Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  The next morning, over cafés crèmes and croissants, Aunt Kate informed me that she and Harry had decided, in view of the heat wave and the discomforts of Paris, to travel to Switzerland earlier than planned and seek out the alpine air. We would rent a carriage at the end of the week. I could not but hear this as a great betrayal. Not to be consulted, to be treated like a child! Only by mentally counting the crumbs on the tablecloth and pricking the meaty part of my palm with my fork did I avoid exploding. All I managed to blurt out was, “But I’m just beginning to feel at home here!”

  “We’ve had a bounteous helping of Paris, dear. We’ve done the grands magasins, had our hair dressed in the finest salons, been to the theatre, seen all the museums”—and she went on in this vein, itemizing every place we’d been—“and won’t it be a relief to escape the heat and the rude concierges! And you, dear, haven’t been sleeping!”

  True enough, but I didn’t need much sleep. I was living on beauty now. With my brain and body perfectly synchronized, life had no hard edges; it did not wear me down. I was beginning to glimpse the person I could be. But my aunt could not understand this; even Harry did not. Their minds were fixed on Switzerland.

  Perhaps the sudden change in plans had something to do with recent letters from Quincy Street. After the gravity of my breakdowns, I expected my parents to be pleased by any sign of gaiety in me, but, instead, they were alarmed. Father advised me soberly to control my imprudence. After my thrilled accounts of Paris fashions and cuisine, my mother wrote me a letter that began, in shock, “My daughter a child of France!” I visualized their phrases engraved on my tombstone.

  Alice James 1848–??

  Captive of the Mere Delights of

  Eating, Drinking, Seeing, and Dressing

  From over the ocean, they were putting out long tentacles and gathering me in, infecting me with their anxieties, and I was powerless to defend myself. Was it because they had known me since birth and could easily reduce me to infancy in their minds? As the old self-doubt pressed down upon my spirit, I felt my thoughts take on the coloration of 20 Quincy Street again. I began to obsessively question the hairdo I’d acquired at a celebrated Parisian salon. What if I was wrong? Wrong about everything?

  I resigned myself to Switzerland.

  The next day, Harry received a petit bleu from Clover and Henry Adams. “We are sick of smoldering ruins and insubstantial Frenchmen and hungering for the sight of a few solid Bostonians,” Clover wrote. Having married a few months earlier, she and Henry were on a year-long wedding journey. And thus, on the eve of our departure for Switzerland, we had a Boston evening with the Bootts and Adamses at a restaurant on the rue Vivienne, which Henry Adams recommended for the perfection of its foie gras and black truffles. Aunt Kate scowled about the prices, whispering dramatically to me that this was what happened when you dined with people in a different income bracket.

  Clover and Henry were already there when we arrived, waving to us from what was obviously one of the best tables. They’d just spent two months in England, where the Adams connections were potent, Henry’s father having been ambassador to Britain during the Civil War years. More recently, they’d “done” Germany. As his eyes swept down the wine list, Henry Adams, scion of two American Presidents, announced, “We have seen many Sleeping Beauty castles, lost twelve thalers at whist, and visited the cathedral at Cologne, which Clover thought ugly.”

  “It was, Henry! I much preferred that old church where eleven thousand virgins were killed, and their bones stuck all over the walls. Their skulls decorated every nook and cranny.” She turned to Mr. Boott and me. “Only the Germans would commit such an atrocity. Look at what the Prussians have done here!”

  “What hotel was this?” said Aunt Kate, who had a habit of not paying attention to what someone was saying until a word caught her interest, whereupon she would pounce on it with vigor.

  “A church in Germany, Aunt Kate,” Harry whispered.

  A sallow pockmarked waiter took our orders, bowing obsequiously and complimenting us on our fluent French, which he seemed to find extraordinary in people of our national origin.

  “We are in the most appalling hotel,” Henry Adams said, as the wine was poured. “Our room was bombed by the Commune and still bears the scars. The chambermaid told Clover, ‘They wanted to kill us and Madame knows that is not agreeable.’”

