The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

Dinner was actually in an hour and forty-five. I used the time to go through my e-mails. I came upon an announcement that had been penned at eight thirty-two that morning. My heart seemed to stop.

  Dear Student,

  It has come to our attention that on the evening of Thursday, February 27, a room in the Faculty Wing was forcibly entered. We hardly need impress upon anyone the gravity of the crime. If you have any information regarding this matter, we urge you to reveal it to a college faculty member. Any person found to be withholding evidence will face severe punitive measures.

  Regards,

  Ellery Flannery

  Director of Student Affairs

  I was breathing heavily. Flannery might as well have taken dictation from my latest nightmare. Except that in my nightmare, it was Orville who had written the letter, and he looked like Rasputin. I tried to tell myself that no one had seen me, and therefore I could not be caught. Why, then, did I feel as though an invisible being were hovering over my shoulder, passing judgment? Surely, I would be found and expelled from Oxford. My lungs constricted. I was too young to have run out of time.

  I whipped out my phone and carefully dialed.

  “Hello?” came the voice on the other line.

  “Is this James Orville the Third?”

  A pause. “Samantha, how did you get this number?”

  “You called me once, remember?”

  My voice was breathless and urgent, and I imagined I sounded like a schoolgirl, with wide eyes the size of saucers. I couldn’t quite believe my own nerve in calling him on a Friday night.

  “So, are you busy?” I asked. There was noise in the background—he was at a party, at a bar, with a woman, maybe. Yes, he was busy. My heart pounded.

  “Where are you?” Orville asked. “The connection is poor.”

  “I’m in Paris.”

  Something crashed in the background on his end, and there was a loud, cumulative roar of approval in the distance. I was jealous; I had hoped he spent his weekends reading books and being antisocial.

  Orville said, “Listen, now is not a good time—is anything the matter?”

  “No.”

  “Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  “I—”

  “Answer.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  We waited. The concern in his disembodied voice was attractive.

  I said, “I had a question about Anne Brontë.”

  Orville let out a breath. “It’s a Friday night.”

  “I was homeschooled,” I explained. “If you don’t mind me asking—did Anne Brontë ever draft a third book?”

  There was silence, which meant that it was either a ridiculous question or a brilliant one. He said, “How should I know?”

  “It’s just that Tenant still seems incomplete to me.”

  Another roar in the background.

  Orville said, “Samantha, I’m busy at the moment.”

  “I received another book. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

  A pause.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “Yes. But I have some questions about it.”

  Orville didn’t answer for a moment. “Thursday next?” he said, eventually.

  “Sure.”

  “You may write me an essay on it. Try to be creative.”

  “Like, I write you a poem?”

  “I hope not. Good night, Samantha.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s past your bedtime.”

  “It’s eight thirty.”

  “I thought you were homeschooled.”

  I couldn’t think of a quick response, which irritated me, and by the time I said, “Sir?” he had already hung up.

  Dinner consisted of peas, mashed potatoes, and pinkish chicken. The meat was chewy and I supposed it was what salmonella tasted like. Mom seemed so pleased that I thought she might have shot and killed the bird herself. Conversation was slow and it felt like we were giving birth. I learned that Mom’s interior decorating business was doing fantastically well; that her wedding dress firm had folded years ago; no, she was not dating anyone; and she did not actually feel a need to be married—after all, did I? I didn’t tell her that Ellery Flannery had a warrant out for my arrest, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you mention on a first date. There were long swaths of silence, which Mom and I weren’t ready for at all. The two of us were the worst sort of acquaintances—people who only knew each other through one activity. Tennis friends.

  “Tell me about your writing,” she said. “I want to hear about your writing.”

  I said, “I stopped writing.”

  “That’s a shame. Why?”

  “I don’t know, do you still paint?”

  “I never painted.”

  “Exactly.”

  She took a slow swallow of cabernet sauvignon. Her eyes were two black bullets. “Samantha, are you all right?”

  “What?”

  “Happy. Are you happy?”

  I looked up. “Not particularly.”

  Immediately, I wished I hadn’t said anything. The words sounded angular and irreversible when spoken out loud—as though I were giving shape to something that could have otherwise disappeared.

  “Tell me what’s bothering you,” she said.

  I picked up my fork and pushed the peas from one side of my plate to another. “I figured out who left me that book on my doorstep. It’s Rebecca Smith. That’s who Dad entrusted to leave me his books. Only now she goes by Defoe.”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed.

  “Defoe,” she said, picking up her wineglass again. Her voice had turned to tin. “Defoe was her middle name.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Your father talked about her all the time.”

  We fell into a silence. She looked like she would like to be finished with this conversation so she could go to bed and wake up twenty years from now. I thought of the conspiratorial way my father had often looked at Rebecca from across the table. It was as if they were members of a secret, two-person club. Had my father ever looked at my mother like that? Surely I would have remembered.

  Mom was staring me right between the eyes. The silence was killing me.

  “I’m not in love with him anymore, if that’s what you’re about to ask,” she said.

