by Steven Sater
Still, as she squirmed, Alice tried—truly she did try—to do that so-difficult thing of imagining someone elderly young again. With a spring in their step. With an ennobling purpose, some real investment in a future which would benefit others, which could rock the world a bit. But try as she might, the man was like an oyster she could not get open. An image she could not get past, of a life spent in service to archaic, materialist ideas, administering a medicine for the human machine, while utterly neglecting the soul.
Huffing and puffing, finally that Doctor steadied himself beside that mordant Nurse. “Hallam. Alfred Hallam,” he murmured.
“Yes, Doctor. See. Some frightful chill’s come over him. That’ll show him, jumping out of bed.”
What?!
In the Doctor leaned, and inspected: “Oh my. My. The lad has plunged.”
Plunged? Because of what he’d done for her? No no no no no.
At a brisk brusque look from the Nurse, the Doctor grimaced. Less for the sake of Alfred, it seemed, than out of fear he’d neglected to put on his Glacial Mask of Doctorly Distance. Getting a colder grip. “Blood-tinged phthisic sputum,” he pronounced.
Meaning what?!
With a grave and graver look, he so offhandedly asked: “Is there family?”
Nurse replied, dutifully: “None found.”
“I’m like family,” Alice cried, bolting upright. “He has me. He’ll always have me.”
Swatting such buzz-a-buzz from her, the Almighty Nurse chastised those beleaguered out-of-breath Orderlies: “Did I not say move this boy? Ward D. Immediately.”
“No!” Alice shouted, jumping from bed. “He’s here with me.”
As if in some dark-karmic response, Alfred erupted in violent coughs. A harsh gasping sound. So loud!
“Alfred!”
But the Nurse came charging like a boar in heat toward her, grabbing hold of her: “I said: Let. Him. Be.”
“No!” cried Alice. “Let me go!”
But, her words made nothing happen. (In this war-torn, refugee world, even the best words held so little abracadabra.)
Skidding across the unswept concrete, Nurse Cross dragged the unrelenting girl back. “Be grateful I haven’t expelled you from the shelter.”
Before Alice could so much as murmur, nervily that Cyclone Nurse turned, threatening to drown that whole scandal-mongering crowd: “Not a word.”
At that word, Alice battered, kicked, pounded; half a scream screaming out of her, when . . .
As if in response—thank you, enemy planes!—a Scalded Cat raid suddenly splintered the night above. A brisk marauding foray by multiple planes, evading anti-aircraft fire. And with that impudent attack, the crack began. Some wound, some trembling which Alice could sense, from above but also beneath the tracks. An abysmal chasm opening—just as, once before, it had: sending her world tumbling down. Not again.
“Everyone—under your beds!”
All at once, everyone ducked—Nigel, Mamie, Angus, even Dodgy (but so slowlocomotively; as if by some horrid bureaucratic accident, he’d been booked on coach, instead of first class). Everyone but Alice, down down, on all fours, and breathing hard.
But Alice could not move. Only she felt the earth within her tremble, mourning with her. As if this whole dark world, and wide, were sensing some coming wound. Were knowing some groaning intimation: soon there would be chaos come again. Once more, the tremors, those pillars of fire falling, zigzagging their dark lightning through the night. The windows of London shaking, dreadful; from Brixton to Islington, all the sisters crying; from Clapham to Greenwich, all the lost papas; from Stepney to Shoreditch, all the young mothers, turning down chairs in their shelters, chanting some broken tune to distract their infant from the dreadful roaring of the sky. To keep those hornets in the sky from becoming once more the hornet in their mind.
A meowing from the crevice mouth: “Pudding. Poor thing, Harold Pudding.”
Harold Pudding out there, still? Running as the bombs come falling? He, too, soon a body on fire? Fleeing, screaming. Running through the pages ripped from all the books in all the world. (“Every page,” as Papa’d say, “a grief dispelled, now turned to . . .” something else?)
“Alice, on your knees. Under your bed,” the Nurse blared, darting below-cot herself. “Pray God, we all get through the night.”
