Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  They rounded a corner and saw two horses hitched outside a tavern. Alphie peered through the window—the grooms were drinking themselves to near death at a table in the back. Each contraction of her heart, each snap of blood in her wrists, each tender flicker behind her ears, all said the same thing: Anthony.

  She unhitched the horses. “Can you ride?” she was about to ask Orchard, but the girl leaped onto the back of the horse and turned it expertly around. Alphie mounted hers, brisk and sure-footed, even though she hadn’t done such a thing in years.

  Together they drove out to the avenue. It had been a long time since she’d worn trousers, since she’d straddled a horse, since she felt the reins burn her bare palms and the muscles clench in her thighs and knees. She heard the clanging of the trolley bells. Here she was, bare-chested, gaining speed down Second Avenue.

  They galloped past Forty-fourth Street—there, just a few miles away, on the banks of the Hudson, her feet had first touched the city sand. Years ago, just fourteen, she’d been ferried down the river by a fur-trapper in a canoe. The day her father turned her out, she’d walked for miles along the wooded bank, stunned and alone, the dollar loose in her pocket. She saw the trapper pushing off from a cove—he was taking his furs down to New York City to sell in the Tenderloin. New York, she dreamed. She gave him half of her dollar, for safe passage and a warm beer. She sat there among the coonskins and rabbit pelts while the valley glided past her, a pearled and craggy dream. The man didn’t speak but made birdcalls to the sky. She felt light-headed as the oars pulled her away from her village and flung green muck on her knees. And here was her thought as she watched the rippling water: how good of her father, how generous, to spare a whole, hard-earned dollar. She remembered Sam’s face and felt a fire in her stomach, a pulse in her groin. But what was it—loathing or desire? In the back of the store they’d been playing around, trying on some of the ready-made clothes. He’d put lipstick on her—a game, just fooling—then practiced a kiss. She could still taste the bittersweet paste in the corners of her mouth, feel the salty drag of his tongue against hers.

  If she turned here and rode fifty miles up the Hudson, she’d find that old village, the home of little Alphie—known then as Alphonse Booth Jr., who worked as a shopboy for his father, sweeping and stocking, delivering eggs from the family coop every weekend. Alphonse, with hen bites on his pale legs, the smell of chicken shit on his shoes and clothes, steering the cart with its teetering crates down the lanes. Alphonse, who had let Sam Vetz kiss him and grope him in the back of the store. They’d wrestled and grabbed at each other, sick with some kind of longing that was both foreign and real—and then Mr. Booth had walked in.

  Alphie steered the horse down into the Thirties, past the bakeries and the oyster barrels, past the stacks of corn and buckets of boot nails, the links of sausage big as oxen yokes and spotty with fat. The horses lurched and whinnied together, thrilled to be given the lead. Beside her the girl’s look was hard and feral—she leaned forward in the saddle and gripped the horn, the soap-boy’s shirt flapping around her small frame, her feet free from the stirrups and braced against the horse’s flank.

  There were times when Alphie hated herself for choosing a life in which she and Anthony had to lie, even when things felt truer than she’d ever known. Sometimes they still went down to the Shingle and Plank, to the places where people knew them, where other couples like themselves gathered, couples carrying on the same kind of ruse in their own houses. Gradually, though, Anthony began to leave her behind, drifting down to the water alone and not reappearing until dawn. Alphie would cry through the night, or pace the rooms, seething and furious, before falling asleep in the chair by the door. Those nights she almost hated him for making their life harder than it already was, and fleetingly she wondered if she could give it all up, if it was worth it. Wouldn’t it be easier if she lived like a man, the way she’d been born, the way her parents expected her to be, the way Anthony lived now? Wouldn’t it be easier for her to marry a plain, undemanding woman and father a few children and drift down once in a while to the waterfront to be the person she knew she was? Why couldn’t she just do what came so easily to everyone else? But in the morning she’d rise and brush out her hair and lace up her corset and she’d feel whole again, like herself, and she looked in the mirror and knew who she was, knew that despite all of the dangers, a life of a different kind of deceit would kill her. How would it feel to know there were people who’d chosen to live as they felt, not as they appeared, and never looked back? Could she bear their happiness, as shunned as they were? Was she brave enough?

