Pinkerton's Sister (22 page)

They had come full circle, and ended almost where they had started, just before the first panel, standing at the bottom of the flight of steps, staring up at the panel they could not see, the figure of the man with the skull in his hand, struggling to discern shapes in the darkness. A chill wind was hissing in the branches of the trees beside them, and the dry leaves fell around them, upon them, scratching across their faces, skittering across the flagstones set into the gravel immediately before the entrance, making furtive little rustling noises in the darkness. Mary Benedict was a trembling wreck. The moon had been clearly visible in the sky for quite some time, but it had not occurred to her to point out the features on its surface, in order to demonstrate her superior knowledge in this area. This was highly unusual. “Ooh, look! The Sea of Vapors –
Mare Vaporum –
” (she invariably gave the Latin names, like a condescending botanist volunteering the Latin names of plants to the ignorant and easily impressed) “is clearly visible tonight,” she would say, with studied casualness, whenever any part of the moon could be glimpsed hazily through the clouds, pointing firmly upward. The name of the chosen sea varied, but the finger was ever firm. She was incapable of speech on this night. On this night she was drowning in her very own, personal Sea of Vapors. (“
La Lune
,” Alice was thinking – French rather than Latin – “
La Lune
.” The battlemented towers, the howling dogs, the creature crawling up out of the depths.
La Loon. La Loon.
) Charlotte had not said a word since they had been halfway along the second wall. The two of them clung together, silent. The only sound was Alice’s voice – with no pause at all, as if she were reading from a book open in front of her – moving inexorably onward with the terrible events of her story.

This was the worst, this was the best, she had told so far.

The moon was completely ignored, but the stars …

The stars were clustering menacingly.

One star.

Two stars.

Three stars.

They were well on the way to four, five, and six stars.

Perky-breasted Madame Etoile would drop both her pitchers and shatter them once those screams started, and the howling of the dogs would increase unbearably. Ripples would spread from the center of the dark pool, as the creature from the depths heaved itself into sight. The towers would tremble, and the masonry begin to lean groaningly outward.

“Francesca, the last of the three sisters, moved toward the uncurtained lamplit window, to see what her sisters had seen before her, seen and not survived. She had to see what they had seen, though what they had seen had killed them …”

Charlotte and Mary braced themselves as Alice moved toward the final words of her story. They might even have stopped breathing in the anxiety not to miss hearing what she had to say.

They held on to each other tightly.

At the exact moment when Alice finished, and Mary Benedict’s mouth began to open in horror at what she had just heard, her hands moving up – appalled – toward her face, one of the heavy castle doors silently swung open. It was far more terrifying than if it had creaked. An old, old man stood looking down at them, the flame in his oil lamp flickering in the wind, and making a popping sound, his face appearing and disappearing, glowing then darkening, brightness then skull-like hollows, his shifting shadow reaching down the steps toward their feet.

Mary Benedict gasped, uttered a sobbing cry, and then turned and ran toward the gates, gravel shooting up behind her as if from a skidding wagon wheel. Fragments of stone peppered their faces, punishment for some small biblical failing. Wailing screams echoed back, distorted by the wind. Deprived of Mary, Charlotte convulsively grabbed hold of Alice.

The old, old man gazed down at the two little girls who remained, who looked up, open-mouthed, like silent, out-of-season carol-singers, and then – without saying a word – he closed the door. Years ago he had held crowded theatres rapt and breathless when he marveled, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”

The whole audience – a few pale faces caught in the glow, the majority unseen and shadowed – was held, not only by those words, and by what those words meant, but also by the way in which those words were spoken.

The following week Alice made them go there again.

Mary Benedict’s attempts to convince them that she-wasn’t-in the-slightest-bit-nervous, never convincing, had now been abandoned. It was the word “counterclockwise” that had done it. She was already starting to tremble, and pulling around to her left, waiting for the door to swing silently open, and a figure to emerge, and come down the steps toward them, beneath the figure of the man with the skull. She would not have seen the moon if it had bounced off her head and rattled her teeth. There would be no “Ooh, look!” tonight, though there might be an “Ooh!” There would be no more cursing to turn Charlotte pink, though Charlotte – any blush would soon have faded – looked as if she could do with a little more color in her cheeks. There would be no ballet positions, whether first, second, third, fourth, or fifth. There would be no
arabesques
, nor even the first stirrings of a pointy-toed
pirouette
.

