The World Below

by Sue Miller

  “I imagine you still are.”

  “No,” she said. “No. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But surely that’s for others to say.”

  She laughed, a surprisingly hard sound. “Well, they wouldn’t either.”

  “I would,” he said.

  There was a long silence. “Would you,” she said. She seemed moved somehow.

  “I wonder,” he said now. “I wonder if I could ask you to come out for a ride tomorrow. It’s likely to be a beautiful day, a good day for motoring.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” she said. Her hand lifted from the post. “You’re … you’re just being nice.”

  “I assure you, I’m not being nice. I’m not nice.” When she didn’t turn her face to his or answer for a few moments, he said, very softly, “It would give me great pleasure.”

  Now she looked. Studying her face, he saw some odd emotion there he couldn’t have named. She took a step backward, but she said, “Well, then, it would give me pleasure too.” She laughed abruptly. This time the sound was carefree and light. “What time?” she asked.

  Ten

  Imagine it: the long, difficult birth. The baby unable to be turned. The mother, finally incapable of any control at all, given over simply to screaming. Then the ether, the cutting, and the rich metallic smell of blood and amniotic fluids. The child, limp, too still and grayish at first, then, with the shock of air, squalling into purple life—a boy, his genitals absurdly swollen, his body slick with matter and blood.

  Then his arrival at the party, still wearing his dark work suit, still carrying in his mind the astonishment of the birth, and somehow, he felt, the scent of blood. The wave of voices from within the house, the lovely girl turning to him in a dress the odd color of her own lips as they curved into her mouth, the sudden plunge into talk and laughter and celebration.

  And through it all, her face lifting to his over and over, as though she had never truly seen him before. Hello. Hello again. Once they bumped into each other and she turned and said “Oh! It’s you!” in a way that made him feel she had been waiting for him forever. For him.

  Imagine it: the bachelor approaching middle age, whose need to earn his way through college and then medical school had kept his young life austere and straitened; called to a half-rural practice in Maine, part surgery, part obstetrics, part nearly worthless medicine, part commiseration. He was grateful—and then ashamed of his gratitude—to ether, to morphine, to laudanum. His patients were grateful too, even when he could do virtually nothing for them. “Doc” they had called him, from the time he was less than thirty, and it made him feel old and prematurely sorrowful.

  Imagine joining the army, being sent to France—the base hospital—full of a shameful eagerness and sense of adventure (for how could this be his freedom, his liberation, this war that had brought catastrophe to Europe and death to thousands and thousands of boys so much younger, so much less liberated than he?), only to find his first task to be uselessly ministering to the scores dying of influenza, drowning in it as it swept through the confined quarters where they lived together. To feel, even as he began his work over there, how powerless he was to be.

  Imagine it: the talismanic memory that comes to him from time to time through all of this, the memory of an early evening in Maine, weighted already, even then, with the sense of what he cannot do, with the growing sense of what medicine itself cannot do, parking his motorcar outside the Rices’ home. He is late; this is his last stop before he goes to his own empty house, this stop to give Fanny Rice a shot of morphine that will, perhaps, let her sleep through the night. He dreads it, what she’s been reduced to: her greedy, cawing voice, the way she weeps sometimes in relief as the drug releases her. As he gets out of the car, his eye is caught by the sense of motion, by a pale dancing glimmer on the deeply shadowed front porch. Ah! it’s the oldest child. Georgia. She’s heard his car and come out to greet him. But for a moment, standing there in her blue dress, drying her hands on a dish towel, her long ribbon of hair falling over her shoulder, she looks like a young woman, not a child; and he is struck, having had the image of Fanny in his mind as he reached across in the car for his bag (Fanny: weightless, skele tal, her flesh yellow and dried)—he is struck by her solidity, her mobile, youthful beauty, the sense of a contained vitality in her. His heart lifts as he steps into the shadow of the house—he can help her after all, even if he can’t help her mother—and it almost seems to him for a moment that the girl, this sturdy, grave child, must have intended this gift to him, must have known how he needed it.

