Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (25 page)

He follows the line of her hand. She points to a near thicket, and he sees now what she means by “wreck.” There is the fire-ruined, vine-twined hulk of a Steinway grand piano ten feet from him; there are raspberry bushes beginning to get green.

“I didn’t notice.”

“No. But you remember.”

“Yes.”

He wipes his face. He shuts his eyes; Daisy stamps and chafes at the bit. His father had had the piano hauled out here and burned. Ian followed him, protesting; they rolled the thing up on a hay wagon and he ran behind the farmhands, in their tracks. By the time he’d reached them he was winded; Judah had dislodged the piano, dumped it, and sent the others back. It was a clearing then. Using sheets and rags and paper, his father stuffed the body of the Steinway. It had been raining. The woods were wet, and Ian, watching, was drenched. His mother had left three days before, after one of those arguments he’d half heard down the hall, though his head was underneath the pillow and he’d held his ears.

Then Judah lit a match. It took some time to catch; it guttered out. He lit a second, and a third; he rolled a sheet of paper tightly and made a torch. His father worked with such deliberate purpose, unhurried, precise, that Ian knew there’d be no hope of holding him back.

So terror became fascination, and he kept out of sight. Judah lit the piano legs. Then he ignited the keyboard. They watched together, though Judah did not know himself accompanied—or, more likely, chose not to acknowledge that anyone surveyed him from the trees’ wet tent. The varnish on the piano stank; the flame was sheets, then rags, then fingers interlocking. He watched until his father too had finished watching and stood and stretched and pissed and headed home. Then Ian crept forward, came down. He touched the hot crepitant keyboard. The pedals were poured metal, and the white ivory was cracked and black. He pocketed two keys.

“Sometimes I think,” says Maggie, “it’s what we call the ‘change of life.’ You know, it happens to women my age.”

“Yes.”

“And sometimes I think something else.”

He watches her again; her face is pale, heavy; she frames the words with caution.

“What’s that?” Ian asks.

“You won’t believe me.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe it, really. I’m not expecting you to—but I have to tell someone,” she says. “You
are
my son, it might as well be you.”

“All right.”

“It’s crazy,” Maggie finishes. “Don’t think I don’t know that much. It makes no sense. But I do know the feeling, after all; I’ve known it twice before.”

“What feeling?”

“This. What I’ve been talking about.”

He lets impatience surface; he is haunted by the spectacle of flame. “What
have
you been talking about?”

“I’m pregnant,” Maggie says.

V

Time passes, Hattie thinks, like something in an hourglass. First it takes forever for the sand to look like anything, falling; then it seems abundant, then there’s nearly nothing left. Next someone comes along and flips the thing—or maybe it’s on a balance, one of those wooden rigs that turn themselves around—and everything flows back again; each grain of sand you feared you’d lost is present and accounted for. She’d been sure that her time had run out. She’d been certain, anyhow, the Sherbrooke line was cut. It’s not a dying name; there are plenty of the Sherbrooke clan in Canada, where they’d made a city; there are collateral cousins in England and Wales, and no doubt some leftover Sherbrookes in San Francisco or Freeport or New Orleans.

But her nearest and dearest are gone. Judah is dead; she’d never thought to have outlived him, had been unprepared for that. She was five years his senior, and he had been strong as an oak. The largest and the loveliest are the first to fall. The oak gets leveled, Hattie knows, before the unimportant reed that flattens itself in high wind. So too with Seth, who had died in his crib; there’d been insufficient time for him to put down roots. He got lifted up and carried into the airless center of the storm. She’s never seen or been in a twister, but she’s heard that it fells everything, and in the cyclone’s center there just isn’t any air. Therefore the infant suffocates, and later the head of the family topples—while she, the reed, bends and survives.

Survival of the fittest: sometimes she preens on that. It would be dishonest to pretend she didn’t triumph in the pure plain gift of survival, and how her teeth stay sound. Her hearing has failed; her eyes are failing; her digestion is not what it was. But she’s eighty-two-and-a-half years old and has kept every one of her teeth. She walks without assistance, though her left knee is arthritic; she could go out dancing if Ian would ask her to dance. Dr. Davies said there’s nothing wrong with you, Miss Sherbrooke, a glass or two of sherry won’t fix, you come on in for whirlpool treatments if that knee hurts too much. She’d asked him if they’d need to cut it, and he said he didn’t think so; nothing appears to be rattling around, just a stiffness of the joints.

She has sciatica, too. That can be a cross to carry when the nerve acts up. When she sits in one position for too long, it feels like she’s been folded and her very bones have creased. Sometimes Maggie offers her a second Manhattan for the pain. Sometimes the maraschino cherries that have been her principal indulgence go sour in her mouth. Or they cloy or clot her throat, and she fears when she swallows she’ll gag.

So survival has its drawbacks. Hattie has not married; it isn’t a question of that. Had she done so and provided heirs, their names would not be Sherbrooke and their home wouldn’t likely be the Big House, and maybe they’d not even live in Vermont. The storm she means is a discriminating wind; it picks and chooses carefully, leveling menfolk and leaving the women alone.

