Pinkerton's Sister (11 page)

“Oh, horror, horror!”

Annie began to sing.

Alice ignored this, adding, “You should refer to me as ‘your ladyship,’ menial one. I am the young mistress of the house and thou a mere varlet.”

This was a game they often played when there was no one else around to hear them. Alice wasn’t too sure about “varlet.” She had an obscure feeling that it was used only in reference to males. She liked to get things right.

Annie performed one of her spectacularly servile curtsies, arms reaching far out on either side of her, head bowed.

“Forgive this humble underling, your ladyship,” she begged.

“I am minded to be merciful on this occasion.”

“Your ladyship is all too gracious to one as insignificant as my groveling self.”

“And there are few as insignificant as thou art.”

“As thou hast often commented.”

Annie wobbled from side to side. She was almost doing the splits. Alice had seen a woman acrobat like this, high up on a tightrope, her parasol quivering in her right hand as she tried to keep her balance.

“Your groveling is to be particularly recommended this morn.”

“Your ladyship — as ever — is all too kind.”

Annie disappeared, clutching the knife, into the dining room, hurrying like someone remembering something urgent. She was in the middle of blackleading the grate. The shutters had all been opened, the doors unlocked, and the dining room would have been swept, and the grate emptied. Annie kept to a meticulous routine. A moment later, the door opened again, and Annie’s head reappeared, leaning out at an angle, time only for a few hurried words.

“I didn’t waste any time looking at my tooth when I should have been working,” she said. “I woke up early this morning, and started work straightaway.”

Her usual time to begin work in the summer was six o’clock. The door closed again. It was as if she needed to explain herself. Papa must have said something again. Her hands and the lower parts of her arms had been dusted pale with ashes. Alice imagined her right hand inside her mouth holding the knife, cinders dropping down into her throat, a victim of Vesuvius, lying still in some inner room in Pompeii, curled up amidst her buried possessions, choked with ashes. She would be kneeling down on the cloth she had laid over the carpet, her housemaid’s box on one side of her, and the cinder pail on the other side, leaning over into the grate to brush on the blacklead. Sometimes, after she had done this, her hair and forehead were marked with soot. Alice thought of her as Cinderella, and herself and Allegra and Edith as the Ugly Sisters, one more than usual for added ugliness. When did Cinderella’s stepsisters become ugly? In her version of the story they were described as “fair in face, but foul at heart,” like something out of
Macbeth
, which was rather more interesting, and — she had thought, with considerable venom (Allegra had been annoying her again) — rather more accurate where Allegra was concerned. Allegra (no hesitation whatsoever in her case) and Edith could both be described as pretty. Alice — how appropriate an expression could be — was undoubtedly the cuckoo in this particular nest.

Cuckoo!

Cuckoo!

Allegra and Edith shook two dishes of peas into the ashes. “Pick them all out in one hour’s time and you can go to the ball,” they said to Annie, and all the little birds under heaven flew down to help her.

As Annie fled from the feast she dropped her left golden slipper upon the stairs.

Oh, Dat Golden Slipper.

She remembered the expression on Mrs. Albert Comstock’s face when she had first seen Annie, and registered the fact that their new maid was black. She had heard her, another time, making some sophisticated and amusing comments about soot and blacklead upon Annie’s skin. Again the jewelry had rattled, the earrings swayed, the feathers vibrated. Teeth had come into view to denote how much her wit had been appreciated. Mrs. Albert Comstock had never seen Annie with dirtied skin — Annie was always fastidious about how she looked when she answered the door — but she found the idea entertaining.

Alice decided that — enjoyable though it was to think about — it was not Allegra who cut off her big toe, and Edith who cut off part of her heel so that the golden slipper would fit their feet when the prince called, but Mrs. Albert Comstock. Her feet were so large — all of her was so large — that she would have had to hack away considerable chunks of flesh with an extra-sharp knife. They could have fed Chinky-Winky — her cacophonous canine (the name she had ha-ha-ha-ha-ingly selected for her Pekinese revealed the good taste for which she was so noted) — for several months. He’d have wolfed it down, and howled for more. Dogs were such loyal pets.

