The Madwoman Upstairs (13 page)

Later—much later—I descended the five flights of stairs like Mad King George and stumbled into the evening air. If I stayed in my tower any longer I was sure my mind would slowly unravel and leak everywhere. Outside, the dewy courtyard looked like it was covered in cold sweat. I was right: the afternoon sun had been a cruel trick. A storm was on its way. The wind circled overhead like a hawk; the clouds were pregnant with rain. I had
Jane Eyre
firmly clutched in my hands as I walked. The asphalt was slippery and I caught myself from falling more than once.

I was left to devise a series of suspects who might have been responsible for tonight’s cryptic and borderline illegal delivery. First—my mother. How was I so sure that she was still in France? I hadn’t seen her in years. Perhaps she was really camped out in the Old College dungeon. But she would never have had access to my father’s books, not after she stormed out of our lives, and especially since the library had
burned
. The second possibility was Rebecca, who was so very, very dead. The third option was Blanche from the National Bank. But she seemed equally as unlikely. A bank associate would hardly steal a client’s family heirlooms and then give them back to her in secret. Lastly, I supposed, there was Sir John, the curator of the Brontë Parsonage, who by process of elimination seemed like the only option, since he was the only Family Nemesis I knew of. But I had never even met him, and how could he have come by a book that to anyone else in the world would mean nothing? It was not a valuable first edition. My father’s copy of
Jane Eyre
had been purchased at a Barnes & Noble.

Desperately, I replayed the afternoon in my mind. There had been so much fluff to the day—Hans, the museum, Amanda—that I wished I had thought to focus on the one part of it that mattered: Marvin and his damn tour group. Had the culprit been the Russian? The amazon? Why had I kept my eyes fixated on the floor? And why hadn’t he locked the door on his way out?

I was panting, and for a moment I imagined the book was too. This was not a novel. It was a force of nature. Here, in my hands, was the collective imagination of a million teenage girls.
Jane Eyre
was one of the most famous novels ever written. It was the book that put the Brontës on the map. It was the reason Charlotte Brontë became a celebrity who hobnobbed with Thackeray. It was the reason that women today secretly fantasized about mystery, danger, and brooding men.
Jane Eyre
was a twisted Cinderella story, about an emotionally brutalized child who grows up and finds a job as a governess in a dreary manor. She falls in love with the surly master of the house, Mr. Rochester, who conveniently forgets to tell her that he already has a wife, named Bertha, a thrashing madwoman who, by the way, he has locked up in his attic. Rochester asks Jane to marry him, but his insane wife’s brother interrupts the wedding to tell Jane the inconvenient truth. Then, to make a long story short, the shit hits the fan.

The novel wasn’t quite as horrible as
Agnes Grey
, but I found it no less threatening. Much like
Agnes Grey
,
Jane Eyre
was not fiction, and I didn’t care what James Orville III had to say otherwise. Charlotte Brontë had merely changed the names of people and places from her own life. She sent Jane to the same miserable Christian boarding school that her sisters had attended; she modeled Jane’s dead friend Helen Burns on their own dead sister, Maria; she modeled Mr. Rochester himself on Charlotte’s tutor in Brussels, Mr. Constantin Héger. Of course, in reality, Héger had been a happily married man, and poor Charlotte pined for him for the rest of her life. There was no romantic ending for Charlotte, but that’s where writing your own novel can be so useful.

The similarity between Jane’s and Charlotte’s lives did not end with characters. Halfway through
Jane Eyre
, Rochester almost burns in his bed, in an attempted murder masterminded by his mad, incarcerated wife. It had always sounded familiar because it
was
familiar. Branwell Brontë’s bed caught fire, too, around the time Charlotte came out with
Jane Eyre
. In the book, it had been a lethal revenge plot. In real life, no one knew what had caused the fire, even to this day. Branwell’s elbow? An unlucky gust of wind? A malicious trespasser? Near the end of
Jane Eyre
, Rochester’s insane wife sets fire to Thornfield Hall by setting curtains aflame and dragging them through the house. Charlotte never allowed curtains in the house until she was thirty-nine years old, due to an all-consuming fear of fire. This, to me, did not seem coincidental.

If
Jane Eyre
was at all rooted in reality, then one enigma remained for me: the madwoman, Bertha. She was the cackle that haunted Thornfield Hall; she was the character whom Jane Austen would never have written. Her function in
Jane Eyre
had been the subject of debate since the 1960s, thanks to two books on the subject,
Wide Sargasso Sea
and
The Madwoman in the Attic
. It was now accepted that Bertha was a symbol of feminism one hundred years before feminism became trendy. Angry, powerful, and sexual, Bertha is the outer manifestation of every rebellious inclination Jane feels on the inside. Just as Bertha is trapped in an attic, Jane is locked in the confines of her dismal occupation, and the social and political limitations of her gender.

It was all a very tidy theory, but it didn’t go far enough. Bertha was entirely unlike any other character the Brontës ever wrote. She was wild and foreign, so terribly out of place that I didn’t trust that she came entirely from someone’s imagination. If it were true that Charlotte had swiped many of the characters in
Jane Eyre
from real life—who, exactly, had been the model for the insane woman living in the attic?

Suddenly, I let out a small shriek. I had lost my balance—my arms flailed, and I landed in a heap on the grass. A sharp pain hit my ankle. I hollered and swore; the twist was bad. It was my right foot, the same foot I had broken years ago, when I had climbed the trellis of our home in Boston and fallen. I clutched my newly angered ankle as if I might strangle it back to its former self. I looked around for a sign of help. All I saw was the vague outline of Halford’s Well and the Faculty Wing beyond, stern and unfeeling. I looked to my left and to my right and realized that I had been walking on the lawn.

