Church of Marvels: A Novel (13 page)

She played up her Italian blood as if it were part of her lusty, continental disposition—something that couldn’t be
helped—
even though, like Sylvan, she’d never been out of New York City. She’d throw around Italian words (usually the wrong ones, although he hesitated to correct her), and even in her roundabout, airy way, there was always the suggestion that her Italian-ness was superior to his (
but I’m not Italian
, he wanted to say,
or if I am I don’t know it
). From what he could discern, Francesca’s mother was a quiet, respectable
Catholic woman who spent her days keeping books for the glass company and teaching music lessons. Why should there be any shame in that, he wondered? And where did Francesca tell them she went, the days and nights she spent with Sylvan along the waterfront?
The Ladies’ Club,
or
tennis lessons,
or
my cousin’s in Chelsea—
she really didn’t care if they believed her or not, they were so
bourgeois
. She wanted to make it very clear that she was wild, artistic, free, and bohemian, unlike her small-minded peers. But in the end, Sylvan realized, she didn’t seem to do much more than seethe. She was fed not by her passion for experience, but by her fury for others. What would she do without their boring conventions? Where would she be if there was nothing to run from?

The last time he saw her was at a party in Greenwich Village. She’d invited him as her guest—even loaned him a suit, already pressed. Flattered, he’d agreed, but all week he was sick with nervousness—if people on his own block didn’t know what to make of him, what would her friends think? That afternoon, when he and Francesca arrived at the brownstone on Barrow Street, it had already begun to rain. Inside there was a large, buzzy, boisterous crowd, all smoking and swilling wine and talking too close. Sylvan stood there in a three-piece suit, drinking a glass of French wine that he couldn’t pronounce; his hair, parted and greased just an hour ago, had started to frizz in the humid air. Francesca introduced him to a series of well-heeled gentlemen as her pugilist.
Please meet my pugilist, Mr. Scarlatta
—which wasn’t his name, and she knew it, but which he supposed sounded more bloodthirsty and exotic than Threadgill.

My pugilist. Mine.

That’s when he realized he wasn’t there to keep Francesca company at all—he was only meant to shock. He could see it in her proud smile as she dragged him from group to group, each introduction a little more manic than the last.
Have you met my pugilist from the East Side?
He braced himself, but everyone just smiled and
shook Sylvan’s hand:
Hello, sir, hello, how do you do. Nice to see you, Mary Frances.
They were all exceedingly polite, which Sylvan hadn’t anticipated—he was overcome with relief, even a bit of brotherly warmth—but looking over to Francesca, he realized that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She was livid and tense, drained of color. And he could see her now the way the others did—embarrassing herself with social stunts and performances, dramatic bids for attention. But they were all determined to staunch it with cool, unruffled acceptance. No men, he realized, were fighting to marry her—they only gritted their teeth when they saw her approach. And the look in their eyes when they shook his hand was one not of jealousy, but of sympathy
. Good luck, chum.
He would never forget the look on her face—like a girl about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake, only to find that another child had already stuck his fingers in the icing.

She glared at Sylvan, distant but accusing, as if this had all been his fault. Whatever had thrilled her—the danger, the impropriety, the illicitness—was gone. He drank the last of his wine, pulled off his collar, and left. He walked all the way home in his borrowed suit, through the spill of the factories at shift’s end, shouldering blindly through a crowd that smelled thick and familiar—rosin and sawdust, wood glue and linseed oil, the liverwurst in their lunch pails, the cheap powdered soap that scrubbed the sap from their hands.

He didn’t see Francesca again at the fights, and he was glad for it. Other women followed—he just wanted to feel something else for a little while, something other than the mortal dread that hovered around him (sometimes he’d wake up with a pounding heart, startled to realize that he was, in fact, fully alive, no matter what he might have dreamed)—but the affairs quickly grew tedious, until he was acting more out of habit than any real pleasure. He spent too much time growing dizzy in the taverns, counting the boot scuffs on the rail, dreading the empty apartment that awaited him. He surrounded himself with people—loud, boorish, smugly glazed—but it only made
him feel more invisible somehow. To be seen but not known was perhaps the loneliest feeling of all.

He had to live for that loneliness, he decided—for the private life of his mind, for the possibility of flight. There was nothing left to keep him on Ludlow Street except the fact that he knew it well, almost too well. It had made him. But into what?

