The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  “No. What?”

  “Well,” Orville corrected, “half siblings.”

  My eyes widened. I was silent for several moments, searching for the right words to express my shock. I felt like a cartoon rodent who had flung himself off a cliff only to be suspended over the abyss.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Samantha,” said Orville. “Read closely. Are we really expected to believe that the respectable Mr. Earnshaw pulls a scrawny, wild-eyed boy off of the polluted London streets, then raises him as his own child—all out of the goodness of his heart? The only explanation is that Earnshaw secretly fathered Heathcliff.”

  I looked away, and around the room. It was as though I had just glanced down only to find that I’d been naked all this time. The entire novel took on a new, grotesque hue. Of course Cathy and Heathcliff were half siblings. They tattled, they fought, they skipped into the moors hand in hand, and they never had sex. Their devotion to each other never evolved from childlike affection. What had Cathy once proclaimed? I am Heathcliff, and Heathcliff is me. I guess she was telling the truth.

  I glanced at Orville in defeat. It was incredible, the ease with which other people’s ridiculous ideas always struck me as true. I looked around again. Everything seemed flatter, all of a sudden. There was no more mystery in the lighting, no more romance.

  “So that’s it?” I said. “The greatest love story of all time is an advanced case of incest?”

  Orville said, “Relax, Samantha. It’s only a story.”

  “Nothing is ever just a story,” I said. “Not in a world where windows can be seen as a portal to another world. Does this mean that Emily Brontë was secretly in love with her brother?”

  Orville took a long, exhausted breath. “Let’s not regress, shall we?”

  “But it could have happened, couldn’t it?” I said, growing animated. “Emily’s whole life was a muddle between her fantasy life and her real life. Who’s to say that she didn’t appear at Branwell Brontë’s window one night? Who’s to say the two of them didn’t have a very close personal relationship? What if this was the grand secret my father wanted to share with me?”

  “Samantha, please—”

  “After all, Cathy was a nutcase, and Emily Brontë was a nutcase; Heathcliff was unstable and so was Branwell. Emily wrote something grotesque and incestuous—maybe it was a reflection of her own life.”

  “Please stop saying incorrect things.”

  “You don’t believe it’s possible? It wouldn’t be the first time the Brontës put their lives into their books.”

  “You cannot evaluate a novel based on the life of an author.”

  “Oh? Do you remember how, in Jane Eyre, the madwoman sets Rochester’s bed aflame and he almost dies? Branwell also supposedly set his own bed on fire. Coincidence?”

  “Branwell’s near death was not the result of an attack by a madwoman.”

  “How are you so sure? He lived in a house with three destitute sisters whom he could have saved had he ever gotten a real job. Are you telling me that you don’t think at least one of them wanted him dead?”

  Orville regarded me for a moment. “You treat your relatives with extraordinary contempt.”

  “I have a right to,” I said. “They split apart my family.”

  “They split apart mine, too, and you don’t see me vilifying them.”

  I paused. The words seemed to have slipped out of his mouth without permission.

  “Another drink?” he said.

  “I haven’t finished my first.”

  He turned to flag down the lanky waitress, but she had disappeared. He turned back to me.

  “Where were we?” he asked.

  “You were about to spill some dark secrets.”

  “Your problem, Samantha, is that you are trying too hard to find a grand meaning in these novels. Usually, meaning tends to find you, in the middle of the night, and when you least expect it.”

  “You mean like a murderer?”

  “I mean like Cathy Linton’s ghost,” he said. “Emily Brontë’s two eldest sisters—Maria and Elizabeth—died of tuberculosis as children, when Emily, Anne, and Charlotte were still very young. If there is any autobiographical inspiration for this scene in Wuthering Heights, then that is it. Have deceased family members and loved ones ever appeared to you in a dream, and felt as real to you as they did in real life? Love, like good fiction, can create reality from nothing. That, Samantha, is the ‘purpose’ of this scene, if you must have one. If a real woman did appear at the window, it would only be because Cathy’s ghost is as real to Heathcliff as anything in the physical world.”

  I pressed my lips together. “I see we’ve come back to Frederick Douglass. You believe this scene represents mere emotional truth, while I—correctly—believe that it’s literally the truth.”

  “Sometimes you need emotional truth to create literal truth.”

  I swirled my drink around and stared into it. “One day, you and I will schedule a two-hour fistfight, and I will show you that it can happen.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said.

  When he grinned, Orville looked like a wolf. He took his glass in his hand, realized it was empty, and returned it to the table with a smack.

  I studied him carefully. “I have a question for you,” I said after a pause.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you know anything about the Warnings of Experience?”

  A pause. “The what?”

  “The Warnings of Experience. Do you know what that is?”

  He frowned. “No.”

  I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed or relieved. I said, “All right.”

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “My father. That’s what he said I was to inherit. The Warnings of Experience.”

  Orville didn’t say anything for a long time. The room was dark and his eyes were lost to me. I held my own empty glass in my hands, looking down at the way it scattered the muted blue and red lights above us. I waited patiently for a response.

