The Binding Chair (16 page)

A hundred times the train derailed, and Alice plunged after the locomotive, down and oddly through her aunt’s underclothes, through bandages and blood, down through cold water, so cold. A smooth glide to the bottom of the lake, where fish with eyes like dinner plates swam up to the glass windows of the coaches. Litovsky held out his arms, and he and Alice danced in the dining car, around and around the piano stacked with dirty dishes, and the solemn staring fish stared and stared, and he bent her back over the lid of the closed piano, among the greasy plates, and kissed her deeply.

May had come to see her. Alice was sure that she had. It couldn’t have been a dream, because here was the proof: a tin of biscuits tied with a pink ribbon. Alice was imprisoned in a dreary London hospital, but May had come and May would rescue her. If she could bite just one biscuit, it would work like a spell: her aunt would appear by her side. But the nurse wouldn’t allow it.

“Nothing. Not a thing but beef tea.” And, no, she wouldn’t take the biscuits and let Alice have the tin, because “What do you want with it? Just a picture of a dog. Now don’t make a fuss, a big girl like you. Aren’t you ashamed?”

…   

“Y
OU MUST NOT
be frightened of marriage, girls,” lisped Miss Clusburtson.
Girlth
.

On Thursdays, Miss Clusburtson taught laws of health instead of maths, a supplementary course whose text was a book of drawings that made a body look like the cutaway of a passenger ship. A Deck. B Deck. C Deck. Steerage.
Lower abdomen
, pronounced by Miss Clusburtson as
ab-doe-man
, was the means of referring to the locus of any indelicate function. She handed out pamphlets for the girls to keep. Folded inside was a picture of an upside down woman, either that or a tree. It was both: the woman’s ashamed face was hidden under the grass, her trunk diverged into two thick limbs topped by leafy feet. Between them, in the tree’s crotch, was a nest of curly hair, and inside the nest an indistinct, vulval egg. Alice hid the pamphlet in her underclothes drawer. The picture had a distressing power, the way it buried the woman’s head and left her private parts in the light.

“One of the teachers keeps telling us not to be afraid of marriage,” Alice said to May.

“Does she really?”

“Yes. But I think she means
consummation.
” Alice whispered the word.

“Do you?” May said. She put her hand on Alice’s hot head. Her voice was like water trickling. Alice touched her smooth silk knee.

“She took us on a trip to the cast courts.” Halls filled with plaster casts of renowned statuary. There the
lower abdomens
of naked males were dressed in paper underclothes. “And some of the girls were terribly mean to her,” Alice wept. What was it about a fever that made a person cry all the time?

“Oh, Lord,” Claire had said. “Save us. It is deadly deadly beastly beastly deadly bloody dull in here. And there’s no air. I’ll die if we don’t leave.”

“Watch your pen, Claire. You’re getting ink on my jumper,” Alice had said.

“Bloody bloody beastly bloody dull!”

“Girls! Please!”
Pleathe!

“There’s dirty bas-reliefs in India,” Claire said. “My father’s seen them. It’s disgraceful pictures of people lighting the lamp, all of them at once, men’s things out of their trousers and the women with their knickers off.” The class was dispersed around the cast of Trajan’s Column: Roman soldiers marching wearily up and around in stripes, as on a barber’s pole.

“What’s lighting a lamp have to do with it?” Alice asked.

“What are you, the village idiot? It means
doing it
. Hindus think that if you get expert at copulation it’s religious. That’s why me and my sisters were sent home.” A missionary’s daughter, Claire was full of contempt for Christ and an astonishing authority on all things immoral. She wasn’t supposed to be friends with unrepentant Jews. “But I don’t care,” she said.

“What do you mean, unrepentant?” Alice wanted to know.

“It means it doesn’t matter to you whether or not you go to hell.”

“But,” Alice protested, “it does.”

The girls walked double file, each holding a partner’s hand, through plaster reproductions so faithful as to make the actual redundant, to ruin the real places later. Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry of the Florence cathedral. A pulpit from Pisa, and a set of stairs ascending to nothing.

