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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  He releases his pants from his boots. “Antiques. I’m a collector.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Antiques.” Conveying somehow that the audience is over, that her attention has been long enough bestowed, Jeanne turns toward the door. “Except they’re not for sale.”

  “You go on in if you want to,” he says. “I need to stretch a little, I’ve been too many hours in that car.”

  Absurdly, till she disappears, Andrew does torso twists. The Toy House bobs and weaves; he straightens and the landscape readjusts.

  In Westport, he has a collection of quilts. He drapes them over the rafter and admires the myriad folds and pleats, the fringes shaking slightly in the updraft from the furnace or an open door. “What’s the point?” Maggie had asked—the last time she visited, with her husband still alive. “They’re useless or ought to be used.”

  “Spoken like a Sherbrooke?”

  “No. Judah would approve. Our house makes this one seem frugal, you know that. But if I don’t admire hoarding in him, why should I like it in you?”

  “Beauty,” he had pronounced. “There’s nothing wrong with hoarding it. Acquiring it. Preserving it.”

  “These quilts”—she shook her head. “They’re meant to keep things warm.”

  “All right.” He reached for the diamond-pattern above him. He pulled, and quilts cascaded. “Let’s take them upstairs and see.”

  Such plenitude in emptiness, however, has come to bother him. He feels, each time he arrives in Westport—alone or with companions—that Maggie had been right. He sees himself becoming that stock figure: the aging, wealthy man-about-town who collects. It could have been stamps or Dresden figurines or statuettes of owls; could have been quartz or Tibetan woodblocks or any kind of collectible that would attestto choice.

  “Form follows function,” Maggie joked. She ascended the steps behind him. The colored stuffs on her arm caught the sun; he turned and watched her at the window where she paused. She stood there clothed in light, bedecked with quilts, and Andrew can remember thinking: this would be what marriage to her means.

  He tells himself he’s not prepared; he should be bringing gifts. Retreating, he makes for the Toy House once more. The snow above the flagstone path is less high than the fallen snow on the surrounding ground.

  Someone starts the pianola, and it beats out “You Are My Sunshine,” tinnily. Peg Morrisey joins in the chorus. Ian counts a dozen faces that he’s seen when walking, or in the supermarket aisles, or behind the drive-up window at the bank. The villagers have gathered here like people under siege, believing that within these walls they will find heat. He excuses himself, goes upstairs. He knocks on his mother’s closed door. She calls, “Who is it?” and he answers, “Ian.”

  “All right.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “It’s not locked.”

  He opens the door. She sits alone, still in her quilted housecoat and on the edge of the bed. “I was just getting dressed,” Maggie says.

  The blinds are drawn.

  “Are you all right?”

  She makes a gesture of apology, then places her palms as if for balance on the mattress. “I have a headache. I took two Excedrin.”

  He watches her. “Where’s Jane?”

  “In her room. She’s got company.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  Now Maggie turns her hands again and moves so that the bed springs squeak. “What time is it?”

  “Three thirty.”

  “Girls,” she says. “Your visitors. She doesn’t seem to mind. Jane, I mean . . .”

  He turns on the bathroom light. One bulb in the vanity fixture has burned out. There is water on the floor. “I showered,” Maggie says.

  “Do you want me to check on her?”

  “It’s all right. I listened. Two dollars a head.” She says this with a rising inflection. “It’s worth it, don’t you think?”

  “For company?”

  “For company. I was getting dressed,” she repeats. “I only put this robe back on because I had to think.”

  He comes to stand beside her. “There’s no power down the hill.”

  “So that’s why there’s a party.” Her smile is fleeting, inward, as if she has been proved correct.

  “It’s not a party.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want me to wear?”

  There is laughter down the hall. Maggie lifts her head, suspicious. “Whatever you want,” Ian says. The laughter is high-pitched, multiple.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she says.

  “Which one was that?”

  “What do you want me to wear?”

  “The hell with it,” he says, exhaling. “I’ll go down alone.”

  Maggie stares at her hands.

  “A dress. Shoes. Anything. Something to show you can get up and dress.”

