Pinkerton's Sister (30 page)

Albert Comstock had unveiled his own statue shortly before his death, just as she had unveiled the statue of herself and her sisters when she was a little girl. She would have liked to see his face when he saw the bottom. Come to think of it, however, with his butcher’s training he would probably have been gratified by such an impressive piece of meat, and automatically assessed its weight and price per pound. His deeply ingrained spirit of commerce – other phrases were sometimes employed by the envious or the spiteful (some had been heard to comment that in choosing to marry whom he did he had been automatically following his usual practice of buying in bulk for cheapness) – was so overwhelming that there was general surprise that the words
SHOP AT COMSTOCK’S
were not engraved in large letters across the toga’s front. Surely he could have persuaded Carlo Fiorelli that the mighty Roman eminence was incomplete unless – like another Mabel Peartree, one brazenly displaying her anatomy – it was casually swinging a shopping basket containing a selection of the culinary delights available for those who chose to experience Service with Sincerity and a Good Selection of Bones Available for Dogs of All Sizes? You visualized some tiny minion whose special skill was to measure bones and dogs’ mouths to achieve maximum compatibility between the two.

Mrs. Albert Comstock had let it be known – you sensed the pageboy, the velvet cushion, the
tarantara
fanfare of trumpets – that her preferred description of the statue was “noble”: an adjective that did not spring readily to mind. Mabel Peartree would have been there at the unveiling, and you could guarantee that she would have seized the opportunity to make use yet again of the word “charming” –
charming! –
the one adjective she knew. This would have been followed – shortly afterward – by “He’s used a
great deal
of marble.” Like Mrs. Albert Comstock, Mabel Peartree always liked to feel that she was getting her money’s worth when anything vaguely cultural was in the offing. Alice – though not within the hearing of Mrs. Albert Comstock – referred to it as The Bebuttocked Behemoth: this captured the essence, she felt. When pressed for a comment by Mrs. Albert Comstock – this, after all, was in the days when she was strange though not yet officially regarded as mad – she (thinking rapidly, overwhelmed by what she had seen, that was the message, struggling to find the words to do it justice) had managed to come out with “It possesses a powerful uniqueness of vision.” This had been received with gratified nods, and she had later heard Mrs. Albert Comstock using the same expression to Mrs. Goodchild, with the general implication that it had come to her in a visionary moment. If Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls had racily risked teaching French, she could have been a daring pioneer of her sex in the male monopoly of the diplomatic service. “The Spanish have a powerful uniqueness of vision,” she’d have been saying, as gunboats clashed. “The Russians have a powerful uniqueness of vision.” A glittering career had been denied her because of beardlessness.

Herman Melville, his books forgotten, his days of writing novels over, hurrying to work in the New York Custom House, would have had the twilight of his years warmed as he caught a glimpse of its white vastness through the trees, and taken comfort from the fact that he had been remembered after all. Some lover of literature had erected a statue to Moby-Dick, and his greatest creation – though not seen as such at the time – would be forever commemorated in this New York neighborhood.

“Call me Albert Comstock …”

The words possessed a certain rough poetry, though they presupposed that the whale narrated the novel. As was only appropriate (it was oddly satisfying when unexpected symmetries were discovered) Albert Comstock had been buried in the same cemetery as Herman Melville, who was not too far away from the man whose imperfectly sighted immensity had given him such misguided – but very real – consolation.

On nights of the full moon Mrs. Albert Comstock was of the firm opinion that the lascivious girls from The House of the Magdalenes would be drawn out in droves to marvel – in rapt, sensual abandonment – at the ample white flesh revealed to them, and some fierce inner hunger would be assuaged by the highly charged erotic allure of its shadowed loveliness, as they collapsed in synchronized waves, the hussies. Alice had overheard her complaining to Mrs. Goodchild and Mabel Peartree about the determined – ahem –
assaults
upon Bertie’s statue. Sometimes, you could tell – ahem –
parts
of the statue had been – ahem –
touched
. Ahems and italics battled to convey the full horror of what she feared. (There was quite a battle in her listeners’ features, also, at this point as they struggled to avoid displaying revulsion too obviously.) For a moment Alice had been a little disconcerted by this, this unexpected link with herself, her belief – which she had shared with no one – that some man or men caressed her statue in
The Children’s Hour
, always in the same place, creating a small area of shiny goldness. She placed her hand on her left breast, above her heart, above her pocket-watch, as if checking the double ticking, assessing that both pocket-watch and heart were working. That was the place.

On those nights, the full-moon nights, in the cold moonlit dormitory, the long thin shapes of the windowpanes thrown across the bare floorboards, the Magdalenes would dream dreams of Albert Comstock, shifting restlessly, awoken to suppressed needs, emitting little inarticulate cries. Mrs. Albert Comstock would picture them with unusual vividness. The cries would gradually become one chorused word, chanted like a great convulsive invocation to the gods in a Greek tragedy: “Comstock! Comstock! Comstock!”

Alice had been born on March the nineteenth 1868, the day on which Captain Nemo had been the first man to reach the South Pole. The summer that followed had been blisteringly hot, and Mama had gone away with her to Staten Island, away from the heat and the glare, to a hotel near the sea where it would be cooler. Even as far uptown as Longfellow Park (tree-fringed, then, semi-rural) the oppressive heavy air of baked, shimmering, heat-hazed sidewalks seemed to press down suffocatingly. Her first few months of babyhood had been in intense heat, and yet – these days – she seemed always to be cold. She had bought 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea
for her little brother, Ben (she always bought books as gifts) – he would have been about eight at the time – and he had come across the date of her birthday, correct down to the year, in the novel. He had been very impressed, thinking it something she had organized herself, a personal request to Jules Verne written in fluent French. It had been like a development of The Alice Collection and The Pinkerton Collection.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
were, inevitably, the first two books Charlotte presented to her, in the year that Ben was born.
For Alice in the – er – Wonderland that is Longfellow Park. Beware of the Queen of Hearts. Dot. Dot. Dot. March 1878.

