“The greatest ever written, William!” I said. “You and Henry can divide the spoils between you—Henry taking Britain and you the continent. What did you say in your talk, by the way?”
“I’ve already forgotten; insomnia has torn my mind to pieces. All I can tell you is that Nora Sidgwick rushed up to me afterwards and said, ‘We are so happy you are as you are.’”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, your European fame will bring such joy to Miss Clarke, you have no idea. Now tell us about the Exposition. Was it ablaze with electric light, and what was that like?”
“Much brighter. Altogether different from gaslight. Some elderly ladies complained that it exposed all their wrinkles.”
“Did you go to the top of Mr. Eiffel’s ‘abomination’?” Henry asked.
“Yes, I stepped into a large box with about sixty other people and we ascended through the air. It lurched a little. You feel it in your stomach.”
I shuddered, thinking of my snakes.
“Some people groaned and obviously regretted getting in, but I loved the sensation of leaving the earth. After a few minutes, the box stops with a loud clunk, and the uniformed man calls out ‘All change here!’ You cross a narrow bridge to another box. It is called an Otis Elevator, and it takes you up to the top. Or near enough.”
“Why two boxes instead of one?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know. I wondered myself.”
“Wait, William,” I said. “Let me close my eyes. Now please describe in detail the view from up there.”
“The walls are glass on two sides, and you can see down to the Exhibition gardens, two hundred seventy-five meters below. I remember the figure from the newspaper.”
The scene bloomed in my mind as William described it. How touchingly small the things of earth, mere toys, seen from the air. I saw the silver ribbon of the Seine, the small puffs of black smoke hanging over the railway line. A view heretofore known only to birds and a few balloonists.
“What about the habitats humains? The newspaper said there are all sorts of dwellings recreated in meticulous detail.”
“Yes. A Lapland house, next to a palatial Persian dwelling. A wooden Germanic house on stilts, a circular Gallic hut, and many others. Then you must imagine, Alice, people from everywhere—that is the principal thing—people of every color and race and in every costume. Egyptian donkey boys, African kings, witch doctors, Japanese geishas, Arab carpet merchants—well, I could go on and on. It was all like an opium dream and made me wish to spend the rest of my life as a flâneur.”
“You walk too fast to be a flâneur, William. They stroll languidly, lost in their reveries.”
“Lord Houghton said the rue de Caire is the most impresssive of the exhibits,” Henry said.
“I agree. It consists of several blocks of a Cairo souk recreated in Paris. It even has fifty or sixty Egyptian donkeys, cared for by the same number of donkey boys.”
“One boy per donkey?” I asked.
“Well, I like to think so. My attention was drawn to a tent where beautiful ladies straight out of The Arabian Nights did a wiggling dance with their stomachs bared.”
“Who wants to see a bare stomach?”
“I might have said that before, but these ladies changed my mind. After that I rambled around, drinking Russian tea from a samovar and, later, Turkish coffee from tiny cups.”
“How did you ever sleep after that?”
“Oh, I didn’t. I am going home now principally to sleep.”
“What else did you do?”
“Well, from a trio of Canadian Indians I bought two tiny canoes made of birch-bark for Harry and Billy, then I began to wonder what to get for Peggy. Oh, Alice, I almost forgot! I brought you a little something.”
After rummaging through his suitcase, he brought out a beautiful pair of jet earrings and a necklace of ivory and jet. I almost burst into tears. They seemed far too precious for the likes of me, and I couldn’t think where I’d wear them. But I recovered and thanked him profusely and then closed my eyes again as William resumed his tale.
“I saw many other wondrous sights, Alice. You must picture a magnificently robed and turbaned African king feasting on exotic delicacies of some sort.”
“How was this king attired?”
“In patterned swaths of yellow, black, and saffron, a turban of the same material, and any number of necklaces and bracelets. Enormous ivory earrings dragged his earlobes practically to his knees. He was a singularly beautiful man and looked as if he could put you in a trance in five seconds flat. Then, let’s see, I saw two Siamese Buddhist monks hobnobbing with a Greek Orthodox priest. Don’t you wonder what they were talking about, and in what language?”
