Pinkerton's Sister Read online

  “What a shame … What a shame …”

  Regular visitors were already beginning to nod their heads in agreement. Others would sense an announcement coming on. Mrs. Albert Comstock tended to announce something rather than merely state it; it was surely a mere oversight that she had failed to install liveried trumpeters in her household, all lined up tidily in a neat line, ready, at a moment’s notice, to produce a fanfare before her every utterance.

  (Deep breaths, inflated cheeks, puckered-up lips.)

  Tarantara!

  “I believe I’m correct in saying that it’s not as cold today as it was yesterday.”

  (Breathe, inflate, pucker.)

  Tarantara!

  “I don’t like Mrs. Italiaander’s new hat.”

  (Breathe, inflate, pucker.)

  Tarantara!

  “What a shame that the war spoiled it all.”

  She nodded to herself at the picture she had created in her mind, the lost prelapsarian wonderland.

  “What a shame …”

  Jewelry rattled as heads nodded in polite — or enthusiastic — agreement, earrings swaying, feathers vibrating.

  Sometimes Alice wasn’t sure whether what was being regretted was the loss of Dixie as a place of perpetual darkie jollity, or the appearance of more and more darkie faces on the streets of New York. Mrs. Albert Comstock — Alice was convinced — was under the impression that minstrel shows were performed by genuine darkies, and not by white men with burned cork on their faces, and this had colored — how apt a word could be — her picture of them. She had once met Booker T. Washington at Mrs. William Boemer’s in Gramercy Park, and — naturally — assumed that he was being introduced to her, and not she to him. She was equal to the occasion. She knew how to speak to such people. “Have you been black for long?” she asked him chattily, in that informal way she had with the lower orders. She prided herself on her ability to put people at their ease. It was a gift granted to the naturally aristocratic. She later confided to Mrs. Goodchild that Booker T. Washington was not as authentic-looking as some of the other darkies she had seen. He wasn’t very black, not really black enough to be totally convincing, and there had been — she’d no doubt remarked, suspiciously — a distinct lack of tambourines and bones. (By the by, wasn’t it rather — er — presumptuous of him to call himself “Washington”?)

  She saw what her mind wanted her to see, and she saw little else. She would have interrupted a performance of Othello to request — with her steely glacial smile (her requests were more in the line of an order) — a rendition of “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” with Othello playing the banjo, and Iago and Desdemona enthusiastically grinning as they cakewalked.

  “In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear us darkies

  singing …”

  — Othello sang —

  “… In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear de

  banjo ringing.

  How de old folks would enjoy it …”

  (“Put out de light, and den put out de light,” Mrs. Albert Comstock’s Othello would soliloquize as — well, what did you expect? — he prepared to strangle Desdemona. “I hab done de state some service” — a likely story! — he would claim, later, when his crime was discovered. All those nasty black fingerprints on Desdemona’s nice white nightie!)

  There came that deep sigh again.

  “What a shame … What a shame …”

  Had she sometimes wondered where they all disappeared to after each minstrel show? Back to Dixie, perhaps, unable to bear missing all the fun?

  On her expeditions into New York City Mrs. Albert Comstock counted the number of black faces she saw in the street, and reported back to her daughter Myrtle.

  (There were certain things that de old folks did not enjoy much at all.)

  “Twenty-seven today,” she’d announce as she arrived back home: the day’s total would be the first words she spoke, as if she were giving a constantly changing password in order to achieve entrance.

  “Only nine today!”

  This could clearly be regarded as one of the better days: the lower the score, the more pleasing the result. Mrs. Albert Comstock was not biased. Negroes, Jews, Roman Catholics, foreigners (the rest of the world, most of the United States, whole neighborhoods in New York City, everywhere, really, that was not 5 Hampshire Square), the poor: she disliked them all equally.

  5

  The crop from her upper lip mounted: several sacksful here, surely.

