by Sue Miller
Of course you have some voice in this matter too. In case I’ve misunderstood you or misjudged you, I want to give you the opportunity to correct that. There’s to be a movie tomorrow night, as you know. I won’t be there, but fifteen minutes after the start, I’ll be waiting outside, just below the terrace, in the apple trees. If I am wrong about you, you will come. If I am right, please stay away. I will be no more wounded by your absence than I’ve been already by your presence.
Yours,
Seward
It was only a few weeks before these events that Georgia had had a visit from her father and Ada and Freddie. It was late in May, only the fourth visit she’d been allowed with them, and she’d looked forward to it for days. It was on this occasion that Ada had brought her the two new outfits, storebought and—to Georgia’s eyes as she held the things up—strange. But Ada had assured her this was the new style. She was wearing a version of it, and Georgia had to agree, it looked fine on Ada.
What’s more, it was sensible, their father pointed out. No more of that tripping over long skirts, no more layers of underthings, no more corsets.
Of course, neither of the girls had ever worn corsets, so this made them both whoop with laughter. Their father sat there watching them, and it seemed to Georgia he might actually have blushed. Then, as if he were following a train of thought, he turned to her. He said, “I’ve wanted to wait until we were together with you again to tell you all something, my dears.”
They were sitting in a corner of the living room. Miss Duffy, one of the women on her porch, was playing the piano, “The Lost Chord.” Georgia’s father’s voice was so uncharacteristically grave that they sobered instantly and waited.
“I’m planning to get married again,” he said.
After a few seconds’ silence, he went on.
“This is someone you haven’t met, Georgia, but Ada and Freddie have, and I know when you do come to know her, you will love her as much as they do.”
There was a sense of suspension. No one spoke. Georgia could feel an odd breathlessness squeeze her chest. Her father’s gaze was steady on her. In his hands the straw hat he’d been wearing earlier turned and turned.
“Is it Mrs. Erskine, Pop?” Ada finally asked.
“Well, of course it is.” He looked over at his slender younger daughter and grinned suddenly. “Good Lord, Ada, you speak as though I were dragging home a different woman every night of the week! Of course it’s Mrs. Erskine.” He lifted his hat to his heart. “My one and only.”
Freddie saw something strange in his older sister’s face. He slid closer to Georgia on the settee. “She’s awfully nice, Georgie.” His voice was soft and private. “She gave me a kit for a tetrahedryl kite and I glued it all myself.”
“Did she, Fred?” Georgia tried to smile back. She couldn’t look at her father, though she had a thousand questions she wanted to ask him. What about me? she wanted to say. What about me?
“Will she come to live with us?” Ada asked.
“Have I raised a gaggle of geese?” Their father’s voice was pitched for fun now, and Ada and Freddie smiled in anticipation. “A pack of pachyderms? Of course, my girl. This is what marriage means. She will live with us and be my wife and your mother.”
“And what will we call her, Dad?” Fred asked. “Will we call her our mother?”
“I’m sure she would like that, Freddie, but we’ll see. Maybe the girls, because they’re older, will call her something else. But we’ll figure all this out in due time.”
Georgia could feel his eyes upon her again, could feel him waiting for her to respond in some way, to ask a question of her own. It was unkind of her, she knew, to stay so silent, so turned away from him and his news. But something thick and dull and shocked within kept her mind from working.
Freddie and Ada, though, were eager enough to make up for her muteness. They peppered their father with questions—about Mrs. Erskine’s dog, about her car, about which rooms in the house would be hers.
Finally, in a moment of silence that fell, she drew a deep breath and managed it: “And when will you be married, do you think?” She felt her heart in her throat.
He looked at her gratefully. “We’ll wait, of course, until you can be there, my dear. Until you’re well.”
The very thing, she thought later at her rest—and bitterly—that might slow her recovery. For why should she labor to get well only to come home to a wedding? To come home to a house that was no longer hers? To come home to be displaced, replaced, made useless and unnecessary?
