Church of Marvels: A Novel (4 page)

One day when they were girls they snuck off to the beach with Aldovar and Georgette. They were only ten or eleven years old at the time, and Belle had just started her sword-swallowing lessons. They were supposed to be at the theater, helping Mother strike the set, but
it was too beautiful out, and they were giddy and restless in the heat. Odile sat alone on the beach while the others ran down to the surf. She watched as Belle and Georgette galloped through the waves, tottering under seaweed headdresses, rolling their bloomers to their thighs. Georgette, who had four legs, wore two sets of bloomers that Mother had stitched together for her. She ran on her outer legs, while the inner ones dangled between, shrunken and spindly, kicking up spray from the surface of the water like the paddles of a steamboat wheel. Aldovar, half-girl and half-boy, waded through the shallows, pausing now and again to pick up a pebble, or jot something down in a small diary. Odile suspected him of being a poet. Onstage his costume was a wedding gown stitched to a tuxedo, but away from the lights, down at the shore, he always wore a gray shirt and plain tailored slacks, nothing fussy. His hair, which he kept long on one side, was braided and coiled beneath a houndstooth derby cap. Without his stage makeup—rouge on one side, a penciled moustache on the other—his face was heart-shaped and fine-boned, like a pretty boy’s or a dapper girl’s.
I am lucky to have two spirits,
he always said.
Most in this life only have one.

Odile sat alone under a yellow umbrella, guarding the lunch-pails, the boots, Belle’s dagger in its leather sheath. She was drinking a bottle of sarsaparilla and humming an old show tune when a shadow fell over her—someone stood above her, hissing and snickering, blotting out the sun. She couldn’t see his face, just the sunlight glowing through his grimy ears.
Croc!
he laughed—a terrible, wheezy sound, like a balloon losing air.
Croc, Croc!
he said again. He was barefoot, smelling faintly of boiled wash and chicken dumplings. With a snicker, he reeled back and kicked sand in her face. She felt it clump in her mouth, burn her eyes. She coughed, spit, blinked frantically, cried something in a voice she didn’t recognize. And then she saw through her tears—just beyond the boy’s shoulders—her sister, charging up out of the water. As he reeled back again, Belle
jumped on top of him and wrestled him down to the ground. Aldovar and Georgette followed her—they held down the boy’s arms and legs while Belle grabbed the dagger from its sheath. Her eyes glittered as she stood there above him, as she lifted the blade high above her head. She brought it down suddenly, with a whoop. The boy thrashed and screamed. Odile saw his little toe roll away in the sand.

Then, just as quickly as they’d pinned him down, Belle and the others let him go. He scrambled away down the beach, tripping and falling, too scared to look back.

The toe lay between them, in the frilled shadow of the umbrella. For a moment the sisters regarded it solemnly, as if they were supposed to eulogize it somehow. Then Belle picked it up and flung it like a peanut into the waves.

It was then that Odile caught sight of their mother marching across the beach, resplendent in her face paint, her heels sinking into the sand. She wanted to turn around and escape, but there was no way; she couldn’t run fast enough in her brace. Belle just stood there with her back to the sea, sand caked into her knuckles and hair, and faced their mother, waiting.

Then Mother was standing over them, pointing to the blood on the dagger:
What is that? What did you do?

She was radiant with anger. She’d only come to find them because they were late for supper—they hadn’t met her at the stage door like they’d promised. She’d had to close up the theater and scrub down the tiger pens by herself. And now here was her daughter, slick with seawater and blood, holding the dagger in her tiny fist. Mother sent Aldovar and Georgette back to the boardinghouse, then dragged the girls home by the hands as if they were babies. Belle was left out on the porch to eat alone—too filthy and savage to step inside, Mother said; why, she’d sooner let the tigers say grace at their table. Belle began to cry, but Mother shut the door and latched it anyway. Later, after a silent meal with no dessert, Odile pressed
her head to the darkened window and saw her sister out on the steps with a plate on her knees, crying and crying, while the waves crashed against the shore.

Belle could be that way, too. Provoked, she lashed out, and abandoned, she broke.

