Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Kitty smiles like an angel. Her fork trembles. A subtle vibration, rapid as a hummingbird’s wings, seems to move through her much of the time. I have never met anyone like her and have to keep reminding myself not to stare.

  Father asks her if Dr. Prince is an easy man to get on with, and she says, “Oh, yes, he is.” After cataloguing his virtues, she says, “His lips are the thinnest you ever saw, more like a thread than a lip, but I have never seen him excited to resentment now for the nine years and a half that I have known him.” I am confused. Nine and a half years? Have they been engaged all this time? And her obsession with her fiancé’s lips seems peculiar. But I am only twelve going on thirteen; what do I know?

  One overcast afternoon I find myself trapped on the piazza with Kitty and a pitcher of lemonade. Years later, recalling this, I see the condensation on the glasses, hear the carts rattling past, smell the manure from the stable down the road. I am holding a green apple in my left hand and poking a wormhole in it with my finger, feeling the juice collect under my fingernail. Kitty is as usual clothed in white, ready for ascension. In her presence I have the impression of hearing hundreds of tiny needles clicking, like a mechanical loom in the textile factories of Lowell.

  Registering my existence, Kitty informs me she adores the sea air and the sound of the surf in her ears, and our family is utterly charming; she wishes this happiness could last forever.

  “I lie awake these long nights, perfectly quiet, thinking unutterable thoughts!”

  “Oh?” I say. “Good ones, I hope?”

  “Heavenly, dear!”

  We sip our lemonade in silence for a few minutes. I rack my brain for something to say. Then it occurs to me that Kitty probably doesn’t care what I think anyhow.

  “Do you ever feel, Cousin Alice, that if someone opposes you, you might shatter like glass?”

  Although I do feel that way at times, I am not about to admit this to Kitty. I shrug and try to avoid meeting her too-intense eyes.

  As if guessing my thoughts, she says, “You know the story about the princess who was sent to a water cure because her eyes were too bright—she looked at things and saw too far? That is all my disease is.”

  Does Cousin Kitty have a disease? I suppose it would be rude to ask what it is.

  “I am writing a book for young people,” she continues, as if I had asked her to tell me more about herself, “based on my experiences. I plan to have it published, but the girl in it is called Mabel, not Kitty. Even if you are dead it seems dreadful to have everyone know what kind of person you were.”

  The things that come out of her mouth! Just as I am wondering how to escape without giving offense, she offers to show me the contents of the heart-shaped cloisonné locket she wears around her pretty neck. “All right,” I say. She opens it. I lean in close, and make out a lock of reddish-brown hair.

  “So Dr. Prince has auburn hair?” I am trying to be polite, although being close to Kitty is making my skin itch. Or maybe it’s my mosquito bites.

  “Oh dear no, Alice! Dr. Prince’s hair has gone completely white from his severe trials!” (As if I should have known this!) “This lock belonged to his late wife.” She stares dreamily at the horizon and her beautiful china-blue eyes mist over. “God saw best to take her to Heaven. He saw best to send me to help Dr. Prince get well, and to care for his motherless children, poor little lambs. And so I shall do.”

  “I see,” I say, though I don’t at all. Dr. Prince must be an elderly man.

  “Dr. Prince’s dead wife knows that I have delivered him and Johnnie and Louise and myself from a terrible spell. She loves me very much.”

  “Who are Johnnie and Louise?”

  “Dr. Prince’s children. You see, I never wished to be married if I must have children. I dreaded the suffering and the squalling of the first year, but as the doctor already has two, he will not require me to bear him more.”

  Can a person choose whether to have children? Doesn’t God just send them as He sees fit? With this thought comes an intimation—a foreboding almost—of a great many other unknowns of which I’d been unaware. The end of childhood is at hand; I feel it in my bones. There is nothing to be done.

