Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  (“All manner of delight!” Mephostophilis whispered, temptingly, caressingly.

  (“Go on!” he was saying.

  (“Have a go!” he was saying.

  (He’d done really well with the Seven Deadly Sins. He might as well have a go with the Ten Commandments.)

  Honor – Should that be “Honour”? Would King James have spelled it “Honour”? – thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

  That was the Fifth Commandment.

  Thou shalt not kill.

  That was the Sixth.

  Odd that those two should be placed one beneath the other.

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s enthusiasm for hypnotism followed so promptly upon the dramatization of Trilby – the year after the serialization in Harper’s Magazine – that Alice had no doubts that he had seen the production, probably several times. She saw him in an adjoining box to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, trying to ignore her running commentary – she kept up an audible response to whatever she was viewing: she thought it encouraged the actors – and focusing his opera glasses on Trilby’s bare feet, Trilby’s mouth, Trilby’s breasts. The nail of his right forefinger – he had long fingernails – tugged minutely at the focusing wheel, as if he were inching a coin along by clicking on its milled edge. He wanted to make the image as sharp as possible. Brian’s power would wane, even with the help of the peacock feathers; Hilde Claudia – bejeweled, beside him – would be forgotten; Theodore and Max, chastely at home under the care of certain trusted servants, animatedly discussing one of the more obscure passages in Mind and Brain, the impish young rogues, would vanish utterly from his mind. Svengali would not be visible within the bright illuminated circle: it would be filled entirely with Trilby. He himself would become Svengali. When she spoke she would be speaking solely to him, the words of Svengali would be words from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s own mind, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s own mouth, his lips moving as if speaking the responses in a church service, his head nodding, his expression changing.

  “Sit down,” his lips mouthed. “I will show you something that will cure your pain better than music.” They were not quite in synchronization with the words spoken, a man perpetually prompted by words that were not his own.

  He brought his chair forward to where Trilby was sitting on the divan, and sat facing her, almost knee to knee.

  “Look me in the white of the eyes.”

  He gazed intently into her eyes, and caressed her temples. (He enjoyed the “caress” bit.) Trilby could not open her eyes, could not speak, could not stand. He had total control over her.

  “That is the devil’s trick – hypnotism.” That was what Taffy said. That would have appealed to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.

  Later, in the moonlight, after he had taken the candle from Trilby’s hand, and lifted it to illuminate her face, he looked into her mouth and told her that the roof of her mouth was like the dome of the Parthenon, and that her tongue was scooped out like the petal of a little pink peony. He had read Trilby before he attended the stage version of it, and what he heard the characters speaking on stage were some of the spicier speeches from the novel, the speeches omitted or toned down for the Mrs. Grundy spoilsports of the theatre. He told her she had a beautiful big chest. This was a line he especially enjoyed speaking. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was so absorbed that he never even noticed the appalled intake of breath from the adjoining box – big chest! – the frantic swishing of the fan, the agitation of the jewels rattling upon the perturbed Bosom. Svengali laid the side of his head against Trilby’s bosom, the angle of his head emphasizing the – ahem – thrust of the jut. Even sharper intakes, even more insistent swishings, even louder rattlings, the sound of an endungeoned prisoner struggling in his chains, frantically fighting for freedom, the Canterville Ghost in need of being oiled by the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator (completely efficacious upon one application). A steady stream of pulverized plaster would be pattering down from the underside of the box, and powdering the pompadours beneath to an eighteenth-century whiteness. Mrs. Albert Comstock was having the time of her life.

  The long white fingernail stopped where it was, arched round in mid-air, the opera glasses became very still. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was holding his breath, trying to will his thoughts into action.

  (“Come on, Trilby! Let’s see you posing.”

  (“Come on, Trilby! Huh! Call yourself a figure-model!”

  (“Get those clothes off!”

  (“Let’s see that beautiful chest!”

  (“That beautiful BIG chest!”

  (“Now!”)

