Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “… sixteen, seventeen, eighteen …”

  She paused, becoming very still.

  Gently, she laid the hairbrush down on the windowsill, the handle precisely aligned with the edge. She did this even when she placed things down — as now — only briefly, wishing objects to be carefully positioned within a space.

  She had recognized that familiar feeling again, like the gradual build-up to an uncontrollable sneeze. It was not, however, a pocket-handkerchief that she required. She walked across to her bed and once more took up her fountain pen and her writing journal from where she had left them. There were the three sentences she had been studying before she had begun brushing her hair, something she had written late last night. It was the beginning of a story, or perhaps something longer. She knew that.

  I saw another ghost last night. They come at twilight, the in-between time, not in full darkness, gathering like starlings in a public square as the light falls. They live in the mirrors.

  She crossed out falls and substituted fails. She was not conscious of thinking about this. Falls was clearly the wrong word to use here. She must have been thinking of fails when she wrote it, or of darkness falling. She changed the period after falls into a comma, wrote in an insertion arrow, and added but in silence, with none of the gregarious noise of the birds. She wrote in another insertion arrow before noise — the page was covered in little symbols and crossings-out, like a wordy mathematical problem — and added groupings &.

  She paused for a moment, and then wrote again, as fluently as if taking dictation.

  Sometimes — & always one at a time — they emerge from the mirrors, & walk into the room.

  She waited.

  She waited a little longer.

  Then she screwed the cap back on the fountain pen — tightly, like someone fearful that the black ink would leak out and stain the sheets — and replaced the pen and the journal exactly where they had been. She returned to the window, picking up the hairbrush again.

  “… nineteen, twenty, twenty-one …”

  It was as if she had been briefly called away to deal with something.

  To dream of seeing yourself in a mirror, denotes that you will meet many discouraging issues, and sickness will cause you distress and loss in fortune.

  The drapes brushed against her.

  She felt the rough, dusty underside of the Thornfield tapestry against her face, like the underside of the imperially colored gold-embroidered purple coverlet under which Dorian Gray had hidden the picture. Here she was in the schoolroom: the picture of Dorian Gray.

  If she were the picture, was her real self out in the world somewhere, living a life that she had never lived, someone young, someone bright and beautiful, someone popular, someone dazzling in society, with the irresistible allure of an illuminated mirror in a darkened room, a Blanche Ingram to her Bertha Rochester? The self she knew — unlike Dorian Gray — had not remained young and beautiful. Unlike Dorian Gray she had never been beautiful, and she could not remember ever feeling that she was young. The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast. That was how the second paragraph of The Princess and the Goblin — one of the books Alice remembered best from childhood — started, and, though certainly never a sweet little creature (sweet!), Alice felt she was as one with Princess Irene when it came to getting older very fast. She was — she felt on the bad days — the cowering soul locked in a darkened room, a soul rotting from within, a withered thing.

  3

  When Miss Ericsson had called her The Woman in White, that was all she had been thinking about: the figure of a woman dressed in white. It was just a phrase she knew: she hadn’t thought of Anne Catherick when she said it. It would never have occurred to her — she was a woman without guile or unkindness — that she had mentioned a character in a novel who had been imprisoned in a lunatic asylum.

  So many of the novels owned by Alice’s mother contained scenes of madness and the asylum. Lady Audley’s secret: madness, and the fear of madness. Those final scenes at the private lunatic asylum in Belgium: the windows shrouded by a scanty curtain, the dark shadow of a woman with a fantastic head-dress, a restless creature who paced perpetually backward and forward before the window. Perhaps that was why she was drawn to them, as she was drawn to Jacobean tragedies, those plays of ghosts, madness, and revenge. She had never seen one of them performed — just as she had never seen an Ibsen play performed — but she read them, those she could find, as she read Ibsen, acting out the events within her head, hearing the voices, seeing the richly clad figures hurtling to their appalling fates, seeing it happen within the rooms around her, these the places in which they lived and died. The Jacobean plays seemed to have been totally forgotten. The reprinted texts themselves, on crinkled, brown-spotted paper, appeared to be hundreds of years old, with old-fashioned spellings, words — she had the feeling — that had not been spoken for centuries. With their elongated letter esses, with their unutterably ancient smell of old books, it was as if they had been lost in some long-ago library, never opened, never read, never acted, but they lived as she read them, setting the events in motion, as if she had spoken the words with which to open a hidden and long-locked door. They were, she felt — as she sometimes felt about some of Shakespeare’s plays (King Lear, The Tempest) — plays that lived best within the mind, where everything could become internalized and intense.

  Another of the novels, the Charles Reade novel — Hard Cash, the one that had always frightened her — in which flames consumed the asylum as the lunatics shrieked with laughter, often came into her mind. Most people seemed to know The Cloister and the Hearth — she’d confused the title with The Cricket on the Hearth — when it came to Charles Reade novels, but for her it had always been Hard Cash. Some people read certain books over and over to comfort themselves, as if hearing the words of a story read at bedtime long ago, the voice of a lost mother or father, the time when everything was safe, and someone was there to look after you. She read Hard Cash to discomfort herself, to feel a fear that had somehow become necessary.

