Alice in Bed (43 page)

“I'm sure they'll turn up.”

“Perhaps I did say something of the sort. Everything felt wrong then, William. The way your father turned his face to the wall and willed himself to die, casually deserting his children. Poor Alice, above all. In his last weeks she seemed to have completely left his mind. He never spoke of her and when she appeared he treated her like a stranger.
It was shocking and terribly sad. Anyway, as you know, I changed my mind about Alice and Katherine. I am glad they had each other.”

“Poor little Sister Alice!”

“Remember how she used to
glare
at me as if she could will me to vanish?”

“I am glad she was unsuccessful.”

“It took me years to forgive her for ruining our wedding. I can still see your poor parents, barely managing to smile. It made our wedding a hurried and furtive affair. Not until we were on the train to New York did I grasp that we were really married.”

“Sister Alice felt everything acutely and could not put her emotions in perspective. She would go into terrible rages sometimes.”

“So a bit like you, darling?”

“I thought you would say that.”

With a hairpin in her mouth, Alice says, “That Miss Stein is an unusual girl. No corset, that was obvious, and as she went out the door she was wearing a hideous straw bonnet with a soiled blue ribbon. In March!”

“She always wears that. She doesn't pay attention to fashion.”

“You and your strays, William! But I liked Miss Stein. There is something about her.”

“Depend on it, dear. Gertrude Stein will go far!”

The diary was not Sister Alice's first postmortem appearance. Some nine months after her death, she “came through” Mrs. Piper. This occurred during one of Bob James's sittings with the psychic in Boston and he wrote up an account, copies of which were circulated to his siblings, children, estranged wife, various friends and acquaintances, spiritualists, and other interested parties. It did not escape William's notice that Bob's problems were the central focus of the communication.

NOTES ON A SITTING WITH MRS. PIPER

December 28, 1893

At the sitting Father, Mother, Alice, and Wilky were said to be present. Alice comes and wishes to know if I am present and then says they
are all in trouble about me and that if they could take me out of my surroundings they would, but that they cannot do. They have been in trouble about me for a good while, that Father is never absent from me, that he is in reality my guiding and guardian spirit. Alice wants to know if my resentment about her will still exists, to which I assure her it does not. When I said to Alice, “How is it you speak now, whereas you on Earth threw discredit upon spiritualism and didn't believe it was possible or wise for the dead to talk with those who were on Earth?” She answered, “We all think differently now. You must not think of us as we were but as we are. Father, Mother, Wilky, and I are always together. We will try and impress Mary in her sleep.” Phinuit predicts, “Some fine morning you will have a peculiar feeling and then you will see a ball of light and out of it your father will come just as you knew him in life.”

William sighs. How dreary the dead are, how inarticulate, dull and blundering—in the séance room, at any rate. While he still champions Mrs. Piper, and absolutely believes she is not a fraud, it is a fact that most messages from the beyond are astonishingly banal. “The photograph . . . which sat on the mantel . . . is now in the spare bedroom. It needs dusting.” A man returns from the dead and has nothing better than this to say to his wife?

He thinks,
If that is my sister, I'll eat my hat
. Sister Alice would never become invested in Bob's train-wreck of a marriage or devote all her postmortem efforts to sorting it out. Nor would she have consented to be channeled by Mrs. Piper in the first place.

Bob is presently in the Danville Sanatorium (again), drying out, and thus for the present unable to trouble the departed. He does trouble the living, however, and frequent screeds have been arriving by mail.

William wanted to invite Bob as a guest speaker in his Philosophy 20b seminar, on mental pathology. The course began with hysteria, and proceeded through double personality, trance states, the history of witchcraft, the classic types of insanity, and the criminological literature. “Beyond—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
below
—the separate islands of consciousness we call our minds lies the infinite, the Mother Sea,” William told his class. This much he has learned from
his self-experimentation with drugs and from interviewing ordinary people who have had mystical experiences.

