Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock always seemed to know the latest treatment that was being tried upon her, though neither Alice nor her mother told anyone what was happening. Clearly Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster entertained his hosts over candlelit dinners with amusing descriptions of Alice Pinkerton’s latest peculiarities in the intervals when he was not playing on his banjo.

  When the wine flowed with especial freedom he might very well combine the two, and sing comic songs about her, accompanying himself on the banjo. As the most fashionable treatises on etiquette explained, the most dependable manner in which to ensure popularity in Longfellow Park, the certain shortcut to a crammed-to-bursting engagement book, was to entertain all and sundry by regaling them with the most intimate and trusted secrets of other people’s hearts. A guest with this to offer was guaranteed a good seat at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, and the biggest plate in 5 Hampshire Square piled high with the most enormous of all the pies produced by Comstock’s Comestibles. Not just the Comstock Jumbo, Titanic, Monumental, or Gargantuan, but the Comstock Colossus, containing as much meat as Noah’s Ark (including Noah himself, Shem, Ham – his very name dribblesomely weighted with promise – and Japheth, and their wives) and approximately the same size, every last cubit meat-crammed to bursting. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster liked to crunch on a Colossus, and he possessed the party piece that guaranteed him guest of honor status. Mrs. Albert Comstock would keep those Colossuses (those Colossi?) coming, shunting them on like entire freight trains packed with whole herds of Chicago-bound cattle, and he’d dish the dirt as the gravy gushed down his chin, lending a youthful tinge to his beard. If he squeezed his beard out when he reached home, little Theodore and little Max could feast for a week on gallon-sized bowls of well-heated beef tea, flourishing with weed-like rapidity on the rich sustenance thus afforded them. The brazen sound of their Day of Judgment trumpets would deepen, as their ever-manlier lungs grew stronger.

  He would find plenty of amusing things to sing about her. The Goodchilds and Mrs. Albert Comstock were the audience taking notes (they’d take plenty of notes), the faces peering down at her from high above, elbows and sniggers fully activated, teeth glintingly on display. She was surprised that Mrs. Goodchild didn’t go into more vigorous attack, bursting into the consulting room on Wednesday mornings with the air of a woman accidentally losing her bearings on some mission of mercy, those missions so movingly epitomizing her greatness of heart. She could have tiptoed through with I’m-not-really-here-don’t-mind-me sort of gestures, listening avidly as she sashayed through. Mrs. Goodchild – decidedly – was showing signs of losing her subtle touch for snooping.

  “I can see …”

  “Yes?”

  “I can see …”

  “Tell me what you can see …”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  She was like the poor Indian in Alexander Pope whose untutored mind saw God in clouds – a gift of discernment not exclusive to Moses – or heard him in the wind. She pictured the Indian as a Red Indian, gazing at the clouds to read the huge smoky messages – capital-lettered with eighteenth-century importance – inscribed across the sky from some vast conflagration consuming the plains, as buffalo herds thundered past in panic, hotly pursued by the ghost of Albert Comstock wielding a chopper, eagerly putting into practice his plans for the Comstock Gigantic, the Comstock Stupendous … Comstock’s Comestibles For A Buffalo Biggie! Grab Your Grub Now! She thought of the same Indian in Othello’s last speech, the one who threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.

