The World Below (23 page)

A nice woman. An organized woman—that would certainly make life different from what it had been! A woman who would be friendly with the neighbors, who would have parties, play bridge and mah-jongg.

Georgia sighed.

“Are you weary, dear?” Mrs. Erskine said, instantly attentive, and Georgia had to perk up and say no, no, of course not, and then try to seem to listen once more.

Late in the afternoon, people began to carry their plates and cups in. Then their chairs. They left, two, three at a time, and suddenly all at once, and the house was quiet again. Mrs. Erskine put on one of Fanny’s old aprons and began walking around, picking up and talking to Mrs. Beston—whom she called Ellen—about which cookies, which sandwiches had been most successful. Georgia and Ada helped, silently, listening to the older women chatting with comradely pleasure as they moved around the kitchen. “I think that on a hot day like today the cucumber just doesn’t stay crisp enough to make it worthwhile,” Mrs. Erskine said.

“Yes. And then you always have to worry about the dressing too,” said Mrs. Beston animatedly. “All them eggs.”

Georgia’s first letter from Seward came almost two weeks after the party, forwarded on from the san. It described the train ride out, his
arrival in Denver, his moving to the boardinghouse his sisters had arranged for him at the edge of town. He had been dizzy and sleepy on account of the altitude at first, he wrote her, but was slowly getting used to it, and he could feel that the hot thin air was soothing to his lungs.

I wonder whether you will be leaving the san soon, and when the wedding date will be set. I feel it’s our wedding date as much as it is theirs, and ‘I’m impatient for it, though a little time will allow me to recover my strength.

He spoke of his desperation when he’d had to leave without finding her to say goodbye and of how much he thought of her.

My life here is not as I’d pictured it because I’m still so tired much of the time, but the place itself is everything it promised to be, and once you’ve come, we can begin to make all of our imaginings come true. Only tell me when. I will be waiting, thinking of you and the places we went together—the woods and also the shed.

Reading this, Georgia felt the strange disappointment that comes when the writer isn’t as electric on the page as he was in the flesh. What did she miss? Of course, the sense of him physically. But also the vibrancy of his illness, his frantic feverishness. His greed for her. In the letters he was merely ill; in the flesh he had been alive with it, as though it were a current charging him.

But she wrote back sweetly and, she thought, boringly. About Mrs. Erskine:

She is, I think, much more refined in many ways than my mother, who grew up, after all, an only child in a farm family. Mrs. Erskine is a person who belongs to clubs and who knows what kind of tea sandwich to serve for what occasion. I do like her, and she is lovely with my father, but I am not used to her.

About Ada:

I cannot find my old comfort with Ada. She was like my echo, my heartbeat, part of me, and she isn’t anymore. It may simply be that she’s grown up, it seems overnight, but it feels very unsettling to me.

She talked about the way she spent her days, cooking again, cleaning, shopping. And sewing clothes for herself, as none of hers fit her, and for the wedding, which was set for September.

I will stay on to take care of Fred and Ada and the house while they honeymoon. They have the use of a friend’s cabin on Green Lake for two weeks. And then I will be free to set my own course.

She didn’t say she was coming, because she couldn’t imagine it, but she knew he would read what she wrote as though she had, and she felt a certain sense of falseness as she folded the paper and sealed it into the envelope.

He wrote back almost right away, a short letter. He’d been quite ill, hemorrhaging again, and his landlady was insisting he go into a san there; she wasn’t prepared to care for someone so sick. He would write more when he was rested, when he was better.

Georgia was neither surprised nor truly grieved by the news, though she felt pity to read it. Her own coldheartedness appalled her. Did she not love him?

She had loved him then, she knew that, but she had begun now to think of that time as a kind of trance, an enchantment, fed by her forced idleness, her fear, her despair. And Seward’s attachment to her had been so quick and absolute that she could see it now only as
born of his desperate need. Why, in all likelihood he saw her as he saw his sisters—as someone to care for him, to center her life on his. Now, busy as she was, taken up as she was by the myriad details of the wedding and her chores, she thought of him as she would think of someone she’d invented, a beautiful boy in a fairy tale. Only he was more like the princess, the sleeping beauty, she mused. And she, more like the prince who was supposed to wake him.

I am thinking of you, Seward dear, [she wrote]. All that’s important right now is that you take good care of yourself.

