Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (21 page)

Judah stops. He considers how best to head west. Hattie thought that west was always a left turn and north was straight ahead, since that’s the way the map looked. He had tried to show her how west changed. “Nonsense,” Hattie said. “The needle’s broken. Every time you walk ahead you’re walking straight ahead.”

“What about south?” he asked her. “Does that mean you have to go backward?”

“How should I know?” she countered. “You’ve never taken me south.”

“It wouldn’t be backward.”

“Turn right,” she said, “and straight ahead you’ll find New Hampshire and then Massachusetts and the sea. I know that much; it’s east.”

So he elects Route 7 where there’s traffic. Ian might be in the bar, or driving past, or paying a courtesy call on Lucy Gregory and Elvirah Hayes. He remembers that you make a fist and put your thumb up for thumbing a ride. He wonders, should he hitch? West is New York State, then maybe he’d dip south and go through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. A white car corners on two wheels and speeds off, blatting its horn.

And now he asks himself why ever he let Ian leave. The boy went off to college, and Judah could have driven there, could have shown up for the football games or plays or weekends Ian mentioned in his first few postcards home. You could fetch him for vacations, Hattie urged. You teach a dog to fetch, said Judah; a son comes home if he wants to and shouldn’t be begged. It isn’t a question of begging, Hattie said, and Judah agreed that that wasn’t the question and let’s not discuss it anymore. All right? he asked. All right, she said, but started in at dinner till he laid it down as final that he’d neither fetch or visit unless Ian asked.

The boy was headstrong; he’d not deny that. Judah’d figured to outlast him and that Ian would come running back for his first college summer—or the second when the first went by with only a postcard from Boston and then one from a place called Elk in what the postmark showed was California. Then he instructed Finney not to forward college bills, but simply to pay them and leave it at that.

Some months later—four years back, he figures now—Judah got a bottle in the mail. He knew it on the instant for a liquor bottle, since it had the heft and shape. He unwrapped it carelessly, tearing at the thick brown paper that had been torn in the sending already, then tossing the cardboard and paper both into the fire behind him. It flamed. Only when he’d read the bottle’s label,
Sherbrook Whiskey
, and broken the seal and tasted it right then and there, not liking it much, telling Finney who’d been there for supper that the family improved with “e,” that the bottom of the silo tasted a sight better and twice as strong—only then, as the carton adhered to itself in its own ash shape behind him did he recognize what he had burned, or believe the clumsy fold and printing (in block letters, underlined, with blue-black ink and no return address he’d noticed) had been Ian’s hand. He put his own in the fire to find it, but the form collapsed.

Now Judah imagines his son. He tracks him to some nightly revel, where redheaded women are dancing. They are drinking, wearing only sequins and anointed with perfume. He imagines Ian in prison or board meetings or the Blueridge Mountains that he’d sent a card from, once. He imagines him in concert halls, with his mother applauding from the second row. He gives Ian a moustache. Then Ian shaves it and he gives him shoulder-length hair and a beard and shaves it all off finally and has him in a raincoat, army coat, denim work coat, sports coat, and then what Sherman Adams got, vicuña, and sporting a cigar. He takes his hand; he takes his money and a kidney out of him for transplants; he has him dead in Vietnam and Memphis and then, miraculously, as he had done a quarter of a century before, gives Ian life. They hold conversations. They laugh. Bygones are bygones, and spilt milk is under the bridge. He will not, can he help it, die a wheezing, slack-mouthed fool. He will break his life off when the time comes like a piece of brittle, and the edges will be trim. “Let’s neaten up the edge,” Hattie says. “Just before we put it back”—and would take her knife and pare through pie or brittle or cake—“Just one more little bite.” He tracks Ian to his mother’s apartment on the edge of the East River where the sun rises and ignites them and they are drinking coffee on the balcony together, steam rising out of their cups.

