Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  “Kindly suspend your disbelief for a moment, Katherine. The situation with Lucie—that’s the girl with three personalities—”

  “Do you think that’s her real name?”

  “Probably not. Anyhow, whenever this Lucie stopped conversing directly with someone, she could no longer see or hear the person. The person to whom she’d been talking simply vanished.”

  “Some people are like that. Take your Miss Percy. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Not exactly, but you have a point. Monsieur Janet says this sort of thing is proof of—what does he call it?—the narrowed and contracted nature of the hysterical mind. Do you find my mind narrow and contracted, Kath?”

  “No, quite the opposite. The French are so odd, aren’t they?”

  “They are, and if you want another example: There was a young woman who could feel neither pain nor touch, and when Dr. Janet brought this to her attention, she said, ‘C’est tout naturel, as long as I don’t see them; everyone is like that.’ Don’t you love that, ‘C’est tout naturel’? So French, believing in their rationality, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  “Exactly! Like the Parisian cab drivers.”

  She doesn’t need to explain. Katherine’s frugalities are legendary, and in Paris her tips to cab men are frequently flung into the road amidst a torrent of French abuse, whereupon K. goes around calmly picking up centimes and putting them back into her reticule. This serves to further inflame the driver, and in this manner vivid French curses have been added to her vocabulary. How I wish I could witness this in person. Maybe if I improve through some miracle—oh, stop, Alice! Sometimes hope tries to creep in, but I am determined to weed it out mercilessly. There are such beautiful open spaces beyond hope and fear, and that is where I want to plant my flag.

  “How exactly does this Monsieur Janet put people in trance, anyway?”

  “It says here he uses ‘the orthodox magnetic method of passes made over the face and body.’” I pass my fluttering hand slowly down the length of Katherine’s face and torso and intone in a vaguely Slavic accent. “You are becoming v-e-r-y sleepy!’”

  Katherine stops to count her stitches, then says, “Fanny Morse tells me that whenever William attends a party, half the guests end up on the carpet, hypnotized.”

  “Oh, he’s been doing that since we were children and saw a stage mesmerist perform in London. William writes here that, when they are in trance, hysterics regain the ability to feel, or see in color, or whatever they were missing—but just for a while. Afterwards, they lapse back into the same old story. And they forget in the waking state what happened to them in trance. I suppose William must think I go into trances all the time.”

  Another pregnant pause from Katherine. “I wonder, Alice. Do you think it really profits a person to remember everything? Perhaps it is better to adopt Emily’s attitude toward history and ‘let bygones be bygones.’”

  One of our pastimes is to plan an imaginary trip to Paris together, a sort of honeymoon. It is unlikely I’d survive a Channel crossing, but that does not stop us from embroidering all sorts of Parisian details: an old hotel with gargoyles and an ancient grumpy concierge who speaks to us without looking up from the smudged register on her desk, café au lait and croissants in bed in the morning. We enjoy brushing imaginary crumbs off our duvet and laughing about our concierge, who persists in believing we are Germans and wishes us Guten tag every morning.

  And then my bell rings, and sweet, vaporous Miss Leppington comes in with a pair of Mind Cure ladies. One is a lean American widow who was once treated by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy herself and is stunned to hear that we, being from Boston, have never encountered this great divine. I attempt and fail to elevate the tone of the conversation by quoting from William’s article. After some moments of reflection, the American says to the Englishwoman, “You call it hypnotism; we call it the Science.”

  “But,” says the Englishwoman, a dowager of the woolen type, “it must be very dangerous to manipulate such a delicate organ as the brain.”

  “Oh, but they mold the brain so wonderfully now,” says the Yankee, resting her chin lightly on her steepled hands. A thin thread of saliva is suspended between an upper tooth and her lower lip. It moves up and down as she talks. I keep waiting for it to break, but it bravely hangs on.

  Meanwhile, K. is trying fruitlessly to explain that hypnotism is not the same as massage.

