The World Below (17 page)

She told me she used to send my mother to her room when she spoke of the voices directing her. “I’d tell her, ‘I don’t want to hear another word about it, Dolly. There’s nobody talking here but you and me, and until you can see that plainly, I want you to sit up there and think hard about it, and I don’t want you to come out until you’ve calmed down.’ Poor girl, as though she could help any of it.”

This fear, the fear that I’d pass this contamination, this disorder, on to my children, did cross my mind often, especially in their teens, which I’d learned by then was when schizophrenia frequently makes its first appearance. But each of them progressed through that period, sometimes angry or odd but clearly
healthy
. It gave me, I must say, a certain distance on whatever difficulties they did have, a distance that sometimes made them wild with irritation. “Don’t you even
care?”
Karen yelled at me once, when I didn’t get angry over Jeff’s missing a curfew.

How to explain? I didn’t, really.

Toward dawn, I slept. I woke in daylight, fevered again, to the noise of the knocker.

I decided to ignore it. It was just someone being neighborly—maybe the charming Mrs. Chick. Or a delivery. They’d leave a note, I told myself. They’d come again.

And then I heard people in the house. I was startled for a few seconds, but then I recognized the voice doing most of the talking:
Leslie. Leslie Knox, the real estate agent—of course!—leading the New York couple in. I thought of the dishes I’d left out in the kitchen—too late. Quickly I got up and opened the curtains, threw the clothes scattered around the room into a drawer, and put on my robe. I climbed back into bed, flapping and smoothing the covers over me. An orderly sickroom: the most I could be asked to offer, I thought, in my condition.

They took a long time downstairs. I could hear Leslie’s voice rising and falling, the murmur of a question every now and then setting her going once more. When they arrived at the top of the stairs, I called to her. She appeared in the doorway, groomed, coiffed, a black-and-white scarf knotted flamboyantly over the shoulder of her tweed jacket.

“Oh, poor thing, you should have
phoned
!?” she said, when I explained I had the flu.

“I forgot you were coming, honestly,” I croaked.

She insisted they didn’t need to look in the bedroom at all. “Oh, no, no, no, no. We’re just getting the
idea
here, since the house isn’t even on the market. I’ll just shut the door, how’s that, and we’ll poke around super-quick up here and get out of your
hair
.” The door closed behind her and then opened. “What do you need? I’ll pop by later with soup and stuff.”

Nothing, nothing, I assured her. She clucked some more, and I could hear her after she’d shut me in. “Can you believe it? And here we are. Oh, well, we’ll just take a quick peek around. Now this is the bath. Huge, isn’t it? Because it was converted, of course, from an old bedroom. You could do a lot with this space, not that it doesn’t already have a certain country charm.…”

After they’d left—the front door banging and Leslie’s voice rising from outside now—I got up to get more aspirin. I stood in the bathroom a moment, looking from there back into the attic rooms, trying to see everything as the New Yorkers might have. It was then I noticed that the narrow door in what had been Lawrence’s room—a door that led to the attic storage area—had been left
open. I went to close it. Once there, though, I stepped on impulse into the attic. It was dark and cold. I reached my hand out, swung it in the thick air, and caught the pull chain. The feeble light went on, and I nearly cried out. There, placed on two trunks, staring at me gimlet-eyed and unfriendly and nightmarishly larger than I’d remembered them, were the great blue heron and the badger from my grandfather’s office. I stood, my hand on my pounding chest, staring back for several seconds.

When I’d calmed down a little, I looked around. There were four or five old trunks shoved back under the eaves and some laundry cases stacked up in a corner. There were the animals, of course, and my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine and her trim but buxom dress form. There were two drunken-looking chairs with broken legs, one a Queen Anne with a dusty needlepoint seat. There were some rolled-up rugs and smaller scattered rolls of what looked like wallpaper. There were various cardboard boxes of stuff, one labeled, for instance,
FRAGILE
:
ORNAMENTS
.

So this was where it had all gone: what the Duchess hadn’t sold, what didn’t fit in the new decor. I felt a kind of warm, growing pleasure of possession, of appetite. It was all still here, then—my past, my mother’s past, my grandparents’ life.

