The World Below (13 page)

The fourth Saturday Georgia was at the san, a cold evening in April, she was allowed to go to a musicale put on by the patients. This would be her first evening up, in public. She was giddy with
delight. She thought about it, only it, for several days ahead of time. After supper, she put on a clean dress, one she hadn’t worn at all here before, and let Mrs. Priley pin her hair up in a new and more grown-up way. The women on her porch all admired the effect when it was done. She looked older. She looked like a Gibson girl. Georgia turned and preened for them. She felt mothered, basking in their praise and then walking in their gossipy midst down the long dim wooden corridors. It would not have occurred to her that there was something slightly prurient, something of the amusement of the initiated dealing with the initiate, in their attentions. It would not have occurred to them how in need she was of what they were so casually, and with such mixed intentions, offering her.

The musicale was held in a room called the library, though it held few books and those mostly of a pious and uplifting nature. No one read them, except to launch jokes about them; the room itself seemed mostly to be a kind of waiting area where patients were allowed to gather before they were let into the dining hall next door for meals.

Georgia had begun to take meals there only in the last week, since being allowed out of bed some of the day. It was the first time she had seen the general population of the place, and she was shocked at the degree of illness of some of them—she felt she didn’t belong there. Thin and pale as she was, she felt, by contrast with them, large, horsey, ruddy. She felt well. On the second day she was at lunch, one of the women at her table had begun to cough so violently that she pushed her chair back abruptly and fled the room. You could hear her under the gentle din of clinking, scraping spoons as she hurried away down the long hall, the cough now combined with a horrible retching noise. Not one person spoke of it. No one stopped eating.

The upholstered chairs in the library were pulled into a kind of rough row tonight alongside a deep sofa that faced the stone fireplace. A piano had been centered in the front of the room, between the fireplace and the sofa. The wooden dining room chairs were
lined up in four or five rows behind these choice seats. Georgia and her friends came in and made their way to the back. You could see everything better from here, Mrs. Priley told her, and Georgia understood that by this she meant the other patients, not the performers. And sure enough, as the others began to arrive in clusters and groups, the older woman, who seemed to have assumed some kind of responsibility for Georgia, leaned over and whispered names and relevant information to her. This one was just up, that one had been away for a few months—see the newfangled dress? Stay away from that gent, he went after all the new girls. This one had just had two ribs removed and they said it had helped, but look how bent he was! Still, they said he’d be leaving soon.

As Mrs. Priley talked, Georgia’s eyes moved around the room. No one was truly old, she saw, but few seemed to be as young as she was. Even so, they called back and forth, they laughed and teased and rearranged their seats. As though they were in the fifth grade, she thought. She’d never seen grown-ups behaving in this childish way before, and after the initial shock a part of her was perversely delighted. Perhaps outside her proper little village, other ways of being, other ways of living, were possible.

There was even, Georgia realized, a kind of
flirting
going on among them, the kind of playful touching she knew from the beginnings of her romance with Bill March and from foolish games she’d played with others before she chose Bill. And yet many of these women wore wedding bands. She thought of the overheard conversation she’d awakened to from her trance of sorrow, and then of other conversations she’d ignored or half attended to in that trance and since. Noises she’d heard in the night. Laughter. When Mrs. Priley got up to speak to someone else, she looked around her more carefully.

Here was Rosanna Moody, Mrs. Moody, whose naked, wounded back she’d seen, who’d told Georgia she had three young ones at home. She was standing, talking animatedly to a tall, slightly stooped man with unruly red hair wearing an old-fashioned tweed
suit. Two bright dots flared in Mrs. Moody’s cheeks, and her hands were in constant motion, her fingers lightly dancing on the man’s sleeve, fluttering at her own bosom; and then back to his elbow, as if beckoning, as if saying, Here, I’ll touch
for
you. Her laugh was bright and sharp, rising above the waves of voice, laughter, voice, that rolled around the room in bursts and ebbings of sound.

Georgia noticed the men’s hands abruptly, how they were everywhere, touching the women. How they rested at the back of women’s waists as they guided them to their chairs. How they dented the bare flesh of an inner arm at the elbow or just below the cuff of a sleeve. She saw one man, perhaps as old as her own father, grip Miss Shepard’s shoulders and turn her, pulling her slightly backward at the same time—almost against his front—as he leaned forward to point something out to her:
See? Over there!
His face nearly sat on Miss Shepard’s shoulder; she looked as though she had two heads momentarily. Georgia would have sworn she saw their cheeks touch, just for an instant. It made her breath rush in; a momentary strange hunger invaded her. She looked away quickly.

Now the first performers arrived, a man carrying a violin, who walked to the front of the room, and a plump woman who sat down with many elaborate readjustments at the piano bench.

After a moment or two of tuning, they launched themselves into a series of Stephen Foster songs. You could hear the man’s deep breathing, sibilant in his nostrils as he moved his upper body slightly with his bowing. They closed with “Aura Lee,” a song Georgia’s father had sung for them sometimes. She felt a pang of homesickness.

After them, a young woman, perhaps younger than Georgia, came to the front of the room and stood by the piano. She carried no music with her. She was extraordinarily thin, and she wore a butter-colored dress—an unwise choice, Georgia thought, for it made her bloodless skin look unhealthy and blue. Her black hair, which was caught up at her neck and then fell to her waist, glistened with a luxuriance that seemed, by contrast with her skin, almost
obscene. Georgia felt, abruptly, that her own hair in the arrangement she’d allowed Mrs. Priley to fix for her was cheap and artificial. She felt embarrassed for herself.

