The World Below

by Sue Miller

  I sat there for a while, and then I turned back to the diary again to try to figure out what it meant, what had triggered the squirreling away of this money in Seward’s name after he died, and why she’d given it in the end to someone—I presumed—in Seward’s family: Miss Wallace. I found it in an entry I’d read through many times before without really noticing it.

  Fifteen

  October 12. A splendid day. John out driving around from dawn till dusk. The younger Miss Wallace came by this pm. The older is ill now too. She asked for help to bring the body home. I promised to try. It will be difficult, though John takes no notice of these things.

  Easy enough for me to translate now. Miss Wallace is Seward’s sister, of course. She wants his body home, in Maine, back from wherever he’d been hastily buried in Colorado. Back to his sisters, the older and the younger Misses Wallace, the older one now dying too.

  By these things in the last line of the diary entry my grandmother means money, of course. The household expenses. Of which she did take notice. From the time of her marriage on into the late twenties, she kept her books carefully, with records of even the smallest expenditure: collar stays 25¢, bluing 70¢, 4 yds dimity $1, knives sharpened 35¢, LG for ice $3. All recorded in now-fading ink, all tallied up at week’s end. And from October 12 forward for those three months there is the weekly amount deducted beside the letters SW in her books. It varies some over those months—certain expenses, like tithing, could not be reduced to accommodate what amounted to her embezzlement, so she could not always control how much she had to set aside—but at the end of that time she was able to give the Wallace sisters their money. It must have felt strange, writing down such a huge expenditure, especially to a person whose life was usually meted out in such tiny increments.

  Imagine it, the daily awareness of the sacrifice, achieved in butter, needles, yarn, cloth, shoes. Things denied herself. Things, perhaps, denied him too—my grandfather. Though maybe she had rules for that as she clearly did for tithing. Maybe she felt only she should pay for Seward’s return. There’s no recorded discussion with herself about this, of course-no introspection on the subject anywhere-so it’s impossible to say.

  It does seem my grandparents’ lives went on normally during this period. The diary made note of their trips to Pittsfield or Bangor, or to Georgia’s father, or John’s mother. There were occasional evenings out, and a good deal of the calling back and forth that women did, to visit or to help with household chores. (This, in fact, was why I hadn’t noticed Miss Wallace’s visit earlier; the diaries were sprinkled everywhere with women’s names, women who called or were called on; were ill or had gotten well or had had children.)

  Throughout these months she recorded how at night my grandfather read aloud and how, every now and then when she had a new tune she’d mastered, she would play the piano for him. During this time he got a one-tube radio and began a lifelong habit of spending some time in the evenings playing with it. Duly noted.

  She had begun by now to help him in his office sometimes too, and those often traumatic episodes were reported as part of her routine.

  My first tonsillectomy today. Horrible. So much blood. John praised my steadiness with the ether.

  One gets a sense then of harmony and routine. Of increasing mutual dependence.

  The other undiscussed, undisclosed reality of her life during this period was that she was pregnant. Nowhere was it explicitly mentioned in the diary, but as I was looking through this material, I suddenly remembered that the date when the initials SW appear in the diary after his death and long absence was very close to the date of my mother’s birth. I counted back seven months or so from my mother’s birth to the period when my grandmother might first have guessed or known that she was going to have a child, and found this entry:

  September 15: A cool, foggy day. Not well this morning, but in the afternoon I let out two dresses and mended John’s socks and some old trousers. He is very happy with my news. We will celebrate Sunday with dinner at Empson’s.

  Counting back farther, to nine months before my mother’s birth, the time when she would have been conceived, I came to the weeks directly after my grandmother got the news of Seward’s death, to the time my grandparents had their painful confrontation about that. They started a child then, in that tender, raw period after my grandfather learned that my grandmother had had a lover before him; in the time right after she learned that her lover had died. After she understood that all the changes in her life had been set in motion by my grandfather’s interference in it. Thinking of it, their making love then, I felt sorry for them and envied them at the same time—I remembered that sex so well: the sex that both binds us and reminds us of our estrangement. The urgent sex that makes us cry out and then weep afterward. The powerful sex that combines anger and desire and sorrow and finally becomes itself a form of forgiveness and healing.

  Out of all this had come my mother, it seemed; and so, I suppose, finally me too.

  • • •

  How odd it must have been for Georgia, this period of discretion, of secrecy in so many things. And how strange it is to read her record of it, knowing all that stays unmentioned, knowing all that was truly going on. Each day is “grand” or “lovely,” or “foul,” “gray.” Once “dismal.” Their daily accomplishments are recorded, and mention is made occasionally of one of her endless rounds of chores; but the only references to the pregnancy are oblique: “Knit 2 prs cunning booties.” “Knit a bonnet with pale green ribbon running through.” And the only note made of the stolen money is the weekly amounts recorded in the ledger next to the initials SW.

  But perhaps it isn’t so strange. The life of a pregnant woman is so private, so secret anyway: the sense of deep solitary fatigue for those early months; the first flickering motions of the swimmer within so light that you aren’t even sure they have happened; the later lurches and kicks that only you know of, while your life outside your body goes on as usual. You smile, you respond: all of this is so inward-turned that perhaps the secret of the money, of Seward’s body coming home, was just like one more thing she was pregnant with, the twin to the growing baby.

