The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  “No, it’s here. It has to be here. Just help me find it. Please. Please help me find it.”

  My lips were thick and heavy. I looked up at my professor and he looked back at me with an expression he might reserve for a sick child.

  “Your father would never have left you a book in water. It would be destroyed. Didn’t you think of that?”

  I muttered, “Not if he put it in a waterproof box.”

  We didn’t say anything, and the absurdity of the statement lingered in the air. He tried to steer me away from the well, but I stayed where I was. Courage. I had finally found courage, and where had it brought me?

  Orville shook his head. “Look at you. You look like that infernal woman on your wall.”

  I frowned. “Pardon?”

  “Come. We’re leaving.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “What is it?” Orville snapped.

  I thought of that old friend, the Governess, in her wild-eyed, drowning disappointment. I said, “You’re right. I picked the wrong well.”

  “I can see that.”

  “No,” I said. “I did. I picked the wrong well. There’s another woman who fell into the water, and she had a book in her hands. Remember?”

  “If you don’t get a move on I will carry you.”

  I was shaking. Orville’s coat, which had been wrapped loosely around me, slid cleanly off my back and landed on the grass. I tried to bend and reach for it, but my fingers felt as though they might crumple into frozen ash. I swayed and almost fell. Orville put a steadying hand on my waist.

  “We need to get you inside, Samantha,” he breathed.

  “Where do insane people go at Oxford?”

  “They jump into a well,” he said. “Come. Walk.” Once again, he tried to urge me forward, but I leaned against him and pushed back. The wind came down at us, sharp and senseless.

  “No,” I said. “Insane people go to my tower. They always have.”

  “Move, or I will carry you.”

  “Much madness is divinest sense. . . . Assent—and you are sane. Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—and handled with a Chain.”

  “You’re babbling.”

  “Don’t you see? The book has been home all this time and I haven’t seen it. It’s just like Dorothy.”

  “Dorothy who?”

  A blinding flash of light brought me back to reality. Was it lightning? Eternity? Orville and I turned around in time to see that it was neither—it was the flash of a camera. There it went again, another burst of light.

  “Who’s there?”

  I thought I had said it—at least, my mouth was open, ready to speak, but it was Orville who had shouted. Ahead of us, not ten feet away, was a shadow. The figure stepped into the light, and I gave a small start.

  “Hans?”

  Yes, I do believe it was Hans, standing there like a pale fish. There was a fancy camera draped around his neck and he was looking between Orville and me as though he couldn’t believe his good fortune. He looked so blond and Nordic that I almost saluted.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Why are you wet?” he replied.

  Orville said, “There is no story here.”

  Story? I glanced at Hans’s perfect face. I was trembling. I glanced from my professor to my so-called friend, and at the professional-looking camera draped so comfortably around the latter’s neck. A truth dawned on me, the sort of truth that later gets written in capital letters on tombstones.

  “You’re H. fucking Pierpont?” I said. “You’re the one who’s been writing about me all fucking year?”

  “Samantha,” Orville warned.

  I lurched, but Orville caught me around the waist and pulled me back. I shouted to Hans: “Go away. I’m just on a walk.”

  Another photo. Snap, snap.

  Hans grinned. “Dressed like that?”

  “We can continue this conversation inside,” Orville said. “She’s not well.”

  I knew it then: Orville and I would both die here, by this old well, and in front of the entire world. Die, or else be disgraced. The pictures would be all over the news, with incriminating headlines. I saw the rumors multiplying; I saw my mother reading about it secondhand in a salon. Hans started firing pointed questions at Orville, but Orville just stared silently back at him, which meant Hans Fucking Pierpont was getting a better story than he could have possibly expected. Why wasn’t Orville saying anything? It was highly uncharacteristic. But I realized that he was not looking at Hans at all. He was looking directly past Hans.

  My eyes adjusted. We were not, in fact, as alone as I thought. There were two more people behind H. Pierpont. One, I realized, was Ellery Flannery. Another was Rebecca Smith. The light from the faculty offices gave the contours of her waistless body a precise definition.

  “Are we interrupting something important?” my old math tutor said, coming forward. I hoped she looked at me and saw a face filled with disappointment, the kind that haunts people forever. She was a small, small woman. She had picked the ending to her story: revenge. I remembered something she had said about my father’s death. It was a well-crafted ending to an otherwise structureless life.

  My glance darted back to Hans. What would I say—was I out for a romantic walk with my professor, or was I out to dig for Brontë gold? Would I choose to be Samantha the Strumpet, or Samantha the Last Living Brontë? Judging from the look on her face, Rebecca already knew which one I would pick. She was doing to me what my father had done to her. She was bequeathing me her story.

