The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  My voice was barely audible, as if confessing to a crime, ‘‘Very little, it’s true.’’ Then I remembered. ‘‘Wait – it was worse than that.’’ I managed to repeat Hooper’s curse.

  ‘‘Ah,’’ said he sagely; unsurprised. ‘‘And did they by any chance have the temerity to impugne your sanity?’’

  I nodded in recognition. ‘‘Yes, they left me feeling less than human.’’

  ‘‘So … ,’’ he paused meaningfully: ‘‘will you now put your trust in me?’’

  Again I nodded. Already, without his touch, I felt lost.

  ‘‘Good.’’ He now approached Wardy and whispered something in her ear. She appealed to me; I gave her permission to carry out whatever he asked of her. She rolled her eyes like a frenzied horse but proceeded to my bedroom from which she emerged carrying a tray laden with my various medicaments. Bowles examined the substances, one by one: ‘‘Hemp pills … opium powders … Sloan’s Ointment (Kills Pain) … Potter’s Herbs … Universal Embrocation … Pinoleum inhalent spray …’’. On and on he went, pronouncing their names as if they were deadly poisons, before dumping the whole lot onto the floor. So ended our first ‘consultation’.

  Forty-five

  His eyes were mesmerically attracted to one another. My brother William’s eyes, as I recalled, also had a tendency to cross in moments of excitement, or distress, such as after having treated a nervous patient at the asylum where he was working. ‘‘What have you seen, Willy?’’ I asked. Appearing badly shaken he stared in my direction, only it was not me he was seeing. His eyes wavered, crossed, met, locked. I cradled his head while he described a black-haired youth with greenish skin. ‘‘He’s entirely idiotic … sits all day with his knees drawn up against his chin, and a coarse gray undershirt drawn over them enclosing his entire figure.’’ It was as if he’d seen a living mummy. But there was something else as yet unspoken, perhaps unspeakable. ‘‘What frightens you so, Willy?’’ I asked. He was hunched over like his patient; in time he whispered ‘‘That shape am I.’’ Naturally I disabused him of the notion. But the apparition still visited him from time to time – it couldn’t be helped – along with his self-mortifying identification with it. He would live with the dread of it, as our Father had of his demons, all his life.

  Bowles snaps his fingers to bring me back. He’d replaced his dining chair with a foot-stool so that his eyes were now level with mine and happily returned to separateness. ‘‘What do you see, Alice?’’ Alice he persisted in calling me as if I were his servant. ‘‘Miss James, if you please,’’ I manage to correct him; hypocrite that I am espousing egalitarian principles at the same time pulling rank. It won’t do, I scold myself, I must not let England spoil me. He ignores me, in any case, leaving me with no option but to call him Arthur. ‘‘Tell me the first thing that comes into your head Alice,’’ he commands, to which I hear myself reply: ‘‘That shape am I.’’ ‘‘What shape is that?’’ he then pursues. The gentleness of his voice belies its authority. I reply: ‘‘The shape of pain.’’

  It helped to picture William and his table-turners, and Henry’s risible Bostonians; that is, to suspect him of fakery. Any minute now, I told myself, he would pull a cheap gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and begin swinging it to and fro before my eyes. You are getting drowsy … your eyelids are growing heavy … soon you will be fast asleep … But he did not. Instead, he drew his hands lightly over my face letting them pass over my breasts and belly. Never did he actually touch; yet their heat was scorchy. After that he began nosing between my legs with his legs. Could this be decent? As his knees urged against my skirts my thighs began to peel apart, a gap opening beneath my winter skirt like an unfolding scarf.

  And still he continues to come forward … Will he split me apart like a wishbone?

  ‘‘Are you prepared,’’ he now pursues, ‘‘to let go of it?’’

  I know of course what he’s talking about. There is nothing else to let go of. But suddenly I am frightened – so frightened I begin shaking all over. He does nothing. Watches. Like Henry. Mildly curious.

  ‘‘Pain shapes my life,’’ I hear myself whisper.

  ‘‘Do you mean to say pain is your life, Alice?’’

