Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  She sat down on the edge of the stage, turning the dagger around in her hands. She’d tried to swallow a sword once before, when she was twelve, but it was too difficult; the taste of her stomach acid coming up on the blade had made her sick. And so she watched as her sister moved on to the arrow, the billiards cue, the chair leg. And when she’d finally mastered the hot sandwich—the most difficult stunt in her routine—Mother had put her at the top of the bill.

  But this dagger—this was her first. Her favorite. The same one that had sliced off the boy’s toe on the beach and sent it rolling through the sand.

  Beside her she heard the rustling of paper, the crack of peppermints between teeth. Tears glided down her cheeks and pooled warmly in her collar. Oh, Belle! Why didn’t you tell me about any of this? Why couldn’t I know?

  Belle, missing from the gypsy party on the beach. Belle, sneaking through the pantry in the morning looking harried and worn, refusing to play her usual show. Belle, alone now in the city—there could be any number of hucksters preying on lost girls like her. The thought that she might be hurt, or sick, or worse—

  “I’m going to find her.” She stood up and turned to the girls, who had spilled out the mints and sat eating them from the dirt. “You might as well tell me everything you know because I’ll find out soon enough.”

  She looked at Pigeon in particular; Pigeon, who was now wearing Odile’s very best gloves—pilfered from where they’d fallen on the floor—one on her real hand, and one on the hand made of wood.

  “What were you doing up at that house just now?”

  Pigeon held up the purse around her neck. “We get the flowers from the shop and take them down to the dragon room. See?”

  Odile drew it up to the light. Inside was a handful of pink and orange blossoms, sweet-smelling, crushed. She remembered seeing the dens—the Chinese parlors, they were airily called on the boardwalk—in the narrow lanes behind the harem. They all promised exotic reveries, but Leland had said they were nothing more than flophouses, with no-account fellows and bunks that hopped with roaches, and a few fat-faced bohemians spouting poetry on the floor.

  “What did Belle say when she left her bag here?”

  “Just to keep it safe.”

  “Did she ever mention a friend to you, a gentleman? Any name at all?”

  Pigeon turned the peppermint over in her mouth. “Just once, when I was up there getting my flowers, I heard her talking to the mean girl, all hissy. They don’t talk to flower girls, not up there—but I heard them in the back room, whispering about a fellow.”

  “Which fellow?”

  “Just said he’d worked at the Featherbone?”

  “What’s that? A theater, a hotel?”

  Pigeon shrugged.

  “I saw something,” one of the girls said now—Georgette. She sat back on her heels, licking a mint in her cupped palm. Her voice was soft and nervous. “There was a man in the dragon room when I took my pouch. Never seen him before, but he was sniffing around for a girl, a fair girl going to have a baby. Seen her in some shop, he says? I didn’t think much of it—they’re all raving there—but he seemed all goosey and cross, like he needed her right away.”

  “Can you take me to him?”

  “That costs extra.”

  “Keep whatever’s there,” Odile said, pointing to the valise. “I’ve got no use for it here anymore.” She felt in her pockets—she had her money, yes—the envelope; her handkerchief; the list she’d made of theaters the night before. The dagger.

  Pigeon buckled back her arm. “I’ll take you there since I’ve got to turn in my pouch.”

  “But be careful,” Georgette said, pulling the nightgown over her head and blinking up through the ruffed collar. “He’s got a bad face, like a monster.”

  THE ROOM WAS DARKER than the burrows of the Frog and Toe, the air pungent and flowery. Little boys sat clustered around a table. Their hands were small and fast; they took apart the opium pipes—bowls, saddles, and stems—with reverence and precision, as if they were tending to the instruments of an orchestra. A boy with a paper mask looked up as Odile and Pigeon walked in. He smiled.

  “Sniff!” Pigeon cried. She ran over and nudged him with her shoulder—a squeak of the iron socket, a grin on her face—then lined up her flowers on the table.

  “I thought you were my best girl!” said the boy, thumping a sticky-looking cake with his fist. “What took you forever?”

  Pigeon pointed to Odile, then leaned in and whispered to him about the man who’d been picking around the mats, but the boy shook his head and said they’d missed him—he’d only just left.

  “What does he look like?” Odile said. “Quick.”

