Alice in Bed
Page 12
“Take me with you, Harry,” I blurted now. “Please! I want to see Paris at midnight.”
Although this was clearly not what he had in mind, I saw him struggle to be reasonable. “Father gave me particular instructions to take good care of you. I wouldn’t want to expose you to anything—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry! I didn’t come to Europe to avoid seeing things! I am over twenty-one, and Father has no right to hand me over to you like a set of crockery.”
Harry turned quiet, apparently chewing this over. You could never accuse him of being insufficiently thoughtful. I pushed my advantage, steepling my hands and making a funny beseeching face. “Please, Harry. It’s my only chance; don’t you see? Anyhow, didn’t Mademoiselle Danse explain everything to us when we were young?”
“That she did,” he chuckled. “I remember her saying that Victor Hugo was man, woman, poet, the king, the people. He was everything; he had seen all, done all, felt all. And Robbie asked, ‘Is he the same as God, then?’ To which Mademoiselle said, ‘My dear boy, God is not a member of the Académie Française!’”
Something I’d forgotten came back to me then. Mademoiselle Danse taking me aside one day after our lessons to say, “You are a very clever girl, Alice. Cleverer than your brothers.” (She meant Wilky and Robbie, who were in the schoolroom with me, while William and Harry were under the tutelage of M. Claudel.) “Unfortunately, because you are a jeune fille, your mind will be considered secondary to your manners and your bonnets. I will tell your parents that you deserve to be rigorously educated, but I can’t guarantee they will listen.” Although I was flattered, I rather dreaded this “rigorous” education, which, in any case, never came to pass.
“If you don’t take me out, Harry, I shall be obliged to go on my own, disguised in one of your best London suits—à la George Sand. That is something you ought to try to prevent.”
A long pause. “All right, Alice. Where would you like to go?”
“Well, I’d like to see Paris spread out at my feet in a blaze of light. Where is the highest point in the city?”
“That would be Montmartre, but I don’t—”
“Yes! Take me there!”
At this outburst, Harry retreated into one of his long, pregnant silences. Then he said, “We may run into—improprieties.”
“Oh Harry, do you have any idea how a woman yearns to see an impropriety? Why do you think George Sand wandered about the city at night in trousers? She wanted to see things as they are!”
“How I’d love to meet that woman!” (Five years later he would.) Perhaps George Sand’s name—or the memory of Mademoiselle Danse—worked on his mind like an incantation, reminding him that writers, regardless of gender, needed to see something of the world, because he somewhat reluctantly agreed to be my guide.
The night was misty, the cobblestones slick; the air smelled of the river. We hailed a cab on the corner of the rue de la Paix, and eventually found ourselves ascending the slopes of Montmartre. When we reached the place where the road ended, Harry asked the driver to wait, and he and I stepped down into a dark lane smelling of earth and manure and recent rain. From the highest point we could reach, we gazed out upon a sea of mist in which rows of gaslights gleamed murkily.
When we returned to where we’d left the cab, it was gone. We had no choice but to walk downhill, a situation that pleased me and made Henry palpably nervous.
“I can’t believe he abandoned us, Harry, after subjecting us to the whole story of his mother’s rheumatism. I suppose the poor woman has been a martyr to it, but still.”
“Give us an arm, Alice. It’s steep.” It was; I had to grip his arm, teetering in my silly shoes. “Can you manage?”
“It’s these shoes, Harry. The heels are specially designed to catch in every crack. Yet another plot to hobble our sex.”
While I was transported by Montmartre’s exoticism, it did not escape my notice that Harry was uneasy, striding fast as I struggled to keep up. We passed an ivy-covered cottage with a thatched roof. Several largish farm animals could be heard shuffling about in the dark yard. Perhaps to calm his nerves, my brother assumed the role of tour guide. “Until last year, this was still the countryside. Since l’année terrible Montmartre and Belleville have been absorbed within the city limits, but, as you see, it is still quite rural.”
It was. We passed a stable on the left and then the slope began to level off. The mist was growing denser, but there were lights ahead. Passing a brasserie whose patrons were obviously drunk and riotous, we kept going, past a cistern and a small orchard. A white cat regarded us regally from the top of a wall. Another brasserie appeared.
