Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (49 page)

“Perhaps indeed when young he met a man called Daniel Sherbrooke, perhaps he won those pistols on a bet. My head is light with the exertion of even these jottings. Sleep.”

Ian continues. Jane’s door is open, and he stands for a moment in the hall. “
That
isn’t how to do it,” Jane is saying. “Not inside.”

The twins respond. She is on her tricycle, turning circles in the room; she veers around the toy shelf and sees him in the door. “Amy hurt her foot,” she says. “That’s why I’m riding.”

“Hello, Amy. Kathryn.”

“In a
ac
cident,” says Jane.

The twins smile, sheepish to be found with someone so much younger. Jeanne Fisk sits on the bed, upright, surrounded by stuffed rabbits. “Hello.”

“Hello. I wondered if you’d left.”

“The master of the house,” she says. “No. I was resting.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

She leans back and crosses her legs. She selects a teddy bear. “We thought we’d skip the guided tour. Skip out on it, anyhow.”

“It won’t last much longer,” he says.

“The stuffing’s coming out. Mr. Bear has popped his buttons, he’s so proud.”

“We played Candyland,” says Jane. “And guess who came in second.”

“Bill,” he says.

“No.”

“Sam.”

“No.” She giggles. “
I
did.”

“I’d never have guessed it.”

“Ian’s teasing,” Jane confides. “He always teases.”

“What would you call this?” Jeanne asks. She indicates the bed, its litter of stuffed animals, and the three girls intent again on Candyland. She lifts a giraffe, then makes a space for him in the circle of rabbits and pats the quilt smooth. “A harem or menagerie?”

He sits. “A guided tour. The public one.”

“Yes.”

“Miles is taking notes downstairs.”

“I know, he wants a story . . .” She smiles at the twins. Amy turns up double-red and passes the ice-cream sandwich. Kathryn turns her card and gets a single blue. She pouts, reluctant—in spite of her announced scorn for such childishness as Candyland—to be last.

“I’ve got to go,” Ian says.

“Here. Take this.” She hands him a seal. Its nose is red, its body black, and its eyes are orange marbles. “Something to remember me by. There’s an antiques appraiser downstairs. Go ask him what it’s worth.”

“He seems angry.”

“Who?”

“Your husband.”

Jane leans forward, concentrating. She turns up the gumdrops and has to lose ground.

“You’re very observant, Mr. Sherbrooke. I knew you’d notice, sooner or later. Men are so observant.” Jeanne addresses the three girls, “That’s what I always tell Miles.” They pay her no attention. She smiles at Ian falsely, showing her teeth, and hands him Minnie Mouse. “Now run along and play.”

The Toy House door is locked. There is deep snow at the entrance, and a broken windowpane; snow has been drifting inside. It lies on the hooked rug like dust. There are watercolors on the walls; Andrew leans forward and looks. A St. Bernard uncovers a man in a snowbank; the dog’s tail appears to be wagging; a barrel labeled Brandy is fastened to its neck. The rescued traveler, already pink-cheeked, smiling, reaches for the flask. A second picture shows the St. Bernard at home, nursing roly-poly puppies; a third shows the dog itself eating a bone that is its ample reward. A chalk sketch titled “Mother’s Little Helper” hangs above the cast-iron cookstove; it shows a golden-headed girl with brooms and clothespins and a pail. There is a picture, also, of the girl saying her prayers. She kneels with her back to the artist, a candle in her hand and a pet duck on the floor beside her; a kitten peers out from under the sheets.

Despite these ornaments, however, the Toy House seems abandoned. Sheaves of newspaper cover the chairs, and a drop-sheet hides the couch. The miniature cupboard is open, but the canisters are upside down and there are empty trays of D-Con on the shelves and floor. A depression in the snow beneath the roof’s perimeter indicates where snow has, melting, dropped. Andrew walks around the house three times, obliterating this line. Brown icicles fall from the eaves.

