Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  On our second day, we lunched together at the hotel restaurant alongside rosy English climbing families. The Bootts were immersed in three weeks’ worth of mail, and didn’t say much, Aunt Kate seemed to be gearing up to discuss a book review in La Revue des Deux Mondes. Harry had just slit open an envelope from William, from Mount Desert Island. Too antsy to wait for him to read the whole letter in his slow and thoughtful way, I tugged at his sleeve and said, “C’mon, Harry. You can’t hog it all to yourself. What does he say?”

  “Well, he is taking many sea baths. Kicking over the traces of civilization. Wishes he might never return to the ‘aetiolated life’ of Boston.”

  “No surprise there. What else?”

  “He takes me sternly to task for using too many foreign phrases in my Nation letters; says I must be more plainspoken if I am not to alienate Americans. By which, he seems to mean commercial travelers on trains—there is quite a long digression about them. Oh, and he detects ‘something cold, thin-blooded & priggish’ in my stories.”

  I laughed, as did Harry.

  “Oh, but how unkind,” Lizzy said, looking concerned and laying a sympathetic hand on Harry’s arm.

  “Oh no, not at all!” Harry explained. “In our family we have a long tradition of abusive literary criticism—don’t we, Alice? William’s violent denigrations of my work are often quite useful.”

  Lizzy seemed mystified. She didn’t have siblings; what did she know?

  When she went off to paint a view that afternoon, Harry tagged along, carrying her easel as if he were her squire. And the next day, and the one after that. Every morning they would politely invite me to accompany them, and I’d say, “No, thank you; think I’ll rest today.” As far as I was concerned, once you’ve seen one glacier you’ve seen them all, and the sight of an alpine meadow abloom with wildflowers did not set my heart afire, either. And I certainly lacked the energy to compete with Lizzy’s erudition.

  Maybe there was something wrong with me. Recent letters from Quincy Street dwelled obsessively on the dire possibility that our party would descend into Italy before the heat was over and “compromise Alice’s strength.” I reverted to practicing my principal hobbies, resting and saving my strength, and everyone seemed to approve.

  Staying behind at the hotel, however, left me within range of Aunt Kate, who seemed liable to unburden herself at any moment. I’d noted with creeping horror that she was flaunting her new costumes from the Paris shopping paradises, which were too dressy for the Alps. She was also spending an undue amount of time in front of looking glasses, pinning on brooches, studying earrings, experimenting with crimps in her hair. I recognized these as ominous signs that she’d taken a fancy to Francis Boott. There was a doomed romance if there ever was one!

  Didn’t she know that Francis Boott did not traffic in the tender affections? I eluded her by insisting that my sick headaches required complete solitude, and there was some truth to this. From time to time I felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the air.

  To William, I wrote a letter with my latest impressions of Frankie (as we referred to Mr. Boott in our family):

  He keeps one in a continued state of irritation either of pleasure of or displeasure, you hardly know which. Then he’ll be so nice and handsome and honest that you can’t but forgive him all his absurdities—until he provokes you again. On the whole, he is the most delightful but uncomfortable infant of sixty conceivable.

  This was true. He would throw a tantrum like an infant of six; the provocation could be as slight as an inadequate wine list or a chateau of which some feature spoiled the period detail. He would go into a sulk, at times even seemed on the verge of tears.

  “What do you and Lizzy talk about?” I asked Harry one evening.

  “Oh, you know—art and the landscape and whatnot. She is exceedingly well-informed on things Italian.”

  “Does she actually know everything?”

  “I have yet to find a subject of which she is ignorant.”

  It struck me one day that none of us really wanted to be here. Harry preferred cities, as did Aunt Kate. Mr. Boott spent most of his time talking about things in Venice and Rome and paid scant attention to nature, and a gouty toe kept him from walking much. Who knew what Lizzy wanted? Her painting, of a high alpine meadow with a craggy peak in the background, developed day by day, and was technically excellent but somehow did not move the heart (in my humble opinion).

