“I thought you cut up frogs.”
“Oh, we cut up fish, fleisch, fowl, whatever you like. Anyhow, one young man had scraped the breastbone clean and said he found no muscles. I asked what that heap of stuff was which he had removed. He said it was ‘meat’ which he had taken off to get at the muscles!”
“The Bee is arriving in fifteen minutes, William,” Mother said. “We don’t have time to dilly-dally and discuss pigeons.”
“Oh, the Bee! Then I am right on time.” He extracted his watch from his vest pocket and sat up eagerly. “I always love seeing all the girls. And, by the way, Mother, there is not a trace of mud on my boots. A leaf or two, perhaps.” Propping one foot on his knee, he dug out two frayed brown leaves that were stuck to the sole and placed them on an end table. Mother grimaced.
“You are not at all welcome at the Bee, William,” I told him, with my hands on my hips for emphasis. “Pray find some way to distract yourself.”
“How cold and cruel you are, Alice. At least let me eavesdrop. You don’t know how I dream of penetrating the ultimate mystery—what women talk about when no men are present.”
“We talk only about men. How could we possibly have other interests?”
Mother called from the dining room. “Alice, do you want to use Grandma Walsh’s tea set or the Wedgwood?”
“Whatever you think, Mother.”
“Is that true?” said William.
“What?”
“Do the girls talk about men? Do they—perchance—mention me? Will the beautiful Levering sisters be present this afternoon?”
“When I am permitted to attend Harvard and take your Comparative Whatever course, you can spy on my Bee. As long as we women remain in bondage, the answer is no.”
“Bondage!” Mother scoffed. “Who has been filling your mind with this stuff and nonsense, Alice?”
“Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, Alice. That is the title of my course. It grieves me that my only sister should forget. It shows how little you care. And you didn’t answer my question about the Levering girls.”
“They don’t belong to our Bee, and they are said to be quite stupid.”
“Very beautiful, however.”
“Please, William, go upstairs before the girls come! If they see you, there will be a logjam at the front door and we’ll never get started.” People hung around William like bees around clover. He didn’t need to learn mesmerism to entrance people, but he learned it anyway.
Nine girls arrived in quick succession. There would have been eleven if Nanny Ashburner were not in England and Susy Dixwell had not been laid low with a grippe. Marny Storer arrived with Lizzy Sparks, Carrie Thayer a few minutes later, breathless and red-faced, followed by Sara and Fanny. The married Bees included Mabel Lowell, Fanny Dixwell Holmes, Ellen Gurney, and Clover Adams, but Mabel and Fanny were absent today. Of the new members, Lillian Horsfeld was quite nice once you recovered from the orgy of hugging and gushing she put you through. I was still making up my mind about Julia Marcou.
Marny Storer was in an expansive mood, possibly due to recent developments in her “secret” romance with Roger Warner, which everyone knew about and which was being conducted in the Bostonian manner, over tomes of constitutional law. She asked what everyone thought of Mr. Eliot’s engagement. I said, “Well, I think it throws an eerie light on the nature of men and their capacity to renew their existence.”
“What do you mean, Alice?” asked Ellen Gurney, smiling. She was the former Ellen Hooper, sister of Clover, and within our Bee was the authority on matters relating to President Eliot, as her husband was Dean of Harvard and the president’s right-hand man. They were on a crusade to modernize and expand Harvard with a modern curriculum and graduate schools modeled on Germany’s. Most of the Overseers dragged their feet and opposed every change.
“Surely he has greatly lost in dignity by it,” I explained, apropos of Mr. Eliot’s love life. “Not that he shouldn’t marry again, poor man, if he wants to, but that he should have fallen in love again so completely and chosen someone so unsuitable. He is as much excited and transported as if he were a man of twenty, my father says.”
“It only shows that he is truly in love, Alice,” said Carrie Thayer, who seemed to derive her opinions from women’s magazines. “Old people can fall in love, too.”
