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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  He watches her. His father would have strung barbed wire or stood in the roadway with shotguns. But Ian too is fighting for the Sherbrooke property, with more modern stratagems: petitions and incorporation papers and a listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Maggie goes to the window. “It’s snowing.”

  “Someone may arrive today,” he says. “You mustn’t worry.”

  “I’m not worrying.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” Ian says.

  His condescension shocks her, he sees, though it comes in the guise of compassion; that he should tell her not to worry seems far more a cause for worry than the statement by itself. She advances on the window and smudges it by breathing. She draws a triangle in the opaque pane. “I’ve had strangers here before,” says Maggie.

  “Yes.”

  “But a museum where we live? I’ve seen them,” she whispers. “Tracking salt all over the carpets. Using up the well.”

  Outside the wind increases, and what had seemed like light drifting snow drives at the window and sticks. The knuckles of her hands are white; she sucks at them, two at a time.

  “You’d better get dressed,” Ian says.

  First, she could ride horses better than anyone—better than his father, even. She made him chocolate cake with chocolate icing and filling, and wrote with whipped cream on the sides and top: this is IaN’S EverYBodY ELse HaNDS OFf! He would watch her, pleased and proud, while she extruded the thin round line and cut it off at each word’s end; when she offered him a turn, all he himself could manage was globs and splotches and leaks. She was a better pianist than anyone—and Judah gave her, when Ian was five, a concert in the house. He brought a violinist and a cellist over from Boston; they were both professionals, but Maggie played the piano part. They played Beethoven and Dvorak, and then sight-read Haydn trios; he had been enthralled. Maggie sat three-quarters facing him, her face flushed; someone turned the pages at his mother’s nod. She played with her lower lip sucked in, swaying, and was the most important person in the trio, with the loudest part.

  He had adored her. He leaned forward, rapt. He was just learning to play. They had hired fold-up chairs and put a hundred in the hall, outside the music room. Some man he didn’t know, behind him, said, “How did she get the musicians, I wonder?” “Judah paid,” said someone else, “or they damn well wouldn’t be here,” and the lady with him said, “Ss-sh, that’s her boy.” Ian flushed and fled.

  They found him in the kitchen. He would not cry, he said to Hattie, and she said, “Of course not. You’re too big for that. You’re five, and five-year-olds don’t cry.”

  “And three-quarters.”

  “Five and three-quarters. Let’s go back.”

  “I want . . .” he said and stopped.

  “Want what?”

  “Promise I can have it?” Ian asked.

  She had been distracted, hearing the music beyond. He heard his mother’s solo passages, and she missed every note.

  “You know,” said Hattie, “I can’t promise anything when I don’t know what you want.”

  “Promise anyhow,” he pressed her.

  “Maybe.” In their negotiations this meant yes.

  “I want that man out of the house!”

  She looked at him, shocked. He stamped his feet. He folded his arms on his chest.

  “I can’t, Ian. You know I couldn’t do that.”

  “You promised!”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the flat nose. The one right behind me.”

  “Who, Andrew? That’s Andrew Kincannon. But he’s your mother’s friend,” she said. “Why ever would you want him out?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?” Hattie was growing impatient.

  “Because of what he said.”

  “About?”

  Ian considered. “About the music. He said, ‘Judah paid . . .’ ”

  “Oh, don’t pay any mind to him. Not Andrew. He’s just jealous.”

  “Of what?”

  Hattie studied the ceiling. She pursed her lips. Even then he’d known she knew more than she was letting on about his mother’s friend, but knows now how much more there was she didn’t dare to guess. “He’s in the business,” she said. “A professional person. He wishes Judah had asked him to arrange the concert, probably. You mustn’t mind his talk.”

  So he had been mollified and went to his room hating them, hating the piano. Later, when his father burned it—though by that time Ian was using the Steinway to practice—he’d understood a little of the reason why. When the fire quieted, he salvaged a black key and a white key that had been cracked and blackened, and hid them in his bureau, in the socks.

