Alice in Bed (37 page)

Afterwards, I say, “According to the Bible, Yahweh has strong objections to man lying with man, while about woman lying with woman he is strangely silent. Why do you think that is?”

“Well, as a male God, he fails to see the possibilities. So much for omniscience.” She stretches her limbs, graceful as a cat, and smiles tenderly at me.

“I remember William holding forth once on ‘inversion,' saying
that women, unlike men, could not really be inverts because there was nothing they
could
do.”

Katherine bursts into peals of laughter. “Always the expert, your brother.” After a long pause, she says. “I can't help noticing, darling. There is a something different about you. Different from
before,
I mean. I can't quite put my finger on it.”

“Three years older and that much more shriveled.”

She clucks her tongue. “No. What
is
it?” Her eyes travel over me appraisingly.

“I'm sure
I
don't know.”

“I see what it is. There is a serenity about you now—underneath your going-off and your headache and leg pains and all of that. Does it have something to do with your diary?”

I smile. How lovely that she can see what others cannot. It is true. There
has
come a great change in me. A congenital faith flows through me now, making all the arid places green—and, well, I can't describe it beyond that.

“It may be because I have given up hope.”

“Do you mean, hope that you will get well?”

“Yes. Everyone thinks hope is a good thing, but it is really a sort of disease of the mind. Anyhow, I have
renounced
it and feel so much better. I don't even hope for an answer to the perennial riddle, what is wrong with me? I probably won't ever know, but then there are so many things we don't know, aren't there?”

I watch her take this in. Katherine never, ever tries to talk me out of my feelings. Nor does she urge me to have “positive thoughts,” as the Mind Cure ladies do.

“Oh, Katherine, isn't it terrible about poor Winnie Howells? Speaking of undiagnosed illnesses.”

“Heartbreaking.”

“Sent away to that dreadful Dr. Weir Mitchell's Rest Cure, far from her family. Hounded to eat, eat, eat, and all that time she herself was being eaten by a cancer. The autopsy proved it. I can't get over the injustice. I just received a letter from poor Mr. Howells in response to my condolence letter to him. I think it was the saddest letter ever written.”

Our dear girl is gone and we begin to realize it, to yield. But we are helpless. I conjure her back in gleams and glimpses of her old childish self.
And he went on to write wistfully of the dear old days when Father and Mother were alive and my brothers and I were young and Winnie was a tiny girl in a scarlet cape. Reading it, I dissolved in a flood of tears.

But now suddenly I am surprised by a memory that makes me laugh out loud.

“What?”

“I was just remembering—you know how short in stature Mr. Howells is?”

“Ye-es.”

“Well, one day he and Mrs. Howells were at our house, and he was speaking of a man whom he described as ‘about my size.' You must picture Mr. Howells doubled up in a deep armchair, looking smaller if possible than ever. And my mother said, ‘Ah, then he must be a very small man?'”

“That does sound like your mother.”

“Yes, and poor Mr. Howells was for the next five minutes quite invisible. In fact, Mother was for some time the only person in existence!”

Katherine gives vent to one of her deep laughs, and for a moment I forget that I am a hopeless invalid, that Winnie Howells is dead, and so are my parents and Wilky, and I will never see my native land again.

A week later K. goes off to Cambridge on another fact-finding mission on the higher education of the female. When she returns, she tells me she met an American girl studying there who told her that there is no need to make rules regulating the walking together of male and female students. Almost all the female students are presumed to be future governesses or teachers, and any male student would rather throw himself into the Cam than be guilty of the bad form of walking with any one of them.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

95 I
RVING
S
T
., C
AMBRIDGE

S
EPTEMBER
18
TH
1890

T
O
H
ENRY
J
AMES

My book appeared two days since, and I've ordered the publishers to send a copy to you.

Most of it is unreadable & too long to sell well I'm afraid. Tell Alice I don't burden her with a copy unless she expressly requests it, as I think the sight of it is more fitted to depress her than to cheer her up.

