Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Not having made the acquaintance of my new neighbors, I am surprised they are aware of my existence. Nurse returns, pale and tremulous, and describes the squalid scene unfolding up there. An unmarried couple, “very drunk and coarse, Miss,” are in the process of bringing an infant into the world with the assistance of an equally inebriated nurse. When Nurse offered medical assistance, the people hurled profanities at her and threatened her (and me) with violence.

  And then the ghastly birth goes on all night right over my head, noisily, agonizingly, until I wish the woman would just die and no one else would ever have to bring an infant into the world.

  The next morning the “parents” and their nurse are still drunk. The infant is dead. The mother, Miss Clarke tells us, did not want to see “the brat,” a beautiful infant boy who lived for three hours. They had not brought a rag to wrap the poor child in, which certainly seems suspicious to me. When told “it” was dead, the mother was glad and worried about whether the doctor could bring her waist into shape. She had laced herself as tight as possible to conceal the pregnancy. And then she asked, “Oh, where is my sealskin jacket?” I assume the police will investigate and that murder charges will perhaps be filed. But nothing happens.

  I implore Nurse not to leave my side the next night. I cannot stop shaking and my heart is in great distress.

  “Beating irregular again, Miss?”

  “Strange jumps and hideous sinkings. It has never been this bad before.”

  Nurse strokes my fevered brow and says, “Let me get you a bromide and we’ll see about fetching a doctor. If only Mr. James or Miss Loring was here!” Bringing me a glass of water, she mixes in a mustard-colored powder, and helps me to sit up and drink it. From her anxiety I deduce that I must appear one step from the grave.

  “No, Nurse! I can’t face another doctor.”

  “Then, I shall cable Mr. James in Italy and he will know what to do.”

  “Oh, how do you bear it?”

  “What, Miss?”

  “The suffering, the wretched lives people lead.”

  “Oh, it is well enough for me. I am very sorry for your headaches and other pains, Miss.” She really is. What a dear person she is.

  “Did you ever hear such howls? Like the hounds of hell. I can still hear them! Oh, the lot of women is hard, Nurse.”

  “Well, Miss, since you ask, I have heard and seen worse.”

  “I wish you had not told me that. My mind has already gone into such a cramp about it.”

  “It is a blessing the poor little thing only lived a few hours. Such a life it would have led.”

  “I suspect deeds of darkness, Nurse. Even in the best case, a human soul was surely left to die. Are they—those people—?”

  “Constable made them leave. The good lord only knows where they will go.”

  And there the tale ends. Apparently no one is interested in inquiring further into the death of an innocent infant.

  HENRY JAMES

  HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON

  APRIL 19TH 1889

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  I found myself the subject of a telegraphic call and rushed to Alice’s side to learn that she had had a very bad attack of the heart—it threatened to be fatal for some hours. . . . The violence of the heart was brought on by nervous agitation about the miserable accouchement that took place in the flat above hers. (It is always dread and fear with her.) She was thrown into such a state of nervous terror I had to remain with her for a week.

  It is odd how, in her extreme seclusion, she is liable to assaults of chance from the outside. For the present, she has taken the rest of the house for herself.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  CAMBRIDGE, MASS

  APRIL 30TH, 1889

  TO HENRY JAMES

  The Physiological Congress in Paris begins Aug. 5. I can’t help feeling in my bones that I ought to go, so I probably shall. If so, I shall be on the Cephalonia, sailing June 22. I shall disembark at Queenstown, as I am more than curious to see the Emerald Isle. Then I shall come to you. How good it will be to see poor Alice again and to hear your discourse.

  HENRY JAMES

  DE VERE GARDENS, LONDON

  MAY 25TH, 1889

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  It is much better I shouldn’t tell Alice anything of your approach till you are here, as you are quite right in supposing that every form of expectation and waiting &c is a bad element for her . . . The whole business of AK’s will was a particularly bad time for her—for she shared in the disconcerted feeling I had (and tried to hide from her) that AK’s large estimate of the needs of the Stamford Walshes (as well as the faraway Minnesota Cochranes) as compared with her sense of ours, with whom her life had been passed, seems a slap in the face.