  But no, she is just relieved. “I thought you’d never get here!” she cries impatiently.

  “But you were wrong, weren’t you?” he answers, and his reward is the surprised, wide smile—she likes to be teased—and then the light way her hair and her dress bell away from her as she turns to lead him in.

  Georgia: she has already been with him through so much.

  He died when I was nineteen, a freshman in college, and my grandmother’s grief was surprising and almost frightening to me. She had seemed so well used to his being old, so tough-minded about it, so gently mocking of all his foibles as well as of their long history together, that I thought she had a great distance on everything. I had, in fact, presumed his age to be a kind of burden to her and his death to be expected, even counted on.

  I came home for his funeral, all the way across the country from California. The house was crowded. Her children, the two who were still alive, had come home too, Rue from France, my uncle Richard from New York. They took Lawrence’s and my bedrooms, and we slept downstairs, he on a cot in my grandfather’s office and I on the couch in the front parlor. We all foraged for ourselves at breakfast—my grandmother didn’t come down until midmorning. It was this, almost more than anything else, that let me know how acute her sorrow was.

  She tried to hide it from us. Three or four times each day, when she felt it overwhelming her, she’d go to her room and close the door. There was never a sound from behind it—I actually listened once, to my shame—but when she emerged, her eyes would be red-rimmed, her voice hoarse, dried out.

  The service was in the Congregational church on the green, a memorial service, since he’d been cremated. We walked up slowly, and ahead of us as we turned onto Main Street we could see others, dressed in their somber clothes, walking in the same direction. It was still mud season, and those who had come farthest wore galoshes or boots with their Sunday clothes. The air smelled of wet earth. As we approached the green, we saw the cars lined up, completely surrounding the square, some pulled up onto the grass. They left deep ruts that were slowly filling with water.

  The minister was young, new, and it was clear he hadn’t known my grandfather well. But he kept his part of the service short. It was an old friend, another retired physician, who delivered the eulogy, which was warm and funny. Then we all sang the familiar songs, my grandmother’s thin soprano strong through them, and walked back again to the house for the collation. The house was full at the start, and it had the feeling of a party, people who hadn’t seen each other all winter catching up with one another’s news. There was no great shock to my grandfather’s death, of course—he was eighty-eight—and that made it easy for people to move quickly from consolation to news and gossip.

  After an hour and a half or so, though, we were winnowed down to the family and to about twenty people who’d known my grandparents well. Ada and Fred were both there, sitting on the couch in the back parlor, she looking like a fatter and somehow more smug version of my grandmother—who sat quietly most of the time in her favorite chair, speaking only when someone spoke directly to her. Others in the room had pulled dining room chairs in here as the party thinned, and a few people were standing, holding coffee cups or drinks. Who was it who started the stories—Dr. Butler, who’d taken over my grandfather’s practice after he retired? or George Hammond, who fished with him? or Ada, who could tell tales of the early part of her sister’s marriage: of
the day my grandfather marched Georgia down to the bank and set her up with her own account, for instance—the only woman Ada knew for years and years who could claim to have her own money.

  I could have told my own stories too, of course. I could have spoken of my grandfather’s funny language for food, designed just to please me, I thought as a child: eggs “done to the death,” fried potatoes “smashed to smithereens” and doused with “gobbets of gooey gravy.”

  I could have described how he’d taught me to drive on the dirt road that ran by Miller Pond, calmly and unflappably reading as I fumbled through the gears and stalled out repeatedly, as I lurched to the shoulder or narrowly missed trees; calling out loudly only if the car began to falter or cough, “It’s gas what makes the car go, Cath: gas, gas, gas!”

