Alice in Bed (8 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” I made a mental note to steer clear of references to my mental cramps around Sara.

It was a mild July evening and, still in our clothes, we were lying on the lawn under the stars, holding one of our rambling conversations about everything. Whether we believed in God (Sara didn't; she'd given up on Him when her parents died), whether it would be worse to be blind or deaf (“Don't forget crippled,” I said), what our deepest fears were. I told her about a girl at school I'd disliked so much I could think of nothing else; every day I felt my thoughts
sharpening like daggers inside me. Later this girl went down in a shipwreck off the shores of Nova Scotia and I was aghast at my witchy powers. Since then I'd tried to police my mind and not think ill of anyone, but people who advised you to do this had no idea how difficult it was.

“Arthur says that you should never
try
to be good. You either are or you aren't. Or you are as good as you can be, given who you are.”

“That's rather facile.” It was irksome to have Arthur Sedgwick cited as an authority. In my view, Sara's brother was conceited, fancying himself too urbane for Boston, and never made the slightest effort to be cordial to me. In contrast, my brothers adored Sara—as did my parents, for that matter. It was rather amusing to hear them singing the praises of the corrupter of their only daughter.

Sara jumped to her feet. “What we need, Alice, is some absinthe!”

So we drifted inside and Sara headed for her secret cupboard.

“Wait, Sara! First you must ponder this gem from
Godey's Lady's Book
.”

I dug the article out of my reticule and handed it to her. She read it aloud in a didactic old lady voice, the way we imagined the
Godey's
editresses would speak:

Quarrels are bad things and no one within his senses—his moral senses we should say—would advocate them, save under such provocation of insult as should be chastised if self-respect is to be maintained.

“Ha, young Alice James!” she laughed. “This is
possibly
the most
fatuous
sentence ever penned by Woman or Man. Perhaps its significance can be discerned only under the influence of
la fée verte.
If you catch my drift.”

She gave me a wink, then poured the emerald liquid into two Bohemian glasses, and we drank it in the flickering candlelight. She lit a joss stick (part of her new séance equipment) and whipped out her pack of tarot cards (which she kept wrapped in a special cloth of some talismanic significance) and laid the cards out in the “Celtic Cross pattern.” She was wearing her seeress expression.

After some mystic discourse about pentacles and cups, the major arcana, the wheel of fortune, a hanged man and a hermit, and whatnot, she pointed to the magician card at the center of the spread, a man with an infinity symbol waving over his head and a wand in his hand, and said, “The card can indicate an interest in a scientific career or someone who is already in such a career.”

“William! Does it say if this person is in Germany?”

Wrinkling her brow, she read from her book, “This card can indicate a career in which speech or writing is of great importance, a salesman, a speaker, a storyteller. . . .”

“Ah, Harry! And Father, of course. We've covered almost everyone in the family.”

“Have you considered that it might be about
you
, Alice?” From her serious expression I saw that she wasn't joking.

“I'm no magician, Sara.” The absinthe was making me giggle. “Maybe it's you.”

Sensing my mood, and possibly losing interest in the tarot herself, Sara moved swiftly through the rest of the cards, telling me: “You will make a voyage overseas and this card indicates an older man who will appear in your life.”

“Will he be on the ship? How much older
is
this man?”

“The cards aren't that specific.”

“I don't think I fancy
old
men, Sara.”

“Relax, Alice! I just said ‘older.' You are always trying to control life and that just keeps life from happening.”

Was that true? Was that why I was always waiting for my life to begin?

Sara made it plain that she considered herself a gifted spiritist, a talent she attributed to having nearly drowned in the ocean at the age of three. “I was sorry they brought me back. It was so beautiful being dead.”

“Did your life flash before your eyes?”

“Yes, but it was a very
short
life.”

For some reason, this caused me to collapse in gales of laughter.

“I'm serious, Alice.”

“I
know
.”

I couldn't stop laughing, and this made Sara laugh, and then we were giggling and kissing and undressing each other, tugging on laces, undoing stays, peeling off stockings. When we'd flung the last of our clothing onto the floor, and Sara was stretching out her arms to me and I was feeling the tidal pull of her, rapid footsteps were suddenly pounding down the stairs, which terminated just beyond Sara's door. Sara quickly blew out the candle and I slipped like a sylph between the sheets, and we went absolutely still, holding our breath, our pounding hearts pressed together, like expert jewel thieves synchronized in the commission of our crime.

