Alice in Bed (15 page)

“Perhaps you are at the wrong address, m'sieur? You are no doubt seeking another establishment?” With her hands on her hips, she aimed an arctic stare at Harry, who began to stammer. I think he'd just noticed that the couple dancing not far from us was a pair of women, both wearing bonnets. I had seen this already, and, I will confess, my heart soared. This was how the world should be, everybody leading the life they wanted and chose. How normal the women looked, like women you might run across shopping on Tremont Street. The one whose face I could see wore a dreamy expression, as the violin pursued its haunting melody.

The café was an island of women! Apart from Harry, not a single male in the establishment, unless the violinists were. (It was hard to tell.) We had stumbled onto a passage to a secret demimonde, which had always existed perhaps in the underbelly of Paris. An old memory surfaced of Mademoiselle Danse pointing out places where “men went with men” and “women went with women.” Perhaps Mademoiselle herself had loved women. Was that why she was dismissed? With Father, there could be any number of reasons.

Harry's manner had turned stiff and cold and he told the maître d' (or maîtresse d'?) in impeccable French that we had indeed made a mistake and would be leaving at once.

Out on the street, he said, “I think we'd best find a cab quickly and return to the hotel.” He seemed so edgy I didn't dare oppose him, although I should have liked to wander about some more.

An elegant young man in gloves of puce passed us, then turned around and walked backwards, favoring Harry with a long, smoldering glance, which he studiously ignored.

“This is a strange
quartier,
isn't it, Harry? Like walking into someone else's dream.”

He did not reply. A nearly opaque white mist hovered near the ground now, slurring the edges of things. Walking through it was like walking through a cloud—moist, briny, vaporous. At one point my
body seemed to dissolve into mist, too, and this sense of being bodiless was as beautiful as casting off heavy armor. The real life inside me was calling to me in the song of my blood; I had only to let go of something. What was it?

Glancing over at Harry, I saw his mouth set in a grim line. How nervous he was. What a fate to be responsible for me. What a fate to
be
someone like me for whom others felt responsible. Difficult to say which was worse. While Harry cast about for a carriage, I kept my eyes open wide, drinking in every detail as if it had to last me for the rest of my life.

“If we can only find a cab now.”

“Relax, Harry. My virtue has not been sullied. I'm having the most delightful adventure. It is so seldom that a girl has a proper adventure.” My words helped not at all. Harry was looking about in mounting desperation for a hansom. A few minutes later, a pair of men, one with implausibly yellow hair and a jaunty carved walking stick, descended from a cab, and walked off down the street, their arms twined around each other's waists, murmuring
doucement
. Harry quickly took possession of their cab.

On the way back he didn't speak of the café nor did I. It was an untouchable topic; there were no words to broach it. As the city slid past, the streetlamps haloed in mist, I imagined that the women I'd seen dancing were wives and mothers during the day, supervising the lessons of their children, ordering viands, giving teas. Married off at the age of fifteen or sixteen to unsuitable men, their only solace was the one evening each month they met at the brasserie. They would give themselves up passionately to each other, for it would have to last through the next thirty days and nights.

Or they were copyists, spending their days copying Van Dyck or Rubens in the Louvre, each secretly working on a portrait of the other. After their deaths, the portraits would be unveiled and declared to be masterpieces, and both artists would be admitted to the Académie. But when I realized I could not name a single woman who had painted a masterpiece or been admitted to the Académie, my spirits sank a little. Why was it that women's lives were always secondary and somehow fruitless?

***

The thought of living in Paris was forming itself in my mind. I made fabulous plans. I would visit the Louvre often, perhaps learn to paint myself. I would attend the Comédie Française regularly and see all the great actresses in the classic roles of Racine, Corneille, and Molière. To be lifted out of sorrow into beauty! Through the incomprehensible workings of fate, I would live here and become a writer, writing under a
nom de plume
so as not to embarrass my family. But what would I write a
bout
? Everything that mattered could not be said. Well, I'd sort that out later.

