Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Page A

vowed to do my best to adhere to the Taylor program.
    It was distressing to learn how many ways I’d been courting disaster. Not just by reading but also by walking on hard pavement, bathing at the wrong time of day, exposing myself to the damp, not drinking enough water, going to bed too late, not resting my eyes for an hour after reading the newspaper, eating fruits and vegetables at the same meal, and a hundred other things.
    Apart from my unbridled reading, I become an exemplary patient. Living amongst aged and moribund people, I began to forget my youth, my rebelliousness, the sharp longings of the flesh. My body settled into a dormant state; perhaps I would hibernate next. I fed on the creamy fattening food served chez Taylor, and my cousin Elly Van Buren, who saw me over Christmas, wrote approvingly to my family that I was looking “fat as butter.” My days were consumed with resting and cultivating the feminine virtues—patience, faith,self-denial, concern for others. Aunt Kate sent home glowing reports of my saintly patience and Mother wrote me weekly, praising my “ultra-spiritual qualities.”
    One evening a strange thing occurred with Aunt Kate; I hardly knew what to make of it. I’d just suffered one of my attacks, after which I was feeling cleansed and clear-headed, like the sky after a thunderstorm. Aunt Kate was by my bedside. Feeling nostalgic about her New York girlhood, she was telling me some old-timey stories when she suddenly exclaimed: “Did you know, Alice, that your father courted me first?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, Aunt Kate?” She couldn’t mean that .
    â€œWell, your father came to our church in New York to give a course of lectures. He was already lecturing and still a young man. He could have charmed the birds out of the trees. I wish you could have known him then.”
    â€œWell, clearly, I couldn’t have done so without violating the laws of nature.”
    She did not appear to hear me, so lost was she in this strange reverie. “We talked one day and he gave me a sort of penetrating look. You know what I’m talking about.” I did. “He made some flirtatious comments about my bonnet. There was something about him; I can’t explain it.”
    Oh dear, where was this going?
    â€œHe took to calling two or three times a week, sitting in the parlor with us. He met Mary, of course, and soon you could not tell which of us he was courting.” She laughed in a queer way. “He was so expansive there seemed to be enough of him for two! But then our father—your grandfather Walsh—took Henry aside for a little talk, and after that he had eyes only for Mary. She was the elder sister, of course.”
    Did Aunt Kate remember to whom she was talking? Maybe she did, because a minute later, she seemed to shake herself out of her trance. “And what a beautiful and sacred marriage they have had!” she beamed.
    For hours afterward I was so disconsolate I was unable even to swallow tea.
    My aunt’s confession reminded me that, not long before our family sailed for Europe in 1855, Aunt Kate was briefly and disastrously married to a Captain Marshall. Whatever went wrong was never stated, but she returned to us a few months later with sadder eyes, and we children were told never to mention the marriage. (In those days a distressing fact could be neutralized simply by not acknowledging it. Yet Father would say anything to anybody .) I don’t recall meeting the Captain, though I must have. In my mind he assumed the shape of a swarthy sea captain who forced poor Aunt Kate to dance the tarantella for hours and then dragged her by the hair into his cabin. My imagination drew a blank at what might have occurred next—I was only seven years old—but I knew it was surely unspeakable. After that, our aunt stayed securely attached to the safe and the predictable.
    After I’d been in New York for five dull,