  TWELVE

  SUMMONED BY NURSE’S TELEGRAM, HENRY ARRIVES AT MY DOOR very peaked, and I deduce from his anxious expression that I do not appear in the pink of health. (I have more or less avoided looking glasses lately.) Ignoring my protests, he engages a new doctor, a Dr. Wilmot, a fox-hunter with a delicate parfum of dog, turf, and wet leather about him. As the doctor shines his light into my eyes and ears and listens to my heart, I attempt to explain how my nerves have been affected by the grim drama overhead—the “snakes” in my stomach, the suffocating fear, the racing heart, the “going off,” and all the rest. One of these days I shall have all my symptoms printed in a pamphlet to avoid repeating them to each new doctor.

  I conclude my sorry tale by saying, “My mind has simply cramped upon it, Doctor! Have you ever heard of such a thing?” I cannot stop shaking. I must be a sorry spectacle, yet the good doctor does not comment on this or reply to my question. More proof of Henry’s observation that while Americans feel compelled to respond to anything that is said, the English understand that it is unnecessary. The doctor and his penlight search my face as if looking for contraband, his small eyes blinking behind his wire spectacles.

  “Have your eyes always been so protuberant, Miss James?”

  “I wasn’t aware they were. What does that signify?”

  “Oh, nothing at all, most of the time.”

  “By cramp,” I try again, “I mean a sort of muscular contraction of the mind. It will seize a thought and hang on like a terrier. And then my sleep goes to pieces, which throws my pneumo-gastric nerve into distress . . .” My Boston doctor and the first doctor I saw in London were emphatic about the role of the pneumo-gastric nerve in my illness, which they diagnosed as suppressed gout, but Dr. Wilmot does not appear to have heard of this sort of gout or of the pneumo-gastric nerve.

  “I see, Miss James.” He pauses for an interval that could pass for thoughtfulness. “It is salutary in such cases to rest the organism as much as possible, particularly after meals. A short walk as long as it is not on hard pavement can be salubrious. Lots of fresh air. That is my recommendation.”

  “But I have been unable to walk for some time, Doctor! I live chained to a couch, four pillows, and three shawls.”

  “Ah yes, quite.” He whips out a pad and writes an order for a tincture of belladonna for my “neurasthenic headache” and a different bromide for sleep and another for nerves.

  “In two years’ time, Miss James, you may try a hydropathic treatment, but it would be very dangerous now.”

  “It is very strange, Doctor. Living in a spa town, I am like an atheist at a holy shrine.”

  “Perhaps eighteen months, Miss James, we shall see.” He smiles, pats my knee, and passes from view. Henry escorts him down the stairs to his shiny brougham, and then returns to spend the day with me, having booked a room at his favorite inn. He is so appalled by my weakness that he will remain a week by my side. I am reclined as usual on the daybed near the window, he sits in the chair next to me, and we watch the facades of the buildings opposite turn rosy with the sunset, each window aglow with a little orange flame. In the distance gas flares blaze in the encroaching dark.

  “Mental cramps are not his specialty, evidently,” I say.


  “No, he knows there is no cure for it at the chemist.”

  My arms suddenly make a flapping motion like a seagull, a movement that happens without my intending it. My gracious brother behaves as if it is perfectly normal for one’s sister to flap her wings. I tell him, “The most striking thing, Henry, is that he was incapable of a single theory or generalization. Did you no-no-notice?” I am shivering now and my lips behave as if I’d just come in from a dip in a cold ocean.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “His mind seemed entirely particulate. As if he has me-memorized all the parts but has no sense of the whole!!”

  “He came highly recommended.”

  Poor Henry; he sounds miffed. My breakdown has snatched him away from his work and social life and he must feel like a clam pried from its shell. Habits and customs are important and necessary to his peace of mind. It is unusual to meet a creature with so strong an artistic inclination and an almost physical repulsion from all personal disorder. Yet here he is, by my side.

