Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  “Do you remember, Harry, how once a week the Empress Eugénie would pass along the Champs-Élysées in her polished black coach with the footmen in the imperial uniform? People along the avenue would bow to her as she passed. It was just as if one of my fairy tales had come to life. I expected elves and pots of gold next. ‘Is an empress as good as a queen?’ I asked Aunt Kate. ‘Does she live in a palace?’ She said, ‘That empress and her husband are nothing but well-dressed ruffians.’ Father made a shushing gesture to warn her not to display her republican sentiments (which he shared, of course) so immoderately, especially in front of the servants.”

  “Yes,” Henry smiles at the memory. “He always said there were spies everywhere, which was quite true. How Louis Napoleon and his beastly Empire made Father’s gorge rise!”

  My brother takes the night train back to London in the evening. I think he plans to go off to the country but has not told me yet, fearing that his departure on top of the news about Aunt Kate might shatter what little sanity remains to me.

  Later I have a long teary talk with Nurse, who by now is almost as well-acquainted with the members of my family as I am. “I hate to think of poor Aunt Kate left to the mercy of those Wyckoffs, Nurse. They are a shady branch of the family. Cousin Howard Wyckoff, after poisoning himself with drink and becoming a lifelong burden on Cousin Helen, left all his money to some worthless cousins and not a dime to Aunt Kate, who had done so much for them. Albert Wyckoff is even more ghastly, and his wife spends all her days betting at the horse-races.”

  “How dreadful!” Nurse says, obviously titillated by the disclosure of such debauched James relatives.

  “Yes. I do wish my aunt could be cared for by William and Alice, but there is no question of her traveling now, unfortunately.”

  “Miss, is she a believer?’

  “Oh, Nurse, who knows? We have such peculiar ways of believing in our family. She has lived her life for others.”

  “Well, then, it will be all right.” She means that Aunt Kate probably won’t go to hell.

  HENRY JAMES

  DE VERE GARDENS, KENSINGTON

  MARCH 20, 1889

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  Seeing Alice last week confirmed my impression that her meager tabby cat little society there is too poor to be “kept up” and for all practical purposes she is wholly alone. Not that she admits for a moment that she suffers from it. Her interest in politics & in the Irish question &c almost constitutes a roomful for her.

  SEVEN

  WHAT A PITY THE YOUNG ARE UNGRATEFUL AND HEEDLESS OF the aged, believing them to have been born faded and incapable of vivid emotions. I wish I’d been kinder to poor Aunt Kate. If her life had a theme, it was her intense longing to absorb herself in a few individuals, in the members of our family primarily. After the deaths of my parents, I am afraid I let her down very badly.

  After Mother’s sudden death from asthma in January 1882, Father and I moved our household to Mt. Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, where I was thrown abruptly into the role of lady of the house, in charge of the account book, the servants, and the care and feeding of Father. I did not find it easy and began to suffer from a constant apprehension that something needed doing and I did not know what it was. So much to do! Ovens needed black leading, ashes needed raking, flues needed cleaning, menus needed devising, linens needed washing, mending, starching, ironing. Oh, you have no idea!

  I caught the smirks on the servants’ faces and knew that they were prepared to laugh behind my back, ignore my orders, and allow the tradesmen to cheat me. I was in an agony of anxiety that I would fail Father. Then, one morning, I woke up knowing exactly what to do; perhaps I had dreamt the solution. I went to Mother’s wardrobe, put on her grey worsted cloak with the fox fur collar, and walked down the hill. I felt my body assume her carriage, her manner of walking, even her thoughts. Carrying her marketing basket, I went from shop to shop, listening for her voice in my head to tell me how much to spend for a roast, that the laundresses should be engaged for Thursday and Friday, that the clothes-horse needed mending. I found myself effortlessly using Mother’s phrasing when I went over menus with Cook or gave orders to the butcher’s boy.

