Church of Marvels: A Novel (17 page)

But after a moment the girl dropped the scissors and fell back, breathing hard through the horn on her mask. Alphie lay shivering on the floor, too scared to move or make a sound. This girl—the same one who’d hidden the scissors in her throat, who’d curled her body through the air as if she had no skeleton at all—hadn’t been startled or confused when she opened the door. She didn’t seem surprised at all.

“What do I have to do?” Alphie begged. “Please, please don’t tell. I’ll be leaving soon—someone’s coming for me. You won’t say anything, will you?” When she didn’t answer, Alphie only cried, “Please! What do you want?”

The girl stood up and looked around the room. She reached for the burnt match in the candle dish, but as soon as she grabbed it,
it turned to powder in her fingers. She grunted, then fished the wet cake of soap out of the bowl and started writing on the mirror.

Alphie sat up and rearranged her dress. Her body was weak, too hot. She rubbed away the lather on her face, the dripping sick in her hair, the dot of blood beading through the hairs on her knee. She watched as the girl stepped back and pointed at the mirror, the soap foaming in her hand. Alphie moved closer, lifting the candle so she could see the letters, dripping and ghostly, written around her face.

WHERE IS SHE

Her skin went cold. She looked over at the girl, who stood gripping the soap, watching her, the horn whistling as she breathed. Alphie took a step forward, bringing the light with her. She stared into the green eyes above the mask. They were filled with tears.

Then she remembered exactly where she’d seen Orchard Broome before. She had been in the room with her that night, too.

T
HE WOMAN STOOD IN FRONT OF SYLVAN, HER KNIFE DRAWN
in the dusty light. It wobbled and twitched at her side, but she took another step forward, close enough for Sylvan to see the freckles on her nose. She was young—around his age, with wavy hair coming loose from its pins, her head cocked to the side as if he were too much of a threat to face plainly. “What’s your name?” she said.

Sylvan, the dogboy—cornered here in the high light of day, in an alleyway paved with cowpat and swill. And this crooked-looking girl, brandishing a dagger as dull as a stalk of celery. He couldn’t think what she wanted from him—he only had a few cents in his hand. This neighborhood teemed with tough women, of course—he’d known a few misfit boxers, burled with old-country muscle; he’d seen little girls rob grown men blind; he’d even watched a shopgirl clobber a thief with a mallet until the man was nothing more than a wet flank of meat, left to sputter on the floor. But nothing like that had ever happened to him, not even close.

He told her his name and smoothed the opium-smoker’s jacket against his ribs. It fit better than his own, with birch buttons and tailored cuffs and a hint of cologne. Underneath he could smell traces
of tobacco and pomade, a faint spice like Mrs. Izzo’s cinnamon oil, and then something else, something stronger and more medicinal. He smelled good, at least. He lifted his chin.

The girl’s eyes met his. “I’m looking for Isabelle Church,” she said.

“I’m not acquainted with any Miss Church.”

“Isabelle Church,” she said again. “You know her.” She tightened her grip around the dagger. “She looks like me.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“You were just looking for her down in the opium den,” she said. “I
know.
”

Sylvan’s blood quickened. He stared at the tip of the dagger, at the girl’s angled face. He tried to remember if he’d seen her before—on the street, at a fight—but he could tell she wasn’t from the neighborhood. She didn’t seem particularly wheedling or coy, the way girls around here could be. She didn’t look weak from work or hunger. She didn’t appear to be the kind of woman the butcher-boy had described, someone feebleminded or drugged—or even particularly eccentric, despite the dagger in her hand. He couldn’t place her—not a churchgoing daughter or factory waif, not a dragon-chaser, not a runaway. She had a directness about her, a way of staring at him with her head slightly atilt, as if puzzled, and with a frankness that unnerved him.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, looking back toward the street, “put that thing down. No one here’s going to fight you.”

The blade trembled in her hand, but she kept it pointed at him. “You were asking around for her,” she said again. “She’s my sister, so tell me. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she your sweetheart?”

“No, no—not at all.”

“You worked at a place called the Featherbone?”

“I don’t even know what that is. Please”—he looked back to the dairy, where pails clanked and a woman whistled to the barn cats. “I’ll help you if you want, but it’s not safe to be waving that around. Not here.”

The girl dropped her arm and sighed. He could see the color in her cheeks, the glimmer of water in her eyes. The wind blew up a flurry of dust; he smelled fresh milk and wet grain, the sweat from her chambray blouse. Out in the street came the songs of the market: a trilling girl with her basket of gingerbread, a suspender-seller clapping two cymbals together.

