Alice in Bed (29 page)

TEN
TEN

F
ROM MY INVALID-COUCH
I
WATCH A BOWLEGGED OLD WOMAN
in a shabby grey dress lumber along Hamilton Terrace, rocking from hip to hip, every gust inflating her skirts like a sail. I
feel
the rocking gait, the heaviness of limbs, the cold fingers of the wind up my skirt. I feel the hunger gnawing at the ragged children's bellies and the sharp flesh-craving of the crows that dive repeatedly into the road. I don't know why this has started happening, this wandering out of my skin; I certainly don't intend to mention it to Nurse or Henry. Still, it's oddly enjoyable.

The honeymooning couple who were always misplacing their key are dead, of scarlet fever. Poor young things, married for less than forty days. At least they went to eternity madly in love and didn't have to witness the toll time would have exacted. The Bachellers, Brookses, and Edwardses have added a total of five unfortunate infants to their broods in the past two years, burdening the older children with more small siblings to tote around. Since his nocturnal invasion of my rooms, the parson has vanished from sight.

I've begun to wonder lately if life is a sort of dream. It is true that the physical world
seems
real and solid enough: fire burns, water reliably boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, if you fall from a great height you break your bones. It appears that you and I inhabit the same world, with the same planets and constellations and laws of momentum, gravity, and whatnot, but I have thought long and hard, and however I try to think my way around it, it seems inescapable that the world I know comes to me through my senses. Without the senses
there would
be
no world at all. All of it might be the dream of a solitary dreamer dreaming a world into existence, including millions of other people who appear to live alongside one. Can we ever
know
there is anything out there?

This is what I am meditating on when my bell rings, announcing a visit from Mrs. Arnold. I am overjoyed to see her again, especially without Miss Percy attached. She reports that she is much improved after taking a course of the waters at the Royal Leamington Spa, attributing her revival particularly to “Swiss showers” and certain mineral waters. She does look less weary and definitely less sallow than before.

I tell her that I have been told in the strictest terms by doctors that I must await some miracle of nature that will render me capable of taking the waters and so far this has failed to transpire. “And,” I add, “these doctors tell you that you will either die or recover. But you
don't
die. And you
don't
recover. I have been at these alternations since I was nineteen and I am neither dead nor recovered.” Mrs. Arnold smiles knowingly. We chronic invalids understand one another; we live in a different universe than the healthy.

We chat a little about the neighborhood, and its residents, and I mutter something about the parsons in this town having that wearying quality that oozes from attenuated piety.

She beams at this. “I am so relieved to hear you say so, Miss James. I feel the same way about the clergymen here. The way they are always thrusting their tracts at you! One of them nearly knocked me to the pavement last week.”

“It never seems to occur to them that you might have your own relations with God already,” I say. “And the emphasis on sin! Prostrating themselves and saying fifty times a day that they are miserable sinners. If they are sinners, why don't they stop, and if not, why lie about it, above all to God? I've a good mind to print up some tracts of my own to oppress the parsons with.”

Mrs. Arnold laughs, triggering a coughing fit. When she has recovered, she tucks her handkerchief into her pocket and says she imagines that she and I might have a thing or two to teach the
parsons. She looks me over appraisingly. “Am I wrong in thinking you have the mystic temperament, Miss James?”

This takes me by surprise. I've never seen myself as a mystic, but then I've never met one apart from my father. I give her a brief synopsis of Father's Vastation and conversion and beliefs and the effect of all this mysticism on our family. “Although I have never been able to ‘take on' Swedenborg,” I tell her, “I've never been able to take this world at face value either. I am stuck betwixt and between, it appears.”

Then something occurs to me. “As you lived many years in India, perhaps you can explain something to me. My brother William was fond of quoting certain Hindoo writings. There was a holy book he was quite enthusiastic about, involving a charioteer who was a god in disguise. What god would that have been?”