  (Bertha swayed on the roof above the battlements, waving her arms, her long black hair streaming against the flames. Rochester ascended through the skylight to save her. He called her name, and she sprang from the roof to her death on the pavement.)

  Miss Ericsson had asked Alice if she dressed in white the way she did because of Emily Dickinson. “No,” Alice had replied, “because of Miss Havisham.” This name — unlike Anne Catherick’s — Miss Ericsson had known, and Alice had had to explain — at great length — that she was not being serious. Once she’d worn colors; now she wore white. It had been something to do with reaching thirty-three. That was when the whiteness started.

  Nor would Miss Ericsson have realized that The Woman in White contained Marian Halcombe — the joy she had felt when she discovered her! — Alice’s favorite moustachioed heroine in fiction. She remembered Emmerson Columbarian making jokes about Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s moustache, and Linnaeus Finch — Charlotte’s much younger brother — joining in. “Don’t be so cruel, Emmerson,” Linn would say. “I happen to think it’s a particularly attractive moustache. Very erotic.” He’d use such words as “erotic”, eager to appall his spinsterly sister and her spinsterly friend, and if they were in the right sort of mood (they were usually in the right sort of mood), Charlotte and Alice would utter shocked tut-tutting gasps to please him. She never thought that — within a few years — she would, in her turn, begin to develop one. She was (and always had been) frizzily dark-haired and sallow-skinned, and it slowly occurred to her — as she examined her face in the mirror (if it was one of her dauntless days) — that what were unquestionably hairs on her upper lip were beginning to achieve the status of a full-grown moustache, as flourishing and twirlable — she felt — as that of any villain in a novel or play.

  “… Come, my Trilby, look a little lower down, between the houses on
the other side of the river …” — the voice was wheedling and insinuating, with a strong foreign accent, not fully fluent in English — “… There is a little light glimmering yonder — it is light of ugly little building — and inside are eight marble slabs — all in a row …” — Svengali twiddled and twirled the lank hair that hung down the side of his face, at his moustache and his beard, twisting them counterclockwise around his fingers as if creating small, tight curls — “… It is called the Morgue …”

  She had been a patient of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (the — nudge, nudge — mad-doctor) for over seven years. First the seven years of dithering and denying, the various experiments, and then the seven years of treatment. More experiments. Mrs. Albert Comstock had recommended, had virtually insisted. She’d heard so much about him. Surely some prince was poised to rescue her, lopping his way through the forest of bearded sentinels with his upraised sword? Her hair had become a little too faded and thin for her to let it down, Rapunzel-like, for him to climb up to reach her tower. It would have to be a not very impressive two-feet-high tower, and — even then — the hair would snap when he was half way up and he would fall to his death, skewered on his own sword. She would have to plait her moustache: it would then bear the weight of armies, and stretch the height of the Flatiron Building. Lines of young princes, their newly polished armor gleaming, would form to make the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk ascent to the schoolroom. They would use the window at the front of the house, facing out across Chestnut Street. She could imagine the expression on their faces when they straddled the window ledge and had a close-up view of what they had climbed up, and of the woman they had risked their lives to claim. The air would be black with princes hurtling to their doom, throwing themselves down like aristocratic lemmings — “Don’t climb up, chaps! She’s absolutely frightful!” — from the cliff-edge of the schoolroom window, a flock of falling wingless Icaruses thudding earthward.

  No prince was on his way to rescue her, that was for sure.

  She would have to organize her own escape. She’d do it through her writing, she’d do it by finding the right words, the Ali Baba “Open, Sesame!” to fling open the locked doors. Like the pupils of St. Cassian of Imola, she’d find an unsuspected power in the nib of her pen. Cassian was a Christian schoolmaster who had refused to make sacrifices to the heathen gods, so he had been handed over to his pupils, who had leaped upon him and stabbed him to death with their iron pens. All it took was a little imagination from the relevant authorities, and going to school could so easily be transformed into a positively enjoyable experience.

  Stab!

  Stab!

  Stab!

  (STAB EVIL SINNER!

  (If it wasn’t ENORMOUS SIBYL it was EVIL SINNER. There were, in fact, several candidates for stabbing, many candidates, a crack-of-doom line of them, and — on her good days — she felt tireless.)

  4

  She had been sleeping in new cotton sheets, and little knots of whiteness clung to her hair, her top lip, her eyebrows and eyelashes, like unmelted flakes of snow in a cold room. Absentmindedly she began to pick at the tiny cotton balls. The hairbrush, in her other hand, was as white and ready for spinning as a flax-packed distaff. How very appropriate. When she had accumulated enough material she could dye the cotton with her watercolors and perfect her Lady of Shalott impersonation, weaving a magic web with colors gay, watching shadows of the world appear in the mirror hanging before her. English authors seemed to have spent most of the last century gazing into mirrors, more and more searchingly as it drew to its close.

  Colours.

  That should have been the spelling. Colours gay.

