Pinkerton's Sister (45 page)

“This –
this
…” – he shook it, to emphasize his point – “is the
very coin of which Our Savior spoke!
”

He sounded exactly like a seller of fake religious relics, about to unload several hundredweight in pieces of the true cross. His knowledge of history was as shaky as his brain-rotting novels would have led you to believe: he appeared to believe that Julius Cæsar had been the Roman emperor during the life of Christ. Somewhere, in the dim – a perfect choice of adjective – recesses of his brain, he was doubtless convinced that Nero was one of the early popes. Corrupt as the rest of them, sourly indicating with his down-turned thumb that death was all that gladiators could expect when
he
was sitting in the Colosseum, he would be carried across from St. Peter's by whip-lashed slaves, their final indignity before the lions pounced.

“And if you study this coin, if you examine it closely, if you gaze upon the lineaments of this
Cæsar
…”

– contempt drenched the first three rows in almost Dr. Vaniah Odom-like quantities –

“… what do you find?”

(He paused dramatically. This rhetorical question would shortly be answered. The more shortsighted of his congregation would spend the interval in marveling at the image of all these Ancient Romans using pocket-watches as coinage, thinking that this probably explained why so many clocks and watches employed Roman numerals.)

The rhetorical question was answered.

“You find that Julius Cæsar
looks like a woman, and has got a big nose!
”

This obviously summed up all the decadence of the Roman Empire at its vilest for the Reverend Goodchild. He had not come to praise Cæsar.

(Mabel Peartree, whose nose had been an inspiration to the architect of the Flatiron Building, always looked poisonous at this point.

(“
Et tu
, Reverend Goodchild?”)

Strollers in the park on the afternoon of that same Sunday could be seen studying the statue of Reynolds Templeton Seabright, clearly firmly of the opinion that it was a depiction of Julius Cæsar, taking comfort from the fact that the nose was not big, and the fact that – despite the flowing toga – he did not look like a woman. The Reverend Goodchild's influence was not as overwhelming as he seemed to think. Thank heaven for that!

– Julius Cæsar chattily instructed Mark Antony, every word audible to the large crowd gathered around him –

You could imagine the crowds, months later, pointing her out in the street with loud whispers.

“That's the one! That's the one who's barren! That's the one with the sterile curse!”

Here was a man with a special skill in making his wife feel cherished and respected, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in a toga, with the Latin word for
Gesundheit!
ever on his lips. Calphurnia must have smiled gamely, and tried to look pleased.

Barren.

Teeth came into sight.

Sterile curse.

Grin widened.

No wonder Calphurnia had gone to such pains to forbid Julius Cæsar from leaving the house on the Ides of March. She knew this was exactly the way to make him do the opposite. Hadn't Brutus been a little bit suspicious when an unknown extra conspirator had slipped in to join them, one with a well-muffled face, a woman's voice, and the biggest dagger of all of them, the one who elbowed Casca aside to get at Julius Cæsar first, the one responsible for at least twenty-seven of the thirty-three stab wounds? (She'd seen pictures in the clouds. She'd seen fierce fiery warriors fighting in ranks and squadrons.)

How could you explain to the Reverend Goodchild that Julius Cæsar's likeness was not, in fact, on the coin, and that what he was displaying for public vilification – an intriguing reversal of Mark Antony with the body in the Forum: “If you have sniggers, prepare to unleash them now” – was an image of
Venus
. Roman ideas of beauty obviously differed markedly from modern taste. The thought of Mabel Peartree as the goddess of beauty, the mother of love, the queen of laughter, the mistress of the graces and of pleasure, was enough to set those of a nervous disposition whimpering.

He had rather spoiled the effect the last time he preached by accidentally opening the case of the pocket-watch. Of its repertoire of six tunes, “The Camptown Races” was probably the least appropriate for it to have played on this particular occasion (“Narcissus” would have been more acceptable), but everyone listened, serious-faced – perhaps searching for what the Reverend Goodchild tended to call “that which is of Symbolic import” (you could hear the capital “S”) – as the first line tinkled tinnily out in All Saints': “De Camptown ladies sing dis song …” It was impossible not to think of the words, and she had seen the lips of the congregation moving in silent unison, like those of shy hymn-singers lacking confidence in their singing ability. The more uninhibited amongst them tapped their feet.

“Doo-dah! Doo-dah!” a loud voice added – quite tunefully – when it had finished. “De Camptown racetrack five miles long …”

This was Serenity Goodchild, the ever lumpish, ever troublesome granddaughter, with that obstinate expression of hers, as if she was – if she felt like it – gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day.

It was the existence of L. N. Fowler's phrenology head in his study that had given her the key to understanding Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, of knowing him for what he was. Her first thought – she
knew
it was true as soon as she thought it – was that if phrenology (long discredited, as outdated as the clothes worn by Lucy Snowe, Jane Eyre, Marian Halcombe, or, for that matter, herself at the age of twenty, friends from childhood, Annie) ever showed the slightest hint of coming back into fashion, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster would be at the forefront, cracking his knuckles and shaking his hands limply from the wrist, an athlete loosening up before an important race, poised for action on the nearest available head, his scrabbling fingers racing across the bumps like crabs on seacoast rocks scuttling toward the nearest pool.