  “How is it done?” asks the British dowager. “Through the skull, by some marvelous instrument, I suppose? And the weighing of the brain is so wonderful. How do they do that?”

  Later, Katherine tells me that Miss Leppington whispered to her on the stairs, “I am so glad to see Miss James looking better. There is less going away of her face in weariness and pain.”

  “Going away of my face?”

  Katherine shrugs and makes one of her funny faces.

  “By the way, did you notice the thread of saliva on the American woman’s tooth? Strung between bottom lip and upper incisor, bobbing up and down whenever she talked.”

  “My, Alice, you are sharp-eyed in your way.”

  “When that happens, it is all I can think about. I was all but overcome by a desire to reach out and break the thread.”

  “I’m so glad you refrained.”

  Several days later, a grievous neuralgia complicated by an infected molar obliges me to assume the horizontal. Katherine stays by my side all day, reading from Kidnapped, by Henry’s friend Mr. Stevenson. Then she reads aloud from the Standard, from which we learn that Henry Morton Stanley is engaged. Who would wed such a creature? And the clericule is married! To secure possession of this rare and precious creature, the paper informs us, the bride was obliged to employ five clergymen and four yards of train.

  When my toothache blooms into great shivering whacks of pain, Katherine brings in a Mind Curess called Susan, who bids me shut my eyes and say over and over to myself, “I am a child of God and as such pure, perfect, and without flaw.” Afterwards she tells me I am too intellectual and “barricaded by my intellectual friends.” Two days later, a dentist is summoned to my bower. The pulling of the tooth is curious and interesting like a little lifetime. First the long drawn-out drag, then the twist of the hand and the crack of doom. Afterwards the dentist seizes my face in both his hands, and says, “Bravo, Miss James!”

  Having taken a bit of laudanum for the pain, I doze afterwards and have a queer dream. Aunt Kate and I are on the ferry to Dover, crossing the English Channel. The sea is very rough, and the sky ahead is black and ominous. I feel a tremor of foreboding.

  “Bad weather ahead,” I say.

  “Don’t give it a thought. The Captain will bring us into port. He is immensely skilled.”

  My aunt beckons me closer and opens the heart-shaped locket she wears around her neck. Inside is a small cameo of Dr. Munro. “He has been my darling since—well, you know. It will be our secret, dear, like your Sapphic romps. How is Sara, by the way?”

  “I didn’t realize you knew.”

  “I have always been able to see through you, dear. Just as if you were wearing a sheer muslin dress with no petticoat.”

  “But aren’t you dead, Aunt Kate? Didn’t I read about you in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research?”

  “No one really dies, Alice, so long as others take the trouble to remember us. I’d be grateful if you’d water my grave with your tears from time to time. Godey’s says it can be helpful to the afterlife.”

  I wake up to a beatific vision of K. removing streaks of grime from the wallpaper with a speck of India rubber. I love the fact that she is a purely transatlantic and modern personality, cleansed of all the receptive vagueness of the traditional female. (I am obliged to note that while transcribing this little phrase into my diary, she gives vent to a self-deprecating psshh.)

  Katherine says she loves watching me wake up. For a few minutes, according to her, I have a lost expression, as if I had just arrived from a kingdom over t
he sea.

  “I am from a land over the sea.”

  ***

  While she is here, I resolve to get my will redone and arrange for my cremation. “It may seem silly, but it will ease my mind to have these details settled. We only die once.” I had been discouraged about cremation, having heard from Miss Percy that it was very fussy and expensive. But Katherine makes inquiries and finds that it is only six guineas and one extra for a parson.

  “That’s very reasonable, is it not?”

  “I think so. Would you like to be scattered at sea, darling?”

  “Ye gods! Poor sailor that I am! Dry land for me, please.”

  So it is settled that my ashes are to be placed in some sort of receptacle and sent home, not as a parlor ornament for William’s house but to be buried beside Father and Mother in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. “So that we shall not be myths, as Harry suggests we might otherwise become,” I say.