My shoes pinched more and more painfully and I tugged on Harry’s sleeve, pleading piteously, “Could we please stop here and have something to drink?” His pause was full of reluctance. I couldn’t believe he was being so stodgy and unadventurous. Why was he set against this neighborhood, which, though admittedly poor, was lovely in its way?
Years later I would realize that the surviving Communards had taken refuge in these alleys only months before our visit, with guns and cannons, and the streets had run with blood. Harry was no doubt recalling this, and had not failed to notice that the brasserie I was pointing to, with its discreet exterior, low ceilings and red interior walls, looked like a brasserie de femmes, where men came in search of prostitutes. He would have been poised to leave quickly if this turned out to be the case. But I was ignorant of brasseries de femmes and the reddish glow made me think of firelight on the walls of a cave.
When we walked in, a few people were sitting at a zinc-topped bar, others at tables, drinking or playing cards, or talking softly, or kissing. (In Boston no one ever kissed—really kissed—in public.) Everyone’s faces were murkily reflected in the mirrored walls. A violin was playing a beautiful and melancholy tune, which Harry identified as Brahms’s Hungarian Dance.
A maître d’ in a swallowtail dinner jacket strode briskly toward us, unsmiling, and said abruptly, “Oui, m’dame, m’sieur?”
At that moment we both absorbed the fact that “he” was a woman, with her hair cropped short like a man’s. She did not carry menus, look around for a table to lead us to, or behave in any welcoming way.
“Perhaps you are at the wrong address, m’sieur? You are no doubt seeking another establishment?” With her hands on her hips, she aimed an arctic stare at Harry, who began to stammer. I think he’d just noticed that the couple dancing not far from us was a pair of women, both wearing bonnets. I had seen this already, and, I will confess, my heart soared. This was how the world should be, everybody leading the life they wanted and chose. How normal the women looked, like women you might run across shopping on Tremont Street. The one whose face I could see wore a dreamy expression, as the violin pursued its haunting melody.
The café was an island of women! Apart from Harry, not a single male in the establishment, unless the violinists were. (It was hard to tell.) We had stumbled onto a passage to a secret demimonde, which had always existed perhaps in the underbelly of Paris. An old memory surfaced of Mademoiselle Danse pointing out places where “men went with men” and “women went with women.” Perhaps Mademoiselle herself had loved women. Was that why she was dismissed? With Father, there could be any number of reasons.
Harry’s manner had turned stiff and cold and he told the maître d’ (or maîtresse d’?) in impeccable French that we had indeed made a mistake and would be leaving at once.
Out on the street, he said, “I think we’d best find a cab quickly and return to the hotel.” He seemed so edgy I didn’t dare oppose him, although I should have liked to wander about some more.
An elegant young man in gloves of puce passed us, then turned around and walked backwards, favoring Harry with a long, smoldering glance, which he studiously ignored.
“This is a strange quartier, isn’t it, Harry? Like walking into someone else’s dream.”
He did not reply. A nearly opaque white mist hovered
near the ground now, slurring the edges of things. Walking through it was like walking through a cloud—moist, briny, vaporous. At one point my body seemed to dissolve into mist, too, and this sense of being bodiless was as beautiful as casting off heavy armor. The real life inside me was calling to me in the song of my blood; I had only to let go of something. What was it?
Glancing over at Harry, I saw his mouth set in a grim line. How nervous he was. What a fate to be responsible for me. What a fate to be someone like me for whom others felt responsible. Difficult to say which was worse. While Harry cast about for a carriage, I kept my eyes open wide, drinking in every detail as if it had to last me for the rest of my life.
“If we can only find a cab now.”
“Relax, Harry. My virtue has not been sullied. I’m having the most delightful adventure. It is so seldom that a girl has a proper adventure.” My words helped not at all. Harry was looking about in mounting desperation for a hansom. A few minutes later, a pair of men, one with implausibly yellow hair and a jaunty carved walking stick, descended from a cab, and walked off down the street, their arms twined around each other’s waists, murmuring doucement. Harry quickly took possession of their cab.
