Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  The Reverend Goodchild was not just wrong about Mrs. Rochester, and about Dorian Gray’s portrait. He was wrong about Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde was not something huge, Frankenstein creature-like, as she had heard him claim. He was ever made uneasy by that “stein” (she had heard some of his comments about wonderful, ardent, dark-eyed Miss Stein) and it was probably this that had led to his also being wrong about Frankenstein’s creature. He thought that the unnamed creature was itself called Frankenstein, having assumed the name of its creator, absorbed him within itself, as Mr. Hyde had absorbed Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde, however, was something far more disturbing than this.

  Mr. Hyde was not a shambling monster, lurching clumsily within the unfamiliar clothing of its body.

  Mr. Hyde was the size of a child, a hunched and hideous child.

  He was the size of a deformed child dressed in adult clothing enormously too large for it – the trousers hanging on the legs and rolled up, the waist of the coat below his haunches, the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders – like the ill-dressed lunatics in Hard Cash. It was as if – like Dorian Gray – he had had his childhood stolen from him, and this had turned him into something misshapen and revolting, horrible – most horrible – to look upon, his stunted body reflecting the ugliness of his malnourished mind. There was no mention of Henry Jekyll’s childhood in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, apart from the brief comment – just after he had thought himself saved – that he had thought of his life as a whole, following it up from the days of childhood, when he had walked with his father’s hand. That was the one memory of his childhood: himself as a child walking hand in hand with his father.

  Walking where?

  Walking to what?

  The descriptions of Edward Hyde were the descriptions of a child – smaller, slighter, younger, than Henry Jekyll – in whom something had gone horribly wrong, and made him monstrous, a thing with a haunting sense of unexpressed deformity.

  That child of Hell had nothing human.

  That was what Henry Jekyll had said.

  (Father Hell, the sinful priest come forth to acknowledge his sin-born child – this thing of darkness he acknowledged his – stepped out from the shadows with Franz Mesmer. He was holding steel implements in both hands, and they glinted slightly. They’d dazzle in full light, perfect for the application of mesmerism. Once you’d got them to take their clothes off, it wasn’t too difficult to get them to agree to having the steel applied to their naked bodies. Turn around! That was what they were whispering in unison. Turn around! They whispered so quietly that anyone hearing them would turn around, thinking that they were responding to promptings from within their own minds.)

  Child.

  “Young Hyde” was what Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, called him, as if his youth were the most horrible thing about him.

  “Master Hyde” was what he called him.

  The first time Mr. Hyde entered the novella, he calmly crushed a girl of eight or ten under his feet, and left her screaming on the ground, a man attempting to destroy what reminded him of childhood, though – in truth – he scarcely seemed aware of what he had done, trampling through her as if she were not there at all, a childhood that had never been. Mr. Utterson had nightmares about him, and saw the little figure glide stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly, and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through the wider labyrinths of a lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it.

  He did not have the mirror that Dr. Jekyll had, the mirror unstained by breath, in which he might see the reflection of that for which he sought, the thing that was pale and dwarfish, the thing that gave an impression of deformity without any namable malformation.

  Mr. Hyde entered Dr. Jekyll’s house through the blistered and stained door that was on the dark, hidden side of the house, in a by-street, the door without bell or knocker, the door that led into the dissecting-room. That was how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde began, with the section entitled “Story of the Door.” That was the Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You door, the door that she sometimes saw as the door of their house on Chestnut Street, the looking-glass door of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s house on Park Place, the door that was every door in Longfellow Park, with gleaming, grinning, G. G. Schiffendecken false-teeth door knockers.

  She had knocked.

  The door had been Opened Unto her.

  It was a door that was opened in the way that the lid of Pandora’s box was lifted, driven open by the powers of what lay within.

  She saw the small grotesque figure – Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray – bent over in the schoolroom, at the desk, its face hidden, very still, conscious of wrongdoing and not wishing to be seen, flooded in red light. When it moved, it would be a crab-like scuttling from shadow to shadow. It was writing and writing and writing, as obsessively as a thing that could never stop, the one task that remained for it to do.

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  The only part of his original character that remained to Henry Jekyll, when he changed into Edward Hyde and was unable to change back again, was his handwriting. Perhaps he was writing his name over and over, to remind himself of who he really was, though the shriveled child he saw in the mirror was not that person. In this, wasn’t he like anyone else, looking into a mirror and seeing a strange reflection that was not the person inside, feeling this more and more powerfully as the years went by, as the reflection aged?

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll …

  “That’s me,” Henry Jekyll thought, lingering over the curve in the letter “J” and the “y”s, touching the loops of the “k” and the “l”s, as though the handwriting were more real than he was. He wrote slowly and carefully, lingering over each letter caressingly, like someone who had to think about the spelling, trying to write in his most beautiful handwriting, attempting to create an attractiveness about the name that had vanished forever from the person it had once defined.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll …

  That’s me. That’s me.

