Alice in Bed Page 5

  As the weeks and months slid by, my happiness and peace of mind increasingly depended on Sara. But you could not set your clock by Sara, she was prone to such extreme fluctuations. Some days she didn’t eat and other days she consumed five or six meals. She developed a sudden irrational interest in the French dancing master and speculated wildly about him. She went to Bar Harbor and acquired a passion for mussels, and then to New York City and returned speaking differently, while denying that she did. She surrounded herself with several people whom she’d previously dismissed as boring. She became acutely critical of George Sand, whom we’d previously idolized together. (“It’s rather bad taste to threaten suicide so often; it should be held in reserve, don’t you think?”)

  My state of longing now rendered me so jagged and raw that, in my lucid moments, I was compelled to admit to myself that I no longer enjoyed my friend’s company as before. I was losing any objective sense of who Sara was since she had become everything to me. Was that what love did? I decided frequently to break things off, but her gaze always dissolved my resistance, her arms would reach for me, and my resolve melted. I now understood the lovesick heroines in novels whom I’d previously dismissed as stupid, silly, and weak.

  By mid-autumn, it did not escape my notice—or my family’s—that I was breaking out in symptoms of nerves. I “went off” while lacing my stays, when Father rehearsed his lecture on “Is Marriage Holy?” when the dressmaker pinned the sleeve of my frock. Occasionally I found myself lying on the floor with no memory of getting there. Within the family my going off became “one of Alice’s things,” just as dressing like a dandy was one of William’s things and being minutely well-informed about the theater was Harry’s thing. Jaunts to the country were proposed. Suspicions were voiced about certain types of weather, heavy meals, newspaper accounts of railway crashes, French novels, staying up too late, and excitement in general.

  When I failed to improve, Aunt Kate mentioned the name of a great doctor in New York City and volunteered to accompany me there.

  TWO

  IT WAS IN SOME WAYS AN OLD STORY. I HAD CELEBRATED MY thirteenth birthday by “going off” and coming to with a vision of my family standing in a ring around me like trees around a clearing. I recalled my mother’s face looking frightened, my father’s concerned but mildly curious. My “fit” was traced to mysterious vapors associated with my first menstrual period, which had just struck without warning.

  Since then my mind and body had been at war, like the armies of France and Prussia, enjoying fragile cease-fires but no lasting peace. Anything could send the caissons rolling toward the front again, blowing up bridges and shelling towns. When I tried to see back to how it all started, there was only a dense jungle behind my eyes.

  Now, as our train chugged along the coast of Connecticut, I was suffering from a thick head-fog through which I could dimly make out the shapes of thoughts. I was unable to bring myself to eat anything or read or talk and merely watched fields of brown stubble, purple marshes, and glassy bits of the Long Island Sound glide past while Aunt Kate knitted and read Elizabeth Gaskell in the seat next to me.

  By the time we pulled into New York City in a cloud of soot-flecked steam, my nerves felt like hot wires. Not wishing to set the seat ablaze, I stood up and fixed a dumb-ox stare at the blur that was Aunt Kate in motion: taking charge, locating our trunks, finding a porter and a hansom, giving directions to the coachman. Her omniscience about practical details—how many shawls to take in a carriage, how much to tip a porter, who were the best doctors in New York—was handy when you were off in remote zones of yourself. From the cabriolet the dusky streets rolled by in a haze, as if I were dreaming with my eyes open.

  I was taken to Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street, to a narrow row house with steep front steps (surely treacherous for invalids?) belonging to Dr. Charles Lafayette Taylor, an orthopedist. With his brother, Dr. George Taylor, likewise an orthopedist, he had devised the Improved Movement Cure, considered by Aunt Kate the most advanced treatment for nerves. The basic idea, if I’d grasped it rightly, was that nervous illnesses were the lamentable result of an imbalance between over-stimulated nerves and an under-developed body. To remedy which the brothers Taylor (creatures so much of the same mold I could scarcely tell them apart) applied their medicine. This consisted of orthopedic manipulation, Swedish massage, and deadly stretches of bed-rest. The first morning I was rigorously examined by the first Dr. Taylor, who expressed concern that my “nervous excitement” might have drawn too much energy into my nervous system, leaving other bodily functions “depressed.” Were my legs and arms weak? Did I suffer from headache? Ever feel dizzy or faint? How about palpitations of the heart?

