Alice in Bed Read Online Free PDF Page B

drank to excess and were prone to spells, and my peculiar cousin Kitty James was in the habit of holding Bible study circles with the lunatics in her husband’s asylum. “The husband is an alienist, whom we have never met because he is supposed to be afraid of people,” I explained. (It was immensely consoling to me that some of the Sedgwick relations were equally mad.)
    â€œOnly of sane people, evidently!” Sara said, and this made me laugh so hard I snorted through my nose. “And yet,” she added, “despite our questionable and probably degenerate ancestry, we are both extraordinarily sane.”
    â€œYes, astonishingly sane.”
    I’d been enlightened on modern theories of Hereditary Degeneracy by William, the designated genius of our family. At breakfast he had a habit of reading aloud juicy sections of medical books tracing thedownfall of a family from “unwholesome habits” in the first generation to slobbering idiocy in the fifth. Acquired characteristics were inherited, according to these authors, inevitably sinking a marginally sane family into mindless degeneracy in a few generations.
    â€œGenius and madness are closely related, according to William. The more genius, the greater the odds of madness. I don’t know how this works scientifically, but I’d venture to say that if any families are on the path to incurable degeneracy it would be the Jameses and the Sedgwicks.”
    Sara hooted at this, a little too loudly in my opinion.
    â€œShh, Sara! You’ll wake your aunts!”
    â€œOh, don’t worry; they’re deaf. They are also quite sane, by the way. So how did your father lose his leg?” This was the sort of personal question that good Bostonians would rather die than ask, though they would be secretly desperate to know. In those days Sara was taking a stand against the Beacon Street niceties.
    â€œA barn fire in Albany when he was twelve. I thought I told you. He dashed in to rescue the horses and his leg had to be amputated.”
    â€œWell, I suppose something like that could drive a person to Swedenborg. Have you seen the stump?”
    â€œOf course. You can come over and see it anytime you wish. Father is not shy about putting it on display.”
    â€œWhat color is it?”
    â€œMottled, violet and white, more or less.” I sighed, thinking of the twelve-year-old Henry James having a leg amputated without anesthesia and growing up under the Calvinist tyranny of William James of Albany. “Poor Father! He believed the end of slavery would usher in a new heaven and a new earth. But even with slavery abolished, the same old sinful world just keeps rolling along.”
    â€œHow disappointing. That is why I try to have no high ideals.”
    And then Sara sprang to her feet and began to turn in a slow circle in the moonlight, arms outstretched, like a jewelry box ballerina. “Do you see what is wrong with this scene, Alice?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNot a single light in any window. All the dull professors and their adoring wives asleep. It’s like a spell, a torpor. Everyone in this houseretires before ten o’clock—my aunts and Theodora, anyhow. We never know where Arthur is. Being a man, he can do as he pleases, while we have a dozen people at our backs. It is a very unjust world.”
    A perfect half-moon, with a sharp edge like a cookie cut in half, hung low in the east, encircled by a halo of milky blue.
    â€œI know what, Alice. After we make sure my aunts are snoring like angels, let’s visit Arthur’s wardrobe and borrow some trousers and cravats and hats—”
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, not wishing to go down this road again. “Arthur’s clothes won’t fit us.”
    â€œWe’ll adapt them, you’ll see, and then we’ll cross the bridge into Boston and find out for ourselves what the world of men is like. Like George Sand.