The Sister Read online

  ‘‘You look well on them,’’ I observed: ‘‘the beans, I mean.’’

  She moued. ‘‘And you, I’m sorry to say, look like the mad Mrs Rochester.’’

  ‘‘I have only been mad with jealousy,’’ I rejoined.

  That got to her, as I knew it would.

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she whispers: ‘‘come here … turn around, dear.’’

  I go to her, turning so that I can feel her thigh pressing against my back. Her fingers enter my hair; soon she is yanking my scalp this way and that. Then it’s the hair-brush: short, purposeful strokes to get the tangles out, followed by longer strokes. I imagine the brush as a violin bow drawing its languid, lazy, nut-to-heel way across a string. Add the vibration of her lip against my ear, the humming of her breath. I cannot identify the tune, but no matter. More businesslike now – gathering up the ends – smoothing – returning to the crown – letting the brush’s teeth sink into my skull and out again. Together we count – ‘‘1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 …’’ – not stopping until we reach one hundred, my thin hair all flyaway and Katharine’s arm about to fall off.

  My turn now. Loosening the wiry frizz from its grips I work it until it makes a scribbly halo around her head. The brush’s bristles are filled with hair from both our heads: my mousey ones and her coarse greying ones which join together to form a loose, prickly, fibrous ball. Katharine takes it up. ‘‘It’s a wonder,’’ she exclaims bouncing it lightly upon her palm, ‘‘we have any hair at all left upon our heads.’’

  *

  Wardy, against her principles, brought us breakfast in bed. I had taken some Godfrey’s Cordial which controlled the palpitations but not the persistent cattiness.

  ‘‘So how was Constance,’’ I pursued, ‘‘aside from her baked beans? Is she still her worthy self?’’

  ‘‘I do not, as you know, ‘buy’ your brother’s assessment of her. Connie is indeed worthy, Alice, and more. Aside from her writing, she is involved in the world, which makes her a lively and challenging companion.’’

  ‘‘As I am not.’’

  ‘‘I did not say that. You are always a challenge, Alice. Connie and I spoke a great deal about the education of women.’’

  I yawned largely. ‘‘And does she suppose that learning alongside men will widen their minds? In my opinion it will reduce them to the size of petit pois.’’

  ‘‘You may mock, Alice, but it is a matter of serious debate. Indeed, there are those separatists who would agree with you, even to the point that the curriculum should be different, though not less rigorous.’’

  ‘‘And where do you stand?’’

  ‘‘You know very well I do not think the feminine mind inferior to the masculine …’’.

  ‘‘But …?’’

  ‘‘But it has been kept back for so long, and enfeebled and …’’. She broke off. ‘‘Oh, never mind all that, Alice, what I really wanted to tell you about were the female students. Constance took me to Cambridge, to see Newnham and Anne Clough and …’’

  ‘‘Who is Anne Clough?’’

  ‘‘Dean of Newnham. But her students … they were fantastical, quite wild in appearance.’’

  I sat up.

  ‘‘Oh, they were wearing all sorts of outlandish – flagrant – costumes: skirts over bloomers, bloomers over skirts, inside-out stomachers, men’s bowlers …’’

  I cut her off. ‘‘I suppose they’re convinced it’s exciting to be shocking.’’

  ‘‘The exciting thing, to my mind, is not apologizing for themselves.’’ She paused, mid-toast, to stare at me. ‘‘I thought you’d be pleased, Alice; I mean, that such radical behavior would please you.’’

  I wanted to be pleased, as much for her as for myself. But I kept seeing my younger self, all boresome insurrections trampled down. I must not be rebellious. I must not punch the air with my fist or dance about shouting, or want to knock my pater’s head off. I must become smooth and flat as if ironed out …

  I bit hard into my cold toast. I had a choice: to remain a bitter old miserablist denyer or – more snapping of toast – not let my own experience stop me from enjoying and celebrating their freedom. It was too late for me but not for them.

  ‘‘Let us praise Cambridge’s little band of radicals,’’ I affirmed: ‘‘they are our hope for the future!’’