And then worse as the music began. The girl had announced the pieces before she sat down, several Chopin preludes. Georgia had heard that name, Chopin, but never his music. As the girl began to play, Georgia was startled to a pure attentiveness by the music’s shocking swing from piano to forte, by its emotive, swaying rhythms. It seemed to her to be speaking—
singing
—of things she’d felt without knowing them, of a life she’d always yearned for without understanding it, a life that connected to the stillness, the solitude of her father’s house at night. She sat motionless, held, tears pricking her eyes, until the music was over. As she applauded the dying girl—someone her mother would have called “that
bit
of a thing”—she had the overwhelming sense that she’d wasted all her opportunities, that she’d done nothing with her life but drift around staring out the windows or making batches of muffins or darning socks and stockings. If she herself should die tomorrow, what would she have accomplished?

Nothing, she thought.

And then was shocked at herself, revolted and confused by this new and strange way of thinking.

At the intermission, there was punch and cookies. A man came up to Georgia and offered to add “a little bit of flavoring” to her punch from a flask he held up quickly, but she shook her head. “Oh, I couldn’t,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” he answered in an offended tone, and moved off.

Mrs. Priley began to introduce her to people, sometimes pulling her away in the midst of one conversation to start another. At a certain point, Georgia heard her own excited voice rising to be heard above the general hum around her, and she suddenly wondered at herself; so quickly, she’d become one of them! It confused her. She excused herself and went to sit alone. Slowly the others too drifted back to their seats.

There were two more performers after the intermission. The first was the san’s director, Dr. Rollins, the man who’d examined her on the day she arrived. He sang ballads and drinking songs in a voice that seemed deepened, almost muffled by his thick beard.

Then a young woman recited a long poem by Tennyson. There was polite applause when she finished.

A silence fell. In it there rose a growing confusion. Was it over? Was this the end? And if that was the case, why didn’t someone say so? They were a group of people used by now to being directed—herded, really—from one place, one activity or nonactivity, to another. The room began to buzz with their angry passivity. Someone ought to take charge. Who would it be?

And then a sharp cry pierced the air, a wail, and quickly another, continuous and blended with it. It seemed to stab at Georgia’s heart. Bagpipes! she knew it almost instantly, though she’d never heard them before, only read of them. Nearly as one, everyone in the room turned—and Georgia did too—to see where the wild music was coming from.

And here was the piper, walking slowly up the side of the room in the aisle formed between the chairs and the window wall that opened onto the terrace. The swollen sac and the prickling array of pipes made his shape seem exotic to Georgia, atavistic, as he moved, almost in silhouette against the dying light outside, toward the front of the room. There he turned into the lamplight and became flesh, three-dimensional. She saw that he was not a man. He was a pale boy, probably several years younger than she was, tall, with a thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead. For a moment now his pumping cheeks flattened, and Georgia saw the shape of his jaw, the light-colored, almost feral eyes under his heavy eyebrows taking the measure of the room. When they met her own, she felt seized; she was unable to look away, even when Mrs. Priley leaned toward her—she was enveloped again in the woman’s lilac perfume—and said, not troubling to lower her voice at all, “Seward Wallace: I heard he’s been at death’s door and back again.”

Others nodded in morose agreement as the tragic music started once more. Georgia bent her head to shut herself away within it.

The next day, at rest hour, Miss Shepard reached over from her bed and handed Georgia the weekly patient newsletter, though this was against the rules; Georgia was still not supposed to read. It was folded back to expose this bit of doggerel:

Georgia Rice
Has come to Bryce
To set the hearts a-flutter.
But just whose hearts
Receive such “smarts”

Our lips will never utter.
They’re male, they’re pale;
they have the “rale.”
They may not last for long.
But now she’s here
They’re of good cheer.
If they die, it’s in mid-song.

Passing it back silently, Georgia felt a thick blush flooding her face, heard the light pounding of her heart in her damaged chest.

Seven

I
t wasn’t until mid-October, after I’d found my grandmother’s diaries—in fact, in a burst of curiosity fed by her diaries—that I made my pilgrimage to Maine to trace her life there. It took the better part of the day on the winding two-lane highways that cut laterally across New Hampshire and Maine. The leaves had begun to drop by then, and there was a faint tone of desolation under the vibrant colors of the fall landscape, the bare bones of things emerging.

Bryce Sanatorium still stands—or rather the building that was Bryce does—high on its hill in almost the exact center of Maine, but it has changed its function (hotel, insane asylum, meditation center) and even its appearance over and over again through the years. The array of outbuildings is long gone now, and the juryrigged upstairs porches, on one of which my grandmother lay nearly motionless for a full month, have been torn off. In fact, the old shingle building may look now very much the way it looked at the turn of the century, before the sanatorium boom, when it was a private female seminary, owned and run by the very virtuous, very Christian, Misses Bryce.

But the steep hill leading up to it, a meadow in one of the photographs of my grandmother, full of tall grass and blurry, wide-topped flowers—daisies? Queen Anne’s lace?—is now a painfully groomed lawn. In the middle of it sits a conference center sign, and there’s an asphalt parking lot, full of late-model cars, where there was once a wide gravel turnaround. (My grandmother never forgot the crunching sound of her father’s car, backing up, driving away, and—when he reached the bottom of the hill—the deep hoarse google of his farewell horn.)