The phone man said the best that we could get was a party line. No real privacy – ever. I was dumbfounded. “There’s no real privacy on them other lines neither,” said Mr. Sterling, the phone man. “You just think there is.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Arnold told me, right in the phone man’s presence. “We’ll get our phone through the Internet like all sane people. The land line is only for emergencies.”
Sometimes when the phone rang we weren’t supposed to answer it because it wasn’t our “ring”. Maybe Arnold can ignore a ringing phone: I can’t. Especially if it goes off in the middle of the night. No counting a “ring pattern” there – not with the echoes of sleep rattling through your head.
“Who could be calling at this hour?” I demanded of my husband. Rhetorically.
But he said, “Cows. Bears.” In his dream or on the phone?
As usual it was up to me to answer it. “Hello?” I quavered. A sharp intake of breath but no one spoke. I
had played this game before. Could we have brought our own ghosts with us?
‘That you, Gayle?” I boldly inquired. “Just checking up on us? We’re fine. The baby’s fine. Arnold says hi.”
155 – Awake Till the End – Stories by Alysse Aallyn
It was only afterwards that I wondered if the caller was my uncle’s “housekeeper”. The unpaid one he swore would be compensated in his will. Who else would be angry enough to hound us? And there was always the possibility that it was my uncle himself, wanting to complain about the way I’d spent his money. It would be just like the stupid dead to initiate calls they can’t complete.
FIVE – MEATSAFE
Our first visitors came when before we were ready (as visitors will). Before the cable was connected. Willette had streaked her hair with an unbecoming dissipated rock star red which, considering her coal black eyebrows and pointed chin made her resemble Sarah Bernhardt in her coffin. She had two legs, however. Willette had always been High Maintenance. Compared with her, Stan, a little plumper, somewhat balder now, seemed refreshingly cooperative and easily amused. In honor of our upstate move he wore a sweaters with a vaguely Chistmassy theme.
“Snowflakes! Moose!” he genially exclaimed. “What’s not to like?”
“You’re not missing anything in the city,” said Willette. “We’ve been burgled.”
take?” Stan. “Better glasses don’t help.”
“Omigod,” I sympathized, “What did they “A Cuisinart and my reading glasses,” said “Those instructions are rough,” I agreed.
“We told the cops to be on the lookout for a bandit with severe left eye astigmatism,” Stan joked.
“Not that they’ll look,” said Willette gloomily. “They never do.”
“Until the guy kills somebody,” agreed Arnold.
“They don’t even care about that now,” asserted Willette. “They bargain murders down to “accidents” just to skew their crime statistics. Fighting crime from a desk chair.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” echoed Arnold, a sociable host refilling wineglasses.
They had been stuck in traffic so we were dining at nine-thirty, a distinct hardship for anyone with my raging metabolism. I had eaten the cheese and crackers all by myself and was forced to smack together some distinctly unappetizing crudités. Zucchini slices with sour cream, anyone? Fortunately it didn’t matter. They wanted dinner and dinner itself hardly mattered because the dining room was so dark. Without windows, but six doors, there were constant and mysteriously unaccountable drafts; the candles slanting first one way and then the other. Over Martel and coffee conversation languished. No Martel for me. No wine. I was trying to be good. Trying to be good does not a dinner party make.
“I know,” I roused myself. “Let’s play
Icicle.”
“Icicle?” they all wanted to know. “How do you play that?”
“One person hides and everyone goes looking for him. When you find him you have to squeeze in as close as you can get. Last person left is the icicle.”
“That’s sardines!” scoffed Arnold. “I’ve played that.”
But Willette was intrigued. “Good game for this house,” she said. “We’ll find cubbyholes and corners even you haven’t seen.”
“I’m warning you, I’m the world-class champion sardines player,” said Stan. “I once won hanging for an hour in a garment bag.”
With a challenge like that, he had to go first.
“Basement off limits!” shouted Arnold. “It’s dangerous down there.” Was that an implied waiver of danger elsewhere? We listened to his footfalls clatter up the stairs and wander overhead.
“Sounds like there are three of him,” said Willette. Of course we weren’t bothering to count.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I teased. “Real estate agent says this house is haunted.”
Willette seemed unintimidated. Stan I could have impressed.
“Our refrigerator tried to eat the delivery man,” said Arnold, getting into the spirit. “Both recovered and doing fine.”
“And there’s kind of a bad smell coming from Arnold’s study.” I suggested.
Arnold gave me A Look. Ooo, snap! Talk about burning with a cold fire! I pulled out the Big Guns. “Oswald Pewlett saw a fireball.”
“I feel a fireball coming on myself,” said Arnold, shaking the empty Martel bottle.
“Maybe it’s an animus.” said Willette. “You know, like a malignant spirit that attaches itself to unfinished business.”
I didn’t know. Upstairs a door slammed. Hard. We took that as a starter’s pistol. I let the others rush straight upstairs, elbowing each other like a middle- school recess, pretended at first to follow, then ducking behind a door.
