Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  He is entirely unable to write or think & as his whole existence consisted in the one or the other the days seem very long to him now. Whatever his philosophy is he certainly practices it in his own life.

  Over the next weeks, his speech grew clearer and he was able to sit up, but now he became childishly irritated by a fold in the bedclothes, the light coming through a slit in the blinds. Objects defeated him. He’d stare at a cup as if he’d never seen one before, grasp a spoon upside-down and try to eat his custard with its handle. While Mother and Aunt Kate took everything in stride (how did they do that?) I was tortured by the idea that the person inhabiting Father’s body was a self-centered, petulant stranger whom I wasn’t sure I could love.

  But he continued to improve and steadily, if slowly, regained the power of speech. For a period he was mentally back in his childhood in Albany before his leg was lost, and one day he wept for hours over what his father’s cruel Puritan God had done to him. Father’s childhood in Albany had always seemed mythic, belonging to an archaic time, an age of giants. The iconically wealthy and pious William James of Albany went through three wives and fathered thirteen children. My brothers and I knew the key elements of the myth by heart: The fire, the amputation, Father’s quarrel with his father, his banishment, his marriage to Mother and their early years in a Fourierite commune in France. The great Vastation, followed by the great Illumination. But from a child’s perspective, it was a tale of unceasing pain and terror.

  By three months after the stroke, Father had recovered most of his faculties. He was able to hobble about with a cane and eat meals in the dining room with the family. Whenever he drank wine, however, he talked as if he had pebbles in his mouth. His fork would go skidding and skittering around his plate, and several times during every meal the utensil would get stuck under the plate’s edge, clacking and clattering between plate and table as Father grappled with it like a demon.

  “Parietal lobe damage,” William whispered to me. “His brain can’t tell him where the plate ends and the table begins.”

  We’d had no dinner guests in months, and turned down all invitations. Seeing Mother’s serene public mask, telling everyone that Father was improving steadily, I felt nauseous. Every meal broke my heart and, unable to eat, I shed ten pounds in a month and a half. I could not escape the sense that I’d brought about some irreparable harm to my father. If I’d wished him dead by daydreaming of going back to Europe, I tried to cancel it by vowing to stay home by his side from now on. Since Katherine had exposed the fallacies of Father’s Ideas, I even denied myself Katherine’s company for a time. But that only made things worse, and I felt as if I were living on a cold planet far removed from the sun.

  Father kept improving, however, until by the week before Christmas, there was scant evidence of the stroke.

  “It is a Christmas miracle,” Mother announced to Dr. Beach, who tried to make out that he’d predicted just such an outcome, when in fact he had predicted the opposite. On Christmas Eve most Bostonians attended church. The Jameses did not. I myself had never set foot in a place of worship except in Europe to gawk at architectural details. William found himself in a church for the first time when he attended Edward Emerson’s wedding. Sometimes Mother or Aunt Kate would say wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be nice just once to hear Phillips Brooks preach? He is said to be very good!” or “It would be lovely to sing Christmas hymns in a church on Christmas Eve!” But Father continued to insist that “professional religion is the devil’s subtlest device for keeping the human soul in bondage.”

  “But, Father, you have not set foot in a church in forty years,” William reminded him. “For all you know, things have changed greatly since your Calvinist childhood.”

  “It is idle to expect any revival of the Church,” he said with a dismissive gesture. “The Bible would have to be written over again.”

  “Well, perhaps you are the man to do it, Father.”

  Father chuckled at this.

  For Christmas I received a beautiful leather-covered desk for my professoress duties; William, a set of precision dissecting tools made in Germany. “Why are you encouraging him?” I said to my parents. William threw a sofa cushion at me from across the room, and I caught it and tossed it back in his face. Sitting in front of the tree (a late concession of Father’s; for most of my life, our household had been barren of any such pagan rituals), we read aloud the Christmas letters from Wilky and Bob and tried to visualize each of them celebrating Christmas. It was not hard to picture them in front of Christmas trees in snowy Wisconsin, with wives and small children gathered round; Mother drifted readily into detailed speculations about each grandchild and how he or she might have greeted his or her gift. But Harry’s bachelor Christmas in France was harder to fathom.