For whole long minutes they stood before the Pórtico de la Gloria from Santiago de Compostela, to which men in nightshirts were glued by their backs, all of them gripping musical instruments. None of their eyes were open, their faces were tipped heavenwards in sightless ecstasy. It looked like a music class for the blind or the backward. Below them, Christ held up his hands in a gesture of shock and dismay, just the way Mr. Samuel did when he heard Alice’s faltering attacks on Ma Robey’s old piano. Other men displaying scrolls and open books wore a look of malicious delight, as if anticipating all the poor marks on next week’s history examination.

“This floor,” said Miss Clusburtson suddenly. “I want you to look at this mosaic floor, girls.
Opus feminae
. Work of women. It was made by women inmates from the Woking prison.”

“Thith mothaic oputh wath mathe by inmathe,” Claire said, not so low that the teacher couldn’t hear.

“
Don’t,
” whispered Alice. “She can’t help it.”

Above them, Michelangelo’s
David
towered, his groin obscured by brown paper, like something from the butcher shop. Claire thrust her chin forward in a manner that presaged aggression. “Mi
th
Clu
th
ber
th
on,” she said.

“Yes, Claire.”
Yeth
.

“Why if you’re always telling us not to be frightened of marriage aren’t you married?”

Miss Clusburtson looked at Claire for a long moment before managing to speak. “You’re speaking of my private life, Claire. It’s not—”

“It’s because of that, isn’t it?” Claire jerked her head toward David’s modestly wrapped genitalia. “You don’t want relationth with men. Ith you whoth frightened.”

Eleanor Clusburtson went pale and then flushed a deep red.

“You might,” Claire said with a worldly, superior tilt of her head, “be an invert. A lizzie.” The fourteen girls standing hand in hand around the statue began to laugh, most of them out of nerves more than amusement. Still, having begun they couldn’t stop. They clung to one another, gasping.

Enflamed by the hysteria, Claire climbed onto the pedestal and pulled the paper from David’s loins. “Well,” she said, touching the uncircumcised tip of his plaster penis, “I thought it would be a bit more—well, just a bit more.”

In the midst of what Miss Robeson called the most disgraceful chaos with which Robeson Academy had ever had the misfortune to be associated, Miss Clusburtson stood silent, unmoving, her hands at her sides.

Alice broke away from the group and grabbed Miss Clusburtson’s frozen arm. “Please,” she said. “I need you to take me to the W.C.” She pulled, but it was as if Miss Clusburtson were cemented into the very mosaic she’d pointed out. “It’s an emergency!” Alice pulled harder, and Miss Clusburtson came free and allowed herself to be dragged away from the rest of the class, still reeling under Claire on the pedestal.

Alice towed Miss Clusburtson around a cast of the Virgin drawing back from Gabriel in fastidious alarm, as if the angel had made a lewd suggestion, and tore past lesser saints and personages, all white white white, as if with shock, and none paler than Eleanor Clusburtson. Inside the washroom, Alice bolted the door and Miss Clusburtson fell against the sink, her hands covering her eyes, tears leaking out from below.

“Wash your face.” Alice turned on the faucet. “Use cold water. Then we’ll go back and you’ll tell Claire she’s to be expelled.” But Miss Clusburtson didn’t move, she went on weeping silently.

“Now,” said Alice. “I hope you’re not crying for Claire. She won’t give a fig. She’s been thrown out of dozens of schools.” Alice tried to pry the thin hands from her teacher’s eyes but gave up. “All right,” she said, after a few more minutes. “You stay here. I’ll check on the rest of them.”

But when Alice returned to the statue of David she found him quite alone, his paper pants rumpled but restored. The hall was empty except for an ancient-looking scholar standing before Trajan’s Column and making notes on a bit of parcel paper. “Pardon me, please,” Alice said. “Have you seen a lot of girls?”

