Pinkerton's Sister (53 page)

Would she be held legally responsible if Max Webster were slaughtered in mid-warble? It would be worth it. She’d have to ensure that Kate would be there with her camera.

It would be cruel.

Good.

It would be
very
cruel.

Excellent.

“Ichabod, Ichabod,” she muttered, as if casting a curse on one of the Ichabod Cranes of Longfellow Park. “The glory is departed.” The Three Weird Sisters had nothing new to teach her when it came to toil and trouble. The fire burned, the cauldron bubbled.

Alice had spent much time in searching through medical textbooks in an attempt to find something that might explain what was wrong with her. Something, surely,
was
wrong with her. In the absence of any clear guidance from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster, who – displaying an unexpected gift for creativity – was making things up as he went along, she tried to find out for herself. Mrs. Albert Comstock – the quotation marks had been mockingly audible – described Alice as suffering from “the vapors.” You could see the pale shapes forming in the air, the insubstantial smoke trails, the will-o’-the-wisps foggily floating above the marshy depths, leading unwary travelers astray. Alice had not bothered to seek out
Vapors
.
Apathy
she’d looked for, and not found.
Exhaustion
.
Weariness
. No success. Exhaustion and weariness did not exist, as far as the medical profession was concerned, beards perkily positioned.

Perhaps what she sought would be contained within a more spiritual volume, one less concerned with the merely physical. After this insight, she’d tried to find
Accidie
, as it described her condition so perfectly, with the added bonus of sounding appropriately confessional and mediæval, like one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

No success.

It was
tick, tick, tick
(and
tick, tick, tick, tick
again) with the Seven Deadly Sins as far as she was concerned, in intention, if not in fact, and as for the Ten Commandments …

She’d better not even
think
about the Ten Commandments. When she was in certain moods as a child, they’d looked temptingly like an irresistible dare, the offered possibility of a ten out of ten target. Miss Caulfeild’s spelling bees had obviously had a detrimental lasting effect upon her, developing her spirit of competition (
Alice Pinkerton: The Spirit of Competition
: get that chisel sharpened, Carlo Fiorelli!) into dark and dangerous areas far beyond her control, beyond the reach of
desiccated
,
embarrassment
,
onomatopoeia
, and
graywacke
, luring her beyond even the corrupting allure of
diarrhea
. It had developed into a ravenous parasite, eating her up until nothing else of her remained, like ambition with Macbeth, or jealousy with Othello. She’d read them, Sunday after Sunday, displayed on the wall in All Saints’ like a taunting challenge at a fairground shooting gallery designed to fire up the gaping peasantry, and have them digging into their pockets for their cash.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. How Many Can You Break? Go On! Have a Go! Splendid Prizes!

(“All manner of delight!” Mephostophilis whispered, temptingly, caressingly.

(“Go on!” he was saying.

(“Have a go!” he was saying.

(He’d done really well with the Seven Deadly Sins. He might as well have a go with the Ten Commandments.)

Honor –
Should that be “Honour”? Would King James have spelled it “Honour”? –
thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

That was the Fifth Commandment.

Thou shalt not kill.

That was the Sixth.

Odd that those two should be placed one beneath the other.

Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s enthusiasm for hypnotism followed so promptly upon the dramatization of
Trilby
– the year after the serialization in
Harper’s Magazine
– that Alice had no doubts that he had seen the production, probably several times. She saw him in an adjoining box to Mrs. Albert Comstock’s, trying to ignore her running commentary – she kept up an audible response to whatever she was viewing: she thought it encouraged the actors – and focusing his opera glasses on Trilby’s bare feet, Trilby’s mouth, Trilby’s breasts. The nail of his right forefinger – he had long fingernails – tugged minutely at the focusing wheel, as if he were inching a coin along by clicking on its milled edge. He wanted to make the image as sharp as possible. Brian’s power would wane, even with the help of the peacock feathers; Hilde Claudia – bejeweled, beside him – would be forgotten; Theodore and Max, chastely at home under the care of certain trusted servants, animatedly discussing one of the more obscure passages in
Mind and Brain
, the impish young rogues, would vanish utterly from his mind. Svengali would not be visible within the bright illuminated circle: it would be filled entirely with Trilby. He himself would become Svengali. When she spoke she would be speaking solely to him, the words of Svengali would be words from Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s own mind, Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster’s own mouth, his lips moving as if speaking the responses in a church service, his head nodding, his expression changing.

“Sit down,” his lips mouthed. “I will show you something that will cure your pain better than music.” They were not quite in synchronization with the words spoken, a man perpetually prompted by words that were not his own.

He brought his chair forward to where Trilby was sitting on the divan, and sat facing her, almost knee to knee.

“Look me in the white of the eyes.”

He gazed intently into her eyes, and caressed her temples. (He enjoyed the “caress” bit.) Trilby could not open her eyes, could not speak, could not stand. He had total control over her.

