Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  In a dark corner there was the life cast (death cast?) of a flayed criminal, a memento mori of a Marsyas, his flute forever silenced. The sculptor had not pointed this out to her – it had seemed deliberately hidden away in its semidarkness, a part of a gallery not open to the public – but she had come across it when she had been wandering about on her first visit, strolling between gods and goddesses like an awed worshiper in a pantheon. It was like an illustration in a book for a medical student, a meticulously detailed engraving to be studied late at night by candlelight, and there should have been large elaborately curled capital letters – A, B, C … – filling all the spaces of the air around it, and italicized explanations should have been printed beneath it. She had a sense of other such figures all around her, Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, many Fig. s from many pages, veins and organs – sharply defined, freed from the blurring obfuscation of blood – neatly laid out for scrutiny like something for sale. The student – clearly one of St. Cassian of Imola’s more ambitious pupils, an eye on a career as a doctor – gestured in the air with his sharp-pointed pen, rehearsing the first incision into the flesh in front of him, perfecting the angle at which to hold his scalpel. There, he thought. There. He moved nearer, bending close to the naked, blindfold woman. (“Yes,” he’d say, years later, a man noted in his profession, laden with honors, anxious to give praise where praise was due, “I had a teacher who gave me a taste for dissection. I owe so much to him. He really inspired me.”)

  Nearest to her were the casts of the dead, whole shelves of death masks, faces, hands, the living unable to let go, clinging on to those from whom they had been taken. Some of them were of people she had known, and not all of them were old. The still faces peered out at her from the shadows, like half-glimpsed ghosts, pausing a while in the moment before speaking, on the point of drawing the first breath. Like the faces of peaceful sleepers, they seemed to have had all emotions shushed away from them – Shh! Shh! (She heard the soothing whispers, felt the comforting hand) – and possessed the remote, faraway expressions of those thinking of something that had happened a long time ago, something without pain or pleasure. People came to Carlo Fiorelli to ask him to do these. He would do to the dead what he was doing to her with those same fingers, and she was as still as the dead would be, her breath half held, poised perpetually between moments of breathing. Being immortalized brought death closer, like photographs somehow seemed to do, concentrating the mind on the passing of time, the awareness of the difference between what once had been, and what now was. She had not known that art was so close to death. The artist leaned across the faces of the dead in the darkened room, a candle held in one hand, its light glowing across their features, like Psyche with her oil lamp bending down to study the face of the sleeping Eros. Time passed, and the wax dripped down onto the faces of the dead as the candle melted. More time passed, and more wax dripped down. As time passed, the death masks grew ever nearer to completion, slowly accumulating, layer upon layer. Carlo Fiorelli was the nephew of Giuseppe Fiorelli, the archeologist who had directed the excavations at Pompeii, the man who had made the plaster casts of those who had died all those hundreds of years ago, the agonized dog, the fallen figures with their arms pressed around their heads, the folds of their garments ridden up around their bodies, pressed against their faces. She was one more white figure in the perpetual Pompeiian gloom of the buried streets and corridors.

  Mrs. Italiaander had a plaster cast of her infant son’s arm – he had been her only child – under a glass dome in her parlor. She, Allegra, and Edith had gathered around it, fortune-tellers consulting a crystal ball – remember that you must die – their reflections curving across the dimpled arm of the plump child they had never known. Mrs. Alexander Diddecott liked to organize her séances at Mrs. Italiaander’s around it, suggesting that it acted as a conduit for the forces with which she grappled, and they had kept at a careful distance, looking, but not touching, just in case. What would little Archer Italiaander Junior (made even smaller by that “Junior”) have to say to his Mama, if he had been drawn out from that other land, when all he had been able to say was that very word, “Mama”? Perhaps that was the only word she wanted to hear. It seemed so strange to have a part of a body on display like that.

