Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (29 page)

But then he had his heart attack and everything was blockage, stoppage, old age fisting fingers through his arteries like ice. Then he was on borrowed time, with credit running out. Then he was at every instant’s mercy, and his sister doled out blood-thinning pills. Maggie watched. He winked at her. He gave Hattie maraschino cherries in exchange, and she said the Lord’s mercy abounded, and he himself had no real fear of credit running out. He said the Lord was not an accountant with favored clientele; you don’t tally debits and credits for angina pectoris if you’ve reached the ripe old age of seventy-six.

“You take that pill now,” Hattie urged. “It’s just one extra swallow in the day.”

Judah choked the white pills back. He gagged on them, Maggie knew; though they were smaller than anything else he ate, they would enlarge in his mouth. They filled the space behind his tongue and thickened as his throat thinned down, and he tried to feel his thick red blood go watery because of the helpful effect of the pills. In their shared room, at night, he spoke to Maggie about it. He wondered should he go on living if living were a hardship, and wondered when he’d know it had become a hardship that wasn’t worth enduring, or was too hard to bear. “You’ll know,” she told him, and he puckered the skin of his cheeks and furrowed the skin of his forehead, concentrating, attempting to know.

They trot the first mile back. Then, at the trail’s highest point, she halts, and her son draws up beside her while they survey what they own. “I like things best in spring,” she says. “You see the contours of the land, the edges—that river there, those foothills. It’s such a green profusion in the summertime; everything crowds together. In a month.”

“I sneeze,” Ian says.

“What?”

“In a month I start to sneeze,” he reminds her. “For all of June.”

“Still? I thought you’d outgrown it.”

“In cities it isn’t so bad. There ain’t no pollination in cement.”

Maggie smiles—her overgrown infant, faking bumpkin chatter in the breeze. “You could have shots.”

“No.”

She looks at Ian sidelong, studying. He wears a red shirt, has gray-blue eyes; his horse is brown. The fields are umber and ocher and a translucent green. “I lied to you,” Maggie says.

He rolls his sleeve down, carefully, then buttons it. He shifts the reins, then does the same, less carefully, to his left sleeve.

“About what?”

“My pregnancy.”

“I thought maybe,” he says. “Menopause. You’re not pregnant, are you?”

There is relief in his voice, and she hears this with regret. “I am.”

“Then how did you lie?”

“It isn’t maybe,” she says. “It’s definite. And I do know the father.”

“Who . . .”

“I got the tests back yesterday. The rabbit says ‘yes.’ Yes.”

“Well.” Ian masters himself. “Just you and me and baby makes three.”

She takes his tone. “That’s what I’d hoped you’d say,” she says.

(Maggie had called the doctor. She introduced herself, and they discussed the weather—the astonishing quantity of rain, okay; and how are you feeling this morning, is it still like this next month in your country, this part of the country, okay, it’s devastation elsewhere, Walter Cronkite says, because of the drought; his wife had never seen such activity, moreover, as with the cows at auction, they went Wednesday night, where we come from such animals are sacred—while she waited for her breathing to quiet, for the hint of yes or no or maybe that would organize his prattle into prophecy, her fate. He told her in his singsong fashion that they hoped to have some cousins come, their relatives would visit just as quickly as the passage could be arranged, okay, and has she been to Albany to see the mall like Delhi’s, and would she recommend Las Vegas as a vacation destination since his wife had a passion for gambling, okay, unfortunate, but true. Finally she asked him outright, and he said, “Congratulations, Mrs. Sherbrooke, you’re a very lucky woman, you must give your husband my compliments. Yes.”)

“This is the last ride,” Ian says, “the three of us will take.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

“Hang on.”

There is a passage in the letters that she knows by heart. It gives life to that archaic language, those beliefs she does not share, and to her present hopes. Anne-Maria wrote:

“Guatemala is a Pleasant Land, with what I venture to approve will be a Healthfull Climate and a people anxious to receive the Call. One tale I wish to tell you, brother, in the Belief it signifies; down here there is a Native Child who has had his tongue spliced from some Harsh Foreman’s cruelty. Who knows the cause? I could not ascertain it, nor do the parents willingly speak of the case (if indeed they be his Parents under whose thatched roof he lies and whose fire he tends, whose food shares). Perhaps it was the common treatment for some childish Deviltry; perhaps indeed he was born thus, as some in the Village make claim. He is a silent boy—ten years old or thereabouts, lissome in contour and gait. We could not make him Speak to us, though Willard is adept at speech, the dialect no obstacle, and I have always had—as I trust you will grant is plain Truth and not Boastful—a way of talking with the Young.

