Pinkerton's Sister (35 page)

The outrage – for outrage it surely was (it struck at the very roots of a civilized society) – remained in place until Monday morning, when two unenthusiastic workmen were detailed to remove the bicycle from Albert Comstock’s buttocks. Kate had taken her camera along to record the moment (“for posterior,” Alice said, mentally bracing herself for Issie Isserliss to ring her bell for a Pun Warning), and brought the resulting photographic essay along to Alice, showing it to her with a detailed commentary. There were two men involved in the operation, one very much younger than the other. They marched in step, accidentally, rather than by design, but this, and the fact that they were similarly attired in dark blue suits, gave them the air of a vaudeville act arriving on stage to begin their routine. The ladder they carried between them became their prop, in the way that some artistes made use of umbrellas or suitcases.

Whilst the older man carried out his duties with gloomy distaste, the young man – sensing his moment – entered into the spirit of the occasion with a verve which hinted at frustrated theatrical ambitions. He paused in heroic poses on his stepladder as the Kodaks clicked, like a famous engineer captured as he paused before some great structure he had brought into being – a bridge flung across a great gorge, a vast machine in an echoing manufactory – or a fearless adventurer about to plant a flag at the North Pole or on the summit of a mountain. He had the right size of moustache for this latter rôle.

Fired by the success of this – appreciative murmurs, discreet bursts of applause – he added sound effects to his repertoire, producing an impressively graphic sucking slurping (rather too graphic for delicate sensibilities) as – wobbling dramatically at the top of the ladder – he finally prized the front wheel of the bicycle free. He bowed with great dignity, his hand upon his heart, like a tenor taking his curtain call after a triumphant début, a Tannhäuser after dying amidst the pilgrims, an Alfredo after cradling the dying Violetta in his arms: the death roll in opera almost paralleled Shakespeare’s. A glittering career with a shrewd theatre owner surely beckoned.

As the applause died away, Oliver thrust his way through the assembled throng.

“Papa! Papa!” he cried, embracing the plinth as if it were a square-shouldered paterfamilias. “I had to be here” – he spoke like one broken, struggling to overcome a deep and painful emotion – “to see your dignity at last restored to you.” He paused, as if unable to continue. “When the wheel finally emerged” – here he paused to produce a lengthy and elaborate sound effect, ending with a liquescent plop (the younger workman was jealously alert, sensing an astute seizer of the limelight) – “I felt that my heart could once more be at peace.”

It was an affecting scene, somewhat spoiled when it emerged – within the week – that it had been Oliver who had inserted the offending artifact in the first place. Anyone who referred to his father’s statue as “Bertie Buttocks” – as Oliver did, on every possible occasion – was marked as a young man somewhat deficient in filial piety. He had committed the vile crime – it was little less than symbolic patricide in the eyes of Mrs. Goodchild, who saw Symbolism in most things and should have interested Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – with the help of Arthur Vellacott. Mrs. Albert Comstock referred to Arthur as Oliver’s “friend” (to be absolutely accurate, she referred to him as Oliver’s “– er – ‘friend’”), the quotation marks – they were pronounced quite distinctly – being a good example of her ability to employ audible punctuation.

(“Friend” …

(“Friend” in quotation marks …

(It was …

(It was a long time ago.

(Papa and Annie.

(And Papa’s “friend.”

(She was drawn to the thoughts as if she were picking at a barely healed abrasion, digging the edges of her nails into what ought to have been left untouched, unable to stop herself.

(The smell of new-struck matches and cigarette smoke, the fire and brimstone smell in the suits and beards of the two men.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.
She was one of the girls from the statue. The full moon emerged from between the trees. The trees had gone; the trees had been destroyed.

(“Plato, Copernicus, Julius Cæsar, Agrippa, Tycho …” Papa’s “friend” was saying, as if conjugating an irregular verb, the same words in the same order as he looked up at the moon, rattling off what he said with the monotonous emphases of something he had learned by heart. There were thirty-three wounds in Julius Cæsar’s body. His ghost appeared to Brutus at Sardis, and at Philippi, and Brutus knew that his hour was come.

