The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  To her credit, her shock seemed almost equal to mine. Her eyes widened and narrowed in rapid succession. She looked at me with an icy expression hardened by sugarless tea and too many winters. There was no smile on her face, no glimmer of fondness in her eyes. She and I used to spend four hours every week together, as she taught me that triangles had three sides and that squares had four and that life was a logical, well-ordered phenomenon. Now here we were, looking at each other the way two Native American mannequins would stare at each other through the glass partition of a museum. It was the way, I feared, that Orville and I would look at each other someday.

  My heart was beating furiously. Orville, who did not seem to realize something terrible was happening, came over to make pleasantries. My two tutors had a brief, cool conversation. I emptied my face of all expression and stared into the smeared gray ovals of Rebecca’s eyes. She was talking to Orville but looking at me. She knew. I could see it on her face. She had just figured out that it was I who had broken into her room. I wondered why she hadn’t guessed it long before now.

  “Forgive me, I’m being rude,” said Orville. “Rebecca, this is Samantha Whipple; Samantha, this is Dr. Defoe.”

  “Hello, Sam,” Rebecca said. Her voice was terse and efficient; she could have been one of Hemingway’s women. Sam, Sam. Memories poured into me like a painful injection. I remembered the bright purple shawl she used to wear, the pumpkin scones she brought in the morning, the smell of alcohol swipes in the air, the tea that spilled over my mother’s tablecloths.

  Orville looked between the two of us and paused. “Do you two know each other?”

  Rebecca turned to him. Her lips were two raspberries on a cold, skull-white face. “This, James, is the student who broke into my room.”

  That’s when my life officially stopped, as cleanly as if someone had snapped a book shut. Orville let out a half laugh and told Rebecca not to be ridiculous. In response, she cocked her head toward me and raised an eyebrow, the way she had when I was a child. She was attractive, in an evil sort of way. She told Orville to ask me himself. And then, my beautiful tutor’s head turned in my direction.

  He waited. “Samantha?” It was not an accusatory glance—just one of surprise.

  I couldn’t look directly at him. “Monsieur, I beg your pardon.”

  He paused. “Answer the question.”

  “It’s not really a yes-or-no question.”

  His eyes were veiled. He and I could no longer be allies, not once he discovered that I had attacked his people. I had committed an academic offense. I might as well have murdered his cat.

  “May I explain myself first, before I answer?” I said. “Perhaps in private?”

  Orville took a sharp intake of breath. A look of horror crossed his face. “You broke into a don’s room?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Orville took a step back from me. Suddenly, I had the overwhelming conviction that I had never broken into Rebecca’s office, that I was entirely innocent, that all of this antagonism was a boiling injustice committed against me by an unfeeling world. Didn’t anyone remember my father was dead? Didn’t that count for anything?

  “You broke into a don’s room,” he repeated. I noticed that it was no longer a question.

  I said, “I can explain.”

  “What were you thinking?” he said. “Are you mad? What is the matter with you?”

  I flinched. “Which one of those questions do you want me to answer first?”

  “This is insanity.”

  “I thought you appreciated insanity. I thought you said there was a lot of sanity in it.”

  Orville’s eyebrows formed a solid, heavy line and his eyes glowed beneath them like smoking pistols. He was being unnecessarily cruel.

  “It was an accident,” I told him.

  “How can it possibly be an accident?”

  “Have you ever read Rebecca?”

  “Focus, please.”

  “I’m just trying to explain this in a way you’d understand.”

  He didn’t answer. The look on his face told me that he no longer knew who I was or what I was doing in his office. Rebecca stood in the doorway, smiling. She was enjoying herself very much. Her face sparked a chord of fury within me.

  I turned back to Orville and snapped: “I was trying to find The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

  He said, “In the math department.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How—”

  “Sir,” I interrupted. I motioned to Rebecca. “This was my father’s mistress.”

  A pause. I saw Rebecca’s eyes flash, then cool. A strange silence ensued, the sort that tells you that the armies have shifted, and no one is quite sure which side is winning. Orville said nothing. He was a stranger to me.

  “I can handle this, James,” Rebecca said. Her voice was calm. “Why don’t you give us a few minutes.”

  “Sir,” I said suddenly, “please don’t leave me alone with her.”

  “James, leave us alone,” Rebecca repeated.

  “I’m begging you, sir,” I said. ”You don’t understand.”

  “James.”

  Orville did not seem to be adapting well to arguments between women. I watched his face wrestle with the decision of whose side to take. Student or teacher? Oppressed or oppressor? My confusion about our entire relationship seemed to rest upon this one response. Didn’t men protect the things they cared about? I watched and waited.

  Finally, Orville let out a breath. Without looking directly at me, he told Rebecca: “Please tell me what you decide to do with her. I will be in the lounge.”

  And without a single look over his shoulder, he quitted the room. The breath left my body in one tortured exhale. All I saw was a last glimpse of his face, perfectly framed by the door, before everything went bleak. I remembered something he had once told me, long ago. And this? This never happened.

