Church of Marvels: A Novel (27 page)

T
HEY’D RISEN EARLY TOGETHER, DUG THE PIT BEFORE DAWN
. First, Odile in the dark, drawing a square through the sand. Then Sylvan, breaking up the sand with a shovel, lifting and turning, digging down into the beach. He felt his lungs open in the damp, salty air, the tickle of beachgrass around his toes. Above him the stars held fast; the sky was as gray as the sea.

They walked down the shore and collected driftwood. They carried the bundles back on their shoulders and stacked them at the bottom of the pit. Together they laid down the slats of an old whiskey barrel, and Sylvan took a match to a twist of paper. He fed the kindling, lay back in the sand, and watched the sparks chase up to the sky. Odile knelt beside him in her topcoat and bathing gown, picking through shells. When the fire was high, they cooked their breakfast—salty gammon, potatoes on a stick, and fresh ears of corn, charred and popping-sweet. They ate together on the tiger quilt, watching the sun rise over the water, listening to the surf, feeling the warmth of the fire at their backs.

The first meal he fixed her was a sorry one. The day they’d arrived, Odile had been very quiet, faraway. They’d walked in silence
from the Brighton Beach landing to her house, where she sat for a spell by the window, staring out at the striped turrets and onion domes. He made her a plate of whatever he found in the pantry—pickled yams, a slice of bread, some anchovies and a glob of mustard. She ate it anyway, without complaint, and he read her the day’s paper, every story he could find: about a bicycle race on Manhattan Beach, a missing jewel thief in Texas, the marriage of a Sunday school teacher to an elevator man at an ice cream factory. She listened and smiled but didn’t speak. She didn’t ask him to leave, and he didn’t feel inclined to go. So he stayed the next day, and the next, waiting for her to give him word, or a ticket. But she hadn’t done it, and he hadn’t asked.

He slept through the nights in Belle’s old bed, wearing gloves filled with cream, which Mr. Mackintosh said would be good for his hands. For the first few nights Odile had stayed in her mother’s room, but she couldn’t sleep—he could hear her up in the middle of the night, restless, turning. Then she padded back down the hall and fell, sighing, into her own little bed. She slept deeply, woke late. Sometimes she would climb in next to him, and he would hold her as she fell asleep, kissing the back of her neck, her hands clenched in his. And when he woke, he found his hands were animate, tender—they were healing.

He wondered how they spoke of him back home—Dogboy, vanished into air—if they ever sang about his fights, told tales of where he’d gone. Would they imagine him walking by the old Church of Marvels—a circle of bricks in the sand, overrun with marigold? Or buttering toast in a bungalow, reading about the price of cheviot suits? Sylvan would never meet Mrs. Church, but he felt for sure that he knew her, for he walked among her things, drank ginger tea with honey from her chipped china cups, read her books of poems and plays, all marked in her curious, exclamatory hand. And when he saw Odile in the easy chair beside him, laughing at the new color
cartoons in the Sunday paper, or reading a letter from Belle in the kitchen, balancing on one leg while the coffee boiled—
it’s good for my back!
she said when she caught him smiling—he knew that she was tough. It had to be the hardest thing, even if he’d never known it himself—to accept that the ones you loved would find their own way home. And already her friends were starting to make plans for the winter: Mack hopping on a caravan through the Dakotas, Leland heading to a circus in Montreal. They talked about it often, gathered at the beer hall—Guilfoyle was ready to shut down early, go scouting in California.
What about you?
Sylvan asked Odile as they drank coffee one morning on the porch.
Where will you go?
She sat down on the brass elephant—
Right here.

As the sun rose higher over the beach, Odile stood up from the blanket and took off her coat. “You’re not coming in?” she said.

Sylvan hugged his knees to his chest. “I’m fine here,” he said. “You go.”

He watched as she made her way down to the water—her feet bare, her limbs glittery with sand, her hair wild around her shoulders. She walked slowly at first, then faster and faster, until she broke into a run. She splashed high-kneed into the ocean and dove under the waves.

He waited to see her emerge—the sheen of her hair, the crest of her shoulder, the pale flutter of her hands. She was swimming farther out—he saw her feet kick up through the foam. They hovered there for a moment—she waved her toes at him—then fell back into the water.

Slowly he stood and dusted the sand from his pants. He started to walk, hands in his pockets, wending his way down to the surf. He paused at the water’s edge, then put one foot in. It was colder than he thought. The foam swirled around his heel and ate away at the sand.

