Alias Grace (18 page)

S
imon is dreaming of a corridor. It’s the attic passageway of his house, his old house, the house of his childhood; the big house they had before his father’s failure and death. The maids slept up here. It was a secret world, one as a boy he wasn’t supposed to explore, but did, creeping silent as a spy in his stocking feet. Listening at half-open doors. What did they talk about when they thought no one could hear?

When he was feeling very brave he would venture into their rooms, knowing they were downstairs. With a shiver of excitement he’d examine their things, their forbidden things; he’d slide open the drawers, touch the wooden comb with two broken teeth, the carefully rolled ribbon; he’d rummage in the corners, behind the door: the crumpled petticoat, the cotton stocking, only one. He’d touched it; it felt warm.

In his dream the passageway is the same, only bigger. The walls are taller, and yellower: glowing, as if the sun itself is shining through them. But the doors are closed, and also locked. He tries door after door, lifting the latch, pushing gently, but nothing yields.
There are people in there though, he can sense them. Women, the maids. Sitting on the edges of their narrow beds, in their white cotton shifts, their hair unbound and rippling down over their shoulders, their lips parted, their eyes gleaming. Waiting for him.

The door at the end opens. Inside it is the sea. Before he can stop himself, down he goes, the water closing over his head, a stream of silvery bubbles rising from him. In his ears he hears a ringing, a faint and shivery laughter; then many hands caress him. It’s the maids; only they can swim. But now they are swimming away from him, abandoning him. He calls out to them,
Help me
, but they are gone.

He’s clinging onto something: a broken chair. The waves are rising and falling. Despite this turbulence there is no wind, and the air is piercingly clear. Past him, just out of reach, various objects are floating: a silver tray; a pair of candlesticks; a mirror; an engraved snuffbox; a gold watch, which is making a chirping noise, like a cricket. Things that were his father’s once, but sold after his death. They’re rising up from the depths like bubbles, more and more of them; as they reach the surface they roll slowly over, like bloating fish. They aren’t hard, like metal, but soft; they have a scaly skin on them, like an eel’s. He watches in horror, because now they’re gathering, twining together, re-forming. Tentacles are growing. A dead hand. His father, in the sinuous process of coming back to life. He has an overwhelming sense of having transgressed.

He wakes, his heart is pounding; the sheets and comforter are tangled around him, the pillows are on the floor. He’s soaked with sweat. After he’s lain quietly for a time, reflecting, he thinks he understands the train of association that must have led to such a dream. It was Grace’s story, with its Atlantic crossing, its burial at sea, its catalogue of household objects; and the overbearing father, of course. One father leads to another.

He checks the time by his pocket-watch, which is on the small bedside table: for once, he’s slept in. Luckily his breakfast is late; but the surly Dora should be arriving at any moment, and he doesn’t want to be surprised by her in his nightshirt, caught out in sloth. He throws on his dressing-gown and seats himself quickly at his writing table, turning his back to the door.

He will record the dream he’s just had in the journal he keeps for such purposes. One school of French
aliénistes
recommend the recording of dreams as a diagnostic tool; their own dreams, as well as those of their patients, for the sake of comparison. They hold dreams, like somnambulism, to be a manifestation of the animal life that continues below consciousness, out of sight, beyond reach of the will. Perhaps the hooks – the hinges, as it were – in the chain of memory, are located there?

He must reread Thomas Brown’s work on association and suggestion, and Herbart’s theory of the threshold of consciousness – the line that divides those ideas that are apprehended in full daylight from those others that lurk forgotten in the shadows below. Moreau de Tours considers the dream to be the key to the knowledge of mental illness, and Maine de Biran held that conscious life was only a sort of island, floating upon a much vaster subconscious, and drawing thoughts up from it like fish. What is perceived as being known is only a small part of what may be stored in this dark repository. Lost memories lie down there like sunken treasure, to be retrieved piecemeal, if at all; and amnesia itself may be in effect a sort of dreaming in reverse; a drowning of recollection, a plunging under.…

Behind his back the door opens: his breakfast is making its entrance. Assiduously he dips his pen. He waits for the thump of the tray, the clatter of earthenware on wood, but he does not hear it.

“Just set it on the table, will you?” he says, without turning.

There is a sound like air going out of a small bellows, followed by a shattering crash. Simon’s first thought is that Dora has hurled the tray at him – she has always suggested, to his mind, a barely repressed and potentially criminal violence. He shouts involuntarily, leaps up, and whirls around. Lying full-length upon the floor is his landlady, Mrs. Humphrey, in a shambles of broken crockery and ruined food.

He hurries over to her, kneels, and takes her pulse. At least she is still alive. He rolls open an eyelid, sees the opaque white. Swiftly he undoes the none-too-clean bibbed apron which she is wearing, and which he recognizes as the one habitually worn by slovenly Dora; then he unbuttons the front of her dress, noticing as he does so that there is a button missing, with the threads still hanging in place. He rummages around inside the layers of cloth, and at last succeeds in cutting her stay-laces with his pocket-knife, releasing an odour of violet-water, autumn leaves, and humid flesh. There is more to her than he would have supposed, although she is far from plump.

