The Madwoman Upstairs (9 page)

My father tried to explain their separation to me, but I already knew what had gone wrong. My father married my mother when she was a very young person—a very young person who would probably not have married him had she known him better. She did not understand that Tristan Whipple came with booze, books, Brontës, and weeks of unexplained absence when he mysteriously fled to England. She did not know on her wedding day that her husband would leave her. Not physically, of course. I think he just forgot she was in the house sometimes.

As I said, it was Christmas Day, 2006. My father had invited a guest over and it was not my mother. It was Rebecca Smith, my new tutor, fresh off the boat from England. She did not like traveling by airplane because it frightened her. This struck me as strange, because she was a teacher of math and used the word
literally
three times in a sentence. She thought that everything in life—homework, emotions, bath temperatures—could be solved with an algorithm. She once explained a bad relationship to me through a graph. The y-axis was intensity of emotion; the x-axis was time spent away from each other. She was brilliant, Dad had to explain.

He had known Rebecca for many years. They had met in England, when Dad was a young man. She was fifteen years his senior. Somehow, he had convinced her to become my overqualified algebra tutor. She was a visiting professor at Harvard and surely did not need part-time work, but my father must have been very persuasive, because for the next year and a half, she came over on Wednesdays and Sundays to teach me how to think of life as a giant graph. She was lovely, accomplished, and amusing, and my father liked lovely, accomplished, and amusing people. Rebecca enjoyed my father because they both liked cabbage and they agreed that true civilization had ended after the Peloponnesian War.
Literally.

I remembered when we first met.

“My name is Rebecca,” she told me. Her voice was glossy.

I asked, “Like the book?”

“Like the name.”

“Do you know the book
Rebecca
?”

“No.”

“It’s about a woman named—”

“Rebecca?”

“Oh, so you’ve read it?”

She hadn’t responded, and that had been the end of the conversation.

I did not know why Rebecca Smith felt the need to be there on Christmas morning, 2006. It was a cold, brittle day. My father had hidden my present underneath the tree. The gift was the size of a small piano, and it had been there for two days, draped in a pink bedsheet. Dad told me not to touch anything underneath because the present was radioactive and might implode. I had been counting down the days until the grand reveal. If he was going to divorce my mother, then it was only fair that I should receive a massive, ostentatious gift from him, like some sort of worker’s compensation. I wished I didn’t have to open it in front of Rebecca. She would misinterpret the gift as a gesture of kindness, when really it was an attempt at an apology.

The three of us sat in a triangle by the gingerbread-decorated tree, awkwardly. I was on the floor by the presents, my father was on the couch, and Rebecca was in the chair by the fireplace, arms thin and folded, with an expectant expression on her narrow face. Inwardly, I compared her to my mother, and found that my mother was lacking. Rebecca might have been much older but she had a stately beauty. She was handsome, not pretty.

When my father gave me the go-ahead to open my gift, I tore off the sheet in one large magician swoop. To my surprise, there was nothing there. I saw only a pile of plastic chairs, the kind you find in cafeterias for pint-size kids. Was this a twisted joke? I looked at Dad, close to tears. But he was grinning. He motioned to the floor. I peered under the wilderness of chairs. Underneath the closest one was a small, solitary envelope. I opened it. Inside, I found Emily Dickinson’s face. My father had given me a bookmark.

I started crying in earnest. I would have been inconsolable had Dad not rushed over to me, eyes lit up. He said,
Dammit, Samantha, don’t you get it?
He tried to explain. This bookmark was a clue that would lead me to my real present. If I followed the hunt correctly, I would find a matching bookmark. If I failed, the present would be lost.

“Courage,” he said. “It requires courage to find it.”

Rebecca was sitting on the chair, ignored and confused, eyes wide like a cod’s. This made me feel pleasantly exclusionary, and I cheered up. I read the text on the bookmark over and over again.
Much Madness Is Divinest Sense.

Immediately, I quitted the room in favor of my father’s library, aka the Heights. I knew it was where he kept all of his Emily Dickinson poetry. The Heights was perpetually dark but I used the pale light from the shut window to fish through his lowest bookshelf, which contained all the books he liked the most:
Daniel Deronda
,
The Epic of Gilgamesh
,
Portrait of a Lady
. There—I found it.
The Greatest Works of Emily Dickinson.
To my surprise, the two hundred and seventeenth page had been dog-eared. On the page, one passage had been highlighted in bright orange:

Exultation is the going

Of an inland soul to sea,—

Past the houses, past the headlands,

Into deep eternity!

Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand

The divine intoxication

Of the first league out from land?

I had never read this poem before, but I gleaned its meaning easily enough—or at least the meaning I knew it would have for my father. We had a basement in our home that he referred to as “Deep Eternity.” (
I’m heading to Eternity,
my father would sometimes say when he went off in search of spare batteries.) I reread the Emily Dickinson poem.
Can the sailor understand . . . ?

I darted from the room and ran to the basement, passing a bemused Rebecca and a beaming father. Deep Eternity was a home for all of our dead electronics and broken bikes. There was a chalkboard on the far wall, and today, there was one sentence written on it.
It was a bright and cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell.

And then, slowly, I realized what my father was doing. He had constructed a treasure hunt for me, built out of literature. The game lasted well into the afternoon. Most of his clues were the opening lines of novels, none of which had ever been meant literally:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting
.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

This last one led me out to the sanitary sewer in the middle of the street. My father had marked it with a giant masking-tape
X
. Rebecca, bored, had retired to take a nap, so it was just me and Dad—the way it should have been. I picked up the heavy metal lid. Did my father expect me to climb in?
Courage,
he had said. I would need courage. I descended the small, damp ladder, and there, to my great surprise, was a giant Dean & DeLuca bag, in which my father had hidden a shoebox containing
The Wizard of Oz.
My Christmas present. It was a wonderfully ornate early edition. Inside, my father had lodged his own Emily Dickinson bookmark. Twins.

