The World Below Read online

  “MILLER AT THE TOP OF HER FORM…

  Miller writes with spare, old-fashioned grace, her story luminous with the small details of everyday life. And if Cath’s journey is the vehicle for telling the story, it’s Georgia whose presence hovers over every moment—she’s as compelling a character as any Miller has yet created.… Miller is exploring, in this fine novel, the endless interplay of past, present, and future in human lives. Forget dainty domestic drama—this is meaty stuff.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Sue Miller’s work belongs at the top of the novel of domestic realism, of the relations between men and women, of hungry generations treading one another down but taking some pleasure in the interplay. Her achievement is to have portrayed this in language that for all its incidental poetry makes us also feel that the poetry isn’t what matters, that her stories are told by employing, as Wordsworth put it, ‘Words/Which speak of nothing more than what we are.’ ”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “What Miller achieves consistently is a certain luminous portrait of the life lived day to day: the choices made, the regrets suffered, the cracks in the foundation we choose to confront or avoid.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Each voice [is] true and distinct. But it is the intricate structure that elevates the novel, the parallels between Georgia and Catherine, the contrasts, echoes, all that is submerged, imagined, needed, the funeral and the birth that frame the story.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Absorbing … Miller’s writing, graced by well-crafted psychological insight, is mesmerizing.… Miller has an uncanny ear for the humming routines of daily life.… Miller unwaveringly explores the myriad accidental moments that, for better or worse, shape the continuity of our lives.”

  —The Denver Post

  “WELL-WRITTEN, INTELLIGENT …

  MILLER KNOWS HOW FAMILIES WORK.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “[Miller] is both a gifted writer and a great novelist.…The World Below is a technically elegant work whose structural complexities are finessed with the deft assurance of, well, a master. There are no pyrotechnical displays here, no straining for brilliance, no intellectual razzle-dazzle, no stylistic huffing and puffing.… But it’s still fine reading, delivering a full load of intelligence, boldness, and unvarnished sentiment—and making it seem effortless.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “The World Below is not a book to take lightly.… The characters dance between soaring hope and sobering mortality. Wondrous as the story is, Miller’s talents are even more so. The World Below explores a world of themes, not only about life and death, but the relationships between men and women, family and friends. Sue Miller’s work will linger in the memory long after readers put it aside. It’s a lovely read.”

  —The Nashville Tennessean

  “Few writers are so attuned to the depths that lie beneath even the most ordinary-seeming lives, the accretion of choices and pure chance that make us who we are. And few writers are so adept at revealing those depths.… Sue Miller manages to convey the drama of ‘ordinary’ life with a subtlety and intelligence not always found in novelists whose names appear regularly on the bestseller lists.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Reading The World Below is a little like savoring a marvelous old album whose photographs are arranged less chronologically than by family traditions and relationships.… Sue Miller has created for us a place where we can go to discover what truly matters most in our lives. The World Below is her most illuminating book: profoundly human, fully engaging story-telling from one of America’s most insightful and accomplished contemporary novelists, showing us how, in these troubling times, literature itself can still be ‘a homeland.’ ”

  —The Burlington Free Press

  “FASCINATING … A WONDERFUL READ …

  Miller’s prose is dazzling, both economical and elegant, and her observations … are often moving and unexpectedly profound. The World Below ultimately is filled with life, and just like life, it exposes us to sobering choices, unexpected pleasures, and rich rewards.”

  —Wilmington Sunday News Journal

  “Sue Miller exemplifies that uncommonly endearing breed of novelist who, on occasion, is taken for granted.…[She] has presented adults and children in a manner that arrests the reader, chiefly because the plot situations she fashions, typically low-key, strike so close to home for so many of us.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Beautifully rendered … Miller’s sense of family and sexual dynamics is as well honed as ever in her latest outing.… The stories of the two women, past and present, bob up and down in the turbulent, muddied waters of recollection. In masterful strokes, the novel takes on a crystalline clarity that threatens to inflict paper cuts via the sharpness of its author’s vision. Miller outdoes herself. Hope dwells eternal for those who dare seek it in The World Below. Do dare.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “In her subtle interweaving of the two women’s lives, Miller reveals the world below the surface and uncovers a rich tapestry of needs and desires.… What gives this book its emotional richness is the wonderful language that pierces to the heart of each character’s struggle to make a richer, freer life. And that richness is captured in the story’s central metaphor.”

  —The New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “Miller limns contemporary life in deft, sure strokes, with an unerring ear for the way parents and children talk; no one can parse a modern marriage as well as she can.… In the Holbrookes, Miller has created a marriage that survives despite its fault lines, a marriage that seems both modern and old-fashioned: recognizably fraught, yet enduring, the sort of marriage readers hunger to read about. Perhaps that’s why this novel is so satisfying.”

