Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  She had — for a time — sought to subdue Sobriety with the aid of artfully administered dramatic irony, after she had first come across the concept as she (at the age of nine) worked her way through Macbeth, planning her New Improved version of Shakespeare. “A little water clears us of this deed,” said Lady Macbeth, her hands soaked in blood. “How easy is it then!” (Dramatic irony.) “Fail not our feast,” Macbeth instructed the soon-to-be-murdered Banquo. (Dramatic irony. Banquo did not fail the feast, and his ghost unleashed chaos.) Dramatic irony seemed guaranteed to produce reliable results, and Alice couldn’t wait to try it. All you had to do (the Macbeths obviously hadn’t realized this) was to say — in your most confident voice — the opposite of what you really wanted to happen, and blank out the words “God willing” from entering your head. (Not even “D.V.” should squeeze its way in through the slightest crack of lapsed concentration, and fingers must remain uncrossed, hands splayed out like Struwwelpeter’s.) She debated whether or not to employ Shakespearean English to ensure a favorable outcome, vaguely feeling that blank verse (or, at the very least, prose employed for particular dramatic purposes: she was a great reader of footnotes) held out a better chance of success. In the end, she decided on modern English, to avoid suspicion falling upon her as awful things began to happen to the object of her designs.

  “I’m sure he’ll be absolutely splendid,” she would announce in ringing tones whenever it was announced that Sobriety Goodchild was going to be persuaded to sing in front of a cowed assemblage. “I’m sure he’ll sing beautifully.” “I’m positive that everyone will really enjoy it.” These were other sentences she employed on a regular basis. She wasn’t sure whether it was the dramatic irony, or whether it was tempted fate (fate succumbed far too easily to temptation in her experience), but it seemed to work with gratifying regularity. The more extravagantly she expressed anticipation (always ensuring that Sobriety heard her), the worse his performance, though everyone applauded politely. Made ambitious by success (Macbeth ought to have warned her against the dangers of ambition) she began a plan, by subtle and sophisticated gradations, to lure Sobriety to his doom by the employment of dramatic irony. There would be an extra level of satisfaction in destroying an uncouth oaf by the use of a literary technique. “I’m sure it’s quite safe to climb upon the roof,” she could proclaim, her tone totally confident, dangling the bait of universal acclaim before his jaw-dangling stupidity. “I can see no possible danger in your launching yourself off into space from on top of the chimney.” That sort of thing. Experimentally, à propos of nothing whatever, she confidently asserted “I’m sure Sobriety won’t spontaneously combust” (this after a first reading of Bleak House) or “I’m absolutely certain that Sobriety’s head won’t fall off,” but results were distinctly disappointing. There had — in fact — been no results whatsoever, with no signs of flames or looseness at the neck. “Get a move on, God!” she’d muttered, a little impatiently, presuming that God was the fate she tempted, or the irony that she was attempting to make dramatic, but He hadn’t been listening, made sulky by her too-pushy confidence. She’d really been looking forward to Sobriety’s leap from the roof of The Old Pigpen, and the instant realization that this was not going to work, the look of terror on his face as he plunged, screaming, to a feather-free Icarusian death.

  Splat!

  She’d particularly looked forward to the Splat!

  No Splat! had been forthcoming, but — after she’d abandoned dramatic irony and put her trust in sheer maliciousness — she’d had her revenge on Sobriety Goodchild after all, and with the words of Shakespeare. So — ironically (this seemed the correct expression to employ) — dramatic irony had, despite her scorning its utter uselessness, played a part in the destruction of the wicked and cruel boy. (That’s what Jane Eyre had called John Reed. “You are like a murderer,” she had said — Alice had cheered her on — “you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!”) She’d done what she’d done all by herself, but God — encouraged by her efforts — had eventually done His share. God had bided His time (she’d had to wait years), but had at last — (grudgingly, she felt; He could be so petty for Someone capital-lettered and omnipotent: why couldn’t He just get on with it instead of moving in a mysterious way all the time?) — punished Sobriety. Smitten was probably the verb to use in this context; God seemed very taken with smiting. He had made him the husband of the wispy, the characterless, the virtually invisible, Mrs. Sobriety Goodchild, and the father — strange, still, to think of him as a husband and father, that poisonous little face of his contorted with taunting — of the dreadful Serenity Goodchild, twelve years old now, and already a domineering diva. It had been tempting fate to name her Serenity, and fate had embraced temptation with enthusiasm, crying out “Goody! Goody!” as it pounced. Perhaps the Splat! had arrived after all, wearing a frilly pink dress and a sulky expression.

  How pleasurable it had been (and still was, though he had to take his place in the line of contenders) to hate Sobriety Goodchild so entirely. It was very important, very necessary, to have someone to hate without reservation, more important — she felt herself thinking — than having someone to love. Love was overrated. This was what she told herself. This was what she tried to believe.

