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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  The flat fact was he had no need to work. There was in any case no employment in town, or none that suited him. He rented out the land. After the hay barn burned down, and with Boudreau’s departure, Ian saw no point in managing the farm himself. He yielded the task with relief. A family three miles away came to the acreage daily on tractors, and he saw them in the distance plowing, seeding, harvesting; they waved and were respectful. He checked the fence lines every so often and discussed with a show of interest which field to plant with what.

  Then Alan Whitely approached. As president of the local drama club, he made a proposition. Since the carriage barn was not in use, and since they required a stage, would Ian consent to let them use it for rehearsals? They wanted to mount an open-air production of Desire Under the Elms, with the inside of the carriage barn as the inside of the house. They might build a proscenium, but it could be dismantled later; they would repair the flooring and rent all the necessary chairs.

  Jeanne Fisk was the group’s treasurer. She called one evening in order to discuss the financial arrangements: whether he required guarantees and what sort of contract to draw up. He said he needed no guarantee: it was a goodwill gesture in accordance with his plan to make the Big House available for community use. He consulted with Samson Finney, however, and called Jeanne back to say they would be grateful for a letter of intent. She said they could discuss the details over lunch; she wondered, also, if he might be interested in becoming a participating member of the group. He said he’d finished acting, and she said, “Nonsense, it’s still in your blood—a drug. I know that much.”

  “Why?”

  “Old actors never die,” she said. “And young ones most certainly don’t.”

  “They fade away, though. It’s called ‘Honorary Withdrawal.’ They turn in their Equity cards.”

  “We’re not a professional company. We do it just for fun.”

  Ian played a parlor game. Take any roomful of strangers and attempt to pair them off: does like attract like, or do opposites attract? Is that blonde in the corner, inclining to fat, the wife of that man with brown sideburns wearing a vest, or will she remain with the host? He had met Jeanne Fisk six months before, at dinner at the Conovers’. Jeanne seemed dissatisfied not so much with Miles or her position in the world as with the whole enterprise of satisfaction; she confided to him that a supper party like this one made her want to smoke. She mimed the process of inhaling and, looking at him, held her breath. Then she released the air and shut her eyes and wet her lips.

  At first he’d been the town’s prize catch—or so Hattie assured him and so it appeared. Jeanne called to offer picnics and chamber-music soirees. One day he met her in the checkout line at Morrisey’s, in the five o’clock half-light. It had been raining hard.

  “You never visit,” she reproached him. “How many times do we have to invite you?”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  Jeanne pointed to the shallots that Morrisey was weighing. “I can cook. You promised you’d come by for lunch.”

  In profile her face had a difficult beauty: dark, strained. Her hip grazed his. Later when he tried to pinpoint how their banter shifted, how that casual encounter came to seem shot through with meaning, it had to do with just such tactile contact. She had reached across him, needlessly, for bread. “Do come to visit,” Jeanne said. Departing, she rested her hand on his arm, as if to seek help with the door or seal a bargain struck.

  At lunch, however, he repeated his refusal to act; she served him a leek quiche. The twins were at school and Miles at the office; a pair of prisms hung in her dining room window. This time by way of excuse he told her he was writing plays, an author, not an actor. She called his bluff. “How wonderful! I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Please. It would be wonderful to stage a play you wrote. We could do that, couldn’t we?” Jeanne asked.

  She wore a scarf that hid her hair; her forehead and features were smooth. Some provocation in her challenge—their courting dance in its first steps—encouraged him to answer yes; he’d show her and they’d see.

  When Jane was born, he’d planted a blue spruce. It was a family tradition, and Ian did as much for Jane as Judah did for him. It was late in the season for setting out trees, but the weather had been mild. He bought the best blue spruce in Quinlan’s Nursery. Quinlan said with luck and water and a protective casing the tree might make it, and not need to wait till spring, and in any case there’d be a guarantee. October was still fine for planting, but November might be touch and go. “You plant a hundred-dollar tree in a ten-dollar hole,” said Quinlan, “and it’s a ten-dollar tree. The way I see it. You plant a ten-dollar tree in a hundred-dollar hole, and it turns out fine. I guarantee this beauty: dig her deep.”

