Pinkerton's Sister (74 page)

A long time seemed to go by when there was silence inside the little brick building.

The House of the Interpreter, like the Palace Called Beautiful, had once been a place where animals were kept. Papa’s “friend” had stopped naming the features of the moon, and the only near sound was the sound of his breathing. During a lull in the wind, she heard footsteps coming toward them, and then Papa’s voice just outside.

The hour had passed.

“There’s something I must tell you,” he was saying to Annie. He never called her by her name, just as he had never called Alice by her name the whole time. He had forgotten who they were. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir.” Annie’s voice was low. It sounded as if she had been crying. He had been rebuking her – cold and sarcastic – for not completing some job properly, hurting her for being a bad girl.

The moon became large and liquid, slightly distorted, Alice seeing it through the showers, through the clouds, and the drops of moisture blurring her vision.

“You must not talk about tonight,” Papa was saying to Annie. His voice became quieter, but more intense. He paused, to ensure that he had Annie’s full attention. “If you tell anyone what has happened, the wind will get you.”

After a pause, he spoke again. Alice imagined him holding Annie under her chin, so that she would look into his face.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you tell anyone what has happened, the wind will get you.”

Papa’s “friend” went outside, and Papa came toward her again. Annie did not look at her. She was standing, very still, with her head lowered, the bad girl standing on a chair at the front of the class for all to gaze upon. The two men seemed to forget that she was there. Papa picked Alice up in the way he had been holding her before, in a sort of seat, and moved out into the open air again, standing under the little clump of trees. Papa’s “friend” followed close behind, as though he wished to hear every word that would be spoken, so that he could memorize them and repeat them later, mimicking the gestures, echoing the words. She could see the moon reflected on the surface of the River of the Water of Life. The darkness in the water, the wind in the trees, seemed to enter her mind. Fir trees sobbed and moaned, holly whistled, ash hissed, beech rustled. Papa seemed very calm, very controlled, as he always did. Whatever he wanted to happen, happened. “Choose
me
!” she’d once wanted to call out when he came into the schoolroom, to gaze at her and her sisters. “Choose
me
!” She’d thought that it would be a sign of love. He took her face in his hand as he had done before, grasping her under the chin. Again he rested the side of his head against the side of her head, and again he tilted her head back until they were both gazing at the moon.

“The Sea of Coldness,” she thought. “The Sea of Crises. The Sea of Showers. The Sea of Clouds.”

“What did you promise Papa?” he asked her softly.

“Every time I look at the full moon I shall think of you, Papa.”

“For always.”

“For always.”

“There’s my Little Woman.”

It became a formula, just like “You’re one of the girls from the statue.”

She didn’t know why – perhaps it was something to do with the way Annie’s head was bowed – but she began to cry, a little burst, short and intense, like a sneeze.

He did not pat her back in the way that Mama would have done. He stood, waiting for her to stop, patiently, a man with all the time in the world – though she knew that the patience lasted only so long, that time had a predetermined end to it – and she soon stopped.

A sudden, stronger blast of wind howled through the branches of the trees, a scream at a pitch it hurt to hear, and she jerked convulsively in Papa’s arms, trying to press her hands against her ears, trying to shut out the noise. Sharp-edged leaves rushed at her face, and she shut her eyes. With his right hand, Papa pulled her hands away from her ears, and put his face close to hers. When she opened her eyes, his face was all she could see. It filled the whole world in front of her, like the moon had.

“You must listen to the wind,” he said.

Then he shouted across to Annie. “Remember what I told you about the wind?” It seemed to be more of a question than a command, but Annie did not answer in words. She nodded her head once, up and down, though Alice could still not see her face.

Then Papa and Papa’s friend took her and Annie back home, because it was late, it was well past Alice’s bedtime, even Annie’s bedtime, and it wouldn’t be good for them to stay out longer.

That was the first time it happened.

It happened numerous times over the months that followed – Papa, Papa’s “friend,” and Annie – through the fall (the fall in which she had walked around and around the Shakespeare Castle with Charlotte, and Mary Benedict), stopping temporarily for the winter. It happened again in the spring and on into the summer, the summer when
The Pilgrim’s Progress
landscape was finally completed, and the performances began. It continued after the performances finished for the year, through into a second fall, and the beginnings of a second winter, and then it stopped because Annie was not there anymore. It happened for more than a year. It happened one last time after Annie had gone, and then it never happened again, and Papa’s “friend” stopped calling. On that last time, there were no indications that it
was
the last time. Nothing was said, there were no promises made to let her know that she was now free, that she need not sit in unmoving silence for those hours, and – for a long time, on into the summer and the following fall, for a year, for years, for long after Annie had gone – she continued to expect that Papa would find her, when she was alone, and tell her that she was going to the Celestial City. That was how it always began.

When Ben was five or six years old she wondered if Papa ever took him for walks to the Celestial City, to meet his “friend” or another “friend,” in the way that he had done so often with her. She looked at her sisters, and wondered about them, trying to catch a hidden expression in their eyes, especially Allegra’s, but it was something she could never ask them. It only ever happened on the way to the Celestial City, or – when the winter set in, and if Mama was not there – in the house, where it had started. Alice would be with Papa’s “friend” in the front parlor, and Papa would take Annie elsewhere in the house. In the evenings – particularly the spring evenings, as they moved away from winter – he would tell her that they were going to the Celestial City, Papa and his Little Woman, Papa’s “friend” and Annie, and, putting down what she was doing – the book she was reading, the piece of music she was trying to learn – she would obediently go into the hall and put on her coat, trying to fill her mind with the words from the book, the sound of the music. These words, this music, would go through her head as she sat on the “friend’s” knee, the girl from the statue.

