Pinkerton's Sister (84 page)

“… and had to close my eyes because the feathers were falling into them. It felt nice. They were warm, not cold. I opened my eyes again, and shaded them …”

She brought her hands up above her eyes, shielding them from bright sunshine, a dazzle on fallen snow.

“… and saw that there were birds in the sky, and the feathers were falling from them. The birds weren’t singing. The birds couldn’t sing. They were opening and closing their beaks, but everything happened in silence. The feathers fell more and more thickly, and after a while they became cold. I thought that the birds could have no more feathers, and that they must be cold, and I felt that coldness. I wanted to make them warm again, to make them sing.”

She stopped, looked across at Alice, with the usual self-deprecating shrug of her shoulders, the rueful twist to her mouth, expecting that Alice would laugh at her for sounding so serious, for thinking that dreams had meanings. There was an opening formula,
and there was a closing formula, and now she spoke that.

“That was my dream.”

She added a little more.

“And now you have come, and brought my dream in with you.”

She moved her hands over where the feathers had settled, stirring them into motion.

“I am your d-d-dreams come true!”

“My dreams come true! Though you haven’t brought enough feathers.”

“It was a very small b-b-bird.”

Alice opened the Dream Book. She actually turned to what would have been the right page for
Feathers
. There was no entry for this subject, but she was not going to read what was written in the book. She remembered to bring the book close to her face, peering, like someone struggling to read without her spectacles. On the left-hand side, halfway down, was an entry for
Father
. She refocused her eyes, so that the words on the page were even more blurred, and pretended to read.

“To d-d-dream of feathers is a very g-g-good omen,” she said, trying to use the right sort of language. “It foretells happiness after a p-p-period of sadness, when all that you have been hoping for comes about.” Annie had seemed so sad recently. She even remembered to struggle over certain words – “omen,” “sadness,” “hoping” – a short-sighted struggler who couldn’t see them the first time, and had to reread them.

She also remembered to look into Annie’s eyes as she lied, smiling to show that she was pleased for her with the interpretation.

She riffled forward nearer to the beginning of the book, to the page with the word
Birds
. Alice had developed a system of looking up the meanings of all the elements of the dreams, and trying to construct a meaning for all the different interpretations put together. “It is a special gift, to be able to reconcile the variant readings into a true interpretation,” she had said impressively, like the seventh child of a seventh child, one with powers granted to a
favored few. This time there was an entry, but she did not read it. Opposite it, on the right-hand page, were
Birth
,
Birthday
, and
Birthday Presents
, the flickering candles on the cake blown out. She knew that she had not looked up
Feathers
before, but could not remember about
Birds
. Annie would remember what she had said. She would have to be careful. Annie had not responded to her smile.

“To d-d-dream of b-b-birds is to d-d-dream of freedom,” she said. This sounded convincing. This must surely be true. She hadn’t linked the feathers with the meaning she had given to them, though most of the interpretations seemed oddly arbitrary. The more arbitrary, the more convincing, perhaps. For some reason, the image of Roman household gods came into her mind, briefly. “You will fly away to a new p-p-place where you will be happy …”

The happier she tried to make the meaning of the dream sound, the sadder Annie looked. She began to improvise further, trying to make her voice sound matter-of-fact, someone reading symptoms from a medical encyclopædia, so that an illness could be diagnosed. She was saving a life. Alone, in a snowbound cabin, miles from anywhere, only she could take the necessary steps.

