Pinkerton's Sister (61 page)

Many and many a time they Stabbed Enormous Sibyl in the years that followed, and her failure to keel over with what ought to have been a Sibyl-shattering smash showed that the imagination – however hard you pushed it, however hard you flexed its muscles – had its limitations.

They
STABBED EVIL SINNER!

They
STABBED EXASPERATING SWANSTROM!

They
STABBED EXTREMELY SMELLY!

They
STABBED ENRAGED SISTERS!

They stabbed and stabbed again.

They had no effect whatsoever.

Carl Fiorelli chatted to her about what was going to happen.

“You will not be able to speak. If you feel you cannot breathe properly, hit me on the arm so I will know. Hit me hard!”

The studio, with its whitewashed brick walls covered by shelves and untidily painted sketches, was more like a manufactory than a place where art was created, like the interior of a warehouse, a barn. All the workers were men – they wore big boots, and these and their clothes were splashed and whitened with old, dried clay, making them look like farm laborers who had been digging in muddy fields – and Signora Fiorelli appeared only to bring lunch on a little wheeled wagon. Clay-spattered stepladders – rough, homemade, cobbled together anyhow – leaned at angles everywhere against the walls. When she first arrived, the floor had just been mopped and was blond and gleaming, but – as the floor dried – the shine went, the color disappeared, and it regained its white-spattered matte finish, like the raw floorboards of a house newly built by careless workmen. Carlo Fiorelli seemed to use anything that came to hand as an implement in his art – nails, scraps of wood, spoons, kitchen implements: these, clay-whitened, like something lumpishly exaggerated with coral or limestone accretions, lay around on every surface – and she pictured him at an evening meal in his house, overcome by inspiration, and running out to his studio, his food untasted, still carrying his knife and spoon with which to gouge and sculpt, as if it were the clay on which he fed.

One workman was preparing clay, the color and consistency of melted chocolate, in one bowl – after the Veal Marsala, the
Coniglio con le Olive
, came the Italian chocolate ice cream (boiled puddings were the usual fare at home: Papa insisted) – and the other continued to rip cloth. She pictured women in the Civil War preparing makeshift bandages for the wounded soldiers, ripping up sheets and pillowcases in the ruins of a large house. Mama’s youngest brother, Edward, had been killed in the war. She still had some of his letters, with the most beautiful of handwriting, and the most inventive of spelling. Alice had seen a photograph of him in his uniform, a slight mischievous-faced young man, looking about fifteen. Grandmama had never used the word “fought” to describe what Teddy had done. It was too violent, too uncharacteristic. He had been present, and he had died. “Fought” made it sound noble and glittering and chivalric. Few of the young men would have thought of themselves as “fighting.” That described what they had tried to avoid in the schoolyard, warned by their mothers: the taller, aggressive boy finding a reason to punch on the shoulders, the scuffle in the dust, the bloody nose, and the embarrassment, the stain on the shirt he had tried to wash out with cold water so his mother wouldn’t find out. “My Teddy would never fight. He’s a good boy.” “Fighting” was not the word to describe what had happened to Teddy at Cold Harbor.

The workman ripping the cotton had started to sing something: there was a great deal of singing at the studio, all the male voices without a woman’s amongst them, like those voices she had imagined from the pages of H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne, though these were more like an oratorio than an opera, a dark part of a Bach
Passion
, there, amidst the pale faces of the dead. When she imagined the young soldiers singing, she did not think of them as singing sad, sentimental songs, battalions of soprano-voiced Sobriety Goodchilds trilling “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” When he was unleashed upon this song, he was capable of producing more pocket-handkerchiefs than Fagin’s gang, massed white handkerchiefs flourishing like the surrenders of entire armies, and thunderous nose-blowings. She was far more moved when she imagined the soldiers singing comic songs. She had heard children, emerging from the park on a Saturday afternoon, singing “Goober Peas” as they chewed peanuts, and wondered if they even knew that they were singing a Confederate soldiers’ song.

The voices of children were the voices of the soldiers as they wished the war was over, when, free from rags and fleas, they’d kiss their wives and sweethearts, and gobble goober peas.

The first strips of cloth were the size of playing cards. They were dipped in plaster of Paris, and Carlo Fiorelli – humming, whistling under his breath, the opera tunes the band played in the park – began to cover her face. He sang a few lines now and then in Italian, with great fervor, intense moments from something larger, oddly out of scale in isolation. She had been wounded and was being bandaged, mummy-like layers being wound around her head to make her better. (“Wound around a wound,” she whispered under her breath, liking the two different pronunciations of the same word in one short sentence.) It was a bad head, and thought bad thoughts, and must be cured. A few years later, after she had seen Oscar Wilde at the theatre, she had imagined Louisa May Alcott, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman talking together in quiet voices about
Hospital Sketches
, and Walt Whitman – never one to be elbowed aside by the writings of another – beginning to quote from one of his Civil War poems: “Straight and swift to the wounded I go,/Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in …” Louisa May Alcott and Oscar Wilde nodded their heads; this confirmed a point they had been making. Smaller pieces of cloth – the size of postage stamps (she imagined rows of miniature bearded presidents lined up across her face, preparing her to be mailed) – were placed carefully on one side, reserved for around her eyes and nostrils. She would be white like a monument, standing high above the fields of the dead.

