The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  The outcome of that year was the opposite of what I would have expected. For all the passion and fire with which Anne had returned home from Thorp Green, the novel she wrote—Agnes Grey—was barf-worthy. Tame. Uninteresting. What of her venom? Surely this could not be the novel she’d set out to write. What had come of the hours pacing alone in her room? Why Agnes Grey?

  I blamed Charlotte. During that year, she set herself up as the editor and collector of her sisters’ work, a position she held until every last one of them was dead. She was the agent, the businesswoman, the entrepreneur. As she was the only sister who had been properly trained in writing by Monsieur Héger, I’m sure it was easy to convince the family that her knowledge of style and plot was far more developed than that of her sisters. It was only natural that she should read Anne’s Top-Secret Manuscript and offer valuable feedback. Right?

  I wished I could have been in the room when Anne showed Charlotte her first wild and unseemly manuscript, the one that documented all the gory details from Thorp Green. Had it been easy for Charlotte to convince God-fearing Anne that such vehement writing should be reserved for the home, not shared with the public? Do you think it wise to expose such things? Charlotte would have said. Is it entirely proper for a Christian woman? Is it fair to your father? To us? To your dying brother? Think of our mother. What of our late mother?

  Anne would balk. She was a changed woman, but not as changed as one would have hoped. She would falter under her sister’s moralistic outpouring, and become Annie again. Charlotte would win. As Anne abandoned her manuscript for the watered-down second draft—Agnes Grey—Charlotte would be quietly updating The Professor. This new draft, called Jane Eyre, would be filled with all the salacious details of Anne’s own original and untold story. The central relationship between professor and student would remain the same, only now there was a new, sensational backdrop: Thorp Green, with its Gothic grandeur, its crusty staff, its pink-cheeked ward, and its mysterious servant, Ann Marshall. It was Anne’s life, and Charlotte stole it. She sensationalized it, colonized it, chopped it up and sold it for parts.

  Then, of course, came the Parsonage Fire. It was a veritable inferno, engulfing Branwell’s bed, the curtains, the nightstand, and half of the wall. It took nearly an hour to extinguish and required the collective effort of all four siblings and the hastily awakened Patrick Brontë. Elizabeth Gaskell later reported that the fire began when Branwell drunkenly set fire to the curtains around his bed, and nearly killed himself. It was plausible, certainly, but I didn’t believe it, not least because Gaskell had a habit of sugar-coating the truth. Branwell never seemed bothered by the fire afterward. He never wrote about it, nor did he seem to reference it at all. The only sibling who seemed traumatized was Charlotte. She experienced something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually banned all curtains from the Brontë household for fear that the incident would repeat itself. It was she, not Branwell, who decided to incorporate a blazing bed into her first novel.

  The fire in Jane Eyre occurs in a similar setting, past midnight on an otherwise calm and noiseless evening. Jane wakes up to a cruel laugh echoing through the hallway. Grace Poole, she assumes. The servant. She creeps out of bed to inspect, and finds Edward Rochester alone in his room, in a bed half-consumed by flames. She manages to extinguish the fire and save Rochester, but it is months before she knows the true culprit: Bertha, the madwoman. It was a woman she did not even know existed, but who had been lurking in the attic of her home for years.

  Exactly how much of Jane Eyre’s fire scene was fact and how much was fiction was difficult to ascertain. This much I knew: the fire at the parsonage had most certainly not started in Branwell’s room. Fire victims didn’t generally walk away without emotional baggage, as Branwell had. (This I knew from personal experience.) No—the fire had occurred in Charlotte’s room, and the only possible culprit was Anne Brontë.

  Without a doubt, it was Anne. I could feel it in my bones, the way dogs sense earthquakes. I knew Anne Brontë like I knew myself. I could feel her burning rage inside of me—the horrible, wretched anger of a woman whose one story had been cruelly usurped by a jealous older sister. What else was there left for her? Few people would attribute attempted murder to a woman who made tea and wore a frock, but those, I knew, were the ones to look out for. I could almost feel Anne’s bitterness welling up inside of her, taking her down the hall late in the night and into her sister’s room.