“That is the devil’s trick – hypnotism.” That was what Taffy said. That would have appealed to Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster.

Later, in the moonlight, after he had taken the candle from Trilby’s hand, and lifted it to illuminate her face, he looked into her mouth and told her that the roof of her mouth was like the dome of the Parthenon, and that her tongue was scooped out like the petal of a little pink peony. He had read
Trilby
before he attended the stage version of it, and what he heard the characters speaking on stage were some of the spicier speeches from the novel, the speeches omitted or toned down for the Mrs. Grundy spoilsports of the theatre. He told her she had a beautiful big chest. This was a line he especially enjoyed speaking. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was so absorbed that he never even noticed the appalled intake of breath from the adjoining box –
big chest! –
the frantic swishing of the fan, the agitation of the jewels rattling upon the perturbed Bosom. Svengali laid the side of his head against Trilby’s bosom, the angle of his head emphasizing the – ahem – thrust of the jut. Even sharper intakes, even more insistent swishings, even louder rattlings, the sound of an endungeoned prisoner struggling in his chains, frantically fighting for freedom, the Canterville Ghost in need of being oiled by the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator (completely efficacious upon one application). A steady stream of pulverized plaster would be pattering down from the underside of the box, and powdering the pompadours beneath to an eighteenth-century whiteness. Mrs. Albert Comstock was having the time of her life.

The long white fingernail stopped where it was, arched round in mid-air, the opera glasses became very still. Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster was holding his breath, trying to will his thoughts into action.

(“Come on, Trilby! Let’s see you posing.”

(“Come on, Trilby! Huh! Call yourself a figure-model!”

(“Get those clothes off!”

(“Let’s see that
beautiful chest
!”

(“That
beautiful BIG chest
!”

(“
Now!
”)

“Mademoiselle,” Svengali said …

– “Mademoiselle,” Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster mouthed –

– “
French!
” A strangled panicky cry from Mrs. Albert Comstock. This was far, far worse than her most ambitious hopes –

“… when you have the pain, then shall you come to my little room on the seventh floor, and Svengali will play to you and take away your pain, and keep it himself because he loves you. And when we are quite alone, then will he play for you the ‘
Adieu
’ of Schubert.”

(“
Little
room,” Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster thought to himself. There wouldn’t be much space to maneuver in a little room when you were crammed in with a beautiful
big
chest. They’d have to synchronize their breathing, so that he wouldn’t be pushed against the wall by the size of the chest as he attempted to move in close to take away her pain.

(“
Quite alone
,” he thought, very still, pulse pounding as if after a good sprint up to Hudson Heights and back, in hot pursuit of Drs. Twemlow and Brown. Perhaps he might join them, a trinity of doctors sprinting gruntingly around Longfellow Park – morning and evening – elbows and knees a blur, shorts cracking with starch, arms and legs at angles of forty-five degrees, academe allied with athleticism? It might help to bring a little – er – quietude to his restlessness, subdue the avid edge of his appetites. Playing his banjo had long lost its soothing efficaciousness, but bad backs and breathlessness were ever the enemies of erotic thralldom.)

When she was hypnotized, Svengali made Trilby sing “Ben Bolt,” the song she would die singing. Before she was hypnotized she was tone-deaf, incapable of singing a note in tune; hypnotized she could sing so beautifully that she cast a spell over her listeners almost as powerful as the spell which had been cast over her.

This time it was Alice’s lips that were moving, as if it were she who were singing. The voice, the music, merged in her mind with those for “I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” and the piano music became thin, distant, echoing, like music that was indeed being played within the cavernous high-ceilinged rooms of some distant halls: tall columns, polished marble, many-paned windows. The music became “Narcissus.” Dappled by the shadows of the sunlight through the palm trees, the trio of musicians – a pianist, a violinist, a violoncellist, all elderly women – in the arched hotel conservatory played as tinklingly as the teacups and teaspoons at the tables around them.

Little decorative flourishes in the piano playing reminded her of the elaborate lettering on the front cover of the sheet music, especially the
o
in
or
just before the alternative title “Oh! Don’t You Remember,” the
B
of
Ballad
, and the sweeping curving lines around this subtitle, and around the name of the singer,
Miss Clara Bruce
, patterned like the ripples in a pool – the patterns opening out from a dropped stone, a rising fish – like the elaborate curlicues and gold lettering on the dark blue cover of her hymn book.

If you dream you are singing while everything around you gives promise of happiness, jealousy will insinuate a sense of insincerity into your joyousness. If there are notes of sadness in the song, you will be unpleasantly surprised at the turn your affairs will take.

When she heard someone singing she saw the words in front of her, like advertisements covering a wall, or the front of a store; she saw the illustrated cover of the sheet music, as if it were being displayed in the windows of Columbarian & Horowitz, alongside the Du Rell or Du Bell Twin Brothers, “Why Did They Dig Ma’s Grave So Deep?”, and “Poor Wandering One.”