Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  Then Alphie, in a rage, was on him. She couldn’t stop herself, even though she knew this was not the person she was. She was the pretty Rembrandt who’d cleaned up the Widows’ cuts and bruises, who had let them sleep in her room when they were afraid of the darkness and the thunder and the crazy man bellowing in the street below. She was the one who long ago had tended to the chickens, the horses, the cats in the barn, the one who’d given extra milk to the runts. She was a good person, she believed, even though others had called her a monster. She just didn’t know what to do with the fury inside her.

  The soap-boy lay at her feet (unconscious? dead?), his eyes swollen and lewdly pink, like a newborn rat’s. She remembered how Anthony had bludgeoned the man who attacked her that night on the waterfront—the drunk man who’d grabbed her by the hair, knocked over her stand. Sempre libera. They were fated and bound, like the lovers in an opera—and that’s what the Signora couldn’t bear.

  The soap-boy’s head was twisted to the side; his cheek was beginning to blue. Alphie lifted her foot and toed away the red trickle of spit on his chin. Who’s the ugly one now?

  Orchard rolled to her side and clutched her ribs, blood hissing from her teeth. Unsteadily, she rose to her feet, but still she hurried—unlatching the trunk, throwing back the lid. There was no way, Alphie thought, a grown person could fit inside. It was smaller than she remembered, maybe two feet by three. How desperate, how rash could their plan have been?

  Still, Orchard grabbed a piece of newspaper from the trunk, crumpled and slimy with soap. She greased down her arms and her legs, slathered her face and her hair. She shook out her shoulders and folded up her limbs, then curled herself inside the open suitcase, like a baby bird in an egg.

  “How is that possible?” Alphie whispered. “What happened to your bones?”

  As Orchard rolled and slithered her body free, Alphie heard the screams in the woods, the distant splashes of water, the terror of the bells. She peered through the doorway and saw, farther down the bank, women running into the river, tripping on their skirts, falling face-first into the black mud. The dogs chased after them, sinking their teeth into ankles and arms, shaking them and dragging them back to shore. Just beyond, a brigade of nurses prowled on horseback, lashes raised above their heads. They circled and shouted. Their whips cracked louder than guns. Alphie saw the madwomen’s dresses break open. They fell to the ground, bleeding between the reeds. Above them the mosquitoes sang, ecstatic.

  Quickly Orchard turned the soap-boy on his back and began to undress him—yanking off his shoes and bandanna, unbuttoning his shirt and trousers, sliding off his oily suspenders—until he lay there on the floor of the boathouse in only his underthings. Alphie lifted him with both arms and dragged him behind the boathouse, through the grass, leaving him in a gnatty thicket and covering his face with a useless handful of leaves.

  Back inside Orchard waited for her. She was holding his clothes. She was holding his clothes out to Alphie.

  Alphie felt her skin go fizzy, her hands begin to shake. She took a step back. “I can’t,” she heard herself say, even though she knew it was ridiculous. If the nurses should hunt them down, if they should find them here with the soap-boy bleeding and half-naked in the brush—here, with a pair of stolen scissors and an empty trunk, the conspirators who’d incited this riot—everything would be over. They’d be banished to the Violents for good.

  Still, she found herself backing away. “I can’t,” she whispered again. “I can’t.”

  A bell tolled over the water. She jumped. They both turned and saw, through the dusty window, a small boat bobbing across the current, drawing closer to the landing. The hounds were bounding farther down the shore, flapping their foamy chops. Horses galloped across the grass. She saw the nurses going from building to building: the pigeon cote, the abandoned dairy, the groundsman’s shed, pulling women away by their hair.

  The bell tolled again. Tears burned in Alphie’s eyes and filled her mouth. It had been so long, and she’d fought so hard. She’d done everything she could to banish that other life of hers, a life never meant for her. She wept as she heard the scissors squeak open, as she felt the girl’s breath against her ear. She thought of Anthony, of what his face would look like when she returned to him so changed. But this was the only chance she had anymore, and so she knelt down and shook out her hair.

  She felt the scissors tense against her hair, then slice it away. It gathered, blond and lost, on the floor.

