Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 by Steven Sater

  Photo credits on this page

  All other images courtesy of public domain.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  RAZORBILL & colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Sater, Steven, author.

  Title: Alice by heart / Steven Sater.

  Description: New York : Razorbill, [2020] | “Based on the stage musical

  Alice by Heart.” | Audience: Ages 12+ | Summary: Fifteen-year-old Alice confronts grief, loss, and first love with the help of her favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, as she shelters with other refugees in a London Tube station during World War II. Includes photographs of underground shelters used in the war.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019036447 | ISBN 9780451478139 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451478153 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Books and reading—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Subways—England—London—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—England—London—Fiction. | Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936–1952—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S2649 Ali 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036447

  For my Gemini women—Emily, Jessie, and Jill . . .

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyight

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Credits

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  —

  For a long time, books were my everything. It was from books that I learned all the things that seemed worth knowing. In a world of parents, teachers, and friends who seemed uncomprehending, it was, always, only books who understood. Books like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, like The Little Prince, like The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Books, unearthed from our school library, which I’d pore over so continually, they came to read like diaries of my own feelings. And indeed it was only to those “diaries” that I could bring my truest self, could reveal my aspiration, could entrust my darkest secrets . . .

  Alice by Heart is a book about a book. About the power of books to help us through the hardest times—to help us restore to our innermost selves what has been lost and found and lost again.

  To be fair, I had a rather unusual childhood. Due to respiratory ailments, I was regularly shuffled from home to the hospital (my plastic-covered room at home coming in time to resemble the oxygen tent I revisited so often). In the meantime, I rarely went to school. Instead, my older sister became my teacher. Each day when she came home (the eternity of waiting till 3:00 p.m., each day, for her!), her lesson plan became my plan; and when she read to me, books were my world.

  Thankfully, by age thirteen, I’d emerged from that plastic-covered room, only to suffer through high school like everyone else. But then, just after my twentieth birthday, a serious accident left me hospitalized again: strapped onto a Stryker frame, which resembled an ironing board, and which turned me from my back to my front every two hours, night and day. Banishing all film and TV, I taught myself ancient Greek, and read every novel I could fit my page-turner into. (Nineteenth-century British novels primarily—Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Charles Dickens . . .) The truth is, when I look back at all that now, I tend to dwell less on my hospital bed and more on the time I spent in The Iliad.

  It’s telling about me, but despite how formative those years have been on the rest of my life, and of course on my writer life, it never occurred to me to write about them, or even about what all that reading had meant to me—until . . .

  In the spring of 2006, in the first flush of Spring Awakening’s success, my esteemed theatrical agent proposed that, like others before us, Duncan Sheik and I try adapting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a piece of musical theater. Of course I knew and loved the book—and the subversive gust of childhood which breathes through it. I had read it to my own children. But given the singular form of its dreamlike narrative, I resisted. My strong instinct was not to turn the story into something it wasn’t. Not to try to craft a Wizard of Oz–like fable out of its hallucinatory sequence of “curiouser and curiouser” incidents. (For, what was the book really but a series of marvels coming and going—phantasmagoric visitations upon a charming, if cipher-like, young British girl? And all the other characters—those unbridled, id-like figures—seemed to appear only to disappear, leaving only the hint of a Cheshire grin.)

  Hardly the stuff of a musical, I thought. Rather, what excited me was to dispense with a theatrical form altogether, and create a music-only project: a series of songs, with an accompanying set of music videos; each song an attempt to capture the magic-carpet ride of its particular chapter.

  Then one night, something in me caved. My beloved friend, and sometime writing partner, Jessie Nelson, invited me to see a group of self-proclaimed high school “theater geeks” perform a concert of Spring Awakening songs. Watching that fresh-faced cast, just the age of our casts when we first began workshopping Spring Awakening, it struck me that we might craft a viable musical from Alice by centering it on the evergreen conundrum of how to leave childhood behind.

  It was at that moment, nine years ago, that Jessie, Duncan, and I began work on our stage musical Alice by Heart. And it was Jessie—forever Jessie—who first encouraged me to incorporate elements from my life into our narrative—to draw on what classic works of literature had meant to the younger me, in the story of our own Alice and her beloved friend Alfred.

  And so we began, and began again. At every subsequent stage of our musical’s development, it’s been Jessie who has inspired, conceived, coerced from Duncan and me, and crafted with us every beat of our musical story. It’s also been Jessie who has repeatedly urged that we incorporate more and more of the original text into our script.

