Alice in Bed (39 page)

“Little Alice,” he says gently, “you ought to let your hair down, you know, or you'll turn into a prune like your mother and Aunt Tweedy.
I'll wager you are a good little daughter, the best little girl in the world. But the world is full of good vanilla pudding daughters who turn into good vanilla pudding wives. There is nothing in it, nothing at all.”

He sits waiting and smoking, the smoke unfurling into the wide sky. “May I share a little secret with you, Cousin Alice? A secret between kissing cousins? More than once I have seen Uncle having his way with Aunt. I wish you could have been there. It made me think of the barnyard, jiggling rumps, squeals, grunts and ruffled feathers. Who'd have thought the old people had it in them?” He smiles lazily.

What does he mean? Why is he remaining behind to talk to
me
, anyway? He sits gazing at me for a long time, too long. I try not to look at his thing, a pale rodent in a tangle of black hair. I shut my eyes and feel invisible, like a small child. The sun beats down and the sweat stings my scalp and face. From the Abyss come shrieks of merriment.

I try to think myself back to the verandah at Kay Street, reading magazines while Mother and Aunt Kate sew or embroider. I must have “gone off” again, because the next thing I know, Bob is sitting next to me, his arm thrown fraternally over my shoulder. “How about your parents, Alice? Is there a peephole in their bedroom? There is usually a peephole somewhere if you look well.”

“I don't think so.” My eyes blur. I want to go home but I can't move. It is like a dream in which you are paralyzed by inaction and words run together and blur and the more you try to get out of the muddle you're in, the deeper you sink into it. A cloud passes over the sun. I shiver, goose-bumps on my skin. Bob is carefully unbuttoning the buttons of my dress. Says he is not a lady's maid, I could help a little. I say, “What?”

His eyes squint at me. He takes my face in his large hands, forcing me to turn toward him. His eyes are obsidian—
a basilisk gaze
, I will think years later, hypnotizing me, pulling me down toward the center of the earth. Suddenly, I grasp why he sought me out: He wields absolute power over me. He is drunk on it; some people are like that. His tongue is prying my lips apart, and my mouth is thick with the yeasty, smoky taste of him, his hot breath. I don't know what to do or think. “You
are
a nervous Nelly, aren't you? If it's about your little flower, cousin, don't worry. I won't take that.” His hands are busying themselves inside my clothes,
and then I am on my back staring at the sky and the wind lifts my skirt and my petticoats and Bob says, as if from far away. “Be nice, Alice.” His voice is rasping and needy, like a giant baby.

His hand is cupped over my mouth, his sweat drips onto my face and eyes, stinging my skin. Glare in my eyes; I shut them. Something is happening, it has been happening for some time, miles away. A tree trunk pinning me down, my tailbone grinding against rock. Perhaps I am caught under a hemlock limb? Can't move. Should I scream? If I called for help, the wind and surf would drown me out.

Moans and a sort of growling, then for a long while nothing, just sky and hot sun and metallic gleam of sea. I hear the cries of gulls and the breeze in the pines, and possibly an animal grunting, nuzzling at my thighs with its snout.

For how long do I “go off”? When I open my eyes next, there is the wide sky, and a tall cumulous cloud that passes, stately as a galleon, and floats off. I cannot feel my legs and wonder if I am dead. I close my eyes and try to feel my way back into my body, into my limbs, bones, skin, and muscles, but I lose myself again. And then Wilky's face hovers above me. “Alice! What are you doing? You'll get sunstroke.”

I see the goodness shining from my third brother's face; he appears to me an angel, without sin or guile. Tenderly, he helps me sit up. I feel very old. I see the sea with its rim of white foam, I see the sky, the wheeling gulls, the low bluffs in the distance, the horizon. None of it has any connection with me. Bob Temple has vanished; perhaps he never was there.

I wish I knew what is real and what is not. I
thought
something happened but it may have been a dream. My dress is buttoned all the way to the neck, all the mother-of-pearl buttons fastened, and the faun, the creature, with its hot panting animal breath, is gone. After helping me to my feet, Wilky leads me down the lane, past the wooden houses with green shutters and the painted wooden palings. The squeals and shouts of my brothers and cousins down in the Abyss fade away. My legs are wobbly. A dog barks, a woman in a white frock waves from a pony phaeton, a baby wails out of sight. I tell no one what happened. How should I? I don't understand it.

SEVEN
SEVEN

I
F
I
WERE GRANTED THREE WISHES,
I
WOULD SPEND ALL THREE
on making Bob Temple go away or (preferably) die. I do not ever want to see him, his eyes drilling into me. My cousins and brothers go blueberry picking, riding, sailing; they take sea-baths, collect shells, visit the library, walk to the village green in the evening to listen to the band. I tell Mother I am unwell and stay home. I flip through the pages of
Godey's Lady's Book
in the misty mornings and the sparkling afternoons, lying on my stomach on the verandah, bits and pieces of advice sticking to my brain at random.

English waterproofs are all the rage now in Paris and consequently are rapidly gaining favor here.

