Eleven
I suppose the truth was that I was sent away. Perhaps my father had indicated that he couldn’t take me for as long that summer as he had the summer before. Perhaps my grandparents felt they needed a rest, some privacy. But certainly, and naturally, they did want to separate me from Sonny. I had as much as asked them to send me away from that situation.
Sent away was not how I felt, though. I felt liberated. I felt deeply and permanently set free, mostly from myself.
Rue lived in a deep, narrow apartment on the Right Bank. If you leaned carefully out the opened windows at the front you could see the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the Seine. These words, Eiffel Tower, Seine, had the power to stir me profoundly, maybe even more than the reality of the places themselves did.
My bedroom was at the back of the apartment, overlooking the inner courtyard, which had once, perhaps, been elegant but was now always full of parked cars and the noise of the concierge’s television set, turned on all day and into the night to what sounded like game shows: you could hear the emcee’s frantic high-pitched voice, the joyless mechanical hysterics of what must have been a studio audience. I had two windows that opened out over this space, and I spent a lot of time, particularly in the evenings, sitting at them and watching the life unself-consciously being acted out in layers in the apartments across the way.
My aunt—the Duchess, was like an older, more elegant, and certainly more stable version of my mother. By the time I saw Rue each morning, she was, as my grandmother always was, carefully dressed—in Rue’s case, though, wearing Chanel knockoffs and thick ropes of gold and pearls around her neck and wrists. We had breakfast together in the dining room, served by the Moroccan maid, Claude, who alone among us seemed at ease; she wore bedroom slippers and shapeless clothes to work in and sang as she moved around the apartment.
Each morning, over our coffee and bread and fruit, Rue told me what her day was to be and what time she would come back to get me for whatever cultural excursion we were to undertake that afternoon.
My days were orderly too. In the mornings I took care of the three American Pierce children. I had lunch with them and settled them down for their rest. I came home immediately to a French lesson with Mme. Georges. Then I was free until the agreed-upon hour with Rue. Several times a week I went back to the Pierces’ in the evening to baby-sit, but I was paid extra for this and was allowed to refuse if Rue and I had something planned.
I didn’t like Rue, but I admired her. Her escape itself, to France, to Paris, to her apartment. Her way of dressing. Her way of seeing the world. All this seemed exotic and remarkable to me, given the little town in Vermont she’d come from, given that she was my mother’s sister. Of course, it had arrived in her life step by step. She’d been a nurse, and she came to Europe in the Second World War. She’d met her husband in France just after it ended. He was a businessman, from a stuffy bourgeois family, and she gave me to understand that marrying her represented his rebellion, his defiance of them. This seemed unlikely to me at the time, for wasn’t her life, in its way, as stuffy and bourgeois as anything imaginable? She was full of strictures—how to sit, how to eat, how to wear one’s hair, how, differentially, to address the people we encountered daily. Rules, endless rules, most of which I’d never heard of before. She meant to make a difference in my life—she had taken me on, that was clear—and she did. Mostly in the ways she intended, but in other ways too.
She announced her intentions, not to me but, in my presence, to her friends. In French. But over the course of the summer, even though my own speech in French was always laboriously composed in my mind before I uttered it, I came to understand bigger and bigger chunks of her conversations. And so I knew what she thought of my life: “So extremely narrow, you wouldn’t believe it.” She spoke of my mother: “Completely deranged, but also capable of a kind of small controlled daily life.” Of my father, foolish and pathetic, though loyal, one had to give him that. And of my grandparents, trying their best, of course, but at their age, how could one expect them to have the energy necessary for the job? And my grandmother! Well, one noted she’d already raised a child of her own so disturbed she ended by taking her own life. What more need one say, after all?
And where, in all of this, she would ask dramatically, raising her glass, or her cup, or her cigarette, was there the smallest chance for this poor little one (me) to experience life, culture, art, as one was meant to? I was a pathetic creature. Culturally I might as well be completely orphaned.
