Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  Without willing it, she pictured the pier on the morning after the fire. Bodies had been lined up along the planks, hidden beneath fronds of burnt wallpaper and the tasseled remains of a curtain. While Belle stayed home, silent and prostrate under her tiger quilt, Odile had stood alone on the boardwalk, tasting smoke in the air, scratching the water from her eyes. She’d stepped gingerly among the dead, coughing back ash and sand, lifting the edge of each makeshift pall just far enough to see what lay beneath. A man’s workboots. The brown apron string of a pastry vendor. And then: the single tail of Aldovar’s tuxedo, the burned ruffle of his wedding gown. The sight of it made Odile’s breath catch in her throat. She remembered seeing the train of his dress disappear into the crowd, toward the burning theater.

  And there next to Aldovar, beneath the theater curtain, she spied a long singed braid, tied with a navy ribbon. The breeze made it stir like a living thing. She tried to swallow, but her throat closed. She’d picked out that ribbon for her mother earlier that day, when they were sitting together in the dressing room, waiting for the show to begin. She’d braided the braid with her own fingers, felt the thick, slippery hair twist around her knuckles.

  She had to be the one to find Belle and tell her what had happened. The only thing worse than seeing it for herself was saying it aloud. For once it was shared—once she sat down by her sister on a cold, wet bench overlooking the shore; once the words were let loose in the air—it all became true. Just a single breath, an exhalation. That was all it took to undo them. Belle turned away from her and gazed at the wind-whipped sea. Whatever had bound them together began to unravel, and as the days went on Belle drifted farther and farther away, like a kite running off from its spool, until she disappeared altogether. And even if Odile could no longer see her or speak to her, she could feel what remained—a faint pluck in her chest, a shiver in her heart, something that drew her on, even when she tried to ignore it, even when she stood alone on the beach and looked at the gathering clouds and wanted to blame Belle, and her flights of passion, for everything.

  WHEN THE FERRY ARRIVED at the pier in Manhattan, she scuttled down the gangplank, hugging her valise to her chest. All she had to guide her was an old map of her mother’s and her sister’s letter. For weeks she’d gone through the theater papers—alone at the kitchen table with a scrambled egg dinner, listening to a mouse cheep in the grate—running her finger down the columns and hoping for a mention of Belle’s name. But nothing had turned up. There were hundreds of stages in Manhattan, she supposed, playing thousands of shows a year—her sister could have found work at any one of them. Still, last night she’d gone through her mother’s directory and made a list of the big Bowery halls, the famous vaudeville houses, and a few dime museums. She didn’t know where to begin—she had no sense of the city at all—so she decided to start on the small stretch of Doyers Street, where her sister had written someone months ago. Perhaps Odile could find whoever it was—maybe they’d had contact with her sister since she arrived. At the very least, if they’d been an acquaintance or admirer of their mother’s as the postman supposed, they might be able to tell her which sort of theaters to inquire at.

  She waited in line at the curbside, then climbed into a rickety cab. Trying to muster the confidence and breezy nonchalance of a native girl, she told the driver to take her to Doyers Street, hoping he wouldn’t ask any questions. He didn’t, and she settled back in the seat.

  The cab jostled out into traffic. It was drawn by a rawboned horse the color of curdled milk, who seemed to have all the time in the world. She watched as the wharves gave way to dim, crooked passageways. She smelled corn and fish pies cooking from carts on the corner, and acrid char drifting down from factory smokestacks. Men with wet cleavers sat smoking on the stoops of their butcher shops, purple and yellow flanks swinging above them, guts spilled out on the stained brick beneath. Each time the cab stalled for pedestrians, or slowed to a stop on a crowded street, Odile felt her body stiffen. She leaned forward in her seat, straining to read the street signs farther down the block.

  Over the years she’d heard names bandied about the dressing room: the Battery, Hell’s Kitchen, the Tenderloin. They all sounded so seedy and carnal—places full of hot steam and painted mouths; men and women pawing at each other in the back of a packing house, kissing between slabs of fat-bubbled meat. But now she stared at street signs in Yiddish and German and Chinese, uncertain what to think. Along the streets she saw pushcarts and stands—mounds of sweet potatoes and squash, buttons, clothespins, eyeglasses glittering like the scales of a fish. Mothers pulled their children down the sidewalks, past piles of trash alive with bees. Was Belle living here, like this, or had she made her fortune as she intended—but couldn’t, for whatever reason, let go of her grief? (Just not dead—dear God, not dead.) As girls they used to read all the lurid pamphlets that reformists passed out in front of the theater: stories of kidnapping and depravity, innocent young women forced into slavery. They’d stashed them away in their room, screaming and howling as they reenacted them at night. Fainting maidens who somersaulted off beds! Captors with wiggling moustaches and bicorne hats, locking the maids in an armoire, forcing them to eat crackers through the door! Now Odile thought of the older women on the boardwalk at night—the real ones, hard and hungry, who lingered outside taverns and bathhouses and beat their parasols against the rails, thumping out messages in code—how they had frightened Belle, with their sinister swish-swack from the shadows, when she and Odile took the shortcut home from the stage.

