The Museum of Extraordinary Things (25 page)

Still, she imagined she would see his death before her very eyes. The cage was open, and Coralie wondered if she would rush to the trainer’s defense if tragedy struck, or if she would watch, paralyzed, as he was eaten alive. But the lion only rubbed his head against his trainer and seemed to embrace him. “That’s a good fellow,” Bonavita said. He pushed the lion off and afterward scratched at his mane with the palm of his hand, which the beast greatly appreciated. A deep rumbling came from Prince’s throat and chest.

“Come inside,” Bonavita urged his audience of one.

Coralie’s heart dropped. But she thought of her dream, how she had feared to make the leap from the ledge in the woods, and then, when she had expected to crash to the ground below, she fell into the blue water and knew she had been made for another element entirely.

She stepped inside the cage.

“Don’t scream or shout,” Bonavita said softly. “Ignore him.”

Coralie was still as the lion studied her. She dared not take a breath as the beast approached.

“I knew it.” Bonavita was pleased with himself and how good a judge of character he was. “You have a form of bravery inside you.”

The lion’s scent was of straw and an earthy wildness. He rubbed his head against Coralie, and as he did, Coralie felt her own wildness. She sensed that all her waking life had been a dream, and that it was only in this moment that she had at last opened her eyes.

When Bonavita called to Prince and clapped his hands, the lion went trotting back to his cushion. Coralie left the cage so that Bonavita might bring the lion his breakfast, the half-frozen carcass of a cow, which the lion attacked with studied intensity. Coralie noticed there were several coarse hairs on her skirt, some golden and some black. Her heart was still pounding, yet she felt overjoyed at having been so close to such a fierce creature, and one as great as Prince.

She asked Bonavita what allowed him to be so fearless in the presence of his lion, especially having been attacked earlier in his life.

“Oh, I fear him,” Bonavita assured her. “He could kill me if he wished. He and I both know that. But the lion that attacked me was misused and ill treated before I had him. I raised Prince from the time he was first born. There is a connection in that sort of companionship, a trust that goes beyond his nature, and mine as well I suppose.”

Coralie asked if Bonavita’s wife wasn’t afraid at each one of his performances, some of which included a dozen tigers and leopards surrounding him in a ring.

“I am good to my wife and to my daughter, but they understand me. In my experience you can only have one great love, and I have chosen mine.”

Coralie was certain that real love was nothing like the life she’d known, the lust of the exhibition room, the shadows lingering on the wall, the rasping sound of the tortoise in its pen, so calm and patient in its confinement, the men who had stalked her on the other side of the tank, then been ushered away as if they were mere figments, rather than flesh and blood.

The animal trainer had thought she was brave, but in her daily life Coralie remained a mouse. Her anger became self-directed, her wounds self-directed as well. When she was angry she stuck pins into her own flesh, but unlike the Human Pincushion, who had been with them for several years and who drank an elixir of nettle, blackberry, and lotus to stanch his wounds, Coralie bled. She felt the pain. In the evenings, she served her father large mugs of rum, so that he would close his eyes and dream and there would be peace inside their house. She shocked herself by considering how easy it would be to lace his drink with arsenic, which was stored in the garden shed and used to keep the rats away. She fled the house, frightened by the sheer wickedness of her thoughts.

The evenings were still damp and chilly even though spring had arrived, and the dusk fell in sheets that were mottled and fish colored. Coralie went to the shoreline where she had first learned to swim. The water’s pull was difficult to resist; she could feel it in her blood, stinging like salt. It was here the whole world opened to her, as it always had, in a grid of sand and sea. She had come to believe that if her father had wanted a docile daughter, he should never have allowed her access to the ocean. It was here she found a strength that often surprised her. Perhaps she was not a spineless creature, but a wonder after all. Recently when she gazed into the mirror she believed she spied a series of lines at the base of her throat. Surely they were not the gills she had dreamed of but merely a pattern of throbbing blue veins. Still, she wondered.

