Alice in Bed
Page 32
“Bostonians are unfathomably fascinated with temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed. Is that because you are a race of sailors?”
Katherine’s brothers are men of the law as well as sailors. One is a judge. While judges are necessary, I believe that sitting on the bench may encourage an exalted view of oneself. But as Katherine adores her brothers, I keep this to myself.
“Speaking of brothers,” she says, “did I tell you I bumped into William near the post office just before I left? I asked him how he was, and he said, ‘Splendid! I have just posted my Index and I can relate to the universe receptively again.’ I asked if he meant his Psychology textbook and he said, ‘Yes. Nasty little subject! Nothing in it! Everything one wants to know lies outside!’”
“That sounds like William. I was afraid he’d go on dragging that manuscript around for the rest of his life. It has been in existence longer than young Harry, who is in long trousers now.”
“I did wonder how he manages to teach a subject he despises.”
“Oh, he only despises it sometimes.”
I dictate another paragraph for my diary. Noticing my references to Inconnu, Katherine says, “Do you mind my asking, Alice: who is this Inconnu?”
“Well, after I ‘pass over,’ as William’s spiritist friends say, Inconnu will be the unknown reader who will turn these pages, amazed at the immortal wisdom this finicky old maid harbored under her unprepossessing exterior.”
I suppose, in the end, Inconnu is an idealized distillation of my surviving family. He/she feels strangely real, linked to me by that peculiar bond of sympathy between author and reader (which I have felt intensely with any author I have loved) and that I feel even now, filling me with quiet radiance.
“Unprepossessing indeed,” Katherine chuckles. “Do you want to have your diary published, darling?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare, Kath. Imagine Father’s apoplexy if his only daughter sullied the family name by publishing her hysterical fancies!”
“Your father has departed. Even Aunt Kate is no more. You have as much right as Henry to publish whatever you wish, it seems to me.”
“Oh, but you don’t honestly think . . . this is publishable?”
“I do.”
Katherine is monstrously well read. I had not dared to hope that my little diary might possess literary value. I shall have to give this some thought. “I suppose my principal readers will be William and Henry. Maybe Bob if he is in his right mind—or even if he isn’t. Later, the odd niece or nephew on a dull, rainy afternoon. William’s little Peggy maybe.” I don’t tell her of my fantasy of a grown-up Peggy reading my diary and thinking, “So this is how Aunt Alice felt. This is how she saw the world! I wish I had known her.” It is silly of me; I have never met the child and she is only three years old.
“I saw Peggy with her mother on the cars just before I left. She is a real beauty. And never draws breath, from what I could see.”
“I wish I could meet her.” I see by K’s expression that she regrets having reminded me of the thousands of miles of blustery Atlantic standing between me and home.
“It’s quite likely, Kath, that Inconnu will think, Oh, that Aunt Alice! Crazy as a loon! I’ll probably ask you to toss the pages into the fire after I go. Meanwhile, don’t breathe a word to anyone, especially Henry. I’ve told you how he likes to use family letters as kindling.”
Sometimes it feels as if someone else inside me is writing, surprising me with thoughts I did not know I had. As if a Book of Alice existed somewhere in a ghostly state, and I have only to discover it and translate it into form.
What wonders abound in Katherine’s presence! The crack in the window frame has been sealed against the winter chill, the chimney has been swept, the carpets and portière curtains taken down and flogged, the bow-front clock repaired. The globes of the lamp that hangs from the ceiling have been scrubbed, the mantel of the lamp on the wall has been repaired. The sudden lessening of gloom is like a heavenly vision.
She has been bringing me up to date on her battles on behalf of the Harvard Annex, the women’s branch of Harvard. The overseers and many of the faculty have apparently taken a vow to repel, vex, and defeat the female sex at every turn—including, most recently, revoking their library privileges. The dilemma is this: The library is located in Harvard Yard, where women are not permitted to set foot lest they distract the Harvard men from their studies. Yet it is the only Harvard library. So far, the women are banned from it, but there is a proposal afoot to permit female persons to use the library on Sunday afternoons between two and four o’clock.
