Pinkerton's Sister (46 page)

They would join hands like Mrs. Alexander Diddecott's Spiritualist Circle, they would sway from side to side, they would chant, they would hum, they would lull her to sleep and forgetfulness.

–
Fair!
–

–
Saxon!
–

And when she sleepeth, she dreameth.

The dreams were inescapable, filling the nighttime skies like the clouds in daytime.

Dr. Severance – who was always spoken of as Dr. Severance of Staten Island, as if it were his title – was the one who pounced first, and she was carried across to his Staten Island clinic on the ferry in a hailstorm, like the body in an out-of-season Venetian funeral.

Dr. Severance tried electrotherapy.

Dr. Severance tried baths (hot).

Dr. Severance tried baths (cold).

Dr. Severance tried massage.

This went on intermittently for about three years. She saw him so much in echoing glass-roofed, white-tiled interiors, so much through the mist of the steam (during hot baths), and the mist of her breath (during cold baths), that she began to think of him not as a doctor but as the proprietor of a bathhouse or a gymnasium with a strict regimen. Around his neck, instead of a stethoscope, a brightly polished whistle – its shiny surface beaded and misted with condensation – hung on the end of a cord, dully visible through the hairs of his beard.

Peep, peep!

Dr. Severance began to blow his whistle, regular blasts like a system of code, running on the spot as if to urge her into activity by his own good example.

“Arms down for The Beards!”

Peep, peep!

Down-down-down!

“Out for The Bosom!”

Peep, peep!

Out-out-out!

“Beards!”

Peep, peep.

“Bosom!”

Peep, peep!

Down-down-down!

Out-out-out!

The arms moved down-down-down, like those of herself and Charlotte, carefully co-ordinated as they worshiped The Sibyl with servile slave-girl bowing movements, bowed down before The Beards, bowed down before The Bosom. They spoke the words in unison, a congregation chanting the responses in an act of worship; they moved their arms in unison, and they bowed down at the same angle of agonized abasement. They knew their place.

They wouldn't dream of speaking in any other way. A different tone of voice would be shockingly inappropriate to all right-minded people, and give rise to appalled and disapproving comment.

Out-out-out!

Peep, peep!

“Again!”

Peep, peep!

“Again!”

Youth!

Pant!

Health!

Pant!

Vigor!

Pant!

In strict regimented lines, across wooden floors scrubbed as white and clean as the deck of a sailing ship, the gymnasts – perfectly synchronized – performed their drill, swinging the Indian clubs in front of them, behind them, above their heads, like jugglers lacking in confidence, reluctant to release their implements. The lines of the floorboards stretched away beneath them, the lines of the wall bars on either side of them, the hissing gasoliers cast down a garish, flickering light: all of them – the floorboards, the wall bars, the gasoliers – narrowing and fading into the distance as far as the eye could see. They were the circus performers in one of the three rings: the Elphinstone ring, or the Dalhousie ring, sufficiently important to avoid relegation to the Barton ring. The strong man stood in front of them in his leopardskin, his right arm upraised, the weights at the ends of the bar as shiny and black and spherical as balloons lifting him up on tiptoe. She was there; blinking in the flaring lights, unable to see the faces of the audience tiered up into the tented interior, Phineas T. (“T” is for Tremendous! “T” is for Terrific! “T” is for Titanic!) Barnum's latest sensation, the Bearded Lady on display.

The gymnasts were like the diagrams to illustrate the semaphore alphabet, arms thrust firmly out in precise positions, a flag in each hand, the little figures in naval uniform like her brother, Ben, drawn over and over. The two-color flags were divided from corner to corner, creating a triangle of red and a triangle of yellow. Perhaps Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max, with their triangular flags, were passing coded tactical advice to their bearded leader.

“Cortelyou approaching from left-hand side! Severance pouncing on your right! Twemlow attempting a sprint!”

The arms moved with jerky precision, like those of a mechanical toy, manufactured to produce certain repeated actions.

Charlotte had told her that the Pinkerton coat of arms was
a rose gules, stalked and leafed, vert.
Colors had special names in heraldry.
Gules –
there came “The Eve of St. Agnes” again – was red.

(In the windows of All Saints', St. Agnes was accompanied by a lamb on the same Brobdingnagian scale as Pharaildis's hens. It was not a little lamb the size of Mary's, not a lamb one would wish to follow one to school, not a lamb to make children laugh and play: it was a lamb from the island of Dr. Moreau, a lamb for screams and flight.)

Vert –
of course – was green,
sable
was black.

ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A. GULES.

That was Hester Prynne's gravestone at the end of
The Scarlet Letter
, and she had imagined a long, slanting field – something barren and unplowed – stretching away to leafless winter hedges, with an emblematic scarlet letter
A
, huge as a billboard, catching the last light of a setting sun, the one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow. Because they were the last words of the novel, the capital letters standing above the blank whiteness of the rest of the final page, she always thought of the gravestone as standing amidst untrodden snow, snow covering the mourning sable of the field, a grave that no one visited.

Charlotte had asked Linnaeus to draw the coat of arms for her, the red rose with six leaves, and the motto beneath it.

The Pinkerton motto was
Post nubila sol.

After clouds, sunshine.

The reader of the clouds followed Dr. Severance of Staten Island, but he brought no sunshine.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried electrotherapy.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried baths (hot).

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried baths (cold).

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster tried massage.