After a long, thoughtful pause, Mrs. Arnold says, “I almost never speak of this, but since you ask, Miss James. . . . When I lived in India I would occasionally visit Hindoo temples to see the art, as one does, you know. Inside a temple there is generally a statue of a god, which the priest of the temple dresses and drapes with jewelry as if it were a very beloved doll. People make pilgrimages, leave food and flowers. You must imagine clouds of smoke and incense, Sanskrit chants no one understands (including the Indians), sweets left to rot on the altar. I looked on it as pagan idolatry at first, being a typical boring Anglican memsahib like everyone else in our little colony.” She smiles, somewhat wistfully.

“Then my son died of a fever, and I lost all interest in life. The world became barren and empty, and not just for a few months. It went on for years. It was, I suppose, what your father would have called a Vastation. One day I visited a certain temple dedicated to Krishna. Do you know him?” She asks this as if he were a person with whom I might be acquainted. I say no.

“He is the god you mentioned who is disguised as a charioteer in the
Bhagavad Gita
, which is the text your brother must have been reading. In one of his aspects, he is fatally attractive to women; he has midnight blue skin and beautiful eyes. There were milkmaids, called
gopis
, who danced with him in the forest at night, losing themselves in the ecstasy.”

“I'm very surprised that the women would have been permitted to wander off to the forest like that. In India!”

“Exactly. You are very perceptive, Miss James. Every religion contains an element that is the antithesis of all the rest. Imagine good Hindoo wives and mothers—who in India are
completely
defined as wives and mothers, scarcely people in their own right—stealing out at night, abandoning husbands and children to dance with the God of Love. It is the forbidden, the unthinkable. In Indian society, more than ours, your identity rests
entirely
on your social role, and, of course, this is especially true of females. Yet there it is, Miss James.”

“I have often dreamed of that sort of encounter,” I say. Then I wonder what on earth I mean. “I mean, it makes perfect sense to me.”

Mrs. Arnold gives me a radiant smile.

“Each
gopi
is made to feel she is the god's only beloved, and in her experience this is true. After her immersion in the sublime, her life as a dutiful wife and mother is over, or rather it ceases to be her real life. A direct experience of the divine is always disruptive, you see, Miss James.”

“Well, that would explain a lot about Father,” I say, and ponder this while masticating the seedcake Nurse brought us.

Then I ask, “By any chance, do you know what this means?” In the margin of the
Evening Standard
, I write
tat tvam asi
—the strange words William wrote in his diary shortly before he went to Somerville. At the time I took it for some sort of fairy spell, but now it occurs to me that the words might be Hindustani or something of that sort.

It takes Mrs. Arnold only a second to decode. “It's Sanskrit. It means, ‘That thou art.'”

Depend on William to know Sanskrit phrases. I ask her what
that
refers to.

“Excellent question. Call it God. Or, better yet, the infinite. Is your brother a mystic?”

“I suppose he is in his way—as well as a great many other things. He is nothing if not multifaceted.”

Her eyes search mine, as if trying to determine if I am the sort of person to be trusted with a secret. Then she confides that she had “a sort
of vision” one day in a temple dedicated to Krishna. It was indescribable, she says; she was galvanized as if lightning had passed through her. She could never tell her husband or friends about it; they'd think she'd gone native. “How do you describe an experience that lifts you out of your life, your personal history, your culture, everything, and gives you new life?”

After she leaves, I think about that for a long time.

ELEVEN
ELEVEN

A
T FIRST
I
THINK IT IS A HORRIFIC DREAM FROM WHICH
I
HAVE
just awakened, petrified and breathless. Then I grasp that it is actually happening, in the flat above mine. I make out the screams and groans of a woman apparently being tortured, the angry growls of a man, and a second woman (I think) ranting like a fishwife. My good little Nurse wakes up, throws on her flannel dressing gown, and flies upstairs.

I hear her running footsteps on the stairs, the creak of a door opening, then a man bellowing. Hyena howls from a woman. Nurse's words are indistinct. A door bangs open and the screaming spills out onto the landing. The fishwife woman screeches some more, the man roars at high volume. “If you bother us again, I swear I'll fillet you like a fish, and that finicky old lady you work for, too.”

