The Bird's Child

by Sandra Leigh Price

‘The sparrows.’

  ‘The sparrows do a lot of talking, especially when they are supposed to migrate for the winter,’ another muffled voice added. The air seemed to fizzle around me.

  ‘Well, you should listen to them. You might hear a thing or two.’

  ‘What happened to him, Hephzibah’s brother?’ The voice was full of curiosity.

  ‘Isaiah was a newly trained scribe. He was friends with Israel, I hear, they had spent some time together at yeshiva.’ The tangle of names, the threads of our family, were all twisted together like a challah bread.

  ‘What happened? Why didn’t he make good his promise? Why is the boy marked with that writing?’

  The questions peppered the air but the ship’s pitch and toss had claimed me; my eyelids were pressed together by the salt of my tears. I drowned in sleep and the trunk closed over me sometime in the night, a black thud.

  The loud slam of the trunk snapping shut on my poor excuse for a costume must have disturbed Lily, for her door opened a crack and her tear-stained eye peered through to see who it was, before she opened the door wide to me. I held out the peace offering of her own hair. She reached for it tentatively, and then threw it onto the bed. The petal-coloured dress was abandoned on the bed too, the only colourful thing in her white room, that and the red splashes of frustration on her cheeks. She was dressed in a plain white shirt and her now-familiar trousers.

  ‘I looked like an idiot,’ she sobbed, tears falling, her nose running. A new wave of embarrassed blushes shot up her neck to join the ones in her cheeks as she wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘The words dried up in my mind.’

  ‘No one noticed. Well, not much.’

  She snorted, the incredulous beginnings of a laugh and the last remnants of her tears. Her whole face seemed to shimmer, painted pink, the tears like a glaze – she was as beautiful as a pearl. I took her face in my hands and wiped it slowly with my handkerchief. Her cloudy eyes stopped shifting and fixed on mine, her lower lip pinned by her teeth. My thumb grazed her lip, and it was soft as kid. A kiss – the possibility of it hung between us like a question mark. But the moment vanished as footsteps loudly passed the door and down the hall. With the slam of a door my hand fell away.

  She stepped out into the hallway and I thought she had fled again, that I had already gone too far, offending her, my hand trespassing on her face. But she was calling to me and when I went to look she was pulling the trunk towards her room for all she was worth, the rope handles burning at the tender flesh of her palms. I didn’t ask why, but took it from her and pulled, the feet of the trunk scraping the wooden floor, two black tracks left in its wake.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Lily

  I felt my whole heartbeat fill the trunk. Ari clapped three times and I pushed the lid and rose up, but clumsily, so before I could even get out the lid clanked down on me and shut me in. I had not been quick enough to brace it with my hands; how would I ever be quick enough? I pushed up the lid again and stood, a weird swan emerging from a battered wooden egg. Ari stood with his eyes glued to his watch.

  ‘Forty seconds and counting,’ he smiled, but I knew it was too long.

  ‘Shall we try again?’

  I crouched down again: if Bess Houdini could do it, so could I. With the lid down a second time it was stifling. The darkness grew and the sides of the trunk leaned closer somehow, the space seemed smaller. My face grew hot; my own breath turned the still air into a furnace, and I felt tears well at the familiar musty smell of old clothes.

  After my father died I retreated to my parents’ cupboard to avoid my mother. Tucked amidst his clothes, I felt close to him, the smell of his aftershave still lingering on the collar of his good suit.

  While hiding in the cupboard one day I found a strange album filled with photographs of girls and women just like me, all of them as pale as I am, albinos each and every one. I pulled it out and listened for my mother, but I could only hear my own heartbeat. The girls in the photographs were posed on chairs, the frills of their dresses rippling down to the floor, corsets holding them in tight. They were made so thin I thought their bones would crack like wishbones. From each portrait a girl stared unsmilingly over my shoulder at something I couldn’t see. Below each of the strangely eerie photographs were their names, Astor Saint Clements, Daisy Sinclair, Xanthe Fitzroy – each claimed to follow the tradition of Unzie the Great, the great white Aboriginal Albino, mind-readers every one.

