She had asked Charlotte to try and find out which words in German were almost the same as the German word for “cloud.” Charlotte actually had an English–German dictionary, but it was just the second volume – L to Z – of a two-volume set, not very helpful when the word sought began with “c.” (Alice had toyed with the concept of someone trying to communicate without using any words beginning with the letters from “a” to “k” in the alphabet.) Charlotte had asked Emmerson, and brought back just two words – “Wolke” (which meant cloud) and “Wolle” (which meant wool) – and several phrases, including the German for “head in the clouds,” “to be under a cloud” (vital for all Germanic Mrs. Albert Comstocks and Mrs. Goodchilds out Magdalene-prodding), “cloud-cuckoo land” (definitely a useful phrase if Alice was in the vicinity), and “her eyes were clouded with tears.” (“Ihre Augen waren von Tränen getrÜbt”: it might come in useful some day.) She must ask her to find out more words from Emmerson, and try to discover if another word ought to have been used in the translation. “Volk” (the German word for “people”) sounded a little like the way Charlotte had pronounced “Wolke,” and she found herself picturing cloud people, heads in the clouds, tall slow-moving beings reaching high into the sky, their shadows stretching out across the landscape.
It might well be, of course – there was always this possibility – that she had misjudged Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (it was not very likely), and that no mistranslation had occurred at all. The interpretation of clouds might be at the very forefront of knowledge – pushing out a new frontier, covered wagons heading west – for those who sought to heal the minds of the lost, and bring solace to the suffering. He had borne his knowledge in triumph to Longfellow Park, like G. G. Schiffendecken bearing his false teeth (held aloft like the spoils of a conquered kingdom for the acclaim of cheering crowds), and she had cruelly spurned what he had offered to her in a spirit of Christian charity. Ha!
Another “ia” was evolving here, she felt, to send Mrs. Goodchild scuttling delightedly: nephophobia, a terror of clouds.
Now would be a particularly good time to provoke a Mrs. Goodchild scuttle: the sidewalks were so icy that there was the attractive possibility that she might skid (several hundred yards if she had achieved full scuttling speed) and break a leg. Alice lingered on this thought luxuriously. Mrs. Goodchild – hurtling through the park on her way home – careened across the marble surroundings of the statues in The Forum, skittling a passing group of nuns from The House of the Magdalenes (Alice generously allowed a small tingle of pleasure to Mrs. Goodchild), and collided with the plinth of Albert Comstock’s marbled magnificence. Sickening crunch. First she scuttled, then she skittled, then she broke a leg. One of the Dennistons’ horses had broken its leg and been shot the previous week. She dreamed. She dreamed. And if she dreamed, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster would wish to know all the details.
If there were a phobia for phobias – phobiaphobia? – she probably had it, and she fully intended to hang firmly onto it.
It was her phobia.
Hers.
No one else should share it.
If she had misjudged him – reading clouds, after all, seemed no more outlandish than some of his other methods of treatment – perhaps she was helping to explore new and unknown territory, a Lewis and Clark of the mind (though Lewis and Carroll might more aptly be seen as her terrain), and “Miss P.” – the very first patient – might feature heavily when the history of this new science came to be written. There would be some impressive term for it – everything Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did had an impressive term for it (it would not be suitable for him to do if it did not) – and she mused a while. Nebulism? (It was nebulous in every sense.) Nephopsychology? Cloudology (not as impressive as nephopsychology)? Or perhaps they were approaching the moment when Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was at last to seize his moment to be immortalized by naming what was his very own discovery after himself.
She – without knowing it – was a pioneer of Websterism, becoming one of the gods by reading the signs in the clouds, interpreting the shapes she saw in the sky. Webster’s Technique would enter the textbooks, like all the diseases that were named after the men who had discovered them: Weil’s, von Recklinghausen’s, Hodgkin’s, Bright’s, Pott’s, Paget’s, and all the others. How very strange to give one’s name to a disease, particularly when the diseases with the names of men were some of the worst, some of the most frightening. She saw their bearded faces – like the gathering of the poets, like the shareholders of the bank – looking down from the walls of the lecture theatre as she lay upon the table in front of them. The members of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s audience strained forward, moving their heads to obtain a good view, as he indicated the patient lying there below them on display, and prodded her into position. They were all glazed like framed photographs or engravings, and she couldn’t see them properly for the reflections in the glass, her own warped shape reversed in front of her. Pale hands pointed, indicated.
