The Madwoman Upstairs

by Catherine Lowell

  She seemed momentarily taken aback. “Well, of course I came. I can’t have my girl sick and alone, can I?”

  I let out a gulp.

  “What is it?” Mom said. “Have I upset you?”

  “Can I tell you what bothers me the most about all of this?”

  “Sweetheart. Tell me.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “He’s always been gone.”

  “No—but now he’s really gone,” I said. “I found what he wanted me to find.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “No,” I said. “Now he and I have nothing left to talk about.”

  I looked down and away. I was crying openly—again. It was very embarrassing, and I had a terrible feeling that at any minute Hans would enter with his camera.

  Mom’s voice softened. “Samantha, the man left you a diary before he died. You say he also left you a painting. God knows how many other things are out there, waiting for you to pretend they’re important.”

  I didn’t respond, and wiped my nose on my sleeve. Mom paused, as if uncertain of whether or not she should express her next thought out loud. Finally, she took a breath and said: “It doesn’t sound like you’re ending a conversation with him. It sounds like you’re just beginning one.”

  I looked up. Her chest rose and fell. I reached for her warm, compact hand and held it very close.

  My last tutorial took place on a Thursday afternoon.

  We had reached the final week of Hilary term. In two days, faculty and students would enter a four-week holiday before Trinity term. To celebrate, small white flowers recklessly crept out of the ground; leaves blushed with faint color. The sun ended its retirement, and so did a population of pale students, who emerged from their dormitories like wide-eyed shock victims. All around was a delicate beauty that you couldn’t help but resent for having been gone for so long.

  In anticipation of this meeting, my professor—ex-professor, I suppose—had his office door open and his curtains pulled back. The room looked like an opera house during the daytime—tranquil, somewhat nostalgic. The windows were open and a light, apologetic breeze came inside, perhaps repenting for an entire season of bad behavior.

  I had not seen Orville since Halford’s Well, and our only communication had been to set a time for this meeting. Today, he was clad in jeans and an Oxford sweatshirt, with a red rag draped across his shoulder. He was pulling out books from his shelves and stacking them around the room in teetering, uneven cliffs. I noticed empty boxes and packing tape. On my way inside, I passed over several piles of Molière, Twain, and Dumas, which were bathing in columns of daylight on the floor. There was little organization, and I doubted he knew what he was doing.

  He must have heard me walk in. He said, “Hello, Samantha.”

  I blurted: “Are you really moving to Ireland?”

  “Who told you?”

  “About fourteen people, all separately.”

  The wind ruffled the curtains. Orville and I didn’t say anything else for several minutes. We seemed to be approaching the strange and inevitable end to our contractual relationship. I would leave this room and his life would go on. The memory of me would be wiped clean; the entire last two terms would simply vanish. I would become nothing but another data point in his growing list of would-be lawsuits. I would graduate, grow old, and die, and James Orville III would politely disappear from my life, as swiftly as a boat drifting out of a harbor.

  “Well,” he said at last, from across the room. His voice was low, and it seemed to echo among the empty shelves. “You found it?”

  “Hmm?”

  I realized that he was motioning toward the book in my hands. I had almost forgotten that I had brought The Warnings of Experience with me. I was holding it to my chest the way some people clutch their cats. Compared to the beautifully bound, engraved editions all around us, my book looked like a discarded human organ.

  “Yes, I found it,” I said, taking a seat on the couch. On the way there, I bumped into a pile of Hemingways, which toppled over like vaudeville props.

  “Where was it?” he asked.

  “Behind the painting, The Governess, in my room. It was tucked in the back.”

  “In the back.”

  “Of the frame.”

  “This whole time?”

  “This whole time.”

  He opened his mouth as if to ask a question, or offer congratulations, but the thought must have only lasted a moment, because he turned back to the shelf. We lingered in silence. I couldn’t look directly at him, not when he was stuffing his boxes with such indignity. I was sweating profusely.

  Finally, when I couldn’t take it any longer, I let out one, perfect sob. “God, I’ve ruined your life, haven’t I?”

  “Please,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  I was sitting already. I put the book on the table.

  “Are you furious with me?” I said. “Let me fix this for you. I will do anything to get you your job back. Please. Please.”

  He looked back at me, surprised. “I am not at all angry,” he said. “Why would you say that?”

  “You’re quitting the career you’ve spent your entire life building. Let me come out to the press and show them this book. I’ll explain what I was really doing there, and you’ll be off the hook.”

  “I’m afraid that will be seen as an even more outlandish and desperate excuse. And can you imagine the hysteria that will ensue if you reveal this book? I’m trying to protect you.”

  I leaned back in my seat, hands to my head, wanting to writhe, or bellow, or implode—anything but watch Orville pack his books. I moved my hands so they covered my ears, in the style of The Scream.

  I said, “What did your father say about the newspapers?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Orville said.

  “Then I suppose it was awful. I don’t even have the vocabulary to express how sorry I am. I wish I could jump into a hole.”

  Something must have struck him as funny because when I removed my hands from my head and looked over at him, his lips had curved into a half smile.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said.

