The World Below

by Sue Miller

Now I was sitting in a rocker in the dark, like an old lady—like my grandmother—listening to the night sounds, the nocturnal birds and insects that started calling only now. And I was thinking, suddenly, about going back. How I would have to go away, to go home, in just a few weeks. Thinking about how it would be to be living alone with the children. How chaotic the house still was, some boxes still unpacked from the January move. How terrible it would be to see Peter again. How far it all seemed from this stillness, this order, this deep peace.

  I sighed. “My life must seem so strange to you,” I said to my grandmother.

  It was a moment before she answered. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said then. She rocked some more. She was so small that her feet lifted off the ground on each tilt back. “Really, when you come to it, everyone’s life is strange, isn’t it? If you just tell it flat out.”

  “Well, but I mean my marriage. I mean, three kids, and then getting divorced. It’s so unlike what you and Grandfather had.”

  “Of course, that’s true.”

  That wasn’t enough for me. I poked at it. “It must seem very … alien to you. Our giving up. Very … I don’t know. Newfangled or something. Very modern. In a bad way.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was kind. “I don’t feel you didn’t try hard enough, Cath, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  In the silver light, her white hair almost glowed, surrounding the faint pale circle of her face. She had taken her glasses off, and in this light she was beautiful again, perhaps even more beautiful than she’d been as a young woman. After a moment she said, “You know, I’m not so old-fashioned maybe as you think.”

  “I suppose not.” Up on Main Street, an unmuffled car blatted past, trailing music.

  “Have I told you ever about the time I was in the san,” she said suddenly, “before I married your grandfather?”

  “A little.” And she had. But the way family stories come at you as a child is necessarily always incomplete, for how can the adults ever really explain what the world was like for them then? Its different shape. How it felt. The grown-ups in my life when I was young were generous with their stories—of course my grandmother in particular. She explained to me whatever I asked her about and more. In that sense there was nothing that was not available to me to know. But knowing is different from understanding.

  This is what I knew: my grandmother had had TB. She’d had to live for a while in a sanatorium. But to me as a child it was like saying, “She had chicken pox,” “She had mumps.” I understood nothing of the mortal fear, of the sense of contamination and damage that the diagnosis brought with it. The feeling they all must have had—my grandmother, her father, her sister and little brother—that their family’s life was being forever altered—and made shamefully visible, at the same time, in its alteration. And that’s what she wanted me to understand tonight.

  “It wasn’t long,” she said. “A little under six months, I think. Probably about average for a stay in those days. And as it turns out, I probably didn’t need to be there even that long.” She pronounced it probly. “Maybe didn’t really need to be there at all. Your grandfather told me that. Later. He waited to tell me. And then I was so mad at him he was sorry he did. Hah!” she cried.

  I couldn’t see her face, turned away from me in the dark. I couldn’t tell if there was any pleasure in her cry.

  After a moment, she went on. “But that’s how it happened, and suddenly there I was. I was just a young girl, really. Young and foolish. And I was so unhappy at first.” Then she described it to me for the first time, going in as if to a prison, having to be stripped and washed, having to lie motionless, without speaking or reading or writing for three weeks after her arrival, the exacting routines and diet, the feeling she had of being shamed, lost, abandoned. How she’d wept, the first days there. “I can’t tell you, really, how unclean I felt. How much I felt I’d failed at everything I’d tried to do in my life up till then.”

