by Leslie Parry
She knew people felt nervous, unsure of what to say to her, but it seemed as if they feared contagion. She wouldn’t be surprised if they choked into their handkerchiefs as they passed her on the street—as if her bad luck, a pungent curse, steamed from her body like a vapor. Whenever she caught them looking at her sideways, she knew what they must be thinking: the last of the Coney Island Churches, Belle’s sister and Friendly’s child, the reedy echo of a thunderous sideshow song. It puzzled them all, perhaps, to see her standing alone on the porch of the house on Surf Avenue—seventeen years old, an orphan, wearing a faded fur coat and flexing a tiger switch in her hands.
But now. Odile-on-the-Wheel.
She straightened her shirtwaist and buttoned up her skirt. When she emerged from behind the screen, she saw Mack sitting at the mirror, slouched over in his slacks and undershirt. Birdie the glass eater stood behind him, massaging his shoulders and neck with camphor oil. Mack’s own hands lay motionless beside him, sheathed in gloves filled with hot cream. He looked up at Odile, his face mottled pink with anguish.
Before she could say anything, however, there was a knock on the door and Guilfoyle blew in, his white cape flapping behind him, powder lifting from his sculpted beard. He glowered at Georgette, who sat painting the toenails on her shrunken feet. (He never had the chance to badger Aldovar, who had run into the burning theater after their mother, and who had died, they were told, from the smoke. And for what? Odile thought. So this huckster could make a few extra pennies? So my mother’s good name could be smeared?) Aldovar and Georgette had been orphaned and raised by the sideshow, where their exotic bodies drew hundreds of awestruck men and fainting women every week. Her mother had always looked after them, but Guilfoyle didn’t like the idea of freaks larking about onstage, where people couldn’t get a good look at their grotesqueries. He wanted them up close, in pens and cages, close enough to spit on. Most of his money had been made off barnyard shows out west, where he charged people fifteen cents to see what he promised was a real satyr captured from the verdant stretches of Shangri-La. Then he pulled back the curtain to reveal a strongman wearing furry trousers that had been stitched to the cheap effigy of a goat’s body. Before anyone could squint for a better look, Guilfoyle would whisk the curtain back and announce in the wise, sorrowful voice of a doctor delivering bad news, that the satyr, should he set sight on a human for more than a few seconds, would likely turn them to stone.
Now he glared at them. “What the hell was that?”
Mack lifted his eyes to the ceiling and bit his bottom lip. His cheeks were quivering. “I’ve never missed,” he said, his voice filled with a tremendous awe. “Not once. Not even in rehearsal, with the wax dummies.”
Guilfoyle turned to Odile. “What were you doing, wriggling around like a worm up there?”
“Take it easy,” Georgette said, fanning her toes with a newspaper. “She was a champ.”
“My knee’s fine, actually,” Odile said. “Thank you for your concern—”
But even as she said it, she could see Guilfoyle’s lids begin to flutter and close. He had a habit of squinching his eyes shut in conversation, as if it any voice but his own put him instantly to sleep. “What if it had been your gut?” he interrupted. “Or your face? The show’d be over for good! We can’t have something like that, you understand me? Not after the fire.”
She stammered for a moment, hot-faced and flabbergasted, unable to think of a coherent reply. She couldn’t believe he used the word we, as if he’d been there that day to see the sky grow black, to smell the burning wood. As if the loss of Friendship Willingbird Church—and the life that she’d built here—had somehow been his.
“Why don’t we do another knife bit?” he said. “Not throwing, which ain’t so new anymore. Last year I saw a real lulu in Virginia City. The girl gets into a box and the fella brings out these big Oriental swords, right?” He drew an imaginary weapon and sliced the air in front of him. “He cuts off her arms and legs—”
“You mean it’s fake,” Odile said. She couldn’t imagine Mack fumbling with a set of tin replicas, driving them into mirrored slots while she lay sweating in a box, a look of exaggerated consternation on her face. “Nothing was ever fake at the Church of Marvels, Mr. Guilfoyle. My mother always made that very clear. In fact, I wager she’d be the first to say that there’s nothing like a little blood to whet an audience’s appetite. It lets them know it’s real.” The tiger in the grass. As much as the audience might speculate or accuse, there was nothing false about Georgette’s legs, or the way Belle had contorted her body and swallowed a sword, or how Birdie bit into a bulb of glass as if it were an apple. That was what her mother wanted: no satyrs or mermaids or peepshow shams, but everything genuine and exotic, a catalogue of real human marvels.
