The World Below (15 page)

Dr. Holbrooke came to visit only a couple of days after her father had been there. In fact, when she was called downstairs, Georgia
had the fleeting thought that perhaps it was her father, come back to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d changed his mind about Mrs. Erskine.

There were four or five strangers in the living room when she entered. Georgia recognized Dr. Holbrooke at once, of course, but he did no more than nod at her, so she assumed he was there for someone else and sat down to wait for her visitor to claim her—please, let it be her father! let it be him! She was looking out the window, intently scanning the grounds, expecting at any moment to see his bulky, energetic shape in shirtsleeves, when she felt a presence next to her and turned.

“It
is
you!” Dr. Holbrooke said. “I didn’t know you at first.”

Her hand went up to her bare neck, as it had over and over in the last few days. “Yes, I cut my hair all off. Well,” she said, and stood up awkwardly. She extended her hand, and he took it, but instead of shaking it, which was what she’d intended, he stood holding it in both of his and looking down at her.

“You look very well,” he said at last, letting her go. “I’m so pleased to see it.”

“Thank you.” She dipped her head. “I’ve tried my best to be a good patient.”

“It shows. It shows,” he said, nodding. “Your new haircut is very fetching too, if you’ll let an old man say so.”

“You’re hardly old!” she said. She felt the heat rise to her face. “But I do thank you. And who are
you
here for?” she asked.

“You, of course,” he said.

“Oh!” She couldn’t help it, she sounded disappointed. “Oh, well. What an unexpected … treat.”

He laughed. “You’re kind to say so. Perhaps you were hoping for someone more dashing.”

“No, really, I thought it might be my father, that’s all.”

“But he was just here, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. Two days ago. How did you know that?”

“Why don’t we sit?” he said. “Over here by the window, perhaps.” As Georgia followed him, she caught his scent. He smelled of wintergreen. But more than that: he smelled somehow
well.
He smelled of health, in a way, she realized, that was noticeable and foreign to her now.

“You’re still my patient, did you know that?” he was saying as they sat down. “I stopped in with Dr. Rollins to see how you were doing just before I sent for you. He told me your family had been in to visit. That must have lifted your spirits immeasurably.”

“Of course it did,” she said obediently.

“Things are well with them?”

“They are,” she said. She talked a little about Ada and Freddie. She didn’t speak of her father or Mrs. Erskine. Holbrooke seemed politely, mildly interested, though his amused, intelligent brown eyes were steady on her. He was wearing a rumpled blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit today, a summer suit, and it made Georgia think of the times he had come to the house the summer her mother was dying, of her relief when he got there at the end of the day—the tired-looking but handsome doctor in his light, wrinkled summer clothes, occasionally flecked here and there with what she assumed was blood, come to put her mother to sleep for a few hours.

He asked about her life at the san, about what her routines were these days, and she told him: her pleasure at being up and around, and, blushing, the joy of the first real bath she’d had.

“Water is … well, you miss it awfully, don’t you, when you just have sponge baths. I
do
love a bath,” she said soberly, and he laughed, in delight it seemed, which made her laugh too, though she wasn’t sure why.

Then her face grew serious.

“What I’m wondering now, I suppose,” she asked abruptly, “is how things are with me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you are still my doctor, I’m wondering about my illness. I feel so well at this point, I’m wondering whether I couldn’t be thinking about going home soon.” A half-formed notion had occurred to her: that if she could get home now, quickly and unexpectedly, she could somehow stop her father’s marriage. He would see, simply, that there was no need to go through with it.

Holbrooke leaned forward. “I know how you must miss them all …” he began.

She shook her head. “It’s more than
that
,” she said. “They miss me. They need me, truly they do. It seems that things are simply falling to pieces without me.” At the lie, she blushed. “Of course, I can’t pretend to have been a particularly good housekeeper, especially not to you, to whom I’ve confessed just the opposite. But I did more or less hold things together at home for my father.” She was so intent on her purpose now that she didn’t note that at the mention of her father, his mouth had hardened and the warmth had drained from his face.