  —Publishers Weekly (boxed and starred review)

  Also by Sue Miller

  WHILE I WAS GONE

  THE DISTINGUISHED GUEST

  FOR LOVE

  FAMILY PICTURES

  INVENTING THE ABBOTTS

  THE GOOD MOTHER

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by Sue Miller

  Reading group guide copyright © 2002 by Sue Miller and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002091348

  eISBN: 978-0-375-41423-7

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  v3.1_r1

  To the memory of Marguerite Mills Beach,

  my own beloved storytelling grandmother.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Bunting Fellowship program for the gift of time and a tiny aericcum-computer that allowed me to finish this book; to Perri Klass for answering my many questions and for guiding me through the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Boston Medical Center; and to Doug Bauer for his generous help.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One


  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  About the Author

  A Reader’s Guide

  PART ONE

  One

  Imagine it: a dry, cool day, the high-piled cumulus clouds moving slowly from northwest to southeast in the sky, their shadows following them across the hay fields yet to be cut for the last time this year. Down a narrow dirt road between the fields, a horse-drawn carriage, two old people wearing their worn Sunday clothes seated side by side in it, driving to town for their grown daughter’s funeral. Neither of them spoke, though you could see, if you cared to look, that the old woman’s lips were moving ceaselessly, silently repeating the same few phrases over and over. It was her intention, formed over the long weeks her daughter lay dying, to rescue her grandchildren from their situation, from their motherless house. To take all three of them back to the farm with her. She was rehearsing what she’d say, though she wasn’t aware of her mouth forming the words, and her husband didn’t notice.

  Imagine this too: later in the afternoon of the same long day, the two older grandchildren, the girls, laughing together. Laughing cruelly at the old woman, their grandmother, for her misguided idea.

  But perhaps it wasn’t truly cruel. They were children, after all. As thoughtless as children usually are. What’s more, they’d spent a good part of this strange day, the day of their mother’s burial, laughing. Laughing nervously, perhaps with even a touch of hysteria, mostly because they didn’t know what they ought to feel or think. Laughter was the easiest course. It was their way to ward off all the dark feelings waiting for them.

  They’d been up before dawn, long before their father and little brother were awake, long before their grandparents started in to town, almost giddy with the number and variety of their chores. The meal after the church service was to be elaborate—deviled eggs, ham, scalloped potatoes, rolls, three kinds of jellied salad, pudding, and butter cookies—and they each had a list of things to do connected with it. They worked in the kitchen in their nightgowns, barefoot, as the soft gray light slowly filled the room. When the housekeeper, Mrs. Beston, arrived, she chased them upstairs to get dressed.

  They had ironed their own dresses the day before because Mrs. Beston was so busy. They hung now on hangers from the hook behind their bedroom door, smelling of starch, smelling just slightly still of the heat of the iron—that sweet, scorchy odor. As they pulled them on over their heads and then helped each other plait their long braids, they were convulsed, again and again, by lurches of laughter that felt as uncontrollable as sneezing. Sometimes it was wild, almost mean. It fed on itself. Just looking at each other, or at their sleepy little brother, Freddie, who’d come in in his nightshirt, his hair poking up strangely, to sit on their bed and watch them, could set it off.

  Maybe this explained it then—why, later in the day, when their father told them of their grandmother’s notion, they couldn’t stop themselves: why they gave way again to the same ragged hysteria. They laughed at her. They laughed at her and their grandfather’s having clopped into town with horse and buggy; their father had had a motorcar forever, it seemed to them (it had been seven years). They laughed because she had only eight teeth left in her head and therefore smiled with her hand lifted to cover her mouth—they could both imitate this awkward, apologetic gesture perfectly. They laughed because she wore a ridiculous straw hat shaped like a soggy pancake, and an old-fashioned dress, the same old-fashioned dress she wore to all ceremonial events. They laughed because she had thought their father would so easily give them away.

  “They are still children,” is what the old woman said to her son-in-law. “They need a childhood.” The two of them had gone together into the parlor after they greeted each other, and when she told him it was private, what she had to say to him, he shut the sliding pocket doors. It had been such a long time since anyone had pulled them out that a thick gray stripe of dust evenly furred all their decorative molding.

  They sat not really looking at each other, the new widower and the dead woman’s mother, and the grandmother forced herself to keep talking, to try to explain her plan to him. She wasn’t a good talker, even in the easiest circumstances, and none of this was easy, of course. She hadn’t imagined very much beyond her first statement ahead of time either. It was really her entire argument.

