Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (7 page)

“That’s not true and you know it.” She was being loyal but the loyalty was fair. “He just gets fighting riled.”

(“Brother,” she had ventured. “Won’t you tell me what’s the matter. Please.”

There were foam flecks and spittle on his lips.

“You’ve been provoked. All right. Something was done to provoke you.”

She watched his sinews working. He moved his fingers, and his forearms indented and swelled. For Judah
was
rampaging. The veins in his temples were blue. He stood, feet spread for balance, on the hearth. He had on a work shirt, and the muscles in his arms were knotted cords. His skin seemed flayed. He had coal lumps in either hand, and he clenched and broke and pulverized the coal. That was, she knew, a feat of strength. No ordinary man could do it, nor could Judah in his ordinary mood. But he stood there grinding the black rock together, with coal dust streaming from his hands as though he’d picked up coal dust to begin with. His hands were black; his forearms blackened and caked. He sprayed small bits and shattered fragments of the coal—in a black semicircle, his back to the mantelpiece, silent. It was the silence, Hattie knew, that meant his true rampaging. Nothing of him moved except his hands and arms. His arms were working only from the elbows in; he kept his elbows splayed. She did not fear his trumpet bellow by comparison, nor his wall-tumbling word frenzy;
this
was the leveling rage. He held them all, she told herself—and all their perquisites and ancestry and expectation of a decent life, and why was that too much to ask for her who’d never done much asking, always satisfied or saying so at least, and her allotted portion an adequate allotment—in those closed clamped hands.

“Please. You’re frightening me. Us.”

His smile had no teeth.

“Judah,” she had pleaded. “Please.”

But nothing would avail until the seizure itself had availed, and he would stand there empty-handed, shivering. He would have crushed a scuttleload of coal.)

“I told you,” Maggie hissed in the kitchen. “I told you he’s impossible. I told you you’d not get a word.”

“It isn’t me he’s mad at,” Harriet said. “It isn’t me he’s destroying out there.”

Judah drove a wedge between them, therefore, and split their alliance apart. He’d split her off from Maggie—she recognized it now—like some skillful herdsman herding sheep.

“Well, what’s he mad at?” Maggie asked. “What did he tell you I’d done?”

“He didn’t tell,” she said.

“I never gave him cause. There wasn’t any reason, Hattie. Believe it.”

“He’s mightily provoked,” she said.

“And you’re mightily frightened, I see.” Maggie raised her long white arms and took her hairpins out. She shook her head and freed her hair and that meant no more kitchen work. “I see that much.”

“You see it, yes.”

“Oh, Hattie,” Judah’s wife said. “You shouldn’t let him cow you. It’s insane.”

“I’m not”—she stacked the dishes. “Not letting him cow me, I mean.”

“Of course you are.”

“I’m not.”

Judah stomped out through the parlor, and his boot prints were black.

“Those schoolboy antics,” Maggie scoffed. “That show-off strong stuff.” She gathered conviction. “Me heap big he-man. You Jane.”

Harriet laughed. She hoped Maggie took her mouth-stretching rictus for laughter.

“The Johnny Weismuller,” said her sister-in-law, “of the northern counties. Another county heard from. But it’s ballot-stuffing, Hattie, don’t you see? It’s a rigged election and one he has to win.”

Harriet poured Ivory soap in the sink. She let the hot tap run.

“You don’t even know,” Maggie said, “what it was we argued about. You don’t even want to know, seems like. You didn’t ask him, and you won’t ask me.”

“It’s not my business,” she said.

“It is. It is, it has to be. But it isn’t, oh, your business to quake in front of that huge bully. He’s your younger brother, Hattie, think of that.”

“I do,” she said. “That’s what I think about. That’s all I’ve been thinking while you let him stand there. You and your fancy charities that don’t begin at home . . .”

“It’s my home too,” Maggie said.

“It wasn’t always and it won’t be always, maybe.”

So what was enmity then friendship turned to enmity again. Push come to shove, she told herself, she was allied with her brother and the born Sherbrookes, not wed. She was a born Sherbrooke, and not above announcing it or taking some pride-pleasure in hearing it announced.

