Pinkerton's Sister (56 page)

It was
definitely
time for something new.

Something New and Improved.

Something that would cause a stir.

It was time …

Tarantara!

It was time…

Tarantara!

It was time to announce the arrival of –
Tarantara! –
cloud-reading.

New!

Improved!

Cloud-reading!

Peep, peep!

Attention!
The two arms were held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees – the gesture of someone in front of a runaway horse – and the flags shaken, as if a king or president was being patriotically greeted.

Peep, peep!

C.
The right arm was held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm was held so that the flag depended from one corner in front of the center of the body.

Peep, peep!

L.
The right arm was held down and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm up and away from the body, so that the two arms made one continuous line.

Peep, peep!

O…

If he developed a sudden fascination with carpentry, sewing, or cookery he would – she felt – somehow insinuate this into her treatment, the book of instruction open for easy reference on top of his desk.

“Make this apple pie for me, Miss Pinkerton. You will undoubtedly obtain much relief. Here is your apron. The apples are in the bowl on your right. Over there are the flour, the butter, and the other ingredients, and in that jug there is some milk …”

“Cook,” he would say, and she would cook.

“The collar of this shirt needs repair …”

“Sew,” he would say, and she would sew.

“Hammer,” he would say, and she would hammer.

He would not say “Write.”

He would not say “Paint.”

He would not say “Read.”

After the reading of clouds came the reading of pictures and the reading of dreams, and these arrived at about the same time, and all these methods continued into the new century. She had rather hoped that the new century, like the firm lines drawn between the epochs of geologic time, might mean the beginning of something new, something that
meant
something, but things remained the same. She did not know the names of the books that had given him the ideas for the reading of clouds and the reading of pictures and dreams, though she had her suspicions that the clouds were the result of an especially vital word being mistranslated by Hilde Claudia, for whom nouns were clearly becoming as big a problem as the werbs. The mistake might very well have happened when a word in the original German had been misread, or when – here was a possibility that surely justified a scholarly monograph from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster – Hilde Claudia, hopelessly confused, had inadvertently introduced her own Cloudier self into the text she was attempting to translate.

She had asked Charlotte to try and find out which words in German were almost the same as the German word for “cloud.” Charlotte actually had an English–German dictionary, but it was just the second volume –
L to Z
– of a two-volume set, not very helpful when the word sought began with “c.” (Alice had toyed with the concept of someone trying to communicate without using any words beginning with the letters from “a” to “k” in the alphabet.) Charlotte had asked Emmerson, and brought back just two words – “
Wolke
” (which meant cloud) and “
Wolle
” (which meant wool) – and several phrases, including the German for “head in the clouds,” “to be under a cloud” (vital for all Germanic Mrs. Albert Comstocks and Mrs. Goodchilds out Magdalene-prodding), “cloud-cuckoo land” (definitely a useful phrase if Alice was in the vicinity), and “her eyes were clouded with tears.” (“
Ihre Augen waren von Tränen getrÜbt
”: it might come in useful some day.) She must ask her to find out more words from Emmerson, and try to discover if another word ought to have been used in the translation. “
Volk
” (the German word for “people”) sounded a little like the way Charlotte had pronounced “
Wolke
,” and she found herself picturing cloud people, heads in the clouds, tall slow-moving beings reaching high into the sky, their shadows stretching out across the landscape.

It might well be, of course – there was always this possibility – that she had misjudged Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster (it was not very likely), and that no mistranslation had occurred at all. The interpretation of clouds might be at the very forefront of knowledge – pushing out a new frontier, covered wagons heading west – for those who sought to heal the minds of the lost, and bring solace to the suffering. He had borne his knowledge in triumph to Longfellow Park, like G. G. Schiffendecken bearing his false teeth (held aloft like the spoils of a conquered kingdom for the acclaim of cheering crowds), and she had cruelly spurned what he had offered to her in a spirit of Christian charity.
Ha!

Another “ia” was evolving here, she felt, to send Mrs. Goodchild scuttling delightedly: nephophobia, a terror of clouds.

Now would be a particularly good time to provoke a Mrs. Goodchild scuttle: the sidewalks were so icy that there was the attractive possibility that she might skid (several hundred yards if she had achieved full scuttling speed) and break a leg. Alice lingered on this thought luxuriously. Mrs. Goodchild – hurtling through the park on her way home – careened across the marble surroundings of the statues in The Forum, skittling a passing group of nuns from The House of the Magdalenes (Alice generously allowed a small tingle of pleasure to Mrs. Goodchild), and collided with the plinth of Albert Comstock’s marbled magnificence. Sickening crunch. First she scuttled, then she skittled, then she broke a leg. One of the Dennistons’ horses had broken its leg and been shot the previous week. She dreamed. She dreamed. And if she dreamed, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster would wish to know all the details.

If there were a phobia for phobias – phobiaphobia? – she probably had it, and she fully intended to hang firmly onto it.

It was her phobia.

Hers
.

No one else should share it.

If she had misjudged him – reading clouds, after all, seemed no more outlandish than some of his other methods of treatment – perhaps she was helping to explore new and unknown territory, a Lewis and Clark of the mind (though Lewis and Carroll might more aptly be seen as her terrain), and “Miss P.” – the very first patient – might feature heavily when the history of this new science came to be written. There would be some impressive term for it – everything Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster did had an impressive term for it (it would not be suitable for him to do if it did not) – and she mused a while. Nebulism? (It was nebulous in every sense.) Nephopsychology? Cloudology (not as impressive as nephopsychology)? Or perhaps they were approaching the moment when Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was at last to seize his moment to be immortalized by naming what was his very own discovery after himself.

