The World Below

by Sue Miller

  Sent away was not how I felt, though. I felt liberated. I felt deeply and permanently set free, mostly from myself.

  Rue lived in a deep, narrow apartment on the Right Bank. If you leaned carefully out the opened windows at the front you could see the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the Seine. These words, Eiffel Tower, Seine, had the power to stir me profoundly, maybe even more than the reality of the places themselves did.

  My bedroom was at the back of the apartment, overlooking the inner courtyard, which had once, perhaps, been elegant but was now always full of parked cars and the noise of the concierge’s television set, turned on all day and into the night to what sounded like game shows: you could hear the emcee’s frantic high-pitched voice, the joyless mechanical hysterics of what must have been a studio audience. I had two windows that opened out over this space, and I spent a lot of time, particularly in the evenings, sitting at them and watching the life unself-consciously being acted out in layers in the apartments across the way.

  My aunt—the Duchess, was like an older, more elegant, and certainly more stable version of my mother. By the time I saw Rue each morning, she was, as my grandmother always was, carefully dressed—in Rue’s case, though, wearing Chanel knockoffs and thick ropes of gold and pearls around her neck and wrists. We had breakfast together in the dining room, served by the Moroccan maid, Claude, who alone among us seemed at ease; she wore bedroom slippers and shapeless clothes to work in and sang as she moved around the apartment.

  Each morning, over our coffee and bread and fruit, Rue told me what her day was to be and what time she would come back to get me for whatever cultural excursion we were to undertake that afternoon.

  My days were orderly too. In the mornings I took care of the three American Pierce children. I had lunch with them and settled them down for their rest. I came home immediately to a French lesson with Mme. Georges. Then I was free until the agreed-upon hour with Rue. Several times a week I went back to the Pierces’ in the evening to baby-sit, but I was paid extra for this and was allowed to refuse if Rue and I had something planned.

  I didn’t like Rue, but I admired her. Her escape itself, to France, to Paris, to her apartment. Her way of dressing. Her way of seeing the world. All this seemed exotic and remarkable to me, given the little town in Vermont she’d come from, given that she was my mother’s sister. Of course, it had arrived in her life step by step. She’d been a nurse, and she came to Europe in the Second World War. She’d met her husband in France just after it ended. He was a businessman, from a stuffy bourgeois family, and she gave me to understand that marrying her represented his rebellion, his defiance of them. This seemed unlikely to me at the time, for wasn’t her life, in its way, as stuffy and bourgeois as anything imaginable? She was full of strictures—how to sit, how to eat, how to wear one’s hair, how, differentially, to address the people we encountered daily. Rules, endless rules, most of which I’d never heard of before. She meant to make a difference in my life—she had taken me on, that was clear—and she did. Mostly in the ways she intended, but in other ways too.

  She announced her intentions, not to me but, in my presence, to her friends. In French. But over the course of the summer, even though my own speech in French was always laboriously composed in my mind before I uttered it, I came to understand bigger and bigger chunks of her conversations. And so I knew what she thought of my life: “So extremely narrow, you wouldn’t believe it.” She spoke of my mother: “Completely deranged, but also capable of a kind of small controlled daily life.” Of my father, foolish and pathetic, though loyal, one had to give him that. And of my grandparents, trying their best, of course, but at their age, how could one expect them to have the energy necessary for the job? And my grandmother! Well, one noted she’d already raised a child of her own so disturbed she ended by taking her own life. What more need one say, after all?

  And where, in all of this, she would ask dramatically, raising her glass, or her cup, or her cigarette, was there the smallest chance for this poor little one (me) to experience life, culture, art, as one was meant to? I was a pathetic creature. Culturally I might as well be completely orphaned.

  Once, when one of her friends protested her speaking of me this way within my hearing—and of my parents and family—she said, “Fffft. If you speak at all rapidly, she understands nothing.” It was the first whole sentence that I was aware of taking in without the internal process of translation.

  I had been lost in myself before this—a defense, I suppose, against my mother’s illness and death as well as, to some degree, an intensified version of that particular stage of adolescence. Now I began to see myself, my story, through Rue’s eyes. I saw, in fact, that I had a story. But not only that. I saw myself, the embodiment of that story, through French eyes too, I saw myself as I was seen, physically moving around in Paris. Rue gave me this: self-consciousness. Before her, I had been invisibly at the center of my world. But the world grew larger for me now, and I became visible in it. To myself, most of all. Even the Pierce children helped me gain a distance on myself. Nathalie, the oldest, announced to me one day that I was their second favorite sitter. I was not, she said, as funny as Lene, the Danish au pair who took care of them in the winter, but I was sweeter, kinder, and at certain times prettier.

  Instantly I understood that I was too somber, not witty enough; and I swore to myself I would change.