He carries her into his bedroom – the settee in his sitting room is too small for the purpose – and extends her upon the bed, placing a pillow beneath her feet to cause the blood to run back into her head. He considers removing her boots – which haven’t been cleaned yet today – but decides that this would be an unwarranted familiarity.

Mrs. Humphrey has neat ankles, from which he averts his eyes; her hair is dishevelled from the fall. Seen this way she is younger than he’s thought; and, with her habitual expression of strained anxiety wiped away by unconsciousness, much more attractive. He sets his ear against her breast, listening: the heartbeat is regular. A simple case of fainting, then. He moistens a towel with water from the jug and applies it to her face and neck. Her eyelids twitch.

Simon pours half a glass of water from the bottle on his nightstand, adds twenty drops of sal volatile – a medication he always carries with him on his afternoon visits, in case of any similar
flimsiness on the part of Grace Marks, who is said to be prone to fainting – and, supporting Mrs. Humphrey with one arm, holds the glass to her lips.

“Swallow this.”

She gulps awkwardly, then lifts a hand to her head. There is a red mark, he notices now, on the side of her face. Perhaps her scoundrel of a husband is a brute as well as a sot. Though this looks more like a hard slap, and surely such a man as the Major would employ a closed fist. Simon feels a wave of protective pity for her that he cannot really afford. The woman is only his landlady; apart from that she’s a complete stranger to him. He has no wish to alter this situation, despite an image that leaps into his mind, unbidden – aroused no doubt by the sight of a helpless woman extended upon his tumbled bed – of Mrs. Humphrey, semi-conscious and with her hands fluttering helplessly in the air, minus her stays and with her chemise half torn off, her feet – curiously, still in their boots – kicking spasmodically, making faint mewing noises while being savaged by a hulking figure that bears no resemblance at all to himself; although – from above, and from the back, which is his point of view during this sordid scene – the quilted dressing-gown looks identical.

He has always been curious about these manifestations of the imagination as he has been able to observe them in himself. Where do they come from? If they occur in him, they must occur as well in the majority of men. He is both sane and normal, and he has developed the rational faculties of his mind to a high degree; and yet he cannot always control such pictures. The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend – a madman, say – lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

“You are quite safe,” he says to her kindly. “You have had a fall. You must rest quietly until you feel better.”

“But – I am on a bed.” She gazes around her.

“It is my bed, Mrs. Humphrey. I was forced to carry you to it in the absence of any other suitable place.”

The skin of her face is now flushed. She has noticed his dressing-gown. “I must leave at once.”

“I beg you to remember that I am a doctor, and, for the time being, you are my patient. If you were to attempt to get up now, there might be a recurrence.”

“Recurrence?”

“You collapsed, while carrying in” – it seems indelicate to mention it – “my breakfast tray. May I ask you – what has become of Dora?”

To his consternation, but not to his surprise, she begins to cry. “I could not pay her. I owed her three months’ back wages; I had succeeded in selling some – some items of a personal nature, but my husband took the money from me, two days ago. He has not been back since. I do not know where he has gone.” She makes a visible effort to control her tears.

“And this morning?”

“We had – words. She insisted on payment. I told her I could not, that it was not possible. She said in that case she would pay herself. She began to go through my bureau drawers, in search of jewellery, I suppose. Not finding any, she said she would have my wedding ring. It was gold, but very plain. I attempted to defend it from her. She said I was not honest. She … struck me. Then she took it, and said she would not be an unpaid slave to me any longer, and then she left the house. After that I prepared your breakfast myself, and carried it up. What else was I to do?”

So it was not the husband then, thinks Simon. It was that sow of a Dora. Mrs. Humphrey begins to cry again, gently, effortlessly, as if the sobs are a kind of birdsong.

“You must have some good woman friend you can go to. Or who can come to you.” Simon is anxious to transfer Mrs. Humphrey
from his own shoulders to those of someone else. Women help each other; caring for the afflicted is their sphere. They make beef tea and jellies. They knit comforting shawls. They pat and soothe.

“I have no friends in this place. We have only recently come to this city, having suffered – having undergone some financial difficulties in our previous abode. My husband discouraged visits. He did not want me going out.”

A useful thought comes to Simon. “You must eat something. You will feel stronger.”

At this she smiles wanly at him. “There is nothing in the house to eat, Dr. Jordan. Your breakfast was the last of it. I have not eaten for two days, ever since my husband left. What little there was, Dora ate up herself. I have had nothing but water.”

And so Simon finds himself at the market, purchasing stores for the physical maintenance of his landlady, with his own money. He’d helped Mrs. Humphrey down the stairs to her own part of the house; she’d insisted on it, saying she could not afford to be found in the bedroom of her lodger in the event of her husband’s return. He wasn’t surprised to find that the rooms were essentially bare of furniture: a table and two chairs were all that remained in the parlour. But there was still a bed in the back bedroom, and onto it he had placed Mrs. Humphrey, in a state of nervous exhaustion. And starvation, too: no wonder she was so bony. He turned his mind away from the bed, and from the scenes of conjugal misery that must have been enacted upon it.