Church of Marvels: A Novel (2 page)

NEW YORK CITY, 1895

S
YLVAN FOUND THE BABY ON A BALMY SUMMER NIGHT, WHEN
he was digging out the privies behind a tenement on Broome Street. All night long the damp air had clung to his skin like a fever, and now, with only a few blocks left before his shift ended, he was huddled halfway inside a buckling stall, his vision blurring and his arms growing numb. Beside him the other night-soilers, slope backed and sweating in the privy doorways, bent and pushed and hoisted and slung. They kept up a rhythm—shovels scraping at the bricks, waste slapping in the buckets, mud sucking at their boots.

Sylvan was hunched over the pit, sifting through the mire, when his shovel came up under something solid and heavy. He stopped and squinted, but it was too dark to see anything. He gripped the handle and watched the shovel head quiver up into the lamplight. Five pink toes pearled above the falling slop, then a foot, then an ankle. Leaning in closer, he saw a small face, still as a mask, floating in the dark.

He drew up the shovel and shouted. He dropped to his knees, closed his hands around the slick body, and, trembling, fell back on
his haunches. The head was limp and slippery in his palm, the hair like moss under his fingers.

The night-soiler next to him, a gaunt and graying man the others called No Bones, leaned his shovel against the open door of his privy and lifted his lantern. “What’s it this time?” he asked. “Good one? Piece of china? What happened to that pitcher from last week—you keep it?”

Sylvan didn’t answer. In his arms the baby was slack and still, lighter than the bucket he hauled across the yard and emptied into the barrels of the slop wagon. He unknotted the kerchief at his throat. In the dark he mopped the baby’s lips and cheeks and the blue bulbs of its closed eyes.

No Bones took a small, curious step forward. The heady smell of kerosene and lime powder and sweat emanating from his clothes made Sylvan’s nose sting and head pinch; he could taste it, burning, in the back of his throat.

“Lemme see there,” the old man muttered, raising the lamp over his head. “Let’s see what you brung up now.”

Light fell across Sylvan’s lap. For a moment neither man moved or breathed. The only sound that passed between them was the steady creak of the lantern.

“What is it? What’d he find?” came voices from across the yard.

No Bones turned his head and whispered hoarsely, “It’s a baby—a white baby. Girl.”

Sylvan stared at her. She was pale, with a small nose and a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in. Whorls of dark hair were greased against her scalp. Slowly and gently he drew her up to his chest.

The other night-soilers dropped their shovels and crowded around him. Their faces were grim and green in the swinging light of their lanterns.

“Looks like a Polack,” someone said.

“No, a Scot—see the way the ears point up? That’s a kelpie.”

No Bones whispered, “Is it dead?”

Sylvan tried to nod but only managed to drop his chin. He had unearthed all sorts of things in the privies: coins, buttons, bottles of hair dye and bourbon, a set of grinning false teeth. But nothing even close to this. Night-soiling was summer work—he and the crew collected waste from the slums and delivered it to a fertilizer factory on the river, always hoping for a small treasure of their own. Back in his cellar on Ludlow Street, the walls were lined with things he’d smuggled home in the dark—loot all the way from Essex Street to Centre, from Canal up to Delancey. He knew it was foolish, but he kept hoping he might discover a gold watch chain, or an heirloom stone slipped from its tarnished, Old World bezel, some small fortune that would allow him to leave Ludlow Street forever. A ticket away from the sickness and noise, the nostrums hocked on street corners, the heavy-lidded undertakers who haunted the halls with their burlap and twine.

But now this. He hadn’t held a child since Frankie.

Suddenly the baby’s chest rose and shook. She mewled weakly. Sylvan’s hand jumped back and hovered above her in the lantern light, his shadow whipping over her skin like smoke. He watched as she took a breath and opened her eyes. They were a dark, watery green.

The foreman pushed his way to the front. “Back to work,” he ordered somberly. “To your posts—now.”

The group of men disbanded, pulling at their beards, crushing their hats between their hands. The light disappeared with them, and Sylvan was left squatting alone by the privy with the baby breathing weakly in his arms.

Beside him Mr. Everjohn scraped the ground with his boot and sighed. “Let’s see it.”

Sylvan stood, wiping away the remaining dirt with his handkerchief.

Everjohn leaned in closer. A slug of tobacco jumped from one cheek to the other. “Christ,” he whispered. “You see anything? Anyone here when you come up?”

Sylvan shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Anyone seen you—or this”—he tilted his head toward the baby—“since?”

“Just the others.”

