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

back from a weekend’s excursion and not seven years.
    “So,” Judah says. “You made it.”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s been raining this last hour,” he gestures. “First, snow. Like it can’t make up its mind what weather we’re having tonight.”
    “You’re up and about,” she says.
    “As you see me.”
    “I can’t quite believe my eyes. I thought . . . ”
    “Believe them,” he tells her—slipping into his protective condescension, opening the car door for her, shepherding her in. “I’m here.”
    Sitting, she asks, “When you got my letter, were you surprised?”
    He starts the car. “Power steering helps.”
    “Were you expecting it? Or was it a shock to you?”
    He drives with both hands on the wheel, and the attentive caution of the aged.
    “. . . But once you get a problem in the power steering unit, it’s harder than all hell to fix. Might as well walk.”
    She settles back; she knows he won’t answer till ready to talk. Her father thrives. Judah, give or take a year, is her father’s age. “How’s Finney?”
    “Fine,” Judah tells her. “He’s coming over for dinner.”
    “And Hattie?”
    “The same.”
    “Ian? Have you heard from him?”
    “Not likely.”
    Things are familiar, not strange. So this is it, she tells herself, this squalid litany; how’s the grocer’s nephew with the harelip; how’s Elvirah—she marvels at her memory for all of this inconsequence—Elvirah Hayes?
    “And you?” Judah asks.
    “I’m as you see me.”
    He signals for a left turn at the Library. “Pretty.”
    “We’re none of us immortal,” Maggie says.
    “Pretty always.”
    “Flatterer.”
    Remembrance is a trick time plays; the world is déjà vu and everything repeats itself, with nothing new under the sun. Elvirah Hayes and Lucy Gregory live in that brick cottage to her right, behind the picket fence.
    “Why did you come?”
    “Why not? What else is one supposed to do?”
    “Don’t laugh at me,” he says.
    Embarrassed, she looks out the window—seeing sleet and the huddled houses. They relax, she thinks, with summer—they sprout awnings and porch furniture and the accoutrements of easy weather. “I’m not. I wasn’t laughing.”
    “Maggie,” her husband pronounces. “Is that what they call you these days?”
    “Whatever you want. Mrs. Sherbrooke.”
    “You’re being nice,” he says. “You’d never been this well-behaved before you took that bus.”
    “I’m a little surprised to see you.”
    “Don’t be,” Judah says.
    He has the possessor’s vanity; her vanity had been to do without the claims of ownership. His love had been exclusive, but hers had been inclusive: all of God’s chillun got wings. So Maggie had opposed him term for term—insisting jealousy was shopworn, and marriage a convenience; her dream had been of liberty, his of unfettered constraint.
    “We’ll take the long way round, through town. That way we’ll miss the hill.”
    “Is it very slippery?”
    “I wouldn’t want to lose you now you’re here.”
    He says this with such force she takes it for the first true note of all his praise and banter; she raises her left hand and rubs it on his cheek. “Feel Daddy’s scratchy face,” she says. “That’s from Pat the Bunny . I remember Ian used to raise that fist of his before we even turned the page, before we’d get to Peekaboo.”
    “Hide-and-seek. Seems like every game there is is one we tried to play.”
    “Succeeded in playing,” she says. He tries to kiss her hand—still staring forward, still driving, and misses and smacks his lips.
    There had been purple martins by the pond. Judah wanted purple martins to keep mosquitoes back. They rarely settled this far north, and had to be enticed. Before she married him he coaxed the birds with houses set up on poles, the proper distance from the pond and built to Amos Sandy’s satisfaction; Amos said they liked their houses just so. He had waited for three seasons, with no luck. Then Maggie