Alice in Bed (21 page)

Harry the schemer! Clearly he'd always meant to go back, had only pretended to “try” New York. I'd overheard Father telling Mr. Howells last week that Harry had “no power to push himself into notice, but must await the spontaneous recognition of the world around him.” He was dead wrong. Harry's ambition was grandiose!

If only he'd leave quickly and get it over with. These good-byes took so much out of one. I felt the air becoming thin, as if I were floating out in lifeless space. Words were spilling out of me in a torrent. I
heard myself complain that the Norton children were not real children at all but more like rare hybrids grown in a hothouse. I'd seen little Lily having a fit over a blueberry stain on her pinafore. “She kept saying, Oh dear! Oh dear! Papa will be angry, won't he? Auntie will be displeased. Over and over again. It was frightful, Harry.”

I'd been wounded to discover that Harry had written Grace Norton several long, thoughtful letters from New York and none to me. The Nortons stood for everything that was luring him away—art, refinement, old cultures, private parks, aesthetic theories. Wherever he went, he'd be buoyed by their letters of introduction. (They knew everyone, naturally.) I had a bleak presentiment of life after he sailed. Dining with the Nortons in the room with the Tintorettos, the children displayed like Infantas, Grace gushing, “I have just had the most
delicious
letter from Harry.”

Harry was staring fixedly at his boots, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening.

“Strange things occur in the woods, I hear,” I said, pounding my walking stick into the ground with unusual ferocity. “Don Carlo and Theodora appear suddenly from behind bushes and trees, or skirting the edge of the horizon. For a widower of fifty with six children at his back it is almost immoral; don't you think so, Harry?”

He made no reply. The subject clearly embarrassed him, and this made me more adamant. I wanted to get a rise out of him—something passionate, not evasive.

“They say old Mrs. Norton has put her foot down about Charles bringing a new wife into the family. Apparently, they will have to wait for her to expire.”

“It may be some time. Mrs. Norton is very spry.” Harry passed his hand over his face, slippery with sweat.

I knew I was growing strident, but could not seem to stop. There is something about a rant that is strangely satisfying. “It might be a good plan, when Charlemagne marries his young wife and starts a fresh brood, to dispose of some half dozen of his children to their various aunts. Wouldn't you agree, Harry?”

I had gone too far and I knew it. The corners of Harry's mouth turned down. He was too indebted to the Nortons to see them as
characters in a farce. We walked in silence for a few minutes, our boots squelching through the muddy patches. My throat felt parched. Whatever my brothers might do, I was doomed to remain behind. Father would go on winding the clocks at night, Mother would keep the household accounts and carp about the Sullen Laundress and the price of coal. Father would go off to the Saturday Club and come back with anecdotes. The
Advertiser
would be read in the morning, the
Transcript
in the evening, and there would be discussions of who had died and who had produced an infant.

After a pregnant pause, Harry promised me that he would think of me whenever he had a new and startling sensation, that he would describe everything to me so I could feel it too. I felt absurdly grateful.

He sailed a month later on a slow Cunarder bound for Liverpool. The crossing was rough, with gale winds. Anthony Trollope was a fellow passenger and Harry talked to him daily, finding him one of the dullest Britons he had met. “I take possession of the Old World,” he wrote us. “I inhale it—I appropriate it! I shall immortalize myself;
vous allez voir
!”

He was right about that.

In Cambridge the trees were losing their leaves. I watched them drift slowly past the windows to turn brown on the ground. Late autumn was the saddest season. How wrenching to watch everything in the natural world die in its turn and to foresee what lay ahead—black ice, short daylight, influenza, blizzards, Father losing his balance on icy sidewalks.

From Paris Harry reported that he was living in a third-floor apartment at 29 rue de Luxembourg and writing a new serial called
The American
. He told us that the waiters in restaurants were his chief society, and Mother worried that he was lonely and hoped he would get Paris out of his system soon. I knew this would never happen. (Some months later, we would read that Christopher Newman, of
The American
, imagines that the worst punishment for an American in Paris is “to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston.”)

Not long afterward, Harry met Ivan Turgenev, who took him under his wing and introduced him to Flaubert and George Sand.
Within a few months he was attending Flaubert's literary
cénacles
at the high end of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. To me he confessed that he was seeing much of
the little rabble of Flaubert's satellites
, including Guy de Maupassant, Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, and Alphonse Daudet. Most of the Frenchmen were immoral and insular, in his opinion. Each of these letters, postmarked Paris, made me feel that I was living a kind of exile.

