Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  Odile could feel the pulse of blood in her fingertips, a rushing in her ears. She seemed to lift out of her body and float in the air—there, looking down on the room from a great height: at Mrs. Bloodworth, shifting weakly in the dust; at Belle, not moving away from the woman, but running toward her, kneeling at her side. “Don’t take it out,” Mrs. Bloodworth was saying. “Quick, bring me that bottle”—her hand, outstretched to the credenza, the decanter on a tray—“and find something to stanch it with.” Belle, hurrying to pour the cordial—rummaging through the trays of a tackle-box, turning up cotton scuds, a vial of iodine. She cut away Mrs. Bloodworth’s skirt and fashioned a tourniquet from the remains of a pillow. Mrs. Bloodworth lay very still on her back, her hands clasped over her heart, her gray hair undone and fanned across the floor like a sandy tangle of seaweed. She stared up at the ceiling: she seemed to see Odile flying above her, weightless in the air. How do you know me? Odile whispered. What is it I’ve done? And then Odile saw herself leaning against the far wall, hunchbacked and panting, staring at her own reddened palm. The floating eye! She lifted higher and higher, through the ceiling of the carriage house, into the sky above the city. She could see into all of its darkening rooms: Mouse in a moth-eaten cloak, scurrying up to the doors of the theater; Lily Up-Your-Alley, illumined in the footlights, raising her head above a tray of macaroons. Sylvan, feeling his way through the swampy darkness, into a shallow pool of light, where young boys gleamed like oysters. She saw the baby, furred and red, in her roost at Mrs. Izzo’s, and Mrs. Izzo singing a happy chantey, sipping her tea. And she saw her mother just ahead of her, riding a finned tiger through the air.

  “I’m sorry,” Odile whispered down through the clouds, even though she wasn’t sure why she was saying it, or to whom. Then there was a noise—a whistle, shrill—and she was back in her own body, hard against the wall, breathing in the dust and rubbing at the spot behind her ear.

  The whistle sounded again, this time louder. Across the room Belle lifted her head.

  Odile turned to look out the window. There were figures in black swarming the yard—mourners, she thought at first. But then she noticed the glossy bills of their caps, the truncheons at their hips. A half dozen in all, scattering—she could hear them tromping through the workshop below, pushing open doors. There was a paddy wagon, a Black Maria, rounding the corner into the alley.

  “The police?” she whispered.

  Mrs. Bloodworth’s breath came in short, rattling huffs. Belle looked frightened now—she ran to the armoire and began pulling off her rags. The man’s shirt, the filthy slippers, the patchy flannel dress—as it fell to the floor, Odile saw the word Asylum printed across the back in grungy letters. Dear God—they were after her. She tried not to think, just hurried over and dumped out the drawers of the credenza. She found a pair of stockings, a fake silk scarf, a pair of old shoes by the door. Her sister, half-naked, now wriggled into a yellow dress—there was a tattoo beneath her throat, Odile saw: Orchard Broome. Her fingers shook at the sight of it, but still, she helped to fasten the buttons, lace the boots, tie back her sister’s hair. She would ask her later—she would ask her everything.

  Mrs. Bloodworth lay very still on the rug. Belle tried to lift her by the arm, but the woman blanched and stiffened, shook her head. “Not me. I have nothing to tell them.”

  There was a ruckus in the shop beneath—something fell and broke. A few curses followed, then an ornery rebuke. Odile’s ears began to itch.

  “Odile!”

  She turned around—Mrs. Bloodworth was looking at her.

  “Take her somewhere safe.”

  “W—what?”

  “Take your sister out of here, any way you can, understand?”

  “I—”

  “Do as I say, and now.”

  Odile glanced around the room. They couldn’t go out the way they’d come in—not with the policemen hunting through the yard, with the box of the Black Maria waiting in the alley. She turned to the peep-eyed windows and cranked open a casement. The breeze was warm with woodsmoke and frying oil. The carriage house was pressed between two tenements—she saw a fire escape in the yard next door, just above the neighbors’ privies.

  Belle reached for Mrs. Bloodworth again, but the woman shook her off. “You need to go with your sister.”

  Belle made a plaintive sound. At the bottom of the stairs someone kicked open the door.

  “Go on!”

