The World Below

by Sue Miller

  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.”

  Of course, it’s easier for me to recall what he told me than what I told him. What would I have felt compelled to fill him in on? My situation, yes. I know I described that generally, mostly by way of letting him know how confused I was about the house—the house he wanted. Wanted for his own. “If I came here … I don’t know,” I said to him, “it would change my life. My work, my friendships. I suppose at least some of my bad habits.”

  I remember that he laughed at that. “Surely you have no bad habits,” he said.

  I must have spoken to him about the children: Fiona, whom he would meet; Jeff, so far away, so happy being so far away and what that might mean about his future; Karen, who was discovering and reporting to me via e-mail from her bed about the astonishments of daytime TV, a revelation to her.

  And Samuel? Well, he talked to me about his work, I remember, though I had to prod him to get the details. “What kind of writing?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s just a small project, I don’t know that I’ll ever finish. The kind of thing an old professor undertakes when he’s retired.”


  “And what kind of thing might that be?” This was very early in our friendship, I remember, when I still found myself impatient with his slowness, his indirection.

  He heard it. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be evasive.” He smiled. “Though it may be that it comes naturally. Certainly my wife would have said so.” His expression, at that moment, with those words, was suffused with a kind of rueful regret. He was a widower, and I’d noticed this complicated sorrow on his face whenever his wife was mentioned. “It’s essays. On the death of a group of towns in Massachusetts in the thirties. I’ve written, I would say, three and about a half so far. It’s taken two years.” He smiled.

  “So, what’s your … angle, I guess?” Hearing myself, I grimaced. “Nasty word, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a modern word. And it’s a question a publisher would ask me, I imagine, if it ever got to that stage.” He was silent a moment. Then he said, “That may be the problem. I don’t think I have one. I just want to record it. The towns’ histories, some of what happened as they died. You know, stories.”

  “It sounds suspiciously like a book.”

  “It may be, I suppose. Depends on what gets finished first, it or me. It’s essays, for now.”

  He spoke of his fondness for my grandmother’s house. “I found a real pleasure in its shotgun arrangement,” he said. “The way each day I had to walk through all the rooms to get to the few I used. From bedroom to kitchen, where I ate, and then back to that little room off the kitchen that I used as a study when in residence. No room went unvisited, as it were.” He paused to look out the window. We were driving past a little waterfall. “I miss that at the Gibsons’, where I don’t have any idea what’s going on in most of the rooms.” Now he grinned at me. “Why, there could be others living there with me, for all I know.”

  This charmed me, and I smiled back at him.

  It was his wife, it turned out—with my aunt Rue’s permission—who’d done the redecorating. I asked him once what his wife was like. We were driving home; I always drove. I was the hostess on these trips. I picked him up, though he would never let me pay for the treats we usually bought—soft-serve cones at the Dairy Queen, beer at a country inn.

  He was silent a long time. I didn’t look at him. Finally he said quietly, “She was a fine person. Discerning, I would say.”

  “Now that’s a lovely word. Discerning.”

  “Yes. And true. True of her. Discerning of beauty. Of what was right.

  “I think she was often unhappy with me,” he said, after a moment. He cleared his throat. “Well, of course she missed the opportunity to work, to have that kind of life—that was hard for many women her age, you know. To see life, and the opportunities of life, change so dramatically just after you’d made all your choices—difficult. It made her doubly critical of my choices. But I think, even aside from that, she found me … well, a little sloppy, I’d say. That I’d settled for something so unambitious, so unlikely to do the world much good. An old professor, at what was really a teaching college. Not even a university.”

  We drove along in silence for a while. He broke it.

  “But of course, what I felt was that I was in the world, that I couldn’t afford her delicacy.” I nodded. “And she felt, I suppose, that I’d sold my soul somehow. And finally, I think, she came to feel that the academic life was not much to have gotten in return.”

  He turned to me. I felt his attention and looked over at him. He was smiling.

  “That was it, the bedrock of our argument with each other.” He looked away.

  I didn’t know what to say, what he was telling me.

  “I miss her,” he said. His voice sounded scraped and tired, suddenly. “I miss the argument itself.”

  “Yes,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  Even this somehow reminded me of my grandfather. When I thought of those comments and the way Samuel had looked, making them, I remembered the moments between my grandparents when some bitterness that stayed submerged most of the time would suddenly surface. I remembered my perplexity as a child over this and then, when I was an adolescent, my sense of embarrassment—mostly, I think, for my grandfather, shamed as he seemed by something in it.

  It made me think about my marriages. If Peter and I had stayed together, or Joe and I, would the price have been the pushing under of whatever enraged or disappointed each of us in the other? Or would we have come to some forgiving peace that included the anger?

