Pinkerton's Sister (27 page)

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.

Me first.

This was what Alice found herself thinking, with some enthusiasm.

Me first.

Please.

I’m quite prepared to supply my own sword. I’ve sharpened the edge especially. It took me
ages
.

I’m not too bothered about the ass or the sheep (I quite like sheep) or the ox, but I’d like first choice of the man and woman, young and old.

I’ve got a little list.

Well, it’s quite a long list, actually, seeing as you ask, but I’d be quick about it.

I wouldn’t waste time.

They never would be missed.

If Mrs. Goodchild – the Reverend Goodchild’s wife (the other Mrs. Goodchild, Sobriety’s wife, was of no account whatsoever: she probably had to remind them who she was before they would admit her into the house) – had had her way, the young women from The House of the Magdalenes would all have been dressed in clothing as distinctive as that worn by the boys of Otsego Lake Academy. She probably visualized dresses in some virulent color, bearing scarlet letter “M”s on their bosoms (Mrs. Goodchild liked to flaunt her literary credentials): not just to emblazon the wearer’s shame, but also to protect the innocent male youth of Longfellow Park, who were pure, without exception, in thought, word, and deed, until the provocative closeness of the sinful sisterhood drew them into temptation. She probably thought of it as a sort of visual warning. As the brightness appeared in the distance, like a nighttime beacon giving intelligence of invasion, the alerted youths could flee in terror at their approach, with high-pitched, bird-like cries.

“A uniform,” she’d said, in that reasonable, steely tone of hers, the one that made you love her, and wish to embrace her cuddlesomely in your arms, “just like the boys from the Academy …”

Mrs. Goodchild had thought for a moment. You could see thought happening when she thought. It was like witnessing someone on the verge of sneezing, and you braced yourself for noise and wetness.

“… though they’d probably need fewer buttons. Being the sort of creatures that they are.”

The Magdalenes were expected to walk around in twos, with their eyes lowered, looking suitably ashamed, massed ranks of Hester Prynnes. Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock her – ahem – bosom friend (though “bosom” was the last thing one wished to think of in connection with Mrs. Albert Comstock; even a carefully inserted “ahem” scarcely lessened the nausea) took it upon themselves to rebuke the Magdalenes if they did not look repentant enough. They behaved as if they were members of a team, a prod-prodding moral patrol, marching about with their heels click-clicking like disapproving tongues.

They prissily perambulated, taking the air as they prodded the passing Magdalenes with bossy
touché
thrusts, effortlessly combining healthy exercise with uplifting moral correctness. Healthy-bodied, healthy-minded, they were bold exemplars of the power of prodding. They were so strait-laced – teams of panting servants must have yo-ho-heave-hoed on the laces – that the laces were probably digging deep into their flesh, like the self-imposed punishment of guilty secret sinners, the private scourgings and lacerations. They were the Lord’s sandwich-board women,
Repent!
on their bosoms – Damn! That word again! –
Repent!
on their backs. It was as if they themselves had become Hester Prynnes, Hester Prynnes emblazoned with complete words, and not just initial letters. They, however, being who they were, bore righteous embellishments, and loitered chastely for pure-minded Arthur Dimmesdales (rather dim Dimmesdales) to join them for an invigorating afternoon of Upholding Moral Standards, and Slaying the Dragons of Sin. (When they fought the forces of sinfulness, they made full use of capital letters.)

They had no trouble whatsoever in saying “Boo!” to a goose, these goose-girls –
girls! –
of good-goodiness. “Boo!” they’d positively bawl, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” as if at a controversial night at the opera (a shortage of nice dresses and nice hairstyles on stage), when “Encore!”s and “Bravo!”s were not the sentiments that sprang to mind. They’d dig the Magdalenes in the back sometimes with their umbrellas or parasols (they took one or other – depending on the weather – out especially, a prod for all seasons), and tell them to conduct themselves with more decorum. A smile was indecorous. They ought to have had spikes inserted on the ends of their umbrellas. Out they marched, large-minded women on a country walk to botanize and entomologize, their instruments poised in readiness to impale a specimen through its abdomen. They were like park attendants on the alert for unauthorized littering.

