The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  I had entered so easily that for a brief second I thought that it must have all been a trick: Rebecca would erupt out of the closet, ready to whack me with some partial differential equations. But there was no one inside. Her office was sunny and incalculably clean. The only thing that felt out of place was the wrappings of what must have been a meal once—tuna fish and cheddar, right on her desk. Hadn’t she thought to throw away her lunch? What a pig.

  My heart was pounding. I thought of the Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures, and wondered if the punishment for stealing from a don’s room would include the swift seizure of my lands and castles. I should have realized the gravity of my crime and left. I did not do that. Instead, I took a slow turn about the room. My lip curled in resentment. Rebecca has been alive this entire time, eating tuna fish. There was a refrigerator in the corner of the room—black, with a white rectangle in the middle. I thought of what I might find inside: a watermelon, jam, a bottle of white wine. Two Beefeater Gibsons. A human heart. On the desk was a pile of problem sets with some eigenvectors drawn in pencil. Nearby was a small sticky note attached to the lampshade, reading, Thanks for the advice; I love you with all my heart, Rebecca. I made a face, and looked around, as though the person who had written it was standing somewhere nearby, smoking something.

  I set about searching for what I’d come for, except that I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly. Proof? Proof of what? Proof that the square root of any negative number was imaginary? Because in that case, there was ample evidence collected in a small avalanche of books on the desk: Vector Calculus, Additive Problems in Combinatorial Number Theory, Graduate Texts in Mathematics. They smelled like damp bread and deep June. They reminded me of algebra at eight in the morning, and the scent of freshly cut grass out the window.

  One part of Rebecca’s room demanded further inspection. On the wall behind her desk, she had hung dozens and dozens of framed documents. I peered closer so I could read them. I stopped. For a woman who had won a mountain of awards in her lifetime, the only documents on her walls were framed copies of what appeared to be exams that she had failed, letters of rejection from different universities, notes from various publishers who had spurned her first book. This office—this well-lit, corner office—was a symbol of her academic triumph, and yet she had decorated it with a lifetime of petty failures. I had seen only one other person do the same—my father.

  Everything seemed wrong, all of a sudden. The seriousness of the situation piled on top of me. It occurred to me that in all the times I had stolen something from Rebecca’s room in our own home, I had never gotten away with it.

  Unease mounting, I searched through Rebecca’s bookshelf quickly, with sloppy fingers. My heart was slamming against my chest. I scanned the books of matrices and linear equations and I panicked, because it occurred to me that Rebecca’s sandwich might not be old at all. It was today’s sandwich. Stupid girl, I told myself—it was today’s. Rebecca would come back, and I would have to jump into the closet, which wasn’t—

  There. There it was. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It was wedged in between Elementary Quantum Mechanics and Advanced Game Theory. It was thick and swollen, like it had been fed and fattened for years and now couldn’t fit comfortably into anything. I plucked it from its position on the shelf. There was no back cover. I recognized the spot on the front where it had been chewed on the corner—by what I had never exactly been sure. Yes, yes, it was my father’s copy. It had been here the whole time.

  I frowned. There was something new that I didn’t remember from my childhood. A bookmark was sticking out of the middle like a grasping, empty hand. I flipped the book open to the marked page. There was Emily Dickinson’s sneering face, peering out at me as if from behind bars. I didn’t understand. My bookmark had been red. This one—this new, strange one—was yellow, and reeked of perfume. I had never seen a yellow Emily Dickinson bookmark in our house. I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense. I was short of breath. These were supposed to be father-daughter bookmarks. They were not supposed to be father-daughter-and-math-teacher bookmarks. I was supposed to be the sole benefactor of his strange little games. Had my father been splitting his affection in half?

  I let out a small wheeze. I put both bookmark and book under my arm and headed for the door. I didn’t bother looking back. I needed to leave. In a moment, I had ejected myself from Rebecca Smith’s office. I slammed the door but the lock clanked and it refused to close entirely. It was broken.

  Then, I did the same thing any criminal would do. I walked down the hall, quite calmly, and fled the country. I was under the English Channel before Oxford could even say, Expelled.

  CHAPTER 11

  I had begun a race against time. It was only a matter of days before Old College would discover that I had broken into a professor’s office. I no longer belonged at Oxford. I had violated the implicit pact between teacher and student. The Serpent had sounded a gong, and there I fell, down from heaven. I would be ritually hanged and quartered, then retroactively denied dining hall privileges.

  I spent Friday morning on the train to Paris, wallowing in guilt and visions of execution. There were two people seated next to me in the airline-blue, septic train booth: a man wearing an electric-green blazer and a mother wearing a squalling, fat-cheeked baby in a sack on her torso. Every few moments the kid would let rip its shrill harpy cry, and the man in green would look to the ceiling in response, as though he had taken up an argument with God.

  “Don’t worry,” the mother said, sweating through a confident smile. She patted the baby on the back as it wailed. “I brought drugs.”

  The man said, “For us too?”

  I had The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in front of me. I hadn’t touched it since I removed it from my bag an hour earlier. The woman on the cover, a middle-aged brunette with a receding hairline, looked like someone who had gone through everything there was to go through in life—twice. Both she and I seemed to recognize the newfound responsibility that had befallen us. Mine was to understand her; hers was to make herself understood.

  My ears popped and unpopped as we sped underneath the English Channel, and the baby, on cue, released a blazing foghorn of a cry. His mother patted him on the back and started singing an original composition called “Wash my body, yeah, yeah, yeah.” I realized that she was looking at The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with some curiosity, the way she would regard a sad Italian opera she couldn’t quite understand: beautiful, but somehow useless.

  Near the French border, I opened up the book. This novel was not a pleasure read. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a mess. Chaos. It was Anne’s emotional vomit, masked in cool, reserved prose. She had written too many narrators, too many stories within stories, too many secrets that no one was allowed to share. It was what happened to an author when she was very, very angry, and trying to tell a complicated story far too quickly. Tenant—published after Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, and Wuthering Heights—was the literary equivalent of a Russian doll: a diary inside a letter inside a book. This was not a story to get lost in. This was a story that reminded you, page after page, that it had been written. You could not help but be aware that there had been an author, that her name had been Anne Brontë, or that she had sat down one night at a lonely table, trying to figure out the best way to spill some secrets.

  It was Anne’s second novel. Her first book, Agnes Grey, had turned out to be boring and useless while its contemporary, Jane Eyre, had been dramatic and popular. Anne tried again, and this time, she was determined to not hold back. Tenant begins with a letter from a young man named Gilbert Markham, a badly disguised version of young Branwell Brontë. He is passionate, impulsive, and on the prowl. “I am about to give a sketch,” he writes to a friend. “No, not a sketch—a full and faithful account of certain circumstances connected with the most important event of my life.” The “most important event” of his life is, naturally, a woman. Her name is Helen Graham and she is a tacitur
n single mother who moves into a deserted old manor and paints morbid landscapes for a living.

  The romance between the two does not end up being terribly romantic, since Gilbert expends most of his energy trying to figure out the secrets of Helen’s sordid past. Why did she come to Wildfell Hall? Why does she have a son? Why are her morbid landscapes so morbid? Helen, in a moment of desperation, finally throws Gilbert her entire diary. It conveniently explains everything that has ever happened to her. Gilbert, naturally, transcribes all two hundred pages of this diary to his old friend, and the rest of the novel becomes the firsthand account of Helen’s past.

  Her past is suitably shocking. As an impressionable young woman, she suffered a misguided marriage with a fabulous rake and alcoholic-in-progress. After a few years, she couldn’t take it anymore and decided to run away. In an act of defiance, she slammed her bedroom door in her husband’s face. It was the door slam that rang around the world. This is the defining moment of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the instant in which Anne Brontë delivered to her readers all the empty promises of Agnes Grey. Helen Graham is the updated version of Anne’s first protagonist. On the outside, she is shy and stern; on the inside, she is fiery, and as strong as a man.

  The novel, not surprisingly, was panned. In the words of Sharpe’s London Magazine, it was a series of “profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured.” But The Tenant of Wildfell Hall finally brought Anne the commercial success that was her due. Her novel outsold even Wuthering Heights, and went into its second printing after only six weeks.

  My father and I both referred to this book as Tenant. Just Tenant. It was his tenant, our tenant, the creature who subleased our basement. Dad didn’t love this book, but he respected it. This was the Hera of the Brontë literature—all-seeing and wise, yet lost in the wake of other, flashier gods. Dad and I never had the chance to explore the whole book together. The furthest we ever got, before he died, was the preface to the second edition. In the wake of her bad reviews, Anne wrote a small and biting essay defending both herself and her work. It was a bold move for a woman whose reputation was already at risk. Anne never once backed down or apologized. She fought back. Reading her preface to the second edition was the equivalent of watching someone you love very much begin to grow some balls. She wrote:

  . . . When I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it, though it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader’s immediate pleasure as well as my own.

  Predictably, Charlotte did her best to crush The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She reviewed her sister’s book with even more contempt than Anne’s numerous critics. “[Tenant] hardly appears to me desirable to preserve,” she commented. “The choice of subject in that work is a mistake.” After Anne died, Charlotte flatly refused the re-publication of her sister’s novel. Perhaps she thought she was trying to preserve Anne’s good name for posterity. But I wasn’t sure Anne wanted to be saved. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall could have been as famous as Jane Eyre, had it only received proper marketing. The support of the Great Charlotte Brontë, if given, could have made Anne a star. Instead, Charlotte deliberately denied her sister the recognition she deserved. Anne died a social reformer who ended up reforming nothing.

  The baby Martian across the train table gave a piercing war cry. With one solid right kick, the kid knocked the book out of my hands. Apparently even a baby could sense trouble when it was right in front of him. I glanced over at the man in the green suit, who had stopped arguing with the roof and was now watching me with the curious expression of someone who might be secretly cataloguing story material for one of his next books. I gave a small frown and pulled my hood over my head.

