The Sister Read online

  I returned once again to Cambridge only this time I was alone, Aunt Kate having moved into her own small house further down the hill. ‘‘How will you manage, Alice?’’ she asked. ‘‘Perfectly well,’’ I replied, ‘‘with Nurse’s help.’’ I’d had enough of her fussing over me.

  I allowed myself to be dressed and combed, took the air and meals at regular intervals. Letters arrived. Henry was mildly alarmed by Neftel’s ‘cure’; Katharine was outraged. ‘How dare he!’ she wrote. William unsurprisingly thought it sounded quite sensible.

  ‘Dear William, I began; then the pen slipped from my fingers and my whole frame began to jiggle and then go rigid. I stumbled over to the doorframe and held on to stop myself from breaking into pie and flying out the window. My head was a tangle of terrors, full of traps. The pit of my stomach, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet, my very heart: how to keep them intact? Something must be done with me, I thought. The idea of self-disposal occurred in the way of a sack of rubbish.

  It got worse. I had to watch my step, avoid bumping into the ‘undesirables’: doctor-ghosts breathing through the walls, medical presences rustling down the stairs. It was like All Hallows Eve when the divide between this world and the next, according to William, was at its thinnest. I imagined a sheet that had been washed and patched to the point of meshwork so that they could tear at it with their disgusting yellow nails and teeth and step straight through. ‘‘Get out!’’ I ordered. But they only laughed. ‘‘Hysteric!’’ they squealed, flapping like crows round a run-over rabbit.

  I objected to their diagnosis: ‘‘But you said I was a neurasthenic!’’

  ‘‘Ignorant female!’’ they roared: ‘‘One must distinguish: the neurasthenic is rather … genteel. The hysteric, on the other hand, is emotionally volatile, violent even … she suffers hallucinations, trance states and fits. So you see: you have ‘graduated’ from civilized debility to wild lunacy!’’ They whooped with glee.

  ‘‘You know nothing of female maladies,’’ I charged. ‘‘I refuse all your useless medical cures and claptrap, mere catch-pails for the ills of the world. I have read about it all in William’s medical textbooks.’’

  ‘‘Books?’’ they cried in unison. ‘‘Books give you ideas! Who might you not become,’’ they sneered, ‘‘Joan of Arc … Jane Austen …?’’

  ‘ ‘‘And why not?’’

  My father, racketed with his wooden leg like one of his own demons crying: ‘‘Rebellion! Disobedience!’’

  My mother: ‘‘Our perfect sunbeam!’’

  Aunt Kate: ‘‘It does not do to hope too much, Alice.’’

  William: ‘‘Have you tried Motorpathic therapy? mechanical orthopedics? Physical exercise is what you want, Alice. The ice-treatment? You must! It’s a real shocker. I suggested it to Henry but he has not kept up with it …’’

  ‘‘Where was he meant to apply the ice?’’ I entreated, but he did not reply. Then in an owlish voice: ‘‘Your freedom and your nakedness.’’

  Dr. Taylor: ‘‘Bend your toes … now bend the ankle and flex the knee …’’

  ‘‘But it hurts!’’

  Here Dr Beach poked Dr Taylor in the ribs. ‘‘Look here, Taylor, this is not some malingering female – she’s suffering from gout, rheumatic gout!’’

  Neftel: ‘‘Ignore any pain! Bend those toes!’’

  ‘‘I cannot … . I will not!’’

  ‘‘Enfeebled female … exposed to too much intellectual stimulation … nervous system perverted from tissue-making … the body is literally starved while the mind. . . . romps away with itself!’’

  ‘‘Romps?’’ I tittered. They ignored me.

  ‘‘What is to be done?’’

  ‘‘Reverse the energy flow!’’

  ‘‘Balderdash! Arrogant phantoms and ghouls!’’

  On they went squabbling amongst themselves:

  ‘‘Have you considered writing down your thoughts and observations, Alice?’’

  ‘‘Writing?’’ came the interruption, ‘‘Writing encourages morbidity: counter-indicated!’’

  ‘‘Agreed: writing, thinking in general, causes mental strain in women!’’

  ‘‘Dis-agree … far too simplistic. It’s not just thinking but excess emotion that drains the body of energy.’’

