The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  ‘‘It is not,’’ she insisted, ‘‘the momentous decision you make it out to be, Alice. The world will not fall if you make the wrong decision; indeed, there is no right or wrong in this case, merely a matter of giving pleasure, or not, to the palate.’’ She sounded so damned reasonable, so sensible, so excessively prosaic, it was I who wanted to pour the teapot into her lap. Henry and I exchanged glances – barely a flicker – but enough for her to accuse me later of ‘playing her off’ against him. She and I might agree about Anna Parnell and Home Rule and such, but the fact was that my brother could understand things which she could not. In such a contest, I was forced to admit, she would always be the loser. Henry and I thought with the same mind, saw with the same imagination, vibrated with the same delicate nervous system, felt the same longings and sympathies, experienced the same kinds of confusions, and suffered similar – though to a lesser degree in Henry’s case – illnesses. Two lives, two beings and one experience. So where did that leave her?

  Henry gave one of his auctioneer’s nods and I allowed myself to be poured half a cup of the black oily liquid. It was the end of summer, everything parched, the roses covered in rust and blackspot, the nights drawing in. In the next few days we would pack ourselves up and – it could not be helped, our lease was up – make another move.

  Twenty-one

  Mayfair. Our new rooms were located three-quarters of the way along a little flank of ten houses making up Bolton Row at the end of Curzon Street as it curves up towards Berkeley Square. The house was modest, flat-faced, of two-stories and near to Henry at the other end of Bolton Street. From our front window, if I squashed my nose up against the glass, I could just make him out as he reached for the handle of his front door before slipping away inside. At the back we looked out upon a ‘sea’ of mews cottages. As for the rooms themselves, they were a great improvement on Clarges Street which Katharine had described as a ‘hole’; though I myself had spent most of the time there being too ill to notice much of anything.

  The move, surprisingly, brought new energy. I began to take an interest. This was London and I was to be part of it, if only from my day-bed. As I told Sara Darwin when she came to call, ‘‘To be any better would be quite superfluous.’’ Looking about her she gave one of her Boston smiles; imagine the stretching of a new rubber-band. ‘‘It is quite airy,’’ she allowed. ‘‘Or at any rate,’’ she then begrudged, ‘‘such that London sees fit to offer at this time of year.’’

  How to let her get away with such meanness? I could not. True, the day was overcast but there was a thin stripe of blue showing through the cloud over the roofs.

  ‘‘I have all the light vouchsafed by heaven,’’ I affirmed.

  ‘‘Indeed,’’ said she. It was hard to match her with the young woman who’d instigated our eclair orgy back on Quincy Street. She busied herself with the tea-things and scones.

  Eventually I said: ‘‘I gather you and Grace have been travelling together.’’ Grace was the youngest sister of Charles Norton, Henry’s latest publisher.

  ‘‘Indeed, Grace is doing research for her book on Montaigne. It was very interesting accompanying her.’’ She pouted, ‘‘You needn’t make that sour look, Alice, I know you are quite allergic to Grace.’’

  ‘‘It is merely her intellectual pretensions I find hard to stomach; otherwise I find her quite inoffensive.’’

  She seemed about to defend Grace with her life but then, looking about her as if the dissolute prude herself might be hiding among the draperies, began to tattle: ‘‘Did you hear,’’ she said, ‘‘Grace gave Mabel Quincy a copy of Montaigne as a wedding present?’’

  ‘‘Which Montaigne?’’ I inquired.

  ‘‘Oh Alice, never mind that!’’ she cried impatiently. ‘‘The point is she gummed together the ‘naughty’ pages: could anything be more deliciously droll!’’

  ‘‘Pitiable, more like, in my opinion.’’

  She could not resist one last indiscretion: ‘‘Grace,’’ she confided, ‘‘cannot even bring herself to say the word,’’ she hesitated before whispering: ‘‘mistress’’.

  I imagined poor newlywed Mabel – her beloved has gone off to his place of business – tiptoeing down to the kitchen and applying the gummed pages to the spout of the tea-kettle and then with sticky fingers parting the pages and diving into the forbidden passages … But the truth of it was such prudery wearied me to death.

