by Leslie Parry
Anthony hadn’t been there to stop the Signora that night. He hadn’t come to Blackwell’s to find her.
It was only a year ago that she’d stood here in her peach crinoline and best hat, her arm looped through his. A year ago she’d lifted her skirts and taken a breath and marched up these very steps to her fate. But now she ran, her body sore and broken but still teeming, and let herself into the parlor.
TWENTY-SIX
INSIDE THE HOUSE, SYLVAN MOVED QUIETLY AMONG THE STIFF, wilted gathering, listening to a feeble violinist scratch out a song. He’d spoken in Italian to the woman at the door—the same words of condolence that the Scarlattas had used when visiting their grieving neighbors. People arrived bearing plates of food and fresh-cut flowers. There was a table crowded with offerings: a whole muskmelon, chocolate torta and jugs of wine, lamb stew with a skin of orange grease.
He could see the casket from where he stood—a simple pinewood box. Underneath the heap of festoons—soggy carnations, cheaply dyed ribbon that bled out in the heat—he could smell the freshly sanded planks, see the glimmer of sap and crudely hammered nails. It reminded him of being a little boy, sleeping along the waterfront in boxes meant for the dead. He hung back near the parlor door, listening to the whispers in the hallway, the flustered patter of the white paper fans.
And poor Anton came in to find her dead.
She was always a nervous-looking thing, wasn’t she? And his mother so good to her!
I won’t speak ill, but there was always something crafty about her. And where are her people now, I wonder? Or does she have any?
An urchin, by the looks of it. I’m not surprised. Someone told me they’d seen her on the bridge once, going over to Brooklyn. And what would she be wanting there?
Poor girl. And the poor lamb with her. I heard the screams, but I didn’t think . . . How could I have known? Didn’t we all scream? I hardly remember, but the things I must have said!
He studied them out of the corner of his eye, looking for a sign of something suspicious or familiar. But these were very much women of the neighborhood—the kind he’d seen every day of his life. Their arms were thick, their faces drawn. They bore the scars and pockmarks of old illnesses, and the plain, unspoken sorrow of those who had buried many beloved of their own. There was a familiar, morbid relief in their eyes—the guilt and pride of having been spared. In the middle of the room were half a dozen women in beaded black shawls, crying louder than the rest. They were the lacrimata—the same women who’d come through the streets last winter, swinging their thuribles of incense, leaving trails in the snow. Their grief was an art; they were paid to mourn with such fervor and conviction.
On the divan behind the backgammon table sat the queen of the bereaved: a woman, plumed and veiled, who cooled herself with a black silk fan. A train of mourners snaked through the room, pecking at the knuckles of her limply offered hand, murmuring their sorrows, bowing their heads. Her veil was drawn back over the brim of her hat, so everyone could see that face—beautiful, Sylvan thought, though in a haughty, injured way. She held back her shoulders and bit down her lips, purred and demurred when the men called her a saint. After all, they intoned, she’d been the one to take in this waif, hadn’t she? She’d been the one to sacrifice, and then to lose them both—sigh, swish, whisper, kiss. The line moved in rhythm around her.
What had happened here? He moved into line behind the others, bracing as he took a step forward toward the divan, and then another. The lacrimata dutifully wailed beside him—the more tears they shed, the more they earned—but this woman wasn’t even dazed or red-nosed, although she clenched a handkerchief tightly. She was flint-eyed beneath the feathers of her hat, nodding along with the impotent tick of her fan. There was something angrily vacant about her face, something both prideful and dead.
Beside her sat a young man—listless, probably drunk, with pale skin and red hooded eyes. He said nothing to anyone, just stared into his lap, as if his hands were a stranger’s that had miraculously attached themselves to his body. She talked for both of them, it seemed—the whispered platitudes, the properly cued sighs of remorse, the routine and empty mention of God. The man might have been her brother, Sylvan guessed, or maybe even her son. They had the same angular widow’s peak, the same moody jut of the chin. With each word someone whispered into her ear, the woman slid her eyes over to look at the man, as if to see that he’d heard it too, but he didn’t move. He didn’t seem to notice her at all.
