The World Below

by Sue Miller

  Nothing, nothing, I assured her. She clucked some more, and I could hear her after she’d shut me in. “Can you believe it? And here we are. Oh, well, we’ll just take a quick peek around. Now this is the bath. Huge, isn’t it? Because it was converted, of course, from an old bedroom. You could do a lot with this space, not that it doesn’t already have a certain country charm.…”

  After they’d left—the front door banging and Leslie’s voice rising from outside now—I got up to get more aspirin. I stood in the bathroom a moment, looking from there back into the attic rooms, trying to see everything as the New Yorkers might have. It was then I noticed that the narrow door in what had been Lawrence’s room—a door that led to the attic storage area—had been left open. I went to close it. Once there, though, I stepped on impulse into the attic. It was dark and cold. I reached my hand out, swung it in the thick air, and caught the pull chain. The feeble light went on, and I nearly cried out. There, placed on two trunks, staring at me gimlet-eyed and unfriendly and nightmarishly larger than I’d remembered them, were the great blue heron and the badger from my grandfather’s office. I stood, my hand on my pounding chest, staring back for several seconds.

  When I’d calmed down a little, I looked around. There were four or five old trunks shoved back under the eaves and some laundry cases stacked up in a corner. There were the animals, of course, and my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine and her trim but buxom dress form. There were two drunken-looking chairs with broken legs, one a Queen Anne with a dusty needlepoint seat. There were some rolled-up rugs and smaller scattered rolls of what looked like wallpaper. There were various cardboard boxes of stuff, one labeled, for instance, FRAGILE: ORNAMENTS.

  So this was where it had all gone: what the Duchess hadn’t sold, what didn’t fit in the new decor. I felt a kind of warm, growing pleasure of possession, of appetite. It was all still here, then—my past, my mother’s past, my grandparents’ life.

  When I’d shut the door behind me and gone back to bed, I lay there daydreaming of the treasure for a while before I fell asleep again.

  A few days later, recovered except for a periodic sag of fatigue, I carried the heron and the badger out to the hall. In daylight they looked particularly pathetic, like very old, very sick animals, but I wanted them downstairs somewhere anyway, reminding me of how things had been.

  The trunks, I discovered, were all locked—against the tenants, perhaps, or thieves. I explored the house for likely keys. There were none, only extra house keys and skeleton keys for the inner doors. In the end I took a screwdriver upstairs and used it to pop the locks, feeling a vandal’s recklessness as I heard the mechanisms yield within.

  The first trunk held woolens. An old suit of my grandfather’s, sweaters, a few thick blankets I remembered from childhood—late in the summer, as the nights began to grow cold, they’d emerge, smelling of camphor. As they did now, the heavy fabrics, when I lifted them out. In the very bottom was one of those fox stoles elegant women like my grandmother wore in the forties and fifties, the fox’s head still attached, the lower jaw fixed with springs. To keep the stole in place, you arranged it so the fox, who in this case was slightly cross-eyed, bit his own tail. “It’s not enough that he’s dead,” my grandfather used to say. “He’s got to look idiotic for all eternity too.”

  “Mere commentary,” my grandmother would say. She said this to him often, and it always made him laugh in response.

  I put the woolens back and turned to the next trunk. It was full of papers, mostly bank statements, check registers, tax forms, and bills, all arranged in labeled folders: HOUSEHOLD, AUTOMOBILE, HOBBIES, CHILDREN, WEDDINGS. I set these last two files aside to look at more carefully later.

  Another trunk held linens: pressed napkins and pillowcases and runners and tablecloths, delicately browned over time. The remaining trunks and the laundry cases contained more linens, some legal documents, bundles of letters from their children and grandchildren, neatly sorted—I recognized my own handwriting in one stack, my mother’s in another. Here was a dissecting kit; a tarnished clarinet, carefully taken apart and laid in its case; a tackle box, the flies arranged in rows, like colorful botanical specimens. The Christmas ornaments, as promised, old-fashioned and simple.

