Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Papa’s going to buy you a looking-glass …”)

  She wondered if Annie would want her to read part of the story to her, as she sometimes did. She hoped she would.

  “Diamond, just hold the baby one minute. I have something to say to your father.”

  Those were the first words she could see, if she peered closely, her nose pressed against the page of the book. The words of the song he was singing – “Baby’s a-sleeping …” – came shortly after this. When there were songs in the novel – especially “I know a river” – the words ran down the middle of the page, and there were big areas of unprinted whiteness on either side, like those beside the illustrations, and at the beginnings and ends of chapters. It was soothing, quieter, when there were no words there.

  Alice touched the picture of Diamond. “I have something to say to your father,” she practiced inside herself, ready for reading. “I have something to say to your father, ” but, this time, Annie did not ask her to read. Sometimes she asked Alice to tell her stories, in the way she had told stories to Charlotte, and Mary Benedict as they walked around and around the Shakespeare Castle. Annie would ask for certain features to be included in the stories: a long straight road, empty fields, trees in the fall. Things like that. This time, she didn’t ask her to tell a story, either.

  There was a newspaper, neatly folded, open at the personals, on a shelf at the side of the bed. The printing was blurred – Alice thought that it was the printing, rather than her eyesight – and it was as if Annie had been touching the paper, attempting to read by touch like a blind person, searching for someone who could predict her future for her, as she was always doing. There may have been words she recognized, words that she wished to touch, and bring closer, words she wanted to know by feel as much as by sight, like Macbeth with the dagger he saw before him. Next to it, wrapped in the silk scarf, was her Dream Book, alongside a neatly stacked pile of Reuben’s letters. They were propped against Annie’s Dancing Bear Bank like a solitary support at the end of a row of books. She ought to have appeared in Annie’s room with her nightgown pocket filled with enough chinking cents for a nighttime of listening, someone weighing herself down prior to drowning. They could lie there side by side, watching the organ-grinder’s arm turning, and the bear dancing, listening to the Duke of Mantua’s song from Rigoletto. “La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento …” Women were fickle, like feathers flying in a wind, always changeable, never constant, like stars falling from the sky. It was the opera in which the hunchback caused the death of his daughter, Gilda. He opened the sack he was about to throw into the river, and found her, stabbed and dying.

  The Dream Book, so conveniently to hand, was there for a purpose, awaiting her arrival in the room, to read, to interpret what had been dreamed. She wondered if Annie would say, “I had a dream last night.” Perhaps she had stopped dreaming.

  The songs in At the Back of the North Wind were words without music. There probably had been music written for them, but she did not know it. All she knew was the words.

  “I know a river

  whose waters run asleep …”

  That was how “I know a river” began.

  “… run run ever

  singing in the shallows

  dumb in the hollows

  sleeping so deep

  and all the swallows

  that dip their feathers …”

  There were feathers again, feathers falling from the sky instead of stars.

  The newspaper and the feathers (the feathers in the song, and the feathers that had fallen through the air) made her think of Annie in the kitchen, carefully renovating black gloves with an eggcup full of black ink and olive oil, and feathers as brushes. She had lined up feathers across the newspaper with which she had covered the kitchen table, and was breathing shallowly, so that they wouldn’t blow away, laboriously dipping a feather in the eggcup, and dabbing at the seams of the gloves, one by one. The gloves were spread in pairs across the table, spaced out with the tips of their thumbs touching, fingers outstretched, like the wrong-colored gloves fluttering in the air during the chorus of a minstrel song. Doo-dah. Doo-dah. The song Annie had been humming would not have been a minstrel song – minstrel songs were for white people, white people with their faces painted black – but one of the songs she had learned from Reuben, a song Alice hadn’t recognized. Perhaps he had sung it to her when she had seen him. It was hearing this through the schoolroom fireplace that had drawn Alice down into the kitchen.

