by Louise Penny
Futile pounding at her belly with her fists, as a child might pound, biting back tears of anger and self-derision. Each morning checking her nightgown, the bedsheets. So desperately did she wish to see coin-sized spangles of blood, streaks of blood, almost her eyes blurred with moisture saw these in the rumpled sheets.
God help me, just this once. I will never doubt you again.
It’s your baby too, Simon. We are equally responsible. Therefore you must help me.
Could not bring herself to approach the man. Certainly not in the classroom, or in the university office that he shared with another young professor.
Nor could she envision herself walking (slowly? briskly?) across campus, making her way to the weathered Victorian house in which the man she loved (for she did love Simon Meech, that was the shameful fact) rented a furnished apartment. A lone figure in a film, dark-clad against snowy white. Climbing stairs, lifting her fist to knock on a door. Dear God, no.
Haunted by the thing inside her, in the pit of her belly, in her uterus, that was so tiny! Surely something might happen to it. How frequent were miscarriages, if Alyce continued not to eat, not to sleep, dazed and uncertain, descending staircases, crossing busy streets . . .
The fact was, Alyce had no idea how to procure an abortion, and she had no money to pay for an abortion, nor even any idea how much money would be required for an abortion. One hundred dollars? Five hundred? A thousand? In high school she’d heard rumors . . . Unexplained disappearances of girls, deaths.
What she did know: abortion was illegal. There was no region of the country in which abortion was legal. Simply to inquire about an abortion might be illegal—might be enough to get her expelled from the university. She dared not risk assuming that another girl would take pity on her and help her. And not report her to authority.
There was only Simon with whom she might plead. And yet there was not Simon.
He would stare at her in disbelief, dismay. Revulsion.
He’d seemed to praise, in certain of his remarks, the “celibate” life. The life that “transcends” the merely personal, trivial. The biological self that is a refutation of the spiritual self. The priestly life, far superior to the conjugal life. Several times he’d expressed impatience with Alyce when she tried to discuss such issues with him, as if there might be two sides to a question and not just his.
Like a candle flame extinguished by a single rude breath, the man’s feeling for her. Erotic longing could not withstand such raw need. Alyce could not risk that.
How do you “abort” a fetus yourself? Not easily.
There were drugs, Alyce knew. Powerful abortifacients available only to physicians, for provoking miscarriages when something has gone wrong with a pregnancy. But these could be lethal if not administered by a doctor. And they were not available, in any case.
Wire coat hanger: the most common remedy. Possibly ice pick, long-bladed knife, chopstick . . . Alyce began to feel faint, dazed, at the mere thought.
6.
So lonely, could not say no.
Astonishing to Alyce to learn, in time, that Roland B___ wasn’t old—not old. Just sixty-one.
Old enough to be Alyce’s father (of course) but (possibly) not old enough to be her grandfather . . .
She was recalling: Sylvia Plath, patron saint of lost souls, had been only thirty at the time of her suicide.
Despite the bald dome of his head and the formality of his public manner, Roland B___ was a surprisingly youthful person. His face gave the impression of being unlined, though (as Alyce saw close up) his skin was a network of creases fine as cobwebs. His pebble-colored eyes were heavy-lidded at times, like a turtle’s, though at other times alert and curious. What appeared to be a scattering of liver marks on the backs of his hands were freckles. Guarded and muted in the seminar, he was capable of quick spontaneous laughter in the privacy of the Poet’s House, especially if he’d had a drink or two.
Red wine, occasionally whiskey. Alyce accepted a drink but (usually) left it untouched.
In the seminar, when Alyce spoke Roland B___ regarded her through half-shut eyes as if it wasn’t Alyce’s words but her voice that fascinated him. She reminded him of someone—did she? She’d wondered at first if he even knew who she was—which of the names on the student roster was hers.
And in the Poet’s House Alyce wondered if he knew who she was among the many women and girls with whom he’d been intimately acquainted in his lifetime.
From his poetry Alyce knew that Roland B___ had had lovers. He spoke of a stoical bachelor’s life as if with regret, but his had not been a bachelor’s life, and probably not stoical. Only first names attached to the wraithlike presences that had drifted in and out of the poet’s life when he’d been a younger man.
But he never forgot Alyce’s name once he’d learned it. Very carefully he pronounced the name—“Alyce.”
Telling her that he’d once met the original Alice: “Alice Liddell.”
Alice Liddell? For a moment Alyce didn’t recognize the name, then she recalled: of course, the child Alice, model for the Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The dark-eyed, dark-haired, dreamy little seven-year-old whom the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”) had photographed in poses of extraordinary tenderness and intimacy, of a kind that would be outlawed in the present time.
“Alice Liddell’s family banished Lewis Carroll finally—no one knows exactly why, but we can imagine. His heart was broken.”
Poor Alice Liddell, forever haunted by “Alice”—the child she’d never really been and could not escape; as an elderly woman brought to the United States by her ambitious son, who’d wished to peddle a book he’d written about her, obliged to meet with the press, pose for photographs, sign copies of the son’s book. Roland B___ had been a young man at the time, newly arrived in New York City, and at a gathering at the National Arts Club he’d actually—for a fleeting moment—shaken the hand of the “original” Alice.
