Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (24 page)

“Ian.” She touches his sleeve. “Would you do the honors, please? The bar is in the pantry.”

“What’s whatever?” Ian asks.

“Bourbon. Wild Turkey by preference. Water and no ice, okay? Just a splash.”

“Of water, or bourbon?”

“The man’s got a sense of humor,” Miles announces. “Sally, my congratulations. Just a splash of water, please.”

In the pantry, she detains him. “Don’t mind Miles. He’s such a tease. Being the local editor . . .” Sally touches his tie. “And promise me two things.”Ian measures, pours.

“First”—she drops her voice—“that you won’t hold all this against me.”

He looks at her. “All right.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s a second thing.” She runs her tongue around her lips, then smiles at him. “That you won’t look at his wife.”

Samson Finney arrives. His neck has thickened, and his eyes have glazed. His hair has gone; there is hair in his nostrils and ears. He takes Ian’s hand and pumps it, saying “My boy” several times.

“Mr. Finney,” Ian asks, “are you still drinking whiskey?”

“What a memory! The answer is affirmative!” He rumbles over to Elizabeth Conover’s chair. A big, bluff man wearing suspenders, he seems Judah’s image, though dim. They talk about the weather, the mobile home zoning ordinance, the incidence of swine flu since Legionnaire’s Disease.

Jeanne Fisk enters the living room, and Ian takes her coat. She calls to her husband, “Betty Boop was doing homework. I couldn’t blame her, really; that’s why she came late. Or the excuse she gave . . .”

“What may I get you?” Ian asks.

“It doesn’t matter. Red wine, if you have it. Thanks.”

“How
are
the children?” Finney asks.

“Fine. Kathryn lost her bicuspid. I was the tooth fairy and I gave her a whole dollar—inflation, you see. I remember being pleased if the tooth fairy forked over a quarter.”

Sally appears with cheese. It has been cut into bite sizes, and toothpicks protrude from the segments like quills. “Do help yourselves.”

“She’s so proud,” Jeanne Fisk continues, “she calls it her ‘gap.’ She keeps pointing to the space and saying, ‘See my gap!’ ”

“And—what’s the other one’s name?” Finney asks. “Amy?”

“Yes, jealous enough to knock her own teeth out. Or tie them to a doorknob.”

At dinner, Sally keeps him by her right-hand side and tells him her own story. She’d lived in Paris for two years, taking whatever jobs were on offer, hoping to break into films. But that meant teaching English to the children of the upwardly mobile; it meant being a gardener’s assistant in the gardens of the rich. Her boss, she says to Ian, was a male model who pulled only the fanciest weeds in Passy; they’d be invited in to cocktails, often as not, and she’d take off her gardener’s smock and pretend to be at home. It was one way to practice French and also earn your keep.

Then after that she’d gotten bit parts riding in the movies; she’d been a stand-in for a starlet ill at ease with horses, and she rode a roan mare six straight days in the mist in the Bois de Boulogne. The movie was never released. They laugh about this, comparing notes, and Ian says that by and large she’d done better in the world of entertainment than had he. Still, Sally says, you understand what made me want to do it, what made me need a life like that. I understand, he says.

They compliment the lamb. Then Finney toasts the wanderer come back. “The Good Lord threw away the mold when He made your father. Sometimes I tell myself that that’s a reason to be grateful because two of Judah Sherbrooke would be more than one small state like ours could handle. He’d fill a room so full you had to leave the windows open just to get some air.” Finney raises his glass. “Absent friends.”

Ian walks the Big House rooms; slowly he charts the four floors. He remembers childhood games along the halls, and which closet was the better hiding place because you could hear all the way to the kitchen, through the dumbwaiter behind it. One afternoon, in Maggie’s room—he is not prying, just passing through, curious about what kind of bird is building in the copper beech outside—he sees a book. It is bound in red vellum, and a marking pencil lies on the open page.

