The Museum of Extraordinary Things

  “You don’t know me,” Coralie insisted. “I’m not an angel. I sometimes doubt if I am even human.”

  Eddie laughed, not at all understanding her meaning, so she begged him to light the lantern. If he wanted to know who she was, then she would reveal herself, though she wept as she did. She showed him her hands, what she considered her deformity, the flesh that separated her and made her different, but also made her herself, the woman he didn’t want to let go of, not even after hours had passed with her in his arms and the liveryman shouted up that it was time for her to leave. She left behind the blue wool coat, neatly folded, on the chair, and the handkerchief containing Hannah’s belongings on the table. He examined the tokens, holding them tenderly. Two black buttons, a comb, hairpins, a golden locket on a chain, and two keys that he held in the palm of his hand.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  the blue thread

  i HAD ALWAYS been a good student. Even in the art of rebellion, I looked for those who might instruct me. I listened not to the rabbis but to my employer, Hochman, who seemed wiser in the ways of the world, an expert in the arena of human nature. Hochman suggested that each person had the option to remake the past as he or she remembered it. In this way, an individual who had betrayed someone dear to him could escape the pangs of guilt and remorse. One who had suffered great loss could manage to go on, despite the burdens of his life. He could forget certain details and focus on others, and in doing so could take strength from the past, despite the hardships he had encountered.

  I saw that my father did not possess this capacity. He was caught in his love for my mother, a fish in a net. He could not remake the fire, or the ashes, or the cold dark night when we ran away from our village. The past clung to him, as it was and always would be, a shroud, a sorrow, a loss that was never-ending.

  He had loved my mother, and the present and the future could not exist without her. I saw his struggle, but from a distance. I stood on the other side of the riverbank, a fisherman with a cold, clear eye. I had witnessed what such emotions could do to a person, how they could rule his life, and ruin it by doing so. I learned my lesson in watching his grief.

  Love, for me, did not exist.

  I’d had a series of encounters over the years. Lust was a story I knew. There were many women I took to bed for the night. I yearned for them in the moment, but in the morning, any lover I’d had was already claimed by the past, even if she was still calling my name.

  I’d forgotten each woman before I left her room.

  Now I thought of nothing but Coralie. I wondered what had filled my thoughts before. I dreamed of the trout I’d once caught. I begged him to tell me what I must do to win her. But my begging went unanswered, for even in my dreams he was a fish and I was a man, and all he knew remained a secret.

  I had asked to take Coralie’s portrait on the day she came to me, but she’d refused. You need to want the person that I am, she told me, not the one you capture. But I felt as though I was the one who had been captured. This was why I dreamed of the trout, imagining that he might hold the cure for what I felt, the piercing of my heart.

  I hadn’t grasped why my father always brought my mother’s photograph to his workplace or why he propped it up on our table so that he might dine with her each night. Now I understood. She was his everything, and she was gone. This was the kind of love that overtook a man’s daily life, wrapping him in knots.

  Desire was too churlish and stupid a word for what I felt. I longed for Coralie. No wonder I had closed myself off. Love like this was all consuming. I found that I was jealous of the strangest things—sunlight, streets, curtains, even her clothing, anything that was close to her. The month of May was slipping away, and I didn’t even notice it. Days and weeks meant nothing to me. I lived within my own hurt feelings, in a cave that was too dark to see the outline of the trees that filled with green leaves.

  I took my dog and walked for miles. I thought that by doing so I might break the spell I was under. Walking had always been a tonic to me, steadying my spirit and my mind. But now as I went onward, I grew worse, as if I’d been enchanted. Somehow I had lost myself in my longings. Then I remembered what Hochman had told me when he read my palm. I had the river inside me. I followed alongside the river that was as much a part of me as anything in my life. In the grasp of my passion, I felt I was a madman, and perhaps I was looking for the same in a companion, for I began to think that the hermit might help me understand the intoxication that had befallen me. I’d heard that failed love had driven him into the woods, away from human company.

  I didn’t need a psychic talent to find him. He was at one of his favorite fishing spots.

  “Did you come to see if I was dead yet?” He handed me the bottle of whiskey he carried with him, and I took a gulp. “You’re the one that looks like hell. What happened to your hand?”

  “Some fellows broke it.”

  I’d been to a doctor who’d set and bound it, warning that although I would regain some use of it, it might well be weakened and misshapen. I was fortunate that the police assumed every man was right-handed, which I was not. I readied my line with my left hand, and the hermit was impressed with my ability to get things done so neatly. Perhaps my art would not be completely undermined if one of my hands was functional. Still, I hadn’t yet found the nerve to work my camera, just in case what little talent I had left had been broken along with my bones.

  “Why’d they do that?” my companion asked. For all his alleged meanness he truly didn’t understand the callousness and cruelty of others. “For the fun of it? Or did you betray someone or mess with the wrong sorts?”

  “I fell in love. That’s my crime. With the mermaid.”

  “You can’t be blamed for that,” the hermit said soberly.

  “You’ve been in love?” I ventured to ask.

  The hermit looked at me darkly.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” I added.

