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

Maggie hissed in the kitchen. “I told you he’s impossible. I told you you’d not get a word.”
    “It isn’t me he’s mad at,” Harriet said. “It isn’t me he’s destroying out there.”
    Judah drove a wedge between them, therefore, and split their alliance apart. He’d split her off from Maggie—she recognized it now—like some skillful herdsman herding sheep.
    “Well, what’s he mad at?” Maggie asked. “What did he tell you I’d done?”
    “He didn’t tell,” she said.
    “I never gave him cause. There wasn’t any reason, Hattie. Believe it.”
    “He’s mightily provoked,” she said.
    “And you’re mightily frightened, I see.” Maggie raised her long white arms and took her hairpins out. She shook her head and freed her hair and that meant no more kitchen work. “I see that much.”
    “You see it, yes.”
    “Oh, Hattie,” Judah’s wife said. “You shouldn’t let him cow you. It’s insane.”
    “I’m not”—she stacked the dishes. “Not letting him cow me, I mean.”
    “Of course you are.”
    “I’m not.”
    Judah stomped out through the parlor, and his boot prints were black.
    “Those schoolboy antics,” Maggie scoffed. “That show-off strong stuff.” She gathered conviction. “Me heap big he-man. You Jane.”
    Harriet laughed. She hoped Maggie took her mouth-stretching rictus for laughter.
    “The Johnny Weismuller,” said her sister-in-law, “of the northern counties. Another county heard from. But it’s ballot-stuffing, Hattie, don’t you see? It’s a rigged election and one he has to win.”
    Harriet poured Ivory soap in the sink. She let the hot tap run.
    “You don’t even know,” Maggie said, “what it was we argued about. You don’t even want to know, seems like. You didn’t ask him, and you won’t ask me.”
    “It’s not my business,” she said.
    “It is. It is, it has to be. But it isn’t, oh, your business to quake in front of that huge bully. He’s your younger brother, Hattie, think of that.”
    “I do,” she said. “That’s what I think about. That’s all I’ve been thinking while you let him stand there. You and your fancy charities that don’t begin at home . . .”
    “It’s my home too,” Maggie said.
    “It wasn’t always and it won’t be always, maybe.”
    So what was enmity then friendship turned to enmity again. Push come to shove, she told herself, she was allied with her brother and the born Sherbrookes, not wed. She was a born Sherbrooke, and not above announcing it or taking some pride-pleasure in hearing it announced.
    “What do you mean by that?” Maggie had straightened.
    It meant she stood for something, where she stood. It meant the time-tried values of decency and loyalty and truthfulness were in the room. “Just what I said.”
    “You mean it?”
    Straightening, she came to Maggie’s chin, and breathed, and watched her breathing.
    “I do,” she said. “I mean just what I said.”

III
     
    “So I’ve come back,” she thinks. “So nothing much matters but that. A nice enough place to return to.” Andrew’s apartment was nice enough too, on East Sixty-Third Street and with a balcony with green outdoor carpeting that simulated grass. He liked to practice putting, and the automatic putting green spat shots back at him. From the next floor, Maggie was certain, or from across the courtyard anyone looking would believe the carpet was actual lawn. They had to vacuum, not cut it; that gave it away, she supposed. But she found the whole thing comical and pleasing and kept Andrew’s telescope inside the balcony door. She did her yoga there. Whenever she caught the binocular’s telltale flash from 14D (that white-haired man in undershirts who was , inexplicably, her father looking down at her from the hill’s height in Wellfleet, and not some sex-tormented dotard in a service apartment) she stepped inside and fetched the telescope and trained it ostentatiously along the sightline of the watcher watched.
    The