Pinkerton's Sister (2 page)

If only.

It was a phrase she sometimes used with Charlotte, when they were trying to make themselves believe that they were being daring about something.
If only
. Charlotte (yet more corruption) had smuggled the Wilde novel in to her in the same way that she had later smuggled in
Trilby
, and it had made her think of the time when they had seen Oscar Wilde at the theatre during his visit to the United States about eight years earlier.

He had been a poet when they had seen him, and then he had turned to prose.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
was nothing like as powerful as
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, a novel that must have influenced Oscar Wilde’s, both set in the same fog-bound nighttime city, the city of Dr. Conan Doyle’s detective, his cab rattling over cobblestones as he pursued murderers — their capes billowing open, their shadows long, unnaturally thin — past spluttering gas-lamps. Mr. Hyde was
The Picture of Dr. Jekyll
, a portrait given solidity and form, a deformed and dreadful statue brought to life like Frankenstein’s creature by an unhappy, tormented Pygmalion. Oscar Wilde had asked for the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson when he was in prison. As he stood in court and faced his accusers, had the words she always remembered best from Stevenson’s novel come into his mind: “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring”?

Wishing to be loved, wishing to be wanted, Dorian Gray had wasted away the hours of his unlived, unloved childhood in that schoolroom, ignored by those he wished would be affectionate toward him. In that schoolroom, the picture that was his hidden self had taken shape within him and he had not known that it was there, the Mr. Hyde of his sub-conscious. (She felt quite modern as she made use of this last word.) She thought of her younger brother, Ben, when he was a little boy — his small, neat handwriting, almost like printing: it hadn’t changed, it was just the same now — showing his school work to his father, his careful notes and diagrams, the Latin verbs, the cross-section of the human eye, the map of Massachusetts, which were never praised or noticed. When Dorian Gray grew to adulthood (when his
body
grew to adulthood: that which was within him had withered, had never grown properly, taking strange shapes), the schoolroom remained unchanged. The dog-eared schoolbooks still filled the satinwood bookcase; on the wall behind it the ragged Flemish tapestry still hung, with a faded king and queen playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists.

The mediæval women bent over their tapestries, like so many Ladies of Shalott looking out at the world through mirrors, all those pale-faced women half sick of shadows.

She saw the Lady of Shalott plainly, in the same pose that she had seen Mariana assuming in a painting (she, also, had been working on embroidery, filling the empty hours), standing — as if weary after a day laboring in those very fields of barley — her hands pressed supportively against her spine, arching herself backward in the low time of the day, the late dark afternoons, aweary, aweary. The same woman, with a different face, floated in her boat down the river, dying in the world for which she had so longed, killed by contact with it, her hair long and tumbled, blown by the wind.

The women wove tapestries, sewed alphabets like school exercises, lions, unicorns, stylized open-petaled flowers. The arras was green, dull gold, crimson, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound. Stags fell, pierced by arrows; wolves pulled deer to the snowy ground; lords released their hawks, and birds — caught in mid-air — fell, fluttering to earth in clouds of feathers: scenes of death and dying, the slaughter of men and animals, beautifully embroidered, thread by thread.

She imagined the colors of their silks — would they have used silk, or would the material have been wool, cotton? — as being the same as those of her watercolors, the little squares of brightness within the wooden box with the brass hinges. She could visualize them with perfect accuracy, as if matching colors for a gown, or fabrics in a room: Chinese White, Viridian Green, Cadmium Yellow, Ultramarine (a Mediterranean light, sea-reflections playing across ruinous white Greek columns: each color had its own little picture), Magenta …

As then, so now.

Women bent over their cross-stitch, bent over their canvases, wasting the hours in filling wildernesses of whiteness, as if somehow attempting to occupy the vast unused vacancies of their minds with the bright gleam of a needle, the stitch-stitch-stitch of the endless holes puncturing the plainness. Stitch-stitch-stitch, as they sat unseen in the corner, sewing all day long. Beneath the tapestries were the locked and hidden doors that led into the rooms where the madwomen were imprisoned. Manganese Violet, Raw Sienna, Gamboge, Brown Madder …

They should know all about
Madder
.

