Alice in Bed (38 page)

SIX
SIX

1891
1891

E
VENTUALLY THE DARK DAY ARRIVES WHEN
K
ATHERINE, LIKE
Persephone, must descend to the underworld again. From my point of view, I mean. She assures me it will not be so long this time; that she will be back before I have time to miss her, but, of course, she knows I miss her all the time.

In the vacuum left by her departure, I peg away again at the black future, working it off five minutes at a time. Large wet snowflakes are drifting softly though the dim winter sky, making a vivid contrast to the soot on the chimney pots. The lamplight comes on in mid-afternoon and blurry little globes of light are suspended here and there in the winter gloom. William's French madwoman who sees the world in black and white would feel quite at home here.

My daybed must be pulled right up to the fire now, and I require at least three pillows and four shawls to stay warm. The shawls and pillows are a trial, for they seldom remain in their proper place and if I reach for a book, the whole structure falls apart, and I must call Nurse in for assistance. Or, if she is out, shiver until she returns, quite helpless. Fortunately, I am deep in the memoirs of Massimo d'Azeglio, an Italian politician of the Risorgimento, who has some interesting beliefs—for instance, that the passion of love should be shunned by youth because it involves a course of perpetual lying.

On Tuesday, Miss Percy stops by, bringing devastating news. Mrs. Arnold died last week, of a fever. “I believe it was malaria.”

I feel as if I'd been knocked down by an omnibus. I can't get my breath at first. Tears spring to my eyes, and all I can do is mutter, “I thought she was getting better.”

“She got better and then she got much worse.” After a thoughtful pause, she adds, “I am not certain it
was
malaria. It may have been typhus.” This imprecision about the cause of death is maddening! It makes it so much worse when people essentially say, “Oh, she died of something. Who cares what it was?” I suppose I shall die of something vague, too.

“Was someone with her when she died?” I can't stop picturing the noble Mrs. Arnold burning up with fever, perhaps half out of her mind, and no one nearby who truly understood and cared for her. No one to hold her hand and guide her down the sacred Ganges and through the gates of paradise.

“She had a nurse several times a week. I expect the nurse was with her.”

“You don't
know
?”

“I didn't think to inquire, Miss James.” Her tone implies that inquiring would be the height of bad manners. I suppose it might be in England.

“Do you know of any living relatives to whom I can write?”

“No. I suppose I could try to find out if you like,” she says, clearly disinclined to bother. Mrs. Arnold, dead, is of no further interest to Miss Percy. She is longing to talk about living people she knows or about her dogs. I wonder if it would pay to have a long line of ancestry and come out at the end of centuries like Miss Percy.

It makes me wonder, not for the first time, how
I
became this dreary thing—a woman in bed? It seemed to happen gradually at first and then reached a point of no return.

Since my scaffolding began to fall, I have been living like a mouse behind a skirting board, knowing nothing of the world beyond a few dark tunnels and whatever crumbs happen to drop nearby. But something has shifted recently. It is hard to describe. My thoughts drift through my brain like clouds. I watch them come and go; I seem to be the vast, empty sky in which they happen.

For a month or so I read compulsively to anesthetize the pain of loss—the double loss, of Mrs. Arnold and Katherine. To distract myself, I tunnel through Renan's
Saint Paul
, followed by Halévy's
Notes and Souvenirs
, before returning to William's article on Janet. This time a particular passage arrests me:

The secondary self enriches itself at the expense of the primary one, which loses functions as the second gains them. An hysteric woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it all together. The abandoned part, meanwhile, may solidify into a subconscious or secondary self.

The word
abandon s
eems to stir something deep inside, and I have a sense of being beckoned by something true and important. I write in my diary:

William uses an excellent expression when he says in his paper on the “Hidden Self” that the nervous victim ‘abandons' certain portions of his consciousness, altho' I have never unfortunately been able to abandon my consciousness and get five minutes' rest. I have passed thro' an infinite succession of conscious abandonments and in looking back now I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I wasn't conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent bursts of hysteria.

