Alice in Bed (17 page)

We chatted about the Bootts: Lizzy's painting, Mr. Boott's music, Lizzy's peerless education. “It goes to show what a European education can accomplish in a girl,” Aunt Kate said. “Such an education would be impossible in America.”

“That's quite true,” Harry said.

“How good is her painting?” I asked him.

“Very proficient. Considerable mastery. But, in the end, feminine painting is only an accomplishment.”

“
Always
, Harry? Invariably?” This irritated me, although it was a relief that he didn't consider Lizzy a great artist.

“Well, how many great female artists can you name?”

The answer was zero.

We went silent, watching the snow-capped peaks slip by. I asked, “Harry, does Lizzy ever strike you as a little—hmm—lifeless?”

“What
can
you mean, Alice?” said Aunt Kate. “She is a lovely girl in every respect. And such a nice, neat figure, too.”

Harry became thoughtful, staring out at the blue enamel sky and the boulder-strewn moraines. A landscape for giants, inhuman in scale. At length, he said, “You're right, Alice. There is a deadly languor about Lizzy at times, as if under all her accomplishments there is no one there.”

“Well, think about it, Harry. All her life she has tried to be what her father wants and thus has no idea who she is.”

“Poor dear girl, growing up without a mother. But daughters generally adore their fathers, don't they?”

“Yes, Aunt Kate. Remember Iphigenia. She went willingly, I suppose.”

“Was she the one who killed her father?”

“No, her father killed
her
to appease the god of winds. Her brother later killed the mother, after the mother killed the father for killing Iphigenia. It was a very high-strung family.”

“Oh, dear child, you need another shawl—you're shivering. Find the heavy tartan one if you can, Harry.”

Then we passed into Italy, to drink in antiquity, olive groves, the Duomo, the Medicis and the Sforzas, Roman aqueducts, the canals of Venice, Tintoretto et al, all the popes and heretics and saints and martyrs, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum and its blood-soaked stones. In Venice a plague of mosquitoes disturbed our sleep. In Torcello we ate innumerable figs and had ices every night. As we sat eating grapes on a bench in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I said, “The chief difference between Europe and America seems to be that people here sit on benches all day staring at you as if you were a picture.” The next day Harry wrote in his journal:

The great difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about on benches and staring at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare.

He had, as usual, expressed it so much better than I.

Why
was I unable to absorb Italy deeply, as I had Paris? Owing to some defect in my nature, my life had a peculiar tendency to burst into bloom briefly, only to turn flat, stale, and unprofitable a short while later.

To make a long story short, our sailing date came, and Harry accompanied us all the way to Liverpool and showed us into our stateroom (which I hoped would not soon be adorned with our vomit). I made a mental list of things I would have to do without: Gothic stained glass, gardens with ingenious topiary, old masters, chic cafés, centuries of history, art museums, copyists, chateaux, ancient gargoyles, brasseries catering to women who loved women,
les grands magasins
. Until the whistle blew, I harbored the absurd hope that Harry would ask me to stay on in Paris with him. I had pictured it so vividly, down to the faces of the gargoyles on the building I'd selected as our future address. But Harry said good-bye, and Aunt Kate and I sailed toward America.

Back home, I tried to prolong the aftertaste of Europe by having a French breakfast of chocolate and a roll, but by late November I told Mother that it no longer agreed with me. One day Mother and I were on Newbury Street doing the marketing and stopped to look at the bonnets displayed in a milliner's window, none of which looked remotely fashionable to a person recently returned from Paris. Dead leaves scuttled along the sides of the road; most people wore sour expressions.

On the horse-cars back to Cambridge I looked across the frozen river at the backs of the brownstones of Beacon Street. Gelid laundry hung stiffly on a line, a pair of crows pecked at something down by the riverbank. No wonder Harry didn't want to come home. In his letters he complained of the early nightfall and claimed to be nostalgic for Quincy Street, but he was probably just trying to spare our feelings.

