The World Below (27 page)

Even at that age, though, I knew that what had happened to my mother had nothing to do with anyone in our family-with anyone else at all. If I had learned one useful lesson from living with a person so disturbed, it was that some illnesses—and to me, palpably, hers—are driven by something internal, something that goes profoundly and horribly awry. My mother, I could have told you, was just
different
when she was ill. Things were deeply, chemically disturbed in her in a way that even the most misbegotten parenting couldn’t have produced. And I didn’t understand my grandmother’s parenting—even Rue’s version of it—to have been that misbegotten.

The tone, then, I ignored or dismissed. I knew it was wrong. It was one of the many ways I slowly understood Rue to be wrong. (I
could
hear in French, and I held it against her that she hadn’t guessed that—and that she continued to speak about me long after I could understand almost all of what she was saying.)

It was harder, though, to dismiss the story she told me—that my grandmother had had an affair in the sanatorium—and Rue was the first person who explained anything about the san to me, the notion of being sent away, the sense of another, discrete culture there. That the man had abandoned her and gone somewhere out west. That my grandmother had turned then to her doctor, my grandfather, and won him over (“You’ve seen the pictures of her then, she was a very pretty girl”) by pretending to be what she was not: sweet and naive. An innocent. “It made all the difference in the world in those days,” Rue said. “You know, for a girl of her background to have had any sexual experience at all.… Well, it put her quite beyond the pale.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette. We were sitting opposite each other in the darkened dining room. Rue rarely smoked when she was alone with me during the day, and of course never on the street, but after dinner she allowed herself two cigarettes—strong, unfiltered French cigarettes that smelled like my grandfather’s cigars.

“And Daddy, of course, knew nothing of it until after the fact.”

“After what fact?” I asked.

“My dear, after they were married.”

“But she wouldn’t
trick
him! I don’t believe that.”

Rue raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

“Besides, he loves her,” I said. “So what does it matter?”

She made a face, a moue.

“Who told you this?” I asked.

“It’s well known in the family,” she said. “Everyone knew it at the time.”

“But who told you?”

“My dear.” She was irritated. “Ada did,” she said, after a moment. “My aunt. Your great-aunt. Her sister.”

“But how did she know?”

“Your grandmother left her journal lying around. And there were letters, letters which came from the man in question even after the wedding. Aunt Ada saw them.”

“So she
read her diary?”

Rue tossed her head impatiently. “Which do you think is the greater wrong: to deceive a man you are about to marry or to read a journal left lying around?” I didn’t answer. “You are young, my dear. You are offended at the childish slight you can imagine. Later you will be able to imagine the other kind of injury. You will see the far greater wrong in it.”

There was finality, judgment in her voice, as there so often was, and I didn’t ask her any more questions. Whenever I thought of this story, though—and I thought of it often, of course, and puzzled and picked at it—I remembered it in the moment it was told to me. The gathering twilight of Rue’s dining room (though the sky was still yellow above the rooftops out the bank of windows behind her); the wine, of which I was always allowed one glass; the hard crumbs on the table I ran my hand over; the pungent smell of Rue’s cigarette; the sounds of Claude in the kitchen, singing softly in her own language and washing dishes; and the bitter pleasure Rue took in the telling, the way she crushed and crushed and crushed her cigarette until no smoke from it trailed any longer. I thought of how horrible her fingers must smell.

Rue was wrong, it turned out. The diary reads:

December 5: Sunny today, and the snow turned to shining ice on the ground. John called late this afternoon and we sat in the parlor for a little while. I found the courage to tell him I was damaged goods. He said it did not matter to him.

