Pinkerton's Sister (19 page)

(“There’s one!”

(“There’s one!”

(“
Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja
…”

(
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

(Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild had moved their heads gradually across as they watched the young woman’s progress down the street, but their bodies had stayed still, rather in the way that certain species of birds observed something of interest, something upon which they were about to pounce. These birds were not cuckoos. These birds were predators, out to kill and eat. The whir of wings. The triumphant squawk. The rending sounds, the flying feathers, the juicy gobbets dangling from the sharp-edged beaks. Nudge, nudge went Mrs. Albert Comstock’s left elbow. Nudge, nudge went Mrs. Goodchild’s right elbow. The young woman – very young, really a girl – had flushed when she saw that she was being observed, held up her head, and clutched her friend’s arm tighter.

(“
Brazen!
” had been Mrs. Albert Comstock’s considered opinion, and – “
Brazen!
” – Mrs. Goodchild had swiftly agreed. They had clutched their umbrellas tighter to them. There would be some prodding – possibly even some smiting – before the day was through. Busy, busy, busy.

(
Nudge.

(“Under a cloud.”

(
Nudge.

(“Under a cloud.”

(
Nudge.

(For a while, Alice had imagined the young woman walking about beneath a small, personal cloud, like an enthusiastic pipe smoker. Rain fell perpetually upon her. It was not a downpour, but one of those damp, dispiriting drizzles that never stopped. Mrs. Albert Comstock’s personal climate would have included thunder and lightning to add a bit of excitement, the lightning zinging on the jewelry, and pulsating off the metal parts of her more adventurous articles of underwear. She had seen the young woman walking about with her friend several times after that, and always imagined the impending cloud, the drizzly mist-like descent a veil around her, hiding her from view, dampening her clothes. Perhaps that was why they wandered in Heneacher Woods, seeking refuge from the perpetual rain under the branches of the trees, whispering together as the dripping water from the leaves hissed around them. They sheltered from the wetness and from the booming voices, the jabbing umbrellas; they shivered beneath the trees, imperfectly protected by their new names. When they entered The House of the Magdalenes they were expected to give up their real names, as if they were changing their status like the nuns, and the young women chose romantic names for themselves that they had read in novels and books of poetry. It was as if they were trying to make-believe that they were characters in the love stories and love poetry that they had read, young maidens to whom handsome young men had vowed eternal adoration amidst beautiful landscapes. Somewhere in those same woods, lost in the mist, hidden by the earth-obscuring fogginess – her outline all faded like a partially erased charcoal drawing – there would be Annie, peering forward, straining her dark eyes, trying to find the way.

(Alice wanted to go up and speak to the girl, say something kind, but she vanished, as they all vanished. She would begin to recognize individual girls – sometimes she even looked out especially for some of them – but always, after a while, she would not see them again.

(“Look at that one!”

(Mrs. Goodchild’s right elbow sank in about three inches.

(“That one’s come to grief!”

(“Look at that one!”

(“That one’s come to grief!”

(That was another expression they used.

(The girls had come to Grief, a strange, misty cloud-enfolded place of sadness where it always rained, a Promised Land where all promises were broken, a Goshen without light. There they were, looking as if they had been crying, many of them. Perhaps their mamas had died.

–
Keep moving! Keep moving!
–

–
Keep moving! Keep moving!
–

The girls whose babies had been taken from them sang about a papa who was not there, and not about themselves, because they were of no account.

Alice’s circlings must have run through into the summer: she had a distinct memory of pressing her face against sun-warmed stone, grains adhering to her skin like sand, and hearing nothing but a breeze through the leaves of trees, and her own heartbeat, magnified with the sea-wave sound of a seacoast shell. She pressed her ear against the wall, but the place had always appeared utterly silent. She tried to hold her breath, imagining someone in an echoingly empty room on the other side of the wall – also holding her breath – trying to listen to her. Perhaps she might hear Annie’s voice, singing a lullaby to her empty arms.

