The Museum of Extraordinary Things (32 page)

“You need to take me where I want to go. To the man we have in common.”

“Are you speaking of the Professor?” The liveryman tried a joke. “He’s common enough.”

“You know who I speak of. He told me you were the one who brought him here. That’s a fact my father wouldn’t care for, should he ever know your part in the photographer’s finding his way to us.”

Leaving the liveryman to think this over, Coralie retrieved Eddie’s camera and plates, which she brought to the carriage.

“Fine, I’ll take those to him,” the liveryman allowed.

“No.” Coralie stepped onto the carriage stair and drew herself up to the driver’s seat. She sat calmly, with her hands folded. “I will.”

The liveryman now entered into a frantic state. “Let’s be reasonable. I’ve got the fish to deal with. As for you, this business will lead to ruin,” he warned. “If I had a daughter, the last thing I’d want would be for her to know about the meanness in the world.”

“If you had a daughter, you would likely want her to know what the world was like so that she might be able to live in it with open eyes.”

The liveryman considered the girl’s words. He had done terrible things in his life, most of which he strongly regretted. In Coralie’s face, however, he saw an absolute faith in him. It was nothing he deserved, but it was most likely the reason he untied his horse, then climbed up beside his passenger.

“If I valued my life, I wouldn’t consider this. You’re lucky I don’t believe myself worth saving.”

Coralie could feel her heart pounding as the horse began to trot. Her plan had become a living thing, not air and thought, but flesh and blood. All at once she was in the center of her life, not hiding behind a curtain or eavesdropping with her ear pressed against a floorboard or a door. She ducked her head as they passed beneath the branches of the pear tree. The whole world smelled so fresh and new she gasped when inhaling the green-tinged scent. Sunlight filtered directly into her face, so that she had to blink in the light. Still she saw everything quite clearly as they headed along the road: the crush of afternoon shoppers, the streetcar barreling toward Coney Island Avenue, the shadow of the liveryman as he whistled at his horse, urging the old steed to quicken its pace, driving them out of Kings County with no idea that he’d already been saved.

EDDIE WAS
half-asleep, slumped in the battered old chair in the corner, when there was a knock at the door. He did not move or respond in any way. He barely heard the rapping through the haze of drink. The dog, which hadn’t been walked or given any attention, made a sad woofing response as he lay at his master’s feet. Coralie waited in the dim stairwell, comforted by the chatter of birds echoing from the tack room in the stable. The day had grown unseasonably warm and she wasn’t properly dressed for the weather in her black wool dress and heavy coat and the cotton gloves that made her fingers itch in weather such as this. She suffered from the heat, and with anxiety, but she pushed her nerves away. When there was no answer from inside the loft, she rapped on the door again. The future was spun from moments such as this. If she backed away, it might all unravel. She knocked again, more urgently. There was Eddie’s voice at last, but his reply was far from pleasant. He shouted that whoever was bothering him should go the hell away and leave him in peace.

The door was unlocked, which seemed foolish in this area of Manhattan, where crime was rampant along the docks. But perhaps Eddie assumed that the worst had already happened to him, and had no fear of any further abuse. Coralie had been worried by figures lurking on Tenth Avenue, but she had been let out in the street with no recourse, for the liveryman insisted he would give her a ride back to Brooklyn only after dark, when he was sure the Professor wouldn’t spy his carriage. She had no choice but to go forward, and so she pushed open the door to peer inside. It was afternoon, but the room was dark, the curtains drawn and no lantern lit. The only bit of brightness drifted down from the domed ceiling window, slashes of light that dashed across the horsehair plaster walls. Mitts rose upon seeing Coralie, trotting over to greet her. She recognized the dog who had followed her through the woods and who now yipped cheerfully, clearly glad for a visitor.

When Eddie looked up he thought he had conjured her or perhaps he was not truly awake. There she was, the woman from his dreams. He leaned forward, puzzled and grateful in equal measure, wondering if the gin he’d been drinking was the cause of his fantasy. Despite his drunken state, he realized she had brought his beloved camera, which he’d mourned, believing it to be lost forever. A grin broke through his somber expression.

As for Coralie, she now grasped what the police had done to him, for as Eddie shifted forward she saw that his face was blue with bruises. Far worse, one hand had bandages that covered a wooden splint. Eddie gazed down at himself, disgusted by his circumstances. “They broke it with a two-by-four.”