“Still, Jo resisted. I call him Jo because his actuall name is far far longer, a disharmonious series of x’s it is difficult to write. I would bring him little gifts and sit by the Fire he stirred (Evil comes to these huts if the hearth-flame Expire) and Eat of his corn-cakes and drink the milky water here from the one tin cup. I will not bother you with details of my talk. I spoke of the Green Mountains where in America we live, and how someday I hoped to show him railroad trains such as our Father possessed. I spoke of the tablets of Mormon, and how it is our fast Belief that revelation persists—that even in these latter ages God may speak to man. He listened, his lips closed. I must confess that, as the weeks continued with no utterance from Jo, my resolution failed. I thought perhaps the forked tongue was the Sign of some Satanic presence, not an attentive Child. Imagine if you will how when he wiped his lips, having shared our frugal repast or proffered me his own, a segment of his tongue caressed the upper lip whilst simultaneous with that a segment licked the nether. Yet in the third week he said, ‘Hold’—in the fourth ‘Urim and Thummin’—in the fifth said, ‘Mrs. Sheldon, you are a good woman to me.’

“I wept; I weep to write it; there is grace abounding in the farthest reaches of our Earth.”

IX

She keeps it a secret as long as she can, and for many reasons. First, she’s superstitious. Keep your head in the sand, she tells herself; don’t count a chicken till hatched. If she does not identify the future’s danger or delight, it might not come to pass. She dismisses Mrs. Russell so the cleaning woman cannot see her; if she is not seen, she tells herself, her stomach is not visible. Because of Ian’s presence and the mess that a third person makes, Mrs. Russell is willing to go.

There might be complications. Maggie does not know this pregnancy will come to term; the odds seem strongly against it. But in the fifth month of gestation she takes the test for Down’s Syndrome; whatever is in her is whole. She passes; they pass; she feels as if the doctor is a hard taskmaster, testing her. He slaps the needle on her stomach like a ruler, and she waits for his verdict like grades. Then he becomes a guru and benign; she feels herself falling in love. He and Ian are the two men in her life, the only two who know. Ian keeps her secret, she is sure. And in the fifth month she requests Dr. Rahsawala not to tell; she tells him how she hopes to give her husband a gift. For the same reason, Maggie says, she does not want to know the baby’s sex. He offers her the option, but she says she’s superstitious and would rather be surprised.

The road to his office is magic. It takes forever to arrive and no time at all to return. Then, when she falls in love with him, she drives there in an instant and takes forever to crawl home. In July he says, “Mrs. Sherbrooke, I know you’re a widow, okay, I do not mind.” He sits behind the desk, his brown face smooth, his hair slicked back, drinking Coca-Cola from a coffee mug. She bleeds a little the next day, and calls him, and he tells her not to leave her bed. She does remain there, attempting to read until the spotting stops. For the time it lasts, however, she contemplates miscarriage, and learns past contradiction—from the heart-stopping sorrow that wells up in her, and the tears she cannot stop—how much she wants this child. She is afraid of bearing it but terrified of losing it; the tea Ian brings her is too strong to drink. She studies herself in the bedside mirror—a wild, aging woman who’s come to this pass, who’ll stay in bed if necessary till her baby’s born.

It has no sex. It is neither he nor she, but it, unnameable. Her life’s blood is its drink. She eats for nourishment, not pleasure, and remembers how, when half this age and carrying her second son, she had been ravenous. Judah bought her raspberries, and she ate two pints at a sitting, with cream. He’d bring her garden produce, and she’d go through a whole plate of greens. Now Maggie’s appetite is gone; now there seems no room inside her for food, and she keeps it down just long enough for it to eat. She is, continually, ill. Hattie notices at last but thinks it is some past-due change, some retribution for the way she used to guzzle but put on no weight. “You’re eating too much pie,” the old woman says, and Maggie dares not reveal that she bakes pie for the Boudreaus but cannot take a bite. If she makes it till her seventh month, she knows, the baby will likely survive.

But seven months means September and an eternity away. The summer has grown hot. The house is well shaded by maples, but there’s never air. July has been so wet, she hears, that the corn’s drowning. Her room in daylight is an incubation cell. At night, with the electric fan and lying on top of the sheets, Maggie can find fitful rest—six hours of surcease. She never sleeps longer than that. She leaves the Big House only to drive to the doctor’s house, and only once every two weeks. He is solicitous—talkative and watchful both at once. By August she knows love for him is only for his office—that it has become her safe haven. He has not seen her in her slender previous integrity; he is not shocked. The room is white. There’s a photograph of Everest and one of llamas and a woodcut that he tells her represents the dancing Krishna. He tells her that she must relax her mind, okay, and for the rest of August she fears not her body but mind.

