The Sister Page 17

  ‘‘And the non-functioning of my legs,’’ I queried, ‘‘is produced by gout?’’

  ‘‘Oh! dear me yes,’’ he responded gleefully. ‘‘I have seen people with their legs powerless for years from this cause!’’

  Katharine narrowed her eyes in the manner of a goat getting ready to head-butt. Truly, I feared she would do him a damage.

  ‘‘However,’’ I heard him conclude, ‘‘I believe time and medicines will do it.’’ He wrote out another prescription for salicene plus an even stronger tonic. ‘‘What tonic?’’ she queried. ‘‘Hemp,’’ he replied. She saw him out. Upon her return she related their conversation, acting both parts with consummate skill.

  Townsend: ‘‘I firmly believe Miss James will improve when she is … how should I put it … when she … (He finally manages to spit it out) … when she reaches middle life.’’

  Katharine: ‘‘I take it you’re referring to the menopause.’’

  Townsend (eyebrow in mid-hoik): ‘‘Indeed.’’

  Katharine: ‘‘But that could be some way off: Alice is not yet forty. Is there nothing that can be done in the meantime?’’

  Townsend: ‘‘The womb is a mysterious organ about which we know little, alas.’’

  Katharine: ‘And who’s fault is that?’’

  Townsend: No reply.

  Katharine: ‘‘But is it possible that such symptoms could be caused by some abnormality?’’

  Townsend: ‘‘I should say if anything it’s the womb’s ‘emptiness’ that is the probable cause.’’

  Katharine: ‘‘Please … not that ridiculous old theory. Something is wrong with Alice’s womb that is depriving the organs and muscles of vital function, and causing her extreme pain. Her womb does not go wandering about her body like some sleepwalker in a nightcap any more than mine does – or yours for that matter. Good day, Doctor.’’

  I applauded her little show calling Bravo. She bowed. I told her, ‘‘You, Kath, are my best medicine, dear.’’ She scooped up one of my hands and pressed it to her bosom. ‘‘And you are mine,’’ she replied: courtly, enigmatical. What could she possibly mean? I wondered. How could I be anything other than a trial to her? Or was she parodying herself now? But it was not the time for such questions. We shared the absurdity of a medical man who had been as intimate with me as my mother yet could not speak openly about an every-day gynecological event. ‘‘He appears to know very little about the female anatomy.’’ She considered the good doctor frankly lazy, apt to take the easy way out by prescribing pills rather than trying to discover the root cause of the problem. ‘‘By my last count,’’ Katharine reckoned, ‘‘you have had at least sixteen periods this year, each one lasting nearly two weeks, is that not so, dear?’’ It was so; moreover the blood flowed so heavily that the rag situation, according to Wardy, had become desperate. ‘‘ ’Tis not normal, in my experience,’’ she’d opined. Which Katharine thought a far more intelligent response than Townsend’s.

  By the end of the week I’d received a whole stack of sympathy letters. ‘‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’’ I protested to Katharine, ‘‘why do people write me such invalid pap? I feel like a goose being forced-fed on sugary meringues.’’ I thrust out my tongue in the way of one about to be violently sick, gagaghh.

  ‘‘Listen to this,’’ I gasped. It was a letter from William: ‘‘ ‘You poor child! … You are visited in a way that few are ever called to bear … stifling slowly in a quagmire of disgust and pain and impotence!’ ’’ I waved my arms, conducting as I read. Then Katharine joined in: ‘‘Stifling in a quagmire of disgust,’’ we yodelled, off-pitch, warbling operatically: ‘‘and pain and im-po-tence!’’

  Truly, it was the best medicine of all; for the moment, even Clover was forgotten. But what could they know of the reality of my condition? Of sharing one’s body with an internal torturer who varied both method, direction and ferocity of torment according to his perverted pleasure: today a skull-splitting headache, tomorrow a spinal massacre, etc etc etc. Yet – allow me a contrariety – I could not bear to have it ‘played up’ by others. I was alive, Clover was not; nor my brother Wilky; nor little Herman; nor the multitudes slaughtered on battlefields; nor those who’d perished in poverty and oppression.

