Pinkerton's Sister

by Peter Rushforth

  “And if you study this coin, if you examine it closely, if you gaze upon the lineaments of this Cæsar …”

  – contempt drenched the first three rows in almost Dr. Vaniah Odom-like quantities –

  “… what do you find?”

  (He paused dramatically. This rhetorical question would shortly be answered. The more shortsighted of his congregation would spend the interval in marveling at the image of all these Ancient Romans using pocket-watches as coinage, thinking that this probably explained why so many clocks and watches employed Roman numerals.)

  The rhetorical question was answered.

  “You find that Julius Cæsar looks like a woman, and has got a big nose!”

  This obviously summed up all the decadence of the Roman Empire at its vilest for the Reverend Goodchild. He had not come to praise Cæsar.

  (Mabel Peartree, whose nose had been an inspiration to the architect of the Flatiron Building, always looked poisonous at this point.

  (“Et tu, Reverend Goodchild?”)

  Strollers in the park on the afternoon of that same Sunday could be seen studying the statue of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, clearly firmly of the opinion that it was a depiction of Julius Cæsar, taking comfort from the fact that the nose was not big, and the fact that – despite the flowing toga – he did not look like a woman. The Reverend Goodchild’s influence was not as overwhelming as he seemed to think. Thank heaven for that!

  “Forget not in your speed, Antonius …”

  – Julius Cæsar chattily instructed Mark Antony, every word audible to the large crowd gathered around him –

  “… To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say,

  The barren touched in this holy chase,

  Shake off their sterile curse.”

  You could imagine the crowds, months later, pointing her out in the street with loud whispers.

  “That’s the one! That’s the one who’s barren! That’s the one with the sterile curse!”

  Here was a man with a special skill in making his wife feel cherished and respected, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in a toga, with the Latin word for Gesundheit! ever on his lips. Calphurnia must have smiled gamely, and tried to look pleased.

  Barren.

  Teeth came into sight.

  Sterile curse.

  Grin widened.

  No wonder Calphurnia had gone to such pains to forbid Julius Cæsar from leaving the house on the Ides of March. She knew this was exactly the way to make him do the opposite. Hadn’t Brutus been a little bit suspicious when an unknown extra conspirator had slipped in to join them, one with a well-muffled face, a woman’s voice, and the biggest dagger of all of them, the one who elbowed Casca aside to get at Julius Cæsar first, the one responsible for at least twenty-seven of the thirty-three stab wounds? (She’d seen pictures in the clouds. She’d seen fierce fiery warriors fighting in ranks and squadrons.)

  How could you explain to the Reverend Goodchild that Julius Cæsar’s likeness was not, in fact, on the coin, and that what he was displaying for public vilification – an intriguing reversal of Mark Antony with the body in the Forum: “If you have sniggers, prepare to unleash them now” – was an image of Venus. Roman ideas of beauty obviously differed markedly from modern taste. The thought of Mabel Peartree as the goddess of beauty, the mother of love, the queen of laughter, the mistress of the graces and of pleasure, was enough to set those of a nervous disposition whimpering.

  He had rather spoiled the effect the last time he preached by accidentally opening the case of the pocket-watch. Of its repertoire of six tunes, “The Camptown Races” was probably the least appropriate for it to have played on this particular occasion (“Narcissus” would have been more acceptable), but everyone listened, serious-faced – perhaps searching for what the Reverend Goodchild tended to call “that which is of Symbolic import” (you could hear the capital “S”) – as the first line tinkled tinnily out in All Saints’: “De Camptown ladies sing dis song …” It was impossible not to think of the words, and she had seen the lips of the congregation moving in silent unison, like those of shy hymn-singers lacking confidence in their singing ability. The more uninhibited amongst them tapped their feet.

  “Doo-dah! Doo-dah!” a loud voice added – quite tunefully – when it had finished. “De Camptown racetrack five miles long …”

  This was Serenity Goodchild, the ever lumpish, ever troublesome granddaughter, with that obstinate expression of hers, as if she was – if she felt like it – gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day.