  I laugh, though I do not find it in the least bit funny. Already, I think, he has betrayed me. Having lured me in by ‘reading’ my pain, pretending to understand and sympathize, he now speaks disparagingly of it. But I must try and explain:

  ‘‘Strange as it seems,’’ I say firmly, ‘‘I consider myself lucky. Pain has given me …’’

  ‘‘What has it given you, Alice?’’

  ‘‘It has given me … that is, it is my connection with the world. Even as I am removed, enclosed – hermit-like, nun-like, so to speak – I am open to the outer life around me. Through a glass darkly, perhaps – but that is the power of it – I may – sometimes, if I am lucky – see whole truths undistorted by the normal hustle and bustle inhabited by the healthy. And when it lets go, the world renews itself, like a fog clearing. So much so that I have almost wished for it with as much fervor as I have begged for its release.’’

  ‘‘You admit, then, to a certain perverse enjoyment of it, perhaps even an attachment to it?’’

  You have misunderstood.

  ‘‘It also contains my story, my history: the memories of my brothers, my Aunt, my parents, my childhood, New England; they are all connected with it and cannot be separated. It has been my lifelong companion. It is therefore not something to get rid of just like that.’’ I snap my fingers in his face.

  ‘‘You are married to your pain then?’’ he suggests mockingly.

  Another laugh, fiercer this time, more like a bark. The way he puts it. Twisting my words. I lash out, only he is ready for me.

  ‘‘Now now, Alice,’’ says he, grabbing my wrists, ‘‘let us have no violence.’’

  I am undone. Disarmed. My body like milk or heavy cream, slowly curdling in the muzzy heat of the room. Only my mind still floating free.

  After that he looks me up and down as if assessing me for a fitting. ‘‘Next time,’’ he informs me, ‘‘you will wear no corset or stays, or any other such female contraptions.’’ He means, I suppose, my undergarments.

  At this Katharine, who has on this occasion sat quietly in a corner pretending to read a book, is completely unmannered. Her face is livid as she looms over him. He rises to meet her, a hand guarding his own face. The left hand, it is. Katharine stares at it. It is missing its fourth finger, she notices. By which time he has slipped away.

  Later Katharine scolds me for a dupe. When I describe my ‘hypnotic rapture’ she throws up her hands: ‘‘ Tosh! leave it alone!’’ Then she begins interrogating me with uncharacteristic suspicion, ‘‘Why must he stroke your arm? For what purpose must your bosom be bared?’’ To which I can only reply vaguely that it is all part of the ‘hypnotic touch’.

  ‘‘You trust him then?’’ she charges.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ I shout back, ‘‘yes I do, oh I do!’’

  Her face by this time is all blotchy. ‘‘Oh Alice, will you allow him to befool you?’’

  I laugh then, accuse her of jealousy.

  She laughs back.

  At which I see – feel – something else rising in her: disgust. Is that too strong a word? a lip-curling, toe-curling creeping thing attaching itself to me like a foul smell? No, it is not too strong. I am becoming less – there, I see it – in her eyes.

  How could I believe in him? How could I allow myself to behave in such a common way?

  ‘‘You admire him, Alice,’’ she accuses: ‘‘deny it.’’

  ‘‘His technique is effective,’’ I admit.’’

  ‘‘His technique,’’ she snorts. ‘‘You mean his cheap seduction technique? It only makes you cheap, Alice.’’

  ‘‘Jealousy!’’

  So it goes on. Our words grow harsher, more wounding. The force of our divergence is frightening. I’m aware of a loosening, a tottering …
a succession of moments, each one wearing away … wearing down … a pumice stone on a calloused heel. The thing we have created between us – what to call it? – regard, loving forbearance – I hardly know – will it now – go? I see that she sees me, cruelly illuminated, as vulgar. What can I do about it?

  ‘‘That is easy: refuse to see him again.’’

  ‘‘Refuse?’’

  ‘‘Yes, refuse, ever again.’’

  ‘‘Oh, but I cannot do that.’’

  ‘‘Oh, but you can.’’

  ‘‘No. I cannot.’’

  She grabs her briefcase and leaves the room.

  ‘‘Where are you going … Katharine …?’’

  Forty-six

  ‘‘No corset?’’ cried an incensed Wardy.

