Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  TAP!

  She watched him blather, ponder, maunder: “Perhaps you ate a bit more marble cake today, and you grew bigger?”

  “And, is that so bad?”

  He lifted a strict paw: “The Queen will be just savage. If I’ve kept her waiting.”

  And then he did a thing that seemed so sad. A thing that seemed to lock them into place, to make of them an emblem: both of them forever separate, looking on one another but never moving toward each other; both of them, rather, remaining so staid, embalmed in some Victorian Picture book, in a child-pose for eternity. So prim. With such a formal, waistcoat-thrust he offered her that fan and his make-believe gloves: “I believe I . . . leave you these.”

  She made no move. Just took this in. What what was she to do? To play the churl, and to refuse him? After all, and after everything they’d lost, here they were again. She’d brought him here to do the book, she wouldn’t fault him doing it. And yet . . .

  She made no move. Just nodded. Holding her thoughts hostage. Could she offer some plea bargain?

  Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

  All right. If that was how he wanted it.

  And so, she merely nodded, and she took his gloves and fan. And then. Then she watched him disappear. Her whole childhood bending toward her, still too far to comfort her. Just her, again, though here.

  And she found herself beside a pool of tears.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Oh, did she?” someone quizzed, puncturing completely the spell of Wonderland. (A spell she’d been working so hard to cast!)

  “Who’s there? she asked herself—and only herself.”

  No surprise, then, that no answer answered back. Barely could Alice take in the question. The question of how, once again, she’d been left, beside some slate-colored pool, and no use following him.

  “And then?” purred someone.

  “And then?” Ah yes. That was the question. The dum-dum question bringing her back. Evicting her into the way it still was (and probably always had been)—in this concrete murk, in this Underground ruin, where her eyes remained so downcast. There: all her gilt-edged story pages—all those beloved Flamingo and Lobster engravings—like nose-blown facial tissues littering the coldsteel tracks.

  Then again. Perhaps it was only the tilt of her head, or the stubborn slant of her cot, which gave the impression of this Downcast Her. Or . . . perhaps she’d gone too far within, then (so unthinkingly) let herself slip out, and like some imbecile mouse, had left herself only one hole to run back to. Look where that left her now. Stuck in ye olde world as it was. Lodged in her old, fatuous self. Wearing this ill-mannered blouse and cement-dusted skirt. And welcome back, burnspots marking her arms.

  In other words: caught. Yet again. In this dunderhead Tube, in the stupefying midst of this stultifying crew, as she murmuremembered those storybook words: “Oh, I wish I could manage to be glad. Only I never can remember the rule . . .”

  “Alice?”

  Yes, she thought, through the dirtytile blur: I must be her still. Alice. But who was this, bending toward her?

  “Have we lost you to the Pool, then? . . . Absent Alice?”

  Tabatha, it was. Come from her perch. Gaunt shoulders hunched, beneath a fraying dress, as if to offer some defense for her bandaged face.

  “Still here, thank you,” Alice murmured. Feeling belittled by the sound of her own voice. “I suppose I’ve just been chattering on?”

  “Like a china cup, yes. But to what end?”

  With a sudden self-conscious remembering, Alice looked out of herself again—and watched the world lock in around her, like some jigsaw puzzle she once more clicked into, bringing some sense (as the missing piece does) to the whole perplexing thing. Here she was—here they all were, still—within the brownblotched encampment. Everyone and everything, appearing like panels in some monochromatic mural. As if the tilewalls and they had been made of one flesh, then slathered with the same dullglaze.

  And Alfred? Presumably there—though every fold of his curtain conspired to seclude him from her. And now, two stout Orderlies stood beside, as if stationed there. Why?

  “He’s there, your friend, yes. And we’re here. In need of all our courage, yes,” Tabatha recapitulated. “Still, it’s rather a brave story.”

  “Oh do you think?” Alice questioned, with a rueful glance toward that quarantine.

  “Better and better, the more of you in it.”

