Pinkerton's Sister (78 page)

“… Oceanus Procellarum, Palus Epidemiarum, Lacus Somniorum …”

Storm. Disease. Sleep.

The thing that she had feared would happen, had happened. The molten bronze had been poured around her body, a little part of her at a time, a thin layer of metal, decorative armor plating slowly encasing her whole body, gradually becoming thicker, gradually becoming rigid, until the living girl within was covered, overwhelmed and stifled by the work of art that contained her.

“… Mare Frigoris, Mare Crisium, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium …”

She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t breathe.

Coldness. Crises. Showers. Clouds.

…
after that they stoned him with stones
…

She had turned into her own bronze figure in
The Children’s Hour
, like a ventriloquist’s dummy poised forever upon the knee of the man who manipulated her, made her move in the ways he wanted, put his words into her mouth.

The Children’s Hour
statue was sited near the children’s play area in the park, and the bedraggled survivors of the exotic birds from the
aviary. In a winter storm – it was the second winter of the Celestial City, just before Annie had gone – a branch from an overhanging tree had crashed through the aviary’s glass roof, and most of the fragile birds had been blown out – or had willingly flown out – from the rarefied warmth of their ornate little pavilion into a nighttime blizzard. Small brightly colored frozen corpses had littered the neighborhood for days.

Alice had been awake, sobbing, alone in the schoolroom at the top of the house, terrified of the wind, and of Papa and his “friend.” She – suffering from a cough – had been left behind when Papa had taken Allegra and Edith to Charlotte’s birthday party. Papa had taken them because Mama was away from home, taking Ben to be seen by his grandparents. Mama would never have left Alice alone in the house when she was ill, even if Annie was there, but Papa did not see children when he looked at her and Annie. A Little Woman was not a child. Charlotte had promised to come and see her the following day, and Allegra had taken her birthday present to the party for her, to give to Charlotte.

Her sobbing was interrupted by bouts of coughing, and when she tried to shut out the sound of the wind by hiding her head beneath her pillows, she felt that she was suffocating, and that was how she felt those times perched upon the knee of Papa’s “friend.” She thought that she heard a more distinct, closer sound than that of the wind, a sharp tapping, like fingernails against glass, and the glass vibrated slightly in the wind. She thought of a sudden crash, and the cold air bursting in.

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

They had not said a word to anyone,
anyone
, and the wind was howling outside her window.

If she screamed, she felt that Papa, even though he was up on Hudson Heights, would somehow come back into the room. She thought that he had hidden himself somewhere in the house with his “friend,” their jaws rotating clockwise in unison as they crunched the cachous, as the pinkness dribbled down into their
beards.
Tick, tock
went the crunching clockwork,
tick, tock
.

Annie would be in her room near the kitchen. In novels, servants had rooms in the attics of houses, but Annie’s room was downstairs. It was Alice and her sisters who had the rooms at the top of the house. She wondered if Annie would be sleeping. The wind would not be so strong where she was. Perhaps she had managed to fall asleep. Perhaps she would have a dream to interpret in the morning, though she seemed to have had no dreams for a long time now.

Timidly, she tried to summon Lizzie Galliant, Lizzie Galliant who lived inside her, and who was afraid of nothing. She would know what to do. She had never let her down, until Papa and his “friend” had started to take her to the Celestial City. Papa was stronger than even Lizzie was. She was half afraid to call Lizzie’s name in case, this time, she ignored the summons, and whom would she have then to help her? Alice knew that she herself possessed special powers, and that she was capable of summoning Lizzie to her assistance. She also knew that she must not use these powers until the right time came, otherwise she would lose them. Unlike Aladdin with the ring and with the lamp, she could not summon a jinnee again and again to do her bidding when she was in danger, or when she needed help. It had to be the right time to use her powers, and she would know when that time had come. She would have only one chance.

“Lizzie!” she called quietly, and even the mention of her name in that room seemed to be louder than the noise of the storm: even her name was strong, the name that Alice had given to her. She said it again, and again, more like an incantation than a summons – “Lizzie! Lizzie! Lizzie!” – and felt herself become stronger.

Lizzie would come, Lizzie was coming, and her mien would be at its most imperious.

The wind was inside the room itself: the night light flickered, almost guttered, and threw tall swaying shadows across the walls, like the gas-lamp outside the front parlor window casting moving
patterns on the wallpaper, shifting, glowing, never at rest.

She heard Lizzie’s voice, calm, soothing. “What ails you, child?”

Lizzie was tall, Lizzie was older and wiser than she was, and sometimes she said “you,” and sometimes she said “thee.”

“I am afeard that something is amiss. Be of good cheer. I am here beside you, and we shall face this stern summoner together. Let us arise and show we fear not this dark and tortuous imbroglio. Be not afeard. We shall drive this varlet back whence he came, a broken and pitiful remnant of his former self. I am Lizzie Galliant. Strong men fall powerless before me! I have the power that alone belongs to women! Men’s beards will burst into flame at my approach and flare wondrously!”

Alice had a particular fondness for this last sentence. She would have given a great deal to possess this power, and had practiced for ages, exercising to build up muscles. No glimmer yet within any of her chosen targets. She had focused her powers like a burning glass upon Dr. Vaniah Odom’s beard on Sundays, but there had not been even the faintest of faint flickering red glows from within its tenebrous depths.

She picked up her night light and cautiously moved closer to the window that looked out from the front of the house, a lull in the storm suggesting for a moment that even the forces of nature quailed before the power of Lizzie Galliant. She saw her reflection glowing in the darkness of the window when she drew back the drapes, and realized that the tapping on the window was a snowstorm.

