might—jerkily, all limbs engaged. His beard pops free of his chin. His grin is toothless and it splits his face. He waves his cap in circles three times at his arm’s extent. Then he reconstitutes himself—jams his cap back on his head, tucks beard into shirt, and turns. Maggie is radiant, watching. When the old man has regained the porch, he turns and waves once more. Again that sudden lift and stretch, as though triumphal crowds were passing; again no word exchanged—Maggie walks up to the car.

  “So you did know him,” Ian says.

  “No.”

  “Well, he certainly recognized you.”

  “In a way. In the way that I know him. We used to wave at each other, that’s all.”

  He starts the car. “But why were you so frightened?”

  “That he wouldn’t be there,” Maggie says.

  “How may we best establish Meaning in this Life? It is a conventional question, a query one hears more and more in households that think the sun a collection of vapours & gas & flame, not God’s Manifest. Willard says Redemption lies in Works. We are engaged in irrigation Labor here, and shall reclaim this land for those whose livelihood depends on it. I had a child; I lost it. This explains my silence. They did such butchery upon me in the local hospital as to make me unfit to conceive. You asked for news. You have it. Implements we would reject rather than use for scraping the bristles off hogs were those they used upon your sister, and Willard says it is a happy Chance I did not die of the infection. I did not think so, then.”

  So they return to the Big House without apples or cider, contented. She kisses him and says, “Now run to whoever you run to, darling. I’m grateful we did take that trip.”

  Ian garages the car. She watches him from her own porch—efficient, orderly. He drives off in the pickup through the woods. She remembers Judah’s funeral. “The whole town attended,” Hattie had said. “Everyone who’s anyone is here. It doesn’t pay to set stock in these things, but when you come to think of it it’s the best kind of tribute, really, the sort of compliment he’d value. Every single person that he’d call a friend . . .”

  Yet to Maggie the crowd of survivors seemed thin—the bald and palsied and bent who clustered to her, condoling. They pressed her hand as if receiving alms; they shook in the weak wind like the last oak leaves above her in the churchyard where he lay. And later, in the Big House, while they filed past the table for coffee and pie, while they came up turn by turn to tell her how they grieved, could understand her sorrow, but wasn’t it lucky he went how he went, the list of names and platitudes came somehow to seem like a petition: tell us you’ll come to our funeral too; promise when the time comes round you’ll remember and attend.

  The baby shifts position. She settles on the daybed in the late-afternoon light. She pats the sack beneath her breasts as though to offer comfort, then pats herself with her left hand and makes circular rubbing motions with her right. It is a question of coordination, Maggie knows. It is a problem of the right hand not following the left. She has received three signals in as many days, and her task is to make sense of them, to resolve these images once more. The child subsides; she dreams.

  There is a pileated woodpecker, a naked walking woman, and a mad old man. She does not know why she thinks him insane, but it is an assumption she’s lived with for years: a glad, waving, wordless madness she welcomes in this world. Ian’s lean brown lover and the bird that summoned her belong to private systems that she cannot share. She is her own sufficiency this afternoon on the porch.

  XV

  So when Hattie accuses her sister-in-law, calling her a Jezebel, the woman will still not repent. Hattie says, “You’re pregnant,” and Maggie says, “That’s right.”

  “And not with Judah’s baby.”

  “No.”

  “Have you no shame?” Hattie asks.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Shame,” she repeats. She musters all her spitting venom and pronounces, “You don’t even know the meaning of the word.”

  “Not in this case,” says Maggie.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “How can you? . . .”

  “Children get born every minute.”

  “Not in this village,” says Hattie. “And not to a widow.”

  Maggie lights a cigarette. The smoke hovers at her head; it will not rise. “But you didn’t mind before.”

  “When?”

  “When you thought it was Judah’s. Or Ian’s, maybe.”

  “Mind? Of course I minded. But there wasn’t anything to do about it.”

