The World Below (14 page)

The conference center that owns the building now gutted it and completely rebuilt its interiors. You can imagine it, I’m sure—the plush carpeting on the floors, the muted, tasteful southwestern colors, the indirect, subtle lighting everywhere. It was hard not be disappointed, seeing it—and then amused, really. My long trip, and this blandly tarted-up building the end point.

In my grandmother’s day, the interiors must have been ornate and dark; the tacked-on cure porches would have robbed almost every window of light. The hard floors in the long corridors would have been worn wood. Maple, perhaps, or pine, paler in the center where the mahogany stain had been scuffed away by all the years of passing feet. In the hallways, shaded sconces would have leaked their brownish light. Only in the grand rooms on the first floor would there have been air and sun and a sense of the wide vistas the hill commanded. Only there, and from the sleeping porches themselves, where, over the spring, Georgia lay and watched the birches fill in, watched the maple trees turn a tender, acid green and obscure the spruces—all but the dark pointed tops along the far ridge.

By the middle of June, she was required to exercise for an hour or more in the late afternoon, and a few weeks after she’d begun her first shy walks out with Seward (Seward did what he liked, in defiance of the schedules set for him), they went into these spruce woods, where the heavy dark boughs made a canopy above them,
where they could wander freely over the rust-colored needles. It seemed enchanted to Georgia the first time she saw it, a new world opening out to her suddenly as the undergrowth fell away in the thick, deep shade. It felt like coming on secret, spacious rooms hidden in the woods.

“Oh, it makes me want to be a child again!” she said to Seward. “To bring Ada here and have a pretend tea party. Or a dance!” she cried, spinning away from him.

He leaned against a tree, watching her twirl. After a moment, she stood still in the middle of the clearing, her arms out, rocking a little in dizziness and pleasure. He stepped forward, lifting his hands. “Surely we don’t need Ada for that,” he said.

Without hesitation, she walked into his arms and let him waltz her slowly, gravely, over the soft whispering needles. She could hear his breath wheezing in his chest, and his hand holding hers felt hot. She kept her head turned a little to the side, away from his steady, asking gaze.

Slowly they shuffled to a stop. He let her go. “Georgia,” he whispered, his head bent to hers.

Again and again over the last few weeks they’d come to this moment. And stopped, like this. It thrilled Georgia—his very tone thrilled her—but there was something intensely uncomfortable about it too. Perhaps it was that she knew they were already reputed to be cousining—though they hadn’t even kissed yet. But something about that, about what seemed its inevitability given the gossip, given the world they were living in, terrified her; it would have been so impossible a notion for that other Georgia, the one she seemed to have utterly left behind. The one who had flirted so gaily, so carelessly, with Bill March, confident that she was in command of their situation, confident that in any case he would never ask her for more than a kiss. It would have been inconceivable, really. She was almost certain he wouldn’t even have wanted it.

Here, in this new world, it seemed there was nothing that couldn’t be imagined—and tolerated, and openly discussed—between men and women. In fact, it was through just such a discussion that Georgia had recently learned exactly what sex entailed. Her diary for the momentous day reads:

May 20. Sunny and cool. Delicious bread pudding for lunch. At rest on the porch, I heard a detailed description of the sex act, which was always a little unclear to me heretofore. Well! It changes my view completely.

Who would have spoken of it so openly, so graphically in front of her? Mrs. Moody? Miss Shepard? And what did it change? She sounds only a little startled, actually—she must have guessed at some of it, anyway. There is even, perhaps, a quality of amusement in her entry. She was, as Mrs. Priley sometimes told her half admiringly, a cool one.

The coincidence of this access of information and the beginning of her relationship with Seward, though, confused her in her feelings for him—made him seem almost dangerous. And for it to be presumed that that’s what they were up to! For it to be thought that the purpose, the aim, of their tender, fumbling attraction to each other was to lie coupled in the way she’d learned of, this, this seemed to her almost insulting, and certainly embarrassing.

