Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Seeing these beards fluffily flocked together, like an illustration for Far from the Madding Crowd — Gabriel Oak, you felt, was just out of sight, grasping his crook like a Good Shepherd (odd to link crooks with goodness) — you could understand why altocumulus clouds were sometimes described as sheep clouds. They crowded the sky with baa-baa bossiness, three bags full with self-importance. Black sheep brought storms.

  Beards and three names were not compulsory for composers, as they were for poets. Most of the greatest of composers — Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, the list could be extended almost indefinitely — seemed to thrive frugally with one name and no beard, though there were those who, poet-like, were possessed of enormous beards, especially if they came from Russia. It must have been because of the severe winters of their homeland, but the great Russian composers — like the great Russian novelists — seemed to have thick beards like detachable accessories hanging down over the front of their fur coats in an attempt to keep warm. The novelists wore them proudly, like Siberian sporrans, in Highland homage to Sir Walter Scott, their distinguished predecessor in their chosen profession. Some of their beards were so huge that they gave the impression that packs of starving wolves — drawn out from deep within the mystical Russian forests — were hurling themselves at their throats.

  Perhaps, like St. Wilgefortis, she should pray for a miraculous beard. Unlike St. Wilgefortis, she did not need a miraculous hairy outgrowth in order to repel the unwanted attentions of men. She seemed to manage this effortlessly with no help whatsoever from God. It was one of the many gifts she possessed.

  All Saints’ Church contained some appalling sights (not least the Goodchilds and the Griswolds: some churches featured gargoyles, All Saints’ had the Goodchilds and the Griswolds), but the stained-glass windows took some beating. St. Wilgefortis — with a beard like a large hairy apron she had inadvertently tied around herself in the wrong position prior to washing the china — was a mere commonplace sight, someone you would pass in the street without a second glance, compared with some of the other saints depicted: St. Erasmus, St. Pharaildis, St. Bartholomew, St. Agatha …

  The things that were happening to them! The things they were pictured doing!

  There was such richness from which to choose, and she had spent most of her Sundays studying them. This had helped to block out the voice of Dr. Vaniah Odom, and then — in more recent years — the Reverend Goodchild’s voice.

  The artist who worked on them had been a Bearded One with another three-ring circus of a name (they appeared to be compulsory, a different act in each ring — bespangled elephants trumpeting, high-wire acts spinning in mid-air, plumed horses bowing their heads — too much action for the eyes to take in all at once): Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton (the surname did not really live up to the two preceding names, and rather weakened the effect), the father of Mrs. Alexander Diddecott. Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton not only took the name of the church all too literally (trying his utmost to include — with pedantic correctness — a representation of every possible known saint), but proved to be equally literal-minded in his depiction of their symbols and their instruments of martyrdom. He reserved the largest expanses of glass for the saints who had met the goriest ends, and depicted their spectacular demises with an unflinching detail that would not have been out of place in one of the more advanced medical textbooks. They made the most luridly illustrated edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs seem tame and tentative. Sunday after Sunday she had examined them with a sprightly interest, effortlessly replacing the face of her chosen saint with the face of Dr. Vaniah Odom or the Reverend Goodchild, lingering over the depiction of his disemboweling, his decapitation, his death by swords, by arrows, by axes, by lions. It was an impressive illustration of the consolation that could be found in art.

  Soon — for the greater glory of Goodchild — the congregation would be moving to a new church, and today would be the last service in the original All Saints’. She would miss the bizarre sights in the windows of the old church.

  “A special service,” was the way that the Reverend Goodchild had described today’s planned events, “a very special service,” and something in the way he had stressed “special” (evil cackling held at bay, one felt, solely by the exercise of strict self-control) seemed to suggest — at the very least — that human sacrifice might be involved. She wouldn’t put it past him. She would probably be the chosen victim, selected like some unfortunate cabin boy clutching the crumpled X -marked piece of paper, another black spot with an implacable summons, as the starving shipwrecked survivors of the crew edged salivatingly closer in the overcrowded boat. Ah well, selection as a scapegoat would make a morning in All Saints’ more interesting than usual. She certainly possessed the whiskers for the part, William Holman Hunt’s painting startlingly given shape. She would be a living reenactment of one of the more obscure martyrdoms in the stained-glass windows, like a tiny extract from a mystery play in mediæval England. She liked to see the positive side of things.

  “There was a guzzling Jack and a gorging Jimmy …”

  — she hummed to herself —

  “… There was a guzzling Jack and a gorging Jimmy,

  And the third he was little Billee,

  And the third he was little Billee …”

  The first mate and the — how appropriate! — ship’s cook closed in on the cabin boy, smiling with unconvincing friendliness, trying not to show their teeth too much, their fingers starting to edge into the pockets where they’d secreted their knives and forks, conveniently close to hand. With the very tips of their fingers they discreetly eased up the flaps, their smiles broadening, gorging Jimmy exerting his every power of gorgeousness. Little Billee — looking deeply suspicious — eyed their approach unenthusiastically, bracing himself to repulse their advances, clenching his fists and scowling. His mother had warned him about this sort of thing.

