Dreams seemed the most perverse area yet into which she had been led.
She could understand the reading of meaning into pictures; she could even understand the reading of meaning into clouds. Mistranslation or not, there seemed to her a certain validity in reading what one saw in certain shapes. What you were in your mind colored everything that you saw, and to read what that mind saw in shapes was to reveal what was hidden inside that mind. When the lawyer, Mr. Utterson – in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – had studied Henry Jekyll’s will, in which Edward Hyde had been made his heir, he suddenly had a vivid picture of Hyde, the man he had never seen. Out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend. In such a way would thoughts from deep within her mind come walking toward her through the shapes of the clouds.
After he had glimpsed his shape in the mists, the man he had never seen began to enter Mr. Utterson’s dreams, walking into them in the way that he walked out of the mists. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and, lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding.
In such a way would figures walk into her dreams, make her rise and do their bidding. In clouds, in dreams, she would see the subjects that possessed her mind. That which was already in the mind was all that the eyes saw, and – sometimes – what was in the mind was a girl at a window, bathed in light, bowed over, a letter in her hands.
Beneath the pillow of each of the fallen girls in The House of the Magdalenes there would be a crumpled Dream Book, pressed flowers – flat and colorless – between certain pages, the cheap, coarse-textured paper stained slightly by sap. Each dream interpretation was like a spell, holding within its words the promise of better things to come.
Dream Books were the province of the impoverished, the unhappy, the eternally hopeful. Their interpretations seemed to find hidden enemies everywhere, false friends, threatened reputations, interspersed with hints and warnings to small tradesmen. She imagined Albert Comstock at the beginning of his glittering career in comestibles – unlikely though it was that it would ever have occurred to anyone to describe him as a small tradesman – beached upon his bed like Moby-Dick in a nightcap, a long, weary day of sausage stuffing at an end, snoring thunderously, with his well-thumbed Dream Book neatly stacked by his bed on top of his accounts book. This would be years before the magic moment when Mrs. Albert Comstock – his mirror image, her bosom as big as his beard – hove into view, and she made him her own.
“I had a dream last night.”
Annie closed her eyes, clenched her hands, praying that she would hear the words she wished to hear as Alice read to her, explained the meaning of what she had dreamed.
Rosobell, their servant now, had two such books – What’s in a Dream and Pearson’s Dream Book – in the cutlery drawer, and consulted them religiously, as if looking up symptoms in a medical book. She read both books, and chose the interpretation she preferred. That was where Dream Books belonged: in the kitchen, their corners curled and browned, pushed up against the knives and forks next to handwritten recipes.
Rosobell had loaned Alice her copies of What’s in a Dream and Pearson’s Dream Book – it had a bright yellow cover patterned with red poppies – in case she wished to consult them. She was a kind woman. The one interpretation from Pearson’s Dream Book that had remained in Alice’s mind – because of its startlingly incongruous randomness – had been: To dream of a cameo brooch, means that you will achieve success as a pianoforte player. “Of course! Of course!” Alice had muttered to herself, sardonically. “Why go to the expense of buying a book when the meaning is so obvious?”
She was recklessly choosing to ignore the clear advice she had been given as a dreamer of dragons.
She was allowing herself to be governed by her passions.
She was placing herself in the power of her enemies through those outbursts of sardonic tendencies.
She had been warned to cultivate self-control.
On the inside cover of the Dream Book was an advertisement for another publication from the same publisher, Things a Woman Wants to Know, with an Illustrated Section on The Folding of Napkins. These two titles usefully covered just about everything a woman wanted (or, indeed, needed) to know in life, Alice thought: dreams, and the folding of starched white table napkins. Unusually greathearted men must have written them. What more could a woman hope to do but spend her time in dreaming as she folded napkins, bent over day after day like a denizen of an unusually genteel sweatshop (a perspiration emporium, possibly), “The Song of the Napkin” rather than “The Song of the Shirt.” The symmetrical, elaborately crafted linen constructions would creep out of the kitchen and begin to mount up and cover the stairs, creeping into every space in the house like stiff-edged oversized lavender-scented orchids, or elaborate party hats for a celebration at the end of a gathering of popes. They would fill the corridors, flood the carpets of all the rooms, rise to press against the windows and the ceilings, rising up, rising up, pale, white, peculiarly proportioned, fungi from beneath dark stone and rotting wood, growing and multiplying in dark cellars with insistent urgency. She would be lifted up, pressed against the skylight in the schoolroom, suffocated, scrabbling at the glass.
Peep, peep!
Attention! The two arms were held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, the flags shaken from side to side, and Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max – seeing an opportunity – leaped into action, anxious to demonstrate their numerous esoteric skills. As an encore, they’d give a demonstration of their yodeling. They could clear a room in fifteen seconds once they were launched into this. People who had suffered for years from sinus trouble were miraculously cured in no time.
They were holding the two-color napkins, divided from corner to corner into a triangle of red and a triangle of yellow, one in each hand.
Peep, peep!