  “Gypsy fellow. Ruffy beard, brownish hat.”

  “A Gypsy?” She could only picture the actors that night on the beach—men with golden earrings and gossamer scarves—barefoot, moustachioed, dancing through the sand with dulcimers and lutes.

  “He gypped the weepy fellow, I saw—took his coat,” the boy went on. “The one with the black sash on the sleeve. He’s a fighter, you can see. His face!”

  “Which way?”

  He pointed down the hallway; Odile thanked him and ran. Through the tattered pongee curtains, out to a gloomy foyer, past an empty chair with a dime novel tented on the arm (A Bride for a Day—she’d loved that one). She ran out the door, up the stairs, knocking a golden bell as she went. The light was bright on the street—she had to stop for a moment, dizzy in the glare. She could smell the meat from a butcher shop, the vinegar stink from olive barrels across the way. Still, she breathed in the wind, cooler, sweet with the traces of bread flour and thyme. Then farther down she saw it—a felt hat, the color of sand. A man, moving away through the marketplace. She thought of Belle, bringing her little dagger all the way to the city, Mother’s old book of poems. She began weaving through the chicken coops and potato wagons, past the fluttering ivory leaves on a stationer’s cart. Just ahead of her—a tall man with dark curls, wearing a band on his jacket sleeve.

  He turned down an alleyway, beneath an arrowed sign that read MILK. She paused for a moment by a cobbler’s bench, matching her breaths to the easy plink of the hammer. Then she gripped the dagger and followed him around the turn.

  He stood in the middle of the alley, alone in a wedge of light, counting out coins in the palm of his hand. She drew the dagger from its sheath, held it low at her side. It had been so long since she’d done anything of the sort—just a girl, standing behind the Church of Marvels, practicing her throws against the corkboard, Mack hemming and clucking as she missed. The knives, bouncing off the yellow wall like grasshoppers, skittering through the sand. Afterward she’d licked her fingers and rubbed at the dimples they left behind in the wood, hoping her mother wouldn’t notice.

  She heard the scuttle of swallows, the low of a dairy cow. She stepped closer, close enough to see the loose twill on his jacket, the fuzz of the knitted band.

  He turned around. His face was bruised, his lip cut, but that’s not what made her stare. One of his eyes was as dark as pitch, the other a watering blue.

  TWELVE

  WHEN ALPHIE WASN’T PREGNANT AFTER THE FIRST FEW months, the Signora began to watch her closely—what she ate (no peppers or sauces), what she wore (loosen the stays), and what she read (no ladies’ magazines). Alphie was sure the woman was punishing Anthony behind closed doors: your gutter mouse has ruined her body. Those matchstick arms! Those narrow hips! After supper, when they all sat together in the parlor and listened to Anthony play the accordion, she couldn’t stand it—the heat, the tension, the little box of teeth: it made her feel faint at times, which the Signora marked as proof of her weak constitution. Whatever explanation Alphie offered up in her studious, broken Italian—I’m sorry, Mother; it’s only a matter of time, surely—the Signora considered nothing more than ninnyish self-pity. Then, when she started asking to see the monthly blood, Alphie felt like a cornered animal. She hadn’t expected to be scrutinized li
ke this, her body an object of curiosity and concern. She thought constantly of the shipyard, the Widows, the men with their boots and their fists, even the good ones who babied her and cuddled her and brought her sweets—she lived in fear that the Signora would discover everything. She had supposed that once they were married and settled into the servants’ quarters, she and Anthony would be left alone, to live their lives privately and as they pleased. But that had yet to happen.

  Alphie lay awake for nights, curled against her husband. Why can’t we just move away? she begged. He only smiled, amused, and brushed her hair. Once things were a little more stable, he promised, they would find a place of their own. Mother was just like that sometimes, he said—new things were hard for; she wanted to have a say in them. She had buried two husbands, after all—there was no one else in the world for her but her son. At times she was even scared to leave the house—how would she fare if she were suddenly alone? Alphie tried her best to understand. If Anthony wasn’t worried, then she shouldn’t be either. So as she drank her coffee in the parlor at night, as she watched him leave with his kit in the mornings, as she powdered her face and brushed kohl on her lashes—not too much, or else the Signora would think she looked like a cheap bat who sauntered hungrily under the elevated track (and that was an image Alphie wanted to leave behind)—she told herself things really would change.

