Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “Wanton Webster!”

  “Bottom-Baring Brian!”

  “Wanton Webster!”

  “Bottom-Baring Brian!”

  Opportunities for this kind of thing were one of the many benefits of becoming a member of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and marching behind the banner proudly borne by Anthony Comstock. Bricks and firewood would be on offer at special discounted prices. For a small fee, you could be one of those manning the barricades alongside Mrs. Albert Comstock (a formidable barricade all by herself) and the Goodchilds, another high priest of prissiness, a nabob of niceness, a grumpy mugwump of modesty, flourishing gigantic fig leaves as if taking part in some rural festivities at harvest time in one of the wine-growing regions of the world.

  Life had suddenly become unbearable for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. Shades of the prison-house began to close upon the groaning man. His beard – with painful irony he favored the model worn by Anthony Comstock – rustled against the edges of the page and scratched against the photograph, tickling unsuitable areas.

  “Brian … Brian … I yearn for your touch, but yet it cannot be. I have a family. I must think of Hilde Claudia, little Theodore” – little Theodore was at least five feet eleven – “and little Max. I have my position in society to consider. This is madness, my darling.”

  The tears flowed through his lank and darkened sidewhiskers and emerged – as if filtered into fresh water – on the other side, dripping from his dampened Dundrearies onto the cover of the book and turning the mauve into – ooh! – (the weeping doctor forgot to cry, perked up, and looked with alerted interest) such an attractive shade of purple. It would be the ideal shade for that new vase he was contemplating purchasing for the conservatory.

  “Tell me what you are thinking, Miss Pinkerton.”

  He would have been surprised if she had told him, particularly bearing in mind the comments she had heard him make to Halitotic Herbert about Oliver Comstock. Oliver was the only one of the Comstocks Alice liked. He had always made it perfectly clear that he loathed his mother, a most endearing quality to anyone who felt about her as Alice did, and if Charm – ha! – felt it was amusing to snigger that Oliver was a Charlotte Anne (this was the expression he used) she was quite prepared to leap to his defense. (Why Charlotte? Alice thought, loyally.)

  Unseen by the doctor, a telltale trickle of talcum powder ran across the carpet toward his desk, like a gunpowder trail about to be ignited for a massive explosion. Bits of Brians – thin shadowed chests, provocatively angled peacock feathers, sleepily half-closed eyes – would be everywhere. Fingerprinting would open up exciting new career prospects for Chastity Heighton. Lightly dusted with talcum powder, she would be an invaluable source for fingerprints of all the men of dubious morals in Longfellow Park, and would find her rôle in life at last. “Your Mount of Venus is highly developed toward the Lower Mars area, and your Lower Luna is very pronounced,” the detective began, accusingly, studying her all-too-eagerly proffered palm, and Chastity nodded excitedly, as if she’d just been paid a great compliment. “I know!” she said proudly. Talcum powder would avalanche down like a storm of confectioners’ sugar onto pastries: sinful, fattening, impossible to resist. Her parents would be so thrilled. The very mention of her name, for the past few years, had brought an excitedly shocked gleam into the eyes of the respectable women of Longfellow Park, and (silently, and in private) a nostalgic smile to the faces of certain equally respectable men.

  Alice had once been startled by a complaining comment she had overheard a woman – on her way to the circulating library – calling across Chestnut Street, at the front of the house, to another through a drizzle.

  “Jane Eyre is covered in fingerprints!”

  (It was as if Chastity Heighton had found a woman friend at last, one with whom she could share her hobby.)

  Jane Eyre covered in fingerprints!

  It was an appealing thought.

  “Rochester has p-p-pounced at last! Fight back, Jane! B-B-Bawl for B-B-Bertha!” she called to them from the window.

  The wet umbrellas had been tilted briefly backward – white, upturned faces – and then hastily moved back upright, clutched more firmly. They had not known what to say.

  (It’s the madwoman! It’s the madwoman! They had known what to think.

  (It’s the local Lizzie Borden, all set to start whacking!)