  ‘‘Hear, hear,’’ cried Katharine, waving a buttery hand. And with that she began to ‘dress’ herself as a Newnham girl. Oh, she would go all skewed and topsy-turvy with her stays on the outside … and short pantaloons and low-slung belts and layers of coats like the Indians and Japanese, and float about like …

  ‘‘And I shall have cropped hair and wear mannish shirts and ties and look neat and slim like a knife in its sheath and …,’’ but I could not go on. My mouth was all trembly and be-crumbed. Katharine clutched my hand. ‘‘Be resolute, Alice, do not give in, dear.’’ Do not, she meant, be tempted to feel sorry for myself. ‘‘No,’’ I said, taking another sip – gulp – of the Cordial – ‘‘I will not.’’

  Sometime later she returned to the subject of Constance. ‘‘Poor Connie is unhappy,’’ she confided. ‘‘She feels all shut up, as she put it, in a British Promenade.’’

  ‘‘Well,’’ I replied, ‘‘for some women there is more to life than education. But,’’ – a hard look here – ‘‘do you really not know why she’s so unhappy?’’

  She paused. ‘‘I suppose she thinks of your brother. She says he has avoided her since their return. Is it so serious with her then?’’

  ‘‘Did she not confess it to you?’’

  ‘‘I suppose she did, in her way.’’

  ‘‘It does not take much to see it.’’

  ‘‘And what do you see, Alice?’’

  I closed my eyes. My brother stands before her. Now he sits, stands again, turns his back. Begins to move about like one of his own enervated characters. Goes to the nearest window and pretends to look out – anything to avoid her pleading gaze. He is seeing into the future – never mind the pleas of his own clamoring heart – how it will end. At last he turns to face her, eyes like the sky after rain at the farthest, palest horizon, blue fading to milk-white to …

  ‘‘I see a terrible yearning,’’ I say.

  ‘‘And will it be satisfied?’’ she asks.

  I shake my head. ‘‘Might as well pine for Michelangelo’s David.’’

  Thirty-five

  ‘‘One step at a time, Alice.’’ The rain that had fallen almost relentlessly during the summer had finally stopped, leaving a soggy matting under the Park’s shrubs and trees; through it, here and there, a contorted Autumn crocus had succeeded in thrusting itself up. Katharine, stopping beneath one of the Irish yews, looked up: ‘‘Have you noticed, Alice, that while it is still relatively calm down here, there is an agitation in the higher branches?’’ I followed her gaze: yes, it was true. She undid one of her gloves as if to feel for the place where the air changed and the turbulence began; then she let it drop, the ungloved hand – a leaf, I thought at first – to settle upon mine.

  ‘‘Shall we sit, dear?’’ she asked, and so we sat. The bench was green with bare patches and black wrought-iron curlicues at the side. Sitting on it suited me; the windlessness, the tameness, the lowness were after all my natural elements; but not Katharine’s. Her back, I saw, was too straight, her hair too slicked, her face too scrubbed. She is altogether too sober, I thought: something is coming.

  Above us the sky is a vast colorless emptiness with dissolving smoke-wisp patterns from the chimneys. But there are also the autumn colors to admire, the rose hips and rowan berries. Katharine points out a late flowering Viburnum; the delicacy of the birches; the plane trees tinged with orange.

  ‘‘Of course they’re not like our maples back Home.’’ She says this quite factually. The word ‘maples’ acts like a switch igniting this tree and that recalled from Prides Crossing and Beverly Farms, conjuring leaves so intense in color they almost hurt: not soft gold
but brazen yellow; not burnt orange but blazing flame, and blood.

  ‘‘True,’’ I agreed, ‘‘but why yearn for a lost place, a lost past?’’ I was remembering a drive – ages ago – with William – somewhere around Tufts. He’d been enrolled there as a student and wanted to show me the ‘distinguished’ place. We’d just reached a railway crossing; when we’d gone over it, William said – as if jolted into noticing for the first time – ‘‘Our native landscape has a certain charm.’’ How quaint, I’d thought; but then, seeing it through his eyes, I began to feel an excitement, an awareness of its broad, vast expanses, the suggestion of so many possibilities … and everything yet to be done. … But this England – with its traditions and its awful perfection – what was left to do? I rose up too quickly and became dizzy. The pretty, soft colors had become blurred and muddied forcing me to sit down again, bump, like a toddler who thought it had learned to walk but there it was falling again.