They surely sang this in deep, vibrant baritones, freshly ironed handkerchiefs, curiously dry, dabbing at the corners of their eyes, as they patrolled the streets in ceaseless search of the sinful. Mrs. Albert Comstock, as so often, was being
strangely moved
.

(Emmerson’s voice in Delft Place, from long ago: “How were the prunes, Mrs. Albert Comstock?”

(Linnaeus, in a fair approximation of the hippopotamus-buttocked Mrs. Albert Comstock’s fruity enunciation, every cushion from the sofa stuffed in appropriate locations about his person: “I was
strangely moved
.”

(Here was Linnaeus again, trying to shock his much older sister.)

Prod.

Prod. Prod.

Prod. Prod.

Some of the girls must have stayed inside the whole time, unable to bear the thought of walking outside when these sanctimonious Mrs. Gamps were on patrol, these priggishly prod-prodding Mrs. Grundys. (Should that be “Grundies”?) Alice had sometimes seen the Magdalenes in the twilight, walking arm in arm in Heneacher Woods: the romantically named Zaydas, Juanas, Constanzas, Madelines, Biancas, Rosamonds, Eleanors, Marianas, heads close together, whispering, as if there were no one in the world to talk to but each other, and all that they had to talk about was handsome strangers, and the shy beginnings of love.

Annie, if she ever been in The House of the Magdalenes, possessed a name that already existed in poetry, without any need of change, though the assumption of a new name was more a form of disguise (the fig leaves behind which they hid their shameful nakedness) than a symbol of a new beginning. Like someone collecting the materials for The Annie Collection – something worthy to stand beside The Alice Collection and The Pinkerton Collection – she had read “For Annie” to her when she had found it, and “Annie of Tharaw.” It had been as if Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had written their poems about her, she their meaning. To read a poem with the name of someone you knew was like coming across a painting of a place where you had been. You saw more than was in front of you.

She could have learned the poems by heart, and recited them to her when she met her again, a sort of password to tell her who she was.

Annie of Tharaw, her light and her sun, the threads of their two lives would be woven in one. She would say this to Annie, as they walked arm in arm in the woods.

Now the woods had gone, the Shakespeare Castle had gone, and the clouds were massed above where they had been. Sometimes, as she looked toward the place where the tower of the castle had once been visible, she saw Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max Webster practicing their semaphore. Max was usually the one who was designated to clamber up the slope onto Hudson Heights, signaling incomprehensible messages to his mother and brother far below, with crisp, mechanical, doll-like precision. He’d enjoy that, performing high against the sky, like a Swiss flag-twirler she had once seen performing in the hall above the ice-cream parlor, a cousin of one of the girls from the ballet class. He had remained completely silent, the only sounds the swish and snap of the flags, far larger than the little flags employed by the signalers, much more dramatic in his gestures, his patriotic slow-motion swirling.

Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.

She wandered back to the window as she dried her face.

Clouds …

The clouds, like shadows at sunset, were elongated and thin, stretching high into the sky as tall as trees above a child. She was a giant in the world, and her thoughts were clouds. Hmm.

There had been some people in Heneacher Woods in the summer, when the woods were still there. They had been four shirt-sleeved men, all wearing straw hats. One of them had been holding a red and white striped pole, like a peripatetic barber. He was the youngest, little more than a boy, and he had the inferior, humble look of a beater at a hunt, awaiting orders from his gun-bearing superiors. He hefted the pole from hand to hand, a vaulter about to begin the long run toward the sandpit and the balanced cane on the measured stands. The one who appeared to be the leader stood alongside a telescope on a tripod, and he had the look of John Randel, Jr., stepped down from his stone plinth in The Forum – this was the name for the area at the main entrance to the park – all ready to impose his grid plan upon the north of the island. Bluffs, hills, rivers, woods: nothing would stand in the way of his new world, and Adam-like he would name the newly created. One of the others carried an ax – no tree could make them pause in their purpose – and the last one grasped sheets of paper (unfolded maps, possibly, or perhaps there were no maps, and they were creating them). They were like visitors from a distant country bearing emblematic gifts. A fifth, laden down with generous supplies of explosives, like tall church candles with nice white wicks, would clearly be hurrying on his way to join them. He’d look like a textile salesman entering a dry goods store with his samples, about to unroll the latest fashions in cloth with an abracadabra gesture.

