Pinkerton's Sister (57 page)

The sevenfold voices of the Sins wheedled and threatened and whined, and – behind their voices – there were countless other voices clamoring to be heard.

Me!

Me!

Me!

Hilde Claudia, Theodore, and Max were untiring.

Peep, peep!

O.
The right arm was held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the left arm was held flat horizontally across the front of the body.

Peep, peep!

U.
The two arms were held up and away from the body at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was the same positioning as for “Attention!” – the gesture to stop a runaway horse – but the arms, this time, remained still, the king or the president ungreeted.

Peep, peep!

D
…

S
…

I see a “C”!

I see an “L”!

I see an “O”!

I see a “U”!

I see a “D”!

I see an “S”!

And what can I see? …

“
Clouds
?” she asked, doubtfully, as he explained what it was she had to do.

“Yes, clouds. Tell me what you can see in those clouds, Miss Pinkerton.”

Cloud-reading had arrived.

She sat in her chair at the window, and gazed up into the sky, above the statues and the tops of the trees in the park, and told Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster what it was she could see. Sometimes, when she was not striving to read the titles of his books, she really did try to see shapes in the sky. It was as if she were Moses on Mount Sinai, and the LORD was coming unto her in a thick cloud. The LORD sat behind her with his notebook, with his angelic host behind him, buoyed up by their beards, they – also – floating high above the world, and she read the clouds, as she would later read the pictures. The people would hear when he spoke with her, and believe him for ever. Hypnotism, clouds, pictures, dreams. There would be thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud. Theodore and Max would – slightly muffled by the intervening door and portiÈre – play their trumpets in the waiting room to ensure the appropriate atmosphere for godlike revelations. It helped no end if you lulled patients into the right mood. Spurning their mother’s heritage, they patriotically opted for the March King rather than the Waltz King, John Philip Sousa rather than Johann Strauss the Younger, and
Semper Fidelis
and
The Stars and Stripes Forever
accompanied the ministrations of their papa.

She would draw near unto the thick darkness where God was, and the talking cures would bring release. She would talk, and she would be cured. The words were something bad inside her that had to be spoken for her to feel better. In an unforeseen reversal of the traditional arrangement, she had become a child in bed – that was how she felt – telling bedtime stories to a listening adult – week after week – as the adult listened with rapt attention, taking notes to satisfy his remembrance the more strongly.

The adult spoke no “Once upon a time.”

The adult spoke no “happily ever after.”

The adult was the listener, not the speaker, and it was the child who spoke of things seen in the air, things in dreams and pictures, the child who spoke the bad words, described the bad things. She spoke in the dimmed room, a room like a child’s summertime room prepared for sleeping.

As she spoke, no one else visible, she could hear the
scratch, scratch, scratch
of the pen-nib behind her, like the sound of the birds’ little curved claws rattling on the bark of the tree. It was like talking to herself.

Well, that was – after all – just as it should be.

That was – after all – the first sign of madness.

That was another title she had saved, and was anxious to use before anyone else did.

It was
her
title.

The First Sign of Madness
. (Or would it be “The First Sign of Madness”? Italics for a novel, and quotation marks for a short story. That was the system of punctuation she followed. She always underlined the titles in her lists, the handwritten symbol of italics, wildly ambitious to write nothing shorter than a novel, novel after novel, a Clarissa Harlowe whose quill was never at rest.)

There were so many unwritten books lined up, waiting.

She should talk more –

Scratch, scratch, scratch

– and the books would be written from her dictation.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster had been Lady Macbeth’s doctor. How unlike him not to have insisted on being named, but to remain just an anonymous Doctor of Physic.

– he’d confided in the Waiting-Gentlewoman –

Unnatural deeds.

Tick.

Unnatural troubles.

Tick.

Infected minds.

Tick. Tick.

Secrets.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

She possessed all the symptoms of infection.

After all those ticks came all those tics, the twitchy outer manifestations of the stricken, the nervous afflictions of the neurasthenic, the restlessness in which she could not be still (the sheets around her as ridged as a sea-washed shore), in which she could not empty her mind of all thought (thoughts swarmed upon her), in which she could not sleep. Sleep brought dreams.

These terrible dreams/That shake us nightly.

Tic. Tic. Tic.

“… More needs she the divine than the physician.”

The Reverend Goodchild – recognizing his cue – hurtled into position, panting slightly, teeth gigantically exposed. He’d (
Phew!
) know all about foul whisp’rings. He’d effect a miraculous cure by inserting a large bottle of Griswold’s Discovery into her mouth, and – the tics intensified at the very thought – the laying on of his grubby, slightly clammy, hands.

Mrs. Goodchild had not liked the sound of the talking cure. It had sounded too like something – whatsit? –
Catholic
to her, the whisperings in the darkness of a confessional, crisscross bars of shadow across the face of the priest on the other side of the grille. Mrs. Goodchild would dearly love to
grill
a priest. When she barbecued something she liked it to be almost black, charred beyond recognition, like a body recovered from a conflagration, a lightning-struck sinner comprehensively sizzled by God at his tetchiest. When she grilled a sausage – “Don’t play ignorant with me!” she’d start off challengingly. “You’re going to answer
every
question I ask you!” – you could sketch an attractive landscape with the stick of charcoal that resulted. She’d be the most inquisitive member of the Spanish Inquisition (Protestant Division), grilling away until the atmosphere of the dungeon was black with meatily flavored clouds of smoke. There were the clouds again. There was no getting away from the clouds, and their meaning was all too clear. The thumbscrews, the rack, and the Iron Maiden (Mabel Peartree thoroughly enjoyed her little part-time position) were neatly lined up in readiness for the next stage of the torturing. The thrill of the grill, then the thrill of the kill, slow, methodical, infinitely prolonged. They’d soon get those Monks and Popes shoved back into Pandora’s box, blackened and barbecued, shriveled, crisped and crackling at the edges.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”

Father Goodchild, his fingers raised to bless, his rosary rattling like Mrs. Albert Comstock’s earrings, leaned toward her.

