Pinkerton's Sister (60 page)

14 ozs. of veal sweetbreads.

14 ozs. of veal fillet.

14 ozs. of chicken livers.

8 tbsps. of plain white flour.

4 ozs. of butter
…

When he’d covered her face in grease, and applied the sheets of waxed paper, he’d begin to beat her face with a sculpting mallet to soften the flesh and make it into a thin layer. The butter would melt almost instantly in the hot frying pan –
Hiss! Hiss!
it foamed disapprovingly – and the flattened flesh would be fried rapidly, browning nicely.

DRINK ME. EAT ME.

If it had been ten years or so later, she would have thought of the recipe for
Coniglio con le Olive.
(She didn’t know the Italian for Veal Marsala.)

2 41⁄2 lb. rabbits.

10 tbsps. of olive oil.

2 onions.

14 ozs. black olives.

6 garlic cloves
…

A
great deal
of garlic.

She thought of the Mrs. Albert Comstock-faced Duchess tossing the sneezing baby up and down like a howling meaty salad being prepared in the pepper-filled kitchen. The Duchess would enjoy beating that little boy to a thin layer.

The Duchess sat with her toes turned in, an expression of massive disapproval on her face. Fire irons, saucepans, plates, and dishes hurtled in Alice’s direction, assisting with the thinning process. She’d be a slimmed-down battered banquet in no time.

Yum-yum
.

The sculptor’s confident fingers moved about her face, as if they were molding her into shape, sculpting her features into those of a face he wished to create, a face better than the face she had. She was the clay on which he worked, no longer a breathing person. She could feel the tips of his fingers through the grease as he rubbed it in: they were coarse – the cut and scarred surfaces scratched her skin a little – not like the hands of an artist at all, but the hands of an artisan or a day laborer, a man who worked with tools or machines. Mama’s hands had been soft and gentle, skimming her skin, barely touching her at all, a butterfly’s wing touch, but these strong cold hands seemed to feel through to her bones.

(But …

(But …

(But they were
nothing
like the hands of Papa’s “friend” – the friend in quotation marks – as he caressed her head, behind the high walls on the way to the Celestial City.

(Night after night.

(The wind blew, and sometimes there was snow.

(Annie was there.

(Carlo Fiorelli was
nothing
like Papa’s “friend.”)

The summer heat of all those years ago had long gone, and in her memory it was – as always – cold in the studio, despite the metal stove with its tall pipe, all the warmth risen uselessly far above the human figures into the high space below the angled skylights. From the place in which she was seated, she couldn’t see the red flickering glow through the ornate filigree frontage, and this made her feel colder. It had been summer when the life-cast was taken – the stove would not have been lit, the air would not have been cold – and yet she somehow always thought of it as being an intensely cold day, white breath coming from within her, whiteness all around, surrounded by sculptures carved from snow. Later memories of the wintry day on which the statue had been unveiled must have overlaid her earlier memories, a coldness from the future creeping back to freeze the past.

Strait Is The Gate That Leadeth Unto Life, And Few There Be That Find It
.

Through the Strait Gate was no place for the strait-laced, and through the Strait Gate the straitjackets waited.

If she started shivering uncontrollably, sensing this coldness approaching, how would this affect her, held within the rigidly expressionless, unmoving mask that was building up around her features?

This moment had come back to her, a year or so later, when she had read
Poor Miss Finch
, in which Wilkie Collins had made a passing reference to a female model “sitting” for the first time in a drawing academy, and being so nervous at the ordeal ahead of her that the only way she could be persuaded into the students’ room was by being led in blindfold. This picture of the naked woman – her eyes bandaged – being stared at by the room full of clothed men as they sketched her body, had stayed in her mind, haunted her, and it may have been this that started
The Life Class
, her novel about a woman art student, developing in her mind. If the nervous figure-model had been Trilby, Svengali would have hypnotized her into confident nakedness. (“Take off your clothes, Miss O’Ferrall.”) Alice had studied Carlo Fiorelli and Linnaeus Finch, and the way that they worked upon their sculptures or paintings, without knowing that she had been studying them: these observations, also, had colored her ideas. Women art students were not admitted into a life class (unless, presumably, they were as blindfolded as a frightened model, in the buff for blindman’s buff). It was not suitable for them to see the unclothed human form. At the end of the novel, naked again, a woman’s body had been stretched out in the dissecting room, as the men – medical students, this time – moved in toward her with their bright sharp-edged instruments. That woman with the pocket-handkerchief tied around her eyes, that woman stumbling, and cutting her fingers on the scalpels, that weeping woman, was a woman who had expressed a wish to learn to become a doctor.