“Number one,” Alice said.

(“First position,” she thought.)

For the first time, she had chosen the panel at which they were to start. They took up their positions to the right of the steps. Also for the first time, she began a story in exactly the same place at which she had started the previous week, wishing – also – to end in the same place, at the bottom of the flight of steps that led upward to the doors, and the figure of the man holding a skull, the doors that had opened.

“Counterclockwise,” she repeated, firmly. Charlotte and Mary, who had
known
she was going to say this, grasped each other tightly. It would be the same panels, the same direction, the same order, but it would be a different story.

It would be horrid.

They were sure it was going to be horrid.

More than horrid, this was going to be really awful, really terrifying.

Good.

“The three little g-g-girls …”

It was the first time that she could recollect her recently acquired, intermittent stutter ever revealing itself to a person other than her family or Charlotte. It had happened with no warning, and it made it sound as if she herself was trembling, made fearful by the story she was about to tell. She felt her way warily around it when she knew it was starting to happen – there’d been good days, and there’d been
really bad
days – and chose to be silent on what she knew to be the bad days. “Am I stuttering?” she’d ask Charlotte – “Am I st-st-stuttering?” would be what she said (she was not always able to distinguish between her stuttering and her struggles to express precisely what it was she wanted to say) – and Charlotte would let her know if she was indeed stuttering. “Yes,” she’d say, shrugging (ever loyal) in a what-does-it-matter? sort of way, though it mattered to Alice.

“G-g-g …” said Mary Benedict, trying to find consolation in this easy target for teasing. “G-g-g …”

She said it in a tiny, babyish voice, as if she was about to say “coochi-coochi-coo!” to a tickly infant. (What an adorable child she was.) You just knew that she’d be imitating it all week at school. She acted as if Alice was affecting an out-of-period fashionable lisp, or a genteel accent, and thus inviting deserved mockery. It was like the way Papa tended to react. He did not take at all kindly to “P-P-Papa” as a mode of address. It somehow reflected badly on the dignity of his status, and demeaned him. “P-P-P!” he’d repeat to her, wincing at some pitiful solecism.

“G-g-g!”

She took a deep breath and started again, rather put out, though she tried to give the impression that she’d been feigning a terrified shudder – her teeth chattering with fear – in a sophisticated attempt to deepen the atmosphere of doom.

No problems this time.

“The three little girls walked up to the Shakespeare Castle in the late afternoon of a day in the fall. Alice Pinkerton walked in front. Behind her, Charlotte Finch was holding on to Mary Benedict. They took up their positions to the right of the steps …” Alice began.

Her voice was low, almost whispering, and they had to strain to hear her. Light was failing, and a storm was approaching.

No more “G-g-g” from Mary Benedict.

G-g-good
.

“Light was failing, and a storm was approaching. No one was near them, no one could hear them, and the door of the castle began to swing open …”

The figures on the panel were of
them
.

The story was about
them
.

By the fifth panel along –
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
– Mary Benedict was begging Alice to stop. (This was no dream. It was a
nightmare
!) By the time they reached
The Tempest
– a storm completely out of control, a storm to carry them far away to a place where they did not belong – Mary and Charlotte were
both
begging her to stop.

She did not stop.

It was an hour and a quarter before – in complete darkness – they reappeared in front of the main entrance, looking up into the blackness where they knew there was a figure of a man with a skull in his hand.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The screams were five-tick, five-star this time, a gigantic ten-out-of-ten tick in the brightest indelible red ink. The old man did not appear, though Alice had had one extra line of the story ready in case he did, one that would have lifted the screams to an unprecedented six-star – a seven-star, an eight-star, enough stars to blaze with a radiance that would have eclipsed the light of the moon – and awoken early sleepers in Harlem.

