Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (50 page)

Her “Yes. Why not?” gave him his measure; it contained no shift of emphasis, no sudden assertion of change. She would have questioned, certainly, his decision to become an engineer or to take up golf. Yet this seemed foreordained. He bought a set of notebooks and began on the following day.

Jeanne was both his audience and critic; he met her at the Dry Goods Shoppe and helped her load the car. As a member of the Cooperative, she spent Tuesday afternoons behind the counter and stocking shelves. She had purchased beans and dried fruit and fabric and cheese; he handled the two bags.

“You want a family,” she told him. “That’s what you really want.”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. You can’t marry your own mother, so you’re after me.”

He opened the car door, then placed the grocery bags on the floor.

“I’m serious,” she said. “You want a family, lock, stock, and barrel; that way you’d be getting three of us for the price of one. A bargain.”

“And in the neighborhood,” said Ian. “You’re right, it’s an advantage.”

She fumbled for her keys.

“I never did want to change diapers. It’s simpler this way, isn’t it?”

She put on dark glasses, bent, and entered the car.

“All that fuss and bother—formulas, midnight feedings. I’m doing it for Maggie’s child, so why get all involved with children of my own? Croup. Measles. Misery. Who
needs
it?”

“I’m sorry. You can stop now . . .”

“I was only getting started. School bills. Migraine. Nagging backache.”

“I told you I’m sorry.”

“I hear you,” he said. “If you want to back off, just back off.”

She looked up and over her glasses’ black rim. “I have to go now.”

“Right.”

“Ian, I don’t want to. It’s that they’re expecting me.”

“Mm-mn.”

“You’re making it more difficult.”

He did not answer, stepped away.

“When can I see you?” she asked.

“You’ll find me. I’ll be the one with baby powder in my buttonhole. Wearing a pink Dr. Denton’s . . .”

Savagely she stepped on the accelerator. The car roared. She swung into traffic, not waiting. He walked along the river, past the covered bridge and sewage treatment plant. Then he broke into a run.

His subject was Judah, he knew. He had imagined his father for years, had tried to come to grips with just such proud constriction—the way that Judah drew a magic circle around the farm, saying thus far and no farther, then raise the roofbeam high. When Alan Whitely suggested that they use the carriage barn, he saw his father there. The image was corporeal, flesh dense with blood and bone. Judah turned in greeting, holding neat’s-foot oil and rags; he had been working on the carriage rigging and the horses’ tack. He lifted his free hand, hieratic, in a compound of menace and welcome that Ian saw as clearly as when last he’d seen it in fact. The gesture was silent, however. He had to muster the right language, to have those talks with Judah that their reticence denied. Judah bent back to his task. The leather was supple; the carriage rails gleamed. Light slanting through the barn seemed palpable and thick with dust; the smell of horses hovered in the empty stalls, and the zinc washing bin and brushes and the currycombs and pails awaited use. They had not been used in ten years. He watched his father stride through the clutter, then tried to make him speak.

This proved no easy task. His father was closemouthed, always had been, and Ian remembered no modulation; he remembered Judah muttering and then at shouting pitch. But his silence had been eloquent; it was action and example far more than speech. Some such character as Hattie could provide the background chatter as she did in Judah’s life. She could be garrulous by contrast and deliver homilies that Ian had no trouble writing: incessant, homespun-glib. She would take the mailman or the plumber as her audience, if there were no family, and no friends arrived for a lunch date or bridge. Failing any audience, Hattie would talk to herself.

So Ian had two figures for his action. One figure spoke too little and the other spoke too much; he needed to disrupt their troubled lifelong truce. He turned their harmony to discord by introducing Maggie, though in the play he called her Jane. He filled two ledger books with notes. Early on, he found a title. He called it
The Green Mantle
, suggesting Edgar’s speech in Lear and signaling the fecund rot that is the slime of algae on a stock pond with poor drainage. “Tom o’ Bedlam” would eat frogs’ legs and drink from this green standing pool—his inheritance suggested also by the title as a verdant passing-on of fields if not authority. The action had a grace note therefore of renewal in collapse; it augured generations as well as spring in fall. For weeks while he began to write, he carried with him heavily the weight of such pronouncements as “Nothing comes of nothing,” or “Never, never, never, never, never,” and “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.”