  This afternoon, in a glacial New York January, as I sit beneath a tiny red work light, in the unlit house of our theater, rehearsals for the New York premiere of Alice by Heart are nearing a close; and the image of a treasured book—a book that’s fo
und and lost and found again—now permeates every aspect of the piece.

  On a rather more golden afternoon, one Southern California day in the summer of 2016, the brave, believing producer of our musical called with a fresh bright idea. “Wouldn’t it be cool,” he pitched, “if you could write an Alice book? A picture book, maybe?”

  Honestly, Kurt’s suggestion left me cold. Why ever would I attempt to transmute our musical monster-in-progress back into a book? To try to craft from it some fresh convincing narrative? A book meant to sit on a shelf—or at least on my shelf—beside Carroll’s classic, transgressive text?

  And yet, as time passed, against all my better wisdom—against every good reason I could muster—as the ever-intrepid Kurt raised again and again the idea of “a picture book—or something like that,” something about the idea began to stick. Something I heard in that inadvertent echo of Lewis Carroll’s text . . .

  At the beginning of Alice’s Adventures, the impatient young heroine famously wonders, “What is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?” Pictures for a book based on our Alice musical I could well imagine. Fresh illustrations, to be sure. But also there were so many heart-stopping photographs, which Jessie and I kept uncovering from our internet research: Londoners taking shelter in Tube stations during the Blitz of World War II.

  So, pictures there were—plenty. But the idea that genuinely sank its teeth into me, that began to live within me, was of a book as a kind of “conversations.” A new Alice book in conversation not only with the original Alice books but also with so many books I had loved—books which had gone through hard times with me. A testament to what those stories had meant to me.

  From the beginning, I envisioned this book as a kind of mosaic. Or perhaps as my own sort of web—a stitching- together of all I wanted to keep myself from forgetting. After all, that was the brunt of our story, really. That in the midst of war and destruction, when all our dwellings can be turned to dust, there remains still what we carry with us. The memory of all we’ve felt or understood. Something like a book we’ve learned by heart.

  My favorite novelist, Marcel Proust, writes unforgettably about what goes into the making of a good book. And he trenchantly observes that a novel is like a cemetery, where the names have been effaced from all the former loves who actually inspired it. For me, this book was to be a different sort of cemetery, one where the headstones represented those books I’d loved. And while the authors, like Proust, were not explicitly credited, still their names were not to be effaced, but meant to be legible for those who cared to look.

  S.S.

  January 2019

  New York

  CHAPTER I:

  —

  MY STORYBOOK ALICE

  London, 1940

  The Underground

  ALICE was beginning to get very tired of lying on her flimsy cot—within this barrack full of cots, this musty world of makeshift hammocks strung between Underground tracks. But, here she was—whoever now she’d become—in the same old shape of her old familiar self—in a cold that kidnapped her from everything else. Everything but the drip, and the drip, and the drip of some thankfully still-unburst water main, high overhead. (Each drip like a word in some unknown tongue, reiterating how irritating Alice’s presence was.)

  Something—each drip seemed to insist—she had to do something. Couldn’t merely lie in the gloom here forever, running the parched palm of her hand over the burlap strap that bound her cot to the world of these tracks. No, she could not just lie here. Not at age fifteen—without even a shred left of her irony! No—no more pretending. Not now. She had to go, had to know: how was Alfred? And so, she thrust herself up—bye-bye, stuffy cot.

  Upright, she started—one step, on. For, despite how far it might feel, despite how disruptive to those other Tube-creatures her trundling by might be, it was only a few meters, she knew, between her cot and his quarantine.

  But then, all at once—there She was. (As always She was.) That Red Cross Nurse. She, who was always and forever monitoring their every wayward move, policing every breath, suppressing every joy, their slightest wish. Keeping every one of them separate and alone, on separate, lonely beds, with only their broken thoughts to keep them company—those, and their bruised or wounded limbs.

  Just hold still, Alice told herself. Soon, she knew, that dread Nurse would be gone—soon, moving on. Passing out blankets to those homeless souls of London. She, the would-be Soul of Charity, clothing and visiting, tending to the drippy-nosed and sickly. Any excuse, Alice surmised, to barge her way in. To bark out orders in that rasp-addled accent of the failed (or faux) aristocrat. Handing down her imperial decrees: “Chilly night, tonight!” Her petty commandments: “You naughty elf! Wipe your nose on someone else!” This High and Mighty Nurse, forever talking down, never to, them—and rarely to some one of them—rather, to the one them: this one, lowly, incurable Tube-station crew, who dared exist beyond Her whim. All their orphaned minds like perfect blanks, awaiting her beige-crayon words to color them in. “Do you have any idea, any of you, how many tired girls in floral prints labored to cut those blanket threads to regulation lengths?”