As our eyes fastened on the frozen mudflats of Charlestown, Mother asked if I knew how bereft Father had been while I was abroad. “With tears in his eyes he would say, How I wish Alice were here to read the
Advertiser
aloud to me, to cheer us up with her jokes.” She had not wanted to worry me while I was abroad, but Father's health
did
suffer during my absence. He came down with a bad grippe, which triggered a painful eruption of his eczema, and other things along those lines. She honestly did not see how I could go abroad again in Father's lifetime.

A lump formed in my throat. “But, Mother, Harry is abroad. William spent almost two years in Germany. The boys are in Wisconsin. Why is Father not bereft without them?”

“Young men must make their way in the world, dear. A daughter is a special comfort.” Although her tone was matter-of-fact, her eyes were sorrowful. Perhaps she did understand how I felt and was sorry, but not enough to commute my sentence. I saw that I would never “make my way in the world,” and any gifts I possessed would wither inside me.

“I have never understood why you children are so enamored of the French,” Mother added, warming to one of her favorite themes. “So many are indecent, their houses are freezing in winter, their servants are dirty, their writers write filth, the tradesmen cheat you at every turn. I always say, I don't know what God will
do
about the French on Judgment Day.”

“Fortunately, Mother, it won't be up to you.”

Was it possible for a person to be born in the wrong country, like a cuckoo's egg slipped into a warbler's nest? As winter ground down on us in earnest, life in Boston became emptier. One night I overheard Mother say to Father, “I do worry that after such overstimulation, it may not be possible to reduce her to the ordinary domestic scene.” But I
must
be reduced to it; I should not be indulged in too much frivolity, which in the long run could spoil my character.

Alice is busy trying to idle
, Mother wrote to Harry,
and it is always very hard depressing work, but I think it will tell in the end.

Paris seemed by then infinitely distant. If Harry did not send us letters bearing that postmark, I might have thought I'd dreamed it.

One morning I found myself in the library with Father, who was fond of saying he liked to “have a daughter by my side to help me with my rhetoric.” A fire roared in the grate. I was reading
A Slight Misunderstanding
by Mérimée when suddenly something came roaring out of some circle of hell and enveloped me in a fever, a rage. My book slid to the floor, and I glanced over at Father dipping his pen in the inkwell, writing his next unreadable book. How rosy and innocent he appeared. Without warning I felt my hands curling into talons to rake the side of his face. I saw it in my mind as if it had already
happened: the parallel gashes in his cheek, the scarlet drops on the carpet, Father's shock and sorrow, my remorse.

But
why
, when his fatherly feelings were so pronounced he would weep at the sight of his children's dear faces? (As William was fond of saying, the philoprogenitive faculty was exceptionally well developed in him.) I was a monster. I sat on my hands, trembling and grinding my molars until the impulse subsided. To steady my mind, I dug my fingernails into my palm and recited the planets in the solar system, the names of the seven seas, the Seven Wonders of the World, until the pressure eased.

Naturally my family had no idea of the storms raging inside me and I was in no hurry to tell them.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

T
HE
V
ILLA
O
NOFRE
, R
OME

O
CTOBER
3
RD
1873

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

Thou seemest to me so beautiful from here, so intelligent, so affectionate, so in all respects the thing that a brother should most desire that I don't see how when I get home I can do any thing else than sit with my arm round thy waist appealing to thee for confirmation of everything I say, for approbation of everything I do, and admiration for everything I am, and never, never for a moment being disappointed.

ELEVEN
ELEVEN

1874

“I
REALLY THINK YOUR BROTHER MAKES HIMSELF ILL BY THINKING
about himself so much,” Mother was saying as we prepared the front parlor for my Bee. We'd polished the silver candelabra, folded the linen napkins, removed crumbs from the carpet and straightened the portrait of Grandmother Walsh (garbed, thanks to the painter's artifice, in a style I liked to call “
Après Moi, le Déluge
”). Mother meant William, of course. Whenever Harry mentioned any trace of ill health in his letters from Europe, she worried and sent him pages of sympathy and suggestions about rest and good climates.