  Every so often Father would address me as “Mary darling” and I treasured that as a sign of his trust. The streets of Beacon Hill were steep, cobbled, slippery in wet or icy weather, and thus impossible for a man with a cork leg, but Father’s interest in life was over. After a few months, Aunt Kate came up from New York to help out, and we took turns in the sickroom, plumping Father’s pillows, giving him sponge baths, applying wet cloths to his parched lips. I read to him from the Transcript and from the poems of Matthew Arnold and Tennyson. We started in on War and Peace.

  “Don’t read me any more Russians,” he said irritably when we’d reached the end of the second chapter. “I can’t keep track of their names.” A month earlier he’d been wild about Tolstoy.

  We tried Wilkie Collins and he complained of the melodrama, and after that he wearied of The Mill on the Floss. “Too womanly! She goes on and on! She should have been ruthlessly edited!” I didn’t entirely disagree. We embarked next on a sentimental novel by Mr. Howells, and Father said, “Who cares if the boy loves the girl or the girl loves the boy or whether they get married? None of it matters—don’t you see?” Finally he wished only to hear passages from his books and smiled dotingly at his own prose. I suppose in time your life becomes a story you tell yourself.

  I saw that my aunt was watching me closely to see if I would fall apart, something for which I’d shown a decided aptitude in the past. When Father’s health went into a steep decline, Harry crossed the ocean and called in Dr. Beach, who diagnosed “softening of the brain” and said Father might live for some time if he took some nourishment. But he turned his head away whenever food was offered.

  It was slow suicide, and I recalled ruefully the long days and longer nights that Father spent talking me out of suicide during my annus horribilis of 1878. It was clear I could not talk him out of it, and I did not try. He knew what he wanted. Before long, his parchment skin was stretched tightly over the bones of his face. His mouth was a lipless cavity. From week to week he shriveled and shrank like a human raisin, and there was a smell about him, like rotting fruit. None of which bothered him in the least.

  “You see how it is with me, darling,” he’d say cheerfully, demonstrating a twiglike arm, the sparrow bones of his clavicle.

  One day, while Aunt Kate and I were going over the next day’s menu and ordering the roast that Father would not touch, she broached the subject we’d avoided so far. “Dr. Beach says your father cannot last more than a month or so. Have you given any thought to where and how you will live? Afterwards.” I pointed out that Dr. Beach did not have the best record for medical accuracy and mumbled something about possibly going to live in my house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, the one I had built for Father and me but in which Father would never set foot.

  “You wouldn’t mind the damp?”

  “I don’t know, Aunt Kate.” That is when it hit me how unprepared I was to be mistress of an empty house. In my anguish I blocked out poor Aunt Kate’s prattle briefly and when my attention returned, she was rambling on about Twelfth Street and Fourteenth Street and Murray Hill. “You’ve always liked New York City, haven’t you, Alice? I remember your saying how much you liked the fashions and the theater.”

  Oh no! Aunt Kate seemed to assume that she and I would live together! Picture the despair that fell over me, imagining our tame spinster rituals, little trips to Newport or Southampton, sherries by the fire, I lending an ear to Aunt Kate’s opinions on the book reviews in the Nation and the fashions in Godey’s. Not to mention the poisonous effect she would have on my relations with Katherine, of whom she did not approve. Maybe that was why she wanted us to live together—to save me from the evil Katherine.

  It was unthinkable. Perhaps you would need to have lived with Aunt Kate and absorbed her through the bone to understand why I c
ould not consent, but I did not know how to explain this.

  I asked Father one day where he wished to be buried and what his epitaph should say. He said, “Here lies a man who has thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage, and death were all damned nonsense. Don’t put a word more.”

  I was waiting. For what? For Father to say that I’d meant something to him, that it grieved him to leave me, I suppose. Had he not said he could not bear to be parted from me, even for a few months? No, that was what Mother told me he said; perhaps Father himself had never actually said that I was the “sun of his existence” and thus it was unthinkable that I should go abroad again in his lifetime. Certainly he was prepared to leave me now without a backward glance. His letters to me over the years had been scarcely distinguishable from love letters; he was that kind of man, larger than life. But now, apart from his oft-expressed desire to “leave this disgusting world,” he did not speak of his feelings at all. He fixed his gaze on the window, becoming obsessed with some sparrows perched on the ledge. I couldn’t help but notice that he was far more interested in those sparrows than me.

