The Sister Page 16

  ‘‘Do you remember, Alice, our visit to Wilton House back in ‘73?’’ He stroked his hat as if it were a lapdog.

  Yes, I recalled being there with him and Aunt Kate: ‘‘The Earl of Pembroke had invited you,’’ I said, ‘‘but we tagged along.’’ Gradually the memory began to fill itself out. ‘‘We were staying at the White Hart … we drove from there to Wilton House like poor pilgrims.’’

  He managed a rueful smile. ‘‘But do you remember a charming cloister, Alice?’’ That I should recall such an architectural detail seemed somehow critical, not so much to his opinion of me but to his sense of ‘rightness’ in the world. I said I did. ‘‘Good. Out of the cloister,’’ he continued, ‘‘opened a series of drawing-rooms hung with family portraits, all of superlative merit. And among them’’ – he paused as if to catch his breath with the force of the memory – ‘‘hung a supreme Vandyck par excellence.’’

  I could barely picture the painting but refrained from saying so since he was clearly devoted to it. For him, it had everything: design, color, elegance, force, finish … But what struck me most was how re-invigorated he seemed by the memory, as if the muscular Van Dyke had somehow restored his own noble dignity.

  ‘‘Alice,’’ I heard, felt him take my hand: ‘‘I shall be leaving tomorrow for the Continent.’’

  ‘‘Fenimore, I presume?’’ My voice, thick. He is in need of comforting, I thought.

  ‘‘I am in need of respite,’’ he allowed: ‘‘… as well as egress from the jungle.’’

  ‘Jungle’ was Henry’s private word for London. Not the London of the tour guide, nor the ‘indispensable place’ as he would call it in his next essay, but a word befitting the ‘real’, the secret London: a vicious, excoriating city lurking with beasts only too ready to pounce. But having taken two hemp pills I could offer no more in the way of memory or mothering. I was only vaguely aware of my brother rising to leave, a shadow on the wall.

  Twenty-five

  ‘‘A note from your brother, Miss. Hand delivered. Said it was urgent.’’

  ‘‘Who said, Wardy?’’

  ‘‘Smith … Mr James’s servant.’’

  ‘‘Does he ask for a reply?’’

  ‘‘No, just that he will be with you shortly with some news.’’

  As I stood at one of the front windows watching for Henry Katharine came up behind me and began walking her fingers up my spine, step by step. The feel of that ‘walk’, the pressure of her fingertips through the fabric of my dress and their stealthy, sneaking step only reinforced my sense of dread, so that when her fingers, gentle but firm as ever, reached my neck I flinched as if anticipating some murderous squeeze. ‘‘Alice?’’ she inquired. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ I said: ‘‘I was thinking of something else.’’ ‘‘It’s alright,’’ she soothed, ‘‘I’m here. Nothing will hurt you.’’ She held me against her. In the early December half-light we could just make out our reflections, the moonlike and the monkish. Nothing will hurt you. A foolish thing to say.

  Katharine normally excused herself during Henry’s visits, but today as a favor to me she would remain. I pictured us as if on stage, two stiff-backed characters, hands folded, awaiting the significant third. The news, they think, cannot be good; the atmosphere ‘bristles’ with tension … Only we were not acting. When my brother was announced Katharine and I turned as one. He stood. He seemed less stout. He was of course not used to confronting us ensemble. From the nose down my brother’s features were as placid as ever but his eyes flared and darted as if an escaped mink had entered the room. Katharine was very still except for twiddling her ring.

  We took our places together on the daybed, Henry directly opposite. We looked to the floor, to our hands or feet, anywhere but at one another. Three palpitating hearts and acrobatic stomachs.

  ‘‘You have delayed your departure for Florence,’’ I said.

  He nodded gravely.

  ‘‘The news …?’’

  ‘‘Not good. I have had it from William. He asked me to let you know.’’ He withdrew the letter from his breast pocket:

  Clover Hooper, our childhood friend, had died. Was dead. Clover Hooper Adams whom we’d met honeymooning at Thussis: she whom I’d so envied; she whom I’d observed being ‘handled’ by her new husband Henry as if she were made of the finest porcelain.

  ‘‘How …?’’ asked the business-like Katharine. The Hoopers had been neighbors of the Lorings at Beverly Farms.

  Henry paused before saying the word we feared: ‘‘suicide.’’

  We said nothing for some seconds.

