Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  The boy with the paper nose turned and looked up at him. “Find what you come for?” He smiled—a weird, teasing smile that Sylvan couldn’t quite read.

  “No.”

  There was something cautious and foxlike about the boy’s eyes; they glittered nervously over the paper nose, watching as Sylvan reached into his pocket. The other boys worked without stopping. Sylvan took out a penny and slid it across the table.

  “Has there been a woman down here?” he asked. He described what little he could about the girl at the butcher shop, but the boy only shrugged.

  “Never seen one like that,” he answered, breathing shallowly through his mouth. He pulled the penny close to the saucer, where the black cake oozed like a sooty pudding. “Sometimes they come looking for a fellow, but no one stays.”

  “Anyone here by the name of Lee? Eddie? You know them at all?”

  “No names here, not with us. That’s the way they like it.”

  “What about that man—the man you were helping?”

  “He’s been down here all night—he’s so sad. Except when Jacky sucks him off. Then he’s all right.” He sniggered, and Sylvan felt his stomach turn. He had to leave. He had to go back to Mrs. Izzo’s, bring milk for the baby. (And part of him dreaded it—he didn’t know what he’d be returning to—he could only pray the fever was gone.) He had to pack his hands in ice, drink a beer and eat some meat and rest his body, which seemed to tremble even in the close, overwarm room.

  He glanced down the row at the other boys, bleary and gaunt. They picked the pipes apart, chipping and scratching, char falling over their hands and fluttering up to snag in their lashes. One boy, the smallest, upset a bowl of residue with his elbow, and the whole thing clattered to the floor.

  The beaked boy screamed and jumped to his feet. “That could be two bits right there!” he hollered. “Now pick it up, every last one!”

  The little boy whimpered, then sank to his knees and crawled around in the dark, trying to pinch up the tiny bits of black from the floor.

  The older boy settled back on the bench. He set the first cake aside and began kneading and patting another.

  Sylvan shook his head. “It’s a hard life you’re living,” he said.

  “When I was born,” said the boy, “me mother, she saw I weren’t me father’s. So she cut me.”

  He lifted the newspaper away from his face. He had no nose. In its place were two black holes that quavered as he drew a breath. “Everything else,” he said, “has been easy.”

  ELEVEN

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FIRE THERE HAD BEEN A GYPSY party on the beach. It seemed like a dream: torches lit along the shore, plumed horses trotting through the sand, androgynes in fake silks flying high up on swings. Odile had walked around barefoot with bells chiming from her ankle, eating a cinnamon doughnut and watching bats swoop across the sky. Her mother sat by the fire pit in a splendor of scarves and tea-colored skirts, holding court with a pair of castanets. Odile looked around for her sister—they were supposed to meet at the fortune-teller’s caravan and head west to watch the fireworks—but Belle never showed. She waited and waited, scratching at her mosquito bites, lolling on the steps of the caravan as the party swelled around her. Eventually she got restless, so she followed Aldovar and Leland down the beach instead. They got drunk behind the bathhouse, then shimmied up a ladder to watch the fireworks from the roof. If she had known that Aldovar would be dead the next day, that the spangled sights beneath her would be gone, she might have taken more time to appreciate them. She would have lingered over the golden glow of the Church of Marvels, the shy twitch of Aldovar’s halved moustache, his shirt parted to reveal a chest like a man’s but as smooth as a girl’s. They lay back on the roof and watched as the fireworks lit up around them, as they zipped and crackled and fizzed to the sea. When Odile sat up to take a slug of whiskey, she thought she saw—just for a moment—someone in the street gazing up at them (Belle?), but by the next pulse of light, the figure was gone.

  When the fireworks were over and the music started up again, Odile said good-bye to Leland and Aldovar—she had to get up early, she explained, and Mother would be waiting for her. They parted ways at the corner. Aldovar had slung Leland, too drunk to stand, over his shoulder. Odile watched them disappear in the mist: Aldovar’s blue silks trailing behind him, Leland red-faced and snoring. Then Odile turned and walked home alone, over the bridges and under the lights. The water sparked with fallen fireworks, and the night air smelled like gunpowder and roasted figs. She could still hear drums down at the shore, the merry couplets of laughter.