  “Don’t make me feel worse.”

  “You dreamt all of this up, and now that book is in front of you. How does that feel?”

  I looked at The Warnings of Experience. “It feels okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  I turned the book over in my hands, then back again. “I never realized how much effort my dad went through to make sure I’d read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall before finding this diary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I glanced up at him. “What if I’d mistakenly found the diary first, and didn’t think anything of it? Or, worse, what if I thought the diary was just a tool to understand the novel, when really it was the other way around? He was trying to teach me the right way to read.”

  Orville didn’t seem to be listening. He was very intent on unloading all his copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh from his shelf.

  I held up The Warnings of Experience. “Here,” I said.

  He turned back around. “Pardon?”

  “This is for you. A gift.”

  Orville just smiled and returned to his work.

  I said, “Don’t you want to read it?”

  He took the red rag from his shoulder and began wiping down the now-empty shelf in front of him. I didn’t understand his disinterest. This was a literary treasure.

  I pressed, “I brought this for you. As a present? I thought you’d want to see it. Is this the diary of Anne Brontë or Bertha Mason? Or Helen Graham? I promise you that this diary will change the entire meaning of Anne Brontë’s novels.”

  Silence. Orville had the otherworldly look of someone who was contemplating his next meal.

  I breathed out once, sharp. “Forgive me, sir, but don’t you care?”

  When he looked back at me, there was a serene smile on his face. He said, “No. I appreciate that there is a physical book
in your hands, and that perhaps it once belonged to someone famous. But this makes no difference to me. I will continue to honor Anne Brontë’s novels as they are, not as she might have intended them to be. Tampering with a finished novel now will only lead to the inevitable destruction of what you seek to protect.”

  “Are you telling me that you are not even slightly curious?” I asked, waving the book at him like I might a long salami sandwich.

  “A diary is worthless on its own,” he said. “It’s like that painting of yours. It is meaningless, is it not, without the story behind it? Jane Eyre can survive without the painting in your room, and yet the painting is nothing without Jane Eyre. You know which one I would prefer.”

  He must have sensed the epic frown growing on my face, because he added: “I am impressed—truly—that you found this. But people write diaries and unpublished novels all the time. I myself have written a few.”

  “But this is a historical artifact.”

  He gave a sad smile. “No, this is a family heirloom. Think of how many fathers and grandfathers that book went through to get into your hands. This is—shall we say—a personal matter? If your father thought Anne Brontë wanted her confessions released to the world, I doubt he would have kept this to himself.”

  At that, I leaned back in my seat, deflated. It was not the response I’d been expecting, nor was it the answer I wanted to hear. I was hoping he might kindly explain the diary’s significance to me, in clear and irrefutable terms. I put the book back on the table. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to read it, either. Several nights ago, I’d read a few passages, but quickly grew so upset that I had to put the whole thing down. The diary wasn’t exactly dull, but it also wasn’t what I’d call exciting. It wasn’t really anything at all. The author was not an Anne Brontë I recognized; she was just another person who decided to chronicle all the things she had done during the day. It was difficult to decide whether she was happy, or bored, or livid. The answer would have been obvious, I’m sure, to someone who knew her well. What I did discover was that a large number of pages had been entirely ripped out. By whom, I suppose I would never know. What I had in my possession was the skeleton of something that may have once been great.

  I hadn’t opened the book since, and my vexation had only worsened. The Warnings of Experience, I realized, had the power to disrupt all the careful, meticulous little worlds I had built for myself, and for the Brontës. Here, in my hands, could be the spoiler for every story I had ever invented; it was the movie that made you forever un-see the book. If I read Anne Brontë’s diary, then I ran the risk losing an old friend who I was only just beginning to regain. The Brontë sisters I knew would disappear in a poof, and then where would I be?

  I let out a huff of air. “I didn’t read it.”

  “I figured that might be the case.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your father’s purpose may not have been to leave you an outrageous diary, but to show you that an outrageous diary could exist—and out of fiction,” he said. “What did you call it before? Literal truth.”

  I shook my head. “No. No. That’s what I thought earlier too. But then I realized that Dad must have had this diary his entire life. And what did he do with it? He just sat in his study, reading and rereading the novels. If he were concerned with discovering ‘literal’ truth, shouldn’t the novels be useless once he had the diary? The diary is like reading a map with no legend.”

  “Yes? What are you saying?” Orville asked.

  I slunk into my seat. “I think I’ve been focused on the wrong thing this entire time. This diary is not terribly valuable unless we understand Helen Graham, and the reason she wrote the diary in the first place. Nor is the diary terribly interesting unless we understand Bertha Mason, and all the potential inside a repressed female brain. Anne Brontë’s life doesn’t give meaning to this diary; the Brontë novels give meaning to this diary. The fiction is more real than the reality.”

  For the first time since I knew him, Orville beamed. He positively beamed. He put down his books and stood up straight.

  “Very good, Samantha,” he said. “That was very good.”

  I looked up. “You’re not going to argue with me?”