  In December he had discovered his grandfather’s daybooks in the attic, in a cupboard with sealed shelves. There were a dozen volumes, and Ian leafed idly through. The handwriting was clear, the pages lined. The books were leather-bound. In his open-faced, right-slanting script, Peacock’s grandson kept accounts, each ledger comprising a year. His principal occupation had been that of banker, and he supervised the workings of the farm with fitful inattention. He planted apple orchards, organized the Elgin Creamery, and undertook to ship milk to New York in refrigerated trains. There were three such trains a day. He reduced the flock of sheep and increased the herd of cows.

  But Joseph Sherbrooke was a meditative man; his entries attested to this. After each row of figures at week’s end, he would unburden himself. And as his affairs grew more complex he kept a separate ledger for the workings of the farm, recording in his daybooks only the daily weather. Full of schemes for social change he never quite effected, he focused on his family with a kind of abstract earnestness. “If I had my preference,” he wrote in 1900, “this century so well arrived would last a thousand years. My darling wife and daughter thrive, the barley yield was excellent, the season’s syrup sweeter than any I can remember tasting. Business prospers. The proper irrigation of the bottomland is now in Leahy’s charge. We are in good health. I have one wish remaining, with which to greet the Year: may the child we await be a son. If so, we are agreed. We will call him Judah; that is praise. For Judah is a place and tribe as well as single man; it is an hilly fastness and an ancient name. For Leah ‘conceived again and bare a son, and she said. Now will I praise the Lord: therefore she called his name Judah, and left bearing.’ ”

  The radiator leaks. He studies the discolored floorboards at its base. He wonders if they should put their best or worst foot forward when Andrew arrives; should he urge his mother to use makeup, for example? Would Andrew respond to Maggie’s collapse or the brave guise of endurance?—Ian does not know him well enough to know.

  “Kincannon,” she pronounced, three days before. “Andrew Kincannon.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Not very well.”

  Maggie lifted her head from her hands. “Try to.”

  He did, and Andrew acquired definition: the full lips, the expensive clothes, the ears that Ian had seen to be lobeless. “What about him?”

  “I can’t handle it. Not by myself.”

  He could not remember Andrew’s eyes. He spent some time attempting to remember and, failing, concluded that Andrew wore glasses. He imagined horn-rimmed glasses, tinted glasses, bifocals, hunter’s glasses, goggles, and even a single black patch.

  “You’ve got to tell him,” Maggie said. “I can’t handle it alone.”

  She spoke to her fingers. He looked at them also. “You’re not alone.”

  “No.”

  He made those assertions of comfort he’d been making now for months. “We’re with you. We’re in this together.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll get better. Wait and see.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t describe it. There’s so much pain, it’s everywhere . . .”

  He lit her cigarette. He flicked the lighter additionally, twice.

  “Like an operation,” Maggie said, “
without anesthesia. So you know what’s happening and feel it, feel it, Ian, but have to stay strapped to the bed.”

  “Jane’s fine, she’s thriving. You mustn’t feel guilty. You’re in a safe place here.”

  She put away her cigarette. He continued with the blessings that she ought to count, and why anxiety was inappropriate; she took a strand of hair and combed it with her thumbnail, then curled and uncurled the hair. “It doesn’t help,” she said. “You used to want to find out.”

  “What?”

  “The name of Jane’s father.” Maggie spoke carefully. For the full term of her pregnancy, he’d asked her that, and she refused to tell him, saying it didn’t matter, wasn’t relevant: she’d had this child to have this child, not to have another husband. “You used to want to know.”

  “So Andrew . . . ?”

  “I need help. I can’t pass an open window, Ian, or go near the medicine chest. Oh, I don’t mean to frighten you, but I might not make it. Some days . . .” She stopped. It was as if, even thick-tongued and in pain, she felt ashamed to admit it. “I don’t mean you, you’d be all right. But Jane. She ought to have what help there is. Christ knows it isn’t likely but he might provide some help. It wasn’t his fault. Andrew Kincannon.”

  Ian reached his hand out, but she placed both her hands in her hair.

