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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Yes. As somebody else’s husband. When I was someone else’s wife.”

  He studied her. There was a kind of logic in her instinct, always, and he’d known it inappropriate to bother her that week. She was paying off old debts—Judah’s dutiful fond widow, embracing sacrifice. They ate Sara Lee croissants, and Andrew prepared cappuccino in his new machine. Maggie had been radiant that morning: fifty-two years old but looking half her age. Her parting kiss, Andrew remembers, had had the taste of marmalade; she touched him where he’d failed to shave, promising to stay in touch. She would follow Neptune north and see what she could see.

  He himself has long been expert at avoidance. If she embraced such behavior, he thought he also could; he’d leave her—them—alone. They had started their affair in 1959. She was taking piano lessons in the city, and he met her in the Russian Tea Room every month for lunch. Maggie had had few illusions. She kept at the piano for the music’s sake, and not because she dreamed of a career. He would order kvass and blini while she ate an omelet and drank tea. She’d talk to him of Judah’s hovering possessiveness, and how from time to time she had to leave the farm.

  “Funny, isn’t it,” she’d say. “The air’s so clear up there I need to come south just to breathe.”

  Later, when the British coined the word “bird,” he’d called her Judah’s bird who migrated twice a month. “But always heads back to its nest,” Maggie said. “Is that what you’re implying? Like a homing pigeon, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” she said. “How was Barbados? How’s Benita?”

  “Fine.” he said. “Still there.”

  It is February fifth. He takes the elevator to the basement and walks through to the garage. The attendant has his Volvo ready, and he’s grateful in advance for how it handles snow. Andrew has a country place in Westport, and he’d bought this station wagon the previous fall in order to carry antiques. Dark green in its reflection, he stows his bag and offers Hank a dollar.

  “Bad out there,” Hank says. “You heading to Connecticut?”

  “Vermont. I’m taking the Taconic.”

  “Drive careful, hear?” Hank squints down at him. They discuss the weather, always, and which direction to take. “Road’s slushy is what the radio says. Slick.”

  “I will,” says Andrew, and buckles his belt. The mother of your child.

  He has been married twice but has produced no children. There was a time when this seemed like a problem, and Benita and he had discussed it for years: whether to try, to try harder, to have tests or to adopt. In those years, however, Andrew loved his work. And she had been an only child who found the world too crowded. Those friends who urged them to have children did so with the urgency of self-justification, as if “family” were a gospel that required spreading. If he and Benita had no children, they appeared to say, their own sons and daughters would be threatened; their deliberations over schools and clothes and camp and orthodontia lost all meaning unless shared.

  His second wife was a dancer and worried about her career. When she shattered her kneecap skiing, and was forced to quit, she said, “Well, maybe we should have kids now. What else am I good for? What else is there?” Andrew answered, “What else there is, is divorce.” Marian agreed. She had gone skiing against his advice and with the ballet master’s boyfriend. They had married each other on impulse, and when the impulsiveness waned they were strangers who disliked each other. They were divorced in Mexico, on their second anniversary; she told him that the doctor said her knee would heal.

  Then his friends’ children grew up. They went to college or dropped out of college or attended law school and medical school and married and had children of their own. At fifty-six, he could well have been a grandfather. He slept with a series of women who could have been his daughter’s age—in a kind of abstract incest, pressing flesh that stayed resilient while his own went slack. Andrew had nephews to visit on Christmas, and that had sufficed.

  The FDR Drive has been cleared. He takes the Major Deegan till the turn for the Saw Mill River and the Taconic Parkway; there the snow begins again. He turns on his wipers and the rear-windshield defrost. He listens to the weather forecast and learns that the brunt of the storm is ahead: eighteen inches fell in parts of northern Dutchess County, and a travelers’ warning remains in effect. “Time to dig, kid.” The announcer makes a jingle. “Those who’ve got someplace to go will get there if they take it slow: turn your wheels in the direction of the skid.”