The earth has been made fruitful, subdued, and embellished by man alone. The ground is tilled by men. The cities are built by men. Nor is there the slightest indication either in Nature or in Revelation, that the work was intended for Woman.

Perhaps because Woman is not a builder or a tiller, the editresses staunchly oppose female suffrage, although they are very keen on the higher education of the fair sex.

Humility leads to the highest distinction because it leads to self-improvement, Study your own character, endeavor to learn and supply your own deficiencies.

The others get used to my being unwell and stop expecting me to join their outings. Aunt Kate shoots me worried glances. I ought to be out in the fresh air, she says, I am looking peaky. In the clarity of vision brought on by misfortune, I have noticed something about my mother and aunt. In middle age, their mouths turn down at the corners, as if frozen in permanent frowns of disappointment. I wonder why, as they are both cheerful, optimistic people. I see them differently suddenly. Has life etched on their faces a dissatisfaction of which they themselves are unaware? Aunt Kate's eyes brim with sadness when she is not being busy and cheerful. Is their habitual cheerfulness a form of resignation? Is that what it is to be a woman?

We women have a world of our own, in which we reign supreme. It is the Kingdom of Home. To teach, to console, to elevate, to train in all goodness and nobleness, to concentrate around ourselves the purest and most intense joys.

Since teaching, consoling, and elevating do not fall within my scope, I don't see how I will ever attain successful womanhood. As for “the purest and most intense joys,” what do the editresses have in mind? From day to day I watch life pass through veils of helplessness. My brothers are growing brown as summer progresses. Wilky's hair is bleached the color of straw. They all go barefoot, as do the Temple girls. Their feet will turn into hooves, says Aunt Kate, who frequently refers to the girls, half critically, half affectionately, as “wild Indians.”

Home is a sort of Heaven on earth and occupies the same relation to the world that the Sabbath does to the rest of the week.

Every day dawns with a gnawing in the pit of my stomach. My skin is clammy, my throat parched, my heart races. I try to blot out the horrid dreams I have been having every night. I will have to see Bob Temple someday; it cannot be avoided. There is something wrong with me. I feel it inside me, a strangeness, an otherness, growing like a tumor.

One morning I wake up to find blood on my nightdress and bed-sheets. For a moment I think I have been stabbed in my sleep; then I remember the pamphlet Mother gave me a few months ago, informing me that, whether you are a scullery maid or a queen, Nature requires you to bleed for days; that all women walk around with this incurable wound, which has something to do with Eve's disobedience. And it is so much worse than I imagined! Mother and Aunt Kate congratulate me, but I am mortified and see nothing to celebrate. The long dresses and corsets that make running and climbing difficult, when it was easy before? That my legs must be called
limbs
and hidden away, as if I harbored something scaly and fishlike under my skirt? That I must bury my true self under a mask of cheerful servitude?

Why cheer the sorrows of womankind?

One day Bob Temple appears in our parlor with several of his sisters. There is no time to escape. I press my back against the wall and wait in dread like a fly caught in a spider's web. But Bob pays no attention to me except to say, in a bored tone, “Hi, Alice.” No secret smirk, no spark of interest, nothing. What happened on the rocks must have been a kind of dream. I decide to forget the whole thing and go on as before.

But it is not so easy to find my way back to “before.” There is a strange laxness in my knee joints. My legs quaver as if they were made of custard. Since my legs always worked properly in the past, I wonder if this has something to do with puberty, which is shocking me daily with new and startling manifestations. It covers me with shame and sets me apart from my brothers. One evening Father is ranting about the vileness of a memoir written by a Frenchwoman. The look he casts in my direction makes me feel that I, too, am in some obscure way covered with filth, or might become so shortly.

Mother, meanwhile, attempts to prepare me for my future as a woman with random pearls of wisdom drawn from her experience. “Marriage requires adjustment in the beginning,” she will say. “The wife needs to cultivate patience, knowing that a man's animal spirits may impel him toward all sorts of dangerous situations.” I briefly wonder what dangers Father rushed into in his youth. In my own case, none
of Mother's advice is helpful. But there is nothing for it but to try to embrace the awful mysteries of femininity and accept that my Realm is Home and my Fate to Do for Others. My parents pretend (and may actually believe) that I am a household angel, but I know better. To be a proper woman I shall have to kill my spirit.

The Emerson children come to visit toward the end of August, and Ellen and Edith remark on how grown-up I have become; they hardly recognize me. Edward Emerson is shaken by the ferocity with which our family argues at the dinner table. I'd always thought it perfectly normal for members of a family to launch
ad hoc
rants, spew colorful insults, stand on their chairs to make a point in a debate, waving knives and forks at each other in a cutthroat manner. “Don't worry, Edward,” Mother says, “The boys always do this. They won't stab anyone.” Father encourages his sons to argue; he
wants
them to rebel, and keeps poking at William, especially, to train him to be a credible philosophical adversary. But it is taken for granted that I am meant to be a “comfort” to my parents. My views on any question are rarely solicited, and I almost never speak up at table.