  Alice had watched Annie from the doorway, wondering what the words to the song would be. When you knew that there were words to accompany a piece of music, when you knew these words, it was quite different to hearing music that was nothing but music. The words seemed to get in the way, interposing themselves between you and the music.

  Annie hadn’t known that she was there. Alice had watched her in the way that she had watched her when she had been practicing her curtsies.

  “Gracious. What a lot of teeth!”

  Annie had not smiled anymore when she curtsied, after Mrs. Albert Comstock had said this, not even when she was making a mock curtsy for Alice. She curtsied with eyes lowered, her face serious, making a nervous obeisance to an uncertain-tempered queen.

  “Off with her head!” screamed the Queen of Hearts, her left arm rigidly horizontal in front of her, her index finger pointing accusingly.

  “Off with her head!” screamed Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild in chorus.

  “Off with her head!” screamed Alice.

  They pointed at Annie like the Three Weird Sisters facing Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, the Thane of Cawdor, the King hereafter.

  The severed heads danced in the air, foretelling Macbeth’s fate, further apparitions rising up from the cauldron.

  To dream of a head severed from its trunk, and bloody, denotes that you will meet sickening disappointments, and the overthrow of your dearest hopes and anticipations.

  She blew the red feather high into the air above the bed.

  When she had seen Annie dabbing black ink onto gloves with feathers, she had been seized with the desire to emulate her, and had gone upstairs to copy what she was doing in every particular, taking her oldest pair of winter gloves out of the drawer. They were going to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s that afternoon, and she would look impressively smart. She had taken the previous week’s newspaper up to the schoolroom, teased some extra-large feathers out between the stitches in her pillow – she’d been Jane Eyre often enough; she might as well try Wuthering Heights and be Catherine Linton in a delirium for a while (though she would not have been able to identify the different feathers, as Catherine had) – and settled down with a bottle of Sanford’s ink, unwisely choosing the indelible ink that was used to mark the laundry. She didn’t have any olive oil, and used ink entirely. It would not make any difference.

  Catherine Linton had said that you couldn’t die if there were pigeons’ feathers in a pillow. Were any of her feathers pigeons’ feathers? She had dabbed away happily along the seams, in the way that she had seen Annie doing, in the places where the leather was rough and abraded. She paused occasionally to add black eyes and augment beards on the faces (all were bearded) on the front page. The one flaw in her enjoyment was that Mrs. Albert Comstock was not pictured Looking Delighted that week; otherwise she could have given her an extra-generous outgrowth of whiskers to balance The Bosom. This required advanced mathematical capabilities. It would have helped her through the afternoon, to gaze at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s face, and remember how much it had been improved by the addition of a gigantic beard. Perhaps she might suggest it to her, as a Beauty Hint, though she was the sort of woman for whom hints – even when capital-lettered – were too subtle to have much effect.

  At Mrs. Albert Comstock’s – impatient to flaunt her gentility – she had removed her renovated gloves with ostentatious elegance, to reveal hands that were striped like a zebra’s bottom with indelible ink, where the undried ink had seep
ed through.

  “Gracious.”

  As with zebras’ bottoms, so with teeth, as Mrs. Albert Comstock conveyed her amused disapproval by revealing – click! – her size sixteen smile. Ha, ha, ha, ha could not be far behind. Alice tried to explain what had happened, and ha, ha, ha, ha had – she had been correct in her assumption – made its tee-hee-heeingly infuriating snorting sound.

  Later, she’d heard them – Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild – making sniggering remarks to each other about Annie, and feathers, and black ink. Alice had learned to cultivate the art of looking in a different direction as she listened in to their conversations. Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild appeared to be under the erroneous impression that ears were like eyes, and needed to be focused on what they were noting to be able to work. Between their sniggers, Alice had picked up certain phrases, not fully understanding what they meant, as she stared across at the painting of Albert Comstock, lost in the contemplation of its enormous loveliness.

  “A large bowl of black ink.”

  Snigger.

  “Do you think he needs to use an ostrich feather?”

