Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  The Signora—reaching for the baby in her basket that night. The Signora, singing a lullaby and rocking her as she cried. Alphie couldn’t be sure what had happened, but this was how she pictured it.

  The Signora, in a dream of love, had doted on that baby. For two days she had giggled and cooed. The bite on her hand glimmered, blacked to a scab, but she didn’t even see it. Not even as she spooned the cooling milk from a saucepan; as she brushed the baby’s hair. A baby girl: the daughter she’d dreamed of having. She called her la mia piccola pipistrella! My little bat. Even her voice was different, a little-girl laugh, and her cheeks were cream-pink roses. But when Anthony tried to speak, she turned and walked right past him, as if he weren’t even there.

  Anthony, alone—hot muggy mornings out in the yard, sanding the casket, retching in the weeds. The sawdust clinging to the hairs on his arms, while inside his mother sang to the baby.

  He bought the wreaths and the garlands. He visited the lacrimata in their quarters behind the convent, where the nuns had been buried standing up, habits shriveled against their bones. I will see to it, he had said. He had done everything his mother asked of him, penitent, ashamed—and still he waited for her wrath.

  But it never came. She’d made him a ghost. There was only the baby, new in her arms, red as a shelled bean and wearing his old baby bonnet. He tucked a blanket of gauze in her cradle when his mother’s back was turned—it was the gauze he used to stuff the mouths of the dead, to give shape to their faces; to plug nostrils and rectums, to keep the leaks away. Even so, the baby slept happy and pure, untroubled by dreams. A life pristine. His mother’s prize, the victor’s.

  What did he think, when he took her away that night, his old familiar walk to the den? That he would get revenge? That he would never again be reminded of the life he’d lost? Or that somehow, in death, the baby would be saved? Alphie would never know. But she knew that even now he would be looking over his shoulder, turning in his sleep, no matter who lay by his side. For wherever he went, something would follow, pawing and hungry, singing a witch-song to the moon.

  All the wolves, they waited true. The wolves, they had their way.

  AFTER ANOTHER ROUND of beer Alphie followed Dolly upstairs to her room. Dolly gave her a peck on the cheek, laid out a dress, and left Alphie alone to change. Slowly, methodically, Alphie brushed out the skirts. She bent over a bowl of water and washed away the Mother’s Milk, the ink and sweat, the stink of horses and the dirt of the soap-boy’s clothes. She peered in the dusty little mirror that hung on the wall. Her hair was a horror, with its hasty chops and stubborn cowlick. She brushed it out of her face and sighed. It would have to do for now.

  As she dropped her eyes, she caught sight of it for the first time, backward in the mirror. His name, written on her body. She touched the skin where it blistered and peeled. She had believed so devotedly in him; she felt as though she couldn’t live without him. She was certain that a life alone was a life failed. As a child she’d longed to be spirited away—to a world of beauty, a world apart. She dreamed of being transformed. But that world was not the Widows’ Walk or the waterfront; it was not Anthony and his cooling-board and his carriage-house home. It was one she had carried with her all along: it was her own heart, and it still beat.

  You have two spirits, Orchard Broome had said to her. Most in this life only have one. She supposed she must have imagined it that way over the years, but she’d always thought of them as two beasty shadows wrestling inside her, fighting for possession of her body and mind. But now she pictured it differently. The spirits weren’t shadows, restless and ill. Instead, they were high up on trapezes, colorful as birds, reaching for each other’s hands as they flew through the air.

  She leaned toward the mirror and mopped the water from her chin. She powdered her face and buttoned up her dress. She pictured the spirits swinging higher—they were ruffled and plumed, one a woman and one a man. She penciled the kohl around her eyes, oiled and brushed her hair. She put on a spritz of Dolly’s perfume. She saw them soaring and careening, closer and closer, their arms outstretched, radiant, bright.

  She stepped back from the mirror, lifted her chin.

  They held out their hands in the stunning lights. And when they touched, there in midair, she was whole.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THEY’D RISEN EARLY TOGETHER, DUG THE PIT BEFORE DAWN. First, Odile in the dark, drawing a square through the sand. Then Sylvan, breaking up the sand with a shovel, lifting and turning, digging down into the beach. He felt his lungs open in the damp, salty air, the tickle of beachgrass around his toes. Above him the stars held fast; the sky was as gray as the sea.