The deepening night was soon strewn with stars. The beach, so crowded in summer months it was impossible to walk along without bumping into another beachgoer, was empty, save for the clam diggers, who called to each other from the beds of shellfish as they worked by lantern light. It was low tide, and the air was perfumed with seaweed. As the dark sifted down, Coralie undressed to her undergarments, unlacing her boots so she might leave them behind. She loved the feel of damp sand in the tide, how it tugged at her, pulling her into a world she could sink into. The waves rolled in, and soon enough she was waist deep in water. There was a film of phosphorescence in the water, an illumination caused by tiny fish that were invisible to the human eye, unnoticed in the daylight hours. This was the virtue of the dark: you were who you had always been, only no one could see you.

She was sopping wet, deep in thought. She had stood beside a lion. Perhaps she had more courage than she’d imagined. She dressed and made the walk back home. When she reached the house, she sneaked inside, then left her sandy boots in the hallway and hung her cloak on a brass hook. Water had taught her how to move lightly, and she floated down the hall. The Professor had come up from his workshop and was asleep in the library, exhausted from the trials of his work, sprawled out in a chair. Coralie studied him from the doorway. How deeply he slept, how completely at ease he seemed, as if the world belonged to him and him alone. She drew closer to his sleeping form and leaned down, making no noise as she took the keys from his pocket. She had often sat beside the tortoise and had matched her breathing to echo that of the sea creature’s. She practiced this technique now, slowing her breath and heart and blood.

In the kitchen, the white enameled stove gleamed. A supper Maureen had left for them earlier remained untouched in the cooking pot. Coralie took the cellar stairs in her bare feet. The floor was nothing more than raked dirt, and there were often mice in the corners. An earthy odor of roots mixed with the tang of chemicals. Coralie fitted the two keys into their locks simultaneously and turned them. There were two soft clicks. She let her eyes adjust to the dark before crossing the threshold. Once she was inside the workshop, the scent of formaldehyde was stronger, nearly overpowering. There were rows of teeth in jars set on a shelf alongside dozens of yellowing books. Nearby was the rack of tools, hammers and awls and saws in varying sizes, from one so tiny it could fit in the palm of a child’s hand to an enormous wood saw. Because it was a humid night the cellar was especially damp, the air sweetened with turpentine and wild gum. There was a dark concoction on the desk as well, a sticky tar-like stuff kept in bottles that Professor Sardie rolled into beads to smoke in a pipe that let off a pungent stink.

A wooden crate more than five feet long took up most of the tabletop. As Coralie approached she found herself counting, as if that task would keep her fear at bay. She pushed on the cover so that it slipped forward. Inside, the crate was packed with solid carbon dioxide that appeared as snow. Curls of moisture rose up, which she waved away so she might peer inside. Coralie spied a shimmer of pale hair, the glimmer of flesh. The girl from the river, her blood replaced by formaldehyde, her world reduced to ice. This was her resting place, a box that would have been better used on the docks to pack bluefish or mackerel for delivery to the markets.

Coralie shoved the cover back in place and stood facing away from the coffin, shivering, as if she were the one dressed in chemicals, bloodless and pale. Without another thought, she went to search for the handbook, driven to discover what her father’s plan might be. The room was dark and the items in the drawer were mere shadows to her eyes, but she grasped around until she found what she wanted, her hands fitting over the cover of smooth Moroccan leather. She had wanted to read her father’s diary in its entirety, but there was no time for that. She swiftly thumbed through, finding the last page he’d written upon. The date was this very day, the ink fresh, an indigo blue he favored, the color of water.

Many of the Professor’s notes were in French, and Coralie understood several phrases.
Je vais créer ce que je n’ai pas. De chair et le sang. De coeur de l’imagination.
But even without written explanations, the ink-stained sketches made his intentions quite clear. He planned to give the city of New York a variation of the trick for which he had been famous, half a woman. This creature, however, would be as monstrous as she was beautiful, a woman joined with a fish, stitched scale to flesh to become a real mermaid, the Hudson Mystery, a far better invention than Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid.

Coralie thought of Maureen’s warning: if you saw the dead twice you were doomed to be haunted. Indeed, the two young women seemed joined by strands of invisible thread, a single being, though one breathed and one was forever still. As Coralie turned to leave, she observed a jumble of belongings on the countertop. A comb, hairpins, a gold locket. She couldn’t bear to see how carelessly these mementos had been tossed into a pile beside surgical tools and bits of bone. She scooped them up, hoping the tokens were so small and unimportant in her father’s eyes he wouldn’t notice their absence.

