The Sister Read online

  ‘‘Did you ever doubt it?’’ she asked conspiritorially, and with a shade too much triumph in her voice. Doubt what? If I let her, I saw, she would go on poking and prodding until she drew blood, which she would then contrive to join intimately with hers. An assumption of defeat, of failure … women together. I recalled a passage Henry had written about her:

  She is fond of irretrievable personal failures … She is interested in secret histories, in the ‘‘inner life’’ of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried …

  But had I, she wanted to know, never suffered a seduction, a betrayal, a disappointment?

  Oh, I might have told her a tale … about me as a still-hopeful girl, about a visit to my friend Fanny Morse at Beverly, about being introduced to the beautiful Charles Jackson; I might have given her details of his loveliness … how he had the nicest face and the sweetest smile you ever saw … how for a year after that I couldn’t open a book or gaze out a window without seeing his face superimposed on print or glass or stupid blank doors … oh, but the tease of it, the melancholy hopelessness of it all. You see, I might have concluded with lip all a-tremble: he was already engaged to Miss Fanny Appleton! I might have gone on moreover to confess, how, as a young woman, I’d longed for him to look at me the way he looked at her: Oh! but things are all wrong, aren’t they? I might have finished up crying. But I would not give her satisfaction, would not have her gloat over my own ‘inner life’; indeed, would not add to her store of forlorn failure (besides, a ‘crush’ was hardly a grand passion). I would not allow her to put her arms around me in sisterly sympathy, in conjoined bitterness. No! I wanted to shout down her ridiculous tube. It was an insult; I did not want her ‘worthiness’; I did not want her.

  Stop. Her tube is no more ridiculous than is she.

  You, Alice, are the risible one.

  Our cups were empty, our side plates held only crumbs, a few hard raisins, a smear of butter.

  ‘‘I read your story ‘The Lady of Fishing Island’,’’ is what I said at last.

  Her small foot tapped beneath her skirts. Now she is waiting upon my judgement. The ‘Lady’ of the title, I recalled, is a nun-like creature who appears among a group of miners at their island camp in the middle of Lake Superior. Rough men. But ‘The Lady’, so long as she remains remote and spiritual, has the power to transform them, so that they become ‘good’ and clean’. But once she falls in love with one of the men, that is the end of her ‘power’. Her love is unrequited, she becomes abject, the men revert and she dies. The object of her affection also suffers from unrequited love.

  ‘‘Darkly disturbing,’’ I managed.

  ‘‘Ah,’’ she smiled, waiting for me to say more.

  Let her wait. ‘‘The message is quite clear, is it not,’’ she asserted: ‘‘Love makes us human, but is bound to be fatal.’’ She held out her hands hoping, I thought, to be contradicted. But who was I to disabuse her?

  I must have shivered then, for she got up and pulled the rug closer round my body: ‘‘You must not get a chill.’’ Her touch was tender, almost motherly. She will soon be fishing for news of Henry, I thought suspiciously.

  There was a pause while Wardy, wearing her anxious-devoted-servant expression, refreshed our cups.

  ‘‘And how is your brother …?’’

  There was not the least doubt which brother she was referring to. At last, I thought, the true reason for her visit – and her solicitousness.

  ‘‘Have you not seen him?’’ I asked ingenuously, knowing full well that Henry had made himself unavailable to her.

  ‘‘I have not – this time,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Henry,’’ I offered, ‘‘has broken into a new novel and must not be disturbed.’’

  ‘‘Of course.’’ She waited.

  ‘‘But he is well. He sometimes finds the London dampness to have a depressive effect. I believe Baldwin has prescribed him strychnine. Have you tried it? I have, it’s quite effective.’’

  ‘‘Indeed,’’ she said sulkily. ‘‘The best medicine for me is to ‘up sticks’, but failing that I opt for guarana.’’

  ‘‘Oh, I prefer hemp; I swear by it.’’

  We continued with our digression upon medical men and medications until Connie, drawn like a moth to the fatal object, said: ‘‘As you no doubt know, he recently suffered a pain in his kidney – caused, I believe, by inflammation.’’

  Henry? A pain in the kidney? I did not know of it.