  They walked down the shore and collected driftwood. They carried the bundles back on their shoulders and stacked them at the bottom of the pit. Together they laid down the slats of an old whiskey barrel, and Sylvan took a match to a twist of paper. He fed the kindling, lay back in the sand, and watched the sparks chase up to the sky. Odile knelt beside him in her topcoat and bathing gown, picking through shells. When the fire was high, they cooked their breakfast—salty gammon, potatoes on a stick, and fresh ears of corn, charred and popping-sweet. They ate together on the tiger quilt, watching the sun rise over the water, listening to the surf, feeling the warmth of the fire at their backs.

  The first meal he fixed her was a sorry one. The day they’d arrived, Odile had been very quiet, faraway. They’d walked in silence from the Brighton Beach landing to her house, where she sat for a spell by the window, staring out at the striped turrets and onion domes. He made her a plate of whatever he found in the pantry—pickled yams, a slice of bread, some anchovies and a glob of mustard. She ate it anyway, without complaint, and he read her the day’s paper, every story he could find: about a bicycle race on Manhattan Beach, a missing jewel thief in Texas, the marriage of a Sunday school teacher to an elevator man at an ice cream factory. She listened and smiled but didn’t speak. She didn’t ask him to leave, and he didn’t feel inclined to go. So he stayed the next day, and the next, waiting for her to give him word, or a ticket. But she hadn’t done it, and he hadn’t asked.

  He slept through the nights in Belle’s old bed, wearing gloves filled with cream, which Mr. Mackintosh said would be good for his hands. For the first few nights Odile had stayed in her mother’s room, but she couldn’t sleep—he could hear her up in the middle of the night, restless, turning. Then she padded back down the hall and fell, sighing, into her own little bed. She slept deeply, woke late. Sometimes she would climb in next to him, and he would hold her as she fell asleep, kissing the back of her neck, her hands clenched in his. And when he woke, he found his hands were animate, tender—they were healing.

  He wondered how they spoke of him back home—Dogboy, vanished into air—if they ever sang about his fights, told tales of where he’d gone. Would they imagine him walking by the old Church of Marvels—a circle of bricks in the sand, overrun with marigold? Or buttering toast in a bungalow, reading about the price of cheviot suits? Sylvan would never meet Mrs. Church, but he felt for sure that he knew her, for he walked among her things, drank ginger tea with honey from her chipped china cups, read her books of poems and plays, all marked in her curious, exclamatory hand. And when he saw Odile in the easy chair beside him, laughing at the new color cartoons in the Sunday paper, or reading a letter from Belle in the kitchen, balancing on one leg while the coffee boiled—it’s good for my back! she said when she caught him smiling—he knew that she was tough. It had to be the hardest thing, even if he’d never known it himself—to accept that the ones you loved would find their own way home. And already her friends were starting to make plans for the winter: Mack hopping on a caravan through the Dakotas, Leland heading to a circus in Montreal. They talked about it often, gathered at the beer hall—Guilfoyle was ready to shut down early, go scouting in California. What about you? Sylvan asked Odile as they drank coffee one morning on the porch. Where will you go? She sat down on the brass elephant—Right here.

/>   As the sun rose higher over the beach, Odile stood up from the blanket and took off her coat. “You’re not coming in?” she said.

  Sylvan hugged his knees to his chest. “I’m fine here,” he said. “You go.”

  He watched as she made her way down to the water—her feet bare, her limbs glittery with sand, her hair wild around her shoulders. She walked slowly at first, then faster and faster, until she broke into a run. She splashed high-kneed into the ocean and dove under the waves.

  He waited to see her emerge—the sheen of her hair, the crest of her shoulder, the pale flutter of her hands. She was swimming farther out—he saw her feet kick up through the foam. They hovered there for a moment—she waved her toes at him—then fell back into the water.

  Slowly he stood and dusted the sand from his pants. He started to walk, hands in his pockets, wending his way down to the surf. He paused at the water’s edge, then put one foot in. It was colder than he thought. The foam swirled around his heel and ate away at the sand.