  “I have a son,” their father had said, laughing humorlessly (Bertha Rochester to the life; no, that was unfair: she understood and pitied Bertha Rochester), sneering, “who is prettier than any of my daughters.”

  Ben — who had been about ten at the time (she’d have been twenty: she was the eldest of the three sisters) — had blushed at the words, a deep, painful blush. She wasn’t sure whether Papa had said this to hurt her or to hurt Ben — he enjoyed hurting both of them, it was one of his more important hobbies — but Ben had shown the hurt more. It was strange — unsettling — to see so young a child blushing, as if blushing — by all the rules of normality — came later, one of the blood-led manifestations of maturity, and a normal child should be incapable of blushing. There had been something disturbingly knowing about a blush, a knowledge that should not have been possessed. “Papa! Papa!” Allegra had protested at his comment, not so much outraged for Ben’s sake, but outraged that her superior prettiness had not been acknowledged. Edith had said nothing, and she — as usual — had said nothing. She tended to let things build up inside her.

  Alice was sure that Maggie Tulliver and Jo March (dark-haired, dark-complexioned, both, other heroines she had adored as a child) possessed moustaches: George Eliot and Louisa M. Alcott had somehow forgotten to mention them. At the end of the Wilkie Collins novel, Marian Halcombe was not — unlike Laura, Lady Glyde — safe and protected in the arms of a husband. She was the plain one who looked on and smiled as her friend married the hero, the honorary maiden aunt of the children of the marriage.

  She had a moustache of her own: what need had she of a man?

  “An old maid, that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps.” That’s what Jo March had said, and Alice had always regarded this as an admirable ambition. She had been born in 1868, the year in which the first part of Little Women had been published, and that was what Papa had called her for a time, for a short time: “My Little Woman.” She had, briefly, modeled herself on Jo — rather halfheartedly saying “Christopher Columbus!” once or twice — though she had never been able to bring herself to address Mama as “Marmee.” Even Jo had ended up as a wife and mother, a Laura, Lady Glyde, and not a Marian. If it had not been quite like Dorothea Brooke marrying Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch, Jo March accepting Mr. Bhaer was very much like Lucy Snowe accepting Monsieur Emmanuel in Villette, an equal betrayal. (No Rochesters, they.)

  There was no Mr. Bhaer in prospect for Alice — a considerable relief: his accent made him sound worryingly like Mrs. Webster, loyal helpmeet of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster — so perhaps she might concentrate on the possibilities of becoming (she would be more single-minded than Jo March had ever been) “a literary spinster”. To be a poet, to be a writer, she needed two things: an appropriate name, and a beard, so that — whatever the qualities of the poetry — her name would at least sound right, and her face look right. Alice Pinkerton possessed neither the name — the syllables fell sadly short — nor the beard for success. She thought of the names of some of the poets in the poetry book — An American Anthology — that Miss Ericsson had given her for her thirty-third birthday in 1901: St. John Honeywood, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Francis Orrery Ticknor, Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar …

  (Miss Ericsson stood diffidently in front of her, with An American Anthology — the size, weight, and color of two bricks side by side — pressed against her bosom. It was one of the things
that women were supposed to do with poetry books. The sunlight caught the gold laurel wreath embossed on its front cover, and Alice expected to see a small, quivering reflection floating on the ceiling, like light from water, or the curved glass face of a pocket-watch. She was holding it out toward Alice, smiling rather shyly.)

  She could not recollect a single line that any of these poets had written, but their names (curious how minor talents — she excluded Mrs. Browning from the observation — insisted on having three names) had a music, a — well, poetry, she supposed — that in itself inspired confidence. She had no doubt that all four would sport magnificent beards, clinching proof of their poetic credentials. “Francis Orrery Ticknor!” she had chanted, as she spun herself around the pillars in the schoolroom, as if enraptured by the magical harmoniousness of the name. “Francis Orrery Ticknor!” Thirty-three years old, and cavorting, chanting! (For some reason, that thirty-three had sounded like a knell of doom.) They may have been wrong about the attic, but perhaps they had a point about the madness. Once she started on Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, there’d be no holding her.