Once, when one of her friends protested her speaking of me this way within my hearing—and of my parents and family—she said, “Fffft. If you speak at all rapidly, she understands nothing.” It was the first whole sentence that I was aware of taking in without the internal process of translation.
I had been lost in myself before this—a defense, I suppose, against my mother’s illness and death as well as, to some degree, an intensified version of that particular stage of adolescence. Now I began to see myself, my story, through Rue’s eyes. I saw, in fact, that I had a story. But not only that. I saw myself, the embodiment of that story, through French eyes too, I saw myself as I was seen, physically moving around in Paris. Rue gave me this: self-consciousness. Before her, I had been invisibly at the center of my world. But the world grew larger for me now, and I became visible in it. To myself, most of all. Even the Pierce children helped me gain a distance on myself. Nathalie, the oldest, announced to me one day that I was their second favorite sitter. I was not, she said, as funny as Lene, the Danish au pair who took care of them in the winter, but I was sweeter, kinder, and at certain times prettier.
Instantly I understood that I was too somber, not witty enough; and I swore to myself I would change.
This became the meaning to me of my stay in France: I would change. I could change. I would come back a different person, ready for a different life. I traipsed after Rue and took in her comments on architecture, on art, on clothes, on manners and food—things I’d never conceived that you thought about, I’d never understood that there could be good or bad versions of. I watched the way French people sat in restaurants and cafés, the elaborate facial expressions and gestures they made as they spoke or listened. So much energy! So much concern! Just about words, ideas. I studied and copied the way the French girls dressed and moved and talked, the light rhythm of their speech. I had my hair cut like theirs. I lost weight. With the money I earned at the Pierces’, I bought new shoes, new clothes. I felt pretty, glamorous, unfright-ened for the first time in my life. In my room, with the lights out and the windows open, I smoked cigarettes I’d stolen from Rue, tilting my head back glamorously, watching the languor of my arms in the mirror.
But there was another aspect to my stay, another change in perspective being offered me. For Rue had her own vision, too, of my grandparents’ lives together. It emerged, it bubbled up in all her talk about them: a clear disdain for my grandmother, a sense of her as untrustworthy, and a deep, jealous adoring of my grandfather. It was the kind of thing, I think now, that my mother, if she’d been like other mothers, if she’d been able to talk to us normally about her family, might have easily explained. She might have said, “Oh, Rue. She was half in love with Daddy. No wonder she always found fault with Mother.”
To my own credit—and because of my love for my grandmother—I understood some of it that way anyway, though I couldn’t have been so easily dismissive or so amused as this theoretical mother of mine. But I sensed there was something off in Rue’s notion of things. I may have concluded this in part because of the way Rue saw my mother’s illness: as something my grandmother had caused. This was, of course, the way the world understood it then, the educated world in particular. And Rue had had medical training. She knew her Freud—or at least the distortion of Freud that held parents, mothers in particular, accountable for all pathology in their children.
Even at that age, though, I knew that what had happened to my mother had nothing to do with anyone in our family-with anyone else at all. If I had learned one useful lesson from living with a person so disturbed, it was that some illnesses—and to me, palpably, hers—are driven by something internal, something that goes profoundly and horribly awry. My mother, I could have told you, was just different when she was ill. Things were deeply, chemically disturbed in her in a way that even the most misbegotten parenting couldn’t have produced. And I didn’t understand my grandmother’s parenting—even Rue’s version of it—to have been that misbegotten.
The tone, then, I ignored or dismissed. I knew it was wrong. It was one of the many ways I slowly understood Rue to be wrong. (I could hear in French, and I held it against her that she hadn’t guessed that—and that she continued to speak about me long after I could understand almost all of what she was saying.)
