The Museum of Extraordinary Things (4 page)

They went on to an area called Frenchtown, where women and children were sold by the hour for sexual use and pleasure. There were evenings when only clients in formal evening clothes were allowed in and the whores were trained to speak with men of the upper classes and wore the most elegant and revealing gowns. Some of the houses were fitted with velvet couches and beds covered with silk duvets; others were filthy, dimly lit, tragic storehouses of sorrow and flesh. Within such places, some of those on sale were considered more desirable if they possessed abnormalities, exactly what the Professor wished to find. Coralie waited in the carriage while her father visited two of these wretched houses, one where boys were clothed in dresses, wearing rouge and color on their lips, the other a grim tenement filled with girls dolled up in oversized gowns, costumes that only served to show how very young they were. Neither house was the least bit interesting to the Professor, and he left both quickly enough. But at the second house he was followed by a heavyset man who had with him a child no older than six. The man did his best to get the Professor’s attention as he toted the girl in a rope sling, for she had neither arms nor legs.

“Here’s what you’re looking for,” the man shouted. “She’ll be to your liking. You can have her for a fair price.”

The child had begun to wail, but one smack from her caretaker and she hushed quickly enough. She appeared too stunned to cry any more. The Professor shook his head and stalked away. Still, the brutal man called after him. “You said you wanted a monster. She’s right here! Look no further.”

“What will happen to the child?” Coralie asked after they had climbed into the carriage, escaping the stranger’s escalating rage.

“Go on,” the Professor told the liveryman.

Coralie cast a swift backward glance to watch the child dragged away to what was surely a dreadful fate. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had tried to stop children from being allowed to beg, or solicit alms, or be in shows of acrobatics or be included in any immoral or indecent exhibition, especially those presenting an unnatural physical formation. But, in truth, such laws were rarely enforced. Children were not recognized as having rights.

“It’s not our business,” the Professor remarked, sure of himself. “We are here on behalf of science.”

“Perhaps it should be,” Coralie protested. “I could take care of her. It would be no trouble.”
The tears that had refused to fall before came freely to her now, though she was quick to wipe them away.

“If you tried to right all the wrongs in the world you’d exhaust yourself in under an hour. This is God’s business.”

“Is it?” Coralie wondered aloud. “Is it not our business to help in God’s work?”

“Our business is to acquire a creature that will draw a crowd, and thereby pay for food and coal and the shoes upon your feet.”

When Coralie strained to see behind them now, the street was empty. The man and his charge had vanished, engulfed by the darkness. It seemed as though they had left God’s sight in this part of the city where human beings were bought and sold as if they were sheep ready for market. “It should be against the law for men to be so cruel,” Coralie pronounced.

“That man is her father.” The Professor turned to his daughter, so that he would not be misunderstood. “And to all the world, he’s well within his rights.”

The Professor had already set in motion his plan for their renewed success. In the first months of 1911 a rumor had begun, one that had been formed inside the Professor’s mind. A monster had settled in the Hudson River, and if a man stood on the banks he might spy it swimming in the dark. Or perhaps it could be sighted at the first light of daybreak, when the water was silver and still. The first to take up the story were two boys fishing for their families’ suppers. They vowed a strange river creature had stolen the catch from their lines; when questioned by the police, each swore it wasn’t a shark, which were abundant in New York Harbor, some reaching fourteen feet long. True, they’d seen a flash of scales set upon the creature’s spine, but it was something entirely different, a being that was dark and unfathomable, almost human in its countenance, with fleet, watery movements. A panic went up. Constables in rowboats patrolled the shores, from the docks downtown all the way up to the Bronx. Several men on the ferries on the four lines which ran from Twenty-third Street to New Jersey leapt into the frigid depths as if they could walk on water, insisting they had heard a woman’s voice call to them, convinced someone had been drowning.

Coralie was the monster that had been sighted from the shoreline, the mysterious creature men wished to either rescue or trap. All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York. Seventeen sightings had been recorded in the papers. Each one corresponded to a time when Coralie swam farther north in the cold, gray river, drifting among the eels, just now arising from the sediment after a winter’s sleep, and keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides. In the mornings she would sit in a pool of sunlight on the back porch so she might read about herself in the
Sun
or the
Times,
a huge beast with teeth not unlike a shark’s and green scales, who was in reality nothing more than a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl who favored simple black dresses and leather-buttoned shoes and was never seen without her gloves.

