“THESE ARE FROM THE BRADLEYS’ YELLOW HEN, MISS,” SHE TELLS me, extracting four fat brown eggs from her marketing basket. “The brown hen is poorly and hardly lays now. They are thinking of eating it.”
This leads to speculation about how many meals this indigent family might stretch out of one sickly hen. What I have been learning about the poor in England is a brutal revelation. One of Katherine’s social worker friends told us there were thousands of families in London living in one room, subsisting on “sop,” which is not a metaphor, as I first supposed, but consists of crusts of bread they get from the parish and soak in water. And these are the families of working men, carpenters and cabinet-makers, all crying out for work!
But there is other news today, and Nurse can hardly wait to impart it, I can tell. In the bakery where she buys our rolls, she conversed with a new neighbor who has just moved in upstairs in our lodging-house. “A young parson just starting out, Miss, very nice. He said he would like to call on you.” The tip of her nose is red from the cold.
Oh dear. Unable to get about on my legs, I have become a sitting duck for parsons. And Nurse herself, a devout Anglican, is a glutton for church.
“Did you tell him I’m a sort of pagan from Boston?”
“Oh no, Miss.” Blushing. She has.
“Very well, Nurse. So long as he doesn’t get his hopes up.”
Nurse (whose name is Emily Bradfield) was hired by Katherine three months ago, shortly after we moved from London to Leamington, K having foreseen that she would eventually be called back to America by family troubles (i.e., her sister Louisa). Her departure came to pass a short while later, in fact, not long after I received a particularly pitying letter from brother William (to be known hereinafter as the Quagmire Epistle). I told Katherine that if she had not been there, I might have gone out, just like a candle.
“Oh Alice, you wouldn’t!” she said.
“Yes, I would. Being my eldest brother, William can make me feel that I exist or not. It was very fortunate you were here.” I was only half joking.
When Katherine sailed home, I thought I would die of heartbreak. I can’t go back to America—ever. Between us lies a large ocean, and it was seasickness that laid me low two and a half years ago, five hundred nautical miles east of Newfoundland. By the time we steamed into the docks of Liverpool, I could not walk or stand. When I do, even now, the world reels around me, and my legs collapse. Although I have seen many doctors—who have blessed me with the most varied and ingenious diagnoses—spinal neurosis, nervous hyperaesthesia, suppressed gout—the reason for my illness remains obscure, although everyone agrees I should not dream of taking on an ocean.
Our voyage had been perfectly lovely the first few days, or would have been if not for Louisa’s possessiveness. Whenever K and I were playing shuffleboard on deck, count on Louisa to pop up with her hand pressed to her forehead like a dying nymph, and K would have to go tend to her whilst I remained in a swaying saloon, hemmed in by a crowd of missionary women on their way to convert the Far East. When we’d walk on deck in the evening, wrapped in woolen shawls in the frosty air, Louisa would chatter away about cousins and second cousins I did not know. Bostonians and their cousins! She suffers from consumption—though she seems an Amazon to me—and it is axiomatic to her that a sister comes before a friend.
At times during our crossing I thought of pouring out my sorrows in a letter to K, so distant did she seem when Louisa wedged herself between us. But that is ancient history now. (Incidentally, Katherine was the last person standing on our ship. She attributed her hardiness to my brother William’s seasickness cure, which consists of a blistering patch behind the ear and has something to do with the semicircular canals of the inner ear. Don’t ask me any more, but he has written papers on it for medical journals.)
WILLIAM JAMES
18 GARDEN ST., CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
AUGUST 9, 1887
TO ALICE JAMES
Your card, and H’s letters, have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, and I am sorrier than I can express. You poor child! You are visited in a way that few are called to bear, and I have no words of consolation that would not seem barren. Stifling slowly in a quagmire of disgust and pain and impotence! Silence, as Carlyle would say, must cover the pity I feel.
I can only encourage you by noting that the laws which govern these vague nervous complaints means that they usually disappear after middle life.
ALICE JAMES
11 HAMILTON TERRACE
LEAMINGTON, WARWICKSHIRE, ENGLAND
AUGUST 31, 1887
TO WILLIAM JAMES
Kath. and I roared with laughter over your portrait of me “stifling in a quagmire of disgust, pain & impotence,” for I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, & though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump. I seem to present
a very varied surface to the beholder. Henry thinks that my hardships are such that I shall have a crown of glory even in this inglorious world without waiting for the next, where it will be a sure thing & my landlady says, “You seem very comfortable, you are always ’appy within yourself, Miss.”