Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (44 page)

“Tell him about animals. And unicorns and maidens and maybe knights in shining armor who beat up the dragon. Whatever you want. Gypsy stories about kings who were beggars before.”

“Once upon a time,” said Judah, “there was a unicorn. There was a maiden and a knight in shining armor who beat up the dragon. He became king of the gypsies. I don’t know stories like that.”

“Invent them,” Maggie said.

An old woman lived in a shoe. Cats went to London to visit the queen, people rode a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, then opened the cupboard to find it was bare and so the poor doggie had none. Except lately all such rhymes feel cruel to her—with Jack tumbling Jill and broken eggs and blackbirds baked alive. Someone is licking platters clean at some other someone’s expense, or riding pell-mell through the streets in order to light lamps or sweep chimneys clean with the bodies of storks or force the children to sleep. People are plunged into pots; spiders wriggle inside, or thumbs come popping out of pies, or ladybird’s house is on fire and she has to hurry home.

Slowly therefore, scuffing the floor to find splinters and keep the parquet shining and because she might as well get use out of the hallway runner before it goes threadbare beneath strangers’ boots, leaning on the banister for much the same reason, not weakness, Maggie approaches the stairs. Judah used to walk that way. She had started on this stairway more than half her life ago, at twenty-three, though blithe, though skipping, her ungainliness what he called grace as, lumbering up after her, she heard him wheeze and snort. The first time, when thirteen, lost, and finding the Big House, she’d not gotten past the kitchen—but more than forty years later Maggie remembers how he’d risen from his work desk like a wave, towering over her, then crashing down. The stairwell has paintings.
Jude
, she wants to tell him.
Look what's happened in the house.
There is a cowboy chasing buffalo, and the pink sun sets behind a canyon wall. There is a stand of birch trees, then a painting of a stream. There is a group portrait—worked up, perhaps, from photographs—of the Transcontinental Railway where the two halves meet. Men pose in top hats or shirt-sleeves, and one man in a cutaway holds a spike and sledge. High noon casts gray light anyhow upon the celebrants; they are shadowless. Maggie holds her housecoat closed and raises it a little; otherwise, she’d slip. The man in the cutaway grins. She drifts past him and studies a cow; its eyes are lakes in which this particular artist has seen fit to paint brown trout.

The second floor is cold. She wears knee socks. Her housecoat has pink quilting that has faded to near-white. Her flannel nightgown is blue. From outside, through the twelve-pane window, past the laden maples and the tamaracks, she sees herself positioned in the tableau’s center: a great glass dome above her, and a farmhouse and flag and glued-down grazing animals above the thick flat base. You buy this toy for Christmas and you give it to your daughter and she shakes it like a rattle till there’s snow.

Hattie’s door is open, as it rarely was during her lifetime; Maggie enters. The furnishings have been placed on display. William Jennings Bryan wrote a thank-you note that’s in a silver frame on the bed table; the hooked rug reads “Home, Sweet Home.” The pillow on the rocking chair is a sampler saying “Rest” that Maggie has not seen before; the oil lamp has been burnished and the candlesticks hold candles. The curtains have been drawn and fastened with a pink silk cord.

This is the window she escaped from,
Maggie thinks.
This,
that he’s hiding.
She undoes the cord’s loop, separates the curtains, and peers out. “Come in the evening or come in the morning; come when expected or come without warning,” was how Hattie put it. She said “hospitality” and “open-handedness” and “Sherbrooke” used to mean one and the same.

Maggie had been openhanded, been a partygiver and a partygoer and the life of every party till her husband could not stand it and shut the Big House door. But she agrees with him now. She wishes she could tell him how reclusiveness prevailed. She balls her fists and stares out at the yew trees as conical as igloos with new snow. It had been easy to leave. She’d left him overnight, then for weekends, then for weeks. Then finally she left for seven years. Now she is just as much a prisoner in this enormous cage as she had ever laughingly called Judah, or the portraits of the ancestors that loom by Hattie’s bed.