On the way back he didn’t speak of the café nor did I. It was an untouchable topic; there were no words to broach it. As the city slid past, the streetlamps haloed in mist, I imagined that the women I’d seen dancing were wives and mothers during the day, supervising the lessons of their children, ordering viands, giving teas. Married off at the age of fifteen or sixteen to unsuitable men, their only solace was the one evening each month they met at the brasserie. They would give themselves up passionately to each other, for it would have to last through the next thirty days and nights.
Or they were copyists, spending their days copying Van Dyck or Rubens in the Louvre, each secretly working on a portrait of the other. After their deaths, the portraits would be unveiled and declared to be masterpieces, and both artists would be admitted to the Académie. But when I realized I could not name a single woman who had painted a masterpiece or been admitted to the Académie, my spirits sank a little. Why was it that women’s lives were always secondary and somehow fruitless?
***
The thought of living in Paris was forming itself in my mind. I made fabulous plans. I would visit the Louvre often, perhaps learn to paint myself. I would attend the Comédie Française regularly and see all the great actresses in the classic roles of Racine, Corneille, and Molière. To be lifted out of sorrow into beauty! Through the incomprehensible workings of fate, I would live here and become a writer, writing under a nom de plume so as not to embarrass my family. But what would I write about? Everything that mattered could not be said. Well, I’d sort that out later.
Every night now I was having immense dreams, from which I woke with a sense of having travelled very far. It required no effort at all; it was all unfolding from the bliss of pure existence. Over the next few days, Harry, Aunt Kate, and I visited Notre Dame and Île de la Cité, the Palais Royal, the Bois de Boulogne, and the Luxembourg gardens. We took the train out to Chartres and to Versailles. One evening, as we sauntered along the boulevard after a late dinner, bolstered by a few glasses of champagne, I was singing softly to myself verses from the opera we’d seen earlier in the day. Ô nuit enchanteresse, Ô souvenir charmant! I sang to myself. Doux rêve! folle ivresse! Divin ravissement! Under the spell of this “divine ravishment” my aunt’s disapproval glanced off me harmlessly as a dying fly. In Paris I was a free woman. Every cell in my body vibrated with possibility.
Passing an illuminated fountain, feeling the fine mist on my skin, I sat down on the ledge of the pool and removed my shoes and stockings. Then, without a sidelong glance at my aunt and brother, I waded into the water with its reflected lights. It was surprisingly easy to erase Harry and Aunt Kate from my mind. Standing near the spray, I adopted the poses of various statues and pictures we’d seen. Diana Surprised by Actaeon. Flora, Goddess of Flowers. Venus at her Bath. How effortless it was to be a goddess in a Parisian fountain.
French people smiled genially as they passed. “Quelle belle statue,” said a man with a spade-shaped beard, as Aunt Kate and Harry looked on in horror. (Yes, I glanced at them before turning quickly away.) In Paris I might live as I was instead of exhausting myself trying to be what I was not. I was done with all that. What Aunt Kate or Harry would do about it I didn’t know; I cared only about being real. I stepped out of the water and sat on the edge of the pool, lifting my bare feet in the air and shaking the water off them. Then I pulled my stockings on over my damp feet.
The next morning at breakfast I appeared in a butter-colored sun-frock announcing that it was too hot to wear a corset and I was sick to death of feeling my sweat collect about my middle. Aunt Kate cast a dark look in my direction. “My dear girl! You can’t go out like that!”
“Why not? It is just—natural, Aunt Kate.”
“You don’t have to see yourself but we have to look at you.” She was aiming for a jocular tone but no one was fooled. I dug in my heels.
“Are you saying you can’t bear the sight of me as God made me? Do you really think the Creator intended women to be encased in steel?”
Harry looked on in astonishment as we bickered like jackdaws until I agreed, rather sullenly, to wear an Egyptian cotton shawl over my shoulders that day. At intervals during the day I remarked on how marvelous it felt to breathe and move without whalebone; I felt like the wind.
The next morning after breakfast, Aunt Kate went round the corner to buy a newspaper, and Harry seized the moment to speak to me about my “manners” toward our aunt.
“She suffers, Alice, when you treat her so high-handedly. She is completely devoted to your happiness on this trip.”
