THE FOLLOWING DAY, A SWELTERING TUESDAY, HARRY, AUNT Kate, and I piled into a hired coach and headed for the Swiss border. “I am praying for a mere soupçon of a breeze,” Aunt Kate said, fanning her flushed face. “So far the air is entirely hot and stagnant.”
“All the more reason to eschew a corset, Aunt Kate.”
“Gracious, Alice, what is this mania about corsets? I wouldn’t dream of going without one.”
“It’s up to you. If you die of heatstroke we can bury you in it.”
“Alice!” But she allowed herself a small smile.
“They seem extremely fond of each other, don’t they?” Harry offered. “The Adamses. When I first heard of their engagement I worried that Clover’s gaiety might be extinguished by the Adams gloom.”
“It is not hard to see how Monsieur Adams might extinguish someone,” I said.
“Oh, Henry is all right. It’s just the Adams manner. They put such stock in affecting not to care about anything.”
“Of course Clover will be happy. Her sister is very happy,” Aunt Kate tilted her heat-flushed face in Harry’s direction. “Everyone says Ellen and Whitman Gurney are the happiest couple in Cambridge. When they are obliged to be apart even for an afternoon they act as if they’d lost each other forever.”
“Perhaps there is such a thing as being too happy,” Harry said.
“How absurd, Harry! How can anyone be too happy?” said Aunt Kate, fanning her face with a copy of Le Figaro while expelling air through pursed lips. She looked near collapse. “I keep sticking my head out hoping for a breeze. So unseasonable. You’d think we were in Naples. Next thing you know, we’ll run into malaria or typhoid.”
“Well, if we succumb, at least we will have done Paris,” I said. Aunt Kate laughed, not realizing that I was perfectly serious.
Crossing the border at Saint-Gingolph, near one end of Lake Geneva, we made our way toward Geneva, and with every mile I felt paradise recede and the heaviness of existence press down on me again. Why? We were in a picturesque country, about to pay a sentimental visit to a city we’d lived in as children, in the house belonging to the Russian invalid with the mushroom hat. Perhaps it was just a passing irritation due to the heat and dust; once we reached the hotel, I would probably revive.
Geneva was pleasant enough. We paid a visit to our old house and to the boarding school Harry had attended with William and Wilky. He confessed that he’d been miserable at the school, which was all science, dead creatures, rocks, phials of smelly chemicals. And mathematics too! While William adored it, Harry yearned desperately for the longueurs of home. He said he preferred the summer he had malaria.
By now Aunt Kate’s voice and incessant platitudes were grating on my nerves, and I failed to be as moved by the scenery as I’d hoped. After ten days of visiting picturesque towns, we moved on to Villeneuve, where the Bootts had planned to rendezvous with us. Their absence was another disappointment. The heat remained oppressive, and after a few days, we made our way to Bern and Interlaken and then settled in Grindelwald, a quaint alpine town 3,400 feet in elevation, at a resort favored by English mountain climbers.
“Just smell this air, Alice,” Aunt Kate said. “Crystalline! The best air on earth for invalids! That is why there are so many resorts for consumptives here. It should do you a world of good, my pet.”
“I am not consumptive yet, Aunt Kate.”
“Of course not, but the climate is excellent for nerves, too.”
Nerves, nerves, nerves—that wearisome topic. Why did God give people nerves if they were going to cause so much trouble? So far the famous Swiss charm was quite lost on me.
Five days later, the Bootts arrived, preceded by a flurry of telegrams. Lizzy and I fell into each other’s arms. We had both sorely missed the company of friends our age, and had topics to discuss and things to laugh about. But the euphoria was short-lived. Traveling with the Bootts, I learned to my dismay, was like walking down a beautiful boulevard with a pebble in your shoe. You could go nowhere without being lectured by Mr. Boott about Palladian columns or the pre-Raphaelites, with the impeccably educated Lizzy chiming in and making you (well, me) feel like a crude lump.
