The World Below (37 page)

But what lasts, after all? What stays the same through the generations? Boundaries shift, refugees die or flee with what they can carry, the waters slowly fill in behind the dams, and what was once there is lost forever, except in dreams and memories.

Of course, my dreams and memories were of Vermont, the place that wasn’t quite home to them, the house they fled to, their new start in their new world. This was the past I had decided to live in exile from. This was what I dreamt of: the village, the house itself. Its smell of wood ash and damp and oranges and rosewater. The stillness that fell over it in the afternoons when my grandmother napped, and the yearning I felt in the summers during that stillness, when I could hear, rising and ringing from elsewhere in the village, the sounds of life. I dreamt of the tangled lilacs by the front door. Of the raspberry patch behind the house and the iridescent Japanese beetles that gathered on the fruit. Of the smell of jam boiling after we’d picked the berries, of fireflies glinting in the summer dark, of snow lightening the nighttime winter sky.

Most of all, I dreamt of my grandparents living there—as though they always had—with their habits, their rituals, their ways of speaking. With the illusory sense I had as a girl, when my own world was so fragile, that they always
would
be there. That they would always welcome me and care for me. That they were a place I could always go. A homeland.

In mid-January, Fiona went back to New York. A few days later, my classes began again at the Frye School. Suddenly my life, which had been my own to shape for so many months, seemed frantically full. I was still visiting Jessie daily, still helping Karen and Robert with meals, but now I added my regular workload to all that. Often I didn’t get home until nine or later, and I was up by six, preparing for the long day.

Arriving home late one night, I stepped over the mail in the front hall and shed my coat. When I bent down, I saw that I had one personal letter, the address typed on an old-fashioned typewriter that did odd things with several letters. It was from Samuel. I took it with me back to the kitchen, where I fixed myself a sandwich, poured a glass of red wine, and then sat down at the table to open it.

Dear Cath,

I’ve just about settled myself back into your house, and grateful I am, every day, for being here. I think of you often as I move through the rooms, and wonder how things are for you, and for your daughter and her baby. May she flourish.

We are in the midst of real winter here. A lot of snow, a lot of ice, a lot of cold. I’ve just about given up driving for the nonce (too old to negotiate all of that), but before I did, I made a trip to, a little reservoir I’d heard of not too far from here. I couldn’t go out on the water, but it seemed to me it looked much as you had described the lake you went to with your grandfather. Here’s what the guidebook says of its creation: “The river was dammed near Wilmington, and a mill complex was built on the reservoir that resulted. This industrial area, which once had about three hundred residents, became known as Mountain Mills. The once-thriving community, including a three-story building, is now submerged beneath the Harriman Reservoir. Portions become visible only in time of low water.”

So now I’m afraid I must eat crow. This reservoir, so much smaller, so much closer by than Quabbin, and with buildings intact underwater, must be the one you went to, wouldn’t you think? It does exist then, that world below the water you thought you saw.

My apologies, therefore, for my too-forceful assertions to the contrary, and all good wishes to you in this new year and new century. (Doesn’t it feel strange to be living in the future?)

Yours as ever,
Samuel

I sat in my glamorous kitchen and thought of him in my grandmother’s house. Samuel. It all seemed far away now, that moment when I might have moved toward him, that moment when he kissed me. His letter, though, stirred me. It brought back to me suddenly the way the buildings had looked through the shifting mirror of the water, the way the world below was there and then not there and then there again, and the way I had felt that day looking down into it, dizzy with my sense of yearning and loss for what was gone, and somehow for all that would ever be gone, in my life.

And I remembered too that when I’d come into the house that afternoon—by myself; my grandfather had stayed outside to clean his fish—my grandmother was waiting. She wanted to know whether my grandfather had spoken to me about France and what I thought about going. When I told her yes, yes he had, and yes, I was going to go, she said, “This will be good for you, Cath. An opportunity,” in a tone that suggested I might be reluctant, might need persuading.

