Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (3 page)

“Judah?” Finney said.

“What?”

“I’ve got to ask this. You might call me legally bound.”

“It’s nothing illegal. Now is it?”

“No. Not till you’ve got witnesses and signed. But morally I’m bound . . .”Judah interrupted him. “ ‘Being of sound mind and body.’ It’s my decision. Mine.”

“When I said you were dying, was it true?”

“Yes, but”—Judah considered this, shifting where he’d settled.

“But what?”

“But not”—and he lowered his lid ponderously—“right away.”

“So it’s a lie,” Finney said.

“You knew that.”

“Not for certain.”

“We none of us can know for mortal certain . . .”

“You made me make a fool of . . .”

Judah brushed this aside. He raised his hand to his ear, palm out. “I want three testaments. That’s what I want from your office. And make each of them binding,” he warned. “Come to supper when my wife comes back and bring them with you, OK? I’ll sign one.”

“And Ian?”

“Write him. Say the same.”

“I don’t have an address.”

“Use the last one you’ve got,” Judah said. “Just write him. Just don’t call.”

He loomed above his friend, extracting a red linen handkerchief. “Here,” Judah said. “Don’t say I never gave you proper compensation. Wipe your nose.”

There is a pianola by the wall, with music rolls that feature John Philip Sousa and music from New Orleans. Maggie played the piano, and there had been a Steinway grand where the pianola stands. She schooled him to love music then. He would sit at her stool’s edge, behind her and a little to the left, watching how she tucked her lip in at the louder parts, astonished at her fingers’ lightsome agility. He marveled how she knew the notes, or when to turn the page. She played with a rapt stillness and the hands of earthly angels but, to hear her tell it, out of tune. He complimented her. “Rachmaninoff,” he said, “himself couldn’t play that piece better. Artur Schnabel’s no more musical than you.”

“Oh, Jude,” she said. “You’re sweet. You’re a dear to say so. But you’ve got a tin ear, darling, and don’t think I don’t know. Or you’re lying to make me feel proud. Or taking the intention for the deed.”

“Not so,” he had protested. “I love to watch you play.”

“But not to
listen
, darling, and that’s the point of it.”

“All right. To listen, then.”

“That was Chopin,” Maggie said. She touched his sleeve. “This is a mazurka.”

Smiling, she’d choose another sheet and play some other melody that set his heart delighting. When she left him, later, he had had the piano hauled out to the woods. He’d learned Rachmaninoff’s name, and Artur Schnabel’s name to please her, and had taken her to concerts in Boston and New York (with Maggie on his right-hand side, in silk, her gloved hands emulating the prodigious maestro’s hands; they’d have box seats always, and she’d press her elbows in with pleasure, clapping, while he watched her breasts expand) and maybe she was right and maybe he did have wax in his ear and maybe couldn’t change. She’d said so, at the end. He’d change, he told her—not begging, but announcing change. “You simply can’t do it,” she said.

So he doused the sounding board with kerosene and filled the works with paper and wrapped the legs in soaked rags. It had made a pleasing conflagration, and the strings snapped, jangling; then he bought a pianola and played that instead.

There is the portrait of Daniel Sherbrooke and a portrait, done from memory, of Peacock’s wife. Most of the Big House paintings, Judah knows, had been ordered in bulk lot from a supplier in London; the supplier charged less for the paintings than frames. “Send us suitable representations,” Peacock wrote, “of scenes both lively and Inspiring. Also I require Floral arrangements and Pictures of apples and two or three scenes from the Hunt. Like unto the fox is man when pursued by conscience-demons in the guise of that goodly baying Pack. We must sniff out Iniquity, e’en to Reynard’s lair.”

What friends they have are gone from them, dead or estranged or fled south. There was a time the Big House seemed continually lit, and he’d find strangers sleeping in the corridor, or come back from the river to find dinner laid out for twenty and the cook in a desperate bustle; they’d kept cooks then, and maids, and he wondered whether Ian thought the world was mostly peopled with maids and visitors and drunks.

