Alice in Bed (28 page)

EIGHT
EIGHT

A
SPIDER HAS BEEN BUSY SPINNING A WEB IN THE WINDOW CASEMENT
since shortly after dawn. On top of its beauty, the web is a death trap, and as I lie there watching it, a small white moth flies straight into it. Its struggles are unbearable to watch, so I free it, tearing several sticky strands and making a mess of that part of the web, so painstakingly constructed this very morning. The moth flies off to the sanctuary of a cream-colored curtain, to dream of eating holes in my woolens. Did I do the right thing? After all, I have cheated the spider of a well-earned meal. It is not easy being a god.

Afterwards, I close my eyes and drift off.

“Do you remember where we left off? We were as usual on our knees in the tomblike chill of the chapel, with its stained glass depicting past Christian atrocities. I had just breathed on your neck, Vivienne. Do you feel a warm breeze smelling of tropical flowers and the sea?”

Hiding your smile behind your hands, you whisper out of the side of your mouth. “Isn't that odd,
chère
Aurore, since we are in a drafty stone chapel in Paris in wintertime!”

“
Attends, chérie!
We must train our minds in difficult austerities”—the sisters have helpfully provided instructive pamphlets on this subject—“until we can transport ourselves at will to a distant tropical land. India, perhaps?”

“Yes!” Your eyes shine. The luminosity of your eyes is one of the seven wonders of my world. “Are we going there to baptize pagan babies?”

A fit of giggles seizes us. We have to hear about these accursed pagan babies
ad nauseam
here. The sisters consider it vital to baptize
them so that they will not spend eternity in limbo, but if you ask me, limbo doesn't sound so bad.

We wait for nighttime. Then I see your feet flying over the cold flagstones, and you slip, shivering, into my bed and pull the covers up over our heads. I feel your breath like a hot spring flowing into a cool pool. Soon we are far away. You press your ear to my chest as if to listen to my heart. I feel the goose-bumps on your arms and start to kiss them away.

“Be careful, Aurore! Sister will hear.”

“You forget that tonight we have Sister Dominique, who is stone deaf.”

“It would be helpful if she were blind as well,” you say, and we muffle our laughter with the pillow.

Our kisses become more fervent. “Have you seen any pagan babies around?” I ask, breathless from kissing.

“
Mais bien sûr
,” you say, with some pretty French gestures. “But, you know, here in India everyone goes up on the roof to sleep in the hot season. The cry of the lovesick peacocks in the courtyard drives one mad with desire.”

I am tracing the line of your cheek and jaw with my index and middle fingers, and you stretch and purr like a cat. Then you seize the front of my gown hungrily, and, trembling, unbutton the innumerable tiny cloth-covered buttons. I like the way you savor each bit of flesh uncovered. You whisper breathily in my ear, “We are supposed to tell the Hindoos about Jesus but I think they are bored to death with the subject.”

I giggle helplessly. “There is so much more to life than Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Lying on my back I draw you down to me. I tug the straps of your nightgown down off your shoulders and your breasts tumble out, round as mangoes. You kiss me firmly on the mouth. Your mouth tastes fruity from the candies you hoard and eat under the covers. “So, then,” you say, with a look of lovely
volupté
, “we let the beautiful Indian ladies with their long blue-black hair tell us about
their
gods. Much more interesting than ours,
n'est-ce pas
?”

“Yes, and so many of them, too.” I can scarcely speak for the waves of pleasure crashing through me. “They've got one for everything—a
goddess of childbirth, a god of the monsoon, even a goddess of smallpox.
Ah, comme tu es diabolique!
”

A loud snore erupts from sleeping Sister Dominque, causing us both to jump a foot. I am struck with helpless hilarity at the thought that she can't hear herself snore. When I mention this to you, you laugh so hard the tears stream down your cheeks. Now the air feels like the steam rising from a laundry tub. Well, of course—we're in India! We sneak out of bed, and, holding hands, patter out of the room in our bare feet and ascend a rude wooden ladder, trembling in our night-dresses. From the roof, the moon is huge and full and looks so close to earth that it seems to brush against the branches of the neem tree. Or do I mean the banyan tree?

