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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  The second act came easily. It was a magic interlude, or meant to seem as such. In the first act the action had been plausible—a little daily round of life in one old man’s set circle. Yet language was at odds with gesture:Hattie’s chatter, Judah’s silence, the descriptive couplets and archaic rhetoric all had been extreme. Now the action went balletic while the diction became that of everyday discourse. Judah climbed down from the hayloft cursing, scaring witnesses, the barn roof had leaked and a section of prime hay had spoiled. The hay that he’d figured for feed in midwinter would prove to be bedding at best; he found six-packs of beer in the eaves.

  And now these creatures moved as they had sent him hopping when a boy. Judah, Hattie, Maggie (who would dominate the second act, whose agony was its subject as she tried to mediate between her dying husband and sister-in-law self-appointed as nurse) became real. He wrote a scene with the five senses figured forth in deprivation: the clear-sighted man going blind, the keen-nosed one who lost his sense of smell, the musician who went deaf. She who prided herself upon her sense of taste lost her taste buds utterly; she who had great tactile skill went heavy-fingered and slow. Together they comprised the senseless individual.

  This dance took place in silence while Judah spoke downstage. He had been honing an ax. He accused his wife of making it with stablehands, of getting locked in the First Congregational Church with the minister, then taking on all four members of a string quartet during intermission at their concert. He repeated this list of betrayals. It did not devalue Maggie nor make her the butt of some joke. The second time through, it was clear that Judah gave no credit to such rumors; his was a boastful litany that praised her foxy worth. There was a shaving mirror by the sink. He pulled it from its nail and studied himself, stage center, patting at his jowls the way a barber might. He muttered to himself, inaudible. His wife gained added value from her value in men’s eyes. He felt the ax-blade’s edge. He sank to his knees and said, “Love.”

  Love was not a word to trust. It was too easy, too often abused, a substitute for lust or amity or even loving-kindness. Ian had experienced these things. He had known puppy love and had made love and, when forgetful of their names, called semi-strangers “love.” Yet the word’s proper usage came hard. Maggie and Judah had known love, perhaps, and he felt untrammeled love for Jane, Because of his face and his money and a certain athletic insistence in sex, he had heard several women use the term. Once a woman chanted “I love you” with such abandon, writhing, that Ian gathered up his clothes and left. They had met at a party three hours before and would not meet again.

  Love is a passion, he wrote, a weak-kneed knowledge that the earth is tilting and the world well lost. It is a bordering, protective solitude, a hunger and invasion, a series of clichés. It manifests itself in several ways: Jeanne became the pursuer pursued. Walking past her house—on the corner of North and School Streets—he listened to her play the flute like an enchantress warming up. She was always waiting for him, always the first to arrive. She had to juggle errands and appointments and cover her tracks, while he had the whole day. He watched her with her children; the girls were six years old, she had been married for eight. They made a unity from which he knew himself excluded. They could display open affection, and such a display (Amy holding to Jeanne’s knee, her brown head buried in the bend of it, one brown eye staring out) was denied him. He imagined her house in the mornings—with the twins at their mother’s side and Miles already occupied, preoccupied, suited up for the day’s work. He listened to Jean-Pierre Rampal endlessly in the Big House music room, wearing Maggie’s patience thin and needing to replace the needle on the phonograph. Jeanne insisted he keep her secret, and the measure of insistence was how he measured distance; she would not leave her husband for the interloper, him.

  This was so clear that they rarely discussed it. She apportioned him his time like some efficient allocations clerk. The truth of all those walks, he claimed, was she had to fix it with the babysitter first. She was busy tending to her family or guests. Jeanne appeared hedged in by need; her husband needed her and the children needed her and he, Ian, was an indulgence—her private neediness administering to itself. She who made their beds wanted every other afternoon to lie out in a clearing, on the blanket of his clothes. Returning from the PTA when the weather changed again, she required the seat of the Packard, or the hayloft when it snowed.