With Ellen and Edith Emerson, who are years older, I visit wounded soldiers in a hospital tent in Portsmouth. We are supposed to cheer the boys up by making charming conversation and distributing magazines, handkerchiefs, and warm socks. I don't know what I was expecting but it was not this. Empty sleeves, bloody bandages over faces, flies buzzing everywhere, terrible smells, a suffocating atmosphere of pain, fear, and horror. I kneel next to a cot and try to make conversation with a boy who looks no more than sixteen. He tries to respond to my question about where he is from, but he is missing much of his jaw. I can see his tongue through a hole in his cheek. Hell is real, after all. I don't see how cheerful conversation or a magazine will remedy this situation. While Ellen and Edith go about being angels of mercy, I have to run outside and sit heaving under a tree until I get my breath.

Toward the end of August Bob Temple is seen walking out at twilight with the Grissoms' hired girl, and then we learn that the Grissoms have forbidden her to walk out with him. A week later their terrier is
mysteriously dead, bleeding from the mouth. A few weeks later, Bob vanishes, and Father says he has gone to New York State. He says that Bob is an “operator and a swindler” and will end up in prison. (Some years later, Bob Temple
will
go to prison, for swindling; he will write pathetic letters to his aunt and uncle Tweedy, which they won't answer.)

Here, on my desert isle in the English Midlands, it all comes rushing back: Bob Temple's scorn for “the Hatter,” as he always referred to Uncle Tweedy. How much we had to hear in those days about the Temples' famous “pride” and “spirit” and “aristocracy.” Harry, especially, was star-struck by their blood ties to a distinguished Temple family in England, or perhaps Ireland, but none of this prevented their living at the expense of anyone who took on the job of providing for them.

Our house on Kay Street has a steep staircase, with treads of varnished oak. I stand at the top and imagine my body tumbling, my neck neatly snapped at the bottom. When I do fall, it happens so fast I am not sure how it started. I land badly bruised, but no bones are broken; the bruises start out the color of a storm-cloud and fade to greenish yellow.

“Alice thinks she can walk on air,” someone jokes.

One evening Mrs. Tappan (who rents a house in Newport most summers) is reading our fortunes with the Egyptian tarot. I close my eyes and draw a card. It is the eight of swords, a despondent female figure with her face buried in her hands, weeping. Mrs. Tappan tries to tell me it is not bad, but then why is the lady crying and lamenting? All the portents are wrong now.

That night, as I am undressing for bed and brushing out my hair, I hear Mother, Aunt Kate, Mrs. Tappan, and Aunt Mary Tweedy playing cards in the parlor. Outside my window a warm rain is falling. Mother's voice has the hushed, solemn tone she reserves for Female Matters, but most of her words are drowned out by the rain. When the rain subsides a little, I hear Mrs. Tappan say, “brutally violated on her wedding night.” What is “violated”? Whatever it is, it happened to a woman Mrs. Tappan knows, in the private car of a train.

“How were they able to go forward with their wedding trip?” I hear Aunt Kate ask.

“I suppose they came to some arrangement,” Mrs. Tappan says, in her omniscient way, adding that, years later, the couple is still living together in Washington. The husband is a powerful senator, and they have a daughter. After the child was born, the husband lost all interest in the wife and turned his attentions elsewhere. The wife, much relieved, told Mrs. Tappan, “What a luxury it is to have possession of my own body.”

Never having imagined that it was possible
not
to possess my own body, I am horrified by this tale. A great war is being waged over slavery now. Father believes the abolition of slavery will usher in a more blessed society, but a woman who marries the wrong man can end up as a sort of slave and there is little she can do about it, apparently.

Mother says something else, which is blotted out by the rumble of thunder outside.

Then I hear Mrs. Tappan say, “The only power a woman can have is to live by her wits and manage her husband.” Apparently, Mrs. Tappan manages hers very well; he is rarely seen with her.

In September, William leaves us to study natural history and chemistry at Harvard, and his long letters home are laced with homesickness and funny anecdotes. Father always opposed college for the boys, claiming it would corrupt their innocence and implant other people's dead ideas in their minds. But he wants William to be a scientist and for this it is necessary to attend the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. I am stunned that my parents have consented to this rent in the family fabric, for up till now we have been like a small, isolated clan living in a remote place, with our own specialized vocabulary and
Weltanschauung
(a word William taught the rest of us).

The Cambridge life Will describes sounds as exotic as Lapland to us, and he enjoys shocking the family with the curiosities of science.

It will probably be a shock for Mother to learn I yesterday destroyed a handkerchief—but it was an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather brown is very good.

Perhaps I am a bit of a seeress after all, for even that far back I had a melancholy glimpse of the future: all my brothers gone and I alone left in an empty, echoing house to “be a comfort” to my parents.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

11 H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE,
L
EAMINGTON

A
UGUST
14
TH
1891

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

Alice has relapsed and collapsed a good deal. She is too ill to be left; & the difficult question of doctors (owing to A's extreme dread of them) & her absolute inability to take tonic doses, drugs &c;—they put her in a fearful nervous state—remains. Her little “improvements” now discourage her more than the relapses; she wants to have done with it all, to sink continuously. At any rate, KPL will not leave her while she is in the present condition. She said it would be “inhumane.”