Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Mrs. Albert Comstock’s term for the irredeemably provincial was to describe someone as being from “one of those straight-edged states,” casting into the outer darkness all life west of the Mississippi, states so devoid of interest and variety that rigid lines could contain them. Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, all of them, withered beneath her contempt: big-skied, wheat-fielded, cow-filled, peopled by grinning gap-toothed gawks wielding grubby dung-spattered pitchforks, far from the seething metropolitan cut and thrust of life in Longfellow Park. “Straight-edged states” was an uncharacteristically poetic phrase from Mrs. Albert Comstock – her strengths lay more in the tepid and colorless – but the more snottily she sniffed and sniggered, the more inescapably provincial she sounded herself, the suburban frump writ large, and few were writ larger than Mrs. Albert Comstock, whose Bosom and Bustle were sights worth a detour for the more adventurous tourist. If Kodaks could cope with the Flatiron Building, Kodaks could cope with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

  If the good Witch of the North had asked Mrs. Albert Comstock if Kansas was a civilized country, and therefore free of witches, she would not have replied, with Dorothy, “Oh, yes.” (“That’s me,” Mildred said, jabbing at the illustration of Dorothy with a well-fed forefinger, her young niece recognizing herself in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as Alice read it to her. “That’s me.”) Geography revealed that Dorothy was a liar, and that Kansas – quite demonstrably – was not civilized. It was undeniably – almost willfully, one felt – straight-edged, a place never civilized, a country in which witches and wizards were still domiciled, shopping in casually chatting twosomes for their groceries in Garden City and Wichita; and in which sorceresses and magicians browsed through racks of ready-made clothing in Topeka and Emporia (whose very name promised large, well-lit department stores). Macy Land was taking its stand, and marching westward. They didn’t just march through Georgia. Away, away, away, ’cross west in Macy!

  The conference among the little group in the wood became animated, and there was much pointing northward, with hands gesticulating, oscillating to indicate uncertainty. The youth, increasingly self-conscious as he sensed Alice watching him – perhaps he had been told about her, perhaps he was nervous of The Madwoman in the Attic, perhaps madness was infectious, or perhaps it was just that her spectacles were glinting in the pale morning sunshine (there had been sunshine) – was given instructions and began to march resolutely away from the others, carrying his pole. Perhaps it was not a pole, but a javelin, and she would fall, pierced through the heart as Dracula was by Quincey Morris’s bowie knife, a casualty of an over-ambitious school sports’ day.

  She saw him, throughout the morning, standing in various locations, with the pole held out from his right side, trying to make sense of the instructions shouted across to him. It always seemed to take four or five repetitions before he grasped what was wanted – a megaphone might have been a useful addition to their array of instruments – and his lower lip drooped. He stood with his pole at the side of him, like an artist’s model for some heroic piece of statuary of a Greek athlete, incongruous in his slenderness and in his dark suit and straw hat, very still, like someone being photographed. They looked like men in an office lunch hour, picknicking in an urban park, loosening their neckties to indicate informality. There was nothing of the countryside about them.

  They brought New York City closer.

  Apart from the youth with the pole, they all had identical drooping moustaches, as if they had bought them as a matching set with their identical straw hats. There was something about this fact, and the way they stood with their heads close together, their arms resting informally on each other’s shoulders, that gave them the look of barbershop singers – perhaps it was the striped pole that made her think of this – about to perform together in close harmony.

  “Woodman, ax that tree!

  Spare not a single bough!

  In youth it sheltered me,

  And I’ll destroy it now...”

  Two of them looked so similar that they might have been brothers, and this made her think of the cover of some sheet music she had seen in the window of Columbarian & Horowitz’s music store years ago, when she was a girl. It was in the middle of the window. Popular Songs Sung By The Du Rell – or had it been Du Bell?; the lettering on some of the covers was as elaborate and difficult to read as Mrs. Albert Comstock’s visiting cards – Twin Brothers. Displayed to the left of the Du Rells or Du Bells was “Why Did They Dig Ma’s Grave So Deep?” Memories of Sobriety Goodchild singing this as a shrill and out-of-key boy soprano were still vivid enough to evoke a shudder: he had specialized in songs lamenting the premature death of a mother, and sang them with great – one might almost say enthusiastic – feeling. Alice’s feelings about Mrs. Goodchild were clearly shared by her son. Another song in his repertoire had been “Cradle’s Empty, Baby’s Gone” (you could always be guaranteed to have a smile put upon your face when Sobriety was unleashed), though – these days – “Bottle’s Empty, Daddy’s Tight” would, perhaps, be more appropriate. He could sing it to Serenity, and the fumes – with luck – would render her unconscious for hours at a time.