“In this new p-p-place you will be able to b-b-begin a new life where your d-d-dreams really will come true. Many p-p-people will love you. All the old unhappiness will be left in the p-p-past. You must not forget all the p-p-people you leave b-b-behind when …”

“Freedom,” “happy,” “new,” “true,” “unhappiness,” “forget”: these were the words on which she pretended to struggle, holding the page even closer to her face. She was trying to give Annie the dream she wanted to have, the meaning for a dream she’d never dreamed, though she had used too many words that made her stutter. She’d used too many words altogether. Should she have mentioned becoming more beautiful, and being respected – she had mentioned being loved – or would Annie remember that this
was the meaning for a dream about geraniums, not birds, not feathers? She saw Annie’s face as it had been throughout the whole of a summer’s day, sun-filled, eyes half closed, staring at the red petals so closely that it was as if she was the one who was shortsighted, and not Alice, concentrating as she was concentrating now. The meaning she had hoped for hadn’t happened in sunshine; Alice might be able to make her believe that the meaning had happened in coldness and snow.

She had gone on for far too long. The interpretations in Annie’s book tended to be enigmatically brief, and of an oracular vagueness that could be stretched to mean most things. Annie was smiling at her, rather sadly.

“‘Where your dreams really will come true,’” she quoted, the inflexion of her eyebrow, if not of her voice, making this a question.

“That’s what it says,” Alice said, not sounding convincing even to herself. “Your d-d-dreams really will come true.” She said it without the quotation marks, trying to make it sound like something that was going to happen. She did not succeed.

“Liar.”

This time it was Annie who said the word. She said it fondly, lovingly.

“Your d-d-dreams really …”

“Liar.”

Alice faltered to a close.

Annie picked up the feathers, and blew them into the air again.

“‘Happiness after a period of sadness,’” she said. “‘All that you have been hoping for comes about.’”

She reached across, and took the book from Alice, touching the words on the page in the way that Alice had visualized her touching the newspaper.

“No,” she said. “Those aren’t the words I can feel here.”

She touched her breast, the gesture Alice often found herself making, and repeated what she had said, stressing the last word.

“Those aren’t the words I can feel
here
.”

(She should have bowed down upon herself.)

(She should have had her arms clasped tightly across her stomach, attempting to warm and soothe a new source of pain.

(“I feel it
here
,” she should have been saying. “I feel it
here
.”)

She touched Alice’s face. The transferring of her hand from her breast to the face – it was a cold, dry little hand – was like a gesture that meant love. It was oddly dignified.

“You’re kind, Alice. You’ve always been kind to me.”

“Isn’t Mama kind?”

“She brought me this comforter.”

Annie lifted up the bedspread, and they touched the comforter underneath it, all those feathers. The tiny sharp quills dug into their fingers like the grip of small birds’ claws, or pens with which to write in miniature books, handwriting that could barely be read.

“
That’s a turkey’s
,” Catherine Linton murmured to herself, “
and this is a wild duck’s; and this is a pigeon’s…And here’s a moor-cock’s; and this – I should know it among a thousand – it’s a lapwing’s. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor…we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons
.”

The first things Alice had looked up in
What’s in a Dream
, twenty-five years later, had been
Feathers
and
Birds
. Then she had looked up
Wind
,
Moon
, other things.

To dream of seeing feathers falling around you, denotes that your burdens in life will be light and easily borne.

That was the first meaning she had read, very like the one – she had remembered every word – she had invented.

To dream of molting and songless birds, denotes merciless and inhuman treatment of the outcast and fallen by people of wealth.

That was the second meaning she had read.

It was a special gift, to be able to reconcile the variant readings into a true interpretation.

“Look.”

Alice leaned across, and picked up the top letter from the pile written by Reuben. There was something she wanted to show Annie. She imagined touching the letter, and then touching her breast, in the way that Annie had just done with the Dream Book. The name was printed in large capital letters on the envelope, so that Annie would recognize it more easily because of this.

MISS ANNIE CLEMENT, In care of Mr. and Mrs. L. Pinkerton, 7 Chestnut Street, Longfellow Park, New York City
…

The band of blue light from the colored glass went right across the deep blue paper as she held it, like something being illuminated for an important scene.

“May I write on this?”

Annie looked doubtful.

“I won’t spoil it.”

Alice looked for a pen or pencil, and then picked up one of the struck matches from the base of the candlestick. Using this as a writing implement, her face close against the envelope, she printed her own name in charcoaled capital letters, exactly beneath Annie’s. There was a good wide space.

