Pinkerton's Sister (96 page)

Honor.

Honor.

Honor.

Thou shalt.

Thou shalt.

Thou shalt.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

Commit adultery.
(Though they would rather – if it were all the same – kill.)

Steal.
(Killing would be better.)

Bear false witness.
(Killing would be far more enjoyable.)

Exodus XX, XXI, and XXII (all those exes in Exodus, as God marked them out for destruction with a cross, like rotten trees in a corrupted orchard) fell to earth, homicidal hailstones blackening the sky, and the piled bodies of an overwhelmed city were lost from sight and buried beneath them. A finer ash pattered and sifted down, drifting through the apertures, and filling every remaining space.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

A hit!

A very palpable hit!

The crowd roared.

Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

Miss Swanstrom had not killed
The Last Days of Pompeii
for Alice. It had been dead already when she had first read it, interested to find the faults that had made Mrs. Albert Comstock declare that Lord Lytton – together with Sheridan Knowles – was her favorite playwright. (If she couldn’t find one of his plays, she’d read one of his novels.) It had soon become clear that a major part of his appeal – it could not have been based upon his subtlety as a writer (not that Mrs. Albert Comstock would recognize subtlety) – was that (like Tolstoi) he possessed a title. Almost as impressive, his other name – Bulwer-Lytton – employed a hyphen. English lords – as Shakespeare’s history plays confusingly demonstrated – seemed, like characters in Russian novels, to possess two or three different names, usually simultaneously. Alice had had to draw up a list of characters, and their various names, on her bookmark when she had read
War and Peace
, and family trees had sprouted like the spidery multi-rooted notes of an amateur gardener.

The names of the characters in Lord Lytton’s novel – they existed more as names, as labels, than as characters – were in her head. After nearly seventeen centuries – Lord Lytton had written, in the final chapter of his novel – the city of Pompeii was disinterred from its silent tomb all vivid with undimmed hues; its walls fresh as if painted yesterday – not a hue faded on the rich mosaic of its floors.

There had been a special-shaped cloud that marked the destruction of the city. The mother of Pliny the Younger had noticed it at about one o’clock on the afternoon of that day in August, a cloud of unusual size and appearance hovering above Vesuvius in the shape of a mushroom or an umbrella pine tree, its trunk extending to a great height, opening out into branches at the top. Pliny the Elder had gone to investigate the strange formation, and had been amongst those killed.

The lines of gas-lamps were smaller and fainter as they stretched farther away across the places that had once been fields and orchards, and the snow whirled around in the pools of light. Once they had lived – or so it had seemed – far beyond the farthest north, then – for a while – on the half-shaped raw edge of things, the shanty-towned frontier; now they were being engulfed, their apartness forever ended. The open countryside had become rough-edged, muddy, unpicturesque, a desolate debris-scattered wildness with an air of utter abandonment, unsuspected so close to a huge city, with straggling farms and small accidental groupings down rutted roads, and the occasional houses of the rich, unused for most of the year, on the higher ground or looking out over rivers. There were still hills and trees, all that had been there before, rocky mounds, wooden shacks, grazing goats, like scenes from rural Montana. It was like the time when she and Charlotte had gone to see Grant’s Tomb a year or so earlier. Across the road from the shining new structure, the pillared Roman Pantheon, the empty fields had stretched away like something on the wrong side of a city, the outer edges where people came under cover of night to dump what they no longer wanted. Away from the Hudson and the swarming crowds of sightseers, amidst the rubbish-strewn lots, were the blank backs of billboards, ragged clumps of bare winter trees, a few scattered amateurishly half-demolished buildings, all waiting to be swept away. Amidst the fields and farms, isolated high-stooped row houses were being built here and there – with no discernible pattern – amongst raw earth, as if they were all that remained after some unforeseen cataclysm had swept everything else away. Sagging wooden palings gave a rural ambience to districts with metropolitan pretensions. Behind them, in ill-tended truck farms, sad-looking vegetables – most of them cabbages – were planted out like geometrical patterns in rows as stiff and straight-edged as the new streets. Their leaves were pale and limp, all the color faded out of them. They’d wither in the mouth like Dead Sea fruit, produce that no one would ever wish to eat. Roads petered out, led nowhere. Half-completed churches reared up in areas excavated so extensively for foundations that the roads seemed like bridges across the chasms of a wasteland, and the raised metal frameworks for the elevated railroads stretched out across wastelands of mud and desolate fields in the early twilight, to places where it seemed that there would never be anyone living.

She experienced the same sensation as she had that morning, that the featureless mounds of snow in the darkness between the lamps marked the buried ruins of a lost city, and not the site of a city that was yet to be built. The place where nothing had been built had become the place where something once was. The wooden signposts, the fenced-off sections, marked the areas claimed by archeologists, the places in which to dig. In its forum were the half-finished columns as left by the workman’s hand, – in its gardens the sacrificial tripod, – in its halls the chest of treasure, – in its baths the strigil, – in its theatres the counter of admission, – in its salons the furniture and the lamp, – in its cubicula the perfumes and the rouge of faded beauty, – and everywhere the bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of that minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life.

