Paula Cohen - What Alice Knew - A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

His fingers twisted the next button on her dress and released it from its hold, exposing the full sweep of her throat. His hand brushed against her flesh, and now his fingers moved quickly, opening the line of buttons until the thick cloth of the dress opened like a flower and revealed not nakedness but what, in its way, was more intimate than nakedness: the stiff encasement of her corset. He put his hands to the tightly laced garment, feeling the heat of her body underneath. Above the ledge of the bodice, he could see the top of her breasts, rising and falling. Beads of perspiration dotted the skin of her throat. His own clothes felt thick and confining. He would have liked to stop to strip off his waistcoat and shirt, but instead he moved his hands to the back of the corset and, with the instinct bred from years of married life, found the hook holding the laces in place.

It was that instinctual motion that brought him back, for the movement of his fingers suddenly transported him to the space of his bedroom at home. He heard whispering inside his head, the words that had roused him to laughter a week earlier when he had fumbled with the laces of his Alice’s corset. “Female suffrage is all well and good,” she had said, “but liberate us first from our corsets.”

“Liberate us first from our corsets.” Why did he have to recall those words now? The recollection of his wife’s voice in its familiar cadence, the laughter they had shared, the image of his bedroom with the child’s crib in the corner caused his fingers to freeze. The desire he had felt for the woman pressed against him seemed to evaporate. His hands fell from her back, and he was overwhelmed with the enormity of the crime he had been about to commit. A vision of his Alice, gentle but accusing, engulfed his consciousness. He saw her, the way her hair curled under her cap near her ears, the way her eyes half closed and her head bent when he embraced her. He desired Ella Abrams more than he had desired any woman before, but his Alice was his life. She was the mother of his children, she shared his grief over their dead Hermie; she had cared for him and listened to his litany of complaints about colleagues and work; she was waiting for him at home.

He wondered, was the desire he had felt really the opposite of the murderous desire of the killer, or was it a variation on the same thing? The opposite of murder was not desire, but love—the steady, willed love that one felt for wife and family. He looked at Ella’s face. It was the most beautiful he had ever seen, but beauty, like ugliness, was a great seducer, an objectifier of the human.

He stood frozen for perhaps a minute until Ella slowly moved away and began to button her dress. When she had finished, she straightened her hair in the small mirror near the door, took her coat from the chair, and touched William’s arm as if to register that she was not angry. He had remained rooted in place, in a kind of stupor, horrified at what he had almost done and awash with regret at what he had failed to do. When he finally roused himself to look around, she was gone.

The portrait of Alice took longer to complete than expected. Sickert had originally said he would need her for four sittings—or rather lying downs, given her condition—but at the third, he announced that he would need more time, at least two more days, probably three. This was despite his arriving every day promptly and remaining for more than two hours.

Alice had forbidden her brothers to enter the room again, and Katherine remained out of town nursing her sister until the following Sunday. Occasionally Archie or Sally came in with a tray of biscuits or a decanter of port, and Sickert charmed them both by performing snippets from his music hall numbers. But these interruptions were short-lived, and for most of the time Sickert was present, he and Alice were alone.

The week they passed in each other’s company, Alice secretly understood, constituted a romance. She knew that people would laugh at the idea. She was ten years older than he was, bedridden, and plain. She existed, moreover, in a comfortable relationship with Katherine that resembled a long-standing marriage. But her feeling for Sickert was different, closer to the kind of pulse-quickening feeling that she had read about in books and had believed she would never experience.

At the end of each visit, after he put away his paints and covered the portrait with a sheet, he would come over to her bed, take her hand in a rather formal manner, and kiss it, lingering a bit longer than was necessary. The scene, to a superficial eye, was conventional enough. This was a charming young man, handsome and pleased with himself, used to getting women, no matter the age, to fall in love with him. Yet Alice felt that, appearances notwithstanding, he desired her as she desired him. The idea would be too ludicrous to utter aloud, and yet she knew it to be true.

When the picture was finally done, Sickert covered it and prepared to take it away. “I don’t want you to see it until it is framed,” he explained. “The frame marks the end; it says with finality that this bit of reality has been set aside and can no longer be altered. But I should warn you,” he added, “seeing your portrait for the first time can be a shock.”

“I’m sure I will like it,” said Alice. “I am not vain.”

“It’s not a matter of vanity; it’s seeing yourself as someone else does. I’ve known people who say that it’s like seeing themselves in their coffin. I don’t agree. But it can be strange to see how another sees you.”

“I should like to see how you see me.”

“Then be patient.” He was, he said, off to Cornwall for a few days, where he had agreed to meet with a group of old school friends, fellow artists. When he returned, the portrait would be framed, and he would drop it off so they could look at it together.

He walked over to the bed to say good-bye, but this time he did not take her hand as he generally did, but touched her face as he had that first day. He held his hand against her cheek for a long time until she turned her head and kissed his palm. She looked up, and he lowered his face almost to hers, holding it there for a long time. For a moment, she thought he would kiss her, but she flinched slightly, and he pulled back.

“I look forward to seeing how you see me,” she repeated, her voice wistful.

He did not respond but rose from the bed, took the easel in one hand and the painting in the other, and left without another word.

It was just as well that he had gone, Alice thought. Katherine was due back the next day.

William lay awake that night in an agony of self-recrimination and relief. Although he had contemplated an act of monstrous betrayal, he had abstained from committing it. He had come to the brink, yet he had stepped back. Should he lament that he had been tempted, or celebrate that he had resisted temptation? The disparity between thought and deed was at once great and negligible, depending upon one’s perspective. But as always, his perspective was multiple, so he could not find rest. He was racked with guilt and driven to rationalization.

The struggle continued through the night, and only close to dawn did he fall into a fitful slumber. He slept until midmorning and would have gone on sleeping, had he not been awakened by a clamor in the outer room. A minute later, Mrs. Smith appeared at the door to his bedchamber. She had the obsequious manner she assumed when she wasn’t being surly and uncooperative. “There’s a man from Scotland Yard who wants you to come with him right away, Professor James,” she simpered.

William stumbled out of bed and dressed quickly. When he entered the parlor, he found a stocky, red-faced officer waiting impatiently. “Inspector says you should come,” the officer asserted bluntly.