Pinkerton's Sister (69 page)

She had found the gravestone of Reynolds Templeton Seabright.

It bore the
Hamlet
panel from the Shakespeare Castle – this was the purpose for which it had been removed – and a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe:
Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
They must have started the demolition of the castle the moment that the old actor was dead. Alice hadn’t known that he was dead on the morning she had come across the almost completed demolition. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they had started to demolish it with the old man still inside, a premature destruction, his heartbeat still sounding within the shell.

Alice and Charlotte had to push hard, and keep the wheels aligned straight ahead. There would be no turning corners with this overloaded wagon. They saw the workmen – a group of about seven of them – walking up the footpath from Longfellow Park, and tried to look as if they were innocently strolling past, perambulating some well-behaved and well-nourished child. One of them waved. Alice had a momentary picture of a shortsighted laborer kindheartedly reaching into the baby carriage and gently chucking a miniature Richard the Third or a miniature Henry the Fourth under the chin. (“He’s very small, isn’t he? Why is he wearing a crown?”) It would probably be the first time ever that Richard the Third had been coochi-coochi-cooed. (“What an adorable king!”)

Charlotte saw the expression on Alice’s face. She waved back to the workman, and the two of them began to increase their pace, trying not to show how much they had to exert themselves to do this. The wheels were creaking alarmingly. (“What do you feed him on?”)

“The two little girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter,” Charlotte prompted, looking at Alice.

They walked on a little way farther.

“The two little girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter.”

Charlotte was determined.

After a while, Alice spoke.

“Counterclockwise,” she said. A ghost story in daylight.

She began.

“The two little g-g-girls walked away from the Shakespeare Castle in the late morning of a day in the winter …”

She could still tell her stories, clockwise and counterclockwise. She knew the details of every panel, and the order in which they had been positioned around the walls.

First,
Macbeth
.

Second …

The workmen were behind them now, walking across toward the opening in the wall, to complete the job they had started. Alice and Charlotte, instead of heading back to Charlotte’s house, were starting down the road past the orchards toward Alice’s house. They gripped the handle of the baby carriage firmly, their hands side by side, about to begin a duet at a piano, leaning back at an angle to prevent it from hurtling down the descent. One of the workmen was whistling a tune Alice recognized. Workmen always whistled. She stopped speaking, and listened, turning back a little in the direction of the music.

Charlotte answered the unasked question.

“‘Shew! Fly, Don’t Bother Me,’” she said. There were few songs she didn’t know.

After a pause, in which Alice did not continue with the story, Charlotte spoke the first line of the song, again prompting.

“… I think I hear the angels sing …” Alice picked up the cue, but she sang, instead of speaking. Charlotte joined in.

“That’s beautiful, girls!” the workman who had been whistling called across to them. “I think it’s me can hear the angels sing.”

They giggled, as girls must – girls must giggle, workmen must whistle – and left, as they arrived, pushing the baby carriage and singing, but walking slowly, not running. They were not – in fact – pushing the baby carriage, so much as being drawn downhill by its weight, digging in their heels to prevent it from running away with them, dragging them downward to their doom. They felt like tiny Miss Stammers, being taken for a walk by her enormous dogs.

(It would be the workmen who would wield the morning stars as they destroyed what remained of the Shakespeare Castle, obliterating the surviving figures, splintering the unbroken glass, the spiked balls swinging around on chains until they were just blurs, wrecking as the walls roared down in clouds of dust.

(With the goddess of beauty they would destroy. They would destroy with the mother of love, the queen of laughter, the mistress of grace and of pleasure.)

Their singing became increasingly breathless. They stopped as they approached Chestnut Street, some time later, feeling like morning stars. They didn’t want anyone to hear them, and to come out and see what it was that was burdening the baby carriage. It would be too much of a surprise to peel back that blue blanket and see what lay within, a baby with the face of King Lear. (“That beard really suits him, bless him!”) If they’d taken Linnaeus with them, they could have laid him protectively across the top of the smuggled haul of Shakespearean refugees. There he’d have wobbled, Linnaeus the First, precociously encouraging his teeth to emerge by chewing gummily on Richard the Third’s hump, the hindquarters of Henry the Fifth’s horse, and throwing any inquisitive peerer off the trail by being what ought to have been there, a baby in a baby carriage.

