The World Below (34 page)

“This is so hokey,” Fiona objected.

“Hokey’s the very thing in the family photo,” he said.

We moved over by the olive trees. Fiona and then Karen took shots of us sitting in a row. Then Karen set the timer and we all stood in the horizontal late-day light and squinted at the camera. She took about three this way, dashing back each time to get in the frame, and then suddenly the sun was gone, and the air felt chilly and damp. As we headed back in, I heard Karen ask Robert, “Did she seem okay when you left?” and I recognized that for her the divided life had begun, that life always half lived elsewhere, always ready to be claimed and summoned. I felt a curious pang for her—some combination, I suppose, of compassion and envy.

I still have those pictures. They’re not kind to any of us, because of the low sunlight and the way our faces look squinting into it, but I love them anyway. Karen presented my copies to me the week after Christmas. By then the boxes had arrived from Vermont, and I’d unpacked them. I’d set the badger and the great blue heron out, the bird on top of the piano, the badger in the kitchen, as if rooting around on the floor. I’d put the diaries in a row on the shelf above my desk, and when Karen gave me the pictures, I arranged five or six on the same shelf.

Fiona was looking at the pictures one day late in her stay when her eye fell on the cloth of the old bindings. “Oh, here they are, all those diaries of Gran’s,” she said.

“Yes. I’m not quite sure what to do with them.”

She splayed her fingers and wiggled them spookily. “Any deep dark secrets?”

“A few.”

“Yeah, but it all came out happily in the end, right?”

“Happily enough,” I said.

It had actually taken me a while to piece together the last chapters of the story. I hadn’t, in fact, until late on the last night of my stay in Vermont, when I sleeplessly went downstairs for hot milk. It was the evening I had dinner with Samuel, the evening he kissed me good night and made me want him. I was restless and upset, full of the sense of loss and self-doubt. In that mood, I wandered back into my grandfather’s study. I sat down and flipped through the first diary to the page that confused me each time I read it: a single reference, very late—long after his death and my grandparents’ reconciliation—to Seward Wallace again. This was it:

March 18: Sleet. A muddy, cold day. Terrible drive to Bangor to say a last goodbye to SW. Even worse on the way home. I told John the whole story tonight. It seems settled at last.
Happy.

I simply couldn’t understand it. How could there be “a last goodbye” now? Seward had died the summer before, in Colorado. And how odd this switch to initials for him seemed. Though it occurred to me as I sat looking at it that night that she’d used them for Seward somewhere before. I just wasn’t sure where. I flipped backward through the diary to the section where she met him, to her life in the san, but in every other reference she used his name: Seward, Seward, Seward, Seward. Where had I seen it then?
SW
. Where was that the way she referred to him?

Then I remembered. It had been in the ledger. In her accounts. I opened that outsize book and went to the same period of time, the middle of March. And then, because I saw nothing but the usual list
of names, I backed up through the weeks and months of recorded purchases and expenses.

And there he was, starting in January:
SW
. Among all the other initials and names that came up weekly or monthly:
Mrs. B
, the piano teacher;
LG
, the iceman;
Mr. P
, chimneys cleaned. There was
SW
. Moving slowly back farther, I saw that listed next to him each week was usually around $5 or $6. The last of these notations occurred in October. Before then, nothing. I turned the pages forward again, to January. A week or so after the last deduction by Seward’s initals, I found the entry
Miss Wallace
and noted by her name the astronomical sum of $65.

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 within 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.