Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth Read Free Book Online Page A

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 March’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