“What do you mean by that?” Maggie had straightened.

It meant she stood for something, where she stood. It meant the time-tried values of decency and loyalty and truthfulness were in the room. “Just what I said.”

“You mean it?”

Straightening, she came to Maggie’s chin, and breathed, and watched her breathing.

“I do,” she said. “I mean just what I said.”

III

“So I’ve come back,” she thinks. “So nothing much matters but that. A nice enough place to return to.” Andrew’s apartment was nice enough too, on East Sixty-Third Street and with a balcony with green outdoor carpeting that simulated grass. He liked to practice putting, and the automatic putting green spat shots back at him. From the next floor, Maggie was certain, or from across the courtyard anyone looking would believe the carpet was actual lawn. They had to vacuum, not cut it; that gave it away, she supposed. But she found the whole thing comical and pleasing and kept Andrew’s telescope inside the balcony door. She did her yoga there. Whenever she caught the binocular’s telltale flash from 14D (that white-haired man in undershirts who was
,
inexplicably, her father looking down at her from the hill’s height in Wellfleet, and not some sex-tormented dotard in a service apartment) she stepped inside and fetched the telescope and trained it ostentatiously along the sightline of the watcher watched.

The apartment walls were gloss white. Andrew said there was little enough light in New York, and he needed what light he could get. So, leaving, she had emptied the shoe-polish box and used his shirts for rags and smeared black and brown polish on the bedroom and living room ceilings and walls. She stood on the sofa to get at the ceiling and tied a black rag to the broomstick—but this was more trouble, somehow, than it was worth, so she concentrated on the walls. She rubbed Kilroys and toxin signs and crosses on the bedroom wall, then rubbed them over and wrote ViVA, and NIXoN LIvES!!!

She knows Judah is dying, of course. She has expected it for years, and that he would require her to give and get his final blessing. She acknowledges she owes her husband that much anyhow; they live on a battlefield site. Their farm had been a theater of the Revolutionary War. Maggie laughed at the phrase. She asked Harriet to tell her what about war was good theater, and how many actors took how many curtain calls.

“Who buys ringside tickets?” she had asked. “What’s so theatrical?”

“That’s not what the expression means.”

“What does it mean then?”

“Theater of war. It’s an expression, that’s all—it’s a way of saying Seth Warner billeted troops.”

“Who’s Seth Warner?” Maggie asked.

“You have to be joking. Seth Warner and the Green Mountain Boys—they made all the difference hereabouts.”

“Not to me,” said Maggie. “All right. George Washington slept in this bed. No wonder the man was universally loved. I mean, the father of his country—he must have fathered thousands, sleeping in all those beds.”

“You’re not being funny,” Harriet said.

“Well, neither is it funny to prink about theaters of war. I wouldn’t be boastful,” she finished. “Not about that.”

“Seth Warner was a decent man. And committed no atrocity and defended in an upright fashion what was his beholden township and his duty to defend.”

So they took picnics to the battlefield and drove where the Green Mountain Boys had shinnied up hills and down gullies. Judah said, “It’s always a shock. I mean, to see this half an acre and to think how many men were dead in it once.”

“I thought Vermonters never died,” she said.

“They died that evening.”

“With their boots on,” Maggie declaimed. “In rightful conflict and with noble mien.”

“Something like that,” Judah said.

“With thistle in their face. And burdock. And probably cow patties.”

“What is it?”

“What is
what
?”

“The problem.” Judah turned to face her. “Tell me.”

A hawk spiraled past them, rising. She wanted to warn every sparrow.

“Nothing,” she said.

“That’s not true.”

“Well, something,” she admitted. “You know I’m pregnant.”

“I guess so,” he smiled down at her. “I was in on it.”

“And it’ll be a boy maybe. And he’ll be a Sherbrooke and proud of his rifle and end up on a field somewhere with his face in cow crap and someone will be saying, ‘Wonderful. You died for your country. Good boy.’ ”

“He isn’t born yet,” Judah said. “You don’t have to worry he’ll die.”

