Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (51 page)

Then Maggie in her youthful guise appeared. She told him to come on in by the fire, he’d catch his death of cold. She said she needed charity, but he had none to spare. She said she needed comforting; he railed at her for the delusion that there was comfort to give. He’d lived to see his first son die, and then she came along and picked up the pieces and patched them together and made him a second son in her guileful image. He would not be beguiled. He had had enough of it; the world was bereft of all reason; it killed his second boy as it had killed his first. And what was left to live for, Judah said, was not worth having; it was by-your-leave and thank-you-ma’am and a jar of cold cream for Job’s boils.

She pleaded with him, piteous, but he was deaf to entreaty; a hangman’s noose has thirteen knots, he said, and he was busy tying them, she needn’t hang around. Her pity turned to anger and, soon enough, a kind of scorn. She said that he was selfish, every suicide was selfish, it was grandstanding, the easy way out, it left the survivors to muddle along with their shame in the town’s eyes, and guilt. If he used that rope, she warned, he shouldn’t plan to have her cut him loose. She washed her hands of all such death-in-life.

Judah stood irresolute. He said that she was shaming him, twisting what she called his weakness the way she twisted everything and him around her little finger. He told her to go back inside. She would not leave. They bickered at each other as if over coffee, and how hot or strong to serve it in which cups. It was not serious. It was vaguely comical, as if Judah threatened suicide each time his will was crossed. This bickering continued while Ian walked on stage. He carried a duffel bag, limping, then sat on the duffel and unlaced his boots. They took no notice of him till he lit his corncob pipe. Maggie did not seem surprised. She threw up her hands; “Oh, you’re impossible,” she said, then turned to Ian and said they should drive to New York.

He had not been killed, of course. The news of his death was some bureaucrat’s error, he had been wounded slightly and sent home on leave. They questioned him; he temporized. He had shot himself in the left knee. What did it matter? he asked; what mattered was he’d come back home alive. He asked about the dairy herd, naming the cows with tenderness, asking which cow had freshened and what was the milk yield and what was for supper that night. He was so hungry, Ian declared, he could eat a horse.

Judah studied him. Maggie did not seem to mind, was kneeling beside him and stroking his hair, saying, “Baby, baby,” while he smoked. “A dishonorable discharge?” Judah asked. “You might call it that,” Iansaid. “What would
you
call it?” Judah asked. Ian said he’d just as soon not name its name but let sleeping dogs lie and bygones be bygones; what mattered was the prodigal come home to stay and the three of them could learn to laugh, making everything up to each other for all those years apart. “They did their best to slaughter me,” he said. “But I made it anyhow. Let’s celebrate the world.”

Jeanne met him in the carriage barn. She wore wooden clogs that resounded, and her skirt was long, with a pink fringe. He told her how Jane that morning had given up her bottle, saying bottles were for babies, but could she keep just one for her play kitchen when she needed it? Jeanne put her fingers on his cheek and splayed them there. “Don’t worry.”

“No.”

“I tell myself two things.”

“What are they?”

“First, that I’ll get over you. Not right away, of course, but in twenty years or so. And, second, you don’t mean to hurt me.”

“No.”

The hand that rested on his cheek had weight; she let it drop. “I’m indecisive, Ian, is that such a crime?”

“No. And you’re not indecisive. You want two things at once, that’s all.”

“You too,” she said. “You too.”

“I’m simplicity itself,” he said. “I want you to leave Miles.”

He had not said this before. He had not planned to say it, but knew it for the truth. “That’s what I want,” he repeated.

Her eyes were wide in the scant light. They had the largest proportion of pupil to iris, he thought, of any eyes he’d seen. “Do you mean that?”

“I do.”

“I’m older than you are, remember? I have two children and one husband who won’t want a divorce.”

“Do you?”

“That isn’t the point. It’s called desertion. If I left him, we’d all have to leave.”

“All right.”

“We couldn’t live here.” She raised her arm, embracing air, and indicated the barn. “Not now.”

“I’ve left before, I can do it again.”

“Yes.”

“Just think about it,” Ian said.

“I think about it all the time.”

He placed his hands on her breasts. She did not move toward him but did not move away. The barn seemed peopled suddenly with Maggie and Jane and the twins and their bags; a porter approached. The floor was a platform, the carriage a train, but Ian could not say for certain if the scene he witnessed were composed for greeting or farewell. “I think about it every day,” she said again. “Ask me what I think about, and there isn’t anything else.” The space felt vast, echoic, and he could hear mice scurry in the walls.

Hattie entered in the final scene. She carried a whisk broom and mop. But she dropped her cleaning implements—seeing the rope at Ian’s neck, his mother in an attitude of mourning, and the block-and-tackle feeding line while Judah hauled. She advanced on her brother, fists on her hips. She scolded him for being a tease, for playing with rope as he used to with fire. If he knew what was good for him, he’d put that noose away.

The quartet that followed took some time to write. Ian knew his play depended on the final scene, and the disjunctive modes of it had here to be combined. He sounded his various themes. It was not to be a play about a single family within a single corner of New England. It was to be—or fail in trying—a tone poem celebrating constancy, the age-old song of agelessness in youth. Therefore these legacies: this paved and fenced dominion where the wilderness was sumac, where trash trees and raspberry bushes ran wild. Therefore these legators, who thought that they could keep possession by not giving and yet gave. When Judah bent to place the noose around his, Ian’s, neck, he did so almost tenderly, as if his son were sculpture of inestimable worth. Maggie’s eyes were marbles; they rolled along the sockets of her skull.

He wearied of this soon enough and tore up the first draft. The sonority and rhetoric was, after all, mere sound. He scored this last scene several times, conceiving of the voices as stringed instruments. He knew no one would notice and did not want them to—but wrote it that way anyhow in order to distinguish Hattie’s querulous treble from Judah’s bass. The four spoke contrapuntally; they took up a figure and phrased it, and though intonation differed the phrasing was the same. Vermont was earthly paradise, and progress the snake in the grass; Vermont was a fool’s paradise, and progress that four-lane highway; there was nothing wild enough to tame.

Ian confronted his father. He wrote the recognition scene he had returned too late to play. They quarreled over roots. Judah said without a taproot any tree will topple in the first important wind. Ian said that’s fearful, it’s an argument for constancy that takes no note of change. Judah said the only trees worth mentioning are those that last, the almond tree, black walnut, oak; and Ian said it’s a question of what kind of growth we’re discussing. This century began before the motorcar or airplane or the Zenith Chromacolor II television set. It started when intrepid men might span in a season’s hard traveling the distance a satellite shows on the six o’clock national news. The man who hears that news while driving from the World Trade Center to his home in Katonah will girdle the globe just commuting this business year—in what way, Ian asked, should radical deracination come as such a shock?

Big talk, big talk, said Judah, the more things change the more they stay the same. They say a baby whale’s six foot by fourteen; you want a preachment, Ian, that’s what I’ll teach you to preach. You start out big you stay that way, since those that have shall get. And them that’s not shall lose.

Jeanne’s face in animation was a face he could not scan; it was too mobile, a quicksilver series, five women, in one that he watched. Miles went salmon fishing for a week, and Jeanne deposited the twins with her sister-in-law in Dorset, saying that an old school friend was dying in New Haven. She met Ian in Manchester Center, and they drove across New Hampshire into Maine. There was constraint between them, a taut expectancy. He drove with his hand on her knee; she covered his hand with her own. She told him that she’d first met Miles when they were both eighteen. He’d been a wonderful dancer, she said, he’d swept her off her feet at Comus; he’d been visiting New Orleans since Jeanne’s brother was his roommate, and they both flew down from Dartmouth for the ball. She remembered to this day the way he looked in evening clothes, a bouquet of white roses in his fist. It was that image she’d married, she said: his slicked-down sandy hair, his praise for Lyndon Johnson as the great conciliator, and how he wore his raincoat like a cape.

They married five years later, when Miles was graduated from journalism school. Both of them dreamed in those first years of foreign postings for UPI or
Time
or
The New York Times
; they would live in Lagos or Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong—anywhere out of this world. Jeanne pictured herself serving tea, or riding through a game preserve, or making servants happy in the scrubbed and newly painted compound back behind the house. They settled for this small-town post as if it would be temporary—bought the house and had the twins as if merely marking time.

She didn’t mean, she said, the twins were unimportant. She’d wanted a child more than anything, she loved them more than anything. With every year and change in them she loved them all the more, her fledglings about to take wing. But Kathryn had been born with a dislocated hip. She spent the first four months in a cast, and Jeanne remembered feeding them—the one so light, the other so heavy with plaster—and feeling how she’d caged herself, was body-bound, how the tropics or the Orient were dreams she must defer.

Miles had been helpful, of course. He was a devoted husband and father; he wanted what was best for them, insisting what he wanted most was just her satisfaction. She fell out of love with him when they were twenty-eight. It had not been fair. She stayed at home all day all week, imprisoned by a pair of Barbie-doll enthusiasts; she cooked and cleaned and dressed and washed and dealt with them continually. Yet when Miles arrived for dinner, striding through the foyer like a guest in his own house, they fled toward their father like hostages set free. He grew sideburns, then a paunch. He took long scalding showers, using all the tank’s hot water, and did not unclog the drain. She knew these things were trivial; she felt disloyal telling him that was how love died. Love faded like the last light of the sunset on Kowloon she would never see except in travel posters; it disappeared like panthers from the edges of a water hole where some other someone’s husband advanced in order to take photographs. It scattered and grew separate like a pair of growing twins.

They reached Mount Desert Island in the dark. They registered as man and wife, then walked along the harbor streets until they found a restaurant. They entered and ordered and ate. The lobsters were ready for molting; he told her how he’d watched them molt and how, with their shells shucked, they were lighter than the water and would rise. “That’s when they make the best eating,” Ian said. “For fish, at any rate. And it’s the same with soft-shelled crabs; you catch them while they shed.”

The waitress had tied napkins to their necks; the napkins bore the legend “Lobster-in-the-Ruff.” Two lobsters shook claws across Jeanne’s breasts; she accepted her bib the way a child might, poutingly. They ate baked potatoes and salad and drank bitter white wine. “Do you realize,” Ian asked, “that this is our first date? I mean we’ve been having our—whatever we’ve been having—for nearly two years now. And we shared meals in public way back when. But it’s the first time we’ve eaten alone since you asked me to your house for lunch.” He dipped a claw in butter, cracked and sucked it while she watched.

She told him how at thirty she’d asked Miles for a divorce. He had been shocked, not suspicious. He’d asked her what was wrong and could she pinpoint and discuss it, so that he could have it fixed. He’d used that expression, Jeanne said, as if marriage were a faucet that required a new washer, or a car that needed lubrication every three thousand miles. She told him “have it fixed” was not a way to solve the problem, but proof of the problem itself: he rolled up his sleeves and consulted a maintenance book.

Miles had been baffled. His self-esteem was shaken, and it hurt her to see how he hurt. He’d asked if she were having an affair, and she answered him truthfully—this antedated Ian—“No.” He’d asked if she would like to take a vacation, go somewhere without him, or go to a doctor, or maybe go to the movies more often. She told him that the trouble was pervasive, not particular, not something you get to have fixed. They had settled down together, but it was unsettling; it was Kansas she traversed. There was beauty in it, certainly, and much that was fruitful and rich. But looking out her kitchen window—past the geraniums in the window box and past the swing set, the sandbox, the hedge, past the white Congregational Church steeple all the way up to Mount Wayne—seeing the swatches of pine and rock and maple like a crazy quilt, then the sky like a bedspread and clouds like white tassels, she still saw the landscape of Kansas, only Kansas, an interminable flatness she was doomed to forever and ever.