Alice in Bed (5 page)

PART TWO
PART TWO

ONE
ONE

1866

“I
THOUGHT TONIGHT WAS WORSE THAN USUAL
. . . . W
HAT DID
you think?”

No need for Sara to explain that she was referring to the dinner party we'd just endured with four other families at Shady Hill, home of the Nortons, her in-laws. (Or, as she preferred to call them, her
out
-laws.) Over the past few years we'd reached the highest stage of young female friendship, marked by a private code of allusions and jokes quite indecipherable by and surely annoying to others. We were eighteen years old.

“Well, it was certainly
Nortonesque
,” I said. “Grace was quite louche about the oysters, I thought.”

Sara's laughter rang out like a bell at the notion of her tightly wound, perfectionistic sister-in-law, Grace Norton, being louche. (We would learn that she really was, but that came later.) It was hot and muggy, and we were stretched out on the Sedgwicks' back lawn in our nightdresses. “After twelve hours of wearing a corset, not wearing one is almost wanton,” Sara said. She could be depended on to make this observation almost every time. “I could melt from sheer pleasure and end up as a little puddle near the azaleas.”

“We ought to start a society, Sara. The Nightdress Society! Boston does not have enough societies; it needs
more
.” Of course, it went without saying that Boston had more societies than it had inhabitants.

So we stared up at the heavens for a bit, exhausting the constellations we knew and arguing over whether the heavenly object above the crown of the beech tree was Jupiter or Mars. Sara insisted briefly that it was the North Star. When we fell silent, the cicadas and tree frogs were deafening. As a small child, I thought this was the sound of the stars twinkling, and I told Sara that this had been a holy thing to me, this tinkling twinkling from deep space, and how crushed I had been to learn the pedestrian truth. (I'd never admitted this to another soul.)

Sara went quiet and I could feel her taking it in.

After a while, I said, “It might not be
so
bad at Shady Hill, if not for the long, drawn-out ordeal of shaking hands with Charles. Why does he
do
that?”

“Oh, I think it is something to do with Italy.”

“How so?”

Sara was prone to long, deep pauses, and we were in one now. Finally, flipping over onto her stomach, she pressed her face into the grass and inhaled deeply. It sounded like the wind sighing in the tops of trees.

“Well, Alice, I think I
can
explain the origin of the long drawn-out hand-shaking thing.” Whereupon she sat up, and, clearing her throat dramatically, began to speak in the cadences of “Nortonese,” our version of the hyper-affected speech of the Nortons. “It is widely believed,” she said, “that this
barbarous
custom originated when Don Carlos was wending his way through his beloved Italy. Not infrequently, he was seized by an ungovernable passion to visit certain great noblemen, who waited breathlessly to be enlightened on Dante's
Paradiso
by this melancholy American of the lugubrious mustache. On one such occasion, through the scrim of rude hovels, Charles discerned the gaunt figure of a count—Do Italians have counts?”

“I believe so.”

“—a count shaking hands with his peasants on Christmas Eve. Returning to his barren native shores and dejected at having no peasants on his own land, Don Carlos took up the feudal custom with his guests. And not just on Christmas Eve.”

I was giggling helplessly now, as much at Sara's mock-ponderous delivery as at her words. Mockery was one of our favorite sports. We both felt that Charles had become very tiresome about Dante lately, and there was widespread fear that he might launch a Dante circle at any moment.

I picked up the thread. “It cannot be denied that he is a distinguished looking man, Lord of Shady Hill, Propagator of
Ruskinism
, Explicator of Dante, Devotee of Tintoretto-ism. . . . And yet, and yet, something spoils the effect. Can it be the manner in which the mouth and mustache droop when he quotes from the
Purgatorio
? That womanish rosebud mouth fringed by a drooping mustache—so reminiscent of a pond fringed by weeds!”

“Oh, stop, Alice! My stomach hurts!” Sara was rolling around on the lawn now, clutching her sides.

“Well, Sara,” I continued, “the dinner guests, whose paws had been thoroughly caressed and massaged, with long melancholy Nortonian glances thrown in, bore up as well as could be hoped. But being crude Yankees, unfamiliar with the customs of fealty, they found it wearisome in the end. Certain guests, notably two maidens of that shire, slunk homeward afterwards and, taking refuge beneath a starry canopy, found solace in singing of the incomparable exploits of Charlemagne. The End.”

