The World Below (35 page)

As the younger sister began her breathless introductions, Georgia stood up. Her pregnancy was, of course, instantly apparent, and Miss Wallace fell silent for just a beat and then went on. She introduced Georgia to their pastor, the Reverend Winter, who had been kind enough to drive them. She chattered. Her voice was fluty, her elocution precise and careful. She thought the train should be coming any moment. They could not, by the way, speak of their gratitude, only hope one day to repay her, and also hope it had not caused hardship in her own life to be so generous to them. They hadn’t realized, she started to say, and trailed off.

No
, Georgia said.
It hadn’t caused hardship
. For how could she speak of her little privations as hardship to them—who had suffered, who were suffering, such enormous, unthinkable losses?

When they heard the bell of the train approaching the station, they went together to the door to the platform and stepped outside into the March cold. The wet, raw rain slapped at them all, and the younger Miss Wallace stood closer to her sister, as though to take the brunt of the blow. The Stationmaster had come out too, and now he spoke to Georgia, almost shouting in her ear. He told her the baggage cars would be near the end of the train. He pointed. When they all looked in that direction, down the platform, they could see that beyond it, a horse-drawn hearse was waiting, black and ominous in the thick drizzle. Georgia heard the older Miss Wallace’s quick, shallow gasp.

The train loomed up out of the mist now, its bell clanging, and then it was upon them like a huge dark animal, so noisy they didn’t bother trying to speak. The steam hissed, the doors clattered open, and suddenly the platform was crowded with people getting off the train, gathering their luggage, being greeted, calling back and forth. Georgia and the Wallace women continued to walk slowly through them, against the tide of buoyant life, making their way to the red baggage cars at the end of the train, where the porters were already
stacking boxes and suitcases onto their trolleys. They worked fast—the train was going on—but even so it was startling to have the coffin appear so suddenly, carried off the train by four men. To have it set down matter-of-factly on its own trolley when they were still some distance from it, to have one of the porters call out, as he turned from it, “Zat everything?” and someone else laugh before he leaned from the door of the train and shouted, “Ayp!”

The undertaker and several helpers were approaching them from the other end of the platform. They reached the trolley first and waited. Only one of them stepped forward to greet the Wallace women. They spoke for a moment in hushed tones. Then the older sister turned and set her hands on the coffin. “Now it’s really true, isn’t it?” she said, to no one in particular.

Her sister gripped her more tightly and bent her head toward hers. Georgia felt herself to be an interloper, an intruder. Her presence here was nothing but ugly, she thought.

The four of them stood watching at the end of the platform, as the trolley was wheeled down the ramp, as the undertaker’s men lifted it off—it seemed no strain to them—and slid it into the back of the hearse, as they closed the doors and went to the front of the carriage. When the horse had clopped off, the sisters turned. The younger one said to Georgia, “Shall you follow us then, in your automobile?”

Georgia said she would and walked slowly back up the platform, just behind them, next to Dr. Winter.

“There’s to be no service,” he said abruptly, as though compelled to speak of something to her. “Just a prayer.”

“I see,” she said.

“The Wallaces had a service earlier, just after he died. A memorial service. Quite moving.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But perhaps you were there,” he said.

“No,” she answered.

“Ah,” he said in agreement. He held the station house door open for her. Ahead of them the sisters moved slowly across the waiting
room to the outer door. “Someone played the pipes,” he said. “Bagpipes,” he explained. “Such a mournful sound.”

“It is,” she said.

“I don’t think I’d ever heard them before. It was stunning.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I understand the young man was a piper himself. If that’s what you call it.”

“Yes, he was,” she said.

Now he opened the entrance door to the rain again. The sisters stood by his car under their umbrella. “Well,” he said, quickly lifting his hat. “We shall see you there.”

“Yes,” Georgia said. While she went to her automobile and set the spark and throttle, he helped the sisters into his car. Then he noticed her, starting to crank the car, and came over to help her. She got back behind the wheel and, as soon as the engine caught, set the spark and throttle back and leaned out the window to thank him. He lifted his hat ceremonially and went to start his own engine.