I’d briefly considered asking Mr. Boott for advice on how I might live in Paris, but I saw now that he’d inevitably say something to Harry or Aunt Kate, who would then explain to me why I could not live abroad, why it would be selfish of me to want to, and where did I think the money was going to come from? I had an unfortunate habit of harboring secret wishes, one of which, right then, was to set up housekeeping with Harry in a Paris flat after Aunt Kate sailed home. This was not utterly insane; brother–sister households were not uncommon. But my thoughts had plunged back to earth since leaving Paris, and I could not ignore the sense that Harry, loving brother though he was, had no great desire to be burdened with a “delicate” sister. Indeed, I suspected he was fleeing to Paris in part to escape family. If he heard about my silly flat-sharing fantasy and recoiled, it would break my heart.
Our hotel was awash in mountaineering Englishmen and their hearty families. In the dining room and common rooms, English people would wait for the Jameses and Bootts to start the conversation. Harry said their reticence was a form of politeness; they were counting on others to make overtures, not wanting to presume. Aunt Kate, however, could not be diverted from her entrenched theory that an American should never open a conversation with an English person, as that left the American vulnerable to being snubbed. Thus several meals passed in near silence, with Aunt Kate studiously pretending the English were invisible.
Harry appeared to be studying Lizzy closely, as if she were an Old Master. Perhaps he meant to put her in a story. Maybe he was falling in love with her. He began to speak of Lizzy in her learned aspect as “produced,” by which he meant brought to a level beyond “finished.” Her manner as well as her intellect were “produced,” he observed; she was precisely what a young woman ought to be according to European standards, a jeune fille bien elevée, learned and accomplished yet modest, sweet, and possessed of that indefinable quality of “repose” that American women so conspicuously lacked (according to Harry). She never put herself forward, and performed only when her father gently pulled the strings.
On our second day, we lunched together at the hotel restaurant alongside rosy English climbing families. The Bootts were immersed in three weeks’ worth of mail, and didn’t say much, Aunt Kate seemed to be gearing up to discuss a book review in La Revue des Deux Mondes. Harry had just slit open an envelope from William, from Mount Desert Island. Too antsy to wait for him to read the whole letter in his slow and thoughtful way, I tugged at his sleeve and said, “C’mon, Harry. You can’t hog it all to yourself. What does he say?”
“Well, he is taking many sea baths. Kicking over the traces of civilization. Wishes he might never return to the ‘aetiolated life’ of Boston.”
“No surprise there. What else?”
“He takes me sternly to task for using too many foreign phrases in my Nation letters; says I must be more plainspoken if I am not to alienate Americans. By which, he seems to mean commercial travelers on trains—there is quite a long digression about them. Oh, and he detects ‘something cold, thin-blooded & priggish’ in my stories.”
I laughed, as did Harry.
“Oh, but how unkind,” Lizzy said, looking concerned and laying a sympathetic hand on Harry’s arm.
“Oh no, not at all!” Harry explained. “In our family we have a long tradition of abusive literary criticism—don’t we, Alice? William’s violent denigrations of my work are often quite useful.”
Lizzy seemed mystified. She didn’t have siblings; what did she know?
When she went off to paint a view that afternoon, Harry tagged along, carrying her easel as if he were her squire. And the next day, and the one after that. Every morning they would politely invite me to accompany them, and I’d say, “No, thank you; think I’ll rest today.” As far as I was concerned, once you’ve seen one glacier you’ve seen them all, and the sight of an alpine meadow abloom with wildflowers did not set my heart afire, either. And I certainly lacked the energy to compete with Lizzy’s erudition.
Maybe there was something wrong with me. Recent letters from Quincy Street dwelled obsessively on the dire possibility that our party would descend into Italy before the heat was over and “compromise Alice’s strength.” I reverted to practicing my principal hobbies, resting and saving my strength, and everyone seemed to approve.
