Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  The soloist began to sing.

  Alice was aware of this happening. The voice was faint and distant, the voice heard from the most distant seat, the voice from a stage that was immeasurably far away so that the singer could scarcely be seen, the voice scarcely heard. Her teeth had started to seize up, dried like withered fruit, frozen in the polite rictus smile she employed in the presence of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.

  It was a child’s voice.

  Then she realized that the distant voice was close. It was a small boy walking past outside, beneath the window and its closed drapes, on his way to the park with his mama and papa. It was like having to readjust your eyes, realizing that something you thought you were seeing far away was in fact just under your nose. There was a sense of bright illumination held temporarily at bay. After the dimly lighted room it would be dazzling when the curtains drew back, the muffled voice suddenly sharp, the brilliance blinding.

  He was singing some children’s rhyme, keeping his voice low, constrained by some sense of decorum. She caught the word “green,” and then – a little later (she tried to shut out “Tell me, tell me …”) – “And if this young prince chance to die.”

  She tried to grasp at the memory evoked.

  It was something more than the voices of the children playing under the chestnut trees, the singing she heard from the schoolroom in summer through the open windows. It was something more than the figures of boys and girls on the leaf-dappled grass, more than “Walking on the green grass,/Walking side by side,/Walking with a pretty girl,/She shall be my bride …”

  It wasn’t so much the words themselves as the rhythm of the words, the timbre of the child’s voice.

  It was linked with her feeling cold.

  As she did now.

  It was linked with her sitting down.

  As she was now.

  It was linked with being very still.

  As she was now.

  It was linked with her face being fixed in one expression.

  As …

  It was …

  She was a little girl in Carlo Fiorelli’s studio, posing for the Longfellow statue. It wasn’t that the memory came to her; she entered the memory, like stepping inside a painting. She was there again, all those years ago, and the unknown little boy’s voice was Giorgio’s voice.

  She did not like to go near the statue of Longfellow and the three little girls in the park anymore, to see herself as she once was. Even if she had been in the habit of wandering about, she would have avoided it. It would have hurt her, like certain photographs hurt her, and the happier the little girl looked in the photographs – opening her mouth to be fed strawberries by her sisters, a ten-year-old holding her newly born baby brother in her arms – the more it hurt.

  It was many years since anyone had said to her, “You’re one of the girls from the statue!” but she and her sisters had been the models for the three girls. Carlo Fiorelli – it was rumored he had won a competition to produce a statue for the Central Park (it must have been one of the rare occasions on which John Quincy Adams Ward had not pounced) – had been a nice man. He had brought his little boy into his studio to sing to them and keep them amused as he took his photographs. They had been disappointed that the little boy, Giorgio – a tiny child, a wisp of a thing even younger than they were – was unable to sing or even speak in Italian (“Is American boy,” Signor Fiorelli had said, by way of explanation), but – in his piping voice, imperfectly in tune – he had sung the words to children’s games, some of them the same songs they themselves sang as they played under the chestnut trees. Without seeming to realize that he was doing it, as though it was an essential part of singing the words, Giorgio had made all the gestures of a child playing the games that accompanied the songs, holding his hands out to either side of him or in front of him, toward invisible companions, as he sang.

  Longfellow had still been alive then, but he had not posed for the phot ographs. Carlo Fiorelli had worked from photographs of the poet collected from other sources. Papa – whose idea the statue had been, Longfellow for Longfellow Park – had been there for the early part of the sitting, before the detailed individual photographs had been taken, and he had sat in as a substitute for the poet in the group photographs.

  The statue was to be a representation of the father and three daughters from Longfellow’s poem “The Children’s Hour,” the poem from which their names had been taken – it was their father’s favorite poem, he claimed, paternally, in public, though she’d never seen him reading poetry, never heard him mention a poem (Moonshine. That would be the verdict if he ever did. Unmitigated moonshine!) – with Longfellow as the father, and Alice and her sisters as the three daughters. This was in the days before Ben-Hur had taken its firm, classical, togaed grip upon Signor Fiorelli.