  ‘‘It’s all right,’’ said Katharine cradling my head against her shoulder.

  ‘‘No, it isn’t,’’ I blubbered: ‘‘Everything that might yet be done has already been done … was done centuries ago … there’s nothing left.’’

  ‘‘What mush!’’ she cried, shoving me away. ‘‘Have you forgotten the Newnham girls … and the workers’ protests and the Irish cause and …’’ Things only seemed fixed and preserved, she went on, but so long as there were people prepared to act for change – there would be change.

  The toddler must pick itself up and try again.

  ‘‘Alice, dear’’ – a perceptible softening – ‘‘there’s something I must tell you.’’

  I already knew of course. It was not Katharine’s way to pine for the past. Oh no, she would claim a thing or put it away forever.

  ‘‘It won’t be forever, Alice. It’s just that …’’ She spoke urgently, passionately, until it was nearly dusk and a grey fawn glove held us. The problem was Europe … England, how it was all too … tight; how she could not find her true place here; how she did not know which direction to turn or how to use her energies and skills. Groups were clamoring for her participation since the demonstration, educationists wanted to ‘pick her brains’ about her Home Studies Program; indeed, she was wanted everywhere but felt she belonged … elsewhere.

  I said we must go back before it gets dark but she remained fixed, intent on explaining: It was all too small, too confined; she needed to touch base again. ‘‘Alice,’’ she was almost pleading, ‘‘do you never miss the sea back home, the mountains?’’ It was a question I’d once asked her, and now she was admitting, yes, that she missed our own dear rugged Eastern coastline. It was her medicine, how could I deny her? And there were her students she had abandoned, what would become of them? At which I longed to cry, ‘So you choose instead to abandon me?’ No, it was too late; she would go; I could not stop her. And there were her eyes to see to: they were getting worse and the Boston Eye Hospital was, after all, ‘the very best’. But then she grabbed an arm – the other – quite roughly – urgently, saying, ‘‘You could, of course, return with me.’’

  ‘‘Return …?’’

  ‘‘Home, Alice. Surely you have thought of it; surely it’s what you intended back in ‘84?’’

  What could I say? do? Home at that moment was nothing more than the bench with Katharine upon it beside me. But she would go, I could not stop her. We had between us no engagement, no marriage, no children; only ourselves. Our lives, I saw, from now on would be more divided than joined. As for going back …

  ‘‘You have a choice, Alice.’’

  I denied it, recalling the Pavonia. I would never survive another such crossing.

  ‘‘You would not have to swim back,’’ she said drily.

  ‘‘Oh, but I would, you see.’’ The effort, I explained, would be at least as great, would leave me weak as a spawning salmon at the end of its run. ‘‘I am satisfied to be here,’’ I concluded: ‘‘To not be here would take more than I possess.’’

  ‘‘More of what, Alice?’’

  Henry’s word ‘inclination’ came forth.

  She sighed, ‘‘Louisa is ready to go home.’’ Her voice scraped. ‘‘Apparently the Hospital Board of Governors are clamoring for her return.’’

  Then there was her father who was not getting any younger; and Katharine herself with her own career to resume, students to nurture, a rambling property that needed urgent repairs, and an extended family to attend to. She was being drawn back. All her life, I saw, she’d had her occupations disrupted, had had to give up her real ambitions. As for looking after her father, her sister and me, that had been taken as a matter of course – of course she would do those things (even though it would not be ‘of course’ had she worn trousers). So of course she must please herself now before it was all too late. And I must let her go.

  ‘‘I will bring you back some syrup,’’ she declared.

  You see, she was already thinking of home, of the fierceness of maples and their sweetness.

  ‘‘So you will have Thanksgiving at home?’’ I asked … or accused?

  ‘‘You know it’s the one holiday I miss, Alice.’’

  ‘‘That’s because you’re a great greedy pig.’’ I stood, wobbled, righted myself. She felt for my elbow. ‘‘Henry will be returning to Florence,’’ I said conversationally. I was trying for buoyancy. ‘‘He has offered me his rooms while he is away.’’

  ‘‘Will you take him up on it?’’