He wobbled and continued. Through the strands of bubbled kelp, the sandcrabs, the bits of broken shells, the stones as smooth
as sucked candy. He moved forward, the water hitting his shins and splashing up under his trousers, cold and sharp. He put his hands against the waves, felt the pressure of the tide. His feet found their way through the sand, to the place where the seabed dropped away. The water rose slowly to his hips, soaking his shirt to his stomach. Farther out Odile broke the surface. The light hit her face, and she smiled.

He drew the air deep into his lungs, until they were full, and fell back in the water. There was a sudden slap of cold, the light dazzling the surface. He kicked his legs, moved his arms. The sea surrounded him. He would swim.

M
Y NAME IS NOT ORCHARD BROOME. IN FACT, I’M NO LONGER
known as Belle. I will never be able to speak my real name, the name I was born with, if I had ever been given one at all. Here on the waterfront I am called simply Mrs. Church, and I’ve grown quite fond of it.

When I arrived all those months ago in Manhattan, Mrs. Bloodworth welcomed me into her home without question. She, too, was grieving my mother’s death, which she’d read about first in the newspaper, and for this it was hard to forgive myself—I didn’t write her with the news. I didn’t write anyone after it happened, not even Mother’s family back in Punxsutawney, whom I’d never met and only thought of as a gaggle of scowling, thick-jawed maiden aunts. I couldn’t live at Coney Island anymore, not after the fire, not after walking through the ruins of my mother’s theater, not with my secret growing bigger inside of me every day. And so I came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s, repentant and searching, wondering what I was meant for.

I dreaded the baby’s arrival. I dreaded seeing it outside of my body. When I grew idle or anxious I kneaded my belly, searching for a sign of something wrong. I woke from nightmares in my little
room on Doyers Street, clawing blindly at the air, while down the hall other women sighed and turned in their sleep. In my dreams the baby sprouted legs and arms and wrapped itself around me like an octopus. I dreamed it was born with a face full of suckling mouths. I dreamed it was born with pincers, with talons, with fangs. I dreamed it came out of my body in pieces: a leg here, an arm there, a slippery head no bigger than a grapefruit. I dreamed it came out of my body slapping wetly to the floor, a gilled mermaid, a translucent eel, a jellied creature of the sea.

She was born on a hot July night—there in the birthing room behind the kitchen, on a bed that smelled like mice. The window was open in the heat, and through it I could see gulls flocking in the yard. Were they watching me? Were they coming to take her away? I heard them caw and flap. The baby answered. She split me and I screamed. Then there were shadows standing over me, bringing cool cloths and sips of rum, and then Mrs. Bloodworth slipped her larded hands between my legs and drew the baby out. I fell back into the pillows, crying. Did she have feathers, I wondered—a bill, webbed feet? I waited for someone to gasp or shout. I turned my head and saw Mrs. Bloodworth holding the baby in the lamplight, wiping her little nose with a handkerchief, then her mouth, her eyes. A tiny girl, briny and squalling and slick. She drew breath into her lungs and called out to the world. I was astonished, delirious—I thought there must be a mistake. She was perfect.

I nursed her those first few weeks, upstairs in my room. I visited her down the hall in the nursery, held her little mittened hand in mine while she slept. She looked like him, I thought—her father’s daughter, with his rosy cheeks and thick hair and curious, reflective eyes. I had written my sister a letter, believing that I might die, that I would meet the end alone on the birthing bed, but my daughter and I were both healthy, alive. She would be going to another family, a good one with a little bit of money—merchants, perhaps—though I
didn’t know their names. This was always the arrangement—I was never to meet them or contact them; I would never see my daughter again. But I would leave Mrs. Bloodworth’s with my good name standing, my life to live unblemished. So on a given night I would say good-bye, and Mouse would deliver her to her new home.

It’s a hard thing to explain—I was unmarried. I had lost the people I loved. I was adrift in a city full of loneliness and spite; I had no home that made sense to me anymore. I was practically a child myself. I couldn’t raise her, cursed and alone as I was, I believed—but I wanted to know that she was loved. I wanted her to grow up far from the shadow of the burned theater, from the things that haunted me then and follow me still. And I trusted Mrs. Bloodworth. I owed her my life. But still, I dreamed about these people, this ghostly couple who would raise my child. Were they good enough? Would she be safe, adored? Or would she be no better off than the children who lived, abandoned, down in the Frog and Toe? The children who never found homes of their own? I just wanted to know, so that I might imagine her as she grew. Through the years I could think back to whatever little house they lived in—the hearth with its cuckoo clock or cranberry garlands, its overstuffed pillows and claret-red rugs, and know: yes—there she is, warm in her nightgown—yes: there she is playing with her doll by the fire—now reading, now laughing, now dipping a cookie into her milk, now falling asleep with her greyhound pup, now a young woman tending to a child herself. When I arrived at their door that night, they wouldn’t even know I was the one who had birthed her. I just wanted to see where she would live. I wanted to look her new mother in the eyes—both of us silent, grateful, fulfilled, yet strangers—and take my proper leave.

So I made a deal with Mouse. I’d find the names of her parents in Mrs. Bloodworth’s ledger if she let me be the Hood, just that one time. I was fast, I assured her. It would be dark, the dead of night, and I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone. It was a straightforward
exchange, wasn’t it?—I’d deliver the child and disappear. And I knew how badly she wanted those names—since I’d arrived she’d talked of little else.

Still, she was nervous.
It’s just . . . it’s not what you think,
she whispered as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the range, boiling the bottles and scrubbing the pots.
The mother’s a . . . well, a fairy.

A—what?
I said lamely, thinking I’d misheard.

I overheard it when I brought them their coffee. I couldn’t help it! She’s a he: a passer, get it? Oh, hell’s bells, I shouldn’t have told you, should I?

Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. My first thought was of my mother, living in disguise for months as a young girl, sleeping side by side with soldiers in the bivouac at night. What cunning and strength, to not get caught. I thought of Aldovar, brushing out his single braid, painting in his beauty mark, our gloved hands holding each other’s in the gaslight. They would do whatever it took to survive. Is that what made Mrs. Bloodworth choose this couple for my baby? And if she found them worthy and sound, then I trusted her—I had to. But I wanted to know, too. I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted to see it done.

So I looked up the name of Mouse’s parents in the ledger. After Mrs. Bloodworth took me into her confidence—after she told me the whole story, from the very beginning—I had looked up other names, too—early in the morning, when she was busy in the hothouse. Georgette, I found, was the daughter of French immigrants who were convinced that her deformity was proof of an Old World curse. Aldovar was born to a wealthy Jewish family on Lexington Avenue, a name I recognized from a department store. They’d left Aldovar with Mrs. Bloodworth and adopted instead a healthy, unnamed slum boy with Ashkenazy blood. I thought about arriving on their marble stair, pulling the thick braided rope, hearing the toll of the finely tuned bell. I wanted to tell them that their flesh nested in mine, that their
blood ran with my own.
I loved your son,
I wanted to say
. He is dead now, but part of you still lives. Do you understand? You are still alive.

It haunted me, that morning Aldovar and I met on the pier. It was dawn, chilly and gray; the seagulls stared at us from the railing. We had words, I regret to say, and I went home anguished and hurt and full of dread. It was the last time we spoke. Hours later he walked into the burning theater.

We had been friends our whole lives, since we were children, but as we grew up things began to change. Between shows I would see him flying kites out over the beach. We always smiled at each other, sly and taunting, and afterward I felt a flash in my gut, a honeyed burn that was gone as quickly as it came. Walking ahead to the theater, where the Church of Marvels banner snapped in the wind, I thought about how the rope twisted around his long fingers, how he drew his hands through the air like a bandleader, how the kites circled and soared. Waiting backstage, I daydreamed about his lopsided smile, his shy, twitching dimple and dark-lashed eyes. One stormy afternoon in October, he ran after me with an umbrella when I was caught hatless in the rain. He told me he was heading home to make some coffee and dry the kites (just past the sharpshooter booth and up those steps, in the leaky brick building behind the Mirror Maze: I’d been up there a hundred times before). But something was different that day. And I, pretending that I didn’t know what was happening even though I did, followed him back to the boardinghouse.

It was only that one time. A tangle of kicked, sweaty sheets, and neither of us shy about it. As he bit into my neck, I heard the pop of toy guns in the arcade below, the rain coming down on the roof. Afterward we lay next to each other and shared an apple crisp, listening to the thunder above, the glassy warble of a street-organ waiting out the storm in a doorway below. As we watched the sun break over the beach, his hand, gritty with sugar, crept over the sheet and held mine.