  But one day, without telling her, the Signora called a doctor to the house. He arrived with a black case, crammed full of cold metal instruments that prodded and expanded, with wagging rubber bulbs and rusted-looking clamps. Alphie saw him from the parlor window in the main house, wheezing up the steps, gripping the rail with his sweaty, bologna-pink hands. Mortified, she ran and hid in Anthony’s workshop, trying not to gag into her handkerchief. She kept her breaths small and her body still as the Signora clucked through the house, opening doors and shouting Alphie’s name and making nervous, elaborate apologies to the doctor—who, by the sound of his voice, didn’t seemed alarmed, only impatient. Silly, flighty girls, he said, then asked the Signora for an almond cookie. Alphie hid there for what seemed like hours, until she was sure he was gone.

  A few days later, when Alphie sat down to breakfast and announced that she and Anthony were expecting a child, she couldn’t tell if the Signora was pleased or dismayed. Some part of her wanted the woman to break—to weep, to hug her, to laugh, genuine and overjoyed—anything but the polite, noncommittal sigh that was her usual expression of accord. Instead, the Signora bit into her toast with a smile that was meant to look relieved but only looked disappointed. Alphie didn’t understand—she’d gotten what she wanted, hadn’t she? Why didn’t it seem good enough?

  When she’d first arrived at the house, shy and baby-faced, she’d thrown herself into the role she’d played so well for years: the polite if impoverished young girl, the healer of others’ pain. Alphie wanted to admire the Signora’s tenacity and pride—all the things this woman had survived; the young man she’d raised!—but too often her toughness gave way to cruelty and paranoia. Some afternoons, when they were alone in the house, the Signora would take out her gruesome museum and lay everything out with a polish and brush. She’d point to Alphie and snap her fan. So Alphie would sit there in the hot gloom, rubbing each tooth with the tiny brush, squeaking them clean with a handkerchief. She arranged them in rows, by color, until she was dizzy and sore. Fulvous, graphite, egg. Eggs made her think of her father’s chicken coops—the smell of shit, the feed and feathers everywhere: in her milk, her hair, her underwear. The Signora would just stand inertly by the table, staring over her shoulder, while Alphie kept her head down and prayed to disappear.

  But Anthony had stood up to the Signora, defied her. He’d married the woman he wanted. Because of that, because of what he had risked, Alphie knew he must love her. What other explanation could there be? He, who had taken a stand on so little, who had lived under his mother’s scrutiny and jealousy, who had been shaken by her bouts of wrathful judgment, had stood up in a Protestant parsonage and married a person he had once paid to fuck. Alphie was not a Catholic or a virgin; she was not as hale as a well-kept girl—she’d been disowned by her father and forgotten by her mother—but he gave her a ring of hammered gold, as if she were the purest, loveliest thing on earth. Such a sweetly simple day: she wore a dress the color of honeysuckle, a new set of calfskin gloves. She carried a nosegay she’d bought from a Widow on the waterfront. The parson was a benevolent man with white gums and a scurvied spine—he’d spent his orphaned boyhood at sea, he said—and because of this Alphie somehow felt a kinship with him; a sense of good fortune, of brighter days ahead. When it was done, the Signora kissed Alphie’s cheek, then turned away and dabbed at her tears. Alphie chose to believe they were tears of happiness.

  But still there were nights when Anthony would come upstairs and collapse in bed, his hands falling over her, holding her too hard, his calluses rough against her bare skin. He’d fold himself around her, jerk her awake, pinch her stomach and her thighs. She could feel his stubble chafe the back of her neck and scrape between her shoulder blades, his lips drag across her skin. He’d had too much to drink, maybe, but he was home. They’d fall asleep like that, holding on to each other until they woke—intertwined and filled with a strange, unknowable dread at daybreak.