  ‘‘Oh Lord, Sara,’’ I burst out, ‘‘do teach old Grace to say damn and blast … bloody …’’ – I was beginning to enjoy myself – ‘‘… breasts … buttocks …’’

  ‘‘Stop!’’ cried the goose: I had already gone too far. The Nortons and the Darwins, I saw, would stick together in the end, yes, like ‘naughty’ pages.

  ‘‘And how is William Erasmus the banker?’’ I asked.

  She bridled: ‘‘You needn’t refer to him as if he were a waxworks, Alice. However,’’ she continued tightly: ‘‘We are prosperous, he has done well and altogether we thrive.’’

  ‘‘So I see.’’ She had been to Paris with Grace and had put on a good many frills.

  ‘‘Congratulations, Sara.’’

  ‘‘For what?’’ she asked, much as she had ten years ago.

  I laughed. ‘‘Back on Quincy Street you asked me if I thought men should be mastered and I replied that I was in no position to advise you on such a subject. But I gather you have succeeded.’’

  ‘‘Succeeded?’’

  ‘‘In subjecting him.’’

  She drew herself up. ‘‘And who has told you that?’’ Half the muscles in her face were tightening in displeasure while the other half struggled against a self-satisfied smile. ‘‘Oh, you needn’t answer,’’ she went on, ‘‘ I suppose it was Charles who told Henry who naturally …’’

  I hoped my own smile was suitably enigmatic.

  ‘‘Life,’’ she announced primly, ‘‘would be a most dreary blank without a dear husband to love.’’

  Had she said ‘drear’ husband?

  ‘‘But how is your beloved Katharine?’’ Her lips were puckered prune-wise.

  ‘‘Stretchably modern as ever,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Henry told Grace,’’ she went on, ‘‘you have established a permanency.’’

  That Henry should tell Grace anything at all was a mystery to me; however I replied factually: ‘‘She is with me for months at a time, it is true. She also continues her work back home part of the year – as you well know.’’

  ‘‘Apparently he sang her praises, her strength of wind and limb, to say nothing of her nobler qualities.’’

  I held my tongue; then did not: ‘‘You know as well as I,’’ I whispered savagely – I’d had enough hypcritical dissembling for one day – ‘‘that he finds something ‘unnatural’ in our arrangement; however, he convinces himself it is all for the best. In any case, it is convenient for him.’’

  She shook herself like a wet dog. ‘‘Well, he admits she is quite devoted to you. But you are beginning to look tired, Alice.’’ Our discussion was clearly at an end. She stood, emphasizing the disparity between us and the fact that, as before, she was prosperous, stout and upright, while I was thin, plain-as-a-biscuit and although relatively well, still one who spent her days reclining on a chaise instead of working in a mill or a factory or a field or a tavern or a kitchen or a study or a studio or classroom, or for that matter a bedroom.

  I said, ‘‘Well, Sara, I am like some Barnum monstrosity to whom people come to gawp and never come again.’’

  ‘‘Nonsense, Alice. You are only tired. Do not disparage yourself. I advise fighting off your demons, wrestling them right down.’’

  ‘‘Really, Sara,’’ I paused, ‘‘I am not a crocodile hunter.’’

  ‘‘Oh tut. I will come again,’’ she threatened, ‘‘when I am next in London.’’

  She did not.

  Twenty-two

  My brother William and I had been in touch by letter, but this was h
is first appearance since my defection, as he put it, to England.

  ‘‘It is good to see you, Willy.’’

  His hug was humid and altogether heartier than Henry’s fragrantly skimming embraces.

  ‘‘And you, my little grey-eyed doe.’’

  I gazed moonily up at him. ‘‘Oh, Willikins,’’ I lisped, ‘‘in my little grey dress (curtsy) and with my little grey face (tongue-ho), my two little grey hands and two little grey feet.’’ Then hitching myself up on tiptoes I hissed into his ear: ‘‘But I do not possess a little grey heart.’’

  He pulled away, the muscles in his jaw near his ears throbbing away like crickets. ‘‘So you are a lioness today; I’d better watch my step.’’

  I growled, flicked an invisible tail.

  He backed off further, moustaches a-twitch.

  ‘‘And Henry …?’’ He peered about him, as if expecting his younger brother to manifest from under one of the turkey rugs.

  ‘‘He’s off on one of his Scottish jaunts,’’ I supplied, ‘‘to be coo’d over by Lady Airy or Airlie in her great lighted pile of a castle.’’

