The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow …
All of literature was in the thirty-seven panels, just as the whole of Shakespeare’s plays was contained in Hamlet. This was her theory. It had occurred to her when Polonius had told Hamlet that he had once played the part of Julius Cæsar at university, and she had the dizzying thought of a character in a Shakespeare play acting another part in a different play. It was just like the moment in “The Eve of St. Agnes” when Porphyro seemed aware of another Keats poem and played “La belle dame sans mercy” (why “mercy” and not “merci,” the thankless cold-hearted woman without manners who never said “Thank you”?), or the moment in Don Giovanni – just before the statue of the murdered Commendatore entered to drag him down to hell – when Don Giovanni listened to music from The Marriage of Figaro. If he’d heard the words that should have accompanied the music, he’d have heard the warning that was in them. It was time to say goodbye to pleasure.
Everything around her had gone away for a while, and then come back. She had read the play to see if she was right. Part of the power of Hamlet lay in not fully understanding it. That’s what she thought. It was like the interior of a vast echoing building, where the details of the architecture could not be seen or understood, the outlines lost in misty vagueness. You stood within it, dimly aware of the surroundings, sensing vast vaulting arches, distant corridors, hidden levels piled up like a city built on ruins. There was a sense of some great secret, just out of reach, about to be revealed, the tip-of-the-tongue sensation of a forgotten memory on the point of being recalled, that not-quite-remembering the name of a piece of music feeling. The lack of a name for this felt-once-before feeling – she hadn’t been able to find one, though she’d searched – made it seem all the more mysterious, something beyond the reach of language. It was like experiencing recollections of a life already lived, seeing things for the first time, but knowing that you’d seen them before. Christina Rossetti’s brother had written a poem about this feeling – “Sudden Light” – though it wasn’t really light that you felt. It was more a dimming of the light, a high humming sound in the ears, as you sank beneath deep water, your arms helplessly flailing. I have been here before. That was how it began. /But when or how I cannot tell:/I know the grass beyond the door,/The sweet keen smell,/The sighing sound (he was absolutely right about the sighing sound), the lights around the shore …
Alice had written this description down, and The Grass Beyond the Door had gone onto her list of titles. She had been keeping a writing journal for three years. She was going to be a writer.
24
The three little girls walked up to the Shakespeare Castle in the late afternoon of a day in the fall. Alice Pinkerton walked in front. Behind her, Charlotte Finch was holding on to Mary Benedict. She might have been dragging her unwillingly along, or she might have been clutching her for comfort.
“Gonorrhea!” Mary Benedict said, attempting an air of saucy insouciance, looking closely at Charlotte to see if she turned pink. Charlotte – as ever – did, one of her darker shades, blending quite nicely with her red muffler.
For a moment Alice toyed with the idea of snapping “Don’t be so bosomptious!” at Mary Benedict, and seeing what effect that would have on her. She wouldn’t lower herself to ask what the word meant, and this might nag away at her for hours, with any luck. Then, more cunningly, she thought of asking Mary Benedict to spell “gonorrhea,” but then decided against that also. She had something else in mind.
Mary Benedict had been to her ballet class the previous day, and was attempting to assume the third position, but her heart wasn’t in it. She hadn’t even remembered to announce what it was she was doing.
“Number one,” Charlotte said, and they took up their positions in front of Macbeth, looking at the backs of the three figures in the flowing robes facing a single, similarly attired figure. It was the first time they had started with the very first panel they had seen.
“Counterclockwise,” Alice decided, and – gratifyingly – Mary Benedict whimpered. Alice always decided the direction the story was going to take. They had been talking of ghosts for most of the afternoon, as the shadows lengthened, and Mary was already in a receptive mood. This was why Alice had chosen counterclockwise. With luck, she might be able to make Mary Benedict scream and run home again. She had managed to do this in a counterclockwise story the previous week when they had reached the final panel of the day’s story, the panel for Measure For Measure. She had been on good form. At the end of the story, she was explaining what was really happening in front of them, the man reaching across a table toward a woman. Alice had leaned toward Mary Benedict – like the man toward the woman – to hiss the final words of the story and Mary had screamed, and fled. That story had gone into her writing journal.
Tried.
Tested.
Succeeded.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The scream had been pleasingly loud, a three-tick, three-star scream.
This afternoon’s story would be even better.
There would be more stars than an entire pack of L’Etoiles. There would be more stars than all the tourist guidebooks for Rome combined. The Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon: all would echo ringingly to the screams as Mary Benedict abandoned herself to total hysteria. She was a girl who knew how to enjoy herself. Flakes of paint would gust like a blizzard from The Last Judgment, and tourists would be lost from sight in a storm of leaf-like fall colorings. They would become the fallen angels, thick as autumnal leaves strewing the brooks in Vallombrosa. Several of the damned would permanently disappear from sight, and enter Mary Benedict like an infection of the blood. With this Scheherazade, Alice had firmly decided, any life at risk would be the life of the listener, not the storyteller. Danger was in words. That was what Doctor Faustus had told the Scholars just before Mephostophilis brought in Helen of Troy. You had to remain silent when spirits were about.
