The Madwoman Upstairs (27 page)

If Gilbert did, in fact, do some well-intentioned meddling with Helen’s image, then I patted Anne Brontë on the back for her foresight. Anne’s own biography had been written retroactively, her image shaped by an elder sister who might or might not have had her best interests at heart. Did Anne know this, and did she deliberately write it into her semi-autobiographical masterpiece, in an effort to publicize her own shackles? The real Anne and the real Helen were both trapped—under layers of narration.

“What are you reading?”

I gave a start. Mom had arrived early, and out of breath. The cold had left her cheeks mottled and red. She unwrapped the scarf from her neck like a bandage.

“Do you want a croissant?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“I just ordered you one.”

“Almond?”

“Almond.”

She sat down. I could tell something was bothering her. There was a crease in her forehead in the shape of the San Andreas Fault. She glanced between
Tenant
and me, me and
Tenant.

“I really hate that book,” she said.

She sounded exactly like me.

“Your father made me read it when we were dating,” she explained. “He told me that everything was right in front of my eyes, but that I would never be able to see a damn thing without being able to read more creatively. Does that sound like a nice thing to say to your future wife?”

“No.”

Mom took a breath. Her weekend-long grin had settled into a deep frown. “I wanted to talk to you about something, Samantha, before you leave tomorrow. Do you know the Brontës?”

“Sorry, who?”

“Don’t joke when I’m being serious. I want you to consider yourself cut off from them. From this moment on.”

There was a small silence. Mom hadn’t even taken off her coat, yet it seemed she had already spat out everything she wanted to tell me.

I waited, and when she didn’t respond, I said: “I don’t think you can do that?”

Mom pursed her lips. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re here, surrounded by Paris, and you are rereading that piece-of-shit book. Don’t you find that sad?”

Because I could think of nothing else to say, I said: “
La merde.
”

“Your dad had a mistress long before Rebecca,” she said. The word
mistress
was sharp and ugly, and yet she glossed over it as though she were describing a flat tire. “His obsession with the Brontës ruined every single relationship in his life—including, I’m afraid, his relationship with you.”

I decided to ignore that. “You must have some idea of what he wanted me to find.”

“Probably some old towels the Brontës used to clean themselves,” she said.

“I’m being serious.”

“Who says I wasn’t being serious? You’re complicating something that was never meant to be complicated.”

“Learning how to complicate things is what makes you smarter.”

“Only in a classroom.”

I said, “Life is a classroom?”

“Christ, Samantha.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

She gave me a fiery stare. “Your father may have been your idol, but I want you to remember that he was not always a good man,” she said. “Have you ever met his doppelgänger, Sir John Booker? What a pair. A Cambridge professor, decorated like the pope, who wastes his talent hounding your father for years, following a mystery he invented. I want you to pay close attention to what happened to both of those men, Samantha. Your father died in his early forties. If the fire hadn’t killed him, the booze would have done it not long after that. I’m sure he knew it. And Booker? Raving mad. A few years ago, he was found wading through the mud outside the parsonage in the middle of the night, looking for something, presumably. Read some articles on him, Samantha. It’s pathetic. You’ll notice that he is also divorced.”

The croissant arrived in a paper bag. “
Chaud,
” said the girl in the green apron who brought it before disappearing. I took a bite but it didn’t taste like much except salt. Mom stared at me for some time, then folded her hands in her lap in the shape of a small cradle.

“I worry about you,” she said. “You’ve gotten so wrapped up with being alone that sometimes it feels as if you like it there.”

My throat constricted. “It wasn’t my choice.”

She stared at me, solemn. “I never did a thing to you, Samantha. Don’t create a delusional fiction and pretend I abandoned you. All I’ve been doing for the last seven years is trying to get you to move in with me. I know why you can’t look at me, and it’s because you see him every time you do. Well, you know what? I look at you and I see him too. He was a brilliant man and he was a scared man. He lived in the past because nothing was at stake there.”

I didn’t answer. She was much more confident than I remembered.