  (Extra-loud snigger at this point.)

  “Several ostrich feathers, I should imagine.”

  Snigger.

  “Can you imagine?”

  Snigger.

  “Keep her fresh and shining.”

  Snigger.

  “I think she’s under a cloud, don’t you?”

  (That expression again, and it caused another extra-loud snigger.)

  “She’s come to grief.”

  Snigger, snigger, snigger.

  ’Twas summer, the darkie was gay.

  No. This darkie had come to grief. No gaiety for her.

  Snigger.

  All coons look alike to me.

  (“Coons” rhymed with “tunes.” Sing those tunes, coons! Sing those tunes! Make sure that you pronounce the words properly!)

  Gracious.

  Whatdoyoumacallit?

  My word.

  Thingamajig.

  If I might be permitted.

  (She would be.)

  Whatsit?

  Darkie.

  Darkie.

  Snigger.

  Snigger, snigger.

  (Snigger sounded – Snigger, snigger, snigger again – like “nigger.” Snigger.)

  Annie walked amidst the sunshine, but rain rained on her alone, a little black cloud that followed her about, and cast her shadow before her, so that people moved away to avoid the darkness.

  A little water hadn’t cleared Alice of the deed of zebra-bottomed hands. She was so covered in ink that if she’d applied Eureka Ink Eradicator she’d have disappeared completely from sight. She had rubbed, rubbed away for what seemed like weeks – Yet, here’s a spot – a Lady Macbeth ensanguined with black blood, slaughtering an entire court in a Titus Andronicus bloodbath as she enthusiastically sang minstrel songs. She dreamed – Stab! – of Mrs. Albert Comstock – Stab! – with the light brown – Stab! – hair. The more she remembered the sniggers she’d heard, the more enthusiastically she imagined the stabbings, in the way that she’d found that to thump herself on her breast helped to take away the pain of certain thoughts.

  Ha – Stab! – ha – Stab! – ha – Stab! – ha – Stab!

  “V” is for Vengeance.

  “V” is for Villainy.

  “V” is for Very Enjoyable Indeed.

  It was always Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild she stabbed, as she thought of the way they’d sniggered about Annie. The wooden doll’s head was mashed to the texture of well-chewed licorice root when there was no flavor left, the tongue all black, and the fibers whitened to the color of long thin whiskery leeks’ roots. “Lickerish” meant greedy, lustful, lecherous. She imagined a big red tongue licking wetly, noisily, slurpily turning black as it licked away the ink on her hands, the ink in all the books, until everything was white again, and no written words remained.

  After the stabs, the slurps.

  She’d been stabbing Papa also, though he was someone they had been sniggering about, not someone doing the sniggering. She stabbed extra hard when she thought of him. In most productions of Hamlet, Hamlet “pranced about” (this was Mrs. Albert Comstock’s insightful phrase: she was a woman who possessed a keen critical mind, a rare grasp of the essentials of world literature) for nearly four hours. After an hour and a half, the mighty Mrs. Albert Comstock buttocks would be shifting restlessly, and her corsets creaking like the timbers of a sailing ship in a storm, and she would be talking even more – and even more loudly – than usual.

  In Alice’s production (she had thought about it in lingering detail), the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father – after his demand for revenge, after his description of his murder – would say “Remember me” and Hamlet would leap upon him and stab him to the heart with a cry of “Then, venom, to thy work.” It was a dagger that he saw before him, and – unlike Macbeth’s – this one was sensible to feeling as to sight.

  Curse him!

  Stab!

  Curse him!

  Stab!

  Curse him!

  Stab!

  STAB ELSINORE’S SOVEREIGN!

  The play would be over before the end of Act One, Scene Five, and everyone could leave the theatre in ample time for a decent meal without having to sit through the rest of it. Mrs. Albert Comstock would be thrilled. The venom was slow-working, but it poisoned the heart.

  “V” is for Venom.

  Hamlet’s Father was also named Hamlet.