She left, tugging the door closed behind her, then quickly turning the locks. The cold had seeped into her blood and her eyes stung with tears. She knew that a monster should not feel anything, not sorrow or regret. She should not weep, or shiver, or sob. To do so would only cause her to give herself away and make herself a target. Better to slink through the dark as she did now. Through the kitchen, down the porch steps, into the yard. In the dark the newly greening leaves appeared black. Out at sea there was a foghorn, for the fog that often arose on spring nights had begun to roll in from the shore, blanketing the neighborhood. It was nearly impossible to see two feet in any direction. Still, Coralie could smell an acrid scent and she spied a flash of red sparks. In the corner of the yard wisps of smoke rose from the trash pile, though it was not trash-burning day. Earlier in the evening, while Coralie was at the shore, the Professor had hurriedly disposed of evidence. But he hadn’t done a thorough enough job. Coralie recognized the blue coat. She grabbed for it, though bright embers burned her fingers. She carried the singed coat to the well in the yard and hurried to work the pump, forcing a stream of water out. The fabric sizzled as the flame was extinguished, with a gasp resembling a human sigh.

Coralie brought her find up to her bedroom. She folded it beneath her featherbed mattress, then lay there with her eyes open, her pulse pounding. She was exactly what she had pretended to be on those nights when she waded into the Hudson, a monster and a monster’s daughter. If the man in the woods could see her now, distraught and lonely, weeping in her bed, he would think she had a heart. But a heart was not enough. She understood that now. What a monster needed most was a plan.

Coralie hurried to the locksmith in the morning, so nervous as she waited she thought she might faint. But in the end luck was with her. Upon returning home, she found her father’s jacket on the hook. She could replace the keys she’d taken before he was aware they’d been gone. She had her own keys now, and a way to unlock her fate.

SIX

THE BIRDMAN

**********

A
FTER ALL
these years I could still remember sleeping in the forest in Russia, there beside my father in the grass. Sometimes when I woke I was surprised by my current surroundings, the light of New York City that streamed in through the window, my dog on the floor, the chimes of the tubular church bells ringing in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd from inside the walls of the General Seminary. For a very long time I believed that when we left our home, we left my mother as well. Where our village had stood the burned fields would again become green and her flesh would be in every blade of grass. When we fled we abandoned the past, or so I then believed. My mother was called Anna, a name I still cannot say aloud.

I wept when we ran away from our home, because I was young, and because the forest was dark and I was afraid. There were so many birds in the forest at night, and I imagined they would carry me away. Night birds are predators, and we were easy prey. A man and a boy in black coats and hats, shoes worn, shirts frayed and unwashed, both lost and uncertain of what lay ahead. I held my father’s hand and led him through the trees because my vision was better, my step steadier. When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well, far from the forests we knew, far from the fields of grass where my mother bloomed again. My father was a realist, I see that now, and a fatalist as well. He believed we were in the hands of God, and that it was best to accept our fate, and not to battle impossible odds.

I often saw that quality in him when I worked beside him in the factory. He was a good worker and didn’t complain, and I faulted him for that as well. The meeker he appeared to be, the more rebellious I became. I wished to be the opposite of all that he was, and hated every trait of his that I found in myself. He was raised under the rule of the Cossacks, the mad horsemen who burned our village and murdered our people and turned us to smoke. Because of this he had learned to keep himself small, like the mice that ran across the table, catching whatever crumbs they could. The conditions of factory workers in New York were so deplorable even a boy my age could tell this should not be the order of the world, that we should suffer so for the sake of our bosses, who lived in town houses and rode in polished walnut carriages and bought the first automobiles, which they treated like fine horses, caring for them tenderly while the children in their factories worked twelve hours a day for pennies and went to sleep hungry.

