Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  “We’ll keep our tongues in our mouths, then,” she proposed. Sensibly enough.

  “Forever Alice.” Alfred smiled. And continued, with an authoritative glee: “Once, some years ago, the world’s most acclaimed giraffe walked five hundred miles—with a royal consort, mind you—across the entire continent. Till it arrived in Paris. The Jardin des Plantes. There, the Queen of France was so impressed, she fed it rose petals from her royal hand . . .”

  “She did?”

  He nodded, assured. Alice couldn’t not be impressed. “How ever do you know all that?”

  “My Dad,” his shrug confessed. A slant of sunblue from his eyes, flecked with hope: “Maybe one day, when we’re older, we can go and pay a visit? To our own royal garden—in Paris! We could feed our own giraffe.” . . .

  . . . Maybe one day, yes. But not today, when not a soul was left, when even hope asked nothing more of her. Not in the blankgolden shade of this derelict, abandoned Wonderland. Beneath the unveiled sun—where now she stood. Knowing that no other Rabbit—no other Alfred—ever would come to her.

  With a lingering sigh, Alice sent her look about: only these broad yawning lawns, the oblivious river casting its goldenblue over its lonely banks. Only those murmuring meadows of proud, silent flowers. Not a Tiger Lily calling her name—not as it did, so summarily, in her Looking-Glass book. Not a frownglowering Daisy remarking on how grownflowering she’d become, or how she talked entirely too much.

  No, only those blown souls on their unpainted briar remained. Only those voluptuous roses, each one rising, so fully itself, through the full expanse of its petals, to each of its outermost leaves. (Each rose, not preening exactly, but knowing the full freight of longing it held, within its petaling grasp, for so brief a spell.)

  With every look, as Nana’d said, we are always saying goodbye. But after we have gone so many times—after we have left so many rooms behind—should it really be so hard?

  Once more she looked about. The world around her suffused so with roselight, it seemed to offer itself to the view for the very last time. That moment every flower seems to glow most like itself, in that misting hour as the sun declines.

  “Sorry, haven’t seen your Rabbit,” someone seemed to gossip. “Not here, not today.” Alice cast about—and about . . .

  No one there but her. No bird twittering, of the plain sense of things, from among the leaves. No bathers bathing in some homely stream. No rustic clippers clipping those majestical croquet hedges. No flamingos seeming to exceed themselves, being so pink. No hedgehogs there, hedging about. Another wondrous city evacuated.

  But . . . there, some departing sound. Some iterated ellipsis of sound. Not unlike the dim rattling on distant roofs, that drizzle of shrapnel dropped so methodically it had come to seem part of the day to day. No, it was more like some odd, insistent ticktock. Someone’s clock?

  Uneasily Alice looked again—and there, on a lonesome rock, lay that Rabbit watch. His war-scored pocket watch! That worn silver moon, catching a breath on some sunlit ledge.

  She stood, staring at it. Unsure how to extend her hand. Or if indeed she should. (For, like an instrument on which he’d played so often, it seemed still to vibrate with his touch . . .) Never could she reach it now, she felt, without some other hand joining her hand—as once his had.

  (Was it so bad, Sisyphus asked, to want a little help in hoisting it?)

  But . . . perhaps it wasn’t his hand she wanted in hers, lifting that wornface from all she remembered. Perhaps it was, rather, the hand of the child she’d been. The child who’d stood watching him tap-tapping that flatglass, as if it might turn him into a Rabbit for real. The still-believing child who’d longed so to join him, just as real herself, in Wonderland.

  Once more she looked. And there he stood—her White Rabbit. The light just catching the furred curve of his ears. So proud, in his frayed hospital gown, the perpetual afternoon of his eyes succumbing to the coming pageant of evening.

  “You,” she said.

  His shoulders near-shivered, then shrugged, abashed. He, so polite to the end: “Still here.”

  Yes. Her eyes said, yes. As if she knew some deeper self, looking on him. “Somehow.”

  He nodded: “Yes.”

