Pinkerton's Sister (93 page)

When the bright lamp is carried in,/The sunless hours again begin.

These were night thoughts.

All that she could hear was the wind, and the windblown snow pattering against the windows. Linnaeus’s painting, hanging on the wall opposite, was reflected in the mirror. There it was, above and beyond the face of Edgar Allan Poe, the face of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, like a glimpse into another room, distant, out of reach, hanging in a corridor in the Looking-glass House, its emptiness deepening a sense of inner silence.

She turned, and walked over to it.

Most nights, most mornings, she stood in front of it for a while.

It was not a painting that became unseen in the room, a part of the furniture, not seen because seen so often. Like a window, like a door, it was something of which she was always aware, opened anew each day to something different. It was not there for its size, for its color, for its blending in with what was already present.

She felt the sensation that she had felt that morning in the hall, just after she had imagined the copy of the
Hudson Valley Chronicle
lying on the tiles, with the engravings of The Bearded Ones, and thought of the words of “Goblin Market,” the two sisters, Lizzie and Laura.

“I am Lizzie Galliant,” she said, repeating the words she had said before she had gone down to Annie’s room on another night of snow, the words she had not said for years. “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!”

It would be like the scene of the dancing in
She
, where the mummified corpses of the long-dead were set ablaze like enormous flaming torches to act as illumination, or the scene in
Quo Vadis?
where Nero illuminated his pleasure gardens with the blazing bodies of living Christians. The Bearded Ones – a more entertaining spectacle – would, after flaring wondrously, explode like Guy Fawkes Night fireworks. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, Dr. Vaniah Odom, G. G. Schiffendecken, the Reverend Goodchild, Papa: all would fizz like Roman candles, flaring stars rocketing up into the sky.

“Did you say
Roman
?” Dr. Vaniah Odom hissed waspishly as he ignited, not pleased, not pleased at all, as he shot skyward.

Whooosh!

Whooosh!

Whooosh!

It was the apocalyptic end of
Through the Looking-Glass
, as Alice pulled the tablecloth with both hands, crashing plates, dishes, and guests to the floor, as bottles flew about, and candles soared up to the ceiling, exploding into stars, as if Alice had slept right through to the following night, the night of the fireworks.

Whooosh!

Whooosh!

Whooosh!

It was the wrong ending, from the wrong book, but she wanted to say the words she had said so often as a child, lashing out with clenched fists at the air in front of her.

“Stuff and nonsense!”

“I won’t!”

“Who cares for
you
?”

“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

She was taller now, more of a height with her adversaries, and she should grow her nails long, like Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster. She should unclench her fists, and lash out with her nails, aiming at throats, at eyes. They would be within reach
now.

As she stood in front of Linnaeus’s painting, the crackling and the explosions, the oohs and the aahs, the acrid gunpowder smell, the frightened shouted words, all faded away. She was aware of nothing but the scene in front of her, a painting of the room in which she stood, the large painting another mirror, reflecting an interior in which she did not exist. Her breathing was stilled – breath misted glass – as she looked into the Looking-glass House of the painting. She did not stand too close to it, holding back a little, feeling that she was above a great height, and might fall into it.

Like all Linnaeus’s paintings, the scene contained no human figure, but its title was a person’s name. All the pictures hanging in Delft Place had this same style. They were conversation pieces without the human figures, paintings of silence, and most were of interiors.
Charlotte –
his painting of his sister – showed the window at which Charlotte sat as she looked out on to the Hudson, sewing, reading, writing letters, sorting her little collections.
Mother
was the piazza on a summer’s day, a cane chair, and the telescope.
Father
was a painting of an empty field – the cloud-filled sky seemed to go on forever – near a small copse, a place she did not recognize. The painting that bore his own name, his last painting – he had named it
Linnaeus
, and not
Self Portrait
, making it appear that he was not Linnaeus – was yet another of the empty, drapeless, bare-boarded, white-doored rooms at Delft Place, the rooms he painted over and over, rooms lined with his own paintings. You did not feel that the paintings were of the interiors around them; you felt that the interiors were designed to match the paintings, a representation of some inner place, close, just out of reach. The rooms became stiller as they were gazed upon. There was no sound, no movement, and all around became suffused with their unpeopled emptiness. If she looked hard enough at the empty rooms and deserted landscapes, if she concentrated on the unpopulated places where people once had been, she sometimes felt that she would be
able to see these absent people. If she didn’t see Charlotte, if she didn’t see Mother or Father, she might begin to see Linnaeus in every painting, even if the paintings bore the names of other people.

