Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (17 page)

“I don’t need charity.”

“This isn’t charity,” she says.

Yet she is startled by his near-divination of her thought. He always had been generous—with that offhand largesse of the rich who need no money since it all was earned before. She used to tell him he threw checks at foundations like scraps at the bluetick hound, only with less careful aim. He’d not even read the brochures.

“You’re wasting it,” she’d say. “These people use ninety percent of their funding for office space. None of it goes to the needy.”

“I give a tithe to the first takers; it’s simpler first come and first serve.”

“But unfair,” she’d protested. “Immoral.”

“Then slip your envelopes on top of the stack,” Judah said. “It won’t make any difference. But if it makes you glad . . .”

So she selected and directed his charity for years. He’d spent less on himself than anyone; she granted that. He wore the same old coats and boots till they were worn to patches, and then he had them patched. His car was always ten years old (though he’d flung that Packard at her, and tried for furs, and the Steinway concert grand). It wasn’t self-denial or a planned austerity, just that he had no use for what she labeled useful. Somewhere Judah must have heard that men who loved their women gave their women gifts—that husbands who could manage it would manage a fur coat, or car, or diamond rings. So when he remembered he took her out shopping—rampaging through George Jensen’s with pockets full of hundred-dollar bills, and emptying those pockets out, floor by floor, as she trailed behind him, protesting. It was luxurious, of course, but not her sort of luxury since he paid more attention to the cattle at an auction barn than to the silver service, or the goblets he bought her, or plate. His gift-giving was so dutiful it undermined desire—and he’d thank her, frowning, for her own few gifts to him, then fold and store them away. It was a frown of puzzlement more than reproof; he just didn’t know what to do with a second overcoat, or a carryall with stamped initials on the flap.

“I got no need of charity,” he mutters at her now.

“No,” Maggie says. “You’re self-sufficient, darling. I know that.”

“Correct. One hundred percent.”

“I’m not dispensing charity. I hate that word. I’m glad to be here and glad you let me come.” She wonders, is that true? “Truly. And grateful for the house.”

“You’re not”—he twists his mouth—“the lying kind.”

“Be quiet,” she commands him. “You’ll tire yourself with this talk.”

And then he is obedient and she takes his flesh between her hands. She prods and rubs and massages his shoulders, feeling him quicken then ebb. He is a white-haired elder lying at her side, and she dispenses charity. She soothes and strokes her husband, making circling motions on his lower back. Maggie rises above him, not mindful now of the sheets, warm with this familiar exertion, watching her breasts sway and dangle as she works.

“That feels fine,” he mumbles. His mouth is in the pillow.

“Hush. Don’t talk.”

She labors like this for some time. She finds herself caressing him and making for his buttocks like an alien, secret place.

“It’s good to be here,” she whispers.

He makes no answer.

“Judah.”

He shifts his head.

“J.P.” She hears herself whispering, hoarse. He draws his hands down to his sides.

“Jude, are you listening?”

Ponderously, he draws up his knees.

“It’s good to be back, do you hear?” She touches herself, expectant. “It is.”

He pushes himself up on his hands. He is on all fours in the bed and turns to face her, focusing. She watches him watching her. He licks his lips.

“That’s not polite. You shouldn’t stare so”—and places his hand on her left breast and lets it settle. “Touch me, Judah.”

He balances. She feels his hand veer.

“Please.”

He falls upon her and is a great weight; she flattens herself and supports him.

“Talk to me,” she says.

He does not move.

“Say something, won’t you? Anything.”

Still he is silent. She listens for his breathing and does not hear but feels it, in concert with hers. She holds her breath. He does not breathe.

“Jude?”

She feels the panic’s edge again and tries to force him off her, but he does not move. She scissors her legs shut. His cold leg moves in consonance, and he lies atop her two closed legs.

“Are you asleep?”

He does not answer.

“Sleepy, darling? That’s all right. We’ve plenty of time in the world,” Maggie says. “Rest.”