  A parting gift, she almost said. But hesitated. For she found herself most with him, only within the silences. And so, with no word said, she looked again. And saw him once again as first she had—battling the nervy May wind for control of his fluttering paperback pages. Every inch the White Rabbit already; in his double-breasted Edwardian jacket. His skin, both pale and flushed, against that bluest navyblue.

  Now, here he stood, all those years later. One moment more, still him. Though he seemed to be fighting back tears. Tears which were not his. Or were, perhaps, not only his. The tears of things. As he said all he said, all he left still unsaid: “I can’t tell you what it’s meant, to come here once again, to run here once again . . .”

  She felt herself nod. As if what she looked at were what she were in.

  Don’t let’s say more, Alfred. Don’t let’s.

  But he, again: “I hope you will remember how it was . . . ?”

  She nodded, again.

  “In the story,” he said, “there’s no moment of farewell. You know.”

  She knew. Hearing, within her, that hymn from the other side of memory; all of it, so silent and sad. The end-sound of a summer without end.

  Don’t let it.

  He, once more: “And so . . .”

  With no further word, he turned to go. But she could not. “Please. Don’t.”

  And the back of him did not. Did not go. He could not! Not her Rabbit. Not yet. However would the sun remain still there?

  But, see—the back of him, etched there, still there. The back of her Rabbit in his waistcoat. She would see him forever, she knew: there, by the desolate rock, forever on that hill in Wonderland.

  Yet once more, he turned toward her. One last look. Her Alfred, in his frailer robe. Forever. Look, there . . .

  Again, she looked and this time thought: Alice, turn one page. I loved him. I still love him. Yes.

  CHAPTER XXIII:

  —

  “SUCH A CURIOUS DREAM”

  BRADRRMMMMBRMMBRMMMM, she’d heard. And everything had gone one silvery blur. As some battery-electric Tube locomotive came rattling Braadrrmrmmmbarr down the track.

  “Our tea!” someone shrieked joyously.

  “Morning already? Ay me,” whinnied someone else.

  Her Mock Turtle? No no, not he, not here. Here, there was only . . . the trusty, gloom-laden Underground.

  Like a late sleeper, resistant still to everything visible, with her eyelids half-shuttered, Alice wrenched herself about and saw—less saw than remembered—no curtain there now. No quarantine tent even. Only a barestript cot.

  For how long, there? How long, till it too would be removed? Erased from the History primer—with all of them. All his thoughts, his memories, like pencil jottings in the margins: all those sleepless-night insights, reduced to so much eraser dust, blown to nowhere. Only the Tube-station walls to stand witness—speechless, cold depositories of the little joy he’d known there.

  But then. “No child,” Papa had said, “can ever be called happy. They can only be congratulated for the hopes we have in them . . .”

  So long she stood. So numb, it was as if she’d been turned to a pillar of salt. Till, at last, she roused and looked about again.

  Through the veil of dark, the first rays of a profounder dark showed in scattered patches, in tinges of brown, near-touches of emergent grey. As if some prehistoric creature, with a hundred mouths, had just begun to rise, stretching itself yawningly from those still-mantled stairs. Scratching and licking its sleepy-faced forelocks (as always it had done, as always it would). Airing its belly and its airy umbrellas, testing its sti
ll-drowsing hind paws. Each morning-mouth grouching and grousing and mouthing some part of the air out of each other mouth.

  “Bring us this day our toast and jam. Or at least some crisp baguette-y bread. Our coffee thick with steam, as our Dotty would have done once,” that Mamie-voice sighed. “Ayy me, don’t we all remember that loveliest of creamery butter—from our cooler? Gobs of milk, fresher than fresh. Got from our dewysilks in Devonshire. Our own gorgeous cattle, who loved us, who knew us, lowing in the meadows around us, part of us! . . .”

  “Milk tea for me,” Angus requested—from the large searching eyes of a mobile canteen worker. Settling his manly self at her tableclothed counter, taking pleasure in his morethanmanly order. “In exchange, I can offer my Meat-And-Two-Vegetables.”