  I wished I knew the exact date the fire had happened. All anyone knew was that it occurred around the time Jane Eyre was written—either soon before it was published, or soon afterward. Each option presented a radically different version of the truth. Had Charlotte Brontë experienced a terrifying fire and decided to replicate the story in her novel? Or had someone read Jane Eyre after it was written, and tried to enact revenge upon the author in the most fitting way possible? Either Anne Brontë had been the inspiration for Bertha Mason, or Bertha Mason had inspired Anne Brontë. In one scenario, the madwoman inspires the book; in the other, the book inspires the madwoman.

  In either case, I had an inkling that the madwoman in the attic was not quite as fictional as the world might have hoped.

  January was a black and silent month, dark and cold in ways I didn’t know were possible. Orville saddled me with so much reading that I started taking meals alone in my tower. Over the next three weeks, we studied Edith Wharton, Samuel Baker, Ovid, John Davies, Dante, Rumi, Cicero, Henry James, and Confucius. Our syllabus was like a literary graveyard that had exploded. There was no chronology or thematic cohesion and it made me wish I had instead chosen to study engineering.

  Near the end of the month, I descended upon the dining hall in search of lunch and signs of life. A freckled man served me cafeteria lettuce and a clump of something with Pommery mustard, and I entered the dining room with my tray. The former kings of England looked down from their portraits with characteristic disdain. Across the room, I spotted Hans, whose golden locks were shining in a way that defied science. When he saw me, he hailed me to come sit. I was surprised. I had not seen or spoken to him since the night Jane Eyre arrived, and I remembered the evening as one of the most awkward I’d ever spent.

  “Samantha!” he said when I walked over to him. I had forgotten how clean and boyish his face was. He was classically attractive in a way that made Orville look like an oaf.

  “It’s been a while,” he said, not introducing me to anyone.

  I said, “Where have you been?”

  “Fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.”

  I paused. “Benjamin Franklin?”

  He said, “Superman.”

  “Ah,” I said, feeling my cheeks growing red. “I think I had a dream about him last night.”

  “Who, Superman?”

  “Benjamin Franklin.”

  Hans grinned. “Was I in the dream?”

  I paused. “It took place at Oxford, so you were probably there, too, somewhere.”

  We started eating. Hans’s friends all smelled of sweat. One was a beefy-necked rugby player with glassy eyes who was talking about vehicle repair. The friend next to him was French, and had a stricken look about him, as if he was secretly thinking: A vehicle? Bah, she is a woman.

  Hans asked me what I was doing this weekend. I told him that I had decided to go to Paris.

  He raised a brow. “What’s in Paris?”

  “My mother.”

  “Are you two close?”

  “No, she’s my mother.”

  “Sure.”

  I reached for the pepper even though I never used pepper. I needed something to do with my hands. I noticed that there were Hornbeams fanned out all over the table.

  “I really hate this paper,” I said.

  Hans didn’t respond, only glanced at Beef-Neck and back at me.

  “Why are there so many of them?” I snapped. “They look like multiplying bacteria.”

  “Noon is normally distribution time,” said Han
s.

  I reached for one and took a cursory look at the new headlines, awaiting the usual burst of defamatory lies and slander. To my relief, I found nothing by Pierpont. The only thing on the front page was an allegation made by a student against her teaching assistant, who had supposedly propositioned her outside a sandwich shop. I flipped to page four, then page five. Nowhere was I mentioned. Page six, however, caught my attention. I squinted. On the lower right of the page was a very small article with a very small portrait of a very small woman. I let out a small gasp. No. Yes? No.

  OLD COLLEGE FELLOW REBECCA DEFOE RECEIVES AWARD FROM NATIONAL ACADEMY

  I dropped my fork.

  “What is it?” Hans asked.

  “Rebecca,” I said.

  “Rebecca who?”

  I blinked. I stared at the paper, struck by a confusion that verged on comical. The head shot next to the article was one of those blurry pictures from the eighties. The woman had beehive hair and the bleary look of someone who has just been kissed on the eyes. I knew this Rebecca. She was my Rebecca.

