Church of Marvels: A Novel (20 page)

Alphie steered the horse down into the Thirties, past the bakeries and the oyster barrels, past the stacks of corn and buckets of boot nails, the links of sausage big as oxen yokes and spotty with fat. The horses lurched and whinnied together, thrilled to be given the lead. Beside her the girl’s look was hard and feral—she leaned forward in the saddle and gripped the horn, the soap-boy’s shirt flapping around
her small frame, her feet free from the stirrups and braced against the horse’s flank.

There were times when Alphie hated herself for choosing a life in which she and Anthony had to lie, even when things felt truer than she’d ever known. Sometimes they still went down to the Shingle and Plank, to the places where people knew them, where other couples like themselves gathered, couples carrying on the same kind of ruse in their own houses. Gradually, though, Anthony began to leave her behind, drifting down to the water alone and not reappearing until dawn. Alphie would cry through the night, or pace the rooms, seething and furious, before falling asleep in the chair by the door. Those nights she almost hated him for making their life harder than it already was, and fleetingly she wondered if she could give it all up, if it was worth it. Wouldn’t it be easier if she lived like a man, the way she’d been born, the way her parents expected her to be, the way Anthony lived now? Wouldn’t it be easier for her to marry a plain, undemanding woman and father a few children and drift down once in a while to the waterfront to be the person she knew she was? Why couldn’t she just do what came so easily to everyone else? But in the morning she’d rise and brush out her hair and lace up her corset and she’d feel whole again, like herself, and she looked in the mirror and knew who she was, knew that despite all of the dangers, a life of a different kind of deceit would kill her. How would it feel to know there were people who’d chosen to live as they felt, not as they appeared, and never looked back? Could she bear their happiness, as shunned as they were? Was she brave enough?

Was she?

This was her body, she knew, but not herself. Looking in the mirror every morning after she dressed, seeing in the flesh the way she felt inside—how could she ever give that up? She had to make a choice. This was hers. And she wasn’t sorry.

She picked up speed, edging her way around wagons, weaving between pushcarts, watching the crowds in the street dodge and leap. Her back and torso were bare to the breeze, her skin sweating in the gray sun. Every week she used to pass this very butcher shop, where the fowl were slaughtered and hung from the awnings, their wings fanned out as if in flight. Sometimes she’d bring home a jar of blood—for puddings and sauces, she always told the shopboy—but then, late at night, she rubbed the blood into her monthly cloths to show the Signora. How she trembled there, as the Signora unrolled the cloth and turned it to the light—how she worried something else would be amiss: the silhouette of her dress, the smoothness of her cheek, the shape of her hands.

But for now there would be no crinoline skirts or twenty-buttoned boots, no pomegranate paste for her lips, no haircombs or bustles or gardenia perfume. She wanted them to be sorry. Bitterly sorry. And she would be there to see it on their faces.

A
FEW HOURS BEFORE DAWN SYLVAN WENT DOWN TO THE
water. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see much—just the hulls rising in the shipyard beyond, the scaffolding etched against the sky. Around him the docks were lit by a yellow pulse—a beacon from an island upriver.

He’d left Mrs. Izzo’s at dusk. After a plate of ham and biscuits and a glass of honeyed milk, Odile had fallen asleep in the chair by the window, the baby in a basket beside her. For an hour she had stared at the little girl in wonder—brushing the fuzz of her hair, tracing the puckish tips of her ears.
I have a feeling,
she’d said,
that my sister would never have left her behind. This isn’t her doing at all.

She’d mentioned going to the police, but then thought better of it. An unwed mother, missing in the city; a baby abandoned in the slums—how many times had they heard that tale of woe before? How quickly would they act? She would go to the Jennysweeter herself, she decided—first thing in the morning, just as Lillian Edgar had said. As they finished their meal, she took out a piece of paper and smoothed it out across Mrs. Izzo’s table—a list of theaters she’d copied from her mother’s directory. She ran her finger down the names,
but there was no Featherbone, nothing that even sounded similar. Her sister, she believed, had been familiar with a man who once worked there. But that could be anywhere in the city. And what—a hotel? A storefront? Saloon? She sighed and looked out the window, touching the bald spot behind her ear.

