The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

  Fifty-four

  The letter had come from Aunt Kate. ‘‘Dear Alice,’’ I read out: ‘‘I hope you are not suffering unduly, and that Katharine is with you, and Henry when he can.’’ Henry, in the flesh, presented himself. ‘‘And how is our admirable Aunt?’’ he inquired. ‘‘She is,’’ I told him – ‘‘in her own words – ‘as well as can be expected’ … But there’s bad news, Henry.’’ His body strained forward like a leashed hound’s; not, I fear, entirely to his credit. The scent of blood did not excite me, it made me feel sick.

  ‘‘Yes, bad,’’ I repeated. ‘‘It’s Winny Howells.’’ Winny was the daughter of Henry’s friend and publisher Dean Howells. ‘‘Not dead – yet,’’ I reported – ‘‘but continuing to weaken and lose flesh. Aunt Kate says she can barely stand without support. Weir Mitchell is still force-feeding her like a goose.’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ said Henry recalling how her father had once nicknamed her ‘the lunch fiend’. ‘‘A rather tasteless attempt,’’ he added, ‘‘- one sees it in retrospect – to make light of the matter.’’

  I glared at him. ‘‘There was nothing light,’’ said I, ‘‘about Winny’s condition, now or then.’’

  Henry was silent. Our family had once spent a summer up in Maine visited by Winny and her father, and Lizzie Boott and her father. Even then Winny was ‘not well’ with her pale cheeks, sunken, glittering eyes ringed with black like a sick raccoon’s. We were all gathered on the terrace, I remember, overlooking the ocean, enjoying the cooling breeze while Dean Howells read from one of his stories. I have only a dim memory of the story myself. What I do recall was how halfway through the first installment Winny put her hand to her stomach and asked to be excused, how she stumbled her way into the house.

  ‘‘Of course she’s too thin,’’ our mother had observed, clearing away the remains of the meal, ‘‘but she will not touch a morsel. I have tried everything from clam chowder to strawberry ice-cream, but the child will not be tempted.’’

  ‘‘She is delicate, certainly,’’ Mr Boott had remarked.

  ‘‘Well, it is the latest fashion,’’ said Lizzie, who knew about such things.

  And then William had said he found it romantic, even glamorous.

  ‘‘She is too young for glamor,’’ Aunt Kate snapped.

  Her father, trying to be philosophical, muttered: ‘‘I suppose she’s going through a phase.’’

  Now I gripped the arms of my chair. ‘‘Seventeen years,’’ I said, reflecting back, ‘‘is a long time to be ‘going through a phase’.’’ No, she was not being stylish, she was ill. What were the doctors doing, still calling her hysterical, force-feeding her until her eyes popped and her throat turned into a hen’s craw and she could not speak for weeks?

  But Henry, for all his exquisite sensibility, was not ‘with me’ at all; nor, more importantly, ‘with’ poor Winny as she was. ‘‘It was certainly a becoming frailty,’’ he said, persisting in the fiction. ‘‘Slight, erect, thin, almost transparent’’ he went on dreamily – for me, unbearably. Was it that very transparency – as if she were already an apparition – he found so ‘becoming’? Henry then – compounding his error – added the words ‘ethereal’ and ‘interesting’- the same ones he’d once used to describe our cousin Minny Temple, now long dead.

  Is it ‘interesting’ to be dead?

  Is it easier to love the dead than the living?

  I could barely speak for picturing Winny, her legs like arms, her arms reduced to driftwood sticks. I see her holding to the newel posts like some ancient with creaking bones while the rest of us listen to her father reading from his wonderful story. Is it wonderful? Are we ‘all ears’? I cannot remember. Oh, but Henry can:

  ‘‘It was called ‘The Wedding Journey’,’’ he says. ‘‘I seem to remember it was currently being serialized in the Atlantic … terribly good … too good to miss.’’

  What can I say? Words, I think, do not merely fail, they betray. I suspect I am producing rather ugly noises, like a train approaching slowly but dangerously out of the dark. Wardy thinks it wise – she is right – to show my brother out. ‘‘For your own protection, Mister James,’’ she says darkly. Later Wardy says, ‘‘You haven’t touched a morsel of your food, Miss.’’ ‘‘No,’’ I agree, ‘‘I have not.’’

