Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (60 page)

His suits are threadbare now, his socks are at his ankles, and he walks with an umbrella as a cane. In the chair across from her, he scratches at the armrest. “Nothing’s what it seems like anymore. You build a road, it hadn’t ought to be a one-way proposition, not only be a bypass and take you somewhere else. You mark my words,” he says, “I’m telling you God’s truth.” Main Street won’t be any use to anyone but bicyclists, weeds will make it to the middle line and daisies push up through the cracks. What the state can do to pasture if it puts a highway through is only one side of the coin, says Finney; they’ll be grazing off of Main Street soon enough. He can remember when the airport was a cabbage field—thirty acres planted in red and white alternate sections. Up there from Mount Wayne it looked like Frederick Matteson was playing checkers with a giant, he had it planted so perfect. So when the runways crumble, it can be a cabbage field again.

The town’s been good to him; he isn’t saying otherwise, and he’s settled something on Jane. It won’t make her rich, Finney says. She doesn’t need it anyhow, but it makes him feel like when he’s gone he’ll keep on going with that girl; she, Maggie, mustn’t mind. Old men are forgetful, he says, but one thing they remember is mortality. He, Finney, recollects that clear as clear. One thing he remembers is the way she looked in ’38, her Calamity Jane outfit on and riding that merry-go-round like it was an actual horse.

Andrew comes to the door. “Can I help?” he asks.

“What did Ian say to you?”

Andrew hesitates. “Not much.”

“But enough,” Maggie says. “When he called . . .”

Andrew nods. She hears his hesitation as if it were speech.

“You needn’t have worried, mister. I’m not about to jump just yet.”

“You don’t belong here.”

“I did. I’ve not been”—Maggie pauses—“well.” Her tongue is thick. It fills her mouth. “Not well. So frightened, Andrew, so anxious all the time. You say it’s easy to leave, but nothing has been easy. Ian does the shopping. I don’t even go out shopping.”

“What keeps
him
here?”

She offers an archaic phrase. “Filial duty, perhaps.”

“He said he was working on something.”

“Yes. I’m glad he told you.”

“That’s all he said,” Andrew says.

The stubble on his chin is gray. She sees this with relief. He draws his hand across his eyes and starts to speak, then stops.

“We’ll leave with you,” she says. “If you’ll still have us, now you’ve seen the—what would you call it?—situation. We don’t have much choice.”

“Where I come from,” he says, “we call it common sense.”

“Where
do
you come from, Andrew?”

“We can spend the night in Westport. We could make it back.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is. Let’s get you packed.”

Maggie looks at him in the diminished light. The storm is over, anyhow; she hears cars pass on North Street out beyond the gate. She had not thought him generous and is unsettled by his presence in the doorway. “I’ll be right down,” she says. “You go and keep them company.”

He will provide for Jane.

She sits. Her luggage tilts toward her, and she steadies it. She remembers finding Judah on the night of her return. They’d been apart for seven years; then he informed her he was dying, and she took the bus north and stayed. That night he tried to sleep with her and failed. She fell asleep beneath him and woke to find him gone. His departure had been noiseless, and her first waking thought (who had lain alone for seven years, or mostly, staying with her lovers only on occasion, with Andrew for a week or two, living with no one but Judah though she lived on Sutton Place and he never visited) was that she’d been dreaming. The room had the dim light of dream. When she realized that the weight that breathed on top of her, the dead weight pressing on her breasts was Judah’s proved reproof—when she realized that he’d left her bed but had been an actual presence, she dressed herself and followed him and went to set things straight.

He was not in the house. She tried every room, from basement up to cupola, not wanting to rouse Hattie or signal her alarm. But she had been alarmed. She switched on the lights of the house. She looked in every closet, in the elevator and the basement, leaving only Hattie’s room unlit. The place seemed huge, illimitable, a cave in which she hunted him but knew there’d be no trace.

