Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “This is what I wished to have,” he said, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change …”

  “We don’t blame you!”

  That’s what the watching Bearded Ones were supposed to reply.

  “We’d have felt the same!”

  Tighter!

  Tighter!

  She reached her hand up toward her reflection, as if, in her turn, to draw circles – more like elongated ovals – at the top of the high forehead, beneath the eyes, across the top lip, with a sharpened BBB. With a more discreet – attractively feminine – moustache, Madeline Usher would look exactly the same as Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Edgar Allan Poe, her twin brother …

  Who is the fairest one of all?

  The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis.

  Alice traced the ovals upon her reflection in the looking-glass, at the top of the high forehead, beneath the eyes, across the top lip, blurring the image. She had read “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and had caught the disease from the words on the page – that was what had happened – the settled apathy creeping up inside her, the black ink upon her fingertips like the first telltale symptoms of a plague, the words that had poisoned her when touched. She peered at the tips of her fingers, her hand held palm-first in front of her face, looking for the blackness there, tracing for a meaning in the lines. A settled apathy. A gradual wasting away. Transient affections. Whatever it was that Madeline Usher had had, she – unmistakably – suffered from it, also.

  We have put her living in the tomb!

  She peered shortsightedly at her face, gazing upon the House of Usher and its landscape, the rank sedges, the white trunks of decayed trees. They were like the first sight of Treasure Island: the gray – grey – melancholy woods, the wild stone spires, the peculiar stagnant smell hanging over the anchorage, the smell of sodden leaves and rotted tree trunks, the clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods, and the surf foaming and thundering on the steep beach.

  The worst dreams Jim Hawkins ever had were when he heard the surf booming, or started upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in his ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

  Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,

  Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.

  If that mockingbird won’t sing,

  Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.

  If that diamond ring turns to brass,

  Papa’s going to buy you a looking-glass.

  25

  Tentatively, she reached out the little finger of her right hand toward the glass front of the moon-dial clock on the mantel, as if it was unlocked, and she was about to flick it open with the edge of her nail, like Papa flicking open his pocket-watch to listen to one of the tinkling music box tunes. A little flick with her little finger, a push with her pinkie, an appropriate enough action for a Pinkerton. “Pinkie” was what some of the boys at Otsego Lake Academy had called Ben, not in a particularly friendly way. She wiggled her little finger. Pinkie. She wiggled her index finger. Trigger. One slight movement with each finger, and there would be peace, an end to moonlight and voices.

  Perhaps it might work this time. The slight counterclockwise push with the very tip of her finger, barely denting the flesh, and the cold illumination would slowly retreat from the room as the near-full moon was rolled away into the darkness, until only the stars remained.

  All of these things your Papa will do,

  Because of the way that he loves you.

  She turned up the lamp a little more. The moonlight on the floor was driven completely away from the room, and light bloomed outward.

  High up as she was, she did not always draw her drapes as she once had, and she was enclosed by looking-glasses on all four walls: the dark-backed windows, the glazed surfaces of pictures, the bookcases. All, in the light of the lamp, reflected her standing in front of the biggest looking-glass in the warm glow from the flickering fire, her hand pressed against her breast. It was a gesture she kept repeating unconsciously. It was starting to snow heavily again. She could hear it against the windowpanes, see the whiteness swarming against the dark outer corners away from the reflections. Her looking-glasses were Dr. Jekyll’s, not Dorian Gray’s, and her reflections in the windows and bookcases – she was surrounded by herself, all the Alices from all the books, in a gloomy winter park crowded round by grotesque frost-protected statues – were distorted, warped into ugly, unrecognizably disfigured shapes, displaying ugliness, not beauty. Perhaps they were a mirror of what she really was, enclosed within a Coney Island mirror maze, wasting her entrance money by failing to laugh at the blurred, flaw-changed images, alone in a crowd of misshapen strangers, pointing, laughing, all of whom had her face and body. She should be a vampire, looking into a mirror and seeing nothing there. Now that would be a true reflection of what she was, what she would be.

  There was something she ought to remember about a mirror, something that had occurred to her earlier that day. She had written it down. She would find it, read it, and add more to it. It was an idea for a story, a beginning from which something was starting to develop. It had been inside her all day, and it would be growing. Something about a mirror. Once she had been scared not to write things down, in case she forgot them. Now she let them grow until the right time came.

  Looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall.

  If that looking-glass gets broke …

  If that looking-glass got broke, Ice Queen splinters would freeze her heart within her, putting an end to all attempts at weeping.

  Crack! Crack!

  Beneath the thin layer of ice was the cold dark water.

  She was below the ice, seeing light, hearing faint sounds, but unable to break through, unable to take a breath.

