The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  I said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same question,” he said, shaking the paper once. “I returned from the banquet to find you sprawled on my doorstep like a Greek tragedy.”

  I squinted. “Was I asleep?”

  “You were thrashing.”

  I let out a wheeze. “I’m a little ill.”

  I tried to stand, but was seized by dizziness. The horror of my nightmare came over me. I collapsed back down on the sofa. I was trembling. I hadn’t dreamt like that in years. My limbs tingled, defeated.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Ten minutes to two.”

  “In the morning?”

  Orville didn’t answer.

  I said, “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “Long enough.”

  I squinted at him, then at the fire. It was emitting soft orange sparks into cold air. I pulled the blanket over me—why did I have a blanket?—and tried to map out what had transpired. If I had, in fact, passed out on the floor of the hallway, then Orville must have moved me. My coat was hanging on a nearby chair; my boots were drying by the fireplace. Had Orville taken them off? God, what a thought.

  The electricity must have come back on; one of the lamps in the corner of the room was bleeding a muted yellow. I pointed to the middle of the table, where a defrosting brick was wrapped in cellophane.

  “What’s that?”

  He glanced at it. “Cake. Interested?”

  I wasn’t exactly hungry, but Orville stood and walked across the room. His legs seemed exceptionally long from my vantage point—he reminded me of one of those circus men who walk on stilts, with billowing balloon pants. I rested my head against the plump, swollen back of the sofa. The next time I looked up, Orville was standing over me, two glasses in his hand. When I didn’t take one from him, he put mine down on the table.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Cognac.”

  I stared at it.

  He waited. “Don’t you drink?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  It was a strange sight, watching a faculty member take a drink. It reminded me that professors must have real lives—lives in which they wore boxers and occasionally cooked, lives in which they sometimes played tennis, sometimes slept with women, and sometimes just sat watching television, like the average peasant.

  It was a minute before I could bring myself to take the cognac in my hands. I put my nose deep down inside the glass, then retracted it immediately. The stench was something awful. Perhaps I was more exhausted than I realized, but for a moment I thought I could make out my father’s face on the surface, warped and vague. I put the glass back down. I didn’t need it. People evaporated in alcohol, the way people evaporated in dreams.

  I looked up and gave a small start. Orville, I realized, was watching me closely.

  “Do you think about him often?” he said. The fire was dying and in the dim light, his eyes looked like two dots drawn by Sharpie.

  I didn’t answer.

  “How old were you when it happened?” he asked.

  “When what happened?”

  A pause.

  I cleared my throat. “I had just turned fifteen.”

  “How very terrible it must have been for you, Samantha.”

  His voice was low and gentle. I frowned and wondered, not for the first time in my life, if I talked in my sleep. We stared at each other for only a moment longer before he reached forward and unwrapped the frozen cake. He set his knife against it and gave it a good thwack. A piece fell to the table like a sledgehammer. He slapped a cold slice onto my open hand.

  I held on to the cake gingerly. Orville was still inspecting me. I wasn’t used to receiving his nonacademic attention. I brushed the hair away from my face. I felt the sudden need to prove that I could, in fact, be good-looking, if you looked hard enough.

  “Sir,” I said, “what’s the punishment for breaking into someone’s room?”

  “Expulsion.”

  “Is it?”

  “Are you considering breaking into a room?”

  Another pause. The fire dimmed of its own accord. In the half-light, Orville’s face looked incomplete, like someone had been too intimidated to finish his portrait.

  “Someone left me another book,” I said. “Wuthering Heights.”

  I thought I saw a note of alarm cross his expression, but he killed it swiftly.

  “Your father’s?”

  I nodded. He frowned. A conversation about the Brontës was not one he wanted to have, it seemed. We lingered in a silence that seemed purely decorative. Then he stood up and walked to his bookshelf. I thought he must have forgotten about me, but he returned with an old, black book. It was Wuthering Heights.

  I looked up at him. “Yes, I see you have it too.”

  “At one point, it was my favorite book.”

  “That’s probably why we’ll never be friends.”

  For the first time since I had known him, Orville came to sit next to me. The couch shifted with his weight. We were very close to each other and I wondered if he was breaking all the college’s rules in one go.

  “This was my father’s copy,” he said, flipping to the scribbled note on the title page. “See here? ‘Dear James, love, Dad.’ ”

  “Thoughtful.”

  Orville was so close that I could feel the warmth radiating from him. My face was next to his left shoulder and I wanted nothing more than to melt against him. I recalled the intense calm I had once felt when Hans took my hand in his, and I wanted to ask Orville to do the same. Instead, I said:

  “Sir, may we please study the Brontës together?”

  “No.”

  “I know you think it’s a personal problem and that you’re not my therapist. But really, this whole issue is entirely academic. I need your professional help. Someone is leaving me very famous novels, ones that my father spent his entire life trying to deconstruct. All I have is some messy old research, with no guidelines.”