  Parts of bodies were all around her where she sat – feeling her face stiffening and growing cold – like the aftermath of some Vandal slaughter in a sacked and burning Rome, lopped-off heads and limbs littering the Forum like the parts of wrecked and (she liked to use a word precisely) vandalized statues. The faces were peaceful, however, the faces of those who had fallen asleep, their eyes and mouths serenely closed, not gaping in agony or terror. They were like the plaster casts of the bodies from a Pompeii in which Vesuvius had brought death gently, without panic, without any pain or struggle to escape. The ashes had pattered soothingly around them like gentle rain, lulling them into sleep and forgetfulness.

  There were still two rusty metal horses’ heads outside, above the entrance, announcing – as appropriately as they had marked out the former livery stables – that here was the domain of a sculptor in stone and in bronze. Charlotte had been disgusted to hear of stables in which there were no horses. The figures of gods and goddesses, the shrouded figures from the Old Testament, the faces of the dead: these were nothing to her. You couldn’t feed sugar to these! You couldn’t pat them on the flank as you fed them straw! The faded STABLES sign still hung between the horses’ heads, the letter L completely erased by time and the weather, the sign that gave entrance as beckoningly as Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You, but in more commanding capital letters, an exhortation that could not be ignored. STAB ES it now read, and the implacable demand had added a pleasing sense of purpose to some of the less eventful days of childhood.

  STAB ES.

  Alice studied the enigmatic summons to commit murder each time she came. It was a portent, she decided, seizing the opportunity to employ this word. It wasn’t MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. (Daniel, Chapter V, Verse xxv.) It was STAB ES. In the absence of Daniel to interpret it for her, she discussed it with Charlotte, and it was then that they had decided that the coded command – intelligible only to them – meant STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL! It was very satisfying when your dearest wish was emblazoned on the wall in words from heaven. They’d been following Charles Kingsley’s instructions to the letter, and this Eleventh Commandment – even if painted on wood rather than written on tablets of stone – was clearly a sacred admonition placed upon them. They’d be happy to obey. It would be wrong of them not to. They could hardly miss. It certainly reconciled Charlotte to the lack of horses.

  They had the brass shield (well polished).

  They had the sword (carefully sharpened).

  You’d think that a goatskin would be easy enough to find, but it was proving to be a real problem. The Misses Isserliss kept goats, but they were all thriving healthily – full of high spirits and goatish kicks, bouncing about with friendly butts and sheep-like bleatings – and she couldn’t bear the thought of stabbing her knife into one of them to remove its skin, even when the thought of stabbing Enormous Sibyl appealed so – er – enormously. She tried to make herself believe that the goats were rams, and that she was going to be Abraham, and sacrifice one of them instead of Isaac – “The Sibyl is a ram,” she told herself. “The Sibyl is an Aries” – but even this couldn’t make her do it. Isaac would have to die. “STAB ES,” she muttered to herself (you had to mutter loudly when capital letters were involved), memorizing an instruction from the LORD, “STAB ES,” and tried to look keen. If they did it here – chisels lay temptingly about on most surfaces – it would be really convenient for the death mask, but would Carlo Fiorelli have enough plaster for the size of the face? This might be a promising opportunity for the plasterer who had plastered all thirty-four rooms of the Italiaanders’ house – a man accustomed to working on an epic scale – and a way of uniting art and industry in a manner that would have gladdened the heart of William Morris. />
  Many and many a time they Stabbed Enormous Sibyl in the years that followed, and her failure to keel over with what ought to have been a Sibyl-shattering smash showed that the imagination – however hard you pushed it, however hard you flexed its muscles – had its limitations.

  They STABBED EVIL SINNER!

  They STABBED EXASPERATING SWANSTROM!

  They STABBED EXTREMELY SMELLY!

  They STABBED ENRAGED SISTERS!

  They stabbed and stabbed again.

  They had no effect whatsoever.

  Carl Fiorelli chatted to her about what was going to happen.

  “You will not be able to speak. If you feel you cannot breathe properly, hit me on the arm so I will know. Hit me hard!”

