Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  He had been struggling for years.

  If Annie had never gone to Madame Roskosch, if she had given birth to her child, this child — when Papa died — would have been almost the same age as Alice herself had been during those secret journeys through the wall and to the Celestial City, the time when Annie had been made pregnant. If Annie had lived, her child would now be almost twenty-five, the same age as Ben. But Annie had gone to Madame Roskosch, to the address that Alice had read out to her, and Annie had died because Madame Roskosch had been an incompetent abortionist. She hadn’t brought together those long separated, shown Annie an accurate likeness of a future husband, and given his name; she had killed her. This was what Alice believed had happened, what she had worked out over the years, though she did not know for certain.

  What was certain was that she had never seen Annie again.

  Upstairs, down a long corridor, a door opened, and she heard her father’s voice.

  “Alice?”

  “Yes, P-P-Papa?”

  It seemed excessively vindictive of fate that the stutter she had developed should experience particular difficulty with the letter “p.” She couldn’t say “Papa” without stuttering.

  “Has the newspaper arrived?”

  “Yes, P-P-Papa.”

  She couldn’t say her own name without stuttering.

  “Bring it to me in my room.”

  “Yes, P-P-Papa.”

  She wasn’t Miss Pinkerton. She was Miss P-P-Pinkerton. She had heard Myrtle Comstock, Mrs. Albert Comstock’s daughter — a woman who pushed the frontiers of sophistication ever outward — calling her this to Mrs. Goodchild. “Myrtle! You really are dreadful!” That had been the response. Mrs. Goodchild had been delighted. Alice ought to join Miss Stammers on her action-packed dog-walking expeditions, Miss Stutters and Miss Stammers — what, precisely, was the distinction between a stutter and a stammer? — jerkily advancing, leashed to unruly hounds, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of speech impediments.

  It would take them so long to say the dogs’ names that if any dog made a break for freedom it would be off and away before they could call it to heel.

  “H-H-Hamlet!”

  “H-H-Hans!”

  “K-K-Kierk-k-kegaard!”

  (You could virtually guarantee that Alice would be the one charged with the duty of summoning Kierkegaard.)

  Distant triumphant barks.

  Mocking woofs.

  A landscape empty of dogs.

  The idea was so appealing that she ignored the fact that Miss Stammers did not, in fact, stammer. With Miss Stammers, Chastity Heighton, and Sobriety Goodchild and his daughter Serenity amongst its inhabitants, Longfellow Park was positively awash with the misleadingly monikered. You’d barely recovered from the shock of grasping that the poisonous squat sniggerer in front of you bore the Christian — Christian! — name Serenity, when it dawned upon you that her surname was Goodchild.

  Carefully, she began to smooth the newspaper where she had crumpled it slightly, Annie saving a page with the names of women who could foretell the future, women born with a genuine gift. She folded it carefully, arranging it with the engraving of the Board of Governors on top, their beards neatly on display, all lined up like an illustration in a sporran catalogue. Gradually, the trembling began to slow.

  “Alice?”

  “Yes, P-P-Papa.”

  She began to walk upstairs. The newspaper still shook slightly in her hands, as if from a distant subterranean tremor.

  19

  She was at the bottom of the stairs, and there was no newspaper lying on the tiles. It was Sunday. There would not have been a newspaper there. Yesterday’s newspaper had already been read, and she had used it to wrap around one of her writing journals when she stored it away.

  She was conscious of letting out her breath suddenly, as if she had been holding it all that time, breathing suspended for a while. She had experienced one of those moments that sometimes happened when a certain passage in a book was read, a certain picture contemplated. It happened over and over again. Time ceased to exist, and she became one with what she read, what she contemplated, within the work of art, like her namesake Alice within the looking-glass. It happened every time she studied Linnaeus’s painting in the schoolroom. The water in the ewer was still hot, steam rising. It must be like dreaming was supposed to be, when time was concentrated into a few seconds, or like drowning, when a life passed before the eyes in moments. Maggie Tulliver must have experienced this, clasped in Tom’s arms, as she and her brother sank to their deaths beneath the flood water: beating her doll’s wooden head against the pillars, cutting her hair jaggedly, Behaving Worse than She Expected, Trying to Run Away from Her Shadow …

  She looked into the room — glass-enclosed, plant-filled, cold in winter — where the piano was, at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. No fire had yet been set in this room, and her breath whitened. She didn’t know why she looked in there; she knew her mother was still asleep upstairs. It was a major undertaking now, to attempt to bring Mama downstairs, and she spent most of her time in her room.

  Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s eyes looked intensely across at her from the music rack. The last thing she could remember her mother playing on the piano had been not Gottschalk but “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” and the music for this was still there. It was in a book with several other songs, and the illustration on the cover was for “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” She hadn’t seen it for a while, and seeing it again made her realize how much she disliked it.

  It depicted a black man and woman, and the two figures were utterly grotesque. Somehow, they reminded her of an illustration of an elephant she had seen in an eighteenth-century travel book, obviously drawn by an artist who had never seen an elephant. He must have drawn it from a written description, rather in the way that Mrs. Albert Comstock designed her laugh, and the result — like the laugh — was oddly, disturbingly wrong. On the cover of the sheet music the theme was more that of crocodiles than of elephants. The two clumsily drawn figures — a man and a woman awkwardly bidding farewell by shaking hands (this seemed a curiously formal gesture: they appeared to be holding each other at a distance, rather than embracing), the man carrying a carpetbag — had bizarrely extended feet, as if they were wearing clowns’ boots, long and narrow like crocodile jaws. Continuing the crocodilian theme, they had small pointed teeth in their enormously wide mouths, bared all ready for a dentist’s inspection (though G. G. Schiffendecken would not have been enthusiastic: no money here), completely without humor. No smiles, these.

  It brought to mind — she shuddered at the recollection — a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin she had seen as a child, in which Topsy had been played by a middle-aged white man — a little, stunted figure with a falsetto voice — in blackface. There had been something nightmarish about this figure.

  “I ’spect I grow’d!” it said, drawing out the last word — “grrroooow’d!” — and visibly waiting for the laughs, which came.

  The audience shrieked, and it stood there, rolling its bugged-out eyes, with its mouth wide open. He was famous for playing this rôle. It was the most disturbing thing she had seen in the theatre until Dum-Dum the Dummy came along.

  She saw a whole row of blackfaced white people looking like this. They were swaying from side to side, white-gloved hands fluttering like flocks of escaping birds, and tears, crocodile tears, poured down their faces as they sang a sentimental song. It was like seeing Mr. Soot, the Sweep, and his family, with their soot-blackened faces, bursting into a harmonious rendition of some popular minstrel-show favorite, waving their brushes in time to the music as dark clouds billowed Hades-like around them. Their voices echoed hollowly up the soot-encrusted interiors of the chimneys, adding a mournful resonance to their words.

  “The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home;

  ’Tis summer, the darkies are gay;

  The corn-top’s ripe, and the meadow’s in the bloom,

  Whil
e the birds make music all the day.

  The young folks roll on the little cabin floor,

  All merry, all happy and bright;

  By-’n-by hard times comes a-knocking at the door: —

  Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!

  “Weep no more, my lady,

  O, weep no more today!

  We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,

  For the old Kentucky home, far away …”

  “Weep no more, my lady, O, weep no more today!” they sang, and the more they sang about not weeping, the more they wept. White tracks ran down from the eyes through the burned cork blackness, their brushes drooped, and the crocodile faces became the faces of zebras. This Happy Family enjoyed a good sentimental snivel. It quite cheered them up. They’d be merry, all happy and bright.

  Alice thought again of the moment when Annie had opened the door to Mrs. Albert Comstock for the first time, and Mrs. Albert Comstock had seen that the Pinkertons’ new servant-girl was black. It was something she would not forget. It was something she had to remember. Annie had just joined them. It was her first job, and she had been nervous. Annie opened the door, bobbed a little curtsy, and looked up with a smile. Alice had seen her practicing in the kitchen, when she thought no one was around. Mrs. Albert Comstock — who rarely deigned to notice servants, in any case — swiftly overcame her initial expression of surprise, and looked through, beyond Annie, to where Mama had been approaching.

  “Gracious!” she had said, indicating Annie with a slight sideways tilt of the head, and the ha-ha-ha-ha sound that she used in place of a laugh. “What a lot of teeth!”

