His eyes swivel loosely about as he slaps his thighs bringing our session to an abrupt end.
Forty-seven
‘‘I’ll warrant,’’ Wardy accused, ‘‘he makes you stare into his eyes, crawl about like a babe, and moo like a cow.’’
‘‘What do you take him for,’’ I shot back, ‘‘a Svengali?’’
‘‘I daresay he does not have a Jewish nose,’’ she allowed.
‘‘Wardy,’’ I scolded, ‘‘it is ignorant to believe that character can be read in terms of racial features any more than in bumps on the skull.’’
She shook her head, ‘‘Oh, but Miss,’’ warned she: ‘‘I heard tell of one poor lady who was so possessed she made faces when he (Bowles) drank vinegar, started when he pricked himself with a pin, and no doubt would have given herself up for hanging when he committed murder!’’
Had she forgotten it was her suggestion to consult him in the first place? Evidently. Well, had I wished to add fuel to her anti-mesmeric fire I could have told her about poor little Verena Tarant in The Bostonians who could do nothing without her father ‘winding her up’; but I would not. Nor about Elizabeth Browning, who they say was ‘creeped out’ by the whole mesmeric exercise (it ‘jangled her nerves’ and ‘curdled her blood’). Instead I told her about Harriet Martineau: ‘‘She was completely cured of her incurable cancer through mesmerism and taught her own servant how to do it.’’ At which the melodramatically-inclined creature threw up her mitts and threatened to leave saying she would not be turned into no hocus-pocuser, and anyway Miss Martineau was no doubt a witch. And away she flounces.
At which Katharine took up the theme (I’d been bamboozled, hoodwinked, duped, etc.):
‘‘Are you to be his fish?’’ she asked.
‘‘It’s you,’’ I flung back, ‘‘who make me wriggle.’’
‘‘I’m only trying to protect you.’’
‘‘Trying to stop me …’’
‘‘Yes, stop you making a fool of yourself.’’
‘‘Hwo-hm.’’
‘‘Please, Alice.’’
Please? I sensed the suffering but cared nothing for it. My Kath had come to seem almost dull to me – her voice muffled, her face a smudge – compared to Bowles’ scythe-like presence: how he cut through my resistance and how the light struck his blade-like edges. Was I mad? Oh, looking back – but that’s too easy – it was like painting a clown’s face over a priceless Della Robbia rilievo. But I’d become brazen, even a little reckless; that cruel, hard streak again: heartless Alice.
Finally she said:
‘‘You must give him up or else.’’
‘‘Or else what?’’ I knew of course what she meant.
‘‘I am quite serious, Alice.’’
‘‘I do not believe you,’’ I lied.
‘‘Then you do not know me at all.’’
The air had thickened between us until we were like two wooden spoons stuck in a cooking pot of hardball.
‘‘Alright,’’ I pronounced at last: ‘‘if you are going – then go.’’
‘‘Are you quite sure, Alice?’’ She gave me this one last chance to change my mind but I was too far gone. At which – a triumph of timing – Bowles appeared. They slid past each other like eels in a too-narrow tank; Katharine departing with one last furious, sad, backward gaze.
What would she do, go where? I wondered, picturing her launching herself out into the world only to become hopelessly stuck in a blur of misery, having to hold to a railing to stop the trembling, biting her lip until it bled … To be so cast out. But she must do something, I saw, for people are beginning to stare, so she makes her purposeful way to the home of Charlotte Guest, or perhaps Mrs Cookson, or the famous Josephine Butler. Or will she go further and ‘give herself up’ to Constance Woolson on the Continent …?
‘‘Alice,’’ Bowles snaps his fingers. The mortifying scene I’d conjured, and the self-reproach – dear Kath, should I call her back? – instantly dissolves. He stands before me; is with me. I rise to greet him in all my natural glory; which is to say uncorseted, my vibrant orange essence shimmering before him.
