Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Would it be hypnotism?

  Would it be clouds?

  Would it be pictures?

  Would it be dreams?

  Would it be …

  Would it be …

  Would it be time for her to be taken away?

  3

  … Grace Poole.

  She remembered the name of the other novel that contained a character named Poole, the one she had been trying to call to mind early that morning. It was a novel she’d been thinking about – on and off – for much of the day, as though teasing herself with the nearness of the knowledge that she had possessed all the time without realizing.

  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  Poole was the name of Dr. Jekyll’s butler, the elderly man who had seen the dwarf, and heard the pacing up and down within the locked room. With the corpse of Mr. Hyde lying on the floor of Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, Poole and Utterson had searched the chamber, looking into the depth of the cheval glass with an involuntary horror. It was so turned that it showed them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in.

  It was a room that looked rather as her room was looking at that moment.

  Come in, or the fog will get into the house.

  She heard the words as clearly as if they had been spoken, as clearly as if they had been “the madwoman in the attic.” For a moment they sounded like something she herself might have uttered, seized by a rebellious impulse – “Come in, or the frogs will get into the house” – as she locked all doors and barred all windows against the entrance of the Goodchilds and Griswolds. An incautious peer through the green glass at their massed approach had pushed her over the edge (Aaaaghhhh!), and driven her to acts of desperation.

  “Come in, or the fog will get into the house.”

  For a while she thought that they must have been words spoken by Poole to Utterson, as he admitted the lawyer to Dr. Jekyll’s house, the house in the fog-shrouded square of ancient, handsome houses decayed from their high estate, and let in flats and chambers to map engravers, architects, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds. Then she remembered that the words were spoken in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and were not spoken by a butler. Dorian Gray had a valet – Victor – rather than a butler, but the words were spoken not by Victor, but by Dorian Gray himself to Basil Hallward as he let him into his house in that same fog on the night he murdered him.

  Victor was probably an incognito Victor Frankenstein, wandering between two more novels in order to observe Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll and pick up a few tips. No wonder people seemed to confuse Frankenstein’s creature with Mr. Hyde, seeing Mr. Hyde as something huge and monstrous, when he was something far more frightening than that. The name “Hyde” was so well chosen, hidden away as Hyde was, hidden away like Bertha Rochester and Dorian Gray’s portrait, but hidden in a far better place, hidden not within a locked inner room, but inside another person like something trapped within the brain, impossible to find unless the brain itself were entered.

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

  Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster demonstrated his celebrated sense of fun.

  The blindfold went around her eyes, and the teasing voice called out to her from some far corner of the room.

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

  She was led in like the frightened figure-model, naked and blind in front of the room full of staring men.

  It was birthday party game time. The candles had been blown out to make it even darker, and there was the lingering church interior smell of just-snuffed candlewicks, the air hazy, stinging the eyes. She could smell it, she could feel it. The one wish had been made.

  “Miss Pinkerton!”

  “Miss Pinkerton!”

  “Miss P-P-P …”

  “Miss P-P-P …”

  “The madwoman in the attic!”

  Dressed in their birthday party best, they called out to her from everywhere around her, and she could not see where they were. She recognized the voices. The blindfold was very tight, as tightly knotted as a gag to prevent screaming. In her birthday-suit bareness, this was the only cloth in contact with her body.

  “Miss Pinkerton!”

  “Miss Pinkerton!”

  “Miss P-P-P …”

  “Miss P-P-P …”

  Lips were puckered for the “P-P-P” all about the room, as if prepared for kissing, big soggy smacks to make the eyes of the seers bug out and bulge.

  “Madwoman!”

  “Attic shape!”

  Not only was the Reverend Goodchild under the impression that Bertha Rochester was imprisoned in an attic, he was also one of those who thought that the picture of Dorian Gray was in the same place, and she remembered when she had heard him say this. It came to her all at once. It had been after an afternoon he had spent sniggering and simpering with Mrs. Albert Comstock at Comstock Castle. She had been – even by her high standards – on repellently poisonous form. So had he. It was one of the things at which they both excelled.

  As they left 5 Hampshire Square, the Goodchilds had been just in front of Alice and her mother. It had been one of the last occasions on which she had been visiting with her mother, before her mother’s collapse into invalidism. An antimacassar had caught on the stud of the Reverend Goodchild’s collar, and it lay across the back of his shoulders like a lace-edged surplice, giving him a provocatively priestly, Roman Catholic appearance. It was neatly arranged, as if he’d done it on purpose, with an artist’s eye for symmetry. It probably matched the lace in his combinations. Alice – as, of course, was only right – said nothing. He was smuggling out Mrs. Albert Comstock’s complete antimacassar collection, piece by piece, to add to the sophisticated ambience of The Old Pigpen, and who was she to stifle the commendable ambitions of another? They’d be carrying out the furniture next, preferably beginning with a piece still occupied by Mrs. Albert Comstock. If she could be persuaded to activate her fan, the three of them would create a scene possessing all the elegance of the bygone days of the sedan chair, an incident from an eighteenth-century novel brought to life to charm all beholders. They might be persuaded to race around Hampshire Square a few times, a sedate and genteel counterpoint to the whip-crackingly underdressed sweatiness of a chariot race (though there’d be plenty of sweat from the Reverend H. P. – Howled Phews! – Goodchild).

