IT WAS A SMALL SWOON, CONSIDERING THE MAGNITUDE OF THE shock. Shocks pleasant and unpleasant undo me equally, and when my body stops trembling and my tears stop flowing—at the sight of that dear face after six years!—I assure William that he is the good sort of shock. He is in tears, too, I should note, and the first thing he gasped was rather odd. “Why, Alice, you’ve become so beautiful. Your suffering has refined you.”
“Well, thank you, William. You’re not so bad yourself.” Though wearing the haggard look of sleeplessness, he nevertheless manages to look young and vital. While Henry has grown portly over the years, William has gone in the opposite direction and is lean as a greyhound.
I explain that my nerves are prone to these fits and that my mind has nothing to say about it. “I remember describing my nerves to you once in the old days, William, and you said, ‘Oh, yes, like bottled lightning.’ It was as if you’d read my mind!”
“It was a description of a woman in a novel I read.”
“I think I remember that novel,” Henry says.
“Oh, I can’t believe I’m not dreaming. You, William, in Leamington, next to Miss Clarke’s wallpaper. Can you believe it, Henry?”
“It is rather an appalling pattern!” William says.
“Isn’t it? Clarkey is immensely proud of it. It is called Marie Antoinette, don’t ask me why. Miss Clarke is a dear, though. She is sure to catch you on the stairs as you attempt to leave. I believe she has a scrapbook devoted to both my famous brothers.”
William laughs. “Pompeiian Red is all the rage in Boston this season. I believe Alice is considering it for the dining room of our new house. If she insists on a frieze of erupting volcanoes, I shall have to put my foot down!”
“Oh but, William, isn’t it the most extraordinary luck that I fell ill in the only land in which lodging houses exist! But now you must tell me about your Psychological Congress.”
“Physiological Congress. It has been timed to coincide with the Exposition Universelle, of course.”
“How wonderful. M. Eiffel’s tower is being called an ‘abomination’ and an ‘eyesore’ in the papers. You must go see it, William.” At this point Nurse comes in with tea, rolls, and gooseberry jam on a tray, and I watch William struggle to maintain a straight face when she curtsies to him. I’d almost forgotten that Americans don’t curtsy and are unaccustomed to slavish manners on the part of their domestics.
After she goes out to visit her family, William says, “Your little nurse, Emily, seems a jewel. And what a beautiful face!”
“Oh, she is, to endure all my snubs and my, to her, unknowable mysteries. Speaking of mysteries, William, they say there is little doubt that your friend, poor chloroformed Mr. Gurney, committed suicide. What a pity to hide it! Every educated person who kills himself does something toward lessening the superstition, I think.”
“It is terribly sad.”
“His wife, Kate, would call on me and pour out her troubles. She said he worked on his psychical research day and night, never took her anywhere and went around telling everyone he’d married beneath him!”
“Oh, I don’t believe it was that bad,” Henry says.
I say, “Wait and see, Henry. That is one widow who will toss out her weeds at the first opportunity. I am surprised, by the way, that the women here seem to do constantly what so rarely happens at home, namely marry again. You’d think that the wife part of you would have been sufficiently developed in one experiment, or that you might like to contemplate the situation from the bereft point of view for a while.”
“Gurney’s death is a great loss to me,” William says. “It seems one of death’s stupidest strokes, for I know of no one whose life task was begun on a more far-reaching scale.”
“Oh, I am very sorry, William. It was heroic of him to suppress his vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.”
We are quiet for a few minutes, listening to the ticking of the clock on the mantel. “Now,” I say, “you must tell me all about your children. I want to hear every detail. I am their aunt. Don’t leave anything out.”
He begins to describe them, beginning with solid, reliable, intellectually precocious Harry, “who, fortunate child, has inherited his mother’s temperament. He can always be counted on to take what falls to him with equanimity. When Bill does not get what he wants, he fills the welkin with lamentation. I think he is much as Father must have been as a child.”
“And little Peggy of the soulful dark eyes?”
“She has a mouthful of teeth and runs about with a cracker always clutched in her fist. Her grandmother thinks she has an unusually vivid inner life. We like to think she shows promise of becoming another Sister Alice—except that she is a chatterbox and you were a quiet child.”