  “And the Tuileries palace is a burnt-out shell, just like the Hotel de Ville,” Clover added. “And now the French have to pay the Prussians for wrecking their capital.”

  “We have been hearing the most ghastly stories of what people ate during the siege,” Aunt Kate said.

  “Yes,” I said, warming to the topic, “after they ran out of horses, a man told us, the restaurants served a rat paté that was surprisingly tasty. Another delicacy was épagniel—spaniel. After that it was tigers and zebras from the zoological gardens. Hardly a creature in Paris left untasted, apparently.”

  “Please, dear, we are about to dine,” Aunt Kate said. “And surely that can’t be true about the zoo animals.”

  I raised my eyes heavenward. I was tired of being corrected continually. Cutlery clattered near the door to the kitchen; voices were raised. A waiter darted to our table with our soups on a tray.

  I looked across the table at Clover, whose wit and charm made you forget she was not especially pretty. In the blink of an eye she’d become a new creature, Mrs. Henry Adams, with stationery and calling cards printed in that name, her old identity as Miss Marion Hooper extinguished. The birth of the Wife was the death of the Maiden, I thought. I recalled an evening years back when Harry returned from the Nortons’ looking transported. He’d been sitting out on the piazza with a party that included Clover Hooper, about whom he exulted, “She is Voltaire in petticoats!”

  William said, “Why are you telling me, Harry? I discovered Clover Hooper.”

  William and Harry were always “discovering” women—as if they had not existed before!

  Compared with the Adamses’ year-long wedding journey, which would include the Nile, my little expedition, with Aunt Kate in charge and calling the shots, seemed tame and predictable. My mind simply could not encompass a year-long honeymoon—a whole year with a man you’d known previously only at dinner parties on Marlborough Street suddenly stuck to you like a burr day and night!

  Clover was saying, “Have you noticed that the cab drivers are all from the country and don’t know their way around? We had one the other day who couldn’t find the place. I said to him, ‘I advise you to study a map of Paris; you’ll find it interesting.’ Do you know what he said? ‘Madame, one cannot know everything.’ How sad and bedimmed Paris seems after its defeat. And yet Mr. Worth does a brisk business.”

  Fashionable gowns by the great couturier Worth adorned the crème de la crème of womanhood not just in Europe but in Boston and other major American cities. I wondered if I could carry off a Worth gown or if I would come out resembling an upholstered sofa.

  “Is it true that Mr. Worth makes you wait for hours?” Lizzy asked. “They say that even princesses have to wait for the great man.”

  “Oh, Mr. Worth!” Clover waved a hand dismissively. “He is just a little English haberdasher, originally. He took me immediately and I have as much style as the concierge at our hotel. He fusses over Americans just to rub the duchesses the wrong way. You ought to have a costume made just to experience his atelier.”

  I chuckled at the thought.

  “Really! He has about a hundred beautiful modistes, whom he holds under some sort of fairy spell, and he snaps his fingers, causing fabrics of all sorts to materialize. He folds and wraps things around you. It is very like an opium dream by De Quincy.”

  Then, with her disarming manner of absorbed attention, she leaned in toward me. “Alice, I am famished for Boston news! My father writes to me, but being a man he leaves out the most interesting things. I know nothing gets past you. How are the dear Nortons? Has Charles expurgated anyone lately?�
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  She smiled slyly. Charles Norton was celebrated for authoring the Lives and Letters of great literary figures, who could die assured that not a single note of questionable taste—or hint of life—would survive the process. Clover was quite familiar with my views on “Nortonism.”

  “Well, Charlemagne has been distinguishing himself lately by telling people that Venice in its glory was the highest form of civilization conceivable to the human mind. He went on to say it was such a pity that men at the present time should not wear swords and go about keeping them bright! Imagine Don Carlos himself with a sword!”

  Clover laughed gaily. Then, apparently recalling the recent death of young Mrs. Norton, she gathered her features into a sober mien. “How will poor old Charles raise all those children on his own? Aren’t there an awful lot of them?”

