by Sue Miller
He turned around. His eyes blazed. “And you don’t care. You won’t come.”
She was sitting up now. “Seward, how can I come? I have to stay. I have to stay until I’m well. Until my father marries. And probably for a while after that. For Ada’s sake, and Freddie’s.”
He shook his head violently. “You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong, Georgia. You are well, first of all. You’re well. And your father will marry no matter what you do, and Ada and Freddie will like that just fine. It won’t make the slightest difference to anyone whether you’re there or not.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at him. She was waiting, waiting until she could leave.
“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” he asked softly.
For a moment she couldn’t respond. She wasn’t frightened, not at all. But, she realized abruptly, that was because she didn’t truly imagine doing it—going with Seward to Colorado. She’d never imagined doing it. It wasn’t real enough to frighten her. Finally she said, “I suppose I may be, yes.”
“But Georgia, what could be more frightening than staying back? Staying here through another cold, damp winter? Not trying, not grabbing at this chance.” His fists clutched as he said this. “You’ve seen the stories.” Stories he’d shown her, worn newspaper articles he’d saved and folded and refolded: miraculous recoveries, lives begun anew. “It’s a new world, Georgia, and we could be part of it.”
She shook her head slowly. “I need to settle things here first, Seward.”
“Can’t you think of me? Can’t you put me ahead of all that for once?”
The bell calling them in began to ring rhythmically, and it occurred to Georgia that she didn’t believe in any of it, that she never had—not the new world he spoke of, not her going there. Most of all, she realized, she didn’t believe Seward was going to live. He was dying. He was dying and he didn’t know it, and that was part of why she loved him: his brave, insistent ignorance, his refusal to see what was there. It was part of who he was.
But she did see it. This was part of who she was—her hard-hearted seeing. She felt this and felt, too, a kind of self-disgust at her own practicality, her clearheadedness.
She stood up and smoothed her hair. “We have to go back now,” she said. “It’s time.” The bell clanged a few times more and then fell silent.
He didn’t answer.
“Seward,” she said. “I love you. I do love you.” She moved close to him. “You are so very dear to me,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and coughed. Once. She could feel him straining to stay in control of himself. “But you won’t come with me,” he said finally.
“I can’t. I can’t come. Not now. Not right away.”
“Ah! Not right away.” He was mocking her, a bitter smile on his face.
She went to the door and opened it. “I should go.”
“Go then.”
“Seward.”
“I’ll stay. You go.” He laughed. “We’ll try it this way.”
“Seward,” she said.
“Go!” he barked.
She stepped outside and closed the door. As she started out of the little clearing around the shed, she could hear the coughing begin again, long and wrenching, as though it would never end.
Dr. Holbrooke came the next week to visit, his second trip to the san since he’d sent her there. It was late in the afternoon. He was alone in the library when she came down, sitting in front of the west-facing windows with the sun at his back, so she couldn’t see his face as she stepped quickly across the room toward him, as he stood to meet her.
“Oh! I’m so glad it’s you!” she said, extending her hands.
“Are you now?” he said. “I wonder why.” He took her hands, half shaking one, but holding on to the other too. Up this close his face was clearer; she could see him. He looked absurdly happy, and younger than she’d seen him look before.
“Because I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” she answered. “Let’s go outside, though. It’s so dim and dreary in here, don’t you think?” She opened one of the long French doors to the terrace. “Here”—she gestured to the chairs set out in rows, as though the terrace were the deck on a mighty ship and the rolling meadow below a deep green sea—“come, cure with me,” she said.
He laughed and sat down. There were four or five other pairs of people clustered here and there on the cure chairs, idly talking. It was the long free period before dinner, after rest. Seward was in the infirmary again, as he’d been once before this summer.
As Holbrooke swung his legs up onto the chair, he said, “Ahh, I feel better already.”
Georgia sat down sideways on the leg rest of the chair next to him. She leaned forward toward him, resting her elbows on her knees.
“Now,” he said. “What is it you wanted to talk about with your doctor? He’s listening.”