  He wobbled and continued. Through the strands of bubbled kelp, the sandcrabs, the bits of broken shells, the stones as smooth as sucked candy. He moved forward, the water hitting his shins and splashing up under his trousers, cold and sharp. He put his hands against the waves, felt the pressure of the tide. His feet found their way through the sand, to the place where the seabed dropped away. The water rose slowly to his hips, soaking his shirt to his stomach. Farther out Odile broke the surface. The light hit her face, and she smiled.

  He drew the air deep into his lungs, until they were full, and fell back in the water. There was a sudden slap of cold, the light dazzling the surface. He kicked his legs, moved his arms. The sea surrounded him. He would swim.

  EPILOGUE

  MY NAME IS NOT ORCHARD BROOME. IN FACT, I’M NO LONGER known as Belle. I will never be able to speak my real name, the name I was born with, if I had ever been given one at all. Here on the waterfront I am called simply Mrs. Church, and I’ve grown quite fond of it.

  When I arrived all those months ago in Manhattan, Mrs. Bloodworth welcomed me into her home without question. She, too, was grieving my mother’s death, which she’d read about first in the newspaper, and for this it was hard to forgive myself—I didn’t write her with the news. I didn’t write anyone after it happened, not even Mother’s family back in Punxsutawney, whom I’d never met and only thought of as a gaggle of scowling, thick-jawed maiden aunts. I couldn’t live at Coney Island anymore, not after the fire, not after walking through the ruins of my mother’s theater, not with my secret growing bigger inside of me every day. And so I came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s, repentant and searching, wondering what I was meant for.

  I dreaded the baby’s arrival. I dreaded seeing it outside of my body. When I grew idle or anxious I kneaded my belly, searching for a sign of something wrong. I woke from nightmares in my little room on Doyers Street, clawing blindly at the air, while down the hall other women sighed and turned in their sleep. In my dreams the baby sprouted legs and arms and wrapped itself around me like an octopus. I dreamed it was born with a face full of suckling mouths. I dreamed it was born with pincers, with talons, with fangs. I dreamed it came out of my body in pieces: a leg here, an arm there, a slippery head no bigger than a grapefruit. I dreamed it came out of my body slapping wetly to the floor, a gilled mermaid, a translucent eel, a jellied creature of the sea.

  She was born on a hot July night—there in the birthing room behind the kitchen, on a bed that smelled like mice. The window was open in the heat, and through it I could see gulls flocking in the yard. Were they watching me? Were they coming to take her away? I heard them caw and flap. The baby answered. She split me and I screamed. Then there were shadows standing over me, bringing cool cloths and sips of rum, and then Mrs. Bloodworth slipped her larded hands between my legs and drew the baby out. I fell back into the pillows, crying. Did she have feathers, I wondered—a bill, webbed feet? I waited for someone to gasp or shout. I turned my head and saw Mrs. Bloodworth holding the baby in the lamplight, wiping her little nose with a handkerchief, then her mouth, her eyes. A tiny girl, briny and squalling and slick. She drew breath into her lungs and called out to the world. I was astonished, delirious—I thought there must be a mistake. She was perfect.

  I nursed her those first few weeks, upstairs in my room. I visited her down the hall in the nursery, held her little mittened hand in mine while she slept. She looked like him, I thought—her father’s daughter, with his rosy cheeks and thick hair and curious, reflective eyes. I had written my sister a letter, believing that I might die, that I would meet the end alone on the birthing bed, but my daughter and I were both healthy, alive. She would be going to another family, a good one with a little bit of money—merchants, perhaps—though I didn’t know their names. This was always the arrangement—I was never to meet them or contact them; I would never see my daughter again. But I would leave Mrs. Bloodworth’s with my good name standing, my life to live unblemished. So on a given night I would say good-bye, and Mouse would deliver her to her new home.