  “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.

  “I hear in the chamber above me

  The patter of little feet

  The sound of a door that is opened,

  And voices soft and sweet.

  “From my study I see in the lamplight,

  Descending the broad hall stair

  Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,

  And Edith with golden hair …”

  That was how it began. The poem was carved in full on the stone base of the statue – the statue itself was bronze – and it never failed to frighten her, especially its ending, those last two verses, like a secret story spelled out in sharply incised letters for everyone to see.

  Grave, laughing, golden-haired, playing the parts they were supposed to play – she was, after all, Alice-from-the-poem – they clustered about Papa as he sat in the heavy armchair chosen by Carlo Fiorelli. Papa was holding an open book in his hands, as if interrupted at study, or as if about to read a favorite story to his eagerly expectant children.

  Edith was the youngest and stood on a stool behind the chair, her arms clasped around her father’s neck, leaning over his left shoulder. Alice and Allegra sat on either side of him, half on the chair, half leaning against him on his knees, their arms entwined around him, the sides of their faces against the rough hair of his beard, looking up at him. They appeared rapt in the words he was speaking, the words he was reading from the book. If they turned their heads, they would be able to read the words for themselves if they’d leaned forward a little, but they looked up at him, as if the words possessed power only if spoken by him. When she’d seen the completed statue, she’d wanted to know if Carlo Fiorelli had actually shown some words on the open pages, but the book was held up at an angle, and you couldn’t see. Birds tended to sit on the top edge of the pages, and whatever was written there – if anything – would be well coated with droppings, and accumulated dead leaves. Despite these hazards, she’d been keen – for a while – to see if any words were written. All she would have to do – she plotted her route – would be to climb her way up Edith or Allegra in her best nailed boots, planting her feet firmly on their knees, waists, shoulders, and heads as she clambered. The thought of doing this had certainly added to the appeal of research, and introduced a dubious element of personal vindictiveness to her otherwise commendable quest for knowledge.

  “Shall I look adoring?” she ought to have asked, anxious – like Serenity Goodchild, years later – to assume the appropriate expression for a photograph. “Shall I look adoring?”

  “… A whisper, and then a silence:

  Yet I know by their merry eyes

  They are plotting and planning together

  To take me by surprise.

  “A sudden rush from the stairway,

  A sudden raid from the hall!

  By three doors left unguarded

  They enter my castle wall!

  “They climb up into my turret

  O’er the arms and back of my chair;

  If I try to
escape, they surround me;

  They seem to be everywhere …”

  Alice had been half afraid when Papa had told her – had called all three of them together to tell them – that they were to be the models for a bronze statue. She hadn’t thought that they would be photographed – this idea hadn’t occurred to her at all – and had, at first, imagined the three of them standing very still for day after day as the sculptor hammered away at a great block of bronze – she had imagined that bronze would be sculpted like marble – until their images emerged from inside it. They would have to hold their breath for all that time. Then, more frighteningly, she imagined molten bronze being poured around their bodies, a little part of them at a time, building up around them gradually until they were completely covered, until they were unable to move, unable to speak, unable to breathe, encased in decorative bronze armor from which they would never be released.

  They were positioned – in and around the chair – upon a kind of turntable. Carlo Fiorelli’s two assistants pulled upon ropes, and they were slowly rotated as photographs were taken of the different angles. It was as if someone – walking right the way around them – was viewing them from every angle, but it was they who were moving, not the person viewing them. It was like being on a slowly revolving merry-go-round, and they held their pose as they were – rather shakily and squeakily – moved round, wobbling slightly. The music that accompanied them was not the fairground pipes of a barrel organ, the clashing of cymbals, the swirling syrupy rhythms, but Giorgio’s tiny shrill voice.

