Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper Page B

fattening months, a letter arrived from Mother startling me with the news that William had just sailed to Europe.
    But he would never go to Europe without a word to me!
    Well, apparently he had. Mother explained that he would spend the next two years studying physiology at the German graduate schools, and as it was a great opportunity for him, I ought not to indulge in selfish regrets in the matter, but accept cheerfully that life is made up of changes and separations from those we love.
    I stared at the blue stationery and the familiar maternal script. The news was so inconceivable that for several days I half believed a second letter would arrive saying that William hadn’t sailed after all. But no second letter came and William was gone and I had no choice but to bear his absence angelically. If you had feelings about anything they called it hysteria.
    My health slid backwards for a while and I didn’t return to Quincy Street until May of 1867, when the wisteria climbing one side of the house was in bloom. I found Harry stretched out phlegmatically on a divan in one of the parlors. His back was poorly again, he said, and our household was “as lively as the inner sepulchre.” (A typical Harryism.) While other Boston families were packing up for a summer at the shore,we were condemned to stagnate in stifling Cambridge again, because Father refused to go anywhere. Cambridge was a social desert, he complained. The Nortons offered good conversation, but whenever you went there with Father you had to worry that Charles would hold forth on the superiority of European society, and this would inspire a blast of the paternal patriotism. Inevitably, Father and Charles would have to be separated and apologies made.
    It was strange to be home. I’d lived so isolated in New York that it was almost as if I’d died and left the world; to be back in my old life made me feel like the ghost of myself. I was half surprised that people greeted me as if they knew me. Whenever I turned round, Mother was pressing something on me—rhubarb jam for my toast, a different newspaper. If I was in my bedroom, her knock would jolt me out of my daydream and force me to consider whether my bookcase needed dusting or I wished to have a baked potato with dinner. She’d want to chat about what day the laundresses were coming and whether the butcher was overcharging us. Why was I required to be interested in these domestic details, while Harry was assumed to have better things to do? I suppose the answer was obvious. He wore trousers and I a skirt.
    Not that my parents weren’t overbearing toward my brothers, too; their affectionate absorption in their five children was almost legendary. Father made the final decisions on the boys’ careers. Steering William, his pride and joy, away from painting into science. Paying the fees to keep William and Harry, but not Wilky and Bob, out of the Civil War. Negotiating fees and terms of publication with Harry’s editors. By holding the purse strings, our parents could veto any venture. Both casually opened and read any mail that entered the house, even when it was marked “private.” There was no escaping them, and, of course, Aunt Kate, when she was present, was a virtual third parent.
    Although Harry was in the law school, sightings of him with a law book in his hand were extremely rare, and whenever his (and William’s) friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. held forth on legal topics, a perfect blankness would fall over Harry’s features. His dissatisfaction with Boston’s provincial dullness (as he saw it) was making him withdrawn and morose. He wrote to William—in a letter left unfinishedon a table, which I read, naturally— I am tired of reading and know it would be better to do something else. Can I go to the theatre? I have tried it ad nauseam. Likewise “calling.” Upon whom? Sedgwicks, Nortons, Dixwells, Feltons. I worried about Harry;