Dr. Alice Howland Character Analysis

How could he, someone so smart, a scientist, not see what was right in front of him?

They used to walk together over to Harvard Yard every morning. Of the many things she loved about working within a mile from home and at the same school, their shared commute was the thing she loved most. […] When they were first married, they even held hands. She savored the relaxed intimacy of these morning walks with him, before the daily demands of their jobs and ambitions rendered them each stressed and exhausted.

But for some time now, they’d been walking over to Harvard separately.

Time and again she’d watched with dread as the most promising careers of her reproductively active female colleagues slowed to a crawl or simply jumped the track entirely. Watching John, her male counterpart and intellectual equal, accelerate past her had been tough. She often wondered whether his career would have survived three episiotomies, breast-feeding, potty training, mind-numbingly endless days of singing “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” and even more nights of getting only two to three hours of uninterrupted sleep. She seriously doubted it.

She was clearly older than forty, but she wouldn’t say she looked old. She didn’t feel old, although she knew she was aging. Her recent entry into an older demographic announced itself regularly with the unwelcome intrusion of menopausal forgetting. Otherwise, she felt young, strong, and healthy.

The emphasis Alice placed on teaching was in part motivated by the belief that she had both a duty and the opportunity to inspire the next generation in the field, or at the very least not to be the reason that the next would-be great thought leader in cognition abandoned psychology to major in political science instead. Plus, she simply loved teaching.

But most of all, they shared a passionate quest to understand the mind, to know the mechanisms driving human behavior and language, emotion and appetite. While the holy grail of this quest carried individual power and prestige, at its core it was a collaborative effort to know something valuable and give it to the world. It was socialism powered by capitalism. It was a strange, competitive, cerebral, and privileged life. And they were in it together.

They’d played this scene out together before, and this was how it ended. John argued the logical path of least resistance, always maintaining his status as the favorite parent, never convincing Alice to switch over to the popular side. And nothing she said swayed him.

She thought about the books she’d always wanted to read, the ones adorning the top shelf in her bedroom, the ones she figured she’d have time for later. Moby-Dick. She had experiments to perform, papers to write, and lectures to give and attend. Everything she did and loved, everything she was, required language.

She’d rather die than lose her mind. She looked up at John, his eyes patient, waiting for an answer. How could she tell him she had Alzheimer’s disease? He loved her mind. How could he love her with this?

In the month since their visit to the genetic counselor, he’d stopped asking her for help finding his glasses and keys, even though she knew he still struggled to keep track of them.

John had agreed to walk with her to Harvard every morning. She’d told him she didn’t want to risk getting lost. In truth, she simply wanted that time back with him, to rekindle their former morning tradition.

And although the thought of staying on too long terrified her, the thought of leaving Harvard terrified her much, much more. Who was she if she wasn’t a Harvard psychology professor?

She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn’t mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, See, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.

She laughed a little, surprised at what she’d just revealed to herself. Nowhere in that list was there anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bit of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice cream cones.

And when the burden of her disease exceeded the pleasure of that ice cream, she wanted to die.

Moonlight reflected off her right wrist. SAFE RETURN was engraved on the front of the flat, two-inch, stainless steel bracelet. A one-eight-hundred number, her identification, and the words Memory Impaired were etched on the reverse side. Her thoughts then rode a series of waves, traveling from unwanted jewelry to her mother’s butterfly necklace, traversing from there to her plan for suicide, to the books she planned to read, and finally stranded themselves on the common fates of Virginia Woolf and Edna Pontellier. It would be so easy. She could swim straight out toward Nantucket until she was too tired to continue.

Lydia reached out across the dishes and glasses and years of distance and held her mother’s hand. Alice squeezed it and smiled. Finally, they’d found something else they could talk about.

She had no classes to teach, no grants to write, no new research to conduct, no conferences to attend, and no invited lectures to give. Ever again. She felt like the biggest part of her self, the part she’d praised and polished regularly on its mighty pedestal, had died. And the other smaller, less admired parts of her self wailed with self-pitying grief, wondering how they would matter at all without it.

In the beginning, they did. They lived their lives together, with each other. But over the years, it had changed. They had allowed it to change. She thought about the sabbaticals apart, the division of labor over the kids, the travel, their singular dedication to work. They’d been living next to each other for a long time.

She’d authored well over a hundred published papers. She held this stack of research articles, commentaries, and reviews, her truncated career’s worth of thoughts and opinions, in her hands. It was heavy. Her thoughts and opinions carried weight. At least, they used to.

She tried to be understanding. He needed to work. But why didn’t he understand that she needed to run? If something as simple as regular exercise really did counter the progression of this disease, then she should be running as often as she could. Each time he told her “Not today,” she might be losing more neurons that she could have saved. Dying needlessly faster. John was killing her.

They talked about her as if she weren’t sitting in the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer’s disease.

More and more, she was experiencing a growing distance from her self-awareness. Her sense of Alice—what she knew and understood, what she liked and disliked, how she felt and perceived—was also like a soap bubble, even higher in the sky and more difficult to identify, with nothing but the thinnest lipid membrane protecting it from popping into thinner air.

“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

What she saw in them, she recognized in herself. This was something she knew, this place, this excitement and readiness, this beginning. This had been the beginning of her adventure, too, and although she couldn’t remember the details, she had an implicit knowing that it had been rich and worthwhile.

She wanted to tell him everything she remembered and thought, but she couldn’t send all those memories and thoughts, composed of so many words, phrases, and sentences, past the choking weeds and sludge into audible sound. She boiled it down and put all her effort into what was most essential. The rest would have to remain in the pristine place, hanging on.

“I miss myself.”