She was stone.

She was bronze.

Sometimes Papa came in the night, and woke her from sleep. This was her sign that spring had arrived, that the evenings were milder.

They would walk towards the Goodchilds’ house, and go down the side adjoining Verbrugge Woods, toward the door with
Knock And It Shall Be Opened Unto You
on the painted board above it. The color of the newly painted door was green, a slightly darker shade than the original faded green, she had discovered, the first time she was taken there in daylight.

The painted board nearest to the right of the door had the words
I Am Directed By A Man Whose Name Is Evangelist To Speed Me To A Little Gate That Is Before Us, Where We Shall Receive Instructions About The Way
, and the one nearest to the left of the door had the words
Strait Is The Gate That Leadeth Unto Life, And Few There Be That Find It
. She read those words many times, just before they stepped inside the door.

They were painted by the same signwriter who had painted the signs for Comstock’s Comestibles, and he had used the same colors and the same style of alphabet. She half expected to see
SERVICE WITH SINCERITY!
painted on a board upon the gate, a promise of polite and courteous attention from Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Apollyon, and Giant Despair. Perhaps the signwriter had a limited repertoire. She had seen the same colors – red and black – and the same ornate lettering on
Beware Of The Dog
signs all round Longfellow Park, and on all the signs in the park. Papa never knocked on the door. He had a key of his own on every occasion after the first time, and that was how it was Opened Unto him. Always, he removed his hat before they stepped inside. He would feel bad if he forgot to do this.

Sometimes Papa’s “friend” would be waiting on the other side of the Gate. Sometimes he would come with them, meeting them on the way there, loitering somewhere so that Mama would not see him. It was the way that children made assignations with disapproved-of friends, friends – the Huckleberry Finns of Longfellow Park – made all the more attractive by that disapproval. The door would be locked behind them, and they would begin to move out into the world beyond the wall, further and further into the world of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
that had taken shape around them during the first winter, and continued to grow throughout the spring that followed. The Hill Called Difficulty was completed and the excavated earth from the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death was transported nearer the lake to make the Delectable Mountains. The Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death were completed almost simultaneously, and it was on another night of a full moon that they had walked through these valleys for the first time.

They walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and past the mouth of Hell, along a narrow pathway with a deep ditch on the right-hand side, and a quagmire on the left-hand side.

They left the Valley of the Shadow of Death and went into the cleared space in the middle of a group of former stables, where Vanity Fair was being constructed. Carpenters had fitted shop frontages into the buildings, and market stalls – the wood of them still raw and unpainted – were lined up in the little cobbled square.

As the landscape unfolded in the course of the next few weeks, the year moving on toward summer, they traveled further into it – the Plain Called Ease, Lucre Hill, the Pillar of Salt (the big wet tongue slurped yum-yummily), By-Path Meadow – until, in the very early summer, Papa and Papa’s “friend” took her and Annie inside the Celestial City for the first time, crossing the River of Death to reach it. The River of Death was the same small stream that formed the River of the Water of Life further upstream, but here it was wider, spreading out into the flatter land before it began to flow into the lake. There was a stiff evening breeze on this particular evening, and – in the nighttime quietness – they could hear the water of the lake slapping against the shore, like waves on the edge of a small sea, and the leaves of the trees rustling.

Papa was watching Annie closely as they made their way back, sensing her apartness. When they paused, just inside the wall, before they went back through the door and onto the path opposite Verbrugge Woods, he began his catechism. There was always a catechism, unfailingly undergone. It went with the key turning in the lock, the men’s hats being placed back on their heads, the surrounding silences.

“What will happen if you tell anyone what has happened?”

“The wind will get me, sir.”

Annie had been told that a silent nod was no longer sufficient. Papa needed to hear her voice now.

“And will you ever tell anyone what has happened?”

“No, sir.”

“You cannot escape from the wind. You know that, don’t you? Wherever you try to go, whatever you try to do, the wind will always find you. Even a gentle wind, even a breeze, barely enough to ruffle the leaves on the trees.”

He lowered his voice, and whispered.

“Even a whisper.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Especially a whisper.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Pilgrim’s Progress
landscape was finally completed, one month after Alice and Annie had been taken all the way to the newly converted Celestial City for the first time by Papa and his “friend,” and the annual summer performances began. “We’re going to the Celestial City,” he had said the first time they’d gone through the Gate – back in the previous fall – but the City had not been built then, and they had moved only gradually through the pages of the book, journeying further and further as the toiling frogs labored ever closer to the edge of the lake.

The Pinkertons were invited to the very first of the week’s performances, a gala opening, as special guests of the Goodchilds. The whole family went. Servants were also invited. It was felt to be a wholesome and educational experience, particularly suitable for the servant class, although – as the Reverend Goodchild delicately phrased it – “Our dusky brethren would, I am sure, be more comfortable within a religious experience with their own people.” They had no servants with them, however. Annie had stayed at home to care for Ben. The Finches also went – baby Linnaeus, like baby Ben, remaining at home in the care of a servant – and Alice was pleased when Charlotte came up beside her as they stood in the forefront of the crowd near the door in the wall. She’d much rather be with her than with Allegra and Edith, who – unaccountably, most annoyingly – were still there. She had really been counting on the company of Ishmeelites from Gilead to arrive with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh (she’d wanted to find out what myrrh looked like: she’d seen gold and – less easy to find, this – frankincense) to carry them away to enslavement in Egypt. They could so easily have been rolled up in carpets – feet kicking furiously – and slotted conveniently between a camel’s humps, but the merchantmen had let her down, the wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men.

The Reverend Goodchild was making a speech, but she heard little of what he was saying.

She was looking at what she had once seen by moonlight.