“Who could get a word in edgewise, in our family? In another family, I might have been the Demosthenes of my sex.” William tosses his head back and laughs. He has one of the world’s best laughs.
“Please, William, do promise me that you will educate your children. Leave Europe for later, when they are old enough to have a Grand Emotion. Do not tear them up by the roots every few months, as we were.”
William gazes at me as if he is trying either to memorize my features or to correlate them with my self of six years ago. It has been that long.
“We were hotel children, weren’t we?” Henry says.
“Do you remember the school in Boulogne where there were only English boys?” William asks. “They were astonished to find we spoke English, not ‘American.’ How like Father to place us in a French school in which no French was spoken!”
“Fortunately, the schools never lasted long,” Henry says.
“I liked the schools. I liked playing with other boys. The school in Geneva, where we boarded with Wilky, was a rollicking good time.”
Henry proceeds to recite from memory the names of all of our tutors and mademoiselles.
I say, “I simply worshipped Mademoiselle Guyot, who passed out those red candies that turned our tongues red. Didn’t Father denounce her at the dinner table for teaching us Papist idolatries?”
“I remember it well,” William says. “He pounded his fist and shouted, ‘Prayers are haggling and God does not haggle!’ Poor Mademoiselle was gone the next day.”
“Oh, my heart was broken, you know. For weeks I kept praying to her bon dieu, who seemed so nice. I didn’t trust Father’s inscrutable deity to listen to my prayers or keep track of my good and bad deeds.”
“The one I remember best was the worldly Mademoiselle Danse,” Henry says.
“She disappeared suddenly, didn’t she?” William says.
“Didn’t they all?” Henry says. “Father said something about her being an ‘adventuress’ but never explained.”
“Yes!” I say, remembering now. “Do you know what I thought that meant? I thought she was an explorer and I pictured her floating down a muddy river in the part of our map of Africa labeled ‘Unexplored Regions.’ Oh, William, are you as appalled by this Stanley character as Henry and I are? Gouging a path through Africa, slaughtering everything in his path.”
After discussing Stanley’s horrors, we move on to Ireland and Home Rule and Parnell and the Unionists. Well, I do—and William listens politely. “The thought of the Irish flinging themselves against the dense wall of British brutality for seven centuries—well, you know my feelings, William. I got so worked up over the Parnell trial that I went off whenever I read anything on the subject.”
I want to seize the opportunity to carp about the British a bit more while my brothers are here, as I can’t do this with most of my callers, who are British. Although William in some moods is prone to despise the entire island and its inhabitants, he does love his London tailor and British gentlemen’s clubs and is very fond of his British Psychical friends. (I like the Sidgwicks, but Fred Myers is a horror and poor Mr. Gurney was quite deluded and is now terribly dead.) I tell him, “I can’t fathom the English. They pass special legislation about a dog’s broken leg but celebrate foxes being torn to shreds. And it is simply inconceivable the lives the poor lead here.”
“Surely we have our poor at home.”
“Yes, but the poor here are different, William. So many centuries have gone into the making of ’em.” Turning to Henry, I say, “What do fashionable people make of the army of ragged, grimy, coughing people they see everywhere? I suppose after a while they just don’t see them. The poor must bother them no more than a cloud of gnats.”
Henry makes a gesture of muted assent, or perhaps neutrality.
I broach the subject of the recent dockers’ strike, and then say to William, “Did you see that two hundred trades in London have gained a ten percent increase in wages as a consequence, the masters caving in to keep the men from going on strike?” William looks blank. Doesn’t he read the newspapers? Or do American newspapers ignore Europe? I am just warming up to a rantlet about imperial actions from Baghdad to Delhi, when I stop and laugh at myself. “Imagine the millions of the Empire being pigeon-holed by a creature whose field of vision is populated by a landlady, a nurse, and two chair-men, one perpetually drunk. It is all very funny. So, William, do tell us what your Congress is about.”
