by Leslie Parry
Sometimes she understood Anthony’s midnight fits, for once in a while her own eyes flew open in the dark and she felt a smothering dread. What am I doing to myself? she asked of her pounding heart. How can I possibly keep this up?
Now, tossing in her bed, the piss turning to a cold burn on her legs, she felt a fever begin to spike. The pain throbbed in her head; her teeth chattered. No matter how tightly she curled under her blanket, she shivered. It reminded her of something else. Her quiet home at night—humming to herself while she put a hand over her belly, while she turned down the sheets and looked out the window, down into the darkening yard—
“Mother’s Milk.”
Alphie looked up and saw an older woman sitting at the foot of her bed. “I got it, too,” she said, “my first week.”
Alphie stared at her. It was the woman with the scars on her chest, her tattoo slashed away.
“My eyesight went,” she continued. “I was no good at the factory no more. My boys didn’t want a leech, so they had me sent here. I’d rather be blind at the factory, stitching my fingers together, than have to wake up one more day and smell this room.”
Alphie stared at the scar beneath her collarbone. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing. Only gave me the name of a family dead to me.” She held up her hand and smiled. Her fingernails were claws—gruesomely long, warped and fuzzed with yellow.
Alphie felt herself begin to shake. Heat flooded her cheeks.
“You must drink some water,” the woman said. She reached for the pail, wrapping her fingers carefully around the dipper.
“Please, no more water.” The wet spot she was lying in began to prick at her skin. She kept playing it over in her mind: Anthony, returning to their rooms above the carriage house. (Where had he been that night?) She saw him pulling himself up the stairs, reaching for the door, only to find the bed unmade, the rug spoiled, the cradle—
Alphie sat up. “Wait.” She pushed the dipper away and stood, swaying on her feet. “Oh God,” she muttered. “Oh my God.”
She wandered out of the room and down the corridor. Beneath her skirt, the scabbard grew tight around a wave of quickened blood. What was she looking for? There was music coming from another room, but it sounded off tempo, in the wrong key.
She could feel the heat shivering off her skin, light crackling in her eyes. She looked out the window, down to the courtyard, where the women were taking air in the ashen light. They wandered in circles, their hands trailing and tickling the bricks as if they were blind.
Didn’t anyone see her? Didn’t anyone know?
She thought she heard something behind her—a wet swishy sound, like a mop being dragged. She turned around, squinting, but the hall seemed to bend and dissolve around her. She wasn’t mad, she told herself; it must be whatever they put in the water here—but still, she was sure she saw something down the corridor, something on the floor. She imagined for a moment it was the girl from the bath, bound at her wrists and her ankles, slithering down the hall like a snake, her eyes bright and fiery, the metal horn at her mouth gleaming like a frozen scream. Alphie turned and ran, half-falling, around the curve of the corridor. But whenever she looked back, she was sure the girl was still there, following her—shoulders rolling, hips swishing, trailing a wake of slime behind her.
Alphie burst into the music room, but no one seemed to see her. A nurse was playing an old piano that was missing some keys. The madwomen were dancing around her, exalting like frenzied May Day nymphs. Alphie pushed between them, then grabbed one by the wrists. “Where’s my baby?” she cried. But the woman only whirled her around, laughing.
“Where’s my baby?” Alphie shouted again as she was flung, stumbling, to the ground. She stared for a moment at the slippered feet jumping around her, at the dust rising from the floorboards in agitated thumps, and there—seeping under the far door—a trickle of water.
She tried to scream, but an old woman yanked her up and pulled her close. “You need to shut up,” she whispered in a garbled accent, her breath sour and stinking of leeks. “You make it worse for yourself, you understand?”
Alphie whimpered and pulled away. She went up to the pinched, sun-brown nurse who stood along the wall. She brought her voice down, to a whisper, so no one else could hear. “Where’s my baby?”
The nurse frowned. “Don’t you know, my dear?” she said sadly. “You have no baby.”
