The World Below (18 page)

Of course, I read them all. I was a greedy girl too. And then I read them again, and again. It was all I did for several days after Fiona left. And slowly pieces of the puzzles began to fall into place. Not all the pieces, not all the puzzles. But the one story among all the others in the trunk that I wanted to understand, those few years of my grandmother’s life, this shifted and sharpened and pulled into perspective. Some of it. Enough for it to become imaginable to me. Enough for me to begin to make a long narrative of the disparate stories she had told me over the years, and to pull in even some of the stories others had told me. Rue, for instance. Or my grandfather. Or my mother, the few times she had spoken clearly of her past or her parents.

Later on, when I understood the story more fully, I wondered why my grandmother had held on to her diaries. I would have destroyed them if I’d had such documents. I would never have wanted my children—or their children when they came—to know the way I made the decisions that resulted in their lives, to know the way I thought and felt when I was young.

But then my diary would have revealed all that, as my grandmother’s, initially anyway, seemed not to. My diary would have been more about the person that went through the days than it was about the days themselves—their weather, their events—as hers seemed to be. And yet tonally I could feel her in that careful record. I could imagine her voice expanding the compressed version I was reading, I could imagine her way of telling the story. What I felt, I think, as I read and reread the diaries, was that I was somehow coming to know her, to understand what her deeper thoughts were under the quotidian of the surface. What I felt was that understanding these slender books would somehow let me piece together too what lay under the later loving surface of my grandparents’ lives together.

I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mail might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. And sometimes when I’m looking through my sent mail on the computer—to see what I’ve told someone about a date or a time or an event in my life—I’m struck by that sense of a record made. My computer letters from Vermont to my children and friends, for instance, certainly would have worked that way. Especially my notes to Karen. By now, because of some episodes of early contractions, she’d been sent to bed by her doctors for the remainder of her pregnancy—nothing to worry about, she assured me. But I could imagine her boredom, her restlessness, so I wrote to her often, sometimes several times a day, reporting whatever struck me or interested me in what I saw or read or did. As I think about those notes now—what I wrote, what I said—it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother’s diaries did—Anaïs Nin she wasn’t, and I wasn’t either, of course. Who is? Not even Anaïs Nin. Still, on occasion I would actually feel a vague sense of loss as I trashed them. But what would have been the point of keeping them? Who would care, ever, to reconstruct a life from such details? It would have taken someone as obsessed with me as I was with my grandmother to make any
deep sense of these notes of mine. And as far as I knew, there was no one so obsessed with me. No one likely to be either. No one with any reason for such an obsession. My children understood my life. There was not that constant division between the surface and the depths of it; and I’d been careful to explain the differences to them when there was.

I had my reasons for mine with my grandmother. For one thing, she was a woman who’d grown up in another time—another universe, really. Understanding who she was and what she was to me depended on understanding that unfamiliar universe too. And then of course there was the mystery lying between us, the mystery of my mother, of her illness, which I’d spent my life worrying at the meaning of. All this fed my appetite for what could be extracted from the accounts of my grandmother’s seemingly ordinary life.

I set myself up in my grandfather’s study. I laid everything out neatly in a kind of time line: the diaries, her relatives’ diaries, the letters from my grandmother and from others to her, the files of bills and receipts, the financial records. As my life unfolded in Vermont, as I lived it and wrote about it to friends and to the children (“Karen, dear, it’s a fine day today, just what you might imagine New England in the fall to be”), I was living her life too, it was running steady as a buried stream under mine.

And my life? I complicated it, of course. I looked for ways to attach myself here, for that was the point, wasn’t it? To see if I could. To see what there was to attach myself to.

I discovered a few movie theaters within driving distance that showed what my kids used to call “fillums”—anything other than action and violence and spectacle. I bought the village paper. I bought the regional paper. I went up to the bulletin boards at the town hall, at the post office, at Grayson’s, for information. I gave myself assignments. Set myself
in motion
. I began to attend a read
ing group that met weekly at the library. I went to a cider festival, a baked bean dinner. I helped serve at a church potluck. Slowly a few people began to greet me by name as I moved about the town. I had Leslie and her husband over for dinner to thank her for her kindness to me while I was sick—she
had
brought me soup, and flowers too.