  “Six, counting the one that killed its mother. Everyone seems to think they’ll be raised by their aunts, with the assistance of nursemaids and governesses. Charles won’t have much to do with ’em before the age of twelve, I shouldn’t think.”

  “Just so you know, Alice—” Clover flashed me a conspiratorial smile—“I’m submitting to Worth’s only because I have been bullied into it. My mother-in-law doesn’t care for the way I dress.”

  It dawned on me that the incomparable Clover might actually care what I thought of her, which surprised me very much.

  Her husband said, “No, dear, what she doesn’t like is that you don’t waltz.”

  “I told her it was not in my line! Alice, I wish you could have seen how she glowered at me in London!”

  Both Clover and Henry apparently found this memory amusing. Plates were cleared, other plates arrived. Clover confided, “I just bought a sad painting resembling Boston Common on a dreary November afternoon, with a row of leafless trees. The artist lost his mind and is now in a maison de santé in Bonn. He must have painted this while he was breaking down.”

  Henry Adams mentioned that he intended to take photographs—his new hobby—when they sailed up the Nile, and hoped his equipment would hold up to the heat. “By the way, Clover and I dined the other night with Mr. Emerson, who had just been up the Nile with Ellen. He apparently found the journey a ‘perpetual humiliation.’ Wasn’t that what he said, dear?”

  “I believe he said the antiquities mocked him.”

  “That’s right! ‘The people despise us,’ he said, ‘because we are helpless babes who cannot speak or understand a word they say.’ He went on to say that the obelisks, temples, and sphinxes ‘defy us with their histories which we cannot spell.’ Or something of the sort. It was a very odd reaction.”

  “It made you shiver, rather,” Clover said.

  “He had no interest whatsoever in the antiquities,” Henry said. “How true it is that the mind sees only what it has the means of seeing.”

  After a silence, Clover burst out suddenly, “Traveling would be quite perfect if only one could go home at night!” She looked forlorn for a moment, and I guessed she was homesick. Maybe that was why she’d been drawn to the melancholy painting that reminded her of Boston. Then we all parted, promising to meet again in Italy—but this would not happen because the Adamses would be laid low with the Roman Fever by the time we got there.

  In the hansom Harry said, “Egypt had best look out. The Adamses drive a hard bargain. They will come back to America with a boatload of priceless antiquities, you can depend on it.”

  TEN

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, A SWELTERING TUESDAY, HARRY, AUNT Kate, and I piled into a hired coach and headed for the Swiss border. “I am praying for a mere soupçon of a breeze,” Aunt Kate said, fanning her flushed face. “So far the air is entirely hot and stagnant.”

  “All the more reason to eschew a corset, Aunt Kate.”

  “Gracious, Alice, what is this mania about corsets? I wouldn’t dream of going without one.”

  “It’s up to you. If you die of heatstroke we can bury you in it.”

  “Alice!” But she allowed herself a small smile.

  “They seem extremely fond of each other, don’t they?” Harry offered. “The Adamses. When I first heard of their engagement I worried that Clover’s gaiety might be extinguished by the Adams gloom.”

  “It is not hard to see how Monsieur Adams might extinguish someone,” I said.

  “Oh, Henry is all right. It’s just the Adams manner. They put such stock in affecting not to care about anything.”

  “Of course Clover will be happy. Her sister is very happy,” Aunt Kate tilted her heat-flushed face in Harry’s direction. “Everyone says Ellen and Whitman Gurney are the happiest couple in Cambridge. When they are obliged to be apart even for an afternoon they act as if they’d lost each other forever.”

  “Perhaps there is such a thing as being too happy,” Harry said.

  “How absurd, Harry! How can anyone be too happy?” said Aunt Kate, fanning her face with a copy of Le Figaro while expelling air through pursed lips. She looked near collapse. “I keep sticking my head out hoping for a breeze. So unseasonable. You’d think we were in Naples. Next thing you know, we’ll run into malaria or typhoid.”

  “Well, if we succumb, at least we will have done Paris,” I said. Aunt Kate laughed, not realizing that I was perfectly serious.

