The World Below Read online

  “Oh, Mister, don’t say that!” Mrs. Beston would cry uneasily.

  “No, no, we count on you, Mrs. Beston. Lock them in their rooms. Send them to bed with no supper. Hang them up by their thumbs till they promise to obey.”

  “Oh now, Mr. Rice!”

  “I’m off now, Mrs. Beston. By Friday, I have every confidence, you’ll have instilled in them the fear of the Lord.”

  But she didn’t. She forgave them everything. Everyone, to her, was a poor dear, most of all their mother. Mrs. Rice, the poor dear. It was only slowly that Georgia came to understand that this was more than peculiarly expressed affection, that Mrs. Beston was referring to something specific, something sad and wrong about her mother.

  She was supposed to leave by three-thirty or four—she had her own family to get home to and cook for—but often she stayed after her chores were done, just to do a few pieces in the puzzle with them, just to play one more hand of Slapjack, one round of War. When she did leave, the house was clean, the laundry was done if it was laundry day, and—after their mother was really ill—there was always something prepared in the kitchen and the girls left with instructions on how to warm it and serve it. Though by then Fanny didn’t have much appetite, Ada or Georgia would always take a tray to her room before they served themselves and Freddie at the kitchen table. And after dinner one of them would go to fetch the nearly untouched tray back down. Both of them were good at keeping track, both of them always knew whether she’d eaten more or less today than yesterday, though they never commented on this to each other.

  But they’d all gotten skilled by this time at never acknowledging what they knew, at pretending they didn’t see what they saw. Everything conspired to encourage them in this—Mrs. Beston’s determined good cheer, their father’s strained, sometimes desperate gaiety, their neighbors’ polite silence about what was happening in their house.

  And their mother: well, hadn’t she always been this way? Indolent, half the time in bed anyway, reading or just daydreaming? Oh, she was sick, they certainly knew that, but they all expected—or pretended to expect, and then forgot they were pretending—that she’d be herself again by spring; or then by summer, when they’d drive over to Bucksport and have lobsters at the pound; or surely by fall, when they’d need to go shopping in Pittsfield for new school things.

  Late one afternoon the summer her mother lay dying, Georgia came out onto the screened porch off the kitchen. Mrs. Beston had gone for the day, but she’d left Fanny’s sheets soaking in a galvanized metal tub of cold water. The blood had colored them evenly a beautiful shade of deep sherbet pink. They looked like snow-covered mountains at sunset. Caught by surprise at the sight, Georgia stopped short and gasped. Her heart was pounding. But then quickly her mind performed its familiar, useful trick: they were having chicken stew for dinner that night, and what she told herself was that the blood was of course from the slaughter of the chicken, somehow spilled onto these cloths.

  There was a world of knowledge that she had to ignore to hold on to this thought, starting with the fact that the chickens were slaughtered out behind the henhouse, but she was practiced at it, it was all accomplished in seconds. She started to whistle as loudly as she could, “Where E’er You Walk.” She went outside into the overgrown yard where the lupines and lemon lilies were slowly being choked out by weeds, and began savagely to pluck them, singing now, ignoring the occasional cry of her mother, audible even through the windows she insisted stay shut.

  She wanted her father, Georgia thought, yanking at the flowers. She wanted him home right now. But he was out on the road for two more days, until Friday, driving his usual circuit of general stores and hardware stores in a radius of several hundred miles. He carried samples of his wares in his motorcar, and the car had come to have that rubbery odor permanently, an odor Georgia would find reassuring even into her old age.

  Avoiding the screened porch, she went around to the front door of the house and brought the flowers inside. In the kitchen, she found a pitcher for them. Ada followed her in from the parlor and they harmonized loudly until their mother had fallen asleep again; or at least, perhaps hearing them, had stopped making noise.

  The pattern had been the same even when their mother was well: their father was gone from Monday till Friday. On those days they had their lazy, slatternly routines without him—improvised meals, what their mother called “picnic dinners.” It was fun, they thought of it as a kind of game. On Friday mornings, they bustled around frantically, cleaning up. “Good Lord, this place is a pigsty!” their mother would say, as if she’d only just noticed, as if some large group of messy strangers had sneaked in and made it so while she wasn’t looking. Usually their father was home by the time they got back from school that afternoon.

  Their weekends together were the center of the family’s life. There were rides in the Model T when the weather was fine; there were real picnics and visits to their grandparents’ farm; there were sleigh rides and sledding and skating in the winter, and an endless round of charades, games, theatricals. There were big elaborate breakfasts both weekend days, and on Sunday a long, late dinner.

  Of course, there was the unfairness that neither parent attended church, whereas the children were made to go for the whole morning—the nursery class for Freddie, Sunday school and then the sermon for the girls. They didn’t get home sometimes until twelve-thirty or one. “Give your parents my regards,” “Say hello to your parents,” the other grown-ups, the churchgoers, would say, in what you would have thought was a slightly mean way. “Oh, yes,” they’d say on their way to pick up Freddie, on their way home across the town green. “Oh, we will!” they’d call as they ran the length of the hedge of mock orange with its dizzying smell in early summer, as they turned into their walk and thundered up the three wooden steps in their good Sunday shoes.

