Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “This is my spittoon,” Grandpapa had said, but he had not — rather disappointingly — demonstrated it in action.

  (Hacht-pertong!)

  There were maps covered in red on the walls, though the red was coloring not the land but the seas, showing the routes of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company’s steamships, as if this was the element he controlled. “He’s in his element,” she thought — pleased with such an exact use of the phrase — as he ran his fingers across the Pacific Ocean with practiced ease, spanning the globe with a sweep of his hand. It was like being in the headquarters of some great general, the place where he planned his battles and conquests. “We shall attack here!” he would say, his finger decisively stabbing in an X-marks-the-spot sort of gesture at the place he had chosen.

  The streets had been strangely dark, dark with the clothes of the men and youths who were everywhere, dark with the shadows from the new high buildings blocking out the sun. The only women were women made out of wood, women made out of stone, not like objects of veneration, but like sacrifices. They were mythical figures, symbolic groupings, veiled and draperied allegories, lining the edges of the roofs and occupying niches, poised in the postures of those about to jump to their deaths. Sailing ships lined the East River, jammed in so closely that it was as if they were permanent structures, and would never leave, fluttering with so many flags that they seemed to be commemorating some special day of celebration. Their bowsprits projected right across the street, carriages drove past beneath them, and she looked down on them from Grandpapa’s high window at the top of the building. There were men in the air above the center of the street at her eye level, working in the rigging above the horses and the laden wagons, the piled barrels, the great sound of shouting. She felt that she could reach across and touch them. After the acrobats, there would be elephants.

  She had come across the ships suddenly.

  She had been walking hand in hand with Grandpapa beneath the curve of the elevated railroad in Coenties Slip, and there was the thunder of a steam train rattling around overhead, its tall chimney like that of a train out in the West, its whistle shrieking out across the prairies, startling the great herds of buffalo. Whoever had later designed the roller coaster at Luna Park must have often strolled around there, finding his inspiration in the juddering sway of the carriages, the lurching curves, the held-in screams of the helplessly thrown-about passengers. There were shanty-like booths that seemed to belong beneath a Coney Island ride — she half expected the hiss and smoke of fairground lighting, the crack of rifles at shooting-galleries — and there were boxes under tarpaulins as if in an open-air warehouse, with high-sided horse-drawn wagons drawn up beside them, spilling out straw on to the cobblestones. There was a transient, temporary air about everything — this fair was a traveling fair about to move on elsewhere — and men in dark suits strolled about, lounged, leaned and propped themselves up. No one said, “How the deuce did she get here?” No one appeared even to notice her, as she stared about, beneath their eye level.

  On South Street, as they approached Grandpapa’s office, she found herself walking beneath the beautifully carved figureheads as they jutted out across the sidewalk between the gas-lamps. The elaborately painted women were lapped by looped chains, and bore the names of goddesses and virtues. He pointed them out to her, and told her their names, just as he told her the names of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company vessels in the photographs in his office.

  “That one’s Pandora …”

  Tap, tap on the glass.

  “That one’s Persephone …”

  Tap, tap.

  “That one’s Eurydice …”

  Tap, tap.

  His fingerprints left clouded whorls upon the surface of the glass, and it was as if the ships were becalmed in a rapidly descending mist, their sails drooping. Through the mist, through the snow, the not-yet-ancient Mariner’s ship sailed, and it grew wondrous cold. And ice, mast-high, came floating by, as green as emerald. She had just been reading the poem.

  “That one’s Psyche …”

  The albatross, its wings creaking as ponderously as the timbers of a fully rigged sailing-ship, drew down close to the mist-enveloped vessel.

  …In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,

  It perched for vespers nine …

  The worshipers gathered on the deck by the light of the evening star, their heads bowed, their faces covered, the silent reaches of the ice all around. Thick snow fell upon them, icicles hung from the rigging, and they held out neatly shaped pieces of food between their thumbs and index fingers as if about to administer communion.

  Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

  This was what they repeated in chorus, their voices muffled.

  One side of the muddy street was all constructed of wood and taut rope, like the elaborate networks of wires — for electricity, for telephone and telegraph — that would later span the lower streets of the city; the other side of the street was of brick and stone, but with all the canvas apparent everywhere else it might as well have been painted scenery. All the figures in the crowded street — all the living figures — (Jo March had been perfectly correct) were congregating men, though not all of them were gentlemen. She saw it all, like something beneath glass, like a tiny detailed model, or a photograph, the nearer figures standing stiff and posed, their shadows hard-edged in the bright sunshine, so that they would appear sharp and focused; the further figures ghost images, blurred and half-formed, mistily caught against the walls and streets behind and beneath them, more solid than they were. Everywhere there were wooden carts, pulled by hand or by horses, capstans, thick coiled ropes, piles of merchandise, a smell like that of new sacks, a sewery whiff from the dark water, what Mrs. Goodchild would describe as “a not very polite sort of smell.” Such smells had been all around her (she was fearless in her quest) — human waste, horses’ (you had to watch where you stepped) — though it had not been a high summer’s day. It would have been a distinctly high summer’s day. Perhaps the beards were designed to be utilized as filters when it became unusually — ahem — unpleasant, a Darwinian evolution to protect the species, the male species. Thus equipped, men could survive the worst that the sense of smell could throw at them. Clutching Grandpapa’s hand, she leaned out to look down into the East River. She had recently read about the holy River Ganges in India, and had the thought that she might see bodies floating past beneath her and heading out to sea, bobbing against each other like Halloween apples, all facing upward and displaying their still, sad faces. What she saw in the windows across the street were not window displays of the sort she had been used to, but goods piled up as if in a warehouse, or the cargo hold of a ship, and all the goods were those that would be needed on board.

