The Sister Read online

  Two years later we meet her again. She has had to drop out of college in order to look after her child. Each night as she tucks him in he calls for his bear: ‘‘Billy, I want Billy.’’ The bear is much loved but sightless because of an ‘accident’ quite early on in its life. It occurred one night after the child had fallen asleep. As Angelica looked down upon him holding the bear, she announced confidently: ‘‘I am angry.’’ She confirmed the sensation before slipping the bear out of her child’s arms with the sleight-of-hand of a magician before tearing its eyes from its head. Only then did she begin to tremble.

  Thus refuting William’s theory.

  *

  ‘‘Your walls …,’’ Dr Mitchell began: ‘‘Can you explain …?’’

  ‘‘It just came upon me,’’ I said sweetly: ‘‘rather urgently … the need to write it down … And since I’d been disallowed paper … In any case, I’d been told the room was about to be painted … pink.’’

  ‘‘I do not see that that has any bearing upon the …’’

  ‘‘Personally,’’ I interrupted, ‘‘I think it looks rather artful: like one of the new wallpapers.’’

  ‘‘Well, that is not the opinion of the staff, I’m afraid.’’

  ‘‘And is it yours?’’

  He ran his fingers through his hair, just as William had done earlier in the day. ‘‘I haven’t actually seen it, Alice, but I have been told …’’.

  ‘‘Would you like to … see it?’’ I imagined him twirling round, enchanted with my creation. But he only shook his head, scratching his scalp with the end of his pen, his helplessness palpable. Yet it made us more equal, so I valued it. But then I began to feel sorry for him. His ‘games’, he admitted, had done nothing to alleviate my physical or emotional symptoms. Beyond that, all he could offer was ‘complete rest and freedom from responsibility’, a regimen that proved helpful for a majority of the asylum’s overburdened inmates, but obviously did nothing for me except fatten me up and slow me down.

  He did not try to dissuade me from leaving. ‘‘I fear we have failed you, Alice. We are not equipped to deal with the more … subtle psychological confusions and pressures.’’ He shook my hand and wished me luck. I thanked him for … everything. Then he did an amazing thing: he called me ‘extraordinary’.

  Eleven

  I returned to the narrow-shouldered Cambridge house at the end of summer but longed for my cottage. How I missed its moss-clad rocks, its sand-choked grass and ocean. And Katharine, above all Katharine. ‘‘I intend to return to Beverly,’’ I announced to Aunt Kate. ‘‘You will do no such thing,’’ she rejoined: ‘‘you will never manage on your own.’’ ‘‘Of course I will,’’ I asserted, already undermined by her certainty. What if she was right? By bedtime I’d gone limp as a paper doll. I held up my arms as she slipped the nightdress over my head.

  Next morning there was a letter from William announcing, in the same paragraph, the joyful birth of their baby Herman and the sad death of our brother Wilky. Sad … joyful? a birth … a death? Hip, ho, hip ho, I began swinging my arms wildly high and low as if conducting a chorus of sopranos and basses, listening with relief to how they cancelled one another out. What news, Alice? Oh, nothing much to speak of … But gradually the voices separated and there it was:

  (1) a birth: a boy called Herman.

  (2) a death: my brother Wilky

  The birth of a child even I understood as good news. But Wilky … dead? Surely not! I appealed to Aunt Kate, who nodded her assent.

  ‘‘You mean you knew of it?’’

  ‘‘I did,’’ she confessed.

  ‘‘Then why …?’’

  ‘‘I didn’t want to distress you.’’

  ‘‘But he was my brother!’’ I howled. ‘‘I should have been told … I should have known!’’

  ‘‘Well,’’ she said drily, ‘‘now you do.’’

  I sank to my knees, defeated. It was too late: for tears, for the funeral, for anything.

  ‘‘So what killed him?’’

  ‘‘Bright’s disease,’’ she explained: ‘‘it affected his heart.’’

  I scribbled notes for a story about a brother and sister, close in age but separated by distance, circumstance and interests. The sister has been told of her brother’s illness but not of its seriousness as she is judged too ill and frail herself to bear the news with equanimity. The family are ‘together’ in their deception, leaving her to imagine her brother haloed and spangled like an angel as if Bright’s Disease were a blessing, the result of having fought and been wounded in the war. She pictures an angel covered in scales like shiny medals.

