Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  With Ellen and Edith Emerson, who are years older, I visit wounded soldiers in a hospital tent in Portsmouth. We are supposed to cheer the boys up by making charming conversation and distributing magazines, handkerchiefs, and warm socks. I don’t know what I was expecting but it was not this. Empty sleeves, bloody bandages over faces, flies buzzing everywhere, terrible smells, a suffocating atmosphere of pain, fear, and horror. I kneel next to a cot and try to make conversation with a boy who looks no more than sixteen. He tries to respond to my question about where he is from, but he is missing much of his jaw. I can see his tongue through a hole in his cheek. Hell is real, after all. I don’t see how cheerful conversation or a magazine will remedy this situation. While Ellen and Edith go about being angels of mercy, I have to run outside and sit heaving under a tree until I get my breath.

  Toward the end of August Bob Temple is seen walking out at twilight with the Grissoms’ hired girl, and then we learn that the Grissoms have forbidden her to walk out with him. A week later their terrier is mysteriously dead, bleeding from the mouth. A few weeks later, Bob vanishes, and Father says he has gone to New York State. He says that Bob is an “operator and a swindler” and will end up in prison. (Some years later, Bob Temple will go to prison, for swindling; he will write pathetic letters to his aunt and uncle Tweedy, which they won’t answer.)

  Here, on my desert isle in the English Midlands, it all comes rushing back: Bob Temple’s scorn for “the Hatter,” as he always referred to Uncle Tweedy. How much we had to hear in those days about the Temples’ famous “pride” and “spirit” and “aristocracy.” Harry, especially, was star-struck by their blood ties to a distinguished Temple family in England, or perhaps Ireland, but none of this prevented their living at the expense of anyone who took on the job of providing for them.

  Our house on Kay Street has a steep staircase, with treads of varnished oak. I stand at the top and imagine my body tumbling, my neck neatly snapped at the bottom. When I do fall, it happens so fast I am not sure how it started. I land badly bruised, but no bones are broken; the bruises start out the color of a storm-cloud and fade to greenish yellow.

  “Alice thinks she can walk on air,” someone jokes.

  One evening Mrs. Tappan (who rents a house in Newport most summers) is reading our fortunes with the Egyptian tarot. I close my eyes and draw a card. It is the eight of swords, a despondent female figure with her face buried in her hands, weeping. Mrs. Tappan tries to tell me it is not bad, but then why is the lady crying and lamenting? All the portents are wrong now.

  That night, as I am undressing for bed and brushing out my hair, I hear Mother, Aunt Kate, Mrs. Tappan, and Aunt Mary Tweedy playing cards in the parlor. Outside my window a warm rain is falling. Mother’s voice has the hushed, solemn tone she reserves for Female Matters, but most of her words are drowned out by the rain. When the rain subsides a little, I hear Mrs. Tappan say, “brutally violated on her wedding night.” What is “violated”? Whatever it is, it happened to a woman Mrs. Tappan knows, in the private car of a train.

  “How were they able to go forward with their wedding trip?” I hear Aunt Kate ask.

  “I suppose they came to some arrangement,” Mrs. Tappan says, in her omniscient way, adding that, years later, the couple is still living together in Washington. The husband is a powerful senator, and they have a daughter. After the child was born, the husband lost all interest in the wife and turned his attentions elsewhere. The wife, much relieved, told Mrs. Tappan, “What a luxury it is to have possession of my own body.”

  Never having imagined that it was possible not to possess my own body, I am horrified by this tale. A great war is being waged over slavery now. Father believes the abolition of slavery will usher in a more blessed society, but a woman who marries the wrong man can end up as a sort of slave and there is little she can do about it, apparently.

  Mother says something else, which is blotted out by the rumble of thunder outside.

  Then I hear Mrs. Tappan say, “The only power a woman can have is to live by her wits and manage her husband.” Apparently, Mrs. Tappan manages hers very well; he is rarely seen with her.