“Girls?” the man asked. “What sort?”

“Schoolgirls. About my size.” The man shook his head.

“W
ELL, THEY’VE GONE
,” she reported to Miss Clusburtson, news that at last inspired the woman to remove her hands from her face.

“
Gone?
What can—What do you mean,
gone?
”

“I mean they aren’t there, not one of them. They’ve … They must have left.”

“Oh. Oh no no no.” Miss Clusburtson swayed as she moaned. “No no no. She’ll have me out on my ear. I’ve lost them, thirteen boarders. I’ll go to prison.”

“You’ll make mosaics,” Alice tried to joke. “Much nicer than school-teaching.”

But Miss Clusburtson only shook her head. “What shall I do? Whatever shall I do?” she said over and over, wringing her hands and pacing and giving every sign of impending hysterics.

“Please don’t,” Alice begged. “It won’t help a bit, crying won’t. What we need to do is think. Tell you what, we’ll have tea in that shop at the corner, the one we went past on the way.” Miss Clusburtson stopped pacing and stared at Alice as if she were speaking another language. “It’s all right,” Alice said. “I’ll pay. I always bring a bit of money, just in case. Something my aunt taught me.” She patted the teacher’s cold hand. “That and separate bank accounts. When you’re married, I mean.” Alice hooked her arm through Miss Clusburtson’s, noting the sharpness of the elbow hidden by the gray sleeve. “We’ll have a big tea,” she said. “Food helps a person think.”

But at the tearoom, Miss Clusburtson wilted over the steaming cups. “Now we’ve run away. We’ve run away. Away from the scene.” Her scone grew cold; she didn’t touch her tea.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve had an accident,” Alice said.

“We have?”

“Definitely. We’ve …” Alice took the spoon from the jam jar and put it in her mouth, licked it clean, and replaced it. “I know.” She leaned forward over the table, exhaling sweet fumes. “We’ll tell Miss Robeson that I began to menstruate. Just today. For the first time. In the cast court.”

Miss Clusburtson opened her eyes wide. “Did you?” she asked, looking newly terrified.

“No! That’s what we’re going to say. We’ll tell her I was frightened and that I needed your help. The girls will back us up. They heard me say
emergency
, they saw us going to the water closet.”

Miss Clusburtson shook her head. “She’ll find out. She’ll know we’re lying.”

“How?”

“She’ll ask for proof, and we haven’t any.”

Alice folded her arms belligerently. “She’ll demand bloody drawers? I’d like to see her try.”

“You don’t know Miss Robeson.”

“We’ll tell her I threw them away and came home without.”

“Then she’ll absolutely know we’re lying.”

“No! Listen! This is—I’m telling you, I mightn’t be good at maths but I’m brilliantly clever at this sort of thing!”

Miss Clusburtson opened her mouth but nothing came out, so Alice had to accept astonishment in lieu of congratulation.

T
HE
C
URE FOR
L
ISPING

M
OST OF
E
LEANOR
C
LUSBURTSON’S STUDENTS
called her Miss Cluthburthon, not to be mean, but after her own example, and Eleanor never tried to correct anyone’s pronunciation. How could she when her lisp was so pronounced, her mouth so uncooperative that she couldn’t enunciate even the name her mother and father gave her?

She did have a brilliant, an exceptionally brilliant, mind, but wasn’t this also a liability? Everyone knows intelligence is no guarantee of success, and why suffer more than a normally acute awareness of injustice? In 1887, when Eleanor was twenty years old, she was accepted to Oxford University, the only woman admitted to the study of higher mathematics. Her school examination results were so remarkable that, in the opinion of the dons, they excused Eleanor from her gender. The occasion was not one of celebration.

“How can I go!” she cried, and she threw herself into her father’s arms and just as quickly pulled out of them. “As soon as they hear me speak, they’ll think me stupid!”

She wept, she tore up the letter of acceptance; she slammed the door to her bedroom and locked it when he tried to follow.