December fifth was a week to the day since my grandfather had asked my grandmother to marry him, since she’d told him that she needed time to think about it. He was traveling by sleigh that afternoon-the back roads were snowed in too deeply for a car—and he’d had several calls to make. One in Newport for a child with a fever and sore throat, one in Corinna for an old patient who’d begun to die, and one in St. Albans to change the dressing on a leg
injury, a farm accident that hadn’t healed and, he suspected now, was never going to heal. In spite of the bright sun—almost blinding as it struck the frozen surface of the snow—he was in a dark mood. As he drove through Preston on his way home, he decided on impulse to stop in at the Rices’. He’d been staying away from Georgia for the last week in an honorable attempt to grant her the time she felt she needed to make her decision, but he told himself as he drove up that he would stop just for a few minutes. He’d use the excuse that he couldn’t let the horse cool down to keep himself to his word.

The sight of her opening the door affected him as it always did, with a deep anticipatory pleasure—of what she might say or do, a story she might tell him, some lively gesture she might make that would amuse or delight him. She blushed as she snatched off her apron. She’d been in the kitchen working with her stepmother, she said apologetically. Christmas cookies. He was aware, suddenly, of that familiar buttery, sweet smell. She led him into the parlor, where there was a slow fire going in the fireplace.

There seemed to be something hushed in the air as they sat down together. At first he thought it was just the day, the shocking cold outside and the sense of being closed up in here. But then he realized that wasn’t it—that it was, somehow, in
her
. She was different. Subdued and a little awkward.

She spoke to him, not quite meeting his eyes. “You know I have nothing to tell you yet.” She had sat down opposite him in a low lady’s chair.

“That’s not why I’m here.”

She tilted her head and looked at him. “Then why
are you
here?”

“I thought it would lift my spirits to see you. And it has.”

“Your spirits needed lifting then?” Her voice was lighter now. Teasing a little.

“Apparently they did.”

“Well, then, I’m pleased to have been of use.” He could see that she was smiling—in spite of herself, it seemed. As if to hide that,
she got up and went to the window, her back to him. When she turned to the room again after a moment, the light was so bright behind her he couldn’t clearly see her face. “What was it that was discouraging you?” she asked.

“As much as anything, not having seen you.”

“If I believed that—” She raised her hand dismissively.

“If you believed that, you would instantly consent to marry me.”

She turned quickly back to the window. “I’ve said I’m not ready to answer that question.”

“I’m sorry, Georgia.” He was watching her back as intently as if it could tell him something about how she felt. “I was making a joke and that was wrong, when you’re still … struggling with your decision.”

“I am. But it’s only because … I’d like everything to be very clear between us if we married.”

“Of course. I would too.”

Her heard her sigh, impatiently. “You answer me so quickly, John. You always do. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really listening to me.”

“I am. I am listening.” He got up and crossed to her, stood just behind her at the window. He could smell her: sachet and the characteristic strong animal odor of her hair. It had been trimmed again recently, he thought. Her neck seemed long and white. “What needs to be clear?”

“Well. First, I would have to learn to love you better.”

He understood that what she was saying was that she didn’t love him now, and for a moment everything stopped for him. But he had known this, hadn’t he? When he had proposed, when he had spoken of his love for her, she had smiled but hadn’t answered in kind. After a few seconds he was able to say, “Do you think that’s possible? That you might?”

Outside, the horse shook its bridle, as if to remind him he couldn’t stay much longer. The jingling was a faint musical sound from in here.

“I’m in hopes,” she said.

In spite of the pain this caused him—this caution on her part—it also made him smile. Her scrupulous honesty. “Then I will be in hopes too,” he said gently.

“And then, you know”—her voice got smaller, and he had to lean toward her to hear what she was saying—“I’m … I’m damaged goods. That’s all.” She was so close to the window that her breath made a cloud on the glass.

He thought she spoke of her illness, of the shadow on her lungs, and he felt such an absurd lifting of his heart—this was all it was!—that he had to control himself not to laugh or cry out somehow in his pleasure and joy. It was evidently so terribly important to her, understanding how he felt about this, that he dared not make light of it. But he had to reassure her, on the other hand, that it didn’t matter to him. That nothing could have mattered less. “That’s of no importance to me,” he said, a little too loudly. “None at all.”