He explains that it will bring together researchers from England, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and the United States for the first time and he expresses his admiration for some French researchers who have been studying hysterics. “They spend hours with a single patient, hypnotizing her (or him) and assembling a psychic biography.”
“But why should the patient wish to be hypnotized?”
“Sometimes when there is a great shock, such as a railway crash, the trauma is forgotten, but not entirely. The memory goes underground. The process is called dissociation. Pierre Janet will hypnotize a patient and uncover the fixed ideas dwelling in the depths of her mind, ideas of which she is unaware but which are making her ill.”
Henry volunteers that idées fixes are a part of the French character, Balzac’s characters being a case in point.
“For example,” William says, “there was a girl who left home in what is called a fugue state.”
“Fugue?” I say. “That sounds lovely.”
“No, it means—well, never mind. Janet hypnotized her and put a pencil in her hand and she wrote, ‘I left home because maman accuses me of having a lover and it is not true. I sold my jewels to pay my railroad fare. I took such and such a train.’”
“Maybe she was lying, William. In French novels it’s nothing but adultery, adultery, adultery.”
“She wasn’t. Under hypnosis, the girl related everything that happened with precision, while continuing to insist she remembered nothing about it. She was not lying, Alice. She had a secondary personality. It had split off from the rest of her mind because of some great disturbance.”
“But, William: when this man hypnotizes the lunatics, what good does this do them?”
“Well, once he has excavated their harmful memories, as it were, he erases or changes them by means of suggestion. He gives the patient a new set of memories.”
“What do you mean, suggestion?”
“Hypnotic suggestion.”
“Oh, hypnotism! There is such interest in the Mind Cure here, William. I wish you could meet Mrs. Lucian Carr. Hundreds of her friends have been cured and she cures herself whenever the necessity arises, having listened to a course of twelve lectures by her prophetess. The funny thing is, when I asked Mrs. Carr what attitude of mind one must assume, she could make no articulate sound, notwithstanding her thirty hours of instruction. She finally said it was ‘to lose oneself in the Infinite!’ Imagine!”
William looks—well, chagrined, I suppose. I must have inadvertently struck at one of his sacred cows. Then I see that there is more to it. I believe William aspires to cure me with this mesmerism mumbo-jumbo. While it is sweet of him to want to see me well, his view of me as a spineless malade imaginaire is unflattering. However, he loves me and means well, so I let it pass.
“How restless Father was!” I say. “Remember how he’d start to pace around the house, and we’d know that soon he’d go somewhere on a train and come back a week later. Where did he go?”
None of us has an answer. “We had no idea of ordinary life at all! I was shunned at Mrs. Agassiz’s school, you know. For two years I hardly dared open my mouth.”
“I thought you liked it there,” William says.
“Eventually, but in the beginning I was a traveler without a map. I simply had no idea what the Assemblies were, or the North Shore, or someone’s Cousin Frank or Aunt Harriet. You know how all Bostonians are related to everyone else in a tangled web of kinship that you are expected somehow to grasp?”
In the presence of my two brothers, I suddenly have the strangest feeling that I have one leg in 1889 and the other in 1860; that our parents are simultaneously alive and dead; that William, Henry, and I are not just our current ages but all the ages we have been. Whatever our age, it seems, we feel the same inside. I enjoy this pleasantly disembodied feeling, and wish time would stop and this moment with my brothers would last forever.
“Are you going to read a paper at the Congress, William?” I ask.
“I have been asked to give the Opening Remarks. I had no idea anyone had heard of me. Being susceptible to flattery, I said yes.”
“That’s wonderful! What will you say?”
“Oh, I’ll write something on the ferry or at my hotel in Boulogne. I can generally count on salt air and sea breezes to revive my brain.”
“Oh, William, you are going to Boulogne! Please do go to all our old places. I so loved the medieval ramparts with the English stone cannonballs stuck in them. Oh, remember the dread episode of the bonnet?”
Even Henry’s memory fails on this. “What bonnet?”
“It was Mademoiselle Cusin’s Christmas present from us—remember? For some reason I was the one delegated to give the instructions for making it. It was the first important mission I’d ever been entrusted with and I was very anxious to succeed. The shop was on the rue Victor Hugo. You took me there, William.”
