Pinkerton's Sister (9 page)

This was not a man who brought light with him; this was a man who brought darkness. This was a man with the face of her father.

If you tell anybody, the wind will get you.

These were the words her father had said to Annie. It was the sort of thing an adult would say to frighten a child, and Annie had been a child. Her father had known it when he had done what he had done to her. The use of these words proved it.

This was a man with the voice of her father, the voice that had made her frightened of the wind and the moon, frightened of many things. Thoughts of
Sing Song
brought the words of one of its poems into her mind.

She shivered, as at the touch of the cold wind.

Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!

These words — the words of Alfred Hardie in
Hard Cash
, also addressed to a father — were words she often whispered, as if they were secret endearments that no one should overhear.

Outside, the wind-blown snow gusted within the little pools of light, and the whole window seemed to groan, the loose pane in the top left-hand corner rattling. The weather had been like this on the day that her father died.

In the wind, and in the darkness, the unnamed man galloped past, but he always turned around and came back. He never stayed away for good.

It was time to wander about the house, ignite a few bed-curtains, rend a few wedding-veils, that sort of thing. Another busy day in the life of a madwoman. All this, and the Reverend Goodchild too. Mrs. Albert Comstock yesterday; the Reverend Goodchild today.
And
Dr. Vaniah Odom!
What wond’rous Life in this I lead!/Ripe Apples drop about my head;/The Luscious Clusters of the Vine/Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine
… She might even manage an enthusiastic demoniac laugh as she staggered berserkly about, though it would be wasted in the absence of visitors. If she had never started the attempts at finding some sort of a “cure” for herself (she heard the quotation marks click cozily into place around “cure” like comforting hands patting shoulders) — Dr. Severance of Staten Island, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (above all, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster) — perhaps she would not have been thought of (by some people) as being a madwoman. She was surely well within the permitted range of strangeness, particularly when she paused to compare herself with some of the people she knew, the acquaintances around her, the neighbors? (The word “neighbors” had something folksy and apple-pie about it that was at odds with the reality.) Mrs. Goodchild had chattily informed her that there was madness in the family — watching her reaction closely (you could tell that she had been saving this up for quite some time as a little, well-deserved treat) — as if mentioning a propensity to freckles or premature baldness. She could never lapse into broken inertia, as Lady Audley had done at the end of the novel, as she looked around the suite of apartments that was to be hers for the rest of her life in the private lunatic asylum, dreary in the wan light of a single wax candle. She really ought to have a candle in her hand as she went downstairs, to continue the Lady Macbeth motif that had come into her mind earlier.

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

The solitary flame of Lady Audley’s candle, pale and ghostlike in itself, was multiplied by paler phantoms of its ghostliness, which glimmered everywhere about the rooms; in the shadowy depths of the polished floors and wainscot, or the windowpanes, in the looking-glasses, or in those great expanses of glimmering something which adorned the rooms, and which my lady mistook for costly mirrors, but which were in reality wretched mockeries of burnished tin. They were fake mirrors, in which the reflections were blurred and indistinct, as fake as the fake books in
Hard Cash
, and made of the same material. Lady Audley would look into them, and she would not be able to recognize herself, just as Alfred Hardie would not be able to open those books, books in which no words were printed.

Amid all the faded splendor —
splendour —
of shabby velvet, and tarnished gilding, and polished wood, the woman dropped into an armchair, and covered her face with her hands. The whiteness of them, and the starry light of diamonds, trembling about them, glittered in the dimly lighted chamber.

Rochester had told Jane that the Bertha Rochester she had seen in her bedchamber had been the creature of an overstimulated brain. Alice had the same problem. It was what she had been told over and over again. A woman should not overexcite her brain. It was injurious. It — ahem — interfered with her — ahem, ahem — womanly functions. Ahems sometimes overwhelmed everything else in any discussion of this — ahem — delicate matter, particularly if it were Dr. Twemlow doing the talking. He was a man who’d blush if a woman removed her hat. There were more throat-clearings than in a consumption clinic. Books should be laid aside for the health’s sake. Dr. Severance of Staten Island and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had both agreed on this. They set down what came from her, to satisfy their remembrance the more strongly.

What’s done cannot be undone.

To bed, to bed.

And not to read.

And not to write.

To bed, to bed, to bed.

And not to think.

And not to talk.

To bed, to bed, to bed.

And not to sew.

No stitch-stitch-stitch.

Just sleeping.

Just dreaming.

Drifting listlessly away.

Like the Lady of Shalott down the river.

She has a lovely face.

That was what Lancelot had said.

You thought that he’d have said “hath.” That’s what knights in poetry tended to say.

Drifting.

Nothing else.

Because nothing else mattered.

She could talk about the clouds.

She could talk about the pictures.

She could talk about the dreams.

Scribble, scribble, scribble
.

She talked, and they wrote.

If she talked she would be better.

The thump, thump, thump of Rosobell preparing the fire in the parlor rattled up through the schoolroom fire-grate. Alice had kept this fire burning all night. Hearing Rosobell meant that it would be a little after 6. 30. She had forgotten to wind her pocket-watch the night before — it was usually the last thing she did before going to bed — and it had stopped in the early hours. She had noticed the silence from her watch-stand, the absence of the
tick, tick, tick
. She would take it downstairs with her, and set it from the kitchen clock.

She picked up the tongs and added one large piece of coal right in the middle of the fire, one that would slowly burn through in the course of the morning, so that the room would still be warm when she returned from church. The little Old Testament figures on the Dutch tiles around the fireplace flickered, appropriate small-scale animation on a Sunday morning. Adam and Eve stood hand in hand at the side of the tree, as if choosing the best fruit to pick for a pie. Noah and his wife stood on the deck of the tiniest ark imaginable — probably just large enough to save two white mice and a small and solitary rabbit from the flood — as the dove flew toward them, weighed down with an olive leaf the size of a tree. Like Breughel’s biblical scenes, like Shakespeare’s Romans, they were dressed in the fashions of the time in which they were created. If she listened at the fireplace, she could hear whereabouts people were in the house. It was especially clear in the summer, when no fire was burning.

