Church of Marvels: A Novel (7 page)

I will see to it,
she remembered Anthony saying. What a strange thing to conjure up—the fragment of an old conversation, a euphonious refrain. What was it they’d been talking about? She could hear his shy and gentle voice, its rippling catch—
I will see to it
. She imagined him whispering it from across the water—
I will see to it. I will see to it, dear heart.

The women were all given hot, sweet thimbles of mead, then marched up the great spiraling staircase to their wards. She wanted more than anything to just
go home
but didn’t quite know, now, where that would be. She lay back on her bed, staring at the tin ceiling with its incongruous patterns of pheasants and scrolls, and put a hand on her stomach.

Il mostro!

Around her, the nurses scowled and hummed while they tucked in the bedsheets, changed the bloodied rolls of flax between the legs of cycling women, brushed their hair or sponged their necks if they were too weak or delirious. It was as if they were anchored at sea, this white barge of women, gazing out at the corniced cliffs of the city and waiting to be rescued.

S
YLVAN TRIED TO SLEEP, BUT HE KEPT HEARING FOOTSTEPS
on the stairs above, whispers through the walls. Hour after hour, his eyes startled open. He reached over to the baby in the bed beside him. He felt the heat of her small body through the tablecloth, the feeble lift of her lungs. Was she feverish, he wondered, or was it just the swelter in the room?

He rose and pulled on his shirt and his trousers, scrabbled for the last of the milk. He tried to get her to eat, but she wouldn’t. She began to cry, her whole mouth turned down—a high-pitched, roostery wail. He rocked her, tried to soothe her, took endless turns around the cellar while she coughed and cried. He found himself falling asleep on his feet, leaning against the wall, grit pinging through the open window as barrows rumbled by.

When he heard a knock on the door, he waited for a moment, unsure if it was real. But then it came again, this time louder. He heard a man’s voice, hoarse: “Pup, Pup!”

Sylvan tucked the baby back in the bed and crept across the room. He braced himself, then cracked the door. It was No Bones, leaning against the jamb, still sweating in his work clothes.

“What is it?” Sylvan whispered. “Did I lose my post?”

“No, no. The fight at St. Elmo’s—an hour. You ready?”

He’d almost forgotten. He had to go—he needed the money, and the purse this morning was close to ten dollars. Already he’d added the figures in his head: rent, food, a new coat, a horsehair brush to clean his boots, enough left over for beer and the morning newspaper. But now he might need some goods for the baby—fresh milk and diaper cloths, maybe a bottle of Bergoon’s cure-all.

“Your name’s on the board.” No Bones wet the corner of his mouth. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine.” Sylvan tensed. “I’m fine.”

No Bones hesitated, folding his hat between his hands. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t fall into some kind of trouble.”

Sylvan felt a prickly coolness on his neck and arms. “No.” He shook his head. “No trouble here.”

“You sure about that?”

There was a whimper from inside. No Bones tried to peer over his shoulder, but Sylvan just said, “I’ll be ready,” and shut the door.

Back inside he lingered by the bed, breathing in the hot, dusty air that had grown faintly sour with milk. He reached out and touched the baby’s cheek. She was warm and listless. A familiar dread took root in his chest. He tried to imagine her here night after night, staring at these walls striated with mildew and candle smoke, listening to the pneumatic hiss and grind coming from the building next door, where a printer set and inked his anarchist dailies. How could he be the person to give such a life to another, when all he wanted himself was to run?

He’d have to take her somewhere else, at least until the fight was over—leave her with someone he trusted. The only person he could think of was Ellen Izzo, the weaver on Cherry Street. She bought the better pieces of loot he gathered from the privies—the brooches and pocket watches, stray baubles and cigarette cases. She’d lived and
worked above the oyster house for as long as he could remember, fashioning mementos for the bereaved from their loved ones’ hair. And she liked Sylvan—she invited him in for tea when she was lonesome, trusted him to read her letters as her eyes grew weak. She’d had a baby at one time herself, a son now grown and gone—Chester, whom an infection had left with only two fingers (making him the fastest shucker in the oyster house), and whom Sylvan had beat up over a pear one day when they were just boys (he hated to think of it now).

A trickle of sweat moved down his forehead and panicked at the tip of his nose. All around him he felt it, the sickness moaning and reeking from the tenements, the stink of waste and the heat of fever. He remembered following the carts down the street in the winter. Frankie’s bag, the smallest of all, was chucked up on top of the wagon by those soot-dusted boys in black. He had watched the bag wobble as the cart turned a corner and disappeared, but all he could feel, when the rumble of the wheels had faded, was how relieved he was for it all to be over.