“I did?”
“Yes, and then you deserted me!”
He obviously hasn’t the faintest idea what I am talking about, whereas for me the event was so disturbing it is permanently etched on my brain.
I describe my ordeal, how the milliners kept bringing out different materials while speaking rapidly and incomprehensibly in French. They stood behind the counter, impatient, as I stood mute and paralyzed. In my panic, I fixed my eyes on a piece of pink material laid out next to a strip of blue on the tall counter I had to stand on tiptoes to see, and mumbled, Oui, comme ça.
“On Christmas day Mademoiselle unwrapped the present, which I saw immediately was atrocious. The pink made you think of a bad sunburn, the blue was dead and lifeless, the design hideous. She made a display of joy but wore it only once, on a visit to the campagne, where we met only peasants. The bonnet was a stain on my character, a great failure. I foresaw that my whole life would probably be an unmitigated mistake. Why did you leave me, William?”
“I recall vaguely going to an art store with the intention of buying watercolors and buying, instead, some naughty cartes de visite. Egyptian Dancing Girls, they were called. It was amazing what you could get in France, even in those days. I didn’t think I’d be needed, being completely ignorant of millinery matters.”
“I was seven, William!”
He is quiet, taking this in. For an instant he looks as if he might weep. Finally, he says, “I was and am a dull clod, Alice. It grieves me that I abandoned you. I hope you can forgive me.”
“Well, I’m not sure you would have managed a better-looking bonnet.”
“Certainly not. I cannot be trusted to pick out a button.”
He mentions that his English friends from the Society for Psychical Research will be coming to the Congress and presenting papers. The Sidgwicks will be trying to drum up support for their international Census of Hallucinations.
“Oh, yes, they told me about their Census. The Sidgwicks have been charming to me, William, and still come all the way to Leamington to call on me. They are the last remnant of my London salon, faithful to the end, while the others have melted away. Nora Sidgwick is the most delightful embodiment of the modern bluestocking, don’t you think? How is Mrs. Piper, by the way? Bob seems to be spending all his time with her. That can’t be good for him.”
“Poor Bob,” says Henry.
“Oh don’t let’s talk about Bob,” William says. “He just stayed a week at our house and exhausted poor Alice by pouring out his miseries until the wee hours. He threw our household into turmoil as usual, and the children kept asking, ‘When is he going?’”
“It is so sad about Aunt Kate, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Lilla Walsh said she was incapable of conversation toward the end. She’d try to say something and then lapse into resignation, saying, ‘I can’t talk it.’”
We carefully avoid the minefield of our aunt’s will. That has been disposed of in letters and shall nevermore be spoken of—by me, anyway. “Poor Aunt Kate, who so loved stating her opinions,” I say. “I suppose we shall all end like that.”
As the light drains from the sky, the three of us sit in wistful silence, recalling the years when we lived like a small tribe isolated on an island, with our own peculiar language and customs—the good and bad of it known only to us and to Bob now.
“Life is so odd, isn’t it?” I tell William I can still picture everything in Cambridge, as clearly as if I were standing there—Harvard Square, the horse-cars, the mansions on “Tory Row,” Mr. Eliot and his port-wine birthmark. “Who is Charlemagne expurgating now?”
“I’m not sure. He hosts Dante evenings these days. The smart set goes. Howells says his spoken Italian is actually quite poor.”
“Oh, Charles is far too self-conscious to have a gift for languages. And how is Grace? You know about her wedding gift to Mabel Quincy, I assume?”
“What is that?”
“I am shocked you don’t know, William, since it was Alice who wrote me of it. It was Grace’s own inept and graceless translation of Montaigne. Before wrapping the book to give to Mabel, she glued the naughty pages together. Even strained through Grace’s polysyllabic fog, the passages were apparently unsuitable for a bride-to-be, although Grace herself did not shy from contemplating them, depraved spinster that she is.”
William laughs lustily at this, and then the talk turns to William’s new house, currently under construction on the former Shady Hill property. “They’ve put in three new streets—mine is Irving Street. I am hoping to move in when I return.” He fumbles in his satchel and finds the blueprints. Spreading them out on my lap, he explains all the rooms and their features.