  The studio, with its whitewashed brick walls covered by shelves and untidily painted sketches, was more like a manufactory than a place where art was created, like the interior of a warehouse, a barn. All the workers were men – they wore big boots, and these and their clothes were splashed and whitened with old, dried clay, making them look like farm laborers who had been digging in muddy fields – and Signora Fiorelli appeared only to bring lunch on a little wheeled wagon. Clay-spattered stepladders – rough, homemade, cobbled together anyhow – leaned at angles everywhere against the walls. When she first arrived, the floor had just been mopped and was blond and gleaming, but – as the floor dried – the shine went, the color disappeared, and it regained its white-spattered matte finish, like the raw floorboards of a house newly built by careless workmen. Carlo Fiorelli seemed to use anything that came to hand as an implement in his art – nails, scraps of wood, spoons, kitchen implements: these, clay-whitened, like something lumpishly exaggerated with coral or limestone accretions, lay around on every surface – and she pictured him at an evening meal in his house, overcome by inspiration, and running out to his studio, his food untasted, still carrying his knife and spoon with which to gouge and sculpt, as if it were the clay on which he fed.

  One workman was preparing clay, the color and consistency of melted chocolate, in one bowl – after the Veal Marsala, the Coniglio con le Olive, came the Italian chocolate ice cream (boiled puddings were the usual fare at home: Papa insisted) – and the other continued to rip cloth. She pictured women in the Civil War preparing makeshift bandages for the wounded soldiers, ripping up sheets and pillowcases in the ruins of a large house. Mama’s youngest brother, Edward, had been killed in the war. She still had some of his letters, with the most beautiful of handwriting, and the most inventive of spelling. Alice had seen a photograph of him in his uniform, a slight mischievous-faced young man, looking about fifteen. Grandmama had never used the word “fought” to describe what Teddy had done. It was too violent, too uncharacteristic. He had been present, and he had died. “Fought” made it sound noble and glittering and chivalric. Few of the young men would have thought of themselves as “fighting.” That described what they had tried to avoid in the schoolyard, warned by their mothers: the taller, aggressive boy finding a reason to punch on the shoulders, the scuffle in the dust, the bloody nose, and the embarrassment, the stain on the shirt he had tried to wash out with cold water so his mother wouldn’t find out. “My Teddy would never fight. He’s a good boy.” “Fighting” was not the word to describe what had happened to Teddy at Cold Harbor.

  The workman ripping the cotton had started to sing something: there was a great deal of singing at the studio, all the male voices without a woman’s amongst them, like those voices she had imagined from the pages of H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne, though these were more like an oratorio than an opera, a dark part of a Bach Passion, there, amidst the pale faces of the dead. When she imagined the young soldiers singing, she did not think of them as singing sad, sentimental songs, battalions of soprano-voiced Sobriety Goodchilds trilling “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” When he was unleashed upon this song, he was capable of producing more pocket-handkerchiefs than Fagin’s gang, massed white handkerchiefs flourishing like the surrenders of entire armies, and thunderous nose-blowings. She was far more moved when she imagined the soldiers singing comic songs. She had heard children, emerging from the park on a Saturday afternoon, singing “Goober Peas” as they chewed peanuts, and wondered if they even knew that they were singing a Confederate soldiers’ song.

  “… When a horseman passes, the soldiers have a rule,

  To cry out at their loudest ‘Mister, here’s your mule!’

  But another pleasure enchantinger than these,

  Is wearing out your grinders, eating goober peas!

  “Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eating goober peas!

  Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas!…”

  The voices of children were the voices of the soldiers as they wished the war was over, when, free from rags and fleas, they’d kiss their wives and sweethearts, and gobble goober peas.