  “I can,” his mother says.

  Judah was cagey in argument, always, with opinions he’d come to before she was born. He had habits she just couldn’t break. He wore his boots to supper, over Hattie’s objections and hers, no matter how muddy or how much they reeked of manure. He bought no books but Fix-It manuals and tolerated no TV and went to concerts with her as a kind of bodyguard, watchful but not listening. She sometimes thought any kind of performance was irritating to him, a cause for suspicion: the lewd embrace of audience and ego in the stage-lit dark. He took it as a personal affront. A thing’s the thing it is, he seemed to say, not something else or more because some magazine or press agent says so: if you walk naked in the world, don’t try to prove you’re dressed. When Lady Godiva went riding, she didn’t make the populace admire her new clothes.

  The wall behind the dressing table shakes. She thinks of walls in California where she had dinner one evening and the soup bowl had its own volition, jiggling on her plate. Their host said, “San Andreas,” as if that might be an answer, as if such agitation might in the act of naming be dismissed. “It’s just the fault,” he said. “Not to worry. If it comes, it comes. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Maggie steadied the tureen. He had a white beard cut in emulation of an eastern sage. “Tomorrow you should look at it. The fault, I mean—up there in Point Reyes. Take a little walk until you find the place it cracked. Not much,” he said. “Hardly worth mentioning. Just a shift in the landscape is all, a zigzag pattern in the fence.” His table had ceased shaking. The light increased. “But think about that six-foot shift and what it does to cities. That’s why San Francisco fell and why downtown burned. That’s where the whole helter-skelter civilization will get swallowed up. In just that six-foot difference: the measure of one tall man.”

  Maggie had been skeptical. She told her own companion, later, that their host was posturing, that all his high-flown rhetoric about our six-foot final home had failed to explain why he patted her ass in the hall or pressed his knee to hers when pouring herbal tea. The earth is not a fabric where you sew a zigzag pattern, a geological fault is not some sort of metaphor for sex.

  Her own walls continue to move. She remembers a cruise she took with Ian and Sam Elliot, when Sam invited them in 1969. That year was the first she’d left Judah, and the Christmas holidays included no trip north. Sam Elliot called, saying, “I’ve got two extra tickets for a Dutch tub leaving next Monday—why don’t you come along?” His own wife and daughter at the last minute elected Zermatt. Sam was divorcing anyhow, and he preferred to send his women to the Alps than listen to their endless bickering; he was sick to death of it, he said, and cognizant that the bitch’s lawyers would jump on this trip and make him pay in spades. “But what the hell,” said Sam, “I’ll end up paying anyway—so why waste the tickets?”

  Maggie asked Ian, and Ian agreed. They made a strange threesome that winter. It was a two-week cruise; the S. S. Maasdam put in at Jamaica and Saint Thomas and Puerto Rico. On the way to Aruba, Maggie remembers, the stabilizer equalizers failed. Again they
had been eating, and by then she was accustomed to the ship’s slow tilt and rise. Yet there was nothing rhythmic in the sudden dive they took—the crash and hurtle of her cutlery, the way the chairs skidded and slipped.

  Sam fell. He picked himself up, cursing, his Cuba Libre all over his shirt. Then the ship dipped in the other direction, as if sliding down gigantic waves, and tumbled in a trough of seas gone virulent. China broke. It smashed and scattered everywhere; waiters lost their trays. “Let’s get out of here,” said Ian, and they struggled to the deck.

  The sky was blue, the air hot. Deck chairs had been upended, and the water in the pool lurched over the pool’s lip. The sea appeared calm, however, and she could not understand it till a steward said, “The equalizers. The stabilizer equalizers, madam. They’re stuck.”

  For half an hour then, while the crew worked to free the stabilizer equalizers, she clung to a guardrail and watched the world veer. Things careened about her that had possessed stability—and all this in a sea without whitecaps, with a gentle breeze. Sam Elliot explained that stabilizer equalizers worked like fins, or training wheels on a child’s bike; they roll on ball bearings, counteracting the waves’ pitch. “Imagine,” he had marveled, “what it must have been like to sail a clipper ship. Before they invented these suckers. Every minute of the trip would have been as bad as this.”

