by Sue Miller
The upholstered chairs in the library were pulled into a kind of rough row tonight alongside a deep sofa that faced the stone fireplace. A piano had been centered in the front of the room, between the fireplace and the sofa. The wooden dining room chairs were lined up in four or five rows behind these choice seats. Georgia and her friends came in and made their way to the back. You could see everything better from here, Mrs. Priley told her, and Georgia understood that by this she meant the other patients, not the performers. And sure enough, as the others began to arrive in clusters and groups, the older woman, who seemed to have assumed some kind of responsibility for Georgia, leaned over and whispered names and relevant information to her. This one was just up, that one had been away for a few months—see the newfangled dress? Stay away from that gent, he went after all the new girls. This one had just had two ribs removed and they said it had helped, but look how bent he was! Still, they said he’d be leaving soon.
As Mrs. Priley talked, Georgia’s eyes moved around the room. No one was truly old, she saw, but few seemed to be as young as she was. Even so, they called back and forth, they laughed and teased and rearranged their seats. As though they were in the fifth grade, she thought. She’d never seen grown-ups behaving in this childish way before, and after the initial shock a part of her was perversely delighted. Perhaps outside her proper little village, other ways of being, other ways of living, were possible.
There was even, Georgia realized, a kind of flirting going on among them, the kind of playful touching she knew from the beginnings of her romance with Bill March and from foolish games she’d played with others before she chose Bill. And yet many of these women wore wedding bands. She thought of the overheard conversation she’d awakened to from her trance of sorrow, and then of other conversations she’d ignored or half attended to in that trance and since. Noises she’d heard in the night. Laughter. When Mrs. Priley got up to speak to someone else, she looked around her more carefully.
Here was Rosanna Moody, Mrs. Moody, whose naked, wounded back she’d seen, who’d told Georgia she had three young ones at home. She was standing, talking animatedly to a tall, slightly stooped man with unruly red hair wearing an old-fashioned tweed suit. Two bright dots flared in Mrs. Moody’s cheeks, and her hands were in constant motion, her fingers lightly dancing on the man’s sleeve, fluttering at her own bosom; and then back to his elbow, as if beckoning, as if saying, Here, I’ll touch for you. Her laugh was bright and sharp, rising above the waves of voice, laughter, voice, that rolled around the room in bursts and ebbings of sound.
Georgia noticed the men’s hands abruptly, how they were everywhere, touching the women. How they rested at the back of women’s waists as they guided them to their chairs. How they dented the bare flesh of an inner arm at the elbow or just below the cuff of a sleeve. She saw one man, perhaps as old as her own father, grip Miss Shepard’s shoulders and turn her, pulling her slightly backward at the same time—almost against his front—as he leaned forward to point something out to her: See? Over there! His face nearly sat on Miss Shepard’s shoulder; she looked as though she had two heads momentarily. Georgia would have sworn she saw their cheeks touch, just for an instant. It made her breath rush in; a momentary strange hunger invaded her. She looked away quickly.
Now the first performers arrived, a man carrying a violin, who walked to the front of the room, and a plump woman who sat down with many elaborate readjustments at the piano bench.
After a moment or two of tuning, they launched themselves into a series of Stephen Foster songs. You could hear the man’s deep breathing, sibilant in his nostrils as he moved his upper body slightly with his bowing. They closed with “Aura Lee,” a song Georgia’s father had sung for them sometimes. She felt a pang of homesickness.
After them, a young woman, perhaps younger than Georgia, came to the front of the room and stood by the piano. She carried no music with her. She was extraordinarily thin, and she wore a butter-colored dress—an unwise choice, Georgia thought, for it made her bloodless skin look unhealthy and blue. Her black hair, which was caught up at her neck and then fell to her waist, glistened with a luxuriance that seemed, by contrast with her skin, almost obscene. Georgia felt, abruptly, that her own hair in the arrangement she’d allowed Mrs. Priley to fix for her was cheap and artificial. She felt embarrassed for herself.