BACKSTAGE IT WAS STICKY-HOT
and crowded, all elbows and chatter and sweat. Odile pushed her way down the hall, hopping on one leg toward the dressing-room door. This theater was nothing like her mother’s—it was narrow and shambling, a former sauerkraut house still reeking of grease, which Mr. Guilfoyle had won in a card game after plying the diminutive, frog-eyed owner with a few rounds of Irish punch. Every day Odile had to do battle with the other players in the dressing room—grubby fingers digging into jars of cold cream, costumes getting shed and trampled underfoot. Today, thankfully, it was too hot for anyone to linger, so she sat down at the mirror alone and lifted the tray of her makeup box.

Belle’s letter was tucked inside—just a single sheet of paper, so delicate it was nearly translucent. There was no return address, no letterhead, no mention of her life in Manhattan. No Doyers Street, no theater name—nothing that gave a clue as to where she might be. Why had she waited so long to write? And why, if she were so downhearted, wouldn’t she simply come home, where she was loved and safe? Odile pressed her nose to the paper but couldn’t smell anything beyond the briny musk of the dressing room.
You are me and I am you.
When they were girls they used to hold their index fingers, hooked like crescent moons, up in the air and try to divine each other’s thoughts. After a while—when they were scared or upset, when they were banished to opposite ends of the room for misbehaving, when they saw each other on the boardwalk from a distance too far to speak—it became their own private signal, a flash of alliance and
sympathy. Sometimes at night Odile would still reach out toward the empty bed, her finger curled in the dark, and wonder if somewhere her sister could read her mind.

“A little heads-up,” came a voice over her shoulder. Quickly she folded up the letter and slid it back into the box.

Leland the dwarf stood behind her, blotting his face with a handkerchief. “Guilfoyle’s got a bug up his britches,” he said. “How’s the boo-boo?”

“Pretty ugly.” She turned her knee to the light. The bandage was already rusty with blood.

Georgette, still damp from the stage lights, trailed in and sat down beside her, crossing both pairs of legs. “What happened, pet?” she whispered. Her hand, soft and slender as a little girl’s, fluttered up Odile’s neck and leafed gently through her hair. “Is it your back again?”

“No!” Odile said, a little too sharply. “I’m fine. Really—it’s practically a paper cut.”

She was grateful that Georgette laughed and began gossiping about something else—the woman in the audience who’d screamed and fainted, and who was now crying into her handkerchief outside the theater, proclaiming this entire place
the devil’s playground
. The Daring Devil’s, Odile thought.

She slipped behind the screen and peeled off her beaded costume. Half of her wanted to tell Leland and Georgette about the letter, but she didn’t know quite what to say. She hadn’t talked to anyone about Mother or Belle, not in months. After the fire Belle had grown so quiet and withdrawn. Everyone must have been whispering about it all along: what poor work Odile was doing, looking after her! When Belle left, Odile began to notice that people lowered their eyes—they turned their heads from her and looked bashfully away. If they saw her coming down the boardwalk, they pretended to study their pocket watch, the menu at the frankfurter stand, a
tangle of kites in the sky. When she came home at night, there would be food on her porch—gravies and aspics in stained crockery, soaking under damp squares of cheesecloth—but no one was there to welcome her or share her table. She dumped the food over the railing in the back. Bone-thin dogs, no longer scared away by the scent of tigers, waited for her in the wide sandy alleyway, wagging their tails and howling.

She knew people felt nervous, unsure of what to say to her, but it seemed as if they feared contagion. She wouldn’t be surprised if they choked into their handkerchiefs as they passed her on the street—as if her bad luck, a pungent curse, steamed from her body like a vapor. Whenever she caught them looking at her sideways, she knew what they must be thinking: the last of the Coney Island Churches, Belle’s sister and Friendly’s child, the reedy echo of a thunderous sideshow song. It puzzled them all, perhaps, to see her standing alone on the porch of the house on Surf Avenue—seventeen years old, an orphan, wearing a faded fur coat and flexing a tiger switch in her hands.

But now.
Odile-on-the-Wheel.

She straightened her shirtwaist and buttoned up her skirt. When she emerged from behind the screen, she saw Mack sitting at the mirror, slouched over in his slacks and undershirt. Birdie the glass eater stood behind him, massaging his shoulders and neck with camphor oil. Mack’s own hands lay motionless beside him, sheathed in gloves filled with hot cream. He looked up at Odile, his face mottled pink with anguish.

