Free The World Below by Sue Miller Page B

hadn’t been in his dark hair. There were a few more lines around his brown eyes, and his mouth seemed drawn down. Perhaps those regular features, the largish nose, were a bit more chiseled. But most of it was just the sense of a man weighted by some knowledge, some sorrow, he hadn’t possessed before.
    If she’d known how to ask, and if he’d been in the habit of articulating his thoughts to anyone, what he might have said to her was that he’d learned how temporary man is. Man, or life. Something he’d known, in some sense, since he lifted a knife to cut open the yellowed flesh of his first cadaver in anatomy class. Something he’d known when he visited Georgia’s mother every day while she was dying, when he passed the three children stopped in their gamesor their outside chores, to watch him, to nod back as he lifted his hat to them, the two pretty jeunes filles and the sturdy little boy; when he mounted the stairs behind the bustling Mrs. Beston; when he entered the airless room and his wasted patient greeted him with an unearthly cry, a rictus of joy and pain lifting her skull’s face. He’d known it, yes, but then he’d had sufficient time—sufficient leisure, really—to consider amply each death, each loss. To count them. To hold himself accountable for them. This, he knew now, had been a gift.
    For now he thought of death differently: as a vast disinterested scythe, cutting us down carelessly, brutally. Leaving half a man to die here and half a man to live there. Leaving him standing in the blood of both to decide which fate for which half, and why, and how.
    Without knowing any of this, Georgia felt sorry for him.
    And he felt sorry for Georgia. She was much thinner than she should have been. She had no color except for the two hectic patches on her cheeks. Her ears, which were large anyway, seemed too large now that her face had narrowed. The pretty young girl watching him from the meadow as he entered the house, standing across her mother’s grave from him, tearless and brave—she’d become this frayed, harried-looking young woman, her hair badly pinned up at the nape of her neck, her nostrils chapped, deep circles bruising her eyes. Still, the word that leapt to his mind when he looked at her was valor. He found her more beautiful than he could have said.
    They talked for a while in his office before he asked her to undress. As he inquired and she told him about her life—her routines, her diet, her sleep habits—he felt a sense of cold, energetic outrage welling up to replace the dispassionate distance he’d come to keep from his patients.
    She didn’t mean to arouse his sympathy. Never for a moment did Georgia feel sorry for herself. There was something nearly callous, actually, in her inattention to emotional nuance, to the effect her life and her words had on others. I felt it occasionally muchlater, when I lived with them. She was nearly congenitally buoyant and always a bit surprised when others were not.
    Now she had no sense of the impact of her sad story, no sense of the harsh judgments the doctor was making with every detail she offered. Cheerfully, she went on. “I should be ashamed, I suppose,” she said. She’d just told him that she let Ada and Freddie read at the table at supper, that nearly any book you opened in the house would slide its load of crumbs onto your lap. “The mice actually eat them sometimes: the books!”
    “Shame doesn’t enter in,” he told her. He raised his hand as if to sweep the notion away, and she saw how long and elegant they were, his hands. Prettier than her own, she thought, looking down at her chewed-off nails.
    The doctor had never liked Georgia’s father. He’d been shocked, actually, by the arrangements made—or not made—during Fanny’s illness: that an invalid should be in charge of the household, that the children were left alone with her at night. As he made notes now on his patient’s case, he was already beginning to think in