“I’m not trying to be rude, Harry. I am simply trying to carve out a little space for myself. When she talks all the time, I can’t hear myself think. I can’t explain it properly. . . . When she breaks into my thoughts, I might as well be on Boylston Street.” I felt near tears; I saw that even Harry didn’t really understand my feelings. No one did.
Harry asked me to try a little harder, and I said I would, though the truth was I was sick and tired of being good.
HENRY JAMES, JR.
HOTEL RASTADT. RUE NUE. ST. AUGUSTIN, PARIS
JUNE 10TH
TO MR. AND MRS. HENRY JAMES, SR.
Alice is like a person coming at last into the possession of the faculty of pleasure and movement. In Paris she is a rejuvenated creature, displaying more gaiety, more elasticity, more genuine youthful animal spirits than I have ever seen in her. She and AK find plenty of occupation with milliners and dressmakers. I think she will find that her mind is richly stocked in delightful memories.
MRS. HENRY JAMES
20 QUINCY STREET
CAMBRIDGE
JUNE 17TH
TO ALICE JAMES
My daughter a child of France! What has become of that high moral nature on which I have always based such hopes for you in this world and the next? That you should so soon have succumbed to this assault upon your senses, so easily have been carried captive by the mere delights of eating and drinking and seeing and dressing I should not have believed and indeed I see it all now, to be merely the effect of a little cerebral derangement produced by the supernatural effort you made in crossing the Channel.
HENRY JAMES, SR.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
JUNE 23, 1872
TO ALICE JAMES
I have lain awake most of the night thinking of my darling daughter so far away in body, so near in soul because so full of Divine desire, et cetera. Harry’s letter frightens me by an account of what he calls your ‘exploits.’ Please remember, my darling, to slow down and take things in a leisurely way. I console myself by remembering that you have always had such power to control imprudence, et cetera, and I count on that now.
NINE
THE DAY AFTER I ABANDONED MY CORSET, THE BOOTTS ARRIVED from Bellosgu
ardo. They’d been anxious to escape the heat of Tuscany, little suspecting that Paris was baking under its own heat wave. Francis Boott, who prided himself on his impeccable taste in all things, suggested we all dine at Le Grand Véfour, on the rue Saint-Honoré.
“It will be too rich for our blood,” Aunt Kate grumbled as she fastened her heavy jade earrings to her sagging earlobes. “We shall have to economize in Switzerland and Italy.” Harry gave one of his Gallic shrugs, as if to say, The Bootts are the Bootts; que voulez-vous? I, submerged in my Parisian dream, made polite noises in the general direction of my aunt without actually listening to her.
Catching sight of the Bootts sitting forlornly at their table, I was struck by how alone in the world the pair was, how hard they had to struggle to amuse themselves. I had never seen this so clearly before. Francis Boott, though intelligent and often charming, was a difficult man—vain, moody, prone to sulks and injured feelings. He would undoubtedly have preferred a son, but when his wife died, leaving him with an infant daughter, he vowed to make her the intellectual equal of anyone. Lizzy was his revenge on the world, which failed to appreciate his talent as a composer (he’d set Longfellow’s verses to music) or his opinions as an art critic. Independently wealthy, he moved from Boston to Europe, rented a wing of a castle in Bellosguardo, and arranged for a rigorous education by private tutors. Lizzy was the result, her father’s masterpiece. She knew four or five languages and most of the arts and sciences, painted with a high degree of mastery, and played the piano beautifully. In addition, she was lovely to look at.
Le Grand Véfour looked expensive. I noticed Aunt Kate’s eyes narrow to slits at the sight of the pink satin banquettes and the naked putti scooting across the cerulean sky of the rococo ceiling. It was like being inside a jewelry box.
After a flurry of kissing, hugging, and exclamations about the heat, we took our seats and pondered the wine list. When the talk turned to Switzerland, I begged the Bootts to consider joining our party. I was thinking how nice it would be to have a friend my age to lighten the burden of Aunt Kate—and even, I had to admit, of dear over-cautious Harry. Lizzy and her father brightened at the prospect. Francis Boott, predictably, knew all the best Swiss hotels.