  ‘‘Look here, I only meant a journal to record everyday events, domestic details. It might soothe her, you know … like knitting.’’

  ‘‘I say leave it to her brothers!’’

  ‘‘The knitting?’’

  ‘‘No no, you fool, the writing …’’.

  ‘‘Hear hear!’’

  I clapped to get their attention: ‘‘You’re not healers, you’re ignoramuses! None of you has any idea what is wrong with me!’’ I covered my ears so I wouldn’t hear their guffaws. ‘‘And I don’t need your permission to put pen to paper … I will not have it, GO AWAY!’’ But I was surrounded by all the doctors who’d attended me since I was a child: George M. Beard, James Jackson Putnam, William Henry Prince, Charles Fayette Taylor, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, and finally Neftel, all telling me I was irascible and nervous and morbid and

  I cannot breathe, help me …

  ‘‘It’s allright,’’ Katharine soothed, manifesting like the heroine she was and taking me in her strong capable arms. ‘‘You’re safe now, you can come back to England with me; I will look after you, you will not be alone. There will be English doctors who will know what’s wrong with you and prescribe a cure.’’

  ‘‘And I will not be an invalid forever?’’

  ‘‘Don’t be silly, Alice, you are resilient.’’

  ‘‘You mean like a lump of dough?’’

  ‘‘Oh, do shut up, dear.’’

  II. LONDON

  (1884–1886)

  Fourteen

  ‘‘You’re quite safe now,’’ said Henry, propped like a sandbag beside me on the bed.

  ‘‘That’s precisely what I’m afraid of,’’ I said. For however solid, he could not be my bulwark against England.

  ‘‘Of being safe?’’ he pursued.

  ‘‘Of coming to you,’’ I replied. He’d had me transported from Liverpool to London to rooms he’d rented for me on Clarges Street, around the corner from his own flat on Bolton Street. But whereas my brother had chosen the Old World as his need, his life, his inestimable blessing, I was merely there in that alien world. In short, it was Henry’s ‘patch’.

  ‘‘I have crossed the ocean and suspended myself around your neck like an old woman of the sea.’’

  He understood my meaning at once: my fear of dependency, of constraining him – but he would not hear of it. ‘‘You have not come in any special sense ‘to me’: you have simply come to Europe and I happen to have been here when you arrived.’’ Leave it to Henry and his gift for verbal legerdemain to swiz my words into a kindness.

  ‘‘I do not intend to be ill the whole time, Henry … to impinge.’’ I wriggled my way into a sitting position. He took my hands in his. His beard, I noted, closely barbered to a dapper little point, had a slimming effect.

  ‘‘But where is Katharine?’’ I demanded. Without her I knew I would not get well.

  ‘‘She has taken her sister to the south coast,’’ Henry explained. ‘‘Bournemouth, I gather: weak lungs.’’

  ‘‘Please telegraph. Tell her I need her.’’

  ‘‘I already have, and she has replied. Apparently the sister is in rather a fragile state.’’

  I made a rude noise.

  ‘‘You may not get her undivided attention, Alice,’’ he warned. His own, he needn’t add, was of course entirely undivided.

  ‘‘But Henry,’’ I said urgently, ‘‘it gives me much joy to be cared for by her, and as soon as she has returned you shall be liberated from responsibility for me.’’ I’d already given him endless care and anxiety. But once again he denied it. He spread his fingers wide upon his chest. ‘‘My dear Alice,’’ he objected, ‘�
�you cling no more than a bowsprit. Even putting your possible failure to improve at the worst, it will be very unlikely to tinge or modify my existence.’’

  I considered the metaphor of the bowsprit which I understood to be the prow of a ship. ‘‘Henry,’’ I ventured, ‘‘allowing for the fact that I am a nautical ignoramus, would not a bowsprit be attached to a mast?’’

  He burst out laughing – a rare event, and the last thing I heard before falling into a long, drug-c…logged sleep.

  *

  The ocean crossing had not been easy; nor had the leaving. To depart, to say goodbye. It was hard to tear myself away from Cambridge, from William, even Aunt Kate. Home: already the word had been loosed from its moorings. As we were boarding I’d quailed, ‘‘I’m not going, I cannot.’’ ‘‘Well, then, stay,’’ Katharine had replied with such maddening reasonableness I’d flung my hat at her. ‘‘What if I get marooned forever on the other side of the ocean?’’ I’d cried pathetically; but my words were drowned in the melee.

