Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  (Side by side, Mesdames Sylvie, Etoile, and Roskosch – the Three Fates; Madame Roskosch was Atropos, the one who cut the thread of life – leaned forward to interpret the shuffling of the patterned plates, studying the shifting shapes. Alice stood before them, facing the Three Weird Sisters, waiting to hear her fate. They could see the past, the present, and the future. They had never been known to fail.

  (“La Maison de Dieu,” Madame Sylvie intoned, in her exotic Brooklyn French accent.

  (“(The Tower Struck by Lightning),” Madame Etoile interpreted (in whispered brackets).

  (Madame Roskosch did not say anything, but leaned closer toward the pictures on the plates.

  (“L’Amoureux.”

  (A little snigger here.

  (“(The Lovers).”

  (Another snigger.

  (“Le Bateleur.”

  (“(The Magician).”

  (She knew what the next cards were going to be. The three of them were grouped together, as if they were a set.

  (“Le Soleil, La Lune, et L’Etoile,” Madame Sylvie muttered, virtually incomprehensibly, even slipping in an “et” to demonstrate her fluency in French.

  (“(The Sun, The Moon, and The Star.)”

  (“La Lune,” Madame Sylvie whispered, letting her breath out in a low hiss, as if this were the card for which she had long been waiting, the card that would win the game, the card that she could snap down on top of the others with a triumphant cry.

  (“The Moon.”

  (The brackets had disappeared, and the moon seemed larger.

  (Card number XVIII was a large serving plate – one big enough to allow ample room for John the Baptist’s head, with a generous accompaniment of vegetables – poised to eclipse all other cards by sheer size. The two battlemented towers loomed hugely, the two howling dogs seemed more ferocious than ever, and the parasite crawled closer out of the deep, dark pool.

  (Madame Roskosch, for the first time, seemed on the point of speaking. She pointed at La Lune, and began to open her mouth. Her teeth were sharp and pointed.

  (A secret was about to be brought to light.)

  It was impossible to walk without breaking the plates, though you tried not to, placing your feet with infinite care, and scarcely breathing. The rafters were exposed in the ceiling of the House of the Interpreter, and cobwebs trembled on the underside of the tiles. Papa’s “friend” sat on a pile of stacked signs not far from the entrance, and when she sat on his knee she could see the moon from the angle at which they were, and the tops of trees writhing against the sky. There was a little copse of them near the entrance.

  She should feel safe, here, protected – The orchard walls are high and hard to climb – but she did not feel so.

  And the place death, considering who thou art.

  The wind was shrieking through these trees so loudly – they were now some distance away from the shelter of the walls – that she almost expected the moon itself to be flipped over and sent spinning away, leaving the world in utter darkness. She listened to the noise made by the wind through the trees, using that sound to overcome all other sound.

  The usual words were spoken. She could still hear them.

  “You’re one of the girls from the statue.”

  12

  She felt again that sensation of being on the verge of a fall, out on the ledge outside Grandpapa’s office. She sat and thought of the bronze sculpture in the park, near the children’s play area and the aviary, repeating sections of poetry in her head to pass the time until Papa returned.

  She was sitting on the man’s right knee, in the same place and position as that of her bronze figure in The Children’s Hour. Papa’s “friend” did something he had not done before. He pushed her head back, just as Papa had done earlier outside, until she was looking directly at the moon. He moved his head down so that the side of it was resting against the side of her head, again like Papa. He had been watching what Papa had done so that he could copy it. Like Papa’s, his beard rubbed against the side of her face. As Papa had done, he tilted his head at the same angle he had tilted hers. She waited for him to ask her to make the same promise that she had made to Papa, but he did not do this.

  He did something else he had never done before. He began to feel the surface of her skull with the tips of the fingers of both his hands, searching for something, mussing her hair. As he did so, he began to recite the names of some of the features of the surface of the moon – she recognized that was what they were: craters, plains, ranges of mountains, rilles – as eager to demonstrate his astronomical knowledge as Mary Benedict was. All the time he was looking upward, a man who could see what he was naming. His eyes could see things that were very far away.

  “Plato, Copernicus, Julius Cæsar, Agrippa, Tycho …” he began, almost in a chant, a memorized list repeated like the declension of an irregular verb, liking the sound the words made, but not knowing their meaning. Mary Benedict had a telescope, and knew all the names of the places on the moon. The moon was an area in which Mary Benedict’s knowledge was undoubtedly ahead of Alice’s, and she had great skill in shifting conversations moonward. Alice wondered whether to nod, to show that she understood, that Mary Benedict had made sure she understood, but it might jerk his fingers away from the contours he seemed to be studying, and might make him angry in the way that Papa was sometimes angry. Papa was always controlled in his anger, absolutely controlled. He always knew exactly what he was saying, planning out what to say beforehand, freed from the tyranny of choice.

  “… Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Hercules …”

  It was a curious list of names, a mixture of the historical and the mythical. She must not move. She must not think anything, or feel anything.

  She was stone.

  She was bronze.

  She was a figure in a statue.

  The hour would pass.

