Pinkerton's Sister (64 page)

Like Mrs. Archbold in
Hard Cash
, like Dr. Severance of Staten Island, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster knew that a whistle was an essential piece of equipment when you were grappling with loonies. He’d blow upon it – when the necessary time arrived (it was only a matter of waiting) – and two men would come quietly into the room.

One of the men would begin to speak to her.

“Be calm, my dear young gentlewoman …”

“Shh! Shh!” the other man said to her soothingly. (He should be patting her on the back. He should be saying, “There, there!”)

“… Don’t agitate yourself. You have been sent here for your good; and that you may be cured …”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean?” she’d cry. “Are you mad?”

“No,” one of the men would answer. “No …”

“Shh!” said the other man again. “Shh!”

(
Pat, pat.
“There, there!”)

“…
We
are not …”

They’d advance toward her, their arms extended on either side of them, like farmers shooing their animals down the tunnel into the slaughterhouse, cutting off the avenues of escape. Now they’d both be making little “Shh! Shh!” sounds, men attempting to calm a troubled sleeper.
There! There! There
was where they wanted her to go, down into the dark, brick-lined straw-strewn tunnel that was the entrance to the labyrinth,
pat, pat
on her back as they guided her the way they wanted her to go.

(She would not – in fact – be walking across to 11 Park Place on Wednesday morning next week.

(She would not be surrounded by men who had been summoned by a blown whistle.

(She would not be
taken away
to the Webster Nervine Asylum.

(She would be traveling there voluntarily, carrying her bags, a woman setting off for an eagerly anticipated and much-needed holiday, walking down the zigzag path to the Hudson – crossing and re-crossing, slightly further down each time, the places where she had already been – on her way to the tunnel under the railroad-track that led to the boat landing. The last time she had made this journey, her mother had gone with her. This time she would be alone.

(S. Weir Mitchell’s method was waiting for her. Then she would be alone no longer. By electing to make this journey, by choosing to go to what she knew would be waiting for her, surely she was providing the definitive proof that – despite her private protestations – she
was
mad, mad in a way that could not ever be cured?

(At the rail of the boat, as it began its journey up the Hudson, she’d look back the way she had come. News – as it had a habit of doing at Longfellow Park – had got around, and the zigzag path was lined with crowds, fluttering with white handkerchiefs.

(“Goodbye, Alice!” Mrs. Albert Comstock was booming, her handkerchief flapping like the mainsail of an Indiaman. “Have a nice time with the loonies!”

(“Goodbye, Alice!” Mrs. Goodchild was shouting. To demonstrate her sadness, she dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief between waves.

(Dab.

(Wave.

(Dab.

(Wave.

(Each brisk flick of the handkerchief dried it efficiently in time for the next dab.

(“Goodbye, Alice!” the Reverend Goodchild bellowed beside his wife. His handkerchief was so squelchily soiled, so heavily cargoed with unidentifiable lumpishness, that it was incapable of waving. Like a flag in mourning, it tastefully demonstrated the sincerity of his sadness. It hung heavily from his hand, swaying slightly, a dangling and dangerously overloaded diaper, like several hundredweight of cheese curdling slowly into full-flavored maturity.

(“Goodbye, Alice!”

(“Goodbye, Alice! Good luck with the gibbering!”)

“Be calm …”

“Don’t agitate yourself …”

“Shh!…”

“Shh!…”

“You have been sent here for your good …”

“You may be cured …”

“
We
are not mad …”

“Shh!…”

“Shh!…”

“Listen to my voice …”

“Be still …”

“Empty your mind of all thought …”

“Sleep …”

(There was a
buzzing
, like the electric bell at 11 Park Place. The door opened, and she was in the dimness of the hall, the lesser light on the other side of the looking-glass. Max and Theodore –
bekannt bei alt und jung im ganzen Land
– scampered closer at her approach, fingers rummaging thoughtfully up their noses. Long-legged and disheveled-haired, skipping and leaping, rich in dubious habits, they looked like the illustration for a new set of verses in
Struwwelpeter
. What was going to happen to them would not be good.

(Good.

(Each
Vogelfänger
faced an uncertain future, a dark fate.

(
Cheerful Stories and Funny Pictures for Good Little Folks
. That’s what Heinrich Hoffman – a man who obviously understood what brought a smile to the faces of young children – promised, as he lopped and mutilated and drowned and, especially cheerful and funny, this one, set light to entire classrooms full of naughty juveniles.

(
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

(Cooee! Max!

(Cooee! Theodore!)

(“Alice …”)

(
Buzzzz!

(The buzzing intensified.

(It was …

(It was …

(It was
their
electric bell.

(It was …)

Loud and clear, shrilly insistent, it finally burst free from the brackets that had muffled it.

It was Charlotte, ringing at the front door, singing “Alice, where art thou?”

Arm in arm, she and Charlotte would walk to All Saints’. That afternoon they would say goodbye to Ben. It might still be light.

It was time for church, time to brace herself for Dr. Vaniah Odom (“back by popular request”) and the Reverend Goodchild.

It was time for the last service in All Saints’ before the church was demolished.

It was time for …

It was time for Alice to go to bed. She had survived the combined forces of Dr. Vaniah Odom and the Reverend Goodchild – it had been a near thing – and now it was time for bed.

