At the conclusion of William’s lecture, a small throng of well-wishers gathered around the podium to congratulate the speaker. Only after this knot of admirers had significantly thinned out did Frank and Jesse leave their seats at the rear of the auditorium and venture toward their brother, who was in conversation with only Alice Gibbens and Asa Hite. At closer range, having had the benefit of Henry’s descriptions, William had little difficulty divining the identities of the approaching gentlemen. They embraced him awkwardly, calling him Willie and obliging him to introduce them to Miss Gibbens and Mr. Hite.
“Ah, yes, I’d like you to meet—” William looked quizzically toward Frank.
“Dr. Will Franklin,” Frank piped up boldly, extending his hand to Asa Hite and bowing gracefully to Alice Gibbens. “And this is my colleague Professor Robert Jessup. We’re old pals of Willie’s from our student days in Europe, n’est-ce pas, cher Guillaume?”
“Yes, of course, Europe,” William echoed, somewhat bemused. “Good old Europe.”
Mr. Hite was delighted to make the acquaintance of William’s distinguished colleagues. “And where are you fellows teaching now?” he inquired.
William, not to be bested by Frank’s brazen fabrications, took the liberty of responding for his brothers: “I believe it’s Carleton College, is it not?” he answered sardonically. “And you, Professor Jessup—if I’m not mistaken—are at St. Olaf?”
“That’s right,” Jesse replied. “Full professor—head of the department, as a matter of fact.”
“Ah, excellent school!” bellowed Asa Hite, who had doubtless never heard of the institution but who went on to express his surprise and admiration that one so young should have already reached such academic heights—and who would have been even more surprised, if considerably less admiring, to have learned that this professorial prodigy was in fact the “pissant desperado” who was not only ruining his railroad business but had also recently been enjoying carnal relations with his lovely daughter.
Elena Hite and Alice James embarked for the continent aboard the Cunard liner Algeria only a fortnight after Henry’s departure. Their crossing was considerably calmer than the author’s; indeed, Elena discovered that the bracing ocean air worked wonders on both her complexion and her disposition. If she harbored any misgivings about having been summarily booted off the stage of her life in the States to be “swept beneath the tattered old rug of Europe” (as she teasingly described her plight in her first letter to William), she was determined to make the most of it. She and her traveling companion were fêted nightly at the captain’s table and enjoyed lively games of backgammon and whist with their shipmates. The men aboard the Algeria, predictably, were all over the fetching young female emancipationist, though Alice James, never having mastered the flirtatious arts beyond the bounds of her family circle, left most of them cold.
Despite her militant solidarity with women in the aggregate, Elena, as she had made painfully clear to William James, had seldom, from her school days on, enjoyed close relations with individual members of her own sex. She had little reason to suppose that her duenna would prove an exception to this trend, especially given that the sole female James sibling was notoriously “tightly wound.” Years later, in her famous diary, Alice would lament her lifelong predicament:
Conceive of never being without the sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given moment you must abandon it all, let the dykes break and the flood sweep in, acknowledging yourself abjectly impotent before the immutable laws. When all one’s moral and natural stock in trade is a temperament forbidding the abandonment of an inch or the relaxation of a muscle ’tis a never-ending fight.
Having feared that she might find herself in the clutches of a stodgy old stick-in-the-mud, Elena was pleasantly surprised to discover that Alice, like her novelist brother, was a canny—and catty—judge of character. The two traveling ladies ended up passing many a delicious hour dissecting the quirks and qualities of their fellow voyagers, especially the men, at whose expense Alice relished displaying her mordant wit. Of one particularly abhorrent specimen—an aggressively charming Italian count who introduced himself as Salvatore Terilli—she remarked that he appeared to have “about as much civilization as a gorilla,” and warned Elena that “to associate with and have to take seriously a creature with the moral substance of a monkey becomes degrading after a while, no matter how one may have been seduced by his ‘shines’ at the first going off.”
