The Museum of Extraordinary Things

by Alice Hoffman

  He came to New York because during his self-education he had studied Walt Whitman and had idolized him, as I did. Due to his reading, Mr. Morris was certain that it was only in the city of New York, so abundant with energy and life, that he would be accepted, able to exist as any other man, despite his differences. He would make his way along the great avenues and the rivers pulsing with commerce; he would walk among the shipbuilders and the workers. Instead, he was locked up on his second day in the city, arrested for creating a nuisance. It was there in jail that my father found him, huddled in a cell, blood streaking his hair. Mr. Morris had been beaten nearly senseless on Broadway in front of a massive crowd, his abusers cheered on by those who were convinced he was a monster. The constables had been of the same opinion, and had kept him cuffed and chained.

  I was in the back of the carriage on the day my father went to the holding cell known as the cage in the Tenth Precinct on Twentieth Street in Manhattan. I was nearly twelve by then and nearly a woman, and I already had begun to accompany my father on business forays. Maureen said my presence gave my father credibility, a word I’m sure he never imagined she knew. I think Maureen hid how bright she was because of her position in life; a housemaid had no right to address a learned man. She had no rights

  at all.

  My father had informants in police stations and hospitals who, for a small fee, would contact him when a particularly interesting specimen was found. Raymond Morris was brought out to our carriage, confused and covered with welts. I lowered my eyes, so as not to gawk, which would have been unseemly, especially when I considered my own abnormalities. Mr. Morris was unique, however, and I couldn’t help but peek at him. I suppose he got into our carriage because it was the only option. The Professor rolled a cigarette, which he offered to his new companion as he discussed terms of employment. Oddities profited here in our city, my father said. Raymond Morris laughed, just like any man. I was sitting behind them, even more silent than usual. I admit my first reaction upon seeing this wonder was sheer terror. To my surprise Morris had a deep, resonant voice as he answered my father’s statement with a recitation.

  “Now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,

  What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,

  What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,

  And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.”

  In response, my father snapped, “Don’t speak in riddles, speak plainly.”

  But I knew those words to be Whitman’s and I could only imagine what Raymond Morris had guessed at before he’d come to our city and seen firsthand what cruelty could be. Perhaps I took a step away from my father on that day, and began to side with the wonders he employed.

  “Do you want the work or not?” my father said coldly. “I don’t wish to waste my time.”

  “Frankly, sir,” Morris said of the employment he’d been offered, “I have no other choice.”

  We traveled back to Brooklyn without any further conversation, though there were dozens of questions I might have asked. Raymond Morris was left at a boardinghouse where many of the living wonders resided, along Sheridan’s Walk, a stretch that ran from Surf Avenue to the ocean, and would in a few years be totally in the shadow of the Giant Racer Roller Coaster. The Professor paid a full month’s rent. “I’m trusting you,” he told Morris, making it clear that as an employee Morris was expected to report to the museum the following day and each day after that. “I don’t expect you to let me down,” my father advised. Indeed, he seemed quite convinced the new man would not run away. Morris knew what awaited him on the beach and on the avenues, a crowd of abusers, nothing more. As we drove off my father was whistling. “That’s money in the bank,” he said. “A true one of a kind.”

  I looked behind us and watched the figure of Raymond Morris on the steps of the boardinghouse, a stranger to Brooklyn and to our world. I prayed that he might indeed run away, and that he might find some empty stretch of marsh or woods where he would be allowed to be

  a man.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK the season began. From my window, I could see the human curiosities gathering in the yard, served coffee and tea by Maureen. There were old standbys who returned year after year, as well as fly-by-night acts, some of whom barely lasted a season. We’d had several pairs of Siamese twins, as well as an alligator man, whose skin was covered with bumps he tinted green. There’d been dwarfs and giants, fat women as well as women so thin one could nearly see through their pale flesh. I was interested in every one, for each had a story, a mother and father, a dream for the future.