  “And the less of us, thank you,” Mamie lobbed in.

  “So,” Tabbie batted back, “you have been listening?”

  “Be serious,” scoffed Mamie.

  “But I am,” rejoined Tabatha. Her voice, grave as some dark sibyl’s, issuing from that mask of wrappings. “It’s when you say what can’t be said that the dogs snap to attention.”

  Before the miffed Miss Van Eysen could mutter whatever, Tabbie turned back, her roughsoft hand grazing Alice’s: “What next, then?”

  “If only I knew,” Alice answered.

  Feeling lost in something like loss itself. Like some ruined compass, everywhere she looked, she kept failing to find north, failing to find home. Come now, no time for all that. Withdrawing into some part of herself where she always was so sure of herself, Alice cast about her mind, to find what next, what next (like some unfamiliar musical phrase she kept struggling to isolate, as it rose into view only to fade away). But it all—all her thought—seemed like some vacant lot, where once, before the air raids had begun, something so good and enduring had stood.

  “In the story,” prodded Tabatha. The unrelenting Tabatha. “What’s next?”

  That is the question, yes. But Alice had no answer. And Tabatha kept asking: “She took his gloves and fan, then she watched him . . . disappear. And then?”

  And then?

  A sudden raw-skinned cough—Alfred’s cough! With a jerk of her neck, Alice caught sight of one of those supposed Orderlies, surreptitiously slipping behind Alfred’s tent. The next moment, the other Orderly met her gaze. One stark “Don’t even think about it” glare.

  CHAPTER X:

  —

  MORE OPEN THAN USUAL

  ONLY some months ago, wasn’t it? That stuffy, mid-September afternoon, after school. She’d been headed with Alfred to a Tube station much like this one. She, knowing always to remain one discreet step behind, in the event he should slip. As they trod over what had become their new playground—heaps of charred and broken brick, and the neatly swept pile of ocean-green glass. No sky discernible above—only ash from the burning rags, and random bits of flaming stuff. As they traipsed down roads of debris and debris, past the occasional alley of rats, and on—past lone and level heaps, which once had been rows of flats.

  And . . . on. Not a chirp from any bird to accompany them, not a sound but their footsteps through the dust. Though, in truth, she could hear nothing much—only Alfred’s bare ruined breath, laboring. She could feel him, so anxious, monitoring the raucous tick-tock of it. She could see the red effort fretting his cheeks—after all the nights breathing the sulfurous dust and ash. Dust like the dust rising around them just now, rising from idle depths of the wreck. From the wasteland, the colossal wasteland that was London.

  And still on they went. She, saying nothing. Better, she knew, not to stray from their usual trek, better she show no concern (surely, nothing overt) that he could miss a step—or again lose his breath. Better, she knew, that he remain confident.

  On. With her shadow even more silent than his. Past a street of homes collapsed like a pack of cards. Spent. Broken pictures and lamps (someone’s bedside lamp!) splintering under their feet. He, staring fixedly ahead of him. Finally, addressing the silence as much as his friend: “Just think, Alice . . . all those windows.”

  “Yes?”

  “Behind every one of them, there was a world—just yesterday
; mother and father and sister, crazy old aunts with their loud, hungry children and pets. Each of them, caught in a life—however nasty, brutish, or sad. Each of them, roomed in their own thoughts and memories. Where are they now, all those memories?”

  “Within them still. Very likely,” she offered. “All those displaced tenants, they could well be with their families. In shelters, now. Or settled in the countryside.”

  “Or heaped in some unmarked street, with the nameless dead.”

  Must he be so brutish and sad? What what to say to encourage him?

  Too late, again. Like a prince in mourning, rebuking the wind that its name had been all but erased: he continued, gloomily, “All the things those people ever saw, all the sweet silent things they ever thought—are those, too, still within them? Waiting to be identified with the rest of them?”

  “Alfred, please,” she urged. “Don’t distress yourself.”

