Church of Marvels: A Novel (25 page)

S
YLVAN CHASED THE MAN OUT INTO THE STREET. HE FOLLOWED
the knobs of his naked shoulders, his dented and blown-about hat. Back in the parlor, with the coffin flung open for everyone to see, the woman on the floor had simply started to cry. The man with the cordial had sat very still, even as bits of straw floated through the air and fluttered down into his glass. No one said anything; no one explained. The tattooed man simply turned his back and walked out the door.

Now Sylvan ran after him in the marketplace. The Rembrandt was lissome and fast; he slipped through the crowd ahead, past the funeral carriage and the fishmonger’s, past the stands of gutted mackerel in quick-melting ice. Sylvan saw him lift his hat in the air and run his hands through his coarse-chopped hair. Through the press of people, around the scattering hens, he kept his eyes fixed on the man’s suspenders, the black
Y
against his pale skin
.
Finally, by the bread sellers, where the air was thick with flour-dust, he caught up to him.

“Mr. Leonetti—”

The man turned around and looked at him coldly. His eyes were swollen, his delicate skin burned pink.

“You worked at the Featherbone,” Sylvan continued, catching his breath.

The Rembrandt took a step away.

“You were down in the poppy box—”

He drew the air in sharply through his teeth. “Once or twice, to find my husband. And how do you know him?”

“I don’t.”

“Then how did you come by his jacket?” He plucked at the armband, now pilled, and frowned back what Sylvan suspected were tears. “One of his gifts?”

“No.” Sylvan shook his head. “I stole it. When he was asleep in the den.”

The man’s jaw clenched. He nodded, then looked away. “I see.”

“I was actually looking for you.”

“For me?” he said, surprised.

“About the baby—”

The man stared at him—stricken, bewildered. Sylvan faltered for a moment, then went on. He told him what he’d found: the baby, in a privy near the poppy box; the young man—his gold charley—delirious in the den. He said he’d been down to the Widows’ Walk that very morning, and the wig-keeper told him the young Rembrandt was dead.

“But how can I believe you?” the man kept saying, his voice growing faint. “How can I believe anything you say?”

Sylvan lifted the nosegay from his coat. The Rembrandt tried to blink away his tears, but they spilled over down his cheeks, turning to pearls in the flour-dust.

“You don’t know what happened?” Sylvan said. “You don’t know about any of this?”

The man shook his head, stunned. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of ink on his face. “You promise me she’s safe.”

Sylvan nodded. “I only need to find her mother—Miss Isabelle Church.”

“I don’t know who that is,” the man said, glancing back over his shoulder. “It was just a girl who brought her to me.” He looked around the marketplace, then lifted his face to the sky. “So peculiar.”

Sylvan turned to follow his gaze. There, standing at the edge of the rooftop, was Odile, at the side of another woman.

A
MURMURATION OF STARLINGS CHASED AROUND THE
smokestacks and lifted to the sky. The sisters looked out across the city—the billowing chimneys, the carts and horses, the black-clad people wandering in a daze from the house near the corner. Odile saw a half-naked man in a bowler hat hurrying away between the stalls, a few policemen lingering by the ice wagon, catching the drip in their hats and drinking it down. And then she heard someone call her name. She looked down—Sylvan was standing there between the pastry carts, waving up to her.

Odile touched her sister’s arm. She mumbled something breathless—there he was, the man she’d met, the one who’d rescued the baby. He could take them to the oyster house, the dead tree, the braids of hair. The baby was there—she was safe with a good woman, a weaver.

And then Belle was running—over to the far edge of the roof, down an old fire ladder, half-rusted and swinging away from the bricks. Odile followed, slower, still mindful of her back, the pulsing cut on her knee. Belle dropped the last ten feet to the ground, arms
wheeling through the air, sending a woman passing by into a fit of screams.