  Was she?

  This was her body, she knew, but not herself. Looking in the mirror every morning after she dressed, seeing in the flesh the way she felt inside—how could she ever give that up? She had to make a choice. This was hers. And she wasn’t sorry.

  She picked up speed, edging her way around wagons, weaving between pushcarts, watching the crowds in the street dodge and leap. Her back and torso were bare to the breeze, her skin sweating in the gray sun. Every week she used to pass this very butcher shop, where the fowl were slaughtered and hung from the awnings, their wings fanned out as if in flight. Sometimes she’d bring home a jar of blood—for puddings and sauces, she always told the shopboy—but then, late at night, she rubbed the blood into her monthly cloths to show the Signora. How she trembled there, as the Signora unrolled the cloth and turned it to the light—how she worried something else would be amiss: the silhouette of her dress, the smoothness of her cheek, the shape of her hands.

  But for now there would be no crinoline skirts or twenty-buttoned boots, no pomegranate paste for her lips, no haircombs or bustles or gardenia perfume. She wanted them to be sorry. Bitterly sorry. And she would be there to see it on their faces.

  SEVENTEEN

  A FEW HOURS BEFORE DAWN SYLVAN WENT DOWN TO THE water. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see much—just the hulls rising in the shipyard beyond, the scaffolding etched against the sky. Around him the docks were lit by a yellow pulse—a beacon from an island upriver.

  He’d left Mrs. Izzo’s at dusk. After a plate of ham and biscuits and a glass of honeyed milk, Odile had fallen asleep in the chair by the window, the baby in a basket beside her. For an hour she had stared at the little girl in wonder—brushing the fuzz of her hair, tracing the puckish tips of her ears. I have a feeling, she’d said, that my sister would never have left her behind. This isn’t her doing at all.

  She’d mentioned going to the police, but then thought better of it. An unwed mother, missing in the city; a baby abandoned in the slums—how many times had they heard that tale of woe before? How quickly would they act? She would go to the Jennysweeter herself, she decided—first thing in the morning, just as Lillian Edgar had said. As they finished their meal, she took out a piece of paper and smoothed it out across Mrs. Izzo’s table—a list of theaters she’d copied from her mother’s directory. She ran her finger down the names, but there was no Featherbone, nothing that even sounded similar. Her sister, she believed, had been familiar with a man who once worked there. But that could be anywhere in the city. And what—a hotel? A storefront? Saloon? She sighed and looked out the window, touching the bald spot behind her ear.

  Sylvan sat quietly at the table, soaking his hands in a bucket of ice water, watching Mrs. Izzo change the bandage on Odile’s knee. He couldn’t help but feel a tick of sadness, or jealousy—that Odile would risk such a thing for her sister, that she loved her without question, that they shared something secret and their own—however reckless and troubled Isabelle was. He decided it for himself—he’d go that night, while Odile rested; he’d ask around and see what he could find.

  He didn’t wake her when he left, didn’t even move to lift the edge of the afghan—there were biscuit crumbs, he saw, still on her fingers—he just whispered to Mrs. Izzo that he’d return in the morning, when his shift was over. She nodded—she was already back at her workbench, concertina spectacles perched o
n her nose, making intricate lace of a dead woman’s hair.

  He had made his way in the dying light, down to the taverns he used to haunt—those half-forgotten nights spent with Francesca, drinking until the stars sang and the pavement rippled—to the muddy cellar dives where he once hid like a frog, fingers gummed to the bar, knowing the ghost in the house awaited him. He asked a few of the old barkeeps—the wilier ones, the raconteurs, the top-hatted sachems with squeaky red faces—if they knew what the Featherbone was. And they liked these questions, the chance to prattle on their pulpit—they believed that the more they knew of the city, the more it belonged to them, native-born, not to the goat-hoofed immigrants. One fellow said he was sure the Bone was out by the shipyard, in back of the old whale skeleton, and not a place any right-blooded man would be seen.