And then worse as the music began. The girl had announced the pieces before she sat down, several Chopin preludes. Georgia had heard that name, Chopin, but never his music. As the girl began to play, Georgia was startled to a pure attentiveness by the music’s shocking swing from piano to forte, by its emotive, swaying rhythms. It seemed to her to be speaking—singing—of things she’d felt without knowing them, of a life she’d always yearned for without understanding it, a life that connected to the stillness, the solitude of her father’s house at night. She sat motionless, held, tears pricking her eyes, until the music was over. As she applauded the dying girl—someone her mother would have called “that bit of a thing”—she had the overwhelming sense that she’d wasted all her opportunities, that she’d done nothing with her life but drift around staring out the windows or making batches of muffins or darning socks and stockings. If she herself should die tomorrow, what would she have accomplished?
Nothing, she thought.
And then was shocked at herself, revolted and confused by this new and strange way of thinking.
At the intermission, there was punch and cookies. A man came up to Georgia and offered to add “a little bit of flavoring” to her punch from a flask he held up quickly, but she shook her head. “Oh, I couldn’t,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” he answered in an offended tone, and moved off.
Mrs. Priley began to introduce her to people, sometimes pulling her away in the midst of one conversation to start another. At a certain point, Georgia heard her own excited voice rising to be heard above the general hum around her, and she suddenly wondered at herself; so quickly, she’d become one of them! It confused her. She excused herself and went to sit alone. Slowly the others too drifted back to their seats.
There were two more performers after the intermission. The first was the san’s director, Dr. Rollins, the man who’d examined her on the day she arrived. He sang ballads and drinking songs in a voice that seemed deepened, almost muffled by his thick beard.
Then a young woman recited a long poem by Tennyson. There was polite applause when she finished.
A silence fell. In it there rose a growing confusion. Was it over? Was this the end? And if that was the case, why didn’t someone say so? They were a group of people used by now to being directed—herded, really—from one place, one activity or nonactivity, to another. The room began to buzz with their angry passivity. Someone ought to take charge. Who would it be?
And then a sharp cry pierced the air, a wail, and quickly another, continuous and blended with it. It seemed to stab at Georgia’s heart. Bagpipes! she knew it almost instantly, though she’d never heard them before, only read of them. Nearly as one, everyone in the room turned—and Georgia did too—to see where the wild music was coming from.
And here was the piper, walking slowly up the side of the room in the aisle formed between the chairs and the window wall that opened onto the terrace. The swollen sac and the prickling array of pipes made his shape seem exotic to Georgia, atavistic, as he moved, almost in silhouette against the dying light outside, toward the front of the room. There he turned into the lamplight and became flesh, three-dimensional. She saw that he was not a man. He was a pale boy, probably several years younger than she was, tall, with a thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead. For a moment now his pumping cheeks flattened, and Georgia saw the shape of his jaw, the light-colored, almost feral eyes under his heavy eyebrows taking the measure of the room. When they met her own, she felt seized; she was unable to look away, even when Mrs. Priley leaned toward her—she was enveloped again in the woman’s lilac perfume—and said, not troubling to
lower her voice at all, “Seward Wallace: I heard he’s been at death’s door and back again.”
Others nodded in morose agreement as the tragic music started once more. Georgia bent her head to shut herself away within it.
The next day, at rest hour, Miss Shepard reached over from her bed and handed Georgia the weekly patient newsletter, though this was against the rules; Georgia was still not supposed to read. It was folded back to expose this bit of doggerel:
Georgia Rice
Has come to Bryce
To set the hearts a-flutter.
But just whose hearts
Receive such “smarts”
Our lips will never utter.
They’re male, they’re pale;
they have the “rale.”
They may not last for long.
But now she’s here
They’re of good cheer.
If they die, it’s in mid-song.
Passing it back silently, Georgia felt a thick blush flooding her face, heard the light pounding of her heart in her damaged chest.