  Orville said, “People have been studying these books for over a century. What did your father possibly expect to find? A missing chapter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then please don’t ask me to become involved.”

  “Please, sir. It will be just like regular tutorials, except useful.”

  Orville stood up and returned to his seat across the table. He sat at the edge of his chair and began packing up the defrosted cake, slowly, as though he were wrapping a delicate present. I pulled the blanket over my torso and stared into the fireplace. It popped and spat out flames like small arguments.

  “Do you know the last image I have of him?” I asked.

  A pause—then: “Who.”

  “My father.”

  No answer.

  “He was trying to hang a painting on the wall,” I said.

  “You don’t have to talk about this.”

  “It was a heavy painting,” I said. “Framed. It was late. He was hammering, and it was so loud that I couldn’t fall asleep. I went downstairs, and there he was, just standing there—the nail between his index and middle finger, the hammer in the other hand—looking down at himself as though his pants had dropped and he couldn’t remember how to pull them back up.”

  Orville repeated, “Samantha. You don’t have to talk about this.”

  I ignored him. “He had been drinking, and was swaying by this time. He lifted the nail to the wall and when he swung, he missed. I’m sure he hit himself on the fingers, but he didn’t react. It was unfair. He was unfair. I started to yell at him to leave the painting alone and go to bed. I told him to stop breathing through his mouth like that. I was screaming because I had never seen him so imperfect. He waved his hammer as a response and smashed it into the wall. He started laughing; then he started singing. ‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.’ I went back upstairs and stuffed two earplugs in my ears and put a pillow over my head.”

  I stopped just then. I let out a bre
ath.

  Softly, Orville said: “And?”

  “And, that’s it.”

  We were silent. When I looked at him, he looked away. True, I was leaving out a couple of bits, like the actual fire. But that was where the memory grew holes, and the journalists had filled me in. Wasn’t it curious, said the New Yorker, that the enigmatic Tristan Whipple should die in the same way Branwell Brontë nearly died—in the same way that Jane Eyre’s Mr. Edward Rochester had nearly died? It was almost as if Tristan Whipple had lived out an old destiny. In the hands of an exceptional poet, perhaps the incident could have been turned into something lasting and artistic. Wasn’t it ironic, then, that the one author who could have done it justice was my father? I stopped reading the papers when I was sixteen.

  I let out a breath. “By now, it’s fiction. It’s like it never even happened.”

  Orville didn’t move. “Of course it happened.”

  “No,” I said, standing up. “No. You’d be pretty surprised at how much it didn’t happen. Where should I put my glass?”

  All of a sudden it felt wrong to be there. I felt like a fraud. I had just described the last hours of my closest companion, and yet my eyes were dry. I was always one step away from raw emotion. Dad used to tell me that to tell a good story, you needed courage. Courage to fully become someone else, even if—and especially if—that person was a more vulnerable version of yourself. I was not a courageous person. I wasn’t even crying.

  I put down my glass. “I might try to forget this conversation.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Will you forget it too?”

  He didn’t respond. I walked over and slipped on my boots.

  “Samantha, shall I walk you home?”

  He looked so concerned that I had a hard time believing he was the same person who liked to strut around this room with a meterstick. I shook my head and let out a cough that seemed to rattle all the bones in my chest. I gathered my things to leave, but I stopped at the door.

  “Sir,” I began, “in Wuthering Heights, someone breaks into Lockwood’s room in the middle of the night. Do you remember?”

  He said, “I remember.”

  “Lockwood realizes that it is, in fact, a ghost. A ghost so real to him that it becomes a physical reality.”

  “Yes. And?”

  I waited. “Well?” I said—I practically gulped. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  I realized I didn’t want to hear his answer, though. So I pulled my coat around me. Orville took a step forward. I didn’t look him in the eye; instead, I thanked him for the cake and quitted the room. I heard him wishing me a merry Christmas as the door shut behind me.

  Reading Wuthering Heights had always made me wonder whether Emily Brontë had done drugs. It was not always clear, even to her, where her imaginary world stopped and where reality began. For a woman who spent her entire life secluded on a desolate English wasteland, Emily Brontë had a curiously nuanced grasp of the world, much more developed than some of her more worldly literary counterparts.

  She was my father’s favorite Brontë. Emily, like him, had been a singularly antisocial creature who loathed publicity, had almost no friends, and ritually burned most of her writing. It was she who invented the family pseudonyms, happily hiding behind the name Ellis Bell like it was a giant plant. Emily stayed on the moors for most of her life, refused any form of medical treatment when she grew ill with tuberculosis, and died at the age of thirty.

