Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  They unloaded the baby carriage, and set out what they had rescued in neat rows in a disused stall. Someone had produced far more than quadruplets. The stall still bore – on a little brass plaque – the name of Jessica, a horse Alice could remember well.

  They were emerging from the stable, carrying Macbeth between them wrapped in the blue blanket, looking like participants in some small religious procession in a Mediterranean country, when Dr. Twemlow emerged, carrying his bag. Yes, he had been on the chomp. There were crumbs in his beard, and down the front of his vest. They were pausing for a moment, awkwardly angled, as Alice attempted to suck the pad of her thumb. She’d cut it on a piece of the stained glass, a Katherina or a Beatrice slicing neatly through her flesh, and she looked up at the doctor through a latticework of fingers, with the salty taste of blood in her mouth. She hoped he didn’t think she still sucked her thumb.

  He looked not at them but beyond them, seeing the baby carriage.

  “My,” he said. “You do come prepared.”

  When Alice appeared not to understand what he meant, he indicated – with a flurry of flaky crumbs – what he was looking at.

  He hovered on the verge of saying, “Unto us a child is born” for several tottering seconds. Then, lurching back onto – more or less – normal usage, he disappointingly changed his mind.

  “Your mama has been blessed” – he liked to give the impression that he was accompanied on his missions by well-drilled annunciating angels (a man who knew he heard the angels sing) – “with a child. You have a little brother.” (A brother!) He made a vaguely clerical gesture with a soap-scented hand. The smell of the soap was the thing she remembered most, that and the weight of Macbeth.

  (A brother!)

  She and Charlotte had carried the panel right up to the top of the house, to the schoolroom. Then Charlotte had returned home with the empty baby carriage, and she had gone to see her baby brother, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and told him that he would learn Latin. They had had the name all ready in case Mama had a baby boy. Papa had chosen it. They had not had a girl’s name ready. It seemed a lot of name for such a small baby. The baby had clasped her proffered fingers firmly.

  “There’s bonus, a gift.”

  She had lain with her arms around Mama for a while, her pocket-handkerchief wrapped around her thumb because of the dripping blood, and then transferred the rest of the figures and the glass to the schoolroom in several journeys, trudging up the stairs with Ophelia, Imogen, Bottom, the figures of kings and queens, tyrants and lovers.

  Now, apart from the panel in Woodlawn Cemetery and an imagined shape in the sky, they were all that was left of the Shakespeare Castle. She had returned, a day or so later, and nothing at all was left, just plowed-up earth. Even the topiary had been grubbed out like a well-rooted dandelion.

  7

  The Macbeth panel was propped against the wall, at one side of the mansard window facing onto Chestnut Street. She turned away from it, and moved toward the fireplace, her reflection advancing in the mirror above the mantelpiece. In the center of the mantel, along from the sheet music bearing the face of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, its back reflected in the mirror, was the clock with the moon dial. She had watched it throughout her childhood, waiting for the full moon, waiting for the cold light to flood into the room through all the windows, as if all that brightness, draining away color, came from within that little wooden case. With this clock she had tried to hold back time.

  When the time of a full moon approached, she would open the glass front of the clock – its small silver key, like a charm from a bracelet, was kept hidden in an old cigar box with other treasures – and push the moon back a few days. She’d thought it would be like trying to hold back a planet, but she was able to do it with the tip of her little finger, a slight counterclockwise push, the action of someone easing an eyelash out of the corner of an eye.

  It had never worked. The full moon had still appeared in the sky on the predicted night, just as the almost full moon had appeared tonight, and the cool silvery light had still spread the outlines of the windows on the floor, like reflections on ice.

