The World Below (19 page)

Of course, it’s easier for me to recall what he told me than what I told him. What would I have felt compelled to fill him in on? My
situation, yes. I know I described that generally, mostly by way of letting him know how confused I was about the house—the house he wanted. Wanted for his own. “If I came here … I don’t know,” I said to him, “it would change my life. My work, my friendships. I suppose at least some of my bad habits.”

I remember that he laughed at that. “Surely you have no bad habits,” he said.

I must have spoken to him about the children: Fiona, whom he would meet; Jeff, so far away, so happy being so far away and what that might mean about his future; Karen, who was discovering and reporting to me via e-mail from her bed about the astonishments of daytime TV, a revelation to her.

And Samuel? Well, he talked to me about his work, I remember, though I had to prod him to get the details. “What
kind
of writing?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s just a small project, I don’t know that I’ll ever finish. The kind of thing an old professor undertakes when he’s retired.”

“And what kind of thing might that be?” This was very early in our friendship, I remember, when I still found myself impatient with his slowness, his indirection.

He heard it. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be evasive.” He smiled. “Though it may be that it comes naturally. Certainly my wife would have said so.” His expression, at that moment, with those words, was suffused with a kind of rueful regret. He was a widower, and I’d noticed this complicated sorrow on his face whenever his wife was mentioned. “It’s essays. On the death of a group of towns in Massachusetts in the thirties. I’ve written, I would say, three and about a half so far. It’s taken two years.” He smiled.

“So, what’s your … 
angle
, I guess?” Hearing myself, I grimaced. “Nasty word, isn’t it?”

“It’s a modern word. And it’s a question a publisher would ask me, I imagine, if it ever got to that stage.” He was silent a moment. Then he said, “That may be the problem. I don’t think I have one. I
just want to record it. The towns’ histories, some of what happened as they died. You know, stories.”

“It sounds suspiciously like a book.”

“It may be, I suppose. Depends on what gets finished first, it or me. It’s essays, for now.”

He spoke of his fondness for my grandmother’s house. “I found a real pleasure in its shotgun arrangement,” he said. “The way each day I had to walk through all the rooms to get to the few I used. From bedroom to kitchen, where I ate, and then back to that little room off the kitchen that I used as a study when in residence. No room went unvisited, as it were.” He paused to look out the window. We were driving past a little waterfall. “I miss that at the Gibsons’, where I don’t have any idea what’s going on in most of the rooms.” Now he grinned at me. “Why, there could be others living there with me, for all I know.”

This charmed me, and I smiled back at him.

It was his wife, it turned out—with my aunt Rue’s permission—who’d done the redecorating. I asked him once what his wife was like. We were driving home; I always drove. I was the hostess on these trips. I picked him up, though he would never let me pay for the treats we usually bought—soft-serve cones at the Dairy Queen, beer at a country inn.

He was silent a long time. I didn’t look at him. Finally he said quietly, “She was a fine person. Discerning, I would say.”

“Now
that’s
a lovely word. Discerning.”

“Yes. And true. True of her. Discerning of beauty. Of what was right.

“I think she was often unhappy with me,” he said, after a moment. He cleared his throat. “Well, of course she missed the opportunity to work, to have that kind of life—that was hard for many women her age, you know. To see life, and the opportunities of life, change so dramatically just after you’d made all your choices—difficult. It made her doubly critical of
my
choices. But I
think, even aside from that, she found me … well, a little sloppy, I’d say. That I’d settled for something so unambitious, so unlikely to do the world much good. An old professor, at what was really a teaching college. Not even a university.”

We drove along in silence for a while. He broke it.

“But of course, what I felt was that I was in the world, that I couldn’t afford her delicacy.” I nodded. “And she felt, I suppose, that I’d sold my soul somehow. And finally, I think, she came to feel that the academic life was not much to have gotten in return.”

He turned to me. I felt his attention and looked over at him. He was smiling.