Staying behind at the hotel, however, left me within range of Aunt Kate, who seemed liable to unburden herself at any moment. I’d noted with creeping horror that she was flaunting her new costumes from the Paris shopping paradises, which were too dressy for the Alps. She was also spending an undue amount of time in front of looking glasses, pinning on brooches, studying earrings, experimenting with crimps in her hair. I recognized these as ominous signs that she’d taken a fancy to Francis Boott. There was a doomed romance if there ever was one!
Didn’t she know that Francis Boott did not traffic in the tender affections? I eluded her by insisting that my sick headaches required complete solitude, and there was some truth to this. From time to time I felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the air.
To William, I wrote a letter with my latest impressions of Frankie (as we referred to Mr. Boott in our family):
He keeps one in a continued state of irritation either of pleasure of or displeasure, you hardly know which. Then he’ll be so nice and handsome and honest that you can’t but forgive him all his absurdities—until he provokes you again. On the whole, he is the most delightful but uncomfortable infant of sixty conceivable.
This was true. He would throw a tantrum like an infant of six; the provocation could be as slight as an inadequate wine list or a chateau of which some feature spoiled the period detail. He would go into a sulk, at times even seemed on the verge of tears.
“What do you and Lizzy talk about?” I asked Harry one evening.
“Oh, you know—art and the landscape and whatnot. She is exceedingly well-informed on things Italian.”
“Does she actually know everything?”
“I have yet to find a subject of which she is ignorant.”
It struck me one day that none of us really wanted to be here. Harry preferred cities, as did Aunt Kate. Mr. Boott spent most of his time talking about things in Venice and Rome and paid scant attention to nature, and a gouty toe kept him from walking much. Who knew what Lizzy wanted? Her painting, of a high alpine meadow with a craggy peak in the background, developed day by day, and was technically excellent but somehow did not move the heart (in my humble opinion).
We had come to the Alps primarily for my sake, after my “slight overexcitement” in Paris. But I soon exhausted the views and identified all the wildflowers in the inn’s botany book and was reduced to reading Daniel Deronda and The Eustace Diamonds in my room or on the terrace while trying to avoid a heart-to-heart with Aunt Kate. (While I was not unsympathetic to unrequited love, the nakedness of her feelings alarmed me.) My thoughts were slipping into monotonous grooves, and an unpleasant episode with the snakes in my stomach kept me on edge most of the night. My aunt remarked at breakfast that I was looking “peaky” and urged me to avail myself of lots of cream.
It was all too plain that Aunt Kate’s campaign for Mr. Boott’s heart was stalled. It would be hard to say whether he even noticed the changes in her toilette, the addition of a glittering hair ornament, the fake roses in her cheeks. One morning, whilst slipping past the Bootts, who were in the library, I overheard Mr. Boott say to Lizzy, “If we linger much longer, I fear things may become rather awkward.”
Not long afterward, the Bootts made their farewell and went off toward some Schloss, I forget which. Fortunately, even when brutally thwarted, Aunt Kate was rarely found in the depths of gloom for long: her affective life was pitched more toward the moderate range than the hysterical, and she succeeded in righting her ship and was herself again by the time we took the Gotthard railway to Italy.
Surveying the peaks as they slipped past, Harry remarked, “There are limits to the satisfaction you can get from staring at a mountain which you have neither ascended nor are likely to ascend.” I wondered if we would read this aperçu in the Nation soon. Did your own words surprise you when you saw them in print?
My family had been praising my letters to the skies, assuring me they’d been read aloud at several gatherings and passed along to “the boys.” Brother Bob wrote that “Alice is turning out to be the genius of the family,” and William compared me not unfavorably to Madame de Sévigné. While my parents urged me to be prudent and rein in my impulses, William’s letters counseled me to “let your mind go to sleep and lead a mere life of the senses.” Aunt Kate advised me to consume more milk and red meat. I was the sort of girl other people were always trying to fix.