  THAT NIGHT IN THE ASYLUM, Alphie dreamed that her face was covered in hair—long hair, thick and silky, heavy as a Widow’s wig. It grew from every pore, pulling at her lips and eyelids and nose, until she couldn’t see or breathe. It grew faster and faster—she tried to hold it, catch it in her hands; she tried to swim through it for light and air. It began creeping around her neck, slowly at first, then cinching tighter and tighter. She tried to grab for the scissors, but her hands got tangled and trapped. Every time she jerked them forward, the hair pulled, excruciating, at the skin on her cheeks. She screamed for air but it was no use. She was snared in a web that she’d made for herself.

  She woke in the asylum bed, out of breath, an ache beating behind her eyes. She put a hand to her cheek, which felt cool and rough. Under the blanket, the scissors had slid out of their loosened hitch and pricked the skin behind her knee. She licked her palm and rubbed at the dots of blood on the pallet. How could she have been so foolish? How long could she last without being discovered?

  Out in the rotunda the night nurse made her rounds, walking the moonlit ring around the dome, peering into each room while the keys slapped against her thigh and her baton beat out a bored rhythm on the walls. There was a wet cough as she drew nearer. Alphie burrowed under her blanket, drawing her knees up to her chin.

  The nurse paused just outside the door—it was the pink-eyed, dyspeptic woman who had taken her wedding ring. Alphie could see it now through the bars, glinting on a bone-thin finger. As quietly as she could, Alphie inched the scissors up her sleeve. The nurse scanned the room, slow and perfunctory, the baton twitching in her side. The women lay silent in their beds, as if they were holding their breaths. You must do this, Alphie told herself, you must, you must—there is no way out until Anthony comes.

  The nurse took a swig from her bottle of tonic, belched, and moved on. Alphie listened to her heels snicking away down the hall.

  Each floor was locked up at night—there was nowhere to go but in a circle, an endless walk of reeking rooms. Still, Alphie knew there was a private washroom for the nurses on duty—it was set off in a little alcove, just behind the barricaded stairs. With the scissors tucked up her sleeve, she waited for the footsteps to die away. Then she threw off her blanket and crept across the room, between the beds where women slept too soundly—it must be those thimbles of mead, she thought. Or else it was fear that had husked them, shriveled their bodies down to the basest cycles. Breathe, sleep, waste, age. She thought of her dream again and touched her face.

  The gate to her room was locked, but she managed to pop the latch with the tip of the scissors and slip out into the hall. The windows, brittle and veined, scattered the moon
light across the ground like seeds. She began walking slowly, matching her steps to ticks from an unseen clock. Just past the stairs—which were closed off by an oak-and-iron door, thrice-bolted—she found the alcove. The washroom door stood ajar.

  It was a small room, dark and overwarm. She saw a washstand and a dingy mirror, a wooden rack that glimmered with silverfish, pegs that hung empty on the wall. She began rummaging through the rack, turning up old candles and a soggy box of matches, a shoe-brush and a couple of rags, a bottle of lime soda and a moldering box of tooth powder. She tucked the rags against the seam of the door, then lit a candle. The yellow pulsed against the gray, the color of a bruise. On the washstand the soap—a dirty, curling flint—sat in a puddle of its own scum. She touched her cheeks again: they felt coarse and hot.

  Through the ceiling she heard a loud thud, then the sound of a body hurling itself against the wall. “Help!” a voice screamed. “Police! Help me!”

  Alphie shuddered over the washbowl. She poured water from the pitcher into her cupped hand, then sucked it up like a cat. She hadn’t anything to drink at supper—she’d been too wary. Her lungs felt tight, her throat dry. The water tasted tinny and sulfurous, but still cool. She drank another handful, then dabbed her wet hands over her face and neck.

  “Police! Oh, God, help!” The ceiling thundered again, shaking down bits of plaster. Alphie brushed the dust from her hair and shoulders. The girls upstairs, she knew, were the wickedest of all—they were the girls who’d thrown themselves down staircases, or made nooses out of their stockings, or chased down their husbands with a pistol. They were all locked away for good. They weren’t allowed out, not ever, not even to attend Sunday prayer in the sitting room. The nurses called them the Violents.

  Should the scissors be discovered in Alphie’s possession, she knew she would be sent up there, too. The nurses might be able to ignore all sorts of things, but no bribe could turn them away from a weapon, especially one that was stolen from them and concealed beneath her flannel dress. After that, there would be no hope for her. She wouldn’t last, not up there.