She didn’t speak for a few moments. What she was wondering was whether he had somehow known already about Seward. Had someone at the san gossiped about her to him? Could it really be he didn’t care? That he could know this about he—he could hear this—and love her anyway? She touched her fingertips to the icy glass, so cold it burned. Finally she said, “You sound so sure of that.”

“I mean to sound sure. I am sure.” He was looking steadily at her face in profile.

She could feel his eyes on her again. She was thinking that his greater experience of the world (when she thought of
the world
she thought of the war, and death, and also certain photographs she’d seen of Paris) must somehow have given him a sense of life broader and wiser than that of the young men she’d known. That he understood her, that he forgave her. It moved her to think he was a person capable of this.

“So if that’s all, if that’s truly all, I hope you’ll have your answer for me soon,” he was saying, in his gentle voice.

“That is all,” she said. For a long moment she seemed lost in thought. Then she looked at him gravely. She said, “And I will. I will have an answer soon.”

When he left, a few moments later, she followed him silently into the cold front hall, where Mrs. Erskine—Mrs. Rice—hearing them, came out from the kitchen to greet him and say goodbye. Her dog, a large mixed breed, brown and white, followed her possessively, his nails clicking on the wooden floor. When Georgia opened the door, he barked wildly at the sight of the horse, and Mrs. Rice had to hold him by his collar while Holbrooke made his exit.

The next day, Georgia accepted his proposal. Three weeks after Christmas, they were married in the small ceremony she had wanted, with just their immediate families present. They went to Boston on their honeymoon. There was a blizzard the second day they were there, and the city seemed, for the remaining two days they stayed, a little like the small town in Maine they’d left behind. Traffic stopped. Stores and offices were closed, and people spoke to each other cheerfully as they passed on the sidewalks. They walked single file through the deep snow to the public library to look at the new murals there by Sargent, whose work Georgia’s new husband admired. They went to the river and watched the sun set. They had tea every afternoon at the Parker House Hotel. Before bed each night they had a glass of sherry in their room.

When they lay down together, he touched her everywhere, gently and thoroughly, as though the touching itself were the point. He said as much. He told her she had knees that broke his heart. That her ankles utterly mended it. He said they could wait, wait until she felt ready.

But his touching made her ready. Made her eager. She was curious, too—if his touching was so different from Seward’s, would the sex act itself be different? Perhaps there were varieties to that also.

It
was
different—slow and luxuriant. It helped Georgia that it was always dark when they lay down together. It helped her that in the overheated hotel they wore so little clothing. It helped her that
his gentleness left room for her to touch him too, to be the aggressor, even the hurried one. She learned to speak his name on those warm nights.

If he was startled by her appetite, by her curiosity and ease, he said nothing. Certainly he guessed nothing. He felt, simply, lucky. He felt that her responsiveness might be part of what was unusual about her in other ways: her straightforward approach to life, her touching honesty, her eagerness to learn.

They went back to Maine, to a small frame house they’d found to rent just outside Pittsfield, and she seemed taken up with the business of making a home—of sewing curtains and slipcovers, of cooking, of writing thank—you letters for the many presents they’d received.

She had asked him before they married for a piano instead of an engagement ring. He had given her the ring because he wanted to, a small moonstone surrounded by chip diamonds. Once they were settled, though, he bought her also an upright piano. With earnest determination, she began lessons with a teacher he’d found for her, someone recommended by one of his patients.

Their life together started to move in its own rhythms. On the weekends, they usually went to visit her family, or her father and stepmother came to them. Often they had Ada, or Ada and Freddie, for the day or overnight. They began to have invitations as a couple: for bridge, for teas. One of Georgia’s high school friends lived in Pittsfield, and she and Georgia visited back and forth. In the spring, after the roads had dried out, John began to teach her to drive.

Once during this period, as he approached the house in the early evening, he heard her playing one of her beginner’s piano pieces, repeating the same simple phrases over and over. It seemed so emblematic to him of her determination, her strength of character, that he stopped in the walk as though suddenly confused about where he was, overwhelmed with love and pity and desire for her.