  *

  Henry returned the next day to see if I was ‘restored’. ‘‘I am not a chest of drawers,’’ I sniped, which clearly amused him. Since my sharp tongue was returned to me – so went his thinking – that must mean I was ‘myself’ again, and the danger passed. I would not maul him.

  He examined the chair and finding it up to his exacting standards of dust-freeness, he sat. He had shaved his beard, I observed, so that his jowls were now exposed as well as the deep lines around his mouth like a pair of parentheses. My brother, I saw, was in some distress. He had not slept well, I also observed, judging by the shadowy craters under his eyes. He would soon, he explained – adding ‘‘reluctantly, of course’’ – be leaving Leamington. It could not be helped: London beckoned. But before he went he wished to consult me about a new idea. I lay back and listened.

  ‘‘There is a young person,’’ he began: ‘‘beautiful perhaps, with a great capacity for life …’’

  I tried picturing this emerging character of his – young, female, thirsty for experience.

  ‘‘I take it, Henry, we are speaking not of a love-match, but of one of your female protagonists?’’

  He allowed that it was so. ‘‘The problem is … her life is’’ – he chose his words carefully: ‘‘… doomed; that is, compromised by illness.’’

  ‘‘I see.’’ Only I lied; I did not. Why, I wanted to shout, make her of all things sick? The subject – which I knew only too well – I found repellent; or at any rate, too close to my own experience. But then I recalled a conversation William, Henry and I had once had:

  ‘‘But Willy, if the self is simply a stream of thoughts, who or what is it then?’’

  ‘‘They are,’’ he’d replied. ‘‘It’s the thoughts that are thinking them … they are thinking each other … each pulse replaced by another.’’

  ‘‘And our tales?’’ Henry had asked.

  ‘‘Our tales are spun but we don’t spin them,’’ had been William’s response: ‘‘they spin us.’’

  At the time I’d felt quite indignant, as had Henry (vibrating dewlaps, I noted), but now it began to make sense. Henry, I saw, had no choice: the subject would continue to be the thing – prodigious … disturbing … impossible – that would – must – claim him.

  ‘‘She is early stricken,’’ he continued, ‘‘… disintegrating … condemned to die while still enamored of the world.’’

  ‘‘And is she also ‘enamored’ of a worldly being?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Do you encourage it?’’

  ‘‘Oh, absolutely.’’

  He regarded me with his keen, appealing eyes. ‘‘Yet how is one to write about such things, about illness and infirmity, with good taste?’’

  I laughed then, a real howler. Which made him rise from his chair and Wardy come running so that I had to reassure them both I was still in my right mind. Well, I could not help myself. For hadn’t he already written about an invalid in good taste? Indeed, wasn’t that was the whole problem with Rosy Muniment: that hideous, barely disguised parody of me? That it was precisely in ‘good taste’ was in my view what made it so wretched. I barely knew what to say, how to speak, torn as I was between wanting to help him – enter his fictional imaginings – and fly at him like a taloned harpy and scratch out his eyes crying, To hell with good taste! But I’d already caused him enough worry.

  ‘‘What precisely,’’ I asked, not unkindly, ‘‘is the problem, Henry?’’

  His reply, when it came, involved an admission. ‘‘It is not,’’ he hesitated, ‘‘a frank subject after the fashion, with its elements well in view and its whole character in its face.’’

  ‘‘N
o,’’ I agreed, ‘‘it is not.’’ You will never succeed, dear Henry, in writing ‘after the fashion’. I was tempted to shout, Oh, for pity’s sake, give it up, Henry – it isn’t you! Truly I could not see why he should be so bothered about it – but he was. For however much he was championed as an author appealing to a ‘superior literary taste’, it was his own secret – deep – desire to write after the fashion. Poor Henry, I thought, how he longs to write a novel that will fill the new display cases at WH Smith’s; that everyone, even Wardy, will read and gossip about. But he will never do it, I knew, nor must he try. I had some responsibility in the matter: I must convince him to continue doing what he did best.

