Alice in Bed (19 page)

Then Lizzy Boott came scampering across the lawn to meet us, as arranged, after her daily two-hour piano practice. Fanny had her impoverished families to occupy her, Sara had the Norton children, Lizzy her music and painting and languages. What did I have?

When the conversation turned to the ball, I observed a horrid metamorphosis taking place in my friends.

“Isn't Mr. Dixey awfully good looking?” Lizzy said.

Sara and Fanny agreed that he was and proceeded to minutely analyze Ellen's dress, the flowers in her hair, the ices, the flutes of champagne. Then they moved on to who danced with whom, who said what to whom, what the favors were in the German. What had
happened
to them that their minds could be captured by trivial things, like monkeys bewitched by shiny objects? The mention of the German made me grind my teeth. Why call it a German when it was a French invention? The French called it a Cotillion.

“I was very disappointed in Mr. Dixey's flimsiness,” I remarked. “Isn't he simply the flimsiest of beings?”

“Why do you say that, Alice?” Fanny asked.

I attempted to explain what was plain as day to me. “It's perfectly obvious he's just a little society type. And that he should have preyed on Ellen Tappan, of all people!”

A secret glance passed between Sara and Fanny. It lasted less than a second but in that interval I registered the fact that my closest friends considered me queer in certain respects and no doubt discussed my queerness when I was absent. It struck a chill through my bones. I looked down at the daisy in my hand and saw that I had stripped it of its petals. I dropped it on the ground.

Why did the hand of fate weigh on me so heavily, while my friends were eager for what life would bring? I believed that love should shake a person to the depths of her being, like the people in the Bible who stood near Jesus and were changed in the twinkling of an eye. Most people, however, refused to rise above the ordinary. While hovering near the punch bowl, I'd had a chance to scrutinize the betrothed couple. Ellen looked flushed and happy, but that probably had more to do with the party, her gown, and being the center of attention. The rest of her life would inevitably be a letdown.

“By the way,” I said, “I talked for far too long with Richard Dana. The personal appearance of the Dana family, even irradiated by the most intense joy, could never be called impressive, don't you agree?” My friends stared at me. I continued my little harangue. “Owing to Mr. Dana's gushing, I had only a word or two with the beautiful Charles Jackson.” Lizzy and Fanny smiled tolerantly. Sara looked squirmy and irritable, probably due to the heat. “I am forced to admit that Miss Appleton is not bad looking,” I added. “I had to refrain from looking in the glass for some time after I came home.”

I expected
some
amusement from my friends. Fanny and Lizzy chuckled a little but Sara was still staring quizzically at me.

“Don't you see, Alice, that you frighten people?”

“How absurd, Sara. Who'd be afraid of me? Don't tell me
you
are.”

Sara's hair was coming undone and she twisted the escaped strands into a knot and secured it again with combs and pins.

“I mean people who don't know you, Alice. Men principally. Some poor man offers to fetch you a Roman punch and you say something arch and obscure about elective affinities. Poor Frank Loring thought you were making fun of him!”

This was so unfair! Was it my fault if a person did not know his
Goethe? As the midday sun glared down from the zenith, the sweat stung my scalp under my plaited chignon. Why was Sara attacking me? Why were my friends drifting away? I searched my mind for some way to restore harmony.

“Oh! I must tell you all about the idiotic conversation I had with Jane Norton at the Godkins' the other night. She said she thought all the young women of Boston, instead of devoting ourselves to painting, clubs, societies and such, ought to stay at home in a constant state of matrimonial expectation. She implied that we are all so happy together that men say to themselves, ‘Oh, they're so happy we won't marry them!'”

Lizzy and Fanny laughed. Lizzy said, “I can't help noticing that Miss Norton has avoided the wedded state herself. Maybe she attended too many painting classes.”

“And then,” I continued, “she went on a tirade against waterproofs, and her own gown as she was speaking was of so hideous a description that it cried out to be covered by a waterproof.”

Sara's face had taken on a crumpled look I knew well, and when she spoke it was in her most strained, I-am-more-sensitive-than-you-can-possibly-imagine voice. “Alice, if you could only hear yourself. You are so
hard
.” I recalled Father saying much the same thing to me once, urging communion with Divine Nature. But hard was the last thing I was. Sara, of all people, should know this.

Everything had changed since Susan died, leaving the six small Nortons. This situation brought Sara and Theodora into the daily orbit of the Nortons, including Charles. Soon there were ominous signs that he was wooing Sara—about which subject I'd wasted much ink speculating in letters to Nanny. At one point Sara fled to New York suddenly and mysteriously and stayed away several months.

“Most likely he has proposed and she has refused him,” I wrote to Nanny during that period. “No one says so but I gather from something Theodora said that Sara plans to stay away until he gets over it.” Ellen Gurney and I had discussed the situation at length. Ellen's view was that Sara was a rare, exquisite creature, much too good for Charles, but that he would wear her down with sheer persistence. I hoped she
was wrong. I wrote to Sara during the time she was in New York,
If you don't come home soon I shall in desperation elope with the handsome butcher's boy
, but her letters were vague and evasive and said little about missing me.

