Pinkerton's Sister (86 page)

“Madame Roskosch,” she said. “Madame Roskosch,” nodding, learning a new word, dark, shadowy, hidden by fog. “Read me the address again. What was the number?”

Alice read her the address again. The number was thirty-seven.

Alice handed her the envelope, and Annie folded it carefully
and placed it within the bosom of her nightgown, like a girl in a novel secreting a forbidden smuggled-in love letter, one that she would take out, unfold, and reread – over and over – whenever she felt sad or lonely.

In this way, without knowing it, using a funny French accent, she helped Annie to die.

“P-P-Papa …”

The snow would mount up the stairs, like the cool blue-green light of the afternoons, and fill the house, until everything was ice. It hissed through the keyhole and beneath the door of the study, like the exhalation of frozen breath from a giant sleeper. It did not occur to her that it was odd to have snow inside the house. It was there, that was all. In the flickering glow of her night light, she was standing in the snow outside a stranger’s house, about to begin the words of a carol.

“Orient” would not go down well in Longfellow Park. “Orient” was seething with the troops of Midian, all of them well armed with sharp-edged primitive weapons. “Orient” was where the faces were inscrutable, but what they held in their hands was all too readily scrutable. “Orient” was where they bowed down to wood and stone, gods that were in the plural, and without capital letters, and too brightly decorated.
Idols. Graven images.
That was what they worshiped, and the words sounded ominously Old Testament, something violently objected to by the LORD. There’d be flames and smiting, and the earth would gape beneath the ungodly.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me
… (The LORD had a propensity for punishing children for the sins of the fathers.) “Orient” was where you couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep because of the constant hammering of nails – such people had no consideration – for the nonstop night and day crucifixions. “Orient” was where they didn’t even possess a proper alphabet or proper music, a place of opium-induced nightmares, a place fastidiously avoided by God. “Orient” was where it was far too hot, in preparation for the flames of hell that awaited the pagan hordes that dwelt there. They wouldn’t bring gold; they wouldn’t bring frankincense and myrrh. They’d bring the means of death with them, cunningly disguised as gifts, learning from the wanton excesses of the underclad knee-flaunting Greeks.

“P-P-Papa …”

Again, there was the high singing sound in her ears, the sensation of being distant from all that was around her, in a dream, observing things happening to herself with a cool, dispassionate interest. After a night with little sleep, the dreams were arriving with the morning, and she was sleepwalking whilst wide awake. She felt disassociated from everything around her, remote in time as much as remote in place. There was no star to follow. All the stars had fallen, and she was lost and wandering in starless darkness. There were no futures to foretell in the heavens. Gemini had faded from the sky. There was no Aries, no Pisces in the floor of heaven.

It was a star of night, without beauty or brightness, leading her on into a deeper darkness, without Virgo, Libra, or Sagittarius.

“P-P-Papa …”

Papa was not to be disturbed. This was known as firmly as if he had hung a sign on the doorknob outside the room, like a guest in an hotel, and yet Alice knocked on the door. It was not a tentative tap, but a firm well-knuckled rap; he was a man who had ordered that he should be awoken for an important appointment at a certain time.

She did not call his name again.

The feast of Stephen.

She looked behind her, trying to make out the figure of a page – small, bowed over – placing his feet in her footprints, and following behind her, laden with flesh, wine, and pine logs. Sire, the night is darker now,/And the wind grows stronger;/Fails my heart I know not how;/I can go no longer.

The figures on the terra-cotta panel were not representations of the Three Weird Sisters facing Macbeth. They were of herself, Allegra, and Edith, singing their carol to Papa. They were herself, Charlotte, and Mary Benedict, singing to Reynolds Templeton Seabright. They were herself, Annie, and Annie’s child, Desiderata – not Joshua; she knew the child would be a girl – singing to …

Singing to …

Singing …

When she pushed the door, it resisted, something pushing against it from the other side. She was pushing it backward through a drift of snow, still loose and lightly packed, so that – with slight pressure – it opened into the study with a crunching sound, slowly and more slowly as it compacted the snow behind
it. As it opened, looser snow gusted out like a blizzard inside the house, and her night light was blown out. In the smoky, flaring light of a windblown gaslight, her nightgown snapped out behind her in an icy blast, she took her first steps inside the snow-filled room. Sleety drizzle drenched her hair and the front of her nightgown, gathering in her eyebrows and eyelashes, blurring all she saw, and scraps of torn paper blew into her and stuck to her cheeks and clothes, like confetti at a wind-blasted wedding. The light suspended from the ceiling swung, hissing, like that of a ship on a stormy sea, and she saw what she saw like someone blinking, darkness and brightness in rapidly flickering succession. There seemed to be more darkness than brightness, and what she saw she saw in glimpses, hurtling past lighted upper windows on the elevated railroad at night. She closed the door behind her, pushing it back without turning around, and the wind blowing through the room eased. Snow, not fire, filled the grate – the fire had long since died – and snow had drifted in through the open window – the upper sash of the left-hand window was almost fully lowered – to accumulate everywhere.

What she saw was somehow remote, far away from her, and yet the detail was intense.

It was a dark subterranean room beneath the level of the snow, like a room cut into ice, as she had once imagined Annie’s room. The windows were almost totally blocked by a snowdrift, stifling the sound and power of the wind, or the door would otherwise have been slammed back. The drift continued down into the room through the opened window, a continuous smooth slope, half burying the desk, down onto and across the floor. In the top left-hand corner of the left-hand window, a little gap – the only part not yet blocked – was funneling more snow through, but all that could be seen through the panes – they were a multiplicity of small dark-backed mirrors – was the deep, windblown, layered snow. The heavy velvet tobacco-smelling drapes of the open window had fallen, or been pulled down, and the brass pole lay at an angle, projecting
from the snow, as if hurled there. Snow was everywhere, incongruously heaped upon everyday domestic objects, and she felt like a survivor after an avalanche, trapped in the ruins of her home, listening for rescuers, distant, muffled voices calling her name.

