Pinkerton's Sister (54 page)

Before he first hypnotized Alice, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster explained to her what he was proposing to do. This was most unlike him. She was not sure how to respond – she gazed at the gleam of the gold book titles in the dim light, unable to make out what they said – until she realized that no response was needed. Again, he was not talking to her: he was rehearsing his lectures, talking to his audience of Bearded Ones, describing himself to them in heroic language, immortalizing himself on his phonograph.

“In the case of Miss P. I followed a bold strategy …”

He likened himself to Orpheus (not even a trace of a smile on his face), traveling down into the underworld to bring Eurydice – herself – back from the realms of darkness. He did not regard this choice of language as being in any way in conflict with his earlier rejection of imagination, just as he did not regard a sudden blazing enthusiasm for hypnotism as being in any way in conflict with his earlier usage of electrotherapy, baths, and massage. As Mrs. Albert Comstock was with art critics, so he was with alienists. He was large (though nowhere near as large); he contained multitudes (most of the population of Asia could have rambled about in roomy solitude within Mrs. Albert Comstock). He would embrace the world and everything that was in it, though – one hoped – not in so literal a manner as Walt Whitman was rumored to have done. The bardic Bearded One would not have approved of her. She looked through the eyes of the dead; she fed on the specters in books.

It seemed, however, somewhat careless of him not to be aware that Eurydice – because Orpheus broke strict instructions, and turned around to look at her face as he led her back to the surface of the earth – was dragged back into the darkness forever, into the realms of silence and uncreated things. This image of her fate did not inspire confidence that the doctor was a man who knew what he was doing, and why he was doing it. She wished she hadn’t read “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Edgar Allan Poe in fine form (the flambeaux flaring, the drapes rippling along the walls), and saw herself – The Facts in the Case of Mlle Pinkerton – mesmerized at the point of death and awoken from her trance months later, to collapse into a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, detestable putridity. Franz Mesmer would smile proudly from behind her at this demonstration of the power of his art, suspended upon his piece of cord and swaying slightly, so that the reflection upon it glinted mesmerizingly. (“Turn around!” he whispered imperiously again. “Turn around!”) That would make a mess of the nice thin-legged chairs with their pale upholstery, that would ruin the expensive – if florid – carpet.

“Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time.”

This – a sentence from The Pinkerton Collection, one of Oscar Wilde’s less celebrated utterances (“I knew Pinkerton would do it” was part of another sentence from “The Canterville Ghost”) – was her most conscious thought as he leaned in toward her, swinging his pocket-watch from his right hand like a gold-plated grandfather-clock pendulum, another Reverend Goodchild on the point of rendering unto Cæsar. If Griswold’s Discovery failed to do the trick, you automatically turned to Pinkerton’s.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

It was a slow, majestic rhythm, a sound too dignified for exclamation points.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster looked like a boy who had just read the instructions for a new game of skill – not quite sure how to go about it – and who was now prematurely facing his first opponent. He had that exact expression of uncomprehending concentration, that precise whiff of nervous perspiration under the American Castile toilet soap.

She half expected him to consult a little rough-papered publication like a Dream Book, ungrammatical and clumsily printed in smudged misspellings, discreetly positioned in his left hand.

Mississippi Mike’s Gide to Hypnotizm.

1. Face the Subjekt.

2. Swing Wotch from side to side.

3. IMPORTANT. Do not leave go of Wotch
…

She might well have her moustache agonizingly ripped from her face as the watch-chain became entangled, or be rendered unconscious by an incautiously powerful oscillation.

(“How on earth did you acquire that black eye?”

(“I was being hypnotized.”)

He had probably practiced in front of one of the bookcases, using the glass as a mirror, striving to achieve the correctly impressive expression of gravitas, the properly vigorous impetus to his swing. The silent nearness of Brian, beneath the reflection, would have been a great comfort to him. He’d probably accidentally hypnotized himself a few times as he experimented, wandering about the room like a somnambulist, bouncing off the walls and rattling the rows of Bearded Ones, until an ungraceful swan-dive off his desk (more
Nutcracker
than
Swan Lake
, and certainly no
Sleeping Beauty
) jarred him into consciousness.

He was going to show her something that could cure her pain better than music.

He did not say, “Look me in the white of the eyes.”

He did not caress her temples. (Slight struggle at this point.)

He did not ask her to sing “Ben Bolt.”

He just said, slowly, over and over again, as he held the watch before her eyes, “Listen to my voice. Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep …”

(This is the devil’s trick.)

She listened to his voice.

She was still.

She emptied her mind of all thought.

She slept.

He had read the instructions properly. He could play the game and win. In the schoolyard he would take no prisoners, lord of his little domain, king of his castle, a snatcher of jump ropes.

“Listen to my voice. Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep.”

He would say this – a notebook placed conveniently to hand – and, Wednesday after Wednesday, she listened to his voice, she was still, she emptied her mind of all thought, she slept.

The battered survivors of the princes – those who had climbed up to the tower in the abortive attempts to rescue her – could form orderly lines outside 11 Park Place to inspect the Sleeping Ugly, but who would wish to awaken her with a kiss?

She would sleep forever; she would never be awoken, and as she slept she would dream. The slab of gray granite pressed insistently upon her, stifling her breathing into shallowness.