They entered the garden via the back entrance, and went into the stables, the cobblestones bright with newly scattered straw, as if packing cases had been prized open. They had a visitor. Dr. Twemlow’s horse was chomping away like a creature never fed, the carriage angled across awkwardly. He himself was probably in the kitchen, also chomping. He had a tendency to wander into kitchens, exclaiming at the delicious smells he had detected with the aid of his trained medical nostrils, and cooks could take a hint. His mama did not feed him properly. That was the general opinion.

There was a pause as Charlotte seized the opportunity to lavish endearments upon an unfamiliar horse. She’d dart into the road to launch herself upon any promising-looking beast, and no stables remained unexplored. “Promising” encompassed all horses that looked sad, neglected, or unwell; “promising” encompassed
most
horses. She’d convinced herself that her loving attentions were all that could draw them back from the very brink of death at the hands of a cruel master, cramming straw into their panicky resisting mouths. Dr. Twemlow’s horse looked as unimpressed as most others, and attempted to bite her. Charlotte patted away for a little while longer, drew her fingers lover-like through its mane, muttered “There’s a good boy! There’s a good boy!” and only desisted when a determined lunge from the good boy almost knocked her off her feet. She behaved throughout as if nothing that happened had come as any surprise to her. As it happened most times she sought to persuade passing horses that she alone loved them and cared for them, this would have been fairly easy to do. You traced her progress down the street by listening for the sounds of whinnying and rearing, as cursing riders came crashing down to earth. “There’s a good boy!” she muttered once or twice more out of habit – from a safe distance – as the good boy rolled his eyes and lashed out with his back legs.

They unloaded the baby carriage, and set out what they had rescued in neat rows in a disused stall. Someone had produced far more than quadruplets. The stall still bore – on a little brass plaque – the name of Jessica, a horse Alice could remember well.

They were emerging from the stable, carrying
Macbeth
between them wrapped in the blue blanket, looking like participants in some small religious procession in a Mediterranean country, when Dr. Twemlow emerged, carrying his bag. Yes, he had been on the chomp. There were crumbs in his beard, and down the front of his vest. They were pausing for a moment, awkwardly angled, as Alice attempted to suck the pad of her thumb. She’d cut it on a piece of the stained glass, a Katherina or a Beatrice slicing neatly through her flesh, and she looked up at the doctor through a latticework of fingers, with the salty taste of blood in her mouth. She hoped he didn’t think she still sucked her thumb.

He looked not at them but beyond them, seeing the baby carriage.

“My,” he said. “You do come prepared.”

When Alice appeared not to understand what he meant, he indicated – with a flurry of flaky crumbs – what he was looking at.

He hovered on the verge of saying, “Unto us a child is born” for several tottering seconds. Then, lurching back onto – more or less – normal usage, he disappointingly changed his mind.

“Your mama has been blessed” – he liked to give the impression that he was accompanied on his missions by well-drilled annunciating angels (a man who
knew
he heard the angels sing) – “with a child. You have a little brother.” (A
brother
!) He made a vaguely clerical gesture with a soap-scented hand. The smell of the soap was the thing she remembered most, that and the weight of
Macbeth
.

(A
brother
!)

She and Charlotte had carried the panel right up to the top of the house, to the schoolroom. Then Charlotte had returned home with the empty baby carriage, and she had gone to see her baby brother, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and told him that he would learn Latin. They had had the name all ready in case Mama had a baby boy. Papa had chosen it. They had not had a girl’s name ready. It seemed a lot of name for such a small baby. The baby had clasped her proffered fingers firmly.

“There’s bonus, a gift.”