  Andrew keeps to the cleared right lane. Scrupulous in nothing so much as self-analysis, he hunts the explanation for this trip. He could have gone antiquing or returned instead to Westport. Yet he feels the half-forgotten gift of anonymity, of no one knowing where he is; he needs to get out of the city; he wants to see Maggie again.

  That’s the explanation, of course, and has been since his heart’s quick lift when Ian spoke her name. The truth that Andrew halfway sees, the knowledge he’s attempted to dismiss, is that Maggie still astonishes him, and has done so from the start. He dislikes inconclusiveness and is driving north for closure. The young Mozart, he remembers, is supposed to have lain sleepless when his father left off playing—waiting for the chord progression to resolve. But his father had a visitor, and they got into conversation, and Mozart had to creep downstairs to sound the final note. Then he went back to bed, according to the story, and fell happily asleep.

  So Andrew tries to tell himself that Maggie will be pleased. He feels the station wagon skidding, slows again, and follows the sand track on snow. She will accept him in her house for old times’ sake if nothing more, and they will drink and chat together, catching up. “There’s so much to tell you,” she’ll say. “I just don’t know how to begin . . .” They share a past by now as long as his statistical future; he’s known her for as many years as he can expect still to live.

  Meanwhile, he has proved a success. He fiddles with the radio again. He can tell her, if she asks, how he’s doubled his firm’s profit in four years, with inflation factored in. He has been in US magazine, dancing with a disco queen; they’ve mentioned him twice in “Around and About.” Nor are his achievements all that flashy always; Kincannon Associates remains firmly grounded in artists’ management. He’s taken over one or two actors for friendship’s sake, and because his legal staff has expertise in maximizing artists’ incomes for the years that they make money. Life may be brief and art long, Andrew says, but the longest shot of all is art when it comes to investment. He himself never buys with investment in mind, but only the pleasure of the purchase—can he use it, can he sit on it or lie in it or stack faience on its shelves?

  Still, something in the calm congruence of furniture does move him. It makes him buy past his need for the object, with the result the Westport farmhouse now seems stuffed. He buys Shaker pieces, mostly, and mixes them in with Breuer chairs. Of such disjunction he makes a motif: the past and the present conjoined. So a formica Parsons table stands catercorner to a seventeenth-century trestle; a water bed is on the porch and sleigh bed in the guest room. In this welter and profusion, Andrew feels at home.

  On the anniversary of their last night together, he dialed Maggie from his office. When she answered, he said, “Hello, it’s Andrew. How’ve you been?”

  “Andrew . . .”

  He held a coffee cup. The cup was Styrofoam, and he broke off a piece with his nail. “Just thought I’d get in touch. It’s been too long. A year.”

  “Exactly,” Maggie said. “About something in particular?”

  “What?”

  “Did you think you’d get in touch”—she pronounced each word with the exaggerated precision of his grade-school spelling teacher—“about something in particular?”

  He incised the rim. “No.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “New York.”

  “It’s a good connection. I thought maybe you were here.”

  “No.”

 
“Well,” Maggie paused. “You must be busy.”

  “No.” Andrew tore the cup in two.

  “The weather has been fine,” she said.

  “That’s fine.”

  “Yes.” Again she paused. It was as if he’d squandered his initiative by dialing—as if the gesture might be self-explanatory, and the single word “hello” would shock them into fluency. “We have a daughter,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I thought you should know.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  “A daughter?” He divided his half into quarters, then eighths.

  “Yes. When I stayed with you that time. When I packed up my apartment after Judah died. She’s three months old. She’s wonderful.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I would have.”

  “Would have?”

  Maggie did not hesitate. “Except you didn’t ask,” she said. “Not once this year. This is the first time you’ve called.”

  He pressed his eyes. Muzak intervened; the receiver squawked like startled geese, and then the line went dead. “Hello? Hello?” he said.

  “I hear you.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe this. I . . .”

  “Believe it,” she said. “That’s when I got pregnant. I didn’t believe it myself.”

