Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  28

  She walked across to the window that looked out from the back of the house, and took up the position she had assumed that morning. As the wind gusted, snow was flung against the windows, like handfuls of gravel thrown to gain attention.

  She opened her hand as she stood there, and looked at her reflection in the mirror on Annie’s ring, as she sometimes did at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, when it seemed to take away the sound from all around her. She held it up close to her face, so that all she could see was her own eye looking back at her. It was her Pinkerton badge of office, flourished imperiously to open doors that would otherwise be barred. We Never Sleep, that was what the unblinking eye promised, a future of perpetual dreamlessness, in which all nights would be spent watching those who were suspected, taking notes, thinking, building up evidence.

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  When you’d seen the right things, heard the right words, you moved in to put an end to what had to be stopped, the guilty vanishing from the world as the narrow barred windows closed in around them.

  She brought the looking-glass ring closer, closer, until the eye began to blur. She was looking for a little white reflection on the iris, as if it would be there at nighttime, the memory of the light that had been shining in through a window in daylight. In photographs, in paintings, windows that were not visible were sensed in that tiny glimmer, opening out the enclosed room into the wider world beyond. The subjects of Henry Walden Gauntlett’s photographs – grouped in front of their cloud-filled skies – all had this brightness in the upper part of the eye, a little to one side, on the verge of tears. He said that it brought them to life, gave them humanity, and discarded any photographs in which he had failed to capture this effect. They had died without that light.

  He had told Kate this when she was learning about photography from him, one of the mysteries of his art. Alice remembered the occasions on which she had been to his studio, to be photographed with her family, feeling that she and her sisters were back at Carlo Fiorelli’s being photographed for The Children’s Hour. She tried not to think of these photographs. She had thought that people would live longer since photography had been invented, their faces remaining after they were dead, but – somehow – the opposite was true. There was a new sadness now because of photographs, even of the living. You seemed to be more aware of change, the perpetual impermanence of being, the ever-aging reflections in the looking-glasses. In the Looking-glass world of the White Queen the inhabitants lived their lives backward, and memory worked both ways. Memories of the future intruded into the present. The Queen – she practiced believing in impossible things – screamed before the brooch pricked her finger; the bleeding came later, with no screams, as the pain had already been experienced. In a similar looking-glass reversal, Alice felt – it was what Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster made her feel – that her past lay before her, and not behind her. All that would happen, all that she would become, was shaped by what had already been, and what had already been could not be changed. She would travel through her life, to find her past moving backward toward her from the future, and she would relive all that had already happened. She looked for the little gleam of whiteness, a glimpse of an emptiness within, trying to remember if there had been a similar gleam in Annie’s eyes, a similar emptiness.

  “Only it is so very lonely here!”

  That was what Alice had said to the White Queen.

  She gazed at the little dot of whiteness on the iris, gazing into this void, until the whiteness seemed to move out toward her, and the features of the face dissolved. Whoever was there in the photograph could no longer be seen, and all she saw was the whiteness, like a nothingness inside them, this little gleam that gave them life. Emptiness and absence drew memories out of her, like magic-lantern projections onto a white screen: the former orchards, now featureless snow-covered building lots; the space above the trees, where the tower of the Shakespeare Castle had once been. It was an image captured on a photograph, one of those blurred ghost figures – not fully there, not quite absent – of someone walking in a street whilst it was being photographed, someone who had not stayed motionless for the duration of the exposure. She had seen such photographs, some of Kate’s studies: the sharply delineated buildings, the transparent, transient, fading human beings. It was strange to see ghosts walking in sunlight, their faint outlines, their blurred features. Ghosts should disappear in sunshine, the way that shadows disappeared with the coming of clouds. Ghosts were shadows, thrown by the shape of the person who saw them. New York City was changing so rapidly that anyone who had been there for some time would see all streets like this, the buildings become as ghostly as the human figures, as short-lived. In street after street, block after block, the buildings – demolished, swept away in weeks, days – would exist only in the memory, people seeing what had once been there, mistily superimposed over what now existed. If she went back to Grandpapa’s office, retraced her Gulliver’s journey on the day she had traveled into the realm of The Bearded Ones, she would become another Rip Van Winkle (beardless, deprived of power) as she wandered lost amongst the vanished buildings, the vanished streets, the whole districts that had vanished forever, unable to recognize where she was. There would be rows of houses which she would never have seen before, and those which had been familiar would have disappeared. There would be towers in the sky that had not been there before, a deeper darkness in the ghost-crowded streets. Strange names would be over the doors, strange faces at the windows, everything would be strange. She’d be staring around, speechless and lost.