“I don’t see why the sight of a woman should be fatal to scholarship,” I say. “I have a good mind to pop off a rantlet to President Eliot myself.”
“You may just as well address a brick wall,” Katherine says, and stomps off to make a pot of tea. When she comes back with the tea things on a tray, her equanimity seems restored. “I sometimes think it will be a hundred years before women gain basic rights. We probably won’t live to see it, Alice. I just have to remind myself that I am only a small link in a very long chain.”
One of K’s splendid qualities is the way she takes my “going off” in stride and never disapproves, as others are apt to do. Let me try to explain what it is like. First, there is a wooziness, a sinking feeling in your head, followed by a startling whoosh as you are drawn downward as if into a funnel. (You may picture the funnel in the pans used for making angel food cake.) Then you go under, and you’re gone. All this takes place in a few seconds. It used to frighten me, but when you faint every day, you soon get used to it and it becomes a sort of hobby.
K. claims that just before I go under there is an utter blankness in my eyes. “You just look gone. Do you feel as if you’ve been gone?”
“Yes. Sometimes when I open my eyes, I don’t know where or even who I am. The whole story of Alice James has been wiped clean. Do you think death appears to us that way?”
“I suppose we’ll find out someday. If there is anyone left to find out.”
Katherine is agnostic verging on atheist. She calls herself a Unitarian, which can mean anything. Eternity neither awes nor interests her particularly, which is one difference between us. Gathering up her work-reticule and a cushion for her back, she settles down near the window to knit. The sky behind her is cloudless and appears chilly.
“Katherine, does it ever worry you that there might not be enough room in heaven for all the people who have lived on earth since the beginning?”
“The good sheep, you mean. The black sheep go elsewhere, so they say.” (In reality, neither of us subscribes to the superstition of hell.)
“Imagine the bureaucratic fuss that would be required for accounting for yourself at the Pearly Gates. It’d be like the East India Company. Documents in triplicate and so on. Surely they wouldn’t just take your word for it! Especially a woman’s word. They’d demand documentation, don’t you think?”
“It’s obvious, darling. The angels must be employed as clerks, scriveners, and bureaucrats.”
“I’ve always said you were a genius, Katherine, and this clinches it.”
“You’re very perky today. What were you laughing about earlier?”
“Oh, it’s this Prussian noblewoman whose memoir I’m reading. Knew every science and language under the sun—like Lizzy Boott, only more so; used to correspond with Descartes, was very handsome. But she had a bête noire. Her nose would get red, and she’d shut herself up and see no one. Who among us does not have a red nose at the core of her being which defies all her philosophy?”
I am watching Katherine assemble the components of a lamp, admiring her hands, so familiar to me and so beautiful. Hands that can split wood, soothe runaway horses, do delicate needlepoint, or stroke my fevered brow. (I am rather partial to hands and believe they reveal character.) When she has the lamp up and running, I ask her if she would mind terribly reading to me from the newspapers. “I’d love to close my eyes and take in th
e world through your lovely voice.”
She picks up the Standard and scans the front page. “Well, the Standard this evening devotes the first paragraph of news to the thrilling fact that the infant daughter of the Duke of Portland was christened in Windsor Castle.”
“You don’t say!”
“Yes, and only at the foot of the column is there a small mention of the ‘impressive gathering’ in Hyde Park of the working-men on the eight hours question. The Rothschilds drew their blinds, they say.”
“Oh, Katherine, isn’t it delicious that these starvelings should make millionaires tremble?”
Then she turns the page and is silent a moment.
“Here is something rather grim. Are you in the mood?” When I nod, she proceeds to read aloud an article about a Hampstead man on trial for subjecting his wretched wife to systematic cruelty. He had continually threatened to kill her, K. reads, either by jumping on her, dashing out her brains, or by inserting a pin or needle behind her ear to penetrate her brain.
