Free Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper

follies love gave rise to!
    Then I made the fatal error of telling Sara that just as I was falling asleep, I often suffered waves of ice-cold panic and a roiling sensation in my stomach. “It feels like snakes writhing and this is accompanied by an overwhelming fear—a fear of being alive . I can’t really describe it.”
    When I glanced at Sara, I caught the scowl that flickered over her features.
    â€œMaybe you ought to take a digestive tablet or something.”
    Clearly my night terrors and other problems were complications Sara preferred to ignore. I almost asked her if dream-flying was more beautiful than what we did in the dark, but you could not ask her such questions. In her aspect of belle dame sans merci , Sara made the rules and you had best follow them or she would pull away.

    W ILLIAM J AMES
    D RESDEN, S EPT. 18 ’67
    T O THE J AMES F AMILY
    I only wish I had that pampered Alice here to see these little runts of peasant women stumping about with their immense burdens on their backs.

    T O A LICE J AMES
    Looking back on what I have done in the way of study this winter it seems one of the emptiest years of my life . . . I am sorry to hear you are feeling delicate. I would give anything if I could help you, my dearest Alice, but you will probably soon grow out of it. How do the Cambridge girls get on?

THREE THREE
    N OTHING MUCH CHANGED AT 20 Q UINCY S TREET, 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 an d his wife, Annie, ran the closest thing to a salon that Boston had to offer. Sara