  She tried to observe English spelling for English authors, but sometimes forgot. Best men are moulded out of faults. That’s what Mariana had said. (Though — a vague memory, this, of something she might once have read — hadn’t Shakespeare originally written “molded”, and wasn’t it the English spelling, not the American, that had changed? She wasn’t sure. Attempts at consistency were beset with hazards.) She was becoming thoroughly Websterized, Websterized in her spelling by Noah Webster, and Websterized — if she wasn’t careful, and relaxed her vigilance — in everything else by Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, proprietor of the Webster Nervine Asylum in Poughkeepsie, as echoing and clangorously guarded as one of those mediæval castles crammed with stitch-stitch-stitching women. “Webster” meant “weaver”. Spider-like, they spun their sticky webs, and tapestries — like mirrors for entrapment — hung in narrow angled corridors all around them. The web had flown out and floated wide; the mirror would crack from side to side. It would be quite relaxing to float down the river, lying robed in snowy white, freed from the oppression of reflection by the breaking of the mirror. Websters were everywhere apparent. If you weren’t careful, you’d find yourself licking the back of a Webster as you prepared to apply a postage stamp.

  “Hello, Ben,” she’d said yesterday morning, seeing one-cent stamps on some of the letters that had just been delivered, looking at Benjamin Franklin. This was what she sometimes said when she came across any representation of the man whose name had been given to her brother. No wonder Benjamin Franklin was colored green, finding himself on the lowest-valued stamp. William Henry Harrison might be purple in the face, but at least they’d put him on the thirteen-cents stamp! That’s what Benjamin Franklin was thinking. It would be worth it to be blue in the face, as long as — like James Madison — you were on a stamp worth two dollars. Huh! from Benjamin Franklin. Two dollars! Then she’d seen that some Websters had been pushed invasively through the mail slot as well; not Noahs, not Dr. Wolcott Ascharms, but Daniels, all in a chorus-line row on ten-cents stamps on a package, tanned and weather-beaten in brown, clearly men who were at one with nature, rarely without their hoes in their hands, and used to dealing with farm animals. Websters were pressing in upon her spelling, her brain, her tongue.

  “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” That’s what Daniel Webster had said. That’s what Miss Hayergaal had written on the blackboard, and the whole class had recited it in unison. You knew he’d shouted it, because Miss Hayergaal had written an exclamation point.

  “One and inseparable!”

  That’s what they’d shouted, the same words at the same time, learned by heart like arithmetical tables. They’d sounded like a multiplicity of the Three Musketeers, all for one, and one for all, rapiers twitching to thrust into Cardinal Richelieu. If the same opportunity presented itself to Mrs. Albert Comstock and the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild — killing a cardinal must feature high on their list of priorities — they’d be there with their umbrellas lethally positioned for action, vigorously have-at-thee-varleting.

  All the needles gleamed in the little light that penetrated the narrow windows.

  Needles will make you better.

  Needles will effect a cure.

  Stitch-stitch-stitch.

  The curse would be on her soon enough. She had no loyal knight and true, and Mrs. Albert Comstock stretched before her like a mountainous subcontinent. She might have spent the whole of yesterday afternoon with the dreadful woman, but that did not grant her immunity from future visitations.

  (This last word, with its implications of suffering and affliction, was a good choice of noun. Plagues made visitations. She also thought that Mrs. Albert Comstock’s occasional description of her “At Homes” as “gatherings” was — for her — eerily prescient. Gatherings were suppurating swellings, boils on the point of bursting. The word described 5 Hampshire Square with forensic exactness, captured that unforgettable atmosphere of hedonistic jollity.)

  At least she hadn’t also spent the whole evening with her as Ben had — afternoon and evening with Mrs. Albert Comstock: his perilous voyagings on the oceans of the world must hold few fears for him after this — hauled along to the theatre as a member of her party. Her brave seafaring brother!

  As she picked out the cotton with her right hand, she stored the harvest in he
r cupped left hand, beside the hairbrush handle, humming to herself.

  “I wish I was in de land ob cotton,

  Old time dar am not forgotten;

  Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land!

  In Dixie whar I was born in,

  Early on one frosty mornin’…”

  With her ready grasp of modern history, Mrs. Albert Comstock had been heard to remark what a pity it was that the Civil War had ended slavery, as the darkies — she used this word (at least, in public) instead of “niggers” to demonstrate her daringly liberal views for the benefit of Mrs. William Boemer — had been having such a good time on the plantations. She visualized the plantations as rather like well-tended orchards: regular sun-dappled rows of identically shaped trees, ripe red fruit, apples, cherries, glowing in the soft, fresh greenery, stretching neatly away to the horizon, a darkie Paradise before the Fall as they — laughing for sheer delight — gathered clumps of cotton that were as clean and white as washing laid out to dry. In the fall the leaves would turn red and gold, and shrivel, become thin and papery and blow away, leaving the branches bare. There would be music at dusk as the trees darkened, and big white grins — they were like thoughtless, carefree children — would gleam like the fruit that had once been there in the daytime as they sang and danced in their joy.

  “Some folks like to sigh,

  Some folks do, some folks do;

  Some folks long to die,

  But that’s not me nor you …”

  They were as happy as the day was long, and the day was long in Dixie.

  “… Away, away, away down south in Dixie!

  Away, away, away down south in Dixie! …”