“Please do describe all her dissolute pruderies to me.”
“Later. Old Mrs. Norton is giving us the evil eye. Oh, look at poor Theo, trying to get on her good side.” I glanced over at Theodora Sedgwick, picking at her food in a nervous, rabbity manner, a smile frozen on her face, nodding compulsively at Mrs. Norton.
“It won’t do any good,” Sara continued. “Mrs. Norton has ordered Charles not to take on a new wife, at least until all the children are grown, and he would never dream of disobeying her. This is strictly entre nous, of course.”
She moved her chair closer to mine and, gazing levelly into my eyes, caught a stray strand of my hair and tucked it tenderly behind my ear. In the guise of hair maintenance, she managed to stroke my cheek and neck briefly with her fingertips. Then she rested her bare arm on the back of my chair, brushing against my bare shoulders. What was this? Just being chums?
After dark at the Nortons, we younger women habitually kicked off our evening slippers under the table and put these instruments of torture back on only as we were leaving. Now, as Grace launched into a pointless anecdote about dining in London with Elizabeth Gaskell (for whom young Lily—Elizabeth Gaskell Norton—was named), I felt Sara’s stockinged foot on mine, first as the lightest of caresses, like moth wings against the skin. A faint smile played at the corners of her lips. Inching her toes slowly down toward mine, she massaged my foot in a way that made me catch my breath, and then she was working her way slowly back up to my ankle. You had to hand it to her; Sara could do more with her toes than most people with their fingers. In every cell of my body I felt myself open helplessly to her touch, and knew at that moment I would have sold out my own mother for an hour in Sara’s arms.
But we had put that behind us. I stared down at my hands gripping my sherry glass, trying not to smile.
Despite his Italian inclinations, Harry evidently took to heart his professed goal of seeking his literary material in America. By December he’d decided to try living in New York, where he could be near his editors, mingle with other men of letters, and support himself with reviews and journalism.
“Do you think you’ll be happy there, Harry?” I asked him. I’d recently made a couple of trips to New York City myself, but to actually live in New York, as Harry was about to, was a pipe-dream for me.
“I have no plans of liking or disliking, of being happy or the reverse,” he said. “I shall take what comes, make the best of it, and dream inveterately.”
Who was this new stoical Harry who behaved as if there was something he must renounce in order to live in America? The week before, at a dinner party at the Howells, I’d found him surrounded by a crowd of girls. One girl, flirting aggressively, kept trying to pin him down on whether he would attend her tea next Thursday. When he said he must write that day, she teased him, saying she’d heard he was a “woman hater”—was it true? I saw Harry recoil, becoming frosty and remote. This was someone I was meeting for the first time.
HENRY JAMES
25TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 4TH 1875
TO WILLIAM JAMES
I am sorry to report that life here is dull and unrelenting. Mornings I work on Roderick Hudson. What a treadmill to be serialized in the Atlantic! I am subject to nightmares in which the magazine comes out with blank pages where RH should be, covering me with shame. The monthly payments are not enough to live on here, so my afternoons are devoted to writing reviews and critical notes on books which are uniformly bad & which I skim. Journalism—bah!
You were right all along. I probably am ruined for America but I shall keep trying. Don’t breathe a word of this to M & F—or A.
HENRY JAMES
25TH ST., NYC,
APRIL 1ST, ’75
TO MISS GRACE NORTON
Before I came here. I didn’t realize how wedded I was to life in Italy, and what I wouldn’t give now for the sight of a proper piazza with a proper fountain! Instead, there is the el spewing coal and live embers onto the street, the hideous brown-stones with their lumpen balustrades, the ceaseless ugly grind of commerce. For literary material there are only two sources here: (1) the brash world of high finance (where I have no entrée even were I inclined to write about stockbrokers) & (2) the hothouse social circuit of the hostesses in their Fifth Avenue mansions. That milieu I could penetrate if I felt the urge, but I don’t somehow. Culture is entirely in the hands of women here. The men are all too busy making money. I’m told they work like dogs, all the time; there is no leisure class here apparently. I sometimes meet your brother-in-law Arthur Sedgwick at a little bohemian chop-house near the Nation’s offices in Beekman Place. He seems to be getting on well as a journalist.