For months he’d waited for the ghost to show itself. For months he’d listened at the doorway, watched from the stairs. Then he heard it in the cellar, moving in the dark, stumbling through the clutter that remained. He saw it staring back at him, wild and bearded in the glass. The ghost, all along, had been him.

NOW HIS BODY
was a golden burn, sparking, loose, zigzagging through the streets. The cold water drying on his face, the sweat stinging his eyes. He’d lost—there was no extra money for Mrs. Izzo or the baby. Back to night-soiling at dusk, with No Bones whispering to the others. Back to the cellar on Ludlow Street; back to the loot. It was a strange sensation—a kind of euphoric fury. Everything around him appeared heightened, almost divine—even the glitter of mop-water tossed in the street; the quarreling birds in the sky—and yet his world had never been narrower. To fall to Banto, of all people—an old speck of gristle, as queeny as a peahen, strutting around with a spray of dyed flowers in his hatband and stinking of cod. How could he have let that happen? What good was he if he couldn’t wallop a brittle old man? And the baby—Sylvan’s nose began to burn, but he sniffed it away—he couldn’t stop thinking of how her eyes had opened in the phosphorous glow of the lanterns.

Around him Broome Street seemed fragmented and unreal. He stepped to the side to let others pass, grumbling. He tried to hold on to one simple thought, something clear and unremarkable. This was the place he’d been the night before. Here was the butcher shop, with
its German signs and waxy, headless hogs. Here was where the slop wagon had stood. Over there was the garbage pile where the other night-soilers had rested with their canteens—now swarmed by crab-pink junkmen, picking through scraps in the naked sun. And here, near his feet, was the spot where he’d stood alone, listening to the baby crying in the yard.

He walked back down the gangway, smelling the fresh spill of guts, the lavender blossoming in the yard beyond. He saw the privies standing open in the sun, glimmering like the murky cavities of a paint tray. Laundry flapped on the line above. Everything seemed remarkably, dismally ordinary.

Back on the street he noticed a man in the window of the butcher shop, hanging a row of quails above the hog legs. He was young—an apprentice, most likely—with a ruddy, sideways nose and a wedge of white-blond hair.

Sylvan knocked on the glass and the man came out, mashing a rag around in his hands. He swayed forward in his galoshes, yeasty smelling and maybe a little bit drunk.

“Were you here last night?” Sylvan asked him.

The man scowled, then said in a thick accent, “Why?”

“I’m looking for a woman,” Sylvan asked.

The man snorted. “I sell only one kind of meat.”

“Maybe lives upstairs? One who was expecting a child? White woman, girl—could have green eyes?” Sylvan went on. “Maybe one who seemed . . . I don’t know . . . troubled? Mad, even?” He tapped the side of his head.

The man paled a little. “The witch?”

“The what?”

He lowered his voice. “Aren’t our boys scared of that one?” He leaned in closer. A quail egg slipped from his fingers and broke across the ground. “Used to buy blood in a jar.”

“What?”

“That’s who you mean, right?” The man rubbed the yolk into the ground with his toe. “She don’t look right. No . . . she don’t
seem
right.”

Sylvan stepped back. “You know her name?”

He shrugged. “She ain’t been by in a while—but then she come in sometime last week. All swelled up, had a funny way of walking.” He paused to take a nip from his flask. “Nervous, I’d say—always looking around. I ask if she wants a drink of the water? No. She needs to go back in yard for the privy? No. Bought a quart this time, not just pint. Lee . . .” he stammered. “Lee and Eddie, I think?”

“Lee and who?”

“That’s who you mean, right? Lee and Eddie’s woman. She’d stop by on her way to the poppy box.” He pointed to the stairs that led from the sidewalk down to the basement.

It took Sylvan a moment to realize what he was talking about—an opium den.

Then the butcher himself sidled out, apron strings tight against his belly, cleaver swinging in his hand. He glared at Sylvan and said pointedly, “You here for quail?”

“Not today,” Sylvan said. “Thank you.”

The man stared him down—a bullfrog pop of the cheeks, a casual swing of the blade. Sylvan knew that look well, so he turned and walked the other way. He could only imagine what his face looked like: bruised chin, split cheek, a salty crust of blood on his lip. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, staring at the wooden staircase that buckled down beneath the butcher shop.

