The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  “Are you saying you regret being with my father, then? I thought you said you were over the whole thing.”

  She snapped her purse shut. “It’s time for you to go, Samantha.”

  “No—please,” I said, and my voice cracked in spite of me. I felt so lonesome, just then, that all I wanted was to be low-level friends, so we didn’t have to keep staring at each other like this. Being vindictive took too much effort. Besides, the two of us should have been allies, not enemies—we were the only two people left who ever really understood my father. Rebecca must have noted the change in my voice, because her eyes narrowed.

  I asked, again, “Do you regret it? Please tell me. I think you were treated very unfairly by the media.”

  She looked me over once, as if trying to decide if I was worth her time. “Have you ever been in love, Sam? Proper, reciprocated love?”

  “No.”

  “It took me thirty-five years to find it,” she said. “At that point, love is not love, but the end of isolation. You find that you do, in fact, belong—if not to a person, then to the rest of humanity, to silly novels and famous tunes. Tell me, if you can, that it’s not part of the reason you love Orville.”

  I didn’t respond. A slow, unfriendly smile came over her face.

  “You and I are more alike than you think,” she said. “On some level, you know this. I saw myself in you even when you were a spoiled child: alone and friendless, loved by only one person, but loved so strongly that it felt like the love of the entire world. My own father ran off with a family friend when I was young, and my mother moved to Guam. I found my therapy in math, just as you seem to have found yours in literature—two disciplines that help make sense of the world. I know what you want, Samantha, because it’s the same thing I wanted. You want a reason to believe that there is something out there larger than yourself, something that makes all the petty things you’ve been through seem irrelevant. That’s how love works. Do I regret falling in love with your father? Regret is made obsolete by the story you tell.”

  She leaned back in her seat. I wasn’t expecting sentimentality, but there it was. She sounded strangely honest, like a real live human being. Her eyes were glassy and I wondered how many feelings she had bottled up behind them, and whether those feelings were organized in a Fibonacci sequence. It was my mistake, I suppose, to think that someone had to be all bad or not bad at all.

  “Did you two stay together, even after you both left Old College?” I asked.

  “Your father left England. For years we kept in touch through letters,” she said. “They weren’t beautiful or effusive, but you come to remember them as beautiful and effusive. Years went by, with him going and coming from England at will. At some point, he wrote me and let me know that a woman named Alice was pregnant, and he was going to marry her. Soon, I began hearing about you. You filled pages. You could have been your own epic. Every time he came to visit me, he would tell me how quickly you learned to read, how much you ate, how you jumped into the laundry hamper when you played hide-and-seek. She’ll be tall, Becky, she’ll be a giant. You were your father’s best story.”

  She did not sound nostalgic, nor did she appear to be recalling a pleasant memory. Her face was sour, her eyes exacting. At the mention of “tall,” my mother’s face popped into my mind.

  “You pursued an affair, knowing it would break up a family,” I said.

  “Your father did the same,” she snapped. “Where is his blame?”

  I said, “Did either of you ever think of my mom?”

  To my surprise, Rebecca let out a cruel laugh. “Your mother didn’t know your father, not the way I did. She married the father of her baby; he married the mother of his.”

  Rebecca’s laugh was high-pitched. My mouth tensed into a small line.

  I said, “And yet Dad broke up with you anyway.”

  I shouldn’t have said it, of course, but the damage was done. Our temporary alliance was over. Rebecca gave me a good, long stare—the kind that could ruin you if you weren’t careful. With one, deliberate motion, she took the square black glasses off her nose and placed them flat on her desk.

  “I told you that he was unable to handle the competing demands of multiple women,” she said. “In the end, I lost, and someone else won. After I left Boston, I didn’t hear from him again until a month before he died, when he came back to Oxford. He visited his old tower, gave me all these damn books, and told me that when she was old enough, little Samantha was to read certain things and live in certain places, because he hadn’t taught you everything he wanted. Please, Rebs, he begged me. Please do this for me. So here we are. Now, it is late and I want to leave. Do you have anything else to say?”

  Her face went pale, her expression blank. I lost, and someone else won.

  “Who was the woman who won out, in the end?” I asked.

  Rebecca’s lip curled. “Can’t you guess?”

  I didn’t say anything. She was not looking at me as a student anymore. I was competition. I took a step away from my ex-tutor, feeling a surge of affection for my father. He’d picked me. He might have been a terrible husband, and a terrible boyfriend, and a terrible student, but he was, in the end, a great dad.

  “I’ll leave,” I said. “Thank you for your time.”

  I wrapped my scarf around my neck. Rebecca, meanwhile, was looking at me with a primal loathing I had seen only in movies and political debates. Here I was, inserting myself once again into the secret club she had built with my father and disturbing the tidy story she had invented for the two of them. It was a resentment I might have felt, too, had our situations been reversed. Maybe she had been right before—we were more similar than I thought.

  To help ease the tension, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out something I knew she would appreciate: her Emily Dickinson bookmark, the one I had found in Tenant. I had picked it up from my tower. I passed it to her like a white flag.