When she returned to Cambridge, her lips were sealed on the subject of her brother-in-law. The danger had subsided, it seemed, and Charles was transferring his affections to Theodora. But a metamorphosis had taken place in Sara, which I did not understand. After her troubles, she assumed the air of a woman of experience and treated me as if I were a naïve girl. She declined to confide in me at all about her Norton problems, and this was unutterably painful to me.

Now she said, “If you only knew how Jane cares for those dear children—and Grace, too—you might have a little Christian charity, Alice, or at least refrain from mocking what you don't understand.”

I stared off in the direction of the Charles River and its diamond sparkles. No one knew what to say.

“Just think!” I said after a long silence. “Mr. Dixey has leased Ellen for life! Isn't it awful, horrible, and incomprehensible?”

TWELVE
TWELVE

1875

F
OR OVER A MONTH
M
OTHER HAD BEEN PREDICTING THAT
Harry would come home soon, and this time her maternal antennae did not fail her. In early October a steamer docked and out walked an older, confident, handsome, sun-bronzed Harry.

I was content just to gaze upon my second brother and take in his stories while Mother and Aunt Kate fluttered around, ordering the cook to make his favorite dishes, going through his clothes and sewing on buttons, asking concerned questions about his health and the quality of the air in his room. He was a stranger now—almost. Formerly shy and tongue-tied, he was displaying a new talent as a raconteur, his youthful stammer concealed behind thoughtful measured pauses. He was invited to no end of teas and dinners, at which people listened reverently to his tales of life at the Palazzo Barberini, where William Wetmore Storey, a sculptor from Boston, was installed, along with his wife and a band of bohemian artists. To hear Harry tell it, it was an Old World paradise of liveried servants, cavernous fifteenth-century halls, every alcove bristling with neoclassical Venuses and Pans.

“Is he still doing sibyls?” Clover Adams asked. “When we were there, there were sibyls on all sides. Sibyls sitting, sibyls standing, sibyls with legs crossed, with legs uncrossed. You've never seen so many sibyls in your life!” Harry admitted that there were probably more sibyls than the world required. Now that Europe had polished and finished him, the Adamses craved his society more than ever and persisted in
trying to persuade him to “come home” for good. Father took Harry as his guest to the Saturday Club, and although he was polite, he did not seem genuinely enthusiastic about the Boston cognoscenti. Mother confided to me, “I trust he will feel more and more that it is much better to live near his family and with his own countrymen, than to lead the recluse life he led abroad.”

Recluse life? Was she daft? What about the glamorous
palazzo,
the liveried servants, the expatriate artists, the beautiful and idle women who went riding with Harry in the Roman
campagna
? After a month and a half, you could see that Cambridge society was already wearing thin for him. Though he tried to mask his feelings, I noted a number of dismissive remarks about the “flimsiness” of American vegetation, the “aridity” of Yankee social life, and the strangeness of a country where men talked only of business and women ruled over the arts. And American hostesses had no respect for one's work, according to him. To be in Harry's company was to be made excruciatingly aware of everything America lacked: great art, an established leisure class, stately homes, proper piazzas with proper fountains, well-trained servants, literary salons, ladies with repose, civilized clubs for gentlemen.

At Shady Hill he was apt to fall into arcane Ruskinian discussions with the Nortons, peppered with words like
campanil
e and
loggia
. One evening, I overheard him telling Grace that he felt it was his duty to “attempt to live at home before I grow older”—as if it were a penance. Later he murmured over his after-dinner brandy, “Europe is fading away into a pleasant dream. I mean to keep a firm grip on the Old World in some way or other.” He now seemed more comfortable at Shady Hill than anywhere else.

He was becoming as mysterious as Father, who had the habit, shared by none of the other fathers we knew, of going off on mysterious trips and coming back a week or two later. William had inherited this proclivity for sudden impulsive journeys to change the weather in his head, and it occurred to me now that Harry resembled Father in the way he parceled himself out. Many people had a piece of him, I thought, but no one, including me, had the whole story.

“We are a disappointment to him, I think,” I whispered to Sara one warm evening on the piazza at Shady Hill. “We don't even speak Italian.” Sara had been making comic faces at me behind her hand every time the word
Ruskin
issued from Charles's mouth. He was in full didactic mode (“It is always to be remembered that . . .” “It will be found on observation that. . .”) and Father was looking quite dyspeptic. It was asserted by someone that Ruskin was the first to interpret the decline of art and taste as the sign of a general cultural crisis. Harry noted that people's ideas of sky were derived from pictures more than reality. Grace said that the relationship of art, morality, and social justice formed a “holy trinity.” What on earth did she mean?

“Speaking of matters Italian, Alice,” Sara whispered into my ear. Her breath smelled pleasantly of wine. “I
wish
you could have seen old Grace batting her eyes at the Italian professor the other night. Oh, the stories I could tell.” Sara had by now passed out of the phase of being charitable about her out-laws.