In the corner were the empty bottles of booze he’d been nursing, as much for the ache of failure inside him as for the pain in his hand. Coralie blamed herself for his condition; she’d done nothing to protect him. She went to him and sat in his lap, her arms around his neck, face buried against his scruffy shirt, still stained with blood. She could feel the heat inside him, and the stirring of his desire. He was experienced with women, but certain she was an innocent he didn’t act on his desire, not as he would have wished to. He had no idea how many books she’d read in her father’s library, with graphic illustrations that she mimed when performing in the tank. It was pretense, meaningless to her. She knew how to excite her viewers, but every move she made was heartless and cold. The chill water, the icy glass, the way she touched herself, all of it was only to thrill her admirers. With Eddie she did not wish to disappear, to become another element, removed from herself. She slipped off her coat and her gloves, relieved it was too dark for him to glimpse her hands. Let him think she was an ordinary woman, and let her be so on this one afternoon. He had no idea that she was a monster and a monster’s daughter.

He murmured she was too good for him; he was a man with a spotty past and a future that was likely going nowhere. Coralie told him the past was of no consequence, and that the future was unwritten. They curled up around each other, and time meant nothing to them. If Eddie could have broken his watch and stopped the movement of the hours, he would have. When he insisted she talk about herself, she avoided personal details and instead told him stories of the world she’d known: of a wonder who drank gin for breakfast and slept with two wives; of the Queen of the Bees, whose poor, abandoned hive had pined for her; of a man who had no fear of lions, though he’d lost his arm to one. She herself was ashamed of all she’d seen and done, and of the many ways her audience had violated her as they watched her in their drunken state of ardor. But for all the wickedness she’d known, she’d never been kissed. Once they began, she could not stop. How strange it was that Eddie, who’d been with so many women, now seemed shy, while she burned with each kiss. She urged him on, unbuttoning her blouse. He groaned with the delight of having her in his arms, intoxicated and somewhat maddened. He kissed her more and more deeply, then forced himself to back off. He’d wanted her for so long, even before he knew she was real, but he wouldn’t allow himself to take advantage of the situation.

“You don’t know me,” Coralie insisted. “I’m not an angel. I sometimes doubt if I am even human.”

Eddie laughed, not at all understanding her meaning, so she begged him to light the lantern. If he wanted to know who she was, then she would reveal herself, though she wept as she did. She showed him her hands, what she considered her deformity, the flesh that separated her and made her different, but also made her herself, the woman he didn’t want to let go of, not even after hours had passed with her in his arms and the liveryman shouted up that it was time for her to leave. She left behind the blue wool coat, neatly folded, on the chair, and the handkerchief containing Hannah’s belongings on the table. He examined the tokens, holding them tenderly. Two black buttons, a comb, hairpins, a golden locket on a chain, and two keys that he held in the palm of his hand.

EIGHT

THE BLUE THREAD

**********

I
HAD ALWAYS
been a good student. Even in the art of rebellion, I looked for those who might instruct me. I listened not to the rabbis but to my employer, Hochman, who seemed wiser in the ways of the world, an expert in the arena of human nature. Hochman suggested that each person had the option to remake the past as he or she remembered it. In this way, an individual who had betrayed someone dear to him could escape the pangs of guilt and remorse. One who had suffered great loss could manage to go on, despite the burdens of his life. He could forget certain details and focus on others, and in doing so could take strength from the past, despite the hardships he had encountered.

I saw that my father did not possess this capacity. He was caught in his love for my mother, a fish in a net. He could not remake the fire, or the ashes, or the cold dark night when we ran away from our village. The past clung to him, as it was and always would be, a shroud, a sorrow, a loss that was never-ending.

He had loved my mother, and the present and the future could not exist without her. I saw his struggle, but from a distance. I stood on the other
side of the riverbank, a fisherman with a cold, clear eye. I had witnessed what such emotions could do to a person, how they could rule his life, and ruin it by doing so. I learned my lesson in watching his grief.

Love, for me, did not exist.

I’d had a series of encounters over the years. Lust was a story I knew. There were many women I took to bed for the night. I yearned for them in the moment, but in the morning, any lover I’d had was already claimed by the past, even if she was still calling my name.

I’d forgotten each woman before I left her room.

Now I thought of nothing but Coralie. I wondered what had filled my thoughts before. I dreamed of the trout I’d once caught. I begged him to tell me what I must do to win her. But my begging went unanswered, for even in my dreams he was a fish and I was a man, and all he knew remained a secret.

I had asked to take Coralie’s portrait on the day she came to me, but she’d refused. You need to want the person that I am, she told me, not the one you capture. But I felt as though I was the one who had been captured. This was why I dreamed of the trout, imagining that he might hold the cure for what I felt, the piercing of my heart.