  So she imagines the earth without balance—a catamaran with two hiked prows or gyroscope about to topple as its orbit slows. Walls shake; rooms are upended; the constancy to count on is no constancy but change. The dried hydrangea in the pot retain both shape and color, yet they crumble to the touch.

  Now Maggie rallies. She has wasted too much time. She selects her clothes efficiently, as if to prove all suspicion unfounded; a cowl-necked yellow blouse, and her three-piece Kimberly knit. She sets the outfit on her bed and, returning to the table, addresses her white staring face.

  “February 19. Four p.m. I told him I was ill. I said he was welcome to soup. He said he wanted half our property in order to withdraw. I said such excess must be born of desperation, and it gave me pain to have a man however sick and drunken take the name of Sherbrooke mistakenly. He said he was not sick or drunk but well within his rights. Half the property was modest as a settlement, since my own line was provable cadet.

  “There was an eloquence about him—the usage of the term ‘cadet,’ for instance—that belied his rough demeanor. And I restrained my immediate impulse to throw the man out. Have him thrown out, I should admit, since the fever coursing through my veins would have rendered me incompetent to eject a fly. Furthermore, he made small fuss—startling no members of the household, lounging on that couch as if to the manor born. So I sat and listened while he fabricated claims—that his father, Daniel Jr., had made and lost more fortunes at a single sitting than our prudent Eastern husbandry amassed. My knowledge of poker is slight. The bizarre intruder used its terminology, however, to describe his life—in a sort of Nicomachean Ethics of the gaming table. It is for this reason principally that I doubt I dreamed his visit, since I would not even in nightmare call the dear dream of America a ‘four flush’ or ‘inside straight.’ He said he was down on his luck. He said the deck was stacked. He said he could not deal with such a bunch of cardsharps holding a dead man’s hand—two aces and two eights. He drank my tea in insatiate gulps and wolfed my four slices of bread. I gave him what money I had.

  “Perhaps indeed when young he met a man called Daniel Sherbrooke, perhaps he won those pistols on a bet. My head is light with the exertion of even these jottings. Sleep.”

  Ian continues. Jane’s door is open, and he stands for a moment in the hall. “That isn’t how to do it,” Jane is saying. “Not inside.”

  The twins respond. She is on her tricycle, turning circles in the room; she veers around the toy shelf and sees him in the door. “Amy hurt her foot,” she says. “That’s why I’m riding.”

  “Hello, Amy. Kathryn.”

  “In a accident,” says Jane.

  The twins smile, sheepish to be found with someone so much younger. Jeanne Fisk sits on the bed, upright, surrounded by stuffed rabbits. “Hello.”

  “Hello. I wondered if you’d left.”

  “The master of the house,” she says. “No. I was resting.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  She leans back and crosses her legs. She selects a teddy bear. “We thought we’d skip the guided tour. Skip out on it, anyhow.”

  “It won’t last much longer,” he says.

  “The stuffing’s coming out. Mr. Bear has popped his buttons, he’s so proud.”

  “We played Candyland,” says Jane. “And guess who came in second.”

  “Bill,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Sam.”

  “No.” She giggles. “I did.”

  “I’d never have guessed it.”

  “Ian’s teasing,” Jane confides. “He always teases.”

  “What would you call this?” Jeanne asks. She indicates the bed, its litter of stuffed animals, and the three girls intent again on Candyland. She lifts a giraffe, then makes a space for him in the circle of rabbits and pats the quilt smooth. “A harem or menagerie?”

  He sits. “A guided tour. The public one.”

  “Yes.”

  “Miles is taking notes downstairs.”

  “I know, he wants a story . . .” She smiles at the twins. Amy turns up double-red and passes the ice-cream sandwich. Kathryn turns her card and gets a single blue. She pouts, reluctant—in spite of her announced scorn for such childishness as Candyland—to be last.

  “I’ve got to go,” Ian says.

