Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  For several days the picture of the poor soul whose job it had been to rub on the yogurt haunted her. He was probably one of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s more hopeless cases now, a benighted being who had descended totally into madness. Curled up in a dark corner of a padded and permanently locked room in the Webster Nervine Asylum, an oubliette for the demented, he would move his hand obsessively round and round in a circular clockwise direction, as if urging the clock onward to the moment of his longed-for death. Whimpering, weeping, he would forever be repeating the movements he had made on the day that had driven him into insanity, the day on which he had applied the yogurt in generously dripping layers to Albert Comstock’s gigantic buttocks. He was a Harry Lawson who was trapped forever in the darkness of the corridors at the center of the earth, the darkness of the corridors within his own mind, an insane Lady Macbeth forever fondling the buttocks that only she could see. (“I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.” That was what the Waiting-Gentlewoman told the startled Doctor of Physic. Hubby clutched at the dagger which he saw before him; she clutched at the fatal chubby-buttocked vision.) Perhaps she might be assigned a cell next to his in their Poughkeepsie place of exile and they could strike up an acquaintanceship, hesitatingly attempting to tap out faltering messages in Morse code, but knowing all the time that it was impossible to tap-tap-tap on a padded wall. Instead of a dot, instead of a dash, the only sound from inside the cells – audible above the howls, the laughter, the shrieks – would be the scratch-scratch-scratch of nails upon the dementedly layered scrawled graffiti, and time would pass with infinite slowness.

  Kate – then a little girl – had watched strollers in the park veer abruptly to one side, choking, to remain upwind of the awful smell from Albert Comstock.

  “And from his statue, as well, I hope,” Alice had added, helpfully.

  The Central Park might very well have statues that included Shakespeare, Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, Beethoven, and Giuseppe Mazzini, but Longfellow Park was quite content with the likes of Albert Comstock and Reynolds Templeton Seabright, thank you very much. Carlo Fiorelli seemed to wish his minor status as a sculptor upon himself. He seemed to specialize in virtually unknown classical figures (Posthumia Faces Her Accusers, Servilius Is Ridiculed by the Soldiers, Claudius Pulcher Dips the Sacred Chickens in Water), and they languished – dusty and unsold – in his workshop, facing their accusers, being ridiculed, dipping chickens.

  Reynolds Templeton Seabright was the best known of the figures. This was not a figure that had been modeled from life: it had been erected some years after his death, when his Shakespeare Castle had already followed him into oblivion, existing only in memory, photographs, and paintings. Carlo Fiorelli had pictured him as Hamlet, his most famous rôle. Unusually, Carlo Fiorelli (Alas) had not chosen the most obvious pose – Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull (the pose in the panel above the front door of the Shakespeare Castle) – but had shown Hamlet at the moment of seeing his father’s ghost, rather an unsettling choice for a man not depicted until after his death. Reynolds Templeton Seabright, mouth open, had just reached the last of four tottering steps back: both arms were outstretched in front of him, the right arm slightly higher than the left, both hands with fingers spread and held upward.

  He had been an actor of the old school, and this was how one portrayed Terror. He would have looked exactly the same when he played Macbeth, and saw the dagger in front of him, or when he played Julius Cæsar, and saw more than one dagger heading toward him. Shakespeare was full of descending daggers. It was like the carefully designed steps in a ballet: open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

  Count five.

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”

  The voice swooped up and down far more than in ordinary conversation, the vowels drawn out like stretched elastic.

  Thunderous applause.

  Open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

  Count five.

  “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

  The voice swooped up and down far more than in ordinary conversation, the vowels drawn out like stretched elastic.

  Thunderous applause.

  Open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

  “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Cæsar!”

  If he had been conveying the idea of Searching, he would have held his hand above his eyes, as if shielding them from sunshine, turning his whole head slowly to the right, then slowly to the left, then slowly to the right, always beginning with the turn to the right. This was how Richard the Third would have looked for a horse, how Malvolio would have scanned Olivia’s garden for spectators, how Kent would have sought King Lear in the storm. One felt, where Reynolds Templeton Seabright was concerned, that he would have employed this same gesture if he had been looking in a drawer for a fresh pair of socks, or in the larder for a jar of pickles. Hand above eyes, head swiveled to right, head swiveled to left, head swiveled to right.