Both women professed to holding jaundiced views of marriage, although her duenna’s disdain for the institution, Elena apprehended, seemed to smack less of any profound political or personal conviction than of plain old sour grapes. In fact, Alice had recently written to her friend Annie Ashburner that she feared facing “the mortification of descending to the grave a spinster, not from choice of the sweet lot, but from dire necessity.” To that same correspondent she had subsequently confided: “If I could get any sort of man to be impassioned about me I should not let him escape.” But as Jean Strouse observed, Alice “appears never to have entered seriously into a relationship with a man, or even to have surmised what that might mean.” In fact, she “found most men, aside from her brothers, ‘queer’ and rather frightening.”
To history, it is the James brothers who are regarded as “queer” (Henry) and “rather frightening” (Frank and Jesse). But to Elena Hite, they—especially William—were a favorite topic of shipboard conversation. For the woman who had grown up as a lonely only child, all of the lively, convoluted, loving, and competitive give-and-take among the Jameses—the whole thick, eccentric, but nourishing stew of their family life—was a dish of which she could never get her fill, and Alice obligingly served up an endless banquet of anecdote and insight to satisfy her charge’s prodigious appetite. Over the course of the long voyage, she treated Elena to a smorgasbord of colorful and candid recollections of Europe, Newport, Cambridge, and the Civil War, offering, among other choice morsels, the observation that Henry—whom she had learned, just before sailing, was back in Paris—was “a native of the James family and knew no other country,” along with plentiful reminiscences of the two younger brothers, both tragically lost in battle so long ago.
Arriving in the French capital, the two Yankee ladies settled in at the Hôtel Lorraine near the Quai Voltaire, a favorite Parisian haunt of the Cambridge intelligentsia, where they were joined for dinner the following evening by Henry James. The trio took a corner banquette at the establishment’s table d’hôte, where the writer, having picked up Jesse’s cautious habit, sat with his back to the walls.
Needless to say, the encounter proved an awkward one. Alice James had no idea that her companion had enjoyed any prior acquaintance with Henry—that she had even, for a number of weeks, masqueraded as his wife—much less that Elena had spent any time with Frank and Jesse, of whose continued earthly existence the youngest James sibling remained entirely ignorant. Henry, having known Elena only by her lecturing soubriquet, had no reason to suspect that the Miss Hite whom his sister was accompanying to Paris would turn out to be his own erstwhile Mrs. James.
“Upon spying me,” Elena recorded in her journal, “H. positively recoiled in his seat. He was flustered & stammering deliciously. I feared he might succumb to apoplexy on the spot, but he miraculously regained his composure and carried off the charade with admirable aplomb, politely enquiring where I was from, how I had enjoyed my first trans-Atlantic voyage, &c. But as soon as A. excused herself briefly between courses, he leaned across the table and grabbed me by the wrist with surprising force, ferociously demanding sotto voce what on earth I thought I was doing there. When and why had I stopped being ‘Miss Phoenix’? And how the devil had I fallen in league with his beloved little sister?”
Elena explained to Henry that her acquaintance with William—and, pari passu, with Alice—had been the machination of her father and Dr. James Putnam of the Massachusetts General Hospital. “I certainly had n
ot the slightest inkling,” she insisted, “that Dr. William James of Harvard would turn out to be one of …you.”
“And what inklings do you suppose Alice might have of …us?” asked Henry.
Elena quickly reassured him that, to the best of her knowledge, neither his sister nor William knew anything of her prior “associations” out in Missouri. Then she turned the tables on her interlocutor by accusing him of having known all along that Jesse had a wife. This Henry vehemently denied, pointing out that in any event, being married was surely the least of his younger brother’s transgressions. He then admonished—virtually threatened—Elena not to divulge a word of any of this to his sister. “You cannot imagine,” he cautioned, “how frightfully it would upset her to learn that her trusted traveling companion had recently been consorting with the infamous outlaw Jesse James, nor—even more disturbing—that said brigand just happens to be her own not-so-late brother.”
