Pinkerton's Sister (31 page)

“The Lower East Side, Mulberry Street …”

She spoke with faint distaste, speaking the very names might infect her mouth, hesitating slightly over the pronunciation, enough to make it quite clear that these were words that did not often pass her lips.

“I’ve been led to believe that it is not at all nice
down there
.”

She made a vague ambiguous gesture downward with her hand, like a shy patient making a discreet reference to some intimate female medical problem, displaying the same eyes-lowered coyness as her physician, Dr. Twemlow, who gave the impression of struggling to control his blushes whilst wantonly taking a female patient’s pulse. He referred to any embarrassing areas of the female anatomy (the greater part of the body, with the possible exception of well-gloved hands) as “The Ladies’ District.” You’d have thought a fashionable shopping area were contained within their corsets and drawers.

“Is it – ahem – within The Ladies’ District?” was a typical inquiry (there were usually several ahems), his head turned discreetly to one side, apparently fascinated by the photograph of his formidable mother on the wall.

(How on earth could male patients bring themselves to discuss their – ahem – Gentlemen’s Districts with the unsmiling visage of Mrs. Twemlow scowling disapprovingly straight at them in sure and certain knowledge that all men were beasts? It was just as well that he was primarily thought of as being a ladies’ doctor. This was not a carefully calculated choice on his part – though the more complicated structure of the frail female body offered more opportunities for the financially ambitious – but was mainly because men were driven away by his fey manner, his prudish evasiveness, and by, above all by, Mrs. Twemlow, either in person, or as the wall-mounted Medusa glaring at them with every appearance of revulsion.)

The whole of da Ponte – like much of Longfellow Park these days – looked like a snowbound archeological site, with something being excavated rather than constructed: trenches, wooden barriers, the names of what had once been there, rather than of what was to be there, the Italian names –
Despina, Elvira, Cherubino –
that marked out the site of the new neighborhood. It was what some builders did: they named an area of land after the hometown of Italian or German or Swedish immigrants, and the settlers would arrive – drawn by a familiar name – to find nothing but empty fields, as if the village from which they had come had ceased to exist without them. She imagined them, headscarfed, carrying bundles, standing disconsolately on the edge of nothingness, Israelites without a Moses, waiting for manna that was never going to fall.

The Megoran Road signboard depicted Mozart, fifteen feet tall, gazing out across the trenches and the snow-covered mounds of earth toward New York City. There was no illustration of da Ponte. This seemed a little harsh, as he, after all, was the one who had actually lived in the city. That was the way with operas: those who wrote the words (W. S. Gilbert was one of the rare exceptions) somehow ceased to exist. Only the music mattered. The operas were Mozart operas, not Mozart and da Ponte operas. There was a thought to ponder: the insignificance of the words, the invisibility of the writer, overpowered by the language of the music.

It was strange to imagine da Ponte living in New York, a friend of Clement Clarke Moore: the man who had worked with Mozart talking with the man who had written “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” (’
Twas the night before Christmas
…) It seemed the wrong time, the wrong place, the collapse of chronology. The St. Nicholas in the poem – dressed all in fur – was nothing like the St. Nicholas in the window at All Saints’, or the massed ranks of red-clad jolly-faced chucklers ho-ho-hoing in the Christmas magazines and department stores. Here was a lost opera, words that were words without arias, music that had never been written.

The developer had probably chosen the name of da Ponte because da Ponte had taught Italian at Columbia College, and Columbia University had now taken up its new location across on Morningside Heights alongside where the Cathedral of St. John the Divine was going to be, and St. Luke’s Hospital, a huge new area of development, just like Hudson Heights earlier. The general feeling was that Mozart was a little – er –
tinkly
and trivial, a minor figure, and that Beethoven would have been a far more satisfactorily respectable and bourgeois choice if you insisted on linking composers with real estate. A profession of “liking” his music was a (relatively) painless method of signaling intellectual pretensions, and demonstrated acceptable taste and middle-class solidity. He was the Tolstoi or Dostoyevski of music, and went well with dark wood and heavy wallpaper. Even if you didn’t fully understand him, you knew that you were getting your money’s worth, especially during the symphonies. You could feel
comfortable
with Beethoven. However, he had unaccountably failed to establish a widely recognized link with New York, and so they were stuck with Mozart. With da Ponte. As evidence of his cultural credentials, the artist had painted several hugely magnified bars of music behind Mozart’s head: she had watched him copying from sheets clipped to the top of his ladder a month or so earlier, struggling as they flapped in the wind. Inspiration was soaring up behind the young man in the powdered wig, music in the very air.