  I had died, apparently, and gone to hell. Orville was gone. Rebecca glanced at the closed door and then back at me. A thin little smile cracked the mask of her face. She and that smile sat down on the couch.

  “Tea?” she asked sweetly. She was not a sweet person, and the sweetness fell flat on its face. She got up, walked to the kettle, and poured herself a cup.

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Have a seat.”

  I noticed she no longer took cream. Was Orville really gone? I thought of all the little things I had worried about this year—what he thought of my essays, if he appreciated my punctuality, if he secretly liked the fact that I was so tall and didn’t wear makeup. I should have instead wondered if he thought of me at all. He and I were not friends, nor had we ever been. He was just someone whom I was borrowing for the year. All I had was the illusion of intimacy.

  I told Rebecca, “That was a very cruel thing to do.”

  “Was it? I could have just expelled you on the spot—would you have preferred that? That was not very clever of you, breaking into my room like that.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t notice the book was gone earlier.”

  “It’s not something I check on a regular basis.”

  “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is my property.”

  “No—it is my property. Your father gave it to me before he died.” There was a note of possessiveness in her voice. “There was no need for burglary. I would have given it to you eventually.”

  “You mean in the middle of the night?” I said. “You have a funny way of delivering things.”

  She blinked. “I suppose I just never wanted to see you again.”

  My mouth opened slightly. She was much too old to be saying petty things, and I think the realization struck her as much as it did me, because she looked away. It had never occurred to me that teachers could loathe their students as much as their students loathed them.

  “I seem to have interrupted an intimate moment just now,” said Rebecca.

  “We were having a tutorial, if you call that intimat
e.”

  She sat down and draped her arm over the couch. A small laugh accompanied the gesture. “Do you take me for a fool?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re in love with him. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

  I stiffened. “Who?”

  “You’re not the first one. Orville has been stealing the hearts of impressionable female students since he arrived. It is the most common citation other faculty members give when trying to steal his job. How can a man possibly teach in such a situation? It must be terribly inconvenient for him, having girls fawning over him when all he is trying to do is work.”

  “I don’t much want to talk about it, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Your cheeks are red, Sam.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about you and my dad? You had a pretty close personal relationship, too, wouldn’t you say?”

  Her expression was lifeless. “I don’t think you understand a single thing about your father’s and my relationship.”

  “Then you won’t mind telling me the whole story.”

  She waited a moment, then a thin smile crept up her face. “You’re very much like him, you know.”

  “I know. We’re exactly alike.”

  “He was not always a good man.”

  “That’s the second time I’ve heard that.”

  She grazed her finger along the rim of the sofa. Her outfit was not quite right, I noticed. The blouse was not entirely tucked into her badly fitted brown trousers, and the wrinkled bits at the end stuck out on the sides. I had a fleeting image of her as a young girl—silent, smart, awkward. My father once told me that her parents had expected many great things from her, and she had systematically done all of them, as if by point-by-point recursive analysis. Top student, top professor, tenure. I wondered where seducing my father fit into that.

  “He was brilliant at many things, you know,” Rebecca said.

  “Who, Dad?”

  “What he could never handle was the strain of having two women in his life.”

  “Let’s leave my mother out of this, please.”

  She shrugged as though I had said something irrelevant. “As you wish.”

  “You must have been very much in love with him, to ruin a marriage.”

  She let out a loud, hard laugh. “Look at your poor, inquisitive little face. You’d like to know everything, wouldn’t you? What we did, where we sat, what we said. Admit it.”

  She had that rapid way of talking from black-and-white movies—the affected, clenched-jaw accent that makes you wonder, Where’s the audience?

  “Yes,” I said. “I already admitted it. Where did you meet him?”

  “Here, at Old College. I was teaching at the time.”

  I said, “You’re lying.”

  “Goodness, already?”

  “What was my dad doing here? He never lived in Oxford.”

  She paused and opened her mouth just slightly, as if I had either missed something terribly obvious or else didn’t really know much about anything to begin with.

  “How much did you and your father communicate?” she asked.

  “In English?”

  “I see he was selective with the stories he told you.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you tell me the rest?” I asked coolly.

  She paused, and for a brief moment I thought I saw a small note of triumph enter her expression. She stood and began to make a lap around Orville’s perfectly kept room.

  “What do you want to know about?” she said, hands behind her back. “Dates? Trysts? Scandals? I can see you love stories. Your father did too. It’s why he died, probably. He visited me at Old College a month before it happened, did you know that? I hadn’t seen him in quite some time. He looked very ill. Alcohol. Later, when I read of the fire, I knew he had won. He had turned his life into art. It was a well-crafted ending to an otherwise structureless life. A perfect, catastrophic death.”

  I don’t think I was imagining it—she sounded as though she was secretly enjoying herself. Her heels made bright popping sounds when she walked off the carpet.