It had been a little later, a little darker, than she had imagined when they had said goodbye to Ben, some time ago. The darkness had made it seem later than it was. Kate had been there, wearing the Roman scarf that Ben had brought back for her from the time he had been in Italy with Joseph. Vivid in crimsons and blues, it had added a little color to a dull day. Ben had promised to bring back each of them something pretty from Japan: a screen, a vase, a kimono.

As she walked upstairs,
A Child’s Garden of Verses
was in her head again, as it had been that morning. She had gone down in darkness, and now it was dark again as she made her way back without turning up the gas. The darkness had barely lifted all day, and the lack of light had oppressed her. She had gone down without candlelight in the dark morning, but now candlelight accompanied her on her way back up the stairs. She had lighted it from the pilot light. The almost full moon shone through the colored glass of the landings, but drained away all the color.

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall.

That was how Robert Louis Stevenson had described it, a clock-face that was brilliantly illuminated, but so far away that the time could not be read.

This clock-face had no
II
. No
IIII
. No
VI
or
IX
, and no hands with black ace-of-spades-shaped tips – like miniature versions of the railings outside Miss Iandoli’s house – moving round and round the dial, muted chiming every quarter of an hour. Lewis Carroll ought to have written an
Alice
story about time, beginning with Alice searching for a missing kitten – it would be the black kitten, and not the white kitten – by stepping inside the tall case of a pendulum clock. Lewis Carroll would play with the concepts of memory and things already seen: he’d rehearsed this in Alice’s conversation in the dark wood with the White Queen – every single thing crooked, all over pins – in
Through the Looking-Glass
. Strangely reduced in size, as if – yet again – she had drunk from the little bottle labeled “DRINK ME,” she would stand in the echoing wood-scented darkness of the base, with the dimly glinting machinery of the weights, chains, and pendulum suspended high above her, as Alice entered the world of Edgar Allan Poe.

– she sang under her breath (terrible dreams shook them nightly, they were troubled with thick-coming fancies that kept them from their rest, the written troubles of the brain weighed upon the heart) –

No tick.

No tock.

Silence.

The old man had so much blood in him.

She should have been stained first red, and then green, and then green, and then blue. She studied her hands, the hands that were filled with darkness in the flickering candlelight and should have been changing color, step by step; she studied her shadow. The moon was big and bright, but the sky seemed utterly black, as empty of stars as the angel-guarded ceiling of All Saints’. The wind had barely abated all day, and was still howling around the house. The candleflame fluttered. She’d memories of Lady Macbeth-like moments on the stairs, wandering up and down, like someone sleepwalking, carrying a candlestick.

– she was thinking, as she approached the schoolroom door –

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Nod was where Cain went in the Bible after he had killed his brother. He was the son of Adam and Eve, the first murderer. Adam and Eve stood hand in hand on one of the Dutch tiles around the fire, but they were pictured when they were still childless, before they were driven out of Paradise. The LORD told Cain that he was cursed from the earth, which had opened her mouth to receive his brother’s blood from his hand; when he tilled the ground, it would not henceforth yield unto him its strength; a fugitive and a vagabond would he be in the earth. Cain said unto the LORD that his punishment was greater than he could bear, because he had been driven from the face of the earth, and hidden from the face of the LORD. There was a mark upon him so that everyone would know who he was. Because they knew who he was, they would not kill him, not bring his suffering to an end.

She had imagined him when she was a little girl, bent over in the land of Nod, east of Eden, his hands covering his face like someone ashamed to be seen. It was a desert place, where a reddish dust blew in the wind which darkened the sun and brought night closer, irritating the eyes so that tears ran down the dirty face of the man who had killed his brother, leaving smudged lines. In the land of Nod he dreamed bad dreams, and wept. No one would kill him, and he had to go on living.

In
Hard Cash
, when Alfred Hardie was taken to the third private lunatic asylum, a huge old mansion fortified into a jail, he was conducted through passage after passage, through door after door, and along a covered way to the noisy ward, to the singing, the roaring, the howling like wolves. As he lay on his filthy truckle bed, one of the maniacs sang, and shouted, “Cain was a murderer! Cain was a murderer!” all night long, over and over again, the one thing he still knew.

I had a dream last night.

Tell me your dream, Miss Pinkerton.

She stepped into the schoolroom. The drapes had not been drawn across the windows, and the cold moonlit pattern of the windowpanes was thrown across the floor, and angled onto the bed. A shadow moved before her.
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

She lit the lamp, and turned up the flame, driving the shadows into the corners of the room, fading the moonlight.

She blew out the candle.

The curl of the smoke, its smell.

Soon she would not hear voices anymore.

Soon she would be still.

Soon she would empty her mind of all thought.

Soon she would sleep.

And when she slept, she would dream.

She bent her head to one side, and then the other, as she removed her earrings.

One Ash Wednesday, these words had gone through her mind over and over at Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s, in the way she used to repeat words to herself when she was memorizing them, or trying to shut out thoughts.

“Listen to my voice,” he was saying. “Be still. Empty your mind of all thought. Sleep …”

“Try as I like to find the way,” she was hearing inside herself, “/I never can get back by day,/Nor can remember plain and clear,/The curious music that I hear …”

Curious Music
. That was one on her list of titles. Another one, from “Keepsake Mill” was
A Sin Without Pardon
. “Here we shall meet and remember the past” was the last line of this poem, as if the place existed only as a source of memory, and would not be there without the weight of what once had been.