Pinkerton's Sister (17 page)

“Gracious!” she had said, indicating Annie with a slight sideways tilt of the head, and the ha-ha-ha-ha sound that she used in place of a laugh. “What a lot of teeth!”

She spoke like someone referring to “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the two crocodile-footed monstrosities.

When she returned home, Mrs. Albert Comstock would have greeted Myrtle with the words, “Only one today!” It was a good day, a very good day, but — “Guess where it was!” — that one was rather too close to home. It wasn’t there for very long, just over a year and a half, and then it died.

The word “crocodile” stirred other thoughts. She was as haunted by crocodiles as Thomas De Quincey in his opium-induced dreamings, as if she — in her turn — had emptied some dull opiate to the drains. What could she remember about crocodiles? This was an exercise she sometimes performed with herself, choosing topics at random, checking — she felt — for signs of movement in the brain, as if gingerly moving an injured limb to see if there was pain.

“I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles”: these words, and one other sentence, were the words from
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
that had stayed in her mind. David Copperfield and Peggotty. Herodotus. St. Theodore and St. Helenus. Robert Louis Stevenson. Christina Rossetti. Oscar Wilde. They’d all been connected with, or had mentioned, crocodiles. The way to escape crocodiles, David Copperfield had read, was to baffle them by constantly turning as you ran away from them, as they found this difficult to do because of their unwieldiness. (But wouldn’t this be too risky? Wouldn’t it slow you down too much?) Peggotty had formed the impression that crocodiles were a sort of vegetable. Herodotus …

She thrust the illustration out of sight, and walked out of the room — half consciously tucking some of her mother’s Louis Moreau Gottschalk music under her arm, as if it was something to read in a quiet moment — and back upstairs.

She hurried up the last flight of stairs to the schoolroom, careful not to spill the hot water. It would be almost too much of a surprise for Ben, to emerge half asleep from his room, thoughts of Japan in his head, and see — at the end of the dark corridor — a figure in a pale kimono moving away from him. He had never been to Japan: he would be imagining scenes from Grandpapa’s photographs, a painted landscape, words on a page.

The schoolroom ran the full depth of the house, and she stood looking out again at the back, gazing out from her high window.

The fields and orchards that had once spread away, and up to Hudson Heights, were going, had gone. In the dark morning light, deep under snow, what she could see — the gas-lamps obscured by windblown blizzards — had the feeling of somewhere north of anywhere else, cold and gloomy in perpetual twilight, a huddled underground settlement in the Arctic, some Siberian port where the sea had turned to ice and vessels were frozen at their moorings, rigging furred like frosted spiders’ webs. The inhabitants, trebled in size with thick clothing, slowly picked their way through streets of frozen mud, their whitened breath like low clouds turgidly unfolding. Everyone was faceless, swathed in mufflers and low-pulled hats, with just their eyes showing, the streets peopled by bank robbers and bandits, gingerly picking their way toward their next holdup in a society where all control had collapsed. It made her think of a map of the world that showed only the unexplored regions, a world with no names, just untouched, unwritten-on whiteness. The Arctic was an unmapped place like this; Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s phrenology skull with no labeled names.

To dream of looking down from high places, or out of windows, or being in a high garret, shows an ambitious mind, curious desires, wandering imagination, and confused thoughts.

She felt — as she had felt all the previous summer — that she could sense New York City moving up toward them, that the city would engulf Longfellow Park, and turn it into another lost community, like Manhattanville or Bloomingdale Village. On nights, especially the sleepless summer nights (there had been many of these), she had been sure that she could sometimes feel the house shake slightly as explosions blasted the rock of Manhattan for the foundations of new buildings, new streets, whole new areas, and the city advanced north. People began to live in places that were not yet on the map, did not really exist. When there had been too little light to read any longer, she had lain and listened in twilight and darkness. It had been too hot to light the lamps, and the twilights had been long, the objects around slowly thickening into indistinctness in the growing gloom. They would surely not be using explosives at night, but she sensed that the windows rattled, the domes of the lamps vibrated, and her dim reflection shivered in the mirror. Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll swayed forward, and then away again. A dull reddish glow burned briefly on the underside of low cloud, and then the house shifted a little. A dull film of dust removed the gleam from the leaves in the garden, and darkened the brightness of glass. When sheets were removed from the clothesline, and when she brushed her hair at night, grains of powdered rock would fall out. The polished surface of her dressing table blurred, and sometimes she thought that the dead gray dust — she stared intently, like someone looking at a first gray hair — came from inside her own head, loosened by the vigor of her brushing.

