Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (56 page)

They were standing in the vestibule, and Maggie stepped outside. She’d brought no wrap because the afternoon was warm, but now she shivered, waiting. Judah collected his coat. The lights were on in the church and the parking lot was full and cars lined the dirt road. A policeman waved at traffic, and a woman in a wheelchair waited for a lift. Maggie saw white curling smoke from a chimney to the east, the sickle moon above her, and a far plane, blinking. She felt herself so alien in this country company—so balanced between shame and scorn—that she began to cry. She licked her lips and tasted salt; she would weep this way for years.

“Jane?”

Jane does not turn.

“Here’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

“Hello.”

“Hello.” Andrew offers his hand. She takes it and shakes hands, polite.

“Pleased to meet you,” says Maggie. “Remember?”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Andrew Kincannon, I’ve known your mother a very long time.”

“Can we play ‘Touch and Try’?” Jane asks. “Are we allowed to, Mommy?”

The hallway where they stand is dark. The wall light is shaped like a candle. It does not function. “Who’s we?”

“Kathryn and Amy. They’re in there already.”

“If you put things away,” Maggie says.

“We
have
been, Mommy. We’re being careful.”

“All right.” She turns to Andrew. “There’s a costume room. She loves to play dress-up.”

“What are you going to be?” Andrew asks. “I mean, when you’re in costume?”

Jane smiles but makes no answer. She is barefoot.

“A princess?” he asks. “Or a ballerina, maybe?”

“Can I wear high heels? Please? They’re wearing high heels.”

“Yes,” Maggie tells her. Jane leaves.

“March 7. Temperature at six o’clock, eighteen degrees. Yesterday my visitor returned, I knew him on the instant, though his aspect was grievously altered; it is as if he had remained with me since three weeks ago when sick myself I showed him to the door. He has not left the region, it appears. He spent the sum obtained from what I consider charity and he called compensation (I speak of the purchase of pistols, those eighty dollars with which he established credit at some nearby tavern) in Drink & Debauching.

“Mine is not a fearful nature. I am not queasy. I enjoy my stirrup cup as well as the next man. But those who favor Temperance could choose no better instance than that poor supplicant who found me by the sugarhouse and asked for permission to sleep there this night. Demanded it, rather. Such permission—judging by the disarray of his face and hair and clothing—had been granted in advance. He raved. He tested my determination to be peaceable. He swore that I should take the sugarhouse or corncrib for dominion, when I told him how Lavinia lay close to term upstairs. He shook his fists. He swore the house was his by right of prior birth, with all of its appurtenances—including, if she met his fancy, though he reserved the right to change his mind upon inspection, since he had not as yet set eyes on her, my wife. He laughed. His right eye had been swollen shut, and viscous fluid bathed his cheek.

“I am thirty-eight years old. He is perhaps five years my chronological senior, but the ague upon him made him seem more nearly seventy. Disease can thus mock time. The sickly child may comprehend mortality as well as the hale ancient. Although he soon ceased flailing them, his fists shook of their own accord nevertheless.

“Mindful of my earlier remorse, I heard him out. I spoke soothingly. I touched his flesh that made my own flesh crawl. I said he should come in and eat and bathe and have a doctor tend his wounds both inward and external. He groaned. He said no human physic now could heal his sickness, nor balm relieve his scars. I covered him with sacking and went to summon aid.”

Lucy Gregory is worried that the power won’t come back. “Last spring,” she says, “I remember, because it was the first day of spring, we had that freak storm. Though why we call it
freak
I don’t know, it happens every year, I declare I should be
used
to it—the one that lasted three days. Well, we lost the freezer. Every single thing we’d packed in there so carefully. The meat. Elvirah went to get some chops, and it’s dark down cellar, you can’t hear the click on the machine if the machine’s not running. So we used the flashlight, and we
thought
we closed it up again and never thought another thing about it. Till the smell started in three days after—I tell you the lid was wide open.” She sniffs. “They say it’s just one power line, and it takes them three whole days.”

