Alice in Bed (41 page)

They have strange ways here of shutting all the windows and doors as soon as a person dies. Nurse says that the corpses turn black if exposed to the air. I wonder if that is true.

A word about my brother Henry. With everything I have put him through, he has never remotely hinted that he expected me to be well at any given moment. He and I have decided not to tell William (knowing his keen sympathy for suffering) until the end, which I hope will not be too long in coming.

Of course, it is impossible to hide the facts from William. I write to tell him, and he writes me a very tender letter, addressed to
My dear little sister
, in which he never pretends that I won't die and shows that he understands my feelings. It is all very deep, beautiful, and William-esque. How could I have thought of hiding my diagnosis from him?

The idea of my post-mortem existence thrills me, wrapped as it is in the eternal mystery. I write to William,

It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, and death is as simple in one's own person as any fact of nature, as the fall of a leaf or the blooming of a rose & I have a delicious consciousness, ever present, of wide spaces close at hand & whisperings of release in the air.

How queer to look ahead on the calendar and know the world will go on without you. Somehow the mind can't grasp its own extinction!

Facts keep disappearing, streaking across the night sky of my mind like meteors and extinguishing themselves. The other day I spent most of the morning trying to recall if the man in
The Ambassadors
was called Strether Lambert or Lambert Strether. They seemed equally plausible. “It is as if someone inside knows that this information will be of little use soon,” I tell Katherine.

Last night I dreamt I was dead, and Henry, having found my diary, had given it to Charlemagne to “edit.” I find him, looking very cross, going through it with a blue pencil, crossing things out until only a few of my words remain. Looking over his shoulder I make out the notes he scribbles in the margins:
Unsuitable! Distasteful! Inaesthetic!

“Inaesthetic? Is that even a word?”

“It is now.
I
make the rules.”

Covered with shame, I plead with him to give me back my journal,
promising to burn it immediately in the fireplace. He shakes his head. “Do not think I refuse because you are an execrable writer, though, of course, you are. I do it because you were my rival.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think I didn't see what was happening under my nose? Under my
table
? It is imperative that Sara's name and several others be expunged from this ghastly document.”

Death feels very close at hand. It hovers around me like a great lover, my mind prostrate before it.

I tease the Nursling to explain to me by what hocus-pocus my soul is to enter Paradise, as she ardently if inarticulately assumes it will. I think it is all covered for her by that word “American.” When she tends my couch of pain, I ask her to remove her cross, claiming it bumps against my nose, but really because it offends my philosophy. But she is the best little creature in the world, and has fitted herself with exemplary patience to all my acute angles.

A new volume of Anatole France is out, which never will be read by me. A small joke I made about a cuckoo and some clocks, Kath tells me, is in Dr. Holmes's
One Hundred Days in Europe
. So I have left some mark on the world after all.

Sara Darwin comes to call, more wan than ever. I almost feel I ought to offer her my bed to lie in. Although obviously very downcast about my prospects, she makes an effort to be cheerful. We discuss Lizzy Boott, who died mysteriously while carrying her unborn babe. “Nobody says what she died of,” I say. “What have you heard?”

“Everyone's lips are sealed. But from something Nanny said I got the impression it was suicide. Nanny won't say—if she knows. But
why
would Lizzy kill herself at such a happy time?”

“Maybe it
wasn't
a happy time. The husband is a very difficult, moody person, they say. An artist. Not unlike Francis Boott.”

“Oh, Arthur says women
always
marry their fathers!”

Still quoting Arthur. Well, don't I quote my brothers?

“Whatever the cause—and we'll probably never know—the thread of Lizzy's life was certainly cut abruptly.”

***

My dying seems to be taking its time. I'd hoped it would go more quickly. One day H. brings to my bedside his friend Dr. William Wilberforce Baldwin, an American physician who lives in Florence. Dr. Baldwin palpates the lima bean, which has grown larger, harder, and more painful of late. Says it is definitely a carcinoma and foretells my death. Such a kind man, kind eyes, kind diagnosis, the kindest of all.

(It is amusing how K reduces doctors to impotent paralysis. Andrew Clarke faded visibly in her presence, but Dr. Baldwin has fared well so far. We continue to like him very much.)

I wonder if I shall have to forgive all those who have wronged me.

Aunt Kate at Niagara saying, “Don't look down, Alice, you'll get vertigo.” So overcome by this phenomenon of nature that I longed to wrap myself in the silver foam and jump. One of my most beautiful experiences. After Mother's death Aunt Kate tried to mother me. After Father died, wanted us to set up a household together, two old maids, but I could not. “She is heartbroken,” Harry said, “that you close your door to her.”

Do not skimp on the morphia
, William writes. Meant for times like these. But it means clouds in the brain and a mouth as dry as the Sahara. And my thoughts turning into a dream every minute.