  What’s more, her son-in-law had always made her shy. He was a large, almost handsome man with slicked-down hair, getting burly now as he approached forty-five. He was a salesman, of vulcanized rubber goods, and his way of dealing with the world came directly from that life: he wanted to amuse you, to charm you. When he was courting her daughter—Fanny, her name was—he had flirted with the grandmother, and this had made her tongue-tied and silent around him. Once, after she’d served him a blueberry cake he found especially delicious, he’d grabbed her and waltzed her around the scrubbed wooden floors of her farmhouse kitchen. This had so unnerved her—his energy and strength, and her helplessness against them—that she’d burst into shameful tears.

  That’s what she felt like doing now, weeping, she was making such a mess of getting this said. It had seemed so clear to her as she moved through her solitary days while her daughter was dying and then since. The children needed her. They couldn’t be left alone through the week any longer. The girls couldn’t be asked to be so responsible—taking care of themselves and then their little brother too. It was too much. It was simply too much. They needed a home: someone to take care of them. She would offer to bring them to town on Fridays to be with him for the weekend. Or he could come out and stay with them on the farm. Oh, they’d be happy to have him!

  All this planning had kept the image of her daughter—wasted, curled on her side, rising to consciousness only to cry out in pain—from her mind; though she’d spoken to Fanny often, another version of Fanny, as she’d made her preparations: as she’d shaken out the extra bedding, as she’d set out the framed pictures of her in the unused rooms she’d made up for the children. “Oh my dear girl,” she had whispered. “They will be fine, you’ll see. They just need someone to tend to them for a change, that’s all, and I am the one to do it.”

  Her son-in-law waited a moment now, out of kindness and sorrow, before he answered. Then he cleared his throat and said that he saw things somewhat differently. His older daughter was almost sixteen, the younger thirteen—not really children at all. They were big, good girls. He needed their help, he said.

  Of course, this was exactly her point. She didn’t press it, though. She sat silently and nodded, just once, furious at herself. She was giving up. This easily.

  And they were, he continued gently (very gently: he was fond of his mother-in-law, this cadaverously skinny and stern old woman), his children, after all.

  She stood up and turned away from him, but not before he saw her mouth pull down, grim and defeated.

  It had taken Fanny several years to die, of cancer, though no one had ever spoken the word in the house or in front of the children. And the truth was, as the grandmother would have admitted if she weren’t wild with a grief that turned in like self-blame, that Fanny had been so unusual a young and then a nearly middle-aged woman that the girls had been in charge of the household long before anyone had guessed she was ill. So much for needing a childhood.

  The girls were named Georgia and Ada. Georgia, the older, could remember even in the years when her mother was well, coming home from school for lunch, a privilege of the town children, to find the house silent, Fanny still in her housecoat, lying on the sofa in the parlor reading, just as sh
e had been when Georgia left. She’d look up, surprised and dizzy. Her face was round and full, with fat, childish lips and a baby’s startled blue eyes: a pretty, oddly unformed-looking young woman. “Why, Georgia,” she’d say, day after day. “How can you be back so soon?” And then she’d rise and ineffectually pat at her hair or her robe. Often she was barefoot, even in winter. “Well, we’d better go see what we can scratch up for you girls to eat, hadn’t we?”

  It was a disgrace, really, though the children didn’t care; they’d gotten used to it long before. In the kitchen, the breakfast dishes were still on the table, the grease congealed, the skin of the syrup pools lightly puckering with the unseen motion of the air. Upstairs, the beds would gape, unmade. When the baby, Freddie, came, Georgia’s first task at noon would often be to take him up to the nursery to change his drooping diaper. “Oh, you pooper,” she would say. “You big flop maker. Look what you’ve done now, you wicked boy.” She would keep a steady stream of this insulting talk flowing, so that he would lie still in fascination and amusement and make her job easier, but also so that she wouldn’t gag—she never got used to the piercing scent of ammonia, and worse, that she released each time she unpinned his sagging, weighted cloths.

  It was a little while after Freddie came—Georgia later thought it must have been then that her mother had first become ill—that they began to have regular help, finally. Mrs. Beston. Her name was Ellen, but no one ever called her that, not even their mother. Mrs. Beston, always and only, though their father sometimes called her Mrs. Best One when she wasn’t around to hear it. She was tall and raw-boned and strong. Entirely without humor, and yet endlessly, bottomlessly cheerful. She arrived Monday mornings, just as their father was leaving for the week. “You must take these children in hand, Mrs. Beston,” he’d say, pulling on his coat. “They’re spoiled rotten. A daily whipping, I should think, and gruel for supper four nights a week at the minimum.” The children, sitting on the stairs waiting to say goodbye, would look at each other with wicked grins.