It was harder, though, to dismiss the story she told me—that my grandmother had had an affair in the sanatorium—and Rue was the first person who explained anything about the san to me, the notion of being sent away, the sense of another, discrete culture there. That the man had abandoned her and gone somewhere out west. That my grandmother had turned then to her doctor, my grandfather, and won him over (“You’ve seen the pictures of her then, she was a very pretty girl”) by pretending to be what she was not: sweet and naive. An innocent. “It made all the difference in the world in those days,” Rue said. “You know, for a girl of her background to have had any sexual experience at all.… Well, it put her quite beyond the pale.” She inhaled deeply on her cigarette. We were sitting opposite each other in the darkened dining room. Rue rarely smoked when she was alone with me during the day, and of course never on the street, but after dinner she allowed herself two cigarettes—strong, unfiltered French cigarettes that smelled like my grandfather’s cigars.
“And Daddy, of course, knew nothing of it until after the fact.”
“After what fact?” I asked.
“My dear, after they were married.”
“But she wouldn’t trick him! I don’t believe that.”
Rue raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“Besides, he loves her,” I said. “So what does it matter?”
She made a face, a moue.
“Who told you this?” I asked.
“It’s well known in the family,” she said. “Everyone knew it at the time.”
“But who told you?”
“My dear.” She was irritated. “Ada did,” she said, after a moment. “My aunt. Your great-aunt. Her sister.”
“But how did she know?”
“Your grandmother left her journal lying around. And there were letters, letters which came from the man in question even after the wedding. Aunt Ada saw them.”
Rue tossed her head impatiently. “Which do you think is the greater wrong: to deceive a man you are about to marry or to read a journal left lying around?” I didn’t answer. “You are young, my dear. You are offended at the childish slight you can imagine. Later you will be able to imagine the other kind of injury. You will see the far greater wrong in it.”
There was finality, judgment in her voice, as there so often was, and I didn’t ask her any more questions. Whenever I thought of this story, though—and I thought of it often, of course, and puzzled and picked at it—I remembered it in the moment it was told to me. The gathering twilight of Rue’s dining room (though the sky was still yellow above the rooftops out the bank of windows behind her); the wine, of which I was always allowed one glass; the hard crumbs on the table I ran my hand over; the pungent smell of Rue’s cigarette; the sounds of Claude in the kitchen, singing softly in her own language and washing dishes; and the bitter pleasure Rue took in the telling, the way she crushed and crushed and crushed her cigarette until no smoke from it trailed any longer. I thought of how horrible her fingers must smell.
Rue was wrong, it turned out. The diary reads:
December 5: Sunny today, and the snow turned to shining ice on the ground. John called late this afternoon and we sat in the parlor for a little while. I found the courage to tell him I was damaged goods. He said it did not matter to him.
December fifth was a week to the day since my grandfather had asked my grandmother to marry him, since she’d told him that she needed time to think about it. He was traveling by sleigh that afternoon-the back roads were snowed in too deeply for a car—and he’d had several calls to make. One in Newport for a child with a fever and sore throat, one in Corinna for an old patient who’d begun to die, and one in St. Albans to change the dressing on a leg injury, a farm accident that hadn’t healed and, he suspected now, was never going to heal. In spite of the bright sun—almost blinding as it struck the frozen surface of the snow—he was in a dark mood. As he drove through Preston on his way home, he decided on impulse to stop in at the Rices’. He’d been staying away from Georgia for the last week in an honorable attempt to grant her the time she felt she needed to make her decision, but he told himself as he drove up that he would stop just for a few minutes. He’d use the excuse that he couldn’t let the horse cool down to keep himself to his word.
The sight of her opening the door affected him as it always did, with a deep anticipatory pleasure—of what she might say or do, a story she might tell him, some lively gesture she might make that would amuse or delight him. She blushed as she snatched off her apron. She’d been in the kitchen working with her stepmother, she said apologetically. Christmas cookies. He was aware, suddenly, of that familiar buttery, sweet smell. She led him into the parlor, where there was a slow fire going in the fireplace.
There seemed to be something hushed in the air as they sat down together. At first he thought it was just the day, the shocking cold outside and the sense of being closed up in here. But then he realized that wasn’t it—that it was, somehow, in her. She was different. Subdued and a little awkward.
