Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Lifting my eyes heavenward, I recite now, “Man must be pleased; but him to please is woman’s pleasure.”

  Sara’s eyes tear up, and she dabs at the corners with her handkerchief. Unable to recall what comes next, I recite the only other lines I remember: She loves with love that cannot tire;/and when, ah woe, she loves alone,/Through passionate duty love springs higher,/As grass grows taller round a stone.

  “I have never quite fathomed how love compares to grass growing up around a stone,” I say. “The whole poem is daft, isn’t it?”

  Sara is gazing at me with infinite tenderness. “Very daft,” she says. “And the absurd notion that love springs from duty and that Home is so holy to our sex that we should never wish to set a foot outside the door. Oh, but Alice, I didn’t mean—” She blushes, evidently recalling that I never go out.

  I brush this aside. “It’s all right, Sara. But what do you think the poet means by when she loves alone? Can it be that the husband has become weary of the poor drudge?”

  Sara laughs merrily, and it is like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. “Ah well, who could blame him? Imagine living with a martyr like that; you’d almost have to be very wicked to balance things out.” As she says this, her upper lip curls in a way familiar to me from the days when she mocked the pieties of our youth. I am surprised by a memory of her hand up my skirt at Shady Hill as Charles Norton droned on about the ancient Greeks, the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. If we could fly back there, to reckless love, to youth and hopefulness, just for an hour. But no one can, of course.

  The sun ducks back behind a cloudbank. Before long, Sara has launched into a tale about a luncheon with the Prince of Wales and some Princesses Royal, which she describes in some detail before becoming gloomily preoccupied with her horticultural problems. She mentions a book I haven’t read and tells me that Grace Norton is in England with Sally and Lily, who are young ladies now.

  “I expect their father wants them to acquire English accents,” I say.

  Sara shrugs. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.” I can’t help noting that a few English inflections have rubbed off on Sara herself, but I suppose she has a right to them, being English on her mother’s side.

  Grace never calls on me, of course. Visits Henry often, sympathizing with him about the loathsome burden of an invalid sister. We are all so concerned, by all means don’t let your work suffer, et cetera. I must have some of Mrs. Piper’s occult powers because I can read Grace like a book, even from afar.

  As for Sara, what happened to the young girl who dreamed of running away to live with the Bedouins, who drank absinthe, quoted Baudelaire, and sneered at all conformity? I was a fairly conventional young girl (though subversive in my mind) until Sara showed me other possibilities.

  Something I had forgotten floats into my mind, something Sara said years ago, when she was visiting America with her new husband. Someone was asking about her honeymoon in Italy. She was speaking into her teacup and so faintly that you wondered if you’d misheard. I recall the word “disappointing.” Or maybe it was “discouraging.” I believed she was referring to the lack of amenities at their hotel, but now I wonder. Was the marriage unconsummated? Or consummated too brutally, as sometimes happens (I am told)? We only see the surfaces of people, even those closest to us; the rest is unspeakable mystery.

  THREE

  THE FIRST THING PEOPLE WONDER ABOUT INVALIDS IS HOW WE occupy our time. First of all, pain consumes a good deal of our attention. It comes in so many dizzying varieties: pounding, grinding, drilling, whacking, constant, floating, intermittent, sharp, dull, radiating; tooth pain, head pain, joint pain, stomach pain, bone pain—I’ve known them all. (I could teach the physicians a thing or two, but they don’t listen, not to a woman anyhow.)

  When the pain is very bad, I have Nurse give me morphia, and then, although I still feel the pain, it seems to have nothing to do with me.

  When callers ask how I pass the hours, I say I read a good deal and leave it at that, but, in fact, there are a thousand small ways to amuse oneself without leaving one’s bed. I really ought to print up a pamphlet on the subject.

  Trying to recall things, for example.

  You think up categories and make lists: All the hats I’ve worn, the rivers I’ve crossed, the twelve labors of Hercules, the hotels I’ve stayed in from Paris to Quebec, the names, in alphabetical order, of the girls in my class at Mrs. Agassiz’s school. The word for nightgown in French (chemise de nuit), the first lines of a Victor Hugo poem (Est-ce ma faute à moi si vous n’êtes pas grands? Vous aimez les hiboux, les fouines, les tyrans,/Le mistral, le simoun, l’écueil, la lune rousse), the names of the Sapphic ladies in Balzac’s La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or.