After a moment he said, “I suspect it’s for exactly that reason that you wound up in here.”

“Yes, but now it’s done its work. It’s made me well. I know I am. Look!” she cried, lifting her hands dramatically. “Look at me! My fever is gone. I’m fat as a pig. I’ve stopped coughing, almost entirely. I’m well: won’t you say it?” She leaned forward and smiled flirtatiously at him, unconsciously copying the behavior she’d so carefully observed all around her at the san. “After all, you’re like a fairy godfather to me—all you have to do is touch me once,” and here she reached over and lightly, playfully, rested her fingers on his arm, “and I’ll be cured.”

“My dear girl,” he said, in a voice she wouldn’t have recognized as his, “that’s hardly within my power.” His face had changed utterly. He looked almost frightened of her, of her touch.

Georgia felt stung, rebuked, as much by his tone—so suddenly formal, so cold—as by what he said. She was abruptly ashamed of herself. She turned away from him quickly to look anywhere else,
out the window where the sun slanted across the terrace. And there was Seward Wallace, standing motionless by a cure chair in his black suit, with that dark thatch of hair falling across his forehead, staring back in at her, a strange expression on his face.

She cleared her throat. “Well. I wonder if you can’t tell me, then, when … how long it will be till I may hope to be released.”

He shook his head. “I can’t, really,” he said. He too was looking out the window. Now he turned back to her. “This is something we have to monitor, Dr. Rollins and I. There is a host of factors that concern us, which we look at when we make such a decision.” She met his gaze. The light, amused look was gone from his eyes. He was her doctor now, only that. He said, “Sometimes a person can seem quite well while being potentially very fragile. It’s very difficult, very difficult to say.”

“So you can’t even suggest to me when I might be able to go home.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said, more gently now.

“How disappointing,” she said. She was, she discovered, furious at him.
As though it were his fault she was ill.
Still, she couldn’t help the chilliness in her tone. She stood, and he quickly rose too. “Well, it was kind of you to stop in to see me,” she said. All she wanted was to escape him, escape herself, escape the room. She extended her hand again, and this time he shook it.

“It wasn’t kindness,” he said, as though he wished to prolong their talk, to begin again.

“Yes, it was,” she said firmly. “It was terribly kind. And I must go up now. And rest. To speed my all-too-poky recovery.” She meant to be light, she meant to mock herself, but even she could hear that she’d failed, that she sounded bitter.

Well, what could she do? She
was
bitter.

“Goodbye, then,” she said, and he answered, and she turned and walked away, leaving him there among the other visitors and patients.

•     •     •

Seward Wallace spoke to her for the first time the day after this visit. They were gathered in the library, waiting for the bell to ring for breakfast, when he came up to her, smiling in a way that seemed artificial to Georgia, entirely too toothy.

“You’ve transformed yourself, I notice,” he announced.

Georgia took a step back from him, from his booming voice. “Well, Mrs. Moody cut my hair, if that’s what you mean.”

“But you’re wearing a different kind of clothing too, aren’t you?” There was something accusatory in his tone. He seemed angry.

Though perhaps, Georgia thought, it was his eyebrow, the strong, dark, single eyebrow, thinned only slightly in the middle above his nose that made him look intense and uncompromising, even in repose. “I suppose I am.” She shrugged. “But I outgrew all my old clothes. They didn’t fit anymore.”

“Ah!” he said. “Still, you look very different.”

“Well, yes. I know I do.”

“I’m Seward,” he said abruptly. “Seward Wallace. I know your name: Georgia Rice.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then I don’t have to bother to introduce myself, a thing I heartily detest.”

He didn’t return her smile. “Did you do it for him?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“For him. The man who visited you yesterday. Is it for him you’ve so
altered yourself?
”

His tone was unpleasant, Georgia thought, as though he were describing something contemptible. What cheek, really! “Where on earth did you get that idea?” she asked. “He’s my doctor, that gentleman. Dr. Holbrooke.”