“Note the characteristic posture of the female, with the arms crossed in front of the breasts, the knees pulled up toward the belly …”
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
His dubious methods, and the vigor with which they were peddled, made her think of Griswold’s Discovery, the revolting patent medicine upon which the considerable fortunes of the Griswolds – Mrs. Goodchild’s sister and brother-in-law – were founded. The boxes in which the bottles of Griswold’s Discovery were enclosed bore – as Proof of Authenticity (this was the expression employed) – the grim bearded face of Josiah Griswold (not something one would imagine anyone wishing to fabricate). Even if the bottles’ swigged contents had contained the secret of eternal life, the series of testimonials from grateful customers contained within the box would have appeared excessive in their hysterical fulsomeness. Griswold’s Discovery was heavily advertised in a way that made the advertising for Barnum’s museum appear coyly reticent, and the face of Josiah Griswold – many feet high – peered glumly down from heights all over New York City like a jealous god in zealous search of sinners, to startle the unwary, and frighten nervous horses. Scowling, disapproving (“I know what you did to put yourself in that condition!” he was booming disgustedly in his loudest voice, so that everyone would hear him), he soared high above TARRANT’S SELTZER APERIENT, COLORIFIC, Boas & Feathers Renovated & Curled, Cigars, Painless Dentist, and Learn to Waltz in Five Lessons, Guaranteed. One somehow felt that nothing but the eager offer of ready money could compel him to allow anyone to purchase his panacea.
If it was not the face of Josiah Griswold, it was the face of the Griswold Girl, smiling and seductive, urging the miraculous elixir upon the populace. Almost Schiffendeckenan in her tantalizing toothsomeness, this buxom brunette looked nothing like any of the frog-faced Griswolds. With the Griswolds and the Goodchilds – the husbands and wives and tribes of children all looked identical in their fearsome frog-facedness – one could not help feeling nervously that some deep-rooted Old Testament prohibition was being willfully flouted, the Table of Kindred and Affinity (she had always boggled at the thought of marrying her grandfather) plundered for forbidden consanguinities, and bulgy-eyed twins had been audaciously coupled in matrimony. Here was inbreeding on a Galápagosian scale to set Charles Darwin’s beard aquivering yet again. Fire from heaven could not be long delayed to end this survival of the unfittest, this pedigree of perfidy.
Forget Josiah Griswold.
Forget the Griswold Girl.
Forget Griswold’s Discovery.
Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max – recognizing that their moment had come around yet again – took up their positions to hootchy, to kootchy (kootchies always followed hot upon hootchies), to pirouette, to bump, to grind, to dazzle with their glitteringly hypnotic golden teeth.
Buy these! Buy these!
These – green, eight-sided, ribbed like poison containers – were the bottles flourished like rabbits from hats by Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in the f
airground flare in front of his wagon. In the dim interiors of the stained-glass-colored bottles, the concentrated clouds stirred and shifted, changing their meanings as they moved, very like a camel, very like a weasel, very like a whale, very like any number of things. The lettering on the bottles’ labels – dark, as elaborate as that on the cover of any sheet music – read Webster’s Discovery, and the Proof of Authenticity was the bearded face of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster himself. There was no place here for Josiah Griswold; there was no place here for the Griswold Girl; they were elbowed vigorously aside, as the clouds swirled and pressed against the cork-stoppered narrow neck, as if they were jinnees seeking to escape, or the contents of Pandora’s box eager to unleash all the troubles of the world. In The Water Babies Charles Kingsley, vigorously expounding his enthusiastic cold-baths muscular Protestantism to his dear little men, had – he’d meet with the wholehearted hear-hear approval of Mrs. Albert Comstock, Dr. Vaniah Odom, the Goodchilds, and, for that matter, Marie Corelli – listed Monks and Popes amongst the contents of Pandora’s box, the ills which flesh is heir to, children of the four great bogies, Self-will, Ignorance, Fear, and Dirt. (He’d also listed Quacks, Unpaid Bills, Potatoes, Bad Wine, and – in a telltale clue to the secret of his fearlessly upright fists-raised posture – Tight Stays.)
“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Lust in a wheedlingly seductive voice.
“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Anger, growing impatient and sounding threatening.
“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Envy, whiningly furious that he was not free.
The sevenfold voices of the Sins wheedled and threatened and whined, and – behind their voices – there were countless other voices clamoring to be heard.
Me!
Me!
Me!
Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max were untiring.
Peep, peep!
O. The right arm was held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm was held flat horizontally across the front of the body.
Peep, peep!
U. The two arms were held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was the same positioning as for “Attention!” – the gesture to stop a runaway horse – but the arms, this time, remained still, the king or the president ungreeted.
Peep, peep!
D …
S …
I see a “C”!
I see an “L”!
I see an “O”!
I see a “U”!
I see a “D”!
I see an “S”!
And what can I see? …
“Clouds?” she asked, doubtfully, as he explained what it was she had to do.
“Yes, clouds. Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.”
Cloud-reading had arrived.
