The World Below

by Sue Miller

  She got up now and washed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. There had been so few mirrors at the san and no privacy at any of them. One caught glimpses of oneself only. Now Georgia looked, hard. My brown beauty, Seward had called her. And she was, brown. Her skin a honey-brown from lying out in the sun, her hair brown touched with a sun-struck gold, thick and flyaway at her chin. Her eyes, brown with flecks of green. At the san, in her bath, she’d noticed that even her nipples had browned. Somehow she felt this to be the result of Seward’s touch, the sign of their sin on her.

  Seward! she thought. How far away, how gone he was! What could she do with her life here that could connect to Seward? That could make any sense of what she and he had done together? What they’d promised each other? She thought of the way he smelled, she thought of his hungry eyes on her, the way his long fingers felt on her legs. A screen door banged downstairs.

  She went back to bed.

  When she woke again, it was late afternoon; she could tell by the sun in the western sky out her window. She heard voices below her in the kitchen, and when she came down the back stairs and stepped onto the old linoleum, Mrs. Beston cried out and crossed the room to seize her, to hold her face and look at her, to touch her hair and make her turn around and around and be admired. “You’re a new gal!” she said, with tears in her eyes, and Georgia felt that someone, at last, had seen her, had understood that everything was changed in her life.

  They had a little party for her a few days later. It was to be Georgia’s introduction to Mrs. Erskine, and she was both impatient and reluctant to have it happen. Once she’d seen Mrs. Erskine, she knew, it would be real, there could no more be the fleeting sense she allowed herself every now and then that things could just go on as they always had.

  Mrs. Beston arrived that day “at crack of dawn,” as she said, to clean and get things in order, and Georgia went upstairs right after lunch, to rest and then to dress carefully, to spend a long time fixing her hair, wetting the flyaway strands and pinching them into place.

  Mrs. Erskine came in the early afternoon, her car loaded with food, and flowers from her garden, and a cut-glass punch bowl and twenty-five matching cups, all wrapped in tissue in a huge box. She was a slender woman, handsome, Georgia thought as she stepped around the car, with frizzy, prematurely white hair, which she wore pinned into a chignon at the back of her head, under the drooping brim of her straw hat.

  She came up the porch stairs and embraced Georgia lightly and gracefully, touching her cool cheek to the younger woman’s for just a moment. “Finally,” she said with satisfaction, as she stepped back. “Though I feel I’ve known you forever, your father’s so crazy about you.” Her voice was light and musical, which seemed strange to Georgia, she looked so mature, almost matronly. She couldn’t have been more different from Georgia’s mother.

  Georgia’s father had come out onto the porch too, and now he stepped forward and, taking Mrs. Erskine’s hands, he kissed her, one of his noisy big busses that got the kiss accomplished while making a joke of it too, Georgia was relieved to note. They all laughed at him, even Mrs. Beston, who’d come out to help unload the car.

  Mrs. Erskine was dressed for the party, in a silk print dress and white shoes, but she unpinned her hat and put an apron on and started to work right away. Georgia tried to help, but Mrs. Erskine and Mrs. Beston told her to go away—what a disgrace, to get help from the guest of honor!—so she went and sat on the front porch swing, listening to the clatter of dishes in the house, the footsteps going back and forth, the voices speaking and laughing. At one point she heard Mrs. Erskine call her father. “Davis?” she said in her girlish voice. “Davis, I’ll need help with this table.”

  “I’ll be there in two shakes,” he called back from upstairs, and in his words Georgia heard a lightness that hadn’t been there in years, since long before her mother died—a lightness she’d never succeeded in bringing to his life, plainly. And she was glad for him—she was! she thought, as she swung slowly back and forth by herself on the porch.

  Who came? Several of her parents’ old friends and some neighbors. Mrs. Erskine had invited her own sister and brother-in-law and their family, so there was a boy Freddie’s age and several slightly younger children, all of whom played wild games in the meadow out back—mown now, Georgia noted. Ada had asked a few people, and several of Georgia’s old schoolmates had come, including Bill March and his fiancée, who was awkward with Georgia at first but then perfectly pleasant to talk to. She and Bill were both full of stories of the university, of people Georgia had known in high school and had thought she would always know, people whose names were like foreign words to her now.

  The house grew crowded and hot and they all brought chairs into the side yard and the women took off their hats and the men their jackets and they sat in the dancing shade under the old maples and drank the punch that Mrs. Beston had made. When the children started a game of tug-of-war, several of the young men and women, including Ada, joined in, but Georgia sat with the adults and watched. It all felt curiously flat to her, though she could tell it was a success and that Mrs. Erskine was pleased. For herself, though, she missed the sense of structure to such events at the san, where there would have been music, or poetry, or a film at the heart of things. That, and the feeling of wildness, of a kind of abandon among the adults that she’d gotten used to. That sense of maleness and femaleness in the air, of what she supposed must be thought of as perversity. The thing that had made it possible for her to become Seward’s lover, to lie down with him shamelessly, over and over.

