Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  Harry, normally more mature, laughs.

  “Billy, stop teasing your sister,” their grandmother says.

  But after sticking out her tongue, Peggy ignores him, apparently riveted by the sight of Miss Stein.

  “How old are you?” Miss Stein asks.

  “As old as . . . the pangs of old age.” Peggy heaves another dramatic sigh.

  “She’s seven,” says Billy. “Seven months!” He laughs maniacally, and Peggy pushes out her lower lip in a pout.

  Professor James returns with a journal offprint in his hands, and scans it. “Ah, here it is. I’ll translate into English. A chance observation has led us, over a number of years, to investigate a great variety of forms and symptoms of hysteria . . . What the deuce do they mean by a ‘chance observation’? They never explain, you see. Later they refer to a ‘complicated case of hysteria’ dating from 1881 but give no details. Why do you suppose it took them so long to publish? Thirteen years! It’s very odd.”

  It is typical of Professor James to solicit students’ opinions, as if they were equals. Neither Mr. Solomons nor Miss Stein can shed any light on the Viennese case.

  “Toward the end of the article they write, Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. A lovely phrase, nicht wahr? But I don’t care for this word they use—das Unbewusste. That’s the unconscious, Miss Stein. I don’t believe it is unconscious. I prefer the word subliminal. Janet speaks of the subconscious, and Dr. Morton Prince of Boston has begun to talk of co-conscious selves. Eventually we shall have to agree on terminology!”

  “I was very surprised to hear Professor Münsterberg say the other day that he does not believe in the existence of the subconscious mind,” Mr. Solomons volunteers.

  Professor James looks deeply shocked. “How extraordinary.”

  At this point the smallest boy’s milk splashes onto the tablecloth and his sister’s plate. “Bad boy!” Peggy says, taking his small hand and slapping it. The little boy wails, and his grandmother gathers him onto her lap. Peggy is sent to her room and flounces out of the room like an enraged prima donna.

  After the dessert dishes are cleared, and the rest of the family disperses noisily, Professor James goes over the students’ article point by point, asking a few technical questions, and says, “I agree with Dr. Münsterberg. This paper is certainly publishable. I would be glad to send it around to a few editors I know.”

  Two hours later, sitting before the looking glass of her vanity, rubbing cold cream into her skin, Alice says, “William, was it really necessary for your students to be minutely informed about the James family’s temper tantrums in Switzerland?”

  “Oh, it’s all right. They are graduate students. Mr. Solomons is, anyway.”

  Alice rolls her eyes at the non sequitur. “The young man has a lovely, shy smile, doesn’t he? And the stout girl has such a compelling and direct gaze. Such as the goddess Athena might have had.” Then, setting down her hairbrush, she gives her husband a sharp glance. “So, how long are you planning to put it off, William?”

  “What, darling?”

  “Reading your sister’s diary. At least do it for Henry’s sake. So you can talk to him about it sensibly and calm him down.”

  “Poor Henry! All those years sitting by Alice’s bedside feeding her gossip, never dreaming she was taking notes.”

  For the past two weeks, stricken letters have been arriving every other day.

  I am almost sick with terror. A woman in Venice said to me ‘I hear your sister’s letters have just been published & are so delightful,’ which almost made me jump out of my skin.

  Henry wondered, and William does too, whether Alice herself had wanted the diary printed or if it was a “pious inspiration” of Katherine Loring’s.

  “But didn’t Miss Loring just make the four copies for the family and herself?” Alice says. “I don’t see the problem.”

  “Darling, think how famous Henry is, and I suppose I am a bit as well. Things leak out. So far, I’ve been able to persuade Katherine not to send a copy to Bob while he is floridly insane!”