World Champion Stan could not make it this easy for us, not even in an unfamiliar house. If it was me I would make a lot of noise going up the front stairs and then sneak quietly down the back. How he slammed that door I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound difficult with our drafts. If you balanced something on it and opened a window…
Outside had to be off-limits. I heard an unpleasant rustling in the rhododendrons. Think far enough outside the box, fall off the edge. I allowed myself to be seduced by the kitchen broom closet. It’s as narrow as an ironing board but runs the depth of the room, thus making an ideal crawlspace. And there was someone inthere. I could hear him breathing. “Is that you, Stan?”
The shadow rippled towards me. “I’ve missed you, Sharl.” That could have been my sigh, me just talking to myself. But then the voice spoke unmistakably and said the most surprising thing: “Time has no meaning.”
That’s not a message I would ever give myself, and it was my uncle’s voice, I swear it. I backed out in a panic, slammed the door so hard the doorknob fell off. The ghost was locked in, ha ha. Serves him right for refusing to play dead.
Willette and Arnold were upstairs together, looking equal parts smug and guilty. Like I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And they couldn’t say exactly where they’d searched. “Please yourselves,” I yawned. Maybe if I found Stan, he would show a sudden yen for pregnant women. Unlike everybody else.
“He’s not downstairs,” I declared, so it was time to inspect the attic. My flashlight revealed footprints in the dust along the steps. I pursued a faint tapping sound. In the dark, Stan had locked himself in the old meatsafe. Dumb place to hide! And he wasn’t happy about it. Like it was our fault. Willette, feeling a bit one down after the exposure of her skirmishes with Arnold, seized advantage like a wolverine protecting its mate.
“What if he had an asthma attack!”
Then you’d be a merry widow, I thought. But honest Stan said, “I don’t have asthma.”
“But an experience like that could give it to you,” said Willette. “Trauma triggers, they call it. “Traumatic inception”. Someone needs to take that door
off at the hinges.”
mandarin .”
“Don’t look at me,” said Arnold. “I’m a
The game was over. “Maybe in the morning,” I told Willette. “I’m gravid and I need my sleep.”
When Arnold finally came to bed – could Stan possibly have agreed to a threesome? I refused to let him in. “You’re the icicle,” I told him.
(Leonard & Virginia Woolf in the Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall)
VIRGINIA If only I could trust you.
LEONARD You can.
VIRGINIA But these drugs turn my brain to cotton wool. There’s a pattern behind the cotton wool, if only I could find it. Did you know the Duckworths, that incestuous race, were cotton merchants? Coining money from the cotton wool that packs me now. If only I could fight back! But my will is so fragmented. My theory is that we all live so dishonestly, unconsciously, disconnected and detached. You are such a stranger! Everything about you is different. That must be why I married you.
LEONARD Tell me everything, Virginia. Tell me what you fear, so we can kill it.
VIRGINIA Where does one begin? Last night I looked in the mirror beneath a pitiless light and suddenly a dreadful animal face showed itself behind me. He bellowed, he stared, his nostrils flared. The pig’s snout broke the mirror until my thighs ached. How could one forget the thrusting of that ugly snout, the snout that meant starvation, pain and death? The purple foaming stain. Somehow it was all my fault. Roars of laughter at my expense. Dream or was it a memory? All that’s left is hopeless sadness. Being dragged down into a pit of absolute despair. Powerlessness. Paralysis. That’s what I remember.
LEONARD Begin at the beginning.
VIRGINIA The beginning is insomnia. I lie awake at night listening to a senile old man gasping, croaking vile indecencies. I thought it was Father, having a fit of the horrors. But the nurse said it was only a cat. Or perhaps the beginning was the whooping cough. I think I knew happiness before I became so ill. The grownups laughed with me, not at me. Whooping cough steals the breath – none of us could breathe. The atmosphere was tangled, matted with emotion. All the children came down with it, all of us gasping. Mother ran from bed to bed until her skin was paper thin and the bones stood out. I used to wonder if Mother had traded my life for hers, until I remembered she preferred the boys. Women serve, men are served.
LEONARD But all of you recovered.
VIRGINIA They threw me into a tank with Gerald, the alligator. Drowning. I knew I must not sink. Couldn’t get my head above the whirlpool.
LEONARD Go on.
VIRGINIA They covered the mirrors when Mother died. I was thirteen. Vanessa was sixteen, Thoby fifteen. Stella was twenty-five, quite grown up. George was twenty-seven, Gerald twenty-four. Adrian was twelve. No one told me what was happening. I was taken to her bed to say good bye but Mother seemed reproachful, so condemning and stern. She said, “Hold yourself straight, little Goat.”
LEONARD Why were you called Goat?
VIRGINIA I was Goat because I couldn’t control my purple rages. The others hated that he talked to me and gave me books. He didn’t allow Stella to read Cousine Bette but said it couldn’t harm me, because I had read Gibbons on the fall of Rome.
LEONARD Did everyone have nicknames?
VIRGINIA Adrian was Wombat, Nessa was the Saint. Thoby was the Goth because he fought. Mother advised self-control to everyone but Father. My mother had two characters, I think. Her real self, and the Angel in the House. Stifler and the life-giver. And to this day I have the oddest feeling that I’m two people, too.
LEONARD Are you talking about the poet Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House?
VIRGINIA Yes. Wasn’t she so popular? Singing, “Sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself.” I caught her by the throat and killed her. It was self-defense. I had to kill her or she would have killed me.
