WHAT A PITY THE YOUNG ARE UNGRATEFUL AND HEEDLESS OF the aged, believing them to have been born faded and incapable of vivid emotions. I wish I’d been kinder to poor Aunt Kate. If her life had a theme, it was her intense longing to absorb herself in a few individuals, in the members of our family primarily. After the deaths of my parents, I am afraid I let her down very badly.
After Mother’s sudden death from asthma in January 1882, Father and I moved our household to Mt. Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, where I was thrown abruptly into the role of lady of the house, in charge of the account book, the servants, and the care and feeding of Father. I did not find it easy and began to suffer from a constant apprehension that something needed doing and I did not know what it was. So much to do! Ovens needed black leading, ashes needed raking, flues needed cleaning, menus needed devising, linens needed washing, mending, starching, ironing. Oh, you have no idea!
I caught the smirks on the servants’ faces and knew that they were prepared to laugh behind my back, ignore my orders, and allow the tradesmen to cheat me. I was in an agony of anxiety that I would fail Father. Then, one morning, I woke up knowing exactly what to do; perhaps I had dreamt the solution. I went to Mother’s wardrobe, put on her grey worsted cloak with the fox fur collar, and walked down the hill. I felt my body assume her carriage, her manner of walking, even her thoughts. Carrying her marketing basket, I went from shop to shop, listening for her voice in my head to tell me how much to spend for a roast, that the laundresses should be engaged for Thursday and Friday, that the clothes-horse needed mending. I found myself effortlessly using Mother’s phrasing when I went over menus with Cook or gave orders to the butcher’s boy.
Every so often Father would address me as “Mary darling” and I treasured that as a sign of his trust. The streets of Beacon Hill were steep, cobbled, slippery in wet or icy weather, and thus impossible for a man with a cork leg, but Father’s interest in life was over. After a few months, Aunt Kate came up from New York to help out, and we took turns in the sickroom, plumping Father’s pillows, giving him sponge baths, applying wet cloths to his parched lips. I read to him from the Transcript and from the poems of Matthew Arnold and Tennyson. We started in on War and Peace.
“Don’t read me any more Russians,” he said irritably when we’d reached the end of the second chapter. “I can’t keep track of their names.” A month earlier he’d been wild about Tolstoy.
We tried Wilkie Collins and he complained of the melodrama, and after that he wearied of The Mill on the Floss. “Too womanly! She goes on and on! She should have been ruthlessly edited!” I didn’t entirely disagree. We embarked next on a sentimental novel by Mr. Howells, and Father said, “Who cares if the boy loves the girl or the girl loves the boy or whether they get married? None of it matters—don’t you see?” Finally he wished only to hear passages from his books and smiled dotingly at his own prose. I suppose in time your life becomes a story you tell yourself.
I saw that my aunt was watching me closely to see if I would fall apart, something for which I’d shown a decided aptitude in the past. When Father’s health went into a steep decline, Harry crossed the ocean and called in Dr. Beach, who diagnosed “softening of the brain” and said Father might live for some time if he took some nourishment. But he turned his head away whenever food was offered.
It was slow suicide, and I recalled ruefully the long days and longer nights that Father spent talking me out of suicide during my annus horribilis of 1878. It was clear I could not talk him out of it, and I did not try. He knew what he wanted. Before long, his parchment skin was stretched tightly over the bones of his face. His mouth was a lipless cavity. From week to week he shriveled and shrank like a human raisin, and there was a smell about him, like rotting fruit. None of which bothered him in the least.
“You see how it is with me, darling,” he’d say cheerfully, demonstrating a twiglike arm, the sparrow bones of his clavicle.
One day, while Aunt Kate and I were going over the next day’s menu and ordering the roast that Father would not touch, she broached the subject we’d avoided so far. “Dr. Beach says your father cannot last more than a month or so. Have you given any thought to where and how you will live? Afterwards.” I pointed out that Dr. Beach did not have the best record for medical accuracy and mumbled something about possibly going to live in my house in Manchester-by-the-Sea, the one I had built for Father and me but in which Father would never set foot.
“You wouldn’t mind the damp?”
“I don’t know, Aunt Kate.” That is when it hit me how unprepared I was to be mistress of an empty house. In my anguish I blocked out poor Aunt Kate’s prattle briefly and when my attention returned, she was rambling on about Twelfth Street and Fourteenth Street and Murray Hill. “You’ve always liked New York City, haven’t you, Alice? I remember your saying how much you liked the fashions and the theater.”
Oh no! Aunt Kate seemed to assume that she and I would live together! Picture the despair that fell over me, imagining our tame spinster rituals, little trips to Newport or Southampton, sherries by the fire, I lending an ear to Aunt Kate’s opinions on the book reviews in the Nation and the fashions in Godey’s. Not to mention the poisonous effect she would have on my relations with Katherine, of whom she did not approve. Maybe that was why she wanted us to live together—to save me from the evil Katherine.