But if I’d been Madame de Sévigné reincarnated, I would still have to sail home in October, while Harry remained in Paris.
It took half an hour for our train to pass through the modern wonder that was the Mt. Cenis tunnel and soon we were whizzing past a sign that read COL DU MONT CENIS, 2083 M. and on into Italy.
We chatted about the Bootts: Lizzy’s painting, Mr. Boott’s music, Lizzy’s peerless education. “It goes to show what a European education can accomplish in a girl,” Aunt Kate said. “Such an education would be impossible in America.”
“That’s quite true,” Harry said.
“How good is her painting?” I asked him.
“Very proficient. Considerable mastery. But, in the end, feminine painting is only an accomplishment.”
“Always, Harry? Invariably?” This irritated me, although it was a relief that he didn’t consider Lizzy a great artist.
“Well, how many great female artists can you name?”
The answer was zero.
We went silent, watching the snow-capped peaks slip by. I asked, “Harry, does Lizzy ever strike you as a little—hmm—lifeless?”
“What can you mean, Alice?” said Aunt Kate. “She is a lovely girl in every respect. And such a nice, neat figure, too.”
Harry became thoughtful, staring out at the blue enamel sky and the boulder-strewn moraines. A landscape for giants, inhuman in scale. At length, he said, “You’re right, Alice. There is a deadly languor about Lizzy at times, as if under all her accomplishments there is no one there.”
“Well, think about it, Harry. All her life she has tried to be what her father wants and thus has no idea who she is.”
“Poor dear girl, growing up without a mother. But daughters generally adore their fathers, don’t they?”
“Yes, Aunt Kate. Remember Iphigenia. She went willingly, I suppose.”
“Was she the one who killed her father?”
“No, her father killed her to appease the god of winds. Her brother later killed the mother, after the mother killed the father for killing Iphigenia. It was a very high-strung family.”
“Oh, dear child, you need another shawl—you’re shivering. Find the heavy tartan one if you can, Harry.”
Then we passed into Italy, to drink in antiquity, olive groves, the Duomo, the Medicis and the Sforzas, Roman aqueducts, the canals of Venice, Tintoretto et al, all the popes and heretics and saints and martyrs, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum and its blood-soaked stones. In Venice a plague of mosquitoes disturbed our sleep. In Torcello we ate innumerable figs and had ices every night. As we sat eating grapes on a bench in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I said, “The chief difference between Europe and America seems to be that people here sit on benches all day staring at you as if you were a picture.” The next day Harry wrote in his journal:
The great difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about on benches and staring at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass. Europe is certainly the continent of the practised stare.
He had, as usual, expressed it so much better than I.
Why was I unable to absorb Italy deeply, as I had Paris? Owing to some defect in my nature, my life had a peculiar tendency to burst into bloom briefly, only to turn flat, stale, and unprofitable a short while later.
To make a long story short, our sailing date came, and Harry accompanied us all the way to Liverpool and showed us into our stateroom (which I hoped would not soon be adorned with our vomit). I made a mental list of things I would have to do without: Gothic stained glass, gardens with ingenious topiary, old masters, chic cafés, centuries of history, art museums, copyists, chateaux, ancient gargoyles, brasseries catering to women who loved women, les grands magasins. Until the whistle blew, I harbored the absurd hope that Harry would ask me to stay on in Paris with him. I had pictured it so vividly, down to the faces of the gargoyles on the building I’d selected as our future address. But Harry said good-bye, and Aunt Kate and I sailed toward America.
Back home, I tried to prolong the aftertaste of Europe by having a French breakfast of chocolate and a roll, but by late November I told Mother that it no longer agreed with me. One day Mother and I were on Newbury Street doing the marketing and stopped to look at the bonnets displayed in a milliner’s window, none of which looked remotely fashionable to a person recently returned from Paris. Dead leaves scuttled along the sides of the road; most people wore sour expressions.