Perhaps my father saw a new order when he closed his eyes and dreamed, for in his dreams surely his fingers did not bleed from stitching all day, and his tired eyes were renewed. He went to labor meetings, but he stayed on the fringes, not wishing to cause trouble. A mouse. Nothing more. I was excited by the idea that men could take their fates in their own hands and could choose to strike. “We’ll see,” my father said with caution, and in fact new workers were quickly hired to replace our striking group, brought in one early morning in horse-drawn carts as if they were cattle. We were beaten back with bully clubs by policemen from the Tenth Precinct when we tried to get at the men who had taken our rightful jobs. I remember that my father had a bruise on his face. He didn’t even mention the pain it must have caused him. At home, I noticed he was spitting blood. A tooth had been knocked out, and he tucked a tea bag into his cheek so that the tannic acid would stop the bleeding.

At the next factory where we were employed the entire floor of workers was fired when there was a mild rumble of discontent; the bosses struck before we could, and newer, green men were brought in. That was when my father went to the docks, that patient, good man I had so little respect for, though we were of the same flesh and blood and he had saved my life more than a dozen times when we traveled over continents, finding us bread and shelter. He was a mouse who feared the forest, yet he had managed to take us into France and on to Le Havre, where he worked shoveling coal in a mill until we could afford steerage on a boat to New York, the only dream we ever shared.

In New York, my father allowed strangers to stay with us; anyone from the Ukraine was welcome to sleep on our floor. At shul he gave to the poor, though I couldn’t imagine who could be poorer than we. He was a good man, but what was goodness in a world where men who were slaving in close quarters fell to tuberculosis and were all but worked to death? I looked upon the long-suffering immigrants with contempt. They were sheep to me, creatures who dared not raise their eyes to the bosses, let alone raise their voices.

On the night our village burned, when my father and I lay together in the grass, with owls swooping above us, our stomachs rumbling with hunger, I was not more than five or six. And yet this was when I began to view him as a coward. Side by side we were, a coward and a coward’s son.

How could we leave my mother behind? Whether she was ash, or grass, or air, in my mind she was in our village still. We abandoned her, and began our new life. I was certain that if I ever loved someone, which seemed impossible to me even then, I would never let her go.

I saw a kindred defiance in Mr. Weiss when he came to me. I have often wondered why I agreed to help him, and maybe this defiance was the reason. Weiss was unwilling to allow his daughter to vanish; he refused to consider her lost, a hail of ashes on the city streets. I had become the sort of man who stood on the edge of things, as my father was, but I liked to think it was my insolence that kept me separate, not any sort of timidity. I was a rat perhaps, but never a mouse.

I should have remained aloof from someone else’s misery as I was on most occasions, yet I was drawn in. Weiss was an older man, dressed in the black clothing of the Orthodox, but he was hardly timid. He had gone to all of the authorities, stationed himself in the corridors of Tammany Hall, where he was ill treated and berated. He had brought his story to reporters at the Yiddish newspaper, the Forward, on East Broadway, as well as to the English-language daily the Sun, but they had failed to look into his daughter’s disappearance. Only when all other efforts had been unsuccessful had he come to me, the finder of what was lost. He believed I had abilities granted by God.

I agreed to do as he asked because he was a man so unlike my father.

And perhaps I did have a gift, as Hochman always said, for I knew how men’s minds worked. When I imagined myself in their circumstances I could think the way they did, no matter how different their lives might be from my own. I became a criminal, a forger, a philanderer. I played out my desires in these various guises, and therefore came up with a map of where I might hide if I were such a person, how I would occupy my time, and on which vices I would spend my money. This turn of my imagination had helped me as a boy in my ability to find men who thought they had escaped detection. But now, in my search for Hannah Weiss, I found myself lacking in skill and soon enough came to an impasse. My usual ability to uncover a person’s innermost self failed me. Even when Hannah’s sister took me to their haunts—Miss Weber’s hat shop on Twenty-second Street; the shul where they worshiped; Madison Square Park, where they fed pigeons on Sundays—I found no clue. Hannah seemed a sweet, pretty girl, hardworking and loyal. But in my background, I had no practice with such people. Good, trustworthy individuals were strangers to me, mysterious in their small desires.

I spoke with several survivors, girls who had known Hannah, in the hope they would help me uncover who she was. I took notes in a small leather-bound book where I kept my appointments jotted down. Her friends spoke with hushed voices when they talked of the fire that had moved through the workroom. It came upon them like a swarm, one survivor told me, red bees bursting through the wall. Many of the girls who had escaped thought Hannah, too, had survived, but it turned out it was Ella they had seen, for the sisters looked so alike it was nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially on that smoky afternoon.

