Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “It would be like 1888 all over again …”

  (A brief memory of Papa’s death, the snowdrifts blocking the light from the windows, the snowdrifts inside the house, the drip-drip-drip of the red grin, the torn papers gleaming in the darkness.)

  “… I must seek out my skates, polish the runners on my sled …”

  “… and hasten to the Central Park.”

  “That could be hazardous. A dinosaur might be roaming down Fifth Avenue.”

  “I thought I’d just killed Mrs. Albert Comstock.”

  “But how satisfying to kill a Martian with one of her own weapons.”

  “Mrs. Albert Comstock is undoubtedly a Martian. The description in the opening paragraph confirms it.”

  “‘Vast and cool and unsympathetic,’” Charlotte quoted.

  “Mrs. Albert Comstock is unquestionably vast.”

  “Tick.”

  “Tick.”

  “Few living things come vaster.”

  “Except, possibly, blue whales …”

  “… There she blows!…”

  “… and the population of China.”

  “Mrs. Albert Comstock is undeniably unsympathetic.”

  “Tick.”

  “Tick.”

  “Mrs. Albert Comstock is unequivocally cool.”

  “Tick.”

  “Tick.”

  “Three adjectives out of three. Tick, tick, tick. There is no doubt whatsoever. Mrs. Albert Comstock is a Martian, and it is our duty to destroy her.”

  “Say that again! Say that again!”

  “Charlotte Finch! You are a corrupting influence on my pristine innocence.”

  It was as if the four of them were together again – herself, Charlotte and Linnaeus, and Emmerson Columbarian – up on Hudson Heights in the music room at Delft Place, singing around the piano, laughing at silly jokes. No, it wouldn’t be thirty or forty years before she and Charlotte turned into the Misses Isserliss: the metamorphosis was already almost complete. She and Charlotte edged ever closer to their Misses Isserliss incarnation, the full-fledged deranged doppelgängers. If she accepted Charlotte’s invitation to move up to Hudson Heights and share Delft Place with her, there they’d be – side by side, their two houses conveniently within cooee distance of each other (a sort of national park for deranged spinsters, a Yellowstone Park of the peculiar) – the two sets of Misses Isserlisses, the image and the reflection, the fully trained and the trainees. It would be so handy for the North River Lunatic Asylum. They’d make friends with the superintendent, wooing him with homemade cakes and knitted vests, and – as a special friend’s favor – he’d lock her in one of the padded cells when she lost control completely on nights of the full moon. She’d shriek unheard all night long, raving dementedly, and the soft walls – she’d caress them for comfort, press her face against them and inhale their dusty urine-scented odor – would yield to her touch like walls in dreams. Padded cells would be like rooms designed for eternal sleep, eternal dreams, with mattresses – ripped, disemboweled – sagging from every surface. She’d emerge in the morning, refreshed and twitching with nervous energy, like a vampire fresh filled with a stranger’s blood. She and Charlotte would grow battier with each year that passed, sharing a house and a sense of humor that no one else could understand. It was a rather pleasing prospect. They were already developing the mannerisms of eccentricity, and Charlotte had three cats, each of which had a name that was a private joke. Alice was taller than Charlotte, and so she should naturally take upon herself the part of Miss Issie Isserliss. She’d enjoy lashing out with the bell. She’d had plenty of practice with her leper’s bell – she was, after all, the Leper of Longfellow Park – and Charlotte would be in top rattling form as she shook the box under the noses of the perpetrators of puns. She’d put a coin into the box specially, to ensure a satisfactory rattle. The box needed its coin, just like the bell needed its clapper. Let’s hear the applause for that clapper! She sometimes imagined Pandora rattling her box in that same way, hopeful of encouraging curiosity, the irresistible urge to lift the lid and peer inside.

  Have a care, Mrs. Albert Comstock! She’d certainly rattle her, her tinkles ever deepening toward the mighty death-knell tolling of reverberating ding-dongs. You might be taking on more than you expect. Who would true valor see/Let him come hither. Valour. A well-wielded bell could give tongue to death.