When the Scarlattas died, Sylvan thought he might send Frankie to live with one of Mrs. Scarlatta’s cousins across town. They had children of their own, he knew. But Frankie was too sick, too weak to be moved. So Sylvan stayed with him in the apartment upstairs, made a little bed for him by the stove. Frankie, two years old, his hair wet with sweat and standing up on his head—how to explain what it meant, that his parents weren’t coming home? That crosses had been painted on all the doors? Such a faint little voice:
Sylvan, I’m thirsty.
Sylvan found he couldn’t sleep at night with the sound of that wracking cough. How could a tiny body, he wondered, make such terrible noise?

For two weeks, while Frankie lay sick on a pile of gloves, Sylvan had broken into the apartments of other families who’d died from consumption, where even as his breaths crystallized in front of him, he could still smell the blood, warm and acrid, in the
wallpaper. The families had long since been carried away on the shoulders of neighbors, but their homes, interrupted, still held a patient vigil: dishes in the sink, blankets mussed, food parched and shriveled on the cutting board. He’d say to himself,
Take the bread, check the floorboards,
but instead he found himself at the table, folding the napkins and righting the spoons, as if everyone were expected back for supper.

But soon he grew desperate. He ate everything in the Scarlattas’ cupboard, sold off what remained. He stole the apples left scattered after the market had cleared; he took the coat off a drunk sleeping in a doorway, and this Sylvan felt sorriest for, robbing a thin man of his warmth on a winter night. But he thought of Frankie lying in the corner by the stove, sweating even as snow drifted in through chinks in the wall. There were times when he’d lean over the bed as Frankie blubbered and moaned and will him to just
close his eyes
. He was tired of stealing for him, tired of staying in the freezing apartment because he couldn’t be moved, tired of waking and worrying, of being so fretful that he threw up his breakfast and was hungry all over again. But mostly he was tired of waiting. For two weeks he watched Frankie get sicker and sicker, and there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t be saved. The sooner it happened, the sooner Sylvan would be on a streetcar, and away.

And so one morning, Sylvan had just walked out the door as Frankie’s lungs took on a grim, familiar rattle—he walked the snowy streets with his hands in his pockets, shivering in his stolen coat. He couldn’t bear to watch. Being there meant that he would let it happen, that he was somehow in league with death, its lame and silent partner. He couldn’t do it—he couldn’t sit by and watch. If he left, it was in God’s hands.

There had been a ghost in the house ever since.

Now, with the baby in his arms, he closed and locked the door, then worked his way through the yard, with its smell of lard and pipe
smoke and iron-burned laundry. Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship. He walked out to Ludlow Street, his eyes aching in the early sun. There were streets named Mulberry and Orchard and Cherry, streets bright and tart, streets with a color and a taste. But Ludlow sounded heavy and numb, like a mouth with a bitten tongue.

It was only a few blocks to Ellen Izzo’s, but now in daylight, with the baby in his arms, it might as well have been a mile. He hurried as fast as he could, trying to keep her quiet. She clung to him, nuzzling his coat and leaving a trail of milky spit along the front.
What if we should pass her mother right here on the street?
he wondered. Someone who recognized the dimpled chin and dark hair and green eyes? How would he explain it? When he raised his head—wondering if people were gaping as he passed, or whispering to each other conspiratorially—he saw that they only looked through him, as if he weren’t even there.

Your curiosity,
Mrs. Scarlatta had once said,
is a dangerous thing. We all need to know our place, or how else would the world go on turning?

But even then, only a child, sitting on the stairs after a rumble and holding a frozen hog’s foot to his cheek, Sylvan wondered,
How does anyone even know what their place ought to be?
He fought for the money now, he always said—and he did; he needed whatever came his way—but the truth was that he liked it. He started when he was nine or ten, because he had to—he needed to fend off the lookouts and guttersnipes, the other boys who tried to bully him and rob him of what little he had. And the feeling afterward—walking the streets like a golden hum—he couldn’t give it up. He was good at it—it was the only thing he’d ever felt good at in his life, and the way he looked somehow helped him. It made the men he faced do a double take.
Look,
his eyes seemed to dare them.
Look at me.

Now he turned down the alley by the oyster house, past the old pear tree that stood dead in the ground. Even though it was hot out, his teeth chattered and his head pulsed. In his arms the baby’s eyes fluttered open. Did she know him? he wondered. And would she know when he was gone?

