The Madwoman Upstairs (25 page)

It was Anne’s second novel. Her first book,
Agnes Grey
, had turned out to be boring and useless while its contemporary,
Jane Eyre
, had been dramatic and popular. Anne tried again, and this time, she was determined to not hold back.
Tenant
begins with a letter from a young man named Gilbert Markham, a badly disguised version of young Branwell Brontë. He is passionate, impulsive, and on the prowl. “I am about to give a sketch,” he writes to a friend. “No, not a sketch—a full and faithful account of certain circumstances connected with the most important event of my life.” The “most important event” of his life is, naturally, a woman. Her name is Helen Graham and she is a taciturn single mother who moves into a deserted old manor and paints morbid landscapes for a living.

The romance between the two does not end up being terribly romantic, since Gilbert expends most of his energy trying to figure out the secrets of Helen’s sordid past. Why did she come to Wildfell Hall? Why does she have a son? Why are her morbid landscapes so morbid? Helen, in a moment of desperation, finally throws Gilbert her entire diary. It conveniently explains everything that has ever happened to her. Gilbert, naturally, transcribes all two hundred pages of this diary to his old friend, and the rest of the novel becomes the firsthand account of Helen’s past.

Her past is suitably shocking. As an impressionable young woman, she suffered a misguided marriage with a fabulous rake and alcoholic-in-progress. After a few years, she couldn’t take it anymore and decided to run away. In an act of defiance, she slammed her bedroom door in her husband’s face. It was the door slam that rang around the world. This is the defining moment of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, the instant in which Anne Brontë delivered to her readers all the empty promises of
Agnes Grey
. Helen Graham is the updated version of Anne’s first protagonist. On the outside, she is shy and stern; on the inside, she is fiery, and as strong as a man.

The novel, not surprisingly, was panned. In the words of
Sharpe’s London Magazine
, it was a series of “profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured.” But
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
finally brought Anne the commercial success that was her due. Her novel outsold even
Wuthering Heights
, and went into its second printing after only six weeks.

My father and I both referred to this book as
Tenant.
Just
Tenant.
It was his tenant, our tenant, the creature who subleased our basement. Dad didn’t love this book, but he respected it. This was the Hera of the Brontë literature—all-seeing and wise, yet lost in the wake of other, flashier gods. Dad and I never had the chance to explore the whole book together. The furthest we ever got, before he died, was the preface to the second edition. In the wake of her bad reviews, Anne wrote a small and biting essay defending both herself and her work. It was a bold move for a woman whose reputation was already at risk. Anne never once backed down or apologized. She fought back. Reading her preface to the second edition was the equivalent of watching someone you love very much begin to grow some balls. She wrote:

. . . When I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it, though it be to the prejudice of my name and to the detriment of my reader’s immediate pleasure as well as my own.

Predictably, Charlotte did her best to crush
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. She reviewed her sister’s book with even more contempt than Anne’s numerous critics. “[
Tenant
] hardly appears to me desirable to preserve,” she commented. “The choice of subject in that work is a mistake.” After Anne died, Charlotte flatly refused the re-publication of her sister’s novel. Perhaps she thought she was trying to preserve Anne’s good name for posterity. But I wasn’t sure Anne wanted to be saved.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
could have been as famous as
Jane Eyre
, had it only received proper marketing. The support of the Great Charlotte Brontë, if given, could have made Anne a star. Instead, Charlotte deliberately denied her sister the recognition she deserved. Anne died a social reformer who ended up reforming nothing.

The baby Martian across the train table gave a piercing war cry. With one solid right kick, the kid knocked the book out of my hands. Apparently even a baby could sense trouble when it was right in front of him. I glanced over at the man in the green suit, who had stopped arguing with the roof and was now watching me with the curious expression of someone who might be secretly cataloguing story material for one of his next books. I gave a small frown and pulled my hood over my head.

Paris was nice, I guess. The city reminded me of one of those people who didn’t need to make an effort to impress you because you both knew you had to get along. My mother said she’d pick me up from the train station, so I waited in the main lobby, which echoed and glittered like a low-budget cathedral. Not too long after I arrived, I saw a familiar-looking woman wearing a fur coat and white-rimmed glasses waiting by the flower stand.

That wasn’t my mother. Instead, my mother turned out to be the woman walking toward me in light jeans and a girlish multicolored top with puffy sleeves. I hadn’t seen her in over two years, and she had dyed her hair a thick, bottomless brown. The old vision I had of her—the blurry blonde in my memory—seemed like a character in a book that had now been inched out of my imagination by the movie. The new face stopped in front of me with a smile I barely recognized. She was stately, with good stage presence, and her teeth sparkled like crystal.

“Let me give you a hug!” she boomed. She was massively tall. We hugged and pulled away, and I looked into her soft, young face. One thing about my mother—she was only forty-two.

“I’ll get your bags,” she said.

