Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Alice in person is elegant and graceful, and talked and laughed in a charming way, making me feel ashamed of my dull and ponderous way with her these last years. The tone of invective and sarcasm that sounded shrill in her letters is uttered in a soft, laughing way, and gives an entirely different impression. I’m afraid I am a dull clod, unfit to deal with airy creations like Alice. But I think she has forgiven me.

  As I kissed her good-bye, she gazed at me with moist eyes and, clasping both my hands in hers, said, “It is sad, William, to think of you, with your love of kith and kin, left alone in Cambridge with the family melted like snow from about you. Our dead—les morts qui sont toujours vivants.” I live in the bosom of a large family and Alice has only Henry, but to her, “family” means the original family circle. A helpless invalid, she feels sorry for me. (I must admit I suffered a twinge of jealousy seeing H and A’s intimacy, their private jokes and references.)

  On our way out H & I ran into A’s landlady, Miss Clarke, a friendly garrulous woman of early middle age with massive red arms. She told me, “Miss James is a perfect angel and means so much to us. I don’t know how we’d get along without her.” This statement was clarified when Harry explained that A. is obsessed with the poor families of the neighborhood, knows every detail of their wretched lives, and keeps them afloat with gifts of money and clothes.

  As for Harry, he’d warned me in a letter, “I am as broad as I am long, as fat as a butter tub & as red as a British materfamilias.” When he met me at the station, I almost didn’t recognize him. He seemed a thorough Englishman, having covered himself with strange, heavy, alien manners and customs, like a marine crustacean with barnacles. After a few hours in his company, however, he became once more the same dear good innocent Harry of his youth. I am sorry to say that he is saving not a cent, so my vision of him paralyzed in our spare room, is stronger than ever. He seems quite helpless in that regard.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  PARIS, AUGUST 6TH, 1889

  TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES

  My darling—Haven’t managed to mail this yet, as new things keep happening. Tonight I found three quills poking out of the mattress cording! My sleep has gone to pieces—Took two chloral hydrate last night, and got two hours of what might technically be called sleep but was not refreshing in the least. Also: heat, drain smells, cries of inebriates and putains on the street. I long for you (and home) more desperately than I thought possible and begin to wonder if I shall go to Switzerland after all.

  Today the Congress was dominated by Pierre Janet. He has the most unruly eyebrows ever seen on a Frenchman and told stories of his hysterics that would make Zola blush. If only Sister Alice could see him, but great French doctors don’t make house calls in England (or even possibly in France) and how could Alice cross the Channel if seasickness almost killed her two and a half years ago? She and H are as ignorant of science as the beasts of the field. I must tread carefully.

  Tell our Harry I almost mistook the man from the telegraph office for one of his lead soldiers. Tell Bill to stay away from Mrs. Waring’s roses, and give Peggy a hug and kiss from her devoted Papa—

  DARLING (AUGUST 7TH) . . .

  This letter goes on and on. I must tell you about the strange man I met at dinner tonight. He is a Dr. Freud, a Viennese neurologist. As I sat down he was carefully excising the center of a slice of bread in a manner that hinted at surgical training. But for such a methodical man he was subject to such flights of fancy! He had heard of me, and confided that he’d read several of my papers. I am quite amazed that I am known to anyone here.

  Dr. Freud clearly dislikes Dr. Janet—and couldn’t explain why. And he is peculiarly fascinated with dreams, recommended strongly that I study mine, warning that “the interpretation is heavy work.” I thought only gypsies paid heed to dreams! He had little interest in the Exposition, and seemed to prefer the Buffalo Bill Cody show in Neuilly, where he was absolutely riveted (and horrified) by Annie Oakley! Seems to suspect Americans of all kinds of barbarities.

  Can’t fall asleep—it is 2:15 am in this stifling hotel room. Perhaps Dr. Freud has had a strange druglike effect on me. He told me at dinner about the hysterical patients he is treating with hypnotism—all women, some American. He said he prefers women patients because their minds are open, less “barricaded.” Would you agree, darling?