  “Hwhere” – he pronounced it thus – “are the socks, my sweetheart?”

  His fricatives, his aspirates, his consonants, and vowels were caressed, were drawn out lingeringly by his teeth, tongue, and throat.

  Thunderous applause.

  Hand above eyes, head swiveled to right, head swiveled to left, head swiveled to right.

  “Hwhere are the pickles, my precious?”

  His vowels gave hours of pleasure. You could listen to them all day.

  Thunderous applause.

  Sock-seeking, pickles-perusing, he had lived his life to the sound of acclamation, up above the world on Hudson Heights.

  As Carlo Fiorelli had confusingly portrayed Hamlet in a toga – he stuck determinedly to the consistency of his art (his Reynolds Templeton Seabright statue had been his ringing declaration of a new philosophy of art: Bare Knees, Not Buttonholes!) – Julius Cæsar did tend to come into the mind of the spectator, rather than Hamlet. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” Cæsar commented to Mark Antony, well pleased with the nearness of Albert Comstock. It may very well have been, of course, that Claudius Pulcher, his outstretched hands deprived of their sacred chickens, had been dusted off and economically pressed into use, at last finding his purpose.

  On the other side of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, somewhat unexpectedly, was a statue of John Randel, Jr., the surveyor for the grid plan that was powering up Manhattan, overwhelming everything in its way. But not Longfellow Park. He was depicted facing north with a Pointing gesture that would have met with the full – if slightly jealous – approval of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, a mighty leader indicating new lands to conquer.

  All the statues in The Forum – toga-clad and tunic-clad – were caught in similar old-fashioned histrionic poses, striking stylized attitudes of emotion, as if Reynolds Templeton Seabright were but the leading man in a company of actors, traveling players finding their home at last in Longfellow Park, waiting hopefully to be greeted by a properly dressed Hamlet (properly dressed was tights, properly dressed was all in black with a nice white Byronic shirt), the best actors in the world for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral … They were like diagrams in a book of acting, demonstrating feelings and how they ought to be conveyed: Triumph, Despair, Arrogance (there were several of these), Joy, raring to be unleashed upon tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Hands were held to heads, to hearts, held in the air in front of the face, their whole body become the image of a mood without the use of words.

  Alice felt that here was a true portrayal of the theatre, where her memories of performances – so often – tended to be visual, the gestures remembered, but not the language that had been used. It was the same in life. In the most intense moments, words did not matter.

  There were no words.

  Emotion was contained within the movements of the body: a head turned to one side, the curled
fingers of a hand raised in greeting or farewell, two hands held forward imploringly. They were like the figures on the terra-cotta panels that had been on the walls all around the Shakespeare Castle, and their gesturing was like what she had heard of the cinematograph where there was no speech, where no words were heard, and everything was conveyed by the expressions of the face, the way the body was held. It was what she had seen in so many operas. It was a language like music, beyond words, a language in which words were no longer needed, or no longer adequate. Much of it was to do with the hands, the way they moved, the way they pulled up at the air, striving for expression, like a language for those who could not speak or hear, intense emotions contained within a small, fierce area of silence, Rosobell attempting to convey a great and complex grief.

  Mama’s …

  Mama’s …

  Mama’s face, now that she could no longer speak.

  The faces were like faces seen in electric light for the first time, suddenly brilliantly illuminated, overbright.

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  In their pompous gesturing – they outdid the best that Max Webster and Serenity Goodchild could accomplish – the statues were tempting targets for the unimpressed and the frivolous, and The Curse of Constipation, in particular, had suffered numerous indignities. Most recently, at the end of the summer, a tandem bicycle had been crammed between Albert Comstock’s buttocks, as if the statue had been an overdesigned storage facility – Insert Front Wheel HERE, with a discreet downward-pointing arrow – for the many bicyclists who whirred around the park, a useful and commendable addition to the many services offered for visitors. She had been cruelly delighted to hear of this from Kate, particularly when photographic evidence had been produced.