“Indeed,” replied Elena. “But might it not upset her at least as much to learn that her darling brother Henry—known in the family circle, as she informs me, by the sweet pet name ‘Angel’—had recently knocked over a bank in Minnesota?”
Henry’s visage took on the same cringing, scolded-schoolboy cast that it had worn when Elena had first caught him staring across at her on the Missouri Pacific Express. But he quickly recovered. “And what proof do you have of that?” he snapped.
“Oh, please,” Elena bluffed, “we both know what we both know.”
“Aha! I thought not,” retorted Henry. But he conceded that it would be best for all concerned if they agreed to keep each other’s secrets.
Returning to the table, Alice discovered her brother and her traveling companion in a conspiratorial tableau of raised wineglasses.
“To a pleasant sojourn!” Henry improvised, bringing his goblet to Elena’s with a celebratory clink.
“And to a quiet one!” Elena added with a nearly imperceptible wink.
Alice, jumping into the jolly spirit of the occasion, raised her own glass and toasted: “To friends and family!”
Alice James was hardly so obtuse as her dining partners may have supposed or hoped. No less perspicacious than her more publicly accomplished brothers, she had already sensed that something was “up” with Elena Hite. Although still ignorant of her traveling companion’s clandestine ties to the James family, Alice was astute enough—having had copious experience of her own in the psychiatric arena—to appreciate that the younger woman’s interest in William went well beyond a patient’s typical curiosity about her doctor. She had especially remarked on Elena’s keen desire to hear all about Alice Gibbens—a red flag that led her to suspect that Elena the Huntress had set her cap, as the expression had it, for her beloved brother. Nor, as the days and weeks of their Paris sojourn together went by, could she help but observe that the patient and her physician were corresponding with a far greater frequency than any demands for medical updates could have warranted. Elena was sending William a letter almost daily, sometimes even twice a day, and he was responding nearly as prolifically. His patient was transparently thrilled to receive these missives, poring over them for nuggets of wit and wisdom that she often insisted on reading aloud to Alice. (The mere appearance of her name in William’s “beautiful and flowing” script on the face of an envelope, Elena confessed in her journal, was enough to transport her with “delicious gleams” of anticipation.)
It would probably be an egregious overinterpretation to suggest that Alice James, even if unconsciously, had it in mind to toss the monkey wrench of Elena Hite into the whirring gears of the “other” Alice’s matrimonial juggernaut; but in her own correspondence with her brother, she seems to have gone out of her way to depict Elena in the most tantalizing possible light, describing her charge as “lovely,” “brilliant,” “delightful,” “such excellent company,” “like a living sunbeam,” and even “celestial.” Whatever his sister’s intentions, William James received these glowing reports with a pleasure wholly disproportionate to any professional pride he might have taken in Elena’s psychiatric progress, which, by her own account in a letter to the doctor, was nearly miraculous:
Dear Dr. James,
What a benign medicine this journey is proving! You will doubtless be gratified to learn that my health & moral outlook have improved boundlessly since you last saw me; indeed, I suspect that you would scarcely recognize the glum, tormented creature of your consultation chamber. Paris is my tonic, owing in no small measure to the attentive ministrations of your superlative sister, without whom I’m sure I would simply wander about this marvelous city like a lost Hottentott. (Alice’s French, as you know, is excellent—better than excellent—whereas I am obliged to muddle through jabbering a dreadful chow-chow of all sorts of languages.)
