“Why, Mr. James!”
Henry James was standing by my bed, one hand on its rail, the other clasping a bunch of primroses wrapped in sheets of The New York Evening Telegram. His overcoat exaggerated the stoutness to which he is prone. Having remembered his hat, he took it off and looked about for a place to hang it. Finding not so much as a peg, he put it down—with an odd tenderness—on the room’s only chair.
“Mr. James, you startled me!” Although I had been employed as his stenographer and typist, I would no more have called him Henry than I would have presumed to criticize his prose, which I thought tedious, or to kiss the novelist’s face, which, with its wide mouth, thin lips, and goggling eyes, reminded me of a frog’s.
“My apologies, Mrs. Finch. I’ve been meaning to visit you ever since your confinement, but the work, you understand, was in a critical phase. I hope you are recovering.”
“I’m not ill.”
“I was given to understand your wits were turned.” Had a look of disappointment briefly clouded his face and glazed his eyes? “I made inquiries at Mrs. Lang’s and was informed that you are being treated for hysteria.”
“I assure you I am not!” I replied indignantly.
“At present, you are residing in the Bellevue lunatic ward.”
“I’m merely resting. Today has been quite exhausting.”
“Be that as it may, I have missed you, Mrs. Finch—your skill and complaisance.”
My face registered surprise, a reaction that prompted him to explain himself.
“Mrs. Lang sent me a ‘Miss Maisie,’ and she has proved a dullard. She does not grasp what I am saying—or rather, how it is that I am saying it. It’s not necessary that she understands me, only that she takes down my dictation accurately. It’s a nuisance, and she fusses overmuch about her working conditions. I had to have the Carlton desk relocated because of the glare of the late-afternoon sun on her machine, and I’ve had the devil of a time about the chair. The chair, she claims, is unsuitable for a person operating a typewriter. You, Mrs. Finch, made no such demands. Moreover, you could always be depended on to keep your head above the ‘stream of consciousness,’ as my brother calls my narrative method, while this Maisie person drowns in it. She is unsatisfactory, and, I suspect, a socialist. I am hoping you will return to Washington Square forthwith, so I can sack her, sans reference.”
He had reached the end of his preamble, for so I felt it to be, having sensed his reluctance to pick up his hat and leave me in peace. With the primroses still in the clutch of his meaty hand, he made a noise in his throat, reminiscent of the rumbling of the Numidian lion I had seen at the menagerie in the Central Park or, to be less fanciful, in the pipe conveying steam to the radiators in Rothschild’s millinery store.
“Is there something else, Mr. James?” I asked when I could no longer bear the sight of his discomfiture. He signed piteously. “Why don’t you sit?”
As before, he surveyed the room, dismayed by its austere furnishings, which consisted of the bed, a table on which sat a water pitcher and a glass, a chair used by consulting physicians and presently occupied by his top hat, and a walnut cabinet, whose contents were known by the medical staff, though not by me. He was still clutching the bouquet.
“Why not put them there?” I suggested, indicating the glass pitcher on the table.
“But, madam, your thirst. It may become intolerable.”
“If it does, I shall drink champagne!” I said gaily.
He regarded his hat, a lovely fawn derby.
“Perhaps it would be safely out of the way underneath the bed,” I suggested.
He took the hat in his hands, sat on the chair, and bent forward to stow the hat beneath the bed. Having glimpsed the bedpan there, he recoiled and decided to sit with his hat on his lap.
I had found the little farce wonderfully entertaining and smiled at him, grateful to have my mind distracted from the confusion of the morning and the mounting sense of panic that had ensued. “Now tell me, Mr. James. Whatever is the matter?”
“I had hoped to find out whether Galen or Kos was right concerning—” He buttoned up abruptly.
“Concerning what?” I asked with a gracious wave of my hand, as a queen would use to bid her subject to continue without fear of the executioner’s ax.
“Your womb …” He had gone quite red in the face.
“My womb?”
“I beg your pardon!” he stammered, his old impediment reasserting itself.
“You were inquiring after my womb,” I repeated pleasantly. We might have been talking about my tonsils.
“Forgive an author his curiosity, but I would have liked to know whether it wanders, as Hippocrates of Kos maintained, or is the stationary organ Galen declared it to be.”
“I’ve no idea, Mr. James.” I was determined to be agreeable.
“Aretaeus conceived of the womb as an organ of the body closely resembling an animal, for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks and, in a word, is altogether erratic. Many physicians still believe this to be the case.”
I stared at him as one would at a talking ape. By this time, I may have even gaped, an undignified rearrangement of the human features alien to polite society.
“In that you are sane—I trust that you are?” he asked, his tone conveying the wish that I were not.
I bristled. “Perfectly!”
He went on in that pedantic way of his, which at the best of times irritated me. At that moment, the time was of the worst. “Hysteria, whose Latin meaning is ‘belly,’ is believed to be caused by a wandering womb.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you, since I am not hysterical.”
“Ah!” He was crestfallen. “Hysteria would make a wonderful subject for a horror tale, don’t you think? I would have called it The Turn of the Screw had you been able to furnish a firsthand account of the various sensations experienced during your madness.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“No matter. But if you should ever feel that wandering sensation in your belly—I beg your pardon—please take note of it.”
He gathered up his hat and coat and left. I shut my eyes, the better to be alone with my thoughts. After a while, which could have been ten minutes or two hours, I opened them. For a moment, I feared that I had imagined Mr. James’s visit; novelists in the flesh were hard enough to manage. Then I detected the ghost of cigar smoke that his clothes habitually gave up, and on the table beside me were the yellow primroses. He was not a figment, I thought, much relieved.
I left the room, only to find darkness, particulate and writhing, in the corridor. I felt my way like a blind woman through twisting passages that, in their form, resembled tripe, until I found an unlocked door. I staggered onto First Avenue and blinked in the blessed light of day. The pavement heaved and then fell flat like a blanket shaken to rid it of leftover dreams.
I was distraught, as anyone would be after having escaped a nightmare of uncommon terror. So vivid had it been, I could not believe, at first, that I was not still caught in its toils, no matter how furiously I shook my head to clear it of the remnant fear. Not even in Edgar Poe’s horrors had I read anything to equal what I’d experienced at Bellevue. I walked the hospital’s frontage and the riverside esplanade, but Riis and the two suffragists were nowhere to be seen. Passersby kept their distance. When I saw myself reflected in a store window, I understood their caution. My hat was gone, my hair had come undone, and my shirtwaist was ripped, my skirt bedraggled. I could easily have been mistaken for a heroine in a sensational novel or an escaped lunatic clutching a yellow primrose in her hand.