Church of Marvels: A Novel Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my sister

  EPIGRAPH

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  —“The Tyger,” William Blake

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Claudia Ballard, you are the hero of this tale. Thank you for believing so ardently in this book, and for your wisdom, insight, patience, and humor. Thank you to the team at Ecco, especially Megan Lynch, Lee Boudreaux, and Dan Halpern. I couldn’t have asked for more incisive, clear-eyed, sensitive editors. Thanks to Elizabeth Sheinkman, Tracy Fisher, and the dedicated folks at WME; Jane Warren and Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada; Lisa Highton and Federico Andornino at Two Roads. (And grazie, Federico, for helping me with the Italian phrases.) To everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—my teachers, my peers, the staff—profound thanks. This book would not exist without you.

  This is a work of fiction, but I found inspiration in the writings of Nellie Bly, Herbert Asbury, and Earl Lind. I’m grateful to institutions like the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and the Tenement Museum for further stoking my imagination. Thanks to Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Kerouac Project—welcome shores on stormy seas.

  Thank you to Adam Farabee, Melelani Satsuma, Zachary Mann, Sharon Smith, Dan Gomez, Jan Wesley, Virginia Parry, and Cris Capen for supporting this undertaking (and its roving author) at many vital turns. To my parents, Dai and Susie Parry, who were always ready with a word of encouragement, or a sing-along around the player piano. To my first reader, my sister Peanut: French martinis on me. To Florence Parry Heide and Suzanne Vidor Parry, who spent years listening to my stories, and regaling me with theirs: I wish you could hear this one. And to Joe Gerdeman, who was so certain for so many years: thank you for giving me a place to come home to.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part 2

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Part 3

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO SPEAK SINCE I WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS old. Some people believed that because of this I’d be able to keep a secret. They believed I could hear all manner of tales and confessions and repeat nothing. Perhaps they believe that if I cannot speak, I cannot listen or remember or even think for myself—that I am, in essence, invisible. That I will stay silent forever.

  I’m afraid they are mistaken.

  People who don’t know any better assume I’m a casualty of the stage life I was born into: a stunt gone awry beneath the sideshow’s gilded proscenium—mauled by a tiger, perhaps, or butchered by a sword that plunged so far down my throat I could kiss the hilt. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. No sword I’ve ever swallowed has been sharp enough to cut. At worst, those blades (blunted by pumice stones in my dressing room after hours) tickle like a piece of straw.

  When I first came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s I knew nothing beyond the home I had left. I’d never been to the city before. I believed I had already seen the worst of the world, but of course I was wrong. I was just a scrappy tomboy from the seashore, my voice a blend of Mother’s airy lilt and the peanut-cracking babel of the boardwalk. My mother was fearsome and beautiful, the impresario of the sideshow; she brought me and my sister up on sawdust, greasepaint, and applause. Her name—known throughout the music halls and traveling tent shows of America—was Friendship Willingbird Church. She was born to a clan of miners in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but ran away from home when her older brother was killed at Antietam. She cut off her hair, joined the infantry, and saw her first battle at the age of fourteen. In the tent at night, she buried her face in the gunnysack pillow and wept bitterly thinking of him, hungry for revenge. A month later she was wounded. In the leaking hospital tent, a nurse cut open her uniform and discovered her secret. Before the surgeon could return, however, the nurse—not much older than Friendship herself—dug out the bullet, sewed up her thigh with a fiddle string, and sent her back to Punxsutawney in the dead of night.

  But Friendship never made it home. Instead she traveled out to the great cities of the Middle West. She joined a troupe of actors and journeyed on to New York. She played town halls and hog fairs, bawdy houses, nickel parlors. She built her own theater at Coney Island—the Church of Marvels—and made a life for herself in a sideshow by the sea. It was the water she loved most, far away from the hills of Punxsutawney, from the black dust that fell like snow twelve months of the year. But she couldn’t shake the coal mines entirely: she prized industriousness and made us work.

  All great shows, she told me when I was little (and still learning to flex the tiny muscles in my esophagus), depend on the most ordinary objects. We can be a weary, cynical lot—we grow old and see only what suits us, and what is marvelous can often pass us by. A kitchen knife. A bulb of glass. A human body. That something so common should be so surprising—why, we forget it. We take it for granted. We assume that our sight is reliable, that our deeds are straightforward, that our words have one meaning. But life is uncommon and strange; it is full of intricacies and odd, confounding turns. So onstage we remind them just how extraordinary the ordinary can be. This, she said, is the tiger in the grass. It’s the wonder that hides in plain sight, the secret life that flourishes just beyond the screen. For you are not showing them a hoax or a trick, just a new way of seeing what’s already in front of them. This, she told me, is your mark on the world. This is the story that you tell.

  But I was young. I mistook my talent for worldliness, my vanity for a more profound sensibility. It was only when I arrived in Manhattan that I saw myself as coarse and strange, a Brooklyn savage with a bag of swords and ill-suited for any other life. I had come to seek the help of Mrs. Bloodworth, and in her care I tried to forget my old life, the troubles that had ended a naïve and happy childhood.