“Francesca did not know why her father hated her and her two sisters,” Alice started. “They did all they could to please him, but he hated them. Their mother had died when they were babies, and they could not remember her at all. They had a sense of being held, being loved, being sung to – none of these things happened now – but they could not picture her face. Sometimes the words of one of the songs would come to them, and they could hear a voice, the voice of their lost mother …”
It was almost forty-five minutes later when they reappeared at the front of the castle, and almost an hour before they stood in front of what was to be the last panel for that particular story, the panel depicting Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull. Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor – favour? – she must come; make her laugh at that. It had become so dark that they had been unable to see the details of the panels after a while. A little while later, and they had been unable to see the panels at all, but – by now – they knew the order of the panels, and what was depicted on them. Sometimes Alice made them feel the outlines of the figures as she continued her story, as if they were handling the words she spoke, caressing the characters she had created. All were within reach, except for the Hamlet panel. Sometimes they had to wait a little, while Alice thought of the next words she was to speak, as if she was straining to hear words being whispered to her, just beyond the sense of hearing. Alice herself did not appear to know what was going to happen next, she – also – hearing the words for the first time as she spoke them, words she had not seen written down.
They had come full circle, and ended almost where they had started, just before the first panel, standing at the bottom of the flight of steps, staring up at the panel they could not see, the figure of the man with the skull in his hand, struggling to discern shapes in the darkness. A chill wind was hissing in the branches of the trees beside them, and the dry leaves fell around them, upon them, scratching across their faces, skittering across the flagstones set into the gravel immediately before the entrance, mak
ing furtive little rustling noises in the darkness. Mary Benedict was a trembling wreck. The moon had been clearly visible in the sky for quite some time, but it had not occurred to her to point out the features on its surface, in order to demonstrate her superior knowledge in this area. This was highly unusual. “Ooh, look! The Sea of Vapors – Mare Vaporum –” (she invariably gave the Latin names, like a condescending botanist volunteering the Latin names of plants to the ignorant and easily impressed) “is clearly visible tonight,” she would say, with studied casualness, whenever any part of the moon could be glimpsed hazily through the clouds, pointing firmly upward. The name of the chosen sea varied, but the finger was ever firm. She was incapable of speech on this night. On this night she was drowning in her very own, personal Sea of Vapors. (“La Lune,” Alice was thinking – French rather than Latin – “La Lune.” The battlemented towers, the howling dogs, the creature crawling up out of the depths. La Loon. La Loon.) Charlotte had not said a word since they had been halfway along the second wall. The two of them clung together, silent. The only sound was Alice’s voice – with no pause at all, as if she were reading from a book open in front of her – moving inexorably onward with the terrible events of her story.
This was the worst, this was the best, she had told so far.
The moon was completely ignored, but the stars …
The stars were clustering menacingly.
One star.
Two stars.
Three stars.
They were well on the way to four, five, and six stars.
Perky-breasted Madame Etoile would drop both her pitchers and shatter them once those screams started, and the howling of the dogs would increase unbearably. Ripples would spread from the center of the dark pool, as the creature from the depths heaved itself into sight. The towers would tremble, and the masonry begin to lean groaningly outward.
“Francesca, the last of the three sisters, moved toward the uncurtained lamplit window, to see what her sisters had seen before her, seen and not survived. She had to see what they had seen, though what they had seen had killed them …”
Charlotte and Mary braced themselves as Alice moved toward the final words of her story. They might even have stopped breathing in the anxiety not to miss hearing what she had to say.
They held on to each other tightly.
At the exact moment when Alice finished, and Mary Benedict’s mouth began to open in horror at what she had just heard, her hands moving up – appalled – toward her face, one of the heavy castle doors silently swung open. It was far more terrifying than if it had creaked. An old, old man stood looking down at them, the flame in his oil lamp flickering in the wind, and making a popping sound, his face appearing and disappearing, glowing then darkening, brightness then skull-like hollows, his shifting shadow reaching down the steps toward their feet.
Mary Benedict gasped, uttered a sobbing cry, and then turned and ran toward the gates, gravel shooting up behind her as if from a skidding wagon wheel. Fragments of stone peppered their faces, punishment for some small biblical failing. Wailing screams echoed back, distorted by the wind. Deprived of Mary, Charlotte convulsively grabbed hold of Alice.
The old, old man gazed down at the two little girls who remained, who looked up, open-mouthed, like silent, out-of-season carol-singers, and then – without saying a word – he closed the door. Years ago he had held crowded theatres rapt and breathless when he marveled, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”
The whole audience – a few pale faces caught in the glow, the majority unseen and shadowed – was held, not only by those words, and by what those words meant, but also by the way in which those words were spoken.
25
The following week Alice made them go there again.