He felt the hurt sing through him—his eyes picked out a door in the shadows. A golden bell hung above the jamb.
Aren’t our boys scared of that one?
Lee and Eddie’s woman. A dragon-chaser. The witch bringing home the blood.

A
LPHIE STARED, SHIVERING, AT THE GIRL IN FRONT OF HER.
She read the words again:
Orchard Broome.

She couldn’t breathe at first. Her home was near that very corner—her little nest above the carriage house, with its shambling doorways and canted floors, its rooms smelling of horse sweat and gardenia perfume and Anthony’s strawberry cordial.

“Do I know you?”

The girl didn’t answer, just stared at Alphie and made a clicking sound in the back of her throat.

Alphie leaned in closer. She tried to recall bits of gossip from the block, anything about a madwoman or an idiot, but the pain crackled through her head again, and she doubled over, sick. There was nothing left in her stomach—she could only gag and gag, throwing up mouthfuls of saliva. She felt a shock of embarrassment—she knew it was unreasonable, but she didn’t want someone from her new neighborhood to see her like this.

But the girl only looked at her, pleading. Her eyes were clear and green, and she had a bald patch behind her ear in the shape of a sickle. Alphie stared at it for a moment, blinking away spots of light.
She had seen that mark before—she was sure of it—but she couldn’t remember where.

“I know you,” she whispered, clearing her throat. Was she one of Anthony’s neighbors? Maybe the girl by the print shop, with the red-stained hands? Or the seamstress who peddled needles next to Mr. Moro’s cart?

The girl opened her mouth, but no words came out, just a low, weak sound without shape to it.

“Are you deaf? Dumb? Is that why you’re here?”

The girl just hung her head. She could be here for any reason at all, Alphie knew—sometimes they sent a woman here when she was out of her mind with fever; when she was too moved by the Holy Spirit or too awkward with company; when she was haunted by something horrible she’d witnessed, or when she couldn’t hold a child in her body. Still, the sickle mark was one Alphie had seen before. Hadn’t she? Or did she just want to believe as much?

Now her ears popped and drained, and the sounds of the asylum became deafening. She looked at the scissors, which had come to rest in a puddle across the floor. “How did you do that?”

The girl rolled on her stomach and inched her feet over to the puddle, then coaxed the scissors up between her toes. She lifted her legs into the air behind her. She curled them up and over her head, slowly, like a scorpion’s tail. She rocked forward, slithery and lithe, until her feet hung just inches from her face. Then she drew the scissors open with her toes and gestured for Alphie to hold out her bound hands.

Alphie did so, astonished. “You must be the maddest of all.”

The girl flexed her ankles and brought the scissor blades together. The twine around Alphie’s wrists snapped and unraveled. Quickly Alphie shook away the cords and rubbed at the welts they’d left behind.

The girl rolled to her side and dropped the scissors to the floor.
Alphie scrambled after them. How often, in her childhood, had she measured and cut the twine for her father’s store? How many times had she snipped the gnarled tail off a beet, or a loose thread from a sleeve? And yet here, the scissors seemed miraculous and providential, an artifact from the outside world.

“Who are you?” She leaned over and cut the rope from the girl’s wrists. There were freckles on the bridge of her nose, blood at the corners of her mouth. Alphie had seen her once before—she must have—unless the water had addled her brain, made her believe in things that weren’t there. “Do you know me?” she pleaded. “Can you speak?”

A door slammed somewhere down the corridor and footsteps echoed on the stones. Alphie tucked the scissors up her sleeve, then folded herself on the floor, shivering.
Please, God
, she prayed.
Don’t let them hurt me. Don’t let them find out.

A pair of nurses entered, women Alphie didn’t recognize—one with a dark, prunelike face; the other with bits of skinned vegetables stuck to her skirt. “Get her to bed,” one said to the other, nodding at Alphie. “And this one”—pointing to Orchard Broome—“we’ve got to make her eat, since she can’t do it herself no more.”

Alphie stumbled to her feet, faint and weak, but allowed herself to be supported by the nurse’s thick arms. As she was guided out of the room, she saw the other nurse pull Orchard Broome to her knees and strap a mask around her head—the bottom half of her face was sheathed in metal and something like a trumpet horn bloomed from her mouth. The nurse cracked a raw egg over it—Orchard Broome gargled and screamed. Then Alphie was pulled around the corner and away.

