The World Below (9 page)

Now she had no sense of the impact of her sad story, no sense of the harsh judgments the doctor was making with every detail she offered. Cheerfully, she went on. “I should be ashamed, I suppose,” she said. She’d just told him that she let Ada and Freddie read at the table at supper, that nearly any book you opened in the house would slide its load of crumbs onto your lap. “The mice actually eat them sometimes: the books!”

“Shame doesn’t enter in,” he told her. He raised his hand as if to sweep the notion away, and she saw how long and elegant they were, his hands. Prettier than her own, she thought, looking down at her chewed-off nails.

The doctor had never liked Georgia’s father. He’d been shocked, actually, by the arrangements made—or not made—during Fanny’s illness: that an invalid should be in charge of the household, that the children were left alone with her at night. As he made notes now on his patient’s case, he was already beginning to think in terms of rescue: what could be done, even if this young woman were not truly ill, to extricate her from the unsuitable demands of her situation, from the way that cavalier, shallow man, her father, was robbing her of her youth and health.

She in turn was moved, thrilled by his concern, his gentle voice asking questions, his eyes on her, amused and kind. Even the fact that he wrote down what she said, as though each detail of her ordinary life were of great interest to him, thrilled her. Solicitude! It was nothing she was used to. She felt it as a balm poured over her. She turned and preened under it. She told him more than she’d meant to, more than she’d told anyone, even Bill March, about the exact state of things at home, about her lonely, proud life.

Then, the undressing. For her, it was, of course, difficult, but probably no more difficult than the notion of undressing before any other doctor would have been. Any of them would have been a man, after all. Oh, she’d noted he was handsome. She’d loved his
tender attentiveness to her. But he was old, to her. He was thirty-nine at this time, and she was just nineteen.

She sat in her white cotton petticoat and chemise on the examining bench, and when he asked her to, she slid the wide straps down off her shoulders and eased her arms out. The chemise was bunched at her waist now, and her shoulders curved forward, as though she were trying to hide her breasts. She
was
trying to hide her breasts.

He was faced the other way while she did this. When he turned around to cross to her, he was already lifting his stethoscope. He didn’t meet her glance.

For him, this was a moment of almost breathless suspension, a moment in which he recognized what he felt for her, what he’d felt for her even when she stood in the field those summer afternoons nearly four years earlier, the sun lighting her from behind—stopped, watching him as he went into the house. Counting on him, as he felt it, to be able to do something, to help her—which, of course, he could not. He found her inexpressibly lovely now, with her pale face, her pale skin—her nipples and nostrils touched with the same faint pinkish hue, the dimmed blue tracery of veins in her breasts, the smooth sheen of the skin of her incurved white shoulders, the weighted pull of the pinned-up brown hair, the wisped loop of it fallen loose, straying freely over her back. He lifted the stethoscope. He touched her flesh, hot with fever.

He examined her silently, gravely, his eyes always averted from hers. She breathed deeply for him. She coughed. She felt his cool dry fingertips as he tap-tapped against her hollow-sounding chest.

When he was done, he stood on the other side of the office to inform her that he thought she should take a tuberculin skin test, that it seemed possible she’d been infected somehow. She’d gotten dressed again, and her hand rose to her bosom when he said this. It rested where his fingers too had touched her. He leaned against his oak file cabinet and looked at that hand, work-roughened but still so young. He was thinking about her breasts, her lungs beneath
them. She agreed to the test, trying to sound lighthearted and unafraid, but his words had been like a blow to her.

As she unbuttoned her sleeve to expose the flesh of her arm to him to be scratched, he was talking. She would have to come back again in three days to have the test read—Saturday. Was there someone who could bring her again then?

Her father, she said.

Though a part of her understood what it meant as soon as it began to rise—the reddened swelling on her forearm where Dr. Holbrooke had tested her—Georgia hoped she was wrong, she hoped perhaps it wasn’t quite red
enough
, quite swollen
enough
to indicate anything serious. By Dr. Holbrooke’s grave face when he looked at it on Saturday, she saw that she’d been wrong to indulge this hope.

