Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “Imagination is an impediment to progress,” he had once said to her, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought he had coined an epigram, a Wildean Mr. Gradgrind wandered far from Coketown. What he had been trying to suggest was that he was a true scientist in the examination of the mind, a man unswayed by anything but the empirical evidence of what he discovered, coolly assessing, free from the dangerous unpredictability of emotion, though she would have preferred imagination, she would have liked emotion.

  He would probably listen to the words from Hamlet with his usual lack of expression, scribble-scribbling in his notebook. Alice P: “Clouds almost in shape of a camel.” Odd grammar. Query: detrimental effect of Harry Hollander songs? She imagined his amused, patronizing little laugh, the sort of indulgent male laughter she associated with beards, dark clothes, the smell of tobacco. Perhaps he might start to hum one of Harry’s songs under his breath as he wrote. “Why Are You So Flirty, Gertie? (Why Are You Such a Tease?)” (An appropriate choice to accompany Hamlet.)

  That’s what she’d do.

  She’d confuse him with camels, worry him with weasels and whales.

  They’d get him blotting his notebook. They’d snap his pen nib.

  She knew Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster for what he was, and she was sure that he knew this.

  When her attention wandered, as it often did, during her visits to his consulting room – as he urged her to tell him her dreams, or what she could see in those clouds, that picture (week after week, he did this) – she studied her surroundings carefully, whilst maintaining an expression of rapt attentiveness and a steady flow of grammatically correct sentences. This was a skill that had served her well at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls. The books on display in the glazed cabinets alongside the window, the framed certificates and the photographs of the famous (or reasonably well-known locally: Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster seized his opportunities where he could) smiling, shaking his hand: all were a statement of his worth, a gown of power.

  Lie there, my art.

  There was plenty of lying, and precious little art.

  She was irresistibly reminded of a fisherman flaunting a large fish for a photographer. Look what I’ve caught!

  The books – as books always did – captured her attention most, and she peered shortsightedly in an attempt to read the titles, hoping that light would glint on the embossed gold. Were they real books, or were they – like those in the terrifying scene in the first lunatic asylum in Hard Cash – fake books, books made out of metal?

  (All unaware, Alfred Hardie walked through the open gate and into the grounds of Silverton Grove House, lured there by the forged note.

  (He entered the handsome hall, was directed up the left-hand staircase, and through an open door into what appeared to be a drawing room.

  (The servant led Alfred across the drawing room and opened a concealed door that was disguised as a looking-glass, and they walked through the looking-glass into the cold bare room beyond, dirty and cobwebbed, its nearer wall lined with the fake books.)

  Every Wednesday morning, as she entered 11 Park Place she imagined herself walking through the looking-glass when the front door was opened, stepping into the reversed, reflected chessboard world of the Jabberwock.

  (Mrs. Archbold, the matron of the asylum, walked toward him. She had been hired by Alfred’s father to imprison him, to keep him prisoner in the hidden realms of the mad.

  (“Calm yourself,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “There is no wonder nor mystery in the matter: you were expected.”

  (She pulled at a gold chain that was hanging around her neck, and drew out an ivory whistle. When she blew upon it, two men came quietly into the room …)

  “I can see a galleon,” Alice would say, fluently, sincerely, all stuttering ceasing, trying to angle her neck to make it look as if she was looking out of the window at the clouds, “its sails billowing out, its flag fluttering …” (Scribble, scribble) and her hesitations, as she strained to make out letters in the blur, were seen as an attempt to describe what she saw with more accuracy.

  The Principles of Psychology. Grundzuge der Physiologischen Psychologie …

  Many of the titles were in German. Hilde Claudia, his small, frightened-looking, Austrian wife (difficult to imagine her waltzing gaily: the Vienna Woods would be dark and troublesome, a place of nightmares) labored all day translating impenetrable texts for his pursed-lipped approval. Her second name was pronounced “Cloudier,” and Alice often thought of her as Hilde Cloudier. The clouds swarmed dark about her, obliterating the sun, and it was cold. She rarely appeared in public, an even more elusive local than Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s husband, and never spoke, utterly silenced by her husband’s constant state of irritation or (more usual) heavily facetious amusement at her frequent mistakes in speaking English.