  “Here. Take this.” She hands him a seal. Its nose is red, its body black, and its eyes are orange marbles. “Something to remember me by. There’s an antiques appraiser downstairs. Go ask him what it’s worth.”

  “He seems angry.”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.”

  Jane leans forward, concentrating. She turns up the gumdrops and has to lose ground.

  “You’re very observant, Mr. Sherbrooke. I knew you’d notice, sooner or later. Men are so observant.” Jeanne addresses the three girls, “That’s what I always tell Miles.” They pay her no attention. She smiles at Ian falsely, showing her teeth, and hands him Minnie Mouse. “Now run along and play.”

  The Toy House door is locked. There is deep snow at the entrance, and a broken windowpane; snow has been drifting inside. It lies on the hooked rug like dust. There are watercolors on the walls; Andrew leans forward and looks. A St. Bernard uncovers a man in a snowbank; the dog’s tail appears to be wagging; a barrel labeled Brandy is fastened to its neck. The rescued traveler, already pink-cheeked, smiling, reaches for the flask. A second picture shows the St. Bernard at home, nursing roly-poly puppies; a third shows the dog itself eating a bone that is its ample reward. A chalk sketch titled “Mother’s Little Helper” hangs above the cast-iron cookstove; it shows a golden-headed girl with brooms and clothespins and a pail. There is a picture, also, of the girl saying her prayers. She kneels with her back to the artist, a candle in her hand and a pet duck on the floor beside her; a kitten peers out from under the sheets.

  Despite these ornaments, however, the Toy House seems abandoned. Sheaves of newspaper cover the chairs, and a drop-sheet hides the couch. The miniature cupboard is open, but the canisters are upside down and there are empty trays of D-Con on the shelves and floor. A depression in the snow beneath the roof’s perimeter indicates where snow has, melting, dropped. Andrew walks around the house three times, obliterating this line. Brown icicles fall from the eaves.

  II

  Ian had spent time onstage since he first studied the piano; he expected to stand in the spotlight and receive applause. He was not an accomplished musician, however, and the few times he played in public were as back-up bass. Then for some years he was an actor, playing bit parts at the Cleveland Playhouse and at A.C.T. in San Francisco. He could recite much of Sh
akespeare and said the song from Cymbeline had taught him everything. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,” he would pronounce. “Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

  Though his love of the theater persisted, he gave up attempting to act. He saw true talent in an actor playing Iago at the Guthrie, and understood himself to be, by contrast, third-rate. The most he’d had was presence—a kind of watchful wariness that made those around him respond. The actor who was Iago made a living, later, as a doctor in a TV serial on hospitals; then he played the DA in a serial about hard-hitting cops.

  But Ian had what Hattie used to call the gift of gab. He loved the way words edged together, the clashing jangling sounds they made. His ear was good. He could manipulate accents, speaking as a German might, or a Spaniard or Cockney or Indian out of Oxford; his inflections were precise. He had some trouble with Italian accents as distinguished from the French, but he embellished Italian jokes with gestures that worked well. All this, he knew, was just the gift of mimicry; he could imitate a barnyard also, crowing as the rooster crows or sounding very like a dog or cat or horse. He amused Jane greatly by being a cow and teaching her the goat’s distinctive bleat. His repertoire included jokes about a chicken crossing roads. The closest he had come to truth on stage was in the title role of Charlie the Chicken, wherein he was transformed; he did the same with less success in Rhinoceros and The Dog Beneath the Skin.

  Yet such transformation had its limits, finally; he was Ian Sherbrooke and not an entertainer. He would be no one’s parakeet or parrot when they came to lift the curtain from his cage.

  Once settled back in the Big House, he occupied himself in several ways. He did the shopping and cooking and spruced up the place. He enjoyed the work of restoration—simple household tasks of carpentry and maintenance. Over time the house gutters and rainspouts had filled; the north-wall paint had peeled. Judah used to deal with one exposure every year, painting first the north wall, then east, then south, then west. Ian found his father’s metal scaffolding stored in the carriage barn. Having assembled it, he scraped and primed and over two weeks painted the north wall.