The Sister Read online

  Later he would find an explanation for what he’d experienced in the work of Swedenborg. ‘Vastation,’ he called it. Evil, he would sermonize, was necessary, yea, essential to God’s plan. God in his infinite love allows the possibility of salvation. If man was not free to be selfish and sinful, he was not free to choose good and God.

  ‘‘Down is up,’’ as I told Dr Mitchell. ‘‘Mad is sane,’’ I went on babbling. ‘‘Welcome to the Divine Natural Humanity. Yes, Father, of course, Father. Bad is good. Selfishness is benevolence. Lying is truth. Evil is salvation … Would that the author of my being had been a stevedore, a bank clerk, an anything rather than what he was: ‘a seeker after Truth’. Whatever that was …’’.

  Mitchell led me away and had me sedated.

  Then there was lunch: a mashed potato ring circling the plate like a funerary wreath decorated with a few soggy spinach leaves. I shared a table with three other women on the same disgusting diet. We stared drowsily into our bowls. ‘‘What d’you guess we’re being fattened up for?’’ one of them asked, scooping the remains of her crusted potato into her napkin for later disposal. Another, winking, said, ‘‘I guess so’s the old witch can eat us for her supper!’’ Dessert was a bowl of milky gruel over which maple syrup had been liberally sloshed.

  Alone in my room I plotted a story about a group of women imprisoned in a beautiful but dark old Boston mansion, set in extensive grounds patrolled by dogs trained to catch escapees. The women are being fattened up for some malign purpose. It would not be clear in the story what the purpose was, but a sense of menace would pervade the tale as the women went waddling about the halls and grounds, barely able to move or think.

  *

  ‘‘Tell me about your brothers,’’ encouraged Mitchell.

  ‘‘My brothers? But I have four.’’

  ‘‘Choose one.’’

  I closed my eyes. I saw Willie slipping naked from the bathroom up to his room. Somehow he’d managed to forget his towel. But I did not tell him about that. Instead, I told him about our wrestling games, how he would pin me to different surfaces as if testing for the best one. One day he began in the garden but I screamed because it was wet and would make me ill, which frightened him, so he pulled me up and pushed me into the garden room instead whereupon he threw me to the floor, which was gratefully carpeted, and there he pushed and pummelled and would not desist, flattening my arms out and pressing himself hard into me while grinding his teeth; then of a sudden wrenching himself off and shoving me away from him so that I rolled like a despised thing, as if what had occurred had been my fault.

  The telling tired me out.

  ‘‘But,’’ Dr Mitchell leaned forward, ‘‘had anything actually occurred?’’

  ‘‘Occurred …?’’ My voice, in its innocence, rose higher in pitch. ‘‘How exactly do you mean?’’

  ‘‘Anything of a violent physical nature, that is …?’’

  I’d had enough ‘soft soaping’ to last me a lifetime. I accused him of cowardice. ‘‘You’re afraid to say it,’’ I taunted, ‘‘aren’t you?’’ And then I dared him to say it. And so he did.

  ‘‘Allright then: did any sexual impropriety take place between your brother and yourself?’’

  ‘‘Of course not,’’ I said disgustedly: ‘‘what a vulgar suggestion. It was all perfectly innocent.’’

  *

  William found me occupying a bench under a sprawling beech. It was late summer and the tree had flung out its fullest, frilliest leaf-petticoat. He followed my gaze up the substantial trunk. ‘‘The mother goddess,’’ he named it, keen as he was on mythic figures. ‘‘Yes, Willie: do sit,’’ I said patting the seat beside me. There was of course too much to talk about: Father’s death; Wilky’s growing illness; his own year in Oxford and London; my ‘incarceration’. He fixed me with his cross-eyed stare. ‘‘It’s wonderful to see you … my little grey-eyed doe.’’ He patted my hand: ‘‘You’re not suffering?’’

  ‘‘Hardly. As you see, it’s more like a country retreat than a madhouse.’’

  ‘‘And the accommodation?’’

  ‘‘Entirely satisfactory. Our rooms are currently painted a clinical white but they are threatening to re-do them in consoling pink tints with moldings and wallpapers. They are worried the glaring whiteness might nudge us – I demonstrated with a precariously positioned pebble – over the edge into madness. We are highly suggestible, you see.’’