Picking it up, he finds a collection of letters on yellowing paper, in a trained yet free-flowing script. Ian reads a signature and date, then recognizes the letters that Anne-Maria Sherbrooke Sheldon sent home. Peacock’s elder daughter married—shortly after her father’s death—a man named Willard Sheldon, in 1870. The Sherbrookes are Episcopalians, but Anne-Maria, in the single act of impulse and rebellion in her otherwise devout, chaste youth, took up with Willard Sheldon when the family lived in San Francisco, and she was eighteen. Ian knows the story; it’s a tale his aunt told often. Willard Sheldon was an upright man, an associate of Peacock’s in a silver mining venture that succeeded. He was a bachelor from Salt Lake City, but not, he liked to say, confirmed in the condition of lifelong bachelordom. He was red-bearded, thirty-three years old and, by all accounts, scrupulous and even-tempered. He was made welcome in San Francisco when he arrived for consultation as to silver shipments that Peacock prophesied would dwarf the Comstock Lode.

There was one problem, however. Sheldon escorted Anne-Maria in the park, or riding. His manners were beyond reproach, his language unobjectionable, his demeanor properly solemn yet, at the proper moments, openhanded. The problem was belief. Peacock, usually meticulous in matters such as this, had altogether failed to see the fellow for the devil’s very agent that he was. Willard Sheldon was a Mormon; his family had followed Smith and Young. The taint of such belief, Peacock later wrote, should have clung to his apparel and made itself known in each heinous pronouncement. But by the time he, Peacock, came to rectify the damage, much damage had been done. His daughter had been smitten in her heart of hearts. She would gladly have been Sheldon’s thirtieth wife, her father fumed; she would have followed the heretical lubricious ape to Zanzibar or Guiana or wherever his mission might take him, and would wear no clothes.

So he forestalled this and sent Sheldon packing. The house in San Francisco was declared off-limits; the corporation books were shut, the chapter closed. Peacock gladly took this worldly and financial loss, he wrote, in order to recoup on otherworldly gain. She might mourn with her innocent’s misapprehension of truth, but the seeming rigor with which her father locked her up was in reality a fond man’s fancy that she might prove free. There was even some suggestion that Peacock chose to travel east and home in order to keep a continent’s breadth between his daughter’s salt-thirst and the man she had chosen to slake it. He took a private, guarded coach. If he died contentedly (and Anne-Maria by his side recorded that his final words had been, “I am content . . .”), it was in part because he felt his darling younger daughter would stay in Vermont and be saved.

His elaborate precautions did not work, of course. Perhaps he knew this also and gave up his own ghost contentedly because, for some few years at least, he had stayed fate. Or perhaps he thought his daughter made of common time-bound stuff. Yet Anne-Maria had inherited, together with her portion of the Sherbrooke fortune, her father’s headstrong fixity of purpose. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints was making converts everywhere; she would and did convert. She married Willard Sheldon on the day of her majority—three years after they first met, and over her elder brother’s resistance.

Ian studies these letters. He sits on the edge of his mother’s unmade bed and leafs through them, deciphering. It appears, for instance, that the family objection had less to do with polygamy—though that is what Hattie had stressed in her version—than with the almost-outlaw nature of the group. Smith himself had been shot in a jail; the Mormons trekked through wilderness; brigandage and persecution everywhere attended them. David Sherbrooke—Peacock’s younger son, and a member of the Vermont State legislature—did what he could to have the marriage disallowed. He made stirring speeches where the similarity of “Moron, Mormon, Mammon, and Moroni” did not pass unnoticed, and he claimed that the tablets appearing to Smith had been fabricated in an ironworks in Seneca. He had privy information that the massacre in Illinois was at the “saint’s” behest.