  There was some commotion on the path, and two more spectators approached. Students? Didn’t this university have a curfew? One student was whispering to the other. No one, I realized, was looking at me. They were instead gawking at Orville, who looked like a wounded leopard cornered by a pack of hyenas. My heart thudded. Flannery came to stand in front of him, kicking aside the coat at his feet. Orville did not look at me, he just began spinning his glorious British sentences. Yes, Samantha had wanted to take a swim, what of it? He did not mention my midnight project or the Brontës. He just kept talking and talking, and I’m afraid I stopped listening. There were hooded figures coming out of the Faculty Wing. Were they hooded, or were my eyes simply closing? Golden bubbles appeared in the distance—flashlights?

  All of a sudden, I was swaying, or was everyone else swaying? No, no, something was very wrong. I was neither as young nor as invincible as I thought. My body was trembling. All I could think of was sudden fainting syndrome and how Victorians had used it to great effect. I was only vaguely conscious of falling. Before I knew it, I had collapsed to the muddy lawn and Orville’s body was looming over mine as a small crowd gathered, and someone was asking someone to fetch something, or do something, or get someone. Samantha? Samantha!

  CHAPTER 16

  Anne Brontë died on May 28, 1849, at the age of twenty-nine. It was pulmonary tuberculosis that killed her, after a sudden and hopeless illness. Hers was an unfair departure, and she seemed to know it. “I wish it would please God to spare me, not only for papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it,” she commented. “I have many schemes in my head for future practice—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done.”

  God’s will was indeed done. Anne left this world peacefully, at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, somewhere in Scarborough. Only Charlotte was by her side, a grieving eldest sister splayed out next to her youngest until the end. Emily and Branwell were both dead, and now it was just Charlotte, alone against the world. For all of the pair’s rivalries and petty competitions, this was surely not the ending Charlotte had in mind. What was her writing, without its inspiration? What was fame, without her family?

  To this day, no one knows the words that were spoken between Charlotte and Anne, or the sentiments that were exchanged. It was a distraught Charlotte Brontë, to be sur
e, whose later lines of poetry spoke for themselves: There’s little joy in life for me / And little terror in the grave; / I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save.

  It seemed like an appropriately sad little ditty, but I had to wonder what Charlotte meant by “save.” Was she referring to Anne’s life, or Anne’s soul? I sincerely hoped it was the latter. I hoped that Anne’s spirit was so wild that it would severely complicate her afterlife, and I hoped that everyone who had ever been close to her knew it. It was my one great hope that after her death, little Anne Brontë took wing and blossomed in a way she didn’t while alive. I wished this to be true so fervently, and with so much of myself, that I think I put a bit of myself into Anne, or maybe it was the other way around. My youngest cousin was suddenly very much alive to me. Imagination can be a terrifying and precise thing, when you want it to be.

  Anne’s final words to her sister were brief and resolute:

  “Take courage, Charlotte,” she said. “Take courage.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said my mother, days later, “is why you felt the need to take off your clothes.”

  It was a very warm day outside, or so I was told. I was in bed in my tower. Several bandages enclosed my right foot and the whole thing stuck out of the covers like a seal surfacing for air. My room smelled of fever and salt.

  “I told you,” I said. “To avoid getting sick.”

  “Right,” she said. “Well, you are sick, so I see that it didn’t help.”

  “I took off my jacket because I wanted to wear it afterward.”

  “Oh?”

  I gave her a look. She had obviously been reading the papers. I said, “Who are you going to believe—me, or H. Fucking Pierpont?”

  “Don’t swear. It’s very American.”

  Mom had arrived from Paris only an hour before, and was now sitting at the foot of my bed, stroking my leg. She insisted that there was nowhere else in the world she would rather be. The Hornbeam rested on her lap, her daughter’s frozen face plastered over the front page. I looked like a wet-T-shirt-contest winner standing next to her Smoking Hot Professor. The latter was staring into the camera with such broiling rage that it seemed uncontainable by any two-dimensional news form. Rendezvous at Well Reignites Old Tradition. Mom had read the article twice already. Once out loud. “I told you you’d crack one day,” she said the moment she arrived.

  I recalled little about the rest of that damp and frosty evening except coming to full consciousness in the blasting heat of a taxicab, which was rushing a professor I didn’t recognize to the hospital. Why was this professor going to the hospital? Then I realized—it was I who was going, and this was my escort. Where was Orville?

  As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with me except for a mild case of hypothermia and a badly scraped foot. As soon as I was released, at 7:17 the next morning, I returned to campus. It was a cold, crisp morning. I bought a ham and cheese sandwich (with sprouts) and went straight to my tower, after which I helped myself to a glass of water, got dressed, and then found my inheritance.

  It was a smooth and easy discovery, as easy as if I had been taking dictation. When I removed The Governess from its perch on the wall, I found The Warnings of Experience casually strapped to the back of the canvas. It was a worn, thin, insignificant book, the width of my thumb. It had been here all along. And there, between the last page and the back cover, was Emily Dickinson. My father’s bookmark. I had held the book in my hands for several moments, feeling the soft old leather and the flimsy, battered pages. I opened it up to find faded black ink sinking into every page in small, slanted, intimate handwriting. Here, in the palm of my hand, was Anne Brontë. The real Anne Brontë.