  ‘‘I believe he parties to escape us,’’ he whispered conspiratorially.

  Yes, I thought, Henry partied to escape his own ancestry – ‘relations with consequences’, he called us – disappearing to the Continent or the wilds of Scotland where we would not haunt him.

  But I’d almost forgotten Willy and Alice’s tragedy.

  ‘‘Poor little Herman,’’ I said feelingly.

  ‘‘Indeed, I mourn the lost little human turtle,’’ he said biting his lip, then going on to describe the child’s blotched face, the nostrils flaring at the insufficient air, the chest pumping up and down, and then the terrible, tearing hiccoughs followed by a whooping bark …

  ‘‘I am sorry, Willy. But you have made your lip bleed.’’ I pressed the spot with my fingertip, then – it couldn’t be helped – licked it.

  ‘‘And Alice?’’ I asked after a respectful pause.

  ‘‘You know of course she was sick herself?’’

  ‘‘Aunt Kate described it: she came down with it around the same time as the little one, I believe?’’

  He nodded. ‘‘She nursed him round the clock. For nine days and nights not more than three hours’ sleep in the whole twenty-four, and yet every day as fresh and passionate and eager to keep him alive.’’ His Adam’s apple rose and fell along the column of his throat.

  ‘‘But it wasn’t to be. The poor little man contracted pneumonia. It was all over on July 9th just as dawn was breaking. We buried him at Cambridge beside our parents. He measured the size of the grave with his index fingers.

  Once again I reached out. His hands felt like hot dinner rolls, the kind you break open in order to remove pellets of indigestible dough before consuming the crisp outer shell. How could we ever let go? But we must of course. William, blinking – the bear emerges from hibernation – shook himself free. He was good at that. Discipline; volition, overcoming inanition. In one of his essays – he’d sent it to me for comment – he explored the problem of how anyone ever decides to get out of bed in the morning. ‘Not that volition has anything to do with it in my own case,’ I’d written back. He begged to differ. Even illness, he believed, could be overcome through pure will. He’d tested the theory personally, forcing himself out of his own sickbed and going for a run around the block.

  And the result?

  Why, he felt a new man by the end!

  Oh, Willy, I wanted to cry, must I bestir myself against all inclination, rise from my sickbed and go running about London like a loon, overruling all weakness and pain?

  But he was going on – the devoted husband – about his Alice. ‘‘The old word Motherhood,’’ he intoned, ‘‘has been given new meaning.’’ Eyes heavenward. If I were Alice, I thought, I’d have longed to throw something at him: Stop sanctifying me forgodsake and do something!

  ‘‘She is resilient,’’ I offered more reasonably.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, clearing the way for a new topic of conversation. Life would go on. There were two other children to attend to after all. ‘‘But you, Alice, tell me about you.’’ He was still alarmingly urgent.

  ‘‘Calm yourself, Willy, I am doing perfectly well.’’ Since my health had improved I was able to say more or less truthfully, ‘‘I am under a strict regimen of rest. As for my diet, my landlady is possessed of the largest repertory of potato manipulation imaginable.’’ It was settling to talk of potatoes.

  He scowled: ‘‘I hope she is not another follower of Fletcher.’’

  I laughed, ‘‘No, she is merely a Swiss.’’

  ‘‘Too much starch,’’ he muttered. His knee would not stay still, nor his squinny eye. During the previous year he’d published a collection of our father’s work entitled, ‘The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James’, with a long introduction of his own. Henry and I had each received a copy.

  ‘‘Willy,’’ I confessed. ‘‘When you sent it last year … it came at a bad time.’’ I did not tell him that I had been unable, could not bear, that is, to hold the thing in my hand. The truth? I’d flung it away. ‘‘But I have since read it and … it gave me great pleasure, Willy, I assure you. What fun it must have been,’’ I added, ‘‘to roll out all those adjectives.‘‘

  ‘‘It’s alright, Alice,’’ he soothed, ‘‘Henry wrote me all about it. As a matter of fact, if it will not embarrass you, he said you burst into tears exclaiming, ‘How beautiful it is that William should have done it! Isn’t it, isn’t it beautiful? And how good William is, how good, how good!’ I could hear your voice, clear as anything, and felt sufficiently rewarded.’’