I hadn’t grasped why my father always brought my mother’s photograph to his workplace or why he propped it up on our table so that he might dine with her each night. Now I understood. She was his everything, and she was gone. This was the kind of love that overtook a man’s daily life, wrapping him in knots.

Desire was too churlish and stupid a word for what I felt. I longed for Coralie. No wonder I had closed myself off. Love like this was all consuming. I found that I was jealous of the strangest things—sunlight, streets, curtains, even her clothing, anything that was close to her. The month of May was slipping away, and I didn’t even notice it. Days and weeks meant nothing to me. I lived within my own hurt feelings, in a cave that was too dark to see the outline of the trees that filled with green leaves.

I took my dog and walked for miles. I thought that by doing so I might break the spell I was under. Walking had always been a tonic to me, steadying my spirit and my mind. But now as I went onward, I grew worse, as if I’d been enchanted. Somehow I had lost myself in my longings. Then I remembered what Hochman had told me when he read my palm. I had the river inside me. I followed alongside the river that was as much a part of me as anything in my life. In the grasp of my passion, I felt I was a madman, and perhaps I was looking for the same in a companion, for I began to think that the hermit might help me understand the intoxication that had befallen me. I’d heard that failed love had driven him into the woods, away from human company.

I didn’t need a psychic talent to find him. He was at one of his favorite fishing spots.

“Did you come to see if I was dead yet?” He handed me the bottle of whiskey he carried with him, and I took a gulp. “You’re the one that looks like hell. What happened to your hand?”

“Some fellows broke it.”

I’d been to a doctor who’d set and bound it, warning that although I would regain some use of it, it might well be weakened and misshapen. I was fortunate that the police assumed every man was right-handed, which I was not. I readied my line with my left hand, and the hermit was impressed with my ability to get things done so neatly. Perhaps my art would not be completely undermined if one of my hands was functional. Still, I hadn’t yet found the nerve to work my camera, just in case what little talent I had left had been broken along with my bones.

“Why’d they do that?” my companion asked. For all his alleged meanness he truly didn’t understand the callousness and cruelty of others. “For the fun of it? Or did you betray someone or mess with the wrong sorts?”

“I fell in love. That’s my crime. With the mermaid.”

“You can’t be blamed for that,” the hermit said soberly.

“You’ve been in love?” I ventured to ask.

The hermit looked at me darkly.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” I added.

“Do you think I want to talk about my life?” Beck asked in return. “I came here to escape my existence. I couldn’t stand the way people in the city treated each other, how they managed to ruin everything they touched. But now it seems the city is following me. Soon enough they’ll pave beneath these trees we’re standing under.”

Beck’s wife, Annetje, was also from an original Dutch family. She became ill with lung disease before she reached the age of twenty, and died in the bed they shared, one Beck’s father had crafted as a wedding present from the wood of an enormous tulip tree that was said to have been planted on the day Henry Hudson first encountered the native Lenapes in 1609. It was their word for island that gave Manhattan its name, for it was the great island then, as it has remained. The Lenape people were accomplished archers and hunters who believed that the Milky Way, which they called the Starry Path, guided the souls of the departed on their journey to the world beyond ours, somewhere in the sky.

Beck abandoned his life soon after his wife’s death, leaving his small farmhouse to fall into ruin. The neighbors helped themselves to his sheep and goats. The chickens became wild, and Beck occasionally found their descendants nesting in the woods. His wife had babied the chickens and let them stay inside during storms, yet they now lived hardily in what was wilderness, while she, who’d been so young and healthy, was gone after an illness of a mere two weeks.

“I didn’t know you had a wife,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What do you know?” Beck muttered.

“Apparently nothing. I’d be grateful for any instruction.”

The hermit laughed out loud. “You’re talking to the wrong man.”

“Tell me this, do you regret it?”

“The lung disease? Are you an idiot?” he growled. “Of course I do. The weather was bad and our home poorly heated. Oh, I regret it, more than I can say. If I were a rich man, maybe the illness wouldn’t have befallen her.”

I shook my head, for that wasn’t what I’d meant. I meant did he regret his marriage and the pain it caused him to have had a great love. When I explained, he glared at me. “Are you asking if I would have been better off if I’d never met my wife, or married her, or lost her? I’ll tell you this, a day with her was better than a life without her.”

I was stunned by the emotion in his voice. I had not expected so much from such a gruff fellow, and we both fell deep into our own thoughts. As we sat in silence, a covey of what I thought were quail flew up from the bushes, and we both turned, startled, as if a ghost were near. I voiced my initial notion, that spirits had been close by.

