Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Sometimes a young man would appear to be walking toward me, and then do an about-face, as if suddenly recalling urgent business at the other end of the ballroom. “If you only smiled, dear, you’d be radiant.” Mother’s oft-repeated advice. Remembering it now, I fake-smiled, but I could not sustain it; the muscles in my cheeks ached and then twitched and, really, what was there to smile about?

  “Hello, Miss James!” Oh, not Ned Codman! He’d caught my fake smile and apparently believed it was directed at him. Now he was stuck to me like a burr. On the other hand, he’d rescued me from being a wallflower, and one had to be slightly grateful for that. How abject was a woman’s fate, when all was said and done!

  “Hello,” I said. “Are you still working at—at—?”

  “Yes, I am, Miss James! National Union Bank,” he said brightly. I could imagine no fate more deadly than working at a bank, but I kept this to myself. “Mrs. Tappan has pulled out all the stops tonight, hasn’t she?”

  Ned was a beanpole, tall and gawky, with jug-ears that stuck out. The light coming through them turned them a rosy pink; their translucency reminded me of something—tropical fish? His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he talked.

  On those rare occasions when I imagined having a suitor, it was never one of these gauche Boston boys (except for the beautiful Charley Jackson, whom I’d marry in an instant, but he was unlikely to ask me). Otherwise, my ideal lover was a mysterious stranger, perhaps someone from abroad, who could perceive the depths of my soul. If I wound up with Ned or someone like him, I’d spend the remainder of my natural life staring at his Adam’s apple until I eventually went insane and attacked it with a fish knife.

  “It does help that Mrs. Tappan is immensely rich,” I observed. “The Sturgis treasure is well nigh inexhaustible, so they say.”

  Ned looked uneasy. You were not supposed to talk about money, although everyone in Boston was secretly preoccupied with it. Ned asked if he could fetch me a sandwich and I said, “Oh, yes, that would be nice,” and he left and returned a short while later bearing a small, dry triangular sandwich. It did not go down easily. We were standing near the tall windows then and I discreetly set the sandwich remnants on the windowsill behind me as Ned ponderously considered the prospects of the Harvard crew that fall. Smiling my best fake smile, I mentally composed a paragraph to Nanny describing Ned Codman’s ears and plodding conversation, Mrs. Tappan in her imperial aspect, Ellen Tappan gazing adoringly at her fiancé, the suave gold digger.

  Behind me, I could hear Fanny Morse chatting with Charley Jackson, who was her cousin. Through Fanny, I might have an inside track with Charley, if only Fanny Appleton would leave the picture. Three-quarters of an hour ago, Charley and I had just begun talking when Richard Dana came along and held forth tediously on the subject of his sister’s wedding, derailing our conversation. If only I could shake Ned off now and sidle over to Fanny, insert myself into the conversation, and work my charms (if I had any) on Charley. Although he was said to be secretly engaged to Miss Appleton, he always brightened when he saw me and laughed at my jokes, which lesser men failed to appreciate. There was room for hope. Faint hope but still.

  At present, however, here was Mr. Codman and his Adam’s apple. When he’d concluded his meandering tale, I asked, “Have you met the prospective bridegroom?”

  “Oh yes. He seems a good fellow. I understand he is a keen sailor, which is always a plus, Miss James.” He smiled, rather nervously.

  “Really? He struck me as quite shallow. As the engagement is to be a long one, I hope he will not become weary of Ellen before the wedding.”

  “Oh!” Poor Ned looked stunned. His ears turned crimson. “Don’t you think they are in love?”

  Just then my mother, stiff and fortresslike in her gown, was giving me an encouraging smile from the matrons’ chairs. Why? Oh yes, a boy was talking to me. I forced myself to focus on Ned and said, “If Ellen gets out from under her mother’s tyranny she may come out all right, I suppose. But why is it that love affairs in real life appeal so much less to one’s sympathy than they do in the silliest novel?”

  I had to suppress a yawn; poor Ned was having a deadly soporific effect upon me. I thought yearningly of my bed and the novel I was reading, while he applied himself to consuming a piece of cake, his Adam’s apple bobbing like mad. With his mouth half full, he said, “Well, I happen to think Boston engagements are a fine thing—and capital for the Race, too!”