  “Smile, girls! Smile!” Carlo Fiorelli urged them, himself smiling to encourage them, big, exaggerated, blissful smiles that made Allegra giggle, and Alice – the smell of Papa’s tobacco-stained teeth in her nostrils – looked beyond and through the camera toward Giorgio. The little boy’s arms moved, conducting a vast silent orchestra, and his high voice rose up and was absorbed by the tall-ceilinged room – it had once been a stables – with its cool northern light, and its many dark angled beams, like the framework of an incomplete structure. She felt he was far, far away from her, out of reach.

  She was waiting, absolutely motionless, for the liquid metal to begin dripping down upon her, to weld her to her father’s body, to press upon her throat and chest and to still her breathing. It would be cold, not hot, like layers of ice freezing around her.

  It would happen soon.

  The day on which Carlo Fiorelli had taken the life cast of her face – she had been alone there on the day this had happened – had been like a memory of an illness when she was very young. It had been the sound of the cloth strips being prepared that had brought this into her mind. Two of the assistants had torn cloth into the right size pieces, and dipped these into a bowl of water to soak them. The sounds of water trickling into the bowl as they squeezed out the excess had been restful and soothing, the sound of Mama caring for her when she had a fever, gently tending her in a quiet house in which the blinds were lowered against the summer heat. Mama was soaking cloth in cool water to ease the heat of her brows, gently drawing back her short-cut hair and dabbing her forehead and cheeks with little wave-like motions. She listened with her eyes closed as it happened over and over, the subdued splashing that was like the sound of refreshment, Mama humming to her almost under her breath in the dim light.

  Carlo Fiorelli – he wore a long white clay-spattered apron – kneeled before her (she was now in the big chair where Papa had sat, her feet not reaching the ground) and applied grease to her face, rubbing vigorously along her eyebrows. She was the exotic dish being prepared for the feast. It would have to be something Italian. Papa would not like that, because it was foreign, one of his most witheringly contemptuous words (and he had many), odd in a man whose fortunes were founded upon steamships crossing and recrossing the oceans. She did not know the names of many Italian dishes, but thought of Veal Marsala, because she had eaten it once – her mouth half open as she chewed cautiously, suspiciously, with a sensation of experimenting, like a girl struggling with something too hot for her to swallow – and remembered the name.

  14 ozs. of veal sweetbreads.

  14 ozs. of veal fillet.

  14 ozs. of chicken livers.

  8 tbsps. of plain white flour.

  4 ozs. of butter …

  When he’d covered her face in grease, and applied the sheets of waxed paper, he’d begin to beat her face with a sculpting mallet to soften the flesh and make it into a thin layer. The butter would melt almost instantly in the hot frying pan – Hiss! Hiss! it foamed disapprovingly – and the flattened flesh would be fried rapidly, browning nicely.

  DRINK ME. EAT ME.

  If it had been ten years or so later, she would have thought of the recipe for Coniglio con le Olive. (She didn’t know the Italian for Veal Marsala.)

  2 41⁄2 lb. rabbits.

  10 tbsps. of olive oil.

  2 onions.

  14 ozs. black olives.

  6 garlic cloves …

  A great deal of garlic.

  She thought of the Mrs. Albert Comstock-faced Duchess tossing the sneezing baby up and down like a howling meaty salad being prepared in the pepper-filled kitchen. The Duchess would enjoy beating that little boy to a thin layer.

  I speak severely to my boy,

  I beat him when he sneezes;

  For he can thoroughly enjoy

  The pepper when he pleases!

  The Duchess sat with her toes turned in, an expression of massive disapproval on her face. Fire irons, saucepans, plates, and dishes hurtled in Alice’s direction, assisting with the thinning process. She’d be a slimmed-down battered banquet in no time.

  Yum-yum.