  “Do you think I want to talk about my life?” Beck asked in return. “I came here to escape my existence. I couldn’t stand the way people in the city treated each other, how they managed to ruin everything they touched. But now it seems the city is following me. Soon enough they’ll pave beneath these trees we’re standing under.”

  Beck’s wife, Annetje, was also from an original Dutch family. She became ill with lung disease before she reached the age of twenty, and died in the bed they shared, one Beck’s father had crafted as a wedding present from the wood of an enormous tulip tree that was said to have been planted on the day Henry Hudson first encountered the native Lenapes in 1609. It was their word for island that gave Manhattan its name, for it was the great island then, as it has remained. The Lenape people were accomplished archers and hunters who believed that the Milky Way, which they called the Starry Path, guided the souls of the departed on their journey to the world beyond ours, somewhere in the sky.

  Beck abandoned his life soon after his wife’s death, leaving his small farmhouse to fall into ruin. The neighbors helped themselves to his sheep and goats. The chickens became wild, and Beck occasionally found their descendants nesting in the woods. His wife had babied the chickens and let them stay inside during storms, yet they now lived hardily in what was wilderness, while she, who’d been so young and healthy, was gone after an illness of a mere two weeks.

  “I didn’t know you had a wife,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “What do you know?” Beck muttered.

  “Apparently nothing. I’d be grateful for any instruction.”

  The hermit laughed out loud. “You’re talking to the wrong man.”

  “Tell me this, do you regret it?”

  “The lung disease? Are you an idiot?” he growled. “Of course I do. The weather was bad and our home poorly heated. Oh, I regret it, more than I can say. If I were a rich man, maybe the illness wouldn’t have befallen her.”

  I shook my head, for that wasn’t what I’d meant. I meant did he regre
t his marriage and the pain it caused him to have had a great love. When I explained, he glared at me. “Are you asking if I would have been better off if I’d never met my wife, or married her, or lost her? I’ll tell you this, a day with her was better than a life without her.”

  I was stunned by the emotion in his voice. I had not expected so much from such a gruff fellow, and we both fell deep into our own thoughts. As we sat in silence, a covey of what I thought were quail flew up from the bushes, and we both turned, startled, as if a ghost were near. I voiced my initial notion, that spirits had been close by.

  “I wouldn’t mind being haunted. I’d be happy for it,” Beck said as we watched the game birds trotting into the ferns.

  When I left he offered me his congratulations.

  “On what?” I asked, confused.

  “Being human.”

  I made my way down to the river. I had the oddest feeling that just as we had become friends, we had also said our good-byes, and would never see one another again. Perhaps that was why he’d told me the intimate details of his life, so that someone would remember him. I noticed tracks in the mud and felt a shiver down my back. Possibly the birds had been startled not by a spirit but by a flesh-and-blood ghoul. Mitts charged off, following the trail all the way to the Old Post Road. As it turned out the game birds we’d spied weren’t quail but wild chickens perching in the undergrowth. There were signs that someone had been past recently, for I could see the fresh tracks of a horse whose rider had made his way down the old road. It seemed an odd coincidence. I wondered if I had been followed to this place, and, just as curious a thought, I wondered what reason anyone might have for doing so.

  The following day, I still couldn’t shake the odd feeling I’d had when I left Beck. I wondered if some of the talent I’d had as a boy had stayed with me, and I could still read the thoughts and fortunes of men. It was possible that my concern upon leaving him had been meaningful and he was in danger. I was too worried to let it be. I headed back to the woods, in such a hurry I didn’t bother to bring Mitts along. I had a panicked feeling, as if I’d no understanding of the world or of being alive. I was fairly certain I’d wasted a good portion of my life. Only now did I realize what the hermit was telling me, that love was never a regret. I felt the need to thank him for speaking to me so frankly.

  I’d let love take me like a river, and carry me forth, and I wouldn’t fight it any longer.

  Beck wasn’t at any of his usual fishing spots. I shouted out for him, but heard nothing in response. When I went up into the woods I saw only charred wood in his fire pit. The air was scented with a sulfuric stink. There was a tin plate on the ground and a wash of silence in the clearing, except for the low calling of doves. Then I knew I was right, and that we had indeed said our last good-bye. I knew that men told you the truth for one of two reasons: when they wished to be rid of what they couldn’t bear to carry, or when they wished to include you in what they knew so their stories wouldn’t be lost. I would always know that his wife was so kindhearted she’d taken the chickens into their home during spells of bad weather. I would know that he was filled with emotion, as if he were still a young man in love.

  I found him in the ferns, facedown, splattered with mud. He was wearing his long underwear. Nothing more. His feet were bare. Someone must have surprised him, possibly when he was sleeping, for I’d never seen him without his boots. There was blood on the ground, and in his hair, where a shovel or a club had split his skull open. When I turned him over, he was stiff, and I could tell he’d been gone for a while. Perhaps he had been murdered soon after I last saw him. I’d thought the trail I’d found was leading away, disappearing into the weeds. But it appeared I’d been wrong. It had led to him instead. The rider may have been waiting for me to pass him by so he might find his way to the hermit’s shack under cover of the night.