  He followed those instructions. He chose a sunny swatch of lawn thirty feet from the Toy House, and dug. He fertilized and soaked the spruce, then banked it with peat moss and hay; he covered it after the snow. The winter proved hard. The tree’s blue spikes lost resilience and went brown. He tended it continually, banking it with hay and dreaming that when spring arrived at last it might have proved successful. It did not. The spruce was blighted, sere; he could not coax it to life. So he went back to Quinlan’s and exercised the guarantee for a replacement. Jane was too young to notice and would anyhow not care; Maggie would have noticed but had not been in the garden. In the same spot, laboriously, Ian planted the substitute spruce, using a pickax to enlarge the hole, then dropping totems in: a silver dollar, a daguerreotype of Peacock’s face, and a penciled unsigned note to Jane that read: “I love you. Flourish.” This tree grew.

  A Greek Revival house at the property’s edge had been intended as a wedding gift for Peacock’s younger daughter. But Anne-Maria married a missionary and did not return to Vermont. Ian spent months renovating the place, sleeping in it from time to time with Sally Conover, but there too his interest waned. He had been boarding up windows when Jeanne tapped his shoulder. He turned; he had nails in his teeth.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He spat the nails into his palm. It was early April.

  “I was out walking,” Jeanne said. “And I heard this hammering . . .”

  He wiped his face with his shirt. He hooked the hammer in his work belt and replaced the nails. “Welcome,” Ian said. “You walk this way often?”

  “Not often.”

  “My house is your house,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Please . . .”

  He showed her through the empty rooms, their vacancy reproachful and the sun blocked out. He had sanded the floors but not sealed them, so they took off their shoes. She praised his carpentry, the turnings on the banister, and he said he had ten thumbs. In the upstairs east-facing bedroom, where light still shone because he had not boarded up the windows, she asked if this was where he’d planned his bed and if he needed one; she had an extra mattress. It was no use to her, she said, it only gathered dust.

  “Would you be willing to share it?” he asked.

  Her hesitation moved him. Smiling, she shut her eyes. There was a passionate demureness in the gesture. For an instant, watching her, he wondered what he’d gain and lose: if this game was worth the candle or he understood the rules.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Jeanne said, and lifted his hand to her breast. They fell on each other, then to the floor, like starvelings after food.

  Ian wrote a play for voices, a play for ventriloquist and dummy, and several play beginnings that faltered on the page. He had had, he claimed, an excellent first line. The curtain would go up and reveal three actors in a living room. They would clear their throats and fold their papers and cross and uncross their legs. No one, however, would speak. This has to continue, he said, past the point of anxiety on the audience’s part; it must provoke boredom, then rage. It must continue till the customers rise and fill the aisles. Then an actor would put down his paper, shake his head, and say: “Well. We seem to have run out of things to say
to one another.”

  He could not continue. He wrote a madman’s monologue titled “The Twenty-Fifth Clock.” This man sat in the center of a circle of clocks, each timed an hour previous to the sundial of its neighbor. By rotating on his chair coincident with the play’s action, the actor could always face the same instant and claim to have annihilated time. An Orpheus clock known as Georgi came creakingly to life. “No one cares to sing about the sordidness of loss,” it sang. “The self-deception of a backward look, and all the little bargainings of fear. I am Orpheus. I care.” This lament, however, dissolved in a cacophony of cuckoo clocks, their works sprung and wheels clogged. The actor at scene’s close was spinning counter-clockwise on his barstool in the dark.