Every night now I was having immense dreams, from which I woke with a sense of having travelled very far. It required no effort at all; it was all unfolding from the bliss of pure existence. Over the next few days, Harry, Aunt Kate, and I visited Notre Dame and Île de la Cité, the Palais Royal, the Bois de Boulogne, and the Luxembourg gardens. We took the train out to Chartres and to Versailles. One evening, as we sauntered along the boulevard after a late dinner, bolstered by a few glasses of champagne, I was singing softly to myself verses from the opera we'd seen earlier in the day.
Ô nuit enchanteresse, Ô souvenir charmant!
I sang to myself.
Doux rêve! folle ivresse! Divin ravissement!
Under the spell of this “divine ravishment” my aunt's disapproval glanced off me harmlessly as a dying fly. In Paris I was a free woman. Every cell in my body vibrated with possibility.

Passing an illuminated fountain, feeling the fine mist on my skin, I sat down on the ledge of the pool and removed my shoes and stockings. Then, without a sidelong glance at my aunt and brother, I waded into the water with its reflected lights. It was surprisingly easy to erase Harry and Aunt Kate from my mind. Standing near the spray, I adopted the poses of various statues and pictures we'd seen. Diana Surprised by Actaeon. Flora, Goddess of Flowers. Venus at her Bath. How effortless it was to be a goddess in a Parisian fountain.

French people smiled genially as they passed. “
Quelle belle statue
,” said a man with a spade-shaped beard, as Aunt Kate and Harry looked on in horror. (Yes, I glanced at them before turning quickly away.) In Paris I might live as I
was
instead of exhausting myself trying to be
what I was not. I was done with all that. What Aunt Kate or Harry would do about it I didn't know; I cared only about being
real
. I stepped out of the water and sat on the edge of the pool, lifting my bare feet in the air and shaking the water off them. Then I pulled my stockings on over my damp feet.

The next morning at breakfast I appeared in a butter-colored sun-frock announcing that it was too hot to wear a corset and I was sick to death of feeling my sweat collect about my middle. Aunt Kate cast a dark look in my direction. “My dear girl! You can't go out like that!”

“Why not? It is just—natural, Aunt Kate.”

“You don't have to see yourself but
we
have to look at you.” She was aiming for a jocular tone but no one was fooled. I dug in my heels.

“Are you saying you can't bear the sight of me as God made me? Do you really think the Creator intended women to be encased in steel?”

Harry looked on in astonishment as we bickered like jackdaws until I agreed, rather sullenly, to wear an Egyptian cotton shawl over my shoulders that day. At intervals during the day I remarked on how marvelous it felt to breathe and move without whalebone; I felt like the wind.

The next morning after breakfast, Aunt Kate went round the corner to buy a newspaper, and Harry seized the moment to speak to me about my “manners” toward our aunt.

“She suffers, Alice, when you treat her so high-handedly. She is completely devoted to your happiness on this trip.”

“I'm not
trying
to be rude, Harry. I am simply trying to carve out a little space for myself. When she talks all the time, I can't hear myself think. I can't explain it properly. . . . When she breaks into my thoughts, I might as well be on Boylston Street.” I felt near tears; I saw that even Harry didn't really understand my feelings. No one did.

Harry asked me to try a little harder, and I said I would, though the truth was I was sick and tired of being good.

H
ENRY
J
AMES
, J
R
.

H
OTEL
R
ASTADT
. R
UE
N
UE
. S
T
. A
UGUSTIN
, P
ARIS

J
UNE
10
TH

T
O
M
R. AND
M
RS
. H
ENRY
J
AMES
, S
R
.

Alice is like a person coming at last into the possession of the faculty of pleasure and movement. In Paris she is a rejuvenated creature, displaying more gaiety, more elasticity, more genuine youthful animal spirits than I have ever seen in her. She and AK find plenty of occupation with milliners and dressmakers. I think she will find that her mind is richly stocked in delightful memories.

M
RS
. H
ENRY
J
AMES

20 Q
UINCY
S
TREET

C
AMBRIDGE

J
UNE
17
TH

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

My daughter a child of France! What has become of that high moral nature on which I have always based such hopes for you in this world and the next? That you should so soon have succumbed to this assault upon your senses, so easily have been carried captive by the mere delights of eating and drinking and seeing and dressing I should not have believed and indeed I see it all now, to be merely the effect of a little cerebral derangement produced by the supernatural effort you made in crossing the Channel.

H
ENRY
J
AMES
, S
R
.

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASS
.