As a little girl, she would kneel down, looking at the crumpled newspaper pages in the grate, the engravings of bearded faces, soot whispering and trickling down, gathering in the rucks, and listen to Mama playing the piano, Annie singing, fragments of conversation. Sometimes she’d hear sobbing, far away, suppressed. Sometimes it was Annie, and sometimes it would be Mama. Mama cried in the same way that she played the piano, quietly, shyly, hoping not to be overheard. Alice had lain awake and heard her, in the evenings, in the small hours of the darkness. Knowing that you had heard someone else cry gave you a special feeling toward that person. She’d dab her fingers in the soot, wipe them across her face, and look at her minstrel-like face in the mirror above the mantelpiece, moving her mouth like someone singing. “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.” She’d open her mouth very wide, flare her eyes. “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.” She used to imagine that Joel Chandler Harris and the writers of coon songs applied blackface make-up before they began writing, and that their manuscripts were marked all over with burned-cork thumbprints.

There was a burst of fire as she jiggled the poker, and the figure of Isaac in one of the Dutch tiles seemed to writhe in flames as he lay bound on the altar upon the wood. Abraham leaned over him, enthusiastic to slay his son with the knife. The angel, peering out from the middle of a cloud, did not appear inclined to do much to interfere. This was one of the Bible stories that seemed designed to test the faith of the reader as much as God had tested Abraham’s. It made it difficult to like God very much. She did not feel guilty for thinking this. This made her feel guilty.

“Don’t do it, Daddy!” the little boy pleaded. “Don’t do it!” But Daddy wasn’t listening. He had his mind on quite other matters, and sharpened the keen edge specially, vigorously stropping the blade on the sole of his sandal like Shylock whetting his knife, keen to start carving Antonio, wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.

“Typical!”

You could just hear Mrs. Albert Comstock commenting loudly in the theatre, her head nodding up and down in delighted disgust. (How on earth had Ben survived an evening crammed into a box with her and the others? She could only hope that the music had been
very
loud. That might have given him a chance.)

“Typical! Just as I expected!”

(“It only goes to show!” That would be her next comment, unless she opted for “You can’t be too careful!” It would be one or the other.)

“… wolfish …”

Nod.

“… bloody …”

Extra-enthusiastic nod on this.

“… starved …”

Slightly more dubious nod here.

“… ravenous …”

Enthusiasm resumed for this nod.

The head went up and down so rapidly that (a merciful release, you couldn’t help thinking) all the features blurred, all chins and wattles wobbling. It was rather like seeing her in her automobile — well trussed-up in plaid blankets and impenetrable veils, like a kidnapped Scottish beekeeper the size of Ben Nevis — as the engine was cranked up (if that was the correct expression), vibrating vigorously, with considerably more than one pound of flesh in mountainous motion. Every part about her quivered. Alice had once seen — it was just before Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fortieth birthday, the day on which her ten-year-old self had destroyed Sobriety Goodchild with the words of Shakespeare — a sign with the words
Youth Restored By Electricity While You Wait
. Mrs. Albert Comstock would not have been able to resist, and Alice had visualized her plugged into the mains, shuddering in just this way, with the added bonus of sizzling sounds, and smoke rising from some of her outlying regions. When, more recently, the electric chair had been introduced as a means of execution, the image had returned to tantalize her, the murderous instincts of childhood not yet fully quelled. “Just sit here, Mrs. Comstock,” she’d say, soothingly, as her victim gazed dubiously around her at the unsumptuous surroundings of the execution cell. “Just sit here, and your youth will be restored. All I need do is pull this switch. Just sit here.” It would soon be Mrs. Albert Comstock’s sixty-fifth birthday. It might be a good time to sing of the wonderful benefits that could be obtained by the application of electricity.
Powerful
currents of electricity. Mrs. Albert Comstock had recently re-read
She
. She’d be in receptive mood for any talk of miraculously eternal youth. She’d just sit here with no hesitation whatsoever. She’d be urging, “More power! More power!” as the great arcs of electricity pulsed blue-white around her. Frankenstein’s creature had been lonely for far too long. It was time for him to meet his mate.

Mrs. Albert Comstock had been the first person in Longfellow Park to possess an automobile (she’d made quite sure of that), and had taken possession of the vehicle well before Samuel Cummerford had arrived to set up his business to cater for fashionable automobilists. Alice couldn’t remember the name of the manufacturer of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s automobile, but its owner had been careful to inform everybody that it was
exactly
(invariably in italics) the same as the one Edith Wharton — the authoress of
The Decoration of Houses
and
The Greater Inclination
, a woman of impeccable pedigree — had purchased. Whatever its correct name, Mrs. Albert Comstock invariably referred to her automobile as Dimmesdale, investing the word with all the grandeur of Mrs. Elton boasting of her sister’s barouche-landau in
Emma
. The name was possibly a provocative literary reference to Hester Prynne’s secret lover in
The Scarlet Letter
. “I shall climb aboard Dimmesdale,” she would announce grandly whenever a visitation was threatened, as if the guilt-ridden minister hadn’t suffered enough already. Imaginations buckled with boggling.

A gust of wind blew down the chimney, and sparks flew as in a blacksmith’s forge. Different patterns in the pieces of material in the quilt on her bed were clearly distinguishable. She could not see the colors, but she knew what they were. That patch with a narrow stripe was from a dress she had worn when she was ten years old. That polka-dot patch was from one of Annie’s old shirtwaists.