  We had come to the Alps primarily for my sake, after my “slight overexcitement” in Paris. But I soon exhausted the views and identified all the wildflowers in the inn’s botany book and was reduced to reading Daniel Deronda and The Eustace Diamonds in my room or on the terrace while trying to avoid a heart-to-heart with Aunt Kate. (While I was not unsympathetic to unrequited love, the nakedness of her feelings alarmed me.) My thoughts were slipping into monotonous grooves, and an unpleasant episode with the snakes in my stomach kept me on edge most of the night. My aunt remarked at breakfast that I was looking “peaky” and urged me to avail myself of lots of cream.

  It was all too plain that Aunt Kate’s campaign for Mr. Boott’s heart was stalled. It would be hard to say whether he even noticed the changes in her toilette, the addition of a glittering hair ornament, the fake roses in her cheeks. One morning, whilst slipping past the Bootts, who were in the library, I overheard Mr. Boott say to Lizzy, “If we linger much longer, I fear things may become rather awkward.”

  Not long afterward, the Bootts made their farewell and went off toward some Schloss, I forget which. Fortunately, even when brutally thwarted, Aunt Kate was rarely found in the depths of gloom for long: her affective life was pitched more toward the moderate range than the hysterical, and she succeeded in righting her ship and was herself again by the time we took the Gotthard railway to Italy.

  Surveying the peaks as they slipped past, Harry remarked, “There are limits to the satisfaction you can get from staring at a mountain which you have neither ascended nor are likely to ascend.” I wondered if we would read this aperçu in the Nation soon. Did your own words surprise you when you saw them in print?

  My family had been praising my letters to the skies, assuring me they’d been read aloud at several gatherings and passed along to “the boys.” Brother Bob wrote that “Alice is turning out to be the genius of the family,” and William compared me not unfavorably to Madame de Sévigné. While my parents urged me to be prudent and rein in my impulses, William’s letters counseled me to “let your mind go to sleep and lead a mere life of the senses.” Aunt Kate advised me to consume more milk and red meat. I was the sort of girl other people were always trying to fix.

  But if I’d been Madame de Sévigné reincarnated, I would still have to sail home in October, while Harry remained in Paris.

  It took half an hour for our train to pass through the modern wonder that was the Mt. Cenis tunnel and soon we were whizzing past a sign that read COL DU MONT CENIS, 2083 M. and on into Italy.

  We chatted about the Bootts: Lizzy’s painting, Mr. Boott’s music, Lizzy’s peerless education. “It goes to show what a European education can accomplish in a girl,” Aunt Kate said. “Such an education would be impossible in America.”

  “That’s quite true,” Harry said.

  “How good is her painting?” I asked him.

  “Very proficient. Considerable mastery. But, in the end, feminine painting is only an accomplishment.”

  “Always, Harry? Invariably?” This irritated me, although it was a relief that he didn’t consider Lizzy a great artist.

  “Well, how many great female artists can you name?”

  The answer was zero.

  We went silent, watching the snow-capped peaks slip by. I asked, “Harry, does Lizzy ever strike you as a little—hmm—lifeless?”

  “What can you mean, Alice?” said Aunt Kate. “She is a lovely girl in every respect. And such a nice, neat figure, too.”

  Harry became thoughtful, staring out at the blue enamel sky and th
e boulder-strewn moraines. A landscape for giants, inhuman in scale. At length, he said, “You’re right, Alice. There is a deadly languor about Lizzy at times, as if under all her accomplishments there is no one there.”

  “Well, think about it, Harry. All her life she has tried to be what her father wants and thus has no idea who she is.”

  “Poor dear girl, growing up without a mother. But daughters generally adore their fathers, don’t they?”

  “Yes, Aunt Kate. Remember Iphigenia. She went willingly, I suppose.”

  “Was she the one who killed her father?”

  “No, her father killed her to appease the god of winds. Her brother later killed the mother, after the mother killed the father for killing Iphigenia. It was a very high-strung family.”