“I know you’ve suffered, sweetheart,” she said. “You’re determined to honor your pain because you think it defines you. I’m just worried that you’ve got a hell of a lot of things pent up in there, and someday that top’s going to come blowing off and you’re going to do something crazy and stupid that will get you in trouble.”

“I already did something crazy and stupid.”

“Breaking into Rebecca’s office? It was illegal, maybe, but not crazy.”

I ripped off a piece of croissant. I could feel the tears congeal behind my eyes. I knew they wouldn’t spill; they never did.

“What’s your point?” I said.

Mom’s head tilted to the side and she pinned me with an empathy so ancient that I could easily have been looking at every mother who had ever lived.

“I love you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’d rather not see you lose your mind.”

I fell silent. I couldn’t seem to look her straight in the eye anymore. I hadn’t heard the word
love
in so long that I had almost forgotten what it could do to you. Even my dad never made wordy evidence of his affection for me; love was just another piece of subtext. I found my heart racing and for one brief, exhilarating moment, I wanted to forget my father entirely and come live in Paris with this strange, emotive woman in front of me. Why shouldn’t I move on?

It was a pleasant thought, but it lasted only a few moments. Almost immediately, I was struck by a crushing grief. It was as if Dad’s ghost was rearing out of its sleepy stupor and knocking me over the head with the punishing back of its hand. I looked down at my croissant and I remembered the soft weight of his bear hugs when I ran down for breakfast, and the way he’d scratch my head when I couldn’t sleep. I remembered his perfect, worn, narrow face, irreverent and bespectacled and not of this world. I could still feel the warmth coiling right off him on those pancake mornings when it was just the two of us, alone against the world. I missed him to the point of physical pain.

Mom was wrong about one thing: I wasn’t interested in some old books Dad left me. I wanted something bigger—a message, a lesson, anything—that was wrapped up in what might very well turn out to be a bunch of used towels. I wanted Dad’s beautiful voice to speak up and tell me something profound and improbable—or at least to finish the conversation we had started long ago. I wanted, I suppose, what everyone wants: meaning. Happiness, in some sense, was irrelevant.

When I finally glanced back up, Mom looked lost. I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrapped my hand over hers. Her fingers were cold. Eventually, I felt them returning my grasp, small and fragile.

CHAPTER 12

I
returned to Oxford on Sunday evening to a stack of papers and pamphlets on my doorstep. The
Hornbeam
had milked the break-in story for everything it was worth. Pierpont’s staff of vipers had published more than a few speculative pieces, many of which suggested that the culprit had broken in to change the mark given on an assignment. The articles were terribly written, but I was relieved to find that they did not mention me. One piece explained that the authorities were “close” to catching the “culprit” who was responsible for the “grand burglary” of the room. I didn’t read past page two. I didn’t know where they had found their “sources,” but to me, it all seemed like a load of “shit.”

That week, I finished my essay on
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. The complete product was less an essay and more of a story on the Brontës, which was reasonable, I thought, considering that Orville had asked me to be “creative.” The final title was “A Very Sad and Pathetic Parable Indeed (Fable? Biography? Autobiography? You Pick).” By Samantha J. Whipple.

Now, here I was, walking to the Faculty Wing to turn it in before the midnight deadline. I would have gone earlier in the day, were it not for my all-consuming paranoia. I was sure that Ellery Flannery would pounce upon me and be able to read the crime all over my face. Since my return from Paris, I only left my tower in the wee hours of the morning or late at night, avoiding everyone I could. The papers wanted a Strange Antisocial Brontë Heiress? Now they had one.

I hadn’t been to the Faculty Wing since I had broken into Rebecca’s office, and my heart was pounding. I was the mistress returning to the scene of the tryst. I took the back route. Halford’s Well was blanketed in darkness, like a defunct German bunker. It didn’t take long to reach the double doors in the front of the Faculty Wing. They were, as usual, locked. I pressed my palm against the frosty glass. How had I snuck in last time? Suddenly, I let out a small yelp. There, on the other side of the door, was a man’s face, also pressed against the glass.