Georgia looked at him a long moment. For some reason she thought abruptly of Seward’s bluish flesh, the bones seeming to jab at him from within.
“Colorado,” she said, freighting the word with the dreams they’d spun about it.
“Colorado?” He frowned. “What about it?”
“Just: what do you think of it? For TB, I mean. As a solution. A cure.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Well, I’m wondering. I’ve read such extraordinary things about people recovering there. Beginning all over.”
“And you’re thinking of it for yourself.”
“Well, yes. I am. Wondering about it, anyway.”
He shook his head. “Speaking as a physician, I can’t see there’d be any benefit for a patient like you.”
“But how about …? Well. I’ve a friend. A friend here who’s quite sick. Much sicker than I am.”
“I see. All right.” He put his hands together, fingers touching, at his chin. “I think at this point that what we can say is that it’s little more than a romantic notion.”
“But what about the cures you read of?”
He shook his head. “No doubt some patients have gotten better. But that would have happened elsewhere too, in all likelihood. And some have died. And that too would have happened elsewhere.” He turned his hands and held them up to her, flat, equal.
“But the sans there, they must be as good, anyway, as those here.”
“Oh, I imagine so.”
“And so, being there would increase a person’s chances of getting well.”
“Not over being here, no.”
Georgia frowned. “But these do increase our chances, don’t they? Being here? Isn’t that why I am here, after all? At your suggestion.”
“They do. Indeed they do. But not for all. You see, what we know how to do with TB is to temporize with the bug. We give the body its own chance to fight it off, to encapsulate it. Eventually there will be a cure, I’ve no doubt of that. But in the meantime, we can only keep those alive whose bodies want to help them to stay alive. And some bodies are less cooperative than others. Some bodies fight less well, even when they’re given all the help a place like this can give. And for those bodies in particular, I wouldn’t suggest the rigors of a long trip out west and then all the effort of setting oneself up out there.”
“But why has it such a reputation then? Why do people go?”
“I don’t think they do as they once did. Oh, before we understood the disease as we do now, it seemed to make sense. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would no doubt have answered you quite differently, and that’s when most patients were making that pilgrimage.”
“And some, curing.”
“To be sure. But some not. And even then I imagine the trip itself killed some.” He shook his head again. “No, I wouldn’t recommend it. And if I were you, I’d advise your friend that she should stay right here.”
“He,” Georgia said. Her eyes were steady on Holbrooke now.
He looked startled. “He?”
“That he should stay right here. My friend is a gentleman. A patient h
ere.”
“Ah!” he said. “I see.” He looked away. “Well, it’s very good of you to be so concerned for him.”
Georgia could feel herself blushing. “He’s very ill.”
Holbrooke stared at the distant line of dark spruces for a while. Then he swung his own legs down and sat up. He was facing Georgia now—their knees almost touching—but still he didn’t look directly at her. After a long moment, he said, more or less to the terrace, “You seem quite well, yourself.”
“No different than I’ve been for a while.”
Now he did look at her. “Perhaps you should be beginning to think of going home.” He said this questioningly but brightly, as though he expected her to seize on it, as though it were a gift he had to offer her.
“Oh, surely not yet!” she cried. Her eyes met his, and he was startled to see that she looked frightened, even appalled, as though this were the thing she wanted least in the world.
In the end, the two things happened within several days of each other, Seward’s departure for Colorado and Georgia’s return home.
The sisters, it turned out, had saved the money for Seward long since but first wanted to try a surgical procedure, artificial pneumothorax, the deflating of the lung in order to rest it. If it worked, and it had worked for some, there would be no need for Colorado, perhaps no more need for Bryce. Since Dr. Rollins didn’t perform this surgery—or any others, for that matter—they had been putting Seward off while it was arranged for a doctor from Boston to come and work on him. Once Dr. Rollins had set this up and it was announced, several other patients signed up for the procedure too, to take advantage of the doctor’s visit.
