Alice in Bed (33 page)

Only now, with Minny twenty years dead, can I allow myself to notice that underneath my hurt and disappointment lurked another emotion. Relief. Less than 2 months later came the horrible news from Pelham that she was dead. Elly & Kitty said she'd fought desperately, agonizingly, to live. How it tortured me to picture my remarkable cousin as a poor, suffering creature, all her gifts reduced to the struggle for breath. If it all comes to this, what is life worth?

J
OURNAL OF
WJ,
CONT
5
AM

Still not a wink of sleep.

There is more, I'm afraid. A breakdown after M's death, the Somerville Asylum. A room of green and white tiles. Shivering inside a wet sheet, teeth clacking like dominos. A painting of a girl in a white muslin dress standing on a bluff overlooking the sea, meant to drive me mad. Or madder. The doctors are all in on it. “Don't jump, Minny!” But my words can't reach her and she tumbles, her white dress billowing around her like a spinnaker. Hypodermic needle in left arm. “For your own good.” Helpless.

All color drains from world, then a dead field, the color of grey volcanic ash, endless. All around me the bodies of dead soldiers, grey-skinned, in heaps. All the fine dead Boston boys! I am sent here to this asylum because I am a shirker. A brief, panicked, doomed struggle. Grey turns to black. No more WJ, end of story.

In the greyness a pinpoint of light, like a very bright star rising in the east. Impossible to look away. I and this orb more brilliant than a thousand suns are one, made of the same substance. It contains the seeds of everything and floods me with bliss. A voice says, “Thou hast overcome the world.”

My body no more to me than a pile of dirty laundry. Oh! the shock of going back into it, like diving into an icy pond. Muscles ache, eyeballs like peeled tomatoes, throat parched, hands lashed to the bedstead with rubber cords. Then I remember. I chose to go back. Why? Minny went
and did not return. I made the wrong choice and must live with it. I weep behind the mask they have put over my eyes.

Written on my intake form (I read very well upside-down): Hypochondria, Melancholia, Chronic Masturbation. Not until my honeymoon did I realize there was nothing wrong with me. Something tugging at the fringes of my mind, tho'. What Freud said at dinner about a railway sleeping carriage when he was two.

I was 2 in 1844, the year of Father's Vastation. Living in Windsor, England. No memory of it. No, something. Making faces at baby Harry. I'd growl like a bear and Harry would bounce up and down, laughing and waving his arms. If I growled louder, Harry's mouth would turn down at the corners and he'd burst into tears. Every time. I kept crossing that boundary between laughter and tears, making Harry laugh, then cry, then laugh again. Other things I remember: Hail beating on the roof, snails leaving glistening slime trails on the flagstones, a steep staircase, floral wallpaper in my parents' bedroom. And this: Father with his head in Mother's lap blubbering like infant, Aunt Kate standing by the washstand, her lips pressed together in a grim line.

Chest tight, face hot. Run outside. Grass high, higher than my head. Pick a dandelion and blow, watch the wind tear it apart. Sky stretches blue, away and away. World so big, Willy little. Where mama, papa, aunty, nanny, brudder, everyone? Gone. Tears burn in my eyes. Desolation rips at my heart. Did not know it was possible to be so alone.

FOURTEEN
FOURTEEN

“H
AVE YOU EVER KNOWN A PERSON TO CHANGE HIS MIND SO OFTEN
, Henry? He is just like a blob of mercury; you can't put a finger on him.”

Naturally, we are speaking of William, who just left us for Liverpool to catch his steamer home. In a spasm of homesickness in his Paris hotel, he cancelled his plans for Switzerland and booked passage on an earlier ship, but while sitting here by my bedside yesterday, his mind had already shifted to a plan for bringing the whole family back to Europe next time.

“He is so like Father, isn't he?” I say. “Do you suppose he is ever content where he
is
?”

“I think that when he first arrives home he will describe his homecoming in terms Odysseus might have used about Ithaca. Then the petty annoyances of life will grate on him and he'll read the shipping news and start dreaming of foreign ports. In a year or two he'll come back to Europe, which he will love at first but which will inevitably disappoint him, each country in its turn, and on it will go.”

“Probably everyone is like that, but William is
more
so. He is more of everything than most people, wouldn't you say?”