As he leaned across, she gazed over Carlo Fiorelli’s bowed shoulder down darkening corridors of plaster casts that seemed to stretch away for always, half-glimpsed figures from the Bible and from mythology, gleaming in the sunlessness like the obscure avenues of a graveyard at dusk. Motes of white dust spun slowly in downward-angled beams of light. More dust lay in drifts like accumulated wind-blown snow, swept away into the more remote corners of the studio, as if by a slatternly housewife who imagined that all her visitors were as unobservant or as uncaring as herself. On either side of the half-clad frozen figures, the wooden shelves stretching right up to the roof were laden with more casts, busts, miniature figures, the whiteness of the sculptures everywhere in stone, in marble, in clay, in plaster.

In a dark corner there was the life cast (
death
cast?) of a flayed criminal, a memento mori of a Marsyas, his flute forever silenced. The sculptor had not pointed this out to her – it had seemed deliberately hidden away in its semidarkness, a part of a gallery not open to the public – but she had come across it when she had been wandering about on her first visit, strolling between gods and goddesses like an awed worshiper in a pantheon. It was like an illustration in a book for a medical student, a meticulously detailed engraving to be studied late at night by candlelight, and there should have been large elaborately curled capital letters –
A
,
B
,
C
…
–
filling all the spaces of the air around it, and italicized explanations should have been printed beneath it. She had a sense of other such figures all around her,
Fig. 1
,
Fig. 2
,
Fig. 3
, many
Fig.
s from many pages, veins and organs – sharply defined, freed from the blurring obfuscation of blood – neatly laid out for scrutiny like something for sale. The student – clearly one of St. Cassian of Imola’s more ambitious pupils, an eye on a career as a doctor – gestured in the air with his sharp-pointed pen, rehearsing the first incision into the flesh in front of him, perfecting the angle at which to hold his scalpel.
There
, he thought.
There.
He moved nearer, bending close to the naked, blindfold woman. (“Yes,” he’d say, years later, a man noted in his profession, laden with honors, anxious to give praise where praise was due, “I had a teacher who gave me a taste for dissection. I owe so much to him. He really inspired me.”)

Nearest to her were the casts of the dead, whole shelves of death masks, faces, hands, the living unable to let go, clinging on to those from whom they had been taken. Some of them were of people she had known, and not all of them were old. The still faces peered out at her from the shadows, like half-glimpsed ghosts, pausing a while in the moment before speaking, on the point of drawing the first breath. Like the faces of peaceful sleepers, they seemed to have had all emotions shushed away from them –
Shh! Shh!
(She heard the soothing whispers, felt the comforting hand) – and possessed the remote, faraway expressions of those thinking of something that had happened a long time ago, something without pain or pleasure. People came to Carlo Fiorelli to ask him to do these. He would do to the dead what he was doing to her with those same fingers, and she was as still as the dead would be, her breath half held, poised perpetually between moments of breathing. Being immortalized brought death closer, like photographs somehow seemed to do, concentrating the mind on the passing of time, the awareness of the difference between what once had been, and what now was. She had not known that art was so close to death. The artist leaned across the faces of the dead in the darkened room, a candle held in one hand, its light glowing across their features, like Psyche with her oil lamp bending down to study the face of the sleeping Eros. Time passed, and the wax dripped down onto the faces of the dead as the candle melted. More time passed, and more wax dripped down. As time passed, the death masks grew ever nearer to completion, slowly accumulating, layer upon layer. Carlo Fiorelli was the nephew of Giuseppe Fiorelli, the archeologist who had directed the excavations at Pompeii, the man who had made the plaster casts of those who had died all those hundreds of years ago, the agonized dog, the fallen figures with their arms pressed around their heads, the folds of their garments ridden up around their bodies, pressed against their faces. She was one more white figure in the perpetual Pompeiian gloom of the buried streets and corridors.