A
LICE
J
AMES

11 H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE
, L
EAMINGTON

J
UNE
10, 1889

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

A life-interest in a shawl, with reversion to the male heir, is so extraordinary & ludicrous a bequest that I can hardly think it could have been very seriously meant. My desire would, naturally, be to renounce my passing claim to that also, as I can hardly conceive of myself, under any conditions, as so abject as to grasp at a life-interest in a shawl!

P.S. If the shawl were left to me outright, I should leave it to you, William, on condition that you wrap it about you while you perform that unaeasthetic duty, which will one day fall to you, of passing my skin and bones through the Custom House.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

11 H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE
, L
EAMINGTON

M
AY
24, 1889

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

Alice told me she didn't remember definitely how she had written to you, but that her letter proceeded really from a sense that she had been snubbed in her innermost, and later, on receipt of your letter, that she had been still more snubbed. Your mistake was, I take it, that you wrote to her too much as a well woman.

She cried to me about the cruelty or at least infelicity of AK's taking from her, in her miserably limited little helpless life, the luxury of devising for herself the disposal of the objects in question. She has had a bad time of it ever since Aunt Kate began seriously to fail. She only gets on so long as nothing happens.

NINE
NINE

I
AM SORRY TO SAY THAT
A
UNT
K
ATE DID NOT PASS LIGHTLY
through the mists and veils of eternity. This is what happens when your kin are in thrall to soothsayers. My brother Bob (now residing in Concord) and William's Alice were having one of their frequent “sittings” with Mrs. Piper, in Boston. (I have never wavered in my opinion of Mrs. P. I'd sooner walk naked in Piccadilly than allow that seeress to gaze upon the mysteries of my soul!) Aunt Kate was known to be gravely ill, and Alice asked after her health. “She is poorly,” Mrs. P. replied and went on to blurt, a few minutes later, “Why, Aunt Kate's here! All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate's come!'” (All this is recounted in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
, if you care to look it up.) When Alice and Bob pressed her for details, they were informed that Aunt Kate had died early that morning.

Galvanized by this message, Bob bolted from the room and flew to the office of the American Society for Psychical Research, where William happened to be. An official statement was extracted from Bob, noting the date and time. A few hours later, William, at home, received a telegram from Cousin Lilla Walsh, notifying him that Aunt Kate had died that very morning. But since Aunt Kate's illness was known to all parties, how difficult would it have been for the pythoness to guess that she'd “passed over”?

I don't think Aunt Kate can be blamed for this sorry manifestation.

For the past few weeks I've been contemplating her life, and it occurs to me that she never sensed how much we resisted her. My failing her, after Father's death, must have seemed a great and ungrateful
betrayal; my inability to explain myself, and hers to understand the situation, made it all the sadder and more ugly.

A week later, Henry is back with me again,
bon comme le pain
. I ask him if he knows what the Captain did to Aunt Kate exactly. He doesn't, but recalls Father saying that the Captain “banished smiles and tears, laughter and all human sympathies to the opposite hemisphere.” Poor Aunt Kate: her one romance ending so disastrously, her only souvenir the “Mrs.” that afterward was appended to her maiden name. Mrs. Walsh.

“It is rather a mystery, Henry. Don't you wish you could travel back in time?”

“Maybe some of it is in a letter somewhere. Though probably not.”

“Oh, Henry, didn't I
tell
you? Right after Father died, when I was so ill, Aunt Kate took the family letters from Father's chest of drawers and began tossing them into the fire. Katherine caught her red-handed and protested, ‘But those are James family papers!' Aunt Kate said it was better that ‘the children' not read them. Doesn't it
grieve
you that our past is gone, wiped clean? Surely it was not Aunt Kate's place to censor
our
family letters! What do you think she was trying to prevent our knowing? Maybe she was trying to eliminate every unflattering glimpse of herself.”

