Church of Marvels: A Novel (26 page)

Odile smiled and laughed. Then Belle took her by the arm and kissed her on the cheek, fiercely, her eyes wet with tears. Odile felt the water bud on her own lashes, but it might have just been the sunlight on the deck, or the way the sails on the harbor glinted like tiny stars. The horn sounded, and everyone jumped, then laughed, including Sylvan, who put a hand to his heart. He started to chuckle—low and raffish, a bashful shake of his head. Odile started to laugh too, which only made him laugh harder, which in turn made her laugh so breathlessly that she began to cry, water spilling over onto her cheeks. Light-headed, she looked over to catch her sister’s eye, but Belle wasn’t there.

Odile blinked and stood on her tiptoes, craning her neck to see farther down the deck. There, beyond a group of older women, she saw the flash of her sister’s hair, the ruffle of the baby’s bonnet. She called out her name, but Belle kept walking.

Odile followed her, pushing her way through the crowd, but she lost her by the time she reached the stairs. She turned right, then left—maybe Belle had just ambled away to soothe the baby, or nurse her in the ladies’ quarters, wherever those happened to be. Still, Odile circled the deck, two full revolutions, looking for the custard-yellow dress, the high and freckled chin. But the faces were all those of strangers. Then, leaning over the rail, she saw Belle on a deck below—walking against the tide of last-minute boarders who were edging their way onto the boat. Odile called after her, but Belle shouldered on, her head bent over her daughter. She made her way down the gangplank to the pier. Odile saw the purple ticket stub flutter down to the water.

“Belle!” The horn blew as she leaned over the railing. “Hurry!”

The wet chains rattled and clanked; the wheels began to turn.
Belle only stood there, watching as the plank was raised and unhitched, as the steam billowed from the stacks overhead.

Odile gazed down three decks to the water, black and foaming under the sputter of the wheel. She could jump. She could risk it—the cold shock, the pain splintering down her back, the pull and drag of the paddle wheels, drawing her under. She wedged her foot up on the rail, felt her skirts flutter around her ankles—but Sylvan was quick behind her, his arms around her waist, lifting her back.

The horn sounded again; the paddle wheels churned. Odile called her sister’s name, but it was lost in the wind. Belle raised her head to the light. There was something in her eyes: a wry sadness, a dogged smile. It reminded Odile of something—of being high up in the rafters and looking down at the Church of Marvels stage—at the Shape Shifter, standing alone in the spotlight.

Belle raised her hand above her head. She crooked her finger.

The wheels turned faster; a pipe organ played; the smokestacks left a pair of trails burned into the sky. All around them the crowds buzzed and laughed, a garden of sunhats blooming at the rail. On the shore beneath the pennants, her sister grew smaller—a fiery yellow dot, alone in a circle of light, her hand raised above her head. The
Queen
made a wide, waltzing turn into the harbor. The engine chuffed louder and louder. Then—a gust of steam, a passing ship—and Belle was gone.

Odile wavered for a moment, blinking back her tears. In the wake she saw ragpickers and fishermen—all skimming the harbor with homemade nets, picking through the lost and the jettisoned. She turned to Sylvan, who only shook his head in wonder. They stared back at the city, a torrent of light.

Something passed through her then, a feeling she couldn’t distinguish, but she’d felt it before—one summer day years ago, when she was still a little girl in a metal brace. She hadn’t been allowed to swim, but her sister took her into the ocean anyway, when their
mother’s back was turned. Belle, small but tough, hoisted Odile up on her back and carried her down to the surf. Odile kept her legs and arms wrapped around her sister, shrieking and laughing as Belle marched into the water—feet, then ankles, knees and hips—the waves rolling over them, lifting them up. They kept going, farther and farther out, until the sandbank fell away. Odile closed her eyes as they dropped—she held her breath, clung tighter to Belle. The water surged over her shoulders, tickled her chin—a mouthful of salt—but they didn’t go under. Belle kicked and kept swimming.
You don’t weigh anything!
she marveled.
Maybe I’m a strongman!
Odile laughed, her cheek against Belle’s sunburned scalp. They swam past the breakers, their bodies slippery and locked.
Faster!
Odile cried.
Faster!
Belle paddled through the dappled water, frog-kicking and spitting back foam, until their mother—alone on the shore—called them back. Odile knew there would be a soft blanket to dry her, a lunch of seltzer and waffles from the stand on the boardwalk.
Come in now!
Their mother’s voice, drifting out over the waves:
Come in now, girls!
But they didn’t stop.
Faster, faster!
Together they dove underwater and came up for air.
A two-headed mermaid!

Now she gazed back to Manhattan as the dark water carried them away—the huge sky above, the pale glimmer of stars, the shipmasts in the haze. She reached over and took Sylvan’s hand.
They cannot burn! They cannot sink!

And the city itself: an island of light. All of those windows, all of those rooms—lit now by candles and electric bulbs, hearthfires and stoves. Deep in its burrows were a thousand hands to kindle the torch: the flick of a match, the turn of a lamp, the spark of a switch; embers rising from chimneys to join the sun. The great hive glowed in its smoke. The world was lit by fire.

A
LPHIE LIFTED THE BOWLER OFF HER HEAD AND RAN A HAND
through her chopped, sweaty hair. She asked a passing man on the street for a smoke. When he stopped, she saw that it was Mr. Moro, the olive-vendor, rolling his pushcart home, but he didn’t recognize her—not here, with her naked face and man’s clothes, her sweaty chest and scabbed tattoo. He just nodded, distracted, and handed her a cigarette without a word. She thanked him as he continued on—
grazie, signor
—and for a moment she smelled the salty oil sloshing around the olive jars and was hungry. She lit the cigarette, inhaled the smoke, and stared up at the sky. The moon hung low in the pale light, just above the bridge. Salt and sand blew in from the sea. For the first time in a long time she wasn’t sure what to do.

She kept walking. She had nothing on her—no money, no clothes, no box of powder and paint. She could do a little bit of bartending, perhaps, at any tavern with a blue star on the door, at least until she got her Rembrandt stand up and running again. She could live week by week at her old boardinghouse, eat supper in a saloon
of her own choosing, with no one to please but herself. Her stomach cramped at the thought of it. Roasted chicken and crispy potatoes. Egg-drop soup. Rarebit on sweet brown bread. Beer.

She made her way down Orchard Street, toward the water. She passed the shipyard with its scaffolds and ladders and pots of tar, the whale skeleton rising from the earth. She passed the rickety wooden building where she’d tricked those first few months away from home, where she’d lived on black liquor and raw potato skins. She looked up to the terrace and saw the Widows at the rail—waiting out the heat in their tangled blond wigs, whistling down to the sailors and smiths. The littlest one smiled, dazed and grim, at Alphie, rubbing at the blue circles under his eyes.

A few blocks down she saw the door to the Shingle and Plank. Inside it was dim and cool, a relief after the heat of the streets, smelling like Irish beer and sour-bread. Here she knew every knot along the bar, every lewd drawing and lonely initial carved into the wood; she could see shapes in the darkest corners of the room. She had once navigated the paths between the tables as if they were the streets of her own little city. But now the bartender looked at her oddly, perched on a stool by herself. Alphie could see that he recognized her somehow, but he couldn’t place her. She thought of the little Rembrandt he remembered: walking in with her folded stand, smelling like cologne and lemon drops, all the men buying her drinks while she smiled agreeably and looked past them, waiting for a glimpse of Anthony.

What a sight she must be now, after the care she’d taken. Her hair cut short, her skin clammy, an ugly scrawl beneath her throat. Would anyone think to find her here? Would they know where to look? She’d have to hide out for a while, she realized, keep away from the places where they knew her as Mrs. Leonetti, the undertaker’s wife. She could not be seen with Anthony again.

Perhaps she’d move west, to the ports on the Hudson, just to be safe. She knew there was a shop nearby, above the cobbler’s, where an old vaudeville star named Carlotta discreetly made dresses for men’s bodies. She’d go there and order something new. But later. Now she ordered a pint of beer, prayed she could pay tomorrow, and put her head down on the bar.

It was Dolly, the songbird who lived in a room above, who recognized her.

“Not Alphie Rembrandt?”

Alphie raised her head. She felt ashamed of the way Dolly looked at her, tentative and scared, as if she were something that had washed ashore from a wreck.

“I almost didn’t know you!” Dolly said, a hand fluttering up to her cheek. “You’ve gone back to—”

“No, I haven’t.” Alphie drank her beer too quickly and coughed. “But I’m a sight, I know.”

“What happened to your gallant knight, your grand opera singer?”

“They all found me out.”

“He’s not with you then?”

“No.”

“Well, we always knew he was the wrong sort,” Dolly sniffed. “What did you want with the likes of him anyway, prancing around up there like he’s straight as a preacher’s prick? Sometimes it’s too risky, trying to cross all the way like that.”

“You’re right,” Alphie said. “He didn’t love me.”

“I think he did, little bird. He must have, to marry you.”

“I don’t know anymore,” Alphie said. “I think he was just trying to hurt someone else.”

Dolly ordered another round of beer and reached out to brush Alphie’s arm. “Hey, I heard from Robbie that The Chandelier is
looking for pretty female impersonators for their new revue. You’ve got a sweet, lovely alto, you know. I think you could try for it.”

“No,” Alphie said, hearing the edge in her own voice. “But thank you.”

“Of course,” Dolly said, blushing. “I only feel sorry you have no home to go to now.”

Alphie didn’t know what to say. She had wanted to feel safe and normal in a world that made her feel like she was wrongly made at every turn. She wanted to prove she was just as much a woman as anyone else. She’d seen Anthony’s troubles as some kind of wrong she could right, as a place for her to be needed. She believed their pain was the same. She had given herself over to making his life better, believing that if she did, she’d somehow atone for her own. But he needed her far more than he loved her. And she’d mistaken her devotion for something more heroic—an unassailable moral purity; a high-mindedness above even sex. But she saw now it was little more than vanity and desperation, a desire to be known.

