NOTHING MUCH CHANGED AT 20 QUINCY STREET, MEANWHILE. Mother rushed around doing a thousand useful things. Harry read or daydreamed and then disappeared for hours on mysterious errands, which, unlike me, he was never expected to account for. Father, after taking the horse-cars to the post office in Boston and back every day, shut himself up in his study to write about Divine Nature. I had always taken it for granted that Father’s Ideas were very “advanced.” Hadn’t Mother been telling us this since our infancy?
At breakfast one morning I was perusing the Nation and came across a letter to the editor by Henry James. It was evidently Father’s response to a letter from a reader in a previous issue criticizing an essay by Father that had run in a still earlier issue. I scanned it while gnawing on my toast with rhubarb jam.
I conceive that you and I, and every other man, are directly or immediately created by God, and not indirectly or mediately through the race. I contend that God creates me not mediately through other men, but immediately by himself; that he, and he alone, gives me being at this moment. If I could confine myself to reacting along with all the world, in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, no man’s speech, I venture to say, would seem more frank than mine. But when I append a harmless benignant coda to my special performance in that concerto, importing that the “Heavens and the Earth” therein mentioned are not primarily the physical phenomena so designated, but the “Heavens” exclusively of the universal mind, I grow unintelligible. Why?
Why indeed? No matter how many times I read it, I could make no sense of this letter. Although no one felt moved to buy Father’s self-published books, many people did flock to hear him lecture, their expressions cycling from delight to intense puzzlement. Father’s Ideas were so advanced, Mother always told us, that most people could not grasp them, and that was why he often looked dispirited when he came home from lecturing. This did not discourage him, however, from continuing to lecture and to write about the Cosmos in the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly, whose editors were his friends. I wondered now if Father was spending his life pursuing a mirage only he could see.
One night Father gave a talk entitled “Society: the Redeemed Form of Man” to a small but devoted group at the Fields’ house on Charles Street. Mr. Fields was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and his wife, Annie, ran the closest thing to a salon that Boston had to offer. Sara came with us, and afterwards we went home to Sara’s house and whispered in the dark, loosely intertwined. Holding one of my hands in hers, Sara was caressing the flap of skin between my thumb and index finger, and it seemed to me at that moment that there had never been a sweeter gesture. How safe I felt with Sara—but only after darkness fell.
After saying all there was to say about Father’s lecture, which puzzled me as much as it puzzled Sara, we went on to discuss our families and their peculiarities, and how we had been affected by these. Tearfully Sara said that she could scarcely remember her parents now. “I have a sort of fog in my head that blurs their faces. I know I loved them . . . maybe the loss did something dreadful to my brain.”
“Amnesia?”
“I don’t know. Something.” She fell silent. After a minute or two, she said, “By the way, most of your father’s talk flew right over my head. What’s a Vastation again?”
“Oh, it was a thing that happened to him in England, when William and Harry were infants, before I was born. Father was sitting in front of the fire one day, happily digesting his midday meal when, completely out of the blue, he was struck by an ‘insane and abject terror,’ as he put it.”
“Why?”
“No reason; that was the point. He went on to describe some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.” I made quotes in the air with my fingers.
Sara laughed delightedly and pulled me closer. “Ye gods! The way your Father talks!”
Yes, Father could talk, commanding a startling rhetoric full of exuberant and highly original invectives. People recalled his words years later and copied them into their memoirs. There was the time when, speaking at an Astor library event, he proclaimed, “These men do not live, and if books turn men into this parrot existence, I hope the Astor library will meet the same fate as the Alexandrian.” And the time when, somewhere else, he observed, “I never felt proud of my country for what many seem to consider its prime distinction, namely her ability to foster the rapid accumulation of wealth.”
And was there a Bostonian who did not know by heart his legendary jousts with Bronson Alcott?
Father: You are an egg half hatched. The shells are yet sticking about your head.
Mr. Alcott: Mr. James, you are damaged goods and will come up damaged goods in eternity.
I reminded Sara of this last dialogue now, and she brought my hand up to her face and softly nuzzled it. “You have a bit of the James gift of gab yourself, Alice. To be candid, I find it . . . stimulating.”