You may sit, Alice.
I sit. He has done something to the seating arrangement, I perceive. Our chairs are closer than ever.
Are you ready, Alice?
I move my head; let him take it for a nod.
Then you will close your eyes, reach into your body to find a switch. There may be one central switch, say, at the base of your spine, or several linked switches. Take your time locating them, please.
Silence while I search about in the dark of my interior.
He takes my hands in his. At which all apprehension vanishes. A pleasant thrill runs from my fingers throughout my body … my heart pounds with joy … what he wishes for, I wish …
Now imagine turning off the switches, Alice.
But I have not found them yet, Arthur. Fortunately, I am still in charge enough of my faculties to decide for myself. I will let him be the caller, I will dance to his tune, but I will not fall under his ‘spell’. And I will submit only so long as it takes to strengthen my nervous system, alleviate my female complaints and debilitating headaches, and tranquillize my mind. After that, he will be dismissed.
He is clearing his throat, flexing his nine fingers:
Alice, there are many different switchboxes, each clearly labelled: one for the right leg, one the left, and one for every other place in the body. Are you with me?
I am with you, Arthur.
You can see the wires to those switches, the nerves that carry sensation, pain, from one place to another and all passing through those switches. Are you still with me, Alice?
Oh yes.
Now all you need to do is reach up and turn off the switches.
And then?
Then you will feel nothing, no sensation will get through.
No pain?
The pain will be damped down because you have turned off the mechanism that controls that particular pain. You have used your mind to switch it off. It is in your hands, Alice. Now, shall we try it?
I nod again, which means I allow him into my body where I follow him down, down until I find the source of the pain which I suppose is my womb which is contracting and cramping and pumping blood again, and I push him out of the way and go flick to the switch which I locate somewhere deep and secret.
Well?
The pain is still there but somehow cannot get to me. No sensation can get through because I have turned off the switch – or rather he has used the power of his mind – or my mind directed by his mind to control my own body – so that it will obey him …
It’s a start, he says. Now you will count to five before opening your eyes. By which time he has gone.
Forty-eight
He insinuates his hand, popping buttons one by one so they fly off, then peels back my skin until I am like one of those Vesalius illustrations in different shades of gory pink. He has opened me up and now he will step inside to assess me and then correct me: unkink my spine, massage my hardened womb, ease my thickened heart, unblock my pinhole of a digestive tract, revivify my slack stupid muscles.
He is a bee and I am his flower. Bowles the bee. See how he pokes his neck forward and back, forward, back, pulling and sucking at the pain, sucking it out of me until I am a clean hollow tube. Only I am mistaken, he is no bee and I am the buzzing foolish one. I know this because he keeps shaking his head, whipping it around so hard his hair is all flopped across his forehead and he has to throw it back again. Tell me, what have I misunderstood, Arthur? My voice is beseeching which I detest. He tells me to listen carefully. Which I am doing. So then he sets off again on one of his owlish drones which threatens to put me back to sleep:
Now you will make yourself go numb, Alice …
I want to cry out. But I have spent my life making myself go numb!
On he goes soporifically:
Your eyes are closed, Alice but your mind is awake becau
se you want to learn to use your own hypnotic abilities …
I note he does not use the word ‘mesmeric’. He admits the practice has long been discredited; although I am not sure I like ‘hypnotic’ any better.
that numb feeling
in your right arm, or your nose, or left ear
a tiny area of numbness
a comfortable tingling feeling
a heavy, thick numbness
that grows and spreads
His face is so solemn as he intones, his voice so owlish I am tempted to reach out and tickle him. Is this poetry or pap?
until it just seems to disappear
so you don’t know how it feels
because it’s as if it’s not there
and if it’s not there it cannot hurt.
Very logical, I hear myself mutter as on he goes encouraging me to pinch myself in one of the numb areas. So that is what I do, I reach up and seize my nose between thumb and forefinger as if to stop a sneeze, digging in with my nails until I feel …
Nothing.
