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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  But forever was five years. Six months later he was dead, and six months later Ian came back, and six months thereafter, more or less, Hattie left the Big House and threw herself into the pond. The circle was complete. Then the hired man did burn the hay and burn the barn and burn himself, though drunk and not intending to, not conscious of the carousel and how his action finished what her own return began.

  Maggie watches herself in the window. It is deep dark outside, and the light behind her renders the pane a dark mirror; she sticks out her tongue. The women of the house, it seems, are those who leave, whereas the men remain. She buckles the first two bags. Forever is five years, she thinks; there’s nothing but death that endures. And short of such finality all action is irresolute: Judah failed to burn the hay, Boudreau survived his burns. Ian has gutted the honeymoon house—the Greek Revival shell on the edge of their land he’d planned to renovate. But soon enough he left it and returned, his father’s son, to where they both began. And now that she, Maggie, is leaving, he will feel free to marry and start the Sherbrooke line again. She wishes her older child well. She tells Ian good-bye. She’d thought that four years previous she’d said good-bye to Andrew, but he’s drinking in their daughter’s presence and about to eat truite almandine.

  Jane, plain Jane, Calamity Jane, Jane Jane come in from the rain—Maggie rests her forehead on the glass. It is cold. She has wanted to jump. Often in the months gone past she’d thought such pain could not be borne, need not be borne, and breathing was too much to ask. Hattie had quit; she could too. There’s nothing in the pure plain fact of continuity to praise. Death lasts beyond all lastingness, so why put pancake makeup on the age lines in her neck?

  Jane is the answer, of course. She is the single reason, and it suffices. Maggie cannot jump—cannot open the window even for fear of the sweet whiff of freedom in jumping. She tries. She sits on the bed’s edge and writes, using her yellow notepad and the toilet case as surface, using a ball-point pen. “Darling,” she writes. “I don’t expect you to understand it now, but maybe later on you’ll understand. Keep this letter, please. It will tell you sometime what you’ll want to know—I loved you, love you, will continue loving you until there’s no life left. My death does not concern you. It should be set apart. It mustn’t worry you. It . . .”

  Maggie stops. She is not serious. She tries this letter on for size like an ill-fitting dress; its lines are not her lines. She takes a second tack. “The only thing that frightens me is that you’ll feel responsible—not now, I mean, not now when Ian and Andrew will take care of you. I’ve gone on a trip, they will say. Remember when we gave you goldfish for your birthday? And you woke up the next morning saying you were just so lucky that the goldfish could be pets? Well, they’d died that night—it happens to fish often on their way from Mammoth Mart. I tiptoed in that night to see how you were doing, and they’d floated to the top. We flushed them down the toilet, Ian and I. But you wouldn’t take no for an answer. I had to lie to you—it’s the first time, maybe the only time I can remember doing that—and pretended they’d gone for a swim. They were fish that belonged in the river, but they’d surely be right back. You went back to sleep, it didn’t seem to bother you. It bothered me. It would bother me if Ian or your father says that I’ve gone on a trip.”

  She takes a second sheet. Her handwriting is clear. “You never asked about Judah, so I didn’t have to lie. You never knew him so it wasn’t a loss, really, and Ian has been wonderful and Andrew will be wonderful and everything will work out fine. If you don’t feel responsible. Going back to New York means beginning again, and I’m not sure I can manage it. But you must manage it, my darling.”

  Maggie stands. She folds the sheets, then tears them twice and lets the letter drop. She turns off the light and goes out.

  Andrew is discussing the work week in Manhattan, and how his junior partners all are workaholics. “Fifty hours a week by Thursday,” Andrew tells Ian. “They log ninety hours by Sunday, and what they do for relaxation is, you know, jogging. Five miles around the park for lunch, then back to the desk. It’s crazy, it’s no good. What I do is shed load. That’s what I advise them—you’re no good after ten o’clock, so why take the office home with you? Wrecks your home life if you’ve got one, wrecks your health, wrecks your digestion sooner or later.” Andrew wags his index finger, admonitory. “The more we work, the less we produce.”