  Something else slipped out of the book, as well—a ripped scrap of printer paper, where my father had scrawled his own note in bright red ink.

  Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

  All my love, Dad

  It was Edgar Allan Poe. One of Dad’s favorites. I was overcome by an incurable sadness. Dad used to tell me that the journey was the important part of anything. He also knew that you only realized you’d had one when it was over. I had called my mother right away, for no reason except that I was crying and I never cried. I didn’t explain what had happened. It didn’t matter. She sounded as though I had just given her the greatest gift in the world. She boarded the train a day later, and now here she was, sitting on my bed and patting my scraped foot among the mess of newspapers.

  I scanned the fragment of the article on my stomach. Did Tristan Whipple Secretly Attend Oxford? I pushed that one aside and reached for another that I had already read once, twice, three times.

  . . . It is not the first time that he has faced questioning of this sort; Dr. Orville drew sharp criticism from the Old College staff several years ago after a close relationship with student Abigail Baasch. Both were cleared of charges on the grounds that no one could prove Baasch was a student during any of the assignations. Others, however, still contest that the affair remains a violation of Oxford’s very foundation: the sanctity of the relationship between the educator and the educated.

  “Dr. Orville has brought this upon himself,” Dr. Ellery Flannery told the Hornbeam on Sunday evening. “I will always maintain that an education is useless if corrupted of its objectivity.”

  Others, however, insist that the fault lies not with Dr. Orville, but with “immature and reckless” undergraduates, and that the ability to induce infatuation in a young student is not an intrinsic flaw, but rather, as one anonymous academic commented, “a regrettable occupational hazard.”

  In response to recent developments, Dr. Orville has taken an indefinite leave of absence. Neither Abigail Baasch nor Samantha Whipple could be reached for comment.

  Carefully, I folded the sheet of newspaper into an airplane and tossed it into the corner of the room, where The Warnings of Experience was now resting, serving a lengthy time-out. I hadn’t touched it since I had discovered it. Yes, I had found my inheritance, and yes, the thought was somewhat satisfying, but everything was tainted now. What did it matter if I had the book, when Orville was lost to me? Who would I show it to now? I wasn’t sure what a “leave of absence” meant, exactly, and if that weren’t just another phrase for “solitary confinement.” Oxford was Orville’s life, and I had destroyed it. In the process, I had also truncated the best education I had ever received.

  Mom, to my left, cleared her throat.

  “I didn’t realize that Halford’s Well was also the scene of a similar assignation twenty-five years ago,” she said. She had moved away from the Hornbeam in favor of the New York Post, which she had brought with her as a present for me. I had made page six. Jane Eyre Rises from the Grave. I refused to look.

  I said, “Yes, it was.”

  “How strange.” She made a face. “I mean, what kind of person fornicates in public?”

  A small silence. I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to say Your ex-husband, and she didn’t continue because I think she was afraid I would say Me. I sneezed violently, and the conversation ended.

  Mom took off her glasses. “Well, are you ever going to tell me the truth? Why were you at that well?”

  I blinked. “To commune.”

  “With?”

  “Dad.”

  Her expression fell. She looked disappointed, then angry. “Don’t tell me he was the one who put you up to this.”

  I pointed at The Warnings of Experience at the other end of the room. “That’s my inheritance.”

  Mom looked over. “I see an old book.”

  “Correct.”

  She frowned and stood up so she could walk over and pick up the small, ragged volume. She brought it back to the bed. I couldn’t look directly at it.<
br />
  “This is what he left you?” Mom said. The book was dangling between her index finger and thumb as if she had encountered an unsavory piece of raw meat.

  “It’s a diary,” I said.

  The longer Mom stared at it, the more triumphantly sympathetic her expression became. If this was my inheritance, then she had won. This was nothing but an old, dirty, disgusting, rotten old wad of paper with some illegible print inside. As usual, Dad had screwed up. He had tried his best to do something epic, but he had failed.

  Mom must have sensed my mood, because she checked her cheerfulness and gave me a “you’re right, this isn’t funny” frown.

  She turned the book over in her hands, reading the cover. “The Warnings of Experience.”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Not yet.”

  Mom put down the book and cleared her throat. “I want you to come live in Paris with me,” she said. The way she said “Paris,” it sounded like “mental hospital.”

  “I’m happy here.”

  “You are miserable here.”

  “I’d still like to stay.”

  “I can see no reason for that.”

  “I’m learning.”

  “About?”

  “Myself?”

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “Don’t swear. It’s very American.”

  We fell into silence. Absently, I took the Hornbeam in my lap and looked at the photograph. Orville’s fingers were clutching my waist as if in a death grip. Had I enjoyed it, being so close to him? I had forgotten to appreciate the moment. The two people in that grainy black-and-white photo were wrapped around each other like they were in love. The image sent an ache through me, in a way I hadn’t experienced during the moment itself. The girl in the newspaper was just another woman I envied. Orville—the real-life Orville—had not responded to my e-mails or messages.

  I took Mom’s hand in mine. “Thanks for coming.”