Then Alice became a little embarrassed, not sure of how to continue, how to explain the point that had seemed so important when she had first noticed it. She knew Annie would understand.

“Can you see?” she asked. “Your name, and my name?”

Annie took the envelope from her.

“They begin with the same letter,” she said. “They end with the same letter. They have the same number of letters in them.” She
smiled at Alice. “They
belong
together.”

She understood.

“We begin the same, and we end the same.” The next bit was more difficult to say, but she had thought it out beforehand. “You are my heart, containing me,” Alice said. “I am your heart, containing you.”

She was reaching out toward an emotion she had never experienced, trying to grasp it in her hand, and feel it. She wanted to know what it was like. She had read about it. Often, she had read about it.

Annie hadn’t laughed, hadn’t looked puzzled.

“Of course, it doesn’t work with ‘P-P-Pinkerton’ and ‘Clement,’” Alice added. She let Annie know that she knew she had a second name. “I tried to do something with them.”

(She’d tried numerology with “Alice Pinkerton” and “Annie Clement,” trying to reduce the letters of the two names to the same number. She’d copied out the table of interpretation from one of Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s books. “A,” “J,” and “S” had a value of 1, “B,” “K,” and “T” had a value of 2, and so on, and – though she’d labored long, struggling with a baffling arithmetical puzzle, trying to cheat – she had never been able to produce any final name number but 8 for her name, and 7 for Annie’s, numbers with different meanings.)

Annie picked up another spent match, and drew a line through the two opening “A”s and two closing “E”s.

“Can you make a word out of the letters that are left?” she asked, as if this might confirm a kinship.

Alice looked dubious, and thought.

“You can almost make ‘CLINIC,’” she said, after a while. This didn’t sound too hopeful.

“I don’t like ‘CLINIC,’” Annie said.

If you dream that you are a patient in a hospital, you will have a contagious disease in your community, and will narrowly escape affliction. If you visit patients there you will hear distressing news of the
absent.

She rubbed where she had drawn through the “A”s and the “E”s.

“Is it better if you use the full names? Do they make a word?”

She picked up the newspaper from beside where the Dream Book had been, and smoothed it on the bed between them. There wasn’t really a “between,” they were so jammed in, and the opened personals pages rested upon them both. Alice thought that Annie was asking her to read something, and began to lean forward, screwing up her eyes.

“I’m trying to find a space, for you,” Annie said, “a space where you can write.”

She turned the page over, and a Griswold’s Girl hovered over a bottle of Griswold’s Discovery, a large area of whiteness between the two of them, reaching out toward it like God on the point of giving life to Adam. The Griswold’s Girl beamed rapturously as Alice thought for a moment, and then wrote – underneath
DISCOVER GRISWOLD’S! THE PURE CURE! –
“ANNIE C” and “ALICE P.”

“‘IN A NICE P-P-PLACE,’” she announced eventually.

“‘In an ice place’?” Annie asked, mishearing. “Is that what it says?”

“A
nice
p-p-place, but I like ‘ice p-p-place.’ I
p-p-prefer
‘ice p-p-place.’”

“Is this where we are?”

“Ice.”

“Aren’t you warm yet?”

“My toes are wriggling with coziness.”

“Nice, not ice. Tell me that poem again. The Annie Collection.”

“‘For Annie’?”

“No, the other one. ‘Annie of Tharaw.’”

“My life, my goods, my gold,” Annie repeated.

“You said it wrong. You didn’t say g-g-g.”

“G-g-good.”

“I don’t know it all by heart,” Alice admitted. “I read it to you from a b-b-book.”

“Do you remember the part about the wind?” Annie asked. “The wind and the bad weather?”

The wind seemed to be penetrating down the interior corridor, blowing through and dipping the candle-flame downward.

Alice started, uncertainly. This wasn’t right.