  There was an awe-inspiring display of beards (all male, only a male could become one of The Bearded Ones: no bewhiskered female had smuggled herself in front of the camera) in the photograph opposite the title page. Many of the poems in the book — too many of them, those written on subjects such as America, Freedom, or Slaves — made her think of some of the groups of statuary silhouetted across the roofs of buildings in the business districts of the city, awkwardly posed, symbolically gesturing. Surprisingly — she had searched assiduously through the volume — there were no poems in praise of beards, though Helen Keller and Shakespeare (with one beard between them) had inspired several eulogies.

  She thought she had found a reference in the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, than whom no one could be more appropriate: his beard was the size of Birnam Wood, a monstrosity on a scale epic enough to inspire terror in Dunsinane, panic-stricken flights, mass pallings in resolution. Macbeth — it may have been why the image came to mind — was a play populated almost entirely by beards; even most of the women had them. The witches flourished theirs at Banquo and thoroughly confused him (“You should be women”: these were pre-Marian Halcombe days), and Lady Macbeth clearly hankered after one of her very own. “Unsex me here,” she’d boomed in her deepest voice, keen to get the sprouting started. She wasn’t too fussed about being top-full of direst cruelty, about having the access and passage to remorse stopped up, or about having the spirits that tend on mortal thought come to her woman’s breasts and take her milk for gall (a passage mysteriously missing from the edition of Shakespeare used at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls). All that she really wanted was the beard. The only beard-free inhabitants of the play — struck down by the beardie murderers — appeared to be Lady Macduff and her son, though this child certainly displayed a precocious beardsomeness in his manner. When she looked at the words more closely — In these peaceful shades — peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old — they turned out to be describing not a beard but an untracked forest, one of those trackless silences in which Chingachgook and Hawkeye still wandered, looking for signs, listening for danger, the books that Ben had loved as a child.

  There was only one thing for it: she clearly needed to develop her moustache — it was a promising beginning — in order to increase her chances of achieving success as a writer, compensate for the paucity of syllables in her name by sprouting a colossal growth of facial hair. At least she chose to write in prose and not in verse. Perhaps this afforded some small possibility of publication, despite her lack of the necessary qualifications. Some women novelists were widely acknowledged to be — er — quite good, really, all things considered.

  To dream of a beard on a woman, foretells unpleasant associations and lingering illness.

  6

  Charlotte had once tried to think of the name of the composer of a particular piece of music. She bent over, banging her forehead against one of the brass candlesticks projecting from the upper frame of the piano, lost in the agonies of thought. She was in a permanent state of near-impalement, and had scars on her forehead the way boys had them on their knees and elbows.

  “Brahms …?” she muttered doubtfully. “Bizet …? B …?”

  She wavered for a moment, seemingly on the point of considering Byron or Botticelli as possibilities, before adding, “Tchaikowsky?” Her knowledge of different composers and their styles was not very extensive, though her knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan was second to no one’s. At last, inspiration had dawned upon her.

  “You know whom I mean,” she’d said, challengingly. (Whom. Charlotte was a stickler for grammatical correctness.) “One of those Bearded Ones!”

  They had developed their own gesture whenever they wished to make a discreet reference to The Bearded Ones, the gesture a man made when he was trying to decide whether or not he was in need of a shave, the insides of the fingers and thumb of their right hands grasping the chin and pulling downward, feeling for bristles. As the beards grew, so did the gestures, and they began to use both hands, making a descending down-down-down gesture from the sides of their faces as far as they could reach to encompass the immensity of the outgrowths. At the bottom, they moved their hands outward and then together, and it looked as if they were making some kind of scooping, gathering movement, drawing something — a large puppy, a tentative tottering toddler experimentally attempting its first steps — protectively in toward them. Alice sometimes wondered if this gesture meant something in the language of the deaf — she kept forgetting to ask Rosobell about this, years later — and was always careful to use it when no one else was looking in her direction. It was a secret gesture.