  Hamlet stabbed through the breath-stained glass of the looking-glass and destroyed the misty reflection of himself. It was what Dorian Gray had done. It was what Frankenstein’s creature had done. It was what Dr. Jekyll had tried to do. It was what she had tried to do, telling Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster what she saw in clouds, what she’d seen in dreams, the distorted images of her inner self. She’d talk, and she’d be cured. The rest would be silence, and in the silence there would be a long-sought-for stillness.

  (Rather silence than the voices she heard, through the walls and up the chimney, the music in the distance. Rather blank white paper than the written troubles of the brain.)

  In her version of Macbeth (this was the result of much studying of the panel in the schoolroom: scholarship took many forms) the Third Apparition – the Bloody Child – instead of prophesying that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” said (this was a much better idea than Shakespeare’s was, Alice thought, and so did Charlotte) “no man of woman born shall harm Macbeth.” In her version the Witches’ trick was with the word “man.” It was (the idea had been like a revelation) a woman – Lady Macbeth, in her madness, his own loving wife – who killed him, lopping off his head, not a man at all!

  First “Give me the daggers!”; then Boing! Boing! Boing!

  Who would have thought Macbeth to have had so much blood in him?

  Those hands would ne’er be clean.

  What was done could not be undone.

  Macduff’s late revelation that he was not “born” because he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” always struck her as cheating, feeble playing with words, certainly not one of Shakespeare’s better efforts. No wonder Macbeth was annoyed. She’d have been furious. At Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls these words were tactfully not explained. At Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls these words were not even printed in their edition. It was the very words that were untimely ripp’d. Wombs did not exist at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls, where the human form was as comprehensively lopped of all dubious portions, all possible sources of not-very-niceness, Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild shriekingly unleashed, weighed down with razor-sharp scissors and chisels, demolishing great swathes of Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Districts like the most uninhibited of New York City’s property developers. In their edition Macduff announced – it was rather self-important of him to employ the third person – “let the angel whom thou still hast serv’d/Tell thee Macduff was
untimely born,” leaving most of the class baffled. You felt, in their edition, that Macduff (a perpetually embarrassed Dr. Twemlow of Fife, scarlet and twitching as the wind whipped at his kilt) would have blushed a becoming pink, and diffidently informed Macbeth that Macduff was – ahem – untimely – ahem – born, with much embarrassed hesitating and spluttering on the ahems. Mary Benedict and (less convincingly) Miss Swanstrom did their best to look knowing at this point.

  Another red feather circled between them, and landed on the white bedspread. It was the wrong color to be a pigeon feather, the feather escaping from the sleeper’s pillow and so permitting death to follow. Now – she continued to look around her – she was inside the little wooden box she had imagined from the other side of the door, inside the illuminated interior of the violin, and the soundholes – the italic “f” and the reversed “s” – now opened into darkness.

  That “f” shape always made her think of music, and of the use of the long “s” in the old eight-volume edition of Clarissa – Clarifsa – that she had read, the events of the novel taking place to the sound of chamber music, sad sounds in small rooms. The wind was louder in the room than she had imagined it would be. She felt small and tucked away, like a doll stored by a child who had become too old, something hidden inside a cigar box beneath the elaborately decorated, brightly colored lid. She did not like this image, thinking of the smell of cigar smoke on clothes and beards. It was a time to talk, to share confidences and tell stories, not a time to think of Bearded Ones.

  She explained about the bird, and began to feel tearful again.

  “Have you had a d-d-dream?” she asked Annie, to change the subject.

  Annie shook her head. No dream.

  Alice unwrapped the Dream Book from the scarf, the ritualistic beginning of an interpretation, as if Annie had said yes. Annie asked her if she had had dreams, and she said no, wondering if Annie was lying to her, as she was lying to Annie. She flicked, apparently casually, through the little book – Album, Dragon, House, Morgue, Pulpit, Stone Mason (all things had hidden meanings) – and stopped at Wind.