  Back at the house she drank two glasses of cold milk standing up at the kitchen sink, then slipped the chimes from her ankle and went upstairs to bed. The rooms were dark, the hallways hushed. Mother was still down at the party, she guessed, and Belle was most likely with her.

  The next morning she rose early, around six, and shuffled downstairs in her nightgown, itchy with sweat, hungry for a pickled egg and a slice of cheese. She went to the pantry behind the kitchen and closed herself in as far as she could between the doors of the larder, the way she had as a child, so that a single band of light trembled over the shelves. She stared at the jars of wax beans—ghost fingers, she used to call them as a girl—and sweet potatoes sliced into floating, blood-pink ears.

  While she stood there on her tiptoes, the back door whined open and shut, and footsteps crossed through the pantry. Odile turned around in her little triangle of darkness, squinting through the crack in the larder doors. She saw Belle yanking off her gloves, unpinning her hat. She looked tired and wan. She must have been up early in the yard, working on her new routine.

  Odile dipped a clothespin into a jar and pinched out a few wax beans. She slid them through the crack in the door, waving them back and forth, scattering vinegar. “Wooo-ooo!” she sang in a ghost-voice.

  Belle jumped, then put her hand over her heart. “For God’s sake!” she hissed. “How old are you?”

  “I speak from the crypt!”

  Belle narrowed her eyes. Her voice was low and edged. “Why do you need everybody to pay attention to you all the time? It’s not like you’re a gimp anymore.”

  Odile was dumbstruck—she couldn’t think of how to answer. Belle took a step forward and, without another word, bit the beans in half—quick and gnashing, like a dog. Then she turned on her heels and walked away, chewing stonily, wiping the juice from her chin.

  Odile stood there, numb. Her shock turned to hurt, then flared up into fury—she hadn’t done anything wrong! She’d only been kidding around, trying to make her sister laugh. She rolled the leftover bits of bean around in her palm, then mashed them into pulp and let them drip to the floor. Bitch.

  They arrived at the theater with Mother just after eight. As Belle ran through her new routine on an empty stage, Odile snuck out to the pens where the tigers lolled in the morning heat. She carried in fresh buckets of water and meat. After they ate, she let them groom her hair while she lay sideways on the ground—their tongues scraped up her neck and ears, leaving her hair wet and standing on end, smelling sour and muttony. Her mother found her rolling on the ground, fur matted to her skirts, the bucket spilled and wet footprints running amok on the ground.

  “Enough horsing around,” she said. “I need you to do my hair.”

  Odile sat up and pointed to hers. “Like this?”

  “Now, Odile.”

  Odile sighed and followed her back to the dressing room. What’s wrong with everybody? she thought. They must have been exhausted from the party and nervous about the show. She gave her mother’s hair a few crisp, crackling strokes with a brush big enough for a horse, then waited for her to wince and scold: Gentle, gentle! But Mother didn’t seem to notice that Odile was standing there at all. She just stared at the glass-topped table with its clutter of jars and bills, as if it were the only real thing in the universe.

  When the navy ribbon was knotted and smoothed, her mother stood up. Odile waited
for something else—a thank-you, at least. But her mother just went to the wardrobe and started sorting through the costumes. Odile stood awkwardly at the dressing table with the brush in hand, running the bristles over her fingers, swallowing against the lump in her throat. How miserable it was, to stand there and want so much to be seen. Mother wouldn’t even look her way.

  Something was wrong that morning, but she never bothered to ask. Her mother’s private feelings, she would realize later (with no small amount of shame), were of no real concern to her. She only cared about what her mother gave to her and what she withheld. If she ever thought beyond that—to what the woman really wanted—it was only because it conflicted with what she wanted for herself. And so after the show, when Mother had opened the dressing-room door and asked her to come inside, Odile thought that by saying no, she was standing her ground. She was showing her mother and her sister that she didn’t need them, that she had better things to do than sit there like a dutiful handmaiden while they quarreled and keened and tried to upstage each other. She had a life and a will of her own; she could ignore them just as easily as they’d ignored her. But all she proved, in the end, was that she was too naïve to consider that something even bigger was happening. She kept walking, proud and cool, ready for her beer and anxious to be alone. Mother had stood in the doorway and watched her pass. She was backlit—a silhouette—framed in a box of sulfur-yellow light, her expression too obscure to read.