“I’ll tell you,” he began, then faltered. He wasn’t sure exactly what she was aware of, or what she suspected. She’d followed him from the poppy box—that much was clear. She knew that he’d been down in the dens, asking around for a woman. But she couldn’t possibly know about the baby, could she? The baby, safe at Mrs. Izzo’s; the baby, whom he’d found only a few blocks away. She would have said as much already.

“I was looking for a woman, yes,” he went on, “but I can’t tell you her name because I don’t know who she is. Just someone who might have visited the dens. An acquaintance of fellows named Lee and Eddie.”

“Lee and Eddie?” she repeated.

His pulse flickered. “Do you know them?”

“I’ve never heard of them.” She began to rub at the skin behind her ear. “Why were you after her? Was she in some kind of trouble?”

Sylvan paused; a muscle twitched in his cheek. She was frustrated, he could tell—crossing her arms, toeing the dirt, biting her cheeks to stave off tears. He wanted to believe that this wasn’t an act, that her worry was genuine—that she was just as baffled as he was. But how could he know what she was really after? If her sister was the one he’d been looking for, a woman who’d done something so wicked—left a baby to die, disappeared in the night, maybe bought
blood in a jar and kept company with wastrels in an opium den—who’s to say she wouldn’t do the same?

“I’ve never met her,” he said carefully, still eyeing the dagger at her side. “There was some commotion the other night. I’m . . . a night watchman of sorts, and I thought a woman fitting her description might know something.” He licked his lips and tasted a scab, still tender from the fight. “Why would you ask if she was in trouble?”

“Because I heard you were looking for a woman”—her voice shook, but she lifted her head—“a woman who was going to have a baby.”

Her face caught the light, and then he could see it: the dimple in her chin. The gold-green eyes. He wasn’t sure what he felt, if it was exhilaration or dread, but he found himself nodding. “Yes,” he said. “Fair skin and green eyes, I’d guess. A baby any day.”

“What kind of commotion?” She was staring at the marks on his face, the bruises and cuts, which had begun to tighten and itch in the sun. “Was someone hurt?”

He drew a breath through his teeth. “Nothing troublesome.” He didn’t want to scare her; he didn’t want to see her scream and faint. What if he was wrong about all of it? What if she accused him of kidnapping, or worse? “Only a little riffraff, noise in the street. I wanted to be sure a woman—a woman in her condition—wasn’t inconvenienced. And nothing came of it. I don’t know any more than you.” He felt a bubble of guilt rise in the back of his throat. Quickly he went on, “Did your sister live nearby—near the butcher’s at all?”

“I don’t even know where I am!” She threw up her arms and looked around the alley, the dimple trembling on her chin. “She left home a few months ago, and only wrote me once. I feel such—
ugh!
” She turned away and wiped at her eyes with a handkerchief, then kicked at a patch in the dirt. He watched as her shoulders lifted and
shook. After a moment she looked back—“You’re a night watchman, you said?”

“I know these streets as well as anyone.”

“Are you with the police?”

He grimaced. “I have respectable work.”

“Yes, I can see that.” She handed him the handkerchief. “Your cheek.”

Fumbling, he dabbed at the cut, then flinched when he saw the cloth come back with blood. “I—I won a fight this morning,” he explained.

“Must have been quite the victory.”

He felt embarrassed to give it back, but she reached over and took it anyway, folded it down in her pocket. “And here I thought a watchman only snored away in his chair, while the dogs ran off with the sausages.” She eyed him. “My name’s Odile Church.”

“Where you from, Miss Church?”

She bent to stash the dagger in her boot. “Coney Island.”

He’d heard stories about that place—the giant machines that turned you upside down, the animals that were allowed into restaurants and served just like people—dogs sitting at tables with napkins tied around their collars, wolfing crème pie off china plates. And all of that water, eating away at the sand—he’d heard about a wave so big that it swept away an entire street, houses and all—it still floated somewhere out in the Atlantic, neighbors tending their gardens, drinking tea on their porches, tossing biscuits to the whales in their backyards.

“We were in a show there,” she went on. “A twin act. No woman down there who might have looked like me?”

“No women at all. It’s a stag den, if you know what I mean.”

“What about these Lee and Eddie people?”

“A couple of dragon-chasers, I would think. I’m not sure.”

“Wait a moment.” She pushed her hand into her pocket and
drew out a crumpled envelope. “There is one thing you can help me with. I found this with my sister’s things.” She unfolded a piece of paper and held it out for him to see. “Can you read?”