(“… Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Hercules …” The oceans, the marshes, the lakes, the seas, were waterless, arid desert regions of ash and stone: Oceanus Procellarum, Palus Epidemiarum, Lacus Somniorum, Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium … They stretched away on all sides of her, and their names infected her, drawn up inside her as she walked upon them in her bare feet: The Ocean of Storms, The Marsh of Disease, The Lake of Sleep, The Sea of Coldness, The Sea of Crises, The Sea of Showers, The Sea of Clouds …

(
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart
…

(She thought, fleetingly, of the very first performance of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, when she had been ten, of the parts played by Papa and his “friend,” their nobility, their virtue. She wondered if Papa’s “friend” was dead, like Papa, and wished he were.

(
Scourged.

(
Buffeted.

(
Lanced.

(
Stoned.

(
Pricked.

(
Burned.

(The man had not been a friend. He had been a “friend.”)

Er – “friend.”

Mrs. Albert Comstock’s “er” controversially hovered on the very verge of becoming an “ahem,” and contained a whole nudge-nudging world of grubbily unwholesome innuendo. Reputations could be enjoyably destroyed by an efficiently administered “ahem.” Oliver was not one to be cowed by an “er” – even an “ahem” would have held no fears for him – and he never failed to introduce Arthur as “my – er – ‘friend.’” Such occasions did not present themselves at 5 Hampshire Square. After she had described Arthur as “Oliver’s – er – ‘friend,’” Mrs. Albert Comstock would go on to comment – without the use of an “er”; no hesitation whatsoever was needed here – that “Arthur Vellacott is rather
French
.” It was the worst thing she could say about anyone.

The younger workman, reluctant to return to his workaday world of weeding planting beds, and mowing lawns, posed with the bicycle for further photographs, as if it were a tiger he had just shot from his howdah. One ambitious photographer posed him beneath the buttocks, pointing upward, a witness indicating the scene of an appalling crime in one of the more lurid newspapers. With his other hand he gripped the handlebars of the bicycle. He avoided touching the front wheel, made fastidious by his own sound effects. The older man, judging by the expression on his face, would have a lot to say to him when they were alone in the musty privacy of their potting shed. “You think you’re too grand now for the likes of me,” he would complain in the agitated accents of a spurned suitor, emotion causing a wobble in his copperplate handwriting as he carefully wrote out his labels,
Fuchsia magellanica, Rhododendron ponticum
, like a doctor prescribing poison. They would be visible all around the park, like the love poems in
As You Like It
hung upon the trees in the Forest of Arden, for the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she of Rosalind.

As a little girl, during the most intense period of her Maggie Tulliver incarnation, she had thought – standing in The Forum, surrounded by the fruits of Carlo Fiorelli’s labors – that this was the nearest she would ever approach to Latin. It was not, she had to admit to her innermost self – as she averted her gaze from Albert Comstock’s straining hams – the most seductive of visions (would she really wish to approach any nearer to
that
?) but
that was not the point
. (She could utilize italics with the best of them.)

The first time she looked at her new baby brother, Ben, she had leaned her face alongside his on the pillow, and – to Mama’s astonishment – said, “You’ll learn Latin,” no great encouragement to the mild-natured infant. As she helped to teach him to walk, she would help him with his Latin, as Maggie had helped Tom.

“Latin’s a language,” she would say, in her most Maggie-like manner, as the toddler tottered toward her. “There are Latin words in the Dictionary. There’s bonus, a gift.” Maggie was so hungry for the written word that she read the dictionary when there was nothing else available. It would give him a flying start at Otsego Lake Academy, and everyone would be impressed by his fluency.

The nearest they approached to Latin or Greek at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls was when they read translations of some of the more decorous myths in prettily illustrated editions. Charles Kingsley – she had to admit it – had been absolutely right about girls and Greek (and Latin).

“A mouse – of a mouse – to a mouse – a mouse – O mouse!”

She was struggling in the water. She was starting to drown. The water was entering her mouth, being drawn up into her nostrils.

“O mouse!”

No mouse appeared.

“O mouse!”

No mouse came to save her from drowning, or offer assistance with Latin grammar.

The men and women within the books of myths were clad in a plethora of loose, flowing, all-enveloping garments (each fold meticulously delineated), and both sexes seemed to favor matching loose, flowing hair. The occasional knee (male) was the sum total of their raciness. The Judgment of Paris was a parade of winter fashions; The Birth of Venus an object lesson in how to avoid catching a chill. Perhaps some day, as their long-delayed entrance into the Classical World, the girls might be allowed to embroider an Ionic column, or even – if they showed real promise – a Corinthian column.