“Dot. Dot. Dot” was what she and Charlotte tended to say to each other after significant pauses, as if they were experiencing one of those moments in a novel when a text moved into silence. The printed words came to a close with three printed dots in a row above a space of whiteness, and the scene that followed was not described. It was usually a scene that you were particularly keen to see described in every detail.

(“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

(“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”)

The third novel in The Alice Collection – more of a Pinkerton, really, than an Alice – had been
Vanity Fair
. Two firm lines were drawn down the first words of the opening paragraph.

While the present century was still in its teens, and on one sun-shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s
…

(Three exclamation points in the margin.)

…
academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness
…

There were, on the same page of text, four exclamation points for “
Have you completed all the necessary preparations incident to Miss Sedley’s departure, Miss Jemima?” asked Miss Pinkerton herself, that majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith
…”

(
!!!!
enthusiastically in the margin, each
!
two inches tall.)

For a while – she quite enjoyed it, and encouraged this usage – Alice was addressed as “majestic lady” or “the Semiramis of Hammersmith” by Charlotte, though neither of them knew what was meant by “Semiramis,” or – indeed – what was meant by “Hammersmith.” Consulting
Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary
soon solved the meaning of “Semiramis” though “Hammersmith”remained a mystery. The village smith stood under a spreading chestnut-tree, hammering away with his large and sinewy hands, the muscles of his brawny arms bulging like Samson’s.

Hammer, smith! Hammer, smith!

Semiramis, a great warrior, became queen and sole empress of Assyria, putting her husband to death to establish herself on the throne, and made Babylon the most magnificent city in the world.

Smite, Semiramis! Smite, Semiramis!

They were a formidable combination. As Charlotte said, their likeness to Alice was positively uncanny.

Miss Pinkerton, that austere and god-like woman
– a few sides later – had merited five exclamation points. Alice rather warmed to the idea of being austere and god-like, and had hoped – she had hoped in vain – that perceptive friends might make the sort of comments that they tended to make when they examined a new photograph or (for the more prosperous) portrait:

“It’s just like you!”

“A remarkable resemblance!”

“So true to life!”

The fourth novel in The Alice Collection had been
The Wide, Wide World
, and Alice had suffered for an entire afternoon in the apple orchard – though not in quite the manner envisaged by the author – as she made the acquaintance of Ellen Montgomery. Alices had been everywhere, an Alice band of sisters jostling competitively in every circulating library, and on every bookshelf: Alice Mildmay, Alice Knevett, Alice Norton, Alice Bluestone … She’d referred to the (carefully selected) fiction shelves in the school library as “the Alician Fields” (she thought this was rather good), hoping to floor Mary Benedict with a pun, but she’d had to explain what it meant – it was something she ought to have realized would happen – rather spoiling the intended effect. (“Oh …” – Mary Benedict, cool and unimpressed – “… I
see
. It’s a kind of play on words, is it? What’s the point of that?” Quite.)

When Alice had come across “For Annie” in a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, she had gone straight to Annie, to read it to her, though – unlike Charlotte – she had sought out no text deliberately. The words seemed to find her.

This was how it began, though it made her sad to think of it, later.

Annie had looked at her very intently as she read, as if the poem had been addressed specifically to her.

She and Annie would sleep with their arms protectively around each other – this is what Alice liked to think – like the sisters, Lizzie and Laura, in “Goblin Market.”

She would be Lizzie; Lizzie the one who saved her sister.

Alice thought of Captain Nemo as possessing the face of her father. It was her father gazing at the ruins of Atlantis, her father whose feet – she heard the icy crunch – were the first to make prints in the trackless snow at the South Pole, her father who was frozen into the iceberg. Jules Verne had described the Antarctic as a volcanic landscape of lava and pumice-stones, an atmosphere of sulfur – like the Icelandic countryside over which Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka had traveled in
A Journey to the Center of the Earth –
but she had always seen an endless dazzling expanse of untouched, unspoiled snow, seen by man for the first time on the day on which she had been born.

On this day, in this place, a man with the face of her father had unfurled a black flag, bearing an “N” in gold, and called for a six months’ night to spread its darkness over his new kingdom. The night had been longer than six months, and it was not a natural night, as if the moon had interposed itself between the sun and the earth, a permanent eclipse, bringing darkness in daylight. Nemo was the name assumed by Captain Hawdon in
Bleak House
. He lived and died in squalor, mourned by no one but Jo, the crossing-sweeper, and was buried in a filthy cemetery heaped with dishonored graves.

His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard – the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect.

The other side of Megoran Road was being prepared for a new area of housing to be named da Ponte: a large signboard had been erected in the late fall announcing this. The use of the name of Mozart’s librettist (and the prices) indicated that here was to be a select development. Mrs. Albert Comstock hadn’t liked the use of an Italian name (this name meant nothing to her except that it sounded
foreign
), in case it attracted Italians (even Italians with money; she understood that such existed), and encouraged them to settle there.

She had heard, she said meaningfully – the sonorous boom tinkling the chandeliers at 5 Hampshire Square – all about what conditions were like in those areas of the city where Italians were allowed to roam unfettered. She visualized them as the hordes of semi-wild pigs that had roamed on the outskirts of the city.