  I leaned down to close his eyes, already rheumy and paling. That was when I saw that his mouth had been sewn closed with blue thread. I wondered what Beck had seen or known that had brought him such a horrible fate. Someone did not want him to tell all he knew.

  I had no choice but to do as he said he’d done. I removed the thread with a knife I found among his pots and pans, telling myself it was only fishing line I was unhooking. But I wept as I did so. Then and there I decided I’d give up fishing. The sport and hungers of men seemed wretched and insincere compared to the run of life in the river. I’d do no harm to any of its inhabitants from now on.

  I buried Beck in a high meadow, where the land was not as marshy and there was a long, sweeping view of the river. I used an old shovel with a half-broken handle, and had only my one good hand, so the going was difficult. I didn’t care. I was streaked with dirt when I was done and sweating through my clothes. My bad hand cramped, and my left shoulder was sore. I knew he wouldn’t have wanted a coffin, he’d have wanted me to bury him in the earth, and I did so. That is the way of my people; we bury our own dead as a final and lasting gift. I said the prayers I’d been taught as a boy and tore my shirt, for this was the only way I knew how to mourn. Standing there, I felt I had lost something more than a man. It seemed a part of our city had been buried with him. The part I loved best.

  Beck had told me to destroy his house when he was no longer in our world. He said that the Manhattan he knew would be gone when he was, and perhaps he was right in that. The villages that lined the highlands of upper Manhattan had already begun to drift into each other as the city moved northward. Soon there would be sidewalks in the last patches of the woods, and buildings to house families, and skyscrapers and highways. No one would know that deer had made their home here once, and that coyotes were spied in the dark, or that there had been wolves that had ventured down the river on those rare occasions when it froze solid in the most brutal winter months.

  The wolf-dog was chained to the porch, frantic. I assumed he had seen the murder of his master, and because he was shackled he could do nothing to defend Beck. I thought he might attack me, but, when I set him off his chain, he merely darted into the woods. Good, I thought, for that was what the old man had wanted, for the beast to be set free.

  I then burned the shack to the ground, as Beck had asked. I had the rain barrel readied to ensure the flames wouldn’t get out of control. My bad hand was aching even more, and my heart was aching as well, but I set to my work with a vengeance. Beck’s house was a flimsy edifice, and it went up easily. I’d seen enough of fire, and I hoped this one would be the last I ever saw. Afterward, I poured water on the remaining embers in case a flame or two should survive.

  It was near dark, but I had no fear of these woods. I felt I had inherited them for whatever time there was left for them. It was then I saw Beck’s wolf staring at me through the smoke. If there was anyone in the world who might understand who I’d been and how I’d lived my life it was this creature. We couldn’t go back to the lives we were meant to live. Beck had wanted the wolf to be free, but there was no wild for him to return to and no man to be his master, and he stood there uneasily, between worlds. I called him to me, and he came. I had said I would care for him, and I would do so. We walked downtown together, not quite companions, wary of each other, but together all the same. When we reached the more populated avenues, I found a rope on the street and looped it around his neck so that he wouldn’t startle when he saw carts and automobiles. He was surprisingly calm. Though the horses in the stable below my studio panicked at the sight of him, the wolf ignored them, as he ignored Mitts, choosing to slink beneath the table, where he made a sort of den for himself. I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

  MAY 1911

  THEY WOULD come for the body in broad daylight, during the afternoon show, for they were less likely to be seen in the midst of a crowd. The Profe
ssor would be engaged at this time, his attention on the flow of customers. No one would expect thievery, if that was what it could be called, in the middle of the day.

  “This is a task best done by ghouls,” the liveryman said, for even he, with his criminal history, was queasy over the work that lay ahead.

  “Then that’s what we’ll be,” Eddie said grimly.

  “And how will we get into the cellar, if you don’t mind me asking?” When Eddie held up the keys Coralie had given him, the liveryman grinned. “I see I should give you a bit of credit. I won’t ask where you got those, brother.”

  They had made a pact to work together, for this one day alone. They would never again speak of it, or speak of each other.

  “What would make a person sew the mouth shut of a person who’d been murdered?” Eddie asked the liveryman as they traveled toward their destination.

  “It’s a message. Ask no questions.”

  “It was done to Hannah, the drowned girl.”

  “No. I saw her for myself.”

  “A person with a kind heart removed the thread. It may be he was killed for doing so.”

  “Perhaps he knew more than he should have. Or at least someone believed he did.”

  Eddie was now struck by the story of the man who’d been stuck in the mud; how the hermit had watched him struggle to break free. Someone had deposited Hannah in the river. Could this have been the man? “If that’s true it doesn’t serve to drive me away,” Eddie told his companion.

  “I wouldn’t expect so. You’re stubborn.”  The liveryman grinned. “It’s part of our heritage. If our people weren’t stubborn we would have disappeared by way of our enemies’ hands long ago.”

  Eddie’s obstinate nature surfaced in his refusal to accept the physician’s verdict that his right hand might be useless in the future. At present, however, his disability was irrefutable. He had therefore stowed his camera in a cupboard, and he felt the loss of it even more deeply than he did the loss of his hand.