  This became the meaning to me of my stay in France: I would change. I could change. I would come back a different person, ready for a different life. I traipsed after Rue and took in her comments on architecture, on art, on clothes, on manners and food—things I’d never conceived that you thought about, I’d never understood that there could be good or bad versions of. I watched the way French people sat in restaurants and cafés, the elaborate facial expressions and gestures they made as they spoke or listened. So much energy! So much concern! Just about words, ideas. I studied and copied the way the French girls dressed and moved and talked, the light rhythm of their speech. I had my hair cut like theirs. I lost weight. With the money I earned at the Pierces’, I bought new shoes, new clothes. I felt pretty, glamorous, unfright-ened for the first time in my life. In my room, with the lights out and the windows open, I smoked cigarettes I’d stolen from Rue, tilting my head back glamorously, watching the languor of my arms in the mirror.

  But there was another aspect to my stay, another change in perspective being offered me. For Rue had her own vision, too, of my grandparents’ lives together. It emerged, it bubbled up in all her talk about them: a clear disdain for my grandmother, a sense of her as untrustworthy, and a deep, jealous adoring of my grandfather. It was the kind of thing, I think now, that my mother, if she’d been like other mothers, if she’d been able to talk to us normally about her family, might have easily explained. She might have said, “Oh, Rue. She was half in love with Daddy. No wonder she always found fault with Mother.”

  To my own credit—and because of my love for my grandmother—I understood some of it that way anyway, though I couldn’t have been so easily dismissive or so amused as this theoretical mother of mine. But I sensed there was something off in Rue’s notion of things. I may have concluded this in part because of the way Rue saw my mother’s illness: as something my grandmother had caused. This was, of course, the way the world understood it then, the educated world in particular. And Rue had had medical training. She knew her Freud—or at least the distortion of Freud that held parents, mothers in particular, accountable for all pathology in their children.

  Even at that age, though, I knew that what had happened to my mother had nothing to do with anyone in our family-with anyone else at all. If I had learned one useful lesson from living with a person so disturbed, it was that some illnesses—and to me, palpably, hers—are driven by something internal, something that goes profoundly and horribly awry. My mother, I could have told you, was just different when she was ill. Things were deeply, chemically disturbed in her in a way that even the most
misbegotten parenting couldn’t have produced. And I didn’t understand my grandmother’s parenting—even Rue’s version of it—to have been that misbegotten.

  The tone, then, I ignored or dismissed. I knew it was wrong. It was one of the many ways I slowly understood Rue to be wrong. (I could hear in French, and I held it against her that she hadn’t guessed that—and that she continued to speak about me long after I could understand almost all of what she was saying.)

  It was harder, though, to dismiss the story she told me—that my grandmother had had an affair in the sanatorium—and Rue was the first person who explained anything about the san to me, the notion of being sent away, the sense of another, discrete culture there. That the man had abandoned her and gone somewhere out west. That my grandmother had turned then to her doctor, my grandfather, and won him over (“You’ve seen the pictures of her then, she was a very pretty girl”) by pretending to be what she was not: sweet and naive. An innocent. “It made all the difference in the world in those days,” Rue said. “You know, for a girl of her background to have had any sexual experience at all.… Well, it put her quite beyond the pale.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette. We were sitting opposite each other in the darkened dining room. Rue rarely smoked when she was alone with me during the day, and of course never on the street, but after dinner she allowed herself two cigarettes—strong, unfiltered French cigarettes that smelled like my grandfather’s cigars.

  “And Daddy, of course, knew nothing of it until after the fact.”

  “After what fact?” I asked.

  “My dear, after they were married.”

  “But she wouldn’t trick him! I don’t believe that.”

  Rue raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  “Besides, he loves her,” I said. “So what does it matter?”

  She made a face, a moue.

  “Who told you this?” I asked.

  “It’s well known in the family,” she said. “Everyone knew it at the time.”

  “But who told you?”

  “My dear.” She was irritated. “Ada did,” she said, after a moment. “My aunt. Your great-aunt. Her sister.”

  “But how did she know?”

  “Your grandmother left her journal lying around. And there were letters, letters which came from the man in question even after the wedding. Aunt Ada saw them.”

  “So she read her diary?”

  Rue tossed her head impatiently. “Which do you think is the greater wrong: to deceive a man you are about to marry or to read a journal left lying around?” I didn’t answer. “You are young, my dear. You are offended at the childish slight you can imagine. Later you will be able to imagine the other kind of injury. You will see the far greater wrong in it.”

  There was finality, judgment in her voice, as there so often was, and I didn’t ask her any more questions. Whenever I thought of this story, though—and I thought of it often, of course, and puzzled and picked at it—I remembered it in the moment it was told to me. The gathering twilight of Rue’s dining room (though the sky was still yellow above the rooftops out the bank of windows behind her); the wine, of which I was always allowed one glass; the hard crumbs on the table I ran my hand over; the pungent smell of Rue’s cigarette; the sounds of Claude in the kitchen, singing softly in her own language and washing dishes; and the bitter pleasure Rue took in the telling, the way she crushed and crushed and crushed her cigarette until no smoke from it trailed any longer. I thought of how horrible her fingers must smell.

  Rue was wrong, it turned out. The diary reads:

  December 5: Sunny today, and the snow turned to shining ice on the ground. John called late this afternoon and we sat in the parlor for a little while. I found the courage to tell him I was damaged goods. He said it did not matter to him.

