The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  I look around, confused. Have my relatives abandoned me on the eve of my arrival? I know it’s rude to break and enter, but then again, this is my dream, and doesn’t that mean that I’m the narrator? I settle into the happy squalor of the room. It’s large and pleasantly untidy. A vague smell of extinguished candle pervades the air. There is a cold draft piping through the chimney.

  I take a seat by the fireplace and interlace my fingers, in the way of contemplative assistant professors. Rarely have I felt quite so at home. The last piece seems to have fallen into place, in a puzzle I didn’t know I was a part of. I can’t shake the feeling that my father has sat in this exact seat, doing the same thing.

  I wait for something interesting to occur, but all I can hear is the clock ticking. If this is my dream, shouldn’t fantastic things be happening? Gunfights, romances, premonitions? And should I feel this . . . awake? Maybe this is what a dream is supposed to be, and all of this time I’ve been doing it wrong.

  Just then, I hear a rattling at the window. It sounds like a branch, rapping on the sill. Suddenly, a row of knuckles comes flying through the glass, and an arm comes right after it—I see the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. A most melancholy voice sobs, “Let me in—let me in!”

  I stand up straight, alert.

  “I’ve come home,” says the voice outside. “I’ve lost myself on the moors!”

  The cold white fingers and cold white arm give way to a cold white body, which pulls itself through the window. It is a man, and he is wearing a bathrobe and holding a martini. It is, I realize, my father.

  “Dad?” I say.

  “Hi, kiddo,” he says. “It’s colder than a witch’s ass out there.”

  I say, “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you you’d find me here someday.”

  “Did I find you or did I conjure you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  I frown and take a step closer. Yes, it is most definitely my father. Those are his same weary, long-suffering eyes. I recognize his shock of black hair and his ski-slope forehead, and I congratulate my unconscious for creating such an exact image of him. He smells the same as he always has: warm, cozy, like an old, comfortable book.

  “You’re not real,” I say. “I’m dreaming.”

  “If it looks like a duck and tastes like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

  This, I remember, is one of his old battle cries. An ache wells up inside of my chest, one that seems to defy the parameters of a dream. Time has failed me, I realize. The Dad-shaped hole in my life has not, in fact, become any smaller. It has just grown less and less visible. I feel the slow panic that accompanies the onset of grief.

  I clear my throat. “I don’t totally respect you, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “You slept with a professor, you cheated on your wife, you drank yourself to death, and you abandoned me.”

  Dad gives his drink a swirl. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  His voice—God, his voice. He takes a seat and I sit next to him. He hands me the martini.

  “Try some,” he says.

  I refuse. Up close, Dad’s face is strangely perforated, like a slab of cheese, or a thin cut of meat.

  “Where is the book?” I ask.

  “What book?”

  “The one you left me. You left me a diary, yes?”

  “You mean this?”

  He reaches behind him and pulls out a small leather volume—barely the size of his palm. I can just make out the faint words on the cover: The Warnings of Experience.

  I say: “Yes, I mean that.”

  “You’ve had it all along.”

  “That is clearly false.”

  “Tap your shoes together and say there’s no place like home.”

  “Can you please be sober?”

  He frowns. I know that he is angry. He chucks the book at the wall. It makes a wide hole and I see it land in the snow outside, in the church graveyard. It descends into the earth, hollowing out a large, black crater. The book sinks into the pit and disappears from sight. I turn to Dad for an explanation, but his face has gone blurry.

  I say, “Are you going now?”

  “I don’t know—am I?”

  “Please tell me what you’d like me to do. I’m too old to be doing this.”

  “You won’t learn anything unless you discover it for yourself.”

  “Our lessons are over.”

  “If you think that, then I have failed you.”

  “Please tell me what you wanted me to know.”

  At this, he smiles, but only slightly. “ ‘I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.’ ”

  “Don’t quote Anne Brontë. Not now.”

  “ ‘But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it.’ ”

  I blink. I glance at the graveyard. The patch of snow where the book landed has formed a very deep and very dark pit—a tunnel to the center of the Earth. It looks like an old pothole in an old street in Boston.

  “Shit,” I conclude.

  I stand up and stumble backward as I realize something of terrible importance. Suddenly, my father is gone; the house is gone; the world is gone. I am in a dark, cold place, goopy with black. Thunder shakes the house of James Timothy Orville III and I awake with a start.

  “Orville.”

  No response.

  “Orville.”

  “Hrmm.”

  Smack. “Orville.”

  “What.”

  “Wake up.”

  “Amy?”

  “Who’s Amy?”

  The lights went on—well, one light went on. Orville had reached over and found the lamp beside the bed. He turned his eyes on me slowly. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, hovering over him, arms crossed. I wished that he had kept the lights off. He slept shirtless, and his white, white torso gleamed like the clean belly of a wet fish. Smooth and radioactively bright.

