Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (61 page)

This is what she must return to, Maggie thinks, these are the ways of the world. Her father puts her feet on his, and she is tall enough to hold him around the waist already and bury her head in his vest, and he moves her through the room to an imagined orchestra. Her feet are on his burnished shoes, and they do the box step so she follows where he leads.

Now once again she is without volition. She’ll go where Andrew takes her, and when. The men are staking claims. She has no claim to stake. The pair of them drink wine and water together, lifting their glasses like legs. She is the tree that they mark.

III

Andrew excuses himself. He finds a bathroom, enters it, and switches on the light. It is early still, not yet seven o’clock, and he feels little hunger; he is accustomed to eating at eight. The windowpane is frosted glass. He cranks it open; it resists. Outside, the blackness appears palpable, as if the line of light his window casts had texture and solidity as well as shape, as if solid geometry were indeed a factor in his life. He smiles. He has not used words like “parallelepiped” in decades; what was he trying to prove? Maggie barely listened, and Ian disagreed. So whom did he want to impress with his half-baked memories of asymptotes and tetrahedrons and collapsing circles where the foci fuse?

Maggie had a second son, she told him once, who died in infancy. He remembers how her face went loose when telling him, as if the lips and nose and eyes were held onto the skull’s smooth plane by glue that came unstuck. She shook. Her words were clear, but her lips made additional motions. She wet them continually. Seth had died of crib death, and she had one remaining son who had, she said, no use for her.

“It’s a phase,” Andrew responded. “All boys go through it. Especially in college.”

“Did you?”

“What? Run away from home?” He considered the best answer. “Metaphysically.”

“Nonsense,” Maggie said. “You either leave your parents or you don’t.”

“Well, what about your husband? You leave
him
, but you don’t.”

“He’s not my parents.”

“I don’t have a son,” Andrew said, “But I’ve
been
one. Right?”

“Right.”

He remembers wondering why she should oppose him so—why her self-abasing confession turned so rapidly to scorn. “Listen,” Andrew said. “You’re inventing trouble for yourself. That’s what’s wrong with you. You imagine that you ought to be upset about him.”

“Ian,” Maggie said. “It’s his name.”

“About Ian. Then you discover, if you’re honest, that you’re not upset. Right?—and that makes you upset. It’s a vicious circle.”

Maggie extracted sunglasses from her handbag. She found a Kleenex, blew on each lens carefully, and wiped.

“The trouble with you . . .”—Andrew pursued his advantage—“it’s interesting. It’s what makes an artist. Very many of my clients seem to share this trait: you’ve got no superego. Or a weak one—you’re all ego, Maggie, no wonder the kid took a trip.”

She tested the glasses. “Smudged,” she announced. She took them off, then folded them again. “You’ve been marvelously helpful, Andrew. Thanks.”

“I mean it . . .”

“Apparently.”

“All ego and no superego,” he repeated.

“Marvelous. It explains just everything. Why Seth died in his sleep, for instance, and I never see my son.”

“I never said . . .”

“Nonsense. I know, that was my word.” Maggie stood. “And thank you so much for your help.”

The bathroom window is ajar; he breathes the winter air. The snow has ceased. He has a sudden image of himself as Jane’s sweater-clad white-headed father, bending over her exercise book in the lamplight that helps him to read. He assists her with her algebra; he solves the problem that her sixth-grade teacher sets. In the room they occupy, there’s a whiff of woodsmoke; he tells her Michelangelo could draw a freehand circle as accurate as a compass-drawn circle. He did it, people say, with either hand.

“Who’s Michelangelo?” she asks. Andrew tells her about Michelangelo—enough to pique her interest, but not enough to keep her from the problem of apples and oranges that ten minutes ago had her stumped. He urinates. The bathroom he had used this morning feels a world away. He could slip out the back door and drive back to Westport or Manhattan, and none of this need have occurred. Eloise would welcome his return. They had parted peevishly before, and her gratitude when greeting him had been well worth the argument. She would ask him to forgive her, and he’d ask her to forgive him, and she’d say—not understanding or with the barest glimmer of suspicion as to where he’d been and what acquired, what relinquished in the interval, the wife and child he’d never had, then had, then left—she understood. She shouldn’t have mentioned the drapes.

