Pinkerton's Sister (13 page)

“Lean forward a little more,” powerful rivals would order peremptorily, and Papa — ever mindful of the importance of contacts — would meekly obey, allowing them to check that false teeth had been correctly inserted, and the most capacious of nostrils kept entirely free of æsthetically displeasing lumpish obstructions. They’d grasp his ears firmly, adjusting the angle of the bald head to their complete satisfaction, as if it were a mirror on a swivel stand.

Her childhood was so long ago that there had been engravings in newspapers in those days, not photographs. (Her childhood was so long ago that it had been in a time when all men had sported beards as a symbol of their maleness. Women thrust out their bosoms, and men their beards: thus were the sexes differentiated.) Doré came to mind again, Papa pictured in (how appropriate) some new circle of hell, some lesser-known Old Testament legend.

The faces of the men were as crosshatched as the engraving on a high-value bank note, meticulously shaded, creating an illusion of depth. The beards were money, and smelled of money, rustling against the face with the smell of all the places where they had been, dirty notes crinkled in tightly grasped handfuls, money slapped down and fanned out challengingly like winning hands at cards displayed by someone who had cheated. They were greasy bank notes with ragged edges, money that had been doubtfully obtained, and folded away in wads, hoarded in dark places for far too long. The beards were almost obsessively detailed, individual hairs drawn and differentiated in precise detail, whilst their ears, in contrast, were oddly unfinished, simply rimmed like manufactured objects — ear trumpets, the interiors of gramophone horns, the thin handles of fragile bone-china teacups — rather than something human, blank and featureless on the inside, blurring into smooth shadows. She could daintily grasp the proffered handle between finger and thumb, and tip it toward her mouth, her whole head tilting, drinking down the bitter contents of the head.

They were the faces of long ago, and they were the faces of long to be.

They stretched back not only the twenty-five years to when she was ten, well back into the previous century, but to many centuries before that. Their faces stared out with the implacable patriarchal confidence of obscure prophets from the Old Testament, warning of what must be, what had to be, what would be, carved in rock like the Ten Commandments, to be obeyed without question, ancestral voices. “Behold!” Malachi cried, pushing himself forward, as if what they had to behold was himself, elbowing the LORD aside and appropriating His words. “I shall do this!” He brought ashes without sackcloth, and his beard was as packed as a factory ashpit. Until recently, a beard appeared to have been a necessary qualification for becoming president, and even Queen Victoria — in fleeting memories of photographs — seemed to have the sort of face that ought to have had a beard, in the way that some faces looked incomplete without spectacles. She probably had a beard worn in private, on intimate royal occasions, passed on to her son — like the crown — as part of the royal regalia. There would be a special attachment, tastefully monogrammed by the royal jeweler — coat of arms tastefully displayed — to fasten the beard and crown together. One was incomplete without the other.

The five faces were eminently respectable male faces, like the faces of surgeons around an operating theatre table, or the managing directors of a successful manufacturing company that was the major employer in some small Midwest town. They were the stern upholders of morality and family values, but with a hint of carefully implied warmth and compassion in their eyes.

Bearded as they were, the expressions on their faces were exactly the same as the expressions on the faces of the middle-aged women in the illustrations for corset designs in the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue.

All around Longfellow Park the five bearded worthies, risen to greet the dawn, gamboled in the freedom and comfort of expertly fitted corsetry, their faces dignified and remote, their gazes untroubled, confident in the rightness of what they were doing. Each had his left hand resting loosely on his left hip, and strolled little distances to and fro, swaying with a natural grace, his womanly poise enhanced by the manly confidence which the possession of a beard confers.

To the sound of their own inner music — whether of Brahms, of Bizet, or (they had the beards for this) Tchaikowsky, Mussorgsky, or Rimsky-Korsakoff — the other Bearded Ones, the men of Longfellow Park, fully armed in the dignity of their corsets, their eyes unfocused, looking far, far away, lost in some world known only to themselves, breathed and moved and had their being.