  “No. I quite like that theory.”

  I blinked. “So this is V-E day?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Victory in Europe.”

  “I’m aware of the term.”

  “That’s what my dad called it whenever he won arguments overseas.”

  “Ah,” said Orville, with a nod and the ghost of a smile. He added, “Ergo.”

  And with that, he turned his back toward me and returned to his shelves. I saw a fresh copy of Pamela drop into the box beneath him. He turned and began to unload the next shelf. Was that it? A fresh wave of sadness hit me. We would be departing soon—I to my tower, Orville to the leprechauns. I had never had to say goodbye forever to someone who was not dead.

  “Tell me,” he said over his shoulder, “do you know who your new tutor will be?” If I was not mistaken, a note of protectiveness had crept into his voice.

  I said, “Not you.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “I suppose I will now have to become an uneducated heathen.”

  “Don’t be dramatic.”

  “My life is over.”

  I didn’t mean to sound as apocalyptic as I did, but there it was. He was leaving the country—was I supposed to be happy? I had injected more of myself than I had ever intended into our nonexistent relationship. Now I would have to relocate the bits and pieces of myself that I had lost, and put myself back together, like a waterlogged puzzle whose pieces didn’t quite fit anymore.

  I kept my eyes down. “Ireland is a long way away, sir.”

  “Not really.”

  “It is a long way away from you.”

  “Pardon?”

  I rested The Warnings of Experience on the table and stood up. I took a few steps toward him. When he sensed me coming, Orville put down his books. I looked him straight in the eye. The devastation on my face was entirely out of my control.

  I said, “What would you like to do about us, sir?”

  He said, “Us?”

  “Brother Heathcliff and Sister Cathy.”

  There—right there. The Subtext collapsed like the backdrop of a busy theater, exposing all the intricate workings behind the set. Orville frowned. At last, he knew. He knew that I loved him. Perhaps he had always known, and the game that I’d thought I was playing so subtly was in fact anything but. He was looking me straight in the eye. He knew.

  He didn’t respond right away. It was a fragile moment. We seemed to be in Act V of a Shakespearean play that could end either in marriage or in premature death. I was breathing heavily.

  “We’ve been good friends, have we not?” he said.

  I felt robbed. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “You must understand that anything between us is impossible.”

  “Does that mean you at least acknowledge that there is something between us?”

  He paused. “I forget how young you are sometimes.”

  “That seems somewhat irrelevant.”

  “When you are older, you will realize that the things you feel to be true don’t require verbal confirmation.”

  I let out a breath. “Fine. I’m still young. Give me verbal confirmation, please.”

  Orville looked toward the windows and began scratching the back of his neck. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.

  “I care for you a great deal,” he said.

  “Fantastic,” I said. “What happens now?”

  “We say goodbye.”

  “You are rejecting me?”

  “It is not rejection when nothing has been offered.”

  “I offer you my heart, my hand, and everything I have.”

  He looked back at me. “Then yes, I reject you. Please don’t take it the wrong way.”

>   I swallowed. Somewhere inside, I began screaming, quietly at first, and then louder and louder, like a kettle reaching the height of its temper. I tried to read Orville’s impassive face, but he looked like a mannequin.

  “I don’t understand why this is a problem,” I said.

  “I have an uncomplicated loyalty to duty.”

  “But you’re no longer my professor.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “You have no more duties anymore. You can go back to being a libertine.”

  He sounded strained, like he was giving birth. “I will be someone else’s tutor, and someone else’s tutor after that. Do you not see the problem? I am an educator. Propriety mandates that you and I will stay friends, Miss Whipple—if that.”

  “ ‘Miss Whipple’? Let’s not get carried away.”

  “I cannot continue this conversation.”

  “You’re just afraid.”

  I was speaking with more confidence than I felt, only because inside, I was dying, and very slowly. I could feel emptiness widening like a balloon inside my torso, replacing what had once been Orville with more and more empty space. Years from now, maybe the balloon would shrink, but it would never disappear. It would just become a small satellite, orbiting my heart.

  Orville took a step closer and we stood face-to-face.

  “Think of it,” he said slowly, in a way that suggested he had already thought about it several times. “Think of what you are asking me to do. Teaching, academia—it is my life. It is not a hobby, nor is it a game. I cannot be with you, Samantha. You believe that our stations have changed. They have not changed. As long as you are a student, we will never be equals. I am in a position of authority. I will always be right, and you will always be less right. Is that what you want out of a relationship?”

  “What I hear you saying is that you want to wait to be together until I am independently intelligent,” I said. “But don’t you think there’s more to a relationship than just intellect? Aren’t you being a little superficial?”

  He looked irritated. “Do you think this is easy for me?” he said. “I am leaving for Ireland so I can escape you. Don’t look at me like that—I’m sure you know it’s true. I refuse to be tempted against my better judgment, and it is not right for you to believe that as a student you are a source of temptation. You are an exceptionally bright and rare creature and you deserve an education. This is my final word. You can argue, but I am too fond of you to have it any other way. Understood?”