  How slowly, then, she’d stopped weeping and entered her new life. How that became what mattered to her. “That’s what happened,” she said. Her voice had changed now. “It happened to all of us, I think. We started to care about that world, and a very peculiar world it was. And I s’pose I should have been more sensible or smarter, but you know, there was a way, I’d have to say, in which I’d been kept sort of more young, more unaware of what goes on in life, by my mother’s dying so early. You would think it might have made me grow up fast, and in one way I guess it did. But it also kept me young. I just closed up at a certain age, I think. I wasn’t sensible or smart.” She shook her head. She was frowning. “Anyhow, that’s how I was when I went into the san. Kind of goony and young. A babe in the woods. And the san … well, it was a place that existed out of time, I guess you’d say. People were just yanked up, don’t you know, as I was, out of their ordinary lives and ways and plunked down there. We all felt that shame, I think. Oh! and so many of them had no hope, really. So there was a kind of—I suppose you’d say maybe a … greediness about life, about all we’d missed or would miss or had left behind. Or might never get back to. It made people wild. Reckless.” She smiled. “It made us quite modern, as you would say. People fell in love. Everyone. Everyone had their romance.” Her voice was suddenly bitter, and I felt a kind of shock, not so much at what she was saying as at her tone. She must have sensed this, because it was gone when she spoke again. Her voice had softened, and I had to lean forward to hear her under the steady sawing of the crickets. “We behaved scandalously, really,” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  After a moment, she spoke again, more loudly, more normally. “And then, when you recovered—if you recovered—it was like going back to a different world from the one you lived in at the san. Having to unlearn … oh, a great deal. Going back to the old rules, the old ways. Not easy.

  “It was as though” she rocked forward and smiled directly at me—that radiant, inclusive smile, “as though we were magically transported to the future, where the rules we knew were smashed to smithereens. Or different, anyway. And lived there for a while. Lived there just long enough, I suppose, to get used to it. And then the spell was broken, and all that world lay in ruins, and we had to find our way back to our old life.

  “It was doubly hard, you see. First we were sent away. And then, just when we got used to that, just when we figured out how to find some comfort there, then we were sent back. And I suppose I’ve always felt it, in a way. That sense that I’ve lived another life. Or several other lives, maybe. Far away. Somewhere I could never get back to. Somewhere not just far away, but gone. It changed me,” she said. “Living that way.” Her rocking had stilled, and now it started again. After a few moments, she said, “So you see.”

  Well, yes, I saw. Some of it I saw. And this was enough. Enough so I didn’t ask about what I didn’t see, though I understand now she may have been inviting me to—even wanting me to. But I didn’t. I didn’t inquire about what she meant by romance. By scandalously. I’m not sure I even thought about those ideas then or made the connection with what I’d been told of her life earlier by my aunt Rue, the Duchess. No, the gift she was giving me was enough for me in that moment: the gift of her parallel failure, of her loss. The healing gift to me of her own shame. I didn’t think of the gift I might have given her, of asking for more or letting her say it all to me. Instead, I sat silently next to her and watched as the moon rose and whitened, and in the dark yard the fireflies blinked their silent songs.

  Six

  It was a judgment. A judgment had been visited upon them, and the signs of that judgment were there for all to see: the visiting nurse to check Ada and Freddie to be sure they weren’t infected too. The instructions to Mrs. Beston for cleaning, for sterilizing or burning everything that had come in contact with Georgia. The sense among the neighbors and the town that nothing in that house had been quite right for a good long time; way back before the mother got ill, things we
re run very peculiarly over there.

  They all had stories they remembered now and passed around. Ada heard the gossip; she felt its sting and passed it on to Georgia when she visited her at the sanatorium for the first time. And Georgia felt even more cut off from what she had loved. With all she’d given up in her own life, she’d done a bad job, apparently. She’d fallen ill, she’d exposed her family.

  Her failure, her failure, her failure.

  Her first weeks in the san were spent in a kind of bereavement like none Georgia had ever felt before. She wept for everything she’d lost: her life, her pride, her reasons to go on from day to day. She wept at last for her mother too—for her mother’s illness, her mother’s death. None of this, none of this would have happened to her, she felt, if her mother had lived. She wept because she missed her father and Ada and Freddie, who were to be allowed to visit only once a month. She wept because she was friendless and alone, and she was frightened that she wouldn’t live. Or if she did live, that she would never be able to marry, to have children and a normal life. She wept because she’d never lived with rules before, and here rules hemmed her in every hour of the day. She’d had to take off all her clothes to be bathed with brown soap when she first arrived, though she frantically explained that she’d washed herself, even her hair, before she went to the doctor’s. Nonetheless, those were the rules. She had to lie in bed day and night through the first three weeks, not permitted up even to go to the bathroom. This was a scorching humiliation for her—there were five other women sharing her sleeping porch.

  She was not allowed for these three weeks to read, or to write, or even to talk to anyone. Her rest, the first step in her recovery, needed to be absolute. The fifteen minutes they’d let her have with her father and Ada by her bedside when they came for the first time was seen as a great and generous exception.

  The result of this was that when she was finally permitted to get up and move around a few times a day—to the bathroom, to her locker to get a fresh nightgown—she was elated. She was dizzy and weak from lying still for so long, and one of the nurses had to help her the first few times she rose, but even so she felt on the mend, as her mother would have said. And it was true that her cough was better, nearly gone.

  But by now she’d begun to run out of tears anyway. Her natural energy and curiosity were taking over slowly. She felt herself coming to life—she thought of it as waking up—in this strange new place.

  She remembered the turn, the moment when she noticed this in herself. She was in bed. The women who shared her cure porch were talking. Talking! When they were supposed to be resting their lungs, lying silent and still, as Georgia obediently was—watching the gray rain drip through the gray-green needles of the pine trees that brushed and scraped against the screens. The foggy air seemed to have floated right onto the porch, to be hanging as a mist around the shadowy figures in each iron bed, around each piece of furniture. Nothing seemed real. Georgia’s nose was very cold. She kept reaching out from under the covers to touch it, amazed, but then her hand would turn cold too and she’d have to put it back, to slip it against the heated flesh where she’d unbuttoned the top of her nightgown. She had three heavy blankets pulled up over her chin, plus her grandmother’s quilt from home, washed at the san and smelling of carbolic disinfectant. Drip-drip-drip went the rain, and the needles shuddered and bounced with the watery blows.

  “They threw her out,” the woman named Mrs. Priley was saying. “We won’t be seeing her again.” There was deep satisfaction in her voice.

  Who? Georgia thought.

  “They never!”

  “What could they do? They found them together.”

  Georgia turned on her back and looked up at the beadboard ceiling. Who? she thought.

  “But when did they get the chance?”

  “Stayed back at lunch, is what I heard, and the—the fools!—made such a racket someone went up to see who was dying.”

  “I wouldn’t sneeze at such a death myself.” They laughed, like naughty girls—though there wasn’t one of them under thirty years old, Georgia thought—and it was by their laughter, the sneaky dark tone of it, that she understood they were speaking of what men and women did in bed together. An image came back to her: her father coming downstairs in suspenders and a collarless shirt on Sunday after they’d been to church, pink as a nicely cooked roast and smelling of shaving soap; and then the butter-and-sugar sandwiches he’d fix for them, the white crystals glinting like tiny diamonds on the pale yellow chunks of thickly spread fat. Biting into it, the opposing textures, the melting sweet grittiness.

  Dying, you called it when you lay together. Well, she hadn’t known that. Though sometimes when she felt Bill March’s hand on her back, on her arm, she had felt a little that way, as though she were dying—a plunging, lurching feeling inside her. But she didn’t like it so well when they’d kissed: the surprising wetness and taste of his mouth, and then his rubbery lips.

  “Who?” she said aloud now, and the women turned to her, startled.

  “Why, it’s a little owl, come to visit us at rest time,” Mrs. Priley said. “Who, who, who.” They laughed again, but not unkindly.

  After this Georgia found herself hearing things, seeing things around her that drew her interest, that made her hungry to know more. That made her want to live in this place, among these strange-seeming people. Her very lostness, her sorrow, gave her a peculiar energy, a kind of desperate attentiveness to what was in front of her.

