The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  I didn’t respond.

  “Two full hours, Samantha,” he repeated. “Do you find nothing suspicious about that?”

  “No. The man was ripped.”

  “The man was lying.” He stood up, one hand in his pants pocket, one hand behind his back. “Have you ever fought with someone, Samantha—really, physically fought?”

  “Have you?”

  “Few people can stand more than a few minutes of full exertion. Douglass, the narrator, exaggerates the struggle so the gravity of his situation becomes more apparent. It is the most basic concept of fiction, which you continually fail to understand. This is not a fistfight; this is the universal battle between oppressor and oppressed. It is the turning point in a slave’s fight for freedom. There is no way Douglass could have made us viscerally feel this moment’s significance without first turning it into fiction. You need to look at a book as an artistic entity, not a self-serving diary. He is not one slave. He is every slave who has ever existed. This is not literal truth, but emotional truth.”

  He had walked toward my couch and was now standing over me. I could smell the tuna on his breath.

  I said, trying to stay calm, “I don’t think you and I understand literature the same way, sir.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “You think that good nonfiction is, in fact, fiction. I think that all good fiction is actually nonfiction.”

  He frowned. “Did your father teach you that?”

  “It’s part of what he called ‘tangible truth.’ ”

  A pause. Orville’s gaze bored down into the top of my head. A strange emotion seemed to be kneading its way through his normally inexpressive face. I knew what he was thinking: Did my father believe the Brontë novels were nonfiction? I didn’t say anything.

  “Very well,” Orville said. “You may go.”

  He turned around and walked to the windows, where he brusquely threw open the curtains. An aggressive morning light tore into the room. I had never seen the room in natural light—only ever by the hellish glow from the fireplace—and it was grayer than I imagined it would be. It was like a vast ocean floor that had been drained of water, and now everyone could see how old and tired it really was. I started to pack up but stopped myself.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “How much do you know about Agnes Grey?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Instead of reading Alexander Pope or Chaucer, how about we read Anne Brontë?” I said. “I would be curious to hear your analysis of her books.”

  There was a long silence. I didn’t think I had asked a difficult question, but perhaps I was mistaken. For the first time, he looked awkward.

  “Samantha, I—” He stopped himself. “That is—I would prefer not to discuss the Brontës with you.”

  “Why not? It’s an academic project.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “I cannot help you.”

  “Why not?” I said, and when he didn’t respond, I added: “Please?”

  I sounded more desperate than I had intended, and I wished I could reel my words back in. Our eyes met. My cheeks burned. I wondered if this was another one of the rules in the giant green Old College Book of Disciplinary Procedures: Professors shall not help their students. I turned away. I could feel Orville’s eyes on me as I packed up. When I was finished, I walked to the door. My hands were shaking. I never asked for help, and people shouldn’t be rejected on their first try.

  “Do you know what I think?” I said, turning back around. “I think you’re refusing me because I know a lot about the Brontës and you do not.”

  He stared at me with a calm, experienced expression. “Don’t flatter yourself, Samantha.”

  We didn’t say goodbye.

  Someone at Old College was out to get me. This person’s name was H. Pierpont, one of the Hornbeam’s most prolific and consistently irritating staff writers. If Pierpont’s last two articles weren’t bad enough (“Tower Welcomes New Occupant But Has Anyone Ever Seen Her?” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Brontë?”) I woke up on a chilly November morning to some more verbal vomit in the paper:

  BRONTË LEGACY EXPOSED?

  PARSONAGE CURATOR WRITES NEW BOOK

  This latest article was about Sir John Booker, who had apparently turned his nasty op-ed from years ago into a nasty book. According to Pierpont, his forthcoming exposé promised to “unpack the literary legacy of the Brontës” and would be “interesting.” I wished people would stop publishing their opinions on the Brontës. New books did nothing but feed an increasingly delusional public imagination. My fuller-than-usual in-box was already stuffed to the brim with unread inquiries from the press. I deleted them systematically, one by one, the way one might shred defunct checks.

  I crumpled the flimsy page of the Hornbeam in my fist and tossed it into the bin in the corner of my room. So far, my attempts to figure out the identity of Pierpont had met with no success. The Hornbeam’s website had surprisingly little to say about its staff. For a student who so enjoyed meddling in my business, Pierpont revealed nothing about his—or her—identity.

  Perhaps I had Pierpont and the Hornbeam to thank, but as the next few days passed, I couldn’t help feeling that I was being watched. During meals, I would turn around to find the gaze of faceless, nameless students resting upon me; during my walks, joggers would sometimes do a double take. And more than once as I walked through the exaggeratedly carpeted Faculty Wing, I felt a sidelong look from a passing professor. Those eyes followed me down the hall and into Orville’s office, where sometimes I imagined they still watched me from behind his closed doors. Had I done something wrong? Had I walked on the lawns, spoken out of turn, or used my spoon in a regrettable fashion? Had I violated page two hundred and eighty-four in the rulebook? Or was it simply suspicious that I was a young woman spending a great deal of time with Oxford’s only aggressively attractive professor? For whatever reason, the entire Faculty Wing had become one giant, raised eyebrow.