Georgia went with them for a walk around the grounds before they left. At the bottom of the meadow, there was a small pond, skimmed with bright-green algae and partially overhung with the delicately traced foliage of two old tamaracks. They took turns throwing stones across it. Georgia’s stones fell short of the other side consistently, landing with deep reverberant plunks! in the murky water.
“You’ve lost your arm here, Georgie,” her father said, and she remembered that sentence as she waved to them, as the car grew smaller toward the foot of the drive and then honked and turned left, toward home. My arm, my heart, she thought.
There was no place to weep, no place to be alone. Georgia returned to the living room and gathered her new clothes up. She carried them to the sleeping porch.
The women there were excited, delighted for the diversion. New clothes! They were something to share, a form of news, really, from the outside world. They insisted Georgia try them on. It was Mrs. Moody who offered to cut her hair in the new style. Someone found a stool, and their nurse, Miss Farraday, loaned them a bed-sheet to drape around Georgia’s shoulders. She unpinned her hair and let it down—your crowning glory her mother had called it—and watched as the long bolts of it slipped and whispered to the floor.
When it was done, she stood in front of the hall mirror. She hardly recognized herself, but that seemed right to her, somehow, since the terms of her life seemed to have changed so absolutely too. She stepped barefoot toward her reflection in the stylish clothes, her eyes glittering.
Mrs. Moody, standing behind her, saw Georgia’s tears in the mirror and thought they were for her shorn head. “Oh, lovey, there’s no need to cry,” she said. “Everybody feels that way at first with a new haircut, but it’ll pass. You do look grand, you know.”
“I know,” Georgia said. She spun around and hugged the older woman. “Of course you’re right.” She stepped back, her hands still on Mrs. Moody’s arms, her chin trembling slightly. Then, as though she were on stage, as though she were playing a part—Georgia: the new version—she slowly took a deep, elaborate bow, and the little group of women looking on from the open porch doorway all applauded her.
Dr. Holbrooke came to visit only a couple of days after her father had been there. In fact, when she was called downstairs, Georgia had the fleeting thought that perhaps it was her father, come back to tell her it was all a mistake, that he’d changed his mind about Mrs. Erskine.
There were four or five strangers in the living room when she entered. Georgia recognized Dr. Holbrooke at once, of course, but he did no more than nod at her, so she assumed he was there for someone else and sat down to wait for her visitor to claim her—please, let it be her father! let it be him! She was looking out the window, intently scanning the grounds, expecting at any moment to see his bulky, energetic shape in shirtsleeves, when she felt a presence next to her and turned.
“It is you!” Dr. Holbrooke said. “I didn’t know you at first.”
Her hand went up to her bare neck, as it had over and over in the last few days. “Yes, I cut my hair all off. Well,” she said, and stood up awkwardly. She extended her hand, and he took it, but instead of shaking it, which was what she’d intended, he stood holding it in both of his and looking down at her.
“You look very well,” he said at last, letting her go. “I’m so pleased to see it.”
“Thank you.” She dipped her head. “I’ve tried my best to be a good patient.”<
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“It shows. It shows,” he said, nodding. “Your new haircut is very fetching too, if you’ll let an old man say so.”
“You’re hardly old!” she said. She felt the heat rise to her face. “But I do thank you. And who are you here for?” she asked.
“You, of course,” he said.
“Oh!” She couldn’t help it, she sounded disappointed. “Oh, well. What an unexpected … treat.”
He laughed. “You’re kind to say so. Perhaps you were hoping for someone more dashing.”
“No, really, I thought it might be my father, that’s all.”
“But he was just here, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. Two days ago. How did you know that?”
“Why don’t we sit?” he said. “Over here by the window, perhaps.” As Georgia followed him, she caught his scent. He smelled of wintergreen. But more than that: he smelled somehow well. He smelled of health, in a way, she realized, that was noticeable and foreign to her now.