  She continued, ‘‘The pain led to an outrageous neuralgic headache, which in turn made him feverish. And that in turn caused him one night to throw off his blanket and fling open the bedroom window. (But how could she know such a thing …?) Which promptly caught him a chill. The ‘cold’ lodged in his legs which ached rheumatically and in his gut – which ached also – and in his lower back. So,’’ she continued proprietorially: ‘‘we rushed two urine samples to Baldwin in Florence – we were in Venice at the time – but. …’’ She paused dramatically.

  We?

  ‘‘By then his symptoms had begun to disappear,’’ she went on. ‘‘He began to feel better and better until, by the time we returned to Florence – thank heavens – don’t you know, he was completely well.’’

  She sat back, absurdly pleased with herself for knowing such things about Henry. What she didn’t know of course was that Baldwin shared medical gossip about her with Henry – which Henry then shared with me.

  I flung off the rug and swung my legs around like clubs. ‘‘So are you engaged yet?’’ I asked spitefully.

  Connie flared, ‘‘Do not be satirical, Alice, we are the best of friends. Anyway,’’ she shook herself like a wet dachs-hund, ‘‘I am far too superior for matrimony. My idea of love is, unfortunately, so high that, like my idea of the office of minister, nothing or nobody ever comes up to it.’’

  Liar.

  ‘‘And your Miss Loring …,’’ she leant forward: ‘‘what does Henry think of her?’’

  I longed to say: since she was privy to Henry’s urine samples, she no doubt knew of his feelings concerning Katharine; instead I trotted out the conveniently ambiguous: ‘‘Henry neither likes nor dislikes.’’ I was fed up with being interrogated. But she was not to be denied.

  ‘‘Do you really believe him to be such a cold fish?’’ The haughtiness had gone; she was appealing to me.

  Henry, a cold fish? ‘‘On the contrary,’’ I replied, ‘‘I think him too sensitive a fish: one that cannot take too much heat.’’

  She rose. ‘‘Alice, my dear, is there something you know about …?’’

  ‘‘About …?’’ I knew of course what she was getting at.

  ‘‘About Henry’s … about Henry, that is.’’

  About Henry.

  Connie, fishing for a clue as to Henry’s ‘intentions’, was now waiting – as one read in railway novels – with bated breath. She wants Henry, I thought. I pictured the small figure encased in its stylish Italian frock down on her knees (disturbingly, like the ‘Lady’ of her story) pleading with him. And Henry? He observes with interest and curiosity the parting in her hair: a rather sad slice of scalp … There he stands before her not out of deliberate cruelty but because he cannot help himself. What else can he do? If he moves in any direction he will be forced to act, and he cannot.

  As for Connie, I reflected, her stories were shrewd and sophisticated but her simple heart bled. Her letters to Henry urged him to create a woman who loves ‘even greatly’. ‘If you will only care for her yourself,’ she pleads … ‘the thing is done.’ But he will not – cannot – help her. My brother, I longed to tell her, is not one for ‘intimacy’. Where does it lead? To the bed-chamber. And where does the bed-chamber lead? To death. My brother had learned too well from our parents’ marriage: men may gain strength from the women they marry but in the end they are leached of that strength. Led-bed-dead – I tracked the logic: He will never respond as you wish. You will not have him. He may be
tempted, but he will not jump in.

  Pity left me. Did she not see it, as everyone else did, how Henry ‘fell’ for witty old bats whose memories went back to the time of Napoleon? ‘‘Old women are marrying young men all over the place,’’ he had proclaimed: If you hear next that Mrs Kemble (73), or Mrs Procter (84), or Mrs Duncan Stewart (85) is to marry me, you may know we have simply conformed to the fashion.’’ Fashion, I thought, was Henry’s ‘get-out’, as was age. He could flirt with those old queens and battleaxes, those ‘human largenesses’ all he liked, and not get entrapped; whereas Constance (small, handle-able, eligible, possible, sensitive, intellectually right) would bind him to her. The poor thing would want to be good heavens loved – the greatest danger of all.

  ‘‘I know nothing about Henry,’’ I said at last, ‘‘that you would wish to know. Another cup of tea?’’

  She shook her head.

  ‘‘Will you be returning to Florence?’’

  ‘‘Just as soon as I finish my research.’’

  I did not ask what it was she was ‘researching’.