  By then, the phrase “The Bearded Ones” had come to mean far more than just men with beards.

  “Speak with respect and honour

  Both of The Beard and The Beard’s owner.”

  They’d chant Samuel Butler’s words in unison — they’d added the capital letters in the second line as a sign of their deferential esteem — essaying a tone of humble supplication as they made their worshipful Masonic movements.

  She had made a precocious attempt to enter the very heartland of The Bearded Ones. It was during her Jo March period, when she had insisted — as a small girl — upon being taken to Grandpapa Brouwer’s office for the first time. Alice had been oppressed with the thought that Longfellow Park was a place of women during the day, a place of pale-clad figures strolling irresolutely, without purpose, dawdling, drifting from place to place, gazing into or (more often) out of windows, waiting for their men to return to them from the world outside, like the dunce-capped mediæval women peering shortsightedly from battlements. This was in the days when New York City was a far distant place, before it expanded northward and began to engulf them.

  “The day is dreary,/He cometh not,” they chorused — the women of the olden times often had to speak in chorus, as if an individual voice was too faint to be heard — “I am aweary, aweary …”

  (“… /I would that I were dead!”)

  Then she had read the chapter almost at the very end of the second part of Little Women — “Under the Umbrella” — in which Jo had gone out into the part of the city where women did not belong, the world exclusively inhabited by men. It came shortly after Jo’s declaration that she was to be a literary spinster, and she had gone into this unknown — oh, fickle, unreliable, malleable, untrustworthy Jo! — to walk with Mr. Bhaer, with whom she had fallen in love. She addressed him as “Sir,” as “Mr. Bhaer,” like another Jane Eyre, another Emma Woodhouse, formal with the man she knew she wanted to love her. Jo had wandered far from the dry-goods stores — the area in which the women belonged — and into the area where the gentlemen most do congregate, the area of countinghouses, banks, and wholesale warerooms, and Alice had been seized with the desire to do the same, and at a far younger age than Jo March. In New York it would be on a much larger scale than anything in Jo M
arch’s New England town, with not one area but many, street after street after street of congregating gentlemen, beards abristle, shouting loudly, gesticulating. She would do it by going to see Grandpapa’s business, the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company, on South Street. This was where Papa worked, but she always thought of it as being Grandpapa’s office, not Papa’s, and it was because of Grandpapa (as well as Jo March) that she had wanted to see the office, not because of Papa.

  “Will you take me, Grandpapa? Will you take me?” and Grandpapa — of course — had taken her into work for the day. (She had shamelessly employed all Allegra’s arts of wide-eyed flirtatiousness.)

  She wanted to examine engineering instruments in one window and samples of wool in another with most unfeminine interest; she wanted to tumble over barrels, and be half smothered by descending bales; she wanted to be hustled unceremoniously by busy men, who would ask — out loud — “How the deuce did she get here?” (This last part particularly appealed.)

  She had her reply all ready.

  “My Grandpapa brought me!”

  Pert and self-possessed, that’s how she’d be.

  “And who are you?” That’s what she should say next, slightly challenging, far stronger than love-changed Jo, weakened and made foolish, no longer — sigh! — the woman she had once been.

  She stood in Grandpapa’s office with Lumpety, her despised doll — they thought she loved it — clutched under one arm. It was not very long afterward that she had disemboweled Lumpety, inspired by the stained-glass window in All Saints’ Church depicting the martyrdom of St. Erasmus. Most satisfactory.

  “This is your great-grandpapa,” Grandpapa had said, indicating the bearded — of course — figure in the huge dark oil painting on the wall of his office, a fearsome-faced unjolliest of Santa Clauses.

  “This is my desk,” Grandpapa had said, demonstrating how it worked by tugging the roll-top up and down, the inner drawers and compartments whitened by countless slips of paper, their loose ends flapping in the draft.