The World Below (16 page)

She was quiet a moment. She had liked Mr. Briscombe, a short, stout balding man who showed to anyone who would look a single worn photograph he carried of his children, seven of them, all indistinguishable, even male from female, all exactly like smaller versions of him—but with hair, of course. He had given her a book,
The Song of the Lark
, by a writer he thought she ought to know, a woman named Willa Cather, and Georgia had loved it.

“On the other hand,” she said finally, “look at me. I’m already better. I know I am.”

He did look at her with his surprising light eyes, and then he looked quickly away. The wind, which smelled unaccountably salty that day, whistled lightly in the trees.

Could he be right?
Georgia was wondering. Surely it was inconceivable that the whole structure of their lives here was falsely premised. She saw Dr. Holbrooke’s amused eyes, Dr. Rollins’s gentle bearded face. Grown-ups, after all.

No, this was just part of Seward’s darkness, his need, as she saw it, to oppose everything.

In fact, Seward was the first angry person Georgia had ever met, the first person she’d known to express rage at the hand he’d been dealt in life; and she, who was incapable of such an emotion, was drawn to him at least partly on this account. It would have been unusual then in a person his age, this degree of self-confident anger, this argued contempt for the adult educated universe, a universe that Georgia herself, even though she was the older, would never have questioned. It made her admire him, though she still felt the tender, protective pull toward him that his age and his situation demanded.

These were all new feelings for her. Her love for Bill March had been based on the great safety she felt with him, on his familiarity, his predictability. He had been an old friend—a playmate, really—from youth. He was handsome in his thick-jawed way, steady, slightly humorless. When she had imagined marriage with him, which she had allowed herself to do from time to time, she saw them leading a life together that would be a continuation of the lives they had led in their parents’ homes.

The attraction Seward had for her was connected to none of that. To nothing safe, or predictable. To nothing permanent. The bond had to do with his illness itself, and then with his anger against it. And with everything that seemed to her exotic in his history: the journalist father, the exclusive boarding school, his having run away from the san.

With a host, too, of small things about him she would have been embarrassed to acknowledge the power of. The catlike, almost feral green of his eyes. How his long bony fingers looked playing the piano or holding the bagpipes—he was prodigiously musical. His shambling, touching walk. The way he held his shoulders hunched slightly, as though to hide his skinniness. The deep resonance of his voice, surprising in someone so young. A kind of burning, dark energy he conveyed.

In fact, it’s possible it was his dying itself that attracted Georgia. For there was a phenomenon so common in the later stages of
tuberculosis that the doctors had a name for it:
spes pthistica
, a kind of surge of life and false vitality that, oddly, often directly preceded the final decline. It served to exaggerate certain characteristics of Seward’s, to make them more or less
who he was
, for that time, in that isolated place.

The day of the movies was blustery and rainy. Even during the rest period, the women on Georgia’s porch talked, speculating about the evening. What the movie was reported to be. What each person thought she might wear. Whether Mr. Bethke, notoriously fickle, would come after someone else now that Miss Shepard was in the infirmary, doing so badly. Their voices rose from here, from over there, disembodied and muffled through the wet, foggy air and the thick bedding tucked up over their chins.

“I wouldn’t let him get close to me,” Miss Duffy said. “He’s the kiss of death. She’s about the third one he’s loved and outlasted.” Outside, the rain roared dully against the roof and into the wind-whipped trees.

“Watch out, Georgia, you may be next,” someone called.

Georgia hadn’t been talking, partly because she still tried to follow the rules, and partly because she couldn’t speak of what she was thinking of: Seward, Seward.

“Oh, Georgia has other fish to fry,” Miss Duffy said.

“Georgia has
littler
fish to fry.” They laughed.

At the movie, Georgia sat by herself in the back row. Mrs. Priley beckoned her forward with a questioning face, but Georgia shook her head, pointing to the empty chair beside her, and Mrs. Priley nodded, assuming, Georgia hoped, that Seward would be coming to sit there.

Miss Duffy, who accompanied the movies, was warming up on the piano. There was the usual calling back and forth across the rows of chairs, the usual changing and rechanging of seats. (“May I sit here?” Mr. Huls asked eagerly, and Georgia said, “I’m sorry, but I
was asked to save it.”) Then Lewis Lunt, who worked the camera and had one withered leg, began to lurch around the room, turning off the lights, and it grew silent, but for the rippling piano and the occasional seizure of laughter or coughing.

The movie was
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
, a Mack Sennett comedy. Charlie Chaplin was starring, playing a scheming city slicker, and Marie Dressler was Tillie, big and sweetly, awkwardly funny, somehow touching in her hopeful ugliness. About ten minutes into it, they’d come to a scene in which Chaplin and Dressler were precariously balanced on a log fence, flirting and alternating falling off, then scrambling up to their perches again. This was the moment, Georgia thought. She coughed, one burst. Then another. Then a long fit. She stood up and left the room, coughing all the way down the hall, in case anyone was listening.

She opened the front door of the building and stepped out into the wet black uproar outside. She circled around to the back of the san, the terrace side. Her feet and clothes were immediately soaked, so she didn’t think about where she was stepping, just jolted across the flattened hillocks of grass to the cluster of twisted old apple trees. She didn’t look back even once to the terrace windows, behind which the movie’s gray light leapt and flickered. She was straining to see Seward under the trees. It seemed he wasn’t there, and she was thinking she might turn back; then his shape separated itself slightly from the thickest trunk. She had the odd thought that it was as though he’d been part of the tree and were emerging from it. An image from her high school mythology book rose in her mind: Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s love. She ran to where he was and stepped in under the down-bent thick branches.