  “Yes,” I admitted, “and just as I am falling asleep, my stomach attempts to tie itself in knots, a sensation accompanied by a feeling of unspeakable dread.” In fact, the chief benefit I was hoping for from this Manhattan adventure was some medical clarification of this malady of mine, but Dr. Taylor only nodded gravely as if he knew everything about me already.

  The shops were smarter and the women more fashionable in New York than in Boston, a fact I confirmed each morning as I dragged myself up the three blocks of Broadway to Thirty-eighth Street, to the brownstone of the second Dr. Taylor. Every morning I wondered if I had it in me to be a fashionable New Yorker, and decided probably not. “I cannot reconcile myself to the peculiarities of my clothes,” I wrote to Sara in one of many meandering letters. Carts, drays, omnibuses, carriages of all types plied Broadway, where crude sheds appeared next to marble palaces—all the sounds combining in a dull roar in my head like a waterfall.

  The second Dr. Taylor had invented a machine for limbering the pelvis, expanding the chest, and kneading the abdomen, the features of which he proudly displayed to me. Tufts of grey hair sprouted from his ears; otherwise, the Taylor brothers were nearly identical, two nondescript balding men of middle age. This Dr. Taylor predicted that I should become “perfectly well” if I submitted to his daily exercises. A woman’s nerves were more delicate than a man’s, he explained, and susceptible to stronger impressions. It followed—though I may be forgetting some of the links in the chain of his reasoning—that a woman who “consumes her vital force in intellectual activities” was diverting it from the achievement of True Womanhood. This spelled tragedy, not just for her but for her children and her children’s children—indeed, for the human race.

  “The body is literally starved! It becomes perverted!” he warned, peering at me through a glass that magnified one watery blue eye. “I hope, Miss James, that you do not read excessively.”

  “Not excessively,” I lied. If I read less, would I develop a keen interest in things like running a house, being married, having children, visiting the poor and comforting the sick? Perhaps I’d prefer to stick with reading. But since I was such a sorry specimen, I vowed to do my best to adhere to the Taylor program.

  It was distressing to learn how many ways I’d been courting disaster. Not just by reading but also by walking on hard pavement, bathing at the wrong time of day, exposing myself to the damp, not drinking enough water, going to bed too late, not resting my eyes for an hour after reading the newspaper, eating fruits and vegetables at the same meal, and a hundred other things.

  Apart from my unbridled reading, I become an exemplary patient. Living amongst aged and moribund people, I began to forget my youth, my rebelliousness, the sharp longings of the flesh. My body settled into a dormant state; perhaps I would hibernate next. I fed on the creamy fattening food served chez Taylor, and my cousin Elly Van Buren, who saw me over Christmas, wrote approvingly to my family that I was looking “fat as butter.” My days were consumed with resting and cultivating the feminine virtues—patience, faith, self-denial, concern for others. Aunt Kate sent home glowing reports of my saintly patience and Mother wrote me weekly, praising my “ultra-spiritual qualities.”

  One evening a strange thing occurred with Aunt Kate; I hardly knew what to make of it. I’d
just suffered one of my attacks, after which I was feeling cleansed and clear-headed, like the sky after a thunderstorm. Aunt Kate was by my bedside. Feeling nostalgic about her New York girlhood, she was telling me some old-timey stories when she suddenly exclaimed: “Did you know, Alice, that your father courted me first?”

  “What do you mean, Aunt Kate?” She couldn’t mean that.

  “Well, your father came to our church in New York to give a course of lectures. He was already lecturing and still a young man. He could have charmed the birds out of the trees. I wish you could have known him then.”

  “Well, clearly, I couldn’t have done so without violating the laws of nature.”

