by Leslie Parry
You, dear sister, have always been the brave one, the good one, the strongest of all. But Odile didn’t feel brave, not in any sense, and certainly not like their mother. She moved woozily through the Bowery marketplace, past steaming, lemony pots of clam broth, past stacked cabbages and dusty corn, past baskets of discarded corks that at first looked like severed thumbs. She remembered the boy’s toe on the beach—how Belle had lopped it right off without flinching. When she wavered for a moment, stalled at the corner while traffic jittered past, Sylvan reached out to steady her.
“Should we stop?”
She shook her head. “I’m well enough.”
He held tightly to her arm. She stared for a moment at the callus on the curve of his thumb, as rough and riddled as a seashell. The sunlight hurt her eyes. “Let’s keep on,” she said.
They walked on through the crush of wagons. She couldn’t shake the shadow-play in the Frog and Toe, or the faces of the flower girls as they gnawed at their peppermints. If only she’d gone after Belle immediately. What had stopped her? Her own grief, she supposed. A sense of responsibility. She was anchored to Coney Island—it was her life. It held the mystery and grandeur of the whole world, there on a narrow spit of land. Sometimes she believed that if she were to leave, even for a short spell, everything she’d lost might return to her—like a faithful dog finding its way home—only she wouldn’t be there to let it in.
The elevated train clattered overhead, deafening. All around her people pushed and elbowed and squawked, as if they were fighting for the same small breath of air. She kept walking, breathing in through her mouth and spitting back flies. The heady stench—horse shit and roasting chestnuts and trash barrels pulsing with maggots—was enough to make her retch.
Beside her Sylvan kept talking and pointing, rolling his hands through the air, as if to distract her from the pull of inwardness. He went on about prizefighting, about something he called the floating eye, the sensation of leaving his own body and regarding it in wonder from afar, even though he was never more fully alive within it. She didn’t know if he was trying to threaten her or comfort her, but she recognized it as the same sensation she had on the Wheel, although she didn’t say as much. She only stared at her shadow rippling over the cobbles, hunched and blowsy, the shape a shriveled bean pod. How selfish could she have been, staying behind for Guilfoyle’s shabby dime-show, instead of following her sister, alone, into the city?
Maybe if she’d reached out in the days after the fire, Belle might have confided in her. She might have told her about a man she was seeing, or someone who’d taken advantage of her, someone who’d made her do something against her will. Odile tried to think of the men who hollered at Belle from the audience. There were only ever two kinds—the old doddering drunks with green gums and fishing-line suspenders, loud and sloppy but always harmless. More menacing were the rich boys out to slum it, boys with horsey laughs and barbered hair who saw her as some kind of kinky prize—a harem-girl they could brag about to their buddies back home. Odile pictured them in libraries with Greek friezes and parquet floors, talking up her sister’s limber body as they whinnied and honked and ground their chalk against a billiard cue.
When they arrived at number 213—a large brick building with a portico of limestone—they found a woman on the stoop out front, working over a piece of lace. She was older, with hair so white and thin that it glowed pink from the glare on her scalp. She looped and knotted a length of thread, squinting at Sylvan and Odile as they approached. “Who you here for?”
Odile shielded her eyes from the sun. She wanted to shove past the woman and clamber up the stairs, yell her sister’s name, but Sylvan spoke first. “We’re looking for someone named Edgar.”
“Lil?” the woman answered, snapping the thread against her tooth.
“No—Edgar,” Odile said. “Or Eddie.”
“Lill-i-an,” the woman said impatiently, turning the sewing over in her lap. “Lillian Edgar, she’s at work—what do you think she does, frowse about here all day like the queen of England?”
“Is that nearby?” Odile asked.
“The theater round the corner.”
“The—the—?”
“The-at-er!” The woman scowled irritably. “What’s wrong with your ears?”