  “I must stay always to be his eldest daughter,” Kitty babbles on. “He has a stronger claim on me than my dear father, for he never scolds or misunderstands me. He can never love me as he did his wife, but I never concern myself, Alice. It is certainly as much as I deserve or want.” Then she relates more anecdotes illustrative of the doctor’s benevolence and his trials and a pile of boring details about the children, while I scan the horizon in desperation, hoping someone will come along and relieve me of Kitty. With her thoughts fixed on the late Mrs. Prince, she tells me in a confiding tone that she is willing to submit to the “martyrdom of the marriage bed.” Her eyes, up close, could burn a hole through you.

  “You know,” she whispers, “it is so beautiful here, and your family is so good and charming, but it cannot last.”

  “It can’t?”

  “No, Alice. I am a little like an animal and feel things before they come. I am quietly watching and preparing for the next thundercloud. You had better prepare, too, little cousin.”

  “Why should I prepare?” I am sick of Kitty and her airy-fairy ways and ready for her to go back to Northampton and never return.

  “Our Lord is merciful but no thought is secret from Him, Alice.”

  I quickly review my secret thoughts: (1) I have wished on occasion that Bob would catch a fever and die so I will not be teased so much. (2) When I picture kissing someone, it is usually a girl. (3) I fantasize sometimes about being blown off a cliff in my hoop-skirt (a danger Godey’s is always warning readers about) and in my imagination it feels lovely, like flying. (4) I am alarmed and frightened by my father’s stump. (5) I wish our Temple cousins would stay away from Newport this summer so I can have my brothers to myself. (But there is as much chance of this happening as of Father tiring of Divine Nature.)

  I steer clear of Kitty for the rest of the visit, which is not difficult, as she is chiefly interested in William. To my relief, she finally returns to her greybeard and marries him a few months later. After she leaves, while we are doing some sewing on the piazza, Mother casually mentions that Kitty had been a patient in the Northampton Asylum, “suffering from a religious mania, so they say,” and met Dr. Prince while in that broken-down state.

  “Oh! That would explain how queer she is, Mother! She told me she holds Bible study classes for the inmates. Wouldn’t you think they’d resent being preached at by a fellow lunatic?”

  “Oh, but she is completely cured, Alice. I believe she looks only to the future now.”

  No, she is a thorough lunatic; why does no one else see this? But I say nothing and refrain from asking Mother what Kitty might have meant by “the martyrdom of the marriage bed.” Some things are best left unknown.

  Just before Kitty’s visit, a shattering thing had happened. Without warning, all my imaginary friends disappeared—the invisible friends who for years kept me company, listened to everything I said, laughed at my jokes, told me their secrets and their stories. I can’t explain this. Did I leave them or did they desert me? Anyway, they were gone now, there was no getting them back, and I found myself starkly alone for the first time. It was like being orphaned, cast out of a warm, loving world into one that was heartless and alien.

  For a long time I blamed Kitty for what happened next, but she was only an omen, like a raven or an owl appearing at your window. In the end there wasn’t much to her; it was as if she’d tried to cobble together a personality out of a handful of traits and didn’t quite bring it off. Yet her presence seemed to shift things in our family and nothing went right afterward. When I try to peer into that darkness, I lose my way. The Temples are in on it somehow, and the War is coming closer, and soon William will stop painting and go to Harvard to study science. That August I will turn thirteen and a veil will drop over me. By September, all pleasure wil
l be drained from my world: the sailing, the sea-baths, the collections of shells and sea-glass, the romps on the beach—all of it will suddenly leave me cold.

  Our Temple cousins do not help matters. By early July, the six of them are, as usual, installed in the house next door with their elderly guardians, Aunt and Uncle Tweedy, and our two households merge into one large, boisterous extended family. Will’s attention is captured entirely by the Temple girls, which is irksome. Harry, too, is in thrall to them, as are Wilky and Bob. As soon as the Temples appear I turn into a grey moth in a flock of butterflies.

