Alice in Bed (25 page)

THREE
THREE

T
HE FIRST THING PEOPLE WONDER ABOUT INVALIDS IS HOW WE
occupy our time. First of all, pain consumes a good deal of our attention. It comes in so many dizzying varieties: pounding, grinding, drilling, whacking, constant, floating, intermittent, sharp, dull, radiating; tooth pain, head pain, joint pain, stomach pain, bone pain—I've known them all. (I could teach the physicians a thing or two, but they don't listen, not to a woman anyhow.)

When the pain is very bad, I have Nurse give me morphia, and then, although I still feel the pain, it seems to have nothing to do with me.

When callers ask how I pass the hours, I say I read a good deal and leave it at that, but, in fact, there are a thousand small ways to amuse oneself without leaving one's bed. I really ought to print up a pamphlet on the subject.

Trying to recall things, for example.

You think up categories and make lists: All the hats I've worn, the rivers I've crossed, the twelve labors of Hercules, the hotels I've stayed in from Paris to Quebec, the names, in alphabetical order, of the girls in my class at Mrs. Agassiz's school. The word for nightgown in French (
chemise de nuit
), the first lines of a Victor Hugo poem (
Est-ce ma faute à moi si vous n'êtes pas grands? Vous aimez les hiboux, les fouines, les tyrans,/Le mistral, le simoun, l'écueil, la lune rousse
), the names of the Sapphic ladies in Balzac's
La Fille Aux Yeux d'Or.

You'd be astonished at how absorbed you can become in a railway timetable; with it as your magic carpet you can travel from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, watching the countryside
rush backwards in your memory. It is fantastic what the mind retains in its hidden pockets. Woods and fields, stone houses, apple orchards, storks nesting in chimneys, village squares with their band shells and their
mairies
, young women in kerchiefs whispering together on a bench. Yesterday I spent most of the morning recalling the ball-gowns of my youth. My first grown-up formal gown had a hoop-skirt. A hoop-skirt was a death trap; it could launch a woman off a cliff in a stiff wind or, if her skirt caught fire, trap her inside the metal cage to burn to death, as happened to poor Mrs. Longfellow of Brattle Street.

The hoop-skirt, and the petticoats undergirding it, eventually shrank to the sleek silhouette of the polonaise; then, unfortunately, for reasons known only to a handful of Parisian couturiers, the polonaise commenced gradually to gather into a puffball over the buttocks, ultimately becoming the bustle. For several years women resembled swaybacked horses, with shelves jutting out from their hindquarters on which you could have rested a wine bottle and glasses. (What a strange notion of female anatomy our young men must have had!) Need I add that these costumes were weighed down by numberless tassels, flounces, braids, beads, jewels, bangles, and other furbelows? To be a woman is to be weighed down.

In the days when I was
not
yet weighed down, when I was a child running free in a short skirt, a powerful reverie would steal over me and it was as natural as breathing or feeling the sun on my skin. Then, inexplicably, when I was about thirteen, a door slammed shut and my secret world, my luminous inner world, became inaccessible to me. Does this happen to everyone? Did I notice it more because of our family's social isolation? Soon I could scarcely remember the past at all; it all became very remote, like teething rings or baby teeth.

But a year or two ago, the past began coming back. Now everything I recall or imagine feels realer than real: the stones are cold and damp to the touch, the colors jewel-like in the stained-glass windows, the scent of vinegar and earth pungent on the stone steps of the cellar.

Well, let me take you there.

The sisters make us kneel on the flagstones to pray; the discomfort is supposed to pull our thoughts away from worldly things and
back to God. But whenever I try to think of God I see only ugly Sister Augustine and am filled with a great repugnance. I open one eye a slit, glimpse the girl next to me in the pew. Her eyes are closed, her hands steepled in prayer, but there is the hint of a saucy smile at the corners of her mouth.

I shut my eyes, open them again. The mysterious smile is still there. Are these the schoolgirls I glimpsed in the Louvre sixteen years ago? Or have I somehow entered the Paris convent where George Sand was educated? I can't say, but here, as in George Sand's convent, the pupils have sorted themselves into three groups
, les sages
(the good),
les bêtes
(the stupid), and
les diables
(the devils). No question about it, Vivienne (for that is the girl's name) is a
diable
. So am I. “Don't open your eyes,” I whisper. “Pretend you are praying, but talk to me.”

“
D'accord.”
The dimple in her cheek deepens as she tries to suppress a smile.

“If you could wish for one person here to die, who would it be?” How easy it is to whisper out of the side of your mouth while scarcely moving your lips. One of the many useful talents fostered in a convent school.

“Would I go to hell for wishing it?”

“No, you'd get a free pass. You'd be off the hook.”

“Well, Sister Augustine then.
Je la déteste
.” Vivienne snaps her fingers soundlessly, holding her hand just below the prayer rail. A wide smile breaks out behind her steepled hands. “Is she gone?
Elle est disparue
?”

“Yes, the only trace of her is a little pile of bones and her crucifix on its heavy chain. Now listen carefully, Vivienne. Tonight we will meet in the small chapel with the baptismal font, the one near the staircase that leads down to the cellar. As soon as Sister Boniface starts to snore, we'll sneak down.”