  For seven months they did not see each other. He completed the play. Then, as if without interruption, they met and coupled again. He tracked her footsteps after rain and wanted to carve their initials on trees. Miles wrote and printed anonymous Letters to the Editor about the Big House boondoggle, and how the National Landmarks Commission wouldn’t know a landmark if it ran aground on Plymouth Rock. He wrote signed editorials that weighed the pros and cons, and—during the months that Jeanne stayed away—came down on the side of the safeguards in Section 106. Ian guessed she was an ardent partner to her husband also, that their afternoon encounters enkindled her for night. Or that she separated out devotion, as he himself had learned to separate the roles of brother, lover, son. “Like cream from milk,” he complained.

  “It’s the reason that you stand for this. You never hear me slam the dishes. Or scream.”

  “Or snore.”

  “I don’t do that.” She seemed half hurt, and he realized again how precarious was the esteem between them, how taut-stretched the tightrope they walked. “I was only thinking of an actual bed,” he said. “One whole night together. It’s a fantasy.”

  “Oh, Ian, dream it true.” Her eyes were wide, voice soft. Yet for all Jeanne’s seeming pliancy, he knew, she’d leave within five minutes of the time she’d planned to leave. She was using him, he said, like a liberated woman run amok.

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “Not using you,” Jeanne said. “Not liberated enough.”

  “Amen to that.”

  She pecked him on the cheek. She said, “If I don’t go, the children will be home before me,” and was gone. He did leg-raisers, watching the sky.

  The third act brought him home. Ian wrote the scenes with fluency, hearing how his father and his mother made their peace. They discovered this was fragile because the world went mad. Their son was killed in Laos—or so the telegram said. Judah’s first child, from his first marriage, had been killed at Anzio, and such recurrence broke him; he painted the barn door a havoc of colors and then produced a rope. He worked with an old man’s shuffling persistence, fashioning a noose and using the hayloft’s block and tackle and a ladder as scaffold; he stood on the ladder’s third rung, staring over fields that he in delirium took to be beachheads, while with jerky puppet-like gestures he urged his babies on.

  Then Maggie in her youthful guise appeared. She told him to come on in by the fire, he’d catch his death of cold. She said she needed charity, but he had none to spare. She said she needed comforting; he railed at her for the delusion that there was comfort to give. He’d lived to see his first son die, and then she came along and picked up the pieces and patched them together and made him a second son in her guileful image. He would not be beguiled. He had had enough of it; the world was bereft of all reason; it killed his second boy as it had killed his first. And what was left to live for, Judah said, was not worth having; it was by-your-leave and thank-you-ma’am and a jar of cold cream for Job’s boils.

  She pleaded with him, piteous, but he was deaf to entreaty; a hangman’s noose has thirteen knots, he said, and he was busy tying them, she needn’t hang around. Her pity turned to anger and, soon enough, a kind of scorn. She said that he was selfish, every suicide was selfish, it was grandstanding, the easy way out, it left the survivors to muddle along with their shame in the town’s eyes, and guilt. If he used that rope, she warned, he shouldn’t plan to have her cut him loose. She washed her hands of all such death-in-life.

  Judah stood irresolute. He said that she was shaming him, twisting what she
called his weakness the way she twisted everything and him around her little finger. He told her to go back inside. She would not leave. They bickered at each other as if over coffee, and how hot or strong to serve it in which cups. It was not serious. It was vaguely comical, as if Judah threatened suicide each time his will was crossed. This bickering continued while Ian walked on stage. He carried a duffel bag, limping, then sat on the duffel and unlaced his boots. They took no notice of him till he lit his corncob pipe. Maggie did not seem surprised. She threw up her hands; “Oh, you’re impossible,” she said, then turned to Ian and said they should drive to New York.

  He had not been killed, of course. The news of his death was some bureaucrat’s error, he had been wounded slightly and sent home on leave. They questioned him; he temporized. He had shot himself in the left knee. What did it matter? he asked; what mattered was he’d come back home alive. He asked about the dairy herd, naming the cows with tenderness, asking which cow had freshened and what was the milk yield and what was for supper that night. He was so hungry, Ian declared, he could eat a horse.

