Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (45 page)

The snow is unrelenting, and the ground has been buried for months. Ian has reasons to go to New York, and he proposes that they travel there together, then take some southbound plane; they have the means and leisure to go south. But Maggie seems as rooted as ever Judah was. “If I can’t get to Morrisey’s”—she tries to make a joke of it—“what’s the point of New Orleans?”

He says there’s a difference between a grocery store where everyone knows you, and a city where nobody does. “The trouble with travel,” she says, but does not complete the sentence; she turns from him, lifting her hands.

He skis across the meadow or on the woodlot trails. Jane enjoys it when he takes her piggyback—not on the skis but snowshoes, scarcely breaking the new crust. She flails her mittens at his ears and chortles, “Giddyap.” Once he took a tumble and she fell head first into the snow, feet sticking up like flags. He’d righted her, but the snow had been too deep for damage, and all Jane said, when he’d finished drying her and swung her back onto his shoulders, was: “Careful, horsey.
Care
ful.”

Her snowsuit chilled his neck. He had wanted to hurry back home. But the sun had been unimpeded that morning, and soon enough the liquid on his chest was sweat, not melting snow. They built a snowman instead. They built a different creature every other day. It was their way of populating the hills. She got to choose when they set out whether they’d carry oranges or carrots or potatoes from the kitchen. She selected buttons or bracelets and told him if he should or should not bring a corncob pipe. They built snowmen and snowladies and snowbabies, turn by turn. Her favorite was babies, and they built them near the Toy House, in a patch defined by tamaracks they called the nursery. Jane had been learning to count. She counted all the carrot slabs that made the babies’ eyes, and could go as high as twenty-nine but then said twenty-ten. If a baby had been ill-assembled and toppled in the night, or if the sun caused its ears to melt and fall, Jane put her hands on her hips the way that Maggie used to, and would say,“
Bad
girl!”

When they build snowparents, however, they elect separate spots. He lets Jane do the choosing. She never chooses a site near the house and never puts a snowman next to a snowlady. One morning he asked her why not. She said, “Because,” and he asked, “Because why?” and she said, “Because they’re different, Ian.
You
don’t understand the rules.”

The rule, he tried to tell her, is that snowmen and snowladies and snowchildren make a family, and they might as well be in one place. It saves on the telephone bills. It means if you have bad dreams in the middle of the night and you wake up calling “Mommy” or “Ian,” they’ll be around to hear. It means that though the Daddy snowman’s in some distant field, there’s family enough.

She had been unconvinced. “It’s
my
rules,” Jane had answered. “I get to do the choosing in this game. You get to build. I choose.”

“You help me building, don’t you?”

“Mm-mn.”

“So why can’t I help you choosing?”

Jane had been adamant. She bent to miss a laden pine branch, but the snowfall brushed them both. “Because it isn’t fun.”

Ian has been hoping for months to keep both Maggie and the house intact. The problem is they seem opposing problems. She wants no interfering strangers in the rooms, and his application to the National Register promised community use. He says that there are doctors who are trained and paid to help; the help she wants, she tells him, is to be left alone. When he consulted a psychologist up in Manchester, the doctor said, “Except for a formal institutionalization, Mr. Sherbrooke, there’s no way we can work with a patient who resists. And even in the former instance—which is a drastic one, at least at this juncture, and one I gather you wish to avoid—admission must be voluntary. Unless she breaks the law.”

The doctor spoke as if by rote, as if telling an illiterate person to fill out and file applications; Ian thanked him and hung up. He remembered that his mother had a lover, once, by the name of Charley Strasser who had been associated with the William Alanson White Institute. Ian could not reach him. He reached the Vice President for Staff, and the Vice President for Staff said yes, he recollected Charley, but Charley went out on the farthest twig of the renegade branch of Sullivanian analysis—and Mr. Sherbrooke no doubt understood what happened to such people; he’s not with us now.