She sat in her chair at the window, and gazed up into the sky, above the statues and the tops of the trees in the park, and told Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster what it was she could see. Sometimes, when she was not striving to read the titles of his books, she really did try to see shapes in the sky. It was as if she were Moses on Mount Sinai, and the LORD was coming unto her in a thick cloud. The LORD sat behind her with his notebook, with his angelic host behind him, buoyed up by their beards, they – also – floating high above the world, and she read the clouds, as she would later read the pictures. The people would hear when he spoke with her, and believe him for ever. Hypnotism, clouds, pictures, dreams. There would be thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud. Theodore and Max would – slightly muffled by the intervening door and portiÈre – play their trumpets in the waiting room to ensure the appropriate atmosphere for godlike revelations. It helped no end if you lulled patients into the right mood. Spurning their mother’s heritage, they patriotically opted for the March King rather than the Waltz King, John Philip Sousa rather than Johann Strauss the Younger, and Semper Fidelis and The Stars and Stripes Forever accompanied the ministrations of their papa.
She would draw near unto the thick darkness where God was, and the talking cures would bring release. She would talk, and she would be cured. The words were something bad inside her that had to be spoken for her to feel better. In an unforeseen reversal of the traditional arrangement, she had become a child in bed – that was how she felt – telling bedtime stories to a listening adult – week after week – as the adult listened with rapt attention, taking notes to satisfy his remembrance the more strongly.
The adult spoke no “Once upon a time.”
The adult spoke no “happily ever after.”
The adult was the listener, not the speaker, and it was the child who spoke of things seen in the air, things in dreams and pictures, the child who spoke the bad words, described the bad things. She spoke in the dimmed room, a room like a child’s summertime room prepared for sleeping.
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
As she spoke, no one else visible, she could hear the scratch, scratch, scratch of the pen-nib behind her, like the sound of the birds’ little curved claws rattling on the bark of the tree. It was like talking to herself.
Well, that was – after all – just as it should be.
That was – after all – the first sign of madness.
That was another title she had saved, and was anxious to use before anyone else did.
It was her title.
The First Sign of Madness. (Or would it be “The First Sign of Madness”? Italics for a novel, and quotation marks for a short story. That was the system of punctuation she followed. She always underlined the titles in her lists, the handwritten symbol of italics, wildly ambitious to write nothing shorter than a novel, novel after novel, a Clarissa Harlowe whose quill was never at rest.)
There were so many unwritten books lined up, waiting.
She should talk more –
Scratch, scratch, scratch
– and the books would be written from her dictation.
Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had been Lady Macbeth’s doctor. How unlike him not to have insisted on being named, but to remain just an anonymous Doctor of Physic.
“Foul whisp’rings are abroad,”
– he’d confided in the Waiting-Gentlewoman –
“… Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets …”
Unnatural deeds.
Tick.
Unnatural troubles.
Tick.
Infected minds.
Tick. Tick.
Secrets.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
She possessed all the symptoms of infection.
After all those ticks came all those tics, the twitchy outer manifestations of the stricken, the nervous afflictions of the neurasthenic, the restlessness in which she could not be still (the sheets around her as ridged as a sea-washed shore), in which she could not empty her mind of all thought (thoughts swarmed upon her), in which she could not sleep. Sleep brought dreams.
These terrible dreams/That shake us nightly.
Tic. Tic. Tic.
“… More needs she the divine than the physician.”
The Reverend Goodchild – recognizing his cue – hurtled into position, panting slightly, teeth gigantically exposed. He’d (Phew!) know all about foul whisp’rings. He’d effect a miraculous cure by inserting a large bottle of Griswold’s Discovery into her mouth, and – the tics intensified at the very thought – the laying on of his grubby, slightly clammy, hands.
Mrs. Goodchild had not liked the sound of the talking cure. It had sounded too like something – whatsit? – Catholic to her,
the whisperings in the darkness of a confessional, crisscross bars of shadow across the face of the priest on the other side of the grille. Mrs. Goodchild would dearly love to grill a priest. When she barbecued something she liked it to be almost black, charred beyond recognition, like a body recovered from a conflagration, a lightning-struck sinner comprehensively sizzled by God at his tetchiest. When she grilled a sausage – “Don’t play ignorant with me!” she’d start off challengingly. “You’re going to answer every question I ask you!” – you could sketch an attractive landscape with the stick of charcoal that resulted. She’d be the most inquisitive member of the Spanish Inquisition (Protestant Division), grilling away until the atmosphere of the dungeon was black with meatily flavored clouds of smoke. There were the clouds again. There was no getting away from the clouds, and their meaning was all too clear. The thumbscrews, the rack, and the Iron Maiden (Mabel Peartree thoroughly enjoyed her little part-time position) were neatly lined up in readiness for the next stage of the torturing. The thrill of the grill, then the thrill of the kill, slow, methodical, infinitely prolonged. They’d soon get those Monks and Popes shoved back into Pandora’s box, blackened and barbecued, shriveled, crisped and crackling at the edges.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
Father Goodchild, his fingers raised to bless, his rosary rattling like Mrs. Albert Comstock’s earrings, leaned toward her.
The talking cure had also sounded Jewish.
Neither of these was a recommendation in the eyes of Mrs. Goodchild. She did not explain why she thought it sounded Jewish, though Mrs. Albert Comstock’s deeply felt description of Svengali hypnotizing Trilby had made a lasting impression upon her.
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