Alice in Bed (9 page)

“Don't be silly, Fanny.” William always wrote these sorts of letters.

As the eldest in the family, William was forever dispensing advice to the rest of us, although he himself often appeared to be the one most in need of advice. In another letter he wrote:

Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential, let her face beam with serious beauty, & glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a
soul with wings, as it were (but very short ones) and let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, & you have no idea how lovely she will become.

“Very short wings!” I grumbled to Harry. “Like a mosquito, I suppose.”

Harry laughed. “I believe William has just described his ideal woman.” In fact, I had been quietly monitoring William's crushes from afar and had recently written him that Fraulein Schmidt, of whom he had written a bit too warmly, must be a bold-faced jay.

A week before their sailing date, the Nortons hosted a “last supper” to bid farewell to their friends. After dinner, everyone gathered on the piazza while Charles pontificated and Grace gazed starry-eyed at him. It was clear that the Norton sisters were on a crusade to correspond with every great (masculine) intellect in Boston and Cambridge, and were steadily extending their range to England. They considered themselves muses to men, if not scholars in their own right, and were equipped with a mysterious sense of a man's future greatness (which Sara speculated was an instinct similar to the navigation of migratory birds). Grace and Jane Norton did not have the slightest use for their own sex.

From the piazza, situated on the rise of a hill, we looked east, beyond the azaleas, to the tidal flats of the Charles. It was a magnificent view, changing color with the time of day, slowly fading through sunset tints of tangerine or salmon pink, through violet, mauve and indigo, to black. After sunset that night, there was no moon, and the only source of light was a smoking oil lamp at one end of the table. Sara and I were sitting at the other end, in darkness, where we could whisper to each other unmolested. (But while preserving an outward politeness, I was already striking Sara from my heart. In my mind she was as good as dead.)

Earlier in the evening Charles had announced, “Name me any American production in which any thought appears!” No one took up this absurd challenge, and I thought I saw Susan briefly roll her eyes but she reverted so quickly to her usual expression of Supportive
Wife that you could not be certain. Like many men who live inside their heads, Charles's emotions were of a crude and infantile cast, in my view. His interactions with his infants were especially painful to behold; incapable of spontaneity, he could only mime the gestures of a devoted papa. When it came time for the children to be put to bed, he patted each on the head awkwardly and smiled sadly, as if mindful of their inevitable future as heirs to a crude, disappointing culture.

Shortly after the eldest child had been rounded up and packed off to bed, sherry cobblers were served. Harry had been speaking reverently of
Madame Bovary
, whereupon Charles observed sanctimoniously that “irregular sex relations have no place in literature. The deeper passions are seldom those of illicit love.” Sara was stifling her laughter behind her fist. I was thinking, What about Abélard and Héloise? when I felt something drop into my lap. I flinched and nearly bolted out of my chair, thinking of bats. But it was Sara's hand. Gripping my brandy glass with both hands to steady myself, I hissed at her. “Stop it!”

She did, but only for the time it took to remove her beaded shawl from her shoulders and drape it over my lap. “I noticed you were shivering,” she whispered, and under the table her hand delved beneath my skirts and came to rest between my thighs. Say what you will, she was good. I could scarcely make out her face in profile, like a queen on an ancient coin, whilst in the enchanted underworld—under the table, under the shawl—her right hand was pressed up against my drawers, having its way with me. I am sorry to say that despite my best intentions her caresses could no more be resisted than a fever, and all the time she sat composed, occasionally making remarks pertinent to the general conversation. Reveling in her power over me, like a torturer.

At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Father was tormenting Charlemagne by insisting that the ancient Persians had a culture far more advanced than that of the Greeks at the time of the Persian Wars. Everyone had everyone else's number here, I thought. Grace Norton had subtle ways of reducing Jane to second-ranking sister and Susan to “not really one of us.” Inclining her head toward me, Sara whispered something random about the Persians but in such a tender tone
it became part of the waves of pleasure lapping through me. Bunching my linen napkin in front of my face, I had to pretend to be stifling an attack of sneezing.

Was this Sara's way of saying, “See what I can do to you? Won't you miss me?”

