Pinkerton's Sister (73 page)

He couldn’t manage the correct tone of voice for a request. He was unaccustomed to making requests.

She tried to nod her head, but she couldn’t because of the way he was holding it, but he must have felt her chin push against the palm of his hand a little.

“Say it. Say it.” (“Gently” was not at all the right word.) “Say you’ll promise.” He was very firm, very insistent.

“Please, sir …” Annie started to say.

Alice hadn’t noticed her come forward. She had been standing against the entrance to the House of the Interpreter, with
Dreamed A Dream
behind her. She spoke hesitantly, like a child in school unsure of the answer to a question. Alice would not have been surprised if she had held her arm into the air, slightly down at an angle because she was not entirely confident.

“Please, sir …”

“
Be quiet!
”

Papa did not turn to face Annie, did not even raise his voice. The two words were hissed out. He continued to focus his attention on Alice.

“Say you’ll promise.”

She managed to speak.

“Yes, Papa.”

“This is what I want you to promise.”

He moved his head down so that the side of it was resting against the side of her head – the bristles of his beard were sharp and rough, she almost expected them to draw blood – and tilted his head at the same angle as he had tilted hers, so that they were both looking at the moon.

“I want you to promise me that every time you look up at a full moon you’ll think of me, your Papa. Will you promise me that?”

He was speaking very quietly, whispering, as though he wanted no one to hear him but herself, though his “friend” was listening. Alice saw him lean in a little closer toward them, wishing to share in a moment of private communion, longing to nuzzle in his beard on the other side of her face. The moonlight caught the lenses of his spectacles, and he seemed to have no eyes. The light dazzled her, like the reflection from a Perseus-polished shield, though this was one that would turn her into stone.

“Please, sir …”

“
Be quiet!
”

Alice whispered in reply. She said it quickly, to stop Papa speaking to Annie in that way again.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Say it. Say it to Papa.”

“Every time I look at the full moon I shall think of you, Papa.”

“For always.”

“For always.”

She looked at the moon, staring at the bright pale circle, though it hurt her eyes, and saw the details of Papa’s face gazing down on her from the nighttime sky, filling her field of vision. It was like an adult’s face thrusting forward to peer in at an infant in a baby carriage, blotting out the whole of the rest of the world.

Coochi, coochi, coo.

What an adorable child.

“There’s my Little Woman.”

Then, and only then, he turned to face Annie. He did not speak to her – he had said nothing to her the whole time except for the two “Be quiet!”s – but pointed up toward the Palace Called Beautiful, in the way he pointed out the place where he detected Annie had missed some dust when she was cleaning a room, or not positioned a drape symmetrically enough. He usually snapped his fingers when he did this, but he did not do so now. Alice had rarely heard him speaking to Annie until recently. The time he had made her sing “Oh! Susanna” remained clearly in her mind because it was so unusual. It was as if it was years later, and he was giving instructions to Rosobell – who had not come to them until years after his death – using the movements of his body instead of words because she could not hear. Annie looked back at Alice. She appeared to be about to say something, but this time Papa did snap his fingers, gesturing upward again, and Annie began to walk to the Palace Called Beautiful, with Papa – after some whispering consultation with his “friend” – following behind her.

Then Papa’s “friend” took her into the House of the Interpreter. They went in amongst the pots of paint and the signs resting against the walls, their feet crunching through the piles of leaves that had drifted in through the door. It was like moving through layers of broken cups and plates, with the sound of the large, fragile leaves shifting. They were in the Potter’s Field, the final resting place of strangers and the unclaimed, unrecognized dead, a landscape composed entirely of tilted heaps of matching crockery, plates, saucers, and bowls neatly fanned out like packs of playing cards across the surface of a table, their whiteness glinting in the cloud-darkened dimness.