  It was around this same time, in late November, that I decided I could no longer look the Governess in the eye. It was too painful. I had tried to live in peace with her, but I had failed. She seemed to be screaming out to me—louder, then louder. Would I let her expire? Well? Would I? She reminded me of Anne. She reminded me of Emily. She reminded me of Charlotte. If I wanted to get philosophical, she reminded me of myself. (I did not want to get philosophical.)

  If the painting had had any other name, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. But the word governess brought up an image of a formerly pretty young woman clad in a black frock, staring down at the floor and contemplating which would kill her first: boredom, destitution, or insanity. Being a governess was one of the evils that my father had once outlined in his famous poem, “Being a Governess and Other Evils.” He used to tell me that no matter how desperate I became in life (was this a likely scenario in his mind?), I should never become one. Once, when our mustached neighbor in Boston called to ask whether I might like to babysit his squealing, cherry-faced child, Dad threw a strange species of fit. He called the job the last legal form of slavery. I tried to explain to him that governesses hadn’t existed for a hundred years, but he waved me aside and walked to his shelf. He pulled out Emma and read Jane Austen’s description of governess Jane Fairfax: “With the fortitude of a devoted novitiate, [Jane] had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.”

  “Ergo,” my father had said.

  Nineteenth-century governesses all looked exactly the same: pale, bitter, and vaguely suicidal, just like the woman in the painting that now rested on my wall. Equal to their employers in nature but not in station, they were stuck in an uncomfortable, friendless limbo. A state of drowning, so to speak. Theirs was a contemptible life, nourished by resentment from the staff, indifference on the part of the family, and the hil
ariously little sum of twenty to forty pounds a year. A governess represented an entire generation of educated, respectable women whose fathers had simply run out of cash. I suppose it struck too close to home for dear old Dad.

  And yet, if my father had wanted to steer me away from the life of a governess, it appeared that he had failed. Here I was—lonely, clad in black, and living in my own little corner of Old College, where I spent my days pacing back and forth in my tower. I was pale and thin and unmarried. Orville was the master; I was his dependent. I was not quite a child and not quite an adult, not quite his friend yet not altogether a stranger. Either I was taking to English literature well, and had begun to find impossible parallels between unrelated things, or else my life was, in fact, becoming alarmingly Victorian.

  To no one’s surprise, governesses ended up comprising a large portion of lunatic asylum residents. Certainly Henry James had known this when he wrote The Turn of the Screw; certainly Charlotte Brontë knew this when she wrote Jane Eyre. There was a very thin line between a governess and madness, so much so that the thing being “governed” often became madness itself. The majority of governesses were left to die alone, go insane, or else write books about the happy ending they never had. Or, in the case of my relatives, all three. All the Brontë women had been governesses at some point, thanks to a lack of money or of a husband or of a brother who could hold down a job. Aside from painting, the only other ways an unmarried woman could earn a decent wage were by writing, acting, or prostitution (and sometimes the first and second were seen as synonymous with the third). Poor Anne had it the worst. In 1840, after two years with one family, she went straight off to a manor called Thorp Green, where she was governess to the Robinson children for the next five years. It was the most transformative period of her life, one that changed poor little Annie in more ways than she could possibly imagine.

  There was nothing else to be done. I pulled my blue bedsheet off my bed. After giving it one giant shake, I draped it over The Governess. There it hung, edge grazing the floor, like a veil on a corpse bride.

  CHAPTER 6

  On Saturday morning, I awoke to a knock on my door. It was Marvin, my shark-toothed friend, who had introduced me to this decrepit home on my first day. To my surprise, there was an entire frat party’s worth of tourists behind him.

  I said, “Hello.”

  The crowd was thick and I found dozens of eyes staring at me like I was the reincarnated version of Bloody Mary.

  Marvin smiled. “It’s time for the tour.”

  He sounded perky. I had forgotten about the tour that visited my tower every weekend. Normally, I woke up early and left long before any tourists arrived, but this morning, it had slipped my mind. I hadn’t cleaned today, and all of my dirty socks were still on the floor in what looked like a sacrificial half circle. There was an empty hummus tub on the desk, and my clothes from yesterday were piled on the back of the chair. The Governess still had a sheet over her terrible face.

  I turned back to Marvin. “The tour is earlier than usual? Or did I just wake up late?”

  “You woke up late.”

  I nodded. “It’s hard, you see, not having windows.”

  Marvin came inside, and the pile of visitors followed him like a great spurt of toothpaste. Protectively, I crossed my arms. My feet were bare and exposed. The woman standing closest to me was several inches taller than I was, with a fanny pack that said: I Heart Dromedaries. I made a point of not making eye contact with anyone, since most people in the room, I noticed, had cameras.

  “Welcome to the tower,” I heard Marvin saying. He enjoyed his job—I could tell. In his voice was the self-satisfied smugness of someone who, at long last, felt powerful. “This tower, as I mentioned earlier, has been the home of many famous inhabitants of Old College. It became something of a tradition for each one to leave something behind for posterity.”