Harry did not forget his promise, and wrote me,

Whenever I see anything very stunning, I long for the presence of my lovely sister, & in default of it promise myself to make the object present to her eyes by means of the most graphic and spirituelle descriptions.

FOURTEEN
FOURTEEN

1876

I
T WAS STRANGE TO SEE MYSELF THROUGH MY STUDENTS
'
EYES
, as the learned Miss James, dwelling in an earthly paradise of books, libraries, lectures, and civilization. (Only one of my students guessed that I was also the sister of an Author.) I ought to have been grateful for my good fortune, but it sometimes struck me that, despite the brutal realities of life on the Plains and the monotony and absence of libraries on the Prairie, my students were happier than I. Certainly, the few books they received in the mail from the Society were more precious to them than all of Boston's culture to me.

But I enjoyed being a professoress more than I'd expected. I would venture to say I felt useful for the first time in my life. Corresponding with my students, reading the books along with them, commenting on their essays, even correcting their grammar and spelling felt like a sort of calling. Imagine: something I was good at—other than neurasthenic vapors! Suddenly people were commenting on how well I looked, on my “brightness” and “animal spirits,” from which I inferred how wan and woebegone I'd been before. I began to understand what a profession offered a man.

Fascinated by my students, William peppered me with questions, and insisted on reading all their letters. One student, from California, wrote that she enjoyed the lesson plan and the essay topics Miss James suggested, which were so different from the brain-numbing tedium of the school she'd attended.

In my school days we had to write essays on such subjects as “Mother, Home and Heaven.” And “We are Here but How long will it last?” Your topics, Miss James, have some meat to them.

“I am in love with her already,” William said. “Does she say if she is married?”

“I believe she is.”

“Then I am too late. Alas.”

His favorite student was Bessie Klemperer, in the Dakota Territory, who wrote that the only books in her home were a German-English dictionary and a Bible. She confided in her fourth letter that she'd been a mail-order bride, sent west by her impoverished Pennsylvania family; the bride-price bought a much-needed plow. Mrs. Klemperer was obliged to hide her Society books in the root cellar so that her husband would not sell or burn them during one of his drunken fits. Fearing she would be
nothing but a cipher in the world's history
, she read whenever she had a spare moment, hardly sleeping or eating.
I craved so much and there seemed no access possible to anything I wanted
.

“What a woman, Alice! She has the spirit of a Crusader.”

“A mail-order bride, William. Sent out like a bolt of calico. Imagine your first glimpse of the grizzled codger who will own you, body and soul.” I shuddered.

“Perhaps I ought to take a train out there and rescue this Mrs. Klemperer. But we don't know what she looks like, do we?”

“It is very disappointing, William, to think you would be influenced by something as superficial as looks.”

“Men are barbarians, Alice. We can't help it.”

“I hope, Alice,” Mother said at dinner, “you are not ruining your eyes by writing long letters to your Western women. Especially do not write too much by candlelight, which Dr. Beach says can cause severe eyestrain.”

“Alice's professorship is an immense thing for her, Mother,” William said. “She is an excellent professoress. Let her be.”

“I suppose Miss Loring must be very intellectual. Is she, dear?”

“Well, she is rather a fiend for history.”

“Would you say she is a bluestocking? Isn't she one of the women behind the Harvard Annex?”

“Yes, to the second question. From what I could glimpse of her stockings, they are grey.” I was in no hurry to reveal to them how fatally I was falling under Katherine Loring's spell.

Father said, “They say that Mrs. Hemenway and other extreme feminists are
hounding
Eliot to let women into Harvard and like a sensible man he won't.”

“And did you hear, dear? Julia Ward Howe
preached
Sunday in Dr. E.H. Clarke's church!”

Before I had time to reflect, I blurted, “I
wish
I had been there to hear what Mrs. Howe said. I'm sure it was more interesting that the usual fare.”

Father had mischief in his eyes. “Well, Alice, you know what Dr. Johnson said about women preaching. It is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well but you are surprised that it is done at all
.”
He guffawed merrily.

For a moment I felt that my head would explode. What came out of my mouth next took me by surprise. “I should like to know why is it that
men
are always telling women what we are like and how we
ought
to be. Why should we permit the other sex to define us?”

I saw that William, across from me, was watching me with keen interest.

“That's all very well, darling,” Father said, “but don't forget it was Eve who listened to the serpent.”