Stitch-stitch-stitch.

The hands didn’t tremble, but kept up the same action over and over again, like well-tuned machines, automatons designed by Isaac Singer, automatons with placid, unchanging, Dr. Coppelius human features, massed Coppélias, girls with enamel eyes. Sometimes she confused Coppelius with Copernicus, and planets swam unseen in their orbits around a night sky, above the bowed backs. They were sin-free Hester Prynnes, always sewing, always stitching, embroidering shrouds for burials, embroidering baby linen, the vestments of ceremony. They never embroidered bridal veils.

Stitch-stitch-stitch.

“… eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine …”

You became bored with embroidery, after a while. She and Charlotte had spent many happy hours of their childhood in devising different methods of killing Mrs. Albert Comstock. Heaven had indeed lain about them in their infancy. Well spotted, Wordsworth!

The high stone narrow-windowed walls of the dark castles seemed designed to keep the women in, as much as to keep enemies out. Outside the castle walls, beyond the moats, the young men marched about, looking stern, bearing falcons on their arms like feathered musical instruments that they were about to play. Troubadours, minstrels, minnesingers, and trouvÈres strummed on lutes, or lyres, or halberds, or whatever it was they strummed on. It was quite difficult to concentrate on the tapestries with all that strumming. It was all the women ever seemed to do, work at tapestries, or wave goodbye to departing knights from the battlements of their castles, wearing tall white conical hats like dunces’ caps. “My life is dreary,/He cometh not,” they chorused as they stitched. The rusted nails fell from the knots that held the pear to the garden- wall. The broken sheds look’d sad and strange. “My life is dreary,/He cometh not.”

Stitch-stitch-stitch.

The stitches were small and neat, barely visible, like stitches sewn by a surgeon after he’d ministered to a mind diseas’d, his well-washed hands rearranging the contents of the sleeper’s head in a more harmonious pattern, the pale skin smoothed and sewn back into place where the incision had been made.

Best men are molded out of faults. That’s what Mariana had said.

On long, empty winter evenings, with the winds whistling around them and rustling the wall hangings, flaring up the torches, they’d sit about competitively comparing the number of lachrymatories they’d managed to fill with their tears to show how much they missed their absent husbands or courtly lovers, those of them who had husbands or courtly lovers. It was their one excitement.

“I’m on my twelfth bottle. I’ve had to send out for fresh supplies,” My Lady Sibylle would announce as her opening gambit, skillfully managing to temper quiet pride with a reasonable stab at overwhelming grief, and crushing all opposition. This was a woman who spent her afternoons, a peeled onion in each hand, listening to sentimental ballads — specialized performers catered for this market — with a lachrymatory applied to the inside corner of each eye, rather like a heavy smoker with two pipes. These were carefully held in place by specially trained maidservants to ensure that not one tear was wasted. The balladeer strummed with syrupy skill, his voice stressing the sad bits so that she’d be able to recognize them.

“Sniffle, sniffle!” sniffled Sibylle in record time, snapping her fingers as she sensed saturation approaching in her left lachrymatory. Time for a fresh container, Eleanor. (Number thirteen! That would show up My Lady Mabelle.) A row of the little glass bottles would be lined neatly across the top of her mediæval mantelshelf like a well-filled salt-tasting miniature-bottled wine cellar if the absence was an extended one, twinkling in the candlelight on assertive display.
I’ve wept more than you’ve wept! I’ve wept more than you’ve wept!
That’s what they were twinkling. That Hundred Years War had been hard going, squeezing them dry like ferociously twisted lemons. Enterprising entrepreneurs had offered ready-filled bottles for sale, with reduced rates for bulk purchases.

“I’ve just started my ninth.”

“My eleventh is nearly half full.”

“I’ve only managed seven so far this week. I’ve not been very well.”

“My life is dreary!”

“He cometh not!”

“He cometh not!”

