Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were, inevitably, the first two books Charlotte presented to her, in the year that Ben was born. For Alice in the – er – Wonderland that is Longfellow Park. Beware of the Queen of Hearts. Dot. Dot. Dot. March 1878.

  “Dot. Dot. Dot” was what she and Charlotte tended to say to each other after significant pauses, as if they were experiencing one of those moments in a novel when a text moved into silence. The printed words came to a close with three printed dots in a row above a space of whiteness, and the scene that followed was not described. It was usually a scene that you were particularly keen to see described in every detail.

  (“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  (“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”)

  The third novel in The Alice Collection – more of a Pinkerton, really, than an Alice – had been Vanity Fair. Two firm lines were drawn down the first words of the opening paragraph.

  While the present century was still in its teens, and on one sun-shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s …

  (Three exclamation points in the margin.)

  …academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness …

  There were, on the same page of text, four exclamation points for “Have you completed all the necessary preparations incident to Miss Sedley’s departure, Miss Jemima?” asked Miss Pinkerton herself, that majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith …”

  (!!!! enthusiastically in the margin, each ! two inches tall.)

  For a while – she quite enjoyed it, and encouraged this usage – Alice was addressed as “majestic lady” or “the Semiramis of Hammersmith” by Charlotte, though neither of them knew what was meant by “Semiramis,” or – indeed – what was meant by “Hammersmith.” Consulting Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary soon solved the meaning of “Semiramis” though “Hammersmith”remained a mystery. The village smith stood under a spreading chestnut-tree, hammering away with his large and sinewy hands, the muscles of his brawny arms bulging like Samson’s.

  Hammer, smith! Hammer, smith!

  Semiramis, a great warrior, became queen and sole empress of Assyria, putting her husband to death to establish herself on the throne, and made Babylon the most magnificent city in the world.

  Smite, Semiramis! Smite, Semiramis!

  They were a formidable combination. As Charlotte said, their likeness to Alice was positively uncanny.

  Miss Pinkerton, that austere and god-like woman – a few sides later – had merited five exclamation points. Alice rather warmed to the idea of being austere and god-like, and had hoped – she had hoped in vain – that perceptive friends might make the sort of comments that they tended to make when they examined a new photograph or (for the more prosperous) portrait:

  “It’s just like you!”

  “A remarkable resemblance!”

  “So true to life!”

  The fourth novel in The Alice Collection had been The Wide, Wide World, and Alice had suffered for an entire afternoon in the apple orchard – though not in quite the manner envisaged by the author – as she made the acquaintance of Ellen Montgomery. Alices had been everywhere, an Alice band of sisters jostling competitively in every circulating library, and on every bookshelf: Alice Mildmay, Alice Knevett, Alice Norton, Alice Bluestone … She’d referred to the (carefully selected) fiction shelves in the school library as “the Alician Fields” (she thought this was rather good), hoping to floor Mary Benedict with a pun, but she’d had to explain what it meant – it was something she ought to have realized would happen – rather spoiling the intended effect. (“Oh …” – Mary Benedict, cool and unimpressed – “… I see. It’s a kind of play on words, is it? What’s the point of that?” Quite.)

  When Alice had come across “For Annie” in a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, she had gone straight to Annie, to read it to her, though – unlike Charlotte – she had sought out no text deliberately. The words seemed to find her.

  “Thank Heaven! The crisis –

  The danger is past,

  And the lingering illness

  Is over at last –

  And the fever called ‘Living’

  Is conquered at last …”

  This was how it began, though it made her sad to think of it, later.

  Annie had looked at her very intently as she read, as if the poem had been addressed specifically to her.

  “… A dream of the truth

  And the beauty of Annie –

  Drowned in a bath

  Of the tresses of Annie.

  “She tenderly kissed me,

  She fondly caressed,

  And then I fell gently

  To sleep on her breast –

  Deeply to sleep

  From the heaven of her breast …”

  She and Annie would sleep with their arms protectively around each other – this is what Alice liked to think – like the sisters, Lizzie and Laura, in “Goblin Market.”

  She would be Lizzie; Lizzie the one who saved her sister.

  Alice thought of Captain Nemo as possessing the face of her father. It was her father gazing at the ruins of Atlantis, her father whose feet – she heard the icy crunch – were the first to make prints in the trackless snow at the South Pole, her father who was frozen into the iceberg. Jules Verne had described the Antarctic as a volcanic landscape of lava and pumice-stones, an atmosphere of sulfur – like the Icelandic countryside over which Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka had traveled in A Journey to the Center of the Earth – but she had always seen an endless dazzling expanse of untouched, unspoiled snow, seen by man for the first time on the day on which she had been born.

