Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (12 page)

“People don’t just . . .”

“Judah does,” she finishes. “There’s nothing changed here, Samson. So I ask you one more time, what’s all the fuss?”

He swallows his answer since Judah approaches. She puts her index finger to her lip and kisses it, then blows him the kiss. “Why, darling,” Maggie says, and crosses to her husband. “How lovely you were well enough to eat with us. How nice you could come down.”

Finney makes excuses. He has his work to do; the bowling league started at eight. He likes the weekly routine of the league—the feel of his personalized ball and the friendly competition and the beer. Sometimes, with his second glass swallowed, he stares at his shoes on the sheen of the alley, watching the pattern his teammates make when running. The red-and-blue striped shoes tumble forward, and he thinks the laminated wood beneath him is a triumph of carpentry. This is all there is, he sometimes thinks; this is ballet, war, law, friendship, everything that counts: the rush and release and the clatter of pins. He has a one-hundred-and-sixty-three-point average for the last ten games; that’s just this side of bad, says Finney, but preening, plucking at his coat sleeve, meaning just this side of good.

Judah says don’t go just yet, let’s smoke one good cigar.

It has been simple for Maggie, a kind of acquiescence, not revolt—and that the path of least resistance happened also to be primrose is a lucky break admittedly, but not her intention or fault. It has been natural, this sitting down to supper with her husband and lawyer and sister-in-law; fortune comes full circle like a wheel.

And there were surprises. She had watched him chew, bone-weary, head to one side and mouth making preparatory motions, as a blind man might. The attentive way he paused to swallow, the effort that it clearly was for Judah to down anything who when she met him gorged on flesh—the weakness in him fortified some fierce protective tenderness she might as well call love.

“Should we talk about it?” Maggie asks.

He makes no answer.

“About how long I’m staying?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your opinion?”

“As long as you need to.”

“Which is why I want to talk about it.”

“The doctors . . .” Hattie begins, but Judah is impatient, spitting smoke.

“Doctors know shit from shinola. As long as they collect the fee it’s operation successful, patient dead. If you’re lucky you come out no worse than you went in.”

“I wanted to tell you . . .” Maggie says.

“What? What? Don’t tell me lies about doctors.”

“That I’m here,” she offers. “As long as you want me to stay.”

So the seven lean years succeeded seven fat; so she sojourned in what Hattie would call wilderness. Yet the Big House and its owner have not changed. “You are,” he said, “my only prized possession. My prizewinning entry at the fair.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “You’re sweet.”

“I’m being truthful,” he said.

“You flatter me.”

“No.”

“Yes. What a generous comparison. The best homegrown turnip.A cow.”

“My prizewinning entry,” he repeated.

“Impossible”—she spread her hands. But he was impervious, possessing her, as he had been impervious to cows. He said they’ll treat you how you treat them, and you get as good as you give. Now Sam, for instance, had no use for Ayrshires. And they know it and can use their horns; they’re mean cows, Ayrshires are, and he’s got to watch them all the time, not like with Jerseys, they’re sweet. I mean there’s more than half a ton of cow, and you don’t want it disliking you . . .

“That isn’t my point,” Maggie said.

“What is, then?” He contrived surprise. “What am I saying that’s wrong?”

“Oh, Jude,” she said.

“Tell me and I’ll fix it”—he spread his hands, palms out. His lifeline was black.

“I was trying to be serious. There’s ways and ways.”

“I’ll mend my ways,” Judah said.

So he joked and parried with her, inattentive. She never could touch him with words. He paid no heed to speech but heeded her motion and shape. She had been angry at that; it was what they called sexist now—the body’s degradation via compliment. Maggie fell back on body claims and was angry with herself and angrier with him for forcing that language upon her—language she’d learned since puberty, or since her first pink sheets. She had grown facile, using it, and fluent in her limbs’ articulation when she walked. She knew that, where she walked, men watched. They followed her with their eyes or in imagined deed and some men followed her actually. She swiveled her hips, she sometimes thought, in comic counterpoint to the way their heads would swivel—or advanced across the room in order to elicit an advance. But she’d been at it long enough and—she remembered Judah’s expression about the game of baseball—had retired undefeated, hanging up her spikes.