Hysteria was what they called it, anyhow, and I won't deny that there were days when I would sit reading, with waves of violent inclination urging me to throw myself out of the window or knock off the head of the benignant pater as he sat writing at his desk. It seemed to me that the only difference between me and the floridly insane was that, in addition to the suffering of insanity, I had the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me as well. In the wars between my body and my mind, I learned to “abandon” the former—my stomach, my legs, my arms—but never for an instant my consciousness. What if I
had
?

My mind sinks and sinks, like a surgical patient counting backwards while going under ether. I see again the low, brooding skies when I used to wander over the cliffs of Newport, my young soul struggling out of its swaddling clothes. I am back to the summer when everything changed, when my life was split into before and after.

Oh, but here is Nurse with a cup of tea and buttered toast. I thank her and tell her that I am very busy thinking and don't wish to be disturbed for a couple of hours. She seems to find this acceptable, if mysterious. I take a bite of toast and stare out my window at two shiny crows perched on my window ledge, their black beady eyes full of alien intelligence. An insane urge strikes me to run out into the street calling for help. As if I could run!

Every summer at Newport, we run in a pack with our Temple cousins, “discovering” secret places, points, promontories, sandy coves, secret inlets, lily ponds, spouting rocks, apple groves, wind-sculpted trees resembling buzzards or witches in profile, chasms carved by the sea. Like explorers, we claim our discoveries and name them. One fine day in July, I am with brothers William and Bob, and Elly and Kitty Temple in our sailboat, the
Alice
. Bob is at the helm. We are hugging the coastline, with its low bluffs and small inlets. William takes over at some point and Bob minds the mainsail and I the jib. For a while everything is perfect. The rhythmic
chip chip chip
of the wavelets against the hull, the silvery foam of our wake, the sun's toasty warmth on my skin, the raucous cries of gulls, the taste of salt on my lips. I remember thinking,
I am perfectly happy right now
.

The wind stiffens; I feel the tug of the jib sheet in my hands. Elly pleads to “steer the boat,” and while Bob observes churlishly that women are bad luck on ships, William cedes the tiller to her. We are headed in the direction of the rocky shoreline. William reminds Elly that she must come about soon. “I know, I know!” she says. A few minutes later, without warning, she panics. She shouts, “Ready about!” and pushes the tiller sharply toward the sail. Wrong! After “ready about” she should have waited a decent interval so we could release the sails and
then
said “Hard-a-lee!” and only then pushed the tiller to make us come about. Now we are in a mariner's worst pickle: the sails close-halt
on the wrong side, and strong gusts knock us over sideways. The leeward rail dips dangerously and water starts to pour in. Now, much too late, Elly screams, “Hard-a-lee! Hard-a-lee!” William leaps over me, grabs the tiller from her, and tries to point the bow into the wind. Bob releases the mainsail and I the jib sheet, and the sails flap wildly. We barely avert capsizing.

I wait for Elly to apologize or act contrite, but she doesn't.

We are searching for something on the shoreline. Five black rocks that point toward a cleft in the granite cliff. About five minutes later, there it is. Elly breaks into gales of laughter. “It looks—it looks like—” She can't talk for laughing.

“What?” Then Kitty sees it. “Elly, you shameless hussy. You mean like a vagina!”

William is gazing dreamily at the cleft in the cliff. We hear the dull roar of the tide rushing in.

“Well, I'm only saying what we're all thinking.”

The others—Wilky James (Harry was absent that day) and Will, Minny, Henrietta, and Bob Temple—wave to us from the small drift-wood-covered beach. As we approach, I make out a picnic hamper, a checked tablecloth, a few towels, and flashes of sunlight reflected off several metal flasks, which no doubt contain whiskey. Drifting toward shore in a din of luffing sails and clicking halyards, we pull up the centerboard, lower the sails, and roughly furl the mainsail. That is, William and I do. Bob nimbly leaps out with the painter and pulls us in. Elly and Kitty do nothing but chatter like magpies.

Ignoring evidence of corks, bottles, handkerchiefs, and other artifacts of civilization, we have on a previous occasion declared ourselves the discoverers of this place. The Abyss, we call it. Above us the cliff rises steeply, covered with brambles, wind-bent pines and cypresses, and narrow deer trails. Down one of these paths the rest of our gang has come, bearing our picnic lunch.