  There was Cordage painted across the brickwork above the windows, Chandler, Sail Makers — and there was Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company. There was an area of different-colored stone in front of the entrance to Grandpapa’s office, like ballast from the hold of a cargo vessel used to pave it after a long voyage. It was greenish, and cold-looking, ice from around the not-yet-ancient Mariner’s ship transported there, crashing down on deck from high above. She bent down and touched it when Grandpapa was not looking. It did feel cold, slightly, and as smooth as something polished. She had a sense of somewhere foreign and far away, a land elsewhere, a stateless visitor resting her hand upon the floor in the dim interior of some embassy. Outside, the polished brass plate on the wall glinted dully. This, also, would feel cold, slightly.

  …Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white,

  Glimmered the white Moon-shine …

  That was the expression that Papa used when she thought out ideas like this.

  Moonshine.

  He said the same thing, his fingers making dismissive take-them-away gestures, if he came across any of her ideas for stories, any of her scribbled beginnings. She usually hid them away now, and no longer left them — invi
ting favorable comment — wherever she had been sitting in the house.

  Moonshine!

  Starveling the tailor played Moonshine in the play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It should have been Snug the joiner. A familiar feeling of rebelliousness was coming across her. Snug would have had access to tools, to potential weapons — saws, hammers — far more powerful than Starveling’s needles and thread. She would have fought back, sawing and hammering with an inspired creative frenzy, though demolishing rather than creating. She’d see Papa, and then she’d saw Papa. See-saw, Margery Daw, Alice shall be a new master. Here was another of the Happy Families bursting out of hiding to commit slaughter, loitering in a cupboard all day, waiting for the dark. She’d be Mr. Chip, the Carpenter, kneeling on Papa with her right knee, pushing well in as she sawed away, with her bottom lip protruding in concentration with the air of someone enthusiastically constructing a coffin. She’d saw Papa, and then she’d hammer Papa. She’d be Mrs. Chip, the Carpenter’s Wife, lashing out with a hammer that was the size of her whole body. She’d — Tap! Tap! Tap! — her back arched well back to get in the full arc of hammering, drive home the nails in the coffin-lid, at long last completing the construction of a favorite piece of furniture. There’d be plenty of chips off the old block, no doubt about that. There wouldn’t be much left of the block when she’d finished.

  Well shone, Moon!

  Well sawn, Mr. Chip!

  Well destroyed, Snug!

  Well hammered, Mrs. Chip!

  Moonshine!

  She straightened up, but still had a sensation of coldness when she walked into the dark interior of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company. It did not just permeate her from her fingers; it crept up through the soles of her feet, also.

  Ice.

  Mast-high.

  As green as emerald.

  Outside there was a painted board above the first-floor windows — oddly like a misplaced family heirloom hung above the chimney piece in some vast baronial hall — depicting a steamship plowing confidently through the sea, white foam boiling away to illustrate its effortless speed. And, on the ledge outside Grandpapa’s office on the third story, there were the figures of the waiting women gazing out to sea.

  All the figures on the ledge were from Greek or Roman mythology, just as the sailing ships in the early years of Grandpapa’s business — the years of the child-hating Santa Claus — had borne the names of women from classical mythology. She had imagined the ships’ figureheads carved in marble, cool and white and aloof above the spray, like blind-eyed busts in a Roman museum. Standing at Grandpapa’s office window, seeing the backs of the stone figures, she had (it seemed thematically appropriate) imagined the Dibbo Daughters lined up on the ledge and about to jump.

  “Jump!” she should be yelling encouragingly from below through cupped hands. “Jump!”

  She had recently quarreled bitterly with Euterpe Dibbo, and was in vengeful mood. The first four of the Daughters had appeared by this date, the promising start of Daddy Dibbo’s idiotic and doomed attempt to produce (with a little incidental assistance from his wife) a complete set of nine daughters, and name them after the Greek muses. It was strange what the writing of overambitious poetry could do to you. Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, and Urania lined up on the ledge next to a still-scowling Euterpe. The muse of music and lyric poetry (and flute playing)! Any sign of a flute, and she’d snap it in half with a disgruntled grunt and stab you with it, the mood she was in.

  “Jump! Go on, jump!”

  She demonstrated her support to fillip their confidence a little. It was the sort of person she was.

  If they leaped too far out, they’d become entangled in the rigging of the nearest ship, and there they’d dangle — boing-boinging up and down, sourly complaining in mid-boing — like the myth of Arachne gone all too horribly wrong.