  Or was that forgiveness at all, if the anger still lived there underneath the peace?

  When Samuel spoke, I wanted somehow to comfort him, though I said nothing. I suppose I was afraid to seem to be criticizing his wife.

  • • •

  We talked about the diaries one day. The diaries and the other material. I told him about my compulsive reading and rereading.

  “Ah, you’ve got the bug,” he said.

  “Is that what it is?” I asked. “Is that what it feels like to you when you’re doing research on something?”

  “Very much.”

  “Without the personal connection, though.”

  “No, absolutely with it. I think if you don’t feel connected, if you don’t feel that what you’re figuring out is going to answer something personally for you, then you don’t do it. I can’t imagine doing it, at any rate.”

  “So what was answered personally for you by writing about railroads?” I was referring to his most famous book, The End of the Line. I’d looked it up in the town library, where there was an inscribed copy. “Large-hearted” it was called on the jacket copy taped inside. “Magisterial and comprehensive.” In the photograph cut from the jacket and taped there too, he was perhaps in his early forties, a seriously ravishing man in a theatrical pose: squinting into the middle distance, a half-smoked filterless cigarette raised partway to his face in curved fingers. A tweed jacket, naturally, but the shirt under it open at the neck. It pleased me to see he’d been vain then; that he wanted the world to see his image shaped in this romantic way. Later I wondered what his wife had thought of this photo—the vanity apparent in it.

  “Aha!” he said. “You’ve been poking around in my past too.”

  “Well, I assume you want people poking around in that part of your past.”

  “Of course it was written to be read, yes. But not the way a diary is.”

  “But a diary isn’t, is it?” I asked. “Written to be read? By anyone but the diarist, I mean.”

  “No?”

  “No. Absolutely no. You write it for yourself.”

  “Then why do you hold on to it?”

  “To look back over your own life. To see how things were for you at a set time, how you felt about them and understood them then.”

  “And then why don’t you, at a certain point in old age, let’s say—if it really is just for yourself—destroy it?”

  “Oh, who knows?” I said. I thought he was being difficult. “Maybe you’re too ill. Or tired. Or you’ve forgotten it, with everything else that presses in.”

  “But what presses in more than the past when you’re old?”

  “I don’t know. The notion of dying, maybe?”

  “Ah, but that’s what makes the past press in.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Just that I can imagine your grandmother imagining you reading her diary.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No. I honestly don’t think that. If you could see them. While they’re not very intimate, they’re really … private, somehow.

  “No,” I went on. “What I imagine is that it would be like killing your past, like killing yourself, in a way, to destroy it. And so you just don’t. You don’t get around to it. You might tell yourself you would tomorrow. Or when you knew you were nearly gone. But it’s so hard to believe that ever, I would think. That you really are going to be gone. And then you are dying, and it’s too late.”

  “But you see, I think all that is true, and I also t
hink at some level your grandmother must have intended you to read them.”

  “But Rue inherited the house first, remember. Not I. If she’d found them, they would have been long gone.”

  “But she was so much less likely to.”

  “To …?”

  “To find them. Even to look.”

  “How do you know that about Rue?”

  “You forget, I dealt with her through the mail for some years. A less sentimental woman, at least on paper, I’ve never encountered. She wouldn’t have been poking through things, looking for her past. When Maggie wanted to redecorate, she figuratively washed her hands of everything. We could have thrown it all away, as far as she was concerned. ‘Sure, do what you like’: that was her tone. Which was lovely for us, of course, to be able to make it ours, more or less. But that’s how she was about it. It was Maggie who felt we couldn’t chuck anything, and it was I who hauled most of it to the attic, at her behest.”

  “So you put it all up there.”

  “Well, some of it was there already. Your grandmother’s dress form, for instance. Charming.” He smiled. “It made me think of the professor’s house.”

  “What professor?”

  “The Professor’s House. The Cather novel.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, feeling stupid.

  “There’s a dress form in an attic in that book, actually several of them, I think, and the eponymous professor, who more or less hides away from his own life up there, is, as I recollect, comforted by them.”

  “Yes, I remember it,” I said. After a moment I said, “And is this you? Are you the professor somehow?”

  He laughed. “No.” Then his face fell. “No, I was quite happy downstairs.”

  When we got back that afternoon, I invited him in. I made us warm cider, with a shot of bourbon—the game that day had been chilly, and by the end, sunless—and we went back into my grandfather’s study. I showed him the way I’d grouped the documents I had. I wanted his approval, I think: yes, this is exactly the way a historian would proceed. But he seemed unamazed at any of it, except for the diaries themselves. Those he lifted almost reverentially, opened carefully.