I clasped my hands to my chest. The door opened. It was only a college porter. He had wet eyes and reminded me of the Tin Man.

“Yes?” he said.

I said, “Hi.”

“May I help you?”

“I have a paper to hand in?”

He didn’t say anything. I held up my essay. It stood stiff for a moment, then flopped over my wrist.

“Name?” he said.

“Samantha Whipple.”

He frowned and I winced. I needed to practice inventing fake names faster.

“The faculty is gone for the evening, miss,” he said.

“I just need to slip it under my professor’s door.”

No response.

“May I?” I asked.

He regarded me for a moment—a long moment—then slowly stepped aside. Something creaked, either the door or his tin joints. I brushed past him and began walking through the foyer. I glanced behind me. The shadowy porter was watching me as I retreated, hands behind his back. Was I mistaken, or had the college hired sentries?

I kept going—past Geological Sciences, past Philosophy—until I made it to the English Department. The lights in the corridor were bright and sterile, and I squinted as I walked. Orville’s door was closed, naturally. His brass knocker was bright and shiny, like a solitary, all-seeing eye. I bent down and slid the essay underneath his door. I meant to be quick about it, but I lingered, looking at the plaque in front of me.
James Timothy Orville III.
I wondered if my name elicited in him the same dull ache. I had thought about him dozens of times this week. Dozens? Hundreds. There seemed to be reincarnations of him everywhere I went, like he was a giant, exploded piñata whose bits and pieces had been showered indiscriminately over England.

To my great surprise, the door flew open. I jumped. There he was, in the darkness—Orville—wearing dark green boxers and a T-shirt with a werewolf on it.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”

His expression didn’t change. “I thought I heard something.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I work here.”

For a moment, I thought he might be about to explain that he was with a student, and could I come back another time.

I said, “Do you live here or something?”

“Your essay is due tonight, did you remember?”

“And you were waiting for it?”

He glanced at the floor, where my essay lay at his bare feet, like an obedient, panting dog. He picked it up and tossed it somewhere into the room behind him. The chamber was dark, except for one square of uneven light.

“What are you watching?” I asked, nodding inside.

“
Jane Eyre,
” he said. “The new one.”

I said, “I haven’t watched a movie in years.”

“Are you asking for an invitation?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Was that a no or a yes?”

“No. Yes.”

“You’d like to watch it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Well, then, come in.”

“What?”

“I said, come in.”

“I—”

“Samantha.”

I stepped inside. He was right; I had wanted an invitation. The room smelled like overheated electronics. Was I allowed to be here at this hour?

“Coat?” Orville said, holding out a hand.

I gave it to him.

“Sit,” he said.

“Woof.”

“Pardon?”

I sat. The movie was paused. There was a scene frozen on the screen. The woman must have been Jane. She was looking sultry and tanned, like she never had in the book. The camera seemed to have caught her mid-wander through an uncharacteristically wild English garden, which had been color-enhanced by one thousand different lighting engineers.

Orville walked to the corner of the room and deposited my coat on the chair by the deadened fireplace. Afterward, he opened the door of his mini refrigerator. A burst of canned light blasted against his face.

“Do you normally camp out in your office in boxers?” I asked.

“In England, we call them ‘pants.’ ”

“My father called them ‘hallelujahs.’ ”

He removed something from the refrigerator. “Did you say you like hot cocoa?”

“Do you have any beer?”

“How about some cereal?”

The door to the fridge closed, and I heard a cabinet door open. In a moment, something rattled and poured into a bowl. It sounded like kibble. Orville walked back to the couch and sat. He handed me a bowl of Bran Flakes. I was silent. The last time I had eaten cereal with my hands was when I was eight years old.

“Really, why aren’t you at home?” I asked.

“Sometimes I find my flat lonely.”

“As opposed to this office?”

“This is my true home. I’ve built my life here.”