  I maneuvered through the crowd, head down, picking up stray pieces of underwear. I ducked inside my wardrobe to change clothes. It was dark and splintery inside and barely large enough for me to lift my arms. I wiggled into a turtleneck and jeans, crashing against the side of the wardrobe more than once.

  “Turn this way, please,” I could hear Marvin saying, “and you can see the exact location where Sir Michael Morehouse’s cat was buried alive in the wall. Do you see the discoloration of the brick, right about here?”

  When I finished changing, I opened the wardrobe door and stepped outside. Immediately, there was a disorienting flash of light. I blinked—once, twice. Someone had taken a picture of me. An emergency response went off in my body. I looked to my right to find a squat, purple-shirted teenager holding a disposable camera to his face. I panicked. Quickly, I made my way to the opposite end of the room, eyes on the floor. The crowd was thick, and I stepped on more than one shoe. I needed to get out of there. I would not appear on the cover of another newspaper, thank you very much.

  Marvin was speaking quickly and with more energy than before. “And over here—do you see? No, this way—is where a former student engraved his initials. If you look closer—”

  There, I found my purse. I slipped on my shoes and slid toward the front door. I was shaking. With one last breath, I closed my tower door behind me and I fled down five flights of steps.

  Once outside, I took a moment to collect myself. It was reasonably warm, to my surprise. I took a short walk around campus, trying to find comfort in my old, long-lost friend, the sun. I had only made it halfway around the path when I found myself near the Plodge, the small cabin near the entry gates, which was currently puffing smoke out of its chimney. This, I knew, was where Marvin worked. And if I remembered correctly, it was also where my Swedish model friend worked. I walked past the porter on duty (she gave me a small nod of recognition) and I found Hans sitting in the room off the right, heels kicked up on the table. He was blindingly blond.

  When he saw me, his face cracked into a smile and he moved to an upright position.

  “Well,” he said. “This is unexpected.”

  I said, “ ‘If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.’ ”

  “What?”

  “Heraclitus.”

  There was a painful silence, in which it occurred to me that I might never have a normal life.

  “What I mean is, Heraclitus said that,” I corrected.

  “Ah.”

  “Sorry.”

  Then he smiled again. He had the distinctive look of a European tennis pro—an electric white athletic shirt, a slightly hooked nose, long spindly legs. His shirt seemed to trap the muscles in between his ribs. I fidgeted. I didn’t date much, and I felt like a tourist in someone else’s sexual fantasy.

  I said, “I’m surprised you remember me.”

  He laughed. He must have thought I was joking, but when I remained silent, he said: “You’re the Brontë.”

  “Do you mind if I stay awhile?”

  He motioned to the seat across from him. He was smiling, but I noticed a degree of cautiousness in his face, as though I were a nervous seal.

  He said, “We could also go out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Out into the world,” he said. “You’ve heard of it, yes?”

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “I’ll close up early.”

  “You can do that?”

  He grinned. “Are you impressed?”

  He packed up his things. I watched him pull on a suede coat and he led me outside, into the warm sunlight. I didn’t realize how desperate I was for a fun afternoon. Already, I was thinking about how I would remember it, years later.

  He asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been to Europe in a while.”

  “All right, sure.”

  We exited the Old College gates and began walking down High Street, which reeked of diesel and cigarettes. There were double-decker buses on the streets, filled with dour, flat-featured people and a
few dogs that, pressed up against the windows, looked subaquatic. It was pleasant walking with Hans—like driving a shiny Maserati. I can’t remember what we talked about. All I registered was that he tended to explain things one too many times and that with his accent, the way he pronounced “Google” sounded like he might kill someone.

  “Well?” he said, finally.

  “Well what?”

  I looked up. We had stopped walking, and were standing right in front of the Oxford Theatre. Some of the letters had fallen off, and now it read OXFORD EATRE. I realized why Hans had stopped—the poster in front of us advertised the newest adaptation of Jane Eyre, which was set to hit theaters this weekend. Charlotte Brontë’s beloved novel. I vaguely recalled that someone from the press—was it the Daily Mail? the Paris Examiner?—had e-mailed several times last week asking for the “Brontë take on the film; were you offended by all the sex?” I hadn’t responded. A new adaptation of Jane Eyre came out every year, and every year, it was exactly the same. An unknown actress would play Jane, and she was usually prettier than she should have been. A very handsome, very brooding, very “ooh-la-la” man would play Mr. Rochester, and Judi Dench would play everyone else.

  I made a noncommittal grunting noise and nudged Hans in the bicep to keep him moving. He didn’t budge. He had stumbled across the family tombstone of his companion, and felt obligated to pay respects.

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” he asked. He pointed to the corner of the poster, at the blackened shadow of a woman right next to the last e in Eyre. The only visible part of her was her two red, wet eyes, and the outline of a gloomy face. She was looking straight at me. We faced off like two chess masters who were meeting again after years apart. I was silent for a long time. The madwoman.

  “Can we keep moving?” I asked.

  Hans looked at me curiously and kept walking. Then, quite suddenly, he veered down a small avenue.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.