This was a rare admission by Sara, who smelled of lily of the valley, absinthe, and tooth powder tonight and whose skin felt silky and electric at the same time. Her lips curved into a naughty smile. She was tender and droll as she kissed and sucked on each of my fingers in turn. It did not matter whether we used the word love; we were ruled by forces more potent and subtle than anything belonging to the daytime world.
I shifted my weight so that my thigh came to rest between Sara’s legs, and she shifted to accommodate me. We were sensitively attuned to each other in this way. If only the rest of life could unfold so easily.
“To tell you the rest of the fascinating story, Sara—”
“What story is that again?”
“The story of Father’s Vastation.”
“Oh yes! I am very interested. I’ve never met anyone who had one before.”
“So it’s 1844 and Father is desperately broken down—on the verge of suicide for more than two years, according to him. In this sorry state, he betakes himself to the Malvern Spa in England, where he meets an English lady invalid to whom he confesses his troubles. She tells him that his travails sound like what Swedenborg called a Vastation. A dark night of the soul sort of thing.”
Tenderly smoothing my hair and kissing my face and neck (tomorrow she would delete this from her mind, of course), Sara murmured, “Mmmm. Sounds like a breakdown to me. And I should know.”
“Are you referring to your aunt who puts rocks in her dog’s dish to make it eat more slowly?”
“Oh, there are dozens of mad Sedgwicks.”
A shiver passed through me. Why had I never considered the possibility that Father had suffered a nervous breakdown? Only now did it occur to me that whenever Father told this story, as he did frequently, a pained look crossed Mother’s features. There was another side to this story, and Mother and Aunt Kate had locked it up inside them so no one else would ever know.
But Sara’s hands were fluttering over my body, and her lips were having their way with my breasts, and Father’s philosophies flew right out of my mind.
I’m sorry to say that after five months in Cambridge, it was becoming apparent that Dr. Taylor’s cure was not holding. I was successful at disguising this at first, but toward the end of August, the collapse of my scaffolding became evident to the household. The difficulty lay, I suppose, in my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women.
It started just after I’d spent the weekend with Fanny Morse in Brookline. We’d been sitting at her dressing table brushing out our hair and braiding it for the night and discussing the Cambridge Bee that was forming under the leadership of Susy Dixwell.
Fanny said, “What a pity Sara will miss the first meetings but, of course, she can join when she gets back.”
“Back from where?” I expected Fanny to say “Bar Harbor” or “New York.”
“Why, Europe, of course.”
That was the way I learned that Sara was to join the Nortons on their upcoming Grand Tour. For weeks, Grace Norton had suffered from a verbal tic that compelled her to cite Ruskin, Leslie Stephen, Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the pre-Raphaelites at random moments. (Leave it to the Nortons to be on intimate terms with all of them!) Sara and I had been laughing about the Norton connections last week and Sara said nothing about her plans to travel with them. Now I learned that she’d been mentally packing her steamer trunks all this time, happy to toss me aside for a chance at the pre-Raphaelites.
Was I being unfair? Had I lost all proportion? I hardly knew.
Sara had so many ways of disavowing what we were to each other. When I told her about La Fille aux Yeux d’Or by Balzac, describing a love affair between two women, I thought she’d be intrigued. But her face snapped shut and she said she wasn’t interested. How could a man know what a woman feels anyhow? she asked peevishly. Her private fiction seemed to be that whatever transpired between us in the dark was a momentary accident that kept recurring despite her best efforts.
When I confronted her about going abroad with the Nortons, she insisted she’d told me about it and was so adamant on this point that I half believed her. Not ten minutes later, she contradicted herself. “You can understand why I didn’t want to tell you, Alice. You have such a tendency to over-react, to take things so deadly seriously.”
“What ‘things,’ Sara? Us, you mean?”
This, like everything else I said that day, irritated her. “What do you mean us? There is no ‘us.’ In a few years, Alice, we will marry and we’ll be occupied with housekeeping and children and what have you.”
