Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (9 page)

“Good evening,” the girl said.

“Good evening. Maggie.”

“Mr. Judah Porteous Sherbrooke.” She smiled. She shook back her plaits.

“You’ve got a memory.”

“I never thanked you properly. I inquired your name. You never told me ‘Porteous’—I asked after that.”

“You thanked me,” Judah said.

“I’m going to New York tomorrow. I’ve had a lovely summer. I’ve got to go now, but thanks.”

She bobbed and moved off, quickening. He knows the child is father to the man. The wish is father to the thought, and necessity the mother of invention. Her propriety and laughter was a seed then, germinant. White clover, Judah knows, stays in the ground upwards of seventy years. She planted something in him (though he would not know it, would forget her name once more, and this their second encounter until she reminded him, later, in their proper courtship, of how he’d rocked back on his heels and neglected to acknowledge how she’d grown, was growing, had won a picture of George Washington at bingo—would plow his bedfields under, repeatedly, and labor enough in his time to tire of it, nearly; would reconcile himself to widowerhood, and bachelorhood, the two indeterminate, fusing, since his first wife had died early on) that took a decade to sprout.

The ordination of the chromosomes
, he thinks,
that’s my true ministry. That’s what I ought to preach.
From that first spawning instant, the sex and size and wit of his sons was ordained.

Maggie had been twenty-three. She called herself, then, Megan. He met her at Morrisey’s Grocery, selecting cheese. She was studying the label and the price on Camembert. He had taken Camembert from the same counter two days before, and the cheese had been inedible. He had returned it, of course. He complained to Morrisey that the stuff was so damn overripe the cow that produced it was ten years buried, and the cowhide wallet worn away with all those doctor bills. “Matter of fact,” Judah said, “I shouldn’t wonder if this was the milking that killed it.”

Morrisey had laughed and credited him and produced a new Camembert cheese. Judah told this story to the girl at the cheese counter, and she turned to face him and was familiar.

“I know you,” Judah said.

“No.”

“I’ve seen you before.”

“It’s possible,” she said.

“Yes. Not lately.”

“No. I haven’t been here”—she calculated, lifting her index finger—“since 1938.”

“I knew you then,” he said, recollecting. “You lost your way on that bike.”

There was nothing timorous about her now, no trace of that thin supplicant. She was model-slim still (was indeed, she told him later, working as a model in New York—but hated it, hated the hair dryers she sat beneath for hair dryer ads, the vacuum-cleaner parts she assembled and disassembled for vacuum-cleaner catalogue ads, the people that she worked with, and their whole notion of chic—).

“Have dinner with me,” Judah said. “We’ll have to fatten you up.”

“I can’t,” she responded—but speculative, smiling. “Thanks anyway.”

“Of course you can.”

“You’re kind to ask . . .”

“For auld acquaintance sake,” he said, and wondered why he pestered her and why he felt persistent.

“I’m with friends.”

“Well, bring them.”

She replaced the Camembert cheese. “My name”—she held her right hand out—“is Megan.”

“And mine is Judah Sherbrooke, Megan. Maggie. Welcome back.”

“I’m passing through,” she said. “I’ll tell the others.”

“Yes.”

“They’re waiting outside. I’ll be back. Mr. Judah
Porteous
Sherbrooke.”

She turned, with her hair swirling, and he watched her out the door.

“Look at that,” Morrisey said.

“I’ll take ten pounds of sirloin,” Judah said. “Now get behind that meat shelf and behave. You ought to be ashamed.”

Morrisey wolf-whistled. “I am, lawsie mercy. I am.” He listened to
Amos ‘n’ Andy
and was working on the accent. “Lawsie mercy. I’se gosh-all get-out ashamed.”

Judah stood by the cereals shelf. He remembers wishing, for a moment, that she’d get back on her bike—or car, or motorcycle, whatever conveyance she used now, or some second stranger’s pickup truck—and leave him to his evening’s plan (a walk, a meal, a smoke, the solitude he broke from only in his aimless grazing). She said to him later that week: “Three coincidences. That’s one too many to take for granted.”

“How else do people meet?”

“Through introductions,” she said. “Because of school friends or through family or work.”

Her friends had come and stayed for drinks, then left (were never present really, were moustachioed absences between the bookcase and the standing lamp, were twittering there like magpies, wearing cameras, asking for gin). He asked her to remain. He barbecued ten pounds of sirloin and dropped the whole thing on her plate. It dwarfed the plate’s circumference, bleeding out onto the cloth.

“You’re joking,” Megan said.

“No.”