This was the last story she had told at the Shakespeare Castle.

She would have liked to have repeated her counterclockwise circlings for a thousand and one nights (storm-threatening nights, all of them, nights without moons or stars), reducing Mary Benedict (Mary
Thérèse
Benedict) to uncontrollable, incoherent gibbering, but – the following week – she and her family had moved away from Longfellow Park, all the way to Lac Qui Parle (now there was a story) in Minnesota. It was as if she had been drawn to Lac Qui Parle by her lavishly accented middle name, the French drawing the French toward it. (It was a way the French had.) It would have been satisfying to think that she had fled in terror, sleepless with nightmares of the Beast of Shakespeare Castle, but the truth was that her father (a lawyer) had taken up a new position in Madison. Alice had known that her story would be the last one that she would tell to Mary. They were carrying her – her and her accents – back to old Minnesota. She saw her, quite clearly, slung headfirst and gagged over someone’s shoulder like a kidnap victim, her feet kicking – first position, second position, third position (she just couldn’t stop herself) – not too keen on being carried.

She had rather hoped that the door would swing silently open again. She would have liked to achieve a six-star scream. It would have been her farewell gift.

“Ooh, look!” a girl would be saying in Lac Qui Parle, over and over, anxious to ingratiate herself with her new classmates, “The Sea of Tranquility –
Mare Tranquillitatis –
is clearly visible tonight.”

Her trembling finger would be a blur against the night sky. She herself would not know the meaning of tranquility ever again, even if she could say it in Latin.

When she had failed to find anything about Annie on Hudson Heights she had read and reread the personals, linking them in her mind with Annie, as if she might find clues to Annie’s whereabouts there. She didn’t need to look again to find the address of Madame Roskosch, as she knew it by heart. It was in a fashionable district near Washington Square, an address designed to create confidence, not one of those high-numbered nothingnesses where the city faltered into unpicturesque rurality. She had read the Henry James novel – he was not one of the novelists whose publications were laid out, as if casually, in Mrs. Albert Comstock’s music room – and thought of Catherine Sloper, sitting alone in a deserted house, sewing her fancy-work like another Lady of Shalott. She often thought of Catherine Sloper. For a while she had thought of it as a novel that had been written just for her, a novel that only she had read, though there had never been a Morris Townsend in her life, though – unlike Dr. Sloper – her father was incapable of wit. (“
Henry James
?” Mrs. Albert Comstock had queried, seemingly under the impression that Alice had just invented the name, completely unaware that she was referring to a novelist, despite
Daisy Miller
. “
Henry James
?” She knew of a
James Henry
– Myrtle had known his daughter well, he was a very good swimmer, big moustache, fond of mulligatawny soup, very well thought of – perhaps Alice was thinking of him.) It was rather the way in which Linnaeus had imagined that the Scandinavian – Danish? (Had he known Hans Christian Andersen?) – artist he admired had painted only for him, a painter of white-doored silent rooms, averted faces. There was no crowded gallery or salon; no jostling behind the cordoned-off canvases, the masses restrained by the thick red ropes on stands; no colored postcard reproductions, or illustrated articles in artistic magazines. There was just Linnaeus, he alone studying the painting in an otherwise empty room, seeing something that seemed to come from within himself, a reflection of his inner state.

In a street just off the quiet square, the trees partially visible behind her (again that seashore hiss of waves; now – at this time of the year – there were no leaves, and the sound of the sea was more of a white-foamed roar as a wind swayed twigs and branches), Annie gazed up at the drawn blinds of number thirty-seven, where Madame Roskosch was waiting for her in just such a room. The whole deserted street was blinded, as if it were a hot summer’s afternoon. Elegant rooms had been promised in capital letters. Her savings were in her purse, and she was wearing her “jules,” the necklace, ring, and earrings that Reuben had bought her for her birthday. Tomorrow she would return to Chestnut Street, and no one would know, not even Alice, not even Reuben.