  Next, we move on to the afterlife of my money and possessions. I tell Katherine I wish to redo my will, leaving out all who have offended me since my last. (If you want to know, I shall leave a third of my estate to William, a third to Henry, and a third to Katherine. Bob, married to a rich man’s daughter, does not require anything from me.) Katherine writes to the American Consul in Birmingham, who informs her that the documents must be signed in his presence. Since I am incapable of traveling, the Consul will condescend to travel to me. Apparently there is a need for witnesses who can vouch that I am Alice James and not an imposter, and it is best if they are from Boston. K enlists Elizabeth Putnam, sister of Jim and Charley, who is presently traveling through Banbury. Then there is Katherine, and we call in Miss Leppington, who is British, but how many Americans can you round up in the Midlands on short notice?

  On the appointed day the consul arrives, a lean, leathery man from one of our western states who informs us with considerable gravitas that he was appointed to his post by the President. Indeed he’d only “accepted the Birmingham place as a special favor to President Harrison.” I refrain from telling him that my brother and I were deeply stricken by President Harrison’s election and I devoted an entire night to tears.

  Faced with the consul’s august presence, I “go off” almost as soon as he arrives and take to my bed, spending most of the time in a half-faint. As through a mist I make out five black figures filing into my bower. The consul, all gesticulation and grimace, plants himself at the foot of my bed and while stroking my knee begins a long harangue to the effect that he and his wife “had both laid upon a bed of sickness.” This is meant to cheer me, I think. He invokes the president again, implying that they are never far from each other’s thoughts.

  K informs me later that Nurse, positioned at my head, was wearing her most devoted nurse expression throughout. And the mild Miss Leppington told K afterwards, “The scene will remain in my thought as one of the most pathetic I ever saw and in my imagination as the most picturesque and American!”

  “So now,” I tell K after the solemn ceremony, “I am packed up and ready to go! I feel a little like George Sand, who writes a long letter to a friend telling him why she is going to commit suicide and says to be sure and have her two mattresses corded.”

  SIX

  1891

  EVENTUALLY THE DARK DAY ARRIVES WHEN KATHERINE, LIKE Persephone, must descend to the underworld again. From my point of view, I mean. She assures me it will not be so long this time; that she will be back before I have time to miss her, but, of course, she knows I miss her all the time.

  In the vacuum left by her departure, I peg away again at the black future, working it off five minutes at a time. Large wet snowflakes are drifting softly though the dim winter sky, making a vivid contrast to the soot on the chimney pots. The lamplight comes on in mid-afternoon and blurry little globes of light are suspended here and there in the winter gloom. William’s French madwoman who sees the world in black and white would feel quite at home here.

  My daybed must be pulled right up to the fire now, and I require at least three pillows and four shawls to stay warm. The shawls and pillows are a trial, for they seldom remain in their proper place and if I reach for a book, the whole structure falls apart, and I must call Nurse in for assistance. Or, if she is out, shiver until she returns, quite helpless. Fortunately, I am deep in the memoirs of Massimo d’Azeglio, an Italian politician of the Risorgimento, who has some interesting beliefs—for instance, that the passion of love should be shunned by youth because it involves a course of perpetual lying.

  On Tuesday, Miss Percy stops by, bringing devastating news. Mrs. Arnold died last week, of a fever. “I believe it was malaria.”

  I feel as if I’d been knocked down by an omnibus. I can’t get my breath at first. Tears spring to my eyes, and all I can do is mutter, “I thought she was getting better.”

  “She got better and then she got much worse.” After a thoughtful pause, she adds, “I am not certain it was malaria. It may have been typhus.” This imprecision about the cause of death is maddening! It makes it so much worse when people essentially say, “Oh, she died of something. Who cares what it was?” I suppose I shall die of something vague, too.

  “Was someone with her when she died?” I can’t stop picturing the noble Mrs. Arnold burning up with fever, perhaps half out of her mind, and no one nearby who truly understood and cared for her. No one to hold her hand and guide her down the sacred Ganges and through the gates of paradise.