JOURNAL OF HENRY JAMES—NYC, APRIL 15, 1875
I’ve told no one here it is my birthday. It is late & I ought to try to sleep on my lumpy bed, but the air is like the steam from a cauldron & I must set down my impressions of tonight. (This journal entry will go directly on the pyre when I am on my deathbed.) Despite my better judgment I met Arthur S. after work at our usual chop-house; as soon as I arrived I saw that he was already drunk. He had no idea it was my birthday. He wanted to discuss Boston. There was nothing I wanted to discuss less; in large part I moved to New York to avoid talking or thinking about Boston.
“I don’t miss Cambridge much, do you? Or Boston,” he said, exhaling twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “By the way, Harry, how is that very serious sister of yours?”
“Quite well, although I don’t know that I’d call Alice serious. We think of her as rather the wit of the family.”
“Well, she always looks so serious.” He poured himself another glass of port and tossed back a few swallows while I wondered what he was getting at. Then he drawled, “Harry, would you say our sisters are old maids? At what age does one cross that threshold? I ask because you write so much about women. You seem to read their minds. What do you think?”
I sensed that he was being disingenuous and said, “Oh, I believe Alice, Sara, and Theodora are still relatively young maids.”
“You know, a couple of years ago I thought Charles would become my brother-in-law for a second time. At that time it was Sara he wanted.”
“I vaguely recall hearing something of the sort. Evidently it didn’t happen.”
“No, but poor Sara had a terrible time. Whenever she was hanging laundry on the line she’d feel him watching her broodingly from the piazza. When he talked to her, his eyes would stray to her bosom. One day she was on the floor playing jacks with the children, and Charles sat down next to her, feigning interest in the game. At one point she leaned forward from her knees to gather up the jacks and felt his hand graze her bottom, so lightly it was almost deniable. After that, she fled to New York, leaving the field to the more receptive Theodora. Haven’t you seen Theo going around with her secret little grin, quoting Charles’s opinions everywhere? When you run across them in the woods, she is always buttoning her blouse, Charles fumbling with his trousers. It is quite comical, really.”
I sat there stone-faced, hoping that Arthur’s confiding mood would pass. Clamping my forearm with his hand, he began to whisper urgently, “I have never told anyone this, Harry, but you are a man of the world. Some years ago, I came back to Kirkland Street late at night. It was during a heat wave and I happened to glance out at the back garden, and, by Jove, there were Sara and Alice without a stitch on. They were standing in the moonlight with their arms around each other and their hair falling down, like nymphs on a Grecian amphora.”
He was still clutching my forearm, bringing his face so close that I could make out a sliver of meat caught between two incisors.
“Oh, well, women are affectionate with one another. It signifies nothing,” I said, hoping to staunch the flow. By now, I was yearning for my forlorn apartment on 25th St. and the dreadful novels I was supposed to review. I hoped (and thought it probable) that Arthur would recall nothing of this conversation tomorrow morning.
“I suppos
e”—Arthur was speaking thickly now—“there are old maids and then there are old maids.” His face brightened and he wagged his index finger playfully at me. “Now that’s what you should write about, Harry-boy—the Boston Marriage.”
“Perhaps you should do it,” I said in my coldest tone as I counted out the change in my palm.
Curiously, however much I was revolted by Arthur’s indelicate harangue, there was a brief spark in my brain that told me that someday I may in fact “do” the Boston Marriage.
ALICE JAMES
20 QUINCY ST., CAMBRIDGE
MAY 23RD, 1876
TO MISS NANNY ASHBURNER
I am with Miss Katherine Loring & have charge of the historical young women. I think I shall enjoy it & I know it will do me lots of good. Don’t you want to become one of my students? I will write you the wisest of letters about any period of the world you choose. You can laugh and think me as much of a humbug as you choose, you can’t do so more than I have myself . . .
