But if he did not practice medicine, the vexed question of what William would do remained unresolved. Still, it was a relief to see him in high spirits again.
He passed his M.D. exam in March but showed no disposition to put up a shingle or seek patients. His mind had moved on. With a band of fellow truth-seekers he formed the Metaphysical Club, which met in the second-floor library of our house. Whenever I passed the room, arguments were flying like bullets, punctuated by bursts of masculine laughter. I was never invited in, which I did not mind, as I was not even sure what metaphysics was to begin with. Whenever the door was ajar, I heard strange things, as if from another world. I heard William say, “My father who looks at the Cosmos as if it had some life in it. . . .” I heard terms like “psychophysical parallelism” and “the thought-atom.” I heard William say, “If God is dead, how long are we going to keep all we know from the public?”
Did William really think God was dead? Had He been alive until recently? Was I part of the ignorant public that either would or would not be kept in ignorance of His demise?
Suddenly, I found myself truly wondering for the first time about God (who previously was only a vague figure wearing the robes of A Child’s Illustrated Old Testament). As I pondered the idea of God, I seemed to sink deeper into my being. Before, I’d felt that I was living my life “out there,” in the world, but I saw now that all along the world had also been living inside me. Or the dream of the world, you might say. And there was a pure awareness in me that was not trapped inside the bubble of thought. Or so it seemed. This was as far as I could go, and I did not know if that made me a believer or an unbeliever.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—called Wendell—was a founding member of the Metaphysical Club and a proud atheist. (Atheism was his only point of compatibility with his father, the humorous, epigram-spewing Dr. Holmes.) My brothers idolized him, but whenever I met him on the landing, I tried to make myself invisible. The man made me shiver, like an evil wind. One evening when he stayed for supper, Mother whispered to me, “Did you notice how he carries his manuscript about in that green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment?”
We had just slipped into the front parlor between courses, supposedly to look for candles. Mother and I had our secret signals, which none of the men ever noticed. (And they claimed to be the superior sex!) Wendell always made it clear he had no use for Mother or me, and addressed himself only to Will, Harry, and Father when he was at our house.
“What manuscript?”
“His thesis, Will says. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands but came back for his bag, and when we were about to go to dinner—this was all before you came downstairs—Will said, ‘Don’t you want to take your bag with you?’ and Wendell said, ‘Yes, I always do at home.’”
“Maybe he is afraid his family will burn it.” The Holmeses were a fractious family who for mysterious reasons all seemed to loathe one another. My comment inspired silent spasms of laughter in Mother, and I caught a glimpse of the carefree girl she must have been before we wore her down with all our tribulations.
I asked William one day if he disagreed with all of Father’s Ideas. He said he’d “leafed through” a few of Father’s books recently (“leafing through” was his preferred method of taking in information; he absorbed an astonishing amount this way). He concluded that Father’s solution to the problem of evil was “philosophically unsatisfying.”
“What is Father’s solution?”
“Oh, that Nature is basically evil and Divine Nature is all good. It’s essentially watered-down Hegel and the Hegelian solution is like the maudlin stage of drunkenness. In my opinion.”
I should mention that a strict if unspoken economy of health held sway in our family. It boiled down to the principle that the sickest member should be permitted to use family funds to travel abroad to regain his (or her) health in the healthier European air. (All doctors agreed about the air.) The sickest James was now deemed to be Harry, with his persistent though ill-defined back trouble. Thus, three months after William’s return, he sailed to Europe with a letter of credit and went directly to the Malvern Spa (where, years before, Father first heard about Swedenborg) to take the famous waters.
His letters began arriving, one or two a week.
After Malvern he was not sure that his cure was “clinched” and thought he might need to go back a second time. Despite his mysterious “dorsal infirmity,” he sounded like a gay blade, describing a garden party he’d just attended with Grace Norton and Sara Sedgwick. It was held at the home of Mrs. Lewes, aka George Eliot, whom Harry went on to describe as magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous, an ugly likeness of Mrs. Sam Ward of Boston. This vision of Harry and the Nortons (and Sara!) conversing with the great George Eliot plunged me into a painful cognizance of my insignificance. In that brilliant society, why should either my brother or my friend spare a thought for me?