  On this opening day, as the wonders gathered, the hood of a man’s cloak fell from his head while he waited his turn for tea. The cloak was made of fine wool and cashmere, but it was no gentleman I saw. I blinked and imagined I’d spied a wolf, then realized it was my father’s new discovery. Mr. Morris gazed up, and I shied away from the window, thinking he might howl and bare his teeth. Instead he bowed and said, “Hello, little girl,” in his deep, musical voice. I was so mortified at having been caught staring that I quickly slipped the curtain closed. But I went on looking at him through the muslin, and I saw him wave to me. After that I had a different feeling about what a wolf might be.

  I had grown to appreciate the people who gathered in the yard and to consider them a sort of family. Still, I kept to myself, following my father’s instructions. Yet with every day that passed I was more certain I was meant to be among them.

  My father was the one who named Mr. Morris the Wolfman, an appellation that came to him in a dream. My father’s dreams and whims were law. He commissioned a sign to be made with Morris’s portrait; the painter was directed to add fangs and a long tail. People screamed when they saw the new living wonder, and he became immensely popular, with lines forming down Surf Avenue, even though some of the women in the crowd had to be revived with vinegar and smelling salts after they saw him. He was, without a doubt, our star attraction, though he never grew conceited. Maureen whispered that the crowd’s reaction was not because he was so fierce—although he’d been taught to shake the bars of the cage in which he was exhibited and to grunt rather than speak. It was when they looked in his eyes and saw how human he was that he terrified them.

  My father’s new employee liked his tea with milk and sugar, and he always asked for seconds when I baked a pear cobbler made with the fruit from our tree. We had begun to use the new tea bags made of muslin and sold prepackaged, and he laughed at their silly hat-like shape. He was great company, and was always a gracious teacher when discussing Whitman, who he felt was the greatest American poet, the Shakespeare of our times, a voice that spoke for all mankind and certainly for those of us who lived in Brooklyn. Mr. Morris worried for me, insisting so much time spent in water, a good eight hours a day, was unhealthy for a girl my age. True enough, my confinement in the tank had turned my skin pale as parchment. I had grown so accustomed to the cold that the rising heat of the warm June days brought out a red rash on my arms and legs. I itched and scratched at my clothes, yet I continued to wear my gloves, as proper French schoolgirls did, for I knew my father was particular in all matters of dress. I didn’t mind this fashion, for I was deeply embarrassed by my hands, which seemed less a wonder than a mistake. I did not consider myself a “one of a kinder,” only an accident of the flesh. I needed the false tail and blue dye to seem truly wondrous. As far as I was concerned, what was exceptional about me was simply a form of trickery.

  Raymond Morris said that if he were as free as he imagined I would become when I legally came of age, on my eighteenth birthday, he would choose to roam the globe and see the true wonders of the world. He spoke of Paris and Egypt and Siam. He told me all he knew of what he’d read of these places, and his stories kept me enraptured. I heard about the French painters Cézanne and Pissarro and of the old masters at the Louvre. I was amazed by descriptions of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and of
silkworms that ate the leaves of white mulberry trees and spun a thread so fine it couldn’t be seen by the naked eye.

  Maureen took to sitting with us in the yard, enthralled as I was, drawn in by Mr. Morris’s deep, measured voice. He was by far the most well-read man either of us had ever met. He knew the work of the great poets by heart, and had memorized whole passages of Jane Eyre, the book he always claimed had set him free after he’d read of the first Mrs. Rochester’s choice to burn down the house rather than remain imprisoned in her misery. He was also a great fan of Poe, a native of his home city, and swore the writer had died more of harassment and misunderstanding than of alcohol. He often read this author’s stories as we ate our lunch. We shivered at these tales of woe and tragedy, and still we begged for more. Although Maureen said she’d never been so frightened in all her life as when we listened to Poe’s tales, I noticed she edged closer to Mr. Morris at these times. I came to understand he was not a monster in her eyes.