  She watches him debone his trout. Perhaps he too is haunted by the ghosts that once ate supper here and held such opinions; he might cite Judah’s attitudes in order to impress the son and wife.

  “Don’t fence me out,” says Ian. “I agree. It used to be the other way around.”

  “Used to be,” says Maggie. “The emptiest phrase in the language. It’s worse than might have been.” She shakes her head, then pats her lips and drinks. “Used to be that there was smallpox here. And people died at fifty if they lived that long. And what we’re eating now would feed a family of twelve. And this was virgin land.”

  “All right,” says Ian. “I was talking about limitation. Fences.”

  “Why? Because you used to be so dead set against them? You open this house to the public because you hate Route Seven?”

  “Don’t shout,” Jane says.

  “We’re not shouting, darling, we’re having a discussion.” But Maggie too can hear the anger in her voice; she takes a cigarette. It is an echo of her argument with Judah, she wants to explain to her daughter. She is preparing to withdraw, and this is how she’s done it always—breaking things, smearing the walls. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she offers. “What I mean is, Ian, it’s yours.”

  But he has turned to Andrew, as if they are in league. They talk about load-shedding and the danger of cult sects and recession and inflation; they talk about the weather and the best road back to Manhattan, or the best road down to Westport, according to which destination Andrew picks. They discuss the advantages of four-wheel drive or front-wheel drive and what to do with cable television when it fails, and whether the Taconic or the Thruway makes more sense; she has difficulty breathing; she keeps her eyes closed. Ian calls it a national madness, there’s no gas left to speak of, and those mammoth rigs that take a gallon every yard are digging roads to nowhere every chance they get. It’s like the difference, says Andrew, between a circle and ellipsis, a rectangle and parallelogram both failing to be square; it’s like parallel lines that fail to meet but intersect in infinity; they’re, what’s the word, asymptotic?

  This is what she must return to, Maggie thinks, these are the ways of the world. Her father puts her feet on his, and she is tall enough to hold him around the waist already and bury her head in his vest, and he moves her through the room to an imagined orchestra. Her feet are on his burnished shoes, and they do the box step so she follows where he leads.

  Now once again she is without volition. She’ll go where Andrew takes her, and when. The men are staking claims. She has no claim to stake. The pair of them drink wine and water together, lifting their glasses like legs. She is the tree that they mark.

  III

  Andrew excuses himself. He finds a bathroom, enters it, and switches on the light. It is early still, not yet seven o’clock, and he feels little hunger; he is accustomed to eating at eight. The windowpane is frosted glass. He cranks it open; it resists. Outside, the blackness appears palpable, as if the line of light his window casts had texture and solidity as well as shape, as if solid geometry were indeed a factor in his life. He smiles. He has not used words like “parallelepiped” in decades; what was he trying to prove? Maggie barely listened, and Ian disagreed. So whom did he want to impress with his half-baked memories of asymptotes and tetrahedrons and collapsing circles where the foci fuse?

  Maggie had a second son, she told him once, who died in infancy. He remembers how her face went loose when telling him, as if the lips and nose and eyes were held onto the skull’s smooth plane by glue that came unstuck. She shook. Her words were clear, but her li
ps made additional motions. She wet them continually. Seth had died of crib death, and she had one remaining son who had, she said, no use for her.

  “It’s a phase,” Andrew responded. “All boys go through it. Especially in college.”

  “Did you?”

  “What? Run away from home?” He considered the best answer. “Metaphysically.”

  “Nonsense,” Maggie said. “You either leave your parents or you don’t.”

  “Well, what about your husband? You leave him, but you don’t.”

  “He’s not my parents.”

  “I don’t have a son,” Andrew said, “But I’ve been one. Right?”

  “Right.”