(Side by side, Mesdames Sylvie, Etoile, and Roskosch – the Three Fates; Madame Roskosch was Atropos, the one who cut the thread of life – leaned forward to interpret the shuffling of the patterned plates, studying the shifting shapes. Alice stood before them, facing the Three Weird Sisters, waiting to hear her fate. They could see the past, the present, and the future. They had never been known to fail.

(“
La Maison de Dieu
,” Madame Sylvie intoned, in her exotic Brooklyn French accent.

(“(The Tower Struck by Lightning),” Madame Etoile interpreted (in whispered brackets).

(Madame Roskosch did not say anything, but leaned closer toward the pictures on the plates.

(“
L’Amoureux
.”

(A little snigger here.

(“(The Lovers).”

(Another snigger.

(“
Le Bateleur
.”

(“(The Magician).”

(She knew what the next cards were going to be. The three of them were grouped together, as if they were a set.

(“
Le Soleil
,
La Lune
,
et L’Etoile
,” Madame Sylvie muttered, virtually incomprehensibly, even slipping in an “
et
” to demonstrate her fluency in French.

(“(The Sun, The Moon, and The Star.)”

(“
La Lune
,” Madame Sylvie whispered, letting her breath out in a low hiss, as if this were the card for which she had long been waiting, the card that would win the game, the card that she could snap down on top of the others with a triumphant cry.

(“The Moon.”

(The brackets had disappeared, and the moon seemed larger.

(Card number XVIII was a large serving plate – one big enough to allow ample room for John the Baptist’s head, with a generous accompaniment of vegetables – poised to eclipse all other cards by sheer size. The two battlemented towers loomed hugely, the two howling dogs seemed more ferocious than ever, and the parasite crawled closer out of the deep, dark pool.

(Madame Roskosch, for the first time, seemed on the point of speaking. She pointed at
La Lune
, and began to open her mouth. Her teeth were sharp and pointed.

(A secret was about to be brought to light.)

It was impossible to walk without breaking the plates, though you tried not to, placing your feet with infinite care, and scarcely breathing. The rafters were exposed in the ceiling of the House of the Interpreter, and cobwebs trembled on the underside of the tiles. Papa’s “friend” sat on a pile of stacked signs not far from the entrance, and when she sat on his knee she could see the moon from the angle at which they were, and the tops of trees writhing against the sky. There was a little copse of them near the entrance.

She should feel safe, here, protected –
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb –
but she did not feel so.

And the place death, considering who thou art
.

The wind was shrieking through these trees so loudly – they were now some distance away from the shelter of the walls – that she almost expected the moon itself to be flipped over and sent spinning away, leaving the world in utter darkness. She listened to the noise made by the wind through the trees, using that sound to overcome all other sound.

The usual words were spoken. She could still hear them.

“You’re one of the girls from the statue.”

She felt again that sensation of being on the verge of a fall, out on the ledge outside Grandpapa’s office. She sat and thought of the bronze sculpture in the park, near the children’s play area and the aviary, repeating sections of poetry in her head to pass the time until Papa returned.

She was sitting on the man’s right knee, in the same place and position as that of her bronze figure in
The Children’s Hour
. Papa’s “friend” did something he had not done before. He pushed her head back, just as Papa had done earlier outside, until she was looking directly at the moon. He moved his head down so that the side of it was resting against the side of her head, again like Papa. He had been watching what Papa had done so that he could copy it. Like Papa’s, his beard rubbed against the side of her face. As Papa had done, he tilted his head at the same angle he had tilted hers. She waited for him to ask her to make the same promise that she had made to Papa, but he did not do this.

He did something else he had never done before. He began to feel the surface of her skull with the tips of the fingers of both his hands, searching for something, mussing her hair. As he did so, he began to recite the names of some of the features of the surface of the moon – she recognized that was what they were: craters, plains, ranges of mountains, rilles – as eager to demonstrate his astronomical knowledge as Mary Benedict was. All the time he was looking upward, a man who could see what he was naming. His eyes could see things that were very far away.

