Alice in Bed Page 11

  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 l
ove; 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.

  “He has such soaring hopes,” Mother confided to Aunt Kate, “but he always ends up disillusioned. He tells the tutors he does not want the boys ‘oppressed’ by too systematic instruction and then he finds fault with the lack of system. And it is for the boys’ education principally that we came to Europe.”

  Was that true? Being quiet and easily overlooked, I had an unfortunate tendency to overhear mystifying adult conversations. I thought we were in Europe because it had Art and History and Cathedrals and Concierges and Soldiers, et cetera, and so that Father could meet European men of letters and discuss his Ideas. There seemed to be so much I didn’t know.

  In those days Father’s Ideas seemed no more or less true than fairy tales about wicked queens, trolls, and fairy spells. In the little amateur theatricals William wrote for us to perform there was often a bearded figure, limping about, speaking glorious religious gibberish, and Father would laugh louder than anyone. (He was prone to laughing or weeping immoderately—like a great river that periodically overflowed its banks.)

  For all I knew, all fathers limped on one leg, thought the world was a dream, wrote books that no one read, gave lectures no one understood, and traveled to Europe with their entire library packed into trunks. (Father’s books were the first thing unpacked whenever we arrived anywhere.)

  It was years before I found out that no other family was like ours.

  The old Paris was partially eclipsed now by Baron Haussmann’s modern Paris. Smart restaurants hid behind vaulted Pompeiian-style colonnades or surprised you with a stained-glass cupola over the dining room. You might also come across a procession of new communicants in white dresses, like barley-sugar angels with expressive little faces, walking into a cathedral that had been in use for almost a thousand years.

  There was no denying it: Paris was worldliness, layer upon layer of it. The priests looked like old roués, the mother superiors like mandarins. The full moon, the color of old gold, seemed to say, “I’ve seen it all.” Why had Father brought us here as children if he so despised “the world.” Did he fail to see the worldliness, or did he secretly embrace it? And was the world really the opposite of the divine, or were they two faces of a single mystery?

  My mind fell into silence, but it was not empty.

  My “improvement” was duly noted in Harry’s weekly letter home, which I read over his shoulder in a bistro. This assessment, half obscured by his forearm, was accurate as far as it went. Something that had long been dormant inside me was coming to life. What it was exactly I could not say.

  While Harry left to spend a day wandering about some artistic quarters that interested him, Aunt Kate and I plunged into one of the grands magasins—the modern “shopping paradises for women,” as the newspapers called them. In a happy daze I tried on gloves, hats, scarves, shawls, and jewelry, and the looking glasses, flatteringly lit, seemed to reveal a more glamorous potential me. “We may have to buy another trunk for our loot,” said Aunt Kate, as transfixed as I by the fashion utopia around us. Its luxe et volupté, if not the calme, was so far beyond what Boston or even New York offered it might have been an absinthe vision.

  It should be noted that Aunt Kate’s medications alone took up a sizable portion of a trunk. On the marble-topped dresser in our shared hotel room I’d taken an inventory. Paregoric, Tincture of Arnica, Pepsin tablets, Dr. Baker’s Blood Builder, The Famous Swiss Sleeping Draught, a hot water bottle. To this cache would be added her new purchases: fig laxative, Eau de la Jeunesse complexion cream, French Arsenic Complexion Wafers, Dr. Pasteur’s Microbe Destroyer, and a “ladies syringe” that I suspected was for Female Problems.

  Every day it was becoming harder for me to tolerate Aunt Kate, whose voice and predictable comments grated on my ears. She was clearly incapable of understanding the miracle that was unfolding within me, the way Paris was inundating my senses and healing my brokenness. She also had a baleful genius for landing by instinct on the very subject I most wished to avoid. In the hansom on the way back from one of the shopping paradises, she badgered me for twenty minutes with questions about Sara. “Have you heard from Sara lately, dear? I imagine Charles is grateful for her help with the children.” I did not want to think about Sara just now. Her sister Susan had died in childbirth several months ago, and Sara and Theodora were swept up in the care of their six motherless nieces and nephews. There were ominous signs that Charles was becoming swept up in Sara, as well, a situation too heart-sickening to contemplate and one I definitely wished to avoid with my aunt, who was like a dog with a bone when she got the scent of something.

  “I’m sure she is terribly busy, Aunt Kate.”

  To be honest, it was a challenge to share Aunt Kate’s room and be privy to her thoughts, her ointments, her snores, not to mention the actual air she breathed (for when you share a room with a person, are you not breathing in the air she has just breathed out, which has been in her lungs?). At night I’d fling open every window, inadvertently beckoning a cloud of moths to come in and immolate themselves in our candles. Fortunately, Aunt Kate dropped off quickly, and I would go sit with Harry on his balcony in the warm, dense, humming night, with the gas-lamps strung like pearls along the avenues.

  “Are you going to scribble your travel notes tonight, Harry?” I asked him in our third week.

  “No, I may go out later, walk around a bit.” He shifted
uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Where?”

  “I-I haven’t decided yet.”

  We sat in silence, listening to the French voices floating on the soft air.

  “Do you remember that grand hôtel particulier we lived in, with the enormous chandeliers and lots of gilt and ormolu—the one that overlooked the Champs-Élysées? You boys had your lessons inside the parapets, and I envied you. Or did I just dream that?”

  “No. That was the era of Monsieur Claudel, the tutor who had written an essay that was mentioned favorably by Sainte-Beuve.”

  “Mentioned favorably by Sainte-Beuve! Well, that might explain how you got so literary, Harry. I remember sitting on the balcony watching ladies having fittings in a dressmaking establishment across the street. And in another window I saw young ballerinas practicing pliés. I thought they were princesses, like the ones in my storybooks. I was heartbroken when Mother told me I could not become a ballerina. She did not say why. Oh, Harry, remember Mademoiselle Danse?”

  “There was a woman with a history, as they say.”

  “I remember when she told me of Madame de Staël, who wrote Considérations sur la Révolution Française, the most important book of the century on the subject. Madame de Staël stood up to Napoleon, she said, and was exiled to St. Petersburg. I’d never dreamed my sex could do anything important enough to be remembered after death. It made a rather strong impression.”

  I saw Harry smile fondly at the memory of the most sophisticated and Parisian of our governesses. He and William often came along on our babyish outings to the Punch and Judy shows when Mademoiselle Danse was in charge.