  “Thank you, Samantha,” Orville said finally, “for trusting me with that information.”

  I shrugged. “I just hoped you’d know what it meant.”

  He let out a long breath. I was about to return our attention to Wuthering Heights when he said, quite abruptly:

  “I’m tired of thinking about this,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  I blinked. “I’m always tired of thinking about this.”

  “Good.”

  “Does that mean we’re leaving?”

  He glanced at his watch. “We’ll have another round,” he said.

  Kilt Woman reappeared and to my great shock, James Timothy Orville III ordered two more drinks.

  It turned out to be one of the finest evenings I ever spent. I ordered a plate of chocolate-covered hazelnuts that tasted vaguely of burnt fish; Orville ordered something covered in coconut that also tasted vaguely of burnt fish. I told him about my days as a disillusioned teenage writer; he told me that he once climbed mountains and dreamt of owning lions. Neither one of us looked at our watches. We both must have felt that it was a lovely thing to be the two of us, sitting in a darkened speakeasy.

  The conversation turned from lions to Hemingway to organic food to our parents. I learned that Orville’s mother had switched from academia to law when she and his father had divorced, and was now a powerful barrister in London, where she had taken a semipermanent new boyfriend and owned a plant named George. I spoke about my father, but only briefly. I explained our little games, and the stupid plans he and I used to make for the future.

  “He promised me that on his fiftieth birthday, he’d take me to see Oscar’s grave,” I said.

  “Who is Oscar?” Orville asked.

  “Wilde.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I didn’t know you two were on a first-name basis.”

  “I used to be terribly in love with him.”

  “You know, he preferred men.”

  “Yes, and he i
s also dead. No one is perfect.”

  He laughed, and the noise startled me so much that I looked away.

  “I would imagine you with someone more like F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said.

  “Too young, too pretty.”

  “Jack London?”

  “Out of my league.”

  He smiled. “You don’t do yourself enough credit.”

  My cheeks brightened and I turned my attention to my drink. I took a manly gulp. Had I received another compliment? I wasn’t sure. To everyone else there, I’m sure Orville and I looked like a couple, maybe from a moody Edward Hopper painting. I was aware of the impossibility of any relationship between Orville and myself, but perhaps that was why I couldn’t stop imagining it. I felt safe knowing nothing could ever happen between us. The truth was that I had no idea what to do with men, and Orville would never have to know.

  “Did you ever make it to Oscar’s grave?” he asked.

  “Dad never made it to fifty.”

  “Ah—I’m sorry.”

  “He and I always said we’d meet up there someday. You know, like people do at the end of foreign films? He would come from the south side, I would come from the north, and some birds would start flying.”

  “We should go.”

  “Home?”

  “No, to the grave. Père Lachaise is a beautiful cemetery. You should see it.”

  I shrugged. “Or, I’ll just write about it. He would have thought that was the same thing.”

  “Do you even write?”

  “No. Are you going to get another drink?”

  Orville gave me a long, searching glance before he turned away to flag down the waitress yet again. He ordered some beer. When he looked back, he said: “You know, I suppose I always fancied Agatha Christie.”

  “Funny,” I said, downing the rest of my drink in one final gulp. “I would have pictured you as a Woolf man.”

  Pint number two arrived. Pint number one hadn’t been very good; no wonder my father preferred whiskey.

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to drink with your students,” I said.

  It was around midnight, and I was holding an empty pint glass. I was drunk. Drunk? Drunk. It wasn’t that great of a feeling. I felt like that protagonist in my dreams, the one who always tried to run but could never seem to move her legs fast enough.

  Orville shrugged. “I’m not allowed to do a lot of things with my students.”

  “I know. I flipped through section C of the rulebook. It’s long.”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “You may be the only student who has ever read that. I applaud you.”

  “Did you know that if you and I were having a tutorial, and I was to remove an article of clothing, you are required to submit yourself to the lawful verdict of your peers and the law of the land?”

  “That sounds right, yes.”

  “Did you also know that any student who is found to have misappropriated property from a professor’s office will have his own possessions seized, including, but not limited to, his lands and castles?”

  “The rulebook is several hundred years old.”

  “So what happens if you and I get caught right now?”

  “Execution.”

  “Guillotine?”

  “Pistol.”

  I laughed. I found that I was swaying slightly. “I don’t understand why the college has such irrelevant laws.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t call them irrelevant,” Orville said, leaning back in his seat. “Some of the specifics are outdated, but at heart, the code of law exists to uphold the sanctity of an education, honor the respect due to fellow students, and maintain the propriety of the tutor-student relationship.”

  I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t call attention to the fact that this tutor and this student were currently slurping beer at a bar, because English teachers were supposed to be good at reading between the lines. Orville’s words sounded like the college’s PR pitch. Thanks to some reading on the subject, I happened to know that the school had gotten into its fair share of trouble over the last few centuries. According to Torrid Happenings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, a book I had discovered in the library, the college had been home to all sorts of affairs, thefts, attempted murders, and would-be coups. What surprised me was not the nature of the infractions, but the glee with which they seemed to have been committed. Getting away with illegal things seemed as if it might have informally been the college’s most respected sport.

