Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Page B

live in such mental isolation that I cannot help but feel that you must see even your own children as strangers to what you consider the better part of yourself.”
    Father’s face clouded as he hacked at the roast with the carving knife.
    When William remarked one evening that he was unable to decide what he should be, Father said, “Being is from God. A man cannot decide to be anything.”
    William grumbled under his breath, “A nice life, provided you can live off your dividends.”
    At Sunday dinner, hunched over his soup bowl, narrowly focused on keeping his spoon from shaking, William observed, “I am convinced, Father, that we are Nature through and through and that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our own will happens save as a result of physical laws.”
    I failed to understand why men took philosophy so personally, as if their lives depended on it. William, compulsively philosophizing, seemed to me like a person who persists in taking a drug that everyone else can see plainly is making him ill.
    Father had lured William into science in the first place so that he could use its methods to corroborate Father’s theories of D.N. He even permitted him to go to Harvard, although he’d always insisted that colleges were “hothouses of corruption where it is impossible to learn anything.” William’s studies led him in the opposite direction, into a cold mechanistic universe, which was now tearing him apart.
    In a household less metaphysical than ours such topics might have caused only minor perturbation. Here the father–son arguments raged loud and fierce, like the wars of the gods on Mt. Olympus. Father would say, “It is very evident to me, William, that all your troubles arise from the purely scientific cast of your thought and the temporary blight exerted upon your metaphysical wit. All scientists are stupefied by the giant superstition we call Nature.”
    According to Father’s private religion, there was Nature and then there was Divine Nature. Only Divine Nature was real; “the world” was a sort of dream.
    William would mutter, “Hmm, I wonder which of us is more stupefied by superstition.”
    Father would say, “The first requisite of being a philosopher is not to think but to become a living man by the putting away of selfishness from one’s heart!”
    â€œNot think? Really , Father?”
    In an attempt to defuse the argument, Mother began to describe some gardens she had seen along Brattle Street, but no one took this up. Throwing his napkin on the table, Father shoved his chair back, scraping the floor, and limped into the other room.
    â€œOh, now you’ve upset your father!”
    â€œIt is equally true that he has upset me.” William got up and climbed the stairs wearily, as if he were a hundred years old.
    â€œHenry has pinned all his hopes on William,” Mother remarked to Aunt Kate. “I don’t know why William can’t keep his ideas to himself. And now they are both missing dessert!”
    â€œMore for us then,” I said, attempting to insert some levity into the near-daily wrangle. Mother glowered in my direction.
    â€œOh, I think they both rather enjoy sparring,” Aunt Kate said.
    William did speak excellent German; you could say that for him.
    Then he astonished us all by reviving, like a plant that is given water. It seemed to occur overnight. He’d gone to bed wrapped in his usual listless melancholy and the next morning bounded down the stairs two at a time, and amused us by reading absurdities from the Boston Evening Transcript , such as a witness in a murder trial who testified that the corpse was “pleasant-like and foaming at the mouth.”
    He went out in bright spirits, wearing a jaunty hat, a colorful waistcoat and gloves he’d picked up in Europe—he’d always dressed like a dandy—and took long, brisk walks for miles. If