Not having made the acquaintance of my new neighbors, I am surprised they are aware of my existence. Nurse returns, pale and tremulous, and describes the squalid scene unfolding up there. An unmarried couple, “very drunk and coarse, Miss,” are in the process of bringing an infant into the world with the assistance of an equally inebriated nurse. When Nurse offered medical assistance, the people hurled profanities at her and threatened her (and me) with violence.

And then the ghastly birth goes on
all night
right over my head, noisily, agonizingly, until I wish the woman would just die and no one else would ever have to bring an infant into the world.

The next morning the “parents” and their nurse are still drunk. The infant is dead. The mother, Miss Clarke tells us, did not want to see “the brat,” a beautiful infant boy who lived for three hours.
They had not brought a rag to wrap the poor child in, which certainly seems suspicious to me. When told “it” was dead, the mother was glad and worried about whether the doctor could bring her waist into shape. She had laced herself as tight as possible to conceal the pregnancy. And then she asked, “Oh, where is my sealskin jacket?” I assume the police will investigate and that murder charges will perhaps be filed. But nothing happens.

I implore Nurse not to leave my side the next night. I cannot stop shaking and my heart is in great distress.

“Beating irregular again, Miss?”

“Strange jumps and hideous sinkings. It has never been this bad before.”

Nurse strokes my fevered brow and says, “Let me get you a bromide and we'll see about fetching a doctor. If only Mr. James or Miss Loring was here!” Bringing me a glass of water, she mixes in a mustard-colored powder, and helps me to sit up and drink it. From her anxiety I deduce that I must appear one step from the grave.

“No, Nurse! I can't face another doctor.”

“Then, I shall cable Mr. James in Italy and he will know what to do.”

“Oh, how do you
bear
it?”

“What, Miss?”

“The suffering, the wretched lives people lead.”

“Oh, it is well enough for me. I am very sorry for your headaches and other pains, Miss.” She really is. What a dear person she is.

“Did you ever hear such howls? Like the hounds of hell. I can still hear them! Oh, the lot of women is hard, Nurse.”

“Well, Miss, since you ask, I have heard and seen worse.”

“I wish you had not told me that. My mind has already gone into such a cramp about it.”

“It is a blessing the poor little thing only lived a few hours. Such a life it would have led.”

“I suspect deeds of darkness, Nurse. Even in the best case, a human soul was surely left to die. Are they—those people—?”

“Constable made them leave. The good lord only knows where they will go.”

And there the tale ends. Apparently no one is interested in inquiring further into the death of an innocent infant.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

H
AMILTON
T
ERRACE
, L
EAMINGTON

A
PRIL
19
TH
1889

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

I found myself the subject of a telegraphic call and rushed to Alice's side to learn that she had had a very bad attack of the heart—it threatened to be fatal for some hours. . . . The violence of the heart was brought on by nervous agitation about the miserable accouchement that took place in the flat above hers. (It is always dread and fear with her.) She was thrown into such a state of nervous terror I had to remain with her for a week.

It is odd how, in her extreme seclusion, she is liable to assaults of chance from the outside. For the present, she has taken the rest of the house for herself.

W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

C
AMBRIDGE
, M
ASS

A
PRIL
30
TH
, 1889

T
O
H
ENRY
J
AMES

The Physiological Congress in Paris begins Aug. 5. I can't help feeling in my bones that I ought to go, so I probably shall. If so, I shall be on the Cephalonia, sailing June 22. I shall disembark at Queenstown, as I am more than curious to see the Emerald Isle. Then I shall come to you. How good it will be to see poor Alice again and to hear your discourse.

H
ENRY
J
AMES

D
E
V
ERE
G
ARDENS
, L
ONDON

M
AY
25
TH
, 1889

T
O
W
ILLIAM
J
AMES

It is much better I shouldn't tell Alice anything of your approach till you are here, as you are quite right in supposing that every form of expectation and waiting &c is a bad element for her . . . The whole business of AK's will was a particularly bad time for her—for she shared in the disconcerted feeling I had (and tried to hide from her) that AK's large estimate of the needs of the Stamford Walshes (as well as the faraway Minnesota Cochranes) as compared with her sense of ours, with whom her life had been passed, seems a slap in the face.