She spoke to him, not quite meeting his eyes. “You know I have nothing to tell you yet.” She had sat down opposite him in a low lady’s chair.
“That’s not why I’m here.”
She tilted her head and looked at him. “Then why are you here?”
“I thought it would lift my spirits to see you. And it has.”
“Your spirits needed lifting then?” Her voice was lighter now. Teasing a little.
“Apparently they did.”
“Well, then, I’m pleased to have been of use.” He could see that she was smiling—in spite of herself, it seemed. As if to hide that, she got up and went to the window, her back to him. When she turned to the room again after a moment, the light was so bright behind her he couldn’t clearly see her face. “What was it that was discouraging you?” she asked.
“As much as anything, not having seen you.”
“If I believed that—” She raised her hand dismissively.
“If you believed that, you would instantly consent to marry me.”
She turned quickly back to the window. “I’ve said I’m not ready to answer that question.”
“I’m sorry, Georgia.” He was watching her back as intently as if it could tell him something about how she felt. “I was making a joke and that was wrong, when you’re still … struggling with your decision.”
“I am. But it’s only because … I’d like everything to be very clear between us if we married.”
“Of course. I would too.”
Her heard her sigh, impatiently. “You answer me so quickly, John. You always do. Sometimes I wonder if you’re really listening to me.”
“I am. I am listening.” He got up and crossed to her, stood just behind her at the window. He could smell her: sachet and the characteristic strong animal odor of her hair. It had been trimmed again recently, he thought. Her neck seemed long and white. “What needs to be clear?”
“Well. First, I would have to learn to love you better.”
He understood that what she was saying was that she didn’t love him now, and for a moment everything stopped for him. But he had known this, hadn’t he? When he had proposed, when he had spoken of his love for her, she had smiled but hadn’t answered in kind. After a few seconds he was able to say, “Do you think that’s possible? That you might?”
Outside, the horse shook its bridle, as if to remind him he couldn’t stay much longer. The jingling was a faint musical sound from in here.
In spite of the pain this caused him—this caution on her part—it also made him smile. Her scrupulous honesty. “Then I will be in hopes too,” he said gently.
“And then, you know”—her voice got smaller, and he had to lean toward her to hear what she was saying—“I’m … I’m damaged goods. That’s all.” She was so close to the window that her breath made a cloud on the glass.
He thought she spoke of her illness, of the shadow on her lungs, and he felt such an absurd lifting of his heart—this was all it was!—that he had to control himself not to laugh or cry out somehow in his pleasure and joy. It was evidently so terribly important to her, understanding how he felt about this, that he dared not make light of it. But he had to reassure her, on the other hand, that it didn’t matter to him. That nothing could have mattered less. “That’s of no importance to me,” he said, a little too loudly. “None at all.”
She didn’t speak for a few moments. What she was wondering was whether he had somehow known already about Seward. Had someone at the san gossiped about her to him? Could it really be he didn’t care? That he could know this about he—he could hear this—and love her anyway? She touched her fingertips to the icy glass, so cold it burned. Finally she said, “You sound so sure of that.”
“I mean to sound sure. I am sure.” He was looking steadily at her face in profile.
She could feel his eyes on her again. She was thinking that his greater experience of the world (when she thought of the world she thought of the war, and death, and also certain photographs she’d seen of Paris) must somehow have given him a sense of life broader and wiser than that of the young men she’d known. That he understood her, that he forgave her. It moved her to think he was a person capable of this.
“So if that’s all, if that’s truly all, I hope you’ll have your answer for me soon,” he was saying, in his gentle voice.
“That is all,” she said. For a long moment she seemed lost in thought. Then she looked at him gravely. She said, “And I will. I will have an answer soon.”
When he left, a few moments later, she followed him silently into the cold front hall, where Mrs. Erskine—Mrs. Rice—hearing them, came out from the kitchen to greet him and say goodbye. Her dog, a large mixed breed, brown and white, followed her possessively, his nails clicking on the wooden floor. When Georgia opened the door, he barked wildly at the sight of the horse, and Mrs. Rice had to hold him by his collar while Holbrooke made his exit.