Anne-Maria, daunted but not apologetic, wrote to her sibling at home. She had inherited Peacock’s ornate prose style also—as if language were a bulwark against the inroads of modernity. Maggie has been reading this; he reads the passage she has checked, in red:

“. . . though much of this seem strange to me, or but newly plausible, I must endeavor so to make it seem to you as if we were yet intimate. For this high Purpose I hold several Reasons. First, it was always our wont to Share, and had I not the perfect Faith this revelation brings with it, why still I would require that the Doubt be divided amongst us. Since I am not at present nor ever may be other than a Missionary’s Wife, and since we are instructed to embark with the first fair weather on what are to me Uncharted seas, nor do I know what reception the Waters or Natives accord, I must take the chance whilst yet I trust to proximate delivery of this my message to send it: I embrace you, brother and friends, with faltering but steadfast Heart. It is my husband’s Duty to acquaint you with the Word. It is mine alone to render you acquainted with the detail of our life. For if familiarity be a bog where the Mosquito breeds yclept contempt—as our dear father used to say—why then I think it also true that too great Distance breed Disdain; it is an arid, stony Soil, one I water daily with my eyes.”

IV

Ian turns the page. Anne-Maria wrote on onionskin, with ink that has faded to brown. Except for the excess of capital letters, her hand had been well trained. He wonders what his mother hunts; she had not seemed family-proud. Judah hated Roosevelt for reasons of his own. He said the man wrecked orchards in order to build roads; he said that peddling apples was a whole lot better commerce to take place on street corners than what they peddled now. But Hattie hated FDR because he was disloyal to his class. “What business does a man like that have,” she’d ask, “consorting with such riffraff and appointing them to Cabinet positions?” So Maggie had reminded her, in Ian’s hearing, of the way the President started his speech to the D.A.R.—“Fellow immigrants,” he’d said.

“There are many Servants of the Lord. Many have been Prosecuted in the service of their Faith. But it is mine that Charity be greater yet than Faith or Hope, and that you would not leave your sister lonely in Most need. Our father made his millions by unceasing vigilance. Many were the dawns I’d rise to see him in his evening clothes still, pen in hand, lit only by the candle glow or some sputtering oil lamp, but illumined from within. With Works. With Aspiration. If these things be as I think them, then it is more than passing Strange we should grow so Lazy in the service of the Word. My Willard says we have a gift it is Damnation not to share, Salvation to distribute. We embark for the Indies this week.

“There are instruments. There are the Urim and Thumin, stones in silver bows. God preserved them near the village of Manchester, Ontario County, New York, so that our messenger could avail himself of Aid in the effort of translation. He bade our prophet carry the Tablets always with him and to guard them zealously against those who steal or profane. For their number is Legion (indeed I think we numbered amongst them once) who set themselves ’gainst Change, for fear it is not Comforting as what they knew before. Therefore the prophet was hounded; his bodily Person was shot. And we who follow in his wake do so most willingly (though you know me too well, brother, not to know the trepidation I experience in front of Watry Peril and the fear of Shipwrack) since Hazard is our true Condition on this Earth . . .”

Now Maggie enters the room. “Hi,” she says. “Reading my old love letters?”

“Not exactly.”

“Written testimonials.” She advances, stands by the bed. “Dear Dr. Carter, your little liver pill has been working wonders; dear Dr. Pepper, yours is the best drink I’ve ever tasted; dear Dr. Smith, let me have another box of cough drops, please. Or is this the first Mr. Smith?”

“What are these?” Ian asks.

“You know. Your great-grandaunt—last of the seafaring Sherbrookes. I found her letters in the attic. May I sit?”

“I’m sorry,” Ian says. “I wasn’t snooping. I didn’t mean to, anyway; it’s just that I got interested. Weird woman, don’t you think? Anne-Maria . . .”

“It’s all right,” Maggie says. She sits. “How long are you planning to stay?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

“Think about it.”

“Why?”

“It makes a difference,” she urges.

“As long as you want me to . . .”

“Weeks? The whole summer?”

“Forever and ever amen.” There is something in her manner that he has not seen before. He tries to name it to himself—nervousness? embarrassment?—and peers at this strange figure settling by him, the intruder, on her single bed.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Have you been outside?”

“Not yet.”

Maggie picks at the coverlet. Her face is worn; she is wearing a red woolen shirt. He wonders, was it Judah’s that it should hang so loosely from her shoulders and bunch around her waist?

“Do you still ride horses?” she asks.

“Not lately. They’re not all that common in your average metropolis. We have horseless carriages these days.”