  She spoke like someone referring to “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the two crocodile-footed monstrosities.

  When she returned home, Mrs. Albert Comstock would have greeted Myrtle with the words, “Only one today!” It was a good day, a very good day, but — “Guess where it was!” — that one was rather too close to home. It wasn’t there for very long, just over a year and a half, and then it died.

  The word “crocodile” stirred other thoughts. She was as haunted by crocodiles as Thomas De Quincey in his opium-induced dreamings, as if she — in her turn — had emptied some dull opiate to the drains. What could she remember about crocodiles? This was an exercise she sometimes performed with herself, choosing topics at random, checking — she felt — for signs of movement in the brain, as if gingerly moving an injured limb to see if there was pain.

  “I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles”: these words, and one other sentence, were the words from Confessions of an English Opium Eater that had stayed in her mind. David Copperfield and Peggotty. Herodotus. St. Theodore and St. Helenus. Robert Louis Stevenson. Christina Rossetti. Oscar Wilde. They’d all been connected with, or had mentioned, crocodiles. The way to escape crocodiles, David Copperfield had read, was to baffle them by constantly turning as you ran away from them, as they found this difficult to do because of their unwieldiness. (But wouldn’t this be too risky? Wouldn’t it slow you down too much?) Peggotty had formed the impression that crocodiles were a sort of vegetable. Herodotus …

  She thrust the illustration out of sight, and walked out of the room — half consciously tucking some of her mother’s Louis Moreau Gottschalk music under her arm, as if it was something to read in a quiet moment — and back upstairs.

  She hurried up the last flight of stairs to the schoolroom, careful not to spill the hot water. It would be almost too much of a surprise for Ben, to emerge half asleep from his room, thoughts of Japan in his head, and see — at the end of the dark corridor — a figure in a pale kimono moving away from him. He had never been to Japan: he would be imagining scenes from Grandpapa’s photographs, a painted landscape, words on a page.

  20

  The schoolroom ran the full depth of the house, and she stood looking out again at the back, gazing out from her high window.

  The fields and orchards that had once spread away, and up to Hudson Heights, were going, had gone. In the dark morning light, deep under snow, what she could see — the gas-lamps obscured by windblown blizzards — had the feeling of somewhere north of anywhere else, cold and gloomy in perpetual twilight, a huddled underground settlement in the Arctic, some Siberian port where the sea had turned to ice and vessels were frozen at their moorings, rigging furred like frosted spiders’ webs. The inhabitants, trebled in size with thick clothing, slowly picked their way through streets of frozen mud, their whitened breath like low clouds turgidly unfolding. Everyone was faceless, swathed in mufflers and low-pulled hats, with just their eyes showing, the streets peopled by bank robbers and bandits, gingerly picking their way toward their next holdup in a society where all control had collapsed. It made her think of a map of the world that showed only the unexplored regions, a world with no names, just untouched, unwritten-on whiteness. The Arctic was an unmapped place like this; Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s phrenology skull with no labeled names.

  To dream of looking down from high places, or out of windows, or being in a high garret, shows an ambitious mind, curious desires, wandering imagination, and confused thoughts.

  She felt — as she had felt all the previous summer — that she could sense New York City moving up toward them, that the city would engulf Longfellow Park, and turn it into another lost community, like Manhattanville or Bloomingdale Village. On nights, especially the sleepless summer nights (there had been many of these), she had been sure that she could sometimes feel the house shake slightly as explosions blasted the rock of Manhattan for the foundations of new buildings, new streets, whole new areas, and the city advanced north. People began to live in places that were not yet on the map, did not really exist. When there had been too little light to read any longer, she had lain and listened in twilight and darkness. It had been too hot to light the lamps, and the twilights had been long, the objects around slowly thickening into indistinctness in the growing gloom. They would surely not be using explosives at night, but she sensed that the windows rattled, the domes of the lamps vibrated, and her dim reflection shivered in the mirror. Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll swayed forward, and then away again. A dull reddish glow burned briefly on the underside of low cloud, and then the house shifted a little. A dull film of dust removed the gleam from the leaves in the garden, and darkened the brightness of glass. When sheets were removed from the clothesline, and when she brushed her hair at night, grains of powdered rock would fall out. The polished surface of her dressing table blurred, and sometimes she thought that the dead gray dust — she stared intently, like someone looking at a first gray hair — came from inside her own head, loosened by the vigor of her brushing.