  She was almost eight months into her pregnancy when he was brought back. The day he was to return she took my grandfather’s car and drove to Bangor in order to meet the train with Seward’s sisters.

  It was cold and rainy, the height of the mud season, when the ice deep under the unpaved roads released its grip on the frozen dirt and turned it into a thick muck. Driving was difficult. Twice she got mired in the mud. Once a farmer behind a team of horses pulled her out, and once she got out herself, taking the board John carried for just such emergencies and pushing it under the tire that was spinning uselessly. She had allowed herself plenty of time for just such an event, though, so in spite of the delays she arrived ahead of Seward’s sisters at the station.

  There was a fire going in the big cast-iron stove in the waiting room. She sat close to it, trying to warm her wet feet, her hard, stiff fingers. The windows had completely steamed over but for the trails of moisture running like tears down the panes, silvering a clear streak here and there.

  She hadn’t told John where she was going, just that she had errands to attend to.

  Couldn’t they wait for a better day? he’d asked.

  No, she said. No, they couldn’t.

  And he acceded, as he always did when she was absolute, though he asked her to ring him during the day, to set his mind at ease. She didn’t do this. She forgot all about it in her hurry, in her guilt.

  In the waiting room an odd sense of timelessness overtook her, a sense of suspension, of living in the interstice between at least two worlds. In some way she almost forgot where she was or what she was doing there. It felt a little like dozing, but she was keenly aware of everything—the conversation of the ticket seller and someone else behind the shiny brass grille, the tick of the station clock, the occasional stutter of the telegraph, the hiss and pop of the fire wit
hin the stove. These seemed to her in her drowse like the consoling elements of song.

  She was startled when Seward’s sisters came in, two tall women, dark-haired, as he had been, followed by a man wearing a black suit. She only knew the younger sister, the one who called on her and shamefacedly asked for her help—they’d found her notes, she said, in Seward’s things and thought (“it was our last hope, really”) that she might be willing, for sentiment’s sake, to loan them something to help them bring him home.

  The other sister seemed initially an elderly woman. Both of them were dressed in black, and in the old-fashioned way, the very way Georgia had dressed until only a little while earlier, in fact; the way only old women dressed now. But while the younger one was recognizably still youthful on closer examination, the older one was clearly ill, with the fever-flushed pallor Georgia knew so well.

  As the younger sister began her breathless introductions, Georgia stood up. Her pregnancy was, of course, instantly apparent, and Miss Wallace fell silent for just a beat and then went on. She introduced Georgia to their pastor, the Reverend Winter, who had been kind enough to drive them. She chattered. Her voice was fluty, her elocution precise and careful. She thought the train should be coming any moment. They could not, by the way, speak of their gratitude, only hope one day to repay her, and also hope it had not caused hardship in her own life to be so generous to them. They hadn’t realized, she started to say, and trailed off.

  No, Georgia said. It hadn’t caused hardship. For how could she speak of her little privations as hardship to them—who had suffered, who were suffering, such enormous, unthinkable losses?

  When they heard the bell of the train approaching the station, they went together to the door to the platform and stepped outside into the March cold. The wet, raw rain slapped at them all, and the younger Miss Wallace stood closer to her sister, as though to take the brunt of the blow. The Stationmaster had come out too, and now he spoke to Georgia, almost shouting in her ear. He told her the baggage cars would be near the end of the train. He pointed. When they all looked in that direction, down the platform, they could see that beyond it, a horse-drawn hearse was waiting, black and ominous in the thick drizzle. Georgia heard the older Miss Wallace’s quick, shallow gasp.

  The train loomed up out of the mist now, its bell clanging, and then it was upon them like a huge dark animal, so noisy they didn’t bother trying to speak. The steam hissed, the doors clattered open, and suddenly the platform was crowded with people getting off the train, gathering their luggage, being greeted, calling back and forth. Georgia and the Wallace women continued to walk slowly through them, against the tide of buoyant life, making their way to the red baggage cars at the end of the train, where the porters were already stacking boxes and suitcases onto their trolleys. They worked fast—the train was going on—but even so it was startling to have the coffin appear so suddenly, carried off the train by four men. To have it set down matter-of-factly on its own trolley when they were still some distance from it, to have one of the porters call out, as he turned from it, “Zat everything?” and someone else laugh before he leaned from the door of the train and shouted, “Ayp!”

  The undertaker and several helpers were approaching them from the other end of the platform. They reached the trolley first and waited. Only one of them stepped forward to greet the Wallace women. They spoke for a moment in hushed tones. Then the older sister turned and set her hands on the coffin. “Now it’s really true, isn’t it?” she said, to no one in particular.

  Her sister gripped her more tightly and bent her head toward hers. Georgia felt herself to be an interloper, an intruder. Her presence here was nothing but ugly, she thought.