II

Ian had spent time onstage since he first studied the piano; he expected to stand in the spotlight and receive applause. He was not an accomplished musician, however, and the few times he played in public were as back-up bass. Then for some years he was an actor, playing bit parts at the Cleveland Playhouse and at A.C.T. in San Francisco. He could recite much of Shakespeare and said the song from
Cymbeline
had taught him everything. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,” he would pronounce. “Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Though his love of the theater persisted, he gave up attempting to act. He saw true talent in an actor playing Iago at the Guthrie, and understood himself to be, by contrast, third-rate. The most he’d had was presence—a kind of watchful wariness that made those around him respond. The actor who was Iago made a living, later, as a doctor in a TV serial on hospitals; then he played the DA in a serial about hard-hitting cops.

But Ian had what Hattie used to call the gift of gab. He loved the way words edged together, the clashing jangling sounds they made. His ear was good. He could manipulate accents, speaking as a German might, or a Spaniard or Cockney or Indian out of Oxford; his inflections were precise. He had some trouble with Italian accents as distinguished from the French, but he embellished Italian jokes with gestures that worked well. All this, he knew, was just the gift of mimicry; he could imitate a barnyard also, crowing as the rooster crows or sounding very like a dog or cat or horse. He amused Jane greatly by being a cow and teaching her the goat’s distinctive bleat. His repertoire included jokes about a chicken crossing roads. The closest he had come to truth on stage was in the title role of
Charlie the Chicken
, wherein he was transformed; he did the same with less success in
Rhinoceros
and
The Dog Beneath the Skin
.

Yet such transformation had its limits, finally; he was Ian Sherbrooke and not an entertainer. He would be no one’s parakeet or parrot when they came to lift the curtain from his cage.

Once settled back in the Big House, he occupied himself in several ways. He did the shopping and cooking and spruced up the place. He enjoyed the work of restoration—simple household tasks of carpentry and maintenance. Over time the house gutters and rainspouts had filled; the north-wall paint had peeled. Judah used to deal with one exposure every year, painting first the north wall, then east, then south, then west. Ian found his father’s metal scaffolding stored in the carriage barn. Having assembled it, he scraped and primed and over two weeks painted the north wall.

The flat fact was he had no need to work. There was in any case no employment in town, or none that suited him. He rented out the land. After the hay barn burned down, and with Boudreau’s departure, Ian saw no point in managing the farm himself. He yielded the task with relief. A family three miles away came to the acreage daily on tractors, and he saw them in the distance plowing, seeding, harvesting; they waved and were respectful. He checked the fence lines every so often and discussed with a show of interest which field to plant with what.

Then Alan Whitely approached. As president of the local drama club, he made a proposition. Since the carriage barn was not in use, and since they required a stage, would Ian consent to let them use it for rehearsals? They wanted to mount an open-air production of
Desire Under the Elms,
with the inside of the carriage barn as the inside of the house. They might build a proscenium, but it could be dismantled later; they would repair the flooring and rent all the necessary chairs.

Jeanne Fisk was the group’s treasurer. She called one evening in order to discuss the financial arrangements: whether he required guarantees and what sort of contract to draw up. He said he needed no guarantee: it was a goodwill gesture in accordance with his plan to make the Big House available for community use. He consulted with Samson Finney, however, and called Jeanne back to say they would be grateful for a letter of intent. She said they could discuss the details over lunch; she wondered, also, if he might be interested in becoming a participating member of the group. He said he’d finished acting, and she said, “Nonsense, it’s still in your blood—a drug. I know that much.”

“Why?”

“Old actors never die,” she said. “And young ones most certainly don’t.”

“They fade away, though. It’s called ‘Honorary Withdrawal.’ They turn in their Equity cards.”

“We’re not a professional company. We do it just for fun.”