  But the real troubles had yet to begin.

  I would stand beside her in that smoky, sepulchral office, the curtains drawn against the hot glare of July. I wore a benign smile on my face while other young women, pale and nervous, sat before her desk. They cried into handkerchiefs, fiddled with abalone combs nested in their hair, drew fans to their faces when they felt sick or faint. Mrs. Bloodworth kicked her heels up on the desk and sighed out smoke. She nodded her head and closed her eyes in sympathetic meditation while the young girls sang of their sorrows. Before I lost my voice I sat there too, sick with the smell of blooming flowers, listening to my secrets echo off the mahogany walls.

  Many think now that I’ve disappeared for good. They might even believe I have died. I can see them huddled in their grim houses, ruffle-breasted and thin-li
pped, rattling dice over a backgammon board, kissing their pretty children good night. They believe they are safe. They believe that all is past and that I’ll hold my tongue. Sometimes I want to laugh and say, “Oh but I have!” I’ve stared at it in my own cupped hands, stiff and bloody and fuzzed with white, gruesomely curled as if around a scream.

  At seventeen I crossed the river alone. I didn’t know, when I departed, that in a few short months I would see the islands of New York—from Coney Island to Manhattan Island to the Island I shudder to name. Like the girls who came to Mrs. Bloodworth’s, I believed my decision was singular and private; I didn’t know that it would determine the fate of people I’d never met. The girls were frightened and alone, in need of a confessor. With a name such as mine, they believed me to be some sort of saint. But how could they know, as they trembled there at the desk, just how cruel the world could be, and I a willing part of it?

  Let me say, this life is not the one I envisioned for myself. I remember the long-ago days when my mother would come up to me after a show, when I was tired and sweaty and sliding my swords into the rack. She’d pull me close and say, “My girl—how proud I am,” and I would hug her and smell the hair oil melting down her neck, her gabardine coat trailing the musk of the tiger cage. There are times when I long to feel just something of that old life—the crunch of sand beneath my feet, the beads of salt in my hair, the sight of Brighton Beach at dusk. I think of my sister, who is still there. I always believed we’d be together—the two of us living in our house by the sea, playing duets on the old piano, ringing in the new century as fireworks showered from the sky. (1900—how far away it seemed to me then! and now only a breath away.) And thinking of this, of her alone, of what I have never been able to tell her—this is something I cannot bear.

  But this story, in truth, is not about me. I am only a small part of it. I could try to forget it, perhaps. I could try to put it behind me. But sometimes I dream that I’ll still return to the pageantry of the sideshow, hide myself beneath costumes and powder and paint, grow willingly deaf amid the opiating roar of the audience and the bellow of the old brass band. It will be like the old days—when Mother was ferocious and alive, before the Church of Marvels burned to the sand. But how can I return now, having seen what I have seen? For I’ve found that here in this city, the lights burn ever brighter, but they cast the darkest shadows I know.

  1

  ONE

  NEW YORK CITY, 1895

  SYLVAN FOUND THE BABY ON A BALMY SUMMER NIGHT, WHEN he was digging out the privies behind a tenement on Broome Street. All night long the damp air had clung to his skin like a fever, and now, with only a few blocks left before his shift ended, he was huddled halfway inside a buckling stall, his vision blurring and his arms growing numb. Beside him the other night-soilers, slope backed and sweating in the privy doorways, bent and pushed and hoisted and slung. They kept up a rhythm—shovels scraping at the bricks, waste slapping in the buckets, mud sucking at their boots.

  Sylvan was hunched over the pit, sifting through the mire, when his shovel came up under something solid and heavy. He stopped and squinted, but it was too dark to see anything. He gripped the handle and watched the shovel head quiver up into the lamplight. Five pink toes pearled above the falling slop, then a foot, then an ankle. Leaning in closer, he saw a small face, still as a mask, floating in the dark.

  He drew up the shovel and shouted. He dropped to his knees, closed his hands around the slick body, and, trembling, fell back on his haunches. The head was limp and slippery in his palm, the hair like moss under his fingers.

  The night-soiler next to him, a gaunt and graying man the others called No Bones, leaned his shovel against the open door of his privy and lifted his lantern. “What’s it this time?” he asked. “Good one? Piece of china? What happened to that pitcher from last week—you keep it?”

  Sylvan didn’t answer. In his arms the baby was slack and still, lighter than the bucket he hauled across the yard and emptied into the barrels of the slop wagon. He unknotted the kerchief at his throat. In the dark he mopped the baby’s lips and cheeks and the blue bulbs of its closed eyes.

  No Bones took a small, curious step forward. The heady smell of kerosene and lime powder and sweat emanating from his clothes made Sylvan’s nose sting and head pinch; he could taste it, burning, in the back of his throat.

  “Lemme see there,” the old man muttered, raising the lamp over his head. “Let’s see what you brung up now.”

  Light fell across Sylvan’s lap. For a moment neither man moved or breathed. The only sound that passed between them was the steady creak of the lantern.