  I thought she might be touched. But the bookmark accomplished quite the opposite effect of the one I had intended. She did not seem struck by a great wave of nostalgia. On her face was a look of spite, one so pure that I could not have replicated it if I tried. I had won—again. I was handing over her consolation prize.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—I thought you’d want it.”

  “Get out.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  But she was already at the door, holding it open. I tried to say something, but her face had turned blank and hard. She didn’t look at me when I walked past her. Once I was in the hallway, the door slammed behind me.

  I waited, ear pressed to the closed door. For several minutes, all I heard was the sound of her pacing, back and forth, back and forth. Then, suddenly, there was a small knocking noise. If I was not mistaken, Rebecca was softly hammering the bookmark to her wall.

  At three in the morning, I left my tower and walked to Halford’s Well. Most of the lights had gone off in the Faculty Wing, and only scattered streetlamps illuminated the night. The majestic lawn was dark and empty. There were no porters wielding sticks, no reporters, no people. For the first time since arriving at Oxford, I was invisible. I felt an unexpected disappointment. I’d always thought that part of being brave was having an audience.

  It was desperately cold. I had kept the yoga pants on but added a T-shirt, a thick running jacket, and an orange headband. Up close, Halford’s Well was large and angular. It was old-fashioned, with a large triangular roof on top that was held together by decrepit slats and oversize nails. I walked to the cold rim and glanced inside. The stench was something medieval. It must have been the end of the world down there, and no one else had noticed. I looked around. There was no sound.

  “All right, Dad,” I muttered. “Your move.”

  I heard only the echo of my own voice. I was cold to the point of complete sensory deadness. The wind was aggressive, and it echoed in the long cylinder below. I spotted the vague outline of a rung in the well wall immediately to my
right. It looked like a ladder, so I flung my leg over the side of the well to investigate. The ledge was thicker than I expected, and in a moment I found myself straddling the stone wall.

  “Stop!”

  My heart seemed to shrivel. I turned around and peered into the darkness. There—I would have known that voice anywhere—was Orville, marching toward me, coat billowing. A burning rage erupted inside me. How was it that the first time I did something truly outrageous, I was thwarted?

  He stopped in front of me, panting. I wondered if he’d run here all the way from Haworth.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to remember a time when I was doing anything, and you didn’t show up.”

  His breath came out in a pearly white stream. It looked like a slow leak. “You left without saying a single word.”

  “Oops.”

  “There was a storm, Samantha.”

  “It was over, James.”

  At the mention of his first name, he fell silent.

  I corrected myself: “I mean, Orville. Jimmy. Who are you, again?”

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Your note. It contained a line from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Were you aware? Yes, I’m sure you were. The priceless treasure remains at the bottom of the well, and it takes courage to dive for it, et cetera. At first I thought you were trying to be ironic. Then I discovered that you were gone, and I remembered our conversation. I thought that you just might, in fact, be unstable enough to come find a well.”

  “It took you ten minutes to figure out what that sentence meant? It took me ten years.”

  “I thought no one could be so idiotic as to take such a ridiculous statement literally. Then I realized it was you. I waited for you at the well in Haworth this morning. I figured that it was the obvious choice.”

  I blinked. “There’s a well in Haworth?”

  He didn’t answer, because he seemed distracted by my positioning on the ledge. I was straddling the rim of the well like I would a horse—awkwardly.

  “Let me see if I understand this correctly,” he breathed, as if wrestling with a new concept. His white, white breath seemed to form arrows in the air. “You are actually proposing to jump inside? Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You are not about to lower yourself into this—this—”

  “What.”

  “Pit of excrement.”

  I blinked. “Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?”

  He took a step forward, and it seemed as though all the times he and I had sparred, or fought, or anything, were nothing but a rehearsal for a drama of this caliber. His voice was brittle.

  “Samantha, listen to me, and listen to me carefully. The Brontës did not leave you anything at the bottom of this well.”

  I said, very evenly, “The Brontës didn’t. But my father did.”

  “Why would he leave your inheritance here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you know what sorts of things people throw down here?”

  I decided I didn’t want to know, so I flung my second foot over the ledge. I felt around on the inside of the wall until my foot landed upon the first step of the ladder. I didn’t get very far—Orville immediately grasped my shoulders from behind. I struggled with him, but he hooked his arms underneath mine and pulled me out of the well, and then several steps out onto the lawn. When I gave a kick and tried to shove him off me, he wrapped his arms around my waist and yanked me back with such force that I thought I might lose my dinner.

  “I will fight you,” I warned.

  “As you wish,” he said.

  I struggled in vain; the moment I pushed myself against him was the moment he twisted me around and pinned my back to him. There he held me, very tight.

  “Shall we do this for two more hours, to see if it’s possible?” he breathed. His grip tightened and I let out a squawk.

  I said, “You’re hurting me.”

  He relaxed his grip. We squared off. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem to matter what I would find at the bottom of the well. I just wanted to jump in. I had rarely been able to call myself stupid and impulsive, and didn’t everyone deserve to?

  “If you stop me, I will just come back later,” I said. “You can’t patrol the area forever.”