He was silent a moment. “I see,” he said. “You know him quite well, I take it.” His voice was stiff.

“Well, of course I do. He’s been our family’s doctor since I was a girl. He cared for my mother in her illness. For many years.”

“I see,” he said.

“I should think so,” she said, and walked away.

Though she wasn’t angry, she thought, as she ate her breakfast: coffee with yellow cream, oatmeal and syrup and milk, eggs and bacon, and thick slices of buttered toast that you could sprinkle, if you wanted to, with a mixture of cinnamon and white sugar kept in tin shakers on the tables. What she thought was that he should be made to realize he’d been rude. You simply couldn’t go around speaking to people that way.

As she conversed with the others at her table, she could see Seward Wallace across the dining room, eating silently, glancing occasionally her way.

It was Freddie he reminded her of! she thought abruptly. And with that she felt a wash of tenderness toward him. He seemed so young, really, so awkward.

And so, when he spoke to her again after the meal, almost unable to lift his eyes to her face, and asked her if she would walk out with him the next day, she consented.

When she thought about this time in her life later on, it seemed to Georgia that she had let Seward
come after her
, as they said in the san—that she’d fallen in love with him—because she felt alone and abandoned and she seized on him for comfort.

But still, she did love him. Didn’t she?

Sometimes when she talked about her time in the sanatorium to me, she seemed to be saying that none of it, none of what she felt and thought then, was quite real.

She spoke to me only glancingly and indirectly of Seward, of course. It’s mostly from her diaries and the letters she kept that I know anything at all about him and his relationship with my grandmother. (And from my aunt Rue, of course, who had her own version of the story.) But once I had its general outlines—the story’s—I began to rehear and reinterpret various of my
grandmother’s remarks or asides to me over the years about her life then.

What I know for certain is that Seward was more than two years younger than she was, sixteen or seventeen to her nineteen, and that he’d been ill already for several years when she came to love him. His promising life was torn in two when, at fourteen or so, a freshman at Andover Academy—a scholarship boy whose father had been a newspaper editor before he too succumbed to tuberculosis—Seward bent over on the football field in the middle of a game and coughed up nearly a cupful of bright red blood. He was taken immediately to the infirmary, and his family was asked to remove him the next day.

His sisters, one of them a teacher, one of them not well herself, had to take in boarders to put him in the san. He’d been there ever since except for a month or so shortly before Georgia’s arrival. He’d left then without the doctors’ permission—run away, essentially. His sisters had had to beg and wheedle to get him back in again, he told Georgia in one of their first conversations. “
Whingeing
,” he said, “the great gift of my family,” and she could hear in his voice that he loved his sisters with the easy, contemptuous love that you’re allowed when you’re the family pet. He’d told her he was the youngest, the only boy.

She had smiled then, and looked away, her eye caught by a motion in the distance. They had been lying side by side that day in the slatted cure chairs on the terrace. High in the air over the tree line, two hawks had lazily floated on the wind, tilting themselves this way and that to stay aloft on its currents.

After a moment she said gently, “But the doctors wouldn’t have kept you out if you were truly ill?”

His mouth twisted into its characteristic bitter smile. “But of course, I
was
truly ill. And it’s their pleasure, it seems to me,
to keep you out
, if they feel like it.
To lock you in.
To tell you everything you may and may not do.”

Georgia shifted under her light wool blanket. “But surely it’s all in the service of making you well.”

“Do you truly believe that?” he asked, as if such a thing weren’t possible, as if she couldn’t be so simple.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Of course I do or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then why do as many
not
get well as do?” He turned to look at her. “Think about it and you’ll see I’m right. They’ve no idea what works and what doesn’t.”

There were other chairs on either side of them, all lined up neatly in a row in the sunlight. Murmuring voices, lazy conversations rose from here and there down the line. Somewhere to the left, someone was coughing.

“But some do get well, Seward. You know that as well as I do.”

“And some, who cure equally hard, die. Look at Mr. Briscombe. There was no one who worked harder at it than he did.”