“But William is much
improved
, Mother. He says he has trained his eyes to read for a certain number of hours a day.”

“I suppose,” she said dubiously. She paused to count out the dessert plates. “But
why
must he express every fluctuation of feeling and every unfavorable symptom? Never thinking of the effect on those around him!”

For the second year, William was teaching Comparative Anatomy at Harvard, where he was a rising star. There was little trace of the gaunt and tormented young man who had gone to the Somerville asylum four years before, although, being William, he still claimed to suffer from periodic waves of insomnia, skin eruptions, mood-swings, melancholy, overwhelming fatigue, and a host of other symptoms that he was prone to over-analyze and treat with dubious folk remedies. He was always recommending his “tinctures”
to everyone and, as far as I could tell, none of them ever worked. Certainly not on me. But wasn't this William's way of trying to make sense of things? While Mother complained about his morbidness privately, I noticed she passed up no opportunity to boast about his Harvard appointment to our friends.

She was saying now, “Do you think we ought to use the big or the medium-sized damask, dear?”

I shrugged, not caring enough to have an opinion.

While we were unfolding the tablecloth, footsteps shook the porch and the door flew open. Dropping his leather case on the floor, William flopped down heavily on the horsehair sofa, propping his boots on the armrest. “My students are infants!” he groaned. “How about a nice, cool lemonade, Alice?”

“I'm very much occupied at the moment, William, as you can plainly see.”

“For heaven's sake, Will, get those muddy boots off the sofa,” said Mother.

“My boys need an immense amount of looking after. You can't imagine. Today they were supposed to be dissecting pigeons to study the muscles—”

“I thought you cut up frogs.”

“Oh, we cut up fish,
fleisch
, fowl, whatever you like. Anyhow, one young man had scraped the breastbone clean and said he found no muscles. I asked what that heap of stuff was which he had removed. He said it was ‘meat' which he had taken off to get at the muscles!”

“The Bee is arriving in fifteen minutes, William,” Mother said. “We don't have time to dilly-dally and discuss pigeons.”

“Oh, the
Bee
! Then I am right on time.” He extracted his watch from his vest pocket and sat up eagerly. “I always love seeing all the girls. And, by the way, Mother, there is not a trace of mud on my boots. A leaf or two, perhaps.” Propping one foot on his knee, he dug out two frayed brown leaves that were stuck to the sole and placed them on an end table. Mother grimaced.

“You are not
at all
welcome at the Bee, William,” I told him, with my hands on my hips for emphasis. “Pray find some way to distract yourself.”

“How cold and cruel you are, Alice. At least let me eavesdrop. You don't know how I dream of penetrating the ultimate mystery—what women talk about when no men are present.”

“We talk only about men. How could we possibly have other interests?”

Mother called from the dining room. “Alice, do you want to use Grandma Walsh's tea set or the Wedgwood?”

“Whatever you think, Mother.”

“Is that true?” said William.

“What?”

“
Do
the girls talk about men? Do they—perchance—mention
me
? Will the beautiful Levering sisters be present this afternoon?”

“When I am permitted to attend Harvard and take your Comparative Whatever course, you can spy on my Bee. As long as we women remain in bondage, the answer is no.”

“Bondage!” Mother scoffed. “Who has been filling your mind with this stuff and nonsense, Alice?”

“Comparative
Anatomy and Physiology
, Alice. That is the title of my course. It grieves me that my only sister should forget. It shows how little you care. And you didn't answer my question about the Levering girls.”

“They don't belong to our Bee, and they are said to be quite stupid.”

“Very beautiful, however.”

“
Please
, William, go upstairs before the girls come! If they see you, there will be a logjam at the front door and we'll never get started.” People hung around William like bees around clover. He didn't need to learn mesmerism to entrance people, but he learned it anyway.