LEONARD Your mother died of pneumonia, Virginia. Don’t feel guilty, Children are disgustingly violent, every one of them. It’s a wonder anyone lives to grow up. I’ve decided brute strength is the enemy of thought – that’s why bullies rule and why we must all be pacifists and abjure force, even though it goes against our natures. Tell me, was this “angel” thing why Nessa was called Saint?
VIRGINIA No. That was because she was too proud to tell a lie. We hid from Father in the garden, and when he demanded, Didn’t we hear me calling? We all said No. Only Nessa said Yes. I told her she was an old fraud.
LEONARD Goat is the worst name, I think.
VIRGINIA No, that was Stella! She was the Cow, because she brought the milk.
LEONARD These nicknames are strangely degrading.
VIRGINIA I named myself Miss Jan. I so longed to be someone else. Laura was the worst of us but she was called Her Ladyship of the Lake.
LEONARD How old was Laura and why on earth was she called that?
VIRGINIA Laura was exactly Gerald’s age. But she was gone by the time mother died. Sent away, because she wouldn’t mind. Father said she was the Giver of the Sword because she forced him to punish her. Then she screamed so he had to punish her more. When Maitland was writing Father’s life he said that everything about Laura would have to be suppressed. Everyone hated Laura.
LEONARD Why did you hate her?
VIRGINIA Temper tantrums. We all had temper tantrums, but hers were worse. Father was still having them, but Mother could calm him.
LEONARD So, Laura went to an asylum?
VIRGINIA When I was ten. Until then she lived with a governess at the top of the house. At night, we heard her howling like an animal.
LEONARD Did your parents ever say what exactly was the problem?
VIRGINIA Mother said she was wicked. Father said she was perverse. Thoby thought she wouldn’t stop touching herself. I read all Father’s letters when I helped Maitland with his book. Father begged Mother to marry him to help with Laura.
LEONARD But she couldn’t help, could she?
VIRGINIA Abominable system, family life. It goes from ignorance and indifference to denial and contempt, open attack and ultimate destruction. None of it was Mother’s fault. She was always visiting the poor and making them clothes. I always thought the poor knew how to enjoy themselves better than we do, because we are cooped up, day after day while they walk out freely.
LEONARD Did you ever visit Laura?
VIRGINIA Once I went with Stella. Laura spoke only gibberish. The only comprehensible sentence was, “I told him to go away.” I couldn’t go back because that was where I saw the deformed men.
LEONARD I don’t understand why Stella was The Cow. Wasn’t she a young, beautiful girl?
VIRGINIA I thought her lovelier than Mother. She was so pale, so white, she looked like cow parsley by moonlight. I don’t think Mother loved her, really. She was Mother’s loyal handmaid. Stella taught us our letters. She was supposed to look after Father when Mother was gone, and Mother was absent a lot.
LEONARD Where did your mother go?
VIRGINIA Nursing the sick. Mother loved nursing the sick, she said they were easier than the well. She seemed always so far away, in her mind. When we spoke to her she looked through us as if she didn’t see us. While Mother was gone, Stella stood in for her.
LEONARD Didn’t Stella have a life of her own?
VIRGINIA She turned down proposals, I know that. Mother didn’t want her to marry. Cousin Jem was obsessed with her – we children were frightened of him.
LEONARD Cousin Jem? Wasn’t he the mad cousin?
VIRGINIA Yes, but before he was locked up, he conceived a passion for Stella. He would run into the house, shouting, while Stella fled up the front stairs. He pursued her, bellowing, right to the nursery where he speared our toast on his swordstick. I thought he looked like a tormented bull. Father said to tell him Stella wasn’t home, but Mother said she could never bar her door to Jem. She said she loved him and he needed us because he was banned from all his clubs. Once he abducted me and Mother.
LEONARD He abducted you?
VIRGINIA Yes, funny, I’d forgotten it till just this moment. I suppose that’s how memory works. He took us to his rooms because he wanted me to pose for him. Mother didn’t want to go, but she couldn’t stop him. As he painted, he declaimed his own poetry:
“if all the harm that were done by men were doubled and doubled and doubled again squared and raised to the power of ten there wouldn’t be nearly enough, not near to keep a small girl for a tenth of a year.”
LEONARD And you were a small girl.
VIRGINIA I was. The smallest. I never saw the picture.
LEONARD How did you get away?
VIRGINIA Did I get away? I don’t remember. I always stammered when I told him Stella wasn’t home so he knew I was lying. When he grabbed me by the collar I thought of the Ripper Man who had been in all the papers. This is what they must have felt, those women, when they were grabbed by Ripper Man. I’m afraid I wet myself and Nurse was angry. She punished everything I did, but I never listened to her. Nurse claimed all emotions like fear, dread, disgust – come from desiring the wrong food or not moving one’s bowels. Children must accept whatever’s given. If you show a preference, then that’s the very thing you’re not allowed to have. It’s as bad for a girl to cry for what she wants as for a boy to land a blow. Yet we did both, because Nurse was nobody.
LEONARD Cousin Jem was taken away to the madhouse. That was a good thing, surely.
