Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  But my blood parents were nameless to me and likely dead. They were no more than a curiosity, I came to realize—a puzzle and a sport in my times of distress, a diversion, a mirror fantasy at a sideshow. They had left us on a doorstep—too terrified, too confused, perhaps too ignorant to take care of us. Did they think it was an act of mercy, I wondered, or were they disgusted, ashamed? I will never know. But I grant them this—seventeen years after they abandoned me, they gave me an idea for escape, and for that I am grateful.

  So here I am now. I live on a quiet street. I work in a small theater on the west side of town, for the Miss Chandelier revue. Alphie helped me find work there. But I’m no longer onstage. I’m doing something I love even more. I run lights. I pad the boys’ breasts. I look down from the booth every night and take notes. It’s a good show, rousing and rascally and full of lively music, and I’m proud of it; the boys are a blessing, and so is the crew. Besides, I never loved being a performer. I didn’t love the rush the way that Mother did. I did it because it was expected of me—and perhaps, I regret to say, because I felt the need to make up for Odile’s infirmity. I felt, for Mother’s sake, that I had to have the strength and talent of two people. And her disappointment could be brutal, crushing, and her passion absolute. So here I take the reins. No more nights of sanding swords and mending costumes and sucking on ginger-bulbs to soothe my calamitous throat. No one here expects me to be a star. No man in a stovepipe hat hawks my talents to drunk passersby on the boardwalk. No one even has to know my tale.

  Mrs. Bloodworth still lives on Doyers Street. Once in a while I pass by the shop—I’ll spy her through the window, floating like an eye beyond the golden spectacles, leaning on a cane. It is safer for us to keep our distance, at least for now. But the shop goes on; the dens still thrive. Sometimes I’ll go down and see Alphie on the waterfront. I have a few drinks with her and a kind British gentleman. I sit with them late into the night at a sidewalk café, watching the lights over the water. Alphie always brings me a bag of lemon drops. The gentleman tells stories of the sea. I’ve begun, slowly, to talk with my hands. I keep a small diary in my coat, alongside a penny pencil—the way Aldovar once did—so that even if I cannot speak, I am never without my voice.

  And every day my daughter grows stronger. Every day she sees something new—she smiles, points, holds an ordinary spoon in her hands as if it’s the most fascinating thing. Now she even walks. She plays in the wings, wanders onto the stage, brings her cookies to the boys while they try to land a number. I’ve named her Orchard Broome. I carry the words on me forever, so why not make them into something worthy? Her name on my body, my blood in hers. My daughter, whom I once dreaded and feared for, and now cannot possibly live without—this story is for her.

  Here is what I understand now, what my mother used to tell me all those years ago—I have witnessed the sublime in the mundane, the things you see every day and fail to understand. Now I believe in the tiger in the grass. Because in truth, this story begins much earlier—before I boarded the ferry to Manhattan, before I knocked over the lamp, before I followed Aldovar up those steps on that rainy afternoon—before my sister and I were born to an unknown woman in the depths of the city.

  It’s a curious thing, the little incidents that lead to a life like this one. For when I knocked on Mrs. Bloodworth’s door—when I stepped inside and shook her hand—I realized that I’d seen her before.

  It was years ago, a Sunday afternoon—a cold, rainy day in the spring. I was being punished—I had cut off the toe of a boy on the beach; I had failed to show up at the theater as I’d promised. So I was housebound, sulky, forced to do chores while my mother entertained in the parlor. I scrubbed the kitchen floor, scoured the oven until my hands were cramped and raw. I lined up the shards of a plate I had broken and glued them back together. Meanwhile Mother laughed on the other side of the door. I was angry that the world without me was happy. Even Odile was gone, down at the boardinghouse with Aldovar and Georgette, playing cards and having fun—I suffered the injustice with no small amount of tears.

  So there I was, bored and peevish, eavesdropping in the kitchen. I was told not to come out, to finish my work, but I couldn’t help it—I peered through the door. Mother was sitting by the fire with a guest, a woman I didn’t recognize. She was regal, tall, with a soft voice that I couldn’t decipher—I could only hear mother’s, lilting and droll. I had no idea what she could be doing here in our bungalow, drinking cheap coffee and laughing with my mother, who was stretched out in her easy chair, still in her stage makeup, smiling with all of her teeth. It seemed they talked forever, until dusk settled and I was sure everyone had forgotten me—waiting alone in the gloomy kitchen, scrounging around for the last pickled egg, keeping watch for Odile through the window. Then I heard footsteps in the parlor—Mother said “Good night,” and closed the front door. Through the window I watched the woman disappear down the lane. I stared at the silhouette of her hat, black and sweeping against the golden sky.

  In the kitchen afterward, as she was rinsing out the coffee cups, I asked Mother, “How do you know that woman?” This was clearly a woman from Manhattan, refined and well-dressed. An actress? I guessed. An opera singer?

  “We’re old friends,” my mother explained to me. “I met her when I was about your age.”

  I couldn’t think of any friends she still might have had, not after all these years—she’d left Punxsutawney, after all. She had traveled the world. She’d lived here most of her life and never looked back.

  I watched her as she took out a cloth and dried the cups and set them back in the cupboard. I waited for her to continue, but she paused, halting over the dishrack. I reached out and touched her arm and saw, with surprise, that she hesitated, that her eyes had misted over. I had never seen my mother cry, not once in my life, not even when my father—her erstwhile husband, the man who had given us his name—left us for good and sailed back to a dreary sheep town in England, never to be heard from again. I suppose she knew by then that she could do it herself.

  As I believed Odile could, too.

  “It was back during the war,” my mother told me.

  She turned and lifted the edge of her skirt. She pointed to the scar that ran from her hip to her thigh, the wormy lavender line where a bullet had been dug from her skin. “Virginia Bloodworth sewed that up with a fiddle string,” she said. “And for that I owe her my life.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LESLIE PARRY is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She was recently a resident at Yaddo and the Kerouac House. Her writing has also received a National Magazine Award nomination and an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories. She lives in Chicago.

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  CREDITS

  Cover design by Allison Saltzman

  Cover images: trapeze artists © by Niday Picture Library/Alamy;

  The Great East River Bridge to Connect the Cities of New York & Brooklyn,

  c. 1872, by Currier & Ives, courtesy of Library of Congress;

  frame courtesy of Richard Sheaff/Sheaff Ephemera

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CHURCH OF MARVELS. Copyright © 2015 by Leslie Parry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, i
n any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN: 978-0-06-236755-6

  EPUB Edition May 2015 ISBN 9780062367570

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