She – without knowing it – was a pioneer of Websterism, becoming one of the gods by reading the signs in the clouds, interpreting the shapes she saw in the sky. Webster’s Technique would enter the textbooks, like all the diseases that were named after the men who had discovered them: Weil’s, von Recklinghausen’s, Hodgkin’s, Bright’s, Pott’s, Paget’s, and all the others. How very strange to give one’s name to a disease, particularly when the diseases with the names of men were some of the worst, some of the most frightening. She saw their bearded faces – like the gathering of the poets, like the shareholders of the bank – looking down from the walls of the lecture theatre as she lay upon the table in front of them. The members of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s audience strained forward, moving their heads to obtain a good view, as he indicated the patient lying there below them on display, and prodded her into position. They were all glazed like framed photographs or engravings, and she couldn’t see them properly for the reflections in the glass, her own warped shape reversed in front of her. Pale hands pointed, indicated.

“Note the characteristic posture of the female, with the arms crossed in front of the breasts, the knees pulled up toward the belly …”

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

His dubious methods, and the vigor with which they were peddled, made her think of Griswold’s Discovery, the revolting patent medicine upon which the considerable fortunes of the Griswolds – Mrs. Goodchild’s sister and brother-in-law – were founded. The boxes in which the bottles of Griswold’s Discovery were enclosed bore – as
Proof of Authenticity
(this was the expression employed) – the grim bearded face of Josiah Griswold (not something one would imagine anyone wishing to fabricate). Even if the bottles’ swigged contents had contained the secret of eternal life, the series of testimonials from grateful customers contained within the box would have appeared excessive in their hysterical fulsomeness. Griswold’s Discovery was heavily advertised in a way that made the advertising for Barnum’s museum appear coyly reticent, and the face of Josiah Griswold – many feet high – peered glumly down from heights all over New York City like a jealous god in zealous search of sinners, to startle the unwary, and frighten nervous horses. Scowling, disapproving (“I know what you did to put yourself in that condition!” he was booming disgustedly in his loudest voice, so that everyone would hear him), he soared high above
TARRANT’S SELTZER APERIENT, COLORIFIC
,
Boas & Feathers Renovated & Curled
,
Cigars
,
Painless Dentist
, and
Learn to Waltz in Five Lessons, Guaranteed
. One somehow felt that nothing but the eager offer of ready money could compel him to allow anyone to purchase his panacea.

If it was not the face of Josiah Griswold, it was the face of the Griswold Girl, smiling and seductive, urging the miraculous elixir upon the populace. Almost Schiffendeckenan in her tantalizing toothsomeness, this buxom brunette looked nothing like any of the frog-faced Griswolds. With the Griswolds and the Goodchilds – the husbands and wives and tribes of children all looked identical in their fearsome frog-facedness – one could not help feeling nervously that some deep-rooted Old Testament prohibition was being willfully flouted, the Table of Kindred and Affinity (she had always boggled at the thought of marrying her grandfather) plundered for forbidden consanguinities, and bulgy-eyed twins had been audaciously coupled in matrimony. Here was inbreeding on a Galápagosian scale to set Charles Darwin’s beard aquivering yet again. Fire from heaven could not be long delayed to end this survival of the unfittest, this pedigree of perfidy.

Forget Josiah Griswold.

Forget the Griswold Girl.

Forget Griswold’s Discovery.

Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max – recognizing that their moment had come around yet again – took up their positions to hootchy, to kootchy (kootchies always followed hot upon hootchies), to
pirouette
, to bump, to grind, to dazzle with their glitteringly hypnotic golden teeth.

Buy
these
! Buy
these
!

These –
green, eight-sided, ribbed like poison containers – were the bottles flourished like rabbits from hats by Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster in the fairground flare in front of his wagon. In the dim interiors of the stained-glass-colored bottles, the concentrated clouds stirred and shifted, changing their meanings as they moved, very like a camel, very like a weasel, very like a whale, very like any number of things. The lettering on the bottles’ labels – dark, as elaborate as that on the cover of any sheet music – read
Webster’s Discovery
, and the
Proof of Authenticity
was the bearded face of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster himself. There was no place here for Josiah Griswold; there was no place here for the Griswold Girl; they were elbowed vigorously aside, as the clouds swirled and pressed against the cork-stoppered narrow neck, as if they were jinnees seeking to escape, or the contents of Pandora’s box eager to unleash all the troubles of the world. In
The Water Babies
Charles Kingsley, vigorously expounding his enthusiastic cold-baths muscular Protestantism to his dear little men, had – he’d meet with the wholehearted hear-hear approval of Mrs. Albert Comstock, Dr. Vaniah Odom, the Goodchilds, and, for that matter, Marie Corelli – listed Monks and Popes amongst the contents of Pandora’s box, the ills which flesh is heir to, children of the four great bogies, Self-will, Ignorance, Fear, and Dirt. (He’d also listed Quacks, Unpaid Bills, Potatoes, Bad Wine, and – in a telltale clue to the secret of his fearlessly upright fists-raised posture – Tight Stays.)

“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Lust in a wheedlingly seductive voice.

“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Anger, growing impatient and sounding threatening.

“Release me from the bottle, and I shall grant you three wishes!” cried Envy, whiningly furious that he was not free.