  “We’re starved!” “We’re dying!” they’d cry out from the front door. Often their mother would stay upstairs—you could hear her washing up—but their father would come down right away, handsome in his shirtsleeves, and take them to the kitchen and fix them butter-and-sugar sandwiches, to tide you over, he would say. When their mother appeared, she would be wearing her Sunday best, just as if she had gone to church. She would be flushed and smelling of lavender, and their father would cry out some silliness: “What is this vision, this apparition of beauty that appears? Girls, girls, you have a beautiful older sister you’ve been hiding from me!”

  It was strange, Georgia thought at the service, how little she felt now. Perhaps she had gotten used to the notion of death, her mother’s death anyway, because of the long illness. She watched her grandparents at the end of the front pew. They didn’t look at each other, but she saw that their knuckled hands were tightly entwined on her grandmother’s lap. The old woman’s shoulders made a stooped, dragging line down. Her dress was shapeless, and shiny from ironing, the lace collar turned a brownish yellow with age.

  Afterward, the grandparents didn’t stay for the buffet Mrs. Beston had set out in the dining room while they were at church. Instead, they shyly summoned their son-in-law to the front porch. When he had said his goodbyes to them, he sent the girls out to see them off. He had told them by now about their grandmother’s plan, and as their grandparents drove away, the girls’ laughter started again, so wild and uncontrollable—at their grandparents’ peculiar old hats, at the splayed horse, the listing buggy—that they had to go around to the meadow at the back of the house to calm down before they could show their pink, glistening faces once more.

  But that night Georgia dreamed of her grandmother, holding her dead mother across her lap—like a Pietá—and weeping inconsolably. And when she woke in the dark in the bed she shared with Ada, Georgia’s face too was wet with tears.

  Two

  It was my own grandmother who told me this funeral-day story, one among many. For it was her story. She was Georgia, the older daughter. She grew up to be a charming woman—small and pretty and always in mo
tion—and she loved to tell the stories of her life to me and my brother. She had a quite particular way of talking when she did, just that much off, rhythmically, from her ordinary use of language. It was a little like the narrative voice of the Brothers Grimm, or some of Rudyard Kipling’s children’s tales. When my father read us those stories aloud, I can remember more than once meeting my brother’s eyes, the exchange of a glance of recognition, a sly smile. If we’d spoken, either of us, we might have said, simply, Gran.

  Georgia lived to be eighty-eight. She outlived her husband by decades, and all of her children but one, my mother’s only sister, Rue. When Rue died her solitary death in France a year ago, it fell to me, to me and my brother, Lawrence, to decide what to do with Georgia’s house.

  Lawrence said he didn’t care, though it’s possible he was just being kind to me. “I could use the dough,” he told me on the phone. “Who couldn’t? But if you want to hold on to it, that’s all right by me. Except it has to pay for itself. No way can it actually cost me anything.”

  This wasn’t a concern, because for all the years since my grandmother’s death the house had paid for itself. It was in West Barstow, a pretty town about fifteen miles from the Connecticut River in southern Vermont, with a view across the lazy hills to the ineptly named Green Mountains in the distance—from here they were blue, a steely faraway blue. After my grandmother died, Rue had had no difficulty in keeping the house rented four or five months of the year as a vacation home, and for the last few years there’d been a year-round tenant. In fact, when the attorney notified me that Rue had left the house to me and Lawrence, he also told me that this primary renter, a retired academic, had offered several times to buy it from Rue, and when he’d heard of her death, he asked that his offer be extended to her heirs.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I could have used the dough too, of course—in all likelihood more than Lawrence, who did quite well, thank you, at a job in Silicon Valley, the exact nature of which I was incapable of understanding, just that it had to do with money, not technology. And probably selling the house would have been the most sensible option. It was too far away; it was old and in need of regular maintenance. The problem was, I had a deep attachment to it, even though I hadn’t seen it in so many years, not since my grandmother’s death in 1988. I thought of it as home—at least more than I thought of any other place as home. In a way, I’d grown up in it, and even now I sometimes dreamt of the house, safe and unchanged from the way it had looked in my adolescence; and of my grandparents, not visible but palpably there somehow, inside it, waiting for me. So after I got word that we owned it now, after I talked to Lawrence and realized he was leaving the decision to me, things seemed, in my mind, to complicate themselves.

  Part of my confusion was my sense of having reached the end of some kind of road in my life in San Francisco. I’d been divorced, for the second time, a few years earlier. Now in conversations I sometimes eard myself refer to the man I’d lived with for twelve years as “my second husband,” words I could not have imagined, in my youth, that I would ever have reason to utter. And you would be surprised, people do look at you, hard, when you say this, as they don’t when you say, “My first husband.” Everyone’s allowed one marital mistake, it seems, but two is over the top.

  What’s more, my children, who had fixed my life in the city for all those years with their attachments, their schooling, their passionate interests, were launched now. No longer attached. Scattered widely, in fact—except for the oldest, Karen, who had wound up back in San Francisco.

