I had my own worries. What if you forget me when we move? What if you sell me to the gypsies? What if my heart stops? What if I fall through the ice? What if my head gets cut off in a train-wreck? What if Françoise puts a sleeping draught in our soup and we fall asleep for a hundred years? What if Father goes away and doesn’t come back? What if he prays for me to die and God hears?
And then your heart finds peace and you learn to love the world. Should probably have been hypnotized as a babe in swaddling.
I watch Nurse pull the shade to half mast and reposition a vase of flowers gathered from our garden. How perfect she is. In the worst periods of my neurasthenic youth I used to cry out to Mother and Father in the infernal nights what would become of me when I lost them. Here was the answer—a little girl then toddling about in a Gloucestershire village.
Half a dozen times a day I think, “I must ask K about that,” or “I must find out about this,” thinking that someday I may need the knowledge. Then I laugh, remembering that “somedays” are over for me.
Constance Maud comes to bid me farewell before she sails to America. A tide of homesickness sweeps me under. Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in Newport. Those namby-pamby tales. “An Old Maid’s Story.” Every woman must be married; it may not be happiest at first but it is later. Stuck to my mind for some reason, although I don’t believe it.
Someday the rights of women will be respected, I suppose.
My ashes to go in a small box, only six guineas and another for a parson. So convenient.
Do you wish to dictate something in your journal?
Not in front of Henry, for no one is to know, only you. You will know what to do when the time comes.
They will want to burn it, I think. Your words into ashes.
Perhaps just a private printing. For the family. Nearly everyone has a crazy aunt in the attic. Could you find someone with a typewriter? I would like to see my thoughts in type; it might give them more gravitas.
She smiles broadly. “I was so hoping you’d say that.”
“Then, who knows, it might be published someday. Or perhaps not.”
William’s little Peggy—Billy teases her dreadfully, Alice writes. “When I speak to Billy, it makes my stomach tremble,” Peggy said. Heaven forbid a portent of heredity!
Long, long ago in Newport when I first died. Sun beating down, heatstroke, dog dead, bleeding from the mouth. Wilky in the parlor, so grievously wounded. Out of his mind. Don’t let the flies.
Standing above the chasm, toes curled over the edge; ten toes, each with its toenail, the baby toenail nearly microscopic.
Sara and her laughing eyes, the Perseids streaking through the heavens.
Creakings on the stair. Aunt Kate opening the bedroom door in Mt. Vernon Street. We never knew if. Life-interest in a shawl. What you bequeath to a servant.
This granite substance in my breast. Gruesome way to pass through the Valley of the Shadow. Great weakness now, like a boulder pinning me down.
The old Swedenborgian lady dressed in black taffeta, her jiggling arms. What lovely manners your children have.
When the father takes it off at night there is a stump. A dead fish, white and purple. The mother rubs it with oil. The father lies on his back and sighs, “Never was a man so blessed as I am with my Mary.”
House in St. John’s Wood 1855. Overlooking a green where elegant ladies and gentlemen practice archery. Like characters out of Robin Hood.
In Paris I see my reflection in the gleaming floors. Robbie says he can see my drawers, and I say, no, you can’t, and he says, yes, yes, I can. Grown-ups tower above us like redwoods.
Such good boys, I have such good boys.
Boulogne. On the beach Robbie and I holding our breath as long as. Spinning like tops to make ourselves dizzy. All fall down! Our footprints in the wet sand filling with water and pieces of sky.
Who will help me cross the river Lethe? What is the ferryman’s name? Katherine will know.
Madame parle français comme une vache espagnole.
Don’t you ever have fun, Cousin Alice?
Dream one night of Clover Hooper. Well, call it a dream. Wearing a white lace dress, sitting on the lip of a baroque fountain, feeding pigeons from her hands. I sit down next to her.
She looks up, startled. “Alice James! I thought maybe you’d gone and done it, too. It’s not a sin, you know.”
“I know that.”
“You may still.”
