Read Online Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) by Nicholas Delbanco - Free Book Online

slept beside her on the pillow. He sucked on his cheek. He wore his brown corduroy pants. She had mended them more times than she would care to count, and offered to buy him a new pair, but he said not until I wear it through, but thanks, but what about this button, can you manage that?
    Later she would tell him that she hated Providence. They were crows over carrion, she’d say. They’d argued over furniture and even stamp collections, like a flock of crows. It’s good, she’d say, to be back home where nothing was in question or out of its accustomed place or on some sort of auction block, with legatees bidding. Judah moved. He looked at her. He craned his head to the left and was staring at her, she could swear, staring through her at the willow. She flattened herself. “I’m crazy about you, mister,” she whispered. “Crazy mad.”
    Hattie comes to the door. They greet each other, constrained. Her voice is high-pitched, querulous. “What brings you to these parts?”
    “I wanted to see you. Both. You know that.”
    “Well, look your fill,” says Hattie. “ We’re not leaving, him and I.”
    Maggie takes her bearings. Judah used to say that any liar dreams he’ll be caught and pardoned; any faithless person reasons faithlessness is faith. There’s something in a clown, he said, that needs to get egg on his face and to take a pratfall walking in or out the door. But women have a harder time of it these years, she believes, than men. Not only do they have the housework and child-work and beauty-work to keep up with, but they also feel dishonored if they honor it as work. When a man has a profession the world calls him a professional; when a woman pursues a career, they call her a “careerist.”
    “Yes, well,” says Judah, entering, carrying her suitcase. “We’ll let her alone a little bit, sister. Just long enough to wash.”
    “I don’t mind,” Hattie says.
    “I didn’t guess you would,” he says. “Well see you in a while.”
    “How long?”
    “Twenty minutes?” Maggie says. “I do want to freshen up.”
    In her own way, her sister-in-law has kept to what she stood for, standing fast. Hattie tried. She loved the boys. But sometimes it had seemed more standing pat than fast, and then there was change all around them so that standing still was change.
    “I’ll be in my room,” Hattie says.
    Hair in the flanges of his nose, hair in his ears; a nose like an Indian’s, where rain could practice skiing. Eyes that were blue in daylight, gray at night, and green in the pine woods or when he looked at grass—the only changeable thing in him, Maggie thinks, an absence of color really, not a hue to name. Big ears to hear her where she walked, a mouth like Cupid’s crossbow, with the skin so often cracked and healed it seemed scarified. That was how his whole skin moved, independent of the bone struts beneath, so that when he squinted his checks would fall, not rise; that was how he used his hands, wrapping them like swaddling around the fork he held. There was stubble on his chin and cheeks; she has been robbed, she tells herself, of his resplendent youth. She has the photographs. He stands there pole-trim, erect. His white hair had been yellow then, as everything was yellow in the print. He is, she hears herself telling Mary, just the most beautiful man. He’s everything I dreamed of, he’s the strongest man in the whole wide world, just dreamy. He’s rich, her city friend says. Yes, he’s very rich. He’s old, she says, not all that old, just graying at the temples. But—and Mary drops her voice, sybilline, insistent—do you love him? Love him, Maggie answers, oh my, yes. I’m mad about the boy. He has this team of horses that he broke himself. He has a carriage—you know, the old-fashioned kind, with plush seats, all the trimmings and a place to put your parasol—and he takes me in it sometimes and we ride for hours and don’t ever leave his land. It’s a one-horse carriage