Pinkerton's Sister (12 page)

(“I dreamed a dream tonight.”

(“And so did I.”

(“Well, what was yours?”

(“That dreamers often lie.”)

Whatever books he consulted were not consulted in her presence, but locked away behind the glass of his bookcases, the key safely hidden in his vest pocket. He was like an alchemist jealously guarding the arcane rituals of his craft. She could not remember the title of Annie’s book. It had been far flimsier than either of the two books Rosobell owned, more of a pamphlet than a book, far too insubstantial to contain all the possibilities of dreams, though Annie believed in it utterly. She listened to Alice’s readings with rapt concentration, staring into her eyes, willing her to tell the truth. The fact that the interpretations were written down in words, something she was unable to read, somehow made them more mysterious to her. When she particularly wanted an interpretation to come true, she would close her eyes, and clench her hands, like someone praying.

Alice was sometimes tempted to embroider what she read, to add undreamed-of future happiness (that “undreamed-of” was used absolutely precisely here), a life in which someone loved her, cared for her. She did this just once, and Annie had known that she was inventing what she pretended to read. Many of Annie’s dreams were dreams obscured by clouds, dreams in which Annie was surrounded by impenetrable fogs, lost in caverns, corridors deep underground, Annie dreaming Alice’s dreams for her, foretelling her future. She had looked up the meanings of some of the dreams she could remember in Rosobell’s books — years later — but they did not give the same meanings as the ones she could remember from Annie’s book.

For a young woman to dream of being in a fog, denotes that she will be mixed up in a salacious scandal, but if she gets out of the fog she will prove her innocence and regain her social standing.

Sometimes she’d catch Annie staring repeatedly at something as the day drew to a close, some object fading in gathering darkness, and knew that she was trying to make herself dream of it, to make a particular thing happen. It never worked. She didn’t have the dreams she wanted to have. Once, throughout the whole of a summer’s day, Alice had watched her hurrying out repeatedly — whenever she could snatch a moment, still holding a brush or a cloth — to study a geranium in a pot on the kitchen stairs, as if trying to memorize every petal, every leaf. It was the way Chardin must have looked at his subjects as he painted
la vie silencieuse
. To dream of geraniums — Alice remembered this, she had looked it up — was to become more beautiful, to be loved and respected.

This was what Annie had wanted.

In the echoey kitchen Alice looked out across the
Through the Looking-Glass
chessboard of the floor. She was high up, looking over the country divided into black and white squares by the brooks and hedges. Sir John Tenniel’s illustration of this view — the foreground trees on a rocky eminence, the distant converging parallel lines of the landscape — was rather like how she imagined the view of Manhattan would be, viewed from the tower of the Shakespeare Castle on Hudson Heights, the grid pattern of the streets fading mistily away. She was not Alice; she was the Red Queen, still suffused by red light, dragging Alice along with her.

It was as if Bertha Rochester were hauling Jane Eyre behind her, never letting go, escaped from that dark inner room.

The kitchen was deserted.

Alice looked at the kitchen table, expecting to see Annie’s Dream Book, still wrapped in its silk scarf, ready for consultation, the printed words of songs on carefully folded paper, or the torn-out page of an out-of-date newspaper. She knew, by the color of the crockery on the dresser — it took as little as that — that she was in the kitchen as it was now, not as it had been then, but she still half expected to turn around and see Annie smiling at her, standing on a chair to reach the coffee beans.

Coffee would be risky if made at the wrong time.

Papa would sniff the air.

“I can smell coffee,” he would say. “Who has been drinking coffee?”

Sniff. Sniff. Sniff.

“Who has been sitting on my stool?”

(He’d cozy his buttocks wigglingly, enjoying the telltale residual warmth.)

“Who has been eating off my plate?”

(He’d sniff up the crumbs he’d spotted, filtering them through his nostril hairs.)

“Who has been picking my bread?”

(He’d …)

“Who has been meddling with my spoon?”

(He’d …)

“Who has been handling my fork?”

(He’d…)

“Who has been cutting with my knife?”

(He’d …)

“Who has been drinking my wine?”

(He’d do all kinds of things. What they were he knew not, but they would be the terrors of the earth.)

The seven dwarfs found the little girl lying asleep on the bed, just as she would lie later within the glass coffin as they wept around her. No more sitting. An end to eating, picking, meddling, handling, cutting, and drinking.

He’d be licking the end of his index finger next, and drawing it across the top of the kitchen table, and around the inner parts of plates, as if seeking to find dust with which to confront a slovenly housemaid. He was searching for telltale cookie crumbs not yet sniffed into the cavernous interior of his head, silently holding out the evidence challengingly on the shiny damp tip of the digit.

(“Well?”)

(Pause.)

(“
Well
?”)

(It was not well.)

Someone had been drinking
his
coffee. (He’d be peering deep into the dimness of the coffee tin.)

Someone had been eating
his
cookie. (He’d be counting the cookies.)

The servants were clearly completely out of control.

Surely it wasn’t expecting too much, that his wife could cope with them? He didn’t ask for much. The little that he did expect should surely be carried out competently? He had more important things to do than inspect coffee and cookies.
Far
more important things.
He
was the one who worked to bring the money into the house.
He
was the one who worked all the hours that God sent. (You imagined God beside him, nodding supportively, on
his
side.)

Sniff. Sniff. Sniff.

He sniffed so strongly that his moustache was sucked upward and inward toward his nostrils. Alice hoped on such occasions —
how
she hoped — that he might make a fatal error one day, inhaling with such angrily incautious power that his entire beard might rear up into the air like a bear on its hind legs, force itself up into his nose and mouth, and suffocate him to death. It would have been like — this thought had occurred to her just recently, all these years later, after the publication of the novel — a dramatic scene from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, the prostrate figure writhing in agony (she could hope) on the floor, and the gigantic hairy beast worrying away at his face. (He would have been worried all right.)

The Shepherd’s Son would wander in from
The Winter’s Tale
to describe to his father how the bear tore out his victim’s shoulder bone as he cried — too late — for help.

“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.

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.