  You’d be astonished at how absorbed you can become in a railway timetable; with it as your magic carpet you can travel from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, watching the countryside rush backwards in your memory. It is fantastic what the mind retains in its hidden pockets. Woods and fields, stone houses, apple orchards, storks nesting in chimneys, village squares with their band shells and their mairies, young women in kerchiefs whispering together on a bench. Yesterday I spent most of the morning recalling the ball-gowns of my youth. My first grown-up formal gown had a hoop-skirt. A hoop-skirt was a death trap; it could launch a woman off a cliff in a stiff wind or, if her skirt caught fire, trap her inside the metal cage to burn to death, as happened to poor Mrs. Longfellow of Brattle Street.

  The hoop-skirt, and the petticoats undergirding it, eventually shrank to the sleek silhouette of the polonaise; then, unfortunately, for reasons known only to a handful of Parisian couturiers, the polonaise commenced gradually to gather into a puffball over the buttocks, ultimately becoming the bustle. For several years women resembled swaybacked horses, with shelves jutting out from their hindquarters on which you could have rested a wine bottle and glasses. (What a strange notion of female anatomy our young men must have had!) Need I add that these costumes were weighed down by numberless tassels, flounces, braids, beads, jewels, bangles, and other furbelows? To be a woman is to be weighed down.

  In the days when I was not yet weighed down, when I was a child running free in a short skirt, a powerful reverie would steal over me and it was as natural as breathing or feeling the sun on my skin. Then, inexplicably, when I was about thirteen, a door slammed shut and my secret world, my luminous inner world, became inaccessible to me. Does this happen to everyone? Did I notice it more because of our family’s social isolation? Soon I could scarcely remember the past at all; it all became very remote, like teething rings or baby teeth.

  But a year or two ago, the past began coming back. Now everything I recall or imagine feels realer than real: the stones are cold and damp to the touch, the colors jewel-like in the stained-glass windows, the scent of vinegar and earth pungent on the stone steps of the cellar.

  Well, let me take you there.

  The sisters make us kneel on the flagstones to pray; the discomfort is supposed to pull our thoughts away from worldly things and back to God. But whenever I try to think of God I see only ugly Sister Augustine and am filled with a great repugnance. I open one eye a slit, glimpse the girl next to me in the pew. Her eyes are closed, her hands steepled in prayer, but there is the hint of a saucy smile at the corners of her mouth.

  I shut my eyes, open them again. The mysterious smile is still there. Are these the schoolgirls I glimpsed in the Louvre sixteen years ago? Or have I somehow entered the Paris convent where George Sand was educated? I can’t say, but here, as in George Sand’s convent, the pupils have sorted themselves into three groups, les sages (the good), les bêtes (the stupid), and les diables (the devils). No question about it, Vivienne (for that is the girl’s name) is a diable. So am I. “Don’t open your eyes,” I whisper. “Pretend you are praying, but talk to me.”

  “D’accord.” The dimple in her cheek deepens as she tries to suppress a smile.

  “If you could wish for
one person here to die, who would it be?” How easy it is to whisper out of the side of your mouth while scarcely moving your lips. One of the many useful talents fostered in a convent school.

  “Would I go to hell for wishing it?”

  “No, you’d get a free pass. You’d be off the hook.”

  “Well, Sister Augustine then. Je la déteste.” Vivienne snaps her fingers soundlessly, holding her hand just below the prayer rail. A wide smile breaks out behind her steepled hands. “Is she gone? Elle est disparue?”

  “Yes, the only trace of her is a little pile of bones and her crucifix on its heavy chain. Now listen carefully, Vivienne. Tonight we will meet in the small chapel with the baptismal font, the one near the staircase that leads down to the cellar. As soon as Sister Boniface starts to snore, we’ll sneak down.”

