The World Below (36 page)

But he felt it, her appalling carelessness. The sense of something youthful and cruelly insensitive in her. Something missing. He had known this about her, he realized in this moment. That she was like this, that this was who she was. It was part of why he had fallen in love with her, though he couldn’t love it, this hard part of her that failed to see beyond herself. He had a momentary, quickly suppressed thought, a worry about what she’d be like as a mother. He pushed it aside. He pushed all this aside: She was his valiant girl. His scrupulously honest Georgia.

And even though it was later than he recommended it to his patients, even though he had felt a kind of constraint for months, the embarrassing constraint (he couldn’t help this perception) of the baby as a witness, or even, somehow, a participant in their love-making, he turned to her now and began the purposive touching that signaled his desire for her.

Georgia too had sometimes had the thought that the baby was part of their intimacy, but it only deepened her pleasure. As John rocked gently in her, she held his hands to her swollen belly, she made him feel the moving life there; and when she reached her climax, she sent her cries out into the night, as though she wanted him, far off in the future, still to hear her joy.

Sixteen

T
he next day, the day after Georgia told him “the whole story,” my grandfather came home at noon and told her to put on a coat, he had a surprise for her. A coat, and gloves too, he said. It was cold out.

Georgia took off the smock she was wearing. She pulled on the only coat she could still wear at this stage in her pregnancy, the navy wool, still damp from the rain yesterday. She buttoned the one button, at the very top of her belly, that would close. She pinned on her hat. He helped her into the car and went around to the driver’s side.

“Am I to guess?” she asked gaily when he got in. She was relieved. He had seemed quiet at breakfast, pensive, and she had worried that he was brooding over her confession of the night before, over Seward. She had wanted to speak to him, to comfort him, but she decided not to. Sometimes, she had thought, it’s better just to wait and see.

“No,” he said now, and smiled over at her. “No, you are to be utterly surprised and, I hope, utterly delighted.”

She had thought then that maybe he was planning to buy something for the baby. Perhaps a crib-they still didn’t have one, only
the cradle that had been John’s when he was an infant. And so she was startled when they stopped in front of the bank. Startled, and then a little frightened. It suddenly occurred to her that they were going to make some kind of ceremony of putting the stolen money back. Oh, surely, she thought, he wouldn’t be so unkind.

She followed him into the building, nodding as people greeted them. They all knew John. He led her to the back, to a door marked V
ICE
-P
RESIDENT
. She had the thought that perhaps John was going to speak publicly of her shameful behavior to this authority. He introduced her to a horrible greedy-looking person, Mr. Blake. She sat down. John and Mr. Blake sat down. Mr. Blake rubbed his plump white hands together. “Well, what may I do for you today?” he asked.

When John said, “We are here to start an account in the name of my wife,” Georgia felt such a rush of relief that she actually laughed aloud, and Mr. Blake, whose rubbery chops quivered with his every move, turned quickly to her and glared, his whole face trembling.

“If looks could kill,” she told me later. But he turned back to John and said, with what seemed strained politeness, “Of course.”

It was a nearly formal occasion. Mr. Blake’s secretary was called in and then sent out again to fetch the records of my grandfather’s account. When she was seated once more, Mr. Blake explained to her what they were doing.

“My goodness!” she said, and looked at my grandmother with something like admiration.

It was difficult for Mr. Blake to accept the terms being described by my grandfather. The account was to be in his wife’s name only. No, Dr. Holbrooke did not need to know, indeed, did not wish to know, when she made deposits or withdrawals; that was exactly the point. Yes, her signature alone would suffice on all the documents. Yes, the money to start it would come from Dr. Holbrooke’s savings account. Yes, five hundred dollars. Yes, he knew what that left him
with. Yes, he was quite certain. No, he did not wish for account summaries or statements to be sent to him.

When they were done, when they were back in the noisy car once again and on their way home, where he wouldn’t have time to eat the lunch she’d carefully prepared, she turned and said to him, “I never would have guessed that, John.”

He looked over at her. She was smiling like a child in her pleasure. It made him feel old and somehow sad, but he smiled back. He said, “Well, I’m glad to be able to surprise you still from time to time.”

I remember that when my grandmother first told me this story—or the part of the story she felt was fit for my ears—I was unimpressed. So he started a bank account for her. So what? It was only much later that I realized how extraordinary a thing this must have been and, realizing that, felt the sense of difference, of distance, between my grandparents’ world and my own.

What she said to me when she told me the story was that she’d secreted money away for her own purposes. “It was early in our marriage, and I was still, I suppose, feeling sometimes as though I wanted to be my own person. To have some privacy for this and that. You know, some things you like to keep to yourself.” She never mentioned Seward to me, she never spoke of what the money was for.

So that was the way I had understood it. Simply that my grandmother, innocently enough, squirreled away some of the money my grandfather gave her so she could have the sensation of independence—the sensation that she’d had far more, peculiarly, when she was someone’s daughter than she did now as a wife. And it made sense to me, that the young woman who’d once been the solitary girl staying up late in her father’s house just to feel her aloneness, her ownership of her own world, should wish for some private corner in her new life. Should steal it, if she had to.

In this version, as in life, she eventually told my grandfather. But in this version, of course, she confessed just to taking the money, not to using it as she had. “And do you know what he did?” she asked me. We were picking blueberries on Bald Mountain, and the
light pinging of the berries in our buckets was an almost musical accompaniment to her tale.