She could delight him, at first. She pleasured him in simple ways, but they were a complex delight. She wore no underwear, for instance, beneath her evening gown. She perfumed herself and smacked her lips when watching him approach in the hot candlelit dark. She kept her stockings and garter belt on and lay down like one of those magazine pinups, Judah told her; when he entered her, she gasped and was appreciative and wanted, she would whisper, to be his garden of earth-ly delights.

“You’ve got the house now,” Hattie says.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“May you have much joy in it. I wish you that.”

“Don’t be so serious, Hattie. Nothing’s changed.”

“That’s not how I see it,” she says.

“Why not?”

“You’re thirty years younger than I am. You can laugh.”

“I wasn’t laughing,” Maggie says.

The phone rings. Hattie goes to it. “Hello,” she answers. “Sherbrookes.”

There is silence.

“Sherbrookes,” Hattie says again. “Who is it?”

Their mother had said, “Sherbrooke residence” is for the maids to say, but you never just answer the phone with “hello.” “Hi” is a way of measuring height, and “yes” is short for “Yes, who may I say is calling, please?” So Hattie had settled on “Sherbrookes” as a way to answer, and she says it a third time.

“Hello”—her voice goes querulous. “Is anybody there?”

In the instant it takes for her to cradle the receiver, Judah divines that the caller is Ian, calling his mother in code.

“Nobody there,” Hattie says. “Just breathing.”

“Maggie’s back,” he says.

“How’s Ian?” Hattie faces Maggie. She drops her voice.

“Who?”

“Ian. Have you heard from him?”

“Yes,” Maggie says. “Last week in fact. He’s fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“You don’t have to whisper.”

She points to where the two men are puffing cigars. “I wouldn’t want Judah . . .”

“What?” Maggie says. “I’m sorry but I just can’t hear you.”

“Do you hear from him often?”

“Yes. Well,” she pauses, judicious. “Not all that often.”

“How often?”

“It’s not that he’s been too busy to call,” Maggie says. “You understand that.”

“I don’t,” Hattie tells her. “I do not.”

“Well, your brother does.”

“Don’t shout at me.”

“I wasn’t shouting.”

“You were,” Hattie tells her. “You are.”

“This is silly,” Maggie says. “We can do better than this. He doesn’t ever call me, if that’s what you’re wanting to hear.”

“I thought so,” Hattie triumphs. “He’s run out on every last one of us, I do so hope he’s well.”

Maggie believes, and tried to tell her husband this for years, that joy’s a thing to share. You spread it around. You do that with butter, he says, not land. Good fences make good neighbors. She knows what he’s saying, she says, but he doesn’t hear her when she declares the opposite, bad fences make bad neighbors; and why should he mistrust this idea of neighborliness anyhow, why isn’t everybody in the same house always, sharing everything? A goddamn hippie commune, he says, in the days they used to argue; nobody gets in my bed but the lady I put there, you hear? I hear you, Judah, Maggie says; I get the message. Loud and clear, he asks her, and she cups a hand to her head like an earphone, tilts it, saying, “Eh?”

But it isn’t always comical, Finney knows that; it’s been a bone of contention between them as long as he remembers. If pushed to it he’d say, indeed, that’s been the rock they foundered on, the bedrock of the squabble where belief enters in, saying enough’s enough. They’re peas in a pod, as he sees it, two of a kind.

“You’ll excuse us,” Judah says, not making it a question. “I want to talk with my wife.”

“Yes,” says Finney.

“Good night.”

“Night.” Released, he gathers his things.

“You can go now,” Judah says. “Hattie.”

“I’m not the one who’s tired,” she says. “You mustn’t mind me.”

“I don’t. I want to talk to this one who’s come all the way from New York City.”

“Good night then,” Harriet says.

“Good night.

“He’ll try to fool you,” she insists to the room. “He’s tireder than he lets on. I promise you that.”

“Hattie, you can leave us now.”

“I’m leaving. It isn’t so easy”—she turns to Maggie. “I sit all day in that chair. And you can’t imagine how it bothers the sciatica, how it irritates the nerve. It’s probably a pinched nerve, Ida Simmons says. But the courtesy to let me take my time going, is that too much, plain gratitude, a simple thank you . . .”

