The World Below (Random House Large Print) - Hardcover

Miller, Sue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375431314 ISBN 13: 9780375431319

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 2001

Synopsis

1. 1 2. What is the significance of Samuel and Catherine's discussion about the 'central invisible fact' of people's life [p. 137]? What 'invisible fact' underlies the lives of Georgia, of John, and of Catherine herself?

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The World Below

By Sue Miller

Random House Large Print Publishing

Copyright © 2001 Sue Miller
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0375431314

Chapter One

Imagine it: a dry, cool day, the high-piled cumulus clouds moving slowly fromnorthwest to southeast in the sky, their shadows following them across the hayfields yet to be cut for the last time this year. Down a narrow dirt roadbetween the fields, a horse-drawn carriage, two old people wearing their wornSunday clothes seated side by side in it, driving to town for their growndaughter's funeral. Neither of them spoke, though you could see, if you cared tolook, that the old woman's lips were moving ceaselessly, silently repeating thesame few phrases over and over. It was her intention, formed over the long weeksher daughter lay dying, to rescue her grandchildren from their situation, fromtheir motherless house. To take all three of them back to the farm with her. Shewas rehearsing what she'd say, though she wasn't aware of her mouth forming thewords, and her husband didn't notice.

Imagine this too: later in the afternoon of the same long day, the two oldergrandchildren, the girls, laughing together. Laughing cruelly at the old woman,their grandmother, for her misguided idea.

But perhaps it wasn't truly cruel. They were children, after all. As thoughtlessas children usually are. What's more, they'd spent a good part of this strangeday, the day of their mother's burial, laughing. Laughing nervously, perhapswith even a touch of hysteria, mostly because they didn't know what they oughtto feel or think. Laughter was the easiest course. It was their way to ward offall the dark feelings waiting for them.

They'd been up before dawn, long before their father and little brother wereawake, long before their grandparents started in to town, almost giddy with thenumber and variety of their chores. The meal after the church service was to beelaborate?deviled eggs, ham, scalloped potatoes, rolls, three kinds of jelliedsalad, pudding, and butter cookies?and they each had a list of things to doconnected with it. They worked in the kitchen in their nightgowns, barefoot, asthe soft gray light slowly filled the room. When the housekeeper, Mrs. Beston,arrived, she chased them upstairs to get dressed.

They had ironed their own dresses the day before because Mrs. Beston was sobusy. They hung now on hangers from the hook behind their bedroom door, smellingof starch, smelling just slightly still of the heat of the iron?that sweet,scorchy odor. As they pulled them on over their heads and then helped each otherplait their long braids, they were convulsed, again and again, by lurches oflaughter that felt as uncontrollable as sneezing. Sometimes it was wild, almostmean. It fed on itself. Just looking at each other, or at their sleepy littlebrother, Freddie, who'd come in in his nightshirt, his hair poking up strangely,to sit on their bed and watch them, could set it off.

Maybe this explained it then?why, later in the day, when their father told themof their grandmother's notion, they couldn't stop themselves: why they gave wayagain to the same ragged hysteria. They laughed at her. They laughed at her andtheir grandfather's having clopped into town with horse and buggy; their fatherhad had a motorcar forever, it seemed to them (it had been seven years). Theylaughed because she had only eight teeth left in her head and therefore smiledwith her hand lifted to cover her mouth?they could both imitate this awkward,apologetic gesture perfectly. They laughed because she wore a ridiculous strawhat shaped like a soggy pancake, and an old-fashioned dress, the sameold-fashioned dress she wore to all ceremonial events. They laughed because shehad thought their father would so easily give them away.

"They are still children," is what the old woman said to herson-in-law. "They need a childhood." The two of them had gone togetherinto the parlor after they greeted each other, and when she told him it wasprivate, what she had to say to him, he shut the sliding pocket doors. It hadbeen such a long time since anyone had pulled them out that a thick gray stripeof dust evenly furred all their decorative molding.

They sat not really looking at each other, the new widower and the dead woman'smother, and the grandmother forced herself to keep talking, to try to explainher plan to him. She wasn't a good talker, even in the easiest circumstances,and none of this was easy, of course. She hadn't imagined very much beyond herfirst statement ahead of time either. It was really her entire argument.