  Many of the windows had already been removed in preparation for the demolition of the church, and were piled in packing cases along the aisles; saints prepared for shipping like some esoteric export line. For the past few weeks members of the congregation had had to contend with the hazards of ill-stacked saints as they made their way to their pews, barking their shins, catching their elbows. Workmen — there was another big top, the pale crowded faces staring upward, hands pointing — would soon swing across to saw at the wooden angels in the roof, and they would come crashing down to earth like a scene from Paradise Lost as the church fell, shooting stars plunging downward.

  Make a wish! Make a wish!

  Years ago, as a little girl, she had once seen angels being jerkily hauled up into the air in a department store (had it been A. T. Stewart’s?) one morning about a month before Christmas. It was a scene that ought not to have been visible during shopping hours, and — when she had suddenly come across it, holding her mama’s hand — it had been like seeing behind the scenery, pulling aside the striped front of the booth at a Punch and Judy show, or (it had occurred to her more recently, as she read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to her niece Mildred) tipping over the screen to reveal Oz, the Great and Terrible, to be a little old man with a bald head. There had been a rotunda rising the full height of the building — four or five stories — to a glass roof, and it was toward this glass, darkly silhouetted against the gray November light, that the angels were ascending, rotating slowly like life-size wind-blown tree decorations.

  Above its sad and lowly plains

  They bend on hovering wing;

  And ever o’er its Babel sounds

  The blessèd angels sing.

  On the ground floor, like formally attired tug-of-war teams, young male assistants in dark suits were heaving away together on ropes. “Yo-ho-heave-ho! Yo-ho-heave-ho!” This was the Babel sound in the heart of that temple of commerce.

  Hauling up angels was such a change (the opportunity all too rarely presented itself) from their usual dull routine that the young men (there were dozens of them, freed from the close atten
tions of the floorwalkers) were becoming noisy and excited, competitively eager to see their angel reach the roof first. The Babel-like babblings were rising to a roar. Bets were probably being exchanged. Angels and archangels may have gathered there,/Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air. Bells should be ringing out in mighty peals as they ascended, as the ropes were pulled. There was something nautical and yo-ho-ho — though not very well drilled — about the young men pulling on the ropes in unison, rather like the group of men disemboweling St. Erasmus in the stained-glass window to the right of their pew in All Saints’. Hooray, and up she rises! Hooray, and up she rises! Huge white sails should be unfolding like enormous wings, snapping out and bellying in a strong north-by-north-west wind. Eight or nine angels, spaced out around the central light-well, lurched bumpily upward, swaying from side to side, their heads leaning too far forward, like a gathering of feathered suicides deciding where to jump, or — already dead — the dangling corpses after a mass hanging, crows shot by a farmer to deter other scavengers.

  More young men were waiting high above them on the top floor, leaning out into the central space, clutching brooms commandeered from the janitor or (they looked pale and pristine) from elsewhere in the store, all ready to maneuver their chosen angel into position with the bristled heads. She had to bend right back in order to see them, as if she were looking up at Dr. Vaniah Odom in his pulpit.

  “My angel! My angel!” they were shouting encouragingly, their voices echoing, fervent suitors glimpsing the girl of their dreams.

  With the combination of brooms and flying angels it was like an incongruous mixture of Halloween (she dithered on the verge of thinking of the word as Hallowe’en: it was a word that seemed to demand an apostrophe) and Christmas, midway between the two dates. The wings of two of the angels became locked, and the more the young men tugged, the more the angels began to tip upside down. If they plummeted earthward, would the store’s employees be insured against death from falling angels? If anything qualified as an Act of God, this was surely it. Alice had tried to walk challengingly beneath the nearest angel — an impulse for a glamorous death had suddenly seized her — but Mama had clutched her hand tightly, and dug her heels in. She was not taking any chances.

  Two of the young men on the top floor had become bored after waiting too long for their log-jammed angel, and had reversed their brooms and started a sword-fight, prodding challengingly at each other’s chests with the blunt wooden handles, like a safety-conscious d’Artagnan and Lord de Winter.

  “Touché!” they shouted. “Touché!”

  Others began to join in. If this had been a few years later, some of the young men would not have been able to resist utilizing their brooms as crutches in Long John Silver impersonations, wincing slightly as the stiff bristles dug painfully into their armpits, and mutineers uttering frightful imprecations would have swung across that central space on hastily improvised rigging. Skewered musketeers and pistol-shattered buccaneers would have hurtled to earth from between the creakily swaying angels. A morning in a department store rarely produced such heady excitement.