“That was it, the bedrock of our argument with each other.” He looked away.

I didn’t know what to say, what he was telling me.

“I miss her,” he said. His voice sounded scraped and tired, suddenly. “I miss the argument itself.”

“Yes,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

Even this somehow reminded me of my grandfather. When I thought of those comments and the way Samuel had looked, making them, I remembered the moments between my grandparents when some bitterness that stayed submerged most of the time would suddenly surface. I remembered my perplexity as a child over this and then, when I was an adolescent, my sense of embarrassment—mostly, I think, for my grandfather, shamed as he seemed by something in it.

It made me think about my marriages. If Peter and I had stayed together, or Joe and I, would the price have been the pushing under of whatever enraged or disappointed each of us in the other? Or would we have come to some forgiving peace that included the anger?

Or was that forgiveness at all, if the anger still lived there underneath the peace?

When Samuel spoke, I wanted somehow to comfort him, though I said nothing. I suppose I was afraid to seem to be criticizing his wife.

•     •     •

We talked about the diaries one day. The diaries and the other material. I told him about my compulsive reading and rereading.

“Ah, you’ve got the bug,” he said.

“Is that what it is?” I asked. “Is that what it feels like to you when you’re doing research on something?”

“Very much.”

“Without the personal connection, though.”

“No, absolutely with it. I think if you don’t feel connected, if you don’t feel that what you’re figuring out is going to answer something personally for you, then you don’t do it.
I
can’t imagine doing it, at any rate.”

“So what was answered personally for you by writing about railroads?” I was referring to his most famous book,
The End of the Line
. I’d looked it up in the town library, where there was an inscribed copy. “Large-hearted” it was called on the jacket copy taped inside. “Magisterial and comprehensive.” In the photograph cut from the jacket and taped there too, he was perhaps in his early forties, a seriously ravishing man in a theatrical pose: squinting into the middle distance, a half-smoked filterless cigarette raised partway to his face in curved fingers. A tweed jacket, naturally, but the shirt under it open at the neck. It pleased me to see he’d been vain then; that he wanted the world to see his image shaped in this romantic way. Later I wondered what his wife had thought of this photo—the vanity apparent in it.

“Aha!” he said. “You’ve been poking around in
my
past too.”

“Well, I assume you want people poking around in that part of your past.”

“Of course it was written to be read, yes. But not the way a diary is.”

“But a diary isn’t, is it?” I asked. “Written to be read? By anyone but the diarist, I mean.”

“No?”

“No. Absolutely no. You write it for yourself.”

“Then why do you hold on to it?”

“To look back over your own life. To see how things were for you at a set time, how you felt about them and understood them then.”

“And then why don’t you, at a certain point in old age, let’s say—if it really is just for yourself—destroy it?”

“Oh, who knows?” I said. I thought he was being difficult. “Maybe you’re too ill. Or tired. Or you’ve forgotten it, with everything else that presses in.”

“But what presses in more than the past when you’re old?”

“I don’t know. The notion of dying, maybe?”

“Ah, but that’s what makes the past press in.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Just that I can imagine your grandmother imagining
you
reading her diary.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No. I honestly don’t think that. If you could see them. While they’re not very intimate, they’re really … private, somehow.

“No,” I went on. “What I imagine is that it would be like killing your past, like killing yourself, in a way, to destroy it. And so you just don’t. You don’t get around to it. You might tell yourself you would tomorrow. Or when you knew you were nearly gone. But it’s so hard to believe that ever, I would think. That you really are going to be
gone
. And then you
are
dying, and it’s too late.”

“But you see, I think all that is true, and I also think at some level your grandmother must have intended you to read them.”

“But Rue inherited the house first, remember. Not I. If she’d found them, they would have been long gone.”

“But she was so much less likely to.”

“To …?”

“To find them. Even to look.”

“How do you know that about Rue?”

