Pinkerton's Sister (48 page)

Eleven
…

Twelve
…

Thirteen
…

Would he say, “Look me in the white of the eyes”?

Would she be compelled to gaze into that unwritten-on blankness?

Would he count from one to ten – the counting starting all over again – as if he had administered a knockout punch?

Would he count backward, drawing her into the zero, the silence, at the end?

Behind her, the glass-covered engravings of The Bearded Ones leaned away from the wall at an angle, a gallery of hirsute, scowl-faced Mrs. Twemlows. They were all straining forward for a good view, holding their breaths, anxious not to miss a moment of this enlightening lecture. Their beards and their glum expressions demonstrated their intelligence.

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

Dark-clothed children with skates and toboggans were streaming through the gates, making the first footprints in the overnight snowfalls, the untouched whiteness that stretched down toward the lake.

To dream of finding yourself in a snowstorm, denotes sorrow and disappointment in failure to enjoy some long-expected pleasure. There always follows more or less discouragement after this dream.

The doctor stood up, partially drew the curtains closed (it seemed odd to draw the curtains in daytime, a man hiding something) – the light dimmed, the cries of children became muffled – as if he had noticed her looking outside, her lack of complete attention.

She was to be hypnotized.

That would make her behave herself, do as she was told.

(“
Verrai?
”)

All the time, she had been aware of the children's voices from outside, a lingerer on the edge of the schoolyard, just as – in summer – she could hear the children playing under the chestnut trees as she listened from the schoolroom. Childhood – faint and far away – seemed like something she'd once heard about, not something that she'd experienced.

This had been …

How long ago?

There had been the other, discarded, methods first, so it would be less than seven years ago. Between six and seven years.

However long ago the precise time, she knew that it had been the time of the great rage for
Trilby
. Perhaps Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster saw himself as Svengali.

Trilby
was fiercely denounced from the pulpit by the Reverend Goodchild and from most other places by Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock; in a rapidly changing world, certain things were comfortingly reliable. It was one novel among many (Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock were united in bigotry, if not in affection) that they had vehemently attacked as immoral and corrupting. Judging by their pronouncements, they generally preferred to attack literature or art from a position of total ignorance, as this freed their minds (those dubious organs) to focus more powerfully on the essentials.

After following this usual method of condemning a novel without having actually having read it, Mrs. Albert Comstock then – in brave and dauntless mood – read it and suffered a disconcerting sea-change. (She was certainly something rich and strange.) The portrayal of Svengali so comprehensively confirmed some of her favorite prejudices that she magisterially declared that it was, after all, a “very moral sort of book, really, when you think about it, as I – personally – have done.” She was a mistress of the incisive literary judgment, her scalpel-like mind dissecting texts with a rare discrimination, laying bare their inner essence to the wonder of scholars, who felt humbled and abashed by her perspicacity.

She signaled her approval by attending a performance of the play at the Garden Theatre. She had been particularly impressed by the use of tableaux in the production, in which the actors and actresses had – at various dramatic moments – frozen for a moment, players holding a significant pose in a game of charades, in order to reproduce some of George Du Maurier's better-known illustrations from the novel. (Cue for applause from the better-informed members of the audience, Mrs. Albert Comstock ever to the fore. She'd probably shouted out the page numbers, so that everyone in the theatre should be fully aware of her mastery of the text, exclaiming at her effortless expertise.) There was nothing remarkable about such realizations to Alice. She had lived for years inside some of Sir John Tenniel's most imaginative drawings, surrounded by all the grotesqueries from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
. She had received a comprehensive description of
Trilby
, laced not just with the usual exhaustive account of the costumes and hairstyles (plot came a poor second to these), but with all Mrs. Albert Comstock's gratified horror at the portrayal of Svengali. Mrs. Albert Comstock had felt threatened, demeaned, degraded: she had thoroughly enjoyed herself. There hadn't been so much shuddering since the last time Othello had kissed Desdemona, when only the exercise of the strictest self-control had prevented a booming “
Uuurgh!
” – the same sound as Charlotte's succinct summing-up of Sobriety Goodchild – from echoing around the theatre and the adjoining streets. Some coat of arms – you felt – should have been hoisted outside the theatre to mark this signal honor and emblazon the name of Comstock upon the night sky: sausages
sable
upon a steak
gules
.
Cibi Comstockianae sinceritas servitiumque.
Albert Comstock – the Colossus of the Cucumber, the Titan of the Tomato – had not been one to overlook any opportunity for publicizing his stores.