Poughkeepsie was clearly a place throbbing with Spirit voices, numinous with the beyondness of things. You headed north, up the Hudson, and you were drawn mysteriously toward it by a power beyond your control. First there was Andrew Jackson Davis, the famous “Seer of Poughkeepsie,” and then – as if that wasn't enough excitement for one place, a place of sensitive, scholarly girls attempting to concentrate on higher learning – there was Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster and the Webster Nervine Asylum, his clinic for extended stays. Like Andrew Jackson Davis he seemed to receive communications from another world, hear voices that no one else could hear. He certainly didn't hear
her
voice at times. What he did do was to, somehow – what was the word to use? –
encroach
upon the areas that belonged to Dr. Twemlow, her medical doctor.

(The areas belonged to
her
, to
her
.)

Dr. Twemlow – his name always made her think that he ought to have some slight speech impediment (who on earth was
she
, to t-t-talk about sp-p-peech imp-p-pediments, to
att-tt-ttempt
to t-t-talk?) – faded, retreated, before the irresistible advance of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. If she had a stutter, then he could have a lisp. If it
was
a lisp. Lisps were for “s” sounds (weren't they?), but what was the term for an inability to pronounce “r” sounds? For want of knowing the correct term – perhaps it
was
“lisp” – she continued to think of Dr. Twemlow as a lisper. (Cruel to have an unpronounceable “s” in the term that defined the condition.) His lisp, like a misspelled limp, hindered him as he staggered along in the race with Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.
He
, the athletic running partner of Dr. Brown!
He
, rarely without a fine sheen of sweat – Millie tended to complain – and a smell of embrocation – she liked this even less – about him.

No, it
wasn't
“lisp.” It was something to do with having a too-short tongue. Poor depwived short-tongued Dr. Twemlow, a man quite incapable of producing a juicy raspberry. On some days – looking wearily across the room at winsomely evasive, fearsomely insistent, Millie – it must be the sound he longed to produce more than any other as a summation of all he felt most deeply about her. How he must crave to evolve into one of the long-tongued! To spring into action with the most resonant of uninhibited letter “r”s, the wettest and most spectacular of raspberries! It wasn't just the desperate desire to produce the sound that conveyed the contempt that he – the verb was wonderfully appropriate –
longed
to pronounce. The creation of a dramatically drenching fall of spray – cruelly denied him – upon the face of his adversary, a Niagara Falls of derision (de
rrrr
ision!), would have been an essential part of the pleasure.

The red and yellow triangular flags were a blur as Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max – leaping up and down on tiptoe in their excitement – signaled success for Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.

“Twemlow dwopping back! Twemlow keeling over! Twemlow withdwawing fwom the wace!”

Twemlow cwushed!

Twemlow wouted!

Twemlow overthwown!

The reader of the clouds examined her face and eyes in particular detail, as if assessing her suitability for his enthusiasm for hypnotism that followed, one of a long line of enthusiasms. If you wished to know what Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had been reading recently, you did not examine his library list (though his carefully locked bookcases would have yielded clues); you studied his changing treatments of her. He commented on her pockmarks (smallpox when she was seven), and told her that her eyes were unusually dry, muttering the phrase “difficulties with tears” to himself. He tended to talk out loud as he examined her. It was not to explain things to her; patients were not in the confidence of their doctors in such matters, not a party to the mystery of their art. It was, indeed, surprising that doctors did not talk to each other (and to themselves) exclusively in Latin, the language of The Bearded Ones.

(Dr. Wycherley treated Alfred Hardie like a human curiosity as he inspected him for the signs of madness. Like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – though Dr. Webster had much the more appropriate namesake – he had the name of an English dramatist. John Webster wrote about death and murder. John Webster wrote about madness.

(“
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae
,” Dr. Wycherley intoned as he examined Alfred, a man casting a spell, or drawing out demons. Here was a doctor who had the right idea, the correct sense of the dignity due to his profession.
Dementiae
didn't sound too promising, another demon unleashed from the darkness.

(When he chose not to utilize Latin, he employed multi-syllabled technical terms, equally obfuscating for the uninitiated, the beardlessly unworthy.

(Dr. Wycherley asked Alfred about his headaches, and about his inability to sleep. He asked him about his nightly visions and voices. Dr. Wycherley sounded just like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, the two dramatists peopling their stages with crowds of lunatics, derangedly speaking the words that they had written for them.)

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster spoke as if he were in a lecture hall, expounding upon his discoveries to serried ranks of the behatted and bebearded rising in rows above him, or as if he were Dr. Seward in
Dracula
– what better comparison? He, also, was the owner of a private lunatic asylum – dictating his diary into a phonograph. When the public tired of the voice of Enrico Caruso, they could listen to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, tapping their feet to the infectious rhythm of his sentences. He assumed highly dramatic postures in front of his audience, as if frozen at the thrilling climax of an opera, or posing – with an expression of piercing yet caring intelligence (this took considerable concentration) – for a new painting by Thomas Eakins,
The Webster Clinic
. He'd make sure that potential patients heard all about it.
As painted by Thomas Eakins
, he'd trumpet in his advertisements, a rather racy endorsement (there was something a little – ahem –
controversial
about some of Thomas Eakins's paintings, and some of his personal proclivities), but it might well attract a more artistic – and therefore more profitably neurotic – clientÈle. Mrs. Italiaander had a painting by Thomas Eakins, depicting her late husband among a group of his fellow architects, all of them holding models of buildings they had designed, and looking like a race of giants. He was the fourth one in from the left.