Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  These last two projected slightly forward from the others, as if replaced hastily on the shelf, highly suitable volumes for last-minute pre-Miss-Pinkerton perusings, judging by the titles. They’d supply a few words, a few phrases, sparsely hold the silences at bay as she told him what she saw in the clouds, what she had dreamed. She couldn’t see a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This was a book she had read. This was the book whose words she repeated to herself. The title would have appealed immensely to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, with its promise of crowds of loonies eagerly surging toward 11 Park Place, all clutching hard cash in their hands, eager to thrust ready money at him for listening to their ravings. If only Charles Mackay had stayed in Longfellow Park in the course of his researches as he expanded his findings for new editions. He’d have found mad crowds aplenty, enough material for a multi-volumed masterwork. She’d have had a chapter all to herself, between “Fortune-Telling” and “The Magnetisers” or – more appealing, this – between “The Witch Mania” and “The Slow Poisoners.” She’d like to have a stab (a more appropriate expression should surely have come to mind) at being a slow poisoner, though fast poisoning held considerably more appeal. “Miss Pinkerrrton,” Charles Mackay would have called her, rolling the “r” sound to demonstrate his Scottishness skittishly, in case she hadn’t spotted the saucily fluttered kilt – well-formed and smooth knees, predicts that you will have many admirers – as he skirled his bagpipes. But none to woo you in wedlock.

  Alice assumed an expression of intelligent concentration, and tried to look as though she was seeing plenty in the clouds, a galleon crowded with incident. She thought of Hilde Cloudier.

  “I can see …”

  “I can see …”

  That was what she should be saying.

  “The rigging is lined with sailors dressed in white …”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  At the appearance of dozens of sailors, the pen began positively to leap across the page.

  Neue Vorlesungen uber – shouldn’t there be an umlaut over that u? – die Krankheiten des Nervensystems, insbesondere uber – another umlaut, surely? –Hysterie. Psychiatry: A Clinical Treatise on Diseases of the Fore-Brain. Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences. Fat and Blood …

  What fun bedtime reading must be in the Webster household, as Mama and Papa sat down with their loved ones – the two crumpled-looking scrawny boys – to read the latest installment from The Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria or Mind and Brain.

  “Read that part about women’s inability to deal with the abstract again, Papa!” young Theodore – he knew how to please – would cry. “Tell us about the less development of their frontal convolutions!…”

  (If this was an example of Hilde Claudia’s translation skills, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s lips would remain firmly pursed, as if perpetually poised for a dry passionless Pharaildisian peck – Peck. Peck. Peck – of a kiss. Here a peck, there a peck, everywhere a peck-peck.)

  “… It is by far my favorite section! Perhaps Mama will demonstrate it for us!” He revealed his proud Germanic heritage with an excess of exclamation points.

  (One of the men began to speak to Alfred.

  (“Be calm, my dear young gentleman; don’t agitate yourself. You have been sent here for your good; and that you may be cured …”

  (“What are you talking about? What do you mean?” cried Alfred. “Are you mad?”

  (“No,” one of the men answered. “We are not …”)

  …or a fear which is sufficient to embitter existence.