Ian played a parlor game. Take any roomful of strangers and attempt to pair them off: does like attract like, or do opposites attract? Is that blonde in the corner, inclining to fat, the wife of that man with brown sideburns wearing a vest, or will she remain with the host? He had met Jeanne Fisk six months before, at dinner at the Conovers’. Jeanne seemed dissatisfied not so much with Miles or her position in the world as with the whole enterprise of satisfaction; she confided to him that a supper party like this one made her want to smoke. She mimed the process of inhaling and, looking at him, held her breath. Then she released the air and shut her eyes and wet her lips.

At first he’d been the town’s prize catch—or so Hattie assured him and so it appeared. Jeanne called to offer picnics and chamber-music soirees. One day he met her in the checkout line at Morrisey’s, in the five o’clock half-light. It had been raining hard.

“You never visit,” she reproached him. “How many times do we have to invite you?”

“I’m sorry . . .”

Jeanne pointed to the shallots that Morrisey was weighing. “I can cook. You promised you’d come by for lunch.”

In profile her face had a difficult beauty: dark, strained. Her hip grazed his. Later when he tried to pinpoint how their banter shifted, how that casual encounter came to seem shot through with meaning, it had to do with just such tactile contact. She had reached across him, needlessly, for bread. “Do come to visit,” Jeanne said. Departing, she rested her hand on his arm, as if to seek help with the door or seal a bargain struck.

At lunch, however, he repeated his refusal to act; she served him a leek quiche. The twins were at school and Miles at the office; a pair of prisms hung in her dining room window. This time by way of excuse he told her he was writing plays, an author, not an actor. She called his bluff. “How wonderful! I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Please. It would be wonderful to stage a play you wrote. We could do that, couldn’t we?” Jeanne asked.

She wore a scarf that hid her hair; her forehead and features were smooth. Some provocation in her challenge—their courting dance in its first steps—encouraged him to answer yes; he’d show her and they’d see.

When Jane was born, he’d planted a blue spruce. It was a family tradition, and Ian did as much for Jane as Judah did for him. It was late in the season for setting out trees, but the weather had been mild. He bought the best blue spruce in Quinlan’s Nursery. Quinlan said with luck and water and a protective casing the tree might make it, and not need to wait till spring, and in any case there’d be a guarantee. October was still fine for planting, but November might be touch and go. “You plant a hundred-dollar tree in a ten-dollar hole,” said Quinlan, “and it’s a ten-dollar tree. The way I see it. You plant a ten-dollar tree in a hundred-dollar hole, and it turns out fine. I guarantee this beauty: dig her deep.”

He followed those instructions. He chose a sunny swatch of lawn thirty feet from the Toy House, and dug. He fertilized and soaked the spruce, then banked it with peat moss and hay; he covered it after the snow. The winter proved hard. The tree’s blue spikes lost resilience and went brown. He tended it continually, banking it with hay and dreaming that when spring arrived at last it might have proved successful. It did not. The spruce was blighted, sere; he could not coax it to life. So he went back to Quinlan’s and exercised the guarantee for a replacement. Jane was too young to notice and would anyhow not care; Maggie would have noticed but had not been in the garden. In the same spot, laboriously, Ian planted the substitute spruce, using a pickax to enlarge the hole, then dropping totems in: a silver dollar, a daguerreotype of Peacock’s face, and a penciled unsigned note to Jane that read: “I love you. Flourish.” This tree grew.

A Greek Revival house at the property’s edge had been intended as a wedding gift for Peacock’s younger daughter. But Anne-Maria married a missionary and did not return to Vermont. Ian spent months renovating the place, sleeping in it from time to time with Sally Conover, but there too his interest waned. He had been boarding up windows when Jeanne tapped his shoulder. He turned; he had nails in his teeth.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He spat the nails into his palm. It was early April.

“I was out walking,” Jeanne said. “And I heard this hammering . . .”

He wiped his face with his shirt. He hooked the hammer in his work belt and replaced the nails. “Welcome,” Ian said. “You walk this way often?”

“Not often.”

“My house is your house,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Please . . .”

