Pinkerton's Sister (79 page)

And by and by a cloud takes all away.

You and I are past our dancing days.

I know thee not, old man.

The raised candle flame was reflected in the dimly visible cups and plates of the dresser, and in the glass of the kitchen clock.

It ticked sonorously. When you couldn’t see properly, sounds were louder.

“One, two; why then ’tis time to do’t.”

One set of quotation marks.

“Annie …”

She started to say the name far too early, and said it so quietly that Annie would not have heard her in any case, but – as she felt when she called the name of Lizzie Galliant – she felt stronger for saying it. She wanted Annie to know that it was she who was coming, so that she would not hear a knock on her door, and think that it was Papa, come to take her out to die in a Sea of Coldness on the way to the Celestial City. It was a frozen sea in which the multitudes of the damned – their heads diminishing away into a distance too far to see – were enclosed in the ice up to their nostrils, unable to cry out, unable to call the name
of someone who would come and save them. Their eyes were full of despair, of realization that this was what eternity would be like; this was all they would ever know, ever again.

Hell is murky.

No quotation marks.

“Annie …”

She had a name to call. She had someone who would save her. She would not cry out, “Help!” The word she would call would be “Annie.”

She held the night light closer to her face, to prevent ice from forming in front of her mouth, inside her mouth, so that she could go on calling. There was a slight warmth, enough to free a Northwest Passage through the Arctic wastes. The center of the stumpy candle had all been burned away, and there was a thin, almost transparent, glowing wall of wax around the flame. She held it close to her eyes. It was like the moment when the surface of a long-frozen lake was on the point of dissolving into liquid. Anyone who tried to walk upon it would plunge through into darkness, icy coldness.

Annie’s room was off a little corridor that ran away from the kitchen. Alice could see the outline of the door illuminated by candlelight from inside. Even though the wind was not quite so violent lower down, it was still keeping Annie awake. Good. She hadn’t liked the thought of approaching a door in darkness. If she had frightened Annie in awakening her, she would have frightened herself further.

“Annie …”

She said it again, louder.

“Annie …”

It was as if there were other people in the house, sleeping, and she could not raise her voice above a certain level.

“Annie, it’s m-m-me, Alice …”

She walked closer toward the thin flickering lines of light.

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much
blood in him?

No quotation marks at all.

Ten years or so later, a dark early morning during another storm, this nighttime scene had come into Alice’s head when she had pushed open the door of Papa’s study to find Papa’s body after he had killed himself.

The 1888 blizzard had started the week before her twentieth birthday. Mama, and her brother and sisters, had been spending the weekend at Grandpapa and Grandmama’s, and had expected to return home on the Monday morning. The storm had started as Monday had started, and they had not managed to reach home through the snowdrifts and blocked roads until several days later, summoned by the news of a death.

In the early hours of the Monday morning, as on the night when the birds were killed, Alice was awoken by the sound of a storm, though it was a storm far worse than the earlier one had been. In the glow of the night light – she still had a nightlight – she had looked at the time on her pocket-watch as it hung on its stand – three forty-eight, the minute hand edging towards the
X
– and gone back to sleep. She had been writing into the early hours, vaguely aware of the sound of the storm, and had fallen asleep only an hour or so earlier. Some hours later, she had woken again, and walked over to the window looking out from the back of the house. She had, for years now, kept all drapes firmly closed, to keep out the darkness (it would be a long time yet before she began to leave them open), and she bobbed down a little, to stand up inside the little covered space with the drapes resting against her back, the cold glass in front of her. It must feel like this for a photographer, bent over under his focusing cloth, about to take a winter photograph of bare trees. There was – she discovered, as
she attempted to look out – no view to capture on this side of the house, no counting up to three or five. There was nothing to see. It would have been difficult enough at night in normal circumstances – there were no street lights yet on that side; it was still all fields and orchards – but the panes of the window were encrusted with snow that looked packed thick enough to keep out daylight. If she hadn’t seen the time on her watch – it was now a few minutes past six – heard that it was ticking, she would have experienced the slightly suffocating feeling that it was broad daylight, and all the windows of the house – the whole of the interior like the bottom of a well, all light excluded – blocked by snow.

The fire was still glowing, and she added more coal before she walked across to the mansard window at the front, and, standing behind the drapes as she had done before, she was enclosed in a little alcove with a seat. She always felt like ten-year-old Jane Eyre at the beginning of the novel when she did this, a child needing to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner. Until she could speak pleasantly, she should remain silent, cross-legged like a Turk in the window seat, hidden behind red moreen curtains, studying a book with descriptions of the death-white realms of the Arctic Zone, those forlorn regions of dreary space, that reservoir of frost and snow, those firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winter, those scenes that were so like the scenes hidden deep inside herself, ice frozen for so long, and at so low a temperature, that it would never melt, the glass-like splinter of ice lodged within the heart.

The scenes from the book, the scenes from inside Jane’s head, were the scenes outside the window, the white pages ripped from a book that never ended, and flung out to bury an entire landscape. A tremendous blinding snowstorm was raging down from the north, had been raging for some time, enveloping and burying the countryside. It was one of those great natural phenomena – like witnessing a comet or a meteorite shower – when those who saw it felt that they had to go on watching, because what they were seeing
was so spectacularly out of the ordinary. Perhaps this was how people reacted during earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, unable to tear themselves away as the buildings collapsed upon them, the ash buried them, hypnotized and destroyed by the most intense moment of their lives, memorizing what they were seeing, believing that they would be talking about it for years to come, made interesting by what had happened to them. That was how they had died at Pompeii – arms guarding their heads, reaching out toward safety, rehearsing the words of witness that they would never speak – their whole lives reduced to the eternal gestures of their silenced bodies. The snow was not so much falling – the flakes were huge, flakes to bury, to smother, spinning and unfolding like leaves, they seemed to slow down time – as being
hurled
against the houses like a barrage of missiles by the gale.