His hair is lank. She reaches to brush it back from his forehead, then stays her hand. She holds it there suspended, shaking, and shuts her eyes again. Now panic enfolds her utterly and fills her mouth and pours itself into her ears. It stops her nose and fingers her and runs rough fingers down her body, squeezing. She drops her hand. It holds her hands. It plays upon her spine as though her spine were something like a xylophone, but with no sheathing for the hammers, with nothing to cushion her; there are no blankets; she shakes. Panic is efficient; it tongues her without haste. It licks its chops and tastes her and is not perfunctory; she vises her legs against it but it pries her easily apart. It has a throat and makes percussive noises in its throat. She weeps but keeps her eyes closed, screams but keeps her lips together and is dry-eyed, soundless. She cries out, “Judah, Jude.” She has a sudden memory of Ian, eight months old, with a flu and croup and fever that reached one hundred and five degrees in the first two hours; Judah took their son and plunged him in the bath, with ice and cold water, and Ian screamed and shivered while they brought the fever down. She remembers Jude’s huge hands, the size of Ian easily, and how they held and tormented their son, but helpful, but healing, and she tries to marry panic and embrace it now. It enters her. It is practiced. It penetrates her with a thick rigid member of ice. It scrapes her womb and fills her mouth and reams her asshole out. It ejaculates everywhere, grunting, spewing ice. Its sperm is like sea spume where even the tideline has frozen. Ian was blue in the face. He spat and had been mottled and outraged. Panic assaults her, stiffening, where there is no pleasure left. It continues. She lay beneath her ancient husband, and he knew her not.

PART III

I

Judah wakes, as he always does, quickly. He is asleep, then wakeful, with no intervening period. He focuses on the pillow beneath him, then the sheet above his head. There is light in the room. The dials of his alarm clock are luminous, radioactive, though Hattie said that if you wear a wristwatch with radioactive dials you get cancer of the wrist. He shakes his head. He disagrees with her, disproving it by proving how many men wore wristwatches with dials like that for how many years. No cancer has ever been reported, to his certain knowledge, that anyone has ever traced to radioactive dials.

It is like strychnine, he said. Swallow a small dose and you build up resistance; swallow a big one without any practice, and it’s your final dose. She had been adamant. What about sciatica, she asked; what about that? They thought they knew about it ever since the word was invented, and here they’d been using it wrong all along and now they’d swear on Bibles what they gainsaid just last week. She made him swear to wear only his uncle’s gold vest watch, with its slipcase and chain. She’d made him send back Finney’s Christmas gift, which illuminated the date. He’d promised, to humor her, and had been out of the habit of timepieces anyhow. He raises himself to joke to Maggie about her sister-in-law’s grim insistence, and how time flies if you throw your watch out the window. There is a janitor at Smith College, he jokes, who’s worked for thirty years. When the girls ask him what he wants for a retirement present, he says, I wanna watch. So they let him. He chortles and slaps at his side. He turns to see how Maggie takes the joke. She is not there. He swivels, scanning the room. There is a bloated form beside him, its breath laborious, and he shrinks from it because his wife was always whippet-lean and a light sleeper. He had not dreamed her, did not dream. He cannot remember his dreams. She has slipped away again, and that is once too often in this life.

Judah extends himself from the bed. It is no distance to the closet, nor any real accomplishment to stand. He acknowledges, departing, that the shape beside him is in fact his wife. She owns the house now and will not leave. It is his turn to go. He will gather up his errant son and they will leave together; Maggie lies there in the bed as bait, for his new quarry will be Ian, and the trap is this woman lying in the middle of the house. He turns his attention to his son, attending to that. There are rings on Ian’s fingers and bells on his toes. He will track and seek his lost son out and force him to return. Ian has a banjo, possibly, or a beer bottle to whistle in or guitar or Jew’s harp or piano; he makes music wherever he goes.

The oil lamp by his bedside gutters down. The shape on the bed rearranges itself. Judah chooses a duck-hunting jacket to clothe his nakedness and stands there hefting it in the closet’s warm oblivion. He fits his arms into his sleeves. The sleeves are thick. He rests, standing as he used to stand in duck blinds in the darkness, a piece of the surrounding space. His coat has the stench of raw health. He needs no boots. He has his cane and body-cunning and will find whoever lies with Maggie where they lie.

Then he makes his way into the hall. He pads down the center of it, secretive. It is a thing he’d noticed early on that men go down the centers of streets, or skulk on the paving, or can’t make up their mind and cross the road at puddles or for the sake of the sun. But early on he’d chosen to walk each walkway’s center. He’d give way to cars, of course, or a team and cart, but not concede dominion to some engineer’s idea of who should walk in which direction when. It is a habit now he won’t break for the sake of stealth, although he walks on tiptoe, without shoes.

“They’re giving out tickets in New York City, Mr. Sherbrooke,” Sam Burgess said. Sam Burgess lost the use of his left arm in a driving accident, so they made him stand outside the elementary school, whistling and waving at cars.

“What for?”

