Pinkerton's Sister (4 page)

(Bertha swayed on the roof above the battlements, waving her arms, her long black hair streaming against the flames. Rochester ascended through the skylight to save her. He called her name, and she sprang from the roof to her death on the pavement.)

Miss Ericsson had asked Alice if she dressed in white the way she did because of Emily Dickinson. “No,” Alice had replied, “because of Miss Havisham.” This name — unlike Anne Catherick’s — Miss Ericsson had known, and Alice had had to explain — at great length — that she was not being serious. Once she’d worn colors; now she wore white. It had been something to do with reaching thirty-three. That was when the whiteness started.

Nor would Miss Ericsson have realized that
The Woman in White
contained Marian Halcombe — the joy she had felt when she discovered her! — Alice’s favorite moustachioed heroine in fiction. She remembered Emmerson Columbarian making jokes about Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s moustache, and Linnaeus Finch — Charlotte’s much younger brother — joining in. “Don’t be so cruel, Emmerson,” Linn would say. “I happen to think it’s a particularly attractive moustache. Very erotic.” He’d use such words as “erotic”, eager to appall his spinsterly sister and her spinsterly friend, and if they were in the right sort of mood (they were usually in the right sort of mood), Charlotte and Alice would utter shocked tut-tutting gasps to please him. She never thought that — within a few years — she would, in her turn, begin to develop one. She was (and always had been) frizzily dark-haired and sallow-skinned, and it slowly occurred to her — as she examined her face in the mirror (if it was one of her dauntless days) — that what were unquestionably hairs on her upper lip were beginning to achieve the status of a full-grown moustache, as flourishing and twirlable — she felt — as that of any villain in a novel or play.

“… Come, my Trilby, look a little lower down, between the houses on the other side of the river …” — the voice was wheedling and insinuating, with a strong foreign accent, not fully fluent in English — “… There is a little light glimmering yonder — it is light of ugly little building — and inside are eight marble slabs — all in a row …” — Svengali twiddled and twirled the lank hair that hung down the side of his face, at his moustache and his beard, twisting them counterclockwise around his fingers as if creating small, tight curls — “… It is called the Morgue …”

She had been a patient of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (the —
nudge, nudge —
mad-doctor) for
over seven years
. First the seven years of dithering and denying, the various experiments, and then the seven years of treatment. More experiments. Mrs. Albert Comstock had recommended, had virtually
insisted
. She’d heard so much about him. Surely some prince was poised to rescue her, lopping his way through the forest of bearded sentinels with his upraised sword? Her hair had become a little too faded and thin for her to let it down, Rapunzel-like, for him to climb up to reach her tower. It would have to be a not very impressive two-feet-high tower, and — even then — the hair would snap when he was half way up and he would fall to his death, skewered on his own sword. She would have to plait her moustache: it would then bear the weight of armies, and stretch the height of the Flatiron Building. Lines of young princes, their newly polished armor gleaming, would form to make the Jack-in-the-Beanstalk ascent to the schoolroom. They would use the window at the front of the house, facing out across Chestnut Street. She could imagine the expression on their faces when they straddled the window ledge and had a close-up view of what they had climbed up, and of the woman they had risked their lives to claim. The air would be black with princes hurtling to their doom, throwing themselves down like aristocratic lemmings — “Don’t climb up, chaps! She’s absolutely frightful!” — from the cliff-edge of the schoolroom window, a flock of falling wingless Icaruses thudding earthward.

No prince was on his way to rescue her, that was for sure.

She would have to organize her own escape. She’d do it through her writing, she’d do it by finding the right words, the Ali Baba “Open, Sesame!” to fling open the locked doors. Like the pupils of St. Cassian of Imola, she’d find an unsuspected power in the nib of her pen. Cassian was a Christian schoolmaster who had refused to make sacrifices to the heathen gods, so he had been handed over to his pupils, who had leaped upon him and stabbed him to death with their iron pens. All it took was a little imagination from the relevant authorities, and going to school could so easily be transformed into a positively enjoyable experience.

Stab!