  (Edward Hyde.

  (That’s what he heard from the whispering inside himself.

  (Edward Hyde.

  (Edward Hyde …

  (That’s what he saw reflected in the mirror.)

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll …

  He wrote the same words over and over, like a badly behaved schoolboy set a copying task by a schoolmaster as a punishment, writing the same lines repeatedly for hour after hour. They were the words of a lesson he had failed to learn, or an admonition to be memorized and never forgotten, Hyde-bound by the malformed and terrifying child that he had become. He tried to write his name exactly the same each time he wrote it, the letters precisely the same size, the angles and whorls as identical as thumbprints or fingerprints repeatedly impressed from the same hand.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll.

  Henry Jekyll …

  (I must NOT …

  (That’s what he should have been writing, carrying out the imposition he had been given to avoid further chastisement.

  (I must NOT …

  (I must NOT …

  (That was the lesson that ought to have been learned by heart.

  (As he wrote out the lines he became less and less conscious of what it was he was writing, seeing nothing but the unwritten whiteness between the words, rather than the words themselves.)

  He existed in what he had written, not in who he was.

  What he had written he would leave behind him, and what he was would cease to be.

  As he wrote, he wept, and it was not the weeping of a child. It was the sound that Poole had heard through the locked door of his master’s cabinet, the sound that was like the weeping of a woman or a lost soul, the weeping that came away upon his
heart, and made the butler himself wish to weep.

  When the bright lamp is carried in,/The sunless hours again begin.

  These were night thoughts.

  27

  All that she could hear was the wind, and the windblown snow pattering against the windows. Linnaeus’s painting, hanging on the wall opposite, was reflected in the mirror. There it was, above and beyond the face of Edgar Allan Poe, the face of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, like a glimpse into another room, distant, out of reach, hanging in a corridor in the Looking-glass House, its emptiness deepening a sense of inner silence.

  She turned, and walked over to it.

  Most nights, most mornings, she stood in front of it for a while.

  It was not a painting that became unseen in the room, a part of the furniture, not seen because seen so often. Like a window, like a door, it was something of which she was always aware, opened anew each day to something different. It was not there for its size, for its color, for its blending in with what was already present.

  She felt the sensation that she had felt that morning in the hall, just after she had imagined the copy of the Hudson Valley Chronicle lying on the tiles, with the engravings of The Bearded Ones, and thought of the words of “Goblin Market,” the two sisters, Lizzie and Laura.

  … That night long Lizzie watched by Laura,

  Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,

  Felt for her breath,

  Held water to her lips, and cooled her face

  With tears and fanning leaves …

  “I am Lizzie Galliant,” she said, repeating the words she had said before she had gone down to Annie’s room on another night of snow, the words she had not said for years. “Strong men fall powerless before me! I have the power that alone belongs to women! Men’s beards will burst into flame at my approach and flare wondrously!”

  It would be like the scene of the dancing in She, where the mummified corpses of the long-dead were set ablaze like enormous flaming torches to act as illumination, or the scene in Quo Vadis? where Nero illuminated his pleasure gardens with the blazing bodies of living Christians. The Bearded Ones – a more entertaining spectacle – would, after flaring wondrously, explode like Guy Fawkes Night fireworks. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, Dr. Vaniah Odom, G. G. Schiffendecken, the Reverend Goodchild, Papa: all would fizz like Roman candles, flaring stars rocketing up into the sky.

  “Did you say Roman?” Dr. Vaniah Odom hissed waspishly as he ignited, not pleased, not pleased at all, as he shot skyward.

  Whooosh!

  Whooosh!

  Whooosh!

  It was the apocalyptic end of Through the Looking-Glass, as Alice pulled the tablecloth with both hands, crashing plates, dishes, and guests to the floor, as bottles flew about, and candles soared up to the ceiling, exploding into stars, as if Alice had slept right through to the following night, the night of the fireworks.

  Whooosh!

  Whooosh!

  Whooosh!

  It was the wrong ending, from the wrong book, but she wanted to say the words she had said so often as a child, lashing out with clenched fists at the air in front of her.

  “Stuff and nonsense!”

  “I won’t!”

  “Who cares for you?”

  “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

  She was taller now, more of a height with her adversaries, and she should grow her nails long, like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. She should unclench her fists, and lash out with her nails, aiming at throats, at eyes. They would be within reach now.

  As she stood in front of Linnaeus’s painting, the crackling and the explosions, the oohs and the aahs, the acrid gunpowder smell, the frightened shouted words, all faded away. She was aware of nothing but the scene in front of her, a painting of the room in which she stood, the large painting another mirror, reflecting an interior in which she did not exist. Her breathing was stilled – breath misted glass – as she looked into the Looking-glass House of the painting. She did not stand too close to it, holding back a little, feeling that she was above a great height, and might fall into it.

