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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  On Sundays there’d be pan-fried potatoes also, with sometimes a thin slice of steak, and sometimes both bacon and sausage if there were company; the morning sun would shine on the juice so that he’d see the orange pulp and pits and squeezings in his glass. He’d shift the butter so it stood in the path of the sun. That way it would be warm enough to spread without forcing and making his muffin collapse. There had been conversation, but they told him not to talk with his mouth full, and what he remembers is not what they said but only the mumble and hum. There were cooks who came and went. There was always a scraping and clatter and weather forecasts and Hattie asking if he’d done his schoolwork to the teacher’s satisfaction.

  “How can he tell?” Judah asked. “It ain’t been graded yet.”

  When Ian brings the Packard back, it is full night. He is shivering; the sunset has been wintry. He garages the car, then sets out for the house. He hears Boudreau calling, turns and sees the man emerge stoop-shouldered, bearing something white and limp, coming from the stock pond. Ian does not trust his eyes; he waits. But presently the aspects of this conjoined figure settle and resolve themselves; soon enough he sees the limbs and lank hair of his aunt, and slime across her gown.

  Boudreau carries her with little difficulty. He has got her in a fireman’s carry, slung around his neck like a young lamb. The men are constrained; it is not clear who should hold her, for instance, or how to effect the exchange. There is some echo of their morning’s argument, perhaps; they seem to be in opposition as they meet. Boudreau is soaked; he has waded in the pond to fetch her, and his clothes are streaming with the water that her clothes disgorge. “Don’t weigh nothing,” he says. “It’s amazing how little she weighs.”

  “I’ll call the doctor.”

  “Too late for that . . .”

  “No—what I mean is,” Ian says, “for a postmortem. An examination.”

  “You do that. But let me tell you, this is death by drowning. Any fool can see as much. And it wasn’t accidental, neither. I got her from the pond.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean . . .”

  Hal holds his left hand up, hieratic; the corpse shifts. “She was a long way in.”

  They lay her in the carriage by the Packard, on the hard red leather of the open seat. Ian closes her eyes. He had expected the lids to be brittle, resistant, but they slide easily shut. “We’ll need you for a witness,” he says to Boudreau. “I’ll go tell my mother, then go into town.”

  “Don’t wake her.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother. Let her get some sleep. She hadn’t ought to see this.”

  “No.”

  “Well.” Boudreau clears his throat. “I’ll get help. You stay here.”

  He watches the man amble off. Something in that upright carriage is a puzzle to him still; there’s swagger and humility combined. It’s as if Hal learned a shambling imitation of Judah himself—but forgot to keep his head up when he walked. His shoes make wet, sucking sounds. Hell is full of thirsty devils, Hattie used to say; it’s what they mean by firewater when you’re doomed by drink.

  He cannot look at her. He hawks, spits, shuts his eyes. He kneels and puts his ear, Indian fashion, to the gravel drive. He knows there is no sense to this, but holds the position anyhow, needing the sense of solidity it gives him, pressing the earth as though perhaps Sally lay there also. He sees himself as Boudreau might, from the dark windy distance: a grown man on all fours. He pivots on his knees since the entrance drive is circular, and listens in the four directions for some sound. He thinks he hears his mother screaming in the house. There is a beaver bog by Glastonbury, where the flat flap of tails on the pond resounds as does his heart now, thumping. Ian rises and enters the house—its uncontested master who must arrange for burial—taking stairway treads three at a time.

  Boudreau is wet, soaked through. He’s shivering so he can’t make it home, or call for the police just yet; he shelters in the hay barn and takes off his coat. Then he pulls his boots off and peels back his socks; his feet are blue. He wheels his arms, then slaps his hands together and slaps his legs and belly until he feels his hands. When he saw Hattie floating like a drowned sheep in the pond, he’d thought to leave his pipe and matchbook on the bank; the matches are still dry enough to take. He lights the kerosene lamp by the door. He pulls a bale free from the stack behind him, sits on it, and smokes. He tamps the pipe and says, “Strange doings, Mr. Sherbrooke,” to test the sound of it.

