The World Below (8 page)

She wrote this to me in my first year of college in California, where I’d gone to get away from my history and the confusing bonds of attachment and guilt and need I felt—for her and my grandfather, for my father, even for my mother. And standing there in my dorm room, hungrily reading the letter, I felt again the yearning for her, for them, that I never outgrew.

I remembered a moment from the spring of that first year I’d lived with them, four or five months after my mother died. I was lying on my bed in the attic, watching a sudden storm come up. The sky blackened, the birds stilled, the trees heaved and shuddered, showing the silvery undersides of their leaves. A wooden chair came skidding drunkenly across the yard, stopped, then hurried on. Suddenly my grandparents appeared in the yard below me, foreshortened and legless from my vantage—I could hear their voices before I saw them, and my grandmother’s laugh. They began to take the wildly flapping laundry off the line: the towels, the white sheets. They worked together quickly, with practiced skill, both holding a sheet, folding it, walking toward each other, away, then in again: the big white belling cloth first halved, then quartered and calmer, now disappearing to a compact bundle between them. They finished—they moved offstage—just before the sky ripped open with lightning and thunder nearly simultaneously, and the pelting of the fat drops began to accumulate to a dull roar on the roof above me.

But I had seen it—their quick mirroring dance, the arms lifting at the same time as they approached each other, lowering as they stepped back, the magic of the wild white cloth growing smaller and smaller between them on the dark grass—and what it looked like to me from my lonely perch above them was the purest form of love.

Four

G
eorgia’s old grandmother had been right: the children grew up fast after their mother’s death—Georgia faster than either of the others. It wasn’t that her burden increased. Actually, she was freer now than she had been, so much of her time had been taken up in the care of her mother during the week. And she felt it, it was a relief not to be waked in the night by her mother’s groans or wild wails, or by the bell that signaled she needed help.

But she also felt lost and alone. Because however odd Fanny had been when well, however ill she grew, however much maturity she needed from Georgia; still, she was Georgia’s mother, and her existence, on whatever terms, meant that Georgia was still a child. And Fanny had struggled, within the demands of her illness, to remind Georgia of that, to try to continue to be maternal—and perhaps because of that was actually more maternal as she was dying than she’d ever been before. She touched her daughter frequently, she stroked her bright braided hair or her soft hands. Her voice, when she spoke to Georgia, often deepened with tenderness. She said, “I’m sorry for you, dearest, you shouldn’t have to do this,” as Georgia helped her up the stairs or into the bath or, later, carried her chamber pot in or out. For as long as it was
possible, she made an effort to connect with the running of the household, to select meals, to discuss with Mrs. Beston the schedule of her duties for the day, to suggest activities or playmates, especially for the younger two—and to arrange, when she could, for Georgia’s freedom.

In the later stages, she tried to protect her children from her illness. The last four or five months of her life, Dr. Holbrooke came almost daily at her request to give her morphine so her pain wouldn’t scare the children—she didn’t realize how terrifying her drugged, slow thickness was in itself. And the summer she was dying, she insisted the windows to her room be closed, in spite of the heat, so her cries wouldn’t float out into the yard where Mrs. Beston tried to keep the children occupied in those long, empty waiting days.

Now Georgia felt abandoned and particularly responsible, more responsible than when she’d had far more to do. It is true there might be a vast, peaceful silence when she waked in the night, but, at least at first, she felt this as her sorrow, her burden. She was in charge of it—the peace, the black nothingness. She was alone.

It was a life not without its pleasures, though, and slowly Georgia learned them. She came, over the long months, to feel a real sense of pride in running her household well. In having stiff fresh-smelling sheets on the beds each week, the new holes neatly patched with darns. In using the dust mop daily, even under the beds, letting Freddie whack it vigorously on the edge of the front porch between rooms. In polishing the few silver pieces they owned at least once a month. And she herself cooked the dishes that the two other children and her father especially loved: Indian pudding, lemon pound cake, corn chowder, baked beans, blueberry pancakes, soda biscuits.

Gradually her life changed to conform to her new role. Perhaps to avoid the lonely wakening at three or four in the morning, she began to stay up later and later when her father was away. Long after Ada and Freddie were in bed, she roamed the house. She took
a delight she couldn’t have explained simply in sitting in chairs she normally didn’t use.
Here I am
, she would think, looking at the darkened room from this new perspective.
This is me, seeing this. Feeling this.
The world seemed, at these moments, to be arranged, fitted, exactly around her.

She liked to watch the empty town green at a time when everyone else was safely asleep, intensely aware of her separateness. She read, sometimes until well after midnight. There was a mantel clock in the parlor with a glass case etched with flowers, and hearing it strike those few isolate notes in the dead span of the night made her feel a rich, melancholic sense of her own solitude.

In her senior year of high school, she fell in love with Bill March, who lived on the opposite side of the green. It was their arrangement to signal each other with a candle at ten o’clock precisely, he from the dark attic bedroom of his house, she from what had been her mother’s sewing room. She loved seeing him there in his white nightshirt in the flickering light, his face a pale blur, so much more romantic than the tall, solid Bill she knew by day, with his square jaw, his occasional stammer. He told her he went to bed directly after this, filled with thoughts of her. But Georgia stayed up. She was restless with thoughts of him, yes, but she also worried about her future: how could she think of marrying, ever? Of leaving her father? Who would take care of everyone? She felt middle-aged at these moments, already a spinster.