  On the doorstep, he had whispered piercingly to his wife, “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but that woman is more grotesque than ever. Just imagine what the picture in the attic must look like.” This had gone down very well with Mrs. Albert Comstock’s great friend. “Ooh, you really are dreadful” – “dreadful” was accompanied by much donkey-like heehawing (“dreadful” was good, “dreadful” was to be commended) – “H.P.! Dreadful!”

  Naughty old H.P.!

  He was – inevitably – one of those who couldn’t distinguish between Frankenstein and his creature, and she’d also heard him refer to Mrs. Albert Comstock as “Frankenstein with a bosom.” “A dreadful thing to say, H.P.!” – the thunderously echoing heehaws were out in force – “Dreadful!” “Dreadful” was what she wanted. “Dreadful” was what she craved to hear. “Say it again, louder!” was the unspoken command as the heehaws reverberated. He’d mentioned a bosom! And, of all the bosoms in the world to mention, he’d mentioned THAT bosom! H.P. – Heehawingly Perceptive – was quite incorrigible! Ostrich feathers whizzed in all directions as the fan was vigorously activated. It was like Icarus working himself up for the moment of launching, that first leap out into space. Go on, Mrs. Goodchild! Jump! If Mrs. Goodchild had understood the reference to the portrait in the attic, it must have become a common expression.

  Alice had not realized that
The Picture of Dorian Gray, like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had become mythic so quickly. The attics of Longfellow Park – it was no wonder that the Goodchilds and Mrs. Albert Comstock boasted of the immense size of theirs (The Old Pigpen was a wilderness of echoing garrets) – must be preternaturally crowded with grinning grotesqueries, discordant with screaming madwomen, dreadful with terrifying portraits. “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” Keats had rhapsodized in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” He’d have soon changed his tune after an eye-opening stroll in her neighborhood. There wasn’t much beauty in the truth he’d find in that vicinity. That was all she knew on earth and all she needed to know.

  She had almost leaned forward and corrected the crowing clergyman, “Not the attic: the schoolroom.” She’d also struggled not to say, “Not Frankenstein: Frankenstein’s creature.” She’d struggled even more not to add, “What an excellent description, H.P.!” She could have knowingly nudged him with her elbow as she said “H.P.” – Hugworthy Pal – as a sign of their growing closeness, leering horribly with an intimacy born of a shared revulsion. (Hyde’s Pal, more like!) It would have been worth it, just to see the expression on his face, torn between pleasure and panic. Her main thoughts at the time, however – apart from gratification that her belief that Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock could not bear the sight of each other had been confirmed – was astonishment that Mrs. Goodchild had read (or at least knew something about) The Picture of Dorian Gray. Perhaps she had furtively perused Oliver’s copy, filched from Mrs. Albert Comstock’s – concealed under an antimacassar – and there had been another sea-change in Longfellow Park, not so rich, not so strange as the other.

  As Oliver stood at the landing stage below Hudson Heights, the music would creep by him upon the water.

  “Full fathom five thy mother lies …”

  “Jolly good!” Oliver would announce, cheerfully. “Could you possibly make it deeper?”

  “Of her teeth are coral made …”

  “Splendid!”

  The Great Barrier Reef would have a rival in the Hudson River, and stunned divers would swim around the immense flooded structure, marveling at the soaring arches and dazzling underwater whiteness. The surface of the river would bubble as if it were boiling as their cries of amazement seethed upward. Out-of-their-depth pearl divers, seduced by the tales of the gleaming riches – pearls already released from the drab, stained confinement of their shells, pearls of unparalleled size and value – would hitch up their – ahem – loincloths and prepare to plunge.

  Those are pearls that were her eyes.

  “Au fond du temple saint, paré de fleurs et d’or,

  Une femme apparaÎt! Je crois la voir encore!…”

  Unaccountably, these Ceylonese pearl fishers would be expressing themselves in French. Not only that, but they’d be singing, and that was what they’d sing as they took deep breaths. This would be the exercise to expand lungs to their maximum capacities. This would be the song to carry them down to the deepest depths, to the biggest pearls. This is what they always sang. You’d think Bizet would have given them another decent melody, but this one always went down well.

  Down, down, the divers dove.

  A woman appeared!

  They could see her again!

  “O vision, ô rêve!”

  This is what they’d bubblingly exclaim – with mounting excitement – as they drew within sight of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s false teeth. This was a dream to feature in the latest edition of all the Dream Books, prominently featured on the covers in large print. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and turned to a new page in his notebook.

  “You tell me your dream …” he began to say, in his most soothing, you-can-trust-me, I-want-every -detail, don’t-miss-out-the-mucky-bits manner.

