The World Below (22 page)

In some odd way, too, unconnected with what she knew was real, she still entertained the belief that she would join him. She believed at one and the same time that he would die and she would lose him and that he would recover and she would go to live with him. She was adept at this, living at once in the worlds of hope and despair, of life and death, because of her mother. Her mother, who had spoken only weeks before she died of taking Georgia to Bangor to buy her new slippers. The old ones, she said one day when she was particularly alert, were a disgrace. They made Georgia look like a slattern.

And Georgia had held on to that until almost the end. Of course her mother wouldn’t die. Her slatternly slippers had not yet been replaced.

Now, with Seward, she was more conscious of the impossibility of her position but no less capable of holding to it, believing in it. He had never seemed so beautiful as now to her either, the hawkish nose so sharply defined, the dark single brow, the pale deep eyes, deeper now than before. His wide, full mouth was the only flesh left to him, it seemed.

He smiled sleepily at her. “When will you come, do you think?”

“After the wedding,” she said.

“Riddles,” he said. “And when will the wedding be?”

“After I’m home. Maybe late summer.”

“Late summer in Colorado,” he said dreamily. “I wonder what that will be like.”

“It will be wonderful,” she said.

His eyes closed. His breathing scraped, and then a cough chuckled lightly out of him. His hands felt hot and dry in hers.

His sisters came for him the next day, a surprise they thought would delight him. He tried to find Georgia to say goodbye, but she was having her bath, along with the others on her porch, a prolonged and even festive social event.

When she was dressed again, smelling strongly of the brown carbolic soap, she went downstairs and outside. She was standing on the terrace when Mr. Cooper saw her and rose laboriously from his chair, trailing his cotton blanket. “Oh, my dear, did Seward Wallace find you?”

“Just now?”

“Within the hour. He was looking all over for you.”

“No. I haven’t seen him.”

“Ah. Well. He’s gone now. He left, with his sisters. I’m sure what he wanted was to say goodbye.”

“He’s left?” She looked at him in disbelief.

He nodded eagerly. “Yes, they took him away.”

“But I didn’t know of it! I never heard anything of it at all!”

“No, I think he didn’t either. They descended and spirited him away, as it were.”

“But, he’s not gone. Gone—to Colorado?” She heard the word suddenly in all its lonely ringing.

“Oh, I couldn’t say that. If that was the plan, perhaps he is. But I don’t know.” He could barely contain his excitement. His lips quivered.

Georgia stood dumbstruck, looking past him. Her hand had risen to her opened mouth.

Mr. Cooper leaned forward and spoke more intimately. “I’m sorry, my dear, to have been the one to tell you.” A lie. He would delight in repeating what he’d said, what she’d said in response to him, over and over in the next week.

“Perhaps he left a note. He must have,” she said, already turning.

“Perhaps,” he said vaguely, and watched her moving quickly away, into the library, the dark center of the san, a ghostly figure in her white summer clothes. “She looked positively
spectral,”
he would say later in each of the many accounts he gave of it.

Seward had written her a short note, all he had time for; and when Georgia’s father came to pick her up it was folded and tied with his other notes to her under her clothes in one of the laundry cases she had packed things in. The handwriting, rushed, wasn’t as shapely as the writing in his other letters. Even so, by our standards, it was calligraphic.

Georgia—This note will have to do for goodbye for now. I will be waiting for you, thinking of you, every day, hoping that the wedding is arranged quickly and over soon and that you are on your way to me.

Your devoted,
Seward

She kept these things in her underwear drawer at home, where she felt they were safe. But Ada, wounded by the changes in her sister in the weeks after Georgia’s return—by her new reserve, her snobbery, as Ada saw it—opened the packet one day and read through them all as a kind of revenge. Then she told a few of her own friends what she guessed of Georgia’s secret life at the san. Since none of them was close to Georgia, though, it hardly mattered except as abstract scandal; it didn’t have the right shocking deeper meaning.

No, it wasn’t until years later that Ada finally found the perfect listener: Rue, my aunt, Georgia’s daughter. Rue, the Duchess, who was angry at her mother for a long list of offenses anyway, and who seized on the news of these letters as gratifying evidence of her mother’s betrayal of her father, of her perfidious coldheartedness.

