Pinkerton's Sister (34 page)

He stood still for a moment, his back whitened by the blown snow, in a curious hieratic posture – positively Goodchildian – as if he were contemplating his pose when the time came (and the time would surely come) for him to be captured forever in polished stone for a statue. When he grinned, a large proportion of him (it seemed the greater part) was, indeed, already statue. The very sight of him should send Carlo Fiorelli hastening for a freshly sharpened chisel. G. G. Schiffendecken, the Reverend Goodchild, and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster were undoubtedly eagerly awaiting the fully deserved public recognition which would reward their labors, when the day came when they – too – should have statues of themselves erected in the park alongside the other local notables. All three would be immortalized in marble for posterity, and achieve an apotheosis far more public and numinous than that afforded the saints crowded together with such unpleasantly democratic closeness in the gloom of All Saints’.

She could visualize the gleaming new statues: Herbert Goodchild next to Albert Comstock – the two Big-Buttocked Berties companionably side by side, like a matching set of grotesquely misproportioned titanic Toby jugs – and G. G. Schiffendecken and Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in the space between Herbert Goodchild and Reynolds Templeton Seabright. There they would be – as was only right – captured in characteristic poses at the scene of their greatest triumphs, the place where they had saved so many souls, bound so many lunatics, inserted so many teeth. All three of them would grin, grin, grin in triumph, free of all false modesty, free of modesty of any kind whatsoever.

(“My Herbert has been immoralized!” That would probably be the expression employed by Mrs. Goodchild. Mrs. Goodchild would be so right.)

The neoclassical statues were arranged in a large circle around The Forum, like a rather more sophisticated version of Stonehenge. Perhaps – she had never checked, she must ask Kate – on Midsummer’s morning the sun rose to throw its beams directly on to the base (generally a word one preferred not to utilize in this context) of the Bebuttocked Behemoth, and another Tess of the d’Urbervilles would be discovered curled up like a sacrificial victim at the feet of Albert Comstock. Chanting Druids (did Druids, in fact, chant?) and uniformed police officers (humming appropriate airs from
The Pirates of Penzance
, to continue the musical motif) would advance toward her as the new day dawned.

Shortly after Albert Comstock had been hoisted into position – it had been like a scene from the erection of the Great Pyramid, the crack of whips, the groans of slaves – she had almost been floored by an appalling rancid smell as she walked past it. She thought that Carlo Fiorelli was carrying realism to startling new heights until she realized that the figure had been coated in yogurt (from Comstock’s Comestibles, naturally) in the belief that this would encourage the growth of lichen, and add a patina of age and antiquity to the too-bright newness.

For several days the picture of the poor soul whose job it had been to rub on the yogurt haunted her. He was probably one of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s more hopeless cases now, a benighted being who had descended totally into madness. Curled up in a dark corner of a padded and permanently locked room in the Webster Nervine Asylum, an oubliette for the demented, he would move his hand obsessively round and round in a circular clockwise direction, as if urging the clock onward to the moment of his longed-for death. Whimpering, weeping, he would forever be repeating the movements he had made on the day that had driven him into insanity, the day on which he had applied the yogurt in generously dripping layers to Albert Comstock’s gigantic buttocks. He was a Harry Lawson who was trapped forever in the darkness of the corridors at the center of the earth, the darkness of the corridors within his own mind, an insane Lady Macbeth forever fondling the buttocks that only she could see. (“I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.” That was what the Waiting-Gentlewoman told the startled Doctor of Physic. Hubby clutched at the dagger which he saw before him; she clutched at the fatal chubby-buttocked vision.) Perhaps she might be assigned a cell next to his in their Poughkeepsie place of exile and they could strike up an acquaintanceship, hesitatingly attempting to tap out faltering messages in Morse code, but knowing all the time that it was impossible to tap-tap-tap on a padded wall. Instead of a dot, instead of a dash, the only sound from inside the cells – audible above the howls, the laughter, the shrieks – would be the scratch-scratch-scratch of nails upon the dementedly layered scrawled graffiti, and time would pass with infinite slowness.

