Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (32 page)

“Finney tells me there are rumors. Hattie knows. So everybody will.”

“She won’t object,” says Ian. “All she wants is to preserve the family name.”

“The family.”

“No. The family name. There’s a difference.”

She closes her eyes in the box. They bury the poor in mass graves. Undertakers are arrested, Hattie knows, for taking money from the state, then burying poor children by the dozen in a box. This box is a mass grave for Sherbrookes; they are buried with her, soundlessly, in tiers on the oak walls.

“You may be right,” the woman says. “She thinks
you’re
the father, you see.”

There is silence. Then Ian says, “You’re joking.”

“No. I wish I was. Or
she
was, anyhow.”

They laugh, and Hattie hears the madness in their laughter—chittering, high-pitched. She presses her eyes shut, but opens them again; nothing changes; nothing’s changed; this is her nightmare’s truth.

“Even better,” Ian says, “if we do it my way. Then the child is mine and you’re its grandmother, not mother. A proper Sherbrooke baby.”

“They’d believe that,” Maggie says. “It does make more sense.” But then her voice shifts register, goes flat. “And what about the baby? Would you tell the baby you’re its father?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought it out.”

“Of course you did. The child grows up not knowing who’s its mother, not knowing who its father was; you have an extra added burden, darling, on those broad, broad shoulders; it’s a
splendid
plan. I’m the one who’s being unreasonable, I know that.” She pauses; Hattie needs to sneeze. She presses her hand on the bridge of her nose, fiercely. “Just a muddleheaded woman who thought this baby’s hers. And had a right to stay that way.”

“I’m sorry,” Ian says.

“Who didn’t want to lie. Tip-top,” Maggie says. “A-okay.”

It is possible, Hattie thinks, that the elevator shaft is—what’s the word for it? She concentrates, reaching for it at her tongue’s tip like a cherry—
conical
. That would mean the square she sits in sits within a circle. That would explain why she whirls. That would mean there’s world enough, a sufficiency unto the day; it’s why she’s twirling on the bottom of this shaft like rings on a raveling string. You tie a string to your finger and tie it to the wedding ring and hold your hand perfectly still. This pregnancy test never fails; it’s a guessing game she’s made young women play forever, and in fifty out of fifty she’s guessed right. If the ring twirls left, why it’s a boy, but if the ring twirls right, then it’s a girl. She’s hanging on like that, although the cables are steel. A hangman’s noose has thirteen knots; she presses the button, ascends.

XI

They take a second cutting from the fields in August. Ian helps Hal Boudreau. There’s not much talk between them, since they are behindhand and would have to shout—but they catch each other’s rhythm, stacking hay. One man unloads; the other piles and places it, and when a wagon’s empty they sit in the barn’s shade and smoke. Hal has theories about the weather’s worsening, that it’s either drought or too much rain and all because of polar ice caps and nuclear bombs.

“The government’s been studying,” he says. “I heard about it just the other day. They figure we’re in for fifty years of trouble. You know; floods . . .”“Still, fifty years,” says Ian. “That’s hard to predict.”

“The ozone belt . . .” Hal falls silent, considering. “I recollect we used to walk through head-high snow when I was a kid. You can’t say it hasn’t warmed up.”

“The Van Allen radiation belt . . .”

“Well,” Hal says. He flicks his cigarette. “Your dad’d have us working a whole lot harder. We ain’t exactly busting ass, now are we?”

“Listen—that farmhouse. The one at the edge of the place—over by Bailey’s. You know about that?”

“The honeymoon house.”

“That’s what they call it?”

“I don’t imagine your father did. But it’s the way it was intended.”

“For whom?”

“Can’t say as I’ve been there in years.”

“You used to, though?”

“Everybody did.” He has left his bite-plate out and grins without teeth. “Half the county anyways, one time or another . . .”

His voice fades. He swings to the tractor and starts it up. “You coming?”

“Not this load,” says Ian. The other waves and winks at him, then clatters off.

Each story starts, “A stranger came to town.” Or maybe it’s that someone leaves for points unknown, then learns to know and conquer strangers or is instead enslaved. What we have here, folks, thinks Ian, is the oldest two-bit tale: it’s come on back and find your father dead, your lands lying fallow, and mother again in the family way. He is astonished at how easily his previous world fades; he steps into his childhood bedroom, scarcely breaking stride. He makes a phone call, writes a letter, returns the rented car. He has few friends to notify, and no permanent address to change. He was between jobs anyhow, he tells his aunt, when she inquires if they’re missing him at work. “Regression,” Maggie calls it, and he tells her, “No. Progression. I’m starting all over again.”

One day he adds a saw and a scythe and a twelve-pound sledge and a wrecking bar and hammers to the toolbox in the truck. He does this offhandedly, on impulse, but has been deciding to do so for weeks. It is August seventeenth. He makes his way to what he thinks of now not as the “haunted” or “honeymoon,” but Anne-Maria’s house. He drags the few sticks of furniture free. He has trouble with the mattress; it collapses on him, sighing, as he lifts it through the door.