She finds herself walking the house. It is not truly sleepwalking, since she does not sleep. But in a kind of trance she finds herself in laundry rooms, or in the greenhouse they emptied last winter, or in the back halls and attic. The cellar is a comfort, even with troublesome pumps. Water beaded on the walls where it had always beaded, and dry rot on the support beams of the cellar (she recognizes the traces now, since Judah had pointed them out) still leaves enough support to hold three times the weight. She knows the flooring—cement or dirt or, in the laundry rooms, linoleum tile—is backed on solid ground.

But the attic is a trial. There everything has been jumbled together, and crates strewn every whichway, with spiders and bats in the eaves. Attics are the place, says Hattie, closest to God and most heaven-aspiring. It behooves a person to maintain a cleanly attic, because otherwise a person is in secret disrepair. Yet the Big House attic is not beyond reproach; Hattie reproaches herself for that; she was always promising to make sense of the storage bins and organize the shelves.

For Maggie feels herself discarded, up in the heights of the house. She fingers instruments that no one plays or tennis rackets with strings snapped and even their wood presses warped and everything askew. She uncovers baseball gloves. Their webbings have been torn. She finds newspapers and magazines retailing early, simple times when nothing was a relic yet that now she moves past gingerly, her head against the beams. There are music stands and curtain rods and Venetian blinds. The closet is a receptacle, a space to fill with litter that is only not-quite waste. There are swallows’ nests. She hunts their skeletons and can find none; they must have followed a favoring wind right out the eyebrow vents.

Once, the previous winter, when she and Hattie went to tea at Helen Bingham’s, there had been a break-in at the house.

“Why don’t you join us this afternoon?” Hattie had asked. “Helen would be pleased to have you, and we could drive over together.”

Maggie, though she despised such gatherings—the wax floral centerpiece, the women cackling over someone else’s troubles and clucking over their own—had just this once agreed. The snow was powder-pure. They stayed till dark and followed a snowplow back home.

There had been tracks on the porch. The kitchen door was broken, and one chair pulled near to the potbelly stove. Nothing had been stolen and nothing else touched; she liked to think of some cold traveler, meticulous but needing rest, grateful for the kitchen’s dark quiet—apologetic, really, about that single smashed lock.

Hattie wanted to call the police. “We’ll catch him, sure. It’s easy to track fugitives in snow.”

But Maggie refused. “Breaking and entering. That isn’t such a sin.”

“It is,” Hattie told her. “He ought to spend the night in jail. He had no business here.”

“How do you know it was ‘he’?”

“A person knows.”

“Well, what if it was Ian? Or somebody like him?”

“I’m shocked,” Hattie said, “that you could even think a son of yours would do such things. That you’d harbor such a criminal.”

“Don’t let’s call. They’d never catch him anyway. You’d just be sending the police all over creation in this weather.”

“If it’s what you want.”

“Yes.”

“Mollycoddling criminals . . .”

Maggie—so giddy with elation she almost wished the intruder were upstairs, in some closet and not, as the tracks on the porch plainly showed, gone—raised her hands. “You got me dead to rights,” she said. She tells herself she welcomes each invasion and escape.

Boudreau trims lawns; he circles their house like a drone. And when he mows the meadow grass he attaches a wagon to the tractor and sucks and spits up weeds with what Maggie thinks of as a giant vacuum cleaner. Judah had invented it years back. He’d built a wire housing on a wagon to hold the catch, and she delighted seeing the green swaths he cut through thistle. In the early mornings now, or at dusk when she knows she might wander unnoticed, Maggie walks by the tamarack and willows and through the river-birch stand. The air is palpable—so thick with gnats and pollen that it feels like netting parting where she walks. There are odors in the air she feels she might swallow or drink. Sprinklers chirrup at the flower beds, and everything enchants her with its hot somnolence. The stone walls of the property appear to her as if they are both parapets and moat.

Then Finney calls. “I haven’t seen you.” He coughs, as if announcing himself at an untended counter. “Not all these weeks.”

“No.”

“Months, it feels like.”

“And you’re just checking in,” Maggie prompts.

“Yes. Something like that.”

“Well, we’re fine. Don’t worry on our account, Samson; you’ve got more likely candidates for sympathy.”

“I don’t doubt. How’s Ian?”

“Fine, we’re fine. Is there something you wanted to ask?”

