Read Online Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper - Free Book Online Page B

natural bent, like the tarot or the dreaming technique she’d told me about last week?
    That conversation took place while we were blackberry picking in the Norton woods, acquiring dozens of tiny scratches on our violet fingertips. While picking a thorn out of her thumb, Sara confided two things, swearing me to secrecy.
    â€œYou know me, Sara. Silent as the tomb.”
    â€œWell, the first thing is that Susan”—Sara’s sister, Mrs. Charles Norton—“is far more than Charles’s muse, as you may have heard him nauseatingly refer to her.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI mean that she writes many of his articles, the ones published in the Nation and the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly . She was always a talented writer, but no one outside the family knows this. How it works is that Don Carlos pens some pretentious drivel and Susan rewrites it. ‘Edits’ it, as they say. Whenever you read something good under his name, you can assume it’s mostly Susan.”
    â€œIncredible.”
    â€œ Many books by Bostonians were written by the authors’ sisters or wives, you know. They say Francis Parkman’s sister Lizzy wrote most of his tome on the French and Indian Wars while he was hysterically blind and couldn’t read or write a thing. She had to translate a heap of French-Canadian documents. Took years. That’s what I heard, anyhow.”
    â€œAre you saying that Susan must do Charles’s intellectual work on top of bearing and raising his children, running the household, and catering to his over-refined nerves?”
    â€œExactly. She’s a model wife, even declining to state her own opinions at dinner, in case you haven’t noticed. When he was wooing her, she kept saying how brilliant and original his mind was. Now she finds his opinions insufferable, I believe. The other day she said, ‘Charles’s views, I’m afraid, are as immutable as Fanueil Hall.’ And then she sighed in a tired way. My heart aches for her. She looks so ancient after five children, Alice! How can a person of eighteen have any idea what marriage will require? And then it’s too late.” Sara seemed on the verge of tears.
    â€œWill she leave him, do you think?”
    â€œWith five children? No, she’s caught! If they divorced, he’d get the children; that’s how it works. Not that he actually enjoys his offspring but they are pleasant accessories to his greatness. Besides, Susan, like the rest of us Sedgwicks, is without a sou. She’d have to put arsenic in his soup to get away, but I am not sure that she is even aware of how unhappy she is. So it will just go on and on.”
    â€œMaybe it’s just as well she doesn’t realize she’s unhappy.”
    â€œMaybe.” She sighed again.
    â€œSo let’s hear your second secret.”
    Whereupon Sara divulged that while I was in New York she had mastered a technique known to “Tibetan occultists” for becoming awake in one’s dreams. Arthur had bought a queer book on the subject in a bookstall near the Seine, which she had lately been studying and putting into practice.
    â€œI don’t understand. It seems to me that either you are awake or asleep.”
    â€œNo, Alice, you can be dreaming and aware of it. If you catch yourself dreaming, you can control what happens in the dream.” Judging by her flushed face, the subject exhilarated her.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œOh, anything. You can ride an elephant or fly through the air. Nothing irrevocable can happen to you in a dream. You can’t die, for example.”
    â€œHave you ever flown?”
    â€œYes. If you believe you can fly in a dream, you just do. You float up and glide. The feeling is exquisite, more beautiful than anything.” I watched a dreamy look steal over her face, which I wished I had put there. Now I was becoming jealous of Sara’s dreams; what