Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Hammer!

  She derived far more pleasure from it than Jael – who’d approached it with the air of someone undertaking a distasteful task; what a waste of an opportunity! – when she drove the tent peg into Sisera’s temple.

  Hammer!

  It ought to have encouraged a lifelong love of camping in her, an eagerness to be the first to put up all tents, the bigger the better, billowing white marquees spreading in all directions like a military encampment. You could always rely on the Old Testament to elevate your mind to thoughts of higher things. (You could always – for that matter – rely on the Old Testament for gruesome detail.) That luxury of vengeance. Luxury was the perfect word to describe how she felt.

  Hammer!

  She luxuriated in what she did. Miss Hayergaal had just praised her for learning “The Village Blacksmith” by heart, and here was the ideal opportunity to bring to vivid life the very scene she had described to her less-than-riveted audience. (A groan from the rest of the class at another word-perfect display from Alice Pinkerton, Euterpe Dibbo positively seething. What greater motivation could there be than this for encouraging her to shine?)

  Hammer!

  Hammer!

  “Under a spreading chestnut-tree”

  – he was clearly local, an artisan from this very street –

  “The village smithy stands …”

  Her right arm rose and fell.

  Hammer!

  Longfellow had described her perfectly. A mighty girl was she, with large and sinewy hands, and the muscles of her brawny arms were strong as iron bands. Her hair was crisp, and black, and long; her face was like the tan; her brow was wet with honest sweat …

  Hmm.

  You couldn’t help feeling – on second thoughts – that Longfellow had perhaps been a little too keen on the realistic detail.

  Hammer!

  You’d better be careful, Euterpe Dibbo and Sobriety Goodchild! Be on the alert, Dr. Vaniah Odom and Mrs. Albert Comstock! Flee into the hills, Papa and Allegra and Edith! She had plenty more nails for hammering, and Mrs. Chip was not feeling chipper. She had a row of them all lined up neatly in her mouth, her mouth puckered primly like Miss Iandoli’s around a line of pins as she cut out a dress pattern. She’d unleash herself upon them as she sought vengeance, and bring her army with her. Like Curdie at the end of The Princess and Curdie, she’d attack with an army of Uglies – what more appropriate person than she could there be to lead such an assemblage? – and with her nine-and-forty grotesque and abnormal creatures (yes, she certainly qualified) she’d scratch, she’d nip, she’d crush, she’d bite, she’d hammer.

  Hammer!

  Hammer

  Hammer!

  The nails may have been bent over at clumsy angles, but all their points penetrated the brain. (The Bible was such a suitable, improving read for a quiet Sabbath afternoon. “Too terrible to speak of here,” Charles Kingsley would have said coyly of the story of Jael, as he had said when he avoided describing Medeia’s revenge – Medea was Medeia to Charles Kingsley, and Dædalus was Daidalos; he was clearly an awful speller, Ida Brook with a beard – unless, being such a muscular Christian, he thought it was different for the Bible, a necessary toughness, my dear little man made all the manlier by a little deep-voiced sinew-stiffening.)

  There actually were two pillars in the schoolroom (she had only just begun to call it this) exactly as in Maggie’s attic refuge – here was a sign – and against them (when not hammering) she ground and beat the doll’s wooden head in the approved Maggie fashion. When she was not doing this she was binding Allegra and Edith (squirming, wriggling, vociferously objecting) to them with jump-ropes, perusing the windows at All Saints’ to discover new methods of martyring them at the stake. She may have been firm with her dolls (well, perhaps rather more than firm: one was disemboweled; one had a head heavy with clumped nails, splintered as a storm-ravaged tree), but she tried to be even firmer with her resolutely unco-operative sisters. One day she would demolish the pillars with the fury of her attack, and the whole house would collapse with an apocalyptic roar, preferably when all her enemies were gathered together within it, drinking tea and nibbling fruitcake.

  “Yea, yea, mine enemies hath …” – was “hath” a plural form of the verb? “They hath” sounded wrong, somehow – “… perished!” she would chant, planning a victory dance, something involving triumphant stomping, and much swaying to and fro with uplifted arms. She might essay the occasional “Whoop!”, the rise and fall ululations as she patted the flattened palm of her hand against her open mouth. She had vague thoughts of Red Indians whooping around a blazing, crackling fire, flying sparks, long thin shadows across night-darkened plains, paint-slashed faces fiercely illuminated. Terpsichore Dibbo – despite her ambitious name – was utterly useless at this sort of thing, and no help whatsoever.

  “First position!” Terps would chant, attempting to emulate Mary Benedict’s ballet demonstrations, and fall flat on her face with an always-surprised squawk.

  Even better than “perished” was “perishèd,” the grave accent adding an emphatic finality to the destruction of those whom she detested.

  (She remembered Romeo being banishèd from Verona, and the actress playing Juliet loudly lamenting.

  (“Banny-shed! Banny-shed!” she howled to the Nurse.

  (It was a word that slew ten thousand Tybalts.

  (It was a pronunciation that had taken Alice by surprise.

  (The actress had thumped her bosom, helpfully emphasizing the anguish for the benefit of the dimmer members of the audience, wincing slightly at an off-target thump.)