A second car avoids him, honking. A mail truck speeds past. Judah has no money and no matches and not enough warm clothes. His ankle aches; his boots are loose. His estate is settled; he turns to see the cupola and wonders is that backward, is it south? He lifts his hands and opens and closes his fists. The palms are white. He peers at them. With a queer final fluttering, he drops his hands and puts them in his pockets and climbs back up the hill. The elms are black. The gate is too heavy; he skirts it and follows the wall. He clambers across where the rocks seem to dip and, negotiating purchase, jumps and tumbles back inside. He lies there for some time.

SHERBROOKES

I

When Ian returns to the Big House, it is for the first time in years. He does so as if by chance. Half his life ago, at thirteen, he followed Maggie to New York. She had offered him his choice, of course, but in a way that left him none: she was his mother and needy and fleeing Vermont for his sake.

Their visits to Judah thereafter were brief. They’d take the bus on holidays, or trains, or the limousine he’d send (refusing to drive or collect them—“It’s fetch and carry,” Judah would say, “I teach it to the dogs”). Then even that sham union shattered, and they stayed away. Since the Sherbrookes believed in plain speaking, said Judah, why not acknowledge their mistake and call a spade a spade: weekend families don’t work.

Nor has he seen his mother since she elected this version of home. Maggie ensconced herself in the Big House as if they’d never left—as if such wounds might heal. Judah died soon after that. Ian knows; he’s kept in touch, if only by message or letter and always at a remove. His absence, he intends to claim, was as accidental as his presence now—the logic of geography, not love.

He had not attended his father’s funeral. He heard about it, however; Samson Finney reached him in Chicago.

“Thank God I’ve found you,” Finney said. “We’ve been looking all week long.”

“It’s only Tuesday,” Ian told the lawyer. “I wasn’t hiding. Why?”

“It’s me who’s calling because—well, because your mother isn’t up to it. She tried you in New York, and then we called around. I’ve been making the arrangements.”

“Mr. Finney, you needn’t apologize. We don’t talk all that often.”

“It’s been a long while, hasn’t it? Years.”

“I recognize the voice.”

“You should call me Samson,” Finney said. “I hope you’ll think of me as at your service, Ian. Should you require it. Not in business matters, I didn’t mean that, though in the legal context also, if you want.”

So it had come as no surprise when the lawyer said at last, “Your father. Judah’s dead.”

In the ensuing silence, Ian thought several things. He thought, That’s that: seventy-six. He wondered how Finney had tracked him and how his mother was feeling and why she hadn’t called. He thought about telephone static, how the crackle made it sound as though there were birds on the wire, poised, scratching.

Then he thought that Finney was not only an informant, but his father’s friend who wanted consolation. The impulse to offer comfort displaced the need to receive it, and Ian cradled the pink lightweight phone and swung his legs out of the bed. “
Passata la commedia
,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“It’s Italian. It means things are over.”

“The funeral’s tomorrow,” Finney said. “I’m calling to inform you.”

He drew in breath. It whistled.

“Ian? You all right?”

He wasn’t sure which way to answer, therefore said nothing and, sitting, crossed his ankles. It was—he consulted his watch—five o’clock.

“He died quickly,” Finney said. “Peacefully. You couldn’t have known.”

“His heart?”

“Mm-mn.”

“I knew about that. I did know.”

“Angina pectoris,” said Finney. “Your mother was with him. His sister, too.”

“Hattie. How’s she taking it?”

“About as you’d expect,” said Finney.

But he expected nothing; they were strangers now. He had seen Maggie, of course, but neither Finney nor Judah nor Hattie for years. He felt as if his own heart were beating in his head; blood pulsed there so loudly it echoed.

“Your mother’s all right,” Finney said.

“When’s the funeral—what time?”

“Eleven. We put it off as long as we could. The whole town will be there. I’ve been hunting you to hell and gone. Chicago—there’s a connection out of Albany . . .” Finney trailed off.

He rubbed his ankle where it itched. He inspected the skin of his feet. Flocks settled on the wires, so he picked his words with care. “If I didn’t see my living father,” Ian asked, “why do you suppose I’d come to see his body? What makes you think I’d visit now he’s dead?”

