After she goes out to visit her family, William says, “Your little nurse, Emily, seems a jewel. And what a beautiful face!”
“Oh, she is, to endure all my snubs and my, to her, unknowable mysteries. Speaking of mysteries, William, they say there is little doubt that your friend, poor chloroformed Mr. Gurney, committed suicide. What a pity to hide it! Every educated person who kills himself does something toward lessening the superstition, I think.”
“It is terribly sad.”
“His wife, Kate, would call on me and pour out her troubles. She said he worked on his psychical research day and night, never took her anywhere and went around telling everyone he’d married beneath him!”
“Oh, I don’t believe it was that bad,” Henry says.
I say, “Wait and see, Henry. That is one widow who will toss out her weeds at the first opportunity. I am surprised, by the way, that the women here seem to do constantly what so rarely happens at home, namely marry again. You’d think that the wife part of you would have been sufficiently developed in one experiment, or that you might like to contemplate the situation from the bereft point of view for a while.”
“Gurney’s death is a great loss to me,” William says. “It seems one of death’s stupidest strokes, for I know of no one whose life task was begun on a more far-reaching scale.”
“Oh, I am very sorry, William. It was heroic of him to suppress his vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.”
We are quiet for a few minutes, listening to the ticking of the clock on the mantel. “Now,” I say, “you must tell me all about your children. I want to hear every detail. I am their aunt. Don’t leave anything out.”
He begins to describe them, beginning with solid, reliable, intellectually precocious Harry, “who, fortunate child, has inherited his mother’s temperament. He can always be counted on to take what falls to him with equanimity. When Bill does not get what he wants, he fills the welkin with lamentation. I think he is much as Father must have been as a child.”
“And little Peggy of the soulful dark eyes?”
“She has a mouthful of teeth and runs about with a cracker always clutched in her fist. Her grandmother thinks she has an unusually vivid inner life. We like to think she shows promise of becoming another Sister Alice—except that she is a chatterbox and you were a quiet child.”
“Who could get a word in edgewise, in our family? In another family, I might have been the Demosthenes of my sex.” William tosses his head back and laughs. He has one of the world’s best laughs.
“Please, William, do promise me that you will educate your children. Leave Europe for later, when they are old enough to have a Grand Emotion. Do not tear them up by the roots every few months, as we were.”
William gazes at me as if he is trying either to memorize my features or to correlate them with my self of six years ago. It has been that long.
“We were hotel children, weren’t we?” Henry says.
“Do you remember the school in Boulogne where there were only English boys?” William asks. “They were astonished to find we spoke English, not ‘American.’ How like Father to place us in a French school in which no French was spoken!”
“Fortunately, the schools never lasted long,” Henry says.
“I liked the schools. I liked playing with other boys. The school in Geneva, where we boarded with Wilky, was a rollicking good time.”
Henry proceeds to recite from memory the names of all of our tutors and mademoiselles.
I say, “I simply worshipped Mademoiselle Guyot, who passed out those red candies that turned our tongues red. Didn’t Father denounce her at the dinner table for teaching us Papist idolatries?”
“I remember it well,” William says. “He pounded his fist and shouted, ‘Prayers are haggling and God does not haggle!’ Poor Mademoiselle was gone the next day.”
“Oh, my heart was broken, you know. For weeks I kept praying to her bon dieu, who seemed so nice. I didn’t trust Father’s inscrutable deity to listen to my prayers or keep track of my good and bad deeds.”
“The one I remember best was the worldly Mademoiselle Danse,” Henry says.
“She disappeared suddenly, didn’t she?” William says.
“Didn’t they all?” Henry says. “Father said something about her being an ‘adventuress’ but never explained.”
“Yes!” I say, remembering now. “Do you know what I thought that meant? I thought she was an explorer and I pictured her floating down a muddy river in the part of our map of Africa labeled ‘Unexplored Regions.’ Oh, William, are you as appalled by this Stanley character as Henry and I are? Gouging a path through Africa, slaughtering everything in his path.”