  The last trunk held elaborate old undergarments and nightgowns that must have been my grandmother’s as a young woman. I lifted up a chemise, a long full petticoat with a crocheted hem. It occurred to me that these were just the kinds of things that Fiona would wear, not as undergarments but as clothing. And she was coming to visit Columbus Day weekend. I put them back. We could go through them together then.

  I was tired by now. I took some of the packets of letters with me—mine among them, of course. It wasn’t until Fiona’s visit a month later that I ventured into the attic again.

  She came up on the train from New York on Friday. I drove to Rutland to pick her up. I hadn’t been on a train in years, and just being in the station made me nostalgic. Fiona herself was wildly excited by the trip, chattering away practically as she stepped onto the platform about how awesome it had been, the view into all those towns and places you’d never see otherwise. “But I mean their backsides, Mom,” she said.

  I hadn’t seen her since early in the summer, when she’d been home for a few weeks before she started a job back east. She’d gotten thinner, and her hair had grown out quite a bit from the virtual crew cut she’d had the year before. She looked lovely to me. She was small and sprightly and had her father’s delicate skin and features. She wore a big sheepskin coat that flapped open over the shortest possible skirt, black tights, and big boots. She carried a backpack that she heaved into the rear of the car before she got in.

  When she’d fastened her safety belt, she turned sideways to look at me behind the wheel and said, “Tell all, s’il vous plaît.”

  I laughed; this was so typical of her. She was my last child and by far the most outgoing, the sunniest. Life, she clearly felt, had been arranged for her pleasure. She was open and curious and interested in everyone. As a little girl, she used to drag home the most unlikely playmates; in high school, her friends included the nerds as well as the popular kids. “Fiona casts a wide net,” we used to say after meeting yet another of her adoptees.

  “No, you tell me,” I said. And she did. Some of it anyway. By the time we got home I knew about the piercing place she’d gone to for her ears (PAIN OPTIONAL, the sign said), about what you could play on the jukebox at her favorite bar (“Lili Marlene”; “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”), about the boy she’d dated in the summer, the boy she was dating now, and uh—oh, yes!—about her courses.

  We went into the attic the next morning, and as I had hoped, she was wild about the old underthings. Together we pulled out the pieces of white cotton, and as she claimed them—the eyelet camisoles would be lovely tops, the nightgowns with crocheted straps and bodices the most delicate of summer dresses, the hemstitched petticoats long pretty white skirts—as she cried out over them and pulled one or two on over her jeans and sweater, I thought of my grandmother in her youth, the pinned-up heavy hair, the pale smooth skin, the trim small body, putting on this one or that. They would be pretty on Fiona too, even though it was an odd combination—Fiona, with her multiple earrings and geometrically cut hair, her unplucked eyebrows, her wine-red lipstick, wearing the pretty underclothes of another era as summer finery.

  We emptied the top tray in the trunk and lifted it out. We worked our way down through the second level. “More, more. I’m a greedy girl,” Fiona said, reaching for the handles of the second tray and lifting it out.

  We looked in. No more clothing. Just a quilt, old and faded. “Phooey,” she said.

  “But it’s lovely, Fee. Look.” I bent over it. And as I lifted it out, three or four things slid out from its folds back into the trunk, thunking the bottom as they fell.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Fiona said, peering in. “Hey, books!” She reached down and scooped several up. They
were small, leather-bound, in black and dark red. She opened one. I could see the pale ink, the rhythmic cursive writing.

  “God, they’re diaries!” I said. I bent into the trunk for another one. It was a square brown book, a young girl’s diary, clearly; the handwriting inside was childish. I recognized the name on the flyleaf as belonging to one of my grandmother’s aunts. Interspersed with the short entries were faint drawings done in pencil: houses, long vistas, flowers.

  I bent down again and lifted out a set of small thin notebooks, tied together with ribbon. I undid them and opened the top one. It was my great-great-grandmother’s, Sally Parsons, the woman who had come by wagon to rescue Georgia after her mother died and rode away empty-handed. The ink in these had faded to pale brown, and some of the pages were breaking apart at the edges. The diaries ran for seven years, 1869–1876.