  She didn’t know the names of all the women depicted in the statues, some of them seated, some of them standing, all of them gazing out in the direction of the sea, shielding their eyes to see better. Perhaps some of them did not have names. Penelope — now there was a woman who knew about tapestries — was certainly there, searching for a first glimpse of Ulysses returning home after his twenty years of wandering. Next to her was Iphigenia. Perhaps she was hoping to see Achilles. Her father — Agamemnon — sent her to Aulis, pretending that she was to be married to Achilles there, but she was really sent as a sacrifice — Diana had insisted — so that the Greek fleet would receive a favorable wind and could sail to Troy to recover Helen. Her father had led her not to her bridegroom but to her death. She would have known what was going to happen to her, when they dressed her as a sacrificial victim, not a bride.

  “I was cut off from hope in that sad place …”

  — that was what she was saying —

  “… Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears:

  My father held his hand upon his face;

  I, blinded with tears,

  “Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs

  As in a dream. Dimly I could descry

  The stern black-bearded kings with wolvish eyes,

  Waiting to see me die …”

  You just knew that The Bearded Ones would have been there. It was the sort of thing they’d have hated to miss.

  Papa had not been there on that day — it had been just her and Grandpapa — and she had peeped into Papa’s empty office, feeling as she did when she peeped into his study at home, feeling that she ought not to be there, seeing a place without him and realizing that such a thing was possible. Without him, the place should not exist. It was dark in the office, a feeling of blinds drawn down in mourning, the views from the window partially obscured by the statues, the backs of the women facing away from him, and it smelled of him, the smell of a tobacco-smoke impregnated beard, as if he were announcing his hidden presence.

  I am here in the room.

  Can you find out whereabouts I am?

  I shall leap out.

  I shall pounce.

  There were maps in his office, also, as there were in Grandpapa’s, but the maps in his office were of the world as it no longer was, the world as it had been before the Civil War (Civil!), the world as he wished it to be once more. Papa lived in a time of his own creating, where even the clock — tick-tock went the wall-clock ponderously, as big as a clock at a railroad station — moved at a pace he dictated. He would tick the time when it was allowed to tick-tock. Without his say-so, the hands of the clock would cease to move, the pages of the calendar would not be ripped away, and there would be an unbroken shaded silence in which nothing moved. Some strangers were named Mr. Robertson or Mr. Faulconbridge or “the man at number seventy-three”; some strangers were named Papa.

  Iphigenia had been the name of one of the earliest of the wooden sailing ships of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company, and the figurehead of the ship was in Grandpapa and Grandmama’s garden. There was what Grandpapa called his “quarterdeck” at the back of their house, and here — at the end of a long, narrowing wooden piazza — was the figurehead, with the ship’s wheel mounted in front of it. She would lie on the lawn beneath it, looking up at the calm, sad, downcast face surrounded by drifting clouds, imagining that she was floating in the air beneath the rooftop sculptures of the office, trying to induce a feeling of weightlessness, of vertigo, rather like the way in which she tried to lose her sense of direction by turning round in the darkness beneath her bedclothes. Sometimes she lay on top of the figurehead on the warm, smooth wood, in the afternoon summer sun, looking down through half-closed eyes at the grass beneath her, trying to see the waves beneath, trying to feel the undulation of the ship’s movements, herself moving away from the place where she was. She could hear the wind in the branches of the trees, the snapping of the flag on the flagpole. It was the sound of the sea nearby, beyond the bottom of the garden.

  7

  The bearded faces were blurred. The photograph of the bearded poets in An
American Anthology was covered by a protective sheet of tissue paper, like the illustrations in her Bible, and The Bearded Ones peered through, a caravan of Old Testament prophets stranded in a sudden desert sandstorm.

  (What was the collective noun for prophets? A clairvoyance? A prognostication?)

  They hovered in the air above her, a mirage in the desert air, far from the oasis, clouds covering the sun. The air became cooler, chillier, and a cold current rippled through the room like wind across a cornfield, rustling the curtains.

  Only Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman looked directly into the camera. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were all photographed in profile, giving them the appearance of suspects posed by a police photographer: THIS POET IS WANTED! Bryant and Holmes, like shortsighted duelists, stared into each other’s eyes almost nose to nose. They couldn’t possibly miss at this range. The remaining three poets — John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Sidney Lanier — favored the kind of expression employed by men faced by someone whom they did not wish to acknowledge, eyes focused evasively to one side, gazing intensely into the middle distance, but seeing nothing. It was the expression people were increasingly starting to assume when they were being photographed, pretending that the camera was not there, and had caught them unaware. Whitman — clearly no gentleman — was wearing a hat, and no necktie, but this was to be expected of a man who matily abbreviated his name to Walt, insisting upon familiarity. Billy Bryant? Olly Holmes? Sid Lanier? Not even the biggest of beards could possibly compensate for such summarily clipped forenames. It would compromise the integrity of the very poetry, threaten the meter, imperil the rhymes.