He had not sold any of his paintings. They were not the sort of paintings that people wished to buy. He had sometimes made a little money – as with the cloud-covered skies for Henry Walden Gauntlett, the glories of the angels for the Reverend Calbraith – by carrying out little jobs that required some artistic ability, like Miss Iandoli adding to the earnings she made from teaching piano-playing by hand-coloring photographs. She imagined Linnaeus walking about at first light, when no one would see him, carrying a palette with only two colors upon it, and renewing the red and the black of the signs all around Longfellow Park.
Keep Off
,
Keep Off
, he’d paint over and over again.
Beware.
If he’d still been alive, it would probably have been Linnaeus who would have been hired to paint the giant Mozart on Megoran Road. He would have painted the right music in the sky. He had been meticulous about that sort of thing.

The breezes would be gentle, the sea would be calm, as the two young women prayed for those they loved.

The paintings reminded her of Ida Brook’s room after she had died. She and Charlotte had gone to see Ida’s mother, to express their condolences. Ida hadn’t really been a friend of theirs, and that was one of the reasons why they had gone: feelings of remorse, things they had said, things they hadn’t said (this last above all). Ida had seemed in perpetual hopeful search of a close friend.

“Would you like to see the room in which she died?” the mother had suddenly asked – not waiting for a reply – after their faltering attempts at conversation had faded into silence, and
they had been led upstairs to gaze in silence, another silence, at a room in which they had never been before, trying to feel something, that someone had died there, trying to think of what to say. The drapes had been partially closed across the slightly opened window, the blind partly lowered, as if an invalid was still there, shielded from too bright a light, and the bed was neatly made, the sheets and blankets so tightly drawn across that no one could have lain inside them.
Tip-tap. Tip-tap.
She had spent the time trying to detect the source of the slight tapping she could hear, and then realized that it was the pull on the end of the blind cord. The little wooden acorn was rattling against the sash bar.
Tip-tap. Tip-tap.
Death was silence.

“Ida Brook! Ida Brook!” She faintly heard Miss Swanstrom’s voice raised for one last time in weary expostulation at the unparalleled dimness and clumsiness of Ida Brook.

For one last time she heard Ida Brook’s voice.

“Oh dear,” she said. “I’ve died. Oh dear. How on earth did that happen? Mama will be so upset.”

She would never hear Ida Brook’s voice again, never see that clumsy, galumphing girl clodhopping about with tousled hair and ink-stained fingers. The mother had closed the door behind them as they entered, and Alice had felt stifled, oppressed, despite the open window. It was too tidy a room for Ida Brook to live in. That was the main thing she thought. How little she’d been affected by the death of someone she’d known. How small a space was occupied by the living.

Alice always closed the door of any room in which she found herself, but the doors at Delft Place – like the doors in the paintings – were always left open, leading into further rooms beyond, and rooms beyond those, illuminated by the light from unseen windows. Someone was expected to call at any moment, and no barrier was to be placed in his way as he stepped into the interior.

Alice –
Charlotte had given her the painting for her thirtieth birthday – was a meticulous representation of the schoolroom, the
room in which she lived her life, though a room from which she was absent. It was as if she was being remembered by what she had left behind her after she had ceased to exist: the windows, the mirror, the bed, the bookcases, the golden stars from All Saints’, the broken figures and pieces of glass from the Shakespeare Castle, the papers, the Huntley & Palmer’s tin, the writing materials, the unpublished novels and stories. She loved this painting, seeing her surroundings, without herself being there, a great weight lifted – a great oppression toppled – by her absence.

She walked across to the window that looked out from the back of the house, and took up the position she had assumed that morning. As the wind gusted, snow was flung against the windows, like handfuls of gravel thrown to gain attention.