One, two, three …

If I cry, she would think on the bad nights — there were many bad nights — my tears will leave a track down the dust on my face, and everyone will know I have been crying. When the wind — ah, the wind! — blew from the south, she could hear very faint dull explosions like a distant conflict, and birds would whir up into the air, startled, as if expecting to be shot.

In the late summer both sides of Dadenhof Road had been marked out in building lots, and the whole of Heneacher Woods, all the way up to Megoran Hill and Jacksons Bluff (she felt her usual instinctive twitch at “Jacksons,” the urge to insert an apostrophe), had been sold. Across the whole of Longfellow Park, fields and farms were vanishing, buildings being demolished, new constructions appearing. It was like the time when she was a little girl, and the Shakespeare Castle had been demolished on Hudson Heights. Its extensive grounds had been developed, and — in place of the topiary and the peacocks — Pettifar’s Orphanage, The House of the Magdalenes, and the North River Lunatic Asylum had appeared, with their Imperial Roman rows of columns and flights of steps, a gleaming white city for the abandoned, the fallen, the demented.

She thought — at various times in her childhood — that she belonged in one of these last two institutions: in The House of the Magdalenes (as one of the nuns, not one of the sinful women), or in the lunatic asylum (this time as one of the inmates, not as a guardian). Women in white, women in black, nurses and nuns, smiled firmly, reached out their hands, capes and cowls obscuring their shadowed faces.

Some of the boys — Sobriety Goodchild always to the fore, the cruelest, the most inventive and insistent — displayed a fondness for deciding (and loudly proclaiming) which girls at Miss Pearsall’s School should be dispatched to which of the institutions. They took particular pleasure in urging the orphanage upon girls who had recently lost a mother or father (even better, of course, if it was both): “Got no Ma, Got no Pa,/Time to go to Pettifar!”

The more vulgar boys (Sobriety Goodchild — needless to say — again a prime contender) were fond of loud speculation about which girls should be in The House of the Magdalenes. Alice had not been entirely sure what a Magdalene was, and vaguely thought at first — from what she had heard — that all those young women had somehow lost their way, and were waiting until they could remember the direction again. “Can’t they use maps?” she had asked, eager to be of assistance. Sobriety Goodchild would have been the one to ask about maps. The Magdalenes could have consulted him for assistance. “He’s
very
keen on geography,” his mama had unconvincingly announced a little while earlier. As far as Alice could ascertain, this dubious assertion was based upon Sobriety’s saying “Lake —
Snigger!
— Titicaca!” a lot in a loud voice, having — whilst idly browsing in his atlas — discovered this irresistibly vulgar-sounding geographical feature straddling the lands of the clearly uninhibited Peruvians and Bolivians. If it wasn’t —
Snigger! —
titty
, it was —
Snigger! —
caca
with Sobriety for ages. North Americans had — how superior! — Lakes Superior, Ontario, Michigan, any number of sober-sounding alcohol-free fresh-water lakes. South Americans had Lake Titicaca.

The lost and wandering Magdalenes had long hair that was darkened and clotted with ointment, and they held half-emptied boxes of it in their glistening fingers, as if they were all Maggie Tullivers, innocently caught out in some new enormity. Their elbows were wrapped around with clean white bandages, tidily fastened with neat prim bows. Old bruises and scratches marked hands and arms, and their dresses were dusty and ripped at the knees. They were much given to falling — this much Alice had gathered — and these were the scars of their falling. Perhaps, like Albert Comstock, they were sinfully given to not-so-secret drinking, or — she remembered a comment from Mrs. Goodchild — excessive finery in clothes, keeling over from too-high heels, twisting their ankles as they fell in a flurry of bright silks. Sobriety Goodchild — who else? — had soon clarified matters for her. “Charlotte the Harlot,” Sobriety had called Charlotte, and poor, dumpy, innocent Charlotte had sobbed because it had sounded so rude. Alice had always been the favored candidate for the North River Lunatic Asylum: they were nearer the truth with this one, she supposed, than they had been with Charlotte, and they had been unrelenting

