The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  Then came Bowles.

  After Bowles all that was lost to me: the steadiness, the pleasurable sufficiency. In Bowles’ wake I was left feeling empty, implausable. I saw that I had been living – as Henry might have put it – on the wrong side of the tapestry. How could that faded, fatiguing daily grind have been enough? What did any of it matter? And why should I care? All was one: another marriage, another death, another doctor; a slice of toast to nibble one’s way through with the industry of a gerbil … a nonsensical letter from Aunt Kate about sailing on a piano round the garden … another of William’s annoyingly facile prescriptions (‘‘Learn to do a fast crawl, Alice … good for the heart!’’)

  Katharine. Must I ‘rate’ her beside the warm drinks and the watching of clouds? Yet how else to assess the damage? Our ‘connection’ was – had been – neither a marriage nor a commonplace companionship. We’d struggled to create something new yet as real, as intimate, as that enshrined institution. A way of being together that was original. Let us be different, we’d said, claiming something we knew to be profound without falling into a pattern. A female friendship? Oh let us simply be together. Simply? It was as if a sliver of bone had got stuck crossways in my gullet. A permanency, we’d called it. Which included the time we were not actively together, having agreed that the fine, invisible filaments uniting us – infinitely stretchable, would hold no matter what.

  Did that mean, I dared to anticipate, it was reclaimable?

  But I am getting ahead of myself. My thoughts at that stage still revolved obsessively around Bowles. His image in the washing bowl, in the face of a flower, superimposed on Katharine’s photograph. The shame of it. Conscience, it is true, forced me to consider her; but my hypocritical body still yearned for him.

  I made excuses for his defection. I’d offended him by failing to respond to his ‘procedures’ – so I reasoned – employing the warped logic of heartache. I was a hopeless case, he’d have concluded, deciding to move on; in which event, I told myself – poor ninny – I may be able to track him down. Doubt arose like an itch yet I would not scratch. Have faith, Alice, I told myself in the way of the fatally deluded. I got Wardy to bring me copies of all the spiritualist and clairvoyant journals. I searched the small advertisements for Bowles the Mesmerist. But the thing went on and he failed to appear, magically or otherwise. Disappointment coated me like wax.

  The feelings, where would they go? There was an irrepressible aliveness about them, like fibrous, dense bulbs ready to swell and proliferate. Yet no implantation must take place, no watering, no encouragement whatsoever. Their tendrils – to continue the metaphor – must be forced to dry out, curl up, their ‘heart’ lose its vital substance.

  That was not the end of the matter however. Presently some other force took hold of me. Much of the physical pain and lethargy had already drained away, but this other thing – a lovelorn fury? – left me awake and fizzing – such a word – to my toes. Never mind William’s ‘spurting fountain’, this was more like Old Faithful, a previously repressed spume ‘letting rip’.

  For a time I amused myself with watching the clouds as they billowed up, coupled, separated again, dashed about behind the jumble of stepped gables, chimneys and – craning my neck – the clocktower with its widows’ walk. Then the curlicues of my own wrought-iron balcony came into focus, with the shrubby flowers Katharine had planted. I must ask her to repot them, I found myself thinking before remembering that she had gone. Finally I watched the raindrops: the classic occupation of solitary spinsters, celibates, poets.

  Soon I was trading the hot heavy comfort of hemp and opium for the fresh stimulus of the early morning air. I barely recognized my newly functioning body as it trotted along the lanes of Leamington, and had me shoveling food into its maw until it was bloated as a bladder. What was I to do with it? One had to look after it like a horse or it would fall into a decline: feed it, exercise it, water it.

  Why was this happening to me? Was I being tested like Job? punished for not appreciating Katharine enough? Or was it the old old story which all of us James children knew by heart: Know this: there is only so much of life’s gifts (genius, good health, etc.) to go around.

  Picture a scales: on one side is balanced rude health, on the other love.

  You cannot have both, Alice.

  But I did not mean to choose.

  Ah but you did.

  But I did not reckon on the price.

  Tant pis.

  So that was that. The only durable meaning I could squeeze from the encounter with Bowles was this strange condition of mine, this cruel joke called ‘being well.’ Yet what good was it to me now that I was alone? I thwacked my walking stick along the railings and lampposts with such force that people shied away.