What's more, her son-in-law had always made her shy. He was a large, almosthandsome man with slicked-down hair, getting burly now as he approachedforty-five. He was a salesman, of vulcanized rubber goods, and his way ofdealing with the world came directly from that life: he wanted to amuse you, tocharm you. When he was courting her daughter?Fanny, her name was?he hadflirted with the grandmother, and this had made her tongue-tied and silentaround him. Once, after she'd served him a blueberry cake he found especiallydelicious, he'd grabbed her and waltzed her around the scrubbed wooden floors ofher farmhouse kitchen. This had so unnerved her?his energy and strength, andher helplessness against them?that she'd burst into shameful tears.

That's what she felt like doing now, weeping, she was making such a mess ofgetting this said. It had seemed so clear to her as she moved through hersolitary days while her daughter was dying and then since. The children neededher. They couldn't be left alone through the week any longer. The girls couldn'tbe asked to be so responsible?taking care of themselves and then their littlebrother too. It was too much. It was simply too much. They needed a home:someone to take care of them. She would offer to bring them to town on Fridaysto be with him for the weekend. Or he could come out and stay with them on thefarm. Oh, they'd be happy to have him!

All this planning had kept the image of her daughter?wasted, curled on herside, rising to consciousness only to cry out in pain?from her mind; thoughshe'd spoken to Fanny often, another version of Fanny, as she'd made herpreparations: as she'd shaken out the extra bedding, as she'd set out the framedpictures of her in the unused rooms she'd made up for the children. "Oh mydear girl," she had whispered. "They will be fine, you'll see. Theyjust need someone to tend to them for a change, that's all, and I am the one todo it."

Her son-in-law waited a moment now, out of kindness and sorrow, before heanswered. Then he cleared his throat and said that he saw things somewhatdifferently. His older daughter was almost sixteen, the younger thirteen?notreally children at all. They were big, good girls. He needed their help, hesaid.

Of course, this was exactly her point. She didn't press it, though. She satsilently and nodded, just once, furious at herself. She was giving up. Thiseasily.

And they were, he continued gently (very gently: he was fond of hismother-in-law, this cadaverously skinny and stern old woman), his children,after all.

She stood up and turned away from him, but not before he saw her mouth pulldown, grim and defeated.

It had taken Fanny several years to die, of cancer, though no one had everspoken the word in the house or in front of the children. And the truth was, asthe grandmother would have admitted if she weren't wild with a grief that turnedin like self-blame, that Fanny had been so unusual a young and then a nearlymiddle-aged woman that the girls had been in charge of the household long beforeanyone had guessed she was ill. So much for needing a childhood.

The girls were named Georgia and Ada. Georgia, the older, could remember even inthe years when her mother was well, coming home from school for lunch, aprivilege of the town children, to find the house silent, Fanny still in herhousecoat, lying on the sofa in the parlor reading, just as she had been whenGeorgia left. She'd look up, surprised and dizzy. Her face was round and full,with fat, childish lips and a baby's startled blue eyes: a pretty, oddlyunformed-looking young woman. "Why, Georgia," she'd say, day afterday. "How can you be back so soon?" And then she'd rise andineffectually pat at her hair or her robe. Often she was barefoot, even inwinter. "Well, we'd better go see what we can scratch up for you girls toeat, hadn't we?"

It was a disgrace, really, though the children didn't care; they'd gotten usedto it long before. In the kitchen, the breakfast dishes were still on the table,the grease congealed, the skin of the syrup pools lightly puckering with theunseen motion of the air. Upstairs, the beds would gape, unmade. When the baby,Freddie, came, Georgia's first task at noon would often be to take him up to thenursery to change his drooping diaper. "Oh, you pooper," she wouldsay. "You big flop maker. Look what you've done now, you wicked boy."She would keep a steady stream of this insulting talk flowing, so that he wouldlie still in fascination and amusement and make her job easier, but also so thatshe wouldn't gag?she never got used to the piercing scent of ammonia, andworse, that she released each time she unpinned his sagging, weighted cloths.