  ‘‘How?’’ asked Katharine; relentless.

  ‘‘I take it,’’ said Henry, ‘‘you refer to the means employed? Apparently she swallowed some of the chemicals she used to develop her photographs. It was,’’ he added, ‘‘her hobby.’’

  Katharine glared: ‘‘It was not her hobby’’ – nasal, mocking – ‘‘it was her passion; she was devoted to it.’’

  ‘‘It was Clover,’’ I recalled, ‘‘who took the photograph of you and Louisa that John Sargent used for his painting ‘Study in Greens’.’’

  She agreed it was.

  ‘‘Clover also photographed The Bee.’’

  ‘‘And that portrait of you, Alice.’’ She pointed above the mantelpiece.

  I nodded.

  We were silent again.

  ‘‘There is of course,’’ Henry hesitated, ‘‘the connection William makes between the creative urge and the destructive urge.’’

  Katharine was rising up, ‘‘How dare he … ,’’ but I pulled her down and shushed her. She was glaring at my brother, her eyes narrowed to slits.

  ‘‘Do you rate it?’’ I asked.

  Henry, inclining more to ‘‘a case of hereditary melancholy,’’ cited the Hooper sisters’ history of suicidal depressions, their not infrequent breakdowns and incarcerations and …

  ‘‘Henry,’’ I interrupted, for once not inclined to ‘side’ with him in Katharine’s presence: ‘‘do not forget that I was also ‘incarcerated’, as you so politely put it. And we were not the only ones. As girls Clover and I used to swap comparisons of the hospitals that, leviathan-like, seemed to swallow up our female friends and relatives. While so many of our brothers were going off to war, we did our ‘duty’ with stays in various ‘bins’, the smellier the better, to salve our consciences. Clover was especially frustrated.’’

  ‘‘So you suspected it?’’

  I shook my head. ‘‘But it doesn’t altogether surprise me. Not long ago I had a letter from Ellen saying she was worried about Clover. Since their father’s death she’d become so depressed she couldn’t do her photography; she wouldn’t go out or see friends. Then she’d sent her sister a strange message saying: ‘Ellen I’m not real – oh make me real – you are all of you real!’’’

  Henry, who looked as if he’d seen her ghostly manifestation, jumped up and began pacing about as if dictating one of his gothic tales:

  ‘‘They’d just returned to Washington … he’d built her a new house there … he had gone out for a walk … when he returned …’’. On he went. We can hear her Henry calling out to her, ‘‘Clover … Clover are you there?’’; feel his worried consternation at getting no reply; see him bursting into her ‘studio’ …

  ‘‘Alice?’’ Katharine was addressing me: ‘‘Did you ever see the photographs she used to take of herself?’’

  I did, I said. There were, so I believed at the time, an unconscionable number of self-portraits. I’d thought her vain, but now I saw my mistake: they were all of a grainy, insubstantial nature.

  ‘‘They were in no way flattering,’’ said Katharine. ‘‘But I suppose they provided evidence.’’

  ‘‘Evidence …?’’ inquired Henry propping himself up beside the mantelpiece.

  ‘‘Of her being real.’’ She spoke impatiently.

  ‘‘Except,’’ I added, ‘‘that she never really believed it; right up to the end, evidently.’�
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  ‘‘Killing herself, however,’’ Henry opined, ‘‘that is, realizing that she could be killed, would have proved her ‘reality’. A paradox,’’ he concluded.

  ‘‘No,’’ Katharine said fiercely: ‘‘a tragedy’’.

  ‘‘Bien sur.’’ Pause; then: ‘‘Yet she was married.’’

  Katharine’s laughed bark-like. ‘‘And do you suppose gaining a husband is like acquiring a nursemaid or a healer? Besides,’’ she went straight on, ‘‘everyone knew there were ‘difficulties’ in the marriage.’’

  Silence.

  Once again I recalled Thussis and the sensation of pleasure, the vibrating waves of heat the honeymooners had given off; the sense that the world, including all of us, had become a backdrop to their romance; and, most of all, how her betrothed, that other Henry, had kept touching her – the brush of a fingertip – as if having to check she was real, or truly his, or to make sure she had not disappeared.

  ‘‘What would it be like, I wonder,’’ I hear myself ask, ‘‘to have someone cherish you to the point of terror?’’ My voice is too loud, the question a ‘blurt’.

  ‘‘Terror, Alice …?’’ Henry strides across the room to place a restraining hand upon mine.