“You’ll spoil me with that kind of joke.”

“Spoiled rotten”—he sat down. “If you haven’t spoiled already. Like that cheese.”

He leaned back, pleased with himself. He studied her gestures, engorging. She sliced and chewed with delicacy, theatrical. She would eat his life.

Even across the continent’s span, Peacock felt himself a native of Vermont. He sent ten thousand dollars home, as his subscription to the cost of levying troops. “We pay John Chinaman,” he wrote, “so why should not the Slave receive like Wages and proud Liberty? All bondage—lest it be to Christ—is heinous in His sight.”

They stand there poised on the shore’s brink, reflected, wavering, in an immobility that is motion arrested for the instant only. She is in the ocean, of it, turned three-quarters to Ireland, the sun in front of her so that Judah, squinting, sees the foam-nimbus smudge her body’s edge—the outline of her indistinct in that spume halo, and all of it shifting, her feet hunting purchase, the sand floor accreting (so that he no sooner puts his foot down than he finds it swallowed up, is up to his ankle in silt), the tide continual and treacherous (though this too seems a code to crack; waves come in sequence, he has learned; there’re maybe seven big waves, maybe nine, then nothing much—as if the trough and crest were components of a level whole, the subtraction of one water mass massed up against the next). Then there are riptides, she tells him, and crosscurrents and circle currents that they call a sea puss, lazily coiling, and though he’s not afraid of it, can subdue what fear he has and enter the water behind her grinning, thumping, dominating the waves, he never thinks of it as better than an armed standoff or some sort of watchful truce: not his element, nor one in which he takes his ease, though the marble quarry up at Danby made a fine place for swimming, and he’d stand in some streambed for hours, snagging trout. But she has wished it and her wish, he jokes, is his command, and therefore they have driven to this coastal outcrop and she is in her element, disporting like some glad sea otter, though he’s never seen an otter and doubts they wear pink two-piece suits; still, Megan loves lobster and oysters and clams, and he promises to have a seaplane bring them lobster. Still she laughs that he’s like some forlorn stranded Neptune who’s forgotten how to swim, standing there on that rock jetty, needing only a pitchfork for trident—huge, she teases him, and cranky and bedraggled as a soft-shelled crab.

“What kind of crab is that?” he asked.

“The kind that’s good for eating.” She licked her lips. “The kind that steams up pink and ain’t as tough as it looks.”

“A hermit crab. That’s what.”

“A god of the sea”—she touched him—“who loves his water sprite.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Very much.”

“And likes to watch her swim.”

“Considering the tasty morsel she herself might make.”

“Yum yum.” She put her fingers in his mouth. “Old Neptune’s hungry again.”

He’s forty-eight years old, he tells her, and not the sort of person to joke with or make jokes about; she pulls her fingers from his mouth, salutes, and dives from the rock jetty cleanly, into the crest of the waves.

“Since we cannot take Material Substance with us,” Peacock wrote, “I am persuaded that a Christian man must make display whilst still in the Possession of Appreciative Faculties, and health. The fireplaces shall be marble, not Parian marble nor the stuffs of Italy, Carrara and suchlike, but from our neighbor quarries in Vermont.”

He had traveled home via the Isthmus. The train across the Isthmus was a train he scorned. There were blockades in the Mexican Gulf, but they were under escort and out of danger’s reach. They took a steamer up the Hudson and a train from Troy.

Peacock fulminated against imprecision in trains. His mine trains had a gauged wheel that could hold the track in snow or rain or ice. If he could keep, he argued, twenty tons of ore from falling off of mountain passes, why couldn’t this rattletrap conveyance arrive on time? “The camel finds the Needle’s Eye,” he wrote, “more readily than I find easement for what they call Pneumonia. Strait is the gate . . .”

Through his law practice, Sherbrooke had acquired real estate and mining properties; he accepted notes in lieu of salary and was a paper millionaire by 1852. He bought Montgomery Street. He was, a letter-writing wit observed in the
Alta California, “
Golden
tongued. There be a stream of language issuing forth from Lawyer Sherbrooke’s mouth with its proportionate amount of fool’s gold, but by all accounts worth panning at sixteen dollars the ounce. His opponents would wish him
dried up
. His admirers say the
vein
is inexhaustible and will run on to the Supreme Court and dwarf the
Mother Lode
. Myself I do account him a
natural asset
to our fair state, babbling as the stream does babble or rumbling as the
mine-shaft
when it buries some unfortunate within. I propose a monument to Lawyer Sherbrooke’s
weighty words
and will be thereof the first subscriber. I herewith pledge two
pounds of pebbles
for our Demosthenes’ mouth . . .”

