The Madwoman Upstairs (11 page)

If the painting had had any other name, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. But the word
governess
brought up an image of a formerly pretty young woman clad in a black frock, staring down at the floor and contemplating which would kill her first: boredom, destitution, or insanity. Being a governess was one of the evils that my father had once outlined in his famous poem, “Being a Governess and Other Evils.” He used to tell me that no matter how desperate I became in life (was this a likely scenario in his mind?), I should never become one. Once, when our mustached neighbor in Boston called to ask whether I might like to babysit his squealing, cherry-faced child, Dad threw a strange species of fit. He called the job the last legal form of slavery. I tried to explain to him that governesses hadn’t existed for a hundred years, but he waved me aside and walked to his shelf. He pulled out
Emma
and read Jane Austen’s description of governess Jane Fairfax: “With the fortitude of a devoted novitiate, [Jane] had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.”

“Ergo,” my father had said.

Nineteenth-century governesses all looked exactly the same: pale, bitter, and vaguely suicidal, just like the woman in the painting that now rested on my wall. Equal to their employers in nature but not in station, they were stuck in an uncomfortable, friendless limbo. A state of drowning, so to speak. Theirs was a contemptible life, nourished by resentment from the staff, indifference on the part of the family, and the hilariously little sum of twenty to forty pounds a year. A governess represented an entire generation of educated, respectable women whose fathers had simply run out of cash. I suppose it struck too close to home for dear old Dad.

And yet, if my father had wanted to steer me away from the life of a governess, it appeared that he had failed. Here I was—lonely, clad in black, and living in my own little corner of Old College, where I spent my days pacing back and forth in my tower. I was pale and thin and unmarried. Orville was the master; I was his dependent. I was not quite a child and not quite an adult, not quite his friend yet not altogether a stranger. Either I was taking to English literature well, and had begun to find impossible parallels between unrelated things, or else my life was, in fact, becoming alarmingly Victorian.

To no one’s surprise, governesses ended up comprising a large portion of lunatic asylum residents. Certainly Henry James had known this when he wrote
The Turn of the Screw
; certainly Charlotte Brontë knew this when she wrote
Jane Eyre
. There was a very thin line between a governess and madness, so much so that the thing being “governed” often became madness itself. The majority of governesses were left to die alone, go insane, or else write books about the happy ending they never had. Or, in the case of my relatives, all three. All the Brontë women had been governesses at some point, thanks to a lack of money or of a husband or of a brother who could hold down a job. Aside from painting, the only other ways an unmarried woman could earn a decent wage were by writing, acting, or prostitution (and sometimes the first and second were seen as synonymous with the third). Poor Anne had it the worst. In 1840, after two years with one family, she went straight off to a manor called Thorp Green, where she was governess to the Robinson children for the next five years. It was the most transformative period of her life, one that changed poor little Annie in more ways than she could possibly imagine.

There was nothing else to be done. I pulled my blue bedsheet off my bed. After giving it one giant shake, I draped it over
The Governess
. There it hung, edge grazing the floor, like a veil on a corpse bride.

CHAPTER 6

O
n Saturday morning, I awoke to a knock on my door. It was Marvin, my shark-toothed friend, who had introduced me to this decrepit home on my first day. To my surprise, there was an entire frat party’s worth of tourists behind him.

I said, “Hello.”

The crowd was thick and I found dozens of eyes staring at me like I was the reincarnated version of Bloody Mary.

Marvin smiled. “It’s time for the tour.”

He sounded perky. I had forgotten about the tour that visited my tower every weekend. Normally, I woke up early and left long before any tourists arrived, but this morning, it had slipped my mind. I hadn’t cleaned today, and all of my dirty socks were still on the floor in what looked like a sacrificial half circle. There was an empty hummus tub on the desk, and my clothes from yesterday were piled on the back of the chair. The Governess still had a sheet over her terrible face.

I turned back to Marvin. “The tour is earlier than usual? Or did I just wake up late?”

“You woke up late.”

I nodded. “It’s hard, you see, not having windows.”