  “Hahahaha,” Dodgy cawed. But as the steady-eyed Canteen worker checked the time and briskly beckoned the next in line, he pressed no-nonsensely forward: “Two sausage rolls, please.”

  See, Alice thought: a just-awakening crowd of London life, queued before the opened doors of that train. The Refreshment Train! That time already?

  Still-somnolent Alice peered around. Hardly a soul left on a cot. Even the sniffling Doctor and Nurse, already in line. Already fussing about how many meat pies, how many buns left, and slices of wartime pound cake . . .

  Would Alfred want cake? Alice turned, almost turned to check, but caught herself and drew a breath.

  Chomping a bit of mock cheddar, Dodgy drew up beside her. With a genuine intonation (or a passable imitation) of empathy: “Nurse Cross, she took him off.”

  She did?

  Nigel nodded, from the tail-end of the queue, “In a better place he is.”

  From those warming tea-urns by the train door, Angus dropped his head casually. “Amen, then.”

  And then? Alice thought. Nowhere left in her thought.

  For her part, Mamie held to her teacup, larking over her shoulder, while swilling the cloudless brew with her personal spoon. “Nothing to be done.”

  “For him, that is,” Angus added in. “Me, I’ll have another bit of bun.” With a half-look to Alice, with a faint half-bow of the head, he loped to fetch it. But, passing Dodgy, paused: “By the by, cheddar, is it?”

  A half-grin curled over Dodgy’s lip. “In America, perhaps, they’d call it that.”

  Unsure where she was, or how she still stood, Alice thought she could count on one hand her perceptions. As in: Item, the stench of soot and coal dust. Item, it must be eggless, that sponge cake. Item, some few months from now, with Alfred’s body settled in warmer ground, there would be thick clusters of his loved crocuses out, marigolds, too—perhaps a flush of those greenyellow daffodils . . .

  “Milk tea?”

  Hmm? Alice turned.

  Dodgy it was—unprecedented as that was—proffering her a watery cup. Enamel cup, only half-warm. Like . . . something she’d known. And remembered? Yes! Her cocoa mug. Nana’s ancient Liberty camping mug, always half-cooled, on that laminate brown linoleum counter. Set out by itself, before she’d even gotten there; as if to say how long Nana’d been there, waiting for her.

  “Or . . . no tea?” Dodgy prompted.

  “No—yes, I mean. Thank you.”

  Still barely catching up to herself, Alice reached for the cup—only to see, and remember, something she already held in hand. The White Rabbit’s watch.

  “Careful!” Dodgy warned, then complimented: “Handsome piece, that.”

  “Yes.”

  Taking the mug with her free hand, Alice strode, steadily, toward her friend’s bare cot.

  “Theobroma Cacao,” the Good Doctor requisitioned, to the squinting dismay of the Canteen worker. Ever the gallant, gamely he proffered a pedagogue’s thread through the maze. “Consisting of slab chocolate in an unmarked wrapper.” Ah, her look said: Got it. Then, dangling his erudition like some forbidden fruit of wisdom: “Theo-broma. ‘Food of the Gods,’ you know.”

  “She knows. We all know. Cake, bun, and biscuits for me. I am faint,” the parched Nurse protested.

  At the edge of things, still unwoken, Alice addressed her absent friend, not lifting her eyes from the cot that had been his. The near-closing words of their book, as best she could remember: “And the whole pack of cards rose up into the air, and . . . disappeared . . . and Alice found herself again, seated upon a riverbank . . .”

  “Let’s be done with that, love,” Angus proposed, saddened to learn, once again, that all good buns must come to an end.

  “Boy is gone,” Nigel reckoned resignedly. Grown restless in queue, and finding his thumb rather unsatisfying.

  But Alice stiffened: “He wanted so to . . . finish it.” She let her eyes shut and continued: “‘And she told her sister, as best she could remember them, all her strange adventures.’”

  Convinced that merely to observe was to sigh, the put-upon Mamie replied, “There she is, still reading to him.”

  “Somehow I doubt he’ll be chiming in,” Dodgy said, with a sympathetic vocal tinge never before heard from him.