“Jaywalking’s what they call it. It costs you fifteen dollars to cross between the green.”

“I call it freedom of movement,” Judah said. “I call it my own skin.”

“I wanted to warn you,” Sam said.

“You’ve done that. But there’s no car coming, and we got no traffic light.”

“Just don’t say I didn’t warn you if you get to New York City and they throw you in the clink . . .”

“Not likely,” Judah said. “But thanks all the same.” And anyhow it is his hall, and anyhow they’d see him if they chanced to look.

There was a riddle Ian asked one morning, after school. “Hey, who’s the strongest man in the world?”

“I don’t know,” Judah said. “What’s your opinion on that?”

“Superman. You’re supposed to answer ‘Superman.’ ”

“Superman.”

“Wrong again,” his son crowed. “A traffic cop. Know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because he holds up a hundred cars with just one hand.”

“Except it’s all he has,” said Judah. Ian veered off to the kitchen to try the riddle out on Mrs. Sattherswaite.

(Judah Sherbrooke lies, they whisper, on his deathbed now that was his marriage bed. He believes he can hear the doctors consulting. We could schedule a quadruple bypass next week, they say, or give him mustard poultices. We could make him take his morning constitutional and see whether yogurt would help. It’s the mitral valve, they say, it’s an infarction; it’s all of that beefsteak for all of those dinners for years. He lies, he hears them say, in splendor, in great pain, in peace. They lie. He is merely husbanding his strength. Bears hibernate, and ducks go torpid in the wintertime, and many beasts are sluggish until heat quickens them. The bedsprings creak and complain. The frame’s securely jointed, he knows about that, but the rails of the sleigh bed need sanding. There where he flings his legs to the floor, or sits at the bed’s edge winding his watch, the inside of his legs has rubbed the edges smooth. There’s nothing like the action of the flesh; it gives a sheen to wood no varnish can accomplish. It’s endocarditis, they say, it’s angina certainly, all his sins upon him at long and final last. What can’t he shoulder by bearing; which trick or two remaining is the trick to play? He asks himself who let the doctors in, the lawyers out, and where is Maggie, and why should they whisper if he hears them anyhow whispering. It’s blockage on blockage, they say, the LAD, the widowmaker, enough to fell an ox. Nonsense, he winks, no such luck. Come here till I tell you: there’s caterpillars coming out of moths. There’s beasts in air and water that will walk upon this earth. It took him three shots through the head to kill one snapping turtle, and the jaws were moving even after that. He’d hunkered in the long grass by the pond, sighting, waiting for the thing to surface, and it surfaced not six feet from him and was an easy shot.)

In his mind’s eye he sees the letter to his son. Its edges curl because the envelope is larger than the paper it contains. Finney has a new secretary, and she insists on folding things twice, the letter turned in on itself, when a single fold would do. She has, Finney tells him, advantages. She can take shorthand faster than he talks, and her typing is acceptable, and she has many talents in the field. In the hayfield, Judah jokes, and Finney—as if he could manage to make hay in hayfields nowadays—winks. The letter has been postmarked March 30th. It says
Please Forward If Necessary
on it, but Ian leaves no forwarding address. It requests him to contact his father or his father’s lawyer and be present at discussions of the terms of the estate. It suggests such presence would be vital to the nature of the settlement, and proposes a per diem allowance and, of course, that travel expenses would be furnished at the estate’s expense.

The envelope is cream white. Finney’s title and address are printed in green ink, on the upper left-hand corner. He employs an IBM Selectric typeface for Ian’s address, but resists a postage meter as a mark of the impersonal. There’s not so many letters, Finney says, that you can’t lick and stamp them by hand. They’ve tried, Lord knows, says Judah, to haul him home before. It lies on a hall table, under magazines. In time the dust will form a diagonal consistent with the left upper edge of Popular Mechanics that lies athwart it, protective. The table, Judah imagines, is a plain pine table with walnut stain. Its two front legs are on the hall runner, its two back legs on the floor. There is therefore a slight downward tilt to the angle of the whole (though not above an eighth of an inch) since the table weighs sufficiently to mark the purple runner, and the runner’s threadbare anyhow. Ian’s off to sea, he thinks, and in this seaport town the mildew happens quickly. It’s as if the envelope was sweated on, or steamed; it’s as if the formal furtive language is a circular, and any lost son everywhere is welcome home.