Maggie did return, of course, and the two of them rattled around together. They were each other’s company. They have been companionable, even, though there’s thirty years between them, and many gulfs between them that are wider than just thirty years. Sharing their meals, the roof, the heat from the fire at night, they are close the way two animals in stalls are close: each locked in place, for better or worse, in sickness and health—but staring straight ahead. For Margaret Cutler is a wed Sherbrooke, not born, and careless enough anyhow about her marriage vows.

Hattie believes in forgiveness. She thinks Maggie maybe never knew and can be forgiven how much trouble and indignity she caused. There’s forgiving and forgetting, however, and Hattie can manage the one but not the other: Maggie had abandoned them. Her return failed to cancel that out. She could come back twenty times over and never make up for her going; she could be relied upon to be unreliable, and that’s why she’d provided only Ian to the Sherbrooke name: a scapegrace and a runaway with fifty percent Cutler blood.

Still, Ian had returned. The hourglass tilts back, pours on; he walked into the house the spitting image of his mother when she first bore him, twenty-six. There are differences according to sex, of course, and Margaret wore her hair longer and had a higher-pitched voice. But Hattie sees the similarity beyond the difference, notices his way of standing (hand on hip, feet slightly splayed, head cocked) is how his mother used to stand when contravening Judah, or in sham agreement. His features are his mother’s, though hers have coarsened over time; when Hattie sits across the table facing them, or in the study at night, it is as if she sees two photographs like those in the newspaper advertising weight loss: after and before. Or like the time she had the portrait of Peacock Sherbrooke restored by cleaning; it had darkened, the restorer said, in the parlor air and because a hundred years of fireplace smoke builds up a layer of soot.

So she had Peacock cleaned. She’d washed him, Judah joked, behind the ears and scrubbed him till he shone. But it had been a shock to them—how what they took for brown was yellow, what they’d thought was dark blue turned the color of an August sky at noon. His cravat had been shockingly red. The white hairs of his beard turned yellow also, and the whole thing glistened under varnish in a way that made Hattie ashamed. Daniel Sherbrooke stared at her—stared down at them from his place above the mantel—like a well-dressed stranger with a gleam in his bright eye. It was brassy, bold in a fashion that made her feel timid, as if time would avenge itself because she’d hoped to cheat. The man who cleaned and restored him said, “You see, Miss Sherbrooke, this is what the artist saw. This is just how your ancestor looked.” But she could not get used to it; her great-grandfather was younger than she, a man in his glinting and peacock-bright prime. She wanted to rub ash on him and make him once more grave.

Therefore Ian makes her nervous not because he’s her grown nephew but because of what has happened lately to his aging mother. It’s as if they fashion an alliance just as Maggie did with Jude. She, Hattie, knows herself excluded; she’s the third and three’s a crowd. They share secrets, she knows that; she hears them whispering in corners or in private rooms. When she says, “Don’t whisper, please,” they talk so loudly they’re shouting and it’s impolite. It’s disrespectful: everything time tamed in Maggie has come again uncaged.

“I’m having the bridge party Thursday,” Hattie says.

Maggie makes no answer.

“Well?”

“That’s nice.”

“Would you care to join us?”

“This Thursday?”

“It’s my turn, it’s been a month. Ida Conover hasn’t been feeling up to it. It’s her turn actually, I suppose you do know that, I imagine you counted,” she says. “But I thought as long as we were able we could jump a week; we’d just skip Ida’s turn.”

“Of course.”

“Well. You don’t have anything scheduled, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Will you join us? It’s about time, I should say.”

“I thank you,” says Maggie. “But no.”

She does not insist; if Maggie feels excluded that will teach her what exclusive means, and maybe she’d stop muttering in corners, jostling, giggling with her son. The bridge game comes and goes. Maggie helps with preparations, as she used to do—making food and setting up the coffee tureen and helping arrange tables—but when the guests arrive she simply isn’t there. Neither is Ian; they are nowhere to be found. They might be found had she, Hattie, sent up the visiting party to traipse through the halls of the house. They are in some upstairs bedroom, locked away and laughing together; she can hear them through the ceilings that are also floors.

Hattie wins that night. She and her partner, Mrs. Doctor Davies, hand Ida and Helen Bingham the worst drubbing they’ve had in months. But she drinks too much Sanka, or something goes wrong with the angel-food cake; triumphant, standing on the porch to wish her guests good evening, chaffing them about the time she’d made her bid of three no trump, telling them that soon enough she’ll win the county tournament, the taste in her mouth anyhow is tin.

Then, as spring progresses, things change. Ian too becomes a customary presence in the house. He spends long days out alone on the land, just as his father had done. His sweetness surfaces once more; he shelves his city ways. He is the last male Sherbrooke, after all, and if this branch of the family is to spread and blossom, it’s up to Ian to make sure. She reminds him of that.