  The four of them stood watching at the end of the platform, as the trolley was wheeled down the ramp, as the undertaker’s men lifted it off—it seemed no strain to them—and slid it into the back of the hearse, as they closed the doors and went to the front of the carriage. When the horse had clopped off, the sisters turned. The younger one said to Georgia, “Shall you follow us then, in your automobile?”

  Georgia said she would and walked slowly back up the platform, just behind them, next to Dr. Winter.

  “There’s to be no service,” he said abruptly, as though compelled to speak of something to her. “Just a prayer.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “The Wallaces had a service earlier, just after he died. A memorial service. Quite moving.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But perhaps you were there,” he said.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Ah,” he said in agreement. He held the station house door open for her. Ahead of them the sisters moved slowly across the waiting room to the outer door. “Someone played the pipes,” he said. “Bagpipes,” he explained. “Such a mournful sound.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’d ever heard them before. It was stunning.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “I understand the young man was a piper himself. If that’s what you call it.”

  “Yes, he was,” she said.

  Now he opened the entrance door to the rain again. The sisters stood by his car under their umbrella. “Well,” he said, quickly lifting his hat. “We shall see you there.”

  “Yes,” Georgia said. While she went to her automobile and set the spark and throttle, he helped the sisters into his car. Then he noticed her, starting to crank the car, and came over to help her. She got back behind the wheel and, as soon as the engine caught, set the spark and throttle back and leaned out the window to thank him. He lifted his hat ceremonially and went to start his own engine.

  The two cars caught up to the hearse within three or four blocks and then drove slowly behind it. Georgia watched the car in front of her, the high black hump jolting through the mist. There was a part of her that wanted to flee, to take this turn or the next one and avoid the ceremony, such as it would be, and the cold, rainy day. To go back to the real world, where she lived.

  But how could she? Seward had had so little, and she was so little of that, how could she not do this small thing for him?—watch him lowered into the earth, say goodbye one last time?

  She tried to make herself think of him, lying in his black suit in the coffin in the hearse. She tried to remember him alive. She called up specific things in her effort to conjure him: the dry fever heat of his body when he lay with her, his long, slightly spatulate fingers.

  The baby kicked and moved. She felt the glide of a tiny fist or a knee along her arm where it rested on her belly. She was flooded, suddenly, with the memory of the dreams she’d had earlier in her pregnancy—dreams in which she gave birth to Seward. In one dream she’d had over and over, he lay sleeping and she was filled with an unspeakable joy as she bent over his bed. In another, he was as she’d most often seen him in life—wearing his black suit, talking and gesturing with assurance. But well, she saw. No longer ill. And in the dream, she understood that she had achieved this for him by carrying him inside her for so long. That this was the cure he’d been searching for.

  She was happy. Though when she woke, she tried to put the dreams out of her mind quickly. They seemed wrong to her. Bigamous. Obscene.

  She remembered, abruptly, that she was to have called John. Her hand rose to her mouth.

  But then she thought of Seward again, Seward saying, “Let’s try it this way. You go, I’ll stay.”

  Well, I have, Seward. I’ve gone on. I’ve changed. And you have stayed. Where you were, as you were. You are the past, Seward, and I have traveled forward, away, into another country, into the future.

  They stood under the pelting rain—it had almost turned into sleet at this point—and watched as the undertaker and his men leaned back against the pull of the ropes and the coffin jolted and slid into the deep hole. When it was seated, when the muddy ropes had been pulled up and coiled and tossed casually into the back of the hearse, Dr. Winter said the Twenty-third Psalm. Isolated under her umbrella, Georgia
strained to hear his voice. It was almost inaudible under the clamor of the storm. He began the Lord’s Prayer, and after the first few words, Georgia heard the sisters join in, though she heard it more as a thickening of the sound than as additional voices. She murmured the words too. She felt like an actress speaking lines.

  For a few seconds after the amen, no one seemed to know what to do. Georgia felt it wasn’t her place to make the first move. To make any gesture, really. Though she was cold. Cold, and her feet were wet, her thin dress shoes soaked through. Finally the younger Miss Wallace stepped toward her.

  “Won’t you come back to our house and warm up before your trip back? Our mother would so like to meet you. Have some tea with us, please, or coffee, and something to eat. We are all so grateful.…”

  No, Georgia said. No, she wanted to try to get home before dark. It had been a hard ride over—all this mud.

  Oh, she knew, said Miss Wallace. They’d certainly brought Seward home in the worst weather possible, but she had felt some urgency, her sister was so ill.

  Oh, yes, Georgia said. She understood.

  At the autos, they said their farewells. Again Dr. Winter helped Georgia start her engine. She drove away before he’d begun to crank his, waving over to the dark shapes within his car as she passed.

  It was night, prematurely night, by the time she stopped the car next to the house. The last half an hour or so she’d driven in a terrible state of tension, anxious about where the edges of the road were, anxious about the rutted mud she sometimes slid through, powerless to steer the car at all. The windows of the house were dark; John was still at work.

  Inside, she turned on the kitchen lights and started a fire in the cookstove. Then she moved around the tiny house, turning the other lights on too, so it would look cheerful to John as he came up the walk. She changed out of her dark clothing, her wet shoes and stockings. She toweled her hair dry and brushed it into its neat shape.