The stairwell is another matter, since it gives on the library door. He would be discovered, and his sham would be exploded and his illness turn to health. He considers the parapets and windows, and of the back servant stairs. But they lead past Hattie’s room, and he knows her far more wakeful, even sleeping behind a shut door, than his careless wife. So he turns toward the elevator shaft. He pads to the door and pulls it open carefully and peers within; the cage is there.

Judah shuts the door again; it is solid oak, and squeaks. The door to the library, too, is solid and windowless oak. They are in the library, discussing him, he is certain. The elevator reeks; it is memory’s confinement and a box for invalids. Still, it fits his spying purpose and will make little noise.

Pleased with his contrivance, he rests for the count of ten. Then he pulls the door open and steps inside and unscrews the elevator’s lamp. Next he feels in the new darkness for the button, pushes, and feels himself fall. There is a soft whirring and complaint from the elevator cables, but he knows they cannot hear him or distinguish this new sound from the surrounding noise of the house—the furnace, for example, or water in the pipes. He settles himself for his vigil, breathing carefully to ten.

(“Count to a hundred,” Ian had said, “before you start to look for me. And keep your eyes closed or it’s cheating.”

“I won’t look,” Judah said.

“But keep your eyes closed. OK?”

“OK.”

“Now count to a hundred,” he yelled, distancing.

“I’m counting. One one hundred, two one hundred, three”—and Judah leaned his head against the wall and listened for his son. Ian hid in closets or would bang doors then shut them without running through, and early on he’d fitted underneath the couch.

“Oley, oley infree; ready or not here I come.”

What, he wonders now, does “oley oley infree” mean; how had he clambered over furniture, shouting “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmum,” in pursuit of that elated boy he could not locate now? Then they played “Thing in the Room,” and Ian chose an object and Judah guessed which one it was by circling and pointing, while Ian cackled. “Getting cold. Ice cold. A little bit warmer. Getting warm now getting hot, getting hot as a person can get.” So Judah, nosing up to the vase, would know it was the vase and turn on his heels and point to the painting of oranges. He would step past the still life and the mantelpiece and Ian would pretend to freeze and shiver, beating his elbows and saying, “Brr-r it’s cold in here. So cold.”)

“Though there be severall who think it improper,” Peacock wrote, “we will not heed the world’s scurrility but take our bounden pleasures in that almost-Eden whence my thoughts continually fly. Oh to be in Vermont where the first green things this week will testify to spring and to His ceaseless
Husbandry Who watcheth over all. I seem to see the Easter lambs at their frolics, and freshening cows, and the season’s wheel which here on this Pacific Coast seems not to turn, or grudgingly, though th’Inhabitants call it healthful and breathe this salt-slime down. Had they one taste of Mountain air, once filled their lungs as I have with the sweet pine-scent of our beloved pasture-land, they would choke with every inhalation or keep Cambric pressed to the nose. There is profit to be made here in the better class of lace . . .”

There where he keeps his ladle the stream runs all summer long; the ladle is tin and large enough for two to drink from—not together, though they’ve tried that too, her head butting his, their noses opposed, but one after the other, his wife going first—and in April or June he only has to dip, not even bending, to fill the cup full; later it tastes of metal, and then of leaves with a flavor not so much the residue as presage of decay, the maple and oak leaves thickening the streambed banks, and clogging the rock sluice he’d chosen. Nearby he built a salt lick and an apple stand, building it at Maggie’s urging and high enough to clear the snow so that the deer might have unimpeded winter access, and when they snowshoed in to see they saw that the apples were gone and the salt lick troughed hollow by tongues, so she laughed and held him and said, “There, we’ve helped that many at least,” and he didn’t answer, “For a week maybe. For the dogs to kill,” but only pressed her where she held him and said, “You’ve eaten those apples. They’re in your cheeks,” and she answered, “Lordy. Lord, I married a romantic. The last of the red-hot romantics,” and he scooped the snow’s crust back and dug till he uncovered the stream and thrust through the crystalline surface to the sluggish trickle beneath—the ladle’s cup was snow-stuffed and he knocked the powder back and filled the cup with icicles and chill white water and drank and made her drink: the tin adhered to her lips and, tearing the ladle free, she shredded her lips’ flesh.

He has tried to reach Ian by phone. He called the last numbers he knew. There had been no answer or the phone was disconnected or the parties that he reached had never heard of Ian Sherbrooke and couldn’t be bothered to look. He didn’t really blame them. It wasn’t a question of blame. But he had known that Maggie knew where Ian could be reached, and tried the phone in Wellfleet and hung up on her father when he heard the first “Hello.”