Sylvan sat quietly at the table, soaking his hands in a bucket of ice water, watching Mrs. Izzo change the bandage on Odile’s knee. He couldn’t help but feel a tick of sadness, or jealousy—that Odile would risk such a thing for her sister, that she loved her without question, that they shared something secret and their own—however reckless and troubled Isabelle was. He decided it for himself—he’d go that night, while Odile rested; he’d ask around and see what he could find.

He didn’t wake her when he left, didn’t even move to lift the edge of the afghan—there were biscuit crumbs, he saw, still on her fingers—he just whispered to Mrs. Izzo that he’d return in the morning, when his shift was over. She nodded—she was already back at her workbench, concertina spectacles perched on her nose, making intricate lace of a dead woman’s hair.

He had made his way in the dying light, down to the taverns he used to haunt—those half-forgotten nights spent with Francesca, drinking until the stars sang and the pavement rippled—to the muddy cellar dives where he once hid like a frog, fingers gummed to the bar, knowing the ghost in the house awaited him. He asked a few of the old barkeeps—the wilier ones, the raconteurs, the top-hatted sachems with squeaky red faces—if they knew what the Featherbone was. And they liked these questions, the chance to prattle on their pulpit—they believed that the more they knew of the city, the more it belonged to them, native-born, not to the goat-hoofed immigrants. One fellow said he was sure the Bone was out by the shipyard, in back of the old whale skeleton, and not a place any right-blooded man would be seen.

Sylvan knew the kind of people who lurked around there at night, of course—grifters and dog-fighters; men on shore for the first night in months, out of their minds with sea-fever and drink. Whoever he was, this man Odile’s sister had known, it was better if Sylvan saw to him first. He drank a beer, slept for a short spell in his own room on Ludlow Street, then made his way down to the water.

He moved through the slips where the taverns were loudest, between women in feathered dresses and packs of grizzled, hooting sailors, their faces streaked with coal dust and sweat. He heard the music and laughter from open saloons, but he kept to himself. Earlier he’d passed the stable where the night-soilers gathered before their shift. He had watched, from across the shadowed way, as the men had readied the slop-wagon, as No Bones stacked the buckets and Everjohn latched down the barrels. He’d listened to the beat of their shovels as they drifted away in the dark, the hymn they sang to strengthen their lungs. He’d turned the other way and kept walking. He couldn’t bring himself to go back, not for another night of it: the smell of shit, the ghostly coating of lime-powder on his hands and his face, the way the other men turned their backs to him when they hosed out the wagon at shift’s end. And then afterward: back to the cellar, to his carefully folded newspapers and rescued debris, a bottle of beer keeping cold in a hole in the floor, where the boards had given way to dirt. He couldn’t.

Behind the shipyard he saw a shiver of light on the cobblestones—a perforated paper lantern, swinging from a post—and then, just beyond, an archway of bone. The whale skeleton, just as the old man had said. He remembered when the whale had washed ashore at the Battery a few years ago—they had set up a tent and charged people a quarter to see it, then sawed it up and boiled it down and sold off the blubber to the oil works. Now he walked under what remained: the ribs, curving up against the sky. The men who passed him in the dark, or who hung back between the bones, smoking
cheroots, only dropped their eyes and looked away, their chins dug deep in their collars.

At the end of the path was a bare-shingled inn, sinking in a patch of sand. Young girls idled out on the terrace, leaning against the rail. He could see the glow of their wigs in the moonlight, as pale as clouds of mercury. They whistled huskily down as he slunk to the door.
Hello, sailor; hey, dandy, up here.
There was a blue star on the frame, he noticed, just as there’d been at the poppy box.

