Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  Odile shifted in the heat, breathing deeply and evenly, using the muscles of her diaphragm, the way her mother had taught her. There were sheets of paper pinned to the corkboard above the table—she squinted to read them through the veil. It looked like the ingredients for some kind of witch’s brew: chewing’s fescue, dame’s rocket, bearded sprangletop, night-flowering catchfly. She tried to imagine why Belle would have gone to such lengths—to come all the way to Manhattan, to a dangerous woman in the middle of the slums. Surely there was someone reputable and nurturing in Brooklyn? Odile would have helped her, without question—she would have kept her secret. If only Belle had asked.

  “This is all very confidential, you understand?” Mrs. Bloodworth sat down on a castered stool and rolled closer to Odile. “People’s reputations are at stake.”

  Odile swallowed. “Whose?”

  “Well, for one—yours.”

  She clipped a flower from the clematis and pinned it to Odile’s dress. It was big and scruffy and white, blown open in the sun. “The smell of this, I find, is so soothing. Especially when you’re in distress.”

  Odile dipped her nose and breathed in the perfume. This had been her sister’s world, from the sooty crook of Doyers Street to the children underground to an apothecary’s botany. What was it she was missing? Belle, unwed and alone, had come here—to a Jennysweeter hidden in a hothouse fog. All without a word, even a hint, to Odile. But something had gone wrong—and here was this blithe, heron-necked woman, filling the bowl of her pipe, unhurried, as if everything else in the world were of no consequence. But Belle had sensed something—she’d written Odile, telling her in no uncertain terms to stay home. She’d been trying to protect her. From shame and scandal, from the dangers of the city—any number of things. From her own addled mind: melancholy, fantastical. From people out to do her harm.

  Mrs. Bloodworth lit her pipe, then leaned back and examined Odile thoughtfully through the smoke. “No one came with you?” she asked, picking a bit of tobacco from her tongue. “No one followed you here?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Threadgill.”

  “How old are you, Miss Threadgill?”

  “Seventeen last October.”

  “And the father—does he know?”

  “My father?”

  Mrs. Bloodworth smiled patiently. “No, the child’s.”

  Child. She wondered if Belle had actually told the father, if that was why she’d left so abruptly. It pained her to think there was a man that she herself might have passed every day on the street—an ordinary, no-face man, or someone she might even know well—there, selling waffles on the boardwalk, clapping wooden tongs in the air; or perhaps counting out her shabby dollars at the bank. Someone who had smiled and said hello, knowing exactly who she was and what she’d lost, but who had kept her willingly a fool. The father of that beautiful baby.

  She shook her head. “He does not, ma’am.”

  “What are your relations with him now?”

  Odile paused, unsure of how to answer.

  “Has he tried to call on you?” Mrs. Bloodworth prompted. “Write to you? Does he know where you are now?”

  “No, we’ve not spoken since the . . .” She gestured weakly in the air. She knew about sex, of course—she had from a young age. Mother never talked about it in any certain terms, although she’d always spoken plainly of their bodies. She’d given them menstrual belts and hot water bottles when their monthlies began, explained that they shouldn’t take their clothes off in front of a man, not even in a dressing room. It stirred men’s blood in an animal way and made their organs swell. (Odile had simply assumed she was talking about the heart.) The rest she’d heard about from Georgette and the other girls in the show—it made her squeamish at first, but then she began to see it everywhere, in every madcap, hootenanny revue. All those comics with their pull-whistles and cranks; all the dancing girls with powdered legs. But sex wasn’t something she’d given much thought to in her own life—why would she? She’d never expected she’d get married or fall in love. She’d never considered a life beyond the one she had always lived: a house full of women, at work on the stage.

  “Tell me what he looks like,” Mrs. Bloodworth continued. “Or do you know?”

  Odile bristled. “I’m not a whore, if that’s what you mean.”

  Mrs. Bloodworth smiled. “You don’t look it. You look cared for. You look like a loved girl.”

  “It was only once,” she sputtered, embarrassed at her own imaginary coupling.

  “Just a sketch,” the woman said again, patiently. “His people, his origin, his temperament.”

