Authors: Judith Hooper
K
ITTY
J
AMES
N
EWPORT
J
ULY
2
ND
1861
T
O
J
ULIUS
S
EELYE
(
HER BROTHER-IN-LAW
)
I think I never saw such a family. The boys are delightfully companionable, full of intelligence, free from anything that is disagreeable in boys of their age, each one having a strongly marked individuality. I enjoy conversing with Uncle Henry and Aunt Mary too & Alice is a sweet little girl. It is all too nice, most likely a trick of the devil. I will steel myself against the temptation to remain here forever in the bosom of this vivid, amusing family. I have promised myself to Dr. Prince and how could I dream of letting the poor man down?
D
OES EVERYONE HAVE A FANTASY OF HOLDING ON TO SOMETHING
and keeping it forever? In the end, even letters can't preserve the past; somehow time reaches backwards and alters them when we're not looking. Among Father's letters, I have just stumbled on one in which he chuckles over the peculiarities of our much-older cousin Kitty James. At the time he masked his feelings well, well enough to fool twelve-year-old me, anyway. I thought that Father thought the world of Cousin Kitty.
It was the very beginning of the Civil War, when no one dreamed it would drag on for four bloody years and kill so many. The world was innocent still, and we were living in Newport. From our house on Kay Street, with its Gothic roofs and small tower, I see William striding (with his characteristic long, fast strides) across Bellevue and down Church Street to paint in the atelier of William Morris Hunt. This was also my route to the school I attended for a brief time before Father decided it was unsuitable for some reason.
From my desert isle in Leamington, I take a memory walk down the streets of Newport, lingering over every tree, house, hedge, blackberry bush, widow's walk, balcony, piazza, scraplet of lawn or patch of moss I conjure up. The pets of the neighborhood come vividly to life, sharpening their claws on tree bark or barking at squirrels. I see Elly Temple arching an ironic eyebrow about Aunt Tweedy, whose pink flesh bulges out of her bathing costume, and I hear Minny saying
sotto voce
, “It is very difficult not to think of a pink whale.”
Oh! I had nearly forgotten the radiance of early life before habit dulls us and makes everything stale. In this happy state, I fall asleep and wake up an hour later. Nurse brings me tea and a roll and goes out to do the marketing. I am being pulled by a powerful tide back to the summer Kitty James came to visit. 1861. Before the hospital tent with the wounded soldiers, before Wilky and Bob marched off to war, before our family unit was split up, before so many things. The
ancien régime.
Kitty is in her late twenties and about to be married, and we are in awe of her, at least at first. She is like a fine porcelain figurine and next to her I feel like a crude clay pot. For many years Father and her father, our Uncle William, were not on speaking terms, following a quarrel over religion or a will or both. But fences have been mended now, and the mysterious Kitty being in our midst is proof of that.
Father makes a big show of doting on our cousin, who is pretty, ladylike, intense, and devoutly religious, sharing his scorn for “the world.” I am used to being Father's “darling girl” and don't appreciate having my place usurped by a cousin I've never seen before. Kitty's fiancé, Dr. William Prince, is an alienist, in charge of the big lunatic asylum in Northampton, a fact that heightens her allure in Will's eyes. That is another thorn in my flesh. He and Kitty keep disappearing down Bellevue, engrossed in conversation. I don't know where they go, and they don't invite me. Kitty is queenly and aloof, though she pretends to be oh-so-humble. I don't know why Will is so fascinated by lunacy.
“What did Cousin Kitty do to win the heart of her Prince?” I say to the others when she is out of earshot. Ha ha, the fiancé's name is Dr. Prince, get it? But my joke falls flat. When you're the youngest of five, your jokes frequently do.
Now it is Sunday dinner and from the head of the table Father is speaking mysteriously of trees. “Two trees grow in the garden of every man's intelligence, children. One is named the Tree of Life, the other the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.” Kitty, on his right, regards him with rapt attention, nodding her head from time to time.
Which trees does Father mean? The tall cypresses that are like stately women, or the fruit trees, good for climbing, bearing pears or cherries or apples? I wonder how a tree can give knowledge of good and
evil. “Both trees,” he continues, “are indispensable to Man's conscious development, but it is good to eat only of one of them, the tree of life. If we eat of the other or seek to live by it, we inevitably encounter death.”