  “In some way, they’re lucky, the ones blown to bits. Must be worse for those under the debris, buried alive but still smelling the dust, hearing the cries of those buried nearby—still muttering. As if being dead were not enough for them.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first life they’ve taken from us.” Her voice rose, fervent as his.

  “Maybe not. But at least we’re still here. Stumbling over their bones, with homes aboveground to go home to.”

  “Yes, and yes,” she said, alarmed by his ragged, discontinuous breath. “But I’m tired, Alfred. Let’s rest a bit. Just there, there’s a bench.”

  But he would not, would not look up.

  “Alfred. Please.”

  Not a nerve in him trembled as she took hold of his arm. As she beckoned him toward what was almost a bench. There sat a blank-faced boy, wrapping his wasted arm in loose pages of days-old newspaper, using its inky print as a kind of tourniquet. As if begrudging the world his endedness.

  At the sight or the thought, Alfred stopped. Stood, unmoving. He became his stare. And something so rigid came over him, as if he might never step out of that posture again.

  Where, where to look? If not at him? Where, in the landscape of death surrounding them?

  Not for the first time since this disastrous war began, Alice found herself musing on those pale, still forms, those ancient Greek friezes her Papa had loved. Those magisterial Elgin Marbles, at the British Museum, worn and wasted from so many centuries of bombings and displacements (and perhaps from all of us, ogling away at them).

  What was it Papa’d said? That they stand there as a testament. As a monument which says, despite how fragmented we may become, despite how splintered into how little we remember, still something that is us remains. Something, at the heart of us, does endure . . .

  And still, throughout her entire spell of remembering, Alfred had not budged. Beyond him, that solemn brick wall, exposing an empty lavatory, with a lone towel hanging from the rack. A lone, still-standing building, its ragged curtains billowing from empty mouths of rose-brick, where once windows had been. Down the road a bit, an emptied, tottering department store, the front blasted from it, a sign in a door frame, proclaiming: “More Open than Usual.” All its tins of food, and bottles of perfume, flat on the street, beside a smattering of corpse-like, rose-pink mannequins.

  CHAPTER XI:

  —

  THAT POOL OF TEARS

  “SO? . . . Alice?”

  Tabatha? It was, trying to conjure the familiar, sentient Alice from the seemingly absent girl. “Meanwhile, back at that ‘Pool of Tears’?”

  Still no Alice surfaced. However visible, on that ill-lit platform, she (no doubt) remained. However miserable.

  Lightly, Tabbie assailed her, again: “Come on then—tell us. In that yarn of yours, what’s next?”

  Barely could Alice hear. Hardly could she bring herself now from the stonegaze of that stout Orderly stationed beside Alfred’s tent.

  “Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “You will tell us?”

  Still barely remembering where she’d left off, and little knowing where she’d come out, Alice began to recite, as if to some campfire world (where darkened faces semi-patiently waited): “The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.”

  Here, she caught a breath, knowing full well what was next: “Alice took up the gloves and fan, and, as the hall was exceedingly hot, she kept fanning herself . . .”

  “How ’bout that Pool?” some smoke-tinged voice drawled.

  Angus—from his lazy pipe? Listening? It couldn’t be.

  A lone cluck—Nigel?—from the ambiguous gloom: “Pool of Tears—yeah?”

  Him—listening, too? Well, all right. Once more, she closed her eyes to read, to find herself within the book within her . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  . . . There, beneath the veiled sun, the Wonderland sun, it seemed Alice stood alone. On some cloudtawny afternoon—reflected, shadowless, within that fabled Pool.

  But within that Pool? It was as if all the drops, of all the petty heartache, of all the loss, all the trifling pains that haunted her still, day to day, had joined the unshed tears for all the still-unmourned-for things. As if upon a pool of Wonderland tears, she were meeting some image of her London world, awash. There, yes: a pool of her own thought, upon whose surface countless shadows played . . .