  She sniffed the air: ‘‘It will be spring in Florence,’’ she mused, ‘‘while it is still cold as the grave here. I don’t know how you and Henry put up with it.’’ I said we had our compensations. She waited, I suppose, for me to elaborate but I did not. She shruggged, gave me a tearful hug and took her leave.

  The next morning Wardy came into the bedroom earlier than usual. ‘‘Where is Miss Loring?’’ I asked. ‘‘She left early. There is a note for you.’’ It was tucked neatly between the upside-down cup and its saucer. As soon as Wardy had gone I examined the envelope for clues, sniffing at it like an animal before tearing it open. Constance, it explained, had been too ‘upset’ to return to Cheltenham alone, so Katharine had gone with her. A fragment of the envelope had adhered to my lip; I spat it out. Outside the fog had come down, not a dirty dingy fog but a white, ectoplasmic haze. No edges, no definitions; the air itself thick as wet sheets; anything could be lurking within it. The envelope was soon covered, inside and out, with furious, half-legible scribbles.

  Thirty-three

  ‘‘Henry!’’ I cried, ‘‘what is going on?’’

  ‘‘Going …?’’

  ‘‘I mean you are wet – while your umbrella’’ – I pointed – ‘‘is perfectly dry.’’

  He regarded his person and then the umbrella; was there a correspondence between the two? Evidently he’d been walking about in the downpour with his furled umbrella on his arm. Did the smash of rain upon his hat provide inspiration, or was it a simple case of absent-mindedness?

  ‘‘You are quite right,’’ he admitted, ‘‘I was rather dilatory in opening it.’’

  ‘‘You will catch your death, Henry.’’

  He smiled: ‘‘It is more likely that that gentleman will catch me – but not quite yet.’’ He would soon dry off, he supposed, in the warm room.

  I noticed a bright flash coming from his shirt-front and leant forward to view it. ‘‘Is that a new coin-pin, Henry?’’ I asked.

  He peered down at himself. ‘‘Ah,’’ he allowed: ‘‘a gift.’’

  I waited.

  ‘‘From Fenimore,’’ he eked out.

  ‘‘You don’t say. But what is the image, my eyes don’t stretch that far?’’

  ‘‘That you must guess,’’ he said clapping a hand over the wretched thing.

  ‘‘Must I, Henry?’’

  Apparently I must. Constance had given him, he explained, a choice of three mounted tie-pins: (1) an owl; (2) the head of Bacchus; (3) the shield of Boeotia. Which had he chosen?

  The game seduced me. My immediate guess – given Henry’s own owlishness – might have been the owl. But Henry was never one for the obvious. No, it would not be the owl. Bacchus? He was, so far as I understood, a god different from all the other Olympian deities, a giver of joy and a soother of cares, experienced through intoxication and ecstasy and. … Noo, I decided, not Bacchus. I decided upon the shield; after all, Henry was nothing if not protected. As for their contribution to music and literature – Hesiod, Corinna, Pindar, Plutarch, I reeled off – were all Boetians.

  ‘‘Number three?’’ I ventured.

  Henry undid the pin and handed it to me, reminding me that by Roman times nothing remained of the Boeotian cities except their ruins and their names. No, it was not the Boetian shield. It was – he was – the rather effiminate youth with luxuriant hair reclining with a wine-cup in his hand.

  Number 2: Bacchus.

  Henry preened. I was furious with myself – I should have known of course. I recalled the myth in which worshippers would seize a wild animal and tear it apart in order to eat it raw – sparagmos – believing they were incorporating into themselves the god and his power. Having ingested Him, as it were, his worshippers became … other; intensified mentally, no longer mere mortals. The surrender of everyday identity. ‘‘Yes,’’ I said at last, ‘‘ I see.’’

  I felt as if I’d been given a glimpse into the complicated workings of my brother’s mind: that deep, wild place hidden beneath the coin-pin.

  Bacchus. I looked up. Henry had reattached the coin-pin and appeared to be waiting. I imagined the pair of them in the jeweler’s shop – Constance and Henry – in Venice? Florence? – Constanza offering him: ‘‘One of those handsome coin-pins, Henry, any one you like …’’

  ‘‘Henry,’’ I said, fixing him with my sternest look: ‘‘That pin advertises her need of you, it …’’.

  ‘‘A gift … generous’’ – oh, the feigned innocence! – ‘‘a mere nothing.’’