Which moment had he chosen from the three da Ponte operas? (She used the expression “da Ponte operas” to demonstrate her solidarity with the power of words. Mozart probably wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about this usage.) She had mused about it for an afternoon, watching him, becoming intrigued. Was it the sublime trio from
Così fan tutte
, in which the two sisters, with Don Alfonso, pray for the safety of their lovers and their friends after they have watched them – as the women believe – sail away to the battlefield, asking for gentle breezes, calm seas to protect them? Was it from the last act of
The Marriage of Figaro
, the sudden mood of melancholy and sadness, the Countess stepping forward in the darkened garden, the casting away of disguises, forgiveness? Was it the Act One finale of
Don Giovanni
, another garden, another evening, and the sound of a miniature minuet flowing outside from a room inside the palace, the three masked figures entering, pausing for a moment to pray on the threshold? Miss Stein had not only opened her eyes to the darkness within Jane Austen’s novels; she had alerted her – a simple matter of a transferring of skills – to the desolation that could be found beneath the pretty dresses and the wigs and fripperies of Mozart. Mrs. Albert Comstock strongly disapproved of such besmirching, and sought sunshine without shadows, smiles that were ever bright and beaming. Why
spoil
things, for heaven’s sake, and make it sound like Ibsen? “Ibsen” was spoken with a certain self-congratulatory daring. This was Mrs. Albert Comstock demonstrating that she was fully conversant with the horrors of modernity. The Longfellow Park fireworks display on New Year’s Eve 1899 might have featured a spectacular sign with the words
Welcome to the
20
th Century!
blazing out against the night sky, but she wanted to know the twentieth century a little better before she offered it her hand for shaking.

Too shortsighted to read even such gigantic notes – the music would be deafening – Alice had asked Charlotte to bring her telescope across from the piazza at Delft Place, telling her that she was devising a method of concentrating the sunshine (there actually had been some sunshine then, though it had been cold) through the lenses in order to construct a heat-ray. She had not read
The War of the Worlds
in vain.

“Alice, where art thou?” Charlotte sang outside the door of the schoolroom.

It was her invariable greeting. Alice would sing the next line of the song, Charlotte the line after that, and Alice would open the door singing the fourth line. Sometimes they varied the pattern. Charlotte would have been mortified if the door had been opened, and she had found herself staring at a room full of people who had heard her singing.

“… I’ve sought thee by lakelet …”

“… I’ve sought thee on the hill …”

“… And in the pleasant wild-wood …”

Alice opened the schoolroom door, and Charlotte staggered in.

“… When winds blow cold and chill …”

The next line was so appropriate that Alice couldn’t resist adding it.

“Is this yet another valiant attempt to rid the world of Mrs. Albert Comstock?” Charlotte asked, rather breathlessly thudding the telescope down on its stand at the window. (It had been there ever since.)

“I have slowly and surely drawn my plans against her. Ever since my attempts at a heat-ray failed to destroy Miss Swanstrom …”

“Your spectacles and pocket-watch glass, however expertly focused, could hardly possess enough power to explode Miss Swanstrom into flame. She was so damp and soggy that the best you could have managed would have been a thin wisp of smoke.”

“… I have longed to annihilate Mrs. Albert Comstock. Now, at last, a weapon of sufficient power has been placed within my grasp!”

“You forgot the evil cackle of the mad genius.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha,” Alice enunciated carefully, a pedantically exact reproduction of the sound Mrs. Albert Comstock made when she wished to suggest that she was in the throes of helpless girlish laughter. The laugh, like the smile, came in one size.

“All too realistic,” Charlotte said, with a shudder, and then indicated the telescope. “Have you not considered the possible effects of your actions, however nobly inspired? The – er – …”

“Dot. Dot. Dot.”

“… er …”

“Dot. Dot. Dot.”

“… corpse …”

“… gigantic as it would be …”

“… would burn for months. The sun would be blotted out. A perpetual winter would descend upon the world, a new Ice Age.”

“It would be like 1888 all over again …”

(A brief memory of Papa’s death, the snowdrifts blocking the light from the windows, the snowdrifts
inside
the house, the drip-drip-drip of the red grin, the torn papers gleaming in the darkness.)

“… I must seek out my skates, polish the runners on my sled …”

“… and hasten to the Central Park.”

“That could be hazardous. A dinosaur might be roaming down Fifth Avenue.”

“I thought I’d just killed Mrs. Albert Comstock.”

“But how satisfying to kill a Martian with one of her own weapons.”

“Mrs. Albert Comstock is
undoubtedly
a Martian. The description in the opening paragraph confirms it.”

“‘Vast and cool and unsympathetic,’” Charlotte quoted.

“Mrs. Albert Comstock is unquestionably
vast.
”

“
Tick
.”

“
Tick
.”

“Few living things come vaster.”

“Except, possibly, blue whales …”

“… There she blows!…”

“… and the population of China.”

“Mrs. Albert Comstock is undeniably
unsympathetic
.”

“
Tick
.”

“
Tick
.”

“Mrs. Albert Comstock is unequivocally
cool
.”

“
Tick
.”

“
Tick
.”

“Three adjectives out of three.
Tick, tick, tick.
There is no doubt whatsoever. Mrs. Albert Comstock is a Martian, and it is our
duty
to destroy her.”

“Say that again! Say that again!”

“Charlotte Finch! You are a corrupting influence on my pristine innocence.”

It was as if the four of them were together again – herself, Charlotte and Linnaeus, and Emmerson Columbarian – up on Hudson Heights in the music room at Delft Place, singing around the piano, laughing at silly jokes. No, it wouldn’t be thirty or forty years before she and Charlotte turned into the Misses Isserliss: the metamorphosis was already almost complete. She and Charlotte edged ever closer to their Misses Isserliss incarnation, the full-fledged deranged doppelgängers. If she accepted Charlotte’s invitation to move up to Hudson Heights and share Delft Place with her, there they’d be – side by side, their two houses conveniently within cooee distance of each other (a sort of national park for deranged spinsters, a Yellowstone Park of the peculiar) – the two sets of Misses Isserlisses, the image and the reflection, the fully trained and the trainees. It would be so handy for the North River Lunatic Asylum. They’d make friends with the superintendent, wooing him with homemade cakes and knitted vests, and – as a special friend’s favor – he’d lock her in one of the padded cells when she lost control completely on nights of the full moon. She’d shriek unheard all night long, raving dementedly, and the soft walls – she’d caress them for comfort, press her face against them and inhale their dusty urine-scented odor – would yield to her touch like walls in dreams. Padded cells would be like rooms designed for eternal sleep, eternal dreams, with mattresses – ripped, disemboweled – sagging from every surface. She’d emerge in the morning, refreshed and twitching with nervous energy, like a vampire fresh filled with a stranger’s blood. She and Charlotte would grow battier with each year that passed, sharing a house and a sense of humor that no one else could understand. It was a rather pleasing prospect. They were already developing the mannerisms of eccentricity, and Charlotte had three cats, each of which had a name that was a private joke. Alice was taller than Charlotte, and so she should naturally take upon herself the part of Miss Issie Isserliss. She’d enjoy lashing out with the bell. She’d had plenty of practice with her leper’s bell – she was, after all, the Leper of Longfellow Park – and Charlotte would be in top rattling form as she shook the box under the noses of the perpetrators of puns. She’d put a coin into the box specially, to ensure a satisfactory rattle. The box needed its coin, just like the bell needed its clapper. Let’s hear the applause for that clapper! She sometimes imagined Pandora rattling her box in that same way, hopeful of encouraging curiosity, the irresistible urge to lift the lid and peer inside.