  She did not appear to hear me, so lost was she in this strange reverie. “We talked one day and he gave me a sort of penetrating look. You know what I’m talking about.” I did. “He made some flirtatious comments about my bonnet. There was something about him; I can’t explain it.”

  Oh dear, where was this going?

  “He took to calling two or three times a week, sitting in the parlor with us. He met Mary, of course, and soon you could not tell which of us he was courting.” She laughed in a queer way. “He was so expansive there seemed to be enough of him for two! But then our father—your grandfather Walsh—took Henry aside for a little talk, and after that he had eyes only for Mary. She was the elder sister, of course.”

  Did Aunt Kate remember to whom she was talking? Maybe she did, because a minute later, she seemed to shake herself out of her trance. “And what a beautiful and sacred marriage they have had!” she beamed.

  For hours afterward I was so disconsolate I was unable even to swallow tea.

  My aunt’s confession reminded me that, not long before our family sailed for Europe in 1855, Aunt Kate was briefly and disastrously married to a Captain Marshall. Whatever went wrong was never stated, but she returned to us a few months later with sadder eyes, and we children were told never to mention the marriage. (In those days a distressing fact could be neutralized simply by not acknowledging it. Yet Father would say anything to anybody.) I don’t recall meeting the Captain, though I must have. In my mind he assumed the shape of a swarthy sea captain who forced poor Aunt Kate to dance the tarantella for hours and then dragged her by the hair into his cabin. My imagination drew a blank at what might have occurred next—I was only seven years old—but I knew it was surely unspeakable. After that, our aunt stayed securely attached to the safe and the predictable.

  After I’d been in New York for five dull, fattening months, a letter arrived from Mother startling me with the news that William had just sailed to Europe.

  But he would never go to Europe without a word to me!

  Well, apparently he had. Mother explained that he would spend the next two years studying physiology at the German graduate schools, and as it was a great opportunity for him, I ought not to indulge in selfish regrets in the matter, but accept cheerfully that life is made up of changes and separations from those we love.

  I stared at the blue stationery and the familiar maternal script. The news was so inconceivable that for several days I half believed a second letter would arrive saying that William hadn’t sailed after all. But no second letter came and William was gone and I had no choice but to bear his absence angelically. If you had feelings about anything they called it hysteria.

  My health slid backwards for a while and I didn’t return to Quincy Street until May of 1867, when the wisteria climbing one side of the house was in bloom. I found Harry stretched out phlegmatically on a divan in one of the parlors. His back was poorly again, he said, and our household was “as lively as the inner sepulchre.” (A typical Harryism.) While other Boston families were packing up for a summer at the shore, we were condemned to stagnate in stifling Cambridge again, because Father refused to go anywhere. Cambridge was a social desert, he complained. The Nortons offered good conversation, but whenever you went there with Father you had to worry that Charles would hold forth on the superiority of European society, and this would inspire a blast of the paternal patriotism. Inevitably, Father and Charles would have to be separated and apologies made.

  It was strange to be home. I’d lived so isolated in New York that it was almost as if I’d died and left the world; to be back in my old life made me feel like the ghost of myself. I was half surprised that people greeted me as if they knew me. Whenever I turned round, Mother was pressing something on me—rhubarb jam for my toast, a different newspaper. If I was in my bedroom, her knock would jolt me out of my daydream and force me to consider whether my bookcase needed dusting or I wished to have a baked potato with dinner. She’d want to chat about what day the laundresses were coming and whether the butcher was overcharging us. Why was I required to be interested in these domestic details, while Harry was assumed to have better things to do? I suppose the answer was obvious. He wore trousers and I a skirt.

  Not that my parents weren’t overbearing toward my brothers, too; their affectionate absorption in their five children was almost legendary. Father made the final decisions on the boys’ careers. Steering William, his pride and joy, away from painting into science. Paying the fees to keep William and Harry, but not Wilky and Bob, out of the Civil War. Negotiating fees and terms of publication with Harry’s editors. By holding the purse strings, our parents could veto any venture. Both casually opened and read any mail that entered the house, even when it was marked “private.” There was no escaping them, and, of course, Aunt Kate, when she was present, was a virtual third parent.