There are two cane chairs, a packing crate that served as table, and, inexplicably, a lamp. Ian scythes a clearing in the high weeds by the house. There he spreads out the mattress, then adds the lamp and crate and chairs. He takes his wrecking tools into the entrance hall and commences to clear the place out.

This is slow work. There are nails to watch for, and glass shards, and great chunks of plaster that come away in sections. He satisfies himself that the “best parlor” wall is not a bearing wall, and attacks that, accordingly, first. The plaster shreds in his fingers; the lath is dry enough so that it also crumbles; he finds horsehair and corncobs throughout. The posts bristle with nails. He pries free the nails that tie the posts to flooring, then takes his sledge to the post-base and knocks the columns onto the diagonal. They hang from the ceiling, then drop. He carries these posts to the pile. The day is bright and hot; the downstairs windows and the door blow plaster dust at him like smoke. He waits for it to settle, but it does not settle—remaining suspended, seemingly, and thickening the air.

Ian labors through the afternoon. His arms and clothes are white. When he catches himself in a window, hair stiff with the white dust, it is as if he sees his father’s face. He takes pleasure in this business of leveling, bringing down two walls and the ceiling that first day. At six o’clock he knows he will be late for dinner at the Conovers, but continues anyhow. When it grows too dark for him to work in safety—hands and legs trembling, eyes uncertain in the wreckage—he piles his tools by the fireplace wall.

“You’re late.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You could have called.”

“I’m sorry. I just wasn’t near a phone.”

“What were you doing? Or should I ask”—Sally asks, her voice flat—“with whom were you doing it?”

“I was alone,” Ian says.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“No.”

“You selfish son of a bitch.”

“Hey, baby, be easy,” he says.

“What for, when we expected you? Why?—give me one good reason.”

He is placatory. “Because I didn’t mean it. I just got distracted.”

“Two hours late . . .”

“I’m sorry. I did want to see you.”

“Well, I called to tell the Harrises that Ida wasn’t feeling well and that we’d have to cancel. The Fisks are coming Saturday; come then. Or you could come alone right now . . .”

“I’ll do that,” Ian says.

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on,” she wheedles. “Where were you?”

“It’s a surprise,” he says.

The trouble with plays is the third act, Ian thinks; what do you do when the hero goes home or is dead? There’s room on room of vacancy he’s planning to fill full. He would tell Judah if he could that all of this has been badly arranged; he hadn’t planned to be fatherless so early, and now’s the time they’d get along; now everything is ready for the recognition scene. Except the road crew struck the set; they’re packed and waiting in production trucks, and even Stage-Door Annie has gone home. So Ian has to play his reconciliation scene alone. Judah should be hale or turned from stone to flesh to greet him or emerge barely changed from the woods. He should fling back his greatcoat, revealing true identity, and they would fall into each other’s arms, and all would be forgiven and each mystery revealed.

As the weeks pass and his mother withdraws, Ian finds himself often alone. The elms are dying, and tent caterpillars breed in the pin cherry tree. The rot is generative, however; things spawn behind each stone. He discovers, in a book of lists, that five thousand five hundred mothers out of every million in Albania are over fifty—or so the government claims. He shows her pictures of a sixty-year-old woman holding her baby. Maggie fails to find instruction in such facts.

She has been halving beans. He watches her cut off the stems, then slice them French style, expertly. What bothers him, he tries to say, is how she plays no music now, how the pianola and the upright piano fail to add up to the burned concert grand. She makes a small, dismissive gesture. “It’s the strangest case of rivalry,” he says. “Twenty-six years between siblings, and we fight over who gets the crib.”

“Go on,” Maggie says. The knife is Japanese. You sharpen it, he knows, by wiping the blade with paper.

His vision blurs; he blinks. “I’m not exactly joking.”

“No.” She studies him.

“Let me help you.”

“I’m finished now, it’s done.” She fetches a colander and pot; her hands seem green. “This isn’t easy for you, is it?”

What wells up in his throat is something he must swallow. “Boats in bottles,” Ian says. He makes a mound of the discarded stems, then scrapes them off the table into his left palm. “That’s what I’ve been building all my life.”

“The taxes,” Finney tells him, when they meet at Morrisey’s. “You can’t keep on forever. They’ll assess you into bankruptcy.”

The aisles are narrow and the light above them flickers. Outside, it rains.

“Your father knew about it,” Finney says. “He was so pigheaded stubborn he chose not to listen, is all. He made the kind of will that’s just an invitation to disaster.”

“You drew it up.” Ian has been buying beer.

“Don’t remind me. I did exactly what he asked me to. But this is the twentieth century, boy; like it or no, it’s a fact.”