The footsteps were moving away now. “It's only Theodora,” Sara whispered, sliding a hand to one of my breasts. “I recognize her tread. Don't worry. Her self-absorption makes her oblivious to others.”

Then, with a sly smile, she kneeled over me, kissing me tenderly on the lips several times. Then she straddled me, with a knee planted on either side, and dreamily worked her way down my body, forbidding me to touch her at all (“You are my captive and I've tied you up”). After flicking her tongue in my ear, and demonstrating the concupiscence of the navel and the erotic zones of the feet, she applied herself to gratifying me in a new and intense manner. Tears streamed down my face from the pleasure of it; I had to hold a pillow over my mouth for a long time. How had Sara learned these things—from an exotic Oriental love manual? (The Sedgwicks seemed to have no end of obscure foreign books.) Would I ever get to the bottom of Sara's mysteries, pin her down finally? Did I wish to? Were the pleasures of the flesh just something for which she had a natural bent, like the tarot or the dreaming technique she'd told me about last week?

That conversation took place while we were blackberry picking in the Norton woods, acquiring dozens of tiny scratches on our violet fingertips. While picking a thorn out of her thumb, Sara confided two things, swearing me to secrecy.

“You know me, Sara. Silent as the tomb.”

“Well, the first thing is that Susan”—Sara's sister, Mrs. Charles Norton—“is far more than Charles's muse, as you may have heard him nauseatingly refer to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she
writes
many of his articles, the ones published in the
Nation
and the
North American Review
and the
Atlantic Monthly
. She was always a talented writer, but no one outside the family knows this. How it works is that Don Carlos pens some pretentious drivel and Susan rewrites it. ‘Edits' it, as they say. Whenever you read something good under his name, you can assume it's mostly Susan.”

“Incredible.”

“
Many
books by Bostonians were written by the authors' sisters or wives, you know. They say Francis Parkman's sister Lizzy wrote most of his tome on the French and Indian Wars while he was hysterically blind and couldn't read or write a thing. She had to translate a heap of French-Canadian documents. Took years. That's what I heard, anyhow.”

“Are you saying that Susan must do Charles's intellectual work on top of bearing and raising his children, running the household, and catering to his over-refined nerves?”

“Exactly. She's a model wife, even declining to state her own opinions at dinner, in case you haven't noticed. When he was wooing her, she kept saying how brilliant and original his mind was. Now she finds his opinions insufferable, I believe. The other day she said, ‘Charles's views, I'm afraid, are as immutable as Fanueil Hall.' And then she sighed in a tired way. My heart aches for her. She looks so ancient after five children, Alice! How can a person of eighteen have any idea what marriage will require? And then it's too late.” Sara seemed on the verge of tears.

“Will she leave him, do you think?”

“With five children? No, she's caught! If they divorced, he'd get the children; that's how it works. Not that he actually
enjoys
his offspring but they are pleasant accessories to his greatness. Besides, Susan, like the rest of us Sedgwicks, is without a sou. She'd have to put arsenic in his soup to get away, but I am not sure that she is even aware of how unhappy she is. So it will just go on and on.”

“Maybe it's just as well she doesn't realize she's unhappy.”

“Maybe.” She sighed again.

“So let's hear your second secret.”

Whereupon Sara divulged that while I was in New York she had mastered a technique known to “Tibetan occultists” for becoming awake in one's dreams. Arthur had bought a queer book on the subject in a bookstall near the Seine, which she had lately been studying and putting into practice.

“I don't understand. It seems to me that either you are awake or asleep.”

“No, Alice, you can be dreaming and aware of it. If you catch yourself dreaming, you can control what happens in the dream.” Judging by her flushed face, the subject exhilarated her.

“Like what?”

“Oh, anything. You can ride an elephant or fly through the air. Nothing irrevocable can happen to you in a dream. You can't die, for example.”

“Have you ever flown?”

“Yes. If you believe you can fly in a dream, you just do. You float up and glide. The feeling is exquisite, more beautiful than anything.” I watched a dreamy look steal over her face, which I wished
I
had put there. Now I was becoming jealous of Sara's dreams; what follies love gave rise to!