  Though it struck me that the divorce had dragged them all back a bit emotionally: they were, I thought, slightly pissed about it. They’d loved Joe and relied on him, as they hadn’t their own father, who’d pulled a disappearing act years earlier—and now I’d upped and lost Joe for them too. I might have been imputing these thoughts to them, but I felt they’d come to see me as a certain kind of person, really: a sort of loser. I felt I worried them, uncoupled. They asked me more often, and with deeper concern, how I was, what I was up to. I imagined their e-mail and phone calls to each other. “Are we going to have to take care of her? How old is she now?”

  But I might have read them this way in part because I felt like such a failure myself. I’d taken Joe and our steady deep friendship for granted. I’d been shocked and wounded when he announced he’d fallen in love with someone else. And then even more shocked by his surprise at my reaction.

  What he’d assumed was that it wouldn’t matter all that much to me. He’d assumed a disaffection on my part, a restlessness as deep as his own. “You can’t tell me you’ve been happy,” he said. We were sitting in our fancy kitchen. I’d been cooking a meal when he made his announcement. I hadn’t been able to respond at first, I was so stunned. I remember that I carefully and deliberately turned off first the burner and then the oven, as if they, and not his news, were what represented the imminent danger to us both. Then I went to the table, filled a glass to the brim with wine, and sat down.

  “I would say content,” I told him. I’d finished half the glass by now.

  “Content?” he asked, his tone conveying his utter disgust with the notion. He pushed his chair back and stood up. He crossed the room and leaned against the granite counter. He ran his hands through his hair—with Joe, always a sign of deep agitation. The expensive sharp knives gleamed in a row behind him. Everything seemed thick and slow to me. He was talking. He didn’t understand, he said. How could I, why would I settle for such a thing? Why would I imagine that he would settle for such a thing?

  It was a good life, I said. A decent life.

  That wasn’t the kind of life he wanted.

  We talked some more. He got angry, his voice rose. This was good, actually, because it allowed me to get angry back. It allowed us both to yell. Eventually I threw a few things. Glasses, to be exact, with the satisfying explosive noise they made as they hit the tile floor. At some point I stormed into the living room and he followed. There, I actually threw a chair. To my great surprise, it too broke as it landed, as though it were only a movie prop.

  A man unnerved by the slightest violence, Joe left the house. But after several hours, hours in which, unbelievably, I fell into a deep sleep on the living room sofa, he came back and gently woke me up. He said what he wanted was for us to be friends, forever. We sat around in front of the fireplace and had a great deal to drink, talking about this, about how it would be accomplished. We both wept. At some point we decided to burn the broken chair. “I never liked the fucking thing anyway,” he said.

  We did. We burned it, and then because in the drunken moment it seemed utterly reasonable—and also funny—we burned several other objects too, objects that seemed emblematic of our marriage, including a worn old sign from an inn we’d stayed in without the kids when we were first in love—since torn down—and all our letters to each other.

  It was the kind of scene that should have ended in our making love, if not in our reconciliation, but it didn’t. We went to bed separately; Joe slept in the guest room. In the morning we were both hungover and cross with ourselves and each other about that, and each a little angry too about the things we’d destroyed in our drunkenness. I remember pulling some of the bundled papers out of the ashes to see if I could save anything. In the center of each page a few scorched phrases were still legible, but that was all.

  Later on I did feel what he’d called on me to feel that night—a kind of shame at my own contentment, at my willingness to settle for what he clearly thought of as so little. Later on I wondered: What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I hungrier, greedier? Why hadn’t I wanted more sex, more friends, more interesting talk? It was like a kind of adult parallel play, what I’d been happy with.

  But the thing is, he had been happy too, at least for some of the time. Often in the months after we separated, my mind ran over the years of our marriage, looking at us here, and then again here. It seemed to me he’d loved the harried, frantic early part best,
when the children were teenagers, when there was always a drama, there was always noise or music or an activity to do with one or two or three wired, lively kids. They were mine from my first marriage, there when he met me and part of who I was then, in an important way.

  I remembered his coming in once from a jog on a chilly, wet evening in December. Every room in our tiny house was ablaze with light. Fiona had a record on—the English Beat, singing “Stand Down, Margaret”—and she was dancing by herself in the living room, a kind of frenzied jumping up and down. Jeff was playing a computer game in his room, yelling when he scored. Karen was in the kitchen with me, reading me the conclusion of a paper she was writing on Emily Dickinson. I was doing something or other about making dinner. The house was warm, it smelled good. We’d been married less than a year. I looked over at him, my almost brand-new husband, his skin and beard glistening wet from the foggy cold. His color was high from his run, but his face was suffused too, with a kind of visible, sated pleasure. He touched my hair as he passed through the room on his way to a shower, and it seemed to me at that moment that I felt a kind of electric charge running through his fingers into me.

  When all that energy and life went away, as it gradually did, of course, he didn’t have the memory of us alone together—or of me alone, of who I was without the noise, the kids—to sustain him. It was all a blank to him, I think. A silent, empty kind of life. He wanted out, and he found a way by falling in love again. The woman he married after we divorced had two little children already, and they’ve quickly produced one more of their own. Sometimes I can feel happy for him.