  It was the last time Odile saw her alive.

  NOW ODILE STOOD UP, the blood rushing to her head. She stared at the shadows flickering in front of her, the devil dancing in a circle of light. Before she could stop herself, she flew over to the stage and pulled down the sheet. The lantern blinded her; the horn sputtered and died. Pigeon ran forward, waving her arm. “You can’t come back here!” she shouted at Odile. “No, no! That’s not part of the play!”

  “What is that?” Odile said, pointing to her stomach.

  Pigeon looked down at the ground, the horns wobbling on her head. “What?”

  “That.” Odile grabbed her by the arm and fished under her dress, tugging at the padding around her stomach. She pulled out something tufted and misshapen—“Just a pillow,” Pigeon whispered.

  Odile turned it around in her hands. It was flimsy and water-stained, losing its stuffing. She ripped it open—sawdust popped and billowed out around her, catching in her mouth and her hair.

  Standing there in the hot light of the lantern, watching the dust flutter and settle to the floor—tasting it, ashy, on her tongue—she felt incredibly, stupidly blind. It wasn’t just grief that had rendered Belle silent and reclusive in the days after Mother’s death—it wasn’t simply the loss that had confined her to the house, made her sickly and pale, forced her to run away without apology or explanation. Nothing of the sort.

  She was pregnant.

  Odile looked down at her fisted hands, at the sprinkling of dust on her clothes. Around her the children whispered and drifted apart; the sheet came down from the line, the horn and the fiddle echoed away in the cavern. How could this have happened? Belle had no sweethearts, no beaux, no men who came to call. She had admirers, of course—she was well-known around the boardwalk—but the girls had shared a dressing room (with their mother, no less). Odile would have known if Belle had invited anyone in after the shows. And she never had. It was always just the three of them, pressing their costumes, pulling pins from their hair, scrubbing greasepaint away with cold cream. Odile only remembered one man with flowers, who came to court their mother—but that was ages ago—and he’d never even crossed the threshold. He’d been too frightened of the tigers.

  “Why wouldn’t she have told me?” Odile whispered. They’d never had any secrets growing up—they, who had no one else in the world but each other. Did Belle really think that her own sister would turn her away, even after they’d watched the Church of Marvels burn? After all that had followed—the daze of the funerals, the tedious meetings with lawyers and the bank, the reassignments to Guilfoyle’s company—did she really believe Odile was so fragile and innocent, her loyalty so easily tested? You, dear sister, have always been the brave one, the good one, the strongest of all. Not I. She wished she could grab Belle now and say, Think of what Mother did for her own brother! She left home. She risked her life. She saw battle, was wounded, was rescued. Odile didn’t think of herself as courageous in that way—not even close—but she would have helped. She’d been there for her sister all along—in the bed across the room, at the kitchen table going through the books, making plates of toast and jam and bringing them upstairs, setting them down wordlessly by the lump under the quilt. But Belle hadn’t said a word.

  She remembered how Belle had looked in the weeks after Mother’s death, of course—puffy and listless, preoccupied by something Odile had always assumed to be grief. She’d left Doyers Street, apparently—but for what? Any number of things might have happened since she’d written that letter. She might have died in childbirth. Alone and ashamed, she could have tried to do herself harm. She might have taken something—one of those special elixirs, the parsley teas for women’s troubles. Or she might have paid one of those doctors who tended to unwed mothers—men who slipped through backdoors with their hooks and bowls, who took the money from etherized girls and left them alone to bleed on the bedroom floor.

  If this is the last letter I write.