He took the stairs two at a time to Mrs. Izzo’s door. She’d be up at this hour, he knew. She lived alone now and had trouble sleeping. Last year Chester had left for work in San Francisco—he’d locomoted all the way across the country, even seen a herd of buffalo running alongside the train. For a while he’d written home every week and sent back a little money. Sylvan—who had learned to read simple lines of English over the years, studying everything from timetables to signboards to newspaper fish-wrap—would read the letters aloud as he sat at Mrs. Izzo’s table, drinking blackberry tea. He would linger over each sentence, inventing what he couldn’t decipher, eliding what he couldn’t explain. Then he’d write a letter for her in return, taking dictation while she licked at her thumbs and polished some brooches and braided a dead woman’s hair. He tidied up her sentences, or used different words when he didn’t know how to spell hers, and secretly embroidered the banal block gossip. He knew it wasn’t fair, but he wanted Chester, wherever he was, to be jealous. He wanted New York to seem exclusive—a potent, faraway thrill. It ate at him. How had Chester Izzo, with his weedy pallor and glutinous, nearsighted eyes, been the one to get out?

And he hated how much he loved Chester’s letters—he hated picturing Chester fat and happy, smoking a cigar in the lobby of a gold-rush hotel, gazing down at rickshaws and pelicans and strands of orange lights. He hated how his own voice sounded when he asked Mrs. Izzo if she’d had word from him, how pitched and needy, and how pleased Mrs. Izzo looked when she answered him. But then the letters stopped coming.
He’s very busy, I’m sure,
Mrs. Izzo would say.
He’s getting himself rich
. But eventually Chester Izzo didn’t write
anymore, he didn’t send money, and her lies grew more fanciful and elaborate.

Sylvan stood there in the heat, smelling the steam that drifted up from the windows of the oyster house. He knocked on Mrs. Izzo’s door—a quick rap—and heard footsteps on the other side. The door cracked open, just an inch, and Mrs. Izzo peered out. If the weather had a face, he thought, it would be hers—a stormy mass of graying hair, veins forking down her temples, and a calm, round visage, the color of burnished gold.

“Sylvan!” She beamed. “Good loot this week?”

“I need your help.” He leaned in, so close he could smell the glue and silver polish on her skin, and told her what had happened. Without a word she swung open the door and ushered him inside.

In the ancient waterfront house, with its salt-cracked shingles and smoky parlor, Mrs. Izzo set quickly to work. She cleared off a table, set water to boil, and took the baby into her arms. Sylvan sat down at her workbench, sore. He stared at the hanks of hair that hung from the rafters, at her easel with its bobbins and weights and its elegant, half-finished braid. Under a bell jar was the likeness of a seahorse, woven in colors of rust and straw—even the fins were articulated in strands of gossamer blond. It was for a widowed sailor, Mrs. Izzo had told him. He ran a hand through his own sweaty hair, pulling and twisting as the baby cried louder.

Mrs. Izzo checked the heat of the baby’s skin and dabbed the mucus from her eyes. She put an ear to her chest and listened to her heart and her lungs. The baby kicked and began to wail.

“What is it?” Sylvan asked.

“Fever.” Mrs. Izzo stuck her finger into a liquor jug and let the baby suckle it, then told him to fetch some things from the kitchen: “Cinnamon—ground up—a rag and a bit of oil.”

He rummaged through the cabinets while Mrs. Izzo laid the baby on the table and peeled away the wet cloth. She swaddled her
in a fresh rag-diaper and cotton blanket, then mixed the ointment.

Sylvan heard pots clanging in the rooms below, the sandy crack of shells. Steam began to drift up between the floorboards, and the parlor soon smelled like lemon and brine. He watched as Mrs. Izzo swabbed the baby’s ears with cinnamon oil, as she bundled her up and sat back, shushing, in an overstuffed chair. It was the chair where Chester used to sit on summer afternoons like this one, all the windows open, bedeviled by asthma. Sometimes, late at night while he shoveled out the privies, Sylvan felt a sadness come over him: Chester, for all his scrawniness and whining, his fear of birds and dogs and horses, his goopy, dripping eyes, had meant something to somebody. Footsteps on the stairs, the squeak of the corroded letter box—everyday sounds that he barely heard anymore—these were the things that Mrs. Izzo listened for. Every time someone knocked on her door—as he had just now, a little guiltily—part of her would wonder.

As the baby quieted and yawned, he told Mrs. Izzo about the match. He promised he’d be back that afternoon, with money and milk. “And something else for your trouble”—he said, although he wasn’t sure what yet. “But—she’ll be all right, won’t she?”

“It’s bound to happen with them so young. But she’s a little bear.” Mrs. Izzo smiled. “She’ll fight.”