Alice in Bed (14 page)

“He has such soaring hopes,” Mother confided to Aunt Kate, “but he always ends up disillusioned. He tells the tutors he does not want the boys ‘oppressed' by too systematic instruction and then he finds fault with the lack of system. And it is for the boys' education principally that we came to Europe.”

Was that true? Being quiet and easily overlooked, I had an unfortunate tendency to overhear mystifying adult conversations. I
thought
we were in Europe because it had Art and History and Cathedrals and Concierges and Soldiers, et cetera, and so that Father
could meet European men of letters and discuss his Ideas. There seemed to be so much I didn't know.

In those days Father's Ideas seemed no more or less true than fairy tales about wicked queens, trolls, and fairy spells. In the little amateur theatricals William wrote for us to perform there was often a bearded figure, limping about, speaking glorious religious gibberish, and Father would laugh louder than anyone. (He was prone to laughing or weeping immoderately—like a great river that periodically overflowed its banks.)

For all I knew, all fathers limped on one leg, thought the world was a dream, wrote books that no one read, gave lectures no one understood, and traveled to Europe with their entire library packed into trunks. (Father's books were the first thing unpacked whenever we arrived anywhere.)

It was years before I found out that no other family was like ours.

The old Paris was partially eclipsed now by Baron Haussmann's modern Paris. Smart restaurants hid behind vaulted Pompeiian-style colonnades or surprised you with a stained-glass cupola over the dining room. You might also come across a procession of new communicants in white dresses, like barley-sugar angels with expressive little faces, walking into a cathedral that had been in use for almost a thousand years.

There was no denying it: Paris was worldliness, layer upon layer of it. The priests looked like old
roués
, the mother superiors like mandarins. The full moon, the color of old gold, seemed to say, “I've seen it all.” Why had Father brought us here as children if he so despised “the world.” Did he fail to see the worldliness, or did he secretly embrace it? And was the world really the opposite of the divine, or were they two faces of a single mystery?

My mind fell into silence, but it was not empty.

My “improvement” was duly noted in Harry's weekly letter home, which I read over his shoulder in a bistro. This assessment, half obscured by his forearm, was accurate as far as it went. Something that had long been dormant inside me
was
coming to life. What it was exactly I could not say.

While Harry left to spend a day wandering about some artistic quarters that interested him, Aunt Kate and I plunged into one of the
grands magasins
—the modern “shopping paradises for women,” as the newspapers called them. In a happy daze I tried on gloves, hats, scarves, shawls, and jewelry, and the looking glasses, flatteringly lit, seemed to reveal a more glamorous potential me. “We may have to buy another trunk for our loot,” said Aunt Kate, as transfixed as I by the fashion utopia around us. Its
luxe et volupté,
if not the
calme,
was so far beyond what Boston or even New York offered it might have been an absinthe vision.

It should be noted that Aunt Kate's medications alone took up a sizable portion of a trunk. On the marble-topped dresser in our shared hotel room I'd taken an inventory. Paregoric, Tincture of Arnica, Pepsin tablets, Dr. Baker's Blood Builder, The Famous Swiss Sleeping Draught, a hot water bottle. To this cache would be added her new purchases: fig laxative
, Eau de la Jeunesse
complexion cream, French Arsenic Complexion Wafers, Dr. Pasteur's Microbe Destroyer, and a “ladies syringe” that I suspected was for Female Problems.

Every day it was becoming harder for me to tolerate Aunt Kate, whose voice and predictable comments grated on my ears. She was clearly incapable of understanding the miracle that was unfolding within me, the way Paris was inundating my senses and healing my brokenness. She also had a baleful genius for landing by instinct on the very subject I most wished to avoid. In the hansom on the way back from one of the shopping paradises, she badgered me for twenty minutes with questions about Sara. “Have you heard from Sara lately, dear? I imagine Charles is grateful for her help with the children.” I did not want to think about Sara just now. Her sister Susan had died in childbirth several months ago, and Sara and Theodora were swept up in the care of their six motherless nieces and nephews. There were ominous signs that Charles was becoming swept up in Sara, as well, a situation too heart-sickening to contemplate and one I definitely wished to avoid with my aunt, who was like a dog with a bone when she got the scent of something.