It was like hearing her own name. A theater—of course. Sylvan said something else to the woman, but all she could hear was the rumble of blood in her head, the distant swell of market bells. Her eyes followed the woman’s thimbled finger, ahead to where the avenue crossed. A music hall, she was saying. Perhaps it was a place Odile would recognize from her mother’s directory—a name she’d jotted down herself the night before, on the old Church of Marvels stationery. Perhaps, after whatever she’d been through on Doyers Street, Belle had gone somewhere familiar.
Odile muttered some kind of thanks, then hurried back through the gate. She and Sylvan turned the corner in tense silence, passing by flower stalls and fruit stands, listening to the knight-pips and dragon-squawks from a children’s puppet show. She pictured her sister idling here beneath these awnings, turning through cherries and pears, buying daffodils and sprigs of yarrow for her dressing room. Lillian Edgar—the name didn’t sound familiar at all—but so far everything in the city had proved to be strange.
Ahead of her was the theater marquee. But it wasn’t the Featherbone, as she’d hoped, just a small variety hall of white brick and green trim: The Garden. She scanned the posters out front, all tacky with wheat-paste and faded by the sun. A musical revue was playing: The Lonely Macaroon, featuring Freddie “the Fried Egg” Eggleston and Lily Up-Your-Alley. No mention of Belle or the Shape Shifter, or any acts of thrill and sensation. A dusty little farce, by the looks of it—what her mother would have called a mustard-and-pickle marquee.
The ticket booth wasn’t open yet, so she knocked at the stage door around back. She glanced over at Sylvan, who unknotted the kerchief at his neck and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had such a particular face—the nose, once broken and now slightly hooked; the red bruise on his cheek; the ink-and-water eyes. She found herself looking back and forth between them, as if they belonged to two different minds, as if they saw two different people standing there beside him. She wondered, fleetingly, if the world appeared to him as if through a stereopticon—two different images that merged into a wondrous, impossible third. It made her shiver for a moment—that he might see a person in her place that she didn’t even know herself, a person who had never before existed.
He caught her looking and shook his head. “If for any reason your sister should have done something dishonorable, or even—I don’t know—something hard for you to understand—”
“She was prone to flights of passion, Mr. Threadgill. And I’m afraid I understand that better than anyone else alive.”
The door was opened by a stubbled stagehand in work gloves and a sleeveless shirt. Odile asked first for Isabelle Church—he only shrugged and shook his head—and then Lillian Edgar. The man eyeballed them for a moment, rolling a sticky wad of chewing gum between his teeth, then pulled back the door and let them in. Odile was suddenly aware of how filthy she must look—boots crusted with dirt, the underarms of her blouse blackened by sweat, hair pasted to her brow. The stagehand pointed them down to Lillian’s dressing room. “In the back,” he said.
The theater itself was dark—Odile heard only the melody of saws and hammers, the crew singing an old Union song. She and Sylvan slipped between the backdrops, making their way to the other side of the stage. She breathed in the scents of paint and cording and sanded wood, the toasted smell of the lamps. There was something about it that grounded her, made her feel right. Not like Guilfoyle’s tin can of a theater, where old kitchen pipes leaked through to the stage. She wanted to believe that Belle had felt at home in a place like this—that in spite of everything, she’d found somewhere safe to return. How many times had Odile climbed into her sister’s bed at night and held her as she raged or wept over a
single, trifling misstep? How many times had they fallen asleep together, heads pressed into the same pillow? And even though Odile reeked of eucalyptus, Belle had never turned her away.
The dressing-room door stood open. At the mirror sat a young woman in a gray gingham dressing gown, pinning wax lilies in her hair. She coughed wetly into a handkerchief, then took a swig of something—a glass of sudsy water, the color of cement. She leaned forward and turned up the lamp and began to paint her lashes. In the mirror Odile saw that her eyes were very bloodshot, her face a milky blue. She coughed again, her whole body contracting, then reached for a dish of talcum. In the doorway beside her, Odile could feel Sylvan tense.