Stab!

Stab!

(
STAB EVIL SINNER!

(If it wasn’t
ENORMOUS SIBYL
it was
EVIL SINNER
. There were, in fact, several candidates for stabbing,
many
candidates, a crack-of-doom line of them, and — on her good days — she felt
tireless
.)

She had been sleeping in new cotton sheets, and little knots of whiteness clung to her hair, her top lip, her eyebrows and eyelashes, like unmelted flakes of snow in a cold room. Absentmindedly she began to pick at the tiny cotton balls. The hairbrush, in her other hand, was as white and ready for spinning as a flax-packed distaff. How very appropriate. When she had accumulated enough material she could dye the cotton with her watercolors and perfect her Lady of Shalott impersonation, weaving a magic web with colors gay, watching shadows of the world appear in the mirror hanging before her. English authors seemed to have spent most of the last century gazing into mirrors, more and more searchingly as it drew to its close.

Colours
.

That should have been the spelling.
Colours gay
.

She tried to observe English spelling for English authors, but sometimes forgot. Best men are
moulded
out of faults.
That’s
what Mariana had said. (Though — a vague memory, this, of something she might once have read — hadn’t Shakespeare originally written “molded”, and wasn’t it the English spelling, not the American, that had changed? She wasn’t sure. Attempts at consistency were beset with hazards.) She was becoming thoroughly Websterized, Websterized in her spelling by Noah Webster, and Websterized — if she wasn’t careful, and relaxed her vigilance — in everything else by Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, proprietor of the Webster Nervine Asylum in Poughkeepsie, as echoing and clangorously guarded as one of those mediæval castles crammed with stitch-stitch-stitching women. “Webster” meant “weaver”. Spider-like, they spun their sticky webs, and tapestries — like mirrors for entrapment — hung in narrow angled corridors all around them. The web had flown out and floated wide; the mirror would crack from side to side. It would be quite relaxing to float down the river, lying robed in snowy white, freed from the oppression of reflection by the breaking of the mirror. Websters were everywhere apparent. If you weren’t careful, you’d find yourself licking the back of a Webster as you prepared to apply a postage stamp.

“Hello, Ben,” she’d said yesterday morning, seeing one-cent stamps on some of the letters that had just been delivered, looking at Benjamin Franklin. This was what she sometimes said when she came across any representation of the man whose name had been given to her brother. No wonder Benjamin Franklin was colored green, finding himself on the lowest-valued stamp. William Henry Harrison might be purple in the face, but at least they’d put him on the thirteen-cents stamp! That’s what Benjamin Franklin was thinking. It would be worth it to be blue in the face, as long as — like James Madison — you were on a stamp worth
two dollars
.
Huh!
from Benjamin Franklin.
Two dollars!
Then she’d seen that some Websters had been pushed invasively through the mail slot as well; not Noahs, not Dr. Wolcott Ascharms, but Daniels, all in a chorus-line row on ten-cents stamps on a package, tanned and weather-beaten in brown, clearly men who were at one with nature, rarely without their hoes in their hands, and used to dealing with farm animals. Websters were pressing in upon her spelling, her brain, her
tongue
.

“Liberty
and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” That’s what Daniel Webster had said. That’s what Miss Hayergaal had written on the blackboard, and the whole class had recited it in unison. You knew he’d shouted it, because Miss Hayergaal had written an exclamation point.

“One and inseparable!”

That’s what they’d shouted, the same words at the same time, learned by heart like arithmetical tables. They’d sounded like a multiplicity of the Three Musketeers, all for one, and one for all, rapiers twitching to thrust into Cardinal Richelieu. If the same opportunity presented itself to Mrs. Albert Comstock and the Reverend and Mrs. Goodchild — killing a cardinal must feature high on their list of priorities — they’d be there with their umbrellas lethally positioned for action, vigorously have-at-thee-varleting.

All the needles gleamed in the little light that penetrated the narrow windows.

Needles will make you better.

Needles will effect a cure.

Stitch-stitch-stitch.