“I'm sure she is terribly busy, Aunt Kate.”

To be honest, it was a challenge to share Aunt Kate's room and be privy to her thoughts, her ointments, her snores, not to mention the actual air she breathed (for when you share a room with a person, are you not breathing in the air she has just breathed out, which has been in her
lungs
?). At night I'd fling open every window, inadvertently beckoning a cloud of moths to come in and immolate themselves in our candles. Fortunately, Aunt Kate dropped off quickly, and I would go sit with Harry on his balcony in the warm, dense, humming night, with the gas-lamps strung like pearls along the avenues.

“Are you going to scribble your travel notes tonight, Harry?” I asked him in our third week.

“No, I may go out later, walk around a bit.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“Where?”

“I-I haven't decided yet.”

We sat in silence, listening to the French voices floating on the soft air.

“Do you remember that grand
hôtel particulier
we lived in, with the enormous chandeliers and lots of gilt and ormolu—the one that overlooked the Champs-Élysées? You boys had your lessons inside the parapets, and I envied you. Or did I just dream that?”

“No. That was the era of Monsieur Claudel, the tutor who had written an essay that was mentioned favorably by Sainte-Beuve.”

“Mentioned favorably by Sainte-Beuve! Well, that might explain how you got so literary, Harry. I remember sitting on the balcony watching ladies having fittings in a dressmaking establishment across the street. And in another window I saw young ballerinas practicing
pliés
. I thought they were princesses, like the ones in my storybooks. I was heartbroken when Mother told me I could not become a ballerina. She did not say why. Oh, Harry, remember Mademoiselle Danse?”

“
There
was a woman with a history, as they say.”

“I remember when she told me of Madame de Staël, who wrote
Considérations sur la Révolution Française
, the most important book of the century on the subject. Madame de Staël stood up to Napoleon,
she said, and was exiled to St. Petersburg. I'd never
dreamed
my sex could do anything important enough to be remembered after death. It made a rather strong impression.”

I saw Harry smile fondly at the memory of the most sophisticated and Parisian of our governesses. He and William often came along on our babyish outings to the Punch and Judy shows when Mademoiselle Danse was in charge.

“Take me with you, Harry,” I blurted now. “Please! I want to see Paris at midnight.”

Although this was clearly not what he had in mind, I saw him struggle to be reasonable. “Father gave me particular instructions to take good care of you. I wouldn't want to expose you to anything—”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Harry! I didn't come to Europe to avoid
seeing
things! I am over twenty-one, and Father has no right to hand me over to you like a set of crockery.”

Harry turned quiet, apparently chewing this over. You could never accuse him of being insufficiently thoughtful. I pushed my advantage, steepling my hands and making a funny beseeching face. “
Please
, Harry. It's my only chance; don't you see? Anyhow, didn't Mademoiselle Danse explain
everything
to us when we were young?”

“That she did,” he chuckled. “I remember her saying that Victor Hugo was man, woman, poet, the king, the people. He was
everything
; he had
seen
all,
done
all,
felt
all. And Robbie asked, ‘Is he the same as God, then?' To which Mademoiselle said, ‘My dear boy, God is not a member of the Académie Française!'”

Something I'd forgotten came back to me then. Mademoiselle Danse taking me aside one day after our lessons to say, “You are a very clever girl, Alice. Cleverer than your brothers.” (She meant Wilky and Robbie, who were in the schoolroom with me, while William and Harry were under the tutelage of M. Claudel.) “Unfortunately, because you are a
jeune fille
, your mind will be considered secondary to your manners and your bonnets. I will tell your parents that you deserve to be rigorously educated, but I can't guarantee they will listen.” Although I was flattered, I rather dreaded this “rigorous” education, which, in any case, never came to pass.

