Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (43 page)

“That’s how I feel,” Maggie said.

“Is this a dismissal, dear?”

“It is.”

Miss Mason gathered her things; it had been the end of the month. Her sister needed help in Westerly, and she herself was sixty-five—too old for this kind of trouble. She’d had enough of cranky folk who thought because they raised a child or two they were more expert than the experts. Because you built a bookcase would you try to build a house, she asked; because you made a dress one time would you set up in business? She had letters from the Vanderbilts and Whitneys and others she’d as soon not name that praised her competence; babies scratch themselves and have been scratching themselves since time began and will go on doing so no matter how often you cut back their nails. She had been planning to give notice anyhow. And now she’d used the word, said Eleanor, now they were finally having this conversation, she couldn’t help
noticing
things in the house: how poorly they’d been managed. If Mrs. Sherbrooke wanted Jane to grow up sad and wrong, why she should just continue doing what she’d done.

The Mexican Hairless was sick. It gagged and heaved. The nurse was trying to salvage some sort of dignity from the dismissal, but her dog was trembling and her suitcase would not shut. She struggled to preserve her precarious hard-won disdain; she tied up the suitcase with cord. The way some people treat you, Eleanor said, it’s enough to make you sick; it’s not the way a person ought to treat their dog. She’s sorry if she spoke her mind, but she’s a plain-speaking person, always has been and will stay that way: a knife that won’t cut melted butter is the sharpest one you’ve got. And she’d rather go to Westerly where value given was value received than stay with those who don’t appreciate her one single additional night.

It had made Maggie sad to see the woman go. Such garrulity was harmless, after all, a way of filling up the space that silence made. So when Miss Mason left (setting out in her Volare like an unloved upright Mary Poppins, telling Ian that the drive was hard on Lassie, harder than he’d ever guess because the motion made her frantic, all that high-speed humming and exhaust: dogs’ ears are sensitive, that’s why she seems so nervous now, their sense of smell is acute, they know a lot about the world without having to see it) she kept Jane in her bed.

That night, at midnight, she awakened to a full moon outside her window and a caricature cheese-face imprinted on the pane. A squirrel chittered in the eaves; she heard the freight train shunting down by Eagle’s Bridge. Her daughter slept, untroubled, surrounded by pillows. There were flowers on her sheets. Moon shadows invaded the room. They formed rabbits and skeletal shapes—the magnified figures of twigs. Maggie can remember thinking, as clouds scudded past and the furnace clicked on, as the clock continued in a different register,
Help me, I’m falling apart.

Helen Bingham said, “She’s wonderful. Wonderful, really.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not exaggerating. I’m not the kind of person who exaggerates. So lively, such a handful . . .”

“That’s true enough,” Maggie said.

“I marvel at it. So alert.” Helen Bingham turned to Jane. “Come over here, will you.” Jane came. “How old are you?”

“Two years old.”

“And when’s your birthday?”

“October thirty-one.”

“A smart one.” Helen nodded. “That’s Hallowe’en, you know.”

“I know.” Jane looked at them unblinkingly.

“What will you be this Hallowe’en. A princess?”

“No.”

“A witch?”

Jane shook her head.

“The whole world dresses up for her birthday,” Maggie said. She studied her fingers.

“Not me.”

“Not you?” asked Helen. “Why not?”

Jane raised her shoulders, shook her head.

“She should have playmates.”

“Yes,” Maggie said.

“There ought to be some other children in this house. Have you looked into play groups?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Cinderella?” Each time Helen spoke to Jane, her voice would rise an octave. “Is that who you’re going to be?”

“Susie,” Jane said.

“Who’s Susie?”

“My imaginary friend.”

Helen clapped her hands. “Did you hear that?
Imaginary friend
. My imaginary friend. Oh my . . .”

“It’s time for your nap,” Maggie said.

Jane approached the couch they sat on, wordless, purposive and took her yellow blanket. She took her bottle also and lay down. Her eyes were blue, long-lashed; she did not close her eyes.

Barns get pegged, Judah had explained to her, not nailed. That way the whole thing has some give, you watch a barn creaking you know what I mean—the whole thing’s likely to collapse sooner than any part of it. So wall by wall in Maggie’s vision becomes rectangular translucency, a shapeliness adhering to itself: she watches planks go brown then black, with Boudreau stretched full length on the hay like some stone warrior, only drunk, only forgetful, the third side of a triangle whose other leg was Hattie, their junction that point in the pond where he dove to find a corpse and would dive again.

Did he run blindly? Maggie wonders. Can you keep your eyes open if your beard and hair are burning? Hattie, the night before, left her eyeglasses behind. She had known the way. She breasted a path through the collapsing foliage that Boudreau, tracking her, would tread again, its density in any case diminished by the season; so perhaps he raced through cattails that had been parted before. Drop a plumb line from the apex of the figure that they make; make that apex the conjunction of Boudreau’s hands and Hattie’s when he hauls her to the mudbank, dead; bisect such painful symmetry and out comes Baby Jane.

It had been Hallowe’en. Seabirds that ride on the ninth wave from shore are the souls of the dead, sailors say. She remembers when she used to dress up like a witch and climb the tree on Hallowe’en, with cooked but cold spaghetti in the pot. There would be light from the Toy House—enough to show the stars on her crepe cone. Children would gather beneath her; she would lower the spaghetti to them like a rope of worms. Ian—who had been in on the joke—would stand by her side twisting his fingers, cackling when she cackled: “Take, take, take.” She wore a nightgown, Hattie complained; they could look up her legs in that tree.

“Well, what will we call her?” Ian asked. He was back in the room, by her bed.

“Her?” Maggie was crying. “Her?”

“Your daughter,” Ian said. “This little lady here.”

“Is she all right?”

The doctor bent above her. His teeth had the luster of pearls. “I told you so already, Mrs. Sherbrooke. A fine healthy baby girl.”

“Yes.” The tears were independent, alien, some other someone’s water squeezed from her. She forced them out like afterbirth.

“Congratulations,” Ian said. “We’ll call her Baby Sherbrooke for a while.”

“Jane,” she said. “Plain Jane.”

“You mean that?”

She heard sirens. She attempted to sit up, but Ian pressed her shoulder. “I’m not joking,” Maggie said. “Just Jane.”

“Jane Sherbrooke.” He turned to Dr. Rahsawala. The baby was wailing, convulsive, gasping for air that would prime the lungs’ pump—that fear allayed on the instant, though in weeks to come they took her to the hospital for every sort of test. There was silver nitrate in her eyes. The choked, high-pitched lament Maggie heard across the room meant severance, a chorus: best of all not to be born.

The Big House has four floors. The attic, Maggie warns herself, can lift at any moment in a southeast wind. It is moored to the house by the frame’s insubstantial anchor only, and wind whistles through it like a signal to hoist sail. She hopes the snows increase. If it’s bad enough and they fail to get the entrance plowed, then nobody will come. They can open the doors to the building, and two o’clock will come and go and three-thirty come and go, and she can say to Ian, “See. I told you so.” He’d scowl and lock the door again and say, “Just wait till springtime. That’s when you get your first tourists.” The mud room will hang no strange shapes.

The first time they hung coats in there, Maggie had been shocked. She carried Jane out of the house. They drove away just as the second set of visitors arrived, and returned as the last car departed. She had refused to countenance his plan—his crazy way of circumventing roads. What you do is build roadblocks, she said, not invite the world under your roof. What the government gives you with one hand they take away with the other; she distrusts the National Register of Historic Places and their letters of approval and their plaques. What you do is keep strangers away, not ask them in to eat your porridge and sit in your chair.

