The Madwoman Upstairs (3 page)

That morning, we were having breakfast on the carpet. He generally used the mornings to explain something he thought I should know: the evils of adverbs, the benefits of cremation, the legal ways to avoid taxes. At the time, he was forty-one, six foot six, and drinking whiskey in his coffee. I was five foot eleven and impossible.

“Sammy,” he had said.

“Dad.”

“I’m going to die someday.”

“Pass the syrup.”

There was a plate of home-cooked pancakes on the floor with us. I remember because Dad had left them on the stove too long, and the bottoms were dotted with charred circles, big and brown like the spots on a cow. He handed me Vermont’s finest.

“When you’re older, you’ll inherit the Warnings of Experience,” he said.

“The Warnings of Experience?” I clarified.

“Correct.”

“Why when I’m older?”

I should have asked him,
Why the Warnings of Experience?
but when you’re young, you never think to question the absurd.

All he said was “Fourteen is an ugly number.”

And that, right there, had been the extent of our conversation. I asked him not to talk like that anymore, because losing my father was an old and very terrible nightmare of mine. With my mother living in Paris at the time, designing wedding dresses, my dad was all I had left. And he was great. He had soft, sloppy hair, and all that hair complemented an out-of-shape writer’s body, just fit enough to be able to lift me up when we hugged. He had square glasses and only two wisdom teeth, a bald spot on his right calf, and eyes like an eagle.
He was great in the ways that only dead fathers can ever truly be great.

As far as I knew, no other living person was familiar with the Warnings of Experience. I wanted to keep it that way. The outside world had long suspected my father’s family of hiding something, and the constant media attention was growing tiresome. Historians liked to point to the fact that an enormous number of Brontë “artifacts” had gone missing over the years, or were otherwise unaccounted for: the girls’ old mugs, paintings, notes, sketches, letters, and a few early novel drafts. Somehow they had been “lost.” Where else could they be, people said, but with my father? Dad was the only living relation of Patrick Brontë, the father of the illustrious Brontë siblings, who outlived all of his children (and wife) and, legend had it, had preserved the Brontës’ most precious belongings for posterity. One of Patrick’s siblings gave birth to one of my great-several-times-over-grandfathers, whose spawn ultimately ended up producing my lovable and rather eccentric dad.

Public speculation about the Missing Brontë Estate had reached an all-time high in the last twenty years. Its mystery incited a dangerous curiosity within the strangely large world of Brontë fanatics, who had all likely read the novels as children and loved them for the rest of their lives. These people were far too easy to convince that since the Brontës were Romantic and Passionate people they had something Romantic (and more importantly, Lucrative) hidden in their past. Journalists did nothing but feed the flames. Headlines grew more and more sensational (
10 Mind-Blowing Reasons Charlotte Brontë Was Secretly Loaded
) until the rumors began infecting the minds of normal people, people who had never even heard of the Brontës before. Instead of believing that my father was hoarding old mugs and sketches, the average uninformed gossip columnist was quick to believe that Tristan Whipple was hiding gold mines, ruby rings, and Gutenberg Bibles. The Brontës themselves became somewhat irrelevant.

All of this taught me only two things: First, when you’re one of the last Brontës, you unwillingly inherit an extraordinarily large and peculiar fan base. Second, when you are a handsome and reclusive single father, you inherit an even larger and more peculiar fan base. As a child, I had always found my father’s fame perfectly normal, like one of those standard life facts you learn at five years old: the sky is blue, the sun sets in the west, fathers are always in the news. But the media attention drove my poor dad crazy. He started refusing interviews, and avoided public appearances when possible. His novels became even more cryptic. He locked himself in his study for hours on end. He started to leave strange trinkets all over the house, so that in case any reporters did break and enter someday, they would find lots of confusing story material. To the outside world, I’m sure my father was a madman.

The irony was that in all those years, I never saw him whip out any hidden Brontë memorabilia. There were no mugs and there were no ruby rings and there were no gold mines. My father cared only for the novels themselves—
Agnes Grey
,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
,
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Shirley
, and
Villette—
which, last time I checked, were still in the public domain. Dad spent his entire life studying these books, picking them apart and analyzing them word by word. He was in awe of them, the kind of awe most people reserve for dark and mysterious women.
These novels are alive and all other books are dead,
he would say.
Do you understand?
He used to give me lessons on them, reading from his worn copies as he made incomprehensible margin notes. I’m sure he knew something the rest of the world did not. But when I’d ask him what it was, all he’d say was:
Sammy, I’m just trying to teach you how to read.

For a time after his death, the Brontës became my true love too—but only briefly, and only by default. I figured that if deconstructing the Brontë novels had been my father’s life project, I would finish his work. Perhaps there
was
something important that I had been missing, and perhaps it was my job as Last Heir to figure it out. From age fifteen to age fifteen and a half, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching the Brontës, re-creating their lives, trying to know them the way my father had—as relatives. I pored over the few history books in my father’s library that had survived the fire; I wrote poems and stories in a morbid Brontë style; I developed imaginary friends in the form of Anne, Charlotte, Emily, and even Branwell, the drunk brother. I suppose I thought it might, in a way, bring my father back to life.

It all came to nothing. To this day, I still did not understand what made my father so impassioned on the subject of his three long-lost cousins, or what he might be looking for. Now, I was cursed with all the knowledge I had acquired about them. I felt like an Olympic athlete who hadn’t worked out in years and was stuck with the muscle-turned-to-fat around her shoulders. I still knew Charlotte, Emily, and Anne like no one should ever know anyone. I knew their shoe sizes and their height; I knew their stupid little secrets; I knew what they fought about and what they laughed about; I knew about the mole on Emily’s right foot. Love always came with scars, and this was mine: the knowledge that the friends I knew best were those I had never actually met.