  But I found myself distracted at this point by Henry’s tie. He’d forgotten, I noted, to attach Connnie’s coin-pin so that said tie flapped loose from his vest. I reached over and tucked it back in.

  ‘‘There,’’ I patted his ever-expanding bosom before going on with my advice, aware that I was contradicting my earlier, negative, response to the subject.

  ‘‘But that is precisely why ‘the subject’ will suit you,’’ I argued. ‘‘There will be secrets and compartments, treacheries and traps. Besides,’’ I continued my encouragement, ‘‘granted the situation of a sick young woman, menaced with death and danger, is it not the very shortest of all cuts to the most interesting state of all?’’

  ‘‘The most interesting state of all,’’ echoed Henry, his lazy lids lifting, pleased with the phrase and its import. ‘‘The writer, you mean,’’ he pursued almost excitedly, ‘‘can’t be concerned with the act of dying!’’ At this, he looked so relieved at finding his way to an ‘understanding’ that his ‘half-dog’ face lifted, tightened, and glowed before continuing with more confidence: ‘‘Let him deal with the sickest of the sick … it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him … the process of life gives way fighting, to the soul of drama that is …’’

  ‘‘Yes, Henry …’’ I waited patiently and was soon rewarded for it. He concluded, quietly triumphant:

  ‘‘… the battle against death.’’

  ‘‘Precisely,’’ said I, adding a phrase that had come to me, ‘‘Live as she could but love as she would.’’

  *

  After he left, a story began ‘to spin me’ (one of William’s lovely phrases, that). It was made up of bits and strands, a patchwork of memory, supposition and threadbare fantasy. As for the ‘characters’ – if I may so dignify them – ‘she’ is called neither Winny nor Minny but … Ginny. The gentleman is called Paul.

  The house is quiet when Paul calls to say good-bye. Ginny enters the spacious parlor ‘with her swift sliding step and her old free laugh’. Even as she approaches – the swishing of skirts – a light, attractive scent … something else medicinal beneath – it is the observing words which fill him with bursts of pleasure; but they also – he is aware of this – distract him, cut him off. She is even thinner, he observes, paler, more compromised by the bouts of haemorraging which she has been known to suffer and he has heard about. As her icy hand with its bird-bones fills his, the thought enters his mind She is failing, and at once he is stricken with shame. But he must not allow it or he will be become indecisive. The world is different for Ginny – as it is for the ant or the ancient – she who must steel herself for the cataclysm of what is about to occur: her own abandonment.

  ‘‘Is it not detestable,’’ she manages to quip (quip!), ‘‘that you should be going and leaving me behind?’’

  ‘‘Wholly,’’ he agrees, failing utterly to offer the obvious.

  But she must sit down, the asking has cost her. ‘‘Well, my dear Paul, tell me,’’ she encourages bravely. So he does. He tells her his plans and she pretends to be pleased for him. Her voice manages to be light and tripping. ‘‘The doctors talk to me of a warmer climate’’ – she has not yet given up hope – ‘‘perhaps we will meet next winter in Rome?’’ He notes a barely perceptible tremble at the side of her mouth, a pulsing vein beneath a layer of transparent skin. He is tempted to extend a finger – to ‘read’ the vein – is there a message for him? – to make the trembling stop … He recalls his older brother advising him to be ‘more active’ in the relationship, more masculine. But he must not act or something terrible will happen: she will – they will both – vanish. Whereas if he resists, the scene will continue to spin itself forever and she will remain interesting forever, while he will remain … free, forever.

  He says he will write, and he does. He tells her he has been to see Frou-Frou at the Gymnase and has spent hours at the Louvre. He has not been extravagant; he has dined modestly. On the other hand, he has managed to live at the best hotels and done trips in the most comfortable way.

  Later Ginny writes to Paul’s sister Charlotte saying, ‘I am very glad that he has gone, although I don’t expect to see him again in a good many years.’ She does not see him at all because she will, within the year, be dead of another lung haemorrhage.

  Fifty-five

  ‘‘Henry, Willy is concerned about Aunt Kate.’’ I shook William’s letter by one of its corners. ‘‘He says she has been found wandering about Quincy Street quite lost.’’

  ‘‘Lost …?’’ he echoed. It was Henry’s last day in Leamington and he was not concentrating.

