The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  He brought a fresh cup of tea back to the center of the room and set it down on the table. He was a very tall man and the teacup was miniature in comparison.

  “Do you have somewhere to be?” he asked.

  I blinked. With the lesson over, a switch seemed to have turned off in his mind, ending our relationship for the time being. He sat down and unfolded the newspaper in front of him. I was unused to sudden coolness in teachers. My father had always been the same person in and out of the classroom. After a day of lessons, he’d take me down to the grocery store and we’d count the lobsters in the tanks. Orville was silent, and I couldn’t help but think that all I had done was rent him for the hour.

  I slung my bag over my shoulder, and slipped out of the room unnoticed.

  CHAPTER 3

  A few weeks later, when I was en route to my first dinner in the Great Dining Hall, I discovered that I had made the front page of the Hornbeam, Old College’s student newspaper.

  LAST LIVING BRONTË DESCENDANT ARRIVES AT OLD COLLEGE

  It was printed in heavy, self-righteous black ink. The paper had infected all of the Old College arcades, and now, discarded copies were flying in the brisk wind like English tumbleweeds. There I was, on the cover page of every paper—too tall, with straight, American teeth. Brown hair, brown eyes, no makeup. The author of the article, an H. Pierpont, must have found my high school yearbook photo floating around the internet. I looked a lot like myself and a little like a man. I snatched a copy off the ground and read:

  The only surviving descendant of the family of Patrick Brontë (father of the illustrious Brontë trio) is Miss Samantha E. Whipple, a first-year English Literature candidate at Old College, and the orphaned daughter of the late Tristan Whipple (best-selling author of Convenient Fiction, Tortillas on a Mantel, and This Is a Book!). According to Sir John Booker, former Cambridge University don and present curator of the Brontë Parsonage and Museum, Miss Whipple is heiress to the Vast Brontë Estate.

  A small squeeze of breath escaped me, as though I had developed a slow leak. I silently welcomed Pierpont to my shit list. I was not an orphan, thank you very much. I did have a mother, even if we didn’t speak often, and she was a real live mother—red-cheeked and frizzy-haired. And where, exactly, had he dug up “the Vast Brontë Estate”?

  “Oi!”

  I looked around. The voice came from behind me. In my anger, I had marched to the front steps without seeing the queue that had begun to form. I apologized to no one in particular and fell into line. In their black capes, my classmates reminded me of very small children, or very old men. Everyone else seemed to know to wear college dress robes. It was raining, so I had worn a yellow poncho.

  Once I was in line, my eyes fell upon a girl with dyed blonde hair who was standing directly in front of me. She had also missed the dress robe memo, and was wearing a shirt advertising Thor the Hammer. The guy next to her was a tall redhead sporting a brave attempt at facial hair. I could tell the two of them would be dating soon; her body was leaning toward his and he seemed ready to inhale her.

  “I hear she’s loaded,” the girl was saying with a bat of her eyes. She had a copy of the Hornbeam clutched in her hands.

  “I’m reading her dad’s books for my next tutorial,” said the boy.

  “They’re a bit overrated, yeah?”

  “Do you know how he died?”

  “Wasn’t it an accident?”

  “He was a drunk.”

  “Oh, was he?”

  “I’m Thomas.”

  “Ellen.”

  They shook hands. Samantha Whipple, having served her purpose as Conversation Filler, became irrelevant.

  I glanced down once again at the Hornbeam, which was wilting from the sweat on my fingers. The Vast Brontë Estate. I hadn’t heard the phrase in years. It was a term coined many years ago by a well-known Cambridge professor, Sir John Booker, when he penned a hostile and inane op-ed of the same name. At least, “inane” was how my father described it. Sir John had accused Dad of hoarding an enormous wealth of primary sources, denying the academic world the joy of their analysis. I remembered the article mostly through my father’s reaction to it. The morning after the piece appeared in the London Times, I recalled coming downstairs to find him frying bacon, something he only did when he was angry. Dad was actually a vegetarian, but he enjoyed the way bacon self-destructed in the pan by stewing in its own grease—like all liars, cowards, and idiots, he used to say. When I approached him, Dad turned, brandished his spatula at me, and explained that Sir John was a perfect example of a man who a) didn’t know how to read and b) didn’t know how to think. I remember nodding and adjusting the bow on his apron. We both had an unspoken understanding of what was coming: a slew of inquiries from reporters, fans, and critics, and yet another departure from the makeshift privacy we had slowly built together. As the years passed, all I came to know of Sir John was that he was “the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” to quote my father—and, I suppose, King Lear.

  I glanced down at my phone. No new messages. Earlier this evening, I had finally summoned up the courage to call B. Howard, hoping that she and I might be able to square away everything on the phone and never need to talk again. Her voice had been crisp and surgeon-like as she explained that she was sorry, but an in-person meeting was necessary, and as soon as possible.

  “Your father’s will was exceptionally confusing,” she explained in a way that let me know she had already spent far too much time thinking about it.

  “Haven’t you had five years to go through it?”

  “That’s not quite enough time.”