It was the time for The Folding of the Napkins.
Illustrated.
“The Miter!” Max announced, singing in his admired but somewhat troubling boy soprano voice. Was “boy” quite the word to use for Max these days? Were there such things as “youth sopranos”? (Yes, there were. They raised their arms in shrill acclamation, and sang “See the conquering hero comes!/Sound the trumpets, beat the drums …” They called for sports to be prepared, for laurel to be brought, for songs of triumph to be sung. They were tall, they were thin, and they were squeakily insistent.)
“Fold the napkin in three lengthwise, and in doing this turn the last fold backward …”
It was the voice of a solo in a church choir, the shrill voice of the white-clad chorister penetrating to the mysteries of faith. There should be an antiphonal chant, to complete the effect – “Verily lengthwise! Verily backward!” – from the gathered congregation of Women Who Wanted to Know.
“… Thus!” Hilde Claudia and Theodore chorused, and all three simultaneously performed the appropriate actions like department store demonstrators, professional smiles upon their faces that also looked like the demonstration of a product, moving their heads a little in order to glint their gold. (Hilde Claudia – if she had possessed Schiffendeckens – would no doubt have seized the opportunity to demonstrate how to slip them in, once she had disposed of the intricacies of how to fold napkins into a miter.)
“… Do not put it over the other!”
(“Verily!” chorused The Women Who Wanted to Know.)
“Double and make a crease to mark the half, and open it out aga
in. Take the left-hand point at the top …”
“… Thus!”
“… and fold it diagonally to the center crease, pressing the divisions well; then take the right-hand point at the bottom, and fold it the reverse way. Now take the figure produced …”
“… Thus!”
The napkins were flourished, smilingly – the smiles, like the napkins, folded only so far, a precise part of a predetermined pattern – held aloft for all to see, to learn, to emulate.
(All in the most martial manner
Marching double-quick;
While the napkin like a banner
Waves upon the stick!
(Willie, Johnnie, Mary Jane, and Peter marched like Grenadiers deeper and deeper into A Child’s Garden of Verses.)
“… and fold it in two, lengthwise and backward, along the line AB …”
“AB! AB!” chanted Hilde Claudia and Theodore, running their index fingers caressingly along the designated line for folding, to clarify Max’s instructions, proud to demonstrate that they knew AB, they knew CD, they knew EF, they knew all the letters of the alphabet, and the gestures by which to signal them.
(“Verily!”)
“… and turn back the right-hand point, so that the points shall be outside …”
“Thus!”
“… Twist the napkin round the fingers to make it like a cap in shape, and tuck the ends at the base into the grooves made by the folds in order to keep them secure …”
Accompanied by thuses and verily, the antiphonal chanting of the believers, the shapes of three bishop’s miters had mysteriously evolved in the hands of Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max. They held them out in front of them for inspection, like priests displaying holy relics to the faithful on a designated day, and then – not sure what to do with them in the absence of a dining table – placed them upon their heads. They looked as if – playing some literary parlor game, a sort of Mrs. Jarley’s Waxworks – they were attempting a partial reproduction of the illustration of the chess pieces from the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, the bishops down in the hearth walking about among the cinders with the kings and queens and castles. Alice had just climbed through the mirror, and jumped down into the room beyond the looking-glass.
The Women Who Wanted to Know applauded with enthusiasm, an encore-demanding acclaim.
(Yes, there would be an encore. Yes, the yodeling would soon begin.)
At last their lives had been given a purpose. At last they knew all that they wanted to know. At last they were initiated into the mysteries of The Folding of Napkins.
“W.Q. to Q.B.’s 4th!” Mabel Peartree shouted, waving her shawl, a little overexcited.
You could see the bafflement in the faces of The Women Who Hadn’t a Clue What She Was Talking About.
(“Double your cue?”
(“Cubies?”
(“Was she speaking in code?”)
Mabel Peartree claimed to be able to play chess, and always had a Mary Celeste game, abruptly terminated in mid-move, laid out on display in her front parlor, carefully copied from a book of puzzles. It was a little still life economically indicating that you were in the presence of scintillating intelligence, like Mrs. Albert Comstock’s proudly displayed novels. She’d look at it knowingly, challenging visitors to unlock the secret of the right move to make.
Hilde Claudia looked annoyed as the shawl twirled and spun in the air, and tugged her miter tighter. She was the one for secret signaling, she was the one who knew the right moves.
“We three kings of Orient are…”
They held the second, unfolded napkin in front of them, to cover the gifts they carried, in the way that Annie enfolded her Book of Dreams in silk. They didn’t need a red and white striped pole. They didn’t need a telescope (“All the better to see you with, Miss Pinkerton”) or a tripod. They didn’t need to sing about the fountain in the park, the roguish pair of eyes, the poor heart stolen away. The King of Light offered gold for royalty, the White One offered frankincense for divinity, the Lord of Treasures offered myrrh for death. What they carried bore a disconcerting resemblance to Portia’s caskets at Belmont in The Merchant of Venice. The thought had occurred to Alice at a Christmas pageant, and she had covered her mouth, to erase the sinfulness of the thought. The more she had tried to think of something else, the more she had thought of those three caskets, gold, silver, and lead. What many men desire. As much as he deserves. Give and hazard all he hath. Reading Shakespeare was encompassed about with dangers to the soul. The scroll bearing the words of poetry was pushed into the empty eye socket of a skull. Gilded tombs did worms infold. The world was still deceiv’d with ornament.