VIRGINIA Where he starved himself to death, and that’s what I shall do if ever you lock me up in one of those places.
LEONARD Go back to your mother’s death.
VIRGINIA I didn’t know what had happened until I saw the nurses crying. I thought they were pretending and we should laugh at them but everyone pulled a face. I went to kiss Mother but she was cold as iron. I never touch iron without thinking of her. Father caromed off people and walls, seeking anyone to wail against. It was like being shut up in a cage with a wild beast.
LEONARD My family was rigidly quiet when my father died. Stiff upper lip, get on with it, try harder, everyone must buckle down. That sort of thing.
VIRGINIA A family is a conspiracy, driven by uncontrollable lusts. I saw a man sitting with mother’s corpse but the others saw no one there. We became unmoored, entering a time of hopeless suspense, muddle, mismanagement, battling the stupidity of those in power. It was as if a finger had been laid upon our lips, sentencing us to a sultry, opaque miasma that choked us and blinded us. Father shouted at Stella if she didn’t stock his writing paper or ordered too much fish. I knew it really was because she couldn’t tell him he was a first-rate writer, as mother always did. Stella had no mind and nobody respected her. Poor father was haunted by fears that he only had a third-class mind.
LEONARD And did he, do you think?
VIRGINIA His ego crippled him. Self-assertion is so loathsome. Father began writing The Mausoleum Book. About death. He wailed from the top of the stairs, “We perished, each alone.” Nothing is to be dreaded so much as egotism. Stella tried her best to rescue us. I wasn’t kind to her because she dragged me to the dentist and ordered all my clothes. I couldn’t bear standing for inspection while being stuck with pins. She was made me wear stays for the first time. Then Stella fell in love.
LEONARD With Jack Waller Hills. Did you like him?
VIRGINIA I did then, but I realized later he was a terrible old Fascist. He used to say, “the weak are wrongdoers who foul the nets.” I know he meant me, that I was a weak wrongdoer. In the end, he was a typical man who liked to have his way. He always put his great hoof down. But at first, he seemed the only truth-teller we had ever met. I was thirsty for knowledge, and he knew things. He taught me how to sugar trees for moths, how to collect and mount butterflies, how to take pride in killing beautiful things. He told me everything about sex, about “street love”, common love, why it is that women can never walk alone. I was so shocked. I asked, What about honor? He said men never think of honor, that they had women constantly, so all their talk of purity is nonsense. Every man has his whore. Every woman except the cheap ones must be locked up tight. Yet they call women fallen! Men are the whores. It makes no sense to me.
LEONARD It does sound mad.
VIRGINIA The night Jack proposed a tramp broken into the garden. Thoby threatened him, shouting at him to go away. We were always frightened of tramps – it seemed they could get in anywhere. I was afraid one had invaded the house and was lurking and leering, waiting to pounce. But it was only Jack. When Father found out about the engagement he tried to stop the wedding but Stella had her own money so he could do nothing. He postponed the wedding until Stella agreed to buy the house next door so that she could still take care of him. During all this Nessa and I were forced to chaperone. You can’t think how awful it is to sit between a couple whispering and trying to touch. I was so angry at Stella I broke my umbrella in half.
LEONARD Child chaperones? Whatever will they think of next?
VIRGINIA I know! I often think I’m the only one who isn’t crazy! Stella and Jack convinced the aunts that Nessa and I could accompany them properly to Bognor but immediately we got there they sent us two out into the rain so they could be alone. We were soaked to the skin!
LEONARD Was there no one who could speak for you?
VIRGINIA The old aunts were the worst of the lot. They curdled our brains with their falsehoods and their pieties. The wedding was the most horrible ordeal. Nessa and I resolved to be Stoic and show no emotion, as if it were nothing touching us. If ever you show feelings you are treated like a beast at the zoo and will never escape the cage. Thus we were buried beneath obligations, under torrents of uncomfortable clothes, awkward visits and unspeakable rituals. I think we are to be congratulated, you and I, that we sidestepped that whole mess so neatly.
LEONARD Yes, the registry office is so much better. It’s over so fast. But after the wedding?
VIRGINIA The happy couple went to Italy, and we were left alone with Father. He was awful to Nessa, how I hated him! He shouted at her as he’d shouted at Stella. But Nessa stood up to him, she was a rock, she didn’t care. That’s when she summoned up her supreme indifference. It’s the bane of all who love her.
LEONARD But Vanessa had no money of her own.
VIRGINIA No. If Stella hadn’t given us allowances we would have had to beg Father for every penny. And then Stella and Jack came home early because Stella was ill.
LEONARD What was wrong with her?
VIRGINIA Violet Dickinson told me Jack must have hurt her with his violent lovemaking. That he broke her somehow. But Violet was just a spinster, so what could she possibly know? The doctors called it appendicitis but you know what cretins they turned out to be. They couldn’t operate because of the baby – she was pregnant, of course. On the night she died, I was sleeping in her new house – in her dressing room in fact –
LEONARD You were sleeping in Stella’s dressing room?
VIRGINIA Yes, I’d been so ill, you see. I always got ill when people went away. But Stella was dying so they sent George to fetch me. George the over-fed pug dog, fat as a louse, beady-eyed as a rat. He wrapped me in Stella’s fur cape and carried me back to Father’s house.