Mrs. Italiaander had a plaster cast of her infant son’s arm – he had been her only child – under a glass dome in her parlor. She, Allegra, and Edith had gathered around it, fortune-tellers consulting a crystal ball –
remember that you must die –
their reflections curving across the dimpled arm of the plump child they had never known. Mrs. Alexander Diddecott liked to organize her séances at Mrs. Italiaander’s around it, suggesting that it acted as a conduit for the forces with which she grappled, and they had kept at a careful distance, looking, but not touching, just in case. What would little Archer Italiaander Junior (made even smaller by that “Junior”) have to say to his Mama, if he had been drawn out from that other land, when all he had been able to say was that very word, “Mama”? Perhaps that was the only word she wanted to hear. It seemed so strange to have a
part
of a body on display like that.

Parts of bodies were all around her where she sat – feeling her face stiffening and growing cold – like the aftermath of some Vandal slaughter in a sacked and burning Rome, lopped-off heads and limbs littering the Forum like the parts of wrecked and (she liked to use a word precisely) vandalized statues. The faces were peaceful, however, the faces of those who had fallen asleep, their eyes and mouths serenely closed, not gaping in agony or terror. They were like the plaster casts of the bodies from a Pompeii in which Vesuvius had brought death gently, without panic, without any pain or struggle to escape. The ashes had pattered soothingly around them like gentle rain, lulling them into sleep and forgetfulness.

There were still two rusty metal horses’ heads outside, above the entrance, announcing – as appropriately as they had marked out the former livery stables – that here was the domain of a sculptor in stone and in bronze. Charlotte had been disgusted to hear of stables in which there were no horses. The figures of gods and goddesses, the shrouded figures from the Old Testament, the faces of the dead: these were nothing to her. You couldn’t feed sugar to these! You couldn’t pat them on the flank as you fed them straw! The faded
STABLES
sign still hung between the horses’ heads, the letter
L
completely erased by time and the weather, the sign that gave entrance as beckoningly as
Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You
, but in more commanding capital letters, an exhortation that could not be ignored.
STAB ES
it now read, and the implacable demand had added a pleasing sense of purpose to some of the less eventful days of childhood.

STAB ES
.

Alice studied the enigmatic summons to commit murder each time she came. It was a
portent
, she decided, seizing the opportunity to employ this word. It wasn’t
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN
. (Daniel, Chapter V, Verse xxv.) It was
STAB ES
. In the absence of Daniel to interpret it for her, she discussed it with Charlotte, and it was then that they had decided that the coded command – intelligible only to them – meant
STAB ENORMOUS SIBYL!
It was very satisfying when your dearest wish was emblazoned on the wall in words from heaven. They’d been following Charles Kingsley’s instructions to the letter, and this Eleventh Commandment – even if painted on wood rather than written on tablets of stone – was clearly a sacred admonition placed upon them. They’d be happy to obey. It would be wrong of them not to. They could hardly miss. It certainly reconciled Charlotte to the lack of horses.

They had the brass shield (well polished).

They had the sword (carefully sharpened).

You’d think that a goatskin would be easy enough to find, but it was proving to be a real problem. The Misses Isserliss kept goats, but they were all thriving healthily – full of high spirits and goatish kicks, bouncing about with friendly butts and sheep-like bleatings – and she couldn’t bear the thought of stabbing her knife into one of them to remove its skin, even when the thought of stabbing Enormous Sibyl appealed so – er – enormously. She tried to make herself believe that the goats were rams, and that she was going to be Abraham, and sacrifice one of them instead of Isaac – “The Sibyl is a ram,” she told herself. “The Sibyl is an Aries” – but even this couldn’t make her do it. Isaac would have to die. “STAB ES,” she muttered to herself (you had to mutter loudly when capital letters were involved), memorizing an instruction from the LORD, “STAB ES,” and tried to look keen. If they did it here – chisels lay temptingly about on most surfaces – it would be really convenient for the death mask, but would Carlo Fiorelli have enough plaster for the size of the face? This might be a promising opportunity for the plasterer who had plastered all thirty-four rooms of the Italiaanders’ house – a man accustomed to working on an epic scale – and a way of uniting art and industry in a manner that would have gladdened the heart of William Morris.