  ‘‘It’s alright,’’ I told her, ‘‘you may close your mouth – and put the ungainly thing away.’’ She was holding it around the waist as if it were a waltzing partner. ‘‘There’s nothing sinister in it,’’ I assured her, ‘‘It’s merely so that I may breathe freely under the hypnotic influence.’’

  She sniffed. ‘‘I don’t like it, nor the way he makes free with his hands.’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ said I provocatively, ‘‘but I do!’’

  When she’d finished flapping she asked, ‘‘But what does he expect you to wear? Must you go about naked under your garments, Miss?’’ Fuming like a fire she slapped her sides: ‘‘It ain’t decent!’’

  ‘‘Do calm down, Wardy,’’ I advised: ‘‘your grammar is slipping. I will wear the new knickers and the chemise with the shaped gussets.’’ She herself had convinced me to buy such things as advertised in one of her women’s magazines.

  ‘‘And what will hold up your stockings?’’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘‘You have heard of garters, I presume?’’ And, truth to tell, it was a relief to be unboned and unmoulded, to not have my flesh pushed this way and that to create a false form. Besides, he was right: I could breathe more freely.

  ‘‘Stand up,’’ ordered Bowles making his lubricious way into the parlor. I stood. He looked me up and down as if he found my droopy person a disappointment; which I thought monstrously unfair as it was he who ordered the de-corseting in the first place.

  Although it rankled to do so, I said – smoothing my skirt over my non-existent hips – ‘‘I have done as you requested.’’ Most women, as I well knew, wore the things to rein in their flesh whereas it was the opposite for me. Without the corset’s false hourglass form I was flat and straight as a plank.

  ‘‘Turn please.’’

  Please? I turned, revolving slowly while he took in the disappointing sight of what he called my ‘natural’ shape: broad but flat, as if I’d been pressed and dried like a floral specimen, my dress a husk leached of color and moisture.

  ‘‘Sideways please.’’

  Again, I obeyed, seeing myself through his eyes as a thin and insubstantial stick figure. Well, so much for appearances! I thought (and what a good example of William’s ‘dissimulation’, and Henry ‘narrowness of vision’), for only on the surface was I such a dim, grey creature. I am like a carrot, I longed to tell him: a dim, dusky purple on the outside; but cut it open and its true nature will be revealed to you with its vibrant orange core.

  But there was Wardy standing guard in the doorway.

  He reached out – it was as if I’d been handed a galvanic ball – and guided me towards the nursing chair where he reached behind him and, without looking at her, gave the signal for Wardy to leave us. Which she did, making her displeasure quite clear by blowing like a whale from inside her own bony mouldings.

  After she’d gone, Bowles sat with his hands folded in his lap and his head bowed as if in prayer, though it seemed unlikely that that was what he was actually doing. It is all part of the performance, I told myself, as his head began to loll to one side. Was he actually falling asleep, or had he put himself into a trance? At which his arms shot up forcing his clasped hands apart, and he reached out to me like a conductor to his orchestra. Or an ape to its mate.

  So we begin. First he tells me my universal fluid has been blocked. How do you know? I ask. He does not look pleased, It is my business to know. What will you do? I ask. I will unblock it, he says. I say it sounds alarming and he says, Do you or don’t you want to be well, Alice? I do, I say, I do, Arthur.

  Good.

  So we proceed. First, he needs to know what the pain is like. Which is disappointing as it reminds me of all the other doctors who have ever attended me. What is the pain like, Alice? Ho hum. So I tell him description comes best from a clear mind not a pain-wracked body, as my brother Henry well knows.

  Bowles takes a deep breath, as if filling himself with patience: Your brother is not my business. Then:

  Do you mean to say you are in pain as we speak, Alice?

  I am.

  Very well. Now, Alice, tell me about your pain.

  My pain, I begin … stop. I want to compare it to a wild animal, as I have done before, but the truth is that aside from my pater’s stuffed animal collection and the Newport raccoons and foxes, and a white stoat that Katharine and I once saw scuttling along the Leam, I have little exerience of wild animals. So instead I say:

  It is like a cat, a very large cat with jowls and a neck like a pig and fur thick as a polar bear’s.

