The World Below (29 page)

Then he saw her lying with a faceless male figure. He thought of certain ways she had touched him—he had been so grateful, so surprised!—and imagined her doing that to someone else. Made himself imagine it, carefully and thoroughly.

And then hated himself for that. Where was his magnanimity now? his forgiveness?

He loved her. He loved her, did he not? She was exactly who she had always been.

He went home after dark again. Again the bedroom door was shut. He slept in the living room. In the morning, he woke to her noises in the kitchen. He smelled brewed coffee. He got up and carefully shaved and dressed. When he went into the kitchen, he saw that she had set his place for breakfast. She had poured him orange juice and coffee. She was at the stove, her back to him.

“Good morning, John,” she said.

“Good morning,” he answered. He noticed that the purple hollyhocks just outside the window were about to burst into tissuey bloom. A fat bee knocked against the screen. She turned slightly and asked him how he wanted his eggs.

“Scrambled and done to the death,” he said, and saw her faint quick smile.

They didn’t speak of their quarrel again for a long, long time.

Twelve

S
amuel Eliasson knew my magical lake, he told me. The Quabbin. The Quabbin Reservoir. It was in western Massachusetts, almost due south of us. The towns that had been flooded were the very towns he was writing about, towns that had disappeared when they dammed up a meandering river called the Swift. They had been sacrificed so that Boston—ever growing, ever thirstier—could have a ready supply of drinking water. It was their sad stories he was telling in his essays.

This was in November. We were celebrating the end of the football season with a fancy dinner I’d cooked, the first complicated entertaining I’d done in West Barstow. I’d had to shop for some equipment at an expensive kitchen store in Rutland: a good sharp chopping knife, individual soufflé dishes, and wineglasses. I’d invited Leslie too, and her husband, and one of the women I’d come to know in my reading group at the library, Lydia Porter. She was lively and near Samuel’s age. It seemed to me he might like her. It was an odd number, but Joe always used to say that odd was good at a dinner party—less predictable.

I’d spent the better part of two days cooking. It reminded me of all the meals Joe and I had made together, and the sense of our life
then as an ongoing festive celebration of wine and food and friendship. It made me remember the relief I’d slowly come to feel about all that after it was over and food had become simply fuel again, as it had been earlier in my life, when getting the kids fed and on to their homework was my only goal in making a meal. But here I was, chopping, sautéeing, simmering a stock, all with a pleasure I thought I’d left behind me.

They were dazzled—or they claimed to be, anyway. Actually I was dazzled myself, and pleased I could still do it. I ate more ravenously than my guests.

Afterward we sat around the table drinking coffee, the lights dim, the fat white candles burned low, the empty dessert plates pushed aside. Prodded by Leslie, by her curiosity about the house and my grandparents, I was talking about how I’d come to live here. I began reminiscing and found myself telling the tale of the mysterious underwater village my grandfather had taken me to, and of how I had somehow thought of France as being connected to it-a place, anyway, as dreamy and remote and promising.

And Samuel said he knew it.

I was delighted. I wanted to go. Would he take me there?

Of course, he said. It would be his pleasure. He made a little bow with his upper body. And so much easier than a football game. “Except,” he said, “you should prepare yourself. There are no buildings.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “The buildings are the whole point.”

“Well, the buildings are the whole
myth?
” he said. “People talk about them and write about them and imagine they’ve seen them, but they’re not there. They don’t exist.”

“But I saw them. I’ll never forget how they looked. You can’t invent such a thing. I saw them.”

“So you say.”

I leaned forward on the table. “Are you telling me I imagined it?”

“I wouldn’t dare do a thing like that.”

“You are, though.”

He turned his cup in its saucer. “Look, here’s the story, Cath,” he said. “It’s a
reservoir
—that’s what you have to remember. The water is used for drinking. It has to be pristine. They couldn’t leave the buildings there to rot. There were pollutants. Lead pipes. Lead paint. Refuse. Chemicals—from liveries and tanneries and cattle. They even had to scrape the topsoil away. Everything was razed and burned. It’s gone. Oh, they saved a church or two. Moved them. They dug up the cemeteries and reburied the dead. But the rest is just not there. Not anywhere.”

“But I’ve heard it too, what Cath says,” Leslie broke in. “That you can see buildings on a clear day if the water’s still. Haven’t you heard that?” She turned to her husband, a large, mostly silent man: Sid.

He wasn’t quick enough. “We’ve all heard that,” Samuel said, “because, I suspect, it’s such a great story. It just doesn’t happen to be true.”

I shook my head. “I swear I saw it. That we both saw it, my grandfather and I. We
talked
about it. I remember.”

“But that’s the way memory works,” Samuel said. “We supply the picture demanded by our imagination. And slowly, over time, it becomes
what was
. This is a big problem for historians.” One of the candles sputtered suddenly, the flame wavered, and the shadows shifted on all our faces.

“Lord,” Lydia said after a moment. “Can you imagine the stink that would be raised if they tried to submerge Barstow? What’s amazing to me is how on earth they were able to get away with it.”

Samuel raised his hand and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. “Money,” he said. “The government bought them out, of course. And the towns were moribund anyway. The whole area was moribund. People desperately needed the money that the government offered.” His face, in the candlelight, was lively with the pleasure of telling his tale; the dots of candlelight danced in his eyes. “Enough people, anyway, needed the money. They wanted it. They wanted to go somewhere else and start over. That old American story. So
there wasn’t a lot left to defend for those who were so inclined. Though there were some who didn’t want any part of it. Much anger. Much bitterness. People who said they’d stay, you know, they’d choose to drown in their homes. Attempted sabotage, even, of the dam. All to no avail, of course. The die was cast by then.” He leaned back in his chair. “And in a certain sense, all those towns had already been abandoned anyway. Really, all of New England had.”

“No they hadn’t,” I objected. “I was here. My grandparents were here.”

“Well.” He smiled at me. “We’ll adjust for that. But really, the period of the actual flourishing of New England—that was very short. The minute the railroads opened the Midwest, the population in all these little farm villages started to drop. You can trace it in the town rolls, just watch it happen year by year all over New England. As economically viable entities, they were dying very soon after they were born. What we think of as New England is really mostly just memory. Nostalgia for what had been. What, actually, in the grand sweep of time, had
barely
been.”

He shook his head.

“No, once the middle of the country was easy to get to, there was no point in trying to squeeze a living out of these hilly, rocky fields, and most people of ambition or gumption figured that out and moved on. So there was a way in which, for the folks in those towns around the Quabbin, it was just the coup de grace. To be expected.”

“Still. Imagine. It must have been so hard.” This was Lydia.

“I’m sure it was,” he said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Damn it!” I said. “It’s what I remember. I hate to admit I could be so mistaken.”

Samuel’s voice was gentle. “Don’t we sometimes
want
to believe things? Want it so badly that we actually feel we’ve experienced them?”

I looked at him. His head was tilted a little, looking at me. I
smiled. “That’s a coercive
we
you’re using, Samuel,” I said. “I’ve been a teacher too, you know. You can’t trick me so easily.” I shook my finger at him.

He smiled back. “All right,” he said. “All right, we’ll go. We’ll look. Then we’ll argue again. And you’ll concede that an old man may sometimes be right.”

“Oh, an old man! What a posture!” I looked around, to make the others join me in my amusement, and realized that they were watching us. Watching Samuel and me together. Taking us in.

I felt flustered, suddenly. But Samuel had sat up, he was talking again, talking to the table at large. Had he noticed too? Was he trying to deflect their attention?

“It’s a fascinating saga, really, even if it doesn’t have the buildings. The idea of that submerged lost history. I find it fascinating, at any rate. Full of its own compelling detail. For instance, there are roads, old local roads.” He turned to me. “We can see them when we’re there. And they just run down under the water. Trail off, as it were.” He crooked his finger slowly inward. “Beckoning.” He’d made his voice creepy too.

Leslie laughed. “Come, come to me,” she croaked.

“Exactly,” he said.

Samuel left with the rest; he’d offered to help me clean up but I said I’d rather do it on my own. I could imagine the other three standing outside if he stayed, talking and laughing about it before they got in their cars. “Well,
that was
certainly interesting!” “A little something going on
there
!” They would talk eventually anyway, I knew that, but perhaps with not quite as much assurance if Samuel left with them. They’d have to be more speculative, more curious about the possibility.

But I found myself, as I was cleaning up, thinking again about the possibility too. Samuel? Samuel and me? It seemed clear to me now that he
was
interested. Was I?

It wouldn’t be so strange. Many couples had such an age difference between them, especially later in life. And what was the age difference, after all? Twenty or twenty-five years, perhaps?

I thought of Joe, marrying someone fifteen years younger than he was. We’d joked about it in the end, he and I, and then the kids and I, but it didn’t seem so preposterous to anyone but Fiona. She, of course, was deeply offended by everything about it.

Did it seem too preposterous to me? I didn’t know. As I slid the dishes into the soapy water, I let myself try to imagine how it would be to—I suppose—
date
Samuel. To be involved with him. I thought, of course, of sex too. But I must confess, it was the Samuel in the book jacket picture I saw then moving with me in some abstract space, not the real Samuel, the Samuel who reminded me of my grandfather.

Qpabbin wasn’t my dream lake. Vast, choppy that day, it seemed oceanic compared to my memory of the quiet green body of water, so much of it visible, that my grandfather had taken me to. Mountainous dark islands rose in this lake’s midst, and the water stretched away blue and cold-looking as far as the eye could see. The moment I saw it I felt a sense of disappointment that I connected, unfairly I knew, to Samuel. I think I had somehow imagined coming again upon my magical pond in his company and … what?

I wasn’t sure. Just that I had wanted our relationship to be connected with that moment in my life, in my past. I had thought of it as affirming in some way what seemed to be beginning, what seemed to be possible, between us.

No, I said. No, this wasn’t it at all.

Samuel wouldn’t accept my denial. He argued with me. He thought we just needed to find an inlet, a cove, a smaller, more sheltered corner, and then I’d see that he was right. We drove along the shore, Samuel talking, me silent and resentful, I suppose. We stopped here and there. We came to one of the disappearing roads
he’d spoken of. We parked and walked down toward the water. Next to the road there was a grove of naked birches, the papery white trunks slender and lissome. Our feet made a rustling noise on their fallen yellow leaves as we walked. The water lapped at the road where it disappeared into the reservoir.

“Now,” Samuel said. “You were probably in some protected inlet like this, don’t you think? Something that made it feel smaller, more … lakelike.” The wind pushed against us. Samuel’s nose was red. Mine also, I suppose. He wore a bright red scarf too, knotted around his throat, and its ends danced and flapped at his shoulders.

“No.” I shook my head. “This just isn’t it.”

He smiled at me and then turned away. We stood side by side for a moment, looking out over the water. “You are a very stubborn woman, aren’t you, Cath?” he said then.

Don’t, I wanted to say. Don’t. “I wouldn’t have said so, no,” I answered miserably.

“I would.” He waited.

Or I think he was waiting. Waiting for me to concede. To agree with him. And a part of me wanted to, just to have it over with. Because I knew suddenly that he wouldn’t give up. Give in. There simply wasn’t a chance of his acknowledging that I might know what I was talking about. It seemed to me to connect with his age—this assurance on his part that he had to be right, that my denying what he felt to be true had to be a kind of childish, womanish resistance to him. I thought of his wife, the sense he had that she’d disapproved of him somehow. Maybe that was what she’d come to, having been lovingly bullied this way, over and over. Withdrawal. We all know the meanness possible in it. The
disapproval.