  Various nightmare scenarios have been spooling through Henry’s mind and his, he explains. Scenario #1: Crazy Bob gets hold of his copy and allows it to fall into the wrong hands. Scenario #2: The “two Marys”—Bob’s wife and daughter—pass it around Concord and alert “the fearful American newspaper lying in wait for every whisper” (Henry’s words). Scenario #3: Katherine Loring herself shows it to some reporter or suffragist sob-sister, either here or in England; or Scenario #4: Katherine allows the diary to be published in its entirety as a book.

  “Oh, I can’t imagine Alice would have wanted that.”

  “Well, we don’t really know, do we?”

  Much of the distress could have been averted, he says, if Katherine had only substituted blanks or initials for names. William sympathizes with the distress of his emotionally private brother and worries, too, about what Alice may have written about him. He still hasn’t read the diary and is not sure why he keeps putting it off.

  Henry has read it and believes it to be a work of genius. Although he ascribes the vehemence of Alice’s opinions of the British to her extreme seclusion, he has found

  an immense eloquence in her passionate ‘radicalism’—her most distinguishing feature almost—which, in her was absolutely direct and original (like everything that was in her). It would have made her, had she lived in the world, a feminine ‘political force.’ She felt the Home Rule question as only an Irishwoman (not anglicized) could. It was a tremendous emotion with her. What a pity she wasn’t born there—or had her health for it.

  For now, they are keeping the diary secret. William has said nothing to Bob, and Alice has kept it secret even from her mother and sisters. “You can’t just lock it up forever,” she says now. “I want to read it. If it is half as good as Alice’s letters, it ought to be very good indeed.”

  “Ah! And this from the person who once referred to Sister Alice as an ‘unnatural woman’!”

  “I said no such thing, William.”

  “You did, darling. The winter Father was dying and I was in London. You wrote me that you went over to Mt. Vernon Street one evening and found Alice and Katherine dining à deux, and the whole atmosphere gave you the strangest feeling. You wrote: ‘Katherine is faithful to Alice and that means that she too is a very lonely woman. And I am finally sure of this: she is not made as other women—our ways of feeling are not hers so we have no right to decide.’

  “Your habit of quoting verbatim from my old letters is very irritating, William. It would be so much better if you remembered where you put the letters I gave you to mail yesterday.”

  “I’m sure they’ll turn up.”

  “Perhaps I did say something of the sort. Everything felt wrong then, William. The way your father turned his face to the wall and willed himself to die, casually deserting his children. Poor Alice, above all. In his last weeks she seemed to have completely left his mind. He never spoke of her and when she appeared he treated her like a stranger. It was shocking and terribly sad. Anyway, as you know, I changed my mind about Alice and Katherine. I am glad they had each other.”

  “Poor little Sister Alice!”

  “Remember how she used to glare at me as if she could will me to vanish?”

  “I am glad she was unsuccessful.”

  “It took me years to forgive her for ruining our wedding. I can still see your poor parents, barely managing to smile. It made our wedding a hurried and furtive affair. Not until we were on the train to New York did I grasp that we were really married.”

  “Sister Alice felt everything acutely and could not put her emotions in perspective. She would go into terrible rages sometimes.”

  “So a bit like you, darling?”

  “I thought you would say that.”

  With a hairpin in her mouth, Alice says, “That Miss Stein is an unusual girl. No corset, that was obvious, and as she went out the door she was wearing a hideous straw bonnet w
ith a soiled blue ribbon. In March!”

  “She always wears that. She doesn’t pay attention to fashion.”

  “You and your strays, William! But I liked Miss Stein. There is something about her.”

  “Depend on it, dear. Gertrude Stein will go far!”

  The diary was not Sister Alice’s first postmortem appearance. Some nine months after her death, she “came through” Mrs. Piper. This occurred during one of Bob James’s sittings with the psychic in Boston and he wrote up an account, copies of which were circulated to his siblings, children, estranged wife, various friends and acquaintances, spiritualists, and other interested parties. It did not escape William’s notice that Bob’s problems were the central focus of the communication.