  ‘‘Yes, why not?’’

  By this time we had made our way over to the duck pond. I suppose she was trying to distract me – Look, Alice, look, as in a primer – See the boys and girls playing hide and seek in the great cedar. There they were hanging from low branches, shimmying up and down with red cheeks creating their own warmth inside the cold wrapping of the day. In that moment I saw what she wanted me to see: what was alive and warm and vital and right there before me rather than some fantastical future of my own creating; so that later I would think, why did I go and squander those last few days before they had a right to be lost?

  ‘‘And will you return?’’

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she spoke deliberately even as I felt her tremble: ‘‘whether or not I am with you permanently, that is, consistently, I am hopelessly, hopelessly’’ – the repeated word fell from her lips – she was stumbling like a horse – fatal, you think – but then it manages to get to its feet again; and with it comes the conclusion of her sentence: ‘‘constant.’’ For a moment I thought she was referring to Constance, the ‘constant’ in Henry’s life. But this was about us, about living as one even while apart with no need of proof because the certainty would be there, the way a fine scent permeated one’s skin long after it had been applied.

  Thus ended another chapter in our life together, and the start of it apart.

  III. DE VERE GARDENS

  Thirty-six

  Wardy, sensing she was no longer needed what with the Smiths upstairs, had already announced her departure: A carriage was due within the hour.

  ‘‘Do sit, Wardy. Now tell me, where will you go?’’.

  ‘‘My Aunt Flo is always happy to have me.’’

  ‘‘And will you be happy to be had?’’

  Wardy thought. ‘‘I don’t mind, Miss. She is very decrepit but keeps a tidy home. I am highly appreciated, to be sure.’’

  ‘‘As you are by me,’’ I put in quickly – ‘‘only circumstances …’’

  ‘‘Too many servants,’’ she broke in wittily, ‘‘spoil the brew.’’

  ‘‘Indeed.’’ I cleared my throat: ‘‘Of course it will all change when my brother returns. It won’t be long. Then we will resume our original arrangement – assuming you are still agreeable?’’

  ‘‘I will let you know, Miss,’’ she said pursing her lips in imitation of some practised crone or other. At which Smith announced her carriage. ‘‘Coming,’’ she hooted. He had already taken her bag. She waved goodbye without loo
king back. She is really quite intelligent, I found myself thinking, in spite of being stultified by the Church and Toryism; and then: I am quite fond of her. As for me, she undoubtedly found me peculiar, un-Christian and half-dead. Would I ever see her again? I called after her: ‘‘Do take care, Wardy.’’

  I’d objected at first to Henry’s suggestion. His ‘chaste and secluded Kensington quatrieme’ was far too grand for me. ‘‘Cockroach-infested lodgings,’’ I’d told him, ‘‘are much more my style.’’ But he’d insisted I would be doing him a service: ‘‘It will give The Smiths something to do.’’ So I agreed.

  The Smiths, I would soon discover, did not welcome the arrangement.

  Now they were down in the pantry muttering over their employer’s decision to give the flat over to his half-mad sister. ‘‘When the cat is away … ,’’ Smith sing-songs as if the old saw had only just been invented, at which The Mrs chimes in with: ‘‘the mouse will play.’’ For the mouse did indeed seem to be nosing into places she ought not to; indeed, the next you knew she would be prying into the master’s private study . Oh yes, they would have to remain vigilant.

  Upstairs, meanwhile, I-Alice-mouse was trying to decide which end of Henry’s enormous dining table to occupy. Although two extra leaves had been removed it still stretched most of the length of the room between the long front windows.

  How does he do it? I hear Katharine ask.

  Do what?

  Eat his dinner here, alone?

  Henry alone, surrounded by candlelight and food, pale against the ‘Pomegranate’ frieze, the burgundy curtains on the long windows drawn against the dark; Smith appearing and disappearing noiselessly. Do they have conversations? Does Henry have a book beside his plate or a periodical propped against the cream jug? Is he planning a scene for a character not behaving as she was meant to behave? Or is he concentrating his attention on his food, deciding that the potato is too waxy, the chop gristly, oh but the broccoli, the broccoli is cooked to perfection? But the truth, as I knew it, was otherwise: