Alice in Bed
Page 19
“Mingling, Father,” William said. “Not meddling.”
To Father “the world” stood for everything that was not divine; it was a fallen world, unredeemed. Still he enjoyed himself in it; wasn’t that inconsistent? At this point Mother tried to change the subject by saying brightly that Bob’s infant daughter, Mary, was large for a girl and had a prodigious appetite.
“It is so nice to have a girl in the family finally,” I said, “but I do wish they’d tell us what she looks like.”
“This shows you to be a hypocrite, Alice,” said William, waving his knife in my direction. “After Edward was born you said, and I quote, I am glad he is a boy and not another miserable girl.”
“I merely wished for the poor babe to be one of the oppressors rather than one of the oppressed.”
Father leaned forward in his chair and nailed me with a look that made me feel like a butterfly on a pin. In his wrathful aspect, Father could be powerful and tempestuous, like Zeus with his thunderbolts. He said, “Do you consider yourself oppressed, dear girl?”
In fact, I’d never pondered the subject of female oppression with any seriousness. It was true that I did not have to scurry around with coal scuttles and chamber pots at first light. I was a pampered member of the capitalist class and therefore an oppressor of others. Yet, compared with my brothers, who had an infinity of choices (with which all of them struggled mightily, I am the first to admit), only one sort of life was available to me. My fate had been prearranged by biology.
“You know what these agitating ladies are saying now? Now that we’ve freed the slaves, the next step is to free women!” Father said, breaking into a great belly laugh. This prompted me to recall something Katherine said about men using ridicule as a weapon against women.
“Will, dear,” Mother said, “didn’t you write a notice of John Stuart Mill’s book in which you disagreed with his thesis? I seem to remember that you sided with the other fellow.”
“So I did, Mother, in sixty-nine. Which does not prevent me from seeing it from the other point of view now.”
“Who would have guessed that these pioneer women would be so fond of books!” Mother said, shaking her head, and rang the bell for the maid.
FIFTEEN
1877
TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, I ASKED WILLIAM IF KATHERINE and I might spend a few weeks at his “Shanty” in the Adirondacks.
William was always recommending the Shanty to everyone as the panacea for all earthly ills, but few people took him up on it. With Jim Putnam and Henry Bowditch, he’d started coming to the Keene Valley when they were all in medical school. Pooling their funds, they bought an abandoned cabin they called the Shanty, which expanded over the years into a collection of weathered wooden shacks clustered in the tall grass behind the local inn, Beede’s. Cold water was available for washing; bathing was done in an icy brook; everything was as rustic as possible.
“By all means, Alice!” He looked rather taken aback, mindful of my well-known skepticism about discomfort, black flies, poison ivy, and other aspects of raw nature. Then he said, “Does this have anything to do with the marvelous Miss Loring’s proficiency with the ax, the tent pole, and the open fire?” I admitted this was so, and he said, “Well, if she can get my lazy, shiftless sister off the sofa and all the way to the Adirondacks, she is a miracle-worker indeed.”
We left in late July, hoping to miss the black fly season. If there was a single biting fly, I threatened to flee instantly to a hotel. It was a long journey. From New York City, we headed north to Saratoga Springs. After the sun set, the window became a dark mirror in which my reflection rode beside me like a more adventurous identical twin. After a night in a local inn, we took a single-track line through wild, almost primeval forest. As lakes, waterfalls, beaver dams, evergreens, and brief glimpses of magnificent peaks flew past, Katherine and I knitted and talked and read aloud to each other from Harry’s new novel, Roderick Hudson. We both thought it was a marvel (or if Katherine felt differently she knew better than to say so to me). As the forest outside became increasingly primeval, I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into and rued the day I solicited holiday advice from William of all people. But here we were at Lake Placid station. From here it was a dusty, jolting carriage ride to Beede’s. The inn, of unpainted clapboard, looked bare and unwelcoming, but it was a four-star hotel compared with the Shanty, which did its best to live up to its name.