“Hattie,” Judah says, and this time is commanding. Finney takes her arm; they make their way. And as Maggie turns to follow Judah, smiling at him, Finney, with a captive’s sheepish smile who nonetheless would wash the feet of captors and dry them with her hair, the lawyer feels that Maggie wanted company not for the celebration but its mournful aftermath, not the night but day. She would cross that bridge when the bridge came; she would make the mountains come to meet her, shifting on their axis as the world continually shifts.

VII

Lately, Hattie has been seeing things. She walks into a room and the walls whir. Cats flash across the edges of her sight. Sometimes she sees birds there also, flitting, with that quick lift and shift of direction that mean they sense an obstacle, and sometimes no beast she can name. She would rather call them “cat” and “bird” than nameless changeling presences because her eyes are weak.

Tonight, however, she can name the ghost she saw. It is—she was sure of it—Seth. The Big House is not haunted, but her dead infant nephew is a presence at the windows and outside every wall. She would not voice her fear to Judah or ask if he sensed something too, but she is certain—in a way that beggars doubt—the crib death was no accident. It would not have happened to another family or in another house. It had not been vengeance so much as retribution for what they’d failed to learn. The lesson was humility; they’d scanted that. They’d thought themselves above ill luck, but all the time it had been brewing, always there in some dark corner, fermenting, heating up.

The Sherbrookes had been fingered by a finger dipped in blood. That moving finger moved across the village, Hattie knows, hovering above the roofs and chimneys, sparing firstborn sons and families that lived with due humility. But above the Big House it wavered and then pointed down, like applewood for water, or any dowser’s stick. She sees forked lightning that way, sometimes, as if it were God’s dowsing stick, eradicating what it touched in order to point to the depths.

Seth had been a candle snuffed out before its time, is what they said at the service: a brightly burning light. And she had been bereaved. She’d mourned and wailed in silence for as many months as Seth had lived—neither daring to commiserate with her sister-in-law nor comfort her brother out loud. Judah had studied gain and pride, not the difficult lessons of loss. His wife proved his equal in that.

“I’m sorry, Maggie,” Hattie would venture. “If you must make me say it.”

“For what?”

“For what happened to Seth. For the way it happened.”

“But no one knows what happened. You’re not responsible.”

“We’re all of us responsible.”

Maggie said nothing, of course. It would have been simpler to dowse for water in the desert than to find the source of tears in her, or to strike a rock and make it gush. She cast no aspersions and said nothing bitter and named nobody by name. But she was tormented by guilt. Hattie herself was unable to sleep and sat awake as now she sat, hearing lamentation fill the corridor. Wherever Maggie stood or rocked there was the sound of weeping; when she, Hattie, went down to breakfast her sister-in-law would be in the kitchen already, wide-eyed, staring, fixing coffee.

“Did you sleep?” Hattie asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she’d answer. “I only just now came down.”

So they kept up appearances. They pretended—as Judah too pretended—that nothing was so badly wrong it couldn’t be set right. What the doctor called crib death, he said, cannot be predicted and therefore by care or precaution avoided: it’s water gone under the bridge. And therefore Baby Seth was scrabbling at the walls and windows—still waiting for a proper burial ceremony and the proper mourning period—at her sight’s outer edge.

Lately she has dreamed day-waking dreams. Thomas Sherbrooke tumbles, in her vision, through the ocean’s depths and whirlpools the way washing does in a fluff-dry cycle. He spins past her, sleeve over leg. His sleeve is empty and unbuttoned but does not flap; it waves. This gravestone lies if it says that it marks the place of my burial, Thomas Sherbrooke says. She, Hattie, hears him out. He is mourning the sweet sun and how his eyes were eaten by the barracuda, and how he’d been undutiful.

“You see me, Hattie,” Thomas Sherbrooke says, “in Davy Jones’s lock-up. You see me ’twixt the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” she pleads. “It’s not your fault.”

“Whose, then? Who was it went to make his fortune on the bounding main?”