The woman caught sight of them in the mirror, then turned around on her stool, tucking her handkerchief into the sash of her gown. She wasn’t old—not much past thirty—with straw-thin calves in yellow stockings and the short, broad torso of a vaudeville tumbler. She looked at them without any recognition or curiosity, only a polite boredom. With her popping eyes, languorous bulk, and a chin that melted away into her neck, she reminded Odile of a woebegone snail.
“Miss Edgar,” Odile began.
“Lil’s good enough.”
“I was hoping you could tell me about a woman named Isabelle Church.”
Lillian drew her eyebrows together. “Who do you mean?”
“She’s known as the Shape Shifter onstage—contortions and sword-swallowing. Plays a little music, too, usually upside down.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that bit,” Lillian said. She took up a talcum puff and began to powder her neck. “Come in and tell me, though.”
They stepped inside. Sylvan stood closer to the door, a respectable distance in a lady’s room. Odile sat down at the mirror. For the first time since she had arrived in Manhattan, she was met with her own reflection: her mud-flecked hat, her wild tangle of curls, her face flushed from the heat: a swamp-flower blooming in the city steam.
“I’m on the stage as well,” she said quickly, licking her fingers and smoothing back her hair. “We had a sister act, actually, back home at Coney Island. I thought Isabelle might have passed through here at one point—maybe found work with you.”
“Girls come here for work all the time,” Lillian said, drawing a line of color around her lips. “But I don’t know any sword-swallowers. We mostly do comic bits, song-and-dance numbers. Once we had a hypnotist cat. But no, no—nothing like that.”
Odile pressed a hand to her sore knee—she could feel the bandage growing gummy with sweat. “Maybe you’ve heard of the Church of Marvels? The great conflagration at Coney Island last spring?”
“Not that I recall.” She plucked a stray hair from the corner of her mouth. “I’m really very sorry.”
Odile began to wonder if her sister went by another name here, if she’d adopted a different identity altogether. She leaned toward Lil, close enough to smell the fresh talc and salty gingham, and opened her mother’s locket. “Perhaps you’ve seen her. She looks like me? This is an older photograph, I know, but still a good likeness.”
Lillian frowned and studied it.
“And whatever you know,” Odile said as their heads were bowed together, “you couldn’t possibly shock me, so there’s no need trying to protect her.”
The woman just leaned back and shook her head, baffled, glancing from Odile to Sylvan and back again. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone like that here, and I’ve been working here near on ten years.”
“You live at number two-one-three on West Thirteenth Street, right around the corner?”
“Why, yes.” She looked at them suspiciously.
“You’d say your hair is dark and skin is fair?”
“You’re looking at me, ain’t you?”
“This was with my sister’s belongings.” Odile drew the envelope from her pocket and smoothed it out on the dressing table. “She was living on Doyers Street, I believe. Now she’s missing and yours is the only name she left behind.”
Lil gazed at it for a moment, cinching the gown tighter at her waist. She lifted the envelope and slid her finger under the flap, then drew out the scrap of paper. She considered it for a long while, then handed it back to Odile. “That’s very odd,” she said, hoarse. “I can’t possibly see why she had it.”
“But what does it mean?” Sylvan asked. He leaned forward and pointed to the word written across the envelope: Mouse. “None of this is familiar to you?”
Lil coughed—a tin-pan rattle, deep in her chest. She shook her head again, the lilies swishing in her hair. “If I knew your sister, I would tell you. I’m sorry, I can’t help you more than that.”
Odile flexed her wrist, prompting her to look again. “Won’t you please think back? My sister could be in danger.”
“If you don’t mind, I’m . . . I’m not well today.” And it was true, Odile could see—her skin was pale, the color of whey, and even her legs in their yellow stockings seemed to tremble.
“Perhaps you know someone by the name of Lee?” Sylvan suggested. “Or Eddie? Your name is Edgar, am I right?”
“It is indeed, but . . .” Lil stammered and shook her head. “I don’t know how I can convince you—your sister isn’t here.”
Sylvan persisted. “You weren’t on Broome Street last night?”
“What business would I have there?”