  8

  When she was a small girl — anxious to improve her literary credibility — she had been drawn to the name Pharaildis: Alice Pharaildis Pinkerton had an undoubted poetic ring to it, and would certainly have improved her syllable count. She wasn’t sure whether St. Pharaildis was a man or a woman: with their penchant for long, flowing garments, it was difficult to distinguish the sexes of saints. This was an occasion on which beards might have served a useful purpose — making allowances for the unhelpful blurring of the boundaries from the likes of St. Wilgefortis — but, as with clothing, so with names: if you were a saint your name could be used for either sex. Half the nuns at The House of the Magdalenes had men’s names. The Reverend Goodchild had his own theories about this, and enjoyed many a good snigger about it with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

  St. Pharaildis was pictured with an enormous hen on either side of her, if she was a her. Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton — like some of the illustrators in the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue — had no conception of perspective (grouped rather incongruously in a free-for-all freemasonry with Japanese and mediæval artists), so it was difficult to make out whether the hens were meant to be in the foreground, or whether they really were — as they appeared to be — bigger than she was. Alice, knowing nothing about the saint, was puzzled by the hens, but decided that they must be the instruments of her martyrdom. Here she was, being pecked to death by giant hens unleashed by some evil despot, because … because she … she defied his cruel edicts and his imperious mien by distributing eggs — from a willow-woven basket — to the starving poor within his evil domain. She pictured just two hens — as there were two in the window — outlandishly large, advancing menacingly, towering over Pharaildis.

  Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!

  Their heads — like the pistons of the Coketown steam engines in Hard Times — worked monotonously up and down, the heads of elephants in a state of melancholy madness.

  And on that farm he had some hens, E-I-E-I-O!

  Peck. Peck. Peck.

  With a peck-peck here, and a peck-peck there.

  Pharaildis (not yet martyred, not yet pecked into sainthood) staggered back a little each time, a girl being pushed in the shoulder by a schoolyard bully, her basket held before her — base forward — like a fragile protective shield, a Basque (a Basque with a basket) playing jai alai. Mabel Peartree had just such a big basket, square with a central handle, and carried it looped over her arm on her way to the shops. It was exactly the sort of basket you imagined being carried by Little Red Riding-Hood, with a piece of cake, a bottle of wine, and a bunch of flowers tucked neatly into one side of it.

  “Oh, Miss Peartree! What big teeth you have!”

  Miss Peartree opened her mouth to reveal — gigantic and glinting — the mighty fruits of G. G. Schiffendecken’s labors. He was a dentist who created on the epic scale of a Michael Angelo sculpture. (This could very well be the only known occasion on which startled comment had been made about the size of her teeth, rather than the size of her — Ye gods! — enormous nose.)

  “All the better to eat you with!”

  Munch. Munch. Munch.

  Pharaildis’s feet crunched on the hens’ eggs, incensing them further. After the crunch, crunch, crunch came the peck, peck, peck and after the pecking came the munch, munch, munch.

  Alice had really liked the name Pharaildis — there was nothing exotic about Alice — but the hens had put her off.

  Had St. Wilgefortis specified the sort of beard she had in mind, or had she to make do with the one she was offered? Alice rather pictured her in front of a mirror, browsing through a selection (ready-to-wear rather than custom-made) offered by a diffident angel, deciding which beard suited her best, trying them on, a fashion-conscious client choosing a bonnet, turning sideways to view herself from different angles, fluffing them up becomingly, judging the effect of threading them artistically through her necklace.

  Here was a useful Beauty Hint: she should make a feature of her moustache, thread it with beads, bedeck it with little silken bows, make the most of what she had until the beard came along, bedazzle Mrs. Albert Comstock with her frivolous femininity.

  9

  Her hand was aching. She had been clutching the bar too tightly, and lines were impressed across the center of her palm, glowing red above the accumulated buds of cotton. The clouds were massing above the Hudson, level upon level, heavy with more snow. She watched them for a while.

  It was like the ending of Villette (Charlotte Brontë was certainly pushing her way forward this morning): The skies hang full and dark — a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms — arches and broad radiations. She saw figures unfurling slowly above her, moving with large, stately gestures, and reached up toward them, straining for a direction in which she might begin to move. Sometimes she would watch them for hours at a time from the w
indow, or lying on her bed gazing up through the skylight, languid and irresolute, like a Victorian lady, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, suffering from the vapors or consumption. She was, after all, born a Victorian (surely, even the most patriotic of Americans born during the presidency of Andrew Johnson would not think of herself as a Johnsonian?): her childhood, her young womanhood, had been last century. Though it was now more than three years into the twentieth century, difficult though this was to believe — 1900 1901, 1902 — she still found herself — when she wasn’t concentrating — beginning to write the year with an 18 instead of a 19. She left a trail of scribbles and crossings-out on checks and bills, and disliked the untidiness. Harry Hollander had written a song about the beginning of the new century: “Let’s All Be Naughty in the Naughts (Do All the Things We Really Shouldn’t Oughts)”. Grammar sometimes took second place to rhyme in Harry’s songs.

  The clouds — it was oddly soothing — formed and re-formed, and the wind was howling round the house as it had been howling all night. This was not soothing.

  She concentrated her thoughts back onto the clouds, as if she were at 11 Park Place, trying to read shapes in the clouds, with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster scribble-scribble-scribbling behind her.

  Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.

  There was his voice again, telling her what it was she had to do.

  He was in the room, voyeuristically loitering in this Eve-of-St.-Agnes weather, hiding away and waiting to see her, like Porphyro spying on Madeline in her chamber, tantalizingly spreading out his seductive feast of candied apple, quince, plum, jellies, manna, dates, as she slept, as she dreamed…

  We must not look at goblin men,

  We must not buy their fruits …

  “No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no…”