Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born,” the Shepherd would say, and after the cold winter years of suffering and unhappiness, the destruction of a family, good things would begin to grow in the world again.

  The ewers from her, Mama’s and Ben’s rooms were the only things on the table, standing ready where Rosobell had placed them. Water was hissing a little as it bubbled in the tin side boiler of the stove. The slight sound made the kitchen appear larger. It seemed emptier than usual now that Annie had gone again, the clock loud. She drew her watch out of her kimono, set it, and wound it. She’d take her mother’s water up later, when she was all ready herself. She, not Rosobell, washed her mother, cared for her in her infirmity. Sometimes, to the sound of trickling water, her mother’s silent head bowed over the bowl, she thought of times when her mama had bathed her face, soothed her when she was ill. She was careful not to get soap into her eyes, dabbed gently with the towel.

  Alice turned the tap on the boiler, filled her ewer, and went back into the hall, still Comstocked into redness. As the morning progressed, the color would creep across the hall, and begin to climb the stairs, one by one. Alice preferred the green light of the afternoons, when the hall seemed cool and lonely, like a deserted house deep under water, or abandoned in the depths of a dense forest. Sometimes — not very often — she would peer through the green glass on one side of the door, and see a green-faced Mrs. Albert Comstock in a green coat walking up a green path. When the frog-faced Goodchilds and Griswolds came calling — this happened more frequently — their green-faced closeness was almost too alarmingly froggy to bear. She always looked through the blue glass if she thought it was they who were approaching: this lessened the shock as they came hopping, croaking, rustling across the tiles, darkening the sky like locusts stripping the crops bare, to confuse the plague imagery somewhat.

  The red glass would have been inviting nightmares, red-blent figures locked in a cycle of hell, like something out of a luridly illustrated edition of Dante, too dreadful even for Doré to contemplate. “Gules” — she had thought correctly — was the word from “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Charlotte had accidentally read it as “warm Giles” — Giles was the Christian name of Mr. Tilleard, Miss Hayergaal’s fiancé — and the whole class had sniggered. (Like “blond” and “blonde,” there was “fiancé” and “fiancée.” You could imagine Mrs. Albert Comstock’s appalled inhalations. Trust the French to bring — ahem — sex so blatantly into their spelling.)

  (“And threw warm Giles on Madeline’s fair breast.”

  (Snigger. Snigger. Snigger.

  (It had been like one of the saucier misprints in a Reverend Goodchild novel.)

  They had sniggered more loudly when Charlotte — realizing what she had just said — had begun to blush, more gules than Giles herself. Miss Hayergaal had looked somewhat thoughtful at the image the choice of words brought to mind, sharpening her pencil lingeringly, with a certain emphatic twist to her wrist action. After she had left to be married, Miss Swanstrom had replaced her. This had not been a good swap.

  15

  She saw again the newspaper she had seen lying across the tiles earlier, the Hudson Valley Chronicle. To buy this once a week had been a sign of gentility, a conscious rural distancing from the encroachment of New York City, though Papa had also bought a New York newspaper.

  She walked across the tulip designs: the dull red, the charcoal, slate-blue, matt sand, and malachite. She had thought, when she first heard the name of the color, that — surely — malachite was the name of one of the Old Testament prophets, battling alongside Habakkuk and Obadiah, and had gone to her Bible to check. Like the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Bible was full of lines — whole passages — you’d never found before, or had read and completely forgotten about. Lines and meanings altered as you altered, and they became new. In both books, every line, sentence, and section seemed to be accounted for, even the smallest word too precious to lose, and nothing should be lost in the fine net of numbering. She lived in one of the unnumbered places of the city, in a terrain that resisted numbering, and where names were used for the streets instead.

  She’d almost been right.

  The name was Malachi. It was the name of the last book — very brief, more like a chapter than a book — of the Old Testament, and it was the name of a prophet, a prophet who warned about the weakening of faith.

  “For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.”

  She had chanted the words out loud for the pleasure of prophesying doom. The hall had such a satisfyingly resonant sound.

  “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the LORD of hosts.”

  She stomped upon the tiles, and swiveled the ball of her right foot from side to side, in the way that men did when they were extinguishing (those who bothered) the ends of partially smoked cigars and cigarettes in the street. She trod down on the proud, and on the wicked, and they were as ashes under the soles of her feet. She had particular people in mind when she did this. She would ensure that the ashes under the soles of her feet were well and truly extinguished, ground to fine powder like snuff all ready for inhalation, ground to nothingness.

  Crunch! (on “tread”).

  Crunch! (on “wicked”).

  Crunch! (on “ashes”).

  Crunch! (on “this,” an extra crunchy Crunch! because of the italics).

  Her shoes crunched through the ashes toward Papa’s study, to the left of the front door as she approached it. She was treading down the wicked, crushing the cinders beneath her as they fell from the darkened sky, pattering down upon her head and shoulders, as if she were in Sodom, Gomorrah, or (again) Pompeii. It was like walking through the layers of wet cinders that remained upon the sidewalks after the snow upon which they had been scattered had melted completely away. The cinders fell pitter-patter upon the folded pages of the Hudson Valley Chronicle.

