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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  Mexican bark paintings hang in the bathroom: bright riotous assemblies of women waving gourds, of cats entwined with birds and men on burros holding guitars. Red dogs gnaw yellow bones and blue parrots watch from vines that establish the border. Everything is drawn in profile, and the primary colors are bright. They come from bins in curio shops. She had purchased ten of these mementos, she remembers, for whatever five dollars had been worth in pesos in 1948.

  It had been nighttime—so hot the long-bladed fans above her seemed to stir the air, not cooling it, like a spoon in tea. In the near distance a radio blared; bullfrogs and cicadas chorused out beyond the plaza; cars made a paseo, backfiring, by the water. She ate turtle steak and drank quantities of rum: her final day in Isla de Mujeres. Something of that seaside languor haunts her still this morning when she studies the bark paintings where they hang above the tub. Life was easy, sweet, and short: a cigarette, a dance, a hammock for the night. She had been the beautiful “gringa,” and a pilot in Mexico City flew her down to Merida, then Isla, for what he called the payment of her company, no string attached. She had been his single passenger; the plane delivered mail.

  Did she know, he asked her, that “gringo” comes from the Spanish-American War? When Teddy Roosevelt’s army went through, he said, singing “Green Grow the Rashes O!” the natives could not understand and thought they sang, “Greengo the Rashes, ho.” Maggie had not known that, and she told him so. “I remember everything,” he said—she struggles for the pilot’s name: Jorge?—“about your presidents. Jefferson, Madison, Harrison, Taft. Zachary Taylor, even. Martin Van Buren was the number eight. Millard Fillmore, what sort of name is Millard for a man? Is it instead a duck?”

  Maggie raises the blinds. Her window is opaque. Jorge had sported a moustache and looked, she told him, just like Howard Hughes. “You know him?” Jorge asked. “Is my hero,” the pilot said, preening. “Is better than your Lindbergh. Lucky Lindy. Wiley Post.”

  Life had been so easy once: she repeats this to herself. Why now is it an act of will to stand, to dress, to keep from crying; what keeps her from a winter’s flight to Isla de Mujeres this year? Hotels, she’s heard, are everywhere along the beach; she could phone for a brochure. Why should the susurrus of voices beneath her be more threatening than jungle sounds; why, if she took that stranger on, should she close her door to neighbors? There were leopards in the wilderness just beyond the plaza, Jorge said; there were reasons to carry a gun. He slapped his hip with nonchalance so that she might admire his holster; it was studded with turquoise and tin. Where had all her gay vivacity been buried, in which cranny of the house?

  “February 18. Slept late and felt unwell. Temperature at eight o’clock reading twenty-one degrees. Wind southerly. Four weeks more to wait until delivery. If we have a son and heir the question will present itself: how best to educate him? What precepts to instill and which to let lie fallow? Nature versus nurture. In this land of opportunity—for still I so account it, notwithstanding recent turmoil and the fear of future such: alarums and excursions on the field of liberty, so that man becomes a slave who does not recognize his bonds, in Satan’s thrall nowhere so much as in our refusal to recognize Satan (whose greatest stratagem is invisibility and who delights in our belief that he has been dismissed, this blithe modern dream that all evil is done)—Judah will have opportunity to choose. I’ll carry him with me pickaback as soon as he’s able to sit. He will be higher than my head by the height of his own head. Then turn by turn, as has been the case for fathers immemorial, I shall exact the tribute Aeneas gave Anchises. Could use a hoist today. Cigar too loosely packed. Tastes bitter, draws like weed. Who imitates the Aeneid fails to properly to imitate Virgil. A strange and troubling visitor this morning. I must conserve my strength.”

  The doorbell rings. The Fisks appear. Miles has a ten-dollar bill in his hand. “Two will get you ten,” he says. “There’s four of us. That’s eight dollars we owe.” Jeanne stands rigid next to him, wearing a beige parka; her daughters’ parkas are pink. “They canceled school,” Miles says. “A little bitty blizzard and they cancel the whole damn day. Well, as it happens, Ian, I was home for lunch, and I’ve been meaning to do a story on this place—so I said to Jeanne here, come on, what with Amy’s broken ankle skiing’s out.”