  ‘What are you doing, Matilda? Get out, get out at once,’ my mother screamed, whiskey on her breath as she reached to pull at my ankle. I tried to draw my knees up further into the cupboard, dropping the album at her feet, but I was not quick enough. She pounced on it.

  ‘What are you doing with that? You are not to have that! Who said you could touch things that don’t belong to you?’

  ‘Who are they, Ma? They look just like me. Are they relations?’ At this she went quiet for a bit, then she sat on the edge of the bed, her fingers toying with the corners of the album, not daring to open it.

  ‘Not likely. Your father bought me that at the carnival before we were married. He took me to see the Three Moon Maidens, who sat on the stage, their arms linked like they were doing the Pride of Erin.’ Her voice caught in her throat and became hard to hear.

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They made predictions in otherworldly voices. We should never have gone, they were charlatans and it is blasphemy what they said.’

  ‘But what did they say?’ I pressed. Desperate to hear, I scooted out of the safety of the cupboard to listen.

  ‘To your father they said he would work with words, which he laughed at of course, for he had just started at the local paper.’

  ‘But what about you, Ma, what did they say to you?’ Her look was steely then as she placed the album face-down on the bed as if it offended the Lord, but she would not speak.

  ‘Ma, what did they say?’ She pulled the rosary out of her pocket and fingered the beads, mouthing a row of Hail Marys.

  ‘Ma?’

  ‘That I should expect one like them,’ she whispered as she lay the beads aside. I did not see her retrieve her stick from beneath the bed, I should have been quick enough, I should have known by then.

  ‘I was expecting you before we were married and you were marked by my sin.’

  Each stroke of it upon my back made me wince and writhe, but I would not cry out. I steeled myself inside the pain, each strike branding my skin with a bloody welt.

  ‘Ready?’ Ari’s muted voice came from above. ‘One, two, three!’ He was counting words, not blows. I flipped the lid and sprang out: a jack-in-the-box could have done no better. But within three seconds the Houdinis would have first got out of a bag tied with rope, then out of a padlocked trunk and have swapped places too. Three seconds: Houdini had the power to make time elastic.

  ‘Five seconds,’ Ari said. He held out his hand to help me from the trunk, the touch of his skin on mine full of static. Surely he was going to lean closer; I felt the invisible hand on my back push me forward, the fingers of desire playing me like a harp.

  ‘The hinge at the back needs altering, I think. There is a hammer in the shed, won’t be a minute,’ he said as left the room. I wasn’t sure what he was meant to be dressed as – Pan, a faun? – but without the horns he reminded me, in his shaggy pants, of a cygnet, brown down to his feet.

  Did Ari not kiss me because I was not of his faith? I thought about Harry and Bess and how they became the Houdinis. He was the son of a rabbi; she was the daughter of a woman who said the rosary every hour. Yet still they had found a third place, a place of their own.

  When I was walking back from the theatre the night before last, a man was selling books on the side of the road, each coloured spine looking like a jewel on the blanket he had laid out along the shopfronts. The first book I picked up, red as a heart, sent a prickle of recognition up my neck. It was the biography of Houdini, based on the recollections of his wife Bess. Ca
refully I flicked through the pages, feeling as though there was a message between the lines just for me, admiring the gloss on their handsome faces in the photographs. According to the book, Bess and Harry met in three different ways and were three times married. Thrice like a fairy tale. Three times a charm. I was curious to read on and find out more, but could see from his stare that the bookseller, huffing impatiently with each page I turned, didn’t want me to linger. Another passer-by stopped, picked up a book and drew the bookseller into conversation, which lent me the time to read on, uninterrupted.

  In the first account of their meeting Harry was performing a magic show with his brother. Bess was there in the front row with her religious mother who, like my own, was deeply suspicious of anything magical lest it offend the Lord. In some twist of a bottle, acid spilled over the stage and onto Bess’s dress, sizzling a keyhole in her skirt. Her mother indignantly swept her daughter out of the theatre, frightened that she would be burned up like a saint. A little accident. That could have been the end of it, but Harry had noticed her sitting beyond the glow of the footlights and he didn’t give up that easily. He tracked down her address and appeared at the front door, begging for the ruined dress and a chance to redeem himself. Bess’s mother reluctantly handed it over, not sure if she should, wondering if she should say the Lord’s Prayer first in case he used it for strange rituals.