J
UNE
23, 1872

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

I have lain awake most of the night thinking of my darling daughter so far away in body, so near in soul because so full of Divine desire, et cetera. Harry's letter frightens me by an account of what he calls your ‘exploits.' Please remember, my darling, to slow down and take things in a leisurely way. I console myself by remembering that you have always had such power to control imprudence, et cetera, and I count on that now.

NINE
NINE

T
HE DAY AFTER
I
ABANDONED MY CORSET, THE
B
OOTTS ARRIVED
from Bellosguardo. They'd been anxious to escape the heat of Tuscany, little suspecting that Paris was baking under its own heat wave. Francis Boott, who prided himself on his impeccable taste in all things, suggested we all dine at Le Grand Véfour, on the rue Saint-Honoré.

“It will be too rich for our blood,” Aunt Kate grumbled as she fastened her heavy jade earrings to her sagging earlobes. “We shall have to economize in Switzerland and Italy.” Harry gave one of his Gallic shrugs, as if to say, The Bootts are the Bootts;
que voulez-vous
? I, submerged in my Parisian dream, made polite noises in the general direction of my aunt without actually listening to her.

Catching sight of the Bootts sitting forlornly at their table, I was struck by how alone in the world the pair was, how hard they had to struggle to amuse themselves. I had never seen this so clearly before. Francis Boott, though intelligent and often charming, was a difficult man—vain, moody, prone to sulks and injured feelings. He would undoubtedly have preferred a son, but when his wife died, leaving him with an infant daughter, he vowed to make her the intellectual equal of anyone. Lizzy was his revenge on the world, which failed to appreciate his talent as a composer (he'd set Longfellow's verses to music) or his opinions as an art critic. Independently wealthy, he moved from Boston to Europe, rented a wing of a castle in Bellosguardo, and arranged for a rigorous education by private tutors. Lizzy was the result, her father's masterpiece. She knew four or five languages and most of the arts and
sciences, painted with a high degree of mastery, and played the piano beautifully. In addition, she was lovely to look at.

Le Grand Véfour looked expensive. I noticed Aunt Kate's eyes narrow to slits at the sight of the pink satin banquettes and the naked
putti
scooting across the cerulean sky of the rococo ceiling. It was like being inside a jewelry box.

After a flurry of kissing, hugging, and exclamations about the heat, we took our seats and pondered the wine list. When the talk turned to Switzerland, I begged the Bootts to consider joining our party. I was thinking how nice it would be to have a friend my age to lighten the burden of Aunt Kate—and even, I had to admit, of dear over-cautious Harry. Lizzy and her father brightened at the prospect. Francis Boott, predictably, knew all the best Swiss hotels.

The next morning, over
cafés crèmes
and croissants, Aunt Kate informed me that she and Harry had decided, in view of the heat wave and the discomforts of Paris, to travel to Switzerland earlier than planned and seek out the alpine air. We would rent a carriage at the end of the week. I could not but hear this as a great betrayal. Not to be consulted, to be treated like a child! Only by mentally counting the crumbs on the tablecloth and pricking the meaty part of my palm with my fork did I avoid exploding. All I managed to blurt out was, “But I'm just beginning to feel at home here!”

“We've had a bounteous helping of Paris, dear. We've done the
grands magasins,
had our hair dressed in the finest salons, been to the theatre, seen all the museums”—and she went on in this vein, itemizing every place we'd been—“and won't it be a relief to escape the heat and the rude concierges! And
you
, dear, haven't been sleeping!”

True enough, but I didn't
need
much sleep. I was living on beauty now. With my brain and body perfectly synchronized, life had no hard edges; it did not wear me down. I was beginning to glimpse the person I
could
be. But my aunt could not understand this; even Harry did not. Their minds were fixed on Switzerland.

Perhaps the sudden change in plans had something to do with recent letters from Quincy Street. After the gravity of my breakdowns, I expected my parents to be pleased by any sign of gaiety in me, but,
instead, they were alarmed. Father advised me soberly to control my imprudence. After my thrilled accounts of Paris fashions and cuisine, my mother wrote me a letter that began, in shock, “My daughter a child of France!” I visualized their phrases engraved on my tombstone.

Alice James 1848–??

