Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (59 page)

Jamie Kerr sighs. He studies his hands. They are cracked and red, and his fingers are nicotine-stained. He has many memories about the Sherbrooke family—though always at a distance, nothing personal, no reason to make that girl there nervous; she looks the spitting image of her mother for a fact. In twenty years, you mark my words, says Jamie Kerr, she’ll be the only other thing ever to compare for looks with her mother hereabouts. They broke the mold, he’d thought, but somehow glued it back. Sometime he’ll tell Ian how their old aunt Harriet was young once also and went dancing. He’ll tell how Judah’s charity was secret so you never knew who paid for what until you knew you didn’t know and therefore understood it must have been Judah—Judah Sherbrooke who’d donated trucks to the rescue squad, food for the hospital fund-raising square dance, books to the Library. He provided clothing to those who otherwise would go without, supported the Old People’s Home up in Woodford where Jamie resided these days. And once a year or every other year or every five years maybe, it didn’t matter when you got to be his age, he, Kerr, would feel so cut off from the world he’d wander into it and greet the survivors, the Sherbrookes who continue.

He hopes he hasn’t intruded. He thinks Ian ought to crack the spines on that John Greenleaf Whittier. He came this way some winters back and wanted to pay his respects. But everyone was out. He’d sat in this kitchen, in this chair, not wanting to disturb the house or walk through without permission. After half an hour maybe he’d stoked the stove and banked it, then departed. History repeats itself, they say, says Jamie Kerr. And maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but one thing’s true for certain in this land of milk and honey—where the milk gets confiscated and you have to shoot the cows, or strontium 90 wrecks the bones of everyone who drinks it, and the honey’s made from saccharine and artificial sweeteners and costs more than a swarm of bees to package in cellophane anyhow—you blink your eyes and blow your nose and what was up in front of you is way-back-when behind. It happens in an instant, in the winking of an eye. It’s like riding a train and sighting some tree and standing up to get a closer look at it and in that standing-instant you find you’ve missed the tree. He himself would rather walk. The tree’s still there, of course, and if you’re walking or on snowshoes or even in the desert on a camel, why you’ll have a chance to study it, to name the kind of tree it is and whether its planting was luck or intention, the way that stand of walnut grew, or the hackberry out by the pond. He’s done that; he’s walked through the house. He’s had his cup of kindness—six of them, to be exact, and tasty too, and just the thing to oil the joints and make an old man supple as the boy he was. He bids them good night and goes out.

“March 25. Temperature at six o’clock, forty-two degrees. No wind. I drink my coffee peaceably; train prompt. We are in the maelstrom’s center but it feels like peace. A poor sort of pilgrim, content to mind shop and spread the butter thickly on his raisin toast. The quartermaster might not seem important to those on the front line, yet without him the troops starve. May my son know just such peace, and may my daughter grow up beloved. It is a worldly prayer but the single thing I pray. Harriet and Judah. May their manners be courtly yet frank. May they have physical health, and long life, and sufficient comeliness to please the eye but not bedazzle it. May their learning be solid not showy, and their skills precise. May his work engage him; may they multiply. Let them continue in this house, as I have continued, and after their departure may they welcome the thought of return.”

II

“You’ve got it all worked out,” says Maggie. “Haven’t you?”

Jane runs to her. Maggie puts her hand, splay-fingered, on her daughter’s head. The curls are thick.

“Are you proud of yourself?” she asks Ian.

“No.”

Andrew lifts his coffee mug. “The sun is past the yardarm, I believe. It’s cocktail time.”

“I could use a drink,” says Ian.

“We all could, couldn’t we?” Andrew is proprietary. He turns to Maggie. “What are you drinking?”

“Vodka,” Ian answers for her. “Just vodka and ice.”

“Show him where the ice is,” Maggie says. “He might not be able to find it alone.”

“There was a man here, Mommy. He just left, he sat in that chair.”

“I’ll find the ice,” says Andrew. “It’s the vodka that’s giving me trouble.”

“Here.” Ian produces a bottle. There are glasses in the drainboard, and he sets out three. “If you’re still drinking bourbon, it’s in that decanter.”

“Kincannon Associates.” Maggie turns to Andrew. “You know, I never really thought of you as
management
before. But that’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? You and your associate here—managing me. Bringing me around.”

Andrew has extracted ice from the freezer. He holds the tray in his hands, uncertain where to crack it.

“Maybe I don’t want a drink,” she says. “Maybe I don’t want to go to New York. Maybe the patient’s not supposed to notice how she’s being treated with patience. Handled. You and your associate should think this through again.”

“There’s no collusion,” Andrew says. “We haven’t handled you.”

She hears herself protesting that the deck is stacked, the game unfair; her very act of protest proves their point. It’s the old trick of asking what cannot be answered, and then taking silence as the evidence of guilt. If she is docile they’ll call it depression; she can’t win for losing, she says.

Andrew turns to Jane. He changes the subject, pointedly. “Do you go to school yet?”

She nods.

“What kind of school—nursery school?”

She shakes her head.

“Kindergarten?”