  “Why this uneasiness?” Joseph Sherbrooke wrote. “Wherefore this sense of impending disaster, as with the silence that precedes a storm? Three elms fell in last week’s wind, and this morning’s stillness is the portent of motion not peace. Thirty-one degrees. The very sky beyond my window is glazed with an additional glaze so that one might think it lacquered: layer on layer of preservative that suggest fragility not strength. Just so did we when children pierce an eggshell with a needle and blow out the liquid contents—thereby retaining the retainer that otherwise would crack. I was always clumsy-fingered, but could perform this feat. Therefore, with the pleasure of skill elsewhere denied me, I would eviscerate dozens of eggs. The women of the household painted them, vying with each other in intricacy of stencil and design—so that by Easter they displayed whole shelvesful of such objects, a rainbow of color refusing to fade.

  “My prey was the hen house no fox ever entered. They dared not because of the dogs. But the dogs were acquiescent while I their young master wreaked havoc—there was in any case a superfluity of food. There are stone eggs also that my aunt collected, and the semiprecious ones called Fabergé. But mine appeared more precious still, at least in my youthful accounting. They were the reward of chores, the final product of a morning hour. Things change. I have changed. I am thirty-eight years old today, with one child born and another arriving. We will celebrate. I smoked two cigars after lunch. The maids set out the birch log on the table, with its twelve drilled holes for candles and the twelve white tapers. It is the hollow center I fear, however, the perfect preservation—year by year unchangingly the birch log!—that suggests decay.”

  The snow is unrelenting, and the ground has been buried for months. Ian has reasons to go to New York, and he proposes that they travel there together, then take some southbound plane; they have the means and leisure to go south. But Maggie seems as rooted as ever Judah was. “If I can’t get to Morrisey’s”—she tries to make a joke of it—“what’s the point of New Orleans?”

  He says there’s a difference between a grocery store where everyone knows you, and a city where nobody does. “The trouble with travel,” she says, but does not complete the sentence; she turns from him, lifting her hands.

  He skis across the meadow or on the woodlot trails. Jane enjoys it when he takes her piggyback—not on the skis but snowshoes, scarcely breaking the new crust. She flails her mittens at his ears and chortles, “Giddyap.” Once he took a tumble and she fell head first into the snow, feet sticking up like flags. He’d righted her, but the snow had been too deep for damage, and all Jane said, when he’d finished drying her and swung her back onto his shoulders, was: “Careful, horsey. Careful.”

  Her snowsuit chilled his neck. He had wanted to hurry back home. But the sun had been unimpeded that morning, and soon enough the liquid on his chest was sweat, not melting snow. They built a snowman instead. They built a different creature every other day. It was their way of populating the hills. She got to choose when they set out whether they’d carry oranges or carrots or potatoes from the kitchen. She selected buttons or bracelets and told him if he should or should not bring a corncob pipe. They built snowmen and snowladies and snowbabies, turn by turn. Her favorite was babies, and they built them near the Toy House, in a patch defined by tamaracks they called the nursery. Jane had been learning to count. She counted all the carrot slabs that made the babies’ eyes, and could go as high as twenty-nine but then said twenty-ten. If a baby had been ill-assembled and toppled in the night, or if the sun caused its ears to melt and fall, Jane put her hands on her hips the way that Maggie used to, and would say,“Bad girl!”

  When they build snowparents, however, they elect separate spots. He lets Jane do the choosing. She never chooses a site near the house and never puts a snowman next to a snowlady. One morning he asked her why not. She said, “Because,” and he asked, “Because why?” and she said, “Because they’re different, Ian. You don’t understand the rules.”

  The rule, he tried to tell her, is that snowmen and snowladies and snowchildren make a family, and they might as well be in one place. It saves on the telephone bills. It means if you have bad dreams in the middle of the night and you wake up calling “Mommy” or “Ian,” they’ll be around to hear. It means that though the Daddy snowman’s in some distant field, there’s family enough.

