Pinkerton's Sister (70 page)

There was this particular night.

Mama was on her way out somewhere – Alice could not remember where – and her anger (she was angry again, the same intense whispering in the echoing hall) was partly because Papa had made her late by spending longer than he had said he would at the club, and (Alice felt) partly because he had brought his “friend” home with him again. He had been coming repeatedly for several weeks by this time. Allegra and Edith were not there – she could not remember, either, where they were – and she was alone in the house, apart from Annie, with Papa and his “friend,” the two bearded men.

She did not have a nurse anymore. Nurse had been dismissed. She had not been a young woman, and she had been kind, patient and affectionate with her, showing her photographs of her sister’s children, and talking about them. Alice couldn’t even remember her name – she had always known her as “Nurse,” and that was how she had addressed her – and she had never known how and why she had left. She had been there, and then she had not been there, without even saying goodbye to her. It was something to do with Papa. Like Miss Ericsson, she would go quiet, and concentrate on some small task when Papa came into the room. “Good evening, Mr. Pinkerton,” she would say – it was usually evening when he appeared, bored, on the lookout for some source of distraction – and then she would busy herself with something trivial, folding some of Allegra’s clothes very precisely, or finding the right toy for Edith. She could remember Nurse showing her a photograph of a boy and a girl, her nephew and niece, standing outside a barn in Kansas or Nebraska, somewhere like that. The boy was holding a puppy, and the puppy was called Patch. She could not remember the boy’s name or the girl’s name, but she knew that the puppy had been called Patch. “The barn is painted red,” Nurse had said, “and that cart is yellow,” and her finger had indicated a barn and a cart that were the color of bruised late-evening clouds, clouds that you saw in your memory.

She did not know where her mama had gone; she did not know where her sisters were; she did not know the exact date (though she knew it was the late summer, sometime before she had started to encircle the Shakespeare Castle with Charlotte, and Mary Benedict): her memories were a curious mixture of the utterly precise, and the mistily vague. Sometimes she could read the labels on every can and bottle on a shelf in a memory, or the headlines in a newspaper in the hand of a passerby; other times she could not see the face of the person in front of her, recognize where she was in the house, or know whether it was night or day. In memory as in life, she was sometimes wearing her spectacles, and sometimes not. Between the sections of intensely detailed recollections there was nothing at all. Why did some things – little things, trivial things – remain in the memory for years, forever, and other things – things you thought you’d never forget, or things you never even thought of memorizing because they were so completely a part of you – vanish without trace?

This particular night she would not forget. Something had changed.

They were in the front parlor. The drapes were not closed, and the gaslights were on so low that the light of the moon – it was a full moon – was bright enough to cast the shapes of the windows right across the carpet, and partly up the wall, long pale shapes like reflections in water, glimmering, shifting, and there were shadows in the corners of the room. The gas-lamp outside had not been lighted. She remembered that, but did not know if it was because the lamplighter had not come – letting the full moon do the work that he should have done – or because it was broken. She should have looked out, and down the street, to see if other lamps had been lighted. Then she would have known. She usually looked out for the lamplighter, but that night she had forgotten. It must have been well past her usual bedtime. It had been windy all day, and the force of the wind increased with the coming of darkness. The curtains – with a faint
whoosh –
shifted a little into the room and back again with the currents of cold air, like something breathing.

The men’s cigarettes glowed as they inhaled. She didn’t know that this was what was happening; she just knew that the ends of the cigarettes glowed red, and then the men would blow, long, thoughtful clouds of smoke into the air, into her face, making her cough. It was as if they had come to the end of a banquet – one of those hour after hour multi-coursed monstrosities favored by Papa, course after course after course, every course piled high on the plate, and every course accompanied by wine. Stained and crumpled napkins had been cast down on the table, belts had been loosened and vests unbuttoned, and the inebriated and overfull feasters sprawled back unsteadily in their chairs. Papa’s “friend” eyed her speculatively. She was one of a range of desserts and he was trying to decide whether or not he had the appetite for a few mouthfuls more.

They did not speak much. They seemed to be waiting for something, each waiting for the other to make a beginning. There was a sense of some written agreement being put to the test for the first time by two businessmen who did not trust each other, each on the alert for a strict adherence to every sub-section, every paragraph, every
word
, each – with scrupulous politeness – attempting to interpret each word, each paragraph, each subsection in a way that would bring a triumphant sensation of superiority over the other. They were two equally matched chess players about to begin a long-awaited game. One player would hold his two clenched hands in front of the other player, his hands side by side, one hand holding a hidden black piece and one holding a hidden white piece, like a father about to surprise his child with an unexpected gift, returning home after a long journey. “Choose,” he would be saying. “Go on. Choose.” Was it the queens he held, or two pawns, or could any piece be used for the selection of the color to play? There was a special language involved, a mixture of languages like (the image had come to her years later) a Volapuk of the chess board:
zugzwang
,
j’adoube
,
kriegspiel
,
en prise
. “Go on. Choose.” There was just the glow from where their mouths were, and then the smoke around their beards and in front of their eyes, making them even more difficult to see in the dim light. She was standing in front of Papa, as he held her loosely at the waist – he often did that – and made her strike matches to light their cigarettes for them. It was like a game, when the matches went out, or the cigarettes failed to light. Sometimes Papa’s “friend” would deliberately blow out the match. The more she giggled, the more they laughed, not really an amused laugh, a different kind of laugh.

She was pretty that night. They told her she was pretty. Then there were those laughs again, because they were laughing at themselves for having said this. They knew it wasn’t true. Why her, and not Allegra? This was what she couldn’t understand. Allegra
was
pretty. Why not Allegra, if prettiness was what they wanted? This was the question she kept asking herself, then, and later, going over it again and again when she was alone in the schoolroom. Was it because she was the one who happened to be there, or had she been
chosen
?