There are cameos above the mantel, and scrimshaw cornucopias; there is a wooden sailor with a carved ivory leg. “Who says we can’t change?” Judah complains now to Harriet. “Who said so; answer me that?”

He had been avid of instruction, wanting to learn the mazurka and how it differs from the waltz or valse polonaise. He had turned the pages for her, not reading the notes really, but reading the toss of her head. Her teeth would bite her lower lip and he would chew his, hard.

He had been to see the doctor three weeks before. There he got his plan. Dr. Wiggins’s face was grave; he listened routinely to Judah but was listening to some heart-speech the stethoscope would translate, attentive only to that.

“Fred, let me ask you something,” Judah said.

“Yes.”

“We’ve been friends for thirty years.”

“Mm-m.”

“Thirty-five years, nearly.”

“I came here,” Dr. Wiggins said, “in ’45. After the Pacific.”

But Judah was not tempted into reminiscence; he watched the man across from him unblinkingly.

“Fred, what are my chances?”

“What are you asking me—
chances
?”

“Let’s put it directly. Am I sick?”

The doctor looked down at his charts. He tapped a ruler on his desk; he snapped a tongue depressor. “Directly, no.”

“But could I be?”

“Of course. You’ve got that heart of yours.”

“Could I say I was dying?”

“You could, in that respect. But not because your doctor says so.”

“I wouldn’t quote you.”

“In that respect,” said Wiggins, “none of us can win this gamble. Specially with angina. We’re every human being bound to lose this bet.”

“I wasn’t asking
if
I’ll die. I’m asking when.”

Dr. Wiggins looked at his hands. They were pink from scrubbing and his nails had perfect crescent moons.

“Jude, I just can’t tell you. It’s a guessing game. What are you, seventy-six? You might go on for five years, ten; you might go on till they haul you out kicking maybe fifteen years from now; on the other hand, and with that heart of yours . . .”

He spread his hands. They were expressive. They told Judah everything he needed to tell Hattie, and what to tell his lawyer to notify his wife. Leaving the office, later, he practiced the gesture—spreading his hands and fingers and letting the fingers contract.

His sister had been handsome once. Or so he can remember thinking, and so Macallister had thought, and Jamie Pearson and the widower Powers from Manchester. Judah hopes she’s taken pleasure when it was available to take; now she sits behind the lamp, a raw-boned woman, fretting. She’d never married—though Jamie Pearson had proposed, and maybe the widower Powers; she’d called that first proposal more a proposition than offer.

“What’s the difference?” Judah asked.

“It’s a business proposal. He wants to be married to the family, not me.”

And she was right, he’d thought; Pearson drank too much and couldn’t hold his drink and therefore couldn’t hold his bank job without some protective influence. But half a catch is better than none, he had declared, even if the catch is half-baked—or, like Jamie, boiled.

“Brother, you insult me,” Hattie said.

“That’s not my intention.”

“And the family. You insult them too.”

So she married history and took an uncle or great-uncle or second cousin once removed or grandfather to bed each night. She’d wedded herself to their letters and daybooks and bills. She kept file boxes in her room with all the clippings she could find, right down to Daniel Sherbrooke’s second cousin, Augustus Cobb. There was a great-great-uncle lost at sea. He’d gone down with a clipper ship off Hatteras, “cut off untimly,” a survivor wrote, “in his manhood’s beauteous prime.” Judah knew she mourned him, and he joked she got more heat from Tommy Sherbrooke drowned at sea than from her hot-water bottle. He wished her joy of their ancestors; he wished her joy and consolation in the watches of the night.

“You misunderstand me.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re doing it a’purpose. You’re being a tease, like you always were.”

She said the same about Samuel Powers, who had lineage to equal theirs and therefore wasn’t in it for that kind of gain. His mother was a Colonial Dame; his father’s forefathers fought with Ethan Allen in Bennington and then at Saratoga Springs. But he scarcely knew his people’s names and didn’t care when she told him, and didn’t read the articles she left for him to read.

