Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  …I had a dream de udder night,

  When ebryting was still;

  I thought I saw Susanna dear,

  A coming down de hill …

  She opened her mouth with a little pop, looking for the bubbles that she thought would emerge, rising in a stream to the surface of the dark water. It was very quiet. There was a distant dog barking somewhere over on the other side of the park, lonely as a nighttime prairie train whistle. Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,/Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away.

  …The buckwheat cake was in her mouf,

  De tear was in her eye,

  Says I, I’se coming from de souf,

  Susanna, don’t you cry …

  The previous week – Saturday morning – Papa had made Annie sing “Oh! Susanna.” Annie hadn’t wanted to, but Papa had made her. He had come out of his study when Annie was in the hall. He said he’d heard her singing when she thought he was out of the house. He’d heard her – several times – from his study, and she had a nice voice. He was sometimes in the house, he told her, when she thought he wasn’t there. He saw more than she realized. He heard more. He had made her sing it properly, correcting her pronunciation in the approved Mrs. Albert Comstock fashion. “Properly” was “de” and “udder” and “ebryting.” “Properly” was “de” and “mouf” and “I’se” and “souf.” Susanna, don’t you cry. Alice had been in the front parlor, sitting at the piano. Unused to asking, Papa had ordered Annie to sing. Alice had wanted to play the music as Annie sang, to let Papa know that she was there, in the next room, and could hear them.

  Annie was hers, not Papa’s.

  Alice looked over Papa’s shoulder and up at the moon. That gave her a reference point to the world she knew, and she might know where she was as long as she saw that, gazing at it as if she was memorizing it. The way that he was holding her, she could not see the direction that they were going, only the places where they had just been. Papa and his “friend” walked without speaking, knowing where they were going.

  “We’re going to the Celestial City,” Papa had said.

  The Goodchilds lived in a former farm on the far side of the park, near the shore of the lake. Longfellow Park still had the feel of being on the edge of open countryside at this time, far from the city, upstate rather than uptown, with Hudson Row and the streets leading out of it, and the new mansions along Park Place, looking oddly urbanized and out of place, forerunners of what was to come. On the western outskirts there were working farms enclosed within rows of new houses, built out at odd angles next to the outbuildings – here it was the farms that were beginning to look out of place – and cattle and pigs browsed and rooted about freely, considering the new streets to be a natural extension of the farmyard. The Goodchilds’ house – near which no animals ventured – had extensive grounds containing orchards and pastures, two cottages, and numerous former henhouses, cowsheds, stables and pigsties, the whole enclosed within a tall brick wall. Beyond the wall, the landscape that led to the Celestial City was being built: the work had started toward the end of the summer, and – by the following summer – performances of The Pilgrim’s Progress were to become a permanent feature of life in Longfellow Park.

  Alice had never, at that time, been inside the Goodchilds’ house, had never been inside the walls that enclosed it – though the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild were often in her parents’ house – but she knew which house was theirs. Everything she knew about their house she had heard from others.

  “That’s where the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild live,” Mama had said, as they walked past – a long, looping detour – on their way to see Mama’s friend Mrs. Italiaander, the widow of the architect who had designed All Saints’ and Park Court, she and Allegra hand in hand, Mama pushing Edith in her reed and maple baby carriage, the lace edge to its parasol wobbling.

  “That’s where the Goodchilds live,” Nurse had said, resting on the oars for a moment, as they looked across the lake from the rowboat toward the back of the house.

  “That’s where Sobriety Goodchild lives. Uuurgh!” Charlotte had said, screwing her face up in revulsion, as they dawdled through Verbrugge Woods, which ran down one side of the house toward the lake.

  She was never sure whether these observations were made as proud demonstrations that the speakers were in possession of privileged information, or whether they were meant as warnings, though she preferred to think that they were warnings. Lizzie Galliant, the heroine of the childhood adventure stories she had invented, gazed at the walls and the half-hidden house beyond, and planned to unmask the dark secrets that none but she suspected.

  The lights were on in the Goodchild house, but – to her disappointment – they did not swing open the tall ornate gates and go up to the front door. By then, she’d started walking around the Shakespeare Castle with Charlotte, and Mary Benedict, and visualized a similar circling. It would be counterclockwise. Instead, they walked past the gates, and – it was quite a long walk – around to the side of the house that adjoined Verbrugge Woods. They were much more exposed now, and the wind became stronger, louder. Alice hadn’t been there since the time with Charlotte, and much had changed.

  It took her a while to realize this, and then she felt all a small child’s resentment at the fact that – for no good reason – things had not remained the same. A proper paved surface – quite wide – had been laid down the side of the wall: she heard the heels of the men’s boots clicking on the stone, the sound echoing back from the brickwork. The loudest sound, however, almost drowning the sound of the footsteps, was that of the wind whistling through the trees in the woods.