“The End,” Sara repeated, like the
amen
at the end of a prayer.

Our problem was not really the Nortons—even we knew that—although it was undeniable that they took art and themselves too seriously. The real problem was that we were eighteen, and our lives were beginning to feel like clothes we'd outgrown.

“It's impossible to imagine Baudelaire here, or Coleridge, or really anyone,” Sara complained. “Cambridge is at heart just a small parochial village.”

“Yes, it is sad. Could the Charles River inspire a decent hashish poem? Even with the Harvard crew sculling upon it?”

Unfortunately, our families were incapable of discerning that we were meant for finer things, for lives more intensely lived. What this life might consist of was hazy, but it consumed us in those days in a
fever of yearning. Like the Jameses, the Sedgwicks were a brilliant family star-crossed by eccentricity, tragedy, madness, and early deaths, and perhaps that was one reason I felt free to confide in her about such things as “Father's Ideas.”

“Isn't he a Swedenborgian or something?”

“Yes. It started when Father went to an English ‘watering hole' and met a lady there who told him about Swedenborg. This was years before I was born. When I was very young I heard this as ‘Sweden Borg' and assumed that ‘borg' was Swedish for bog, and that Father had been to a very wet one somewhere in Sweden.”

Sara laughed enthusiastically. “There
could
be religions that start in bogs, I suppose. Is he still a Swedenborgian?”

“No. He diverged. Now his religion is so exclusive it has only one member. Father.”

As Sara giggled, a great relief fell over me. Father's Ideas had been a burden for me since early childhood, to be honest. I couldn't make sense of his writings, but William told me not to worry; no one could. Father had been disinherited in his youth by his father, the stern Calvinist patriarch known as “William James of Albany,” and successfully contested the will. I'd already divulged this to Sara, along with other family secrets. That my Aunt Janet was a madwoman, several uncles drank to excess and were prone to spells, and my peculiar cousin Kitty James was in the habit of holding Bible study circles with the lunatics in her husband's asylum. “The husband is an alienist, whom we have never met because he is supposed to be afraid of people,” I explained. (It was immensely consoling to me that some of the Sedgwick relations were equally mad.)

“Only of
sane
people, evidently!” Sara said, and this made me laugh so hard I snorted through my nose. “And yet,” she added, “despite our questionable and probably degenerate ancestry, we are both extraordinarily sane.”

“Yes,
astonishingly
sane.”

I'd been enlightened on modern theories of Hereditary Degeneracy by William, the designated genius of our family. At breakfast he had a habit of reading aloud juicy sections of medical books tracing the
downfall of a family from “unwholesome habits” in the first generation to slobbering idiocy in the fifth. Acquired characteristics were inherited, according to these authors, inevitably sinking a marginally sane family into mindless degeneracy in a few generations.

“Genius and madness are closely related, according to William. The more genius, the greater the odds of madness. I don't know how this works scientifically, but I'd venture to say that if any families are on the path to incurable degeneracy it would be the Jameses and the Sedgwicks.”

Sara hooted at this, a little too loudly in my opinion.

“Shh, Sara! You'll wake your aunts!”

“Oh, don't worry; they're deaf. They are also quite sane, by the way. So how did your father lose his leg?” This was the sort of personal question that good Bostonians would rather die than ask, though they would be secretly desperate to know. In those days Sara was taking a stand against the Beacon Street niceties.

“A barn fire in Albany when he was twelve. I thought I told you. He dashed in to rescue the horses and his leg had to be amputated.”

“Well, I suppose something like that could drive a person to Swedenborg. Have you seen the stump?”

“Of course. You can come over and see it anytime you wish. Father is not shy about putting it on display.”

“What color is it?”

“Mottled, violet and white, more or less.” I sighed, thinking of the twelve-year-old Henry James having a leg amputated without anesthesia and growing up under the Calvinist tyranny of William James of Albany. “Poor Father! He believed the end of slavery would usher in a new heaven and a new earth. But even with slavery abolished, the same old sinful world just keeps rolling along.”