“I mean would you like to?”

“Sure.”

“And get some air?” she asks.

“Yes. But where do you keep horses?”

“We could borrow some,” she says. “I have the use of two of them. Why don’t we ride together this morning? I could use the exercise; we both could, probably.”

“I’d love to,” Ian tells her. “Give me ten minutes.”

“That’s fine,” Maggie says, and is gone.

“There is one further reason. Even at this distance, while I prepare our trunks and grips for Embarkation unto I know not truly where, I feel myself at home with you in those Myriad rooms and Houses we have all called home. There is naught that may dissever what blood and birth conjoin. My husband is a Man both resolute and kind. He is an excellent Dancer who has renounced the Dance. All imputation otherwise basely imputes his name—our shared surname now, let me remind you—and is a mote plucked out of not the Neighbor’s eye but him who sees Imperfectly. Comparison is base. I compare myself most Basely to those of our Belief who have received Revelation. I must transcribe for you verbatim our Prophet’s Words, when Moroni came to visit him in his impoverished bedroom, in the Night. It is even so I first saw Willard Sheldon, and so I see him yet:

“ ‘He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. His hands were naked, and his arms also, a little above the wrists; so, also, were his feet naked, as were his legs, a little above the ankles. His head and neck were also bare. I could discover that he had no other clothing on but this robe, as it was open, so that I could see into his bosom.

“ ‘Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning. The room was exceedingly light, but not so very bright as immediately around his person. When I first looked upon him, I was afraid, but the fear soon left me . . .’

“Comparisons are base; I acknowledge this once more. You will think me foolish; you have always thought me foolish, brother, a giggling, unsteady girl. But I swear by everything we held together Holy, by the Sacred memory of our parents and all I will never Profane; I swear to you on pain of ridicule and chastisement, even so do I look on my Willard when he in his Nightshirt appears.”

Ian goes to the hall closet and selects his father’s riding boots; his own, from half a life before, are pinched and small. Judah’s boots stand upside down, on stretchers. They have been recently greased. From years of usage, the soles are worn thin; Ian wears two pairs of socks. “Will you, won’t you join the dance?” his mother used to say. She would recite him the Lobster Quadrille, then take his hand gravely, inquiring, “Will you, won’t you; will you, won’t you?” and drop him a curtsy. He does deep knee bends in the boots, then bends the ankles in and out, then jumps and clicks his heels together, twice.

He has forgotten the pure beauty of it all—the way the clouds accumulate on Woodford Ridge, or how a firebreak slashed down a mountainside completes the green design. The cows and barns in the far distance seem perfectly positioned, and the meadows are a tilting patchwork stitched by stone. The lilacs and the fruit trees are in bloom.

Maggie drives him to a trailer he had not remembered. It has the look of permanence, however: on cinderblocks, with a young box hedge to the front and a paddock at the rear. Split wood has been stacked between two stakes, and washing hangs from the line; long underwear flaps like a flag. The trailer’s trim is red; there are curtains. The door is shut. There are bicycles and a yellow slide-set in the yard.

“Who lives here?”

“You know them. The Boudreaus.”

“I don’t remember,” Ian says.

Again he senses that constraint in her, as if she has grown vigilant in order to set him at ease. Maggie hands him the car keys, then opens the door to get out. “Hal Boudreau. He used to work the place. Still does odd jobs for us—when he’s not drinking, that is.” Tossing her hair back, she takes his arm. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s the horses we’ve come to visit. There!”

Two Morgans stand underneath the maples at the paddock’s farther reach. She whistles to them, shrilly, putting her small and index fingers to her teeth. Ian is startled: his mother seems a hoyden now, the girl his father might have known when first they rode together. Her skin is flushed, her movements quick; the horses hurry to her and she pats and scratches at them, then points to where the tack hangs on the rail. Before he has his bearings, nearly, they are inside the gate, and Maggie has managed the saddles and bridles, and though he has the larger animal he can see it’s not her favorite, is sluggish by comparison. He fiddles with the stirrups. She slips off her own horse, adjusting the leathers, then back before he can contrive some smart-aleck cowpuncher compliment about how well she looks today, how well he remembers she rides.

