Church of Marvels: A Novel (24 page)

T
HROUGH THE ROOST OF FEATHERED HATS, BETWEEN THE
ruffles of taffeta and paper fans, into the sweltering, overstuffed parlor with its smell of tooth powder and ricotta fritters and browning carnations—Alphie pushed ahead, toward the sound of sobbing. She saw a casket on the dining table, strewn with garlands, and ancient wailers in their black beaded shawls. They were swooning and kissing their prayer cards, crying so hard she thought they might pitch forward and collapse. Who were they weeping for, she wondered, and with such ardor? As she moved forward into the room, people muttered and fell back, picking up their skirts, chirring into handkerchiefs. The wailers stopped when they saw her approach. Their eyes grew large; their tongues went still. Alphie shoved past them toward the casket—toward the two figures seated on the chesterfield beyond—even as a hush fell over the room, even as the mourners turned like a murder of molting crows, confused and alarmed, to face her.

There was Anthony, alive. He was sitting beside the Signora, staring dumbly at his hands. He looked terrible—as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in days—gazing down at his palms as if they were eaten through with maggots. He’d been down in the dens again, she could tell. His
eyes were swollen and bloodshot, his fingernails black. He seemed to be held upright only by the crackle of his freshly starched suit.

“Anthony?”

He didn’t look up. He just opened and closed his fists, then turned over his hands and stared at his knuckles. Beside him the Signora, in her finest mourning dress—a confection of frothy silks and French lace—turned away from her flock and raised her eyes to Alphie’s.

The bruise thudded in the back of Alphie’s head. “
Buon giorno
, Mamma.”

The Signora stayed very still, her fan ticking but her eyes dead black. The cleft in her ear darkened with a wave of blood. The mourners stared at Alphie, awed and stricken, as if she were an animal escaped from a cage at the zoo. Then just as quickly they looked away—at their milky coffee and squared handkerchiefs, at the cluster of boots on the rug. As if by turning to stone and averting their eyes, they could somehow make her disappear. But Alphie just stood there, sweating and panting, waiting for Anthony to raise his head. This was the nightmare that she’d woken up from, night after night, year after year. Here, her body: a betrayal, exposed. Here, a crowd gathered around her, their faces grim and aghast. But it wasn’t laughter or cruelty she was met with. Only silence.

“Anthony?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “What is all this?”

He reached over to the table for a glass of cordial, took a drink, then lifted his eyes to hers. She braced herself for it—the recognition, the relief. But he only stared at her blankly, then looked away.

“
Anton
,” she said again.

“Who is he?” a child asked somewhere across the room. “Who is that man?”

“
Nessuno,
” Anthony whispered, staring down into his glass. “
Nessuno.
”

The Signora drew her lips into a thin, trembling smile. She took
a step forward and slipped. She tumbled to the floor, but no one moved to help her; they could only stare as she lay sprawled on the rug with her hat askew and her fan ripped in half, gawping like a caught fish. Anthony didn’t turn to help her to her feet—he didn’t seem to hear her at all. He just took a sip of his cordial and stared at the wall.

The blood began to whir in Alphie’s ears. She thought of the baby rattle Anthony had made himself, the shimmer of teeth as they fell to the floor and caught in her hair.
Il mostro!
She thought of little blue children laid out on his cooling-board, in dark rooms all across the city, and his pincers twisting their teeth free. She thought of how he shook out his pocket when he returned home, and how his mother would sweeten his coffee with bourbon and grab her golden box from the mantel. She would demand music—
Fisarmonica, fisarmonica!—
a merry song to chase away the night that pawed at the windows, furring the glass. Anthony would play his accordion then, and even through the sweetest music, Alphie could hear the whisper of grit in its lungs. Who were the wolves the Signora believed prowled beyond her door? Who were the beasts—shadowy, fanged—that her son had to prove he could vanquish?

Now someone was at her side. It was the parson, the scurvied man with puffy white gums. “Sir,” he said, taking Alphie by the arm. “I’m sorry, sir—do you know this man?”

She turned to look at them—there, the Signora’s blustery circle of friends in their bombazine and pearls; there, the neighbors, picking wormishly at their cakes; there, the wailers, a chorus of lachrymose toads. The candles had almost burned away; the air smelled of smoking wicks. She saw among the crowd the handsome black band that she’d knitted for Anthony, but on the arm of another man. She stared at it. How had he come by such a thing, unless her husband had made a gift of it? She looked over at the pair of them—Anthony, his eyes fixed firmly on the wall in front of him; the Signora, a woozy confusion of furbelows and perfume, white-faced on the rug.