  It’s a hard thing to explain—I was unmarried. I had lost the people I loved. I was adrift in a city full of loneliness and spite; I had no home that made sense to me anymore. I was practically a child myself. I couldn’t raise her, cursed and alone as I was, I believed—but I wanted to know that she was loved. I wanted her to grow up far from the shadow of the burned theater, from the things that haunted me then and follow me still. And I trusted Mrs. Bloodworth. I owed her my life. But still, I dreamed about these people, this ghostly couple who would raise my child. Were they good enough? Would she be safe, adored? Or would she be no better off than the children who lived, abandoned, down in the Frog and Toe? The children who never found homes of their own? I just wanted to know, so that I might imagine her as she grew. Through the years I could think back to whatever little house they lived in—the hearth with its cuckoo clock or cranberry garlands, its overstuffed pillows and claret-red rugs, and know: yes—there she is, warm in her nightgown—yes: there she is playing with her doll by the fire—now reading, now laughing, now dipping a cookie into her milk, now falling asleep with her greyhound pup, now a young woman tending to a child herself. When I arrived at their door that night, they wouldn’t even know I was the one who had birthed her. I just wanted to see where she would live. I wanted to look her new mother in the eyes—both of us silent, grateful, fulfilled, yet strangers—and take my proper leave.

  So I made a deal with Mouse. I’d find the names of her parents in Mrs. Bloodworth’s ledger if she let me be the Hood, just that one time. I was fast, I assured her. It would be dark, the dead of night, and I wouldn’t breathe a word to anyone. It was a straightforward exchange, wasn’t it?—I’d deliver the child and disappear. And I knew how badly she wanted those names—since I’d arrived she’d talked of little else.

  Still, she was nervous. It’s just . . . it’s not what you think, she whispered as we stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the range, boiling the bottles and scrubbing the pots. The mother’s a . . . well, a fairy.

  A—what? I said lamely, thinking I’d misheard.

  I overheard it when I brought them their coffee. I couldn’t help it! She’s a he: a passer, get it? Oh, hell’s bells, I shouldn’t have told you, should I?

  Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. My first thought was of my mother, living in disguise for months as a young girl, sleeping side by side with soldiers in the bivouac at night. What cunning and strength, to not get caught. I thought of Aldovar, brushing out his single braid, painting in his beauty mark, our gloved hands holding each other’s in the gaslight. They would do whatever it took to survive. Is that what made Mrs. Bloodworth choose this couple for my baby? And if she found them worthy and sound, then I trusted her—I had to. But I wanted to know, too. I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted to see it done.

  So I looked up the name of Mouse’s parents in the ledger. After Mrs. Bloodworth took me into her confidence—after she told me the whole
story, from the very beginning—I had looked up other names, too—early in the morning, when she was busy in the hothouse. Georgette, I found, was the daughter of French immigrants who were convinced that her deformity was proof of an Old World curse. Aldovar was born to a wealthy Jewish family on Lexington Avenue, a name I recognized from a department store. They’d left Aldovar with Mrs. Bloodworth and adopted instead a healthy, unnamed slum boy with Ashkenazy blood. I thought about arriving on their marble stair, pulling the thick braided rope, hearing the toll of the finely tuned bell. I wanted to tell them that their flesh nested in mine, that their blood ran with my own. I loved your son, I wanted to say. He is dead now, but part of you still lives. Do you understand? You are still alive.

  It haunted me, that morning Aldovar and I met on the pier. It was dawn, chilly and gray; the seagulls stared at us from the railing. We had words, I regret to say, and I went home anguished and hurt and full of dread. It was the last time we spoke. Hours later he walked into the burning theater.

  We had been friends our whole lives, since we were children, but as we grew up things began to change. Between shows I would see him flying kites out over the beach. We always smiled at each other, sly and taunting, and afterward I felt a flash in my gut, a honeyed burn that was gone as quickly as it came. Walking ahead to the theater, where the Church of Marvels banner snapped in the wind, I thought about how the rope twisted around his long fingers, how he drew his hands through the air like a bandleader, how the kites circled and soared. Waiting backstage, I daydreamed about his lopsided smile, his shy, twitching dimple and dark-lashed eyes. One stormy afternoon in October, he ran after me with an umbrella when I was caught hatless in the rain. He told me he was heading home to make some coffee and dry the kites (just past the sharpshooter booth and up those steps, in the leaky brick building behind the Mirror Maze: I’d been up there a hundred times before). But something was different that day. And I, pretending that I didn’t know what was happening even though I did, followed him back to the boardinghouse.