Sensing – in her turn – a marketing opportunity, and climbing ponderously onto a bandwagon, Mrs. Albert Comstock prevailed upon the head butcher at Comstock's Comestibles to launch a Trilby Sausage, with special window displays in all the branches to ensure its success. Alice pictured windows crammed with lines of sausages, all of them swaying in unison and singing “Ben Bolt” at the tops of their shrill, sausagy voices. The bigger stores in Longfellow Park, like many of its more prominent inhabitants, had a keen eye for elaborate window dressing. In the same month Mrs. Albert Comstock had graced a
Trilby
musical evening at Mrs. Alexander Diddecott's, no doubt smiling with effortful motherly pride as her daughter Myrtle played “Rosamunde” and “
L'Adieu
” (Schubert's life encompassed numerous tragedies), as Max Webster (then just beginning his career as the Infant Phenomenon of Longfellow Park) sang “
Au clair de la lune
” and “
Plaisir d'amour
,” as Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster played a Hungarian Dance on his banjo, as Mabel Peartree (serious competition for the sausages, and containing even more teeth) sang “Ben Bolt” …

Those who had been present were heard to say that it would take them a long time to forget it.

Perhaps at the next
Trilby
musical evening – this time at Chàteau Comstock – after he had delighted everyone with his prowess on the banjo, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster might contribute to the theme of the evening by hypnotizing Mrs. Albert Comstock. It would be like conquering a mountain. He could borrow the triangular flags from Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max, and plant them firmly at Mrs. Albert Comstock's summit as a symbol of his achievement.

“Listen to my voice,” he'd say.

Grudgingly, she'd listen.

“Be still.”

She'd be still, assuming the posture of a pole-axed hippopotamus.

“Empty your mind of all thought.”

That wouldn't take her long.

“Sleep.”

The snores would start, and the never-at-rest chandeliers of 5 Hampshire Square would tinkle piercingly.

Charlotte had brought Alice copies of
Harper's Magazine
as each installment of
Trilby
was published, discreetly smuggled into the house doubly concealed, the magazine inside sheet music, the sheet music inside her music case. This was the time before the sea-change, and Mrs. Albert Comstock had just loudly announced that she had cancelled her subscription to
Harper's
in protest against their publishing such material. All over Longfellow Park pens were dipped into inkwells, as – in their neatest handwriting – genteel ladies, who had heard what Mrs. Albert Comstock had said, discreetly wrote to
open
subscriptions.

Mrs. Albert Comstock and the Goodchilds were – as Oliver and the genteel ladies (starting to chafe a little at the restrictions imposed by gentility) had long discovered – a very good source of ideas of what to read when inspiration flagged. The same genteel ladies, wearing their most impenetrable veils, set out in groups of two and three (like wagons in a wagon train, they felt safer traveling in groups) to inspect plays, paintings, and sculpture denounced by the forces of Comstock (Anthony and Mrs.) and Goodchild (Reverend and Mrs.). Such denunciations had the power of three stars in a tourist guidebook.
Mrs. Albert Comstock: “I found it utterly repugnant!”
or
Mrs. Goodchild: “My – whatsit? – disapprobification
…
”
– an ambitious attempt at eight syllables here –
“
…
is total!”
hoisted in large letters around the façade of a New York theatre should be enough to get the lines forming, fights breaking out as the number of Mrs. Goodchild's syllables increased. Her righteous fury would drive her ever onward to the heady heights of ten, twelve, fourteen syllables, and complete incomprehensibility, whatdoyoumacalliting until steam came shrieking out of her ears.