Coralie knew her father was in desperate need of an exhibit that would compete with Dreamland and Luna Park and the other grand amusements in Coney Island. Two years earlier the famous Sigmund Freud had come to Brooklyn, to try to understand the American point of view; among the few things that were said to have impressed him were the magnificent amusement parks. Imagination was all in Brooklyn, and this was what Sardie had to sell; it was his gift, one he thanked his maker for each and every day. He always insisted that his establishment was not a freak show, like the well-known Huber’s Dime Museum on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, which had been a purveyor of the strange and unique for many years until
finis
was posted on its door in 1910, or the dozens of dreadful little entertainments that lined lower Surf Avenue, exhibitions that debased and degraded their human skeletons and amputees, their conjoined twins and the men who allowed fleas to suck the blood from their bodies, along with the wrestling rings and vaudeville halls, the worst and most exploitive of them having moved northward, to an area known as the Gut. The Museum of Extraordinary Things was a true museum, a place of edification, wherein natural curiosities were displayed along with human marvels. Now, however, they needed more, and, when more could not be found, it must be invented. If there was anyone who might be able to succeed in such an act of trickery, it was the Professor, who had been a magician in France, quite famous in his time, known for acts of wonder so astounding they had made people doubt their own eyes. He understood that not only could a man’s eyes mislead him but his mind could deceive him as well.

Coralie followed her father’s instructions, as she had all her life, though her heart sank at the nature of her obligation, a trick to be played upon all of New York. The headlines called her the Hudson Mystery, for no one had managed to spy her features. Two fellows in a canoe had caught sight of her tonight as she’d raced past so these witnesses wouldn’t be able to make out her womanly form. Instead they saw only what they imagined, exactly as the Professor had predicted, and men’s imaginings were dark in these dark times. It was a season of great and terrible clashes in the streets, of bosses and politicians and police pitting themselves against working men and women. Debates became free-for-alls, with arrests of workers wanting nothing more than their fair share. The gap between the immigrant populations relegated to the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side and those who lived in brownstone mansions surrounding Madison Park had created a tinderbox of hatred.

And yet despite the news of labor troubles—strikes of ship workers on the docks of Brooklyn and garment workers in Manhattan gathering in near riots—there was always a story in the
Sun
and in the
Times
on the day following a swim, for the Hudson Mystery had caught their readers’ attention. The creature of the deep had become a riddle discussed on street corners and in shops. In the morning, the eighteenth news story would appear, a fortuitous number, as it was Coralie’s age, her birthday having been celebrated two days earlier with a ginger-apple cake Maureen had baked, rich with sugar icing and dotted with candles that sparked when Coralie tried to blow them out.

Once she’d left the river, Coralie walked through the newly unfolding swamp cabbages and fiddlehead ferns that grew in wild profusion in the boggy woods. Freedom was a treasure, even for a scant few hours. The chance to become a heedless wraith wandering through the chill landscape was a gift. No one could command her here. She might easily be a water nymph who had clambered onto the shore of a new and tender land. The world looked aglow, as if a door had opened and there, on the other side, was a vivid haze. She imagined it was the future that awaited, the unexpected life she might lay claim to if she never again returned home. Shadows threaded through the locust trees. The night’s dark color washed over the landscape in a mist of blue. She removed the mask she wore to make her seem inhuman, one fashioned by the same woodworker who made the museum signs.

Coralie gazed across the river at a shore she did not recognize, unaware that the white cliffs shining in the dark were called the Palisades. She was not far from the last wild land to the north, but she had no idea of where north was, as she had no idea that the Bronx itself was being remade after the building of the Grand Concourse, modeled on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Monsters did not carry maps, and when they were lost they had no recourse but to rely on human kindness. Coralie peered through the thickets before her. In secluded patches of Manhattan that had once belonged to the original Dutch landowners, the acreage was still overgrown with ancient stands of hickory, chestnut trees, and black-green elms. Through the shadows, she caught sight of a curl of smoke rising into the dark. She followed it as if it were a beacon, hoping for a hot cup of coffee and a blanket to throw around her shivering body.

Her clothes clung to her as she went on; but even when she was weighed down by her sopping trousers and shirt, she had a swimmer’s easy gait. She swiftly made her way up the slippery bank. Brambles clung to her, but she managed to untangle herself from the stickers. The silence of the night was intoxicating. There were no crickets yet, for the season was still too cold, no peepers, and no birds sang at night. The swamp cabbage that was everywhere had a pungent stink, green and sharp. Just then a dog barked, the sound echoing. All at once Coralie had a rush of panic. What had she been thinking to look for company? What questions might be asked of a young woman swimming in the river in this harsh season? And who was to say there were not criminals camping in these woods, homeless men who would think nothing of attacking her?

Coralie crouched down and narrowed her eyes, peering past the shadows. Through the locust trees she spied the form of a young man at a bonfire, fixing a late supper over the flames. She darted behind the nearly heart-shaped leaves of a linden tree, the better to see who she had come upon. She thought of Whitman.
Stranger! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
And yet, as she watched this stranger, she was mute. He was dark, with handsome features, rangy and more than six feet tall. He was sunburnt from his day at the river, and he whistled to himself as he cleaned the fish he’d caught. Something about him moved Coralie in a way she didn’t understand, an almost magnetic pull. She felt alarmed by the thrum of her own pulse. The dog beside the young man was the sort used for fighting. It spied her in the woods and began to bark in earnest.