“They were probably bastards,” Samuel said. “Thirteen percent of all the children born back then were out of wedlock. That’s something to think about, when you get to thinking.”

Judah agreed. “The man’s got sense,” he said to Harriet. “And knows how to laugh besides.”

“It’s no laughing matter.” She disdained, she said, all such easy-earned disdain. There were things worth taking seriously, and why should she trust Powers to take her into his family—with his sham family sense? What kind of proof could he give her that he honored what she stood for if he didn’t also honor where she stood?

“You’re talking in circles. You just don’t want to leave our house.”

“Why should I?” She had smiled at him, coquettish. “It’s a losing trade.”

So Harriet aged and solidified, her flesh gone gray. She was the one who first used the word “spinster.” “I’m your spinster sister,” she would say—deflecting the pain of it, lifting her hands—“the one who’s left behind to mind the store.”

Jamie Pearson drank until his liver quit. Samuel Powers married a redhead from Connecticut, who was divorced and already had two children. They flew to Nassau for their honeymoon, and the plane went down. Doc Macallister was long since dead, and Harriet, surviving, put their obituary notices in her Miscellany file.

Now he finishes his drink. He opens the dining room door; his sister precedes him, bustling. He pulls out her chair for her, then pushes it forward to the table with her slight added burden. Harriet had been thin then plump then fleshy then corpulent and now is thin again. In the old days she had candied apples and Indian corn and peanut brittle ready when the children of the village dropped by for Hallowe’en. “Oh my,” she would exclaim—as each child shuffled in, sack at the ready, big-eyed behind masks—“don’t we look marvelous tonight. Tell me what you want to do for trick or treat.”

The cowboys would yodel or brandish their capguns, and Pocahontas war-whooped while she filled her sack.

“My goodness, we’re near out of chocolate.” Harriet came from the kitchen with a basket full of chocolate kisses, and packs of Hershey bars.

“You’ll like this,” she told Davy Crockett. “Only don’t murder raccoons.”

“I didn’t do it, ma’am,” he said.

“But would you? Would you do it if you had the chance?”

“I got three woodchucks,” he announced. “With just my .22.”

“You’d do it,” she lamented. “All those dear creatures slaughtered for the sake of coonskin caps.”

“I got it for my birthday,” Davy Crockett said. “It was give me. Trick or treat.”

The Big House porch would be lamplit—Judah had rigged jack-o’-lanterns—and they played movie tiptoe-music on the pianola. In the rare lulls, when no one was there or could be heard arriving, Harriet would clasp her hands and bow her head and say, “My, my, brother, but they do exhaust me so. The girl with all the crinolines—Scarlett O’Hara, I think she said she was—is Maisie Petersen. Isn’t it
astonishing
?”

“This is her last year in that kind of outfit.”

“How much she’s grown,” Harriet marveled. “How quickly she’ll be beautiful.”

“It happens,” Judah said.

None, no single one of them would ever equal Margaret. She was and is and always will be his definition of grace. She had hair the color of wheat and cornflower eyes and legs that made him think of jumping deer. He knows these words are cheap but prizes them nevertheless, and would not call her simply blonde and blue-eyed and long-legged. Nor does she wither and stale in his recollection; she is always twenty-three, running flat-out from the house to meet him, arms pumping, feet raising dust. He would have trouble focusing, from all those hours in the sun, and she would be a doubled, jerky vision, wearing a white dress. He cracked two ribs from squeezing her, but there was no fragility in her athlete’s stride. Or thirty-three, her long hair longer but not one whit altered in its coloration (though later he’d suspected and accused her of hair dye and she’d said so what, so what if I just touch it up?) nor five pounds fatter to mark the decade, standing at the staircase, dressed, lifting her dress to come down. His sons had kicked her belly out, and he saw her nine months pregnant, a moon. An arm or leg would shove at her, and he’d watch her bunch and ripple; she’d smooth her skin and rearrange herself on the three extra pillows in bed.