“It’s
à la mode
!” he’d announce, with a saucily unsuccessful attempt at an accent.

Boom!

“It’s what every woman will want!”

Crash!

The landscape would fall flat before them, as if in worship.

They gathered in a little huddle, consulting on some small, vital detail. Another line might be drawn along here, one of those absolutely straight state lines – firmly held ruler, freshly sharpened pencil pressing into the paper – that ignored geography as resolutely as the grid pattern of the city. It was like coming across Mason and Dixon, or Lewis and Clark, unexpectedly, undaunted men about to stride off into the unmapped wilderness, into areas as yet unknown to Rand and McNally.

There was Dixie again, for the second time that morning. (“In Dixie whar I was born in,/Early on one frosty mornin’ …” You’d think there’d never be frost there, there’d never be a morning like today’s.) She’d convinced herself that Dixie had – or, at least,
ought
to have – taken its name from the Mason-Dixon Line. What did Charles Mason think – she asked herself – of Jeremiah Dixon’s name being chummily appropriated and adapted as the name for the South, instead of his?
His
name came first in Mason-Dixon Line, for heaven’s sake! It should be Macie,
Macie
, or – at the very least – Macy, not Dixie! (“Ah is from Macy,” Southern belles could intone throatily, proud of their pampered department store existence, where all their needs were promptly catered for. They were in Macy! Hooray! Hooray! Away, away, away down south in Macy!)

There was a colossal painting of Lewis and Clark gazing out across the West in Mrs. Italiaander’s dining room, taking up the whole of one wall, the lower edge partially hidden by the sideboard, so that the landscape seemed to emerge from the cornucopia of the silver serving dishes. They were somewhere very high up, and an immensity of landscape stretched below them, as if they were being tempted by Satan, looking out at all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

Mrs. Albert Comstock’s term for the irredeemably provincial was to describe someone as being from “one of those straight-edged states,” casting into the outer darkness all life west of the Mississippi, states so devoid of interest and variety that rigid lines could contain them. Wyoming, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, all of them, withered beneath her contempt: big-skied, wheat-fielded, cow-filled, peopled by grinning gap-toothed gawks wielding grubby dung-spattered pitchforks, far from the seething metropolitan cut and thrust of life in Longfellow Park. “Straight-edged states” was an uncharacteristically poetic phrase from Mrs. Albert Comstock – her strengths lay more in the tepid and colorless – but the more snottily she sniffed and sniggered, the more inescapably provincial she sounded herself, the suburban frump writ large, and few were writ larger than Mrs. Albert Comstock, whose Bosom and Bustle were sights worth a detour for the more adventurous tourist. If Kodaks could cope with the Flatiron Building, Kodaks could cope with Mrs. Albert Comstock.

If the good Witch of the North had asked Mrs. Albert Comstock if Kansas was a civilized country, and therefore free of witches, she would not have replied, with Dorothy, “Oh, yes.” (“That’s me,” Mildred said, jabbing at the illustration of Dorothy with a well-fed forefinger, her young niece recognizing herself in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
as Alice read it to her. “That’s me.”) Geography revealed that Dorothy was a liar, and that Kansas – quite demonstrably – was not civilized. It was undeniably – almost willfully, one felt – straight-edged, a place never civilized, a country in which witches and wizards were still domiciled, shopping in casually chatting twosomes for their groceries in Garden City and Wichita; and in which sorceresses and magicians browsed through racks of ready-made clothing in Topeka and Emporia (whose very name promised large, well-lit department stores). Macy Land was taking its stand, and marching westward. They didn’t just march through Georgia. Away, away, away, ’cross west in Macy!