  “Oh, I get it!” Fiona said abruptly. “It’s weather!”

  “What?” I asked. I looked over at her. She had been reading through the book she had picked out first. She was sitting on a trunk under the weak light of the single bare bulb, wearing a long white cotton slip over her sweater and jeans and heavy boots.

  She grinned at me. “See, I couldn’t figure it out at first. Every entry says, ‘Lovely day,’ ‘Lovely day,’ and I was thinking, Now here is the cheerful type! and then there’s one that says ‘Cloudy day,’ and another, ‘Gray day.’ ”

  “Whose is that one?” I asked.

  “The diary?” She flipped back to the front. “Georgia Rice. And then she’s added Holbrooke.” She looked up at me. “Gran.”

  She lifted the book and read aloud:

  “January 12. Lovely day. John in the office all day. Maudie Osbourne came over and we went together to call on Laura Kendall. She’s getting better, but hasn’t gone out yet. I knitted in the evening. John read aloud chapters 8 and 9.

  “January 13. Lovely day. It snowed a little this evening, John out most of the day, driving from here to there. A long time with Mrs. Wood, but the baby came fine in the end. Didn’t she yell though, he said. You would too, I told him. I finished a sweater, started on leggings. John read. I’ll be glad to be done with Hardy.”

  Fiona looked up and grinned. “Well, Anaïs Nin she ain’t.”

  She looked down and was about to start again. “Fee,” I said. I couldn’t bear it. She looked at me, startled. She could hear the discomfort in my voice. “Don’t read any more, honey,” I said. “It just means too much to me.”

  “Oh! Well. Of course, Mom. I was just having fun. I wasn’t thinking anything about it.”

  “I know. And I’m sure they are fun. They’ll be fun. But I guess I’d just like to have time to take them in first.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “No. No, of course not. I have my treasure,” she said, scooping up her pile of underclothes, “and you have yours.”

  And while she gathered her hoard together and chatted to me about each piece, I made a little pile of the books and sat with them on my lap, as though it were nothing to me to wait.

  Of course, I read them all. I was a greedy girl too. And then I read them again, and again. It was all I did for several days after Fiona left. And slowly pieces of the puzzles began to fall into place. Not all the pieces, not all the puzzles. But the one story among all the others in the trunk that I wanted to understand, those few years of my grandmother’s life, this shifted and sharpened and pulled into perspective. Some of it. Enough for it to become imaginable to me. Enough for me to begin to make a long narrative of the disparate stories she had told me over the years, and to pull in even some of the stories others had told me. Rue, for instance. Or my grandfather. Or my mother, the few times she had spoken clearly of her past or her parents.

  Later on, when I understood the story more fully, I wondered why my grandmother had held on to her diaries. I would have destroyed them if I’d had such documents. I would never have wanted my children—or their children when they came—to know the way I made the decisions that resulted in their lives, to know the way I thought and felt when I was young.

  But then my diary would have revealed all that, as my grandmother’s, initially anyway, seemed not to. My diary would have been more about the person that went through the days than it was about the days themselves—their weather, their events—as hers seemed to be. And yet tonally I could feel her in that careful record. I could imagine her voice expanding the compressed version I was reading, I could imagine her way of telling the story. What I felt, I think, as I read and reread the diaries, was that I was somehow coming to know her, to understand what her deeper thoughts were under the quotidian of the surface. What I felt was that understanding these slender books would somehow let me piece together too what lay under the later loving surface of my grandparents’ lives together.