Apart from his induced coma at Somerville, he has never had a full-fledged mystical experience and keeps hoping. Nitrous oxide comes closest. As he told his class recently, at the institution formerly known as the Annex and recently incorporated as Radcliffe College, “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed. The truth fades out, however, at the moment of coming to.” In the sober light of day his utterances, written down by his wife, never fail to sound silly. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists.

Bob's letters from Danville are monuments of self-absorption and self-sabotage. William believes his students could learn more about systematic delusions from one hour of Bob than from days of some alienist prattling about his theories.

“You
can't
, William!” Alice had told him.

“Why not?”

“You can't put your insane brother on display at Harvard. They think you're half mad already.”

“Really? Do they say that?” He is amused by the periodic rumors of his madness, Alice less so. In the end he listened to his wife, the wisest person he knows, and arranged to treat his students to a tour of the Worcester Lunatic Asylum instead.

Soon after the box containing Alice's ashes arrived—brought over the ocean by the faithful Miss Loring, along with (as they would learn later) the two notebooks containing Alice's diary. William shook out the contents of the box onto the pages of the
Boston Evening Transcript
and sat contemplating a pile of fine grey powder laced with hard bony bits. It was impossible to conceive of this mound of grit as Alice. Maybe the crematorium sweeps out a handful of ashes from numberless carbonized bodies, sprinkles some into an urn, and says, “Here's your loved one.” But it makes no difference because it is not Alice.

The box sat on a shelf in his study, where it remained until the marble gravestone he ordered in Florence arrived.

He chose the epitaph from Dante. When he saw it chiseled in stone, he broke down—in gratitude for his sister's final release, in grief that she was gone. Henry wrote him that the inscription was so right that
it was as if one sunk down on one's knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache.

He and Alice took the urn containing the ashes to the family plot in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Harry, Billy, and Peggy came along and were uncharacteristically quiet and solemn. He had not pictured how hard the ground would be in December, and barely managed to scrape out a hole, while the snow fell around them. The flakes floated slowly through the air and made a downy quilt on the ground. The far shore of the river was curtained in mist, and the boughs of the hemlock branches bowed under their dollops of white frosting. There was a sense of holy presence, as Alice deserved.

“Is Aunt Alice sorry she never met me?” Peggy asked.

“I am sure she is, dear,” her mother said.

We are trees whose roots grow deep and intertwine in the dark, William thought. Life is a passing dream, and then we enter into our deeper life. To Sister Alice, as to Father, death seemed truer, more complete, than life. One thing he knows: Normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted by the flimsiest of screens, lie forms of consciousness altogether different.

That night, William falls asleep and sleeps soundly for an hour, then awakes, lucid and alert. He knows there is no chance of going back to sleep. This is probably the beginning of a period of exaltation—one of his “jiggle” states, as Alice calls them, when he is full of electric energy and his leg jiggles nearly constantly. Eventually he will feel as if he'd ridden a roller-coaster fifty times in a row, but right now life is murmuring to him, communicating its intricately woven patterns. With his fingertips tingling and his heart on fire, he pads downstairs in his carpet slippers and sits in silence in the dreaming house. His father's portrait (by Francis Boott) regards him levelly, almost sternly, as if to say, “What are you afraid of?”

It is chilly in his study, and he makes a fire. Then he unlocks the desk drawer, and pulls out Alice's typewritten diary, surprised by its thinness. Sitting in his favorite armchair, he reads. The first entries are tentative, almost apologetic. Then she seems to gain traction and the power of her mind kicks in. As he reads on, he has an impression, almost palpable, of being inside his sister's head, reading about the Parnell case in the newspapers, talking to Nurse about the Bachellers and Brookses, receiving a visit from a couple of Mind Cure crones. Being inside her mind is an intimate thing, and he is moved in ways he cannot put into words.