  I looked between Hans and his friends as though we were back in middle school and someone had just played an insensitive practical joke. But Hans’s face contorted in genuine confusion.

  “Do you know who Rebecca Defoe is?” I asked.

  Hans nodded. “The matriarch of the math department.”

  “Is she British? Did she write a textbook when she was twenty-five and does she wear multiple gold rings?”

  “You know her?”

  I blanched. My sanity was flapping wildly out of control. I held the limp newspaper in my hand. How could such small, two-dimensional words have the power to change entire worlds? Rebecca had died. Died, as in was no longer capable of accepting awards. And who was Rebecca Defoe? The woman pictured—the woman staring back at me from 1982—was Rebecca Smith.

  Hans looked at me with his pair of peacock-blue eyes.

  “Nothing,” I said, answering a question he hadn’t asked. “I just didn’t know she was a professor here.”

  “She’s quite well known.”

  “Is she? How convenient.”

  “Pardon?”

  My cheeks were flushed. I racked my brain, trying to remember how my father had introduced us. He had called her a math teacher. Teacher. Not Oxford professor. A material omission, no? Regardless, the entire article was impossible—Rebecca had drowned. It was only a few months after my father had died. Her boat had crashed in the early hours of the morning, and she had sunk, along with her Greek lover, down to the bottom of the ocean. They found her days later, lying facedown on the floor of the cabin, like she had just popped down for a nap. I wasn’t crazy—it had happened. And yet, according to this paper, she was alive and well and giving speeches at national conferences.

  Hans said: “You don’t look very good.”

  “I think it was the mustard stew.”

  “It was fish.”

  “Maybe that’s it, then.”

  I looked back at his sun-streaked hair. How I wished the two of us could interact just once without another bit of my past resurrecting itself between us. We were doomed, he and I. I could never live a normal life, not when my life was overrun by ghosts.

  Hans said: “I’ll walk you back to your place, yeah? We can talk about it.”

  I didn’t respond, and turned to look at the faculty table instead. For a moment, I thought I’d find Rebecca sitting in the front, grinning at me like a wolf.

  “Where is she?” I asked. “Is she here?”

  “She’s not allowed to eat in hall.”

  “I thought you said she was the matriarch of the math department.”

  “That doesn’t mean she hasn’t been on probation.”

  “What did she do?” I asked. “Fake her own death?”

  Hans said something but I wasn’t listening. A small sound escaped my mouth that didn’t seem to be coming from me. It was coming from the teenager who had awakened inside me, the one who had once been forced to learn trigonometry with an English woman’s scented-toothpick collection. What’s twelve times seven, Sam, twelve times seven? I pressed my palms into the cool wood of the table. It didn’t seem right that cold, real objects existed in a world where Rebecca Smith might still be alive.

  I stood and told Hans to stay where he was. I smiled at no one in particular and left the table. As I walked out, I had the feeling that someone in this room—a painting, a person, even a spirit—was watching me.

  When I returned to my tower, I threw open the computer. I remember the exact morning when I had learned of Rebecca’s death. I had been a fifteen-year-old in a robe, standing on our doormat with curlers in my hair. Mystery at Sea, shouted the headlines, over and over again. I remember feeling the strange, unconscionable excitement that only sudden tragedy can produce. The victim was London native Rebecca Smith. Age fifty-five. Teacher. Unmarried.

  At the time, Dad was dead and my mother was living with me in Boston. I read and reread the headlines and paced back and forth on our patio, barefoot, clutching the paper in my hands and thinking how nice it was that at least Dad would never have to know. I never told my mother, since I knew it would upset her. She had never liked it when my father spoke of Rebecca. The knowledge of my former tutor’s demise was my own burden.

  Back in my tower, my fingers were numb and shaking and it took me three tries to type the right name into Google. Rebecca Smith dies at sea, breaking news, lover, yacht. I pressed enter. Immediately, several articles appeared. Mystery at Sea, Mystery at Sea. I felt vindicated, but only for a very short moment. A closer inspection and a more thorough reading told me that this was not, in fact, the woman I knew. This Rebecca Smith—the one who died—had been a grade-school teacher and romance novelist.

