by Leslie Parry
It was only that one time. A tangle of kicked, sweaty sheets, and neither of us shy about it. As he bit into my neck, I heard the pop of toy guns in the arcade below, the rain coming down on the roof. Afterward we lay next to each other and shared an apple crisp, listening to the thunder above, the glassy warble of a street-organ waiting out the storm in a doorway below. As we watched the sun break over the beach, his hand, gritty with sugar, crept over the sheet and held mine.
He was a man, like any other, only as a child his circumcision had gone awry. Still, there was nobody I could tell about it, not even Odile—we had told each other everything all our lives, but I couldn’t bear for her to be jealous or confused or disappointed in me—she, who’d looked up to me our entire life. But briefly, privately, I had dreamed of a future with Aldovar—of seeing him make kites for our children, of starring with him in an aerial show on the beach. I imagined the two of us in goggles and tailcoats, waving from a hot-air balloon as it lifted up over the boardwalk, as a brass band played a salute from the stands. I pictured my mother at the edge of the water, her head turned up in wonder, growing smaller and smaller as we drifted into the sky, until she was only a dot in a fur coat, standing alone in the sand.
But that life was not to be. It was gone forever, ash.
So that night on Doyers Street I put on the cloak and drew up the hood. I stepped into the overshoes and pinned the white flower to my breast. I went out into the night, down the dark narrow lanes, the basket at my side. We’d given the baby a nip of sherry to help her sleep. A blue blanket concealed her. I could smell the sweetness on her breath, the powder on her skin. I didn’t know then that I was leaving Doyers Street for good. I didn’t know that after that night I would never speak again.
Mouse told me there would be no trouble with the family—and if there was, I should leave. We were just couriers after all, not bloodhounds. She’d passed their house a few times before, with Mrs. Bloodworth in her carriage, just so she knew where to go. Mouse was not worried that the exchange itself would be muddled—only that Mrs. Bloodworth would somehow discover our ruse and punish her with extra chores: more laundry perhaps, extra diapers.
But when I got to the place Mouse had described—Orchard and Broome—I got turned around. I couldn’t figure out where to go. It was night, you see, a neighborhood I didn’t know well—I was never out at such an hour, and certainly not by myself. I walked back and forth in front of the small house, the one tucked between the tenements. I noticed a woman standing at the window. She’d been keeping watch—she wore a hat, a coat, and I saw a suitcase ready on the sill beside her. As if she were expecting someone. I took a step forward. But it was the wrong window, I realized—I was meant to go around back, through the alley, to the carriage house behind. My heart pounded—I walked away from the streetlight as quickly as I could and stumbled down to the mews.
When I knocked on the carriage-house door, Alphie answered. She was so young—so striking, really, with her golden hair and fair skin and delicate bones. Without a word—just a smile, a swell of relief and happiness that nearly broke my heart—she led me up those crooked stairs. There was a jar of blood on the dressing table, I noticed—to set the stage, to make it real. She shook out a nightgown. I helped her undress. There was an open bag—her husband’s—with pincers and needles, a small knife, a roll of gauze. An undertaker, Mouse had said. Alphie took the knife and carefully cut the ties on the pillow, pulled it free from her stomach. Then a door slammed shut below, and she turned to me, and I knew from the look on her face that this was not the plan.
I heard footsteps and a sound I couldn’t place: tick-tick-tick. The woman I’d seen in the window—the neighbor, I thought at the time—threw open the door and saw us there: me in my hooded cloak, the baby still sleeping in her basket, and Alphie, stark naked and holding the pillow at her side. The woman’s eyes went black. I’d never seen anything like it. Her pupils grew to fill them, like a broken nib of ink.
She went after Alphie, wild with horror. Alphie screamed (and would anyone worry, I wondered, about a lone woman furiously screaming in the house of a baby about to be born?). I tried to push myself in front of Alphie as she scrambled back into her dress, but in my haste I knocked the blood-jar to the floor, and I slipped in the wet. From where I lay I saw the Signora bring a rattle down on Alphie’s head with a sickening thud. It broke, and she reached for a kettle. I was amazed at the strength of that woman, the animal fear in her black, unseeing eyes.
