The Sister

by Lynne Alexander

‘‘You know perfectly well why,’’ she replied.

  ‘‘Do I?’’ I scowled at the curling letter. ‘‘So we must spout the usual thing merely because it’s expected of us, whip up fortitude and forbearance like a batch of stiff meringues? Oh, live, live, by all means live!’’ One fist reamed the other: ‘‘But why? why must she?’’

  Katharine removed her spectacles. ‘‘What would you advise her instead, Alice: ‘Oh, die, die, by all means die …’?’’

  I refused to be bullied. ‘‘Only imagine, Kath,’’ I pleaded my case: ‘‘first her father, then her sister, then her husband. How could anyone be so cruel as to wish her to live after so much loss? That is why I say nothing would rejoice me more than to hear that she was gone.’’

  ‘‘I see,’’ said presiding Judge Katharine. She stuck her glasses back on: ‘‘May I take it then that her death would give you no pleasure?’’

  ‘‘You know perfectly well it would not,’’ I replied. ‘‘I am not cruel. My heart is wrung for poor Ellen, but I would rejoice for her sake, to know that she was out of pain. And after all,’’ I added, ‘‘does it not take great courage to discontinue oneself?’’

  Wordlessly, Katharine reached into a pocket of her skirt and handed me the telegram:

  Boston, Nov 1888

  I regret to have to inform you of the tragic death

  of Ellen Hooper Gurney.

  The telegram lay in my lap like a discarded railway serviette. Ellen – so I see her – stands beside the track outside Cambridge near a cluster of sad, old warehouse buildings. A strange place to wait, I think: a straight stretch where the train – the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line – is known to speed up rather than slow down. And there stands Ellen, dressed for the occasion in her best coat with the fur collar; and as she waits the parfum she has dabbed behind one ear and then the other – but what about her wrists? – rises strong, furred and slightly rank- into her own nostrils; and for the first time she thinks of how she will smell later. Will the parfum outlast the smell of decay? She is amused to think of it as she swivels her feet in the gravel, jumps on and off the sleepers like a child playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can. Sensibly, instinctively, at the sound of the train’s warning hooter off she leaps. That’s right, Ellen, shoo. Another warning whistle. Get back, you’re standing too close. By now the wolves are howling like train whistles. As for the birds of night, they’re pulling her by her hair with their tiny fangs, up up and away. But their grip cannot hold; here comes the train – express; there goes Ellen springing forward as if to an order from our old schoolmistress Miss Hunter:

  Jettez, Ellen, jettez.

  Katharine went about in a respectful, sad stupor while I reclined with my unforgiving conscience. Rejoice? After the fact, I could not. That someone of Ellen’s delicacy should have had such a violence done to it – and that I had somehow wished for it – was not easy to be reconciled with. ‘‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alice,’’ said Katharine: ‘‘You never imagined such an end for her, but only a gentle release from her unhappiness.’’ She was right, of course; yet how to rid myself of the ghastly impact of the moment, the collision of iron against flesh and bone?

  ‘‘All our ripe and mellow are vanishing,’’ I whispered. And with that my own thoughts of ‘discontinuance’ were set in motion.

  *

  Ellen’s suicide was the second of an accumulation of deaths during that year and into the next. Does their order matter? Katharine would insist ‘yes’, but I would say ‘no’. What matters is that they happened at all, as if some sinister infection in the air around Boston had wormed its way into the brains and hearts of its victims causing them to reach for a vial of poison or make for the nearest cliff or stretch of railway track or … .

  After Ellen – but before her had come Clover – came Lizzie Boott; then came William’s friend Edmund (another of the Gurneys); then our old schoolmistress, Rebecca Hunter.

  Came did I say? I mean of course went.

  Lizzie Boott. She and her husband had been spending the winter in Paris with their infant son when her sudden death was reported. ‘‘Pneumonia, they call it,’’ I reported sneeringly.

  ‘‘You do not credit it?’’ asked Katharine.

  I admitted I did not. It seemed obvious to me that she simply could not cope with the roles of wife and daughter and now mother. ‘‘Think,’’ I said, ‘‘how she’d clung to her father, and he to her; how they’d seemed more connected, more extreme – dare one say married – than any unblooded pair; so that the insertion of a husband, however pleasurable, would come to seem a violent act, the axe with its wedge dividing plant from parent – just not to be endured.’’