We have just discovered that in the cellar there are dank stone steps, smelling of earth, mice, and rot, leading to the underground catacombs. These catacombs go on forever, we have heard, beneath the streets of Paris. Who could resist such an adventure? Yet we tremble to think what monstrosities might lurk in those subterranean tunnels.
That night, as it happens, Vivienne falls asleep before Sister Boniface does, and I don't have the heart to wake her. It is so cold in the dormitory that little cloud-puffs rise from the girls' mouths. There are delicate frost flowers etched on the lower half of most of the windows. I lie awake most of the night, hearing the bells toll the hours, thinking of Vivienne's smile, my rosary, my evensong.

A knock on the door jars me out of this daydream. It is Miss Percy, one of my most faithful callers, in an apple-green walking dress with a rose-colored polonaise. She is accompanied by an elderly lady I've never seen before.

“The door downstairs was on the latch so I just walked up. I hope you don't mind, Miss James.”

Miss Percy is an Englishwoman of the useful information sort, a type Henry says is more common among the men here.

“Oh, yes, Miss Clarke has taken to leaving the front door unlatched, as the newlywed couple upstairs cannot seem to hold on to their key. I hear them in the corridor—‘
You
had it, Darling.'

‘No, Ducks, I am sure I saw you put it in your vest pocket this morning.'”

The newlywed husband bounds downstairs at half past eight every weekday morning, a series of fast thuds, a pause for the landing, another series of thuds. I know them by heart. Count to three and he bounces into view striding across the crossroads, where ragged children sweep the dirt and straw back and forth. He takes his hat off with his left hand, runs his right hand through his hair, puts the hat on again, and disappears. At half past five he bounds up the stairs again like a half-grown puppy. His wife meets him in the hall, and there are kisses and murmured endearments. The rhythms of this young couple, like the five daily mail deliveries and Nurse's venturings out, punctuate the monotony of my days. There is always something to look forward to.

“In the beginning marriage must feel like playing house,” I remark to my visitors. “Until it gets to be a chore.”

“Yes, I expect so,” Miss Percy says, and introduces me to Mrs. Arnold, an elderly lady with skin tags on her eyelids resembling
barnacles on a log. Apart from this, she is rather elegant and has a beautiful smile. She suffers from malaria, she informs me cheerfully. It is incurable and waxes and wanes, “but when you've had it as long as I have, it simply becomes part of your life. It is curious how one becomes accustomed to things, isn't it, Miss James? I am not sure I would be willing to give up my malaria now that it has become part of my character.”

Miss Percy, sipping the tea that Nurse has brought in, appears deeply puzzled. After doing her customary 360-degree scan of the room, she asks, “How do you occupy yourself all day, Miss James? If I were stuck in a room all day, I should go barking mad, I think.”

This is a tactless thing to say to an invalid, but Miss Percy is a good egg and means well. “Oh, I read, write letters, stare out the window. I have become a connoisseur of skies and clouds. Also, I am capable of an immense amount of wool-gathering.”

I am thinking,
Oh my dear, if you only knew!

I ask Mrs. Arnold where she contracted her disease, and she tells me India. She is the widow of a civil engineer and spent thirty years on the subcontinent, living on in Lucknow for several years after her husband's death. I steel myself for the usual condescension toward the duskier races, but Mrs. Arnold is not one of those. If she hadn't fallen ill, she never would have returned, she tells me. “My heart is in India. Unfortunately, this body requires a northern climate.” (I like the way she says
this body
, as if it were an object only loosely connected with herself. I have a feeling Mrs. Arnold and I may become friends.)

Miss Percy chooses this moment to interrogate me about where we got the buns I am serving and to reflect on their resemblance to a pastry baked by a friend's cook. It is some time before we manage to get out of this rut and back to India. Mrs. Arnold describes several things that interest me greatly: a temple in Calcutta where monkeys are worshipped as gods, weddings where six-year-old brides, weighed down with gold jewelry, weep for their mothers, a city on the Ganges where the sickly flock to die because it is considered auspicious to die there.

“The Hindoos do not hide death. They put a dead relative on an open pyre and everyone sits around and watches it burn; you see the
skin blacken and the fat crackle and the arms fall off. If you take a boat down the Ganges at night, you pass dozens of bodies burning on the ghats like candles in the night. After that it is impossible not to see the body as a temporary abode.”

She smiles and so do I. Miss Percy arches an eyebrow. I suppose I will get an earful on the subject of pagan idolatry another day.

Leamington, Mrs. Arnold adds, reminds her of Benares, the city on the Ganges where it is considered auspicious to die. Both are waiting rooms for eternity, but here there is a great gulf between heaven and earth, she says, while in India the next world feels very near, separated by the subtlest of screens. I am finding Mrs. Arnold very interesting and hope she will visit again.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

D
E
V
ERE
G
ARDENS
, K
ENSINGTON

J
ANUARY
1889

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

Alice is not unhappy, but she is homesick. I don't think she likes England or the English very much—the people, their mind, their tone, their hypocrisy. This is partly owing to the confined life she leads and to the passive, fragmentary way she sees people. Also to her being such a tremendously convinced Home Ruler.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

F
EBRUARY
11
TH
, C
AMBRIDGE