Guilfoyle tugged at the fringe on his gloves. “I’ve told you before—”
“And I’ve told you: if the danger’s not real, the audience knows. Who wants to watch something so safe? There’s no suspense in it! I assure you, Mr. Guilfoyle, if I were sitting in the audience—”
“The suspense is in the presentation.” He drew the word out slowly, rolling it around on his tongue. “Good lord, all you have to do is hold still and smile pretty! How hard can that be?”
Odile felt her face turning red. “If they want to see a magic show or a stupid mime act, they can go to Mr. Mephisto’s tent for a nickel.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, all right?” Guilfoyle blew air up into his moustache, sending a cloud of powder through the air. “Of course they want to see danger—of course they want a little blood. But what, I ask you, is more grisly then seeing a girl get her head lopped off? Sure they know it’s fake—but it’s the thrill they’re in for, real or not. All they care about is how’d-they-do-that. And what I’m talking about here’s a good spectacle, one that’ll keep them guessing—and one where nobody gets hurt.”
Odile looked over at Mack. He lifted his head and gazed at her with rheumy, stricken eyes. Mother had recruited him nearly thirty years ago, when he was a bucktoothed boy straight out of the Union Army.
“It’s just sounds so—” She paused, trying to summon the harshest word she could think of. “So amateur.”
“Amateur!” Guilfoyle threw up his hands. “This from a gimp not even gimpy enough to make a dime from!”
Odile’s knee trembled; her back twitched. They loved her on the Wheel of Death—enough to fear for her life. What could matter more than that? She looked at the troupe gathered around her, at their bad skin and puffy eyes, their numb gaze following Guilfoyle, who seethed around the room in a flurry of white. It was the world that she knew, only now everyone seemed tawdry and misshapen, as if she were staring at their five-cent reflection in the Mirror Maze. Here was Mack, but his face was bloated from too much drink; Georgette, sloppy-mouthed and sunburned, having flings with every two-bit boy from Manhattan; Leland gambling away everything he had on the horses. You must remember, her sister had written, you are where you belong. But she was wrong, Odile thought—they belonged together.
She heard Guilfoyle calling after her, but she didn’t turn around, just stumbled out of the theater and into the dusty, sunlit alley. Her face was hot; the tips of her ears stung. She blinked the sand crumbs from her eyes and kept walking, over the trolley tracks and down to the beach. Her mother’s locket knocked against her chest. How hot the metal must have gotten the day of the fire, how it must have burned its leafy pattern into her skin, right above her heart.
She came to a stop beneath the pier. The foam wrapped around her ankles and held there, as if afraid of being sucked back into the sea. She’d hidden here for hours the day of the fire. At one point someone had called her name but she was too scared to call back. The tigers were the first living things she saw. They were galloping down toward the shore, their great legs springing through the sand, cloaks of flame rising from their backs. She waited for them to howl, but they were silent. She didn’t even hear the sound of w
aves breaking over their bodies as they thrashed blindly into the sea.
THREE
HER SECOND MORNING ON THE ISLAND, ALPHIE WAS WOKEN early for exercise. Promenading, the nurses called it—as if she were a debutante out for a stroll in the park. In the parched light of dawn, she and the other women, pilloried and aching with sleeplessness, were marched down the path to the river. Leather collars had been fastened around their necks; a long cable yoked them together like mules. Her blue flannel dress, with its coarse, unfamiliar stitching, was stiff with mildew and smelled like turpentine. Her head throbbed; her ears crackled and hummed as if they were full of water. She stared again at her hands. There was a pale, puckering groove around her finger where her wedding band used to be.