“Yes, but one thing puzzles me, William. Are the people in the habitats actually who they are supposed to be, or are they actors? Is the African king really a king? Are the carpet merchants really carpet merchants? Where does everyone sleep at night—in the habitats, or in a hotel? And will they be content to go back to Darkest Africa after they’ve seen Paris?”
“All excellent questions, Alice, to which, sadly, I don’t have the answer.”
“I’m going in October, and will try to find out for you, Alice.”
“Thank you, Henry. Did you see those big machines, William? In that place—what is it called?”
“The Galerie des Machines. Yes. I felt like a man in a myth who is taken, awed and terrified, into the abode of the gods.”
“What sort of machines?” Henry asked.
“Oh, pumps, dynamos, transformers, hydraulic elevators. Edison’s ‘Big Lamps.’ I’d seen a few of the things before, at the Exposition in Philadelphia in seventy-six, but they’ve grown larger and more complex now. Of course I don’t understand them at all. The most remarkable machine was this new invention of Mr. Edison’s, called a ‘phonograph.’ It played two ‘records.’”
“Records?”
“That is what they call them. The sound is etched into disks somehow, in grooves. I don’t understand it, but one played the ‘Marseillaise’ and ‘America,’ and on the other record male voices could be heard shouting, Vive Carnot! Vive La France! Vive la République!”
“Is the sound clear?”
“No. More like spirits speaking to you drunkenly from another world. I hope the mediums of Boston don’t get wind of it.”
“What makes the moving walkway move, William?”
“Oh, gears I suppose,” he said vaguely. “You are a very exacting interviewer, Alice. Maybe you should take up journalism.”
“Sadly, William, the inside of a sickroom is not considered picturesque in our age.”
“Well, you glide effortlessly in one direction as other people glide past in the opposite. And such people, as I’ve said, from all over the world!” He took a pencil and a piece of notepaper and made a little sketch, in which Japanese women in kimonos glide by, and in the opposite direction, a turbaned man with a little boy.
He continued sketching furiously. “Here is something I actually saw. The maharajah, as you can see, is in front holding his small son’s hand, while the maharani and the small daughters—whose noses and ears are pierced by blood-red rubies, by the way—trail behind.”
I closed my eyes and saw them in my mind, their skin the hue of cinnamon or caramel, clothes the color of persimmons, peonies, French scarlet poppies. Something about this was familiar—what was it? Telling my stories to William, who was writing them down and illustrating them. I was about four, watching the drawings come to life. His drawing of an owl was the owl; the little girl, who wins a staring contest with the owl and is crowned Queen of the Night, was a real little girl. When William named her Alice, she was me—a transformed me.
“As you may know, Alice, the Oriental insists on having his females walk behind him and does not permit them to run amok founding charities, hounding college presidents, and running the world.”
“And practicing
unscrupulous journalism,” Henry added.
“Don’t forget that we ‘Occidental females’ are considered too irrational to vote and are barred from most occupations. According to your friend Francis Parkman, Henry—”
“He’s hardly a friend, Alice.”
“Well, I seem to recall he wrote you a very unctuous letter about The Bostonians. Wasn’t he the model for your Basil Ransom?”
“Among others.” Did I detect a faint blush on my brother’s cheek? Perhaps he is a little embarrassed about The Bostonians, with its lampoons of feminists, psychics, and revered Boston figures like Miss Elizabeth Peabody. Bostonians have not quite forgiven him for this.
“Katherine and I had the misfortune to attend Mr. Parkman’s Lowell lecture on The Rights of Women. A more accurate title might have been, Why Women Should Be Merely Ornamental. If females could vote, he said, we’d constitute a large noncombatant class and overwhelm the nation with our emotionalism. He seemed to feel that women could not be trusted to wage war with any regularity.”
“Good grief,” William sighed, then proceeded to describe other personages, such as Negroes in elegant suits, a Turkish pasha, a flock of Belgian nuns wearing wimples who seemed poised to take flight.