He jammed down his hat and buttoned his collar and stepped inside, through a sateen curtain, into a low-ceilinged room. Perfume and smoke, the liquor as black as ship’s tar. Men sat at felt-lined tables, their faces turned from the light. He saw the glimmer of their watch chains, the wrinkle of their coats. Here and there a fat hand curled around a snifter—a clawed armrest—a young knee in a flounced skirt. In another room, someone played a lonely waltz on a harmonium.

Sylvan could feel the eyes dragging over him, picking through the oakum dust that lingered in the air, following him as he approached the bar, where a bald man mopped up a spill and ate a plate of pickled onions with a toothpick.

“I’m looking,” Sylvan said in a low voice, “for a young man who worked here once.”

The bartender stared at him, then speared another onion and dragged it, split, around the rim. “Upstairs,” he said. “The Widows Walk. They’ll take care of you.”

O
DILE WOKE WHEN IT WAS STILL DARK OUT. SHE DIDN’T KNOW
where she was at first—when she opened her eyes, she saw only a postcard from San Francisco, tacked to the headboard of the bed. White cliffs and palm trees. Women in lavender dresses, promenading by the sea. Then she smelled oyster brine in the air. For a moment she thought she was in a sea cave, festooned with kelp, but she realized it was only the braids that hung from the rafters, and she heard the hiss of the river beyond the walls. Quietly she rose and lifted the baby from her basket, whispered in the dark:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright!
How many times had she recited the same thing for her sister in the middle of the night—when they were too nervous, too excited to sleep—when they lay awake with a candle lit and made shadow puppets on the wall?

Briefly she’d wondered if Belle, confused and alone, had tried to get rid of the baby—if she’d panicked and left her behind in a privy—if she believed that any fate, even death, was better than giving her up to someone else. But how could someone like Belle—always so strong-minded and loyal, a woman who’d tended to the children of the Frog and Toe, who’d taught them the same routines
she and her sister once practiced in their own room at night—do something so desperate and cruel? She couldn’t believe it. Belle was in trouble—she knew it by the tremble in her blood. Lines of that letter played around in her mind, like the haunting refrain of a song.

While Mrs. Izzo slept, she brewed herself a cup of coffee, bitter and black, and sat drinking it alone at the workbench. She took a swath of lace, the thickest and darkest, and made a veil for her hat. She would have to arrive at the apothecary shop as someone else: a girl in mourning, in trouble. Mrs. Bloodworth would know her face—it was her sister’s face, although crooked to the side and slightly narrow. The mean little scrub-girl had seen her, too—a plucky naïf with a worn-out valise, chirruping at the yellow door. She began to think of a story: an immigrant girl, a chambermaid, lost in the city and needing help. Sitting there among the bobbins and needles, she felt as if she were back in the old theater, mending costumes before a show. She had stitched the golden flames to Belle’s devil dress, the ruffles to Aldovar’s gown, the sequins to Mr. Mackintosh’s blindfold. She had a role, she reminded herself as she pinned the veil to her hat and laced the dagger in her boot. A performance of sorts.
Relax your face. Open your throat. Raise your chin like you have a secret that everyone wants to know.

When Mrs. Izzo woke, she made Odile breakfast: a hunk of cheese, a cold egg, and a slice of ham. Odile thanked her, offered to pay something for the food and the bed, but Mrs. Izzo just shook her head. “I only want your word that you’ll be back for the child. That Mr. Threadgill’s thanked proper. That she’s got a peaceful home to go to.”

Odile unlatched her locket and set it down on the table, next to the cameos and brooches. “This is as good as my word, ma’am,” she said. “It’s yours.”

It hurt her to leave the baby behind, even for a short while, but
she was safe, at least—alive. There was some strange relief in that, wherever her sister had gone.

She drank the last of her coffee, looked out the window. She drew a crescent in the steam on the windowpane and peered through to the river-dumps beyond.
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

She remembered, when the tiger cubs were little, how she and Belle used to perch one on a stool in the ticket booth, then crouch red-faced below while a dithering patron opened her purse and asked for a pass and then screamed loud enough to shake the rafters. But there would be no more of that, she realized. No more of Mother and Belle’s disquieting fights—Belle tearing at the curtains with her chalked-up hands, or bashing in a footlight with her heel—while Odile sat alone in the wings, plinking a mallet against her brace, trying to find a song of her own.