“This is rustic.” It was all I could do, frankly, not to burst into tears, for I was suddenly overcome by fatigue and a lost forsaken sense of being parted from everything comforting and familiar. This vacation, I suddenly felt, was a great mistake.
“Isn’t it grand?” Katherine said, thereby demonstrating that in this respect at least she was my polar opposite.
While I thought wistfully of civilized inns I’d known, Katherine sprang into action, locating lanterns, candles, fire tools, blackened cooking pots and utensils, and an assortment of bedding. In one of the cupboards, reeking of mildew, we found wooden puzzle pieces in disarray, and determined that they came from three different puzzles and that more than half the pieces were missing. Then we stood together before a tattered map tacked to a wall.
I was beginning to feel less panicked standing next to Katherine, who could obviously cope with anything.
“What are all these queer little symbols?” Katherine asked.
“It looks like a record of past mountaineering feats by William and his friends. This thing here”—a comic figure with its hair standing on end in terror—“must be a symbol for a trail they consider hair-raising.”
“It’s very well executed!”
“William was an artist first. When we lived in Newport he studied under William Morris Hunt and was said to have a ‘future.’ Father made him go into science instead and that backfired as far as Father was concerned, because it turned Will into an atheist.”
“Your family is so . . . dramatic.”
“You could say that. After going into science, he never touched a paintbrush again. Seems a shame, because he was very talented, but that’s William for you.”
“Well, let’s avoid the hair-raising trails.” I knew that Katherine was equal to any trail but was thinking of my limitations. How kind she was.
Over the next few days we did a lot of rambling. We rambled over the easy trails and a few “moderate” ones, identifying cones and conifers, picking wild raspberries and admiring the peaks as they changed color with the time of day. We went botanizing and pressed wildflowers between the pages of a book. Katherine, whose uncle was the great Harvard botanist Asa Gray, knew all the trees and flowers and their Latin names. (The Shanty had a mildewed copy of Gray’s botany guide next to the candleholders.) She could read the woods like a book and knew which plants were edible and which poisonous, how to build a shelter and survive in a storm, how to tell which animals had passed from their tracks and scat.
“How did you acquire all this forest lore, Kath? You could go off tomorrow and live in the woods like a hermit.”
“Yes, I really could.” She shrugged in an eloquent way that I was already coming to love.
We were sitting before the fire, wrapped in moth-eaten woolen blankets, eating the meal we’d managed to cook on the hearth. Under interrogation, Katherine was cajoled into admitting that as a girl she could run like the wind, climb the tallest trees, and whittle anything you liked out of wood. “But none of this was worth a wooden nickel if you were a girl.”
“Oh, Katherine! Did your brothers tease you?”
“No. They treated me like another brother. We were the best of companions.”
“Lucky you. I have a sad recollection of being in the woods in Newport with Robbie and Wilky. They asked if I wanted to play cowboys and Indians, and, being gullible, I said yes. That time they tied me to a tree with a clothesline and told me I was a captive and shouldn’t expect to get out of it alive. Then they went off and forgot about me. I died a hundred deaths in the next h
our.”
“That’s terrible, Alice! Did you ever get free?”
“I suppose I must have. Strangely, I don’t remember how.”
“Being the youngest in the family must have been hard for someone as sensitive as you.” She spoke so sympathetically, with such a tender expression, that tears welled in my eyes.
In the late afternoon, after a little hiking and looking at views, we peeled off all our clothes and bathed in a frigid pool fed by an icy brook. Out of the corner of my eye, I covertly admired the lines of Katherine’s body. Unlike most people, she was more beautiful undressed than dressed; her clothes just muddled the impression. I liked the fact that her beauty was a veiled, secret thing, not divined at first glance, overlooked by most. When she took off her spectacles her near-sighted blue eyes were very beautiful and so were her lashes. In order not to gawk, I lifted my eyes to the sky and studied a pair of hawks riding the thermals far above us. “I wonder what those hawks are so interested in. Hope it’s not us.”
“We’d be rather a mouthful, I think.”