After he departed for the station in late afternoon, Harry and I spent the rest of the day analyzing him. “Didn’t you want to laugh,” I said, “when he described his new house in New Hampshire? Fourteen doors all opening to the outside! It could be a description of William’s mind. He is simply himself, isn’t he? A native of the James family and of no other land.”
The next day Henry, too, sank below my little horizon, plunging me back into solitude. I think it will take me some time to assimilate the enormous fact of seeing William again after so many years. It is like a reunion with parts of myself that had been wandering in circles, lost, for years.
PART FOUR
ONE
1890
TODAY IS ONE OF THOSE RARE DAYS WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS: A large packing crate arrives. Four brawny lads carry it upstairs and break apart the wooden slats, and there it is: the desk with the leather top I was given for Christmas 1877 for my “professoress” duties. I’d asked William and Alice to send it when they dismantled my Manchester house, but I’d forgotten and now it appears in my rooms like a dream object.
If only I could have saved the musty air exhaled by its drawers; once opened, of course, the past was immediately contaminated. How strange to come across your own flotsam and jetsam, your own “remains”! A rusty key to my old steamer trunk, a key to a jewelry box I no longer possess, an envelope, labeled Alice 1849, containing a lock of fine baby hair. (I must make sure Mrs. Piper doesn’t get her paws on that after I “pass over.”) In other drawers: bottles of ink, pen-wipers, engraved calling cards of Boston ladies, clippings from Godey’s (saved as a joke for Sara), a skein of violet yarn, a hatpin, a few outdated American postage stamps, a half-written letter to one of my students from the Society to Encourage Studies at Home (I suppose it is too late to mail it now), cabinet photographs of various friends. And in the two lowest drawers on the right: a cache of family letters.
I can’t decide whether Alice and William put them in there on purpose or if they just happened to be there. A quick glance at the envelopes reveals that mingled with Mother’s and Father’s letters are masses of letters to and from everyone in the family: a nearly random collection of Jamesiana.
I wait several days before tackling them; I am not sure why. Finally, one day after breakfast, I ask Nurse to bring me one of the bundles.
“Which one, Miss?”
“Oh, whatever is on top. Surprise me.” This turns out to be a bundle of Mother’s letters bound with a blue satin ribbon. Tears spring to my eyes at the sight of her dear handwriting, particularly my name written in her hand. To think that her living hand touched this paper, addressed the envelope, poured out these thoughts through her pen. I feel for some minutes as if a current of electricity had passed through me.
“Are you all right, Miss?”
“Perfectly well, Nurse.” How unpleasant to have someone watch you as if you were a chimpanzee in the zoo. There are times when I wish Nurse would disappear for a little while. But she does her best, poor girl. It can’t be easy catering to my eccentricities.
The first letter I unfold is from Mother to Father.
I saw how Alice’s spirits sunk last evening in hearing of the recital of all your troubles—and she sighed a deep sigh, and said oh how I wish Father was here. My heart melts with tenderness toward you my precious one.
The letter is undated and contains no clue to where Father was. Next I come to a pile of Mother’s letters to me while I was in the clutches of the Brothers Taylor in New York.
I hear such fine accounts of your blooming appearance that I shall expect to hear from the doctor that the great work of restoration is almost completed.
My blooming appearance! My great restoration! What an optimist she was.
In a letter to William, Father is depicted as being comforted by Alice’s lovely and loving companionship, which he enjoys more than ever because it is not marred by his old anxiety about her. This was written in 1873 or ’74, when I was holding my own nervously, or was believed to be.
It is clear from these letters that our mother was the glue that held our family together; every page is perfumed with her love. Here she is writing to Harry while he was abroad in 1868.
What are you living on dear Harry? It seems to me you are living as the lilies and fed like the sparrows. But I know too that you toil and spin, and must conclude that you receive in some mysterious way the fruits of your labour.
To William in Dresden in 1867: Beware dear Willy of the fascinations of Fraulein Clara Schmidt or any other such. You know your extreme susceptibility, or rather I know it, so I say beware. I skim through many loving letters to Wilky and Bob and their wives, reporting on the Boston weather and news and anxious for details about their babies.