LEONARD And then?
VIRGINIA Stella died and Jack was left bereaved. Now we had two widowers wailing. The men in our family hardly waited for the bodies to be buried before turning to their next victim. I remember Jack holding my wrist on one side so tightly he left bruises, and George holding me on the other side. I was trapped, you see, I couldn’t get away. George won so Jack settled on Nessa. They actually wanted to marry! I couldn’t believe it. I told Nessa, you can’t be serious! She said, “So you’re against me too,” and gave me a look that broke my heart. But she knew they couldn’t marry because of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Act.
LEONARD They could have married in France.
VIRGINIA That’s what they say about everything, that “the French get away with it.” Luckily it all blew over because Nessa was granted a place at the Slade. Then I was quite alone. George pounced immediately and began ordering clothes and jewels to release me into society. I was the sacrificial offering to his violent gusts of passion and his mean little piggy brain.
LEONARD
And then?
VIRGINIA
And then Father began to die and I went mad a little. After he died, I went mad a lot.
LEONARD
Well, it isn’t any wonder, from what I’ve heard. If you are mad then so am I.
VIRGINIA You can’t think how long I’ve waited for those words!
(she reaches out a hand to him – he clutches it and kisses it)
LEONARD
Dearest! You will always be my only love!
(they gaze at each other, both trembling with pent-up emotion)
VIRGINIA But darling, if Dr. Craig consigns me to deepest darkness you will have to marry someone else. You can’t waste your life waiting for me.
LEONARD That won’t happen. Craig says our future’s what we make of it.
VIRGINIA Oh, honey mongoose! Let’s make a pact right now to rise above the nay-sayers. You have given me all the best things I have ever had in life, rescued me from the cliff edge again and again. You have been absolutely perfect to me, and I have been disgraceful to you. You work so hard and I do nothing. It’s all my fault. I was mad and angry before I met you and I am madder and angrier right now. I want you to know that I do want to cuddle you but I don’t know how to show it. In spite of my vilest imaginings I’ve always known that I love you and that you love me.
(he leans his face towards her, she awkwardly moves closer and they kiss delicately)
LEONARD Virginia, I promise not to ever push you any farther than you want to go.
VIRGINIA Oh honey! And I promise to follow all your rules; early bed, milk for breakfast; just so long as I can always read and write.
(they embrace)
LEONARD
If ever you cease writing I shall divorce you immediately.
VIRGINIA
(laughing awkwardly as if she has forgotten how)
It’s a bargain. Oh, darling, shall we really have our own press and print all our own work?
LEONARD Yes, and some of your friends if they are good enough. You decide.
VIRGINIA
And can I have a bulldog, too? I’ve always wanted a bulldog pup.
LEONARD
Certainly, my pet.
VIRGINIA
And can we live in London? A new house all our own?
LEONARD
Not London but perhaps some leafy suburb.
VIRGINIA
Leonard! Suburbs!
LEONARD
Think of the bulldog, Virginia. He must have a healthful life.
VIRGINIA
You’re right of course, Leonard. You are always right.
LEONARD
Bulldogs need a place to roam.
VIRGINIA
Fresh air and food. Lots of good red steak.
LEONARD
May I order dinner now, Virginia? Surely, it’s time.
VIRGINIA Yes, Leonard.
(She clutches his hand fiercely while with his other he rings the bell) CURTAIN – END
VIRGINIA I should never have married you. Women see the worst of men, how cruel they are at home, how they believe in ranks and ceremonies, how they demand praise and management. We bring out what’s bad in each other. We should live separately.
LEONARD Virginia, I admit I have been a brute. I told you that before you married me. I have faults, vices and beastlinesses. I am lustful, a whorer, a gazer after women, a vicious man who has loved the refinements of vice. I have seen the filth of the brothel, know that it is filth and still I’ve lain with the ugliest whore. I have been selfish, jealous, and cruel. You are the most beautiful, most magical among women. Yet I must have you, and not some inferior female who would enrage me with her inferiority and submission. I am terminally and unconditionally in love with you. God, the happiness I’ve had being with you and talking to you – mind to mind and soul to soul. I don’t care so much for the physical part. You are the best thing I have ever had in my life. I will never be content, now, with second best.
VIRGINIA And here am I, a failure, childless, no writer and insane. You confessed your sins before we married, but I knew I was insane with a mad sister and a madder uncle and yet I married you.
LEONARD Tell me the truth. Why did you marry me, the penniless, trembling Jew?
VIRGINIA Perhaps only because you were my beloved brother Thoby’s best friend. He said, I’ve met a man so violent, so savage, he trembles with contempt for the whole human race. And that was you.
LEONARD Thoby was so beautiful it was difficult to speak with him of iniquity or despair.
VIRGINIA Thoby had the kind of beauty that defends itself from caress.
LEONARD And you’re the same. With such gestures one falls in love for a lifetime.