She’d never understood the poem before, not really—and she’d never said as much to Mother—but now it began to make some kind of sense. What god could dream up a creature so fierce? And what god could contain the thing he’d created, when she burned as bright as all the rages of heaven, and when she came to wield the very fire that had forged her?

A GOLDEN FOG HUNG LOW
on the riverbank. As Odile walked down Cherry Street, she saw the black glitter of the water, the old row houses with their crooked shutters and maritime stars. In the air she could smell salt and fish, metallic water pooling between the cobbled bricks, a heel of rye left to harden and mold on the curbside. She passed buildings that seemed to have been lost: dwarfed in the shadows, on streets so narrow no traffic could pass.

Up on the Bowery the crowd grew dense. She looked at every passing face, hoping that one would be Belle’s. But no one met her
eye, and if they did they looked quickly away.
I’m a mourner,
she reminded herself.
Play the part.

She reached the apothecary shop on Doyers Street, with its looming gold spectacles and dusty windowpanes. Above her the sky flamed red. The breeze lifted her hair, cooled her neck. A tired dray pulled a wagon down the lane—milk or ice or newspaper. She remembered drinking coffee on the beach with her sister, combing for shells under gray morning clouds, the boardwalk empty, the ocean like stone. For a moment she strained to hear the
ruff-ruff
of the stubborn surf along the shore, the nervous chitter of the trolley bell. But there was only the bump of wagon wheels along the ruts in the ground, the angry caw of squirrels on the roof.

She drew the veil over her face, stepped up to the green shop door and reached for the knob. She couldn’t go home, she reminded herself. What had she left to return to without seeing this through?

She walked inside and a bell chimed above her, the most innocent of sounds. She glanced around at the rows of polished shelves, stocked with tonics and powders and pastes. Some of the labels had started to curl in the heat. She looked over to the counter, with its iron register and old scales, but the stool behind it was empty.

A few people idled beneath a fan that hung from the ceiling. She’d seen a fan like that once before, in the lobby of a seaside hotel. The blades whirred and squeaked. A young couple lingered drowsily in the breeze, studying tins of blemish cream. A sunburned man stood beside them, fanning himself with his hat and squinting at jars of soda powder. No one spoke. Odile looked back and forth, but they all seemed lost in a dull, overheated stupor.

She sidled up to the counter and waited, picking at the wood-grain. She studied the spidery knobs of ginger, the bottles of dandelion ale, the roots and herbs with confoundingly poetic labels: angelica, floating-heart, rabbit tobacco, meadow-rue.

A woman emerged from the back room. She wore a homespun
gray dress and a wilted-looking pinafore. “Help you?” she asked, drawing up to the counter.

She was young, Odile saw, not yet twenty, but already stooped—glum and wattled, the kind of woman whose gaze was both frank and bored, her tone unimpressed.

“Good morning,” Odile stammered, the veil sticking to her lips. She puffed it away and cleared her throat. “I’m here for a cup of tea.”

The woman didn’t blink, didn’t betray any emotion at all. “You have an ailment?” Her accent was Russian, educated—like the furriers’ wives of Brighton Beach who played their violins in the tea garden on Sundays.

“It’s a personal matter,” Odile said.

The woman shook her head. “It’s not possible today, I’m afraid.” She plucked absently at her cuffs, which stood out from her plain and workmanlike dress: they were embroidered, pristine—a piece of distinction and pride.

Odile tried to picture Belle standing at this very counter, carrying her bag of poetry and swords, the baby growing bigger inside her. She studied the woman’s face: her furrowed brow and downturned mouth, her hands busy sorting bills along the counter. She wondered if she might have been in a situation like Belle’s, too, if she’d come here to give up her baby, to live in a strange room far from home, to spend her evenings in a parlor with nothing for company but an untuned piano.

“I’ve come very far,” Odile said, feeling the burn behind her eyes as she drew up her tears. “Do you know what it is, to be homesick?”