  The sculptor’s confident fingers moved about her face, as if they were molding her into shape, sculpting her features into those of a face he wished to create, a face better than the face she had. She was the clay on which he worked, no longer a breathing person. She could feel the tips of his fingers through the grease as he rubbed it in: they were coarse – the cut and scarred surfaces scratched her skin a little – not like the hands of an artist at all, but the hands of an artisan or a day laborer, a man who worked with tools or machines. Mama’s hands had been soft and gentle, skimming her skin, barely touching her at all, a butterfly’s wing touch, but these strong cold hands seemed to feel through to her bones.

  (But …

  (But …

  (But they were nothing like the hands of Papa’s “friend” – the friend in quotation marks – as he caressed her head, behind the high walls on the way to the Celestial City.

  (Night after night.

  (The wind blew, and sometimes there was snow.

  (Annie was there.

  (Carlo Fiorelli was nothing like Papa’s “friend.”)

  The summer heat of all those years ago had long gone, and in her memory it was – as always – cold in the studio, despite the metal stove with its tall pipe, all the warmth risen uselessly far above the human figures into the high space below the angled skylights. From the place in which she was seated, she couldn’t see the red flickering glow through the ornate filigree frontage, and this made her feel colder. It had been summer when the life-cast was taken – the stove would not have been lit, the air would not have been cold – and yet she somehow always thought of it as being an intensely cold day, white breath coming from within her, whiteness all around, surrounded by sculptures carved from snow. Later memories of the wintry day on which the statue had been unveiled must have overlaid her earlier memories, a coldness from the future creeping back to freeze the past.

  Strait Is The Gate That Leadeth Unto Life, And Few There Be That Find It.

  Through the Strait Gate was no place for the strait-laced, and through the Strait Gate the straitjackets waited.

  If she started shivering uncontrollably, sensing this coldness approaching, how would this affect her, held within the rigidly expressionless, unmoving mask that was building up around her features?

  This moment had come back to
her, a year or so later, when she had read Poor Miss Finch, in which Wilkie Collins had made a passing reference to a female model “sitting” for the first time in a drawing academy, and being so nervous at the ordeal ahead of her that the only way she could be persuaded into the students’ room was by being led in blindfold. This picture of the naked woman – her eyes bandaged – being stared at by the room full of clothed men as they sketched her body, had stayed in her mind, haunted her, and it may have been this that started The Life Class, her novel about a woman art student, developing in her mind. If the nervous figure-model had been Trilby, Svengali would have hypnotized her into confident nakedness. (“Take off your clothes, Miss O’Ferrall.”) Alice had studied Carlo Fiorelli and Linnaeus Finch, and the way that they worked upon their sculptures or paintings, without knowing that she had been studying them: these observations, also, had colored her ideas. Women art students were not admitted into a life class (unless, presumably, they were as blindfolded as a frightened model, in the buff for blindman’s buff). It was not suitable for them to see the unclothed human form. At the end of the novel, naked again, a woman’s body had been stretched out in the dissecting room, as the men – medical students, this time – moved in toward her with their bright sharp-edged instruments. That woman with the pocket-handkerchief tied around her eyes, that woman stumbling, and cutting her fingers on the scalpels, that weeping woman, was a woman who had expressed a wish to learn to become a doctor.

  As he leaned across, she gazed over Carlo Fiorelli’s bowed shoulder down darkening corridors of plaster casts that seemed to stretch away for always, half-glimpsed figures from the Bible and from mythology, gleaming in the sunlessness like the obscure avenues of a graveyard at dusk. Motes of white dust spun slowly in downward-angled beams of light. More dust lay in drifts like accumulated wind-blown snow, swept away into the more remote corners of the studio, as if by a slatternly housewife who imagined that all her visitors were as unobservant or as uncaring as herself. On either side of the half-clad frozen figures, the wooden shelves stretching right up to the roof were laden with more casts, busts, miniature figures, the whiteness of the sculptures everywhere in stone, in marble, in clay, in plaster.