  He blinked once, twice, three times. It had taken me four tries to find the right door, and now here I was, in Orville’s bedchamber. With the light on, I could make out the dim outline of tangled phone chargers on the shelf above his head.

  “Samantha—what is it?” he wanted to know. His eyes were puffy with sleep, and there was a pillow mark slashed across his cheek. “Is Paris burning?”

  I couldn’t seem to answer.

  Orville sat up straighter. “You’re trembling—what’s wrong?”

  “It’s cold in here.”

  He paused. I secretly hoped he’d ask me to hop in, but he just said: “There’s a blanket in the dresser.”

  I shook my head. “I just had a dream about my dad.”

  Orville didn’t respond for a moment—then: “How was he?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to talk about books.”

  He gave a sideways glance at the clock on the wall. “Four in the morning,” he said. “It’s four in the morning.”

  “You once asked me what reading meant to me. It was several months ago and we were at that pub. Do you remember? I have an answer for you now, if you’d like to hear it.”

  He lay back down and put his forearm over his eyes. “Now?”

  I poked him in the chest with my index finger. It worked—he reopened his eyes. His skin was warm, almost baked. It was a bad time to emote, apparently. He looked tired and useless.

  I said, “Courage.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Reading teaches you courage. The author is trying to convince you something fake is real. It’s a ridiculous request, and it questions the sanity of the reader. The extent to which you believe the author depends on how willing you are to jump in headfirst.”

  “Jump into what?”

  “Can you please pay attention? Whatever the book has for you to jump on into.”

  “You ended t
hat thought with two prepositions.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “Do you think we might be able to have this conversation in the morning?”

  “You once asked me why I appreciated no authors,” I said, ignoring him. “It’s because I simply cannot feel things as a normal person does. No—don’t look at me like that. It’s true. I have never been able to properly invest myself in a book because books are lies, and I do not like being lied to. Reading well requires bravery, and it’s something that I don’t have. This is why I am neither a good writer nor a good reader.”

  Orville’s eyes narrowed. “Courage is not a possession. It is a state of mind.”

  “Yes, one that requires a leap of faith. That’s what my dad used to tell me. I always thought he meant a figurative leap of faith. But I think he meant a real leap of faith.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “As in, literal. Get it?” I made a leaping motion with two of my fingers, in case he needed the visual.

  He squinted. “Are you planning on jumping off something?”

  “What kind of wells are around here, if you had to guess?”

  Orville exhaled and checked the clock again. “Go back to sleep, Samantha.”

  “No. I’m finally seeing things clearly.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it.” He rested his head on his pillow and closed his eyes. I poked him one more time but he didn’t react. That’s when I put my hand on his cheek.

  Orville’s eyes flew open. I blinked at my own nerve. My fingertips were cold and his face felt velvety. I had broken a barrier. I could almost hear the cymbals crashing; I could picture the portraits in the dining hall waking up with a start and screaming at each other to sound the alarm—Be quick about it, man, awaken the troops! But Orville did not move away. He just lay there with an immobile stare, a frown on his face. His chest rose and fell slowly. It grew very quiet. My life, I knew, was about to change.

  Orville said, very clearly, “What are you doing.”

  But before he could say anything else, I pushed my face into his in a kiss that I hoped he would someday understand to be the surprising yet inevitable end to our torturous, imaginary courtship. I kissed him, and it was strong, and I wished I could say my blood was roaring, but really it was my ears that were roaring—maybe it was the voices of all those academics in their portraits screaming at me to knock it off, or debating all the heteronormative gender nonconformity issues that I was raising, and after all, had I thought this through? Or was I overthinking this? Gosh, both seemed likely, didn’t they? Time seemed to slow down, and what I felt was heat and sweat, but really they were both just coming from me, not him. In that moment, all I could think of was why the world’s most basic task carried with it so many academic violations, and all the seriousness of a terrible crime.

  I was about to call the whole thing off, when suddenly—and to my great surprise—Orville lurched forward. I squeaked, or was that the bed? His hand cupped the back of my neck—hard—and his face found mine, again and again. I felt a surge of helplessness, the kind I imagined people nearly died from. And yet I couldn’t understand whether he was pulling me toward him or trying to thrust me off of him. I panicked with the weight of both options, and before either became clear to me, I did the only sensible thing I could: I threw his head back on the pillow—it landed with a thump—and I fled the room, like an airborne ballerina who’s finally gone soaring wildly out of control.