On the horse-cars back to Cambridge I looked across the frozen river at the backs of the brownstones of Beacon Street. Gelid laundry hung stiffly on a line, a pair of crows pecked at something down by the riverbank. No wonder Harry didn’t want to come home. In his letters he complained of the early nightfall and claimed to be nostalgic for Quincy Street, but he was probably just trying to spare our feelings.
As our eyes fastened on the frozen mudflats of Charlestown, Mother asked if I knew how bereft Father had been while I was abroad. “With tears in his eyes he would say, How I wish Alice were here to read the Advertiser aloud to me, to cheer us up with her jokes.” She had not wanted to worry me while I was abroad, but Father’s health did suffer during my absence. He came down with a bad grippe, which triggered a painful eruption of his eczema, and other things along those lines. She honestly did not see how I could go abroad again in Father’s lifetime.
A lump formed in my throat. “But, Mother, Harry is abroad. William spent almost two years in Germany. The boys are in Wisconsin. Why is Father not bereft without them?”
“Young men must make their way in the world, dear. A daughter is a special comfort.” Although her tone was matter-of-fact, her eyes were sorrowful. Perhaps she did understand how I felt and was sorry, but not enough to commute my sentence. I saw that I would never “make my way in the world,” and any gifts I possessed would wither inside me.
“I have never understood why you children are so enamored of the French,” Mother added, warming to one of her favorite themes. “So many are indecent, their houses are freezing in winter, their servants are dirty, their writers write filth, the tradesmen cheat you at every turn. I always say, I don’t know what God will do about the French on Judgment Day.”
“Fortunately, Mother, it won’t be up to you.”
Was it possible for a person to be born in the wrong country, like a cuckoo’s egg slipped into a warbler’s nest? As winter ground down on us in earnest, life in Boston became emptier. One night I overheard Mother say to Father, “I do worry that after such overstimulation, it may not be possible to reduce her to the ordinary domestic scene.” But I must be reduced to it; I should not be indulged in too much frivolity, which in the long run could spoil my character.
Alice is busy trying to idle, Mother wrote to Harry, and it is always very hard depressing work, but I think it will tell in the end.
Paris seemed by then infinitely distant. If Harry did not send us letters bearing that postmark, I might have thought I’d dreamed it.
One morning I found myself in the library with Father, who was fond of saying he liked to “have a daughter by my side to help me with my rhetoric.” A fire roared in the grate. I was reading A Slight Misunderstanding by Mérimée when suddenly something came roaring out of some circle of hell and enveloped me in a fever, a rage. My book slid to the floor, and I glanced over at Father dipping his pen in the inkwell, writing his next unreadable book. How rosy and innocent he appeared. Without warning I felt my hands curling into talons to rake the side of his face. I saw it in my mind as if it had already happened: the parallel gashes in his cheek, the scarlet drops on the carpet, Father’s shock and sorrow, my remorse.
But why, when his fatherly feelings were so pronounced he would weep at the sight of his children’s dear faces? (As William was fond of saying, the philoprogenitive faculty was exceptionally well developed in him.) I was a monster. I sat on my hands, trembling and grinding my molars until the impulse subsided. To steady my mind, I dug my fingernails into my palm and recited the planets in the solar system, the names of the seven seas, the Seven Wonders of the World, until the pressure eased.
Naturally my family had no idea of the storms raging inside me and I was in no hurry to tell them.
WILLIAM JAMES
THE VILLA ONOFRE, ROME
OCTOBER 3RD 1873
TO ALICE JAMES
Thou seemest to me so beautiful from here, so intelligent, so affectionate, so in all respects the thing that a brother should most desire that I don’t see how when I get home I can do any thing else than sit with my arm round thy waist appealing to thee for confirmation of everything I say, for approbation of everything I do, and admiration for everything I am, and never, never for a moment being disappointed.