Here is something. In December 1872, not long after my return from my Grand Tour of Europe, Mother writes to Harry (in Paris):
Alice has found after six weeks’ experience at home that the delicious breakfast of chocolate & roll in the morning does not agree with her as it did abroad. There is doubtless a stimulus in it which she could bear there but cannot bear here. She has given it up and is all right again.
Yes, for a brief period my “French breakfast” could summon an aftertaste of Paris. When it stopped “agreeing” with me, it meant that Europe had entirely faded away. I was not exactly “all right again.”
Not long afterwards, when weekly letters began arriving from Harry in Paris, reporting luminous conversations with George Sand, Turgenev, Zola, and Flaubert, my writing hand began to revolt. Given a pencil, it would scribble hateful, spiteful things, things I wasn’t aware of thinking. Although I did my utmost to conceal this part of myself, as if it were a claw-hand, my family sensed that I was not as well as might be wished. In a letter to Harry, Mother laments,
Poor child. Why is it that she has gone back so? Can there be anything in this climate to account for it? She has been trying to write to you for some time past, but always finds her strength too little for the good long letter and I dissuade her from it. Do not dwell much on what I have told you, in your letters, only recognize it as a reason for her not writing.
In 1878, the year of William’s marriage, when Father was talking me out of suicide daily, Mother was calmly telling my brothers that Alice is not so strong as we might wish or that Alice has had a little setback. No mention of my being on the brink of insanity.
Oh dear, here is Nurse again, come to see if I have fainted and require revival. She subscribes to the common prejudice that thinking too much, especially about oneself, is an unhealthy activity. “It’s all right, Nurse,” I tell her. “These letters are nectar and ambrosia to me.”
“If you say so, Miss.”
Having noticed the tear tracks on my cheeks, she loiters
nearby, looking for something to straighten so she can monitor my condition. This is very wearisome. “Please, Nurse, don’t distress yourself. I am fine, really.” I am thinking, Don’t you have some praying to do? Intercessionary prayers for my benighted soul or something? Finally she leaves, and I pick up another stack of Mother’s letters, which turn out to be commingled with many of Aunt Kate’s. (They were as similar in penmanship as they were in physiognomy.)
Here is Aunt Kate writing to Harry in 1873:
Your mother writes that you learned to love Paris before you left it and I am so glad that you stayed long enough to do so. I wish so much that Alice could have had a good long quiet draught of it.
How interesting. While Mother sought answers to my poor health in the vagaries of climate, Aunt Kate understood perfectly where the trouble lay. Perhaps I underestimated her.
As church bells in Leamington toll the hour, my mind is back in Cambridge in the days of our youth. Sitting stiffly in the formal parlor at Quincy Street meeting Wilky’s new bride. The letters bring it all back: how appalled we were by Carrie, a shallow girl flaunting expensive jewelry, and hoped Wilky wouldn’t notice our lack of enthusiasm. (He didn’t.) After Carrie, Bob’s Mary was a breath of fresh air. Mother appreciated her sound practical nature and I adopted her as my little pet and we went around with our arms entwined like a pair of devoted sisters. Having no intellectual side, however, Mary wore thin soon enough, and it was a relief to see her go—to see them both go, I should say, for a euphoric Bob was nearly as exhausting as Bob in a morose state.
I see myself sucking in my breath while Mother pulled on my stays as I don a new costume for Father’s lecture on “The Woman Thou Gavest Me.” Noting the perplexity on the Bostonian faces, it hits me how bewildering Father’s philosophy is to others. Then I see Aunt Kate going off to Dr. Munro for manipulations and coming back smiling mysteriously. Time winds backwards and I am in Newport driving my pony phaeton along the Ocean Drive, looking out on a dark blue ocean frosted with whitecaps. Later I am swatting at flies while Wilky lies delirious in our parlor, the wounds in his ankle and his side refusing to heal. The smell was unforgettable.
Alice in Bed Page 29