  Amy offers him her ankle for inspection. She pulls up the snow-covered cuff of her jeans, and advances a signed cast. “I busted it,” she says. “The metacarpals, too.”

  Jeanne’s face is red from what might have been the wind. She unzips her parka, stuffs her gloves in bulbous pockets, and, in a single gesture, shakes her black hair free. “We don’t want to trouble you. This is the right time, isn’t it?”

  “No trouble,” Ian says. He indicates the others. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  The twins are lean. They have their mother’s dark intensity, and their father’s features. Their eyes are large, their cheeks bright pink; snow melts on their berets. They too unzip their parkas and are wearing the same sweaters—turtlenecks from Scandinavia, with white chalets. Their names have been embroidered: “Kathryn” and “Amy” in red.

  “Just go ahead,” Miles says. His voice echoes in the hall. “We’ll tag along.” He nods at the two spinsters, recognizing them. “You can catch us up to what we’ve missed some other time. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Mr. Fisk,” says Lucy. “Am I right?”

  He nods. “And this is my wife, Jeanne. This here is Kathryn. Amy.”

  “Elvirah Hayes,” Elvirah says. She titters, tentative. “All present and accounted for. We’re quite a party, I must say.”

  “Your mother around?” asks Miles.

  Jeanne has not moved. Unblinkingly, she watches her husband, then gives a small shrugging lift of her shoulders. “It’s hot in here,” she says. “Could we take off our coats?”

  Ian indicates the cloakroom. Miles admires the brass hooks. He fingers the miniature deer heads, their antlers extended for coats. “That’s what counts, I tell you. Detailing. Carpentry. It’s attention to detail that tells you what’s what.”

  He turns to Ian now and claps him on the back. The blow is hard, unnatural. “That’s what I admire, friend. You look around you long enough, you get to see what’s what. A person gets to notice things he just hasn’t noticed before. Those silver-plated hinges. These hooks, for instance. Deer heads, horns. Terrific.” He raises Ian’s arm, as if proclaiming a new champion. “I bet our Mr. Sherbrooke here screwed them in himself.”

  Judah had mistrusted prophecy. He said fortune-tellers told him nothing that he hadn’t known before, and palmists just tickled his palm. He told Maggie he trusted prediction—the way the rain would likely follow when the wind came north-northeast, or what the groundhog’s shadow meant that day in February and when geese traveled south. These were signs and portents, and he accepted them. When he first heard of the Manhattan Project, for instance, he’d predicted the world would explode. There were sufficient learned fools to blow the earth apart. It was only a question of time, said Judah, and not a long time either, and the portent would come to fruition and be a prophecy fulfilled.

  Yet prophecy was not the same as omens; he put no stock in omens and walked under ladders to prove it. Black cats could cross his path forever and he’d notice but not mind. You see yourself, he said, better in mirrors than crystal balls—providing you learn to look straight. It was like the law of averages and the law of probability. He, Judah, never had a car crash in his life. He’d fallen off horses often enough, and tractors, and broken his leg and collarbone falling in the barn. So every time he went out driving, the law of averages was for him and the law of probability against. He’d explained it to her once.

  “Let’s say you take a quarter,” Judah said, “and flip it.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, odds are fifty-fifty it’s going to come up heads.”

  “Or tails.”

  “Mm-mn. It’s always fifty-fifty and nothing changes that.”


  “What if the coin’s not balanced? What if you throw it up sideways or don’t flip your wrist?”

  “The law of probability,” he explained, “is always fifty-fifty when the odds are one to one. Now let’s take averages instead. Let’s say for some strange reason you’ve spent the night flipping quarters. And you’ve thrown ten thousand times and it’s always turned up heads.”

  “Five thousand should have been tails,” Maggie said.

  “Correct. And the odds are good you’ll start a run on tails—bet on it. You’ve been batting a thousand but you ought to bat five hundred. So you’re likely to start flipping tails.”

  “Sounds likely.” Maggie smiled at him. He was proud of his analogy, intent.

  “So you’d figure, see, the next thousand or two thousand tosses would mostly turn up tails.”

