Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Alice fell down into the darkness, becoming sleepy, clutching at the things she could remember, as if they would prevent her fall: Latitude, Longitude, the Antipathies, cats and bats. She fell past the cupboards and the bookshelves – there were many, many books – the maps and pictures hung upon pegs, and the empty orange marmalade jar, like the one that Tess of the d’Urbervilles used to hold the flowers on the grave of her dead baby, visited in secret and at night. She tried to glimpse the titles of the books, reaching her hands out toward them, tried to see the countries in the maps, the subjects in the pictures, but it was too dark – she could read nothing, she could see nothing – and she fell toward the center of the earth.

  There were monsters there, at the heart of the labyrinth, and Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka tramped deeper inside the labyrinth of subterranean galleries inside her mind, seeking them out. All three were Bearded Ones. The novels of Jules Verne seemed to be as curiously free of women as the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson: not only writers, but also the characters of whom they wrote were most appropriate for their parts when bearded. All explorers – apart from Isabella Bird (she knew that there were other such women, but she could not bring their names to mind) – were in possession of a beard: beards were an essential part of the equipment (carefully ticked off on long lists), like pith helmets, compasses, and native bearers. Each subterranean discoverer bore his own stalactite – wondrously shaped and whorled – around with him in order to blend in with his surroundings, and Professor Von Hardwigg (the very name promised a hairstyle as spectacular as his beard) gave a commentary to his companions as they descended.

  “The interior of the female’s head is – as we suspected – strangely empty …”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  Someone was taking notes.

  Jules Verne had written opera libretti before he wrote novels, and she always saw his novels as operas, his characters – a stirring male chorus; there were no female voices – singing as they descended beneath the surface of the sea, floated across the desert in a balloon, journeyed to the moon, or to the center of the earth.

  Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka were supposed to light their way with Ruhmkorf’s coils – whatever they were (her ugly little head couldn’t possibly know) – but she saw them in her mind (in every sense) as holding flaming torches aloft as they descended, in wanton defiance of explosive gases. They were like three bearded statues of Liberty Enlightening the World.

  “… Give me your tired, your poor …”

  – they sang, as if expecting the underground corridors to be teeming with crowds of the oppressed –

  “… Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore …”

  Mrs. Albert Comstock would certainly warm to the phrase “wretched refuse”: she couldn’t have put it better herself (and there was far too much of it about).

  Refuse the refuse!

  Verb, then noun.

  That was her motto.

  Alice had a photograph of herself as a little girl standing in the torch of the statue. It had been taken when the torch – all by itself – was erected in Madison Square Gardens during fund-raising for the statue, and it was oddly disconcerting to look at it now, so out of its place, and see the buildings of the city towering above the upraised hand, as if the whole immense figure of the woman had sunk beneath the surface of the earth. That was where she belonged, out of sight, buried in the darkness, hidden from light.

  The men’s voices echoed, drawn out and lingering, as they tramped down the underground corridors, the flames of the torches flickering on the rocky walls. It was a Wagnerian scene. Siegfried would appear shortly, and a mighty-bosomed Mrs. Albert Comstock-shaped BrÜnnhilde encased in iron like a battleship, full of complaints as usual: “O feiger Mann! Falscher Genoss!/Hinter dem Helden hehltest du dich …” Crystals of opaque quartz fused with drops of natural glass hung from the roof like pendants, and flared into life as they walked beneath them.

  Feiger Man!

  Falscher Genoss!

  The words echoed and reechoed, a perpetual motion of sound in the narrow channels beneath the surface.

  Down, down, they tramped, and the geological layers – neat and sharp-edged, parti-colored as a vegetable terrine – were like cupboards, like bookshelves (the bookshelves past which Alice had fallen with such curious slowness), like the diagrams in a textbook, with the little engravings of the creatures that had lived in each period, their skeletons drawn as if they had always been dead, their bones slotted neatly into straight-lined epochs as if into a dark wooden glass-fronted display cabinet, fossils with the same coiled shapes as a carefully arranged collection of seashells.

  Down, down, they tramped: Holocene, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene – singing the names in a bass chorus – Oligocene, Eocene, Paleocene, Late Cretaceous …

  Through the epochs they tramped, through the periods, through the eras, through the bones of the dinosaurs, through the ammonites, the ferns, the insects and the fish. The further they penetrated to the center, the regions of eternal night, the simpler the life forms became. The rocks around them, like a layered history of architecture, buildings piled one upon the other through the centuries, as in Rome, became more primitive and undecorated as they went further down. At first they spun, like Renaissance artists lowered on the ends of ropes into the earth, through the debris of the ages and down into Nero’s buried Golden Palace, hovering like descending dei ex machina, gods coming down to earth to bring calmness and order to the tortured lives of those who were merely human. They hung in mid-air above the earth-scattered mosaic floors, flying open-mouthed, their torches catching the glint of gold, painted flowers, the faces of nymphs and gods moving on the walls – alive – in the shifting light. Then, punching their way through the mosaics, they moved miles further down, deeper into the darkness, through the rich-veined marbles – agate gray with white, yellow with red – through schist, calcareous rocks, and red sandstone, to dark and gloomy walls, oppressive, without decoration or brightness.