  Judah studied him. Maggie did not seem to mind, was kneeling beside him and stroking his hair, saying, “Baby, baby,” while he smoked. “A dishonorable discharge?” Judah asked. “You might call it that,” Iansaid. “What would you call it?” Judah asked. Ian said he’d just as soon not name its name but let sleeping dogs lie and bygones be bygones; what mattered was the prodigal come home to stay and the three of them could learn to laugh, making everything up to each other for all those years apart. “They did their best to slaughter me,” he said. “But I made it anyhow. Let’s celebrate the world.”

  Jeanne met him in the carriage barn. She wore wooden clogs that resounded, and her skirt was long, with a pink fringe. He told her how Jane that morning had given up her bottle, saying bottles were for babies, but could she keep just one for her play kitchen when she needed it? Jeanne put her fingers on his cheek and splayed them there. “Don’t worry.”

  “No.”

  “I tell myself two things.”

  “What are they?”

  “First, that I’ll get over you. Not right away, of course, but in twenty years or so. And, second, you don’t mean to hurt me.”

  “No.”

  The hand that rested on his cheek had weight; she let it drop. “I’m indecisive, Ian, is that such a crime?”

  “No. And you’re not indecisive. You want two things at once, that’s all.”

  “You too,” she said. “You too.”

  “I’m simplicity itself,” he said. “I want you to leave Miles.”

  He had not said this before. He had not planned to say it, but knew it for the truth. “That’s what I want,” he repeated.

  Her eyes were wide in the scant light. They had the largest proportion of pupil to iris, he thought, of any eyes he’d seen. “Do you mean that?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m older than you are, remember? I have two children and one husband who won’t want a divorce.”

  “Do you?”

  “That isn’t the point. It’s called desertion. If I left him, we’d all have to leave.”

  “All right.”

  “We couldn’t live here.” She raised her arm, embracing air, and indicated the barn. “Not now.”

  “I’ve left before, I can do it again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just think about it,” Ian said.

  “I think about it all the time.”

  He placed his hands on her breasts. She did not move toward him but did not move away. The barn seemed peopled suddenly with Maggie and Jane and the twins and their bags; a porter approached. The floor was a platform, the carriage a train, but Ian could not say for certain if the scene he witnessed were composed for greeting or farewell. “I think about it every day,” she said again. “Ask me what I think about, and there isn’t anything else.” The space felt vast, echoic, and he could hear mice scurry in the walls.

  Hattie entered in the final scene. She carried a whisk broom and mop. But she dropped her cleaning implements—seeing the rope at Ian’s neck, his mother in an attitude of mourning, and the block-and-tackle feeding line while Judah hauled. She advanced on her brother, fists on her hips. She scolded him for being a tease, for playing with rope as he used to with fire. If he knew what was good for him, he’d put that noose away.

  The quartet that followed took some time to write. Ian knew his play depended on the final scene, and the disjunctive modes of it had here to be combined. He sounded his various themes. It was not to be a play about a single family within a single corner of New England. It was to be—or fail in trying—a tone poem celebrating constancy, the age-old song of agelessness in youth. Therefore these legacies: this paved and fenced dominion where the wilderness was sumac, where trash trees and raspberry bushes ran wild. Therefore these legators, who thought that they could keep possession by not giving and yet gave. When Judah bent to place the noose around his, Ian’s, neck, he did so almost tenderly, as if his son were sculpture of inestimable worth. Maggie’s eyes were marbles; they rolled along the sockets of her skull.

  He wearied of this soon enough and tore up the first draft. The sonority and rhetoric was, after all, mere sound. He scored this last scene several times, conceiving of the voices as stringed instruments. He knew no one would notice and did not want them to—but wrote it that way anyhow in order to distinguish Hattie’s querulous treble from Judah’s bass. The four spoke contrapuntally; they took up a figure and phrased it, and though intonation differed the phrasing was the same. Vermont was earthly paradise, and progress the snake in the grass; Vermont was a fool’s paradise, and progress that four-lane highway; there was nothing wild enough to tame.