  It had been intended as a joke. She knew, of course – Of course! Of course!: she should have shouted it at them – that the woman was talking about the condition of Jane Eyre the printed book, and not Jane Eyre the character, but they had – conversation abandoned – hastily continued in their different directions, the one bound for the library clutching the maltreated Jane Eyre closer to her under her greatcoat, carefully avoiding looking up toward Alice at the window. The lack of punctuation in the spoken word (in the majority of people: Mrs. Albert Comstock somehow managed to use punctuation, where appropriate, as a weapon when she spoke) could so easily give rise to unfortunate misunderstandings.

  “Do not be afraid,” the book borrower muttered to her bosom. “I shall protect you from Mrs. Rochester.”

  The words were whispered, the lips pressed against the edges of the pages in the gap between the buttons, a mother comforting a sleeping child.

  Here was a borrower who was only too conscious of the awesome responsibilities that were placed upon her each time she removed a book from the premises, her heart going pit-a-pat as she stepped outside the double doors and down the steps. Here was a borrower who nightly intoned the rules that were pasted on the inside front cover of every volume in the library, her lips moving as if in prayer as she tremblingly repeated the Four Commandments of the insomniac bookworm. Here was a borrower whose tastes ran to full-blooded novels throbbing with pulsating passions. Here was a borrower whose life was a little lacking in excitement.

  1. Every precaution must be taken to protect the library book from rain in the event of inclement weather.

  2. If infectious diseases should break out in your house do not return this book but at once inform the librarian.

  3. Readers infringing this regulation, or knowingly permitting the book to be exposed to infection, are liable to a penalty.

  4. Do NOT write inside this book, EVEN in pencil.

  (Whack! the maternal mutterer was hearing behind her. Whack! Whack! Whack! She could feel the ax whistling past her, just missing.)

  “I am taking every precaution to protect you!” she reassured Jane Eyre.

  Whack!

  “I shall at once inform the librarian!”

  Whack!

  “I shall not knowingly permit you to be exposed!”

  Whack!

  “NOT!”

  Whack!

  “EVEN!”

  (Whack! Whack! Whack!)

  To dream that you are in an attic, denotes that you are entertaining hopes which will fail of materialization. For a young woman to dream that she is sleeping in an attic, foretells that she will fail to find contentment in her present occupation.

  Propping up Brian – she preferred her reading of the word – was a well-fingered copy of one of L. N. Fowler’s phrenology heads. Everywhere it was cracked and crazed. Remarkably like her head. Astonishingly like it.

  It was mapped in labeled regions, some of them printed in capital letters, the words faded and worn. Was the head possibly a portrait of L. N. Fowler himself, spectacularly bald, amenably posing for the sculptor? Mrs. L. N. Fowler would have shaved him specially, with his newly sharpened cutthroat razor, concentrating carefully as she swept across Humor, Mirthfulness, and Wit, anxious to avoid cutting him and having blood drip down through Time, Measure, Color and Neatness into his left eye. She would have marked out the areas of his skull in her neatest printing.

  Some of the letters had been rubbed completely away, and an obliterated initial letter S above the right ear produced an area intriguingly identified as the one that revealed ELFISH PROPENSITIES. She r
emembered – as a child – studying the ear closely (the head had not always been placed in the consulting room), to determine whether or not it was unusually pointed at the tip. She had touched her own skull, as if feeling for evidence of lettering beneath her hair, the mapping that meant an area had been explored and claimed by The Bearded Ones. The left side of the phrenology head – Love of Sex, Amativeness, Destructiveness, Extermination, Secretiveness, Reserve, Policy, Evasion – was cozily nuzzled up against Brian in snugglesome emulation of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. Perhaps there was something in phrenology after all, though she would like to have seen more detailed evidence of Destructiveness and Extermination where he was concerned. She should assess its accuracy, run her fingers through her physician’s hair around his left ear, expertly caressing the organ, passing off her actions with a bell-like Mrs. Albert Comstock-style laugh. Mrs. Albert Comstock was currently modeling her laugh on the one possessed by Mavis Clare, the heroine of The Sorrows of Satan, a novel which was the most outrageous example of a writer making love to herself since Charlotte Brontë had written The Professor. Mrs. Albert Comstock was a tremendous admirer of Marie Corelli’s novels. Miss Corelli knew everything about everything, and this spoke directly to the heart of Mrs. Albert Comstock, who possessed (oddly enough) these very same qualities. Both women had firm opinions on every subject, and showed little reluctance in letting everyone know this: the best manufacturer of umbrellas, the real meaning of Christianity, the most efficacious treatment for the complexion, the principle of forgiveness (and where it was appropriate). Mavis Clare’s laugh was described as “a merry little laugh like a peal of bells,” and Mrs. Albert Comstock tried her best.