  Max Webster had, more recently, snatched his former glory from him (art was sometimes as short as life, Hippocrates), and was now the resident shrill-voiced mother-demolisher of Longfellow Park. All places with pretensions to gentility possessed one. This – no doubt – was: (a) why Serenity Goodchild had been so ruthlessly promoted as the New Improved Infant Phenomenon (and with prettier dresses), and (b) why Mrs. Webster always looked so worried. She must keep the kitchen knives in a locked drawer, and ensure that Max’s demands were met in every way. “Why Did They Dig Ma’s Grave So Deep?” would be followed by “Mother’s with the Angels There” and either “Bringing Pretty Blossoms to Strew on Mother’s Grave” or “A Flower from Mother’s Grave.” (When he wasn’t strewing flowers there, he was tugging them up and carting them off.) If Mother wasn’t Resting Beneath the Daisies, then Mother was ‘Neath the Daisies Sleeping; and if the Angels hadn’t Gathered Mother unto Jesus, then the Angels were busily occupied in Beckoning Mother Home to Rest, or Bringing a Kiss from Mother. Mother Dear Had Gone to Heaven, and it appeared to be the best news that Max Webster had heard for ages. He sang with what could best be described as threatening sentimentality, as he gazed dewy-eyed – as if inspired by her presence – at his visibly apprehensive mother, his arms reaching out and making worryingly ambiguous gestures in her direction.

  “… Why did they dig Ma’s grave so deep …”

  – he inquired of his audience, clearly itching to roll up his sleeves, spit on the palms of his hands, and start shoveling –

  “… Down in the clay so deep?

  Why did they leave me here to weep …”

  – Tears filled the eyes of the women in the audience as he launched for the high notes at this point, and, for rather different reasons, pained tears (Ouch!) filled the eyes of the wincing men –

  “… Why did they dig Ma’s grave so deep?…”

  Sweet!

  Sniff, sniff!

  Sweet!

  Mrs. Webster’s confidence couldn’t have been helped by her husband’s vigorous applause. She undertook translations of medical treatises from the German on his behalf – at his insistence – and Charm became oh-so short-tempered when she made mistakes. She always made mistakes. Some of her translations were more difficult to make sense of than the original German, even when you included those alarming occasions when Gothic script was involved. A few mistranslated werbs, and here he was wociferous for her demise. Oh Charm, Charm, you could be wery cruel! Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was clearly all in favor of securely buried mothers, well down in the soil, with – preferably – a two-ton stone on top. His mother must have been like Dr. Twemlow’s. You could sense Mrs. Alexander Diddecott hovering in the background, panting slightly, eager to illustrate these lachrymose scenes. They were just the sort of thing to get her mixing her watercolors. Max always h
eld “The Angels Took Mama” – those angels never had a moment’s rest – in readiness as a threatening encore. Alice quite enjoyed the chorus of this one, the agonized philosophical questioning.

  “… Goodnight! Mama, your troubles are over,

  Gone to a home on the bright golden shore,

  Never more your sweet smile I see …”

  (A tremulous smile from Hilde Claudia as Master Max went down on one knee, clasped his hands to his heart, and stared straight at her, as if encouraging her to die right on cue.)

  “… The angels took Mama, why don’t they take me?

  The angels took Mama, why don’t they take me?”

  A good question, this last. She had to fight an inclination to join in at this point, astonish them all by her fervor, her sing-along-with-me enthusiastic gesturings.

  Take him! Take him!

  On the right-hand side of Columbarian & Horowitz’s window was “Poor Wandering One,” the very first sheet music Charlotte had purchased for a Gilbert and Sullivan song: this was why she could remember this window display so well, so often had she gazed into it with Charlotte, debating the purchase. If she thought deeply she would probably have been able to remember some of the other songs in the window, but there would be, however, no more appropriate song to sing in Longfellow Park than “The Fountain in the Park,” the most popular of the songs sung by the Du Rell or Du Bell Twin Brothers.