Before she could say anything, however, there was a knock on the door and Guilfoyle blew in, his white cape flapping behind him, powder lifting from his sculpted beard. He glowered at Georgette, who sat painting the toenails on her shrunken feet. (He never had the chance to badger Aldovar, who had run into the burning theater after their mother, and who had died, they were
told, from the smoke.
And for what?
Odile thought.
So this huckster could make a few extra pennies? So my mother’s good name could be smeared?)
Aldovar and Georgette had been orphaned and raised by the sideshow, where their exotic bodies drew hundreds of awestruck men and fainting women every week. Her mother had always looked after them, but Guilfoyle didn’t like the idea of freaks larking about onstage, where people couldn’t get a good look at their grotesqueries. He wanted them up close, in pens and cages, close enough to spit on. Most of his money had been made off barnyard shows out west, where he charged people fifteen cents to see what he promised was a real satyr captured from the verdant stretches of Shangri-La. Then he pulled back the curtain to reveal a strongman wearing furry trousers that had been stitched to the cheap effigy of a goat’s body. Before anyone could squint for a better look, Guilfoyle would whisk the curtain back and announce in the wise, sorrowful voice of a doctor delivering bad news, that the satyr, should he set sight on a human for more than a few seconds, would likely turn them to stone.

Now he glared at them. “What the hell was that?”

Mack lifted his eyes to the ceiling and bit his bottom lip. His cheeks were quivering. “I’ve never missed,” he said, his voice filled with a tremendous awe. “Not once. Not even in rehearsal, with the wax dummies.”

Guilfoyle turned to Odile. “What were you doing, wriggling around like a worm up there?”

“Take it easy,” Georgette said, fanning her toes with a newspaper. “She was a champ.”

“My knee’s fine, actually,” Odile said. “Thank you for your concern—”

But even as she said it, she could see Guilfoyle’s lids begin to flutter and close. He had a habit of squinching his eyes shut in conversation, as if it any voice but his own put him instantly to sleep.
“What if it had been your gut?” he interrupted. “Or your face? The show’d be over for good! We can’t have something like that, you understand me? Not after the fire.”

She stammered for a moment, hot-faced and flabbergasted, unable to think of a coherent reply. She couldn’t believe he used the word
we,
as if he’d been there that day to see the sky grow black, to smell the burning wood. As if the loss of Friendship Willingbird Church—and the life that she’d built here—had somehow been his.

“Why don’t we do another knife bit?” he said. “Not throwing, which ain’t so new anymore. Last year I saw a real lulu in Virginia City. The girl gets into a box and the fella brings out these big Oriental swords, right?” He drew an imaginary weapon and sliced the air in front of him. “He cuts off her arms and legs—”

“You mean it’s fake,” Odile said. She couldn’t imagine Mack fumbling with a set of tin replicas, driving them into mirrored slots while she lay sweating in a box, a look of exaggerated consternation on her face. “Nothing was ever fake at the Church of Marvels, Mr. Guilfoyle. My mother always made that very clear. In fact, I wager she’d be the first to say that there’s nothing like a little blood to whet an audience’s appetite. It lets them know it’s real.”
The tiger in the grass.
As much as the audience might speculate or accuse, there was nothing false about Georgette’s legs, or the way Belle had contorted her body and swallowed a sword, or how Birdie bit into a bulb of glass as if it were an apple. That was what her mother wanted: no satyrs or mermaids or peepshow shams, but everything genuine and exotic, a catalogue of real human marvels.

Guilfoyle tugged at the fringe on his gloves. “I’ve told you before—”

“And I’ve told
you
: if the danger’s not real, the audience knows. Who wants to watch something so safe? There’s no suspense in it! I assure you, Mr. Guilfoyle, if
I
were sitting in the audience—”

“The suspense is in the
presentation
.” He drew the word out slowly, rolling it around on his tongue. “Good lord, all you have to do is hold still and smile pretty! How hard can that be?”

Odile felt her face turning red. “If they want to see a magic show or a stupid mime act, they can go to Mr. Mephisto’s tent for a nickel.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, all right?” Guilfoyle blew air up into his moustache, sending a cloud of powder through the air. “Of course they want to see danger—
of course
they want a little blood. But what, I ask you, is more grisly then seeing a girl get her head lopped off? Sure they know it’s fake—but it’s the thrill they’re in for, real or not. All they care about is
how’d-they-do-that
. And what I’m talking about here’s a good spectacle, one that’ll keep them guessing—and one where nobody gets hurt.”