Above me, the wind took aim. I should not have underestimated the weather. The black clouds looming overhead brought me back to a pre-modern era, when women still died of chills. The rain started to fall, strong and synchronized. It was too painful to stand, so I just sat there, like bait. I had
Jane Eyre
trapped underneath my coat. I secretly hoped it was bleeding in the rain, my father’s margin notes leaking out like someone’s last breath.

It was some time before I saw my first beacon of hope: a shadow emerging from the Faculty Wing. I stayed very still. Was it a faculty member? I sat up straight and gave a weak holler.

The figure stopped and turned. It had, I noted, a huge head.

“Who is there?” it roared. Baritone.

“The student Raskolnikov?”

He must have not heard me, because he said: “Speak!”

I tried again, but my voice was snatched by the wind. The shadow began moving toward me. Immediately, I recognized him. My heart sank. Orville. What was he doing here at this hour? Shouldn’t he be at home, with a leggy girlfriend? His coat billowed behind him like a broken, flapping tent.

I tried to look chic, like one of those women who know how to arrange their limbs in front of the camera. But I was splayed over the lawn, drenched. I’m sure I looked like I belonged on a toilet.

Orville arrived and stood over me. A puff of white air escaped his mouth. The rain was pounding his hair onto his forehead. He didn’t bother brushing the stray strands away from his eyes.

“Samantha,” he said, expelling a breath.

I said, “Hi.”

“What in God’s name are you doing on the lawn?” His voice was sharp; he sounded like a human Weedwacker.

I looked around. “Ruminating?”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

He stopped. “How badly?”

I pointed to my right ankle. “I can’t move it.”

He looked left and then right, as if waiting for the medic. Then he knelt to the ground, elbows resting on his knees. He glared at my foot like it might heal by intimidation. I felt as though I was back in 1820 with a pale pink frock and the last name Dashwood. Orville poked at my boot with a gloved index finger.

“Does that hurt?” he said. His features were stern.

“Yes.”

“How about now?”

“You’re doing the same thing.”

“Now?”

“Really?”

Gingerly, he took my foot in one hand and removed my boot.

I squeaked, “Sir!”

My cold, socked foot flopped out of the shoe and gleamed in the muted lamplight like a dead fish. I had never felt so naked in my life. I willed myself away—back inside, back in Boston, anywhere but here. His hands were clammy and wet, and he was hurting me more than I cared to admit. He peeled off my sock—good God, the impropriety.

“Please,” I said, wincing. “I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t answer. He moved his fingers in slow circles around irrelevant parts of my foot.

In a moment he concluded: “Sprained.”

We stared at each other. The rain continued to pound, like coarse salt.

“Thank you, doctor,” I said.

He glanced at the dim outline of the Faculty Wing, then at the well. His frown was impressively unpleasant.

“Did you say that you saw anyone?” he asked.

“Sorry?”

He snapped, “Did you
see
anyone?”

“Just you. Why do you ask?”

“This is not the best place to be found. Come, I’ll help you up.”

He wrapped one of my arms around his neck and helped me to a standing position. Quickly, I removed my arm from around his neck, but he reached for it and slung it back over his shoulders.

I gave a surprised yelp. “What are you
doing
?”

His free arm wrapped around my waist. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“I don’t need a hospital.”

He reached for my knees and attempted to lift me but failed. I was nearly six feet tall and he was not quite as strong as he thought. He straightened back up and we stood, immobile, in an awkwardness so profound it seemed beyond the power of expression.

“Please,” I said, “you don’t need to do this. You’ll only get back problems when you grow up.”

He didn’t answer.

My cheeks warmed. “I meant—when you get old.”

Silence.

I corrected, “Older.”

“Samantha,” Orville said, and he let out a breath, “there will come a time when you will need to learn not to be scared shitless of me.”

I shut up.

He helped me limp toward the entrance gate. My brain seemed crowded and swollen. The silence was loud and ugly, and in my mind, it stretched out for several years. Occasionally I found myself muttering, “Interesting.”

At last, we exited the college. There were only a few cars splashing through the glassy puddles on High Street. We both saw the cab as it rounded the corner.

“Taxi!”
Orville bellowed. The cab swerved, lurched, and screeched to a stop by the curb. We piled into the back, out of the rain. Orville told the driver, “Take me to the Radcliffe Hospital.”

The man looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

Orville reached forward and slammed the plastic partition shut.

The hospital was a white Soviet-looking building by the freeway, whose inside still reeked of all the recycled breath from the afternoon. After depositing me on a chair in the deserted waiting room, Orville found the receptionist at the front desk, a thirty-something nurse with pinched lips and three piercings.

“She’s taken a spill,” I could hear him explain.

Someone was typing in the distance. The nurse, glancing my way, said, “Your daughter will be fine.”

He said something I couldn’t hear. I was clutching
Jane Eyre
, flipping through pages absently. Some of the ink had bled, but for the most part, my father’s comments remained intact.

Orville returned a few moments later. I snapped the book shut.

“Have a seat,” I said. “Dad.”

He walked to the chair directly next to me, then changed his mind and sat farther away, with one chair between us. He reached for the
Herald Tribune
on the table near us and shook it open.

“You really didn’t have to do this,” I said. “This is not in your job description.”

“You don’t need to remind me,” he said. “What in God’s name were you doing out at this hour?”

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“I was finishing some work.”

“I was taking a walk.”

“In a storm?”

“I had a rough evening.”

He stared at me. By itself, his face wasn’t terribly handsome—there were crooks in strange places, and his eyebrows were much too large. But he had an impressively focused stare, unreadable and perfect.