“The Adam and Eve story was written by some
man
, Father, and haven't you said the Bible is metaphorical? I'm quite sure Yahweh himself did not descend from a thundercloud to accuse woman of taking marching orders from snakes!”

How weary I was of being good! How I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours. Like the gilded Latin words discharged by medieval saints in pictures, words spilled from me without forethought. “You might make the case, Father, that the history of womankind is a series of absurd pronouncements by men. How would you feel if every book you picked up told
you, ‘Men are overly muscled, hairy creatures, of whom little can be expected on account of their inadequate brains. They are occasionally useful for war and moving heavy furniture and not much else, but because wars are sometimes necessary, women must appear to support them in the delusion that they are the superior sex.'”

The seas had parted and I waited to see what would happen next. My senses felt keenly alive, as if I were a wild animal in the forest. William set down his fork and gazed at me as if I'd just swung through the room on a trapeze. Father looked briefly like an ox stunned by a blow, but quickly recovered. Mother's lips were pressed together in displeasure and she was nervously picking at nonexistent crumbs on the tablecloth. “How absurd, Alice,” she said. “I mean, does Miss Loring agitate for the suffrage and say that we should go about in Amelia Bloomers, freeing ourselves from the ‘tyranny of men'?”

Father chortled at this.

William said, “If Miss Loring supports the female suffrage, Mother, I salute her!”

“Oh, not you too, William,” Father said.

“Yes, Father. In
The Subjection of Women,
John Stuart Mill points out that the present swallowing up of the woman in the man grows out of men's egotism. All the fine phrases about women's ‘higher' function, their mission to ‘refine,' et cetera, amount to insincere flattery and ill atone for the loss of opportunity for moral growth that results from open, independent mingling in the business of the world.”

I was startled to hear him define the dilemma of womankind so accurately. I'd no idea he'd given the matter any thought.

The higher mission to refine was, of course, central to Father's concept of Woman. Hadn't we just heard him, talking before the Women's Club of Boston, describe with unmingled disgust his horror of any woman who “forsakes the sanctity and privacy of her home to battle and unsex herself in the hot and dusty arena of the world”? I would venture to say he was more insistent on this principle than most men of his generation. Naturally, he was roused to battle by William's words, as William intended. “Meddling in the business of the world! I suppose you think that is desirable, William.” And
you
,
my girl”—aiming one of his penetrating looks at me—“are you swallowing these toxic modern doctrines? I have always had such high hopes for you!”

I did not answer and became absorbed in buttering my roll, savoring the oddly sweet afterglow of having stood up to Father. Such was the potency of Katherine Peabody Loring, my new friend.

“Mingling, Father,” William said. “Not meddling.”

To Father “the world” stood for everything that was not divine; it was a fallen world, unredeemed. Still he enjoyed himself in it; wasn't that inconsistent? At this point Mother tried to change the subject by saying brightly that Bob's infant daughter, Mary, was large for a girl and had a prodigious appetite.

“It is so nice to have a girl in the family finally,” I said, “but I do wish they'd tell us what she
looks
like.”

“This shows you to be a hypocrite, Alice,” said William, waving his knife in my direction. “After Edward was born you said, and I quote, I am glad he is a boy and not another miserable girl.”

“I merely wished for the poor babe to be one of the oppressors rather than one of the oppressed.”

Father leaned forward in his chair and nailed me with a look that made me feel like a butterfly on a pin. In his wrathful aspect, Father could be powerful and tempestuous, like Zeus with his thunderbolts. He said, “Do you consider yourself
oppressed
, dear girl?”

In fact, I'd never pondered the subject of female oppression with any seriousness. It was true that I did not have to scurry around with coal scuttles and chamber pots at first light. I was a pampered member of the capitalist class and therefore an oppressor of others. Yet, compared with my brothers, who had an infinity of choices (with which all of them struggled mightily, I am the first to admit), only one sort of life was available to me. My fate had been prearranged by biology.

“You know what these agitating ladies are saying now? Now that we've freed the slaves, the next step is to
free women
!” Father said, breaking into a great belly laugh. This prompted me to recall something Katherine said about men using ridicule as a weapon against women.

“Will, dear,” Mother said, “didn't you write a notice of John Stuart Mill's book in which you
disagreed
with his thesis? I seem to remember that you sided with the other fellow.”

“So I did, Mother, in sixty-nine. Which does not prevent me from seeing it from the other point of view now.”

“Who would have guessed that these pioneer women would be so fond of books!” Mother said, shaking her head, and rang the bell for the maid.