  She had seen such photographs, also, when Mrs. Alexander Diddecott produced alleged evidence that ghosts existed, and manifestations during séances (Alice wasn’t sure whether these, also, qualified as ghosts), pointing triumphantly at the semitransparent misty figures of men and women awkwardly posed on twilight staircases or in empty rooms. When they appeared alongside the living they appeared to be superimposed from another dimension, unaware of the others around them, their introspective eyes not quite looking in the right direction, not quite looking at the right angle. All of them had a blurry radiance around their faces, like the glowing nimbuses of the saints in the stained glass windows of All Saints’, sanctified because they were dead. When they spoke – Mrs. Alexander Diddecott assured her that they sometimes spoke (she had tried to persuade Charlotte to come with her, to speak with her dead brother) – Alice imagined that they spoke with the voice of a ventriloquist’s manipulated figure, the voice of Dum-Dum the Dummy.

  You can’t stop me talking.

  You can never stop me talking.

  Dum-Dum says what must be said.

  The dead have to speak.

  It seemed that – seeing these images in the other, outdoor photographs – the streets were ghost-crowded, the figures of the dead passing unseen in daylight amidst the living they outnumbered.

  The Reverend Goodchild had a line of similar photographs in the Sunday-school room, a whole row of Children Who Had Found the Lord and Been Saved. They looked not unlike Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s winsome waifs, but with added smugness. “I’ve been saved!” they were declaring. “And you haven’t!” Only considerable self-control, you felt, kept them from thrusting out their tongues mockingly at the doomed, like – a daunting visualization, possible only in the most capacious of minds – massed mocking rows of Serenity Goodchilds and Myrtle Comstocks. Alice – her soul was undoubtedly damned, and she’d end up comparing notes in hell with Dr. Faustus, both of them sulky and complaining, like ill-mannered captains of losing teams – couldn’t stop herself seeing “Saved” in sporting terms. In photograph after photograph she imagined mud-stained men – dressed for football or baseball (many of them favored stripes), blurred with movement in front of a net or beside a white line – triumphantly holding up the Children Who Had Found the Lord. “Saved!” they were shouting, breathless but triumphant. “Saved!” Being Saved seemed, unfortunately, to result – almost immediately – in d
eath. The realization grew upon you as you studied the details of the Saved beneath each photograph, the throb-throbbing details of virtuous deathbed speeches unparalleled since the time when Dickens had shamelessly committed Nellicide (though Little Eva had jealously tried her best in Uncle Tom’s Cabin). This was not much of an incentive for good behavior to the seething mob of juveniles crammed into the Sunday-school. No wonder Mabel Peartree had such difficulty in controlling them.

  Annie had not been photographed. There were no photographs of Annie, unless – somewhere – she was captured in a ghost-photograph as she trudged toward Washington Square, a wraith like a shadow in the street, barely seen against the sidewalk. Alice thought again of the lack of photographs in her room, she and her family people who had never been. There was the memory of a voice, eyes in a fading face.

  She …

  She couldn’t …

  She couldn’t really …

  She couldn’t really remember Annie all that well, though she attempted to persuade herself that she could.

  There.

  She’d put it into words.

  Annie, where art thou?

  Her eyes were as dark as the pips of a pear.

  “Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.”

  That was the title of the song she had been trying to remember, though now that she remembered the song she didn’t think that the line about the eyes being as dark as the pips of a pear came from it. She had been convinced that it did. She could hear the voices singing from across Park Place.

  “I am a broken-hearted milkman, in grief I’m arrayed

  Through keeping of the company of a young servant maid

  Who lived on board and wages the house to keep clean,

  In a gentleman’s family near Paddington Green.

  “She was as beautiful as a butterfly

  And proud as a Queen

  Was pretty little Polly Perkins

  Of Paddington Green …”

  Pretty little Annie Clement of Longfellow Park.

  … With a smile upon her countenance

  And a laugh in her eye.

  If I thought that she loved me

  I’d have laid down to die …

  “… The man that has me must have silver and gold …”

  – that was what Polly Perkins had said –

  “… A chariot to ride in and be handsome and bold.

  His hair must be curly as any watch-spring,

  And his whiskers as big as a brush for clothing …”

  The skylight was covered in settled snow, as it had been on the night she had gone down to Annie’s room, and on the morning after the 1888 blizzard had begun. She felt that the whole house was buried beneath a huge drift. If she opened the window, snow would avalanche inward, and fill the room, hissing briefly on the lamp before bringing darkness. It would be like an icy version of the ashes that covered Pompeii, bringing death by eternal winter, and she would be found curled up within, perfectly preserved with her possessions scattered about her, just as she had imagined Annie that morning, lying choked with cinders. Their two bodies should be side by side, their arms wrapped around each other protectively, a statue caught forever in a frozen moment.

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

  Did you miss me?

  Come and kiss me.

  Never mind the bruises, hug me, kiss me …

  There would be a great, white silence, and the wide swathes of snow with no footprints. Mama and Papa would be many feet above them, wrapped in furs, watching as the men that they had summoned dug down through the thick-packed snow. The horses hitched to the sled, sensing the atmosphere, frightened by the approach of the wolves, shied nervously, and their bells jingled.

  “My daughter!” Mama was calling. “Save my daughter!”