Thought I would die on the voyage over, carried off the ship like a plank by three stout sailor lads. Sun glimpsed through the fog like a pat of butter melting.

Childhood rushes at me now like a rising tide, nursery joys and miseries passing in waves. The women go into the bathing machines and come out wet and laughing. Our maids in Paris hanging Mother's and Aunt Kate's nightdresses on the clothesline in the inner court. Drip, drip on the flagstones.
Monsieur has two wives like a Mohammedan.
So many things stripped away, as the great millstone grinds my bones. Worldly things shrivel and fall away, and then there is this faint hum, a delicious thrumming. Doors are flung open, great vistas coming into view.

NINE
NINE

1892

T
HE ROOM IN WHICH
I
WILL DIE HAS A PRESSED-TIN CEILING,
which I have ample time to study whilst lying on my back. The frieze of pineapples turns out on closer scrutiny to be a frieze of palm fronds, and the tiny angels in the four corners of one tile only look (for a day or two) like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As my dying progresses, the tiles begin changing from day to day, from silver to slate blue to pistachio green to gunmetal grey to old gold to Pompeiian red. Never know what I'll see. My aunt's profile cleverly concealed among some shrubbery, my cousin Minny Temple romping through a field of tasseled corn, a finger of God pointing to a cluster of grapes with a bee orbiting it.

Katherine says the “bee” is a flyspeck and I would do well to ignore it.

William comes from over the sea, sits by my bedside, visibly shaken by my decrepitude. Such delicious company. When you are soon to die, you see other people in their wholeness. You could sit and watch them all day like your favorite exhibits in a museum.

We discuss Henry's play, which is chiefly what I think about these days.
The American
has been performed in the provinces and now moves inexorably toward London. The best actors are French, H. says, but for
mise-en-scène
the English are second to none.

I told Nurse that when Henry's play comes to London, she ought to go and have a seat in the stalls. She said, “I think, Miss, I would
rather go in the gallery, and I could get some of the maids to go with me, and I would be sure not to tell them before that it was written by Mr. James, and then if it did not succeed it wouldn't be any matter.”

Hearing this, William roars with laughter.

“William, when I ‘pass over,' please promise you won't unleash your Mrs. Piper on my defenseless soul.”

Laying his hand over his heart, he says, “The name Alice James shall never pass my lips in her presence. But I'm afraid I can't control Bob.”

“No one can control Bob!”

We laugh together as the afternoon stretches out, endless as a summer in early childhood. The curtains billow, and I breathe in the sweet smells of grass and earth. We are in a state in which everything strikes us as funny and we can't stop laughing. And this is the last time we will see each other in life!

William is describing his “experiments” with nitrous oxide gas, “the most mystical of drugs,” according to him. Alice stays up with him all night, writing down everything he says in case there is anything important.

“What drugs have you
not
taken, William?”

“Didn't you ever want to take something stimulating, Alice, so you felt yourself just going off and grasping for a second the unity of the universe?”

“Funny you should say that. That seems to be happening fairly often of late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, well, I go off all on my own. I don't need drugs.”

“You may be interested to know, Alice, that your friend Dr. Weir Mitchell”—he grins mischievously, knowing how I have loathed this man since meeting him years ago at the Fieldses—“sent me peyote recently, promising me I would be in ‘fairyland.' I took some while I was in New Hampshire. I retched for hours and felt no other effect.”

“William! You ought to know better than to take
that man's
medicine. And that horrid Rest Cure. It does no one any good; it's perfectly obvious.”

Probably not, he concedes.

“Poor little Winnie Howells. You must admit it's shocking, William. And these doctors so sure of themselves! By the way, the other day I was remembering Weir Mitchell's gruesome story in the
Atlantic Monthly
—about a soldier who lost all four of his limbs. It gave me nightmares.”

“Ah, yes, the Human Stump. It made a deep impression on me as well.”

“Wouldn't the man have bled to death, though?”

“Well, I suppose Weir Mitchell must know, being a neurologist.”

A fly zigzags insanely around the room. William picks up a newspaper to whack it and I say, “No, William, let it be.”

“If you want a fly buzzing around the room—”

“To that fly you and I are as gods, and today I shall be a merciful deity. How long do flies live, anyway? A day or two?”

He doesn't know. I thought he would.

“You know,” I say, “I always pictured the Human Stump rolling along end over end like a ball, didn't you?” He nods, and we both break up laughing again.

“How is Charlemagne these days, William? I hear that he gets the bequest of Lowell's manuscripts and so on. He is his—what do you call it?”

“Literary executor. The way Charles gets his name stuck to every greatness is fabulous, isn't it? Dante, Goethe, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fitzgerald, Chauncey Wright, and now Lowell.”

“Someone, I forget who, told Katherine that Charles goes around boasting that he has burned some of the sweetest love letters ever written, to make sure that ‘no eye but mine should ever see them.' Can you imagine?”

