The Sister Read online

  Sometime later Katharine Loring interviewed me to teach history on her Home Studies Program. The date was marked on my calendar for that year: friendship, it said. Friendship, the very word sounds cool. It was not.

  ‘‘Alice,’’ she now announced, ‘‘I believe you are in need of a holiday.’’

  ‘‘Me?’’

  ‘‘You.’’

  I laughed: ‘‘But I am an invalid.’’

  ‘‘That is not all you are, Alice. In any case, your Aunt Kate and the evidence of my own eyes tell me you are much improved.’’ I admitted I was somewhat better but in no way well enough to do such a thing as travel: why, I could barely get out of bed without falling over, not to mention bleeding all over the carpet. She flung back the quilt. ‘‘Now stand,’’ she ordered. I stood. ‘‘Now walk.’’ I walked. ‘‘How do you feel?’’ ‘‘I feel …’’. I barely knew how to express my condition. ‘‘Nothing,’’ I said at last, flapping like a new bird.

  ‘‘Well,’’ she declared, ‘‘in summer, there are two possibilities: to go abroad or lose oneself in the mountains.’’ I immediately replied that I would certainly choose the former. She smiled ruefully. ‘‘Ah, and I would choose the latter.’’ Then she did a surprising thing. In spite of my avowed preference for ‘going abroad’, she invited me to go with her to the Adirondacks. And I did an even more surprising thing: I agreed.

  According to William I was a good deal tougher than I’d been. I was still stupidly wobbly with snarlings behind my eyes, in the pit of my stomach, up through the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands. But Katharine was there helping me at every turn. ‘Miss Loring is a real savior to her,’ as William had written to Henry. Which left me feeling quite smug, thinking: So Willy has his savior, and I have mine. Once my wasted muscles had recovered – it took several more weeks – off we went to the Adirondacks.

  *

  It wasn’t until she actually pushed open the cabin door and guided me in that I realized we were occupying the very shanty that William and Alice had occupied during their honeymoon. I sagged down onto one of the wooden chairs while Katharine came and knelt before me.

  ‘‘Do you mind very much, dear?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Of course not,’’ I lied.

  I woke during the night and there they were, William and Alice: rumpled, blushing, blissful. He was rough and bristly and full of growly pent-up passion while she was shy and demure. I recalled wrestling matches with William and saw that this was rather similar. The wolves returned and joined in with their mating yowls. Meanwhile Katharine held me in her arms, rough nightgown to rough nightgown. I whispered deep into her ear, ‘‘We are not alone,’’ – but she would have none of it. ‘‘That was the past, Alice. We are here now, together, and they are not.’’ She was wrong of course: we were all there crowding that creaky cabin bed. The place reeked of them. But we’d travelled a long way and Katharine was determined to have her holiday, and I did not have the heart to deprive her of it.

  Out on Lake Placid I watched her swim as if she were flying on her back while I plopped about in the shallows stumbling over slippery stones, my wet skirts threatening to drag me down. ‘‘Undress!’’ she cried: ‘‘There’s no one about.’’ She herself had a penchant for nudity. But all I could do was hold my arms across my papery body and shiver in the heat. I could not trust Nature or myself not to do me in. Kath loved it; revelled in its rocky, mossy, animal’d, tree’d, flower’d, largely unpeople’d wildness. The peaks, imposing, threatening, hulked around us. I cowered as from an attack of giants; she invited their benign gaze.

  Most days she would take off on long solitary hikes. ‘‘Beware of bears,’’ I’d warn. One day she proposed I come along saying the exercise and air would do me good. I cared not a bear’s toenail for the exercise but welcomed the excuse to get away from the cabin’s resident ghosts.

  As we tramped through the woods however I felt only fear and discomfort: from the branches scratching our skin and the spiders spreading their sticky webs which I tried to pull off but could not. I heard myself scream. ‘‘It is nothing,’’ Katharine soothed. I knew she was right, of course, but that very nothingness disturbed me even more than the positively biting fleas, the vicious red ants, the sportive midges, the humming mosquitos and giant hairy spiders; for beyond these things, there was nothing: nothing to call one out of oneself. No paintings or buildings or people but only a great tangle of confusion – stems, twigs, leaves – intertwinings mossy, damp, dank. After that the rock-strewn blankness. And always the droning biting insects.

  ‘‘Please, can we stop?’’