Seven
It wasn’t until mid-October, after I’d found my grandmother’s diaries—in fact, in a burst of curiosity fed by her diaries—that I made my pilgrimage to Maine to trace her life there. It took the better part of the day on the winding two-lane highways that cut laterally across New Hampshire and Maine. The leaves had begun to drop by then, and there was a faint tone of desolation under the vibrant colors of the fall landscape, the bare bones of things emerging.
Bryce Sanatorium still stands—or rather the building that was Bryce does—high on its hill in almost the exact center of Maine, but it has changed its function (hotel, insane asylum, meditation center) and even its appearance over and over again through the years. The array of outbuildings is long gone now, and the juryrigged upstairs porches, on one of which my grandmother lay nearly motionless for a full month, have been torn off. In fact, the old shingle building may look now very much the way it looked at the turn of the century, before the sanatorium boom, when it was a private female seminary, owned and run by the very virtuous, very Christian, Misses Bryce.
But the steep hill leading up to it, a meadow in one of the photographs of my grandmother, full of tall grass and blurry, wide-topped flowers—daisies? Queen Anne’s lace?—is now a painfully groomed lawn. In the middle of it sits a conference center sign, and there’s an asphalt parking lot, full of late-model cars, where there was once a wide gravel turnaround. (My grandmother never forgot the crunching sound of her father’s car, backing up, driving away, and—when he reached the bottom of the hill—the deep hoarse google of his farewell horn.)
The conference center that owns the building now gutted it and completely rebuilt its interiors. You can imagine it, I’m sure—the plush carpeting on the floors, the muted, tasteful southwestern colors, the indirect, subtle lighting everywhere. It was hard not be disappointed, seeing it—and then amused, really. My long trip, and this blandly tarted-up building the end point.
In my grandmother’s day, the interiors must have been ornate and dark; the tacked-on cure porches would have robbed almost every window of light. The hard floors in the long corridors would have been worn wood. Maple, perhaps, or pine, paler in the center where the mahogany stain had been scuffed away by all the years of passing feet. In the hallways, shaded sconces would have leaked their brownish light. Only in the grand rooms on the first floor would there have been air and sun and a sense of the wide vistas the hill commanded. Only there, and from the sleeping porches themselves, where, over the spring, Georgia lay and watched the birches fill in, watched the maple trees turn a tender, acid green and obscure the spruces—all but the dark pointed tops along the far ridge.
By the middle of June, she was required to exercise for an hour or more in the late afternoon, and a few weeks after she’d begun her first shy walks out with Seward (Seward did what he liked, in defiance of the schedules set for him), they went into these spruce woods, where the heavy dark boughs made a canopy above them, where they could wander freely over the rust-colored needles. It seemed enchanted to Georgia the first time she saw it, a new world opening out to her suddenly as the undergrowth fell away in the thick, deep shade. It felt like coming on secret, spacious rooms hidden in the woods.
“Oh, it makes me want to be a child again!” she said to Seward. “To bring Ada here and have a pretend tea party. Or a dance!” she cried, spinning away from him.
He leaned against a tree, watching her twirl. After a moment, she stood still in the middle of the clearing, her arms out, rocking a little in dizziness and pleasure. He stepped forward, lifting his hands. “Surely we don’t need Ada for that,” he said.
Without hesitation, she walked into his arms and let him waltz her slowly, gravely, over the soft whispering needles. She could hear his breath wheezing in his chest, and his hand holding hers felt hot. She kept her head turned a little to the side, away from his steady, asking gaze.
Slowly they shuffled to a stop. He let her go. “Georgia,” he whispered, his head bent to hers.