  NOTES ON A SITTING WITH MRS. PIPER

  December 28, 1893

  At the sitting Father, Mother, Alice, and Wilky were said to be present. Alice comes and wishes to know if I am present and then says they are all in trouble about me and that if they could take me out of my surroundings they would, but that they cannot do. They have been in trouble about me for a good while, that Father is never absent from me, that he is in reality my guiding and guardian spirit. Alice wants to know if my resentment about her will still exists, to which I assure her it does not. When I said to Alice, “How is it you speak now, whereas you on Earth threw discredit upon spiritualism and didn’t believe it was possible or wise for the dead to talk with those who were on Earth?” She answered, “We all think differently now. You must not think of us as we were but as we are. Father, Mother, Wilky, and I are always together. We will try and impress Mary in her sleep.” Phinuit predicts, “Some fine morning you will have a peculiar feeling and then you will see a ball of light and out of it your father will come just as you knew him in life.”

  William sighs. How dreary the dead are, how inarticulate, dull and blundering—in the séance room, at any rate. While he still champions Mrs. Piper, and absolutely believes she is not a fraud, it is a fact that most messages from the beyond are astonishingly banal. “The photograph . . . which sat on the mantel . . . is now in the spare bedroom. It needs dusting.” A man returns from the dead and has nothing better than this to say to his wife?

  He thinks, If that is my sister, I’ll eat my hat. Sister Alice would never become invested in Bob’s train-wreck of a marriage or devote all her postmortem efforts to sorting it out. Nor would she have consented to be channeled by Mrs. Piper in the first place.

  Bob is presently in the Danville Sanatorium (again), drying out, and thus for the present unable to trouble the departed. He does trouble the living, however, and frequent screeds have been arriving by mail.

  William wanted to invite Bob as a guest speaker in his Philosophy 20b seminar, on mental pathology. The course began with hysteria, and proceeded through double personality, trance states, the history of witchcraft, the classic types of insanity, and the criminological literature. “Beyond—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say below—the separate islands of consciousness we call our minds lies the infinite, the Mother Sea,” William told his class. This much he has learned from his self-experimentation with drugs and from interviewing ordinary people who have had mystical experiences.

  Apart from his induced coma at Somerville, he has never had a full-fledged mystical experience and keeps hoping. Nitrous oxide comes closest. As he told his class recently, at the institution formerly known as the Annex and recently incorporated as Radcliffe College, “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed. The truth fades out, however, at the moment of coming to.” In the sober light of day his utterances, written down by his wife, never fail to sound silly. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists.

  Bob’s letters from Danville are monuments of self-absorption and self-sabotage. William believes his students could learn more about systematic delusions from one hour of Bob than from days of some alienist prattling about his theories.

  “You can’t, William!” Alice had told him.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t put your insane brother on display at Harvard. They think you’re half mad already.”

  “Really? Do they say that?” He is amused by the periodic rumors of his madness, Alice less so. In the end he listened to his wife, the wisest person he knows, and arranged to treat his students to a tour of the Worcester Lunatic Asylum instead.

  Soon after the box containing Alice’s ashes arrived—brought over the ocean by the faithful Miss Loring, along with (as they would learn later) the two notebooks containing Alice’s diary. William shook out the contents of the box onto the pages of the Boston Evening Transcript and sat contemplating a pile of fine grey powder laced with hard bony bits. It was impossible to conceive of this mound of grit as Alice. Maybe the crematorium sweeps out a handful of ashes from numberless carbonized bodies, sprinkles some into an urn, and says, “Here’s your loved one.” But it makes no difference because it is not Alice.

  The box sat on a shelf in his study, where it remained until the marble gravestone he ordered in Florence arrived.

  He chose the epitaph from Dante. When he saw it chiseled in stone, he broke down—in gratitude for his sister’s final release, in grief that she was gone. Henry wrote him that the inscription was so right that it was as if one sunk down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache.

