Alice in Bed Page 3

  Oratory was inculcated in the young in the belief that every young man of good family should be prepared to mount a pulpit and stir the citizenry with an exhortation of some sort. To hear Bostonians talk, you’d think that such institutions as the Saturday Club, Papanti’s dancing school, the Ether Monument, and the water side of Beacon Street were on a par with Salisbury Cathedral, Versailles, and the Sistine Chapel, and a newcomer had best acquaint himself with them in a hurry.

  Mr. Eliot’s first cousin, Charles Eliot Norton, editor of the North American Review and future Harvard professor of fine arts, resided in baronial splendor on his estate, Shady Hill, north of Harvard Yard. It provoked considerable mirth in Cambridge that the two cousins had staked out antipodal positions on the great questions of the day. Pragmatic, scientific, and utilitarian, Mr. Eliot, a chemistry professor before becoming president of Harvard, declared on more than one occasion, “The most useless people we see are the Americans who live abroad without any profession or occupation but that of time-killer.” His cousin, meanwhile, spent long periods abroad, preferring Italy to all other cultures. Of all parts of Europe Italy was the most decadent in Mr. Eliot’s view. “Rome stinks,” he was heard to say. Also: “Cathedrals are bad things, being costly and not well adapted to other uses when no longer needed for idolatry.” Meanwhile, Charles Norton suffered daily, hourly, from the newness, crassness, tastelessness, ignorance, and barbarism of America.

  It was to Charles Norton, his formidable mother, and his two cultivated unmarried sisters, Jane and Grace, that our family was principally beholden in those years. Charles was the Platonic idea of the pedant. An autocrat on intellectual matters, he was fond of saying that “two institutions—Harvard College and the New York Nation—are the only solid barriers against the invasion of barbarism and vulgarity.”

  If you conversed with him, you’d be subjected to utterances like, “Like Antonio in Twelfth Night, I can no answer make but thanks, and thanks, and thanks.” He would confide over his after-dinner brandy, “What I have suffered most from in my life is the omnipresence of vulgarity.” The real cause of his suffering, I thought, was that he lived cut off from his feelings and then blamed society for the hollowness he felt. He, of course, believed he was a deep thinker and never understood that he merely skimmed the surface of life.

  Charlemagne, as I liked to call him, became the butt of Father’s jokes, and the two remained in a genial state of war for years. I recall Father lifting his gaze to heaven and saying, “How that man does wither every green and living thing!”

  For me, the great gift of the Nortons was that through them I met Sara Sedgwick. Until then, Fanny Morse had been my closest friend. I loved Fanny dearly, but I soon loved Sara more. She was, you might say, the best and the worst thing that happened to me in those years.

  The four young Sedgwicks were orphans, left in the care of a pair of kindly British maiden aunts, the Misses Ashburner. When Susan Sedgwick gave her hand in marriage to the much older Charles Eliot Norton, the two families became inextricably linked. Father could never accept the May–November union between Susan and Charles. “To think of that prim old snuffers imposing himself on that pure young flame!” he would say with a dyspeptic wince. “What a world!”

  Charles was a man stricken with a perpetual melancholy, perhaps due to his belief that culture had been going steadily downhill for the past three or four centuries. Renaissance and baroque Venice was the apogee of civilization, and Tintoretto the greatest of artists. Although Charles’s private art collection included several Tintorettos and other masterpieces, nothing could seem to console him for the absence of art museums, Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals, and even gentlemen (according to him) in America.

  As we became friends, Sara and I read the same books, passing them back and forth with notes inserted in the pages, often in a private code. Like many eighteen-year-olds, we were affected in a deeply personal way by our reading and came to feel that we suffered from grave ennuis. These were triggered almost daily by the mind-numbing calls a woman had to make on infirm old ladies, distant relatives, and anyone who left a calling card in the brass bowl in your hall. Also by the Boston pieties, such as the habit of quoting other Bostonians (e.g., Julia Ward Howe, Miss Elizabeth Peabody, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes) as if no one else in the world had ever produced a memorable utterance. Above all we scorned the syrupy cult of womanhood embodied in such magazines as Godey’s Lady’s Book, which Sara and I would sometimes leaf through, hunting for the most moronic passages.

  We were gorging ourselves, meanwhile, on subversive French ideas. We savored the scandalous worlds of Flaubert and Zola, and quoted Baudelaire as other Bostonians quoted Mr. Emerson. Opium and absinthe poets, natural realism, decadence, corrupt men, fallen women, kept women, cocottes—things that did not exist, as far as we knew, in Boston—thrilled us. We idolized George Sand, a woman with a man’s name who scandalized the bourgeoisie by smoking in public, leaving her husband, carrying on tempestuous love affairs with Chopin and the poet Alfred de Musset, among others, and threatening suicide at the drop of a hat. Most glamorously in our eyes, she dared walk around Paris at night dressed in men’s clothes.

  “George Sand writes gracefully, but why, oh why, do they have to translate books about adultery and such things where any young person can get hold of them?” Mother said at supper one night when Sara and her sister Theodora were dining with us.

  “You are forgetting, Mother, that we can read French. Sara has been very much corrupted by taking on Les Liaisons Dangereuses at a tender age.”

  Puzzlement clouded the maternal brow and Father unleashed one of his great belly laughs, pointing his fork in my direction as if to award me the point.

  “Well, leaving them in French would at least make them more difficult to read,” Mother persisted.

  “Logic has never been our mother’s strong suit,” William remarked to Sara.

  Father then said amiably that George Sand’s latest book made his gorge rise. “I don’t think I ever read a thing that reflects a viler light on her personal history. How bestial that woman must be, to grovel spontaneously in such filth.” Such abrupt changes in the conversational weather were par for the course at our house, and visitors were often taken aback. Sara had become very still, looking from face to face to judge the gravity of the quarrel—if it was a quarrel.

  William said, “Whatever you do, Sara, don’t take our father seriously. No one does, you know.”

  Father laughed heartily at himself as he went back to cutting up his meat.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  1866

  “I THOUGHT TONIGHT WAS WORSE THAN USUAL. . . . WHAT 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 kne
w 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.