The World Below (20 page)

“No, really. I’m a thoroughly modern woman, after all. Maybe what you see”—I raised my arms—“is exactly what you get.”

As he set his mug down, he said, “Now that is something I very much doubt.”

I smiled. We sat in silence for a long moment. A log shifted and scattered sparks on the hearth. “It must feel odd to sit here with me,” I said at last. I gestured around with my cup.

“No. In what way—odd?”

“Oh, I mean that it was yours for so long. I’ve stolen it out from under you in some sense.”

“Well, you’ve hardly stolen it.”

“Yes, but you know what I mean.” I sat up straighten “Come on, Samuel, I’m saying I’m
sorry
?”

“Don’t be.” He smiled. “If I’d had my way, I’d have stolen it all out from under
you
. But we’d still be sitting right here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that I would have offered
you
the drink.”

I grinned at him. “You should have got to Rue before she died,” I said. “Bad planning.”

“I tried. Believe me. No, actually I think she had some sense of obligation to you. To hold on to it for you.”

“Did she say that?”

“I inferred it. What she said was that there were others—other heirs—she’d have to consult. I went so far as to check to see who these others might be—I thought I might try approaching them on my own—but of course it was hers and hers alone. There were no others. So she was either thinking of you as an heir, even though you weren’t technically, or she was just lying to put me off.”

I was remembering Rue. “It’s really very strange if she did think of it that way. We hadn’t been in touch for a long time. I didn’t much like her. I lived with her once,” I offered. “One summer. In Paris. She took me in.”

“That doesn’t sound so evil. Very auntlike, actually.”

“Well, she meant to remake me, I think. I was more her project than her guest. She disapproved of the way I was growing up. And to a degree, she succeeded. In remaking me, I mean. New haircut, new way of dressing.” I shook my head. “I came back here completely unsuited to be a high school senior in rural Vermont. But I suppose it was helpful later—to have seen that other world. That other way of being.” I smiled at him. “I was
very
chic in college.” I thought of myself then, wearing skirts and little heels when everyone else was in blue jeans.

“I can imagine,” Samuel said. “You’re still chic.”

“Ah, but I’m in rural Vermont again. That helps enormously.”

“Nonsense. You’d be dazzling wherever you went.”

“Well. Thank you,” I said, after a little pause. I was embarrassed, suddenly. I hoped I wasn’t blushing. Was this a kind of pass? Or just
an older man being courtly, being kind to a slightly younger woman? I couldn’t tell, I realized, and it made me uncomfortable. I thought of what Fiona had said on her visit earlier.
Was
I, in some sense, dating Samuel? Had
be
seen this as a date? Was that why he sat on now, as the windows grew dark? “More cider?” I asked.

As if he had read my mind, he stood up. “No,” he said. “No, it’s time for me to be getting home.”

After Samuel left, I heated up some soup for supper, thinking of him. Was he interested? Was I?

And then I thought,
No
, that I was misreading everything. That I’d been right earlier; what seemed like interest was just a kind of courtliness, Samuel’s way of being polite. Still, carrying my bowl of soup back to my grandfather’s study, sitting down at the old desk and beginning to read through my grandmother’s diaries once again, looking for references, specific or oblique, to religion, I found myself thinking of Samuel from time to time—just his face, and the way his smile lifted it suddenly from its melancholic cast.

There were only a few entries in the diary concerned with belief or nonbelief. Georgia wrote of churchgoing, of course, and, yes, what she wore to church too. Occasionally she named someone she’d encountered there. Sometimes she mentioned the topic of a sermon—the prodigal son, or the signs of God’s goodness around us.

She wrote about an argument she’d had with Bill March once about whether God intended the Allies to win the war.

I cannot think He would take sides in such a question which seems to me an argument only between men. Bill says I am wrong, that He is always on the side of right. It made us unhappy to disagree, so we stopped speaking of it.

She was troubled, more than once, by Seward Wallace’s doubt of God’s existence.

Seward thinks I am foolish to pray for his recovery, or mine, that if there is a God, He is so cruel that such a thing couldn’t possibly matter to Him. I do not know if this could be, but I do not like to think so.

On New Year’s Day, 1920, four months after her return home from the san, she wrote:

So ends this year, a year of so much turmoil and change in my life. So many hopes and fears and joys and sorrows. I wish that I could better apprehend our reason for being on this earth and that I could set a better example for Ada and Fred. That I could be better prepared to live, and so to die too of course. G.L.R.

Two weeks later, she married my grandfather.

P
ART
T
WO

Nine

C
olorado. It was Seward’s dream. In Colorado the air was a rinsed blue, cloudless and dry, above the towering Rockies. He had a postcard that showed its magnificence. Thousands, he told Georgia, had gone out there and been cured. And then stayed on, to start a new life in a place where you could do anything, be anything. Couldn’t she picture them there? How it could be?

They were lying together in the dusty toolshed, on the narrow cot kept there for the gardener to nap on. It was after dinner, almost time to return for their nightly rituals: the thermometer, the mugs of thick milk, and then the long restless wait for sleep on the cure porches, the sky still faintly light till nine or later.