  ‘‘Sensitive might be a more accurate word.’’ He paused: ‘‘And you are eating?’’

  ‘‘Like a goose being prepared for slaughter.’’

  ‘‘Slaughter, Alice?’’

  ‘‘I am being Fletchered to death. Stuffed to the gills on a high-starch diet of potato-rice-blancmange-bread-spaghetti. I chew every stodgy mouthful for at least 15 minutes: first one way, then the other.’’ I demonstrated puffing out my cheeks, as if they needed any further puffing. ‘‘Then I swish milk around in my mouth before finally swallowing, thus rendering any identifiable foodstuffs total mush.’’

  He groaned. ‘‘Don’t tell Henry or he’ll be violently ill.’’

  ‘‘I wouldn’t dream of it. They say he is able to cycle two hundred miles a day on his own dietary regime – Fletcher that is.’’

  William tsk’d. ‘‘Sheer quackery. Anyway, do you intend to cycle two hundred miles a day, Alice?’’

  ‘‘My ambitions are rather more modest: merely to get up the stairs to my attic room: I can barely manage it.’’

  ‘‘That’s because carbohydrates make you fat and lethargic.’’

  ‘‘They like us that way; we do not cause trouble.’’

  ‘‘What you want to give you energy is a high fat, low carbohydrate diet. Beef, raw or cooked – that’s what I recommend.’’

  I snarled: ‘‘Mmn, red meat … then I shall be even more of a hyena, Willie, and you might not like that.’’

  ‘‘It would be better than …’’.

  ‘‘A stuffed goose?’’ I sighed. ‘‘Actually, Katharine would agree with you, she thinks they’re turning us all into brainless idiots.’’

  There was a pause. ‘‘How is Katharine, by the way?’’

  ‘‘Boringly well, as ever. Writes at least twice a week. Travelling suits her. But she hates me being here.’’

  He looked around. ‘‘I’m not sure I like it either,’’ he said.

  ‘‘What is there not to like? The grounds, as you see, are quite magnificent … .’’

  ‘‘However disguised it’s still an institution for the …’’.

  ‘‘Neurotic, hysterical, neurasthenic, hypochondriacal, etc etc etc?’’ I supplied.

  ‘‘Is that Mitchell’s diagnosis?’’

  I nodded. He refuted it. I was not hysterical, merely ill. ‘‘In any case, however defined, I don’t like you being secluded with a bunch of … mentally and emotionally unstable females.‘‘

  ‘‘But Willie, that is precisely what I am!’’

  ‘‘I don’t care,’’ he repeated. ‘‘I see it leading to either an unnatural demureness …’’.

  ‘‘You mean it will break my spirit? Turn me into a sugary cringing little Dame Durden?’’

  ‘‘Just so. Alternatively …’’

  ‘‘Yes?’’

  ‘‘… to open revolution.’’

  ‘‘Ah. That’s more like it, Willie. You see me as Liberty leading the rabble across the lawns, as in the Delacroix, with Fletcher’s head on a pike?’’

  But then I realized he’d used ‘open revolution’ to stand in for madness; that after awhile I would ‘graduate’ from mere dilapidation into stark raving lunacy.

  ‘‘Don’t worry, Willie,’’ I soothed, ‘‘I won’t let them turn me into the mad Mrs. Rochester.’’ I looked up towards my own top floor turret room. ‘‘Though the idea of fire had occurred to me.’’

  ‘‘That’s my Alice,’’ he grinned broadly, adding: ‘‘Obviously they have not destroyed that part of your brain where the im
agination resides.’’

  ‘‘Not for want of trying,’’ I told him: ‘‘they have jolted me out of my wits. But which part of the brain is it exactly?’’

  He took my cranium between his two hands and drew upon it with his finger – somewhere near my left ear – a shape the size of a soda biscuit.

  I said, ‘‘I will request they stay away from that area in future.’’

  We sat silently for a time.

  ‘‘And how is Alice?’’ I asked. ‘‘And your little Billy?’’

  ‘‘Ah, the domestic catastrophe is nearly eighteen months old. He has a rich orange complexion, a black shock of hair and is of a musical disposition – though not too musical. I find I have affection for the little animal.’’

  ‘‘And little Henry?’’