She had — for a time — sought to subdue Sobriety with the aid of artfully administered dramatic irony, after she had first come across the concept as she (at the age of nine) worked her way through
Macbeth
, planning her New Improved version of Shakespeare. “A little water clears us of this deed,” said Lady Macbeth, her hands soaked in blood. “How easy is it then!” (Dramatic irony.) “Fail not our feast,” Macbeth instructed the soon-to-be-murdered Banquo. (Dramatic irony. Banquo did not fail the feast, and his ghost unleashed chaos.) Dramatic irony seemed guaranteed to produce reliable results, and Alice couldn’t wait to try it. All you had to do (the Macbeths obviously hadn’t realized this) was to say — in your most confident voice — the opposite of what you really wanted to happen, and blank out the words “God willing” from entering your head. (Not even “D.V.” should squeeze its way in through the slightest crack of lapsed concentration, and fingers must remain uncrossed, hands splayed out like Struwwelpeter’s.) She debated whether or not to employ Shakespearean English to ensure a favorable outcome, vaguely feeling that blank verse (or, at the very least, prose employed for particular dramatic purposes: she was a great reader of footnotes) held out a better chance of success. In the end, she decided on modern English, to avoid suspicion falling upon her as awful things began to happen to the object of her designs.

“I’m sure he’ll be absolutely splendid,” she would announce in ringing tones whenever it was announced that Sobriety Goodchild was going to be persuaded to sing in front of a cowed assemblage. “I’m sure he’ll sing beautifully.” “I’m positive that everyone will really enjoy it.” These were other sentences she employed on a regular basis. She wasn’t sure whether it was the dramatic irony, or whether it was tempted fate (fate succumbed far too easily to temptation in her experience), but it seemed to work with gratifying regularity. The more extravagantly she expressed anticipation (always ensuring that Sobriety heard her), the worse his performance, though everyone applauded politely. Made ambitious by success (
Macbeth
ought to have warned her against the dangers of ambition) she began a plan, by subtle and sophisticated gradations, to lure Sobriety to his doom by the employment of dramatic irony. There would be an extra level of satisfaction in destroying an uncouth oaf by the use of a literary technique. “I’m sure it’s quite safe to climb upon the roof,” she could proclaim, her tone totally confident, dangling the bait of universal acclaim before his jaw-dangling stupidity. “I can see no possible danger in your launching yourself off into space from on top of the chimney.” That sort of thing. Experimentally,
à propos
of nothing whatever, she confidently asserted “I’m sure Sobriety won’t spontaneously combust” (this after a first reading of
Bleak House
) or “I’m absolutely certain that Sobriety’s head won’t fall off,” but results were distinctly disappointing. There had — in fact — been no results whatsoever, with no signs of flames or looseness at the neck. “Get a move on, God!” she’d muttered, a little impatiently, presuming that God was the fate she tempted, or the irony that she was attempting to make dramatic, but He hadn’t been listening, made sulky by her too-pushy confidence. She’d really been looking forward to Sobriety’s leap from the roof of The Old Pigpen, and the instant realization that
this was not going to work
, the look of terror on his face as he plunged, screaming, to a feather-free Icarusian death.

Splat!

She’d particularly looked forward to the
Splat!

No
Splat!
had been forthcoming, but — after she’d abandoned dramatic irony and put her trust in sheer maliciousness — she’d had her revenge on Sobriety Goodchild after all,
and
with the words of Shakespeare. So — ironically (this seemed the correct expression to employ) — dramatic irony had, despite her scorning its utter uselessness, played a part in the destruction of the wicked and cruel boy. (That’s what Jane Eyre had called John Reed. “You are like a murderer,” she had said — Alice had cheered her on — “you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!”) She’d done what she’d done all by herself, but God — encouraged by her efforts — had eventually done His share. God had bided His time (she’d had to wait
years
), but had at last — (grudgingly, she felt; He could be so petty for Someone capital-lettered and omnipotent: why couldn’t He just get on with it instead of moving in a mysterious way all the time?) — punished Sobriety.
Smitten
was probably the verb to use in this context; God seemed very taken with smiting. He had made him the husband of the wispy, the characterless, the virtually invisible, Mrs. Sobriety Goodchild, and the father — strange, still, to think of him as a husband and father, that poisonous little face of his contorted with taunting — of the dreadful Serenity Goodchild, twelve years old now, and already a domineering diva. It had been tempting fate to name her Serenity, and fate had embraced temptation with enthusiasm, crying out “Goody! Goody!” as it pounced. Perhaps the
Splat!
had arrived after all, wearing a frilly pink dress and a sulky expression.