“If the mote is in thy neighbor’s eye,” Peacock wrote, “pluck out the mote in thine own. Thus do we learn the gentleman’s comportment—since I never yet knew scoundrel but could bandy reputations with the best. Truly to learn humility is, I think, the Christian’s highest art—for many’s the mock-humble man who thrives on Pomp and Praise. I pride myself on nothing half so much as this: that never have I claimed as due more than the bond’s redeemable Value, nor ever left notes unredeemed.”

There is Italian marble everywhere, and columns that his father ordered shipped from Greece. The house is what he labeled sizeable and others call huge. Judah moves through it with habit’s ease, not noticing the glitter or the gimcrack elegance his mother had insisted on as
comme il faut
. He’d asked her what that meant, and she said, “What it means is place. It’s knowing your position in this town, and how to keep it up.”

So the Big House is ornate in ways he only sees when seeing it as others do: Maggie, for instance, batting her eyes at him, staring at the mirror that had silver Cupids at the top. They had married three months later, in the upstairs ballroom. They had a civil service, with a justice of the peace presiding, and only a handful of relatives and friends. Her parents motored north from New York. Her father was his, Judah’s, age and none too pleased about it—but not, when he arrived and saw the farm, any too displeased. They got along. They got through a bottle of sour-mash whiskey that first afternoon. He remembers Maggie’s father with affection—a dapper man wearing pinstripe suits and a moustache like Thomas E. Dewey’s moustache.

“We could go the whole hog,” he had offered his bride. “If you’d prefer.”

“No. This is between us, not them.”

So they’d stripped the guest list back and made no fuss about it, keeping private covenant and swearing private marriage vows and saving the parties for later. There would be parties enough.

V

“Hattie,” James Pearson called. “Hey, Hattie.”

“Yes,” she’d said.

“Come on over here.”

“Why?” she inquired.

“Why not?”

“Not till you ask more politely, Mr. James Pearson, sir,” she’d reprimanded him, smiling. “Not till you ask the way a gentleman would ask it.”

“Please.”

“That’s better.”

“Come on over here, hey, Hattie, please.”

His face was red. His hair was red. He flamed at her from the room’s dark corner.

“Well,” she acquiesced. “Since you insist.
Parce que vous insistez.
”

“I do,” he said. “I do.”

She’d taken that as augury and walked toward him, blushing. He reached out his right hand.

“Say please,” she’d chided him.

“Please.”

His hand was freckled, and the knuckles sprouted hairs.

“Say pretty please”—she took his hand—“with a cherry on top.”

“Pretty please with a cherry on top.”

“Say pretty please with a cherry on top, and marshmallow dressing, and sugar.”

He placed his left hand on her waist.

“Pretty please,” he’d whispered. “With a cherry on top, and marshmallow dressing, and sugar.”

“No,” Harriet pouted, withdrawing. “I don’t like marshmallow dressing.”

This completed their routine. She had learned it when learning the way to jump rope. This was her posed, phrased resistance, and now she let him fondle her and gave herself up to his arms. He smelled of licorice. He pressed and mauled at her for minutes, for what seemed like hours though she kept close track of time. He disarrayed her clothing, and she let him paw the disarray. Then Harriet pulled back and kissed his freckled chin and said, “No, please. We mustn’t.”

“Yes.”

“No. Pretty please.”

The licorice transmuted and became the smell of gin.

“Why not?” He had turned sullen.

“Mr. James Pearson”—she chaffed him—“you know the answer to that.”

“Christ, Hattie . . .”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

Later, when she met him by accident—Jamie, just come from propping up the Drop-Inn bar, whose nose had gone bulbous and stomach distended and red hair lost its fullness and sheen—she had reconsidered. She thanked her lucky stars. She watched him shuffling down Main Street, doffing his engineer’s cap to women in comic obscene deference, doing a jig on streetcorners as he waited for the light to change—and thanked her luck he did not see her or doff his cap when she passed. Obscurely, she had been offended that Jamie stayed in town. He should have vanished from the streets and bars when he vanished from her embrace. He had sworn to. “Hattie, I’m leaving,” he said. “I can’t stay around here like this.”

“Don’t go.”

“I know when I’m not wanted.”

“Please stay,” she said, not meaning it and he knew she didn’t mean it and, to spite her, stayed. He weaved and hiccuped past her as an emblem of decorum lost; he lost his job at the bank. She noticed, when he did the hornpipe, he clicked his heels twice in the air. Therefore she wished on him, in retribution for her broken heart, a broken leg. He should, she thought, twist an ankle at least and not prove so monkey-agile, capering.