  MORAL AND RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS was printed across the top of the skull on the right-hand side. She found herself reversing left and right, thinking from the point of view of the pottery head, as if the skull were her own head, and she was a reflection looking into her own eyes. The eyes were without pupils, and she thought of The Children’s Hour, the bronze statue in the park of herself and her sisters when they were little girls, the blind-eyed children grouped around their father.

  (Between the dark and the daylight,/When the night is beginning to lower,/Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,/That is known as the Children’s Hour.)

  For a woman to dream of a bronze statue, signifies that she will fail in her efforts to win the person she has determined on for a husband.

  Lower down, just above the forehead, was the legend INTUITIVE, REASONING, REFLECTIVE, FACULTIES. (That last comma was surely redundant.) Lowest of all on the side she could see, just above the right eye, the words were LITERARY, OBSERVING, KNOWING, FACULTIES. (Ditto.) The only place any of these qualities existed in that office was locked away in a glass-fronted bookcase, printed on the surface of a hollow pottery head. To the left of the door – it was one of a number of framed portraits (all of them men, mostly Bearded Ones, mostly unknown) that lined that wall, a disconcerting phalanx of disapproving faces – there was an engraving of Dr. Gall of Vienna, the physician who had laid the foundations of phrenology. He had adapted the heads from Ancient Greek statues for use in phrenology – she imagined plaster casts of Apollo Belvedere, Venus, Zeus, and Aphrodite – and gods and goddesses bowed down before him as he read the fate that lay encoded within the contours of their skulls. They would wither and die as a new mythology rose to replace them. It would be like a scene from “Hyperion,” the Titans lost in lethargy and self-doubt.

  “The exploration of the head is a well-established science in Vienna,” Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had once announced, as if commenting (a highly unlikely possibility) on the perspicacity of his wife.

  (Franz Mesmer – the founder of animal magnetism, the man after whom mesmerism was named – was another one from Vienna. He had studied medicine at the university there, and his portrait was inevitably amongst Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s pantheon of household gods. Alice avoided looking into his eyes, but could feel them on the back of her neck.

  (The sun, the moon, and the stars affect the nervous system of the human body… That was what he was saying in a hypnotic monotone.

  (Turn around!

  (That was what he was saying.

  (Turn around!

  (Mesmer, who had learned much of his craft from Father Hell – a man drawn surely to his calling by the appropriateness of his name, a man who had applied steel to the naked bodies of his patients as his method of treatment – would have been received with open arms at the Webster Nervine Asylum. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster would be able to relax by attempting to outstare Franz Mesmer, looking him challengingly in the white of the eye close up, in the posture of someone about to arm-wrestle. Put in the mood by an exhausting evening of Brian-grappling, he wouldn’t leave it at looking. He’d be all in favor of emulating Mesmer’s own technique and employing the laying on of hands, vigorously setting to work like a saucy slap-slapping masseur let loose on a naughty boy in need of strict discipline. The application of steel – and not just bamboo – was what was required for satisfactory results, and, of course, chuckle, a more enjoyable time for all concerned.)

  Papa had had a taste for phrenology.