Hush, little baby.

She heard nothing.

Don’t say a word.

Day after day she’d wandered through the oddly depopulated, silent grounds, feeling like the last inhabitant of Ancient Rome, dazzled by the light on the white marble. She’d felt as if she had been left – forgotten, crying out “Mater! Mater!” (Maggie Tulliver was not the only girl who studied Latin books) – in an abandoned city, everyone else fled, sandals flip-flopping, from the approach of the barbarian invasion, the head-lopping Visigoths or Vandals.

Ooh, look!

Here they come, the evil swart-faced hordes!

Flee!

Flee for your lives!

The Goodchilds and the Griswolds poured up from the direction of Heneacher Woods – it was like a scene from “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” with frogs instead of rats, or the goblins surging up into the castle in search of Princess Irene – howling threateningly, led by Mrs. Albert Comstock. She was crammed like a bulky Boadicea into her buckle-wheeled chariot, heftily hefting her wide-bladed sword, jammed in with Dr. Vaniah Odom and Anthony Comstock (less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels). Those poor, poor horses. War could be such hell. Dr. Vaniah Odom’s little head was straining to see over the top edge of the chariot, like a small child pressing his nose against a candy-store window.

“Smite!” he and Anthony Comstock were urging the frog-faced masses in unison, with venomous glee. “Smite! Smite! Smite! Filth! Filth! Filth!” (When they said it three times it was true.)

They smote.

Their vorpal blades went snicker-snack.

The Jabberwocks – their jaws bit, their claws caught – had seized the weapons from those who had sought to rid the world of them. This was not a frabjous day. It was a day without callooh, a day without callay, and there would be no joyous chortlings.

Flames roared up from Hudson Heights, and the columns of Pettifar’s Orphanage, The House of the Magdalenes, and the North River Lunatic Asylum fell in fragments of shattered marble as they were destroyed to the triumphant yells of the barbarians. The black clouds of smoke would be visible for miles, and the fires would rage for days. It was the sort of scene that would lend itself to one of Dickinson Prud’homme’s more ambitious quasi-historical canvases, offering ample opportunities for painting large women – in attitudes of extravagant abandonment – deprived of most of their clothing.

The Women of Hudson Heights Lament the Destruction of Their City.

That should draw the crowds at his next exhibition, the men sniggering like Otsego Lake Academy schoolboys, nudging each other, discreetly indicating the best bits with lubricious glee.

“Over there, top left-hand corner!”

–
Nudge, nudge! –

“Look at that one bending over!”

–
Nudge, nudge! –

“Have you seen
those
?”

Like purchasers of peaches, or the Walrus selecting from the Oysters, they seemed to favor those of the largest size when it came to bosoms, and Dickinson Prud’homme cheerfully catered for the most excessive of their imaginings. The larger his bosoms grew, the larger his houses, his horses, his stomach. Faintly, in the distance, was the rumble of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s chariot wheels (now there was a bosom to reduce any bearded nudger to an awed, gaping silence), and the faraway cries of “Smite!” and “Filth!” drew closer, louder.

Alice circled, and she circled again.

She circled The House of the Magdalenes.

She circled Pettifar’s Orphanage.

She circled the North River Lunatic Asylum.

Clockwise, and counterclockwise, she circled the white-columned buildings, and she circled their deserted grounds.

She never found Annie.

The three little girls walked up to the Shakespeare Castle – built for himself up on Hudson Heights by Reynolds Templeton Seabright, the celebrated Shakespearean actor-manager – in the late afternoon of a day in the summer. Alice Pinkerton walked in front. Behind her, less confident, less willing – they were definitely hanging back – were Charlotte Finch and (even more reluctant, she was almost walking backward) Mary Benedict. They had spent the afternoon in Alice’s favorite apple orchard, and Alice had told them that they were going to walk all the way around the castle and look at the terra-cotta panels that depicted scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Alice had done this by herself on the previous afternoon, and now wished to show her findings to her friends. She had seen four Shakespeare plays performed (
Macbeth, Hamlet
,
Romeo and Juliet
, and
Julius Cæsar
), and regarded herself as an expert. She might have seen just four on stage, but after she had read them (as if to check that the printed versions had the same endings, and that the actors had remembered their lines correctly), she had read all the others – gripped by them as stories – just as she read Jacobean tragedies and, years later, the plays of Ibsen, hearing the voices, moving the figures around as they played their foreordained parts, spoke their given lines.

