Alice in Bed (3 page)

TWO
TWO

“T
HESE ARE FROM THE
B
RADLEYS
'
YELLOW HEN,
M
ISS
,”
SHE TELLS
me, extracting four fat brown eggs from her marketing basket. “The brown hen is poorly and hardly lays now. They are thinking of eating it.”

This leads to speculation about how many meals this indigent family might stretch out of one sickly hen. What I have been learning about the poor in England is a brutal revelation. One of Katherine's social worker friends told us there were thousands of families in London living in one room, subsisting on “sop,” which is not a metaphor, as I first supposed, but consists of crusts of bread they get from the parish and soak in water. And these are the families of working men, carpenters and cabinet-makers, all crying out for work!

But there is other news today, and Nurse can hardly wait to impart it, I can tell. In the bakery where she buys our rolls, she conversed with a new neighbor who has just moved in upstairs in our lodging-house. “A young parson just starting out, Miss, very nice. He said he would like to call on you.” The tip of her nose is red from the cold.

Oh dear. Unable to get about on my legs, I have become a sitting duck for parsons. And Nurse herself, a devout Anglican, is a glutton for church.

“Did you tell him I'm a sort of pagan from Boston?”

“Oh no, Miss.” Blushing. She has.

“Very well, Nurse. So long as he doesn't get his hopes up.”

Nurse (whose name is Emily Bradfield) was hired by Katherine three months ago, shortly after we moved from London to Leamington, K having foreseen that she would eventually be called back to America
by family troubles (i.e., her sister Louisa). Her departure came to pass a short while later, in fact, not long after I received a particularly pitying letter from brother William (to be known hereinafter as the Quagmire Epistle). I told Katherine that if she had not been there, I might have gone out, just like a candle.

“Oh Alice, you
wouldn't
!” she said.

“Yes, I would. Being my eldest brother, William can make me feel that I exist or not. It was
very
fortunate you were here.” I was only half joking.

When Katherine sailed home, I thought I would die of heartbreak. I can't go back to America—ever. Between us lies a large ocean, and it was seasickness that laid me low two and a half years ago, five hundred nautical miles east of Newfoundland. By the time we steamed into the docks of Liverpool, I could not walk or stand. When I do, even now, the world reels around me, and my legs collapse. Although I have seen many doctors—who have blessed me with the most varied and ingenious diagnoses—spinal neurosis, nervous hyperaesthesia, suppressed gout—the reason for my illness remains obscure, although everyone agrees I should not dream of taking on an ocean.

Our voyage had been perfectly lovely the first few days, or
would
have been if not for Louisa's possessiveness. Whenever K and I were playing shuffleboard on deck, count on Louisa to pop up with her hand pressed to her forehead like a dying nymph, and K would have to go tend to her whilst I remained in a swaying saloon, hemmed in by a crowd of missionary women on their way to convert the Far East. When we'd walk on deck in the evening, wrapped in woolen shawls in the frosty air, Louisa would chatter away about cousins and second cousins I did not know. Bostonians and their cousins! She suffers from consumption—though she seems an Amazon to me—and it is axiomatic to her that a sister comes before a friend.

At times during our crossing I thought of pouring out my sorrows in a letter to K, so distant did she seem when Louisa wedged herself between us. But that is ancient history now. (Incidentally, Katherine
was the last person standing on our ship. She attributed her hardiness to my brother William's seasickness cure, which consists of a blistering patch behind the ear and has something to do with the semicircular canals of the inner ear. Don't ask me any more, but he has written papers on it for medical journals.)

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

18 G
ARDEN
S
T
., C
AMBRIDGE,
M
ASS
.

A
UGUST
9, 1887

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

Your card, and H's letters, have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, and I am sorrier than I can express. You poor child! You are visited in a way that few are called to bear, and I have no words of consolation that would not seem barren. Stifling slowly in a quagmire of disgust and pain and impotence! Silence, as Carlyle would say, must cover the pity I feel.

I can only encourage you by noting that the laws which govern these vague nervous complaints means that they usually disappear after middle life.