  Odile tried to think of something credible and bland—a moment of hesitation that Mrs. Bloodworth mistook for bashfulness, or even shame. “Fair?” she suggested. “Dark? Stout, thin? A gentleman? A drunkard? Intelligent, crude, fluent in music? Anything you can offer will help me.”

  “Oh,” she stammered. “He was just a boy, like any other. Dark hair. A beard.”

  “I know it’s difficult to talk about.”

  Yes, it is, Odile thought. But not in the way that you think. “I’m not a bad person,” she felt compelled to say.

  “Of course not.” Mrs. Bloodworth shook her head. “There are no bad women here. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And how long ago was the event?” She took a draw on her pipe. “With this dark-haired boy like any other.”

  “A few months?”

  “And how do you know that you’re with child?”

  “Because I know myself, I suppose.”

  She blew a line of smoke in the air. “You’ve missed your monthlies?”

  Odile nodded: a brief, demure drop of the chin.

  “Have you been examined by a doctor, a midwife, a friend—anyone at all?”

  “No one. I simply walked out the door and left.” She met Mrs. Bloodworth’s gaze and felt something harden in her chest. Little Friendship Willingbird, hitchhiking through the hills of Pennsylvania in her dead brother’s suit. Isabelle Church, sailing off to the city in a tumbledown boat, carrying her bag of swords. “Only a letter under the inkwell, to tell them not to come after me. I’d write.”

  Mrs. Bloodworth paused to refill her pipe. “Any cramping?” she asked, tamping down the tobacco with the handle of her shears. “Aches, nausea, spots of blood? Anything giving you trouble?”

  Odile had no idea how to answer. What did pregnant women feel like? Sick, she figured. Swollen. Fatigued. What was it she used to say when she feigned sickness as a child? “Just a little fuzzy-feeling, I suppose.”

  “Have you had any bouts of melancholy or distress? Hallucinations? Macabre thoughts?”

  Odile thought of the fanciful lines from her sister’s letter: describing their mother as a mermaid. The tigers, undersea. Even Pigeon had talked of such magical beasts—mighty and finned, battling a suckered colossus. “Please,” she said. Her throat grew watery and raw; her eyes began to burn. “I only want . . .”

  “You want to move on with your life. I understand,” Mrs. Bloodworth replied. “You want to return to the world unashamed, without consequence or disgrace. You want to wake from this dream and be able to resume your life. Yes?” She plucked a handkerchief from her apron and handed it Odile. “I understand.”

  Odile took it and drew it up under her veil. It smelled sweet and homey, like rosewater.

  “You will be provided for while you’re here,” Mrs. Bloodworth went on. “But I must be strict on this point. You will not be allowed to leave the house during your confinement, or associate with anyone who might come to the door. I don’t mean to be cruel, you see, only safe. If you must contact anyone, if only to maintain decorum or avoid suspicion, you mustn’t relay one word about what happens under this roof. That’s vital. We can never be too certain. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes.” Like a captive, Odile thought. All those secrets,
just as Miss Edgar had said. She wadded the handkerchief up in her hand, stared at the poppies on the shelf. Mrs. Bloodworth, supplying her flowers to the underground dens; mixing her nostrums and salves for unwed mothers, then selling off their babies to those who couldn’t carry them, or who needed to cover up secrets of their own. She thought about the scrub-girl downstairs—sullen, fuzzy-lipped, eye-rolling Mouse. She must have known Belle, despite what she’d claimed yesterday. Odile smoothed her skirt and felt the envelope crackle in her pocket.

  Mrs. Bloodworth stood up, the stool squeaking beneath her. “I’ll have to examine you, all right?”

  Odile looked up at her, startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “A normal procedure,” the woman continued. “Just to see how you’re faring. See when your term ends, what we can expect.”

  “Now?”

  “It will be easy, I promise. Just a touch. Stand up.”

  “What about downstairs? You have a room somewhere, yes? Isn’t there a proper way . . . some paper I should be . . . ?”

  “Yes, just after this, I promise. No one can see you in here—you have my word.” She drew closer, so close that Odile could smell her breath—leafy, a trace of tobacco and tea—through the veil.

  “You wear a corset?” Mrs. Bloodworth asked.

  “Just—just my knickers and a cami.”

  “Good, that’s as it should be.”