“Christ, I hate these proud memorials. I hate each marble slab. I hate what they did to them and everyone who comes to glory in the memory of war.”

“We came for a picnic,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to spoil it.”

“We can go,” he said.

“Yes. Please.”

So he became solicitous and watchful, and would have kept her on the sofa bed the last ten weeks. She hadn’t meant it that way, she explained. She’d been upset, and war was still a topic she’d prefer to avoid, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t climb stairs or fetch her food or go to the bathroom alone. Judah thought all women were helpless, of course. He’d wheeled his mother around too long and too considerately to consider any woman other than an invalid who needed help with washing and needed her pillows plumped up. It hadn’t been that way at first. At first he admired her seat on a horse, and the ease with which she ran or swam, but it was like some armor-suit he had to find the chink in. He had to find the way she cracked, the place where she was joined together and would tear along the seam. Maggie knew her fear for Ian’s life would be a seam that showed. She had been fearless for herself, and hadn’t thought to lock the door, but now each open door was risky and each crowd carried polio, even with the Salk vaccine, and every drinking fountain was a place she drank from, first.

“You’ll make a sissy of him,” Judah said.

“I’ll make a survivor.”

“A lot of people drink from fountains without contracting polio.”

“What does that prove?” she asked.

“He’ll drink from streams. He’ll swallow a lot worse than water.”

“In his own good time,” she said. “And not until he wants.”

Therefore Judah fastened on her fear of guns. He taught Ian to hunt, although he knew she hated guns and feared the two of them shooting each other while they hunted deer. There would be a clearing; it would be rimmed with spruce. Her son would face her husband and both would be wearing russet, having taken off their red hunting jackets because it got too hot.

“Be careful,” she would warn them.

“Yes, Ma,” Ian would say—with that impatient knowingness she herself had mustered once.

“I mean it. Judah. Ian.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, you’ll be careful?” she asked.

“Yes, we know you mean it.”

Largely, however, she feared for his weakness, not strength. She felt herself protective of the boy-man who needed protection. “Feeding time at the zoo,” she had called lunch, laughing. “Come and get it. Nice raw meat. Nice bloody cutlets, boys.” Yet it wasn’t always funny and she saw the great swatch of muscle and sinew, hacked back from the bone with a needle-bright blade, the animal bellowing not with sensate grief or pain but only amazement, only how could they do this to me, only what fair-weather friends have turned foul? That’s what Ian said they thought; that’s what cows were good for if they weren’t good for milk. “Hey Mom, what’s for lunch?” he’d ask.

“What’s always for lunch?” Maggie asked.

“Food.”

“Drink,” Judah concurred. They washed their hands. She made them wash their hands for thirty seconds under the tap, no matter what was said about the Salk vaccine.

“It’s Wednesday,” Maggie said. “It’s always spaghetti for Wednesday.”

“Psketti,” Ian lisped. He mispronounced on purpose what had eluded him before.

“And dessert?” they chorused. “What’s for dessert?”

“Your just deserts,” she joked. That too was a Wednesday tradition—angel food cake. Her stripling coarsened while she and Harriet fed him and observed it, and she watched even-handed, balancing scorn and relief.

“Margaret,” Finney said ten days ago. “Or do I call you Mrs. Sherbrooke?”

“Whatever,” she said. “How are you, Samson?”

“Tolerable,” he said. There was static on the line. His voice approached. “I’m better than Judah is, Margaret.”

“You always were”—she teased him. “You were, what’s the word, exemplary.”

“It’s not a joking matter. I’m calling to tell you he’s sick.”

Voices intervened. She heard the operator ask if this was Akron, then asking for the routing code to Akron, Ohio.

“How sick?” she asked. She lit a cigarette. “Did he tell you to call?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes. I hear you.”

“Good,” he said. His voice was higher-pitched than she remembered. She thought, perhaps so big a man impressed her with flesh resonance, so that at a distance one forgot his speech’s squeak. “Good,” he said again, and paused.

“Go on.”

“What was the question?” Finney temporized.

“How sick?” she repeated. “And did he tell you to call?”