“Put it out of your mind, Thomas, if only for my sake. Don’t blame yourself.”

“The devil spar,” he burbles at her, inconsolable. “That’s what I’m tied to, me hearties. That’s where I spend my time. Forever and ever and ever and . . .”

“Don’t. I can’t bear to hear it.”

He silences. He raises his leftover arm at her with all the sweet grace of Ian, and he doffs his cap. Striped fish swim at his ears. “I’ll have this dance,” he says. “If you’ll permit me, Miss Harriet. It’s written on the dance card.”

“Yes,” she says.

“It’s what we call a hornpipe jig,” he says.

She waits, collecting her breath. It is difficult to breathe. “I can’t swim,” Hattie tells him, but he guides her through shoals. The water, once she holds his waist, does nothing to her garments, and they spin together, laughing. He murmurs compliments. He says she is a natural-born dancer, and she says he lies. He protests his whole life now is spent in the service of truth.

“That’s right and proper,” she commends him. “That’s as it should be.”

Pilot fish maneuver past. He points to them: “It means there’s a big one nearby. A killer whale, most likely. Some kind of shark.”

She struggles, in over her head. He whispers courteous things to her, and his manner does not change—but what had seemed a dance transforms itself to writhing. She falters, loses step. She opens her mouth and the water roars in and she swallows, choking, while Thomas weaves himself around her like a willow branch, or weeds.

“Your manners, Mr. Sherbrooke,” Hattie pleads.

He continues dancing, swimming, smiling his death smile.

“Please.”

His hair, she sees with horror now, is water moccasins.

“A gentleman needs no reminding when to take a lady home.”

But he is oblivious, as she knew he would be; his arm is an electric eel. His legs are octopus legs.

The death of Seth that night in his crib had been, she understands, the beginning of the end. There had been trouble beforehand, of course; every marriage has some trouble, and this May–September marriage was slated for its share. Still, she’d thought it for the best and thought they’d handle difficulty when difficulty came; they’d talk it out and fix it the way they discussed what’s for supper. In the first years of their marriage, they gabbled over weather and the news and music and what Maggie was planning to do for the day and what Judah’d planned for the morning and, later, what Ian did or was about to do. They chattered and whispered and told the same stories until it seemed they’d wear the language out. They wore their tongues out, surely, what with kissing each other and licking their lips. Those early years were hard, of course, but if she’d been a betting woman and been asked to bet she’d have plunked her money down on luck and love enduring; she too forgot humility and dreamed no ill-omen dreams.

Then Seth died a crib death and was gathered up by God. Then the banter ended, and there was silence at meals. Judah could talk with his mouth full, she told herself, relenting; he could mumble nonsense all he wanted to at suppertime, just so he shared some of his bereavement and lightened it by sharing with those who were also bereaved. Ian took no notice or, if he noticed, didn’t much mind. That was understandable; he was only three years old and too young to care. But there was selfishness abounding in the silence of the Big House, and it made a breach too wide to fill.

“He’s the strong but silent type,” Maggie complained. “Know why? Your brother has nothing to say.”

“Still waters run deep,” she had said.

“Come off it, Hattie, still waters don’t run. They sit there and stagnate, that’s what they do. They get covered over with weeds.”

Soon Maggie started traveling, who’d been a stay-at-home. She’d say where she was going and take a trip and visit friends to fill up the silence-breach. First she’d stay the day away, and then the day and night, and then stay days at a time. To begin with, Maggie took her son along and he’d come back from Concord, Massachusetts, or Mystic, Connecticut, or New York City with stories to tell of every ship they boarded and each museum and what the grizzly bear looked like, standing on its hind legs in the hall. Then, with him, at summer camp, she went off alone. Judah would be in the fields or at his accounts or off at auction somewhere, and she’d back the Packard up and race away and should never, Hattie thought, have been permitted to drive.