Mary Benedict’s attempts to convince them that she-wasn’t-in the-slightest-bit-nervous, never convincing, had now been abandoned. It was the word “counterclockwise” that had done it. She was already starting to tremble, and pulling around to her left, waiting for the door to swing silently open, and a figure to emerge, and come down the steps toward them, beneath the figure of the man with the skull. She would not have seen the moon if it had bounced off her head and rattled her teeth. There would be no “Ooh, look!” tonight, though there might be an “Ooh!” There would be no more cursing to turn Charlotte pink, though Charlotte – any blush would soon have faded – looked as if she could do with a little more color in her cheeks. There would be no ballet positions, whether first, second, third, fourth, or fifth. There would be no arabesques, nor even the first stirrings of a pointy-toed pirouette.
“Number one,” Alice said.
(“First position,” she thought.)
For the first time, she had chosen the panel at which they were to start. They took up their positions to the right of the steps. Also for the first time, she began a story in exactly the same place at which she had started the previous week, wishing – also – to end in the same place, at the bottom of the flight of steps that led upward to the doors, and the figure of the man holding a skull, the doors that had opened.
“Counterclockwise,” she repeated, firmly. Charlotte and Mary, who had known she was going to say this, grasped each other tightly. It would be the same panels, the same direction, the same order, but it would be a different story.
It would be horrid.
They were sure it was going to be horrid.
More than horrid, this was going to be really awful, really terrifying.
Good.
“The three little g-g-girls …”
It was the first time that she could recollect her recently acquired, intermittent stutter ever revealing itself to a person other than her family or Charlotte. It had happened with no warning, and it made it sound as if she herself was trembling, made fearful by the story she was about to tell. She felt her way warily around it when she knew it was starting to happen – there’d been good days, and there’d been really bad days – and chose to be silent on what she knew to be the bad days. “Am I stuttering?” she’d ask Charlotte – “Am I st-st-stuttering?” would be what she said (she was not always able to distinguish between her stuttering and her struggles to express precisely what it was she wanted to say) – and Charlotte would let her know if she was indeed stuttering. “Yes,” she’d say, shrugging (ever loyal) in a what-does-it-matter? sort of way, though it mattered to Alice.
“G-g-g …” said Mary Benedict, trying to find consolation in this easy target for teasing. “G-g-g …”
She said it in a tiny, babyish voice, as if she was about to say “coochi-coochi-coo!” to a tickly infant. (What an adorable child she was.) You just knew that she’d be imitating it all week at school. She acted as if Alice was affecting an out-of-period fashionable lisp, or a genteel accent, and thus inviting deserved mockery. It was like the way Papa tended to react. He did not take at all kindly to “P-P-Papa” as a mode of address. It somehow reflected badly on the dignity of his status, and demeaned him. “P-P-P!” he’d repeat to her, wincing at some pitiful solecism.
“G-g-g!”
She took a deep breath and started again, rather put out, though she tried to give the impression that she’d been feigning a terrified shudder – her teeth chattering with fear – in a sophisticated attempt to deepen the atmosphere of doom.
No problems this time.
“The three little girls walked up to the Shakespeare Castle in the late afternoon of a day in the fall. Alice Pinkerton walked in front. Behind her, Charlotte Finch was holding on to Mary Benedict. They took up their positions to the right of the steps …” Alice began.
Her voice was low, almost whispering, and they had to strain to hear her. Light was failing, and a storm was approaching.
No more “G-g-g” from Mary Benedict.
G-g-good.
The figures on the panel were of them.
The story was about them.
By the fifth panel along – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Mary Benedict was begging Alice to stop. (This was no dream. It was a nightmare!) By the time they reached The Tempest – a storm completely out of control, a storm to carry them far away to a place where they did not belong – Mary and Charlotte were both begging her to stop.
She did not stop.
It was an hour and a quarter before – in complete darkness – they reappeared in front of the main entrance, looking up into the blackness where they knew there was a figure of a man with a skull in his hand.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The screams were five-tick, five-star this time, a gigantic ten-out-of-ten tick in the brightest indelible red ink. The old man did not appear, though Alice had had one extra line of the story ready in case he did, one that would have lifted the screams to an unprecedented six-star – a seven-star, an eight-star, enough stars to blaze with a radiance that would have eclipsed the light of the moon – and awoken early sleepers in Harlem.
This was the last story she had told at the Shakespeare Castle.
She would have liked to have repeated her counterclockwise circlings for a thousand and one nights (storm-threatening nights, all of them, nights without moons or stars), reducing Mary Benedict (Mary Thérèse Benedict) to uncontrollable, incoherent gibbering, but – the following week – she and her family had moved away from Longfellow Park, all the way to Lac Qui Parle (now there was a story) in Minnesota. It was as if she had been drawn to Lac Qui Parle by her lavishly accented middle name, the French drawing the French toward it. (It was a way the French had.) It would have been satisfying to think that she had fled in terror, sleepless with nightmares of the Beast of Shakespeare Castle, but the truth was that her father (a lawyer) had taken up a new position in Madison. Alice had known that her story would be the last one that she would tell to Mary. They were carrying her – her and her accents – back to old Minnesota. She saw her, quite clearly, slung headfirst and gagged over someone’s shoulder like a kidnap victim, her feet kicking – first position, second position, third position (she just couldn’t stop herself) – not too keen on being carried.
Pinkerton's Sister Page 17