By now I just wanted her to leave and get it over with. But when she drew me into her bed two days before their party sailed, I succumbed helplessly, of course. How could I stay angry while Sara kissed me so thoroughly and ran her hands over my back and buttocks in a way that turned me to jelly? While my tongue traced the outline of her earlobe and inched down her neck toward her breasts, she was tugging at me with an aching desire written on her face. And then the boundary between us seemed to drop away and we melted into one rapturous, gasping person. I knew better than to mention this to Sara; it was the sort of thing she would scoff at, and I was doing my best to get over her. But the sweetness of it lingered for days.

FOUR
FOUR

I
WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE
N
ORTONS FINALLY SAILED.
N
OW
I could breathe more easily, put Sara out of my mind, get on with my new healthy, sane life. I had all sorts of plans. I threw myself into gardening, planting runner beans, lettuce, butternut squash, asters, and chrysanthemums. I spent hours watering and weeding and staking and pruning and fighting off insects. I liked the sight of the dirt in the creases of my palms, proof that I'd done something earthy and real for a change. Some days I tried being a social butterfly, attending teas and receptions and making bright, animated chit-chat. In the evenings I went to lectures and pronounced them “fascinating.” I went to bed exhausted.

Harry, meeting me on the stairs, looked baffled. “What has gotten into you, sister of mine?”

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“Where is your stylish languor, your feminine vapors? Next thing we know you'll turn into Aunt Kate.”

“What about you, Harry? How is the
law business
coming?”

“Fine,” he said unconvincingly.

I gave him a jaunty little wave and continued on my way upstairs to help Mother muck out the attic. The next day we beat the carpets, and a few days later I let Fanny talk me into coming along on her home visit to one of her immigrant families, and tried to overcome the nausea that would strike me inside those fetid rooms. I kept telling myself I would get used to it, but who was I fooling? A single glance from Sara could undo in an instant all my emotional fortifications and bring me
to my knees. In her absence even a stranger with the same way of tilting her head while she laughed could make me catch my breath.

I was distracted from this monomania, fortunately, by a visit from our Temple cousins, which had the added benefit of providing me with material for my next letter to William. I informed him that Minny—his and Harry's favorite of the girls—was not as interesting as she used to be. I attributed this to her being too much influenced by the last person she talked to, so that you never knew where you'd find her. I also described for him the view from my window of the Lowells' garden, where Effie Shaw was seated, looking as lovely as ever. She was the beautiful widow of the dead Civil War hero, Charles Lowell, and sister of Robert Shaw, another fallen hero. She regularly brought her small orphaned daughter to visit her in-laws. How I envied her! To go through life as the tragic widow of a war hero, mother of an orphan. Nothing more would be expected of Effie; she could rest on her laurels.

Clover Hooper sometimes came out to spend the day with Effie, and sometimes Clover and I would exchange a few words over the fence.
She still threatens to invite me to dinner
, I wrote William,
but has never been able to bring her mind to the point of doing so yet, although from what she says she encourages me to think that she tries very hard.
I did not tell William how hungrily I'd waited for the dinner invitation that never came. Nor that at a recent dinner party I'd overheard Mrs. Howells asking Clover, “What do you think of Harry James's
Galaxy
heroine? She reminds me of a great many people in general but no one in particular.” To which Clover replied, “I think as usual the boy has chawed more than he can bite off.”

A week after the Temples departed, Mother solicited my help in choosing new wallpapers for one of the parlors. We set out all the samples and stared at them from up close and across the room, but I could not find my way to an opinion. While pondering the wallpaper, Mother confided that she hoped William would not “waste his opportunity” in Germany, as a number of shares of real estate in upstate New York had to be sold to send him there. There had been, as I recalled, a slight unpleasantness about money—bad investments by Father, corrective action by Mother.

“Is it so very expensive?”

“Well, your father's
immortal work
certainly won't pay for it!”