P.S. We who have had all our lives, more books than we know what do with can’t conceive of the feeling that people have for them who have been shut out from them always. They look upon them as something sacred apparently & some of the letters I get are most touching.
THIRTEEN
AS FANNY MORSE WAS EXPLAINING THE PROJECT, I WAS HALF-LISTENING to her and half-listening to the ice-coated twigs tinkling like fairy chimes in the wind. Last night’s freezing rain had hung a splendid fringe of icicles on Mr. Eliot’s eaves that looked sharp as swords. I’d formed a vivid mental picture of a passing Harvard student being killed instantly by an icicle piercing his hat and brain, and was mentally composing the headline in the Boston Evening Transcript—Harvard student skewered by icicle, or should it be transfixed?—when Fanny said something about nervous invalidism, that wearisome topic.
She was talking about Miss Anna Ticknor, who was so broken-down nervously a year ago that she spent six months at Dr. Weir Mitchell’s rest-cure farm in Pennsylvania, without success. The copious rich food forced upon her there inspired a lifelong distaste for food and the proscription against reading made her an even more fanatical reader. In the end, she returned to her house on Chestnut Street, hired a companion/nurse, and accepted invalidism as her lot.
I knew where this was going, of course. Fanny was using Miss Ticknor’s nerves—which she obviously equated more or less with mine—to lure me into Miss Ticknor’s Society to Encourage Studies at Home. I had nothing against societies, but I assumed this one would turn out to be as old-maidish and earnest as so many others. The Rights of Women were powerfully magnetizing the social atmosphere of Boston during this period, and everyone was abuzz about it. Still, the choices for Woman remained few: Wife and mother, on the one hand; social reformer on the other. Both unpaid. What else was there? Editress of a magazine for ladies, schoolmistress at a girls’ school or a dame school for infants, composer of soporific rhymes and/or moralistic stories to run next to pie recipes in women’s magazines. Nurse? Clara Barton aside, nursing was a plebeian occupation, and I had no wish to handle sick bodies; dealing with my own was onerous enough. There were a handful of dry, bespectacled medical doctoresses in Boston who delivered babies, but I did not care for the sight of blood, which, come to think of it, would rule out nursing as well. People were always saying in those days how far Woman had risen, serving on the Boston school board, attending the new women’s colleges and the land-grant coeducational colleges of the west, even, in the case of some extreme bluestockings, graduate school. But my friends and I had missed the chance to go to college, having been born a decade too soon.
“Fanny, do you ever wish for a nor’easter or something—just to liven things up?”
“Not really.” I watched her worried eyebrows bunch up. “Anyhow, during one period in bed, Miss Ticknor began to feel oppressed by the number of volumes in her library, which was her father’s, as you know, and is considered the finest private library in Boston.”
“That may be, but I don’t think Miss Ticknor can rest on her laurels, library-wise. William may well overtake her at some point.”
Plowing past my irrelevancies, Fanny went on to relate that Miss Ticknor, seized by a desire to share her books with women who had none, did what any self-respecting Boston bluestocking would do—gathered the intellectual women of Boston and Cambridge around her and founded a society, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home.
“Do bear in mind, Fanny, that I am the misguided product of Father’s pedagogical experiments. I have a very shaky intellectual foundation. I’m not sure I ever learned fractions. No Latin at all, of course.”
Fanny, I am obliged to admit, was a model of forbearance. “No one’s asking you to teach Latin, Alice. Anyhow, we’re not teachers; we are called Managers. Our students are sent books and we correspond with them about their reading. It would be easy for someone as well-read as you.”
She showed me a pamphlet describing the Society that was given out to students. I flipped to the end, where there were a few paragraphs cautioning female students against “overdoing,” culminating in a burst of feminine poetry. I read these lines aloud:
Lose not thyself nor give thy humors way,
God gave them to thee under lock and key!