As she straightened beneath the leafy tent, his arms encircled her, she felt his breath hot on her cheek, her neck. And then, for the first time, he kissed her, his lips hard, pressing into hers, his entire bony body embracing hers. He smelled of his illness, of the brown soap they used at Bryce, of mentholatum, of rain, of flesh and fever
heat. Georgia rose to her toes to push her body against his in hunger and terror and a kind of willed abandon.

Her diary entry for this day reads:

Dreary all day. The movie at night. I stole away and met Seward as he had asked me to, amongst the apple trees in the pouring rain. We went to the little gardener’s shed together. Soaked. We took off our wet things. I belong to him forever now.

Eight

M
y grandmother gave me a diary once. A four-year diary, like the one she’d kept in her youth and young womanhood. It was on my birthday the first year I lived with them, and I remember her carefully explaining its virtues to me—how, if you kept it religiously, you could look back and get a picture of yourself living your own life: the way you’d grown or changed over the years. If she was disappointed that I didn’t really use it, she never said so.

When she explained it, she told me about the journals she’d kept, about how strictly she’d held herself to the daily task when she was young, even when she didn’t feel like it, even when she was sick and exhausted and wanted only to sleep, to sleep forever at the end of each busy day. She drew a picture for me then of herself, the only one awake in her father’s house. How she had loved that, the delicious sense of being aware of herself, as she wasn’t in the course of the day. Aware of her feelings and of herself as the one feeling them. And then she said dismissively, “Oh, you know how it is when you first think of yourself as at the center of your own universe. Maybe even somehow its creator. That was me all over.”

It was then too that she told me about the prohibition against reading and writing the first weeks at the san, and how looking at the blank pages that stood for that time in her diary hurt her. “Though maybe those empty slots were just as good as words in some ways. Some things just feel empty, I suppose, and that time—those first weeks in the san—they surely did to me.”

It hadn’t occurred to me then that her diaries might still exist. Though if I’d thought about the way my grandparents lived–the careful preservation of everything: string, wrapping paper, corks, old clothes, old furniture–I might have wondered, anyway. As it was, it was almost by accident that I found them.

The first weekend I was in Vermont, I got sick. I could feel it descending Sunday afternoon, an afternoon I
did
spend driving down country roads, stopping in one place to pick my own apples—I remember standing on the wooden ladder, reaching through the gnarled, scaly branches, feeling a kind of pride in the way I was embracing my new life, stepping out into my new world. And then in the car, on the way home, it began: the dry throat, the tight chest. I could tell it was going to be bad.
Amazing
, I thought with a kind of detached wonderment, as though it were happening to someone else.
Amazing. It arrives
.
It descends
.

By the time I got home, I was feverish, and I went directly to bed. Through the night I slept and woke, getting up to take aspirin and drink water whenever I felt the fever and chills begin again. And one of the times just after the fever had faded, while I lay there in my grandmother’s bed enjoying that welling gratitude you experience at simply feeling
better
, I started to think about illness itself. About how fearlessly we get sick now. It’s innocent, our sickness. We’re used to its meaning nothing. Miserable as we may be, we know
its just a little flu, its just a cold
. There’s no sense of mortality connected with the experience, none of the terror of death that was
part: of falling ill when my grandmother was young. “Fit as a fiddle one morning and gone the next.”

I pondered childbirth, which I’d so thoughtlessly undertaken three times. Always with fear of the pain, it’s true, always with the anxiety that I would not endure it well, that I would somehow shame myself before the assembled multitudes in the delivery room (and why were there always so many people in there? to this day I don’t understand it) but never with the idea in my mind that I might die in the process. Or
from
the process, later. Never.

Polio, I supposed, was the last of the illnesses that might have frightened me that way, and my memories of it were vague. It was the putative reason for our trips east each summer, for our long stays away from my father at my grandparents’ house. West Barstow was, we understood, somehow a cleaner place, a safer place than home. A place where we could play freely with the other kids and swim in the dammed-up river and run out together in the evenings with clear glass jars to catch fireflies, all without fear of infection.

And then suddenly that fear was gone too—banished: the iron lung, the wheelchair, the thick hinged braces. It seemed there was nothing that could threaten you that doctors couldn’t cure.

How different life was for my grandmother! How full of terror she must have been at every fever she had, every cough, every flushed cheek. How frightening were childbirth and infancy; she lost one child before he was a year old. Death lurked everywhere—death, and blame.

And then to have my mother succumb, as she saw it, to dementia, so long after she thought that job was well done. How terrifying it must have been, the remoteness of my mother’s tranced face in her adolescence, her bewitched conversations about the instructions she had received and her need to proceed in certain ways. (That first time, in college, it was renunciation—no food, no bathing, no brushing her hair or teeth, no changing her clothes.)

And how tiny, how weak, my grandmother’s arsenal was against anything. Bed rest. Rich foods. A daily nap. She herself took one all
her life, just after the lunch dishes were washed and put away. The whole house fell silent in order not to disturb her sleep. I chafed under this regimen when I lived with them. I remember my restlessness in my hot room under the eaves in summer, sweating, listening to the buzzing of the hornets in their nest outside the window, idly touching myself sexually while I waited for release from the stillness and heat. “Well, thank goodness that’s over,” my grandmother would say briskly when she reappeared smelling of rosewater, her hair neatly repinned—ready for battle, as my grandfather put it.