The Rational Cure

There is a kind of garden one keeps not for beauty but for vigilance — every hedge clipped to a sightline, every path raked so that a single footprint betrays the wanderer. In such a garden I was raised; and I was at once its rarest specimen and its suspected weed. My mother tended me with a love I do not now doubt, and a mistrust I never, as a child, could prove; and the two were grafted so close upon one stock that to this hour — lying here with the curtains drawn against a light my eyes can no longer bear — I cannot say where the one leaf ended and the other began.

Her project was plain enough, though it was never once spoken to me in plain words. I was the daughter of a poet who had become a byword, and there waited in my blood, she believed, a Byronic element as surely as a fever waits in marsh air — a thing of passion and disorder and ungoverned imagination, which might, if it were not checked, rise up and claim me. Against it she prescribed a regimen. Not poetry — never poetry; that door she kept shut, and the key, I think, upon her own person — but Number, and music, and above all moral correction, administered in steady doses as one administers a tonic to a constitution thought to be predisposed. Reason was to be my inoculation; obedience, the proof that the cure was taking.

I have wondered since whether she truly feared the poet, or feared the man — whether what she watched for in me was genius or only its ruin, the two being, in her experience, the same catastrophe wearing the same face. She had loved that face once, and been undone by it. I will not pretend to judge her. A woman wronged builds her fortifications where she was breached; and I was the ground she chose to hold.

The instruments of the holding were the ladies.

I called them, in the privacy of my own resentment, the Furies — those grave older friends of my mother's who were set about me to observe, to instruct, to note, and to report. They came with kind faces and improving books; they wrote letters when I was not looking; the letters went to my mother, and from my mother came back — by return of post, or by the colder post of her countenance — the verdict upon my week. I learned very young that I was never quite alone — that a sum done sloppily, a temper shown at the pianoforte, a question asked with too bright an eagerness, all entered some ledger I was not permitted to see, but whose balance governed my days. To be a child so watched is to acquire, prematurely, a second self: the one that is seen, composed and answering — and the one that withdraws behind it and keeps its own counsel. I built that inner room early. I furnished it well. I am, I sometimes think, writing now from inside it still.

I do not say this to accuse. The watching was meant for my preservation; and there is a tenderness in surveillance that the surveilled can feel even as they chafe at it — you matter so much that you must not be lost. But a young mind grown in a watched garden learns, before all things, concealment, and learns it as a kind of breathing. What I most loved I learned to love quietly.

Then came the illness, which did what no Fury could — it shut the door for me.

The headaches had been with me since I was small — great pressing pains behind the eyes, that turned the daylight into a weapon and set the page swimming. But it was in the year of my fourteenth birthday that the measles took me, and took me hard — not the brief crimson nuisance of the nursery, but a long prostration that laid me on my back for the better part of three years and left my legs unwilling to bear me. I went, by slow degrees, from the bed to the couch; and from the couch, propped and faltering, to crutches, upon which I made my halting progress into my sixteenth year. There were months in which I could not so much as cross a room unaided; and the room itself was kept dim, as this one is, and the days lay measureless and still.

Here is the strange mathematics of it: that the very stillness my mother could never wholly impose by discipline, the body imposed by collapse — and in that enforced quiet I came into my inheritance, though it was not the inheritance she watched for. For a mind that cannot run must look; and a gaze held long enough upon any single thing begins to penetrate it. Pinned to my pillows, forbidden exertion, I had nothing to do but attend — and attention, I have come to believe, is the whole of genius, or at least the nearest part of it we may cultivate by will. I watched the play of light along the cornice and tried to reckon its angles. I followed a line of figures across a slate until the figures themselves dissolved and the relations between them stood out clean — as a constellation stands out from its scatter of stars, once one has been told the shape to look for. The sickroom, which was meant to be my smallest world, became the chamber in which my largest one first showed itself.

And so the cure overshot its mark, as cures will. The mathematics my mother set before me as a bridle, I seized as a spur. She offered Number to keep me from dreaming; I found that Number was the most dreaming thing there is — that beyond the dull arithmetic of the schoolroom lay an unexplored country, vast and lawful and shining, wherein the imagination was not the enemy of rigour but its very engine. To pursue an analysis to its conclusion was, I discovered, an act every bit as rapturous as the verse-making I was forbidden — only it could not be confiscated, for it happened wholly within, in that inner room no Fury could enter. They could read my letters. They could not read my thoughts — and my thoughts had begun to move among magnitudes.

Music she permitted likewise as a restraint — a lady's accomplishment, a settling of the nerves. In me it became an appetite of the same family. I heard in it what I had begun to feel in the calculus: that beneath the surface of feeling lay order; that a melody was a structure as much as a sentiment, ruled by proportion and interval, by relations one might almost write down. I had not then the words for what I dimly apprehended — that the beautiful and the demonstrable might be one thing, seen from two sides. That recognition was to wait many years, until an engine of wheels and a French gentleman's pages should give me the occasion to say it. But the seed of it was sown there, in a darkened room, by a girl upon crutches who had been given music to keep her docile, and made of it instead a glimpse into the architecture of the world.

What my mother never understood — what perhaps she could not afford to understand — is that she had misread the inheritance. She watched for the poet to surface and drown me. But the thing that rose in me was not the poet against the analyst, nor the analyst against the poet: it was both at once, fused, indivisible. The fire she feared and the discipline she trusted were not two contestants in my nature, but the two halves of one indivisible mind; and her whole regimen of separation — poetry locked away, Number prescribed — could no more divide them than one may divide the convex of a curve from its concave. She gave me the half she approved, and forbade me the half she dreaded; and I, in the dark, quietly married the two, and told no one.

I kept it hidden because I had been taught, before ever I could reason, that what I most was must be watched — and what is watched must be hidden if it is to survive. That is the lasting wound of the rational cure: not that it gave me Number, for which I am grateful past expression, but that it taught me my own gifts were a contagion to be managed, and set me forever a little apart — observing even my own raptures with one cool eye, as though a Fury sat yet at the foot of my bed, taking notes.

She loved me. I will set that down plainly, here at the end, where I have small patience left for anything but the true. She loved me with a ferocity that frightened us both, and she mistrusted me in the very same breath; and she did not know — how could she? — that the child she laboured to save and the child she laboured to suppress were the identical child, and that I should need every part of her cure, and survive it only by betraying its purpose. I have spent my life proving the contagion she feared to be, instead, a calling. Whether I have proved it well enough, I shall not be granted the years to learn.

But I learned, in that dim and watched room, the one lesson that has carried me to every threshold since — that the mind, however confined, however overlooked, however dictated to, keeps an inner chamber that none may enter uninvited; and that within it, attended closely enough, anything may be made to show its hidden shape.