  This was the House of the Interpreter, the place where things were explained, and made clear, where Christian was shown excellent things to help him in his journey. The Interpreter went with him into a private room, and explained the meaning of the picture that hung there against the wall. He told Christian what it was he could see in that picture, the picture of a man whose work was to know and unfold dark things to sinners, a forerunner of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, a pioneering John the Baptist of alienists. In another room the Interpreter showed Christian two little children, Passion and Patience, and explained their behavior to him. For the things that are seen, are temporal; but the things that are not seen, are eternal. These things did ravish his heart; he could have stayed at that good man’s House a twelvemonth, but that he knew he had further to go.

  “… Oceanus Procellarum, Palus Epidemiarum, Lacus Somniorum …”

  Because they were in Latin, they were like the words of Doctor Faustus, the words of an apothecary, words to make the impossible happen: gold from lead, eternal life, the calling up of devils.

  The Ocean of Storms. The Marsh of Disease. The Lake of Sleep.

  It was like Christian’s journey to the Celestial City infinitely extended with many new dangers. It would be a long time before he and Hopeful drew near the presence of the Shining Ones and the Gates, and the bells that rang for joy.

  “… Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium …”

  There, floating high above them, was a huge hollow phrenological head, brightly illuminated – bright enough to cast shadows – with all its features marked and labeled, all the labels to what lay beneath the surface, the things that were hidden from sight like something secret beneath the unstable, shifting, volcanic emptiness. She had just read The Last Days of Pompeii, and the tips of his fingers pattered upon her head like descending ashes. From his clothes, from his beard, there was that Sodom and Gomorrah, that Pompeii, that Paradise Lost, that fallen angel smell of smoke and cinders.

  As his fingertips moved across her head, he was reciting what it was he could feel, identifying his findings from the lettering in the
sky, the words large enough to read from earth, an Interpreter guided by a higher source of knowledge. Coldness, he found, Crises, Showers, Clouds …

  Next, he would tell her what his findings meant.

  Everything had a hidden meaning. That was what Mrs. Alexander Diddecott had told Mama.

  She imagined Annie, beyond the Hill Called Difficulty, in the Palace Called Beautiful, sitting upon Papa’s knee, just as she was sitting on the knee of Papa’s “friend.” She, too, would be looking up at the moon, at the seas that were not seas, at the cracked and crazed surface where the lettering was fading. Like Christian and Charity in The Pilgrim’s Progress they would discourse together till late at night. Annie would be in a large upper chamber, whose window opened toward the sun rising, and the name of the Chamber would be Peace, where she would sleep till break of day.

  On the day after this she would see the Delectable Mountains. She would be taken to the top of the house, and bade look south, and she would behold, at a great distance, a most pleasant mountainous country, beautiful with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts; flowers also, with springs and fountains, very delectable to behold. Then she would go on her way, into the Valley of Humiliation.

  “Conscientiousness, Justice, Integrity …” Papa would be saying, seizing an opportunity for phrenology, forcing Annie’s face against his watch-chain, and away from the light of the moon. “Hope, Hope Future, Hope Present, Spirituality, Faith, Trust, Wonder …”

  A long time seemed to go by when there was silence inside the little brick building.

  The House of the Interpreter, like the Palace Called Beautiful, had once been a place where animals were kept. Papa’s “friend” had stopped naming the features of the moon, and the only near sound was the sound of his breathing. During a lull in the wind, she heard footsteps coming toward them, and then Papa’s voice just outside.

  The hour had passed.

  “There’s something I must tell you,” he was saying to Annie. He never called her by her name, just as he had never called Alice by her name the whole time. He had forgotten who they were. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir.” Annie’s voice was low. It sounded as if she had been crying. He had been rebuking her – cold and sarcastic – for not completing some job properly, hurting her for being a bad girl.

  The moon became large and liquid, slightly distorted, Alice seeing it through the showers, through the clouds, and the drops of moisture blurring her vision.

  “You must not talk about tonight,” Papa was saying to Annie. His voice became quieter, but more intense. He paused, to ensure that he had Annie’s full attention. “If you tell anyone what has happened, the wind will get you.”

  After a pause, he spoke again. Alice imagined him holding Annie under her chin, so that she would look into his face.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you tell anyone what has happened, the wind will get you.”

  Papa’s “friend” went outside, and Papa came toward her again. Annie did not look at her. She was standing, very still, with her head lowered, the bad girl standing on a chair at the front of the class for all to gaze upon. The two men seemed to forget that she was there. Papa picked Alice up in the way he had been holding her before, in a sort of seat, and moved out into the open air again, standing under the little clump of trees. Papa’s “friend” followed close behind, as though he wished to hear every word that would be spoken, so that he could memorize them and repeat them later, mimicking the gestures, echoing the words. She could see the moon reflected on the surface of the River of the Water of Life. The darkness in the water, the wind in the trees, seemed to enter her mind. Fir trees sobbed and moaned, holly whistled, ash hissed, beech rustled. Papa seemed very calm, very controlled, as he always did. Whatever he wanted to happen, happened. “Choose me!” she’d once wanted to call out when he came into the schoolroom, to gaze at her and her sisters. “Choose me!” She’d thought that it would be a sign of love. He took her face in his hand as he had done before, grasping her under the chin. Again he rested the side of his head against the side of her head, and again he tilted her head back until they were both gazing at the moon.