“If it gets worse I shall ask K for the lethal dose. Morphine. Dr. Baldwin kindly told us. But you—why did you drink potassium cyanide? I thought you had the perfect life!”
“Not at all. We could not have children and there seemed no point in going on. I am very occupied with the children here.” I look down at the pigeons and see that they have changed into street urchins with smudged faces. “But the clergy, Alice! Scurrying around with their horrid rat faces.” She shudders. “No, Alice, the real story is this. Henry, mi caro sposo, fell in love with Mrs. Cameron. Do you know her? Her husband is a Senator. The love was all in his mind but Henry’s sensual organ is his mind. The rest of him hardly matters.”
“Do you mean to say—?”
“Yes, Alice. He wrote a depressing novel called Esther in which a woman bearing a striking resemblance to moi falls into a hopeless melancholy after her father dies. Henry wrote it before Papa died. A queer case of precognition, no? I can take a hint, you know!”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and then he wrote a second novel, also anonymous. Most people thought I wrote it. But that’s not it, either. What was it? Oh, yes, my mad dead Aunt Susie kept invading my dreams. Said I would have to kill myself eventually, so why put it off? Her voice in my head all the time, all the time. Do you know what that’s like? To blot it out, I had to drink a poisonous chemical used in photography. Did you know I took up photography? Anyway, I died and two years later Ellen had to throw herself in front of a train. Then Ned. The whole family—a chain reaction!”
“But Ned is still alive. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
“Wait. In a few years’ time he’ll throw himself out of a window.”
They take turns at my bedside, K and H. Is it Sunday? Oh yes, the bells. Nurse at her religious debaucheries all day.
K reading aloud from Miss Woolson’s story “Dorothy” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Stops to hypnotize me every twenty minutes.
Where did my hysteria go?
My feebleness extreme. Can no longer sit up, so many things behind me now. From the supine position I dictate something for my diary. Strange dream this afternoon, woke up choking. Lizzy Boott and Annie Dixwell standing up in a boat in a stream, passing through a cloud into golden sunlight. Look back toward shore, beckoning to me. Both dead.
“The welcoming committee,” Katherine says.
Katherine reading aloud again, hypnotizing me every twenty minutes.
Father dying. Oh, this disgusting world! Did he not see his only daughter? Was I not there by his side?
Nothing ever happened really. Once I was a small person in a big world. Now the world abides in me. Stars explode. Kingdoms rise and fall, turn to dust, seven layers of Troy, library of Alexandria in flames. Periclean Athens, Napoleon I and the other Napoleon, the one we saw in Paris. Try to tell Katherine and Henry but words become garbled passing through my lips. Time for talk over, I suppose.
I have always been the same: lively and sad, I have loved God my father and liberty. Madame de Staël, as quoted by Mademoiselle Danse. Feeding a goat a scrap of paper through the palings of a wooden fence. Bob Temple goes to prison for his crimes. Governesses depart in tears. God does not haggle. Henry James has kept the secret.
Please, Alice, do take some liquid.
This year my happiest ever. Enfolded in the love of friend and brothers.
La Revue des Deux Mondes. Says it will rain?
H writes W about my progress toward deterioration.
Nights long. Dreadful cough
ing. Breathing agony. Bones on fire.
I shee it! I shee it!
What, Alice? (Henry)
Typewrii .. fee—fee woman.
Horrible wracking cough. Nurse wipes my mouth tenderly and props me up against a firm pillow so I can breathe. Clots of bloody tissue on my nightdress, Katherine changes me into a clean one. I attempt speech.
Try to rest, dear. Save your strength.
For what? (Attempt to laugh; produce a witchy cackle.)
Bi-shycle, bi-shycle.
What’s that about a bicycle, Alice? (Henry)
Fee women. Becush closhe. Rub a bit of my nightdress between my thumb and index finger. Henry works it out. “Women who ride bicycles must wear functional clothing?”
Yesh! Yesh!
So women will be set free by the typewriter and the bicycle? (Katherine.)
Yesh. You will shee! Coming. Coming soon.