After that, we move on to Cambridge friends. “Winnie Howells”—daughter of the novelist—“is sicker than ever,” William says. “Nerves, apparently. Weir Mitchell, the rest-cure man, has her now, so I suppose she will gain.”
“Oh, William! That dreadful man.”
As the little clock on the mantel chimes the hour, I draw my shawl around me. “You don’t know what it means to have a few laughs, William. I never go out, you know. I have no idea of life at large. I see mostly women, when I see anyone, and British women—well, the minds of even the most intelligent are simply cul-de-sacs, more or less long. The dead wall you always come to in time.”
Several minutes of deep silence pass.
“Nurse thinks I am a godless savage because I have no outward ritual, little realizing that I am wholly devoted to the Unknowable Mystery Behind Phenomena!” William smiles at this, knowing what I mean. “Anyhow, William, I hope you are coming back here afterwards on your way to Liverpool?”
“I shall return, bearing tales of the Exposition. But first I am making a side trip to Geneva to gaze upon our old house. Remember it, Alice?”
“Yes. I loved the garden. Remember our Russian landlady, who was a terrible invalid, and sat reading under a lime tree, in her mushroom hat, always so happy?”
ONGOING LETTER FROM WILLIAM JAMES TO MRS WILLIAM JAMES HOTEL RASTADT, PARIS. AUGUST 3RD, 1889.
After I had paced the street for 3/4 of an hour and begun to give up all hope, suddenly Harry’s portly form appeared on the balcony cheering me on. I rushed up—A. was on her bed, in a fainting, panting condition, white as a sheet, with outstretched arms into which I threw myself. She kept gasping out, “You understand, don’t you, it’s all my body, it’s all physical, I can’t help it.”
Alice in person is elegant and graceful, and talked and laughed in a charming way, making me feel ashamed of my dull and ponderous way with her these last years. The tone of invective and sarcasm that sounded shrill in her letters is uttered in a soft, laughing way, and gives an entirely different impression. I’m afraid I am a dull clod, unfit to deal with airy creations like Alice. But I think she has forgiven me.
As I kissed her good-bye, she gazed at me with moist eyes and, clasping both my hands in hers, said, “It is sad, William, to think of you, with your love of kith and kin, left alone in Cambridge with the family melted like snow from about you. Our dead—les morts qui sont toujours vivants.” I live in the bosom of a large family and Alice has only Henry, but to her, “family” means the original family circle. A helpless invalid, she feels sorry for me. (I must admit I suffered a twinge of jealousy seeing H and A’s intimacy, their private jokes and references.)
On our way out H & I ran into A’s landlady, Miss Clarke, a friendly garrulous woman of early middle age with massive red arms. She told me, “Miss James is a perfect angel and means so much to us. I don’t know how we’d get along without her.” This statement was clarified when Harry explained that A. is obsessed with the poor families of the neighborhood, knows every detail of their wretched lives, and keeps them afloat with gifts of money and clothes.
As for Harry, he’d warned me in a letter, “I am as broad as I am long, as fat as a butter tub & as red as a British materfamilias.” When he met me at the station, I almost didn’t recognize him. He seemed a thorough Englishman, having covered himself with strange, heavy, alien manners and customs, like a marine crustacean with barnacles. After a few hours in his company, however, he became once more the same dear good innocent Harry of his youth. I am sorry to say that he is saving not a cent, so my vision of him paralyzed in our spare room, is stronger than ever. He seems quite helpless in that regard.
WILLIAM JAMES
PARIS, AUGUST 6TH, 1889
TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES
My darling—Haven’t managed to mail this yet, as new things keep happening. Tonight I found three quills poking out of the mattress cording! My sleep has gone to pieces—Took two chloral hydrate last night, and got two hours of what might technically be called sleep but was not refreshing in the least. Also: heat, drain smells, cries of inebriates and putains on the street. I long for you (and home) more desperately than I thought possible and begin to wonder if I shall go to Switzerland after all.
