Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  Show no fear. “No, I’ve got it. I believe.”

  Alfred, from third-row center, watchwatching. Wanting, so keenly, to feed her the answer.

  “Then?” Miss O’Shaughnessey jabbed.

  Near-bereft, Alice swallowed, breathed: “Who led the British troops to victory in the legendary Battle of Effandune?”

  Ah, the aching contortion of Alfred’s sweet face!

  “Ethandune,” Miss O’Shaughnessey coldly corrected. “But yes, that is the question.”

  Thank heaven.

  “And the answer?”

  That was the question, yes.

  “Alice?”

  Never once, in all those thousand years, since the Battle of Effen-Ethandune, never had a single Angle or Saxon gesticulated so urgently as Alfred did then. Cupping his hands on the crown of his head.

  Ah, the crown! “Well, it must have been . . . the king,” Alice conjectured.

  Miss O’Shaughnessey, unimpressed: “Namely?”

  What what were those Alfred-thumbs trying to tell her? Jabbing again toward his chest.

  “King . . . Chest-er,” Alice tried.

  “Excuse me?”

  “King . . . Me?”

  “Alice!”

  Then it hit her. Eureka. “King Alfred!” . . .

  . . . “Pudding? Harold Pudding?” Dr. Butridge quacked, with a wary, mysophobic air. That quack transporting her, as such quacks do, back to the Limboland world of the Tube (that unmapped space, located somewhere between the gloom without and the gloom within). There, upon the blurred tile-horizon, that delusional Doctor still tracking Harold—like a dentist chasing a traumatized patient who’d fled to the waiting room. His madmedical clipboards rattling, coldly pinching the air. No pinch in death—they seemed to brag—so sharp as this.

  But as the echo of that rattling brass mournfully died away, some strange, articulate silence settled upon them all. The Nurse drew closed Alfred’s curtain, and a slow awareness dawned, that that damaged infantryman had just run, half-senseless, into the rain of shells and the fiery night. Still, the wordlessness, and the awe, lasted only so long. Then, that familiar beast, Adolescent Hubbub, reared its head once more.

  “Maybe he thought those bombed streets needed company?” Dodgy opined.

  “Quite right,” Mamie cooed. “Good of him.”

  “But what if he? . . . If he’s . . . hit?” mewled Nigel.

  That dire, flattening siren sounded a kind of amen, and again all eyes peered up those stairs. But . . . to no end. Not a word from Pudding. No one there.

  Only that Red Cross requiem, that whistle resounding through the night—and all their insomniac ears—as she summoned her Secret Thugs, aka the Orderlies. With a heaving-and-ho-ing of her stalwart arm.

  Just watch her, Alice thought. Must be wanting only to throw up her hands, to sit and weep—for the shadow of death, falling on all of them. (All of them, like Alice herself, so rude, so resentful of her. As if, despite all the Nurse’s care, she could never inspire love in any of them, only fear.) And still, she had to stay in command. To marshal her strength, show no weakness, bring order again.

  “The imbecilic, that numpty, Harold Pudding!” the Nurse decreed, then commanded: “Bring him back. Immediately.”

  Thankfully, not a body, nobody, was propped aloft on a stretcher, when those Orderlies dropped everything. (Effectively abandoning Alfred—thank you.) When they bolted down the platform, toward the stairs. A thievish progress of darkness spreading over the station, like the ominous, shuddering shadow of horses, fleeing, bewildered by lightning.

  “All right, lights out. Everyone. In. Their. Bed.”

  With that, a stirring of blankets. A listless or begrudging moan, here and there. That was that.

  Till, once more, Hubbub, with its thousand whispering tongues, could not restrain a single one of them:

  “How dare he? To up and leave?” “Who?” “Pudding!” “Oh. Did he?” “Who?” “Abandoning his mates again, isn’t he?” “I begged him not to go—you heard me.” “Are we really bothering to blather about that half-wit?” “They’ll be bombing!” “Bedwetter!” “I did everything I could. You heard me.”

  And Alfred, breathing more easily, was he? His body restored to some calm again? Or not? What had he done to himself, to his health, by lunging from bed to help her—only made himself more flush, more feverish? Or had the expense of all that spirit reassured him somehow? That he still had it in him? She could not see or know, only hear him dimly. As she chanted inwardly for him, thanking him, her true friend, thanking him . . .