  Odile didn’t look back. She pushed herself through the small window and out to the eaves, then reached back to help her sister. She took Belle’s hand and eased her through, freeing her skirt where it caught on the sill. They stood together on the roof, sweating and shivering—then they ran across the shingles to the farthest edge, which overlooked the yard next door. They jumped down onto the roof of the neighbors’ privies, the wood shuddering beneath their feet. They hurried on, trampling over the untrue boards, under lines of sodden laundry, coughing back the terrible smell, while someone bellowed, alarmed, in a stall below.

  At the end of the row, they hoisted themselves up to the fire escape. The metal burned their hands as they clambered over the side, but they ran—past children waving dry tobacco leaves, past nipping dogs and vines of yellow tomatoes, past pink-eyed women hanging out the wash, all the way up the clanging stairs to the roof. Odile’s lungs opened as they reached the top—she looked out over the roofs of the city, a great ocean of brick and stone, stretching to the horizon. They fled between chimneys, scattering birds, breathing in the brine and smoke from the river.

  Behind them they heard police whistles, the whinnies of a horse. Belle stopped on the edge of the roof and looked back. From where they stood they could see Mrs. Bloodworth being taken out on a stretcher. For a moment Odile thought that she turned her eyes to the roof—that she saw the girls standing there, watching her as she was carried away; that perhaps she even nodded her head: go—but it might have just been a trick of the light, the way the shadows played over her face. They watched as she was hoisted into the back of the paddy wagon, as a man leaned against the heavy door and brought down the latch, as he yelled to the driver, “Hospital!” The whip snapped, the horses lurched, and the carriage rolled away down the street.

  A hot wind tore across the roof; gulls wheeled in the sky. Odile looked silently on. Whatever had happened, whatever was done, Belle leaned into her now, held fast to her hand—as if her sister were the only thing in the world that could keep her from flying away.

  TWENTY-NINE

  SYLVAN CHASED THE MAN OUT INTO THE STREET. HE FOLLOWED the knobs of his naked shoulders, his dented and blown-about hat. Back in the parlor, with the coffin flung open for everyone to see, the woman on the floor had simply started to cry. The man with the cordial had sat very still, even as bits of straw floated through the air and fluttered down into his glass. No one said anything; no one explained. The tattooed man simply turned his back and walked out the door.

  Now Sylvan ran after him in the marketplace. The Rembrandt was lissome and fast; he slipped through the crowd ahead, past the funeral carriage and the fishmonger’s, past the stands of gutted mackerel in quick-melting ice. Sylvan saw him lift his hat in the air and run his hands through his coarse-chopped hair. Through the press of people, around the scattering hens, he kept his eyes fixed on the man’s suspenders, the black Y against his pale skin. Finally, by the bread sellers, where the air was thick with flour-dust, he caught up to him.

  “Mr. Leonetti—”

  The man turned around and looked at him coldly. His eyes were swollen, his delicate skin burned pink.

  “You worked at the Featherbone,” Sylvan continued, catching his breath.

  The Rembrandt took a step away.

  “You were down in the poppy box—”

  He drew the air in sharply through his teeth. “Once or twice, to find my husband. And how do you know him?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how did you come by his jacket?” He plucked at the armb
and, now pilled, and frowned back what Sylvan suspected were tears. “One of his gifts?”

  “No.” Sylvan shook his head. “I stole it. When he was asleep in the den.”

  The man’s jaw clenched. He nodded, then looked away. “I see.”

  “I was actually looking for you.”

  “For me?” he said, surprised.

  “About the baby—”

  The man stared at him—stricken, bewildered. Sylvan faltered for a moment, then went on. He told him what he’d found: the baby, in a privy near the poppy box; the young man—his gold charley—delirious in the den. He said he’d been down to the Widows’ Walk that very morning, and the wig-keeper told him the young Rembrandt was dead.

  “But how can I believe you?” the man kept saying, his voice growing faint. “How can I believe anything you say?”

  Sylvan lifted the nosegay from his coat. The Rembrandt tried to blink away his tears, but they spilled over down his cheeks, turning to pearls in the flour-dust.

  “You don’t know what happened?” Sylvan said. “You don’t know about any of this?”

  The man shook his head, stunned. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of ink on his face. “You promise me she’s safe.”