I remember that I tried to tell her that I
wanted
to go, that I was
meant
to go, but somehow she couldn’t hear that; at cross purposes to me now, she kept on buoyantly arguing with some phantom reluctant granddaughter.
Sometimes we needed to do things that seemed difficult, to challenge ourselves
. It was only much later that I realized that she, like my grandfather, must have been making a connection between my trip and her parallel voyage as a young woman into the sanatorium; and that she was telling me it had been worth it, it had been good for her. That it had opened her and changed her as she hoped France would open and change me. This was the only time ever, in my memory—this day when she needlessly tried to persuade me of the necessity of my going away—that she spoke unequivocally positively about her own going away, about her going into the san, that she directly acknowledged what was good about the changes it made in her life.

The rains had started by now in San Francisco, the wild sweeping lashes of water off the ocean that were our version of winter. At night I lay in my own bed and listened to them rolling across the roof. Everything felt damp, even my clothes when I put them on in the morning. The ground underfoot was utterly saturated; your print was filling with water as you lifted your foot.

Late one afternoon, I stood by a parking meter outside the butcher shop I liked near Robert and Karen’s apartment in North Beach, the stem of my umbrella tucked under my arm, the top of it resting on my head like a huge ribbed hat the rain was using for a drum, while I frantically rooted around in the change part of my wallet for the right coins. And then I realized: I was thumbing past the quarters looking for some other coins, coins I didn’t have, francs or pesos or soles or rials. Who knows? Dream coins, in any case. I laughed at myself for a second. “The quarter will do,” I said aloud.

“What?” a girl shouted at me from under her umbrella as she walked by.

“Ah, nothing,” I said, but she was gone.

When I got over to Karen and Robert’s, I told her the story. I blamed it on the rain. I said I must have thought I was in monsoon country.

“Well, take heart,” she said. “It’d be worse if you’d stayed in Vermont. I heard on the news that it was snowing in New England-a big storm.”

Snow. As I moved around my daughter’s kitchen helping to fix the meal, I saw it in my mind’s eye, falling on my grandmother’s house. And then I had the sudden memory of a time going home years before, going home in a snowstorm to visit my grandmother as she lay dying.

When the family friend who’d taken charge of things for us then called me, she said she thought it was going to be an easy death, that my grandmother was just sleeping more and more of the time. It might even be a few weeks, she thought, but if I wanted to say goodbye, it would probably be best if I came now, when she might still be able to take me in, to speak to me.

My life was complicated. I was married to Joe, I was teaching, of course, but that was the least of it. Mostly it was the kids. They were teenagers then, each with an elaborate schedule, each with activities I was supposed to attend and applaud. My daybook was full of destinations and arrows and times. It would be hard to arrange getting away.

I tried to muster the reasons for not going. Maybe I
didn’t
want to say goodbye. We had said goodbye over and over, actually, at the end of every visit for years, my grandmother holding my hands after our kiss and saying, “I want to take a good long last look at you now. You never know.”

But I went. Of course I went. I had to go. Joe said he’d drive out to Jeff’s big basketball game. He’d cook and decorate a sheet cake for Fiona’s class party. These were the things he loved about our life together anyway. He was glad to do them, he said, and I knew that was true.

I flew east into a snowstorm, though our sky so high above the earth was sunny and blue the whole way. We came down into clouds and darkness. We landed in Hartford and I rented a car there. It was truly night by the time I set out, and still lightly snowing. I drove north on the blanketed interstate at about forty miles an hour, sometimes stuck for long stretches behind a slowly moving plow.