  “Pun Warning!”

  Tinkle! Tinkle!

  “Unclean!”

  Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

  “Unclean!”

  Splat!

  The bats were swarming.

  The next generation of batty spinsters was all lined up and ready to be unleashed, more bats than a night-shrouded cavern swarming with high-pitched shrieks, the insect-like rattle of membranous wings, the night sky loud and restless.

  She bent to the telescope, fiddling with the eyepiece, as if to bring the memory into sharper focus, bring it closer, and explained what it was she was looking at.

  “Which piece of Mozart, do you think?” she asked. “Which would you choose? Which opera? Which music?”

  Charlotte gave the matter some thought, as Alice bent to the telescope, like Kate over her camera, or Henry Walden Gauntlett.

  “I …”

  Charlotte didn’t know very much Mozart. Beethoven would have been a better bet.

  “I …”

  She’d much rather that Gilbert & Sullivan had been proposed. The ampersand – Charlotte tended to write an ampersand between the two names – linked them like the proprietors of a long-established business, with signs above plate-glass windows in the main streets of most large cities. “The Mikado,” she’d have said confidently. “The Pirates of Penzance.”

  “I …”

  She then noticed Alice’s shoulders starting to shake, her fingers tightening on the sides of the telescope.

  “None of them!” she said firmly.

  “None of them,” Alice confirmed, laughing. She straightened up, and looked at Charlotte. “One of Mozart’s lesser-known pieces.”

  “Not one of Mozart’s pieces at all.”

  “Not one of Mozart’s pieces at all!”

  Charlotte started to bend down toward the eyepiece, and Alice put her hand across it teasingly.

  “I know what must have happened,” she said. “The sign painter decided to add some music, and grabbed hold of whatever was on his music rack to take with him to copy, the first thing he came across.” She smiled at Charlotte. “What piece of music would that be? What would be the most likely? Don’t say Gilbert and Sullivan! Think back a few years. Any home, any music rack, what do you think is most likely to …?”

  It was not Ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunkety plunky-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunkety plunky-plunk. It was …

  “‘After the Ball’!” Charlotte was unhesitating.

  “Yes!”

  They began to waltz around the room, together, singing.

  “… After the ball is over, after the break of morn,

  After the dancers leaving, after the stars are gone,

  Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all,

  Many the hopes that have vanished, after the ball …”

  “How could Mozart ever manage to forget he wrote that?” Charlotte asked.

  “It has definite thematic links with both The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Miss Stein would be proud of you!”

  “I hope Miss Iandoli doesn’t notice,” Alice said. “She’d probably set fire to the sign in protest at the demeaning of Mozart.”

  “Mysterious Conflagration in Longfellow Park.”

  “Back to Mrs. Albert Comstock.”

  “Huge flames.”

  “Thick smoke.”

  “The thicker the better.”

  “Then we wouldn’t be able to see her.”

  37

  She brushed her teeth with Dr. Graves’s Tooth Powder, wondering how long it would be b
efore G. G. Schiffendecken began to stock an extensive range of tooth products bearing his name, and worthy of the false teeth he rammed into every available mouth. There would be bottles on an epic scale in order to cope with the needs of the gigantic landscape-encompassing grins. In his presence it was wise to keep your mouth shut. One thoughtless yawn in his vicinity, and an unfamiliar set of oversized teeth would challengingly occupy your gums, as if you had been seized with an unfamiliar mood of vivacity. As you goggled vacantly at the invasive grin-grin choppers, G. G. Schiffendecken would begin his patter, informing you – in a spirit of informative informality – that it was well worth paying extra for teeth of such high quality.

  Smiles were far more sincere when you’d forked out a fortune.

  She wandered back across to the window as she dabbed at her lips with the towel. She clutched the towel to her, feeling like a bather drawn to the edge of a frozen sea.

  The not-yet-ancient Mariner’s ship came into her mind again. The mist. The wondrous cold. The ice, mast-high. The gale-driven snow on the night of Papa’s death, and the fallen telegraph poles lying across the street like the ice-covered masts of a storm-wrecked armada. The bowed heads. The muffled voices. Sins and iniquities.

