The Museum of Extraordinary Things

  What I wanted to know had both nothing and everything to do with the natural world.

  I wished to know love.

  I began to sneak off to Dreamland in the summer months, though my father had told me often enough that the owners of that park were our enemies. He said we were like nations at war. All wars must be won or lost, he told me, and in time we would go to battle. I didn’t want battle, however, just lovely summer nights. I knew Coney Island could be dangerous, and it was definitely changing. There was the Brighton Beach Racetrack near an area called the Gut and two others in Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend. The sport had begun on Coney Island, with the Brighton Beach Fairgrounds and the Brooklyn Jockey Club. But racetracks brought in a criminal element, and the clientele that frequented them could be rowdy. That thuggish group of horsemen and gamblers mixed with men and women looking for a good time at Dreamland and Luna Park in a world made of steel and papier-mâché. I began to climb out my window after I had finished my chores and bade my father good night. The evenings were inky, with banks of clouds and a pink-tinted fog that rolled in from the Atlantic. At first I merely sat on the roof gazing down at the rush of life on Surf Avenue, but I soon wanted more. My father had always told me that my heart and lungs were larger than an average person’s, and this was the reason I could remain underwater for so long without air. Perhaps my desires were larger as well. What I wanted haunted me and wouldn’t let me go. At night I tossed and turned, and usually rose from my bed without the benefit of sleep. I yearned for a different life.

  I always made certain to pile clothes beneath my quilt in the form of a sleeping body when I crept out of our house, so that my absence wouldn’t be noticed if my father decided to check on me. Not that he ever would. He was busy in his workroom after supper, and when he was done he went out on his own to the taverns of Brooklyn, of which there were more than a dozen on Surf Avenue alone. I was not uppermost in his mind.

  “Men will be men,” Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. “Don’t complain,” she advised. “That’s how women find their freedom. When there’s no one else at home.”

  Maureen’s words rang true enough. With my father gone I could read whatever I wanted, making myself comfortable in the overstuffed horsehair chair he most preferred. The cereus plant loomed on the oak side table, but I ignored it. I didn’t believe that it would ever bloom, and that on some magical night it would change before my eyes. To me, it was a malevolent specimen, more likely to swallow spiders and flies than to flower miraculously. I immersed myself in Poe’s chilling tales, though my father had often called Poe a perverted individual, a drunkard and a deviant. I dared to look through volumes from the East in which men and women performed sexual acts I tried my best to understand. I ate buttered toast and rice pudding for dinner rather than the daily routine of fish my father insisted upon, and tasted red wine for the first time. I unbraided my hair and stared at myself in the mirror so that I could consider who I might be when I became a woman. Someone with long dark hair who possessed a pale complexion and a quiet nature, who let no emotion show, yet was inwardly excited by the idea of the future, whose eyes burned with desire.

  Before long, I was so sure of myself I stopped climbing out the window and simply walked out the front door. As soon as I left the museum, I felt myself become another person. If anyone had asked my name, I would have called myself Jane, the name of the character in the novel Raymond Morris had always spoken of with such reverence, the book that had set him free. It was a common enough name, yet somehow stately and independent. I was impressed by the character’s statement: I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die. Those words made me feel I was not the only one who was at odds with who I was expected to be, and that angels were meant for another world, not for ours.

  The night watchman at the park’s gate grew to know me so well he allowed me to sneak in without payment. The watchman seemed kindly, and he always told me to enjoy myself and stay out of trouble, but he once asked for a kiss in exchange for this favor.

  “Come on, Jane,” he urged, for that was the name I’d given him. His job was not to be the guardian of wayward girls but to ensure that the crowds did not get too unruly. At night, after the gates were locked, he circled the eastern arena, where the animals were kept, watching over the leopards and tigers, alongside the horses and Shetland ponies children paid to ride, keeping a special eye on the pride of lions, which included a great creature called Black Prince, who was said to behave like a dog when around his trainer and like a beast from hell should anyone else dare to approach his cage. “I’ve got to have my fair share,” the watchman told me. When I grew flustered and tears sprung to my eyes, he waved me on. I thought it over, then went back to him. Perhaps there was a part of me that still felt I had to do as I was told, or perhaps I wanted to test myself and see what I was worth. I stood on tiptoes and pecked the watchman’s cheek. In that instant I knew the power a young girl can have over a man, although I did not yet know that ability could also be a curse. The watchman always let me into the park after that. Sometimes he gave me a few dimes to spend on myself. All for the sake of a kiss.

  This was before Dreamland was closed for renovations last year, in the autumn of 1910. All the same, the park was astounding even before the new attractions were added and all of the elegant icy white buildings were painted. I remember passing through the massive gate for the first time, stunned to see the gigantic biblical sculpture called Creation, an enormous winged angel. I couldn’t take my eyes from her. It was as if a goddess had fallen from the sky onto the shores of Brooklyn. Though I knew it was a betrayal to be so in awe of our competitor, I had never seen anything so beautiful.