I took the basket. I ran toward the door, the baby wailing. But the woman was quick behind me, knocked me down. She took the pincers and the knife, the ones from the bag; she pulled at my tongue while I hit her in the stomach and struggled for breath. She sliced it right out. She held it up to the light, flopping there in the tongs, while I lay on the floor, bleeding and bleeding, faint with shock. For a moment she looked confused and sick. And then she saw the basket—my little baby, crying in the night. She dropped everything—she reached for her—
The pain was unbearable; my consciousness went. A few things remain of the night: a man’s face, a ruffle in the darkness. A wad of gauze stuffed into my mouth. The rock of the carriage, my blood on my hands. Being helped by a warden onto a cot. They’ve attacked each other, the man said, counting out the money. You will see what I mean—they are not sound of mind at all. The wardens didn’t ask questions, just put us in an ambulance bound for the boat. We were passed off to others—the Matron, the nurses—and they all regarded us with the same mixture of impatience and disdain.
In the examination room the doctor iced whatever remained of my tongue and wrapped up my jaw. For a day I slept in the infirmary, waking every hour to the nurses washing out my mouth, changing the gauze. When I was better oriented, they handed me a pencil but I only stared blankly at the paper. I refused to write my name, my story, for whom would I imperil then? Mrs. Bloodworth? The scared unwed mothers who came to her for help? The desperate ones, like Alphie, with nowhere else to turn? So I refused. I was sick with pain and shock. So I played dumb, and I figured they would let me go. But the mutes, unclaimed and terrified as I was, and with no identification, were kept until someone came for them. And no one could know I was there.
The morning on the pier, when I first told Aldovar about the baby, he said it was impossible. He did not believe me. I felt frightened—he, my dearest friend, my confidant, whom I had trusted since we were children, only looked at me blankly, dismissively. I’m not sure what was harder for him: to accept the fact I was carrying a child at all, or that the child was his—that he was capable of this, that it was only him I’d been close to. It’s simply not possible, he insisted. He said I couldn’t marry a man who was not really a man. His hands trembled as he tried to light a cigarette in the wind. For if they knew the baby was his, he rationalized, would they still think he was half-woman? Would anyone really believe us?
I was stunned, frightened. I’d never heard him talk this way before—not to me, not to anyone. When I came back from the pier, I snapped at my sister, who was hiding in the pantry, only trying to amuse me. I refused to go through with my routine. My mother took me into the dressing room to talk. I stood, terrified, in front of her, as she closed the door and sat down by the mirror. How could this woman ever love me again, I wondered? I had ruined everything. I was worse than a freak, and yet I still thought of myself as an innocent. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t. I was only curious.
She turned her eyes on me and waited. For a moment I was numb. There was nowhere else to turn, no one else to help me. So I told her everything. And she listened. She was worried, I could tell, but she sat there and listened and held my hand. She told me that she loved me.
I wish this was how it ended.
But then we argued. I grew more and more furious. In my temper I knocked the things off her dressing table—the paints, the pins, the books with her photographs—and then, by accident, a kerosene lamp. This is what I can never tell Odile, why I can’t go back to Coney I
sland. The lamp wobbled and fell. I leapt toward it, but I was too late. It shattered, and the flames started up the edge of the curtain. Mother tried to tamp it out, but it jumped to the gabardine coat she’d hung on the door, then the upholstered chair. She told me to run and pump some water, quickly, and to see that my sister was safely outside. I ran and couldn’t find a bucket, couldn’t find Odile—and then I turned and saw the smoke, the flames through the windows, the wood red-black and crackling. I tried to get in through the stage door, but the heat was too much. The doorknob alone seared the palm of my hand.