This was a shock. I'd always assumed that Mother was a fond handmaid to Father's genius. She sat at his lectures beaming like a madonna, and was disappointed when his self-published books did not sell well (or, to be completely accurate,
at all
). To Father, this world was a shadow of the real, a sort of mass hallucination. He was always urging us children to pluck out the thorn of our egotism and recover our Divine Nature, and Mother endorsed this project one hundred percent. When, as children, one of us was yelling or pouting or pulling another's hair, she'd say, in an admonitory tone, “D.N., dear.” Since we were educated at home, it was some time before I discovered that other families did not march to the drumbeat of D.N.

Now I wondered if, to Mother, Father's Ideas were only the hobbyhorse of a lovable crank. Her pride in knowing how to stretch a dollar, her mania for order and her relentless housecleaning might be seen in a new light. Someone had to take care of business, she must have reckoned as a young bride. Father drifted here and there like a will-o'-the-wisp, charming roomfuls of people with his intoxicating talk, writing esoteric books and giving esoteric lectures, going off on mysterious journeys by himself, while Mother did the hard work of keeping the family going.

Efficient and energetic, Mother could probably have run a small nation—if nations were ever governed by those wearing skirts. To me she seemed equal to any task but one: managing French servants. How disturbing it had been, when we lived in a grand rented house on the Champs-Élysées during our childhood abroad, to hear the servants mocking Mother's accent and running circles around her, Françoise the cook whispering to Aurore, the head parlormaid, “Madame speaks French like a Spanish cow,” Aurore observing, while hanging Mother's and Aunt Kate's nightdresses on the line in the courtyard, that “Monsieur has two wives like a Mohammedan.” I was seven years old and knew almost nothing, but I had quickly and effortlessly picked up the French language. To see Mother cowed by the French was shocking, like discovering that God did not care whether people were good or bad.

***

Casting Sara out of my heart was proving more difficult than expected. By summer's end, I'd stopped calling on people or going on picnics, sails, rides, or walks. I said I was tired but it was really that nothing seemed worth the effort. I turned down Fanny's invitations until she was telegraphing me concerned looks whenever we met. The vegetables and flowers I'd planted went unweeded and unwatered. It required a Herculean effort to move myself from the parlor to the verandah. Aunt Kate made noises about the bad airs that came up from the marsh this time of year, and I said, yes, that must be it, but it was not.

I could not even eat a peach now because Sara loved them so.

One morning I woke up with my heart racing and a sensation that my breath was being sucked out of me. It was horrible, annihilating. For a few minutes I was unable to move, speak, or think. Was this what madness was? Aunt Janet loomed in my memory, trembling like a leaf in a gale and jabbering about a plot by the Albany newspaper to omit key ingredients from its recipe for pound cake. And my cousin Kitty James Prince with her God-dazzled eyes and her schemes for putting clothing on dogs and cats for the sake of decency. I would have to discontinue myself if I got like that.

At breakfast Mother and Aunt Kate asked me if I felt all right, and I said I did. Later I admitted that my nerves were troubling me, and that the world seemed blurry and far away.

Aunt Kate said, “Well, darling, I know just the medical man for you. Dr. Munro will put you right.”

She went on to say that he had
completely
cured her nerves and back. “Now whenever I feel nervy or have lumbago or a neurasthenic headache or anything at all, I have a few sessions with the doctor, and I'm right as rain. The man is a miracle-worker!”

A few days later I was in his treatment room.

When I think of Dr. Munro, I see his hands, large and square, with springy copper-colored hair at the wrists. His treatment room was in his home on Beacon Street, a tall, narrow building of maroon brick across from the Public Garden. I rang the doorbell under the brass plaque with
DR. EDWARD MUNRO
on it, and a servant directed
me down a murky corridor past portraits of stern, unsmiling Puritan ancestors. The first time I saw Dr. Munro, I was put off by his squint, which made you think of a troll you must meet and overcome in a fairy tale. But I knew that Aunt Kate's health had been improved by seeing him, and his manner was all benevolence.

He had me lie down on his table. He loosened my clothing, and then his fingers were traveling lightly over me. He was like a dowser of the body, sensing unseen nerve currents beneath the skin. Eventually his hands would locate a spot of particular significance: a place below one armpit, an area at the top of my hips, a spot near my clavicle, a place high on the inner thigh. While his touch frequently embarrassed me and made me twitchy, his gentle manner reassured me. When he reached a spot of interest, he would cock his head to the side, as if hearing secret music inside me. If I tried to speak, he would shush me and explain that he was “reading” me now.

