Church of Marvels: A Novel (9 page)

“My name’s Odile Church.” Odile held out her hand. The girl eyed it suspiciously, then leaned forward and shook it.

“I don’t have a mind to take up your morning,” she continued. “If someone can tell me what business my sister had here, I’ll be grateful for the knowledge and quick on my way.” She cleared her throat and hurried on, before the words
almshouse
and
sickhouse
and
cemetery
could be suckled from the pipe stem and set loose on a cloud of reeking smoke. “Isabelle, or Belle, as she likes it. Five
feet tall, an acrobat of sorts. She might have found work in a theater nearby. They called her the Shape Shifter, if that sounds at all—”

The girl raked the nib across her teeth. “Why don’t you come inside, Miss Church?” She leaned against the door, propping her foot up on the wood behind her. “You can wait in the parlor while I ask.”

“Why,
thank
you.” Odile crossed the threshold into a dimly lit foyer, her heels clicking on the tile. She peered up the shadowed stairwell, then down the corridor, past a pile of blankets and hot water jugs, but saw no one.

Behind her, the girl shut and latched the door. “I was just making a pot of coffee,” she said, beckoning Odile down the hallway, opening the double doors to the drawing room. “I’ll bring you a cup if y’like.”

Odile’s stomach burned. She hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since early that morning, when she forced down some weak tea and a hardboiled egg. “Yes, please, very black.” She nodded at the girl, who studied Odile’s flimsy hat and sweat-stained collar, the stickered valise with its glue-plugged corners and layer of sand. The girl lifted her chin, her nostrils flaring with something that was half pride and half menace, curtsied and said, “Make yourself comfortable, miss. I’ll be back in a moment.”

When she was left alone, Odile scanned the parlor, hoping something would look familiar to her—something small that she might recognize as her sister’s. The room was dark and humid and musty smelling, but it was still reasonably well kept—certainly no poorhouse. Odile glanced at the wooden faces carved into the scrollwork above her head, at the footworn carpets and high-backed sofa. There was even an upright piano. But no easy chairs or coffee-stained afghans or sheet music trampled underfoot, no orange, windblown fur floating in through the door. Everything was somber and spare, far from their home on Surf Avenue.

She thought again of the women with their umbrellas, the leaky harem over on Mermaid Avenue. She looked around at the empty ashtrays and burgundy curtains. There was no trace in the air of cologne or sweat or primly held cherry cigarettes. No sound of beds creaking upstairs or men rising from their messed sheets with a yawn, of boots falling tired and haphazard on the stairs, of barefoot girls tiptoeing through the yard to scrub the musk off their bodies in the cool, quiet gloom of the privies. Still, the quiet unnerved her. She didn’t even hear murmurs on the stairs, or the clink of cups and saucers. It looked like a stage set after the theater lights had been snuffed.

When the girl returned with the coffee tray, Odile held up her mother’s locket, opened to a photograph of Belle. “This is who I’m looking for.”

The girl slid the tray onto the table and lifted her eyes, expressionless. “I don’t recognize her.”

“Can you take a better look?”

The girl picked a shrivel of tobacco off her tongue. “Like I say, I’m only the help. Here.” She handed Odile a cup of coffee. “Seems like you need this.”

Odile took the coffee and sipped it. The girl didn’t meet her eyes, just set the pot back on the table and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. Odile snuck a glance at her ankle, where the boot-skin had worn white around the dagger blade. Five inches and single-edged, by the look of it. It probably had never seen an oiled handkerchief or a square of sanding paper—had up to three burrs, she guessed, along the tongue.

The girl noticed her looking, and she straightened up a bit, a smile gliding out toward the corners of her mouth. “I dare say you’ve come a long way,” she said. “It’s not quite like back home, is it?”

Odile bristled. What did this girl take her for? Scared of the streets of Manhattan, trembling at the sight of a knife! As if she were no more than a naïve little sand hopper, alighting in the city with
a dead-end letter and a cheap, sentimental necklace. “No, it’s not,” she enunciated. Certainly she’d heard stories about the wickedness and debauchery of New York, but these were nothing compared to the stories New Yorkers had heard about the perversions at Coney Island. She poured herself another cup of coffee. The muscles in her back were tensing—it was the same pain she felt when Mack threw a knife particularly hard, so hard that the Wheel quaked under her hips and shoulders. Now she was seized with the urge to pull the knife from the girl’s boot and fling it magnificently through the air—to slice her pipe in half where it stuck out from her mouth at an angle. The blade would plunge into the wall behind her with a tremulous hum, and Odile would stare the girl down until her smirk disappeared and the sheared pipe nib drooped on her lips.