“You’re a lovely dancer, Seward,” she said, now brightly. “Were you made to take lessons, as I was?” She stepped away from him again, waltzing on her own, going backward with her arms up to hold an imaginary partner in dancing class. “One-two-three, one-two-three,” she sang out, swaying deeply on the downbeat, twirling up on the last two counts.

Georgia’s transformation was complete by now. She was unrecognizable as the girl who’d arrived at the san three months earlier. Her long hair had been cropped off, and what was left curled in thick waves around her face, exposing her slender neck. Ada had
brought her new clothes, since she’d outgrown her old ones on the diet rich in milk and butter that the patients were kept to. The skirt she wore today was nearly straight, ribbed, and ended midcalf. She’d buttoned her long sweater when they’d entered the woods, where the air was suddenly so much cooler. A wide stripe near its hem circled her hips like a low-slung belt.

Seward watched her for a moment, and then he began to cough. It went on, and Georgia stopped in the middle of the clearing. The air was twilit under here, though it was only around four in the afternoon on one of the longest days of the year. Seward was turned away from Georgia, hunched over, one hand resting on a tree. She saw that with the other, he held a glinting silver vessel to his mouth, a sputum cup or flask. He wore a black suit today, as always, and, bent over as he was, he looked suddenly like a frail and angular old man. You wouldn’t have guessed at the fierce energy he normally conveyed. She went close to him and, after a moment, touched his convulsing back.

He yanked himself angrily away. On the ground around the tree under him, she saw a spray of glistening blood droplets, their deep red color shocking against the orange needles.

“Go!” he said fiercely. And when she stood, open-mouthed and confused: “Go! Get the hell out of here!”

That evening after supper, Georgia found a note in her mailbox. She stood in the dim hallway, with people passing behind her, talking and laughing, to read it.

Dear Georgia,

I am sorry to have shouted at you today, but I couldn’t bear it, your seeing me like that. Especially after you had turned away from me once again.

I say I am sorry. That may not be true, for I am still angry with you too. Why? Because over and over you seem to encourage me. You seek me out. You launch conversations. It was you, after all, who suggested the walk today, after I’d told you about the woods. And then when I touch you, or speak tenderly to you, you become at once all nerves and gaiety.

I think you’ve misled me about your feelings. You’ve allowed me to believe you may care for me when you don’t, when what you feel is pity, or a kind of bemusement at your ability to stir feelings in me so easily. This is intolerable to me. I’d rather not see you at all than to feel myself made light of in this way.

Of course you have some voice in this matter too. In case I’ve misunderstood you or misjudged you, I want to give you the opportunity to correct that. There’s to be a movie tomorrow night, as you know. I won’t be there, but fifteen minutes after the start, I’ll be waiting outside, just below the terrace, in the apple trees. If I am wrong about you, you will come. If I am right, please stay away. I will be no more wounded by your absence than I’ve been already by your presence.

Yours,
Seward

It was only a few weeks before these events that Georgia had had a visit from her father and Ada and Freddie. It was late in May, only the fourth visit she’d been allowed with them, and she’d looked forward to it for days. It was on this occasion that Ada had brought her the two new outfits, storebought and—to Georgia’s eyes as she held the things up—strange. But Ada had assured her this was the new style. She was wearing a version of it, and Georgia had to agree, it looked fine on Ada.

What’s more, it was sensible, their father pointed out. No more of that tripping over long skirts, no more layers of underthings, no more corsets.

Of course, neither of the girls had ever worn corsets, so this made them both whoop with laughter. Their father sat there watching them, and it seemed to Georgia he might actually have blushed.
Then, as if he were following a train of thought, he turned to her. He said, “I’ve wanted to wait until we were together with you again to tell you all something, my dears.”

They were sitting in a corner of the living room. Miss Duffy, one of the women on her porch, was playing the piano, “The Lost Chord.” Georgia’s father’s voice was so uncharacteristically grave that they sobered instantly and waited.

“I’m planning to get married again,” he said.

After a few seconds’ silence, he went on.

“This is someone you haven’t met, Georgia, but Ada and Freddie have, and I know when you do come to know her, you will love her as much as they do.”

There was a sense of suspension. No one spoke. Georgia could feel an odd breathlessness squeeze her chest. Her father’s gaze was steady on her. In his hands the straw hat he’d been wearing earlier turned and turned.