  “It isn’t that the dead don’t talk,” uttered some voice above. “We’ve just forgotten how to listen.”

  With a hitch of her head, Alice made out not (as she’d expected) the ravishing gleam of that most enigmatical Cat, but rather the still-bandaged face of that street-tough Tabatha.

  “Talk, do they?” Angus puffed. “Talk?”

  “Through time,” affirmed that evening-grin. “That’s the riddle of the pages left behind.”

  Alice nodded to herself. Her thoughts coming and going in a silence of their own; “So, Alice sat, and tightly closed her eyes . . .”

  “Dear God,” Mamie balked.

  “Shhh!” Nigel insisted. Scooching forward, frail arms akimbo, he implored Alice: “Go on.”

  She pondered a moment, unsure.

  Pillowed on his fraying coat, Dodgy nodded. “Do.”

  And so, Alice did: “‘Oh, what a curious dream I’ve had,’ Alice said.”

  “‘Curious, yes,’” Tabatha returned. “‘But . . . wonderful.’”

  An unaccustomed silence settled over the platform, a kind of majesty settling softly on the tea tureens, falling on the train itself, on the serried rows of emptying cots. Settling, falling on those few youths remaining, the morning all before them, and with nowhere much to go.

  For the moment, only Tabatha watched, seeming to weigh Alice’s loss. “Sometimes we overcome, you know, just by going on.”

  Alice let her eyes shut. Then opened them. Casting her look once more about the lightening station. “Light,” Papa would say, “is a kind of reassuring.” World still there. And indeed, from the streets above, she could hear the brooms sweeping all the fresh shattered glass (what her book would call “such quantities of sand”)—and there, the morning hammers, hammering again . . .

  With a “Poor thing” sort of sigh, Mamie quipped to no one in particular: “Well, at least that book is done.”

  “No,” Alice replied, “never done.”

  With that, she crossed, she knelt upon the platform, and with fresh resolution, methodically gathered the lost pages from her book, along with scattered pictures from the Harold Pudding sketchpad.

  Just like that, she thought. She would bind them together like that, all the loose leaves of time present and time past. And in that composite book, all the pictures (all the sketches) from those Underground nights would look on and inform, would perhaps grow to mirror, all the conversations she’d had with her first storybook.

  And perhaps in that composite book, in that weaving of blank misgivings and moods—from bits she’d learned, from all the thoughts she’d found and lost and found again—she would meet the child who once she’d been. Or rather, a composite child would arise from within her, would replace her, as she watched her White Rabbit forever running past—as she found and brough
t him again and again, down the hole to Wonderland.

  CREDITS

  —

  Based on the stage musical Alice by Heart

  Book by Steven Sater and Jessie Nelson

  Music by Duncan Sheik

  Lyrics by Steven Sater

  Choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman

  Directed by Jessie Nelson

  Original New York production by MCC Theater

  Artistic Directors Robert LuPone, Bernard Telsey, and William Cantler

  Executive Director Blake West

  Produced by special arrangement with Kurt Deutsch and Cody Lassen

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  —

  Beyond all my borrowings from poetry and fiction, I also owe a real debt to original source materials and contemporary works of historical nonfiction. Those works include:

  Ackroyd, Peter. London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets. Anchor Books, 2012

  Bell, Amy Helen. London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London Blitz. I.B. Tauris & Co, 2011.

  Harris, Carol. Blitz Diary: Life Under Fire in World War II. The History Press, 2010.

  Harrisson, Tom. Living Through the Blitz. Faber and Faber, 2010.

  Hodgson, Vera. Few Eggs and No Oranges. Dennis Dobson, 1976.

  Nicolson, Harold. The Harold Nicholson Diaries: 1907–1964. Edited by Nigel Nicolson, Pheonix, 2005.

  Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and

  Letters of George Orwell. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Vol. 2, Nonpareil Books, 2000.

  Perry, Colin. Boy in the Blitz: The 1940 Diary of Colin Perry. Sutton Publishing, 2000.

  Spender, Stephen. World Within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. Hamish Hamilton, 1951.

  Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and assisted by Andrew McNeillie, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984.