(They had to remember to repeat these last three lines at regular intervals, an antiphonal woeful chanting. When they couldn’t think of anything else to say, these were the lines to repeat.)

The dunces’ caps leaned forward as they bent to their tapestries, back to the lions and unicorns, the kings and queens, the games of chess, the hooded hawks, the arrow-pierced stags. The unmarried were excluded from such conversations. The unmarried had no one to cometh not (if you couldn’t have a man who cometh, you were automatically excluded from having a man who cometh not), nothing about which to boast, and no reason to weep. The unmarried had extra-large tapestries to stitch as compensation. Another night of stitching lay before them. When they were completed, they would be hung upon the bare stone, and then they would begin more tapestries. There was always enough bare stone for more tapestries. There could never be enough tapestries. There was no one left to whom they might wave goodbye, and so they stitched, the married and the unmarried. They were like monks in a silent order, stitching away at illuminated manuscripts, bent over as if seeking out a brighter source of illumination in the candlelit gloom, day after day, night after night, words of prayer, words of renunciation.

Stitch-stitch-stitch.

“One, two, three …” she began again, tugging at her hair with the brush, with the grimly determined expression of a keen gardener pulling up strong-rooted weeds. You spent hours getting rid of them, and back they came again the following day.

She’d been fond of gardening when she was a very little girl, doing her stint as Miss Spade, the Gardener’s Daughter. Miss Spade was one of the cards in Happy Families, the English children’s card game that Miss Ericsson had given her, and Miss Spade wielded her hoe with a look of murderous malice. All fifty-two members of the Happy Families looked like maniacal potential killers, and most held convenient weapons in threatening postures. It made you worry about English methods of child-rearing.

She’d been no Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary (though she’d been willfully contrary herself, and had known a distinctly contrary Mary).

She hadn’t nurtured silver bells, or cockleshells, and she had most certainly
not
nurtured pretty —
ha! —
maids all in a row. She’d hadn’t so much been fond of gardening, as fond of weeding, not quite the same thing. What she had nurtured had been weeds, carefully sought out, encouraged, and hoarded for the pleasure of uprooting them. That was how her garden grew. It was not so much the planting she enjoyed, as the pulling up, the ripping away until every inch of earth was free of weeds, and there was nothing there that should not be there, nothing there but disturbed and freshly turned soil, dark and damp beneath the surface like a newly dug grave. It was the way she kept the schoolroom, or tried to — everything in its place, everything angled precisely in position — battling unceasingly with her untidy and unco-operative sisters. (That hyphen in “unco-operative” was one of her acts of rebellion against the dictates of Webster. This was a word that
needed
its hyphen.) The first thing she did, each time she entered the room, was to walk around straightening pictures and shifting objects — half an inch this way, a quarter of an inch that way — like someone with an image of perfection in her mind in which there was a predetermined area of unfilled space, definite as a cast shadow. She had followed the gardener about during his mornings in the garden, jealously insisting that all weeds were there for her to destroy.

“There’s one,” he’d indicate helpfully.

“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!” she’d declare, plucking away with a two-handed will.

“There’s another one.”

“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow!”

“What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug …?” said the gardener, a young man with a literary frame of mind. “There’s another.”

They plucked away from the memory effortlessly, scarcely rooted at all, little crumbs of earth adhering, falling loose, pattering down. She sometimes suspected that the gardener planted the weeds there especially, just to give her pleasure. They always pulled away so easily — she preferred the sensation of tugging, grappling with tenacious roots, the breathless struggling — and the earth around them always seemed so watered and fresh, like that of plants for sale in an expensive florist’s shop, all the arts of horticulture devoted to their careful nurturing. Undaunted, she tugged away, plucking furiously, someone preparing a chicken for an emergency meal. She didn’t care what she plucked, as long as she was plucking. If there’d been silver bells or cockleshells they’d have been hurled into a heap, jingling. The pretty maids all in a row would have blazed in the biggest bonfire she could build, glamorously unarmored Joans of Arc sizzling en masse like an ignited beauty contest.