  There’s wind inside the barn. He pulls the door shut. The runners need oiling; they squeak. He sees a stack of feed sacks, takes one, and rubs himself down. He’s taking off his shirt to let it dry out also when he sees what he’s known all along awaits him, his consolation and reward. He trims the wick; the flame is steady now. It’s how you remember a man’s name, he thinks, not knowing you remembered it, but knowing that you knew it anyhow, like when the light strikes slantways on a house so suddenly you recollect that thirty years ago this Christmas you were inside at the drop-leaf table, eating pie. He busies himself, remembering. There was old Jamie Kerr and Lewis back from Arizona—“Airizona,” Lewis called it—where they sent him for his lungs. Judah’d just got married to that amazing girl, so busy courting her he’d not had time to make a proper wedding, or not bothered to, because any time they were upright and in public must have seemed a waste. He himself was down from Maine. Engaged to Amy, hunting work, he’d not known that this town would be their town forever; he can see the rhubarb spilling out over its crust.

  Boudreau stops shivering. He relishes the time it takes to sidle past the bottle. He bends and lifts it clear, unscrews the top and sniffs it and swigs, holding his pipe in his left hand now, his right hand in his beard, temptation dangling from his fourth and pinkie fingers like an extra length of flesh. Drinking, he sees the Alagash. There’s wide, fast water where he’d pitch his camp, where he came upon his daughter once asleep without her shirt on, with the fishing rod lashed to a tree. He’d known he’d never see her again when she went off to live with Indians, doing what her postcard said was government work. How come, he’d asked his wife (who’d made no answer, had pretended she was busy with the stove top and scouring pad), how come she could afford to send those turquoise bracelets, tiepins, cuff links, necklaces? On government pay, he said, I’d like you to answer me that.

  He tips the gin. He whistles, wishes for the thousandth time that Billy had had asthma when they drafted him, not gone, not gotten over what he’d suffered with through all of seventh grade; knows as he always has it’s futile, finished, milk spilled so long ago you can’t even see where it spilled, drinks, thinks the old woman had willed it, heading fifty yards through cattails like a hunter for his blind. Sweet suffering Jesus, he thinks, you were a rare one at your age wanting to learn how to swim.

  But sorrow does not die with its occasion. Grief lasts. He is not drunk. There’s not enough to get drunk on, only warm. If he wanted to get drunk he would. He’d walk to Merton’s Hideaway or the Village Arms and tell them a story they’d pay for, tell what’s been happening to Sherbrooke women lately, how one of them drowns and the other fills out like a mainsail; it’s only three fingers of gin. He drinks. His wife will be waiting, incurious, and he’ll let her wait. Harry’s home. He’ll be sitting by the TV, not watching, drawing circles, making triangles inside the circles, then circles inside the triangles again. Loss endures. Hal waves his pipe. There’s room enough, if he’s careful, for both the pipe and bottle in the circle of his mouth, and he spends some minutes shaping things so that they fit. The bottle’s neck is a circle, and he puts the pipestem in; he lies down in the haymow, balancing. He hears the Coleman lamp hum. There’s things to juggle in this world, he tells his old employer, there’s problems like the ones that he and the boy were discussing: bowling alley, shopping mall. He’ll fix it in the morning when he’s dry. He has one inch of gin, one inch of tobacco remaining, and must not confuse them; this white wet certainty of comfort is what they want you to
swallow. He strikes his final match and settles back.

  Labor: she savors the word. It is both curse and blessing, her portion again. It is a rack she’s pinioned on, but willingly. Maggie enters a hall with a great fire burning at the room’s far end. She shuts her eyes and rides with it and will not scream; she screams.

  Ian comes to the door. He has something to tell her; she tells him, “Not now. Call the doctor. Please.” He does as she bids him, and dials; the doctor answers on the second ring and says he will arrive. Ian’s hands feel wet with pond slime still; he wipes them on his pants. He touches the bed, and it also is wet. He takes her in his arms.