  Crossing the border at Saint-Gingolph, near one end of Lake Geneva, we made our way toward Geneva, and with every mile I felt paradise recede and the heaviness of existence press down on me again. Why? We were in a picturesque country, about to pay a sentimental visit to a city we’d lived in as children, in the house belonging to the Russian invalid with the mushroom hat. Perhaps it was just a passing irritation due to the heat and dust; once we reached the hotel, I would probably revive.

  Geneva was pleasant enough. We paid a visit to our old house and to the boarding school Harry had attended with William and Wilky. He confessed that he’d been miserable at the school, which was all science, dead creatures, rocks, phials of smelly chemicals. And mathematics too! While William adored it, Harry yearned desperately for the longueurs of home. He said he preferred the summer he had malaria.

  By now Aunt Kate’s voice and incessant platitudes were grating on my nerves, and I failed to be as moved by the scenery as I’d hoped. After ten days of visiting picturesque towns, we moved on to Villeneuve, where the Bootts had planned to rendezvous with us. Their absence was another disappointment. The heat remained oppressive, and after a few days, we made our way to Bern and Interlaken and then settled in Grindelwald, a quaint alpine town 3,400 feet in elevation, at a resort favored by English mountain climbers.

  “Just smell this air, Alice,” Aunt Kate said. “Crystalline! The best air on earth for invalids! That is why there are so many resorts for consumptives here. It should do you a world of good, my pet.”

  “I am not consumptive yet, Aunt Kate.”

  “Of course not, but the climate is excellent for nerves, too.”

  Nerves, nerves, nerves—that wearisome topic. Why did God give people nerves if they were going to cause so much trouble? So far the famous Swiss charm was quite lost on me.

  Five days later, the Bootts arrived, preceded by a flurry of telegrams. Lizzy and I fell into each other’s arms. We had both sorely missed the company of friends our age, and had topics to discuss and things to laugh about. But the euphoria was short-lived. Traveling with the Bootts, I learned to my dismay, was like walking down a beautiful boulevard with a pebble in your shoe. You could go nowhere without being lectured by Mr. Boott about Palladian columns or the pre-Raphaelites, with the impeccably educated Lizzy chiming in and making you (well, me) feel like a crude lump.

  I’d briefly considered asking Mr. Boott for advice on how I might live in Paris, but I saw now that he’d inevitably say something to Harry or Aunt Kate, who would then explain to me why I could not live abroad, why it would be selfish of me to want to, and where did I think the money was going to come from? I had an unfortunate habit of harboring secret wishes, one of which, right then, was
to set up housekeeping with Harry in a Paris flat after Aunt Kate sailed home. This was not utterly insane; brother–sister households were not uncommon. But my thoughts had plunged back to earth since leaving Paris, and I could not ignore the sense that Harry, loving brother though he was, had no great desire to be burdened with a “delicate” sister. Indeed, I suspected he was fleeing to Paris in part to escape family. If he heard about my silly flat-sharing fantasy and recoiled, it would break my heart.

  Our hotel was awash in mountaineering Englishmen and their hearty families. In the dining room and common rooms, English people would wait for the Jameses and Bootts to start the conversation. Harry said their reticence was a form of politeness; they were counting on others to make overtures, not wanting to presume. Aunt Kate, however, could not be diverted from her entrenched theory that an American should never open a conversation with an English person, as that left the American vulnerable to being snubbed. Thus several meals passed in near silence, with Aunt Kate studiously pretending the English were invisible.

  Harry appeared to be studying Lizzy closely, as if she were an Old Master. Perhaps he meant to put her in a story. Maybe he was falling in love with her. He began to speak of Lizzy in her learned aspect as “produced,” by which he meant brought to a level beyond “finished.” Her manner as well as her intellect were “produced,” he observed; she was precisely what a young woman ought to be according to European standards, a jeune fille bien elevée, learned and accomplished yet modest, sweet, and possessed of that indefinable quality of “repose” that American women so conspicuously lacked (according to Harry). She never put herself forward, and performed only when her father gently pulled the strings.