  “Gesundheit!” he would exclaim, with the heavy jocularity of the humorless, every time Hilde Claudia inadvertently lapsed into German, her own language the symptom of a problem with her health. Poor Hilde Claudia was perpetually under a cloud, perpetually damp and drizzled upon, suffering from colds and sneezing whatever the weather. Theodore and Max were encouraged to be on the alert for the unauthorized use of German, and would shout Gesundheit! just like Papa. It would make her speak English. It was a jolly family joke, demonstrating their jolly family funsomeness. It was for her own good. They were very keen. “Gesundheit! Gesundheit!” they’d be crowing all the time, fingers pointing triumphantly, even if Hilde Claudia had done nothing more than mispronounce a word. “It has wery cold been, this vinter,” she would begin, slowly, agonizing over each word, and – “Gesundheit! Gesundheit!” – Theodore and Max would be off like rockets, fingers accusingly angled. (Wery! Vinter!) “‘Wery’ is not German!” Hilde Claudia would insist desperately, almost weeping. “‘Vinter’ is not German!” (Unfortunately for Hilde Claudia, “vinter” was German. Theodore and Max cock-a-doodle-dood like a farmyard full of roosters.) After a while she stopped speaking altogether, probably thinking it safer. You could tell that Theodore and Max were disappointed about this, slightly sulky at a lost chance of pleasure.

  Alice remembered her at Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s once, before she took the veil and vanished, closing as many doors as possible between herself and the world outside 11 Park Place. She’d been sitting in a corner of the conservatory, partially hidden behind a large fern, like some drab-colored moth seeking camouflage to escape capture, visibly nervous at the thought of being forced into conversation. “It is the werbs.” That was what she had told Miss Ericsson, when – not liking to see anyone sitting all by herself – she had gone and sat beside her and tried to talk. This was more or less all that she had said, explaining her silence, her crouching in the undergrowth, made tense by tenses. Nouns she could more or less cope with – she could grasp at the person or thing, and, a little more helplessly, at the place – especially if they were common or proper (though abstract nouns opened up worrying areas of ungraspability). She learned lists of vocabulary every night, trying to improve her English, rather in the way that Alice’s Mama had tried to learn things to please Papa. Alice thought of her – thought of both women – alone in a room with a book, bent over, lips moving as they repeated things to themselves, memorizing, counting things out on their fingers as if speaking to someone deaf. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had hauled Hilde Claudia out into the open, after making a determined search, and she had trembled as she was led into the next room to be introduced to someone she was told she ought to meet. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster wished to demonstrate her in action. She was a useful piece of equipment for his office, like a shiny new typewriter or a newly installed telephone. She could speak German. “Speak German, Hilde Claudia,” he’d say (giving his imprimatur to an authorized occasion) – you had a sensation of a lever being pulled, or a button pressed – and she’d say something in German, usually the same thing, some comment about the weather, or about being pleased to meet whomever she was meeting. She
could use verbs when she spoke in German. There were no problems with “wery” or “vinter.” All sneezing ceased.