Isaac Clusburtson, widower and second violinist for the Philharmonic Society, sat at his desk in the drawing room of their small house on Cheyne Road. He held his head in his hands; he drank gin with bitters; he spoke solemnly to the tintype of his deceased wife, petitioning her advice for their daughter; and then composed a letter to Dr. Andrew Scott, whose notice he had seen in the December 8, 1885, issue of
Harper’s Weekly
. Eleanor’s father subscribed to a number of American publications, among them
Appleton’s Journal, Popular Science Monthly
, and
Christian Union
. A man who considered America a land of reason, hygiene, and promise, Isaac Clusburtson often cut out advertisements that illustrated these virtues and saved them in the cabinet where he kept the gin.

Dr. Andrew Scott cured abnormalities of speech.
Don’t allow a lisp or stutter to obstruct the course of fortune! Of profession! Of love!
read the message below a drawing of a beaming groom and shyly smiling bride. An address was printed at the bottom of the notice: 848 Broadway, New York City.

Isaac Clusburtson’s penmanship was precise and anguished and sloped downwards on the page. It was his habit to include a narrow line underneath his signature. In writing the letter to Dr. Scott he added this emphasis with such force that twice he tore the page with his nib and had to begin again.

Within a month, Eleanor’s matriculation had been postponed, a consultation with Dr. Scott of New York arranged, passage by steamship booked. Eleanor would travel with her father’s older sister, the aunt who had often stepped in as surrogate mother and chaperone.

Delayed once, twice, and a third time by winter storms, the ship, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s iron-hulled
Great Britain
, arrived in New York harbor on 19 March 1889, Eleanor’s twenty-second birthday. The crossing had made both women ill, and as soon as they disembarked and collected their luggage, they hired a cab to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, on Madison Square, thankful that Isaac had secured their accommodations in advance. At the hotel, they went immediately to bed.

The next day was the first of spring; outside their window a tree burst with early blossoms, its roots branching under a cab stand and fed by piles of horse dung. Dr. Scott, a handsome man of forty-odd years, received them in his well-appointed office. He served them tea; he fondled his fobs and his waistcoat buttons; he handed Eleanor a card on which fifty words were printed.

“Read them aloud,” he said. “If you please.”

And she began: Adept. Ancillary. Bastion. Bakery. Celebrated. Candelabra.
She lisped through the entire alphabet.

“Ah,” said Dr. Scott, pouring tea. He listened with his left ear cocked toward the young woman. “You see,” he said, “so many speech problems are caused by teeth. Cured by their removal and replacement.”

Eleanor looked at him. Unconsciously, she ran her tongue over the smooth surface of her incisors. Apart from a tendency to squint, she was a pretty enough young woman, her hair a dull blond, her features regular, if a bit small.

“My partner, Dr. Albert Boylan, is an expert in the science of dentistry.” He stood and withdrew a card from the drawer in his desk. It was thick, creamy, the words it bore engraved. Under the name
Dr. Albert Boylan
was an address, 846 Broadway, New York.

“Yes, just one door down.” Dr. Scott smiled. “He’ll see you tomorrow, at two in the afternoon.”

Eleanor and her aunt thanked him. They left his office and walked along Broadway through Ladies’ Mile, where they purchased gloves and hats from a milliner by the name of Miss Marcy. They didn’t speak of the consultation. They bought two black umbrellas with carved bone handles and a memorably good supper of spring lamb served with apple jelly, roast potatoes, and peas.

Eleanor’s aunt spooned up the tiny green orbs. “Where do they get them so early?” she asked, and she ordered an extra portion from the obsequious waiter.

Back in the hotel, both women slept well. The next morning, neither could remember her dreams.

