Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  She turned away from the light, touching the sticky hair at the back of her head. Anthony would be here soon. She was sure of it—but how would she survive until then? How could she keep herself safe? She heard the slosh of water, the burbling sniffs, doors opening and closing, then footsteps drawing near. She looked up and saw the bath nurse approaching—the shine of her cheap-greased hair; those buggy, lashless eyes. Alphie tried to turn away, but the nurse took hold of her and pulled her up by the wrists.

  Quickly she turned out Alphie’s pockets—all empty—then shook the ribbon from her hair and ordered off her boots. Alphie cried at the crawl of curious hands over her body, at the foreign blisters and chewed-up nails. “Please don’t take my clothes,” she begged, hunched over and holding her stomach. “Don’t make me get in the water. I . . . I don’t know how to swim!”

  “That’s nonsense. All women must bathe, and all women must wear a uniform dress.”

  Alphie slumped forward, struggling for breath. Above her the nurse flicked through a sheaf of papers. Alphie heard the dutiful scratch of a pencil, a belch that smelled like lime soda, an exhausted sigh. She felt the end of the pencil flick through her hair, lift the hem of her skirt. “One pair boots, one pair stockings, hair ribbon, wedding band—”

  “Don’t write that one down.”

  The nurse looked up from her papers. She was stringy as a lizard, all muscle and knobs. She was tired, Alphie could tell—dyspeptic and sore after working through the night. She probably looked forward to her bed—wherever that was; a little dormitory apart with a tea tray and a lady’s magazine—the kind the Signora always forbade Alphie to read—with illustrations of girls riding sidesaddle by the sea, or smoking Turkish cigarettes on the shore of a lagoon.

  Alphie twisted her wedding ring off her finger. “Please—don’t make me get in that water.”

  “You stink of piss. You’d rather have your piss than your gold?”

  Alphie didn’t answer, just held out the ring. What good would it do her in here? “They don’t have to know.”

  The nurse hesitated for a moment, then took it. She rolled it around between her thumb and her forefinger. “I’m good at my job,” she said.

  “I believe you.”

  She tested the ring with her teeth, then stuffed it into her apron and handed Alphie a blue flannel dress. “If there’s any trouble from you again, you’ll be locked away with the Violents until you rot. I’m good, you see, but I’m not kind.” She unchained Alphie, then pointed to a pile of clothes on the floor—“Leave your things there.”

  As she stalked back to the bathtub and wrung out the rags, Alphie made a show of sliding off her stockings and folding them neatly next to her boots. The nurse came back and damped down Alphie’s hair, rubbing it coarsely with a rag that smelled like turpentine—“Just to out the blood.” Alphie flinched at the pain in her head. Her stomach cramped. When the nurse stepped into the hall and hollered something to the room beyond (a garbled back-and-forth, the peevish shuffling of papers), Alphie quickly changed against the wall. There was blood on her legs, she saw. Her groin ached; her head spun. I am kind, she thought, but I’m not good. The nurse returned and led her away in the dark. They left behind a room of shed dresses and empty boots, as if the women’s bodies had all dissolved into air.

  The Matron was waiting for her in the last room. Alphie cowered in the light of the lamp, the blue dress scratching against her skin. She saw a table in the corner, fitted with leather straps and a stained sheet. Beside it sat a grandmotherly nurse in a bonnet. There was a device strapped to her hand, connected by a wire to a box on the table, which buzzed with some kind of electric current. The nurse stepped experimentally on a pedal, and the whole thing kicked and whirred.

  “Number seven, Volpe,” the Matron said.

  Nurse Volpe didn’t say anything, just stirred a bowl of thick black ink.

  “What’s this?” Alphie said hoarsely.

  The Matron dragged Alphie onto the table, cinching her down at the ankles and wrists. They forced a draught of mead down her throat, which burned up into her nostrils and made her cough.