  The wildness of the night was becoming exciting: the teachers at school always complained that the girls became noisy and hard to control when there was a storm. She couldn’t see the trees – Papa was holding her so that her back was to them – but she could see the huge swaying shadows of branches grappling against the wall, the color of the ivy that covered it all bleached away by the bright moonlight. The shadows seemed to stagger, an exaggerated version of the way that Papa and his “friend” had been walking. They moved a little further, and then she could see trees, the tops of other trees, the trees beyond the wall, moving from side to side in the wind. She heard their leaves hissing, a sound different from that made by the nearer trees outside the wall. Sounds were different there; different trees grew. The leaves were already beginning to fall – the men’s feet sometimes crunched through accumulated heaps, individual leaves made little scampering sounds against the paving-stones like small, wild creatures – and now they descended in a blizzard as the wind tore them from the branches, flicking against her face like taunting fingernails (this was one of Sobriety Goodchild’s many specialties), quite painful.

  It was then that she saw the first of the newly painted boards that had been affixed to the wall. The moonlight was bright enough to read by, but the shadows hid some of the words. The only words she could read on the first board were The Wilderness Of This World. The words seemed to pulsate as they were hidden and revealed, hidden and revealed, by the undulating shadows. She read them over Papa’s shoulder, leaning a little for the best angle.

  On another board the words she could read were Strait Is The Gate. It was like being inside Mrs. Italiaander’s front parlor, where framed and glazed biblical texts lined the walls, reflecting and making more visible the plump little marble arm in the glass dome that was precisely positioned in the center of the table. For a moment she felt the sensation of being inside an immense roofless room, flooded with moonlight, the brightness reflecting on the polished glass surfaces, turning the texts into wordless mirrors. Then she realized where they were going: to the green-painted door in the wall, a door almost hidden by trailing sprays of untrimmed ivy that hung down like a loose and swinging curtain. She and Charlotte had noticed this, imagining a secret garden within, and dared each other to try to open it. They had turned the round knob, but the door had been locked.

 
Papa pulled her so that she was facing forward. Without speaking a word to her, he clasped his two hands together, enclosing her within a kind of seat, her back against the inner side of one arm, the upper parts of her legs against the inner side of the other. Now the door that she had seen with Charlotte was in front of her. It had been repainted – it was impossible to tell the color in the moonlight – and the ivy had all been cut away from around it. Above it was another painted sign, on which she could read every word: Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You. She tried to remember a story she had once read, in which a hidden door in a wall had led to a different world. She had certainly told stories in which Lizzie Galliant had found her way through such doors, into magic kingdoms, forgotten lands.

  The wall, to which other painted boards had been fastened, stretched away to right and left, shadowed by the shapes of trees, as sharp-edged and distinct as shadows made by sunlight. She almost expected it to feel warm, so sun-like were the shadows. She imagined crowds lining beside the wall to enter, brightly lighted in the cool moonlight, the hugely magnified shadows of hands lifting to knock and have the Gate – that was the word painted upon the board – Opened Unto them.

  But Papa’s “friend” did not knock. He produced a key from an inside pocket – Alice was surprised that it was he who had the key, and not Papa – and unlocked the Gate.

  “The Celestial City,” he said, and Papa sniggered, thinking he had said something witty.

  They went through the Gate and into the place where there was to be no more crying, nor sorrow, for he that was the owner of the place would wipe all tears from her eyes, a place peopled with thousands, none of whom was hurtful, but loving, and holy, every one walking in the sight of God, clothed with immortality, as with a garment. Round and round she’d walk in the sight of God within the walls, clockwise and counterclockwise.

  Papa and his “friend” – she remembered this clearly – removed their hats before they stepped inside, and Papa’s “friend” locked the door behind them. They entered like respectful visitors stepping inside a place of worship.

  11

  In the shelter of the wall it was, for a while, stiller and quieter.

  In front of them the landscape of The Pilgrim’s Progress stretched away into the distance, sloping downward in the direction of the lake, brightly lighted in the moonlight, each structure – each tree, each stone – casting a shadow that lent it a peculiarly tactile three-dimensional quality in the softly radiant light. Behind them, beyond the wall, the place from which they had come, was the City of Destruction, peopled by the damned who would burn with fire from Heaven (Mrs. Albert Comstock with an intensity that would have sizzled a salamander); before them was the way to the Celestial City, a chance of salvation.

  Immediately on their left was the House of the Interpreter, which looked as though it was being used as a sign-painter’s temporary workshop. Moonlight flooded in through the open door to illuminate the bottom ends of some signs propped up inside: … Dreamed A Dream, … Wrath To Come, … His Holy Pilgrims. A paved path, the Wall of Salvation on either side of it, led upward away from this to where a great mound of earth – the Hill Called Difficulty – was taking shape. Further back, a little to one side, wheelbarrows, spades and picks were stacked against the near wall of the Palace Called Beautiful. A workman had left his jacket hanging over the handle of one of the spades, and it fluttered, bat-like, casting a long shadow.