“Play group,” Ian says.

“Has it occurred to you?” asks Maggie—of no one in particular, of the space between the two men, bisecting it, interrogating air—“That maybe I know what I’m doing? That grief is—what would you two call it—an appropriate posture?”

Ian ignites the front burner. “I’m making supper,” he says. “Jane made the salad dressing.”

“The madness of our parents,” Maggie mocks him.

“Trout.” Ian has his back to her. “That’s what we’re having.”

“When?”

“In half an hour.”

“Fine,” Maggie tells them. “I’ll pack.”

In her room again, alone, she does begin to pack—pulling out a matched set stamped LV and opening the luggage on her bed. She turns on the overhead light, then empties her six bureau drawers. Maggie works for several minutes with efficient inattention—not sorting things or folding them but stuffing each valise until it barely shuts. She fills her cosmetics case also. Holding the hair dryer, however—having trouble with the cord, attempting to bend and wrap it so the slipcase is positioned properly—Maggie sees herself reflected in the bathroom-vanity console.

She pats her face as might a blind person, feeling its contours. The cheekbones are sharp. She wiggles her nose. Maggie has to concentrate; she snaps the cosmetics case shut. In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. But whom would he choose for a consort, she wonders, the blindest of the blind or the one who can distinguish dark from light? This is assuming, of course, that all the women are equally young, equally rich and attractive and adept in bed. She presses the lobes of her ears. The parable does not make this explicit, but it is implicit: the terms of success are sight and sight only—therefore all else must be equal.

Or perhaps the one-eyed man in the region of the blind is damned, not saved by sight. Perhaps he alone can see devastation, how the landscape around them grows withered and sere. He in all that countryside must meditate on blight. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder has no eyes, then how might such beauty survive? She tries to remember and cannot remember if the phrase is “country of the blind” or “kingdom of the blind.” She busies herself, remembering. If she does not remember, the men in the kitchen conferring beneath her will win; her problem these past years has been retentiveness.

Maggie smiles. She touches her teeth. She is retentive enough, Lord knows, but what she retains makes no sense. She remembers a man in a diner who wore a thick cord sweater and ordered coffee next to her, closing his hands on the mug. He turned to her and confided how he liked sugar first, then cream. That way the sugar could dissolve at leisure in the hot brew above, and all he needed was a spoon for stirring. Most people prefer to have their coffee poured first, and then they add cream and sugar. But his practice was the reverse. He had had to explain this, always, to waitresses or people who offered him coffee. She remembers his theory in detail, and the sensuality with which he praised the sugar’s diffusion—the way it rose to the surface, permeating everything from the bottom up. For the life of her, however, Maggie cannot recollect the man’s name—or the diner, or whether they arrived together or ever met again. Perhaps it was no diner but a restaurant or airport lounge; perhaps the stranger was a dream-transfigured lover or man in a TV commercial.

She does not know. She does not need or care to know; it is a composition without frame. But she wakes up with the taste of sugar, the coffee so thick it is viscous, her mother telling her to have some manners and not to pile her spoon so high or take a second spoon. The amount of sugar that she seems to need is appalling; it’s probably a sugar imbalance, or maybe it’s pure gluttony and will make her fat. Her father tells them never mind, it’s good for the folks in Jamaica, and he brings her sugar cane to chew.

The Cutlers have maids from Jamaica. Maggie’s childhood is an unbroken memory of maids—all wearing white frilled aprons and green uniforms that button at the neck. Their names are Netty and Alice and Gladys and Bess; they meet her in the hallway when she comes home from school. Later, they tell her their troubles. They have glass in their thumbs or pins in their hips or seventeen cousins in Runaway Bay, and problems with men and rheumatism in the winters in this city made out of steel and cement; she might not believe it yet, but soon enough she’ll learn. Steel and cement soak up water like nobody’s business, and when the winter comes it gives that dampness back, that’s how a city breathes, that’s why it’s smart to wear rubber-soled shoes. She sits at the kitchen table, on a stool the twin to that which Jane possesses now, head cocked, winding spaghetti around her fork and smearing the pasta with ketchup. Or she’s ladling Netty’s special sauce that’s orange and milky and just how she likes it; her mother tries on Saturdays but never can equal the taste or consistency—so Netty makes up a batch on Fridays and they keep it in the freezer, just in case.

She attempts to find instruction in such scenes. She knows that in Manhattan she will seek help, and the help will ask her, at sixty-five dollars an hour, to conjure up that full-time help to whom her parents might have paid sixty-five dollars a week. These are the facts of inflation, not value. Maggie packs her boots. She takes four pairs. She evaluates her parents’ absence. It had been easy enough, in the years when she wanted to exorcise Judah, to label him some father-surrogate, some ratified totem of incest with no sexual taboo. It had been easy but untrue; the two men were the same age but otherwise unlike.

She knows an analyst might argue that their very opposition is proof of similarity; she’s picked her father’s opposite number out of a kind of ambivalence. But the truth is the two men were fond of each other; they would have gotten along. Maggie remembers, still, the contrast at her wedding: Judah huge and rumpled, Mr. Cutler slight and neat. He sported a Thomas E. Dewey moustache that he later enlarged to a beard.