  The Matron muttered something to Volpe, who nodded without expression and leaned over Alphie, tracing the skin above her collar. Alphie thrashed and screamed, but the Matron just stuffed a rag into her mouth and tightened the straps. Then the room went dark—a swath of linen was tied around her head, covering her eyes. She could feel the sticky press of Volpe’s hand on her clavicle; an elbow pressed on her nipple through the dress. Alphie shrieked and kicked at her restraints, spit flying from the corners of her mouth, until Volpe rose—she heard the stool scrape back and topple over—and planted her hand firmly against Alphie’s heart. With a click of the pedal, the motor began to whir. And then the needle set into her, carving a line of tremulous, saw-pitched music into the skin below her throat. Alphie could smell the smoke, feel something trickle and pool in the hollow of her collarbone. The loop and drag of Volpe’s hand, the percussive tooth of the needle, the rattling box—all of it made the pain in her head unbearable. She tried to scream but choked. And then, just as abruptly, the motor was cut and Alphie was patted over with a wet sponge. When the blindfold and rag were removed, she could see Volpe’s hand was smudged with black and red.

  Volpe perched her glasses on top of her bonnet and sniffed, studying her handiwork. Alphie, in her delirium, thought she heard the words, Did I spell it right?

  Beside her the Matron nodded, her features slack and nonplussed. That’s the name she gave us.

  That night they slept ten to a room on cots fitted with oilcloths and moldy wool blankets. Two women had to be tied to their beds to keep them still. Alphie curled up and covered her face with her hair, then cried her voice away. She couldn’t bear it; she’d come so far from her days as a girl on the street, a bony runaway with shoes made from paper, waiting there on the corner with her paint stand and jars. And here she was, through some cruel reversal, sent back to the anonymous hive, trapped in a room full of women who were not missed and not wanted, who would wear the same dress every day until it disintegrated on their hungry frames—a dress she wore, too, formless and smelling of some previous disease, stamped with the words Ward 5, Lunatic Asylum, Blackwell’s Island.

  MANHATTAN WAS SO CLOSE: she watched it shimmer beyond the coal scows on the river; she could see the arched windows of the factories articulated through the fog like the humps of a sea monster. As the promenade ended, a bell clanged near the old boathouse—gulls flapped and scattered, cutting the sky. The day’s ferry, Alphie realized, was approaching the island. Maybe Anthony would be onboard—he would be coming, at last, to fetch her.

  She tried to turn again toward the water, but the women were jerked away by the cart, sweating up the path toward the asylum. They waded through the kitchen garden, between knots of culm and trees crippled with brown fruit. Alphie could feel her scalp starting to burn. She smelled the piss of the cart nag and the stink of their bodies. She knew it was horrible to be vain, but she missed her silver brush and fine haircombs, the pretty pots of cream on her dressing table, her aquamarine earrings and gardenia perfume. She couldn’t help but hope, when Anthony arrived—despite her ruddy, sleepless face, the dress with its crusting bits of tobacco, the strange tattoo—he still found something beautiful. She cursed herself for giving up her wedding band, but he would understand, wouldn’t he? She’d been so frightened.

  As they were herded into the courtyard, the gate rattled open and the Matron’s wooden heels clacked across the stones. Alphie stood there, wavering in the light. Finally, the boat had arrived. Anthony would be coming, at last, to take her home. As the women were unhitched from the cart—as the rope zipped free from the rings on their collars; as the nurses made their way down the row, unbuckling collars and hanging them on a yardstick—she looked anxiously back. The Matron was waiting for the wagon at the turn, scowling and breathless, rolling up her sleeves with irritable, pronounced little flicks. The sound of hoove
s and wheels drew nearer—it was a sound Alphie had heard, without thinking, every day of her life: the banal song of the icemen and junk-pickers, the crush of hansom cabs on the Bowery. But now it meant something. As the wagon turned into the yard, Alphie craned her neck. The groundsman was at the reins, an elderly man with muttonchops and coveralls. She tried to look around him for the brim of Anthony’s hat. But as the horse clipped to a halt, Alphie saw that the wagon only brought the day’s deliveries: a paltry sack of mail that the groundsman slung over his shoulder, and a teenaged boy hefting a small trunk of soap. The boy stared back at her with yellow eyes that matched his hair and his teeth. She grimaced. Certainly nothing like Anthony, who, despite his steamed suit and dark coiffure, kept his lips bitten in to hide the pipe burns, and would absently roll his fingers around his cuff links, dislodging the tar under his nails.