  On this day, in this place, a man with the face of her father had unfurled a black flag, bearing an “N” in gold, and called for a six months’ night to spread its darkness over his new kingdom. The night had been longer than six months, and it was not a natural night, as if the moon had interposed itself between the sun and the earth, a permanent eclipse, bringing darkness in daylight. Nemo was the name assumed by Captain Hawdon in Bleak House. He lived and died in squalor, mourned by no one but Jo, the crossing-sweeper, and was buried in a filthy cemetery heaped with dishonored graves.

  His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard – the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect.

  36

  The other side of Megoran Road was being prepared for a new area of housing to be named da Ponte: a large signboard had been erected in the late fall announcing this. The use of the name of Mozart’s librettist (and the prices) indicated that here was to be a select development. Mrs. Albert Comstock hadn’t liked the use of an Italian name (this name meant nothing to her except that it sounded foreign), in case it attracted Italians (even Italians with money; she understood that such existed), and encouraged them to settle there.

  She had heard, she said meaningfully – the sonorous boom tinkling the chandeliers at 5 Hampshire Square – all about what conditions were like in those areas of the city where Italians were allowed to roam unfettered. She visualized them as the hordes of semi-wild pigs that had roamed on the outskirts of the city.

  “The Lower East Side, Mulberry Street …”

  She spoke with faint distaste, speaking the very names might infect her mouth, hesitating slightly over the pronunciation, enough to make it quite clear that these were words that did not often pass her lips.

  “I’ve been led to believe that it is not at all nice down there.”

  She made a vague ambiguous gesture downward with her hand, like a shy patient making a discreet reference to some intimate female medical problem, displaying the same eyes-lowered coyness as her physician, Dr. Twemlow, who gave the impression of struggling to control his blushes whilst wantonly taking a f
emale patient’s pulse. He referred to any embarrassing areas of the female anatomy (the greater part of the body, with the possible exception of well-gloved hands) as “The Ladies’ District.” You’d have thought a fashionable shopping area were contained within their corsets and drawers.

  “Is it – ahem – within The Ladies’ District?” was a typical inquiry (there were usually several ahems), his head turned discreetly to one side, apparently fascinated by the photograph of his formidable mother on the wall.

  (How on earth could male patients bring themselves to discuss their – ahem – Gentlemen’s Districts with the unsmiling visage of Mrs. Twemlow scowling disapprovingly straight at them in sure and certain knowledge that all men were beasts? It was just as well that he was primarily thought of as being a ladies’ doctor. This was not a carefully calculated choice on his part – though the more complicated structure of the frail female body offered more opportunities for the financially ambitious – but was mainly because men were driven away by his fey manner, his prudish evasiveness, and by, above all by, Mrs. Twemlow, either in person, or as the wall-mounted Medusa glaring at them with every appearance of revulsion.)

  The whole of da Ponte – like much of Longfellow Park these days – looked like a snowbound archeological site, with something being excavated rather than constructed: trenches, wooden barriers, the names of what had once been there, rather than of what was to be there, the Italian names – Despina, Elvira, Cherubino – that marked out the site of the new neighborhood. It was what some builders did: they named an area of land after the hometown of Italian or German or Swedish immigrants, and the settlers would arrive – drawn by a familiar name – to find nothing but empty fields, as if the village from which they had come had ceased to exist without them. She imagined them, headscarfed, carrying bundles, standing disconsolately on the edge of nothingness, Israelites without a Moses, waiting for manna that was never going to fall.

  The Megoran Road signboard depicted Mozart, fifteen feet tall, gazing out across the trenches and the snow-covered mounds of earth toward New York City. There was no illustration of da Ponte. This seemed a little harsh, as he, after all, was the one who had actually lived in the city. That was the way with operas: those who wrote the words (W. S. Gilbert was one of the rare exceptions) somehow ceased to exist. Only the music mattered. The operas were Mozart operas, not Mozart and da Ponte operas. There was a thought to ponder: the insignificance of the words, the invisibility of the writer, overpowered by the language of the music.

  It was strange to imagine da Ponte living in New York, a friend of Clement Clarke Moore: the man who had worked with Mozart talking with the man who had written “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” (’Twas the night before Christmas …) It seemed the wrong time, the wrong place, the collapse of chronology. The St. Nicholas in the poem – dressed all in fur – was nothing like the St. Nicholas in the window at All Saints’, or the massed ranks of red-clad jolly-faced chucklers ho-ho-hoing in the Christmas magazines and department stores. Here was a lost opera, words that were words without arias, music that had never been written.