How strange it was to be back at home! To be sleeping in the double bed with Ada under the light blankets that smelled of sachet, not carbolic soap. To feel another body so close and have it not be Seward’s, have it not mean what it had meant so recently. Ada wanted to snuggle—she was happy to have Georgia home—but Georgia was almost shocked by her sister’s touch, shocked and somehow embarrassed. After a few minutes, when Georgia lay rigid in her embrace, Ada turned away, hurt.

Strange too to wake to a day without routines: no milk, no regulated meals, no bed checks or appointments or thermometers or nurses or rules. She dressed late, the first morning, and ate breakfast after ten o’clock. She and Freddie played three long games of Parcheesi. When he was hungry, she fixed him lunch. Ada came home about then and made herself a sandwich too, and then Georgia went upstairs to take a nap. She had been told she must do this daily, indefinitely, and get plenty of sleep at night to keep her strength up. It was important not to get worn down again.

When she woke in the hot, musty room, she didn’t know where she was for a moment. From outside she could hear children’s distant voices and the start-and-stop whir of someone mowing a lawn nearby. She licked her lips and lay there awhile, looking carefully around at the objects in the room. Ada had rearranged things a little, put her collection of dolls, for instance, on top of the dresser they shared. A small thing, among other small things, but looking at them Georgia felt displaced. She felt displaced generally, she realized. It all seemed to have gone so smoothly without her. Much of that was due, she knew, to Mrs. Beston, who’d come four or five days a week in her absence. But Georgia had noticed too how Ada took charge easily now, commanded both Freddie and her father in a way Georgia herself had never dared to do. She had even carelessly directed Georgia in the setting of the table last night. It wasn’t that she minded, Georgia told herself, so much as that she felt superfluous. And though Ada would undoubtedly gradually step back and let Georgia resume some of her authority, she knew this would scarcely matter. Within a month or so her father would have married and she would owe it to Mrs. Erskine to keep herself superfluous.

She got up now and washed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. There had been so few mirrors at the san and no privacy at any of them. One caught glimpses of oneself only. Now Georgia looked, hard.
My brown beauty
, Seward had called her. And she was, brown. Her skin a honey-brown from lying out in the sun, her hair brown touched with a sun-struck gold, thick and flyaway at her chin. Her eyes, brown with flecks of green. At the san, in her bath, she’d noticed that even her nipples had browned. Somehow she felt this to be the result of Seward’s touch, the sign of their sin on her.

Seward! she thought. How far away, how gone he was! What could she do with her life here that could connect to Seward? That could make any sense of what she and he had done together? What they’d promised each other? She thought of the way he smelled, she
thought of his hungry eyes on her, the way his long fingers felt on her legs. A screen door banged downstairs.

She went back to bed.

When she woke again, it was late afternoon; she could tell by the sun in the western sky out her window. She heard voices below her in the kitchen, and when she came down the back stairs and stepped onto the old linoleum, Mrs. Beston cried out and crossed the room to seize her, to hold her face and look at her, to touch her hair and make her turn around and around and be admired. “You’re a new gal!” she said, with tears in her eyes, and Georgia felt that someone, at last, had seen her, had understood that everything was changed in her life.

They had a little party for her a few days later. It was to be Georgia’s introduction to Mrs. Erskine, and she was both impatient and reluctant to have it happen. Once she’d seen Mrs. Erskine, she knew, it would be real, there could no more be the fleeting sense she allowed herself every now and then that things could just
go on
as they always had.

Mrs. Beston arrived that day “at crack of dawn,” as she said, to clean and get things in order, and Georgia went upstairs right after lunch, to rest and then to dress carefully, to spend a long time fixing her hair, wetting the flyaway strands and pinching them into place.

Mrs. Erskine came in the early afternoon, her car loaded with food, and flowers from her garden, and a cut-glass punch bowl and twenty-five matching cups, all wrapped in tissue in a huge box. She was a slender woman, handsome, Georgia thought as she stepped around the car, with frizzy, prematurely white hair, which she wore pinned into a chignon at the back of her head, under the drooping brim of her straw hat.

She came up the porch stairs and embraced Georgia lightly and gracefully, touching her cool cheek to the younger woman’s for just a moment. “Finally,” she said with satisfaction, as she stepped back. “Though I feel I’ve known you forever, your father’s so crazy about you.” Her voice was light and musical, which seemed strange to
Georgia, she looked so mature, almost matronly. She couldn’t have been more different from Georgia’s mother.

Georgia’s father had come out onto the porch too, and now he stepped forward and, taking Mrs. Erskine’s hands, he kissed her, one of his noisy big busses that got the kiss accomplished while making a joke of it too, Georgia was relieved to note. They all laughed at him, even Mrs. Beston, who’d come out to help unload the car.

Mrs. Erskine was dressed for the party, in a silk print dress and white shoes, but she unpinned her hat and put an apron on and started to work right away. Georgia tried to help, but Mrs. Erskine and Mrs. Beston told her to go away—what a disgrace, to get help from the guest of honor!—so she went and sat on the front porch swing, listening to the clatter of dishes in the house, the footsteps going back and forth, the voices speaking and laughing. At one point she heard Mrs. Erskine call her father. “Davis?” she said in her girlish voice. “Davis, I’ll need help with this table.”

“I’ll be there in two shakes,” he called back from upstairs, and in his words Georgia heard a lightness that hadn’t been there in years, since long before her mother died—a lightness she’d never succeeded in bringing to his life, plainly. And she was glad for him—she was! she thought, as she swung slowly back and forth by herself on the porch.

Who came? Several of her parents’ old friends and some neighbors. Mrs. Erskine had invited her own sister and brother-in-law and their family, so there was a boy Freddie’s age and several slightly younger children, all of whom played wild games in the meadow out back—mown now, Georgia noted. Ada had asked a few people, and several of Georgia’s old schoolmates had come, including Bill March and his fiancée, who was awkward with Georgia at first but then perfectly pleasant to talk to. She and Bill were both full of stories of the university, of people Georgia had known in high school
and had thought she would always know, people whose names were like foreign words to her now.

The house grew crowded and hot and they all brought chairs into the side yard and the women took off their hats and the men their jackets and they sat in the dancing shade under the old maples and drank the punch that Mrs. Beston had made. When the children started a game of tug-of-war, several of the young men and women, including Ada, joined in, but Georgia sat with the adults and watched. It all felt curiously flat to her, though she could tell it was a success and that Mrs. Erskine was pleased. For herself, though, she missed the sense of structure to such events at the san, where there would have been music, or poetry, or a film at the heart of things. That, and the feeling of wildness, of a kind of abandon among the adults that she’d gotten used to. That sense of maleness and femaleness in the air, of what she supposed must be thought of as perversity. The thing that had made it possible for her to become Seward’s lover, to lie down with him shamelessly, over and over.

Sitting here now, hearing her own voice among the others cheering on Ada and Freddie and Bill March and one of the Simpson children, she found it difficult to believe in that other world, in what she had become and done at the san. And yet she could hardly believe in this world either, she felt so cut off from it now. As though this life, these events, were a dream she was living through. When someone spoke to her, when she answered, she half expected bubbles to rise from her mouth, she felt so underwater, she felt she was moving so slowly and thickly through this day.

Would she ever outgrow this? Would her own life become familiar and comfortable to her again, as life in the san eventually had? Or had she made herself unfit for it, with all she’d done, all she’d learned? The shade had deepened as the shadow of the house grew long in the yard.

Of course, she was thinking, it wasn’t her own life anymore, not as she’d known it. Maybe that was all that was the trouble. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to Mrs. Erskine and the way the
house would be run. She looked over at the older woman. One of her nieces was on her lap, facing her with her legs straddling her aunt’s, playing with Mrs. Erskine’s necklace. Mrs. Erskine’s hands met around the child’s bottom. She was talking in her bell-like voice to Mrs. Mitchell, whose chair was next to hers. Both women laughed. Mrs. Erskine’s head tilted back slightly in pleasure. Now the niece’s hands reached up to her aunt’s face. The little girl cupped Mrs. Erskine’s cheeks for a moment, as if to summon her attention. Mrs. Erskine looked down at her, smiled, and bent her head slightly to drop a kiss into one of the little girl’s small palms before she turned back to Mrs. Mitchell.