  The man who went riding by, late at night when the fires were out, when the wind was high, the man who galloped and galloped about, had a face that she knew when she was a little girl. When the trees were crying aloud, when the ships were tossed at sea, he went by at a gallop, and then came back at the gallop again, and he had the face of Papa’s “friend.” Papa was not the kind of man who had friends – it was a word she had never heard him use – but she could not think of any other term to define the man she meant. There were many possibilities – “colleague,” “associate,” “acquaintance” – but she always thought of the word “friend,” and she always thought of this word in quotation marks, at a time when Oliver Comstock was a new-born baby, and it would be years before Mrs. Albert Comstock began to refer to Arthur Vellacott as Oliver’s “friend.” She only ever saw Papa’s friend – Papa’s “friend” – in darkness, and it seemed he appeared when – like tonight – there was a powerful wind blowing, and, it seemed so in her memory, when – like tonight – there was a bright full or near-full moon, a man drawn out by wildness and the cold phosphorous brightness. She never knew his name. He was just Papa’s “friend,” a man with a beard who smelled of tobacco and drink, and money was involved with it. When he came, something entered the house that should have remained outside, and it was Papa who had brought it in.

  He had started coming to the house in the months before Ben was born. The two men – before they arrived – seemed to spend most of the early evening in drinking at their club. Mama said so – a fierce, frightened whisper in the hall – and she could smell that smell when they came toward her. Papa was at home less and less, working late, absent at weekends, and when she saw him that was the smell that she began to notice. She couldn’t have said if it was whisky (“whisky” if the drink came from Scotland, “whiskey” if the drink came from Ireland) or brandy, or whatever it was: it was just the smell that she knew as “drink.” That was the word used by Mama, the word she wasn’t supposed to have overheard, and that was the way he smelled now, of that, and of the strong cigarettes that he smoked, the ones that made her cough, and tears come into her eyes. The way he talked was different, the way he moved was different: both speech and movement seemed drawn out and fastidious, with an underwater slowness. Throughout the glimmering green-lit, aquatic summer evenings, throughout the early fall, he slid his feet across the tiled floor of the hall with careful, conscious daintiness. It was the same sort of movement as the careful, overcontrolled way he slid the back of his finger across the inside of his top lip to remove loose grains of tobacco, or enunciated words with absolute precision from those same wet lips.

  There was this particular night.

  Mama was on her way out somewhere – Alice could not remember where – and her anger (she was angry again, the same intense whispering in the echoing hall) was partly because Papa had made her late by spending longer than he had said he would at the club, and (Alice felt) partly because he had brought his “friend” home with him again. He had been coming repeatedly for several weeks by this time. Allegra and Edith were not there – she could not remember, either, where they were – and she was alone in the house, apart from Annie, with Papa and his “friend,” the two bearded men.

  She did not have a nurse anymore. Nurse had been dismissed. She had not been a young woman, and she had been kind, patient and affectionate with her, showing her photographs of her sister’s children, and talking about them. Alice couldn’t even remember her name – she had always known her as “Nurse,” and that was how she had addressed her – and she had never known how and why she had left. She had been there, and then she had not been there, without even saying goodbye to her. It was something to do with Papa. Like Miss Ericsson, she would go quiet, and concentrate on some small task when Papa came into the room. “Good evening, Mr. Pinkerton,” she would say – it was u
sually evening when he appeared, bored, on the lookout for some source of distraction – and then she would busy herself with something trivial, folding some of Allegra’s clothes very precisely, or finding the right toy for Edith. She could remember Nurse showing her a photograph of a boy and a girl, her nephew and niece, standing outside a barn in Kansas or Nebraska, somewhere like that. The boy was holding a puppy, and the puppy was called Patch. She could not remember the boy’s name or the girl’s name, but she knew that the puppy had been called Patch. “The barn is painted red,” Nurse had said, “and that cart is yellow,” and her finger had indicated a barn and a cart that were the color of bruised late-evening clouds, clouds that you saw in your memory.