  One of the few occasions on which Alice went outside the house (apart from carefully planned outings to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s when that lady’s insistence finally became too much) was to attend the service at All Saints’ on Sundays, as she was doing today. The Reverend Goodchild liked to imply that his spiritual ministrations were the one thing that kept her going (translation: “It keeps the madwoman quiet, but don’t go too close”), but she went to see him and his wife for the same reason she went to see Mrs. Albert Comstock: to keep her hatred fresh, energizing. These feelings were dark plants, carefully nourished, lovingly tended.

  Oscar Wilde — here he was again — had described her feelings rather well, and supplied some useful expressions: “Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence! You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.” She wouldn’t agree with that last sentence. The first half was fine — she rather flourished on her bestial sense (her real self, she sometimes felt) — though she tended to feel that what she became was what she wanted to be, not what she would not be. She should try the opening sentences sometime, and see how they went down with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

  “Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence!”

  That should liven things up in the soporific surroundings of the music room. Teacups and biscuits would fly in all directions, and fans would flick out like lethal weapons. Brontosaurian boomings would rattle windows for miles around, and avalanches would imperil the steeper slopes of Hudson Heights. The shrill cries of startled babies and frightened lunatics would echo around the white-marbled emptinesses.

  21

  She poured the water into the basin on the hand-wash-stand, tied back her hair, took a deep breath — with the air of someone about to attempt a little adventurous pearl fishing — and immersed her face. If you tired of Carmen, there was always Les PÊcheurs de perles.

  Drowned in a bath of the tresses of Annie.

  She began to hum “Au fond du temple saint,” imagining silvery bubbles streaming out behind her as she swam deep down into the blue Ceylonese waters.

  “Au fond du temple saint, paré de fleurs et d’or,

  Une femme apparaÎt! Je crois la voir encore!…”

  Time for the symbolic cleansing ceremony — a sort of ritual purification (common amongst primitive peoples) — before she ventured into the unclean realm of the Reverend Goodchild.

  Would boiling water be powerful enough for this task?

  Should she have recklessly emptied a bottle of Lysol into the bowl, and washed away her face, ceased to be herself, just to be on the safe side?

  22

  It was on Hudson Heights that she had gone searching for Annie for a while, a
year or more after she had gone, circling the new buildings in the way that she had circled the vanished Shakespeare Castle, clockwise and counterclockwise, telling stories to Charlotte, and to Mary Benedict, as if Annie might have become one of the listeners, or a character in one of the stories, abandoned, fallen, demented. She had tried other places, and now she tried these. Annie had disappeared so suddenly – her few possessions had been left neatly tidied away in her little windowless room – that Alice could not believe that she was not coming back. There was the threaded needle carefully tucked into the shirtwaist she had been in the middle of letting out, and a half-eaten chocolate bar – a rare treat – hidden, still fresh, in a decorative box next to Reuben’s letters. It had once contained a pull-along iron toy of a father with a baby sitting astride one of his legs, over the shin. It had belonged to Edith. Each time the wheel turned, a bell would ring, and the father would lift his leg high into the air, as if bouncing the baby up and down.

  Hie to the market, Jenny come trot,

  Spilt all her buttermilk, every drop …

  (Ring! Ring! Ring!

  (Edith would hear the bell, and come running.)

  Every drop and every dram,

  Jenny came home with an empty can …

  A letter had arrived for Annie from her brother Reuben, two days after she had gone – she had said nothing to anyone, as if expecting to be back before anyone had noticed – and it remained for a while, in its bright blue envelope, propped up where she would see it as soon as she entered the room.

  Miss Annie Clement.

  “I miss Annie Clement,” Alice thought, and felt guilty because wordplay must mean a lack of emotion. It didn’t. It didn’t. “If he do bleed,” Lady Macbeth had said of the murdered Duncan – he bled, he most certainly bled, gallons gushed – “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,/For it must seem their guilt.” “Gild,” “guilt”: there were puns at moments of intense emotion. Alice took comfort in being like Lady Macbeth. It was a definite promotion from being one of the Weird Sisters. Not on her sole, but on her soul, she made her knife keen. That was Gratiano’s pun in The Merchant of Venice, another pun made as a knife approached a heart.

  She began at The House of the Magdalenes, the place of lost girls – though every face she saw there was white – circling in the dark early morning on days when she was not at school, or in the early dusk of evening. It was again a time of winds and snow, as if – by choosing the same weather as that in which she had last seen her – Alice might once more bring her into being. She went out into the coldness, serious and determined – well wrapped up – disguised as a girl about to toboggan or skate with friends. She was a Pinkerton. She should find clues, and follow them up – scribbled lines on a hidden note, telltale prints across fields with unbroken snow (she peered as closely as Good King Wenceslas’s page marking his footsteps), a mysterious message – but there were no clues to find.

  She peeped in at windows, seeing the girls, the sinful girls with their bowed heads, sitting at tables or carrying out their assigned duties. Sometimes she saw them nursing their babies (mysteriously, they all seemed to have babies; Sobriety Goodchild jeered and sniggered, explaining with crude simplicity, and it was no longer a mystery), and felt as if she was drawing nearer to a truth.