Something about his bleariness, his pout seemed familiar. As the line moved closer, as Sylvan slinked his way up toward the backgammon table, which was scattered with guttering candles and plates of half-eaten cake—as he saw her black-gloved hand lift and drop, lift and drop—he snuck a glance in the man’s direction. The light was different—fuller and blue, bringing out the pores on his nose, the flick of his lashes as he gazed at his hands. He was sitting upright, combed and cologned, dressed in good Sunday black. But he knew him. It was the man from the opium den—the man who’d held his hand as they lay back on the cushions, who’d whispered nonsense to the whistle of the pipes. The man whose jacket he wore now.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the front hall—a door banging open, cries and murmurs, the confused shuffle of feet. The mourners parted and drew back. A young man staggered into the room. He wore no shirt, only trousers with suspenders and a pair of broken shoes. He was sweating, out of breath, stinking of mildew and horse. Everyone looked at him, then at each other.
He took a step toward the divan. He was ragged and wet-eyed, but that’s not what made Sylvan stare. There, beneath his collarbone, was a single word, tattooed on his skin. Leonetti.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THROUGH THE ROOST OF FEATHERED HATS, BETWEEN THE ruffles of taffeta and paper fans, into the sweltering, overstuffed parlor with its smell of tooth powder and ricotta fritters and browning carnations—Alphie pushed ahead, toward the sound of sobbing. She saw a casket on the dining table, strewn with garlands, and ancient wailers in their black beaded shawls. They were swooning and kissing their prayer cards, crying so hard she thought they might pitch forward and collapse. Who were they weeping for, she wondered, and with such ardor? As she moved forward into the room, people muttered and fell back, picking up their skirts, chirring into handkerchiefs. The wailers stopped when they saw her approach. Their eyes grew large; their tongues went still. Alphie shoved past them toward the casket—toward the two figures seated on the chesterfield beyond—even as a hush fell over the room, even as the mourners turned like a murder of molting crows, confused and alarmed, to face her.
There was Anthony, alive. He was sitting beside the Signora, staring dumbly at his hands. He looked terrible—as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in days—gazing down at his palms as if they were eaten through with maggots. He’d been down in the dens again, she could tell. His eyes were swollen and bloodshot, his fingernails black. He seemed to be held upright only by the crackle of his freshly starched suit.
“Anthony?”
He didn’t look up. He just opened and closed his fists, then turned over his hands and stared at his knuckles. Beside him the Signora, in her finest mourning dress—a confection of frothy silks and French lace—turned away from her flock and raised her eyes to Alphie’s.
The bruise thudded in the back of Alphie’s head. “Buon giorno, Mamma.”
The Signora stayed very still, her fan ticking but her eyes dead black. The cleft in her ear darkened with a wave of blood. The mourners stared at Alphie, awed and stricken, as if she were an animal escaped from a cage at the zoo. Then just as quickly they looked away—at their milky coffee and squared handkerchiefs, at the cluster of boots on the rug. As if by turning to stone and averting their eyes, they could somehow make her disappear. But Alphie just stood there, sweating and panting, waiting for Anthony to raise his head. This was the nightmare that she’d woken up from, night after night, year after year. Here, her body: a betrayal, exposed. Here, a crowd gathered around h
er, their faces grim and aghast. But it wasn’t laughter or cruelty she was met with. Only silence.
“Anthony?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “What is all this?”
He reached over to the table for a glass of cordial, took a drink, then lifted his eyes to hers. She braced herself for it—the recognition, the relief. But he only stared at her blankly, then looked away.
“Anton,” she said again.
“Who is he?” a child asked somewhere across the room. “Who is that man?”
“Nessuno,” Anthony whispered, staring down into his glass. “Nessuno.”
The Signora drew her lips into a thin, trembling smile. She took a step forward and slipped. She tumbled to the floor, but no one moved to help her; they could only stare as she lay sprawled on the rug with her hat askew and her fan ripped in half, gawping like a caught fish. Anthony didn’t turn to help her to her feet—he didn’t seem to hear her at all. He just took a sip of his cordial and stared at the wall.