What had happened? She stared at the coffin, laid out on the table. Cedar dust hung in the air—the sweet, peppery smell of death’s shell. She remembered the bump of the carriage in the night, Orchard Broome’s body beside her. She remembered the sawdust in her hair, the sawdust on her tongue—the taste of that cedar, thick in her throat.

“Sir?” the parson said again.

“Of course he knows me,” Alphie said, turning back. “Why, you’re the one who married us.”

He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes watery and slightly a-bulge. The breath left his lungs in a long hiss.

“
E ‘un uomo squilibrato!
” the Signora screamed. “
Squilibrato!”

Alphie looked at Anthony again, but he seemed very far away—his elegant, dye-flecked fingers wrapped around his cordial glass, his eyes sunken and fixed on some immovable point. She stood there between them, worrying her tooth with her tongue.
I am the wolf he let in.
The tooth rocked back and forth in its coppery pocket, then slipped free. She tasted it rolling around in her mouth, a hot pearl of salt. She spit it out into her hand—it was small and nubbled and arrow-shaped, pink at the root.

The Signora gazed at her, shaking. There was something so sad in her eyes—Alphie didn’t know what to think. She lifted the Signora’s tiny, gloved hand as the others had done, and wrapped it around the tooth.

The parson shouted for someone to grab Alphie. The neighbors—who had been guided there only by dutiful manners and slyly rumbling stomachs—now stared at the specter in the room:
a blasphemer, a lunatic, bedeviled by drink. Where were the police?
Alphie pulled away and strode up to the casket.
Is it I who is mad?
she seethed, pushing the carnations to the floor.

Let’s see who’s mad. Let them all see.

She unlatched the lid and threw it back. But other than a sack of straw, the coffin was empty.

T
HE CARRIAGE HOUSE SMELLED TERRIBLE—THE SPILLED PERFUME
, the sweaty yellow sheets, the warm curl of meat growing green in its handkerchief. Odile stared at it for a long moment. A tongue too small to be an ox’s or a lamb’s, all rough-shorn and lean. Slowly she wrapped it back up and shut it away in the drawer. On the floor the rice glimmered in a patch of sun. She shuddered. Who were these people? How could anyone stand to live here, with the smells wafting up from the shop beneath—cedar, ammonia, flesh—and the spiders scuttling over black stains on the rug?

Then there was a noise below—a door knocking open, someone tripping up the stairs. Odile reached down and pulled the dagger from her boot. She pointed it at the door.

She didn’t know exactly what she expected to see—a neighbor sent to fetch the undertaker. Mouse chasing her down. The lady of the house herself—the painted wife in gamine clothes—returning home with a leaky parcel from the butcher shop. But instead she saw her own ghost appear at the top of the stairs. A young woman with a bleeding mouth and a wild mass of hair.

Belle.

She stood alone in the doorway, sleek as a newborn foal, trembling on her skinny legs. She wore a man’s shirt over a torn and dirty dress. On her feet were small, shapeless slippers, and her skin was greased with something that smelled fatty and butter-sweet, like soap. She didn’t say anything, just took a step into the room.

Odile ran and threw her arms around her, pressed her nose into the crease of her neck. She smelled the grass in her hair, the pony-musk on her clothes. She felt her sister’s heart beating fast, the tick of blood in her neck. Belle tensed for a moment, then fell against her shoulder. Odile drew a breath—she wanted to ask if she was all right, what had happened, what she needed,
let’s go home
—but the words wouldn’t come. She had a weird, fleeting thought that she wanted to
eat
her sister, like a sorceress in a storybook—gobble her down in her belly, keep her safe. But she just held on to her, an ache prickling in her nose, between her eyes, the dagger still damp in her hand.

When Belle leaned back, she saw it there between them—she saw her own eyes, stunned and red, staring back at her in the blade. She must have known where Odile had gotten it—she must have known she’d been down to the Frog and Toe. A look crossed her face—wonder, then shame, then a terrible distress. She made a sound Odile had never heard before, a low and doglike whine, rippling in the back of her throat. Odile started to cry herself—she couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, but even as the words came out, she wondered,
Why am I the one saying this?