  CHAPTER XV:

  —

  SO LITTLE ABRACADABRA

  NIGHT Two, it had been. (Though, “the weeping lasts only a night,” Papa always had said.) And yet, a tear-riddled Night Two it had been, in this Underground station; with Alfred, though wounded, still here, just here, on a cot beside hers. It was before he’d begun the worst of the wheezing, the most frightful coughing. Before that dire Nurse had taken him from her and set him behind that insignia’d curtain. Till then, till that night, it had seemed like this whole horrid war was a thing that somehow had happened around Alice. A thing that, however acutely it grieved her, would one day make sense, if she only got through it. But this . . .

  On Night Two, he had still been so him. His spirit resilient. Consoling, cheering her, telling her tales. In spite of the effort it cost him, regaling her with faux biographies of that whole Underground crew. (As if everyone else existed only so Alfred and she could create legends out of them.) Till she could do nothing but swallow her useless tears. Admiring again how inventive he was, how unflagging his care and attention to her. Naturally, he’d reserved all his wittiest bits for his recitation about their Dame Nurse. Affecting, all through it, to sound like some BBC programmer, while his head rested gamely on his pillow, the faint electric fire of his eyes still so animated.

  “At the proud age of eighteen,” he began, “the brilliant if unruly aristocrat, Agatha Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, had been formally presented to the Queen. To whom she reportedly quipped: “‘Why is it only the women who have to wear gloves?’”

  “White Rabbits aside,” Alice replied.

  He, duly noting, continued: “Educated at home in Kenilworth, for discretionary purposes until her Mum and Dad had had their fill, the girl continued her schooling at the Convent of the Assumption in Paris. That is, until her expulsion therefrom. Due to . . .” (And here he paused, for effect, or at least to ponder what to say next.)

  “Do tell,” Tabatha ventured, eavesdropping from her crevice above.

  “Purportedly due,” he complied, “to her catastrophic liaison with some notorious Czech race car driver, and the subsequent traumas she inflicted on a half-dozen young, trusting nuns.”

  “Oh, he’s good,” opined Tabatha.

  “And so, back to England—back to the family manor—she went?” queried Alice, her mood lightening, knowing so well the (invariably) Jane Austen–esque form of his fables.

  “To Kenilworth, yes,” he affirmed. “But then, finding their Agatha all grown and home again, what were Lord and Lady Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby to do? What with her flooding and moating their formal dining room, what with the forts she constructed from the Louis Quinze settees as she did battle with Imaginary Vikings? Where could they possibly send the girl? What career could contain her? What lord (or lady) ever would have her?”

  Unsure about that, Alice and Tab chose patience and waited.

  “Thankfully,” the boy resumed, “those parents’ heartfelt prayer was answered with the outbreak of World War II.”

  “All right, lights out. And silence,” that omnipresent Nurse abruptly brayed.

  His voice remaining gentle and low, as ever, the mischievous Alfred continued: “To the relief of all, and the surprise of none, Lady Agatha insisted on marching direct
ly to the front. And while her genteeler sisters—”

  “I said, silence, Crickets,” Nurse chirruped. “Why is it I hear you, but you can’t hear me?”

  Let her speak, Alice thought, catching the Nurse’s eye. Offer some bland smile; soon enough she’ll mosey on.

  “Indeed,” Alfred pressed on, in a whisper, “that very evening, Lady Agatha spied a placard at Paddington Station: FIRST AID RED CROSS LECTURES. Within moments, Her Ladyship was memorably in attendance. Impressing one and all, with her vivid classroom interactions—”

  “I said!” And there that Actual Nurse was, her sudden stern hand on Alice’s shoulder bidding a halt to all this nonsense. Encroaching, once again, on everything them.

  “You will wear the boy out with your chatter! Now lie down, as he has—on your bed. Let the poor ailing thing be. Time. To. Sleep.”

  Reluctantly, Alice settled back, set her preoccupied head on her pillow, her blistered arms under her blanket. And she remained there, at anchor. Trying to convince herself that the Nurse was moving on, like some ruinous angel passing over. (An angel, like the one Papa’d told her of: always turned toward the past; but seeing there only one heap of debris. Wreck after wreck after wreck . . .)