He had talked of Orpheus and Eurydice, but – even if this myth had not had the ending it had – it was not the right comparison. She did not have the sensation of being lost somewhere inside a network of subterranean galleries, waiting to be rescued. What she felt was that the galleries were
inside herself
, and that there was a monster hidden somewhere in the depths of them. If any myth did come into her mind it would be the myth of the Minotaur, the creature at the heart of the Labyrinth that demanded the lives of the young.

This felt more like the way things were, though she balked at the thought of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster as Theseus, heroically penetrating deep within the darkness to find and slay the monster. She would be Ariadne, she supposed, handing Theseus the threads so that he would be able to find his way back out of the Labyrinth after he had destroyed the creature that lived inside her. She saw the threads as being the threads of tapestries. As Theseus traveled deeper into the darkness, closer to the monster, the tapestries that she wove by night and day would be unpicked, line by line – out flew the web and floated wide – and all the pictures would unravel thread by thread: the faded king and queen playing chess in a garden (
Alice meets R.Q., Alice through Q’s 3rd to Q’s 4th, Alice meets W.Q., Alice to Q’s 5th
…), and the company of hawkers carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. If Pinkerton’s failed to cleanse away all the colors, all the elaboration of the pictures and patterns, she would have to rely on Webster’s. Then the unstitched whiteness of the blank canvases would unravel thread by thread, in their turn, and all that would remain in her high-towered blank-walled schoolroom would be the empty frame of her loom, like a picture frame without a picture. There, exposed to view, blinking in the unexpected brightness of the light, would be the face of Bertha Rochester, no longer hidden. Theseus would abandon Ariadne on Naxos – here was another analogy that should not have been used – and there she would be, alone on the seashore, curled up in sleep, weary, tear-stained, gazed upon by Bacchus. High on the ledge outside Grandpapa’s office, suddenly appearing amidst all the women, Theseus’ father would wait for the return of his son, gazing out to sea, looking for the first glimpse of the sails, hoping against hope that they would be white, the linen bare, the colored threads all unraveled. Their blackness would drive him to despair and self-destruction.

Perhaps she herself was the monster, hidden away like Fair Rosamond – an unfair Rosamond (most unfair!) – the secret beloved of Henry II, in the center of the mazed corridors of the house named Labyrinth. Queen Eleanor made her way through the maze with a thread, and murdered her.

What she should have thought about, as she braced herself for hypnosis – he had made it sound potentially painful, a G. G. Schiffendecken of the mind, warning her that this might hurt just a little (
Painless Alienist
the sign buzzed and pulsed,
Painless Alienist
the sign lied in large letters) – was the opening of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. This was, she supposed – thank you, Charlotte – inevitable. This was, she supposed, more like it. Here she was being hypnotized by the White Rabbit: the pocket-watch and the waistcoat pocket from which it emerged in Sir John Tenniel’s illustration were identical to those of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. He certainly had pinkish eyes, and there was that way his nose sometimes twitched as it loomed through the whiskers. If the rabbit’s long ears were pressed down alongside his face they would bear more than a passing resemblance to the mighty beard. She was already within Wonderland, already within the looking-glass, and it was only fitting that it should be the White Rabbit who led her into the deeper levels, a Professor Von Hardwigg of the rabbit world, leading her on her journey to the center of the earth.

Alice fell down into the darkness, becoming sleepy, clutching at the things she could remember, as if they would prevent her fall: Latitude, Longitude, the Antipathies, cats and bats. She fell past the cupboards and the bookshelves – there were many, many books – the maps and pictures hung upon pegs, and the empty orange marmalade jar, like the one that Tess of the d’Urbervilles used to hold the flowers on the grave of her dead baby, visited in secret and at night. She tried to glimpse the titles of the books, reaching her hands out toward them, tried to see the countries in the maps, the subjects in the pictures, but it was too dark – she could read nothing, she could see nothing – and she fell toward the center of the earth.

There were monsters there, at the heart of the labyrinth, and Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka tramped deeper inside the labyrinth of subterranean galleries inside her mind, seeking them out. All three were Bearded Ones. The novels of Jules Verne seemed to be as curiously free of women as the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson: not only writers, but also the characters of whom they wrote were most appropriate for their parts when bearded. All explorers – apart from Isabella Bird (she
knew
that there were other such women, but she could not bring their names to mind) – were in possession of a beard: beards were an essential part of the equipment (carefully ticked off on long lists), like pith helmets, compasses, and native bearers. Each subterranean discoverer bore his own stalactite – wondrously shaped and whorled – around with him in order to blend in with his surroundings, and Professor Von Hardwigg (the very name promised a hairstyle as spectacular as his beard) gave a commentary to his companions as they descended.

“The interior of the female’s head is – as we suspected – strangely empty …”

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

Someone was taking notes.

Jules Verne had written opera libretti before he wrote novels, and she always saw his novels as operas, his characters – a stirring male chorus; there were no female voices – singing as they descended beneath the surface of the sea, floated across the desert in a balloon, journeyed to the moon, or to the center of the earth.

Harry Lawson, Professor Von Hardwigg, and Hans Bjelka were supposed to light their way with Ruhmkorf’s coils – whatever they were (her ugly little head couldn’t possibly know) – but she saw them in her mind (in every sense) as holding flaming torches aloft as they descended, in wanton defiance of explosive gases. They were like three bearded statues of
Liberty Enlightening the World
.

– they sang, as if expecting the underground corridors to be teeming with crowds of the oppressed –