  He and Alice took the urn containing the ashes to the family plot in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Harry, Billy, and Peggy came along and were uncharacteristically quiet and solemn. He had not pictured how hard the ground would be in December, and barely managed to scrape out a hole, while the snow fell around them. The flakes floated slowly through the air and made a downy quilt on the ground. The far shore of the river was curtained in mist, and the boughs of the hemlock branches bowed under their dollops of white frosting. There was a sense of holy presence, as Alice deserved.

  “Is Aunt Alice sorry she never met me?” Peggy asked.

  “I am sure she is, dear,” her mother said.

  We are trees whose roots grow deep and intertwine in the dark, William thought. Life is a passing dream, and then we enter into our deeper life. To Sister Alice, as to Father, death seemed truer, more complete, than life. One thing he knows: Normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted by the flimsiest of screens, lie forms of consciousness altogether different.

  That night, William falls asleep and sleeps soundly for an hour, then awakes, lucid and alert. He knows there is no chance of going back to sleep. This is probably the beginning of a period of exaltation—one of his “jiggle” states, as Alice calls them, when he is full of electric energy and his leg jiggles nearly constantly. Eventually he will feel as if he’d ridden a roller-coaster fifty times in a row, but right now life is murmuring to him, communicating its intricately woven patterns. With his fingertips tingling and his heart on fire, he pads downstairs in his carpet slippers and sits in silence in the dreaming house. His father’s portrait (by Francis Boott) regards him levelly, almost sternly, as if to say, “What are you afraid of?”

  It is chilly in his study, and he makes a fire. Then he unlocks the desk drawer, and pulls out Alice’s typewritten diary, surprised by its thinness. Sitting in his favorite armchair, he reads. The first entries are tentative, almost apologetic. Then she seems to gain traction and the power of her mind kicks in. As he reads on, he has an impression, almost palpable, of being inside his sister’s head, reading about the Parnell case in the newspapers, talking to Nurse about the Bachellers and Brookses, receiving a visit from a couple of Mind Cure crones. Being inside her mind is an intimate thing, and he is moved in ways he cannot put into words.

  Soon he is reading ravenously. About the drunk and reckless “chair-man” who nearly dumped Alice out of her bath chair into a pasture. About the new baby who was an “excrescence” upon its sister’s body. About Henry Morton Stanley’s activitie
s as reported in the newspaper. The oleaginous “clericule.” Nurse’s and Miss Clarke’s views of life. Miss Leppington, Miss Percy, the identical twin sisters who say, “We have such a headache.” Henry’s visits and his gossip. Miss Loring coming and going. Ireland and Home Rule. The follies of England’s “tinsel monarchy.” The American consul from Birmingham who had “laid upon a bed of sickness.” The crushing poverty of the masses and the haughty insouciance of the rich.

  Here is Alice’s sharp tongue, her sarcasm, the hilarious epithets she invented for the Great Men and others she scorned. But, above all, he is struck by passages of deep discernment and insight. She had so little to feed on, and so much loneliness and pain, yet her diary has a fierce beauty that makes him think of fantastic spiny plants abloom in the desert. He finds his name scattered throughout. He is quoted on various topics, his wit contrasted to Miss Clarke’s lack of same, his children’s memorable quotations noted, and, of course, he appears in the somewhat devastating episode of July 18 when Henry presented himself doubled by William. Of his next appearance, after the Physiological Congress, she writes, William is simply himself, a creature who speaks in another language as Henry says from the rest of mankind and who would lend life and charm to a treadmill.

  His little sister’s love for him, despite his being so often a clumsy, judgmental, insensitive clod, brings tears to his eyes. She thought of him far more frequently than he thought of her. He and Alice and the children were always on her mind; any scrap of information confided in a letter lived a second life through her. And Henry’s visits are described like the visitations of a prince; everything he tells her takes up residence in her mind.

  It is painful to read that she considered herself a “Barnum monstrosity” and that after Henry left her side, I could cry for hours after he goes, if I could allow myself such luxuries, but tears are undiluted poison. Recalling her loneliness after Father’s death, she wrote of