Kate – then a little girl – had watched strollers in the park veer abruptly to one side, choking, to remain upwind of the awful smell from Albert Comstock.

“And from his statue, as well, I hope,” Alice had added, helpfully.

The Central Park might very well have statues that included Shakespeare, Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Burns, Beethoven, and Giuseppe Mazzini, but Longfellow Park was quite content with the likes of Albert Comstock and Reynolds Templeton Seabright, thank you very much. Carlo Fiorelli seemed to wish his minor status as a sculptor upon himself. He seemed to specialize in virtually unknown classical figures (
Posthumia Faces Her Accusers
,
Servilius Is Ridiculed by the Soldiers
,
Claudius Pulcher Dips the Sacred Chickens in Water
), and they languished – dusty and unsold – in his workshop, facing their accusers, being ridiculed, dipping chickens.

Reynolds Templeton Seabright was the best known of the figures. This was not a figure that had been modeled from life: it had been erected some years after his death, when his Shakespeare Castle had already followed him into oblivion, existing only in memory, photographs, and paintings. Carlo Fiorelli had pictured him as Hamlet, his most famous rôle. Unusually, Carlo Fiorelli (
Alas
) had not chosen the most obvious pose – Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull (the pose in the panel above the front door of the Shakespeare Castle) – but had shown Hamlet at the moment of seeing his father’s ghost, rather an unsettling choice for a man not depicted until after his death. Reynolds Templeton Seabright, mouth open, had just reached the last of four tottering steps back: both arms were outstretched in front of him, the right arm slightly higher than the left, both hands with fingers spread and held upward.

He had been an actor of the old school, and this was how one portrayed Terror. He would have looked exactly the same when he played Macbeth, and saw the dagger in front of him, or when he played Julius Cæsar, and saw more than one dagger heading toward him. Shakespeare was full of descending daggers. It was like the carefully designed steps in a ballet: open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

Count five.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”

The voice swooped up and down far more than in ordinary conversation, the vowels drawn out like stretched elastic.

Thunderous applause.

Open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

Count five.

“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

The voice swooped up and down far more than in ordinary conversation, the vowels drawn out like stretched elastic.

Thunderous applause.

Open mouth, four steps back, arms out, fingers spread, freeze.

“
Et tu, Brute?
Then fall, Cæsar!”

If he had been conveying the idea of Searching, he would have held his hand above his eyes, as if shielding them from sunshine, turning his whole head slowly to the right, then slowly to the left, then slowly to the right, always beginning with the turn to the right. This was how Richard the Third would have looked for a horse, how Malvolio would have scanned Olivia’s garden for spectators, how Kent would have sought King Lear in the storm. One felt, where Reynolds Templeton Seabright was concerned, that he would have employed this same gesture if he had been looking in a drawer for a fresh pair of socks, or in the larder for a jar of pickles. Hand above eyes, head swiveled to right, head swiveled to left, head swiveled to right.

“Hwhere” – he pronounced it thus – “are the socks, my sweetheart?”

His fricatives, his aspirates, his consonants, and vowels were caressed, were drawn out lingeringly by his teeth, tongue, and throat.

Thunderous applause.

Hand above eyes, head swiveled to right, head swiveled to left, head swiveled to right.

“Hwhere are the pickles, my precious?”

His vowels gave hours of pleasure. You could listen to them all day.

Thunderous applause.

Sock-seeking, pickles-perusing, he had lived his life to the sound of acclamation, up above the world on Hudson Heights.

As Carlo Fiorelli had confusingly portrayed Hamlet in a toga – he stuck determinedly to the consistency of his art (his Reynolds Templeton Seabright statue had been his ringing declaration of a new philosophy of art:
Bare Knees, Not Buttonholes!
) – Julius Cæsar did tend to come into the mind of the spectator, rather than Hamlet. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” Cæsar commented to Mark Antony, well pleased with the nearness of Albert Comstock. It may very well have been, of course, that Claudius Pulcher, his outstretched hands deprived of their sacred chickens, had been dusted off and economically pressed into use, at last finding his purpose.