  As with novels, so with sheet music: Alice did not particularly like seeing the illustrations. The images of the singers if they formed the illustration – stiffly posed in evening dress or costumes, staunchly homely in appearance, most of them, eyes glazed with singing the same song over and over, or saucily twinkling if it was a comic song – would infiltrate the music, interposing themselves between the words and her, a song that could be sung only with their voices, their expressions and gestures.

  The twins were pictured side by side, at a slight angle to each other, giving them the appearance of Siamese twins joined at the shoulder, a musical Chang and Eng, the one on the left looking younger than the one on the right, and both intensely serious. You knew that their secret sorrow was that they were not identical, and did not look more like twins. There was something so proud about that vaunted Twin Brothers, that refusal to give them individual names, on the cover of the sheet music. “We are!” you could hear them insisting, the fact giving them rarity value, an added significance. “We are! We really are twins!” They seemed unaccountably somber for a song so light-hearted, so frivolous, as if it were they who were deploring the depth of Ma’s grave. They may have been demonstrating the seriousness of their art, or discovering some hidden shadows in the words, one of the dark levels that Miss Stein had uncovered to her with such zest at school in “William Wilson,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” or “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

  “While strolling in the park one day …”

  There was no preamble. The four men in the woods – each still grasping his pole, his ax, his papers, his telescope, the twins become quadruplets – were suddenly singing, harmonizing their voices with considerable skill, the boy’s half-broken plangency like a bourdon. They clasped their hands to their hearts; they swayed to and fro.

  “… All in the merry month of May …

  A roguish pair of eyes, they took me by surprise …

  In a moment my poor heart they stole away!…

  Oh a sunny smile was all she gave to me …

  And of course we were as happy as could be …”

  They began to dance, perfectly synchronized, never changing their expressions of dignified solemnity: they, clearly, had also seen the cover of the sheet music, and the faces of the sepulchral songsters, and knew how to behave appropriately. They all simultaneously took three steps to their left, and lifted their left hands out in front of them. “Ahhhhhh!” they chorused, the word long and drawn-out. Carpenters – they were all wearing folded paper hats like children at a birthday party, giving them a festive air – on the roof of one of the new houses being built alongside Megoran Road, chorused “Ahhhhhh!” in return, and lifted their left hands. They formed a vigorously gyrating chorus-line of Mr. Chipses, playing on their saws and hammers in an uninhibitedly improvising percussion section. A hammer flew up in an arc and plummeted to earth, unleashed by some gauche sinistral. (Was this last phrase tautological?) “Heads below!” the unleasher shouted, after rather too long a pause. Grunting and heaving, they’d be laboring to prize the hammer – no prizes for this attempt – from the skull of a stunned passer-by, yet another victim of these lethal Highland Games, kilts akimbo and sporrans spattered. After the javelin came the hammer throwing, and after the hammer throwing would come the caber tossing (a useful utilization of the trees that were about to fall in swathes): the ever-expanding school population must be kept down somehow.

  After the surveyors, later in the summer, throughout the fall, had come the workmen to chop down Heneacher Woods, and the cherry and apple orchards on the low slopes beneath Hudson Heights. Day after day she had heard them, and watched them from her window, chopping down the cherry trees like massed clockwork George Washingtons. The echoing sound of trees being chopped down was the sound that had so haunted Hawkeye.

  The cherry trees and apple trees fell in swathes, and truth was upheld in a fierce bright light where there were no shadows in which to shelter. It was as if the men with the axes were in the employ of Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild, shamelessly bribed to destroy the woods and cull the Magdalenes, drive all the names from poetry – bowed down beneath the rain falling perpetually from the clouds – out into the open landscape where they might be more readily hunted down. There’s one! There’s one!

  “… My mother …”

  Chop! Chop! Chop!

  “… kissed me here,

  My father …”

  Chop! Chop! Chop!

  “… pressed my hand –

  Forgive this foolish tear

  And ax that oak tree grand!”

  Chop! Chop! Chop!

  33

  Alice looked across to where the orchard had been, the place where Mrs. Albert Comstock had once fallen on top of her.

  She saw her, falling to earth like a – he! he! – heavenly body, crashing down, the shadow above herself becoming larger and larger as Comet Comstock approached the point of impact, and the moment of complete darkness as she struck. The apple trees splayed out at angles, their fruit pulped white and ciderized, and tidal waves engulfed New Jersey. Any schoolboy eyewitness – she remembered thinking this at the time it happened – would have seen a provocative variation of Newton’s theory of gravity: a human being falling earthward toward stationary apples. This, of course, would not have occurred to schoolgirl witnesses, who would – in their artless schoolgirl way – have thought of little but suitable recipes for crushed apples.