“We should be going,” says Elvirah. “No point in putting it off.”

Ian leads the group along the upstairs hall. Jane is in the costume room along with the Fisk twins; they wear pinafores and bonnets. Jane’s whalebone corset brushes the floor; she drapes it from her shoulders like an overcoat. She is wearing lipstick also, and lipstick highlights on her cheeks. She smiles at him half-fearfully and takes three steps and puts her arms around his knees.

“We’re playing,” Jane says. “Pretend.”

“Yes. I see that.”

Kathryn and Amy seem abashed. They look at him through lowered lids, then look at the grouping behind him—Samuel Coffin, the two old ladies, Vito, and the rest. He puts his hand on Jane’s head. “Having fun?”

Her reply is muffled. He feels like an intruder, in some stall where women dress.

“How old are you?” asks Lucy.

“Three and a half.”

“A smart one.” Vito waggles his hand.

“May she have her mother’s looks,” Samuel Coffin pronounces. “And her mother’s brains.”

“That’s good,” says Vito. “Very good. Her
mother’s
looks, her
mother’s
brains.” He chuckles, memorizing this. “Except of course that, if he heard it, Judah’d have your head.”

“It’s a compliment,” says Samuel Coffin. “I’d have told him to his face.”

“How many sisters does Cinderella have?” asks Jane.

“Two,” Ian says.

“These are my sisters,” she says. “We’re getting dressed for a party.”

Lucy Gregory advances. “You’ll turn into a pumpkin.”

Jane seems undecided as to whether she should greet these strangers. She tightens her hold on his arm.

“Hey, Cinderella, your coach awaits you.” He ruffles her hair. “Come on out.”

The look she gives him then is Maggie’s glance entirely: a baffled willfulness compounding fear and trust. Perhaps because of Andrew, or the villagers’ gleeful scrutiny, or those twin hostages to Miles who stand beneath the goose-necked lamp in silk and hoopskirts staring up at him—Ian removes her arms. He bends to her and picks her up and shuts his eyes and buries his head in her neck.

The green grass cloth has faded where the picture hung, or rather not faded so much as retained coloration while the wall around it darkened in some process of response to sun that causes cloth to darken; Maggie sees the picture as if there (not taken off when the glass cracked and left unrepaired in the broom closet, stacked for salvage with those other objects Ian has not yet found the time or interest to redeem), its eighteen- by twenty-four-inch frame a lessening of contrast but sufficient contrast still, the cow and clouds and haystacks Hattie loved to point to, saying, “This is what it looked like when I first learned the way to look,” and the protected rectangle therefore appearing changed, not constant, as if bleached by the absence of sun. The cow had been Ayrshire, clumsily painted, the sienna of its haunch and horn too stridently an aspect of the composition, not the true color of the cow, and its udder too absolute a complement to the haystack at the upper left. It had been done by Hattie’s friend who’d read an article once on Corot, who incised the thick paint with the edge of her palette knife, bluntly, making barbed-wire strands and grass stalks. Maggie remembers those fields with regret, remembers how when young she seemed to be out in them always, always helping Judah or bringing him his lunch or walking to meet him or walking back as if from a secret assignation, though lawful. They’d made a joke of it: he was never in the house and Hattie never out of it, so if they wanted privacy they made love in the woods. And even in old age, when he couldn’t wander far afield, he wore his work boots and bib overalls and that red-and-black plaid shirt she’d given him in 1958. He took himself laboriously off to the outbuildings, puttering, giving orders, making order, or to the Toy House, where he’d sit wrapped in sheepskin, ruminant, so that if she needed him she’d know to look outside.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew says. “I should have told you.”

“What?”

“That I was coming. Planning to come. It isn’t fair to just barge in.”

“You’re welcome,” she says. “You knew that.”

“I didn’t. Not really. The last time we talked . . .”