He showed her through the empty rooms, their vacancy reproachful and the sun blocked out. He had sanded the floors but not sealed them, so they took off their shoes. She praised his carpentry, the turnings on the banister, and he said he had ten thumbs. In the upstairs east-facing bedroom, where light still shone because he had not boarded up the windows, she asked if this was where he’d planned his bed and if he needed one; she had an extra mattress. It was no use to her, she said, it only gathered dust.

“Would you be willing to share it?” he asked.

Her hesitation moved him. Smiling, she shut her eyes. There was a passionate demureness in the gesture. For an instant, watching her, he wondered what he’d gain and lose: if this game was worth the candle or he understood the rules.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Jeanne said, and lifted his hand to her breast. They fell on each other, then to the floor, like starvelings after food.

Ian wrote a play for voices, a play for ventriloquist and dummy, and several play beginnings that faltered on the page. He had had, he claimed, an excellent first line. The curtain would go up and reveal three actors in a living room. They would clear their throats and fold their papers and cross and uncross their legs. No one, however, would speak. This has to continue, he said, past the point of anxiety on the audience’s part; it must provoke boredom, then rage. It must continue till the customers rise and fill the aisles. Then an actor would put down his paper, shake his head, and say: “Well. We seem to have run out of things to say to one another.”

He could not continue. He wrote a madman’s monologue titled “The Twenty-Fifth Clock.” This man sat in the center of a circle of clocks, each timed an hour previous to the sundial of its neighbor. By rotating on his chair coincident with the play’s action, the actor could always face the same instant and claim to have annihilated time. An Orpheus clock known as Georgi came creakingly to life. “No one cares to sing about the sordidness of loss,” it sang. “The self-deception of a backward look, and all the little bargainings of fear. I am Orpheus. I care.” This lament, however, dissolved in a cacophony of cuckoo clocks, their works sprung and wheels clogged. The actor at scene’s close was spinning counter-clockwise on his barstool in the dark.

He wrote a play about Pygmalion and Galatea in reverse. The sculptor so embraced his craft that every woman he approached became a Muse or artifact instead; his kiss turned flesh to stone. At a retrospective of his work, which transpired in the second act, the sculptor propositioned women at the Guggenheim. They clustered to the eight-foot-high anthracite phallus by the entrance desk. Stroking it, they murmured praise that pointed out the fruitful conjunction of aesthetics and pornography. Ian tried to write about injustice—those things that sent him to the streets when an undergraduate, and kept him on the road thereafter: poverty, repression, war, disease. But there his gift of mimicry felt forced; he could not write of revolution in the accents of belief.

He tried a play about a playwright trying to write plays; he wrote about himself as the prodigal son. He wrote a play for children, calling it
King Ed
and updating Oedipus; he tried an Orphic mystery with a grape-guzzling narrator that women tear apart. All these failed. He knew enough to know how poor his early efforts were, and to keep quiet about them. On his twenty-eighth birthday, however, while drinking scotch and soda with Maggie on the sleigh bed on the west-facing porch, he realized just how secretive he’d been. His mother did not know he wrote; he had not dared admit it. Whether this was shame or pride seemed unimportant somehow; he had accumulated nothing in the years away. They had been five-finger exercises; Ian clenched his fist. He studied the pattern his fingerprints made on the glass. He told her he would like to write, and she said, “Yes. Why not?”

Already she seemed inward-facing, barely able to muster attention for Jane’s breakfast or a soiled crib sheet. Yet she had not been indifferent. Her “Why not?” acquiesced. Those family occasions where he had had to toast the guest, or write a birthday poem for his aunt, the years of magic shows or wild imagining occasioned by some steamer trunk, its lid sprung, costumes in profusion in the attic, where he was Wild Bill Hickock, Captain Marvel, then d’Artagnan in outfits worn to school—all these seemed sufficient preparation. Maggie assumed (with no lift in her eyebrow or hitch in her rocking motion) that he could do and be just what he’d care to: a Sherbrooke does not bite off more than Sherbrookes chew.