Still an attractive woman, he’d thought, despite being exploited by her son and his publishers. The following year, 1934, she’d died, at the age of eighty-two.
Nineteen thirty-four! Alyce was astonished, this was so long ago.
Roland B___ said thoughtfully, “All her life she’d had to endure seeing pictures of herself, growing ever older, set beside the Tenniel drawings of ‘Alice’—perpetually a little girl, with beautiful eyes and thick ringlets of hair. Newspaper reporters fawning over her, to her face, then writing ironic profiles of her as an adult, aging woman.”
Alyce agreed, that would be painful. A difficult life.
Haunted by your own child-self! A vision of you in another’s eyes, and not in your own. Forever young, as you grew older.
Alyce told Roland B___ she’d thought the Alice books were frightening when she’d been a child. Even the illustrations by John Tenniel frightened her. So grotesque! And Alice so often looking pained, grown too big, or shrunken, made to carry freakish creatures in her arms, fleeing from a shrieking mad queen—Off with her head! Off with her head!
She recalled the Alice of the books as a child very different from herself. Rather, the British girl had seemed somewhat adult to Alyce. And an orphan.
An orphan? Roland B___ was curious.
Well, Alice has no parents in the Alice books. Down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland and through the mirror into the Looking-Glass World, Alice wanders entirely alone, lost, without even a last name.
“I suppose you are right, dear. I’d read the books so long ago, I scarcely remember details. It never occurred to me that, as you’ve said, Alice was alone.”
Roland B___ began to recite:
“A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
&nbs
p; Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes . . .”
The poet’s voice trailed off with an air of melancholy, regret.
Alyce was feeling uneasy. In the poet’s overheated drawing room, a sense of chill.
Fragments from the Alice books she was being made to recall, as one might recall fragments from disturbing dreams. Like bats with fluttering wings these beat about her head. “Curiouser and curiouser”—“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”—“beat him when he sneezes”—“six impossible things to believe before breakfast.” The mad twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum screaming at each other. The elderly white king sleeping beneath a tree, dreaming of Alice, and if he wakes from dreaming of her, Alice will vanish. Oh, terrifying! The Walrus and the Carpenter, strolling along the beach and devouring baby oysters one by one. Alice is herself going to be eaten—it’s only a matter of time. Alice is only protected by remaining entranced in Wonderland and in the Looking-Glass World by the game of chess in which the (unlikely) promise is she will become a queen. Recalling the elderly White Queen disappearing into a soup tureen, about to be eaten by a leg of mutton, and candles rising madly to the ceiling—Something is about to happen!
Alyce shuddered. She’d hated and feared the Alice books and had had bad dreams about finding herself captive inside their pages. She was only realizing now.
On his fingers Roland B___ calculated how old he’d have been when Alyce was seven: “Fifty, at least! More than the difference in years between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell.”
But why was Roland B___ telling Alyce this? And why, with such a strange smile?
The poet dared to take her hands, to comfort her.
“‘Still she haunts me, phantomwise.’”
Alyce tried to smile, embarrassed. The poet held her hands with surprising strength.
“You are an unusually beautiful girl, Alyce—I mean, your beauty is unusual. It is not at all conventional, and some might say—those lacking a discerning eye might say—that you are not ‘conventionally attractive’ at all. You remind me of the child Alice Liddell, actually—those dark, melancholy eyes.”
Alyce drew a sharp breath. “Well. I am not Alice Liddell, Professor. And I think I will leave now.”
And so the comforting hands released hers, startled. The eyelids hooded like turtles’ eyelids fluttered in alarm. Alyce rose to her feet, smiling, to think, Enough of goddamned dark, melancholy eyes. I have shocked you at last, haven’t I.
7.
Each morning the tiny slug held firm. Deep inside the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who’d once been, no, had never been Alice Liddell.
No loosening of menstrual blood, fresh dark stains in the bedclothes. No.
God help me. Even if you don’t love me.
And the blunt and unassailable answer came at once to her: Die, then. The power is in your hands.
The possibility of killing herself.
In the early hours of the morning suicide appeared to be more feasible than abortion, certainly more convenient, since it didn’t involve others and would incur no expense.
Preposterous even to consider. A pregnancy would last only nine months, and nine months is not long in a normal lifetime. Yes, but there would be no normal lifetime remaining after the pregnancy.
Steeling her courage to ask one of the older girls in the residence if Alyce could speak with her in private about something serious, something private, rehearsing the faltering words she would say, but her weak courage failed, she could not bring herself to so expose herself, for she could not trust anyone. Could not.
Throwing oneself from a height, from a bridge, would be an effective means. Stepping in front of a speeding vehicle, preferably a truck or a bus. Alyce tried to imagine summoning such courage if she had not even the courage to approach someone to speak of her predicament.
Later in the pregnancy, when she became desperate. Maybe then. If desperate, fanatic, and obsessed, maybe you don’t need courage.