I had coffee several times at a little shop on the green. I spoke one day to my high school boyfriend, Sonny Gill, when I stopped to refuel my car. He was as he’d come to be very quickly after high school—thick, graceless, his face deeply seamed with what looked like worry but probably wasn’t: he seemed singularly cheerful. And very loud, which surely he hadn’t been then. I didn’t remember it anyway. Several of his teeth were gone. He still smoked. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said when I left.

I got a paying job too, of sorts. I went to the town paper—a weekly—and offered myself as a writer. They didn’t really need anyone, the man at the front desk (the editor, it turned out) said. Except (laughter here) to do sports—the implication being that I wouldn’t qualify as a sports writer. This irritated me, this assumption, so of course I said I’d do it, and we agreed on a trial column: I’d cover a crucial football game the next Saturday for the Barstow Catamounts, to be played away, in a town just the other side of Rutland.

When I got home, I called Samuel Eliasson to see if he’d go with me.

Samuel was my tenant, inherited from Rue along with the house, the man I’d forced to move out so I could move in, the man who wanted to buy my grandmother’s house. He was living for the time being in another big rental house on the green, the Gibson house. He was a tall man in his seventies with a head of silver-white hair, and I’d run into him several times by now—the first time when
he introduced himself to me at the potluck. Since then, he’d stopped over once to say that if the house presented any problems or complications I couldn’t manage, he’d be glad to try to help. That he knew it rather well by now. I liked him for the flattering, courtly charm that elderly men sometimes offer to women my age. And in this case, I thought that since he’d been a college professor, he might know something about football. I didn’t, really. Jeff had played soccer in high school.

We went. We had a good time. There were no bleachers, nowhere to sit, so you meandered up and down the sidelines with the action, trying to see through the flailing bodies to figure out what was going on. Early on, it started to rain. Slowly the boys on the field were covered with mud. By the end, you couldn’t see their numbers, let alone the color of their uniforms. I screamed myself hoarse. Barstow won.

We stopped in Rutland for supper on the way home, and Samuel helped me make sense of the scattered notes I’d taken. Over the next few days I wrote the column. I submitted it to him first. He sat opposite me in my grandmother’s back parlor, a tall, lanky old man, his long legs stretched out in front of him, grayish tennis shoes on his feet, and peered through his half glasses at my rough draft.

“Well, see, Cath, this is a form that needs to be completely predictable,” he said. “Nobody wants anything new, anything very personal.” He laughed. “Nothing even very interesting, really. So the description here: the weather, the crowd”—he shook his head and looked over his glasses at me—“out.” He looked like a stern old headmaster.

“Yessir,” I said.

He suggested more violent alternatives to all my verbs:
hit, pounded, hammered, squashed, sacked, flattened
. “Those are really
de rigueur,”
he said. He added a string of corny adjectives, always preceded by an article: “the burly O’Connor,” “the speedy Evans,” “the indomitable Reed.” “There!” he said when he was done, when he handed it back to me. “Now
that’s
sports writing.”

They loved it. I was on, for $25 a column. When I wrote the next one—by myself this time—I kept his editorial advice in mind and doctored my own language as I went.

We took Fiona to a game with us the weekend she was in town. She was charmed by Samuel, by his way of speaking. “Imagine saying ‘I’m completely at your service, madam.’ ” She was cleaning up after our supper, hers and mine, and imitating Samuel, his answer when I reminded him of the following week’s game. “Think of it, Mom. No guy I date will ever, ever, say that to me.”

“I’m not
dating
Samuel.”

“Did I say you were? Very touchy. Should I say … too touchy?”

“You should not,” I answered. “He’s old enough to be my father.” I did the math. “Well, almost.”

We worked side by side at the sink for a few minutes. Then she said, “Speaking of fathers. Or of people who ought to be older than they are. I saw Joe.”