  After a series of lurches and turns, the cab came to a halt on a street so congested that another horse pushed his head through the window and snuffled Odile’s sleeve. They’d reached the Bowery, a name she’d always conflated with the Growlery, her father’s workshop. The Growlery sounded like a place where the tigers might live, but in fact it was just a little room in the very back of the theater, where Mr. Church would sit between shows, drinking his port and reading his copy of Dickens. He wasn’t a sword swallower or a stuntman. He wasn’t a performer at all. He’d been the show’s sign painter, an artist who’d gone back to England when the girls were small, and whom their mother rarely talked about. But Odile could still hear the patient turn of those blue-thumbed pages, the spotty glass meeting the table with regular thumps, a sentimental sigh ruffling her father’s beard. That was the only real memory she had of him: seeing him alone among his paint cans, reading in a shaft of light. Had he loved her, she wondered? Or had he been ashamed of her, hunched and rasping at his knee?

  She rapped on the roof and yelled up to the driver. “Are we close?”

  He looked down from the box. “You said Doyers, am I right? Just down there a bit.”

  “I’ll walk.” She got out and paid her fare, then stood alone on the sidewalk. All around her she heard scraping hooves and lurching wheels, the thunder of sewing machines from windows above. She shuffled down the street between umbrella menders and pencil carvers, all putting on a show for the crowd. A current of black hats bobbed between the carts. This is where their weekend visitors arrived from—those blushing couples in line for the Hee-Haw and the Jolly Octopus, the straw-hatted men who marveled at her aloft on the Wheel. She passed a medicine show—a huckster in a suit parading around a shock-haired, dope-eyed girl, claiming he’d cured her after she’d been hit by lightning. Immediately Odile thought of Guilfoyle, and her stomach turned.

  Just past the huckster and his bait, Odile saw the sign for Doyers Street. She paused at the corner. At first it looked like a dead end—a thin black seam in the great rock of the city—but as she walked ahead, she saw it was crooked like an elbow. She glanced into each fogged and lowly storefront, at the lettering on every door. She began to worry—nothing looked obvious or familiar. All she saw were rows of silent, sepulchral houses, a shuttered Mandarin tea parlor, two gray goats gnawing at the weeds between the bricks. A few older men sat out on the steps, reading their newspapers, eyeing her briefly and then looking away. />
  A cloud passed in front of the sun, and then she saw it—there, on the roof of the building at the hook in the road—a glass room, a glowing fog that hovered just above the eaves.

  Then I realize I’ve been sitting too long in the hothouse, staring at the flowers, and the rain is coming down heavy on the glass.

  The blood flickered in her ears. She waited for a cart to pass, then hurried over, the valise thumping against her sore knee. On the first floor was an apothecary shop. She studied the stenciled sign in sham goldleaf—Bloodworth’s—and the pair of oversized spectacles drawn on the window glass, next to advertisements for headache pills and hair restoratives. But the shop was still shuttered, the windows dark. There was only a pair of pigeons roosting on the ledge, and rats chasing each other through the ivy. Perhaps Belle had written someone here for a special order—there were various throat tonics and lozenges her mother preferred. Even Odile’s eucalyptus cream had arrived by train from Chicago.

  She tilted her head back. The building was simple and plain, three stories high. Perhaps the hothouse belonged to someone who lived in the rooms above, or the apothecary himself. The building, she saw, had two doors: the green shop door, sashed and locked, and a yellow door farther off to the side, set back from the street and half obscured by ivy.

  Odile walked up to the yellow door and knocked. She heard footsteps approach on the other side. A small panel in the door slid open, squeaking on its track. Eyes and a nose appeared, but not the hazel eyes and small, freckled nose of her sister. Instead, it was the face of a young red-cheeked girl, out of breath and chewing nervously on a pipe stem. She stared at Odile and blinked. Odile blinked back, the words stuck in her throat.

  “Good morning,” she stammered. “I don’t know if I’m at the right address, but . . .” She stared at the crumbling, fluted jambs and blisters of paint on the door. She cleared her throat and looked at the girl again, forcing a brave, polite smile. The girl took an uneasy drag from her pipe and blinked her eyes, waiting.

  “I’m looking for Isabelle Church.”

  The girl blew out a line of smoke. “You must have the wrong house,” she said. The panel in the door shut.

  Odile stood on the stoop for a moment, her heart thudding. “Excuse me!” she shouted. “Wait a moment!” She banged harder this time, using the heel of her fist.

  The panel opened. Now the girl lowered her voice; some of the hardness was gone from it. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re after, but you’ve got the wrong idea,” she whispered.

  “I’ve come all the way from Coney Island, and I’m looking for my sister, Isabelle Church,” Odile said again. “I’ve only just received a letter. I’m afraid it’s rather urgent. Has she been here? Do you know who she is?”

  The girl crinkled her eyebrows. “Did she say she was here?”

  “Not to me, no . . .” Odile hesitated. She wasn’t sure what Belle had been hiding from her, or why. “She might have corresponded with someone here,” she said carefully. “Is there anyone I can speak to? Anyone who might have been acquainted with the Churches of Coney Island?”

  “I couldn’t say,” the girl answered. “I’m only the help.”

  Odile didn’t like the indifferent lift of her shoulders, or the odd, nervous clucking sound she made as she sucked in her cheeks. “I’m not leaving,” Odile said, leaning against the door, “until I talk to someone who knows.”

  The panel shut again, but this time Odile heard bolts slide and latches lift. The door opened, and the girl stepped out into the light, tuck-tucking on her pipe. She was younger than Odile, maybe twelve or thirteen—bowlegged and weevily, with a whiskery fuzz on her upper lip and a housedress already stained from the morning’s chores. Odile could easily have mistaken her for a Coney Island scrub-girl, save for the dagger hilt that flashed briefly above her bootstrap as she shook out her skirt. The girl tapped the hilt, perhaps unconsciously, with the toe of her boot and squinted at Odile through the smoke. “Who are you, exactly?” she said.

  “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 qu
ite 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.