  And through the drifts the snowy clifts

  Did send a dismal sheen:

  Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken –

  The ice was all between.

  38

  Now the snow covered the whole of the area that was to become da Ponte, though the face of Mozart was clear. Snow was not falling, but the wind blew up gusts from the drifts that had accumulated earlier, and she looked down on the flurries beneath her, high up above the clouds.

  G. G. Schiffendecken trudged into view on his morning walk with his dog, bowed over as he walked into the blizzard, the dentist drawn forth by the brushing of her teeth. He lay in wait, listening, all poised to pounce. For a moment it really felt like she had brought him into being by thinking of him, but this was a walk he undertook every morning. Coleridge had been inaccurate in his description. There was the shape of a man. There was the shape of a beast. He’d been right about drifts and snowy and ice. He’d certainly – when G. G. Schiffendecken was involved – been right about dismal. How could a man with so many teeth, so lavishly equipped for uncontrollable mirthfulness, look so dismal and lowering most of the time? It was a sinful waste of material. Perhaps for him – as a dentist – grinning qualified as work, another exhausting demonstration of what it was he manufactured. He stood nearby, as his dog – huge, of indeterminate breed, the sort of dog one felt ought to have a miniature wooden barrel around its neck – urinated copiously on Mozart’s feet. G. G. Schiffendecken gazed away into the middle distance in the opposite direction, back home, up toward Hudson Heights, strenuously adopting the attitude of someone unaware of what his dog was doing. Knowing his taste in music, Alice suspected Symbolism.

  The dog bore the unexpected name of Olivia, unexpected – not least – because, Olivia, judging by the – ahem – urinating technique employed, was quite demonstrably not what Mrs. Alexander Diddecott would have described as a “girl dog.” It was probably some coded reference to the missing Mrs. Schiffendecken. G. G. Schiffendecken had discovered her liaison – somewhat dangereuse when dental equipment was freely available – with that very tall thin man who played the banjo even more loudly than Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, and she had decamped to Brooklyn (famed home of Mary Kinkeldey, she of the unacceptable vowels) with her paramour. The Teeth – she, of course, had had a set of her husband’s false teeth installed – possessed strange, erotic powers.

  “Olivia!”

  G. G. Schiffendecken could be heard exclaiming the name each evening, as he took his second walk of the day with the dog, unwinding after a busy day with his arms down people’s throats.

  “Olivia!”

  His teeth – the mighty Schiffendecken teeth – could be seen gleaming in the darkness as he wandered past, calling Olivia’s name. It was strangely haunting. New posts, still pale and unweathered, bore the names of the streets that would be built there (names that would hold no meaning for G. G. Schiffendecken): Almaviva, Figaro, Giovanni (surely a rather controversial choice for the more strait-laced), Dorabella, Susanna…

  Harry Hollander came into view, walking down the site for Susanna Street, heading straight for Mozart. G. G. Schiffendecken (who was probably singing “O, Susanna!” under his breath: that name he did recognize), noticing his approach, began to prepare himself for the ritual of greeting. Alice saw Harry Hollander walking past several times a day – even in weather such as today’s – as he worked on his latest song. He was gesticulating now as he strode along, as if conducting. He saw her at the window, and removed his hat, with a courtly bow. He was never too lost in his composing to cease to be a gentleman. She bowed back, and then waved with her hairbrush; though – by then – he had lowered his head again against the wind. He had never achieved a success as great as “O, Susanna!”, but he worked away every day, and lived in hope.

  He was very modest and down-to-earth about what he did for a living, and they – she, Charlotte, Linnaeus, and Emmerson – had once had a very jolly evening with him years ago, in which he insisted that they should vote to decide which was the very worst song he had ever written. The winner – he had promoted it vigorously by singing it appallingly – had been “There’s a Gap in My Heart where Dorothy Dwelt (For Dorothy’s Not There Now).” “Sensible, sensible, Dorothy” had been his comment. He took his song-writing seriously: this particular song, clearly, had failed to achieve some personal standard. (“Dorothy paid for the doctor,” had been his enigmatic explanation.) There was a sign in his window at Mrs. Chambers’s, where he boarded on the far side of the park, which read: Harry Hollander. Songs written.