After discussing Stanley’s horrors, we move on to Ireland and Home Rule and Parnell and the Unionists. Well, I do—and William listens politely. “The thought of the Irish flinging themselves against the dense wall of British brutality for seven centuries—well, you know my feelings, William. I got so worked up over the Parnell trial that I went off whenever I read anything on the subject.”
I want to seize the opportunity to carp about the British a bit more while my brothers are here, as I can’t do this with most of my callers, who are British. Although William in some moods is prone to despise the entire island and its inhabitants, he does love his London tailor and British gentlemen’s clubs and is very fond of his British Psychical friends. (I like the Sidgwicks, but Fred Myers is a horror and poor Mr. Gurney was quite deluded and is now terribly dead.) I tell him, “I can’t fathom the English. They pass special legislation about a dog’s broken leg but celebrate foxes being torn to shreds. And it is simply inconceivable the lives the poor lead here.”
“Surely we have our poor at home.”
“Yes, but the poor here are different, William. So many centuries have gone into the making of ’em.” Turning to Henry, I say, “What do fashionable people make of the army of ragged, grimy, coughing people they see everywhere? I suppose after a while they just don’t see them. The poor must bother them no more than a cloud of gnats.”
Henry makes a gesture of muted assent, or perhaps neutrality.
I broach the subject of the recent dockers’ strike, and then say to William, “Did you see that two hundred trades in London have gained a ten percent increase in wages as a consequence, the masters caving in to keep the men from going on strike?” William looks blank. Doesn’t he read the newspapers? Or do American newspapers ignore Europe? I am just warming up to a rantlet about imperial actions from Baghdad to Delhi, when I stop and laugh at myself. “Imagine the millions of the Empire being pigeon-holed by a creature whose field of vision is populated by a landlady, a nurse, and two chair-men, one perpetually drunk. It is all very funny. So, William, do tell us what your Congress is about.”
He explains that it will bring together researchers from England, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and the United States for the first time and he expresses his admiration for some French researchers who have been studying hysterics. “They spend hours with a single patient, hypnotizing her (or him) and assembling a psychic biography.”
“But why should the patient wish to be hypnotized?”
“Sometimes when there is a great shock, such as a railway crash, the trauma is forgotten, but not entirely. The memory goes underground. The process is called dissociation. Pierre Janet will hypnotize a patient and uncover the fixed ideas dwelling in the depths of her mind, ideas of which she is unaware but which are making her ill.”
Henry volunteers that idées fixes are a part of the French character, Balzac’s characters being a case in point.
“For example,” William says, “there was a girl who left home in what is called a fugue state.”
“Fugue?” I say. “That sounds lovely.”
“No, it means—well, never mind. Janet hypnotized her and put a pencil in her hand and she wrote, ‘I left home because maman accuses me of having a lover and it is not true. I sold my jewels to pay m
y railroad fare. I took such and such a train.’”
“Maybe she was lying, William. In French novels it’s nothing but adultery, adultery, adultery.”
“She wasn’t. Under hypnosis, the girl related everything that happened with precision, while continuing to insist she remembered nothing about it. She was not lying, Alice. She had a secondary personality. It had split off from the rest of her mind because of some great disturbance.”
“But, William: when this man hypnotizes the lunatics, what good does this do them?”
“Well, once he has excavated their harmful memories, as it were, he erases or changes them by means of suggestion. He gives the patient a new set of memories.”
“What do you mean, suggestion?”
“Hypnotic suggestion.”
“Oh, hypnotism! There is such interest in the Mind Cure here, William. I wish you could meet Mrs. Lucian Carr. Hundreds of her friends have been cured and she cures herself whenever the necessity arises, having listened to a course of twelve lectures by her prophetess. The funny thing is, when I asked Mrs. Carr what attitude of mind one must assume, she could make no articulate sound, notwithstanding her thirty hours of instruction. She finally said it was ‘to lose oneself in the Infinite!’ Imagine!”