HERE WAS HER HOME
now, a room with ten rusted beds; ten mangy, straw-filled pallets. As the nurse returned her, shivering, to bed, she
said sternly, almost sorrowfully, “No more trouble, understood? You’ll catch your death.” Alphie dropped her slippers to the floor, her feet slimy and ice cold. She smelled the pot in the corner overrunning with piss. She crawled under the blanket and touched her body, freezing and shaking, while the nurse plodded away. She pissed herself, not even caring anymore. The heat warmed her.

If anyone here should discover what she’d done, what she’d concealed, she wasn’t sure what would happen—she’d be stoned, or hanged, or taken some place even worse, a place as bad as where the Widows walked behind the shipyard. She lay with her hand under her pillow, clutching the pair of scissors. If someone should come near her, touch her, she wouldn’t be afraid to use these. She pictured the scissors puncturing the heart of the Matron. What a strange sensation it must be to stab someone, popping through the layers of muscle and flesh, grating against the ribs, until the blade came to a rest in the fat, blubbering sac of the heart, while everything else leaked slowly away. A big red sun sinking into darkness.

She turned to face the wall, away from the white-lipped women who sank further into fever and delirium. She cut two strips from the edge of her blanket and cinched them tight around her thigh, about an inch apart from each other. Then she slid the scissors carefully beneath them, the metal slick against her skin, until the hinge rested firmly on the highest knot. A makeshift scabbard.
Look—
she’d say when she was free at last—
at Blackwell’s I saw a girl pull this from her throat!
Anthony would laugh and say perhaps she was mad after all, to dream up such a thing.
And I didn’t give them back,
she’d say,
I kept them so I could defend myself, so I could fight. Think what might have happened if you hadn’t come!
Then he would look into her eyes, take her by the shoulders with his firm hands, and tell her that
of course
he had come for her. Of course.

Tonight Anthony would go to bed alone. She imagined him undoing his collar and his cuffs, leaving them by the dish on the
stand. She imagined him turning sideways into bed, sleeping shirtless in his old pair of long underwear, from which she’d scrubbed blood and opium tar, tobacco juice and tea. She pictured his dark hair tumbling against his face, his stubbled jaw sinking into the pillow, his back curled against the still-burning light. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would seize up in bed and cry out: a terrible, blood-chilling sound that was half choke and half scream. Immediately she was awake beside him, her heart pounding. She thought he was awake, too, but he was still asleep, gasping for air, falling out of bed and punching the floor, his eyes open but not seeing. Finally she’d shake him, or press a wet handkerchief to his face until he woke, startled. Afterward he was confused and disoriented, unsure of where he was, with a look in his eyes of someone hunted. He’d be thirsty, ravenous, so in the darkest hour of night Alphie crossed the yard and slipped through the Signora’s back door to forage for something to eat. She loved the smells of the kitchen in the main house: the orecchiette in mushroom sauce, the melting balls of cheese, the béchamel. She’d grab something quietly, careful not to wake the Signora, then steal back to the servants’ quarters, her skin still buzzing and her heart hammering in her chest. Anthony would sit up in bed, wolfing down a wedge of cheese wrapped in mortadella, glugging a glass of whiskey between deep, agonized breaths. She rubbed his knees, his back, but she was shaking herself, and somehow she was angry that he’d put her through this ordeal, too. But she tried to remember how he spent his days—crowding into unfamiliar bedrooms and parlors, laying the dead out on his cooling-board. And when the consumption had swept through last year, there was no time to prepare the bodies—they were carted away while he watched, helpless, from the street.

The thing she never spoke about, not even to Anthony, was the ritual he had with his mother when he returned home. Every time he went out to prepare a body, he brought her back a souvenir.
A tooth. She kept them all in a jewelry box, and once in a while she took them out to arrange them around the darts of the backgammon tray. She lifted her spyglass right up to her eye, as if she were an archaeologist on a field study. They were human teeth, but she indexed them by animal: wolf, hippopotamus, alligator, rat. Anthony never explained this to Alphie, and she was too uncomfortable to ask.
He hunts the animals for me,
the Signora once said, but Alphie couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not.
He keeps me safe. There are wolves who live in the dumps by the river—don’t go past Essex, especially at night.
Pronged molars, spotty fangs, baby’s teeth no bigger than grains of rice. Alphie remembered the marks on the Signora’s body, and shivered.

