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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Two years old.”

  “And when’s your birthday?”

  “October thirty-one.”

  “A smart one.” Helen nodded. “That’s Hallowe’en, you know.”

  “I know.” Jane looked at them unblinkingly.

  “What will you be this Hallowe’en. A princess?”

  “No.”

  “A witch?”

  Jane shook her head.

  “The whole world dresses up for her birthday,” Maggie said. She studied her fingers.

  “Not me.”

  “Not you?” asked Helen. “Why not?”

  Jane raised her shoulders, shook her head.

  “She should have playmates.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said.

  “There ought to be some other children in this house. Have you looked into play groups?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Cinderella?” Each time Helen spoke to Jane, her voice would rise an octave. “Is that who you’re going to be?”

  “Susie,” Jane said.

  “Who’s Susie?”

  “My imaginary friend.”

  Helen clapped her hands. “Did you hear that? Imaginary friend. My imaginary friend. Oh my . . .”

  “It’s time for your nap,” Maggie said.

  Jane approached the couch they sat on, wordless, purposive and took her yellow blanket. She took her bottle also and lay down. Her eyes were blue, long-lashed; she did not close her eyes.

  Barns get pegged, Judah had explained to her, not nailed. That way the whole thing has some give, you watch a barn creaking you know what I mean—the whole thing’s likely to collapse sooner than any part of it. So wall by wall in Maggie’s vision becomes rectangular translucency, a shapeliness adhering to itself: she watches planks go brown then black, with Boudreau stretched full length on the hay like some stone warrior, only drunk, only forgetful, the third side of a triangle whose other leg was Hattie, their junction that point in the pond where he dove to find a corpse and would dive again.

  Did he run blindly? Maggie wonders. Can you keep your eyes open if your beard and hair are burning? Hattie, the night before, left her eyeglasses behind. She had known the way. She breasted a path through the collapsing foliage that Boudreau, tracking her, would tread again, its density in any case diminished by the season; so perhaps he raced through cattails that had been parted before. Drop a plumb line from the apex of the figure that they make; make that apex the conjunction of Boudreau’s hands and Hattie’s when he hauls her to the mudbank, dead; bisect such painful symmetry and out comes Baby Jane.

  It had been Hallowe’en. Seabirds that ride on the ninth wave from shore are the souls of the dead, sailors say. She remembers when she used to dress up like a witch and climb the tree on Hallowe’en, with cooked but cold spaghetti in the pot. There would be light from the Toy House—enough to show the stars on her crepe cone. Children would gather beneath her; she would lower the spaghetti to them like a rope of worms. Ian—who had been in on the joke—would stand by her side twisting his fingers, cackling when she cackled: “Take, take, take.” She wore a nightgown, Hattie complained; they could look up her legs in that tree.

  “Well, what will we call her?” Ian asked. He was back in the room, by her bed.

  “Her?” Maggie was crying. “Her?”

  “Your daughter,” Ian said. “This little lady here.”

  “Is she all right?”

  The doctor bent above her. His teeth had the luster of pearls. “I told you so already, Mrs. Sherbrooke. A fine healthy baby girl.”

  “Yes.” The tears were independent, alien, some other someone’s water squeezed from her. She forced them out like afterbirth.

  “Congratulations,” Ian said. “We’ll call her Baby Sherbrooke for a while.”

  “Jane,” she said. “Plain Jane.”

  “You mean that?”

  She heard sirens. She attempted to sit up, but Ian pressed her shoulder. “I’m not joking,” Maggie said. “Just Jane.”

  “Jane Sherbrooke.” He turned to Dr. Rahsawala. The baby was wailing, convulsive, gasping for air that would prime the lungs’ pump—that fear allayed on the instant, though in weeks to come they took her to the hospital for every sort of test. There was silver nitrate in her eyes. The choked, high-pitched lament Maggie heard across the room meant severance, a chorus: best of all not to be born.