  It was the existence of L. N. Fowler’s phrenology head in his study that had given her the key to understanding Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, of knowing him for what he was. Her first thought – she knew it was true as soon as she thought it – was that if phrenology (long discredited, as outdated as the clothes worn by Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre, Marian Halcombe, or, for that matter, herself at the age of twenty, friends from childhood, Annie) ever showed the slightest hint of coming back into fashion, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster would be at the forefront, cracking his knuckles and shaking his hands limply from the wrist, an athlete loosening up before an important race, poised for action on the nearest available head, his scrabbling fingers racing across the bumps like crabs on seacoast rocks scuttling toward the nearest pool.

  Plop. Plop. Plop.

  There was something raffishly disreputable now about phrenology, something that linked it vaguely with fortune-telling, tarot cards, palm-reading. Madame Sylvie’s Human Hair Emporium and Salon de Beauty (it had been in business long enough) had probably once supplied (at vastly inflated prices) wigs with gigantically exaggerated Himalayas of bumps – Amaze Your Phrenologist! Impress Your Friends! – in the areas it was thought most desirable to possess. She’d imagined stupid people demonstrating their stupidity by hammering themselves repeatedly on the head to create grossly swollen mounds in the areas that denoted intelligence. Now, the laying on of hands had something distinctly wash-them-now-and-keep-them-clean about it, the faint whiff of lingering perspiration from a (very) high summer chiropodist, gingerly handling corns and bunions, calluses slippery with sweatiness. She’d seen the haggard face of the Indian Woods Road chiropodist when she’d visited her optician last August. There he was, sitting shakily on a white-painted chair beside the front door, inhaling the fresh air as urgently as a firing-squad prisoner drawing on his last cigarette, working up his courage for another deep dive into the murky depths of the lower digits, a man whose nerves were visibly shattered by squelchy summer socks and stockings. Perhaps the Reverend Goodchild had booked in for an extra-long appointment after a good, brisk walk to Harlem and back in his thickest socks that he’d worn all week. That stricken face had interposed itself between her and A HKL as she peered mistily at Mr. Brczin’s sight-test. The windows had been open in the heat, and she’d – suicidally – sniffed the air. No. Not a whiff of Reverend Goodchild. Things hadn’t been quite as bad for the chiropodist as she had feared.

  Fashion was what mattered most to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, if fashion meant more money. Mrs. Albert Comstock showed herself a slave to fashion in the hats with which she adorned her head (she paraded them like the saints in the windows of All Saints’ paraded the instruments of their martyrdom, some hats bearing a disconcerting resemblance to some of the more outré instruments). Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s similar enslavement revealed itself in what he chose to do with the insides of other people’s heads (a form of martyrdom – alienated to death – unaccountably not given artistic expression by Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton in his otherwise comprehensive coverage of the subject).

  Wherever there was a new fashion, wherever there was a new idea (a faint stir, a distant rumor), there would Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster be, straining at the starting line, concentrating on hearing the crack of the pistol, wearing his white knee-length shorts (neatly ironed by Hilde Claudia: the results produced by the maid were not equal to his exacting standards) and white running-shirt (bearing the number 1
1 – for 11 Park Place, the address of his consulting room – front and back). In any race, Dr. Twemlow was the one to watch carefully. He was a keen amateur runner, and he and Dr. Brown – one of the Science masters at Otsego Lake Academy – often went out running together. They had the best-known knees in the neighborhood. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s eyes were keenly focused on the finishing tape. It was a short track, but its length was crowded with enthusiastic spectators, those at the back jumping up and down to achieve a better view. Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max were there, to cheer Papa on, prominent in the front row, waving little triangular flags (also neatly ironed): they knew what he would say if they were not present. In the race elbows would be utilized, opponents would be tripped, but no one would notice.

  All that mattered was to win.