“You’re still my patient, did you know that?” he was saying as they sat down. “I stopped in with Dr. Rollins to see how you were doing just before I sent for you. He told me your family had been in to visit. That must have lifted your spirits immeasurably.”
“Of course it did,” she said obediently.
“Things are well with them?”
“They are,” she said. She talked a little about Ada and Freddie. She didn’t speak of her father or Mrs. Erskine. Holbrooke seemed politely, mildly interested, though his amused, intelligent brown eyes were steady on her. He was wearing a rumpled blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit today, a summer suit, and it made Georgia think of the times he had come to the house the summer her mother was dying, of her relief when he got there at the end of the day—the tired-looking but handsome doctor in his light, wrinkled summer clothes, occasionally flecked here and there with what she assumed was blood, come to put her mother to sleep for a few hours.
He asked about her life at the san, about what her routines were these days, and she told him: her pleasure at being up and around, and, blushing, the joy of the first real bath she’d had.
“Water is … well, you miss it awfully, don’t you, when you just have sponge baths. I do love a bath,” she said soberly, and he laughed, in delight it seemed, which made her laugh too, though she wasn’t sure why.
Then her face grew serious.
“What I’m wondering now, I suppose,” she asked abruptly, “is how things are with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you are still my doctor, I’m wondering about my illness. I feel so well at this point, I’m wondering whether I couldn’t be thinking about going home soon.” A half-formed notion had occurred to her: that if she could get home now, quickly and unexpectedly, she could somehow stop her father’s marriage. He would see, simply, that there was no need to go through with it.
Holbrooke leaned forward. “I know how you must miss them all …” he began.
She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “They miss me. They need me, truly they do. It seems that things are simply falling to pieces without me.” At the lie, she blushed. “Of course, I can’t pretend to have been a particularly good housekeeper, especially not to you, to whom I’ve confessed just the opposite. But I did more or less hold things together at home for my father.” She was so intent on her purpose now that she didn’t note that at the mention of her father, his mouth had hardened and the warmth had drained from his face.
After a moment he said, “I suspect it’s for exactly that reason that you wound up in here.”
“Yes, but now it’s done its work. It’s made me well. I know I am. Look!” she cried, lifting her hands dramatically. “Look at me! My fever is gone. I’m fat as a pig. I’ve stopped coughing, almost entirely. I’m well: won’t you say it?” She leaned forward and smiled flirtatiously at him, unconsciously copying the behavior she’d so carefully observed all around her at the san. “After all, you’re like a fairy godfather to me—all you have to do is touch me once,” and here she reached over and lightly, playfully, rested her fingers on his arm, “and I’ll be cured.”
“My dear girl,” he said, in a voice she wouldn’t have recognized as his, “that’s hardly within my power.” His face had changed utterly. He looked almost frightened of her, of her touch.
Georgia felt stung, rebuked, as much by his tone—so suddenly formal, so cold—as by what he said. She was abruptly ashamed of herself. She turned away from him quickly to look anywhere else, out the window where the sun slanted across the terrace. And there was Seward Wallace, standing motionless by a cure chair in his black suit, with that dark thatch of hair falling across his forehead, staring back in at her, a strange expression on his face.
She cleared her throat. “Well. I wonder if you can’t tell me, then, when … how long it will be till I may hope to be released.”
He shook his head. “I can’t, really,” he said. He too was looking out the window. Now he turned back to her. “This is something we have to monitor, Dr. Rollins and I. There is a host of factors that concern us, which we look at when we make such a decision.” She met his gaze. The light, amused look was gone from his eyes. He was her doctor now, only that. He said, “Sometimes a person can seem quite well while being potentially very fragile. It’s very difficult, very difficult to say.”
“So you can’t even suggest to me when I might be able to go home.”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, more gently now.