And then it was all happening too fast for her. He was telling her father she couldn’t live at home any longer, that she needed to rest, to gather her strength to fight the illness. She needed further tests: fluoroscopic examinations, sputum slides. He wanted to send her directly to the sanatorium from his office.

“Oh, no, not today!” she cried. She looked to her father for help and saw that none would be coming. There was something already fixed and sorrowful, closed off to her, in his wide, boyish face.

She looked at the doctor. “I just can’t today,” she pleaded.

He smiled gently back. “Why not?”

Why not? There was too much to do. And she began to list her duties: the school clothes that needed mending, the rugs to beat, the Sunday dinner to fix tomorrow, the trip to buy groceries planned for this afternoon, after her appointment here. But as she spoke, as the image of each task rose in her mind, it was not so much they but the unspoken pictures she was barely conscious of that pulled her: her long delicious nights alone, the close air of the bedroom she shared with Ada, the way it looked by lamplight, the wild freedom of her solitude, the gleeful preparation for Friday
night, the gargling sound of her father’s motorcar pulling into the shed. How could she give any of it up? How could she go away? She just couldn’t, not today.

When she was done with her public list—her list of chores—he smiled kindly at her again. “But you see,” he said, “this is precisely why you have to go.”

He had made all the arrangements, it turned out. He had done this because he wanted to be prepared in case the test was positive to fend off any protests by her father. He wanted to be ready to present her going away, if that’s what was required, as a fait accompli.

As it happened, her father was quietly grateful that it could all be taken care of so easily, so quickly. He turned to his daughter, and he too began gently to insist: she had to go, there was to be no questioning, no arguing about this. It was something she must do for all of them.

Holbrooke watched him speaking to his daughter. All the ease and joviality were erased from the man’s wide, fleshy face. He looked stricken, actually. Ashy. For a moment only, then, the doctor allowed himself to think of the other man’s losses, of the fear he must be experiencing. To feel sorry for him.

There are only a few pictures of Georgia at the sanatorium, taken by friends, I suppose, or by Ada or her father when they came to visit her; and then, later, at the end of her stay, by the man she married—her doctor. Dr. Holbrooke. My grandfather. The difference between her image in these pictures and those of her in her earlier life is a revelation. In the old days she wore long dresses, white in the summer, dark plaids or stripes or solid colors for winter. She kept her hair parted in the middle, pulled back into braids or, later, in a bun at her neck, fastened often with a long, drooping ribbon. She had a radiant, open smile: a girl’s smile.

The san remade her. Of course, the way other women looked and acted changed too, with the end of a kind of national innocence;
everyone, after the war, was moving into a newly made world. But clearly my grandmother embraced the change eagerly, chose it. Her hair in the san pictures has been cropped and blows in loose curls around her face. Sitting in the sun in a cure chair on the open terrace has lightened it, so that in these faded photographs she looks suddenly blond. She wears the new narrow skirts of midcalf length and a long baggy sweater jacket. A scarf is flung carelessly around her neck. She is laughing in several of these pictures, she is self-consciously flirting with the camera. She looks the way I remember her looking later in life too: confident, poised, self-contained.

She said not, though. She said she was nervous as a cat, wild with constant strained emotion. “I was kind of crazy, I think,” she told me once. “We all were. And of course, everyone was in love, even the ones who were dying. Even some of the patients we thought of as the old folks, strange to say, had their romances.
Romance
.” She weighted the word oddly. Then she smiled, what seemed a sad smile. “It was how we managed to get by from day to day.”

The way I used to think of it, her stay in the san, the way she described it to us, was as if it were a long voyage on a boat—that same forced intimacy of the small private world within the larger one. The enormous emerging importance of people you might not pay a moment’s attention to if your life were your own.

She felt that—that her life was not her own. And she hadn’t brought anything with her to help her remember her old life, her arrival was so rushed. It wasn’t until the third day there that her father and Ada arrived with several boxes of things they had packed for her. In them, the quilt from her bed at home, pieced by her grandmother. Her clean monthly cloths, folded and wrapped discreetly by Ada in a wool shawl. A few dresses, a few sweaters, quantities of the necessary undergarments. Her three-month baby picture in her mother’s arms, her mother “fat as a pig,” in her own words. Cookies made by Ada and her four-year diary, which she was in the last year of.