  I sank back in my seat. My heart was no longer pounding; it was bleeding, spilling all over me. Whoever had invented this life for me had had a sick sense of humor. I was furious—not at myself but at the child version of myself, the one who had put curlers in her hair, read something in the paper, and wanted so badly to believe it that she must not have thought to finish the article. This, as my father used to say, was what happened when people didn’t do close reading.

  I thought of all the pity I had wasted over the years. In the days after Rebecca had “died,” I dressed in black and refused to eat. I took a bath with all my clothes on, submerged my head, and waited in the dirty bubbles until I thought I would implode. I denied myself cheese and avocados, in a self-imposed mourning ritual whose genesis I can’t actually remember. I pressed all ten fingers against my lips and blew a kiss to the sky, thinking, God bless you, Rebecca, even though I was not religious, and God probably didn’t take requests from imposters. I did a lot of things out of guilt, because I had never had the courage to admit the truth: I hated Rebecca.

  Really, very passionately—I hated her. It was a loathing so pure that in its absolute form, it might have passed for love. But it was the kind of hatred you could only admit to when someone has not died in unspeakable tragedy. Only after knowing she was alive was I able to acknowledge what I had been hiding for years. I was now, perhaps for the first time, a reliable narrator.

  Memories came back to me in their uncorrupted, unfictionalized form: Rebecca sitting at the kitchen table, eating my mother’s old Swiss chocolates; Rebecca by the paddling pool, taking my old spot next to my father; Rebecca using the master-bathroom shower, even on Monday mornings. She stayed over when our lessons went late into the evening and she didn’t want to drive home—at least, that was what she said. As time went on, she started filling the master bathroom with things she would need for the night: toothpaste, floss, lipstick.

  Sometimes, I would sneak in through the window and take things from the guest room where she slept. Yes, technically, I “stole.” It was immoral, probably, but I saw it as just. I would nick her magazines, her scarves, her nail-polish remover—little things that at the time seemed like grand victories. Rebecca always made me return them to her,
eventually, but I remained undeterred. I’m sure I made her life as miserable as she made mine. The only comment I remember her making on the subject of my thefts was also the only piece of advice she ever gave me: we were sitting down over linear equations one morning when she turned to me, coolly, and said, The only thing you own in this world is your reputation, Samantha. Don’t let it be tampered with. I had never been able to decide whether she had been advising me or threatening me.

  I paced the loose floorboards of my tower, refusing to look directly at the corner in which I had stacked Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. I supposed I had found the woman who had delivered them. I felt cheated. If anyone were to come back to life, it should have been my father. I sat on the edge of my bed and methodically arranged the pillows around me. All I could think of were Rebecca’s two blank eyes staring at me from the depths of a vast ocean. Quietly, I reached for my bedsheet and hung it back over The Governess.

  That Thursday, I broke into Rebecca’s office.

  If that sounds drastic and illegal, it’s because it was drastic and illegal. To be fair, I did not go to the Faculty Wing with the intention of breaking in. It was the day before my trip to Paris. My suitcase was waiting for me back in my tower. All I meant to do was pop by, politely request the rest of my books, and demand a thorough explanation of what the hell was going on.

  Instead, it happened like this: I crept into the Faculty Wing at 4:55 p.m., and spent twenty minutes trying to locate Rebecca’s office, which turned out to be in a vaulted corridor in the South Wing that reeked of rubber and shoe polish. I found the office easily enough—it was in the corner, with the same misleading last name that I had discovered in the paper. Defoe. Her office door was old. I noticed that the lock was on its last legs. I knocked once, then twice, then once more again, but there was no response. I knocked harder. I was angry. I had finally tracked her down—would she avoid me? I knocked again and again. I could feel the door rattling. I took the door handle in my hand and pushed on it, and then I pushed some more, and then, after one hard shove, there I was.