Belle just took her by the hand and dragged her, stumbling through the rooms—pulling the blankets off the bed, turning over the cradle, kicking aside the empty jar, the scattered rice—
teeth,
Odile saw, they were
teeth.
Belle threw open the armoire doors, pushed aside the mess of dresses, then turned around and reached for a basket on the floor. A blanket, a broken rattle. A loose flower, pulpy and black—nothing more.

Odile realized what she was looking for, of course—“The baby.”

Belle turned to her, eyes wide, the sound growing louder in her throat.

“I’ve seen her. A man rescued her from . . . from . . .” She felt the tears start to come again—she pressed her hands to her eyes. She hoped she could find her way back to Mrs. Izzo’s from here—somewhere by the river-dumps, the oyster house. “She’s with a woman down by the water. I think I . . .”

Belle grabbed her by the arms. Up close Odile could see something was wrong with her mouth. It was too dark, a pit, as yawning and empty as an eel’s. The only movement was the glisten of spit as she drew in a breath. She hadn’t spoken a word, Odile realized—not once since she’d walked in the door.

Suddenly Odile was burning hot; the light snapped in her eyes. “Who did this to you?” She cupped her sister’s chin—“Tell me!” But of course Belle couldn’t say—
that was just it, wasn’t it? She couldn’t say!
—and Odile only felt a wave of blind, stupid frustration. Her own tongue prickled and swelled up like a sponge, pasting itself to the roof of her mouth.

Then: a noise beyond the door—footsteps on the stairs, a rasp. Odile looked over. She brought up the dagger, still sticky in her hand. A woman burst, breathless, into the room—Mrs. Bloodworth, still in her rumpled shirtwaist; still wearing her apron, smeared with green. She stepped over the sheets, the jar, the teeth. She looked around for a moment, her fingers pressed to her mouth, then hurried toward the girls.

“Good Lord!” she said. “Mouse told me—”

Belle only covered her face and began to sob.

Odile pushed herself in front of her sister. She took the dagger—the little, riddled old knife—and flung it through the air. Her wrist flicked, her elbow sprang. She felt a hitch in her back; a searing pain
shot up her spine and fizzed through her neck. For a moment her whole arm went numb; her vision blurred. There was a quick, soundless gleam in the air, and everything went still.

Mrs. Bloodworth stopped in the middle of the room. She looked puzzled, surprised. She glanced down at the hilt, which stuck out sideways from her hip, like a hand crank on a barrel organ. The red began to bloom around it. She nodded slowly, calmly, as if she were agreeing with something someone had said. But the room was silent. Belle gasped and looked at Odile, then back at Mrs. Bloodworth, who stood there with her hand raised in the air, her eyes fixed on the hilt in wonder. For a moment it seemed as if she was about to reach down and give it a turn, to see what notes she might sing. Then she swayed and fell down to the floor.

Odile could feel the pulse of blood in her fingertips, a rushing in her ears. She seemed to lift out of her body and float in the air—there, looking down on the room from a great height: at Mrs. Bloodworth, shifting weakly in the dust; at Belle, not moving away from the woman, but running
toward
her, kneeling at her side. “Don’t take it out,” Mrs. Bloodworth was saying. “Quick, bring me that bottle”—her hand, outstretched to the credenza, the decanter on a tray—“and find something to stanch it with.” Belle, hurrying to pour the cordial—rummaging through the trays of a tackle-box, turning up cotton scuds, a vial of iodine. She cut away Mrs. Bloodworth’s skirt and fashioned a tourniquet from the remains of a pillow. Mrs. Bloodworth lay very still on her back, her hands clasped over her heart, her gray hair undone and fanned across the floor like a sandy tangle of seaweed. She stared up at the ceiling: she seemed to
see
Odile flying above her, weightless in the air.
How do you know me?
Odile whispered.
What is it I’ve done?
And then Odile saw herself leaning against the far wall, hunchbacked and panting, staring at her own reddened palm.
The floating eye!
She lifted higher and higher, through the ceiling of the carriage house, into the sky above
the city. She could see into all of its darkening rooms: Mouse in a moth-eaten cloak, scurrying up to the doors of the theater; Lily Up-Your-Alley, illumined in the footlights, raising her head above a tray of macaroons. Sylvan, feeling his way through the swampy darkness, into a shallow pool of light, where young boys gleamed like oysters. She saw the baby, furred and red, in her roost at Mrs. Izzo’s, and Mrs. Izzo singing a happy chantey, sipping her tea. And she saw her mother just ahead of her, riding a finned tiger through the air.

