Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  30

  Now years had gone by and Mrs. Albert Comstock was a widow, the mother of Myrtle and Oliver; and the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild were the grandparents of simpering Serenity, fruit of the loins of their son Sobriety and his wife whatsername, though they would prefer not to think of her in these terms, and Alice had long since ceased to be a girl.

  She liked to think of the Reverend Goodchild undertaking his grandfatherly duties and unenthusiastically dandling Serenity on his knee at regular intervals. She was a “big-boned child”: that was Mrs. Goodchild’s description of her, said in a tone that made it sound her proudest boast. She sounded, in fact, remarkably like Albert Comstock had sounded when he had been recommending a particular cut of beef, dangling from a hook in front of him like an ill-treated corpse, as he stood there in his long white apron. A few vigorous sessions of Serenity-bouncing should reduce the Reverend Goodchild’s lifespan by a few years, or – at the very least – exacerbate his hemorrhoids.

  See-saw, down in my lap,

  Up again onto her feet …

  If she was feeling particularly vindictive – this happened quite frequently – she liked to visualize the Reverend Goodchild gingerly attempting to bounce Serenity up and down on the end of his leg, in the position of Edith’s old iron toy, a stomach-churningly life-size version of the Baby Quieter Wheel Toy. The figure of the father seemed to be totally unaware that there was a baby firmly attached to his lower leg, and leaned back in his carriage, his hands nowhere near the baby’s, reading his Evening News. He had a bald head, like Papa, but no beard. Baby Quieter was the headline that absorbed him, a rather disturbing headline in a sensational newspaper that seemed to consist almost entirely of lurid descriptions of crime. A quiet baby in the Evening News was unlikely to be sleeping peacefully, cooing to itself as Mama sang a lullaby. Ring! Ring! Ring! went the bell, as the wheels trundled round and round, and his leg shot rigidly high into the air, over and over again, like a spectacular nervous twitch, with the unnoticed baby grimly clinging on. It had the exact pose of one of Miss Stammers’s embarrassing dogs, the dogs that would clamp themselves to the legs of blushing visitors, and snuffle noisily with eyes-closed bliss at inappropriate parts of their anatomy. They had a particular fondness for the Reverend Goodchild himself – that smell clearly awoke some deep-seated ancestral instincts – and he would clasp his hat protectively in front of his person if he spotted the dogs, Miss Stammers in tow, pounding eagerly toward him, salivating, already starting to sniff, tensing their hind legs as they prepared to hurl themselves ecstatically at his crotch.

  “Phew!” they would be saying, in their doggy fashion. “Get a whiff of that, chaps!”

  Ring! went the bell.

  Ring!

  Ring!

  Serenity rose and fell with increasing speed, until the bell sounded like a nighttime warning in a fire-threatened city, and hemorrhoids exploded like overheated sausages. If he built up enough momentum, he would be able to hurl Serenity high over his head with a resounding Kerboing!, and propel her several hundred yards into the distance, as if she were the terrifying ammunition of some advanced mediæval siege-machine. If this weapon had fallen into the hands of the English or the French, the Hundred Years War would have been over in three weeks.

  …Little

  – little! –

  …girl lost her white cap,

  Blown away in the street.

  Splat!

  Splat!

  Splat!

  The skies would have been black with squawkily descending Serenity Goodchilds, catapulted over the walls of besieged cities to explode messily inside and spread plague. City walls would have collapsed instantly into heaps of rubble (plenty more ammunition for Mrs. Albert Comstock’s thwunking here), pushed down from inside as panic-stricken, fleeing citizens stumbled across the debris, and it would have been like a nation of Jerichos at the blasts of the rams’ horn trumpets.

  “We surrender!” the English would have cried, emerging shakily, pale-faced, nauseated, hands above their heads.

  “We surrender!” the French would have cried (in French, you wouldn’t catch them lowering themselves to speak English: “Nous something-or-other!”), still trembling after the impact of the terrible new weapon that threatened all civilization, though – being French – they would be more used to awful smells, and would not be so shaken by the appalling stink.

  And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

  Me first.

  This was what Alice found herself thinking, with some enthusiasm.

  Me first.

  Please.

  I’m quite prepared to supply my own sword. I’ve sharpened the edge especially. It took me ages.

  I’m not too bothered about the ass or the sheep (I quite like sheep) or the ox, but I’d like first choice of the man and woman, young and old.

  I’ve got a little list.

  Well, it’s quite a long list, actually, seeing as you ask, but I’d be quick about it.

  I wouldn’t waste time.

  They never would be missed.

  31

  If Mrs. Goodchild – the Reverend Goodchild’s wife (the other Mrs. Goodchild, Sobriety’s wife, was of no account whatsoever: she probably had to remind them who she was before they would admit her into the house) – had had her way, the young women from The House of the Magdalenes would all have been dressed in clothing as distinctive as that worn by the boys of Otsego Lake Academy. She probably visualized dresses in some virulent color, bearing scarlet letter “M”s on their bosoms (Mrs. Goodchild liked to flaunt her literary credentials): not just to emblazon the wearer’s shame, but also to protect the innocent male youth of Longfellow Park, who were pure, without exception, in thought, word, and deed, until the provocative closeness of the sinful sisterhood drew them into temptation. She probably thought of it as a sort of visual warning. As the brightness appeared in the distance, like a nighttime beacon giving intelligence of invasion, the alerted youths could flee in terror at their approach, with high-pitched, bird-like cries.