  In September, William leaves us to study natural history and chemistry at Harvard, and his long letters home are laced with homesickness and funny anecdotes. Father always opposed college for the boys, claiming it would corrupt their innocence and implant other people’s dead ideas in their minds. But he wants William to be a scientist and for this it is necessary to attend the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. I am stunned that my parents have consented to this rent in the family fabric, for up till now we have been like a small, isolated clan living in a remote place, with our own specialized vocabulary and Weltanschauung (a word William taught the rest of us).

  The Cambridge life Will describes sounds as exotic as Lapland to us, and he enjoys shocking the family with the curiosities of science.

  It will probably be a shock for Mother to learn I yesterday destroyed a handkerchief—but it was an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather brown is very good.

  Perhaps I am a bit of a seeress after all, for even that far back I had a melancholy glimpse of the future: all my brothers gone and I alone left in an empty, echoing house to “be a comfort” to my parents.

  HENRY JAMES

  11 HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON

  AUGUST 14TH 1891

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  Alice has relapsed and collapsed a good deal. She is too ill to be left; & the difficult question of doctors (owing to A’s extreme dread of them) & her absolute inability to take tonic doses, drugs &c;—they put her in a fearful nervous state—remains. Her little “improvements” now discourage her more than the relapses; she wants to have done with it all, to sink continuously. At any rate, KPL will not leave her while she is in the present condition. She said it would be “inhumane.”

  EIGHT

  YOU DON’T FEEL IT AT FIRST, AND YOU CAN’T PUT YOUR FINGER upon it, but as the days go by you unfold it with the Telegraph, in the morn. It rises dense from the Pall Mall Gazette and the Evening Standard in the evening; it creeps through the cracks in the window frames like the fog and envelops you throughout the day.

  I asked Henry how it struck him from his wider view. He said he did not think it could be exaggerated. British phariseeism. The way they believe that they alone of human races massacre savages out of pure virtue.

  But I really must avoid wide-ranging pontification à la Norton.

  I am weak and getting weaker for no particular reason. At summer’s end this great prostration. Clinging to my little nurse like a drowning creature to a straw. Henry, with his grave grey eyes, summoned from Vallambrosa to my squalid indigestions. Listens so well, like a priest. Holds my hand in silence, later reads to me from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. ’Tis a cruel fate that he should have my troubles fastened to him like a burr.

  “Your nerves are my nerves,” he says. “Your stomach is my stomach. We two are one.” Was there ever such a brother? My tears overflow at his goodness. I have given him endless care and anxiety, but notwithstanding this and the fantastic nature of my troubles, I have never seen an impatient look upon his face.

  I think we ought to call in a doctor, Alice.

  Oh please, no more Great Men. I shall soldier on by myself, thank you very much.

  Has the Pall Mall Gazette come yet? The English continue to be upset with Mark Twain over his frivolous treatment of Arthurian legend in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. They had a little time of being interested in Americans, Henry says, and now they are dreadfully sick of us.

  Shall I bring the tea now, Miss? Shall I rearrange your shawls?

  The doctors steer clear of the hopeless cases, I believe. I laugh, remembering the one in London who said to Henry, “Your sister will not die but she will never be well.” I said, “Well, doctor, it is nice to hear that I am immortal, anyhow.”

  Henry distracts me with tales of London, his friends, t
he racy exploits of the Prince of Wales and his crowd. He says he saw Stanley Clarke receiving his orders from the Prince, and his manner was precisely that of Smith, Henry’s servant, before Henry, and the manner of the Prince was that of kind master. One day he brings along a sympathy note from Grace Norton, written in such Nortonese. I must be very unwell for the Ancient Houri of Kirkland Street to write to me.

  A cable brings Katherine across the waves on the Umbria, a stormy passage. My Rock of Gibraltar. Shocked by my pallor, my shrinkage of flesh. “Why didn’t you say it had got so bad?” I suppose I had to get a little worse in order to lose all conscience about absorbing Kath as my right.

  K is better than the Transcript for Boston news. The Annex women still must fight Harvard for every crumb, she says. Tells me all the foolish things said by the president, the overseers, reactionary professors, the male sex in general.

  Girls have no natural capacity for classical languages. Latin or Greek places too great a strain on the female nervous system.

  Philosophy is inimical to the fair sex.