“It’s not . . .”

“It is. Judah’d take no pleasure in the kind of thing you’re after. He was ceremonial all right, but not for this sort of ceremony. I’m working here, I’ve got a job.”

“You sound just like your father. Did you know that?”

“People used to tell me,” Ian said. “But nobody here knows his name.”

“
Passata la festa,
” Finney pronounced. “That’s what you said, isn’t it? I was in Italy during the war, and I understand the expression. We have a saying in America, you know. We say, ‘Water under the bridge.’ ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk.’ ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ we say.”

“I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I’d be there in the morning if I could. But this is how it stands for now. I’ll call Maggie and explain.”

At five o’clock that afternoon the lights had been on in the street below, the traffic loud; he sat in the increasing dark while Finney’s protestations turned to curiosity—what was he doing in Chicago? how long had he been there, on what sort of job? how long was he planning to stay?—and wondering, was he in truth like Judah? would Judah have refused to come to his, Ian’s, funeral, and should he prove a point by going? would his mother be glad? would she consider his return a victory or capitulation—and for whom, to whom? So Finney had questions and Ian had questions; he hung up and turned on the light. He could see his own reflection in the room’s one window—adrift, legless, surrounded by smoke. Judah had used a toast Ian proposed—lifting his hand to the mirroring window, invoking the thick, deep-voiced ghost: “May you live all the days of your life.”

“You’ve been cut out.”

“Of what?”

“The will,” Maggie told him. “You’d have gotten everything if only you’d arrived.”

“When? For the funeral?”

“No—when he sent that letter. When he asked us both to come, six months ago.”

This phone was white. He had called her collect from Detroit. His company, he told her, was the bus-and-truck road show for
Excalibur
; next month they would start a swing south. They had been in touch before, but now the will was filed.

“He so much wanted you to visit,” Maggie said. “We both did. You’ll get what Finney calls a handsome settlement.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the service.”

“We didn’t expect you. Not really.”

Ian stretched the telephone cord, then watched it spring back, coiling. “What letter?”

It was eight o’clock at night, the day after Judah’s funeral. He was standing in the cloakroom of the theater bar. There was so long a silence that he thought they’d been cut off. Finally she said, “You didn’t get it?”

“What?”

“The letter Finney sent.”

“Not that I remember.”

“Try to.”

“No.”

“I knew he was incompetent,” said Maggie. “I never believed him dishonest.”

The cloakroom attendant was dressed like a French maid—black mesh stockings and a short white skirt, high heels and a black bow. She was forty, however, and fat.

“Who?”

“Finney. Not your father.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ian said. “I might have opened it and thrown the thing away.” The cloakroom attendant tapped at her watch. She raised her eyebrows, shook her head. “It makes no difference.”

“Darling . . .”

“I’ve got to go now,” Ian said. “Entertain the troops.”

“Do keep in touch.”

“I will,” he promised and hung up. He did not call again.

Arriving at the Big House, therefore, he tells himself it’s unplanned. He could have kept on driving, could make it up to Burlington or Montreal by nightfall, or any of the towns between: Rutland, Middlebury, Montpelier. He could find a friend or make a friend or buy a bed to lie in—but that would have been avoidance. Though he’s managed to avoid this corner of Vermont for years, he finds himself unwilling to tuck his tail under and run. Habits are for breaking, Judah said. And Ian knows the road; his two hundred forty horses know the way.

Yet the roads have altered. What had been dirt is tar now; where the pharmacy once stood is a McDonald’s. They’ve put a highway through, and when he noses past what used to be the Parker place he sees a concrete overpass. There are cloverleafs for trucks; there’s a pink haze in his rearview mirror that he assumes is sunset till he sees the sun off to the west. Shocked, he reconnoiters; the village is a township now, creating its own evening light; the Sherbrookes’ thousand acres have been bordered by cement.