  The Big House has four floors. The attic, Maggie warns herself, can lift at any moment in a southeast wind. It is moored to the house by the frame’s insubstantial anchor only, and wind whistles through it like a signal to hoist sail. She hopes the snows increase. If it’s bad enough and they fail to get the entrance plowed, then nobody will come. They can open the doors to the building, and two o’clock will come and go and three-thirty come and go, and she can say to Ian, “See. I told you so.” He’d scowl and lock the door again and say, “Just wait till springtime. That’s when you get your first tourists.” The mud room will hang no strange shapes.

  The first time they hung coats in there, Maggie had been shocked. She carried Jane out of the house. They drove away just as the second set of visitors arrived, and returned as the last car departed. She had refused to countenance his plan—his crazy way of circumventing roads. What you do is build roadblocks, she said, not invite the world under your roof. What the government gives you with one hand they take away with the other; she distrusts the National Register of Historic Places and their letters of approval and their plaques. What you do is keep strangers away, not ask them in to eat your porridge and sit in your chair.

  Then shame possessed her for her adamancy, her sounding so like Judah that she could hear him approve. Those had been his arguments, not hers; that had been his way of toting up accounts. He had been more litigious than their lawyer, Samson Finney; he wrote simultaneous testaments, then decided which one should apply. Maggie urged her husband to share and share alike, but with his homegrown sense of equity he tacked up No Trespassing signs.

  So she yielded to Ian’s insistence. He convinced her that his strategy was sane; in order to keep out traffic they had to open the gates. She called the paying visitors their “guests.” The second Thursday, when guests arrived, she stayed upstairs with Jane. There had been noises beneath her, and the sound of scuffling feet, and when Ian rang the gong to tell her that the coast was clear, the coast was covered with mud. She vacuumed all that night. She had time before the next invasion, and she wanted no strange fingerprints on the counters or the walls. She mopped the kitchen floor. Ian said he’d had six visitors, and nobody entered the kitchen; she said the floor required mopping once a month. “At eleven o’clock?” he inquired. “Mrs. Russell does it, doesn’t she? And she’s coming tomorrow.”

  “But I’m not tired,” said Maggie, rinsing, “and I feel like doing something.”

  Ian bought mannequins. He knotted scarves. “Jane will love this stuff,” he said. He spaced dummies in the sewing room as if at a tea party, and dressed them carefully. The room was a success. He called it “Touch and Try,” and left a heap of jackets and bonnets and shawls on the ironing board. There was one blouse with thirty-eight mother-of-pearl buttons down the back; there were riding habits and a collection of collars. When she set the room straight, afterward, the mannequins would have been moved. Their wigs had come uncurled.

  A woman with a plastic face pauses at the church in order to remove her hat. She holds a parasol. Another bends to stoke a stove, and her face is black. Happy huntsmen come through woods with a stuffed deer slung from a pole; children sit around a table, raising pewter spoons to bowls half full of papier-mâché eggs; there’s a slab of cardboard bacon on each plate. These are reconstructions she has seen in the local museum. She stands behind the cord or glass and watches her own vividness go dim: mother and children, a tableau vivant—note especially the shark's-tooth's necklace on the three-year-old. This may be an amulet intended to ward off evil. Note also the harpoon on the wall, and the trout net by the snowshoes
; a trapper’s implements have been set out for cleaning on the workbench to your right.

  Maggie tells herself Jude’s stories. There is the one about the beekeeper followed everywhere by bees. When they swarmed they swarmed to him, and he was honey all over. There is the one about the crow who thought it was a duck, and the dog that found its master five hundred miles from home, in Boston, on a subway car. Her heart is beating rapidly; it hurts. She opens the door to her room. This is Thursday; she has to prepare. There is the story of the bank clerk who increased the balance sheet of anyone he trusted and considered deserving. He’d embezzle fifty dollars at a time and spread it through the accounts. They were little windfalls, always, not enough to query or get curious about—but enough to make a difference for a birthday celebration or a fine wedding present or maybe a new coat of paint. He was forty when he started, and went on till retirement without being caught. Afterward he told Judah that he’d done it to plow back excess profits—to do what he said the bank should do for the community it serves.