  He remembers wondering why she should oppose him so—why her self-abasing confession turned so rapidly to scorn. “Listen,” Andrew said. “You’re inventing trouble for yourself. That’s what’s wrong with you. You imagine that you ought to be upset about him.”

  “Ian,” Maggie said. “It’s his name.”

  “About Ian. Then you discover, if you’re honest, that you’re not upset. Right?—and that makes you upset. It’s a vicious circle.”

  Maggie extracted sunglasses from her handbag. She found a Kleenex, blew on each lens carefully, and wiped.

  “The trouble with you . . .”—Andrew pursued his advantage—“it’s interesting. It’s what makes an artist. Very many of my clients seem to share this trait: you’ve got no superego. Or a weak one—you’re all ego, Maggie, no wonder the kid took a trip.”

  She tested the glasses. “Smudged,” she announced. She took them off, then folded them again. “You’ve been marvelously helpful, Andrew. Thanks.”

  “I mean it . . .”

  “Apparently.”

  “All ego and no superego,” he repeated.

  “Marvelous. It explains just everything. Why Seth died in his sleep, for instance, and I never see my son.”

  “I never said . . .”

  “Nonsense. I know, that was my word.” Maggie stood. “And thank you so much for your help.”

  The bathroom window is ajar; he breathes the winter air. The snow has ceased. He has a sudden image of himself as Jane’s sweater-clad white-headed father, bending over her exercise book in the lamplight that helps him to read. He assists her with her algebra; he solves the problem that her sixth-grade teacher sets. In the room they occupy, there’s a whiff of woodsmoke; he tells her Michelangelo could draw a freehand circle as accurate as a compass-drawn circle. He did it, people say, with either hand.

  “Who’s Michelangelo?” she asks. Andrew tells her about Michelangelo—enough to pique her interest, but not enough to keep her from the problem of apples and oranges that ten minutes ago had her stumped. He urinates. The bathroom he had used this morning feels a world away. He could slip out the back door and drive back to Westport or Manhattan, and none of this need have occurred. Eloise would welcome his return. They had parted peevishly before, and her gratitude when greeting him had been well worth the argument. She would ask him to forgive her, and he’d ask her to forgive him, and she’d say—not understanding or with the barest glimmer of suspicion as to where he’d been and what acquired, what relinquished in the interval, the wife and child he’d never had, then had, then left—she understood. She shouldn’t have mentioned the drapes.

  Andrew washes his face. There is no soap in the soap dish, and the towels are wet. He thinks “paternal instinct,” and wonders, is he supposed to have paternal instinct with no practice of paternity? He likes Jane well enough. She’s pretty and perky and quick. She’s quietly attentive, also, as if she hears why people talk as well as what they say. But he’d be lying if he said that he felt shivers up his spine when introduced to his daughter, or that her every word engaged him and her glance had been instructive. He would have failed, no doubt, to select her from a playground or room full of children; she would be a stranger for months.

  Such an instinct must be earned, he thinks; the strangeness dissipates. It takes place over time. It has to do with bottles and wailing importunity become some sort of greeting, with pride and delight at the first word or tooth. He has shared none of this. He never wanted to. He had averted his eyes from the peephole at the Toy House and lived the intervening years without regret. He runs his tongue over his teeth. He has many faults, but one of them is not the lust for repetition. Having embraced avoidance, he need not do so again.

  He opens the door. Jane is there. For an instant they assess each other. “I ate already,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “When it was my suppertime. I don’t like fish.”

  “Does Ian cook often?”

  She nods.

  “Does your mommy cook also?”

  “Froot Loops. She used to,” says Jane.

  “Or do you go to restaurants? With your mommy and Ian?”

  “Only Ian.”

  Andrew gets to his knees. He is conscious of the gesture, the stiffness in his joints, the patterned oak beneath him, and her height now consonant with his. “Would you like to take a trip? And visit many restaurants?”

  She watches him. “With who?”

  “Me. And your mommy.”

  “And my brother?”

