Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (15 page)

Seth had suckled at her; his perfect hands had ten perfect fingers with perfect crescent nails. They fitted themselves to the curve of her breast and were a perfect fit. His eyes were blue as blue could be and he shut them in appreciation while he drank. They stayed that way. Then the suction lessened; then his lips stopped working; then the action of his throat, in its turn, ceased. He slept.

“You let me come. You
asked
me to.”

“No. Finney did.”

“You haven’t got to wreck it, Mr. Sherbrooke. We could maybe like each other.”

“Don’t take me for a fool,” Judah says. “It isn’t too much to ask, now is it, just don’t take me for a fool.”

“I won’t,” she says. “I never have.”

“Miss Black Bottom. Miss Yellow Belly,” he derides her. “Maggie the Queen of the hop.”

Then Judah shuts his eyes. There is a regularity in his breathing that makes it seem to be sleep. She imagines husbands a century or so before who’d leave for seven years and go to cross a continent or ocean. Gone to make a fortune or shore up failing fortunes, they would come back wearing earrings maybe, and carrying parrots or malacca canes, smoking strangely fashioned pipes. Or centuries before that, even, bounding home to tell of wondrous voyages, and three-legged natives wearing palm fronds for shoes, and nothing else but musk oil to disguise their animality. There would be news to give and get, and the oil lamps would have flickered and the windows misted over just the same way for that pair of strangers, those fraudulent avatars also . . .

Old sons would visit mothers who had lost their sense and sight. Sons would come home to fling themselves after the last handful of earth strewn on a new-dug grave. They would return, Maggie imagines, with a week’s hard ride, with no chance to favor their horses or thank the ferryman sufficiently (who was not used to night trips, who didn’t like the weather and was half-deaf anyhow, who heard no apologies therefore and waved the tip away in a gesture of derision, muttering about horse pucky on his loading ramp). Sons returned without left legs or six inches taller or bearded or bald, returning through malarial swamps and taking the shortcut past the tamaracks where two thousand died that first August—skirting the bogs and rapids, but losing their packhorses anyhow to gopher holes, a kind of indignity always attendant, mosquitoes rampant and the storm-felled oaks impassable, the message (“Come Home if you Can; Mother Faring poorly and would like to see you Once”) deciphered, worried over endlessly, the paper of it worn and rubbed dull with folding, edges furled . . .

“I’m dying,” Judah says.

She makes no answer.

“You know that.”

“No.”

“Finney must have told you. You got to know that much tonight.”

She takes his hand.

“I’ll die if I sleep here alone,” he says.

“We’ll watch over you.”

“How can I be sure of it?”

“I promise.” She spreads his fingers with hers. She strokes his palm.

“How do I know you won’t leave me?”

“You don’t.”

“You always have.”

“I always came back,” Maggie says.

They are adept at this gambit also, and she marvels at how quickly she resumes their ancient play. Men return from wars or bounty expeditions or mental hospitals; their parents say, hey, boy, fix me this gatepost, hey, boy, go brush your teeth.

“Don’t leave me. Don’t run out.”

“I won’t.”

“How can I trust you?”—he stares at her, unblinking. She waits for him to blink.

“You can,” says Maggie.

“Come sleep with me.”

“All right,” she says. “I’ll get an extra blanket. I’ll be back with pillows.”

“No,” Judah says. “In this bed.”

He releases her hand and pats the space beside him.

“I need someone to hold me. When I die.”

He would, she knows, spare her nothing; he has worked out his punishment in every fierce particular. “If you ask me, Mr. Sherbrooke, you’re a mighty lively corpse.”

“I’m not asking your opinion, I’m asking for your help. For charity’s sake.”

Her hands are shaking. Her voice shakes. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal.”

“Or send up someone who’ll do what I ask. Find me some other lady.”

“No,” Maggie tells him. “I’ll stay.”

He looks at her. She could swear he smiles. It is a grin he turns—she could swear intentionally—into a cough.

