Pinkerton's Sister (7 page)

— that was what she was saying —

You just knew that The Bearded Ones would have been there. It was the sort of thing they’d have hated to miss.

Papa had not been there on that day — it had been just her and Grandpapa — and she had peeped into Papa’s empty office, feeling as she did when she peeped into his study at home, feeling that she ought not to be there, seeing a place without him and realizing that such a thing was possible. Without him, the place should not exist. It was dark in the office, a feeling of blinds drawn down in mourning, the views from the window partially obscured by the statues, the backs of the women facing away from him, and it smelled of him, the smell of a tobacco-smoke impregnated beard, as if he were announcing his hidden presence.

I am here in the room.

Can you find out whereabouts I am?

I shall leap out.

I shall pounce.

There were maps in his office, also, as there were in Grandpapa’s, but the maps in his office were of the world as it no longer was, the world as it had been before the Civil War (
Civil!
), the world as he wished it to be once more. Papa lived in a time of his own creating, where even the clock —
tick-tock
went the wall-clock ponderously, as big as a clock at a railroad station — moved at a pace he dictated. He would tick the time when it was allowed to tick-tock. Without his say-so, the hands of the clock would cease to move, the pages of the calendar would not be ripped away, and there would be an unbroken shaded silence in which nothing moved. Some strangers were named Mr. Robertson or Mr. Faulconbridge or “the man at number seventy-three”; some strangers were named Papa.

Iphigenia
had been the name of one of the earliest of the wooden sailing ships of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company, and the figurehead of the ship was in Grandpapa and Grandmama’s garden. There was what Grandpapa called his “quarterdeck” at the back of their house, and here — at the end of a long, narrowing wooden piazza — was the figurehead, with the ship’s wheel mounted in front of it. She would lie on the lawn beneath it, looking up at the calm, sad, downcast face surrounded by drifting clouds, imagining that she was floating in the air beneath the rooftop sculptures of the office, trying to induce a feeling of weightlessness, of vertigo, rather like the way in which she tried to lose her sense of direction by turning round in the darkness beneath her bedclothes. Sometimes she lay on top of the figurehead on the warm, smooth wood, in the afternoon summer sun, looking down through half-closed eyes at the grass beneath her, trying to see the waves beneath, trying to feel the undulation of the ship’s movements, herself moving away from the place where she was. She could hear the wind in the branches of the trees, the snapping of the flag on the flagpole. It was the sound of the sea nearby, beyond the bottom of the garden.

The bearded faces were blurred. The photograph of the bearded poets in
An American Anthology
was covered by a protective sheet of tissue paper, like the illustrations in her Bible, and The Bearded Ones peered through, a caravan of Old Testament prophets stranded in a sudden desert sandstorm.

(What
was
the collective noun for prophets? A clairvoyance? A prognostication?)

They hovered in the air above her, a mirage in the desert air, far from the oasis, clouds covering the sun. The air became cooler, chillier, and a cold current rippled through the room like wind across a cornfield, rustling the curtains.

Only Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman looked directly into the camera. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were all photographed in profile, giving them the appearance of suspects posed by a police photographer:
THIS POET IS WANTED!
Bryant and Holmes, like shortsighted duelists, stared into each other’s eyes almost nose to nose. They couldn’t possibly miss at this range. The remaining three poets — John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Sidney Lanier — favored the kind of expression employed by men faced by someone whom they did not wish to acknowledge, eyes focused evasively to one side, gazing intensely into the middle distance, but seeing nothing. It was the expression people were increasingly starting to assume when they were being photographed, pretending that the camera was not there, and had caught them unaware. Whitman — clearly no gentleman — was wearing a hat, and no necktie, but this was to be expected of a man who matily abbreviated his name to Walt, insisting upon familiarity. Billy Bryant? Olly Holmes? Sid Lanier? Not even the biggest of beards could possibly compensate for such summarily clipped forenames. It would compromise the integrity of the very poetry, threaten the meter, imperil the rhymes.

Seeing these beards fluffily flocked together, like an illustration for
Far from the Madding Crowd
— Gabriel Oak, you felt, was just out of sight, grasping his crook like a Good Shepherd (odd to link crooks with goodness) — you could understand why altocumulus clouds were sometimes described as sheep clouds. They crowded the sky with baa-baa bossiness, three bags full with self-importance. Black sheep brought storms.

Beards and three names were not compulsory for composers, as they were for poets. Most of the greatest of composers — Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, the list could be extended almost indefinitely — seemed to thrive frugally with one name and no beard, though there were those who, poet-like, were possessed of enormous beards, especially if they came from Russia. It must have been because of the severe winters of their homeland, but the great Russian composers — like the great Russian novelists — seemed to have thick beards like detachable accessories hanging down over the front of their fur coats in an attempt to keep warm. The novelists wore them proudly, like Siberian sporrans, in Highland homage to Sir Walter Scott, their distinguished predecessor in their chosen profession. Some of their beards were so huge that they gave the impression that packs of starving wolves — drawn out from deep within the mystical Russian forests — were hurling themselves at their throats.

Perhaps, like St. Wilgefortis, she should pray for a miraculous beard. Unlike St. Wilgefortis, she did not need a miraculous hairy outgrowth in order to repel the unwanted attentions of men. She seemed to manage this effortlessly with no help whatsoever from God. It was one of the many gifts she possessed.

All Saints’ Church contained some appalling sights (not least the Goodchilds and the Griswolds: some churches featured gargoyles, All Saints’ had the Goodchilds and the Griswolds), but the stained-glass windows took some beating. St. Wilgefortis — with a beard like a large hairy apron she had inadvertently tied around herself in the wrong position prior to washing the china — was a mere commonplace sight, someone you would pass in the street without a second glance, compared with some of the other saints depicted: St. Erasmus, St. Pharaildis, St. Bartholomew, St. Agatha …

The things that were happening to them! The things they were pictured doing!