The next day, Georgia accepted his proposal. Three weeks after Christmas, they were married in the small ceremony she had wanted, with just their immediate families present. They went to Boston on their honeymoon. There was a blizzard the second day they were there, and the city seemed, for the remaining two days they stayed, a little like the small town in Maine they’d left behind. Traffic stopped. Stores and offices were closed, and people spoke to each other cheerfully as they passed on the sidewalks. They walked single file through the deep snow to the public library to look at the new murals there by Sargent, whose work Georgia’s new husband admired. They went to the river and watched the sun set. They had tea every afternoon at the Parker House Hotel. Before bed each night they had a glass of sherry in their room.
When they lay down together, he touched her everywhere, gently and thoroughly, as though the touching itself were the point. He said as much. He told her she had knees that broke his heart. That her ankles utterly mended it. He said they could wait, wait until she felt ready.
But his touching made her ready. Made her eager. She was curious, too—if his touching was so different from Seward’s, would the sex act itself be different? Perhaps there were varieties to that also.
It was different—slow and luxuriant. It helped Georgia that it was always dark when they lay down together. It helped her that in the overheated hotel they wore so little clothing. It helped her that his gentleness left room for her to touch him too, to be the aggressor, even the hurried one. She learned to speak his name on those warm nights.
If he was startled by her appetite, by her curiosity and ease, he said nothing. Certainly he guessed nothing. He felt, simply, lucky. He felt that her responsiveness might be part of what was unusual about her in other ways: her straightforward approach to life, her touching honesty, her eagerness to learn.
They went back to Maine, to a small frame house they’d found to rent just outside Pittsfield, and she seemed taken up with the business of making a home—of sewing curtains and slipcovers, of cooking, of writing thank—you letters for the many presents they’d received.
She had asked him before they married for a piano instead of an engagement ring. He had given her the ring because he wanted to, a small moonstone surrounded by chip diamonds. Once they were settled, though, he bought her also an upright piano. With earnest determination, she began lessons with a teacher he’d found for her, someone recommended by one of his patients.
Their life together started to move in its own rhythms. On the weekends, they usually went to visit her family, or her father and stepmother came to them. Often they had Ada, or Ada and Freddie, for the day or overnight. They began to have invitations as a couple: for bridge, for teas. One of Georgia’s high school friends lived in Pittsfield, and she and Georgia visited back and forth. In the spring, after the roads had dried out, John began to teach her to drive.
Once during this period, as he approached the house in the early evening, he heard her playing one of her beginner’s piano pieces, repeating the same simple phrases over and over. It seemed so emblematic to him of her determination, her strength of character, that he stopped in the walk as though suddenly confused about where he was, overwhelmed with love and pity and desire for her.
They had planned a picnic for the third Saturday in July. They would go to the Saco River and spread a blanket along its banks. He was going to take fishing gear with him—this was the ostensible reason for the trip—but what he really looked forward to was driving up with Georgia beside him in the car. Was spreading the blanket between them, and watching her unpack their lunch. He imagined the way she would set the dishes out, her wrists turning, her hands opening. The way her arms would move, quick and graceful. He loved her! He loved her more now than he had when they married. Their sex was like an unspoken secret between them, a deep pleasure running underneath everything else that he wouldn’t have dared to hope for. He felt its promise in her every rushing, impatient step in the house, in the tilt of her head when she greeted him, in each gesture she made.
The house was silent when he entered it, which surprised him. She was not in the kitchen or the living room. The bedroom door was closed.
Was she sleeping? Was she ill? He knocked gently.
“Yes,” she said.
“Georgia?”
“Yes. Come in.”
She was sitting in the chair by the bed. Perhaps she’d been looking out the window, watching his approach. But her face, he saw as she turned to him now, was reddened, her eyes swollen.
“What is it?” he said. Her father, he was thinking. “My darling, what’s wrong?”