She shaded the light and peered outside into Chestnut Street, her forehead against the cold glass. In the circles of light from the gas-lamps, huge flakes dizzyingly gusted and spun, and miniature drifts had formed upon the windowsill and in the corners of the window. Then she saw, lying on the sill, up against the glass like someone seeking refuge, a tiny red bird, a little tropical flame of warmth, its claws tightly gripped to prevent itself from crying out.
Emboldened by the temporary cessation of the wind, she hurriedly opened the window, and reached through the bars to pick up the almost weightless scrap of color.

Back in her bed, the window closed again, and the drapes tightly drawn, she – with a vague memory of something she had read or heard – placed the little corpse within the bosom of her nightgown. It had been as cold as a glacier-smoothed pebble, recovered after years buried deep within the ice. For several hours she had lain awake, like a young nursing mother, still, hardly daring to move, thinking that the warmth of her body might bring it back to life. It was what Lizzie Galliant would have done. A little pool of water gathered in the hollow at the base of her neck, and wet the edge of her gown.

She was awoken suddenly by a tremendous crash, and leaped up in her bed as the wind screamed around the nursery.

The wind will get you.

She felt something leap within her breast, a tremendous beating of wings, confusedly remembered the red bird, and clutched at the front of her gown. Suddenly they had become huge wings, the wings of an eagle or a swan beating in her face, leaping up and away from her, blundering about the room, crashing against the mirror and thudding into the walls, sweeping the Shakespeare Castle figures and the fragments of glass to the floor with a smash, sweeping down the fallen golden stars, a sense of swarming shadows, the sound of deafening wings. The wind howled again, and she arched back against her pillows, the wings pounding against her chest. Then she realized that the pounding, the beating, was from within herself, was the pounding of her own frightened heart, and that the bird was dead – had been dead ever since she had lifted it into the room – its torn red feathers strewn all down the front of her nightgown and across her sheets.

She began to pick at the red feathers down the white front of her nightgown – so many feathers for so small a bird – and found that what she thought were feathers was in fact blood.
During her sleep – perhaps in holding the small body, fragile as an egg, comfortingly against herself, perhaps in unknowingly convulsing as the sound of the renewed storm increased – she had crushed it. The blood was everywhere, and the little corpse – seemingly made entirely of blood – had disappeared in a spray of redness.

Holding her hands away from herself, a feeling that it was they that were stained, they that would mark what she wore (though they were clean, it was what she wore that was soiled), she slid out of bed on the side toward the squat, windblown candle. She was drawn toward the light, and made herself sit still for a moment, trying to decide which of the noise was from outside the house, and which of it was from inside herself. Gradually, her breathing and her heartbeat steadied, though looking at the rapid flickering of the little flame made her want to breathe more quickly. As she bent toward it, long shadows bowed around the walls and in the mirror. The fire was now ashes, burned out by the intensity of the wind, and the room was very cold.

She didn’t call for Lizzie Galliant again. The right time had not yet come. There would be another time, a worse time, and then would be the time to call for her, the time for the two of them to face the stern summoner side by side, the time when strong men would fall powerless before them, and beards would burst into flame and flare wondrously. She held out her hands a little, palms upraised, to feel a faint warmth from distant flames.

Annie.

Alice picked up her night light, and moved toward the door. There was such a downdraft from the chimney as she passed the fireplace that she shielded the candle, and hunched protectively around it. The snow would come down there first and advance into the room, creeping forward, accumulating in the corners …

Annie …

She had not done this before, but she had not been alone in the house at night before with Annie.

She wanted Annie to cover her warm, to pray to the angels to keep her from harm. She wanted Annie to tenderly kiss her, to fondly caress her. She wanted to fall gently to sleep on her breast, deeply to sleep from the heaven of her breast.

She had read about it.

Now she wanted to do it.

She began to make her way downstairs. On the landings the storm seemed to be all around her. The night light gave such a small area of illumination. She could barely see down to her feet moving on the stairs, and had to feel her way downward. The house was a different place in darkness. She ought to have lighted a lamp. There were no colors on the stairs, no colors anywhere. She should close her eyes, find out what sleepwalking was like, gain an insight into Lady Macbeth, and impress Charlotte by her knowledge. Charlotte was a good friend, and always prepared to be impressed.

“This is ‘slumb’ry agitation,’” she thought. It was always satisfying when words left the page and became real.

“‘She has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’”

That was another example. She was conscious of visualizing two sets of quotation marks for this sentence as she thought of herself speaking it, but there should only be one. The words had ceased to be an extract from a text; they had become a description of what she herself felt.

She couldn’t rub her hands together without putting the night light down on the stairs, and she didn’t want to do that.

“Yet here’s a spot.” There were many of those. She was a guilty woman after a bloody death. One set of quotation marks.

“Wash the blood-stains from your fingers,” she chanted, interposing a little Longfellow into the Shakespeare. “Bury your war-clubs and your weapons.”

The tiles of the hall, and then of the kitchen, were cold under her feet. She could feel the edges of the individual tiles, the rough lines of cement between the smooth tiles. She slid the
soles of her feet about, trying to see if she could distinguish between white tiles and black, and feel which color was the colder. She imagined that the white ought to be the colder, the slippier. It was as if she was walking a great distance across a sheet of ice. She ought to be holding her hands in front of her if she was sleepwalking, but she held them out to the side, like a novice skater taking her first tentative steps out onto a frozen lake. Would she have been able to read words painted on the tiles with the tender skin at the sides of her feet, in the way that her fingers had traced the raised or incised letters of a gravestone?

Infant Daughter of Lincoln and Lucinda Pinkerton.

She slid the soft rounded edges of her feet – first one, then the other – gently across the cold surface in a long looping curve, attempting to balance herself preparatory to Mary Benedictine balletic cavortings.