The curse would be on her soon enough. She had no loyal knight and true, and Mrs. Albert Comstock stretched before her like a mountainous subcontinent. She might have spent the whole of yesterday afternoon with the dreadful woman, but that did not grant her immunity from future visitations.

(This last word, with its implications of suffering and affliction, was a good choice of noun. Plagues made visitations. She also thought that Mrs. Albert Comstock’s occasional description of her “At Homes” as “gatherings” was — for her — eerily prescient. Gatherings were suppurating swellings, boils on the point of bursting. The word described 5 Hampshire Square with forensic exactness, captured that unforgettable atmosphere of hedonistic jollity.)

At least she hadn’t also spent the whole evening with her as Ben had — afternoon
and
evening with Mrs. Albert Comstock: his perilous voyagings on the oceans of the world must hold few fears for him after this — hauled along to the theatre as a member of her party. Her brave seafaring brother!

As she picked out the cotton with her right hand, she stored the harvest in her cupped left hand, beside the hairbrush handle, humming to herself.

With her ready grasp of modern history, Mrs. Albert Comstock had been heard to remark what a pity it was that the Civil War had ended slavery, as the darkies — she used this word (at least, in public) instead of “niggers” to demonstrate her daringly liberal views for the benefit of Mrs. William Boemer — had been having such a good time on the plantations. She visualized the plantations as rather like well-tended orchards: regular sun-dappled rows of identically shaped trees, ripe red fruit, apples, cherries, glowing in the soft, fresh greenery, stretching neatly away to the horizon, a darkie Paradise before the Fall as they — laughing for sheer delight — gathered clumps of cotton that were as clean and white as washing laid out to dry. In the fall the leaves would turn red and gold, and shrivel, become thin and papery and blow away, leaving the branches bare. There would be music at dusk as the trees darkened, and big white grins — they were like thoughtless, carefree children — would gleam like the fruit that had once been there in the daytime as they sang and danced in their joy.

They were as happy as the day was long, and the day was long in Dixie.

“What a shame … What a shame …”

Regular visitors were already beginning to nod their heads in agreement. Others would sense an announcement coming on. Mrs. Albert Comstock tended to announce something rather than merely state it; it was surely a mere oversight that she had failed to install liveried trumpeters in her household, all lined up tidily in a neat line, ready, at a moment’s notice, to produce a fanfare before her every utterance.

(Deep breaths, inflated cheeks, puckered-up lips.)

Tarantara!

“I believe I’m correct in saying that it’s not as cold today as it was yesterday.”

(Breathe, inflate, pucker.)

Tarantara!

“I don’t like Mrs. Italiaander’s new hat.”

(Breathe, inflate, pucker.)

Tarantara!

“What a shame that the war spoiled it all.”

She nodded to herself at the picture she had created in her mind, the lost prelapsarian wonderland.

“What a shame …”

Jewelry rattled as heads nodded in polite — or enthusiastic — agreement, earrings swaying, feathers vibrating.

Sometimes Alice wasn’t sure whether what was being regretted was the loss of Dixie as a place of perpetual darkie jollity, or the appearance of more and more darkie faces on the streets of New York. Mrs. Albert Comstock — Alice was convinced — was under the impression that minstrel shows were performed by genuine darkies, and not by white men with burned cork on their faces, and this had colored — how apt a word could be — her picture of them. She had once met Booker T. Washington at Mrs. William Boemer’s in Gramercy Park, and — naturally — assumed that he was being introduced to her, and not she to him. She was equal to the occasion. She knew how to speak to such people. “Have you been black for long?” she asked him chattily, in that informal way she had with the lower orders. She prided herself on her ability to put people at their ease. It was a gift granted to the naturally aristocratic. She later confided to Mrs. Goodchild that Booker T. Washington was not as authentic-looking as some of the other darkies she had seen. He wasn’t
very
black, not really black enough to be totally convincing, and there had been — she’d no doubt remarked, suspiciously — a distinct lack of tambourines and bones. (By the by, wasn’t it rather — er — presumptuous of him to call himself “Washington”?)