  “Mademoiselle,” Svengali said …

  – “Mademoiselle,” Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster mouthed –

  – “French!” A strangled panicky cry from Mrs. Albert Comstock. This was far, far worse than her most ambitious hopes –

  “… when you have the pain, then shall you come to my little room on the seventh floor, and Svengali will play to you and take away your pain, and keep it himself because he loves you. And when we are quite alone, then will he play for you the ‘Adieu ’ of Schubert.”

  (“Little room,” Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster thought to himself. There wouldn’t be much space to maneuver in a little room when you were crammed in with a beautiful big chest. They’d have to synchronize their breathing, so that he wouldn’t be pushed against the wall by the size of the chest as he attempted to move in close to take away her pain.

  (“Quite alone,” he thought, very still, pulse pounding as if after a good sprint up to Hudson Heights and back, in hot pursuit of Drs. Twemlow and Brown. Perhaps he might join them, a trinity of doctors sprinting gruntingly around Longfellow Park – morning and evening – elbows and knees a blur, shorts cracking with starch, arms and legs at angles of forty-five degrees, academe allied with athleticism? It might help to bring a little – er – quietude to his restlessness, subdue the avid edge of his appetites. Playing his banjo had long lost its soothing efficaciousness, but bad backs and breathlessness were ever the enemies of erotic thralldom.)

  When she was hypnotized, Svengali made Trilby sing “Ben Bolt,” the song she would die singing. Before she was hypnotized she was tone-deaf, incapable of singing a note in tune; hypnotized she could sing so beautifully that she cast a spell over her listeners almost as powerful as the spell which had been cast over her.

  This time it was Alice’s lips that were moving, as if it were she who were singing. The voice, the music, merged in her mind with those for “I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” and the piano music became thin, distant, echoing, like music that was indeed being played within the cavernous high-ceilinged rooms of some distant halls: tall columns, polished marble, many-paned windows. The music became “Narcissus.” Dappled by the shadows of the sunlight through the palm trees, the trio of musicians – a pianist, a violinist, a violoncellist, all elderly women – in the arched hotel conservatory played as tinklingly as the teacups and teaspoons at the tables around them.

  Ker-plunk, ker-plunk,

  Ker-plunkety plunky-plunk.

  Ker-plunk, ker-plunk,

  Ker-plunkety plunky-plunk …

  Little decorative flourishes in the piano playing reminded her of the elaborate lettering on the front cover of the sheet music, especially the o in or just before the alternative title “Oh! Don’t You Remember,” the B of Ballad, and the sweeping curving lines around this subtitle, and around the name of the singer, Miss Clara Bruce, patterned like the ripples in a pool – the patterns opening out from a dropped stone, a rising fish – like the elaborate curlicues and gold lettering on the dark blue cover of her hymn book.

  If you dream you are singing while everything around you gives promise of happiness, jealousy will insinuate a sense of insincerity into your joyousness. If there are notes of sadness in the song, you will be unpleasantly surprised at the turn your affairs will take.

  When she heard someone singing she saw th
e words in front of her, like advertisements covering a wall, or the front of a store; she saw the illustrated cover of the sheet music, as if it were being displayed in the windows of Columbarian & Horowitz, alongside the Du Rell or Du Bell Twin Brothers, “Why Did They Dig Ma’s Grave So Deep?”, and “Poor Wandering One.”

  “Oh! don’t you remember sweet Alice, –

  Sweet Alice, with hair so brown;

  She wept with delight when you gave her a smile,

  And trembled with fear at your frown …”

  Before he first hypnotized Alice, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster explained to her what he was proposing to do. This was most unlike him. She was not sure how to respond – she gazed at the gleam of the gold book titles in the dim light, unable to make out what they said – until she realized that no response was needed. Again, he was not talking to her: he was rehearsing his lectures, talking to his audience of Bearded Ones, describing himself to them in heroic language, immortalizing himself on his phonograph.

