Jodie Noel Vinson, featured in the new Ocean State Review
The Forty Steps
40. Dear Alice, beloved of brothers and biographers:
39. (I will be a footnote to your story.)[i]
38. Perhaps you’re Miss James now, no longer the
child I knew. Mutual illness makes you familiar.
I would even call you sister, descending the daily
scale of pain, someone who knows this grim
grindstone[ii] that hangs about my neck or crumbles
into fragments (I could fill my pockets—).
37. How it ebbs, flares, flows (like the tide there,
below, watch it come on again) causing you to
cloister: here in Newport in the houses of your
family; there in England, in the arms of loved ones.
36. I also wanted shelter; but I built my own. Some
may think the new cottage drove me here, or that
it was the loss of the old house, on Church Street,
where the students came, where my sisters died and
my mother toiled—that sent me down these
35. steps.
34. It seems I stand there now, that I’ll continue to
stand, long after all has been demolished. Can you
see me, erect in the doorframe, white smock over
dusky dress—fastened by ribbons, ornamented
with crucifix and pocket watch—dark hair parted,
perpetually awaiting my students?
33. But now the door is shut; lessons have been
learned. Remember this one: that your story lives
on and mine will not is owing, in part, to what I
taught you, as well as—we may as well admit—
to the fame of your brothers:
32. Henry
31. William
30. Wilkinson
29. Robertson
28. When war came, when the brothers went away,
we longed for that more obvious struggle, for ex-
pression in canon ball and blood. For loss justified,
mourned, and properly buried (where will I be—?)
Instead a slow decline, a mild disintegration, a day-
to-day unraveling, this incessant silent suffering.
Yet nothing to complain of; words led us nowhere.
27. I recall you now as a timid student, fresh from
Europe, someone who asked permission for every-
thing (all my students were well behaved). I kept
the same order as my mother, never idle, remember
Alice? While you were at lessons my fingers were
at work, knitting worsteds: star-stitched shawls and
sontags, crafting intricate knots, blocks of bright
colors and looped borders that circled in on them-
selves. Each of us waiting at the fringes, learning
the precipitate edges of our lives.
26. (Mother! I had to leave it, our two-story house
with its gambrel roof. Yes, the paneling was fine,
the wood balusters strong but the roof was not and I
was not and besides I’d spent my days there. Work
and life beneath the same shoddy shingles, turning
ever into themselves. I had to build something new.
25. Mother, I wore your broach tonight. See me
standing in the costume of our ancestress: brocaded,
bonneted, and belted with everyday objects of heavy
silver: the scissors and needle box, gravy dish and
spoons, a vase, a vessel, a cross. Those thousand
quotidian burdens drag me down for the last time.
Watch me go readily, bearing the faces of my dead.)
24. Alice! They told me you asked permission even
for that.[iii] And that your father granted it, as long as
you did it properly, so as not to distress your friends.
23. Where are my friends? I was never attractive,
but they said I was intelligent. My students will re-
call the small things children notice: fresh face,
white teeth, quick hands, smooth hair…
22. I could smooth my hair, lashed by this wind that
whips from the far horizon, shattering the sea into
white-spackled waves rushing the coastline like
sprites from another world. I could turn. I could
climb (I told him to wait), the rungs rasping under
my weight. I could take a breath, give directions:
“To the Casino,” where I could dance with those
who, in a few hours, will be laughing, speculating—
21. Will I distress my friends? I’ll admit pleasure
in the drama of it: this last articulation, these forty
stairs. A weather-worn Jacob’s ladder clinging to
cliffside, even the banister splintered by sea-spray.
Do you see the metaphor? It’s all I have left.
20. I’ll stay here (halfway now) listening to the
wind’s whistle through wooden stairwell, to the
rush and pulse of surf below. Here where I can see
the beginning and—at last, an end. I was always
in-between. Middle child living up to her sisters’
spirits, who haunted the house with standards only
angels could achieve. Perhaps those small ghosts
sent Father to the island Asylum, leaving Mother
and me with the school, where I was also between:
educator of the rich, partial to the poor—who
threw the better parties, often on these stairs.[iv]
I remember the music, the jigs, the dance steps
19. step
18. step
17. From the top step (it seems so far behind me!)
I listened to the servants’ stories, learned the gossip;
how you treated your nurses. These stairs bridged
that divide, maybe that’s why I felt at home here.
I’d look out on the deep blue ocean, sun spangling
the surface, feel my head clear with the open sky.
16. You walked these cliffs too—sometimes I saw
you, mere child, clothed in neutral colors like
camouflage against the dove gray clouds that
rose over metallic waves. As if you might melt
away. You walked and walked beside the waters
until you could sit, as I among others instructed,
silent, subordinate, and still. You are sitting still,
15. Alice. The sky is immense today, its depths, re-
fracted in water, are imminent. The sea breeze, after
relentless heat, refreshes, sending ocean spume up
against the serrated coast that tapers in the distance
and disappears. Through the mist I glimpse the
jagged rocks below, where waves froth and churn,
a picture of my inner state, that mighty organ as you
called the stomach: a nest of snakes coiling and un-
coiling themselves, distorted, distended, inflamed.
14. And yet you didn’t do it. You had your father’s
permission, the right, and, as always, the means.
Maybe even the final act had to be handed to you.