There was a hum and buzz in the sanatorium as the great day approached; some stories passed around about miraculous recoveries, others about fatal perforations. There were those who were skeptical of the whole thing, those who were jealous, those who were greedy and impatient.
Seward’s surgery was unsuccessful. He described it to Georgia afterward, the doctor loud and jolly at the start, a fat man, Seward said, with a wide, carefully groomed mustache and strangely small and delicate hands. After the first attempt he’d fallen silent, except to murmur, “Difficult, difficult.” Twice more he tried. It was a wide needle, Seward said. “It’s like having a nail ever so tenderly inserted in your side.” The doctor could find no soft tissue, no unscarred area. “He’s the first medicine man who’s ever said ‘I’m sorry’ to me,” Seward said. “I was so struck by that I actually thanked him for it.”
They were sitting in almost the same spot Georgia had sat in a few weeks earlier with Holbrooke. Seward had been released from the infirmary, but he was weak still, tired. He hadn’t suggested a walk, their euphemism for finding a place to lie together—the shed or the soft bed of needles in the woods. Once or twice as they were speaking he had drowsed and waked, without seeming to notice his own absence, and this frightened Georgia. She was holding his hand, she didn’t care who saw.
She hadn’t told him anything of Holbrooke’s visit, of what he’d said about Colorado or the risks of the trip out; or of her last examination with Dr. Rollins, when he’d pronounced her as well as she could be; and the subsequent telegram from the san to her father to ask him to come to fetch her. She had heard from him two days earlier: he would come for her a week hence. None of this had she mentioned to Seward.
She’d stayed silent because she thought Seward should go to Colorado. She thought so in spite of the risk. Because he wanted it so badly, because it gave him hope, and she saw, with Seward, that it was hope—and rage and defiance—that kept him alive. What else could be, with lungs so destroyed by lesions that there was no room for a needle to slide in?
In some odd way, too, unconnected with what she knew was real, she still entertained the belief that she would join him. She believed at one and the same time that he would die and she would lose him and that he would recover and she would go to live with him. She was adept at this, living at once in the worlds of hope and despair, of life and death, because of her mother. Her mother, who had spoken only weeks before she died of taking Georgia to Bangor to buy her new slippers. The old ones, she said one day when she was particularly alert, were a disgrace. They made Georgia look like a slattern.
And Georgia had held on to that until almost the end. Of course her mother wouldn’t die. Her slatternly slippers had not yet been replaced.
Now, with Seward, she was more conscious of the impossibility of her position but no less capable of holding to it, believing in it. He had never seemed so beautiful as now to her either, the hawkish nose so sharply defined, the dark single brow, the pale deep eyes, deeper now than before. His wide, full mouth was the only flesh left to him, it seemed.
He smiled sleepily at her. “When will you come, do you think?”
“After the wedding,” she said.
“Riddles,” he said. “And when will the wedding be?”
“After I’m home. Maybe late summer.”
“Late summer in Colorado,” he said dreamily. “I wonder what that will be like.”
“It will be wonderful,” she said.
His eyes closed. His breathing scraped, and then a cough chuckled lightly out of him. His hands felt hot and dry in hers.
His sisters came for him the next day, a surprise they thought would delight him. He tried to find Georgia to say goodbye, but she was having her bath, along with the others on her porch, a prolonged and even festive social event.
When she was dressed again, smelling strongly of the brown carbolic soap, she went downstairs and outside. She was standing on the terrace when Mr. Cooper saw her and rose laboriously from his chair, trailing his cotton blanket. “Oh, my dear, did Seward Wallace find you?”
“Just now?”
“Within the hour. He was looking all over for you.”
“No. I haven’t seen him.”
“Ah. Well. He’s gone now. He left, with his sisters. I’m sure what he wanted was to say goodbye.”
“He’s left?” She looked at him in disbelief.
He nodded eagerly. “Yes, they took him away.”
“But I didn’t know of it! I never heard anything of it at all!”
“No, I think he didn’t either. They descended and spirited him away, as it were.”