She kept smelling odd things in the air: raw and sour meat; moldering lemons; the persistent, sulfurous twitch of a match. She tried to turn her head, to look west over the water toward Manhattan, but the collar pinched at her throat. She could only see as far as the overgrown riverbank, where gulls pecked at the rot in the rushes and scum eddied between the stones. In the horse-drawn cart ahead of them, a nurse with foggy spectacles beat a pie pan with a kitchen mallet, urging them to move. Another nurse sang old Irish drinking songs between spits of tobacco, which sometimes missed the roadside and sprayed Alphie on the cheek. Alphie tucked her head down, juice dripping from her face and the ends of her hair, while insects whirred, curious and tickling, at her lip. Through the ache in her head, she remembered that tobacco was a good base for makeup; it hid the bruises and bee stings on darker complexions. Anthony, though, had been so fair she’d had to grind up chalk with a pestle, mix in some flour and cream. Anthony. Even as the women moaned around her, trudging in the grass to the clap of tin, she could still hear the boat horns braying on the river, the flaring hiss of their wakes. Her husband would find out what happened, and he would come for her.
The harness bells clinked as they moved ahead. Alphie struggled to keep up through the lashing, itchy weeds, tripping in her slippers, which were too small and beginning to tear at the skin on her heels. She wouldn’t be here much longer, though—she couldn’t be. She’d been missing for a full day already—Anthony would be looking for her, savage with panic. She pictured him coming home in the evening, only to find her gone and the Signora alone in the parlor, perched at her backgammon table and picking at a dish of licorice drops. Once he learned what his mother had done, he’d be sick and furious, racing to catch the first ferry over. But what if he couldn’t find her? What lies would the Signora have told him? Alphie began to tremble. She wanted to scream across the water, to wherever the Signora sat in her oyster-gray dress with its fringed bib of beads. Even now she could hear the beads swaying and ticking from that famously sculpted bosom, see the prisms of light thrown, taunting, back in her eye. She wanted to scream as loud as these other women, but she’d gone hoarse from wailing in the night, partly from the pain in her head, partly from the panic. Signora. Even when she said the name, it sounded as if she were trying to shake a wad of phlegm from her gullet.
As they came up through the trees and rounded the bend, the octagonal dome of the madhouse glowed white in the sun. At the sight of it, the woman in front of Alphie—a young half-bald girl named DeValle—started to whimper. “Shut your mouth!” the nurse shouted. Alphie closed her eyes, feeling the collar jerk at her neck, the heat tighten her skin. One of her teeth had come loose in the night—she squeaked it back and forth with her tongue until her jaw ached and she tasted a thin trickle of blood.
Hurry, she prayed. Hurry.
A MONSTER, THE SIGNORA had called her. When Anthony spoke, his voice was as dulcet as a melodeon, but the Signora’s was flinty, coarse, two rocks clapped together: Il mostro, il mostro! All she recalled of that night were a few scattered images. Each time a memory emerged, jagged and glinting in her mind, she felt nauseous and nervous and faint, and just as quickly it sank away. She remembered a spill, dark and oily smelling, on her bedroom rug. A crushed red flower beside her, the Signora’s splattered boots. At some point Alphie had gasped for air and called weakly for Anthony. The Signora, disgusted, tried to yank her up, but Alphie flailed in terror and bit her hand like an animal. The Signora yelped and pulled back. Blood oozed down her wrist and into the sleeve of her dress. Then a pain exploded in the back of Alphie’s head—like a firecracker zizzing and popping, over and over again, until she couldn’t see anything but light. Everything that followed had the pure and tetherless quality of a dream. She remembered being lifted into the air like a child. She remembered floating in the dark. She remembered lying on the tacky floor of a carriage, the streetlamps passing outside the window like dull yellow moons. Lost in a spidery mass of hair (her own? another’s?), she smelled the rusty breaths from a body beside her, tasted sawdust on her tongue, and was aware of the strange lightness at her stomach.
She woke sometime later that night to find herself still clothed in her old boots and filthy frock, the pain in her head like an animal raging to hatch. There was movement around her, but her eyes were weak, swimming in mucus. She stared blindly at the stripes of moonlight across her feet. Am I in prison? she thought. Will I be punished?