  There was a tower in which thousands of lightbulbs had been installed, and the night above the park was so lit up that I sometimes feared my father would be coming home from his evening out and spy me walking along. I took to wearing a black shawl to cover my head so I might fade into the dark. But underneath the shawl my hair was unbraided, and I let it fall down my back.

  Our museum was tiny and old-fashioned, a minor diversion, not a grand, heart-stopping display. I awoke each day to the scent of formaldehyde and mothballs and a schedule of dull housework as I helped Maureen with the ironing and cooking before the museum opened for business. I helped to feed the birds and watered the neglected cereus plant.

  My hours in the tank had become a chore. I often curled up at the bottom dozing until my father rapped on the glass. I knew I was meant to turn this way and that, posing, and to smile through the waves I created when I splashed my tail. I was not to show my teeth or make rude faces. Each morning I coated myself with olive oil as Maureen suggested, so that my skin would not dry out and crack, as if I were another tortoise kept in the hall of science. Each night I dreamed I wandered the streets of our neighborhood until I found myself at the fish market. I was there buying haddock and clams when I realized people were laughing at me. I looked down to find I had no legs. I had not forgotten the entertainment my father had been most famous for before he came to this country, the display of cutting a woman in half. The trick haunted me. I knew I would be a far better fish if I didn’t have legs. Then I would be caught in the net of my life, unable to climb out the window at night, unable ever to run away, fated never to see the true wonders of the world.

  There were such huge crowds on summer evenings in the streets of Coney Island that no one noticed me, a plain girl in a black dress and gloves, my hair the color of ink. I visited Luna Park and the other, smaller entertainments. But I preferred Dreamland, perhaps because I could see its brilliant tower from my bedroom window. The park had become a part of my dreams before I ever walked through the gate. I went to every attraction and still couldn’t get enough. The one entertainment I avoided was the sideshow that fronted the park, for it reminded me too greatly of my father’s museum, though he called our human oddities scientific entertainments and living wonders and the sideshow’s term was fr
eaks of nature. The Queen of Fatland was one of the star acts at the Dreamland sideshow, and was said to weight 685 pounds though her height was not more than five foot two. I had seen the Queen off-season, shopping at the same fish market I frequented on Neptune Avenue. Her real name was Josephine, and she once gave me a recipe for bluefish fillet boiled with rosemary and sliced potatoes. The Queen was originally from Minnesota and now lived with two sisters in Brighton Beach, a very respectable neighborhood. She told me that my father had once offered her a position at the museum, but she was paid far more by the owners of Dreamland and, more important, she was treated with respect.

  “We would have done so as well,” I assured her.

  The Queen laughed and patted my head, as if I were truly still a child. She wore enormous felted hats decorated lavishly with ostrich feathers. The bodices of her gigantic silk dresses were encrusted with rhinestones and pearls.

  “Honey, do you know your father’s reputation? He’s as cheap as they come.” She might have said more, but she backed off with a sigh, perhaps because I was a young, impressionable girl. “However, he’s your father, so you think whatever you’d like.”

  The Queen sang opera in the sideshow, favoring exquisite Italian arias. She told me there were men who fell in love with her at the moment they first heard her voice. I waved when I saw her on the evenings I passed by, but I had no interest in attending her performances. I wanted nothing more than to watch the crowds of everyday people, who seemed far more interesting and unpredictable than the living wonders I knew. The human curiosities who took their breakfasts of apple fritters and doughnuts on our back porch had come to seem no more mysterious to me than the moths that hovered over the cabbages in our garden. The men who ate fire and contorted their arms and legs into rubbery shapes spent their downtime playing cards at a table under the pear tree, like ordinary workmen. The women with too much hair or too little flesh changed into their costumes in the kitchen, revealing their frayed undergarments, asking me to fix cups of milky tea.

  At Dreamland my favorite pastime was to stand in the shadows of the huge ballroom built above the iron pier and watch the lovers dance. They were so beautiful, each one unique. The music was the latest Enrico Caruso, so romantic and lovely, and Frank Stanley’s popular song “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” The ocean glowed in the light of the stars, so many hanging above us in the dark that no human being could ever count them all. The everyday people who attended the park screamed in metal carts that were flung down the Chute the Chutes. They kissed in dark corners. Many of them lived as if the world was coming to an end that very night, raising their skirts, making love to strangers, begging to be scared out of their wits and thrilled to their very core.

  The season I haunted Dreamland was the same summer I borrowed Maureen’s copy of Jane Eyre. I wanted to read it for myself so that I might understand the depth of Mr. Morris’s passion for this tale. Maureen said I could only have access to the volume when I was with her, for she was so protective of the book she kept it wrapped in brown paper to shield its cover. Just as well. My father didn’t approve of women authors, and he most assuredly would not have approved of Miss Brontё. I had to admit, the novel confused me. I knew I was supposed to have sympathy for the main character, the orphaned Jane, who was near my age and all but friendless and whose name I took for myself on the nights I wandered off on my own. Yet it was the madwoman locked in the attic who held my interest and compassion. I could understand how Mr. Morris might have been so radically affected by the madwoman’s story he had run away the very night he finished the book. I thought if I ever fell in love, I would want my beloved to wish what I had come to wish, that the book had ended differently, so that the first Mrs. Rochester might have made her escape.