We sit companionably in silence for a while. Well, William sits; I remain supine. The state of dying opens up all sorts of beautiful silences no one feels compelled to fill. A day could be an eternity; before long, a minute may last forever.

“Your essay ‘The Hidden Self' interested me very much, William. I was quite taken with Marie, the woman with a fever, delirium, and chills—all hysterical, I gather. It was a buried memory of something, wasn't it?”

“Yes, Janet found that she had immersed herself in a cold bath years before, trying to bring on a miscarriage.”

“Do you think everyone has one? A hidden self?”

“Definitely.”

“I am flooded these days with old memories and new illuminations. It is like a river rushing through me. I believe your doctor Janet would find me of interest.”

“I daresay he would.”

“I wish I could describe it properly, William. It is as though parts of myself have been living as captives in the basement while I tried to live on the upper floors of the house. From time to time I'd hear groans or a rattling of chains down there and I'd do my best to ignore it and think of something pleasant. Remember Mother saying, when we went to the dentist, ‘Just think of something pleasant, dear'?”

“If only it were so easy.”

“But it's curious, William. I am no longer afraid of the captives in the cellar.”

To live one's whole life in a cruel world wherein the heart's desire is never attained, and then to discover it was there all along! I want to tell William about this, but I can't find the words.

He has been trying to describe the “moving pictures” he saw recently, taken of the Paris Exposition, blurry people waving from a blurry moving walkway.

“I still don't see how a picture can move, though.”

He explains that it is projected on a screen like a magic lantern show.

“Oh! Like the rats jumping into the man's mouth,” I say, referring to the magic lantern shows we took in as children in London, where itinerant performers dazzled us with the wonders of science. “If life gets any more modern, what will become of us? Oh, William, you will live into the twentieth century!”

Sorrow flickers across his face. For a minute he looks as if he might cry. Dear William. Persists in believing I should have had a salon, a fuller life, even a whole country at my feet. If he only knew, the paralytic on his couch has a wider experience than Stanley slaughtering savages. But maybe you have to be a terrible invalid to know this.

“I wonder if women will ever get the vote,” I muse. It has become a matter of mere curiosity to me.

This inspires William to tell me about his students at the Annex, whom he seems to prefer on the whole to the young men, but then he would, being such a flirt. “It took me months to talk Eliot into letting Mary Calkins into my graduate seminary, held in
my house
. She is a professor at Wellesley College, a brilliant psychologist. He refused at first. I had to badger him for months. We men need to be put in our place, and the women will do it, I hope. It's about time.”

“Well, Katherine goes on storming the barricades in her polite but stubborn way.”

“I hope she succeeds.”

“Think of it, William! In the past year and a half, Henry has published
The Tragic Muse
, brought out
The American
, and written another play,
Mrs Vibert
. Combined with your massive
Psychology,
not a bad show for the family! Especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all!”

William goes back to America. Bidding each other good-bye, we pretend we'll see each other again, because how do you say good-bye forever? The strange thing is that now he is always with me. So is everyone I have ever known.

I try sitting up at table. Lean my head against the table, shut my eyes, feel the hum of the gas. I hear the stitches made by Katherine at her sewing. I swear I can even hear a spider spinning its web. Makes a web out of its body, then goes and lives in it. Just like Henry with his fiction—making a world and living back into it.

I cannot go back now to what I dreamt I was.

It appears that I was born a few years too soon. When the morphia I was taking for pain caused insomnia and nervous distress, K and H stumbled upon an article on hypnotism in
The Fortnightly Review
by a Dr. Tuckey. They somehow prevailed on the man to come here to instruct Katherine in his dark arts. To my surprise, the mild radiance of Dr. Tuckey's moonbeam personality has penetrated with a little
hope the black mists that enveloped us. Knew at a glance how susceptible my nerves were and said, “It is dangerous to put her to sleep all the way.” Did not say what would happen.

Katherine performs the hypnotism skillfully. It does little for the pain, by which I mean the ceaseless grinding of my bones, the vise tightening around my skull, the blinding spasms in various mysterious internal organs. But, as I wrote to William, what I do experience is a calming of my nerves and a quiescent passive state, and I fall asleep now without the sensations of terror that have accompanied that process for so many years. The first time I was hypnotized I floated into the deep sea of divine cessation, and saw all the dear old mysteries and miracles vanish into vapor.

A miracle! The snakes stilled at last. The inner watchdog worn out with its ceaseless vigil. As a child I absorbed from Mother and Aunt Kate that it was the job of women to worry. Is the laundress consumptive? Will the boys put someone's eye out with a stick? Is there dust on top of the armoire? Is Alice taking her nap? Is the air too damp? Are the children learning profanities? Will everyone's clothes be ready for the season? Is Father becoming fatigued?

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
.