So he buys books. He reads of postpartum depression that may last for years. He reads about the common and uncommon psychic side effects of menopause. Anxiety and dysfunction are “commonplace concomitants” of depression, but he cannot think about his mother in terms of commonplace concomitants. Therefore he waits in ignorance, telling himself he can handle the house. It has stood upright and solid since 1869. When the east wind brings the sound of plows, or nighttime comes with Maggie still in her nightgown, drinking coffee in the window seat; when the furnace gives out and the pipes in the laundry room freeze, and the greenhouse roof crumples in that January ice storm like tin in tin shears, Ian pits himself against the weather. He tries to be a kind of father to his young half-sister, trying to make up to them for all his time away.

The nightgown Maggie wears has elastic at the wrist. She pushes back the fabric and stares at the new mark. Then gravely, as if vitality were ratified because the flesh receives impressions even on a window seat, and the pink line left by elastic might serve as a bracelet of pain (this mark is there and wasn’t there this morning and will not be there tomorrow, so I exist in time, and time was things were easy and Jane will grow up happy), she readjusts the sleeve.

“February 4. Temperature at six o’clock, six degrees. To suppose no connection exists between the present and future character is to take away the uses of the present state. High wind, north northwest. The sense of prior history is requisite for any sense of destiny. To freeze time is to embrace stagnation. It denies progress as well as decay and weakens the hold on men of moral investment in the future. To the animal the past is blank, and so must be the future. But to the inquiring mind the present is comparatively nothing. I see within this block of ice the stilled springtime freshet, the watering hole. To suppose that the bones of a Mammoth unearthed means somewhere now a Mammoth walks, and Mastodons inhabit icy regions to the north, is too great credulity.

“My father hated Charles Darwin. It was no personal distaste, no animus against the man but rather I think against the enforced expectation of change—not so much the fear of having been descended from a Monkey as the fear of what the Human Race will presently become. I fear it also. My child will be dead by the millennium. This girl born a century after her great-grandmother might perhaps have a grandchild surviving by then, or if longevity be afforded to her child: what strange and marvelous visions will they find familiar? Five years ago there were no more than four horseless carriages in the United States. Today they number thousands and tomorrow in the millions—shall we therefore forfeit feet?”

A dog has been found floating in the local reservoir. The water pipes are high in lead content, and the previous fall it appeared as if lead poisoning might reach epidemic proportions. The town manager drank water from every shop on Main Street as if to prove public fears groundless. This drink-in was reported by Miles Fisk. The local paper ran a photograph of William Ellison holding an eight-ounce water glass and toasting the populace, smiling. “Hydrophiles, Unite!” the caption read.

William Ellison’s day-long drink-in took place on a Friday, however, and on the following Monday he did not report for work. He claimed it was a family matter, then admitted he was indisposed, then checked into the hospital for tests. “I’ve got sick leave coming,” he told Miles. “And I’m overworked. Can’t you give a guy a break?”

Disease-control and prevention experts arrived from Burlington. They too sampled the water, but under laboratory conditions and not by drinking it. Miles gave front-page play to the story, quoting Ellison’s excuses, running the photos of a test tube and of the suspect eight-ounce glass on adjacent columns.

Then Peacock’s aqueduct was unearthed. They found the moss-grown, perfectly arched viaduct on Cold Spring Road; it testified to masons’ skills a hundred years before. Peacock had wanted water closets on the fourth floor. Since his house crested the highest hill for miles, he had had to bring the water down from Woodford Mountain. It worked. When Joseph added wells, however, the aqueduct was disconnected in 1921.

Now, experts claimed it would prove serviceable still. Jim Brockway, who’d retired from the Army Corps of Engineers, said the line could be cleaned up. Hank Woburn, the dowser, said the apple trees on Cold Spring Road were stunted for one reason only: they headed down to where the water was. Walt Newcomb, who built the dam up at the reservoir and had had to take his chain saw to it during dredging, said if Jim and Hank agreed on water, only a fool disagreed. When Ian got a haircut, Vito the barber, speaking for the selectmen, said the selectmen concurred: it would be worth a feasibility study. They needed his permission, said Vito—busy with the razor he was stropping—but they figured they had his support. You could say, said Vito, we’ll trade you off the water for that exit ramp.