Andrew washes his face. There is no soap in the soap dish, and the towels are wet. He thinks “paternal instinct,” and wonders, is he supposed to have paternal instinct with no practice of paternity? He likes Jane well enough. She’s pretty and perky and quick. She’s quietly attentive, also, as if she hears why people talk as well as what they say. But he’d be lying if he said that he felt shivers up his spine when introduced to his daughter, or that her every word engaged him and her glance had been instructive. He would have failed, no doubt, to select her from a playground or room full of children; she would be a stranger for months.

Such an instinct must be earned, he thinks; the strangeness dissipates. It takes place over time. It has to do with bottles and wailing importunity become some sort of greeting, with pride and delight at the first word or tooth. He has shared none of this. He never wanted to. He had averted his eyes from the peephole at the Toy House and lived the intervening years without regret. He runs his tongue over his teeth. He has many faults, but one of them is not the lust for repetition. Having embraced avoidance, he need not do so again.

He opens the door. Jane is there. For an instant they assess each other. “I ate already,” she says.

“Yes.”

“When it was
my
suppertime. I don’t like fish.”

“Does Ian cook often?”

She nods.

“Does your mommy cook also?”

“Froot Loops. She used to,” says Jane.

“Or do you go to restaurants? With your mommy and Ian?”

“Only Ian.”

Andrew gets to his knees. He is conscious of the gesture, the stiffness in his joints, the patterned oak beneath him, and her height now consonant with his. “Would you like to take a trip? And visit many restaurants?”

She watches him. “With who?”

“Me. And your mommy.”

“And my brother?”

“In New York City,” Andrew says, “there are many restaurants. Friendly’s, for example. McDonald’s. And so many others you’d think you could burst.”

“He doesn’t want to.”

The floor is cold. Andrew’s knees hurt. He stands again. “Who doesn’t?”

“Ian.”

“How do we know? Did you ask?”

“It’s emeralds,” Jane lifts her right hand to show him. “This ring.”

“He doesn’t have to come, you know. It’s not that far away. Or he could join us later.”

“Mm-mn.”

“He’s been to New York City. So now it’s your turn,” Andrew says. “We’d better go back for dessert.”

She takes his hand, returning, as if to tell him that he’s won her momentary fealty. Maggie’s face seems smooth in the candlelight; the lines in her neck are erased. Jane sits in the chair next to his. He counts the chairs; this table could seat twelve.

Sitting, he is weary; he moves his toes in his shoes. Last night Eloise declared (putting on her coat in the foyer, jabbing at the elevator button with her vermilion index fingernail) he should get in touch with his feelings. He mouths the phrase, attempting to get back in touch. But he cannot touch feelings; he can only feel, touching, and he finds that touching enough. He makes a little ditty of the idiotic syllogism. A fashionable distaste for fashion, he tells himself, the kind of person who watches TV in order to disparage it—that’s who I am. He had attended a wedding that week where the rabbi instructed the couple to “Tickle. Touch. Unzip.” Andrew had controlled himself. It was his client’s daughter who stood there nodding solemnly, promising in silk and lace to tickle and unzip. The rabbi had been plump, with turquoise chains around his neck and a Vandyke beard. “A solemn marriage contract it isn’t,” her father had said later. They clinked glasses. “Four daughters I’ve got, Andy. But just one
kaddish zoger.
There.” He pointed to a boy in a white jacket, with a red carnation and a pompadour. “That’s the little
pisher
. My
herzkind
. About the daughters, Andy, I’m exactly in touch with my feelings.” He clapped his hand upon his heart and pulled a wallet from the tuxedo’s inside pocket. “Talk about a soft touch, Andy, it’s five thousand dollars a feel.”

“Do you remember?” Ian asks, “when they had actual trains here?” He turns to Maggie. “When they whistled at the house?”

“No. They’d stopped doing that.”

“According to his daybook,” Ian says, “Joseph set his watch by the train whistle. He shot his shotgun off at them if they were late.”

“Well, not exactly
at
them,” Maggie says. “Up in the air.”

Andrew rubs the tabletop. He makes conversation with Ian, as once he had tried to with Judah. He asks about the crops and cash value of hay these years, and what the land is good for other than dairying. “Developers,” says Ian. “Bowling alleys on the bottomland because it’s flat.”

“You don’t mean that,” says Maggie.