  ‘‘Of course.’’ She pulled a rubber mat from her rucksack and placed it on a patch of bare earth so that I’d be protected, while she sat, unconcerned, directly upon a fissured rotting log. She handed me a cup of sweetened coffee from her thermos. ‘‘Drink that, it will give you oomph.’’ ‘‘Oomph …?’’ I scoffed.

  That night she made a bonfire. We sat around it hugging our mugs of cocoa, the creamy stars above and no one else within a mile – or so we thought. ‘‘It’s quite romantic,’’ said the normally prosaic Katharine. Burnt marshmallows coated my teeth and tongue. An owl hooted. Down on the Lake the loon rose up and cackled hysterically.

  The next day she persuaded me to go with her again but after an hour of climbing I came to a halt. ‘‘I cannot go on,’’ I declared. I felt as if all the blood coursing round my body had been drained out and substituted with mercury. She looked around. ‘‘Then wait here,’’ she said, ‘‘I’ll just go to the ridge: I won’t be long, I promise.’’ Sunlight streamed down through the trees. I leant against a bank crisscrossed with tree roots, determined to make the most of the peaceful silence. But the longer I waited the less silent, or empty … or peaceful it became. The scents of pineapples … dry, hot combustible pine needles. As I swivelled my new boots nervously back and forth, the needles were displaced revealing the dry earth beneath and the ants making their way here and there.

  I guess I was trying to distract myself from the lurking fear, or boredom, that had crept up like a spider, by focusing my attention on the ants. It seemed logical; after all ants were known to be quite fascinating creatures. And it worked. A whole army had been revealed, lines of them marching to and fro hauling bits of wood heavier than themselves, some of them joining forces to share a load. As I stared down at them, the minutely articulated parts of their bodies became more evident. What did I know about the parts of ants? Nothing. Anyway, there was a limit to my curiosity. I got up and plucked a blueberry from its branch. I carried it back to my perch against the bank and held it up to the light. It was a deep blue-black overlaid with a bloom of white through which small streaks of red appeared like veins. I rubbed it tenderly against my skirt to bring up its shine; noted how its ‘flower’ end gaped like the mouth of a baby bird; let it roll around in my palm.

  But how long could I hold the perfect berry without crushing it? It was surprisingly hard work not to squash the life out of it. Not that it is alive, I reminded myself … not like an ant. Still, some voice, some impulse, warned me against damaging it, so I held my hand artificially still, the berry dead center. I stared down at it. Why was I doing this? Why, having torn my attention away from the industrious ants, was I concentrating on an unremarkable if ‘blooming’ blueberry? Surely, I told myself, you have not picked it for an aesthetic experience but because you’re hungry. And so I raised my palm to my mouth. But just as was about to pop the berry in, I sensed the danger. What danger? ‘‘You are being silly and superstitious,’’ I said out loud. Yet there it was palpable in the berry’s blue-black fatness, its promise of sweetness, its tiny seeds, the sharp mineral tang that would, if I allowed it past my lips, burst inside my mouth. But I must not or else … what? Some nameless dread. No … it had a name, only I was reluctant to voice it. Bear … Ursus horribilis. I sensed it lurking nearby, rising on its hind legs … sniffing, its big wet nose like a shiny black marshmallow with its cavern
ous holes growing wetter and wetter and dripping with … appetite. Warily, it draws closer and closer until …

  Was I mauled by the bear? Did Katharine come back to find a bloodied mangled corpse? Or did the bear wait and – greedy guts! – gobble up both of us? I began to laugh; it was too ridiculous, there was of course no bear. But there was something in my hand, wet, crushed. Ah, I told myself, so that is what this is about: not the bear itself but the possibility of it, the prickle at the back of the neck, the fear that causes the skin to be coated in a particularly pungent type of perspiration. Which might or might not, after all, summon a keen-nosed bear …

  I stared down at the berry now crushed and oozing its juice between my fingers. All I knew was that there was something, or not a thing but a sense of a thing lurking, and that that something had somehow been contained in the blueberry. But it was over. I stood. What now? I thought of Henry who liked to cause a twist in his tales: would a surprising thing occur? Or would it be something more subtle, a feeling, an understanding, a failure to see what had been there or not been there, an opportunity lost, or even … a mistake in the original scenario? For by now the ‘import’ of the bear had become still clearer to me. The bear in the wood (or ‘The Bear in the Wood’as I’d begun to think of it) was an idea, an idea that lurked like a bear or a beast crouching in a jungle; so that it signified little whether it was ‘real’ or not, or indeed whether I was destined to be slain by it or not.