  “I see.” She had tried to understand why he loved arithmetic and so enjoyed accounting and was meticulous keeping the books.

  “But you couldn’t bet it that way because the odds on every toss are still just fifty-fifty. That’s the whole problem with doubling. That’s why it’s difficult just to play odds. And you see why driving gets more dangerous the same time it gets less.”

  She’d known he was half joking. She knew he’d left out some variables, but Maggie didn’t know which. He’d flipped his car keys in the air, then caught them and opened the passenger door. “Get in,” he’d said. “Let’s go.”

  Ian shows them through the house. Miles subsides. After his first outburst he has little left to say; he follows nodding, smiling, scratching at his hairline with a hand festooned with rings. The twins are inattentive, whereas Jeanne inspects each item with slow care. The white-haired stranger coughs. He looks about him hawking, swallowing. “Name’s Kerr,” he says, “Jamie Kerr. You won’t remember me.” To this gathering of visitors, Ian delivers his speech. He praises the glazing in the French doors, the downstairs fenestration, points to the Vermont marble in the fireplace, the Persian carpets his father called rugs. He makes glancing reference to the girth of Peacock’s wife, at least as evidenced in the portraits and the dressing gown ballooning on the dressmaker’s dummy upstairs.

  Amy favors her foot. “I’ve got snow in my cast,” she announces. “It’s melted. The plaster feels all squooshy.”

  “Mommy, she’s complaining.” Kathryn hops up and down.

  “If you knew how much it hurts . . .”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t!”

  “I do.”

  “She doesn’t, does she, Mommy?”

  Kathryn does a ballet turn to prove her own agility. “You tell me all the time. You never quit complaining.”

  “I wish you knew how much it hurts. I wish it was your ankle . . .”

  “Stop it. Both of you,” Jeanne says.

  Ian indicates the cupola. It soars two floors above them, its stained glass snuffed by snow. The doorbell rings. He excuses himself; he half expects Andrew Kincannon. Instead a group of neighbors enter, stamping, blowing on their hands. They make a relieved commotion. Advancing singly or in pairs, they ignore the goldfish bowl with its few dollar bills. He greets them in the entrance hall. They tell him, “Power’s out . . .”

  The snow seems a white wall outside; it travels laterally. Wind causes it to rise. Past the columns of the porch it is as if snow gathers, advancing, and they watch from the trough of a wave. “You’ve got ’lectricity,” says Samuel Coffin. “Heat.”

  “The whole hill’s out,” says Helen Coffin. “Since early morning. Seven o’clock.”

  “Mm-mn.” Peg Morrisey smiles at him, toothless. “We were talking, Helen and I, and she swears she’s seen the lights on here, and we take a look from the upstairs window and sure enough it’s Thursday, you’re open anyhow, so we thought we’d come and make that visit we’ve been promising. But mostly if you didn’t mind, just sit and wait it out.” She coughs. “I’ve got this winter flu. Can’t seem to shake it, the weather’s not helping . . .”

  Miles returns. “Of course,” he says. “You’re welcome. Public invited . . .”

  “They’ll fix it,” says Elvirah. “By nightfall, anyway.”

  “A pipe don’t take too long to freeze,” says Coffin. He turns to Miles. They are adversaries. “I was you I’d write a article about it. Folks thinking they can get away without ’lectricity full-time. But not if they’ve got running water in the house.”

  Miles pats his pockets. “Matches?”

  “Here.” Coffin owns the Furniture Shoppe on the corner of Willowbrook Drive. “Delusion,” he pronounces. He is on the proposed Mall’s planning board; his shop is in the center of the present cloverleaf. “One don’t exclude the other, it’s all part and parcel, you see. Like the way a farmer nowadays needs gas. For his tractor, his combine, every damn machine. Petroleum derivatives.” Samuel sighs, disgusted. “You think Mobil Oil or Texaco or Exxon give one damn about America?”

  “The multinationals,” Miles offers. He tamps his pipe.

  “Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Esso that turned itself into Exxon.” Coffin squares his shoulders. “Rockefeller money, all of it. It’s shameful. What in hell did we fight that war for, anyhow, so they can kick the dollar around? The German mark. Go begging to the Russians so’s they condescend to buy our wheat?”

  “The Japanese . . .”

  Ian wonders if he can ask Maggie for help. There are more arrivals, bulking in the doorway. He waves them in.

  “So you need a blowtorch just to keep the pipes from freezing. So you lose your whole damn stock to chemicals. Then some outfit comes along and offers to pay damages. Damages.” He prods at Ian with his index finger, fiercely. “What kind of compensation is damages and court costs when you’re dead? When some farmer gets to bulldoze a whole herd of dairy cows used to be making good milk?”

  The hallway lights flare. The furnace rumbles, firing, and the lights go dim.

  “Water too,” says Lucy Gregory. “It isn’t drinkable. It’s like we lived in Mexico or some such place.”

  “Iceland more likely,” says Sam. “You got to boil it twenty minutes just to wash your hands . . .”

  “February 19. Temperature at six o’clock, twenty-seven degrees. No wind. Ache in throat and stiffness in joints, but less. Peculiar encounter yesterday, and this morning with my fever done it seems almost like something I might have imagined, a dream. O lente, lente currite noctis equi.

  “Let me reconstruct it. Peacock Sherbrooke had a son, Daniel Jr., who disappeared in San Francisco thirty years ago. Unlike his sister, Anne-Maria, he left no trace behind—sending no letters or Christmas gifts to those who stayed in Vermont. His parting was not amicable, apparently. Peacock enjoined the whole clan to return on his last journey, and the profligate demurred. He had business in the brothels and at the gaming tables; he had credit in the bars. How much of this was true I can only surmise; my father must have felt abandoned in this house. But if so he never spoke of it—nor of the other two sisters who died of pleurisy. So father alone survived of all who journeyed east with Peacock, coming home to this new domicile. And he alone had issue, and this is the line of descent.

  “Or thus I had assumed till yesterday. It is now an arguable question, according to my visitor—who claims to be the son of Daniel Sherbrooke Jr., via an octoroon mistress later become Daniel’s wife. Who came here for the dual purpose of reverence for his paternal homestead, as he called it, and the not-so-pious but keener purpose of extortion. He called it remedy. His frame was thin, complexion dark, and his eyes had the glitt’ring intensity of madmen convinced they are sane. He showed a pair of pistols—unloaded, I am glad to say—with mother-of-pearl inlay on the handles, and the letters D and S. He said these were his legacy, together with one diamond stickpin long since exchanged for gin (this latter conclusion was mine, since it took no nose to notice what was reeking from his mouth). He said his mother passed away in rags on the rain-soaked California docks, and though she never breathed one word
of bitterness at bitter usage, he himself was not so saintly or without a sense of justice and recourse. We were cousins, he said, and equal under the eye of God and the American Constitution, and it offended him that there should be inequity so grievous between blood-kin. He sat at his ease on the couch. He rearranged the cushions. His mother had had skin to match the color of her reputation, but an unspotted purity of countenance to those who knew her well.”

  This time Andrew parks by the carriage barn; his is the only car. His tire tracks are deep; snow reaches the base of the door. There are many footprints on the driveway, however; he tucks his pants into his boots. Split wood has been stacked to his left. Exhaling, he watches his breath.

  A woman appears on the porch. He approaches. She is dark and slight, not Maggie; she raises her hand with a stranger’s politeness and asks, “Cold enough for you?”

  He nods. “But at least the snowfall’s stopped.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Andrew Kincannon.”

  “Jeanne Fisk.”

  He climbs the stairs and stands at her level one full step down from the porch. Her black hair is thick and her eyes are large; the look is, he tells himself, Hepburn—Audrey and Katharine both. “The world’s inside,” she says.

  “A party?”

  “More or less.” The woman shrugs. “It’s Ali Baba time. Open Sesame.”

  He hears laughter in the hall. “Not your kind of party, I take it.”

  “I needed some air. Do we know each other?”

  “No. Pleased to meet you; I’m not from these parts.”

  “My family’s inside,” she says, as if her presence does require explanation. “What brings you here?”