  The female mind is unfit to tackle the higher realms of mathematics.

  It is a great waste of Harvard’s precious resources to teach women, who will never contribute meaningfully to society or the world of ideas.

  I ask K, “Didn’t you write me that President Eliot told Mrs. Howe and her group that ‘the monotony of women’s lives has been greatly exaggerated’?”

  “Yes, and the women laughed at him! I wish you could have been there. He looked quite cowed for a few minutes.”

  One day K is taken to visit a beautiful old house at Mortlake, a private school to prepare infants for Eton, and she describes to me all the luxuries provided for the pampered young ones. A few days later Nurse goes to the Wadsworth Infirmary, where a friend of hers is nursing. She describes a girl of twelve dying of consumption, so thin and shriveled that she seems only five or six. Her mother is in a madhouse from drink and her father died the week before in a drunken fit, and there she lies trying to smile over some biscuits just given her. There was also a little boy with a crooked spine dying of cancer, and many other unfortunates. This is indeed a land of contrasts.

  I expected to get better with Katherine here, but there’s no denying that I am weaker, thinner, and yellower every day. I see K’s anxious looks, hear her whispering with Nurse when she thinks I am dozing. Why, then, do I feel like a child who has been taken to the seashore? A vast holiday stretches before me all the way to the horizon. I see my footprints in wet sand filling with water, reflecting jagged pieces of sky. What is this joy that overflows my heart?

  Worn down by the pathetic pleas of K and H, I finally relent and allow the Primrose Knight to present himself to me again. I refer to Dr. Wilmot, who being a fox-hunter and the treasurer of the local Primrose League, cures me by local color more than by his medicines. After listening attentively to my chest, he pronounces a “severe distress of the heart.” My heart may give out at any moment, he says, or I may linger on for some time.

  K and H decide it will be more practical to move me to London, and I see no reason to object. It doesn’t really matter where I am; I am always on the island of me! Ten days to pack up our household—me, Katherine, Nurse, and little Louisa, formerly under-parlormaid, now our maid-of-all-work—and whisk us away forever from Miss Clarke and the Mind Cure ladies and the Marie Antoinette wallpaper. Miss Clarke sheds a fountain of tears. “I shouldn’t say so, Miss, but there never was nobody like you.” I shall miss her, too, her indefatigable spirit and boundless goodness.

  Thus my three and a half lonely years in Leamington draw to a close. In an invalid carriage of the great Western Railroad we travel to dark carboniferous London, and take rooms in the South Kensington Hotel in Queen’s Gate Terrace, not far from Henry’s flat in De Vere Gardens. A fine hotel, but Australian children run constantly through the corridors, screaming. Apparently Australians do not believe in suppressing the child.

  Our little maid Louisa asks, “Is this the Jack the Ripper part of London?”

  In this hotel the servants gather in the Steward’s Room, and Nurse tells us everything that transpires there. She is allowed to report all mental eccentricities of the Lady’s Maid, the Chef, the Steward, the Waiter, et cetera, but the line is rigidly drawn at all gossip about the “lydies.” The Lady’s Maid, however, likes to gossip on ladies’ shortcomings, and thus a wider social range is opened to us.

  Katherine smiles indulgently at the manner in which I turn up and rake the thin soil of Nurse’s substance. I tell her that Nurse has just revealed to me those hitherto mysterious but powerful factors in life, a ‘sense of authority’ and a ‘sense of your betters,’ by letting me know that I possess both.

  “Do you mean to say you have a sense of your betters?”

  “Oh no, Kath. Apparently I am a Better as well as an Authority, whose quoted word carries finality in the arguments of the steward’s room. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Mrs. Sidgwick comes to call, bearing a volume of verse by a Persian poet called Hafiz Shirazi. His words strike me like lightning. Especially a beautiful poem about the ten thousand things that do not matter.

  “That’s it! That’s it exactly!” I say to Katherine. “Being so absorbed in the ten thousand things that do not matter, we miss the one thing that does.”

  “What is that, darling?”

  “Being, Katherine. This becomes rather obvious when you are stripped to the bone by illness.”