  Sylvan nodded. “I only need to find her mother—Miss Isabelle Church.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” the man said, glancing back over his shoulder. “It was just a girl who brought her to me.” He looked around the marketplace, then lifted his face to the sky. “So peculiar.”

  Sylvan turned to follow his gaze. There, standing at the edge of the rooftop, was Odile, at the side of another woman.

  THIRTY

  A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS CHASED AROUND THE smokestacks and lifted to the sky. The sisters looked out across the city—the billowing chimneys, the carts and horses, the black-clad people wandering in a daze from the house near the corner. Odile saw a half-naked man in a bowler hat hurrying away between the stalls, a few policemen lingering by the ice wagon, catching the drip in their hats and drinking it down. And then she heard someone call her name. She looked down—Sylvan was standing there between the pastry carts, waving up to her.

  Odile touched her sister’s arm. She mumbled something breathless—there he was, the man she’d met, the one who’d rescued the baby. He could take them to the oyster house, the dead tree, the braids of hair. The baby was there—she was safe with a good woman, a weaver.

  And then Belle was running—over to the far edge of the roof, down an old fire ladder, half-rusted and swinging away from the bricks. Odile followed, slower, still mindful of her back, the pulsing cut on her knee. Belle dropped the last ten feet to the ground, arms wheeling through the air, sending a woman passing by into a fit of screams.

  Odile hurried to keep up, but her sister ran ahead, disappearing into the crowd. “Wait!” Odile called. She pushed against the swarm of the marketplace, ducked beneath the swinging wares. She looked for the brim of Sylvan’s hat, the crinkled sheen of his beard, the wild flap of her sister’s clothes. “Move!” she heard herself say, shoving past vendors with their bundles of garlic, their swatches of wallpaper and leather shoe tongues. She turned around in the throng, but there was no sign of her sister anywhere.

  The wind picked up, hot and stinging, blowing about the flour from the bread stands, the shower of sparks from a knife-grinder’s wheel. Odile stumbled through the haze, blinking back grit. She called her sister’s name. She wove between carts to the dithering song of a zither and flute; she heard the snap of awnings, the clanging of pots. And then she saw—through the dust, just beyond the pastry carts—the faint silhouette of her sister, running after the man in the bowler hat. But he was as slippery as a minnow and vanished into the swelling crowd.

  Then someone grabbed Odile’s arm—Sylvan. He was sweating, flushed, his blue eye bloodshot and his dark eye watering. She was about to ask what had happened, how he’d found her there, but he only pulled her toward him. For a moment her head went fuzzy—she had the startled thought that he was going to kiss her, right there in the middle of the market square—but he was looking past her, his jaw clenched.

  She turned around to see. By the ice wagon the policemen were watching them through the lifting dust, craning their necks, pinching the water from their moustaches. They muttered to each other and sucked their teeth, twisted their hats back on their heads.

  Belle was looking at them, too—worried now, drawing the collar higher up her neck. Sylvan started walking—he beckoned to them with a nod of his head. Odile took her sister’s hand and followed. Together they weaved away down the street, through the rising clamor and smoke.

  Odile was too scared to look back. They moved quicker and quicker, turned onto the Bowery (the Growlery, she thought again, picturing her father at his workbench, smelling once again the stage paint and oil and varnished wood). A sob bubbled up in her chest, but she kept her eyes ahead, her hand joined with her sister’s. At the corner where the huckster bellowed through a cardboard cone, where the lightning-struck girl pranced around with her singed hair and loopy eyes, she began to feel faint. Her back seized up; her bad knee buckled. She stumbled there on the sidewalk, right in front of the medicine trunk. The huckster pointed at her on the ground, ruddily triumphant, rapping his bamboo cane: “Don’t you see, my dear faithful ladies and gents, a girl stricken right here at our feet—a girl who could be your daughter, beset by a malady that could arise in your very house! Weak blood! Delicate nerves! A lugubrious disposition!” He held up his bottle to the gathered crowd, then reached down to Odile, who struggled to get to her feet. “THIS—this is an answered prayer, right before your eyes—guided to us by an almighty hand, knowing what physic we can minister.”

  But even as he said it, Sylvan collared him and shoved him off his box, punched him once in the gut so he gasped for breath. His assistant just sat down on the trunk and lit a cigarette, patted her hair, made eyes at the shoeshine boy on the corner.