  Paris was nice, I guess. The city reminded me of one of those people who didn’t need to make an effort to impress you because you both knew you had to get along. My mother said she’d pick me up from the train station, so I waited in the main lobby, which echoed and glittered like a low-budget cathedral. Not too long after I arrived, I saw a familiar-looking woman wearing a fur coat and white-rimmed glasses waiting by the flower stand.

  That wasn’t my mother. Instead, my mother turned out to be the woman walking toward me in light jeans and a girlish multicolored top with puffy sleeves. I hadn’t seen her in over two years, and she had dyed her hair a thick, bottomless brown. The old vision I had of her—the blurry blonde in my memory—seemed like a character in a book that had now been inched out of my imagination by the movie. The new face stopped in front of me with a smile I barely recognized. She was stately, with good stage presence, and her teeth sparkled like crystal.

  “Let me give you a hug!” she boomed. She was massively tall. We hugged and pulled away, and I looked into her soft, young face. One thing about my mother—she was only forty-two.

  “I’ll get your bags,” she said.

  We walked outside and when a cab pulled over, Mom opened the door for me, blind-date style. She was more beautiful than I remembered, but maybe beauty came with age and confidence. We climbed inside. My bag rested between us like a small beached whale. She rattled off some directions to the taxi driver, then turned to me and said:

  “You still remember your French, don’t you, Samantha?”

  “I spoke French?”

  “Seat belt.”

  The car lurched forward. It was already late in the afternoon, and the day was dragging itself down behind the buildings. In its final moments, the wilting sun looked like a fist that had opened up to unleash five beams of pink and orange. To someone else, it was probably poetic. To me, everything looked like the inside of Rebecca’s office. The break-in had swelled in size and magnitude in my mind over the last few hours. I felt ill. I was not a daughter visiting her mother; I was a fugitive here to be harbored by a familiar amazon.

  Mom, however, seemed to be having a great time. The smile never left her face for the duration of the car ride. She patted my hand three or four times, and sometimes rubbed it. When she smiled, she looked very put-together, like a colleague, or a stylish aunt. If I were a kid and looking at her for the first time, I would have wished she were my mother. This, right here, was the prime of her life. It wasn’t fair to resent her for how young she was, but I did. If she hadn’t married so young, she would not have needed to run away.

  Mom’s new apartment was on the fashionable side of the rue de Magdebourg, on the seventh floor of a building that looked like a fancy chocolate. There were multiple locks on her front door, I noticed. A nice idea. Kept out criminals like myself. Inside, everything was squeaky clean and magazine-tidy. The furniture was shiny and angular. The centerpiece was a giant, glossy slice of sedimentary rock. It was very avant-garde. I guess it was supposed to represent the view of Earth as seen from a great distance.

  Mom immediately disappeared into the kitchen. I dropped my bags and took a look around. There were no books. It made the space feel soulless. Or, maybe soulless was a term people used when everything was perfect and you just resented not being part of it. Mom had always wanted me to move to Paris. I chose Boston. At the time, I couldn’t leave my father. I’d picked between my two parents, and my mother had lost. I didn’t like to think about it.

  “While you’re here, I’d like to buy you something,” Mom called from the next room.

  “You don’t have to buy me anything,” I said.

  “Do you know what you’d look great in?”

  I said, “A Porsche?”

  “Knee-length skirts.”

  “Hmm.”

  “The guest room is off to the right. I’ll be there in a second.”

  I showed myself to my room. It was yellow and blue—clearly designed for a daughter. Ruffles. Curtains. A big orange bed. An artsy painting of a purple and green woman with six feet. Stacked on top of the nightstand were dozens of copies of French fashion magazines. Each one had a page whose corner was turned down, likely filled with shoes an
d knee-length skirts. It was as though some child had died in here and no one had touched the room since.

  “Do you like it?” Mom asked.

  I didn’t realize she had returned, and I turned around to find her with a mug of hot chocolate in her hands. She handed it to me. Old-looking marshmallows bobbed on the surface.

  “For you,” she said with an expectant look on her face.

  I paused. “Thank you.”

  It was the saddest moment we ever spent together.

  I took a step back and accidentally knocked over my bag, out of which tumbled The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I picked it up, as well as the dental floss that had also spilled out, and dropped them both on the bed. Mom’s eyes rested on the book. She looked at it with alarm, like it was instead several thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine.

  She cleared her throat and said, innocently, “You’ve already read that, haven’t you?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “More than once?”

  “It’s one of the books that arrived on my doorstep. Remember? I told you.”

  She paused. “And you carry him with you.”

  I didn’t respond. Mom’s smile fell, for the first time. There was a certain tragedy about her just then—one, ironically, that I knew my father would have found irresistible. Her gaze roved from my bangs to my neck to my ears to my nose and eyebrows and mouth and forehead. I had her cheekbones, her small rib cage, and her bone structure, but I knew she was looking for what else she could call her own. I was my father’s daughter. She hadn’t known what to do about it when I was a child, and she didn’t know what to do about it now.

  “Dinner is in thirty,” she said. With a small smile, she left the room.