“You’ll break my heart,” she told him.

“There’s nothing to break,” Jamie said.

“You’re cruel. You’re being unfair.”

“All right,” he had leered at her, stinking of gin-sweetness. “Show me your heart. Let’s have a look.”

So, breathless, not daring to breathe, not knowing why she did it but knowing that she had to, once, not knowing how she dared but knowing his juniper-berry fueled bravado was a dare she had to take, she took off her blouse and unlaced her chemise. She had been cold. There were goose pimples on her arms. She dropped her chin because he might still put his rough hands on her neck, and there was a chill wind blowing that made her naked neck contract. There were willow trees. They stood in a bower the green branches made, and he reached out and twined his fingers in the willow strands.

“Keep going,” Jamie said. “All I can see is ribs.”

Her brassiere was white. It had lace eyelets and four hooks. She reached around and fumbled with the clasps and closed her eyes to concentrate so she would not be fumble-clumsy, and because the cold wind hurt her eyes.

“Jamie?”

“A-yup.”

“James Pearson-person,” she said.

“Keep going.”

“I’ve got a heart,” she finished and dropped its final protective layer and stood there shivering. She screwed her lids tight shut. Her heart was in her throat. “Well, haven’t I?”

“That’s all you got,” he said and laughed and turned on his two heels and left her in the willow’s shadow and crashed across the stream still laughing, whistling. She hated him implacably. She wanted to put out his eyes.

Harriet closes the bathroom door. It squeaks, requiring oil. The door drinks oil, it seems, the way Judah drinks whiskey; no matter how well lubricated, it soon enough dries up. That had been Maggie’s joke. Most of the wit and levity within the household had been hers; she, Harriet, grants that. But there is such a thing as too much levity, as jokes in bad taste following the jokes in good. Their mother had a saying: “There are six senses,” she said.

“Which?”

“How many do you know about?” her mother asked. “How high can you count?”

“To five. One two three four five.”

“And what are the five senses?”

“Sight and sound and smell and touch and taste,” Harriet said.

“That’s right. And then there’s
good
taste, darling: the sixth sense.”

So Harriet would chant while bouncing, “Sight and sound and smell and touch and taste and
good
taste,” or skip rope to the rhythm of it, counting six. There was a sixth sense she learned of later that meant you saw for distances you couldn’t possibly see. It meant you heard things too far away for sound to carry, and smelled smoke when there was something burning, though you couldn’t smell the smoke. It happened to her, Harriet, sometimes; she walked into a room and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and the clock started to chime. She shivered when she heard Fred Rowley’s name and learned, next day, that Fred Rowley had died in a car crash twenty-four hours before. She saw a painting on the Millers’ wall (of the Connecticut River, with an Indian poised on the bank, wearing war paint and feathers and a loincloth) and decided she didn’t much care for it and the instant she made her decision the oil painting fell.

That was coincidence, maybe; she’s willing to grant that. But she had run out screaming from the Wittens’ parlor at the very minute of the day her mother died. She’d known (though in the Library, attending to the Periodical Shelves) when her nephew Seth was born. It was her day to volunteer, and Judah said, “Go on, we’ll manage without you. We’ve managed before,” and Maggie said, “If this one’s half as long in coming as the last, why, there’ll be plenty of time.” So she had been arranging
National Geographic
and marking down the issues missed or out of order. They had a complete second set. There was no smoking in the Library, of course. She herself had never smoked. But suddenly her lungs filled up, and there was the smell of Judah’s cigar smoke, and she had known beyond coincidence there was a baby born.

Harriet arranges herself in the sheets. She uses an electric blanket, but also a hot-water bottle, since she does not trust the blanket while she sleeps. There could be short circuits or a defect in the wiring or faulty connections she would not notice till the morning, till too late. Hilda Thornhill had suffered first-degree burns on her back. If the hot-water bottle broke, Harriet thought, all she would wake up was wet.

“Lord,” she murmurs. “Save my brother Judah from the ravages you visit on us all. Preserve my nephew Ian according to the love we bear him, and his just deserts . . . ”

She cannot continue. The prayer does not soothe her, nor is she composed. The junket had been excellent, she knows. It was just the right consistency, and neither too tart nor too wet. The Sanka did not trouble her—not even that second cup. She, Harriet, breathes with a sweet and inoffensive breath. Judah can tease or ignore her or flaunt her need for maraschino cherries, but her teeth are much better than his. She wonders what sort of wood George Washington used for his incisors. She imagines Martha Washington held in the crook of her husband’s right arm, face tilted back and breathing deeply, but breathing in the smell of cedarwood, not Crest.