Soon he is reading ravenously. About the drunk and reckless “chair-man” who nearly dumped Alice out of her bath chair into a pasture. About the new baby who was an “excrescence” upon its sister's body. About Henry Morton Stanley's activities as reported in the newspaper. The oleaginous “clericule.” Nurse's and Miss Clarke's views of life. Miss Leppington, Miss Percy, the identical twin sisters who say, “We have such a headache.” Henry's visits and his gossip. Miss Loring coming and going. Ireland and Home Rule. The follies of England's “tinsel monarchy.” The American consul from Birmingham who had “laid upon a bed of sickness.” The crushing poverty of the masses and the haughty insouciance of the rich.

Here is Alice's sharp tongue, her sarcasm, the hilarious epithets she invented for the Great Men and others she scorned. But, above all, he is struck by passages of deep discernment and insight. She had so little to feed on, and so much loneliness and pain, yet her diary has a fierce beauty that makes him think of fantastic spiny plants abloom in the desert. He finds his name scattered throughout. He is quoted on various topics, his wit contrasted to Miss Clarke's lack of same, his children's memorable quotations noted, and, of course, he appears in
the somewhat devastating episode of July 18 when Henry presented himself doubled by William.
Of his next appearance, after the Physiological Congress, she writes,
William is simply himself, a creature who speaks in another language as Henry says from the rest of mankind and who would lend life and charm to a treadmill.

His little sister's love for him, despite his being so often a clumsy, judgmental, insensitive clod, brings tears to his eyes. She thought of him far more frequently than he thought of her. He and Alice and
the children were always on her mind; any scrap of information confided in a letter lived a second life through her. And Henry's visits are described like the visitations of a prince; everything he tells her takes up residence in her mind.

It is painful to read that she considered herself a “Barnum monstrosity” and that after Henry left her side,
I could cry for hours after he goes, if I could allow myself such luxuries, but tears are undiluted poison.
Recalling her loneliness after Father's death, she wrote of

those ghastly days when I longed to flee to the firemen next door and to escape from the ‘Alone, Alone' that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered through the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments as they turned themselves from today into tomorrow.

He and Alice should have reached out to her! Why hadn't they? She could have moved in with them for a while. At the time he thought that Katherine Loring was the only person she wanted near her. Aunt Kate had assumed that she and Alice would form a household together, but Alice would have none of it. In tears, Aunt Kate complained to him that Katherine was poisoning Alice's mind, that she had a “Svengali-like effect” on her.

Now that he considers it, Sister Alice probably would not have felt comfortable living in a nest of Gibbenses.

He takes in, deeply now, how it was to be the youngest in the James family and the only girl—alternately doted on, overlooked, petted, taken for granted, stifled, sacrificed to others. At the mercy of four teasing older brothers, subject to the iron rule of Mother and Aunt Kate, on the one hand, and the impenetrable conundrums of Father's Ideas on the other. To possess her gifts and be told that the only way to be a successful female was to be sunny, self-denying, and receptive. (He, too, once believed that females were intended to be lovely, selfless angels devoted to the happiness of men, but he has been capable of change, thank heavens.)

He comes to the terrible summer of 1878, which Alice refers to as
the time when I went down to the dark sea, its dark waters closed
over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace
. The summer of his wedding. Alice's rudeness toward his fiancée made him want to wring her neck but at times, catching sight of her pale, haunted face, he would feel overwhelmingly sorry for her. He had an obscure sense of having wronged her. As if he'd abandoned her somehow. Deep waters there. Screams in the night. Mother, Father, and Aunt Kate taking turns sitting up with her. The way she looked at him as if she would reel him in with her drowning eyes. It was, as their mother put it, “a genuine case of hysteria.” Was it? And what
is
hysteria
au fond
?

So many things he does not understand. Why did she decide in early adolescence to
clothe myself in neutral tints and walk beside still waters
? What prompted her urge to
knock off the head of the benignant pater
? What did she mean when she wrote,
How thankful I am that I never struggled to be one of those ‘who are not as other ones are,' but that I discovered at the earliest moment that my talent lay in being more so
?