  Inside the copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses that she had given to Ben when he was a little boy, she had written From your loving sister. “The children sing in far Japan, ” picking out this line from “Singing,” seemingly knowing that Ben would travel to that country one day. It was a book without pictures, and when she had read the verses she had seen scenes from her own childhood, feeling that the poems had been about her. She wondered if he had the book in his room somewhere. There was still a “his” room. The previous lines of the poem, with even more seeming prescience, were The sailor sings of ropes and things/In ships upon the seas, but she had written what she had written because she had just been to see The Mikado with Charlotte.

  “When the bright lamp is carried in,

  The sunless hours again begin …”

  She reached her hands up and over her shoulders, and began to unhook the back of her dress.

  “… O’er all without, in field and lane,

  The haunted night returns again.

  “Now we behold the embers flee

  About the firelit hearth; and see

  Our faces painted as we pass,

  Like pictures, on the window-glass.

  “Must we to bed indeed? Well then,

  Let us arise and go like men …”

  – like men, like men, she must be like a man –

  “… And face with an undaunted tread …”

  – she must be undaunted, she must summon up the spirit of Lizzie Galliant, protectress from childhood –

  “… The long black passage up to bed.

  “Farewell, O brother, sister, sire!…”

  She let her dress slip down, and there were words …

  There were words …

  The words were – for a while – just out of her reach like the name of a snatch of remembered music, and then they came to her.

  Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees …

  Something like that.
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br />   Well, “rich” was wrong, but the sound was right. It was “The Eve of St. Agnes” again: Madeline preparing for sleep, hoping to receive visions of delight, as – unknown to her – Porphyro watched. Her rich attire crept rustling to her knees: half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, pensive awhile she dreamt awake.

  For a long time she had thought – it must have blighted many an afternoon at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls – that Porphyro had taken Madeline away to murder her. “Porphyria’s Lover” had somehow become conflated with Porphyro – Robert Browning fused with John Keats (a testament to the clarity of Miss Swanstrom’s teaching) – and she had pictured Madeline being strangled by her own hair on another night on which the wind blew. The feast that Porphyro had prepared in the chamber – especially the candied apple, the jellies, and the lucent syrops – had sounded ominously like the seductive, corrupting fruits of the goblin men. Her lover found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string he wound three times her little throat around and strangled her. He propped her head up on his shoulder, and all night long, as the wind raged, he sat unstirring with her corpse beside him.

  These lovers fled away into the storm.

  “… O wind, a-blowing all day long,

  O wind, that sings so loud a song!

  “I saw the different things you did,

  But always you yourself you hid.

  I felt you push, I heard you call,

  I could not see yourself at all –

  O wind, a-blowing all day long,

  O wind, that sings so loud a song!

  “O you that are so strong and cold,

  O blower, are you young or old?

  Are you a beast of field and tree,

  Or just a stronger child than me?…”

  She knew the answer to this one.

  She held up her hand in the childless schoolroom – I know! I know! Ask me! Ask me! – but nobody asked her.

  She saw the different things it did.

  She felt it push.

  She heard it call.

  It was strong and cold.

  It was not young.

  It was a beast.

  It was stronger than she was, and it was not a child.

  26

  She shifted her face a little to the left, and again studied the face of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the face of Edgar Allan Poe next to her reflection – she was drawn to the eyes – in the way that people had studied the face of her new baby brother twenty-five years ago. There was a special way of looking at the faces of babies, at the faces in old photographs, searching for likenesses between what was and what once had been. This was how she was looking at herself, trying to recognize someone she had once known.

  Why had Lewis Carroll kept to the usual red and white chess pieces, instead of changing them to black and white, to echo the black and white kittens, a Black Queen, a Black Knight? She imagined the king and queen playing chess on the Flemish tapestry in Dorian Gray’s schoolroom as black and white pieces, a white king holding a white king, and a white queen holding a black queen, as if shifting into her shadow. They moved across the tiles of the kitchen floor at nighttime, when everyone was asleep, creeping out like mice or cockroaches into the clock-ticking stillness.

  Sometimes, in darkness, in candlelight, she had looked into the mirror in an attempt to see Annie’s face, the dark reflection looking back into her eyes, the white piece opposite the black piece, like an object and its shadow. Shadow gave depth to substance. That was what her drawing teacher had told her.

  You had to have shadows, as if no day were sunless.

  To dream of seeing yourself in a mirror, denotes that you will meet many discouraging issues, and sickness will cause you distress and loss in fortune.

  It was Annie’s eyes that she could remember best.

  She felt like Madeline on St. Agnes’ Eve – January the twentieth: no wonder it had been so cold, no wonder it had been snowing – carrying out all the correct rituals in order to see the face of her beloved, the murderer who would carry her away to his haunted palace. Mrs. Alexander Diddecott always claimed that Halloween was the best night for this sort of thing, the night to produce the best results. You leaned over a bowl of water with a lighted candle – it had to be at midnight, as the clock was chiming – allowing the molten candle wax to drip into the water, and (she assured them) the fallen wax would harden into the initial of the man with whom you would fall in love, or (at the least) marry. You had to complete the action within the time that it took for the clock to strike twelve. If you failed to achieve this, you had to wait a whole year until the next St. Agnes’ Eve before you could do it again.