I’ve learned to take things into my power. My steps,
like forty torturous days, lead down; no more of this
gradual grade, I fling myself into the obscurity of a
footnote. There are so many of us to follow, Alice,[v]
13. Lizzie[vi]
12. Clover[vii]
11. Ellen[viii]
10. Constance[ix]
9. Dear Alice: This evening on the Forty Steps,
will you think of it? Do you feel kinship even across
the Atlantic that crashes upon the rocks where we
both see my body washed up, wrecked before the
fall, already fallen. Alice! Do you imagine each step,
now an inevitable march, like forty endless nights?
8. Will you read of it, ensconced in your chair in
some sunny English field?[x] When you come to the
end will you feel a jolt of recognition at the final
judgement, at that familiar word: “nervous?”
7. You would be relieved at diagnosis. We are
those who rejoice at palpable disease, it hardly
matters how conventionally dreadful a label. To no
longer have to stagger alone under the monstrous
mass of subjective sensations for which we are
always held personally responsible while they wash
their cold hands with graceful complacency.
6. To have a name! But before it is named we are
told it is only in our minds—as such it is no threat
to their bodies. Then, when the name comes it is
something canned and understood, a disease they
don’t have. Either way, they are free. Either way,
we are burdened: with the responsibility of living,
and then, of dying.
5. Die or recover, you will recover or die, the doc-
tors said, as if I had a choice, as if life were a binary
between solid ground and life-sapping sea. And not
the slippery staircase on which we all linger.
4. Will you feel envy? What about grief? Will you
call me my Becky? Would you even call it heroic to
be able to suppress one’s vanity to the extent of
confessing the game is too hard? Will you think of
me when you declare anyone who spends her life as
an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is
justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide
at a moment’s notice?
3. So I am justified. Someone please take notice: I
am done with cushions and shawls (Alice, I knit
them myself) done with the never-ending pain and
with the disbelief it engendered. Done with the
necessity of work and of shelter, with the burn out
of my body under both until I sunk down, Alice!
2. There is no-
1. where
e
A
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e
SUICIDE OF MISS HUNTER.
NEWPORT, R.I., July 25—Sunshine and
shadows prevail, and while the festive dance at
the Casino was in progress to-night many who
were present discussed the sad fate which had
befallen Miss “Becky” Hunter, who a few hours
before had deliberately committed suicide by
jumping into the ocean at the foot of the 40
steps on the cliffs. Miss Hunter was a member
of a prominent Newport family and had kept a
private school where children of wealthy par-
ents were educated. She was building a hand-
some cottage, and it was said that she was so dis-
appointed over certain details connected with it
that she resolved to commit suicide. She took
her carriage and drove to the 40 steps and
told her driver to wait for her. The driver
never saw her alive again, and half an hour
later he was told that the body of the lady was
floating in the angry whitecapped sea below
the cliffs. It is a sad Summer tale. The de-
ceased lady had long been a victim of nervous
dyspepsia.
The New York Times, published: July 26, 1887
[i] Rebecca Hunter, schoolteacher of Alice James, makes a brief appearance in her biography, alongside other women suffering poorly understood conditions filed under that hapless category: nervous. While it’s difficult to hold her brothers’ (William, Henry) prolific output against Alice’s meager diary without feeling the loss of potential,women like Rebecca existed—persist still—in deeper silence.
[ii] Italicized words are from Alice’s letters and diary, kept towards the end of a life plagued by illness. Before she began recording her own words, Alice quoted others in a Commonplace book, a method one biographer describes as “ventriloquism.” I’ve adopted this form: placing Alice’s words in Rebecca’s mouth, to enlighten the situation of both ill women, and to bring meaning to Rebecca’s otherwise muted life—and to her death.
[iii] “I told her so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased; only I hoped…she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends” (Alice’s father in a letter to her brother Robertson).
[iv] During the Gilded Age, the Forty Steps was a gathering place for the servants of Newport’s grand houses.
[v] Many of Alice’s friends took their lives by means that, in the absence of their words, appear as articulations in themselves. As scholar Margaret Higonnet puts it: “To take one’s life is to force others to read one’s death.”
[vi] The painter Elizabeth Boott, a model for Henry James’ characters, died—by official account—of pneumonia, but Alice would refer to her friend as having so violently discontinued herself.
[vii] The photographer Clover Adams ingested the chemicals used to develop her images.
[viii] Clover’s sister Ellen, threw herself in front of a train.
[ix] Henry’s admirer, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, dropped from the window of a Venetian palazzo.
[x] When she learned of her former teacher’s death, Alice wrote to William: Tell me when you next write whether the Miss Rebecca Hunter who threw herself off the 40 Steps was my Becky! Alice may have been sent Rebecca’s obituary, though many of the flowery testimonials from the time tacitly skip over the nature of her death (What a pity to hide it, Alice would write upon news of another unacknowledged suicide).
Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in non-fiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays and reviews have been published in Harvard Review, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Agni, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Gettysburg Review, Fugue, The Massachusetts Review, Arts & Letters, Nowhere Magazine, World Literature Today, Kyoto Journal, SICK magazine, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places.
A 2023 Bread Loaf Scholar, she is the recipient of the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the New Ohio Review Literary Award in Nonfiction, the PEN-3 Prize in Storytelling, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and a residency from The Jentel Foundation. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and selected as Notable Essay in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.
Jodie lives with her husband in Providence, where she serves the Rhode Island writing community as Program Director at a literary arts nonprofit.