“Go,” he says. “I’ll manage. Just find me somebody else.”

“Who else would have you, Judah? I’m your wife.”

So now she tries to comfort him, who has little comfort to spare. She says the world is full of things that frighten her, because you’re never certain where they hide at night. Best keep the closet doors open, she whispers; best keep chest-drawers pulled out. Best close your eyes; best pluck your brows; best wish upon and blow the lash that falls.

“You win.” He lifts his hands in submission.

“And you.”

“I’m tired,” Judah says. “Let’s both of us get into bed.”

She sits beside him. She has felt the same way, sometimes, after drinking too much or not good enough wine. Her very bones have stiffened; nothing works. No single limb or digit makes its customary motion.

“Get in,” he says. “Under the covers.”

“It’s hot here,” Maggie says.

“Not for me,” he tells her. “It’s as cold as that night was we slept out in the winter. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Get yourself here next to me.”

She commences.

“Not that way,” Judah says. “If you’re so hot and I’m your husband anyhow, take off your clothes.”

She is sweating.

“I’m not hot,” Maggie says.

“Of course you are. You’re sweating. You’re a furnace.”

“I’ll get used to it.”

“No,” Judah says. “Take off your clothes.”

She tells herself it doesn’t matter—that this is her husband in health, not sickness; in his prime, not mad old age. She unbuttons her blouse.

“I’m dying,” Judah says. “Tonight. You’ll see.”

“Please,” Maggie says, “Don’t say that. Please.” She drops her blouse to the chair by the bed.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” he says.

“But you’re succeeding, Judah.”

“The skirt. What about taking off that?”

And so he wheedles and coaxes her out of her clothes. She lies rigid beside him, watching the gooseflesh on her arms prickle and subside. It is, she tells herself, a caricature scene:
Death and the Maiden
or perhaps
Virginity Defended and Preserved
. But there is only his breathing, and she had yielded up her maidenhood thirty-four years earlier, in the changing room of the cabana in Alan Seligman’s family’s Easthampton beach house.

“Hold me,” Judah says.

She holds him. She busies herself with memories: the way that Alan Seligman’s swim trunks’ elastic intaglioed his stomach, and the burnished gold his body was above the line contrasting with the flaccid fish pallor below. He had pretended competence but was a virgin also, and they fumbled and poked at each other. Maggie shuts her eyes. Alan Seligman had been eighteen and won the freestyle relay and was flexing his pectoral muscles and biceps and triceps for her; they went steady afterward and improved their shared technique.

Judah keeps his ear cocked although she thinks him heedless, and keeps his right eye open behind the lashes’ web. He is peeking out at Maggie like a schoolboy, inching the curtain aside. She would be his audience and join in the applause, be stomping her feet in the aisle. There are others. It is dark. The footlights flare at them, not him. He will leap to her side with agility—and not be caught in the bedclothes or crippled, or spavined by arthritis like some out-to-pasture Clydesdale collapsed with its own weight. You have to be quick-footed to steal a march on Jude.

He feels a man’s life signifies; it matters how he walks upon this earth. He has been schooled from childhood to believe that actions ramify, a Sherbrooke’s more than most. He says the Lord giveth and taketh away, but so does the federal government, and so can any man who’s self-willed, self-reliant, self-defined. Therefore he will give his house and barns and land for love; therefore he withdraws from anxious husbandry. His world is the visible world. He owns everything he sees of it, and that has been enough. Lying beside him—two feet to the side, and half a head shorter, she looks at a different world. It’s only natural, he tells himself, it’s one of the laws of perspective. But he owns all she sees to boot—even lying, feigning sleep, in the bedroom of the house he fingered in its replica that morning. He can confer it, and does so. She takes it as her due.