“Please do describe
all
her dissolute pruderies to me.”

“Later. Old Mrs. Norton is giving us the evil eye. Oh, look at poor Theo, trying to get on her good side.” I glanced over at Theodora Sedgwick, picking at her food in a nervous, rabbity manner, a smile frozen on her face, nodding compulsively at Mrs. Norton.

“It won't do any good,” Sara continued. “Mrs. Norton has ordered Charles not to take on a new wife, at least until all the children are grown, and he would never dream of disobeying her. This is strictly
entre nous
, of course.”

She moved her chair closer to mine and, gazing levelly into my eyes, caught a stray strand of my hair and tucked it tenderly behind my ear. In the guise of hair maintenance, she managed to stroke my cheek and neck briefly with her fingertips. Then she rested her bare arm on the back of my chair, brushing against my bare shoulders. What was this? Just being chums?

After dark at the Nortons, we younger women habitually kicked off our evening slippers under the table and put these instruments of torture back on only as we were leaving. Now, as Grace launched into a pointless anecdote about dining in London with Elizabeth Gaskell
(for whom young Lily—Elizabeth Gaskell Norton—was named), I felt Sara's stockinged foot on mine, first as the lightest of caresses, like moth wings against the skin. A faint smile played at the corners of her lips. Inching her toes slowly down toward mine, she massaged my foot in a way that made me catch my breath, and then she was working her way slowly back up to my ankle. You had to hand it to her; Sara could do more with her toes than most people with their fingers. In every cell of my body I felt myself open helplessly to her touch, and knew at that moment I would have sold out my own mother for an hour in Sara's arms.

But we had put that behind us. I stared down at my hands gripping my sherry glass, trying not to smile.

Despite his Italian inclinations, Harry evidently took to heart his professed goal of seeking his literary material in America. By December he'd decided to
try
living in New York, where he could be near his editors, mingle with other men of letters, and support himself with reviews and journalism.

“Do you think you'll be happy there, Harry?” I asked him. I'd recently made a couple of trips to New York City myself, but to actually live in New York, as Harry was about to, was a pipe-dream for me.

“I have no plans of liking or disliking, of being happy or the reverse,” he said. “I shall take what comes, make the best of it, and dream inveterately.”

Who was this new stoical Harry who behaved as if there was something he must renounce in order to live in America? The week before, at a dinner party at the Howells, I'd found him surrounded by a crowd of girls. One girl, flirting aggressively, kept trying to pin him down on whether he would attend her tea next Thursday. When he said he must write that day, she teased him, saying she'd heard he was a “woman hater”—was it true? I saw Harry recoil, becoming frosty and remote. This was someone I was meeting for the first time.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

25
TH
S
TREET
, N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

M
ARCH
4
TH
1875

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

I am sorry to report that life here is dull and unrelenting. Mornings I work on Roderick Hudson. What a treadmill to be serialized in the Atlantic! I am subject to nightmares in which the magazine comes out with blank pages where RH should be, covering me with shame. The monthly payments are not enough to live on here, so my afternoons are devoted to writing reviews and critical notes on books which are uniformly bad & which I skim. Journalism—bah!

You were right all along. I probably am ruined for America but I shall keep trying. Don't breathe a word of this to M & F—or A.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

25
TH
S
T
., NYC,

A
PRIL
1
ST
, '75

T
O
M
ISS
G
RACE
N
ORTON

Before I came here. I didn't realize how wedded I was to life in Italy, and what I wouldn't give now for the sight of a proper piazza with a proper fountain! Instead, there is the el spewing coal and live embers onto the street, the hideous brown-stones with their lumpen balustrades, the ceaseless ugly grind of commerce. For literary material there are only two sources here: (1) the brash world of high finance (where I have no entrée even were I inclined to write about stockbrokers) & (2) the hothouse social circuit of the hostesses in their Fifth Avenue mansions. That milieu I could penetrate if I felt the urge, but I don't somehow. Culture is entirely in the hands of women here. The men are all too busy making
money. I'm told they work like dogs, all the time; there is no leisure class here apparently. I sometimes meet your brother-in-law Arthur Sedgwick at a little bohemian chop-house near the Nation's offices in Beekman Place. He seems to be getting on well as a journalist.

J
OURNAL OF
H
ENRY
J
AMES
—NYC, A
PRIL
15, 1875

I've told no one here it is my birthday. It is late & I ought to try to sleep on my lumpy bed, but the air is like the steam from a cauldron & I must set down my impressions of tonight. (This journal entry will go directly on the pyre when I am on my deathbed.) Despite my better judgment I met Arthur S. after work at our usual chop-house; as soon as I arrived I saw that he was already drunk. He had no idea it was my birthday. He wanted to discuss Boston. There was nothing I wanted to discuss less; in large part I moved to New York to avoid talking or thinking about Boston.

“I don't miss Cambridge much, do you? Or Boston,” he said, exhaling twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “By the way, Harry, how is that very serious sister of yours?”