“Was your childhood happy, Katherine? I can never figure out if mine was happy or tragic.” I laughed to show I’d meant this light-heartedly.
“Yes, it was—until I saw the unfairness. I wondered why the world of men was outdoors, interesting and filled with adventure, and the world of women was indoors, narrow and boring. My mother, poor dear, was always trying to form me into a charming young lady—unsuccessfully, as you can see.” She laughed. “As a result I became a bit lonely, I suppose.”
“Then you must tell me everything about yourself and become less lonely.”
The glance Katherine gave me made me giddy for a moment.
Over the next few days, we did campy things like gather wild-flowers, look at interesting birds and other wildlife through binoculars, cook primitive meals on the hearth and consume them while watching the sun sink behind the saw-toothed ridgeline in a blaze of amber or tangerine. We made an unsuccessful attempt at one of the wooden puzzles. At night we lit candles and lanterns and made a fire with the logs that Katherine had split with an ax earlier in the day.
I’d watched her chopping wood just before sunset, admiring her grace and strength, recognizing in a flash that she carried in her person all the masculine virtues as well as the feminine ones (for she was devoting her life to helping the less fortunate, as good women did). Pregnant with this illumination, I sat in awed silence, gazing at the peaks around me, the bright fingernail paring of moon between the cedars, the whole world astonishingly aglow and alive.
Later I would tell Katherine that this was the moment I saw into her soul and knew that we were intended for each other. Katherine said she knew it the day I came to volunteer in the History Department. “I was just waiting for you to find out!”
That night as we lay bundled in blankets, feeling the hard wooden floor beneath our bones but not minding because we were together, there came a scuffling noise outside.
“What kind of animal is that?” I asked. If anyone would know, it would be Katherine.
“A large one, from the sound of it. Bigger than a porcupine or a skunk, I’d say. Maybe a large, clumsy raccoon.”
“A bear?”
“Possibly.”
I saw that Katherine was unafraid and this made me unafraid, too.
A few minutes later the “animal” revealed itself to be Dr. Charley Putnam, brother of William’s great friend Jim Putnam, and also a physician. He was puttering around the camp in the dark, not realizing that anyone else was there. Running into us, he became flustered, blushing and apologizing and asking if we needed anything.
“You know, Charley, I think we’re running out of oil for the hurricane lamp,” Katherine said.
“There is some at Beede’s. I’ll bring it by tomorrow if you like. Will that be soon enough, or do you need some right now?”
“No, we’re fine for tonight. Thank you!”
“I suppose this makes us the foolish virgins, not the wise ones,” I ventured.
Charley lapsed into silence. “Ah. Well, good night, then.”
After he stole off to his lair, we could not stop laughing.
“He didn’t pick up on the Bible reference, did he?” I said.
“I rather think not.” Katherine chuckled heartily.
“Did you see his carpet slippers? I suppose that behind those slippers and maiden-aunt ways there might lurk a certain virile charm.”
“Think of the irony, Alice. Two maidens alone in the primeval forest—menaced by Charley Putnam of Marlborough Street.”
“It’s safe to say that nothing dangerous could ever come from Marlborough Street.”
Charley’s gawky intrusion, the mood of hilarity, the moon, the crystalline air, and our perfect understanding of each other’s jokes led to what came next, which marked the beginning of our life together.
We stayed up most of the night talking in each other’s arms. I told Katherine about Aunt Kate’s disastrous marriage to the unsuitable Captain, Mother’s inability to gain the respect of our French servants, Father’s impenetrable mysticism, our years in Europe and the governesses who came and went mysteriously. I told her of my love for my brothers, my horror of the German at the end of a Back Bay ball, my perplexity about my future. I said that although the idea of marriage was anathema to me, I would like to collect at least one marriage proposal.
“Why?”
“Well, I suppose, to hang on the wall like a diploma, so to speak.”
Katherine hooted with laughter, and this made me laugh, too.
“Tell me about your childhood, Katherine. I want to know everything about you.”