  And what does the cat do, Alice?

  He strikes with both paws, grabs on and refuses to let go.

  Like a crab?

  Well, I suppress a titter, a furry crab … should such a thing exist.

  And where does he strike?

  Today my spine.

  Where on your spine?

  Mostly the base but when he gets bored with that, he works his way up and begins sharpening his claws on my shoulder blades.

  Ah – it is his turn for levity – the way my landlady’s cat does on the frame of my sofa.

  I am not a sofa, Arthur.

  No, Alice, I realize that. So, he continues: he has got your shoulder blades in a sort of wrestler’s lock, is that right? And will not let go causing the pain to vibrate up and down your body until you must scream or pass out?

  I would not have described it so melodramatically myself, but that is not unlike how it is.

  Good (deep breath). And what will persuade him to let go? Is there anything you can think of?

  That’s obvious: a plate of chicken livers, or roasted skin. Oh, and blood. He laps blood like milk; indeed, he prefers it.

  Ve-ery good, Alice. Eyes closed, pleased. Now imagine the cat as he sniffs the offering; what does he do?

  He lets go.

  Yes! He retracts his claws, dropping off your spine, and makes for the skin and blood … And you experience the pleasure of release.

  No, Arthur, you’re wrong there, it is not pleasure. At first it is as if my bones do not know what to do with themselves and so they contract with an even worse pain. It feels as if the damage is done and cannot be undone.

  But it can. Keep breathing, Alice. Remind yourself, the cat is not there, nothing is there. He has jumped off and has attacked the plate of food, gulping like the animal that he is.

  That means he could jump back again – as soon as he has finished his meal, if he so chooses.

  In which case you must learn to tame him, domesticate him …

  Put him to sleep?

  Why not, he has eaten heartily and is sure to be feeling drowsy. But first I suggest giving him a name.

  What sort of name?

  An emasculating sort of name.

  A name for my cat-like pain that will render it flaccid, impotent, powerless?

  As you say.

  Alright, I tell him, thinking: Dainty – Slight – Cloake – Mrs Parlour – Dovedale – Gyves – Tagus – Couch – Noad …

  But names are not just names, as my brother well knew. They are portraits-in-a-word, the summation of possibility, musical appelations, labels that determine, haunt, fix forever, transmute …

&nbs
p; Alice?

  I am right here, Arthur.

  Potcher – Drabble – Perch – Pudney – Trendle – Gaye …

  I do not have all day.

  Okay, I have decided. He’s called Cridge.

  Excellent. A Cridge wouldn’t be capable of hurting you. You are smiling, Alice?

  That’s because Cridge is purring, crossing his paws like a giant pink-nosed bunny in a shop window. But I know he’s only acting, that he will strike again. Cridge is only pretending to look cute.

  Never mind anticipating what he will do, how is it now, the pain?

  There is an ache, a stiffness, a weariness, but the electrical current pain, the cutting nerve-blasting pain, the slicing of blade pain – has retreated.

  Good. I’m pleased with you. You are over the worst.

  But Cridge will strike again. His hunger for inflicting pain is insatiable.

  But so is his hunger for food, Alice. At this point Bowles’s mouth is close to my cheek, to my ear, his breath brushing my skin so all the tiny hairs are alerted.

  Besides, he whispers, Cridge does not exist.

  Panic’d, I reply, Do you mean to do something about him? For as strange as it may seem, the idea of destroying Cridge, now that I have created him, seems monstrous.

  Don’t you want him gone forever, Alice?

  I … I don’t know. By now I’m feeling confused, by Bowles’s scent and the power, however absurdly employed, of my own imagination. In any case, I feel I must not betray Cridge because Cridge – now I see it – is part of me, however damaged, not to mention damaging. Finally I manage to stammer:

  If I got rid of him it would be like, like …

  Like what, Alice?

  Like destroying part of myself.

  But he is your attacker, Alice, a creature who makes you suffer.

  Yes yes, even so … . but even the most sadistic character – Gilbert Osmond, for instance – you have read it, I assume? – is not so easily disposed of. So it will take time to get rid of Cridge.

  You are not writing a novel, Alice.

  No, but this is an exercise of the imagination, is it not?