  “I do hope he isn’t alone on Christmas Day,” Mother said, tearing up. “I will be uneasy about him until he finds a wife to manage the practical details of existence. Especially as he is so far from his family.”

  “The Angel is very good at getting himself invited to nice places, Mother,” William pointed out. “He’s probably at a great manor house in Normandy, being waited on hand and foot by liveried servants. I don’t feel sorry for him. He is no doubt feeling very sorry for us living in the American wilderness.”

  At Christmas dinner Father presided in the old way, carving the goose, joking with Mother, reassuring Aunt Kate that not only did the gravy have no lumps, it was possibly the most homogeneous gravy he had ever tasted.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, Cambridge was buried under a foot and a half of snow, and Fanny, Sara, and I rented a horse and sleigh and flew through the white streets silently, covered in fur, like characters in Tolstoy. Mauve trees stood in the silvered fields. The frosty wind snatched our breath away and bits of ice blew into our faces and reddened our cheeks.

  Holding her muff protectively in front of her face, Sara announced she had important news; but we must promise not to be angry with her.

  “We can’t hear you if you mumble into your muff, Sara,” I said.

  Removing her muff from her mouth, she imparted her news, which was that she had resolved to apply herself in earnest to the task of finding a husband.

  “A husband!” I said. “I hear they are a good deal of trouble most of the time.”

  Sara laughed and said that we must take into account how fundamentally weak-minded she was. “I am not like you two. Maybe it’s because I am an orphan, but I feel as if I’m just dangling, like a loose thread. So I am going to England a month from now—to Yarmouth, to stay with cousins there.”

  “You’re not!” said Fanny. “You can’t!” I said.

  It was a blow. Lizzy Boott and her father had recently returned to Europe, too. The ranks of our friends were thinning. If things kept going in this direction, I would be the last spinster in Boston.

  “I will miss you both dreadfully, and you must write me so I don’t perish of loneliness. But it’s now or never. Boston has been a poor fishing ground, I must say. Look at what poor Theodora has caught!”

  “Your plan is not a very romantic one, Sara,” I said—but I said it gently.

  “It’s not my fault, Alice. It’s that cursed war! The fine flower of Boston manhood buried on the battlefields, and a generation of spinsters withering on the vine. Even the insipid stories in Godey’s allude to the shortage of men.”

  “Surely there are some nice men still among the living. William, for example?”

  William and Sara were always flirting; you could not miss their mutual attraction. But William flirted with many girls.

  “You know I adore William, but he is so whimsical! He can’t provide the ballast I require. I am like dandelion fluff, scattered by every breeze. I need to graft myself to something solid—a large family preferably belonging to the class of landed gentry.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors, Sara,” I pointed out. “What are you—dangling thread, dandelion fluff, a boat needing ballast, or a plant in ne
ed of staking?”

  Sara smiled and shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

  “Landed gentry!” Fanny said. “My, my, my!”

  “In that case you are wise to go fishing in England,” I said. “Better that than some malarial plantation in Georgia. I wish you all success and happiness, Sara.” (This was true; I really did.)

  “Thank you.” Tears welled in her beautiful grey eyes. “We are friends forever, nothing can change that. I hope you two don’t despise me for being so—practical.”

  “How could we despise you?” Fanny and I cried, nearly in unison.

  There came a hush during which we listened to the wind soughing in the hemlocks and white pines. Sara took out her handkerchief and dabbed at her tear-stained face, then smiled through her tears. “By the way, Alice, has it escaped your notice that your brother is desperately in love with Alice Gibbens?”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. It was a year since Father returned from a meeting of the Radical Club and announced, “William, I have met your future wife.” This turned out to be Alice Gibbens, a schoolteacher of twenty-six. An intense, turbulent relationship ensued, with many ruptures, long searching talks, multiple misunderstandings. Anyone familiar with William, his jagged emotions and shifting moods, would not be greatly astonished to learn that his courtship of Miss Gibbens was a via dolorosa, strewn with obstacles, secret guilt, elaborate thirty-page confessions. He appeared to be doing his best to convince Miss Gibbens that he was the worst possible choice for a husband. Several months ago, he told me sadly that it was all over. “She does not love me,” he said after reading her latest letter from Canada, where she’d fled to escape his moods. “She cares no more for me than for a dead leaf, nor ever will.”

