Church of Marvels: A Novel (3 page)

He didn’t remember much before the age of four or five, when he came to the Scarlattas’—just strange fragments of a life on the street, which clicked through his mind like the framed photographs in a Mutoscope machine. A few months ago he’d gone to a Mutoscope parlor up on the Bowery. He waded through the cavernous room amid a crush of eager, queuing people. It was so crowded he only had the chance to see one strip. He balanced himself on a rickety stool and pressed his face to the cool, slick metal of the eyepiece. He wound the crank slowly at first, so that the pages creaked forward. Each photograph was a little different from the next. Then he spun it so rapidly the pictures whizzed by and turned into a single movement: a boxer knocking out his opponent with a bloodthirsty windmill punch. Slow, then fast. Slow and fast. Separate photographs, then a living story. The boxer’s arm poised behind him, his lips pulled back over his teeth. Then, a few flips later: the opponent’s
chin thrust in the air, the muscles in his neck twisting, a spray of saliva fanned against the black. Sylvan stood there, alternating between still life and moving image, until his nickel was up and the screen snapped to black.

His early life, he thought, was like the slow flip of photographs: the images were too sparse and sporadic to make any sense together, but each was so vivid that whenever one flickered to his mind, he was startled by its intensity. How could certain visions like these remain so luminous, and yet he had no recollection at all of what had come before or after? A whip-scarred pony, neighing in a leaky stable. A band of red-haired children chasing him down the riverbank, pelting him with rocks. Sleeping in a pile of damp, foul hay. Sleeping in a cedar box on the waterfront. The wood of that box, unpainted and cotton-soft under his cheek, and the sticky sap that dripped from it like a wound. (Mrs. Scarlatta later told him those were the paupers’ coffins, waiting to be filled and taken over the river.) And then this, perhaps the most vivid of all: a square of white cotton blowing down a frosted alleyway. The shape of a hand had been cut out of it. It flapped in the breeze, the missing fingers waving him forward. It tumbled down a set of cellar stairs and landed at a door. He tried the latch, and it opened.

The day Mr. Scarlatta found him hiding in the Ludlow Street cellar, he brought him upstairs to the family’s apartment and crowed, “Look, a stowaway!” Sylvan had heard Mr. Scarlatta recount the story over countless suppers, damp eyes alight with wonder as if seeing it for the first time: “I’d gone down, you see,” he’d begin, rolling his hands in the air as if to coax the story into motion. “A cold, cold morning. There was nothing down there, just a little room of things nobody wanted anymore, not even robbers!” He was proud of the fact he could afford to own things he didn’t use. Some things had come with him and Mrs. Scarlatta from across the sea, and now they had the dignity of occupying their own quarters, too, rather
than being turned into firewood for beggars and vagrants. “What I was even looking for that morning—how can I remember?” he’d chuckle, tugging at his whiskers. “But what I should come upon! I go inside—and! Like a little elf had been there. Everything was nice on the shelves! The floor was swept. And this little boy, he was rolled up in a yard of cotton, fast asleep. I was astonished. This little elf”—he lowered his hand to his waist—“just this high, and how did he do all of it?”

Sylvan had been sick and delirious when the Scarlattas found him. For days he slept on a makeshift bed in their apartment—three uneven chairs pushed together—next to a pair of sewing machines. He lay wrapped in that same yard of cotton, shivering and hot, while the treadles tamped out a rhythm beside him, while knitting needles
tsk
ed from unseen hands. Once in a while he’d open his eyes and see the flash of scissors, hear the whish of a skirt. Sometimes a hand would slide under his neck and roll his head forward, bringing a saucer of broth to his lips.