  But she has been deceived. Instead of getting better, her brother dies. She has been stupid, gullible. However, the reader is begged not to hold her entirely responsible for her childish blindness; after all, has she not been kept deliberately in the dark through the family’s deception? In any case, their ‘strategy’ is soon shown to have been an ill-conceived ‘bungle’ as the sister, overcome with remorse and guilt, is tipped into irretrievable madness.

  ‘‘But why may I not return to Beverly Farms?’’ I took up my plea. Aunt Kate shook her head. I simply would not cope. The responsibilities involved in managing the seaside property and its acreage, its outbuildings and stables, would be too great for me. Would they? Oh, they would. There would be storms along the coast, the wind would howl down the chimneys and the wolves would join in.

  I pictured Henry’s ‘house of fiction’ beside my house of failure. Each time I closed my eyes I saw it staring back at me out of its uncurtained, abandoned windows; while outside the horses and the sea both bucked and foamed at the mouth, rolled and retreated and returned again, pawing the ground before lying down glossy and peaceful to lick each others’ backs.

  It no longer belongs to me, I thought; nothing does, not even my own body.

  William’s letter ended with the following: ‘Well, Alice, you will now face your freedom and your nakedness’.

  *

  ‘‘Can you describe the pain, Alice?’’ asked Dr Beach assuming an unctuous familiarity.

  ‘‘No, Dr Beach,’’ I told him pointedly, ‘‘I cannot describe the pain; my brother Henry is the describing one.’’ But that left me feeling as if I’d been emptied out. So, desperate to ‘refill’ myself, I decided since it was my pain I would describe it, however lamely and inadequately.

  Where to begin?

  ‘‘Anywhere you like,’’ encouraged Beach perusing his fingernails.

  I considered describing the multiple clamorings in my head as of a dozen hungry children banging on empty metal plates with metal spoons. But it would not be helpful. I must try and isolate one of the sources of distress. Immediately my hands flew to my stomach, which had been hugely swollen and hard as a new rubber ball. He brushed my hands away and palpated the area. ‘‘Tumors, assuming that’s what you’re worried about, do not come and go,’’ he twinkled, obviously amused. Furious tears leaked out from under my lids. Pain. The problem was I could only speak about it when I was not experiencing it. Pain drove the words away rendering it, literally, unspeakable. But without words, what could he do for me?

  I felt a sharp jab in my buttocks: something to ‘relax’ me., he explained.

  ‘‘Now,’’ he moued, ‘‘if you don’t tell me, Alice, how can I help you, hmmm?’’

  I moued back. The pain had begun to abate so that I was able to describe the pressure towards a gripping center, the pelvic muscles threatening to break apart; the digestive convulsions that now left me weakened.

  ‘‘You are ‘out of the woods,’ said Beach.

  But woods had nothing to do with it.

  ‘‘I feel nothing,’’ I reported, gratefully content. It struck me then as a possible definition of health: to feel nothing.

  But the memory of it, of course, was not the same as it. Given my euphoric pain-free state, the words came tripping out, light and cheerful, belying the pain; for once pain is gone, I realized, i
t cannot be re-experienced in the same way. A mercy. The body is clever in that way. We can reel off, after the fact, a list of adjectives to describe pain (mild, soaring, intense, unbearable), or employ metaphors (it pinched like a crab … pummelled like a boxer’s fists) but there is no way to convey the actual, lived experience. A problem in logic. I saw no way out. William would understand; Beach had no idea. He hoped, by the way, I would come to his concert next Saturday evening.

  ‘‘Ah, a musical doctor,’’ I commented; then: ‘‘Have you ever observed a piano being tuned, Doctor?’’ I was thinking of Aunt Kate’s upright that had been moved into our parlor when she returned to live with us. Her preference had been for Chopin. Our father had wanted her to play Bach which he found more ‘cerebral’, but Aunt Kate ignored him and went on playing Chopin, dreaming of who knew what. Her marriage, remember, had lasted less than two years. I appealed to Beach: ‘‘What kind of marriage is that?’’ I asked. Unfortunately, he explained, that was not his field of expertise. ‘‘About the pain,’’ he reminded me: ‘‘something about a piano?’’ ‘‘Oh, yes,’’ I recalled: ‘‘The way to tune a piano is to place a special wrench-like contraption over the head of the tuning pin, and then to lower the pitch, slacken the string counterclockwise; to raise the pitch, turn the peg clockwise. Tighter. Tighter still until the string is so taut you can feel its vibration. There is a point just before it breaks, literally at breaking point, when it can almost sing to itself, and then it sets all the others singing.’’ I paused.