  Odile swallowed hard, her fingers numb. There was nowhere to go in that little glass room; she was already backed against the table, tickled by vines, keeping company with old phosphate jars of snippers and razors and shears. Slowly she stood. She shook out her blouse and unbuttoned her skirt until the pleats of her knickers showed. She looked away as Mrs. Bloodworth’s fingers, warm and tough, massaged her stomach and pushed gently around her navel. The veil, the fog, the tremulous threat of tears—she stood as still as possible, blinking in the swelter, waiting for it to be over. Perhaps Mrs. Bloodworth wouldn’t be able to tell anything (she’d eaten so many sweets lately, after all—there were always bags of caramels and taffy backstage); perhaps she’d invite her down to the office to talk things over further—any place where she could find a trace of her sister, why she’d gone.

  After a moment Mrs. Bloodworth stood back. “Miss Threadgill, I have something to tell you.”

  “Wh—what’s that?”

  “I don’t believe you’re pregnant at all.”

  Odile tried to look surprised, but she just felt breathless and sick. “No, no, that can’t be—”

  Mrs. Bloodworth broke into a smile and touched her shoulder. “Aren’t you relieved? It’s good news, right?”

  Odile dropped her head, her ears hot. She pressed the veil to her face and began to cry.

  “It’s called a phantom womb,” Mrs. Bloodworth was saying. “It might be your nerves.”

  Phantom womb.

  “Have you been under particular stress lately? Perhaps something has shifted in your life? There’s someone you’ve lost?”

  The tears fell over on her cheeks, hot and stinging, thin as blood. She sat down on the stool and turned away.

  “It’s clearly a great burden you’ve been carrying, a great stress. Might I suggest a tonic for your nerves? We carry some in the shop if you’d like to stop on your way out.”

  Odile nodded at the glass wall. She felt the woman’s hand rub her back.

  “You are lucky that you came to me, that you didn’t do anything rash.”

  The veil clung to Odile’s face. She tasted the sour snot running from her nose; tears ached between her eyes. Mrs. Bloodworth’s hands leafed gently through her hair. And then Odile felt it—the tip of the woman’s finger, tracing the crescent behind her ear.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SOON ALPHIE NOTICED MEN WERE TRAILING THEM—MEN IN uniform, on horseback. She looked over her shoulder as discreetly as she could—they were following them down the congested lane, maybe forty yards back. A paddy wagon rounded the bend, and the other carts parted to make way. Orchard looked over at her, worried—by now the asylum would have alerted someone on the shore—and there she was in a blue flannel dress, riding a horse stolen from a saloon near the landing. And Alphie: wearing the soap-boy’s clothes, her tattoo bared for all to see.

  Alphie tried to spur her horse faster, turning the corner to lose them, but the swarm of coaches and pushcarts only grew thicker. The horses whinnied and balked. She looked over her shoulder, saw the shimmer of black through the heat. They wouldn’t take her back to the asylum, of course. She’d be sent someplace even worse, the most brutal of men’s workcamps. A tattoo was nothing—she’d heard male prisoners were branded on the face with hot pokers. A fairy there would be killed. And what she’d done—what she’d conspired to do: passing herself off as a married woman, buying a baby from a Jennysweeter’s crib—was far graver than selling her body or drinking in a dress at the wrong bar. She would be put away forever.

  She just had to get to Anthony. They could get on a train and take off, past Peekskill and Poughkeepsie, all the way to Montreal. She glanced back and saw the police horses weaving through the marketplace. The officers were faceless in the shadows of their caps; their nightsticks swung from their belts. She heard one of them whistle, jarring and shrill.

  Orchard veered sharply to the right, guiding her horse between the fruit stands. Alphie jumped down from the saddle and started running, cutting through the living sea of the marketplace, squelching through horse shit, knocking past women with their baskets of laundry. She hadn’t run like this in years—trousers flapping around her ankles, hard shoe-heels pulling open the skin on her feet, the bowler threatening to blow back from her head. A tough, she realized—that’s what she looked like. The kind of boys she’d once been frightened of and fascinated by, knowing she didn’t belong.