  “Perry-shed! Perry-shed!”

  Alice was not lamenting.

  Anything but.

  No anguish, and no bosom-thumping for her. It was her feet – in the absence of the necessary bosom – that thumped, and her arms and hair swung like storm-lashed tree branches, whilst – to the sound of her breathless, eager incantations – her enemies perry-shed in terrified howling heaps. The unexpected power of an extra syllable. Something perry-shed sounded far more satisfactorily obliterated than something merely “perished.” One last brief glimpse of the rose-patterned china, the shape of the teethmarks in the half-chewed slice of fruitcake (the last thing they ever saw a glacé cherry, two sultanas, a few crumbs) and then darkness, dust, oblivion.

  “Nutty as a fruitcake, am I?” she’d shout challengingly to the fruitcake nibblers. It would be the last thing they ever heard, putting them quite off their nuts.

  It would be just like Samson obliterating the Philistines. (The perfect choice of noun, this last.)

  It would be extremely entertaining.

  She couldn’t wait.

  34

  Now the trees had all gone, and she looked down on building lots, and half-finished houses, outside work stopped in the severe weather, the ground too solid to dig. Carpenters and plasterers were working inside the houses where work was far enough advanced, and on weekdays – above the gusting of the wind – she could hear whistling, singing, hammering, and see the prints of heavy boots in the snow. Out there Frankenstein’s creature would be staggering, lost in the Arctic wastes, searching for Mr. Hyde, searching for a mirror, the picture of Dorian Gray, and here was the madwoman gazing down on him from her high window.

  At least – she tried to comfort herself – she didn’t have to look out from her window across to the park and the statue of Albert Comstock, as Kate did.

  Kate and her parents lived on Park Place, a few doors away from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. How that statue must haunt her dreams, and bring restlessness to quiet evenings. It had been there for nearly fifteen years, and was covered in enough bird droppings to fertilize every cornfield from Ohio to Nebraska. The crops would be gargantuan and strange tasting, the ears curiously shaped. Exports would plummet. The birds seemed to seek out this particular statue, as if Mrs. Albert Comstock – who displayed a surprising grasp of Symbolism – had trained them especially. It might well be
, of course, that Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s doves had a hidden purpose, and were not reared solely to inspire poetry.

  Carlo Fiorelli had made the unfortunate change in the style of his sculpture at about the time of this statue – brought on, possibly, by his becoming enamored of Ben-Hur (“Is wonderful, wonderful book!”) several years after its publication – and decided that boots and buttonholes were inimical to marble, and promptly outlawed modern dress from all his work. As a result, the minor worthies of Longfellow Park were depicted dressed in the way he imagined Ancient Romans would have been dressed. In carefully arranged togas or athletes’ tunics, barefooted or sandaled, and most of them wearing laurel wreaths – they were, after all, the cream of local society – the men (they were all men: The Bearded Ones were out in cool, white force) stood around The Forum, just inside the ornamental gates on Park Parade facing out toward the lake, like victors in some great battle surveying a conquered kingdom.

  The statue of Albert Comstock – Albert Comstock: The Spirit of Commerce – was designed to illustrate, and encourage, the entrepreneurial spirit of the growing community. He was sitting down, a portly figure, hands pressed against the sides of his thighs, and leaning forward at an odd angle. There was a sensation of strain about the pose, an expression of extreme concentration on the face. It was known locally among the young – with their distressing lack of respect for their elders – as Albert Comstock: The Curse of Constipation.

  Carlo Fiorelli had rather misjudged the length of Albert Comstock’s tunic. He had aimed for a dignified simplicity, the innocence of earlier times; what he had produced was a very fat man showing his bottom. This was what Kate saw every day from her bedroom window: the bottom facing toward her, peeping provocatively through the trees like a harvest moon.

  “How’s Bertie’s bottom?” was one of Alice’s regular greetings when Kate came to see her.

  (“Sweet Moon …”

  (Pyramus, sensing his cue, sprang into action, striding on stage in his manliest manner just after Thisby had sprinted away from the lion. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was nearing its end.

  (“… I thank thee for thy sunny beams;

  I thank thee, Moon, for shining now so bright …”)

  The statue consumed enough marble for a small cathedral, and on sunny days its vast shadow blighted several acres beyond it, inhibiting all thoughts of picnics, suppressing all possibilities of déjeuner sur this particular herbe in that direction. Manet’s paintbrush would have dropped from his nerveless hand. Who could face nibbling on a chicken leg with those gigantic dimpled buttocks twinkling close by?

  Albert Comstock had unveiled his own statue shortly before his death, just as she had unveiled the statue of herself and her sisters when she was a little girl. She would have liked to see his face when he saw the bottom. Come to think of it, however, with his butcher’s training he would probably have been gratified by such an impressive piece of meat, and automatically assessed its weight and price per pound. His deeply ingrained spirit of commerce – other phrases were sometimes employed by the envious or the spiteful (some had been heard to comment that in choosing to marry whom he did he had been automatically following his usual practice of buying in bulk for cheapness) – was so overwhelming that there was general surprise that the words SHOP AT COMSTOCK’S were not engraved in large letters across the toga’s front. Surely he could have persuaded Carlo Fiorelli that the mighty Roman eminence was incomplete unless – like another Mabel Peartree, one brazenly displaying her anatomy – it was casually swinging a shopping basket containing a selection of the culinary delights available for those who chose to experience Service with Sincerity and a Good Selection of Bones Available for Dogs of All Sizes? You visualized some tiny minion whose special skill was to measure bones and dogs’ mouths to achieve maximum compatibility between the two.