  Surely there’d be an excess of lovers whose names began with “I” or “O,” the most likely shapes for falling wax to form, eager jostling crowds of Ians and Osberts, Irwins and Orvilles, pushy lips confidently pursed for kissing? Were you allowed to move about a bit, attempting to write, like naughty, frostbite-defying small boys writing their names in the snow as they urinated (she sometimes saw rather more than she bargained for when she looked down from her high window), or was that cheating?

  “Me! Me! Me!” chorused the crowds of Ians and Osberts, the bustling throngs of Irwins and Orvilles.

  I am the man of your dreams!

  I am the lover foretold in the mystic midnight ceremony!

  In candlelight you leaned across the water, struggling to make out letters in the dimness, in Mr. Brczin’s consulting room on Indian Woods Road, in dire need of new spectacles.

  “I think it might be a ‘C.’ No, a ‘Q.’ It could be a ‘Q.’ Unless it’s a ‘D,’ or an ‘O’ …”

  The lenses grew thicker and thicker, the size and shape of portholes. You saw the dim reflection of yourself glinting on the surface of the water, a distant figure at the bottom of a well.

  Bong! the clock chimed hollowly, down in the hall.

  Bong!

  Twelve seconds, that was the only time you had in all the year to discover that name.

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Did you attempt (another part of the All-Hallows’ Eve fun, self-consciously preserving old traditions like a participant in a mummers’ play, a bell-jingling English morris dancer, or the choir in Under the Greenwood Tree) to sink your teeth into apples floating in the same water, risking mouthfuls of wax – Teuch! – chewing death masks, cannibalistic teeth closing on the initials of one’s beloved?

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Economically uniting two traditions in one, you could – in one continuous piece – cut the peel from the apple you’d retrieved from the water (removing it from your mouth first made this significantly easier), and throw it over your shoulder. It would fall – Madame Diddecott assured them – into the initial of the man who was the one for you, the Ian or Irwin or Isaac, the Osbert or (preferably not) Orville, the Ivor or (even worse) Oswald.

  Brace yourself, Ivan!

  Purse those lips, Oscar!

  You bear names with a favored letter.

  How likely was it that apple peel would form an “H” or an “E” or a “B”? Determined girls would peel and peel away if they’d set their hearts on Harold or Edward or (an interesting choice, this one, from a girl who liked a challenge) Brian – how many apples had Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster crunched his teeth into, like an Adam enthusiastically embracing sinfulness, waist-deep in browning, cidery-smelling peel? – and their families would be eating apple pies for months.

  Bong!

  Bong!

  They should have sent in Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster when they were demolishing the apple orchards. He’d have chewed his way through them in no time, peel hurtling over his shoulders, a combine harvester at full throttle, wrecking the little lost pockets of Paradise as comprehensively as a whole galaxy of Mrs. Albert Comstocks crashing cataclysmically to earth.

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Madeline leaned over the bowl of water, searching for the face of the man who was going
to murder her. It was so difficult to see clearly. Behind her, on the casement high and triple-arch’d, St. Agnes was depicted in the glass, three times over, with her threefold malformed lambs hugely leaping, their hooves sharpened for killing. In bed, supperless, lying upon her back, Madeline would look like the sculptur’d dead in the chapel, emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails: knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries, aching in icy hoods and mails.

  There were only a couple of seconds left!

  She peered closely, almost immersing her face in the water.

  She could see something!

  P!

  P!

  She could definitely see a “P.”

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Just in time.

  The man who would murder her had a name that began with a “P.”

  In another room, a similar room, a room not far away, Dr. Jekyll gazed into a cheval glass, weeping like a lost soul, searching for changes in his face, for the hidden monster that came from within him. He had the intense focused stare of a Narcissus who loathed his reflection, yet could not look away, mesmerized by his own eyes. Ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunkety plunky-plunk … In a room beyond this one, through the wall from Dr. Jekyll, each seeing the other as his own reflection, Dorian Gray stood in front of his portrait with a mirror, also searching for changes, the signs of aging. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. Dr. Jekyll sobbed in front of his reflection, seeing the dreadful thing he had become, and Dorian Gray smiled in front of his, seeing nothing but unchanging, ageless beauty. Order was reversed in his schoolroom, a place from within the Looking-glass House, and it had become a room in which a work of art aged, and a human being never altered. There should have been a portrait of himself in Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet alongside his cheval glass, a portrait that never changed in the way that Dorian Gray’s changed, an image of himself as he had once been. The reflection in the mirror would change, day by day it would change, altered by that which grew inside, even if the only change was that caused by time, and still he would sob, as the – this time – unchanging nature of art intensified the sense of his own fragile transience.