They were passing her between each other – this had happened before – half throwing her little distances into two outstretched hands, and sometimes it hurt, jarring the breath out of her, when they caught her under her arms. She was laughing when they began, slightly excited, and then she fell quiet when she became breathless. They held their cigarettes in their mouths to leave their hands free, and ash tumbled down onto her head as they caught her with a jerky upward motion. Papa held her so that her ear was against his watch-pocket, and she could hear his watch ticking, feel its small vibration, and the watch-chain pressed against her cheek.

As she was pressed closer against them, she smelled other smells above the smell of the cigarettes and the alcohol. There was a meaty, sweaty kind of smell – old sweat, drawn out by warmth – and, stronger than this, the smell of cinders and smoke. They both had the fire and brimstone smell of fallen angels cast out of heaven. The elevated railway did not, at this time, travel as far out as Longfellow Park, but they must have been on it that day. The smoke from the train had blown upon them, scattered them with ashes, and they smelled as if they had been toiling all day in a foundry, pouring out the molten metal whilst dressed – oddly formal – in dark suits, their faces gleaming red in the darkness, or laboring in a vast, darkened manufactory, fitfully illuminated by the flames from furnaces as they tossed in shovelful after shovelful of crumbling, wet coal, the metal edge of the shovel scraping against the concrete floor in a way that made her shudder. It was like the high-pitched shriek of chalk on a blackboard, as the answers were written up after a test. The smoky, industrial smell gave her the feeling that their hands would be calloused and dirty, and that she would have hand-prints upon her clothes and body. She didn’t want her dress to be spoiled.

Papa’s “friend” was humming a tune, absent-mindedly, in the same sort of way that people chewed gum or whittled at pieces of wood. She was one of a long line of burdens being thrown from hand to hand by workmen loading a steamboat or a freight car, or the same burden being thrown over and over again, and he was passing the time, lulled out of boredom and forgetfulness by the music, the same piece repeatedly. It was one of the tunes from Papa’s pocket-watch. Perhaps he had heard it a short while earlier, and it had stayed in his mind.

– he hummed, rather tunelessly –

After a while Papa started to whistle it. She heard it shrill against her ear, felt the warm breath blowing against her. Then they were both whistling, loitering idlers in the street, men with time to kill and nothing to do, indolently waiting for some source of amusement to catch their attention. They were men in the mood to place wagers on the first bird to alight on a telegraph wire, the first dog to bark or growl, the first raindrop to reach the bottom of a windowpane.

“Pass the Parcel!” Papa’s “friend” suddenly shouted, making his mind up about something. She opened her eyes, and the white exploding fireworks shapes became black exploding shapes. She tried to turn her head, to see what was happening across the room, and Papa’s “friend” was clapping his hands, making inward gestures, like a player in a game wanting the ball to be passed to him. Papa laughed until ash fell down the front of his vest and into her hair, and threw her across to his “friend.”

“When the music stops …!” his “friend” said, and – behind her back – she felt him, holding her with the upper parts of his arms, mime the actions of someone playing a piano. His whistling stopped, and he pulled off one of her shoes without unbuttoning it properly, hurting her. They were her favorites, red tanned goatskin, buttoning up the side, with a little tassel on the front.

(
Goatskin
shoes!

(All this time – without realizing it – she had possessed the goatskin for which she and Charlotte had long sought to suppress Mrs. Albert Comstock. They could have killed her
ages
ago. Barefoot, she could have walked through snow to administer the fatal blow, carrying her coal scuttle and Grandpapa’s Japanese sword. The shoes would have been on the small size for the task assigned to them, but they would have sufficed, if she’d held them carefully in the right place.
When you come near her look not at her herself, but at her image in the brass; so you may strike her safely. And when you have struck off her head, wrap it with your face turned away, in the folds of the goat-skin on which the shield hangs.
It was important that she avert her face. She must not look upon that which she was killing.)

Papa’s “friend” began to whistle again, and threw her across to Papa.

Papa immediately threw her back, given something he did not want.

“When the music stops …!”

Papa’s “friend” pulled off her second shoe, and threw her straight back. They were becoming clumsier in the way they were throwing her. It did not matter if she should fall, if she did not remain upright, and it was beginning to happen more and more quickly. She was to be hurtled across a white line, part of a pattern painted on grass, a smear of grass-stains and whitewash down the whole length of her body, an object being used in order to win a game with strict predetermined rules. Somewhere, faint in the distance, an unseen crowd roared encouragement to the players. There would be the shrill sound of a blast on a whistle, an infringement of the rules detected by an alert referee, and someone would start booing. She was feeling giddy, her vision blurred, her sense of direction lost. It was like the time on the roundabout when she had been sick, and Mama had held her, patting her back, whispering words of comfort because she was crying.

She was not crying now. She did not protest, did not utter a word.

Surreptitiously, Papa’s “friend” touched her face lingeringly, caressingly, like someone attempting to make out the profile of a queen or a president on the heads side of a newly minted coin, recognizing the person depicted solely by touch. She had become a coin like the coin on Papa’s watch-chain, a small unit of currency.

It happened this particular night, and then it happened every time he came, and he came often.

Something made her feel that she ought to become still, silent, make herself invisible, weightless, not really there at all.

It was what she learned to do in the weeks that followed, when Papa’s “friend” began to sit her down upon his knee. He just held her, very still, very close, seeming to freeze, and hold his breath. When Papa left the room – he had started to leave the room,
click, click, click
across the hall to his study on the opposite side, another
click
as he closed the door behind him – she felt that she was on the edge of a vertiginous drop, poised like the statues of the watching women on the ledges of Grandpapa’s office, waiting for their men to return from the sea.