  The first title she had deciphered had been a whole bound series of the magazine Brain. At first she had read the word as Brian, and something about its pale mauve binding, and its position half hidden in the shadows on the bottom shelf, had led her to uncover the clues – she was after all, a Pinkerton, detection was her heritage, she was fully alert to the latest discoveries – that revealed what was hidden within those tenebrous tomes. Sparingly applied talcum powder (finely ground, lavender-scented, smuggled into the consulting room in a china pillbox inside her purse) brought to light what had hitherto been hidden, but long suspected by her: the glass which enclosed Brian was made cloudy with the whorls of damp and fevered fingerprints, the pouted imprints of kissing lips. The study of fingerprints – a true Pinkertonian awareness, this – by detectives, this new infant science, this search for uniqueness in order to gather together the evidence against a criminal, seemed like something from the realm of the quacks, the quack-quacking migration of sky-darkening flocks of wild geese out chasing. They were caught red-handed, and hidden in the bloodstained lines of their fingers and thumbs was the evidence that would condemn them to death, captured by the markings on the body that only they possessed. In the fairground booths, doctors and detectives fearlessly donned brightly colored headscarves, and jangled with gold-coin jewelry as they interpreted dreams (if they were doctors), or (if they were detectives) ventured into palmistry and graphology to bring murderers to justice. “The Lower Mars section of your Mount of Venus is flat and undeveloped,” the detective would say accusingly, his earrings jangling, as he grasped the killer’s especially washed hand firmly. (Wash suspect’s hands thoroughly was the golden rule in the grubby world of fingerprint reading.) “Your whole Plain of Mars is also very flat, almost a hollow.” This – it would be made quite clear – was not a characteristic of which one could be proud. “Are you a man lacking in confidence?” he would suddenly ask with meaningful emphasis, gazing with unblinking and suspicious regard into the eyes of the sweating man across the table, daring him to attempt to outstare him, daring him to keep on denying and denying, when his guilt was as clearly marked upon his hands as Lady Macbeth’s had been. “Your Line of Life is very short.” (That always set them trembling, the first words of confession spilling from the frightened lips. “I didn’t mean to …” That’s how they would start. “All I wanted was the money …” It would all come pouring out, another triumph for forensic palm-reading.) Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – for his were the fingerprints, the lip-prints (was a science in these developing, also?) – would have had to lie prostrate on the carpet to achieve the right angle for labial contact; he would probably rather have enjoyed this, the ritualistic humiliation.

  The keys to the bookcases – tiny, ornate, golden, like the key to a musical box, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do! I’m half crazy, all for the love of you!”– were kept at all times in the doctor’s vest pocket, just above his heart. He – of all people (the reader of clouds, the reader of dreams and pictures) – had to be fully alert to the significance of Symbolism, odd in a man who claimed to eschew imagination. All the bookcases were kept locked, to exclude the unworthy, to bar the beardless. The lack of keys was no problem to a trained Pinkerton: a few deft watch-repairer-like twists with the point of her hatpin, and the bookcase – the only one with its glass covered in prints, the only one kept double locked with two different keys (her keen eye had soon registered these significant details) – yielded up its secrets, and the truth could no longer be denied.

  To dream of keys, denotes unexpected changes.

  The violet volumes were filled – crammed to bursting – with erotic photographs of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s secret, forbidden love: Brian, a pale, artistic youth, thin and sinuous as an Aubrey Beardsley lily, with a collection of blue and white china, and limpid, sulky eyes.

  Between the two of them, a dangerous passion throbbed.

  “The sailors are swaying from side to side. They are beginning to sing, and they’re waving to two other ships that have just started to appear over the horizon …”

  Sailors swaying from side to side. More sailors pouring in by the shipload.

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  The nib of the pen almost ripped through the paper. The impression of the handwriting would be legible six pages deep.

  For a young woman to dream of sailors, is ominous o
f a separation from her lover through a frivolous flirtation. If she dreams that she is a sailor, she will indulge in some unmaidenly escapade, and be in danger of losing a faithful lover.

  Alone, in the evening – “I need to undertake some research, meine kleine Nachtmusik”– fortified by a glass of brandy, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (reclining in a nightshirt of a color that Brian told him really suited his complexion) would linger guiltily, caressingly, over certain pages, illuminated in flickering firelight, as the voices of Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max echoed faintly from around the piano in the room upstairs, the words of the song interspersed with extempore yodeling. A certain frivolity was permitted on carefully designated occasions.

  “… A most intense young man,

  A soulful-eyed young man,

  An ultra-poetical, super æsthetical,

  Out-of-the-way young man!...

  “A Japanese young man,

  A blue-and-white young man,

  Francesca di Rimini, miminy, piminy,

  Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!...

