Alice in Bed (16 page)

In the hansom Harry said, “Egypt had best look out. The Adamses drive a hard bargain. They will come back to America with a boatload of priceless antiquities, you can depend on it.”

TEN
TEN

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY, A SWELTERING
T
UESDAY
, H
ARRY
, A
UNT
Kate, and I piled into a hired coach and headed for the Swiss border. “I am praying for a mere
soupçon
of a breeze,” Aunt Kate said, fanning her flushed face. “So far the air is entirely hot and stagnant.”

“All the more reason to eschew a corset, Aunt Kate.”

“Gracious, Alice, what is this mania about corsets? I wouldn't
dream
of going without one.”

“It's up to you. If you die of heatstroke we can bury you in it.”

“Alice!” But she allowed herself a small smile.

“They seem extremely fond of each other, don't they?” Harry offered. “The Adamses. When I first heard of their engagement I worried that Clover's gaiety might be extinguished by the Adams gloom.”

“It is not hard to see how Monsieur Adams might extinguish someone,” I said.

“Oh, Henry is all right. It's just the Adams manner. They put such stock in affecting not to care about anything.”

“Of
course
Clover will be happy. Her sister is
very
happy,” Aunt Kate tilted her heat-flushed face in Harry's direction. “Everyone says Ellen and Whitman Gurney are the happiest couple in Cambridge. When they are obliged to be apart even for an afternoon they act as if they'd lost each other forever.”

“Perhaps there is such a thing as being too happy,” Harry said.

“How absurd, Harry! How can anyone be
too
happy?” said Aunt Kate, fanning her face with a copy of
Le Figaro
while expelling air
through pursed lips. She looked near collapse. “I keep sticking my head out hoping for a breeze. So
unseasonable
. You'd think we were in Naples. Next thing you know, we'll run into malaria or typhoid.”

“Well, if we succumb, at least we will have done Paris,” I said. Aunt Kate laughed, not realizing that I was perfectly serious.

Crossing the border at Saint-Gingolph, near one end of Lake Geneva, we made our way toward Geneva, and with every mile I felt paradise recede and the heaviness of existence press down on me again. Why? We were in a picturesque country, about to pay a sentimental visit to a city we'd lived in as children, in the house belonging to the Russian invalid with the mushroom hat. Perhaps it was just a passing irritation due to the heat and dust; once we reached the hotel, I would probably revive.

Geneva was pleasant enough. We paid a visit to our old house and to the boarding school Harry had attended with William and Wilky. He confessed that he'd been miserable at the school, which was all science, dead creatures, rocks, phials of smelly chemicals. And mathematics too! While William adored it, Harry yearned desperately for the
longueurs
of home. He said he preferred the summer he had malaria.

By now Aunt Kate's voice and incessant platitudes were grating on my nerves, and I failed to be as moved by the scenery as I'd hoped. After ten days of visiting picturesque towns, we moved on to Villeneuve, where the Bootts had planned to rendezvous with us. Their absence was another disappointment. The heat remained oppressive, and after a few days, we made our way to Bern and Interlaken and then settled in Grindelwald, a quaint alpine town 3,400 feet in elevation, at a resort favored by English mountain climbers.

“Just smell this air, Alice,” Aunt Kate said. “Crystalline! The best air on earth for invalids! That is why there are so many resorts for consumptives here. It should do you a world of good, my pet.”

“I am not consumptive
yet
, Aunt Kate.”

“Of course not, but the climate is excellent for nerves, too.”

Nerves, nerves, nerves—that wearisome topic. Why did God give people nerves if they were going to cause so much trouble? So far the famous Swiss charm was quite lost on me.

Five days later, the Bootts arrived, preceded by a flurry of telegrams. Lizzy and I fell into each other's arms. We had both sorely missed the company of friends our age, and had topics to discuss and things to laugh about. But the euphoria was short-lived. Traveling with the Bootts, I learned to my dismay, was like walking down a beautiful boulevard with a pebble in your shoe. You could go nowhere without being lectured by Mr. Boott about Palladian columns or the pre-Raphaelites, with the impeccably educated Lizzy chiming in and making you (well, me) feel like a crude lump.