“What does that mean, Fanny? That God locks us up but supplies us with a key? Or are the humors—whatever they are—meant to be locked up? It is not at all clear.”
“Don’t worry about it, Alice. Health is a sort of fixation with Miss Ticknor, because she was such a terrible invalid.”
“I hope at least she is not the fussbudget type of invalid.”
Fanny looked weary, and I thought I could read her mind. My bouts of invalidism were my way of withdrawing from life, and would no doubt continue until I became completely housebound and set in my ways, like Miss Ticknor before she started the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. (Not that she was entirely normal now. Fanny did mention that meetings with her were “like being swept up in the tail of a comet.”)
In Boston, it should be noted, the habit of introspection (or “thinking about yourself too much”), especially when combined with the condition of “having too much time on your hands,” was deemed morbid, leading inevitably to queer behavior if not to the asylum. Fanny was trying to rescue me from this fate by getting me interested in “something outside of myself.” That I was naturally inclined toward the inner world more than the outer was something I could not explain to her.
But, reading the disappointment on her face, I did feel contrite for being such a hard nut to crack. “Oh, but pay no attention to my silliness, Fanny. I shall think about joining your Society. It is very kind of you to invite me.” She did not look like she believed me.
Over the next two months, she threw herself into the Society and became less available to her friends, prompting Sara to grumble about “Fanny’s prairie ladies.” One day I was drifting through the dining room looking for the Advertiser, standing near the dumbwaiter. Through the shaft I could hear Mother and Aunt Kate talking down in the kitchen as they inventoried the dry goods. Aunt Kate was saying, “What she needs, poor girl, is a constant change of air for a year or more. Her Cambridge life seems blighting to her.” I drew in my breath. I thought I’d convinced everyone I was fine.
“I don’t know why,” I heard Mother say. “Other girls manage to flourish in Cambridge.” As they drifted off toward the pantry, I waited. When they moved in my direction again, I heard Mother say, “Her health does seem to improve when she has something to do other than contemplate her own uselessness.” I almost dropped the cup and saucer I was holding. All these years, had Aunt Kate been my secret ally, pleading my case with Mother, while I went about like an unfinished sentence? Blighted!
And so to curtail further contemplation of my uselessness, I invited Fanny to tell me more about the Society. Delighted, she took me through all the printed materials, the reading lists, the charter, the lists of Managers and the students who paid two dollars to
sign up. The charter emphasized the founders’ desire to stay out of the newspapers and to educate Woman without taking her out of her proper Sphere, compromising her domestic duties, or overtaxing her sensitive Nervous System.
“Most of our students have no books and no libraries,” she explained. “They are starved for the written word! We send them books, and they write essays and we reply by mail. It’s like an extended intellectual conversation!” The Society had compiled a lending library, she explained, organizing itself into six departments, English, History, Art, French, German, and Natural Science. The Manager in charge of each discipline compiled a reading list.
When I told William about the Society, I expected him to joke about hen parties, but he took it very seriously.
“You must do it, Alice. The women of the world need you as a professoress.”
“But I have had no coherent education, having been torn up by the roots repeatedly as a child, due to Father’s Ideas.”
“No more do I. Mr. Eliot seemed to have this idea I could teach and I couldn’t bear to disappoint the poor man. It has given me a reason to get up in the morning. That may sound like a trivial thing but—”
“It’s not.”
“No.” A moment passed in which we silently understood each other.
And so I said yes.
Fanny actually clapped her hands together in her exuberance. “Next week we’ll meet with Miss Loring, who is in charge of the historical young women.”
“I fear the learned Miss Loring will be dismayed by my unsystematic scholarship.”
“Oh, come, Alice. Everyone knows you’re the brightest star in our constellation.”
“I am?” This was a genuine surprise to me.
In a departure from my usual modus operandi, I made a major decision without consulting my parents or Aunt Kate. I could not face their anxious hovering and I had already made up my mind.
Alice in Bed Page 17