  “A pallid and thin young man,

  A haggard and lank young man,

  A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery,

  Foot-in-the-grave young man!…”

  Something inside Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster broke, and he began to sob. The tears flowed down his cheeks, as he tenderly pressed his lips against Brian’s bare shoulder, imperfectly concealed by a loosely clutched sunflower. These were photographs of the kind that could not be entrusted to the post office without dire risk of incurring the wrath of Anthony Comstock, and all the gradations of shame to follow: seizure, denunciation, destruction, vast heaped piles of dirty books and dirty pictures – fluttering, blackening – blazing like a forest fire.

  Anthony Comstock, the celebrated – not to say, notorious – moral reformer was no kin of Mrs. Albert Comstock, but he and she were as twin souls in their vindictiveness, their small-mindedness, and their implacable air (worn like Crusaders’ breastplates: Mrs. Albert Comstock’s would contain enough metal for Brooklyn Bridge) of moral superiority.

  “My strength is as the strength of ten,” Anthony Comstock probably intoned into the mirror each morning (in the way that other men intoned, “Youth! Health! Vigor!”), “because my heart is pure.”

  What a tribute it was to his fame, he no doubt remarked – vague, like Mrs. Albert Comstock, about dates and chronologies – that Tennyson should have created so recognizable a picture of him in Sir Galahad. One felt, with Anthony Comstock, that any bonfire of piled up filth! – the word spat out, faces dampened for yards around, lightning bolts unleashed from his eyes – would not be complete without the perpetrator (artist, author, purchaser: he was happy to allow considerable leeway on this point) tied to a stake at its summit, screaming dementedly in agony, and dying – hideously disfigured – as the flames consumed his body with exquisite slowness. Anthony Comstock’s thoughts lingered sensually on this image. He was a self-appointed scourge of the sinful, and therefore all the keener. He did not seek financial reward. It was payment enough for him – he’d say this with a modest, self-deprecating smile – to drive his chosen victims to suicide. With the quiet pride of a stamp collector arranging and mounting his latest findings, he sat at home of an evening – filling the empty hours – totting up the numbers of those he’d driven to death, and calculating the number of tons of books and pictures he’d been instrumental in burning or dumping into a convenient river. He’d dumped so many dirty books and pictures into the rivers around New York that it was astonishing that they were still navigable, not filth-silted through full fathom five, so crammed with carnality that even a canoe couldn’t get through. Every day should be bringing shocking news of ships being wrecked against these rude reefs, or stranded in these salacious shallows. The survivors – not too keen on being saved too swiftly – would gather in giggling damp-bearded groups, making themselves comfy – “Look at this! Look at this!” – to examine the details of the grubby merchandise on which they’d grounded, breathing their hot breath on the soggy pages to dry them out a bit and make them more legible. They came unto those yellow sands, and then took hands. Bow-wow, the watch dogs barked. “Look at this! Look at this!” they’d whisper, keeping their voices as low as possible, anxious to avoid making any sound that might be interpreted as a cry for help.

  “Look at page one hundred and sixty-three!”

  “Page one hundred and eleven!”

  “Eighty-nine!”

  “Seven!”

  Any fool who attempted to signal with his shirt, or a hastily improvised fire, idiotically seeking premature rescue, would soon find himself knocked on the head and bound and gagged. You wouldn’t have been surprised if lust-crazed pilots had deliberately steered ships to destruction, wreckers seduced by the siren call of smut. You wouldn’t catch Grace Darling rowing out to rescue licentious lingerers such as these! Not likely! “Over here, Darling!” they’d snigger droolingly, nudging each other with meaningful purposefulness, their baser selves fully unleashed and all raring to go, especially after they’d boggled at page seven. “This way, Darling!” She’d biff them over the head with her oars, brain them with a bash. They weren’t going to contaminate her nice clean rowboat. Mucky mariners! Filthy beasts!

  “I’ll drown my book!” Anthony Comstock declaimed challengingly, like a pornographic Prospero, rather pleased with himself. (Deeper than did ever plummet sound. That’s how deep he’d drown it.)

  The printed word was bad enough, but the world was crammed with unsuitable works of art, paintings and sculptures athrob with brazen bareness, pendulously wobbling dangliness (hadn’t these people heard of sensible underwear?) that quite turned the stomach, and gave rise to potential impurity of thought. Strategically positioned fig leaves were not the answer. Oh dear me, no. They left far too much still – ahem – protruding, giving rise to ribald speculation.