After a long, uncomfortable pause, Henry says, “Aunt Kate did the proper thing.”

Oh! Why didn't I see it before? Henry burns many of the letters he receives. I've seen him at work by the fireplace, pruning his legacy. After an awkward silence, he adds, “It was not Katherine's place—well, never mind.” With an uneasy glance at me, he falls silent.

“How can you
say
that, Henry?”

“You know what vultures the press and the public can be, Alice.”

“But Aunt Kate is of no possible interest to either.”

Clearing his throat, my brother shifts uneasily in his chair, and then the scales fall from my eyes. He is nervous about
his
public and
his
reputation and
his
posthumous life. And evidently agrees with Aunt Kate that Katherine is an interloper in our family, despite having kept me alive by sheer willpower for months at a time. But some things
cannot be spoken. Being so much at odds with William, I can hardly afford to quarrel with Henry, too; a person has only so much spleen at hand at any given time. I am glad at any rate that I have not told him of my diary. He would view it as part of
his
“remains,” not as
mes beaux restes
. Perhaps I
shall
leave instructions to have it published.

A heavy silence weighs upon us.

Over the next weeks, further postmortem effects transpire through Aunt Kate's last will and testament. To start with, she had a much larger estate than any of us suspected. After leaving $10,000 each to William and to Wilky's widow, she left the bulk of her estate to some obscure Walsh cousins in Connecticut and some Cochrane relatives in Minnesota of whom we'd scarcely heard before. She left nothing to Bob. Henry was given a choice of some heirlooms. I received a bit of family silver and a “life-interest” in a valuable shawl, which, according to the will, must revert to a male heir upon my demise.

“Why has my aunt, who was a second mother to me, treated me like a distant relation of no account?” I sob to Nurse. “I don't mind her leaving her money to those who need it more, but this shawl business is a slap in the face.” (I am pleased to say that Nurse feels very injured on my account.) A day or two later, enlightenment dawns. Aunt Kate was determined to keep the shawl from passing on to Katherine's evil shoulders after my demise. How unspeakably it pains me to think of this.

When I try to communicate my feelings to William (by letter, of course) he regards me as a mad Fury, or so I discover later. Aunt Kate's gift of the bulk of her fortune to the mysterious far-flung Cochranes instead of to our family, with whom she lived for years at a time, is a great enigma, the other being that William is the only member of our family to receive a sizable sum. With his large brood, he needs money more than I do, but poor Henry is feeling the pinch these days and I'd always thought he was our aunt's favorite. Maybe, at the end, her affections flowed to the fertile branches of the family tree instead of the fallow ones; perhaps she yearned to perpetuate herself through the generations.

Anyway, I make the mistake of writing William a long epistle in which the following passage appears:
Your ease in your position as
exceptional nephew, etc. showed an artless healthy-mindedness suggestive of primitive man
. Perhaps I did go a bit far, but I was provoked. Anyhow, it was a joke!

William's next letter blasts me to kingdom come, taking me to task for taking Aunt Kate's bequest “so hard” and pointing out, as if I were simple-minded, that other relatives are more in need of cash than I. As is William himself, evidently. His letter runs on for pages about the expense of the maintenance of two houses, property taxes, servants' salaries, Harry's school tuition, the expense of traveling abroad to replenish himself every time he breaks down. As if I were trying to steal the bread out of his children's mouths!

As I read the letter, the teacup shakes in my hand and slops tea into the saucer. I consider breaking off relations with William. When I mention this to Henry the next time he visits, he says, “I understand how you feel, Alice, but you must know our bonds can never, ever be severed.” But I wonder how William and I will manage to go on from here, and this thought pains me more than I can say. It has not escaped Nurse's notice that I fell ill shortly after William's letters darkened our threshold, and she took the unprecedented step of writing William to inform him that his letters were making me ill. Henry also wrote to him explaining that there was nothing materialistic in my feelings about the will. William eventually apologized, after a fashion, probably mostly to placate Harry.