  CHAPTER 15

  Dear Sir John,

  This is Samantha. I snuck out of the house at 5:30 a.m. this morning, but I wanted to thank you for your hospitality, especially since you hated my father so much, and you dislike me too because I look so much like him and you think I am dating your son. (I am not dating your son; that would be gross.) I know you didn’t know my father very well, but he was actually not a very bad man, and sometimes he could be a very good man. He did things that I don’t understand, but if it makes you feel better, I don’t think he did, either. I’m sorry if this handwriting is slanted and illegible; I have not slept in about a year. I am leaving my professor a note, too—would you see that he gets it?

  All the best,

  Samantha J. Whipple

  It was almost eight thirty at night by the time I made it back to Oxford. The Haworth train was out of commission due to a broken rail, which meant the only option available to me was an obscure bus line. The storm had ended, but it was still an apocalyptic eighteen-hour ride, thanks to storm-chewed roads and piles of slush, which spat out from under our wheels like chopped salad. The time did not do good things to my mind. With horrific accuracy, I replayed the last twenty-four hours. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

  When I returned to campus, I dropped my bags in my room and then went straight to the Faculty Wing. Rebecca’s door was slightly ajar, and so was her mouth. I must have looked like hell.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She didn’t answer immediately. Her expression told me that I better have a damn good reason for being here.

  “That stench,” she said. “It’s primordial.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Never take the bus.”

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “The First Circle of Hell.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  I said, “That’s the one filled with all the unbaptized pagans.”

  No response.

  I clarified, “ ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’?”

  Silence. We had nothing in common. I took a seat without being asked. The room was cold, and in the distance, I heard odd gurgling noises that sounded similar to several bodily functions. I tried to make myself comfortable, but I was wearing a scratchy wool coat and yoga pants that were too tight. I had only worn yoga pants once before, and it turned out the tabloids were wrong. They did not look good on everyone.

  Rebecca looked suspicious, so I explained: “I was in Haworth.”

  “What were you doing in Haworth?”

  “Visiting the Brontë Parsonage.”

  “I see,” she said. Her voice was pinched. The only thing on her desk, I noticed, was a hammer. “James Orville was also there this weekend.”

  The mention of his name brought a blush to my cheeks. “Oh? Was he?”

  “Did you know he would be there?” asked Rebecca.

  “Pardon?”

  “That is—were you there together?”

  “Is that a pot of coffee?”

  “You’re blushing.”

  She didn’t offer me any coffee. Instead, she took a seat behind her desk and smoothed her palms over her trousers. She seemed to be remembering something unpleasant. I recalled her telling me that she and my father used to take romantic trips up north for the weekend. It was all part of their tragic love story. An unfair twist of fate, perhaps, that my story did not seem to be playing out quite as tragically.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” I said. I tried to sound suave, but the effort of feigning comfort produced a larger discomfort than I was expecting. “Was Halford’s Well named after my father?”

  Her face barely moved. “I see you figured that out.”

  “Yes. He was your student.”

  “He was my student.”

  “Of mathematics.”

  “He knew how to read and write already. He believed education should be a challenge.”

  “I see. Someone once told me that people store their stuff in Halford’s Well,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “It is Oxford’s oldest wishing well,” she said, impatient. “People have been throwing pennies in it for hundreds of years. Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “Did people throw in anything besides pennies? Like, objects?”

  “One throws one’s wishes, not one’s belongings.” />
  I thought about it. “What if I wanted to go take a dip there tonight? Is it deep?”

  Rebecca’s “I’m not amused” stare was eerily like my mother’s. Her expression told me that last night she had been dining with Keats and discussing poetry; now look what sort of uneducated ruffian she was with.

  She repeated: “Take a dip?”

  “Did my dad ever do that?”

  “No sane person would swim in there.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rebecca did not want to pursue such a jejune conversation, it seemed, because she began packing up her things. A stack of ungraded papers from her drawer made it into her purse, and then came lipstick and earrings—things she carried around but apparently never used.

  I walked to her desk, cautious. She looked tired. I thought about opening up to her completely, telling her what I felt and how I felt it, if not out of camaraderie, then because vulnerability was a currency and could be used the way some people used down payments. My breath quickened.

  “I don’t think you did anything wrong,” I said. “With my father, that is. It was just unfortunate that people reacted the way they did.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Love for a professor is not inherently pathological,” I continued. “I think it has the right to be nurtured, just like anything else.”

  She gave me a cold, provisional smile. “And what, pray tell, has suddenly fashioned this new opinion?”

  I took a breath. “You were right. I’m in love with James Orville.”

  The smile did not leave her face. She looked triumphant, for a brief moment.

  “Then I hope you are prepared to ruin his life,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You think that you can eliminate the power differential between you two. You will not eliminate it. You will reinforce it. When a student loves a teacher, it is childish, natural, almost sweet. When a teacher loves a student, it is unnatural, a disease. He becomes a label. Predator. Manipulator. Monster.”

  “I am only trying to treat him as a human being.”

  “And by doing so, you will dehumanize him.”