  Hattie knows her answer makes no sense. She didn’t much mind and she still wouldn’t mind if the child were a Sherbrooke, not bastard. Yet she feels allowed to lie in the face of brazen falsity; she’ll fight fire with fire; they’ll see.

  “But what can I do now?” Maggie’s voice is—she could swear it—amused.

  “Farm the thing out.” Her own voice has gone querulous, whining, like a girl about to cry. “Have it adopted.”

  “It’s not a thing.”

  “Put it up for adoption. Or else . . .” The threat is empty, Hattie knows. There’s no “or else” to threaten her with, nothing to insist on but the force and weight of decency, and decency doesn’t apply.

  “I’d like your help,” says Maggie. “I’d be grateful if you felt the way you felt before.”

  “What about the father?”

  “No. He doesn’t know.”

  “How can that be?” Hattie asks. “He’s a stranger?”

  “He just doesn’t know,” she repeats.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday. How’s that possible?”

  “It is.”

  Hattie summons control. There’s indignity enough without her having to debase herself by asking what Maggie won’t tell. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, said Our Savior, and she’d cast no stone. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t disapprove; it didn’t mean she had to countenance or take part in such shamefulness, it meant that sin abounded in her once spotless house. Nowhere in the Bible did it say you had to welcome Jezebel, or take Mary Magdalen in. And that Judah’d willed this house to Maggie, who kept her here on sufferance, was just her fool brother’s mistake. Lot’s daughters were a whorish pair, no matter what reasons they gave.

  There is nothing left to do but lock herself into her room. She gathers up her knitting and her cocktail glass. The others can weep till the carpets are salt; she herself will not descend.

  “The difference you’re making makes no difference to me,” Maggie says. “It’s my child, understand. It could come from a stork, if you’d rather. Or”—she gestures—“Hal Boudreau.”

  “I never . . .”

  “And I’m not saying he’s the father. That isn’t the point. The point is you’ve been wanting all these weeks to credit Judah. You’ve not done the addition. Credit me.”

  “But Ian . . .”

  “He’s no more the father than Boudreau.” There is anger now in Maggie, and whip-snapping severity. “I got it from the whorehouse where I worked.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “In Guatemala. Last week. Now if you don’t mind, I’m tired. I’ve got to entertain the football team.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “You should.”

  Yet Hattie feels a queer desire to prolong this talk, since when i
t’s done all’s done. She stamps her foot, then taps it. “You’ve killed me,” she says.

  “No.”

  “It’s the same as murder. This is the death of me.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It is. You listen to me, just this once. A person’s name is their way of living; a person’s good name is his life. You’ve taken ours and dragged it through the mire—that pig wallow where you’re at home. It was the last thing left us. Now there isn’t anything left.”

  “Oh, Hattie, it’s not true!”

  “What is then? What’s your sluttish truth?”

  Maggie swallows. She is white as if they’ve just passed Christmas, not Columbus Day. Her cigarette is out. “There’s my child,” she says.

  “Who? Ian?”

  “The one I’m carrying. It’s in the service of life.”

  “So you say. I don’t believe it, I . . .”

  But Maggie ends this argument by shrugging, veering off. “Suit yourself,” she says. It is as if the woman mocks her—saying words can’t kill, ideas can’t kill, a name or child or shame can’t kill; you’ll live to be a hundred, Hattie, wait and see. She will not wait. She’ll never ever speak to Jezebel again; she’s told her so in no uncertain terms.

  Once the world was lovely; once she only had to hear a stream in order to tell Judah, “Isn’t it beautiful; isn’t it lovely, that sound?” Then everything was cause for celebration and the world chock-full of celebrants; she remembers how he used to light up Roman candles and sparklers and pinwheels come Fourth of July. Ian would watch big-eyed, bug-eyed, corking his ears with his thumbs. And Maggie would be out there with her husband, a quick shadow on the grass, a shape that darted in to light the fuse he offered her, and they would huddle together while the fireworks went off. She, Hattie, would stay on the porch. She’d sit in the rocker or join Ian on the double seat or just stand at the railings and look down on their intricate dance.