The James Boys by Richard Liebmann-Smith

Author:Richard Liebmann-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366771
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

On the afternoon of September 7, 1876, over a thousand miles from the chaos and carnage taking place out in Minnesota, Elena Hite arrived in Cambridge to meet with William James. It was a glorious late-summer day in the academic suburb. Students were moving in for the new semester, shouting their hallos across the Harvard Yard or lounging in laughing groups under the shade of the slender elms that lined its crisscrossing paths. Elena, togged up to the nines for the occasion in a cloud of Valenciennes lace, swanned her way along a gauntlet of admiring glances and breezed into William’s office in Lawrence Hall.

She had girded herself for an immaculate clinical setting bristling with an armamentarium of gleaming medical instruments. But the doctor’s lair turned out to be distinctly unclinical and almost comically unprepossessing. The tiny chamber was barely more than a cubbyhole, strewn willy-nilly with books, academic journals, sketch pads, framed collections of Amazonian lepidoptera, a metronome, horopter charts, and a couple of pieces of tarnished brass scientific apparatus. Other than the disconcerting presence of a large apothecary jar full of decapitated frogs bobbing in formaldehyde, the overall ambiance of the room was casually inviting, as was the man himself. William greeted Elena in his shirtsleeves and offered her a chair he had apparently just appropriated on her behalf from a nearby lecture hall.

At barely five feet eight, the oldest James brother was not nearly so tall as Elena had imagined, yet he carried himself with a limber grace and a bounce to his step. What struck her most pleasantly about the doctor was his voice, which James Putnam once described as having “a resonance and charm which those who had once heard it, especially in conversation, never could forget.”

Elena took her seat and arranged the frilly flounces of her skirt about her ankles. She had a secret “test” for the men she encountered, staring into their eyes with a decidedly unladylike directness to gauge their moral—and perhaps erotic—mettle. (She was particularly drawn to those who unflinchingly met and returned her probing gaze.) On this basis she now completed her comparative taxonomy of the James men, of whom she was beginning to fancy herself something of a connoisseur: “While Jesse’s steel blue eyes seem to look through you,” she wrote in her diary, “Frank’s look around you, and Henry’s darker orbs peer into you.” William, she recorded approvingly, “looks at you.”

When the young doctor gently inquired what had brought her there, Elena sighed and let her elegant shoulders slump a bit, hardly knowing where to begin.

Back home in Hartford after her collapse out in Missouri, she had failed to regain her equilibrium. Whatever comfort she might have imagined deriving from being under her father’s roof again and amid the familiar furnishings of her childhood had been short-lived at best. She slept poorly, ate either too much or scarcely at all, and found herself cross, restless, and too distracted even to read. All around her, the city rattled with ghosts.

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