The blood began to whir in Alphie’s ears. She thought of the baby rattle Anthony had made himself, the shimmer of teeth as they fell to the floor and caught in her hair. Il mostro! She thought of little blue children laid out on his cooling-board, in dark rooms all across the city, and his pincers twisting their teeth free. She thought of how he shook out his pocket when he returned home, and how his mother would sweeten his coffee with bourbon and grab her golden box from the mantel. She would demand music—Fisarmonica, fisarmonica!—a merry song to chase away the night that pawed at the windows, furring the glass. Anthony would play his accordion then, and even through the sweetest music, Alphie could hear the whisper of grit in its lungs. Who were the wolves the Signora believed prowled beyond her door? Who were the beasts—shadowy, fanged—that her son had to prove he could vanquish?
Now someone was at her side. It was the parson, the scurvied man with puffy white gums. “Sir,” he said, taking Alphie by the arm. “I’m sorry, sir—do you know this man?”
She turned to look at them—there, the Signora’s blustery circle of friends in their bombazine and pearls; there, the neighbors, picking wormishly at their cakes; there, the wailers, a chorus of lachrymose toads. The candles had almost burned away; the air smelled of smoking wicks. She saw among the crowd the handsome black band that she’d knitted for Anthony, but on the arm of another man. She stared at it. How had he come by such a thing, unless her husband had made a gift of it? She looked over at the pair of them—Anthony, his eyes fixed firmly on the wall in front of him; the Signora, a woozy confusion of furbelows and perfume, white-faced on the rug.
What had happened? She stared at the coffin, laid out on the table. Cedar dust hung in the air—the sweet, peppery smell of death’s shell. She remembered the bump of the carriage in the night, Orchard Broome’s body beside her. She remembered the sawdust in her hair, the sawdust on her tongue—the taste of that cedar, thick in her throat.
“Sir?” the parson said again.
“Of course he knows me,” Alphie said, turning back. “Why, you’re the one who married us.”
He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes watery and slightly a-bulge. The breath left his lungs in a long hiss.
“E ‘un uomo squilibrato!” the Signora screamed. “Squilibrato!”
Alphie looked at Anthony again, but he seemed very far away—his elegant, dye-flecked fingers wrapped around his cordial glass, his eyes sunken and fixed on some immovable point. She stood there between them, worrying her tooth with her tongue. I am the wolf he let in. The tooth rocked back and forth in its coppery pocket, then slipped free. She tasted it rolling around in her mouth, a hot pearl of salt. She spit it out into her hand—it was small and nubbled and arrow-shaped, pink at the root.
The Signora gazed at her, shaking. There was something so sad in her eyes—Alphie didn’t know what to think. She lifted the Signora’s tiny, gloved hand as the others had done, and wrapped it around the tooth.
The parson shouted for someone to grab Alphie. The neighbors—who had been guided there only by dutiful manners and slyly rumbling stomachs—now stared at the specter in the room: a blasphemer, a lunatic, bedeviled by drink. Where were the police? Alphie pulled away and strode up to the casket. Is it I who is mad? she seethed, pushing the carnations to the floor.
Let’s see who’s mad. Let them all see.
She unlatched the lid and threw it back. But other than a sack of straw, the coffin was empty.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE CARRIAGE HOUSE SMELLED TERRIBLE—THE SPILLED PERFUME, the sweaty yellow sheets, the warm curl of meat growing green in its handkerchief. Odile stared at it for a long moment. A tongue too small to be an ox’s or a lamb’s, all rough-shorn and lean. Slowly she wrapped it back up and shut it away in the drawer. On the floor the rice glimmered in a patch of sun. She shuddered. Who were these people? How could anyone stand to live here, with the smells wafting up from the shop beneath—cedar, ammonia, flesh—and the spiders scuttling over black stains on the rug?
Then there was a noise below—a door knocking open, someone tripping up the stairs. Odile reached down and pulled the dagger from her boot. She pointed it at the door.
She didn’t know exactly what she expected to see—a neighbor sent to fetch the undertaker. Mouse chasing her down. The lady of the house herself—the painted wife in gamine clothes—returning home with a leaky parcel from the butcher shop. But instead she saw her own ghost appear at the top of the stairs. A young woman with a bleeding mouth and a wild mass of hair.