Plop. Plop. Plop.

There was something raffishly disreputable now about phrenology, something that linked it vaguely with fortune-telling, tarot cards, palm-reading. Madame Sylvie's Human Hair Emporium and Salon de Beauty (it had been in business long enough) had probably once supplied (at vastly inflated prices) wigs with gigantically exaggerated Himalayas of bumps –
Amaze Your Phrenologist! Impress Your Friends! –
in the areas it was thought most desirable to possess. She'd imagined stupid people demonstrating their stupidity by hammering themselves repeatedly on the head to create grossly swollen mounds in the areas that denoted intelligence. Now, the laying on of hands had something distinctly wash-them-now-and-keep-them-clean about it, the faint whiff of lingering perspiration from a (very) high summer chiropodist, gingerly handling corns and bunions, calluses slippery with sweatiness. She'd seen the haggard face of the Indian Woods Road chiropodist when she'd visited her optician last August. There he was, sitting shakily on a white-painted chair beside the front door, inhaling the fresh air as urgently as a firing-squad prisoner drawing on his last cigarette, working up his courage for another deep dive into the murky depths of the lower digits, a man whose nerves were visibly shattered by squelchy summer socks and stockings. Perhaps the Reverend Goodchild had booked in for an extra-long appointment after a good, brisk walk to Harlem and back in his thickest socks that he'd worn all week. That stricken face had interposed itself between her and
A HKL
as she peered mistily at Mr. Brczin's sight-test. The windows had been open in the heat, and she'd – suicidally – sniffed the air. No. Not a whiff of Reverend Goodchild. Things hadn't been quite as bad for the chiropodist as she had feared.

Fashion was what mattered most to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, if fashion meant more money. Mrs. Albert Comstock showed herself a slave to fashion in the hats with which she adorned her head (she paraded them like the saints in the windows of All Saints' paraded the instruments of their martyrdom, some hats bearing a disconcerting resemblance to some of the more outré instruments). Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster's similar enslavement revealed itself in what he chose to do with the insides of other people's heads (a form of martyrdom – alienated to death – unaccountably not given artistic expression by Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton in his otherwise comprehensive coverage of the subject).

Wherever there was a new fashion, wherever there was a new idea (a faint stir, a distant rumor), there would Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster be, straining at the starting line, concentrating on hearing the crack of the pistol, wearing his white knee-length shorts (neatly ironed by Hilde Claudia: the results produced by the maid were not equal to his exacting standards) and white running-shirt (bearing the number 11 – for 11 Park Place, the address of his consulting room – front and back). In any race, Dr. Twemlow was the one to watch carefully. He was a keen amateur runner, and he and Dr. Brown – one of the Science masters at Otsego Lake Academy – often went out running together. They had the best-known knees in the neighborhood. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster's eyes were keenly focused on the finishing tape. It was a short track, but its length was crowded with enthusiastic spectators, those at the back jumping up and down to achieve a better view. Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max were there, to cheer Papa on, prominent in the front row, waving little triangular flags (also neatly ironed): they knew what he would say if they were not present. In the race elbows would be utilized, opponents would be tripped, but no one would notice.

All that mattered was to win.

She had experienced her first collapse at the age of twenty, not long after her father's death. The Bearded Ones – approvingly – had said it was grief. (
Ha!
) When the grief proved longer lasting than the black mourning clothes, and there appeared to be no remedy, it became an embarrassing problem.
A Remedy for Grief
: it sounded like something from a mediæval tale, something in which simples and dawn-gathered flowers featured. She already had this phrase in her list of titles, and had even written the first few pages of a story.

Anna listened carefully for a moment, locked the door behind her, & stepped out into the street, into the sunshine of a mild spring morning
…

Several years went by, and The Bearded Ones gathered around her bed, the dark clothes, the beards – black, gray, white, ginger (Dr. Cortelyou, a man unlikely to rise very high in his profession) – in a circle around the whiteness of the linen, like the elders of a tribe or a mass gathering of exorcists, their faces blurred and indistinct, braced to cast out demons. Some demons were named Mephostophilis or Beelzebub or Asmodeus. The names of her demons varied, and The Bearded Ones called them out, as if to lure them into daylight from the darkness. Sometimes they were named Neurasthenia. Sometimes they were named Hysteria or Dread or a variety of other names. They were exceeding fierce. They would not go away. Tobias had driven Asmodeus away with the awful stench caused by burning the liver and heart of a fish. You'd have thought that the smell of The Bearded Ones would have had the same effect, that smoky, sweaty smell, of cigars and pipe tobacco, of grubby old bank notes and dirty coins.

For a young woman to dream of a physician, denotes that she is sacrificing her beauty in engaging in frivolous pastimes. If she is sick and thus dreams, she will have sickness or worry, but will soon overcome them, unless the physician appears very anxious, and then her trials may increase, ending in loss and sorrow.

“The female is exhibiting various manifestations of hysteria. Note, gentlemen, the obvious agitation as I approach her and take hold of her arm. Perhaps, Dr. Severance, you would care to take hold of the other arm. Ignore her attempts to pull away.”