  “… The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow

  Gave a lustre of midday to objects below …”

  The developer had probably chosen the name of da Ponte because da Ponte had taught Italian at Columbia College, and Columbia University had now taken up its new location across on Morningside Heights alongside where the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was going to be, and St. Luke’s Hospital, a huge new area of development, just like Hudson Heights earlier. The general feeling was that Mozart was a little – er – tinkly and trivial, a minor figure, and that Beethoven would have been a far more satisfactorily respectable and bourgeois choice if you insisted on linking composers with real estate. A profession of “liking” his music was a (relatively) painless method of signaling intellectual pretensions, and demonstrated acceptable taste and middle-class solidity. He was the Tolstoi or Dostoyevski of music, and went well with dark wood and heavy wallpaper. Even if you didn’t fully understand him, you knew that you were getting your money’s worth, especially during the symphonies. You could feel comfortable with Beethoven. However, he had unaccountably failed to establish a widely recognized link with New York, and so they were stuck with Mozart. With da Ponte. As evidence of his cultural credentials, the artist had painted several hugely magnified bars of music behind Mozart’s head: she had watched him copying from sheets clipped to the top of his ladder a month or so earlier, struggling as they flapped in the wind. Inspiration was soaring up behind the young man in the powdered wig, music in the very air.

  (Longfellow Park, Longfellow Park,

  Where even the signboards sing!)

  Which moment had he chosen from the three da Ponte operas? (She used the expression “da Ponte operas” to demonstrate her solidarity with the power of words. Mozart probably wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about this usage.) She had mused about it for an afternoon, watching him, becoming intrigued. Was it the sublime trio from Così fan tutte, in which the two sisters, with Don Alfonso, pray for the safety of their lovers and their friends after they have watched them – as the women believe – sail away to the battlefield, asking for gentle breezes, calm seas to protect them? Was it from the last act of The Marriage of Figaro, the sudden mood of melancholy and sadness, the Countess stepping forward in the darkened garden, the casting away of disguises, forgiveness? Was it the Act One finale of Don Giovanni, another garden, another evening, and the sound of a miniature minuet flowing outside from a room inside the palace, the three masked figures entering, pausing for a moment to pray on the threshold? Miss Stein had not only opened her eyes to the darkness within Jane Austen’s novels; she had alerted her – a simple matter of a transferring of skills – to the desolation that could be found beneath the pretty dresses and the wigs and fripperies of Mozart. Mrs. Albert Comstock strongly disapproved of such besmirching, and sought sunshine without shadows, smiles that were ever bright and beaming. Why spoil things, for heaven’s sake, and make it sound like Ibsen? “Ibsen” was spoken with a certain self-congratulatory daring. This was Mrs. Albert Comstock demonstrating that she was fully conversant with the horrors of modernity. The Longfellow Park fireworks display on New Year’s Eve 1899 might have featured a spectacular sign with the words Welcome to the 20th Century! blazing out against the night sky, but she wanted to know the twentieth century a little better before she offered it her hand for shaking.

  Too shortsighted to read even such gigantic notes – the music would be deafening – Alice had asked Charlotte to bring her telescope across from the piazza at Delft Place, telling her that she was devising a method of concentrating the sunshine (there actually had been some sunshine then, though it had been cold) through the lenses in order to construct a heat-ray. She had not read The War of the Worlds in vain.

  “Alice, where art thou?” Charlotte sang outside the door of the schoolroom.

  It was her invariable greeting. Alice would sing the next line of the song, Charlotte the line after that, and Alice would open the door singing the fourth line. Sometimes they varied the pattern. Charlotte would have been mortified if the door had been opened, and she had found herself staring at a room full of people who had heard her singing.

  “… I’ve sought thee by lakelet …”

  “… I’ve sought thee on the hill …”

  “… And in the pleasant wild-wood …”

  Alice opened the schoolroom door, and Charlotte staggered in.

  “… When winds blow cold and chill …”

  The next line was so appropriate that Alice couldn’t resist adding it.

  “Is this yet another valiant attempt to rid the world of Mrs. Albert Comstock?” Charlotte asked, rather breathlessly thudding the telescope down on its stand at the window. (It had been there ever since.)

  “I have slowly and surely drawn my plans against her. Ever since my attempts at a heat-ray failed to destroy Miss Swanstrom …”

  “
Your spectacles and pocket-watch glass, however expertly focused, could hardly possess enough power to explode Miss Swanstrom into flame. She was so damp and soggy that the best you could have managed would have been a thin wisp of smoke.”

  “… I have longed to annihilate Mrs. Albert Comstock. Now, at last, a weapon of sufficient power has been placed within my grasp!”

  “You forgot the evil cackle of the mad genius.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha,” Alice enunciated carefully, a pedantically exact reproduction of the sound Mrs. Albert Comstock made when she wished to suggest that she was in the throes of helpless girlish laughter. The laugh, like the smile, came in one size.

  “All too realistic,” Charlotte said, with a shudder, and then indicated the telescope. “Have you not considered the possible effects of your actions, however nobly inspired? The – er – …”

  “Dot. Dot. Dot.”

  “… er …”

  “Dot. Dot. Dot.”

  “… corpse …”

  “… gigantic as it would be …”

  “… would burn for months. The sun would be blotted out. A perpetual winter would descend upon the world, a new Ice Age.”