  Standing up, her head felt light, her neck chilly. But she dressed. She pulled off her flannel dress and her filthy underclothes. She shook out the boy’s pants, buttoned and cuffed them at the ankles. She pushed her feet into his plain brown shoes and brushed the dust from his bowler. She pulled on his plain cotton shirt, which smelled garlicky and damp, and shrugged on the well-thumbed suspenders. She tied the bandanna loose around her throat, careful to keep the tattoo covered. She rolled up the sleeves and rubbed the greasy wads of newspaper over her arms, until her skin was smeared with ink.

  Orchard Broome stabbed a few holes in the trunk with her scissors, then twisted herself inside. Alphie snapped it shut and drew the buckles taut. She lifted it with more ease than she imagined.

  She walked out to the landing, feeling the sun on her skin, the sting of brine on her lips. She licked them clean. Her fingers shook, but she unbuttoned the too-tight collar and let her Adam’s apple flex. One button, and then another, enough to show the silky trail of hair down her chest. She ran a hand against her smooth cheek, shaved clean with the scissors in the nurses’ chamber. It had been ages since she’d worn pants, since her ribs had stretched, since the pale skin of her chest had felt the warmth of the sun. Her mouth opened, blanched and bruised, her lungs shuddering but still drawing breath.

  THE BOATMAN SAW A FIGURE on the landing. He squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun, which rose above the fog and turned everything white. There was a commotion on the grounds beyond—cracks and shouts, the thunder of horses. He would have mistaken it all for a picnic race if he hadn’t known exactly where he was heading, and if he hadn’t seen the women, wrangled and dog-bitten, bleeding on the shore. Christ, he thought—the fools were having another one of their fits.

  “Just in time, eh?” he said as he slowed against the landing. “What malarkey.” He looped the bowline around the horn, then looked up at his passenger. “Ready to go, chap?”

  The young man nodded and lifted his trunk, turning his face toward Manhattan. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve never been readier in my life.”

  3

  SIXTEEN

  ALPHIE WAS ABOUT TO STEP INTO THE BOAT WHEN ONE OF the nurses came clattering down the dock. “Wait!” she called, waving her arms. “Wait there!”

  The boatman cursed under his breath. “What the hell’s this?”

  The old boards thudded underfoot as the nurse ran toward them. Alphie pulled down the brim of her hat and turned her face to the water. Her mouth went dry; her body began to tremble. She stared at the waves lapping against the stern, at the roiling chop beyond. She could jump now, just like those sad summer days in the Hudson, kicking out alone to the wooded islet where the mourning doves sang. Could she outswim them? Was she fast enough? The suitcase grew heavy in her hand. She pictured Orchard Broome sinking to the bottom of the river, coiled tight in her leather box, fish swimming through her hair.

  “A few on the loose,” the nurse said to the boatman, pinching her side. “Had any trouble?”

  “Just pulled in.”

  “You don’t mind if I have a look?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  The nurse glared at him. He sighed and grumbled, “As long as it’s a fast one,” then turned to Alphie. “Sorry, chap.”

  The nurse stepped into the boat and started clopping through the green scum of water. She threw back a canvas sheet and squinted at the knots of tackle. She nosed under the bench-seats, kicked back the lines. Wheezing, she turned to gaze back at the shore�
�the flash of horses in the thicket, the boathouse with its rust-red bell. Then she looked over at Alphie. “Boy, you didn’t happen to see—”

  But she didn’t finish her sentence. Alphie had unbuttoned her trousers and stood pissing over the edge of the landing, into the water. The nurse shook her head in disgust and turned back to the boatman. “Protocol is all, y’see?” she said. “Just carrying out orders.”

  The boatman shrugged and reached to unloop the cable from the horn. Alphie shook off, buttoned up, and tipped her hat.

  The nurse ignored her. “No more boats till we’re finished here,” she said, then turned on her heel and stalked away.

  When the boat rocked away from the island, Alphie felt dizzy. She sat at the bow, tasting the chalky air, watching Manhattan draw closer. The sun rose over the riverbank behind them, warming her back through the thin shirt, turning the city ahead to glass. She kept her hat pulled down over her head, the trunk close to her side. She wanted to lean over and run her hand over the hole in the side, just to feel the touch of Orchard Broome’s finger, a sign that she was alive. But she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, her face turned stonily from the man at the helm.