For certainly Alyce would become desperate when others began to notice, to suspect. When her stomach swelled out and her clothes no longer fit.
How long did she have? Weeks? A death sentence—the pregnancy growing like a tumor that could not be stopped.
Slashing her wrists. All she would require was a razor or a sharp knife and the act could be executed in the night, without detection if she acted sensibly. In a bathtub with running water to dilute the flow of blood, carry it away to oblivion. In one of the bathrooms in the residence which were single occupancy, equipped with a bathtub and not a shower stall; a room that could be locked, where no one could interrupt and Alyce could sedate herself with aspirin and lower herself into hot steaming water, shut her eyes refusing to see, for she was a coward and could not bear to see streams of blood in water rushing down a drain, as her heart beat slower with the loss of blood a sweet comfort would come over her at last . . . But—would she have removed her clothes, as if for a bath? Or would she be dressed, or partly dressed, in her flannel nightgown perhaps? For she would not (oh, she would not) want to be discovered both naked and dead.
And how would dead be accomplished, exactly? Only one wrist could be slashed by the badly trembling right hand, not both wrists. The left wrist, or rather the inside of the left forearm, the tender flesh there would have to be cut (deeply, swiftly, unerringly) before pain overcame her and the razor or knife fell from her fingers into the splashing water . . .
Overdose of pills? Which pills? Alyce had no prescription pills, would have to buy pills at a drugstore, and what pills would these be? Sleeping pills? She had no idea. If she were at home she’d have access to the medications in her parents’ medicine cabinet—pills for high blood pressure, angina, kidney trouble, arthritis. But if she swallowed enough pills to kill herself, that might be enough pills to cause her to vomit, for she was not accustomed to swallowing pills. Had no idea how her stomach would react. And if she didn’t vomit enough she would sink into a sweaty stupor but not die, her heart continuing to beat like a stubborn metronome, waking hours or days later in her own vomit and excrement, taken by ambulance to an ER, where her stomach would be pumped—whatever pumped meant, it did not promise romance or dignity. Hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation, parents contacted, discovery of pregnancy, removed from the university, possibly brain-damaged, possibly “vegetative state” . . .
Alyce laughed. Three-twenty a.m. and she was standing flat-footed on a cold hardwood floor, having heaved herself up from the bed in which she’d failed to sleep since turning out the light several hours before.
Deciding, Goddamn, she would not. Would not kill herself, nor even make the attempt.
Returning from morning classes to discover a folded note in her mailbox, a phone message. Something like a sliver of glass piercing her heart at the thought that this was Simon summoning her to him at last, but in fact as her fluttering eyes barely made out through a scrim of tears the note was a phone message for her—Dearest Alyce, Please call this number. R. B.
8.
In this way her life was decided.
The gift of her life. So Alyce would think at the time.
Returning to the Poet’s House. Her heart beating eagerly as Roland B___ opened the door with a playful bow.
“Dear Alyce! I have missed you. Come in.”
It was decided, Alyce would act as Roland B___’s assistant and archivist. For that would be the formal title of her role in his life and (as she might have anticipated at the time) in his posthumous life—assistant, archivist.
“I will pay you, of course, Alyce. I don’t expect you to give up your precious time for nothing.”
And, “Please do call me Roland, dear. Will you at least try?”
It was touching to Alyce that the poet so readily forgave her for her rudeness to him. Bru
shing aside her embarrassed apology with a dismissive gesture—“Don’t be absurd, dear. An old man is well advised to be put in his place when he oversteps boundaries. Good to remind me.”
“Oh, but, Professor, you’re not old.”
The words leapt from Alyce. She had no idea that she would speak at all in response to the poet’s rueful remark.
She’d spoken laughingly, out of nervousness. Like Alice in the Looking-Glass World in which all things are reversed, comical.
But she saw how it was true. Roland B___, in his solitude, loneliness. At the university he was admired, often invited to receptions, luncheons, dinners, but he went everywhere alone and returned to the faded-brick Poet’s House alone. In the antique-furnished bedroom, in the four-poster bed alone.
And Alyce in her solitude, loneliness. Surrounded by others her age, swarms of others on the university walkways, yet alone.
For Simon Meech had not contacted her, and in the classroom he seemed now scarcely to glance in her direction and to take no notice how she departed immediately when the class ended.
All of the colors of the drawing room in the Poet’s House seemed brighter to her, richer and more beautiful than she recalled. Crimson velvet pillows on a dove-gray velvet sofa, a deep russet-brown Chinese vase on the fireplace mantel, portraits of stern-looking eighteenth-century gentlemen on the walls.
How comical, these portraits! As if, long dead, long forgotten, they were playing the roles now of ancestors.
“Come in, dear Alyce! Your hands are cold. Will you have tea?” Drawing her into the overheated interior, where, on the beautiful old grand piano, a crystal vase of red roses pulsed with vivid color—For me? Those roses are for me.
Here was someone who cherished her. Would not repudiate, hurt her.
Strange, since Alyce’s previous visit there’d come to be a new mood between her and Roland B___ that was lighter, more playful and (just perceptibly) erotic.