The foreman pushed his hands into his pockets. He glanced warily around the yard, to the offal-stained gangway of the butcher shop, then up to the darkened windows of the tenement. “Goddammit,” he hissed.

Sylvan took a deep breath. “There’s the mission over on Hester,” he said. “Convent runs an orphanage, too, over on Mulberry.”

Mr. Everjohn turned back to him, grinding the tobacco between his teeth. “You know I can’t keep it on my watch,” he said. “Someone’ll find it by dawn—take it there themselves.” He slurped and spit. “Best for all of us if we leave it where it laid.”

“She might need a nurse—”

“We’ve got the Bloody Gutter beat tonight—you know we can’t be bringing a child through those streets.”

“It’s just another few blocks,” Sylvan said, but he saw the look on the foreman’s face and knew he should retreat before his shovel and bucket were taken from him and he was turned out into the street without the week’s wages. At nineteen Sylvan was youngest on the crew, strong-limbed and quiet. Mr. Everjohn liked him well enough, but the other men were clannish and wary. Under their breaths they called him Dogboy. He’d been puzzled over and picked apart all his life—
the skin of a Gypsy, the hair of a Negro, the build of a German, the nose of a Jew.
He didn’t belong to anyone. They stared at him with a kind of terrified wonder, as though he were a curiosity in a dime museum. One of his eyes was brown, so dark it nearly swallowed the pupil, and the other a pale, aqueous blue.

Sylvan looked down at the baby. He thought of the drunkards and gang boys, roosting in alleys and doorways from Mulberry clear out to the river, waiting in the warm night for someone, anyone, to cross them. And the night-soilers, a piecemeal crew of blacks and Irish, Slavs and Chinese, near-cripples and convicts and rye-pickled drifters, were a mark. He’d heard a story last summer about a night-soiler who tried to help two children find their way home. A gang of neighborhood men, believing he meant to kidnap them, clobbered him to the ground and tied him to the back of a wagon. Sylvan wondered if the children were there to see it, if they saw him die in the street, if they screamed because they couldn’t understand why the man who’d taken their hands and helped them home was now being dragged through the dirt with his mouth open and eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.

The foreman’s tongue flicked up into his moustache, tobacco juice wetting the ends. “I’m not putting the boys in danger—not for some whore-trash’s baby.”

He put out his hand and rested it on the baby’s head. Then, pulling away, he cleared his throat and said, “At least you dug it out. But we’ve just got one job to do—and you keep doing it, right?” He clanged his shovel against the ground and disappeared across the yard, down the narrow gangway to the street. “Gather up, gather up!”

Sylvan knelt down and placed the baby on the ground, far away from the butcher’s barrels, which were filled with feathers and bones. He stroked her forehead to soothe her, then stood up and jammed his fists into his pockets. He willed his legs to move but they felt like wood. He watched as the folds of the knapsack sagged around her, exposing her naked body to the night air. He bent down and tucked her in again. When she pushed out her tiny fists and batted down the sides, he found the clasps and buckled the sack tightly across her chest. Her body arched and trembled. She opened her mouth and began to cry.

Sylvan felt his throat close and his nose prickle. He took his kerchief from his pocket and dropped it over her face, then grabbed his bucket and shovel and staggered down the gangway to the street, where the slop-wagon was waiting. The other soilers were resting on the curbside among ash heaps and garbage piles, their knapsacks open in their laps. They took draws from water canteens and shared slices of bread, chatted in loud whispers, but Sylvan could still hear the faint cry, raw and tuneless, coming from the yard.

He emptied his bucket over a barrel in the back of the wagon. There was nothing he could do, he told himself. Mr. Everjohn was right. By morning she’d be sleeping alongside a dozen other foundlings in the troughlike crib of the orphanage, nursing Tammany milk. Or some family from the tenement might take her in, raise her as their own. Or perhaps the person who’d left her behind would still come back for her.

Sylvan rubbed his eyes as if trying to make the image stick. Even through the stench of the slop-wagon, he could smell the blood and viscera from the butcher shop. He raised his eyes to the windows above. There could be fifty people living in that building, maybe a hundred. Who would have done such a thing? The baby wasn’t just abandoned to the whims of the city streets—she hadn’t been entrusted to another’s care, or left in a well-traveled place to be discovered and rescued. Sylvan shivered though the night was hot and still. The baby, he knew, was meant to die.

“Broome to Orchard!” the foreman called from down the street, clanking his shovel head against the walk. “Orchard and Broome—step in, hey!”

The other men got to their feet, gathered and readied themselves. Sylvan felt nauseous and light without the sack on his shoulder, without the loot clinking and knocking against his hip. From the yard the wail seemed to come louder. Quietly he slipped out of the stretching, laughing knot of men and ran back down the gangway
and into the yard. He stared, breathless, at the small bundle beneath him in the shadows. He knelt down and picked the kerchief off her face. The crying stopped. The baby stared up at him, her eyes glimmering in the darkness.

“Moving out, moving out,” the foreman cried down the road.

Sylvan fell into the back of the line and marched down the street with the others, their caps shoved tight on their heads, their clothes black with grime. They began to sing, as they did every night when they felt their limbs tiring and eyelids pulsing. They moved together like one giant shadow, their bodies low-bent and taut, their shovels striking out a beat in the moonlit dust. The baby slept soundly against Sylvan’s chest, rocking with each long stride. When the band turned on to the main thoroughfare, she kept so quiet that Sylvan thought no one could know she was hidden there among them, except for the brief moment she flashed into view, like a cap of foam on a dark wave, as they rolled through a nimbus of streetlight.

AT THE CORNER
he slipped away. He fell back behind the others, hid the baby in his coat. He made his way blindly down the alley—stumbling past wheelbarrows and rabbit hutches, blinking back the drizzle in his eyes. They wouldn’t notice he was gone, not right away—maybe not until they returned to the stable, where the men heeled off their overshoes and scrubbed themselves clean. It was near the end of the shift, he reminded himself. When he reported for work the next evening, he’d say he’d been jumped—maybe by a tough he’d once trounced in an underground match, a fellow fighter hungry for revenge. Would they believe him? Would they even be surprised?
Dogboy’s a wild one. He has no people. He’s got no tribe.

He reached his home on Ludlow Street just before dawn. In the yard he placed the baby on a crate and peeled off his sticky shirt. Ducking his head under the spigot of water, he rubbed at his
curls and lathered his arms and face with a bar of soap. He gazed at the girl through the falling water and realized he was shaking. Perhaps he could put on Mr. Scarlatta’s brown suit and take her to the convent himself, where blind Sister Margaret taught orphans to make shoelaces.

He filled a bucket with water and carried it down the steps to the cellar door, cradling the baby in his arm. Inside they were greeted by loot from the privies—the rusted door keys and clay pipes, the saucers and belt buckles and green glass bottles—and the few things he’d foraged from the Scarlattas’ glove shop upstairs: a good pair of mittens for winter work, and the dummy hands that now lined the shelves like drowning men reaching for air.

He warmed the water on the stove and poured it into an old washtub. He set the tub, sloshing, on the floor and knelt down beside it. Other than the throaty purr of flies, the room was silent. As he bathed the baby, he saw the red lattice of veins beneath her bluing skin, the tiny claws of her fingernails. She was skinnier than he thought she’d be, with puffed-up eyes and a trail of fuzz down her back, like a wolf pup.

When she was dry, he fashioned a diaper from a rag, then swaddled her in an old tablecloth. From the shelf he retrieved a glass bottle with a rubber hose attached. It had been Frankie’s. He’d been born just over two years ago, heir to the glorious emporium his father dreamed of building: Scarlatta and Son’s Fine Gloves and Handwear. Frankie, with his hammy legs pedaling through the air as if he were riding an invisible bicycle. “An athlete, maybe!” his father cried, tossing him up. “A strongman!”

Sylvan filled the bottle with milk, which he kept cool in a hole in the floor. He pushed the nipple, gnawed and misshapen at the end of the hose, between the baby’s lips. She ate slowly, sluggishly, her skin growing warm against his.

He tried to envision a woman creeping outside to the privy,
shaking out the folds of her skirt and watching the baby turn over into the shadows. He tried to picture her posture, the set of her face, the way her moist and terrified eyes would have widened in the dark. But as hard as he tried, the only person he could imagine standing there, stooped over the hole and feeling the bloodstained skirts fall back around her ankles, was a tall woman with wet cheeks and a white kerchief tied around her head. He didn’t know if this woman was a dream or a memory, but it was an image that had been flickering in his mind for as long as he could remember. She was leaning against a wall, crying into her hands. Her shoulders were bunched and heaving, her cheeks half-shadowed and wet. He tried to recall what had happened, who she was—his mother; his nurse? Had she died? Had he wandered away from her in the street? Had she looked up from the fly-spotted flanks of meat at the butcher’s and realized he was no longer at her knee? Or had she, for whatever reason, set him down in front of a Punch and Judy show in the market square, turned on her heel, and walked away?