  Katharine was silenced. But was it right to acknowledge one’s impossible position in so irrevocable, so damaging – for others – a way?

  ‘‘Not everyone,’’ she added, ‘‘is on such familiar terms with suicide as are you.’’

  ‘‘Why how dare you, Katharine Loring Peabody.’’ I hated the acts, the bad endings – surely she knew that?

  ‘‘Yes,’’ she acknowledged, ‘‘but by such an act are we not forced into their secret miseries more than we might want to be taken?’’

  It was undeniably true, I conceded, and undeniably important to the picture. ‘‘Still, I say bravo, for though it is, yes, painful for us, is it not brave to suppress one’s vanity, to be able to confess that the game is simply too hard for it to continue?’’

  Only the sound of her rocking, to and fro.

  William’s friend – the next ‘victim’ – had used chloroform, altogether a ‘sloppy suicide’ – so I gathered from William’s letter. Gurney had written the definitive analysis of apparitions and ghosts. Now, I thought, he is of their number, untidily bespattered.

  And last – oh, but surely not least – on the suicide list, our old teacher herself, Miss Rebecca Hunter. According to a local newspaper report she’d died

  ‘by venturing too near the sea while taking the sea air

  along the cliffs where the waves run high

  and irregularly, and she was drowned.’

  I see Miss Rebecca Hunter. I see her smoothing her skirt as she slides in behind a small table looking freshly scrubbed, hair smooth and shiny, teeth white as baby wool. In her careful and precise way she listens while I or Katharine or the others stumble through our recitations. After that she announces we will go out for a ‘blow’ leading us in a gaggle along the cliffs.

  ‘‘Blatant lie!’’ I cried, throwing the clipping from me.

  ‘‘Why, what are you impugning, Alice?’’

  ‘‘What am I impugning? I yelped. ‘‘It is they who impugn, who cover up the truth. Think, Katharine, about those cliffs. Did she not tramp them every day of her life? Could she not walk them with her eyes closed?’’

  Katharine, retrieving the crumpled-up newspaper clipping, smoothed it out and re-read it. A source, I muttered, watching her. She takes her clues from written sources, that is what she does, thought I. But not newspapers, for heaven’s sake, not newspapers. She put the cutting aside.

  ‘‘I’m afraid,’’ she admitted, ‘‘you’re probably right, Alice.’’

  That at least was a relief. ‘‘Oh, but why be afraid?’’ I went on. ‘‘Surely it is better that she took control of her own demise than slipped off the edge like some stupid ewe.’’

  ‘‘Ewe?’’ she laughed. ‘‘I believe you once called her a moose in skirts.’’

  ‘‘Did I? I don’t remember. But if she was a moose,’’ I thrust out my jaw, ‘‘what were we?’’

  ‘‘Oh, Alice.’’

  That night we entertained Miss Hunter. Miss Rebecca Hunter, her fingers busy with bright worsteds: star-stitch, sontags, block patterns, loopy borders … Becky Hunter does her knitting while we read from Godey’s Lady’s Book. What do we read? A passage by Samuel Johnson? An article on the formation of dew? A receipt for apple dumplings? ‘How to make a wedding breakfast for 40 …?’

  ‘‘Tell
us, Miss Hunter, how to become a mother – how to make a baby … Tell us about the war, Miss Hunter …’’.

  Miss Hunter smiles imperturbably. Now, girls. White teeth, smooth hair, star-stitch, block pattern, loop border, knit one, purl one …

  ‘‘O tell us about the poor old maid who threw herself off the cliffs she knew like the back of her hand, down the forty steps and into the sea.’’

  Now, girls, let us all draw the backs of our hands.

  ‘‘Miss Hunter, tell us about your mother. What will she make of her daughter venturing too near the sea?’’

  Silence. She has come and gone in a slow arc and then a commotionish splash. There is no such word as commotionish. Never mind. The waves go blipping over her as if she were just another bit of seaweed then close neatly over her like a seam doubly sewn from the reverse of the garment, as Miss Rebecca Hunter taught us, leaving no evidence at all. A tragic accident, tut-tut.