Mother came in and poured, as was customary. Everyone praised the pineapple upside-down cake, then returned to knitting, crocheting, needlework, and gossip. Marny Storer mentioned that one of the Lowell women had suffered a breakdown and was said to be resting in Somerville. To which Clover Adams said, “Believe me, if you’ve seen Somerville, rest is the last word that applies.” Clover and Ellen (as well as their brother Ned) were presumed to have considerable expertise about insanity in general and the Somerville asylum in particular, as their father, Dr. Hooper, volunteered his services there. As children they had played croquet on the lawn with some of the milder lunatics and had amusing stories. (That their aunt, Susan Sturgis Bigelow, suffered a breakdown and killed herself went unmentioned, although everyone in Boston knew about it.)
“Of course,” Clover said, between sips of tea, “the insane asylum is the goal of every good and conscientious Bostonian. Mrs. X has a baby. She becomes insane and goes to Somerville. Baby grows up and promptly retires there. The great circle of life!”
My wool was soft as a cloud and my needles clicked as I churned out squares of yellow and white in alternate rows of knit and purl. I was trying to form a mental picture of my newborn nephew as either a tiny replica of Wilky with some features of Carrie thrown in, or vice versa. It was provoking that Wilky’s letters contained no specifics about what the infant looked like, which was what we most wanted to know.
I did not fail to note that over half the Bee were sewing things for their own hope chests, and no one said a thing, although our avowed purpose was to sew for the hospital and the poor down on the marsh. I should have seen it coming, I suppose: the way men would invade the world of women and ruin it. How they’d pick off the women one by one, like predators. It seemed to start with Mabel Lowell, who married a man no one had heard of and returned transformed into a dull matron. Did no one else perceive the deadly glaze that came over these new brides?
Why this mania for engagements? To be bound forever by the heaviest chains of matrimony to a stranger who might keep repeating the same jokes—or worse! Of course, I’d be the first to admit that my suitors were few and easily discouraged. “My only prey are widowers,” I’d written to Nanny Ashburner last week. “I’d like to try my hand with bachelors first.”
“Isn’t it an unjust world?” I remarked to Lizzy Boott the day after the Bee. It was hot and muggy, and we were lying about like limp lettuce on the Bootts’ verandah, gossiping and reading the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Nation. (The Bootts had moved back to Boston last year.) “The male sex gets to shop around for as long as they choose, and we have to take the first offer lest we wither on the vine!” Lizzy readily agreed and five minutes later was speculating tediously about the status of Freddy Mason’s affections for her. Even worse, Freddy himself turned up, interrupting our conversation, and then had nothing to say—just sat there like a tidy parcel done up at Metcalf’s.
Still, if asked how I was that summer, I would have had no hesitation in saying that I was very well, so well, in fact, that to be better would be superfluous. I’d taken several trips, to Quebec and Niagara with Aunt Kate, to New York by myself. The travel cheered me up immensely, and I vowed that in the future I would travel by myself a good deal, at least to New York. My parents and Aunt Kate were convinced that all my troubles lay behind me; in their letters to Harry and “the boys,” they noted the vigor of my excursions and pronounced me “perfectly well.”
William and I were the only “children” at 20 Quincy Street now. Bob and Wilky would go on living in the Midwest with their brides and babies for the foreseeable future. Harry was still abroad, having become enamored of Italy. His rec
ent letters home told of riding horseback every morning through the campagna outside Rome, in the shadow of ancient aqueducts. Five women had invited themselves to ride with him, he reported. Mother wondered who these women were and if they were very forward. Father said, “Don’t worry so much, dear. The Angel”—as Harry was known in our family due to his angelic disposition—“has a good, solid character and it sounds as if he’s in good hands.”
“That unhealthy climate, though!” Mother exclaimed over Sunday dinner, restlessly smoothing the tablecloth with her hand. “I don’t know why Harry insists that Italy is the place where he feels most himself. Why can’t he feel like himself in Boston?”
For Mother, reality was a canvas that could be reshaped almost indefinitely. Even the past could be altered, if necessary, through the force of her disapproval. William should never have gone to Germany. I should not have put my health in jeopardy by going ice skating when the temperature hovered around ten degrees. Bob and Wilky should certainly not have bought that derelict plantation in Florida and tried to farm it with a band of freed slaves. (Both “the boys” had been officers in the two Negro regiments from Massachusetts, and had the highest esteem for their soldiers. They’d tried to do something noble for the freedmen, but, having no head for business, had quickly gone bankrupt.) All of this should never have happened.
Father said now, “Harry must go somewhere for inspiration, dear! I don’t see how he could have written ‘The Madonna of the Future’ in Boston.”
“Hmmf,” she said.
Whenever Harry described a great pleasure in his letters, he would write, “Forgive me!” and reassure us that the outing he’d just described had palled in the end or that the American colony in Rome was “a very poor affair.” I did not believe him.
“Harry has reached a fork in the road,” William said, reaching for the water pitcher, “and must either return soon, or remain in Europe forever. I’ve told him he can’t write about Europe for Europeans. Naturally, America will be hard for him at first.”
“Why should it be hard for him? It’s his home,” Mother said, looking tearful. No one took this up.
“Do you think Harry is very much changed?” I asked William.
“When I visited him last fall his Italian was very fluent. When speaking to Italians, he’d address them with arrogant manners and theatrical gestures. I asked him why his whole manner changed in Italian. He said, what did I mean?”
“If Boston people and Boston things are good enough for Mr. Howells, why shouldn’t they be for Harry? You’d think he’d wish to be closer to the Atlantic Monthly.”
“Yes, Mother,” I said, scrutinizing the advertisements in the Transcript, “and he could write novellas about the Famous Vegetable Cure for Female Weakness. They claim here it cures ALL female disorders including feelings of languor, sparkles before the eyes, a dragging sensation in the groin . . .”
“Really? Let me see that, Alice!” William rudely snatched the newspaper out of my hand and held it beyond my reach while he scanned it. “By George, you’re right. Here it is, right next to a lady in a bustle. Languor, sparkles before the eyes; sounds like neurasthenia to me.”
“I don’t care for this new bustle style,” said Father. “In our day women would never be mistaken for sofas. They dressed simply and elegantly; isn’t that right, dear?”
Mother was tapping her water glass with her fingernail. When others strayed from the topic, she would become uneasy until she managed to steer the conversation back to, in this case, Harry’s health and the Italian climate. “Remember, Will, when you and Harry were so ill with the Roman Fever? And so far from home! I don’t understand why Harry has chosen to put his health in peril again.”
Citing poor health, William had taken a leave of absence from teaching the previous autumn to join Harry in Rome for several months. Almost immediately, the two of them were stricken with the Roman Fever, and for weeks William was desperately homesick and, in that febrile, melancholy state, penned letters home bemoaning the shortcomings of Italian civilization. Whenever a letter arrived from abroad, Father would bring it to the next Shady Hill dinner party to read aloud, and one night he arrived with two letters. When he announced he had letters from William in Rome, all the Nortons from old Mrs. Norton down to young Sally brightened visibly.
Sara whispered into my ear, “For heaven’s sake don’t mention Italy to Charles. It’s just like rolling a stone downhill.” Her breath was warm, and our eyes met, just for a moment, and there it was again. Like striking a match.
“Wait and see, Sara. The Nortons are in for a shock.”
I knew Father and I could see the fiendish glow behind his spectacles as, feigning innocence, he read that William felt his mind
being opened to the past like an unwilling oyster, and that with all this dead civilization crowding in upon my consciousness, I feel like one still obliged to eat more & more grapes and pears, and pineapples, when the state of the system imperiously demands a fat Irish stew.
On and on it went, his jeremiad against “moribund latinity.” Italy, he lamented, couldn’t help injuring all one’s active powers, for the weight of the past here is fatal. Father’s voice became especially sonorous when he read: Even art comes before one here more as a problem. I think that that end is better served by the stray photographs which enter our homes.
Charlemagne’s countenance appeared to darken at this passage in particular.
“My goodness,” old Mrs. Norton said later, as I was saying goodbye. “And Harry loving Italy so! How on earth do your two brothers get along there, dear?”