  “May I?” he would inquire of friends and neighbors (usually mothers; he seemed a little more wary of fathers) as he placed a hand on the shoulder of a young daughter (never a son), you’d have thought that he was asking to borrow an umbrella, and then – whumpf! – everything went black for the girl as she was rammed face forward against him – a stink of tobacco, itching fabric, buttons cutting into the skin – as he began to caress what he wetly referred to as “the organs.” The busy fingers would go to work on the half-suffocated child, the dexterous digits – could something dexterous be described as sinister? – beavering away, a man truly fulfilled by his hobby, snuffling excitedly, like a pig rooting for truffles. It was regarded as an endearing eccentricity. It had never happened to her – being unattractive had its compensations – but Kate Calbraith had shown what it had done to her, as if the actions of the fingers upon her skull had changed the contours of her face, when Alice had taken her up to the schoolroom – after he had finished – to show her the sections of stained glass and the terra-cotta figures she had saved from the Shakespeare Castle. Papa had comprehensively investigated her only a few days before his – hurrah! hurrah! – death during the snowstorm. Perhaps the excitement had contributed to his demise: he had certainly gone at it with enthusiasm. There had been snow on the Calbraiths’ boots when they arrived: she remembered the wet footprints across the tiles in the hall, the red-tinged snow through the colored glass in the door.

  Kate had had the impression of his watch-chain at an angle across her forehead, like a scar caused by some piece of machinery, and the reverse side of the Roman coin he wore on the chain was clearly marked over her left eye. She was a little girl then, a few years younger than Alice’s little brother, who had been ten when Papa killed himself. There was the lettering at the bottom of the coin, and the image of the two captives sitting on the ground with their heads bowed, the woman on the left, and the man – his hands bound behind him – on the right. There was desolation and despair in the posture of the two simply portrayed figures.

  The red imprint – like a temporary tattoo from Mississippi Mike’s Parlor (TatTOOSE PROFFesionally DONE UpSTARES) – gradually began to fade. Kate had rubbed at it squeamishly, a child removing someone else’s spit from her face.

  “The psychological damage, will – of course – take longer to heal,” Alice had said to herself, feeling very modern, though Kate was more concerned about the possible damage to her dress.

  If this had happened a few weeks later, when Ben had started at Otsego Lake Academy – he and all the Crowninshields’ boys had started there after their old school had closed abruptly – she could have asked his Latin teacher, Mr. Rappaport, to come across. If he had been able to read mirror writing he could have had a brief one-word browse – CÆSAR – of Kate.

  The Re
verend Goodchild, long after Papa’s death, borrowed that same Roman coin from Mama (tactful twinkle, creepy little caress of the hand) – not, these days, Kate-warmed (though that would have been a bonus for Halitotic Horace: a brief frisson of pleasure) – whenever he launched into his celebrated “Render unto Cæsar” sermon: a source of innocent merriment to all those who knew his taste in food and wine, and other – less categorizable – pleasures.

  “‘Shew me the tribute money’” he would declaim, as he began to approach what he regarded as the sensational climax of his oration. (You just knew he was saying “shew” and not “show.”) “‘And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Cæsar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’”

  At this point he would pause breathtakingly – so he firmly believed – and whip the pocket-watch out of some inner sanctum several layers within his clothing. There was a certain amount of wriggling and bending, a coy bather slipping out of his bathing suit under an inadequate towel. He held the watch on high, the chain dangling, the coin catching the light, now become a street seller of dubious valuables. (The Reverend Goodchild was many different men.)

  “This – this …” – he shook it, to emphasize his point – “is the very coin of which Our Savior spoke!”

  He sounded exactly like a seller of fake religious relics, about to unload several hundredweight in pieces of the true cross. His knowledge of history was as shaky as his brain-rotting novels would have led you to believe: he appeared to believe that Julius Cæsar had been the Roman emperor during the life of Christ. Somewhere, in the dim – a perfect choice of adjective – recesses of his brain, he was doubtless convinced that Nero was one of the early popes. Corrupt as the rest of them, sourly indicating with his down-turned thumb that death was all that gladiators could expect when he was sitting in the Colosseum, he would be carried across from St. Peter’s by whip-lashed slaves, their final indignity before the lions pounced.