When I’d shut the door behind me and gone back to bed, I lay there daydreaming of the treasure for a while before I fell asleep again.

A few days later, recovered except for a periodic sag of fatigue, I carried the heron and the badger out to the hall. In daylight they looked particularly pathetic, like very old, very sick animals, but I wanted them downstairs somewhere anyway, reminding me of how things had been.

The trunks, I discovered, were all locked—against the tenants, perhaps, or thieves. I explored the house for likely keys. There were none, only extra house keys and skeleton keys for the inner doors.
In the end I took a screwdriver upstairs and used it to pop the locks, feeling a vandal’s recklessness as I heard the mechanisms yield within.

The first trunk held woolens. An old suit of my grandfather’s, sweaters, a few thick blankets I remembered from childhood—late in the summer, as the nights began to grow cold, they’d emerge, smelling of camphor. As they did now, the heavy fabrics, when I lifted them out. In the very bottom was one of those fox stoles elegant women like my grandmother wore in the forties and fifties, the fox’s head still attached, the lower jaw fixed with springs. To keep the stole in place, you arranged it so the fox, who in this case was slightly cross-eyed, bit his own tail. “It’s not enough that he’s dead,” my grandfather used to say. “He’s got to look idiotic for all eternity too.”

“Mere commentary,” my grandmother would say. She said this to him often, and it always made him laugh in response.

I put the woolens back and turned to the next trunk. It was full of papers, mostly bank statements, check registers, tax forms, and bills, all arranged in labeled folders:
HOUSEHOLD
,
AUTOMOBILE
,
HOBBIES
,
CHILDREN
,
WEDDINGS
. I set these last two files aside to look at more carefully later.

Another trunk held linens: pressed napkins and pillowcases and runners and tablecloths, delicately browned over time. The remaining trunks and the laundry cases contained more linens, some legal documents, bundles of letters from their children and grandchildren, neatly sorted—I recognized my own handwriting in one stack, my mother’s in another. Here was a dissecting kit; a tarnished clarinet, carefully taken apart and laid in its case; a tackle box, the flies arranged in rows, like colorful botanical specimens. The Christmas ornaments, as promised, old-fashioned and simple.

The last trunk held elaborate old undergarments and nightgowns that must have been my grandmother’s as a young woman. I lifted up a chemise, a long full petticoat with a crocheted hem. It occurred to me that these were just the kinds of things that Fiona would wear, not as undergarments but as clothing. And she was
coming to visit Columbus Day weekend. I put them back. We could go through them together then.

I was tired by now. I took some of the packets of letters with me—mine among them, of course. It wasn’t until Fiona’s visit a month later that I ventured into the attic again.

She came up on the train from New York on Friday. I drove to Rutland to pick her up. I hadn’t been on a train in years, and just being in the station made me nostalgic. Fiona herself was wildly excited by the trip, chattering away practically as she stepped onto the platform about how awesome it had been, the view into all those towns and places you’d never see otherwise. “But I mean their
backsides
, Mom,” she said.

I hadn’t seen her since early in the summer, when she’d been home for a few weeks before she started a job back east. She’d gotten thinner, and her hair had grown out quite a bit from the virtual crew cut she’d had the year before. She looked lovely to me. She was small and sprightly and had her father’s delicate skin and features. She wore a big sheepskin coat that flapped open over the shortest possible skirt, black tights, and big boots. She carried a backpack that she heaved into the rear of the car before she got in.

When she’d fastened her safety belt, she turned sideways to look at me behind the wheel and said, “Tell all,
s’il vous plaît
.”

I laughed; this was so typical of her. She was my last child and by far the most outgoing, the sunniest. Life, she clearly felt, had been arranged for her pleasure. She was open and curious and interested in everyone. As a little girl, she used to drag home the most unlikely playmates; in high school, her friends included the nerds as well as the popular kids. “Fiona casts a wide net,” we used to say after meeting yet another of her adoptees.

“No, you tell me,” I said. And she did. Some of it anyway. By the time we got home I knew about the piercing place she’d gone to for her ears (
PAIN
OPTIONAL
, the sign said), about what you
could play on the jukebox at her favorite bar
(“Lili Marlene”;
“Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”), about the boy she’d dated in the summer, the boy she was dating now, and uh—oh, yes!—about her courses.

We went into the attic the next morning, and as I had hoped, she was wild about the old underthings. Together we pulled out the pieces of white cotton, and as she claimed them—the eyelet camisoles would be lovely tops, the nightgowns with crocheted straps and bodices the most delicate of summer dresses, the hemstitched petticoats long pretty white skirts—as she cried out over them and pulled one or two on over her jeans and sweater, I thought of my grandmother in her youth, the pinned-up heavy hair, the pale smooth skin, the trim small body, putting on this one or that. They would be pretty on Fiona too, even though it was an odd combination—Fiona, with her multiple earrings and geometrically cut hair, her unplucked eyebrows, her wine-red lipstick, wearing the pretty underclothes of another era as summer finery.

We emptied the top tray in the trunk and lifted it out. We worked our way down through the second level. “More, more. I’m a greedy girl,” Fiona said, reaching for the handles of the second tray and lifting it out.

We looked in. No more clothing. Just a quilt, old and faded. “Phooey,” she said.

“But it’s lovely, Fee. Look.” I bent over it. And as I lifted it out, three or four things slid out from its folds back into the trunk, thunking the bottom as they fell.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Fiona said, peering in. “Hey, books!” She reached down and scooped several up. They were small, leather-bound, in black and dark red. She opened one. I could see the pale ink, the rhythmic cursive writing.

“God, they’re diaries!” I said. I bent into the trunk for another one. It was a square brown book, a young girl’s diary, clearly; the handwriting inside was childish. I recognized the name on the flyleaf as belonging to one of my grandmother’s aunts. Interspersed
with the short entries were faint drawings done in pencil: houses, long vistas, flowers.

I bent down again and lifted out a set of small thin notebooks, tied together with ribbon. I undid them and opened the top one. It was my great-great-grandmother’s, Sally Parsons, the woman who had come by wagon to rescue Georgia after her mother died and rode away empty-handed. The ink in these had faded to pale brown, and some of the pages were breaking apart at the edges. The diaries ran for seven years, 1869–1876.

“Oh, I get it!” Fiona said abruptly. “It’s
weather
!”

“What?” I asked. I looked over at her. She had been reading through the book she had picked out first. She was sitting on a trunk under the weak light of the single bare bulb, wearing a long white cotton slip over her sweater and jeans and heavy boots.

She grinned at me. “See, I couldn’t figure it out at first. Every entry says, ‘Lovely day,’ ‘Lovely day,’ and I was thinking, Now
here
is the cheerful type! and then there’s one that says ‘Cloudy day,’ and another, ‘Gray day.’ ”

“Whose is that one?” I asked.

“The diary?” She flipped back to the front. “Georgia Rice. And then she’s added
Holbrooke.”
She looked up at me. “Gran.”

She lifted the book and read aloud:

“January 12. Lovely day. John in the office all day. Maudie Osbourne came over and we went together to call on Laura Kendall. She’s getting better, but hasn’t gone out yet. I knitted in the evening. John read aloud chapters 8 and 9.

“January 13. Lovely day. It snowed a little this evening, John out most of the day, driving from here to there. A long time with Mrs. Wood, but the baby came fine in the end. Didn’t she yell though, he said. You would too, I told him. I finished a sweater, started on leggings. John read. I’ll be glad to be done with Hardy.”

Fiona looked up and grinned. “Well, Anaïs Nin she ain’t.”

She looked down and was about to start again. “Fee,” I said. I couldn’t bear it. She looked at me, startled. She could hear the discomfort in my voice. “Don’t read any more, honey,” I said. “It just means too much to me.”

“Oh! Well. Of course, Mom. I was just having fun. I wasn’t thinking anything about it.”

“I know. And I’m sure they are fun. They’ll be fun. But I guess I’d just like to have time to take them in first.”

“Well, sure.”

“Do you mind?”

“No. No, of course not. I have my treasure,” she said, scooping up her pile of underclothes, “and you have yours.”

And while she gathered her hoard together and chatted to me about each piece, I made a little pile of the books and sat with them on my lap, as though it were nothing to me to wait.