Nine girls arrived in quick succession. There would have been eleven if Nanny Ashburner were not in England and Susy Dixwell had not been laid low with a grippe. Marny Storer arrived with Lizzy Sparks, Carrie Thayer a few minutes later, breathless and red-faced, followed by Sara and Fanny. The married Bees included Mabel Lowell, Fanny Dixwell Holmes, Ellen Gurney, and Clover Adams, but Mabel and Fanny were absent today. Of the new members, Lillian Horsfeld was quite nice once you recovered from the orgy of hugging and gushing she put you through. I was still making up my mind about Julia Marcou.

Marny Storer was in an expansive mood, possibly due to recent developments in her “secret” romance with Roger Warner, which everyone knew about and which was being conducted in the Bostonian manner, over tomes of constitutional law. She asked what everyone thought of Mr. Eliot's engagement. I said, “Well, I think it throws an eerie light on the nature of men and their capacity to renew their existence.”

“What do you mean, Alice?” asked Ellen Gurney, smiling. She was the former Ellen Hooper, sister of Clover, and within our Bee was the authority on matters relating to President Eliot, as her husband was Dean of Harvard and the president's right-hand man. They were on a crusade to modernize and expand Harvard with a modern curriculum and graduate schools modeled on Germany's. Most of the Overseers dragged their feet and opposed every change.

“Surely he has greatly lost in dignity by it,” I explained, apropos of Mr. Eliot's love life. “Not that he shouldn't marry again, poor man, if he wants to, but that he should have fallen in love again
so completely
and chosen someone so unsuitable. He is as much excited and transported as if he were a man of twenty, my father says.”

“It only shows that he is truly in love, Alice,” said Carrie Thayer, who seemed to derive her opinions from women's magazines. “Old people can fall in love, too.”

Mother came in and poured, as was customary. Everyone praised the pineapple upside-down cake, then returned to knitting, crocheting, needlework, and gossip. Marny Storer mentioned that one of the Lowell women had suffered a breakdown and was said to be resting in Somerville. To which Clover Adams said, “Believe me, if you've seen Somerville, rest is the last word that applies.” Clover and Ellen (as well as their brother Ned) were presumed to have considerable expertise about insanity in general and the Somerville asylum in particular, as their father, Dr. Hooper, volunteered his services there. As children they had played croquet on the lawn with some of the milder lunatics and had amusing stories. (That their aunt, Susan Sturgis Bigelow, suffered a breakdown and killed herself went unmentioned, although everyone in Boston knew about it.)

“Of course,” Clover said, between sips of tea, “the insane asylum is the goal of every good and conscientious Bostonian. Mrs. X has a baby. She becomes insane and goes to Somerville. Baby grows up and promptly retires there. The great circle of life!”

My wool was soft as a cloud and my needles clicked as I churned out squares of yellow and white in alternate rows of knit and purl. I was trying to form a mental picture of my newborn nephew as either a tiny replica of Wilky with some features of Carrie thrown in, or vice versa. It was provoking that Wilky's letters contained no specifics about what the infant looked like, which was what we most wanted to know.

I did not fail to note that over half the Bee were sewing things for their own hope chests, and no one said a thing, although our avowed purpose was to sew for the hospital and the poor down on the marsh. I should have seen it coming, I suppose: the way men would invade the world of women and ruin it. How they'd pick off the women one by one, like predators. It seemed to start with Mabel Lowell, who married a man no one had heard of and returned transformed into a dull matron. Did no one else perceive the deadly glaze that came over these new brides?

Why this mania for engagements? To be bound forever by the heaviest chains of matrimony to a stranger who might keep repeating the same jokes—or worse! Of course, I'd be the first to admit that my suitors were few and easily discouraged. “My only prey are widowers,” I'd written to Nanny Ashburner last week. “I'd like to try my hand with bachelors first.”