Then I made the fatal error of telling Sara that just as I was falling asleep, I often suffered waves of ice-cold panic and a roiling sensation in my stomach. “It feels like snakes writhing and this is accompanied by an overwhelming fear—a fear of being
alive
. I can't really describe it.”

When I glanced at Sara, I caught the scowl that flickered over her features.

“Maybe you ought to take a digestive tablet or something.”

Clearly my night terrors and other problems were complications Sara preferred to ignore. I almost asked her if dream-flying was more beautiful than what we did in the dark, but you could not ask her such questions. In her aspect of
belle dame sans merci
, Sara made the rules and you had best follow them or she would pull away.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

D
RESDEN,
S
EPT.
18 '67

T
O THE
J
AMES
F
AMILY

I only wish I had that pampered Alice here to see these little runts of peasant women stumping about with their immense burdens on their backs.

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

Looking back on what I have done in the way of study this winter it seems one of the emptiest years of my life . . . I am sorry to hear you are feeling delicate. I would give anything if I could help you, my dearest Alice, but you will probably soon grow out of it. How do the Cambridge girls get on?

THREE
THREE

N
OTHING MUCH CHANGED AT
20 Q
UINCY
S
TREET, MEANWHILE.
Mother rushed around doing a thousand useful things. Harry read or daydreamed and then disappeared for hours on mysterious errands, which, unlike me, he was never expected to account for. Father, after taking the horse-cars to the post office in Boston and back every day, shut himself up in his study to write about Divine Nature. I had always taken it for granted that Father's Ideas were very “advanced.” Hadn't Mother been telling us this since our infancy?

At breakfast one morning I was perusing the
Nation
and came across a letter to the editor by Henry James. It was evidently Father's response to a letter from a reader in a previous issue criticizing an essay by Father that had run in a still earlier issue. I scanned it while gnawing on my toast with rhubarb jam.

I conceive that you and I, and every other man, are directly or immediately created by God, and not indirectly or mediately through the race. I contend that God creates me not mediately through other men, but immediately by himself; that he, and he alone, gives me being at this moment. If I could confine myself to reacting along with all the world, in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, no man's speech, I venture to say, would seem more frank than mine. But when I append a harmless benignant coda to my special performance in that concerto, importing that the “Heavens and the Earth” therein mentioned are not primarily the physical phenomena so designated, but the “Heavens” exclusively of the universal mind, I grow unintelligible. Why?

Why indeed? No matter how many times I read it, I could make no sense of this letter. Although no one felt moved to buy Father's self-published books, many people did flock to hear him lecture, their expressions cycling from delight to intense puzzlement. Father's Ideas were
so advanced
, Mother always told us, that most people could not grasp them, and that was why he often looked dispirited when he came home from lecturing. This did not discourage him, however, from continuing to lecture and to write about the Cosmos in the
Nation
and the
Atlantic Monthly
, whose editors were his friends. I wondered now if Father was spending his life pursuing a mirage only he could see.

One night Father gave a talk entitled “Society: the Redeemed Form of Man” to a small but devoted group at the Fields' house on Charles Street. Mr. Fields was editor of the
Atlantic Monthly an
d his wife, Annie, ran the closest thing to a salon that Boston had to offer. Sara came with us, and afterwards we went home to Sara's house and whispered in the dark, loosely intertwined. Holding one of my hands in hers, Sara was caressing the flap of skin between my thumb and index finger, and it seemed to me at that moment that there had never been a sweeter gesture. How safe I felt with Sara—but only after darkness fell.

After saying all there was to say about Father's lecture, which puzzled me as much as it puzzled Sara, we went on to discuss our families and their peculiarities, and how we had been affected by these. Tearfully Sara said that she could scarcely remember her parents now. “I have a sort of fog in my head that blurs their faces. I know I loved them . . . maybe the loss did something dreadful to my brain.”

“Amnesia?”

“I don't know. Something.” She fell silent. After a minute or two, she said, “By the way, most of your father's talk flew right over my head. What's a Vastation again?”

“Oh, it was a thing that happened to him in England, when William and Harry were infants, before I was born. Father was sitting in front of the fire one day, happily digesting his midday meal when, completely out of the blue, he was struck by an ‘insane and abject terror,' as he put it.”

“Why?”