Judah did not travel, and her father was unwilling to intrude. He had tried to avoid taking sides. And since their marriage was continually a question of which side to take, he’d kept to the sidelines and covered his eyes; he had welcomed Maggie when she fled from Judah, first, but urged her to return.

Her mother had been dead by then—having had an aneurysm at fifty-six. There had been no warning. Maggie remembers picking up the phone, and her father’s choked announcement, and her disbelief: her mother died at luncheon, drinking tea. “She never knew what hit her,” was the phrase he used. Maggie can remember how she pictured some crazed waiter wielding the teapot as a truncheon, wreaking havoc in Le Pavillon and scattering the customers like chaff. She herself is fifty-five. She thinks perhaps the women of her family are doomed to early death. Her mother had been prudent and had paid attention to her diet and gone to exercise class. She had been (she liked to say, with a self-deprecating moue) “well preserved.” And they had not been intimate—so that Maggie, thinking back on it, thinks possibly what troubles her now is retrospect and augury, a punishment for her at-the-time indifference to her mother’s death. She had worn mourning, of course; she comforted her father and played the dutiful daughter for months. Still, the quick of her remained untouched; she could not help half smiling at a term like “well preserved”; it was redolent of candied yams and pickles and vegetable permanence, not health. She had broken from her mother with a break so absolute it had appeared to heal.

Yet nothing is that simple, she knows now. No such fracture mends. The image of her mother—stern-seeming, brittle, sitting with her long legs crossed and reading the
New Yorker
their one summer in Vermont (when first, at thirteen, she’d met Judah; when her family elected once to take an inland holiday but hated it, hated the heat and the flies and lack of salt water and seafood; “We tried,” her mother said. “We gave it every opportunity. You have to give us that.”)—is an image of life lost.

And although she now might see herself as her mother’s look-alike and has tried to offer Jane what she herself never received, her father was not Judah—never was. She loved him without reservation, but he made her smile. Even in his final years, living in retirement in Wellfleet and careless of his clothing, fixated on his Rhodes 19, even in his deathbed rantings (paranoid in the Hyannis hospital, convinced the doctors were trying to torture him, trying to make him yield the secrets of the Bounty’s mutiny and whether he had been responsible, had horsewhipped Fletcher Christian, had given a sufficient ration of the shipmates’ bonus rum), the man was more comic than fierce. The Cutler in her had been banished when she married Judah Sherbrooke, and she wanted it that way. She put all that behind her when she entered the Big House.

Maggie walked on marble then. Peacock’s walkways had been marble, brought from the quarries at Danby or Proctor, and the path he laid out through the grounds would shine beneath the moon. The village, too, had had marble sidewalks. North Street and West Street and Main Street used the broad slick stone for paving—and since there were no streetlights, such a sheen was an advantage. She remembers the bright reach of it like wake behind a boat, the feel of her heels in the slight corrugations, and how the facing had pocked.

But the elders of the village thought such grandeur commonplace; you couldn’t give marble away. It was slippery when wet. It made Elvirah Hayes so nervous she walked in the mud by preference. Agnes Nickerson fell down in front of Morrisey’s and cracked her knee open and fractured her hip. Samson Finney said that marble had three uses only: it’s useful for statues and tombstones and sinks.

So two years after Maggie came they cracked up all the paving or levered it off to the side. They joined the state sidewalk program, getting crosswalks and poured-cement slabs. That was an improvement, Finney said, though not so good for lawsuits or the tourist trade. Then trains stopped coming too. When Maggie first arrived there had been nine trains heading north per day, and nine trains heading south.

The village is a losing proposition; Samson tells her why. The price of fuel oil and the price of gasoline is prohibitive and getting worse; real estate’s too high. Industry goes south or west, or simply goes bankrupt and quits; the Route 7 bypass won’t work. It will take tourists past the town, not cause them to stop off and visit; our industry is tourists now, he says. Half the state is paying for the other half to live on welfare; it used to be seventy-thirty, but now it’s fifty-fifty. He’s seen breadlines before and he’ll see them again if he lives. I’m telling you the truth, he says, as if she might not otherwise agree; you’ll see fighting in the streets before you see our welfare system fixed.

Samson has aged. He comes to visit once a month and calls her every week; his visits are ceremonial always, and he brings a gift for Jane. He is her only visitor and one authentic guest. He sits and reminisces in the leather block chair Judah liked, the strongest link to Judah left, telling his widow how they would carouse, drinking Irish whiskey neat, and patting his lips with his tie. “To hell in a handcart,” he says. “It was Judah’s expression. Or mine. I’m not sure I recall which one of us began it—but every time I’d use the phrase, he’d say you mean handcar, not handcart, and we’d argue over that. Or maybe it was me who’d say handcar and him who’d say handcart, I can’t remember.” Finney blinks. “It doesn’t matter anyhow, it’s just an expression. The world’s gone to hell in a handcart is what we used to say.”