Alphie shook her head—no, no—and broke away. She heard the swish again, coming closer. She ran back to the hallway and down the stairs to the yard. She stumbled and grabbed for the rail but missed—she skidded down, scraping her ankle and slamming her hip. The tip of the scissors sliced into the skin above her knee. Still she pushed herself up and staggered the rest of the way down. Outside she joined the walk of women, turning endlessly around the courtyard in a nervous, murmuring wheel. She folded herself in between them, hoping to disappear.
Then, a few yards ahead, she saw the Polish woman with the frizzy hair—she was leaning against the wall, holding a piece of lint up to her cheek, whispering to it, clucking. Alphie ran after her, tripping in her slippers. She could hear the words come out of her mouth—part of her knew she didn’t make sense; the words were not what she meant—but still, she couldn’t stop herself. “I need my baby, please, please.” She reached out for the lint—it looked so soft, so sweetly silly there in her hand—
“Mine!” the woman roared. She slapped Alphie’s face so hard that Alphie wavered for a moment, stunned. And as they stood there, blinking at each other, the lint lifted out of the woman’s hand and flew away. Alphie watched her chase after it, all the way to the far end of the yard, shrieking as it turned and jumped in the wind, as it floated over the stanchion and out toward the river. Then, as it disappeared into the trees, she fell to her knees and wailed. Alphie felt that wail down in her bones—something so deep and true that tears sprung to her eyes. She turned and, weeping, walked the other way.
My baby . . . She reached the front gates, wrapped with heavy chains, the locks as big as horseheads. She could see the smoky glow of Manhattan through the trees. Her nose and eyes were running, her breath was ragged, her cheeks burned. A trickle of blood ran down her leg, beading the soft blond hairs, growing sticky in the heel of her slipper. Everything seemed so quiet. There was only the sound of a magpie, burring in a barren tree.
When the Signora walked into the room that night and saw her undressing—when she saw her remove the pillow that was cinched against her stomach—all Alphie could do was stand there with the sick feeling that nothing would be the same again. She felt her old life shrivel up and die inside her, a flicker in the pit of her stomach. But she didn’t throw herself at the Signora’s knees or turn away ashamed. She didn’t fan her hands over her flat stomach with its pearly navel. She just stood squarely in front of her, naked, and met her gaze. There was nothing, she knew now, that she could say. Part of her strangely relished the sensation, holding the perverse stomach in her hand, with its fraying buttons and splitting wales. She watched the woman’s eyes go dark, her lips part, her perfect skin turn a sickly gray.
Il mostro, the Signora had said. Il mostro.
TEN
LEE AND EDDIE’S WOMAN. SYLVAN PICKED HIS WAY DOWN THE staircase, to the door beneath the butcher shop. He paused for a moment, staring at the small blue star painted on the frame. If the mother were an opium smoker, she might have no memory of leaving her baby in the privy at all. She might have been overcome with madness—some kind of terrible, intoxicated fit. She don’t seem right, the butcher’s boy had said. She might wake this morning sick with panic and horror, turning restlessly through her rooms, unsure of what she’d done. She might have left her baby behind not out of terror or spite, but because she was living in some kind of feverish whimsy, a topsy-turvy phantasmagoria.
His body still crackled from the fight. He turned the knob and let the door stutter open. He’d never been inside an opium den before, but he’d heard
a few of the night-soilers talk about them. He expected to see something exotic—golden dragons, men with silks and queues—but he was only met with a pink-nosed, middle-aged doorman in a blown-out chair. The man, heavyset and red-haired, looked up from a lady’s dime novel, alarmed. He stared at Sylvan with eyes as sunken and black as a potato’s.
“I’m looking for a woman,” Sylvan said, peering toward a darkened hall beyond. “Maybe friendly with a pair calling themselves Lee and Eddie.”
The man stood up and leaned into him, so close Sylvan could feel the moist breath on his skin. “What’s wrong with your eye?” he said. “You blind?”
“If you’re as ugly as you look it must be working fine.”
The man grinned. “I know who you are,” he said. His glossy nose twitched like a rabbit’s. “I seen you fight once. On Henry Street, in the cornfield.”
“Did I win?”
The man just squawked with laughter, a sound that was somewhere between a belch and a bark.
Sylvan said again, “Lee and Eddie?”