  The first strips of cloth were the size of playing cards. They were dipped in plaster of Paris, and Carlo Fiorelli – humming, whistling under his breath, the opera tunes the band played in the park – began to cover her face. He sang a few lines now and then in Italian, with great fervor, intense moments from something larger, oddly out of scale in isolation. She had been wounded and was being bandaged, mummy-like layers being wound around her head to make her better. (“Wound around a wound,” she whispered under her breath, liking the two different pronunciations of the same word in one short sentence.) It was a bad head, and thought bad thoughts, and must be cured. A few years later, after she had seen Oscar Wilde at the theatre, she had imagined Louisa May Alcott, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman talking together in quiet voices about Hospital Sketches, and Walt Whitman – never one to be elbowed aside by the writings of another – beginning to quote from one of his Civil War poems: “Straight and swift to the wounded I go,/Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in …” Louisa May Alcott and Oscar Wilde nodded their heads; this confirmed a point they had been making. Smaller pieces of cloth – the size of postage stamps (she imagined rows of miniature bearded presidents lined up across her face, preparing her to be mailed) – were placed carefully on one side, reserved for around her eyes and nostrils. She would be white like a monument, standing high above the fields of the dead.

  As the first layer began to dry, she could no longer feel the fingers of the sculptor applying further layers, and she felt enclosed within metal, peering out through the eyeholes, encased within bronze. She was within the statue looking out; she herself had actually become the statue. She was the Girl in the Bronze Mask, or the benighted heroine of The Curse of the Capitoline, the first of the two Reverend Goodchild novels published in 1876, and the mask had become a part of her face, not fastened on separately. “This is really interesting” had been her main thought. Her face had become something heavy, and she felt herself drawn downward as if by sleep, a sensation of languor, a wish to lay the head down, and drift away. It was a strange feeling – the curious feeling of being separate from her body – but she never felt that she was having any difficulty in breathing. Carlo Fiorelli was applying clay to her hair, all round the back of her head, the sculptor molding her into shape. Between bursts of song, he had talked to her a little at first, but then – as her mouth was covered – he stopped talking to her. He and the workmen exchanged little comments, instructions and observations. It was just because they had become absorbed in what they were doing, but she felt that she had ceased to be there, was already a statue. As he covered her ears, silence closed in upon her. She tried very hard not to swallow. If she did so, her whole face seemed to shift uncomfortably.

  The second layer of cloth was dipped in blue plaster of Paris.

  (Paris.

  (Mrs. Albert Comstock staggered back a little, reaching for her umbrella with which to defend herself.

  (Paris, France.

  (Blue plaster.

  (Sacre bleu!

  (French blue plaster.

  (What monstrosity was being brought into being practically within her p
urlieu?)

  He used blue plaster so that he would know when he had covered the whole face twice, but – it occurred to her a year or so later – she must have looked like Oscar Dubourg, the blue-faced twin in Poor Miss Finch. How would Charlotte have reacted to seeing her like that, bringing literature to life?

  After the clouds came the pictures, and after the pictures came the dreams. After the fifth or sixth picture had been read came the first reading of a dream, with the considerable difference that – this time – she did not interpret; she merely described, and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did the interpreting.

  There was a distinct change in the atmosphere of the morning on which this first happened. He had experienced another vision: something he himself had read in the clouds, something huge and tumultuous unfurling above St. George and the Dragon, something that was going to change the way in which he saw things, and send him down into different caverns. He was the artist, and she was the artist’s model (Trilby again), hired for the day, placed in the position that he chose, the raw – naked, shivering – material from which he created his works. Sometimes she felt like a victim of Burke and Hare, an anonymous corpse sold to an anatomist for dissection. Burke and Hare merged again in her mind with Jekyll and Hyde, though here there was no Jekyll – Jekyll had vanished altogether – but two Hydes, linked like a monstrous birth, doubled in power, moving in unison, searching through suffocatingly dark alleyways, sniffing the air, seeking for those to kill.

  If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.

  Even more books had arrived from Austria – the crowbars were never at rest – and Hilde Claudia had been busy translating. It would soon be time to buy yet another bookcase, to find room for yet another key in his vest pocket, which bulged, which chinked, like an inadequately concealed layer of chain mail positioned to protect the heart from assault, to shield it from feeling. Alice hoped Hilde Claudia was more careful with her dictionary this time, though she was still always trouble having with her werbs.