  Originally she’d had a different plan: she’d lose the baby before it was born. It happened all the time. A sickness, a fall. But as the months passed, she’d started to panic. She realized that a miscarriage wouldn’t deter the Signora or win her sympathy. It would only feed her contempt. The Signora would call the doctor to the house obsessively, full of righteousness disguised as motherly concern. And how many times could Alphie avoid him? The Signora would take pleasure in the idea there was something wrong with Alphie and her body. The new woman: inferior, sickly. The wife Anthony had chosen himself: a failure. So Alphie had paid a visit to Mrs. Bloodworth, whom she’d heard about from one of the Widows. Trustworthy, she’d been told. Discreet.

  And so it was done. Early one morning, with the Signora still sleeping and Anthony gone, Alphie arrived at Doyers Street wearing her plainest dress. Just as she was instructed, she walked through the green door of the apothecary shop and simply asked for a cup of tea. She was shown into a back room with Oriental screens, where a woman with pollen-dusted hands received her. Mrs. Bloodworth was both prickly and soothing, buttermilk and razor wire—Alphie wasn’t sure how to behave around her. This was a woman who had seen stranger things than Alphie dared dream, and who only lit a pipe and smiled at her hawkishly with an interest that was genial but mercenary. Alphie smiled back, distracted by the sound of the clock on the wall, gurgling and clucking like a fat hen.

  She told Mrs. Bloodworth simply that she couldn’t bear children—a brief and hurried explanation—then pressed on: it didn’t matter to her if the child was a boy or a girl, as long as it might have some of Anthony’s coloring. She would prefer if the baby took after him in some way—it would be safer, after all—not like her own stalk-thin forebears, with their snot-yellow hair and overwet lips and bulbous, disbelieving eyes.

  Mrs. Bloodworth considered her for a long moment. And how did you come to find me here? Alphie, short of breath, stammered the name of the Widow on the waterfront: Why, it was Billie the Barber told me. That’s when Mrs. Bloodworth leaned in closer, her eyes lifting from Alphie’s folded hands to her padded chest to her blushing face, taking slow inventory of her features. Alphie leapt from her chair—I shouldn’t have come—but the woman reached out her hand and held gently to Alphie’s wrist.

  Don’t you know I will help you? she said. You are not the first of your kind who has come to this door. Then, without another word, she rang for a tray of coffee and pulled a ledger from her desk.

  Alphie stood there for a moment, her corset chafing her ribs. You won’t tell about me?

  Why would I? Mrs. Bloodworth raised her head and looked at her. We both of us live by our secrets.

  The night of the delivery, alone in the carriage house, Alphie had prepared. Even though Anthony and the Signora had left for Poughkeepsie that afternoon—just as they’d planned—as the hours passed and the dark drew nearer, Alphie began to get nervous. For a moment she missed her days as a penny Rembrandt—mixing paints on her cardboard palette, seeing the fiery silhouettes of the coal ships on the river, smelling a gentlemen’s expensive shaving soap as she leaned in to brush the gravel from his cheek. Still now, wherever she went—the butcher’s, the cobbler’s, even Mrs. Bloodworth’s—she instinctively looked for a blue star on the door. The north star. It meant someone like her would be safe. But she wasn’t one of those boys anymore—a fairy, and known as one, risking danger beyond the small constellation of havens that protected her. Now she was someone’s wife, passing for good. She’d been in such a drive to get this matter resolved that she hadn’t stopped to consider what it would be like to actually have a child. All she knew was that she wanted a different life, a better one. She never wanted to feel that terror again, the blackness exploding in the back of her brain when a drunkard would push her to the floor in a narrow room behind the shipyard, then rip the wig off her head and beat her because she’d made him do something wicked, something against God. But there were better times after she ran away and started working at her own stand—the freedom to walk the streets as she chose, learning the places where she’d be welcomed and safe, getting a tip from a blushing customer who stared, incredulous, at his face fixed up in the mirror.