  The Magdalenes never appeared in the streets of Longfellow Park with their babies. To carry a child would be to invite a stoning. A large target painted helpfully upon the infant’s gown would convert it into an attraction at a traveling fair, with gaudy prizes for the best shots.

  “Me first! Me first!”

  Mrs. Albert Comstock – eager for all the fun of the fair – lurched forward, swiveling her arm around like the sail of a storm-battered windmill, unleashing a rock the size of a meteorite, still hot from its journey through space.

  Oh dear, what can the matter be?

  Thwunk!

  Dear, dear, what can the matter be?

  Thwunk! Thwunk!

  Oh dear, what can the matter be?

  Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk!

  She’d be so long at the fair.

  Rock after rock hurtled to the target, and Mrs. Albert Comstock was almost buried beneath the tottering pile of tawdry pottery that she’d won by her exertions, her unerring baby-battering bull’s-eyes. Rocks! That was what The Bosom was made of; there’d be enough ammunition to keep that bulgy arm whirling for months. The sails spun around until they were just a humming blur. The ground wheat – warm, almost smoking – would keep the city in loaves throughout the winter, flour billowing out like an avalanche. Some were given bread; some were given stones. Man could not live by bread alone, but Mrs. Albert Comstock would thrive on stones.

  Alice strained to see figures at lighted upper windows, in the way she had striven to make out the patterns in the clouded stained glass of the tower of the Shakespeare Castle.

  After The House of the Magdalenes she tried Pettifar’s Orphanage, though she would have been unable to say whether she was searching for Annie’s baby, or for Annie herself. At the orphanage there was less to see, and the blinds were drawn for most of the time, the lonely children living in perpetual twilight. “Pettifar’s” had the sound of a store about it, the children neatly stacked on shelves, quietly on their best behavior, waiting to be purchased. Customers wrangled for reductions, peering closely to find faults – “This one’s rather grubby,” “There’s a part missing from this one” – to justify their intransigence.

  “I’m looking for a little baby,” she would say, raising her hand as if she were in school. “I’m not sure whether it’s a girl or a boy, but it will be about a year old, with dark skin, and very dark eyes. He’ll be called Joshua if he’s a boy, and she’ll be called Desiderata if she’s a girl.”

  She knew this. She and Annie had talked about children, and the names of children, as if they were playing at Houses, as if the house that Annie was tending were her own house. With her too-long apron, and expression of careful concentration, Annie looked like a small girl tending her make-believe home. They’d both decided that they’d like one boy, and one girl, the boy first. Annie had also volunteered the name she would like her husband to have, as if she had consulted Madame Etoile, the celebrated French Clairvoyant. The capital letters proved that she was important.

  “Joshua or Desiderata. It’s for a friend,” she would add, helpfully.

  She would wait, browsing through the selection available, as they checked their stock. The babies would hold up their arms, asking to be chosen, like puppies in a pound wagging their tails. The thought of Pettifar’s had always made her shudder, and what she saw in her mind looked very much like George Cruikshank’s illustration of Oliver Twist’s workhouse: no color anywhere, and the shaded black lines drawn repeatedly, as if they were scribblings-out, covering up some hidden message beneath, especially on the upper part of the blank wall.

  Annie had left a hidden message – two hidden messages – but Alice had not realized this for some time.

  Lastly, and for rather longer than she had at the orphanage, she began to circle the North River Lunatic Asylum, the place where Sobriety Goodchild said she herself belonged. Perhaps she’d left it until last for that reason, thinking that they might seize her, keep her there, as they had imprisoned Alfred Hardie in Hard Cash, and put an end to her searching. She walked through the entrance, and behind the high walls as boldly as she had walked into the grounds of the Shakespeare Castle, and circled the building in a counterclockwise direction, the direction she had taken for her darker stories, the ones that made Charlotte go very quiet, and Mary Benedict scream. It was screams she listened for, the sound of the noisy ward. She’d already read Hard Cash three and a half times – it was one of her ways of frightening herself – and she knew the horrors that could be expected in a lunatic asylum.

  She thought that there was a reason for the close proximity of the three institutions, an efficiency in their positioning. First, the girls would have their babies in The House of
the Magdalenes, and these babies would be taken from them after harvesting. She had an image of Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild wielding giant, glittering scythes like the pendulum on Mrs. Albert Comstock’s clock.

  They swung their bodies from side to side, cutting through the crops as if they were imitating the figure of Death, or – in a literary mood (one of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s phases) – reenacting a scene from “The Pit and the Pendulum” or one of the more bucolic Thomas Hardy novels. On the chosen morning, the babies would be forcibly removed from the arms of the girls (some prying might be involved, some effortful levering), and transferred to Pettifar’s Orphanage, and the girls – walking neatly in line like pilgrims approaching the end of their journey, guarded and prodded by stern-faced attendants – would be removed to the North River Lunatic Asylum, still singing lullabies to the babies who were no longer there, driven mad by the absence of what had once been in their arms.