  “2 lbs. of good cooking apples.” (Considerably more than two pounds would be ready for instant, for urgent, use.)

  Tick.

  “4 ozs. of brown sugar, or to taste.”

  Tick.

  “1 oz. of butter.”

  Tick.

  “The rind of one lemon.”

  Tick.

  This was Alice at the age of ten, inflamed by a recent reading of The Mill on the Floss, rather embittered by Charles Kingsley’s preface to The Heroes, in which he matter-of-factly (and – she had to admit it – with complete accuracy) assumed that only boys would be taught Greek. (He wasn’t much better in The Water Babies, where he took it for granted that any reader would be a boy. “My dear little man,” he head-pattingly addressed him, “My dear little boy.” He addressed him in this way so frequently that the dear little man would be patronizingly patted to half his original size, flat-headed, and littler with every passing moment. Was that why pâté was named pâté, because it had been compressed and squashed by unrelenting patting?) It was just the same in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As Alice swam about in the pool of tears it was
her brother’s Latin Grammar (“A mouse – of a mouse – to a mouse – a mouse – O mouse!”) that came into her mind as she tried to remember the correct way of speaking to a mouse, finally deciding that “O Mouse!” was the appropriate response.

  The face of Tenniel’s Alice, seemingly on the point of drowning – her left hand raised, water up to her chin, her mouth beginning to open as if for a scream, her long blonde hair trailing Ophelia-like behind her (she saw Ophelia in a painting, like The Lady of Shalott, like Mariana) – became the face of Maggie Tulliver struggling in the water, calling out for her brother Tom. She saw Maggie at Mr. Stelling’s, trying to help Tom with his Latin and being scorned.

  The Maggie Tulliver period lasted for far longer than the Jo March. It probably never really went away.

  She copied Maggie – what a splendid idea it was – in taking out her anger on a wooden doll, entering into the actual text of the novel. In the absence of Papa or Allegra or Edith or Mrs. Albert Comstock or Dr. Vaniah Odom or Sobriety Goodchild or Euterpe Dibbo or any one of twenty others (she was going to need more dolls: hers would never last out) she hammered nails into its head with tremendous enthusiasm, like a small boy keen on carpentry. She was the sort of girl who was very firm with her dolls, and insisted that they behaved themselves. She held them by their feet and dashed them against beams, battered and punished them, and – most satisfyingly of all – hammered in those nails.

  Hammer!

  She had barely finished reading Chapter IV of The Mill on the Floss before she was sprinting around the house in search of a hammer and a good supply of nails in order to follow Maggie’s lead. It had been a Eureka! moment. Mrs. Albert Comstock opted for “Earache!”, but Alice – something of a traditionalist – favored “Eureka!” Maggie was clearly a girl who felt things the way that Alice felt things, and she embraced the phrase that luxury of vengeance – used to describe the hammering – as a proof of fellow-feeling, humming along in unison with Maggie and Jael as the hammer rose and fell. She was definitely Mrs. Chip, the Carpenter’s Wife, and not Miss Chip. Miss Chip – daintily dressed, her hair neatly enclosed in a mediæval-looking net – simperingly held a measly little lightweight hammer, flourishing it by its slim little handle as if she was pretending to be a fairy and using it as her magic wand. She was Marie Antoinette playing at being a carpenter. She’d have handmade gold nails, and gilded wood with pre-drilled holes for hammering into – with a prettily assumed expression of creative endeavor – as her big-wigged courtiers politely applauded. Mrs. Chip – leaning back at an angle for maximum whack – looked as if she really meant business, about to explode a bloated bluebottle with a rolled-up newspaper, a messy splat to coat the entire surface of a window with sticky entrails, and block out the view. Nothing would survive when she let rip. She’d sort the sods out. She was probably in the middle of constructing a home made guillotine. “Après nous le déluge!” That’s what she’d be saying with a note of triumph, a Madame de Pompadour – Mrs. Chip didn’t have quite the right hairstyle – who’d switched sides and was keen to start decapitating. Marie Antoinette would not be Happy for much longer. Her feeble little hammer, her jeweled shepherdess’s crook, was for ornament, not for use, and would not protect her from what was to come.