  “I remember the first day I met him,” she said. “I was wearing a blue dress. He was wearing a gray jumper. He was young—impertinent. Nineteen? Twenty? I can’t remember. We knew it would happen. Our romance, I mean. It started with the occasional lunch. The occasional lunch turned into the occasional drink, which turned into the occasional weekend trip up north to obscure hotels. I was drunk on him—he was drunk on me.”

  If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a touch of pride in her voice: yes, she had once experienced a grand passion, thank you very much. She reminded me of a shy teenager who finally has a boyfriend and hasn’t yet discovered that the feeling of relief is sometimes stronger than love.

  “One night, he came to visit me here and we were caught, just as I knew we would be, and long before I was anywhere near done with him,” she said, speaking quickly. “We were found outside, on the lawns by the well. You’ve seen it, I imagine.”

  “What do you mean, ‘found’?”

  “A student stumbled upon us, and took a photograph.”

  I said, “I don’t understand.”

  She glanced back at me. “What don’t you understand?”

  I paused. “Were you—not wearing clothes?”

  An unexpected silence hit the room. I looked away, struck by a red-hot humiliation. I had an image that no daughter should ever have: her father, naked and vulgar and flawed and human. I could not escape the vision of him rolling around on the lawn with this strange, waxy woman. Rebecca’s expression was direct and unemotional. She was watching my reaction closely, as though congratulating herself on the impact she had administered.

  I searched through my repertoire of retouched memories, questioning what I could have done to Rebecca to warrant such a strong dislike, other than stealing the occasional lip balm out of her room. She was staring at me the way a wronged wife would look at her husband’s mistress. It was an expression that I had never seen on my mother’s face, not once.

  I cleared my throat. “Well, don’t stop there. What happened next?”

  She shrugged. “A few years ago, the university accepted my return. They watch me closely. Not as closely as they watch your tutor, perhaps, but close enough. This is why Orville will never look upon you, Sam. There is too much to lose.”

  Her voice was so calm and flat that I wondered if she had recited this story many times before, like it was Tristan and Isolde. So far she hadn’t forgotten a single word.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You were cast out?”

  “Can’t you imagine?” she said. “The story first appeared in the Hornbeam. Then the Examiner. The Times. Soon, there wasn’t a person in England who hadn’t seen it—an Oxford don, caught in a compromising position. I saw my reputation destroyed overnight. I resigned immediately. Years later, I was so desperate to escape England that I moved to Boston and tutored a spoiled teenage girl. Never underestimate the sacrifices you will make for love, Samantha.”

  I appraised her silently for a moment. Her cheeks were the color of sour cream. It seemed as though we were no longer in the twenty-first century but instead in a strange addendum to the nineteenth, where public shame was the inevitable response to a woman’s freedom. One tryst did not seem like enough to warrant such a backlash; I wondered if Rebecca was leaving out a few key details.

  “You know,” I said, “you really don’t sound as angry as you should about all of this.”

  She gave me a stony smile I was beginning to hate. “It was many years ago,” she said. “I suppose I’ve learned to forget.”

  With that, she returned to the couch and took a seat. She was a terrible liar. She hadn’t forgotten anything. This was the defining episode of her life, which she had crafted into a tidy story. I couldn’t tell whether she was altogether here or I was talking to the mask of Rebecca—the version of herself she sent out as her PR person. There was a cold resentment lurkin
g beneath her calm features that I found alarming. This story was not over for her—not at all. She reached for her creamless tea, which was the color of tar, and took a long sip.

  “If my dad loved you so much,” I ventured, “why did he ask you to leave Boston eventually?”

  It was a terribly worded question—I had meant it to sound cordial. Rebecca’s gray eyes flashed and she immediately put down the tea with a loud clank. Any expression she had dropped right off her face.

  “All right, Sam,” she snapped. “Let’s get on with it. How would you like to be expelled? In public or in private?”

  I blanched. “I don’t think my father wanted you to expel me. I have a feeling you made him a promise that you’d take care of me here.”

  “A promise to a dead man is like sand in the wind. And I’ve done my duty already. I saved those infernal books for you, and I put you in that bloody tower.”

  My eyes widened. “You put me in the tower?”

  “I had to pull several strings. It’s a historical landmark.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “It’s quite the hellhole.”

  “Blame your father. He wanted you there.”

  “How did he even know about the tower?”

  For the second time, a perplexed look came across Rebecca’s face, as though she was unclear as to how, exactly, I had grown up to be so ignorant.

  “Have you never listened to the tour that goes through your room?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I notice you took advantage of it to leave me Jane Eyre. Is there a reason you couldn’t have just delivered the books all in one go, or in person—preferably both?”

  “Your father had a very particular order he wanted you to read them in, and he wanted you to know they were important.”

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t believe her. She looked so borderline evil that I couldn’t help but think that she had drawn out this entire process on purpose, to exact some sort of strange torture.

  “So he comes to Old College before he dies, leaves you everything important, then takes an entire safe deposit box to leave me a lousy bookmark,” I said.