  Fifty-two

  ‘‘So,’’ I observed, ‘‘the prodigal daughter returns.’’ She shied away like a large, bone-shy animal. I reached out for her. ‘‘Please …’’ Still she hesitated. It saddened me to see her so nervous of me, as if I might attack her with my claws. ‘‘I am not a tiger,’’ I said. The tabloid headlines that week had blared the news of a circus tiger turning on its beloved master and biting off his leg. I dared to take her hand. The skin was dry and sere, one of her fingers swollen. ‘‘It’s nothing,’’ she said, covering it with her other hand, as if it too was a mark of her shame. But surely it was I who should be beating my breast crying mea culpa.

  ‘‘It was nothing but a huff,’’ she declared, shaking herself as if to dislodge any remaining vestiges of huffiness.

  I denied it as a ‘mere huff’; rather a dramatic response. To which I added: ‘‘actually quite reasonable … under the circumstances.’’

  She drew herself up. ‘‘That is why I should not have claimed it for myself.’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ I went on, ‘‘but Henry believes in it implicitly …’’.

  ‘‘Precisely. Louisa and Henry are the dramatic ones.’’

  ‘‘Yet we respond to them … to it,’’ I pointed out.

  ‘‘It is impossible not to: that is the problem. It is coercive and cynical. It uses its influence, charm, power, whatever might be adventitious to one’s cause. I cannot condone it. Insofar as my action was ‘a drama’, I repudiate it.’’

  I did not blame her for it, I said.

  ‘‘Oh but I blame myself.’’

  ‘‘Do not …’’

  She cut me off: ‘‘I’m sorry, Alice.’’ Her very unreproachfulness reproached me.

  ‘‘No,’’ I shook my head: ‘‘it is I who drove you away …’’

  She covered my mouth with the swollen hand. ‘‘The important thing,’’ she declared, ‘‘the thing I realized while away, was what a mistake it was – so cowardly – to leave you when I did … in the position you were in. It was, is, my place to stay with you, see you through the Bowles’’ – she waved a hand not knowing what to call it – ‘‘affair.’’ She scanned my face for clues:

  ‘‘I assume he is still … around.’’

  I did not reply and she did not press me.

  ‘‘I have returned, Alice,’’ she continued, removing her spectacles, ‘‘because my conscience told me I must. I will vouch for you. I am your friend, your helpmeet, Alice, in wisdom as well as folly. I do not deny that it hurts, but I am determined to support you through it.’’

  I could not but help but smile at her speechifying tone. ‘‘And if I do not ‘get through it’?’’ I asked.

  Turning to face me – to consider the possibility – a point of light struck her eye: the eye a cold body, the light a hot, needle-like shaft causing the cold body to melt at its touch, the eye to brim over.

  ‘‘Oh, I really don’t know,’’ she admitted, once again shrinking from me. The pain of having been shut out, of being unfavored, of having had to witness an attraction she could not match, remained.

  Did she fear contamination from Bowles? I wondered. So far as she knew I was still ‘attached’ to him and his course of treatments.
Nor did I disabuse her of the notion. I confess it; I deliberately withheld the truth, prolonging her suffering. Heartless Alice? Yes and no. The truth as ever was complicated. My original ‘romantic susceptibility’ to Bowles shamed me of course, but having been abandoned by him somehow shamed me even more; as if that would make her think less of me. But so it was. She had returned to stand by me – and would soon discover there was nothing to stand by – no intruder against whom I required protection. I was tempted to tell her that I’d dismissed him – thrown him out for an adventurer – if only I had! – but I could not bring myself to lie to her.

  Did I still want her? she asked simply. It was her bravery that touched me then, her capacity for self-reproach, for correction for … I recalled her saying of herself she was hopelessly constant. On the contrary, I told her, that constancy is the hopeful thing.

  Of course I want you … goose.

  So to the ravelling, the moment by moment re-connecting. But of what had those invisible filaments been made; and had enough of them survived?

  For the first two nights after her return, we slept together in the way of strangers, keeping a ‘safe’ distance. But by the third night I could bear it no longer. I must do something, I vowed, to reclaim her, re-learn her; replace ‘she-who-was-not-Bowles’ – and therefore a disappointment, a second-best – with she who was irreplaceably best.