  Through this cavernously echoing obscurity they journeyed toward the Central Sea, huge, endless, its shores littered with the bones of the ages, edged by a forest colorless and unperfumed, overhung by flickering storm-racked clouds and the weight of their huge shadows, a place for Dante, for Virgil, for Doré. It was a silent sea, its fish blind, eyeless, in whose depths hideous monsters fought for supremacy. Here Be Monsters. This was the ornately scripted legend on the empty spaces of the map, of the mind. Here the monsters slept, curled up, twitching as they dreamed, awaiting their awakening. At the center there would not be just a single Minotaur. The Minotaurs would be in herds, furred and black and humped, thundering and running wild like buffalo on the Great Plains, and there was no one there to hunt them.

  Like a child, Harry Lawson shut his eyes, so that he would not see the darkness.

  To dream of seeing a cavern yawning in the weird moonlight before you, many perplexities will assail you, and doubtful advancement because of adversaries. Work and health is threatened. To be in a cave foreshadows change. You will probably be estranged from those who are very dear to you.

  Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

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

  She listened to his voice.

  She was still.

  She emptied her mind of all thought.

  She slept.

  “Sweetly she sleeps, my Alice fair,

  Her cheeks on the pillow pressed,

  Sweetly she sleeps …”

  The Bearded Ones swayed from side to side, they chanted, they hummed, they lulled her into sleep and forgetfulness.

  This enthusiasm for hypnotism lasted for almost eighteen months.

  Sometimes he used the pocket-watch, sometimes the flame of a candle, sometimes the glint of his gold ring. He fisted his hand, and held it up before her
– about to strike her in the face – and angled it until the light from the window caught the gold. Thick gold watch links spread across his chest, as if he were chained down by wealth, an indulged prisoner of luxury, enthralled by his thralldom. There was a great deal of gold about Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, much of it visible when he showed his teeth. When G. G. Schiffendecken appeared on the scene, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did not fall prey to the seductive power of his false teeth, the teeth that spread across Longfellow Park in wave after wave of gigantic grins, haunting the dreams of the nervous. The Maoris of New Zealand had their Queequeg-like facial tattoos, their features pressed all over with large inky thumbprints; the more remote tribes in the mountainous areas of Burma had their giraffe-necked women; and the inhabitants of Longfellow Park had their Schiffendecken’s Grins (“Longfellow Park! Longfellow Park! I can tell by your teeth it’s your home!”), but not at 11 Park Place.

  Here – people who did not trust banks (stubbornly refusing to be seduced by the lavishness of the new branch of the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bank) – they carried their savings about with them in their mouths. The head of Charm – Charm! – or Cotty or Asch (whatever it was Hilde Claudia chose to call him in their queasily imagined private, intimate moments), the head of Hilde Claudia, and even the heads of Theodore and Max (running out of space in their own capacious mouths, the parents transferred assets into the mouths of their offspring) were bowed down by the weight of the gold in their teeth, the sinfulness of their capitalistic instincts, and when they talked it was like catching glimpses into a bank vault, the dull gleam in the darkness through bars.

  Charm or Cotty or Asch – whatever you called him, he was still Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – bared his teeth when he concentrated, and the metal gleamed in the light that shone through the small gap in the curtains. A pocket-watch, a candle flame, a ring: these did not hypnotize her; she was hypnotized by a tooth, a particularly large canine left of center at the top.

  Closer he came toward her, and closer, carrying his instrument of murder before him, planning to smother her with his beard. The faint smell of fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell – Wednesday mornings were days on which he breakfasted generously on herring – would become overpowering, a man who’d been employing his beard as a seine net, strung out across the Hudson. Faintly flapping tails would slap against the side of her face, attempting to revive her after a faint. Faints were not very far away some mornings. Occasionally, there were soft-boiled egg mornings, and these – if anything – were even worse than the fish. He appeared to have developed a technique of secreting extra supplies of food within his beard, so that – without interrupting the flow of his probings – he could discreetly nibble his way through the morning when troubled by gnawing pangs of hunger. Spasmodically, he activated his jaws after slipping a few extra supplies into his mouth from his hidden stockpile, though she never seemed to catch the moment when hand made contact with mouth. Whenever he chomped, whatever he chewed, she could never rid herself of the feeling that it was she upon whom he feasted.