There is silence on the phone. She pictures him, considering, tamping down his pipe or rearranging stacks of sheets within the rolltop desk. “I only thought I ought to warn you,” Finney says at last. “I’m a small-town lawyer. Licensed in Vermont. I don’t know what they do down there in that fancy Manhattan of yours—though if you ask me they don’t either, if you push us to it we’d get ourselves a verdict half the time. That’s my opinion, anyhow—put small-town savvy at the bench with big-city smarts, and small-town savvy can win. That’s how I’ve lived my life. Or tried to.”

Maggie waits.

“But I have to admit it, I’m stumped.” His voice has a queer weariness, as if admitting to confusion has confused him further. “Judah was—well, I don’t need to tell you—he was adamant about divorce. Which meant remarriage, far as he saw it. So that carried over, Maggie, and he didn’t want you marrying after he was dead. Now this could be challenged, I daresay”—his voice cracks, and she hears him sigh, exhaling—“by one of those lawyers, who’d no doubt be glad for a cut. But it boils down to loyalty—stay Mrs. Judah Sherbrooke and you keep the whole estate. Get married and it’s gone.”

“How could I have signed that?” Maggie asks.

“You didn’t have to. It was Judah’s signature we needed.”

“Well, how could
he
?”

In Los Angeles, Maggie finds herself remembering, there were Santas slung from palm trees and a sleigh with reindeer rigged above the boulevard. She sat in a car in Bel Air, warm, watching joggers, waiting at an intersection for the light to change. She mentioned that it did seem strange: a plastic Santa leapfrogging traffic. Her companion said, “Yeah, that’s California,” and put his car in gear.

“You take my meaning,” Finney says.

“Not really. No.”

“Do I have to spell it out?”

“Maybe,” she tells him. “It’s not what you think, Samson, I’m not planning to marry just now.”

“What I think doesn’t matter. My opinion doesn’t count.” He breathes so that she hears it, as if inhaling probity. Maggie senses he behaves this way in the courthouse, and the claim of weakness is a move he makes by habit, falling back. He makes his counter-claim. “But there’s rumors going round. Things people see and say.”

She remembers, also, a woman in a sable coat. The woman wore leg braces and blue hair. She was sitting on a park bench with two tethered Pekingese.

“What kind of rumors?” Maggie asks.

“That Judah has a baby coming. Just a little late. I don’t deny or confirm it, you understand, I know nothing about it at all. But I do believe you should know,” Finney says.

She uncoils the black cord, then twists it again.

“And remember you can’t remarry or the Big House goes on the block. Dismantled. Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says, “but there’s two options that I see. Providing there’s a grain of truth in what we’re discussing. In which case, of course, it’s something to celebrate, right? You mustn’t mind me saying this, but—well; it’s either a Sherbrooke or bastard. Correct?”

“You accept the rumors?”

“You haven’t let me visit.” His voice is steady now, official. “I’m talking hearsay, not eyewitness evidence. If it’s the prior instance—Judah Sherbrooke’s child—then it may be tongues will wag; there may be a few difficulties—but no legal problems, follow?” He pauses. “At least not in this state. At least not in this town. No objection I can foresee. If it’s the second instance, however,” Finney says, “the testament obtains.”

She tries to pay attention as he talks about the options consequent on birth. He wants the child to be Judah’s; he is willing to believe it, because that’s how Sherbrookes behave. She is not shocked. She wants to feel—or simulate—shock, but knows he’d take her protestations for guilt. What’s guilty in the land’s law is, for Sherbrookes, innocence. Though she could sue to keep the place, and the presumptions and precedents are in her favor, says Finney, there are certain battles it seems smarter not to fight. “ ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ is my motto,” he says. “Or pass it on to Ian while you can.”

So once again, thinks Maggie, she’s being controlled by her husband and is bending to his will. If she raises the child in the Big House, it has to be called Judah’s child. She supposes that this happened with some frequency in 1500, on feudal estates; women lied about their children’s parentage. But this is not 1500, or feudal estates, and she’s trying against odds to have what’s hers to hold.

It could have been wind chaff, or sperm in a bathtub; she reads of a mother who claimed to be a virgin, and that she’d been impregnated by some total stranger’s emission in the swimming pool. There are those who swear to virgin births; an egg is activated by a needle, Maggie knows. It had been inadvertent. She could have slept with Andrew or not slept with Andrew, could have told him or not told him how they had conceived. She tells herself that Andrew was the swimming pool, or needle; the child is hers alone. With every week and month she waits, the temptations of her privacy increase.