  “Oh, dear child, you need another shawl—you’re shivering. Find the heavy tartan one if you can, Harry.”

  Then we passed into Italy, to drink in antiquity, olive groves, the Duomo, the Medicis and the Sforzas, Roman aqueducts, the canals of Venice, Tintoretto et al, all the popes and heretics and saints and martyrs, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum and its blood-soaked stones. In Venice a plague of mosquitoes disturbed our sleep. In Torcello we ate innumerable figs and had ices every night. As we sat eating grapes on a bench in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I said, “The chief difference between Europe and America seems to be that people here sit on benches all day staring at you as if you were a picture.” The next day Harry wrote in his journal:

  The great difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about on benches and staring at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare.

  He had, as usual, expressed it so much better than I.

  Why was I unable to absorb Italy deeply, as I had Paris? Owing to some defect in my nature, my life had a peculiar tendency to burst into bloom briefly, only to turn flat, stale, and unprofitable a short while later.

  To make a long story short, our sailing date came, and Harry accompanied us all the way to Liverpool and showed us into our stateroom (which I hoped would not soon be adorned with our vomit). I made a mental list of things I would have to do without: Gothic stained glass, gardens with ingenious topiary, old masters, chic cafés, centuries of history, art museums, copyists, chateaux, ancient gargoyles, brasseries catering to women who loved women, les grands magasins. Until the whistle blew, I harbored the absurd hope that Harry would ask me to stay on in Paris with him. I had pictured it so vividly, down to the faces of the gargoyles on the building I’d selected as our future address. But Harry said good-bye, and Aunt Kate and I sailed toward America.

  Back home, I tried to prolong the aftertaste of Europe by having a French breakfast of chocolate and a roll, but by late November I told Mother that it no longer agreed with me. One day Mother and I were on Newbury Street doing the marketing and stopped to look at the bonnets displayed in a milliner’s window, none of which looked remotely fashionable to a person recently returned from Paris. Dead leaves scuttled along the sides of the road; most people wore sour expressions.

  On the horse-cars back to Cambridge I looked across the frozen river at the backs of the brownstones of Beacon Street. Gelid laundry hung stiffly on a line, a pair of crows pecked at something down by the riverbank. No wonder Harry didn’t want to come home. In his letters he complained of the early nightfall and claimed to be nostalgic for Quincy Street, but he was probably just trying to spare our feelings.

  As our eyes fastened on the frozen mudflats of Charlestown, Mother asked if I knew how bereft Father had been while I was abroad. “With tears in his eyes he would say, How I wish Alice were here to read the Advertiser aloud to me, to cheer us up with her jokes.” She had not wanted to worry me while I was abroad, but Father’s health did suffer during my absence. He came down with a bad grippe, which triggered a painful eruption of his eczema, and other things along those lines. She honestly did not see how I could go abroad again in Father’s lifetime.

  A lump formed in my throat. “But, Mother, Harry is abroad. William spent almost two years in Germany. The boys are in Wisconsin. Why is Father not bereft without them?”

  “Young men must make their way in the world, dear. A daughter is a special comfort.” Although her tone was matter-of-fact, her eyes were sorrowful. Perhaps she did understand how I felt and was sorry, but not enough to commute my sentence. I saw that I would never “make my way in the world,” and any gifts I possessed would wither inside me.

  “I have never understood why you children are so enamored of the French,” Mother added, warming to one of her favorite themes. “So many are indecent, their houses are freezing in winter, their servants are dirty, their writers write filth, the tradesmen cheat you at every turn. I always say, I don’t know what God will do about the French on Judgment Day.”

  “Fortunately, Mother, it won’t be up to you.”

  Was it possible for a person to be born in the wrong country, like a cuckoo’s egg slipped into a warbler’s nest? As winter ground down on us in earnest, life in Boston became emptier. One night I overheard Mother say to Father, “I do worry that after such overstimulation, it may not be possible to reduce her to the ordinary domestic scene.” But I must be reduced to it; I should not be indulged in too much frivolity, which in the long run could spoil my character.