  ‘‘Yes, Henry, lost: like a lamb.’’

  The ‘subject’ of Aunt Kate was an impossible one of course since we had both turned our backs on her. But while the ‘subject’ of Aunt Kate could be avoided, ‘she’ could not.

  ‘‘Henry,’’ I admitted: ‘‘I tell myself a dozen times a day I’ll write such and such to her, but then I do not. But I will pull myself up and do it today.’’

  My brother produced one of his faux-agonized expressions: yes – certainly – alas – he too had ‘neglected’ her. But had I, he wanted to know, felt her to be in some way ‘prodigious’?

  ‘‘Prodigious?’’ I scoffed: ‘‘Aunt Kate?’’ I was gripped with a sense of her pliability, her over-eagerness, her too-willing care of us. But then I caught myself. How must it have been for Henry, a boy, delicate, made much of? Surely it had left him with a softer spot for her in his heart. He looked away. If so, he was unwilling to indulge in ‘feelings’. Oh, but her ‘secret’, that he could entertain.

  ‘‘Her secret, I mean to say,’’ he clarified, ‘‘was what made her ‘prodigious’.’’ There was no denying it: we cared more for that than all her years of looking after us. It was not to our credit.

  ‘‘It could be made much of, certainly,’’ I agreed. ‘‘While she’’ – exquisite cruelty – ‘‘could not.’’

  He added: ‘‘And the infamous Captain Marshall …?’’

  ‘‘He was – is – the interesting – repulsive – thing.’’

  ‘‘And the secret …?’’

  ‘‘The violence,’’ I submitted, ‘‘was all in his meanness and coldness.’’

  Together, we saw that that would be enough to ‘break’ anyone; thus, the violent disruption of the marriage.

  ‘‘I suppose we must not abandon her?’’ he asked at last.

  ‘‘Not with impunity.’’

  But the question remained for him: ‘‘Did we’’- Henry’s unpardonable sin – ‘‘make use of her?’’

  ‘‘Of course we did,’’ I said: ‘‘we allowed her to take care of us; but being children we were by nature ungrateful. And committed, above all, to a good mystery.’’

  We lived through a long, ripening silence. The truth, if such it was, could not be undone.

  ‘‘What else does Willy have to say?’’ Henry asked at last.

  ‘‘He says they are all thriving … Alice is run about by their new little Margaret Mary … Oh, and they claim she takes after you.’’

  My brother, obviously relieved to be released from the ‘subject’ of Aunt Kate, said: ‘‘I shall send a telegram at once commiserating.’’

  ‘‘He tells me, silly Willy, to read as much comic literature as I can.’�
��

  Henry grinned.

  ‘‘There is, I’m afraid, a ‘PS’: another death.’’

  ‘‘Who …?’’

  ‘‘Ellen Hooper’s husband.’’ I pronounced his full name: ‘‘Ephraim Whitman Gurney.’’ As I did so I recalled Ellen’s own whistling tone, the breathy adoration with which she’d spoken of him (Oh, Whitman!) during that first year of her marriage.

  ‘‘Of what did he die?’’ asked Henry.

  I scanned the letter again but found no cause of death. ‘‘He was,’’ I pointed out, ‘‘dean of an entire Harvard faculty.’’ Henry avowed he should not like to carry such responsibility himself; it would not be conducive to one’s health. Then he announced, alas, London beckoned; he had ‘‘a good deal to do, and besides,’’- he gave one of his auctioneer’s nods first towards me and then towards the empty rocker where Katharine liked to sit – ‘‘a third person is rather a superfluous appendage.’’ I did not disabuse him of the notion.

  Later that evening Katharine and I turned to one another. Dean Gurney’s death was of course regrettable but it was Ellen, we agreed, who was now at risk. First her father, then her sister Clover, and now her husband: What would become of Ellen Hooper Gurney?

  Fifty-six

  We were right to worry about Ellen: she’d confessed to William she was longing ‘‘to join Clover and Whitman’’. And how had he responded? we queried. By telling her, of course, that she must live. Silly Willy. I tossed his letter into the fire.

  ‘‘Why must she live?’’ I asked Katharine.