  She’d spent a few evenings looking wretched, and then she had stopped appearing in other people’s houses. Alice had pictured her, cowering in a corner, unable to speak, reduced to holding up shakily printed notices to keep potential conversationalists away. Please at a distance away with werbs be keeping. Please be not speaking. Please aloneness let me be having. Perhaps it was on such evenings that she had begun to develop her curiously all-absorbing interest in semaphore. A system of communication that did not involve speaking must have held a powerful allure for her. The idea would have grown in her mind to fill all that silence around her as she sought frond-shadowed refuge behind the more distant plants in conservatories, or sat upright and petrified on far-distant sofas in dark corners, with someone’s aged half-asleep aunt propped up against her, chin firmly clamped to her shoulder. She would have begun her first tentative signalings with napkins filched from a nearby side table (she tended to hide herself away amidst the stacked appurtenances of the dining room), passing the hours – a napkin in each hand – by learning the different signals, as methodically as she learned her lists of English vocabulary. Rapidly, jerkily, each gesture looking like an out-of-control nervous twitch, a stutter of the whole body, she’d jerk out her right arm – the aged aunts shooting off the sofa to slide across the well-polished parquet flooring on their chins – and her left arm at different angles, mumblingly memorizing the alphabet. Then she’d started to appear, accompanied by her two tall sons – they towered above her, spindly, angled to one side if the wind was blowing, two Ichabod Cranes who’d be much improved by headlessness – in the less populated parts of Longfellow Park, early in the morning, or just before dusk, practicing long-distance signaling. She’d somehow acquired several sets of semaphore flags, and Theodore or Max would be sent as far away as possible – here was a requirement with which Alice could readily identify – to conduct wordless conversations with their mama. Alice could imagine her in the evenings with the red material and the yellow material stitch-stitch-stitching away in her sewing chair by the light of a lamp as she manufactured her flags. Semaphore flags would have been ideal for the mediæval women, a useful method for signaling from between the crenellations in the battlements of the castles that enclosed them, an attractive alternative to arrows or boiling oil. Alice had watched the semaphoring Websters, borrowing Charlotte’s telescope for the purpose, intrigued enough to attempt to work out the code.

  There were two signals that were used more than any other, both of them – unusually – involving agitation of the flags. The first – in which both flags were held in the air at an angle away from the body and waved like a jolly greeting – always preceded any signal, and clearly meant Attention! or Ready to Begin!, something like that. She would concentrate on what followed, once she saw that one. The other signal of this sort was the one that Hilde Claudia seemed to use more than any other, even more than Attention! – she always looked frantically worried, as if every signal was a cry for help, a desperate last attempt to seek succor, Come now! Come now! Come NOW! – in which she held the flag in her right hand down in front of her, and looped the flag in her left hand around and around as if describing a figure of eight in the air. This, Alice, came to realize, meant Error!, and Hilde Claudia would begin her signaling all over again. Even with semaphore flags, it appeared, werbs crept in and caused chaos. Error! Error! An expression of unutterable woe came across her face every time she signaled an error, and she sometimes dashed her flags to the ground in despair. Not much comedy in these errors.

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster always referred to her as Hilde Claudia – not “my wife,” not “Mrs. Webster” – when he introduced her, using her first name as if she were a child being chucklingly introduced to be cooed over and chucked under the chin. If Alice were Hilde Claudia she’d have chucked him over her shoulder with a vigorous grunt. He made her name sound like one word, as if this were the name of the particular item he had purchased, and jabbed her in the back as he said it.

  “This is my telephone …”

  “This is my typewriter …”

  “This is my …”

  – Thrust! –

  “… Hildeclaudia. It can speak German.”

  “Speak German.”

  Thrust!

  “Speak German.”

  Thrust!

  The thrust made her totter forward a few inches, as if she were given to hurling herself at strangers. They wouldn’t realize that they were being given her name, and – suspecting some exotic foreign word or phrase (they knew that she was foreign) – Hulles de Clous d’hier? Île de Cloudiérè? (Was that was where she was from? Where on earth was it?) It sounded French – they tended to smile in their most cosmopolitan fashion (this involved more teeth than usual), and murmur (to Hilde Claudia’s bafflement) “Bonjour” or (sometimes accompanied by a self-consciously continental kiss on the back of her hand) “Enchanté!” As she politely endured the long lingering kisses – thank goodness she was wearing gloves – she studied the bald patches on the backs of their heads (the kissers tended to have bald patches) with evident distaste. She could still see the red lines where they’d been scratching themselves, and why did that one have a mirror-reversed line of handwriting across it in green ink, as if he’d applied his newly written correspondence to his conveniently situated baldness and employed it as a blotter? She leaned a little closer, interested despite herself, trying to make out what it said, but the man must have had an unusually absorbent head, and all the writing was blurred. There was one phrase, however, just on the verge of legibility, which seemed to say …

  She leaned closer.