  ‘‘But William …’’

  ‘‘Enough, Alice. It was a thing I felt compelled to do, for Father’s sake. But I am working on bigger things now. I am hoping, once things settle down at home’’ – obviously referring again to Herman’s death – ‘‘The Principles will soon be finished.’’ He’d already published several articles in The New England Journal of Psychology, which Henry had praised for their ‘intellectual larking’.

  ‘‘That’s wonderful news, Willy. And Henry will soon finish his new novel; with luck,’’ I added, ‘‘we will soon be able to read it.’’ I’d intended to express equal pleasure in my brothers’ successes, not to pit them one against the other or in any way measure the relative merits of their writing. But the mention of Henry’s writing had sprung a sudden wave of anger, an eruption: ‘‘… curliness … maddening … thin-blooded … priggish …’’

  I’d known of course of his ‘disapproval’ of Henry’s style but not the extent of it. ‘‘It’s all too ornate, don’t you think, Alice?’’ He went on without waiting for a reply: ‘‘I recommended more straightforward action but he ignored my advice. Really … I doubt that I shall read any more of his stuff,’’ he concluded. ‘‘I have tried, Alice, believe me, but …’’ Here he leant close enough for me to feel the heat of his breath, its saltiness: ‘‘What does he think he’s up to, Alice, with all that’’ – he twirled his wrist as if warming up for a duel – ‘‘fencing and parrying?’’

  To which I could only reply, ‘‘And do you think, Willy, that he does not know what he is doing?’’

  He hit the chair back. It was not the cohesive rejoinder he’d been hoping for, but I could not, would not, betray Henry for the sake of currying favor. Yet the situation must be ‘corrected’. The best strategy, I saw, would be to focus on one of his, William’s, accomplishments, avoiding any further mention of Henry’s. So I said:

  ‘‘I gather you have been to Paris for the annual Psychological Congress.’’

  At once he brightens: ‘‘ ‘And now’,’’ he mimicks, ‘‘ ‘Monsieur. Weell-yam James will open the proceedings …’.’’ He bows.

  ‘‘Oh, and did you manage it in French, Willy?’’ I then ask, all innocence.

  At which he erupts: ‘‘I am not inclined to spout in that flowery to
ngue in the way of my younger, shallower and vainer brother!’’

  ‘‘William!’’ I was truly taken aback, by the vehemence and vitriol of the outburst. ‘‘How could you! Nothing could be more wrong-headed as a description of Henry and you know it!’’ I restrained myself from crying out ‘Why you’re just jealous because Henry as we both know is cleverer, more sensitive, imaginative and famous than you, so there!’

  But he was already grinning his wicked little-boy grin. ‘‘Surely you cannot deny that he is my younger brother?’’

  I threw one of my cushions at him. Catching it with one hand – but we must change the subject – he began telling me about the hiking trip he’d planned in Switzerland after the Paris congress.

  ‘‘Yet here you are in London, Willy,’’ I pointed out, ‘‘not clambering up a Swiss gully or traversing a glacier.’’

  He admitted it was so. In truth, he was desperate to get home. ‘‘All I want is to see Alice and the boys again. I will not be satisfied until I do.’’ He cracked the knuckles of his left hand, one by one, followed by the right.

  ‘‘And Europe?’’ I was thinking of Henry’s American, Newman, who could not get enough of Europe – but refrained from making the comparison for fear of consequences.

  ‘‘To hell with Europe,’’ he cried. ‘‘I have seen enough anyway. The only necessity is to get home. To America, Chocorua … Alice.’’ He hugged the pillow until it was squashed flat against his chest.

  Is that is how he embraces Alice?

  Abruptly he flung the thing away. I feared he would launch into another anti-Henry diatribe, but he did not. I wanted to laugh, and weep, at the thought of my two brothers having to escape, from me, from one another, from some held notion of a country that was or wasn’t their own. And there he was scowling at me, as if to say How can you stand it here among the deadly, stupid, lazy, doughy lumps? What he actually said was, ‘‘Do you not miss the American edge, Alice, the lucidity?’’ To which I thought it best not to reply that I had Henry, and Katharine, who together provided more than enough ‘edge’ and ‘lucidity’ for my requirements.