  In a pine grove not far from our house, I come upon William one day kissing Kitty Temple, the eldest of the girls. Her back is pressed against the trunk of a tree, and there is not a millimeter of space between them. Her arms are wrapped around Will’s neck, her eyes closed dreamily. I can’t see William’s face, but for an instant I feel what they feel, the tug of intense physical longing. It is a revelation. The air around them quivers with their desire; the trees and tall grasses seem to bend to it. Their kiss rouses feelings and sensations in me I can’t name; all I know is that I can’t bear to watch them kiss anymore. I call out to them, and they startle and pull apart.

  William says it is just for practice, and please don’t tell Mother. My eye falls on a column of ants near my foot; I place the toe of my boot in their path and watch the ants swerve around it. You can’t help but admire them, marching along in a soldierly column, carrying their immense burdens. I make no answer to William except to scowl. I am not a tattletale; he should know that by now.

  William has been working on a portrait of Kitty Temple for weeks. They go off together to Mr. Hunt’s studio every day, sometimes with their painter friend John La Farge, and return hours later. I wonder if there is a portrait or if they are just going there to kiss some more, with their bodies pressed against each other. At the end of August the painting is unveiled and I feel its power. Your eyes are drawn to Kitty’s white neck, her cloud of dark hair, her beautiful hands engaged in some needlework. Despite my fragmentary knowledge of art, I see that William has captured an immortal quality in Kitty; if I’d known the words then, I would have said it was the Eternal Feminine. Was that mysterious quality inside Kitty all along, or did being painted by William make her more beautiful? (William has sketched me numerous times, in caricature style, along with the rest of our family, but I doubt he will ever find me worth an oil painting.)

  Was this when I first knew I was set apart from others and could expect nothing from the world? Did it happen all at once, or little by little? Maybe I should have William’s Dr. Janet—was that the man’s name?—mesmerize me to remember what has slipped through the cracks.

  I have a sense of something else that happened that summer which remains just out of reach. I write in my journal,

  I had to peg away pretty hard between twelve and twenty-four, “killing myself”—absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk beside still waters, and possess oneself in silence.

  But what do I mean by this?

  WILLIAM JAMES

  95 IRVING STREET, CAMBRIDGE

  JUNE 22ND 1890

  TO HENRY HOLT (HIS EDITOR)

  No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated in 1,000 pages—it is a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass testifying to but two things: that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd that WJ is incapable.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE

  JUNE 19TH 1890

  TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES

  TAMWORTH IRON WORKS, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  Darling—I just mailed The Principles of Psychology in 5 large boxes. If it burns up at the post office, I don’t care for I shan’t rewrite it. I miss you dreadfully, but you know that already. I hope you are all well and that black flies aren’t feeding on the flesh of our children. We are having a Biblical plague of them here just now, but that is not the worst of my troubles. On the horse-cars on the way home from the PO, a hideous thought burst into my mind. The proofs! I cannot bear to contemplate them. Therefore I intend to leave within the week, before they arrive, and join you in NH. That way, they can’t disturb my peace till the end of summer.

  How is the new fraulein working out? I hope she will be tough enough to withstand Billy.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  95 IRVING STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

  JUNE 26, 1890

  TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES

  Darling: You were right. I did not manage to leave. That you know me so well is either reassuring or terrifying, I am not sure which.

  You must promise not to laugh or rail against me when I tell you why. Just before I was to leave, I woke up before dawn in a white panic, convinced that the reason Henry Holt hadn’t acknowledged receipt of the book was because he loathed it and had not the heart to tell me. For several days I pictured in vivid detail my sorrowful fate as an unpublished professor, pitied and scorned at the Faculty Club, &c. I wrote to Holt that since I hadn’t heard from him, I felt no further responsibility whatever about having the thing published.

  And the very next day the proofs started arriving, 20 by each of the 4 daily mail deliveries. Thus I am caught & unable to join the rest of you, alas. It is a terrible business, these proofs. I miss you to the point of despair. I see you so clearly in my mind, sitting at your dressing table in your peach-colored gown, the smell of your cold cream, your hair falling down. I weep at the thought of my children’s dear faces.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE.

