Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (16 page)

“Croquet’s a game,” she said. “You win some when you’re lucky.” Harriet was ill and shivering and her next shot hit a rock and bounced right back. That was the trouble with Vermont; no matter how you fine-tooth-combed it there were always, anyhow, rocks. It was inhospitable country for a proper round of croquet. “It doesn’t matter,” Hilda chortled. “You’ll have better luck next time, I’m sure.”

“It isn’t luck, it’s skill. I’m off my game.”

“You couldn’t know about that rock, of course.”

So Hilda inched her out. She, Harriet, is near to sleep now and upholding truthfulness and therefore bound to qualify that judgment. It hadn’t, in plain truth, been close. It was closer to a country mile than inches, and Hilda brayed with pleasure as she hit the stick. Her upper plate was loose. Harriet pointed that out. “Don’t be a spoilsport, dearie,” Hilda said. Harriet had not been any sort of spoilsport, then or ever; it was just she’d had no practice losing at croquet. So she’d had the borders trimmed, and Judah levered up the rocks for her and she took every comer on again and beat them handily—but she had lost her taste for it and was glad, that year, for snow.

Ian was meticulous. He spent hours preening—or what seemed to Hattie like hours—turning in front of the mirror, studying himself with what at first seemed vanity and then something harder to name and accuse. It was the kind of study he’d accorded puzzles, or spelling, or the internal combustion engine when he took his first motor apart. There were parts and wholes, and somehow the sum of the parts, Hattie knew, had to add up to the whole. Somehow those eyes and ears and eyebrows made up the whole of a face, and Ian studied it to puzzle out the mystery of things. She hesitates now, though she had not at the time, to call it being vain. There was nothing personal in that slow study, as if he might have studied any available skull—providing that the skull would smile and wink and scowl on order and not lose patience or leave.

He had learned degree and size. Hattie made this clear without saying; her lessons were none of them spoken but written on the blackboard of the air, and just as quickly erased. The neighbor’s homes are none of them big as the Big House, and theirs is the biggest around. The Sherbrookes that spilled over went to Canada and started up a place called Sherbrooke there. Our family was sitting here when neighbors came in wagons, and they took their shoes off when they came into the parlor, and the shoe still fits.

So that way they were similar; that way vanity was utilized by each. When the sun sinks over Woodford Ridge it is the sun, not Hattie’s world sinking, and no one speaks her name if she isn’t there to hear. Ian had occasion to be vain; he was his mother’s picture in a man. Everything that passed for beauty or handsome was his, and handsome is as handsome does, Hattie said. You couldn’t help but notice how the phone rang nightly, and how they always picked him in the partner’s choice.

She hears the sough of Judah’s toilet, and the trickling refill in its tank. There are voices raised in what she thinks is argument, then thinks is maybe song. If her Redeemer liveth, He knows without half trying all the goings-on in the Big House, and he too clucked his tongue. Pins dropped in a haystack are silent, she knows. Yet across the hall, inside his room, she hears the sound she has tried to avoid: Maggie saying “Judah,” and what sounds like springs, like slamming doors, the sound she hears unceasingly, the slap of flesh on flesh,
Judah, Husband
, while Hattie curses her hearing, her ears that have to endure this,
Judah, Jude
. The bustle of the two-backed beast is loud, continual, and even in this seven-year silence it’s all she’s ever listened to from that cage three doors away where Maggie prowls, her heels going clickety-clack on parquet—and places her hands on her ears and hears in her cupped palm the sound again, blood thumping
Husband, Judah, Judah, Jude
, and presses her elbows together like knees and forces her ears shut.

XI

“I’m dying,” Judah says.

“Don’t say that,” Maggie says.

“I’m dying.”

“Fifty years from now.” She snaps her fingers. “Just like that, remember? It used to be your joke.”