  But I must reply.

  Katharine took her place at my desk and waited while I gathered my drug-dispersed thoughts.

  ‘‘Begin ‘Dear Willy,’ ’’ I dictated: ‘‘Tell him that amidst the horrors of which we read every day my woes seem of a very pale tint indeed. Tell him, as for my so-called ‘quagmire of disgust, pain and impotence’, I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, and though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychological, or indeed psychic truths, assure him I shall not tremble at the last trump. There. Sign it: ‘Always your loving sister, Alice.’ ’’ She looked up, unusually rosy. It must have seemed to her an odd little speech, uncharacteristically serious for one such as me. I was not always such a brave little soldier, yet my words had been brave, so that once having said them, I knew them to be true; and just to make sure I wasn’t talking tosh, I repeated them to myself: I shall not tremble at the last trump. No tosh: I meant each word.

  ‘‘Do you doubt their veracity?’’ I asked.

  There was a pause. ‘‘No, dear, I do not.’’

  The next morning she confessed to what I had already guessed: she would soon be defecting (again) back to the States to look after her ailing father.

  Neither she nor Henry would be with me over the Christmas holidays.

  Time nevertheless would pass. I saw a mangle spilling out the days like great wet sheets. Henry could make time pass of course so that it slid smoothly, lightly, drily by; no flapping and slapping, no clattering of mangles for Henry. Time would wrap me in its sticky envelope. Time entrapping yet emptied of significance, of connection. Time spitting out reams of Christmas twaddle. Time going off in a great puff leaving only a photograph behind: a gap where a breathing human body once was, a Voltaire in petticots. Time leaving me at the mercy of the living: my landlady, Mrs Dickson and Wardy, my nurse. Time chattering. Time creeping over me like one of Mr Darwin’s Galapagos turtles.

  Twenty-seven

  Katharine returned in the new year. ‘‘It’s absolutely shameful,’’ she cried, flapping about like a ruddy duck in a rage. ‘‘Look to your nose, dear,’’ I warned. It had begun to glow. That she ignored. ‘‘Everyone in London and Boston is talking about it. He has used us ‘Bostonians’- as he refers to us en masse as if we were a school of fish – as his models, making us look foolish and … He has distorted, simplified and exaggerated: it is absolutely inexcusable.’’

  She stopped churning about and faced me: ‘‘Tell me you deny it.’’

  It was a challenge, but also a plea for me to join her, to rescue her from her own helpless rage. Well I could not. Perhaps I understood too well the process of separating oneself and others from one’s characters. My brother had made it clear to me, as he had to all those who had challenged him on this same score, that his creations were the product of his imagination.

  ‘‘Surely,’’ she tried, ‘‘you must admit the portrait of Olive Chancellor is outrageous.’’

  I would admit no such thing. The ‘portrait’ of Olive Chancellor (manipulative, hysterical, ‘peculiar’) was admittedly painful. But it did not follow that it was of Katharine. More likely it was based on a number of different women in the Boston ‘movement’ who behaved with Olive’s stiffness of manner and dogged rigidity of purpose. My Katharine was nothing like that; my Katharine was flexible and adaptable, elastic to the point of … . Oh, she might be able to whistle through her teeth and do crowcalls, but she was nothing like that vulnerable wooden doll, Olive Chancellor.

  ‘‘Poor Olive,’’ I muttered.

  ‘‘So you admit …?’’

  ‘‘I admit,’’ I said, ‘‘only that he was writing what he perceived as a ‘type’ – not you.’
’

  ‘‘Oh, but how could he!?’’ Katharine burst out, rather chillingly Olive-like. She began reading aloud the description of Miss Birdseye, ‘the poor little humanitarian hack’; followed by that of Dr Prance, the typical ‘Yankee female: spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflection or a grace.’

  ‘‘Really, it’s too much!’’ She slammed the book closed. ‘‘A shameless parody of poor Elizabeth.’’

  ‘‘But, Kath dear, ‘‘ I objected, ‘‘those descriptions are from Basil Ransom’s point of view, not Henry’s.’’

  ‘‘Oh, but …’’.

  ‘‘But what?’’