It was a little while after Freddie came?Georgia later thought it must havebeen then that her mother had first become ill?that they began to have regularhelp, finally. Mrs. Beston. Her name was Ellen, but no one ever called her that,not even their mother. Mrs. Beston, always and only, though their fathersometimes called her Mrs. Best One when she wasn't around to hear it. She wastall and raw-boned and strong. Entirely without humor, and yet endlessly,bottomlessly cheerful. She arrived Monday mornings, just as their father wasleaving for the week. "You must take these children in hand, Mrs.Beston," he'd say, pulling on his coat. "They're spoiled rotten. Adaily whipping, I should think, and gruel for supper four nights a week at theminimum." The children, sitting on the stairs waiting to say goodbye, wouldlook at each other with wicked grins.

"Oh, Mister, don't say that!" Mrs. Beston would cry uneasily.

"No, no, we count on you, Mrs. Beston. Lock them in their rooms. Send themto bed with no supper. Hang them up by their thumbs till they promise toobey."

"Oh now, Mr. Rice!"

"I'm off now, Mrs. Beston. By Friday, I have every confidence, you'll haveinstilled in them the fear of the Lord."

But she didn't. She forgave them everything. Everyone, to her, was a poor dear,most of all their mother. Mrs. Rice, the poor dear. It was only slowly thatGeorgia came to understand that this was more than peculiarly expressedaffection, that Mrs. Beston was referring to something specific, something sadand wrong about her mother.

She was supposed to leave by three-thirty or four?she had her own family to gethome to and cook for?but often she stayed after her chores were done, just todo a few pieces in the puzzle with them, just to play one more hand of Slapjack,one round of War. When she did leave, the house was clean, the laundry was doneif it was laundry day, and?after their mother was really ill?there was alwayssomething prepared in the kitchen and the girls left with instructions on how towarm it and serve it. Though by then Fanny didn't have much appetite, Ada orGeorgia would always take a tray to her room before they served themselves andFreddie at the kitchen table. And after dinner one of them would go to fetch thenearly untouched tray back down. Both of them were good at keeping track, bothof them always knew whether she'd eaten more or less today than yesterday,though they never commented on this to each other.

But they'd all gotten skilled by this time at never acknowledging what theyknew, at pretending they didn't see what they saw. Everything conspired toencourage them in this?Mrs. Beston's determined good cheer, their father'sstrained, sometimes desperate gaiety, their neighbors' polite silence about whatwas happening in their house.

And their mother: well, hadn't she always been this way? Indolent, half the timein bed anyway, reading or just daydreaming? Oh, she was sick, they certainlyknew that, but they all expected?or pretended to expect, and then forgot theywere pretending?that she'd be herself again by spring; or then by summer, whenthey'd drive over to Bucksport and have lobsters at the pound; or surely byfall, when they'd need to go shopping in Pittsfield for new school things.

Late one afternoon the summer her mother lay dying, Georgia came out onto thescreened porch off the kitchen. Mrs. Beston had gone for the day, but she'd leftFanny's sheets soaking in a galvanized metal tub of cold water. The blood hadcolored them evenly a beautiful shade of deep sherbet pink. They looked likesnow-covered mountains at sunset. Caught by surprise at the sight, Georgiastopped short and gasped. Her heart was pounding. But then quickly her mindperformed its familiar, useful trick: they were having chicken stew for dinnerthat night, and what she told herself was that the blood was of course from theslaughter of the chicken, somehow spilled onto these cloths.

There was a world of knowledge that she had to ignore to hold on to thisthought, starting with the fact that the chickens were slaughtered out behindthe henhouse, but she was practiced at it, it was all accomplished in seconds.She started to whistle as loudly as she could, "Where E'er You Walk."She went outside into the overgrown yard where the lupines and lemon lilies wereslowly being choked out by weeds, and began savagely to pluck them, singing now,ignoring the occasional cry of her mother, audible even through the windows sheinsisted stay shut.

She wanted her father, Georgia thought, yanking at the flowers. She wanted himhome right now. But he was out on the road for two more days, until Friday,driving his usual circuit of general stores and hardware stores in a radius ofseveral hundred miles. He carried samples of his wares in his motorcar, and thecar had come to have that rubbery odor permanently, an odor Georgia would findreassuring even into her old age...

Continues...

Excerpted from The World Belowby Sue Miller Copyright © 2001 by Sue Miller. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Large Print
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375431314
• ISBN 13: 9780375431319
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 436