  Harry’s mother took a needle and a piece of fabric and a skein of thread and – abracadabra – she had made a new dress, even better than the old one, to the exact petite measurements of Miss Bess. And again, as in a puff of smoke, Harry appeared at Bess’s door and would be not turned away by her Jesus-fearing mother until he saw that it fit snug as a glove on her doll-like limbs. When he saw her in his mother’s hand-stitched dress, Harry asked her to step out, but did she dare? Her mother lay like a dragon across the threshold. ‘Your mother wouldn’t stop you if we were married,’ he said. She took his hand and they ran down the stairs, their feet barely touching the ground, not stopping until Coney Island.

  In the second account of their meeting, Harry and Bess were both in acts at Coney Island’s sideshow alley. Bess, filled to the brim with the temptation of elsewhere, picked up her skirts and ran away from home to become part of the Floral Sisters song and dance act, singing their famous song ‘Rosabelle’. Harry and his brother’s act was after hers. Harry had the nightly study of her feet upon the floorboards, the stark white light on her face as she warbled like a little dawn bird at the sun. His brother Dash had pointed her out to him as the girl he wanted to ask out, but their eyes crashed into each other as they crossed places, between the wings and the stage, the light and the dark, their paths intertwining, never to be parted.

  In the third account their meeting happened by way of Dash. He had eyes for the other Floral sister, so had invited them to meet him and his brother, to take an evening walk upon the beach, each the other’s chaperone. They shook hands and enjoyed the fresh air along the Coney Island boardwalk, their lungs used to three stuffy shows a day, drinking deep the ocean breeze. They were halfway along when they were approached by a man who taunted Houdini and his brother, calling them and their act a fake. Houdini offered the man a hundred dollars if he could reveal the secret of the box, of the Metamorphosis, but they never heard from him again. Instead an article appeared in the Coney Island Clipper:

  The Bros. Houdini who have mystified the world by their mysterious box mystery, are no more and the team will hereafter be known as the Houdinis. Houdini’s new partner is Miss Bessie, the petite soubrette.

  They had known each other less than two weeks.

  I looked at the bookseller, still deep in conversation. A tram rattled past and sent a warm dusty breeze up the back of my legs, a welcome warmth on the cold street. I raced through the words; I wanted to know if his family had accepted her, an outsider. A man wolf-whistled across the road, but I did not look up. They were married first by a ringmaster on Coney Island, a justice of the peace. Bess’s distressed Catholic mother sprinkled holy water every time she passed their wedding photo, even splashing it in their eyes when they came to visit. So Harry and Bess decided on a second wedding, a Catholic wedding to appease her. The invitations went out, but she would not attend, for her daughter had damned herself, cleaving to a Jew and a magician. So to balance the seesaw of their life together, they got married a third time, this time by a rabbi.

  Bess’s mother would not yield for twelve years, not until Bess was dangerously ill and called out for her. Harry went to get her, but her mother would not come, not until he camped on her doorstep for three days and nights. Bess was afraid that Harry’s mother would react the same way, appalled that her beloved boy had married a Catholic, but she opened her arms and blessed the Lord for another daughter. Ari’s uncle would never do the same to me.

  ‘Are you going to buy that book or just read the print off it?’ the bookseller asked, taking a deep puff of his cigarette. I looked at the price and put it gingerly back down on the blanket. If Bess could do it, curl up and confine herself, knowing she would spring forth reborn, so could I.

  Ari knocked on my door before he entered and I felt my face grow hot as he sat down on the bed and pulled out the nails from the back wall of the trunk, yanking like a mad dentist until the rusty tooth came free. There needed to be enough hold to stop the back flapping free, but enough give for us to push it out and swap places. The light danced over the heads of the hummingbirds back in their box on the mantelpiece, the most colourful things in the room. I didn’t want to think of Billy and his provocation.