Georgia’s head rested on Seward’s chest, and within it she could hear the whirring, the ticking of his breathing, as well as what felt like the overemphatic slow thud of his heart on each beat. They were dressed. They had never been undressed in each other’s presence after that first night; there was always too much risk of being discovered. Their lovemaking had become a matter of unbuttoning a Bit here and there, of sliding Georgia’s skirts up to her waist, of pushing fabric aside. Seward hungrily stared at Georgia’s flesh where it was exposed, but Georgia had no wish to see Seward’s
body. She could feel its thinness—the bones of his pelvic cage driving into her as he lay between her legs, the hard arch of his ribs sheltering his weakened lungs, the knobs of his spine under her hands when she held him, the pronounced ridge of his clavicle where her fingers rested now. It broke her heart to touch him through his clothing, to unbutton his shirt and rest her hand on the working oven of his chest, to feel his heart shake his body.

But it wasn’t only this that kept her from wanting to look, and she knew it. It wasn’t just his unbearable boniness, the mark of his disease. It was also the sex itself. It was the sheer embarrassment of it. She didn’t understand it, truly, what it was all about. The parts she enjoyed and would have liked lingering over—the teasing beforehand, the gentle touching—these were always rushed now, too soon over. And then there was all that desperate huffing and puffing, and—so quickly afterward!—Seward’s pained cries, one, and then another, and another.

She held him then, she loved him for his crying out, for his need of her, for the way he lifted himself from her when he was finished and looked so hard at her, seeming to see her most clearly then, to wish to burn her face into memory. And she loved this too, perhaps most of all—the lying still afterward and dreamily talking.

But in between … well, it sometimes seemed so silly. And his stiff member an odd kind of joke really. Georgia thought of it as like some kind of helpless animal, the way it poked at her, sometimes so blindly that Seward asked her to touch it, to help him put it into her.

His voice rumbled under her head now. He was spinning an elaborate story, a variation on a story he had told her over and over—a story they had told each other, for Georgia had added her embellishments sometimes, and sometimes her corrections. They would go out by train, in their own sleeping car, and watch the wooded green of the East fade as they came to the plains, those vast grasslands. And then they’d see them, rising like a row of low, distant clouds on the horizon line—the Rockies! Only they wouldn’t
believe it initially. Mile after mile what they would at first think were clouds would sit, motionless but increasing in size, in grandeur—until their eyes would make the translation: not clouds, mountains! Blue, white at the peaks, just like the postcard.

And then their life there. A little hut, a shack, really; they would need no more. A stream nearby, where Seward would catch fish for their dinner. The dry thin air, easy to breathe, shrinking the lesions on his lungs, giving Georgia her strength back.

In one version he’d spun, she would be well almost instantly—she really was well, Seward had insisted, it was just these jackass doctors who didn’t know it—and she would, perhaps, give piano lessons to support them until his recovery was complete.

Georgia had laughed, then, and reached down to flick the pine needles off her skirt; the women on the porch had such an eye for these things.

“I couldn’t possibly do that, Seward,” she said.

They had been in the clearing that day, resting on the soft ground. Georgia was leaning over Seward, propped up on her elbow.

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because, you dunce, I don’t play.”

“Of course you play. Everyone plays. And anyone can teach beginners.”

“But I
don
’t play. Not a note. I can’t read music, except vaguely. ‘Dah, dah,
dah’:
here it goes up. ‘Dah, dah, dah’: here it goes down. This many beats to a measure. Just from singing in choir, though, not playing.”

He had looked at her, then, as though seeing something new and startling in her face. “You don’t play,” he said.

“I don’t.”

“But that’s so strange. So surprising. What an odd way to grow up. Not playing.”

Georgia had laughed again, but she was hurt—pained in the way she often felt in the san. For everything she didn’t know, hadn’t even
guessed at, until she arrived here. For her sense of being always
too late
. She stood, slowly, and bent over, dusting her skirt. After a moment, she said casually, “Really, it’s strange of you to think I necessarily would have. To think everyone grew up exactly as you did. Like a blinkered horse who thinks what’s in front of him is all there is to the world.”

“Oh, a horse now, am I?” He sat up to watch her.

“You are. No sideways vision at all.”

She had hoisted her skirt then and refastened her garter, pulling the white stocking taut on her leg. She’d gotten so plump that a little roll of fat pushed over the top of it as she yanked it up.

“I don’t need sideways vision to see what I see now.”

“Oh?” She smoothed her skirt down. “And what’s that? What do you imagine you see?”

“I see you, Georgia.” He had stood up, too, and come to her. Now he bent and lifted the hem of her skirt. His hand scrabbled up her leg. She felt his fingers on the skin above her stocking, and now his thumb sliding up into her step-ins, where she was still moist. “I see just what I want. You.” He had walked her backward slowly until she rested against a tree, and then he began to kiss her again.

This was how all difficulties were resolved between them: more kissing, more touching, more lying together. But sometimes Georgia thought about the ways in which it seemed that Seward hardly knew her. How could he love her, as he said he did, when he seemed so incurious about her, about how she had lived before the san? He knew nothing, really, of what her life had been, of what had been important to her. Sometimes when Georgia offered an opinion, he would dismiss it, but so casually that it seemed as though he felt it wasn’t possible she could really think that.