  She’d paid Mrs. Bloodworth the fee weeks ago, in the back room of the apothecary shop. One hundred dollars—sweaty and rumpled, sewn into the lining of her coat. She’d laid the bills across the desk, then watched as the woman licked her thumb and counted them twice. For months Alphie and Anthony had skimped, saved, done what they could. Anthony sold off his good cuff links, the ones his stepfather used to wear to church. He even cut back on his mother’s allowance—he told her that money had been scarce since the consumption swept through. They’d taken the bodies away in those wagons; there hadn’t even been time for funerals. The Signora had been furious, indignant. She made a show of buying hard stale bread even though there was still enough money for olive loaves and onion rolls. Alphie did her best to stay out of her way, to find excuses to rest, unobserved, as her confinement drew nearer.

  For a while at night—when Anthony stole down to the dens alone, when the Signora fell asleep with a knife beneath her pillow, waiting for the wolves—Alphie walked over the bridge to turn a couple of tricks. She felt guilty—she was married now, and this life was supposed to be behind her—but what else could she do? She couldn’t make that kind of money with her paint-kit and lemon drops. She couldn’t disappear for nights on end in the state she was in, waiting down by the waterfront for brawls to begin. This was quick, at least; nameless. It wasn’t a betrayal, she believed; it was only a duty. It was for their life together, a life they’d worked so hard to preserve. She had to make some sacrifices, didn’t she? Didn’t everybody? So she went over the river where no one would know her, to the Brooklyn ports, to the thick-grown hedges by the shore, where men met faceless in the dark. She wore her old dress, too small for her now, and kept her eyes closed as she held it bunched around her waist, waiting for the act to be done. It’s a good thing, she told herself as the sweat of a strange man tickled the back of her neck. This would be the last of it, she swore, and then things would be normal. But one night Anthony took the money she’d earned and spent it down in the dens—she felt sick and furious, betrayed. Do you know what I did for that? she cried the next morning. He just shrugged, gulped down some milk, and regarded her with cold, glassy eyes: It’s not
like you minded it. She broke down and cried—I did it for both of us, she sobbed, for the baby. Please believe me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Anthony was supposed to take his mother away that day, on the four o’clock train to Poughkeepsie. They’d planned a visit to some cousins on his stepfather’s side—people the Signora was wary of, but since they had a little money and were generous with family, she agreed to go. He and Alphie had talked about it, gone over it night after night as they readied for bed. He and the Signora would visit the family without her—she was confined, of course, and couldn’t travel—and they’d return early in the week. Alphie expected she’d have a few days at least. She’d given Mrs. Bloodworth the directions, the list of things to be mindful of. Avoid the main house—too visible from the street. Come through the back gate, to the carriage house door where he keeps his shop. I will be there alone. If someone should happen to stop you for any reason, just say you’ve been sent to fetch the undertaker. No one will think twice. The baby would be delivered after ten, while the neighbors were sleeping off their days of hot and lonely work, while the toughs gambled and fought in corner taverns until they were black-eyed and hoarse.

  Don’t worry, Mrs. Bloodworth promised her. Our girl is discreet—and fast.

  But the Signora hadn’t boarded the four o’clock train to Poughkeepsie. She’d been home all along. Now, as Alphie pushed through the sweaty crowds on the street, as she looked over her shoulder at the glimmer of the police wagon—stalled for a moment by an overturned cart—she began to panic. What about Anthony? Had he gone to Poughkeepsie as planned? Had he even made it to the station? Where the devil had her husband been that night? And why hadn’t he told her that the plan had changed—that something was wrong—that the Signora was home?

  She tried to remember exactly how they’d said good-bye—she’d been nervous all day, distracted, packing Anthony’s clothes while he played his accordion in the office below. After lunch he’d walked his suitcase through the yard to the main house, then returned to their rooms for a glass of cordial and a cigar. He’d patted her stomach absently as he smoked, the ash rolling down her dress. He told her he’d left money in the razor tin—it was hidden in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, behind the puffs and brushes. And she believed him. She tried to lie down and rest—there was a long night ahead, and her whole body hummed. She drifted in and out of sleep, her stomach churning against the pillow. She felt his hand ruffle softly through her hair, heard him set down his glass on the tray—then the click of the door, his light tread down the steps.