Belle.
She stood alone in the doorway, sleek as a newborn foal, trembling on her skinny legs. She wore a man’s shirt over a torn and dirty dress. On her feet were small, shapeless slippers, and her skin was greased with something that smelled fatty and butter-sweet, like soap. She didn’t say anything, just took a step into the room.
Odile ran and threw her arms around her, pressed her nose into the crease of her neck. She smelled the grass in her hair, the pony-musk on her clothes. She felt her sister’s heart beating fast, the tick of blood in her neck. Belle tensed for a moment, then fell against her shoulder. Odile drew a breath—she wanted to ask if she was all right, what had happened, what she needed, let’s go home—but the words wouldn’t come. She had a weird, fleeting thought that she wanted to eat her sister, like a sorceress in a storybook—gobble her down in her belly, keep her safe. But she just held on to her, an ache prickling in her nose, between her eyes, the dagger still damp in her hand.
When Belle leaned back, she saw it there between them—she saw her own eyes, stunned and red, staring back at her in the blade. She must have known where Odile had gotten it—she must have known she’d been down to the Frog and Toe. A look crossed her face—wonder, then shame, then a terrible distress. She made a sound Odile had never heard before, a low and doglike whine, rippling in the back of her throat. Odile started to cry herself—she couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, but even as the words came out, she wondered, Why am I the one saying this?
Belle just took her by the hand and dragged her, stumbling through the rooms—pulling the blankets off the bed, turning over the cradle, kicking aside the empty jar, the scattered rice—teeth, Odile saw, they were teeth. Belle threw open the armoire doors, pushed aside the mess of dresses, then turned around and reached for a basket on the floor. A blanket, a broken rattle. A loose flower, pulpy and black—nothing more.
Odile realized what she was looking for, of course—“The baby.”
Belle turned to her, eyes wide, the sound growing louder in her throat.
“I’ve seen her. A man rescued her from . . . from . . .” She felt the tears start to come again—she pressed her hands to her eyes. She hoped she could find her way back to Mrs. Izzo’s from here—somewhere by the river-dumps, the oyster house. “She’s with a woman down by the water. I think I . . .”
Belle grabbed her by the arms. Up close Odile could see something was wrong with her mouth. It was too dark, a pit, as yawning
and empty as an eel’s. The only movement was the glisten of spit as she drew in a breath. She hadn’t spoken a word, Odile realized—not once since she’d walked in the door.
Suddenly Odile was burning hot; the light snapped in her eyes. “Who did this to you?” She cupped her sister’s chin—“Tell me!” But of course Belle couldn’t say—that was just it, wasn’t it? She couldn’t say!—and Odile only felt a wave of blind, stupid frustration. Her own tongue prickled and swelled up like a sponge, pasting itself to the roof of her mouth.
Then: a noise beyond the door—footsteps on the stairs, a rasp. Odile looked over. She brought up the dagger, still sticky in her hand. A woman burst, breathless, into the room—Mrs. Bloodworth, still in her rumpled shirtwaist; still wearing her apron, smeared with green. She stepped over the sheets, the jar, the teeth. She looked around for a moment, her fingers pressed to her mouth, then hurried toward the girls.
“Good Lord!” she said. “Mouse told me—”
Belle only covered her face and began to sob.
Odile pushed herself in front of her sister. She took the dagger—the little, riddled old knife—and flung it through the air. Her wrist flicked, her elbow sprang. She felt a hitch in her back; a searing pain shot up her spine and fizzed through her neck. For a moment her whole arm went numb; her vision blurred. There was a quick, soundless gleam in the air, and everything went still.
Mrs. Bloodworth stopped in the middle of the room. She looked puzzled, surprised. She glanced down at the hilt, which stuck out sideways from her hip, like a hand crank on a barrel organ. The red began to bloom around it. She nodded slowly, calmly, as if she were agreeing with something someone had said. But the room was silent. Belle gasped and looked at Odile, then back at Mrs. Bloodworth, who stood there with her hand raised in the air, her eyes fixed on the hilt in wonder. For a moment it seemed as if she was about to reach down and give it a turn, to see what notes she might sing. Then she swayed and fell down to the floor.