  The first time she’d paid him a call—a proper call in the middle of the day; not like the nights when he’d stumble out of a tavern and pay her two pennies to clean his face up with a scud of cotton—she’d glimpsed him through a half-open door.

  He had dressed Mrs. Miller’s baby that week. He showed her the photographs on his desk. A set of twins: one born living and the other dead. They took photographs of him next to his sister, both dressed in their pearl and satin christening gowns and propped against a pillow. The little girl’s eyes were wide and shining, her lips wet with drool. One restless hand had dissolved into a smoky plume beside her face. But the boy’s head hung forward, until his chin rested on his collar. His legs were stretched straight out in front of him, in a way she’d never seen a baby sit, and his hands were spread in an eerie and unnatural fashion over them, like an old man trying to push himself out of a chair. As she peered closer, she could just see the white crescents glowing beneath his almost-shut lids. She turned away, gasping and sick, and there were Anthony’s hands, ripe with the fetor of embalming fluid, offering her smelling salts and a tumbler of strawberry cordial.

  Now she watched the soap-boy open his trunk—three feet by two of hand-thumped hogsfat patties, wrapped in newspaper. Not the dyed, scented lozenges at the Signora’s house, which Alphie turned to slivers in the bath. The boy unloaded the soap into a wheelbarrow while the Matron flicked through an account book. Alphie saw the newspaper ink on his palms and knuckles, mackled headlines run in reverse. While the Matron turned away to consult with the groundsman, the boy looked over and caught her staring. Alphie stepped back, but he just sneered and tugged his balls and licked at the gap in his teeth. “They must have locked you away for being so ugly,” he said, then tittered and snapped up his case.

  Alphie was stunned, then mortified. She wanted to lunge at him, pound his freckles back through the bones of his cheek. But he just turned away and leaned over the ledger with the Matron, scowling as she ran her finger down the columns. “You owe me another five pounds of the Navy soap,” she was saying. “Do you know how many floors we have to scrub here? Perhaps you’d care for a tour with this nice group of ladies, just to show you how filthy it can be?”

  The boy dug a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. “I’ll bring the difference next week.” He had a voice that was naturally high and nasal, one he’d clearly tried to deepen by smoking.

  “It will be tomorrow,” the Matron said, snapping the ledger closed. “The morning ferry. And it will be correct—or we’ll take our business elsewhere. Understand? I won’t be cheated.” Then she turned to the line of women and yelled, “Breakfast!”

  Jallow, the squat nurse with the eyeglasses, drove them all, sore and meek, up into the dining hall, while black-mouthed Bradigan dug another chaw of tobacco from her apron and ordered them to be quiet. Alphie sat down at one of the long tables. Her stomach growled and ached, even though the room smelled like boiled gristle. When she’d arrived at Anthony’s, the air had been so clean—smelling of wood polish and licorice, fruit and cake and mourning wreaths—that it had made her sick. She’d spent her first afternoon there hunched over a chamber pot, watching her vomit splatter against the porcelain. When she blew her nose, she was alarmed to see a clot of translucent mucus glistening in the folds of her handkerchief. When she tried to explain to the Signora that she must be sick—that it was colorless as a ghost, not speckled and gray-brown—she was only met with an arched, disdainful brow.

  Anthony had rescued her once before, from a life of few comforts and little promise. The Signora never thought Alphie was good enough for her son—there was always something she found lacking in Alphie’s manners, speech, intelligence, style—but Anthony had loved her and made her his wife, much to the bafflement and furious injury of his mother, who was used to controlling everything that went in and out of the house. When they were first married, the Signora even asked to examine Alphie’s monthly napkins—she would sit there in the parlor with a lorgnette held up to her eyes, reading the bloodstains like tea leaves, looking for any sign of excitability, wantonness, or infirmity. Are you reading those romantic novels? Or wearing your corset too tight? Alphie could only shift impatiently on the parquet during these interviews, unsure how to answer.