  “A uniform,” she’d said, in that reasonable, steely tone of hers, the one that made you love her, and wish to embrace her cuddlesomely in your arms, “just like the boys from the Academy …”

  Mrs. Goodchild had thought for a moment. You could see thought happening when she thought. It was like witnessing someone on the verge of sneezing, and you braced yourself for noise and wetness.

  “… though they’d probably need fewer buttons. Being the sort of creatures that they are.”

  The Magdalenes were expected to walk around in twos, with their eyes lowered, looking suitably ashamed, massed ranks of Hester Prynnes. Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock her – ahem – bosom friend (though “bosom” was the last thing one wished to think of in connection with Mrs. Albert Comstock; even a carefully inserted “ahem” scarcely lessened the nausea) took it upon themselves to rebuke the Magdalenes if they did not look repentant enough. They behaved as if they were members of a team, a prod-prodding moral patrol, marching about with their heels click-clicking like disapproving tongues.

  They prissily perambulated, taking the air as they prodded the passing Magdalenes with bossy touché thrusts, effortlessly combining healthy exercise with uplifting moral correctness. Healthy-bodied, healthy-minded, they were bold exemplars of the power of prodding. They were so strait-laced – teams of panting servants must have yo-ho-heave-hoed on the laces – that the laces were probably digging deep into their flesh, like the self-imposed punishment of guilty secret sinners, the private scourgings and lacerations. They were the Lord’s sandwich-board women, Repent! on their bosoms – Damn! That word again! – Repent! on their backs. It was as if they themselves had become Hester Prynnes, Hester Prynnes emblazoned with complete words, and not just initial letters. They, however, being who they were, bore righteous embellishments, and loitered chastely for pure-minded A
rthur Dimmesdales (rather dim Dimmesdales) to join them for an invigorating afternoon of Upholding Moral Standards, and Slaying the Dragons of Sin. (When they fought the forces of sinfulness, they made full use of capital letters.)

  They had no trouble whatsoever in saying “Boo!” to a goose, these goose-girls – girls! – of good-goodiness. “Boo!” they’d positively bawl, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” as if at a controversial night at the opera (a shortage of nice dresses and nice hairstyles on stage), when “Encore!”s and “Bravo!”s were not the sentiments that sprang to mind. They’d dig the Magdalenes in the back sometimes with their umbrellas or parasols (they took one or other – depending on the weather – out especially, a prod for all seasons), and tell them to conduct themselves with more decorum. A smile was indecorous. They ought to have had spikes inserted on the ends of their umbrellas. Out they marched, large-minded women on a country walk to botanize and entomologize, their instruments poised in readiness to impale a specimen through its abdomen. They were like park attendants on the alert for unauthorized littering.

  “She is more to be censured than pitied …”

  They surely sang this in deep, vibrant baritones, freshly ironed handkerchiefs, curiously dry, dabbing at the corners of their eyes, as they patrolled the streets in ceaseless search of the sinful. Mrs. Albert Comstock, as so often, was being strangely moved.

  (Emmerson’s voice in Delft Place, from long ago: “How were the prunes, Mrs. Albert Comstock?”

  (Linnaeus, in a fair approximation of the hippopotamus-buttocked Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fruity enunciation, every cushion from the sofa stuffed in appropriate locations about his person: “I was strangely moved.”

  (Here was Linnaeus again, trying to shock his much older sister.)

  “… She is more to be despised than helped …”

  Prod.

  “… She is a hussy who has ventured

  On life’s stormy path, ill-advised …”

  Prod. Prod.

  “… Scorn her with words fierce and bitter,

  Laugh at her shame and downfall …”

  Prod. Prod.

  Some of the girls must have stayed inside the whole time, unable to bear the thought of walking outside when these sanctimonious Mrs. Gamps were on patrol, these priggishly prod-prodding Mrs. Grundys. (Should that be “Grundies”?) Alice had sometimes seen the Magdalenes in the twilight, walking arm in arm in Heneacher Woods: the romantically named Zaydas, Juanas, Constanzas, Madelines, Biancas, Rosamonds, Eleanors, Marianas, heads close together, whispering, as if there were no one in the world to talk to but each other, and all that they had to talk about was handsome strangers, and the shy beginnings of love.

  Annie, if she ever been in The House of the Magdalenes, possessed a name that already existed in poetry, without any need of change, though the assumption of a new name was more a form of disguise (the fig leaves behind which they hid their shameful nakedness) than a symbol of a new beginning. Like someone collecting the materials for The Annie Collection – something worthy to stand beside The Alice Collection and The Pinkerton Collection – she had read “For Annie” to her when she had found it, and “Annie of Tharaw.” It had been as if Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had written their poems about her, she their meaning. To read a poem with the name of someone you knew was like coming across a painting of a place where you had been. You saw more than was in front of you.