VIRGINIA Thoby and I were so close until he went away to that school, where the boys fought and buggered. When he came back he was so different, harsh and cruel. He beat me. I just stood there and let him pound me with his fists, feeling the most awful sadness; why hurt another person? He showed off by abusing me. I refused to surrender the space we used to have, but he said, Girls must give up. That’s what it means to be a girl. It was essential for the fellowship of men that I be kept out. Because you were his greatest friend I hoped the best of him lived on, in you. But you are nothing like him.
LEONARD The Goth was always a law unto himself. He didn’t acquire friends, he annexed worshippers. You and Vanessa looked so like him our Circle called you “Visigoths.” Misses Virginia and Vanessa Stephens, so beautiful that dogs turned to look at them in the street.
VIRGINIA Trust me, it’s not that pleasant having dogs turn to look at one in the street. So, you married me, thinking I was like Thoby and you were disappointed.
LEONARD Virginia, you must stop thinking everything is your fault. We were primed to fall in love because of our friendships, but we actually fell in love because we saw each other’s true selves.
VIRGINIA I saw how shocked you were when you realized you had married a madwoman.
LEONARD Life may be an obstacle race but that doesn’t mean one would want the obstacles removed.
VIRGINIA I should have told you!
LEONARD Did I tell you my tremor is hereditary? My father had it, too. Should I have confessed that? We didn’t want to talk about our families. We wanted to revel in each other’s hopes and dreams.
VIRGINIA When we talked, I forgot everything except the joy of our conversation. Originality and freedom, purity and restraint, we discussed it all. Here’s someone who cares, I thought, about the hidden pockets of emotion, someone who wants to work like a steam engine at uncovering the truth. I needed to know that when I weep, I am not the only weeper. You almost persuaded me we could change the world with just our two brains.
LEONARD Nothing’s more important than the two of us united.
VIRGINIA Yet somehow here I am, locked up in a madhouse.
LEONARD Virginia, this isn’t a madhouse and you are not insane. But we need the doctor’s permission for you to leave. We must figure out, the pair of us, how you can assume control. I don’t believe in guilt or apologies. I know what it is to be driven beyond endurance but I know I can avoid the whirlpools if you help me, Virginia. Let me help you learn how to assume control.
VIRGINIA What’s the use of men talking to women, we’re too different. We must hate and fear each other. Women can’t even step outside their doors with any safety. If you could strip off my skin you would see my nerves gone white with fear of you.
LEONARD You’re talking to the member of a despised race rooted out as pests wherever we settle. My nerves should be white with fear of your kind. It’s a fetid, sordid world. Yet we two are somehow different. In Ceylon, I took out my gun to put an end to the utter foulness, the stupid blind vindictive foulness of everything. You see, we have that in common.
VIRGINIA You did? You really tried to shoot yourself?
LEONARD I thought that the only reason one doesn’t commit suicide is that one is either a selfish coward or already dead and rotten. The one thing that saved me was a vision of you, the beautiful Miss Stephen who wrote like an angel and quoted Plato. I longed to meet you. But I was so afraid of making a fool of myself my very soul and stomach trembled.
VIRGINIA You stayed alive because of me?
LEONARD I did. So you must return the favor. Lytton Strachey and I wrote long letters back and forth. He argued against suicide and insisted that I propose.
VIRGINIA Lytton asked me to marry him once. Thank God, I didn’t. The very idea of his criticisms would have kept me from writing anything.
LEONARD He understood all that. He said the only person who was right for you was me.
VIRGINIA But he didn’t know about my spoiled, ruined body.
LEONARD You have a perfect body!
VIRGINIA Currently being stuffed like a Strasbourg goose, thanks to you. Strapped down, force fed, shot with drugs.
LEONARD All because you refuse to eat. Let me order dinner right now and feed it to you. How about that?
VIRGINIA I’m not hungry. Oh, let me die, Leonard! Let me go! Find a girl who can love you properly! I failed in the bedroom – you made that perfectly clear.
LEONARD Perhaps copulation is inherently degrading. Really, horseback riding is more pleasurable.
VIRGINIA But there’s children to look forward to, surely.
LEONARD I don’t want children and if you really read The Wise Virgins, you’ll know why.
VIRGINIA But we won’t raise them in a strict Jewish home!
LEONARD There’s your prejudice again! It wasn’t the Judaism, it was the endless striving for dominance of tiny minds. How I hated it!
VIRGINIA Father shrieked and screamed that we were sending him to the poorhouse with our expensive household bills. I brought him a catalog of King’s College classes for Ladies but he said he couldn’t spare me because it was my turn to pet him, soothe him, cut his meat! I wanted to write, but I couldn’t keep it private. Once I had a diary with a lock but Thoby stole it, so I pasted my secret pages into a book.
LEONARD After my father died we really were headed for the poorhouse. My brother had to work to support the family.
VIRGINIA Don’t you think every family is a lonely caravan, absolutely private, silent and unknown? I see us wedged in together, surrounded by vast space we couldn’t cross. It seemed impossible to break through the dark cloud and shed light on those shrouded, curtained rooms. Censors, visionary figures everywhere admonished us. Father told me no intelligent being had any right to believe in God, but when I was six years old, I dreamed that I was God.
LEONARD And your mother?
VIRGINIA Mother said there couldn’t be a God because no just God would have killed the splendid Herbert Duckworth, her first husband. She loved him so. She never told my father she loved him.