She presses herself to him and is again the cocksure twenty-three-year-old who’s met her husband-match. Then Judah had been superb. He was the strongest man she’d ever known or would have wanted to know; he set her teeth on edge. He set them chattering, then ground them down, it seemed, until her teeth were nerve ends too. When he hugged her he had done so with such suffocating pressure that even her teeth felt compressed. He’d cracked two ribs those years—and when she remonstrated or drew back he was, absurdly, hurt.

“It’s me who’s hurting,” Maggie’d say. “I’m the one who can’t breathe deeply.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know your own strength.”

“All right,” he’d promise. “I’ll quit.”

But he wouldn’t quit, would never leave off pawing at and pressing and compressing her until, for sanity’s sake, she made him keep hands off. He called her “Hellcat” since there was a play about a football hero, and his wife who was Maggie the Cat. Elizabeth Taylor played the movie part, and they went to see the movie and he told her, meaning it, she looked better than that Maggie or the movie actress anyhow, and by a country mile. She rewarded him for that. It came to be a system of reward. When he grew submissive she’d submit in turn to his manhandling and lie there underneath him while he worked his ardor off. It wasn’t all one-way, of course. She took pleasure enough for herself. But there was always panic at the edge of it—that he would take more than she had to give and leave her sucked dry, dessicate, bone pounded into bonemeal and her pelvis crushed. She’d seen a dog that way once—run over on its hind legs but not yet dead, but howling, running with no way to run. Hattie came and fetched her, seeking help. It lifted itself impossibly from the roadbed, swiping at its body that had no dimension left—and she, Maggie, ran to the house and found Judah in her turn and told him to bring his rifle. He did, but the collie was dead by the time they got back to it, with the blood not running. He shot it anyway, point-blank, twice in the head.

“Hold me,” he repeats.

“How?”

“Here,” the old man mutters.

“Are you all right?”

Her husband makes no answer, turning to the wall. So once again she is his helpless totem, sprawled beside him on her back. The dog had shifted twice.

“Harder,” he says now. “I’m dying.”

Maggie sighs. It does not help. She tries to see him in his towering possessiveness and marbled perfection, stripped to the waist while he sponged himself clean after work. The division of the sun line on his arms was absolute.

“I don’t know you,” Judah says.

“Yes you do.”

“This isn’t my wife.”

“Oh, Judah, yes but it is.”

“No. Outen here,” he warns her. “This isn’t the way my wife works.”

She knows when things went bad. She knows when the whiff of mortality became a mortal stink. When Seth died the world went bitter, difficult, and everything that seemed to fit was formless after that. That was the path’s true turning; that was when the woods grew dark and trails crisscrossed and doubled back and things she took for granted were no longer hers to take.

Seth had been a sunshine child. He lay contemplative, grinning for hours in his crib or the rocking chair Jude rigged for him or on her lap. She was sure he understood things as he suckled, blue eyes wide and huge. They had been drinking when Seth died, disputing in their practiced way about the way to be and behave. She remembers that much. She has spent the intervening years forgetting, and there are many things about the night she never could remember. But she remembers an argument with Judah as to squatter’s rights. She’d said the nation had been built by squatters, and like as not his ancestors got what they’d gotten by squatting, and the early bird catches the worm’s a phrase for birds and worms. Therefore those who took land today had no less justice in the taking; more, seemed like, since the government made it a good deal harder to keep. He’d scoffed at her. He’d said how about the three hundred acres of bottom land; how about everything that abuts the river; we’re not using it this season are we, so why not just give it away? Why not, she’d answered, and been serious, and he’d looked at her and seen as much but said you can’t be serious. Why not, she’d repeated; what are we holding it for? For our sons, that’s who for, Judah said. Men who’ll make the proper use of it in its proper time. I’m glad of that, she’d said, of course (but thinking back on it thinks maybe that’s when she thought she heard Seth; maybe that was pride’s signal and the time that outrage settled in, suffocating and betraying and sucking every bit of air up from her infant’s room; maybe that was the self-congratulatory shepherd penning the wolf inside his fold, then ticking off his blessings as he heads back for the hut). I’m glad for them, repeated Maggie, and grateful, but it doesn’t change the argument; it doesn’t mean that those who need the land should get no pasture rights. I’ve built this place, Judah said, with these two hands I’ve tilled it. Your great-grandfather built it, she said. You’ve tilled it for lack of anything better to do. There’s been no necessity here—and thinks she hears it once again, thinks as he looms above her, furious, passionate, the advance he makes upon her prelude to some sort of grappling, but whether to beat or embrace her she’s never certain till joined; thinks later the susurrus she heard was the whistling, whimpering final breath Seth drew, and had she not taunted her husband so, had they not finished the bottle, had the night been less loud with cicadas or had she not insisted on Chopin in their lovemaking’s aftermath, bedded by him on the library couch and therefore not even stumbling past Seth’s bedroom to their own—had she only been less idle her son would somehow live.

There’s no blame to attach. There was no way to prevent it, and nothing to have done. But Maggie takes the blame up anyhow and knows that otherwise nothing makes sense; if his death is wholly senseless then the world is wholly evil, and she’d rather think there’s meaning she can’t as yet quite grasp. Hattie said the same. Only Hattie said it, saying there was meaning in the soul’s salvation and punishment for evil ways, and Maggie told her, never quite saying it, say that again and I’ll pull out your tongue.

Now she is using the toilet and lifting her hand for the chain. She hauls at air with her right hand, then lifts her left hand instead and finds the chain and pulls. She washes both her hands. They measured land in rods here, Maggie remembers, and remembers thinking it’s a better word than acreage. She knows that millions of children die yearly, and crib death is the sort of graceful gathering to God a theologian might describe. She knows that, by comparison, death by starvation or cholera or bombing is a fate far worse, and the best thing of all, say the ancients, is not to have been born. Next best, she knows, is to die young and in untrammeled innocence surrounded by your loved ones in a world they appear to control.

Yet that suspicion of a whisper was enough—that susurrus on the second floor while she strained against her husband underneath. It meant Seth suffered while she took her pleasure, and she hears it now more loudly than any scream of pain. From that time, she herself had aged; from that fell turning she hacked her own way. Light changed in the afternoon, and woods that seemed benign were suddenly hurtful, threatening; birds fed on putrid flesh. Owls that seemed wise were ferocious; mourning doves were fierce. From that time on her beauty was a weapon—and she wielded it both as a shield and spear. She would endure, she said to Judah, no third child. They’d lost one altogether, and the firstborn, Ian, would make his way, gain or loss, out in the world without them. Hostages to fortune, she says, that’s what we are, wife and child. Whose talk is that, he asks her, feigning interest, and she says William Shakespeare’s, or maybe Francis Bacon’s, and he says big talk, big talk. Don’t feign illiteracy, Jude, she says, it’s bad enough as is. What’s bad enough, he asks her. Being a hostage to fortune, she says. Being for an instant on the top of fortune’s wheel. It means you have to drop.

She rose again, of course. Folks rise, he told her, sententious; can’t keep a good man down. That’s a dirty joke, she wants to tell him, it’s only manly boasting. That’s the sort of purblind optimism she’s earlier embraced; all it is is turning; all it is is evil, evil chance.

Maggie tells herself to think of other things. She will not think of Seth or any of the accoutrements of beauty nor her vanished own. She will instead think about cats. She’ll concentrate on cats and dogs and raining cats and dogs and dog days and dog pounds and penny wise, pound foolish. But the word that sidles up and lodges next to foolish is careless, and the word next to careless is love, careless love. And so she is word-trammeled, circling, caught in the web he’s spun that is this bed. She studies the brown leather chair and the three photos of her son. Judah lies like a vast spider next to her, at home in his intricate tangle—and all she herself can manage is a set of nonsensical songs. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, she sings; come fly with me, let’s fly away;
away in yon valley, in a low lonesome place . . .

That had been Judah’s verse. That had been his courting tune, and he sang it with a plangent grace that never failed to move her. It overpraised his ear to call it tin. She didn’t know if there were cheaper alloys even than tin; she could call his ear aluminum foil, she supposes, or plastic, or claim it was made out of mud. But he sang “Saro Jane” with an emotion that beggared complaint—believing it, believing he was some rejected rancher and she, Maggie, had elected comfort while he rode the range.

Range was home on; range was kitchen; kitchen was the place she came from when he called. The distraction succeeds. Maggie sighs. She is carried from this evil room to her apartment’s kitchen, or memories of Judah with his caterwauling earnestness, or how she’d seen Gene Autry at the circus once, his belly all over his pants.

“That’s better.”

“Yes,” she says.

“That’s what I want from you,” he says and turns to face her.

“Your servant, sir.”

“For better or for worse,” he says, only half mocking. “In illness as in health.”

(He had wanted, he told her, to offer a no-nonsense speech. He had been straightforward in the taking, as in asking, “Will you be my wife?” That was honorable discourse, and she should know it for a New Englander’s plain speaking, without embroidery. Generations of Sherbrookes had gone to their knees and cracked their joints before generations of soon-to-be-Sherbrookes, he joked. He’d not get off his knees, he said, till she said yes.

“Is that a threat or promise?”

“A promise to keep.”

“You’ll hurt yourself”—she bent above him—“down there on that hardwood floor.”

But she had looked down at him swaying, not so composed as all that, not certain if he meant what he never would ask without meaning.

“It doesn’t surprise you,” he said.

“No.”

“You’ve known it was coming, likely.”

“I thought so, maybe.” Maggie opened her eyes.

“Well, what did you think”—he rocked back on his heels—“when you thought it was coming?”

“I thought I’d tell you yes.”

He put his hands on her knees. She stooped above him, then knelt where he was kneeling and smiled and said, “That’s settled then.” He kissed her, elated, pleased she had accepted him and only told her afterward she’d taken the words from his mouth.)

So it had happened offhand finally, after all his preparatory scheming, his traps and teasing preludes—happened as she knew it would, looking back, coterminus with her not caring that it happened anymore, with his decision that the legacy was trivial and separation trivial and who cared how he handled it or fouled or let fall the reins: Jude kept his seat, was graceful as he’d been when in his riding prime, was mastering that comic turn the world calls circumstance and giving his wife what she’d anyhow always possessed—his house, his lands, his body to dispose of in the way that she saw fit. “Thanks anyhow,” she told him, “but no thanks. It’s kind of you to offer but I’m otherwise engaged.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I do.”

Later still he tells her, “Take it,” and she says, “All right.” She takes it with the negligence she’d always shown to favor, as if a debt redeemed.

“So tell me where you’ve been,” he asks.

“New York mostly. San Francisco.”

“New Orleans?”

She smiles at him. “A little.”

“To visit your cousins?”

“To visit the queen.”

“Do you have an apartment?” he asks. “A house?”

“It’s still the same apartment. In New York City. On the river. In just about the exact middle of town.”

“You’ve said that before,” Judah says.

“I know. Which is why I repeated it.”

“You’ve got a memory.”

“No. It’s you who used to quote it—that thing I said the day we met. I wouldn’t have remembered.”

But she controls herself. She is creature-comforts Maggie who knows her way around. She is mistress to the house and wife to the man in the bed. He holds her, vehement. She is fifty-one years old and, without much adjusting, a blond. She had, she tells herself, been asked for help by him who’d never asked before—though much of that begging seemed malice and some of it certainly fake. She thinks of the endless demands on devotion that devotion, once constituted, makes: it isn’t a question of manners, or habit, isn’t a question of needing to hurt what seems so vulnerable now; it is for Maggie simply that she doesn’t know how to refuse him this night; what he asks of her she gives because for years she gave or gave in or gave over.