Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) by Nicholas Delbanco Page A

He’s watched her late arrivals often enough. He wonders how many doors she’s knocked at, or been asked to enter, and how many times he himself has waited two miles from her drop-off point, consulting his watch. Her appetite was checked. She’s reined it in too many years to give it its head now. So she’d arrive—not cheerful, not breathless to get at her plate—and ring for wine and have a cigarette. He hated cigarettes. They slaked her hunger, she said, as a glass of chill white wine would slake her thirst. She could puff out smoke rings and did so, coolly, while he watched. She was the only woman ever to dare to smoke rings in his house. She crossed her legs and sat there smoking, drinking, in pure opposition. He knew she used the smoke stink to cover up her body’s stench from love. He broke or hid the ashtrays, and she dropped her matches and ash on the floor. It hadn’t been an accident, he came to decide, that she knocked on the Big House door—and not at some farmhouse or barn.
    Yet what he calls deception she had called tact. She was a reed bending before him, pliant, at first even obsequious in public, but Maggie never broke. She took the Big House over as if it was a toy house, something manageable. She charmed them all—just sitting there, crossing and uncrossing her legs, engaging in discussions as to Adlai Stevenson (“Christ,” he had asked her. “Who’s this Adlai Stevenson to get so worked up over? An egghead with egg on his face. A politician like the others, but a bit less expensive to buy . . .”) or practicing her scales. She read aloud. In the evenings she would read him Tennyson or John Greenleaf Whittier or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he found himself suspecting there were messages in what she read, some code he failed to crack. She read them with a deference that was kissing cousin to mockery. She read of babbling brooks in a voice that made him think of babbling brooks. She read of leafy copses and the azure empyrean in a way that made him see both woods and sky.
    Yet she did so—he hunted the term—holding back. She was always holding back. Even in her hurtling run, or the way she came at him headlong, or the ferocity she showed him when he had her cornered—there was something inside her inviolate. It was like those Chinese boxes on the windowsill. There was Meg inside of Megan, and Megan inside Margaret. But inside Maggie—his final pet name—in the epicenter of her, impenetrable, there was a stranger he could not touch or name. He had gone clumsy-fingered at the end. He could not pick that lock. Even penetrating his wife, with her beneath him pinioned and Judah at his full extent, there was some final love veil that he could not lift. She stared at him, eyes hooded, and he never knew for certain what she, tilting, glazed, had seen.
    Nor did he want to know. He was nearly, for the one time of his manhood, fearful. He had loved her, nearly, for the limitation of her love for him—he who had been limitless in love. It was that hooded glare he feared, her head thrown back, neck arched, and the veins in her neck working while he worked above her. He had power in reserve. He had his wealth and history of women in reserve. He had had, for the first years, the advantage of years. So he pitted his battering strengths against her receptive inertia; he pitted his heat and her chill. It was a standoff mostly, though he sometimes thought he won, exulting in the warmth of her—then found it reflected, or fox fire, maybe heat she got in Providence those weeks she spent there with what she said was her cousin, maybe heat from a mazurka, or valse polonaise .
    So Judah traded off his leverage and gave her cars, or permission to smoke cigarettes, or not to visit with him when he visited their son at elementary school. He knew he looked the clown. He knew what they said of him in the village, and what his sister must think. He guessed what “Cousin” Alexander said of him, in that