  ‘‘That is how it feels inside of me.’’

  ‘‘Quite the Hallelujah Chorus in there,’’ Beach quipped, pleased with himself. I stared. Soon he would tell me I would be skipping about in no time. I had blundered again. There was too much energy in my description of pain recollected in, if not tranquillity, relative wellness. I had failed to convince him. He thought I was enjoying myself too much, and perhaps I was. In love with her own illness … painting her symptoms in metaphorical terms … a literary family, don’t you know. I began to think a pair of scythes tearing at me might have made a more accurate description. And the piano had been wrong; a symphony orchestra made up of blind, deaf musicians would have better represented the rumble and smash of instruments all playing out of tune and time, more like an army turning against itself. But I had been afraid of over-dramatizing. Yet how was I to know? As soon as the pain was no longer with me, the telling of it, about it, became another fiction. You have to make it up, I thought, once it’s gone. That is what Henry is so good at, and I am not. Yet how could Beach help me if I could not make him understand? So if Beach failed to diagnose the problem, it was my fault, not his. Stoopid stoopid stoopid.

  ‘‘Well, Miss James.’’ He stood tall, a handsome man with wide shoulders and a shock of prematurely white hair. He examined my heart, pronouncing it, unlike poor Wilky’s, a ‘vivacious’ organ. ‘‘You mean I am alive?’’ I asked. ‘‘Evidently,’’ he replied. Then he gave his summation: ‘‘I hold out strong hope that in eighteen months or two years time, at the outside, you shall be strong enough to have some special treatment for those poor spindles. But we shall see, it does not do to hope for extravagant results. As for the digestive problem, keep away from fatty foodstuffs and get out and enjoy yourself. I believe you spend too much time indoors with your books. I will bring you some charcoal next time,’’ he concluding, patting my stomach as if I were his pet dog.

  Twelve

  I walked the ten blocks to Dr Neftel’s office on East 48th Street. It was late February by now, cold and slushy, but I felt warm inside my coat and fur-lined galoshes. My brother Wilky was dead, but I was not. Or was I? Neftel’s building, an elegant East side brownstone, was sandwiched between two tall, ugly brick buildings. I was admitted by a nurse who took my coat and led me to Neftel’s ‘inner sanctum’ – it occupied the entire first floor – where the ‘great man’ was waiting, fingers a-twiddle. What would he do to me? Would he sit and ‘Mitchell’ me about my family? I prayed not.

  ‘‘So, Miss James, sit, sit, tell me, you have a problem, take your time we have all day.’’ At $100 a visit, I thought, he can afford to take all day. While I described my symptoms (headache, indigestion, back pain, stiffness, heaviness and sometimes paralysis in the legs), Neftel scanned the notes I’d had sent from the asylum. ‘‘Wrong!’’ he burst out, ‘‘all wrong! What are they doing to you? Rest? Rest? Any more rest and you will fall asleep for the rest of your life!’’ He was standing now, pummeling his desk. He swung one leg up and let it hang there while he outlined his treatment: ‘‘Your symptoms, Miss James – hysterical neuralgias, spinal irritations causing pseudo-paralysis, etc. etc. etc – are the result of electrical currents that have gone wrong in the body but which can be redirected, while those that are dormant can by the same token be electrically stimulated. ‘‘Are you with me, Miss James? Good, we will start immediately.’’ When I inquired what else the treatment would involve he slapped his thigh, ‘‘Exercise! exercise and more exercise!’’ ‘‘But,’’ I remonstrated, ‘‘Dr Mitchell prescribed total rest.’’