The blood streamed so from the shoe that her white stocking was quite red. At the wedding of Annie and the prince, all the little birds under heaven flew down again to here a peck, there a peck, everywhere a peck, peck, peck, and this time they pecked out the eyes of Mrs. Albert Comstock. Alice did enjoy a good story with a happy ending. It cheered her up no end. All the birds of the air wouldn’t be a-sighing and a-sobbing on this occasion. They’d be cheerfully chirping away, licking slurpily at their blood-spattered beaks so that no drop of nourishment was wasted, a dawn chorus of well-nurtured twitterings. Feed birds regularly, supply a good source of water, ensure that household pets are safely out of the way, and they’ll bring a great deal of pleasure to your garden with their singing and their colorful plumage.

To Alice, the darkest thing about Annie was not her skin. It was her eyes.

They looked into hers, deep, far-seeing, serious, as Alice read to her, stories, poems, extracts from newspapers, her brother’s letters, the words of songs, the meaning of dreams, because Annie couldn’t read.

Her eyes were as dark as the pips of a pear.

The sentence came into her mind. She had heard it in a song once, and it was the only line she could remember. It had been about a girl. There was a girl’s name in the song title, and the word “green” was also in it somewhere. The words of another song — a nonsense song — drifted into her mind.

Her age it was blonde, and her hair it was nineteen.

Something like that. She must have heard the words when she was at the Calbraiths’ house, being sung by someone coming out of the park. She liked the different spellings of “blond” for a man and “blonde” for a woman, and always differentiated. There were so few adjectives in English with this sort of distinction.

She could hear Annie working in the dining room. When she had blackened and then polished the grate, she would dust and polish the furniture. There would be no fire to light from today onward, as summer had now officially arrived. Alice had once regularly talked to Annie as she worked, but now she had started to feel awkward about doing this, even when Papa was not in the house. It had begun to seem wrong, somehow, to be chattering away to Annie’s bent back as she cleaned and polished. She saw herself talking to Annie as she swept the stairs, moving down step by step in front of her. She saw herself following her into the parlor — this was still before breakfast — and watching her pushing and tugging all the furniture into the middle of the room, covering it with dust sheets, and sweeping the floor. She would not let Alice help her.

She stood outside the parlor, waiting for Annie to emerge, hoping she would have time to talk to her before she began to lay the breakfast cloth.

“Would your ladyship care to venture into the servants’ quarters, and hazard a small cup of coffee and a cookie purchased from Thoroughgood’s?” This is what she was hoping Annie might say to her, even though Annie rarely seemed to have a moment when she was not working.

“Gracing our humble domain with her noble presence,” Alice would prompt her.

Annie’s next obeisance would be even more spectacular, her skirt making a perfect circle on the tiles around her. It had happened many times before. It would happen again.

“Yet again I beg forgiveness, your ladyship. Gracing our humble domain with her noble presence. Wouldst thou care to undertake a Thoroughgood cookie?”

“I wouldst.”

She’d enjoy the cookie, though the coffee — it would most certainly need to be a
small
cup — was a more hazardous undertaking: dark, bitter, headachy, a drink for adults. This, of course, was its appeal. She’d sip at it — not really enjoying it, but enjoying the idea of it — her face as puckered up as if she were swallowing down some foul-tasting but essential medication, or as if guiltily indulging in some illicit addiction to alcohol.

Annie turned back again, as she began to walk toward the kitchen.

“I’ve had a letter from Reuben with some more songs. I’ll sing you some of them.”

Reuben, Annie’s brother, was sixteen, a singing waiter in a restaurant on West 48th Street. She’d asked her about Reuben. She liked to hear about brothers. Annie had been with them for a year, and seemed even smaller than when she’d first arrived. Every time Reuben saw her, he’d pick her up and put her over his shoulder. Annie had told her this. Reuben wouldn’t have been allowed to come to the house.

When she told Alice that she had had a letter from her brother, she was asking Alice to read it for her. Alice would read it to her over and over, until she knew it more or less by heart. Sometimes, when she was feeling homesick or unhappy, and if she had completed all her work — she would work ferociously all morning to free fifteen or twenty minutes for herself so that she would be able to do this — she would ask Alice to read parts of old letters to her, so that she would feel closer to Reuben. If Papa were not in the house, Alice would play the music for the songs, and teach Annie the words. All the time, Annie would be on edge, thinking that she was doing wrong, that she’d be caught.