  Sitting on the hard bench, waiting for her breakfast of beef tea and bread, Alphie dreamt of the smells from the Signora’s kitchen larder, the steaming dishes at the dining table: burrata melting over poached egg and asparagus, crinkles of pancetta in sweet potato soup. She loved going down to Mr. Moro’s olive cart on Saturday afternoons and staring at the vats, smelling the sardines and vinegar. Mr. Moro would ladle the olives into a jar, and even though she was supposed to return home and leave them on the draining board to be made into paste, an old fear gripped her as she weaved through the crowded marketplace. Sometimes she ducked into an alley behind barrels of trash and gobbled them all—skinning the olives to their pits, drinking the juice, sucking the salt from under her fingernails—hiding there where no one could see her with her hand wedged wrist-deep in the jar, licking the syrup off her fingers like a dog. Afterward she simply told the Signora that her purse had been snatched and the grocery money was gone. The Signora sucked in her cheeks, pale with indignation, but Anthony took out his billfold and counted out the money again.

  Next to her at the dining table, ignoring her food, was the jittery young woman named DeValle. She read aloud from a yellow square of newspaper. The women in the asylum weren’t allowed paper of any sort, even for letter writing, but yesterday Miss DeValle had dug this scrap from a rotting pillar in the hall. When the nurses had tried to pry it away from her, she’d wailed and thrashed about, then snapped her own hair out by the roots. Frightened that the girl’s father, a congressman from New Jersey, would arrive for his weekly visit to find her balding and despondent, the nurses pressed the paper back into her hand and looked the other way. Now, in quiet moments like these, DeValle took the folded square out from her slipper and recited the advertisement over and over again. She wet and re-wet her lips, her voice frantic and catching: “Malvina Cream! The one reliable beautifier—blemishes, sunburn, ringworm, wrinkles! One tin, fifty cents. Oh, look, fifty cents!” She glanced at Alphie and smiled.

  Alphie smiled back. Gently she reached over and brushed back what remained of her hair. There, inked in harried script across the girl’s skin, just beneath her throat, was a single word. Her name: DeValle. From across the table another woman glared at them. She was old and ornery-looking, with a bitterly bunched mouth, and as Alphie watched, she lifted her chin and pointed to her own tattoo. But it had been slashed over and over again, as if with a blade, so there was nothing left but a hash of purple scabs.

  Alphie touched her chest, which was crusted over and raw-itchy with pain. They’d all been inked—most, like DeValle, with a surname. But some women were brought in and didn’t know who they were, or didn’t speak English; sometimes they didn’t speak at all. Their names became the places they were found, landmarks and street corners and gambling halls: Union Square South, Delancey Suffolk, Brooklyn Bridge. Alphie couldn’t see Volpe’s handiwork o
n her own skin, but at least she knew who she was; she knew precisely who she was, even though there were some who believed that she didn’t.

  She ate her tea and bread slowly, her tooth aching. Across the room, a woman with tangled blond hair slumped over her breakfast and cried. One of the nurses tried to lift the bowl to her lips, help her to eat, but the woman couldn’t swallow—the tea spilled right out of her mouth, all over the front of her dress. A string of spit oozed from her chin. Her eyes fluttered for a moment, then set on Alphie’s.

  There was something about her stare—lucid and snake-green, too familiar—that made Alphie’s pulse tick. Quickly she looked back at her bowl, feeling sick to her stomach. She was saving it all up to tell Anthony, everything she saw and heard. She would confess that when the nurse had come to check on them during the night, Alphie had mistaken the ring of keys on her belt for the hand of a skeleton. She would talk about the Polish woman down the hall, who believed a piece of lint was her baby, and the girl from the East Side who sat at the window as if it were a sewing machine, passing invisible sheets of cotton over the sill. There were so many stories—she didn’t know how to keep them all in her head; she had to continue reciting them to herself, tending to them, watering them like the plants in her conservatory, or else they’d wither and die, colorless husks. The longer she was there at the asylum, the more crowded her garden became, and the more exhausted she grew trying to cultivate it.