  Which seemed to say …

  If the bowing man had stood up unexpectedly, the back of his head would have caught Hilde Claudia’s chin with a painful whack, and hoisted her up into the air, setting the chandelier jingling.

  … You saucy boy!

  This was what it seemed to say.

  Who was this oh-so-saucy boy, and what was the source of his oh-so-sauciness?

  (Much agitation from Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fan if she happened to be present. French and kissing. Ooh la la! crept ever closer. Nowhere was safe.)

  It became cloudier and cloudier for Claudia, and the days were always dark.

  “Speak German.”

  Thrust!

  “Speak German.”

  Thrust!

  With much the same thrustingly officious tone of voice, Mrs. Albert Comstock imperiously demanded “Speak English!” (with an added exclamation point) of the Renwicks, the young English couple, possibly in an attempt to prevent them from indulging in a predilection for conversing in Hindoostanee. She wanted to hear what English accents sounded like, and – after the Renwicks politely obliged – she commented loudly on how convincing she found them, on the very verge of correcting their pronunciation of certain words. Guests of Mrs. Albert Comstock had to conform to preexisting prejudices.

  “How is it now with the weather?” Hilde Claudia asked repeatedly, with increasing desperation, on the occasions on which she was allowed to speak English in public. “How is it now with the weather?” People tended to nod at this, with small smiles, as if what she said was a conversational counter, rather like “How are you?” (to which an answer was not expected) but Hilde Claudia really wanted to know.

  (“How is it now with the weather?”

  (She waited for news of increasing warmth.

  (She waited for news of brighter days.

  (She waited for news of cloud-free heavens.

  (She waited in vain.

  (“We have been given cold weather,” she was sometimes driven to answer herself.

  (“We have been given dark weather.”

  (“We have been given oh-so-much cloud.”

  (The oh-so-much cloud grew thicker, darker, ever more impenetrable. Cloudier, today, Hilde Claudia, very much cloudier.)

&
nbsp; Come now! Come now! Come NOW!

  Alice had never heard her refer to her husband by name, and sometimes speculated about how she would address him, though she always thought that – whatever it was – it was sure to be spoken deferentially. Perhaps she abbreviated his middle name and called him Charm. If the Heightons could still straight-facedly address their daughter as Chastity after the Sunday-school picnic, Mrs. Webster could go ahead and address her husband as Charm.

  Unless she called him Cotty.

  Unless she called him Asch.

  Asch would Tritsch her, Asch would Tratsch her, if she attempted the Tritsch, Tratsch polka. (“Opus 214,” she would announce solemnly, determined to suppress any unsuitable elements of frivolity in her choice.) There’d be Donner, there’d be Blitz, there’d be Wiener Blut all over the carpet, and the air would be bluer than the Beautiful Blue Danube when he let rip. (Yes to Wine, yes to Song, no, no, no to Women.)

  She saw Hilde Claudia, tentatively, rubbing tired eyes, holding out a translation to her husband after a day of toiling, the pages covered in crossings-out and variant readings.

  “Is this meeting with your approval, Charm? Always I am trouble having with the werbs.”

  Her exhausted arms – barely capable of lifting the flags – jerked into spasmodic automatic action. Somewhere in the distance, someone would see her signal, and respond.

  Attention!

  H …

  I …

  Error!

  H …

  E …

  HELP! FROM CHARM ME BE RESCUING!

  HELP! I AM BY COTTY CAPTIVE!

  HELP! ASCH HAS ME HERE PRISONERED!

  More book titles became legible.

  Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Asylum Journal. Traumdeutung. A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women. The Borderlands of Insanity …