“If you
don't
take me out, Harry, I shall be obliged to go on my own, disguised in one of your best London suits—
à la
George Sand. That is something you ought to try to prevent.”

A long pause. “All right, Alice. Where would you like to go?”

“Well, I'd like to see Paris spread out at my feet in a blaze of light. Where is the highest point in the city?”

“That would be Montmartre, but I don't—”

“Yes! Take me there!”

At this outburst, Harry retreated into one of his long, pregnant silences. Then he said, “We may run into—improprieties.”

“Oh Harry, do you have any idea how a woman yearns to see an impropriety? Why do you think George Sand wandered about the city at night in trousers? She wanted to see things
as they are
!”

“How I'd love to meet that woman!” (Five years later he would.) Perhaps George Sand's name—or the memory of Mademoiselle Danse—worked on his mind like an incantation, reminding him that writers, regardless of gender, needed to see something of the world, because he somewhat reluctantly agreed to be my guide.

The night was misty, the cobblestones slick; the air smelled of the river. We hailed a cab on the corner of the rue de la Paix, and eventually found ourselves ascending the slopes of Montmartre. When we reached the place where the road ended, Harry asked the driver to wait, and he and I stepped down into a dark lane smelling of earth and manure and recent rain. From the highest point we could reach, we gazed out upon a sea of mist in which rows of gaslights gleamed murkily.

When we returned to where we'd left the cab, it was gone. We had no choice but to walk downhill, a situation that pleased me and made Henry palpably nervous.

“I can't believe he abandoned us, Harry, after subjecting us to the whole story of his mother's rheumatism. I suppose the poor woman
has
been a martyr to it, but still.”

“Give us an arm, Alice. It's steep.” It was; I had to grip his arm, teetering in my silly shoes. “Can you manage?”

“It's these
shoes
, Harry. The heels are specially designed to catch in every crack. Yet another plot to hobble our sex.”

While I was transported by Montmartre's exoticism, it did not escape my notice that Harry was uneasy, striding fast as I struggled to keep up. We passed an ivy-covered cottage with a thatched roof. Several largish farm animals could be heard shuffling about in the dark yard. Perhaps to calm his nerves, my brother assumed the role of tour guide. “Until last year, this was still the countryside. Since
l'année terrible
Montmartre and Belleville have been absorbed within the city limits, but, as you see, it is still quite rural.”

It was. We passed a stable on the left and then the slope began to level off. The mist was growing denser, but there were lights ahead. Passing a brasserie whose patrons were obviously drunk and riotous, we kept going, past a cistern and a small orchard. A white cat regarded us regally from the top of a wall. Another brasserie appeared.

My shoes pinched more and more painfully and I tugged on Harry's sleeve, pleading piteously, “Could we
please
stop here and have something to drink?” His pause was full of reluctance. I couldn't believe he was being so stodgy and unadventurous. Why was he set against this neighborhood, which, though admittedly poor, was lovely in its way?

Years later I would realize that the surviving
Communards
had taken refuge in these alleys only months before our visit, with guns and cannons, and the streets had run with blood. Harry was no doubt recalling this, and had not failed to notice that the brasserie I was pointing to, with its discreet exterior, low ceilings and red interior walls, looked like a
brasserie de femmes,
where men came in search of prostitutes. He would have been poised to leave quickly if this turned out to be the case. But I was ignorant of
brasseries de femmes
and the reddish glow made me think of firelight on the walls of a cave.

When we walked in, a few people were sitting at a zinc-topped bar, others at tables, drinking or playing cards, or talking softly, or kissing. (In Boston no one ever kissed—
really
kissed—in public.) Everyone's faces were murkily reflected in the mirrored walls. A violin was playing a beautiful and melancholy tune, which Harry identified as Brahms's
Hungarian Dance
.

A maître d' in a swallowtail dinner jacket strode briskly toward us, unsmiling, and said abruptly, “
Oui,
m'dame, m'sieur?”

At that moment we both absorbed the fact that “he” was a woman, with her hair cropped short like a man's. She did not carry menus, look around for a table to lead us to, or behave in any welcoming way.