  Here were more ghosts.

  On the front page was an engraving of the Board of Governors of her old school, Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls. All were men. All were bearded. Her father — he had been dead now for fifteen years — was the one on the far left in the second row. If the size of the beard was the standard by which manhood was measured, her father was the man amongst men, the Biggest of the Beards. A double crown was his: the Biggest of the Beards, the Baldest of the Bald. The bald head gleamed with a Humpty Dumpty radiance, as if freshly polished, a looking-glass in which you might discern your reflection, a mirror of all vanities. Self-conscious colleagues or business acquaintances, in the midst of a serious-faced conversation, would be unable to resist discreetly patting at their hair, adjusting the collars of shirts, or tugging at the knots of neckties. They’d forget what they’d been saying, rapt in self-contemplation, striving for perfection in their appearance, an essential implement in the armory of the ambitious.

  “Lean forward a little more,” powerful rivals would order peremptorily, and Papa — ever mindful of the importance of contacts — would meekly obey, allowing them to check that false teeth had been correctly inserted, and the most capacious of nostrils kept entirely free of æsthetically displeasing lumpish obstructions. They’d grasp his ears firmly, adjusting the angle of the bald head to their complete satisfaction, as if it were a mirror on a swivel stand.

  Her childhood was so long ago that there had been engravings in newspapers in those days, not photographs. (Her childhood was so long ago that it had been in a time when all men had sported beards as a symbol of their maleness. Women thrust out their bosoms, and men their beards: thus were the sexes differentiated.) Doré came to mind again, Papa pictured in (how appropriate) some new circle of hell, some lesser-known Old Testament legend.

  The faces of the men wer
e as crosshatched as the engraving on a high-value bank note, meticulously shaded, creating an illusion of depth. The beards were money, and smelled of money, rustling against the face with the smell of all the places where they had been, dirty notes crinkled in tightly grasped handfuls, money slapped down and fanned out challengingly like winning hands at cards displayed by someone who had cheated. They were greasy bank notes with ragged edges, money that had been doubtfully obtained, and folded away in wads, hoarded in dark places for far too long. The beards were almost obsessively detailed, individual hairs drawn and differentiated in precise detail, whilst their ears, in contrast, were oddly unfinished, simply rimmed like manufactured objects — ear trumpets, the interiors of gramophone horns, the thin handles of fragile bone-china teacups — rather than something human, blank and featureless on the inside, blurring into smooth shadows. She could daintily grasp the proffered handle between finger and thumb, and tip it toward her mouth, her whole head tilting, drinking down the bitter contents of the head.

  They were the faces of long ago, and they were the faces of long to be.

  They stretched back not only the twenty-five years to when she was ten, well back into the previous century, but to many centuries before that. Their faces stared out with the implacable patriarchal confidence of obscure prophets from the Old Testament, warning of what must be, what had to be, what would be, carved in rock like the Ten Commandments, to be obeyed without question, ancestral voices. “Behold!” Malachi cried, pushing himself forward, as if what they had to behold was himself, elbowing the LORD aside and appropriating His words. “I shall do this!” He brought ashes without sackcloth, and his beard was as packed as a factory ashpit. Until recently, a beard appeared to have been a necessary qualification for becoming president, and even Queen Victoria — in fleeting memories of photographs — seemed to have the sort of face that ought to have had a beard, in the way that some faces looked incomplete without spectacles. She probably had a beard worn in private, on intimate royal occasions, passed on to her son — like the crown — as part of the royal regalia. There would be a special attachment, tastefully monogrammed by the royal jeweler — coat of arms tastefully displayed — to fasten the beard and crown together. One was incomplete without the other.

  The five faces were eminently respectable male faces, like the faces of surgeons around an operating theatre table, or the managing directors of a successful manufacturing company that was the major employer in some small Midwest town. They were the stern upholders of morality and family values, but with a hint of carefully implied warmth and compassion in their eyes.

  Bearded as they were, the expressions on their faces were exactly the same as the expressions on the faces of the middle-aged women in the illustrations for corset designs in the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue.

  16

  All around Longfellow Park the five bearded worthies, risen to greet the dawn, gamboled in the freedom and comfort of expertly fitted corsetry, their faces dignified and remote, their gazes untroubled, confident in the rightness of what they were doing. Each had his left hand resting loosely on his left hip, and strolled little distances to and fro, swaying with a natural grace, his womanly poise enhanced by the manly confidence which the possession of a beard confers.

  To the sound of their own inner music — whether of Brahms, of Bizet, or (they had the beards for this) Tchaikowsky, Mussorgsky, or Rimsky-Korsakoff — the other Bearded Ones, the men of Longfellow Park, fully armed in the dignity of their corsets, their eyes unfocused, looking far, far away, lost in some world known only to themselves, breathed and moved and had their being.