As he grew stronger, Mrs. Scarlatta asked him where his mother might be. Sylvan had answered quite plainly that he didn’t have one.
She’s dead then?
No.
She’s left you?
No.
You’ve run off then, haven’t you?
Sylvan, confused, said no once again. When he was able to sit up and move about, she gave him a pair of old shoes, a mended coat, and a polished penny. If he went up the street and bought himself a new set of laces from the convent, she said, he could have a sweet roll when he returned. But the prospect of being out on the snowy street again paralyzed him; he only stared at the penny, red as a burn in his palm. When Mrs. Scarlatta nudged him toward the door, he tried to carry the stained yard of cotton with him, whimpering and clinging, getting tangled up in its train. Finally she took a pair of scissors and cut away the corner. She tucked the square in his pocket, next to the penny.
There—just if you get scared—but you won’t, will you?

The cotton, which he had found in a scrap heap in the cellar,
had come from a mill in Connecticut.
Sylvan & Threadgill,
Mr. Scarlatta explained as he rubbed his fingers against the grain—
it makes for good church gloves, see?
And so this was how Sylvan Threadgill—collective son of the East Side winter, a glove’s carefully scissored outline, and an unlatched basement door—came to Ludlow Street.

After this, the images in Sylvan’s memory came quicker and easier; they joined together in a smooth, whirring story, one he recognized. Mr. Scarlatta kept him clothed and fed in return for daily chores: mopping the stairs, replacing cones of newspaper in the privies, shoveling out the effluent that flooded the yard from the street, washing soot from the windows with a cold wadded rag. He hauled buckets of water up to the tenants, plugged cracks in the walls and floors, brushed ice from the walk in the winters, polished the banister until it gleamed. He made a room for himself in the cellar: sewing his own pillow and stuffing it with newspaper, teaching himself to read those same newspapers, stacked in the corner for kindling; shoveling coal and fixing the stove, boiling his own coffee in a small tin can.

Now the sunlight crept into the cellar, gilding the grime on the high, narrow panes. The baby coughed wetly, rolled her head away. He tried to picture her in the convent’s home for girls: marching in single file under the milky eyes of Sister Margaret, breaking the stale bread that had been donated by parishioners. A life of answering to a false name like Agnes or Claire, pretending to be some other girl in an ill-fitting dress, waiting to emerge from the gloomy, floating world that separated the child she was born as and the free woman she’d become.

Her eyes fluttered open, staring wetly at nothing.
A dogboy brought you in when you were no more than a babe,
one of the sisters would say.
And that’s all I can tell you.

Sylvan knew he would never be able to pass the clapboard wing of the convent, where the orphaned and abandoned girls lived,
without craning his neck and imagining what had become of her. He couldn’t see those girls marching down the street—with their powdery complexions and nunlike pinafores and modestly parted hair—without wondering which of them she was. And so she, too, looking for a bearded man in a wrinkled brown suit, would turn her head as they passed on the street. It would be a moment of frightened curiosity when their eyes met: a tremor of recognition, an ache so hollow and lonely in their stomachs that it made them feel faint. They’d find themselves unable to speak, and later, when they turned to look back into the crowd, the apparition would be gone and they’d wonder if they had even seen each other at all.

W
HENEVER SHE WAS SPINNING ON THE WHEEL OF DEATH,
Odile tried to focus on one simple and particular thing, like the smell of spun sugar, or the melancholy wheeze of a boardwalk accordion. If her eyes were open, she trained them on Mack’s glinting watch fob while the colors of Coney Island whirled around her. It was a weird calm, when the clamor of the crowd seemed to dull to a whisper and she felt completely still, as if she and the fob were fixed in space, and it was the world that spun madly around them. But today she was having trouble. Her eyes darted through the crowd; her arms strained against their strappings. She felt dizzy and sick. With each revolution of the Wheel, the blood rushed to her head, and so did thoughts of her sister’s letter.