  During those lessons, we’d sometimes stop and picnic on the promontory where they later built a summer camp for boys. He would open what my grandmother had prepared with an eagerness that seemed to me to transcend hunger—that had to do, I always thought, with the connection he felt to her, through this food she’d made. Afterward, stuffed, I would sunbathe on the old khaki blanket and he would fetch his fishing rod from the trunk of the car and move around the edge of the lake, casting off out beyond the lily pads. Sometimes I watched him, or waded, feeling the sunfish brush my ankles or nibble at my bare feet. And then we’d drive again. I think now he probably had instructions to keep me out of the house all day so my grandmother could reclaim her solitude. Could nap.

  I could have described the long letters he wrote to me at college, reminiscing about his own undergraduate days, calling me back to my wavering purpose—the life of the intellect, wasn’t it?—by remembering his with such clarity and fondness. Once he wrote:

  There was a secondhand bookstore a few blocks off campus which I used to haunt with friends. You can imagine my pleasure at finding a first edition of Carlyle there one day. I spent almost a full week’s wages on it.

  I could imagine no such thing, of course, but it made me aware, momentarily, of wishing I were the sort of person who could.

  I could have said he was always the one who tended to me when I was sick, arriving at my bedside before I called out for him sometimes, with cold water to drink and cool cloths to wipe my face, my hands and forearms. That he didn’t believe in aspirin for a fever unless it got dangerously high. He’d look at the thermometer and shake it down, saying, “Good for you, Cath, you’re burning the bugs up.”

  I didn’t say any of this, I think because they felt too dear to me, too private, these memories; and my grandmother said nothing either, perhaps for the same reason.

  When I came, at age fifteen, to my grandparents’ house to stay, I couldn’t have fathomed what it might have meant to them to have me there—as their child, as it were, their last real child having left home so many years before. I assumed their love, I assumed my welcome. I romanticized myself: I assumed, I think, that they would actually take some comfort from me, that I would be their consolation for the death of my mother. And I’m happy for myself—for that other version of myself—that I was able to do so, to be so thoughtlessly self-centered that I didn’t for a moment consider that my presence might have been inconvenient, or a burden, or in any way painful.

  When I arrived for good, my grandfather had been more or less retired for a decade or so, though people in town still called him for the occasional emergency—when there was a farm accident or a child ran a high fever in the middle of the night—and he kept his black bag ready; he always went when he was called. Aside from that, their lives were ordered and seemed bland to me.

  Now they don’t. Now even the order seems a matter of will and strength, a way of meeting life energetically, a way of turning away from what had been hard and disappointing to what could be mastered or learned. But I didn’t know then, of course, that anything had been hard or disappointing. Oh, there was my mother and her illness, yes, but surely she was my tragedy more than theirs. This, anyway, was how I saw it. I didn’t think of what her fragility, her strangeness, might have cost them as she grew up, especially in that time when child-rearing had just become a science and a troubled child a sign of some failure in the great experiment of parenting—which wasn’t even a gerund yet.

  I knew nothing, either, of their daughter Ruth’s—my aunt Rue’s—angry estrangement. And though I did know of Lewis’s death in the Second World War, that seemed heroic and enlarging to me, almost enviable.

  I didn’t know anything of what they’d done to each other or forgiven each other in order to make their regulated life. And I shared that life completely without really even being grateful for it, without noticing what I was taking from it, how it was encircling me and comforting me. Though I noticed them more than I had before, on summer visits. Then I think it was hard to see around my mother, she so preoccupied us all. Now I saw them. How my grandfather often seemed amused by me, and by Gran. How much she always needed to be busy, to have a project.

  Sometimes I felt I provided that for her. She was anxious, I think, about what my mother might or might not have taught me about life and took it upon herself to fill in what she imagined were the gaps. How to knit, for instance. Or the arrangements of knives and forks at a place setting. Sewing a coat button on tight enough to stay, loose enough to be workable. Making egg salad.

  Had Dolly—my mother—spoken to me about sex? she asked one day.

