Church of Marvels: A Novel (23 page)

S
YLVAN STARED AT THE HOUSE ON BROOME STREET. IT WAS
one of the few that still stood between the tenements, two stories of brick with a poorly shingled roof. The black curtains were drawn against the sun, and a wreath of flowers hung on the door, already limp in the noonday heat. The sight of it made him shiver. Even on this steamy summer day, no one was leaning from an open window or gathering on the stoop. The whole place was quiet, as if it were holding its breath.

A carriage waited at the curbside. It was polished so black he saw his own reflection in it, glowing like an apparition. It wasn’t like the morgue wagons from last summer, with shrouded bodies piled on top of each other. He recognized the wedded stinks of flesh and medicine, the black gleam of the chassis in the fractured light. A funeral carriage.

Beside him another man, a neighbor carrying a bucket of eggshells and coffee grounds, paused on his way to the ash-barrels. He lingered next to Sylvan, sucking on a messily rolled cigarette, then barked at one of his children, who was playing around the wheels of the carriage. “
Smettila, ragazzo! Subito!
”

The boy had found something on the ground—an artichoke, thorny and stiff. He was so slight and bony, and the vegetable so majestically rotund, that at first he was overcome with excitement. He turned it around and around in his hands, quickly at first, then slower as his elation gave way to bewilderment. He tried to bite into it like an apple, then gnawed helplessly at the stem. When he started to cry—great, gasping, frustrated sobs—his father called him back again, and he came running. The artichoke tumbled away under the carriage and came to a rest in the dust.

Sylvan stared at it for a moment, round and gray as a lopped-off head. He thought of William on the Widows’ Walk, brushing out the matted wigs—the ravenous fury in his eyes when he talked about
hot cocoa
and
oranges
.

Then he saw mourners passing around the carriage, ascending the steps to the door, murmuring to each other in Italian. One man carried a violin case, another a plate of melting chocolate. They would spend the day holding a vigil for the dead, he supposed—bringing food, taking turns comforting the bereaved, playing music to chase away the ghosts. There hadn’t been as many wakes during the winter—there were too many dying, and too quickly. For a moment Sylvan felt a ripple of jealousy—this family could mourn the dead the way they wanted to, instead of watching two strangers drag a body away down the stairs.

Sylvan turned and asked the man in Italian, “What’s happened next door?”

The man looked at him—curious at first, then disconcerted—a reaction Sylvan had come to expect, but which now only made him feel nervous.

“
Parto,
” the man replied. He flicked his cigarette into the dirt and grabbed his son by the shoulder, then steered him away down the street.

Childbirth.

O
DILE WENT AROUND THROUGH THE ALLEY, JUST AS MOUSE
had said, and pushed open the gate. The yard was empty, the garden overgrown. The small carriage house was rambling and pitched, with a bank of peep-eyed windows that shone muddily in the sun. On the ground floor the doors stood open in the heat. She took a step forward and peered inside. It was the undertaker’s shop, cluttered with tools—she could smell the sponge-burn of alcohol, the raw cedar of the caskets. On the cooling-board a cat looked up from its bath, bemused.

She found a door around the side and banged it open with her hip—there, a crooked flight of stairs, stretching up into darkness. She paused for a moment, then quietly reached down to her boot and drew the dagger from its sheath. It trembled in her outstretched hand, loosening the still, humid air around her. One step at a time she made her way up the stairs, the blade glinting in the murky light, bands of iridescence a-shiver on the walls. On the last stair she paused, the dagger pointed at the door. She strained to hear a voice, a sound, anything at all, but there was only the melody of a washday song drifting in from a tenement next door. She pushed
on the door with the tip of the blade. It swung open, whining on its hinges.

Beyond were two small rooms. The first thing she saw was a cradle, empty. A big, sagging bed, the sheets stormy and tossed, a dented kettle on the floor and an upturned jar beside it. At her feet lay a pillow, sliced and gutted, the feathers blown across the room. The hooked rug was stained, littered with something that looked like rice.