“I wouldn’t mind being haunted. I’d be happy for it,” Beck said as we watched the game birds trotting into the ferns.

When I left he offered me his congratulations.

“On what?” I asked, confused.

“Being human.”

I made my way down to the river. I had the oddest feeling that just as we had become friends, we had also said our good-byes, and would never see one another again. Perhaps that was why he’d told me the intimate details of his life, so that someone would remember him. I noticed tracks in the mud and felt a shiver down my back. Possibly the birds had been startled not by a spirit but by a flesh-and-blood ghoul. Mitts charged off, following the trail all the way to the Old Post Road. As it turned out the game birds we’d spied weren’t quail but wild chickens perching in the undergrowth. There were signs that someone had been past recently, for I could see the fresh tracks of a horse whose rider had made his way down the old road. It seemed an odd coincidence. I wondered if I had been followed to this place, and, just as curious a thought, I wondered what reason anyone might have for doing so.

The following day, I still couldn’t shake the odd feeling I’d had when I left Beck. I wondered if some of the talent I’d had as a boy had stayed with me, and I could still read the thoughts and fortunes of men. It was possible that my concern upon leaving him had been meaningful and he was in danger. I was too worried to let it be. I headed back to the woods, in such a hurry I didn’t bother to bring Mitts along. I had a panicked feeling, as if I’d no understanding of the world or of being alive. I was fairly certain I’d wasted a good portion of my life. Only now did I realize what the hermit was telling me, that love was never a regret. I felt the need to thank him for speaking to me so frankly.

I’d let love take me like a river, and carry me forth, and I wouldn’t fight it any longer.

Beck wasn’t at any of his usual fishing spots. I shouted out for him, but heard nothing in response. When I went up into the woods I saw only charred wood in his fire pit. The air was scented with a sulfuric stink. There was a tin plate on the ground and a wash of silence in the clearing, except for the low calling of doves. Then I knew I was right, and that we had indeed said our last good-bye. I knew that men told you the truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn’t bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn’t be lost. I would always know that his wife was so kindhearted she’d taken the chickens into their home during spells of bad weather. I would know that he was filled with emotion, as if he were still a young man in love.

I found him in the ferns, facedown, splattered with mud. He was wearing his long underwear. Nothing more. His feet were bare. Someone must have surprised him, possibly when he was sleeping, for I’d never seen him without his boots. There was blood on the ground, and in his hair, where a shovel or a club had split his skull open. When I turned him over, he was stiff, and I could tell he’d been gone for a while. Perhaps he had been murdered soon after I last saw him. I’d thought the trail I’d found was leading away, disappearing into the weeds. But it appeared I’d been wrong. It had led to him instead. The rider may have been waiting for me to pass him by so he might find his way to the hermit’s shack under cover of the night.

I leaned down to close his eyes, already rheumy and paling. That was when I saw that his mouth had been sewn closed with blue thread. I wondered what Beck had seen or known that had brought him such a horrible fate. Someone did not want him to tell all he knew.

I had no choice but to do as he said he’d done. I removed the thread with a knife I found among his pots and pans, telling myself it was only fishing line I was unhooking. But I wept as I did so. Then and there I decided I’d give up fishing. The sport and hungers of men seemed wretched and insincere compared to the run of life in the river. I’d do no harm to any of its inhabitants from now on.

I buried Beck in a high meadow, where the land was not as marshy and there was a long, sweeping view of the river. I used an old shovel with a half-broken handle, and had only my one good hand, so the going was difficult. I didn’t care. I was streaked with dirt when I was done and sweating through my clothes. My bad hand cramped, and my left shoulder was sore. I knew he wouldn’t have wanted a coffin, he’d have wanted me to bury him in the earth, and I did so. That is the way of my people; we bury our own dead as a final and lasting gift. I said the prayers I’d been taught as a boy and tore my shirt, for this was the only way I knew how to mourn. Standing there, I felt I had lost something more than a man. It seemed a part of our city had been buried with him. The part I loved best.

Beck had told me to destroy his house when he was no longer in our world. He said that the Manhattan he knew would be gone when he was, and perhaps he was right in that. The villages that lined the highlands of upper Manhattan had already begun to drift into each other as the city moved northward. Soon there would be sidewalks in the last patches of the woods, and buildings to house families, and skyscrapers and highways. No one would know that deer had made their home here once, and that coyotes were spied in the dark, or that there had been wolves that had ventured down the river on those rare occasions when it froze solid in the most brutal winter months.