I'd briefly considered asking Mr. Boott for advice on how I might live in Paris, but I saw now that he'd inevitably say something to Harry or Aunt Kate, who would then explain to me why I could not live abroad, why it would be selfish of me to want to, and where did I think the money was going to come from? I had an unfortunate habit of harboring secret wishes, one of which, right then, was to set up housekeeping with Harry in a Paris flat after Aunt Kate sailed home. This was not utterly insane; brother–sister households were not uncommon. But my thoughts had plunged back to earth since leaving Paris, and I could not ignore the sense that Harry, loving brother though he was, had no great desire to be burdened with a “delicate” sister. Indeed, I suspected he was fleeing to Paris in part to
escape
family. If he heard about my silly flat-sharing fantasy and recoiled, it would break my heart.

Our hotel was awash in mountaineering Englishmen and their hearty families. In the dining room and common rooms, English people would wait for the Jameses and Bootts to start the conversation. Harry said their reticence was a form of politeness; they were counting on others to make overtures, not wanting to presume. Aunt Kate, however, could not be diverted from her entrenched theory that an American should
never
open a conversation with an English person, as that left the American vulnerable to being snubbed. Thus several meals passed in near silence, with Aunt Kate studiously pretending the English were invisible.

Harry appeared to be studying Lizzy closely, as if she were an Old Master. Perhaps he meant to put her in a story. Maybe he was falling in love with her. He began to speak of Lizzy in her learned aspect as
“produced,” by which he meant brought to a level beyond “finished.” Her manner as well as her intellect were “produced,” he observed; she was precisely what a young woman ought to be according to European standards, a
jeune fille bien elevée
, learned and accomplished yet modest, sweet, and possessed of that indefinable quality of “repose” that American women so conspicuously lacked (according to Harry). She never put herself forward, and performed only when her father gently pulled the strings.

On our second day, we lunched together at the hotel restaurant alongside rosy English climbing families. The Bootts were immersed in three weeks' worth of mail, and didn't say much, Aunt Kate seemed to be gearing up to discuss a book review in
La Revue des Deux Mondes
. Harry had just slit open an envelope from William, from Mount Desert Island. Too antsy to wait for him to read the whole letter in his slow and thoughtful way, I tugged at his sleeve and said, “C'mon, Harry. You can't hog it all to yourself. What does he say?”

“Well, he is taking many sea baths. Kicking over the traces of civilization. Wishes he might never return to the ‘aetiolated life' of Boston.”

“No surprise there. What else?”

“He takes me sternly to task for using too many foreign phrases in my
Nation
letters; says I must be more plainspoken if I am not to alienate Americans. By which, he seems to mean commercial travelers on trains—there is quite a long digression about them. Oh, and he detects ‘something cold, thin-blooded & priggish' in my stories.”

I laughed, as did Harry.

“Oh, but how unkind,” Lizzy said, looking concerned and laying a sympathetic hand on Harry's arm.

“Oh no, not at all!” Harry explained. “In our family we have a long tradition of abusive literary criticism—don't we, Alice? William's violent denigrations of my work are often quite useful.”

Lizzy seemed mystified. She didn't have siblings; what did she know?

When she went off to paint a view that afternoon, Harry tagged along, carrying her easel as if he were her squire. And the next day, and the one after that. Every morning they would politely invite me to
accompany them, and I'd say, “No, thank you; think I'll rest today.” As far as I was concerned, once you've seen one glacier you've seen them all, and the sight of an alpine meadow abloom with wildflowers did not set my heart afire, either. And I certainly lacked the energy to compete with Lizzy's erudition.

Maybe there
was
something wrong with me. Recent letters from Quincy Street dwelled obsessively on the dire possibility that our party would descend into Italy before the heat was over and “compromise Alice's strength.” I reverted to practicing my principal hobbies, resting and saving my strength, and everyone seemed to approve.

Staying behind at the hotel, however, left me within range of Aunt Kate, who seemed liable to unburden herself at any moment. I'd noted with creeping horror that she was flaunting her new costumes from the Paris shopping paradises, which were too dressy for the Alps. She was also spending an undue amount of time in front of looking glasses, pinning on brooches, studying earrings, experimenting with crimps in her hair. I recognized these as ominous signs that she'd taken a fancy to Francis Boott. There was a doomed romance if there ever was one!

Didn't she know that Francis Boott did not traffic in the tender affections? I eluded her by insisting that my sick headaches required complete solitude, and there was some truth to this. From time to time I felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the air.

To William, I wrote a letter with my latest impressions of Frankie (as we referred to Mr. Boott in our family):

He keeps one in a continued state of irritation either of pleasure of or displeasure, you hardly know which. Then he'll be so nice and handsome and honest that you can't but forgive him all his absurdities—until he provokes you again. On the whole, he is the most delightful but uncomfortable infant of sixty conceivable.

This was true. He would throw a tantrum like an infant of six; the provocation could be as slight as an inadequate wine list or a chateau of which some feature spoiled the period detail. He would go into a sulk, at times even seemed on the verge of tears.

“What do you and Lizzy talk about?” I asked Harry one evening.

“Oh, you know—art and the landscape and whatnot. She is exceedingly well-informed on things Italian.”

“Does she actually know
everything
?”

“I have yet to find a subject of which she is ignorant.”

It struck me one day that none of us really wanted to be here. Harry preferred cities, as did Aunt Kate. Mr. Boott spent most of his time talking about things in Venice and Rome and paid scant attention to nature, and a gouty toe kept him from walking much. Who knew what Lizzy wanted? Her painting, of a high alpine meadow with a craggy peak in the background, developed day by day, and was technically excellent but somehow did not move the heart (in my humble opinion).

We had come to the Alps primarily for my sake, after my “slight overexcitement” in Paris. But I soon exhausted the views and identified all the wildflowers in the inn's botany book and was reduced to reading
Daniel Deronda
and
The Eustace Diamonds
in my room or on the terrace while trying to avoid a heart-to-heart with Aunt Kate. (While I was not unsympathetic to unrequited love, the nakedness of her feelings alarmed me.) My thoughts were slipping into monotonous grooves, and an unpleasant episode with the snakes in my stomach kept me on edge most of the night. My aunt remarked at breakfast that I was looking “peaky” and urged me to avail myself of lots of cream.

It was all too plain that Aunt Kate's campaign for Mr. Boott's heart was stalled. It would be hard to say whether he even noticed the changes in her toilette, the addition of a glittering hair ornament, the fake roses in her cheeks. One morning, whilst slipping past the Bootts, who were in the library, I overheard Mr. Boott say to Lizzy, “If we linger much longer, I fear things may become rather awkward.”

Not long afterward, the Bootts made their farewell and went off toward some
Schloss
, I forget which. Fortunately, even when brutally thwarted, Aunt Kate was rarely found in the depths of gloom for long: her affective life was pitched more toward the moderate range than the hysterical, and she succeeded in righting her ship and was herself again by the time we took the Gotthard railway to Italy.

Surveying the peaks as they slipped past, Harry remarked, “There are limits to the satisfaction you can get from staring at a mountain which you have neither ascended nor are likely to ascend.” I wondered if we would read this
aperçu
in the
Nation
soon. Did your own words surprise you when you saw them in print?

My family had been praising my letters to the skies, assuring me they'd been read aloud at several gatherings and passed along to “the boys.” Brother Bob wrote that “Alice is turning out to be the genius of the family,” and William compared me not unfavorably to Madame de Sévigné. While my parents urged me to be prudent and rein in my impulses, William's letters counseled me to “let your mind go to sleep and lead a mere life of the senses.” Aunt Kate advised me to consume more milk and red meat. I was the sort of girl other people were always trying to fix.

But if I'd been Madame de Sévigné reincarnated, I would still have to sail home in October, while Harry remained in Paris.

It took half an hour for our train to pass through the modern wonder that was the Mt. Cenis tunnel and soon we were whizzing past a sign that read
COL DU MONT CENIS
, 2083
M
. and on into Italy.