“The tumultuous privacy of storm,” she thought, enfolded in the little space between the drapes and the window, the pocket of silence. This was what Ralph Waldo Emerson must have experienced, to make him write those words.

She sat on the window seat and watched the red-stained snow surge through Prospero’s cloak, and accumulate in red drifts against the house, across where Chestnut Street had been the previous day. The cloak vibrated slightly, and there was a humming, like a wineglass on a high note. You wet your fingertip, and circled round and round the rim, faster and faster. Mrs. Alexander Diddecott and Mrs. Italiaander reversed a wine-glass, and pressed their fingers against the upturned base. The wineglass slid with a squeaky sound across the polished surface of the table, faster and faster around the glass-enclosed white plaster arm in the center, impelled by a force outside the control of the lightly resting fingers. It spun from letter to letter of the alphabet spread out on cards in a circle around it, a concentric shape within the circle of the table, spelling out troubling, riddling Delphic messages from beyond. The sliding discordant stridency of the glass rim spelled out imperfect messages like flawed chalk, when the downward or
the upward strokes did not mark the blackboard. The messages were elaborately analyzed, searched for secret messages.
No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee, of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter.
The blood-colored snow piled high.

The snow – with the direction in which the gale was blowing – should have been drifting up against the opposite side of Chestnut Street (as it was, all the steps up to the front doors on that side of the street were already covered), but it was funneling round onto their side. Through the howling of the wind, she could hear a high-pitched humming – shriller than the sound made by the vibrating glass in the window – that kept changing in pitch.

BEWARE
, the wineglass message spelled out, sliding rapidly across from letter to letter with its piercing chalk-on-blackboard shriek.
DANJER
.
DARKNES
. The cards were always arranged – it was a little hushed ritual, Mrs. Italiaander clutching her necklace – in the same order, solemnly positioned around the table in a counterclockwise direction as if they were playing cards being dealt out before a game with high stakes. The little loosely curled white fingers of Archer Italiaander Junior always pointed – discreetly indicating a private communication – at the letter
M
.
MAMA
. Was that what he was saying? His mama did not seem to notice, but each time the fingers silently pointed.
DETH
.
BLUD
. That’s what the wineglass spelled out, but
M
was the real, the hidden message, the one that no one but she had noticed. They always drank red wine from the glasses first – it gave an uncomfortably holy communion sort of feeling to the ceremony – and some was always left in the glasses, dribbling down slowly as they were inverted, and leaving long wet streaks, quicksilver-like with their curved rims, across the polished table as they slid from place to place. It was like another hidden message – in handwriting this time – as the curved outer surfaces of the loops and swirls and beads of redness scribbled out across the table and caught the dim light.

The humming wineglass sound would keep Miss Iandoli awake, even if the storm didn’t, and it was loudest outside her house. It
was the sound of the wind through the telegraph wires, and a telegraph pole stood right outside Miss Iandoli’s bedroom window. You looked up toward the sky, and every city street – these days – was enclosed within a tight network of wire, level upon level, like thick washing lines strung between tenement buildings, to prevent the birds from flight. Some of the poles had so many arms – was that the word? – upon them that they had the look of wide skyward-pointing ladders with which invaders from another element could storm the upper levels of the skies, each rung of the ladder with an odd dark shape silhouetted upon it at each side, like roosting, motionless birds, caught within the traps, all in the exact same position, all the exact same size. From these, the wires led across from pole to pole like rigging from the masts of a ship.

There were no lights on in any of the houses, as if she was the only person awake, yet she thought of everyone she knew, imagining him or her awake and watching as she was watching, visualizing the windows at which he or she would be sitting. For this you had to sit, a spectator at a play or the opera, not stand with one hand resting negligently against the wall on one side. Charlotte would be calling to Linnaeus to come and look, come and look, as the storm shrieked around Hudson Heights. It was like a summer beach, the tide coming in, and coming in, and the sandcastles losing their shapes and vanishing, though this was a beach where the sea would freeze, the waves held in their descent, as the moving landscape changed out of recognition beyond, a place in which the only things that were fixed were those that were held within the mind of the observer. She wondered if Papa was sitting looking out across the wildness at the back, where the fields and orchards would be buried under huge windblown drifts, or facing the same way she was facing, out across the street, losing track of time in his study. She had heard a door click in the hall long ago, before she had gone to sleep, a sound that had echoed right up the stairs, before the snow had started.

When the dark early morning had come – nothing to show
that it
was
morning, except for the time on her pocket-watch – the street was still deserted, no one daring to venture out, and the blizzard howled. It was going to snow all day; the snow was never going to end. There were not many children in Chestnut Street, but she doubted that – in an hour or so – there would be any streets and parks in the city noisy with shrieking children tugging sleds and rolling great balls of snow down slopes, heads bowed against the gale. What was happening outside was too extreme, too dangerous, for children – for anyone – to be out, and she had a sense of being marooned, out of reach of anyone else. She was not sure whether she was barricaded in against the blizzard, or whether the storm had trapped her in the house. In the back of her mind, she ticked her way through a little list. Mama and the others would not be getting back today; travel was impossible, and the whole city would have shuddered to a halt. All streets would be the same as the street in front of her, a deserted snow-blocked canyon down which winds howled. Karin, their maid, had gone with them. There was plenty of coal, plenty of oil, candles, food. If Papa had not also been in the house, she would, tentatively, have started to feel a little exhilarated, a desert island sense of freedom, even if the island did happen to be surrounded by a frozen sea across which intruders might approach. Slowly, tentatively, bulkily well-swathed figures would begin to feel their way across the undulating solidified surface of the waves.