  Sylvan knew the kind of people who lurked around there at night, of course—grifters and dog-fighters; men on shore for the first night in months, out of their minds with sea-fever and drink. Whoever he was, this man Odile’s sister had known, it was better if Sylvan saw to him first. He drank a beer, slept for a short spell in his own room on Ludlow Street, then made his way down to the water.

  He moved through the slips where the taverns were loudest, between women in feathered dresses and packs of grizzled, hooting sailors, their faces streaked with coal dust and sweat. He heard the music and laughter from open saloons, but he kept to himself. Earlier he’d passed the stable where the night-soilers gathered before their shift. He had watched, from across the shadowed way, as the men had readied the slop-wagon, as No Bones stacked the buckets and Everjohn latched down the barrels. He’d listened to the beat of their shovels as they drifted away in the dark, the hymn they sang to strengthen their lungs. He’d turned the other way and kept walking. He couldn’t bring himself to go back, not for another night of it: the smell of shit, the ghostly coating of lime-powder on his hands and his face, the way the other men turned their backs to him when they hosed out the wagon at shift’s end. And then afterward: back to the cellar, to his carefully folded newspapers and rescued debris, a bottle of beer keeping cold in a hole in the floor, where the boards had given way to dirt. He couldn’t.

  Behind the shipyard he saw a shiver of light on the cobblestones—a perforated paper lantern, swinging from a post—and then, just beyond, an archway of bone. The whale skeleton, just as the old man had said. He remembered when the whale had washed ashore at the Battery a few years ago—they had set up a tent and charged people a quarter to see it, then sawed it up and boiled it down and sold off the blubber to the oil works. Now he walked under what remained: the ribs, curving up against the sky. The men who passed him in the dark, or who hung back between the bones, smoking cheroots, only dropped their eyes and looked away, their chins dug deep in their collars.

  At the end of the path was a bare-shingled inn, sinking in a patch of sand. Young girls idled out on the terrace, leaning against the rail. He could see the glow of their wigs in the moonlight, as pale as clouds of mercury. They whistled huskily down as he slunk to the door. Hello, sailor; hey, dandy, up here. There was a blue star on the frame, he noticed, just as there’d been at the poppy box.

  He jammed down his hat and buttoned his collar and stepped inside, through a sateen curtain, into a low-ceilinged room. Perfume and smoke, the liquor as black as ship’s tar. Men sat at felt-lined tables, their faces turned from the light. He saw the glimmer of their watch chains, the wrinkle of their coats. Here and there a fat hand curled around a snifter—a clawed armrest—a young knee in a flounced skirt. In another room, someone played a lonely waltz on a harmonium.

  Sylvan could feel the eyes dragging over him, picking through the oakum dust that lingered in the air, following him as he approached the bar, where a bald man mopped up a spill and ate a plate of pickled onions with a toothpick.

  “I’m looking,” Sylvan said in a low voice, “for a young man who worked here once.”

  The bartender stared at him, then speared another onion and dragged it, split, around the rim. “Upstairs,” he said. “The Widows Walk. They’ll take care of you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  ODILE WOKE WHEN IT WAS STILL DARK OUT. SHE DIDN’T KNOW where she was at first—when she opened her eyes, she saw only a postcard from San Francisco, tacked to the headboard of the bed. White cliffs and palm trees. Women in lavender dresses, promenading by the sea. Then she smelled oyster brine in the air. For a moment she thought she was in a sea cave, festooned with kelp, but she realized it was only the braids that hung from the rafters, and she heard the hiss of the river beyond the walls. Quietly she rose and lifted the baby from her basket, whispered in the dark: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright! How many times had she recited the same thing for her sister in the middle of the night—when they were too nervous, too excited to sleep—when they lay awake with a candle lit and made shadow puppets on the wall?

  Briefly she’d wondered if Belle, confused and alone, had tried to get rid of the baby—if she’d panicked and left her behind in a privy—if she believed that any fate, even death, was better than giving her up to someone else. But how could someone like Belle—always so strong-minded and loyal, a woman who’d tended to the children of the Frog and Toe, who’d taught them the same routines she and her sister once practiced in their own room at night—do something so desperate and cruel? She couldn’t believe it. Belle was in trouble—she knew it by the tremble in her blood. Lines of that letter played around in her mind, like the haunting refrain of a song.