  The chair in which she sat at Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s was the same sort of chair as the one in which she sat in Mrs. Albert Comstock’s box at the opera, with the same straight legs, the same faded figures in the tapestry of its seat and back. Sometimes – though it featured no tapestry, was without the half-discernible groupings of gods and goddesses, the minor figures of mythology – she experienced the same sensation when she sat in the chair in the dentist’s, as G. G. Schiffendecken (smelling of peppermint, grunting with concentration, seeing nothing but teeth: other human beings existed solely as containers for teeth) labored in the darkness of her mouth to extract the source of infection. He always gave the impression of being a more hygienic version of Samuel Cummerford, a rival for the automobile salesman, his head hidden as he bent well down, pottering about, poking and peering under a lifted hood with well-washed hands. It was always advisable to count your teeth after you’d been in his chair: he was fully capable of surreptitiously attempting to extract one or two teeth on each visit, bringing ever closer the day when you would be driven to purchase a complete artificial smile, and sent out into the world a transformed person, newly toothsome in every possible meaning of the word. Patients would stumble out into the street, their faces curiously contorted as they – “un, ooh, ee” – touched their teeth one by one with their tongues, making a cautious inventory of the contents of their mouths (had he smashed? had he grabbed?) – “oar, ive, ix …” In bed that night they’d be doing this over and over, a new method of inducing slumber.

  Evven.

  Ate.

  Ine.

  En.

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster should be leaning over her with the same bright metal instruments in his hands, prod, prod, prodding away at the lineaments of her brain, and sending her out into the world, free from pain, and with a more radiant smile. As she looked out of the Park Place window, she sometimes ran her fingers beneath the seat on either side of her, feeling the same round-headed tacks attaching the material to the wooden frame, and felt that she was in the opera house, looking down onto the stage. Faintly, she heard the voices of a male operatic chorus, the glass that enclosed them muffling The Bearded Ones in the photographs and engravings behind her as they sang with one voice. She looked up at the clouds in the way that the characters in operas looked at the painted backcloths – just a few feet behind them – like people looking at something real, seeing deep into infinite distances, far across seas, a star-filled or sun-brightened vastness that unfolded endlessly, searching for the arrival of someone they loved or hated, longing to embrace or to kill.

  As she spoke, the tips of her fingers moved up and down on the smooth bright brass heads beneath her, as if she were picking out the different notes on an obscure instrument, one no longer played in a modern orchestra, accompanying herself with music. Hidden away in the darkness of the little open-fronted room, she watched the brightly illuminated figures below her live and die to music, singing. Words by themselves could not express the intensity of all the emotions that they experienced.

  They sang in a language she could not understand.

  In the darkness of the theatre you could not see to read the libretto, and the words were heard imperfectly, even if they were in a language you thought you knew, even if they were in the language that you yourself spoke. What you heard was not the words that were written down, the words from which meaning might be teased, but sounds, the human voice employed as another source of sound, another musical instrument.

  “… Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht,

  Zernichten der Heuchler erschlichene Macht!…”

  You would not hear this. You would not see these words – in a printed text – in front of you. What you heard – though you’d grasp the occasional words (“the sun,” “the night”), complete phrases, hearing them, seeing them – was usually meaningless, the emotion conveyed through music, not language, and then the curtain drew across. It was time to sleep. The music had ended.

  At the end of one of her fifty-five minutes of Wednesday morning cloud-reading, searching for the shapes in the sky, he told her what she was to do the following week, the fifty-five minutes of picture -reading. The sense of the crowded lecture theatre, the behatted and bebearded rising in tiers above her, the scribble, scribble, scribble of notes being taken, the voice that was always too loud for a consulting room … Mrs. Albert Comstock had chosen to disguise herself with a John Greenleaf Wh
ittier false beard, which rather suited her (rarely had she appeared so pullulatingly feminine), whilst Mrs. Goodchild had favored the Oliver Wendell Holmes, cheekily curled at its extremities.

  “What is happening in this picture?”

  This was the new question.

  This was the new enthusiasm.

  New books had arrived from Vienna, whole crates of books that had to be crowbarred open, burglar-like. Hilde Claudia had been toiling night and day.

  “What is happening in this picture?”

  A mere description was not acceptable: the picture had to be interpreted.

  (The female – Miss P. – had it carefully explained to her what it was she had to do, and she seemed to understand. On the first occasion …)

  The pictures – a different picture each time – were hung on the wall alongside the window. The curtains, open for the clouds, were closed for the pictures, as they had been closed for the hypnotism. There was a light above the picture, the only illumination in the room, and she focused on this brightness, hearing only the hissing of the gas, and the voice behind her. She saw nothing but the picture, like someone concentrating prior to hypnotism.