Now she descends. She sees Ian in the kitchen and constructs a smile. They will pay to see her mummified, bending at the waist but swaddled in silk and chinchilla; the legend says that that’s what Judah’s wife should wear. She wonders what there is for breakfast, since the Froot Loops box is empty—only pastel crumbs inside, only the sweetened broken arcs of circles that Jane insists be whole, returning each morning’s measure of breakage because she will not swallow it. Ian has been making coffee. The pot steams. Maggie hopes so hard for snow she feels herself shiver: every second Thursday let there be blizzards till June.

III

Ian hears her shuffling progress. When his mother comes into the room he smells her from a distance; he will have to urge her to wash. Her hair looks like a squirrel’s nest—lank, tangled now, and graying, with Hattie’s tarnished silver comb protruding from the bun. The skin beneath her eyes is puffy, darkened, as if she has been pressing on a bruise. He does not regret calling Andrew. For weeks he’d gone to sleep each night resolved to take some morning action—to shock Maggie back to competence, if she could be shocked. She had been his image, always, of efficient sanity; now she holds her housecoat closed because the buttons have been lost.

She raises her shoulders, exhaling. “Is there coffee?”

Ian pours a cup. He adds both cream and sugar, then justifies himself again, as he feels the need to do each time they open the house. “It’s the legal minimum. If they look at it too closely, we might not get away with it. It’s just a way of saying this is public property for six hours a month.”

“I hate it,” Maggie says.

“You used to have more people visit every weekend than we ever get these days on tour.”

“Except they were invited.”

Ian looks at his hands. “The government protects us, that’s how we keep Route Seven away. As part of the Historic Preservation Act. You know all this, we’ve got no choice.”

“We do.”

“Not much.”

“We don’t need the money.”

“Agreed.”

Maggie sighs. She dips her head like some slow schoolgirl learning long division.

“It has to be of public value. That’s what Finney says.” He pours himself more coffee. The mug has been chipped; Ian runs his index finger twice around the rim. “Section one-oh-six: the effect of the roadway must be determined by the head of the relevant federal agency. Otherwise they can’t release the funds or issue the license and permits, remember; otherwise we’d be sitting ducks. ‘In practice,’ says the handbook, ‘a mediated solution has usually been achieved.’ ”

He repeats this as though he’s persuaded; it’s a lesson he learned six months back. Yet the truth that Ian hides (with all his talk of National Historic Preservation Acts and the National Register of Historic Places and house museums and Advisory Councils and easements and Tax Reform Acts) is he’s just as lost as she, and flailing at the future with words about the past:
preservation
, trust. “Well, anyhow,” he says, “that’s what Finney figures.”

“Not upstairs. Not in Jane’s room.”

“No. But we can rope it off.”

“Not my room,” Maggie reminds him. “Not anyplace we live in.”

“Have it your way,” Ian says. “Have it the way Miles Fisk wants. Let them put an exit ramp right through the south-facing gate. Past the shed field; that’s where they’ll put Sunoco and a Hojo’s if we’re lucky. We could harvest plastic bottles and tin cans.”

He watches her. His father would have strung barbed wire or stood in the roadway with shotguns. But Ian too is fighting for the Sherbrooke property, with more modern stratagems: petitions and incorporation papers and a listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Maggie goes to the window. “It’s snowing.”

“Someone may arrive today,” he says. “You mustn’t worry.”

“I’m not worrying.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Ian says.

His condescension shocks her, he sees, though it comes in the guise of compassion; that he should tell her not to worry seems far more a cause for worry than the statement by itself. She advances on the window and smudges it by breathing. She draws a triangle in the opaque pane. “I’ve had strangers here before,” says Maggie.

“Yes.”

“But a
museum
where we live? I’ve seen them,” she whispers. “Tracking salt all over the carpets. Using up the well.”

Outside the wind increases, and what had seemed like light drifting snow drives at the window and sticks. The knuckles of her hands are white; she sucks at them, two at a time.

“You’d better get dressed,” Ian says.