That was all the cue Nigel needed; he began murmuring feverishly, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”
Toting her treasured tea-trinkets below, Mamie struck a rather diffident tone: “Pray to God? After what he’s put me through? I wouldn’t even invite Him to my birthday.”
“God is dead,” pronounced Dodgy blandly. Examining some disastrous bacon-like bit, stuck to his lower lip. “Meanwhile, I’m not feeling so well myself.”
With that, Alice dropped onto her chafed chafing knees, surreptitiously crawling across the shadowy platform toward Alfred. Taking advantage of a world distracted.
For the moment, only the stopped breaths and the dull tintinnabulation of the hollow Tube station. All else silent, till . . .
With an antique toke on his Sophistical pipe, Angus theorized: “At this point, God’s only excuse is He doesn’t exist.”
“He doesn’t,” Tabatha hissed. “We killed him.”
Maybe, Alice thought. Either way, this was no time for theology. With a final lurch forward, here she was. And now, and now, with a quick covert flick of the curtain, she peered up from under the quarantine tent. “Alfred?”
“‘Hush! Hush!’ said the Rabbit.” In a low tone, through half lids, Alfred recited from memory: “‘Hush! Or the Queen will hear you!’”
“Alfred, calm yourself,” warned Alice.
Barely did he seem to take heed. No, his face was sealed to her. Pleased as he clearly was to see her, he did not seem surprised or relieved. (As if he’d known she’d always be there.) Still, something so unsteady within him. As though unready for that back-and-forth world of “won’t” or “will,” he relied on long-known book words: “‘He sent them word I had not gone; we knew it to be true—’”
“Alfred, you’re skipping to the end. That’s the Trial.”
But on he went: “‘If we should push the matter on, what would become of you?’” Then, dropping all pretense of playing, he struck so plaintive a tone: “What would become of you, Alice?”
“I—” she faltered. “I’ll be Alice still, and chasing after you, my ‘Dear, oh dear!’ White Rabbit.”
“No,” he answered squarely. “I won’t be here again. We must, must end before I end.”
“Alfred, catch your breath,” she cautioned.
“No. I have to put a period. The sentence has no meaning if it does not end—”
“It will. Again, again,” she assured him. “We’ll go there still.”
“You will. And for you to carry on, you must care less for me.”
“Never. No.”
He looked to her, as if through a world of pain for her, and answered with gravity: “Then, I’ll make that easier for you. Although it breaks my heart, I’ll help you let me go.”
Alice stared at him. Unsure what to think.
“I followed you,” he said, “now follow me.” And with a flicker of his pale ailing hand, he summoned once again their one rosegolden sweep of Wonderland.
CHAPTER XVI:
—
“COME, WE LIVE IN RIDDLES, CHILD”
CLOUDLESS the sky stood, over the cloudless land. She, once more, standing beside her White Rabbit— she, in her Storyblue dress—before the house of the March Hare. That notorious house, just as detailed in their book, with its chimneys “shaped like ears,” and its roof “thatched with fur.”
For, here she was—yes, look—with Alfred here: transported, at his word, to their cloudless land again . . .
But was this, in fact, her
Alfred—or was it the White Rabbit? Dressed in the Rabbit’s plaid waistcoat he was, wearing those fine gloves—holding that dottering fan. But with some inner tremor, some Alfred-tremor; as if he still had something to prove to her—some thesis he needed her to believe in.
“There was a table set out under a tree,” he intoned raspily. But no table yet appeared.
With a curious, maybe compensatory flourish, he gestured, the most official of White Rabbit gestures; assuming the mantle of Storyteller, summoning the fantastical scene. Meanwhile, pulling himself up, drawing himself apart.
And she? No matter how tightly she held on, she felt him glide out of his glove. Leaving her nothing but five empty cotton fingers, which were quickly losing all their warmth.
“The table was a large one,” he declaimed, “and the March Hare and Mad Hatter were having tea at it, with a Dormouse seated between them, fast asleep . . .”
