After a while I began to cut out and save the stories that tore at my heart:
The lad who opened the door said his mother was in the Banstead Lunatic Asylum, suffering from melancholia brought on through starvation . . .
The comments, which appeared in our columns on Monday last on the case of the man Mark Henry Vaile, who fell dead through starvation has excited considerable interest.
On Wednesday afternoon a parish officer called for the first time and desired to take all the children to the workhouse . . .
As my clippings collected in unsightly drifts on the end-tables, poor Nurse was growing quite distraught. “Miss,” she said, “if you insist on saving these nasty things, perhaps you ought to paste them into a proper album.” I saw from her expression that she was prepared for a fight and was surprised when I capitulated immediately. “You are quite right, Nurse. It is best to be systematic about a hobby if one undertakes one.”
The next morning she ventured out in a bone-chilling rain under the cheerless skies of Leamington (I, of course, live untouched by weather, as one does in dreams or the afterlife) and returned with a nice scrapbook from the stationer’s.
This introduced a fresh dilemma, for now I was obliged to mull over various organizational schemes and categories. Victims of Poverty, Absurd Parliamentary Debates, the Parnell Case, Moral Blindness, Royal Blunders, Heartless Tories, Irish Home Rule, Despicable British Institutions, Injustices to Women, Stanley in Africa, Incidents of Casual Cruelty toward the Natives of the Empire. I saw that this could lead to an endlessly ramifying scheme that wearied my brain just to think about. Finally I decided just to file them by date.
At some point something surprising happened. Gradually I found myself penning whole paragraphs of commentary, which soon overshadowed the clippings. I began to entertain the occasional fantasy that my clippings and commentary would be published after my death, exposing the numberless ways the poor and defenseless have been wronged on this damp island. (Of course, it is more likely that some future relative, stumbling on this collection of yellowing clippings about events and people long forgotten, will think, “Great-Aunt Alice was a regular magpie, wasn’t she? Surely we can throw out her rubbish now.”)
After pasting clippings into my book religiously for several months, I woke up one morning with a premonition so keen it was as if I’d been shown my entry in the Book of Fate. I would start a diary, a secret one. I knew suddenly that I’d always been meant to do this, though I did wonder why anyone would be fascinated by the ruminations of a shut-in. Still, it was obvious that I must be my own Boswell.
I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather what doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me.
Such was my tentative first entry. At first I was haunted by a vision of my heirs finding an empty book, as if I’d never really lived or had any significance, even for myself. I’d imagine Charles Norton enthroned in his little empyrean in Cambridge, with Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner (of the legendary beautiful arms) on his right, and Mr. Howells on his left, and who knows who else drinking in his golden phrases. I would wonder why he was considered such a great man and taken so seriously while I remained a nonentity.
As time went on, I was throwing myself into my diary with the zeal of a prisoner in solitary confinement scratching his tale on his cell walls.
My circumstances allowing for nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way.
True, no adoring crowds hung on my every word (except for faithful Nurse, who can always be counted on for praise, like a faithful retainer in a play by Racine), yet somehow my solitude was becoming green and fertile and my life sweet to my sight.
My past has begun to dribble back to me, luminous and laden with import. So far I have refrained from revealing the existence of the diary to anyone but Nurse, to whom I dictate my words when I am too ill to write. She is as awed in the performance of this task as if she were amanuensis to Mr. Gladstone himself.
FIVE
SUCH IS MY LIFE—MICRO-EVENTS PUNCTUATED BY DEADLY sameness—yet at the same time an indescribable sea change is taking place within me. Why this is I cannot say.
A note from Venice yesterday reports that Henry has suffered a light attack of jaundice, but this morning’s note reports that he is sitting up and eating a mutton chop. Apparently he has an excellent doctor and an impassioned gondolier taking care of him. The she-novelist fidgets in the background evidently.