Instead, she shook her head and said, “We’re quite the act back at Coney Island.” Her throat seemed even drier now. She sucked a drop of coffee from the rim of the cup. “Maybe you’ve heard of the Church sisters—taming real tigers from Java?” She pulled up her skirt and pointed to the bandage on her knee. “One took a bite right out of me yesterday. Blood wouldn’t even come out of its fur. I had to dress it up quickly to catch the ferry in time. Like I said, I’m here to find my sister, and I’m not leaving until I do.” She smoothed her skirt back over her lap and smiled.

The scrub-girl smiled back, her face devoid of expression. “You’re welcome to wait.”

She stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

Odile felt a cold sweat break across her hairline; her tongue prickled in her mouth. She looked over her shoulder. Something was different—a tang to the air, a ripple in the atmosphere. She stood and took a turn around the room, glancing behind the sofa, between the curtains, but no one was there.

She paused at the piano and ran her hands over the keys. She used to play, though she hadn’t in years. For a little while their
mother had hired a man with a cane—a half-deaf, faunlike émigré—to come to the house and give them lessons. Odile hated running scales, hated the plucky pastoral études and grim sonatinas, hated counting out the measures to the ornery clap of his hands.
But it’s good for your posture,
her mother insisted. Belle had loved dance-hall music the most—syncopated, percussive, a little bit brash. At night while their mother cooked dinner, they crowded each other on the piano bench, playing sloppy duets together, hollering nonsense in fake opera voices.

She pressed down on middle C. It twanged and stuck, out of tune. She played a quick trill, part of Belle’s old routine, hoping someone through the walls would hear it and know. She missed hearing Belle talk about “glisses” and “quarter tones,” seeing sheet music litter the floor of the parlor. She missed coming home and finding Belle at the piano with a pencil in her mouth, getting down a tricky refrain. She remembered how Aldovar had harmonized beautifully when they all sang together in the wings after an exceptionally good (or bad) show. She missed hearing the audience gasp as Belle played her ragtime upside down, all sweat and bluster, her body arched beneath the lights. She even missed her mother’s old songs—learned long ago from a circuit rider in the hills—the lyrics a blend of bonny Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch—and which she only sang when she thought nobody was listening, pinning the clothes to the line on Sunday mornings.

Odile heard a creak behind her and turned around. Someone was standing there by the door, now open—a little girl in a sleeveless cotton shift, carrying a lantern in her hand. She was no more than eight or nine years old, with wide, wary eyes and thick brown hair chopped short like a boy’s.

“I’m sorry,” Odile started, looking to the piano and back. “I was just playing a song we used to . . .” Her voice died in her throat. The girl, she saw, was missing her right arm. In its place was a wooden
one, jointed at the elbow and wrist. An iron socket cupped her shoulder; a leather strap buckled under her armpit. As she leaned in closer, Odile saw that the wooden fingers were long and delicate, individually whittled. The forefinger and baby finger were raised, the thumb slightly curled—as if they were about to flutter down to the piano and play a chord.

The girl whispered, “Don’t drink the coffee.”

Odile blinked, lifting her eyes to the girl’s face. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve seen it before,” the girl continued. She wore a purse around her neck, a burlap pouch on a length of twine, but Odile couldn’t tell what was inside. “They put something in your drink to make you sleepy and when you wake up, you’ve got no money or shoes.”

Odile clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, trying to draw up saliva. This would be quite an elaborate setup, wouldn’t it, for something with such a small payoff? If the scrub-girl had simply wanted her pocket change and necklace, why hadn’t she just threatened her with the dagger? “They can pick me over all they want,” she said, “but I’m afraid they won’t find anything worth stealing.” She mustered a laugh and dabbed weakly at her temples.

The little girl was quiet for a moment. “You said a tiger bit you. But I thought the tigers died.”

At first Odile didn’t know if she’d just imagined it or if the girl had actually spoken. “What?”

“The tigers—I thought they were buried right next to her mother in the graveyard. They had their own coffins, she said, with little dwarf pearballers.”

“P-pallbearers.”

“So how could one bite you yesterday? Did you get more?”

The blood rushed to her head. She had the sensation that she was on the Wheel again—the room started to turn around her—(But
where was the hot breeze? The smell of rotting seaweed and beer?) She studied a circle of light on the runner, trying to spot herself, but it swung left and right, left and right, like the tongue of a tolling bell. She put a hand on the piano to steady herself. “Where is she?”

The little girl shook her head. “She’s gone.”