“No reason; that was the point. He went on to describe
some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life
.” I made quotes in the air with my fingers.

Sara laughed delightedly and pulled me closer. “Ye gods! The way your Father talks!”

Yes, Father could talk, commanding a startling rhetoric full of exuberant and highly original invectives. People recalled his words years later and copied them into their memoirs. There was the time when, speaking at an Astor library event, he proclaimed, “These men do not live, and if books turn men into this parrot existence, I hope the Astor library will meet the same fate as the Alexandrian.” And the time when, somewhere else, he observed, “I never felt proud of my country for what many seem to consider its prime distinction, namely her ability to foster the rapid accumulation of wealth.”

And was there a Bostonian who did not know by heart his legendary jousts with Bronson Alcott?

Father: You are an egg half hatched. The shells are yet sticking about your head.

Mr. Alcott: Mr. James, you are damaged goods and will come up damaged goods in eternity.

I reminded Sara of this last dialogue now, and she brought my hand up to her face and softly nuzzled it. “You have a bit of the James gift of gab yourself, Alice. To be candid, I find it . . . stimulating.”

This was a rare admission by Sara, who smelled of lily of the valley, absinthe, and tooth powder tonight and whose skin felt silky and electric at the same time. Her lips curved into a naughty smile. She was tender and droll as she kissed and sucked on each of my fingers in turn. It did not matter whether we used the word
love
; we were ruled by forces more potent and subtle than anything belonging to the daytime world.

I shifted my weight so that my thigh came to rest between Sara's legs, and she shifted to accommodate me. We were sensitively attuned to each other in this way. If only the rest of life could unfold so easily.

“To tell you the rest of the
fascinating
story, Sara—”

“What story is that again?”

“The story of Father's Vastation.”

“Oh yes! I am very interested. I've never met anyone who had one before.”

“So it's 1844 and Father is desperately broken down—on the verge of suicide for more than two years, according to him. In this sorry state, he betakes himself to the Malvern Spa in England, where he meets an English lady invalid to whom he confesses his troubles. She tells him that his travails sound like what Swedenborg called a Vastation. A dark night of the soul sort of thing.”

Tenderly smoothing my hair and kissing my face and neck (tomorrow she would delete this from her mind, of course), Sara murmured, “Mmmm. Sounds like a
breakdown
to me. And I should know.”

“Are you referring to your aunt who puts rocks in her dog's dish to make it eat more slowly?”

“Oh, there are
dozens
of mad Sedgwicks.”

A shiver passed through me. Why had I never considered the possibility that Father had suffered a nervous breakdown? Only now did it occur to me that whenever Father told this story, as he did frequently, a pained look crossed Mother's features. There was another side to this story, and Mother and Aunt Kate had locked it up inside them so no one else would ever know.

But Sara's hands were fluttering over my body, and her lips were having their way with my breasts, and Father's philosophies flew right out of my mind.

I'm sorry to say that after five months in Cambridge, it was becoming apparent that Dr. Taylor's cure was
not
holding. I was successful at disguising this at first, but toward the end of August, the collapse of my scaffolding became evident to the household. The difficulty lay, I suppose, in my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women.

It started just after I'd spent the weekend with Fanny Morse in Brookline. We'd been sitting at her dressing table brushing out our hair and braiding it for the night and discussing the Cambridge Bee that was forming under the leadership of Susy Dixwell.

Fanny said, “What a pity Sara will miss the first meetings but, of course, she can join when she gets back.”

“Back from where?” I expected Fanny to say “Bar Harbor” or “New York.”

“Why, Europe, of course.”

That was the way I learned that Sara was to join the Nortons on their upcoming Grand Tour. For weeks, Grace Norton had suffered from a verbal tic that compelled her to cite Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the pre-Raphaelites at random moments. (Leave it to the Nortons to be on intimate terms with all of them!) Sara and I had been laughing about the Norton connections last week and Sara said nothing about her plans to travel with them. Now I learned that she'd been mentally packing her steamer trunks all this time, happy to toss me aside for a chance at the pre-Raphaelites.

Was I being unfair? Had I lost all proportion? I hardly knew.

Sara had so many ways of disavowing what we were to each other. When I told her about
La Fille aux Yeux d'Or
by Balzac, describing a love affair between two women, I thought she'd be intrigued. But her face snapped shut and she said she wasn't interested. How could a man know what a woman feels anyhow? she asked peevishly. Her private fiction seemed to be that whatever transpired between us in the dark was a momentary accident that kept recurring despite her best efforts.