  She should borrow Mabel Peartree’s shopping basket, and one of Max Webster’s little cloaks. If anything vaguely historical was selected for warbling, out came the cloaks. Max Webster pictured himself as a living embodiment of the time When Knighthood Was in Flower, and this particular bloom blossomed with a tropical luxuriance, a hothouse flower on the point of smashing through the glass into the colder, darker world outside. He was the hero of Mrs. Twemlow’s favorite novel, a Charles Brandon de nos jours (“French!” Mrs. Albert Comstock shrieked, her parasol twitching into action. “French!”), and his complexion – he believed – held a tinge of beauty that the sun could not mar and a girl might envy. He was a real live man – ha! – full of manliness. He was almost rosy (an apple all ripe for big-teethed chomping). He was six feet (he really was, was Master Max, this Infant Phenomenon stretched on the rack of shrieking) of perfect manhood, strong and vigorous as a young lion. As she listened to him killing off his mother yet again, Mrs. Twemlow Senior’s jaws rotated briskly in a counterclockwise direction as she demolished the violet creams in record time. Vigorous. Vigorous. Alice would wrap his red cloak about her, like some out-of-order cloak of invisibility, and then she could look the part for Little Red Riding Hood.

  “Oh, Dr. Webster! What big ears you have!”

  (He did. They poked out from the outer regions of his beard like glumly disporting hippopotami surfacing for air.)

  “All the better to hear you with, Miss Pinkerton.”

  Scribble, scribble.

  “Oh, Dr. Webster! What big eyes you have!”

  (He did. Magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, they seemed perpetually agog, sniggeringly avid at the juicy discoveries – fat, wriggling worms – he grubbingly unearthed.)

  “All the better to see you with, Miss Pinkerton.”

  (She’d omit the big hands. She preferred not to think about being informed that they were all the better to hug her with.)

  “Oh, Dr. Webster! What a big tooth you have …”

  (She didn’t want to think about this either.)

  It glinted, it winked, and it drew her in toward it.

  He was a huckster, a fast-talking showman, a carpetbagger whose carpetbag was crammed and clinking with bottles of violently colored water. He held them up in front of a wagon that emblazoned his name three-dimensionally in lurid reds and golds, and the flaring lights shone through the contents of the bottles so that his face changed color from blue to green to red. Like curiously unerotic hootchy-kootchy dancers, Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max wanly pirouetted to and fro in the flaring lights, listlessly manipulating their triangular flags like miniature fans in soporific semaphore, their minds on other things as they bumped and grinded (or should this be “ground”?).

  Not much joy from hypnotism.

  (Not much joy for the patient, that is. He’d quite enjoyed following in the footsteps of Svengali.)

  It was time for something new.

  There’d not been much joy from electrotherapy.

  There’d not been much joy from baths (hot).

  There’d not been much joy from baths (cold).

  He’d spent most of the time with his spectacles all misted over, and he hadn’t been able to see a thing.

  There’d been no joy whatsoever from massage. He’d imagined that this would offer generous opportunities to caress temples, followed – almost instantly – by big chests falling submissively under his power. No such luck. He might have followed in Svengali’s footsteps, but he had signally failed to achieve any measure of chesty fulfillment.

  It was definitely time for something new.

  Something New and Improved.

  Something that would cause a stir.

  It was time …

  Tarantara!

  It was time…

  Tarantara!

  It was time to announce the arrival of – Tarantara! – cloud-reading.

  New!

  Improved!

  Cloud-reading!

  Peep, peep!

  Attention! The two arms were held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees – the gesture of someone in front of a runaway horse – and the flags shaken, as if a king or president was being patriotically greeted.

  Peep, peep!

  C. The right arm was held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm was held so that the flag depended from one corner in front of the center of the body.

  Peep, peep!

  L. The right arm was held down and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm up and away from the body, so that the two arms made one continuous line.

  Peep, peep!

  O…

  If he developed a sudden fascination with carpentry, sewing, or cookery he would – she felt – somehow insinuate this into her treatment, the book of instruction open for easy reference on top of his desk.

  “Make this apple pie for me, M
iss Pinkerton. You will undoubtedly obtain much relief. Here is your apron. The apples are in the bowl on your right. Over there are the flour, the butter, and the other ingredients, and in that jug there is some milk …”

  “Cook,” he would say, and she would cook.

  “The collar of this shirt needs repair …”

  “Sew,” he would say, and she would sew.

  “Hammer,” he would say, and she would hammer.

  He would not say “Write.”

  He would not say “Paint.”

  He would not say “Read.”

  After the reading of clouds came the reading of pictures and the reading of dreams, and these arrived at about the same time, and all these methods continued into the new century. She had rather hoped that the new century, like the firm lines drawn between the epochs of geologic time, might mean the beginning of something new, something that meant something, but things remained the same. She did not know the names of the books that had given him the ideas for the reading of clouds and the reading of pictures and dreams, though she had her suspicions that the clouds were the result of an especially vital word being mistranslated by Hilde Claudia, for whom nouns were clearly becoming as big a problem as the werbs. The mistake might very well have happened when a word in the original German had been misread, or when – here was a possibility that surely justified a scholarly monograph from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – Hilde Claudia, hopelessly confused, had inadvertently introduced her own Cloudier self into the text she was attempting to translate.