  But first I had to make sense of her, be convinced of her; and so I set out to ‘read’ her, yes, like a book; oh, not some potboiler full of mesmeric magicians and swooning damsels, but a rugged yet gentle New England story such as Sarah Orne Jewett might write.

  It took place, to begin with, in the dark., and lasted most of the night, for nothing must be missed out, head to toe, front to back. There the story of her revealed itself word by word, image by image. No page was turned too quickly. Its underlying structure was exposed as my thumbs met bone. Once or twice she moaned but mostly she slept through it. In the morning there were bruises (kindly, unintentional).

  ‘‘Do they hurt?’’ I asked.

  She replied, ‘‘I thought you’d given me up.’’

  ‘‘No.’’

  ‘‘Well then,’’ she asked, ‘‘when is he coming again?’’ Her fingers tightened in anticipation around mine. Still, I made her wait. When it couldn’t be avoided any longer I confessed:

  ‘‘He is not – will not – come again.’’ I told her of his defection.

  ‘‘Alice!’’ For a moment I thought she would slap me. ‘‘You little tease!’’

  How could I deny it? I could not. But her flutter of fury was quickly overwhelmed by relief. Bowles was gone forever. She pressed me to her until we were scored back into each other’s being, until we ‘fit’ again’; the restoration of what you might dare to call, along with sorrow, love.

  Do not be fooled, Reader, we were not – could not be – as before. I was yet prone to conjuring him up kneeling at my feet, kissing my hand &etc. Katharine, observing what she called one of my dreamy ‘sluttish’ expressions, would refrain from asking where I’d been. Which was wise of her. Yet even as I allowed myself to wallow in the language and imagery of romance, I knew it for tripe. I blame it on Charlotte Yonge and her ilk. All those years of romance imbibed. Lovers constant and inconstant, present and absent, real and concocted – love would correct everything. ‘My saviour!’ cries our heroine. Shame on her – and me. Imagine nearing forty before learning to distinguish between attraction – or ‘inclination’ as Henry had put it – and ‘constancy’. Still, it took time, time not just to see that Bowles had been a kind of fiction – like a book you devour in one sitting then forget for the rest of your life – but to feel it. Yet it happened, the morning on which I woke up and saw not Bowles the mesmerist but my friend Katharine. She who would endure. As she never tired of reminding me, the whole beauty of our relationship was in its ‘balance’. There must be no ‘victor’ and hence no ‘victim’ (‘saving’ or even hypnotic ‘healing’ would therefore not come into it). Neither would dominate the other. ‘‘That is the whole point,’’ argued my dear returned Katharine. ‘‘We are, as it were, collateral: no superior, no inferior.’’ It was all terrifically sensible.

  Fifty-three

  My brief flurry of health did not alas continue. The doctor blamed an overstimulated nervous system, as if that nest of nerves had the capacity to plot its revenge against me for a mere fillip. Wardy snorted behind her hand. In her own way, she was relieved to have me back ‘as I was’. ‘‘You mean you wish me helpless and dilapidated again?’’ I charged. ‘‘I mean,’’ she insisted, ‘‘ I prefer you with your feet on the ground.’’ ‘‘But my feet are not on the ground,’’ as I pointed out, they were raised up on the sofa-bed with extra cushions beneath.

  ‘‘Oh, Miss …’’

  That I should be so pitied by my nurse!

  Later there was a rap at the door, and my brother was announced.

  Katharine, who had resented me ‘summoning’ Henry, now stood by, one hand draped possessively about my shoulders. Perhaps, I considered, she does not trust me with a man; not even – or especially – my own brother.

  She asked politely after his stay at the Royal. He allowed it was sufficiently comfortable allowing for an ‘overdressed room’ and ‘an underdressed chop’. He then returned the compliment – if such it was – by asking politely after herself and her family. She summarized the situation by a coolly uninformative: ‘‘They are as well as can be expected.’’ Then: ‘‘I’m off for a restorative swim if you’ll excuse me.’’

  We sat silently together. It was not Henry’s intention to ‘clear the air’ of Katharine but to redefine the room’s influence, claiming it for ourselves alone; as if we’d been enveloped together inside a capacious fur wrap.