  He swore beneath his breath. “Then I’ll go in. You stay here.”

  “You don’t know what to look for.”

  “Do you?”

  I didn’t answer. Orville seemed to know that he was going to lose—at least, he stopped arguing with me, and ran his fingers through his hair. I took off my shoes, which I hadn’t thought to do earlier. I didn’t see why he thought he had to stay and watch; deep-sea well diving was a solitary sort of activity.

  “You’ll want to take off your pullover first,” Orville said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ll catch a chill if you have nothing warm to wear after.”

  I nodded and attempted to lift my running jacket over my body without undoing the zip. I say “attempted” because my fingers were fat and useless in the cold. I struggled until Orville told me to stop. He took a step forward and his fingers found the edge of my jacket for me. After a clumsy moment with the layers, he tried to lift it over my torso. It would have been a seamless operation, but the neckline got stuck around my nose and I floundered, arms raised in the air. I could feel my cheeks redden, but fortunately, no one could see them. Orville wrestled with my jacket until he removed the entire thing. I thanked him but couldn’t seem to look at him. Instead, I turned back to the well, lowered my legs over the side, and stepped back onto the ladder.

  Before Orville disappeared from view, I saw him wagging a finger at me. “One word, and I will come after you.”

  I nodded and began to descend. The night sky faded until the only thing in front of my face was the stone wall.

  “Well?” Orville called.

  “It’s really nice down here,” I said. “We should do this more often.”

  “Just be quick about it.”

  “How many diseases are down here, if you had to estimate?”

  He didn’t respond, which was worrisome. The pit was deeper than I’d anticipated. I peered into it, envisioning the monster that was lurking in those unholy depths.

  Quite suddenly, my bare toes hit water. I forgot about Orville; I forgot about my father. It was a humorless cold. The water hit my shins, and after that it moved up my shins to my knees, and then to my thighs and waist, and as I lowered myself I let out a small scream because it was so very cold, and my body was so very bony and out of shape. I was breathing heavily, and the noise filled the air around me. The water was midway up my body, and once it was there, my lungs constricted painfully. Everything around me seemed to be a long way away. I heard something from a distance—it was Orville, calling my name. I strained to catch his words, which were either echoing around the dark cave, or just in my mind—was he saying that a light had gone on somewhere?

  I tried to respond, but the belt of water had tightened around my lungs like a noose. The water reached my torso, my shoulders, my neck. One more step, and it was at my chin. The last bit of humor dissipated from the situation. I took a gulp of icy air and plunged into the filthy water. I screamed small, wet screams and felt a wild rush of water by my ears. I flailed for the bottom of the well.

  My foot struck something solid—which then moved. I had landed upon a bed of pennies. I felt around with my toes and my foot hit something sharp—a syringe? I kept sweeping my toes from left to right but there was nothing there but bottles and pennies and hundreds of old dreams and wishes and petty disappointments. I was wrong, and Orville was right. I would find no boxes, no books, no gold, no answers, not here. I screamed at nothing and no one, and my voice was lost in the ancient water, which seemed to have heard it all before. I had been wrong. Good God—I had been wron
g?

  I pushed myself up, up, until I broke the surface and gasped for air. I couldn’t breathe. Somewhere above me, a man was yelling. Do you hear me, Samantha? I’m coming down there—do you hear me! I stopped listening, and not by choice. My entire body was shaking. Dead? Was this what being dead felt like? I couldn’t pull myself upward. Breathing was a luxury, and I was suddenly too weak for it. I steadied myself on the ladder until my lungs slowly began to fill again, gulping the cold, frosted night air. I heard nothing. There was nothing in this world but my shallow breathing, my fat fingers, my small, small lungs. My hair was as heavy as a rug. I ordered my fingers to move and to my surprise, they did as they were told. They grasped the ledge—but I still couldn’t pull, could I? Then how was it that I was moving? I must have been climbing, because the waterline was no longer at my waist. My breath was rapid and—aha!—the water was back around my shins. This was curious—I seemed to be being yanked up by a crane—was it a crane, or a human? Orville, I realized, had leaned over and grabbed me underneath the arms and then around the waist, and then was pulling that waist upward—up, up. I tumbled over the ledge and away from the well. I made it to my feet and there was Orville, above me, pulling me further upright and rubbing my arms at a frantic pace, cursing at himself, and cursing at the cold. His coat was gone and instead I realized that it was what was now wrapped around me. He was running his hands through my hair, over my back, calling me mad, dammit, mad—stroking my back with the wide palms of his hands. Stupid girl . . . silly . . . stupid . . . But his voice was mellow, and somewhat sweet, and after a moment, he wrapped both arms around me and held me very still.

  “Orville,” I muttered.

  “We need to get you inside,” he said.

  “I d-didn’t find anything.”

  “Of course you didn’t. This was an imbecilic project.”

  I didn’t move. I was clinging to him. He tried to pull me off but I didn’t let go.

  “I didn’t find anything,” I gulped.

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “I really thought it’d be there.”

  Orville fell silent. The wind came over the lawn. “We need to go. This is not a good place to be found.”