  In his last weeks he seemed literally not to see me. As he lay dying, I was becoming a ghost to him. If he registered my presence at all, he’d say, “Shouldn’t you be mending the linens?” The only person he wanted near him now was Aunt Kate. Whenever I passed his bedroom I’d see her rubbing his stump with oil, murmuring to him. He was a happy infant again. Perhaps his dying brain mistook Aunt Kate for his Mary; perhaps the second sister finally enjoyed the happiness denied her fifty years earlier.

  And then Father’s last words. The morning of the day he died he was heard to say, “Such good boys, I have such good boys.” Later his face brightened and he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, “There is my Mary!” Before the sun set, he was dead, reunited with his Mary, and I left behind like a stray dog.

  For several weeks I’d been suffering ghastly attacks of indigestion and nervous fits, lying in my bedroom most of the time with the curtains drawn. Even a slit of light was torture to my eyes. Katherine moved in to care for me, giving me opium for the blinding pain in my head. I have a bleary recollection of Aunt Kate coming into the bedroom one day as I was weeping, and saying, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, you’d think you were the only one in this family with any feelings! Can’t you think of anyone else for once?”

  Arguments could unquestionably be brought forth to support this view of me, I suppose, but I blurted, “Who are you? I thought you were my aunt but now I wonder if you are a vampire.” I did not know if I’d said that or merely thought it. Aunt Kate dissolved at some point (things appear and disappear mysteriously when you are on opium) and Katherine said, “That was rather rough, Alice.”

  “What?”

  “Calling your aunt a vampire.” But she was wearing a faint smile.

  “Did I? Well, no one ought to pay attention to the ravings of an opium drunkard.”

  Sometime later I reportedly announced (again I have no memory of this), “Aunt Kate is a psychic vampire, Katherine. Don’t you see how she feeds on the lives and emotions of others? She is an intimacy thief!” I was shocked when Katherine told me later what I’d said, but isn’t it the things you can’t say aloud that sicken you slowly over time?

  William was on sabbatical in Europe the whole time Father was dying, staying in Harry’s flat in London while Harry was in Boston. The brothers had switched places! Feeling awfully blue and homesick amidst the distant politeness of Londoners, William confided in a letter to us, I feel as if I might die tonight and London not feel it. William’s Alice and Harry were launching telegrams and letters almost daily urging him not to cut short his sabbatical and come home, as everyone knew that under the circumstances impractical, moody William would be more hindrance than help.

  In the befogged days after Father’s death, “Mrs. Alice” came over to the house to go through cupboards and attend to various practical matters, and, finding herself in the dining room one evening with Katherine, she began to question her sternly about the opium she was giving me. Didn’t she know it could turn me into an addict? Had she consulted Harry, who as my brother and current head of household, should properly be managing his sister’s affairs? (All this was what Katherine told me later.)

  Katherine said, “Are you questioning my position with regard to Alice? Or Alice’s medical care, about which you are completely uninformed?”

  That made my sister-in-law back down.

  “If you had any idea how she suffers, you would not question it,” Katherine went on. “She is very ill, and when have you ever put out a helping hand? When have you invited her to a meal at your house or treated her like a sister?”

  Mrs. Alice turned crimson, Katherine said. She said she’d been terribly tied down with the babies and the housework and William’s being abroad and her father-in-law’s illness. And, yes, poor Alice, being the daughter, was more bereaved than anyone. She knew that. She twisted her gloves in her hands, and seemed at a loss for words.

  Her glance fell over the table, set for two, strayed into the dark bedroom Katherine and I were sharing, and returned to Katherine’s face. “We do appreciate, Miss Loring, the devoted care you take of Alice,” she said, pulling on her long woolen gloves. “I assume that yours is more than an ordinary friendship. That you are . . . friends for life?”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “That is how it is, then.”