  Katharine apologized for having taken longer than she’d anticipated. She waved towards the horizon. ‘‘The path kept leading me upwards. I came to a clearing where most of the trees had been uprooted by storms, burnt by forest fires. In their place young pines have sprung up in the gaps, thin as eyelashes.’’ I pictured her, another ‘eyelash’ among them. ‘‘Wheren’t you afraid?’’ ‘‘Afraid?’’ she echoed as if the meaning of the word escaped her. She reached down for my hand to pull me up but dropped it in disgust. ‘‘It was only a blueberry,’’ I said.

  The next morning Dr. Charles Putnam, who turned out to be occupying another shanty a small distance away, came stumbling over to introduce himself. Katharine, not liking to be encroached upon, held out her hand but did not extend her hospitality to breakfast. ‘‘No need,’’ he made a dismissive, wavelike motion, ‘‘I have brought my gentleman-cook.’’ We managed to restrain ourselves until he’d gone at which point we collapsed giggling. Fighting for breath, Katharine speechified, ‘‘You see … just goes to show … the same inequality between the sexes exists in the wilderness as that which disgraces the effete civilizations to which most of us cling.’’ ‘‘Hear hear,’’ said I, still spluttering. At some point he crept up on us again, this time to offer his ‘protection’ if we should need it. ‘‘I doubt that we shall,’’ affirmed Katharine, pale with the effort to remain straight-faced, ‘‘but thank you anyway.’’

  One night, after we’d gone to bed, there arose a great tumult outside the cabin. It sounded as if someone were trying to batter down the walls. I hid under the blanket, nightmare-ridden, but Katharine jumped out of bed, threw a shawl around her shoulders, grabbed her revolver (!), and slammed outside. I pulled the blankets over my head.

  ‘‘Away’’ Shoo! Boo!’’ I heard her yell. The sound of hoofs; mooing.

  ‘‘Cows,’’ she reported on her return.

  ‘‘Just as well it wasn’t bears,’’ I said, peeking out from my coward’s nest.

  ‘‘That’s what the pistol was for,’’ she added matter-of-factly.

  I stared: was there anything she could not do? I could think of nothing. She who possessed all the brute superiority which distinguished man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. I recalled a passage from The Minister’s Wooing, by our friend Harriet Beecher Stowe: ‘Katy could harness a chaise, or row a boat; she could saddle and ride any horse in the neighborhood; she could cut any garment that ever was seen or thought of, make cake, jelly and wine … all without seeming to derange a sort of trim, well-kept air of ladyhood that sat jauntily on her’ … and I knew for certain that ‘Katy’ had been based on my Katharine.

  As for Dr. Putnam, our ‘protector’, why, he was not to be seen during the entire episode. Still, it amused us to think of our friends gossipping about the two virgins of thirty summers living alone in the woods with a bachelor. It amused us still more to take turns imitating his pious expression with the virtuous spectacles sitting far down his nose, his general maiden-aunt-like turn of figure and limp-wristed, sashaying walk. It was the most fun I’d had the entire time.

  At the end of our stay I made my confession: ‘‘I wish I loved Nature more, dear Kath, but I do not. The truth is I prefer a tub any old day to a slimy pool with weeds grabbing at my legs.’’ I did not say how they’d reminded me of all the dark forces in my life, of all the dreads past and to come that would if they could ensnare. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ I snivelled: ‘‘I’ve spoiled your vacation.’’ ‘‘Don’t be silly, Alice,’’ she soothed, endlessly patient and reasonable. ‘‘It is perfectly defensible to favor a tub over a pool: merely a difference in temperament and preference. Do not turn it into something more than it is. Let’s face it, you have never really been one for nature, that is all.’’ And so we returned to the City where I found my mother dangerously ill.

  Six

  My mother’s voice rasped and wheezed: ‘‘Henry … where is … Henry?’’ ‘‘Henry is visiting friends in Washington, Mother, he’s very well.’’ ‘‘Tell him … there is … no … cause … for anxiety.’’ Then there was father to worry over: ‘‘Your father … do not … forget … your father’s … bedtime … cordial.’’ While puffing out the recipe – half a lemon slice, three whole cloves, a jigger of whiskey – she gulped air like a caught fish for water. But she was not a fish, I reminded myself, shamed, she was my mother. How much is a jigger, Mother? Would I make my father drunk? But then the cordial went out of my head as the tiny air-carrying vessels in her lungs closed up and her breath grew even more ragged and constricted. I reminded myself I was in charge and felt the fresh air fly into my own chest and my heart grew steady as the grandfather clock on the landing.