X

Hattie finds herself with slogans now when what she wants are words. She despises supermarkets and the jingles she finds herself singing in supermarket aisles. They pipe in music from every corner, and she is pursued while hunting rope or camphor or tomato juice or corn. In those newly built and lavish emporiums, Hattie feels her age. She stumbles down the corridors of canned goods and household supplies, pushing her pushcart as once she pushed her mother’s wheelchair, but with a deal less agility. She—who’d admit to many faults but never indecisiveness—is assaulted by competing claims and labels and products and stands there indecisive, trying to sort matters out. Like as not she’d reach for camphor and there’d be mothflakes and mothballs and mothcakes to choose from, and when she’d choose at last and reach she’d knock the whole stack down, or scatter cans. She did the bulk of their shopping at Morrisey’s, or had it done by Judah—but once a month, maybe, or once every three weeks she negotiates the shopping plaza, tormented by such opulent look-alike choice. Soda water, for instance, would be marked at thirty-five cents the bottle. There were five-or-ten-cent additional deposits to pay. So she’d accumulate bottles at forty or forty-five cents the bottle, arranging them in her cart and checking the stamped price each time. Once she found a bottle marked at eighty-five cents and pointed out the error to the girl at the checkout machine.

“Look here,” she said. “Someone marked eighty-five cents.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” said Hattie, pointing. “Right at the spot where my fingernail is. On the cap.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll only charge you for thirty-five cents.”

“I expect so,” Hattie said.

But her point would be lost, and her precision wasted—except for the fifty cents saved, and that was hardly saving. The girl would sweep her goods along, and someone else would pack them, and Hattie would be out of there before she even knew it, sorting the change. She’d be out on the tarmac, hunting the taxi she’d ordered, still hearing the loudspeaker bray organ music behind her and taking her first deep breath and breathing in gas fumes and heat and the smell of hamburger fat from the restaurant section.

Judah cursed modernity and every tinsel accomplishment; they were salvaging nothing important, he said, although they saved some time. “A stitch in time saves nine” had been her motto, but he asked her if she truly thought they required this frugality, and what did it save anyhow—nine stitches or nine times?

“Nine stitches,” she had said, “and please don’t forget who does the stitching.” He granted her her point but said she should throw the old clothes and sheets and tablecloths away.

“If I did that,” she said. “We’d see how long you’d let me do it.”

“Long enough.”

So she hoarded their history’s leavings; she is like a magpie, he complains, lining her room with silk scraps. “A penny saved earns pounds,” she said. “Waste not, want not,” she urged. Then Judah told her they earned more each year than they knew how to spend. She said that wasn’t possible, and he explained to her that money made money without half trying; funds accumulated on the trust funds and investments, and even after taxes there was all they’d ever need. “Necessity’s a difficult teacher,” she reminded him, and mended the living room curtains where he didn’t see they needed mending, and wouldn’t have cared if they did.

But Maggie had spent money like she spent herself on everything—flat-out. It was as hard to hold to, Judah said, as a greased squealing pig. Not that he minded it, either; there was as much fun spending as there was in getting, and he lavished gifts on her. He gave her earrings and bracelets and cars and would have given a fur coat if she tolerated furs. “I can’t abide it,” Maggie said.

“What?”

“Shooting and trapping and poisoning those animals. A seal for a sealskin coat, a lamb for lambswool. Leopards.”

“They ain’t defenseless. And some of them is pests.”

“Don’t play the trapper, please. Did you ever notice that you put your bumpkin accent on whenever you’re not certain?”

“Sartin,” Judah pronounced. “Shorely.”

“Well, I don’t want a coat that comes from killing. Thanks anyway. No thanks.”

Hattie listened, envious. Words were a kind of coinage they melted down from slogans; Ivory Snow is a dish soap, and Gleam and Crest are toothpastes, and Joy is a detergent, not a state of mind.