  She had experienced her first collapse at the age of twenty, not long after her father’s death. The Bearded Ones – approvingly – had said it was grief. (Ha!) When the grief proved longer lasting than the black mourning clothes, and there appeared to be no remedy, it became an embarrassing problem. A Remedy for Grief: it sounded like something from a mediæval tale, something in which simples and dawn-gathered flowers featured. She already had this phrase in her list of titles, and had even written the first few pages of a story.

  Anna listened carefully for a moment, locked the door behind her, & stepped out into the street, into the sunshine of a mild spring morning…

  Several years went by, and The Bearded Ones gathered around her bed, the dark clothes, the beards – black, gray, white, ginger (Dr. Cortelyou, a man unlikely to rise very high in his profession) – in a circle around the whiteness of the linen, like the elders of a tribe or a mass gathering of exorcists, their faces blurred and indistinct, braced to cast out demons. Some demons were named Mephostophilis or Beelzebub or Asmodeus. The names of her demons varied, and The Bearded Ones called them out, as if to lure them into daylight from the darkness. Sometimes they were named Neurasthenia. Sometimes they were named Hysteria or Dread or a variety of other names. They were exceeding fierce. They would not go away. Tobias had driven Asmodeus away with the awful stench caused by burning the liver and heart of a fish. You’d have thought that the smell of The Bearded Ones would have had the same effect, that smoky, sweaty smell, of cigars and pipe tobacco, of grubby old bank notes and dirty coins.

  For a young woman to dream of a physician, denotes that she is sacrificing her beauty in engaging in frivolous pastimes. If she is sick and thus dreams, she will have sickness or worry, but will soon overcome them, unless the physician appears very anxious, and then her trials may increase, ending in loss and sorrow.

  “The female is exhibiting various manifestations of hysteria. Note, gentlemen, the obvious agitation as I approach her and take hold of her arm. Perhaps, Dr. Severance, you would care to take hold of the other arm. Ignore her attempts to pull away.”

  They would join hands like Mrs. Alexander Diddecott’s Spiritualist Circle, they would sway from side to side, they would chant, they would hum, they would lull her to sleep and forgetfulness.

  “Sweetly she sleeps, my Alice fair …”

  – Fair! –

  “… Her cheeks on the pillow pressed,

  Sweetly she sleeps, while her Saxon …”

  – Saxon! –

  “… hair,

  Like sunlight, streams o’er her breast.

  Hush! Let her sleep! I pray, sweet breeze,

  Breathe low on the maple bough.

  Hush! Bright bird, on her window trees!

  For sweetly she sleepeth now …”

  And when she sleepeth, she dreameth.

  The dreams were inescapable, filling the nighttime skies like the clouds in daytime.

  Dr. Severance – who was always spoken of as Dr. Severance of Staten Island, as if it were his title – was the one who pounced first, and she was carried across to his Staten Island clinic on the ferry in a hailstorm, like the body in an out-of-season Venetian funeral.

  Dr. Severance tried electrotherapy.

  Dr. Severance tried baths (hot).

  Dr. Severance tried baths (cold).

  Dr. Severance tried massage.

  This went on intermittently for about three years. She saw him so much in echoing glass-roofed, white-tiled interiors, so much through the mist of the steam (during hot baths), and the mist of her breath (during cold baths), that she began to think of him not as a doctor but as the proprietor of a bathhouse or a gymnasium with a strict regimen. Around his neck, instead of a stethoscope, a brightly polished whistle – its shiny surface beaded and misted with condensation – hung on the end of a cord, dully visible through the hairs of his beard.

  Peep, peep!

  Dr. Severance began to blow his whistle, regular blasts like a system of code, running on the spot as if to urge her into activity by his own good example.

  “Arms down for The Beards!”

  Peep, peep!

  Down-down-down!

  “Out for The Bosom!”

  Peep, peep!

  Out-out-out!

  “Beards!”

  Peep, peep.