From these skeletons, from the condition and position of the bodies, the novel had been constructed, inventing names and lives for them: Burbo, Calenus, Diomed, Julia, Arbaces. When the dead had completely crumbled away, they left a space where they had once been amidst the solidified ashes. If plaster was poured into this space, like a cast being made for a statue, the faces and figures of those who had once been there were recreated. This was what Giuseppe Fiorelli had done at Pompeii. As she looked at Linnaeus’s painting of herself, the painting that bore her name, but in which she did not appear, she thought of this idea of a nothingness where a life had once been lived, where all that remained was what once had been around it.

She thought, most of all, of her writing materials – outside her family, Charlotte and Linnaeus were among the few people who knew (or “had known” in Linnaeus’s case: death demanded a whole new grammatical construction) that she wrote – the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin in the shape of a bundle of leather-bound books tied together by a strap. It was in here that she kept her ink and pens, her lists of titles.

The Shape of the Clouds
.

The title had come to her that morning. It was one that she had to use. Late last night, and in the course of the day, what would be the first sentences had started to form in her head. She thought of it as being a story, but it might develop into something more. She felt the impulse, the weight, of something more substantial inside her. She waited until a sentence was perfect: then she could write it down, her scratching pen the only sound in the silent room. Once she had started, the words flowed, at least five hundred words a day. That was what she aimed to achieve every day.

She looked at the reflection of her face in the dark glass of the night-backed window, and smoothed her just-combed hair, hearing the voices of the maidens in
The Mikado
, preparing Pitti-Sing for her wedding day, dressing her hair, and painting her face and lips.

She looked at her face reflected in the dark glass, the reflection without braiding, without paint.

Supple.

Fair.

Loveliness.

Pretty.

Grace.

Pretty.

Six crosses in a row.

This raven had brought an unkindness.

Pitti-Sing’s voice sang the next part as a solo.

This she
had
managed.

She had cried.

She had started in fright when she was summoned.

Her heart had fluttered; her color had come and gone.

An unkindness of ravens.

A desert of lapwings. It stretched away before her, and there was no birdsong.

A tittering of magpies.

Titter! Titter!

The magpies sniggered about what they knew, as they flew across against the clouds.

One for sorrow.

Two for joy.

Three for a wedding.

Four for a death.

Five for silver.

Six for gold.

Seven for a secret never to be told.

A Secret Never to be Told.

A Sin without Pardon.

(Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.)

A child should always say what’s true.

Robert Louis Stevenson said this in “Whole Duty of Children,” the fifth poem in
A Child’s Garden of Verses
, just after “Young Night Thoughts.”

“
Ihre Augen waren von Tränen getrübt.
”

Her eyes were clouded with tears.

She knew that sentence would come in useful.

The words came to her from far away and long ago.

She went across to the fireside, and pulled her warmed nightgown on over her head, then returned to her usual place standing at the window. She’d disordered her hair, and would need to brush it again. Her hairbrush was where she had left it, precisely aligned on the window ledge.

Intermittently, the moon emerged from behind the snow-filled clouds. It had still been daylight – however dark and wintry – when she, Charlotte, and Kate had waved goodbye to Ben, another version of the terra-cotta
Macbeth
figures. He’d said his goodbyes to Mama, alone in her bedroom, trying to understand what she was attempting to say to him. She’d held her hand to the side of his head, and wept. They had stood at the parlor window, waving their hands tiltingly in the way that children waved. It had been too cold to stand at the front door, a gray, dark day without shadows, and the snow had started again.

Charlotte and Linnaeus had been waiting for her in the moonlight when she had returned with Mama from her first stay in the Webster Nervine Asylum. She and Mama had left the boat – like people disembarking after a day’s pleasure cruise up the Hudson: voices across the water, laughter, fireworks – and Charlotte and her brother had come out of the shadows to greet them. They must have waited for a long time. Arm in arm, they had walked up the slope beneath the trees, and Charlotte had started them all singing, singing to the moon, the song from
The Mikado
. Alone on stage, dressed and painted for her wedding, Yum-Yum sang about the sun and the moon.

She looked at the moon now.

When she looked at it, she tried to work out what it made her think, how she felt, wrinkling up her eyes as if she were staring into the brightness of a midday sun, waiting for an eclipse to begin. If she waited there long enough, if she waited there all night through, she might see the moon fade, and the morning star appear. When the moon was lost for a while, she looked at the reflection of her face in the dark glass.

“‘Yes, I am indeed beautiful!’” she said aloud, quoting Yum-Yum’s words. “‘Sometimes I sit and wonder, in my artless Japanese way, why it is that I am so much more attractive than anybody else in the whole world.’”

The moon appeared again, the moon that was so nearly a full moon. She should be in fine cackling form by Wednesday morning, when she began her journey to the Webster Nervine Asylum for her second stay there, her mind crammed – her eyes dazzled – with all the empty whiteness of full-moon lunacy.

La Lune! La Lune!

She was such a card!

A carriage would be waiting for her at the boat landing when she arrived at Poughkeepsie. It would drive along beside the edge of the river, and then up through the trees, through the open gate and into the grounds. Dressed all in white, she’d be driven through the whiteness of the snow, into the wordlessness and the silence that was waiting for her in the margins.