“All right.”

“We ought to talk about it. You should have some legal recourse. A procedure we agree on, that we plan . . .” Finney coughs. He keeps his voice low, standing at Ian’s elbow in the checkout line. “I mean about taxes. For the eventuality. In case it should eventuate . . . You studied political science?”

“I’ll stop by your office. We’ll talk.”

Ian works at the house, thereafter, with a fixity of purpose that takes him by surprise. He is compelled. Whatever it was that had made him lethargic now makes him unable to sleep. He wakes at dawn and sets out for the site, hauling the tools he thinks he’ll need from Judah’s old toolshed by the sugarhouse. He is excitable, jumpy; his nerve ends feel filed. Yet the procedure he follows is methodical; he guts the whole house in two weeks. Each morning, on arrival, he sets fire to the accumulated refuse of the day before—saving out and setting apart the wood that might serve to rebuild. He has a childhood fear of rusty nails, since lockjaw means you’ll never talk again. And he remembers how Ray Bolger as the Tin Man needed oil to move, how tetanus can stiffen all your joints.

So he is careful, laboring. He pulls the nails from every piece of wood he saves, and keeps that stack free of the ground. He cuts the cracked panes from the windows and gathers up the glass. He removes the rotted sills. When he leaves he chokes the fire embers with plaster; where he works he sweeps. He had had, Judah told him, no skill with his hands; he had been all thumbs. Therefore the simplicity of gutting the rooms is a comfort; he exults in his precision and has all the time in the world.

Upstairs, he leaves things intact. Where the plaster has already fallen he removes a section; where the ceilings belly down he pulls them down entirely. He loves that last suspended instant prior to collapse—it is as if the wood holds back and the plaster bands together, as if their opposition to his leveling act is animate. He works in silence, but humming, happy in the house.

Now his image of Judah grows huge—not shrunk-shanked like Finney, or manageable. He knows, of course, how memory enlarges: Judah might in fact have been less sizable than in the stories about him. Long after Adam left Eden, he knows, the light in their shared house burns on. The way that Maggie looked at him was not how a mother should look. When she said, “They think
you’re
the father,” her laugh had not been guiltless. Was she embarrassed at a white lie that she helped to foster, or at its plausible truth? Had she countenanced the rumor, or simply turned blushing away? He needs to know, he tells himself, he has to find out what they’re saying, and who said it first.

So he attempts to locate the true father of her child. Ian assumes the man is married, unavailable. He imagines candidates. He thinks of the men who came and went on Sutton Place when he last shared her life. There was a flutist from the Philharmonic, a real-estate broker, a professor of law. He remembers their names. They brought flowers and wine to the apartment, and sometimes stayed the night. More often they did not remain. At eighteen, he remembers, he took a cruise with his mother and Sam Elliot to the Caribbean for two weeks. The boat was Dutch; they stopped in Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, Jamaica, and Aruba, he remembers how the trade winds bent the trees in Aruba at ninety degrees. He remembers the name of the tree—divi-divi—and how the taxi driver in Aruba spoke five languages. The three of them drank rum swizzles and played games of shuffleboard; Sam Elliot wore flowered shirts and bought him a watch at the duty-free port; he called Ian “son.”

“I’m not your son,” he protested, and Sam said it was just an expression, a word. They had been lying in deck chairs by the ship’s saltwater pool. Sam did leg-raisers and sit-ups before accepting broth. He said, “Your mother’s marvelous,” and Ian said, “I know.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Sam said, “if you see what she’s been going through.”

Ian flexed his stomach muscles, but did not raise his legs.

“You’re my chief rival, understand. I wonder if you’re cognizant of that.”

“I do have a father.”

“Yes. Well. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

“It’s hot. I need a swim.”

Maggie joined them, glistening. She wore a pink scarf on her hair, and her profile, Ian thought, looked like a raised medallion. “Whew,” she said. “If it wasn’t for this sea breeze . . .”

“There’s no breeze,” Sam said. “It’s just the forward motion. Ian and I were getting acquainted. We’ve reached agreement, you might say.”

She found her dark glasses. “On what?”

“On nothing. On the fact that you’re marvelous, Mom.”

“That isn’t nothing,” she said. “I thank you, gentlemen.”

He dove into the pool’s green depth and swam the length of it without surfacing, shutting his eyes against salt. Sam Elliot ate turtle steak near the dock in Kingston. All through the homeward journey he complained of stomach cramps; he took rumba lessons, and tried to teach Ian the steps.

Charley Strasser was a psychologist with the White Institute. He spoke about the virtues of Sullivanian group therapy, and proffered books by Harry Stack Sullivan. “But you’ve got to want it,” Charley said, “or it’s just a waste of time. You’ve got to work at confronting the self. It’s hard work, let me tell you. By comparison, I’m telling you, digging ditches is a breeze.”