Will Constance Fenimore Woolson take advantage of Henry’s weakness to put a love philter in his food? I am obliged to confess that for several years now I have resented the time Henry spends with her, though she is slightly older, unbeautiful, and deaf as a post. When she invited Katherine to stay with her in Oxford two years ago—when K was conducting her research on the higher education of the female—it began to seem that the mild-mannered Miss Woolson might be my Nemesis. (K assured me I had bats in my belfry.)
Now I have begun to think I have been all wrong about Miss Woolson. Her letters to me have been very sympathetic and gracious. Well, we shall see.
My headache has a drilling quality today, and there appear to be gnats crawling over my eyeballs; I must blink to push aside a sort of veil of them in order to read. For the past week my feet have been two blocks of ice, then this morning a surge of heat shot from my toes all the way up to my midsection. I won’t try your patience by detailing all my afflictions; I only wish to remind you that during the events recounted here I have never been a well woman, not even for a day. I am, if anything, less ambulatory than a year ago. My headaches and stomachaches are Olympian in intensity and my “going off” at midday is as predictable as the church bells that ring on Sunday mornings.
All around me people are rushing about doing things and strenuously believing they are happy. They work so hard at it, your heart goes out to them. I do nothing and a new kind of joy wells up inside me. Whence does it come, this beauty not of this world, which arises from nowhere and dissolves into nothing? I could not tell you what it is, yet it is my purest pleasure.
While Nurse is out and about, I find my way back to the convent school in Paris. The chill is growing more penetrating. It is dark now when we rise in the morning, and we are obliged to break a thin crust of ice in the basins to wash our faces. My hands and feet stay numb all morning. Perhaps they are training us to be penitents. Will hair-shirts be next? A short while ago I passed through a girlish mystical phase during which I heard dead saints offering me spiritual advice and briefly aspired to die a virgin martyr so that my relics would acquire supernatural powers. This did not last long, as it quickly became obvious that even a small discomfort like cold feet broke my spirit. Also, I began to see the barbarities buried under the surface of religion and when I read a smuggled copy of Voltaire, Écrasez l’infame became my motto.
I complain at every turn, but you never do; you are the brave one, Vivienne.
Do you remember when the note I passed to you in the schoolroom was found and turned over to Mother Superior? As it depicted her in unflattering terms, she was not pleased, and I was on bread and water for three weeks. My thoughts verged on delirium. Hunger exacerbated the cold and I wondered if I should die of it, would I get to be a martyr? What would my symbol be, a potage with an X across it? The other pupils were told that I had suffered a cerebral derangement from bad vapors and overexcitement, and no one was allowed to speak to me. I would see you in chapel casting longing looks in my direction, communicating with the subtlest of signals—a raised eyebrow, a wink, the flash of a sad downturned clown mouth. Our love grew in silence, like a vine that finds its way around every obstacle.
One night at vespers, I knelt on the flagstones, next to you, aware that half of me was miserable (kneeling on cold flagstones, shivering, hungry) while the other half
was swooning with pleasure. I blew softly on your neck, your face, your hands. Remember when we wrote to each other on the fogged windowpanes, love notes in our special disappearing code? Can you feel a small warm breeze brushing your skin—like the touch of a butterfly’s wings?
Oh, but here is Nurse, returned from her marketing. She strides briskly over to a window and begins hoisting it. Without a word to me. Am I an inanimate object?
“What are you doing, Nurse?”
“Getting you some fresh air, Miss. It is very mild today.”
“Let me be the judge of that. Your mild may not be my mild.”
When the sash sticks at half an inch open, I breathe a sigh of relief. But Nurse keeps at it and finally succeeds in raising it, whereupon the world whooshes into my room. I’d actually forgotten what outdoors smells and sounds like: the odor of dung and straw, the calls of the match-girl and the chair-mender, the wailing children, the barking dogs, people shouting on the street. My poor senses, bereft all winter, hardly know what to make of it all.
“It is probably too chilly,” I say, though it does occur to me that a little fresh air might dispel the miasma of sour sweat left over from the parlor maid’s recent dusting foray. Poor things. They can’t help it, having no means of bathing.
“It really is quite warm, Miss. It would be a pity to keep the window shut.”