Later, listening by the fireplace in the schoolroom, Alice would hear Annie singing as she worked downstairs. She had a beautiful voice. It had never occurred to her to ask Annie if she would like to be taught how to read. There was some embarrassment, some awkwardness, about the idea — a belief that it was somehow insulting — that had made her unable to suggest it. She wished now that she had thought to at least ask Annie what her reaction would be to the idea.

She saw her holding an envelope containing her brother’s latest letter, smoothing it carefully between her hands. Reuben always used the same deep-blue envelope and paper, but Annie would have recognized his letters by his handwriting, whatever the color of his stationery. Alice always read the address on the front of the envelope before she read the letter inside it. “Miss Annie Clement …” She discovered Annie’s surname when she first read one of the envelopes.

“Miss …” Annie would repeat. “Miss …”

(“Annie
Clement
,” Alice repeated to herself. “Annie
Clement
.”)

Sometimes, there would be a sheet from a newspaper spread out on the kitchen table, as carefully smoothed as one of Reuben’s letters. Alice looked at the flattened, rough-edged paper, still mottled with dried mud from the potatoes or carrots around which it had been wrapped, and imagined Annie’s dark hand on the white paper, moving over it again and again, as if she was ironing cotton sheets. Whenever she recognized a page of personals she kept it for Alice to read to her. The ones she liked to hear were the ones from fortune-tellers, mediums, clairvoyants, anyone who professed to be able to offer guidance for the future.

“‘Madame Etoile,’” Alice would read, “‘the celebrated French Clairvoyant, can tell you all you want to know. She was born with a genuine gift, and can guide you in all aspects of life with her professional skill. She can see the past, the present, and the future.’”

(“
Ze past, ze present, and ze futaire
,” Alice would say, attempting a French accent, to add to the authenticity. Mrs. Albert Comstock’s aversion to anything
French —
a word almost always accompanied by a shudder when she spoke it — was a definite incentive for this unsuspected naughtiness.)

Annie would nod her head, as if this was what she had been hoping to hear.

“‘She can bring together those long separated, show you an accurate likeness of your future husband …’” — “…
your futaire ’usband
…” (the French had a tendency to drop their aitches with democratic carelessness) — “‘… and give you his name …’” — “…
geeve you ’is name
…” — “‘… She has never been known to fail. She also gives lucky numbers. Ladies only. No gentlemen admitted. Consultation fee, fifty cents to one dollar. She sheds light on the tenebrous.’”

“‘Tenebrous’?” Annie asked.

“Dark, shadowy, hidden by fog.”

“Tenebrous.” Annie nodded her head. She liked to learn new words.

Sometimes she asked Alice to write down an address for her, and Alice would scrape away the dirt with her fingernails so that she could read it, and print it out carefully. Annie had never responded to any of the advertisements, but she had a list of addresses, just in case. Alice had never told her that Madame Etoile was probably about as French as Madame Sylvie, who owned the Human Hair Emporium and Salon de Beauty from which Mrs. Albert Comstock purchased her Jumbo-sized wigs. Phineas T. Barnum had certainly missed an opportunity where she was concerned. Madame Sylvie’s accent was Brooklyn at its most unabashed — it made Mary Kinkeldey sound positively genteel — and to hear her pronounce “Salon de Beauty” was to experience all the thrill of living in a city that was truly cosmopolitan.

Sometimes it was “I’ve had a letter from Reuben,” sometimes it was “I’ve found a new page of personals,” and sometimes it was “I had a dream last night.” When Annie said, “I had a dream last night,” she would be asking Alice to read the interpretation for her from her Dream Book. She would produce the book, wrapped in a special silk scarf like something precious, describe her dream, and Alice would read out to her what it was said to signify. It was a curiously skewed prefiguring of what was to happen twenty-five years later, when Alice found herself describing her dreams to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, she became the one who was unable to read, she who needed to have the meanings explained to her.