Reviews of
The Principles of Psychology

It is literature. It is beautiful, but it is not psychology.

—Wilhelm Wundt

. . . . shows that there is no body of doctrines, held by all competent men, that can be set down in a book and called Psychology. . . . [A] work of the imagination.

—George Santayana

The author is a veritable storm-bird, fascinated by problems most impossible of solution. . . . [T]he most complete piece of self-evisceration since Marie Bashkertseff.

—G. Stanley Hall

. . . materialist to the core . . .

—Charles Peirce

FIVE
FIVE

“L
ISTEN TO THIS
, K
ATHERINE
. H
ERE IS A WOMAN WHO CAN ONLY
see in black and white!” I am reading aloud parts of an essay by William, “The Hidden Self,” which has just been published in
Scribner's
. “Imagine! And here's a girl who split into three different people. They come out in the hypnotic trance state, apparently. Lucie One has no awareness of Lucies Two or Three, but Lucie Three does know of Lucies One and Two. It boggles the mind, doesn't it?”

“What do you mean, she
became
three people?”

“Apparently she harbored three separate minds, or personalities, inside her. What do you suppose that would
feel
like?”

“Complicated.” A pregnant pause. “If you
believe
it.”

“What? You don't?”

“Have
you
ever met anyone like that? In real life?”

“Well, if you mean on
Beacon Street,
Katherine, then no, things of that nature could
never
happen. Certainly not on the water side.”

She laughs delightfully. The Lorings live on the water side, the even numbers. When you visit people on the water side of Beacon, they always insist on making you admire the view, no matter how many millions of times you've seen it before. As if the Charles River and the mudflats of Charlestown were the Taj Mahal.

William's essay is a discussion of this Dr. Janet, of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who uses hypnotism to read the minds of hysterical people (as far as I can make out). After William returned from his Congress, he put off working on his textbook for several months by
reading Janet's tome and boiling it down to this essay. Although sending it to me is doubtless part of his diabolical plot to cure me of my “hysteria,” I am finding it more interesting than I expected. Katherine takes a dimmer view.

“Kindly suspend your disbelief for a moment, Katherine. The situation with Lucie—that's the girl with three personalities—”

“Do you think that's her real name?”

“Probably not. Anyhow, whenever this Lucie stopped conversing directly with someone, she could no longer see or hear the person. The person to whom she'd been talking simply vanished.”

“Some people are like that. Take your Miss Percy. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Not exactly, but you have a point. Monsieur Janet says this sort of thing is proof of—what does he call it?—
the narrowed and contracted nature of the hysterical mind
. Do you find my mind narrow and contracted, Kath?”

“No, quite the opposite. The French are so
odd
, aren't they?”

“They are, and if you want another example: There was a young woman who could feel neither pain nor touch, and when Dr. Janet brought this to her attention, she said, ‘
C'est tout naturel,
as long as I don't see them; everyone is like that.' Don't you love that, ‘
C'est tout naturel'
? So French, believing in their rationality, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

“Exactly! Like the Parisian cab drivers.”

She doesn't need to explain. Katherine's frugalities are legendary, and in Paris her tips to cab men are frequently flung into the road amidst a torrent of French abuse, whereupon K. goes around calmly picking up
centimes
and putting them back into her reticule. This serves to further inflame the driver, and in this manner vivid French curses have been added to her vocabulary. How I wish I could witness this in person. Maybe if I improve through some miracle—oh, stop, Alice! Sometimes hope tries to creep in, but I am determined to weed it out mercilessly. There are such beautiful open spaces beyond hope and fear, and that is where I want to plant my flag.

“How exactly does this Monsieur Janet put people in trance, anyway?”

“It says here he uses ‘the orthodox magnetic method of passes made over the face and body.'” I pass my fluttering hand slowly down the length of Katherine's face and torso and intone in a vaguely Slavic accent. “You are becoming v-e-r-y sleepy!'”