  She turned to the children—most of them had crept away, restless or disappointed, but a few of the girls remained onstage, still in their patchy costumes: Pigeon, in horns made from penny pencils; Georgette, with two doll legs tied clumsily to her waist; Birdie, holding a lumpy pomegranate in lieu of a glass bulb. They stared at Odile openmouthed, as if she were performing all the death throes of Shakespeare. “What happened to Miss Church? You need to tell me—now—where did she go?”

  They didn’t answer, just sat there among the scattered props, watching her pace.

  “You expect me to believe you don’t know anything? After what I just saw?” She screamed then—a raw, frustrated, disconsolate scream, until her head ached and her eyes brimmed with water. She kicked her valise through the dirt. She thought of all the pitiful things nestled inside—the neatly folded nightgown, the silly peppermints, the old ivory haircomb—as if she’d find her sister staying in some posh hotel.

  “This isn’t playacting—I’m asking you truly!” She felt a burn in her nose but rubbed it away. Then she crouched down and unlatched her valise, drew out the pouch of peppermints. “What was she doing at that house on Doyers Street? Did she live there?”

  The girls gathered around her, coy and squeaking, reaching out their hands. Odile held the pouch high above her head. Pigeon, the smallest, unbuckled her wooden arm and held it aloft, trying to bat the prize out of Odile’s fingers. Odile just grabbed the arm away—“No! No cheating.”

  “That’s my arm!” Pigeon said, terrified. “That’s my only arm!”

  Odile felt a prickle of guilt but she held the limb in the air above her, hearing the dispirited creak of its joints.

  Pigeon began to cry. “Please give it back.”

  “Not until you tell me about that house.”

  “It’s where the broken legs go. I thought you knew!”

  She’d heard the phrase before, but only in hushed, pitying voices. A home for unwed mothers. No wonder the scrub-girl at the door had been careful.

  “What do you mean, broken legs?”

  She leaned down toward the children, but she heard only the rat-rustle of their bare feet, the swish of their costumes as they shifted in the dirt. They held out their hands to her and waited.

  Odile tipped the pouch over her mouth and started gobbling peppermints, grinding them furiously between her teeth. “Tell me!” she said, spraying crumbs.

  Pigeon looked over to the others, then took a deep breath. “Girls go there when they’ve got in trouble. Once I was up there, and I saw something I wasn’t supposed to. There was a lady who’d
come there to get rid of a baby. I could see the bump in her skirt, just a little one, and she cried and said that someone would kill her if they found out. I didn’t hear all of it. But the girls, they want their babies to go away. So they go there for help.”

  Odile blinked back her tears. So it was more than just a home for unwed mothers—the women went there to get rid of it. She felt sick at the thought of it—she’d heard about the potions used, the terrible things that made you sick: days of retching and bleeding. Some girls didn’t make it through at all.

  “And how am I to believe you, after all of this?” she whispered. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  Pigeon dropped her voice. “She left something here. Something she didn’t want anyone to find.”

  Odile handed back her arm. “What is it?”

  Pigeon hopped up on stage. She pointed—“this”—and Odile moved over to look. She recognized it immediately—Belle’s carpetbag, still with their mother’s crooked stitching along the seam. She knelt down and prized it open. Inside she found a book by William Blake, inscribed To F., from V. Pressed between the pages was an envelope with Belle’s handwriting—only a single word, scribbled across the flap: Mouse. Inside was a torn scrap of paper, but the lettering was in a different hand: EDGAR, hair dark, skin fair, 213 W 13—girl. Odile didn’t know what it meant, but she tucked it in her pocket and rifled through the rest—some blank sheets of stationery, an empty bottle of throat tonic, a few wig-pins, and there, rustling at the very bottom, a layer of sand.

  She sat back on her heels. There was something else, she felt—something heavier sewn into the side. She took a pin, split the stitching, and reached in. Her fingers brushed the length of something soft and pliant—leather, she guessed—and traveled up to a carved wedge of metal. Carefully she drew it out.

  A dagger.

  Odile bit into the fingertips of her glove and yanked it off with her teeth, then touched the hilt with her bare hand. She unsheathed the blade and saw there, engraved in the forte, I.C. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes. Isabelle.