Tum, tum, tum, tum, ti-tum …

Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti, tum …

Tum-ti-tum, tum-ti tum-ti tum-ti, tum-ti-tum …

There was some other music, just on the very edge of hearing. It wasn’t Tchaikowsky. It wasn’t Mussorgsky. It wasn’t Rimsky-Korsakoff …

The music was surely the music of Bizet, it suddenly occurred to her. Faintly at first, and then louder and louder, a pianist began to pick out the opening notes of Carmen’s first aria. By the little decorative flourishes, she recognized that the pianist was Emmerson Columbarian, playing at the entrance of Columbarian & Horowitz, his father’s music store on Hudson Row.

The five men were Albert Comstock, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, the Reverend Goodchild, G. G. Schiffendecken, and her father.

G. G. Schiffendecken had never been on the Board of Governors of Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls, and had not arrived in Longfellow Park until about five years ago, but there he was with the others, as if he had known them all his life. All five now had acacia flowers clasped in the corners of their mouths, rather like cigars, and moved forward with large bouquets peeping out provocatively from the bosoms of their corsets. Seductive, slow and sleepy in the sunshine, the lotus-lulled lovelies languorously braided their beards, like mermaids lingeringly brushing their hair with underwater lassitude. With a sultry haughtiness they placed both hands upon their hips, and, moving as one, began to sway their bodies erotically, their heads raised in taunting contempt for all the young men who gazed upon them, fascinated and lost. Their voices, as they sang, were superbly true soprano voices, rich and throaty, vibrant with passion.

Now a full orchestra was playing.

As they moved before her, proudly flaunting their magnificent bodies, lost in the rhythm of the music, she vividly remembered the startling illustrations for what was coyly described as “The Winter Package” in the Fall and Winter editions of the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue, issued at the end of September. It was a part of the mysterious patterns of the seasons, the signs of an approaching winter: squirrels gathered hazelnuts, the great flocks of migrating birds darkened the skies, bears retreated into caves, and the women of America ordered their warm vests and drawers from Lindstrom & Larsson to ensure their survival in the coldness that lay before them. In this catalogue, middle-aged women — decorous and dignified expressions on their faces, no doubt to dispel any misunderstanding about their motivations — held out two woolen vests and five pairs of woolen drawers neatly lined up across their extended right arms, like worshipers with votive offerings, or thoughtful hostesses offering a tidbit to a particularly favored guest. The intended effect was so thoroughly wholesome that you half expected the women to be giving a jolly wave with their free left hands, though this — perhaps — might imperil the precious cargo by unbalancing the pose.

There was a double-page spread of this mass display of drawers — the effect was rather overwhelming — and what she remembered most of all about it, as an impressive example of the high moral tone on which Lindstrom & Larsson prided themselves, was that — although “The Winter Package” consisted of three vests and six pairs of drawers — the women in the illustration, without exception, proudly held out just two vests and five pairs of drawers, to make absolutely clear to the reader that the women — clad in chemises and smiling winsomely — were securely enclosed within the third vest, and the sixth pair of drawers. This, no doubt, was to avoid unseemly speculation on the part of any male (particularly the young, vulnerable, adolescent male) who — by accident or design — had strayed into these delicate pages of the catalogue, and become inflamed, a weakness to which their sex was prone.

Marching in perfect unison, the massed ranks of drawer-displaying Bearded Ones, the corseted Carmens, appeared over the horizon, and began to converge on Longfellow Park, to join the vanguard of their illustrious army in Hudson Row, their right arms extended like the military salute in some South American dictatorship, the fanned-out underwear like playing cards about to be shuffled for some esoteric variation of
vingt-et-un
. With their left hands they caressed the lower parts of their left breasts, a repeated fondling left-to-right gesture, like a coded Masonic signal. The drawers trembled as their bodies vibrated to the perfectly pitched soprano voices of the wanton temptresses they had become, and the young men who lined the streets were driven into a frenzy by their animal allure.