  And now, through the monotone drip from that water main, she could feel her sensation waning, some new silence absorbing her mind, as if she might finally melt into night . . . But there, like a balm, came her friend’s rebel whisper: “With the barbaric intensification of the Blitz, that newly certified Nurse, who had anticipated the most heroic of front-line adventures, found herself assigned to a lowly Tube station. Disheartened but undeterred, she applied the steel wool of her mind to maintaining that station like a Spartan military operation . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  And still, Night Nine, it was. The ninth of nights, in this Underground-now. But had it ever, she wondered, been other than now? Other than lying here? Other than praying that ungodly Doctor (so certain in all his certainties) would not hear the tracheal moan through Alfred’s cough—and would not seize on that as medical evidence . . .

  Yes. It had. On those blessedly thought-free lawn runs, behind their houses. Those times the morning seemed so transparent. On offer.

  But how when where was all that greenshade now? Where—on Night Nine, with the spring of her mind winding down? Consigned, as she was, to hearing again those nightboots of lead creak across her diminutive soul. She, sitting restless, stiff as this creaseless cot. Surely, she’d been exiled to some Land of the Lost, where she fed from a trough of regret, on the hum of a train, which never quite came, and that singular, simpering drip.

  And there, somewhere near. In some pool of the dark, not far, that artful Dodgy stirred. See, draping himself stealthily, in his semi-rheumatic flannel blanket. Seemingly, for no one else, alone with himself, he preened and posed, he positively glowed. (Let those doltish do-goods languish in their doom and gloom, content with their obscurity. That boredbored boy intended to party!)

  “I said: Bed,” the Nurse bayed, strong-arming the negligent Nigel (who’d been busily saying the prayers Mummy taught him). Done with that, done with him, she started round, inspecting, would-be protecting, and when need be, forcibly flinging her restless charges in bed: “One day, dears, you’ll thank me.”

  Consumed with this, her righteous mission, stripping from the children this last vestige of that petty thing, Liberty, she did not notice Dodgy, dolled-up Dodgy, trailing his floor-length behind him. Behind her. Would-be bedazzling, as he sashayed down that dreary platform in her wake. All lightness, himself, all chiffon. (As if she were merely Night’s bridesmaid, he the true bride.)

  With a haggard gasp, the Red Cross Nurse paused. Affronted. Scandalized by something. Not Alfred. Then who? Some truant? There! That blue-blooded debutante, nattering-on—upright? “Miss Van Eysen!”

  “Sorry, it’s Mamie.”

  “Excuse me?” the Nurse reproved her. “What do you dream you’re doing?”

  “Me?” the frayed Mamie riposted. “Sitting up.”

  “That much, I can see. Really, the more I do for you, Miss Mamie, the less you do for yourself.”

  “All right, then,” Mamie agreed, “I’ll just amuse myself here. Meanwhile, you go fetch us some Breakfast Tea.”

  “There is no tea.”

  “Only three Tube stops to Harrods, or so they tell me,” the pale girl retorted, saluting the Nurse with her chipped gold-and-shell-pink teacup.

  Baam, those Cross (kleptomaniacal) hands clamped down on Miss Van Mamie and her contraband cup. More intent, frankly, on claiming a win than on correcting any real sin.

  “Ohhhh,” Alice thought aloud, “how I wish I could shut myself up like a telescope.”

  Wonderlandwords bounced straight back at her: “Too late, Pig.”

  Alice looked about, puzzled. Only to be struck by a fresh bit of verbiage: “Come, Piggie,” a weirdly familiar mouth frowned. “Come to Duchess.”

  The Duchess?! From Wonderland? That Imperious Dame, with the wattling neck and snout, who would so savagely beat her pig-infant and fling him about? Who so crassly chastised the Story Alice merely for thinking aloud. (“Think too much, my dear, and you forget to talk!”)

  What was that deadly Duchess doing here? Had the Underground been so battered, and left so bewildered, that now it was letting whatever Wonderland Characters in? (Alternatively, had London been so thoroughly deluged, even storybook characters were taking refuge in the Tube?)