  All was confusion as the ship pulled out of the harbor: shouts and halloo-ings and wails of lost children mingling with nautical clankings and thumpings and foghorn blasts while bustling, purposeful passengers had to weave their way round those who stood fixed to the spot as if they could not remember why they had ever got it into their heads to leave such a place as The United States of America and board a ship bound for little old Europe.

  Another thing. I’d been led to believe that Katharine had returned from her English research tour for my sake, that her mission had been to escort me personally, so that we – she and I – could be together. Why, she has returned to fetch me, I’d repeated to myself, flushing with pleasure, all swelled up like an important little personage, that I should be the object of such devotion. Only the truth, it turned out, was that she’d returned to America for her sister Louisa: to accompany her to Bournemouth for her ‘weak lungs’. I, Alice, was the tailpiece.

  Katharine of course denied it. ‘‘I have come back to accompany you both,’’ she insisted in the way of a mother reassuring her children they are equally loved. ‘‘Both? To hell with both!’’ What I required was to be unique, singularly beloved, a flaming Blakean angel, an exploding comet that would fill the skies blotting out all other celestial matter. Me and only me. Dunderhead.

  Louisa and I retreated to the odorous gloom of our separate cabins; Katharine therefore spent her time running back and forth between us. (Unusually we were travelling servant-less since no American servant of our acquaintance was willing to accompany us for such an extended stay in England.) Once I caught her looking panic-stricken, as if trying to weigh up which one of her invalids might need her more; and the thought as plain as the KEEP GANGWAY CLEAR sign: How am I to live my life saddled with two such demanding nervous wrecks?

  I lay in a feverish heap, the engine’s vibration running through my hands, up into my arms into my chest, throat and belly. I could feel the sea flapping against the side of the ship and in my delirium I saw riding the waves my friends and acquaintances, fresh and gay, preparing to tumble one after the other like young dolphins into matrimony: Jenny Watson on the arm of old Newland Perkins … Nina Mason on the arm of Mr John Gray … Lila Cabot and Sargy … Clover Adams and her Henry. One after the other they succumbed. Or had they escaped out of their single state into the only really successful occupation a woman could undertake? At some point I managed to stagger up to the main deck where I hung gasping over the rails. Katharine came up behind me:

  ‘‘Alice, what d’you think you’re doing?’’

  ‘‘I’m watching for a merman, or Poseidon come to snatch me down to the other realm.’’ I went on spitefully imagining myself as Persephone married at last: ‘‘Even if it is to the King of the Dead, even if for only half the year.’’

  ‘‘And would you make such a deal, Alice?’’ she asked mildly.

  ‘‘Of course I would,’’ I said.

  ‘‘Well I,’’ she said firmly, ‘‘would as soon jump overboard as marry anyone, dead or alive.’’

  At which I was sick over the side and had to return to our cabin where I lay limp as a leek. The days wore on. At some point I began to panic: what would become of me alone in London? Where would I fit in, what be my contribution? How would I present myself other than as Henry’s sister? Making witty conversation was not an occupation. I pictured a cozy cell of women, with Katharine as their leader, discussing ‘the woman question’, plotting like wasps. Oh, the woman question! Should they be spiky or soft and yielding to the touch as if they were artichokes or melons? Women’s education, the slave trade … of course such things mattered only … Katharine had the spirit for it, and I did not.

  I managed to grab a piece of ship’s paper from a cubbyhole. ‘My darling Kath …’ I wrote, my letters sprawling this way and that – ‘I have you for a friend & I have you haven’t I notwithstanding my foolishness my sins my …?’

  Katharine, returning from Louisa – she’d had one of her nervous prostrations – found me down on my knees.

  ‘‘Forgive me,’’ I begged.

  ‘‘For what, for heaven’s sake?’’

  ‘‘For … for … ,’’ I flapped and babbled unintelligibly.

  ‘‘Are you trying to make yourself ill, Alice?’’ she accused, her patience understandably at an end.

  I handed her my note. She tore it into bits:

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she scolded: ‘‘you have done nothing wrong – nothing.’’