LEONARD
Never?
VIRGINIA
Never. I wrote stories in which clever, courageous children rescue their families and bring hope to the sick. Do you believe in God, Leonard?
LEONARD No one believes in God. Virginia, we must refuse to be determined by our pasts. Our parents had too many children to cope but we won’t make the same mistake. Don’t you want to be free, Virginia? With so many mouths to feed, freedom’s never possible.
VIRGINIA I know you’re only saying that because Dr. Hyslop insists the mad should never propagate.
LEONARD I swear I’m not. Nessa has children – and with all her lovers looks to spew many more – wouldn’t that be enough for you?
VIRGINIA (turning away)
Surely loneliness destroys us. Futile and infertile – aren’t those more than adequate reasons for self-murder?
LEONARD We’ll never be futile, not us. You’ve written a wonderful novel, Virginia. I know you’ll write many more.
VIRGINIA Received by my family in complete silence.
LEONARD They’re barely literate. My whole point is that family shouldn’t matter. I’ve freed myself – I never see my mother if I can help it. Remember how upset she was to be excluded from our wedding? Surely an ambitious person’s gaze should widen, take in more?
VIRGINIA Take in who? Society, like the Countess of Carnarvon? Publishers like Gerald?
LEONARD How about other modern thinkers, trying to do what we are doing? Finding new ways to be, see, think, do, connect. Roger Fry with his “significant form”. Maynard Keynes with aggregate demand, E. M. Forster’s clever novels. The literary impressionism you attempted in Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA Forster isn’t clever. He thinks women should be banned from the London Library Board and never allowed on the grass at Cambridge. How on earth can dry, dusty books ever make up for real, live children?
LEONARD Was your childhood really anything you’d care to revisit, Virginia?
VIRGINIA Yes, yes, yes. If I could only tell you, or anybody. Oh, the magic summers at St. Ives! Lost, gone forever. Paradise before, catastrophe after. Now whatever it is I want I cannot tell. I was born with extraordinary capacities for feeling, but you say bury my emotions or they will never let me out.
LEONARD Not bury them, Virginia. Manage them. We need to convince the world that you are fine and well. Let’s get to the bottom of the ideas that torment you. How many years was that paradise of childhood, really? Two or three? We have our whole, long, fruitful lives ahead of us.
VIRGINIA It was paradise before the deaths began.
LEONARD There’s no escaping death, Virginia.
VIRGINIA You intimate that children would drive me mad?
LEONARD They would certainly stop you working. Can you see a house filled with nannies, nurses, servants, their followers and lovers? Cockney quarrels and endless Bedlam difficulties? You once described your nursery as a cage where you were forced to perform compulsory tricks.
VIRGINIA And what do you call this damnable house? Cousin Madge says you’re mean and think of nothing but money.
LEONARD Madge is an idiot. Let’s resolve to cut all idiots on principles of health.
VIRGINIA If that were only possible! Here I am in George’s house, sentenced to eternally hawking Gerald’s books!
LEONARD But George isn’t here. And there are other publishers in the world besides Gerald.
VIRGINIA Worse ones, doubtless. Did you read Gissing, or even Meredith?
LEONARD Then we’ll publish our books ourselves.
VIRGINIA (turning to face him)
Could such a thing be possible?
LEONARD Of course, it is. You know your Women’s Cooperative promotes apprenticeships. I think the Working Man’s College teaches printing.
VIRGINIA Oh, imagine if that were so! How I’d love to print! I used to bind books, I liked that. The tools were so beautiful. Papers from Italy, leathers from Africa. The smell alone was heavenly.
LEONARD Don’t these doctors recommend handiwork?
VIRGINIA Tat-work! Or crochet!
LEONARD Let’s defeat them, then. Can’t we, together, push the world our way? Or at the very least carve out a tiny corner where we can live and thrive?
(Curtain. Lights up on Scene 3, CONSULTATION ROOM of DR. CRAIG. LEONARD sits, head in hands.)
DR CRAIG Glad to see you, Mr. Woolf. I am eager to hear your opinion of the progress of our patient.
LEONARD Virginia and I have been talking and I must admit she does not sound altogether mad to me.
DR CRAIG My dear fellow, insanity of the mind merely means whatever derangement disables a person from thinking the thoughts, feeling the feelings and doing the duties of the social body in, for, and by which he lives. Insanity is nothing more than a want of harmony between the individual and his social medium. That individual sadly becomes a social discord of which nothing can be made.
LEONARD She speaks frequently of her home life where her brothers took advantage of her.
DR CRAIG You are referring to her delusions. You will have noticed that patients, particularly intelligent ones, are very cunning as they seek to involve their caregivers into sharing their beliefs of persecution and misfortune. It is much better not to allow oneself to re-hash a history that must remain forever uncertain but to forcefully insist on a calming, healthful daily regimen starting now.
LEONARD Surely, you’ll agree that being resentful of bad treatment hardly constitutes insanity.