Maggie releases his arm. They stand in what once served as a solarium. There are bay windows on the southern wall, and ceiling hooks for plants. The plants have gone leggy, however, or brown; some pots hold nothing but dirt. “It’s just too expensive,” she says. “The cost of fuel oil. It isn’t worth it, everything freezes, there’s no point trying.”

Andrew sits. He stands again. She indicates a brittle, leafless bush.

“Azalea?”

“Ian says it’s cheaper just to buy new plants every spring. You’ve no idea”—she shakes her head. “Living in that southern place with someone else paying the bills.”

“New York,” he says. “It’s not exactly tropical.”

“No.”

He watches her. A greenhouse is visible out to the right. An upright piano stands by the door; the piano bench has lost a leg. “May I ask this: how’ve you been?”

“Surviving,” Maggie says.

“And Jane?”

“I wondered when you’d ask.”

“How is she?”

“She’s got your mouth. Your coloring.”

“I’d like to spend some time with her.”

Maggie moves to the window and fastens the drapes. The drapes are many-pleated, beige, and patterned with an S for Sherbrooke.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I should have warned you.”

Ian skis cross-country. She used to do that also, and snowshoe, but it’s been weeks and feels like years since she’s braved the winter weather. The fields have gone so fat with snow they’ve thickened past the second strand of wire, wearing its barbs like a belt. While Judah lived and she was young, such fencing was not threatful, was simply an efficient way to keep the herd contained. It had not seemed an obstacle or augury of tetanus or reminder of the wars. “ ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ as that rotten farmer said,” she’d say, laughing at the notion of an Ayrshire in the tulip patch, or trampling the sweet peas and eggplant, blundering down gravel paths because the fence was bad: the dream of placid passage where the cow path had been beaten turned to her nightly nightmare of an unleashed animality, all burrs and flies and shit.

How explain this to Andrew, she wonders? How tell him how her world has been contained? He stands by her side like Boudreau. He has that same hangdog expectancy, that air of previous entitlement—as if his very manhood were a virtue, something to be honored though unearned.

There are differences, of course. Boudreau is a burned drunk living near the Alagash, and Andrew is what Hattie would have called “distinguished.” He wears expensive clothing and his fingernails are trim. His body has the sort of leanness that signifies wealth—not the half-starved voraciousness of Hal in his long Johns swigging gin. In America, she thinks, the better off you are the skinnier you stay. She swallows, shuts her eyes. Judah or Boudreau or Andrew in this nightmare seem the same. There’s a cat-o’-nine-tails and a set of ankle straps, a mirror and always the bed: there’s beauty as booty, her force-fed submission as prize.

“It’s been a long time,” Ian says. “How are you?”

“Fine. Just fine,” says Jeanne.

“We haven’t talked since New Year’s.”

“The word was ‘terrific,’ remember? I used to say ‘terrific’ when you asked.”

“I remember,” Ian says. “Why was Miles in such a hurry?”

“To leave, you mean?” They stand beneath the cupola. “He’s probably got an appointment. He wants to slip his secretary in between town meetings.”

“Miles?”

“I told him when he asked. He asked about you finally. I told him there was nothing left, but there had been something.” She examines her hand. “So he’s making up for all those years of blissful ignorance—catching up. With secretaries, babysitters, even Bill Ellison’s daughter.”

“I don’t believe it,” Ian says.

“Why not? He wants an open marriage now—he read about how well it works. That’s why he slapped you on the back and what he meant by leaving me here.” She spreads her fingers carefully, then folds them to her palm in sequence. The thumb remains upright. “Or maybe you’d prefer Bill Ellison’s daughter yourself.”

“Not likely.”

“No?”

“No.” He waves at Samuel Coffin in the far end of the hall, then points for Samuel’s benefit to a stuffed bison head. The bison’s eyes are mottled and the size of billiard balls. “When did you tell him?” he asks.

“My New Year’s resolution. I told myself I wouldn’t lie. I’d tell him if he asked.”