When I confronted her about going abroad with the Nortons, she insisted she'd told me about it and was so adamant on this point that I half believed her. Not ten minutes later, she contradicted herself. “You can understand why I didn't want to tell you, Alice. You have such a tendency to over-react, to take things so deadly
seriously
.”

“What ‘things,' Sara? Us, you mean?”

This, like everything else I said that day, irritated her. “What do you mean
us
? There is no ‘us.' In a few years, Alice, we will marry and we'll be occupied with housekeeping and children and what have you.”

Really? Was that the future? We were at breakfast, and the muffin I'd been eating was stuck to my palate, dry as sawdust. I saw starkly at that moment that our relations were always conducted on Sara's terms. Endearments such as “darling” or “dearest” were permitted, if at all,
only in the night-world, but as soon as we had clothes on we had to snap back into our public characters. If I accidentally smiled too yearningly at Sara at breakfast or addressed her in fond tones, I'd pay for it with a week's shunning. It was clear now, if not before, that I would never be happy as Sara's lover.

And since grand tours lasted for a year at the minimum, I would have to consider Sara dead and go through all the mourning associated with that. Because I was already losing her forever, or so it seemed to me, I dared for once to press her on the great taboo, the question of Sara and Alice.

“How can you say ‘There is no us,' Sara, after our nights together? If you found it so trivial, you have hidden it well. But maybe you are just a liar. Perhaps everything is only a game to you.”

A vein throbbed at her temple, and her voice trembled. Fixing her gaze on the milk pitcher, she explained that “what we do at night” was a momentary experience of the eternal, which afterwards scattered like mercury. You should never discuss it—
discuss
meant tedious and ponderous in Sara-world—because that made it dead. “The eternal is like water; it flows through your fingers, you cannot hold onto it.”

I didn't know about the eternal, where it flowed. All I knew was that, whatever intimacies took place between us, Sara could be counted on to ignore me the next day. Most people (Fanny Morse, for instance) would probably live and die in the Boston virtues, never dreaming there were embraces that could make you weak in the knees. I sincerely wished I were one of the unawakened ones now. Sara was leaving me for a year, as if it were nothing. It was a bitter truth: the one who loves less (or not at all) has all the power, and this is why love is so painful.

After going through the motions of bidding good-bye to Sara's aunts, I set off down Kirkland Street, arriving at 20 Quincy Street a quarter hour later. I waved to old Mrs. Lowell, dead-heading the day lilies in her perennial bed, and went inside and waited for the tears to flow. Instead, I was dry-eyed, feeling nothing at all.

Perhaps this was the answer. Train yourself to be a Spartan mother to your emotions. If you
do
have feelings, for heaven's sake keep them to yourself. My spirits brightened at the prospect of becoming
a different sort of person—healthy-minded, unemotional, detached. Whenever Sara came to mind, I dismissed her like an appointment that must be cancelled. I made a list of her annoying traits and consulted it whenever I felt stabs of longing.

It wasn't just Sara, either.
Everyone
disappointed me. Harry, who went around feeling superior to Cambridge, which he considered quite good enough for me—a mere girl, belonging to the domestic sphere. And William! Complaining in his letters from Dresden about not hearing from me and begging me to write. As if I could write in the state I was in! I still hadn't forgiven him for deserting me without even bothering to say good-bye.

His first letters from Germany were read aloud by Father on the verandah with the oil lamp hissing in the perfumed dark. They were passed around to family friends and read at gatherings, where everyone roared with laughter at William's depictions of the residents of his Dresden lodging house. The landlady who kept exclaiming
wunderschön
about everything. The “Hamburg spinster” who queried William about a
people we had with us called ‘Yankees' about whom she had heard such strange stories and who seemed to be, if reports were true, of all the people in the world the very worst.

His letters always made us laugh. I savored a sweet one to me in which he portrayed himself as a lovesick troubadour pursued by lovely women but remaining true to one woman, whose name he muttered under his breath—
the peerless child of Quincy Street, i.e. Thou
. Fanny Morse's brow furrowed at this and she asked me later, “Why does your brother write you love letters?”