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

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.
    “This is my spittoon,” Grandpapa had said, but he had not — rather disappointingly — demonstrated it in action.
    (
Hacht-pertong!
)
    There were maps covered in red on the walls, though the red was coloring not the land but the seas, showing the routes of the Occidental & Eastern Shipping Company’s steamships, as if this was the element he controlled. “He’s in his element,” she thought — pleased with such an exact use of the phrase — as he ran his fingers across the Pacific Ocean with practiced ease, spanning the globe with a sweep of his hand. It was like being in the headquarters of some great general, the place where he planned his battles and conquests. “We shall attack
here
!” he would say, his finger decisively stabbing in an X-marks-the-spot sort of gesture at the place he had chosen.
    The streets had been strangely dark, dark with the clothes of the men and youths who were everywhere, dark with the shadows from the new high buildings blocking out the sun. The only women were women made out of wood, women made out of stone, not like objects of veneration, but like sacrifices. They were mythical figures, symbolic groupings, veiled and draperied allegories, lining the edges of the roofs and occupying niches, poised in the postures of those about to jump to their deaths. Sailing ships lined the East River, jammed in so closely that it was as if they were permanent structures, and would never leave, fluttering with so many flags that they seemed to be commemorating some special day of celebration. Their bowsprits projected right across the street, carriages drove past beneath them, and she looked down on them from Grandpapa’s high window at the top of the building. There were men in the air above the center of the street at her eye level, working in the rigging above the horses and the laden wagons, the piled barrels, the great sound of shouting. She felt that she could reach across and touch them. After the acrobats, there would be elephants.
    She had come across the ships suddenly.
    She had been walking hand in hand with Grandpapa beneath the curve of the elevated railroad in Coenties Slip, and there was the thunder of a steam train rattling around overhead, its tall chimney like that of a train out in the West, its whistle shrieking out across the prairies, startling the great herds of buffalo. Whoever had later designed the roller coaster at Luna Park must have often strolled around there, finding his inspiration in the juddering sway of the carriages, the lurching curves, the held-in screams of the helplessly thrown-about passengers. There were shanty-like booths that seemed to belong beneath a Coney Island ride — she half expected the hiss and smoke of fairground lighting, the crack of rifles at shooting-galleries — and there were boxes under tarpaulins as if in an open-air warehouse, with high-sided horse-drawn wagons drawn up beside them, spilling out straw on to the cobblestones. There was a transient, temporary air about everything — this fair was a traveling fair about to move on elsewhere — and men in dark suits strolled