The talking cure had also sounded Jewish.

Neither of these was a recommendation in the eyes of Mrs. Goodchild. She did not explain why she thought it sounded Jewish, though Mrs. Albert Comstock’s deeply felt description of Svengali hypnotizing Trilby had made a lasting impression upon her.

Mrs. Goodchild and Mrs. Albert Comstock always seemed to know the latest treatment that was being tried upon her, though neither Alice nor her mother told anyone what was happening. Clearly Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster entertained his hosts over candlelit dinners with amusing descriptions of Alice Pinkerton’s latest peculiarities in the intervals when he was not playing on his banjo.

When the wine flowed with especial freedom he might very well combine the two, and sing comic songs about her, accompanying himself on the banjo. As the most fashionable treatises on etiquette explained, the most dependable manner in which to ensure popularity in Longfellow Park, the certain shortcut to a crammed-to-bursting engagement book, was to entertain all and sundry by regaling them with the most intimate and trusted secrets of other people’s hearts. A guest with this to offer was guaranteed a good seat at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, and the biggest plate in 5 Hampshire Square piled high with the most enormous of all the pies produced by Comstock’s Comestibles. Not just the Comstock Jumbo, Titanic, Monumental, or Gargantuan, but the Comstock Colossus, containing as much meat as Noah’s Ark (including Noah himself, Shem, Ham – his very name dribblesomely weighted with promise – and Japheth, and their wives) and approximately the same size, every last cubit meat-crammed to bursting. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster liked to crunch on a Colossus, and he possessed the party piece that guaranteed him guest of honor status. Mrs. Albert Comstock would keep those Colossuses (those Colossi?) coming, shunting them on like entire freight trains packed with whole herds of Chicago-bound cattle, and he’d dish the dirt as the gravy gushed down his chin, lending a youthful tinge to his beard. If he squeezed his beard out when he reached home, little Theodore and little Max could feast for a week on gallon-sized bowls of well-heated beef tea, flourishing with weed-like rapidity on the rich sustenance thus afforded them. The brazen sound of their Day of Judgment trumpets would deepen, as their ever-manlier lungs grew stronger.

He would find plenty of amusing things to sing about her. The Goodchilds and Mrs. Albert Comstock were the audience taking notes (they’d take
plenty
of notes), the faces peering down at her from high above, elbows and sniggers fully activated, teeth glintingly on display. She was surprised that Mrs. Goodchild didn’t go into more vigorous attack, bursting into the consulting room on Wednesday mornings with the air of a woman accidentally losing her bearings on some mission of mercy, those missions so movingly epitomizing her greatness of heart. She could have tiptoed through with I’m-not-really-here-don’t-mind-me sort of gestures, listening avidly as she sashayed through. Mrs. Goodchild – decidedly – was showing signs of losing her subtle touch for snooping.

“I can see …”

“Yes?”

“I can see …”

“Tell me what you can see …”

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

She was like the poor Indian in Alexander Pope whose untutored mind saw God in clouds – a gift of discernment not exclusive to Moses – or heard him in the wind. She pictured the Indian as a Red Indian, gazing at the clouds to read the huge smoky messages – capital-lettered with eighteenth-century importance – inscribed across the sky from some vast conflagration consuming the plains, as buffalo herds thundered past in panic, hotly pursued by the ghost of Albert Comstock wielding a chopper, eagerly putting into practice his plans for the Comstock Gigantic, the Comstock Stupendous …
Comstock’s Comestibles For A Buffalo Biggie! Grab Your Grub Now!
She thought of the same Indian in Othello’s last speech, the one who threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.

The chair in which she sat at Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s was the same sort of chair as the one in which she sat in Mrs. Albert Comstock’s box at the opera, with the same straight legs, the same faded figures in the tapestry of its seat and back. Sometimes – though it featured no tapestry, was without the half-discernible groupings of gods and goddesses, the minor figures of mythology – she experienced the same sensation when she sat in the chair in the dentist’s, as G. G. Schiffendecken (smelling of peppermint, grunting with concentration, seeing nothing but teeth: other human beings existed solely as containers for teeth) labored in the darkness of her mouth to extract the source of infection. He always gave the impression of being a more hygienic version of Samuel Cummerford, a rival for the automobile salesman, his head hidden as he bent well down, pottering about, poking and peering under a lifted hood with well-washed hands. It was always advisable to count your teeth after you’d been in his chair: he was fully capable of surreptitiously attempting to extract one or two teeth on each visit, bringing ever closer the day when you would be driven to purchase a complete artificial smile, and sent out into the world a transformed person, newly toothsome in every possible meaning of the word. Patients would stumble out into the street, their faces curiously contorted as they – “un, ooh, ee” – touched their teeth one by one with their tongues, making a cautious inventory of the contents of their mouths (had he smashed? had he grabbed?) – “oar, ive, ix …” In bed that night they’d be doing this over and over, a new method of inducing slumber.