Today the Congress was dominated by Pierre Janet. He has the most unruly eyebrows ever seen on a Frenchman and told stories of his hysterics that would make Zola blush. If only Sister Alice could see him, but great French doctors don’t make house calls in England (or even possibly in France) and how could Alice cross the Channel if seasickness almost killed her two and a half years ago? She and H are as ignorant of science as the beasts of the field. I must tread carefully.
Tell our Harry I almost mistook the man from the telegraph office for one of his lead soldiers. Tell Bill to stay away from Mrs. Waring’s roses, and give Peggy a hug and kiss from her devoted Papa—
DARLING (AUGUST 7TH) . . .
This letter goes on and on. I must tell you about the strange man I met at dinner tonight. He is a Dr. Freud, a Viennese neurologist. As I sat down he was carefully excising the center of a slice of bread in a manner that hinted at surgical training. But for such a methodical man he was subject to such flights of fancy! He had heard of me, and confided that he’d read several of my papers. I am quite amazed that I am known to anyone here.
Dr. Freud clearly dislikes Dr. Janet—and couldn’t explain why. And he is peculiarly fascinated with dreams, recommended strongly that I study mine, warning that “the interpretation is heavy work.” I thought only gypsies paid heed to dreams! He had little interest in the Exposition, and seemed to prefer the Buffalo Bill Cody show in Neuilly, where he was absolutely riveted (and horrified) by Annie Oakley! Seems to suspect Americans of all kinds of barbarities.
Can’t fall asleep—it is 2:15 am in this stifling hotel room. Perhaps Dr. Freud has had a strange druglike effect on me. He told me at dinner about the hysterical patients he is treating with hypnotism—all women, some American. He said he prefers women patients because their minds are open, less “barricaded.” Would you agree, darling?
We men are such heavy, blundering, obtuse creatures; we require taming by our womenfolk. Even at the age of not yet two, don’t you think Peggy is having a civilizing influence on the boys? I am getting more homesick by the minute; I don’t think I can bear to go to Switzerland now, I would only envy the men I see going home to wives and children, with parcels under their arms.
JOURNAL OF WJ 8/9/89
While Herr Doktor Freud & I were talking, I described Sister Alice—her hysterically paralyzed legs and general broken-downness—identifying her as a “female relation of mine.” I immediately felt like a mouse that has attracted the attention of a cat. He peppered me with prying questions, which made me feel it would be unnerving to be his patient. I mentioned that the young woman had been too ill to attend her brother’s wedding, whereupon, he said, “Ach, a wedding, you say? Weddings give rise to all kinds of complexes. Is it possible that the young woman was in love with—who was it?—the brother?”
“Surely not,” I said. “They are brother and sister.”
“It happens, Dr. James,” he said in an irritating manner, “even in the most respectable families. Say that in the girl’s mind the brother is her suitor, her sweetheart, her husband even. Perhaps the brother has led her on unconsciously by flirting with her at an impressionable age. The girl becomes over-stimulated. Naturally, the desire for sexual intercourse with the brother is too charged for her to acknowledge and becomes submerged in her unconscious, giving rise to symptoms.”
I suppressed the urge to fling my wine into Dr. Freud’s face. Is brother/sister incest really so common in Austrian families? How can he presume to know all about a person he has never met? Also, I don’t like this word unconscious. This region of our being is not unconscious, like a person in a coma; it is subliminal. All the gods as well as the devils come to us through the subliminal door.
I didn’t flirt with my sister, not intentionally, anyhow, but I suppose Dr. Freud might see it differently. I can’t make up my mind if he is a grand halluciné or a genius—perhaps a bit of both. When I brought up Pierre Janet, he went silent, then said, “If I may speak frankly, Professor James, I don’t trust Janet, although he is Charcot’s protégé and there is no one I admire more than Charcot. There is something unheimlich about Janet, don’t you find?”
I don’t know what he meant. It was all in all quite a queer evening.
JOURNAL OF WJ CONT.
8/10, 1 AM
I forgot to mention Freud’s queer confession last night. He told me, within a half hour of meeting, that he suffered from a fear of travel (Reisefieber). This was due apparently to an experience of seeing his mother’s nude body in a sleeping car when he was two years old. Can anyone really remember being two years old? Why should the mother’s body inspire such shock in an infant?