As far as I could tell there was nothing unusual about Hannah—no secrets, no flaws. But perhaps everyone has a secret life, and on the last day of my interviews, I discovered someone who knew more about Hannah than the others. This survivor asked me to refer to her in my notes only as R, the first letter of her name. She didn’t wish to be in the public eye, and feared the fierce determination of the press. The building where her family lived had been circled by reporters after the tragedy. She had been hysterical for over a week, unable to speak or understand what was said to her. Still reporters called out her name from the street when her parents refused to have her interviewed. R was too distraught to be in our world, a place where she had seen her two younger sisters perch like doves upon the ledge of the ninth floor. She had told her sisters to go on without her, and she went back for her new coat, cranberry-colored wool. By then the smoke was everywhere and the elevators were no longer running; she had managed to grab hold of the burning ropes in the elevator shaft by throwing her coat around the sizzling twine so her hands wouldn’t burn as she lowered herself down.

She ran outside, and she saw her sisters on the ledge when she looked up. She thought that they saw her as well, for one tossed down her ring, as a gift and a keepsake. Unfortunately, the speed that carried it had embedded the ring in the sidewalk; the silver had been flattened, becoming a part of the concrete. R blamed herself for not catching the memento, though it would have likely burned her hand, perhaps even broken the small bones of her fingers.

R’s parents only allowed me to speak to their remaining child because Mr. Weiss had contacted them and vouched for me, and because they knew of his predicament. When I agreed not to use their daughter’s name in any way, and swore I would not upset her, I was at last invited to their home. Time was passing, and I knew from my work with Hochman that after twenty-four hours a missing person was half as likely to be found, and after a week, the chances were slimmer still. We were now passing the two-week mark, a very bad portent for recovery. Hochman always said that in two weeks a man could completely refashion his history; he could walk all the way to Ohio or Iowa, change his name and his accent, disappear into another life. In the woods, footprints faded, the wind rose up to disperse shreds of clothing, flesh became grass.

I sat in an unfamiliar parlor on East Thirteenth Street. The room was close, and there were rollaway cots that had been covered with white sheets, the beds where R’s sisters had slept. A sheet also covered the mirror on the wall, as was always the case during mourning periods. R was nineteen and had been burned on her arms and legs. The skin was red and mottled now, coated with a healing gel of aloe and fish oil. She had been a pretty girl, but now she seemed ravaged, not just by the effects of the fire on her body but by the memory of all she had seen. She told me she had no wish to be awake. There were days when she slept for eighteen hours or more, doing her best to bypass time completely.

“Did I deserve this?” R asked me. Her voice was so young and plaintive I felt only a fool would dare to respond. Who was I to remark upon her life? All the same I made a comment I thought might ease our conversation. I told her no, she did not deserve her fate, and if there was a God, something I myself doubted, then he had made a terrible mistake.

She laughed hoarsely and said, “God has nothing to do with this. It’s men’s greed that made this happen.”

Her mother was watching from the hallway, to ensure I didn’t tire R or upset her by dredging up memories of March 25. I recounted what I had so far learned of Hannah Weiss. R’s eyes were lowered as I spoke. When I finished she lifted her gaze to meet mine.

“They didn’t know her completely,” R said. “I was her closest friend.”

I signaled to the mother then, and asked if she would bring us tea. She had been suspicious of me from the start and had insisted I leave my camera in the front hall. Now she looked at R with an uneasy expression, but R merely said, “I’ll be fine with him. We could use the tea for our parched throats.”

When her mother went down the corridor, I asked R what she meant.

“Hannah went to labor meetings and didn’t tell her father. Mr. Weiss was strict. She knew he would fear for her safety. He would have never allowed her to risk going to prison. I saw her once with several strikers outside another factory on Great Jones Street. She ran after me and made me promise not to tell. So I gave her my promise. She hugged me to thank me. She said, I’ll remember this.”

“Even if her father wouldn’t approve, there’s nothing so unusual in any of that,” I countered.

“She wasn’t alone. She was with a man. She started going to union meetings with him. I think she was in love with him.”