  Inwardly, she saw again: no Wonderland thing, no. Only that still-unbroken looking glass, swinging like a loose tooth in her sister’s bare and shattered room. But she mustn’t, mustn’t dwell there. Press on with your story, Alice.

  But . . . there, just there once, in front of that still-familiar glass, within that so sophisticated room . . . her sister had stood. Beloved, lovely Catherine. Still-unscathed, unwounded Catherine. Savvy as ever, lately so tall and surprisingly willowy. Trying new trousers (the price tag still on them) with her best cotton sweater—the one with the split-pea buttons, picking up the pea-green motif of the collar. Busy, bossy, trendy Catherine. Doing her eyes—as she called it. Readying herself for her Edmund. Meeting him for some High Tea or some such thing. At some smart new café. With some whole new smart set of teens, whom he of course knew. Really, it was all Alice could do not to keep asking and asking about them. (Knowing full well she’d been born with the doom of being too young ever to join them.)

  “My advice to you, Alice,” Cathy offered. But not as a question—advice was sure to follow. “Keep yourself as is. Everything just as is. One more birthday, perhaps—then, that’s it. Never consent to go double-digit.”

  “Just stay nine, forever?”

  “That’s when the best of it is,” that raven eyeliner vigorously contended. “When you’re still free to do as you please. To stay and stay late. To play whatever games—”

  “What, with Alfred?”

  “Who else?”

  Stay nine forever—with Alfred? “What do you mean?”

  The light rouge nodded, in sync with the matte-raspberry lips: “Give it a few years. Mum won’t even let you alone with him.”

  “Don’t be silly—”

  “But she won’t, love. It isn’t enough to be a good girl, you also have to seem like one. Particularly, since his family has a bit of money . . .”

  “. . . Pool of Tears?” some brash voice intruded. “Meaning, like the slosh-pool down here? From the blasted water main? One big bad drip, drip, drip?”

  Oh drat! That did it. Angus, undoubtedly. Tearing a sudden hole, making a terrible crack in Alice’s looking-glass reverie. Yanking her abruptly back, reeling her through some sad fraying portal, back to this grimconcrete world—and Catherine gone.

  Once again, Alice looked about—and took in the matte-unrouged Underground gloom. Nowhere to look that could be bothered being looked at. (Certainly not those scattered pages, still sc
owling in dismay at their own hideous change.) Trapped. And somehow sadder and wiser for that. As if she’d reached a sort of puberty in tears . . .

  Without so much as a sigh, with only a glance toward her quarantined listener, whom she could only hope was listening, that wordweaving girl took up her Tale again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Wondering who, or what exactly, she had become, Alice bent to look into that Wonderland Pool of Tears. There, another Alice bent to meet her—a seeming reflection of her, in a Storyblue dress just like hers, in a pinafore just as pristine as hers—but such a strange, ungainly figure that Alice started back from it. It, too, started back, as if she too were strange.

  And there, another Image seemed to surface. This one smoother, somewhat slimmer (thank you), soliciting her eye from the watery gleam. Alice bent, for a closer peek—it bent!—and pleased, she fixed her look on it. Pleased, it fixed its look. Like someone Alice had been friendly with, once, but hadn’t seen in such an age, she’d rather just avoid her really. (Someone surely Alfred would remember. And had he found her so naive, so needy as now she did?)

  In any event. Just think how many “me”s she’d already been! Countless “me”s, who’d come and gone. And which of them remained with her, remained as her? She wondered . . .

  For, with all she’d lost these last few months, with all she’d never dreamed she’d feel, that now she’d come to know so feelingly, she’d had to be continually remembering, stitching together some new her, some self who could maybe make sense of all the loss. But then, through the unending night, she’d had to be forever unremembering—like some modern-day Penelope—unwinding darkluminous thread, unstitching that new her again. Weaving a kind of tapestry of all she so intended to forget. Of all the fresh hurts. All the loss for words. All the worry for what would come next, what next . . .