The man’s expression changed. He sniffed and held out his hand. “Fifteen gets you a mat.”
Sylvan reached into his pocket. He didn’t have much on him, but he counted out the coins anyway—there was still some left over for Mrs. Izzo, at least, a fresh bottle of milk.
The man smiled in spite of himself. “I knew it was you! What was it they was calling you again?”
Sylvan shook his head. “I can’t remember.”
“When you won they all went mad, didn’t they? Like this—” He threw back his head and howled like a dog.
Sylvan tensed. “That’s me, all right.”
The man set down his book and waved a freckled paw. “This way, then.”
He led Sylvan down the hallway, through a series of curtains. The floor was slanted, the ceiling low. Corridors branched out around them, gauzy with faraway light, but Sylvan kept his eyes on the man ahead. The deeper the passage took him, the hotter he felt—he pushed up his sleeves, opened his collar. The walls were painted in hues of red—for a moment Sylvan had the dreamy sensation that he was swimming through the vein of a body, toward a lush, warming heart. Ahead of him the man was lumbering and stout, so large he had to duck beneath the doorframes, but he moved quickly, almost gracefully. The passage seemed to turn and fold back on itself, and then it came to an end. The man pulled aside a blue curtain and beckoned Sylvan inside.
It was the whistling he heard first, nervous and discordant, as if he were standing in a hutch of sick birds. A vapor hung in the air, its sweetness cut with the smell of unwashed skin. Through the fog he saw a row of bunks, brittle with woodworm, and lamplit mats along the floor where people lay curled on their sides. No one looked up as he passed, but Sylvan peered into each crowded bunk, at every flop of rags on the ground. Faces glowed in the puddles of light, but their features were slack and strange and dreamy. He saw blissfully pink-bulbed eyes, smiles of ruined teeth, chins gooey with saliva. No women, though—only men.
The doorman came to a stop in the far corner of the room. He waved Sylvan over, then nodded at the ground.
Sylvan stared down at the mat. It was occupied by a young man in a rumpled suit, a long pipe at his fingertips. Beside him squatted a boy of eight or nine, tinkering over an enameled box. The boy took no notice of Sylvan, just speared an opium pill with a darning needle and lifted it to the pipe. The man shifted a little on the cushion beneath him, then leaned slowly toward the light. The flame flickered beneath a glass cowling, and soon his face came into view: first his lips, meeting the carved mouthpiece of the pipe; then the broad, questioning nose; the high cheeks and hooded brow; the moist, choleric eyes. He was handsome but bedraggled, unshaven, stinking of sweat. He looked as if he’d been lying there for days.
He took a long draw on the pipe, which whistled and clucked. Sylvan smelled something bloom in the air, a scent like anise and lavender. He felt light-headed and suddenly nauseous. His ears were still ringing from the fight, he realized; he could hear a clicking in his jaw. The man fell back on the cushion, his chest expanding, his limbs going slack. He turned his eyes up to Sylvan and smiled.
There had to be some mistake. Sylvan looked over, but the large man was already retreating back through the den, his oaky shoulders rolling in and out of the shadows.
The boy with the box stood up. He wore a cone of newspaper over his nose, like a bird in a child’s stage-play. Sylvan stared at the wag of his poorly cut hair, the blackened tips of his fingers. A memory flashed in Sylvan’s mind—a foggy waterfront street, a gang of boys pelting him with pebbles and trash as he ran, panting, among the maze of coffins. The same dread filled him now, at nineteen years old—how was it possible to be scared of children?—but still, he was relieved when the boy gathered up his tools and left.
The man lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “Is your name Eddie?” Sylvan asked.
The man turned and blinked at him, a dimple flickering in his cheek.
“Lee?”
He just smiled at Sylvan, beatific, uncomprehending. A beetle trundled over his coat, which lay crumpled at his side.
Sylvan knelt down by the lamp. “Do you know who I’m talking about? Lee and Eddie?”
The man kept smiling, but Sylvan couldn’t tell if it was because he understood or because he didn’t.
“Where’s the woman?” Sylvan began to feel a little faint—the floor seemed to rise up, the air began to bend. “The woman with the baby?”