The two cars caught up to the hearse within three or four blocks and then drove slowly behind it. Georgia watched the car in front of her, the high black hump jolting through the mist. There was a part of her that wanted to flee, to take this turn or the next one and avoid the ceremony, such as it would be, and the cold, rainy day. To go back to the real world, where she lived.

But how could she? Seward had had so little, and she was so little of that, how could she not do this small thing for him?—watch him lowered into the earth, say goodbye one last time?

She tried to make herself think of him, lying in his black suit in the coffin in the hearse. She tried to remember him alive. She called up specific things in her effort to conjure him: the dry fever heat of his body when he lay with her, his long, slightly spatulate fingers.

The baby kicked and moved. She felt the glide of a tiny fist or a knee along her arm where it rested on her belly. She was flooded, suddenly, with the memory of the dreams she’d had earlier in her pregnancy—dreams in which she gave birth to Seward. In one
dream she’d had over and over, he lay sleeping and she was filled with an unspeakable joy as she bent over his bed. In another, he was as she’d most often seen him in life—wearing his black suit, talking and gesturing with assurance. But
well
, she saw. No longer ill. And in the dream, she understood that she had achieved this for him by carrying him inside her for so long. That this was the cure he’d been searching for.

She was happy. Though when she woke, she tried to put the dreams out of her mind quickly. They seemed wrong to her. Bigamous. Obscene.

She remembered, abruptly, that she was to have called John. Her hand rose to her mouth.

But then she thought of Seward again, Seward saying, “Let’s try it this way. You go, I’ll stay.”

Well, I have, Seward. I’ve gone on. I’ve changed. And you have stayed. Where you were, as you were. You are the past, Seward, and I have traveled forward, away, into another country, into the future.

They stood under the pelting rain—it had almost turned into sleet at this point—and watched as the undertaker and his men leaned back against the pull of the ropes and the coffin jolted and slid into the deep hole. When it was seated, when the muddy ropes had been pulled up and coiled and tossed casually into the back of the hearse, Dr. Winter said the Twenty-third Psalm. Isolated under her umbrella, Georgia strained to hear his voice. It was almost inaudible under the clamor of the storm. He began the Lord’s Prayer, and after the first few words, Georgia heard the sisters join in, though she heard it more as a thickening of the sound than as additional voices. She murmured the words too. She felt like an actress speaking lines.

For a few seconds after the amen, no one seemed to know what to do. Georgia felt it wasn’t her place to make the first move. To make any gesture, really. Though she was cold. Cold, and her feet
were wet, her thin dress shoes soaked through. Finally the younger Miss Wallace stepped toward her.

“Won’t you come back to our house and warm up before your trip back? Our mother would so like to meet you. Have some tea with us, please, or coffee, and something to eat. We are all so grateful.…”

No, Georgia said. No, she wanted to try to get home before dark. It had been a hard ride over—all this mud.

Oh, she knew, said Miss Wallace. They’d certainly brought Seward home in the worst weather possible, but she had felt some urgency, her sister was so ill.

Oh, yes, Georgia said. She understood.

At the autos, they said their farewells. Again Dr. Winter helped Georgia start her engine. She drove away before he’d begun to crank his, waving over to the dark shapes within his car as she passed.

It was night, prematurely night, by the time she stopped the car next to the house. The last half an hour or so she’d driven in a terrible state of tension, anxious about where the edges of the road were, anxious about the rutted mud she sometimes slid through, powerless to steer the car at all. The windows of the house were dark; John was still at work.

Inside, she turned on the kitchen lights and started a fire in the cookstove. Then she moved around the tiny house, turning the other lights on too, so it would look cheerful to John as he came up the walk. She changed out of her dark clothing, her wet shoes and stockings. She toweled her hair dry and brushed it into its neat shape.