No danger here – it occurred to Alice in later years – of impressionable girls being confronted by the flagrantly displayed Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Districts of the Classical World. She could see the pain of thought in the expressions of Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild. Had the Greeks and Romans really experienced such uninterrupted sunshine that clothes were no longer necessary? Carlo Fiorelli’s generously carved buttocks were problematic enough, but buttocks were the least of their worries when confronted by brazen wall-to-wall bareness in Greece, Italy, or most of the larger museums. One really did not know where to look; every averted eye found itself confronted by further excesses.

Mrs. Albert Comstock occasionally played at being a gardener at 5 Hampshire Square, an enormous Marie Antoinette pottering about as a shepherdess between neatly sculpted topiary, a gigantic Mrs. Elton (a woman, surely, after Mrs. Albert Comstock’s own heart) picking strawberries at Donwell Abbey in
Emma
. In all her apparatus of happiness, wearing a large-brimmed hat in the sunshine (a
very
large-brimmed hat), adopting various picturesque, nurturing poses, she would stand about in the shrubbery like a half-ruined folly erected by an eccentric landowner. She was especially keen on cutting, lopping, and pruning, whatever the time of year.

Snip-snap! Snip-snap! Snip-snap!

This skill would be utilized for a new and even more important purpose: to ensure the tenacious endurance of all that was nice, the destruction of all that was not nice. Niceness was a central concept of Comstockian philosophy.

(“Is it
nice
? Is it really
nice
?” Alice imagined her inquiring, quite as enthusiastically as she herself asked “Is it
horrid
?” when Charlotte urged some dubious novel upon her.)

Mrs. Albert Comstock would approach disapproved-of nude statues with that same expression of intense concentration, that same pair of scissors, that same snip-snap enthusiasm. Never had Struwwelpeter looked so nightmarish, the great, long, red-legged scissor-woman so threatening.

Snip-snap! Snip-snap! Snip-snap!

In her wake would be small tinkling sounds, like Christmas tree baubles smashing on the hall tiles, though, instead of sharp silvery shards, there would be white pieces of marble, curled and rounded, like sea-smoothed tropical shells.

Snip-snap! Snip-snap! Snip-snap!

Tinkle! Tinkle! Tinkle!

A well-gloved Mrs. Goodchild would surely not take too much persuasion to follow behind her, gingerly sweeping the – ahem – lopped extremities into a dustpan with an expression of theatrical disgust (Tamora realizing the
precise
contents of the pie she’d so enjoyed polishing off), head shudderingly averted. Reynolds Templeton Seabright would have been hard put to equal it. Here could be the raw materials for a Swiss Garden to outdo G. G. Schiffendecken’s
Crikey!
-inducing landscape, one of the sights of Hudson Heights. The genteel ladies of Longfellow Park would line up with sedate eagerness for entry, elbows fiercely angled to prevent latecomers from pushing their way forward. The rumor was that the Swiss Garden on the dentist’s “estate” was composed of hundreds of discarded Schiffendecken Grins, the marbled teeth piled high in serried ranks with the alpine plants cascading around them. It would be a terrifying sight in the twilight, with all those hundreds of identical grins gleaming cheekily, like a scene at 5 Hampshire Square just after Mrs. Albert Comstock had unleashed an epigram. It was unnerving, the thought of lips being silently retracted in the half-darkness, and the garden grinning in the gloom. Suddenly, startlingly, they would begin to yodel in unison, to demonstrate that they were Swiss. This must have done much damage to the Swiss tourist industry, and inhibited an entire generation from purchasing cuckoo clocks and learning to ski. Skiing would have been a useful accomplishment on a day like today.

In her travels – Mrs. Albert Comstock traveled far and wide, Kodak clicking, scissors snipping (though Switzerland had so far escaped the clickings and snippings) – she would have a special pocket in her reticule, next to the one for her Kodak, and in it she would keep her scissors. She would leave a white wake behind her like a battleship bashing through marble, and all the world would wonder. (“Who on earth is that
appalling
woman?” That’s what the world would wonder.)