  I looked away. “No, that’s not what I was thinking.”

  “Well, I’m not. I’m the one who left him, remember?”

  I said softly, “Was it because they were having an affair?”

  I looked up to find her big black eyes still examining me. She didn’t respond. She just picked up her glass again and took a large swallow. I felt a strange surge of affection for her.

  “More chicken?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “She teaches at Oxford now, you know.”

  “Who? Rebecca?” Her voice was brittle. “She always taught at Oxford. Your father liked to visit her there when we were married.”

  I paused. “I see.”

  “I hear she came to Boston, after I left.”

  I could tell she was trying hard to act nonchalant. She looked away, then passed me the chicken even though I hadn’t asked for any. The one trait she and I appeared to share was a tendency to squeeze our lips together when we were upset.

  I said, softly, “Can I tell you something, and would you please not tell anyone?”

  “Go for it.”

  I took a breath. “I broke into her office yesterday.”

  Mom squinted. “Whose office?”

  “Rebecca’s.”

  A pause. “What?”

  Then, suddenly, I couldn’t stop talking. I launched into an overwrought explanation of the entire incident, from beginning to end, then back to the beginning. I told her it was inevitable, how I forced open Rebecca’s door, then poked around, then snatched her book and left, how I didn’t even seem to be myself, how I seemed to be listening to the angry bullied kid inside of me, though I actually was never bullied, was I? I ke
pt talking and talking—about what, I’m not exactly sure—but by the time I was done, my mother was staring at me as though we had never met before, not even in our own dreams. The mother I had imagined and the daughter she had imagined still existed, somewhere, but not here.

  At last, she said: “Goddammit, Samantha.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll be kicked out if they find out.”

  She put her palm flat on the table. It made a swatting sound. “Goddammit, Samantha.”

  I flinched. I wanted to be punished; yes, I needed to be punished. There was absolution in punishment. One zinging reprimand would welcome me into a world of normal mothers and normal, badly behaved teenage daughters.

  Mom said: “The door? You used the door?”

  I blinked. “Sorry?”

  “Next time you use the window. Understand?”

  My mouth closed. Mom stood up, and I heard the refrigerator door open and shut behind me. A pop and fizzle meant a can was opening. She returned and sat back down across from me. Then, at ten o’clock in the evening, on the fashionable side of the rue de Magdebourg, my mother handed me a beer.

  We spent Saturday wandering around Paris. I learned a few things about my mother. She was from a hippie family in California—which I had always known, I suppose, but now I finally understood. She had worked as a bird researcher, and her first boyfriends included more than one member of an Irish punk band. We glossed over her life with my father, since it was irrelevant, and moved on to her life in Europe, where she had become fluent in Norwegian and blogged about wild dogs. She was now a CEO and had only four good friends because when you age, she said, you lose the energy to be fake.

  In the early afternoon, we took a picture in front of Notre-Dame, strolled along the Seine, and bought my first eight-dollar hot chocolate. We went home and made angel-hair pasta for lunch, then watched a graphic French movie named after a Baudelaire poem. The day was aggressively European and felt like a small, absurd vacation. Mom had a laugh like a hyena. More than once, I found myself picturing how my life would have been as her daughter rather than my father’s.

  In the evening, she had to run to a client meeting but we agreed to meet up later at L’écume des Pages. I arrived early and set up shop at a back table so I could write Orville an essay. It’s a curious crowd that lives in bookshop cafés on Saturday nights. The woman next to me was reading Insects of the Rain Forests. Nearby was a Frenchman who had come here, it seemed, to take off his shoes and release his foot odor. He wiggled his toes. I pulled out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and began to draft my impromptu essay for Orville. I told myself I was writing this essay for him, but really, I was writing this essay to him. I couldn’t help but write with the acute awareness that James Orville would be the one reading it, that maybe he’d scan the words on the page and hear my own voice whispering in his ear.

  I sat back, my chair teetering on its two back legs, and tried to think of something intelligent to say. I had no thesis, no direction, and no ideas. It was nearly impossible to read my father’s battered copy of this book, which is why I gave up halfway through and started skimming. He had underlined, starred, or scribbled next to almost every single line. There was one passage I knew he preferred above all others, and it was on page two of the preface, enthusiastically highlighted in red:

  I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it. But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it, especially as he that does so will be likely to incur more scorn and obloquy for the mud and water into which he has ventured to plunge, than thanks for the jewel he procures.

  It was, of course, the clue my father had given me for Christmas, the one that had once led me down a sanitary sewer. There was a “priceless treasure” in this book, too, much as in Agnes Grey.

  I took out my pen. I decided to write about Helen Graham. The world knew her as a stable, reasonable, and pragmatic protagonist—a tall, lady-like figure, clad in black. And yet I was beginning to suspect that something was deeply off with her. Helen is shunned by society, not because of the existence of her bastard child and mysterious ex-husband but because of her peculiar behavior. She is described as a witch—pale, breathless, agitated. Upon meeting her, Gilbert comments that he would rather see her from a distance than be near her. There is an easy explanation for her unpopularity: Helen’s independence is foreign and threatening to a remote nineteenth-century English village. Yet the depictions of Helen soon go a few steps beyond mere independence: Lo! Mrs. Helen Graham darted upon me—her neck uncovered, her black locks streaming in the wind. This is not necessarily how one would describe proto-feminism. It is, however, the way one might describe a madwoman.