  “In New York City,” Andrew says, “there are many restaurants. Friendly’s, for example. McDonald’s. And so many others you’d think you could burst.”

  “He doesn’t want to.”

  The floor is cold. Andrew’s knees hurt. He stands again. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Ian.”

  “How do we know? Did you ask?”

  “It’s emeralds,” Jane lifts her right hand to show him. “This ring.”

  “He doesn’t have to come, you know. It’s not that far away. Or he could join us later.”

  “Mm-mn.”

  “He’s been to New York City. So now it’s your turn,” Andrew says. “We’d better go back for dessert.”

  She takes his hand, returning, as if to tell him that he’s won her momentary fealty. Maggie’s face seems smooth in the candlelight; the lines in her neck are erased. Jane sits in the chair next to his. He counts the chairs; this table could seat twelve.

  Sitting, he is weary; he moves his toes in his shoes. Last night Eloise declared (putting on her coat in the foyer, jabbing at the elevator button with her vermilion index fingernail) he should get in touch with his feelings. He mouths the phrase, attempting to get back in touch. But he cannot touch feelings; he can only feel, touching, and he finds that touching enough. He makes a little ditty of the idiotic syllogism. A fashionable distaste for fashion, he tells himself, the kind of person who watches TV in order to disparage it—that’s who I am. He had attended a wedding that week where the rabbi instructed the couple to “Tickle. Touch. Unzip.” Andrew had controlled himself. It was his client’s daughter who stood there nodding solemnly, promising in silk and lace to tickle and unzip. The rabbi had been plump, with turquoise chains around his neck and a Vandyke beard. “A solemn marriage contract it isn’t,” her father had said later. They clinked glasses. “Four daughters I’ve got, Andy. But just one kaddish zoger. There.” He pointed to a boy in a white jacket, with a red carnation and a pompadour. “That’s the little pisher. My herzkind. About the daughters, Andy, I’m exactly in touch with my feelings.” He clapped his hand upon his heart and pulled a wallet from the tuxedo’s inside pocket. “Talk about a soft touch, Andy, it’s five thousand dollars a feel.”

  “Do you remember?” Ian asks, “when they had actual trains here?” He turns to Maggie. “When they whistled at the house?”

  “No. They’d stopped doing that.”

  “According to his daybook,” Ian says, “Joseph set his watch by the train whistle. He shot his shotgun off at them if they were late.”

  “Well, not exactly at them,” Maggie says. “Up in the air.”

  Andrew rubs the tabletop. He makes conversation with Ian, as once he had tried to with Judah. He asks about the crops and cash value of hay these years, and what the la
nd is good for other than dairying. “Developers,” says Ian. “Bowling alleys on the bottomland because it’s flat.”

  “You don’t mean that,” says Maggie.

  “Or parking lots, maybe. You see”—Ian reaches for the pitcher of water—“to those who live their life on a farm, it isn’t so romantic. It’s a losing proposition, and you get burned in the bargain. You wake up one morning and find yourself dead; you find out the cows have mastitis and the feed’s run out and prices have been raised for everything but milk. You go downtown to wrangle with the Agway man, and while you’re gone the vet shoots the herd and says it’s for taxpayers’ safety. Shit.” He drinks. “It’s nothing personal, you understand; my father knew enough to get out from under, at least. I’m talking about the whole region. Ski slopes. Picturesque fishing villages. The best New England ever does is almost as good as it used to.”

  “What keeps you here?” Andrew asks.

  “The chamber of commerce somewhere asked a caterer to reproduce the first Thanksgiving feast.” Ian has grown voluble; he crosses his fork and his knife. It is as if he wishes to accumulate conversation, to hoard it for the silence soon to come. “At today’s prices,” he says, “and with no profit margin, the estimate was one hundred fifty dollars a head. They screamed at him, they said he’s crazy. But he told the city fathers that he’d cut it close. He said you’ve got to figure lobsters, goose, and turkey—all the trimmings; applejack brandy, wine. They ate themselves silly, those Pilgrims.”