  Maggie listens for some sound from Jane. She is not distracted. There’s the one about Sebastian who was a night watchman at the plastics plant. One night the boiler exploded. They put out the fire with help from every volunteer department in a twenty-mile circle; Judah had been there, and it took the best part of a night. Once it was possible to get inside, they hunted for Sebastian and could find no part of him. They called his daughter to see if he’d maybe stayed home, and his daughter said no, but could she give him a message? No message, the firemen said.

  Then Judah found a watch. It was waterproof and fireproof and shatterproof, and registered twelve fourteen. They identified it as Sebastian’s watch, and then they found a piece of what was once a shoulder, and a metal shoe tip that had melted into toes. They held a full-scale funeral, but the only thing they buried was his watch.

  “Those aren’t the right stories for Ian,” Maggie had maintained. “Tell him something sensible.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong with the stories I know?”

  “They’re pointless,” Maggie said.

  “You sit around and listen.” Judah bit his right thumb’s cuticle. “That’s how you pick things up.”

  “Tell him about animals. And unicorns and maidens and maybe knights in shining armor who beat up the dragon. Whatever you want. Gypsy stories about kings who were beggars before.”

  “Once upon a time,” said Judah, “there was a unicorn. There was a maiden and a knight in shining armor who beat up the dragon. He became king of the gypsies. I don’t know stories like that.”

  “Invent them,” Maggie said.

  An old woman lived in a shoe. Cats went to London to visit the queen, people rode a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, then opened the cupboard to find it was bare and so the poor doggie had none. Except lately all such rhymes feel cruel to her—with Jack tumbling Jill and broken eggs and blackbirds baked alive. Someone is licking platters clean at some other someone’s expense, or riding pell-mell through the streets in order to light lamps or sweep chimneys clean with the bodies of storks or force the children to sleep. People are plunged into pots; spiders wriggle inside, or thumbs come popping out of pies, or ladybird’s house is on fire and she has to hurry home.

  Slowly therefore, scuffing the floor to find splinters and keep the parquet shining and because she might as well get use out of the hallway runner before it goes threadbare beneath strangers’ boots, leaning on the banister for much the same reason, not weakness, Maggie approaches the stairs. Judah used to walk that way. She had started on this stairway more than half her life ago, at twenty-three, though blithe, though skipping, her ungainliness what he called grace as, lumbering up after her, she heard him wheeze and snort. The first time, when thirteen, lost, and finding the Big House, she’d not gotten past the kitchen—but more than forty years later Maggie remembers how he’d risen from his work desk like a wave, towering over her, then crashing down. The stairwell has paintings. Jude, she wants to tell him. Look what's happened in the house. There is a cowboy chasing buffalo, and the pink sun sets behind a canyon wall. There is a stand of birch trees, then a painting of a stream. There is a group portrait—worked up, perhaps, from photographs—of the Transcontinental Railway where the two halves meet. Men pose in top hats or shirt-sleeves, and one man in a cutaway holds a spike and sledge. High noon casts gray light anyhow upon the celebrants; they are shadowless. Maggie holds her housecoat closed and raises it a little; otherwise, she’d slip. The man in the cutaway grins. She drifts past him and studies a cow; its eyes are lakes in which this particular artist has seen fit to paint brown trout.

  The second floor is cold. She wears knee socks. Her housecoat has pink quilting that has faded to near-white. Her flannel nightgown is blue. From outside, through the twelve-pane window, past the laden maples and the tamaracks, she sees herself positioned in the tableau’s center: a great glass dome above her, and a farmhouse and flag and glued-down grazing animals above the thick flat base. You buy this toy for Christmas and you give it to your daughter and she shakes it like a rattle till there’s snow.

  Hattie’s door is open, as it rarely was during her lifetime; Maggie enters. The furnishings have been placed on display. William Jennings Bryan wrote a thank-you note that’s in a silver frame on the bed table; the hooked rug reads “Home, Sweet Home.” The pillow on the rocking chair is a sampler saying “Rest” that Maggie has not seen before; the oil lamp has been burnished and the candlesticks hold candles. The curtains have been drawn and fastened with a pink silk cord.