I can’t deny this. The air is not as chilly as I’d feared. Oh, and there is the postman in his red tunic with gold epaulettes bringing round the second post. I am reluctant, however, to capitulate so easily to Nurse’s schemes. When you are dependent on people for your survival, you must maintain your millimeter of selfhood however you can.
I allow her to keep the window open while she gives me the latest news on the Bachellers. Two weeks ago I gave Mrs. B an old nightgown of mine (to wear, I thought) and she thinks it is so fine that she has set it aside for her “boorial.” If I were in her shoes (or her carpet slippers, for she cannot wear shoes on her ruined feet), I suppose I’d be looking forward to boorial, too. And she was proudly wearing around her neck a blue ribbon that came with my pincushion. My heart goes out to these poor souls, gathering scraps like nesting birds. To them “Miss James” is a semi-mythic creature, inconceivably rich and exotically American.
Then Nurse reads to me from the Telegraph, from which we learn that the troops of Her Christian Majesty have been engaged in killing three thousand dervishes in Iraq by depriving them of water. I am outraged and long very much to rant, but Nurse is too smooth a surface on which to hang a rant, so I will do it later in the pages of my secret diary.
My harangues have had some effect on her, though. She is beginning to grasp that the privileged classes enjoy their pleasures at the expense of the poor, and are entirely unapologetic about it. Last week she returned quite downcast from the funeral of old Mrs. Bond. She described how the daughter and grandchildren stood by the grave a long time, waiting. Finally, a parson came, pulled a book out of his pocket, read over the service, turned and walked away. He never spoke to the family or even looked at them.
The next morning Nurse assumes her drill-sergeant aspect and insists I must go out and breathe some fresh air. Even thinking about going out in the bath chair makes me feel exposed, a snail without a shell. But Nurse insists, and I surrender in the end. At first the world is utterly overwhelming, and I wish I could stop up my ears as well as my nose. After we’ve gone two or three blocks, a bird sings a piercingly sweet three-note song and my heart cracks open. Near the pump house we run into the Brooks children pulling a dog along by a rope round its neck. “The woman as wants to lose it gave it to us and we’s ’ad it all afternoon,” Becky Brooks informs us. About ten minutes later, we meet Alice Edwards with the new baby of that family appended and inquire after its health. “He would be better if Mother hadn’t let him fall out of bed last night. She didn’t find it out until twelve o’clock,” the girl says. Yet the baby is smiling up at a sky the French would call moutonné, azure with many fluffy little clouds resembling herds of sheep.
Although Nurse is too slight to manage the bath chair easily, she gamely pushes me through orchards and gooseberry bushes to the garden in front of the Hawkes farmhouse. It is so beautiful I am in tears. An old weathered farmer with only two yellow teeth in his head smiles at us. On the way back we pass a one-eyed boy of twelve, very poor and rough, tenderly carrying a tiny baby. I feel as if I were meeting characters from a favorite book I have been reading for years, and I pass the rest of the day in a sort of ecstatic trance.
During the night something wakes me, and I am in dense darkness, sensing some menace in the room. It is not a dream. Something is happening and presently it solidifies into the form of a man sprawled in my armchair. My mind freezes, a panicked rabbit, and then, unbelievably, a second creature is lumbering toward me. I feel the hairs at the back of my neck stand erect. And then the creature sprawls onto my bed, shaking the mattress like a dinghy in a gale, while fumes of liquor assail my nostrils.
“Hullo, what’s this? Roger, I didn’t know you’d engaged us a lady of the evening. Bit long in the tooth but it’ll do.”
My heart races. The apparition clears some rattling phlegm from its throat, and the mattress heaves again as he lunges toward me. His heavy head comes to rest on my chest, and I am pinned in place while he nuzzles at the front of my nightdress like a truffle pig. Hideous! Something about this is eerily familiar—being helpless, my limbs pinned down by a brute. Am I reliving something I dreamt or something that happened before?
My eyes squeeze shut. No use fighting. It will happen now, whatever it will be.