No one was as close to her as words on a page. She hugged the books to her, lover-like, and heard no sound but what those words said. She preferred to read in a room by herself, but if she read when other people were in the room – she drew nearer to her book to exclude them – she was always conscious that they did not know the words she read, could not hear what she was hearing, as if a voice was whispering inside her telling her something that only she should know.

Every time they went to Charlotte’s house they passed the castle, hidden away behind its wall, but they had never dared to enter the grounds. It was – as Alice had discovered – easy to do so. The castle was close to the road, to take advantage of the views from the bluff, not marooned in the middle of its extensive parkland, and the gates were not locked. There were no signs of life anywhere as they peered – prisoner-like – through the upright metal bars (it was like peering down from the height of the schoolroom): no distant crouching gardeners, no maids with baskets on errands, no ancient strolling actor reciting reminiscing soliloquies as he took advantage of the sunshine.

The gates were slightly ajar, inviting entrance, and Alice boldly pushed them open a little further and marched in, making no attempt to muffle the sound of her feet crunching through the neglected, weed-grown gravel. Charlotte and Mary teetered behind her as if making the first tentative steps across a tightrope, arms out at either side for balance above an abyss. There would – it appeared – be a long way to fall. The battlemented front of the castle rose above them. There was a flag hanging from the flagpole above the tower, but it hung limply in the still, warm air, and the device upon it could not be seen. Gulls squawked above them, giving a sensation of the open sea and of distance, though no sea was visible, and there was no distance. Here, quite close behind the walls, the feeling was just the opposite of that, a feeling of heat and enclosure. There was – rather disappointingly – no drawbridge or portcullis at the entrance, just a wide shallow flight of steps up to a studded double door.

Alice went straight up to the first pinkish panel, to the right of this main entrance, and stood before it, like a visitor in front of a piece of sculpture in an art gallery. It was about three feet wide and two feet high.

“
Macbeth
,” she announced, unnecessarily. The title of the play depicted was inset in the lower edge of the elaborate frame that surrounded the high relief of the molded scene. It seemed to be there just for her alone: the first Shakespeare play she had ever seen performed, the first panel on the castle wall. She knew all about
Macbeth
, and was hoping for some questions. As usual, Mary Benedict did not say anything, but Charlotte did not disappoint her.

“Which one’s Macbeth?” she asked.

“That one.” This was an easy start. She pointed with complete authority at the figure of the man facing the three figures in long, loose gowns, with their backs toward them.

“And,” she added, pointing (she could do with a proper indicator – like a conductor’s baton – to give her an air of real authority), “they are the Three Weird Sisters.”

“Just like you, Allegra, and Edith,” Mary Benedict said. She did not speak often, but when she spoke it always seemed to be as a result of deep thought. Mary Benedict was an only child, and sometimes Alice could not blame her parents for deciding that one was enough.

“Especially Allegra,” Alice conceded. Her two sisters were a trial. She bore the burden of her status as eldest sister with – she felt – a certain dignified nobility.

“Especially
you
,” Mary Benedict replied, with considerable emphasis. She made it sound like something she’d been saving up to say for ages.

Alice thought for a while, and then decided to ignore this. Such forbearance made her feel righteous, but it would not last for long.

Mary Benedict cultivated (unsuccessfully, in Alice’s view) an air of weary sophistication, occasionally – a quick glance around to ensure there was no one else within hearing (this definitely weakened its effect) – employing exotic curse words as a demonstration of this quality.