Alice in Bed Read online

  One day when the door was ajar I saw him sitting before his looking glass sketching. It was a self-portrait, very well done, but his face looked hollowed out by grief. It was almost as sad as the sketch he did five years earlier of Wilky lying in our parlor at Newport, delirious from his war wounds.

  In early March came the telegram informing us that Minny was dead, of consumption. William closed in on himself completely, and Mother delivered his meals on a tray, left outside his door. The food was seldom touched.

  MINNY TEMPLE

  PELHAM, NEW YORK

  JANUARY 15TH ’70

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  . . . the unutterable sadness & mystery that envelops us all—I shall take some of your chloral tonight. Don’t let my letter of yesterday make you feel that we are not very near each other—friends at heart. Altho’ practically being much with you or even writing to you much would not be good for me—Too much strain on one key will make it snap—& there is an attitude of mind, (not a strength of Intellect by any means) in which we are much alike—Good-bye

  JOURNAL OF WILLIAM JAMES

  MARCH 1870

  Death sits at the heart of each one of us; some she takes all at once; some she takes possession of step by step, but sooner or later we forfeit to her all that nature ever gave us. Instead of skulking to escape her all our days and being run down by her at last, let us submit beforehand.

  HENRY JAMES

  MALVERN, MARCH 29TH 1870

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  And so Minny went on, sleeping less & less, waking wider & wider, until she awaked absolutely! I had a dream of telling her of England and of her immensely enjoying my stories, But instead of my discoursing to her, I shall have her forever talking to me, Amen Amen, to all she may say. The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought.

  SEVEN

  LATER I WOULD RECALL THE SHADOWS OF THE TREES LYING across Quincy Street, how sharp and definite they were, as if drawn with a ruler. I would remember a brief flash of well-being, the last I would have for a while. Then Mother was telling me that William had gone to the Somerville Asylum, and I was not to discuss this with anyone outside the family.

  Somerville! Was it that bad?

  “What is supposed to be wrong with him?”

  Mother was vague. Hypochondria, melancholia, and unwholesome habits were cited along with William’s need for rest. “You know how he will always burn the candle at both ends. I suppose he will need a different climate soon.”

  I felt a surge of rage toward her. Somerville! Where so many Bostonians went and never came out.

  “Climate has nothing to do with Will’s troubles, dear,” Father called from the verandah. “His problem is that he has been poisoned by empirical doctrines.”

  What he meant, I believe, was that William was an unbeliever. When I’d queried William about his philosophy recently, his answers had been cryptic. “When the world seems to me base and evil, my will is palsied.” I asked if he still planned to go into science, and he said, “I am about as little fitted by nature to be a worker in science of any sort as anyone can be. Yet my only ideal of life is the scientific life.”

  We were forbidden to visit or write to him; family influences were considered baleful at this juncture, apparently. Aunt Kate was in Italy with a Van Buren cousin. Harry was still feasting on England. Wilky and Bob were in Milwaukee trying to get a start in the railroad business. The hush that fell over the house was like death, and if I did not distract myself, my deepest fear slipped through the cracks: My parents dead, my brothers gone, claimed by marriage and families, and myself alone, a sad wandering shade. There seemed to be an inevitability about it, like an oncoming train.

  I took to spending mornings in William’s room. His window afforded a view of the slender elms and the red brick of Harvard Yard, the young men jostling each other on the diagonal footpaths. You could set your clock by President Eliot leaving his house at one o’clock and returning at three-forty-five. From one side, in profile, you’d never guess that a large port-wine birthmark covered most of the other cheek. It was as if there were two President Eliots, one with the birthmark, the other without.

  I was hungry for any trace of William. A hint of pipe smoke on a velvet dressing gown. A list, in his small, neat hand, in the pocket of his Norfolk jacket. A pillow that retained the shape of his head. I unearthed his extensive “physiognomic collection” from a drawer, and noted the addition of two Germans with monocles and a delicately pretty young lady with an aigrette in her hair. (William, who dabbled in phrenology, prevailed on everyone he knew to send him cabinet photographs, even of strangers. He had over a hundred.) On his dresser, next to his silver comb and brush set, sat a framed photograph of Minny, at age fourteen, with her hair brutally chopped off. She’d done it herself, evidently with sheep shears. She said she wanted to feel the wind in her hair, but I suspected she’d had lice.