  So the woman would bark—so she’d instruct—and then, on she’d go. With that prominent nose, protruding from those tweezed-out, painted-on brows, and that prehistoric raven claw of hair. Leading, of course, with her no less prominent chin. Declaring herself incapable of fatigue with her every wary step. Demanding room for herself, wherever she went.

  “Dr. Butridge!” the Good Nurse rasped. But no word answered. “Lyman Butridge!” she bellowed, as if swallowing the sorry truth that she could not, even through such vocal grandeur, summon a somewhat grander man. No, only him. Him, her minion. In rank, the woman’s superior; in fact, her subordinate.

  “Doctor, this instant,” she persisted.

  “What?” he quacked.

  Poor Butridge. Had he lost his hearing in the bombing? Or something? In any event, here he was, doddering on, on his interminable nightly rounds. Really, thought Alice, the man must have been here, must have done this, must have spewed out his spittle and prescriptions since the ducks got seasick riding Noah’s ark.

  “Doctor, come see,” the Nurse yawped. But that Doctor doddered on. And on. Exasperating the would-be-unflappable Nurse: “Dr. Butridge! The Hallam boy.”

  “The Hallam boy”? Meaning, Alfred?! But why was she summoning the Doctor to him? Why again?

  Duty done, the Nurse flapped the quarantine curtain shut and hastened on—to examine her next suspect.

  Alice shuddered, snapping to attention. She had to see, had to know, what those medical thugs were planning. Couldn’t they just let be? Why this infernal need to Do? After all, what was Alfred to them? Just another stop on the Good Doctor’s nightly perambulations. The truth was, for medical men, war meant business.

  On, Alice. One step. No Nurse around now. And that Doctor? He’s a Doctor, he won’t even look up. Certainly, he won’t look back.

  Beyond all that, she thought, he wasn’t a mean man, Butridge. No doubt, deep down, he wanted to help Alfred. She knew that. Still, let her step the slightest step toward her friend’s quarantine, the man would virtually thrust himself before her—like some ministering Minotaur in this labyrinth of cots. (Or like that nonsense-spewing beast from her Alice-book, Through the Looking-Glass. The Jabberwock—but grown so wonky!) Splattering the dingy world with his doomdealing words, diagnosing this and that. Confusing this patient with that one. Prescribing that one this, and this one that. Spilling his Medical Commandments onto the platform like jacks. An incompetent, querulous quack, deciding what was what, and who got what—who was permitted to live, and who not. As if he bore the Clipboards of the Law in his ecstatic, twitching hands.

  All the more reason she could not back down. Must not look back. And so, forward she inched. Vigilant. As, in his never-soiled medical robe, with those pl
eated short sleeves and that drooping button wagging from its mildewed thread, that antediluvian Doc clambered behind Alfred’s curtain. Clipboards clattering.

  On. One step Alice went—clocking the Doctor through the sheet. His lean, shoulders-wobbling silhouette.

  “Hallam. Alfred Hallam,” he mumbled. Mere words, she knew. Some mere name, soon to be ticked off from an indifferent, half-rusted clipboard. (One more Element, merely, on his official Periodic Table—another human life reduced to isotopes and neutrons.) But Alice leaned forward, intent. Now what? Not a breath. Not a thump on the chest. And then, some Roman-sounding phrase, like a verdict: “Superventrical . . .” something? “Tachycartoonia . . .”? Mere gibberish. As her most-beloved book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, would say: “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it!”

  Ridiculous, really. Could he never just say, “Your friend will be all right, thank you.” No, always and forever, that Doctor used only the most inscrutable terminology. As if only to show you how scary words really were. Why else did doctors and priests always speak in such a way, when they knew you knew no Latin? Why, except to show how much you needed them, Goodly Robed Men, to intercede with God or some Bacteria on your behalf.

  Another step. Very nearly there she was. She could almost duck, could almost join that Dodo Doctor and Alfred, on the other side of that silvery curtain. Maybe she could—maybe she just would.

  She set her hand on the curtain. Finally, there. But was she there, she wondered, while he remained unaware of her? Half-stooped already, she cast one last quick look about. And there, zooming toward her—from where?—that Nurse! God’s one Cross Nurse. A Fascist if ever there was one (though of course she wasn’t). A woman like a coil ever coiled, ever ready to spring.

  “Alice?!”

  Never had her name felt shorter or squatter or more spat out upon her. As if she were hardly worth the time it took to name her.