There was such richness from which to choose, and she had spent most of her Sundays studying them. This had helped to block out the voice of Dr. Vaniah Odom, and then — in more recent years — the Reverend Goodchild’s voice.

The artist who worked on them had been a Bearded One with another three-ring circus of a name (they appeared to be compulsory, a different act in each ring — bespangled elephants trumpeting, high-wire acts spinning in mid-air, plumed horses bowing their heads — too much action for the eyes to take in all at once): Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton (the surname did not really live up to the two preceding names, and rather weakened the effect), the father of Mrs. Alexander Diddecott. Elphinstone Dalhousie Barton not only took the name of the church all too literally (trying his utmost to include — with pedantic correctness — a representation of every possible known saint), but proved to be equally literal-minded in his depiction of their symbols and their instruments of martyrdom. He reserved the largest expanses of glass for the saints who had met the goriest ends, and depicted their spectacular demises with an unflinching detail that would not have been out of place in one of the more advanced medical textbooks. They made the most luridly illustrated edition of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
seem tame and tentative. Sunday after Sunday she had examined them with a sprightly interest, effortlessly replacing the face of her chosen saint with the face of Dr. Vaniah Odom or the Reverend Goodchild, lingering over the depiction of his disemboweling, his decapitation, his death by swords, by arrows, by axes, by lions. It was an impressive illustration of the consolation that could be found in art.

Soon — for the greater glory of Goodchild — the congregation would be moving to a new church, and today would be the last service in the original All Saints’. She would miss the bizarre sights in the windows of the old church.

“A special service,” was the way that the Reverend Goodchild had described today’s planned events, “a very
special
service,” and something in the way he had stressed “special” (evil cackling held at bay, one felt, solely by the exercise of strict self-control) seemed to suggest — at the very least — that human sacrifice might be involved. She wouldn’t put it past him. She would probably be the chosen victim, selected like some unfortunate cabin boy clutching the crumpled
X
-marked piece of paper, another black spot with an implacable summons, as the starving shipwrecked survivors of the crew edged salivatingly closer in the overcrowded boat. Ah well, selection as a scapegoat would make a morning in All Saints’ more interesting than usual. She certainly possessed the whiskers for the part, William Holman Hunt’s painting startlingly given shape. She would be a living reenactment of one of the more obscure martyrdoms in the stained-glass windows, like a tiny extract from a mystery play in mediæval England. She liked to see the positive side of things.

— she hummed to herself —

The first mate and the — how appropriate! — ship’s cook closed in on the cabin boy, smiling with unconvincing friendliness, trying not to show their teeth too much, their fingers starting to edge into the pockets where they’d secreted their knives and forks, conveniently close to hand. With the very tips of their fingers they discreetly eased up the flaps, their smiles broadening, gorging Jimmy exerting his every power of gorgeousness. Little Billee — looking deeply suspicious — eyed their approach unenthusiastically, bracing himself to repulse their advances, clenching his fists and scowling. His mother had warned him about this sort of thing.

Many of the windows had already been removed in preparation for the demolition of the church, and were piled in packing cases along the aisles; saints prepared for shipping like some esoteric export line. For the past few weeks members of the congregation had had to contend with the hazards of ill-stacked saints as they made their way to their pews, barking their shins, catching their elbows. Workmen — there was another big top, the pale crowded faces staring upward, hands pointing — would soon swing across to saw at the wooden angels in the roof, and they would come crashing down to earth like a scene from
Paradise Lost
as the church fell, shooting stars plunging downward.

Make a wish! Make a wish!

Years ago, as a little girl, she had once seen angels being jerkily hauled up into the air in a department store (had it been A. T. Stewart’s?) one morning about a month before Christmas. It was a scene that ought not to have been visible during shopping hours, and — when she had suddenly come across it, holding her mama’s hand — it had been like seeing behind the scenery, pulling aside the striped front of the booth at a Punch and Judy show, or (it had occurred to her more recently, as she read
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
to her niece Mildred) tipping over the screen to reveal Oz, the Great and Terrible, to be a little old man with a bald head. There had been a rotunda rising the full height of the building — four or five stories — to a glass roof, and it was toward this glass, darkly silhouetted against the gray November light, that the angels were ascending, rotating slowly like life-size wind-blown tree decorations.

On the ground floor, like formally attired tug-of-war teams, young male assistants in dark suits were heaving away together on ropes. “Yo-ho-heave-ho! Yo-ho-heave-ho!” This was the Babel sound in the heart of that temple of commerce.

Hauling up angels was such a change (the opportunity all too rarely presented itself) from their usual dull routine that the young men (there were dozens of them, freed from the close attentions of the floorwalkers) were becoming noisy and excited, competitively eager to see their angel reach the roof first. The Babel-like babblings were rising to a roar. Bets were probably being exchanged. Angels and archangels may have gathered there,/Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air. Bells should be ringing out in mighty peals as they ascended, as the ropes were pulled. There was something nautical and yo-ho-ho — though not very well drilled — about the young men pulling on the ropes in unison, rather like the group of men disemboweling St. Erasmus in the stained-glass window to the right of their pew in All Saints’. Hooray, and up she rises! Hooray, and up she rises! Huge white sails should be unfolding like enormous wings, snapping out and bellying in a strong north-by-north-west wind. Eight or nine angels, spaced out around the central light-well, lurched bumpily upward, swaying from side to side, their heads leaning too far forward, like a gathering of feathered suicides deciding where to jump, or — already dead — the dangling corpses after a mass hanging, crows shot by a farmer to deter other scavengers.