The man just shook his head again, confused.
“The one they call the witch—the one at the butcher’s shop, expecting a baby. You know who I mean?”
The man must have found this amusing, because he chuckled deeply and closed his eyes.
“Do you understand me? What happened to her?”
“Jesus,” someone moaned nearby. “What do you want with him for? Ain’t he been through enough?”
Sylvan reached out and shook the man’s shoulder. The bones felt fragile through his shirtsleeves, almost spongy. Still, he gripped him hard. “Do you know where they are?” He gave him another shake. “Listen to me! Lee and Eddie!”
The man frowned, tried to open his eyes. “Don’t I know where who are?”
“Lee and Eddie.”
“Yes?”
“You do?”
“I do what?”
“Lee and Eddie. What happened to the woman with the baby?”
The man drew his eyebrows together. “There is no baby.”
Sylvan’s vision skipped; the blood began to pop and tingle in his ears. He felt dizzy, too warm, as if he’d been hit too hard, or had too much to drink. The high of the fight was wearing off, and his body began to burn with pain.
The man took Sylvan’s hand in his. “Come,” he said. “Lie down. You’re hurting, I know.”
For a moment Sylvan thought he might throw up. He lay down on the mat and stared up at the loose, crooked coffers on the ceiling. With one hand he reached into his pocket and clutched at the old square of cotton, the one Mrs. Scarlatta had cut for him. Beside him the flame burned low and smoky in its glass.
The man held on to his other hand, gently. “He’ll be all right. He’ll be all right, won’t he?”
“She,” Sylvan said, an image of Frankie flicking through his mind. “It’s a girl.”
“Of course.” He laughed breathily. “Of course. I meant that.”
Sylvan closed his eyes. Next to him the man sank further into a daze, whispering something he couldn’t understand. Sylvan heard the breaths come evenly, felt the cool fingers go slack around his. He breathed deeply, too, waiting for the pain to subside, tasting the floral haze in the air. In the dreamy half state between waking and sleeping he pictured the soilers digging him out of the den, crowding around with their lanterns raised, peering down over the rubbled tin and pillows. Help! he wanted to call up to them. Help, I’m down here! But they just stared into the pit with terrified eyes, grabbed their buckets and disappe
ared, and when Sylvan turned to see what it was they’d been frightened by, he realized he had a tail, bushy and thick as a wolf’s, wagging away in the dirt.
AFTER A WHILE he opened his eyes—had he been asleep?—and sat up, aching. He glanced over at the man next to him, slack-jawed and puffy-eyed, white crusts of drool at the corners of his mouth. He was no one special, Sylvan realized—probably a spoiled child like Francesca, slumming it in the dens, the kind of person who took pride in unbuilding what his father had given him, when he should have been grateful he’d been given anything at all.
He glanced over at the man’s cast-off coat—a handsome toffee brown, with a knitted black band around the arm. He shook it out and tried it on. It was tailored, beautiful—nicer than anything he’d ever owned. He remembered the coat he had stolen from a vagrant in the winter, but this wasn’t the same, he told himself. This man could afford it.
He wobbled to his feet and made his way past the languorous forms on the floor, the sputter of lamps. He turned through the doorway, then followed the corridor back, looking for a sign of the heavyset man. Curtain after curtain, the air cool at one turn, warm at another—he couldn’t be sure which way he’d come in.
He turned a corner and found himself in a small room. Half a dozen boys were hunched over a table with brushes and knives, chiseling tar from opium pipes that were stacked in the middle like kindling. They scraped the residue into little bowls. At the head of the table sat the boy with the paper-cone nose, molding the dregs into soft, lumpy cakes.
Sylvan had heard stories from the other soilers about a gang of wild children who lived beneath the city, let loose like mice in a maze of tunnels, but he’d never believed it was true. The way the men talked, he imagined a pack of feral animals, starved and vicious, prowling their way through a living grave. In the darkness of the earth, he thought, the only thing visible would be the whites of their tiny eyes, the gnash of their baby teeth. But these children sat quietly here in front of him, working as methodically as tailors, their faces downcast and gray.