  Fifty-seven

  I signed the Christmas money orders I’d made out for William and Alice’s boys: $3.00 for little Harry and $2.00 for Billy, envelopes enclosed.

  ‘‘Is it enough, given the rate of exchange?’’

  ‘‘Don’t fuss, dear,’’ Katharine grumbled: ‘‘It will do perfectly well.’’

  I ran my tongue along the envelope flap, stuck it down and left it for Wardy to post in the morning. Then I took up my usual place on the daybed, with Katharine occupying the rocker. The window out of which we gazed, high and wide and south-facing, let in warmth during the day, but as it got dark it loomed like one of Mr. Whistler’s solid black portrait backgrounds.

  ‘‘The shortest day of the year,’’ noted Katharine.

  As we watched, the lights of Leamington began to come on: one across the way in the basement where the soup was being made, one in the attic where a servant was arranging her cap, one on the main floor where the lamps and candles were being lit for a supper party. So it went on until the solid black rectangle had been splashed all over with yellow bursts and flares.

  People killed themselves all the time, Katharine reasoned. Rarely a week went by when a body failed to be fished out of the Leam. There was nothing special about ‘our’ dead. Four? a drop in the … yes, ocean.

  Was that supposed to make me feel better?

  ‘‘Let’s face it,’’ Katharine said – pitiless, rational – ‘‘they were lost to you the day you left for England.’’

  ‘‘Lost?’’ I repeated, flinching. But she was right of course: friendships did not easily survive an ocean’s separation.

  We returned to our separate books and thoughts. After a time Katharine began to yawn, and then – yawns being catching – so did I. Still we sat. The fire was dying down. Katharine rocked. An adventure in patience, I thought to myself, in persistence. The courage to resist temptation, to not act selfishly. To not act. To be bored. To have the courage to be happy. To settle down with our living, and our dead.

  In due course all the lights across the way went out, Leamingtonians tending after all to turn in early. So the pattern was reversed and the Whistler loomed again. Wordlessly, Katharine rose and blew out our own lamps before feeling her way back to the rocker.

  Darkness. Unframed, unpictorial; no edges; no inside or outside; no ending and no beginning. A sensation of floating, weightless, freed from gravity. (Would we go tumbling about like lumps of coal?) The darkness felt kind then, almost motherly. Had we become enwombed? encrusted like pies? Still we sat, until it seemed not just that we would not move, but that we could not. Presently, I felt sure, we would be absorbed until there was nothing left of us.

  Is this what Henry means when he calls the darkness palpable?

  Beastlike, it swallowed time.

  A tiger-pounce of panic. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  ‘‘Horripilant,’’ I hissed, absurdly pleased at being able to use such a word.

  ‘‘What, dear?’’ Katharine’s voice emerged as if from far away.

  ‘‘Nothing.’’

  The darkness, quite sated, yawned.

  It was getting cold. We knew there was a window because it let in a draft. At some point Katharine came and, piling on another blanket, curled herself around me. My hearth companion.

  ‘‘There now, stay close. It wouldn’t do for one of us to happen to vanish.’’

  Stars. Flung out across their black bed.

  ‘‘Clover – Ellen – Lizzie – Becky’’ – one for each, we counted. A fine spangling. Thus we totted up the loss. Then we slept, squashed together, groaning at the discomfort. Blinking, we woke to first light.

  ‘‘Come along, dear,’’ said Katharine, at last, hoiking me up quite roughly.

  ‘‘It cannot get worse,’’ I said. But with the morning post, it did: Winny Howells’ name was added to the list. That made five.

  What did the light care?

  Fifty-eight

  ‘‘Do you realize,’’ I said, ‘‘that all along Winny had had some terrible wasting disease?’’ The news had come from Aunt Kate. Katharine, that prosaic plant, asked to know its name. ‘‘She didn’t say,’’ I replied impatiently: ‘‘besides, what does it matter?’’ The point was, I explained, that in the end Winny did not die, as accused, of thinness or nerves: she was ill – only the medical men were too blind, ignorant and incompetent to know it.

  ‘‘The funeral is next Friday,’’ I added savagely.

  Having signed my condolence letter I turned to a clean page and drew a circle, adding names at the ends of spokes around its perimeter, beginning with Minny Temple and ending with Winny Howells. ‘‘We have come full circle in our year of deaths.’’ I held out the page for Katharine to see: ‘‘From Minny,’’ I pointed out, ‘‘to Winny.’’ Snickering squeezing out of me like sourish cream.