She had lain with her arms around Mama for a while, her pocket-handkerchief wrapped around her thumb because of the dripping blood, and then transferred the rest of the figures and the glass to the schoolroom in several journeys, trudging up the stairs with Ophelia, Imogen, Bottom, the figures of kings and queens, tyrants and lovers.

Now, apart from the panel in Woodlawn Cemetery and an imagined shape in the sky, they were all that was left of the Shakespeare Castle. She had returned, a day or so later, and nothing at all was left, just plowed-up earth. Even the topiary had been grubbed out like a well-rooted dandelion.

The
Macbeth
panel was propped against the wall, at one side of the mansard window facing onto Chestnut Street. She turned away from it, and moved toward the fireplace, her reflection advancing in the mirror above the mantelpiece. In the center of the mantel, along from the sheet music bearing the face of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, its back reflected in the mirror, was the clock with the moon dial. She had watched it throughout her childhood, waiting for the full moon, waiting for the cold light to flood into the room through all the windows, as if all that brightness, draining away color, came from within that little wooden case. With this clock she had tried to hold back time.

When the time of a full moon approached, she would open the glass front of the clock – its small silver key, like a charm from a bracelet, was kept hidden in an old cigar box with other treasures – and push the moon back a few days. She’d thought it would be like trying to hold back a planet, but she was able to do it with the tip of her little finger, a slight counterclockwise push, the action of someone easing an eyelash out of the corner of an eye.

It had never worked. The full moon had still appeared in the sky on the predicted night, just as the almost full moon had appeared tonight, and the cool silvery light had still spread the outlines of the windows on the floor, like reflections on ice.

The man who went riding by, late at night when the fires were out, when the wind was high, the man who galloped and galloped about, had a face that she knew when she was a little girl. When the trees were crying aloud, when the ships were tossed at sea, he went by at a gallop, and then came back at the gallop again, and he had the face of Papa’s “friend.” Papa was not the kind of man who had friends – it was a word she had never heard him use – but she could not think of any other term to define the man she meant. There were many possibilities – “colleague,” “associate,” “acquaintance” – but she always thought of the word “friend,” and she always thought of this word in quotation marks, at a time when Oliver Comstock was a new-born baby, and it would be years before Mrs. Albert Comstock began to refer to Arthur Vellacott as Oliver’s “friend.” She only ever saw Papa’s friend – Papa’s
“friend”
– in darkness, and it seemed he appeared when – like tonight – there was a powerful wind blowing, and, it seemed so in her memory, when – like tonight – there was a bright full or near-f moon, a man drawn out by wildness and the cold phosphorous brightness. She never knew his name. He was just Papa’s “friend,” a man with a beard who smelled of tobacco and drink, and money was involved with it. When he came, something entered the house that should have remained outside, and it was Papa who had brought it in.

He had started coming to the house in the months before Ben was born. The two men – before they arrived – seemed to spend most of the early evening in drinking at their club. Mama said so – a fierce, frightened whisper in the hall – and she could smell that smell when they came toward her. Papa was at home less and less, working late, absent at weekends, and when she saw him that was the smell that she began to notice. She couldn’t have said if it was whisky (“whisky” if the drink came from Scotland, “whiskey” if the drink came from Ireland) or brandy, or whatever it was: it was just the smell that she knew as “drink.” That was the word used by Mama, the word she wasn’t supposed to have overheard, and that was the way he smelled now, of that, and of the strong cigarettes that he smoked, the ones that made her cough, and tears come into her eyes. The way he talked was different, the way he moved was different: both speech and movement seemed drawn out and fastidious, with an underwater slowness. Throughout the glimmering green-lit, aquatic summer evenings, throughout the early fall, he slid his feet across the tiled floor of the hall with careful, conscious daintiness. It was the same sort of movement as the careful, overcontrolled way he slid the back of his finger across the inside of his top lip to remove loose grains of tobacco, or enunciated words with absolute precision from those same wet lips.