Then the town’s water cleared up. They diagnosed a case of colitis in William Ellison; they said the decomposing dog contaminated nothing, and likewise the dead floating deer. So the selectmen turned elsewhere, and the feasibility study was dropped. It would have cost three thousand anyway, said Vito, it would have been throwing worse money after bad.

“Most people using that expression say ‘Good money after bad,’ ” he said, “but you notice I say ‘worse money after bad.’ Because it’s a question of worse after bad, not better after bad, it’s a question of cutting your losses—what all of us are doing in these parts. Vermont’s a place,” said Vito, “where everything becomes a problem lately of worse after bad.” He shook his head, confiding; he doesn’t understand how any of them stand it; he himself will be in Naples by this time next year.

That was a threat he’d made since Ian could remember, and had made to Judah since the end of the Second World War. But Vito loved winter, and the alpine slide at Bromley. He hung a sign on the door every Wednesday that read: “Gone Sliding Down Bald Mountain. Had to Shut up Shop!” His daughter who did greeting cards—the one who stayed at home because the leg brace made her shy—painted it. The first letter of each word had red-and-white stripes, and the exclamation point after “Shop!” looked like a barber pole.

Yet whether Vito goes or remains, whether they hook up to the aqueduct or not—whether the selectmen endorse the bypass and the shopping mall or oppose them—makes small difference finally. Now, holding out means mostly holding on. Ian is the last male Sherbrooke, and the first male Sherbrooke settled before Houston or Los Angeles had names. And he has to face New England’s decline: had Peacock kept that acre of Montgomery Street in San Francisco where he worked, the single acre would be worth far more than these thousand acres he retained.

“Stucco on a postage stamp,” says Morrisey. “I tell you I seen it. The price of property out there.” He has returned from Disneyland, and postcards of Pluto are taped to the cash register. “A ‘For Sale’ sign in California”—he shakes his head. “Either you’re a millionaire or don’t even botherto knock.”

This is a cold region, and they’re pouring warm water on ice.

“February 6. Rain for the first time this winter. Temperature at six, thirty-six degrees. Mercury falling, however, and already I see sleet. Aunt Anne-Maria died this morning—or rather I learned of her death by this morning’s post. She was by all accounts a virtuous woman, one whom it would have been worthwhile and a pleasure to know. Her wanderings took her far afield, to Surinam and Guatemala and even, if I remember rightly, Siam. This is recollection at second remove, since I have nothing but the haziest personal image of her (nor do I know if I remember the woman or remember having been urged to remember). When she married Willard Sheldon, she found the Mormon Faith and was lost to us entirely. The memory I do have is of Father reading her letters aloud—sent from Surinam or Guatemala or perhaps Siam—shaking his head. It deeply grieved him, I believe, to feel at so wide a remove. Proximity and distance are riddles we must learn to solve: the very objects on this writing desk attest within a four-foot reach to oceans and deserts traversed. In its leather parts the blotter is Italian, the pen French. The meerschaum comes from Holland, the tobacco from Virginia—and so on and on around the girdling globe. There is no collector’s volition at work, nor the conscious purpose of catholicity—but I am perforce more near to the savage digging roots and fashioning this ink than was my father to his sister once she traveled to her tropics in an alien belief. If my daughter has a brother when our second child arrives, may it not prove so with them!”

Ian turns on the entrance hall lights. He sets the pianola roll to “You Are My Sunshine.” He unlocks the storm doors that give onto the front porch. He picks three china oranges from the display bowl on the sideboard and spends some minutes juggling. Then he replaces the fruit. If Andrew arrives, he tells himself, they will have a consultation; pleased by the near-rhyme of “confrontation-consultation,” he repeats this several times. He listens for Maggie and Jane. In the “Hudson River Valley Dawn” attributed to Bierstadt that he looks at, inattentive, a horseman emerges from pines. Ian has not noticed this before. He looks at it more closely and sees the man’s black hatbrim, the ocher gleam of saddlebags, and the brown withers of the horse. The horse’s neck is wet with sweat; the man may carry oil paints in his pack. He sits the horse as if they have been traveling some distance, his body in a practiced slouch, the rifle protruding at thirty degrees. There is nothing to do now but wait.