  STILLNESS

  PART I

  I

  His dream is incomplete, and he knows this even as he loses it. They are riding gondolas in a cold wind. His skis feel cumbersome. These pines are snow-white pillows he will have to rearrange. The alarm means travel, always, like a wake-up call; Andrew switches it off. The room is dark. He lies in his king-size bed, on the diagonal. The drapes are floor-to-ceiling, though last night Eloise had asked, “Why call them that? They start six inches from the floor and they certainly don’t reach the ceiling. And anyhow they drop, they drape—that means they should be called ceiling-to-floor.”

  “Don’t be so literal,” he’d said.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s pretentious. The cognoscenti’s game of innocence.”

  “Talk about pretentious . . .”

  “What time did you say you were leaving?” Andrew had opened the hall closet. “I’ve got to get up early. Thanks for coming by.”

  He dials the weather number: WE 6-1212. A male voice wishes him good morning: it is minus six degrees. There is light to moderate snow falling as of six o’clock; the snow will taper off to flurries by midafternoon. The wind is north-northeast in Central Park.

  His sheets have a diamond pattern; the blanket is Hudson Bay Blue. The mattress pad is electric and keeps him sufficiently warm. He wears a silk kimono stitched with crescent moons. The bathroom door has full-length mirrors on each side. He will have to call his office, canceling the lunch date; he tries to remember with whom he’s supposed to be eating, and where.

  Andrew Kincannon is fifty-six years old. Lately he finds himself forgetting details like who’s where for lunch. It’s not that he misses appointments or that anybody notices—or, if they should happen to notice, would they call him to account. He is not forgetful. It’s just that he can’t bring himself to feel it matters much: Kincannon Associates would get along without him, and probably as well without him these next months. There are fifteen people in the office he could send instead.

  Andrew turns on the shower and smiles. Waiting for the water to adjust, shedding his kimono, he imagines sending all fifteen to La Grenouille. They’d jockey for position near the guest. Who is it anyhow, he tries to remember, then does: that reggae singer’s manager. He shrugs, yawns, tastes his tongue. Maybe Kennedy’s shut down; maybe the man from Jamaica’s scared to go out in a storm.

  He touches his toes. He likes his spray hot, strong. Some of his best thinking has been done in showers. He used to tell his clients this, announcing that he’s changed their strategy the way a Speakman Anystream can change from mist to faucet strength, although it’s always water, always Speakman Anystream, so what we’re going to do, love, is try a different mix. But he does not want to concentrate—and concentrates, therefore, on soap.

  Soap too is various. Some prefer rich lather; others prefer soap scented or with the promise of medicinal benefits: as “natural” as plausible or as artificial. Benita, his first wife, liked Camay soap not because of its ingredientsor shape, but because she liked the raised medallion and attempted to keep it intact. For weeks Andrew would notice the way the soap shrank—as if she used only its edges, or the portrait’s underside. He prefers Roger & Gallet. He shampoos his hair, then rinses.

  This also fails. He’s fully awake now and cannot keep from thinking of the day and trip to come. He tries to remember Benita’s phone number, and her cousin’s middle name; he tries to remember their hotel in Barbados in 1959, then the name of the reggae man’s manager’s son. He succeeds: 222-3732, Alison, Sam Lord’s Castle before the renovation, Bill. Still, he must drive to Vermont.

  Stepping out of the shower, toweling down briskly, he decides that he is grateful for the storm; it will be something to concentrate on. He selects a tape of Sylvia Marlowe playing Couperin; the harpsichord’s clear regularity enables him to pack.

  The call surprised him yesterday. He’d answered the phone the way he often did, half hearing, checking the notepad for calls. Suzy bunched his message slips according to three categories: Urgent, Urgent Urgent, and Call Back. He was checking through that last list when the home phone rang.

  “Hello? Is this Andrew Kincannon?”

  “It is.”

  “Hello. I tried your office.”

  “But you got me here instead.”

  “This is Ian Sherbrooke,” Ian said.