  “Is your heart broken?” I asked Maureen the day I returned the book to her. The Wolfman had been gone for more than two years. After his departure, Maureen had suffered from bouts of melancholy. Her eyes had been watery and red, but she blamed her reaction on the tang of the spring onions that grew wild in our yard and all over Brooklyn. I had no idea that Mr. Morris had recently found his way back to Brooklyn, and was secretly living only a few miles away.

  “Do you think I have a heart to break?” she said quite seriously.

  “I know you do,” I responded without hesitation. “Surely, you must worry over Mr. Morris?”

  Maureen came to sit beside me. I had never understood why people on the street smirked and stared with disgust when they saw her. Birds were many colored and they were still considered beautiful, why shouldn’t the same be true of Maureen? Her scars and splotches seemed another part of her, a feature no more or less important than her red hair or hazel eyes. Sometimes I imagined the burns on her face and throat had been formed from handfuls of light thrown upon her, and that same glorious light radiated back from her soul.

  “Mr. Morris is a man who knows how to take care of himself.” Maureen seemed convinced this was true, but I still cried a little over his fate.

  “I wish he had taken me with him,” I said.

  Maureen took my hand in hers. Looking back on this, I suppose she felt bad not to be truthful with me, but she had spent her life protecting me and was not about to tell me any secret my father might wring out of me.

  I was not wearing gloves, and my first impulse was to pull my hand away and hide my abnormality, but she held fast. “I think I failed you,” she said to me in a mournful tone.

  I assured her she hadn’t. She alone had cared for me for as long as I could remember. It was Maureen who taught me to walk. It was she who sat at my bedside when I had childhood fevers, holding a cold cloth to my forehead, spooning chamomile tea between my lips when I was too ill to drink from a cup. She encouraged me to teach myself to read, though my father said I was too clumsy to learn to write my letters, due to my defect. Maureen could not write either, but I later taught her to read well enough so that she could decipher recipes and letters, which she said was a great gift. I told her everything, every nightmare and fear. Or at least I had. It was only lately that I had begun keeping my thoughts and deeds private. It pained me to conceal anything from Maureen—she had always been so good to me. As we sat together I gathered up my courage and confessed my secret life at Dreamland. I told her that I went along the avenue to watch the couples dance, losing myself in the crowds. I admitted that I called myself Jane if anyone questioned me, and that when I walked through the gates beneath the statute of Creation I felt I had become someone brand new.

  I expected Maureen to laugh, for she was a rebel and abhorred rules and regulations. She often groused and complained about my father when we were alone, making jokes about his stern manner and his attention to detail, especially when it came to his clothes. In fact he was a dandy and preferred cashmere and silk. Maureen could imitate him perfectly, mimicking his accent and his harsh way of speaking. She could give such a good impression of the cold, chalky glare of his anger it seemed she was possessed by his spirit. I thought she might give a performance now, copying the way he bowed formally when he greeted an audience. Instead, she was angry. She told me in no uncertain terms I was never to sneak out to Dreamland again.

  “You don’t know the sort of trouble you can get into. You take a step too far, and you’ll find there’s no coming back. Promise me you’ll stop sneaking around.”

  I was surprised by the worry in Maureen’s expression. We could hear my father in the museum, making the last announcements before he closed the doors for the day. There were very few people in attendance. The crowds were already waning, and evening shows had been canceled. We knew autumn not from the change of color in the foliage but by the empty streets and the thinning crowds, who would not return until the following season.

  “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll stop.”

  Maureen did not appear convinced. “I’ll be the one keeping a watch on you now.” She studied me carefully, lifting my chin so she could stare into my eyes. “Have you had your month
ly bleeding?”

  I admitted I had.

  “I thought as much! And you never said a word.” She was clearly disappointed to find I hadn’t confided in her. “Then you’re a woman and must act like one.” Our heads were close together, but she lowered her voice further due to the intimate nature of our discussion. “When you leave here against the Professor’s wishes, you’d better do so with no thought of returning. We’re not like other people, Cora. They would never understand us.”

  As evening fell I sat alone in my room, gazing out my window, thinking over Maureen’s advice. I saw Malia the Butterfly Girl making her way down Surf Avenue, her mother’s arm drawn protectively around her. They passed by the tintype photo gallery on the corner, where an individual could be photographed against cardboard cutouts of the seashore. Malia had left behind her orange costume. Her face was no longer decorated with makeup. The kohl eyeliner and rouge painted into the pattern of a monarch’s wing had been washed off at the pump in our yard, and her face was pretty and plump. She wore a plaid cloak that hid the fact that she’d been born without arms. From my vantage point, both mother and daughter looked ordinary as they disappeared into the crowd.