The sun was blotted out as bouquets — still warm with the heat from within the bosoms of the corsets — vests in sets of two, and drawers in sets of five, were flung high into the air to land at the feet of the chosen objects of desire.

It was the music that made them do it.

Albert Comstock looked in fine form for a man who had died a month or so before her father. He favored the Hilda corset, cut especially for the fuller figure, its amply proportioned gussets in a tasteful shade of green, small floral motifs adding a discreet color contrast. With quiet pride he paraded to and fro, far from the haunts of man on the edge of Indian Woods near the Ivansaans’ farm, displaying the same neat economy of movement that characterized the way he tipped flour into the scales in his store, or briskly swung paper bags around twice between his fingers when they were filled with apples. His dimpled upper arms were freckled by the sunlight through the branches, and there was a little moue of concentration on his face as he strove to achieve the outward expression of his inner serenity, the low morning light sending long shadows from the trees out across the grass, and glinting on his garters as they swung in the bright air. He was several hundred pounds of pullulating womanhood, more of a woman than his wife would ever be. Across Hilda’s ample bosom — tastefully embroidered for a modest extra payment — were the words
COMSTOCK’S COMESTIBLES: “SERVICE WITH SINCERITY!”

Above
SINCERITY!
his teeth glinted with insincerely exposed fulsomeness.

For several enjoyable weeks, Emmerson Columbarian had striven to convince her — with supportive evidence — that Albert Comstock and his wife were really one and the same person, Humpty Dumpty (to whom each bore a remarkable resemblance) rather than Tweedledum and Tweedledee. There was something unfocused and distant about Albert Comstock’s face, as if his surroundings were not really there.

G. G. Schiffendecken — the hugely false-toothed dentist, all teeth fully on show — moved with co-ordinated grace under the glass canopies of the stores on the west side of Hudson Row. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, on the opposite side of the street, mirrored his movements, more complex and balletic than those of Albert Comstock. The occasional ambitious essay of an
entrechat
— G. G. Schiffendecken’s perfectly reflected in Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s — was interposed between elegantly executed
pirouettes
and
pliés
.

The shadows of the letters on the front of the canopy above the entrance to Albert Comstock’s cavernous emporium, the very first in his ever-expanding empire, the same as those displayed across the corseted bosom —
COMSTOCK’S COMESTIBLES: “SERVICE WITH SINCERITY!”
— were thrown onto the sidewalk. Alfred Eakins, one of the assistants, preparing for the day ahead, was briskly sweeping with a stiff-bristled broom. He must have been a very small child when Albert Comstock died, and yet here he was — the same age he was now, a youth, barely a young man — carrying out his duties on a day on which Albert Comstock danced. His first task of the day, every day, was to sand the wooden floor of the store with generously extended Parable-of-the-Sower gestures. His second task was to line up the chairs in front of the counters, preparing for swooning customers overcome by the splendors of the sausages on display, the charisma of the cheeses. His third task — they were always in the same order — was to brush the sidewalk.

He stood respectfully to one side, holding the broom handle like a salute, as G. G. Schiffendecken — executing a particularly dazzling sequence of
arabesques
— danced across in front of the store, his ample figure reflected in the gleaming windows. Every detail of the Carlotta model (its quiet, understated charm, its ageless sense of style, its convenient access in moments of — ahem — difficulty) moved gracefully across the neatly stacked cans and packets of prepared food, and the display (“Come buy our orchard fruits!”) of ripe plums, cherries, melons, peaches, and grapes, each single drop of oozing syrupy juice capturing the image of G. G. Schiffendecken, as his reflection moved across its surface from right to left.

Outside Metheney’s Hardware Store, G. G. Schiffendecken paused for a moment, and turned to face Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster across the street. At the very same moment Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster turned to face G. G. Schiffendecken, gazing at him intently. All he saw in the world was the shadowed letter “S” across his bosom, like the emblem of some hidden sin, a sin that drew him powerfully toward it. He knew what the “S” meant. He — let’s be clear about it — was quite keen on what the “S” meant.