Odile hurried to keep up, but her sister ran ahead, disappearing into the crowd. “Wait!” Odile called. She pushed against the swarm of the marketplace, ducked beneath the swinging wares. She looked for the brim of Sylvan’s hat, the crinkled sheen of his beard, the wild flap of her sister’s clothes. “Move!” she heard herself say, shoving past vendors with their bundles of garlic, their swatches of wallpaper and leather shoe tongues. She turned around in the throng, but there was no sign of her sister anywhere.

The wind picked up, hot and stinging, blowing about the flour from the bread stands, the shower of sparks from a knife-grinder’s wheel. Odile stumbled through the haze, blinking back grit. She called her sister’s name. She wove between carts to the dithering song of a zither and flute; she heard the snap of awnings, the clanging of pots. And then she saw—through the dust, just beyond the pastry carts—the faint silhouette of her sister, running after the man in the bowler hat. But he was as slippery as a minnow and vanished into the swelling crowd.

Then someone grabbed Odile’s arm—Sylvan. He was sweating, flushed, his blue eye bloodshot and his dark eye watering. She was about to ask what had happened, how he’d found her there, but he only pulled her toward him. For a moment her head went fuzzy—she had the startled thought that he was going to kiss her, right there in the middle of the market square—but he was looking past her, his jaw clenched.

She turned around to see. By the ice wagon the policemen were watching them through the lifting dust, craning their necks, pinching the water from their moustaches. They muttered to each other and sucked their teeth, twisted their hats back on their heads.

Belle was looking at them, too—worried now, drawing the collar higher up her neck. Sylvan started walking—he beckoned to them
with a nod of his head. Odile took her sister’s hand and followed. Together they weaved away down the street, through the rising clamor and smoke.

Odile was too scared to look back. They moved quicker and quicker, turned onto the Bowery (
the Growlery,
she thought again, picturing her father at his workbench, smelling once again the stage paint and oil and varnished wood). A sob bubbled up in her chest, but she kept her eyes ahead, her hand joined with her sister’s. At the corner where the huckster bellowed through a cardboard cone, where the lightning-struck girl pranced around with her singed hair and loopy eyes, she began to feel faint. Her back seized up; her bad knee buckled. She stumbled there on the sidewalk, right in front of the medicine trunk. The huckster pointed at her on the ground, ruddily triumphant, rapping his bamboo cane: “Don’t you see, my dear faithful ladies and gents, a girl stricken right here at our feet—a girl who could be your daughter, beset by a malady that could arise in your very house! Weak blood! Delicate nerves! A lugubrious disposition!” He held up his bottle to the gathered crowd, then reached down to Odile, who struggled to get to her feet. “THIS—
this
is an answered prayer, right before your eyes—guided to us by an almighty hand, knowing what physic we can minister.”

But even as he said it, Sylvan collared him and shoved him off his box, punched him once in the gut so he gasped for breath. His assistant just sat down on the trunk and lit a cigarette, patted her hair, made eyes at the shoeshine boy on the corner.

Belle helped Odile to her feet; Sylvan lifted her and carried her away through the crowd. She could feel the wound split open in her knee, a hot crackle in her back—her spine seemed to contract like a telescope as they hurried over the bricks. She had an image of her old brace, the one she’d flung from the pier, now washing ashore in the night, crab-walking through the sand under a veil of kelp—a sea-monster bride, returning to her:
Croc! Oh, Croc!
She felt the brush of
her sister’s hand, the heat of Sylvan’s breath. Upside down she saw a line of swinging pretzels, the paling light of Cherry Street, the pear tree in the rag alley where Mrs. Izzo lived.

Then Belle, racing down the alley—Sylvan yelling ahead:
The stairs, the left!
, and Mrs. Izzo shuffling out on the landing to see the commotion, the baby in her arms.