It was unthinkable. Perhaps you would need to have lived with Aunt Kate and absorbed her through the bone to understand why I could not consent, but I did not know how to explain this.
I asked Father one day where he wished to be buried and what his epitaph should say. He said, “Here lies a man who has thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage, and death were all damned nonsense. Don’t put a word more.”
I was waiting. For what? For Father to say that I’d meant something to him, that it grieved him to leave me, I suppose. Had he not said he could not bear to be parted from me, even for a few months? No, that was what Mother told me he said; perhaps Father himself had never actually said that I was the “sun of his existence” and thus it was unthinkable that I should go abroad again in his lifetime. Certainly he was prepared to leave me now without a backward glance. His letters to me over the years had been scarcely distinguishable from love letters; he was that kind of man, larger than life. But now, apart from his oft-expressed desire to “leave this disgusting world,” he did not speak of his feelings at all. He fixed his gaze on the window, becoming obsessed with some sparrows perched on the ledge. I couldn’t help but notice that he was far more interested in those sparrows than me.
In his last weeks he seemed literally not to see me. As he lay dying, I was becoming a ghost to him. If he registered my presence at all, he’d say, “Shouldn’t you be mending the linens?” The only person he wanted near him now was Aunt Kate. Whenever I passed his bedroom I’d see her rubbing his stump with oil, murmuring to him. He was a happy infant again. Perhaps his dying brain mistook Aunt Kate for his Mary; perhaps the second sister finally enjoyed the happiness denied her fifty years earlier.
And then Father’s last words. The morning of the day he died he was heard to say, “Such good boys, I have such good boys.” Later his face brightened and he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, “There is my Mary!” Before the sun set, he was dead, reunited with his Mary, and I left behind like a stray dog.
For several weeks I’d been suffering ghastly attacks of indigestion and nervous fits, lying in my bedroom most of the time with the curtains drawn. Even a slit of light was torture to my eyes. Katherine moved in to care for me, giving me opium for the blinding pain in my head. I have a bleary recollection of Aunt Kate coming into the bedroom one day as I was weeping, and saying, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, you’d think you were the only one in this family with any feelings! Can’t you think of anyone else for once?”
Arguments could unquestionably be brought forth to support this view of me, I suppose, but I blurted, “Who are you? I thought you were my aunt but now I wonder if you are a vampire.” I did not know if I’d said that or merely thought it. Aunt Kate dissolved at some point (things appear and disappear mysteriously when you are on opium) and Katherine said, “That was rather rough, Alice.”
“What?”
“Calling your aunt a vampire.” But she was wearing a faint smile.
“Did I? Well, no one ought to pay attention to the ravings of an opium drunkard.”
Sometime later I reportedly announced (again I have no memory of this), “Aunt Kate is a psychic vampire, Katherine. Don’t you see how she feeds on the lives and emotions of others? She is an intimacy thief!” I was shocked when Katherine told me later what I’d said, but isn’t it the things you can’t say aloud that sicken you slowly over time?
William was on sabbatical in Europe the whole time Father was dying, staying in Harry’s flat in London while Harry was in Boston. The brothers had switched places! Feeling awfully blue and homesick amidst the distant politeness of Londoners, William confided in a letter to us, I feel as if I might die tonight and London not feel it. William’s Alice and Harry were launching telegrams and letters almost daily urging him not to cut short his sabbatical and come home, as everyone knew that under the circumstances impractical, moody William would be more hindrance than help.
In the befogged days after Father’s death, “Mrs. Alice” came over to the house to go through cupboards and attend to various practical matters, and, finding herself in the dining room one evening with Katherine, she began to question her sternly about the opium she was giving me. Didn’t she know it could turn me into an addict? Had she consulted Harry, who as my brother and current head of household, should properly be managing his sister’s affairs? (All this was what Katherine told me later.)
Katherine said, “Are you questioning my position with regard to Alice? Or Alice’s medical care, about which you are completely uninformed?”
That made my sister-in-law back down.
“If you had any idea how she suffers, you would not question it,” Katherine went on. “She is very ill, and when have you ever put out a helping hand? When have you invited her to a meal at your house or treated her like a sister?”
Mrs. Alice turned crimson, Katherine said. She said she’d been terribly tied down with the babies and the housework and William’s being abroad and her father-in-law’s illness. And, yes, poor Alice, being the daughter, was more bereaved than anyone. She knew that. She twisted her gloves in her hands, and seemed at a loss for words.
Her glance fell over the table, set for two, strayed into the dark bedroom Katherine and I were sharing, and returned to Katherine’s face. “We do appreciate, Miss Loring, the devoted care you take of Alice,” she said, pulling on her long woolen gloves. “I assume that yours is more than an ordinary friendship. That you are . . . friends for life?”
“You assume correctly.”
“That is how it is, then.”