From Italy, in his wretched, homesick state, William had written me the tenderest, most fraternal letters, of which I could recall whole passages by heart. Thou seemest to me so beautiful from here, so intelligent, etc. But no sooner did he return home than he started scheming to get back to Europe. Wherever he was, it was his nature to long for where he was not. He wrote to Harry warning him that if he came home, he would have to “eat his bread in sorrow” for some time (I managed to sneak a look at the first paragraph when William left it on a table), which must mean that William felt that he was eating his bread in sorrow. If my brothers only knew what it was like to be a female, stuck in Cambridge in perpetuity, eating your bread in sorrow year after year, and no one wants to hear a peep out of you.
Now William was saying, “I recall Harry turning the most ghastly hue. Later I realized it was the exact color of many of the Roman buildings. Yellow ochre, I believe. Roman Fever, by the way, Mother, is only malaria by another name.”
“Well, why not call it that?”
“How was Mrs. Sargent’s ‘aesthetic tea’ yesterday, William?” Father asked. “What was aesthetic about it?”
“Oh, it meant that certain individuals read poetry while others sat and longed for them to stop so that they might start talking again. Afterwards I had a long and drastic dose of Miss Putnam, relieved, happily, by the incoming of Miss Bessie Green.”
“Well, poetry might at least relieve the awkward silences that characterize so many Cambridge teas,” I said while inwardly steaming over the mention of Bessie Green, a loud, silly, and man-crazed girl with whom I hoped William was not too smitten.
My own European tour was two years behind me and it was pathetic how often I consoled myself with the memories, like polished gemstones I took out to fondle secretly. When Harry’s letters were read aloud, I burned with longing and envy and feared that my emotions must be visible to others. No one seemed to notice, however.
“I wish at least that Harry would go on to Switzerland or someplace like that,” Mother was saying. “A cool, bracing climate, not a stagnant one, is what he requires now. Don’t you think so, Will?”
“You could be right, Mother. The effect of climate on health has never been explained to my satisfaction.”
I snatched the newspaper back from William and held it out of his reach while I flipped to the back pages and scanned them. “Oh, look! It’s there ag
ain! An obviously fraudulent company is attempting to lure the maidens of Boston into purchasing and raising silk-worms. Someone should expose them, don’t you think so?” I passed it to William.
“And look what they’re charging!”
“It would be a source of income for poor women, I suppose,” Mother said, “and it would not take them out of the home.”
“Mother, it is an obvious fraud. I feel moved to write a churlish letter to the editor.”
“You won’t sign your name, will you, pet?”
“I shall use my name, Father, and I shall say that I am the daughter of one Henry James and the sister of another, and better than both.”
In early September, Mrs. Tappan gave a ball for her daughter Ellen and her fiancé, a Mr. Dixey, at her Beacon Street mansion, which had a real ballroom on the third floor. Young, unmarried women were obliged to go to these Back Bay balls, just as young men must go to war. That night I hovered near the punch bowl, trying to blend in so that it would not be too apparent I was a wallflower. The gown that had seemed so pretty at home was eclipsed now by dozens of creations in taffeta, velvet, and satin. My slippers rubbed painfully against my heels; I would have to put a poultice on them when I got home.
Meanwhile, I strove for a blithe and bubbly demeanor, which was what was generally prized in a young woman, as far I could tell. I would be the first to admit I lacked the talent and inclination for flirting, which seemed daft to me when I saw other girls doing it. Why did they make themselves seem so insipid? Something I read in Godey’s came back to me: “How to Converse with Young Men.” It advised one to talk about what the young man was interested in and “draw him out.” Although I’d attempted this a few times, it always proved monotonous in the end. Why did most people have to be so boring?
While hugging the shores of the punch bowl at the Tappans’, I subjected myself to a frank self-assessment. I was still young. My hair shone brightly after it was washed, my eyes were “intelligent” (or so I’d been told), my figure was not bad. My complexion was unblemished, if not “bright.” That my gown was unbecoming was perhaps not fatal. I was considered witty. This, however, might not be an asset.
Alice in Bed Page 15