  ‘‘Enough,’’ warned Katharine, ‘‘or you’ll make yourself ill again.’’ Sometime later – we’d had our supper, the fire was lit – ‘‘Shall we have a Nuremberg Christmas Tree, Alice?’’ It was the latest ‘thing’, made of goose feathers to save fir trees. She believed it to be preferable.

  ‘‘What of the poor geese?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘I believe they do not necessarily kill the geese for their feathers.’’

  ‘‘No,’’ I pointed out, ‘‘they do for our dinner.’’

  ‘‘Oh, Alice.’’

  I held up my hand, ‘‘Alright … I give in.’’

  Earlier she had proposed a trip to London.

  ‘‘And what will we do there?’’ I had asked.

  ‘‘We will live, dear.’’

  Was I, were we, not already living? I asked. Did we require the grande monde, the red gleams and blurs of Christmas illuminations, the dazzle of shops and cafes, the vulgar encrustations of theaters, the flashing lamps of elegant houses and carriages, the whole uproar of pleasure and prosperity, the richness and clatter and calamity of it all to convince us we lived? Must I be jostled about by the crowds in Trafalgar Square only to drool over Nelson’s hams?

  ‘‘This is my life,’’ I argued defensively: ‘‘steady and unadventurous perhaps but not small; no, minute by minute, a grand, fat, billowing, all-encompassing life. For a woman,’’ I went on, ‘‘might have an amount of experience out of any proportion to her adventures. It is for the imagination to supply them, with the help of literature and reports of friends and the clarity – if such it be – of one’s own eyes.’’

  ‘‘Bed!’’ I went on, making her jump in alarm; then lowering my voice: ‘‘or a piece of finely-wrought prose (here I quoted from The American, words enfolding me like an embrace: ‘He lived over again the happiest hours he had known – that silver chain of numbered days in which his afternoon visits, tending sensibly to the ideal result, had subtilised his good humour to a sort of spiritual intoxication.’) Altogether a lived life, a peopled life, an experienced life: including friends … and pain, yes even that. As for the ‘wider’ world, I may be a poor paralytic on my daybed, but I can still
imagine Stanley slaughtering the savages or Parnell’s standing ovation, led by Gladstone, as he entered the Commons chamber. In other words, the world and its wars, struggles, suffering, joys & etc is mine. As it happens, Kath, I relish much and miss very little from my invalid’s perch.’’

  Breathless, I stopped.

  She was staring as if she’d never seen me before.

  ‘‘Besides,’’ I added, ‘‘I am not well enough. I cannot gorge on London like Henry.’’

  That did it. London was abandoned and the Nuremberg tree was installed. It was ‘dressed’ – lightly, as the feathers would not tolerate weight – by Wardy and Katharine, with directorial ‘tips’ from me: too high … bare spot just there … a crooked angel. Splendid, it was too.

  On the Monday before Christmas Mrs Bacheler from ‘next door’ brought me a ‘giftlet’ with effusive wishes from the whole family. They are people who, refreshingly, send ‘love’ rather than ‘duty’. ‘‘Mister Bacheler said to bring it today,’’ she reported reprovingly. ‘‘I told him we must wait until Wednesday, Christmas proper, but he says give it over now as the world could end on Tuesday. Godforbid, says I.’’

  ‘‘Does he wish me to open it now?’’

  ‘‘So he does.’’

  A little brass tray for pins, costing three pence. How do I know the price? Because Wardy took a week to choose it for them, and I had to advance the money. Not that that could diminish its effect. In return, I handed over a basket of provisions including a pineapple, which object she claimed never to have laid eyes on before.

  ‘‘Oh, Miss James!’’ she exclaimed, rather overcome.

  Katharine nevertheless remained restless clearly wishing to go, if not to London, then somewhere else. I shook my head. Where we went, I argued, was not the point. This was our destination; we had arrived, were already taking part in ‘the act of living’. ‘‘Here, in Leamington?’’ she asked doubtfully. Was it possible to plunge into Leamington? It was, I insisted. And so – but was I ‘up to it’? yes, I was – we went for a Boxing Day outing.