  We have just discovered that in the cellar there are dank stone steps, smelling of earth, mice, and rot, leading to the underground catacombs. These catacombs go on forever, we have heard, beneath the streets of Paris. Who could resist such an adventure? Yet we tremble to think what monstrosities might lurk in those subterranean tunnels. That night, as it happens, Vivienne falls asleep before Sister Boniface does, and I don’t have the heart to wake her. It is so cold in the dormitory that little cloud-puffs rise from the girls’ mouths. There are delicate frost flowers etched on the lower half of most of the windows. I lie awake most of the night, hearing the bells toll the hours, thinking of Vivienne’s smile, my rosary, my evensong.

  A knock on the door jars me out of this daydream. It is Miss Percy, one of my most faithful callers, in an apple-green walking dress with a rose-colored polonaise. She is accompanied by an elderly lady I’ve never seen before.

  “The door downstairs was on the latch so I just walked up. I hope you don’t mind, Miss James.”

  Miss Percy is an Englishwoman of the useful information sort, a type Henry says is more common among the men here.

  “Oh, yes, Miss Clarke has taken to leaving the front door unlatched, as the newlywed couple upstairs cannot seem to hold on to their key. I hear them in the corridor—‘You had it, Darling.’

  ‘No, Ducks, I am sure I saw you put it in your vest pocket this morning.’”

  The newlywed husband bounds downstairs at half past eight every weekday morning, a series of fast thuds, a pause for the landing, another series of thuds. I know them by heart. Count to three and he bounces into view striding across the crossroads, where ragged children sweep the dirt and straw back and forth. He takes his hat off with his left hand, runs his right hand through his hair, puts the hat on again, and disappears. At half past five he bounds up the stairs again like a half-grown puppy. His wife meets him in the hall, and there are kisses and murmured endearments. The rhythms of this young couple, like the five daily mail deliveries and Nurse’s venturings out, punctuate the monotony of my days. There is always something to look forward to.

  “In the beginning marriage must feel like playing house,” I remark to my visitors. “Until it gets to be a chore.”

  “Yes, I expect so,” Miss Percy says, and introduces me to Mrs. Arnold, an elderly lady with skin tags on her eyelids resembling barnacles on a log. Apart from this, she is rather elegant and has a beautiful smile. She suffers from malaria, she informs me cheerfully. It is incurable and waxes and wanes, “but when you’ve had it as long as I have, it simply becomes part of your life. It is curious how one becomes accustomed to things, isn’t it, Miss James? I am not sure I would be willing to give up my malaria now that it has become part of my character.”

  Miss Percy, sipping the tea that Nurse has brought in, appears deeply puzzled. After doing her customary 360-degree scan of the room, she asks, “How do you occupy yourself all day, Miss James? If I were stuck in a room all day, I should go barking mad, I think.”

  This is a tactless thing to say to an invalid, but Miss Percy is a good egg and means well. “Oh, I read, write letters, stare out the window. I have become a connoisseur of skies and clouds. Also, I am capable of an immense amount of wool-gathering.”

  I am thinking, Oh my dear, if you only knew!

  I ask Mrs. Arnold where she contracted her disease, and she tells me India. She is the widow of a civil engineer and spent thirty years on the subcontinent, living on in Lucknow for several years after her husband’s death. I steel myself for the usual condescension toward the duskier races, but Mrs. Arnold is not one of those. If she hadn’t fallen ill, she never would have returned, she tells me. “My heart is in India. Unfortunately, this body requires a northern climate.” (I like the way she says this body, as if it were an object only loosely connected with herself. I have a feeling Mrs. Arnold and I may become friends.)

  Miss Percy chooses this moment to interrogate me about where we got the buns I am serving and to reflect on their resemblance to a pastry baked by a friend’s cook. It is some time before we manage to get out of this rut and back to India. Mrs. Arnold describes several things that interest me greatly: a temple in Calcutta where monkeys are worshipped as gods, weddings where six-year-old brides, weighed down with gold jewelry, weep for their mothers, a city on the Ganges where the sickly flock to die because it is considered auspicious to die there.