  Alice is busy trying to idle, Mother wrote to Harry, and it is always very hard depressing work, but I think it will tell in the end.

  Paris seemed by then infinitely distant. If Harry did not send us letters bearing that postmark, I might have thought I’d dreamed it.

  One morning I found myself in the library with Father, who was fond of saying he liked to “have a daughter by my side to help me with my rhetoric.” A fire roared in the grate. I was reading A Slight Misunderstanding by Mérimée when suddenly something came roaring out of some circle of hell and enveloped me in a fever, a rage. My book slid to the floor, and I glanced over at Father dipping his pen in the inkwell, writing his next unreadable book. How rosy and innocent he appeared. Without warning I felt my hands curling into talons to rake the side of his face. I saw it in my mind as if it had already happened: the parallel gashes in his cheek, the scarlet drops on the carpet, Father’s shock and sorrow, my remorse.

  But why, when his fatherly feelings were so pronounced he would weep at the sight of his children’s dear faces? (As William was fond of saying, the philoprogenitive faculty was exceptionally well developed in him.) I was a monster. I sat on my hands, trembling and grinding my molars until the impulse subsided. To steady my mind, I dug my fingernails into my palm and recited the planets in the solar system, the names of the seven seas, the Seven Wonders of the World, until the pressure eased.

  Naturally my family had no idea of the storms raging inside me and I was in no hurry to tell them.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  THE VILLA ONOFRE, ROME

  OCTOBER 3RD 1873

  TO ALICE JAMES

  Thou seemest to me so beautiful from here, so intelligent, so affectionate, so in all respects the thing that a brother should most desire that I don’t see how when I get home I can do any thing else than sit with my arm round thy waist appealing to thee for confirmation of everything I say, for approbation of everything I do, and admiration for everything I am, and never, never for a moment being disappointed.

  ELEVEN

  1874

  “I REALLY THINK YOUR BROTHER MAKES HIMSELF ILL BY THINKING about himself so much,” Mother was saying as we prepared the front parlor for my Bee. We’d polished the silver candelabra, folded the linen napkins, removed crumbs from the carpet and straightened the portrait of Grandmother Walsh (garbed, thanks to the painter’s artifice, in a style I liked to call “Après Moi, le Déluge”). Mother meant William, of course. Whenever Harry mentioned any trace of ill health in his letters from Europe, she worried and sent him pages of sympathy and suggestio
ns about rest and good climates.

  “But William is much improved, Mother. He says he has trained his eyes to read for a certain number of hours a day.”

  “I suppose,” she said dubiously. She paused to count out the dessert plates. “But why must he express every fluctuation of feeling and every unfavorable symptom? Never thinking of the effect on those around him!”

  For the second year, William was teaching Comparative Anatomy at Harvard, where he was a rising star. There was little trace of the gaunt and tormented young man who had gone to the Somerville asylum four years before, although, being William, he still claimed to suffer from periodic waves of insomnia, skin eruptions, mood-swings, melancholy, overwhelming fatigue, and a host of other symptoms that he was prone to over-analyze and treat with dubious folk remedies. He was always recommending his “tinctures” to everyone and, as far as I could tell, none of them ever worked. Certainly not on me. But wasn’t this William’s way of trying to make sense of things? While Mother complained about his morbidness privately, I noticed she passed up no opportunity to boast about his Harvard appointment to our friends.

  She was saying now, “Do you think we ought to use the big or the medium-sized damask, dear?”

  I shrugged, not caring enough to have an opinion.

  While we were unfolding the tablecloth, footsteps shook the porch and the door flew open. Dropping his leather case on the floor, William flopped down heavily on the horsehair sofa, propping his boots on the armrest. “My students are infants!” he groaned. “How about a nice, cool lemonade, Alice?”

  “I’m very much occupied at the moment, William, as you can plainly see.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Will, get those muddy boots off the sofa,” said Mother.

  “My boys need an immense amount of looking after. You can’t imagine. Today they were supposed to be dissecting pigeons to study the muscles—”