“… Bearing gifts we travel so far …”
(Should it be “travel so far” or “traverse afar”?)
The Magi’s miters wobbled slightly as they walked. The folded napkins were too small for their heads, and so they walked like the socially ambitious undertaking deportment exercises, the miters balanced upon them. They walked very upright, their shoulders straight, their arms slightly out to each side. Once they had mastered deportment they – developing a taste for social advancement – would turn to Miss Winterflood to improve their elocution. She was a very aged lady now (one sometimes felt that she might very well have played Gertrude to Reynolds Templeton Seabright’s Hamlet), but her vowels continued to be a source of astonishment and envy.
“… Fiiieeeld aaand fooouuuntaaaiiin, mooor aaand
mooouuuntaaaiiin,
Fooollooowiiing yooondeeer staaar …”
They would have the vowels of bishops, the vowels of kings, of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar.
It was time for the encore.
The yodeling began, and The Women Who Wanted to Know applauded with Reynolds Templeton Seabright thunderousness. “Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald” (they’d certainly have some tales to tell), followed by “Morgenblätter” (and they’d make headlines in the morning papers). It was a time for waltzing, not for marching. The Waltz King was at last given an opportunity to set all feet tapping to his insistent one-two-three, one-two-three rhythm. When it came to culture, you couldn’t beat what Vienna had on offer.
The applause was the sound of a thunderstorm about to unleash its first tree-shattering fork of lightning, the flames and the smoke, the earth-shaking smash.
Up on the hill, Benjamin Franklin braced himself as he flew his kite, drawing the lightning toward him with the key – small, glinting in the intermittent flashes – that dangled below the silk kite tacked to the cross of thin laths.
(“Unter Donner und Blitz” from the quick-to-spot-a-cue Websters.)
This was a key to unlock the mysteries of the storm-clouded skies, a key to release the knowledge locked away, the mysteries hidden in the box.
On the morning when Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had told her that she should begin to tell him her dreams he hadn’t actually announced “I am a disciple of the Dream Books”, he hadn’t used the expression “oneiromancy” – she was beset about by “ancies”; after the “ias,” the “ancies” – but he had been all fired up. Hilde Claudia had been working overtime, werb-grappling all the hours that God sent, hemmed in by sharp-cornered, acutely angled dictionaries, strips of ripped paper protruding from the more significant pages. Alice had again seen him as at the start of a race, running on the spot, flexing and unflexing his fingers. He took deep breaths; he stretched up into the air as far as he could reach, and his arms mimicked the number 11 on his shirt; he reached down and touched his toes; what lay ahead was a marathon, not a sprint, and he was going to elbow his way to the front, come what may. His shirt was blindingly white. His starched shorts – they were rigid enough to stand up by themselves like a baffling manifestation at one of Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s séances – had an ironed-in crease that was sharp enough to crack a walnut.
Hilde Claudia’s, Theodore’s, and Max’s arms were a blur, the flags spinning as if their lives depended upon it, shipwrecked mariners on a w
aterless island signaling to a passing vessel, the first they had sighted in seven years of searching.
“You tell me your dream,” he had started to explain, and she had tottered on the verge of singing, “I’ll tell you mine.”
That would have set him scribbling: perhaps the interpretation of music might have arrived after all. It was a song, a dreadful sentimental song as Sung by Miss Etta Butler that she remembered Charlotte playing on the piano three or four years ago – “You Tell Me Your Dream, I’ll Tell You Mine” – the little boy and the little girl singing coyly to each other. The perfect song for herself and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.
If “Ben Bolt” was the song for hypnotism, this would be the song for dream-reading. They would sit – in the position prior to hypnotism – facing each other, with their knees almost touching, but he would not produce his pocket-watch. Instead he would go down on one knee – a suitor making a formal proposal – and implore her in song.
“You had a dream, well, I had one too,
I know mine’s best ’cause it was of you.
Come sweetheart tell me, now is the time,
You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you mine …”
It would almost be enough to make her look forward to Wednesday mornings.
(“Sweetheart”?
(Hmm.
(She wasn’t too sure about “sweetheart.”)
What he said would depend upon which Dream Book he used. Perhaps she might be offered a choice of interpretations. Shelves would be crammed with brightly colored books, far jollier than the usual somber volumes. The title What’s in a Dream had made her think of “what dreams may come”: there was Hamlet again, cloud-reading, dream-reading. What’s in a Dream was the book to which Alice referred most frequently, seeking out the meanings of the past, the dreams that Annie had dreamed all those years ago.
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