William looks—well, chagrined, I suppose. I must have inadvertently struck at one of his sacred cows. Then I see that there is more to it. I believe William aspires to cure me with this mesmerism mumbo-jumbo. While it is sweet of him to want to see me well, his view of me as a spineless malade imaginaire is unflattering. However, he loves me and means well, so I let it pass.
“How restless Father was!” I say. “Remember how he’d start to pace around the house, and we’d know that soon he’d go somewhere on a train and come back a week later. Where did he go?”
None of us has an answer. “We had no idea of ordinary life at all! I was shunned at Mrs. Agassiz’s school, you know. For two years I hardly dared open my mouth.”
“I thought you liked it there,” William says.
“Eventually, but in the beginning I was a traveler without a map. I simply had no idea what the Assemblies were, or the North Shore, or someone’s Cousin Frank or Aunt Harriet. You know how all Bostonians are related to everyone else in a tangled web of kinship that you are expected somehow to grasp?”
In the presence of my two brothers, I suddenly have the strangest feeling that I have one leg in 1889 and the other in 1860; that our parents are simultaneously alive and dead; that William, Henry, and I are not just our current ages but all the ages we have been. Whatever our age, it seems, we feel the same inside. I enjoy this pleasantly disembodied feeling, and wish time would stop and this moment with my brothers would last forever.
“Are you going to read a paper at the Congress, William?” I ask.
“I have been asked to give the Opening Remarks. I had no idea anyone had heard of me. Being susceptible to flattery, I said yes.”
“That’s wonderful! What will you say?”
“Oh, I’ll write something on the ferry or at my hotel in Boulogne. I can generally count on salt air and sea breezes to revive my brain.”
“Oh, William, you are going to Boulogne! Please do go to all our old places. I so loved the medieval ramparts with the English stone cannonballs stuck in them. Oh, remember the dread episode of the bonnet?”
Even Henry’s memory fails on this. “What bonnet?”
“It was Mademoiselle Cusin’s Christmas present from us—remember? For some reason I was the one delegated to give the instructions for making it. It was the first important mission I’d ever been entrusted with and I was very anxious to succeed. The shop was on the rue Victor Hugo. You took me there, William.”
“I did?”
“Yes, and then you deserted me!”
He obviously hasn’t the faintest idea what I am talking about, whereas for me the event was so disturbing it is permanently etched on my brain.
I describe my ordeal, how the milliners kept bringing out different materials while speaking rapidly and incomprehensibly in French. They stood behind the counter, impatient, as I stood mute and paralyzed. In my panic, I fixed my eyes on a piece of pink material laid out next to a strip of blue on the tall counter I had to stand on tiptoes to see, and mumbled, Oui, comme ça.
“On Christmas day Mademoiselle unwrapped the present, which I saw immediately was atrocious. The pink made you think of a bad sunburn, the blue was dead and lifeless, the design hideous. She made a display of joy but wore it only once, on a visit to the campagne, where we met only peasants. The bonnet was a stain on my character, a great failure. I foresaw that my whole life would probably be an unmitigated mistake. Why did you leave me, William?”
“I recall vaguely going to an art store with the intention of buying watercolors and buying, instead, some naughty cartes de visite. Egyptian Dancing Girls, they were called. It was amazing what you could get in France, even in those days. I didn’t think I’d be needed, being completely ignorant of millinery matters.”
“I was seven, William!”
He is quiet, taking this in. For an instant he looks as if he might weep. Finally, he says, “I was and am a dull clod, Alice. It grieves me that I abandoned you. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Well, I’m not sure you would have managed a better-looking bonnet.”
“Certainly not. I cannot be trusted to pick out a button.”
He mentions that his English friends from the Society for Psychical Research will be coming to the Congress and presenting papers. The Sidgwicks will be trying to drum up support for their international Census of Hallucinations.
“Oh, yes, they told me about their Census. The Sidgwicks have been charming to me, William, and still come all the way to Leamington to call on me. They are the last remnant of my London salon, faithful to the end, while the others have melted away. Nora Sidgwick is the most delightful embodiment of the modern bluestocking, don’t you think? How is Mrs. Piper, by the way? Bob seems to be spending all his time with her. That can’t be good for him.”