Katherine stops to count her stitches, then says, “Fanny Morse tells me that whenever William attends a party, half the guests end up on the carpet, hypnotized.”

“Oh, he's been doing that since we were children and saw a stage mesmerist perform in London. William writes here that, when they are in trance, hysterics regain the ability to feel, or see in color, or whatever they were missing—but just for a while. Afterwards, they lapse back into the same old story. And they forget in the waking state what happened to them in trance. I suppose William must think I go into trances all the time.”

Another pregnant pause from Katherine. “I wonder, Alice. Do you think it really profits a person to remember
everything
? Perhaps it is better to adopt Emily's attitude toward history and ‘let bygones be bygones.'”

One of our pastimes is to plan an imaginary trip to Paris together, a sort of honeymoon. It is unlikely I'd survive a Channel crossing, but that does not stop us from embroidering all sorts of Parisian details: an old hotel with gargoyles and an ancient grumpy concierge who speaks to us without looking up from the smudged register on her desk, café au lait and croissants in bed in the morning. We enjoy brushing imaginary crumbs off our duvet and laughing about our concierge, who persists in believing we are Germans and wishes us
Guten tag
every morning.

And then my bell rings, and sweet, vaporous Miss Leppington comes in with a pair of Mind Cure ladies. One is a lean American widow who was once treated by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy herself and is stunned to hear that we, being from Boston, have never encountered this great divine. I attempt and fail to elevate the tone of the conversation by quoting from William's article. After some moments of reflection, the American says to the Englishwoman, “You call it hypnotism;
we
call it the Science.”

“But,” says the Englishwoman, a dowager of the woolen type, “it must be very dangerous to manipulate such a delicate organ as the brain.”

“Oh, but they mold the brain so wonderfully now,” says the Yankee, resting her chin lightly on her steepled hands. A thin thread of saliva is suspended between an upper tooth and her lower lip. It moves up and down as she talks. I keep waiting for it to break, but it bravely hangs on.

Meanwhile, K. is trying fruitlessly to explain that hypnotism is not the same as massage.

“
How
is it done?” asks the British dowager. “Through the skull, by some marvelous instrument, I suppose? And the weighing of the brain is so wonderful. How do they
do
that?”

Later, Katherine tells me that Miss Leppington whispered to her on the stairs, “I am so glad to see Miss James looking better. There is less going away of her face in weariness and pain.”

“
Going away
of my face?”

Katherine shrugs and makes one of her funny faces.

“By the way, did you notice the thread of saliva on the American woman's tooth? Strung between bottom lip and upper incisor, bobbing up and down whenever she talked.”

“My, Alice, you are sharp-eyed in your way.”

“When that happens, it is all I can think about. I was all but overcome by a desire to reach out and break the thread.”

“I'm so glad you refrained.”

Several days later, a grievous neuralgia complicated by an infected molar obliges me to assume the horizontal. Katherine stays by my side all day, reading from
Kidnapped,
by Henry's friend Mr. Stevenson. Then she reads aloud from the
Standard
, from which we learn that Henry Morton Stanley is engaged. Who would wed such a creature? And the clericule is
married
! To secure possession of this rare and precious creature, the paper informs us, the bride was obliged to employ five clergymen and four yards of train.

When my toothache blooms into great shivering whacks of pain, Katherine brings in a Mind Curess called Susan, who bids me shut my eyes and say over and over to myself, “I am a child of God and as such pure, perfect, and without flaw.” Afterwards she tells me I am too
intellectual and “barricaded by my intellectual friends.” Two days later, a dentist is summoned to my bower. The pulling of the tooth is curious and interesting like a little lifetime. First the long drawn-out drag, then the twist of the hand and the crack of doom. Afterwards the dentist seizes my face in both his hands, and says, “Bravo, Miss James!”

Having taken a bit of laudanum for the pain, I doze afterwards and have a queer dream. Aunt Kate and I are on the ferry to Dover, crossing the English Channel. The sea is very rough, and the sky ahead is black and ominous. I feel a tremor of foreboding.