  But I knew I had. By escaping to England I had not freed myself but ‘turned tail.’ Going abroad to live indeed: how ridiculous can you get? I was nothing but a middle-aged spinster running for cover, a sour rag of a body, a …

  After that I began to shake so violently the ship’s doctor had to be called in. He diagnosed ‘rigor’, prescribing cold compresses to bring down the fever. Nevertheless, by the time the S.S. Pavonia docked at Liverpool on the morning of November 11th, I was unable to move my limbs or speak; and although I could perfectly well understand the questions being put to me (‘‘Can you hear me, Alice? Are you in pain?’’), I could not make any comprehensible noises since my jaw remained rigid and quaking. Eventually I was carried off the ship by two staggering sailors. As they bumped me down the gangway I raised my eyes to a sky so low and thick I felt sure I could reach up and bunch it into my arms like a vast grey blanket.

  Katharine ran alongside the litter. She was wearing her spectacles to stop her crashing into things. Louisa trailed behind making annoying keening noises. When we stopped Katharine pressed my arm: ‘‘We are in England, Alice,’’ her voice weary, tentative, hopeful. And though my legs would not work and I could not trust my heart not to fly out of my chest and burst like a shot albatross, I felt calmer and even relieved as I stared up into the Liverpudlian sky with the wintry sea behind us.

  ‘‘I have been here … before,’’ I managed to stammer. It was my first European Tour and our family had landed then as now at Liverpool before going on to Paris. ‘‘Hush, I know,’’ said Katharine gazing down at me, and there it was, the blue of memory: Paris, the hotel where we’d stayed, a balcony high above the Street of Peace; and there, a lady wearing a blue shawl – so blue! – and her eyes, I was sure they matched it; and there it was again inside the French cupboard, that very same blue, as the governess, Mlle Godfroi, flung it open to get my walking shoes … ; and all around us the sound of the beautiful strange language which I and Henry, in spite of having chills and fevers, picked up faster than the others. The mystery and the pain … the anticipated delights … the hopefulness … . So that now it came to me again, that blue Paris cupboard, as if I had been carrying it inside me all this time and could open it whenever I pleased. My body might wither away, I told myself, but my mind could go on expanding forever, yes, like the sky. I would live for a time in this Old World with its long history and grey skies, but for me it would be new, new, and brilliantly blue. And there, further along the dock, as if to prove it, was H
enry – all grown up – waiting to take delivery of me.

  Fifteen

  Imagine one of my father’s specimen cases mounted on the wall of his study filled with toucans, great horned owls and pelicans. Now imagine the creatures, with their silly beaks and talons, inside me – alive and about to break me open – my body, glass – and burst out. My nightdress was soaked, I could barely breathe. My heart, a flock of hummingbirds, had flown up into my head and was beating at hundreds of times its normal rate behind my eyes in an iridescent blur. My body – joints, muscles, stomach, throat – was being attacked from within. The sharp shooting pains felt like metal spiders – should there be such things – creeping about, each slow tentacled movement causing a splintering of bone and stripping of muscle. Then came the snakes writhing about trying to tear their way out. My throat was closed stopping me from crying out. Eventually I managed to swallow two more hemp pills from beside the bed before passing out again.

  At some point I was examined by a doctor. Henry arrived as the old quack was leaving. I was still in bed, floppy as anything. I watched my brother hesitate: should he pull up the captain’s chair or perch awkwardly beside me on the sweat-soaked bed? He chose the latter which pleased but also frightened me: was it an indication of the gravity of my condition?

  ‘‘You are out of danger,’’ said Henry, adding reassuringly: ‘‘You shan’t die, you know.’’

  I turned my face to the pillow.

  ‘‘He thinks you’ve probably struck a nerve, something to do with galvanism. He claimed you applied some contraption to the back of your neck to relieve a headache thus inducing something like a paralytic stroke.’’

  I blinked twice, slowly. True; in desperation I’d applied a vinegar-soaked pad connected to a high-voltage battery. Clever Alice.

  ‘‘He said you were suffering mild shock following a bad attack but nothing life threatening. Do try and relax.’’ He stroked my cheek with a finger that reeked of coal-tar and India ink. ‘‘My own diagnosis – for what it’s worth,’’ he added, ‘‘is that you are suffering from a protracted adjustment to living in this new/old world.’’