Marvin came inside, and the pile of visitors followed him like a great spurt of toothpaste. Protectively, I crossed my arms. My feet were bare and exposed. The woman standing closest to me was several inches taller than I was, with a fanny pack that said:
I Heart Dromedaries
. I made a point of not making eye contact with anyone, since most people in the room, I noticed, had cameras.

“Welcome to the tower,” I heard Marvin saying. He enjoyed his job—I could tell. In his voice was the self-satisfied smugness of someone who, at long last, felt powerful. “This tower, as I mentioned earlier, has been the home of many famous inhabitants of Old College. It became something of a tradition for each one to leave something behind for posterity.”

I maneuvered through the crowd, head down, picking up stray pieces of underwear. I ducked inside my wardrobe to change clothes. It was dark and splintery inside and barely large enough for me to lift my arms. I wiggled into a turtleneck and jeans, crashing against the side of the wardrobe more than once.

“Turn this way, please,” I could hear Marvin saying, “and you can see the exact location where Sir Michael Morehouse’s cat was buried alive in the wall. Do you see the discoloration of the brick, right about here?”

When I finished changing, I opened the wardrobe door and stepped outside. Immediately, there was a disorienting flash of light. I blinked—once, twice. Someone had taken a picture of me. An emergency response went off in my body. I looked to my right to find a squat, purple-shirted teenager holding a disposable camera to his face. I panicked. Quickly, I made my way to the opposite end of the room, eyes on the floor. The crowd was thick, and I stepped on more than one shoe. I needed to get out of there. I would not appear on the cover of another newspaper, thank you very much.

Marvin was speaking quickly and with more energy than before. “And over here—do you see? No, this way—is where a former student engraved his initials. If you look closer—”

There, I found my purse. I slipped on my shoes and slid toward the front door. I was shaking. With one last breath, I closed my tower door behind me and I fled down five flights of steps.

Once outside, I took a moment to collect myself. It was reasonably warm, to my surprise. I took a short walk around campus, trying to find comfort in my old, long-lost friend, the sun. I had only made it halfway around the path when I found myself near the Plodge, the small cabin near the entry gates, which was currently puffing smoke out of its chimney. This, I knew, was where Marvin worked. And if I remembered correctly, it was also where my Swedish model friend worked. I walked past the porter on duty (she gave me a small nod of recognition) and I found Hans sitting in the room off the right, heels kicked up on the table. He was blindingly blond.

When he saw me, his face cracked into a smile and he moved to an upright position.

“Well,” he said. “This is unexpected.”

I said, “ ‘If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.’ ”

“What?”

“Heraclitus.”

There was a painful silence, in which it occurred to me that I might never have a normal life.

“What I mean is, Heraclitus said that,” I corrected.

“Ah.”

“Sorry.”

Then he smiled again. He had the distinctive look of a European tennis pro—an electric white athletic shirt, a slightly hooked nose, long spindly legs. His shirt seemed to trap the muscles in between his ribs. I fidgeted. I didn’t date much, and I felt like a tourist in someone else’s sexual fantasy.

I said, “I’m surprised you remember me.”

He laughed. He must have thought I was joking, but when I remained silent, he said: “You’re the Brontë.”

“Do you mind if I stay awhile?”

He motioned to the seat across from him. He was smiling, but I noticed a degree of cautiousness in his face, as though I were a nervous seal.

He said, “We could also go out.”

“Out where?”

“Out into the world,” he said. “You’ve heard of it, yes?”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I’ll close up early.”

“You can do that?”

He grinned. “Are you impressed?”

He packed up his things. I watched him pull on a suede coat and he led me outside, into the warm sunlight. I didn’t realize how desperate I was for a fun afternoon. Already, I was thinking about how I would remember it, years later.

He asked, “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been to Europe in a while.”

“All right, sure.”