He was a man, like any other, only as a child his circumcision had gone awry. Still, there was nobody I could tell about it, not even Odile—we had told each other everything all our lives, but I couldn’t bear for her to be jealous or confused or disappointed in me—she, who’d looked up to me our entire life. But briefly, privately, I had dreamed of a future with Aldovar—of seeing him make kites for our children, of starring with him in an aerial show on the beach. I imagined the two of us in goggles and tailcoats, waving from a hot-air balloon as it lifted up over the boardwalk, as a brass band played a salute from the stands. I pictured my mother at the edge of the water, her head turned up in wonder, growing smaller and smaller as we drifted into the sky, until she was only a dot in a fur coat, standing alone in the sand.

But that life was not to be. It was gone forever, ash.

So that night on Doyers Street I put on the cloak and drew up the hood. I stepped into the overshoes and pinned the white flower to my breast. I went out into the night, down the dark narrow lanes, the basket at my side. We’d given the baby a nip of sherry to help her sleep. A blue blanket concealed her. I could smell the sweetness on her breath, the powder on her skin. I didn’t know then that I was leaving Doyers Street for good. I didn’t know that after that night I would never speak again.

Mouse told me there would be no trouble with the family—and if there was, I should leave. We were just couriers after all, not bloodhounds. She’d passed their house a few times before, with Mrs. Bloodworth in her carriage, just so she knew where to go. Mouse was not worried that the exchange itself would be muddled—only that Mrs. Bloodworth would somehow discover our ruse and punish her with extra chores: more laundry perhaps, extra diapers.

But when I got to the place Mouse had described—Orchard and Broome—I got turned around. I couldn’t figure out where to go. It was night, you see, a neighborhood I didn’t know well—I was
never out at such an hour, and certainly not by myself. I walked back and forth in front of the small house, the one tucked between the tenements. I noticed a woman standing at the window. She’d been keeping watch—she wore a hat, a coat, and I saw a suitcase ready on the sill beside her. As if she were expecting someone. I took a step forward. But it was the wrong window, I realized—I was meant to go around back, through the alley, to the carriage house behind. My heart pounded—I walked away from the streetlight as quickly as I could and stumbled down to the mews.

When I knocked on the carriage-house door, Alphie answered. She was so young—so striking, really, with her golden hair and fair skin and delicate bones. Without a word—just a smile, a swell of relief and happiness that nearly broke my heart—she led me up those crooked stairs. There was a jar of blood on the dressing table, I noticed—to set the stage, to make it real. She shook out a nightgown. I helped her undress. There was an open bag—her husband’s—with pincers and needles, a small knife, a roll of gauze. An undertaker, Mouse had said. Alphie took the knife and carefully cut the ties on the pillow, pulled it free from her stomach. Then a door slammed shut below, and she turned to me, and I knew from the look on her face that this was not the plan.

I heard footsteps and a sound I couldn’t place:
tick-tick-tick
. The woman I’d seen in the window—the neighbor, I thought at the time—threw open the door and saw us there: me in my hooded cloak, the baby still sleeping in her basket, and Alphie, stark naked and holding the pillow at her side. The woman’s eyes went black. I’d never seen anything like it. Her pupils grew to fill them, like a broken nib of ink.

She went after Alphie, wild with horror. Alphie screamed (and would anyone worry, I wondered, about a lone woman furiously screaming in the house of a baby about to be born?). I tried to push myself in front of Alphie as she scrambled back into her dress,
but in my haste I knocked the blood-jar to the floor, and I slipped in the wet. From where I lay I saw the Signora bring a rattle down on Alphie’s head with a sickening thud. It broke, and she reached for a kettle. I was amazed at the strength of that woman, the animal fear in her black, unseeing eyes.

I took the basket. I ran toward the door, the baby wailing. But the woman was quick behind me, knocked me down. She took the pincers and the knife, the ones from the bag; she pulled at my tongue while I hit her in the stomach and struggled for breath. She sliced it right out. She held it up to the light, flopping there in the tongs, while I lay on the floor, bleeding and bleeding, faint with shock. For a moment she looked confused and sick. And then she saw the basket—my little baby, crying in the night. She dropped everything—she reached for her—

The pain was unbearable; my consciousness went. A few things remain of the night: a man’s face, a ruffle in the darkness. A wad of gauze stuffed into my mouth. The rock of the carriage, my blood on my hands. Being helped by a warden onto a cot.
They’ve attacked each other,
the man said, counting out the money
. You will see what I mean—they are not sound of mind at all.
The wardens didn’t ask questions, just put us in an ambulance bound for the boat. We were passed off to others—the Matron, the nurses—and they all regarded us with the same mixture of impatience and disdain.