Alice in Bed (13 page)

EIGHT
EIGHT

I
MUST POINT OUT, IN MY DEFENSE, THAT OVER THE YEARS MY
mind did its best to suppress my body, with its howling rages, sickening dreads, and ravening desires. It declared martial law and policed the insanities arising from my thighs, my hands, the pit of my stomach. It held me hostage at times with sudden, incomprehensible faints and savage blasts of rage or terror.

“What does it feel like?” William asked.

“Like the feeling you have before you sneeze, only some kink in your organization prevents you from sneezing and you are left with a ghastly pressure in each and every cell of your body.”

“Hmm,” he said, after a pensive pause. “Like an unscratchable itch?”

“Yes, but worse.” There was a volcano erupting inside me at times. Everyone knew you could not control a volcano.

But there had been a time
before
; I was fairly certain of that. Hard as I might try, this lost Eden gleamed and glittered just out of reach. For all I knew, everyone was homesick for a native land that may never have actually existed. But my friends were uncomprehending when I alluded to this.

Only William seemed to recognize the thing I described. “I know exactly what you mean, Alice. The lost paradise.”

“So what
is
it exactly, William?”

“Father would say it is Divine Nature. Elusiveness seems to be its essential characteristic.”

Maybe this nameless homesickness was what drove William to fanatically embrace philosophy and metaphysics, Harry to worship
at the shrine of art, Bob to drink immoderately and experience frequent religious conversions, and me to—well, what
did
I do? That was the question.

In the spring of 1872 my family decided I would profit from a Grand Tour of Europe with Harry and Aunt Kate. I was, at this time, considered delicate but
much
improved since my darkest days, and it was hoped that the softer European air would complete my cure. We crossed the Atlantic on a fast Cunard screw steamer, the
Algeria
. As the ship skirted the shores of Fire Island and headed out into the Atlantic, I felt something new, auspicious, and boundless well up inside me. I was ready to take the plunge.

For the first month we “did” England. Devonshire, Exeter, the ancient town of Chester. Visiting the Royal Leamington Spa, I felt no shiver of foreboding, though perhaps I should have. After Oxford and the Cotswolds and four perfect days in Lytton, we pushed on toward London, stopping in Wells and Salisbury, “doing” Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge. At Wilton House, I spent a memorable forty-eight hours in communion with that glorious object, the Van Dyck portrait of the Pembroke family. I can't tell you what a relief it was to discover that I was not numb to great art, as I'd feared (based on my tepid reaction to the Norton pictures and aesthetic commentary). I may have been ignorant, but a picture
did
speak to me, after all.

While Aunt Kate went off to gather parasols, shawls, guidebooks, and digestive biscuits, I scanned her half-completed letter to 20 Quincy Street. (Yes, I was in the habit of reading any letter left lying around. In my defense I cite the lifelong necessity of compensating for being the youngest and most ignorant member of the family, as well as the fact that the others did it, too.)

An account of Harry's virtues consumed two paragraphs:

If you were to see him invariably folding in the most precise manner the shawls and rugs which are brought in from our drives and smoothing them down in some quiet corner, with the parasols and umbrellas—

and more along those lines. Of me (like most people, I was principally interested in reading about that most fascinating of beings, myself) Aunt Kate observed,

She takes it all very calmly and is never at any time unduly excited, which of course enables her to bear her pleasures in a more lastingly beneficial way.

My absence of excitement—emulating the patient barnacle—was my cardinal virtue now.

In London we stayed at the Charing Cross Hotel, and the noise, filthy air, and teeming multitudes were oppressive. Could there really be so many poor, everyone filthy and ragged like people out of Dickens? As far as I could tell, their greatest, perhaps their sole, amusement was to watch the rich in their finery dismount from their carriages outside the grand houses. I soon wearied Aunt Kate and Harry with my diatribes, so after racing through the standard tourist sites, we made our way speedily to Paris, where letters from Quincy Street awaited us. In his letter to me, Father confided that as soon as I sailed, he settled into my empty room every afternoon to do his reading, feeling
alone with my darling, whom we love consumedly as usual and rejoice in every letter that comes as a love letter
. The letter went on in that vein, a love letter itself, for Father was incapable of expressing himself any other way.