It is strange what you think of when you’re trying not to think of something else, and my grandmother’s mind that night was very busy, thinking and yet not thinking. She saw herself making a hash with the leftover roast beef and the beets she’d put up, and potatoes. She pictured exactly the steps involved. She saw herself washing the potatoes, drying them, grinding the meat into a bowl. She
remembered, too, how she’d made the ketchup she would serve with the hash. It had been a hot day late last summer, and the air in the kitchen was thick with the rich sweet-sour smell of vinegar and sugar and overripe tomatoes. She thought of how sick she’d felt, how she’d blamed the heat, blamed the smell, not yet knowing she was pregnant.

She thought again of the baby and rested her hands on her belly. Boy or girl? she wondered, as she often did, picturing each—not naked, not genitally, but as she would dress them. Dolly, they’d decided, if it was a girl—Dorothy. If a boy, they weren’t sure. A boy, she hoped. A boy for John.

John. She saw his face. His dear face. And then abruptly she remembered the way it had looked when she told him about Seward. His disbelief. His angry confusion. His mouth that funny pulled-down line. Bitter, as though he’d bitten a lemon. She’d seen then how old he was, how much older than she.

She got up quickly and poured what was left of her tea down the gurgling drain. She fetched the potatoes from the bin in the pantry and began to rinse them off. She started to hum “Where E’er You Walk.” The water in the pot bubbled silver and then started to roil, releasing its thin cloud of vapor. She dropped the potatoes in. The windows slowly turned opaque with steam.

When John came home, ruddy-cheeked, wet, he started to scold her—why hadn’t she called, he had been so worried—but she went to him and embraced him. She kissed him so passionately, so recklessly, that it took his breath. He felt himself stir and harden in response to her, and he had to turn away to gain control of himself.

While he washed up and changed his jacket for dinner, she reheated the hash, warmed the green beans, and poured their glasses of milk. Over the meal, they spoke only desultorily. He told her something of his day, tidbits he’d saved that he thought might be of interest to her. She hardly spoke at all, but when she lifted her eyes to his, there was a sort of stunned devotion in them that he
found startling. She looked almost dizzy. He actually wondered, once, if her labor was perhaps starting, but he didn’t want to ask her such a question.

They stood next to each other to do the dishes, leaving the serving pieces to dry in the rack. He hung the wet towel on the wooden bar. She turned off the light.

In bed, they lay side by side for a while. He could feel the thrum of something alert and tensed in her.

“You’re awake, dear?” she whispered.

“How can I sleep, next to a machine that won’t turn itself off?” he said.

She laughed. Her hand found his and held it briefly. “I want to tell you something, John. Something terrible and wonderful at the same time.”

“Yes,” he said, suddenly alert himself.

“And I want you to hear me out, to listen to all of it before you say one word. John?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Really to listen,” she said.

He waited.

“Seward Wallace came home today. His body. His coffin. From Denver. I went to meet it and see him buried.”

He didn’t answer. His heart had begun to pound, heavy thick beats he could feel in his throat.

“His sisters, they had wanted him back, to be buried with the family, and I agreed to help them. I did help them. With money, John. Money from household accounts. So I’ve known about it for a long time, you see. About his coming back. I should have told you, I know. But somehow, I couldn’t. That’s why I went to Bangor today. Not for errands for myself, but for Seward.”

She had turned and he could hear her voice close to his ear. He could feel the heat of her breath.

“John, I didn’t know what I would feel. Whether … I just didn’t know. But what I felt was … oh, I’m not sure I can explain it! I felt so
far away from all that. I felt it had all happened in another world somehow. And that I had gone on, I’d gone forward. I felt, I think, with the baby, that a claim had been made on me that makes me live in this world. The baby, and you too, of course. I belong here, John. I belong with you.”

John didn’t answer her. He was afraid to. He was grateful and glad, but he was angry too, and he didn’t want her to know that. Her voice was so charged, so alive with this gift she felt she was giving him that he felt to question her, to question it, would be to wound something vital in her that connected them. That
could
connect them if he just left it alone. He had failed her once before in a similar moment. What he knew was that he could not fail her now. He had to be as generous as she so carelessly assumed he was.