“Isn't it an unjust world?” I remarked to Lizzy Boott the day after the Bee. It was hot and muggy, and we were lying about like limp lettuce on the Bootts' verandah, gossiping and reading the
Revue des Deux Mondes
and the
Nation
. (The Bootts had moved back to Boston last year.) “The male sex gets to shop around for as long as they choose, and we have to take the first offer lest we wither on the vine!” Lizzy readily agreed and five minutes later was speculating tediously about the status of Freddy Mason's affections for her. Even worse, Freddy himself turned up, interrupting our conversation, and then had nothing to say—just sat there like a tidy parcel done up at Metcalf's.

Still, if asked how I was that summer, I would have had no hesitation in saying that I was very well, so well, in fact, that to be better would be superfluous. I'd taken several trips, to Quebec and Niagara with Aunt Kate, to New York by myself. The travel cheered me up immensely, and I vowed that in the future I would travel by myself a good deal, at least to New York. My parents and Aunt Kate were convinced that all my troubles lay behind me; in their letters to Harry and “the boys,” they noted the vigor of my excursions and pronounced me “perfectly well.”

William and I were the only “children” at 20 Quincy Street now. Bob and Wilky would go on living in the Midwest with their brides and babies for the foreseeable future. Harry was still abroad, having become enamored of Italy. His recent letters home told of riding horseback every morning through the
campagna
outside Rome, in the shadow of ancient aqueducts. Five women had invited themselves to ride with him, he reported. Mother wondered who these women were and if they were very forward. Father said, “Don't worry so much, dear. The Angel”—as Harry was known in our family due to his angelic disposition—“has a good, solid character and it sounds as if he's in good hands.”

“That unhealthy climate, though!” Mother exclaimed over Sunday dinner, restlessly smoothing the tablecloth with her hand. “I don't know
why
Harry insists that Italy is the place where he feels most himself. Why can't he feel like himself in Boston?”

For Mother, reality was a canvas that could be reshaped almost indefinitely. Even the past could be altered, if necessary, through the force of her disapproval. William should
never
have gone to Germany. I should
not
have put my health in jeopardy by going ice skating when the temperature hovered around ten degrees. Bob and Wilky should
certainly not
have bought that derelict plantation in Florida and tried to farm it with a band of freed slaves. (Both “the boys” had been officers in the two Negro regiments from Massachusetts, and had the highest esteem for their soldiers. They'd tried to do something noble for the freedmen, but, having no head for business, had quickly gone bankrupt.) All of this should
never
have happened.

Father said now, “Harry must go
somewhere
for inspiration, dear! I don't see how he could have written ‘The Madonna of the Future' in Boston.”

“Hmmf,”
she said.

Whenever Harry described a great pleasure in his letters, he would write, “Forgive me!” and reassure us that the outing he'd just described had palled in the end or that the American colony in Rome was “a very poor affair.” I did not believe him.

“Harry has reached a fork in the road,” William said, reaching for the water pitcher, “and must either return soon, or remain in Europe forever. I've told him he can't write about Europe for Europeans. Naturally, America will be hard for him at first.”

“Why should it be hard for him? It's his
home
,” Mother said, looking tearful. No one took this up.

“Do you think Harry is very much changed?” I asked William.

“When I visited him last fall his Italian was very fluent. When speaking to Italians, he'd address them with arrogant manners and theatrical gestures. I asked him why his whole manner changed in Italian. He said, what did I mean?”

“If Boston people and Boston things are good enough for Mr. Howells, why shouldn't they be for Harry? You'd think he'd wish to be closer to the
Atlantic Monthly
.”

“Yes, Mother,” I said, scrutinizing the advertisements in the
Transcript
, “and he could write novellas about the Famous Vegetable Cure for Female Weakness. They claim here it cures ALL female disorders including feelings of languor, sparkles before the eyes, a dragging sensation in the groin . . .”