Really? Was that the future? We were at breakfast, and the muffin I’d been eating was stuck to my palate, dry as sawdust. I saw starkly at that moment that our relations were always conducted on Sara’s terms. Endearments such as “darling” or “dearest” were permitted, if at all, only in the night-world, but as soon as we had clothes on we had to snap back into our public characters. If I accidentally smiled too yearningly at Sara at breakfast or addressed her in fond tones, I’d pay for it with a week’s shunning. It was clear now, if not before, that I would never be happy as Sara’s lover.
And since grand tours lasted for a year at the minimum, I would have to consider Sara dead and go through all the mourning associated with that. Because I was already losing her forever, or so it seemed to me, I dared for once to press her on the great taboo, the question of Sara and Alice.
“How can you say ‘There is no us,’ Sara, after our nights together? If you found it so trivial, you have hidden it well. But maybe you are just a liar. Perhaps everything is only a game to you.”
A vein throbbed at her temple, and her voice trembled. Fixing her gaze on the milk pitcher, she explained that “what we do at night” was a momentary experience of the eternal, which afterwards scattered like mercury. You should never discuss it—discuss meant tedious and ponderous in Sara-world—because that made it dead. “The eternal is like water; it flows through your fingers, you cannot hold onto it.”
I didn’t know about the eternal, where it flowed. All I knew was that, whatever intimacies took place between us, Sara could be counted on to ignore me the next day. Most people (Fanny Morse, for instance) would probably live and die in the Boston virtues, never dreaming there were embraces that could make you weak in the knees. I sincerely wished I were one of the unawakened ones now. Sara was leaving me for a year, as if it were nothing. It was a bitter truth: the one who loves less (or not at all) has all the power, and this is why love is so painful.
After going through the motions of bidding good-bye to Sara’s aunts, I set off down Kirkland Street, arriving at 20 Quincy Street a quarter hour later. I waved to old Mrs. Lowell, dead-heading the day lilies in her perennial bed, and went inside and waited for the tears to flow. Instead, I was dry-eyed, feeling nothing at all.
Perhaps this was the answer. Train yourself to be a Spartan mother to your emotions. If you do have feelings, for heaven’s sake keep them to yourself. My spirits brightened at the prospect of becoming a different sort of person—healthy-minded, unemotional, detached. Whenever Sara came to mind, I dismissed her like an appointment that must be cancelled. I made a list of her annoying traits and consulted it whenever I felt stabs of longing.
It wasn’t just Sara, either. Everyone disappointed me. Harry, who went around feeling superior to Cambridge, which he considered quite good enough for me—a mere girl, belonging to the domestic sphere. And William! Complaining in his letters from Dresden about not hearing from me and begging me to write. As if I could write in the state I was in! I still hadn’t forgiven him for deserting me without even bothering to say good-bye.
His first letters from Germany were read aloud by Father on the verandah with the oil lamp hissing in the perfumed dark. They were passed around to family friends and read at gatherings, where everyone roared with laughter at William’s depictions of the residents of his Dresden lodging house. The landlady who kept exclaiming wunderschön about everything. The “Hamburg spinster” who queried William about a people we had with us called ‘Yankees’ about whom she had heard such strange stories and who seemed to be, if reports were true, of all the people in the world the very worst.
His letters always made us laugh. I savored a sweet one to me in which he portrayed himself as a lovesick troubadour pursued by lovely women but remaining true to one woman, whose name he muttered under his breath—the peerless child of Quincy Street, i.e. Thou. Fanny Morse’s brow furrowed at this and she asked me later, “Why does your brother write you love letters?”
“Don’t be silly, Fanny.” William always wrote these sorts of letters.
As the eldest in the family, William was forever dispensing advice to the rest of us, although he himself often appeared to be the one most in need of advice. In another letter he wrote:
Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential, let her face beam with serious beauty, & glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul with wings, as it were (but very short ones) and let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, & you have no idea how lovely she will become.
“Very short wings!” I grumbled to Harry. “Like a mosquito, I suppose.”
Harry laughed. “I believe William has just described his ideal woman.” In fact, I had been quietly monitoring William’s crushes from afar and had recently written him that Fraulein Schmidt, of whom he had written a bit too warmly, must be a bold-faced jay.