  One, two, three …

  If I cry, she would think on the bad nights — there were many bad nights — my tears will leave a track down the dust on my face, and everyone will know I have been crying. When the wind — ah, the wind! — blew from the south, she could hear very faint dull explosions like a distant conflict, and birds would whir up into the air, startled, as if expecting to be shot.

  In the late summer both sides of Dadenhof Road had been marked out in building lots, and the whole of Heneacher Woods, all the way up to Megoran Hill and Jacksons Bluff (she felt her usual instinctive twitch at “Jacksons,” the urge to insert an apostrophe), had been sold. Across the whole of Longfellow Park, fields and farms were vanishing, buildings being demolished, new constructions appearing. It was like the time when she was a little girl, and the Shakespeare Castle had been demolished on Hudson Heights. Its extensive grounds had been developed, and — in place of the topiary and the peacocks — Pettifar’s Orphanage, The House of the Magdalenes, and the North River Lunatic Asylum had appeared, with their Imperial Roman rows of columns and flights of steps, a gleaming white city for the abandoned, the fallen, the demented.

  She thought — at various times in her childhood — that she belonged in one of these last two institutions: in The House of the Magdalenes (as one of the nuns, not one of the
sinful women), or in the lunatic asylum (this time as one of the inmates, not as a guardian). Women in white, women in black, nurses and nuns, smiled firmly, reached out their hands, capes and cowls obscuring their shadowed faces.

  Some of the boys — Sobriety Goodchild always to the fore, the cruelest, the most inventive and insistent — displayed a fondness for deciding (and loudly proclaiming) which girls at Miss Pearsall’s School should be dispatched to which of the institutions. They took particular pleasure in urging the orphanage upon girls who had recently lost a mother or father (even better, of course, if it was both): “Got no Ma, Got no Pa,/Time to go to Pettifar!”

  The more vulgar boys (Sobriety Goodchild — needless to say — again a prime contender) were fond of loud speculation about which girls should be in The House of the Magdalenes. Alice had not been entirely sure what a Magdalene was, and vaguely thought at first — from what she had heard — that all those young women had somehow lost their way, and were waiting until they could remember the direction again. “Can’t they use maps?” she had asked, eager to be of assistance. Sobriety Goodchild would have been the one to ask about maps. The Magdalenes could have consulted him for assistance. “He’s very keen on geography,” his mama had unconvincingly announced a little while earlier. As far as Alice could ascertain, this dubious assertion was based upon Sobriety’s saying “Lake — Snigger! — Titicaca!” a lot in a loud voice, having — whilst idly browsing in his atlas — discovered this irresistibly vulgar-sounding geographical feature straddling the lands of the clearly uninhibited Peruvians and Bolivians. If it wasn’t — Snigger! — titty, it was — Snigger! — caca with Sobriety for ages. North Americans had — how superior! — Lakes Superior, Ontario, Michigan, any number of sober-sounding alcohol-free fresh-water lakes. South Americans had Lake Titicaca.

  The lost and wandering Magdalenes had long hair that was darkened and clotted with ointment, and they held half-emptied boxes of it in their glistening fingers, as if they were all Maggie Tullivers, innocently caught out in some new enormity. Their elbows were wrapped around with clean white bandages, tidily fastened with neat prim bows. Old bruises and scratches marked hands and arms, and their dresses were dusty and ripped at the knees. They were much given to falling — this much Alice had gathered — and these were the scars of their falling. Perhaps, like Albert Comstock, they were sinfully given to not-so-secret drinking, or — she remembered a comment from Mrs. Goodchild — excessive finery in clothes, keeling over from too-high heels, twisting their ankles as they fell in a flurry of bright silks. Sobriety Goodchild — who else? — had soon clarified matters for her. “Charlotte the Harlot,” Sobriety had called Charlotte, and poor, dumpy, innocent Charlotte had sobbed because it had sounded so rude. Alice had always been the favored candidate for the North River Lunatic Asylum: they were nearer the truth with this one, she supposed, than they had been with Charlotte, and they had been unrelenting