“Is she in trouble? Is she hurt?”

“No one knows what happened to her.” The girl hung the lantern on her wooden arm as if it were a coat peg. “But she left something. Maybe you want to see it?”

For a moment Odile didn’t know who to believe—the surly scrub-girl with a boot knife and moustache, or this tiny girl with a wooden arm. “What is it?”

The girl said, “I’m not supposed to open it.”

“Then show me—now.”

She led Odile into the hall, to a little door behind the stairs. When she opened it, no light or sound came from below, just a soothingly cold draft and the raw clay smell of earth.

The light swung out in front of them, illuminating a set of dirt stairs that spiraled down into the darkness. Odile followed the girl down. The corner of her valise dragged against the wall—she could hear the sound of it catching and scraping, feeling its way along the curve. As they wound deeper and deeper into the black lung of earth, Odile stared at the lantern, trying to see beyond the shadow, but her vision began doubling and tripling until it seemed there were a dozen lanterns dancing about her head, brilliant as the electric canopy at Coney Island.

This, she thought briefly, might be Belle’s greatest act. Perhaps by now she had transcended herself entirely. Perhaps she had shifted into something else—not a shape anymore, not even a body. Perhaps she had turned into the light itself.

B
EFORE ALPHIE WAS MARRIED TO ANTHONY, SHE’D BEEN A
penny Rembrandt. Her earliest turf was on the Bowery, just south of Delancey, where nights were busy and raucous, and where she was able to earn enough money to pay for a room in the back of a Chinese boardinghouse. But after a while she found herself working closer to the ports, where the gentlemen slummed with the rabble, where she made even more money cleaning up wastrels after long, boozy nights at the dance halls, before they returned home to their parents and wives. She’d sit under a string of lights, powdering over ring-stamped cheeks and blackened eyes, coloring in bites left by a whore. Every night as it grew dark, she carried her stool, her folding table, and her box of paints down to Water Street and waited for men to spill out of the saloons. On occasion, to bide the time, she’d clean up a few scrapping boys for a penny, so they wouldn’t get in trouble when they returned home for supper. They lay there whimpering and dazed, chunks of ice melting against their jaws, while Alphie, mixing paint in a coffee can, proudly cooed over their split knuckles and swelling eyes. But when it grew dark and the gentlemen started to slink in among the
sailors, jittery in their faun coats and grosgrain ties, doffing their top hats with satin petershams, she shooed the children away and readied her brushes. For a little extra, she also offered lemon drops to sweeten the breath, a spritz of cologne, and clean handkerchiefs she’d stitched herself.

This was how she met Anthony—on a chilly autumn night, stationed outside an unmarked saloon called the Shingle and Plank. He had staggered out alone, his lip sliced and his eye a fiery, bruised pink, the color of a mashed plum. He had crossed the wrong man, he said. She dabbed at the cut and painted the skin beneath his watery, upturned lashes. “You’re lucky he didn’t bury you,” she told him. He only laughed grimly and said death to him was as constant as the moonrise at night. Then he lifted his head and kissed the inside of her wrist. He had a very particular scent, she noticed, something like ether and orange peel.

Alphie found herself waiting for him, week after week, choosing the clubs she knew he frequented. The sight of him sent a charge through her—the black armband he wore on his coat, his sensitive, thoughtfully pursed lips. By that hour of the night, his face was always stubbled, his clothes messed. He drank too much, offended too many men, then retreated to the opium dens beneath the city to forget himself. It awoke something in her, to see someone so kind and giving, so full-hearted, and yet so lost, so wretchedly bent on his own destruction. She had left home, ashamed of herself and the fury she’d caused, but now the prospect of love didn’t seem like such a dangerous thing at all.