We exited the Old College gates and began walking down High Street, which reeked of diesel and cigarettes. There were double-decker buses on the streets, filled with dour, flat-featured people and a few dogs that, pressed up against the windows, looked subaquatic. It was pleasant walking with Hans—like driving a shiny Maserati. I can’t remember what we talked about. All I registered was that he tended to explain things one too many times and that with his accent, the way he pronounced “Google” sounded like he might kill someone.

“Well?” he said, finally.

“Well what?”

I looked up. We had stopped walking, and were standing right in front of the Oxford Theatre. Some of the letters had fallen off, and now it read O
XFORD EATRE
. I realized why Hans had stopped—the poster in front of us advertised the newest adaptation of
Jane Eyre
, which was set to hit theaters this weekend. Charlotte Brontë’s beloved novel. I vaguely recalled that someone from the press—was it the
Daily Mail
? the
Paris Examiner
?—had e-mailed several times last week asking for the “Brontë take on the film; were you offended by all the sex?” I hadn’t responded. A new adaptation of
Jane Eyre
came out every year, and every year, it was exactly the same.
An unknown actress would play Jane, and she was usually prettier than she should have been. A very handsome, very brooding, very “ooh-la-la” man would play Mr. Rochester, and Judi Dench would play everyone else.

I made a noncommittal grunting noise and nudged Hans in the bicep to keep him moving. He didn’t budge. He had stumbled across the family tombstone of his companion, and felt obligated to pay respects.

“Who’s that supposed to be?” he asked. He pointed to the corner of the poster, at the blackened shadow of a woman right next to the last
e
in
Eyre
. The only visible part of her was her two red, wet eyes, and the outline of a gloomy face. She was looking straight at me. We faced off like two chess masters who were meeting again after years apart. I was silent for a long time. The madwoman.

“Can we keep moving?” I asked.

Hans looked at me curiously and kept walking. Then, quite suddenly, he veered down a small avenue.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I have an idea. Let’s go to the Ashmolean.”

I followed him. In about ten minutes, we arrived at a large, ornate structure with grandiose columns and the self-importance of a Wordsworth poem. A museum. There was a sign outside advertising the special exhibit:
Early Women Writers.
I turned to Hans with a grimace, but he seemed strangely excited at the prospect of a museum, like he hadn’t used his brain in years and wanted to give it a go again.

I must have looked as unpleasant as I felt, because Hans said: “What’s wrong?”

“I hate women.”

“Pardon?”

“I meant writers.”

He led the way inside. The foyer was a vast marble chamber that smelled like hot glue. The red-cheeked man at the door handed us each a pamphlet and told us not to miss the official opening of the exhibit in a few weeks, when Sir John Booker of the Brontë Parsonage would be doing a book signing, alongside some other notable speakers. I feigned disinterest and followed Hans upstairs, past the Pre-Raphaelite display, and past a statue of a headless Roman, until we arrived at the main attraction:
Early Women Writers
.

Judging from the brochure, the exhibit featured the sketches and notebooks of a handful of women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and, of course, the Brontës. These were the ballsy “early adopters”—the women who became novelists long before it was cool. At the time they lived, a woman who ventured outside the domestic sphere ran the risk of pernicious public scrutiny. Yet all of these ladies gave the finger to everyone and did it anyway.

“Are you all right?” Hans asked.

“Yes,” I lied. I was sweating profusely. I started walking quickly, head down. I felt like I was lost in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. Rationally, I understood that the gallery was meant to glorify freedom of speech and gender equality. But all I could see was a tribute to suffering. The history of these particular writers was a history of censorship. Their work was defined not by what they wrote, but what they had been forced to cut out. Frances Burney—poor Fanny! Hers was the first gallery we visited. She burned all her writing at age fifteen, due to her family’s scorn. And Jane Austen—dear Jane! I charged through her gallery so quickly that at one point Hans had to jog to keep up. After her death, her letters were painstakingly edited—entire pages ripped out—to the point where the Jane Austen we know today was not the woman who actually lived. I walked quicker and quicker. I felt a ringing in my ears. All the portraits on the walls stared down at us from their cages as if they were instead looking out the window of a strange asylum. I could not help feeling like someone was screaming very loudly, only from a great distance.