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “Have you ever done anything wrong, sir?”

  Orville, who must have been thinking of something else, looked up. “Hmm?”

  “Have you ever violated the rules?”

  “In what way?”

  “I read somewhere that Old College has seen quite a few trysts in the last few decades.”

  Orville’s eyes jumped to life. My cheeks immediately reddened. I hadn’t meant to say it—or, at least, I hadn’t meant for it to sound the way it did. I had intended my question and my statement to be two independent thoughts. A harsh silence fell over both of us, and I wished I could jump under the table. My words lingered between us like a slow-motion bullet.

  All he said was “I don’t think you realize how serious a question that is, Samantha.”

  The mood collapsed swiftly and cleanly. Orville did not seem angry—just silent. He must have been remembering why he spent most of his time with people his own age. He motioned for the check, and when the waitress gave it to him, he covered up the price with half of his palm. Once he was done paying, we stood up. I followed him to the door.

  I cleared my throat. “You know, that tutorial was not terribly helpful,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood. “I guess I’ll have to wait for meaning to come find me in the middle of the night, with a bludgeon.”

  He didn’t respond. It was cold outside, probably, but my beer blanket was thick and my torso felt warm and alive.

  Orville drew his coat around him. “I’ll walk you home, Samantha.”

  “Don’t. What if someone sees you?”

  “It’s past midnight.”

  “Yes, but a man’s reputation once lost is lost forever.”

  I smiled but Orville didn’t react. We walked down the long street in silence. I couldn’t tell whether I had said something wrong, or whether I had said something true.

  At the next block, he changed his mind and waved down a cab with one solid raise of his right arm.

  “Thank you for the drinks,” I said.

  “Please, don’t mention it.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  The cab pulled up in front of us silently. I was expecting a hug, or perhaps a smile, but Orville and I said goodbye in the most stilted way possible: he gave what might have been a bow, and I saluted him. After a small lingering glance, we each disappeared into the night.

  Dear Sir John,

  Thank you for your letter. I would have reached out sooner, but I’ve actually received help already with the books. Did you know Heathcliff and Cathy were half siblings? I know, I know—of all the rotten tricks.

  I would, however, rather enjoy visiting the parsonage. My father once told me that I’d find him there, someday. Can we arrange a weekend visit?

  Also, sometime would you tell me about being knighted? It all sounds very interesting.

  Best,

  Samantha

  CHAPTER 10

  The Fire took place on a calm, noiseless evening, sometime past midnight.

  The year was likely 1847, possibly 1846. No one knew the exact date. The four Brontë siblings were home with their father at the parsonage, all together again. Charlotte had recently spent two years in Brussels, taking lessons from (and falling in love with) a handsome married man named Constantin Héger. She had fled, heartbroken, upon the realization that her professor would never return her love. At that same time, Anne and Branwell had recently come home—wide-eyed and traumatized—from their mysterious ordeal at Thorp Green.
No one, not even Emily, knew the true reason for their hasty return.

  It was a picturesque reunion, at least from a distance. Biographers lovingly recall this period as the most prolific of the Brontë lives. It was the time when Charlotte discovered (and soon published) Emily’s secret poetry stash, and the year the three sisters began writing their most famous novels. But something was very wrong. Each sibling had returned home with only bits and pieces of the person who had left. Charlotte had lost her confidence, Anne had lost her sweetness, and Branwell had lost his talent, his sobriety, his dignity, his sense of humor, his coat, his house keys, and all of his friends. Instead of writing playful juvenilia, the family began writing with a manic need, the way people do when they have too much to say and not enough time. In 1846, Charlotte wrote her worst novel, The Professor, a badly disguised version of her experience in Brussels. Emily wrote a novel about twisted families who lived on the moors and descended into insanity and depression. Anne, meanwhile, was busy working on a Top-Secret Manuscript that she refused to share with anyone.

  Of all her siblings, Anne was the one who had experienced the most radical transformation. Rather than the civilized, even-tempered young girl who had left years before, she was now impatient, unpredictable, and deathly silent on the subject of what had happened to her at Thorp Green. She had grown determined and fierce. Emily, I’m sure, would have found the character transformation very fetching and would have encouraged Anne to dress in britches and start brandishing a sword. Charlotte would have been less pleased. How had it come to pass that Annie—small, scrawny, baby-faced Annie—was now her equal?

  Charlotte must have been able to hear Anne through the thin wall, scratching her quill across old parchment late into the night. Competitiveness would have surged like a poison through Charlotte’s veins. For the first time in her life, she would be desperate to read the writing of her insignificant little sister. Could Anne’s novel possibly be better than The Professor? It was a question of no little importance. There was room for only one star in the family. And wasn’t it Charlotte’s right to be remembered? She was the eldest, the shortest, the ugliest, the one whose heart had just been trampled upon and deformed. If she could not find happiness in this life, didn’t she at least deserve to be remembered in the next one?