  While Mrs. Izzo slept, she brewed herself a cup of coffee, bitter and black, and sat drinking it alone at the workbench. She took a swath of lace, the thickest and darkest, and made a veil for her hat. She would have to arrive at the apothecary shop as someone else: a girl in mourning, in trouble. Mrs. Bloodworth would know her face—it was her sister’s face, although crooked to the side and slightly narrow. The mean little scrub-girl had seen her, too—a plucky naïf with a worn-out valise, chirruping at the yellow door. She began to think of a story: an immigrant girl, a chambermaid, lost in the city and needing help. Sitting there among the bobbins and needles, she felt as if she were back in the old theater, mending costumes before a show. She had stitched the golden flames to Belle’s devil dress, the ruffles to Aldovar’s gown, the sequins to Mr. Mackintosh’s blindfold. She had a role, she reminded herself as she pinned the veil to her hat and laced the dagger in her boot. A performance of sorts. Relax your face. Open your throat. Raise your chin like you have a secret that everyone wants to know.

  When Mrs. Izzo woke, she made Odile breakfast: a hunk of cheese, a cold egg, and a slice of ham. Odile thanked her, offered to pay something for the food and the bed, but Mrs. Izzo just shook her head. “I only want your word that you’ll be back for the child. That Mr. Threadgill’s thanked proper. That she’s got a peaceful home to go to.”

  Odile unlatched her locket and set it down on the table, next to the cameos and brooches. “This is as good as my word, ma’am,” she said. “It’s yours.”

  It hurt her to leave the baby behind, even for a short while, but she was safe, at least—alive. There was some strange relief in that, wherever her sister had gone.

  She drank the last of her coffee, looked out the window. She drew a crescent in the steam on the windowpane and peered through to the river-dumps beyond. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  She remembered, when the tiger cubs were little, how she and Belle used to perch one on a stool in the ticket booth, then crouch red-faced below while a dithering patron opened her purse and asked for a pass and then screamed loud enough to shake the rafters. But there would be no more of that, she realized. No more of Mother and Belle’s disquieting fights—Belle tearing at the curtains with her chalked-up hands, or bashing in a footlight with her heel—while Odile sat alone in the wings, plinking a mallet against her brace, trying to find a song of her own.

  She’d never understood the poem before, not really—and she’d never said as much
to Mother—but now it began to make some kind of sense. What god could dream up a creature so fierce? And what god could contain the thing he’d created, when she burned as bright as all the rages of heaven, and when she came to wield the very fire that had forged her?

  A GOLDEN FOG HUNG LOW on the riverbank. As Odile walked down Cherry Street, she saw the black glitter of the water, the old row houses with their crooked shutters and maritime stars. In the air she could smell salt and fish, metallic water pooling between the cobbled bricks, a heel of rye left to harden and mold on the curbside. She passed buildings that seemed to have been lost: dwarfed in the shadows, on streets so narrow no traffic could pass.

  Up on the Bowery the crowd grew dense. She looked at every passing face, hoping that one would be Belle’s. But no one met her eye, and if they did they looked quickly away. I’m a mourner, she reminded herself. Play the part.

  She reached the apothecary shop on Doyers Street, with its looming gold spectacles and dusty windowpanes. Above her the sky flamed red. The breeze lifted her hair, cooled her neck. A tired dray pulled a wagon down the lane—milk or ice or newspaper. She remembered drinking coffee on the beach with her sister, combing for shells under gray morning clouds, the boardwalk empty, the ocean like stone. For a moment she strained to hear the ruff-ruff of the stubborn surf along the shore, the nervous chitter of the trolley bell. But there was only the bump of wagon wheels along the ruts in the ground, the angry caw of squirrels on the roof.

  She drew the veil over her face, stepped up to the green shop door and reached for the knob. She couldn’t go home, she reminded herself. What had she left to return to without seeing this through?

  She walked inside and a bell chimed above her, the most innocent of sounds. She glanced around at the rows of polished shelves, stocked with tonics and powders and pastes. Some of the labels had started to curl in the heat. She looked over to the counter, with its iron register and old scales, but the stool behind it was empty.