…   

D
R
. B
OYLAN’S OFFICES
were filled with the most modern American equipment. He pointed out the cast-metal chair with a reclining back that he could raise and lower by means of an ivory-handled crank, its red plush neck support, the red-and-turquoise pillow that padded the footrest. Eleanor looked at the silk fringes on the pillow. She ignored all the rest: the Whitcomb fountain spittoon that dispensed drinking water through the beak of a tiny brass swan perched over the basin, the foot-treadle drill, the complex arrangement of mirrors that reflected lamplight into the mouth of anyone lying in the chair. None of these impressed her. Eleanor looked at the fringes and told herself that nothing very terrible could happen to a person whose feet were resting on a red-and-turquoise silk cushion.

“Your lisp,” Dr. Boylan said, “is caused by your front teeth. To cure it, we extract them. We teach you to speak without front teeth.” He pressed his hands together, as if about to lead the women in prayer. “Then, when your new speech has been established—it ought not to take more than two months—we replace them with these.” He opened a cabinet filled with little drawers, one of which held, on a blue velvet pad, two shining white porcelain teeth with gold posts.

Dr. Boylan pulled the drawer all the way out and offered it to Eleanor as if it were a gift. The teeth looked like jewels, like studs or cufflinks or earrings. When Eleanor hesitated to take the drawer, the dentist selected one of the false teeth and placed it in her palm.

“It’s beautiful,” she said softly.
Ith beautiful
.

“Yes,” he agreed. From another, larger, drawer, contents jumbled, no velvet pad, he produced a handful of quite different teeth. “These are the natural ones I’ve replaced. Not so beautiful.”

“No,” she said, her voice a little faint. She and her aunt nodded silently over his album of testimonial letters from satisfied clients, many accompanied by smiling tintypes.

Eleanor looked up. “How much will it hurt?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear.” Dr. Boylan’s voice was unctuous, a melting pat of butter. “Not at all.” He showed the women his ether inhaler, a glass globe with wadded cotton inside, a mouthpiece designed to hold the lips in a cold kiss. “We have both ether and a newer anesthesia, nitrous oxide. My colleague, Dr. Thomas Evans of Philadelphia—you’ve heard of him?”

Eleanor shook her head.

“No?” he said. “I
am
surprised. He’s Napoleon’s dentist. Charles, I mean. Charles Napoleon. Not the one who was exiled. Dr. Evans has emigrated to Paris and treats most of the royal families on the continent. It was he who pioneered the use of nitrous oxide, which has all the advantages of ether, but not so many of the disadvantages. No nausea. No headaches.”

Dr. Boylan showed Eleanor a small pedal compressor attached to a rubber hose and mask. With his foot he pumped the pedal, put the mask over his nose and inhaled. When he spoke, his voice came out high, not so much like a woman’s as like that of a music-hall actor impersonating a woman. “Affects the vocal cords,” he explained. “Only temporarily,” he added, noting Eleanor’s look of alarm. He released a weird trill of laughter. “Wears off quickly!” He shook his head. “No longer use chloroform. Too dangerous. Colleague of mine. Most unfortunate. Had a young man succumb.” Apparently, the gas had the effect of reducing a person’s speech to fragments.

“Succumb?” Eleanor asked.
Thuckum?

“Succumb?” her aunt echoed.

“Entirely.” Dr. Boylan giggled.

Eleanor nodded. She squinted as though she’d gotten dust in her eyes.

“How do you make sure the new teeth stay in?” her aunt asked.

“Vulcanite plate. Very comfortable. Holds the posts.” Dr. Boylan reached out and put his hand on Eleanor’s chin. “Open, please,” he said, and she did as she was told.

“Four teeth at most!” he proclaimed. “Maybe only two.”

“Do you draw them all at once?” Eleanor managed to ask.

“No. By no means. One. Then another. Prevent shock.”

E
LEANOR AND HER
aunt left Dr. Boylan’s office and walked slowly to their hotel on Madison Square. En route they spoke little. Eleanor bought a copy of the
Evening Telegram;
they ordered dinner in their rooms. Over a meal of roast duck she read at table, a bad habit, but her aunt had pushed aside her plate and was writing letters. The front page included an inauspicious article about a jeweler who, having strangled two prostitutes, his housekeeper and her cat, now awaited his own end by means of an extermination device invented by a dentist. The dentist had tested it on horses and sheep. It was called an electric chair, but the horses hadn’t sat in the chair, of course. The dentist put electrodes in their mouths and anuses.