First, she could ride horses better than anyone—better than his father, even. She made him chocolate cake with chocolate icing and filling, and wrote with whipped cream on the sides and top: this is IaN’S EverYBodY ELse HaNDS OFf! He would watch her, pleased and proud, while she extruded the thin round line and cut it off at each word’s end; when she offered him a turn, all he himself could manage was globs and splotches and leaks. She was a better pianist than anyone—and Judah gave her, when Ian was five, a concert in the house. He brought a violinist and a cellist over from Boston; they were both professionals, but Maggie played the piano part. They played Beethoven and Dvorak, and then sight-read Haydn trios; he had been enthralled. Maggie sat three-quarters facing him, her face flushed; someone turned the pages at his mother’s nod. She played with her lower lip sucked in, swaying, and was the most important person in the trio, with the loudest part.

He had adored her. He leaned forward, rapt. He was just learning to play. They had hired fold-up chairs and put a hundred in the hall, outside the music room. Some man he didn’t know, behind him, said, “How did she get the musicians, I wonder?” “Judah paid,” said someone else, “or they damn well wouldn’t be here,” and the lady with him said, “Ss-sh, that’s her boy.” Ian flushed and fled.

They found him in the kitchen. He would not cry, he said to Hattie, and she said, “Of course not. You’re too big for that. You’re five, and five-year-olds don’t cry.”

“And three-quarters.”

“Five and three-quarters. Let’s go back.”

“I want . . .” he said and stopped.

“Want what?”

“Promise I can have it?” Ian asked.

She had been distracted, hearing the music beyond. He heard his mother’s solo passages, and she missed every note.

“You know,” said Hattie, “I can’t promise anything when I don’t know what you want.”

“Promise anyhow,” he pressed her.

“Maybe.” In their negotiations this meant yes.

“I want that man out of the house!”

She looked at him, shocked. He stamped his feet. He folded his arms on his chest.

“I can’t, Ian. You know I couldn’t do that.”

“You promised!”

“Which one?”

“The one with the flat nose. The one right behind me.”

“Who, Andrew? That’s Andrew Kincannon. But he’s your mother’s friend,” she said. “Why ever would you want him out?”

“Because.”

“Because why?” Hattie was growing impatient.

“Because of what he said.”

“About?”

Ian considered. “About the music. He said, ‘Judah paid . . .’ ”

“Oh, don’t pay any mind to him. Not Andrew. He’s just jealous.”

“Of what?”

Hattie studied the ceiling. She pursed her lips. Even then he’d known she knew more than she was letting on about his mother’s friend, but knows now how much more there was she didn’t dare to guess. “He’s in the business,” she said. “A professional person. He wishes Judah had asked him to arrange the concert, probably. You mustn’t mind his talk.”

So he had been mollified and went to his room hating them, hating the piano. Later, when his father burned it—though by that time Ian was using the Steinway to practice—he’d understood a little of the reason why. When the fire quieted, he salvaged a black key and a white key that had been cracked and blackened, and hid them in his bureau, in the socks.

In December he had discovered his grandfather’s daybooks in the attic, in a cupboard with sealed shelves. There were a dozen volumes, and Ian leafed idly through. The handwriting was clear, the pages lined. The books were leather-bound. In his open-faced, right-slanting script, Peacock’s grandson kept accounts, each ledger comprising a year. His principal occupation had been that of banker, and he supervised the workings of the farm with fitful inattention. He planted apple orchards, organized the Elgin Creamery, and undertook to ship milk to New York in refrigerated trains. There were three such trains a day. He reduced the flock of sheep and increased the herd of cows.

But Joseph Sherbrooke was a meditative man; his entries attested to this. After each row of figures at week’s end, he would unburden himself. And as his affairs grew more complex he kept a separate ledger for the workings of the farm, recording in his daybooks only the daily weather. Full of schemes for social change he never quite effected, he focused on his family with a kind of abstract earnestness. “If I had my preference,” he wrote in 1900, “this century so well arrived would last a thousand years. My darling wife and daughter thrive, the barley yield was excellent, the season’s syrup sweeter than any I can remember tasting. Business prospers. The proper irrigation of the bottomland is now in Leahy’s charge. We are in good health. I have one wish remaining, with which to greet the Year: may the child we await be a son. If so, we are agreed. We will call him Judah; that is praise. For Judah is a place and tribe as well as single man; it is an hilly fastness and an ancient name. For Leah ‘conceived again and bare a son, and she said. Now will I praise the Lord: therefore she called his name Judah, and left bearing.’ ”

The radiator leaks. He studies the discolored floorboards at its base. He wonders if they should put their best or worst foot forward when Andrew arrives; should he urge his mother to use makeup, for example? Would Andrew respond to Maggie’s collapse or the brave guise of endurance?—Ian does not know him well enough to know.