  “The Sea of Coldness,” she thought. “The Sea of Crises. The Sea of Showers. The Sea of Clouds.”

  “What did you promise Papa?” he asked her softly.

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

  “For always.”

  “For always.”

  “There’s my Little Woman.”

  It became a formula, just like “You’re one of the girls from the statue.”

  She didn’t know why – perhaps it was something to do with the way Annie’s head was bowed – but she began to cry, a little burst, short and intense, like a sneeze.

  He did not pat her back in the way that Mama would have done. He stood, waiting for her to stop, patiently, a man with all the time in the world – though she knew that the patience lasted only so long, that time had a predetermined end to it – and she soon stopped.

  A sudden, stronger blast of wind howled through the branches of the trees, a scream at a pitch it hurt to hear, and she jerked convulsively in Papa’s arms, trying to press her hands against her ears, trying to shut out the noise. Sharp-edged leaves rushed at her face, and she shut her eyes. With his right hand, Papa pulled her hands away from her ears, and put his face close to hers. When she opened her eyes, his face was all she could see. It filled the whole world in front of her, like the moon had.

  “You must listen to the wind,” he said.

  Then he shouted across to Annie. “Remember what I told you about the wind?” It seemed to be more of a question than a command, but Annie did not answer in words. She nodded her head once, up and down, though Alice could still not see her face.

  Then Papa and Papa’s friend took her and Annie back home, because it was late, it was well past Alice’s bedtime, even Annie’s bedtime, and it wouldn’t be good for them to stay out longer.

  That was the first time it happened.

  13

  It happened numerous times over the months that followed – Papa, Papa’s “friend,” and Annie – through the fall (the fall in which she had walked around and around the Shakespeare Castle with Charlotte, and Mary Benedict), stopping temporarily for the winter. It happened again in the spring and on into the summer, the summer when The Pilgrim’s Progress landscape was finally completed, and the performances began. It continued after the performances finished for the year, through into a second fall, and the beginnings of a second winter, and then it stopped because Annie was not there anymore. It happened for more than a year. It happened one last time after Annie had gone, and then it never happened again, and Papa’s “friend” stopped calling. On that last time, there were no indications that it was the last time. Nothing was said, there were no promises made to let her know that she was now free, that she need not sit in unmoving silence for those hours, and – for a long time, on into the summer and the following fall, for a year, for years, for long after Annie had gone – she continued to expect that Papa would find her, when she was alone, and tell her that she was going to the Celestial City. That was how it always began.

  When Ben was five or six years old she wondered if Papa ever took him for walks to the Celestial City, to meet his “friend” or another “friend,” in the way that he had done so often with her. She looked at her sisters, and wondered about them, trying to catch a hidden expression in their eyes, especially Allegra’s, but it was something she could never ask them. It only ever happened on the way to the Celestial City, or – when the winter set in, and if Mama was not there – in the house, where it had started. Alice would be with Papa’s “friend” in the front parlor, and Papa would take Annie elsewhere in the house. In the evenings – particularly the spring evenings, as they moved away from winter – he would tell her that they were going to the Celestial City, Papa and his Little Woman, Papa’s
“friend” and Annie, and, putting down what she was doing – the book she was reading, the piece of music she was trying to learn – she would obediently go into the hall and put on her coat, trying to fill her mind with the words from the book, the sound of the music. These words, this music, would go through her head as she sat on the “friend’s” knee, the girl from the statue.

  She was stone.

  She was bronze.

  Sometimes Papa came in the night, and woke her from sleep. This was her sign that spring had arrived, that the evenings were milder.

  They would walk towards the Goodchilds’ house, and go down the side adjoining Verbrugge Woods, toward the door with Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You on the painted board above it. The color of the newly painted door was green, a slightly darker shade than the original faded green, she had discovered, the first time she was taken there in daylight.

  The painted board nearest to the right of the door had the words I Am Directed By A Man Whose Name Is Evangelist To Speed Me To A Little Gate That Is Before Us, Where We Shall Receive Instructions About The Way, and the one nearest to the left of the door had the words Strait Is The Gate That Leadeth Unto Life, And Few There Be That Find It. She read those words many times, just before they stepped inside the door.

  They were painted by the same signwriter who had painted the signs for Comstock’s Comestibles, and he had used the same colors and the same style of alphabet. She half expected to see SERVICE WITH SINCERITY! painted on a board upon the gate, a promise of polite and courteous attention from Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Apollyon, and Giant Despair. Perhaps the signwriter had a limited repertoire. She had seen the same colors – red and black – and the same ornate lettering on Beware Of The Dog signs all round Longfellow Park, and on all the signs in the park. Papa never knocked on the door. He had a key of his own on every occasion after the first time, and that was how it was Opened Unto him. Always, he removed his hat before they stepped inside. He would feel bad if he forgot to do this.