The World Below (5 page)

The truth was, I hadn’t liked Rue. For years when I thought of her, I pictured her alone in her apartment on the Right Bank, looking censoriously out her window at anyone passing, anyone who might be making some kind of social mistake, as she saw it. At some point, I realized where this image had come from: a photograph I’d seen of the Duchess of Windsor, her face seamed in bitterness, peering out from
her
window in Paris in her old age and widowhood. After I made this connection, my brother and I started calling Rue “the Duchess.” One or the other of us would have had a note to report from the Duchess, or a Christmas card, or, unexpectedly and often unaccompanied by any explanation, the gift of some piece of family history: a bunch of photographs, a stack of six mono-grammed coin-silver spoons tied with a ribbon. By the time of her death, she had faded in my mind to the slight pinch of dislike I felt when I heard her name—or nickname.

I went back to the front hall and up the complaining stairs. There had originally been three bedrooms under the sloping roof in this, the oldest part of the house, but one had long since been turned into a large bathroom. Its door was open, and within it you could see another door, which gave onto the two attic bedrooms in the extension beyond. These small rooms had been mine and Lawrence’s when we visited and then came to live. There was another, steeper stairway that descended from between them into the kitchen. Lawrence and I used to leave its door open at night: our rooms were unheated, and what we said was that we wanted the benefit of the rising warmth. But I think too that we were comforted by the nighttime sounds of my grandparents moving around, talking intermittently and peaceably below us.

The same revising touch at work downstairs was evident up here. The wide floorboards, brown then, had been painted a light blue-green. And I could see that our dark old nightstands were now a pretty gray.

A faint scorched odor was spreading in the house from the heating ducts. I opened a few windows to air things out and then I went
back downstairs, back outside, and started to unload the car: groceries, booze, and the single suitcase I’d brought with me—I’d mailed myself several other boxes of clothes and books and things I thought I might want, so that I wouldn’t have to lug them around. The air was even chillier now, and somewhere in the distance a dog was relentlessly barking.

While I put things away in the kitchen, I started a small pot of coffee in an electric percolator I’d found set out on the counter. When it was done, I sat down at the dining room table with my cup. The coffee was terrible—it made me wonder how long the can had been sitting around—but I managed a few sips as I watched the light through the pinkish maple outside the window. It had been years since I’d seen trees this color. I was struck with a kind of grief, looking out the window—as though, even though I was here now, looking at it, this world was already lost to me.

Ridiculous, I thought. I got up and took my cup to the kitchen sink. I dumped it out and went back to the front hall, where I’d left my suitcase. I lugged it up the steep stairs and began to unpack slowly in the room that had been my grandmother’s when I was young, putting my things away in her old bureau. The drawers were lined with paper that might even have dated from her day; it was browned and crumbling with age at the edges.

I nearly jumped when the knocker on the front door sounded. On my way down the stairs, it was struck again, four times, loudly.

I opened the door.

An old woman stood on the granite block step outside. She was tiny and slightly curved over, so that she had to look up and a little bit sideways to see me. It made her seem sly, and I had a quick odd moment of what felt almost like a child’s fear of her. She introduced herself—Mrs. Chick—and only then did I recognize her. Of course.
Mrs. Chick, Chick, Chick
, we’d called her as children, imitating the way you call hens in. She lived two doors down.

Mary
Chick, she told me now when I tried to call her
Mrs
. She’d brought over sticky buns for my breakfast tomorrow; she’d made a
double batch and didn’t need them all, she said. She handed me the heavy packet in aluminum foil.

I thanked her profusely. I offered her coffee. She said she didn’t mind. I hung her coat up and led her back to the kitchen. I took down a cup for her and filled it and then refilled my own—though I didn’t really want any more—nattering on pointlessly all the while about this and that: my trip, the ease of the drive up, the way things in town looked exactly the same.

“Well, I suppose they might, to
you
,” she said.

We carried our coffee to the back parlor, and I turned on a few lamps, still making nervous chatter, the more nervous now because of her silence, because of her eyes moving shrewdly over everything.

In the faint
whoosh
of air that rose when I sat down, I smelled sex again, and I wondered if Mrs. Chick had noticed that as I walked in front of her. Whether she would even recognize it if she had. As she set her cup down after the first sip or two of coffee, she said, “Changed a bit, idn’t it?” and nodded, a quick flip up of her chin.

“The house?”

She nodded again.

“So
much,” I said. “I know it’s lovely, but I can’t get used to it.”

“Your grandmother would spin in her grave to see it.”

We both surveyed the room. In the warm lamplight everything looked fresh and welcoming. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’d like it.”

Her mouth pulled straight, as though insulted. “Oh, no, not her,” she insisted. “ ‘Where’s my …?’ ”—she looked around—“ ‘Where’s my rocker? Where’s my old sofa? Where’s my down puff?’ Oh, she had to have her old things.”

I looked at her, smiling so gassily at me. My grandmother had never liked her; I remembered that now. It was a comforting notion somehow. “Do you have any idea what happened to all that stuff?” I asked.

She sniffed. “Your aunt took some, I know that. Silver and the like.”

“Oh. Well, we got some of that too, actually. Lawrence and I.”

“Hm!” she said.

“Do you think she sold the rest? What’s not here?”

“She did, some. They had an auction, I’m told. It was over to Rutland, and I didn’t go, but some did. She only sold what was worth real money, I think. Some more silverware. Some rugs, they say. You know, those old Oriental ones she had. And some rag ones too, apparently. Those are worth something now. We used to think they were just a good way to use up our old clothes.” She smiled grimly, and I smiled back.

There was a little silence. She shifted, and her chair protested. “You going to stay on, you think?” she asked at last, with the little glance sideways and up. Her ears were slightly outsize and pointed at the tops, I saw. Maybe she
was
an elf. A gnome.