  She was surprised by the choice of pictures. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did not mention, if he indeed knew, who the artist was or what the title of the picture was – that would have compromised interpretation – but she recognized what they were, and they were better chosen than she would have imagined.

  “Tell me what you can see in this picture, Miss Pinkerton.”

  The first picture was a Tintoretto, St. George and the Dragon. What a blow that Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was no friend of Roland Birtle. Thus had she been prevented – no great surprise, this – from seeing Tintoretto’s Paradise in the consulting room, probably the only picture, and the only artist, known to Childe Roland, essential components of his fascination in conversation. As he grappled with the challenging complexities of small talk, he employed that tone of voice of his, the one that almost guaranteed refreshing sleep, glazed eyes, and no exercise whatsoever for the brain. (“Did you know …” he would begin, in the tentative tone of voice of a tourist making his first hesitating foray into the disturbing world of Useful Foreign Phrases, “… that the largest painting in the world is Paradise by Tintoretto? It is eighty-four feet wide …”) It would have been a stimulating challenge to interpret a picture eighty-four feet wide by thirty-three and a half feet high in fifty-five minutes. She could have gone for a refreshing stroll across it, rather in the way that G. G. Schiffendecken patrolled his “estate” from wall to wall like a sentry on duty outside a well-guarded royal palace. It might have brought a little color to her cheeks, a Wednesday morning walk in Paradise.

  Here – in the chosen Tintoretto (it was considerably smaller than Paradise) – were clouds, the reading of clouds and the reading of pictures merging. “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish.” That’s what Antony had said, searching for shapes in the clouds in the moments before his death, thinking that Cleopatra was dead. Well, here was something dragonish, and here was a fleeing princess – formally dressed in silks and jewels (the Vermeer-like gleam of pearls), clothes for a blazingly candlelit ballroom, not clothes for the open air – hurtling away from the dragon and out from the foreground of the picture toward her.

  The dragonish cloud unfurled high in the sky, breathing out smoke that opened out into further shapes, a bear, a lion, a tower’d citadel, its entrance barred and inaccessible …

  To dream of a dragon, denotes that you will allow yourself to be governed by your passions, and that you are likely to place yourself in the power of your enemies through those outbursts of sardonic tendencies. You should be warned by this dream to cultivate self-control.

  Here was a personal rebuke, a series of warnings designed expressly for her.

  (Do not be governed by your passions.

  (Control those outbursts of sardonic tendencies.

  (Cultivate self-control.)

  “I c-c-can see …”

  (What she saw was Annie.)

  “Yes?”

  “I c-c-can see …”

  (What she saw was a girl dressed in blue, standing in the light of an unseen window, surrounded by stillness and silence. What could Miss Pinkerton see in this picture?)

  “Tell me what you can see …”

  (What did this picture mean? It was the picture at which she gazed as she paused in the midst of reading, leaving words behind in an attempt to interpret the wordless.)

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  (What had Annie been trying to say, unable to communicate in words, and letting a picture carry her message? There would be a great deal of scribbling if she tried to interpret this picture: the thoughts in the girl’s head, the contents of the letter.

  (The nameless girl in blue – utterly still, self-absorbed, bent over in the light from the window, aware of nothing but the contents of the letter in her hand – was reading a love letter, a confession of guilt, a suicide note, a brutal rejection. Sometimes Alice thought that the girl could not read, and was staring uncomprehendingly at the writing on the paper, trying unsuccessfully to make out what it was it said, in the same way as Alice was staring at the picture. This girl wore no jewels, though Alice could just make out some pearls – pearls, again – lying on the surface of the table in front of her. Brass-headed studs hammered into the surface of the two chairs in the picture caught the light, glinted as the pearls glinted. Alice ran the tips of her fingers across the tacks hammered into the underside of the chair in which she sat, as if she had herself stepped into the picture, as if it was she who was the girl in blue.