  He wrote a play about Pygmalion and Galatea in reverse. The sculptor so embraced his craft that every woman he approached became a Muse or artifact instead; his kiss turned flesh to stone. At a retrospective of his work, which transpired in the second act, the sculptor propositioned women at the Guggenheim. They clustered to the eight-foot-high anthracite phallus by the entrance desk. Stroking it, they murmured praise that pointed out the fruitful conjunction of aesthetics and pornography. Ian tried to write about injustice—those things that sent him to the streets when an undergraduate, and kept him on the road thereafter: poverty, repression, war, disease. But there his gift of mimicry felt forced; he could not write of revolution in the accents of belief.

  He tried a play about a playwright trying to write plays; he wrote about himself as the prodigal son. He wrote a play for children, calling it King Ed and updating Oedipus; he tried an Orphic mystery with a grape-guzzling narrator that women tear apart. All these failed. He knew enough to know how poor his early efforts were, and to keep quiet about them. On his twenty-eighth birthday, however, while drinking scotch and soda with Maggie on the sleigh bed on the west-facing porch, he realized just how secretive he’d been. His mother did not know he wrote; he had not dared admit it. Whether this was shame or pride seemed unimportant somehow; he had accumulated nothing in the years away. They had been five-finger exercises; Ian clenched his fist. He studied the pattern his fingerprints made on the glass. He told her he would like to write, and she said, “Yes. Why not?”

  Already she seemed inward-facing, barely able to muster attention for Jane’s breakfast or a soiled crib sheet. Yet she had not been indifferent. Her “Why not?” acquiesced. Those family occasions where he had had to toast the guest, or write a birthday poem for his aunt, the years of magic shows or wild imagining occasioned by some steamer trunk, its lid sprung, costumes in profusion in the attic, where he was Wild Bill Hickock, Captain Marvel, then d’Artagnan in outfits worn to school—all these seemed sufficient preparation. Maggie assumed (with no lift in her eyebrow or hitch in her rocking motion) that he could do and be just what he’d care to: a Sherbrooke does not bite off more than Sherbrookes chew.

  Her “Yes. Why not?” gave him his measure; it contained no shift of emphasis, no sudden assertion of change. She would have questioned, certainly, his decision to become an engineer or to take up golf. Yet this seemed foreordained. He bought a set of notebooks and began on the following day.

  Jeanne was both his audience and critic; he met her at the Dry Goods Shoppe and helped her load the car. As a member of the Cooperative, she spent Tuesday afternoons behind the counter and stocking shelves. She had purchased beans and dried fruit and fabric and cheese; he handled the two bags.

  “You want a family,” she told him. “That’s what you really want.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. You can’t marry your own mother, so you’re after me.”

  He opened the car door, then placed the grocery bags on the floor.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “You want a family, lock, stock, and barrel; that way you’d be getting three of us for the price of one. A bargain.”

  “And in the neighborhood,” said Ian. “You’re right, it’s an advantage.”

  She fumbled for her keys.

  “I never did want to change diapers. It’s simpler this way, isn’t it?”

  She put on dark glasses, bent, and entered the car.

  “All that fuss and bother—formulas, midnight feedings. I’m doing it for Maggie’s child, so why get all involved with children of my own? Croup. Measles. Misery. Who needs it?”

  “I’m sorry. You can stop now . . .”

  “I was only getting started. School bills. Migraine. Nagging backache.”

  “I told you I’m sorry.”

  “I hear you,” he said. “If you want to back off, just back off.”

  She looked up and over her glasses’ black rim. “I have to go now.”

  “Right.”

  “Ian, I don’t want to. It’s that they’re expecting me.”

  “Mm-mn.”

  “You’re making it more difficult.”

  He did not answer, stepped away.

  “When can I see you?” she asked.

  “You’ll find me. I’ll be the one with baby powder in my buttonhole. Wearing a pink Dr. Denton’s . . .”

  Savagely she stepped on the accelerator. The car roared. She swung into traffic, not waiting. He walked along the river, past the covered bridge and sewage treatment plant. Then he broke into a run.