Harry’s letters were read aloud at the Emersons’ and the Howells’, and everyone said how marvelous they were. I wondered briefly if I could write something equally marvelous if I had more access to the picturesque, before remembering that such egotism was unbecoming in a woman.
SIX
1869
BY THE TIME I TURNED TWENTY-ONE ON AUGUST 7, 1869, EVERYONE was commenting on my “great improvement,” the roses in my cheeks, my being a “perfect sunbeam to father.” This last was Mother’s assessment in her weekly letter to Harry, which she gave as usual to Father to take to the post office in Boston.
A creature of habit, Father rode the horse-cars into Boston every afternoon to mail our letters and collect our mail, always returning with anecdotes. (I suspected that the anecdotes, more than the mail, were the point of the excursion.) A woman on the cars who looked just like a parrot, with bright beady eyes and a scarlet cape. The poet James Russell Lowell composing verses on the spot about the new transatlantic undersea cable, then complaining, “I hate science. I hate it as a savage hates writing, because I fear it will hurt me somehow.” A man returning from having a nasal polyp removed by Dr. Bigelow who said the doctor seemed entirely indifferent to his pain. The horse-cars were the social high point of Father’s day.
I had just written to Nanny Ashburner: I feel so well now that to feel any better would be superfluous. It felt true when I wrote it, and I hoped it was. Nanny was Sara Sedgwick’s cousin (through the British side of their families) and she had become my chief correspondent after she moved to England. Whenever I found myself at an awkward tea or a boring lecture, I consoled myself by recreating the scene for Nanny and, after a few months of this, the so-called life I was living felt less vivid and interesting, even less real, than my retelling of it. I was beginning to understand why Harry wanted only to be left alone to write to his heart’s content; I felt the same desire, but because I was only a girl, no one, including myself, took my writing seriously.
And William: after a brief burst of renewal, his chronic weariness of spirit was back. You could see it in the pinched look of his face, his baleful silences, his slow and halting movements. Having dispensed with medicine, he planned to devote himself to psychology or perhaps philosophy. Meanwhile, he was making sporadic efforts to get on track with anatomy, disappearing into his room for hours with acrid chemicals, dissection knives, and microscopes. It was like having a mad scientist living in the house.
Mother harped at him about spilling solvents on the carpet and reminded him daily to lay a towel over his dresser scarf if he planned to set staining liquids there. He promised sincerely to take great care and unquestionably meant to, but it was a fact of nature that disorder erupted around William. Although he’d extracted a promise from Mother not to clean or even enter his room—which he’d taken to calling his “laboratory”—she was incapable of passing his door without an aggrieved sigh. One day she ordered a cleaning raid while William was spending the day in Milton, resulting in the destruction of two prize grouse wings he had set aside for some scientific purpose.
When W
illiam returned to find his room tidied and the wings missing, he flew into a rage. “Honestly, William!” Mother said. “The wings had insects crawling on them.” She told him not to act like a spoiled child and added that Father said the other day that he was “a bit of a shirker” and sometimes regretted having paid the fee to keep him out of the war. From the landing, I saw the shock on his face, as Mother vented her frustrations. Wasn’t it time he figured out his life? Look at Harry! He had already been published, and he was not diverted into a different career every time he read a new book, et cetera.
“Harry James, angel, hero, martyr,” William mumbled under his breath. Mother turned her back and walked briskly downstairs, casting a dark look at me, whom she considered too soft-hearted about William. When she was out of earshot, I said, “You know, William, she always quotes Father whenever she wants to say something unpleasant about us. I don’t believe Father says half the things she claims he does.”
“Who knows?” he said in a choked voice, and disappeared into his room like a phantom.