Belle had left home three months ago, in the spring, not long after their mother died. Friendship Willingbird Church, the grand dame of Coney Island, the fabled Tiger Queen of the sideshow, a woman who had survived so much (a Rebel’s bullet, falls from a trapeze, animal bites, and sword slashes) that to have her die so close to home—in a fire, in the very theater that she built—remained unthinkable. Odile still expected to see her in the crowd, swinging
her fist to the beat of the cornet, gesturing for her daughter to
keep that chin up
. She still expected to see Belle every time she walked home after a show—sitting there on the porch railing, smoking a cigarette, her mane of hair loose and wild in the twilight. But Belle was gone now to Manhattan, without explanation or apology. After ten weeks of waiting for a letter, a word—nearly three months of fury and despair—Odile had begun to think the worst. But that morning the postman had left an envelope on the front porch, next to the brass elephant she rubbed for luck every day before the show began. Odile had torn it open as she hurried down to the boardwalk.

            
Odile, I hardly know what to say. I’m sorry for everything. Please don’t be angry with me—I know you must be, and it breaks my heart. I have started this letter so many times, and yet I still cannot summon the words I need. I think of you every minute of the day, and of Mother. I wonder where she is—heaven, yes, but where is that? The sky itself? The ether and stars? Sometimes I imagine it looks like the Church of Marvels, with painted clouds lowered down from the rafters, and glitter fizzing in the air. Sometimes I imagine it is quieter, an undersea cave. I picture her there sometimes, a floating mermaid with a seaweed harp, and the tigers have fins. Then I realize I’ve been sitting too long in the hothouse, staring at the flowers, and the rain is coming down heavy on the glass.

            
It is hard for me to sleep—sometimes I don’t know what is real and what is imagined. I’m writing this sometime in the night. Who guides my hand across this page, I wonder? Is it I, alert and sound? Is it my dreaming self, compelled to find you in the dark? Is it another spirit? I cannot say. You, dear sister, have always been the brave one, the good one, the strongest of all. Not I. And yet you are me and I am you, and I believe that courage must reside in me, too, though I have yet to find it.

            
I’m sorry if I was ever short with you, or impatient, or didn’t listen when you tried to confide in me. If for some reason this is the last letter I should write to you, please know that I love you. And you must believe, no matter what, that you are where you belong.

            
Your Sister

The crowd shrieked and gasped as blades zinged through the air and lodged, humming, next to her ears and above her shoulders. They protested gleefully as Mack snapped on his sequined blindfold and turned his back.

Odile squeezed her eyes shut. The routine was unbearable today. Each thud of the blade, each beery pant of the crowd made her tense. Her fists curled against the leather cuffs. Even the knives seemed to be coming slower. They didn’t sound right when they struck. Loose, sloppy, they rattled in their grooves. Usually they were thrown so powerfully, so precisely, that they sank into the wood as if it were a wedge of butter. She opened her eyes and watched the ash-blue proscenium flip over. A sea of gaping mouths rose into the air. She felt her insides slosh from one side of her body to the other. A blade plunged into the wheel half an inch above her head, pinning her back by the hair. Somewhere in the front row a woman screamed and fainted.

“Watch the pretty lady go ’round and ’round, ’round and ’round!” shouted the dwarf in the otterskin hat.

Odile swallowed the bile rising in her throat. If Belle were still at home, she’d be headlining. She’d be the draw. Isabelle Church, the Coney Island Shape Shifter—her twin sister and their mother’s protégée. At seventeen, Belle could swallow longer swords than most men. She could twist her body into impossible shapes. She could stand on top of a piano, bend over backward, and play a ragtime
melody upside down. She was daring and mysterious and utterly unafraid—the audience loved her.

At first glance the twins looked alike—they were both freckled and hazel-eyed, with thick blond hair and the snub nose of a second-rate chorus girl. But that was where the similarities ended. Unlike Belle, with her lithe and pliant acrobat’s body, Odile had a permanent crook in her neck and a slight curve to her spine. As a girl she’d been made to wear a brace, a horrible thing like a metal corset, with a tin collar that trumpeted up her neck and flared beneath her chin. She looked like some kind of Elizabethan monster, clanking down the boardwalk in the ocean fog.
Croc!
the other children teased as she herky-jerked her way down the street.
Croc-Croc-Croc-Odile!
At night she would cry as her mother unbuckled the brace and put it away, as she rubbed eucalyptus cream over the bruises and welts left behind. Her body looked as though it had been gone over with a pie crimper. Why was she different?