Captive of the Mere Delights of

Eating, Drinking, Seeing, and Dressing

From over the ocean, they were putting out long tentacles and gathering me in, infecting me with their anxieties, and I was powerless to defend myself. Was it because they had known me since birth and could easily reduce me to infancy in their minds? As the old self-doubt pressed down upon my spirit, I felt my thoughts take on the coloration of 20 Quincy Street again. I began to obsessively question the hairdo I'd acquired at a celebrated Parisian salon. What if I was wrong? Wrong about everything?

I resigned myself to Switzerland.

The next day, Harry received a
petit bleu
from Clover and Henry Adams. “We are sick of smoldering ruins and insubstantial Frenchmen and
hungering
for the sight of a few solid Bostonians,” Clover wrote. Having married a few months earlier, she and Henry were on a year-long wedding journey. And thus, on the eve of our departure for Switzerland, we had a Boston evening with the Bootts and Adamses at a restaurant on the rue Vivienne, which Henry Adams recommended for the perfection of its
foie gras
and black truffles. Aunt Kate scowled about the prices, whispering dramatically to me that this was what happened when you dined with people in a different income bracket.

Clover and Henry were already there when we arrived, waving to us from what was obviously one of the best tables. They'd just spent two months in England, where the Adams connections were potent, Henry's father having been ambassador to Britain during the Civil War years. More recently, they'd “done” Germany. As his eyes swept down the wine list, Henry Adams, scion of two American Presidents, announced, “We
have seen many Sleeping Beauty castles, lost twelve thalers at whist, and visited the cathedral at Cologne, which Clover thought ugly.”

“It was, Henry! I much preferred that old church where eleven thousand virgins were killed, and their bones stuck all over the walls. Their skulls decorated every nook and cranny.” She turned to Mr. Boott and me. “Only the Germans would commit such an atrocity. Look at what the Prussians have done here!”

“What hotel was this?” said Aunt Kate, who had a habit of not paying attention to what someone was saying until a word caught her interest, whereupon she would pounce on it with vigor.

“A church in Germany, Aunt Kate,” Harry whispered.

A sallow pockmarked waiter took our orders, bowing obsequiously and complimenting us on our fluent French, which he seemed to find extraordinary in people of our national origin.

“We are in the most appalling hotel,” Henry Adams said, as the wine was poured. “Our room was bombed by the Commune and still bears the scars. The chambermaid told Clover, ‘They wanted to kill us and Madame knows that is not agreeable.'”

“And the Tuileries palace is a burnt-out shell, just like the Hotel de Ville,” Clover added. “And now the French have to
pay
the Prussians for wrecking their capital.”

“We have been hearing the most ghastly stories of what people ate during the siege,” Aunt Kate said.

“Yes,” I said, warming to the topic, “after they ran out of horses, a man told us, the restaurants served a rat paté that was surprisingly tasty. Another delicacy was
épagniel
—spaniel. After that it was tigers and zebras from the zoological gardens. Hardly a creature in Paris left untasted, apparently.”

“Please, dear, we are about to dine,” Aunt Kate said. “And surely that can't be true about the zoo animals.”

I raised my eyes heavenward. I was tired of being corrected continually. Cutlery clattered near the door to the kitchen; voices were raised. A waiter darted to our table with our soups on a tray.

I looked across the table at Clover, whose wit and charm made you forget she was not especially pretty. In the blink of an eye she'd
become a new creature, Mrs. Henry Adams, with stationery and calling cards printed in that name, her old identity as Miss Marion Hooper extinguished. The birth of the Wife was the death of the Maiden, I thought. I recalled an evening years back when Harry returned from the Nortons' looking transported. He'd been sitting out on the piazza with a party that included Clover Hooper, about whom he exulted, “She is Voltaire in petticoats!”

William said, “Why are you telling
me
, Harry?
I
discovered Clover Hooper.”

William and Harry were always “discovering” women—as if they had not existed before!

Compared with the Adamses' year-long wedding journey, which would include the Nile, my little expedition, with Aunt Kate in charge and calling the shots, seemed tame and predictable. My mind simply could not encompass a year-long honeymoon—a whole
year
with a man you'd known previously only at dinner parties on Marlborough Street suddenly stuck to you like a burr day and night!