DR CRAIG My dear sir, your wife is under doctors’ care because she tried to take her own life. We are obviously not dealing with a healthy person here. No, taken by themselves, delusions do not necessarily indicate insanity but when they are found in conjunction with broad evidence of failure to conform one’s general conduct to the ordinary rules of life and society such a diagnosis must be made. Clearly such an obligation places great responsibility on the keen insights and experience of professional men rigorously educated to the highest standard and admitted by the demanding qualifications of the Royal Society of Medicine. As a man of the world you must know that is always very common for weaker beings to resent those on whom greater fortune has been showered and to feel their gains are somehow ill-gotten. This resentment stirs up a host of fantasies that must be very firmly rejected. Successful work never leads to this disorder but unsuccessful work shows a very different etiology.
LEONARD But in the case of Virginia’s upbringing –
DR CRAIG Mr. Woolf, in every case the instinctive impulses of children must sooner or later clash with the social regime, to the infant’s sorrow and momentary discomfiture. Elders must be recognized as the authority in such matters or chaos would result. Therefore, no airing of childhood wrongs can ever constitute a fruitful line of inquiry.
LEONARD It seems the situation was so severe that Dr. Savage was consulted at the time –
DR CRAIG My good fellow, it would be better for you to face the fact that delusions never require any other support than the conviction of the deluded. A man may believe, for example, that his head has been opened, his brains removed and some other substance substituted. That is a very common delusion, I can assure you.
LEONARD Virginia is an intelligent woman. I believe she must be handled intelligently. I may even say she has a touch of genius. In fact, I believe she is the only true genius I have ever met.
DR CRAIG Are you arguing that geniuses are in some way above or beyond the law, Mr. Woolf? I certainly hope you are not.
LEONARD Her family was considered the highest intellectual intelligentsia of their day. It seems obvious to me –
DR CRAIG What is obvious to me, is that the degree of education and the social status of the person whose conduct is under consideration are indeed important facts, for habits that would be decidedly eccentric in the upper classes may pass unremarked in the lower reaches of society. The sex of the patient is even more critical to diagnosis. Outbursts of emotional weeping in men, for example, are a symptom of grave import but among women occasion no remark. Any woman’s effort to escape her true femininity places her moral hardihood at peril. Imagine some up to date woman adopting a divided skirt under the belief that it is a healthier form of apparel and permits greater freedom of action. Very well. But should she indulge in so subversive a notion as to think that male attire is even more hygienic and to actually carry her belief into practice, the arm of the law will at once reach out to warn her. If the warning is not heeded, society will place her in safekeeping until she has learned to conform to the ideas of the majority. This is the situation in which your wife finds herself at the current time. Before her marriage, I am given to understand that your wife frequented a rather louche artistic bohemia. Now that she is a married woman you have acquired a unique opportunity to place her feet on a more secure footing. I understand you have rejected the possibility of committing her to an asylum but want to give her another chance in the wider world. It is accordingly crucial that you not indulge her in useless analysis of who or what was at fault in her upbringing but encourage her to commit to a fresh new life, with you, where she submits to a healthful pattern which you will lay out for her.
LEONARD What you say makes a good deal of sense, but Virginia has always had her own ideas about everything. Her reading alone, even from childhood has been voluminous. I think I can say that she’s read everything and everybody.
DR CRAIG Now I think you are laying your finger on a much likelier culprit in your wife’s hysteria than the boyish behaviors of exuberantly boisterous, youthful males. Most women’s minds are simply not capable of absorbing and processing the histories and theories of men who lived in more pernicious times. As a Cambridge graduate you do not need me to point out which books might be especially dangerous. We may even disagree on which authors have a nihilist or even Bolshevik bent. But if you are committed to keeping your wife out of the asylum you must make it your life work to supervise your wife more closely in future. I understand there is family money?
LEONARD Some money. We will both need to seek employment.
DR CRAIG I think you will find your wife far too fragile for the hurly burly of economic exchange. These patients are frequently considered brilliant in conversation. But on inspection this seeming brilliancy will be found in large measure to be due to the unconventional nature of their chatter. Patients such as your wife are often considered more entertaining when ill than when in health for through loss of control they make remarks which the healthy would fear to utter. A sane person is inhibited in both speech and action. I think you must reconcile yourself to having a saner, healthier but possibly duller wife who partakes of a less unsettling society.
LEONARD But can it ever be right to subject an intelligent person to regimes designed for the mad?
DR CRAIG My dear sir, there is really no distinction between physical disease and mental disorder. Mrs. Woolf must learn to practice equanimity and you are the best judge of how to assist her in that course. In any given individual where nothing more than exaggerated and uncontrolled normal characteristics may constitute mental disorder, we realize how narrow is the margin between those whom we call the sane and the insane. You are her husband. Have faith in your power to exercise benevolent dominance. It is a husband’s obligation.
LEONARD But Virginia is so sensitive! I am concerned –
DR CRAIG I cannot suggest too strongly, my dear sir, that you focus more on your wife’s bowels than on her brains. Constipation is not only a common symptom of the insane, it is the rule rather than the exception. Another symptom which appears early and which stands out in strong relief, is hypersensitivity. To me this is the symptom of all symptoms which may occasion unsoundness of mind.
LEONARD Virginia becomes so excited when I approach her –
DR CRAIG I will prescribe Hyoscynamine. It is a wonderful relaxant which has given excellent results in quieting the most difficult patients.
Alysse Aallyn 