  Wuthering Heights was her one, beloved baby. It received very little praise when it was published in 1847, and Emily died the following year under the impression that it was a failure. The book was a weird, sick, twisted creature that brought to life a slew of unappealing characters. There were family trees as complicated as the Russian monarchy, plagued by an avalanche of similar names: Hareton, Heathcliff, Hindley. There was a plot, I guess, but it was grounded somewhere between the natural and the supernatural, heaven and hell, this world and Emily Brontë’s dream world.

  I had read Wuthering Heights several times and seen all the movie adaptations, from old black-and-white movies with too much wind and not enough dialogue to artistic French films saturated with awkward sex and visible chest hair. The image of Cathy and Heathcliff roaming about the cruel Yorkshire moors was about as famous as that of the Titanic sinking. No one seemed to doubt that this novel was one of the most passionate, romantic love stories in English literature. And yet, there is very little romance between Heathcliff and Cathy. Heathcliff is a beast, not a human. “He’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” says Cathy, who could also be describing herself. There are some moments of picturesque melodrama, but the love story is weak at best. Cathy and Heathcliff do not evolve together; they just are. Nelly Dean gives the best description of the pair: Heathcliff gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered [Cathy] to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species. They both end up miserable, then dead.

  The idea that this book was a great love story was Emily Brontë’s little magic trick. She had always been a believer in grand dreams, and what better way to demonstrate the power of the imagination than to engineer a book that encouraged—no, required—her readers to imagine? The real romance between Heathcliff and Cathy has been invented by millions of eager readers. We must assume they love each other, even when some of the facts don’t add up. And thanks to our significant efforts, their “love” feels as real as if Emily had spelled the whole thing out. Emily succeeded in doing what my father had always wanted to do: she made people use their imaginations.

  Wuthering Heights was the second-to-last book my father and I read together in full. I was fourteen. He and I were sitting in our backyard, legs draped into our paddling pool. The water was orange because it had been there for three and a half years. I asked Dad if we’d get polio; he told me that I had already been vaccinated, maybe. He had been reading Wuthering Heights aloud to me over a series of days. Every day I would listen while watching our bare feet through the orange water. We looked like test subjects in a lab for radioactive waste.

  Once we finished the book, Dad asked me what I thought of it. I said it was full of contradictions. Contradictions was my favorite word at the time, along with flocculate. Emily invented a brutal world that bred sin and immorality, yet revealed it through a narrator blinded by British politeness and manners. She created one of the most enduring loves in English literature, yet suggested that such a love could never survive. She demonstrated that those who live in the past are doomed never to escape it, yet she trapped the reader in stories of a violent, turbulent past. It was, I thought, a pretty good analysis for a teenager.

  My father just splashed his foot once in the water without smiling. I could tell that he didn’t agree with me. I tried to tell him about similes, but he interrupted to say that I was overanalyzing. I told him all about dichotomies and juxtapositions, but he said not to mention those insidious words again—did I want to have to go play soccer? Dichotomy was his least favorite word, right after twinkle.

  I learned that day that my father cared about one scene, and one scene only: the Scene with the Hand. It was one of the first moments in the text. The narrator, who has been emotionally brutalized by Heathcliff’s less-than-amiable hospitality, has a dream about a noisy branch outside his window. Dad reread the passage to me for added emphasis:

  “I must stop it, nevertheless!” I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in!”

  When he finished reading, he said, “A little out of place, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is clunky, amateur writing.”

  “It’s a dream,” I said. “Lockwood is ha
ving a nightmare.”

  “Is it really? This passage does not fit in with the rest of the book. You have to wonder why it is here at all.”

  I said, “Maybe Emily was just a bad writer.”

  “She was a very talented writer.”

  “Maybe because it was her first novel, and she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  Dad frowned. He was angry. There was a sickly, manic gleam in his eye, and I knew he would soon begin to gesticulate wildly. I wanted to stop the lesson, but I stayed put.

  “Try again,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a dream and she thinks that ghosts are real.”

  “Better. Go with that.”

  “Go with what?”

  “You’d be amazed to discover all the tangible things that can come out of dreams.”

  “Like drool?”

  “Perhaps this is too advanced for you, after all,” he snapped. “You’re just not ready.”

  With that, the lesson was over. We didn’t speak for days. I knew why he was upset. Dad thought I wasn’t learning quickly enough. He didn’t understand why, after all his efforts, I couldn’t think the way he did. I was too conventional. Too calm, too sedate, and too much like my mother. He knew that I would read a book and think of it only as a book rather than as a part of myself—something that I could live and breathe. As hard as he tried, my beautiful, bizarre father could not teach me to be creative.

  Then, of course, he died, not even a full two months later. I never did find out what made the Scene with the Hand so fascinating to him. All I could do was mull over the words he had underlined. Let me in—let me in!

  I wanted to scream the exact same words back to him.

  A few days before New Year’s, I received a knock at my door. Another tour group, I supposed. Or was it another book?