“Oh … don’t,” she said. She’d raised a hand to stop him. “John, it’s … I’m so sorry. It’s just my own—”
“Your father’s all right.”
A sad, startled little laugh emerged from her. “Yes,” she said, and shook her head no. “Yes, everyone at home is fine. It’s just—acch!” She gestured vaguely. “Ada and Daddy stopped by. She had a letter that had come for me.” He saw it then where her hand had suggested, the torn—open envelope lying on the blue coverlet.
“It’s about my friend,” she said. And, when he didn’t respond, “The young man from the san. His death. It’s … it’s upset me.”
“I’m so sorry, my darling.”
“Oh, John, I’m sorry. I’m sorry too.”
He was kneeling by her now, holding her, but she was inert in his arms, unresponsive, and after a moment he let her go, confused. He sat back on his heels. He asked, “Which young man was this?”
“The young man I spoke to you about. You know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember this. When did you speak to me about him?”
“John, you must remember.” She frowned down at him. Seated in the chair, she was taller than he was.
“I don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“When I spoke to you … before we were married. I told you. I told you, of my relations with him.” He seemed puzzled still. She looked down at her hands in her lap. “When I told you I wasn’t … a virgin.”
He turned sharply away, as though she’d struck him. The word shocked him on her lips. It seemed crude. He got up, almost stumbling. He was stunned, and then also trying to recollect the moment she was speaking of.
He did, he did remember it-how she had looked in profile, her lips opened, and the fleeting mist of her breath on the clear glass. He remembered the smell of her hair, the bright sun, a sheen on the snow outside, and the horse tossing its head impatiently.
Damaged, she had said.
No: damaged goods. Yes. The jargon of gossips, the ugly phrase that would be used of her, his wife, by others. Yes. Damaged goods. She had said that.
And he had heard it the way he wished to. He had thought—because he was a fool, because he was besotted—he had thought she meant her lungs.
Her lungs, which had probably healed themselves before she even entered the san. Before she met her lover. Her paramour. The man who had fucked her before he did. Who damaged her. Whom he had heard of before and understood nothing about.
She was speaking now. “You were so extremely generous and forgiving then. I hope … you can be now, too. For a moment, anyway. Because my grief—my sorrow—is temporary, I assure you.” Her voice was apologetic now, formal and apologetic. She thought he was hurt. Hurt by her sorrow for someone else. “It will pass, I know.”
He stood with his back to her, his elbows resting on the top of the tall bureau, his hands fisted together at his mouth. Around him on the dresser scarf were the odd things he’d left there: coins, a stack of folded handkerchiefs he hadn’t put away yet, pressed into neat squares by Georgia, his silver-backed brushes, a set that had been his father’s. He didn’t see them.
“John,” she said. “It has nothing to do with you and me.”
“I’m afraid it does.” His voice was priggish and chilly; he couldn’t help himself.
“No, John. I swear to you, it doesn’t.” There was a little fear in her voice now. She was startled by his response. She had thought he would be more understanding. He, who by her lights had understood so much.
She stood up. “I will put it behind me, John. Of course, you’re right. You’re right. I have no right to such grief.”
Still he didn’t answer, lost as he was in his own amazement and pain.
“We’ll … we’ll go on our picnic, John.” She had come to stand next to him. Her hand moved up his back tentatively and lightly gripped his shoulder. “John, look at me. I’ve put it behind me. I’ve forgotten it already.”
He shrugged her away. “Don’t say that. You don’t need to say that.”
She stood there a moment before she said, “But what am I to do, John? You’re angry, I can tell.”
“If I’m angry …I am angry, you’re right. But only with myself.” She had been honest, after all. She had made no excuses. She had used those ugly words about herself. Damaged goods. It was not her fault he had misunderstood her.
“John,” she began. He could see her hands rising again. To touch him.
“Georgia, you must let me be!” he burst out.
She stepped back from him. She was white. “Of course,” she said. “I only meant—”
“I just need to think this through.” He put his head in his hands for a moment.
