Pinkerton's Sister (18 page)

How pleasurable it had been (and still was, though he had to take his place in the line of contenders) to hate Sobriety Goodchild so entirely. It was very important, very
necessary
, to have someone to hate without reservation, more important — she felt herself thinking — than having someone to love. Love was overrated. This was what she told herself. This was what she tried to believe.

One of the few occasions on which Alice went outside the house (apart from carefully planned outings to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s when that lady’s insistence finally became too much) was to attend the service at All Saints’ on Sundays, as she was doing today. The Reverend Goodchild liked to imply that his spiritual ministrations were the one thing that kept her going (translation: “It keeps the madwoman quiet, but don’t go too close”), but she went to see him and his wife for the same reason she went to see Mrs. Albert Comstock: to keep her hatred fresh, energizing. These feelings were dark plants, carefully nourished, lovingly tended.

Oscar Wilde — here he was again — had described her feelings rather well, and supplied some useful expressions: “Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence! You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.” She wouldn’t agree with that last sentence. The first half was fine — she rather flourished on her bestial sense (her real self, she sometimes felt) — though she tended to feel that what she became was what she wanted to be, not what she would not be. She should try the opening sentences sometime, and see how they went down with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

“Get hence, you loathsome mystery! Hideous animal, get hence!”

That should liven things up in the soporific surroundings of the music room. Teacups and biscuits would fly in all directions, and fans would flick out like lethal weapons. Brontosaurian boomings would rattle windows for miles around, and avalanches would imperil the steeper slopes of Hudson Heights. The shrill cries of startled babies and frightened lunatics would echo around the white-marbled emptinesses.

She poured the water into the basin on the hand-wash-stand, tied back her hair, took a deep breath — with the air of someone about to attempt a little adventurous pearl fishing — and immersed her face. If you tired of
Carmen
, there was always
Les PÊcheurs de perles
.

Drowned in a bath of the tresses of Annie.

She began to hum “
Au fond du temple saint
,” imagining silvery bubbles streaming out behind her as she swam deep down into the blue Ceylonese waters.

Time for the symbolic cleansing ceremony — a sort of ritual purification (common amongst primitive peoples) — before she ventured into the unclean realm of the Reverend Goodchild.

Would boiling water be powerful enough for this task?

Should she have recklessly emptied a bottle of Lysol into the bowl, and washed away her face, ceased to be herself, just to be on the safe side?

It was on Hudson Heights that she had gone searching for Annie for a while, a year or more after she had gone, circling the new buildings in the way that she had circled the vanished Shakespeare Castle, clockwise and counterclockwise, telling stories to Charlotte, and to Mary Benedict, as if Annie might have become one of the listeners, or a character in one of the stories, abandoned, fallen, demented. She had tried other places, and now she tried these. Annie had disappeared so suddenly – her few possessions had been left neatly tidied away in her little windowless room – that Alice could not believe that she was not coming back. There was the threaded needle carefully tucked into the shirtwaist she had been in the middle of letting out, and a half-eaten chocolate bar – a rare treat – hidden, still fresh, in a decorative box next to Reuben’s letters. It had once contained a pull-along iron toy of a father with a baby sitting astride one of his legs, over the shin. It had belonged to Edith. Each time the wheel turned, a bell would ring, and the father would lift his leg high into the air, as if bouncing the baby up and down.

A letter had arrived for Annie from her brother Reuben, two days after she had gone – she had said nothing to anyone, as if expecting to be back before anyone had noticed – and it remained for a while, in its bright blue envelope, propped up where she would see it as soon as she entered the room.

Miss Annie Clement
.

“I miss Annie Clement,” Alice thought, and felt guilty because wordplay must mean a lack of emotion. It didn’t. It didn’t. “If he do bleed,” Lady Macbeth had said of the murdered Duncan – he bled, he most certainly bled, gallons gushed – “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,/For it must seem their guilt.” “Gild,” “guilt”: there were puns at moments of intense emotion. Alice took comfort in being like Lady Macbeth. It was a definite promotion from being one of the Weird Sisters. Not on her sole, but on her soul, she made her knife keen. That was Gratiano’s pun in
The Merchant of Venice
, another pun made as a knife approached a heart.

She began at The House of the Magdalenes, the place of lost girls – though every face she saw there was white – circling in the dark early morning on days when she was not at school, or in the early dusk of evening. It was again a time of winds and snow, as if – by choosing the same weather as that in which she had last seen her – Alice might once more bring her into being. She went out into the coldness, serious and determined – well wrapped up – disguised as a girl about to toboggan or skate with friends. She was a Pinkerton. She should find clues, and follow them up – scribbled lines on a hidden note, telltale prints across fields with unbroken snow (she peered as closely as Good King Wenceslas’s page marking his footsteps), a mysterious message – but there were no clues to find.

She peeped in at windows, seeing the girls, the sinful girls with their bowed heads, sitting at tables or carrying out their assigned duties. Sometimes she saw them nursing their babies (mysteriously, they all seemed to have babies; Sobriety Goodchild jeered and sniggered, explaining with crude simplicity, and it was no longer a mystery), and felt as if she was drawing nearer to a truth.

The Magdalenes never appeared in the streets of Longfellow Park with their babies. To carry a child would be to invite a stoning. A large target painted helpfully upon the infant’s gown would convert it into an attraction at a traveling fair, with gaudy prizes for the best shots.

“Me first! Me first!”

Mrs. Albert Comstock – eager for all the fun of the fair – lurched forward, swiveling her arm around like the sail of a storm-battered windmill, unleashing a rock the size of a meteorite, still hot from its journey through space.

Oh dear, what can the matter be?

Thwunk!

Dear, dear, what can the matter be?

Thwunk! Thwunk!

Oh dear, what can the matter be?

Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk!

She’d be so long at the fair.

Rock after rock hurtled to the target, and Mrs. Albert Comstock was almost buried beneath the tottering pile of tawdry pottery that she’d won by her exertions, her unerring baby-battering bull’s-eyes. Rocks! That was what The Bosom was made of; there’d be enough ammunition to keep that bulgy arm whirling for months. The sails spun around until they were just a humming blur. The ground wheat – warm, almost smoking – would keep the city in loaves throughout the winter, flour billowing out like an avalanche. Some were given bread; some were given stones. Man could not live by bread alone, but Mrs. Albert Comstock would thrive on stones.

Alice strained to see figures at lighted upper windows, in the way she had striven to make out the patterns in the clouded stained glass of the tower of the Shakespeare Castle.

After The House of the Magdalenes she tried Pettifar’s Orphanage, though she would have been unable to say whether she was searching for Annie’s baby, or for Annie herself. At the orphanage there was less to see, and the blinds were drawn for most of the time, the lonely children living in perpetual twilight. “Pettifar’s” had the sound of a store about it, the children neatly stacked on shelves, quietly on their best behavior, waiting to be purchased. Customers wrangled for reductions, peering closely to find faults – “This one’s rather grubby,” “There’s a part missing from this one” – to justify their intransigence.

“I’m looking for a little baby,” she would say, raising her hand as if she were in school. “I’m not sure whether it’s a girl or a boy, but it will be about a year old, with dark skin, and very dark eyes. He’ll be called Joshua if he’s a boy, and she’ll be called Desiderata if she’s a girl.”

She knew this. She and Annie had talked about children, and the names of children, as if they were playing at Houses, as if the house that Annie was tending were her own house. With her too-long apron, and expression of careful concentration, Annie looked like a small girl tending her make-believe home. They’d both decided that they’d like one boy, and one girl, the boy first. Annie had also volunteered the name she would like her husband to have, as if she had consulted Madame Etoile, the celebrated French Clairvoyant. The capital letters proved that she was important.

“Joshua or Desiderata. It’s for a friend,” she would add, helpfully.

She would wait, browsing through the selection available, as they checked their stock. The babies would hold up their arms, asking to be chosen, like puppies in a pound wagging their tails. The thought of Pettifar’s had always made her shudder, and what she saw in her mind looked very much like George Cruikshank’s illustration of Oliver Twist’s workhouse: no color anywhere, and the shaded black lines drawn repeatedly, as if they were scribblings-out, covering up some hidden message beneath, especially on the upper part of the blank wall.

Annie
had
left a hidden message – two hidden messages – but Alice had not realized this for some time.

Lastly, and for rather longer than she had at the orphanage, she began to circle the North River Lunatic Asylum, the place where Sobriety Goodchild said she herself belonged. Perhaps she’d left it until last for that reason, thinking that they might seize her, keep her there, as they had imprisoned Alfred Hardie in
Hard Cash
, and put an end to her searching. She walked through the entrance, and behind the high walls as boldly as she had walked into the grounds of the Shakespeare Castle, and circled the building in a counterclockwise direction, the direction she had taken for her darker stories, the ones that made Charlotte go very quiet, and Mary Benedict scream. It was screams she listened for, the sound of the noisy ward. She’d already read
Hard Cash
three and a half times – it was one of her ways of frightening herself – and she knew the horrors that could be expected in a lunatic asylum.

She thought that there was a reason for the close proximity of the three institutions, an efficiency in their positioning. First, the girls would have their babies in The House of the Magdalenes, and these babies would be taken from them after harvesting. She had an image of Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild wielding giant, glittering scythes like the pendulum on Mrs. Albert Comstock’s clock.

They swung their bodies from side to side, cutting through the crops as if they were imitating the figure of Death, or – in a literary mood (one of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s phases) – reenacting a scene from “The Pit and the Pendulum” or one of the more bucolic Thomas Hardy novels. On the chosen morning, the babies would be forcibly removed from the arms of the girls (some prying might be involved, some effortful levering), and transferred to Pettifar’s Orphanage, and the girls – walking neatly in line like pilgrims approaching the end of their journey, guarded and prodded by stern-faced attendants – would be removed to the North River Lunatic Asylum, still singing lullabies to the babies who were no longer there, driven mad by the absence of what had once been in their arms.

(Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild would be fully prepared for mocking. This would be the bit they enjoyed the most. These girls
needed
mocking for the sake of their souls. The umbrellas, the parasols, the scythes, would point at angles as carefully calculated as a diagram in a book of mathematical problems.

(“Look at that one!”

(“That one’s under a cloud!”

(“Look at that one!”

(They’d wait until the girl was sobbing – mission accomplished; it sometimes took quite some time with the more hard-faced ones – and then move on to the next one.

(“Look at that one!”

(“That one’s under a cloud!”

(“Look at that one!”

(This expression – “under a cloud”
–
was one of Mrs. Albert Comstock’s and it had created the idea of a personal climate in Alice’s mind, as if each of the indicated girls had carried an area free of sunshine about with her, a small place of sadness.

(She’d first heard it just after The House of the Magdalenes had opened, when Mrs. Albert Comstock had nudge-nudged Mrs. Goodchild as they stood in front of Twelvetrees & Twelvetrees in Hireling Road, and indicated one of the first Magdalenes to be sighted. They’d been on full alert for several weeks.

(“
She’s
under a cloud,” she had tittered, rather loudly, sounding more pleased than anything else, and she and Mrs. Goodchild – with no attempt at hiding their gawking – had watched the pregnant young woman across the street, walking arm in arm with a friend.

(Mrs. Albert Comstock and Mrs. Goodchild were just like Theodore and Max Webster out loony-spotting, singing their Papageno aria as they pointed.