“Is it Mrs. Erskine, Pop?” Ada finally asked.

“Well, of course it
is.
” He looked over at his slender younger daughter and grinned suddenly. “Good Lord, Ada, you speak as though I were dragging home a different woman every night of the week! Of course it’s Mrs. Erskine.” He lifted his hat to his heart. “My one and only.”

Freddie saw something strange in his older sister’s face. He slid closer to Georgia on the settee. “She’s awfully nice, Georgie.” His voice was soft and private. “She gave me a kit for a tetrahedryl kite and I glued it all myself.”

“Did she, Fred?” Georgia tried to smile back. She couldn’t look at her father, though she had a thousand questions she wanted to ask him.
What about me?
she wanted to say.
What about me?

“Will she come to live with us?” Ada asked.

“Have I raised a gaggle of geese?” Their father’s voice was pitched for fun now, and Ada and Freddie smiled in anticipation. “A pack of pachyderms? Of course, my girl. This is what marriage means. She will live with us and be my wife and your mother.”

“And what will we call her, Dad?” Fred asked. “Will we call her our mother?”

“I’m sure she would like that, Freddie, but we’ll see. Maybe the girls, because they’re older, will call her something else. But we’ll figure all this out in due time.”

Georgia could feel his eyes upon her again, could feel him waiting for her to respond in some way, to ask a question of her own. It was unkind of her, she knew, to stay so silent, so turned away from him and his news. But something thick and dull and shocked within kept her mind from working.

Freddie and Ada, though, were eager enough to make up for her muteness. They peppered their father with questions—about Mrs. Erskine’s dog, about her car, about which rooms in the house would be hers.

Finally, in a moment of silence that fell, she drew a deep breath and managed it: “And when will you be married, do you think?” She felt her heart in her throat.

He looked at her gratefully. “We’ll wait, of course, until you can be there, my dear. Until you’re well.”

The very thing, she thought later at her rest—and bitterly—that might slow her recovery. For why should she labor to get well only to come home to a wedding? To come home to a house that was no longer hers? To come home to be displaced, replaced, made useless and unnecessary?

Georgia went with them for a walk around the grounds before they left. At the bottom of the meadow, there was a small pond, skimmed with bright-green algae and partially overhung with the delicately traced foliage of two old tamaracks. They took turns throwing stones across it. Georgia’s stones fell short of the other side consistently, landing with deep reverberant
plunks!
in the murky water.

“You’ve lost your arm here, Georgie,” her father said, and she remembered that sentence as she waved to them, as the car grew
smaller toward the foot of the drive and then honked and turned left, toward home.
My arm, my heart
, she thought.

There was no place to weep, no place to be alone. Georgia returned to the living room and gathered her new clothes up. She carried them to the sleeping porch.

The women there were excited, delighted for the diversion. New clothes! They were something to share, a form of news, really, from the outside world. They insisted Georgia try them on. It was Mrs. Moody who offered to cut her hair in the new style. Someone found a stool, and their nurse, Miss Farraday, loaned them a bed-sheet to drape around Georgia’s shoulders. She unpinned her hair and let it down—
your crowning glory
her mother had called it—and watched as the long bolts of it slipped and whispered to the floor.

When it was done, she stood in front of the hall mirror. She hardly recognized herself, but that seemed right to her, somehow, since the terms of her life seemed to have changed so absolutely too. She stepped barefoot toward her reflection in the stylish clothes, her eyes glittering.

Mrs. Moody, standing behind her, saw Georgia’s tears in the mirror and thought they were for her shorn head. “Oh, lovey, there’s no need to cry,” she said. “Everybody feels that way at first with a new haircut, but it’ll pass. You do look grand, you know.”

“I know,” Georgia said. She spun around and hugged the older woman. “Of course you’re right.” She stepped back, her hands still on Mrs. Moody’s arms, her chin trembling slightly. Then, as though she were on stage, as though she were playing a part—Georgia: the new version—she slowly took a deep, elaborate bow, and the little group of women looking on from the open porch doorway all applauded her.