“But, he’s not gone. Gone—to Colorado?” She heard the word suddenly in all its lonely ringing.
“Oh, I couldn’t say that. If that was the plan, perhaps he is. But I don’t know.” He could barely contain his excitement. His lips quivered.
Georgia stood dumbstruck, looking past him. Her hand had risen to her opened mouth.
Mr. Cooper leaned forward and spoke more intimately. “I’m sorry, my dear, to have been the one to tell you.” A lie. He would delight in repeating what he’d said, what she’d said in response to him, over and over in the next week.
“Perhaps he left a note. He must have,” she said, already turning.
“Perhaps,” he said vaguely, and watched her moving quickly away, into the library, the dark center of the san, a ghostly figure in her white summer clothes. “She looked positively spectral,” he would say later in each of the many accounts he gave of it.
Seward had written her a short note, all he had time for; and when Georgia’s father came to pick her up it was folded and tied with his other notes to her under her clothes in one of the laundry cases she had packed things in. The handwriting, rushed, wasn’t as shapely as the writing in his other letters. Even so, by our standards, it was calligraphic.
Georgia—This note will have to do for goodbye for now. I will be waiting for you, thinking of you, every day, hoping that the wedding is arranged quickly and over soon and that you are on your way to me.
Your devoted,
Seward
She kept these things in her underwear drawer at home, where she felt they were safe. But Ada, wounded by the changes in her sister in the weeks after Georgia’s return—by her new reserve, her snobbery, as Ada saw it�
�opened the packet one day and read through them all as a kind of revenge. Then she told a few of her own friends what she guessed of Georgia’s secret life at the san. Since none of them was close to Georgia, though, it hardly mattered except as abstract scandal; it didn’t have the right shocking deeper meaning.
No, it wasn’t until years later that Ada finally found the perfect listener: Rue, my aunt, Georgia’s daughter. Rue, the Duchess, who was angry at her mother for a long list of offenses anyway, and who seized on the news of these letters as gratifying evidence of her mother’s betrayal of her father, of her perfidious coldheartedness.
How strange it was to be back at home! To be sleeping in the double bed with Ada under the light blankets that smelled of sachet, not carbolic soap. To feel another body so close and have it not be Seward’s, have it not mean what it had meant so recently. Ada wanted to snuggle—she was happy to have Georgia home—but Georgia was almost shocked by her sister’s touch, shocked and somehow embarrassed. After a few minutes, when Georgia lay rigid in her embrace, Ada turned away, hurt.
Strange too to wake to a day without routines: no milk, no regulated meals, no bed checks or appointments or thermometers or nurses or rules. She dressed late, the first morning, and ate breakfast after ten o’clock. She and Freddie played three long games of Parcheesi. When he was hungry, she fixed him lunch. Ada came home about then and made herself a sandwich too, and then Georgia went upstairs to take a nap. She had been told she must do this daily, indefinitely, and get plenty of sleep at night to keep her strength up. It was important not to get worn down again.
When she woke in the hot, musty room, she didn’t know where she was for a moment. From outside she could hear children’s distant voices and the start-and-stop whir of someone mowing a lawn nearby. She licked her lips and lay there awhile, looking carefully around at the objects in the room. Ada had rearranged things a little, put her collection of dolls, for instance, on top of the dresser they shared. A small thing, among other small things, but looking at them Georgia felt displaced. She felt displaced generally, she realized. It all seemed to have gone so smoothly without her. Much of that was due, she knew, to Mrs. Beston, who’d come four or five days a week in her absence. But Georgia had noticed too how Ada took charge easily now, commanded both Freddie and her father in a way Georgia herself had never dared to do. She had even carelessly directed Georgia in the setting of the table last night. It wasn’t that she minded, Georgia told herself, so much as that she felt superfluous. And though Ada would undoubtedly gradually step back and let Georgia resume some of her authority, she knew this would scarcely matter. Within a month or so her father would have married and she would owe it to Mrs. Erskine to keep herself superfluous.