  Sometimes one or two of the mobile patients came in to talk to them on their porch, bringing gossip, notes from other patients, news. This one had upped and left, sick as she was—told the doctors off and then packed her bags. Someone else had died, and they’d tried to take the body out in the night so no one would notice, but his fellow patients stayed awake and sang hymns when the muffled footsteps passed in the hall. That one had sneaked onto the women’s ward two nights ago, bringing champagne someone had smuggled in to him.

  Slowly certain names became familiar to her. Miss Farraday, a nurse everyone was frightened of. Mr. Bethke, a patient who argued and broke the rules constantly. She learned that Miss Shepard, who had the bed next to hers, was thought to be “cousining” with him; and twice when she woke in the night and looked over, it seemed to her that Miss Shepard’s bed was flatter than it should have been: flat enough, perhaps, to be entirely empty. Though in the mornings she was always lying there, waiting with the others for the cups of thick warm milk to be distributed.

  Sometimes now she dreamed of people she’d heard of but hadn’t met yet, and in their facelessness, in their vague but urgent sexuality, they were more compelling than anyone she’d known in her past, anyone she could conjure from memory.

  And indeed, when Ada and her father came for their second visit, Georgia was startled that their news and the names they mentioned—even Bill March’s—seemed less vivid to her; seemed themselves to come from a dream she might have had once, a peaceful, nostalgic dream of that old life.

  She was allowed to take her afternoon rest on the terrace now, on one of the cure chairs set out in neat rows facing west, and the touch of the sun warm on her face, the stir and smell of the air, and the long view down the lawn and over the dark hills made her feel in the world again.

  But what a changed world! What a mysterious one!

  Once she came back onto the sleeping porch after one of these rests and interrupted some procedure being performed on Mrs. Moody. Her shirtwaist was lowered, and Georgia saw the white flesh of her back. There was a deep red incision line running along the curve of her shoulder blade, and a stubby pink tube emerged horribly, obscenely, from the swollen, open wound in the flesh within the curve. Everyone—Mrs. Moody, the doctor, and the nurse—froze when she came onto the porch, and they held themselves that way as though having their picture taken until she quickly withdrew again. She never spoke of this to anyone, she never understood what she had seen, but her revulsion and terror at the sight became p
art of how she thought of her own disease and made her more determined to get well, to do everything they told her. To obey every oppressive rule.

  The fourth Saturday Georgia was at the san, a cold evening in April, she was allowed to go to a musicale put on by the patients. This would be her first evening up, in public. She was giddy with delight. She thought about it, only it, for several days ahead of time. After supper, she put on a clean dress, one she hadn’t worn at all here before, and let Mrs. Priley pin her hair up in a new and more grown-up way. The women on her porch all admired the effect when it was done. She looked older. She looked like a Gibson girl. Georgia turned and preened for them. She felt mothered, basking in their praise and then walking in their gossipy midst down the long dim wooden corridors. It would not have occurred to her that there was something slightly prurient, something of the amusement of the initiated dealing with the initiate, in their attentions. It would not have occurred to them how in need she was of what they were so casually, and with such mixed intentions, offering her.

  The musicale was held in a room called the library, though it held few books and those mostly of a pious and uplifting nature. No one read them, except to launch jokes about them; the room itself seemed mostly to be a kind of waiting area where patients were allowed to gather before they were let into the dining hall next door for meals.

  Georgia had begun to take meals there only in the last week, since being allowed out of bed some of the day. It was the first time she had seen the general population of the place, and she was shocked at the degree of illness of some of them—she felt she didn’t belong there. Thin and pale as she was, she felt, by contrast with them, large, horsey, ruddy. She felt well. On the second day she was at lunch, one of the women at her table had begun to cough so violently that she pushed her chair back abruptly and fled the room. You could hear her under the gentle din of clinking, scraping spoons as she hurried away down the long hall, the cough now combined with a horrible retching noise. Not one person spoke of it. No one stopped eating.