  * * *

  • • •

  No time for wondering. A mere two cots away, Nurse Cross was so consumed, attempting to bury the spit-and-polish Mamie in rough wool, that that Underground Duchess was free to grab at Alice, to dandle the child to her withering breast: “All grown up, are you?”

  “Not all, my Duchess.”

  “Not what I hear. Pig!”

  “From whom?” Alice demanded.

  “From youm. Wallowing through your story-afternoon, trailing bunny tails, doing Caterpillar fumes and shrooms?”

  “But—” Alice tried, “the Caterpillars—”

  “Blaming insects, dear?”

  And with that, adopting the indignant manner of that cross-dressing Dodgy, that vehement Duchess gave Alice’s bottom a smack.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rule Forty-Two”—La Duchesse scowled—“you know it, dear. You so, ‘Oh I know it all by heart!’ You have no right to grow here!”

  “But I can’t help it.”

  “Can!” she demanded, thwacking Alice again.

  “Really,” sighed Alice. “I’m too old for this.”

  “Exactly,” the Duchess proclaimed. “Now you’re all too big to be my pig!”

  “I never was your pig!”

  “Pig!” the Duchess spat. “You made yourself too big! You skipped my bit—your cherished Chapter Six—entirely. Set a bookmark on my heart, but don’t mind me.”

  Whack, she smacked the girl’s tail end.

  “Ouch!” Alice leapt from bed.

  Round the Duchess circled, her enormous skirt swooshing and swirling on the yielding air, till the Red Cross Nurse jerked about. Through the murk of senseless darkness, her trained eyes discerned some laggard behind her. “Who’s that?”

  “Mummmmy!” wawled Nigel. Suddenly, demandingly, grappling the Nurse in his weakened arms, stopping her cold in her tracks. (Like an infant crying in the night, and with no language but the cry . . .)

  The Nurse stiffened, tightening her smile; but then let her arms, suffering all, slowly fall, and suffered this child to embrace her as Mum.

  Almost Alice was touched—to remember how lucky she was, that one day, when all this was done, she would again be held by her Mum . . . For the moment, however, she was too consumed with this redoubtable Duchess.

  And she, said Duchess, w
as entertaining no interest in some blip of Underground tenderness. Merely she glared at Alice: “Now what have you done? You piiiiiig!”

  “But, shall I not get any older than I am?” a defiant Alice asked.

  “Wretched Pig,” swaggered the Duchess, offended. Her words rattling: “Grew yourself such breasts and hips, my lovelies sagged, just watching them. You broke my heart, you selfish tart, and now my day’s just fart fart fart! And so I’m left—with no one left.”

  “But, I never—”

  “You stole my soul and made me old, you pig! You stripped the sheets, and stole my sleep, and left my youth a dream. I’ll see you at the Trial!”

  “The Trial?”

  “Exactly. You think our Tale—and that bouncy bunny tail—belongs to you? To hold on to, to linger, to rewrite as you choose? You pig! You piiiiiiig! Piiiiiiiiiiiiig!”

  “Dodgy Dawkins?” the Red Cross Nurse abruptly blared, near-burning a hole in the Underground air.

  “Oh please,” came back Dodgy. From somewhere near.

  “Don’t tempt me.” Catching hold of the scoundrel, the Nurse peeled him from some blanket not his. With a sneer, “Back! To! Your! Bed!”

  (Really, Alice thought, the day this war was done, the woman should be named the Patron Saint of Sleep, in recognition of her sermons about “Back to Bed.”)

  Fortunately, before that (saintly) Nurse could draw too near, the dastardly Duchess had disappeared. But . . . to where? Or had Alice hallucinated the entire encounter?

  Never could she quite riddle it out. For, soon as she set herself back in bed . . .

  That Nurse, striding on to the quarantine curtain summoned her watchdog: “Doctor, join me here.”

  What now? Let him sleep, can’t you? You’re the Queen of that. He just needs sleep.

  On came Dr. Butridge: mumbling, clipboards clinkclanking in his blundering forefingers and thumbs. Utterly oblivious to his own blundering. Unfathomable, Alice thought; the way he came sputtering on, eyebrows scrunched, squinting like some half-blinded tailor, reducing the infinite world to the needle eye he struggled to squint through.