How nice to have friends and brothers who know me so well they can decode my gibberish.
Pain lifting now. If you squint you can see it. Like space, like the silence between words. A wave of emptiness washes over my mind. My hard core melting, melting. The emptier I get the fuller I am.
To William. A telegram, whispered into Henry’s ear. Tenderest love to all farewell am going soon Alice. How did people say good-bye before the telegraph?
Who has been dreaming the dream of Alice James?
Alice I can’t hear you, you’re whispering.
Sun through the mist. Pat of butter melting, melting. Carried off the ship like a plank. Alice James takes her bow, exits stage left. Look!
Please, Alice, try to take some—
Lock eyes with K, squeeze her hand, I think she receives. The pain that consumed me is gone. Please don’t ask me, oh please don’t, to stay another day.
HENRY JAMES
11 ARGYLL RD., KENSINGTON W.
JANUARY 12, 1893
TO WILLIAM JAMES
Her lungs, her heart, her breast are all in great distress, constant fever, a distressing choking retching cough. . . . She could not sleep. She is perfectly clear and humorous and would be talking if doing so didn’t bring on spasms of coughing.
March 6th, 1893—All through Saturday the 5th and even in the night, Alice was making sentences.
—Written by Katherine Peabody Loring at the end of Alice James’s diary.
CABLE FROM HENRY JAMES TO WILLIAM JAMES
MARCH 6. 1893
ALICE JUST PASSED AWAY PAINLESS
KATHERINE PEABODY LORING
11 ARGYLL RD., KENSINGTON W.
MARCH 8, 1893
TO FRANCES ROLLINS (FANNY) MORSE
I cannot give you any idea of the beauty of that last night, those last hours, when Alice knew that she was free at last, though she was too weak to say much.
Ed essa da martiro
E da essilio venne a questa pace
(“From martyrdom and exile to this peace”)
—inscription on Alice James’s funeral urn, from Dante
TEN
1894
THE SOUP COURSE IS STILL IN PROGRESS, AND ALREADY TWO quarrels have erupted among the Jameses of 95 Irving Street. Billy is warming to his favorite sport of tormenting Peggy, calling her a “harridan” and a “frump,” words Peggy is too proud to admit she doesn’t know. She takes refuge in being dictatorial toward Aleck, the last-born in a family as quarrelsome as the Balkans. Will they have to have another child so that Aleck will have someone to lord it over? No, William thinks, no more! They can scarcely manage the four they have.
The doorbell rings.
“Who could that be, this time of night?” Alice’s mother, Eliza, wonders.
“Go answer it, Harry,” Alice tells her eldest. “I hope it’s not one of your melancholiacs, William—but don’t they come by in the morning?” Then she catches the look on his face. “Oh, no, William! Please tell me you didn’t schedule your office hours during our dinner hour!”
“It was the only time I was sure of being here. I didn’t think anyone would come.”
Alice rests her forehead on the heel of her hand.
Two voices, one male, one female, echo in the vestibule, and Harry can be heard taking their coats and hats with a bonhomie worthy of a valet at a gentlemen’s club. When the students come round the corner to find the James family sitting at dinner, they freeze like deer in a forest. The young woman actually takes a step backwards.
“Miss Stein! Mr. Solomons! Marvelous to see you! Do join us. I hope you haven’t eaten.” He moves some chairs around and places Miss Stein on his right and Mr. Solomons on his left. Mrs. James smiles from the other side of the table, a little wearily, before ringing for the servants and telling them in excellent French to bring out two more plates.
The students have come to consult Professor James about their research paper, “Normal Motor Automatisms.” Dr. Münsterberg told them last week that it was good enough to publish, but as his English is not fluent, he suggested they have Professor James look it over as well.
It summarizes a series of laboratory experiments in automatic writing, designed to find the exact point at which a personality splits and “releases” a secondary personality. The experimental design is Professor James’s, but he has abandoned laboratory work since Dr. Hugo Münsterberg of Berlin came to Harvard. Although Miss Stein is only an undergraduate, Professor James granted her special permission to take Dr. Münsterberg’s graduate seminar, where she’d be the first to admit she has no business being. She admires Dr. Münsterberg but she idolizes Professor James.