  JULY 6TH 1890

  TO HENRY JAMES

  Today I went to Somerville to visit poor Kitty Prince and found her thrashing like a demon, pinned down by three nursing matrons and one doctor. She is so shriveled I thought her legs would snap like matchsticks and watched in horror as the nursing matron pinched her nostrils shut. This forced poor K to open her mouth, into which the red-faced doctor inserted a horrible metal bit and turned a screw that pried her mouth open. All this time she was shaking and quivering from head to toe. When they forced a long brown tube down her throat, the choking sounds were horrific, and, while I gaped in disbelief, the matron inserted a funnel into the end of the tube and poured a pitcher of yellow fluid down Kitty’s throat. Raw eggs. Her eyes roved wildly, like a spooked horse.

  I asked the doctor why they were torturing her. He said, “She is determined to starve herself to death and we must prevent that. We have orders from the superintendent to force-feed her three times a day.” Well, I know the superintendent (Edward Cowles) as a colleague and (I thought) an enlightened scientific man, and I intend to give him a piece of my mind. Why not just let her die if her case is hopeless? (He told me last month that her chances of recovery now are nil.)

  TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION

  JULY 4, 1891

  Sir: For several years past I have lived in provincial England. Although so far from home, every now and then a transatlantic blast, pure and undefiled, fans to a white heat the fervor of my patriotism.

  This morning, most appropriately to the day, a lady from one of our Eastern cities applied to my landlady for apartments. In the process of telling her that she had no rooms for let, the landlady said that there was an invalid in the house, whereupon the lady exclaimed, “In that case perhaps it is just as well that you cannot take us in, for my little girl, who is thirteen, likes to have plenty of liberty and to scream through the house.”

  Yours very truly,

  Invalid

  FOUR

  SO I AM PUBLISHED! HOW MUCH MORE DISTINGUISHED ONE’S words look in print; I confess it gives me a little warm glow. I went through almost as many author-processes in composing it as Harry does with one of his novels. He writes that everyone in London has guessed my identity and that I am the talk of the town.

  It is a month of miracles. Two weeks later, Katherine arrived chez moi after three years’ a
bsence! Listed in the shipping news as “Mrs. Peabody,” a passenger on the Cephalonia, she fortunately succeeded in transforming herself into Miss Katherine Peabody Loring on the train from Liverpool and is with me now.

  What bliss it is to huddle in my daybed by the window and dictate my diary entries to K., who, with her self-devised code, takes dictation as quickly as I can talk. She is a wonderful audience; her infectious laughs, wry commentary, and pointed questions spur me on. One thing you should know about Katherine: she is in thrall to words. She once referred to my having “seduced” her with “my language,” and occasionally says things like, “I’m not sure how you would put it in your language.”

  “What do you mean, my language? It isn’t as if I had my own dialect.”

  “In my family we think the Jameses talk like Irish bards. I’ve never heard anyone talk like William. At dinner parties most of the table goes silent so they can listen in.”

  “It was always thus, Katherine. Father had his bardic moments, and William and Henry, even poor Bob. I, on the other hand, express myself entirely normally.”

  “Not really, dear.”

  “Give me an example, then.”

  “All right. When we were discussing your finances yesterday you said, ‘My income is a most interesting quantity, with the greatest capacity for diminishing itself and yet still existing.’ I made a note of it in my diary.”

  “I was only stating the facts.”

  “Most people would have phrased it differently. Anyway, that’s only one example.”

  “Do I figure prominently in your diary, Katherine?” I ask in a teasing tone.

  “What do you think?” She flushes a little. In some respects, my beloved is shy, which I find endearing. “I believe I have been influenced by your diary a little, Alice. Lately, I’ve been trying to overcome the Boston tendency to record bare facts. A typical entry in a Loring diary goes like this: Mild overcast day, temp. 64. 1:30, Dined at Tavern Club with J. Winthrop. Stopped by Doll’s afterwards. You should see my brothers’ diaries. Nothing more personal in them than the air temperature.”