Watching the theater burn, calling for my sister, choking on ash, reaching up to my face and feeling my eyebrows gone—I was confused and numb, but I was sure Mother had made it out. What hadn’t she survived before? I waited and waited, sitting there on the curb, watching as the brigades arrived with their steam-pump engines (I will never forget the hiss of those valves in my ear, the sweat of the blinkered horses). It took two hours to put out the fire, and by then the theater was gone.
The dead were piled slowly on the boardwalk. Odile was the one who found her. Odile was the one who came to tell me she was gone. And all I could do was sit there, on a bench overlooking the indifferent sea, and nod, as if I’d known all along that it must be so.
To walk through the ruins afterward, to see the shrouded people who had died, to know it had been my hand—how could I ever go back? Sometimes I think I can hear the audience, I can see my mother, I can eat ice cream with my sister and brush the tigers’ coats. Sometimes I believe Aldovar is still there on the beach waiting for me, his kites aloft in the air. I will never feel the breeze on a hot summer day without thinking of him. I will never pass the open door of a theater without wanting to step inside, just to see if my mother is there. I know I will never hide with Odile in the curtains of the old stage again. We will never buy sweet pastries from the man in the brown apron. We will never build forts with Aldovar and Georgette in the boardinghouse parlor, or play checkers on overturned crates, bartering peanut shells and curling slivers of soap. Once I followed Aldovar up those steps under the umbrella, everything changed.
So I will let Odile think it was the shame of being unwed that drove me away, the confusion of being fallen and alone. I cannot tell her how the fire started and I cannot tell her why. I had expected Mother, upon hearing the news, to punish me in some way—call me harlot or jezebel, tell me I’d ruined the family, her good name—but she just shook her head tearfully. This could hurt you, my dear—the labor might be dangerous. You might be risking your own life.
Of all the things she could have said to me that day, nothing would have surprised me more. Of course childbirth was dangerous. But my body was such an instrument, so pliant and durable in my mind, capable of nearly anything—I hadn’t yet worried about the pain.
She hesitated. I had never seen my mother doubt herself, never seen her stumble or pause to search for the right word. But I could tell she was wrestling with something. She had a hard time meeting my eye. I only looked at her levelly and said, What do you mean?
There were footsteps out in the hall. Mother held up her finger—one minute—and opened the door, called out to Odile. Come in for a moment, will you? But I didn’t hear Odile answer—she just kept walking. Mother stood for a moment in the doorway. I saw her shoulders drop, heard her sigh, and then she turned slowly back to me, shutting the door behind her.
She took a seat in front of me, folded her hands. You and your sister, she said slowly, you almost didn’t live.
I’d never heard the story of our birth—we had asked, of course, but she’d always shushed our questions and turned away. Now I began to wonder why.
Your birthmarks—, she said, and a feeling of dread began to overtake me. She tried again. The day you were found—
I looked her in the eyes and suddenly I knew. We weren’t hers at all.
This is the story she told me. Seventeen years ago, on a foggy autumn morning in Manhattan, a woman named Mrs. Bloodworth found a suitcase on her doorstep. Puzzled, she looked up and down the street, but saw no one. There was no tag on the handle, no note of any kind. She was about to turn away, but then she heard a sound coming from inside, a faint rustling, like a bird in its nest. She knelt down and opened it. Inside were twin girls, newborns wrapped in newspaper. They were joined together at the head.
She took them inside, up the stairs to the nursery, which had been empty all summer. She threw the dusty sheets off the furniture and laid the girls in a crib. They were sallow and frail, heavy-lidded, but alive. She washed them with a warm sponge, fed them, swaddled them together and prayed they would live.
She wrote to my mother. The year before, Friendship had adopted two abandoned children for her burgeoning sideshow—a girl with four legs and an androgynous boy. If the twins survived, Mrs. Bloodworth thought they might find a home on the stages of Coney Island. Friendship wrote back and said she would come as soon as she could—she was busy opening a revue this week, but perhaps next?