The thick flakes coming out of the dark at the windshield, the steady shuddering slap of the wipers, the vehicles looming ahead of me on the road—all this was hypnotic. When I pulled into my grandmother’s driveway and turned the engine off, I sat for some long moments in the silence that followed, trying to relax and at the same time prepare myself for what was to come. The flakes landed silently on the car and melted with the engine’s heat. The windows on the first floor of the house glowed with light, light that fell into the yard and made the steadily falling snow seem thicker and heavier than it was.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I smoothed the flesh under my tired eyes, patted my hair into place. I put on some fresh lipstick—as though it mattered what I looked like. But I didn’t know what to expect of this goodbye. I’d never seen death or a dying person before. The event had always happened offstage in my life. Everything about what I was getting ready to go through frightened me. And I suppose I wanted something from it, though I wasn’t sure what. Some moment of recognition from her of me. Some gesture. Some final words to take with me back into my life. I couldn’t have imagined that there would be anything she would want of
me.

When I opened the car door, the air was still and, oddly, not cold. The walk hadn’t been shoveled, and my shoes filled with snow in the short distance to the house. I knocked and opened the door almost simultaneously—of course it wasn’t locked—just as the hospice nurse emerged from the back of the house. We’d spoken frequently on the phone in the last weeks, but I’d never met her. She was young, maybe in her early thirties, with rosy freckled skin and no makeup. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt and big green puffy slippers. As she took my coat, as I heeled off my shoes, she fussed over me—the terrible driving, the treacherous conditions. Some news or talk show droned on in the kitchen.

And then she said, quite simply and terrifyingly, “Go right on in. I told her you were on your way, and I think she’s expecting you.”

Georgia was asleep, propped up in the hospital bed that had replaced her own bed in the front parlor. She was thin, which she’d never been in my memory, and this more than anything else shocked me. It had caved her face in and made her nose prominent. Her hair had been cut very short too, as short as a boy’s. Her ears stuck out a little. She wore an old familiar nightgown, buttoned neatly up to her neck. Her knobbed hands rested on the smoothly folded back sheet as though arranged there.

My feet in their wet socks had made no noise as I crossed to her, so I spoke in a whisper and touched her very gently—her hands first, and then her face. Her skin, which I’d been afraid of, was soft as a baby’s.

Her eyes blinked a few times and then opened: brown, brown flecked with green. Why had I never noticed that before? She seemed to focus on me, to take me in, so I spoke again. “It’s Cath, Gran,” I said. “I’m here to sit with you awhile.”

What was it about my gestures then, or my face, what confusion of association or of physical resemblance made her take me for someone else? For my grandfather, I think: her prince, come to wake her. Made her face lift in pleasure, made her hands swim
vaguely toward me, made her cry out with delight, “Oh!
Here
you are at last!” Her smile was radiant. “Now you can take me home!”

And what gift of love or sympathy made me able to be what she needed in that moment, made me able to act my part, to give her back to her world? Made me able to answer her, “Yes”?

“Yes, of course I will.”

The World Below

Sue Miller

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with Sue Miller

Michelle Huneven is the author of two novels
, Round Rock
and
Jamesland.
Sue Miller and Michelle Huneven have been friends for seventeen years

Michelle Huneven: What was the germ for this book, the first glimmer you had for it? Where and when did your find the evocative title?

Sue Miller: I think the initial impulse came from some diaries I inherited years ago from my grandmother’s grandmother. They were written in 1869 and 1870, and they document her daily life with her husband on a farm in Maine. The entries are each only a few sentences long, and they concern primarily the weather and the work that got done on a given day, and who came to call, or whom they called on. There’s a kind of fascinating boredom to the document as a whole. And then, on a day in June 1869, there’s an entry that reads:

“It has rained all day. I washed in the morning and worked on Mrs. (illegible)’s dress in the afternoon. I am doomed to be disappointed in everything that I take pride in. I sometimes wish I was under the sod sleeping the sleep that knows no waking.”

Nowhere else is this feeling expanded on, nowhere is the context for this cri de coeur discussed, and the next entry is back to the routine pattern—the waters having folded over it. I was moved by this, by the notion of a life of deep feeling running under the surface of this life of daily achievement and steady labor. By the idea of an unacknowledged world living below the world of the mundane. This was part of the germ for the book, and certainly the source of the title.