On the other side of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, somewhat unexpectedly, was a statue of John Randel, Jr., the surveyor for the grid plan that was powering up Manhattan, overwhelming everything in its way. But not Longfellow Park. He was depicted facing north with a Pointing gesture that would have met with the full – if slightly jealous – approval of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, a mighty leader indicating new lands to conquer.

All the statues in The Forum – toga-clad and tunic-clad – were caught in similar old-fashioned histrionic poses, striking stylized attitudes of emotion, as if Reynolds Templeton Seabright were but the leading man in a company of actors, traveling players finding their home at last in Longfellow Park, waiting hopefully to be greeted by a properly dressed Hamlet (properly dressed was tights, properly dressed was all in black with a nice white Byronic shirt), the best actors in the world for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral … They were like diagrams in a book of acting, demonstrating feelings and how they ought to be conveyed: Triumph, Despair, Arrogance (there were several of these), Joy, raring to be unleashed upon tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Hands were held to heads, to hearts, held in the air in front of the face, their whole body become the image of a mood without the use of words.

Alice felt that here was a true portrayal of the theatre, where her memories of performances – so often – tended to be visual, the gestures remembered, but not the language that had been used. It was the same in life. In the most intense moments, words did not matter.

There were no words.

Emotion was contained within the movements of the body: a head turned to one side, the curled fingers of a hand raised in greeting or farewell, two hands held forward imploringly. They were like the figures on the terra-cotta panels that had been on the walls all around the Shakespeare Castle, and their gesturing was like what she had heard of the cinematograph where there was no speech, where no words were heard, and everything was conveyed by the expressions of the face, the way the body was held. It was what she had seen in so many operas. It was a language like music, beyond words, a language in which words were no longer needed, or no longer adequate. Much of it was to do with the hands, the way they moved, the way they pulled up at the air, striving for expression, like a language for those who could not speak or hear, intense emotions contained within a small, fierce area of silence, Rosobell attempting to convey a great and complex grief.

Mama’s …

Mama’s …

Mama’s face, now that she could no longer speak.

The faces were like faces seen in electric light for the first time, suddenly brilliantly illuminated, overbright.

In their pompous gesturing – they outdid the best that Max Webster and Serenity Goodchild could accomplish – the statues were tempting targets for the unimpressed and the frivolous, and
The Curse of Constipation
, in particular, had suffered numerous indignities. Most recently, at the end of the summer, a tandem bicycle had been crammed between Albert Comstock’s buttocks, as if the statue had been an overdesigned storage facility –
Insert Front Wheel HERE
, with a discreet downward-pointing arrow – for the many bicyclists who whirred around the park, a useful and commendable addition to the many services offered for visitors. She had been cruelly delighted to hear of this from Kate, particularly when photographic evidence had been produced.

“Tut-tut!” she had – er – tut-tutted. “How shocking. Tut-tut-
tut
!”

The bicycle had remained proudly in place over a weekend, proving a popular attraction after the last of the year’s Sunday afternoon concerts.

Still humming the more well-known airs from
The Marriage of Figaro
(Mozart was insinuating himself in everywhere),
Les Huguenots
or
La Sonnambula
, and singing “Just Tell Them that You Saw Me” or “Break the News to Mother” (the band master had been in nostalgic mood), the crowds had paused to savor the sight once more before leaving the park. The bicycle was so firmly inserted into the cleavage that Daisy Bell and her beau could have pedaled away in mid-air for hours with perfect safety, the bright lights in her dazzling eyes – despising policemen and lamps – illuminating the statue with a soft radiance. This had not gone unnoticed. The last music Kate had heard from the park on that Sunday afternoon had not been Mozart or Meyerbeer or Bellini, but the sound of the crowds spilling out through the gates singing, with enormous feeling: