Pinkerton's Sister (43 page)

“My strength is as the strength of ten,” Anthony Comstock probably intoned into the mirror each morning (in the way that other men intoned, “Youth! Health! Vigor!”), “because my heart is pure.”

What a tribute it was to his fame, he no doubt remarked – vague, like Mrs. Albert Comstock, about dates and chronologies – that Tennyson should have created so recognizable a picture of him in Sir Galahad. One felt, with Anthony Comstock, that any bonfire of piled up
filth!
– the word spat out, faces dampened for yards around, lightning bolts unleashed from his eyes – would not be complete without the perpetrator (artist, author, purchaser: he was happy to allow considerable leeway on this point) tied to a stake at its summit, screaming dementedly in agony, and dying – hideously disfigured – as the flames consumed his body with exquisite slowness. Anthony Comstock's thoughts lingered sensually on this image. He was a self-appointed scourge of the sinful, and therefore all the keener. He did not seek financial reward. It was payment enough for him – he'd say this with a modest, self-deprecating smile – to drive his chosen victims to suicide. With the quiet pride of a stamp collector arranging and mounting his latest findings, he sat at home of an evening – filling the empty hours – totting up the numbers of those he'd driven to death, and calculating the number of tons of books and pictures he'd been instrumental in burning or dumping into a convenient river. He'd dumped so many dirty books and pictures into the rivers around New York that it was astonishing that they were still navigable, not filth-silted through full fathom five, so crammed with carnality that even a canoe couldn't get through. Every day should be bringing shocking news of ships being wrecked against these rude reefs, or stranded in these salacious shallows. The survivors – not too keen on being saved too swiftly – would gather in giggling damp-bearded groups, making themselves comfy – “Look at
this
! Look at
this
!” – to examine the details of the grubby merchandise on which they'd grounded, breathing their hot breath on the soggy pages to dry them out a bit and make them more legible. They came unto those yellow sands, and then took hands. Bow-wow, the watch dogs barked. “Look at
this
! Look at
this
!” they'd whisper, keeping their voices as low as possible, anxious to avoid making any sound that might be interpreted as a cry for help.

“Look at page one hundred and sixty-three!”

“Page one hundred and eleven!”

“Eighty-nine!”

“
Seven!
”

Any fool who attempted to signal with his shirt, or a hastily improvised fire, idiotically seeking premature rescue, would soon find himself knocked on the head and bound and gagged. You wouldn't have been surprised if lust-crazed pilots had deliberately steered ships to destruction, wreckers seduced by the siren call of smut. You wouldn't catch Grace Darling rowing out to rescue licentious lingerers such as these! Not likely! “Over here,
Darling
!” they'd snigger droolingly, nudging each other with meaningful purposefulness, their baser selves fully unleashed and all raring to go, especially after they'd boggled at page seven. “This way,
Darling
!” She'd biff them over the head with her oars, brain them with a bash. They weren't going to contaminate
her
nice clean rowboat. Mucky mariners! Filthy beasts!

“I'll drown my book!” Anthony Comstock declaimed challengingly, like a pornographic Prospero, rather pleased with himself. (Deeper than did ever plummet sound. That's how deep he'd drown it.)

The printed word was bad enough, but the world was crammed with unsuitable works of art, paintings and sculptures athrob with brazen bareness, pendulously wobbling dangliness (hadn't these people heard of sensible underwear?) that quite turned the stomach, and gave rise to potential impurity of thought. Strategically positioned fig leaves were not the answer. Oh dear me, no. They left far too much still – ahem – protruding, giving rise to ribald speculation.

Aprons
.

That was what it said in the Bible – Genesis, Chapter III, Verse vii –
they sewed fig leaves
(definitely a plural)
together,
and made themselves aprons
, and it was in aprons that their hopes clearly lay for a dangle-free future. Montgomery Ward & Co. produced good-quality mechanics' aprons out of bed ticking at a cost of only
twenty cents
each if their name was stamped clearly on the front. (They cost fifty cents without the name.) These aprons were perfect for their job of enforcing purity. They were thirty inches wide, and thirty-six inches in length, the right size for covering the areas of maximum danger (though some of Rubens's larger ladies – as if employed in one of the messier manufactories – might require to be multi-aproned), and were supplied complete with shoulder and waist straps that – tightly knotted and carefully adjusted – should ensure safety from all angles.
And
they had useful pockets.
Montgomery Ward & Co., Chicago
would be a guarantee of suitability for the family agog for culture without embarrassment, and would introduce a bracing sensation of the outside world of commerce into the too rarefied atmosphere of museums and galleries.

He thought of himself as a man living a thrilling life full of adventures, battling the forces of evil with the upraised sword of purity. Perhaps the Reverend Goodchild could be persuaded to model one of his dreadful historical novels upon his life.
Comstock: Scourge of the Sinners
(1903) would be one more to add to the list, the long, long list of ploppily bubbling potboilers, the ones that smelled so bad as they were stirred upon the stove. Inspiration – not the first word that sprang to mind – showed no signs of flagging, and Halitotic Herbert churned them out as if he'd borrowed one of the sausage machines from Comstock's Comestibles, all titles throbbing with sensational overtones, all titles racily alliterative.

“Buy a Goodchild for your Good Child!” was the exhortation above the full list of titles available in The Works of the Reverend H. P. Goodchild (the oeuvre was much recommended as a suitable source for Sunday-school prizes), printed opposite the title pages. “Thoroughly wholesome in tone!” was the puzzling conclusion of
The Poughkeepsie Press
, placed alluringly beneath. (The exclamation points got you panting before you'd even read a word of the first page.) The anxious parents of Vassar students must be hastening – in the vastness of the night – to remove their imperiled daughters to a place of greater safety, if this was what wholesomeness meant in the dark backward and abyss of Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie was clearly not the quiet place slumbering in academic quietude that it purported to be. Some freelance contributor, scribbling away in one of the less accessible rooms at the Webster Nervine Asylum (the third door on the left, just past the Fauntleroy Ward), had probably written the enticing recommendation.

Possibly, some time in 1930 – when he would be about a hundred – he would run out of sinful Roman and Parisian landmarks to employ for his settings, and inspiration (
ha!
) would at last fail him. All he would have to offer as his anticlimactic swan-song (here was a swan that Leda would have repulsed vigorously, lashing out with every sign of revulsion) would be
The Slightly Unpleasant Events Just off the Corso
, where even alliteration faltered, and the death count was disappointingly low, only just making double figures. The –
ha!
– thoroughly wholesome in tone oeuvre would grind to a halt, and there would be a crisis in Sunday-schools throughout the land. What on earth could they offer as prizes now that there were to be no more Goodchilds for their Good Children? It would be back to
Ben-Hur
.

“I've already
read
this!” the Good Children – no longer so Good – would complain rebelliously, and there would be a nationwide revolt. (Not missing a single Sunday-school all year, and then being offered a book you'd already read as a reward!) He wrote at least two a year: forests were laid waste for his meretricious trash, and when the forests were gone the light was blinding.

The scandalously apron-free photographs of Brian would not meet with Anthony Comstock's approval. He did not know much about art and literature, but he knew what he disliked, and what he disliked most of all was any hint of nudity, or any mention of (careful glance around, voice lowered to a thrilling hiss) sex. It would be an extra-big bonfire, with extra-hot flames. Spectators would be encouraged to lob bricks, to engage in antiphonal chanting.

“Wanton Webster!”

“Bottom-Baring Brian!”

“Wanton Webster!”

“Bottom-Baring Brian!”

Opportunities for this kind of thing were one of the many benefits of becoming a member of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and marching behind the banner proudly borne by Anthony Comstock. Bricks and firewood would be on offer at special discounted prices. For a small fee, you could be one of those manning the barricades alongside Mrs. Albert Comstock (a formidable barricade all by herself) and the Goodchilds, another high priest of prissiness, a nabob of niceness, a grumpy mugwump of modesty, flourishing gigantic fig leaves as if taking part in some rural festivities at harvest time in one of the wine-growing regions of the world.

Life had suddenly become unbearable for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. Shades of the prison-house began to close upon the groaning man. His beard – with painful irony he favored the model worn by Anthony Comstock – rustled against the edges of the page and scratched against the photograph, tickling unsuitable areas.

“Brian … Brian … I yearn for your touch, but yet it cannot be. I have a family. I must think of Hilde Claudia, little Theodore” – little Theodore was at least five feet eleven – “and little Max. I have my position in society to consider. This is madness, my darling.”

The tears flowed through his lank and darkened sidewhiskers and emerged – as if filtered into fresh water – on the other side, dripping from his dampened Dundrearies onto the cover of the book and turning the mauve into –
ooh!
– (the weeping doctor forgot to cry, perked up, and looked with alerted interest)
such
an attractive shade of purple. It would be the ideal shade for that new vase he was contemplating purchasing for the conservatory.

“Tell me what you are thinking, Miss Pinkerton.”

He would have been surprised if she had told him, particularly bearing in mind the comments she had heard him make to Halitotic Herbert about Oliver Comstock. Oliver was the only one of the Comstocks Alice liked. He had always made it perfectly clear that he loathed his mother, a most endearing quality to anyone who felt about her as Alice did, and if Charm –
ha!
– felt it was amusing to snigger that Oliver was a Charlotte Anne (this was the expression he used) she was quite prepared to leap to his defense. (Why
Charlotte
? Alice thought, loyally.)

Unseen by the doctor, a telltale trickle of talcum powder ran across the carpet toward his desk, like a gunpowder trail about to be ignited for a massive explosion. Bits of Brians – thin shadowed chests, provocatively angled peacock feathers, sleepily half-closed eyes – would be everywhere. Fingerprinting would open up exciting new career prospects for Chastity Heighton. Lightly dusted with talcum powder, she would be an invaluable source for fingerprints of all the men of dubious morals in Longfellow Park, and would find her rôle in life at last. “Your Mount of Venus is highly developed toward the Lower Mars area, and your Lower Luna is very pronounced,” the detective began, accusingly, studying her all-too-eagerly proffered palm, and Chastity nodded excitedly, as if she'd just been paid a great compliment. “I
know
!” she said proudly. Talcum powder would avalanche down like a storm of confectioners' sugar onto pastries: sinful, fattening, impossible to resist. Her parents would be so thrilled. The very mention of her name, for the past few years, had brought an excitedly shocked gleam into the eyes of the respectable women of Longfellow Park, and (silently, and in private) a nostalgic smile to the faces of certain equally respectable men.

Alice had once been startled by a complaining comment she had overheard a woman – on her way to the circulating library – calling across Chestnut Street, at the front of the house, to another through a drizzle.

“Jane Eyre is covered in fingerprints!”

(It was as if Chastity Heighton had found a woman friend at last, one with whom she could share her hobby.)

Jane Eyre covered in fingerprints!

It was an appealing thought.

“Rochester has p-p-pounced at last! Fight back, Jane! B-B-Bawl for B-B-Bertha!” she called to them from the window.

The wet umbrellas had been tilted briefly backward – white, upturned faces – and then hastily moved back upright, clutched more firmly. They had not known what to say.

(
It's the madwoman! It's the madwoman!
They had known what to think.

(
It's the local Lizzie Borden, all set to start whacking!
)

It had been intended as a joke. She knew, of course –
Of course! Of course!
: she should have shouted it at them – that the woman was talking about the condition of
Jane Eyre
the printed book, and not Jane Eyre the character, but they had – conversation abandoned – hastily continued in their different directions, the one bound for the library clutching the maltreated
Jane Eyre
closer to her under her greatcoat, carefully avoiding looking up toward Alice at the window. The lack of punctuation in the spoken word (in the majority of people: Mrs. Albert Comstock somehow managed to use punctuation, where appropriate, as a weapon when she spoke) could so easily give rise to unfortunate misunderstandings.