“Well, every Christmas, I’d ask my parents for a coonskin cap, a bowie knife, or a bow and arrow, and on Christmas morning I’d find a dollhouse or a tea set. No one seemed to notice that only Louisa played with these things. She’d chatter away at her dolls for hours, dressing and undressing them. I thought she was daft.”
“What an extraordinary child you must have been, Katherine,” I said, stroking her hair.
“I don’t know about that. As I was falling asleep, I would fantasize about running away to sea. I learned celestial navigation from a book, and my father gave me a sextant. I think he sympathized secretly, but he had no choice but to leave me to Mother to mold into a proper female. And she did try very hard, poor woman.”
I laughed and kissed her on the mouth. “I think you’ve turned out very nicely, but I daresay your mother had little to do with it.”
“I had a plan, an insane one, admittedly. When I turned thirteen I planned to stow away on one of the merchant ships docked at Long Wharf. If I mastered all the necessary skills I believed I’d be taken on as a seaman. Apparently, one could be hired when one was thirteen. Of course, one also had to be a boy. I didn’t discover that part until I was eleven, and it was a terribly bitter pill to swallow all at once: That I was only a girl and would always be a girl, bad luck on ships, fated to stay home, spending the rest of my natural life marching around Boston with Mother and Louisa making calls. Did you have to do that?”
Lying on my side, I was tracing the lines of Katherine’s face with my fingertips. “Oh, yes, calling on elderly forlornities. The great female pastime,” I sighed. “They should have seen your greatness, Katherine, and worshipped it.”
She blushed. “Don’t be absurd, Alice.”
“But you are so good, Katherine. And you always know exactly what to do. I want to know how you got that way. When I met you at Fanny Morse’s luncheon—do you remember?”
“How could I forget meeting you?”
I’d never seen myself as the sort of person who makes an unforgettable impression. It was lovely to think I had. “You’d just contrived to send food and supplies into Paris by balloon when the city was under siege by the Prussians. I thought, If she can do that, there is nothing she cannot accomplish.”
“Someday I’ll have to tell you what I thought of you,” Katherine said with a m
ischievous smile.
The next morning, I sat outside at a splintered wooden table in a pool of white sunshine, writing letters. I wrote to my parents, Fanny Morse, Nanny Ashburner, and Sara. The shanty lacks nothing in the way of discomfort and is no doubt after camping the worst thing, I wrote to Sara. We stumbled gratefully over the stones in the brook and bathed therein, but one tub in the hand is worth fifty brooks in the bush. I refrained from praising Katherine to Sara, who shortly before we left said irritably, “This Miss Loring is quite the paragon from what you say! Does she have any faults at all?” To Nanny, however, I permitted myself to write, There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood & drawing water to driving runaway horses & educating all the women in North America.
SIXTEEN
FIRST CAME THE WILD NOR’EASTER THAT LASHED THE TREES, tore off branches and shingles, and sent them flying through the air. The sky darkened and rain fell so hard the drops bounced off the ground. Hail spattered at the windows like pebbles thrown by unruly children. Streets became gushing streams in minutes.
The next day, the air turned crisp, with the slightly metallic taste of fall. We were eating our Sunday joint. Mother had just asked Aunt Kate to pass the rolls. Father was saying, “I am bewildered and disgusted by the young men, so worldly, so handsome, so impudent, I meet in the cars,” when he suddenly fell sideways, rigid as a felled tree, his mouth frozen in an “oh” of surprise. He lost consciousness. Dr. Beach was sent for, listened to his heart, felt his pulse, shone a light in his eyes, and said it was a stroke. He could not say whether he would recover. “He may have one foot in the next world already,” he said, which, I thought sorrowfully, meant that poor Father had no feet in this world at all.
With the assistance of our large, muscular cook, we managed to carry him upstairs to his bed, where he regained consciousness after a few hours. For the next month, he lay mute and listless, while Mother, Aunt Kate, and I took turns picking bits of food out of his long beard, setting a bedpan under him, wiping the drool from his chin. His eyes followed us and he was strangely docile, a large, helpless infant. His first utterances were difficult to decipher. As I told Nanny in my letter: