Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  “And they wouldn’t keep her? They wouldn’t just turn the man out of the house instead?”

  “He was from Siam. She was a half-breed, you see? And anyone would know it. So I left her with Mrs. Bloodworth; I signed her away. But even so, my mother and father wouldn’t take me back. It’s a sin, what I done. I did everything they asked, and still they wouldn’t let me home.”

  “And what would have happened to my sister’s child?”

  “Sold to a good family, you can only pray. Though why she’d have my name here, I can’t tell you. Only Mrs. Bloodworth would know where I am. She’s the one who found me the room at Mrs. Porter’s, when my parents wouldn’t take me in.”

  Sold! Even the sound of it—one brisk, austere syllable—struck Odile like the clap of a hammer. “If I were to pay her a visit, might she know where my sister is? Perhaps she found her lodging, too?”

  “If she has, she’ll never tell you. That’s part of the agreement, you understand? Your sister is protected. You’ll get no information at all.”

  “But I’m her family.”

  “There’s nobody more dangerous than family.” Lil looked back in the mirror and powdered her face again. “I know that to be true.” For a moment she stared at her reflection—the grim, hooded eyes; the burst vessels in her cheeks. Then, mechanically, she brushed back her hair and righted the pins, slid on a bracelet, wound a scarf around her throat. She bared her teeth in the mirror and practiced her smiles—big, hammy, antic smiles, like a series of souvenir photo-graphs.

  Odile stood up to take her leave, but Lillian turned back once more. She lowered her voice as carpenters shuffled down the hallway, just outside the door. “Go into the shop tomorrow, first thing. She will only see girls in the morning. Ask for a cup of tea. At least then you’ll get into the back room; you’ll see Mrs. Bloodworth for yourself. You might find a trace of your sister. More than you’ll find here, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean pretend I’m there for the same?”

  “You said you were on the stage, right?” Footsteps drew closer in the hall. “But be careful—please. She is not a forgiving woman.”

  There was a knock on the door—the stagehand summoning Lillian for rehearsal.

  As she stood, she looked back at the envelope again, still clenched in Odile’s hand. “Burn it, will you?”

  When she left—a barrage of silks and powder and tinkling gems, carrying her tray of macaroons—Sylvan turned to Odile.

  “There’s something I need to show you.”

  THEY TURNED INTO a narrow alley off Cherry Street—Odile saw boys shucking oysters, cats stalking through the weeds. Even though it was hot out, her teeth chattered and her head pulsed. Everything came dizzily to life: the sweat on Sylvan’s neck, the jammy cuts on his knuckles, the crinkle of his elbow as he reached for the banister and drew himself up the stairs. And the staircase itself, bleached by the sun—in the light she saw a fine web of filaments around it, glowing like a spun cocoon.

  A door opened on the landing above. A woman leaned out. She was kind-eyed and stout; she let them inside, whispered to Sylvan. Odile heard the words She’s sleeping and then smelled cinnamon in the air. She followed Sylvan into the dark, steamy room, listing as if she were at sea.

  He beckoned her. There was something at his feet—a basket, lined with quilts. She heard a rustle from inside. A kitten, she thought. A rabbit.

  She drew a breath and looked down. She felt the tears start to well in her throat.

  “I’m not a night watchman,” Sylvan said. “I’m a night-soiler. And this is what I found in a privy.”

  A baby. A puffy, pink face; a dimpled chin. A drooling, sleeping, milk-sweet baby, with little bat-ears sticking out beneath her silken tugs of hair. She yawned and opened her eyes, and it took no more than a second for Odile to see that she looked like Belle.

  FIFTEEN

  ALPHIE DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT SHE FELT, IF IT WAS thrill or terror. Memories, though shifty and piecemeal, were starting to come back to her. The night that Anthony and his mother were supposed to have gone to Poughkeepsie—the night that she paced the rooms alone—she remembered a faint rap on the carriage-house door, the darkness of the stairs as she crept down to answer it. Mrs. Bloodworth’s girl was waiting for her on the step. She wore a hooded black cloak and a white flower at her breast. Orchard Broome, standing there in the shadows, bearing the basket beside her.

  And here she was on the island, flanneled and masked, drinking the raw asylum eggs, unable to speak her own name. What a strange bit of fortune, Alphie thought—together they made a plan, scribbled in soap on the mirror of the nurses’ washroom, then washed away with a rag.

  After they snuck back down the hall, Alphie paused at the gate to the other ward. It was locked—how had Orchard escaped and followed her? As far as Alphie could tell, she had nothing to open it with, not even a hairpin. Alphie was about to reach for the scissors, but then they heard footsteps circle back down the corridor. Orchard dropped to her stomach and slithered beneath the bottom rung—a space of no more than six inches. Alphie stared at the girl’s body, flat and slippery as an eel, undulating under the bar. Her skirt dragged and swished, her legs kicked, and then her slippered feet disappeared—thwoop!—fast as a penny flicked across a floor. Alphie stood alone in the hall, wondering if she was hallucinating. But back in her own bed, with the taste of sweat and soap on her upper lip, her heart pounded so hard that it hurt: her heart, as real as anything she knew.

  She remembered, as a small child, seeing her father dress a doe by the river. He made Alphie hold the knife, then guided her hand and cut into the animal’s flesh—the blood began to spill, the skin peeled away, but there beneath the ribs the heart still beat. Just twice: flup, flup.

  Flup, flup, then still.

  It’s what we do, her father had insisted. It’s man’s way. Alphie stared at the organs, pulled out in a glistening snarl around her feet. But this isn’t my way, she thought, although she knew she couldn’t say it out loud. The song of the heart haunted her, all through the winter. She heard it in the burning hearth, in the snowy trees. She fell asleep and heard it in the pillow beneath her head: flup, flup. Then gone.

  Sometimes, when Alphie had worked on the waterfront—a fourteen-year-old Widow in waxy blond curls—she lay alone in her room at night, scrubbing her limbs with a crusted rag. In that room (barely big enough for a body, no brighter than a coal box) she could hardly see her hand stretched out in front of her. There in the dark with nothing else to guide her, her old senses came alive, and she imagined she was back in the house on the river, the place where she’d been born. In her mind she weaved through the old rooms, up and down the stairs, around the familiar corners—to the linen cabinet where she used to hide as a child with her corncob doll pressed to her breast. To the kitchen hearth where she sat making paper dolls, the same doll over and over, while her mother threw dough against the table and sighed. To the foul, low-lying henhouse, where she used to belly-crawl through the straw, groping for speckled eggs still warm in their nests. To the crooked forest path that ran from their house to the shop, thick with the smell of loam and dead leaves in the rain. In the darkness she could still feel the sting of the river water on her naked limbs, taste a buttery yolk as it slipped whole down her throat. She could see the stars through the wind-bent trees, the crooked steps up to the kitchen door, the raccoon’s eyes blinking from the old woodpile, even her mother and father hunched over their dinner plates, the knife edges glinting in the lamplight. Sometimes she wept so hard she threw up, and the Widows’ erstwhile, goggle-eyed madam beat her for the smell of her room, which she had to clean all over again. So she stopped thinking that way. She shrank back from the edges of her mind and stayed in one gray place. For years she stopped trying to think anything at all.

  But now, in the asylum ward, she allowed shapes to come alive in the darkest corners of the room. She saw again the bed she shared with Anthony, the little cradle by the range, the pil
lows she could never quite clean—marked by the black tally of her eyelashes, the grease from Anthony’s hair. She saw the credenza, the bottle of cordial, her old paint kit on the shelf, nothing more than a tackle box tied with a sad bit of ribbon. (But the smell of it when she opened the lid!—the mineral whiff of the creams and pastes, the rusty sweetness of the powder, the tang of lemon drops.) She saw her dresses hanging on the rack, the hats on their lonesome pegs. She saw the girl’s white flower where it lay on the rug, crushed beside the broken rattle. The rattle—she’d forgotten! Anthony had made it for her just as summer began. A pretty, painted thing of wood. But that night the Signora—il mostro!—had cracked it open on her skull, and as Alphie fell to the floor she saw raining down around her—not dry beans like she’d imagined—but teeth. Children’s teeth. Her hand, confused, had flown up to her mouth, where she was missing two of her own, but those had been punched out years ago, by a drunkard who told her she’d suck better without them.

  Now in bed she worried her loose tooth with her tongue. She felt a throb echo through her body, down into her groin. She had wondered if resignation would come to her at Blackwell’s, the way it had in that dark room on the waterfront—if she would just shrink away from her grief and dreams, and hope that her body survived while her mind disappeared. But something had changed. Now the only thing that could keep her alive was her mind—not her body, waiting to betray her.

  Where is she? Orchard Broome had begged, but Alphie couldn’t tell her. She didn’t remember what happened to the baby at all.

  SHE HEARD THE HOUNDS at dawn. They groaned and yipped, scraping across the yard on their chains, gobbling up gristle thrown on the ground. Then came the heavy tread in the hall, the drag of Jallow’s baton across the stone. She checked her thigh—scissors, secure—and rose from her bed. The other women were startled awake, too—they fell, groping and mole-blind from their beds, hurrying to ready themselves in the darkness. Alphie shook out her shapeless skirt, bowed her head, and waited for Jallow to herd them downstairs for their promenade. When the nurse came clattering into the room, Alphie snuck a glance her way, trying to see if she looked different today (more aware somehow, or suspicious) but Jallow only blasted a pellet of snot out of her nostril and marched them all downstairs to the courtyard, just as she’d done the day before.

  It was still dark, with a golden glow just starting to burn over the water. They shuffled down to the south gate, where they were joined by Bradigan and the shivering women from the other ward. Over the river Alphie heard the first sounds of the city—the grate of metal, the hiss of steam, the horns and bells of the longshoremen. She breathed in the early smell of morning, grass and dew. The crickets were thrupping in the brush. Something about it reminded her of her childhood, tramping through the woods to the water—far away from the glowering townspeople at the shop counter, fussing over their push brooms and fennel seeds—far away from her father, red-faced at the woodpile, beating her with a log because she couldn’t lift the ax. All those mornings running to the river through the forest, stripping off her horrible clothes, waiting for the green water to hide her, envelop her. Even then, only a child, she knew she had to pretend to be someone else—for her parents, for their customers, for everyone else in that miserable factory town, dark and ashy with smoke—even if it made her sad. If she ran fast enough on those raw, dark mornings through the woods, she might see the trees and morning stars, merrily alive, scurry back to their rightful places. She might hear the animals whisper and sing. And she would gain something special—a secret knowledge, an awakening. Something no one else could know. But until then she had to pass unnoticed, waiting to be delivered to another world where she belonged.

  The horses were already harnessed and hitched to the cart, nosing in their feedbags. Alphie glanced around for Orchard. In the blue huddle beyond, she saw the glint of her mask, a small moon floating in the dark. At the sound of the whistle, the women allowed themselves to be guided by the nurses into a single line. Orchard kept close to the front, Alphie to the back, her head down, trying to look tired and unremarkable despite the charge that coursed through her. When DeValle shuffled in behind her, Alphie grabbed her wrist and squeezed. “Whatever you see, don’t you dare make a sound—I’ll take your Malvina Cream, every last tin. Understand?”

  DeValle whimpered and nodded.

  Jallow and Bradigan moved in tandem down the row, collaring the women and hitching them together. Alphie kept her eyes down as they passed the rope through the metal ring on her collar, as they talked to each other over the women’s heads. The gates rattled open, and the hounds began to bray.

  The nurses climbed stiffly into the wagon. The horses pricked up their ears. The charwomen circled the yard with their snuffers, tamping out the lights.

  Jallow whistled, and the horses lurched ahead. The women were pulled down the path to the river. Alphie saw the lighthouse to the north, and to the south the almshouse and the prison. Then, at the curve of the road, they passed the groundsman’s wagon, coming up from the landing. The breath caught in her throat, itching like a bug—she saw the sneering soap-boy with his banged-up trunk. He didn’t even glance at them, just rubbed his nose and stared dully at his boots. She was terrified, but also sick with relief—she needed it to be him. And here he was, the piggy bastard, ready to greet the Matron, who waited behind as always with her blue lamp and musty book. Alphie looked away, as if it were of no interest to her. The order had been wrong yesterday. He’d come, grudgingly, to fix it.

  They plodded forward down the road, under an arbor of barren trees. Bradigan and Jallow rode with their backs to the women, conferring about something in low voices. Jallow seemed upset—it was her fellow, she kept saying; her fellow was untrue. Once in a while Bradigan turned to hock a mouthful of tobacco juice onto the road. Jallow steered the horses, wiping at her face, not even bothering with the pie-pan lying beside her. Alphie tried to keep her feet steady. The rope buzzed and burned against the ring of her collar—she could feel the hemp-dust tickle her nose. They looked like one straggling, accordioned creature, she thought, a giant blue millipede.

  She couldn’t bear for Anthony to see her this way—her body caked with oil and dander, her hair matted and still reeking of Mother’s Milk, the skin at her throat now festering, marked by a name she couldn’t read.

  For a quarter of an hour the women tramped doggedly ahead, their feet lost in a billow of dust. She heard, echoing through the trees, the song of the convicts breaking stone, the echo of hammers, the patter of patrol boats. Then—there it was: the dull clang of the boathouse bell, summoning the ferry’s return. She heard the gulls crying overhead, the hiss and slap of water. Her heart answered, fluttering up in her chest.

  They moved around a horseshoe bend, down into a copse of trees—the densest, most wooded portion of the promenade—thick with mayapple and shepherd’s purse. How strange, Alphie thought, passing through the bowers, that the farther afield they got from the asylum, the more things flourished, returning to life. As Jallow and Bradigan lifted their lamps in the early light, as the horses snorted their way through the trail of fog, she pulled the scissors from under her dress and prized them open. As the women buckled and swayed ahead, Alphie slid the blades around the rope and started grinding. For a moment it seemed the cords were too tough, the scissors too dull, her fingers slippery and numb. Soon the wagon would emerge onto the trampled, sunlit path by the river. She squeezed harder and harder at the scissors, until her palms were chafed and the blades were jammed with bits of thread.

  Dismayed, she looked at the fraying, chewed-up twine in front of her. The women kept winding down the path, listing to the side. She leaned the other direction, putting strain on the rope, feeling the muscles cramp in her neck. Then the cords unraveled, hummed, and snapped. The women in front of her jerked forward. Alphie stopped in the middle of the path. The rope unthreaded, slipping through the hoops of each collar with a pop of dust. The horses trotted faster and faster through the
trees, with no weight to hinder them. Jallow and Bradigan yelled, struggled to settle them; they whistled and pulled at the reins. The madwomen fell back, watching the rope snake away through dirt, the nurses’ bonnets roll and pitch like two black balloons in the fog. They wavered for a moment in their blue flannel dresses, then looked around at each other, confused. Some began to scatter. DeValle began to laugh. Orchard grabbed Alphie’s hand and pulled her away through the trees, past the old cannon with its bird’s-nest crown, behind the old military wall overgrown with foxglove. She crouched down and took the scissors from Alphie and cut their collars free.

  Then they ran between the wraithlike trees, through thickets of ironweed and possum haw. Orchard was quick, much quicker than Alphie, but Alphie ran until her lungs ached with the force of it, until her feet were cut open and her slippers weren’t much more than shreds of fabric swinging from her ankles. Through the grove they heard the echoing panic of the pie tin, the nurses blowing their whistles: Help!

  They ran along the shore, to the landing and the old boathouse—there, the bell with its half-rotted rope, creaking in the breeze. Through the door Alphie could see the soap-boy with his yellow eyes, chewing the skin around his knuckles. He was done with his delivery and now sat with his feet propped up on the soap-case, waiting for the ferry to make its return.

  The Matron’s horn sounded up the hill. The dogs, excited, began to bray. The boy spit out a hangnail and rose to his feet, bewildered. Alphie hovered there just outside the door, breathing in the balmy scent of wet wood and soap—then Orchard touched her arm and they shoved their way inside, wrestling him back against the wall. “What the devil is this?” he spat. “I’ll kill you bitches dead.”

  Orchard lunged at him, the open scissors flashing in her hand. But the boy was fast—he raised a hand and struck her upside the head, so hard she stumbled to the floor.