  She did not know where her mama had gone; she did not know where her sisters were; she did not know the exact date (though she knew it was the late summer, sometime before she had started to encircle the Shakespeare Castle with Charlotte, and Mary Benedict): her memories were a curious mixture of the utterly precise, and the mistily vague. Sometimes she could read the labels on every can and bottle on a shelf in a memory, or the headlines in a newspaper in the hand of a passerby; other times she could not see the face of the person in front of her, recognize where she was in the house, or know whether it was night or day. In memory as in life, she was sometimes wearing her spectacles, and sometimes not. Between the sections of intensely detailed recollections there was nothing at all. Why did some things – little things, trivial things – remain in the memory for years, forever, and other things – things you thought you’d never forget, or things you never even thought of memorizing because they were so completely a part of you – vanish without trace?

  This particular night she would not forget. Something had changed.

  They were in the front parlor. The drapes were not closed, and the gaslights were on so low that the light of the moon – it was a full moon – was bright enough to cast the shapes of the windows right across the carpet, and partly up the wall, long pale shapes like reflections in water, glimmering, shifting, and there were shadows in the corners of the room. The gas-lamp outside had not been lighted. She remembered that, but did not know if it was because the lamplighter had not come – letting the full moon do the work that he should have done – or because it was broken. She should have looked out, and down the street, to see if other lamps had been lighted. Then she would have known. She usually looked out for the lamplighter, but that night she had forgotten. It must have been well past her usual bedtime. It had been windy all day, and the force of the wind increased with the coming of darkness. The curtains – with a faint whoosh – shifted a little into the room and back again with the currents of cold air, like something breathing.

  The men’s cigarettes glowed as they inhaled. She didn’t know that this was what was happening; she just knew that the ends of the cigarettes glowed red, and then the men would blow, long, thoughtful clouds of smoke into the air, into her face, making her cough. It was as if they had come to the end of a banquet – one of those hour after hour multi-coursed monstrosities favored by Papa, course after course after course, every course piled high on the plate, and every course accompanied by wine. Stained and crumpled napkins had been cast down on the table, belts had been loosened and vests unbuttoned, and the inebriated and overfull feasters sprawled back unsteadily in their chairs. Papa’s “friend” eyed her speculatively. She was one of a range of desserts and he was trying to decide whether or not he had the appetite for a few mouthfuls more.

  They did not speak much. They seemed to be waiting for something, each waiting for the other to make a beginning. There was a sense of some written agreement being put to the test for the first time by two businessmen who did not trust each other, each on the alert for a strict adherence to every sub-section, every paragraph, every word, each – with scrupulous politeness – attempting to interpret each word, each paragraph, each subsection in a way that would bring a triumphant sensation of superiority over the other. They were two equally matched chess players about to begin a long-awaited game. One player would hold his two clenched hands in front of the other player, his hands side by side, one hand holding a hidden black piece and one holding a hidden white piece, like a father about to surprise his child with an unexpected gift, returning home after a long journey. “Choose,” he would be saying. “Go on. Choose.” Was it the queens he held, or two pawns, or could any piece be used for the selection of the color to play? There was a special language involved, a mixture of languages like (the image had come to her years later) a Volapuk of the chess board: zugzwang, j’adoube, kriegspiel, en prise. “Go on. Choose.” There was just the glow from where their mouths were, and then the smoke around their beards and in front of their eyes, making them even more difficult to see in the dim light. She was standing in front of Papa, as he held her loosely at the waist – he often did that – and made her strike matches to light their cigarettes for them. It was like a game, when the matches went out, or the cigarettes failed to light. Sometimes Papa’s “friend” would deliberately blow out the match. The more she giggled, the more they laughed, not really an amused laugh, a different kind of laugh.

  She was pretty that night. They told her she was pretty. Then there were those laughs again, because they were laughing at themselves for having said this. They knew it wasn’t true. Why her, and not Allegra? This was what she couldn’t understand. Allegra was pretty. Why not Allegra, if prettiness was what they wanted? This was the question she kept asking herself, then, and later, going over it again and again when she was alone in the schoolroom. Was it because she was the one who happened to be there, or had she been chosen?