And as she said it, she felt a tick in her throat. This was the longest she’d ever been away from home—a mere day—and already it felt as if the world had turned upside down, as if she were strapped to the Wheel but couldn’t get off. She could walk away from this place right now, she knew—she could hail her way back
to the docks, head home on the ferry, retreat to the lonely glow of the bungalow, forget everything she’d seen and leave Belle to tend to this alone. She’d never asked for Odile’s help, anyway; she didn’t even seem to want it.
You must believe, no matter what, that you are where you belong.
But what then? Before long all the players, everyone she knew, would scatter down the coast for the winter: to Atlantic City, the Florida fairgrounds, maybe even the grimy palaces of Cincinnati and Chicago. But what would she do? Where would she go?
Chin up!
her mother used to say as Odile stood blinking and dazed in the stage lights.
Cheat out to the crowd. There—show us your face. You have lightning bolts, for God’s sake, and you’re going to use them!

“You have a seamstress in your family,” Odile ventured. “Your mother, I suppose.”

The woman looked up sharply.

“She made you these.” Odile reached out and lifted the woman’s hands, then rolled her wrists out so she could see the embroidery on the cuffs. From a distance it looked like a flowering bough—tendrils, buds—but up close she saw it was actually a line of music. She began humming it.

The woman, spooked, drew her hands away and pressed them to her sides.

“Prokofiev?” Odile asked. She remembered it from her lessons with the émigré professor, who had clapped his hands or thumped his cane as she plunked arrhythmically at the old piano by the hearth. Now she brought her hands down to the counter and played silently against the wood, her fingers running and skipping over each other, chasing up to the meadow-rue and down to the mint.

The woman grew pensive for a moment. She nodded along, then winced. “Your counting, ach!” she said. “You have to count.
Dah-
dah-dah,
dah-
dah.”

Odile laughed. “My mother always said that, too.”

The woman brushed and straightened her cuffs. She squinted at Odile, then hesitated. “Where are you from, did you say?”

“It doesn’t matter, really. I can’t go back.”

The corner of the woman’s mouth twitched. She reached over and pulled on a chain that hung near the register. Above them the ceiling fan sputtered to a stop. In the middle of the room the other shoppers scowled and shifted uncomfortably.

“Go on!” she called to them. “No buying, no staying!”

Slowly they skulked away. The door chimed as they dissolved into the white glare of the morning. When they were gone, the woman put her elbows on the counter and leaned forward.

“A woman’s ailment, you mean.”

“Yes.” Odile found herself nodding. “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”

She beckoned to Odile. “This way, then.”

Odile followed her out the green shop door. The woman drew the sash and turned the lock, then looked back and forth down the street. She led Odile a few paces to the right, under a wayward thatch of ivy, through the yellow door—into the same low-lit foyer where Odile had ventured the day before, valise in hand: the same tiled floor and stacks of blankets, the quiet set of stairs.

“Stay here for a minute,” the woman told her. “I will see, yeah?”

Odile only nodded, her heart pounding.
Be the part!
her mother had cried from the darkness of the theater, unseen among the empty seats.
Be it!

The woman walked up the stairs and paused on the landing, where a young girl was on her hands and knees in the shadows, scrubbing the floor. “Mouse, see that she waits there, yeah?”

The brush paused for a moment, then continued, dunking and whishing. Odile stood there in the heat, straining to hear any conversation from the floors above. But there was just the sound of the young girl on the stairs—the clank of the bucket, the hiss of the
brush, the creak of her elbows and knees as she worked her way down to the foyer. When she reached the bottom stair, she sat back on her heels and wiped the hair from her face. Odile recognized her—the scrub-girl, surly and bowlegged—the one who’d put the knock-out drops in her coffee.

Mouse
.

In her pocket the envelope crinkled. That word—a name—written in her sister’s hand.

There were footsteps on the stairs again, and the woman appeared. She nodded to Odile, her voice thick and authoritative. “Mrs. Bloodworth is ready for you.”