She was sitting on an unfamiliar bench, her stockings wet through her boots. She listed sideways and back. Wake up! she commanded herself. Stay awake! Then she realized she was rocking—she heard the slap and shush of water, the creak of wood. A boat. Alarmed, she tried to stand, but couldn’t—she’d been collared and chained to the bench like an animal. She slipped and fell backward, hitting her tailbone on the edge.
When she opened her eyes, someone was pushing something between her teeth—a wooden dipper. Then came a warm dribble of water. A woman was standing over her with a bucket. Alphie swallowed the mouthful of water, tasted something gritty like silt. “Where’s Anthony?” she whispered. “What’s happened?”
“I couldn’t tell you, miss,” the woman said and moved on, dunking the ladle back in the pail.
Miss. Alphie lifted her head. They didn’t know who she was? A half-dozen other women were chained beside her, huddled like toads along the bench, black-eyed and stuporous. She stared ahead. There, beyond the bow, was the phantom slug of an island, the lighthouse she used to see from her old room on the shipyard. The moon skipped, the spume chattered; her head felt like a stone.
It was pitch-black by the time they arrived at the gates, darker still by the time the women were herded into a hall and shut in a pen to be processed, like dirty fowl in an abattoir. The Matron walked slowly over to the pen, a blue-burning lamp in her hand. She swung her whistle like a policeman’s billy club. The pen, iron bars on three sides and set against the wall, was barely big enough to hold them. As the lamp made its way down the line of blinded women, Alphie saw the wall come to life behind them, pulsing and shivering. It must have been white once, like the rest of the room, but now she stared in horror at the chaos of fingernail-scratches, teethmarks, and stains. There were urgent prayers and lovers’ names, carved into the soft plaster or written in body fluids—many in tongues she couldn’t read. They were all scribbled on top of each other, hysterical and illegible, the women’s last messages to the outside world. Pressed in together, the new women, still sick from the boat and muddled by drugs, wept or screamed.
One by one they were taken away down the hall. When it was her turn, Alphie was led into an airless examination room. She stood there pickling in sweat, blinking against the light as yellow as vomitus. The nurses tried to touch her but she jumped, quivering, clutching at the folds of her dress. Her bladder ached, but she didn’t want to use the chamber pot—she couldn’t squat there in the corner of a room and lift her skirts while everyone gawped—so she relieved herself, hot and then cold, down her stocking and over her knees, until the runnels dried and itched.
The doctor was a toothy man with cold fingers and an unevenly clipped moustache. He took Alphie’s pulse, pressed her tongue down with a spoon, asked her questions that she felt were designed
to trick her into something. She didn’t meet his gaze, just looked down and away, fixing on spots on the floor.
“Is that blood on your dress? In your hair?”
Alphie, startled, looked down at her hands, fisted and holding tight to her frock. She saw the stains on her skirt, but she had no memory of anything violent other than biting the Signora’s hand. She’d been surprised at the salty bubbles of blood, but that was just a puncture, surely—nothing that would have led to this.
“Do you know who you are?” the doctor said testily. “Where you’re from?”
She felt confused and tired, but she spelled out her name anyway, tears filling her eyes. “This is a plot, don’t you see? She’s always hated me! I’m a good girl. Please, please. He’ll be looking for me. He’ll call the police when he finds out! You have to let me go!”
“Did you do someone harm?”
“I didn’t mean to! It was just a little gnash—I wasn’t myself—”
“A gnash? Is that what you call it?”
“What did she tell you about me? It’s a lie, I swear it!”
The doctor didn’t answer, just scribbled something down in his notes. Then he lifted his stethoscope and moved his hand toward her chest, but she slapped him away. “Leave me alone—I didn’t do anything! Please!”
He raised his hand and beckoned, expressionless, to someone behind her. Two nurses hooked Alphie under the arms and dragged her, thrashing and slipping in her own piss, down into the bathing hall. They chained her by her ankles to a chair against the wall, then left her there to wait. Alphie could see the filthy tub in the lamplight, and the bath nurse bent over it, red-cheeked and sweating—there was a wadded rag in her fist, a nude flicker in the water beneath her. She grunted and whistled and scrubbed a crying woman clean. For a moment Alphie had the strange sensation that she was looking out at her own slippery body—the red-raw flesh in the greening water, the pink beady nipples, the panicked eyes.