  We men are such heavy, blundering, obtuse creatures; we require taming by our womenfolk. Even at the age of not yet two, don’t you think Peggy is having a civilizing influence on the boys? I am getting more homesick by the minute; I don’t think I can bear to go to Switzerland now, I would only envy the men I see going home to wives and children, with parcels under their arms.

  JOURNAL OF WJ 8/9/89

  While Herr Doktor Freud & I were talking, I described Sister Alice—her hysterically paralyzed legs and general broken-downness—identifying her as a “female relation of mine.” I immediately felt like a mouse that has attracted the attention of a cat. He peppered me with prying questions, which made me feel it would be unnerving to be his patient. I mentioned that the young woman had been too ill to attend her brother’s wedding, whereupon, he said, “Ach, a wedding, you say? Weddings give rise to all kinds of complexes. Is it possible that the young woman was in love with—who was it?—the brother?”

  “Surely not,” I said. “They are brother and sister.”

  “It happens, Dr. James,” he said in an irritating manner, “even in the most respectable families. Say that in the girl’s mind the brother is her suitor, her sweetheart, her husband even. Perhaps the brother has led her on unconsciously by flirting with her at an impressionable age. The girl becomes over-stimulated. Naturally, the desire for sexual intercourse with the brother is too charged for her to acknowledge and becomes submerged in her unconscious, giving rise to symptoms.”

  I suppressed the urge to fling my wine into Dr. Freud’s face. Is brother/sister incest really so common in Austrian families? How can he presume to know all about a person he has never met? Also, I don’t like this word unconscious. This region of our being is not unconscious, like a person in a coma; it is subliminal. All the gods as well as the devils come to us through the subliminal door.

  I didn’t flirt with my sister, not intentionally, anyhow, but I suppose Dr. Freud might see it differently. I can’t make up my mind if he is a grand halluciné or a genius—perhaps a bit of both. When I brought up Pierre Janet, he went silent, then said, “If I may speak frankly, Professor James, I don’t trust Janet, although he is Charcot’s protégé and there is no one I admire more than Charcot. There is something unheimlich about Janet, don’t you find?”

  I don’t know what he meant. It was all in all quite a queer evening.

  JOURNAL OF WJ CONT.

  8/10, 1 AM

  I forgot to mention Freud’s queer confession last night. He told me, within a half hour of meeting, that he suffered from a fear of travel (Reisefieber). This was due apparently to an experience of seeing his mother’s nude body in a sleeping car when he was two years old. Can anyone really remember being two years old? Why should the mother’s body inspire such shock in an infant?

  As my brain whirred and sleep eluded me, I thought more about Sister Alice and my possible guilt in that regard. I was revisited by the memory of her anguished face when Minny came to visit and we stayed up all night talking in front of the fire. Fresh snow covering roofs, streets, and fields like a white duvet, Alice sat there with us for over an hour, sensing that we wanted to speak privately and determined to prevent this; she has never really cared for any of the Temples. At last she left, favoring us with one of her most disdainful glances on the way out. Remembering what happened afterward, I almost wish she had stayed. But I will try to fall asleep now.

  JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 2:30 AM

  NO LUCK WITH SLEEP . . .

  After Alice left the room, Minny felt free to unburden herself about Elly’s engagement to Temple Emmet, three decades her senior. “She does it out of duty.
But if they are not appalled at what they do, why should I worry? My future brother-in-law has invited me to travel to California with them, and as the doctors seem to think it will be good for my lungs, I will go, I think.”

  I wondered if she meant to leave forever and could not bring myself to ask. “If you strike gold, please write to me and I will come out by the next train and help you run the mine. I have nothing else to do now.”

  “I certainly will, Willy.” She smiled wistfully. “But aren’t you a doctor now?”

  “Only technically.” I explained that my oral examination, by Dr. Holmes, lasted all of fifteen minutes. “I shall confine myself to prescribing medicines for friends and family, hoping they don’t die.”

  Shouldn’t have mentioned dying. Did not know the status of Minny’s health. V. thin and pale. Staying in Pelham, New York, with Kitty and her husband (another elderly Emmet), forbidden by her doctors to return to the damp of Newport.