“Of course. Only—”
“No. Georgia.” He turned to face her. “You misunderstand me. It’s not you I’m angry with. I’ve been stupid. I’ve … heard only what I wanted to hear. I—I didn’t take in what you were trying to tell me the day you spoke of this young man.”
“But I said—”
“I know what you said. I remember it well. And I misheard it. This is what I’m telling you. I misheard it then. I misunderstood you. I didn’t realize until just now that you had had … a lover, before me. Before we were married.”
She sat down now on the edge of the bed. “But I said so, John,” she whispered. “I was at pains to tell you.”
“Georgia, I know. It was my own wish to … believe something else that kept me from hearing you correctly.”
“But you were so … wonderful. So forgiving. What did you think I was speaking of?”
“Your illness. Your lungs. Your damaged lungs. Which of course are hardly damaged at all.”
“You thought I spoke of my tuberculosis?”
“Yes.”
She laughed suddenly, a single harsh cry. “Yes,” he said.
Her eyes were unfocused for a moment. Then she looked sharply at him again. “So it wasn’t your … you didn’t understand me then. You didn’t forgive me.”
“I don’t know. No. Not then. I didn’t. I need to think this through, Georgia.”
There was a long silence in the room. Outside someone walked by, cheerfully whistling off key. Georgia felt lost in herself, in confusion. She felt dizzy. She remembered him that day, how she had begun to love him at that moment—when he forgave her.
Finally she spoke. “Did you know how lovely I found you then, John?” she said. “How … wise and lovely?”
After a moment, still not looking at her, he said, “I know what you’re saying. You’re saying I wasn’t. That that wasn’t me. And you’re right. I understand that. I am not lovely. I’ve never been wise.”
His face was so full of despair that she turned away from him. For a while she watched her own fingers, opening and closing on the blue bedspread, on its bumps and ridges. Finally she said, “Do you want another chance, John?”
“Another chance?”
“Yes.” She sat up straighten “Another chance to say whether or not you find my being damaged goods of importance to you.”
“You are my wife, Georgia. Whether it’s of importance or not no longer counts for anything.”
She stared at him. “How foolish you sound,” she whispered.
“I feel foolish.”
They remained in miserable silence for perhaps two minutes, looking fiercely away from each other. The breeze lifted the curtain at the window. I wish I could die, Georgia thought. I wish I had died in the san. I wish I had been consumed by TB.
And then she said, “What did you mean, John, that my lungs are scarcely damaged at all?”
He sighed. He was leaning against the wall now, his arms folded over his chest. He said, “Just that you’re well, really.”
“Now.”
“Yes, now. Probably then too.”
“Then. When you sent me into the san.”
“Probably. You probably had tidily encapsulated lesions even before you arrived.”
“But you’re not saying I needn’t have been there?”
“In strictly physical terms, probably not. But you did have the disease. And it seemed, given the strains on you at home, the wisest course. You needed a rest, or you might have gotten truly ill. The san provided it.”
“But that isn’t what you said to me.” Her voice was fraying. “You said I had TB. You said I was truly ill.”
“And so you did. You weren’t truly ill, but you did have TB. You had had it.”
“But I didn’t need to go, really.”
He felt, in his grief and shock, that she was off on a tangent, belaboring an entirely irrelevant point. “This is of no importance now, Georgia. Why harp on it?” He sounded impatient. “You rested at the san, and you gained some strength. It did you no harm, and I suspect it did you a lot of real good.”
“But it changed my life!” she cried.
He thought she was referring to her young man, to her affair. That she was blaming him—him!—for that. He looked at her coldly, and she answered his look.
“You had no right to do that,” she said slowly.
He turned away.
“John. You had no right.”
“I was your doctor, Georgia.” His fists hit the bureau at the word. “I needed to do what was best for you.”
“But surely I should have had some say in the matter.”
“If you had had your say, you would have stayed at home with your father and worked yourself to the bone.”
“Yes! and what’s wrong with that? That was my job.”
“Ah, Georgia.”