  EIGHT

  A SPIDER HAS BEEN BUSY SPINNING A WEB IN THE WINDOW CASEMENT since shortly after dawn. On top of its beauty, the web is a death trap, and as I lie there watching it, a small white moth flies straight into it. Its struggles are unbearable to watch, so I free it, tearing several sticky strands and making a mess of that part of the web, so painstakingly constructed this very morning. The moth flies off to the sanctuary of a cream-colored curtain, to dream of eating holes in my woolens. Did I do the right thing? After all, I have cheated the spider of a well-earned meal. It is not easy being a god.

  Afterwards, I close my eyes and drift off.

  “Do you remember where we left off? We were as usual on our knees in the tomblike chill of the chapel, with its stained glass depicting past Christian atrocities. I had just breathed on your neck, Vivienne. Do you feel a warm breeze smelling of tropical flowers and the sea?”

  Hiding your smile behind your hands, you whisper out of the side of your mouth. “Isn’t that odd, chère Aurore, since we are in a drafty stone chapel in Paris in wintertime!”

  “Attends, chérie! We must train our minds in difficult austerities”—the sisters have helpfully provided instructive pamphlets on this subject—“until we can transport ourselves at will to a distant tropical land. India, perhaps?”

  “Yes!” Your eyes shine. The luminosity of your eyes is one of the seven wonders of my world. “Are we going there to baptize pagan babies?”

  A fit of giggles seizes us. We have to hear about these accursed pagan babies ad nauseam here. The sisters consider it vital to baptize them so that they will not spend eternity in limbo, but if you ask me, limbo doesn’t sound so bad.

  We wait for nighttime. Then I see your feet flying over the cold flagstones, and you slip, shivering, into my bed and pull the covers up over our heads. I feel your breath like a hot spring flowing into a cool pool. Soon we are far away. You press your ear to my chest as if to listen to my heart. I feel the goose-bumps on your arms and start to kiss them away.

  “Be careful, Aurore! Sister will hear.”

  “You forget that tonight we have Sister Dominique, who is stone deaf.”

  “It would be helpful if she were blind as well,” you say, and we muffle our laughter with the pillow.

  Our kisses become more fervent. “Have you seen any pagan babies around?” I ask, breathless from kissing.

  “Mais bien sûr,” you say, with some pretty French gestures. “But, you know, here in India everyone goes up on the roof to sleep in the hot season. The cry of the lov
esick peacocks in the courtyard drives one mad with desire.”

  I am tracing the line of your cheek and jaw with my index and middle fingers, and you stretch and purr like a cat. Then you seize the front of my gown hungrily, and, trembling, unbutton the innumerable tiny cloth-covered buttons. I like the way you savor each bit of flesh uncovered. You whisper breathily in my ear, “We are supposed to tell the Hindoos about Jesus but I think they are bored to death with the subject.”

  I giggle helplessly. “There is so much more to life than Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Lying on my back I draw you down to me. I tug the straps of your nightgown down off your shoulders and your breasts tumble out, round as mangoes. You kiss me firmly on the mouth. Your mouth tastes fruity from the candies you hoard and eat under the covers. “So, then,” you say, with a look of lovely volupté, “we let the beautiful Indian ladies with their long blue-black hair tell us about their gods. Much more interesting than ours, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Yes, and so many of them, too.” I can scarcely speak for the waves of pleasure crashing through me. “They’ve got one for everything—a goddess of childbirth, a god of the monsoon, even a goddess of smallpox. Ah, comme tu es diabolique!”

  A loud snore erupts from sleeping Sister Dominque, causing us both to jump a foot. I am struck with helpless hilarity at the thought that she can’t hear herself snore. When I mention this to you, you laugh so hard the tears stream down your cheeks. Now the air feels like the steam rising from a laundry tub. Well, of course—we’re in India! We sneak out of bed, and, holding hands, patter out of the room in our bare feet and ascend a rude wooden ladder, trembling in our night-dresses. From the roof, the moon is huge and full and looks so close to earth that it seems to brush against the branches of the neem tree. Or do I mean the banyan tree?