“EDGAR,” Sylvan declaimed, just loud enough for the birds to scatter.
“Hair dark, skin fair, two-one-three West Thirteen—
”

“All right—Edgar. Does that mean anything to you?” she asked. “What about those numbers—an address?”

“Up in the Village, I should think.”

He thought of the rainy afternoon at the party with Francesca, the smell of his borrowed suit, the damp press of the gentlemen’s hands against his. He looked at Odile—at her locket on its funny glass chain, her wild hair wavy with sweat. What had she been thinking, coming into the city by herself?

“I can take you,” he said. “A good neighborhood, but it’s too easy to lose your way.”

She looked at him for a moment, considering.

“I have nothing on me, I promise you.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat, felt his fingers close around something smooth and stippled, no bigger than a pea.

“Here.” He held it out for her to see, turning it up in his palm. “That’s all. A tooth.”

T
HERE WAS A STORY ODILE REMEMBERED, A STORY THEIR
mother used to tell. Once, long ago, in Punxsutawney before the war, Friendship’s brother had taken her to see a traveling magic show. It was the first time Friendship had seen anything other than Christmas vespers at the hotel bar, where her uncle, crippled in a mining accident, poured steins of beer for the traveling businessmen. She and her brother had run down the hill from the house; their mother had taken to bed with a spell and their aunties were busy bundling goose feathers in the kitchen. They snuck in behind the miners and toughs and big German families who spoke no English, huddled in a town hall that had seen dances and auctions and even a human dissection by the local doctor. The magician had come all the way from Pittsburgh. When he stepped out from behind the curtain—his hair molded, his moustache waxed, his spectacles gleaming in the footlights—he was holding a large, brilliantly green reptile. Friendship had never seen anything like it before: the medieval, spiny back, the armored wattle, the pink tongue and wizened face.
Is that a dragon?
she whispered to her brother. But her brother, who knew everything, could only stare at the stage in wonder, unable
to answer. Some people in the audience screamed; a few ran for the door. The magician stepped forward and asked for a brave volunteer. Friendship’s brother elbowed her hard, shoving her into the aisle. The magician turned, squinting through the motes of light, shielding his eyes with his white-gloved hand. Then he pointed down and said:
Yes. You
. And so Friendship walked slowly, apprehensively down the aisle, heads turning to watch her pass. Everything was silent, except for the wooden steps that squeaked on her way up to the stage. She was embarrassed at first, in her hand-me-down dress that smelled like the noosed, oily goose in the smoke shack. But she wanted to get closer to the dragon—nestled there in the man’s arms, claws gripping at his sleeve, the striped, molting tail sticking out like a shoot. Her skin tingled as she stepped under the lights. With a whoosh, the magician spun away from the audience, his back to the spotlight, and instructed Friendship to tug twice at his coattails. She did, baffled and giggling, a little afraid. He hopped up and down, then turned back to the crowd. The animal had transformed in his hands—no longer scaly and serpentine, but orange and furred, yawning in his cupped hands. A kitten. Friendship gasped. The magician took a step forward and held it out to her, but she backed away.
Go on,
he said as the audience laughed.
Tell them it’s real.
And so Friendship reached out, trembling, and lifted the kitten into her arms. Folded ears and white whiskers. A pink nose that left cold, itchy dots on her neck. She nodded, stunned.
That’s your prize,
said the magician
. Ladies and gentlemen, my lovely assistant!
There was a crackle of applause from the crowd, echoing all the way up to the balcony. Friendship felt a rush, a thrill, a sense of being outside herself and yet utterly whole. The cheers grew louder as she stepped down from the stage and walked back up the aisle to her brother. He hollered louder than the rest, whistling and stomping his feet. Something came over her then, and she jumped up on her rickety seat, holding her kitten aloft for everyone to see. The spotlight found her. The audience roared.

It was the first time she had ever been on stage, in front of all those faces, alit with wonder, and life would never be the same for her again.

AT FOURTEEN YEARS OLD
their mother had only left a note on a sheet of foolscap under her parents’ inkwell:
I’ve gone to fight
. Friendship Willingbird Church, younger than Odile was now—not just venturing over the bridge to the city, a scant few miles away, but riding off to avenge her brother’s murder, living in disguise, every day running from death and discovery. To have seen battle, to have watched men die beside her—some perhaps by her own bayonet—to have felt a bullet passing through her body (like fire, she’d said). And then, jogged away on a rattling stretcher, smelling the rust and rot in the surgeon’s tent, hearing the grind of the bone saws—weak and bleeding but still trying to stop the nurse, barely older than herself, as she cut away her clothes. She had risked everything for her brother’s honor. To see it done. To know his name. To bear witness to his sacrifice. And then, on crutches, to be helped into a circuit rider’s wagon, to be wheeled away in the dead of night through a Union embattlement—how had she done it?

You, dear sister, have always been the brave one, the good one, the strongest of all.
But Odile didn’t feel brave, not in any sense, and certainly not like their mother. She moved woozily through the Bowery marketplace, past steaming, lemony pots of clam broth, past stacked cabbages and dusty corn, past baskets of discarded corks that at first looked like severed thumbs. She remembered the boy’s toe on the beach—how Belle had lopped it right off without flinching. When she wavered for a moment, stalled at the corner while traffic jittered past, Sylvan reached out to steady her.

“Should we stop?”

She shook her head. “I’m well enough.”

He held tightly to her arm. She stared for a moment at the callus
on the curve of his thumb, as rough and riddled as a seashell. The sunlight hurt her eyes. “Let’s keep on,” she said.

They walked on through the crush of wagons. She couldn’t shake the shadow-play in the Frog and Toe, or the faces of the flower girls as they gnawed at their peppermints. If only she’d gone after Belle immediately. What had stopped her? Her own grief, she supposed. A sense of responsibility. She was anchored to Coney Island—it was her life. It held the mystery and grandeur of the whole world, there on a narrow spit of land. Sometimes she believed that if she were to leave, even for a short spell, everything she’d lost might return to her—like a faithful dog finding its way home—only she wouldn’t be there to let it in.

The elevated train clattered overhead, deafening. All around her people pushed and elbowed and squawked, as if they were fighting for the same small breath of air. She kept walking, breathing in through her mouth and spitting back flies. The heady stench—horse shit and roasting chestnuts and trash barrels pulsing with maggots—was enough to make her retch.

Beside her Sylvan kept talking and pointing, rolling his hands through the air, as if to distract her from the pull of inwardness. He went on about prizefighting, about something he called
the floating eye,
the sensation of leaving his own body and regarding it in wonder from afar, even though he was never more fully alive within it. She didn’t know if he was trying to threaten her or comfort her, but she recognized it as the same sensation she had on the Wheel, although she didn’t say as much. She only stared at her shadow rippling over the cobbles, hunched and blowsy, the shape a shriveled bean pod. How selfish could she have been, staying behind for Guilfoyle’s shabby dime-show, instead of following her sister, alone, into the city?

Maybe if she’d reached out in the days after the fire, Belle might have confided in her. She might have told her about a man she was seeing, or someone who’d taken advantage of her, someone who’d
made her do something against her will. Odile tried to think of the men who hollered at Belle from the audience. There were only ever two kinds—the old doddering drunks with green gums and fishing-line suspenders, loud and sloppy but always harmless. More menacing were the rich boys out to slum it, boys with horsey laughs and barbered hair who saw her as some kind of kinky prize—a harem-girl they could brag about to their buddies back home. Odile pictured them in libraries with Greek friezes and parquet floors, talking up her sister’s limber body as they whinnied and honked and ground their chalk against a billiard cue.

When they arrived at number 213—a large brick building with a portico of limestone—they found a woman on the stoop out front, working over a piece of lace. She was older, with hair so white and thin that it glowed pink from the glare on her scalp. She looped and knotted a length of thread, squinting at Sylvan and Odile as they approached. “Who you here for?”

Odile shielded her eyes from the sun. She wanted to shove past the woman and clamber up the stairs, yell her sister’s name, but Sylvan spoke first. “We’re looking for someone named Edgar.”

“Lil?” the woman answered, snapping the thread against her tooth.

“No—Edgar,” Odile said. “Or Eddie.”

“
Lill-i-an
,” the woman said impatiently, turning the sewing over in her lap. “Lillian Edgar, she’s at work—what do you think she does, frowse about here all day like the queen of England?”

“Is that nearby?” Odile asked.

“The theater round the corner.”

“The—the—?”

“The-
at
-er!” The woman scowled irritably. “What’s wrong with your ears?”

It was like hearing her own name. A theater
—
of course. Sylvan said something else to the woman, but all she could hear was
the rumble of blood in her head, the distant swell of market bells. Her eyes followed the woman’s thimbled finger, ahead to where the avenue crossed.
A music hall,
she was saying. Perhaps it was a place Odile would recognize from her mother’s directory—a name she’d jotted down herself the night before, on the old Church of Marvels stationery. Perhaps, after whatever she’d been through on Doyers Street, Belle had gone somewhere familiar.

Odile muttered some kind of thanks, then hurried back through the gate. She and Sylvan turned the corner in tense silence, passing by flower stalls and fruit stands, listening to the knight-pips and dragon-squawks from a children’s puppet show. She pictured her sister idling here beneath these awnings, turning through cherries and pears, buying daffodils and sprigs of yarrow for her dressing room. Lillian Edgar—the name didn’t sound familiar at all—but so far everything in the city had proved to be strange.

Ahead of her was the theater marquee. But it wasn’t the Featherbone, as she’d hoped, just a small variety hall of white brick and green trim: The Garden. She scanned the posters out front, all tacky with wheat-paste and faded by the sun. A musical revue was playing:
The Lonely Macaroon
, featuring Freddie “the Fried Egg” Eggleston and Lily Up-Your-Alley. No mention of Belle or the Shape Shifter, or any acts of thrill and sensation. A dusty little farce, by the looks of it—what her mother would have called a
mustard-and-pickle
marquee.

The ticket booth wasn’t open yet, so she knocked at the stage door around back. She glanced over at Sylvan, who unknotted the kerchief at his neck and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had such a particular face—the nose, once broken and now slightly hooked; the red bruise on his cheek; the ink-and-water eyes. She found herself looking back and forth between them, as if they belonged to two different minds, as if they saw two different people standing there beside him. She wondered, fleetingly, if the world
appeared to him as if through a stereopticon—two different images that merged into a wondrous, impossible third. It made her shiver for a moment—that he might see a person in her place that she didn’t even know herself, a person who had never before existed.

He caught her looking and shook his head. “If for any reason your sister should have done something dishonorable, or even—I don’t know—something hard for you to understand—”

“She was prone to flights of passion, Mr. Threadgill. And I’m afraid I understand that better than anyone else alive.”

The door was opened by a stubbled stagehand in work gloves and a sleeveless shirt. Odile asked first for Isabelle Church—he only shrugged and shook his head—and then Lillian Edgar. The man eyeballed them for a moment, rolling a sticky wad of chewing gum between his teeth, then pulled back the door and let them in. Odile was suddenly aware of how filthy she must look—boots crusted with dirt, the underarms of her blouse blackened by sweat, hair pasted to her brow. The stagehand pointed them down to Lillian’s dressing room. “In the back,” he said.

The theater itself was dark—Odile heard only the melody of saws and hammers, the crew singing an old Union song. She and Sylvan slipped between the backdrops, making their way to the other side of the stage. She breathed in the scents of paint and cording and sanded wood, the toasted smell of the lamps. There was something about it that grounded her, made her feel right. Not like Guilfoyle’s tin can of a theater, where old kitchen pipes leaked through to the stage. She wanted to believe that Belle had felt at home in a place like this—that in spite of everything, she’d found somewhere safe to return. How many times had Odile climbed into her sister’s bed at night and held her as she raged or wept over a single, trifling misstep? How many times had they fallen asleep together, heads pressed into the same pillow? And even though Odile reeked of eucalyptus, Belle had never turned her away.

The dressing-room door stood open. At the mirror sat a young woman in a gray gingham dressing gown, pinning wax lilies in her hair. She coughed wetly into a handkerchief, then took a swig of something—a glass of sudsy water, the color of cement. She leaned forward and turned up the lamp and began to paint her lashes. In the mirror Odile saw that her eyes were very bloodshot, her face a milky blue. She coughed again, her whole body contracting, then reached for a dish of talcum. In the doorway beside her, Odile could feel Sylvan tense.

The woman caught sight of them in the mirror, then turned around on her stool, tucking her handkerchief into the sash of her gown. She wasn’t old—not much past thirty—with straw-thin calves in yellow stockings and the short, broad torso of a vaudeville tumbler. She looked at them without any recognition or curiosity, only a polite boredom. With her popping eyes, languorous bulk, and a chin that melted away into her neck, she reminded Odile of a woebegone snail.

“Miss Edgar,” Odile began.

“Lil’s good enough.”

“I was hoping you could tell me about a woman named Isabelle Church.”

Lillian drew her eyebrows together. “Who do you mean?”

“She’s known as the Shape Shifter onstage—contortions and sword-swallowing. Plays a little music, too, usually upside down.”