  “The Hindoos do not hide death. They put a dead relative on an open pyre and everyone sits around and watches it burn; you see the skin blacken and the fat crackle and the arms fall off. If you take a boat down the Ganges at night, you pass dozens of bodies burning on the ghats like candles in the night. After that it is impossible not to see the body as a temporary abode.”

  She smiles and so do I. Miss Percy arches an eyebrow. I suppose I will get an earful on the subject of pagan idolatry another day.

  Leamington, Mrs. Arnold adds, reminds her of Benares, the city on the Ganges where it is considered auspicious to die. Both are waiting rooms for eternity, but here there is a great gulf between heaven and earth, she says, while in India the next world feels very near, separated by the subtlest of screens. I am finding Mrs. Arnold very interesting and hope she will visit again.

  HENRY JAMES

  DE VERE GARDENS, KENSINGTON

  JANUARY 1889

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  Alice is not unhappy, but she is homesick. I don’t think she likes England or the English very much—the people, their mind, their tone, their hypocrisy. This is partly owing to the confined life she leads and to the passive, fragmentary way she sees people. Also to her being such a tremendously convinced Home Ruler.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  FEBRUARY 11TH, CAMBRIDGE

  TO MISS ALICE JAMES

  I ask everyone, Alice, who has seen you whether you are homesick, and can’t make out how it is, either from their replies or yr. letters. You being caught over there is the strangest fate. Mary Watson was in the cars last evening and told me of her visit to you last summer, praising (like everyone else) yr charm, brilliancy and beauty. Why don’t you have yr photog. sold as a professional? There would also be an American market. . . . Wendell Holmes is going to vote for Harrison, God knows why, except to show the shady side of himself.

  FOUR

  IT BEGAN AS A COMMONPLACE BOOK. YOU KNOW THE SORT OF thing, for aren’t they all the same? Favorite poems (on Love, Motherhood, God) copied out next to keepsakes from balls, steamship ticket stubs, inspirational passages from literature, sympathy cards from friends. My book was far from inspirational, however, being almost exclusively devoted to newspaper clippings documenting my obsessions. What can I say? I am a shut-in.

  I believe I’ve mentioned that when I am too ill to read, Nurse reads aloud to me from the Standard, the Times, the Telegraph, or the Pall Mall Gazette in her high clear voice. On the Irish Question, Parliamentary debates and so on, she wraps herself in my opinions a hundred percent. I have heard her say, “Of course I know nothing about it myself, but I know someone who says so-and-so. My patient Miss James and she must know.”

  Sadly, however, I can’t seem to cure her of that dismal “sense of
one’s betters” that poisons everything here. Yesterday she and I were reading a newspaper story about a visit two of the princesses paid to a hospital. I said, “When, Nurse, have you seen a dying child recover because a princess has passed through a ward?” She kept insisting that it was terribly kind of the royals to visit the sick. She won’t hear a word against them. (Miss Clarke is even more devoted; the Queen’s Jubilee is memorialized on her tea towels, a tea cozy, an apron, and a serving plate.)

  “Well, they ought to do something to justify the cost of keeping ’em,” I said, at which Nurse went silent as a clam and began to knit strenuously. I told her that I couldn’t stop thinking about young Georgie Cross, about whom she’d told me. After the girl’s mother died of cancer, she was placed with a “lydy” and put in charge of six children at one shilling per week and one change of underwear. Imagine getting by with a single change of underwear per week and never having a bath, whilst having to dress and undress countless pampered children all day long! I casually remarked that if the royal household had one fewer horse, a hundred Georgies could have a whole week’s worth of underwear. Unfortunately, during my harangue I made reference to the “tinsel monarchy” and Nurse reacted as if I’d slapped her. I must watch my tongue and avoid attacking her sacred cows, however absurd they may strike me.

  In the newspapers Nurse and I have been reading about Mr. Balfour, about Henry Morton Stanley plowing through darkest Africa, shooting at everything that moves. About Robert Browning, dead. (A pity he didn’t die before he made such a spectacle of himself with Edward Fitzgerald.) Every day the great men go on shouting in Parliament, starting wars, massacring Arabs, Indians, and Africans, acquiring medals and titles. To me they are like children, knowing nothing of real life.