  (Had the pearls accompanied the letter? There was no joy in the girl’s pose, no sense of her having received a token of love. Sometimes Alice saw resignation in the pose. Sometimes the ringless hands seemed on the point of crumpling up the letter they held.

  (Sometimes Alice thought that the girl – in her loose blue smock – was pregnant. Was this what Annie had been trying to tell her?

  (“Pregnant” was not a word one tended to hear in Longfellow Park. “Ahem – you know” was a favored phrase for fertility, as was “an interesting condition” – it was a condition found most interesting by Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild, prod, prod – or, voice lowered, a word most often whispered, “gravid.” Mrs. Goodchild did not need to say “whatdoyoumacallit?” or “thingamajig” or “whatsit?” when “gravid” came into it; the word came readily to her mouth. Mrs. Albert Comstock did not choose to employ an “er” in this context, though an “ahem” was invisibly inserted prior to the hissing whisper.

  (Alice had never liked the sound of “gravid.” It possessed an uncomfortable echo of “rabid.”

  (It was dangerous, highly infectious.

  (It led to foaming at the mouth and madness.

  (There was no cure.

  (You had to shoot them.

  (Bang! Bang!

  (It was the kindest thing to do.

  (They were better off dead.

  (“Enceinte” – a swooning cringe into italics at this point, for the employment of a foreign word – could not possibly be used because “enceinte” was French. Any girl who was “enceinte” had clearly neglected to marry, another brazen trollop, another candidate for The House of the Magdalenes, another Madeline, Mariana, or Elaine, hardly fair, hardly lovable, hardly the lily maid – Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha – of Astolat. If the word “enceinte” was employed, rain clouds would be sure to follow.

  (“She’s under a cloud.”

  (Nudge, nudge.

  (Nudge, nudge for les nuages. They were sure to be French clouds, extra-pendulous, extra-dark and threatening, thrusting officiously with uncorseted breasty wobblings.

  (“She’s under a cloud.”

  (The rainfall would be heavy and prolonged.

  (Sometimes words were abandoned entirely in favor of gestures, with much meaningful curving of hands in fronts of stomachs, worryingly like Alice and Charlott
e’s shorthand for Beard, as if The Bearded Ones carried their unborn young before them in kangaroo-like hairy pouches.

  (“She’s come to grief.”

  (Nudge.

  (“She’s come to grief.”

  (Nudge.

  (She arrived at the place she had never seen before, and Grief was there to welcome her home.

  (Something about the pose of the girl dressed in blue, about the mood of the whole painting, made her think of the other meanings of “pregnant,” the sense of something rich with meaning, momentous, teeming, but whatever meaning there was seemed to slip through her fingers, pushed out of reach by the very hands that grasped for it. The much-folded reproduction of the painting had become torn and crumpled over the years, overlaid with a net of lines like the onset of age on the human face, cracked and crazed like the surface of an old oil painting, a phrenology head, and the crisscross lines had multiplied. Squares of color would drop out, like the pieces of a damaged mosaic, scattering fragments of brightness on the dusty floor, all that remained of a lost picture.)

  The second picture had been a more recent painting, a William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott.

  What had made him select this particular picture?

  Other pictures followed, and all of them contained the figure of a woman, usually alone. After a few weeks, the reading of the clouds was alternated with the reading of pictures: some weeks there were just the clouds, some weeks just the pictures. Sometimes the hissing of the gas made her feel headachy and dull, as if the gas had not been lit and she was being lulled into sleeping and forgetfulness, freed from all the troubles of the world. Beyond the drawn curtains was the stage, and on the stage the soloist awaited the moment for her song, illuminated by a circle of light in the midst of the darkness.

  “I c-c-can see …”

  “Yes?”

  “I c-c-can see …”

  “Tell me what you can see …”

  She saw Annie.

  She saw a girl dressed in blue.