  Allegra and Edith had been thrown to the circling wolves, anything to keep them at bay a little longer, to buy the time necessary to save her favorite child. The wolves munched halfheartedly. What they were eating didn’t taste very appetizing, but they were hungry. The spades of the diggers became a frantic blur. They knew that they were racing against time. Papa would be hurtled wolfward next. It would be their last chance. Apart from the sheer pleasure of seeing him being devoured – Munch! went the wolves’ salivating jaws. Munch! Munch! Crunch! (the Crunch! was the first mouthful of head) – there was the distinct possibility that his flesh would poison them, and that they would choke on the mighty snow-stiffened beard. The munching and howling would be replaced by retching, reeling, and writhing, so much more enjoyably alliterative. After Reeling and Writhing there would be Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Papa was so educational. Alice squatted amongst the rocks, looking up at the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Her feet were tiny.

  From below her, deep within the house, she heard the muffled chiming of a clock. It had been hours since she’d settled Mama for the night. She’d been upset, thinking of Ben going away. Alice didn’t count how many chimes there were, but it was a prolonged sequence, a late-night eleven or twelve o’clock chime.

  Tick, tock, tick, tock.

  His life seconds numbering,

  Tick, tock, tick, tock.

  It stopped short

  Never to go again,

  When the old man died.

  No clock had stopped when Papa had died, not even the wall clock with the snow-obliterated face in his study. Unseen behind the glass the hands had turned the same as always, the pendulum swung from side to side with the same regular rhythm.

  Tick, tock, tick, tock.

  29

  The Reverend Goodchild had made himself sound unusually beneficent when he had explained that the bodies of those buried in All Saints’ graveyard were to be exhumed and reinterred in the fashionable new cemeteries. It was most magnanimous of him: the bank – having bought the land – might have been prepared to pay extra for the novelty of sinking its vaults amidst the bodies, the sides of the coffins forming unusual paneling for a subterranean boardroom. Every business benefited from new and novel ideas, and there would have been an undoubted frisson from handling dazzlingly polished gold bars and crisp new bank notes amidst the decay of the dead. Here the Websters would feel at home. They would rent a vault for private use, and grin unrestrainedly, unleashing their golden gleams with no fear of their smiles being smashed and grabbed by opportunist thugs. They would save up their jokes for these safe, private moments. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s upper canine – more and more fully displayed – would lull Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max into hypnotized forgetfulness. Their red and yellow flags would droop.

  In the spring, when the ground was no longer too frozen to dig, the coffins would be removed, and it would be like the Day of Judgment in the graveyard, as the mounds of fresh soil mounted amidst the gravestones, and the bodies were drawn up out of the earth.

  Papa would be rising from his grave, as if he’d never been dead.

  Albert Comstock was buried – safely at a distance – over at Woodlawn Cemetery, like Reynolds Templeton Seabright, where the monuments were bigger and grander, more worthy of the colossi therein interred, but Papa was at All Saints’, only a short walk away. She would be able to go across to the graveyard during the exhumations and prod his bones, to make sure that he was dead. Just in case. She did not see them as white bones, bright in the blackness. They were thick and darkly furred, partially gnawed, meat still adhering, shunned by retching predators.

  Papa would be rising like a resurrection, a Lazarus who had lain in the grave for fifteen years, not four days – “Lord, by this time he stinketh” – bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face bound about with a napkin. Faintly, warningly, there was – on the very edge of hearing – the sound of a chamber quartet playing on odd instruments, a tune that brought its words inescapably to mind. Toe to foot, foot to ankle, ankle to leg, leg to knee, knee to thigh, thigh to hip, hip to back, back to shoulder …

  Dem bones. Dem dry bones.

  Your s
houlder bone connected to your neck bone,

  Your neck bone connected to your head bone,

  I hear the word of the Lord!

  Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’

  Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’

  Dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk aroun’

  I hear the word of the Lord!

  There were only two bodies with their family name that she knew in the graveyard at All Saints’. One of them was Papa’s, and one of them was the body of someone she had never known in life, someone who had died at the moment when she herself had been born. It was the body of her unnamed twin sister.

  The Pinkertons were lucky, Alice supposed, in losing only one child, unless there were others that Papa did not think worthy of remembering, others that he had long since forgotten. He seemed to have forgotten those who were living, so why not those that were dead?

  Perhaps she did have the gift, and really was the seventh child of a seventh child (there were aunts and uncles of whom she had never been told, though it was a struggle to think of Papa as a child). The little skeletons buried in the garden – they would be there somewhere, in the earth beneath neatly labeled plants, crunch, crunch, crunch – were not the skeletons of birds, not the forgotten nest that Catherine Linton had discovered in the wintertime. This was why she had the power to interpret dreams, the power to read clouds and pictures. Her twin sister’s gravestone was the size of a milestone, the few words upon it as terse as an indication of distance: Infant Daughter of Lincoln and Lucinda Pinkerton (this was the only place where she had ever seen her parents’ Christian names side by side) 19th March 1868. If she were the seventh child of a seventh child, there would have to be five others buried in the garden to make up the total of the six sisters who had been born and died before her.