Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Page A

agency you may not know what it was. What would I not give if you could pay me a visit here! . . . I stump wearily up the 3 flights of stairs after my dinner to this lone room where there is no human company but a ghastly lithograph of Johannes Muller and a grinning skull to cheer me . . .

FIVE FIVE
    1868
    W ILLIAM, MEANWHILE, WAS NOT IMPROVING AT ALL.
    By the next steamer came a letter confessing that his health was actually very poor. His German servants were greasy and unclean, he wrote, and the thought of his breakfast plates being handled by them sickened him. And no window was ever opened in that land.
    My servant here asked me in great excitement if I slept with the window open. She said there was a man in Weimar who slept with his window open and he became blind! Out in the street the slaw and fine rain is falling as if it would never stop—and the street is filled with water and that finely worked up to a paste of mud which is never seen on our continent.
    Although permeated by melancholy, this letter was at least leavened by humor. As it happened, it was the last letter from Germany that would be read aloud to the family group. Subsequent ones were read silently by Father and tucked away like contraband. Harry and I knew from his expression not to ask.
    When William arrived home in late autumn, I thought at first I was meeting his ghost. I wanted to shake him out of this trance or whatever it might be, because this was not the William I knew. Thin, hollow-eyed, and silent, he conversed without animation, shuffled his feet when he walked, complained of always being cold, even next to aroaring fire. When he held a teacup, the coffee splashed onto the saucer or the tablecloth, and it was heartbreaking to see how he tried to hide the tremor from the family.
    â€œI don’t know what’s eating him,” Mother said. “He looks transparent , as if you could poke a hole right through him.”
    Sorrow registered in her eyes before she snapped back to her default mode of taking care of business and pretending everything was fine. Being the only robust member of the James family was her cross to bear, as she shouldered the various illnesses, black moods, breakdowns, financial disasters, and heartbreaks of her children, whose temperaments were complicated and foreign to her.
    â€œHe keeps saying it is philosophical hypochondria,” Harry said. “I can’t make out what he means.”
    If you asked William what was wrong, you’d get a long laundry list. His back had “collapsed,” his eyes were bad, his brain “moribund,” he could not concentrate or remember anything. And, on top of all that, he suffered from “severe dyspepsia and chronic gastritis of frightful virulence and obstinacy.” He took long walks in the cold and came back half frozen, pale and silent. He rarely joked now, and a humorless William was like an ocean without tides.
    Mother had her theories. “He has too much morbid sympathy!” she complained to Harry and me. “The other day he was fretting about the servants having only one armchair in the kitchen. He wouldn’t stop talking about it!”
    Dejected at seeing his wunderkind so fragile and unhappy, Father blamed Darwinism and other atheistic doctrines.
    At meals William was either silent as a wax figure or twitchy and combative, starting painful arguments with Father. “I have read your article on Swedenborg, Father, and I can’t comprehend the gulf you maintain between Head and Heart. To me they are inextricably intermingled.”
    â€œThen you understand nothing, William. You are as dense as the pusillanimous clergy.”
    (The pusillanimous clergy were a favorite target of Father’s bombasts.)
    â€œYour theory of Creation is a muddle, Father. I cannot fathom what you mean by ‘the descent of the Creator into Nature.’ You don’t explain it, and it seems to be the kernel of the whole system. You