  “Bosom!”

  Peep, peep!

  Down-down-down!

  Out-out-out!

  “Speak with respect and honour

  Both of The Beard and The Beard’s owner.”

  The arms moved down-down-down, like those of herself and Charlotte, carefully co-ordinated as they worshiped The Sibyl with servile slave-girl bowing movements, bowed down before The Beards, bowed down before The Bosom. They spoke the words in unison, a congregation chanting the responses in an act of worship; they moved their arms in unison, and they bowed down at the same angle of agonized abasement. They knew their place.

  “Speak with respect and honour

  Both of The Bosom and The Bosom’s owner.”

  They wouldn’t dream of speaking in any other way. A different tone of voice would be shockingly inappropriate to all right-minded people, and give rise to appalled and disapproving comment.

  Out-out-out!

  Peep, peep!

  “Again!”

  Peep, peep!

  “Again!”

  Youth!

  Pant!

  Health!

  Pant!

  Vigor!

  Pant!

  In strict regimented lines, across wooden floors scrubbed as white and clean as the deck of a sailing ship, the gymnasts – perfectly synchronized – performed their drill, swinging the Indian clubs in front of them, behind them, above their heads, like jugglers lacking in confidence, reluctant to release their implements. The lines of the floorboards stretched away beneath them, the lines of the wall bars on either side of them, the hissing gasoliers cast down a garish, flickering light: all of them – the floorboards, the wall bars, the gasoliers – narrowing and fading into the distance as far as the eye could see. They were the circus performers in one of the three rings: the Elphinstone ring, or the Dalhousie ring, sufficiently important to avoid relegation to the Barton ring. The strong man stood in front of them in his leopardskin, his right arm upraised, the weights at the ends of the bar as shiny and black and spherical as balloons lifting him up on tiptoe. She was there; blinking in the flaring lights, unable to see the faces of the audience tiered up into the tented interior, Phineas T. (“T” is for Tremendous! “T” is for Terrific! “T” is for Titanic!) Barnum’s latest sensation, the Bearded Lady on display.

  The gymnasts were like the diagrams to illustrate the semaphore alphabet, arms thrust firmly out in precise positions, a flag in each hand, the little figures in naval uniform like her brother, Ben, drawn over and over. The two-color flags were divided from corner to corner, creating a triangle of red and a triangle of yellow. Perhaps Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max, with their triangular flags, were passing coded tactical advice to their bearded leader.

  “Cortelyou approaching from left-hand side! Severance pouncing on your right! Twemlow attempting a sprint!”

&nbs
p; The arms moved with jerky precision, like those of a mechanical toy, manufactured to produce certain repeated actions.

  Charlotte had told her that the Pinkerton coat of arms was a rose gules, stalked and leafed, vert. Colors had special names in heraldry. Gules – there came “The Eve of St. Agnes” again – was red.

  (In the windows of All Saints’, St. Agnes was accompanied by a lamb on the same Brobdingnagian scale as Pharaildis’s hens. It was not a little lamb the size of Mary’s, not a lamb one would wish to follow one to school, not a lamb to make children laugh and play: it was a lamb from the island of Dr. Moreau, a lamb for screams and flight.)

  Vert – of course – was green, sable was black.

  ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A. GULES.

  That was Hester Prynne’s gravestone at the end of The Scarlet Letter, and she had imagined a long, slanting field – something barren and unplowed – stretching away to leafless winter hedges, with an emblematic scarlet letter A, huge as a billboard, catching the last light of a setting sun, the one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow. Because they were the last words of the novel, the capital letters standing above the blank whiteness of the rest of the final page, she always thought of the gravestone as standing amidst untrodden snow, snow covering the mourning sable of the field, a grave that no one visited.

  Charlotte had asked Linnaeus to draw the coat of arms for her, the red rose with six leaves, and the motto beneath it.

  The Pinkerton motto was Post nubila sol.

  After clouds, sunshine.