  Belle helped Odile to her feet; Sylvan lifted her and carried her away through the crowd. She could feel the wound split open in her knee, a hot crackle in her back—her spine seemed to contract like a telescope as they hurried over the bricks. She had an image of her old brace, the one she’d flung from the pier, now washing ashore in the night, crab-walking through the sand under a veil of kelp—a sea-monster bride, returning to her: Croc! Oh, Croc! She felt the brush of her sister’s hand, the heat of Sylvan’s breath. Upside down she saw a line of swinging pretzels, the paling light of Cherry Street, the pear tree in the rag alley where Mrs. Izzo lived.

  Then Belle, racing down the alley—Sylvan yelling ahead: The stairs, the left!, and Mrs. Izzo shuffling out on the landing to see the commotion, the baby in her arms.

  Sylvan, lowering Odile to the ground, helping to steady her—Please, Mr. Threadgill, I’m fine—

  And Belle just ahead, running and tripping up the stairs—her hands, brindled with ink, reaching out to the baby—

  Odile slumped down on the bottom step, sweat dripping from her hair. She drew a hard breath—her lungs felt pleated, beaded with sand. She was aware of a shadow above her, growing wider than the sun. She felt Sylvan’s fingers move across her shoulder, slink up into her hair. He pressed gently against the crook in her neck, where a knot had formed. Something fizzed in the base of her skull. She turned to look back—at her sister on the highest stair, lifting the baby’s face to hers.

  The tickle in her knee. The twitch of her back. Hot stars of light in her eyes. She kept thinking of the dagger, flung—how she still felt its heat in the palm of her hand.

  She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife—flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave—she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

  WHEN THEY WERE WASHED UP and rested, Sylvan took the sisters to the pier on the river, where the Brighton Beach steamboat made its landing.

  Odile dug sixty cents from her pocket
and bought the tickets: two purple stubs that left her fingers fuzzy and stained. She handed one to Belle. They stood together in a slant of sunlight, under a poster that touted the wonders of the modern fleet: They cannot burn! They cannot sink!

  Around them the pier was thronged with people—women with white parasols and picnic baskets; coxcombs in straw hats and shined shoes, their buttonholes pegged with chrysanthemums. In a few hours they would all be delighting in their stroll down the boardwalk, clinging to each other in the cars of the Hee-Haw, gathering on the benches of Guilfoyle’s theater. These were the faces, blank and pudding-soft, that shone beyond the footlights, watching her aloft on the Wheel.

  Sylvan bought a newspaper and stood at the rail, quietly turning the pages. There was a band playing on the esplanade below: the merry tweedle of a clarinet, the harrumph of a tuba. Pennants snapped along the pier. Odile stared out to the Statue of Liberty, a warm smudge on the harbor, to the billowing ships coming in. The archway above the landing read, THIS WAY TO THE ISLE OF DREAMS!

  She sat down with Belle in the shade beneath the timetable. Belle leaned back, lanky and loose in her yellow dress, while chalk dust lifted from the board and swirled around them in the breeze. In her arms the baby sneezed.

  “You can have Mother’s room,” Odile began. “And you won’t have to see anybody, not right away. We don’t have to tell them you’re back, at least until you’re ready. We’ll think up a story, all right? We’ll find one that suits you.”

  Belle raised her head and nodded obliquely.

  Odile had seen her sister quiet before, sometimes for days—mute with fury, sore and brooding, punishing everyone around her with an aloof disdain. But now her silence didn’t seem uneasy or tense. She looked wistful, even serene, staring out at the water while the breeze stirred her hair. Still, Odile found herself chattering, anxious to make up for the silence. Belle and the baby should see the doctor first, she said. They would buy a bassinet. They would re-paper the room, shake out the rug. Belle could even work at Guilfoyle’s for the time being, if she wanted—at least backstage, where they always needed help with stubborn costumes and tardy cues—and then maybe, just maybe, they could start a theater of their own together, once they’d saved enough. Perhaps they could create an imaginary husband for her—a sailor at sea. A tightrope walker who’d fallen from a great height, with no net to save him. Her mind raced; her tongue grew dry, and suddenly she was conscious of it: too conscious, how it slaked the roof of her mouth, how it ticked along her teeth, as brisk as the lever of a telegraph; how it slid, fat and eely, along her lips as she paused to wet them, unsure of what Belle wanted to hear.