  “Oui, c’est elle! C’est la déesse plus charmante et plus belle!…”

  The fountain pen began to race scratch-scratchingly across the page.

  Mrs. Albert Comstock!

  Charmante.

  Belle!

  (Charming!

  (Beautiful!

  (Mrs. Albert Comstock!)

  He couldn’t avoid involuntary cries of revulsion and disbelief. He must practice more to suppress them. They almost always seemed to lead to a certain loss of confidence on the part of his patients, often at points where it was becoming really interesting.

  He looked again at his notes.

  Charmante!

  Belle!

  Mrs. Albert Comstock!

  Unobtrusively, he shifted his chair a little more securely behind his desk so that he was well shielded by a pile of leather-bound books.

  Hell’s bells!

  These were men with enormous mental problems.

  He felt about under the heaps of papers that littered the ink-stained red-leather surface, feeling for the handbell that he kept for just such an emergency. A brisk burst of the prearranged signal – the first line Papageno sang in The Magic Flute – and Theodore and Max would shoulder-charge their way into the room to grasp the lunatic pearl fishers with the killer hold around the neck that paralyzed all normal movement, the one that they practiced on their mother every Thursday night under careful supervision. His two sons – they were so keen – would sometimes ask if they could practice on Mama on other nights when they were bored, and (eager to encourage enthusiasm: Hilde Claudia should surely be capable of recognizing that this was what he was doing) he always agreed to their demands. They’d stand there, flexing their knuckles, leaning forward. “Go on, Papa,” they’d wheedle insinuatingly. “Go on. We’ve nothing else to do. Go on. We’re bored. Let us strangle Mama.”

  The pearl fishers warbled away, unaware of the furtive rustlings as their doctor frantically sought for the means of summoning assistance.

  (“Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja …”)

  (Ja! Bring the straitjackets with you!)

  (Ja! Bring the big sticks and the gags!)

  (Ja! Alert Poughkeepsie!)

  (Ja! Send urgent messages to the Webster Nervine Asylum!)

  (Help!)

  (Ja!)

  “… Oui, c’est elle! C’est la déesse qui descend parmi nous!…”

  They were simple men, who’d led sheltered Ceylonese lives, with not much to get the pulses racing except an occasional passing elephant of unusual attractiveness.

  Unleashed on Longfellow Park they’d create carnage. No woman with G. G. Schiffendecken false teeth would be safe from – ahem – untoward familiarity.

  Up on Morningside Heights, work had started on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, but here – peering over the rails of the many boats as they made their way up and down the river – astonished observers caught glimpses of something even more spectacular, rippling with quivering columns of insubstantial sunlight, dappled by the swarming shadows of shoals of fish. It was another cathedral, a drowned cathedral, with its submerged stone angels, its carved memorial tablets, its sodden books, dwarfing the tallest structures in the city.

  (Poole was the name of Bertha Rochester’s keeper.

  (Poole was the name of Dr. Jekyll’s butler.

  (There was another name …

  (There was another name shared by characters in two different novels, another name ending in an “e” …

  (It hovered on the edge of memory …

  (Rooke.

  (That was it.

  (Rooke was the name of the nurse in Persuasion.

  (Rooke was the name of the head keeper in Drayton House Asylum in Hard Cash, the third lunatic asylum in which Alfred Hardie was imprisoned. In this madhouse the name of the doctor was Dr. Wolf. He’d rook him, all right, he’d move across the squares of the chessboard, leaping across the unoccupied ranks and files, moving ever closer to his goal.

  (A rookery of Rookes. A rookery of seals. They slithered on the wet rocks on the edge of the cold, gray sea in a remote place where they had never seen a human being.)

  4

 
“Come in, or the fog will get into the house.”

  Dorian Gray – with his pure, bright, innocent face – had murdered Basil Hallward on November the ninth, the eve of his (and Oliver Comstock’s) birthday. He had sat in his library with him, smoking, his own fog creeping up around him and into the room, and then taken him up to the top of the house – to the schoolroom – and shown him the hideous face on the canvas. Basil Hallward had asked him to pray, to say the prayer that he was taught to say in his boyhood – “Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities” – and Dorian had picked up a knife he had used to cut a piece of cord, and dug it into the great vein behind Hallward’s ear, crushing the man’s head down on the table, and stabbing him again and again. When his servant woke him in the morning, he looked like a boy tired out with play, or study.

  Poole led Utterson across the yard to the building that was known as the laboratory or the dissecting rooms. Inside the dingy windowless structure they crossed the theatre once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light fell dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize; and through this Mr. Utterson was at last received into the doctor’s cabinet.

  It was a large room, fitted around with glass presses, furnished, among other things, with a cheval glass and a business table, and looking out upon the court by three dusty windows barred with iron. Outside, the block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence.

  (“Storeys” and “storey” – like “discoloured” – were the spellings used by Robert Louis Stevenson. She preferred “stories” and “story,” liking the idea this gave of a building that was constructed out of words, levels of a building that were created within the imagination, and took physical shape. There was the first story, and the second story. There was the hidden third story.)