  Tum, tum, tum, tum, ti-tum …

  Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti, tum …

  Tum-ti-tum, tum-ti tum-ti tum-ti, tum-ti-tum …

  There was some other music, just on the very edge of hearing. It wasn’t Tchaikowsky. It wasn’t Mussorgsky. It wasn’t Rimsky-Korsakoff …

  The music was surely the music of Bizet, it suddenly occurred to her. Faintly at first, and then louder and louder, a pianist began to pick out the opening notes of Carmen’s first aria. By the little decorative flourishes, she recognized that the pianist was Emmerson Columbarian, playing at the entrance of Columbarian & Horowitz, his father’s music store on Hudson Row.

  The five men were Albert Comstock, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, the Reverend Goodchild, G. G. Schiffendecken, and her father.

  G. G. Schiffendecken had never been on the Board of Governors of Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls, and had not arrived in Longfellow Park until about five years ago, but there he was with the others, as if he had known them all his life. All five now had acacia flowers clasped in the corners of their mouths, rather like cigars, and moved forward with large bouquets peeping out provocatively from the bosoms of their corsets. Seductive, slow and sleepy in the sunshine, the lotus-lulled lovelies languorously braided their beards, like mermaids lingeringly brushing their hair with underwater lassitude. With a sultry haughtiness they placed both hands upon their hips, and, moving as one, began to sway their bodies erotically, their heads raised in taunting contempt for all the young men who gazed upon them, fascinated and lost. Their voices, as they sang, were superbly true soprano voices, rich and throaty, vibrant with passion.

  “L’amour est une oiseau rebelle

  Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,

  Et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle,

  S’il lui convient de refuser

  Rien n’y fait …”

  Now a full orchestra was playing.

  As they moved before her, proudly flaunting their magnificent bodies, lost in the rhythm of the music, she vividly remembered the startling illustrations for what was coyly described as “The Winter Package” in the Fall and Winter editions of the Lindstrom & Larsson catalogue, issued at the end of September. It was a part of the mysterious patterns of the seasons, the signs of an approaching winter: squirrels gathered hazelnuts, the great flocks of migrating birds darkened the skies, bears retreated into caves, and the women of America ordered their warm vests and drawers from Lindstrom & Larsson to ensure their survival in the coldness that lay before them. In this catalogue, middle-aged women — decorous and dignified expressions on their faces, no doubt to dispel any misunderstanding about their motivations — held out two woolen vests and five pairs of woolen drawers neatly lined up across their extended right arms, like worshipers with votive offerings, or thoughtful hostesses offering a tidbit to a particularly favored guest. The intended effect was so thoroughly wholesome that you half expected the women to be giving a jolly wave with their free left hands, though this — perhaps — might imperil the precious cargo by unbalancing the pose.

  There was a double-page spread of this mass display of drawers — the effect was rather overwhelming — and what she remembered most of all about it, as an impressive example of the high moral tone on which Lindstrom & Larsson prided themselves, was that — although “The Winter Package” consisted of three vests and six pairs of drawers — the women in the illustration, without exception, proudly held out just two vests and five pairs of drawers, to make absolutely clear to the reader that the women — clad in chemises and smiling winsomely — were securely enclosed within the third vest, and the sixth pair of drawers. This, no doubt, was to avoid unseemly speculation on the part of any male (particularly the young, vulnerable, adolescent male) who — by accident or design — had strayed into these delicate pages of the catalogue, and become inflamed, a weakness to which their sex was prone.

  Marching in perfect unison, the massed ranks of drawer-displaying Bearded Ones, the corseted Carmens, appeared over the horizon, and began to converge on Longfellow Park, to join the vanguard of their illustrious army in Hudson Row, their right arms extended like the military salute in some South American dictatorship, the fanned-out underwear like playing cards about to be shuffled for some esoteric variation of vingt-et-un. With their left hands they caressed the lower parts of their left breasts, a repeated fondling left-to-right
gesture, like a coded Masonic signal. The drawers trembled as their bodies vibrated to the perfectly pitched soprano voices of the wanton temptresses they had become, and the young men who lined the streets were driven into a frenzy by their animal allure.

  “… L’amour est enfant de BohÊme,

  Il n’a jamais connu de loi;

  Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime;

  Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi …”

  The sun was blotted out as bouquets — still warm with the heat from within the bosoms of the corsets — vests in sets of two, and drawers in sets of five, were flung high into the air to land at the feet of the chosen objects of desire.

  It was the music that made them do it.

  Albert Comstock looked in fine form for a man who had died a month or so before her father. He favored the Hilda corset, cut especially for the fuller figure, its amply proportioned gussets in a tasteful shade of green, small floral motifs adding a discreet color contrast. With quiet pride he paraded to and fro, far from the haunts of man on the edge of Indian Woods near the Ivansaans’ farm, displaying the same neat economy of movement that characterized the way he tipped flour into the scales in his store, or briskly swung paper bags around twice between his fingers when they were filled with apples. His dimpled upper arms were freckled by the sunlight through the branches, and there was a little moue of concentration on his face as he strove to achieve the outward expression of his inner serenity, the low morning light sending long shadows from the trees out across the grass, and glinting on his garters as they swung in the bright air. He was several hundred pounds of pullulating womanhood, more of a woman than his wife would ever be. Across Hilda’s ample bosom — tastefully embroidered for a modest extra payment — were the words COMSTOCK’S COMESTIBLES: “SERVICE WITH SINCERITY!”