  Although Harry was in the law school, sightings of him with a law book in his hand were extremely rare, and whenever his (and William’s) friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. held forth on legal topics, a perfect blankness would fall over Harry’s features. His dissatisfaction with Boston’s provincial dullness (as he saw it) was making him withdrawn and morose. He wrote to William—in a letter left unfinished on a table, which I read, naturally—I am tired of reading and know it would be better to do something else. Can I go to the theatre? I have tried it ad nauseam. Likewise “calling.” Upon whom? Sedgwicks, Nortons, Dixwells, Feltons. I worried about Harry; mostly I worried that he’d flee to Europe, too.

  In the first weeks following my homecoming, Sara was fond and loving, asking concerned questions about my health, laughing at my tales of the Brothers Taylor and the invalid hotel, filling me in on all the Norton atrocities I’d missed. I saw that she had really missed me; she even admitted as much. While I was away, she’d tried having heart-to-heart talks with Theodora, she said, but it was hopeless. She’d gone to a dozen or so plays and concerts and lectures with Fanny Morse, who, though delightful, of course, was too tame-Boston to conceive of a world that did not revolve around “the Shore,” Beacon Street, and all the “dear people” of her acquaintance.

  Sara was anything but tame; she was drawn to vivid, violent things—volcanic eruptions, Nor’easters, revolutions, shipwrecks. The details made her eyes shine. Pompeii was her favorite place in Europe. She could not stop thinking about the dogs struck dead alongside their masters, and all the people mummified in the act of eating grapes or patting the family dog or scrubbing the floor, their agony preserved for eternity. “It is almost indecent to look, they are so exposed. Your heart is pierced by pity. And yet isn’t that its great appeal?”

  “But how do you stop your mind from cramping around it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” I made a mental note to steer clear of references to my mental cramps around Sara.

  It was a mild July evening and, still in our clothes, we were lying on the lawn under the stars, holding one of our rambling conversations about everything. Whether we believed in God (Sara didn’t; she’d given up on Him when her parents died), whether it would be worse to be blind or deaf (“Don’t forget crippled,” I said), what our deepest fears were. I told her about a girl at school I’d disliked so much I could think of nothing else; every day I felt my thoughts sharpening like da
ggers inside me. Later this girl went down in a shipwreck off the shores of Nova Scotia and I was aghast at my witchy powers. Since then I’d tried to police my mind and not think ill of anyone, but people who advised you to do this had no idea how difficult it was.

  “Arthur says that you should never try to be good. You either are or you aren’t. Or you are as good as you can be, given who you are.”

  “That’s rather facile.” It was irksome to have Arthur Sedgwick cited as an authority. In my view, Sara’s brother was conceited, fancying himself too urbane for Boston, and never made the slightest effort to be cordial to me. In contrast, my brothers adored Sara—as did my parents, for that matter. It was rather amusing to hear them singing the praises of the corrupter of their only daughter.

  Sara jumped to her feet. “What we need, Alice, is some absinthe!”

  So we drifted inside and Sara headed for her secret cupboard.

  “Wait, Sara! First you must ponder this gem from Godey’s Lady’s Book.”

  I dug the article out of my reticule and handed it to her. She read it aloud in a didactic old lady voice, the way we imagined the Godey’s editresses would speak:

  Quarrels are bad things and no one within his senses—his moral senses we should say—would advocate them, save under such provocation of insult as should be chastised if self-respect is to be maintained.

  “Ha, young Alice James!” she laughed. “This is possibly the most fatuous sentence ever penned by Woman or Man. Perhaps its significance can be discerned only under the influence of la fée verte. If you catch my drift.”

  She gave me a wink, then poured the emerald liquid into two Bohemian glasses, and we drank it in the flickering candlelight. She lit a joss stick (part of her new séance equipment) and whipped out her pack of tarot cards (which she kept wrapped in a special cloth of some talismanic significance) and laid the cards out in the “Celtic Cross pattern.” She was wearing her seeress expression.