Jeanne asked him to show her the play. He told her he needed more time. It was, of course, his own absent presence he tried to imagine—his role in this drama as other than author, and what they argued over when he was not home to listen. He saw Judah as a warrior preparing his own bier. He ringed himself with hay and cattle, sticks and leaves and logs. His armor and favorite objects and women were arrayed in order of importance so the best would be the last to burn; he scrambled up on this improvised pyre at the first-act curtain and stretched out on top. He scratched at his armpit; he sniffed. Judah looked out at the audience with a queer cunning, lighting matches, waiting as the suicide so often waits for someone to shout “Stop!”

The next time they met he was contrite. Jeanne found him by the sugarhouse; he had been stacking wood. “I’m stuck here,” Ian said. “I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, that’s all. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“I started it.”

He waved a birch log at her like a peeling plump baton.

“Escape,” she said. “That’s what you mean to me also, I suppose.” Jeanne smiled. She gave him a letter. “Is this what you’re after?” she asked. The Sage City Players were grateful for free access to the carriage barn and wanted to convey their thanks to Mrs. Margaret Sherbrooke and Mr. Ian Sherbrooke for the community spirit involved in such an offer. The production of
Desire Under the Elms
had had to be postponed due to the unforeseen absence of Alan Whitely. He had been offered a summer stock role in Falmouth, and therefore the company was temporarily without its president and leading man—but she, as the group’s treasurer, was confident she spoke for everyone when signing this testimonial; they hoped to take advantage of his offer at some future date.

“Thank you,” Ian said. “Has Miles seen this?”

“No. Why?”

“Because he wants the place shut down. The highway lobby . . .”

“Look!” Jeanne pointed to the west. A hawk was wheeling, gliding; it plummeted. The sky was white. She shuddered, touched his arm. They stepped inside the sugarhouse. He closed the door and drew her into the sweet-smelling darkness, then down.

The second act came easily. It was a magic interlude, or meant to seem as such. In the first act the action had been plausible—a little daily round of life in one old man’s set circle. Yet language was at odds with gesture:Hattie’s chatter, Judah’s silence, the descriptive couplets and archaic rhetoric all had been extreme. Now the action went balletic while the diction became that of everyday discourse. Judah climbed down from the hayloft cursing, scaring witnesses, the barn roof had leaked and a section of prime hay had spoiled. The hay that he’d figured for feed in midwinter would prove to be bedding at best; he found six-packs of beer in the eaves.

And now these creatures moved as they had sent him hopping when a boy. Judah, Hattie, Maggie (who would dominate the second act, whose agony was its subject as she tried to mediate between her dying husband and sister-in-law self-appointed as nurse) became real. He wrote a scene with the five senses figured forth in deprivation: the clear-sighted man going blind, the keen-nosed one who lost his sense of smell, the musician who went deaf. She who prided herself upon her sense of taste lost her taste buds utterly; she who had great tactile skill went heavy-fingered and slow. Together they comprised the senseless individual.

This dance took place in silence while Judah spoke downstage. He had been honing an ax. He accused his wife of making it with stablehands, of getting locked in the First Congregational Church with the minister, then taking on all four members of a string quartet during intermission at their concert. He repeated this list of betrayals. It did not devalue Maggie nor make her the butt of some joke. The second time through, it was clear that Judah gave no credit to such rumors; his was a boastful litany that praised her foxy worth. There was a shaving mirror by the sink. He pulled it from its nail and studied himself, stage center, patting at his jowls the way a barber might. He muttered to himself, inaudible. His wife gained added value from her value in men’s eyes. He felt the ax-blade’s edge. He sank to his knees and said, “Love.”