“Did you? In New York?”

“Yep. There on business of some sort. He called and we had dinner.”

“Was it okay?”

Fiona had been the most angry of the kids at Joe about the breakup. She had been very angry, actually, and this was so unlike her that we were all a little frightened. And secretly relieved too, I suppose. She acted out for all of us. Called him an asshole, slammed doors. For a while after he moved out, she refused to see him,
to be reasonable
, as he put it.

“I
am
reasonable,” she said. “This jerk is abandoning me. He’s saying ‘go fuck yourself,’ and I’m saying to him, ‘No, excuse me, excuse me,
you
go fuck
yourself.’ ”

“In whose world does this pass for reason?” Karen had asked.

“Oh, it’s just the language you object to,” she said. “Get over it. Think about what I’m saying. You know I’m right.”

When she finally did consent to see Joe, she was sarcastic, unpleasant. She rode him mercilessly. She wasn’t interested in
meeting Edie either. Joe had somehow imagined, I think, that he could have us all. Not quite all together, but all within his emotional purview anyway, all still somehow his family. Fiona was the one who said
no
, clearly. No. He’d walked out on her and was not to be allowed to forget that.

She shrugged now. “I suppose. It was a little polite, if you know what I mean.”

I laughed. “Let me see if I can imagine that. You. Polite.”

She smiled back. “Well, I mostly meant him, actually. He was polite. Careful, I would say.”

I waited a minute before I asked, “And did that make you feel triumphant, dear?”

“It didn’t.” She sighed. “It made me sad, really.”

I said nothing.

Her back was to me now, her long neck elegant but somehow also vulnerable. She was putting the tops on the jars and bottles left out on the counter. She said, “He showed me pix of the kid. Mariel.”

“She’s cute, isn’t she?”

“All kids are cute, Mom.”

“Not so. Though you, of course, et cetera, et cetera.”

She crossed to the refrigerator and began to put the cream away, the bottled water. When she turned around, she was frowning. “Wasn’t that the Cuban boat thing, you know, with all the criminals? The
Mariel?”

“That sounds right.”

“Anyway,” she said.

“It’s still a nice name.”

“I said so.” She leaned against the counter, facing me. “I also said, ‘So what will you do when she’s not so cute and little anymore and you want new babies to go goo-goo over? Begin again?’

“And he got all stiff and said, you know,
This was his child, how could I speak that way?
And I said, ‘Well, I guess ’cause for a long time I thought of myself as your child too.’ ”

“Oh, Fee,” I said.

“Yeah,” she answered glumly.

In spite of my defensiveness with Fiona, the truth was that as the fall wore on I found myself looking forward more and more to my Saturdays with Samuel. The long drives to the games reminded me of drives I’d taken here and there with my grandfather as a teenager—drives designed, in all likelihood, to let my grandmother have some solitude. Samuel even looked a little like my grandfather, white-haired and handsome, with not a sign of balding. He had the same strong beaky nose, the same olive palette to his skin. He towered over me, even though he was beginning, like my grandfather too, to stoop a little. He even dressed a bit like him. Oh, not as formally; Samuel was an academic type, after all. Corduroy pants, tweed jacket, and, almost invariably, the old tennis shoes. But he did wear the jacket every time we were together, and whenever we did anything special—and the games were apparently special to him—he wore a tie, too.

And as we made our way on those Saturday mornings to one town or another in a wide circle around Barstow, we talked in the same desultory and yet somehow deeply satisfying way I’d talked with my grandfather.

What of?

Books, I remember. He loved Edith Wharton, which I found surprising. Except, he told me, for
Ethan Frome
.

“Same here,” I said.

He sometimes brought a couple of books to loan to me. Occasionally history—I remember reading
Changes in the Land
with his careful notes, all but illegible to me, in the margins—but he loved contemporary fiction too. I first read Penelope Fitzgerald when he introduced me to her. “Such witty economy,” he said admiringly, as he handed over two thin volumes. “A hard act to pull off.”