He had a habit of popping peppermint candies into his mouth and humming. There were always a series of notes that
seemed
to be leading to a tune but never quite arrived, which was frustrating to me. He halted his humming to ask me personal questions about my periods, their duration and intensity, and to predict that I should greatly benefit from bearing children—the sooner the better. On the third or fourth visit, he became engrossed in a spot four inches below my navel that was apparently associated with “hystero-epilepsy,” which I did not recall being told I had. What did it feel like to be hystero-epileptic? I could not bring myself to ask.

On the next several visits, his fingers inched into more intimate territory, not shying away from the triangle of my pubic hair, the junction of the inner thigh and the torso, the labia. Naturally, one had to expect this sort of thing from doctors, but this did not make it any less humiliating, especially as I sensed I was disappointing him continually with my tepid or flinching responses.

“Why are you so
nervous
, Miss James?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, here we will teach you to relax,”—using the royal ‘we' as usual—“and your life will become more beautiful. You will see.”
Patting my knee paternalistically. Yes, I thought, life
would
be better if I could relax, but how did one do it?

My body stiffened, erecting invisible barricades against his fingers, and Dr. M would gently massage away my resistance. His benign clinical detachment made it possible somehow to divorce his hands from the rest of him, and, for a brief period afterward, I felt as if I had honey running through my limbs. I did not know what to think about this.

On my seventh visit, Dr. Munro clucked his tongue and informed me that my uterus was “tipped” and this could explain the enfeebled state of my nerves.

“But how would this have happened?”

“Oh, it could be the result of an old horseback-riding injury or a fall or simply a hereditary defect.”

“I did tumble down a flight of stairs shortly after my thirteenth birthday.”

“We hear that sort of thing
all the time
, Miss James,” he said, brightening. “Don't worry; we can remedy this in short order.” He strolled over to the wooden cabinets that took up most of one wall and drew something out of one of its drawers.

It was a shiny instrument of highly polished wood, with a handle and a rotating knob. He did something to it to make it purr, then rumble. He held it against my upper arm so that I could feel it vibrate. It seemed like an ingenious clockwork toy, and then alarm bells went off in my head. “What is it for?”

Dr. Munro smiled his gentle smile and said there was nothing to fear. Then he poked around with it a bit, finally laying the vibrating object against a part of my anatomy I'd always regarded as private. My body jumped as if electrocuted, and I barely suppressed a yelp, but I reminded myself that Dr. Munro was “the best in the business,” according to Aunt Kate. Did that mean that Aunt Kate had experienced this vibrating wand business? This was something I did
not
care to picture. When the instrument vibrated against another very personal spot, it was painful at first, and then turned to a sort of pleasure, which, in a way, was worse. I cried out involuntarily, as had occurred before only
during my Emerald Hours with Sara. It was mortifying to experience this in Dr. Munro's office, by mechanical means.

The doctor, however, congratulated me on having attained a “proper hysterical paroxysm.”

“Is that a
good
thing?”

“Yes, it is, my dear. The paroxysms are the body's way of discharging hysterical energy. If you carry on with the wand, I predict you will be
completely
cured in no more than three months. You are fortunate, Miss James. Many ladies are unable to attain such a paroxysm.”

“Oh?” I was completely at sea now.

“Yes, and they can be identified by certain facial features, which are monuments, as it were, to a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Fortunately, these patients can in many cases be re-educated—not in their minds but in their bodies.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn't.

Dr. Munro was willing—not to say eager—to prescribe a “wand” for home use if I felt so disposed. “Thank you. I don't think that will be necessary,” I said politely. At the end of that day's treatment, I dashed down his brownstone steps, nearly bumping into Mrs. Munro on her way up. She was a plump woman in a squishy layered bonnet resembling a meringue, and I wondered if she ever consoled herself with one of her husband's vibrating wands.

A few days later I told my parents that Dr. Munro was not helping me, and they did not object to my discontinuing his ministrations.