It wasn’t until boarding school that I studied the Brontës in an academic context. Starting high school at sixteen years old meant that I was two to three years older than all my classmates. I had fought to be placed with the rising junior class, but when my mother enrolled me, she explained to the administration that my father’s homeschooling experiment had been an “unmitigated disaster,” and recommended that I start with the freshmen so I could recover from all the academic damage that had been unfairly inflicted upon me.

My hope was that my first formal English class on the Brontës would help me understand my relatives better—or at least shed some light on what my father had spent his life trying to figure out. But I was disappointed. Mr. Martin’s class was the first time that I saw how the rest of the world knew the Brontës: not as moles and shoe sizes but as dramatic Hollywood films, badly made PowerPoint presentations in class, dolls for little girls. They were everything
but
human beings.

Mr. Martin boiled down each sister’s character so that they lost all taste, flavor, and flair. We learned that Charlotte was the eldest, the most famous, and the ringleader of the family. Four foot eleven. Strong, opinionated, admirable. The entrepreneur. A real nineteenth-century ballbuster.
Jane Eyre
was her brainchild. Mr. Martin didn’t bother mentioning that it was the sort of novel you adored as a child and then misunderstood for the rest of your life.

The second sister, we learned, was Emily—intensely passionate, wild, and imaginative. She was the action figurine with windswept black hair, a heaving bosom, and a petticoat drenched from her wild traipses across the stormy English moors. Her greatest work and only novel was
Wuthering Heights
, considered the most romantic book ever written by those who had never read it carefully.

And then there was Anne. Quiet, forgotten Anne. The last Brontë. The youngest. The failed social reformer. Meek. Moralizing. Sweet. Author of the most boring book,
Agnes Grey
, the one that never made it to SparkNotes. She was the Brontë who had been overshadowed by her infinitely more talented sisters. In other words, the Loser.

I approached Mr. Martin one day after class to complain about his complete misunderstanding of my family. He had a heart-shaped face with a fuzzy beard and stubby fingers resembling baby pickles. On his desk were the plastic bags that he put over his head when it rained.

“I don’t think you’re being fair to Annie,” I said to him.

“She speaks!” he said with a kind smile. “I thought you had taken a vow of silence.”

I shook my head. “I think you’re wrong about Annie.”

When he smiled, thick creases gouged his cheeks, like Earth’s fault lines. He cocked his head to the side. “Annie?”

“Her friends called her Annie.”

“And how do you know that?”

“My dad told me.”

His smile faded at the mention of my father. The look on his face said,
I don’t know what to say. Help me.
I knew the expression well. I saw it on the face of every fourteen-year-old girl in my dorm. No one knew what to say about my father’s death, so no one came near me.

“You’re not explaining Anne the way my father used to,” I told Mr. Martin. “You’re making her boring.”

He sat down and gestured that I should do the same. I ignored him.

“Did your father tell you quite a lot about Anne?” he asked.

I frowned. “Are you a reporter?”

“Goodness, of course not.”

He was silent then, and uncomfortable. I wondered if he read the newspapers. If the rumors were true, could it be that the largest literary inheritance in recent history would fall into the hands of a teenager?

I took a breath. “Do you know anything about the Warnings of Experience?”

“The what?”

“The Warnings of Experience. Please tell me what it means.”

He looked sympathetic, as though I was a lost, poor, friendless child—for the first time, a true Brontë.

“Samantha, would you like to sit down and talk?” he said.

I meant to say, “I’d rather not,” but it came out “I’d rather rot.” I left the room.

It was in those first few months of high school that I began to realize something rather awful, something that I would skillfully repress for years. Every member of the press believed that my father had left me something tangible—a Brontë treasure. Everyone was wrong. What I had was the Warnings of Experience. And the Warnings of Experience, I had come to believe, was not an object. It was just another one of my father’s esoteric lessons. Perhaps reporters would have figured this out had they ever seen the whiskey in Dad’s coffee and the veins in his eyes. I was the only one who had seen the Great Tristan Whipple sprawled out on the couch like a beached starfish. I knew—deep down, I knew—that his parting gift to me was a warning not to become like him. There was a reason B. Howard of the British National Bank could not understand his will, and there was a reason I didn’t much want to discuss it. It was because, I suspected, there was actually nothing there.

In retrospect, I should have returned Mr. Martin’s smiles and attempt at friendship. He was simply doing his job, which was to introduce kids to literature. But at the time, there was nothing I hated more than his lectures about
Wuthering Heights
.
It’s a book of raging contradictions,
he used to say.
Nature versus civilization, heaven versus hell, love versus violence.
Supposedly, he was teaching us how to do “close reading.” We were not doing “close reading.” Close reading was when my father analyzed chapter headings for two hours. I once told Mr. Martin that he was missing the point of the book; Mr. Martin said that the point of the book was that we were never able to understand it fully. It was a markedly different way of thinking than Dad’s, and I found the transition between the two terribly disorienting. In the end, there was only one thing that came out of my cumulative education: a whole lot of white noise.

On Thursday morning, I made my first trip to the Old College Faculty Wing. It was a miniature castle at the heart of campus, in the middle of a wide, lake-size lawn. I recognized the building immediately from posters, postcards, and BBC dramas. It was giant and rectangular, studded with stone turrets and four looming gargoyles, all of which appeared to be frothing at the mouth. This, right here, was the defining building of Oxford, associated with so many scandals throughout the years that it now accounted for fifteen percent of tourism in England.