Eleanor turned quickly to a feature on page three. An ornithologist had penetrated the aerie of an eagle and discovered its nest to be twenty-five feet in diameter. “Why,” she said, standing and pacing the distance diagonally across the room, one corner to its opposite. “Why, that’s almost as large as this room.”

“Imagine,” said her aunt.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Dr. Boylan extracted Eleanor’s right incisor while she lay in the clammy embrace of ether. Worried that nitrous oxide’s tendency to trim a person’s sentences might predict a similar abridgment of one’s thoughts—or worse, one’s capacity for thinking—she had refused the newer drug.

During the procedure Eleanor had a vision of herself plucked from the fancy dental chair by an eagle larger than she. Before the bird took her away, he measured her from head to foot with a gold tape he kept under his wing, and then he grasped her neck with his talons so that one curved claw penetrated her ear. She held the pretty cushion as the eagle carried her off, flying over wild and unfamiliar landscapes. As her legs swung beneath her, she saw rivers in the dodging space between her feet.

High above creation, Eleanor discovered the aerie’s sticks were woven together in mysterious and unexpected patterns, like lace. In her new home she wore an apron and a nightcap with a tassel. Now a devoted bird wife, she cut up the rabbits and lambs the eagle carried home. Together Eleanor and the great bird of prey sat on the silk cushion in the round nest of black sticks and ate meat dripping with blood. Then they slept together, she under his black wing.

Suddenly, Eleanor was miserably awake, still holding the cushion. Dr. Boylan was shaking his head. “Most astonishing. Never happened before. I hadn’t even begun when you picked it right up from under your feet.” He shook his finger, as if at a naughty child, and gently withdrew the cushion from Eleanor’s hands, plumped it briskly and replaced it on the footrest.

B
EFORE
E
LEANOR REACHED
the hotel, pain struck her abruptly in the face like a blow from a cudgel. She collapsed against her aunt in the cab and had to be carried from the street into the lobby, too faint to hold herself upright.

Taken to her room on the second floor, Eleanor lay on a couch, the hole in her mouth plugged with gauze: Laudanum did nothing. The torment she endured was so intense that it effected a revolution in her perception, such that all that had been true, real, and present before the extraction was now rendered false, unreal—banished by the black talons that now held her face tight. The one true thing in the world was pain.

Her aunt paced among the chairs and moaned with fear, while inside Eleanor’s mouth the drop of arsenic routinely used by dentists to prevent infection seeped from the cotton gauze into the empty socket of her lost tooth. It reached upwards, into what Dr. Boylan could have identified as the
myrtiform fossa
of the
superior maxillary
. As it traveled, it killed bacteria, and bone cells as well. The death of the germs caused no discomfort to Eleanor. The death of part of her jaw inspired a baroque series of hallucinations in which the great black-feathered bird, once her affectionate husband, became enraged and slowly tore her face to bits.

Eleanor lay on the couch, panting slightly. Her aunt paced, paced, paced. Through the clerk downstairs she sent messages to Drs. Scott and Boylan, who replied that they made no calls; they saw patients in their offices only.

Eleanor’s first sentence, a week later, was “I won’t go back.” Her second, that same day, “Pay them, and go to a booking agent to arrange our passage home.”

The word
passage
revealed that the lisp, at least, was intact.
Pathage
.

Under the care of her aunt, Eleanor Clusburtson returned to England and, after a year’s delay, to university, to a life of kind, elegant numbers, companions who required no conversation. If her fellow students thought of her at all it was not as stupid but as mute. Silently she attended lectures; mouth shut, she submitted her pages of proofs. She kept her head bent over equations; she kept house for her father.