Again and again over the last few weeks they’d come to this moment. And stopped, like this. It thrilled Georgia—his very tone thrilled her—but there was something intensely uncomfortable about it too. Perhaps it was that she knew they were already reputed to be cousining—though they hadn’t even kissed yet. But something about that, about what seemed its inevitability given the gossip, given the world they were living in, terrified her; it would have been so impossible a notion for that other Georgia, the one she seemed to have utterly left behind. The one who had flirted so gaily, so carelessly, with Bill March, confident that she was in command of their situation, confident that in any case he would never ask her for more than a kiss. It would have been inconceivable, really. She was almost certain he wouldn’t even have wanted it.
Here, in this new world, it seemed there was nothing that couldn’t be imagined—and tolerated, and openly discussed—between men and women. In fact, it was through just such a discussion that Georgia had recently learned exactly what sex entailed. Her diary for the momentous day reads:
May 20. Sunny and cool. Delicious bread pudding for lunch. At rest on the porch, I heard a detailed description of the sex act, which was always a little unclear to me heretofore. Well! It changes my view completely.
Who would have spoken of it so openly, so graphically in front of her? Mrs. Moody? Miss Shepard? And what did it change? She sounds only a little startled, actually—she must have guessed at some of it, anyway. There is even, perhaps, a quality of amusement in her entry. She was, as Mrs. Priley sometimes told her half admiringly, a cool one.
The coincidence of this access of information and the beginning of her relationship with Seward, though, confused her in her feelings for him—made him seem almost dangerous. And for it to be presumed that that’s what they were up to! For it to be thought that the purpose, the aim, of their tender, fumbling attraction to each other was to lie coupled in the way she’d learned of, this, this seemed to her almost insulting, and certainly embarrassing.
“You’re a lovely dancer, Seward,” she said, now brightly. “Were you made to take lessons, as I was?” She stepped away from him again, waltzing on her own, going backward with her arms up to hold an imaginary partner in dancing class. “One-two-three, one-two-three,” she sang out, swaying deeply on the downbeat, twirling up on the last two counts.
Georgia’s transformation was complete by now. She was unrecognizable as the girl who’d arrived at the san three months earlier. Her long hair had been cropped off, and what was left curled in thick waves around her face, exposing her slender neck. Ada had brought her new clothes, since she’d outgrown her old ones on the diet rich in milk and butter that the patients were kept to. The skirt she wore today was nearly straight, ribbed, and ended midcalf. She’d buttoned her long sweater when they’d entered the woods, where the air was suddenly so much cooler. A wide stripe near its hem circled her hips like a low-slung be
lt.
Seward watched her for a moment, and then he began to cough. It went on, and Georgia stopped in the middle of the clearing. The air was twilit under here, though it was only around four in the afternoon on one of the longest days of the year. Seward was turned away from Georgia, hunched over, one hand resting on a tree. She saw that with the other, he held a glinting silver vessel to his mouth, a sputum cup or flask. He wore a black suit today, as always, and, bent over as he was, he looked suddenly like a frail and angular old man. You wouldn’t have guessed at the fierce energy he normally conveyed. She went close to him and, after a moment, touched his convulsing back.
He yanked himself angrily away. On the ground around the tree under him, she saw a spray of glistening blood droplets, their deep red color shocking against the orange needles.
“Go!” he said fiercely. And when she stood, open-mouthed and confused: “Go! Get the hell out of here!”
That evening after supper, Georgia found a note in her mailbox. She stood in the dim hallway, with people passing behind her, talking and laughing, to read it.
Dear Georgia,
I am sorry to have shouted at you today, but I couldn’t bear it, your seeing me like that. Especially after you had turned away from me once again.
I say I am sorry. That may not be true, for I am still angry with you too. Why? Because over and over you seem to encourage me. You seek me out. You launch conversations. It was you, after all, who suggested the walk today, after I’d told you about the woods. And then when I touch you, or speak tenderly to you, you become at once all nerves and gaiety.
I think you’ve misled me about your feelings. You’ve allowed me to believe you may care for me when you don’t, when what you feel is pity, or a kind of bemusement at your ability to stir feelings in me so easily. This is intolerable to me. I’d rather not see you at all than to feel myself made light of in this way.