  I lower my voice: ‘‘I meant to say ‘excess’.’’ Then I add, more conversationally: ‘‘Aunt Kate once told me having a mate does not save you from anything except the indignity of having to call yourself an old maid.’’

  ‘‘I guess marriage saves no one from despair,’’ says Katharine reaching for my other hand.

  It’s at that point I remember something else from Thussis.

  From my window I could see straight through the gray-blue portals of the Via Mala – that old-time Evil Way – with its melancholy rocky crags rising on either side red as the rust on an ancient sword. In the waning afternoon, dark shadows deepened against a background of sheer gray rock. Pine trees clung on for dear life. The next day we took the carriage-road winding into it, advancing like a group of simple, credulous readers into some darksome romance. Or a burial procession.

  I did not say any of that of course. Instead I recalled how Clover’s Henry had one day said of her: ‘‘ ‘Oh, my wife is a charming blue … she reads German, also Latin, also, I fear, a little Greek. So, as I tell her, any woman learning Greek must buy fashionable dresses.’ ’’

  ‘‘And how did she ‘take it’?’’ asked Henry, claiming not to remember.

  ‘‘Oh, then she could take it,’’ I said.

  ‘‘But not forever?’’

  ‘‘No, not forever. ‘‘You once called her a Voltaire in petticoats,’’ I reminded him.

  ‘‘Did I? I suppose I may have … yes … she seemed to have had her wit clipped a little; but then, at the time I mean, I suppposed she had expanded in the affections.’’

  An unfortunate word to choose, I thought, that ‘expanded’.

  But practical Katharine was already thinking ahead: ‘‘Now we must look to Ellen,’’ she counseled. ‘‘She will be feeling the strain of her sister’s death – added to their father’s.’’ And with that she left the room.

  Henry remained. Presently I recalled a visit I’d had from Clover back in ‘82. She’d just returned from Washington D.C., where she’d entertained Henry among other de chic guests in her drawing-room: ‘He may in time get into the ‘swim’ over here,’ she’d reported, ‘but I doubt it. I think, Alice, that the real, live, vulgar, quick-paced world in America will continue to fret him. No, I believe your brother prefers a quiet corner with a pen where he can create men and women who say neat things and have refined tastes and are not nasal or eccentric.’

  ‘‘You’re smiling, Alice,’’ observed Henry.

  ‘‘It’s nothing,’’ I said. ‘‘I was remembering Clover … at her sharpest.’’

  ‘‘Indeed.’’ He consulted his pocket-watch. ‘‘I see I must go.’’ Florence, and Fenimore, were calling to him. He bent to embrace me and, checking to see the coast was clear of Katharine, took his leave.

  I found her at the back window of our bedroom. ‘‘Henry’s gone,’’ I told her: ‘‘you can come out now.’’ Her reflected smile was lopsided. She was drawing circles in the glass: faces with dots for eyes and dashes for mouths; under each one she wrote a name: Sara, Fanny, Clover, Ellen … So then I reached out and put an ‘X’ over the circle that had been Clover. ‘‘Oh, Alice.’’ But it was not meant cruelly. I’d already begun to imagine what it must have been like for her: mixing the chemicals with hand a-tremble … the cloudy fizzing cocktail … how her eyes would smart … but quick before it goes off … the tipping back of her head … throwing it down … .the unspeakable searing of her secret flesh and then a puff of light as if some giant camera had shot her gloriously alive before all the lights go out.

  ‘‘Clover is dead,’’ I said, thinking The Personage must have suffered a muddled moment for sparing a rag-tag like me while sacrificing a substance-ful being like Clover.

  Katharine nodded.

  Now we must look to Ellen.

  Before going to bed I wrote to Clover’s sister: My dear Ellen … In due course I received an alarmingly crumpled scrawl:

  ‘Sorrysorrysorry expect no more letters,’ she’d written … ‘I dread even to write my own name’. A soberer ‘PS’ followed: But thank you, Alice, you are one of the few people who might have understood Clover’s plight …’

  There was also a letter from Ellen’s husband Whitman scrawled on Harvard letterhead From the Dean’s Office saying Ellen was still showing the strain of Clover’s death and did not feel up to writing letters. But he would be sure and tell her of my concern.

  A letter from Aunt Kate repeated the ‘horrible’ news, also reporting – as if the same letter could properly contain them both – her own ‘bad’ cold and Rob’s ‘condition’.