  “Hmm,” she says indulgently, ever tolerant of my “gypsy” ways.

  Waves of illumination pass through me now. Some queer magic is afoot. For example, I often come across in my reading just what I’d been thinking about. Yesterday I was remembering a mustard-yellow gown with a bustle I wore to a ball in 1875—only to read in the newspaper a few hours later that the bustle has been declared dead. And my reading so haphazard!

  Would you like to hear the Pall Mall Gazette?

  Only if there is a good murder.

  Here is a letter from Fanny Morse. Shall I read it to you now or later?

  Fanny encloses a little pamphlet, “How to Help the Poor.” I suppose it is all right for America, but I believe the poor here can improve their lot only by rising up and chopping off some heads.

  Harry says people continue to talk about Jack the Ripper, and there is speculation that the killer is a real-life Mr. Hyde, whose consciousness (or part of it) has become inaccessible to himself. Something up William’s alley, I should think.

  As my dissolution advances, the plan is for me to be carried to H’s flat, it being considered unaesthetic here to die in a hotel. Harry, meanwhile, like the buttony-boy, has broken all out in stories. I adore “The Modern Warning,” and feel as if I were the heroine.

  Abrupt change of plans: Seeing no glimmer of improvement in me—indeed, quite the opposite—Katherine has found us a house in Campden Hill, all covered with Virginia creeper. A cook, a Mrs. Thompson, comes with the lease, and on spring afternoons we hear the rooks in Lord Holland’s park. A glimpse of sky and feathery green and Katherine laboring with a hoe and a spade in our scraplet of a garden, planting American seeds sent over by Fanny Morse. I wonder if they will take root in English soil.

  Louisa tells K, “You have to be happy when you’re young because afterwards you never can be. Because then you will be married and how can you be happy with a man at your back all the time?” Nurse and Cook are engaged in a religious war over Louisa’s soul. Anglican Nurse gives her a bonnet; Baptismal Cook retaliates with an apron. “She keeps talking about Our Maker,” Nurse explains to me, “and that is Chapel, not Church.” Meanwhile, upstairs, the cold Unitarian fish (Kath) and the votary of natural religion (your humble servant) look on in amusement. Mrs. Thompson’s taste for tawdry jewelry is distressing to behold.

  Nurse takes me to the window. Carries me, really. I stick my head out and drink in a long draught of spring. Golden daffodils, swelling twiggery of old trees, relentless housecleaning
of rooks, gradations of light, the mystery of birth in the air. I hope as the season advances I may occasionally be carried by my slaveys through the tangled bloom.

  A great peace wells up in me these days. Whence does it come?

  Please, the curtain, half-way. Yes, like that, exactly.

  Sometimes I think I am reliving my life in reverse. Like unwinding a string that has been wound around your finger. One year undone and then the next, and the next, each with a rush of memories like the debris of an exploding planet. And I am not doing anything! I only observe.

  Is that the teakettle shrieking?

  So many things pass though me now, weightless. The skies of Newport. Commonwealth Avenue with its mall of spindly trees. The stone gargoyles in Paris, with their lapping tongues and bulging eyes. The year Father was dying. Harry sleeping in Father’s study, keeping the accounts, I keeping house. Reading together in the evenings, both of us unspeakably bereft. H. asking what I thought of his stories, seeming to value my poor opinion.

  Calling cards on a silver tray. Lady someone. Shall I say you are too ill, Alice?

  Yes, too ill.

  A draft slips through the cracks in the window frame. I freeze at the first chill even under five blankets. For the others it is warm, Nurse all flushed. How subjective the world is, as William points out in his Psychology. Rain splashes like hail against the glass. Later the sun comes out and rainbows shimmer everywhere.

  Although K’s venturings into the world are sadly curtailed by my unbridled demands, she did go out yesterday to see “The Dancing Girl” with Mrs. Clough. In the play, a wicked duke rehearses his villainies and says how much better are the lower orders than such as he, whereupon Mrs. C. exclaims, “I am so sorry to hear him say that; it is hard enough as it is to keep people in their place, and it does them a great deal of harm to hear that sort of talk.”