“Yours is Daisy, mine is Maybe,” Maggie says.

“Who named them?”

“Hal—they’re his. They need the exercise.”

And she is off and out the gate, her horse ahead, its tail raised while it drops great steaming gouts at Daisy’s feet; Ian, busy with the reins and the adjustments his muscles must make, fastens the latch to the paddock behind. Then he regains his seat and turns to see his mother break into a canter up the first small slope. He thinks he sees a man’s face at the trailer door. It stares at him; he waves at it with his free hand, taking both reins in his left. It is a red beard, possibly; a trick of the light; not there.

They reach a footpath on the property that widens into bridle path, and they draw abreast. The paths are familiar, not strange. Peacock has ordained, she reminds him, that the land be circled with such roadways—in concentric circles, the circumference of the inside circle being precisely one mile. They come to the property’s limit. The woods are thin and, in this second week of May, just starting to sprout and fill in. He sees Woodford Mountain to the north, then the Green Mountains ringing them, then the river that bisects the valley where they live. Through the birches and the oak and locust trees Judah left for hedgerows, Ian sees the town. Yet motels and shopping centers are low-lying things; he sees only spires and mills. His grandfather’s grandfather also would have used horses for travel, would have worn such riding boots and breathed the morning air.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

He looks at her.

“Deep thoughts?”

“Only that these woods are second cutting,” Ian says. “Third cutting, maybe. So they look about as young as whenever Peacock bought this place.”

“In eighteen sixty-nine,” she says. “There were family farms on it before, but that’s the year he finished up. I’m the historian now.”

“I know. That’s what I was reading. But I wondered why . . .”

“Got tired of
Little Women,
” Maggie says.

He looks at her. She sits more heavily. “If you’re tired,” Ian offers.

“No. The walls have ears. I don’t mean Hattie eavesdrops, but I never get to feel alone with you inside. I wanted a chance, just once these weeks, to tell you what’s been going on; to ask you what you think of it without the Sherbrooke portraits frowning down at me, the Sherbrooke family chairs complaining when you sit on them, the Sherbrooke carpets kicking up dust . . .”

“We’re both of us Sherbrookes.”

“Yes. So I put you in as close as we can get to wilderness, and you talk about the time that Peacock lumbered it. Or how these horses constitute the past. Oh, Ian, you don’t know how sick I get, how weary of pretending . . .”

She halts, she drops her reins and lets Maybe pull at leaves. There is sweat on the Morgan’s brown neck. He halts beside her, feeling his heart go out to her who always seemed beyond the reach of pity. Ian reaches for his mother’s arm; the horses shy. He turns Daisy in a circle and brings them nose to nose.

“Why don’t you leave?” he asks.

“That’s not the question . . .”

“Why not? For vacations, anyway. Why don’t you bring friends up?”

“It isn’t all that easy.”

“Not that hard.”

“You’re wearing Judah’s boots. Don’t you know why Hattie keeps them greased? Because she’s sure he walks the halls at night. How do you think she’d take to an actual visitor? To any gentleman caller who actually called on my room?”

“She’d get used to it.”

The horses snout and nuzzle at each other, not gently.

“I wouldn’t,” Maggie says.

He watches a squirrel behind her freeze, then bolt, then freeze again.

“Some days,” she continues, “I wake up sick. I always used to think the mornings were just wonderful—I’d wake up every single morning full of just the most extravagant intentions about how to spend the time. But it’s as if some switch gets crossed, or some connection missed—whatever. I can’t face it, Ian, every little duty, every detail, every invitation or meal or telephone call or arrangement. If this is all it is”—she spreads her hands out, dismissive—“then it just isn’t enough.”

“There’s music,” he suggests.

“It’s worse when there’s music around, as if some hole has opened out and this whole place will break apart; it all goes hollow if I hear Schubert, for instance. The day you came, I’d been sitting the whole afternoon just listening to the Impromptus, just a wreck. Why do you think we’re here?”