Maggie tried the pantry last. The storm door to the back porch had been insecurely fastened; the door had slipped its latch. Then she knew on the instant how Judah escaped; he’d done what he used to do often, leaving the Big House behind, walking off the heat or shame or argument or airlessness of life within such walls. He was out on the land where she never could track him, and his privacy endured. He had invited her into the mansion—invited her in 1938 when first they met, when she was lost; invited her again a decade later when they met at Morrisey’s by seeming-accident that they soon enough, in the talkative sessions of their new nakedness together, agreed to call fate; invited her to marry him and enter countless times thereafter, to come back from Providence, Boston, New York, to come back again in April, 1976, and have the house declared—in Ian’s absence, Finney’s acquiescent presence, Hattie’s powerless abiding—her own.

Yet the land remained utterly his. She owned it outright also, but she could not bring herself alone to roam its thousand acres as she did when at his side. So all through the dawn of her first day’s return she waited by his exit door, wearing her traveling clothes, drinking coffee in the kitchen and huddled to the stove. The world might be no merry-go-round, nor memory a carousel—but Maggie was assailed by circularity. He had been as lost to her as she had been to him before, when fled south to Manhattan. At eight o’clock that morning, while Hattie was stirring above, while she was on her third cup of coffee and her stomach would not settle, Judah walked in from the porch. His step was slow. His lips were blue. His boots were unlaced, and bits of straw clung to his duck-hunting jacket.

“Still here, I see,” Judah said.

“Still here.”

“Sleep well?”

“No, I didn’t. Did you?”

He made no answer but blew on his hands. She rose and poured him his coffee.

“I thank you.” His hands had been raw. He folded his hands around the mug so she could not see the mug, and steam rose from his thumbs. They made a kind of peace together, drinking, silent, and it lasted. Later that morning she did go outside. She found hay bales drawn up on the ground, and some of them were loosened where he’d made the hay his pallet for the night. And Maggie had known (again on the instant, not needing to confirm this by the matchbook lying there, the few charred stalks and shocks) that Judah had endured the April watch by the barn, relinquishing the house to her for what would prove forever.

But forever was five years. Six months later he was dead, and six months later Ian came back, and six months thereafter, more or less, Hattie left the Big House and threw herself into the pond. The circle was complete. Then the hired man did burn the hay and burn the barn and burn himself, though drunk and not intending to, not conscious of the carousel and how his action finished what her own return began.

Maggie watches herself in the window. It is deep dark outside, and the light behind her renders the pane a dark mirror; she sticks out her tongue. The women of the house, it seems, are those who leave, whereas the men remain. She buckles the first two bags.
Forever is five years,
she thinks; there’s nothing but death that endures. And short of such finality all action is irresolute: Judah failed to burn the hay, Boudreau survived his burns. Ian has gutted the honeymoon house—the Greek Revival shell on the edge of their land he’d planned to renovate. But soon enough he left it and returned, his father’s son, to where they both began. And now that she, Maggie, is leaving, he will feel free to marry and start the Sherbrooke line again. She wishes her older child well. She tells Ian good-bye. She’d thought that four years previous she’d said good-bye to Andrew, but he’s drinking in their daughter’s presence and about to eat
truite almandine.

Jane, plain Jane, Calamity Jane, Jane Jane come in from the rain
—Maggie rests her forehead on the glass. It is cold. She has wanted to jump. Often in the months gone past she’d thought such pain could not be borne, need not be borne, and breathing was too much to ask. Hattie had quit; she could too. There’s nothing in the pure plain fact of continuity to praise. Death lasts beyond all lastingness, so why put pancake makeup on the age lines in her neck?

Jane is the answer, of course. She is the single reason, and it suffices. Maggie cannot jump—cannot open the window even for fear of the sweet whiff of freedom in jumping. She tries. She sits on the bed’s edge and writes, using her yellow notepad and the toilet case as surface, using a ball-point pen. “Darling,” she writes. “I don’t expect you to understand it now, but maybe later on you’ll understand. Keep this letter, please. It will tell you sometime what you’ll want to know—I loved you, love you, will continue loving you until there’s no life left. My death does not concern you. It should be set apart. It mustn’t worry you. It . . .”