  ‘‘Poor Rob has gone off the rails again,’’ I told Katharine, just returned from lecturing a group of educationists at The University of London. She put down her briefcase.

  ‘‘Drinking?’’

  I nodded. ‘‘He’s been diagnosed with ‘progressive nervous degeneracy’ and has had to be hospitalized.’’

  ‘‘I’m sorry for his wife and children,’’ she said tartly. Then: ‘‘Is there any good news, Alice?’’ She came up behind me, tapped the back of my head as if hoping to release a drop of sweetness.

  ‘‘Oh yes,’’ I said, ‘‘she says people are all over talking about Henry’s new work, The Bostonians.’’

  ‘‘So they would. And what are they saying?’’

  ‘‘Oh, Aunt Kate is no literary critic. She is proud of Henry regardless of what they or indeed common opinion says.’’

  She did not inquire further, which was just as well.

  Twenty-six

  ‘‘So, you have had a relapse,’’ observed the observant Dr Townsend. The pain had come on gradually, increasing and spreading like a scurrilous rumor. Katharine blamed Henry for taking me out in the rain, and for ‘overdoing it’. ‘‘Overdoing what?’’ I asked. ‘‘Paintings … galleries … ,’’ she named idiotically, as if Art itself were to blame for my illness. But I was in no condition to argue aesthetic’s case, or Henry’s. The rheumatic pains scissored through from my stomach to my hands, feet to hips, shoulders to neck. My head felt twice its normal size and weight. Some other devouring force pincered its way from muscle to muscle, organ to organ. Each time I was on the verge of falling asleep I was jolted awake as if by a double-dose of the Holtz Electrical Machine – except the current was inside me. ‘‘Sleep deprivation is a form of torture,’’ I yodeled. It was horrible.

  Katharine showed the natty little doctor into my bedroom then made to retreat herself; but no, no, he waved her forward. When his back was turned, she mimicked his glove-sucking expression, which made me titter even through my tears.

  ‘‘So how is our patient?’’ he began: ‘‘has the salicene been of benefit?’’ I allowed as how I could not live without it, all t
he while rolling my head from side to side as if trying to loose it from the rest of my body. Townsend was amused by what he called my ‘exaggeration’. ‘‘Exaggeration? How dare you …’’ I was about to kick him when Katharine caught my leg.

  ‘‘Now now, Miss James,’’ he waved, palpating my body starting at the feet and working his way slowly and sadistically upwards. I winced and writhed as one on the rack. (Katharine later admitted having to restrain herself from kicking him as he ‘worked me over’.) Yet in truth he could not be accused of having used any significant force at all.

  The threnody of pain played on.

  ‘‘I suppose,’’ Katharine ventured from her chaperone’s corner, ‘‘this weather does not help?’’ She disliked the dampness herself, how it crawled through the pavements up through the basements and floorboards and walls; how even the mice and cockroaches bore its message along with goodness knows what life-threatening diseases. On top of the dampness came layers of paperings and hangings and paintings and draperies which she found suffocating. She missed our New England countryside, its fresh air and open skies, its mountains, its trees, its …

  Townsend flexed and unflexed my legs gymnastically rotating them at the hip, bending them at the knee, pointing them heavenwards. As he worked he referred to ‘the legs’ neurosis’ as if they were a pair of deranged, slow-witted twins. ‘‘The legs cannot be hurried,’’ he added. I pictured ‘the legs’ – Sally and Sue? Molly and Milly? – shuffling along like stubborn little girls and, in spite of the pain, began to giggle. At which Townsend and Katharine exchanged looks: Could it be her mind rather than her body that is at fault? Tears leaked from between my lids. He took hold of one hand, Katharine the other. My brief bout of hilarity – he called it ‘hysteria’ – soon gave way to a floppy exhaustion.

  ‘‘Bedridden women,’’ I croaked, quoting one of the doctors from back home, ‘‘are such a trial to professional skill.’’ Townsend ignored this. ‘‘Can you describe your sensations?’’ he tried. He really was a dogged little man. ‘‘It is as if,’’ I managed, ‘‘some message from my brain is being intercepted so that by the time it reaches my knees it is distorted and indecipherable.’’ Townsend hmm’d at appropriate intervals before delivering his verdict: a diagnosis of ‘‘gouty diathesis complicated by an abnormally sensitive nervous organization, brought about by anxiety and strain.’’