  “What is it? What’d he find?” came voices from across the yard.

  No Bones turned his head and whispered hoarsely, “It’s a baby—a white baby. Girl.”

  Sylvan stared at her. She was pale, with a small nose and a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in. Whorls of dark hair were greased against her scalp. Slowly and gently he drew her up to his chest.

  The other night-soilers dropped their shovels and crowded around him. Their faces were grim and green in the swinging light of their lanterns.

  “Looks like a Polack,” someone said.

  “No, a Scot—see the way the ears point up? That’s a kelpie.”

  No Bones whispered, “Is it dead?”

  Sylvan tried to nod but only managed to drop his chin. He had unearthed all sorts of things in the privies: coins, buttons, bottles of hair dye and bourbon, a set of grinning false teeth. But nothing even close to this. Night-soiling was summer work—he and the crew collected waste from the slums and delivered it to a fertilizer factory on the river, always hoping for a small treasure of their own. Back in his cellar on Ludlow Street, the walls were lined with things he’d smuggled home in the dark—loot all the way from Essex Street to Centre, from Canal up to Delancey. He knew it was foolish, but he kept hoping he might discover a gold watch chain, or an heirloom stone slipped from its tarnished, Old World bezel, some small fortune that would allow him to leave Ludlow Street forever. A ticket away from the sickness and noise, the nostrums hocked on street corners, the heavy-lidded undertakers who haunted the halls with their burlap and twine.

  But now this. He hadn’t held a child since Frankie.

  Suddenly the baby’s chest rose and shook. She mewled weakly. Sylvan’s hand jumped back and hovered above her in the lantern light, his shadow whipping over her skin like smoke. He watched as she took a breath and opened her eyes. They were a dark, watery green.

  The foreman pushed his way to the front. “Back to work,” he ordered somberly. “To your posts—now.”

  The group of men disbanded, pulling at their beards, crushing their hats between their hands. The light disappeared with them, and Sylvan was left squatting alone by the privy with the baby breathing weakly in his arms.

  Beside him Mr. Everjohn scraped the ground with his boot and sighed. “Let’s see it.”

  Sylvan stood, wiping away the remaining dirt with his handkerchief.

  Everjohn leaned in closer. A slug of tobacco jumped from one cheek to the other. “Christ,” he whispered. “You see anything? Anyone here when you come up?”

  Sylvan shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “Anyone seen you—or this”—he tilted his head toward the baby—“since?”

  “Just the others.”

  The foreman pushed his hands into his pockets. He glanced warily around the yard, to the offal-stained gangway of the butcher shop, then up to the darkened windows of the tenement. “Goddammit,” he hissed.

  Sylvan took a deep breath. “There’s the mission over on Hester,” he said. “Convent runs an orphanage, too, over on Mulberry.”

  Mr. Everjohn turned back to him, grinding the tobacco between his teeth. “You know I can’t keep it on my watch,” he said. “Someone’ll find it by dawn—take it there themselves.” He slurped and spit. “Best for all of us if we leave it where it laid.”

  �
��She might need a nurse—”

  “We’ve got the Bloody Gutter beat tonight—you know we can’t be bringing a child through those streets.”

  “It’s just another few blocks,” Sylvan said, but he saw the look on the foreman’s face and knew he should retreat before his shovel and bucket were taken from him and he was turned out into the street without the week’s wages. At nineteen Sylvan was youngest on the crew, strong-limbed and quiet. Mr. Everjohn liked him well enough, but the other men were clannish and wary. Under their breaths they called him Dogboy. He’d been puzzled over and picked apart all his life—the skin of a Gypsy, the hair of a Negro, the build of a German, the nose of a Jew. He didn’t belong to anyone. They stared at him with a kind of terrified wonder, as though he were a curiosity in a dime museum. One of his eyes was brown, so dark it nearly swallowed the pupil, and the other a pale, aqueous blue.

  Sylvan looked down at the baby. He thought of the drunkards and gang boys, roosting in alleys and doorways from Mulberry clear out to the river, waiting in the warm night for someone, anyone, to cross them. And the night-soilers, a piecemeal crew of blacks and Irish, Slavs and Chinese, near-cripples and convicts and rye-pickled drifters, were a mark. He’d heard a story last summer about a night-soiler who tried to help two children find their way home. A gang of neighborhood men, believing he meant to kidnap them, clobbered him to the ground and tied him to the back of a wagon. Sylvan wondered if the children were there to see it, if they saw him die in the street, if they screamed because they couldn’t understand why the man who’d taken their hands and helped them home was now being dragged through the dirt with his mouth open and eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.

  The foreman’s tongue flicked up into his moustache, tobacco juice wetting the ends. “I’m not putting the boys in danger—not for some whore-trash’s baby.”

  He put out his hand and rested it on the baby’s head. Then, pulling away, he cleared his throat and said, “At least you dug it out. But we’ve just got one job to do—and you keep doing it, right?” He clanged his shovel against the ground and disappeared across the yard, down the narrow gangway to the street. “Gather up, gather up!”