“Marriageable ladies,” Hattie says. “There must be plenty in this town. They flock to you, I’ll bet.”

“Not so I’ve noticed,” he says.

“You don’t go out enough.”

“I’ve got two women in this house.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?” He teases her with his pretended innocence; he purses his lips and cocks his head.

“Ian Sherbrooke,” Hattie says. “Don’t play the fool with me.”

“I’m not, I’m just reminded how you used to tell me to stay home. Not to go out dancing all night long.”

“Is that what you call it?”

He smiles. The smile is like, she thinks, the one you use for toothpaste ads or graduation photographs.

“Old enough to know better.” She sniffs. “That’s what you are. There’s only just so long a man should wait. If you get my meaning . . .”

“I do.”

“Well, anyway, you won’t object if Ida Conover comes to visit, and brings her daughter’s niece.”

“You ask whatever company you want. It’s your house,” Ian says.

There are other changes, too. She invites the Conovers, and Ian proves polite. Ida arrives with her daughter, Elizabeth, and her grandniece Sarah. “Call me Sally,” Sarah says. She has just the most marvelous figure; breeding will out in the end. She’d been to Wellesley College, which is, Hattie understands, an upright place to go. Then there had been some years abroad and something about an unfortunate marriage—some reason anyway that brought the girl back to New England. They sit together on the porch, eating apple pie with cheese and cream.

“I hope it’s not too forward if I say this, Ian,” Elizabeth says. “But we’re all delighted you’re back.”

“I knew you,” Ida offers, “when you didn’t come up to my knee. This place does need a man.”

Hattie breaks out sherry too. “His mother made this pie,” she says. “Perfectly good. I couldn’t do better myself.” Maggie is not with them, but she gives credit where credit is due. She’d taught Maggie everything about baking, of course, but nowadays could scarcely fault the results—although she faulted Maggie in the eating. She must just pack them away. There’d be rows of pies one afternoon, setting on the rack to cool, and next day Hattie would come for a slice and there’d be nearly nothing left—just empty tins in the drain.

Ian tenders his mother’s regrets. She was called off unexpectedly to see an old school friend. She expected to be back home in time to say good-bye to them, and meantime said hello. Hattie knows this for a lie, but also common courtesy; they couldn’t declare how the woman’s upstairs, too proud or busy or bored or whatever to come on down and have the common courtesy to even say hello. The crust is flaky and, if you ask her, too dry.

Elizabeth is talking of the way they’d tarred her lawn, simply dropped a stream of tar right down where they should have followed the curve. No matter how she fusses about it, her white rocks are black, and every single blade of grass they’d planted there so carefully is no doubt dead, so they have to seed again come fall. Just imagine, she tells Hattie, I called Bottomley so fast he said he’d be right over, and he only came next afternoon and by then I was fit to be tied. By then I gave him a piece of my mind, you can wager. I told him what I thought of his crew; they’ll tar your lawn and fill in holes that never needed fixing, but do you think when winter’s here they’ll bother to plow out a person? No such luck; the snow can melt before they’ll even notice or quit their coffee break. Sometimes I think between time off for coffee and time off for lunch we’re lucky to get three hours of work for our taxes by now, in what’s a working day. Hattie looks up over her knitting glasses to agree, to offer them a second serving and sees—she could swear it, plain as day and twice as bright, although her eyes are worrisome, because they’d moved to the glider and are creaking back and forth, but only she could spy it from her angle in the chair, Ida, and Elizabeth are spared, or mercifully ignorant, or used to it, or blind—the Conover girl drumming her fingers (vermilion nails they are; she should have known) right smack in Ian’s lap.

Then things get worse. He takes to spending time in bars. She knows it, since she smells his breath, and sometimes he returns with mud down the back of his shirt. “Gone for a pig wallow?” Hattie wants to ask. “Been rolling with that harlot in the hay?” She separates the clothes for washing—light from dark—in two wicker baskets. That way Mrs. Gore, who comes to collect them and still can’t tell the difference between Irish linen and Orlon, and never knows which one to iron and is color-blind to boot, won’t make the fabrics run. So when she goes through Ian’s clothes she finds cigarette papers and blood. She isn’t prying, she wants to tell him, she doesn’t mean to pry—but pray tell me, Ian Sherbrooke, if you plan to be disgraceful all your days.

She pretends nothing happened, of course. She cannot trust her eyes. She asks him offhandedly, later, how he likes the Conover girl and he says he likes her well enough. She tells him if he’s short of funds and wants to buy prepackaged cigarettes, why she’d be happy to help; he needn’t roll his own. She asks, “Have you been dancing?” but he does not answer and she will not pry. At the Library Committee Meeting the first Wednesday afterward, she asks Elizabeth how long her charming Sarah plans to remain in the town. The woman spreads her hands (her nails are pink and clean, but Hattie thinks, it’s in the family, degenerate; she shouldn’t splay her fingers so, what right has she to preen on them?), the cuffs on her blouse have been frayed. “Sally,” Elizabeth says.