  “A daughter.”

  “Yes. Jane Sherbrooke.”

  “All alone? You had her all alone?” Dimly, at the back of his brain; the enormity of what she’d done and failed to do came clear.

  “Ian’s here. There was a doctor.”

  He lit a cigarette. He deliberated, smoking. “What you mean is, don’t you, that I wasn’t good enough.”

  It was as if she’d rehearsed her response. “This child is mine, not yours. It’s been a year now, Andrew, and you’ve remained in your life. Don’t be hurt. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

  “You’ve succeeded,” Andrew said.

  Again the Muzak intervened. When Maggie came back on the line, her voice had shifted pitch. “I’m sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t my intention.”

  “Jane,” he said. “A daughter. Jane Sherbrooke, you call her.”

  “Keep in touch.” Then she hung up, so he had to realize how she meant the opposite: you cannot touch me. Good-bye.

  The next day—a February morning chill as this one, three years previous—Andrew flew to Albany. He rented a car and drove east. Moved by some notion of cunning, he parked at the Big House entrance gate and approached through the first line of pines. He saw Maggie in the window of the Toy House and advanced. The Toy House was a replica of Peacock Sherbrooke’s mansion, built five hundred yards away from its original and to the children’s scale. He stepped quietly around a shaped yew by the window and waited there knee-deep in snow. She did not hear him or turn. She was studying a stove, it seemed, and its relation to a cradle; her breath steamed faintly in the inner air. He strained to hear the song she sang, but it was nearly tuneless: “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’; Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.”

  Andrew stared. He waited in shocked disbelief while flesh of his flesh existed on the far side of a window like the window of a hospital. It would be three months old. It had its eyes open or possibly shut, but was facing the other direction. He pursed his lips and kissed the glass and lifted his hand, then retreated.

  Maggie sat. She lowered herself into the chair and pushed to set it rocking; she changed the cradle’s angle several times. It was empty, with no blankets, but the question of position appeared to be important—she adjusted the cradle repeatedly and was not satisfied. She extended her foot, nudging the cradle this way and that, then let it come to rest on what seemed the diagonal between her bentwood rocker and the cast-iron cook stove. The griddle had been covered with toy canisters marked Flour, Sugar, Salt. Her humming was continual; he heard it through the pane. He told himself, when she changed songs or ceased her earnest rocking, he would enter and make himself known. “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’ ”—Maggie sang. Whatever she held was so thoroughly swaddled he could not see its face. He wondered, had she lied to him and was this child a doll? He wondered, would she be nursing out here, then wondered if Maggie had milk.

  Snow fell. He looked up at the Toy House slate roof. A sharp sense of exclusion assailed him, as if Maggie had been right to say he had no place in the Big House, no presence in their family that would not feel intrusive. He told himself it was his right to meet and greet his daughter, if only this once while she slept. He pictured her eyes and small hands. He could take her wordlessly, examine Jane’s features, and leave. He would do so once Maggie held still. The rocking, however, continued. If he knew some code word, Andrew thought, some answering tune, some way to arrive without disruption, why then he’d enter the Toy House as if it were not locked to him, in a simple act of entry, since he held the key.

  He had no key. The door was not locked and the window not nailed, but the Toy House resisted him palpably nevertheless. He waited for perhaps ten minutes in this attitude, crouched and shivering, unable to decide if he should claim his daughter or disclaim all interest. Maggie did not want him there and would not know he came. He would put all this out of his mind. He had ejaculated children elsewhere also possibly; there might have been Kincannons he never knew existed. Andrew turned. If he left, he can remember thinking, he could leave unchallenged; he withdrew in his own recent tracks.