She could guess now what had happened that night. She’d seen Anthony’s face at the funeral, heard it from the man on the street—he’d been down in the poppy box. How foolish could she have been? He had likely been gone all afternoon, drifting from den to bar and back again, lost track of the time. And when he finally returned home—well past the four o’clock train—the Signora had already found out the worst. Her own husband, rather than coming to her aid and defense, rather than protecting her—had chosen instead to protect himself. Now she remembered the lights of Bellevue Hospital, the swish of money exchanging hands; a brief glimpse of the wardens, vole-eyed and taciturn, folding the bills in their crisp paper bibs. An ambulance, already crowded with women, was bound for the moonlit wharf. He had left the person he loved, signed her away to the island to rot—to be discovered there for what she
was, and then to be punished forever; a work-camp slave, a life of rock-breaking and maggot-meat—never to see Broome Street again.

FOR A MOMENT
she imagined what her life might have been like if nothing had gone wrong that day—if he and his mother had gotten on the train, if the Jennysweeter’s girl had delivered the baby without incident. But she knew what would have followed: a life even lonelier, waiting up for Anthony night after night, raising a child by herself while he drifted and drank—
but it’s my fault if he’s that way, isn’t it?
—and then having that child (that sweet little girl!) fall under the obsessive tyranny of his mother.

The Signora—reaching for the baby in her basket that night. The Signora, singing a lullaby and rocking her as she cried. Alphie couldn’t be sure what had happened, but this was how she pictured it.

The Signora, in a dream of love, had doted on that baby. For two days she had giggled and cooed. The bite on her hand glimmered, blacked to a scab, but she didn’t even see it. Not even as she spooned the cooling milk from a saucepan; as she brushed the baby’s hair. A baby girl: the daughter she’d dreamed of having. She called her
la mia piccola pipistrella!
My little bat. Even her voice was different, a little-girl laugh, and her cheeks were cream-pink roses. But when Anthony tried to speak, she turned and walked right past him, as if he weren’t even there.

Anthony, alone—hot muggy mornings out in the yard, sanding the casket, retching in the weeds. The sawdust clinging to the hairs on his arms, while inside his mother sang to the baby.

He bought the wreaths and the garlands. He visited the
lacrimata
in their quarters behind the convent, where the nuns had been buried standing up, habits shriveled against their bones.
I will see to it,
he had said. He had done everything his mother asked of him, penitent, ashamed—and still he waited for her wrath.

But it never came. She’d made him a ghost. There was only the baby, new in her arms, red as a shelled bean and wearing his old baby bonnet. He tucked a blanket of gauze in her cradle when his mother’s back was turned—it was the gauze he used to stuff the mouths of the dead, to give shape to their faces; to plug nostrils and rectums, to keep the leaks away. Even so, the baby slept happy and pure, untroubled by dreams. A life pristine. His mother’s prize, the victor’s.

What did he think, when he took her away that night, his old familiar walk to the den? That he would get revenge? That he would never again be reminded of the life he’d lost? Or that somehow, in death, the baby would be saved? Alphie would never know. But she knew that even now he would be looking over his shoulder, turning in his sleep, no matter who lay by his side. For wherever he went, something would follow, pawing and hungry, singing a witch-song to the moon.

All the wolves, they waited true. The wolves, they had their way.

AFTER ANOTHER ROUND
of beer Alphie followed Dolly upstairs to her room. Dolly gave her a peck on the cheek, laid out a dress, and left Alphie alone to change. Slowly, methodically, Alphie brushed out the skirts. She bent over a bowl of water and washed away the Mother’s Milk, the ink and sweat, the stink of horses and the dirt of the soap-boy’s clothes. She peered in the dusty little mirror that hung on the wall. Her hair was a horror, with its hasty chops and stubborn cowlick. She brushed it out of her face and sighed. It would have to do for now.

As she dropped her eyes, she caught sight of it for the first time, backward in the mirror. His name, written on her body. She touched the skin where it blistered and peeled. She had believed so devotedly in him; she felt as though she couldn’t live without him. She was certain that a life alone was a life failed. As a child she’d
longed to be spirited away—to a world of beauty, a world apart. She dreamed of being transformed. But that world was not the Widows’ Walk or the waterfront; it was not Anthony and his cooling-board and his carriage-house home. It was one she had carried with her all along: it was her own heart, and it still beat.

You have two spirits,
Orchard Broome had said to her.
Most in this life only have one.
She supposed she must have imagined it that way over the years, but she’d always thought of them as two beasty shadows wrestling inside her, fighting for possession of her body and mind. But now she pictured it differently. The spirits weren’t shadows, restless and ill. Instead, they were high up on trapezes, colorful as birds, reaching for each other’s hands as they flew through the air.

She leaned toward the mirror and mopped the water from her chin. She powdered her face and buttoned up her dress. She pictured the spirits swinging higher—they were ruffled and plumed, one a woman and one a man. She penciled the kohl around her eyes, oiled and brushed her hair. She put on a spritz of Dolly’s perfume. She saw them soaring and careening, closer and closer, their arms outstretched, radiant, bright.

She stepped back from the mirror, lifted her chin.

They held out their hands in the stunning lights. And when they touched, there in midair, she was whole.