We walked outside and when a cab pulled over, Mom opened the door for me, blind-date style. She was more beautiful than I remembered, but maybe beauty came with age and confidence. We climbed inside. My bag rested between us like a small beached whale. She rattled off some directions to the taxi driver, then turned to me and said:

“You still remember your French, don’t you, Samantha?”

“I spoke French?”

“Seat belt.”

The car lurched forward. It was already late in the afternoon, and the day was dragging itself down behind the buildings. In its final moments, the wilting sun looked like a fist that had opened up to unleash five beams of pink and orange. To someone else, it was probably poetic. To me, everything looked like the inside of Rebecca’s office. The break-in had swelled in size and magnitude in my mind over the last few hours. I felt ill. I was not a daughter visiting her mother; I was a fugitive here to be harbored by a familiar amazon.

Mom, however, seemed to be having a great time. The smile never left her face for the duration of the car ride. She patted my hand three or four times, and sometimes rubbed it. When she smiled, she looked very put-together, like a colleague, or a stylish aunt. If I were a kid and looking at her for the first time, I would have wished she were my mother. This, right here, was the prime of her life. It wasn’t fair to resent her for how young she was, but I did. If she hadn’t married so young, she would not have needed to run away.

Mom’s new apartment was on the fashionable side of the rue de Magdebourg, on the seventh floor of a building that looked like a fancy chocolate. There were multiple locks on her front door, I noticed. A nice idea. Kept out criminals like myself. Inside, everything was squeaky clean and magazine-tidy. The furniture was shiny and angular. The centerpiece was a giant, glossy slice of sedimentary rock. It was very avant-garde. I guess it was supposed to represent the view of Earth as seen from a great distance.

Mom immediately disappeared into the kitchen. I dropped my bags and took a look around. There were no books. It made the space feel soulless. Or, maybe
soulless
was a term people used when everything was perfect and you just resented not being part of it. Mom had always wanted me to move to Paris. I chose Boston. At the time, I couldn’t leave my father. I’d picked between my two parents, and my mother had lost. I didn’t like to think about it.

“While you’re here, I’d like to buy you something,” Mom called from the next room.

“You don’t have to buy me anything,” I said.

“Do you know what you’d look great in?”

I said, “A Porsche?”

“Knee-length skirts.”

“Hmm.”

“The guest room is off to the right. I’ll be there in a second.”

I showed myself to my room. It was yellow and blue—clearly designed for a daughter. Ruffles. Curtains. A big orange bed. An artsy painting of a purple and green woman with six feet. Stacked on top of the nightstand were dozens of copies of French fashion magazines. Each one had a page whose corner was turned down, likely filled with shoes and knee-length skirts. It was as though some child had died in here and no one had touched the room since.

“Do you like it?” Mom asked.

I didn’t realize she had returned, and I turned around to find her with a mug of hot chocolate in her hands. She handed it to me. Old-looking marshmallows bobbed on the surface.

“For you,” she said with an expectant look on her face.

I paused. “Thank you.”

It was the saddest moment we ever spent together.

I took a step back and accidentally knocked over my bag, out of which tumbled
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. I picked it up, as well as the dental floss that had also spilled out, and dropped them both on the bed. Mom’s eyes rested on the book. She looked at it with alarm, like it was instead several thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine.

She cleared her throat and said, innocently, “You’ve already read that, haven’t you?”

I said, “Yes.”

“More than once?”

“It’s one of the books that arrived on my doorstep. Remember? I told you.”

She paused. “And you carry him with you.”

I didn’t respond. Mom’s smile fell, for the first time. There was a certain tragedy about her just then—one, ironically, that I knew my father would have found irresistible. Her gaze roved from my bangs to my neck to my ears to my nose and eyebrows and mouth and forehead. I had her cheekbones, her small rib cage, and her bone structure, but I knew she was looking for what else she could call her own. I was my father’s daughter. She hadn’t known what to do about it when I was a child, and she didn’t know what to do about it now.

“Dinner is in thirty,” she said. With a small smile, she left the room.

Dinner was actually in an hour and forty-five. I used the time to go through my e-mails. I came upon an announcement that had been penned at eight thirty-two that morning. My heart seemed to stop.

Dear Student,

It has come to our attention that on the evening of Thursday, February 27, a room in the Faculty Wing was forcibly entered. We hardly need impress upon anyone the gravity of the crime. If you have any information regarding this matter, we urge you to reveal it to a college faculty member. Any person found to be withholding evidence will face severe punitive measures.

Regards,

Ellery Flannery

Director of Student Affairs

I was breathing heavily. Flannery might as well have taken dictation from my latest nightmare. Except that in my nightmare, it was Orville who had written the letter, and he looked like Rasputin. I tried to tell myself that no one had seen me, and therefore I could not be caught. Why, then, did I feel as though an invisible being were hovering over my shoulder, passing judgment? Surely, I would be found and expelled from Oxford. My lungs constricted. I was too young to have run out of time.

I whipped out my phone and carefully dialed.