  “Oh, the Race,” I said wearily.

  Now Ned was visibly searching for an escape, and who could blame him? He finally found an exit line—he had to tell his cousin they should leave separately, or was it together?—and scurried across the room. I leaned back against the long windows, savoring the feel of the cool glass against my bare back, reminding myself that attending balls was like visiting the dentist. You just had to grit your teeth and get through it.

  Regrettably, the beautiful Charley Jackson was now on the other side of the room talking to a young woman I didn’t recognize. Lilla Cabot and Sargy Perry strolled past me, arm and arm, in the direction of the refreshment table, lost in their mutual self-regard. Their engagement was a joke; they had nothing to live on, Sargy was very immature, and Lilla was, well, Lilla. It was hard to forget overhearing her say, “Alice James is a hard woman to please. I pity the man who tries.” While wondering gloomily why I was so misunderstood, I saw Sara waltz by in the arms of a dark-haired man I did not know. I studied her expression to see if she was falling in love. It would happen one day.

  Dante could not have devised a more hellish torture than the “German” at the end of a Back Bay ball. With the inane repetitiveness of a children’s game, a couple dances, then each seeks a new partner, presenting her/him with a favor (a nosegay, a hair ornament, a handkerchief), and those couples dance in turn and then seek other partners, bestowing more favors, and so on until everyone is waltzing. Until you have spent an eternity on a Louis Quinze tuffet, your gloved hands in your lap and a martyr’s smile on your lips, whilst the chairs around you empty like trees in winter, you have no idea of humiliation. Fortunately, it ends eventually.

  Two days later, on a warm September day, Sara, Fanny, and I were sunning ourselves on the steps of the Harvard greenhouse, leaning back like passengers on the deck of an ocean liner. Fanny was describing her visit to an immigrant family on the bad side of Beacon Hill; she’d found three small children prostrated by the heat; the youngest could not be revived. “You cannot convince them that fresh air is good for them.”

  Then Lizzy Boott came scampering across the lawn to meet us, as arranged, after her daily two-hour piano practice. Fanny had her impoverished families to occupy her, Sara had the Norton children, Lizzy her music and painting and languages. What did I have?

  When the conversation turned to the ball, I observed a horrid metamorphosis taking place in my friends.

  “Isn’t Mr. Dixey awfully good looking?” Lizzy said.

  Sara and Fanny agreed that he was and proceeded to minutely analyze Ellen’s dress, the flowers in her hair, the ices, the flutes of champagne. Then they moved on to who danced with whom, who said what to whom, what the favors were in the German. What had happened to them that their minds could be captured by trivial things, like monkeys bewitched by shiny objects? The mention of the German made me grind my teeth. Why call it a German when it was a French invention? The French called it a Cotillion.

  “I was very disappointed in Mr. Dixey’s flimsiness,” I remarked. “Isn’t he simply the flimsiest of beings?”

  “Why do you say that, Alice?” Fanny asked.

  I attempted to explain what was plain as day to me. “It’s perfectly obvious he’s just a little society type. And that he should have preyed on Ellen Tappan, of all people!”

  A secret glance passed between Sara and Fanny. It lasted less than a second but in that interval I registered the fact that my closest friends considered me queer in certain respects and no doubt discussed my queerness when I wa
s absent. It struck a chill through my bones. I looked down at the daisy in my hand and saw that I had stripped it of its petals. I dropped it on the ground.

  Why did the hand of fate weigh on me so heavily, while my friends were eager for what life would bring? I believed that love should shake a person to the depths of her being, like the people in the Bible who stood near Jesus and were changed in the twinkling of an eye. Most people, however, refused to rise above the ordinary. While hovering near the punch bowl, I’d had a chance to scrutinize the betrothed couple. Ellen looked flushed and happy, but that probably had more to do with the party, her gown, and being the center of attention. The rest of her life would inevitably be a letdown.