Harry’s latest letter confided that he’d been to Malvern a second time, but was not certain that his cure would hold. Meanwhile, he wrote from Oxford:
I thought that the heart of me would crack with the fullness of satisfied desire. As I walked along the river, I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel and blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts. The whole place gives me a deeper sense of Englishness than anything yet.
I wondered if I would ever have a deeper sense of anything but Bostonness.
William, too, suffered from Harry’s letters. They reminded him of how he’d squandered his chances, and suggested that shy Harry might be better at making his way in life than he, the supposed genius of the family. It remained a sad fact that however much he brooded over the question of what to do, his thinking only spun him in circles. He was obliged to admit finally that Harry’s Lifting Cure was not working for him. Upon quitting it, he took a series of questionable patent medicines that left him sicker than before. He bought a battery from someone at the Massachusetts General Hospital and electrified himself religiously. This was supposed to help his nerves, but no one could detect any improvement.
On one of his better days, he and I took a walk in the Norton woods, and who should appear on the footpath like an evil toadstool but Jane Norton. She droned on in her usual manner about a book on Madame de Sévigné. As the footpath was just wide enough for two abreast, I was obliged to hang back behind them. To my relief, Miss Norton had a tea date and left after ten minutes.
“Did you see how she blocked me, William? It was a choice between walking through the poison ivy or walking behind, like an Oriental wife.”
“Sorry, Alice. I’m not very perceptive these days.” A brooding silence. “You know, don’t you, that my nineteen months in Germany were a waste of the family funds. An utter failure.”
“But your German improved, and didn’t you learn masses of physiology?”
He went silent, frowning at the ground. Then he said, “Until recently, Alice, it was thought to be impossible to determine the rate of transmission of a stimulus along a nerve. Then this German genius, a man called Helmholtz, figured out how to measure this time with the greatest accuracy in the sciatic nerve of a frog. Do you know what that means?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, it was like discovering the atom of consciousness.”
While he was in Germany, he explained, he took an overnight train to Heidelberg to hear Helmholtz lecture. “When I got there, the university was empty; there were no lectures. I’d arrived during a vacation! The closest I got to a German physiologist during my time in Germany was a brief glimpse of Wilhelm Wundt”—whoever he was, I thought—“up on a dais, mumbling from his notes in German, while students copied down every word in huge notebooks called Hefts.”
“Hefts?”
“Yes, a peculiar German invention. It was abominably clear that my brain and eyes would never permit me to sit for hours taking notes in German. Nor, due to my dorsal infirmity”—a malady as mysterious in William as it was in Harry—“could I stand for eight hours a day dissecting frog nerves in the laboratory.”
“Yecch, William! You like to do that?”
“Yes, actually. Eventually I broke down completely and made my halting, shuffling way to the Teplitz spa.”
“Where is that, in Germany?” I saw that William was filling me in on what occurred after Father stopped reading his letters aloud.
“In Bohemia. Unfortunately the Kur left me weaker than before. I tried it again a few months later, with identical results. Later, I went to Divonne to see if a French watering-hole would suit me better. It didn’t, alas.” He sighed.
“But why go three times, William, if it did you no good?”
“Oh, I told myself it would work this time because the temperature of the water was different or because I was having cold rubs or sponge baths or wet packs. The doctors always act as if the Kur is a sure thing, you know.”
“The Doctors Taylors in New York were like that, too! On the whole, doctors seem to have an unreasonable optimism about their dark arts.”
William agreed that that was true. Then, in a spasm of self-disgust, he was ticking off on his fingers all the careers he’d abandoned. It was an impressively long list. He quit painting (on Father’s insistence) to study chemistry, then quit chemistry to study comparative anatomy, then quit anatomy to study natural science. Then, “after the great Amazon expedition of 1865 with Mr. Agassiz exposed my incapacity in that field,” he turned to medicine. Just short of an M.D., he was lured to Germany by the promise of physiology. And all he’d ended up with, he said, was “a handful of monstrous compound words in German.”