As the first layer began to dry, she could no longer feel the fingers of the sculptor applying further layers, and she felt enclosed within metal, peering out through the eyeholes, encased within bronze. She was within the statue looking out; she herself had actually become the statue. She was the Girl in the Bronze Mask, or the benighted heroine of
The Curse of the Capitoline
, the first of the two Reverend Goodchild novels published in 1876, and the mask had become a part of her face, not fastened on separately. “This is really interesting” had been her main thought. Her face had become something heavy, and she felt herself drawn downward as if by sleep, a sensation of languor, a wish to lay the head down, and drift away. It was a strange feeling – the curious feeling of being separate from her body – but she never felt that she was having any difficulty in breathing. Carlo Fiorelli was applying clay to her hair, all round the back of her head, the sculptor molding her into shape. Between bursts of song, he had talked to her a little at first, but then – as her mouth was covered – he stopped talking to her. He and the workmen exchanged little comments, instructions and observations. It was just because they had become absorbed in what they were doing, but she felt that she had ceased to be there, was already a statue. As he covered her ears, silence closed in upon her. She tried very hard not to swallow. If she did so, her whole face seemed to shift uncomfortably.

The second layer of cloth was dipped in blue plaster of Paris.

(
Paris.

(Mrs. Albert Comstock staggered back a little, reaching for her umbrella with which to defend herself.

(Paris,
France
.

(
Blue
plaster.

(
Sacre bleu!

(
French
blue plaster.

(What monstrosity was being brought into being practically within her purlieu?)

He used blue plaster so that he would know when he had covered the whole face twice, but – it occurred to her a year or so later – she must have looked like Oscar Dubourg, the blue-faced twin in
Poor Miss Finch
. How would Charlotte have reacted to seeing her like that, bringing literature to life?

After the clouds came the pictures, and after the pictures came the dreams. After the fifth or sixth picture had been read came the first reading of a dream, with the considerable difference that – this time – she did not interpret; she merely described, and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did the interpreting.

There was a distinct change in the atmosphere of the morning on which this first happened. He had experienced another vision: something he himself had read in the clouds, something huge and tumultuous unfurling above St. George and the Dragon, something that was going to change the way in which he saw things, and send him down into different caverns. He was the artist, and she was the artist’s model (Trilby again), hired for the day, placed in the position that he chose, the raw – naked, shivering – material from which he created his works. Sometimes she felt like a victim of Burke and Hare, an anonymous corpse sold to an anatomist for dissection. Burke and Hare merged again in her mind with Jekyll and Hyde, though here there was no Jekyll – Jekyll had vanished altogether – but two Hydes, linked like a monstrous birth, doubled in power, moving in unison, searching through suffocatingly dark alleyways, sniffing the air, seeking for those to kill.

If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.

Even more books had arrived from Austria – the crowbars were never at rest – and Hilde Claudia had been busy translating. It would soon be time to buy yet another bookcase, to find room for yet another key in his vest pocket, which bulged, which chinked, like an inadequately concealed layer of chain mail positioned to protect the heart from assault, to shield it from feeling. Alice hoped Hilde Claudia was more careful with her dictionary this time, though she was still always trouble having with her werbs.

Dreams seemed the most perverse area yet into which she had been led.

She could understand the reading of meaning into pictures; she could even understand the reading of meaning into clouds. Mistranslation or not, there seemed to her a certain validity in reading what one saw in certain shapes. What you were in your mind colored everything that you saw, and to read what that mind saw in shapes was to reveal what was hidden inside that mind. When the lawyer, Mr. Utterson – in
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde –
had studied Henry Jekyll’s will, in which Edward Hyde had been made his heir, he suddenly had a vivid picture of Hyde, the man he had never seen.
Out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.
In such a way would thoughts from deep within her mind come walking toward her through the shapes of the clouds.

After he had glimpsed his shape in the mists, the man he had never seen began to enter Mr. Utterson’s dreams, walking into them in the way that he walked out of the mists.
He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and, lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour he must rise and do its bidding.

In such a way would figures walk into her dreams, make her rise and do their bidding. In clouds, in dreams, she would see the subjects that possessed her mind. That which was already in the mind was all that the eyes saw, and – sometimes – what was in the mind was a girl at a window, bathed in light, bowed over, a letter in her hands.

Beneath the pillow of each of the fallen girls in The House of the Magdalenes there would be a crumpled Dream Book, pressed flowers – flat and colorless – between certain pages, the cheap, coarse-textured paper stained slightly by sap. Each dream interpretation was like a spell, holding within its words the promise of better things to come.

Dream Books were the province of the impoverished, the unhappy, the eternally hopeful. Their interpretations seemed to find hidden enemies everywhere, false friends, threatened reputations, interspersed with hints and warnings to small tradesmen. She imagined Albert Comstock at the beginning of his glittering career in comestibles – unlikely though it was that it would ever have occurred to anyone to describe him as a
small
tradesman – beached upon his bed like Moby-Dick in a nightcap, a long, weary day of sausage stuffing at an end, snoring thunderously, with his well-thumbed Dream Book neatly stacked by his bed on top of his accounts book. This would be years before the magic moment when Mrs. Albert Comstock – his mirror image, her bosom as big as his beard – hove into view, and she made him her own.