  She asked me if I knew a cure for sleeplessness.

  “How many hours are you sleeping at night?”

  “Oh, I don’t sleep. I have given it up.” She laughed at herself, and I promised to send her a few tablets of the new wonder drug Chloral. Another bond between us—sleeplessness.

  The next part is painful to recall. We stayed up all night & I deluged her with all my philosophical distress—the full catastrophe that was WJ. Horrible recital.

  She drew her crocheted shawl around her, her face tinged pink in the reflected firelight. Her irises were the color of the Atlantic on a clear, cold day in January. If she were not my cousin, I knew without a doubt that I would be in love with her. In fact, I was in love with her. I decided to tell her that night.

  About Elly’s marriage of convenience she said, “It is the irretrievableness of the step that is so overwhelming to my mind. I have told no one else of my feelings—only you, Willy.” Said she was certain now she would never marry. She’d renounced everything, even God, and found a wild, pagan happiness in the simplest things—the sky, the play of light on a wall, the hush of falling snow. “I do not understand Uncle Henry’s view of Creation. When he says it was not a single event in time but is continually occurring through some process, what does he mean? It truly makes no sense to me.”

  Forgot to mention the terrible row at dinner. Never saw Father so irate as when Minny challenged his beliefs, trembling but unflinching. No woman had ever stood up to him like that, and I was quite sure she won the debate. Am fading now, will attempt sleep.

  JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 3:15 AM

  No, instead of trying to sleep I’ll continue writing for as long as it takes. Altho’ my memory is usually execrable, I remember everything about that long night twenty years ago.

  Minny told me that she’d concluded that she was a natural stoic, an “unrepentant pagan.”

  “That is brave,” I said.

  “Not at all, Willy. While lying awake at night, I have done an immense amount of thinking. Hour after hour I pondered the doctrine of vicarious atonement, which your father subscribes to. Has Jesus taken on all our sins and released us? I took it in deeply for over a month. I thought so much about Jesus in my sleeplessness that I began to feel very close to him, as if I lived inside his mind. I can’t describe it properly. It probably sounds mad.”

  “It doesn’t.” What an extraordinary being my cousin was. My own struggles seemed small and distant in her presence, as if they were trinkets. If we could only be together, I might become the man I was meant to be. Or such was my deluded idea.

  “Finally, William, I found I could not accept it. I gave it up. And now I am a happy pagan child.”

  Just before dawn, I blurted it out—asked Minny to marry me. She looked startled. I explained I meant a “white marriage”—we’d go to Europe, living together like brother and sister. I would take her to the best spas of Europe & she would be cured of her consumption, I of my hypochondria, &c. What a self-centered and unbalanced young man was I! What a blessing that we outgrow our youth! To convince M. that a real marriage between us would be a crime against nature, I subjected her to an incoherent rant about my degeneracy and my vices, the suicidal urges crashing through me, &c, &c. I cringe to recall it. Was there ever a more self-defeating marriage proposal?

  Poor M. sat there silently, hands folded in her lap, regarding me levelly. She said gently that she would consider my offer and write to me of her decision.

  Her letter arrived two weeks later. She’d had two “very bad” hemorrhages and her doctor told her, “My dear young lady, your right lung is diseased!” and she replied, “Well, Doctor, even if my right lung is all gone I should make a stand with my left.” Then another doctor said her lungs were not so bad after all and so she thought she would go to California. She was turning me down.

  Only now, with Minny twenty years dead, can I allow myself to notice that underneath my hurt and disappointment lurked another emotion. Relief. Less than 2 months later came the horrible news from Pelham that she was dead. Elly & Kitty said she’d fought desperately, agonizingly, to live. How it tortured me to picture my remarkable cousin as a poor, suffering creature, all her gifts reduced to the struggle for breath. If it all comes to this, what is life worth?

  JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 5 AM

  Still not a wink of sleep.