  She could have learned the poems by heart, and recited them to her when she met her again, a sort of password to tell her who she was.

  “… As the palm-tree standeth so straight and so tall,

  The more the hail beats, and the more the rains fall, –

  “So love in our hearts shall grow mighty and strong,

  Through crosses, through sorrows, through manifold wrong.

  “Shouldst thou be torn from me to wander alone

  In a desolate land where the sun is scarce known, –

  “Through forests I’ll follow, and where the sea flows,

  Through ice, and through iron, through armies of foes …”

  Annie of Tharaw, her light and her sun, the threads of their two lives would be woven in one. She would say this to Annie, as they walked arm in arm in the woods.

  Now the woods had gone, the Shakespeare Castle had gone, and the clouds were massed above where they had been. Sometimes, as she looked toward the place where the tower of the castle had once been visible, she saw Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max Webster practicing their semaphore. Max was usually the one who was designated to clamber up the slope onto Hudson Heights, signaling incomprehensible messages to his mother and brother far below, with crisp, mechanical, doll-like precision. He’d enjoy that, performing high against the sky, like a Swiss flag-twirler she had once seen performing in the hall above the ice-cream parlor, a cousin of one of the girls from the ballet class. He had remained completely silent, the only sounds the swish and snap of the flags, far larger than the little flags employed by the signalers, much more dramatic in his gestures, his patriotic slow-motion swirling.

  Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.

  32

  She wandered back to the window as she dried her face.

  Clouds …

  The clouds, like shadows at sunset, were elongated and thin, stretching high into the sky as tall as trees above a child. She was a giant in the world, and her thoughts were clouds. Hmm.

  There had been some people in Heneacher Woods in the summer, when the woods were still there. They had been four shirt-sleeved men, all wearing straw hats. One of them had been holding a red and white striped pole, like a peripatetic barber. He was the youngest, little more than a boy, and he had the inferior, humble look of a beater at a hunt, awaiting orders from his gun-bearing superiors. He hefted the pole from hand to hand, a vaulter about to begin the long run toward the sandpit and the balanced cane on the measured stands. The one who appeared to be the leader stood alongside a telescope on a tripod, and he had the look of John Randel, Jr., stepped down from his stone plinth in The Forum – this was the name for the area at the main entrance to the park – all ready to impose his grid plan upon the north of the island. Bluffs, hills, rivers, woods: nothing would stand in the way of his new world, and Adam-like he would name the newly created. One of the others carried an ax – no tree could make them pause in their purpose – and the last one grasped sheets of paper (unfolded maps, possibly, or perhaps there were no maps, and they were creating them). They were like visitors from a distant country bearing emblematic gifts. A fifth, laden down with generous supplies of explosives, like tall church candles with nice white wicks, would clearly be hurrying on his way to join them. He’d look like a textile salesman entering a dry goods store with his samples, about to unroll the latest fashions in cloth with an abracadabra gesture.

  “It’s à la mode!” he’d announce, with a saucily unsuccessful attempt at an accent.

  Boom!

  “It’s what every woman will want!”

  Crash!

  The landscape would fall flat before them, as if in worship.

  They gathered in a little huddle, consulting on some small, vital detail. Another line might be drawn along here, one of those absolutely straight state lines – firmly held ruler, freshly sharpened pencil pressing into the paper – that ignored geography as resolutely as the grid pattern of the city. It was like coming across Mason and Dixon, or Lewis and Clark, unexpectedly, undaunted men about to stride off into the unmapped wilderness, into areas as yet unknown to Rand and McNally.

  “… How could she act de foolish part,

  An’ marry a man to break her heart?

  “Den I wish I was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray!

  In Dixie Land we’ll take our stand, to lib an’ die in Dixie,

  Away, away, away down south in Dixie!

  Away, away, away down south in Dixie!”

  There was Dixie again, for the second time that morning. (“In Dixie whar I was born in
,/Early on one frosty mornin’ …” You’d think there’d never be frost there, there’d never be a morning like today’s.) She’d convinced herself that Dixie had – or, at least, ought to have – taken its name from the Mason-Dixon Line. What did Charles Mason think – she asked herself – of Jeremiah Dixon’s name being chummily appropriated and adapted as the name for the South, instead of his? His name came first in Mason-Dixon Line, for heaven’s sake! It should be Macie, Macie, or – at the very least – Macy, not Dixie! (“Ah is from Macy,” Southern belles could intone throatily, proud of their pampered department store existence, where all their needs were promptly catered for. They were in Macy! Hooray! Hooray! Away, away, away down south in Macy!)

  There was a colossal painting of Lewis and Clark gazing out across the West in Mrs. Italiaander’s dining room, taking up the whole of one wall, the lower edge partially hidden by the sideboard, so that the landscape seemed to emerge from the cornucopia of the silver serving dishes. They were somewhere very high up, and an immensity of landscape stretched below them, as if they were being tempted by Satan, looking out at all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.