Sylvan, lowering Odile to the ground, helping to steady her—
Please, Mr. Threadgill, I’m fine
—

And Belle just ahead, running and tripping up the stairs—her hands, brindled with ink, reaching out to the baby—

Odile slumped down on the bottom step, sweat dripping from her hair. She drew a hard breath—her lungs felt pleated, beaded with sand. She was aware of a shadow above her, growing wider than the sun. She felt Sylvan’s fingers move across her shoulder, slink up into her hair. He pressed gently against the crook in her neck, where a knot had formed. Something fizzed in the base of her skull. She turned to look back—at her sister on the highest stair, lifting the baby’s face to hers.

The tickle in her knee. The twitch of her back. Hot stars of light in her eyes. She kept thinking of the dagger, flung—how she still felt its heat in the palm of her hand.

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife—flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave—she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

WHEN THEY WERE WASHED UP
and rested, Sylvan took the sisters to the pier on the river, where the Brighton Beach steamboat made its landing.

Odile dug sixty cents from her pocket and bought the tickets: two purple stubs that left her fingers fuzzy and stained. She handed one to Belle. They stood together in a slant of sunlight, under a poster
that touted the wonders of the modern fleet:
They cannot burn! They cannot sink!

Around them the pier was thronged with people—women with white parasols and picnic baskets; coxcombs in straw hats and shined shoes, their buttonholes pegged with chrysanthemums. In a few hours they would all be delighting in their stroll down the boardwalk, clinging to each other in the cars of the Hee-Haw, gathering on the benches of Guilfoyle’s theater. These were the faces, blank and pudding-soft, that shone beyond the footlights, watching her aloft on the Wheel.

Sylvan bought a newspaper and stood at the rail, quietly turning the pages. There was a band playing on the esplanade below: the merry tweedle of a clarinet, the harrumph of a tuba. Pennants snapped along the pier. Odile stared out to the Statue of Liberty, a warm smudge on the harbor, to the billowing ships coming in. The archway above the landing read,
THIS WAY TO THE ISLE OF DREAMS
!

She sat down with Belle in the shade beneath the timetable. Belle leaned back, lanky and loose in her yellow dress, while chalk dust lifted from the board and swirled around them in the breeze. In her arms the baby sneezed.

“You can have Mother’s room,” Odile began. “And you won’t have to see anybody, not right away. We don’t have to tell them you’re back, at least until you’re ready. We’ll think up a story, all right? We’ll find one that suits you.”

Belle raised her head and nodded obliquely.

Odile had seen her sister quiet before, sometimes for days—mute with fury, sore and brooding, punishing everyone around her with an aloof disdain. But now her silence didn’t seem uneasy or tense. She looked wistful, even serene, staring out at the water while the breeze stirred her hair. Still, Odile found herself chattering, anxious to make up for the silence. Belle and the baby should see the doctor first, she said. They would buy a bassinet. They
would re-paper the room, shake out the rug. Belle could even work at Guilfoyle’s for the time being, if she wanted—at least backstage, where they always needed help with stubborn costumes and tardy cues—and then maybe, just maybe, they could start a theater of their own together, once they’d saved enough. Perhaps they could create an imaginary husband for her—a sailor at sea. A tightrope walker who’d fallen from a great height, with no net to save him. Her mind raced; her tongue grew dry, and suddenly she was conscious of it: too conscious, how it slaked the roof of her mouth, how it ticked along her teeth, as brisk as the lever of a telegraph; how it slid, fat and eely, along her lips as she paused to wet them, unsure of what Belle wanted to hear.

For a moment she didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to go back to Guilfoyle’s. She didn’t want him to stare at her sister, so changed. Lascivious, inquisitive, snickering things under his breath like
Dumb Belle! Haha!—get it?—
then swiftly ordering a stack of pamphlets that heralded the arrival of
Rubberwoman, Tongueless Wonder from the Orient!
“I promise,” she said, taking her sister’s hand, “I’ll look after you. It’s your life to resume without consequence, to live as you please.”

Belle bobbed her head, and a long silence stretched between them. Odile realized it was the same thing Mrs. Bloodworth had said to her in the hothouse.

“Will you tell me what happened?”

Belle spelled a word across the palm of her hand:
Someday.

“You’ll tell me everything, right?”

She nodded. Her mouth ticked up, the glimmer of a smile.

Then from up the river they saw it—the steamboat coming in to dock. The painted paddle-boxes, the piping stacks—the
Coney Island Queen,
drifting grandly through the harbor. On the pier people began to queue, holding their hats to their heads.

The baby started to cry. Belle stood up and took a slow turn
by the ticket booth, patting and soothing her while seagulls chased crumbs across the ground.

Sylvan tucked the newspaper under his arm and studied the boat, scratching the rough ends of his beard. “What if something happens to it?” he asked Odile. “Can you swim?”

“Sylvan! Of course I can swim.”

“Are you sure?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” she said as he dusted the chalk from her shoulders. She pointed to the banner above them. “See? Invincible.”

HE READ THE WORDS
slowly to himself and over again, but still felt a twinge of despair. How could something like that boat—piled with so many woozy people, with a deck so low to the sea, possibly stay right? Then, just over Odile’s shoulder, he saw Belle returning to them, flushed. She moved the baby to her hip, brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She held out a third ticket to Sylvan.

“No, no—” he said, but she pressed it into his hand.

Odile reddened, then looked quickly away. “It’s her way of thanking you. You should take it.”

He stared at it, a small scrap of paper curled up in his palm. He’d never been off the island before—not once in his life—unless it was a long time ago, with the white-kerchiefed woman who had cried in her hands.

“It’s not all tinsel and sea-slime,” Odile was saying. “Everyone thinks that, but it’s lovely, it’s more. And if you hate it, you can come right back tonight. But we should celebrate, at least. Have a good meal. And perhaps”—she looked to her sister—“Belle will even play us a song.”

The two of them stood side by side, leaning into each other, their faces expectant, so alike. “Thank you,” he said. He gazed down
at the baby, now kicking in her mother’s arms, her eyes open and turned to the sky. He didn’t know what to do—he’d already planned his good-bye. The whole walk there he’d prepared himself, going over it in his mind: deciding on the particular cast of his eyes, his blithe but level words, even the pressure he would give to Odile’s hand if they chose to shake. Now he felt disoriented, and the energy he’d worked up for that moment—as tight as a knot in his stomach—faltered and began to unravel. He didn’t want to part, not so awkwardly, but drawing out the day and knowing it would only happen later seemed even worse. He’d never really said good-bye to anyone, he realized; he wasn’t well rehearsed. He could turn and walk home; he could go back to Ludlow Street and find another match, a better purse, and hope that Mr. Everjohn would give him back his shovel. The loosened knot spun out in his gut—the ticket grew clammy in his hand, the blood rumbled like the ocean in his ears—and then he met the girls’ eyes and said all right, yes. He’d go.

THEY BOARDED THE STEAMBOAT
,
The Coney Island Queen.
Three tiers of sanded decks and fresh white paint and scuppers as dainty as eyelets. A floating petticoat, Odile thought
.
She followed Sylvan and Belle up to the highest deck, where they stood at a bend in the rail, watching the muslin sea. Everywhere people chittered and laughed, giddy as crickets, their faces turned up to the sun. They were happy fools—ready for their clambake, their valentine parade—sailing to the seashore under a cloudless wash of blue.

Her sister stood close at her side. Odile had missed the familiar press of her shoulder, goading but affectionate; the way Belle canted her head slightly to the left to meet hers, as if they were huddled in together, sharing a secret. They watched as a lost kite skittered through the air above them, with a tail made from a lady’s checkered stocking. The baby reached up as if she saw it, too. Belle leaned back,
shielding her eyes from the sun. The kite jumped through a rumple of steam, over the docks and the yellowing trees. The leg fluttered and kicked, dancing a jig over the rooftops of the city.