To live in Paris had been Harry's goal since he was a boy of twelve. He'd arranged to stay on after Aunt Kate and I were to sail home in the autumn, and I wondered if he would ever come back. His hunger for the Parisian life was written all over his face, which sometimes wore an expression verging on the predatory.

Harry's first passion, in fact, was the French theater. During our childhood years in Paris he could often be found in a mild trance near a playbill stuck to a post. At the age of twelve, he was already an obsessed fan, conversant with the names of all the great actresses and the dramatic monologues for which they were famous. (William used to tease him about his
préciosité
, advising him to kick a ball around once in a while and get his clothes dirty. Harry smiled and paid no attention.)
For obvious reasons, Aunt Kate and I left the choice of plays to him, and we went twice to the Comédie Française, seeing a performance of Molière's
Mariage Forcé
one day and two days later, Alfred de Musset's
Il Ne Faut Jurer de Rien
.

Afterwards, we strolled along the rue de Richelieu at twilight, past jewelers, expensive restaurants, and chic cafés where people drank aperitifs at marble-topped tables and talked with their hands in the air. Harry was in a sublime mood, remarking that after Molière's tremendous farce,
Il Ne Faut Jurer
was “like a fine sherry after a long ale.”

The subject of refreshments made me wonder if you could get absinthe in France nowadays. Aunt Kate was audibly searching her memory for the address of a jeweler on the rue de Richelieu where she'd purchased a brooch years ago. I linked arms with Harry, who was minutely analyzing the play we'd seen. Did we notice how, in the drawing-room scene, the eccentric baroness sits with her tapestry, making distracted small talk with the
abbé
as she counts her stitches? While on the other side of the room her daughter, in white muslin and blue ribbons, is taking a dancing lesson from a dancing teacher in a red wig and tights.

“Yes, what about it, Harry?” Aunt Kate said.

“Well, what an art to preserve the tone of accidental conversation! That is quite foreign to British invention.”

“I thought the girl's dancing was rather good,” said Aunt Kate.

But Harry had not finished. Did we catch how, in a later scene, “the young girl, listening in the park to the passionate whisperings of the hero, drops her arms half awkwardly to her sides in fascinated self-surrender. That gesture spoke volumes. Unhappily for us as actors, we are not a gesticulating people.”

The phrase “fascinated self-surrender” set off something inside me. I asked Harry whom did he mean exactly when he said ‘we'?

“I mean the Anglo-Saxon race in general.”

He had a point. The vibrant and animated French did make Anglo-Saxons seem dull and wooden. Maybe we needed to drink stronger coffee. Or absinthe. Furthermore, it was clear that females of the Anglo-Saxon race did not have the first notion of how to tie a scarf, drape a shawl, dress a bonnet, or affix an orchid to one's bosom or one's hat.

“If you gesticulate too much in real life,” Aunt Kate joked, “you run the risk of knocking the glasses off a waiter's tray.”

Harry had contracted to write a series of travel essays for the
Nation
aimed at the new market of Americans on the Grand Tour. We were running into hordes of them at every tourist attraction, clutching their Baedeckers or their Thomas Cooks, their American voices, loud, nasal, and flat, floating through the air. (Like the rest of my family, especially William, I was very sensitive to voices and easily irked by bad-voiced people, though I knew they probably could not help it.) Harry frequently solicited my opinions of and reactions to various sights, and I felt flattered until I began to suspect that I was his ideal reader in the sense that I embodied the eager but uninformed American Abroad.

“Harry, when you write your pieces for the
Nation
do you practice on me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, plumb the depths of my ignorance so you know what to tell your readers?”

Harry just laughed. Aunt Kate said, “Don't be absurd, dear.”

We were staying at the Hotel Rastadt off the rue de la Paix, and in the second week we took the horse-omnibus to the Louvre every day. Harry remarked that the last time he'd visited the Louvre it was with Charles Norton “and it was heavy work, as he takes art too seriously.”