  Her death came quietly. All four of my brothers – William, Henry, Wilky, Robertson – carried her body to the cemetery in Cambridge. It was a splendid day, the weather having no regard for our small human loss. Clear cold crisp: I coughed until my shoulders shook but refused to cry. Our father managed to embarrass us by invoking the Divine Nature throughout his funeral oration, and afterwards by producing small mewling noises as if an abandoned rodent was hidden in his patriarch’s beard. Aunt Kate stood beside him like a wife-in-waiting. Would she look after him now or would I? What, I considered, was to be her place in our family? Mother/ Father/ Aunt Kate: the three of them had stood solid as a milking stool. But one of its legs – my mother, Kate’s own sister – had been lopped off; so how would the stool now stand?

  Later, Aunt Kate said she thought mother would be proud of me: ‘‘I see her looking down from heaven rejoicing that her death has given you renewed spiritual life.’’ I said I would rather not be spied on from above, if she didn’t mind.

  I had many letters of commiseration from my old friends Sara Darwin (nee Sedgwick), Annie Richards (nee Ashburner), Ellen Gurney (nee Hooper), etc., implying insultingly that the loss was heavier for me because of my single ‘condition’. There was also one from Italy from Henry’s ‘friend’ Constance Fenimore Woolson: ‘A daughter feels it more than a son of course because her life is so limited.’ I would not deign to reply to that one either.

  Back home we stood about like store dummies being fussed over by mother’s relations and family friends while Aunt Kate and the servants scurried around us. The parlor had been cleared to make room for the food and flowers, their rotting, sweet smells combining not unlike the sentiments being served up. A truly exemplary life … such selflessness. Black bombazine shapes glided and swirled or stood like silhouettes of gloom. Two women rea
ched greedily for the same smoked salmon hors d’oeuvre. Father’s cheeks above his white whiskers were violently red as he made his way towards me. I dived for a cheese canape but there he was at my ear: ‘‘Alice!’’ so that the square of cheese flew off its cracker-bed and landed on the white tablecloth which mother had selflessly crocheted.

  ‘‘Father …?’’

  ‘‘Alice,’’ he repeated removing me from the fray. ‘‘There is something I wish to present to you.’’ He fiddled about in his vest pocket to retrieve a small, tissue-wrapped parcel. ‘‘What is it, Father?’’ He waved, ‘‘Open it, open it.’’ I un-bowed the ribbon and parted the tissue. ‘‘Oh,’’ said I; and again oh … . No doubt my mouth stood open in a parody of surprise, tho’ whether pleasurable or horrified he was not to know. The ghastly thing – a hairwork and jet brooch – consisted of loops of intricately woven strands cinched in the middle by a gold clasp and engraved with the word ‘Mother’. Three worked tassels made from my mother’s mousy, obedient hair dangled from the center. ‘‘Let it be a reminder,’’ he pronounced, ‘‘of your mother’s goodness.’’ His hand shook as he pinned it to my chest, while my own hands clenched and unclenched.

  ‘‘Thank you, Father,’’ I managed as three large females pounced, oohing and cooing ‘‘How very charming!’’ … ‘‘I’m sure you will never want to take it off!’’ I had to restrain myself from ripping the thing from me and despatching all of them with the pin, but instead I felt my brooched heart shrivel like a salted slug. I longed for Henry to rescue me but he’d hooked his thumb into his waistcoat pocket, and there it hung along with the rest of his hand like some newly shot game-bird.

  But it was William who steered me into a corner, for my own safety or everyone else’s it was not clear. ‘‘I see you are still a hyena, my little grey-eyed Alice.’’ ‘‘Am I, Willie?’’ Had he read my mind, word for word, seen me as ‘The Mad Brooch Stabber’? ‘‘The hyena,’’ I informed him, ‘‘is not a very attractive animal, you know. Aside from its ungainly body and mangy fur, it is known for its pusillanimous behavior. Is that what you think of me?’’ ‘‘Now, now, Alice,’’ he smirked.