She tucked the dagger back in her boot and started hunting through the rooms, looking for anything that might have been her sister’s, any clue to tell her what might have happened when Belle had arrived that night with the baby. She threw open the armoire and sorted through the clothes—a beaded moiré blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, custard-yellow poplin, a ratty old dressing gown—but nothing looked familiar. Everything was too dirty, too gamy-smelling and sad. She turned to the vanity, which was crowded with pots of color and cream. A paper valentine was tucked into the mirror frame. On the front, two rosy, disembodied hands held up a sentimental banner:
Faithful friends forever be.
Odile turned it around. The back was signed,
To my own “Violetta”: Always Free.

She sat down on the stool and started turning out the drawers. It reminded her of the dressing room at their old theater. Perhaps this woman, like Belle, had been on the stage, too. Was that their bond? Was that why Belle had brought the baby here herself? She rummaged through brushes and paints, tubes of ointment and blemish cream. Wart-remover, hand balms, powder. A bar of shaving soap. A tin of razors, empty. And then, something she recognized from Aldovar’s dressing room, rolled up in the very back: a padded corset, with a leather cup at the groin. She studied it for a moment, disconcerted, then closed it away again.

Somewhere across the way people shouted and wailed. The tenement song blended with the clatter of traffic, and then—from
farther away—the dirge of an old violin. Her eyes fell on a handkerchief, folded over like a dumpling on the vanity. She reached over. There was a weight to it, she felt—a shape. She unwrapped it and squinted into her palm. Twisted inside was something soft and blue, no bigger than a mouse.

She turned to the light. There, perched in her hand, offered up like a sweet. A tongue.

A
LPHIE ARRIVED AT THE STEPS OF THE SIGNORA’S HOUSE
. There was a mourning wreath, she saw, on the door. The parlor windows were open in the heat, and she smelled the familiar, rancid musk of carnations carried out on the breeze.

She looked over her shoulder, but no one had followed her—not yet. A few of the neighbors passed by, and she fell back into the street, quick to hide her face. She worried they would stop and gape, their brows wrinkled in disbelief, but they didn’t even notice her. They moved briskly ahead, murmuring to themselves, their Italian too quiet and quick for her to make out. Three phlegmatic, fat-rumped women from the tenement next door—clad in black and linked together, drifting up the steps to the Signora’s front door. Then she understood: even though she felt obscene and exposed, here on the street—in the body of a teenaged boy—she was simply invisible. Anonymous. Just another summertime laborer, standing shirtless and breathless in the sun, waiting to join up with friends for a cold beer and a rowdy jump in the river.

Shaking, she lifted her face to the house. The wreath, the flowers,
the women in black in the dead summer heat, a violin playing a funeral song beyond. What had happened, and so quickly?

She remembered the blood spilled on the floor of her bedroom, and the doctor’s words as she retched up the asylum swill:
Did you do harm to another?
Had she? Was it more than just a panicked nip as the Signora wrenched her up from the rug? (And why, of all things, would she have bitten the Signora right there on her hand, knowing what she’d suffered in the past?) She heard the wailing through the windows, and her skin went numb.

Anthony hadn’t been there to stop the Signora that night. He hadn’t come to Blackwell’s to find her.

It was only a year ago that she’d stood here in her peach crinoline and best hat, her arm looped through his. A year ago she’d lifted her skirts and taken a breath and marched up these very steps to her fate. But now she ran, her body sore and broken but still teeming, and let herself into the parlor.

I
NSIDE THE HOUSE, SYLVAN MOVED QUIETLY AMONG THE STIFF,
wilted gathering, listening to a feeble violinist scratch out a song. He’d spoken in Italian to the woman at the door—the same words of condolence that the Scarlattas had used when visiting their grieving neighbors. People arrived bearing plates of food and fresh-cut flowers. There was a table crowded with offerings: a whole muskmelon, chocolate torta and jugs of wine, lamb stew with a skin of orange grease.

He could see the casket from where he stood—a simple pinewood box. Underneath the heap of festoons—soggy carnations, cheaply dyed ribbon that bled out in the heat—he could smell the freshly sanded planks, see the glimmer of sap and crudely hammered nails. It reminded him of being a little boy, sleeping along the waterfront in boxes meant for the dead. He hung back near the parlor door, listening to the whispers in the hallway, the flustered patter of the white paper fans.