He paused, considering. “I’m calling on my own say-so; he wouldn’t want you to know.”

“Then why did you tell me?”

“I’d better correct that,” he said. “He’d want you to know, but not want to know that I told you.”

“Samson,” she said. “Don’t play the lawyer, please.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to joke with you. It’s no joking matter”—he coughed.

She let his cough subside. She listened to it echo and wondered if it echoed all the way to Akron. Stubbing out her cigarette, she watched the ash disperse. Death, she told herself, he’s dying; why won’t he dare use the word? “What word do lawyers use?” she asked. “What’s the danger of decease?”

“Demise,” he corrected her.

“Death. Death,” she nearly shouted. “All right, how sick is he?”

“I’m not a doctor,” Finney said. “You needn’t shout.”

She lit a second cigarette. “I’m sorry. Thank you for calling.”

“I thought you should know. You’re still his wife.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

“I’m only his lawyer,” he said. “I don’t know the medical facts.”

“The coroner’s report,” Maggie said. She was sleepy, suddenly. She wanted to lie back and sleep.

“What? How’s that?”

“Can you hear me, Akron? Over and out,” Maggie said.

“There’s trouble with the lines. Bell Telephone,” Finney said. “It’s the second-most mismanaged company. It’s impossible . . .”

“Which is the first?”

“Consolidated Edison Electric. I’m not even a customer, but Con Ed’s famous for mismanagement. It’ll bring the country down. It’ll bring us to nuclear war.”

Then she remembered his theories. He and Judah traded theories over coffee as to who brought the country lowest, and in the service of which foreign power or infidel belief. General Motors, Judah claimed, was the country’s curse. “What’s good for GM is good for the nation,” he said. “I believe that. I grant it for argument’s sake. But also in reverse—and since those rattletraps they make are all tin and tinsel and glitter, why in hell should Americans be pleased?”

“Why not?” Finney asked. “We still make more cars.”

“With—what do they call it—planned obsolescence? With a motor that won’t take you fifty thousand miles and body work I’d kick in except it just might dent my shoe. Better do it barefoot,” Judah said.

So they argued while she listened—first carefully then carelessly, then as to actors rehearsing. She had had water in her ear. She heard the sea continually. It was as if she held a conch shell there, suspended, hearing the sea’s tide—but in her right ear, there where Finney theorized, she heard only babble, a small stream hauled over rock.

“So I wanted you to know,” he said. “I think you have the right.”

“Yes.”

“It’s up to you of course. I wouldn’t want to interfere.”

“I’m coming,” Margaret said. “I’ll write him that it’s my idea to come.”

There was a Cole Porter song. It came from
Kiss Me Kate
, which came in turn from
The Taming of the Shrew
. Bianca—whose name rhymed with Sanka when her suitor chided her—sang a song explaining her flirtatiousness. “I’m always true to you,” she sang, though her fashion of truth ran to lying. She sang about millionaire playboys and what they tried to offer her in exchange for what she offered. She whirled through stanzas, getting fortunes, driving her true love wild. He had fits of jealous haggling while she swore her faithless devotion. The audience applauded. It pounded its approval night after night. The song was a showstopper, and even her stage lover had to smile and approve and applaud.

She made Judah take her, twice, to
Kiss Me Kate
. He was not happy in New York. Other men might be impressed by the Empire State Building, for instance, or overawed or bored or busy calculating costs, but Judah, she knew, calculated only his chances should the wind blow him off of the tower. He would gauge jumping distance and check the ledges for toeholds and be an animal at bay.

So his pleasure in the theater would be mixed. He could not forget himself. He gauged the strength of men beside him and in front; he thought the woman who handed them programs was lighting the wrong row on purpose or making him shuffle thick-footed down the wrong aisle. “Darling, in my fashion,” Bianca sang—and Judah would be grim. There was nothing humorous, for him, in all those Texas millionaires and Oklahoma tycoons she sang about, nor did he find it funny when she flounced away. They argued betrayal; they argued pancake makeup as a substitute for flesh tint, and buttressed body garments as a substitute for flesh.