  ‘This time, we can try to swap, you go out and I go in.’ Ari readied himself in front of the trunk and I crouched down in the darkness made hot again by my own breath. I tried to concentrate and listen to the spiel that had begun, counting for my cue, to burst forth out of the wooden egg, but I couldn’t shake off the sensation of his thumb on my lip. It had sent prickles up my neck. We were like bees hovering around the flower of each other.

  My first kiss had been a curse, like a plague mark upon my door: it felt as if everyone knew that I had been sullied. But when Billy kissed me, his lips were so full of wanting, it was a strange persuasion; as if his lips had offered mine an answer and mine had questioned back. His kiss had set off a craving in me.

  Ari clapped three times and I pushed out the back of the trunk, trying to be quick and elegant all at once, but the lid was weighted wrongly and it collapsed back down, folding me away like one of Miss du Maurier’s old unwanted dresses. I waited for Ari to lift the lid and help me out, but all was quiet. Then a soft winnowing of air blew my hair across my face, for Ari had leaned close to the lid, his breath coming in the escutcheon, blowing me the breath of life as if to the drowned.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Billy

  Without my playthings the party was too quiet for me, even though the gramophone needle burned hot through the music. He had the plait, the key to an invitation into her room. I went up to my room, livid, and cupped my ear to the wall between us, wishing I had brought my empty glass so I could have used it to extend the powers of my hearing. But the more I listened the more the room on the other side grew quiet. The silence grew like a drone in my ears as if I’d grown deaf. I held my hand up to the wall and wished I had the power to reach through and extract her from the Jew’s malediction. Such was Crisp’s reach that Merle didn’t even look at me when I said my vows, but cast her eyes downwards as if in thrall to his merest suggestion, as if in Crisp she was in the presence of the Lord.

  Merle stood beside me in a bedraggled lace dress, a straggly patch of purple Paterson’s curse in her hand. I looked at her belly and wondered, could my child really be in there? I could see no swelling curve, but perhaps it was too early to tell; her face was certainly wan. In front of us, the courthouse official wrote out the marriage certificate like an infant learning his letters, while I waited impatiently for Merle to catch my eye, the gold band that Crisp had made me buy loose on her finger.
It had nearly erased my resources: all I had left were two pennies to keep each other company in my pocket, their jingling friction more conversation than Merle and I had had since we had set out on the road. Now that I had got Merle knocked up there was no way to get on the good side of Crisp; every side of him was sour. And his daughter, the mother of my child-to-be, had turned, as if she were Lot’s wife, to a pillar of salt.

  Every town we rolled into, Crisp would drum up business on the main street, standing upon the wagon, a fat wedge of the Holy Bible in his hands. He would make a commandment’s worth of claims to the elixir’s benefit, so help us all. My God, he even smiled at the audiences that gathered, their careworn faces lifting up to him, the Father of Benevolence, an angel of mercy, convincing the poor fools that with his elixir, and his elixir alone, they would be healed. In between Crisp’s oratories, I was to toss my knives at a target and Merle to do a psychic turn. If only I had had the foresight to lure Crisp to my cross of hay bales, to show him the promise of an accidental blade, then what hand would Fate have dealt me next?

  Even though we had crossed the bridal threshold, Merle and I were still not permitted to share a bed. Crisp had made it very clear that I had broken his trust by seducing his only daughter, and though we were now married, it was for her respectability only. To gain my marital rights, I would have to scrape my way back to his good graces by only the very best of behaviours. Why did I obey, stupid bastard that I was, what stardust had been blown into my eyes?

  We went together, black-weeded undercover mourners, to gather what dirt we could. It was a sick preparation but a necessary one, for how else could Crisp have the spirits speak through Merle to the townsfolk? In the smaller towns we would sometimes come across graveyards with no new occupants, or the graves of those so old when they were laid in the ground that there was no one left behind, no relatives to squeeze for facts. Often times Merle and I would get our information from the memorial in the centre of town, the gold lettering of the war dead baking in the sun. I would collect the names: lost to bullet, gas, mortar, the whole damn sacrifice to stupidity. The dates of their deaths could have been mine.