And now, like some magniloquent master of ceremonies, the Rabbit beckoned. And there: a terribly long, terribly formal table, covered in the finest cloth of dust, descended from the rose-fingered heavens and wobbled onto an endless verdant lawn.
There, the Mad Hatter (or a Harold Hatter, was it?). Seated, most regally, at the table’s head; his rakish hat, his hair, his collar, thick with rubble and thicker with dust. A lazy Nigel-lidded Dormouse napping on the tabletop before him. And look—a random dusty page drifting from some dragonish cloud. The Hatter nabbed it, dabbed his lips with it—just as if there were tea in his chip-chipping, gilt-edged pink cup.
And she? Near-lost in the weird new wonder of it. Once again so absorbed. As if she invariably hovered at the brink of becoming the thing she beheld, disappearing into whatever page was before her. But now, it seemed, it was Alfred turning those pages, commandeering the look of the illustrations. (Determined, as he’d said, to make everything “easier” for her—by making her somehow care less for him?)
Speaking of. Staring intently at her (near-daring her to object), with a brusque tug-tug removing his gloves, the boy suddenly, utterly transformed. Casting off that dapper White Rabbit attire (and with it, his entire Rabbit About Town manner), he assumed the airs of a common Hare.
Alice went slack jawed. “You? But you’re not at this tea.”
“But the March Hare is,” her Rabbitical friend came back. “And today he’s me.”
Alice looked to him, bewildered. And his tone altered entirely.
“You must, must carry on,” he said plainly. So plaintively. “Without me, Alice.”
“No!”
“You must. Come, follow me.”
“But where exactly?”
To which, he nothing said. But his eyes seemed to probe her—to pose her, to herself, like some questioning musical phrase. Like some riddle he knew she never could answer. How to look back? Perhaps with the only look she had left. A look like the arrow in that Paradox: that useless arrow which could never reach its target, because in each moment, all motion is motionless . . .
But what did the Mad Hatter care about any of that? With a brisk peremptory twitch, he leaned, conspiratorially, toward the March Hare. With a fobbed-off flick of the wrist, indicating the Hapless Alice: “Do we see that little tweeb, just there?”
“My dear, what have you done to your hair?” the March Hare maffled, fussing like a maiden aunt.
“Don’t be rude,” retorted Alice.
“Then don’t offend us with that hair,” the Hatter sneered.
Ouch. What, should she just disappear? Like that girl in the big red painting by Degas, becoming nothing but the bother of her hair, nothing but the tug and the yank and the brush, till nothing remained that was surely her, only one vaporous redwave of the air.
But no. Better simply to sigh and set her ill-mannered bangs aside, like a book too important to be looked at just now.
With that, the Dormouse peeped out—but only to yawn, and to set off a yawn from the Hatter, who presently set off a yawn from the Hare.
And now, all at once, a trio of yawns. Open mouths, all around.
But why must they yawn? As if to display how tedious-to-be-with she was? But no, that was harsh. Perhaps it was just that—like everyone home in London—they’d all grown so hopelessly tired, and tense, from the lack of sleep, night after night, what with the interminable sirens, and taking shelter under the teetering dining tables, while all shattered London shook from the latest bombardment.
“The endless chain of days, you know,” the Dormouse mulled.
Oh really? Despite all their sour-faced plaints, Alice knew she could be rather good company. Surely, she hadn’t been away so long that she’d marooned herself from all her social gifts. Had she really so neglected her once-sterling wit and former, schoolgirl charm?
Intrepidly she approached. Terribly, formally, that March Hare sat up tall and blocked her from a thoroughly available chair. With a wave of one morbidly sensitive paw: “Sorry, no room.”
“There’s plenty of room.”
Even the Dormouse snubbed her: “Not here.”
“You give the goon some room,” the Hatter observed, “the next thing that you know she wants your chair.”
“Can’t bear these chairs,” the Dormouse declared.
Okay, rude. But what was she to do? Pretend she didn’t want to play Pretend? Alice took a seat. (There were plenty of seats.) Immediately, the Hatter scooted one place away. The March Hare nudged poor Alice on, to where the Hatter had been, and dropped into the seat that she’d been in. O-kaaay.