  Sitting cross-legged on William’s disheveled bed, I scrutinized the books stacked on his nightstand. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 defeated me at once with a passage so long and dull I could not continue, and Thomas H. Huxley’s The Scientific Aspects of Positivism was not much livelier. Two books were left. Divine Love and Wisdom by Emanuel Swedenborg and Christianity The Logic of Creation by Henry James, Sr. It seemed that William had been reading Father and Swedenborg just before going mad. This was a little odd in view of his oft-stated opinion of the paternal prose, neatly summed up by the frontispiece he designed for Father’s books—a man flogging a dead horse. But recently, it appeared, he’d been actually trying to understand Father’s Ideas. How had he become a stranger whose thoughts I could only guess at?

  There must be a clue here somewhere, I thought. William’s library was as vast as it was eclectic. My mind swam trying to read the titles. Tomes of philosophy, French volumes on ether and obstetrics, German texts on physiology. My eyes fell on a maroon volume, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, by Henry Maudsley. Shortly before William went “away,” I recalled Mother remarking, “I see him hanging his head over a large maroon volume, and then he goes around with a peculiar stricken look.” Was this the offending book? I flipped through the pages, and came to an underscored passage:

  Multitudes of human beings come into the world weighted with a destiny against which they have neither the will nor the power to contend; they are the step-children of nature, and groan under the worst of all tyrannies—the tyranny of a bad organization.

  This must have been meaningful to William, for the margins bristled with arrows and exclamation marks. I flipped to another chapter and landed on a doubly underlined passage.

  The ordinary hysterical symptoms may pass by degrees into chronic insanity. Loss of power of will is a characteristic of hysteria in all its Protean forms, and with the perverted sensations and disordered movements there is always some degree of moral perversion.

  A dying fly buzzed in the window casement. I slammed the horrid book shut and stuffed it back on the shelf between an obstetrics textbook and a volume entitled Psychologie Morbide.

  The next day, the room had a sour smell, which I traced to a half-eaten apple in the wastebasket. Like a cat burglar, I rifled through each of the drawers in his desk, discovering a small, worn leather notebook. This flipped open to a place where several pages had been torn out, leaving jagged edges. Just before the torn section was a page of notes on a book called Du Haschish et d’Alienation Mentale by J. Moreau, some observations about insanity. Right after the ripped-out pages I came upon the saddest lines ever written, in William’s hand:

  I may not study, make or enjoy, but I can will. I can find some real life in the mere respect for other forms of life. Nature & life have unfitted me for any affectionate relations with other individuals—it is well to know the limits of one’s individual faculties.

  It tortured me not to know what he’d confided in the missing pa
ges. Something about Minny? A suicide note, which he later tore up? Or something I could not even imagine? Perhaps there was a hard, unknowable core in everyone; perhaps it was ultimately impossible to bridge the gap between people. I was holding the diary in my hand like a hot coal when I heard Mother’s steps on the stairs. I quickly stuffed it back into the drawer, and pretended to be scanning the bookshelves.

  “Alice?” She peered in anxiously.

  “Hello, Mother. I was just looking up a word in William’s German dictionary.” I held up this thick volume. “Do you know what Vorstellung means?” She did not. Neither did I. I’d just read the word in one of William’s diary entries.

  A few days later, while Mother and the maids were occupied with beating the carpets, I returned to William’s diary and found a page with a cross, marked with the initials M and T and the date March 6, 1870. Under it was the following melancholy passage:

  By the big part of me that’s in the tomb with you may I realize and believe in the immediacy of death! May I feel that every torment suffered here passes and is as a breath of wind—every pleasure too. Minny, your death makes me feel the nothingness of all our egotistic fury—The inevitable release is sure . . . tragedy is at the heart of all of us. Go to meet it instead of dodging it all your days and being run down by it. Use your death (or your life, it’s all one). tat tvam asi.

  Shortly after writing that, William went to Somerville. Strangely, apart from the particulars, I knew how he felt. Perhaps it was part of the James temperament to arrive at these bleak and stony outcrops of existence.

  “We expect the rest to do him a great deal of good,” Mother told all our friends, as if William were at a health resort and not a madhouse. A memory came back to me: William and I sitting on the verandah drinking lemonade while Mother and Aunt Kate knelt in the fresh loam planting seedlings, in ecstasies over the hollyhocks.

  “How do you suppose they remain so cheerful in the face of the pain of existence?” William said.

  “It’s just the way they are, I suppose.”