  “Tut-tut!” she had – er – tut-tutted. “How shocking. Tut-tut-tut!”

  The bicycle had remained proudly in place over a weekend, proving a popular attraction after the last of the year’s Sunday afternoon concerts.

  Still humming the more well-known airs from The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart was insinuating himself in everywhere), Les Huguenots or La Sonnambula, and singing “Just Tell Them that You Saw Me” or “Break the News to Mother” (the band master had been in nostalgic mood), the crowds had paused to savor the sight once more before leaving the park. The bicycle was so firmly inserted into the cleavage that Daisy Bell and her beau could have pedaled away in mid-air for hours with perfect safety, the bright lights in her dazzling eyes – despising policemen and lamps – illuminating the statue with a soft radiance. This had not gone unnoticed. The last music Kate had heard from the park on that Sunday afternoon had not been Mozart or Meyerbeer or Bellini, but the sound of the crowds spilling out through the gates singing, with enormous feeling:

  “Daisy, Daisy

  Give me your answer do!

  I’m half crazy,

  All for the love of you!

  It won’t be a stylish marriage,

  I can’t afford a carriage,

  But you’ll look sweet,

  Upon the seat

  Of a bicycle made for two!”

  The outrage – for outrage it surely was (it struck at the very roots of a civilized society) – remained in place until Monday morning, when two unenthusiastic workmen were detailed to remove the bicycle from Albert Comstock’s buttocks. Kate had taken her camera along to record the moment (“for posterior,” Alice said, mentally bracing herself for Issie Isserliss to ring her bell for a Pun Warning), and brought the resulting photographic essay along to Alice, showing it to her with a detailed commentary. There were two men involved in the operation, one very much younger than the other. They marched in step, accidentally, rather than by design, but this, and the fact that they were similarly attired in dark blue suits, gave them the air of a vaudeville act arriving on stage to begin their routine. The ladder they carried between them became their prop, in the way that some artistes made use of umbrellas or suitcases.

  Whilst the older man carried out his duties with gloomy distaste, the young man – sensing his moment – entered into the spirit of the occasion with a verve which hinted at frustrated theatrical ambitions. He paused in heroic poses on his stepladder as the Kodaks clicked, like a famous engineer captured as he paused before some great structure he had brought into being – a bridge flung across a great gorge, a vast machine in an echoing manufactory – or a fearless adventurer about to plant a flag at the North Pole or on the summit of a mountain. He had the right size of moustache for this latter rôle.

  Fired by the success of this – appreciative murmurs, discreet bursts of applause – he added sound effects to his repertoire, producing an impressively graphic sucking slurping (rather too graphic for delicate sensibilities) as – wobbling dramatically at the top of the ladder – he finally prized the front wheel of the bicycle free. He bowed with great dignity, his hand upon his heart, like a tenor taking his curtain call after a triumphant début, a Tannhäuser after dying amidst the pilgrims, an Alfredo after cradling the dying Violetta in his arms: the death roll in opera almost paralleled Shakespeare’s. A glittering career with a shrewd theatre owner surely beckoned.

  As the applause died away, Oliver thrust his way through the assembled throng.

  “Papa! Papa!” he cried, embracing the plinth as if it were a square-shouldered paterfamilias. “I had to be here” – he spoke like one broken, struggling to overcome a deep and painful emotion – “to see your dignity at last restored to you.” He paused, as if unable to continue. “When the wheel finally emerged” – here he paused to produce a lengthy and elaborate sound effect, ending with a liquescent plop (the younger workman was jealously alert, sensing an astute seizer of the limelight) – “I felt that my heart could once more be at peace.”