A
LICE
J
AMES

11 H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE

L
EAMINGTON,
W
ARWICKSHIRE,
E
NGLAND

A
UGUST
31, 1887

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

Kath. and I roared with laughter over your portrait of me “stifling in a quagmire of disgust, pain & impotence,” for I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, & though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump. I seem to present

a very varied surface to the beholder. Henry thinks that my hardships are such that I shall have a crown of glory even in this inglorious world without waiting for the next, where it will be a sure thing & my landlady says, “You seem very comfortable, you are always 'appy within yourself, Miss.”

THREE
THREE

T
HE PARSON PRESENTS HIMSELF ON A
W
EDNESDAY: A HANDSOME
young man with a wispy mustache. I watch his eyes avidly scan my poor sitting room, alighting in turn on the feeble watercolor of Mt. Vesuvius, the dreadful Nottingham lace, the lamp with its sticky mantle, Miss Clarke's porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, wrapped in their shawls of mauve or grey dust. (So far the visits of the parlormaid have succeeded only in moving the dust around.)

He praises the view from my window and some features of the mantel, and I am struck by the fact that to fulfill his clerical duties he must substitute hearty enthusiasm for real connection, which produces a disagreeable impression of hailing someone across a great distance. Already the man is quite fatiguing and has only just arrived.

I invite him to sit in one of the wing chairs, and after Nurse brings in tea and scones (simpering like a lovesick girl), I explain that I am basically a pagan with Unitarian influences, but I am reading the Bible now with great interest. The Old Testament, actually. At this the parson brightens, like a traveling salesman invited to display his wares.

“Splendid, Miss James! Most people intend to read our Lord's words but never get round to it. I always say, you could die tomorrow, and then where would you be?”

I refrain from pointing out that the Old Testament surely cannot contain “our Lord's words.” I explain that I was not in the habit of reading scripture and had no idea the Bible was full of so many abominations; indeed, when it comes to smitings, abominations, plagues, stonings, and the like, the Old Testament must have no equal.

“Ah yes, that is why we find the New Testament far safer, Miss James. Particularly for ladies.” He is smooth as oil, this Roger Yardley. He has for the most part avoided looking directly at me, no doubt finding me quite hideous.

Nurse glides through the room again, now in her woolen cloak, carrying her marketing basket, eyes cast down in her angelic mode, one of her standards. I watch the cleric's hand slide into his Gladstone bag and emerge with a stack of tracts, which he places on the table between us. I read, upside down:
The Wages of Sin is Death.
(Shouldn't it be
are
death? And since everyone dies, isn't that an empty threat?) He asks if I'd like him to read to me, and I say, “Oh, no, thank you. Nurse is reading to me just now, from Tolstoy.” He looks perplexed. Only after he leaves will I realize that he was proposing to read one of the tracts to me.

He and I lumber down several unpromising conversational paths. He asks me about the nature of my suffering, and I give a garbled account of suppressed gout, mind cramps, useless legs, attacks of panic, and am just about to describe the dreadful sensation of snakes coiling and uncoiling in my stomach that afflicts me just as I am falling asleep when I notice his glazed smile. In a flash, I see myself through his eyes: a boring invalid, full of peculiar fancies, pathetically grateful for a few kind words from a handsome young cleric.

How far I have fallen and how quickly, too! Six months ago, in London, I presided briefly over what Henry referred to as my “salon,” and fashionable Londoners would call every Wednesday morning to sample my American drolleries. Even Fanny Kemble, the great actress, came, and her entrance never failed to be dramatic, owing to her breathlessness and pallor after the ordeal of my staircase. Although she was gracious and went around telling people about the “so very clever and droll Miss James,” I felt self-conscious in her presence, having heard that American women made her think of white mice shrieking. William's friends from the Society for Psychical Research also came and discoursed amusingly about mediums and “beings.”

Then my legs collapsed again, and I had to give up London for tranquil Leamington. (Tranquil is a kind way of putting it.) Katherine and I had a lovely two months here, until Louisa's lungs went downhill
again and K was summoned home. And here I am, stranded in the Midlands, unable to walk, far from every soul I have ever known. (But I shan't sink into self-pity and become a bore even to myself.)

