Alice in Bed Read Online Free PDF

through the scrim of rude hovels, Charles discerned the gaunt figure of a count—Do Italians have counts?”
    â€œI believe so.”
    â€œâ€”a count shaking hands with his peasants on Christmas Eve. Returning to his barren native shores and dejected at having no peasants on his own land, Don Carlos took up the feudal custom with his guests. And not just on Christmas Eve.”
    I was giggling helplessly now, as much at Sara’s mock-ponderous delivery as at her words. Mockery was one of our favorite sports. We both felt that Charles had become very tiresome about Dante lately, and there was widespread fear that he might launch a Dante circle at any moment.
    I picked up the thread. “It cannot be denied that he is a distinguished looking man, Lord of Shady Hill, Propagator of Ruskinism , Explicator of Dante, Devotee of Tintoretto-ism. . . . And yet, and yet, something spoils the effect. Can it be the manner in which the mouth and mustache droop when he quotes from the Purgatorio ? That womanish rosebud mouth fringed by a drooping mustache—so reminiscent of a pond fringed by weeds!”
    â€œOh, stop, Alice! My stomach hurts!” Sara was rolling around on the lawn now, clutching her sides.
    â€œWell, Sara,” I continued, “the dinner guests, whose paws had been thoroughly caressed and massaged, with long melancholy Nortonian glances thrown in, bore up as well as could be hoped. But being crude Yankees, unfamiliar with the customs of fealty, they found it wearisome in the end. Certain guests, notably two maidens of that shire, slunk homeward afterwards and, taking refuge beneath a starry canopy, found solace in singing of the incomparable exploits of Charlemagne. The End.”
    â€œThe End,” Sara repeated, like the amen at the end of a prayer.
    Our problem was not really the Nortons—even we knew that—although it was undeniable that they took art and themselves too seriously. The real problem was that we were eighteen, and our lives were beginning to feel like clothes we’d outgrown.
    â€œIt’s impossible to imagine Baudelaire here, or Coleridge, or really anyone,” Sara complained. “Cambridge is at heart just a small parochial village.”
    â€œYes, it is sad. Could the Charles River inspire a decent hashish poem? Even with the Harvard crew sculling upon it?”
    Unfortunately, our families were incapable of discerning that we were meant for finer things, for lives more intensely lived. What this life might consist of was hazy, but it consumed us in those days in afever of yearning. Like the Jameses, the Sedgwicks were a brilliant family star-crossed by eccentricity, tragedy, madness, and early deaths, and perhaps that was one reason I felt free to confide in her about such things as “Father’s Ideas.”
    â€œIsn’t he a Swedenborgian or something?”
    â€œYes. It started when Father went to an English ‘watering hole’ and met a lady there who told him about Swedenborg. This was years before I was born. When I was very young I heard this as ‘Sweden Borg’ and assumed that ‘borg’ was Swedish for bog, and that Father had been to a very wet one somewhere in Sweden.”
    Sara laughed enthusiastically. “There could be religions that start in bogs, I suppose. Is he still a Swedenborgian?”
    â€œNo. He diverged. Now his religion is so exclusive it has only one member. Father.”
    As Sara giggled, a great relief fell over me. Father’s Ideas had been a burden for me since early childhood, to be honest. I couldn’t make sense of his writings, but William told me not to worry; no one could. Father had been disinherited in his youth by his father, the stern Calvinist patriarch known as “William James of Albany,” and successfully contested the will. I’d already divulged this to Sara, along with other family secrets. That my Aunt Janet was a madwoman, several uncles