  “It’s because they are healthy-minded. Not sick souls . . . like us, Alice.”

  Along with missing William, I felt remorse for snubbing Minny the last time I saw her. It was too late to make amends, obviously. Not long after her death, Elly and Kitty came to stay a few nights in Cambridge, both limp from days of weeping. Having yoked herself in marriage to a much older Emmett cousin, Kitty was expecting a baby, who would inevitably bear the imprint of all this grief, poor thing. And Elly was about to wed another Emmett greybeard. There was an infinite supply of them evidently.

  “Isn’t it awful?” I said to Mother. “To sell yourself for life!”

  “It’s nothing to do with selling, Alice. They have no choice, poor girls; they must settle. They have nothing to live on.”

  Still, that was selling yourself.

  In Balzac’s La Fille aux Yeux d’Or there was a character who

  came from a country where women are not beings, but things—chattels, with which one does as one wills, which one buys, sells, and slays; in short, which one uses for one’s caprices as you, here, use a piece of furniture.

  I thanked my lucky stars that I was not from such a country. But was there such a great difference between being “bought and sold” and marrying a man you don’t love because you have no money and no means of getting any?

  “I’m sure the girls will make a go of it,” Mother said. “Love grows over time.”

  I was not disposed to believe this. Only Minny seemed to be holding out for something better, and where had that got her? If she had lived, she would have become a spinster adjunct to one of her sisters’ households. In the stories I read in Godey’s, young women of noble character were rescued from a cruel fate at the last moment, but that had not happened to the Temples, and I did not think it would happen to me. On the whole, it seemed that noble character was rarely rewarded.

  Two months later, William returned from Somerville fatter, healthier, and quite cheerful. He never spoke of what happened there, and the superintendent told our parents not to broach the subject. “He must put it behind him and never speak of it again,” Mother said.

  It was a relief to see him taking an interest in life again, going to parties in high spirits, hosting meetings of the Metaphysical Club, setting off for the new laboratory he shared with his medical school friends Jim Putnam and Henry Bowditch, to work on physiological experiments that he suddenly thought would be quite significant. Around this time, he discovered a French philosopher whom he would credit with his salvation. A Monsieur Renouvier, who believed that a person was not completely at the mercy of Nature; that even in a largely mechanical world, there was a small space for an independent will. Just a spark was enough for William. Standing on that ground, he could reclaim his life. I marveled that something as dry as philosophy could affect someone so personally, but that was William.

  In the late spring of 1870 the Nortons returned to Cambridge, laden with several new Tintorettos, a Veronese, a Tiepolo, an uncomfortable Louis Quinze loveseat and matching chairs, several precious quartos and first editions, in addition to a great many Italian and French phrases and tales of Ruskin and Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and William Morris. Grace Norton flaunted her new Paris fashions, and even the children were prattling in Italian and French.

  “Isn’t it monstrous?” Sara laughed. “They are like little wind-up toys. Have you ever met an affected six-year-old?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Well, have a little chat with Sally one of these days.”

  “Can’t you influence them, as their aunt?”

  “Oh, I don’t wield much influence in that household. Those children have too many old-maid aunts as it is.”

  “There will never be a shortage of maiden aunts in Boston, I suppose.”

  Our reunion was so affectionate I felt guilty for having previously struck Sara dead in my mind. I didn’t mind hearing her say that she’d missed me “excruciatingly” and couldn’t wait to tell me all about the Nortons’ European inanities.

  A few days later, walking along the tow-path of the Charles, Sara said she wanted to discuss our Emerald Hours. I wondered whether any other pair in human history had ever uttered the sentence, I want to discuss our Emerald Hours. But it did not seem the right time to say this to Sara, who seemed nervous and brittle. Her eyes were fixed on the ground in front of her and she was speaking haltingly, as if from a memorized text, telling me she’d read in “an authoritative medical book” that a woman who became “too attached” to her own sex would coarsen her nature, endanger her future as a mother, and possibly develop facial hair and become masculine in appearance.

  Forgive me, but I burst out laughing.

  “What?” Sara looked hurt.

  “Sorry. I was just picturing you with a handle-bar mustache.”

  This elicited a tight little smile. “Please don’t make light of this, Alice.”

  Seeing how fragile she looked, I saw how hard it was for Sara to have this conversation and how nervous she was about my reaction.

  “Don’t worry, Sara. It is fine with me. To put all that behind us.”

  Actually, it was a relief.

  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 time
s. 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.