  I told her that I would have to get back to her regarding a meeting date, as I had a large volume of homework, thanks to my tyrannical professor, who belonged in an evil German fairy tale. Now, however, as I looked down at the Hornbeam, I wished we had set up an appointment and met already. Blanche Howard would have told me what I already suspected—that my father had left me nothing—and then I could have gone to the press and kindly explained what should never have required outside confirmation: I was nobody.

  A small breath of wind hit my shins, the only part of my body not covered by my yellow power-poncho. Thor the Hammer and her new boyfriend were laughing about something as the rain fell quietly around us. Her giggle sounded like a bottle of champagne popping. The line began to move. I envied Thor for such seamless flirting. It was as if she had taken some special class that I had missed in high school, where you learn how to be social. What had I been doing all those years, anyway? I scooted closer to my soggy, chattering classmates, aware of the acute loneliness you feel when surrounded by so many other people. The line moved quickly, and soon I dropped the Hornbeam on the ground, leaving it to crumple into the puddles.

  At dinner, I sat next to a Swedish third-year who looked like an underwear model. Thick neck, small waist, jutting jaw. He had a watered-down face, pale like the inside of someone’s arm. This is how our conversation went:

  “I haven’t seen you before,” he said. The accent was strong.

  I said, “ ‘To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Shelley,” I said.

  He extended a hand sideways. “Hans.”

  “No, Percy Shelley,” I said, taking his hand. “Said that quote. Sorry.”

  “All right, yeah.”

  “I’m English.”

  “You sound American.”

  “I study English.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I’m math.”

  I hated meeting people. Being homeschooled for a decade had not granted me social graces. My father never corrected the expressions I had learned incorrectly, because he thought miscommunication was funny, and as a result, I went to high school thinking that it was trivilous instead of frivolous, exasperate instead of exacerbate. I lived in a world in which people still said “jolly.” I spent high school saying things like “if urged.”

  I glanced around. The Great
Dining Hall was four hundred and seventy-two years old, begun by Old College Master John Stuart VIII during his second year in office. The stone was blackened and it looked like the building had been smoking the same cigar for centuries and had dribbled ash all over itself. Tonight, the six long tables inside the hall were bathed in a sickly, yellow light, and students crammed around them like too many animals at a trough. The only empty tables, reserved for faculty, were at the front of the room, facing horizontally.

  On all the walls around us were paintings of English kings and Old College presidents, whose portraits filled up every bit of space like uneven, mismatched graves. The collection looked like a Tetris game that Michelangelo had started as a kid and, frustrated, left spackled onto the wall. The table I chose faced the north wall, which meant that Richard III was glaring down at me, a chicken leg in his hand. I glanced at the sour men in the portraits next to him, and couldn’t help but feel that we had walked into a loud argument between them that had suddenly been silenced.

  Across from me were two girls, one of whom had a name that I believe began with an A, and the other of whom had a field of study that was abbreviated PPE. PPE had introduced herself as Marissa, though it might have been Melissa. Melinda. Abigail. Horace? Hans, meanwhile, gave me a quick debriefing regarding his life. I learned that he liked Chinese rum, had three middle names (all beginning with E), and ended more than one thought with a loud grunt. His father was English, his mother was in the bottled-water business, and all of their friends were undertakers.

  “Where do you live in college?” he asked.

  “In a tower.”

  “Hah.”

  “It has no windows and it smells like venison.”

  He paused, and the smile faded. “You mean the tower? You live in the tower?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re the Brontë then.”

  Again, I nodded.

  He gave a slow smile. “No one’s lived there in years. The tower, I mean. People call it the Tower of Extinction.”

  “Because people die in there?”

  “No, because you’re so isolated that you never procreate.”

  “I see.”

  “I could visit you if you wanted.”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  We stopped talking because the room had fallen silent. The faculty had arrived. I looked behind me to find a solemn procession of middle-aged men and women. One woman—short and squat—was leading the way inside. She looked like a Geraldine, or perhaps a Thomasina, and all in all resembled a bathrobed granny. It took several minutes for all of them to reach the front tables. When they did, I noticed that half the seats were empty. Had the faculty caught the plague? The squat professor, Geraldine, gave a toast in Latin, and then we began to eat.

  “Why do they look so serious?” I asked Hans.

  “You are looking at the most brilliant minds in the Western world.”

  “They don’t look very friendly.”

  “Anyone who teaches here has fought his way to the top. The entire process is rather vulgar. Don’t think this is a pleasant group of people.”

  I squinted back at the tables. In a room filled with bland black gowns, the empty seats stood out like missing teeth.

  “There appear to be quite a few people gone,” I said. “Were they all killed off?”

  He followed my gaze. “Eating in hall is a privilege. Sometimes people lose that privilege.”

  It sounded like a phrase he had repeated several times before. I wondered how many times he had been scolded as a child.

  “What’d they do?” I said. “Walk on the lawns?”