  This is the window she escaped from, Maggie thinks. This, that he’s hiding. She undoes the cord’s loop, separates the curtains, and peers out. “Come in the evening or come in the morning; come when expected or come without warning,” was how Hattie put it. She said “hospitality” and “open-handedness” and “Sherbrooke” used to mean one and the same.

  Maggie had been openhanded, been a partygiver and a partygoer and the life of every party till her husband could not stand it and shut the Big House door. But she agrees with him now. She wishes she could tell him how reclusiveness prevailed. She balls her fists and stares out at the yew trees as conical as igloos with new snow. It had been easy to leave. She’d left him overnight, then for weekends, then for weeks. Then finally she left for seven years. Now she is just as much a prisoner in this enormous cage as she had ever laughingly called Judah, or the portraits of the ancestors that loom by Hattie’s bed.

  Now she descends. She sees Ian in the kitchen and constructs a smile. They will pay to see her mummified, bending at the waist but swaddled in silk and chinchilla; the legend says that that’s what Judah’s wife should wear. She wonders what there is for breakfast, since the Froot Loops box is empty—only pastel crumbs inside, only the sweetened broken arcs of circles that Jane insists be whole, returning each morning’s measure of breakage because she will not swallow it. Ian has been making coffee. The pot steams. Maggie hopes so hard for snow she feels herself shiver: every second Thursday let there be blizzards till June.

  III

  Ian hears her shuffling progress. When his mother comes into the room he smells her from a distance; he will have to urge her to wash. Her hair looks like a squirrel’s nest—lank, tangled now, and graying, with Hattie’s tarnished silver comb protruding from the bun. The skin beneath her eyes is puffy, darkened, as if she has been pressing on a bruise. He does not regret calling Andrew. For weeks he’d gone to sleep each night resolved to take some morning action—to shock Maggie back to competence, if she could be shocked. She had been his image, always, of efficient sanity; now she holds her housecoat closed because the buttons have been lost.

  She raises her shoulders, exhaling. “Is there coffee?”

  Ian pours a cup. He adds both cream and sugar, then justifies himself again, as he feels the need to do each time they open the house. “It’s the legal minimum. If they look at it too closely, we might not get away with it. It’s just a way of saying this is public property
for six hours a month.”

  “I hate it,” Maggie says.

  “You used to have more people visit every weekend than we ever get these days on tour.”

  “Except they were invited.”

  Ian looks at his hands. “The government protects us, that’s how we keep Route Seven away. As part of the Historic Preservation Act. You know all this, we’ve got no choice.”

  “We do.”

  “Not much.”

  “We don’t need the money.”

  “Agreed.”

  Maggie sighs. She dips her head like some slow schoolgirl learning long division.

  “It has to be of public value. That’s what Finney says.” He pours himself more coffee. The mug has been chipped; Ian runs his index finger twice around the rim. “Section one-oh-six: the effect of the roadway must be determined by the head of the relevant federal agency. Otherwise they can’t release the funds or issue the license and permits, remember; otherwise we’d be sitting ducks. ‘In practice,’ says the handbook, ‘a mediated solution has usually been achieved.’ ”

  He repeats this as though he’s persuaded; it’s a lesson he learned six months back. Yet the truth that Ian hides (with all his talk of National Historic Preservation Acts and the National Register of Historic Places and house museums and Advisory Councils and easements and Tax Reform Acts) is he’s just as lost as she, and flailing at the future with words about the past: preservation, trust. “Well, anyhow,” he says, “that’s what Finney figures.”

  “Not upstairs. Not in Jane’s room.”

  “No. But we can rope it off.”

  “Not my room,” Maggie reminds him. “Not anyplace we live in.”

  “Have it your way,” Ian says. “Have it the way Miles Fisk wants. Let them put an exit ramp right through the south-facing gate. Past the shed field; that’s where they’ll put Sunoco and a Hojo’s if we’re lucky. We could harvest plastic bottles and tin cans.”