  They were passing her between each other – this had happened before – half throwing her little distances into two outstretched hands, and sometimes it hurt, jarring the breath out of her, when they caught her under her arms. She was laughing when they began, slightly excited, and then she fell quiet when she became breathless. They held their cigarettes in their mouths to leave their hands free, and ash tumbled down onto her head as they caught her with a jerky upward motion. Papa held her so that her ear was against his watch-pocket, and she could hear his watch ticking, feel its small vibration, and the watch-chain pressed against her cheek.

  As she was pressed closer against them, she smelled other smells above the smell of the cigarettes and the alcohol. There was a meaty, sweaty kind of smell – old sweat, drawn out by warmth – and, stronger than this, the smell of cinders and smoke. They both had the fire and brimstone smell of fallen angels cast out of heaven. The elevated railway did not, at this time, travel as far out as Longfellow Park, but they must have been on it that day. The smoke from the train had blown upon them, scattered them with ashes, and they smelled as if they had been toiling all day in a foundry, pouring out the molten metal whilst dressed – oddly formal – in dark suits, their faces gleaming red in the darkness, or laboring in a vast, darkened manufactory, fitfully illuminated by the flames from furnaces as they tossed in shovelful after shovelful of crumbling, wet coal, the metal edge of the shovel scraping against the concrete floor in a way that made her shudder. It was like the high-pitched shriek of chalk on a blackboard, as the answers were written up after a test. The smoky, industrial smell gave her the feeling that their hands would be calloused and dirty, and that she would have hand-prints upon her clothes and body. She didn’t want her dress to be spoiled.

  Papa’s “friend” was humming a tune, absent-mindedly, in the same sort of way that people chewed gum or whittled at pieces of wood. She was one of a long line of burdens being thrown from hand to hand by workmen loading a steamboat or a freight car, or the same burden being thrown over and over again, and he was passing the time, lulled out of boredom and forgetfulness by the music, the same piece repeatedly. It was one of the tunes from Papa’s pocket-watch. Perhaps he had heard it a short while earlier, and it had stayed in his mind.

  Beautiful dreamer …

  – he hummed, rather tunelessly –


  …wake unto me,

  Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee …

  After a while Papa started to whistle it. She heard it shrill against her ear, felt the warm breath blowing against her. Then they were both whistling, loitering idlers in the street, men with time to kill and nothing to do, indolently waiting for some source of amusement to catch their attention. They were men in the mood to place wagers on the first bird to alight on a telegraph wire, the first dog to bark or growl, the first raindrop to reach the bottom of a windowpane.

  …Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,

  Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away …

  “Pass the Parcel!” Papa’s “friend” suddenly shouted, making his mind up about something. She opened her eyes, and the white exploding fireworks shapes became black exploding shapes. She tried to turn her head, to see what was happening across the room, and Papa’s “friend” was clapping his hands, making inward gestures, like a player in a game wanting the ball to be passed to him. Papa laughed until ash fell down the front of his vest and into her hair, and threw her across to his “friend.”

  …Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,

  List while I woo thee with soft melody …

  “When the music stops …!” his “friend” said, and – behind her back – she felt him, holding her with the upper parts of his arms, mime the actions of someone playing a piano. His whistling stopped, and he pulled off one of her shoes without unbuttoning it properly, hurting her. They were her favorites, red tanned goatskin, buttoning up the side, with a little tassel on the front.

  (Goatskin shoes!

  (All this time – without realizing it – she had possessed the goatskin for which she and Charlotte had long sought to suppress Mrs. Albert Comstock. They could have killed her ages ago. Barefoot, she could have walked through snow to administer the fatal blow, carrying her coal scuttle and Grandpapa’s Japanese sword. The shoes would have been on the small size for the task assigned to them, but they would have sufficed, if she’d held them carefully in the right place. When you come near her look not at her herself, but at her image in the brass; so you may strike her safely. And when you have struck off her head, wrap it with your face turned away, in the folds of the goat-skin on which the shield hangs. It was important that she avert her face. She must not look upon that which she was killing.)