  I must admit, it is lovely to have him all to myself for a little while.

  Several days later, when I no longer seem likely to expire in the next moment, he delivers some news he’d withheld before. Edmund Gurney, of the Society for Psychical Research, has died. He is—was—a good friend of William’s and used to attend my “salon” in London.

  “What? The beautiful, poetical Mr. Gurney? He was so young!”

  “The cause was chloroform, self-administered.”

  “Suicide?”

  “There is to be an inquest.”

  “Oh, poor Mr. Gurney. I can’t say I am surprised, though. They say his ghosts in Brighton turned out to be frauds and he had already put them in his book. I also think it was to escape his tactless and inconceivably literal-minded wife.”

  “But she is very beautiful.”

  “Yes, but the story I heard of the marriage was this, Henry. Some half dozen young men were on a search for ‘beings.’ One of them found a ‘being’ in a Pimlico lodging-house, the daughter of a solicitor who had died, leaving a large family in poverty. Mr. Fred Myers, who seems an even greater idiot than ever, persuaded Mr. Gurney to marry her. Apparently, Mr. Gurney wrote to all his friends saying that he was going to marry a young woman much beneath him, who as his wife would have finer opportunities. But I do admire him now for terminating himself so unapologetically.”

  “We don’t know yet. It might not be suicide.”

  “Oh, it is, Henry. It is.”

  Poor, dear Henry is looking more drawn and worn-out by the day. ’Tis a sad fate that he should have me wrapped around him like the old woman of the sea. In an attempt to atone for this, I tell him a little anecdote about Miss Clarke, using some of her phrasing. “You might as well use the pearls that drop from my lips, Henry, so they stay in the family.”

  “Perhaps you should write, Alice,” he says.

  “Oh no, my scope is so narrow. I don’t go into society, as you know. Besides, it is vulgar in a woman—or so Father used to say.” I wait to hear what Henry will say.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Oh, by the way, on Katherine’s recommendation, I have been reading your Miss Woolson. I think her ‘Miss Grief’ is a very fine and tragic story. Don’t you agree?” “Miss Grief” is about a woman named Aarona Moncreif, a writer and a genius but poor, shabby and unattractive, who is rejected by the male-dominated publishing world. The author who rejects her bears a slight resemblance to my brother. I might add that there is a whiff of Sapphism around Aarona, about whose writing the term “perversity” is frequently employed. Katherine told me after spending a few days with Miss Woolson in Cambridge that she thought she belonged to the tribe of women who love women.

  “Oh yes, she is a most meticulous writer,” Henry says.

  Faint praise, I think.

  “Miss Woolson sees into the depths of a woman’s heart, doesn’t she?” I say, feeling the impulse to defend her. A barely perceptible irritation flits across Henry’s face, which he masks with a practiced smile. Less and less do I suspect Miss Woolson of scheming to steal Henry’s heart. The relationship between them is more complicated but nonetheless intense. I confine myself to saying that her work deserves more attention, and Henry agrees.

  However much he may care for his Miss Woolson, he obviously does not consider her his literary equal. I wonder if he has ever stolen any pearls from her lips and used them in his stories?

  “Oh, that reminds me, Henry.” I shuffle through a pile of clippings on my tea tray and pass one to him. “This is from the Pall Mall Gazette. A letter to the editor written by a man who was bitten by a mosquito at Henley.”

  He looks perplexed.

  “One of my documents humains, Henry! Didn’t you say that everyone in England cultivates an all-consuming hobby, the queerer the better? This is mine. I can’t very well cultivate obscure varieties of roses in my present state of health.” So far Henry is aware only that I have a notebook in which I paste odd clippings, and knows nothing of the secret diary.

  He reads the clipping thoughtfully and says, “Hmm.”

  “And these are all the letters written in response.” I pass him a stack of related clippings. “The discussion was about whether mosquitoes could survive a British winter. Most people thought not. One letter was from a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society!”

  “It is an extraordinarily microscopic focus!”