He drives the land’s perimeter. He knows the access routes and is unreasoningly pleased to see them blocked. There are
No Trespass
and
Private Property
signs, and locked gates everywhere, there is a high stone wall for half a mile, then a four-strand barbed-wire fence. He stops the car on the edge of the road, gets out and locks it, and decides to enter the grounds of the Big House on foot. As his father might have done, he checks the tight-strung wire. Finding a rusty stretch with give to it, he holds the bottom strand down with his shoe, lifts the second strand up, and slides through. There is snow on the north-facing slope in front of him, but the earth is soft and wet. It is early April, and he smells things breathe and thaw. Someone has been spreading manure on what he calculates must be the Shed field to his right; the breeze comes from the east.

Ian leans against a silver birch and collects his breath. It’s not that he’s short-winded, but his belly’s in his throat, there’s more to this, he tells himself, than he bargained for. He’d been a city boy the last half of his life. Yet it’s like swimming or riding, he thinks, once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget. You grow stiff with disuse or lose the edge that practice gives, but you know the silver birch from beech, and recognize that oak tree there in front of you, at the edge of the stand of split-leaf maple. A freight train down by Eagle’s Bridge gives four pulls on the whistle as it shunts across the roadbed; it’s a sound that heralds bedtime, as it did when he was six.

So Ian sits. He finds a boulder to sit on and pulls his knees up and supports his elbows on his knees. He rests his chin on his hands. He faces the house a half mile away and summons up his education to do battle with the breath-stopping, summoning glow of it all. This is absurd, he tells himself: the Prodigal Returned. You can’t go home again; home is where they have to take you in; what goes around comes around—it’s every cliché in the book.

This does not work, however; he cannot make such fun or mockery of homecoming as to make it simple to go home. He sits wreathed to himself on a cold April night (the very picture of his mother in a man, Hattie used to say, but a chip off the old Sherbrooke block) and fights for breath as once when he had asthma, and inhales for the count of eight and holds. He sits there for some time.

“Don’t go.”

“We’re going.” Maggie had taken his hand.

“Don’t.”

“You come too, Judah. Or visit us at least.”

“No.”

“Please . . .”

“Leave and you take yourself with you,” his father said. “Go, but don’t ever come back.” Judah, not quite pleading, would plead for his young wife’s attention, and she gave him that but never what he truly asked for, never let herself be bound by what Hattie called tight marriage ties and she a hangman’s noose. Though Ian had not understood the terms of the discussion, he heard the words and saw them argue and knew it was more than a matter of language. Their argument had been impersonal, nearly—as if they liked each other well enough, loved each other always, but stood up for ways of being that could not be wed.

Maggie was flirtatious, Judah stern; she was gay where his father was grim. Although they owned the largest house and holdings in their corner of Vermont, her vanity had been to do without possessions. He was tight-fisted and she open-handed; he was white-haired and Maggie a blonde. She took pleasure in cities her husband abhorred, the art and music he derided or refused to discuss. When telling Ian about Woodstock or “the summer of love” or the civil rights movement, for example, she had been sympathetic. Judah’s politics, his wife declared, were to the right of Attila the Hun; he had never met a piece of legislation he believed was worth the fuss.

But she believed the government could prove a force for social good, and was worth respecting. Judah, a New Englander, voted for Republicans; she was a Democrat. Ian heard workmen in the fields or coming out of bars or barns tell jokes about old Sherbrooke’s young bare-naked wife. He merely had to show himself to silence their backslapping hilarity, but this happened often. Maggie admired those who shared things, while her husband was retentive; she had hoped to travel; he to stay at home. She had been beauty incarnate, and they gossiped in the town.

Yet there is much he does not, cannot understand—how leaving and loving, for instance, are two sides of the one coin. For Maggie came back in the end. A year ago exactly she had returned to the Big House and settled in again. She who proposed a different kind of sharing had shared in her husband’s last months. They had lived apart for seven years, but hadn’t once mentioned divorce. Then Judah bought her back. If Ian has not been what others would call dutiful, it is in part because his mother occupies the place she hauled him from and made him think of as a golden prison-cage.