She opened her hand as she stood there, and looked at her reflection in the mirror on Annie’s ring, as she sometimes did at Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, when it seemed to take away the sound from all around her. She held it up close to her face, so that all she could see was her own eye looking back at her. It was her Pinkerton badge of office, flourished imperiously to open doors that would otherwise be barred.
We Never Sleep
, that was what the unblinking eye promised, a future of perpetual dreamlessness, in which all nights would be spent watching those who were suspected, taking notes, thinking, building up evidence.

Scribble, scribble, scribble.

When you’d seen the right things, heard the right words, you moved in to put an end to what had to be stopped, the guilty vanishing from the world as the narrow barred windows closed in around them.

She brought the looking-glass ring closer, closer, until the eye began to blur. She was looking for a little white reflection on
the iris, as if it would be there at nighttime, the memory of the light that had been shining in through a window in daylight. In photographs, in paintings, windows that were not visible were sensed in that tiny glimmer, opening out the enclosed room into the wider world beyond. The subjects of Henry Walden Gauntlett’s photographs – grouped in front of their cloud-filled skies – all had this brightness in the upper part of the eye, a little to one side, on the verge of tears. He said that it brought them to life, gave them humanity, and discarded any photographs in which he had failed to capture this effect. They had died without that light.

He had told Kate this when she was learning about photography from him, one of the mysteries of his art. Alice remembered the occasions on which she had been to his studio, to be photographed with her family, feeling that she and her sisters were back at Carlo Fiorelli’s being photographed for
The Children’s Hour
. She tried not to think of these photographs. She had thought that people would live longer since photography had been invented, their faces remaining after they were dead, but – somehow – the opposite was true. There was a new sadness now because of photographs, even of the living. You seemed to be more aware of change, the perpetual impermanence of being, the ever-aging reflections in the looking-glasses. In the Looking-glass world of the White Queen the inhabitants lived their lives backward, and memory worked both ways. Memories of the future intruded into the present. The Queen – she practiced believing in impossible things – screamed before the brooch pricked her finger; the bleeding came later, with no screams, as the pain had already been experienced. In a similar looking-glass reversal, Alice felt – it was what Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster made her feel – that her past lay before her, and not behind her. All that would happen, all that she would become, was shaped by what had already been, and what had already been could not be changed. She would travel through her life, to find her past moving backward toward her from the future,
and she would relive all that had already happened. She looked for the little gleam of whiteness, a glimpse of an emptiness within, trying to remember if there had been a similar gleam in Annie’s eyes, a similar emptiness.

“Only it is so
very
lonely here!”

That was what Alice had said to the White Queen.

She gazed at the little dot of whiteness on the iris, gazing into this void, until the whiteness seemed to move out toward her, and the features of the face dissolved. Whoever was there in the photograph could no longer be seen, and all she saw was the whiteness, like a nothingness inside them, this little gleam that gave them life. Emptiness and absence drew memories out of her, like magic-lantern projections onto a white screen: the former orchards, now featureless snow-covered building lots; the space above the trees, where the tower of the Shakespeare Castle had once been. It was an image captured on a photograph, one of those blurred ghost figures – not fully there, not quite absent – of someone walking in a street whilst it was being photographed, someone who had not stayed motionless for the duration of the exposure. She had seen such photographs, some of Kate’s studies: the sharply delineated buildings, the transparent, transient, fading human beings. It was strange to see ghosts walking in sunlight, their faint outlines, their blurred features. Ghosts should disappear in sunshine, the way that shadows disappeared with the coming of clouds. Ghosts were shadows, thrown by the shape of the person who saw them. New York City was changing so rapidly that anyone who had been there for some time would see all streets like this, the buildings become as ghostly as the human figures, as short-lived. In street after street, block after block, the buildings – demolished, swept away in weeks, days – would exist only in the memory, people seeing what had once been there, mistily superimposed over what now existed. If she went back to Grandpapa’s office, retraced her Gulliver’s journey on the day she had traveled into the realm of The Bearded Ones, she would become another
Rip Van Winkle (beardless, deprived of power) as she wandered lost amongst the vanished buildings, the vanished streets, the whole districts that had vanished forever, unable to recognize where she was. There would be rows of houses which she would never have seen before, and those which had been familiar would have disappeared. There would be towers in the sky that had not been there before, a deeper darkness in the ghost-crowded streets. Strange names would be over the doors, strange faces at the windows, everything would be strange. She’d be staring around, speechless and lost.