A week before their sailing date, the Nortons hosted a “last supper” to bid farewell to their friends. After dinner, everyone gathered on the piazza while Charles pontificated and Grace gazed starry-eyed at him. It was clear that the Norton sisters were on a crusade to correspond with every great (masculine) intellect in Boston and Cambridge, and were steadily extending their range to England. They considered themselves muses to men, if not scholars in their own right, and were equipped with a mysterious sense of a man’s future greatness (which Sara speculated was an instinct similar to the navigation of migratory birds). Grace and Jane Norton did not have the slightest use for their own sex.
From the piazza, situated on the rise of a hill, we looked east, beyond the azaleas, to the tidal flats of the Charles. It was a magnificent view, changing color with the time of day, slowly fading through sunset tints of tangerine or salmon pink, through violet, mauve and indigo, to black. After sunset that night, there was no moon, and the only source of light was a smoking oil lamp at one end of the table. Sara and I were sitting at the other end, in darkness, where we could whisper to each other unmolested. (But while preserving an outward politeness, I was already striking Sara from my heart. In my mind she was as good as dead.)
Earlier in the evening Charles had announced, “Name me any American production in which any thought appears!” No one took up this absurd challenge, and I thought I saw Susan briefly roll her eyes but she reverted so quickly to her usual expression of Supportive Wife that you could not be certain. Like many men who live inside their heads, Charles’s emotions were of a crude and infantile cast, in my view. His interactions with his infants were especially painful to behold; incapable of spontaneity, he could only mime the gestures of a devoted papa. When it came time for the children to be put to bed, he patted each on the head awkwardly and smiled sadly, as if mindful of their inevitable future as heirs to a crude, disappointing culture.
Shortly after the eldest child had been rounded up and packed off to bed, sherry cobblers were served. Harry had been speaking reverently of Madame Bovary, whereupon Charles observed sanctimoniously that “irregular sex relations have no place in literature. The deeper passions are seldom those of illicit love.” Sara was stifling her laughter behind her fist. I was thinking, What about Abélard and Héloise? when I felt something drop into my lap. I flinched and nearly bolted out of my chair, thinking of bats. But it was Sara’s hand. Gripping my brandy glass with both hands to steady myself, I hissed at her. “Stop it!”
She did, but only for the time it took to remove her beaded shawl from her shoulders and drape it over my lap. “I noticed you were shivering,” she whispered, and under the table her hand delved beneath my skirts and came to rest between my thighs. Say what you will, she was good. I could scarcely make out her face in profile, like a queen on an ancient coin, whilst in the enchanted underworld—under the table, under the shawl—her right hand was pressed up against my drawers, having its way with me. I am sorry to say that despite my best intentions her caresses could no more be resisted than a fever, and all the time she sat composed, occasionally making remarks pertinent to the general conversation. Reveling in her power over me, like a torturer.
At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Father was tormenting Charlemagne by insisting that the ancient Persians had a culture far more advanced than that of the Greeks at the time of the Persian Wars. Everyone had everyone else’s number here, I thought. Grace Norton had subtle ways of reducing Jane to second-ranking sister and Susan to “not really one of us.” Inclining her head toward me, Sara whispered something random about the Persians but in such a tender tone it became part of the waves of pleasure lapping through me. Bunching my linen napkin in front of my face, I had to pretend to be stifling an attack of sneezing.
Was this Sara’s way of saying, “See what I can do to you? Won’t you miss me?”
By now I just wanted her to leave and get it over with. But when she drew me into her bed two days before their party sailed, I succumbed helplessly, of course. How could I stay angry while Sara kissed me so thoroughly and ran her hands over my back and buttocks in a way that turned me to jelly? While my tongue traced the outline of her earlobe and inched down her neck toward her breasts, she was tugging at me with an aching desire written on her face. And then the boundary between us seemed to drop away and we melted into one rapturous, gasping person. I knew better than to mention this to Sara; it was the sort of thing she would scoff at, and I was doing my best to get over her. But the sweetness of it lingered for days.