  ‘‘Mitchell? Weir Mitchell??’’ Neftel came close enough for me to smell his garlicky breath. ‘‘Weir Mitchell is an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy. He tells old ladies what they like to hear: rest and food. Hah, you like to spend your days stretched out on a chaise longue dropping bon-bons down your throat? Fine by me, but you will not get better. If anything, worse. Nervous disorders affect the body’s tissues and the accumulated products of tissue-metamorphosis act in a deleterious manner upon all the vital processes producing a depressing effect upon the muscular and nervous system and a feeling of exhaustion. Rest exacerbates this by deactivating the sensitive electromotor system of the muscles. Exercise, on the other hand, brings fresh blood and lymph to the affected muscles, removes the effete substances so that the organs can resume normal function. Simple.’’

  He snapped his fingers.

  ‘‘However,’’ he added, ‘‘Rome was not built in a day.’’

  ‘‘No,’’ I agreed. I began to relax enjoying the way his Slavic tongue lapped at the English language. He was small and dainty with golden hair on the backs of his hands. He hopped about the room, barely able to contain himself, as if he were on some youth drug. But what was I to do, run a marathon, climb the Matterhorn, swim the East River? ‘‘Yes, of course, why not?!’’ He could not be serious. He was. Neftel belonged to something called The Penguin Club. He and a handful of others went early every morning for a plunge from Rockaway Beach.

  ‘‘Even in winter?’’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘‘Especially in winter!’’ Neftel replied.

  ‘‘But surely not …?’’

  Neftel laughed. ‘‘Come come, we are not lunatics, no, we wear special insulated suits. But only until maybe March and then, yes, we go in starkers. Most exhilarating!’’

  Starkers? That night I had a dream in which I swam alone with Neftel, my hair loose and streaming. I am laughing. ‘My mermaid,’ he calls me, which makes me laugh even more, delighted by our exotic intercourse. But then I feel my legs becoming trapped inside my mermaid’s tail so that I cannot kick and begin to drown …

  ‘‘You read too many tales!’’ he said when I told him about it. ‘‘Come, time for another electrical treatment.’’

  I allowed myself to be led over to the machine which enfolded me in its sinister-looking arms. He hooked me up. ‘‘Are you ready?’’ I nodded, bracing myself for the jolts which I remembered from The Holtz Machine. This one was even more vicious, like being attacked by swarms of bees, then hammers, then … .

  ‘‘So!’’ cried Neftel. ‘‘Now you walk!’’

  ‘‘Walk …?’’ I could barely stand. Still, if I walked I did not have to think about Wilky, or about Katharine who hadn’t written in weeks. Each day I forced myself to walk further, uptown to downtown and back, crisscrossing East side to West side. The neighborhoods changed, the sidewalks filled and emptied with clutter, the fashiona
ble women came and went, but I kept moving. Perhaps, I thought, this is what William meant by my ‘freedom’. So long as I kept moving the funk could not get me. I wrote to Aunt Kate and friends Sara and Fanny and Ellen telling them it was doing me a deal of good. Only to Katharine did I express my doubts. But it was true that I had more energy than I’d had in a long while. I felt light. Best of all, I slept well and was free, ever since the mermaid dream, from nightmares. I was alone yet did not feel lonely. I even attended the gala opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, a performance of Handel’s Jephtha, sung in Latin. Afterwards, I walked home fueled by anti-biblical fury. To sacrifice a daughter? And then, that she should spend two months running about the mountains bewailing her virginity? As if chastity were some social lotion for the extermination of evil? But then I turned my ire on the daughter: enough bewailing, you nincompoop, go and lose it!

  But who was I to talk?

  A month passed. ‘‘Walk!’’ ordered Neftel. ‘‘I cannot,’’ I said. I was walked out. The electricity had left me feeling starched. My shoes were worn to onionskins, my feet blistered; and then the nightmares and palpitations returned. I was afraid to go out, could not face the squalid, alien, odious City, with its brick-faced houses, its ash-barrels and vendors, its bleak treeless sidewalks, its screaming fish-wives. Its smells. Give me back my blessed humble Boston, I prayed. Besides, I’d begun to feel degraded by the treatment, by being yelled at and worked like a slave. ‘Neftel,’ I wrote Katharine, ‘is a quack with the moral substance of an avian.’ I paid him his exorbitant fee. Even then he squawked: ‘‘Walkwalk!’’ squawked the parrot, and I obeyed: I walked out of his office.

  Thirteen