  “Oh, I believe that is all over now,” I told Sara.

  I’d met Miss Gibbens and liked her at first. Then, when I began to observe how deviously she was sinking her claws into William, I began to detest her. I confess to being relieved that she was out of the picture.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Sara said.

  After I reached home that evening, I stood for a while in the middle of Quincy Street in the midwinter dark without a cloak or bonnet or gloves and let the icy pellets lash my face. Then I wiped my eyes and went inside to take up my life again.

  Why, I wondered, was everyone I cared about insisting on living in England all of a sudden?

  In early January a letter arrived from Harry reporting that he’d crossed the Channel, disembarked at Folkstone, and made his way to London, his new home. I have burned my ships behind me—let my apartment. I always meant sooner or later to go to London. Despite the filthy weather—dirty fog-paste, like Thames mud in solution—he pronounced himself as happy as could be.

  SEVENTEEN

  1878

  WHEN THE NEWS ARRIVED THE FOLLOWING SPRING OF THE SUCCESS of Sara’s “fishing expedition,” I was unsurprised. It was as I’d foreseen (and I consider myself a bit of a seeress in these matters). I knew Sara to be capable of a steely resolve in pursuit of what she felt her happiness required, and it took her no more than five months to hook a rather large fish, namely William Erasmus Darwin, the eldest son of Mr. Charles Darwin. Harry described him in a letter as a gentle, kindly, reasonable, liberal, bald-headed, dull-eyed, British-featured, sandy-haired insulaire. He was older than Sara, but perhaps that was what she needed for ballast.

  Harry attended the wedding and sent us a lengthy report.

  Six months earlier, Nanny Ashburner had married a Mr. Richards from Maine, and thus I was doubly bereft (while being required to act pleased, even overjoyed, about their happiness). Swept up in her usual maelstrom of noble causes and good works, Katherine was often unavailable; she was a woman of action and I was a woman of—what?—indolence, I suppose. It appeared that what I’d dreaded and joked about for years—being “the last bloom unplucked”—was indeed coming to pass. There was still Fanny, but she had one besotted suitor after her, and I had never had one apart from the simple, mouth-breathing stable-boy in Ripton, Vermont, who proposed to everything in a skirt. But I pulled myself together and managed to sound as thrilled in my letters as was required of friends of the newly engaged or married.

  In the fall Sara brought her new husband to Cambridge, where they were feted at a great many receptions. (Sara was a great favorite in Cambridge-Boston, and the Darwin family had numerous Boston connections.) I found Mr. Darwin exactly as Harry described and liked him very much. The odd thing was that Sara herself did not appear as happy as a newly married woman ought to be. She did not look well either—bone-white and too thin—and seemed to be dragging herself through the events, her manner flat and listless. What had happened to her in England to reduce her to a ghostly simulacrum of herself?

  “I cannot forgive her for her lack of enthusiasm for her new husband,” I said to Fanny following one reception for the newlyweds. “When you think of the hordes of lovelorn spinsters . . .”

  “Oh Alice, don’t be too hard on her. Marriage isn’t always a bed of roses.”

  “Well, she shouldn’t have taken it on then!”

  “When we take something on, do we ever really know what we are taking on? Let us wish for Sara’s happiness.”

  After a pause, I said, “You’re right, Fanny. You must help me to be more charitable.” Though it was irksome that so many of the best young women of Cambridge were being carried off like the Sabine women, I would keep these thoughts to myself. For myself and Katherine, there would be no rites, no well wishes, no receptions, no wedding journeys, no acknowledgment whatsoever of our union.

  But that was not the worst. The worst was still to come.