“How disappointing. That is why I try to have no high ideals.”

And then Sara sprang to her feet and began to turn in a slow circle in the moonlight, arms outstretched, like a jewelry box ballerina. “Do you see what is
wrong
with this scene, Alice?”

“What?”

“Not a single light in any window. All the dull professors and their adoring wives asleep. It's like a spell, a torpor. Everyone in this house
retires before ten o'clock—my aunts and Theodora, anyhow. We never know where
Arthur
is. Being a man, he can do as he pleases, while we have a dozen people at our backs. It is a very unjust world.”

A perfect half-moon, with a sharp edge like a cookie cut in half, hung low in the east, encircled by a halo of milky blue.

“I know what, Alice. After we make sure my aunts are snoring like angels, let's visit Arthur's wardrobe and borrow some trousers and cravats and hats—”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” I say, not wishing to go down this road again. “Arthur's clothes won't fit us.”

“We'll
adapt
them, you'll see, and then we'll cross the bridge into Boston and find out for ourselves what the world of men is like. Like George Sand. Don't you want to
know
what they keep from us?”

Maybe it was the light in Sara's eyes or the way she clutched me from behind and leaned into me, a sensation rendering me briefly speechless; at any rate, I submitted to another fruitless discussion of how to pass ourselves off as males of the species. I was of the opinion that the great George Sand had made up the whole thing. After all, the woman did make up stories as her profession!

Still tipsy from the Nortons' after dinner brandies, Sara got up and tried out a male swagger.

“You look like a drunken sailor on shore leave, Sara. A bizarrely feminine one. Anyway, where would we
go
? What would we actually
do
?”

“A tavern. We'll pop in and order a whiskey. Two whiskeys.”

But how did you conduct yourself in a tavern? When you ordered a glass of whiskey, did you ask for a particular brand? Did you pay when you ordered or at the end? While Sara and I knew no end of sewing stitches, ordering a drink in a tavern was plainly beyond us. And then there was the problem of our voices. “Anyhow,” I pointed out, “the moment we leave the house we'll be recognized by President Eliot, who always knows by some mysterious power what everyone in Cambridge is up to.”

“Does he really?”

“Yes, he does. Father says he derives a secret joy from delivering bad news to people. You can be sure he'd lecture us about how young ladies are meant to behave, and bring us home to our families in shame.”

The tavern idea was jettisoned, for now. We lay on the lawn in silence, slapping the mosquitoes that were landing on our bare flesh with increasing frequency.

Sara said, “Have you ever studied men's faces at a dinner party after they've gone off by themselves to smoke? When they rejoin the women, they look as if they'd returned from some dark and mysterious country about which they are sworn to secrecy.”

We stared up at the night sky in silence for a while. Unlike Boston, Cambridge had only a handful of streetlamps then, and the stars were a splash of diamonds on black velvet. I felt a wave of irritation at them for being so far away and inaccessible.

“If you were a man, Alice, what would you do? I think I'd go live with the Bedouins. Flaubert says the vast silence of the desert is like the sea.”

More drunken shouts erupted on Kirkland Street. A pack of young men nearby were howling like wolves. “Ah, the great scholars of Harvard,” Sara sighed.

“I shouldn't like to go about on a camel, Sara. They are bad-natured, so they say.” In truth, I didn't feel drawn to join the Bedouins at all, and despite growing up with four brothers, I suspected the real lives of men were as remote from women as the craters of the moon. Meanwhile, women were obliged to live inside safe little cages like parakeets.

We fell silent. What more was there to say? Our little fantasy of liberation had collapsed and could not be revived. When the mosquitoes became intolerable, we headed for the house.

The French doors always stuck in humid weather. Sara vigorously jiggled the handle while pushing against the door with the sole of her foot. This did the trick. Inside we wandered about the sleeping house silently, like assassins, grass clippings stuck to the soles of our bare feet. Sara stubbed her toe on a chair leg and at the same moment a mouse jumped down from a pantry shelf and sped across the floor. We grabbed hold of each other as if we were passengers on a sinking ocean liner, laughing and shushing each other.