Am I right, Alice? Do you see how it is? How you can make sensation disappear, learn how to allow your deeper mind to turn off those painful areas in your body until there is no discomfort at all, there is nothing …
But he is wrong. There is blood on my hand and my nose is already swelling like a turnip. Yet it’s his next words that truly make me want to weep:
Only I cannot do it for you: you must do it for yourself.
Must I? I cry, already bereft. Must I always always do it for myself?
He nods. More flopping hair. That is what I have been trying to tell you, Alice.
Oh damn.
Forty-nine
His two tricks having failed he now proposes a more ‘radical’ approach involving a deal of heavy breathing interspersed with rude snorting noises.
Are you ready, Alice?
I say I am.
Now, Alice, your body is becoming heavy and limp …
Like a sack of potatoes?
Alice …
If I go on like this he will walk out of the room and not come back and I will have lost him. I apologize. Please. Proceed. Which he does, rising and coming towards me so that I feel the heat of his body closing in. The next thing I know he is taking my hand and, placing it lightly upon his upturned one, rising me from my chair. Eyes closed, Alice, he reminds me and then Trust me as he leads me across the room with the easeful assurance of a dancing master. My usual stumbly gait is gone. I am light as light itself and able to dance any dance so long as he is holding me in his arms and moving me about.
I am about to bump my nose into the wall.
I reach out with my free hand to stop myself.
Good, he coos, though I have no idea what it is I have done or not done that merits his praise. Yet it pleases me. Except I must not let it, I am not that silly. Now he releases the other hand and places it alongside the other so that both hands are flat against the wall as if searching for a secret panel.
What do you feel? he asks, and I reply: a wall and begin describing the texture of the paper and so on, but he is not interested in all that. Then what? There is a long silence in which he is filling himself up, with what I do not know, but whatever it is it will soon be transferred to me, so I await it with anticipation.
The heat of his body.
His fingers hover along my spine, never actually meeting fabric yet having already plunged in and scoured me out –
Now, Alice, I want you to go on feeling the wall with your fingers
until something happens
something begins to give way
soften
until you are no longer aware of the wall’s solidity,
until it really is no longer a solid barrier
until it has dissolved and you are
moving through into another dimension
a new reality, Alice, deeper … further …
into the real world
The real world? I echo.
yes the real world
where you feel more alive, more clear-headed
than you have felt for a long while
without pain or paralysis
where the world is like a painting come alive
where …
Are you with me, Alice?
My mouth opens but nothing emerges. He tells me I am capable of more. I want to believe him; but what more? Before I learned to cork myself up I felt charged with possibility (did not William call me a ‘spurting fountain’ and ‘bottled lighting’?). But here he is inviting me to touch the source of life, its flow, its connections, its dissolving walls. There are no barriers if you allow yourself to expand, to touch the source. It is all hocus-pocus, I want to shout, but something stops me. What? I think of my brother Henry and his stories of the ‘strange’ … and William’s unseen world from which, so he believed, the soul received its best nourishment. Was William’s ghayh the same as Arthur’s?
My head is starting to bang.
He leads me back to my place where he tells me I am now pregnant with possibility, and I believe him (a miracle!), and he says I am now infused with vital influence (bottled lightning!) and will soon have the power to sensitize my own body so that next time, next time, you will be able to control the pain within your own body – and even this I believe. Even so, it is all too much and I slump forward in a heap with blood gushing down my legs. Wardy comes running, ‘‘What is it, Miss, has Bowles done you a damage?’’ We look around, but he is no longer present to be chastised.
Fifty
‘‘What d’you mean, he’s not there?’’
‘‘I mean,’’ she explained ponderously, ‘‘he no longer lodges in his rooms in Spencer Street, body and soul swept out, shingle removed. His landlady said he made off during the night, though he’d paid her more than enough to cover the rent. ‘He was generous that way,’ says she. ‘Generous with Miss James’s money, you mean’, says I.’’