  ‘‘It is not nothing, Henry; and for you to flaunt it like that is perfectly appalling. It is everything cruel, insensitive and heartless.’’

  He sat quite still. Eventually he defined their relationship as ‘a cautious intimacy’, adding expansively: ‘‘I see her at discreet intervals.’’

  I shook my head vehemently: ‘‘It’s no good toying with her,’’ I warned.

  ‘‘Alice,’’ he rejoined, ‘‘Constance is an intelligent woman. She understands when she is spoken to; a peculiarity I prize, as I find it more and more rare – except for you of course.’’

  ‘‘Henry, I don’t require flattery. Nor does she require your discretion.’’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘‘Do not play dumb, Henry. You know perfectly well it’s something else, something deeper, she longs for.’’

  Everything in his attitude warned against pursuing the matter, but for once, I thought, I must speak out – on my own behalf as well as hers.

  ‘‘Commitment, Henry: intimacy … love.’’

  He held out his hands, but I was quite determined:

  ‘‘There’s danger in it’’, I said fiercely: ‘‘for Constance. Consider her desperation, her aloneness. What if there was to be some cataclysmic event, some … drama? How your own position would be affected. And as for poor, betrayed Constance … .’’ But I had gone too far already. He raised a hand as if to stop the earth turning. Proceed at our peril, it said – so I did not.

  Thirty-four

  ‘‘So,’’ I charged – I and my low candle were waiting to pounce -‘‘how was it with Constance, or is it Fenimore or Constanza with you too?’’

  She asked if she might not remove her hat first.

  I said: ‘‘Go right ahead, be my guest.’’

  She bobbed.

  We were behaving absurdly due to being ‘strung out’: she with travelling, I with pain and worry. She removed her spectacles, her eyes smoky and red-rimmed.

  ‘‘It’s after midnight, dear,’’ she blinked.

  I said, ‘‘Tell me briefly and I will let you go.’’

  ‘‘What is it you want to know precisely?’’

  ‘‘I want to know precisely about Constance … and you.’’

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she said evenly: ‘‘Connie was upset by your brother’s behavior. She felt insulted and vulnerable, and was loathe to be alone. Surely
you can understand that.’’ She reached for my hand but I snatched it away.

  ‘‘So you made sure she was not alone. And did you comfort her?’’ My voice smeared in the way of butter upon bread.

  Now – here comes the surprise – my dear friend and companion laughed … and went on laughing, while I waited for the ‘fit’ to subside. ‘‘You ask what we did,’’ she managed at last. ‘‘Well, I will tell you: We exchanged recipes.’’

  ‘‘Recipes,‘‘ I snorted.

  ‘‘Alice, Constance craved company,’’ she explained: ‘‘ordinary, everyday women’s talk. That is what she found comforting.’’

  ‘‘So you talked about …?’’

  ‘‘Baked beans.’’

  ‘‘Which recipes?’’

  ‘‘Please.’’

  ‘‘Which?’’ I demanded.

  She knelt facing me on the bed, her skirts spread around her. ‘‘Alice,’’ she charged: ‘‘you haven’t the slightest interest in cookery, so why ask and why should I tell you when I’m weary to the point of collapse?’’

  ‘‘Because I insist,’’ I replied; merciless.

  ‘‘Alright, then. On the subject of baked beans, the American versus the British. The traditional English preference is for a tomato-mustard sauce with only a pinch of treacle; which Connie, a Southerner, has adopted. I, on the other hand, a Northerner, favor lashings of blackstrap molasses, catsup and beer optional according to taste. Will that do?’’

  No, it would not do. ‘‘What happened then?’’

  ‘‘Happened?’’ she cried. ‘‘Why, I shovelled down heaps of her beans which I enjoyed immensely.’’ She rubbed her stomach. My Kath was not above teasing.

  ‘‘So you ate them together?’’

  ‘‘Yes, we … Oh, Alice, only you could turn the humble act of degustation into something filthy. However,’’ she added, tittering rudely, ‘‘I admit to it.’’

  ‘‘With no ill effects?’’

  ‘‘None whatever … now will that do?’’

  I pictured them together, Constance and Katharine, poring over recipe books and cookpots, heads together, Katharine’s spectacles all steamed up, tasting from one another’s spoons.