He visited her stand regularly—mostly when he needed to, sometimes when he didn’t. One night he lingered for a while in his nice black suit, telling her stories from Italian operas (which she’d never heard of or seen before, although she didn’t want to admit it). She was fascinated by the tale of Violetta, a Parisian courtesan in love with a gentleman. “But she dies, of course,” said Anthony
offhandedly. “For love.” He gave a blithe little laugh. “Don’t they all?” (
Do they?
Alphie wondered.) Even the word
opera—
it sounded so sophisticated to her, so continental, so very far from the soot and fog of the waterfront. Meanwhile Anthony bought one of her handkerchiefs and tucked it in his breast pocket. He wore cream-colored gloves, she noticed, and freshly polished shoes. He was meeting someone, perhaps—a girl—but she didn’t ask. She only tried to sing along with him, her voice thin and scratchy beneath his warm, vibrant tenor:
Sempre libera, Sempre libera.
Another man stumbled by and glared at them, hollering something unintelligible. He swayed on his feet, drunk and reeking, sweat prickling on the florid dome of his head. He repeated whatever it was—a threat?—but she only looked away as if she hadn’t heard him. And then he was on her, calling her names, yanking her back by the hair, kicking over her stand. She screamed—it was a man with church-wine breath, just like her father, and giant tuberous fists pink from factory dye. He kneed her in the gut, tried to punch her between the legs. Anthony lunged forward, wedging himself in front of her, but the man, drooling, just knocked him back.
Fuck off, faggot
. Then something in Anthony snapped. He took the jar of brushes and smashed it against the man’s head. He kicked him where he lay, over and over again—in the ribs, the face—until the man sputtered and went limp. Alphie stared at the body, face-up in the street. Was he dead? She couldn’t be sure.
He doesn’t look very good, does he?
Anthony said. He crouched down and left thumbprints of rouge on the man’s cheeks, painted his lips a ghastly pink. Then he picked up the scattered brushes, one by one, folded up the stand and took Alphie, shaking, back to her room at the boardinghouse. He left his shoes by the door and threw his gloves, now ruined, in the stove. He helped her wash her face, brush her hair.
Shh, shh.
As she leaned over, crying into her hands, she felt the bristles tug and scratch against her scalp. He smoothed her hair behind her ears, kissed her neck, her
cheeks, her lips. And when he left the next morning, ambling down the dark lane in his rumpled suit, she looked at him with a kind of wonder. He’d saved her. Later that day, when she walked by the corner where her stand had been, still smelling Anthony on her skin, she saw that the drunk man was gone. Whether he’d left on his own two feet or in the bed of a bodywagon she wasn’t sure. But she never saw him again.

After a while Anthony started spending the afternoons with her. He stopped in on his way between funerals and brought her flowers, which no man had ever done, and even if she suspected they were swiped from the lid of a dead man’s box, she arranged them sunnily in an old paint jar on her windowsill. They would eat kidney and quail pies at one of the quieter alehouses, farther afoot from the thoroughfares, then return to her room at the boardinghouse, where they drowsed in bed for hour after hour, as a square of tensile light waxed across the walls. Even though she wanted the life he had promised her—a house with a sitting room, the peace of routine—Alphie would come to think of those days, those long and secret hours before he had to return home for supper, as being some of the happiest of her life. She would lie naked beside him and listen as he talked in his scattered, searching way, smoking a cigarette and stroking the blond fuzz on her arms. Meanwhile, the landlord’s canaries trilled just outside the door, and somewhere across the yard an old man played a war song on a fiddle.

Anthony told her that he lived behind his mother’s home, in the quarters of the old carriage house. He worked as an undertaker—a trade he learned from his late stepfather, a quiet, heavyset man, who said little, smiled less, and hobbled through the rooms on swollen, gouty feet. He had taken Anthony on his routes during the day, traveling the neighborhood with his box of fluids, swabs, and needles; guiding the carriage to the cemetery and back. In each dark apartment Anthony learned the secrets of bodies—their contours and
shades, their flaws and their beauties. There was nothing under heaven that disgusted him.

Where others had branded Alphie common and vulgar, he considered her elegant. Her curiosity had provoked her parents to call her “unreasonable,” but he told her she was quick and clever. Never had she believed that in her circumstances she would find such sympathy and trust, especially in someone so unlikely: a man who dressed the bodies of the dead, who pumped their veins full of dye and plugged their wounds with cotton batting, who brushed their skin with wax and lard until they glowed ethereal.

Anthony talked often about his beautiful, temperamental mother: sometimes as if he longed to impress her, as if he craved her approval and admired her taste. But other times he’d arrive at Alphie’s in a state, his eyes gone black with fury, and for the rest of the night he’d sulk so devotedly that there seemed to be no way Alphie could break the spell.

What the Signora could never know was that the first time Anthony had been with Alphie—the night after the fight, after he’d escorted her back to the boardinghouse—he’d paid her. Alphie had to do a little bit on the side—everyone did—but only when she really needed it. The memory of those earliest months made her sick—the gangrenous, popeyed drunks lurching for little children in the alleyway, the smell of those narrow closet-rooms behind the shipyard. For a time, just out of her father’s house and alone, she’d worked at the worst of those places, where they were all made to wear matching blond wigs. The men on the waterfront called them the Widows. Sometimes the Widows huddled together on the mildewed terrace overlooking the yard, but usually they were kept inside, in that rickety little building as dark as a coal mine. Some strain of shoe-black liquor was served at the saloon downstairs, and by the time the johns pulled themselves up to the second story, they had become beasts. And the more ashamed they were, the worse it was for the Widows.
One night a man knocked out two of Alphie’s teeth. Another beat her with his cleated shoe, leaving a permanent lump on the crown of her head. For a while, lying on the floor and waiting for daylight, she thought about death. She studied every beam in the rafters; she dreamed about the black depths of the river. But in the mornings she fixed her mind elsewhere; she had to. She learned to paint over the others’ bruises and scars, draw in eyebrows that had been burned away by a cigar. It was the only comfort she could give. Some of them were just babies: nine or ten years old.