  ‘‘How are you, Alice?’’ Henry asked warmly. It was his first visit since my move to Leamington.

  ‘‘In your presence,’’ I reported, ‘‘I feel entirely restored.’’

  He made a mock-prayerful gesture. ‘‘But generally …?’’

  ‘‘Oh, generally I am committed to the intricate work of being sick.’’

  ‘‘Ah, the intricate work of being sick,’’ he repeated, enjoying the sound of it if not its implication. ‘‘Yet it is a solution, I suppose?’’ he went on.

  ‘‘A solution to …’’.

  ‘‘Oh the practical problem,’’ he leant forward: ‘‘… of life.’’

  In spite of my dilapidated state, I rose to embrace my brother: how could I not? For only Henry could come up with such a solution … to the practical problem of life.

  ‘‘But in answer to your question,’’ I resumed, ‘‘I am instantly better for not being asked how we are today: for that I thank you, Henry.’’

  ‘‘Ah’’ – he understood my meaning at once – ‘‘the medical assumption of plurality.’’

  ‘‘They are cowards, Henry.’’

  ‘‘But how do you find Leamington?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘It is not Paris.’’

  ‘‘Evidement.’’

  ‘‘ ‘It is almost as flat as a table’,’’ he began. Recognizing the quote at once, I joined him word for word: ‘‘ ‘and The Parade is obviously much appreciated by the many plump and pleasing and perhaps a little over-dressed dowagers’.’’

  We finished together flushed and panting as if we’d run a race.

  ‘‘One cannot do better,’’ my brother offered, ‘‘than quote Hawthorne.’’ The wink of a dimple suggested itself before retreating back into the crease in his right cheek. But how did I find the neighborhood of Leamington? he wanted to know.

  I told him briefly about the Bachelers, on one side, with their five children. And Miss Percy on the other side, how she bustled about cheery-in-the-morning so you wanted to bash her over the head with a stiff broom, yet since she was altogether good natured you didn’t. ‘‘She looks upon me as a pitiable object. ‘Don’t you get awfully tired of reading?’ she asks; she who spends her ho
urs strumming on her rattle-trap of a piano and is in and out all over the place twenty times a day. ‘‘Even so,’’ I reflected, ‘‘I guess I’d rather have Miss Percy for interest than many of your great men.’’ ‘‘Oh,’’ said Henry, ‘‘but that is because you are the exception: you have remained unspoiled and …’’

  ‘‘… virginal?’’

  ‘‘Entirely yourself, Alice.’’

  But he was reminded of Bowles. William, to whom I’d written, had doubtless told Henry all about him.

  ‘‘And the mesmeric exercise,’’ – he approached the subject in his sidling way – ‘‘do you ‘rate’ it?’’

  ‘‘Oh, I do not rate it at all,’’ I told him. ‘‘As for its effects, like its practitioner, it did not last.’’ Correct, insofar as it went. But the truth – I was being unfair – Bowles had offered me something: a technique which I would be able to use on certain occasions and would perhaps afford relief.

  ‘‘Alas,’’ said Henry letting his fingers spread. Between them dropped paragraph after paragraph of our mingled, unspoken thoughts. We’d both been born, so it might seem, with a foreknowledge of loss, of giving up; a propensity – talent? – for living with less human nourishment in the way that others had to make do with inadequate food. The result in both cases, a kind of hunger.

  ‘‘But Katharine, I gather’’ – his timing was impeccable – we were not after all the same in this – ‘‘has been returned to you?’’

  ‘‘Yes, yes she has.’’ I was not – the point was made – I felt it keenly – starving.

  ‘‘And yet,’’ he sighed, ‘‘you are not entirely well.’’

  What could I say? ‘‘I feel sure I will begin to improve.’’

  Henry looked anxiously towards the door.

  I reassured him as to her continued absence as she would still be doing invigorating ‘lengths’ at the ladies’ pool. We agreed William would heartily approve.

  Then he said this. ‘‘You will get well, or you won’t,’’ he paused, ‘‘but either way it lies between yourselves.’’ He gave a little bob or bow of his head as if inscribing a punctuation mark in space. In the silence that followed it occurred to me that my brother would have sneered at Katharine’s idea of ‘equality’ just as he had sneered at her favorite female historians. Yet he held her equally responsible for my well-being.