  Mrs. Albert Comstock had let it be known – you sensed the pageboy, the velvet cushion, the tarantara fanfare of trumpets – that her preferred description of the statue was “noble”: an adjective that did not spring readily to mind. Mabel Peartree would have been there at the unveiling, and you could guarantee that she would have seized the opportunity to make use yet again of the word “charming” – charming! – the one adjective she knew. This would have been followed – shortly afterward – by “He’s used a great deal of marble.” Like Mrs. Albert Comstock, Mabel Peartree always liked to feel that she was getting her money’s worth when anything vaguely cultural was in the offing. Alice – though not within the hearing of Mrs. Albert Comstock – referred to it as The Bebuttocked Behemoth: this captured the essence, she felt. When pressed for a comment by Mrs. Albert Comstock – this, after all, was in the days when she was strange though not yet officially regarded as mad – she (thinking rapidly, overwhelmed by what she had seen, that was the message, struggling to find the words to do it justice) had managed to come out with “It possesses a powerful uniqueness of vision.” This had been received with gratified nods, and she had later heard Mrs. Albert Comstock using the same expression to Mrs. Goodchild, with the general implication that it had come to her in a visionary moment. If Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls had racily risked teaching French, she could have been a daring pioneer of her sex in the male monopoly of the diplomatic service. “The Spanish have a powerful uniqueness of vision,” she’d have been saying, as gunboats clashed. “The Russians have a powerful uniqueness of vision.” A glittering career had been denied her because of beardlessness.

  Herman Melville, his books forgotten, his days of writing novels over, hurrying to work in the New York Custom House, would have had the twilight of his years warmed as he caught a glimpse of its white vastness through the trees, and taken comfort from the fact that he had been remembered after all. Some lover of literature had erected a statue to Moby-Dick, and his greatest creation – though not seen as such at the time – would be forever commemorated in this New York neighborhood.

  “Call me Albert Comstock …”

  The words possessed a certain rough poetry, though they presupposed that the whale narrated the novel. As was only appropriate (it was oddly satisfying when unexpected symmetries were discovered) Albert Comstock had been buried in the same cemetery as Herman Melville, who was not too far away from the man whose imperfectly sighted immensity had given him such misguided – but very real – consolation.

  On nights of the full moon Mrs. Albert Comstock was of the firm opinion that the lascivious girls from The House of the Magdalenes would be drawn out in droves to marvel – in rapt, sensual abandonment – at the ample white flesh revealed to them, and some fierce inner hunger would be assuaged by the highly charged erotic allure of its shadowed loveliness, as they collapsed in synchronized waves, the hussies. Alice had overheard her complaining to Mrs. Goodchild and Mabel Peartree about the determined – ahem – assaults upon Bertie’s statue. Sometimes, you could tell – ahem – parts of the statue had been – ahem – touched. Ahems and italics battled to convey the full horror of what she feared. (There was quite a battle in her listeners’ features, also, at this point as they struggled to avoid displaying revulsion too obviously.) For a moment Alice had been a little disconcerted by this, this unexpected link with herself, her belief – which she had shared with no one – that some man or men caressed her statue in The Children’s Hour, always in the same place, creating a small area of shiny goldness. She placed her hand on her left breast, above her heart, above her pocket-watch, as if checking the double ticking, assessing that both pocket-watch and heart were working. That was the place.

  On those nights, the full-moon nights, in the cold moonlit dormitory, the long thin shapes of the windowpanes thrown across the bare floorboards, the Magdalenes would dream dreams of Albert Comstock, shifting restlessly, awoken to suppressed needs, emitting little inarticulate cries. Mrs. Albert Comstock would picture them with unusual vividness. The cries would gradually become one chorused word, chanted like a great convulsive invocation to the gods in a Greek trage
dy: “Comstock! Comstock! Comstock!”

  35

  Alice had been born on March the nineteenth 1868, the day on which Captain Nemo had been the first man to reach the South Pole. The summer that followed had been blisteringly hot, and Mama had gone away with her to Staten Island, away from the heat and the glare, to a hotel near the sea where it would be cooler. Even as far uptown as Longfellow Park (tree-fringed, then, semi-rural) the oppressive heavy air of baked, shimmering, heat-hazed sidewalks seemed to press down suffocatingly. Her first few months of babyhood had been in intense heat, and yet – these days – she seemed always to be cold. She had bought 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for her little brother, Ben (she always bought books as gifts) – he would have been about eight at the time – and he had come across the date of her birthday, correct down to the year, in the novel. He had been very impressed, thinking it something she had organized herself, a personal request to Jules Verne written in fluent French. It had been like a development of The Alice Collection and The Pinkerton Collection.