“Hey, Missie Sherbrooke. You there! Hey, my maiden lady.”

Her next suitor, Samuel Powers, was bluff about her chastity and found it a fine joke.

“Don’t shout,” she’d said to him. “I hear you.”

“So you ain’t deaf?”

“No.”

“Not deaf to entreaty, neither?” He chuckled. “What about that?”

“You hush up, Mr. Sam,” she said.

“Not deaf to my proposals? Not deaf to argument?”—he winked at Judah hugely.

“No,” she said. “Not all that deaf. You’d wake the sleeping dead with that bellow.”

“OK,”—he slapped his sides, delighted. “All right then. OK.”

“But hush your mouth and mind your manners, Mr. Sam.” She was reading Southern novels then. She dropped a curtsy to him from her imagined carriage height but also dropped her handkerchief.

“Accidental a-purpose.” He pounced. He gathered up her handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and kissed the handkerchief. “Hey, Judah,” he bellowed. “Looky here. Look at this moo-chwower.”

“
Mouchoir
,” she had corrected him.

Her brother laughed, sardonic.

“It’s mine, you unmannerly man. Give it back.”

She stomped her foot in what she hoped was a heroine’s coquettish fashion. He crumpled up her handkerchief and put it in his waistcoat pocket, covering the watch fob and the silver chain.

“Not likely,” Vice President Powers declared. “I found it and I’ll keep it. To console me, Missie Sherbrooke.” He winked at her this time, and she checked to see if Judah was watching—then saw her brother at the fireplace, back turned.

“This memento,” Powers continued. “This fragrant memory, if I may so describe it”—his chest and belly shook with pleasure. “This, this, this moo-chwower.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and bit the end of it. She turned away to hide her tongue’s sudden pain (like burning it on gravy or licking at the sharp edge of a piece of paper) and he resumed his chat with Judah as to railroad stocks. They were engrossed in a prospectus by the time she turned again, and he flung her compliments like bones.

“Hey, Missie Sherbrooke,” Powers said. “Sashay this way, why don’t you? Do a poor fellow a favor.”

He and her brother swapped stories. They slapped each other’s backs. Grimacing in the corner, they huddled over balance sheets and toted up credits and debits. They bickered together the way old friends bicker, and she was only an accessory, she knew. Widower Powers consoled himself with whiskey and gin rummy and poker and cigars. There were other forms of consolation, no doubt, to judge by his burbling smug whisper when he came back from Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“There’s things”—he grew expansive—“things to see there. Yes.”

“What sort of things?” she asked.

“I can’t hardly begin to describe them. Don’t know as it’s proper in—saving your pardon—mixed company.”

“Why, Sam,”—she fluttered, letting her voice break—“you’ve learned something after all. After all these weeks.”

“A-yup,” he chortled, nudging Judah. “You can say that again.”

“Bridgeport, Connecticut,” she continued. “It’s on the water, correct?”

“Right. Leastways I think so.”

“You didn’t notice?”

“Nope. Not me.”

“I thought you said you saw things there.”

“Hattie,” Judah intervened, “he never got out of his room.”

And she was tired suddenly, tired of their self-delighting schoolboy antics. She was weary of their glib obscene fraternity in lust. Powers would be boastful. “I’ve joined in the amorous lists,” he would say. “I’ve entered the fray. I’ve thrown my gauntlet down and plan to be a-jousting soon”—he winked—“in amorous lists.”

So when he married that redhead from Bridgeport, Connecticut, Harriet was not surprised. Instead she felt, perceptibly, relief. She was relieved of Samuel’s importunities (smoothing his hair past the bald spot, crinkling up his eyes in heavy-handed laughter at some heavy-handed joke, clinking the silver together in his side pants pocket, fist working at the coinage, cloth-swaddled, huge) and at peace.

Nor did she feel embittered by Judah’s teasing title, “Spinster.” She selected it herself. It was an honorable name—the spinning sister—and her chosen fate. Time passed, and the passage was simple. She gave up on vanity. She had been young, then youthful, then a woman in her prime, then middle-aged, then past her prime, then old. She had eaten sweets and then forsaken sweets in order to preserve her figure and now ate sweets again. She had tried, persistently, to battle her increasing age, but it had been a losing battle and better not to fight. Time was, she joked, the perfect diet; time has brought her weight back down to what she’d weighed when seventeen. She’d thought her girth irrevocable—but it was time-revoked.