“It’s a rather delicate situation,” Odile said quickly, glancing back to Sylvan, “She’s not well, and she needs to come home. I’m afraid she might have been expecting a child.”
Lil’s cheeks were damp, her eyes feverish. She coughed very hard, and suddenly Sylvan looked worried—he poured her a glass from a pitcher nearby. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, we should let you rest.”
Lil took the water and drank it, then got up to close the door. “I’m only saying it once, and you never heard it from me, you understand?” She sat down again and reached for a matchbook. “It’s Mrs. Bloodworth’s writing.”
Mrs. Bloodworth—the name on the apothecary door. “On Doyers Street, you mean?”
“You know her, then.”
“Only the name,” Odile said. “Who is she? The shopkeeper?”
Lil was quiet for a moment. “She’s a Jennysweeter.”
“What is that?” Odile asked, looking to Sylvan and back. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know why my name would be here, but it’s her writing.” Lil drew a shallow breath. “But I’ve been so poorly lately, and I ain’t getting any better, so why not tell you?”
She brushed her eyes with her fingertips, then pulled open a drawer and fumbled around for a cigarette case. Odile could see the white handkerchiefs crumpled up inside, all spotted with blood, like the doves of a luckless magician’s show.
“It’s all right,” Odile said as calmly as she could, even though her heart was thudding in her chest.
“I made a mistake,” Lil said, fingers shaking as she struck the match, “and Mother, she wouldn’t let me keep it.”
Odile understood then. It was what Pigeon had told her down in the Frog and Toe: They want their babies to go away—so they go there for help. “I’m sorry, Miss Edgar. What a harrowing thing to go through.”
“She—she made me go to Mrs. Bloodworth.”
“For a tonic, I know.”
“I’m sorry?”
Odile leaned in confidentially. “To get rid of it,” she whispered.
Lil’s eyes grew wide. She shook her head. “Oh, no, no. My baby didn’t die. No—I gave her to Mrs. Bloodworth.” She coughed again, her eyes watering, blood spotting the back of her hand. “She said she would find her a good home. I didn’t want to do it, but my parents made me! And I loved that baby, Miss Church!”
“You simply handed her over?” Sylvan asked. “You didn’t do her any harm?”
Lil looked up at him. “Why would I have done such a thing as that?”
Odile didn’t know what he was after, but she felt a surge, too, both panic and relief. B
elle had meant to have the baby after all; she’d come all this way to give it up. No potions or pills or hooks; no throwing herself down a flight of stairs. But perhaps something worse had happened—Odile had no idea what it was like, living in a home of broken legs. So she began again, gently, “Were you there at the same time as my sister?”
“No, no. This was many years ago—a decade, more—and I was just a girl.” Lil looked up in the mirror—at her makeup, now messed. She dragged a brush through a jar of carmine oil and slowly painted back her lips, letting the cigarette turn to ash between her fingers.
Odile gazed around the dressing room, at the musty costumes crowded in their rack, at Lillian’s prop tray of macaroons painted pink and green. She tried desperately to organize her thoughts. Mother would have been beside herself, of course. She couldn’t possibly have known about Belle’s condition—if she had, she never would have made her go through with a new routine. She wouldn’t have kept her on the stage at all.
“We should take our leave,” Sylvan said. “Thank you, Miss Edgar.”
“But you’ve come,” she said, turning to them with wet, curious eyes. “Someone’s come after all this time. Isn’t that an act of Providence? No one has come about Mrs. Bloodworth, or my baby—not once, in all these years. Not even my own family come looking for me.” She paused for a moment, fixing the lilies in her hair. “I loved a man, you see, only he—well, he worked in our house. I had to sneak downstairs, find excuses to be alone with him. But soon they could tell—they could tell the thing I’d done.”
“So they sent you away,” Odile said. “To Doyers Street.”
“For a little while they tried to be Christian about it. Mother said she would pass it off as her own, and I was kept good out of sight. I didn’t tell them who the man was, the one who’d done the thing to me. Only the girl was born, and she didn’t look like me. She looked like him.”