  “By the way,” I said, “I talked for far too long with Richard Dana. The personal appearance of the Dana family, even irradiated by the most intense joy, could never be called impressive, don’t you agree?” My friends stared at me. I continued my little harangue. “Owing to Mr. Dana’s gushing, I had only a word or two with the beautiful Charles Jackson.” Lizzy and Fanny smiled tolerantly. Sara looked squirmy and irritable, probably due to the heat. “I am forced to admit that Miss Appleton is not bad looking,” I added. “I had to refrain from looking in the glass for some time after I came home.”

  I expected some amusement from my friends. Fanny and Lizzy chuckled a little but Sara was still staring quizzically at me.

  “Don’t you see, Alice, that you frighten people?”

  “How absurd, Sara. Who’d be afraid of me? Don’t tell me you are.”

  Sara’s hair was coming undone and she twisted the escaped strands into a knot and secured it again with combs and pins.

  “I mean people who don’t know you, Alice. Men principally. Some poor man offers to fetch you a Roman punch and you say something arch and obscure about elective affinities. Poor Frank Loring thought you were making fun of him!”

  This was so unfair! Was it my fault if a person did not know his Goethe? As the midday sun glared down from the zenith, the sweat stung my scalp under my plaited chignon. Why was Sara attacking me? Why were my friends drifting away? I searched my mind for some way to restore harmony.

  “Oh! I must tell you all about the idiotic conversation I had with Jane Norton at the Godkins’ the other night. She said she thought all the young women of Boston, instead of devoting ourselves to painting, clubs, societies and such, ought to stay at home in a constant state of matrimonial expectation. She implied that we are all so happy together that men say to themselves, ‘Oh, they’re so happy we won’t marry them!’”

  Lizzy and Fanny laughed. Lizzy said, “I can’t help noticing that Miss Norton has avoided the wedded state herself. Maybe she attended too many painting classes.”

  “And then,” I continued, “she went on a tirade against waterproofs, and her own gown as she was speaking was of so hideous a description that it cried out to be covered by a waterproof.”

  Sara’s face had taken on a crumpled look I knew well, and when she spoke it was in her most strained, I-am-more-sensitive-than-you-can-possibly-imagine voice. “Alice, if you could only hear yourself. You are so hard.” I recalled Father saying much the same thing to me once, urging communion with Divine Nature. But hard was the last thing I was. Sara, of all people, should know this.

  Everything had changed since Susan died, leaving the six small Nortons. This situation brought Sara and Theodora into the daily orbit of the Nortons, including Charles. Soon there were ominous signs that he was wooing Sara—about which subject I’d wasted much ink speculating in letters to Nanny. At one point Sara fled to New York suddenly and mysteriously and stayed away several months.

  “Most likely he has proposed and she has refused him,” I wrote to Nanny during that period. “No one says so but I gather from something Theodora said that Sara plans to stay away until he gets over it.” Ellen Gurney and I had discussed the situation at length. Ellen’s view was that Sara was a rare, exquisite creature, much too good for Charles, but that he would wear her down with sheer persistence. I hoped she was wrong. I wrote to Sara during the time she was in New York, If you don’t come home soon I shall in desperation elope with the handsome butcher’s boy, but her letters were vague and evasive and said little about missing me.

  When she returned to Cambridge, her lips were sealed on the subject of her brother-in-law. The danger had subsided, it seemed, and Charles was transferring his affections to Theodora. But a metamorphosis had taken place in Sara, which I did not understand. After her troubles, she assumed the air of a woman of experience and treated me as if I were a naïve girl. She declined to confide in me at all about her Norton problems, and this was unutterably painful to me.

  Now she said, “If you only knew how Jane cares for those dear children—and Grace, too—you might have a little Christian charity, Alice, or at least refrain from mocking what you don’t understand.”

  I stared off in the direction of the Charles River and its diamond sparkles. No one knew what to say.

  “Just think!” I said after a long silence. “Mr. Dixey has leased Ellen for life! Isn’t it awful, horrible, and incomprehensible?”

  TWELVE

  1875

  FOR OVER A MONTH MOTHER HAD BEEN PREDICTING THAT Harry would come home soon, and this time her maternal antennae did not fail her. In early October a steamer docked and out walked an older, confident, handsome, sun-bronzed Harry.

  I was content just to gaze upon my second brother and take in his stories while Mother and Aunt Kate fluttered around, ordering the cook to make his favorite dishes, going through his clothes and sewing on buttons, asking concerned questions about his health and the quality of the air in his room. He was a stranger now—almost. Formerly shy and tongue-tied, he was displaying a new talent as a raconteur, his youthful stammer concealed behind thoughtful measured pauses. He was invited to no end of teas and dinners, at which people listened reverently to his tales of life at the Palazzo Barberini, where William Wetmore Storey, a sculptor from Boston, was installed, along with his wife and a band of bohemian artists. To hear Harry tell it, it was an Old World paradise of liveried servants, cavernous fifteenth-century halls, every alcove bristling with neoclassical Venuses and Pans.

  “Is he still doing sibyls?” Clover Adams asked. “When we were there, there were sibyls on all sides. Sibyls sitting, sibyls standing, sibyls with legs crossed, with legs uncrossed. You’ve never seen so many sibyls in your life!” Harry admitted that there were probably more sibyls than the world required. Now that Europe had polished and finished him, the Adamses craved his society more than ever and persisted in trying to persuade him to “come home” for good. Father took Harry as his guest to the Saturday Club, and although he was polite, he did not seem genuinely enthusiastic about the Boston cognoscenti. Mother confided to me, “I trust he will feel more and more that it is much better to live near his family and with his own countrymen, than to lead the recluse life he led abroad.”

  Recluse life? Was she daft? What about the glamorous palazzo, the liveried servants, the expatriate artists, the beautiful and idle women who went riding with Harry in the Roman campagna? After a month and a half, you could see that Cambridge society was already wearing thin for him. Though he tried to mask his feelings, I noted a number of dismissive remarks about the “flimsiness” of American vegetation, the “aridity” of Yankee social life, and the strangeness of a country where men talked only of business and women ruled over the arts. And American hostesses had no respect for one’s work, according to him. To be in Harry’s company was to be made excruciatingly aware of everything America lacked: great art, an established leisure class, stately homes, proper piazzas with proper fountains, well-trained servants, literary salons, ladies with repose, civilized clubs for gentlemen.

  At Shady Hill he was apt to fall into arcane Ruskinian discussions with the Nortons, peppered with words like campanile and loggia. One evening, I overheard him telling Grace that he felt it was his duty to “attempt to live at home before I
grow older”—as if it were a penance. Later he murmured over his after-dinner brandy, “Europe is fading away into a pleasant dream. I mean to keep a firm grip on the Old World in some way or other.” He now seemed more comfortable at Shady Hill than anywhere else.

  He was becoming as mysterious as Father, who had the habit, shared by none of the other fathers we knew, of going off on mysterious trips and coming back a week or two later. William had inherited this proclivity for sudden impulsive journeys to change the weather in his head, and it occurred to me now that Harry resembled Father in the way he parceled himself out. Many people had a piece of him, I thought, but no one, including me, had the whole story.

  “We are a disappointment to him, I think,” I whispered to Sara one warm evening on the piazza at Shady Hill. “We don’t even speak Italian.” Sara had been making comic faces at me behind her hand every time the word Ruskin issued from Charles’s mouth. He was in full didactic mode (“It is always to be remembered that . . .” “It will be found on observation that. . .”) and Father was looking quite dyspeptic. It was asserted by someone that Ruskin was the first to interpret the decline of art and taste as the sign of a general cultural crisis. Harry noted that people’s ideas of sky were derived from pictures more than reality. Grace said that the relationship of art, morality, and social justice formed a “holy trinity.” What on earth did she mean?

  “Speaking of matters Italian, Alice,” Sara whispered into my ear. Her breath smelled pleasantly of wine. “I wish you could have seen old Grace batting her eyes at the Italian professor the other night. Oh, the stories I could tell.” Sara had by now passed out of the phase of being charitable about her out-laws.