Mrs. Bloodworth waited and nursed them, but the girls weren’t getting any stronger. The smaller one was bent and curled beneath her sister, growing listless and weak by the hour. Her spine was twisted and soft, her body hunched unnaturally. As she bowed farther and farther to the side, her sister howled and kicked and stretched to fit her, her body like a pull of rubber.
Mrs. Bloodworth didn’t know what to do. To save them, they had to be separated, and she’d never performed anything like that in her life, although she had seen some things in the war she would never forget. As a young nurse she had amputated men’s arms and legs. She had tweezed bullets from their shoulders and swaddled their burns. She had set jawbones back into faces, sewn brains back into skulls. And so she lit her lamps and boiled her water. She cleaned her kit. She laid the children on the kitchen table beside a bottle of ether and said a prayer, then another—one for each child: two prayers that could keep each other company on the way to heaven. It was just a fine integument that joined the girls’ head together—a flint of bone—but the veins were delicate, braided, snarled. She couldn’t let her hands slip, her fingers shake. So she took a swig of rum and worked into the night, by the light of the oil lamp. She stayed up for two days and nights tending to them. Afterward, their heads limp and gauzed, the babies lay apart in a single crib. They took their milk slowly. They slept so deeply. Their color began to return. But if they weren’t touching they cried—and so Mrs. Bloodworth kept them side by side, each soothed by the warmth from her sister. When Friendship arrived, Mrs. Bloodworth apologized—the girls would never again be the rarity she’d promised; she was sorry her friend had gotten her hopes up, that she’d come all this way. But when Friendship leaned over the crib and saw us—both looking back at her, Mrs. Bloodworth’s neat stitching behind our ears—she couldn’t walk away. Something changed within her, she said. That’s when she knew we were hers. We were strong.
But we aren’t yours, I seethed. You lied my whole life!
In my heart you are mine, Mother said tearfully. I didn’t want you to find out like this—I just want you to be safe. Who can know if you carry the same thing in your own body?
I was stunned and betrayed. I didn’t know what to believe. And so we argued.
After the funeral, while Odile pored over the account books at the kitchen table, I went quietly through the boxes in Mother’s room—theater tickets, playbills, penny souvenirs from London and San Francisco, her old scrapbooks full of clippings. In a smaller box I found letters from this woman, Mrs. Bloodworth, all posted from an address on Doyers Street. I didn’t know what to expect when I read them—something cold, perhaps, without color or life. But it was clear, from Mrs. Bloodworth’s questions and musings, that Mother had written about me and Odile many times over the years, and very fondly, too. There were references to our exploits and mishaps—Odile flinging her brace from the pier with a savage whoop; a tender poem from Aldovar that Mother had found among my things (though she didn’t embarr
ass me by mentioning it to my face, ever). I didn’t tell Odile—I couldn’t bear to show her the letters, not during her grief—but after the funeral I made the decision. I would go to see Mrs. Bloodworth myself. I wrote her a letter and packed my bags. When I arrived I would ask her: Is my mother’s story true? Did this all really happen? Where do I even belong? And when she took me in, she told me that yes, this was our story, mine and Odile’s, and that no matter what had happened before or since, my mother had always loved us. She offered to help me through my confinement—she would nurse me and shelter me, be vigilant for anything amiss. She would find a home for my baby, however it was born.
When Odile knocked on Mrs. Bloodworth’s door that day, how could she have guessed that she’d crossed that very threshold before, joined with me in the woman’s arms?
Sometimes as I sat in Mrs. Bloodworth’s kitchen, warming my hands around a mug of tea—those early, gray summer mornings when I couldn’t sleep, too shaken by my dreams—I imagined my other mother and father. I liked to think of them as handsome, well-mannered, with lovely names and matching furniture—I wondered if they were lonely, if they thought about me, regretted me, wondered where I was. Mouse was concerned with the same thing—had she ever passed her own father on the street? Would her mother come looking for her, even after thirteen years? We would sit there while the sun rose and warmed the table, dreaming up lives we’d never had. And because we hadn’t lived them, and hadn’t been disappointed by them, we believed they were somehow better—and ourselves better and braver within them.