It’s just the way you were born,
their mother said. It’s the same thing she said about the marks on their scalps. Odile and Belle each had a bald spot, a crescent of shimmery white skin behind her ear—Belle’s was on the left side of her head; Odile’s was on the right.
They’re birthmarks,
her mother would say.
You’re unique.
Unique! Mother said the same thing about Georgette, the dancer born with four legs. Or
singular,
which is how she described Aldovar, the show’s half-man-half-woman, who had died that day in the fire, too.

For most of her life Odile had watched the show from beyond the footlights. As a child her posture had made contorting and sword swallowing impossible to master. Her lopsided lungs kept her from much exercise at all. (The only thing she had ever been allowed to practice—between shows, in the alleyway behind the theater—was knife throwing. The doctor had thought it might help to stretch her muscles, relieve her back. So occasionally Mack would carry out a
corkboard and a quiver of his favorite knives and try to teach her. But her aim was terrible, always off—she keeled too far to the left, and before long the side of the theater was flecked with pits and grooves.) When the brace came off for good last year—thrown with no small bit of ceremony into the ocean—Odile was given a small role at last: the angel in Belle’s Daring Devil routine. There, high on a trapeze above the Church of Marvels—a theater-in-the-round, with a floor of sand—Odile’s sweaty hands grappled the rope. Her heart struggled against her powdered chest. She descended from the cool rafters into the stinging light, wearing a halo and a pair of paper wings. Beneath her, Belle, in horns and a red silk dress, danced and leaped and twisted her body into knots. Odile’s job was to hurl three heavenly thunderbolts, all of which Belle caught between her toes and promptly dipped down her throat. Afterward Odile was cranked back up to the rafters, where she watched the rest of the show beside the noosed sandbags, which swung around her head like the great weights of a clock.

Now the knives were hitting so close to her skin she could feel cold air shaking off the metal. Above the cries of the audience she heard Mack lurch and grunt. His feet didn’t seem to land right—the floorboards, which usually echoed his steps so musically, now groaned, overstressed. Odile drew a breath and tried to concentrate.
You’re making him nervous!
she scolded herself. In the crowd she saw a white hat rolling above the dirty, black-felted bowlers. It belonged to Mr. Guilfoyle, who had taken over the sideshow after the Church of Marvels burned. He’d come off the traveling circuit, but unlike Mother he spent most of the time in his office, eating nougat candies and sweating over pamphlets, writing letters to showpeople he’d known out west and cajoling them to come to Coney Island. Why, of all days, did he have to be here?

“Step up and see her survive the Blind Man’s Bluff!” hollered the dwarf. “Eleven knives and not a drop of blood!”

Whenever Odile got nervous, her fingers would creep up into her hair and rub at the smooth, silky mark, as if it were a charm or a rune. But now her hands were trapped, her ankles cuffed. She felt her whole body shiver and buck. The letter sounded so melancholy and despairing—not like her sister at all.
If for some reason this is the last letter I should write to you—
what did that even mean? Was she feverish? Ill? A hothouse, of all things—isn’t that where consumptives lay on wheeled chaises, languishing under ferns?

She thought of how restless and aloof her sister had been in the weeks after Mother died, when all Odile had wanted was someone to cry with, even as she rose early and set to work at the kitchen table, writing letters and settling accounts. Belle had stayed up late into the night in their mother’s room, leafing through her things, even after Odile had snuffed the candles and gone to bed. One morning there was simply a note left on the kitchen table:
I need a change for a while—you understand, my dear—so I’ve gone to Manhattan. Perhaps I will find some fortune there. I promise to write.
When Odile asked Mr. Aggis at the post office if Belle had sent or received any letters recently, he recalled only one to Manhattan—an address someplace on Doyers Street. He assumed it was a response to one of the many letters the girls had received—sympathy and prayers for their mother from all over the country.