But she had always known her sister-in-law would return. She knew it as she’d known that time on School Street when the collie ran after the bus. Hattie saw it coming though she’d seen the dog go after cars and trucks and buses every morning for what seemed like years, and veer and fade off barking. She’d known it a part of the morning’s arrangement, part of the proportion of things that the bus would angle left because the Oldsmobile in front of the Carters was parked a foot farther away from the curb, and the collie would maybe lose footing or maybe scent something for once on the wind or off the tire’s rim that wasn’t danger but delight, would hurtle ahead as the bus shifted gears (the driver so used to this noisy assault he’d not even bothered to check, certain the dog was in sham earnest only, more worried about Oldsmobiles than someone’s pet in any case and not overly worried about either, worried most about his watch, which if it wasn’t running fast was telling him he’d better). The pattern held; she’d seen it; the dog was entirely crushed.

The chills were mortal here in April, what with the weather changing and snowing the one day and raining the next and then being sixty degrees. So there is also, Hattie knows, the question of her brother’s health. He shouldn’t get over-excited; he shouldn’t tire himself. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she warned.

“Don’t baby me,” Judah responded.

“I wasn’t,” Harriet said. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I only said you ought to be more careful.”

“There you go again.”

“All right. I didn’t mean it badly.”

“Again,” Judah said. “Again.”

So she’d wished him vanquished who had lately been invincible, and is glad now (she decides, scrubbing her teeth and then using dental floss and then mouthwash) that Maggie has returned. Teeth are the mark of class distinction, Harriet maintains. They are the surest yardstick in these times of changing measure. No poor people have adequate teeth, and if poor or ignorant people have adequate teeth they are the exceptions that still prove the rule. She likes her sweets; she will not gainsay that. She keeps mints and toffee candy by her bed. But she attends to her dental hygiene and scrubs and rinses with a scrupulous regularity after every meal. She will die without a false tooth in her, and only a few teeth removed.

It is raining loudly now; snow funnels from the eaves. She can remember building snowmen with Maggie and Ian and maybe one of his friends. They gathered and rough-shaped the snowman while she fetched the props: a scarf and porkpie hat and carrots and old coat and coal. Ian rolled his snowball down the hill, enlarging it, and by the time he reached them the snowball was up to his shoulders. The friend did the same and brought them what would serve as the snowman’s round white head. They hoisted it up and smoothed the balls together and Maggie said, “We need a belt. Hattie, is there a belt for this big-bellied man?”

“We need arms,” Ian said. “We have to give him arms.”

“And shoes,” said Ian’s friend. What was his name, she asks herself; was it the Harrison boy?

“That isn’t possible. He’d melt.”

Nonetheless they set to it, smoothing and adjusting him and inserting the coals for his buttons and the carrot for his nose. She went back in the house to carve potato ears, then fetched a pair of Judah’s boots and an old dressing gown sash.

“His feet are fat,” the friend declared.

“And flat,” rhymed Ian. “His feet are fat and flat.”

They skipped with the pure pleasure of it, fashioning the snowman until their gloves were soaked. Their noses, Maggie said, were just as red as any carrot, and dribbled a good deal more. “His feet are fat and flat,” they chortled and placed Jude’s boots, Charlie-Chaplin style, pointing out wide-angled at the snowman’s base. Maggie tilted the hat down at a rakish angle, so that it shaded one eye.

“Now let’s do Mrs. Snowman,” Ian said.

“Mrs. Snowlady, you mean,” Maggie said.

“Let’s do
you
, Mommy.”

“Snowladies,” the friend—Joey Harrison?—said. “What do they getto wear?”

“Well,” Maggie said. “Coal and carrots and potatoes, like the others. Then maybe an apron and bonnet. You know, something housewifely, so no one gets confused.”

“I’ll get them,” Hattie offered. “I know where.”

“And don’t forget the lipstick,” Maggie said. There had been an edge in her voice.

“We’ll build you, Mommy,” Ian said. “From the bottom up. We’ll give you straw for hair.”

So they set to work again and fashioned the snowman’s companion. Hattie fetched an apron and a broom. The house was hot, or maybe it was the temperature change, or the afternoon which before had been cloudless was suddenly cloud-shadowed and her energy was spent; maybe it had been the vengeance with which Maggie shaped and jammed on breasts and buttressed her ice hips—but what had been a game was earnest now, and not much fun, and she told Ian that she’d lost the stomach for it.

“But where’s the bonnet?” Ian asked. “You promised.”