As my brain whirred and sleep eluded me, I thought more about Sister Alice and my possible guilt in that regard. I was revisited by the memory of her anguished face when Minny came to visit and we stayed up all night talking in front of the fire. Fresh snow covering roofs, streets, and fields like a white duvet, Alice sat there with us for over an hour, sensing that we wanted to speak privately and determined to prevent this; she has never really cared for any of the Temples. At last she left, favoring us with one of her most disdainful glances on the way out. Remembering what happened afterward, I almost wish she had stayed. But I will try to fall asleep now.
JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 2:30 AM
NO LUCK WITH SLEEP . . .
After Alice left the room, Minny felt free to unburden herself about Elly’s engagement to Temple Emmet, three decades her senior. “She does it out of duty. But if they are not appalled at what they do, why should I worry? My future brother-in-law has invited me to travel to California with them, and as the doctors seem to think it will be good for my lungs, I will go, I think.”
I wondered if she meant to leave forever and could not bring myself to ask. “If you strike gold, please write to me and I will come out by the next train and help you run the mine. I have nothing else to do now.”
“I certainly will, Willy.” She smiled wistfully. “But aren’t you a doctor now?”
“Only technically.” I explained that my oral examination, by Dr. Holmes, lasted all of fifteen minutes. “I shall confine myself to prescribing medicines for friends and family, hoping they don’t die.”
Shouldn’t have mentioned dying. Did not know the status of Minny’s health. V. thin and pale. Staying in Pelham, New York, with Kitty and her husband (another elderly Emmet), forbidden by her doctors to return to the damp of Newport.
She asked me if I knew a cure for sleeplessness.
“How many hours are you sleeping at night?”
“Oh, I don’t sleep. I have given it up.” She laughed at herself, and I promised to send her a few tablets of the new wonder drug Chloral. Another bond between us—sleeplessness.
The next part is painful to recall. We stayed up all night & I deluged her with all my philosophical distress—the full catastrophe that was WJ. Horrible recital.
She drew her crocheted shawl around her, her face tinged pink in the reflected firelight. Her irises were the color of the Atlantic on a clear, cold day in January. If she were not my cousin, I knew without a doubt that I would be in love with her. In fact, I was in love with her. I decided to tell her that night.
About Elly’s marriage of convenience she said, “It is the irretrievableness of the step that is so overwhelming to my mind. I have told no one else of my feelings—only you, Willy.” Said she was certain now she would never marry. She’d renounced everything, even God, and found a wild, pagan happiness in the simplest things—the sky, the play of light on a wall, the hush of falling snow. “I do not understand Uncle Henry’s view of Creation. When he says it was not a single event in time but is continually occurring through some process, what does he mean? It truly makes no sense to me.”
Forgot to mention the terrible row at dinner. Never saw Father so irate as when Minny challenged his beliefs, trembling but unflinching. No woman had ever stood up to him like that, and I was quite sure she won the debate. Am fading now, will attempt sleep.
JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 3:15 AM
No, instead of trying to sleep I’ll continue writing for as long as it takes. Altho’ my memory is usually execrable, I remember everything about that long night twenty years ago.
Minny told me that she’d concluded that she was a natural stoic, an “unrepentant pagan.”
“That is brave,” I said.
“Not at all, Willy. While lying awake at night, I have done an immense amount of thinking. Hour after hour I pondered the doctrine of vicarious atonement, which your father subscribes to. Has Jesus taken on all our sins and released us? I took it in deeply for over a month. I thought so much about Jesus in my sleeplessness that I began to feel very close to him, as if I lived inside his mind. I can’t describe it properly. It probably sounds mad.”
“It doesn’t.” What an extraordinary being my cousin was. My own struggles seemed small and distant in her presence, as if they were trinkets. If we could only be together, I might become the man I was meant to be. Or such was my deluded idea.
“Finally, William, I found I could not accept it. I gave it up. And now I am a happy pagan child.”