Afterward Odile had searched through Belle’s wardrobe and dresser, hoping for something more, an explanation. But the drawers were jumbled with everyday litter—paper valentines and trolley tokens, lozenges of beeswax and throat balm. Odile was outraged and bereft—she couldn’t begin to grieve another, especially when there was so much left to be done. So she threw herself into a mania of arithmetic: tending to Mother’s outstanding affairs, calculating expenses and balancing the books, practicing with Mack for Mr. Guilfoyle’s show. When her sister didn’t write, Odile convinced herself it was because Belle was busy—she must have found a role on
the vaudeville stages of Manhattan. Still, Odile kept the house ready for her, listened for the creak of floorboards in the night. When she couldn’t sleep, she turned and faced the empty bed beside her. She gazed at the faded quilt Mother had made for them when they were young: a dozen tiger faces stitched from scraps of felt, with yarn whiskers and button eyes. She thought of how, as little girls, she and Belle would sit by the fireplace at night, each with a sleeping cub in their laps, and listen to Mother recite poems from an old book:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright . . . In the forests of the night.
She remembered, after the shows, putting her hands through the bars of the cage and feeling their great rough tongues roll between her fingers. But these days, when the sun dimmed outside and the arbor of white lights crackled on, the quilted faces seemed to leer at her savagely, their green button eyes shining in the electric wonder of Surf Avenue.

Then—it happened so fast that at first she didn’t think it happened at all. It was like coming up from underwater: the noise of the crowd roaring over her, her body arching against the wheel as she gasped for breath. A pain shot through her knee, icy and stinging. She didn’t wince, or wiggle, or throw herself back against the boards. If she reacted, the crowd would, too. So she continued to spin, her body rigid against the wheel, the accident undetected, the blade burrowing deeper into the gash with each rotation.

There were cries of relief and crescendoing applause as Mack brought the Wheel to a stop. Odile lowered her eyes as discreetly as possible. She hadn’t been stabbed, just sliced. The knife had come in at an angle, grazed her right above the knee. Mack unstrapped her ankles and wrists and helped her down from the wheel, his smile growing hard and terrified when he saw the carved skin. As she stepped forward, her stocking ripped, and hot blood started to dribble down her calf. Still, she hobbled to the edge of the stage and took two quick bows while smiling assuredly at the audience. Everyone
looked deformed, as if she were seeing them through the bottom of a drinking glass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” roared the dwarf in the otterskin hat, “the amazing Mr. Mackintosh and his lovely assistant, Miss Odile-on-the-Wheel!”

Another bow, and as the whispers started up in the front row, patrons leaning in and pointing, she hurried off the stage, limping and grasping Mack’s arm for support. She collapsed in the wings. A stagehand rushed up with a fresh strip of linen and a flask of rum. While he washed and bandaged the wound, she took a few nips and looked around for Mack. She wanted to run after him, tell him it had been a mistake, an accident, she wasn’t concentrating the way she should have been. But all she could do was sit there, weak and shaky, with a single line running around in her head.

You are me and I am you.

BELLE COULD BE HOTHEADED
at times, too sensitive. She was painfully meticulous about each stunt in her act—she punished herself when she didn’t master them, and yet refused to believe others when they told her she had. How many times had Odile cleaned up flung powder or a smashed bottle of ginger beer in the dressing room afterward, or lain awake at night while her sister brooded in the bed beside her?
Your sister is prone to flights of passion,
Mother explained, as if it were some kind of cross for them to nobly bear.
But sometimes I feel that way too!
Odile wanted to say. But she knew that in herself, any show of emotion would be viewed as something sickly, inferior—self-pity, perhaps; the mark of a weak constitution. But in Belle it wasn’t shameful, or even a flaw. It was some kind of artistic right.