She lay awake now in her little buckled bed, listening to the women sigh and weep around her, sucking at the spot where her own teeth were gone. She wiggled the loose one with her tongue until it squeaked and bled. She tried to imagine what was happening back at home, but she couldn’t even be sure what day it was. She thought of Anthony, haunting the halls of a Bowery tenement, shaving the beard off a dead man’s face, sewing a child’s cold lips together. She pictured his mother, counting out dessert forks for a party, or smoking alone in the parlor, the only sound in the house the clatter of dice on her backgammon board, the teeth rattling in their gilded box.

Months ago, in the spring, after an especially bitter fight with his mother, Anthony had disappeared. Alphie tried to wait him out, the way she’d done before, but after days of the Signora’s blistering silence and her own sleepless nights by the door, she’d put on her yellow poplin dress and veiled hat and worked her way down Broome Street—she knew there was an opium den he used to visit, back in the days when she lived alone at the boardinghouse. She lifted her skirts as she stepped down the stairs to the basement. She knew the code at the door; the man recognized her, tipped his hat. When she found Anthony lying there on the ground, his clothes tangled, his thick hair
pasted to his skin, his beautiful eyes raw and puffed as a rummy’s, he looked suddenly old, a stranger.

Get up,
she said.

His gaze lingered somewhere over her shoulder. She took his hands in her own, ignoring the sticky mess they left on her gloves.
I know it’s bad,
she said,
but you have me.

He turned his eyes on her then, and the look on his face was one she’d never seen before—disgust, disbelief, a venomous contempt.
You?
he spat.
You? You’re the reason I’m here.

She let his hand drop back to his chest. She walked, stunned, up the stairs, past the man at the door and out into the rowdy street. The sun blinded her; the smell of eels and spilled milk made her gag. He didn’t know what he was saying; he wouldn’t remember it tomorrow—he could have meant anything by those words. Yet she knew she was a cause of anguish for him, as much as he loved her. Ever since she’d come to the house, he couldn’t relax. He only seemed calm when he was working, when he left for the day with his case of swabs and needles, when he took his hat off its peg and marched out into the street. He was so gentle with the families of the dead, so compassionate. But when he came home to the dinner table, she could tell he was drugged. Leaving the den and crossing over the Bowery, she thought,
I’ll just keep walking. I’ll walk all the way to the train station, go anywhere else. Then he’ll be sorry. Then he’ll realize what I am to him, what I’ve given.
But the thought of him coming home, aching and disoriented, and finding her gone, was too painful. She would be thinking about him the whole time, hoping he would come after her. And what if he didn’t? She had nowhere else to go.

Sometimes she understood Anthony’s midnight fits, for once in a while her own eyes flew open in the dark and she felt a smothering dread.
What am I doing to myself?
she asked of her pounding heart.
How can I possibly keep this up?

Now, tossing in her bed, the piss turning to a cold burn on her
legs, she felt a fever begin to spike. The pain throbbed in her head; her teeth chattered. No matter how tightly she curled under her blanket, she shivered. It reminded her of something else. Her quiet home at night—humming to herself while she put a hand over her belly, while she turned down the sheets and looked out the window, down into the darkening yard—

“Mother’s Milk.”

Alphie looked up and saw an older woman sitting at the foot of her bed. “I got it, too,” she said, “my first week.”

Alphie stared at her. It was the woman with the scars on her chest, her tattoo slashed away.

“My eyesight went,” she continued. “I was no good at the factory no more. My boys didn’t want a leech, so they had me sent here. I’d rather be blind at the factory, stitching my fingers together, than have to wake up one more day and smell this room.”

Alphie stared at the scar beneath her collarbone. “What did they do to you?”

“Nothing. Only gave me the name of a family dead to me.” She held up her hand and smiled. Her fingernails were claws—gruesomely long, warped and fuzzed with yellow.

Alphie felt herself begin to shake. Heat flooded her cheeks.

“You must drink some water,” the woman said. She reached for the pail, wrapping her fingers carefully around the dipper.