My life here is so full of interest and my time so thoroughly filled that I’m practically bursting to tell you absolutely everything. The other evening, following an afternoon at the dazzling Musée du Louvre, we dined nearby at Le Grand Véfour, a favorite restaurant—or so we were told—of the emperor Napoleon (the first one, that is) and his empress Josephine. (I ate a thrush!) We have also explored the gilded splendor of the recently renovated opera house, the verdant and aromatic treasures of Le Jardin des Plantes, as well as the lofty, sky-pricking spires of the Notre Dame cathedral. Wherever we go we are treated to the splendid spectacle of parading soldiers, all hugely colorful, especially the mounted cuirassiers in their shining plumed helmets and snug white culottes de peau. (Alice & I attempted to imagine how you might appear decked out in such picturesque military attire & we happily concurred that you would make a most dashing dragoon.) Such wonders, of course, may seem merely so much vieux chapeau to the cosmopolitan likes of yourself—but to this wide-eyed daughter of Hartford it is all so much like having tumbled into the pages of a fantastical picture-book….
And if Paris was Elena’s tonic, her letters to William from that glittering city were rapidly becoming his own; for with the descent upon Cambridge of the chill gloom of November—along with his outlaw brothers—the doctor’s spirits had taken a decided turn for the worse.
To keep them away from Henry Sr. and their mother, and to substantiate the pretense that they were “visiting scholars,” William installed Frank and Jesse in Miss Upham’s boardinghouse on Kirkland Street, where he himself had been a resident during the early 1860s, before the rest of the family moved from Newport to Boston. The establishment catered to graduate students and bachelor dons, and in Frank’s case, at least, the role of academic proved a credible cover, as the older outlaw was more than content to spend his days auditing lectures and prowling through the stacks of the Harvard libraries. Jesse’s adjustment to his newly assumed scholarly identity was a bit rockier: William had winced to hear a report from the boardinghouse that his youngest brother, in the heat of a philosophical debate, had countered an aggressive challenge to his logic by declaring, “I refute it thus!” and drawing a cocked Derringer from the watch pocket of his waistcoat.
The old family taint was also casting its shadow over William’s romance with Alice Gibbens. Indeed, of this troubled period in their courtship, R. W. B. Lewis wrote, “William seemed oddly bent on undermining his case.” To whatever doubts and hesitations already bedeviled him—and they were legion—William added the unspoken complication of Elena Hite. His patient had become, in the phrase of Linda Simon, “a luminous figment of his imagination,” and as her shapely figure pirouetted incessantly across his mind, she came to exemplify everything that the Boston schoolmistress was not—a dazzling bird of paradise to Miss Gibbens’s drab and fussy brood hen. But was Elena, he must have wondered, a symptom or a solution? There was no denying that she was beautiful, bright, and sexually fascinating; nor could it have been lost on the man who once wrote “marry this fortune” that, in addition to her other charms, she was—or would become upon her father’s death—an immensely wealthy woman. While Alice Gibbens may have been the choice of Henry Sr., Elena appe
ared to be gaining the approval of Henry Jr. and his sister, with whom she seemed to be getting along famously. Her letter from Paris continued:
Our dear Henry has graciously sacrificed eons of his scribbling time to play cicerone to this pair of idle Yankee ladies. He has introduced us to many of his American friends here, including the delightful Bootts ( father Francis & daughter Elizabeth), Mr. Edward Lee Childes, Miss Henrietta Reubell, &c., and even to a smattering of his French confrères, among them the estimable M. Gustave Flaubert, with whose masterful Madame Bovary you are no doubt familiar.
Just yesterday, through the generous offices of sweet Lizzie Boott, we all paid a visit to the atelier of the celebrated painter Thomas Couture, erstwhile instructor to George Stanley, of whom you & I spoke in Cambridge, if you will recall. I fear I pestered your poor brother mercilessly to arrange this little pilgrimage, for which I have since offered him my most abject apologies. Despite the stellar opinion in which this artist is apparently held in certain quarters, I must confess that I found M. Couture hardly so formidable an entity—either in his art or his person—as I had been led to expect. Even his much-ballyhooed canvas The Romans of the Decadence struck me as, au fond, a tawdry thing. The work seemed an egregious example of the very worst sort of bombastic academic painting—highly impasted, exquisitely rendered in every detail yet totally false in overall effect. Ugh!
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