  That night she’d waited for the knock on the door downstairs. When it came, she crept down, clutching her padded stomach and gripping the banister, every nerve in her body alive. At the door she found a figure in a hooded cape, carrying a basket.

  Quickly she’d led the young woman up the stairs. In the room, however, she froze up, uncertain what to do or say. So the girl set to work helping her. Together they turned down the bed and stripped the sheets to stain with blood. Alphie started to undress, to get rid of the pillow for good. She glimpsed the baby girl just once, over the edge of the basket.

  It’s a good thing you’ve done for me, Alphie whispered as Mrs. Bloodworth’s girl helped her out of her dress.

  The girl was quiet for a moment, her hands freeing the tiny seed buttons from their hooks. You’re lucky, she said. You have two spirits. Most in this life only have one.

  Those were the only words they’d spoken. As Alphie stepped out of her skirts and untied the pillow, she heard the door slam below, then footsteps rising. She and the girl looked at each other with confused stares, disbelieving, each waiting for the other to explain. There was a hesitation on the landing, a momentary creak of the wood, but then the steps continued, faster and determined—and she heard it clearer, the tick of those beads, the smell of licorice in the air—and the door, she hadn’t locked it—

  The boat pulled up to the dock. Her heart was pounding. She waited for the boatman to offer his hand, to help her out, but that was foolish now—she had to remember herself. As calmly as she could, she lifted the trunk and stepped onto the landing, making her way down the wharf. She wasn’t used to moving in these clothes—she felt awkward, taking big, sloppy strides, one arm swinging as she tried to balance the trunk. She’d just passed the ticket bridge when she heard the stationmaster say, “Sir?”

  She looked back and saw a trail of something on the planks behind her, dark and wet. It dripped from the corner of the trunk, splatted on the toe of her shoe. She put a hand to the hole Orchard had punched in the side—something was leaking from it, and when she pulled her fingers away she saw they were sticky with blood.

  “It’s just soap,” she heard herself say, wiping her hands on her trousers. “It goes soft in the heat.”

  The stationmaster waved over one of his men. “Please, sir, open the trunk.”

  The toady took a step toward her, not menacing, but with a routine firmness in his voice. She backed away, then broke into a run, tearing up the dock in the soap-boy’s hard and poorly cobbled boots. Her shoulders ached and her fingers shook as she struggled to keep hold of the trunk. She pushed through the crowd of
stevedores, through gusts of steam and spilling pallets, too scared to look back. Fifty yards away she ducked between two piano crates and sprang the latches on the trunk, then lifted Orchard Broome up by her soap-slick elbow. The girl wavered a little, queasy and pale. Without the mask, her mouth had started to bleed again. She couldn’t spit—she had no tongue—so she hunched over and drooled into the street. Alphie pulled off her shirt and buttoned it over Orchard’s damp flannel dress, so that no mark of the asylum could be seen. She unknotted the bandanna around her neck and helped her stanch the blood.

  Then she looked back over her shoulder, but the wharf was so crowded—the faces bulging and blurred, the men black-eyed as scarecrows—that she couldn’t pick out the stationmaster or his toady. She couldn’t tell if anyone was even chasing them at all. Still, she and Orchard hurried across the avenue, dodging the slobber of cartnags and the careless, thwicking whips of the drivers. They passed into the shadows of Fifty-fourth Street, wheezing and listing. The air grew close, the sky darker. Alphie grabbed at a cramp in her side. Her head ached, muddled by the steam whistles in the factories, the shrill tantrum of a grinding-wheel, the hansoms hiccupping over the cobbles. Somewhere she smelled dumplings frying in fat, and her stomach folded in on itself.

  She had to get home before anything else happened—to see Anthony, to assure him that her love for him was absolute and she wouldn’t disappear. She had to keep him safe from his mother, from himself. That was her job, wasn’t it? That was her strength. Something tolled inside her—the memory of panic. The blush and gloom of the children at the Widows Walk—the men who scuttled there, craven and ashamed; the men who bounded proudly through the rooms, pot-bellied, bird-necked, sticky-fingered; happy for their meager slice of power, for the chance to say, see what I can do to another. See how they turn to me, how they abide.