  He smiled. ‘‘Thriving.’’ Alice, he added, was soon to have another: ‘‘It’s only just been confirmed.’’

  ‘‘That’s splendid news, Willy: congratulations.’’

  He shot his fingers through his hair leaving it spiked like an artichoke. ‘‘She is my earth, Alice. What would I do without her?’’

  ‘‘Don’t fuss, Willie,’’ I said: ‘‘She’ll be fine: she’s like Katharine, hideously healthy. Anyway, it’s mostly the poor that die in childbirth.’’

  He’d begun tapping his foot. ‘‘She’s always there, when I have my nervous attacks … you understand, Alice.’’ He was breathing noisily. ‘‘She knows exactly how to calm me down with her … mellowness.’’ He turned to face me. ‘‘She is not like us, Alice … not an ounce of morbidness in her body. And the house,’’ he went on, ‘‘she creates such a sense of order and calm, yes more calm … even when the children cry, she manages to silence them, or take them away somewhere because you see I find it … disturbing, but she protects me from … oh, everything.’’ He blinked; he was having trouble with his eyes again. I wanted to say As our mother did our father but instead I took his hand, ‘‘I’m glad you found her … Alice, I mean. I’m happy for you, truly.’’ And I was – to know that she would keep him safe. But who would keep me safe? Katherine, of course. Yet could I say, What would I do without my Katharine? The two statements did not appear to carry equal weight. Even in my own mind ‘Alice’s Katharine’ and ‘William’s Alice’ seemed to belong in separate compartments.

  William twirled one end of his moustache, then the other before reaching round to my other side where there lay the latest Cornhill Magazine. ‘‘What’s this you’re reading?’’ I explained it contained a reprint of Henry’s nouvelle Daisy Miller: the story of an all-American girl – brash, even vulgar, yet somehow appealing – who refuses to conform to the code of behavior in Roman society and is therefore punished. She flirts in the Colosseum by moonlight, catches malaria, and dies.

  ‘‘Have you read it?’’ I asked.

  By way of reply he muttered, ‘‘An echo of Newport, indeed.’’

  ‘‘And why not,’’ said I, ‘‘as a way of portraying a New England ‘type’?’’

  But he had no rational response: the whole enterprise seemed to annoy him:

  ‘‘What a way to make a living!’’ he burst out.

  I allowed the unguarded exclamation to die away. ‘‘Practicing an art, as Henry does,’’ I said at last, ‘‘is not so much a way of making a living as a way to make life more bearable … to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.’’

  His eyes widened. ‘‘And for whom does this ‘Daisy Miller’ make life more bearable?’’

  ‘‘Henry, for one,’’ I said. ‘‘She is his creation, she and the rest of her ‘vulgar’ American family. Part of him, I believe, is devoted to her; is one with little Randolph when he asserts, ‘American candy is the best … American girls are the best.’ ’’

  ‘‘Do you mean to say you think it was a mistake for Father to drag us off to Europe when we were children?’’

  ‘‘A mistake?’’ I repeated. I read out a sentence I had earmarked: ‘‘ ‘Winterbourne wondered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at about this age.’ ’’ I looked up. ‘‘It is his paean to all that – candy, girls, not being ‘stiff as an umbrella’. His regret at its loss.’’

  ‘‘Regret …? But he took it upon himself to leave!’’

  ‘‘True enough, but acting never stops one regretting. As for Daisy herself,’’ I went on, ‘‘Winterbourne is drawn to her, of course, but he also wishes to be her.’’

  ‘‘And exactly who or what is this Daisy Miller?’’

  I held out my palms, as if testing for rain. ‘‘I guess,’’ I said, mimicking Daisy’s favorite speech pattern, ‘‘all this.’’ My fingers clutched at the empty air as if to draw something meaningful out of its dry sedated mildness, except that Henry’s world was divided and divided, viewed from so many different angles and points of view it seemed impossible, ridiculous, to try and reduce it to some comprehensible shorthand. But I saw no other way.

  ‘‘I guess,’’ I said, ‘‘it’s about confusion, temptation … attraction and repulsion towards this ‘Americanness’, this ‘innocence’ he has left behind.’’

  ‘‘But he has chosen it: the other,’’ he almost sneered.

  I turned to fact him square-on: ‘‘That is the whole point. Daisy is sacrificed to Europe.’’