Clover was saying, “Have you noticed that the cab drivers are all from the country and don't know their way around? We had one the other day who couldn't find the place. I said to him, ‘I advise you to study a map of Paris; you'll find it interesting.' Do you know what he said? ‘Madame, one cannot know everything.' How sad and bedimmed Paris seems after its defeat. And yet Mr. Worth does a brisk business.”

Fashionable gowns by the great couturier Worth adorned the
crème de la crème
of womanhood not just in Europe but in Boston and other major American cities. I wondered if I could carry off a Worth gown or if I would come out resembling an upholstered sofa.

“Is it true that Mr. Worth makes you wait for hours?” Lizzy asked. “They say that even princesses have to wait for the great man.”

“Oh, Mr. Worth!” Clover waved a hand dismissively. “He is just a little English haberdasher, originally. He took me immediately and I have as much style as the concierge at our hotel. He fusses over Americans just to rub the duchesses the wrong way. You ought to have a costume made just to experience his atelier.”

I chuckled at the thought.

“Really! He has about a hundred beautiful
modistes,
whom he holds under some sort of fairy spell, and he snaps his fingers, causing fabrics of all sorts to materialize. He folds and wraps things around you. It is very like an opium dream by De Quincy.”

Then, with her disarming manner of absorbed attention, she leaned in toward me. “Alice, I am
famished
for Boston news! My father writes to me, but being a man he leaves out the most interesting things. I know nothing gets past you. How are the dear
Nortons
? Has Charles expurgated anyone lately?”

She smiled slyly. Charles Norton was celebrated for authoring the Lives and Letters of great literary figures, who could die assured that not a single note of questionable taste—or hint of life—would survive the process. Clover was quite familiar with my views on “Nortonism.”

“Well, Charlemagne has been distinguishing himself lately by telling people that Venice in its glory was the highest form of civilization conceivable to the human mind. He went on to say it was such a pity that men at the present time should not wear swords and go about keeping them bright! Imagine Don Carlos himself with a sword!”

Clover laughed gaily. Then, apparently recalling the recent death of young Mrs. Norton, she gathered her features into a sober mien. “How will poor old Charles raise all those children on his own? Aren't there an awful lot of them?”

“Six, counting the one that killed its mother. Everyone seems to think they'll be raised by their aunts, with the assistance of nursemaids and governesses. Charles won't have much to do with 'em before the age of twelve, I shouldn't think.”

“Just so you know, Alice—” Clover flashed me a conspiratorial smile—“I'm submitting to Worth's
only
because I have been bullied into it. My mother-in-law doesn't care for the way I dress.”

It dawned on me that the incomparable Clover might actually care what I thought of her, which surprised me very much.

Her husband said, “No, dear, what she doesn't like is that you don't waltz.”

“I told her it was not in my line! Alice, I wish you could have seen how she
glowered
at me in London!”

Both Clover and Henry apparently found this memory amusing. Plates were cleared, other plates arrived. Clover confided, “I just bought a sad painting resembling Boston Common on a dreary November afternoon, with a row of leafless trees. The artist lost his mind and is now in a
maison de santé
in Bonn. He must have painted this while he was breaking down.”

Henry Adams mentioned that he intended to take photographs—his new hobby—when they sailed up the Nile, and hoped his equipment would hold up to the heat. “By the way, Clover and I dined the other night with Mr. Emerson, who had just been up the Nile with Ellen. He apparently found the journey a ‘perpetual humiliation.' Wasn't that what he said, dear?”

“I believe he said the antiquities mocked him.”

“That's right! ‘The people despise us,' he said, ‘because we are helpless babes who cannot speak or understand a word they say.' He went on to say that the obelisks, temples, and sphinxes ‘defy us with their histories which we cannot spell.' Or something of the sort. It was a very odd reaction.”

“It made you shiver, rather,” Clover said.

“He had no interest whatsoever in the antiquities,” Henry said. “How true it is that the mind sees only what it has the means of seeing.”

After a silence, Clover burst out suddenly, “Traveling would be quite perfect if only one could go
home
at night!” She looked forlorn for a moment, and I guessed she was homesick. Maybe that was why she'd been drawn to the melancholy painting that reminded her of Boston. Then we all parted, promising to meet again in Italy—but this would not happen because the Adamses would be laid low with the Roman Fever by the time we got there.