  My heart sank. “Sort of,” I said.

  “You know about it anyway, I suppose,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t look at her.

  “Good.” She went on for a few minutes with what she was doing, mashing potatoes for supper. “Still, the relevant information is how natural it feels, I would say. Though when you think about it much, it seems it wouldn’t. As natural as breathing or walking.” She added butter and began to beat it in. She said, “And if it doesn’t, then someone doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  When I came to live with my grandparents for good, I wasn’t a happy girl. Of course, part of my unhappiness had to do with my mother’s death; but I was also unhappy because I was—I had been—an oddity in my high school in Evanston. A loner. A girl who didn’t know how to talk to others. How could I have been otherwise, growing up as I did? With a mother who didn’t know how to talk to me?

  I think I saw my move to Vermont as offering me the opportunity we all seek at some time in our adolescence to start over. It worked. I suppose I was still a bit of an oddity, but I felt myself here to be a superior oddity, and so I was more comfortable than I’d been at home. And that comfort was what made me acceptable.

  It was easy to get to know the kids around me. We rode a bus together to the regional high school, which was, by urban standards, small—only about three hundred pupils. There were around twenty of us who took the bus from West Barstow, another thirty or so from Barstow itself. On the return trip in the afternoon, there were eight or ten stops near town where kids got off, but as the weather warmed—and I had arrived only a month or so before that long, hesitant process began—more and more of them chose to ride past their own stops to get off at the green. The green: my stop. They would hang around there for half an hour or an hour and then even longer than that, as the days grew warmer.

  I started to linger too, to hang around with them. We shed our coats. We formed and reformed clusters, sitting perched on the backs of the benches provided (it would not have been cool to sit on the slatted seats). Someone would wander up to Grayson’s for Cokes or Slim Jims or small bags of potato chips or candy. The tougher kids smoked. Over the long spring, the hour at which we dispersed to chores or music lessons or television got later and later.

  For many of the girls, the point of all this was the cars, the older boys driving by in cars or pickup trucks. They cruised the town green slowly, their radios loud, their voices pitched louder over the music. They’d pull up along the curb in front of the monument and talk and smoke and call the girls over by name, mostly th
e juniors and seniors. The girls went; they stood bent over with their elbows resting on the window openings, shifting their weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, their bottoms waggling slowly from side to side in their long straight skirts.

  In all of this I was an observer rather than a participant, but I was accepted as an observer. Sought out, in fact, to receive commentary and explanations. There were girls who liked explaining their world to me, who liked the role of guide, initiator. So while I wasn’t really a part of things, I wasn’t entirely left out either, that first spring.

  Then, one morning early in the fall, Sonny Gill got on the bus just outside of town. I’d seen him in school the spring before. He was a year ahead of me, a senior now, and therefore in none of my classes, which was convenient or even perhaps necessary for me: I didn’t have to know at first how badly he did in school. What I knew instead was how astonishingly beautiful he was. He had curling blond hair and perfectly even, perfectly shaped features, nearly female in their delicacy.

  It’s all I saw on this day as he made his way toward me down the aisle between the worn leather seats, nodding to one or another of the sophomore or junior boys who respectfully greeted him. As he passed me, he pointed his forefinger at me and slowly lowered his arched thumb down to it, a shooting motion. My breath stopped.

  That was all it took, that gesture. He was beautiful, he was older, and no one in my life had ever claimed me so simply. Had ever claimed me at all.

  That afternoon, he sat next to me on one of the bench backs on the green, smoking. He’d wrecked his car, he told me. (Thus his appearance on the bus, which few seniors rode.) He hadn’t really minded, though, because he thought I must ride the bus, so he guessed he’d run into me.

  “You seen me around, didn’t you?”

  I said I had.

  “You interested?”

  I looked away. I couldn’t bear to have him see me say yes. “That’s it then,” he said. “I’ll talk to you when the car’s fixed. We’ll go somewhere.”