“Well, you needn't worry about us, Harry. We are barbarians.”

“Speak for yourself, Alice,” Aunt Kate said, laughing.

We agreed to take the museum in sections every morning for at least a week, no more than two hours at a time. Harry believed that two hours was the limit for appreciating art; after that you could absorb no more. One day we admired the Venetians, then it was ancient Greek and Hellenistic amphoras, then a room full of Watteaus. Day by day, we became intimate with Dutch and Flemish interiors, English landscapes, the painters of the court of Louis XIV, mannerists, portraitists, still lifes, Napoleonic battle scenes, madonnas thin and dour, rosy and smiling, stiff, animated, maternal, virginal; whole rooms devoted to classical or neo-classical Dianas, Floras, and Neptunes. What a treat to be in a country that
had
art museums.

Lacking Harry's specialized aesthetic vocabulary, I was unable to articulate my experience of the sublime, but I felt it in every pore. Some pictures affected me corporeally, like a beautiful
crise de nerfs.
Others made me feel that I was opening my eyes on my first day on earth. Contemplating the scenes of ordinary Flemish and Dutch people, captured in the act of drinking, smoking or playing cards, I felt as if I were seeing them through the eyes of God, and was moved to tears.

“What is wrong, dear?” asked Aunt Kate, who always seemed to be right on my heels. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No, Aunt Kate, a gnat flew into my eye. I believe I've removed it with my handkerchief.”

“Well, don't overdo, my girl. Be sure to say when you've had enough of museums.”

Sometimes I'd hover near the copyists at their easels. Most were women, many quite young. Harry said they were low on the social ladder, barely middle class, and most likely did not have enough of a
dot
to marry. Marriage in France had nothing to do with love; it was a financial arrangement between families, he said. (Harry had mysterious ways of picking up this sort of information from the air.)

“And then you commit adultery as often as possible!” I said.

Harry was taking copious notes in his black notebook every day. Respectful of his genius, Aunt Kate took care not to disturb him, and whenever she had a yen to talk sidled over to me. “I've never really understood Titian,” she'd say. Or, “I've seen quite enough crucifixions for today; how about you?” If only Aunt Kate would vanish for an hour or two, so I could be alone with my God. Not the church God to whom people directed their tiresome, self-centered prayers. My God (and I use the term loosely) was speaking to me through beauty, revealing every inch of His creation. He dwelled in the secret heart of things, I saw clearly now, but I wouldn't try to explain this to anyone else.

One day in the Louvre I caught a glimpse of a band of school-girls, lined up in pairs, each pair holding hands. They were being herded briskly through the halls by two elderly sisters in butterfly wimples, past pagan nudes and debauches toward pietàs, crucifixions, and annunciations. The girls wore identical frocks and pinafores and
appeared well-behaved, modest, and obedient, except for a pair near the rear. One of the girls leaned into her partner to whisper into her ear, eliciting a saucy smile. That smile! It flickered for an instant and was gone, mysterious and fleeting. You could almost feel the girl's hot breath on your ear.

Leaving the Louvre, we tried to stroll through the Tuileries, but stroll was the wrong word, for the fresh wounds of the Franco-Prussian war here were shocking to behold. The Palace was a blackened shell and in the ruined gardens starved crones sat on cracked stone benches mumbling to pigeons and sometimes competing with them for crusts of bread. Not far away were the
hôtels particuliers
, with their private inner courts, the carriages of the rich with their coats of arms, beautifully dressed women with costly jewelry hanging from their alabaster necks.

Thanks to Baron Haussmann's tear-downs, wide modern boulevards led in the most rational fashion from civic monument to civic monument. Under the surface, though, I could feel the pulse of the old Paris, the Paris of our childhood, quainter, darker, hidden, with crooked buildings and twisting cobbled streets. It tugged at me like a tide. What had been left behind back there, at the age of seven or eight or nine, that felt so precious?

Eight different governesses came and went during our family's time abroad, between 1855 and 1860, and heaven only knows how many tutors. The reason they stayed for such short intervals and left suddenly, sometimes in tears, had something to do with Father, which remained mysterious.