It remains, to this day, the finest present my father ever gave me—and finer than that was the pride on his face when I returned to the house, clutching my prize. I devoured
The Wizard of Oz
that very day, if only because I wanted to be lost somewhere, and a book seemed like a good place. I loved Dorothy more than any protagonist I had ever known. She longed for something so deeply that it came true. (This level of imagination, Dad said, was the greatest and most elusive of life skills.) That day, I fell back in love with my father. His bookmark was my entry into a world—
his
world—the one that he used to escape life, pain, divorce. Here was my escape too. He was helping me, in his own way.

Recalling Christmas of 2006 made it all the more cruel that seven years later, I would be sitting in my lonely Oxford tower with Dad’s bookmark in my lap—just with no Dad. If I knew my father well, this bookmark was a clue. The clue would lead to another clue, and another clue after that, and then maybe this time I would find the Warnings of Experience. But this game was meant to be played indoors, in a closed system—a backyard, or maybe even a library—not across an entire country. I had no idea where to start. And couldn’t he have explained this all in a letter? I put the bookmark down on my desk, right next to
Agnes Grey
, and sat back in my seat.

For the third time that evening, I found myself dwelling on Rebecca Smith. It surprised me to learn that my father had chosen her to witness the signing of his will since a year and a half after Rebecca became my tutor, my father politely asked her to leave. He had never told me why. It bothered me to think that they secretly kept in touch. Couldn’t he have asked a lawyer to be a witness? Or my mother? It was a stupid choice on his part. Rebecca had died only months after my father did. The papers said that it was a boating accident, off the coast of Scotland. To this day, her remains were lying at the bottom of the sea, along with all the gold rings she kept around her middle finger, and along with everything my father had ever told her. Down with her, I suppose, went my first clue.

CHAPTER 5

T
he weeks passed and as my preoccupation with
Agnes Grey
and my bookmark grew, I developed an equally pressing concern. As it got colder, all I seemed to be doing was growing stupider. Every tutorial I suffered with Orville invariably turned into a verbal lynching. Our syllabus implied that I was studying critical theory and the masterpieces of the Western canon. What I was actually learning was the agony of speechlessness, and the exhaustion of contemplating my own idiocy.

“But what does it
mean
?” Orville would ask. He liked to sit in his chair—the stuffed, lumpy, cancerous piece of orange leather by the fireplace—and ask me the same question over and over again, until my temples throbbed and the only thing left in this world was his sick grin and meterstick. The sick grin, I imagined, was a construction of my too-easily-terrified imagination; the meterstick was something Orville kept in his right hand so that he could thwack the coffee table for additional punctuation.

This particular morning, we were having an impromptu pop quiz on “An Essay on Criticism.” Orville had handed me the text the moment I arrived. Now, twenty minutes later, here I was, sweating dramatically.

“You’re still not telling me anything, Samantha,” he said pleasantly. I had a volume called
English Masterpieces
in my lap, which I had come to know as
Hell: Volume I.
In it was everything that I hated: “The Rape of the Lock,” “The Wasteland,” blurry pictures of Wordsworth, and four thousand and seventy two footnotes.

Orville asked, “What is ‘An Essay on Criticism’ about?”

I said, “Criticism.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“That depends. Was I right?”

Orville’s gaze was steady. His shirt was fitted, and through his sleeves, his biceps appeared to be flexing and unflexing on their own. It was fascinating and disgusting at the same time. My palms were damp and leaving perspiration marks on the book’s pages. I imagine I had the sweaty sheen of a woman in labor.

He said, “Let’s try again. What is this essay
about
?”

“It talks about the role of poetry and critics.”

Thwack.

I jumped. The meterstick made an empty, twiggy sound against the wooden table. He appeared at ease, as though he had been slashing unruly furniture his entire life.

“An essay does not
talk
,” he said. “Tell me something less juvenile.”

I said, “It’s about poetry in the modern era.”

“Tell me something less vague.”

“Modern era meaning post-Reformation.”

“Tell me something less incorrect.”

I blinked. Orville’s jaw was twitching. In all the lessons I had had with my father, I had never felt so powerless. Had I had any backbone myself, I might have—

Thwack.

I jumped back to attention. “Sorry.”

Finally, Orville put the meterstick down. “Oh, for God’s sake, Samantha, if you keep apologizing, I am going to have to lower your marks.”

He reached for his tea. There was a worn, tortured look to his face when he concentrated, and I was disgusted to find myself attracted to it. Intelligence carried a handsome degree of authority.

Orville leaned back in his chair, in a gesture I recognized. I knew what was coming next: his favorite question, and my least. Sure enough, he motioned toward “An Essay on Criticism” and asked, “Does this piece of writing strike you as reliable?”

I restrained a desire to hit something. Teachers had been asking that question for years and it made me batty.
Questioning the reliability of a narrator was an attempt to prove that every novel written—every verb, every comma—existed solely for the sake of subversion. There was no such thing as face value; there were only authorial biases and self-constructed identities.

Orville looked pleased. I was beginning to believe that he enjoyed nothing more than watching me froth at the mouth and implode.

I answered, “Yes, it is reliable.”

“Wrong,” he said. “How can it be reliable? The essay deliberately exemplifies that which it admonishes. Pope offers specific advice for writers and then ignores each of his own instructions.”

“Sure.”

“He deplores the use of metaphors, and then proceeds to liken ‘expression’ to an unchanging sun, ‘false eloquence’ to a prismatic glass, and words to leaves. Alexander Pope,” he concluded, “is a fool.”