I wished I could think of something wise or helpful to say. I didn’t know why he didn’t just practice medicine since he already had the degree, but that seemed the wrong thing to say. I longed to tell him how desolate it had been at Quincy Street while he was gone. If he left again, I’d be left alone with the old people, and eventually I would lose them, too, and end up completely alone, a nervous, twitchy woman with an enormous library, like Miss Anna Ticknor of Chestnut Street. But, of course, I didn’t say this, either.
No one bothered to tell me, in the course of our peculiar, insulated childhood, that sisters and brothers could not marry, and it amused our family to pretend that I would wed William. It was a joke, of course, only I did not get it. From my infancy onward, William was celebrating my supposed beauty and charms in a courtly manner, addressing me in letters and poems as Sweetling, You Lovely Babe, Charmante jeune fille, and “the sweet lovely delicious little grey-eyed Alice who must be locked up alone after receipt of this letter.” He would claim that I was breaking his heart when I failed to write back to him promptly. He made sketches of me captioned “the loveress of W.J.” and penned sonnets and odes to me in French and English, once inviting the family into the parlor to hear him perform his sonate to Alice. The moon was mildly beaming/Upon the summer sea,/I lay entranced and dreaming/My Alice sweet, of thee . . .
When my childish heart formed a picture of being loved and adored, it was the picture William painted. To understand this, you would have to grasp how magnetic William was; men as well as women would follow him with their eyes across a crowded room. And I was just a little girl.
I did not learn the truth about brothers and sisters until I was nine, when Mary Tappan said, “You’ve got bats in your belfry, Alice. Brothers and sisters can’t marry. Their children would be two-headed monsters and put in a circus!” The magnitude of my folly was revealed to me at one stroke. But perhaps a part of me persisted in believing that in some queer way William and I were married, not literally but in our inmost hearts.
Christmas found William glum and saturnine, shivering inside three or four layers of clothing. He’d stopped joking about absurdities in the Transcript or anything else. He’d hunch
over his dinner, cutting his meat into microscopic pieces, speaking little.
In January, our cousin Minny Temple came to visit, looking thin and drawn, but she was not too ill to provoke an unpleasant scene at dinner by arguing with Father. Eyes ablaze, she insisted that his solution to the problem of existence—surrender to Divine Nature—was “ignoble and shirking.” Father turned crimson and denounced her. From where I sat I could see Minny’s hand in her lap wadding her napkin, but she did not back down or apologize. I had to admit she was brave.
Our six Temple cousins were the children of Father’s sister Catherine, who had died of consumption within weeks of her husband. The orphaned Temples were being raised by their childless aunt and uncle, the Tweedys, who receded ineffectually into the background over the years, as if overpowered by the vitality of their young wards. Mother always said they had “grown up by the side of the road like wildflowers.” In Newport the girls went barefoot, with their hair hanging loose and their skirts hitched up, and I had come upon them more than once “practice-kissing” one or another of my brothers.
“People who kiss their cousins have babies with two heads,” I would say, hearing Elly and Kitty snicker as I walked away.
After dinner that fateful evening in January 1870, Minny went to sit in the library with William. I joined them, thinking I’d enjoy a little chat with my cousin, but they hardly bothered to make conversation with me. Nor did they try very hard to disguise the fact they were waiting for me to leave. But wasn’t it my home, too, and wasn’t William my brother? Something in me was determined to thwart their desire to be alone together, so I sat in the library for some time, staring into the flames, picking at my cuticles, immovable as a boulder. Inside my heart a Medean rage smoldered. In the morning it was painfully obvious they’d stayed up all night, burning through six or seven large logs. What had they talked about all night long? Whatever it was, Minny hurried away at the crack of dawn, and William was behaving queerly. A letter arrived from her ten days later, and he stopped taking walks and seeing people and simply stayed in his room, emerging only for meals, eyes glassy, hands tremulous. What had Minny done to him?
Alice in Bed Page 9