I am mystified. Does this mean not to eat the apples that fall to the ground in the orchards? I certainly don't
want
to eat them, but is that how we encounter death, by eating rotten fruit? William is laughing as usual. He waves his fork in the air and says, “Father, that is just the sort of unintelligible metaphor that doesn't go down well with the reading public.”
Oh, a metaphor! I know what that is. Why didn't Father say so?
Kitty smiles like an angel. Her fork trembles. A subtle vibration, rapid as a hummingbird's wings, seems to move through her much of the time. I have never met anyone like her and have to keep reminding myself not to stare.
Father asks her if Dr. Prince is an easy man to get on with, and she says, “Oh, yes, he is.” After cataloguing his virtues, she says, “His lips are the thinnest you ever saw, more like a thread than a lip, but I have never seen him excited to resentment now for the nine years and a half that I have known him.” I am confused. Nine and a half years? Have they been engaged all this time? And her obsession with her fiancé's lips seems peculiar. But I am only twelve going on thirteen; what do I know?
One overcast afternoon I find myself trapped on the piazza with Kitty and a pitcher of lemonade. Years later, recalling this, I see the condensation on the glasses, hear the carts rattling past, smell the manure from the stable down the road. I am holding a green apple in my left hand and poking a wormhole in it with my finger, feeling the juice collect under my fingernail. Kitty is as usual clothed in white, ready for ascension. In her presence I have the impression of hearing hundreds of tiny needles clicking, like a mechanical loom in the textile factories of Lowell.
Registering my existence, Kitty informs me she
adores
the sea air and the sound of the surf in her ears, and our family is utterly charming; she wishes this happiness could last forever.
“I lie awake these long nights, perfectly quiet, thinking unutterable thoughts!”
“Oh?” I say. “Good ones, I hope?”
“Heavenly, dear!”
We sip our lemonade in silence for a few minutes. I rack my brain for something to say. Then it occurs to me that Kitty probably doesn't care what I think anyhow.
“Do you ever feel, Cousin Alice, that if someone opposes you, you might shatter like glass?”
Although I
do
feel that way at times, I am not about to admit this to Kitty. I shrug and try to avoid meeting her too-intense eyes.
As if guessing my thoughts, she says, “You know the story about the princess who was sent to a water cure because her eyes were too brightâshe looked at things and saw too far? That is all my disease is.”
Does Cousin Kitty have a disease? I suppose it would be rude to ask what it is.
“I am writing a book for young people,” she continues, as if I had asked her to tell me more about herself, “based on my experiences. I plan to have it published, but the girl in it is called Mabel, not Kitty. Even if you are dead it seems dreadful to have everyone know what kind of person you were.”
The things that come out of her mouth! Just as I am wondering how to escape without giving offense, she offers to show me the contents of the heart-shaped cloisonné locket she wears around her pretty neck. “All right,” I say. She opens it. I lean in close, and make out a lock of reddish-brown hair.
“So Dr. Prince has auburn hair?” I am trying to be polite, although being close to Kitty is making my skin itch. Or maybe it's my mosquito bites.
“Oh dear no, Alice! Dr. Prince's hair has gone completely white from his severe trials!” (As if I should have known this!) “This lock belonged to his late wife.” She stares dreamily at the horizon and her beautiful china-blue eyes mist over. “God saw best to take her to Heaven. He saw best to send me to help Dr. Prince get well, and to care for his motherless children, poor little lambs. And so I shall do.”
“I see,” I say, though I don't at all. Dr. Prince must be an elderly man.
“Dr. Prince's dead wife knows that I have delivered him and Johnnie and Louise and myself from a terrible spell. She loves me very much.”
“Who are Johnnie and Louise?”
“Dr. Prince's children. You see, I never wished to be married if I must have children. I dreaded the suffering and the squalling of the first year, but as the doctor already has two, he will not require me to bear him more.”
Can a person
choose
whether to have children? Doesn't God just send them as He sees fit? With this thought comes an intimationâa foreboding almostâof a great many other unknowns of which I'd been unaware. The end of childhood is at hand; I feel it in my bones. There is nothing to be done.