“Bad weather ahead,” I say.

“Don't give it a thought. The Captain will bring us into port. He is immensely skilled.”

My aunt beckons me closer and opens the heart-shaped locket she wears around her neck. Inside is a small cameo of Dr. Munro. “He has been my darling since—well, you know. It will be our secret, dear, like your Sapphic romps. How is Sara, by the way?”

“I didn't realize you knew.”

“I have always been able to see
through
you, dear. Just as if you were wearing a sheer muslin dress with no petticoat.”

“But aren't you dead, Aunt Kate? Didn't I read about you in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
?”

“No one really dies, Alice, so long as others take the trouble to remember us. I'd be grateful if you'd water my grave with your tears from time to time
. Godey's
says it can be helpful to the afterlife.”

I wake up to a beatific vision of K. removing streaks of grime from the wallpaper with a speck of India rubber. I love the fact that she is a purely transatlantic and modern personality, cleansed of all the receptive vagueness of the traditional female. (I am obliged to note that while transcribing this little phrase into my diary, she gives vent to a self-deprecating
psshh
.)

Katherine says she loves watching me wake up. For a few minutes, according to her, I have a lost expression, as if I had just arrived from a kingdom over the sea.

“I
am
from a land over the sea.”

***

While she is here, I resolve to get my will redone and arrange for my cremation. “It may seem silly, but it will ease my mind to have these details settled. We only die once.” I had been discouraged about cremation, having heard from Miss Percy that it was very fussy and expensive. But Katherine makes inquiries and finds that it is only six guineas and one extra for a parson.

“That's very reasonable, is it not?”

“I think so. Would you like to be scattered at sea, darling?”

“Ye gods! Poor sailor that I am! Dry land for me, please.”

So it is settled that my ashes are to be placed in some sort of receptacle and sent home, not as a parlor ornament for William's house but to be buried beside Father and Mother in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. “So that we shall not be myths, as Harry suggests we might otherwise become,” I say.

Next, we move on to the afterlife of my money and possessions. I tell Katherine I wish to redo my will, leaving out all who have offended me since my last. (If you want to know, I shall leave a third of my estate to William, a third to Henry, and a third to Katherine. Bob, married to a rich man's daughter, does not require anything from me.) Katherine writes to the American Consul in Birmingham, who informs her that the documents must be signed in his presence. Since I am incapable of traveling, the Consul will condescend to travel to me. Apparently there is a need for witnesses who can vouch that I am Alice James and not an imposter, and it is best if they are from Boston. K enlists Elizabeth Putnam, sister of Jim and Charley, who is presently traveling through Banbury. Then there is Katherine, and we call in Miss Leppington, who is British, but how many Americans can you round up in the Midlands on short notice?

On the appointed day the consul arrives, a lean, leathery man from one of our western states who informs us with considerable
gravitas
that he was appointed to his post by the President. Indeed he'd only “accepted the Birmingham place as a special favor to President Harrison.” I refrain from telling him that my brother and I were deeply stricken by President Harrison's election and I devoted an entire night to tears.

Faced with the consul's august presence, I “go off” almost as soon as he arrives and take to my bed, spending most of the time in a half-faint. As through a mist I make out five black figures filing into my bower. The consul, all gesticulation and grimace, plants himself at the foot of my bed and while stroking my knee begins a long harangue to the effect that he and his wife “had both laid upon a bed of sickness.” This is meant to cheer me, I think. He invokes the president again, implying that they are never far from each other's thoughts.

K informs me later that Nurse, positioned at my head, was wearing her most devoted nurse expression throughout. And the mild Miss Leppington told K afterwards, “The scene will remain in my thought as one of the most pathetic I ever saw and in my imagination as the most picturesque and American!”

“So now,” I tell K after the solemn ceremony, “I am packed up and ready to go! I feel a little like George Sand, who writes a long letter to a friend telling him why she is going to commit suicide and says to be sure and have her two mattresses corded.”