Just before dawn, I blurted it out—asked Minny to marry me. She looked startled. I explained I meant a “white marriage”—we’d go to Europe, living together like brother and sister. I would take her to the best spas of Europe & she would be cured of her consumption, I of my hypochondria, &c. What a self-centered and unbalanced young man was I! What a blessing that we outgrow our youth! To convince M. that a real marriage between us would be a crime against nature, I subjected her to an incoherent rant about my degeneracy and my vices, the suicidal urges crashing through me, &c, &c. I cringe to recall it. Was there ever a more self-defeating marriage proposal?
Poor M. sat there silently, hands folded in her lap, regarding me levelly. She said gently that she would consider my offer and write to me of her decision.
Her letter arrived two weeks later. She’d had two “very bad” hemorrhages and her doctor told her, “My dear young lady, your right lung is diseased!” and she replied, “Well, Doctor, even if my right lung is all gone I should make a stand with my left.” Then another doctor said her lungs were not so bad after all and so she thought she would go to California. She was turning me down.
Only now, with Minny twenty years dead, can I allow myself to notice that underneath my hurt and disappointment lurked another emotion. Relief. Less than 2 months later came the horrible news from Pelham that she was dead. Elly & Kitty said she’d fought desperately, agonizingly, to live. How it tortured me to picture my remarkable cousin as a poor, suffering creature, all her gifts reduced to the struggle for breath. If it all comes to this, what is life worth?
JOURNAL OF WJ, CONT 5 AM
Still not a wink of sleep.
There is more, I’m afraid. A breakdown after M’s death, the Somerville Asylum. A room of green and white tiles. Shivering inside a wet sheet, teeth clacking like dominos. A painting of a girl in a white muslin dress standing on a bluff overlooking the sea, meant to drive me mad. Or madder. The doctors are all in on it. “Don’t jump, Minny!” But my words can’t reach her and she tumbles, her white dress billowing around her like a spinnaker. Hypodermic needle in left arm. “For your own good.” Helpless.
All color drains from world, then a dead field, the color of grey volcanic ash, endless. All around me the bodies of dead soldiers, grey-skinned, in heaps. All the fine dead Boston boys! I am sent here to this asylum because I am a shirker. A brief, panicked, doomed struggle. Grey turns to black. No more WJ, end of story.
In the greyness a pinpoint of light, like a very bright star rising in the east. Impossible to look away. I and this orb more brilliant than a thousand suns are one, made of the same substance. It contains the seeds of everything and floods me with bliss. A voice says, “Thou hast overcome the world.”
My body no more to me than a pile of dirty laundry. Oh! the shock of going back into it, like diving into an icy pond. Muscles ache, eyeballs like peeled tomatoes, throat parched, hands lashed to the bedstead with rubber cords. Then I remember. I chose to go back. Why? Minny went and did not return. I made the wrong choice and must live with it. I weep behind the mask they have put over my eyes.
Written on my intake form (I read very well upside-down): Hypochondria, Melancholia, Chronic Masturbation. Not until my honeymoon did I realize there was nothing wrong with me. Something tugging at the fringes of my mind, tho’. What Freud said at dinner about a railway sleeping carriage when he was two.
I was 2 in 1844, the year of Father’s Vastation. Living in Windsor, England. No memory of it. No, something. Making faces at baby Harry. I’d growl like a bear and Harry would bounce up and down, laughing and waving his arms. If I growled louder, Harry’s mouth would turn down at the corners and he’d burst into tears. Every time. I kept crossing that boundary between laughter and tears, making Harry laugh, then cry, then laugh again. Other things I remember: Hail beating on the roof, snails leaving glistening slime trails on the flagstones, a steep staircase, floral wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom. And this: Father with his head in Mother’s lap blubbering like infant, Aunt Kate standing by the washstand, her lips pressed together in a grim line.
Chest tight, face hot. Run outside. Grass high, higher than my head. Pick a dandelion and blow, watch the wind tear it apart. Sky stretches blue, away and away. World so big, Willy little. Where mama, papa, aunty, nanny, brudder, everyone? Gone. Tears burn in my eyes. Desolation rips at my heart. Did not know it was possible to be so alone.