  I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mail might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. And sometimes when I’m looking through my sent mail on the computer—to see what I’ve told someone about a date or a time or an event in my life—I’m struck by that sense of a record made. My computer letters from Vermont to my children and friends, for instance, certainly would have worked that way. Especially my notes to Karen. By now, because of some episodes of early contractions, she’d been sent to bed by her doctors for the remainder of her pregnancy—nothing to worry about, she assured me. But I could imagine her boredom, her restlessness, so I wrote to her often, sometimes several times a day, reporting whatever struck me or interested me in what I saw or read or did. As I think about those notes now—what I wrote, what I said—it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother’s diaries did—Anaïs Nin she wasn’t, and I wasn’t either, of course. Who is? Not even Anaïs Nin. Still, on occasion I would actually feel a vague sense of loss as I trashed them. But what would have been the point of keeping them? Who would care, ever, to reconstruct a life from such details? It would have taken someone as obsessed with me as I was with my grandmother to make any deep sense of these notes of mine. And as far as I knew, there was no one so obsessed with me. No one likely to be either. No one with any reason for such an obsession. My children understood my life. There was not that constant division between the surface and the depths of it; and I’d been careful to explain the differences to them when there was.

  I had my reasons for mine with my grandmother. For one thing, she was a woman who’d grown up in another time—another universe, really. Understanding who she was and what she was to me depended on understanding that unfamiliar universe too. And then of course there was the mystery lying between us, the mystery of my mother, of her illness, which I’d spent my life worrying at the meaning of. All this fed my appetite for what could be extracted from the accounts of my grandmother’s seemingly ordinary life.

  I set myself up in my grandfather’s study. I laid everything out neatly in a kind of time line: the diaries, her relatives’ diaries, the letters from my grandmother and from others to her, the files of bills and receipts, the financial records. As my life unfolded in Vermont, as I lived it and wrote about it to friends and to the children (“Karen, dear, it’s a fine day today, just what you might imagine New England in the fall to be”), I was living her life too, it was running steady as a buried stream under mine.

  And my life? I complicated it, of course. I looked for ways to attach myself here, for that was the point, wasn’t it? To see if I could. To see what there was to attach myself to.

  I discovered a few movie theaters within driving distance that showed what my kids used to call “fillums”—anything other than action and violence and spectacle. I bought the village paper. I bought the regional paper. I went up to the bulletin boards at the town hall, at the post office, at Grayson’s, for information. I gave myself assignments. Set myself in motion. I began to attend a read ing group that met weekly at the library. I went to a cider festival, a baked bean dinner. I h
elped serve at a church potluck. Slowly a few people began to greet me by name as I moved about the town. I had Leslie and her husband over for dinner to thank her for her kindness to me while I was sick—she had brought me soup, and flowers too.

  I had coffee several times at a little shop on the green. I spoke one day to my high school boyfriend, Sonny Gill, when I stopped to refuel my car. He was as he’d come to be very quickly after high school—thick, graceless, his face deeply seamed with what looked like worry but probably wasn’t: he seemed singularly cheerful. And very loud, which surely he hadn’t been then. I didn’t remember it anyway. Several of his teeth were gone. He still smoked. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said when I left.

  I got a paying job too, of sorts. I went to the town paper—a weekly—and offered myself as a writer. They didn’t really need anyone, the man at the front desk (the editor, it turned out) said. Except (laughter here) to do sports—the implication being that I wouldn’t qualify as a sports writer. This irritated me, this assumption, so of course I said I’d do it, and we agreed on a trial column: I’d cover a crucial football game the next Saturday for the Barstow Catamounts, to be played away, in a town just the other side of Rutland.

  When I got home, I called Samuel Eliasson to see if he’d go with me.

  Samuel was my tenant, inherited from Rue along with the house, the man I’d forced to move out so I could move in, the man who wanted to buy my grandmother’s house. He was living for the time being in another big rental house on the green, the Gibson house. He was a tall man in his seventies with a head of silver-white hair, and I’d run into him several times by now—the first time when he introduced himself to me at the potluck. Since then, he’d stopped over once to say that if the house presented any problems or complications I couldn’t manage, he’d be glad to try to help. That he knew it rather well by now. I liked him for the flattering, courtly charm that elderly men sometimes offer to women my age. And in this case, I thought that since he’d been a college professor, he might know something about football. I didn’t, really. Jeff had played soccer in high school.