  Mr. Morris was with us for three years, and during that time the Museum of Extraordinary Things prospered. Unlike the other wonders, who vanished during the off-season, to carnivals in Florida and throughout the South, Mr. Morris remained in Brooklyn. He had been led here by literature, and so he remained close to Whitman’s world. He was befriended by a bookseller from Scribner’s Publishers who had rooms at the Brighton Beach Hotel for the season. This kind man brought him whatever volumes he wished, including modern novels such as Call of the Wild, by Jack London, which must have brought to mind the relationship between wolves and men, as well as The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, considered radical for its exposure of the wretched conditions of the meatpacking industry.

  Mr. Morris’s disappearance from our midst was not sudden, though it may have appeared that way to others, for one day at the height of the season he simply did not arrive. It was apparent that my father had been watching Mr. Morris for quite some time, with disapproval and distaste. The two rarely spoke. The Professor often saw what escaped others’ eyes and had a particular knack for spying people’s weaknesses. He preferred flaws that he could exploit and was therefore uncomfortable with an employee who was so intelligent and learned, a man who, had he not been born as he was, would have easily been my father’s equal or better. I’d overheard him say to Mr. Morris, “I hope you haven’t forgotten that I rescued you. Think of where you’d be if not for me. No one else would have you. They’d run from you, stone you, cry out for your captivity. Remember at all times, you are a freak of nature, and that alone is your distinction.”

  It was a demeaning thing to say. I understood the sting of such a comment, for my father had often told me that after my mother’s passing another man might have left me in an orphanage, particularly in light of my deformity. But he had been loyal to me, and therefore he expected my loyalty in return. Such a debt of gratitude made me feel as if I had no choices in this world, as if my future lay in only one direction, a path decided upon by my father.

  Raymond Morris bowed his head when he was reminded of his time in prison, and quickly offered his thanks for his rescue, but there was a glint of mistrust in his eyes. He was a man of great dignity, and surely this was the reason Maureen was attracted to him. They often sat together, speaking in confidence. She had let slip that she visited him during the off-season and had mentioned that upon one or more occasions she’d brought him a leek and onion pie, one of her specialties. When I questioned her about how frequently she spent time with him, she informed me that polite girls didn’t ask questions about a person’s private life. Once, when they didn’t know I was nearby, I had seen Mr. Morris take her hand. I was not the only one who noticed their closeness. Soon enough Maureen was found in his room by the landlord of the boardinghouse, who then demanded a fee from my father, insisting that a room in which two people cohabited should have the charges doubled.

  If Maureen was in love with the Wolfman, she never discussed it with me. I only knew that my father dismissed Raymond Morris, though he was our most popular attraction and made the museum more prosperous than it had ever been. I was surprised at the depth of my father’s fury. Morris was asked to leave the boardinghouse where he’d been deposited after his release from jail. I don’t know where he went, but I do know he left Maureen a token on the day he vanished: a worn copy of Jane Eyre, set out on the kitchen counter, wrapped in brown paper and twine, with her name written upon the wrapping in his graceful script.

  I heard Maureen arguing with my father in the parlor afterward. The Professor said she was a whore, so low she would get on her back for a vile dog. That was what he called the Wolfman, Satan’s dog. I thought I heard a slap, but I wasn’t sure. I put my hands over my ears, but I still heard Maureen crying. After that she said no more of Mr. Morris, and although her eyes were often red and inflamed, she didn’t dare to go against my father. She was his employee after all, and jobs were not so easy to come by. If she left she would likely be fit only for factory work, grueling and low paying, and she might even be turned away from that because of the burn marks on her face.