“Kincannon,” she pronounced, three days before. “Andrew Kincannon.”

“Who?”

“Do you remember him?”

“Not very well.”

Maggie lifted her head from her hands. “Try to.”

He did, and Andrew acquired definition: the full lips, the expensive clothes, the ears that Ian had seen to be lobeless. “What about him?”

“I can’t handle it. Not by myself.”

He could not remember Andrew’s eyes. He spent some time attempting to remember and, failing, concluded that Andrew wore glasses. He imagined horn-rimmed glasses, tinted glasses, bifocals, hunter’s glasses, goggles, and even a single black patch.

“You’ve got to tell him,” Maggie said. “I can’t handle it alone.”

She spoke to her fingers. He looked at them also. “You’re not alone.”

“No.”

He made those assertions of comfort he’d been making now for months. “We’re with you. We’re in this together.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll get better. Wait and see.”

She shook her head. “I can’t describe it. There’s so much pain, it’s everywhere . . .”

He lit her cigarette. He flicked the lighter additionally, twice.

“Like an operation,” Maggie said, “without anesthesia. So you know what’s happening and
feel
it, feel it, Ian, but have to stay strapped to the bed.”

“Jane’s fine, she’s thriving. You mustn’t feel guilty. You’re in a safe place here.”

She put away her cigarette. He continued with the blessings that she ought to count, and why anxiety was inappropriate; she took a strand of hair and combed it with her thumbnail, then curled and uncurled the hair. “It doesn’t help,” she said. “You used to want to find out.”

“What?”

“The name of Jane’s father.” Maggie spoke carefully. For the full term of her pregnancy, he’d asked her that, and she refused to tell him, saying it didn’t matter, wasn’t relevant: she’d had this child to have this child, not to have another husband. “You used to want to know.”

“So Andrew . . . ?”

“I need help. I can’t pass an open window, Ian, or go near the medicine chest. Oh, I don’t mean to frighten you, but I might not make it. Some days . . .” She stopped. It was as if, even thick-tongued and in pain, she felt ashamed to admit it. “I don’t mean you, you’d be all right. But Jane. She ought to have what help there is. Christ knows it isn’t likely but he might provide some help. It wasn’t
his
fault. Andrew Kincannon.”

Ian reached his hand out, but she placed both her hands in her hair.

“Why this uneasiness?” Joseph Sherbrooke wrote. “Wherefore this sense of impending disaster, as with the silence that precedes a storm? Three elms fell in last week’s wind, and this morning’s stillness is the portent of motion not peace. Thirty-one degrees. The very sky beyond my window is glazed with an additional glaze so that one might think it lacquered: layer on layer of preservative that suggest fragility not strength. Just so did we when children pierce an eggshell with a needle and blow out the liquid contents—thereby retaining the retainer that otherwise would crack. I was always clumsy-fingered, but could perform this feat. Therefore, with the pleasure of skill elsewhere denied me, I would eviscerate dozens of eggs. The women of the household painted them, vying with each other in intricacy of stencil and design—so that by Easter they displayed whole shelvesful of such objects, a rainbow of color refusing to fade.

“My prey was the hen house no fox ever entered. They dared not because of the dogs. But the dogs were acquiescent while I their young master wreaked havoc—there was in any case a superfluity of food. There are stone eggs also that my aunt collected, and the semiprecious ones called Fabergé. But mine appeared more precious still, at least in my youthful accounting. They were the reward of chores, the final product of a morning hour. Things change. I have changed. I am thirty-eight years old today, with one child born and another arriving. We will celebrate. I smoked two cigars after lunch. The maids set out the birch log on the table, with its twelve drilled holes for candles and the twelve white tapers. It is the hollow center I fear, however, the perfect preservation—year by year unchangingly the birch log!—that suggests decay.”