“Or parking lots, maybe. You see”—Ian reaches for the pitcher of water—“to those who live their life on a farm, it isn’t so romantic. It’s a losing proposition, and you get burned in the bargain. You wake up one morning and find yourself dead; you find out the cows have mastitis and the feed’s run out and prices have been raised for everything but milk. You go downtown to wrangle with the Agway man, and while you’re gone the vet shoots the herd and says it’s for taxpayers’ safety. Shit.” He drinks. “It’s nothing personal, you understand; my father knew enough to get out from under, at least. I’m talking about the whole region. Ski slopes. Picturesque fishing villages. The best New England ever does is almost as good as it used to.”

“What keeps you here?” Andrew asks.

“The chamber of commerce somewhere asked a caterer to reproduce the first Thanksgiving feast.” Ian has grown voluble; he crosses his fork and his knife. It is as if he wishes to accumulate conversation, to hoard it for the silence soon to come. “At today’s prices,” he says, “and with no profit margin, the estimate was one hundred fifty dollars a head. They screamed at him, they said he’s crazy. But he told the city fathers that he’d cut it close. He said you’ve got to figure lobsters, goose, and turkey—all the trimmings; applejack brandy, wine. They ate themselves silly, those Pilgrims.”

“Is that an answer?” Andrew asks. “What
are
you working on?”

“It is. Because I don’t believe it. I believe they ate a little leftover cornmeal and turnips and maybe the first of the hams. Maybe Samoset brought in some feedcorn from the storehouse.”

Maggie rouses. “We’ve been sold a bill of goods,” continues Ian, and she says, “I’ve heard that before.”

“Yes? From whom?”

“Your father.”

“I don’t remember.”

“He had this theory about Roosevelt. He used to say how Roosevelt’s historians made picture books of settlers bringing in the sheaves. Sitting down to celebrate. When nothing grew that time of year—it was never harvest time in Vermont in November.”

“Well”—Ian smiles—“that’s one thing we would have agreed on.”

“Entirely,” says Maggie. “And more often than you think.”

Andrew, drinking water, has a sudden vision of the winter when New England was true wilderness, not with roadways plowed and salted and honeycombed with motels. Men with names he can barely remember—names in front of libraries or state capitols or churches, names like Hooker and Mather and Shepard and Cobb, Bradford, Bradstreet, Edwards—names that conjure broadcloth and a broadax in conjunction, the preachers felling brush the length of the Connecticut Valley, the men who founded colonies not so much in the image of that England they left as in the image of a New Jerusalem, a place where faith and works, where faith in works was manifest: he sees them dreaming.

The air would be clear. It had the depthlessness of dream. Sight followed it until the horizon was lost, was blue, remaining in the mind’s eye like the kingdom of the just so properly proportioned that it required no king. No tree there stood so tall it seemed distinct, nor mountain peak that belittled the hills, nor cataract that made the stream a tributary merely. The world was frozen, cleansed, air like a knife-edge where such settlers drank. They broke the ice each morning that forbade reflection on the wells. What they saw when bending to the surface of the ice was not their nearing features but a rippled visage of perfection: purity.

It cracked. Evil attended. Evil was corporeal; it had both face and frame. It passed elderberry wine and pumpkin pie and hiccuped, holding its stomach. It continues. It waits leering, stinking, its collar undone, its grease-thick fingers on the rump of some pink parlor wench, using the King’s English and the Bible to calumniate, using gin and water to incite the children sleeping on the bear pelt by the door, feeding slops to the redskin or dogs. It lights its clay pipe and stretches, edging the girl to the fireplace coals and the nearby mattress of straw ticking it can spread her on, and thinking:
soft, soft, soft, from here on in it’s soft.

She does not resist. She joins him there with glad abandon, having no reason not to. Men drink. They hoist pewter tankards like the ones on the mantel behind him. They build with wood, then brick, then quarry for marble and slate. Men ford rivers without bridges and make pasture out of forests, and they lay out roadbeds and trainbeds and canals. The firelight was similar; a chicken tracked under equivalent tables for crumbs. The minister attended. Someone sang. A child succeeding in sleep at the far edge of that trestle, her head cradled in her arms, has hair astonishingly like Jane’s; it spills like liquid amber over her crossed wrists.