  “Isn’t it?! I have always said that this is the ideal country for an invalid. Tell me something, Henry, did you ever think of not writing?”

  A long Henryesque pause, and finally he says, “Without art my life would be a howling desert.”

  The phrase sticks to my mind long after he leaves.

  Eventually, I think, you must come to the end of yourself—and then what? I sometimes feel that I am in a sort of afterlife now, a non-physical realm of recollection and reflection, in which I must work out the solution to an important riddle before I can progress. But what is the riddle?

  Three weeks later, on a day when the sky resembles yellow custard and a warm drizzle blurs the view from my windows, Henry appears unexpectedly at midday, just after I have reached the end of volume three of George Eliot’s collected letters.

  “What an abject coward she seems to have been about physical pain, Henry, jotting down every headache as if it were the end of the world! She has greatly fallen in my estimation.”

  “She was still a great writer!”

  “Yes, of course—but such whining!”

  I notice then my brother is staring down at his shoes as if they were causing him a secret anguish. I wonder who has died this time and am on tenterhooks while Nurse pours our tea. Then he grasps both my hands, and says gravely, “Alice, I have something to tell you.”

  “Oh! You’re not getting married?”

  If he were stolen from me, I don’t know if I’d be able to bear it. And what a chore it will be to pretend to be happy, as I did, perhaps none too convincingly, when William married Alice Gibbens.

  “Certainly not,” he says, with a smile. “It is that William is here.”

  I turn white as a sheet (I actually feel the blood draining from my face) and the teaspoon trembles in my hand. I stare at my brother. “Here?”

  “He is waiting now in the Holly Walk for the news to be broken to you, and if you survive the shock, I am to tie my handkerchief to the balcony. May I tell him he may come up?”

  “Of course,” I say just before passing out.

  THIRTEEN

  IT WAS A SMALL SWOON, CONSIDERING THE MAGNITUDE OF THE shock. Shocks pleasant and unpleasant undo me equally, and when my body stops trembling and my tears stop flowing—at the sight of that dear face after six years!—I assure William that he is the good sort of shock. He is in tears, too, I should note, and the first thing he gasped was rather odd. “Why, Alice, you’ve become so beautiful. Your suffering has refined you.”

  “Well, thank you
, William. You’re not so bad yourself.” Though wearing the haggard look of sleeplessness, he nevertheless manages to look young and vital. While Henry has grown portly over the years, William has gone in the opposite direction and is lean as a greyhound.

  I explain that my nerves are prone to these fits and that my mind has nothing to say about it. “I remember describing my nerves to you once in the old days, William, and you said, ‘Oh, yes, like bottled lightning.’ It was as if you’d read my mind!”

  “It was a description of a woman in a novel I read.”

  “I think I remember that novel,” Henry says.

  “Oh, I can’t believe I’m not dreaming. You, William, in Leamington, next to Miss Clarke’s wallpaper. Can you believe it, Henry?”

  “It is rather an appalling pattern!” William says.

  “Isn’t it? Clarkey is immensely proud of it. It is called Marie Antoinette, don’t ask me why. Miss Clarke is a dear, though. She is sure to catch you on the stairs as you attempt to leave. I believe she has a scrapbook devoted to both my famous brothers.”

  William laughs. “Pompeiian Red is all the rage in Boston this season. I believe Alice is considering it for the dining room of our new house. If she insists on a frieze of erupting volcanoes, I shall have to put my foot down!”

  “Oh but, William, isn’t it the most extraordinary luck that I fell ill in the only land in which lodging houses exist! But now you must tell me about your Psychological Congress.”

  “Physiological Congress. It has been timed to coincide with the Exposition Universelle, of course.”

  “How wonderful. M. Eiffel’s tower is being called an ‘abomination’ and an ‘eyesore’ in the papers. You must go see it, William.” At this point Nurse comes in with tea, rolls, and gooseberry jam on a tray, and I watch William struggle to maintain a straight face when she curtsies to him. I’d almost forgotten that Americans don’t curtsy and are unaccustomed to slavish manners on the part of their domestics.