  Like all Linnaeus’s paintings, the scene contained no human figure, but its title was a person’s name. All the pictures hanging in Delft Place had this same style. They were conversation pieces without the human figures, paintings of silence, and most were of interiors. Charlotte – his painting of his sister – showed the window at which Charlotte sat as she looked out on to the Hudson, sewing, reading, writing letters, sorting her little collections. Mother was the piazza on a summer’s day, a cane chair, and the telescope. Father was a painting of an empty field – the cloud-filled sky seemed to go on forever – near a small copse, a place she did not recognize. The painting that bore his own name, his last painting – he had named it Linnaeus, and not Self Portrait, making it appear that he was not Linnaeus – was yet another of the empty, drapeless, bare-boarded, white-doored rooms at Delft Place, the rooms he painted over and over, rooms lined with his own paintings. You did not feel that the paintings were of the interiors around them; you felt that the interiors were designed to match the paintings, a representation of some inner place, close, just out of reach. The rooms became stiller as they were gazed upon. There was no sound, no movement, and all around became suffused with their unpeopled emptiness. If she looked hard enough at the empty rooms and deserted landscapes, if she concentrated on the unpopulated places where people once had been, she sometimes felt that she would be able to see these absent people. If she didn’t see Charlotte, if she didn’t see Mother or Father, she might begin to see Linnaeus in every painting, even if the paintings bore the names of other people.

  He had not sold any of his paintings. They were not the sort of paintings that people wished to buy. He had sometimes made a little money – as with the cloud-covered skies for Henry Walden Gauntlett, the glories of the angels for the Reverend Calbraith – by carrying out little jobs that required some artistic ability, like Miss Iandoli adding to the earnings she made from teaching piano-playing by hand-coloring photographs. She imagined Linnaeus walking about at first light, when no one would see him, carrying a palette with only two colors upon it, and renewing the red and the black of the signs all around Longfellow Park. Keep Off, Keep Off, he’d paint over and over again. Beware. If he’d still been alive, it would probably have been Linnaeus who would have been hired to paint the giant Mozart on Megoran Road. He would have painted the right music in the sky. He had been meticulous about that sort of thing.

  Soave sia il vento,

  Tranquilla sia l’onda …

  The breezes would be gentle, the sea would be calm, as the two young women prayed for those they loved.

  The paintings reminded her of Ida Brook’s room after she had died. She and Charlotte had gone to see Ida’s mother, to express their condolences. Ida hadn’t really been a friend of theirs, and that was one of the reasons why they had gone: feelings of remorse, things they had said, things they hadn’t said (this last above all). Ida had seemed in perpetual hopeful search of a close friend.

  “Would you like to see the room in which she died?” the mother had suddenly asked – not waiting for a reply – after their faltering attempts at conversation had faded into silence, and they had been led upstairs to gaze in silence, another silence, at a room in which they had never been before, trying to feel something, that someone had died there, trying to think of what to say. The drapes had been partially closed across the slightly opened window, the blind partly lowered, as if an invalid was still there, shielded from too bright a light, and the bed was neatly made, the sheets and blankets so tightly drawn across that no one could have lain inside them. Tip-tap. Tip-tap. She had spent the time trying to detect the source of the slight tapping she could hear, and then realized that it was the pull on the end of the blind cord. The little wooden acorn was rattling against the sash bar. Tip-tap. Tip-tap. Death was silence.

  “Ida Brook! Ida Brook!” She faintly heard Miss Swanstrom’s voice raised for
one last time in weary expostulation at the unparalleled dimness and clumsiness of Ida Brook.

  For one last time she heard Ida Brook’s voice.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “I’ve died. Oh dear. How on earth did that happen? Mama will be so upset.”

  She would never hear Ida Brook’s voice again, never see that clumsy, galumphing girl clodhopping about with tousled hair and ink-stained fingers. The mother had closed the door behind them as they entered, and Alice had felt stifled, oppressed, despite the open window. It was too tidy a room for Ida Brook to live in. That was the main thing she thought. How little she’d been affected by the death of someone she’d known. How small a space was occupied by the living.

  Alice always closed the door of any room in which she found herself, but the doors at Delft Place – like the doors in the paintings – were always left open, leading into further rooms beyond, and rooms beyond those, illuminated by the light from unseen windows. Someone was expected to call at any moment, and no barrier was to be placed in his way as he stepped into the interior.

  Alice – Charlotte had given her the painting for her thirtieth birthday – was a meticulous representation of the schoolroom, the room in which she lived her life, though a room from which she was absent. It was as if she was being remembered by what she had left behind her after she had ceased to exist: the windows, the mirror, the bed, the bookcases, the golden stars from All Saints’, the broken figures and pieces of glass from the Shakespeare Castle, the papers, the Huntley & Palmer’s tin, the writing materials, the unpublished novels and stories. She loved this painting, seeing her surroundings, without herself being there, a great weight lifted – a great oppression toppled – by her absence.