  We said nothing for a few moments. ‘‘It is also of course,’’ I added, ‘‘about sex.’’ He stiffened. Clearly we should not be discussing such things – I should not be discussing such things – but was it not the privilege of madness, after all? I had found the passage where Winterbourne stands at the bottom of the hotel’s great staircase watching Daisy as she trips down towards him and senses ‘something romantic going forward’. I read out: ‘‘ ‘He could have believed he was going to elope with her.’ There,’’ I exclaimed, feeling mildly triumphant: ‘‘What else is that but a barely veiled way of saying, He undressed her with his eyes … he imagined running away with her and throwing her down on the bed and ravishing her … Am I not right, Willie?’’

  He gave a great puff of disapproval while running his fingers repeatedly through his hair. ‘‘You are getting over-excited, Alice: I think we had better get you back in the house.’’ I reached up to pat down the rather mad-looking tufts. I guess I felt quite calm.

  After William had gone I made my way down the central corridor, narrowly avoiding collision with a nurse carrying a steaming pile of linen. Then on the narrow stairway up to my room I met the so-called decorator. I was beginning to feel encroached upon. ‘‘Must my room be painted pink?’’ I spat the word, as if someone had stuffed my mouth with over-sweetened marzipan. ‘‘Do I not have a say in the matter?’’ He began to back off, poor man, trapped as he was in that confined space with an inmate. He was merely following orders, he explained. ‘‘Well, then,’’ I pursued, ‘‘my order is – if it must be painted at all – for blue, the palest of blues.’’ The color of French cupboards, of Katharine’s eyes; the clear, unsentimental hopefulness of blue. But he had gone before I could explain all that. And meanwhile my room was still white.

  Before leaving William had presented me with a copy of his ‘What Is An Emotion?’ It was his year’s work which had been published in the philosophy journal, ‘Mind.’ ‘‘I do not suppose,’’ he’d said with that familiar tinge of competitive bitterness, ‘‘it will water your soul as Daisy Miller did, but it is … what it is.’’ Having had enough of soothing him, I’d had to bite my tongue from agreeing. ‘‘Goodbye, Willie,’’ I eventually managed. ‘‘Love to Alice and the children.’’

  I curled up in the window and read. I did not find its turgid academic style easy, but I persisted. Do we run from a bear because we are afraid, or are we afraid because we run?

  His theory, in the end, appeared simple: a refutation of the natural assumption that we feel first and act later. According to this theory, upon catching sight of the bear, we experience complex bodily responses: racing heart, tight stomach, swea
ty palms, tense muscles, etc. – which causes us to flee. As we do so, the body goes through further physiological upheaval (blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, etc etc.) At some stage (when we are halfway up a tree observing the bear climbing after us?) we translate these responses into an emotion: in this case, I am afraid. In other words, the mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to the physiology, not vice versa.

  We do not tremble because we are afraid; we do not cry because we are sad. No, we are afraid because we tremble. And we are sad because we cry.

  The year is 1862. Winter. William announces his intention to walk the Appalachian Trail come spring. ‘‘But there will be bears,’’ objects Henry. We can all see he’s afraid, but it’s part of his ‘new regime’. He will battle his demons. He will take his rifle. He is not a sissy like Henry. He will not be beaten. Later I lie in bed thinking of him tromping along in terror yet forcing himself not to fear. How like a bear he is, I think.

  I stopped reading and gazed about me. The walls of my attic room, I realized, were like enormous empty pages. ‘‘Never touch paper with pen, brush or pencil as long as you live,’’ Mitchell had advised.

  Well then I won’t.

  I began my story on the south-facing wall working my way round with a crayon I’d found in the games room. The story was called ‘Billy’s Bear’. It featured a young woman called Angelica, and a rather older man called Professor William Beard. He is a philosophy teacher and Angelica is his student. He is very attracted to her and she is naturally flattered. ‘‘Call me Billy,’’ he instructs. In due course he seduces her. She experiences certain bodily sensations (rapid heartbeat, sweating, etc.). I am in love, she now feels.

  Thus proving William’s theory.

  Angelica soon discovers she’s with child. ‘‘I do not believe it can be mine,’’ protests the philosophy teacher called Billy. ‘‘But it is yours, it cannot be otherwise,’’ cries Angelica, helplessly.