She had been a faithful diarist, and she would feel an ache whenever she opened these pages to the empty days she’d missed when she was first sent away and then when she wasn’t allowed to write in the san. Her first entry after the almost monthlong blank:

April 14. A lovely day, but chilly. News: I’m ill, the doctor says, and must stay here, in Bryce Sanatorium, until I get well. I worry about Ada and Fred, but Father says not to, maybe he’ll marry some nice widow to take my place, ha-ha! I cried for several days at first, but then he and Ada brought all my things and lightened my spirits. Still, I’ve been gloomy since then.

On the same day three years before:

Lovely day. After school I weeded and turned over the vegetable patch. Father will bring the seeds home on Friday, so it’s good to be ready. Mother had a bad night. Mrs. Beston left Spanish rice for supper. Fred wouldn’t eat it.

Two years before:

Strangely warm today. We ate lunch outside at school, though we kept our coats on, and John Mitchell sat with me and asked me to go bicycling with him. I am cutting down an old dress of Mother’s for Ada to have—the soft brown wool she wore for best in winter. At first Ada said she didn’t want it, but now she sees how pretty it will be, she does.

And the year before:

A gray day, wintry and sullen. Winnie told me she is engaged! To Harold of course. It’s still a secret. She will marry in the fall if he doesn’t have to go to war—and surely it will be over by then, with all our boys headed over! She would like me to be maid of honor. I’ve said that I will be pleased to. She’s already planning it out. We’re all to be in apple green taffeta, she thinks. Not my best color, but I don’t complain, I am so happy for her.

Georgia’s father married again just after she was released from the sanatorium—as it happened, the widow he’d joked about had been real. A little over three months after that, Georgia became engaged to my grandfather, and they were married too, after a scandalously short engagement. Looking casually at this history, you might have thought that she’d arranged a life that repeated itself, that she was again offering herself as a caregiver to a much older man. But that wasn’t the nature of the relationship as I remember it.

My grandfather did seem very old to me when I was a girl; he was in his seventies then. But in spite of this, it was he who seemed the caretaker in the family: he was always completely protective and solicitous of my grandmother. It was as though she were a fragile blossom, as though she could be easily damaged. Which seemed strange to me. For she was—everyone who knew her said so—the most flirtatious, the most playful, the most energetic of women. He was the one who seemed vulnerable: frail and shaky.

My grandfather was white-haired and tall. He bent slightly forward from the hips when he walked, and he walked stiffly. His hands trembled, rising to any task, though in its execution he was always steady and precise. In the evenings he read, Hardy or George Eliot, occasionally Raymond Chandler, but mostly his favorite, Dickens. At some point his breathing would begin to thicken, the book would slip from his hands, and his head would drop forward. “Give him a poke, lovey,” my grandmother would say, passing through the room on her way to some duty. “It’s too early for bed, and he’s not in it.”

And my brother or I would cross the room and gently, almost fearfully, shake his shoulder till he woke.

“Ah! Thank you, my dear,” he’d say, and pick up the trembling book again.

But still, it was he who hovered gently around her, who reminded her to rest each day. Who took us out, away, so she could do so, always with the same line: “Your gran needs her beauty sleep.”

But what could I know of them then, or of their marriage, really? My old grandmother, my very old grandfather. I saw only what they wanted to show me, what they chose to show the world. And they were as careful about this as they were about what they wore—about
dressing
each day, for instance. It mattered, I think, that my grandfather arose each morning and put on a jacket and tie, even long after he retired. That my grandmother wore a dress—or a skirt and blouse—and stockings and shoes with a moderate heel. Every single day. (These stockings were held up by a girdle or a garter belt, never panty hose. You could glimpse this elaborate arrangement every now and then if she sat awkwardly, and you saw these things pinned on the line in the summertime—businesslike, glaringly white: no-nonsense. Though there was something humorous, I always thought, in the way the tabs danced so gaily, so promiscuously, in the wind.)