  At Newburgh the snow starts in earnest. The sides of the Taconic are heaped high. There is diffuse sun, however, and a glaucous sky glows brightly; the snow shines. It is nine o’clock. Andrew reaches for sunglasses from the glove compartment and adjusts his driving gloves. He tilts the rearview mirror down and is not displeased. The face in it seems purposive: a trace of tan still from his January stint in the islands, gray at the temples and sandy, short-clipped hair. The nose is wide and flat, and sometimes he pretends he broke it in a barroom, the teeth are capped. He wears a dark green turtleneck and uses a cigarette holder; its band is silver, stem black. “You’re past the mid-life crisis,” Eloise had taunted him. “You’re at the male menopause.”

  What bothers him of late, however, has been the absence of crisis. The weeks become months, the years decades, and everything seems foreordained. While his friends and secretaries shift from est to Zen to Transactional Analysis, Andrew prides himself on constancy, whatever else he is, he is not a convert. “Nouvelle vague,” he’d say. “You’re just riding the wave crest, pal. New vague.” Pleased with his bilingual pun, he’d make a point of translation. “You understand that vague means wave; that’s what I mean by hanging ten on every wave crest. And it’s, what’s the word, a wipeout. Like Studio Fifty-Four.”

  So although he cannot prophesy which fads will take stage center, he knows they will succeed each other as night follows day. And even though he makes his income in part off of such faddishness, he feels the scorn for fashion that a servant feels for service—knowing well enough how wind-scraps follow a prevailing wind, and what appears like luck is organized by men like him, in offices, ten months before “the first big break.” He’s tired of his work. He has grown weary of his clients’ inflated fees, and fame. He slows for a gas station that looms whitely to the left of him and unlocks the gas tank for a boy in a black parka. “Fill it up,” says Andrew. “Please.”

  “Right,” the boy says. “Check the oil?”

  “Okay. You got a telephone?”

  “In there.” He jerks his head. “I notice yon got no snow tires.”

  “Radials,” says Andrew. “Four of them.”

  “Right. I notice your wiper blades’re iced.”

  “Right,” says Andrew. “It’s snowing. You notice?”

  Hunting a dime in the change he pulls out, he feels ashamed of such impulsive condescension; he’d had no reason to mimic the boy. Using the credit card, having to repeat
the number to the operator, he calls his office.

  “Kincannon Associates,” says Sally. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Mr. Kincannon?”

  “Himself.” And, pleased with the timbre of her voice, pleased also that she’d known his own voice from the two words of his greeting, Andrew talks to the switchboard, canceling lunch. He’s out of town, he says, and won’t return till Monday; they’re turning the Taconic into a toboggan run. She is worried. He tells her not to worry, they have the snowplows out and everything’s fine. For the next twenty-four hours, however, he cannot be reached, he will call again tomorrow at this time.

  He steps out of the phone booth and pays for the gas. He shivers. Until the instant he made light of it, the weather seemed a joke; now, for the first time in his journey, Andrew feels uncertain. He kicks at his four tire treads and brushes off the roof. Slush has frozen thickly on the fenders and the doors. Why is he going and where does he go to; what will he find once arrived? North, where the road has been blasted through rock, the ice slides are multicolored; he follows the Taconic until Route 295.

  Surprise: she had astonished him when she first came to his apartment, not flirtatiously, in 1959. “Judah would kill you. You know that, I suppose.” She had taken off her clothes with the unembarrassed competence of a nurse preparing for some surgical procedure—as if someone else’s body were at stake. He had adjusted the lights. He could not tell if she was joking or attempting to enliven their adultery with fear. “We might as well get on with it,” she’d said.

  Years later, returning to Judah, she wanted to wrestle a stag. It had blundered into the swimming pool in Westport, and Maggie reached for it bare-handed. He screamed at her to stop, and she had done so, shocked. They watched together while the animal escaped. She sat on the diving board, arms around her knees, in his raincoat; he had had to vacuum the pool. The blue plastic cover was shredded, a deck chair’s fabric ripped. Next morning he insisted they drive to New York, diverting her announced intention to go north to Judah. So when she did leave she blackened his walls, writing “NIXoN LIvES!!!” with rags and shoe polish on the plaster; she had known he planned to have the room repainted anyhow that week.