She’d been on the street since she was fourteen, when she was turned out of the house by her father for kissing a boy (Sam, the grandson of old Mrs. Vetz next door), for letting him touch her in the back of the shop behind the feed bins. She and Sam had been friends their whole lives. Still, her father beat her with a garden rake, saying it was all her mother’s fault, her slut mother’s, who had made her weak and stupid, who had always let her try on perfume and the other tools of the devil, even when she was small. Alphie had waited for her mother to run after her, to comfort her, to curse the temper of her father, who was prone to wild and evangelistic rages. But her mother had done nothing at all, only turned away when Alphie was handed a dollar and driven out into the street.

Growing up in her little town, she had only ever seen two ways to be a woman: tending the hearthfire, as a wife to a man; or waiting in the dark outside the factory saloons.
Plucked harps,
her mother called those women. Alphie believed that her fate had long ago been sealed, that she was ruined for any other life. But here was a man who protected her from what people thought she rightly deserved. Here was a man who was brave in a way that others could never be. So when she saw Anthony’s sullenness, his sad and feral eyes, she only wanted to make him happy, with a desire so fierce that it hurt. When he said to her one afternoon
, I couldn’t be what I am without you,
and closed her hand in both of his, she felt a rare fulfillment. She had
something to give, something another person couldn’t live without—she’d never known such a feeling.

Then, one day without warning, Anthony disappeared. He’d promised to take her uptown, to a posh, discreet club near Union Square—they planned to meet in the park at half past ten, then walk the last block together. She’s been in a state of excitement all day: scrubbing and re-hemming her best dress, brushing out her blond hair until it crackled, spending more than she could afford on a gardenia corsage. She waited and waited at the corner of the square, but he never arrived. In the pit of night, back on the waterfront, Alphie went from tavern to tavern, asking after him, but no one had seen him in days. At the Shingle and Plank, the bartender gave her a finger of whiskey and a plate of Welsh rarebit. The other patrons flirted with her and bantered with her, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. The food went uneaten. The corsage withered and died. Enraged, distraught, she haunted the alleys where he was known to stroll; she waited, shivering, on the corners outside his favorite saloons. The only place she wouldn’t go was the house at the back of the shipyard. From a distance she could still see the Widows in their blond wigs—waiting in the darkened windows and doorways; milling, drugged, on the terrace.

She cried alone in her room for weeks, feeling stupid and blind. She went back over everything they’d said to each other, wondering what she could have done differently. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she woke up to a greater fear—what if something had happened to him? What if he’d been robbed? Gutted and left to bleed on the floor of an opium den? She was overcome with the urge to hurt herself—even more than she was already hurting—for it was her fault, after all, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been enough for him. She was weak and perverted and foolish, and why would a good man like him love a broken bird like her?

As the weeks passed, an older, portlier gentleman from the
Shingle and Plank started frequenting her stand for lemon drops and cologne. He’d been a sailmaker in the British navy and now worked as a clerk for a tea company. He was red-faced and squinty-eyed and had a big, bushy beard, but he was kind and gentle and treated her well. His accent made everything he said sound thoughtful and intelligent, even if pitched at a polite half whisper. If he seemed reserved or quiet, it was only because he was content and didn’t require anything, and then Alphie wasn’t exactly sure what her role was, how she should behave, what he wanted or needed from her. But he was comforting, and after a while she let herself enjoy his company, although he rarely touched her—he brushed her cheek, maybe, or her hand, but he seemed shy, which was unusual for the sort of man who spent his nights scouring the waterfront for dice games.

One afternoon they went to see a vaudeville show on the Bowery. As they emerged onto the street afterward, she glimpsed something through the swarm of people: the flash of a familiar coat, the shimmer of a black armband. The sailmaker steered her by the elbow against the crowd, offering his opinions of the show, asking her where she’d like to eat, but she didn’t hear anything he said. She kept looking back over her shoulder through the crush of revelers, wondering if she’d imagined it.