  There is more, I’m afraid. A breakdown after M’s death, the Somerville Asylum. A room of green and white tiles. Shivering inside a wet sheet, teeth clacking like dominos. A painting of a girl in a white muslin dress standing on a bluff overlooking the sea, meant to drive me mad. Or madder. The doctors are all in on it. “Don’t jump, Minny!” But my words can’t reach her and she tumbles, her white dress billowing around her like a spinnaker. Hypodermic needle in left arm. “For your own good.” Helpless.

  All color drains from world, then a dead field, the color of grey volcanic ash, endless. All around me the bodies of dead soldiers, grey-skinned, in heaps. All the fine dead Boston boys! I am sent here to this asylum because I am a shirker. A brief, panicked, doomed struggle. Grey turns to black. No more WJ, end of story.

  In the greyness a pinpoint of light, like a very bright star rising in the east. Impossible to look away. I and this orb more brilliant than a thousand suns are one, made of the same substance. It contains the seeds of everything and floods me with bliss. A voice says, “Thou hast overcome the world.”

  My body no more to me than a pile of dirty laundry. Oh! the shock of going back into it, like diving into an icy pond. Muscles ache, eyeballs like peeled tomatoes, throat parched, hands lashed to the bedstead with rubber cords. Then I remember. I chose to go back. Why? Minny went and did not return. I made the wrong choice and must live with it. I weep behind the mask they have put over my eyes.

  Written on my intake form (I read very well upside-down): Hypochondria, Melancholia, Chronic Masturbation. Not until my honeymoon did I realize there was nothing wrong with me. Something tugging at the fringes of my mind, tho’. What Freud said at dinner about a railway sleeping carriage when he was two.

  I was 2 in 1844, the year of Father’s Vastation. Living in Windsor, England. No memory of it. No, something. Making faces at baby Harry. I’d growl like a bear and Harry would bounce up and down, laughing and waving his arms. If I growled louder, Harry’s mouth would turn down at the corners and he’d burst into tears. Every time. I kept crossing that boundary between laughter and tears, making Harry laugh, then cry, then laugh again. Other things I remember: Hail beating on the roof, snails leaving glistening slime trails on the flagstones, a steep staircase, floral wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom. And this: Father with his head in Mother’s lap blubbering like infant, Aunt Kate standing by the washstand, her lips pressed together in a grim line.

  Chest tight, face hot. Run outside. Grass high, higher than my head. Pick a dandelion and blow, watch the wind tear it apart. Sky stretches blue, away and away. World so big, Willy little. Where mama, papa, aunty, nanny, brudder, everyone? Gone. Tears burn in my eyes. Desolation r
ips at my heart. Did not know it was possible to be so alone.

  FOURTEEN

  “HAVE YOU EVER KNOWN A PERSON TO CHANGE HIS MIND SO OFTEN, Henry? He is just like a blob of mercury; you can’t put a finger on him.”

  Naturally, we are speaking of William, who just left us for Liverpool to catch his steamer home. In a spasm of homesickness in his Paris hotel, he cancelled his plans for Switzerland and booked passage on an earlier ship, but while sitting here by my bedside yesterday, his mind had already shifted to a plan for bringing the whole family back to Europe next time.

  “He is so like Father, isn’t he?” I say. “Do you suppose he is ever content where he is?”

  “I think that when he first arrives home he will describe his homecoming in terms Odysseus might have used about Ithaca. Then the petty annoyances of life will grate on him and he’ll read the shipping news and start dreaming of foreign ports. In a year or two he’ll come back to Europe, which he will love at first but which will inevitably disappoint him, each country in its turn, and on it will go.”

  “Probably everyone is like that, but William is more so. He is more of everything than most people, wouldn’t you say?”

  While he was here, he told us about his Congress, which I could not entirely absorb due to my ignorance of physiology, et cetera, but there was apparently a great deal of hysteria and mesmerism in it. “As in a dream,” he told us, “I heard speaker after speaker refer to the published work of Monsieur Weelyam James. One Frenchman described ‘Le Sentiment de l’Effort’ as ‘the greatest work in psychology ever written.’ I had no idea anyone had heard of me.”