She and Ada wore silk dresses, midcalf length, of a pale orchid color. Each had a low waist and a draped sash over the hip. Mrs. Erskine—Grace to them now—gave them each a long strand of pearls to wear too, her wedding present to them. Their shoes were gray silk, the softest shoes that had ever held Georgia’s feet.

Grace herself wore a satin dress of pale brown, the color of richly creamed coffee. It was ankle length and had a lace panel down the front. On her head she wore a small cap of the same lace. No veil. She carried lilies, lilies from which Georgia had carefully cut each powdery pistil early that morning, so their vivid dye wouldn’t stain anything.

After the service, they all walked slowly back across the green to the house, the bride and groom at the head of the parade. Here and there the maples were turned already, cerise, orange, yellow. The wedding and the party afterward were just for family and close friends, but the neighbors came out onto their porches and waved and called out their greetings as they ambled across the green.

It had been cool the night before, but the day was warm, and the house grew warmer as the party went on. Georgia and Ada and Mrs. Beston were in charge this time, with two hired girls to serve and clean up. There was a wine punch and little sandwiches and fruit salad and, of course, the cake.

When everyone seemed settled, Georgia went out to the front porch for a few minutes to cool off, to be alone. Just as she closed the screen door behind her, Dr. Holbrooke, who’d had to park his car all the way around the corner on Main Street, turned into the walk.

He was late because he’d been at a difficult birth where he’d finally had to perform a cesarean section. In the car on the way over, it had seemed to him he still smelled of blood, though he could see none on his hands or clothes. He’d been up since two in the morning, and he was exhausted. He had told himself he’d just stop by the wedding party for a few minutes and pay his respects. He’d been surprised, actually, to be invited; but then, he thought, Rice had no reason to think he felt anything but friendly toward him, and every reason to be grateful for his daughter’s good health.

And here she was, just turning from the screen door, flushed, wearing a long glamorous dress, a flower pinned in her hair.

“Dr. Holbrooke!” she cried. “But you completely missed the service.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was standing on the lowest step now, looking up at her just above him. Her face was damp with heat, little coils of her thick hair stuck to her forehead.

“Oh, don’t be sorry. Come in! I, for one, am very glad you’re here.” This sounded so true, so heartfelt, that he was startled by it—by the sense of her pleasure at seeing him.

It was heartfelt. Seeing him so abruptly, Georgia had the sense of him as someone who knew her
as she was
, who understood what had happened to her life, who’d been part of it, in fact, as it changed. There was an extraordinary sensation of relief for her in this, she had felt so solitary and isolated up to now. So
false
somehow.

He followed her in, watching the motion of the long clinging dress against her body as she walked ahead of him. She found her father and introduced her new stepmother, and while he stood there talking to them she fetched him a glass of the punch. When he thanked her, she smiled, her head lifted slightly back, as though
she were as thirsty as he in some other way and were drinking his very words.

He stayed the afternoon, until after the cake was sliced and served, until the bridal couple went upstairs to change, until they came back down, running across the front porch and the walk between the guests who pelted them with rice. He moved around and talked, always trying to locate Georgia—across the room, or on the stairs, or darting back into the kitchen. He often caught her eye or found her looking at him. It was as if they had an agreement: first you look, then I will. Even when he couldn’t see her, he was aware of her fine, bright laugh, ringing out perhaps just a little too loudly, with too much nervous energy. He could be sure of nothing, of course, but he felt that something had changed in her feelings toward him, that she was suddenly seeing him not as an older man, not as her doctor. He felt absurdly energetic and happy.

She came out onto the porch with him again to say goodbye. There were a few guests still left inside, and the low hum of conversation followed them.

“This will make enormous changes in your life, I imagine,” he said, as they stood in the cooling air. “This wedding. This marriage.”

“Oh, my life!” she said dismissively. “I’m tired of thinking about it.” She had drunk three glasses of the wine punch, and she felt light-headed and carefree.

He was so startled he couldn’t answer for a moment. “You’re very young to say a thing like that,” he said finally, gently.

Her chin lifted. “I’m not so young as you think.” And at once she seemed terribly young, a defiant child.

He was amused. He smiled at her. “And what do you imagine I think?”

“You think I’m a girl. Nothing but a sweet little girl. Isn’t that so?”

“No. It’s not. Even when you were a sweet little girl, it was not.”

She was holding on to the porch post, swinging herself slightly from side to side. The fabric of her dress swayed slowly against her
legs. There was a burst of laughter from in the house. “I
was
sweet, though, wasn’t I?” she said suddenly.

“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

I
magine 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.