  December fifth was a week to the day since my grandfather had asked my grandmother to marry him, since she’d told him that she needed time to think about it. He was traveling by sleigh that afternoon-the back roads were snowed in too deeply for a car—and he’d had several calls to make. One in Newport for a child with a fever and sore throat, one in Corinna for an old patient who’d begun to die, and one in St. Albans to change the dressing on a leg injury, a farm accident that hadn’t healed and, he suspected now, was never going to heal. In spite of the bright sun—almost blinding as it struck the frozen surface of the snow—he was in a dark mood. As he drove through Preston on his way home, he decided on impulse to stop in at the Rices’. He’d been staying away from Georgia for the last week in an honorable attempt to grant her the time she felt she needed to make her decision, but he told himself as he drove up that he would stop just for a few minutes. He’d use the excuse that he couldn’t let the horse cool down to keep himself to his word.

  The sight of her opening the door affected him as it always did, with a deep anticipatory pleasure—of what she might say or do, a story she might tell him, some lively gesture she might make that would amuse or delight him. She blushed as she snatched off her apron. She’d been in the kitchen working with her stepmother, she said apologetically. Christmas cookies. He was aware, suddenly, of that familiar buttery, sweet smell. She led him into the parlor, where there was a slow fire going in the fireplace.

  There seemed to be something hushed in the air as they sat down together. At first he thought it was just the day, the shocking cold outside and the sense of being closed up in here. But then he realized that wasn’t it—that it was, somehow, in her. She was different. Subdued and a little awkward.

  She spoke to him, not quite meeting his eyes. “You know I have nothing to tell you yet.” She had sat down opposite him in a low lady’s chair.

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  She tilted her head and looked at him. “Then why are you here?”

  “I thought it would lift my spirits to see you. And it has.”

  “Your spirits needed lifting then?” Her voice was lighter now. Teasing a little.

  “Apparently they did.”

  “Well, then, I’m pleased to have been of use.” He could see that she was smiling—in spite of herself, it seemed. As if to hide that, she got up and went to the window, her back to him. When she turned to the room again after a moment, the light was so bright behind her he couldn’t clearly see her face. “What was it that was discouraging you?” she asked.

  “As much as anything, not having seen you.”

  “If I believed that—” She raised her hand dismissively.

  “If you believed that, you would instantly consent to marry me.”

  She turned quickly back to the window. “I’ve said I’m not ready to answer that question.”

  “I’m sorry, Georgia.” He was watching her back as intently as if it could tell him something about how she felt. “I was making a joke and that was wrong, when you’re still … struggling with your decision.”

  “I am. But it’s only because … I’d like everything to be very clear between us if we married.”

  “Of course. I would too.”

  Her heard her sigh, impatiently. “You answer me so quickly, John. You always do. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really listening to me.”

  “I am. I am listening.” He got up and crossed to her, stood just behind her at the window. He could smell her: sachet and the characteristic strong animal odor of her hair. It had been trimmed again recently, he thought. Her neck seemed long and white. “What needs to be clear?”

  “Well. First, I would have to learn to love you better.”

  He understood that what she was saying was that she didn’t love him now, and for a moment everything stopped for him. But he had known this, hadn’t he? When he had proposed, when he had spoken of his love for her, she had smiled but hadn’t answered in kind. After a few seconds he was able to say, “Do you think that’s possible? That you might?”

  Outside, the horse shook its bridle, as if to remind him he couldn’t stay much longer. The jingling was a faint musical sound from in here.

/>   “I’m in hopes,” she said.

  In spite of the pain this caused him—this caution on her part—it also made him smile. Her scrupulous honesty. “Then I will be in hopes too,” he said gently.

  “And then, you know”—her voice got smaller, and he had to lean toward her to hear what she was saying—“I’m … I’m damaged goods. That’s all.” She was so close to the window that her breath made a cloud on the glass.

  He thought she spoke of her illness, of the shadow on her lungs, and he felt such an absurd lifting of his heart—this was all it was!—that he had to control himself not to laugh or cry out somehow in his pleasure and joy. It was evidently so terribly important to her, understanding how he felt about this, that he dared not make light of it. But he had to reassure her, on the other hand, that it didn’t matter to him. That nothing could have mattered less. “That’s of no importance to me,” he said, a little too loudly. “None at all.”

  She didn’t speak for a few moments. What she was wondering was whether he had somehow known already about Seward. Had someone at the san gossiped about her to him? Could it really be he didn’t care? That he could know this about he—he could hear this—and love her anyway? She touched her fingertips to the icy glass, so cold it burned. Finally she said, “You sound so sure of that.”

  “I mean to sound sure. I am sure.” He was looking steadily at her face in profile.

  She could feel his eyes on her again. She was thinking that his greater experience of the world (when she thought of the world she thought of the war, and death, and also certain photographs she’d seen of Paris) must somehow have given him a sense of life broader and wiser than that of the young men she’d known. That he understood her, that he forgave her. It moved her to think he was a person capable of this.

  “So if that’s all, if that’s truly all, I hope you’ll have your answer for me soon,” he was saying, in his gentle voice.