  No response. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. Surely the Greatest Minds in the Western World were exempt from mortal punishments? I noticed that my own professor was conspicuously absent. I thought of the Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures, a thick green volume I had found tucked inside my mailbox a week ago, and which, according to the letter attached to it, I was “encouraged to examine” before term began. Nowhere had I found any restrictions regarding eating in the dining hall, an observation I shared with Hans.

  He laughed. “You actually read the whole rulebook?”

  “No.”

  I had tried to make it all the way through, but I failed. For one thing, half of it was still in Olde English. For another, the print was comically small, as if the author had been concerned that two hundred pages weren’t quite enough to squeeze in all the creative and arbitrary punishments available to students and professors. According to the rules I did read (and remembered), students who jumped the queue were to be sent back to their dorms immediately; professors and students were supposed to sit a prescribed distance away from each other at all times; professors and students were never to spend more than an hour alone under any circumstances. Most crimes, I noticed, ended in “timely expulsion.” It seemed to me that the college had dealt with a number of infractions in the past and was now trying to send a clear message to its lawyers: “See? We tried.”

  Hans and I fell into a patch of silence. He was very good-looking (did I mention?), and as a result, I found it difficult to think of something to say. Politics? Religion? Witty banter? What did good-looking people talk about, anyway? Somewhere during the second course, he broke the silence for me. He was a student of mathematics, he explained, but his true passion was writing. I told him I hated writing; he didn’t ask me why. I learned that he worked three jobs and cooked twice a week, and that, if I wanted, I could visit him in the Porters’ Lodge (affectionately called the Plodge), where he worked part-time. There was no central heating there, however, and the place had small holes in the roof, and in the snow it was impossible to walk there, so I should dress warmly and be prepared. I nodded. This is what I was learning about Old College: it was miserable and perfect. Everyone had a morbid fascination with its obsolete customs, even—and most particularly—those who pretended to hate them.

  Near the end of dinner, Hans said: “I notice that you keep looking at him.”

  “Who?”

  “James Orville.”

  I gave a start. “What? Where? He’s here?”

  “No.” He pointed up toward the wall. “Dr. Orville.”

  “What?” I squinted to make out the portrait above us. “I thought that was Richard III.”

  Hans laughed. “Close.”

  I stared up at the half-eaten chicken leg caught between the man’s hands. “Orville’s a little young to have his own portrait, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “He won the International Arts and Literature Prize at twenty.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s a big fucking deal.”

  “As big as being a king of England?”

  He shrugged. “A matter of opinion.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Orville gets a spot on the wall, but not at the dinner table?”

  He hesitated. “Something like that.”

  Pudding arrived but I couldn’t seem to eat. I was much too aware that Richard III—Orville?—was watching me. His gaze was steady. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a good ruler, or Caligula. I’m sure that to a more experienced observer, the answer would have been obvious. For now, I wished he would wipe that cheeky grin off his face.

  It happened several nights later.

  I was returning to my tower from the library when I discovered a small package leaning against my door, like a sultry actress from the 1940s. It was wrapped in an old copy of the Hornbeam. As I approached, it seemed to breathe, Where have you been, baby?

  I thought it must be a belated birthday gift from my mother, but then again, she had already bought me something, hadn’t she? Fluffy slippers—the impractical kind. I picked up the delivery. No scotch tape. Someone must have wrapped it in a hurry. There was a message scrawled in thick black marker across the top.

  Here.

  I took the package inside, to the refrigerated air inside my room. I
set it down on the desk. Here. Was that Here you go, dear, or was that Here, fool, it’s yours? No address. No return address. The sender must have lived within Old College walls. I ripped through newspaper wrapping, then let out a small shriek.

  It was a book—one I recognized immediately. Not because of the title, Agnes Grey, but because of the ink stain above the Anne in Anne Brontë, which appeared just below the faded portrait of the young woman on the cover. This book—this ugly, jam-stained book—was an emblem of my childhood. It was Turkish coffee and burned pancakes. It was Shelley in the paddling pool, and the shadows of friends I once knew, conjured out of a dank, dusty literary graveyard. This book had belonged to my father.

  My mind drew a breathless blank. Agnes Grey. Here, in my lap. What? No. There was no single creature who could have delivered this to my doorstep. My father’s library had burned down many years ago. This was an elaborate, twisted trick. No one could have known what this book meant to me, or how my father and I had read it together, long ago. I sat down. All I could see was the Governess, whose eyes seemed suddenly bright.

  I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed my phone, dialed, and let it ring once, twice, seven times.

  “Claude, c’est toi?”

  My mother’s voice was smooth and light. It belonged bottled up and stored inside her wine cabinet. There was a party bustling in the background. I heard dishes and laughter and friendly epithets. I imagined all of France was gathered around my mother to eat cheese in a city that was sparkling like a thousand opals.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Alice?”

  “Samantha.”

  Another pause. I knew she was surprised. She was the one who usually called me, on the first of every month, like an invoice.

  Someone let out a loud laugh in the background; then Mom said, “Sammy! Bonsoir!”

  “Yes, hola,” I said. “Did you send me something in the mail?”

  “Say it again?”

  “Mail. Did you send something?”

  “I hope they fit!”

  “I mean a book.”