“I must stay
always
to be his eldest daughter,” Kitty babbles on. “He has a stronger claim on me than my dear father, for he never scolds or misunderstands me. He can never love me as he did his wife, but I never concern myself, Alice. It is certainly as much as I deserve or want.” Then she relates more anecdotes illustrative of the doctor's benevolence and his trials and a pile of boring details about the children, while I scan the horizon in desperation, hoping someone will come along and relieve me of Kitty. With her thoughts fixed on the late Mrs. Prince, she tells me in a confiding tone that she is willing to submit to the “martyrdom of the marriage bed.” Her eyes, up close, could burn a hole through you.
“You know,” she whispers, “it is so beautiful here, and your family is so good and charming, but it cannot last.”
“It can't?”
“No, Alice. I am a little like an animal and feel things before they come. I am quietly watching and preparing for the next thundercloud. You had better prepare, too, little cousin.”
“Why should
I
prepare?” I am sick of Kitty and her airy-fairy ways and ready for her to go back to Northampton and never return.
“Our Lord is merciful but no thought is secret from Him, Alice.”
I quickly review my secret thoughts: (1) I have wished on occasion that Bob would catch a fever and die so I will not be teased so much. (2) When I picture kissing someone, it is usually a girl. (3) I fantasize sometimes about being blown off a cliff in my hoop-skirt (a danger
Godey's
is always warning readers about) and in my imagination it
feels lovely, like flying. (4) I am alarmed and frightened by my father's stump. (5) I wish our Temple cousins would stay away from Newport this summer so I can have my brothers to myself. (But there is as much chance of this happening as of Father tiring of Divine Nature.)
I steer clear of Kitty for the rest of the visit, which is not difficult, as she is chiefly interested in William. To my relief, she finally returns to her greybeard and marries him a few months later. After she leaves, while we are doing some sewing on the piazza, Mother casually mentions that Kitty had been a patient in the Northampton Asylum, “suffering from a religious mania, so they say,” and met Dr. Prince while in that broken-down state.
“Oh! That would explain how queer she is, Mother! She told me she holds Bible study classes for the inmates. Wouldn't you think they'd resent being preached at by a fellow lunatic?”
“Oh, but she is completely cured, Alice. I believe she looks only to the future now.”
No, she is a thorough lunatic; why does no one else see this? But I say nothing and refrain from asking Mother what Kitty might have meant by “the martyrdom of the marriage bed.” Some things are best left unknown.
Just
before
Kitty's visit, a shattering thing had happened. Without warning, all my imaginary friends disappearedâthe invisible friends who for years kept me company, listened to everything I said, laughed at my jokes, told me their secrets and their stories. I can't explain this. Did I leave them or did they desert me? Anyway, they were gone now, there was no getting them back, and I found myself starkly
alone
for the first time. It was like being orphaned, cast out of a warm, loving world into one that was heartless and alien.
For a long time I blamed Kitty for what happened next, but she was only an omen, like a raven or an owl appearing at your window. In the end there wasn't much to her; it was as if she'd tried to cobble together a personality out of a handful of traits and didn't quite bring it off. Yet her presence seemed to shift things in our family and nothing went right afterward. When I try to peer into that darkness, I lose my way. The Temples are in on it somehow, and the War is coming
closer, and soon William will stop painting and go to Harvard to study science. That August I will turn thirteen and a veil will drop over me. By September, all pleasure will be drained from my world: the sailing, the sea-baths, the collections of shells and sea-glass, the romps on the beachâall of it will suddenly leave me cold.
Our Temple cousins do not help matters. By early July, the six of them are, as usual, installed in the house next door with their elderly guardians, Aunt and Uncle Tweedy, and our two households merge into one large, boisterous extended family. Will's attention is captured entirely by the Temple girls, which is irksome. Harry, too, is in thrall to them, as are Wilky and Bob. As soon as the Temples appear I turn into a grey moth in a flock of butterflies.
In a pine grove not far from our house, I come upon William one day kissing Kitty Temple, the eldest of the girls. Her back is pressed against the trunk of a tree, and there is not a millimeter of space between them. Her arms are wrapped around Will's neck, her eyes closed dreamily. I can't see William's face, but for an instant I
feel
what they feel, the tug of intense physical longing. It is a revelation. The air around them quivers with their desire; the trees and tall grasses seem to bend to it. Their kiss rouses feelings and sensations in me I can't name; all I know is that I can't bear to watch them kiss anymore. I call out to them, and they startle and pull apart.