Love was not a word to trust. It was too easy, too often abused, a substitute for lust or amity or even loving-kindness. Ian had experienced these things. He had known puppy love and had made love and, when forgetful of their names, called semi-strangers “love.” Yet the word’s proper usage came hard. Maggie and Judah had known love, perhaps, and he felt untrammeled love for Jane, Because of his face and his money and a certain athletic insistence in sex, he had heard several women use the term. Once a woman chanted “I love you” with such abandon, writhing, that Ian gathered up his clothes and left. They had met at a party three hours before and would not meet again.

Love is a passion, he wrote, a weak-kneed knowledge that the earth is tilting and the world well lost. It is a bordering, protective solitude, a hunger and invasion, a series of clichés. It manifests itself in several ways: Jeanne became the pursuer pursued. Walking past her house—on the corner of North and School Streets—he listened to her play the flute like an enchantress warming up. She was always waiting for him, always the first to arrive. She had to juggle errands and appointments and cover her tracks, while he had the whole day. He watched her with her children; the girls were six years old, she had been married for eight. They made a unity from which he knew himself excluded. They could display open affection, and such a display (Amy holding to Jeanne’s knee, her brown head buried in the bend of it, one brown eye staring out) was denied him. He imagined her house in the mornings—with the twins at their mother’s side and Miles already occupied, preoccupied, suited up for the day’s work. He listened to Jean-Pierre Rampal endlessly in the Big House music room, wearing Maggie’s patience thin and needing to replace the needle on the phonograph. Jeanne insisted he keep her secret, and the measure of insistence was how he measured distance; she would not leave her husband for the interloper, him.

This was so clear that they rarely discussed it. She apportioned him his time like some efficient allocations clerk. The truth of all those walks, he claimed, was she had to fix it with the babysitter first. She was busy tending to her family or guests. Jeanne appeared hedged in by need; her husband needed her and the children needed her and he, Ian, was an indulgence—her private neediness administering to itself. She who made their beds wanted every other afternoon to lie out in a clearing, on the blanket of his clothes. Returning from the PTA when the weather changed again, she required the seat of the Packard, or the hayloft when it snowed.

For seven months they did not see each other. He completed the play. Then, as if without interruption, they met and coupled again. He tracked her footsteps after rain and wanted to carve their initials on trees. Miles wrote and printed anonymous Letters to the Editor about the Big House boondoggle, and how the National Landmarks Commission wouldn’t know a landmark if it ran aground on Plymouth Rock. He wrote signed editorials that weighed the pros and cons, and—during the months that Jeanne stayed away—came down on the side of the safeguards in Section 106. Ian guessed she was an ardent partner to her husband also, that their afternoon encounters enkindled her for night. Or that she separated out devotion, as he himself had learned to separate the roles of brother, lover, son. “Like cream from milk,” he complained.

“It’s the reason that you stand for this. You never hear me slam the dishes. Or scream.”

“Or snore.”

“I don’t do that.” She seemed half hurt, and he realized again how precarious was the esteem between them, how taut-stretched the tightrope they walked. “I was only thinking of an actual bed,” he said. “One whole night together. It’s a fantasy.”

“Oh, Ian, dream it true.” Her eyes were wide, voice soft. Yet for all Jeanne’s seeming pliancy, he knew, she’d leave within five minutes of the time she’d planned to leave. She was using him, he said, like a liberated woman run amok.

“I’m not,” she said.

“Of course you are.”

“Not using you,” Jeanne said. “Not liberated enough.”

“Amen to that.”

She pecked him on the cheek. She said, “If I don’t go, the children will be home before me,” and was gone. He did leg-raisers, watching the sky.

The third act brought him home. Ian wrote the scenes with fluency, hearing how his father and his mother made their peace. They discovered this was fragile because the world went mad. Their son was killed in Laos—or so the telegram said. Judah’s first child, from his first marriage, had been killed at Anzio, and such recurrence broke him; he painted the barn door a havoc of colors and then produced a rope. He worked with an old man’s shuffling persistence, fashioning a noose and using the hayloft’s block and tackle and a ladder as scaffold; he stood on the ladder’s third rung, staring over fields that he in delirium took to be beachheads, while with jerky puppet-like gestures he urged his babies on.