  I sat back in my seat. Yes, I quite liked that theory. I enjoyed the thought that Helen Graham may have been secretly off her rocker—that she was so wild and powerful as to be feared by everyone. It wasn’t an altogether outlandish idea, either. The narrator, to use Orville’s favorite expression, is unreliable. The man who tells the story is the man who eventually marries the protagonist. A besotted lover can never be objective. As the transcriber of Helen’s secret diary, Gilbert becomes the editor in chief of her life, able to remove or twist anything that seems too shocking for his audience. Her character has been cleaned and beautified for the public. For all anyone knew, the real Helen could have been another Bertha, finally lashing out against her entrapment.

  If Gilbert did, in fact, do some well-intentioned meddling with Helen’s image, then I patted Anne Brontë on the back for her foresight. Anne’s own biography had been written retroactively, her image shaped by an elder sister who might or might not have had her best interests at heart. Did Anne know this, and did she deliberately write it into her semi-autobiographical masterpiece, in an effort to publicize her own shackles? The real Anne and the real Helen were both trapped—under layers of narration.

  “What are you reading?”

  I gave a start. Mom had arrived early, and out of breath. The cold had left her cheeks mottled and red. She unwrapped the scarf from her neck like a bandage.

  “Do you want a croissant?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I just ordered you one.”

  “Almond?”

  “Almond.”

  She sat down. I could tell something was bothering her. There was a crease in her forehead in the shape of the San Andreas Fault. She glanced between Tenant and me, me and Tenant.

  “I really hate that book,” she said.

  She sounded exactly like me.

  “Your father made me read it when we were dating,” she explained. “He told me that everything was right in front of my eyes, but that I would never be able to see a damn thing without being able to read more creatively. Does that sound like a nice thing to say to your future wife?”

  “No.”

  Mom took a breath. Her weekend-long grin had settled into a deep frown. “I wanted to talk to you about something, Samantha, before you leave tomorrow. Do you know the Brontës?”

  “Sorry, who?”

  “Don’t joke when I’m being serious. I want you to consider yourself cut off from them. From this moment on.”

  There was a small silence. Mom hadn’t even taken off her coat, yet it seemed she had already spat out everything she wanted to tell me.

  I waited, and when she didn’t respond, I said: “I don’t think you can do that?”

  Mom pursed her lips. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re here, surrounded by Paris, and you are rereading that piece-of-shit book. Don’t you find that sad?”

  Because I could think of nothing else to say, I said: “La merde.”

  “Your dad had a mistress long before Rebecca,” she said. The word mistress was sharp and ugly, and yet she glossed over it as though she were describing a flat tire. “His obsession with the Brontës ruined every single relationship in his life—including, I’m afraid, his relationship wit
h you.”

  I decided to ignore that. “You must have some idea of what he wanted me to find.”

  “Probably some old towels the Brontës used to clean themselves,” she said.

  “I’m being serious.”

  “Who says I wasn’t being serious? You’re complicating something that was never meant to be complicated.”

  “Learning how to complicate things is what makes you smarter.”

  “Only in a classroom.”

  I said, “Life is a classroom?”

  “Christ, Samantha.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

  She gave me a fiery stare. “Your father may have been your idol, but I want you to remember that he was not always a good man,” she said. “Have you ever met his doppelgänger, Sir John Booker? What a pair. A Cambridge professor, decorated like the pope, who wastes his talent hounding your father for years, following a mystery he invented. I want you to pay close attention to what happened to both of those men, Samantha. Your father died in his early forties. If the fire hadn’t killed him, the booze would have done it not long after that. I’m sure he knew it. And Booker? Raving mad. A few years ago, he was found wading through the mud outside the parsonage in the middle of the night, looking for something, presumably. Read some articles on him, Samantha. It’s pathetic. You’ll notice that he is also divorced.”

  The croissant arrived in a paper bag. “Chaud,” said the girl in the green apron who brought it before disappearing. I took a bite but it didn’t taste like much except salt. Mom stared at me for some time, then folded her hands in her lap in the shape of a small cradle.

  “I worry about you,” she said. “You’ve gotten so wrapped up with being alone that sometimes it feels as if you like it there.”

  My throat constricted. “It wasn’t my choice.”

  She stared at me, solemn. “I never did a thing to you, Samantha. Don’t create a delusional fiction and pretend I abandoned you. All I’ve been doing for the last seven years is trying to get you to move in with me. I know why you can’t look at me, and it’s because you see him every time you do. Well, you know what? I look at you and I see him too. He was a brilliant man and he was a scared man. He lived in the past because nothing was at stake there.”