Now, moving with caution, soundlessly, she readies her own bed. It is a tester bed, not canopy, because there is nothing inside it to cover, no shameful goings-on; the fringe around the bedposts is pink eyelet lace. She allows herself that much. It is an extravagance, of course, and frilly the way little girls dream about frills. Sometimes, staring past the bed’s frame at the rectangle of ceiling, Hattie thinks maybe that’s how you get to heaven, that’s what ascension means. Maybe you go through a space that’s called a tester shape because it doesn’t close you in and is a trial. There’s tribulation inside, and pleasure for the best part of a quarter of your life. Lately she’s been sleeping poorly, but still she calculates six hours on the average for, say, sixty years. She’s done better than that to begin with, and nowadays does worse, but it all evens out. Along the way there’s been temptation that came in many guises—call it luxury, then restlessness, then sloth. The eyelet lace would be a comfort-temptation and test, but her soul would hurtle past it into the cold space beyond and butt against the ceiling and knock for admittance. It would be smoke without a chimney, lifting to the topmost part of rooms to hover, coil, and dissipate—or birds caught in a barn or, like the bluejay in the entrance hall that time, battering at windows, seeing only the blue sky beyond. It was like the way heat rises to cool upper air, or the way she went lightheaded after bending and straightening up and thought she’d grown six inches. Everything would rise about her, and what seemed like plaster with a crack in it would be, entirely, smoke. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, but this would be a screen to shield her from impurities and smoke the hellish remnants out and leave her in the perfect welcoming empyrean, breathing without luxury or sloth.

Hattie smiles. She permits herself day-waking dreams if the visions are not harmful, and no one could claim daydreams of heaven ever did anyone harm. Her heaven is snow-white but warm. It is a storm of miracles, with everything unblemished and intact. Vermont is her heaven on earth. It is a kind of paradise, free from the disasters that beset the countries she reads of and almost every other state. It has no tidal waves or hurricanes because it has no ocean; it has no poisonous snakes. There are no earthquakes and no one dies of jungle fever, and no one ever dies because of rabid bats. There are rabid bats, all right, behind the Big House shutters, and she hears them squeak and rave but knows they will not bite her if she offers nothing to bite. There are no floods worth mentioning, or not enough to kill you, and few drought years in Vermont. It is Eden on earth except for a blizzard that maybe could cause you to freeze. But even then you had to be improvident and not amass the firewood, and there are no avalanches like she’s seen on TV in Canada. Men fire off their guns and mountains fall. There are wood ticks in abundance that Judah picks off the dogs, but they do not carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever. He’d sit there squeezing and applying rubbing alcohol or matches to the ticks, and she’d be appalled at their blood-sucking tenacity—but it is not fatal in Vermont.

And so this earthly paradise stretches around her, comforting. There are high winds, admittedly, but not so high you perished out of breathlessness, and if you stay away from falling trees. No place in the Bible does it say what happened to the tree once they ate the apples from it, but Hattie thinks the tree went rotten and was hollowed out by woodpeckers hunting for insects and fell in the first high wind. Eve knew enough to get out of the way, but Adam cast a backward, rueful look. Get thee behind me, he seemed to be saying, at least until I’m full of sinful knowledge and have honed my ax.

Still, paradise is warm. It is a stepped-up version of September. There are skies so deep the deep she knows means shallow, with no bitter cold or natural catastrophes or enemy to man. If only for that single fault, the landscape would be Eden, so she warms it up in daydreams just the way that New Orleans is warm—and then the snow is duck down in angelic sheets.

She’d populate it differently too. She’d pay no attention to color or creed, since paradise is democratic and without regard to that. But He regarded manners at the entry portal, and if your hands are presentable, scrubbed, and cleanly after labor. He regarded works, of course, and kept them in a ledger, keeping neat accounts. But mostly He decided if you’d done willful harm, or not, and if you’ve done no willful harm in thought and deed you were just about guaranteed access to eternal life. It would be bliss; it would be cherry trees in blossom and no neighbors running neighbors down and nothing spoiled or soiled. It would be a profusion of delights. The people would be openhanded and glad-hearted and their wings have eyelet lace through which you can see arms.