“How disappointing,” she said. She was, she discovered, furious at him. As though it were his fault she was ill. Still, she couldn’t help the chilliness in her tone. She stood, and he quickly rose too. “Well, it was kind of you to stop in to see me,” she said. All she wanted was to escape him, escape herself, escape the room. She extended her hand again, and this time he shook it.
“It wasn’t kindness,” he said, as though he wished to prolong their talk, to begin again.
“Yes, it was,” she said firmly. “It was terribly kind. And I must go up now. And rest. To speed my all-too-poky recovery.” She meant to be light, she meant to mock herself, but even she could hear that she’d failed, that she sounded bitter.
Well, what could she do? She was bitter.
“Goodbye, then,” she said, and he answered, and she turned and walked away, leaving him there among the other visitors and patients.
• • •
Seward Wallace spoke to her for the first time the day after this visit. They were gathered in the library, waiting for the bell to ring for breakfast, when he came up to her, smiling in a way that seemed artificial to Georgia, entirely too toothy.
“You’ve transformed yourself, I notice,” he announced.
Georgia took a step back from him, from his booming voice. “Well, Mrs. Moody cut my hair, if that’s what you mean.”
“But you’re wearing a different kind of clothing too, aren’t you?” There was something accusatory in his tone. He seemed angry.
Though perhaps, Georgia thought, it was his eyebrow, the strong, dark, single eyebrow, thinned only slightly in the middle above his nose that made him look intense and uncompromising, even in repose. “I suppose I am.” She shrugged. “But I outgrew all my old clothes. They didn’t fit anymore.”
“Ah!” he said. “Still, you look very different.”
“Well, yes. I know I do.”
“I’m Seward,” he said abruptly. “Seward Wallace. I know your name: Georgia Rice.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then I don’t have to bother to introduce myself, a thing I heartily detest.”
He didn’t return her smile. “Did you do it for him?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“For him. The man who visited you yesterday. Is it for him you’ve so altered yourself?”
His tone was unpleasant, Georgia thought, as though he were describing something contemptible. What cheek, really! “Where on earth did you get that idea?” she
asked. “He’s my doctor, that gentleman. Dr. Holbrooke.”
He was silent a moment. “I see,” he said. “You know him quite well, I take it.” His voice was stiff.
“Well, of course I do. He’s been our family’s doctor since I was a girl. He cared for my mother in her illness. For many years.”
“I see,” he said.
“I should think so,” she said, and walked away.
Though she wasn’t angry, she thought, as she ate her breakfast: coffee with yellow cream, oatmeal and syrup and milk, eggs and bacon, and thick slices of buttered toast that you could sprinkle, if you wanted to, with a mixture of cinnamon and white sugar kept in tin shakers on the tables. What she thought was that he should be made to realize he’d been rude. You simply couldn’t go around speaking to people that way.
As she conversed with the others at her table, she could see Seward Wallace across the dining room, eating silently, glancing occasionally her way.
It was Freddie he reminded her of! she thought abruptly. And with that she felt a wash of tenderness toward him. He seemed so young, really, so awkward.
And so, when he spoke to her again after the meal, almost unable to lift his eyes to her face, and asked her if she would walk out with him the next day, she consented.
When she thought about this time in her life later on, it seemed to Georgia that she had let Seward come after her, as they said in the san—that she’d fallen in love with him—because she felt alone and abandoned and she seized on him for comfort.
But still, she did love him. Didn’t she?
Sometimes when she talked about her time in the sanatorium to me, she seemed to be saying that none of it, none of what she felt and thought then, was quite real.
She spoke to me only glancingly and indirectly of Seward, of course. It’s mostly from her diaries and the letters she kept that I know anything at all about him and his relationship with my grandmother. (And from my aunt Rue, of course, who had her own version of the story.) But once I had its general outlines—the story’s—I began to rehear and reinterpret various of my grandmother’s remarks or asides to me over the years about her life then.