  Beyond that – this whole area was still a building site – the ground, as far as it could be seen, was being cleared for the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death: felled trees lay on their sides, and there was a long, deep swath of raw earth, with huge piles of excavated soil. The trees must have been felled that same afternoon, though there was something ragged and shattered about them, the remnants of a wood destroyed in a storm, torn down, snapped and ripped rather than cut. The wood was still fresh and white where they had been axed, and there was a smell of sap and greenness, like the time when the apple trees had been pruned in the orchard. She thought of the smell of apples, soft brown, overripe fruit slippery and bursting beneath her feet, a rotting Eve-peopled Paradise in which there was too much fruit, too much knowledge. Vanity Fair, the Plain Called Ease, Doubting Castle, the Mountain of Error, and the Celestial City itself could not be seen, but were probably still being constructed. In daylight, the whole area must heave with swarming Goodchilds and Griswolds, frogs pushing laden wheelbarrows, frogs endlessly arcing up and down with picks like chain-ganged prisoners, characters from a children’s story created to induce nightmares, a kingdom in which the kings were frogs. The starlight and dewdrops were waiting for her, loitering with no virtuous intent. The River of the Water of Life could be heard faintly, running through the grounds and down toward the lake.

  Papa held her face firmly in one hand, hard enough for his fingers to dig in, and pushed her head back until she was looking directly at the moon. She blinked, and tried to pull away a little: it was bright enough to dazzle. Papa spoke gently (no, not “gently,” quietly, intensely) but his hand hurt.

  “You’re my Little Woman,” he said – it was something he had often said before – “My Little Woman, and you must make me a promise. You’ll make your Papa a promise, won’t you?”

  He asked as if she had a choice.

  (“That’s a rhetorical question,” she said to herself in the pause that followed.)

  He couldn’t manage the correct tone of voice for a request. He was unaccustomed to making requests.

  She tried to nod her head, but she couldn’t because of the way he was holding it, but he must have felt her chin push against the palm of his hand a little.

  “Say it. Say it.” (“Gently” was not at all the right word.) “Say you’ll promise.” He was very firm, very insistent.

  “Please, sir …” Annie started to say.

  Alice hadn’t noticed her come forward. She had been standing against the entrance to the House of the Interpreter, with Dreamed A Dream behind her. She spoke hesitantly, like a child in school unsure of the answer to a question. Alice would not have been surprised if she had held her arm into the air, slightly down at an angle because she was not entirely confident.

  “Please, sir …”

  “Be quiet!”

  Papa did not turn to face Annie, did not even raise his voice. The two words were hissed out. He continued to focus his attention on Alice.

  “Say you’ll promise.”

  She managed to speak.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “This is what I want you to promise.”

  He moved his head down so that the side of it was resting against the side of her head – the bristles of his beard were sharp and rough, she almost expected them to draw blood – and tilted his head at the same angle as he had tilted hers, so that they were both looking at the moon.

  “I want you to promise me that every time you look up at a full moon you’ll think of me, your Papa. Will you promise me that?”

  He was speaking very quietly, whispering, as though he wanted no one to hear him but herself, though his “friend” was listening. Alice saw him lean in a little closer toward them, wishing to share in a moment of private communion, longing to nuzzle in his beard on the other side of her face. The moonlight caught the lenses of his spectacles, and he seemed to have no eyes. The light dazzled her, like the reflection from a Perseus-polished shield, though this was one that would turn her into stone.

  “Please, sir …”

  “Be quiet!”

  Alice whispered in reply. She said it quickly, to stop Papa speaking to Annie in that way again.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Say it. Say it to Papa.”

  “Every time I look at the full moon I shall think of you, Papa.”

  “For always.”

  “For always.”

  She looked at the moon, staring at the bright pale circle, though it hurt her eyes, and saw the details of Papa’s face gazing down on her fr
om the nighttime sky, filling her field of vision. It was like an adult’s face thrusting forward to peer in at an infant in a baby carriage, blotting out the whole of the rest of the world.

  Coochi, coochi, coo.

  What an adorable child.

  “There’s my Little Woman.”

  Then, and only then, he turned to face Annie. He did not speak to her – he had said nothing to her the whole time except for the two “Be quiet!”s – but pointed up toward the Palace Called Beautiful, in the way he pointed out the place where he detected Annie had missed some dust when she was cleaning a room, or not positioned a drape symmetrically enough. He usually snapped his fingers when he did this, but he did not do so now. Alice had rarely heard him speaking to Annie until recently. The time he had made her sing “Oh! Susanna” remained clearly in her mind because it was so unusual. It was as if it was years later, and he was giving instructions to Rosobell – who had not come to them until years after his death – using the movements of his body instead of words because she could not hear. Annie looked back at Alice. She appeared to be about to say something, but this time Papa did snap his fingers, gesturing upward again, and Annie began to walk to the Palace Called Beautiful, with Papa – after some whispering consultation with his “friend” – following behind her.

  Then Papa’s “friend” took her into the House of the Interpreter. They went in amongst the pots of paint and the signs resting against the walls, their feet crunching through the piles of leaves that had drifted in through the door. It was like moving through layers of broken cups and plates, with the sound of the large, fragile leaves shifting. They were in the Potter’s Field, the final resting place of strangers and the unclaimed, unrecognized dead, a landscape composed entirely of tilted heaps of matching crockery, plates, saucers, and bowls neatly fanned out like packs of playing cards across the surface of a table, their whiteness glinting in the cloud-darkened dimness.