“Plato, Copernicus, Julius Cæsar, Agrippa, Tycho …” he began, almost in a chant, a memorized list repeated like the declension of an irregular verb, liking the sound the words made, but not knowing their meaning. Mary Benedict had a telescope, and knew all the names of the places on the moon. The moon was an area in which Mary Benedict’s knowledge was undoubtedly ahead of Alice’s, and she had great skill in shifting conversations moonward. Alice wondered whether to nod, to show that she understood, that Mary Benedict had made sure she understood, but it might jerk his fingers away from the contours he seemed to be studying, and might make him angry in the way that Papa was sometimes angry. Papa was always controlled in his anger, absolutely controlled. He always knew exactly what he was saying, planning out what to say beforehand, freed from the tyranny of choice.

“… Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Hercules …”

It was a curious list of names, a mixture of the historical and the mythical. She must not move. She must not think anything, or feel anything.

She was stone.

She was bronze.

She was a figure in a statue.

The hour would pass.

This was the House of the Interpreter, the place where things were explained, and made clear, where Christian was shown excellent things to help him in his journey. The Interpreter went with him into a private room, and explained the meaning of the picture that hung there against the wall. He told Christian what it was he could see in that picture, the picture of a man whose work was to know and unfold dark things to sinners, a forerunner of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, a pioneering John the Baptist of alienists. In another room the Interpreter showed Christian two little children, Passion and Patience, and explained their behavior to him.
For the things that are seen, are temporal; but the things that are not seen, are eternal.
These things did ravish his heart; he could have stayed at that good man’s House a twelvemonth, but that he knew he had further to go.

“… Oceanus Procellarum, Palus Epidemiarum, Lacus Somniorum …”

Because they were in Latin, they were like the words of Doctor Faustus, the words of an apothecary, words to make the impossible happen: gold from lead, eternal life, the calling up of devils.

The Ocean of Storms. The Marsh of Disease. The Lake of Sleep.

It was like Christian’s journey to the Celestial City infinitely extended with many new dangers. It would be a long time before he and Hopeful drew near the presence of the Shining Ones and the Gates, and the bells that rang for joy.

“… Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium …”

There, floating high above them, was a huge hollow phrenological head, brightly illuminated – bright enough to cast shadows – with all its features marked and labeled, all the labels to what lay beneath the surface, the things that were hidden from sight like something secret beneath the unstable, shifting, volcanic emptiness. She had just read
The Last Days of Pompeii
, and the tips of his fingers pattered upon her head like descending ashes. From his clothes, from his beard, there was that Sodom and Gomorrah, that Pompeii, that
Paradise Lost
, that fallen angel smell of smoke and cinders.

As his fingertips moved across her head, he was reciting what it was he could feel, identifying his findings from the lettering in the sky, the words large enough to read from earth, an Interpreter guided by a higher source of knowledge. Coldness, he found, Crises, Showers, Clouds …

Next, he would tell her what his findings meant.

Everything had a hidden meaning. That was what Mrs. Alexander Diddecott had told Mama.

She imagined Annie, beyond the Hill Called Difficulty, in the Palace Called Beautiful, sitting upon Papa’s knee, just as she was sitting on the knee of Papa’s “friend.” She, too, would be looking up at the moon, at the seas that were not seas, at the cracked and crazed surface where the lettering was fading. Like Christian and Charity in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
they would discourse together till late at night. Annie would be in a large upper chamber, whose window opened toward the sun rising, and the name of the Chamber would be Peace, where she would sleep till break of day.

On the day after this she would see the Delectable Mountains. She would be taken to the top of the house, and bade look south, and she would behold, at a great distance, a most pleasant mountainous country, beautiful with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts; flowers also, with springs and fountains, very delectable to behold. Then she would go on her way, into the Valley of Humiliation.

“Conscientiousness, Justice, Integrity …” Papa would be saying, seizing an opportunity for phrenology, forcing Annie’s face against his watch-chain, and away from the light of the moon. “Hope, Hope Future, Hope Present, Spirituality, Faith, Trust, Wonder …”