She waits at the window seat. She has never been a lazy woman; no one gainsaid that. No one denied that she woke at first cockcrow and worked at the day’s tasks unflaggingly—glad for the chance to be useful and not meddlesome or lazy but only helping out. Busy hands keep out of cookie jars, she said, and empty hands are never full and weak ones aren’t worth shaking if they daren’t shake you back.

But this night she does feel lazy and will stay that way. This night there are others asleep in the house, and Judah’d made it plain enough her presence was crowd-company, and that he’d do without her now who hadn’t done without her day or night for seven years. There is nothing to do in the room. She’ll stay in here till Maggie leaves, or noon, though she doubts that Maggie will make it till noon. She’ll stay until they come to get her and find the door’s been locked.

For exile even self-imposed is exile, with nothing to read she wants to be reading and no television set or silver to polish, and her afghan in the billiard room. She ought to have remembered that. She could have swept in, leaving, and swept it up and taken it but couldn’t creep back down there now and get her work. It is purple and yellow, which are Millie Ferguson’s favorite colors, and Hattie plans to finish it by May Day for Millie Ferguson’s niece. It had been unkind of Judah, but she was used to his unkindness and inured long since; his wife should intervene, however, and take Hattie’s part. Yet she wishes Margaret no willful harm either, for having failed to intervene or say with loving-kindness, “She’s your sister. She could stay.”

She sniffs. She wouldn’t have wanted to stay. There had been goings-on enough in that room, and will be likely again; she, Hattie, has no need to know. Curiosity, she used to tell Ian, doesn’t always kill the cat, but if he sticks his nose in garbage cans he’ll come up smelling bad. It makes no difference if there’s a pile of roses; sniff around it long enough and you’ll find the stench of compost at the bottom of the barrel; there are certain things it’s better not to know. They huddle in the rooms beyond her, bickering or reconciled or lustful, and everything would be arranged and rearranged in any case. So she is glad of her privacy and has left the room of her own free will and not been ordered out. She wishes she had the silverware or afghan anyhow; it would have passed the time. “There’s no natural catastrophes,” she’d said to Judah. “Not in Vermont.”

“But what about unnatural?” he’d asked, only half joking. “What about my wife?”

“That isn’t fair,” Hattie said. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” he assured her.

“Not really.”

“A manmade disaster. Just like her son.”

Ian, their glory, their hope—who’d make all well in this world and was an image of perfection in the next. A long while after Eden, she had been bursting to say to her brother, there were lights in the house the first family built. There was someone inside sweeping up. There was silver to polish and canning to do and the sampler for the downstairs hall is frayed along the edge. There are bills to pay. There is always someone leaving and someone left behind, and ingratitude rides on the train of departure like thistles on a skirt. You pick your steps and have picked them before and know the way the path heels over and where it would be, likely, mud, and anyhow the thistles find you out and follow you and find themselves a brand-new site at breeding time.

Hattie listens for the furnace and can distinguish its noise. Water clanks beneath her in the hallway pipes. It sounds like iron croquet balls on carom shots; she loves croquet. She’d beat Judah handily when he consented to play. She knows the pitch and obstacles and takes on every comer and never ever had lost. “You’re a tough customer, ain’t you,” she’d tease him—and then go through five wickets without losing a turn and knock his ball into the uncut grass for good measure on her last. “Some tough customer,” she’d say, and wipe her hands on her handkerchief, since they’d grown damp on the stick.

Hilda Payson had beaten her, once. But Harriet had been overconfident and lazy and let Hilda get the jump on her and then was knocked into the wet uncut grass herself, and was just getting over a cold. So her shoes were soaking and she sneezed and missed the recovery shot, and then Hilda, who was gleeful and cantankerous and not to be trusted with the liquor cabinet key, knocked her back again. She’d nearly lost her temper. She said dreadful things, nearly aloud. Hilda Payson had pretended not to care. But Hilda cared—she, Harriet, could see that—cared tremendously, was cawing to herself in triumph and her knees were set so far apart you’d think she sat on a horse.