  She had been unconvinced. “It’s my rules,” Jane had answered. “I get to do the choosing in this game. You get to build. I choose.”

  “You help me building, don’t you?”

  “Mm-mn.”

  “So why can’t I help you choosing?”

  Jane had been adamant. She bent to miss a laden pine branch, but the snowfall brushed them both. “Because it isn’t fun.”

  Ian has been hoping for months to keep both Maggie and the house intact. The problem is they seem opposing problems. She wants no interfering strangers in the rooms, and his application to the National Register promised community use. He says that there are doctors who are trained and paid to help; the help she wants, she tells him, is to be left alone. When he consulted a psychologist up in Manchester, the doctor said, “Except for a formal institutionalization, Mr. Sherbrooke, there’s no way we can work with a patient who resists. And even in the former instance—which is a drastic one, at least at this juncture, and one I gather you wish to avoid—admission must be voluntary. Unless she breaks the law.”

  The doctor spoke as if by rote, as if telling an illiterate person to fill out and file applications; Ian thanked him and hung up. He remembered that his mother had a lover, once, by the name of Charley Strasser who had been associated with the William Alanson White Institute. Ian could not reach him. He reached the Vice President for Staff, and the Vice President for Staff said yes, he recollected Charley, but Charley went out on the farthest twig of the renegade branch of Sullivanian analysis—and Mr. Sherbrooke no doubt understood what happened to such people; he’s not with us now.

  So he buys books. He reads of postpartum depression that may last for years. He reads about the common and uncommon psychic side effects of menopause. Anxiety and dysfunction are “commonplace concomitants” of depression, but he cannot think about his mother in terms of commonplace concomitants. Therefore he waits in ignorance, telling himself he can handle the house. It has stood upright and solid since 1869. When the east wind brings the sound of plows, or nighttime comes with Maggie still in her nightgown, drinking coffee in the window seat; when the furnace gives out and the pipes in the laundry room freeze, and the greenhouse roof crumples in that January ice storm like tin in tin shears, Ian pits himself against the weather. He tries to be a kind of father to his young half-s
ister, trying to make up to them for all his time away.

  The nightgown Maggie wears has elastic at the wrist. She pushes back the fabric and stares at the new mark. Then gravely, as if vitality were ratified because the flesh receives impressions even on a window seat, and the pink line left by elastic might serve as a bracelet of pain (this mark is there and wasn’t there this morning and will not be there tomorrow, so I exist in time, and time was things were easy and Jane will grow up happy), she readjusts the sleeve.

  “February 4. Temperature at six o’clock, six degrees. To suppose no connection exists between the present and future character is to take away the uses of the present state. High wind, north northwest. The sense of prior history is requisite for any sense of destiny. To freeze time is to embrace stagnation. It denies progress as well as decay and weakens the hold on men of moral investment in the future. To the animal the past is blank, and so must be the future. But to the inquiring mind the present is comparatively nothing. I see within this block of ice the stilled springtime freshet, the watering hole. To suppose that the bones of a Mammoth unearthed means somewhere now a Mammoth walks, and Mastodons inhabit icy regions to the north, is too great credulity.

  “My father hated Charles Darwin. It was no personal distaste, no animus against the man but rather I think against the enforced expectation of change—not so much the fear of having been descended from a Monkey as the fear of what the Human Race will presently become. I fear it also. My child will be dead by the millennium. This girl born a century after her great-grandmother might perhaps have a grandchild surviving by then, or if longevity be afforded to her child: what strange and marvelous visions will they find familiar? Five years ago there were no more than four horseless carriages in the United States. Today they number thousands and tomorrow in the millions—shall we therefore forfeit feet?”

  A dog has been found floating in the local reservoir. The water pipes are high in lead content, and the previous fall it appeared as if lead poisoning might reach epidemic proportions. The town manager drank water from every shop on Main Street as if to prove public fears groundless. This drink-in was reported by Miles Fisk. The local paper ran a photograph of William Ellison holding an eight-ounce water glass and toasting the populace, smiling. “Hydrophiles, Unite!” the caption read.