“I’m sorry,” Odile whispered down through the clouds, even though she wasn’t sure why she was saying it, or to whom. Then there was a noise—a whistle, shrill—and she was back in her own body, hard against the wall, breathing in the dust and rubbing at the spot behind her ear.

The whistle sounded again, this time louder. Across the room Belle lifted her head.

Odile turned to look out the window. There were figures in black swarming the yard—mourners, she thought at first. But then she noticed the glossy bills of their caps, the truncheons at their hips. A half dozen in all, scattering—she could hear them tromping through the workshop below, pushing open doors. There was a paddy wagon, a Black Maria, rounding the corner into the alley.

“The police?” she whispered.

Mrs. Bloodworth’s breath came in short, rattling huffs. Belle looked frightened now—she ran to the armoire and began pulling off her rags. The man’s shirt, the filthy slippers, the patchy flannel dress—as it fell to the floor, Odile saw the word
Asylum
printed across the back in grungy letters. Dear God—they were after
her
. She tried not to think, just hurried over and dumped out the drawers of the credenza. She found a pair of stockings, a fake silk scarf, a pair of old shoes by the door. Her sister, half-naked, now wriggled into a yellow dress—there was a tattoo beneath her throat, Odile saw:
Orchard Broome.
Her fingers shook at the sight of it, but still, she helped to
fasten the buttons, lace the boots, tie back her sister’s hair. She would ask her later—she would ask her everything.

Mrs. Bloodworth lay very still on the rug. Belle tried to lift her by the arm, but the woman blanched and stiffened, shook her head. “Not me. I have nothing to tell them.”

There was a ruckus in the shop beneath—something fell and broke. A few curses followed, then an ornery rebuke. Odile’s ears began to itch.

“Odile!”

She turned around—Mrs. Bloodworth was looking at her.

“Take her somewhere safe.”

“W—what?”

“Take your sister out of here, any way you can, understand?”

“I—”

“Do as I say, and now.”

Odile glanced around the room. They couldn’t go out the way they’d come in—not with the policemen hunting through the yard, with the box of the Black Maria waiting in the alley. She turned to the peep-eyed windows and cranked open a casement. The breeze was warm with woodsmoke and frying oil. The carriage house was pressed between two tenements—she saw a fire escape in the yard next door, just above the neighbors’ privies.

Belle reached for Mrs. Bloodworth again, but the woman shook her off. “You need to go with your sister.”

Belle made a plaintive sound. At the bottom of the stairs someone kicked open the door.

“Go on!”

Odile didn’t look back. She pushed herself through the small window and out to the eaves, then reached back to help her sister. She took Belle’s hand and eased her through, freeing her skirt where it caught on the sill. They stood together on the roof, sweating and shivering—then they ran across the shingles to the farthest edge,
which overlooked the yard next door. They jumped down onto the roof of the neighbors’ privies, the wood shuddering beneath their feet. They hurried on, trampling over the untrue boards, under lines of sodden laundry, coughing back the terrible smell, while someone bellowed, alarmed, in a stall below.

At the end of the row, they hoisted themselves up to the fire escape. The metal burned their hands as they clambered over the side, but they ran—past children waving dry tobacco leaves, past nipping dogs and vines of yellow tomatoes, past pink-eyed women hanging out the wash, all the way up the clanging stairs to the roof. Odile’s lungs opened as they reached the top—she looked out over the roofs of the city, a great ocean of brick and stone, stretching to the horizon. They fled between chimneys, scattering birds, breathing in the brine and smoke from the river.

Behind them they heard police whistles, the whinnies of a horse. Belle stopped on the edge of the roof and looked back. From where they stood they could see Mrs. Bloodworth being taken out on a stretcher. For a moment Odile thought that she turned her eyes to the roof—that she saw the girls standing there, watching her as she was carried away; that perhaps she even nodded her head:
go
—but it might have just been a trick of the light, the way the shadows played over her face. They watched as she was hoisted into the back of the paddy wagon, as a man leaned against the heavy door and brought down the latch, as he yelled to the driver, “Hospital!” The whip snapped, the horses lurched, and the carriage rolled away down the street.

A hot wind tore across the roof; gulls wheeled in the sky. Odile looked silently on. Whatever had happened, whatever was done, Belle leaned into her now, held fast to her hand—as if her sister were the only thing in the world that could keep her from flying away.