“I’m here!” she should be calling, to guide them to her. “I’m here!”

She had no thoughts of what had happened, the how or why of it, the bitter cold of outside breaking through into the inside, like the strange reversals that occurred when carefully decorated inner walls – walls for displaying pictures and photographs in quiet rooms – were exposed to the elements during the demolition of a building. Forgotten drapes flapped from broken windows, and rain-drenched wallpaper hung down in strips. Her house had collapsed around her, and she was walking through snow. The books, the shelves, were buried under snow; snow covered the carpet, the chairs against the wall, the cigar lighter, the inkstand, and papers. What had once been there was hidden from view, and only her memory made her see it now. There was nothing but the snow, a continuous, untrodden swathe of smooth snow that swept in an unbroken arc from Hudson Heights, through the orchards, through the house, across the room, through the window, across the street, and down Chestnut Hill. The globes of the unlit wall lamps were filled with snow, and the photograph of the office on South Street had a miniature drift of snow across its lower half. An out-of-season storm had invaded that sunlit summer scene. Papers slapped wetly from the mantel and shelves, and were stuck at angles where they had been blown in crumpled layers against the glass of the mirror, the pictures, the windows, like fly sheets advertising cheap goods pasted to the dark exterior of a failed business. They were startlingly white in the dim underground light. Around them, and everywhere in the room, were fragments of torn paper. Papa had made his own artificial snowstorm in the room before the real snow started, tearing up page after page, ripping them up small so that no word should be legible, and throwing the pieces high
into the air, so that a blizzard whirled around in the wind through the open window.

She was treading blood into the whiteness as she moved forward. She looked down and saw this. Her bare right foot had stepped through the torn wet paper and the snow into the broken glass of a smashed bottle. She couldn’t feel this – her feet were numbed – but she saw the blood.

All these thoughts, these impressions, happened in moments.

All she was aware of was of opening the door, stepping into the room, and seeing her father towering above her, over her, half buried in snow and paper, his swivel chair on top of his desk, as if he had placed it there in preparation for hanging himself, ready to leap out into space.

The chair had swung right round so that he was facing her, and what she saw was a tableau – a
tableau vivant
in which nothing was living – silent, motionless, a Mrs. Jarley’s Waxworks where the spirit of Madame Tussaud – there was another Madame – was at its strongest. On one side of the desk, the four drawers had been pulled out from top to bottom – a little further out each time – so that they formed a set of library stairs from the floor to the desktop. It was like an ascent to a guillotine where he could do a far, far better thing than he had ever done, even if he would not find a far, far better rest.
A Tale of Two Cities
! She had been the first to guess what the tableau was representing, and had won the game.

The accompanying music – she heard it distinctly; Miss Iandoli, recklessly throwing her windows open in the blizzard, was playing the piano transcription – was not from an opera this time, though the fourth movement, the most significant one, had been filched from an opera. It was the music from a symphony, the
Symphonie fantastique
, “Episodes in the Life of an Artist.” Berlioz had, with sympathetic appropriateness for the subject, the two featured cities –
Paris et Londres (Paris and London) –
named the five movements in French, and helpfully translated these names – whisperingly enclosed in brackets – into English.

1.Rêveries, passions (Daydreams, Passions).

2. Un bal (A Ball).

3. Scène aux champs (In the Fields)
…

He had not hanged himself.

He had …

He had cut his throat, and there was

(
STAB EVIL SINNER!
)

far more blood than the blood from her foot.

(
La Maison de Dieu (The Tower Struck by Lightning).

(
L’Amoureux
(The Lovers).

(
Le Bateleur
(The Magician).

(
Le Soleil (The Sun).

(
La Lune (The Moon).

(
L’Etoile (The Star)
…)

The snow had poured in upon him, piling up across his shoulders and tumbling down, and his blood had poured down his chest and stomach, accumulated in his lap, mingling with the heaped snow, and down his legs, across the desk, and down to the floor toward where she was standing. All the red ink from all those torn sheets of papers, all the redness from all those columns of scribbled and slashed-out figures, all that infinity of years of numbering, profit and loss, had burst out from within him into a single mass of darkly clotted gleaming blackened scarlet. She pulled away some of the confetti-sized pieces of wet paper stuck to her face, looking at what was written on them, a woman searching for something to read to pass the time. Faintly, she recollected reaching up and catching fragments of burned paper as the Shakespeare Castle fell in ruins, and smoke billowed around her.
The sun/Has turn’d to ice! – There is a haze in the sky,/Chilly and thick, that ne’er will clear away!/The earth is wither’d grass, leaves, flowers, and all!
The torn paper was all covered with handwritten figures in columns, and the red ink stained her hands. Her face, also, would be streaked with smudged redness, and dabbed with an excess of scarlet-smeared white beauty spots, like the face of an unskilled boy who had overambitiously attempted
to shave away a nonexistent beard.

4.Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold).

It was a rapid march she heard. He was hastening toward his execution; he was leaping into space, eager to be dead, or being pushed forward from behind, through the study, up the four steps, onto the top of the desk, struggling to free himself, but overpowered.

She moved forward for a close look, her head leaning back to see.

His head had fallen back, something severed and gazing up at the ceiling from a drenched basket, and the great gash in his throat grinned at her like a huge red-lipped mouth. His frozen beard, blood seeping pinkly through the ice, stuck vertically upward like wild, surprised hair above the dripping lips. He looked like King Lear,
fantastically dressed with wild flowers
.