  No one mentioned the Wolfman in the days that followed, and a new exhibit soon enough took his place, a young man named Horace, whose older brother brought him from Sunnyside, Queens, in the mornings and picked him up in the evenings. Horace had only half a jaw and could neither speak nor hear, but he had been taught to growl in a menacing manner, as the Wolfman had. My father named him the Jungle Boy and employed the sign maker once more. Horace never complained and he did as he was told. As far as I knew, he couldn’t read.

  ONE MORNING, not long after Mr. Morris’s departure, as Maureen and I sat on the back porch peeling potatoes for a stew, I found myself thinking about “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story of Poe’s that Mr. Morris had read to us in which a murderer cannot escape his own guilt. I was thirteen at this time, and I was especially interested in the ways in which some men felt guilt, while others seemed free to hurt those closest to them without remorse. The protagonist in Poe’s story is certain he continues to hear the heart of his victim beating beneath the floorboards, but it is the pulse of his own guilt that resounds. I wondered if all men’s deeds came back to haunt them and proposed an idea to Maureen: if the Wolfman were to become famous at some other exhibition, perhaps my father would regret his decision and want to hire him again and then all would be well.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Maureen said coldly. “Your father has no regrets.”

  “He must. All good men do, and he must have been that for my mother to have loved and married him.”

  Maureen studied me, and I felt pity in her gaze. Of course she thought I was naïve, and I suppose I was. I’d been kept away from the world, and what I knew of it were bits and pieces that didn’t add up.

  “Love is odder than anything you might find here,” Maureen instructed. Her voice was kind, yet I felt she was delivering a warning. She sometimes carried Mr. Morris’s edition of Jane Eyre with her, for it was pocket size and she was very attached to it. I wasn’t certain if it was the story she was faithful to, or if her loyalty belonged to the man who had given her the book.

  “Did you love Mr. Morris?” I asked. It was bold of me to question her so, for I’d been warned by my father never to bring up his name. But I was truly interested in Maureen’s welfare, and I think she softened when she saw my earnest expression.

  “He read to me when I was with him in his room, and I went there willingly. All I can tell you is that when it was dark, he was like any other man. Better,” she told me. “Far better than anyone who’s passed through this yard.”

  THERE CAME an evening when I was reading in my father’s library, as was my habit when he was out and I had my pick of what was on the shelf. When I grew drowsy, I started for bed, going first to the kitchen to make sure the back door was locked. I happened to glimpse a bit of light as I passed by the stairs to the cellar. When I peered down I noticed the door to the workroom had been left ajar. I went down the
steps, drawn by my curiosity before I could think things through. The door to this room was always locked and bolted twice, but somehow the Professor had forgotten to do so on this occasion. As usual, he hadn’t informed me where he was going or when he would return, but he was often gone past midnight. I wondered if the open door was a sign sent to me from above suggesting I should look inside, or if it was a simple act of forgetfulness.

  It was in this cellar room that my father maintained scientific experiments, dissecting and studying some of the strange creatures he had discovered in morgues and hospitals, and in the back rooms along the docks. No one was to disturb him when he was locked away, not even if he missed his dinner. There were times when the liveryman he employed dragged a bundle down the stairs and the two men would then stand together and argue over a price in low tones. I had heard them raise their voices more than once, and I hadn’t known whether I should fear for my father’s safety or for the safety of the liveryman.

  I made my way to the threshold of the workshop. I pushed open the door so that I might peer through the darkening shadows. Jars of specimens gleamed and dust motes hung in the unmoving air. From the corridor where I stood I could see that there were canisters of salt and formaldehyde set upon the shelves, all in readiness for any new specimens. I spied the skull of a leopard that was being fitted with a third set of teeth so that it might appear more ferocious and strange. There were fingernails that had grown ten feet long before they’d been cut and were now soaking in bleach, and a box of the bodies of bright birds captured in New Guinea, their feathers tinted even brighter shades with red and orange dye. On a white metal table there was a selection of knives and surgery tools. My father, it seemed, did not shy away from helping nature create miracles. In this way he was a tailor of the marvelous, a creator of dreams.