The parson has been talking about the weather and from there has managed to leapfrog nimbly to Nature, in which he naturally discerns the hand of the Creator.

“You have heard of Mr. Charles Darwin, I suppose?” I say.

“Naturally, Miss James.” His jaw muscles work yeomanlike at his chewing.

“Then you must know that Nature is just one thing eating a smaller thing all the way down. Even the birds seem to spend most of their time trying to peck one another's eyes out.”

“Miss James, I think you would be persuaded to change your mind if you were to read Bishop Paley. He gives this example: If a person who has never seen a watch were walking through a wood and came upon one, he would know immediately that it had been
designed
and could not have arisen by chance. So too with the human frame and the complex working of various organs, Miss James. Consider—” And he's off and running, don't ask me for details.

In an instant I see through him as if he were transparent. Underneath the religiosity lurks a ruthless ambition. This young cleric is prepared to claw his way to the top of the heap, and will spend the remainder of his life groveling before his superiors and condescending to his inferiors.

“The human eye, just to consider one organ, is too well designed to have arisen by accident,” he is saying, adding more anatomical minutiae, which I'll spare you. A standard speechlet, I suppose. When he winds down, I say, “I wonder if your bishop ever went out into the woods and saw a wasp caught in a spider web. A torment worthy of Dante, I assure you. The wasp struggles, at first believing it will escape but becoming more tightly wrapped all the while in its sticky winding-sheet. The struggle is agonizing, lasting hours. When it stops struggling I am sure the wasp knows it will die.”

With a handkerchief the clericule dabs at his nose, which (I have just now noticed) drips. His hands fumble with the tracts. His tongue
darts out to catch a stray crumb from his mustaches. How quickly he is undone—by a supine female invalid.

“It is a pity to waste your theology on me, Mr. Yardley, when there are other invalids who would be more easily redeemed.” He smiles thinly, fishes his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, mimes surprise at the lateness of the hour, and takes off as if fleeing a pestilential city. Afterwards, I tell Nurse to toss out the tracts, which are no doubt crawling with microbes.

“If you don't mind, Miss, I'll give them to the Bachellers.” The Bachellers are among the most miserable of Leamington's impoverished families. Mrs. B has had all her teeth pulled and unable to afford new ones, subsists on soup and sop. Mr. B is grotesquely crippled from a work accident and cannot work. There are nine or ten small Bachellers in various states of misery.

“I'm sure they'd prefer something more filling and sanitary, Nurse.”

She clears the tea things briskly, without looking at me. I am afraid I am a continual disappointment to her. By early evening the duel with the cleric has ripened into a severe neuralgia. I am stretched out on my back like a dead Crusader, with the heavy velvet curtains drawn, thinking of the past, of Cambridge, of my dead parents, of poor Wilky, of William's small son—all our beloved dead laid out in the earth of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

G
ARDEN
S
TREET,
C
AMBRIDGE,
M
ASS.

J
ULY
26
TH
1887

T
O
A
LICE
J
AMES

I am desolated to hear of your latest troubles. We hear much about Suppressed Gout even here on these shores; Dr. Beach says that if the poison could be made to come out in your joints, your nervousness would leave you entirely.

I think I have told you of Mrs. Leonora Piper, a Boston medium who has impressed me by minutely describing the illnesses of some of Alice's California relations, as well as the most embarrassing secrets of our household. Most mediums are fakes and rogues but Mrs. P seems to be the genuine article. She has brought some comfort to poor Alice (and me) after the death of our little Herman.

Would it be too much to ask you to snip a sample of your tresses (about two inches in length) and send it to me with your next letter, and I will let you know Mrs. P's “diagnosis.” I know your skepticism about the occult, but what is there to lose?

A
LICE
J
AMES

11 H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE

L
EAMINGTON,
E
NGLAND

A
UGUST
13
TH
1887

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

I hope you will forgive my base trick about the hair. It came not from my head but from a deceased friend of Nurse's. I will be curious to hear what the woman will say about it. Its owner was in a state of horrible disease for a year before she died—tumors, I believe! I thought it would be a test of whether your prophetess was simply a mind-reader. If she were anything more, I should greatly dislike to have the secrets of my being exposed to the wondering public.