Against my shuttered lids, a pinkish glow, like dawn. My eyes open to a lamp floating across the room. Attached to it is Nurse, in nightdress and cap. My angel of deliverance. The man whose head rests on my chest emits a rattling snore. The one in the armchair groans. I lose track of what happens next. Nurse says something sensible and scolding, and the inebriated cleric and his companion—for they are my apparitions—slink away.
The next day Nurse confers with Miss Clarke and establishes that the two drunken young men blundered into my apartment by mistake. Apologies are proffered but Miss Clarke understands that the cleric must leave. This does not happen all at once, and in the meantime he scuttles around furtively, pointedly avoiding Nurse on the street and the landing.
Now I must have Nurse sitting by my bedside knitting until I fall asleep.
“You understand that I cannot feel safe, Nurse, as long as the parson is here.”
“Miss Clarke will have him out by month’s end. Do not worry so much, Miss. It was just a mistake. It won’t happen again.”
“You of all people, Nurse, should know how my mind cramps around things.”
“Ah, Miss, I know it. I told Father, Miss James is the most sensitive lady I ever nursed!”
I am struck by the heavy-handedness of fate. In my utter seclusion, to be invaded by two drunken men in the middle of the night! I think of it now and my hair stands on end!
SIX
ARRIVING ON MY DOORSTEP IN MID-MAY JUST AS THE MISSES Lawrence are preparing to depart, Henry is as stunned as I was the first time to meet this pair of identical twins of fifty, dressed identically. Today they wear gowns of pea green and bonnets with scarlet flowers, and one of them remarks, upon being introduced to H., “I’m sorry that we must wend our way home. We have such a headache today.”
“Do they always dress identically?” he asks after they disappear round the corner.
“Yes, and they suffer from the same diseases. Water on the knee and enlarged hearts, I believe.”
“Did one of them really say, We have a headache?”
“Yes, and they are also apt to say, ‘Oh, that always disagrees with us.’ Pleasure and pain are shared equally, it seems.”
“When they share a headache, do you suppose it is a half-strength headache for each of them?”
“We’ll never know. But to see one Miss Lawrence gazing fondly at t
he other is almost an obscenity, Henry, like catching someone smiling lovingly at her own reflection in a looking glass. The real mystery is why Nature went to the trouble of creating two Misses Lawrence, when one might have sufficed.”
Henry settles himself in the armchair and stretches out his legs, stiff from his train journey. Nurse brings us tea and muffins, all aflutter. (She worships the famous Mr. James and flits around him like a besotted moth round a candle.) Finally, she excuses herself and goes out to call on friends.
Having missed my brother sorely, I can only gaze at him fondly while he conveys his gossip. He informs me that Wendell Holmes is in London now, being wined and dined and winning every Briton’s admiration.
“I wonder what they see in him. Don’t you?”
“Well, Alice, he is very intelligent and a great success at the law.”
“But don’t we always see people as they were when we first knew them? I always thought Wendell had the air of a shady man performing a card trick. Do you remember how he used to flirt with every pretty girl by telling them his war stories, how heroically he swam across the river with the ball in his foot, how the soldiers looked with their heads shot off? I had to hear the whole story three times, as I happened each time to be sitting near a young woman Wendell wished to impress. One of the Temple girls, usually.”
Henry barely laughs. He seems edgy; I wonder why.
“Why, what is eating you, Henry? You are all fidgety.”
He tells me gently that Aunt Kate is gravely ill in New York City.
“But I was writing to her this very morning!” Irrationally, I am about to produce my letter as proof that Aunt Kate is all right.
She is being cared for by our Walsh and Wyckoff relations, he tells me, and William writes that they say she cannot last long. As a warm rain falls outside, and the muslin curtains billow, Harry and I reminisce about our aunt, who was a third parent to us, whose passing will be the end of that generation. We recall her wide-brimmed gardening hat; her coterie of trusted doctors; her constant presence during the years we spent in Europe as children; how, unlike Mother, she adored all things French.
Alice in Bed Page 23