Leon Solomons, the most brilliant of the current crop of graduate students in psychology, takes the paper out of his case and proceeds to discuss fine points of experimental design with Professor James. Miss Stein, uninterested in methodology, looks across the table at the little girl and finds her staring back.
“Lots of students come to our dinners,” the girl says. “We know practically everyone at Harvard. We know Professor Royce and Professor Cummings and Professor Palmer and Professor Child. Do you know about our aunt who died? Her name was Aunt Alice and I never met her. But we put her ashes in a vase!”
“It’s an urn,” says Harry in a tone of amused contempt.
“Peggy, please focus on eating,” says the elderly lady, evidently her grandmother, “and let the grown-ups talk.”
In her laboratory notes, Miss Stein noted at first that she had “no subconscious reaction.” But after performing the experiments for a while, she found that when someone read a story to her at the same time that she wrote down the words dictated by another person, something odd would happen and her hand would begin to write unconsciously and go on writing for a long time, in a sort of trance.
When there is a break in the conversation, Mrs. James asks both students where they are from and whether they are enjoying Cambridge. They chat about their respective boarding houses, and about Leon’s plans to go to Europe next summer.
“I break down every two or three years and have to ruin myself by going to Europe,” Professor James tells them. “Last year, on my sabbatical, the whole family came, and an entire Swiss village was condemned to witness the quarrels and tantrums of the James family on our balcony. Later, in cold damp stony Florence, the children were sick with catarrhs all winter in a freezing house. My brain shut down completely and by the time we came back I’d lost all memory for psychology.”
The students are unable to think of an appropriate response to this.
“When you have been over there for a long period, and you come back here, you see all too starkly the American over-strained seriousness, our narrow horizons, our jerky angular unsmiling ways and manners. You become partially dissociated. But maybe that is just me.” He smiles graciously.
Miss Stein mentions that she lived in Vienna briefly as a small child and saw the emperor Franz Josef stroll through the Volksgarten while a band played patriotic songs.
“Ah, that would explain why your mind is so—capacious, Miss Stein
. Early influences! Which reminds me”—addressing both students—“Have you ever heard of this man Sigmund Freud? Viennese. I have just been reading the most extraordinary article in the Neurologisches Centralblatt. The title is Über den Psychischen Mechanismus Hysterischer Phänomene. Do you know German?”
Mr. Solomons does; Miss Stein does not. “Well, it begins rather strangely. A chance observation—oh, hang it, I’ve forgotten exactly.” He abruptly pushes back his chair and strides out of the room. Peggy has not taken her eyes off the young woman across from her, and tells her now, “You needn’t worry about boring us. We are used to intellectual conversations. Except Aleck.” With her elbow, she indicates the small boy next to her. “He used to be called Francis Tweedy, but now he’s Aleck.”
“Was not!” says the boy.
“You were, too! You just don’t remember.”
From the head of the table, Alice scans the faces, mentally making a place for her dead boy. In her mind there are always five children, not four. Herman would be ten now, filling in the gap between Billy and Peggy.
To get Peggy to close her mouth, she says, “Peggy, dear, do eat your asparagus.”
All the Jameses have beautiful voices, Miss Stein notices. She feels as if she were dining with the gods on Mt. Olympus.
“It’s too . . . stringy,” Peggy says. “I wish I did meet Aunt Alice. Now I’ll have to wait until I die, and that will be a long, long time.” She heaves a dramatic, world-weary sigh.
“You don’t know that, Peggy,” smirks Billy, across the table. “You could be dead as a doornail tomorrow, and we’d have to talk to you through Mrs. Piper.” He rolls his eyes up in his head, fluttering his eyelids, and drones in a low voice. I am Peeeeeggggy Jaaaaames. Reeeecently deceeeeeased.
Alice in Bed Page 37