  It was an affecting scene, somewhat spoiled when it emerged – within the week – that it had been Oliver who had inserted the offending artifact in the first place. Anyone who referred to his father’s statue as “Bertie Buttocks” – as Oliver did, on every possible occasion – was marked as a young man somewhat deficient in filial piety. He had committed the vile crime – it was little less than symbolic patricide in the eyes of Mrs. Goodchild, who saw Symbolism in most things and should have interested Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – with the help of Arthur Vellacott. Mrs. Albert Comstock referred to Arthur as Oliver’s “friend” (to be absolutely accurate, she referred to him as Oliver’s “– er – ‘friend’”), the quotation marks – they were pronounced quite distinctly – being a good example of her ability to employ audible punctuation.

  (“Friend” …

  (“Friend” in quotation marks …

  (It was …

  (It was a long time ago.

  (Papa and Annie.

  (And Papa’s “friend.”

  (She was drawn to the thoughts as if she were picking at a barely healed abrasion, digging the edges of her nails into what ought to have been left untouched, unable to stop herself.

  (The smell of new-struck matches and cigarette smoke, the fire and brimstone smell in the suits and beards of the two men. Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. She was one of the girls from the statue. The full moon emerged from between the trees. The trees had gone; the trees had been destroyed.

  (“Plato, Copernicus, Julius Cæsar, Agrippa, Tycho …” Papa’s “friend” was saying, as if conjugating an irregular verb, the same words in the same order as he looked up at the moon, rattling off what he said with the monotonous emphases of something he had learned by heart. There were thirty-three wounds in Julius Cæsar’s body. His ghost appeared to Brutus at Sardis, and at Philippi, and Brutus knew that his hour was come.

  (“… Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Hercules …” The oceans, the marshes, the lakes, the seas, were waterless, arid desert regions of ash and stone: Oceanus Procellarum, Palus Epidemiarum, Lacus Somniorum, Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium … They stretched away on all sides of her, and their names infected her, drawn up inside her as she walked upon them in her bare feet: Th
e Ocean of Storms, The Marsh of Disease, The Lake of Sleep, The Sea of Coldness, The Sea of Crises, The Sea of Showers, The Sea of Clouds …

  (Then will all clouds of sorrow depart …

  (She thought, fleetingly, of the very first performance of The Pilgrim’s Progress, when she had been ten, of the parts played by Papa and his “friend,” their nobility, their virtue. She wondered if Papa’s “friend” was dead, like Papa, and wished he were.

  (Scourged.

  (Buffeted.

  (Lanced.

  (Stoned.

  (Pricked.

  (Burned.

  (The man had not been a friend. He had been a “friend.”)

  Er – “friend.”

  Mrs. Albert Comstock’s “er” controversially hovered on the very verge of becoming an “ahem,” and contained a whole nudge-nudging world of grubbily unwholesome innuendo. Reputations could be enjoyably destroyed by an efficiently administered “ahem.” Oliver was not one to be cowed by an “er” – even an “ahem” would have held no fears for him – and he never failed to introduce Arthur as “my – er – ‘friend.’” Such occasions did not present themselves at 5 Hampshire Square. After she had described Arthur as “Oliver’s – er – ‘friend,’” Mrs. Albert Comstock would go on to comment – without the use of an “er”; no hesitation whatsoever was needed here – that “Arthur Vellacott is rather French.” It was the worst thing she could say about anyone.

  The younger workman, reluctant to return to his workaday world of weeding planting beds, and mowing lawns, posed with the bicycle for further photographs, as if it were a tiger he had just shot from his howdah. One ambitious photographer posed him beneath the buttocks, pointing upward, a witness indicating the scene of an appalling crime in one of the more lurid newspapers. With his other hand he gripped the handlebars of the bicycle. He avoided touching the front wheel, made fastidious by his own sound effects. The older man, judging by the expression on his face, would have a lot to say to him when they were alone in the musty privacy of their potting shed. “You think you’re too grand now for the likes of me,” he would complain in the agitated accents of a spurned suitor, emotion causing a wobble in his copperplate handwriting as he carefully wrote out his labels, Fuchsia magellanica, Rhododendron ponticum, like a doctor prescribing poison. They would be visible all around the park, like the love poems in As You Like It hung upon the trees in the Forest of Arden, for the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she of Rosalind.