  “She had a nurse several times a week. I expect the nurse was with her.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I didn’t think to inquire, Miss James.” Her tone implies that inquiring would be the height of bad manners. I suppose it might be in England.

  “Do you know of any living relatives to whom I can write?”

  “No. I suppose I could try to find out if you like,” she says, clearly disinclined to bother. Mrs. Arnold, dead, is of no further interest to Miss Percy. She is longing to talk about living people she knows or about her dogs. I wonder if it would pay to have a long line of ancestry and come out at the end of centuries like Miss Percy.

  It makes me wonder, not for the first time, how I became this dreary thing—a woman in bed? It seemed to happen gradually at first and then reached a point of no return.

  Since my scaffolding began to fall, I have been living like a mouse behind a skirting board, knowing nothing of the world beyond a few dark tunnels and whatever crumbs happen to drop nearby. But something has shifted recently. It is hard to describe. My thoughts drift through my brain like clouds. I watch them come and go; I seem to be the vast, empty sky in which they happen.

  For a month or so I read compulsively to anesthetize the pain of loss—the double loss, of Mrs. Arnold and Katherine. To distract myself, I tunnel through Renan’s Saint Paul, followed by Halévy’s Notes and Souvenirs, before returning to William’s article on Janet. This time a particular passage arrests me:

  The secondary self enriches itself at the expense of the primary one, which loses functions as the second gains them. An hysteric woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it all together. The abandoned part, meanwhile, may solidify into a subconscious or secondary self.

  The word abandon seems to stir something deep inside, and I have a sense of being beckoned by something true and important. I write in my diary:

  William uses an excellent expression when he says in his paper on the “Hidden Self” that the nervous victim ‘abandons’ certain portions of his consciousness, altho’ I have never unfortunately been able to abandon my consciousness and get five minutes’ rest. I have passed thro’ an infinite succession of conscious abandonments and in looking back now I see how it began in my childhood, altho’ I wasn’t conscious of the necessity until ’67 or ’68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent bursts of hysteria.

  Hysteria was what they called it, anyhow, and I won’t deny that there were days when I would sit reading, with waves of violent
inclination urging me to throw myself out of the window or knock off the head of the benignant pater as he sat writing at his desk. It seemed to me that the only difference between me and the floridly insane was that, in addition to the suffering of insanity, I had the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me as well. In the wars between my body and my mind, I learned to “abandon” the former—my stomach, my legs, my arms—but never for an instant my consciousness. What if I had?

  My mind sinks and sinks, like a surgical patient counting backwards while going under ether. I see again the low, brooding skies when I used to wander over the cliffs of Newport, my young soul struggling out of its swaddling clothes. I am back to the summer when everything changed, when my life was split into before and after.

  Oh, but here is Nurse with a cup of tea and buttered toast. I thank her and tell her that I am very busy thinking and don’t wish to be disturbed for a couple of hours. She seems to find this acceptable, if mysterious. I take a bite of toast and stare out my window at two shiny crows perched on my window ledge, their black beady eyes full of alien intelligence. An insane urge strikes me to run out into the street calling for help. As if I could run!

  Every summer at Newport, we run in a pack with our Temple cousins, “discovering” secret places, points, promontories, sandy coves, secret inlets, lily ponds, spouting rocks, apple groves, wind-sculpted trees resembling buzzards or witches in profile, chasms carved by the sea. Like explorers, we claim our discoveries and name them. One fine day in July, I am with brothers William and Bob, and Elly and Kitty Temple in our sailboat, the Alice. Bob is at the helm. We are hugging the coastline, with its low bluffs and small inlets. William takes over at some point and Bob minds the mainsail and I the jib. For a while everything is perfect. The rhythmic chip chip chip of the wavelets against the hull, the silvery foam of our wake, the sun’s toasty warmth on my skin, the raucous cries of gulls, the taste of salt on my lips. I remember thinking, I am perfectly happy right now.