But what to do? Here she was. Here they were. And her Rabbit was telling it this way. For her sake, or so he claimed. And so she put on a wry, patient smile: whatever the hardships, whatever the wonders, together they’d take a pretend toast-and-tea, and they’d soldier on.
And indeed. Only too pleased with his grubby new seat, the Mad Hatter reared a cup, except he no longer had a cup. “I’ll have another cup.”
Alice tried: “Of tea, you mean?”
“Chip chip chip!” the Hatter nodded, (in a rather Harold manner). Then abruptly demanded, “One place on, please.”
So it went. At a glib, grating pitch. As the Mad Hatter pushed one more on, and the Hare nudged Alice on, as he flitted into the seat that had been hers—and made it his. Like some insufferable game of Musical Chairs.
“Did you hear how mean she was to Mary Ann?” quipped the March Hare, with a look askance at Alice.
The Dormouse, demure: “Love Mary Ann.”
“I wasn’t,” Alice crisply replied. “She was. Mean.”
“Then you should say what you mean,” the Hatter chided.
“But I did.”
Once more, open mouths greeted Alice all around. Blind mouths.
And then the Hare pressed one seat on, and the Hatter one seat on, and the Dormouse too, one on.
“She means: she means what she said,” the Mad Hatter said, meaning just what he said.
March Hare: “It was mean, what she said.”
“It was mean what she did,” the Hatter punctuated.
“But then, that’s how she is,” deduced the Hare.
“Hate how she is,” the Dormouse gloated, ever glib.
Talk about mean. Really, it was the most infuriating . . . Or. Was this, maybe, what Alfred had meant—saying he’d make it easier for her? Because he was being—and who wants to be with or be near someone who’s being?—so unspeakably rude?
Although “rude,” alone, did not speak it. The word was too little, the word was beneath it. The fact was, he was using this scene—one of their most beloved, time-honored scenes—to castigate her. To demean her. And all because? Because she wanted to hold and keep him? Because she wanted, still, Wonderland to be, forever to be, all it had been—for both of them?
The Mad Hatter lifted an imaginary teapot. Toting it aloft, he turned meltingly, and thereby a
ll the more menacingly, toward Alice. “More tea?”
“One place on. And more tea, please,” that Maestro Hare abruptly declared.
“But why do we keep moving on? In truth, there is no place at your table for me,” Alice stated, trying to waken the kind, caring Alfred she’d known. The Alfred who must still be there, behind beneath that Mad Tea veneer.
“My hat!” the Hatter smirked. “She wants more tea.”
Sorry? “But I haven’t had any yet. So, how could I take more?”
“No,” the Hatter whined, less than benignly. “How could you take less?”
“It’s simple to take more,” adduced the Hare. Doubling the dig. (Certainly more than their book ever had.)
“That is,” is’d the Hatter, “when you’ve had none.”
With a near-rhyming dig, Alfred dug further in, “You senseless twit, go taste regret.”
Alice stood, beyond bewildered. Beyond offended. Seemingly abashed, he dropped the March Hare mask: “Hate me yet?”
Well, now that you mention it. “I never would or could,” she said.
“You should,” he said. So baldly said. Even as his eyes met hers, in a kind of involuntary plea.
In, toward Her Alice-ness, the Hatter leaned. But Alice cut him off. Defiant now, definitive: “Don’t. I mean, you’re all so mean.”
“We do that,” huffed the Hare.
“Must we?”
Something so urgent and raw in his look as it met hers. Imploring her: “You tell me. You keep coming back for more.”
With a discreet dip of those dubious ears, he was, once more, Alfred: “Hate me now?”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
So, that was it. That was why he’d confined them in this punishing, this opprobrious scene. To make her hate him so much, she’d let him go.
Haughtily the Hatter hoisted himself up, toasting the air with a fustian hand: “So, shall we have a riddle?”
“Yes,” Alice air-toasted back.
“Now she wants a riddle!” the Hatter whined, with a roll of his one good eye.