I shrugged. “I just don’t know,” I said. “It would depend on so much.”

“I suppose your family might not like it,” she said in a leading tone

“Well, there’s not much family left at home to consult.” I set my coffee down. I just couldn’t drink it. “None, really.”

“Well, but I imagine your husband might have an opinion or two.”

Ah, here it was. The gossip had reached even this far corner of the country, apparently. All right then. “As it happens, my husband and I are divorced.” I tried another smile at her. “So even if he did, it’s not an opinion, or even two opinions, that I’d have to listen to anymore.”

“Hah!” she said, it seemed, for a moment, appreciatively. She stopped to lift her cup and have another swallow of coffee before she said, musingly, her eyes gone distant and flat, “Now, if I recollect, you divorced the first one too?”

“Why, what a good memory you have!” I tried to keep my voice innocently enthusiastic.

“Some years back,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“There were children there, I recollect.”

“Yes. Three.”

She turned her head. “None from this one, I imagine.”

“Three seemed enough to me,” I said. “Sometimes it seemed like too much.” I was trying to change the tone, trying to include her in a kind of tired-parent joke.

She didn’t bite. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s the way you do it now.” Her mouth made a tiny bundle of righteousness. “I’ve been married for sixty-two years come February. Only one way to do
that
.”

“Amazing,” I said. I stood up. “You know, I’m awfully sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’ve got to keep at it, or I’m never going to get unpacked.”

When she’d left, I went directly to the kitchen and threw away the heavy packet of sticky buns. I wouldn’t have eaten them anyway—all sugar and butter, not what a middle-aged woman still afflicted with vanity needs—but it gave me pleasure to close the lid of the trash can over them. I took the back stairs to the second floor two at a time. Wild with irritation, I went into the bathroom and washed my face. As I scrubbed, I was thinking of Mrs. Chick’s sly sideways look.

Abruptly I recalled that my grandmother had always made funny stories of her visits, her
descents
. She’d amused us all with her retelling of Mrs. Chick’s self-satisfied judgments. “ ‘
They say
,’ ” she would imitate. “Who? Who says, Mrs. Chickadee? Who besides you?”
That
was the tone I needed to take, the attitude I needed to strive for.

But it seemed such an effort. And suddenly I thought I’d made a mistake, coming here. This world was too small, too insular, too full of judgment and history for me to fit into it in any way. Hadn’t I been in flight from it when I chose to go to college in California?
Hadn’t I deliberately stayed on to live at the other end of the country, in a place where people were allowed to reinvent themselves, over and over if they wanted?

Of course, I hadn’t thought of it this way at the time. At the time I stayed because I’d fallen in love with Peter, my first husband. Because I’d entered his seductive world completely. Because when I came back to visit my grandparents, it felt like time-traveling to me, and I wanted to live in the
now
, the now of Peter’s life, with him. He was a political scientist. He’d been my instructor my junior year, and I felt singled out by him,
chosen
, recognized in some deep and important way, when he asked me for coffee, when he touched me, when I moved in with him and began to share his life—a life full of his political convictions, of meetings he chaired. Of articles he wrote and interviews he did. Of people turning up suddenly to spend a week or a month on our couch, a week or a month in which it seemed the talking and the drinking and the dope and the music never stopped.

We were married in my world, my old world, back here in West Barstow, in the Congregational church at the top of the green with the sun streaming through the clear glass windows and all the early-summer flowers in the churchyard glowing like jewels in its clean light.

My father and I had come east a week ahead of time to help organize things and to have a visit with my grandparents before I began my new life in the West. I had looked forward to this time when I was still in California, but once here, installed in my room above the kitchen, I was almost crazed with impatience, with my appetite and need for Peter, with my eagerness to be gone. When he arrived, two days before the wedding, I picked him up at the station in my grandfather’s car. We stopped in the parking lot of the wildlife management area—many jokes about this—and made love frantically for hours, climbing and draping ourselves this way and that over the seats. When we got to my grandparents’, late for dinner, we were so clearly postcoital—our hair in disarray, my lips
swollen, my face chafed; I’m sure we even smelled yeasty and sexual—that no one bothered to ask what had happened to delay us.

After the ceremony, we took the train to New York, where Peter had academic meetings to attend. As we rolled and ticked along, he stared out the window at the hilly rockstrewn fields, at the old villages we were passing through. At one point he said, “You must feel sometimes as though you came from another country, Cath.”

“No, not really,” I answered.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not the same country I came from.”

I finished putting away my few things, and then I stood in the upstairs hallway, looking from room to room. I went back through the bathroom to the rooms that had been mine and Lawrence’s. There was one window in each space, in the dormer. The light leaking in now in what had been my room was dim and melancholic—a soft gray rectangle.

I thought of my life in San Francisco, the bright light falling into the kitchen there late of a fall afternoon, the cheerful loud noises of my Hispanic neighbors performing their eternal car repairs in their driveway. I thought of Joe, of the way he used to call out from the front door when he arrived home in our happier days, of his habit then of bringing me small gifts several times a week—four cookies in a white box with a bow from a bakery he liked on Green Street, or a pair of antique earrings, or a book I’d expressed interest in, or a little brown paper bag of some spice neither of us had ever heard of from the Syrian market. I thought of the children. Of Karen, so happy, but so unrealistic, as I saw it, about how she’d manage everything once the baby came. Of Jeff, who’d written from Ecuador of standing on the equator and jumping from one side to the other. Of Fiona, in college in New York and in love with the city. All this life. All this past. Mine.

None of it had any connection that I could feel to the hungry, lonely girl who had come to live in this room.

Three