I interrupted her saga. ‘‘Surely he left a forwarding card?’’
Her look said: Which of us is the clever mistress and which the stupid servant?
So that was the end of Bowles. And Katharine. Could anything be more deliciously cruel? It put me in mind of Henry and his art, the fierce purity of it, like bathing in ice water. I turned to my dressing table mirror: What has Bowles done to me? I asked of it. The answer came: Nothing. He never intruded like a doctor with his disagreeable questions; nor took your pulse nor examined your tongue nor used some horrid percussor or stethoscope to listen for your heart. So there.
All true, I acknowledged. And another thing, I confided: His ear once approached my bosom as if it were a pillow made of a thousand gosling feathers, but just as I was preparing myself to receive the weight and warmth of him he ‘came to’ and pulled away, more’s the pity.
The mirror was mum, as if it had decided I was no longer worth speaking to.
What was I to conclude, then: that I’d been ‘taken for a ride’? Should I admit to degradation? Or deny it was anything at all; that Bowles had come and gone having proved himself a fake, leaving the surface of my life as unruffled and tranquil as glass? My mind was a walnut – one that had been split open – while I kept trying to restore it to what it had been – my hands shaking – desperate to fit myself back together again. But, look, it’s impossible: I cannot make it fit.
It was not merely my mind that had split apart but my whole self.
Alice: how to match her with she who had been before?
From time to time Bowles returned to me: You alone have the right to decide what is wrong with you.
I can make him last forever, I thought, wrapping his words around me like a greatcoat. Then, employing his method of suggestion, I ‘tuned into’ the pain – visualized ‘Cridge’ letting go with his claws – turned off switches – went numb – refused – the pain. Bowles’ Gift: a fine title for a story, I thought, though I was too busy controlling switches and numbing myself to think of writing. Then,
by the end of the week it happened as he’d predicted: I was able to walk without Wardy’s help. I ordered a breakfast of scrambled eggs accompanied by toast and coffee; afterwards went to the toilet without having to strain and bleed. The other bleeding had stopped along with the cramping. And my spine seemed to have stacked itself into its rightful position with my head, migraine free, balanced just-so upon my neck.
‘‘Well,’’ I announced brightly to Wardy, ‘‘it appears that I have been cured by Mr Bowles after all.’’
‘‘You have not been cured, Miss,’’ she snorted: ‘‘you have been seduced – if you’ll forgive me saying so.’’
‘‘No, I will not forgive you’’ – I banged my fist for emphasis, adding: ‘‘how can you be so vulgar?’’ No, it would not do: such a trite, predictable, morally unserious outcome must not attach itself to me. Henry had written about such things in relation to ‘feminine’ fiction but I could never be so susceptible, or silly. No, it tremendously would not do. I picked up the nearest missile, my hairbrush, and flung it at her with enough force to crack a mirror. She ducked. Then on she went, goose, ignoring all my protestations and denials, to describe in gruesome detail (but how did she know?) the symptoms of the commonest of ‘conditions’: a fast-beating heart, bright, glassy eyes, an excess of energy. Which must be denied, strenuously. Though later, after she had gone to bed, I shocked myself by crying out, ‘‘Damn, am I never to be allowed to do the common thing?’’
The answer returned: No.
Fifty-one
Bowles spoiled things.
Wrong. I spoiled things. I allowed myself to be hypnotized.
Before Bowles, I recalled, there had been a steadiness to my days: a sweet sameness, moments anticipated, repeated, relished. Daily excitements. The small things I cared about: a piece of finely-wrought prose – letters from home – newspapers – the taste of coffee – watching clouds – rain – pain. Even (or do I mean especially?) getting into bed, the realization of it – mattress, sheets, pillow, quilt – a relief so intense I’d lie there thinking I am no more. The kindest kind of death.
The Sister Page 29