For a young woman to dream that she attends a play, foretells that she will be courted by a genial friend, and will marry to further her prospects and pleasure seeking. If there is trouble in getting to and from the play, or discordant and hideous scenes, she will be confronted with many displeasing surprises.

The more his mother and Mrs. Goodchild attacked certain books – whatever it was they attacked, whether books, paintings, or sculptures – the more Oliver sought them out. He seemed to treat their virulent rantings as thoughtful suggestions for his library list (not that the local library would risk purchasing any titles that might be thought controversial), obtained copies of them somehow or other, and carried them around with him at all times, the titles prominently on display, flaunting them in the way his mother displayed her teeth.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
,
Trilby
, Huysmans, Zola, Baudelaire (anything, in fact, vaguely French); all were sought out. He had held out
Against Nature
so that the title was clearly visible, rather in the way that Mabel Peartree held her sheet music. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had chuckled away about this to the Reverend Goodchild in that sophisticated way he had.

“It must be the Comstock training coming out, even in Oliver,” he said, thinking of the window displays at Comstock's Comestibles, “to have the goods on display so clearly identified so that we know what they are.”

“
Against Nature
!” The Reverend Goodchild was quick to identify that he had understood the joke.

(Pause for snigger.)

“
Against Nature
!”

(Another snigger.)

“You can say that again!”

(So Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster said it again.)

Alice had struggled not to intervene with a helpful clarification. “It doesn't mean
Against Nature
in
that
sense.” That's what she ought to have said, helpful as ever. “Why do you open your big mouths when you don't even know what you're talking about?” That's
certainly
what she ought to have said. It was something she ought to say, loudly, at regular intervals, striking out with great force for added emphasis. She was always furious with herself when she did not say the words she was prompted to speak.
Say it! Say it!
the inner voice hissed fiercely at her, but she seldom said it. She spent much of her time, consequently, in a state of rage. Christopher Marlowe had undoubtedly had her in mind when Wrath made his appearance in
Doctor Faustus
, yet another Deadly Sin ticked on her list of shortcomings. Seven were barely enough to cope. She ran up and down the world with a case of rapiers, wounding herself when she could get none to fight withal.
I was born in hell
. That was what Wrath said, the blood dripping from his many self-inflicted wounds.

Oliver must have been only eleven or twelve when
The Picture of Dorian Gray
had been published. It was ostentatiously seized upon, and he took great care to point out meaningfully to anyone he came across that he had the same birthday as Dorian Gray. (He did: November the tenth.) He treated it rather like a Mrs. Beeton's
Book of Household Management
for behavior, and the epigrams came thick and fast. He was – as in many other things – exceptional in this, as he was not from a family in which epigrams flowed freely. Albert Comstock had been ambitious when venturing upon a word of more than three syllables, and Mrs. Albert Comstock's bon mots – always rapturously received – included such candidates for Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations
as “Life is a funny business, isn't it?” and “It's really annoying when feathers cling to black velvet.” Having half-heard the word “aphorism,” she referred to these gem-like utterances as “Arthurisms” (the capital letter was clearly audible), under the impression that the term had been coined to commemorate some great wit of that name. Hard luck, Oscar Wilde, crushed into nothingness! She had probably made discreet inquiries, attempting to trace Arthur, and lure him to Hampshire Square, to dazzle delighted guests with his effortless quips. “Foreigners are not to be trusted” and “Poor people are happier than we are most of the time. I know this to be a fact.” This was the sort of thing she had in mind, the sort of thing she said herself, the sort of thing she said over and over again. She had maintained this standard for years, flinging out the Arthurisms with great wet slaps. It was exactly like watching the zoo-keeper hurling the fish to walruses at feeding time: the frantic excitement, the honking sounds, the white whiskers and gleaming tusks, the faint smell of decay.