  Sitting here now, hearing her own voice among the others cheering on Ada and Freddie and Bill March and one of the Simpson children, she found it difficult to believe in that other world, in what she had become and done at the san. And yet she could hardly believe in this world either, she felt so cut off from it now. As though this life, these events, were a dream she was living through. When someone spoke to her, when she answered, she half expected bubbles to rise from her mouth, she felt so underwater, she felt she was moving so slowly and thickly through this day.

  Would she ever outgrow this? Would her own life become familiar and comfortable to her again, as life in the san eventually had? Or had she made herself unfit for it, with all she’d done, all she’d learned? The shade had deepened as the shadow of the house grew long in the yard.

  Of course, she was thinking, it wasn’t her own life anymore, not as she’d known it. Maybe that was all that was the trouble. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to Mrs. Erskine and the way the house would be run. She looked over at the older woman. One of her nieces was on her lap, facing her with her legs straddling her aunt’s, playing with Mrs. Erskine’s necklace. Mrs. Erskine’s hands met around the child’s bottom. She was talking in her bell-like voice to Mrs. Mitchell, whose chair was next to hers. Both women laughed. Mrs. Erskine’s head tilted back slightly in pleasure. Now the niece’s hands reached up to her aunt’s face. The little girl cupped Mrs. Erskine’s cheeks for a moment, as if to summon her attention. Mrs. Erskine looked down at her, smiled, and bent her head slightly to drop a kiss into one of the little girl’s small palms before she turned back to Mrs. Mitchell.

  A nice woman. An organized woman—that would certainly make life different from what it had been! A woman who would be friendly with the neighbors, who would have parties, play bridge and mah-jongg.

  Georgia sighed.

  “Are you weary, dear?” Mrs. Erskine said, instantly attentive, and Georgia had to perk up and say no, no, of course not, and then try to seem to listen once more.

  Late in the afternoon, people began to carry their plates and cups in. Then their chairs. They left, two, three at a time, and suddenly all at once, and the house was quiet again. Mrs. Erskine put on one of Fanny’s old aprons and began walking around, picking up and talking to Mrs. Beston—whom she called Ellen—about which cookies, which sandwiches had been most successful. Georgia and Ada helped, silently, listening to
the older women chatting with comradely pleasure as they moved around the kitchen. “I think that on a hot day like today the cucumber just doesn’t stay crisp enough to make it worthwhile,” Mrs. Erskine said.

  “Yes. And then you always have to worry about the dressing too,” said Mrs. Beston animatedly. “All them eggs.”

  Georgia’s first letter from Seward came almost two weeks after the party, forwarded on from the san. It described the train ride out, his arrival in Denver, his moving to the boardinghouse his sisters had arranged for him at the edge of town. He had been dizzy and sleepy on account of the altitude at first, he wrote her, but was slowly getting used to it, and he could feel that the hot thin air was soothing to his lungs.

  I wonder whether you will be leaving the san soon, and when the wedding date will be set. I feel it’s our wedding date as much as it is theirs, and ‘I’m impatient for it, though a little time will allow me to recover my strength.

  He spoke of his desperation when he’d had to leave without finding her to say goodbye and of how much he thought of her.

  My life here is not as I’d pictured it because I’m still so tired much of the time, but the place itself is everything it promised to be, and once you’ve come, we can begin to make all of our imaginings come true. Only tell me when. I will be waiting, thinking of you and the places we went together—the woods and also the shed.

  Reading this, Georgia felt the strange disappointment that comes when the writer isn’t as electric on the page as he was in the flesh. What did she miss? Of course, the sense of him physically. But also the vibrancy of his illness, his frantic feverishness. His greed for her. In the letters he was merely ill; in the flesh he had been alive with it, as though it were a current charging him.

  But she wrote back sweetly and, she thought, boringly. About Mrs. Erskine:

  She is, I think, much more refined in many ways than my mother, who grew up, after all, an only child in a farm family. Mrs. Erskine is a person who belongs to clubs and who knows what kind of tea sandwich to serve for what occasion. I do like her, and she is lovely with my father, but I am not used to her.

  About Ada:

  I cannot find my old comfort with Ada. She was like my echo, my heartbeat, part of me, and she isn’t anymore. It may simply be that she’s grown up, it seems overnight, but it feels very unsettling to me.

  She talked about the way she spent her days, cooking again, cleaning, shopping. And sewing clothes for herself, as none of hers fit her, and for the wedding, which was set for September.

  I will stay on to take care of Fred and Ada and the house while they honeymoon. They have the use of a friend’s cabin on Green Lake for two weeks. And then I will be free to set my own course.

  She didn’t say she was coming, because she couldn’t imagine it, but she knew he would read what she wrote as though she had, and she felt a certain sense of falseness as she folded the paper and sealed it into the envelope.

  He wrote back almost right away, a short letter. He’d been quite ill, hemorrhaging again, and his landlady was insisting he go into a san there; she wasn’t prepared to care for someone so sick. He would write more when he was rested, when he was better.

  Georgia was neither surprised nor truly grieved by the news, though she felt pity to read it. Her own coldheartedness appalled her. Did she not love him?