“You forget, I dealt with her through the mail for some years. A less sentimental woman, at least on paper, I’ve never encountered.
She
wouldn’t have been poking through things, looking for her past. When Maggie wanted to redecorate, she figuratively washed her hands of everything. We could have thrown it all away, as far as she was concerned. ‘Sure, do what you like’: that was her tone. Which was lovely for us, of course, to be able to make it ours, more or less. But that’s how she was about it. It was Maggie who felt we couldn’t chuck anything, and it was I who hauled most of it to the attic, at her behest.”

“So
you
put it all up there.”

“Well, some of it was there already. Your grandmother’s dress form, for instance. Charming.” He smiled. “It made me think of the professor’s house.”

“What professor?”

“The Professor’s House
. The Cather novel.”

“Oh.” I nodded, feeling stupid.

“There’s a dress form in an attic in that book, actually several of them, I think, and the eponymous professor, who more or less hides away from his own life up there, is, as I recollect, comforted by them.”

“Yes, I remember it,” I said. After a moment I said, “And is this you? Are you the professor somehow?”

He laughed. “No.” Then his face fell. “No, I was quite happy downstairs.”

When we got back that afternoon, I invited him in. I made us warm cider, with a shot of bourbon—the game that day had been chilly, and by the end, sunless—and we went back into my grandfather’s study. I showed him the way I’d grouped the documents I had. I wanted his approval, I think:
yes, this is exactly the way a historian would proceed
. But he seemed unamazed at any of it, except for the diaries themselves. Those he lifted almost reverentially, opened carefully.

Afterward I asked him to make us a fire in the back parlor, and we sat, sipping the cider and eating crackers and cheese for a while. I wondered if he was thinking of similar darkening fall afternoons spent here with his wife. I wondered what they might have been speaking of.

I was talking about my deepening sense of my grandmother’s life, in particular everything that I had come to understand about tuberculosis and the shame and fascination of the san, and what a revelation that was to me. “That’s what the task of the historian must be—is it? To explain how life
felt
as it went by. Not just what happened, but how differently it signified: what happened.”

“Yes, that’s apt,” he said. “I’ve often thought of it as like anthropology. Like explaining the rules of another culture, another country. Which it seems to me the past is, in some sense.”

He thought for a few moments. The fire hissed.

“I’m sure there are countless other things that would be as revelatory if you knew of them. If you were looking for them. They’d change the ground under the story.”

“Like what, do you think?”

“Oh, well. Let’s use my wife as an example. She was a believer. Religious. And that was always present in her life in a way I sometimes lost track of, since I’m not. Or at least not in the way she was. For her it was, I would say, the central invisible fact of her life. And yet you could write her life’s story without including it if you didn’t know specifically about it. It was simply underneath everything else. As it may well have been for your grandmother. Probably was, in point of fact.”

“Do you think so?”

“I can’t know, really. But she was a churchgoer till the last. I remember that. We used to see her there every Sunday in the summers we were up before she died, in one or another of her hats. Many hats.” He smiled at me. “You will remember them.”

“Yes,” I said. I stretched my legs out, toward the fireplace.

“Now maybe she went for the sociability, or just because she’d always gone. But maybe, just maybe, she was a believer. A true believer. And then, if that was so, it would raise other questions. You’d have to know, for instance, what kind of a believer. Did she see each moment of her life as given by God: here, a test to rise to, there, a moment of grace? Or did she just assume him as a beneficent presence? Somehow, maybe even casually, in charge of everything.”

“I see,” I said. “Yeah. Well, all that would make a difference, wouldn’t it?”

“It would. But it’s not something she’s likely to have written about explicitly.”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I’ve come across it. Explicitly.” I’d been staring into the fire, as one does. Now, because he was silent, I looked at him. He was watching me, frowning.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry. I was just wondering, I suppose. What you would say the central fact of
your
life is. The one that I can’t see.”

“Maybe you see it all,” I said. He laughed and shook his head.