  “In the case of Miss P. I followed a bold strategy …”

  He likened himself to Orpheus (not even a trace of a smile on his face), traveling down into the underworld to bring Eurydice – herself – back from the realms of darkness. He did not regard this choice of language as being in any way in conflict with his earlier rejection of imagination, just as he did not regard a sudden blazing enthusiasm for hypnotism as being in any way in conflict with his earlier usage of electrotherapy, baths, and massage. As Mrs. Albert Comstock was with art critics, so he was with alienists. He was large (though nowhere near as large); he contained multitudes (most of the population of Asia could have rambled about in roomy solitude within Mrs. Albert Comstock). He would embrace the world and everything that was in it, though – one hoped – not in so literal a manner as Walt Whitman was rumored to have done. The bardic Bearded One would not have approved of her. She looked through the eyes of the dead; she fed on the specters in books.

  It seemed, however, somewhat careless of him not to be aware that Eurydice – because Orpheus broke strict instructions, and turned around to look at her face as he led her back to the surface of the earth – was dragged back into the darkness forever, into the realms of silence and uncreated things. This image of her fate did not inspire confidence that the doctor was a man who knew what he was doing, and why he was doing it. She wished she hadn’t read “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Edgar Allan Poe in fine form (the flambeaux flaring, the drapes rippling along the walls), and saw herself – The Facts in the Case of Mlle Pinkerton – mesmerized at the point of death and awoken from her trance months later, to collapse into a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, detestable putridity. Franz Mesmer would smile proudly from behind her at this demonstration of the power of his art, suspended upon his piece of cord and swaying slightly, so that the reflection upon it glinted mesmerizingly. (“Turn around!” he whispered imperiously again. “Turn around!”) That would make a mess of the nice thin-legged chairs with their pale upholstery, that would ruin the expensive – if florid – carpet.

  “Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time.”

  This – a sentence from The Pinkerton Collection, one of Oscar Wilde’s less celebrated utterances (“I knew Pinkerton would do it” was part of another sentence from “The Canterville Ghost”) – was her most conscious thought as he leaned in toward her, swinging his pocket-watch from his right hand like a gold-plated grandfather-clock pendulum, another Reverend Goodchild on the point of rendering unto Cæsar. If Griswold’s Discovery failed to do the trick, you automatically turned to Pinkerton’s.

  Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

  It was a slow, majestic rhythm, a sound too dignified for exclamation points.

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster looked like a boy who had just read the instructions for a new game of skill – not quite sure how to go about it – and who was now prematurely facing his first opponent. He had that exact expression of uncomprehending concentration, that precise whiff of nervous perspiration under the American Castile toilet soap.

  She half expected him to consult a little rough-papered publication like a Dream Book, ungrammatical and clumsily printed in smudged misspellings, discreetly positioned in his left hand.

  Mississippi Mike’s Gide to Hypnotizm.

  1. Face the Subjekt.

  2. Swing Wotch from side to side.

  3. IMPORTANT. Do not leave go of Wotch …

  She might well have her moustache agonizingly ripped from her face as the watch-chain became entangled, or be rendered unconscious by an incautiously powerful oscillation.

  (“How on earth did you acquire that black eye?”

  (“I was being hypnotized.”)

  He had probably practiced in front of one of the bookcases, using the glass as a mirror, striving to achieve the correctly impressive expression of gravitas, the properly vigorous impetus to his swing. The silent nearness of Brian, beneath the reflection, would have been a great comfort to him. He’d probably accidentally hypnotized himself a few times as he experimented, wandering about the room like a somnambulist, bouncing off the walls and rattling the rows of Bearded Ones, until an ungraceful swan-dive off his desk (more Nutcracker than Swan Lake, and certainly no Sleeping Beauty) jarred him into consciousness.

  He was going to show her something that could cure her pain better than music.

  He did not say, “Look me in the white of the eyes.”

  He did not caress her temples. (Slight struggle at this point.)

  He did not ask her to sing “Ben Bolt.”

  He just said, slowly, over and over again, as he held the watch before her eyes, “Listen to my voice. Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep …”

  (This is the devil’s trick.)

  She listened to his voice.

  She was still.

  She emptied her mind of all thought.

  She slept.

  He had read the instructions properly. He could play the game and win. In the schoolyard he would take no prisoners, lord of his little domain, king of his castle, a snatcher of jump ropes.

  … In the old churchyard, in the valley, Ben Bolt,

  In a corner obscure and alone,

  They have fitted a slab of granite so gray,

  And sweet Alice lies under the stone …

  “Listen to my voice. Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep.”

  He would say this – a notebook placed conveniently to hand – and, Wednesday after Wednesday, she listened to his voice, she was still, she emptied her mind of all thought, she slept.

  The battered survivors of the princes – those who had climbed up to the tower in the abortive attempts to rescue her – could form orderly lines outside 11 Park Place to inspect the Sleeping Ugly, but who would wish to awaken her with a kiss?

  She would sleep forever; she would never be awoken, and as she slept she would dream. The slab of gray granite pressed insistently upon her, stifling her breathing into shallowness.

  He had talked of Orpheus and Eurydice, but – even if this myth had not had the ending it had – it was not the right comparison. She did not have the sensation of being lost somewhere inside a network of subterranean galleries, waiting to be rescued. What she felt was that the galleries were inside herself, and that there was a monster hidden somewhere in the depths of them. If any myth did come into her mind it would be the myth of the Minotaur, the creature at the heart of the Labyrinth that demanded the lives of the young.

  This felt more like the way things were, though she balked at the thought of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster as Theseus, heroically penetrating deep within the darkness to find and slay the monster. She would be Ariadne, she supposed, handing Theseus the threads so that he would be able to find his way back out of the Labyrinth after he had destroyed the creature that lived inside her. She saw the threads as being the threads of tapestries. As Theseus traveled deeper into the darkness, closer to the monster, the tapestries t
hat she wove by night and day would be unpicked, line by line – out flew the web and floated wide – and all the pictures would unravel thread by thread: the faded king and queen playing chess in a garden (Alice meets R.Q., Alice through Q’s 3rd to Q’s 4th, Alice meets W.Q., Alice to Q’s 5th …), and the company of hawkers carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. If Pinkerton’s failed to cleanse away all the colors, all the elaboration of the pictures and patterns, she would have to rely on Webster’s. Then the unstitched whiteness of the blank canvases would unravel thread by thread, in their turn, and all that would remain in her high-towered blank-walled schoolroom would be the empty frame of her loom, like a picture frame without a picture. There, exposed to view, blinking in the unexpected brightness of the light, would be the face of Bertha Rochester, no longer hidden. Theseus would abandon Ariadne on Naxos – here was another analogy that should not have been used – and there she would be, alone on the seashore, curled up in sleep, weary, tear-stained, gazed upon by Bacchus. High on the ledge outside Grandpapa’s office, suddenly appearing amidst all the women, Theseus’ father would wait for the return of his son, gazing out to sea, looking for the first glimpse of the sails, hoping against hope that they would be white, the linen bare, the colored threads all unraveled. Their blackness would drive him to despair and self-destruction.

  Perhaps she herself was the monster, hidden away like Fair Rosamond – an unfair Rosamond (most unfair!) – the secret beloved of Henry II, in the center of the mazed corridors of the house named Labyrinth. Queen Eleanor made her way through the maze with a thread, and murdered her.

  What she should have thought about, as she braced herself for hypnosis – he had made it sound potentially painful, a G. G. Schiffendecken of the mind, warning her that this might hurt just a little (Painless Alienist the sign buzzed and pulsed, Painless Alienist the sign lied in large letters) – was the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This was, she supposed – thank you, Charlotte – inevitable. This was, she supposed, more like it. Here she was being hypnotized by the White Rabbit: the pocket-watch and the waistcoat pocket from which it emerged in Sir John Tenniel’s illustration were identical to those of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. He certainly had pinkish eyes, and there was that way his nose sometimes twitched as it loomed through the whiskers. If the rabbit’s long ears were pressed down alongside his face they would bear more than a passing resemblance to the mighty beard. She was already within Wonderland, already within the looking-glass, and it was only fitting that it should be the White Rabbit who led her into the deeper levels, a Professor Von Hardwigg of the rabbit world, leading her on her journey to the center of the earth.