Then shame possessed her for her adamancy, her sounding so like Judah that she could hear him approve. Those had been his arguments, not hers; that had been his way of toting up accounts. He had been more litigious than their lawyer, Samson Finney; he wrote simultaneous testaments, then decided which one should apply. Maggie urged her husband to share and share alike, but with his homegrown sense of equity he tacked up No Trespassing signs.

So she yielded to Ian’s insistence. He convinced her that his strategy was sane; in order to keep out traffic they had to open the gates. She called the paying visitors their “guests.” The second Thursday, when guests arrived, she stayed upstairs with Jane. There had been noises beneath her, and the sound of scuffling feet, and when Ian rang the gong to tell her that the coast was clear, the coast was covered with mud. She vacuumed all that night. She had time before the next invasion, and she wanted no strange fingerprints on the counters or the walls. She mopped the kitchen floor. Ian said he’d had six visitors, and nobody entered the kitchen; she said the floor required mopping once a month. “At eleven o’clock?” he inquired. “Mrs. Russell does it, doesn’t she? And she’s coming tomorrow.”

“But I’m not tired,” said Maggie, rinsing, “and I feel like doing something.”

Ian bought mannequins. He knotted scarves. “Jane will love this stuff,” he said. He spaced dummies in the sewing room as if at a tea party, and dressed them carefully. The room was a success. He called it “Touch and Try,” and left a heap of jackets and bonnets and shawls on the ironing board. There was one blouse with thirty-eight mother-of-pearl buttons down the back; there were riding habits and a collection of collars. When she set the room straight, afterward, the mannequins would have been moved. Their wigs had come uncurled.

A woman with a plastic face pauses at the church in order to remove her hat. She holds a parasol. Another bends to stoke a stove, and her face is black. Happy huntsmen come through woods with a stuffed deer slung from a pole; children sit around a table, raising pewter spoons to bowls half full of papier-mâché eggs; there’s a slab of cardboard bacon on each plate. These are reconstructions she has seen in the local museum. She stands behind the cord or glass and watches her own vividness go dim: mother and children, a tableau vivant—note especially the shark's-tooth's necklace on the three-year-old. This may be an amulet intended to ward off evil. Note also the harpoon on the wall, and the trout net by the snowshoes; a trapper’s implements have been set out for cleaning on the workbench to your right.

Maggie tells herself Jude’s stories. There is the one about the beekeeper followed everywhere by bees. When they swarmed they swarmed to him, and he was honey all over. There is the one about the crow who thought it was a duck, and the dog that found its master five hundred miles from home, in Boston, on a subway car. Her heart is beating rapidly; it hurts. She opens the door to her room. This is Thursday; she has to prepare. There is the story of the bank clerk who increased the balance sheet of anyone he trusted and considered deserving. He’d embezzle fifty dollars at a time and spread it through the accounts. They were little windfalls, always, not enough to query or get curious about—but enough to make a difference for a birthday celebration or a fine wedding present or maybe a new coat of paint. He was forty when he started, and went on till retirement without being caught. Afterward he told Judah that he’d done it to plow back excess profits—to do what he said the bank
should
do for the community it serves.

Maggie listens for some sound from Jane. She is not distracted. There’s the one about Sebastian who was a night watchman at the plastics plant. One night the boiler exploded. They put out the fire with help from every volunteer department in a twenty-mile circle; Judah had been there, and it took the best part of a night. Once it was possible to get inside, they hunted for Sebastian and could find no part of him. They called his daughter to see if he’d maybe stayed home, and his daughter said no, but could she give him a message? No message, the firemen said.

Then Judah found a watch. It was waterproof and fireproof and shatterproof, and registered twelve fourteen. They identified it as Sebastian’s watch, and then they found a piece of what was once a shoulder, and a metal shoe tip that had melted into toes. They held a full-scale funeral, but the only thing they buried was his watch.

“Those aren’t the right stories for Ian,” Maggie had maintained. “Tell him something sensible.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with the stories I know?”

“They’re pointless,” Maggie said.

“You sit around and listen.” Judah bit his right thumb’s cuticle. “That’s how you pick things up.”