And poor Anton came in to find her dead.

She was always a nervous-looking thing, wasn’t she? And his mother so good to her!

I won’t speak ill, but there was always something crafty about her. And where are her people now, I wonder? Or does she have any?

An urchin, by the looks of it. I’m not surprised. Someone told me they’d seen her on the bridge once, going over to Brooklyn. And what would she be wanting there?

Poor girl. And the poor lamb with her. I heard the screams, but I didn’t think . . . How could I have known? Didn’t we all scream? I hardly remember, but the things I must have said!

He studied them out of the corner of his eye, looking for a sign of something suspicious or familiar. But these were very much women of the neighborhood—the kind he’d seen every day of his life. Their arms were thick, their faces drawn. They bore the scars and pockmarks of old illnesses, and the plain, unspoken sorrow of those who had buried many beloved of their own. There was a familiar, morbid relief in their eyes—the guilt and pride of having been spared. In the middle of the room were half a dozen women in beaded black shawls, crying louder than the rest. They were the
lacrimata
—the same women who’d come through the streets last winter, swinging their thuribles of incense, leaving trails in the snow. Their grief was an art; they were paid to mourn with such fervor and conviction.

On the divan behind the backgammon table sat the queen of the bereaved: a woman, plumed and veiled, who cooled herself with a black silk fan. A train of mourners snaked through the room, pecking at the knuckles of her limply offered hand, murmuring their sorrows, bowing their heads. Her veil was drawn back over the brim of her hat, so everyone could see that face—beautiful, Sylvan thought, though in a haughty, injured way. She held back her shoulders and bit down her lips, purred and demurred when the men called her a saint. After all, they intoned, she’d been the one to take in this waif, hadn’t she? She’d been the one to sacrifice, and then to lose them both—
sigh, swish, whisper, kiss
. The line moved in rhythm around her.

What had happened here? He moved into line behind the others, bracing as he took a step forward toward the divan, and then another. The
lacrimata
dutifully wailed beside him—the more tears they shed, the more they earned—but this woman wasn’t even dazed or red-nosed, although she clenched a handkerchief tightly. She was flint-eyed beneath the feathers of her hat, nodding along with the impotent tick of her fan. There was something angrily vacant about her face, something both prideful and dead.

Beside her sat a young man—listless, probably drunk, with pale skin and red hooded eyes. He said nothing to anyone, just stared into his lap, as if his hands were a stranger’s that had miraculously attached themselves to his body. She talked for both of them, it seemed—the whispered platitudes, the properly cued sighs of remorse, the routine and empty mention of God. The man might have been her brother, Sylvan guessed, or maybe even her son. They had the same angular widow’s peak, the same moody jut of the chin. With each word someone whispered into her ear, the woman slid her eyes over to look at the man, as if to see that he’d heard it too, but he didn’t move. He didn’t seem to notice her at all.

Something about his bleariness, his pout seemed familiar. As the line moved closer, as Sylvan slinked his way up toward the backgammon table, which was scattered with guttering candles and plates of half-eaten cake—as he saw her black-gloved hand lift and drop, lift and drop—he snuck a glance in the man’s direction. The light was different—fuller and blue, bringing out the pores on his nose, the flick of his lashes as he gazed at his hands. He was sitting upright, combed and cologned, dressed in good Sunday black. But he knew him. It was the man from the opium den—the man who’d held his hand as they lay back on the cushions, who’d whispered nonsense to the whistle of the pipes. The man whose jacket he wore now.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the front hall—a door banging open, cries and murmurs, the confused shuffle of feet. The
mourners parted and drew back. A young man staggered into the room. He wore no shirt, only trousers with suspenders and a pair of broken shoes. He was sweating, out of breath, stinking of mildew and horse. Everyone looked at him, then at each other.

He took a step toward the divan. He was ragged and wet-eyed, but that’s not what made Sylvan stare. There, beneath his collarbone, was a single word, tattooed on his skin.
Leonetti.