  ‘‘Well, he’s just so ignorant of the basic issues of our cause.’’

  ‘‘My brother,’’ I countered, ‘‘does not pretend to write political tracts.’’

  Katharine pulled a comb out of her hair only to replace it.

  ‘‘It’s just so full of … vitriol against us.’’ She began flipping through the pages stabbing at one passage after another.

  I objected: ‘‘But you must admit it’s also highly amusing.’’ I referred to the description of the librarian, a Miss Catching. And the jibe that if Verena were to expose Basil as one of their ‘traducers’, she – the librarian that is – would not know how to treat such a revelation; in other words, would not know under what letter to file it.

  I covered my mouth.

  ‘‘You find that amusing?’’ She shut the book.

  ‘‘I’m afraid I do.’’

  ‘‘Very well. And how do you like the image of yourself?’’

  I started. ‘‘You think I am …?’’

  ‘‘Verena Tarrant of course, the little speechifier.’’

  It was too absurd. The girl was far too lovely and openly loving, too generous and expressively ‘natural’ to be based, however loosely, upon me; though she had reminded me at one point of our poor dead cousin, Minnie Temple. Yet, I reasoned, she cannot ‘be’ Minnie Temple because only Verena can ‘be’ Verena: she is made of words, only words. That is what it means to create characters. Just so, the characters in The Bostonian, as in his other stories, had been created out of all of us, yet were profoundly none of us. I imagined how he would proceed: like a chef choosing ingredients from here and there, yet even as he reaches for this spice or that herb, he is not consciously aware that he is doing it. But in the end it all comes together. Only then do his characters – for they are his – take on ‘lives’ of their own. Still, it remains an illusion.

  ‘‘I do not say the characters are direct copies’’ – she was intent on pursuing the matter – ‘‘Henry’s much too clever for that. Nevertheless, is it not about the corruption of an innocent, about the subjection of one will upon another?’’

  ‘‘And which of us is the innocent and which the corrupter?’’ I was in a reckless, mocking mood.

  ‘‘You may find it all … elevating,’’ said Katharine, ‘‘but I do not.’’

  ‘‘I can see that.’’

  ‘‘Well, how would you like to be described as a snobbish, pathetic, hysterical … grotesque?’’ She proceeded to read out: ‘morbid … grim … shy … rigid …’, her voice trailing off ending in a sort of moan.

  I had to admit the women in Henry’s book were for the most part a ‘faded and dingy human collection’; that only Verena Tarrant escaped the charges of grotesqueness, plainness and risibleness. But what, I asked myself, had impelled Henry to write such a ‘below the belt’ book? Had he consciously set out to expose ‘women like us’ to public ridicule? Was it his intention that we examine ourselves as if we were the characters in his book? Decidedly not. It would have been the tension of the situation that would have appealed to him: an older woman with financial and social clout ‘taking over’ an innocent, talented, beautiful girl who then sets about exploiting her for her own aims like a performing monkey. But it will have been an abstract relationship that Henry the writer had set about exploring.

  ‘‘Why,’’ I managed at last, ‘‘I wouldn’t mind at all being described as ‘passionate’. As for being the putative model for Verena Tarrant, unfortunately I do not fit the part. No one this side of the Adams Asylum would take it into their head to describe me as handsome. And,’’ I went on in more serious vein, ‘‘as for Olive’s worry about Verena marrying …’’ – I laughed: ‘‘Where is the likelihood of that for me?’’ But then I began to wonder if she could be right: that Henry might indeed have been writing about me by omission, as it were, revealing my tragedy through the fact that no Basil Ransom had come into my life to ‘rescue’ me as he had Verena Tarrant.

  Katharine saw it quite differently. ‘‘In that case,’’ she said, ‘‘you are well out of it.’’ She accused me of ‘refusing to see the obvious’: how we’d fallen into another of Henry’s traps, that it was his intention to cause just such a rift between us. And with that, she strode out of the room – returning almost at once: ‘‘Your brother,’’ she added, ‘‘for all his cleverness, does not know he writes about himself.’’