  At the moment he seemed to be working his way through most girls’ names (toward the end of the previous year he had dealt with the majority of the city’s landmarks), and Charlotte told her of the latest publications as they appeared in the window at Columbarian & Horowitz. After Lillian, Gertie, Gladys, “You’re Bet, You’re Betty, You’re Lillibet (But You’ll Always Be Lizzie to Me),” “Linger Longer, Lydia (Stay Awhile with Me),” there had been Florence, Mabel (Mabel Peartree had studied it avidly, on the alert for anything dubiously nasal in its references), Bessie, Dora, Mildred, Grace, whole crowds of others. A publisher on West 28th Street, not far from Broadway, paid him ten dollars a song.

  She had been slightly anxious in case he got around to using the name Charlotte, and when he did – Charlotte had arrived flushed with pleasure, and played it instantly on the piano – he had not only written a lovely melody, but (obliterating memories of Sobriety Goodchild) had included, amongst his more-or-less rhymes for Charlotte, “Louisa May Alcott,” “Lancelot,” and “Camelot” in a song about a girl who had loved books as a child. She didn’t envy him if this time he’d reached Agatha. (“Stagger the”? “Swagger the”? or – introducing an element of drama – “Dagger the”?) Aggie might have been easier, but there were worrying hazards – “saggy,” “baggy,” “scraggy” – if he was attempting a love song. It was only a matter of time before he got around to Alice. Perhaps she could collaborate with him, unleash her creative side.

  “Look up, there’s Alice,

  Dripping with malice,

  Peering out over the park.

  It must be traumatic,

  Quite operatic,

  To be crazy like poor

  Lucia di Lammermoor,

  To be locked in the attic

  All, all alone in the dark …”

  She was undoubtedly strange.

  Mrs. Albert Comstock – with her detailed information about Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster and the clinic – frequently told her she was strange (in the tone of voice of someone doing her a tactful favor, as if discreetly informing her that she had bad breath or an unfaithful husband), so it must be true. Mrs. Albert Comstock – who was a mistress of the well placed “er” –
invariably referred to it as “Dr. Webster’s – er – clinic.” (She was clearly longing to say “er – lunatic asylum,” so keen that she’d probably dispense with the “er” before much longer.) Alice always felt that the next sentence would be to remark that it was rather – er – eccentric, surely, to rely upon the Webster Nervine Asylum – such an inconvenient distance away – when the North River Lunatic Asylum – she’d manage to slip the phrase in, somehow – was so – er – convenient. She couldn’t get it into her head (surprising, when you considered its vast empty spaciousness) that Alice was seeing Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in his consulting room on Park Place, and was not making the journey to stay up in Poughkeepsie.

  (Yet.)

  Though she would …

  She would …

  She would be making that journey soon.

  On Wednesday.

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had insisted.

  Today, Ben would begin his journey to Japan, and – three days later – she would be making her shorter journey upriver. “Upriver.” The thought frightened her. There was a hint of slavery about the word, a suggestion of being sold into bondage. She was probably thinking of some narratives from before the Civil War, accounts of slaves being taken down river to the busier slave markets. There was some such reference, she thought, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (or was it The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?), where the word “downriver” was a word to be spoken with fear. Curiously enough, Mrs. Albert Comstock’s intelligence sources – a moment’s pause here, to consider the incongruity of the word “intelligence” being discovered cheek by jowl (the jowls were pendulous and saliva-glistening, wobbling like those of a dribbly bulldog’s) with Mrs. Albert Comstock – had failed to discover the imminence of this departure. It was news she’d be thrilled to discover, and she’d waste no time in informing all her acquaintances. Sides would be sore from vigorous elbow-prodding, spectacles misted and dripping from sibilant whisperings.