  Andrew stopped crossing names out. He capped his Montblanc pen again. “Hello.”

  “Maggie gave me the number,” her son said. “Or, at any rate, I took it.”

  Andrew lit a cigarette.

  “Don’t blame your secretary,” Ian said. “I told her it was serious, an emergency even—but she wouldn’t give out the number. Your unlisted number, I mean. I got it from my mother.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m calling . . .” Then he paused. “She doesn’t know I’m calling. Understand?”

  Andrew nodded. “It’s been a long time.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I thought we could change it.” His voice was low-pitched, his elocution excellent—an actor, Andrew remembered. “Or you could, anyhow.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Home. Vermont. From the carriage barn, actually, so Maggie can’t listen.”

  Andrew struck a second match. He held it to the cigarette. “What’s wrong?”

  “You ought to come on up.”

  Ian would be thirty, Andrew thought; it had been a dozen years since they last met. He had seen Ian’s mother since then, but always in private—and the last time he had spied on her she did not know he watched. “Why?”

  “It took till yesterday until she told me it was you.”

  He put his thumb on the crossed rackets. They were embossed on the cigarette box lid.

  “That’s how I knew she’d let me call. Three, four years,” said Ian. “Have you known about it all this time?”

  Andrew made a movement of impatience. It was as if he’d come into a play mid-act, with the exposition over. “Why call me now?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow is tour day. That way you could wander through the house. You could just simply show up, and we’d have to let you in.”

  “You’re losing me.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course.” There was the crackle of static, and Ian’s voice increased. “You don’t know I’ve been living here. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the Big House is partway a museum now. I have to open it every second Thursday of the month. I’ll explain it to you when you come. But we could get you in.”

  The cigarette box was silver. He’d taken second place in the mixed doubles tournament. At match point he’d missed an overhead; Andrew put pressure on his thumb, then lifted it. “Thanks.”

  “It isn’t the reason I’m calling.”

  “Listen.” He let irritation surface. “I’m a personal manager, right? And an old friend of the family, if that’s what you want me to say. But I don’t handle mystery writers. Just tell me what you’re after.”

  In the ensuing silence he had a picture suddenly of Ian as Maggie’s look-alike—hand poised beside the wall phone, knuckles white where they clenched the receiver. “Right.” The voice went flat. “A funny thing happened to you on your way to work tomorrow.”

  “What?”<
br />
  “You didn’t get there.”

  “No? Give me one good reason.”

  “Two.”

  Andrew controlled himself. He counted five, then told himself to hang up. He told himself this call was a mistake from the beginning; he needed a drink. Then he chose to have some sympathy, to be more welcoming to someone who did after all have a claim on his attention. He started to say, “I’m sorry . . .” when the stranger in a carriage barn changed the conversation utterly.

  “Two reasons,” Ian said. “If you’re still listening. Because the mother of your child is going crazy. Come.”

  Dressed now, he opens the drapes. There is no snow falling, but his balcony is lined with snow—three inches like white foam atop the railing. It will not clear. The sky is gray and cloudless, with a density that augurs permanence. He had dialed Maggie’s number the minute Ian hung up. The line had been busy, however, and Andrew heard the buzzing with relief. He poured himself a full glass of Wild Turkey; he would not have known what to say. It had been early evening, and he watched the first flakes, calculating: four years since they last met. Her husband, Judah, had recently died. Andrew could not understand why Maggie planned to remain in Vermont, she’d come to Manhattan that week to pack up her apartment. He protested when she left the final time.

  “I don’t understand,” he had said. “Why should you go back up there?”

  “It’s home.”

  “Not now. It doesn’t have to be.”

  “It does.”

  “But I’m not married,” Andrew said.

  “Not this week, maybe. I give you a month.”

  “Marry me.”

  They had been lovers for years, faithful to their shared ongoing infidelity. She took his hand, half smiling. “I’m supposed to be the other woman. Right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Andrew, this is silly. We wouldn’t know what to do. You forget how often I’ve been hiding in that closet.”

  “You could trust me.”