Our clothes are damp from our near-drowning. Elly peels off her outer garments and Henrietta follows suit, although she didn't go sailing. I keep my damp clothes on, shivering in the sun. After eating our sandwiches, we race around collecting shells and sea glass and
wading in the surf. Between the sun-dazzled sea and the whiskey in the flasks, a wildness begins to crackle in the air. I feel it breaking out in goose-bumps on my skin. Henrietta leaps from boulder to boulder stripped down to her drawers and bodice, the wind whipping her hair like a mare's tail.

After lunch we follow the deer-trail up the hill and gather at the lip of the Abyss (which I think would more accurately be called a chasm), watching the rising tide pour in four to six feet below.

“Let's take off our clothes and jump in!” Kitty says. Elly's eyes widen. “Yes, we'll be mermaids.” Will Temple, Wilky, and Bob laugh; I see their teeth. (Two years later the three of them will march off to war; Will Temple will be killed, Wilky gravely wounded, Bob will survive unharmed but will suffer night terrors for the rest of his life.)

“Are mer
men
invited? Do such beings exist?” William asks.

“They
must
exist,” says Minny, perched on a flat rock, dreamily pulling off her stockings. “Otherwise the mer-people would die out.”

The boys peel off shoes and socks, unbutton trousers; the Temple girls giggle in a froth of petticoats, laying out their clothes on the boulders, with smaller rocks to hold them down. William is staring at the girls, transfixed. Blue eyes flecked with green. I stand with my bare toes on the lip of the chasm, staring down at the roiling green water with its flailing banners of yellow foam. The others start jumping in; their splashes and voices echo off the rock walls. There is a moment when I might have jumped, but I pause too long. I think too much; I already know this is one of my problems.

I step backwards, away from the chasm, sealing my fate.

I shade my eyes with my hand and gaze out at the sea. Black and white ducks bob for fish. They look like clockwork toys. Far away to the left is a wide curve of pale sand roughly the color of naked human flesh.

I must record what happens next, but I shrink from the task. Do I dare disturb the past?

Bob Temple comes up silently behind me, like an assassin, his hand at the nape of my neck. Didn't know he was there. My whole body flinches. “Why don't you take off that dress, Cousin Alice! It looks damp and you're not allowed to just stand around watching.” He
laughs pleasantly.

“Oh.” As the eldest, Bob Temple imposes the rules. He is a grown man, twenty-one years old, with black hair on his knuckles and chest. My stomach flutters and I feel queasy.

“Do you know what our sisters and brothers are doing down there, Alice?”

“Playing. I suppose.”

His attention throws me into confusion. Wanting it and dreading it, paralyzed and confused, I stare down at my feet, which seem miles away suddenly.

“Don't
you
ever play, Alice?” His voice is soft, almost caressing.

“Yes.” My face grows hot.

“Well? Why aren't you down there with them?”

“Don't want to ruin my clothes.” Feeling stupid and tongue-tied, I fix my eyes on a patch of emerald moss on a grey boulder. I don't look at Bob, but I
feel
him staring at me hard. The small hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I can't think why such a worldly and (to me) terrifying young man would have any interest in me.

“Have you heard of ‘kissing cousins'? You and I are kissing cousins, Alice.”

I can't think what to say to this. Wilting under the burden of my mousiness, my awkwardness, my inability to banter brightly like my cousins, I nudge a pebble with my toe and squint at the horizon with its faint band of citrine. We stand at the edge of America: low bluffs, promontories, islands, and ocean as far as the eye can see. On the other side: Europe. Harry always says that Newport is “midway between America and Europe, culturally” and thus a fitting location for the James family.

I must have drifted off, because the next thing I am aware of is being perched on a boulder, with Bob Temple sitting cross-legged about ten feet away, his back against another boulder, smoking, watching. I feel his eyes burning into me. Then I see that he is naked. I didn't observe him undressing; it is as if his nakedness occurred by magic while my mind was away.