  She had loved him then, she knew that, but she had begun now to think of that time as a kind of trance, an enchantment, fed by her forced idleness, her fear, her despair. And Seward’s attachment to her had been so quick and absolute that she could see it now only as born of his desperate need. Why, in all likelihood he saw her as he saw his sisters—as someone to care for him, to center her life on his. Now, busy as she was, taken up as she was by the myriad details of the wedding and her chores, she thought of him as she would think of someone she’d invented, a beautiful boy in a fairy tale. Only he was more like the princess, the sleeping beauty, she mused. And she, more like the prince who was supposed to wake him.

  I am thinking of you, Seward dear, [she wrote]. All that’s important right now is that you take good care of yourself.

  She and Ada wore silk dresses, midcalf length, of a pale orchid color. Each had a low waist and a draped sash over the hip. Mrs. Erskine—Grace to them now—gave them each a long strand of pearls to wear too, her wedding present to them. Their shoes were gray silk, the softest shoes that had ever held Georgia’s feet.

  Grace herself wore a satin dress of pale brown, the color of richly creamed coffee. It was ankle length and had a lace panel down the front. On her head she wore a small cap of the same lace. No veil. She carried lilies, lilies from which Georgia had carefully cut each powdery pistil early that morning, so their vivid dye wouldn’t stain anything.

  After the service, they all walked slowly back across the green to the house, the bride and groom at the head of the parade. Here and there the maples were turned already, cerise, orange, yellow. The wedding and the party afterward were just for family and close friends, but the neighbors came out onto their porches and waved and called out their greetings as they ambled across the green.

  It had been cool the night before, but the day was warm, and the house grew warmer as the party went on. Georgia and Ada and Mrs. Beston were in charge this time, with two hired girls to serve and clean up. There was a wine punch and little sandwiches and fruit salad and, of course, the cake.

  When everyone seemed settled, Georgia went out to the front porch for a few minutes to cool off, to be alone. Just as she closed the screen door behind her, Dr. Holbrooke, who’d had to park his car all the way around the corner on Main Street, turned into the walk.

  He was late because he’d been at a difficult birth where he’d finally had to perform a cesarean section. In the car on the way over, it had seemed to him he still smelled of blood, though he could see none on his hands or clothes. He’d been up since two in the morning, and he was exhausted. He had told himself he’d just stop by the wedding party for a few minutes and pay his respects. He’d been surprised, actually, to be invited; but then, he thought, Rice had no reason to think he felt anything but friendly toward him, and every reason to be grateful for his daughter’s good health.

  And here she was, just turning from the screen door, flushed, wearing a long glamorous dress, a flower pinned in her hair.

  “Dr. Holbrooke!” she cried. “But you completely missed the service.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He was standing on the lowest step now, looking up at her just above him. Her face was damp with heat, little coils of her thick hair stuck to her forehead.

  “Oh, don’t be sorry. Come in! I, for one, am very glad you’re here.” This sounded so true, so heartfelt, that he was startled by it—by the sense of her pleasure at seeing him.

  It was heartfelt. Seeing him so abruptly, Georgia had the sense of him as someone who knew her as she was, who understood what had happened to her life, who’d been part of it, in fact, as it changed. There was an extraordinary sensation of relief for her in this, she had felt so solitary and isolated up to now. So false somehow.

  He followed her in, watching the motion of the long clinging dress against her body as she walked ahead of him. She found her father and introduced her new stepmother, and while he stood there talking to them she fetched him a glass of the punch. When he thanked her, she smiled, her head lifted slightly back, as though she were as thirsty as he in some other way and were drinking his very words.

  He stayed the afternoon, until after the cake was sliced and served, until the bridal couple went upstairs to change, until they came back down, running across the front porch and the walk between the guests who pelted them with rice. He moved around and talked, always trying to locate Georgia—across the room, or on the stairs, or darting back into the kitchen. He often caught her eye or found her looking at him. It was as if they had an agreement: first you look, then I will. Even when he couldn’t see her, he was aware of her fine, bright laugh, ringing o
ut perhaps just a little too loudly, with too much nervous energy. He could be sure of nothing, of course, but he felt that something had changed in her feelings toward him, that she was suddenly seeing him not as an older man, not as her doctor. He felt absurdly energetic and happy.

  She came out onto the porch with him again to say goodbye. There were a few guests still left inside, and the low hum of conversation followed them.

  “This will make enormous changes in your life, I imagine,” he said, as they stood in the cooling air. “This wedding. This marriage.”

  “Oh, my life!” she said dismissively. “I’m tired of thinking about it.” She had drunk three glasses of the wine punch, and she felt light-headed and carefree.

  He was so startled he couldn’t answer for a moment. “You’re very young to say a thing like that,” he said finally, gently.

  Her chin lifted. “I’m not so young as you think.” And at once she seemed terribly young, a defiant child.

  He was amused. He smiled at her. “And what do you imagine I think?”

  “You think I’m a girl. Nothing but a sweet little girl. Isn’t that so?”

  “No. It’s not. Even when you were a sweet little girl, it was not.”

  She was holding on to the porch post, swinging herself slightly from side to side. The fabric of her dress swayed slowly against her legs. There was a burst of laughter from in the house. “I was sweet, though, wasn’t I?” she said suddenly.