While he was here, he told us about his Congress, which I could not entirely absorb due to my ignorance of physiology, et cetera, but there was apparently a great deal of hysteria and mesmerism in it. “As in a dream,” he told us, “I heard speaker after speaker refer to the published work of Monsieur Weelyam James. One Frenchman described ‘
Le Sentiment de l'Effort
' as ‘the greatest work in psychology ever written.' I had no idea anyone had heard of me.”

“The greatest
ever written
, William!” I said. “You and Henry can divide the spoils between you—Henry taking Britain and you the continent. What did you say in your talk, by the way?”

“I've already forgotten; insomnia has torn my mind to pieces. All I can tell you is that Nora Sidgwick rushed up to me afterwards and said, ‘We are so happy you are
as
you are.'”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I don't know.”

“Oh, your European fame will bring
such
joy to Miss Clarke, you have no idea. Now tell us about the Exposition. Was it ablaze with electric light, and what was that like?”

“Much brighter. Altogether different from gaslight. Some elderly ladies complained that it exposed all their wrinkles.”

“Did you go to the top of Mr. Eiffel's ‘abomination'?” Henry asked.

“Yes, I stepped into a large box with about sixty other people and we ascended through the air. It lurched a little. You feel it in your stomach.”

I shuddered, thinking of my snakes.

“Some people groaned and obviously regretted getting in, but I loved the sensation of leaving the earth. After a few minutes, the box stops with a loud clunk, and the uniformed man calls out ‘All change here!' You cross a narrow bridge to another box. It is called an Otis Elevator, and it takes you up to the top. Or near enough.”

“Why two boxes instead of one?” Henry asked.

“I don't know. I wondered myself.”

“Wait, William,” I said. “Let me close my eyes. Now please describe in detail the view from up there.”

“The walls are glass on two sides, and you can see down to the Exhibition gardens, two hundred seventy-five meters below. I remember the figure from the newspaper.”

The scene bloomed in my mind as William described it. How touchingly small the things of earth, mere toys, seen from the air. I saw the silver ribbon of the Seine, the small puffs of black smoke hanging over the railway line. A view heretofore known only to birds and a few balloonists.

“What about the
habitats humains
? The newspaper said there are all sorts of dwellings recreated in meticulous detail.”

“Yes. A Lapland house, next to a palatial Persian dwelling. A wooden Germanic house on stilts, a circular Gallic hut, and many others. Then you must imagine, Alice,
people
from everywhere—that is the principal thing—people of every color and race and in every costume. Egyptian donkey boys, African kings, witch doctors, Japanese geishas, Arab carpet merchants—well, I could go on and on. It was all like an opium dream and made me wish to spend the rest of my life as a
flâneur
.”

“You walk too fast to be a
flâneur
, William. They stroll languidly, lost in their reveries.”

“Lord Houghton said the rue de Caire is the most impresssive of the exhibits,” Henry said.

“I agree. It consists of several blocks of a Cairo souk recreated in Paris. It even has fifty or sixty Egyptian donkeys, cared for by the same number of donkey boys.”

“One boy per donkey?” I asked.

“Well, I like to think so. My attention was drawn to a tent where beautiful ladies straight out of
The Arabian Nights
did a wiggling dance with their stomachs bared.”

“Who wants to see a bare stomach?”

“I might have said that before, but these ladies changed my mind. After that I rambled around, drinking Russian tea from a samovar and, later, Turkish coffee from tiny cups.”

“How did you ever sleep after that?”

“Oh, I didn't. I am going home now principally to sleep.”

“What else did you do?”

“Well, from a trio of Canadian Indians I bought two tiny canoes made of birch-bark for Harry and Billy, then I began to wonder what to get for Peggy. Oh, Alice, I almost forgot! I brought you a little something.”

After rummaging through his suitcase, he brought out a beautiful pair of jet earrings and a necklace of ivory and jet. I almost burst into tears. They seemed far too precious for the likes of me, and I couldn't think where I'd wear them. But I recovered and thanked him profusely and then closed my eyes again as William resumed his tale.

“I saw many other wondrous sights, Alice. You must picture a magnificently robed and turbaned African king feasting on exotic delicacies of some sort.”

“How was this king attired?”

“In patterned swaths of yellow, black, and saffron, a turban of the same material, and any number of necklaces and bracelets. Enormous ivory earrings dragged his earlobes practically to his knees. He was a singularly beautiful man and looked as if he could put you in a trance in five seconds flat. Then, let's see, I saw two Siamese Buddhist monks hobnobbing with a Greek Orthodox priest. Don't you wonder what they were talking about, and in what language?”

“Yes, but one thing puzzles me, William. Are the people in the habitats actually who they are supposed to be, or are they actors? Is the African king really a king? Are the carpet merchants really carpet merchants? Where does everyone sleep at night—in the habitats, or in a hotel? And will they be content to go back to Darkest Africa after they've seen Paris?”

“All excellent questions, Alice, to which, sadly, I don't have the answer.”

“I'm going in October, and will try to find out for you, Alice.”

“Thank you, Henry. Did you see those big machines, William? In that place—what is it called?”

“The Galerie des Machines. Yes. I felt like a man in a myth who is taken, awed and terrified, into the abode of the gods.”

“What sort of machines?” Henry asked.

“Oh, pumps, dynamos, transformers, hydraulic elevators. Edison's ‘Big Lamps.' I'd seen a few of the things before, at the Exposition in Philadelphia in seventy-six, but they've grown larger and more complex now. Of course I don't understand them at all. The most remarkable machine was this new invention of Mr. Edison's, called a ‘phonograph.' It played two ‘records.'”

“Records?”

“That is what they call them. The sound is etched into disks somehow, in grooves. I don't understand it, but one played the ‘Marseillaise' and ‘America,' and on the other record male voices could be heard shouting,
Vive Carnot! Vive La France! Vive la République!
”

“Is the sound clear?”

“No. More like spirits speaking to you drunkenly from another world. I hope the mediums of Boston don't get wind of it.”

“What makes the moving walkway move, William?”

“Oh, gears I suppose,” he said vaguely. “You are a very exacting interviewer, Alice. Maybe you should take up journalism.”

“Sadly, William, the inside of a sickroom is not considered picturesque in our age.”

“Well, you glide effortlessly in one direction as other people glide past in the opposite. And such people, as I've said, from all over the world!” He took a pencil and a piece of notepaper and made a little sketch, in which Japanese women in kimonos glide by, and in the opposite direction, a turbaned man with a little boy.

He continued sketching furiously. “Here is something I actually saw. The maharajah, as you can see, is in front holding his small son's hand, while the maharani and the small daughters—whose noses and ears are pierced by blood-red rubies, by the way—trail behind.”

I closed my eyes and saw them in my mind, their skin the hue of cinnamon or caramel, clothes the color of persimmons, peonies, French scarlet poppies. Something about this was familiar—what was it? Telling my stories to William, who was writing them down and illustrating them. I was about four, watching the drawings come to life. His drawing of an owl
was
the owl; the little girl, who wins a staring contest with the owl and is crowned Queen of the Night,
was
a real little girl. When William named her Alice, she
was
me—a transformed me.

“As you may know, Alice, the Oriental insists on having his females walk behind him and does not permit them to run amok founding charities, hounding college presidents, and running the world.”

“And practicing unscrupulous journalism,” Henry added.

“Don't forget that we ‘Occidental females' are considered too irrational to vote and are barred from most occupations. According to your friend Francis Parkman, Henry—”

“He's hardly a
friend
, Alice.”

“Well, I seem to recall he wrote you a
very
unctuous letter about
The Bostonians
. Wasn't he the model for your Basil Ransom?”

“Among others.” Did I detect a faint blush on my brother's cheek? Perhaps he is a little embarrassed about
The Bostonians,
with its lampoons of feminists, psychics, and revered Boston figures like Miss Elizabeth Peabody. Bostonians have not quite forgiven him for this.

“Katherine and I had the misfortune to attend Mr. Parkman's Lowell lecture on The Rights of Women. A more accurate title might have been, Why Women Should Be Merely Ornamental. If females could vote, he said, we'd constitute a large noncombatant class and overwhelm the nation with our emotionalism. He seemed to feel that women could not be trusted to wage war with any regularity.”

“Good grief,” William sighed, then proceeded to describe other personages, such as Negroes in elegant suits, a Turkish pasha, a flock of Belgian nuns wearing wimples who seemed poised to take flight.

After he departed for the station in late afternoon, Harry and I spent the rest of the day analyzing him. “Didn't you want to laugh,” I said, “when he described his new house in New Hampshire? Fourteen doors all opening to the outside! It could be a description of William's mind. He is simply himself, isn't he? A native of the James family and of no other land.”

The next day Henry, too, sank below my little horizon, plunging me back into solitude. I think it will take me some time to assimilate the enormous fact of seeing William again after so many years. It is like a reunion with parts of myself that had been wandering in circles, lost, for years.