At other times, though, she began to seem more a child than she had in her childhood, to go backward. There was, after all, no one there anymore to remind her that she was a young lady now, that there were certain decent ways to behave. Mothers in town and other older women commented on this, that it was a shame, a disgrace, really, the way she still raced Freddie and Ada across the town green after church, shrieking and carrying on. The way she jounced when she walked, you had to look away, you truly did. The way she’d been seen in a tree in the Marches’ front yard and you could look right up her dress and she didn’t seem to have the least idea.

She played wild games in the house with Ada and Freddie too, their own three-person versions of Hide and Seek or Sardines or Kick the Can that went on long after the younger children should have been in bed. One night, Mrs. Mitchell, hearing what she described to anyone interested as “blood-curdling screams” coming from the Rices’ well after nine, went over to see what was happening, whether she could help. A silence fell in the house when she banged the knocker, and after a long minute or two, Georgia—panting, flushed with excitement and damp with perspiration—opened the door a crack. No, she said. No, nothing was wrong. She was terribly sorry if Ada or Fred had been a bother; she’d speak to them right away. And then, much too quickly, she shut the door again, hard, right in Mrs. Mitchell’s face.

The wildest play, though, was aimed at their father, at diverting him, at lifting his burden of grief. During the week they planned their surprises: their theatrical productions, their scavenger hunts, their patriotic tableaux or concerts, their minstrel shows, their living room parades, once with their cat, Napoleon, dressed as a baby pushed in a carriage at the head. Friday nights were frantic, sometimes, with gaiety. And when their father laughed, when he gave himself over again to his family’s life, to the possibility of finding some pleasure there even without Fanny, Georgia felt complete, she felt rewarded: she,
she
had made this possible, through her efforts. Surely this would be enough forever.

It was all, anyway, she was aware of wanting.

And so, after she graduated from high school, she did not, as she had planned earlier, go to the university along with Bill March—or even to normal school, as many of her friends were doing. She stayed home, she undertook more of the household chores, more of the cooking, and they were able to get by with having Mrs. Beston come only twice a week.

It was just as her grandmother had said it would be: her girlhood was done.

•     •     •

But as illness had trapped her in this particular box of happiness, so illness rescued her, too. For several months in the third winter after her mother’s death, Georgia had a cold, with a cough that never seemed to ease. Finally her father insisted she go to the doctor, and, as he would be out of town the day of the appointment, he arranged with a friend to drive her into Pittsfield. The doctor was their family doctor, the same man who’d cared for her mother. He knew Georgia well, of course, though he hadn’t seen her in three years. He welcomed her in; he invited her to sit down. His office smelled sharply of soap and disinfectant, and of something else, too, something more pleasant. Wintergreen, perhaps.

In the time since she’d last seen him, Dr. Holbrooke seemed to have changed somehow. Changed completely, he would have said. He’d been to war in France. As a doctor, to be sure, but that, perhaps, made it worse. What Georgia thought, as she sat down in the wooden chair opposite him and looked at him across his desk, was that he’d become old in the meantime, but somehow without altering much physically. She looked carefully: surely there must be something she could attribute it to. It’s true there was a bit of gray where there hadn’t been in his dark hair. There were a few more lines around his brown eyes, and his mouth seemed drawn down. Perhaps those regular features, the largish nose, were a bit more chiseled. But most of it was just the sense of a man weighted by some knowledge, some sorrow, he hadn’t possessed before.

If she’d known how to ask, and if he’d been in the habit of articulating his thoughts to anyone, what he might have said to her was that he’d learned how temporary man is. Man, or life. Something he’d known, in some sense, since he lifted a knife to cut open the yellowed flesh of his first cadaver in anatomy class. Something he’d known when he visited Georgia’s mother every day while she was dying, when he passed the three children stopped in their games
or their outside chores, to watch him, to nod back as he lifted his hat to them, the two pretty
jeunes filles
and the sturdy little boy; when he mounted the stairs behind the bustling Mrs. Beston; when he entered the airless room and his wasted patient greeted him with an unearthly cry, a rictus of joy and pain lifting her skull’s face. He’d known it, yes, but then he’d had sufficient time—sufficient leisure, really—to consider amply each death, each loss. To count them. To hold himself accountable for them. This, he knew now, had been a gift.

For now he thought of death differently: as a vast disinterested scythe, cutting us down carelessly, brutally. Leaving half a man to die here and half a man to live there. Leaving him standing in the blood of both to decide which fate for which half, and why, and how.

Without knowing any of this, Georgia felt sorry for him.

And he felt sorry for Georgia. She was much thinner than she should have been. She had no color except for the two hectic patches on her cheeks. Her ears, which were large anyway, seemed too large now that her face had narrowed. The pretty young girl watching him from the meadow as he entered the house, standing across her mother’s grave from him, tearless and brave—she’d become this frayed, harried-looking young woman, her hair badly pinned up at the nape of her neck, her nostrils chapped, deep circles bruising her eyes. Still, the word that leapt to his mind when he looked at her was
valor.
He found her more beautiful than he could have said.

They talked for a while in his office before he asked her to undress. As he inquired and she told him about her life—her routines, her diet, her sleep habits—he felt a sense of cold, energetic outrage welling up to replace the dispassionate distance he’d come to keep from his patients.

She didn’t mean to arouse his sympathy. Never for a moment did Georgia feel sorry for herself. There was something nearly callous, actually, in her inattention to emotional nuance, to the effect her life and her words had on others. I felt it occasionally much
later, when I lived with them. She was nearly congenitally buoyant and always a bit surprised when others were not.