  Ian confronted his father. He wrote the recognition scene he had returned too late to play. They quarreled over roots. Judah said without a taproot any tree will topple in the first important wind. Ian said that’s fearful, it’s an argument for constancy that takes no note of change. Judah said the only trees worth mentioning are those that last, the almond tree, black walnut, oak; and Ian said it’s a question of what kind of growth we’re discussing. This century began before the motorcar or airplane or the Zenith Chromacolor II television set. It started when intrepid men might span in a season’s hard traveling the distance a satellite shows on the six o’clock national news. The man who hears that news while driving from the World Trade Center to his home in Katonah will girdle the globe just commuting this business year—in what way, Ian asked, should radical deracination come as such a shock?

  Big talk, big talk, said Judah, the more things change the more they stay the same. They say a baby whale’s six foot by fourteen; you want a preachment, Ian, that’s what I’ll teach you to preach. You start out big you stay that way, since those that have shall get. And them that’s not shall lose.

  Jeanne’s face in animation was a face he could not scan; it was too mobile, a quicksilver series, five women, in one that he watched. Miles went salmon fishing for a week, and Jeanne deposited the twins with her sister-in-law in Dorset, saying that an old school friend was dying in New Haven. She met Ian in Manchester Center, and they drove across New Hampshire into Maine. There was constraint between them, a taut expectancy. He drove with his hand on her knee; she covered his hand with her own. She told him that she’d first met Miles when they were both eighteen. He’d been a wonderful dancer, she said, he’d swept her off her feet at Comus; he’d been visiting New Orleans since Jeanne’s brother was his roommate, and they both flew down from Dartmouth for the ball. She remembered to this day the way he looked in evening clothes, a bouquet of white roses in his fist. It was that image she’d married, she said: his slicked-down sandy hair, his praise for Lyndon Johnson as the great conciliator, and how he wore his raincoat like a cape.

  They married five years later, when Miles was graduated from journalism school. Both of them dreamed in those first years of foreign postings for UPI or Time or The New York Times; they would l
ive in Lagos or Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong—anywhere out of this world. Jeanne pictured herself serving tea, or riding through a game preserve, or making servants happy in the scrubbed and newly painted compound back behind the house. They settled for this small-town post as if it would be temporary—bought the house and had the twins as if merely marking time.

  She didn’t mean, she said, the twins were unimportant. She’d wanted a child more than anything, she loved them more than anything. With every year and change in them she loved them all the more, her fledglings about to take wing. But Kathryn had been born with a dislocated hip. She spent the first four months in a cast, and Jeanne remembered feeding them—the one so light, the other so heavy with plaster—and feeling how she’d caged herself, was body-bound, how the tropics or the Orient were dreams she must defer.

  Miles had been helpful, of course. He was a devoted husband and father; he wanted what was best for them, insisting what he wanted most was just her satisfaction. She fell out of love with him when they were twenty-eight. It had not been fair. She stayed at home all day all week, imprisoned by a pair of Barbie-doll enthusiasts; she cooked and cleaned and dressed and washed and dealt with them continually. Yet when Miles arrived for dinner, striding through the foyer like a guest in his own house, they fled toward their father like hostages set free. He grew sideburns, then a paunch. He took long scalding showers, using all the tank’s hot water, and did not unclog the drain. She knew these things were trivial; she felt disloyal telling him that was how love died. Love faded like the last light of the sunset on Kowloon she would never see except in travel posters; it disappeared like panthers from the edges of a water hole where some other someone’s husband advanced in order to take photographs. It scattered and grew separate like a pair of growing twins.

  They reached Mount Desert Island in the dark. They registered as man and wife, then walked along the harbor streets until they found a restaurant. They entered and ordered and ate. The lobsters were ready for molting; he told her how he’d watched them molt and how, with their shells shucked, they were lighter than the water and would rise. “That’s when they make the best eating,” Ian said. “For fish, at any rate. And it’s the same with soft-shelled crabs; you catch them while they shed.”