  In April 1878, William announced his engagement to Alice Gibbens. I received the news as if it were an electrocution. The first few times Miss Gibbens came to call, I had to slip away quickly up the back stairs, as I simply could not bear to see the loving looks that passed between that Alice (the false Alice, to me) and William. Or, for that matter, my parents’ excessive fondness for Miss Gibbens, with her “melting brown eyes.” Father was enchanted, having “discovered” this goddess, after all. Mother was charmed by her practicality and thrift and the fact that she had worked as a teacher to help support her family; she would make a good wife for a poor man like William, who had to work for a living. I did not see how I could forgive her for stealing William, my parents, and the name Alice James in the bargain.

  The truth burned like lye. Alice Gibbens would come first with William forever. If we were all shipwrecked he would save her first and leave me to drown. I recognized that my thoughts were extreme, but Miss Gibbens’s perfections were nails driven into my flesh; I felt my very psychic existence to be in peril and had to save myself somehow. Sauve qui peut! When I was obliged to interact with my future sister-in-law, I withdrew into an implacable coldness and revenged myself by talking over her head in the James family code. “Have you heard?” I’d say, “The Children are going to the Shore, and so is Charlemagne. And the Ancient Houri of Kirkland Street has been lecturing lately on the French ladies of the eighteenth century!” Miss Gibbens would smile, vaguely and uncomprehendingly, ignorant of the fact that the Children were the family of Professor Childs, Charlemagne was Charles Norton, and the Ancient Houri of Kirkland Street was Grace Norton. Once, when I’d snubbed Miss Gibbens in this way, I caught a flash of pure hatred on William’s face. He would hate me from now on, I supposed. Such things could not be repaired. But no one in the family was much interested in my sufferings. What was I compared to a blissful engaged couple?

  “You should see the way she prattles on about books with Father, pretending to be so intellectual,” I harped to Katherine the long-suffering. How good and patient she was during my slough of despond.

  “Well, isn’t she actually intellectual?”

  “Katherine dear, given our bond, I expect you to dislike her alongside me.”

  “My loyalty to you is absolute, darling, but in the end you will have to swallow her, yo
u know.”

  I did not think I could. Almost overnight, I became ill. My mind moved along a narrow groove. It was like dreaming with my eyes open. The dream was unchanging and oppressive; a nightmare in which things became muddled and I lost my way at every step. My parents would shoot me searching glances and ask if I were feeling poorly, and I would say I was perfectly fine. The others did not understand because they were healthy-minded. William was not by nature perhaps, but evidently Alice Gibbens had made him so.

  Healthy-minded people couldn’t grasp that just getting out of bed could be as exhausting as laying track for the railroad. To dress myself or dress my hair was beyond my powers. Paralyzed by my image in the mirror, I’d break out in a cold sweat and watch my shaking hand set the hairbrush down on the dresser scarf. Someone would find me later, with one side of my hair pinned and the other side hanging loose, staring at my face in the glass as if wondering whose it was.

  My stomach was pierced with sharp pains; presently I was having fits almost every night. Sometimes it was Mother or Aunt Kate, but usually it was Father who comforted me. I saw during my lucid intervals that I provided something for him—a congregation of one. We would talk softly for hours, or rather Father would talk and I would listen. He would talk about whatever came into his mind—Wilky’s war wounds, the failure of the boys’ Florida plantation, the evils of slavery, the horrors of the class system in Europe, Mother’s perfections, the “pusillanimous clergy,” Father’s troubled relations with his old Transcendentalist friends. He told me one night that his trouble was that he’d always been “exploding with love.” I recognized that I was hearing a conversation he was always having with himself. I tried to tell him that I, too, was exploding with love. Although I might appear to be a cold, thin-blooded person, inside my heart I was a geyser. Chagrined by feeling so much, I’d perfected a way of veiling myself. I told Father that I wished there were a bromide I could take to relieve me of feeling everything so intensely, so I could be normal. He said not to wish for that; it was a fine thing to feel deeply, but I must channel it into Divine Nature.