Maggie stops. She is not serious. She tries this letter on for size like an ill-fitting dress; its lines are not her lines. She takes a second tack. “The only thing that frightens me is that you’ll feel responsible—not now, I mean, not now when Ian and Andrew will take care of you. I’ve gone on a trip, they will say. Remember when we gave you goldfish for your birthday? And you woke up the next morning saying you were just so lucky that the goldfish could be pets? Well, they’d died that night—it happens to fish often on their way from Mammoth Mart. I tiptoed in that night to see how you were doing, and they’d floated to the top. We flushed them down the toilet, Ian and I. But you wouldn’t take no for an answer. I had to lie to you—it’s the first time, maybe the only time I can remember doing that—and pretended they’d gone for a swim. They were fish that belonged in the river, but they’d surely be right back. You went back to sleep, it didn’t seem to bother you. It bothered me. It would bother me if Ian or your father says that I’ve gone on a trip.”

She takes a second sheet. Her handwriting is clear. “You never asked about Judah, so I didn’t have to lie. You never knew him so it wasn’t a loss, really, and Ian has been wonderful and Andrew will be wonderful and everything will work out fine. If you don’t feel responsible. Going back to New York means beginning again, and I’m not sure I can manage it. But you must manage it, my darling.”

Maggie stands. She folds the sheets, then tears them twice and lets the letter drop. She turns off the light and goes out.

Andrew is discussing the work week in Manhattan, and how his junior partners all are workaholics. “Fifty hours a week by Thursday,” Andrew tells Ian. “They log ninety hours by Sunday, and what they do for relaxation is, you know, jogging. Five miles around the park for lunch, then back to the desk. It’s crazy, it’s no good. What I do is shed load. That’s what I advise them—you’re no good after ten o’clock, so why take the office home with you? Wrecks your home life if you’ve got one, wrecks your health, wrecks your digestion sooner or later.” Andrew wags his index finger, admonitory. “The more we work, the less we produce.”

She watches him debone his trout. Perhaps he too is haunted by the ghosts that once ate supper here and held such opinions; he might cite Judah’s attitudes in order to impress the son and wife.

“Don’t fence me out,” says Ian. “I agree. It used to be the other way around.”

“Used to be,” says Maggie. “The emptiest phrase in the language. It’s worse than might have been.” She shakes her head, then pats her lips and drinks. “Used to be that there was smallpox here. And people died at fifty if they lived that long. And what we’re eating now would feed a family of twelve. And this was virgin land.”

“All right,” says Ian. “I was talking about limitation. Fences.”

“Why? Because you used to be so dead set against them? You open this house to the public because you hate Route Seven?”

“Don’t shout,” Jane says.

“We’re not shouting, darling, we’re having a discussion.” But Maggie too can hear the anger in her voice; she takes a cigarette. It is an echo of her argument with Judah, she wants to explain to her daughter. She is preparing to withdraw, and this is how she’s done it always—breaking things, smearing the walls. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she offers. “What I mean is, Ian, it’s yours.”

But he has turned to Andrew, as if they are in league. They talk about load-shedding and the danger of cult sects and recession and inflation; they talk about the weather and the best road back to Manhattan, or the best road down to Westport, according to which destination Andrew picks. They discuss the advantages of four-wheel drive or front-wheel drive and what to do with cable television when it fails, and whether the Taconic or the Thruway makes more sense; she has difficulty breathing; she keeps her eyes closed. Ian calls it a national madness, there’s no gas left to speak of, and those mammoth rigs that take a gallon every yard are digging roads to nowhere every chance they get. It’s like the difference, says Andrew, between a circle and ellipsis, a rectangle and parallelogram both failing to be square; it’s like parallel lines that fail to meet but intersect in infinity; they’re, what’s the word,
asymptotic
?