“But can the brain be penetrated so easily?”
“I don’t know, but there is more.” She reads more of the man’s dastardly acts, and suddenly bursts out laughing and can’t stop. I am quickly doubled over as well.
“Why are we laughing?” I say. “It is terrible of us.”
“We must stop now. We really must.” She struggles to regain a serious mien and then, a minute later, glances at me and explodes in laughter again. “Oh dear! What if Emily comes home and finds us cackling like a couple of harpies?”
“Oh, she will be gone for some time. Her Sabbath-day dissipations last from eight-thirty in the morning till five in the afternoon. She visits her family somewhere in the middle of the day, I think.”
The article K is reading concludes with the monstrous husband being found guilty and fined ten shillings.
“This must go into my journal, Kath. It so perfectly illustrates man’s inhumanity to woman. Does it say whether they are still living together after that?”
“It gives the impression they are. I suppose the poor woman has nowhere to go, and there are probably children.”
Thinking of this, our hilarity subsides instantly.
A quarter hour later, Katherine asks me, “Would you like another cup of tea, Alice? Shall I help you get dressed, or is this one of your Marie Antoinette days?” (Referring to that queen’s habit of receiving callers in her boudoir.)
“No. I think I shan’t get dressed today, Katherine. I would much prefer to help you get undressed.” I smile up at her and tug at her arm so she sits down abruptly next to me. “Nurse will be at her Guild all day, so while the cat’s away . . .”
She flashes me a particular intimate smile I love. I begin by unbuttoning her blouse as she fumbles with the buttons of her skirt. So many layers to a woman! Normally, unbuttoning is a trial, but at these times it is a delicious game. I loosen her stays and kiss away the red marks pinched into her shoulders, and when her breasts tumble out I turn my attention to them. Then, she is kissing the inside of my wrist and slowly works her way up my arm and into the hollows of my throat, my eyes mist up with joy. And a great wind comes up and blows away the world and we return to our true selves.
Afterwards, I say, “According to the Bible, Yahweh has strong objections to man lying with man, while about woman lying with woman he is strangely silent. Why do you think that is?”
“Well, as a male God, he fails to see the possibilities. So much for omniscience.” She stretches her limbs, graceful as a cat, and smiles tenderly at me.
“I remember William holding forth once on ‘inversion,’ saying that women, unlike men, could not really be inverts because there was nothing they could do.”
Katherine bursts into peals of laughter. “Always the expert, your brother.” After a long pause, she says. “I can’t help noticing, darling. There is a something different about you. Different from before, I mean. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“Three years older and that much more shriveled.”
She clucks her tongue. “No. What is it?” Her eyes travel over me appraisingly.
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“I see what it is. There is a serenity about you now—underneath your going-off and your headache and leg pains and all of that. Does it have something to do with your diary?”
I smile. How lovely that she can see what others cannot. It is true. There has come a great change in me. A congenital faith flows through me now, making all the arid places green—and, well, I can’t describe it beyond that.
“It may be because I have given up hope.”
“Do you mean, hope that you will get well?”
“Yes. Everyone thinks hope is a good thing, but it is really a sort of disease of the mind. Anyhow, I have renounced it and feel so much better. I don’t even hope for an answer to the perennial riddle, what is wrong with me? I probably won’t ever know, but then there are so many things we don’t know, aren’t there?”
I watch her take this in. Katherine never, ever tries to talk me out of my feelings. Nor does she urge me to have “positive thoughts,” as the Mind Cure ladies do.
“Oh, Katherine, isn’t it terrible about poor Winnie Howells? Speaking of undiagnosed illnesses.”
“Heartbreaking.”
“Sent away to that dreadful Dr. Weir Mitchell’s Rest Cure, far from her family. Hounded to eat, eat, eat, and all that time she herself was being eaten by a cancer. The autopsy proved it. I can’t get over the injustice. I just received a letter from poor Mr. Howells in response to my condolence letter to him. I think it was the saddest letter ever written.”