  His subject was Judah, he knew. He had imagined his father for years, had tried to come to grips with just such proud constriction—the way that Judah drew a magic circle around the farm, saying thus far and no farther, then raise the roofbeam high. When Alan Whitely suggested that they use the carriage barn, he saw his father there. The image was corporeal, flesh dense with blood and bone. Judah turned in greeting, holding neat’s-foot oil and rags; he had been working on the carriage rigging and the horses’ tack. He lifted his free hand, hieratic, in a compound of menace and welcome that Ian saw as clearly as when last he’d seen it in fact. The gesture was silent, however. He had to muster the right language, to have those talks with Judah that their reticence denied. Judah bent back to his task. The leather was supple; the carriage rails gleamed. Light slanting through the barn seemed palpable and thick with dust; the smell of horses hovered in the empty stalls, and the zinc washing bin and brushes and the currycombs and pails awaited use. They had not been used in ten years. He watched his father stride through the clutter, then tried to make him speak.

  This proved no easy task. His father was closemouthed, always had been, and Ian remembered no modulation; he remembered Judah muttering and then at shouting pitch. But his silence had been eloquent; it was action and example far more than speech. Some such character as Hattie could provide the background chatter as she did in Judah’s life. She could be garrulous by contrast and deliver homilies that Ian had no trouble writing: incessant, homespun-glib. She would take the mailman or the plumber as her audience, if there were no family, and no friends arrived for a lunch date or bridge. Failing any audience, Hattie would talk to herself.

  So Ian had two figures for his action. One figure spoke too little and the other spoke too much; he needed to disrupt their troubled lifelong truce. He turned their harmony to discord by introducing Maggie, though in the play he called her Jane. He filled two ledger books with notes. Early on, he found a title. He called it The Green Mantle, suggesting Edgar’s speech in Lear and signaling the fecund rot that is the slime of algae on a stock pond with poor drainage. “Tom o’ Bedlam” would eat frogs’ legs and drink from this green standing pool—his inheritance suggested also by the title as a verdant passing-on of fields if not authority. The action had a grace note therefore of renewal in collapse; it augured generations as well as spring in fall. For weeks while he began to write, he carried with him heavily the weight of such pronouncements as “Nothing comes of nothing,” or “Never, never, never, never, never,” and “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.”

  Jeanne asked him to show her the play. He told her he needed more time. It was, of course, his own absent presence he tried to imagine—his role in this drama as
other than author, and what they argued over when he was not home to listen. He saw Judah as a warrior preparing his own bier. He ringed himself with hay and cattle, sticks and leaves and logs. His armor and favorite objects and women were arrayed in order of importance so the best would be the last to burn; he scrambled up on this improvised pyre at the first-act curtain and stretched out on top. He scratched at his armpit; he sniffed. Judah looked out at the audience with a queer cunning, lighting matches, waiting as the suicide so often waits for someone to shout “Stop!”

  The next time they met he was contrite. Jeanne found him by the sugarhouse; he had been stacking wood. “I’m stuck here,” Ian said. “I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, that’s all. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  “I started it.”

  He waved a birch log at her like a peeling plump baton.

  “Escape,” she said. “That’s what you mean to me also, I suppose.” Jeanne smiled. She gave him a letter. “Is this what you’re after?” she asked. The Sage City Players were grateful for free access to the carriage barn and wanted to convey their thanks to Mrs. Margaret Sherbrooke and Mr. Ian Sherbrooke for the community spirit involved in such an offer. The production of Desire Under the Elms had had to be postponed due to the unforeseen absence of Alan Whitely. He had been offered a summer stock role in Falmouth, and therefore the company was temporarily without its president and leading man—but she, as the group’s treasurer, was confident she spoke for everyone when signing this testimonial; they hoped to take advantage of his offer at some future date.

  “Thank you,” Ian said. “Has Miles seen this?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because he wants the place shut down. The highway lobby . . .”

  “Look!” Jeanne pointed to the west. A hawk was wheeling, gliding; it plummeted. The sky was white. She shuddered, touched his arm. They stepped inside the sugarhouse. He closed the door and drew her into the sweet-smelling darkness, then down.