“Poor Bob,” says Henry.
“Oh don’t let’s talk about Bob,” William says. “He just stayed a week at our house and exhausted poor Alice by pouring out his miseries until the wee hours. He threw our household into turmoil as usual, and the children kept asking, ‘When is he going?’”
“It is so sad about Aunt Kate, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Lilla Walsh said she was incapable of conversation toward the end. She’d try to say something and then lapse into resignation, saying, ‘I can’t talk it.’”
We carefully avoid the minefield of our aunt’s will. That has been disposed of in letters and shall nevermore be spoken of—by me, anyway. “Poor Aunt Kate, who so loved stating her opinions,” I say. “I suppose we shall all end like that.”
As the light drains from the sky, the three of us sit in wistful silence, recalling the years when we lived like a small tribe isolated on an island, with our own peculiar language and customs—the good and bad of it known only to us and to Bob now.
“Life is so odd, isn’t it?” I tell William I can still picture everything in Cambridge, as clearly as if I were standing there—Harvard Square, the horse-cars, the mansions on “Tory Row,” Mr. Eliot and his port-wine birthmark. “Who is Charlemagne expurgating now?”
“I’m not sure. He hosts Dante evenings these days. The smart set goes. Howells says his spoken Italian is actually quite poor.”
“Oh, Charles is far too self-conscious to have a gift for languages. And how is Grace? You know about her wedding gift to Mabel Quincy, I assume?”
“What is that?”
“I am shocked you don’t know, William, since it was Alice who wrote me of it. It was Grace’s own inept and graceless translation of Montaigne. Before wrapping the book to give to Mabel, she glued the naughty pages together. Even strained through Grace’s polysyllabic fog, the passages were apparently unsuitable for a bride-to-be, although Grace herself did not shy
from contemplating them, depraved spinster that she is.”
William laughs lustily at this, and then the talk turns to William’s new house, currently under construction on the former Shady Hill property. “They’ve put in three new streets—mine is Irving Street. I am hoping to move in when I return.” He fumbles in his satchel and finds the blueprints. Spreading them out on my lap, he explains all the rooms and their features.
After that, we move on to Cambridge friends. “Winnie Howells”—daughter of the novelist—“is sicker than ever,” William says. “Nerves, apparently. Weir Mitchell, the rest-cure man, has her now, so I suppose she will gain.”
“Oh, William! That dreadful man.”
As the little clock on the mantel chimes the hour, I draw my shawl around me. “You don’t know what it means to have a few laughs, William. I never go out, you know. I have no idea of life at large. I see mostly women, when I see anyone, and British women—well, the minds of even the most intelligent are simply cul-de-sacs, more or less long. The dead wall you always come to in time.”
Several minutes of deep silence pass.
“Nurse thinks I am a godless savage because I have no outward ritual, little realizing that I am wholly devoted to the Unknowable Mystery Behind Phenomena!” William smiles at this, knowing what I mean. “Anyhow, William, I hope you are coming back here afterwards on your way to Liverpool?”
“I shall return, bearing tales of the Exposition. But first I am making a side trip to Geneva to gaze upon our old house. Remember it, Alice?”
“Yes. I loved the garden. Remember our Russian landlady, who was a terrible invalid, and sat reading under a lime tree, in her mushroom hat, always so happy?”
ONGOING LETTER FROM WILLIAM JAMES TO MRS WILLIAM JAMES HOTEL RASTADT, PARIS. AUGUST 3RD, 1889.
After I had paced the street for 3/4 of an hour and begun to give up all hope, suddenly Harry’s portly form appeared on the balcony cheering me on. I rushed up—A. was on her bed, in a fainting, panting condition, white as a sheet, with outstretched arms into which I threw myself. She kept gasping out, “You understand, don’t you, it’s all my body, it’s all physical, I can’t help it.”
Alice in Bed Page 27