“I would have stayed home, and my father wouldn’t have married, and I would never have met Seward or married you, and I would have my life back.” She thought of it now; she yearned for it, the way it had been, her solitary, queer life in her father’s house, the long nights alone reading, just sitting, the melancholic striking of the old clock every quarter hour, the strong sense of herself as at the center of everything.
“And is that what you want? Your old life back?”
She was weeping now. “It is,” she wailed. “It’s what I want!”
She wept, on and off, for nearly two days, sometimes not sure what she was weeping over. Everything. Everything that was lost to her forever. Her home, her family. Seward, and his terrible solitary dying. John, who was not who she’d thought he was. Herself: the person she’d felt herself to be before all this started—this muddle that was her life now.
John stayed away the whole first afternoon, driving around the countryside. When he came home, it was after dark and the bedroom door was shut. He undressed and slept on the divan, under the afghan his mother had crocheted for their wedding present. In the night, he opened his eyes to the strange light, the unfamiliar shapes. What had waked him? Then he heard it: the high animal keening, small and pathetic, from behind the door. He didn’t go to her.
The next morning, when he went in to dress for church, she was huddled under the covers with the pillow thrust over her head. She didn’t move or speak to him the whole time he was in the room, though he didn’t try in any way to muffle his noise.
He sat in the last pew, alone, the red hymnals set out evenly next to him on the unoccupied spots. The service was boring, the sermon vague and useless. He left quickly afterward, barely greeting Dr. Scott. He drove to Empson’s Hotel in Ellsworth, as he had often done before he was married, and had a long slow lunch: pea soup with Parker House rolls, roast chicken and potatoes with giblet gravy and string beans, vanilla ice cream for dessert. He tried to tell himself he was enjoying this, but every now and then he would stop chewing and stare into some middle distance, stunned at his bad luck. His and Georgia’s, he reminded himself—for she had been mistaken in him too, after all.
Afterward he sat in the hotel lobby smoking a cigar and trying to read the paper, some long article about Sacco and Vanzetti. In the late afternoon he drove back to his office for a while and sat thinking, his feet up on his desk. Once or twice, he fell asleep briefly and had miserable and confused dreams. In the last one, he saw Georgia as she’d been as a girl, standing in the meadow in the sun when he went in to her mother—so sturdy and brave and pure—and he woke feeling as empty as if she’d died.
And then he swung his legs down and slammed his fist on his desk in a rage at himself. She was brave and pure. She’d been utterly truthful, scrupulously so. It was he who’d been the liar—about her illness, and then about his own magnanimity. It didn’t matter that it was unintentional. And if she’d lost her virtue in the san, well, who had sent her there? Who had thought he knew what was best for her? Who had behaved as though he were God in His heaven, pushing mere mortals around, rearranging their lives to suit His whim?
Georgia. He thought of how she had looked the day he had examined her here in his office, her shoulders curved forward to hide her breasts, her long strands of hair straying over her back. The way her flesh had felt, dry and hot with fever under his fingertips.
Then he saw her lying with a faceless male figure. He thought of certain ways she had touched him—he had been so grateful, so surprised!—and imagined her doing that to someone else. Made himself imagine it, carefully and thoroughly.
And then hated himself for that. Where was his magnanimity now? his forgiveness?
He loved her. He loved her, did he not? She was exactly who she had always been.
He went home after dark again. Again the bedroom door was shut. He slept in the living room. In the morning, he woke to her noises in the kitchen. He smelled brewed coffee. He got up and carefully shaved and dressed. When he went into the kitchen, he saw that she had set his place for breakfast. She had poured him orange juice and coffee. She was at the stove, her back to him.
“Good morning, John,” she said.
“Good morning,” he answered. He noticed that the purple hollyhocks just outside the window were about to burst into tissuey bloom. A fat bee knocked against the screen. She turned slightly and asked him how he wanted his eggs.
“Scrambled and done to the death,” he said, and saw her faint quick smile.
They didn’t speak of their quarrel again for a long, long time.