  My heart thumped. ‘‘Of course,’’ I argued, ‘‘he writes about himself, including himself in the hodgepodge that is creation – which he knows very well, by the way; yet he remains Henry the author: himself only himself.’’ Yet, having said that, I had to admit I’d thought of Basil Ransom as Henry, or rather the Henry Henry could never be, the one who acted rather than stood by watching. But that was evidently not what she meant. She hesitated before coming out with her ‘bombshell’:

  ‘‘I believe Olive Chancellor is Henry himself.’’

  I stared. That again. I did not like to think of it. But was it possible that Henry had loved, indeed did still love, outside? There was no question but that it was love as described in the book, however ‘peculiar intense and interesting’ between the two women. Could it be that Henry was able to write about their ‘condition’ precisely because he knew of it himself and therefore pitied; yet was all the more scathing because it frightened him that he could feel, indeed had felt, such a thing gripping his own heart? Could it be then that Katharine was right? Had he exposed, along with Olive and Verena’s ‘Boston’ relationship, his own ‘peculiar’ proclivities? For how else, I now began to reason (coming dangerously close to Katharine’s position), could he have thrown himself into such a character as Olive Chancellor with her ‘pulsing passion’?

  At last I managed to ask: ‘‘And how is that?’’

  She did not reply.

  ‘‘You think he is jealous of you?’’ I supplied.

  ‘‘That is correct.’’

  ‘‘That you have taken me away from him?’’

  Katharine nodded.

  ‘‘That he wished to be ‘attached’ to me himself?’’

  ‘‘I wouldn’t phrase it like that myself. But look here,’’ she gathered up the book, flung it open and pointed: ‘‘It says here that Basil Ransom thinks: ‘… only if Olive Chancellor takes Verena away to Europe, only then would he not be able to follow her.’’’ She looked up, triumphant. ‘‘And isn’t that what I have done with you?’’ The question vibrated around us. I was, I’ll admit, secretly gratified to think I might be beloved of both. But there was something wrong with her logic. ‘‘Oh,’’ I pointed out, ‘‘but Henry was already here in London. You took me to him, not away from him. So that I could have both of you.’’ I paused, unwilling to be torn between the two people I loved most in the world, before adding: ‘‘And I do, do I not … have you both?’’

  We went on arguing about The Bostonians until I began to think of it as Henry’s delinquent creation, which it would become increasing hard to defend. Katharine held to the view that the novel was overdone and cartoonish. If it was harsh and overdone, I riposted, it was also true. Why, I could name several in the movement who were ‘like that’.

  ‘‘Like what?’’ Katharine’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘‘Types,’’ I hissed.

  But Katharine could not forgive its lack of understanding of, never mind sy
mpathy for, the women’s movement.

  ‘‘But it is a literary work, a romantic drama, not a history,’’ I insisted, choosing a passage for its musical quality, its depth of feeling, its humor. She listened impatiently as I read. It was for me like drinking my brother in, siphoning his consciousness directly into mine. ‘‘How,’’ I entreated, ‘‘could you not be seduced by his words?’’

  ‘‘Easily,’’ came her snappish reply.

  The space between us had grown thick and distorted, almost as if we’d engaged in gymnastics or fisticuffs. Our breathing was labored, we perspired, our arms hung at our sides. Katharine’s hair looked as if it was about to lift off her scalp. Eventually we agreed to let the matter rest but it would soon ignite again fueled by some remark or other.

  Katharine was not alone in her condemnation. The public, it transpired, had largely turned against the book. Bostonians resented the one-sided critical portrait of their city. Aunt Kate scolded Henry for basing Miss Birdseye on Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s sister-in-law. And it did not go unnoticed that the Brahmin Olive lived in a small elegant house on Charles Street as did Mrs James T. Fields and her ‘Boston Marriage’.

  William complained of the book’s having too much ‘descriptive psychology’, by which he meant, poor prissy Willy, sex. As I told Katharine, ‘‘He refers to the relationship between the two women in the book as an ‘inverted passion’.’’ Well, she couldn’t give a fig for that. I wrote telling him not to be such a bourgeois prude and an oaf. It was a work of genius. It eluded simple interpretation. It could not be pinned down. Like Henry himself.