No, I didn’t.

“Well, of course, at first he was shocked, I think. Surprised that I would have felt it necessary to do such a thing. You know, anything I wanted, your grandfather would have given me. But that was the point of it, of some of it anyway, for me. I didn’t want to tell him every single little thing I wanted. I didn’t want everything to be a gift from him to me.” Her hands moved rapidly over the low bushes, and the berries seemed to fall eagerly into her bucket, in groups. I plucked mine more laboriously, one by one.

“But he understood all that, without my ever saying it, don’t you know. He understood me so well. And the next day he
marched
me down to the bank and we sat down across the desk from a horrid-looking fat old man named Mr. Blake.” She looked up at me, smiling. “I can see him now, all jowls and muttonchops. Anyway, we set it all up. And not a word to me about whether he thought what I’d done was wrong. To this day I don’t know if he thought so.” Then she stood and moved farther away, to a fresh patch.

Had she come to believe this version herself over time? That her worst crime, her worst insult to her marriage had been theft? Had she forgotten by the time she told me about it that she’d stolen for
Seward?
That the theft itself was perhaps the least of it for my grandfather?

Of course, the point of the story as she passed it along to me was to praise my grandfather for his generosity, and even in her version he was certainly generous enough. And after all, why would she tell a child—or even an adolescent—the other version? The version in which my grandfather’s generosity included his acceptance of, his forgiveness of, her love for Seward Wallace and her affair with him.

Her entry for that day reads:

March 19. Clear all day today. At noontime, John took me to the bank to get my own account. Mr. Blake could scarcely believe his ears. It took so long that John had no time to eat! I napped this pm and Susie Morrell came to tea. Stew for dinner. I hemmed a blanket this evening.

This was who he was then. Betrayed, robbed by his wife, he tried to understand the reasons why she might have felt it necessary to do either and to arrange their lives so she’d never have to do it again.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that was why he made her this unexpected gift.

But maybe he understood her better than she understood herself. Maybe what he saw even then was that he
had
had too much power in her life, that it could only make her want to rebel against him unless he released her, unless he gave her some kind of freedom from him.

Or it might have been that he understood that their quarrel over Seward, over his having sent Georgia to the san, wouldn’t be over, couldn’t be over, until some equity had been established between them. Maybe he saw that her embezzlement was her way of evening up the balance between them, and he was acknowledging the justice of it by making sure it was never again necessary.

Of course, it might all have been simpler and less personal than that. After all, women had just gotten the vote. Maybe her embezzlement caught him up and made him realize how old-fashioned their arrangement was. Maybe they stepped together into the modern world when they entered Blake’s office.

I can’t know. All I can say is, no matter what he put aside in himself, no matter what he hid, his doing this in response to her theft seemed to me utterly characteristic of him. And when I pieced together the final bits of what we might call his story, sitting in his transformed study late at night, I wept for everything that must have been painful for both of them in all this. I wept for their hard-won triumph.

If that’s what it was.

•     •     •

It would seem that their marriage was ready at this point for its true beginning. All the false assumptions had been cleared away, all the false starts had played themselves out. It was only a little less than a month after this that my mother, Dolly, was born, “fat and healthy,” Georgia notes in her diary. (Her diary, which ends eight months after this, though by then she has become so inconstant a journalist that it might as well have ended with the birth.)

Why is it, then, that only five months after Dolly’s birth, they move? They leave Maine, which my grandmother never stopped calling
home
, and go to a little town in southern Vermont not very different from the one they left behind.

My grandmother used to offer a joking explanation for it sometimes, years later, when she was teasing my grandfather in front of us. She’d say, “Oh, your grandfather! He couldn’t bear to share me with anyone, not even my own family, so he whisked me off—well, it might as well have been to the ends of the earth in those days, it took so long to get from here to there.” But there was not, in this topic, ever the note of true anger or bitterness that came up over the issue of the san, of the control he’d exerted at that only slightly earlier time in her life. And clearly he felt the difference. He was at ease with this joke, as he wasn’t with the other. He would smile abstractedly at her, his part of the ritual.

Of course, the simple answer is they left because he was offered a job. Someone was retiring from his practice or had died, I can’t remember if I ever knew which. It was certainly a better job—the annual income higher, the town a little bigger, the roads (and that was so important) a bit better and better maintained.

But might there not have been too the wish to leave certain things behind? To put away the pain of the past and start anew?

What things?

Well, their difficult beginnings, for one. Of course, the reminders of Georgia’s illness, and all the people who’d known about it.
Maybe even her father and all he had once meant to her, and her old home, which was Mrs. Erskine’s now. Mrs. Rice’s. Grace’s.

And then Seward. Seward, white and cold and young forever, never changing, in his grave; and the things she’d done, the money she’d stolen, to bring him there.

All this past, all these memories, they abandoned. They became simply a part of the place left behind. They became a story they told to us in bits and pieces. And by the time I was old enough to want to go back and find the places–to put the story together with what was left of it—everything had changed. The san was the tasteful conference center. Preston, the little town where Georgia and Ada and Fred grew up watching their mother’s death, was a nameless crossroads with a few sagging buildings clustered together. The graveyard where Seward and his parents and at least one sister lay buried was overgrown and vandalized, many of the old stones stolen or knocked over and their names made almost indecipherable anyway by acid rain and time.