  Aprons.

  That was what it said in the Bible – Genesis, Chapter III, Verse vii – they sewed fig leaves (definitely a plural) together, and made themselves aprons, and it was in aprons that their hopes clearly lay for a dangle-free future. Montgomery Ward & Co. produced good-quality mechanics’ aprons out of bed ticking at a cost of only twenty cents each if their name was stamped clearly on the front. (They cost fifty cents without the name.) These aprons were perfect for their job of enforcing purity. They were thirty inches wide, and thirty-six inches in length, the right size for covering the areas of maximum danger (though some of Rubens’s larger ladies – as if employed in one of the messier manufactories – might require to be multi-aproned), and were supplied complete with shoulder and waist straps that – tightly knotted and carefully adjusted – should ensure safety from all angles. And they had useful pockets. Montgomery Ward & Co., Chicago would be a guarantee of suitability for the family agog for culture without embarrassment, and would introduce a bracing sensation of the outside world of commerce into the too rarefied atmosphere of museums and galleries.

  He thought of himself as a man living a thrilling life full of adventures, battling the forces of evil with the upraised sword of purity. Perhaps the Reverend Goodchild could be persuaded to model one of his dreadful historical novels upon his life. Comstock: Scourge of the Sinners (1903) would be one more to add to the list, the long, long list of ploppily bubbling potboilers, the ones that smelled so bad as they were stirred upon the stove. Inspiration – not the first word that sprang to mind – showed no signs of flagging, and Halitotic Herbert churned them out as if he’d borrowed one of the sausage machines from Comstock’s Comestibles, all titles throbbing with sensational overtones, all titles racily alliterative.

  “Buy a Goodchild for your Good Child!” was the exhortation above the full list of titles available in The Works of the Reverend H. P. Goodchild (the oeuvre was much recommended as a suitable source for Sunday-school prizes), printed opposite the title pages. “Thoroughly wholesome in tone!” was the puzzling conclusion of The Poughkeepsie Press, pl
aced alluringly beneath. (The exclamation points got you panting before you’d even read a word of the first page.) The anxious parents of Vassar students must be hastening – in the vastness of the night – to remove their imperiled daughters to a place of greater safety, if this was what wholesomeness meant in the dark backward and abyss of Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie was clearly not the quiet place slumbering in academic quietude that it purported to be. Some freelance contributor, scribbling away in one of the less accessible rooms at the Webster Nervine Asylum (the third door on the left, just past the Fauntleroy Ward), had probably written the enticing recommendation.

  Possibly, some time in 1930 – when he would be about a hundred – he would run out of sinful Roman and Parisian landmarks to employ for his settings, and inspiration (ha!) would at last fail him. All he would have to offer as his anticlimactic swan-song (here was a swan that Leda would have repulsed vigorously, lashing out with every sign of revulsion) would be The Slightly Unpleasant Events Just off the Corso, where even alliteration faltered, and the death count was disappointingly low, only just making double figures. The – ha! – thoroughly wholesome in tone oeuvre would grind to a halt, and there would be a crisis in Sunday-schools throughout the land. What on earth could they offer as prizes now that there were to be no more Goodchilds for their Good Children? It would be back to Ben-Hur.

  “I’ve already read this!” the Good Children – no longer so Good – would complain rebelliously, and there would be a nationwide revolt. (Not missing a single Sunday-school all year, and then being offered a book you’d already read as a reward!) He wrote at least two a year: forests were laid waste for his meretricious trash, and when the forests were gone the light was blinding.

  The scandalously apron-free photographs of Brian would not meet with Anthony Comstock’s approval. He did not know much about art and literature, but he knew what he disliked, and what he disliked most of all was any hint of nudity, or any mention of (careful glance around, voice lowered to a thrilling hiss) sex. It would be an extra-big bonfire, with extra-hot flames. Spectators would be encouraged to lob bricks, to engage in antiphonal chanting.