Our dear girl is gone and we begin to realize it, to yield. But we are helpless. I conjure her back in gleams and glimpses of her old childish self. And he went on to write wistfully of the dear old days when Father and Mother were alive and my brothers and I were young and Winnie was a tiny girl in a scarlet cape. Reading it, I dissolved in a flood of tears.
But now suddenly I am surprised by a memory that makes me laugh out loud.
“What?”
“I was just remembering—you know how short in stature Mr. Howells is?”
“Ye-es.”
“Well, one day he and Mrs. Howells were at our house, and he was speaking of a man whom he described as ‘about my size.’ You must picture Mr. Howells doubled up in a deep armchair, looking smaller if possible than ever. And my mother said, ‘Ah, then he must be a very small man?’”
“That does sound like your mother.”
“Yes, and poor Mr. Howells was for the next five minutes quite invisible. In fact, Mother was for some time the only person in existence!”
Katherine gives vent to one of her deep laughs, and for a moment I forget that I am a hopeless invalid, that Winnie Howells is dead, and so are my parents and Wilky, and I will never see my native land again.
A week later K. goes off to Cambridge on another fact-finding mission on the higher education of the female. When she returns, she tells me she met an American girl studying there who told her that there is no need to make rules regulating the walking together of male and female students. Almost all the female students are presumed to be future governesses or teachers, and any male student would rather throw himself into the Cam than be guilty of the bad form of walking with any one of them.
WILLIAM JAMES
95 IRVING ST., CAMBRIDGE
SEPTEMBER 18TH 1890
TO HENRY JAMES
My book appeared two days since, and I’ve ordered the publishers to send a copy to you.
Most of it is unreadable & too long to sell well I’m afraid. Tell Alice I don’t burden her with a copy unless she expressly requests it, as I think the sight of it is more fitted to depress her than to cheer her up.
Reviews of The Principles of Psychology
It is literature. It is beautiful, but it is not psychology.
—Wilhelm Wundt
. . . . shows that there is no body of doctrines, he
ld by all competent men, that can be set down in a book and called Psychology. . . . [A] work of the imagination.
—George Santayana
The author is a veritable storm-bird, fascinated by problems most impossible of solution. . . . [T]he most complete piece of self-evisceration since Marie Bashkertseff.
—G. Stanley Hall
. . . materialist to the core . . .
—Charles Peirce
FIVE
“LISTEN TO THIS, KATHERINE. HERE IS A WOMAN WHO CAN ONLY see in black and white!” I am reading aloud parts of an essay by William, “The Hidden Self,” which has just been published in Scribner’s. “Imagine! And here’s a girl who split into three different people. They come out in the hypnotic trance state, apparently. Lucie One has no awareness of Lucies Two or Three, but Lucie Three does know of Lucies One and Two. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean, she became three people?”
“Apparently she harbored three separate minds, or personalities, inside her. What do you suppose that would feel like?”
“Complicated.” A pregnant pause. “If you believe it.”
“What? You don’t?”
“Have you ever met anyone like that? In real life?”
“Well, if you mean on Beacon Street, Katherine, then no, things of that nature could never happen. Certainly not on the water side.”
She laughs delightfully. The Lorings live on the water side, the even numbers. When you visit people on the water side of Beacon, they always insist on making you admire the view, no matter how many millions of times you’ve seen it before. As if the Charles River and the mudflats of Charlestown were the Taj Mahal.
William’s essay is a discussion of this Dr. Janet, of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who uses hypnotism to read the minds of hysterical people (as far as I can make out). After William returned from his Congress, he put off working on his textbook for several months by reading Janet’s tome and boiling it down to this essay. Although sending it to me is doubtless part of his diabolical plot to cure me of my “hysteria,” I am finding it more interesting than I expected. Katherine takes a dimmer view.