The Museum of Extraordinary Things

  If Coralie had been anyone else, a hired act like any other, she would have already been turned out of her father’s house. She wondered if she might have preferred a life as a housemaid or as a clerk in a nearby shop, but her father drew her close and told her he would never let her go.

  “What we do not have, we will create,” he assured her.

  He had already fashioned his clever plan. The new creature might be an alligator or a snake, or some strange combination of the two, wrought by thread and nails and ingenuity, a being far superior to Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid. There was a workshop in the cellar, a space Coralie had never been allowed to enter, not even after she’d passed the age of ten. Two locks bolted upon the door, one made of iron, the other of brass. The keys were kept on the Professor’s watch chain.

  “Our creature will be whatever people imagine it to be,” he’d confided to Coralie. “For what men believe in, they will pay to see.”

  The Professor brought her with him in his search. He often struck a more satisfying deal when he presented himself as a family man. He had a scant few weeks before the season began in which to find a wonder that would satisfy not only his customers but also the press. They went first to the docks in Red Hook, but there were no giant squids or whales as large as leviathans, no albino sea lions or jellyfish of enormous proportions. On the far west side of Manhattan they went to the meat markets, where the cobbled streets ran with blood from the many slaughterhouses nearby. Among the carnage there might be skulls and bones that could be sewn to the pelts of living creatures. While the Professor went through the markets, the liveryman stayed to guard their cart, for a ragtag gang of men scrutinized the rig. They eyed Coralie, calling out rude remarks. She often carried a knife in the pocket of her dress when she was out in public, and was glad to have it in her grasp now. It was the same knife she had used to draw blood when she cut through the webbing on her hands.

  The street was desolate, and the gang edged closer. Coralie felt her heart grow heavy, but, as it turned out, the liveryman chased off the mob with a few well-aimed rocks. He was a burly, silent man who had spent hard time in Sing Sing for crimes he wouldn’t disclose. After the mob dispersed, he came to check on Coralie. She said she’d like some air and leapt from the carriage so that she might stand beside him, though she knew her father would have disapproved of her doing so. The soles of her boots were soon dyed red with butchers’ blood, which ran between the paving stones.

  “I’d never eat a living creature,” the carriage man said, surprising Coralie with his ease of conversation, for he’d never spoken to her before this day. “They’ve got as much soul as we do. More if the truth be told.” A sparrow perched above them in a leafless plane tree and sang boldly. “See there.” The hired man pointed with his thumb. “That’s heart and soul.”

  When the Professor returned empty-handed they continued on to the morgue at Bellevue, a dim and wretched place that the liveryman referred to as the bone house when he was instructed to set off in the hospital’s direction. To gain entrance, Sardie would state that they were looking for his poor daughter’s beloved mother, who had disappeared. They had done so before, much to Coralie’s shame. If they were at first turned away, Coralie would weep and appear distraught; the guards would then pity her and allow them to view the unclaimed dead. This time, however, as they walked up the granite steps, Coralie found she could not cry. She had begun to fear they would be punished for their conniving ways if indeed God saw and knew all of mankind’s deeds. Perhaps there was a hell below this earth, and they would burn in it for all the lies they’d told.

  The Professor took Coralie aside when he saw her difficulty. “If you cannot cry, then I can see to it that you’re able,” he said. He caught her arm and squeezed it affectionately. “Not that I would ever have cause to do so.”

  Coralie then understood what she must do. She pinched her own arm, hard, bringing bright tears to her eyes.

  Once allowed in, they searched the morgue, though the smell was overpowering, and the contents horrifying. The Professor gave Coralie his linen handkerchief to place over her nose and mouth. There were several women laid upon the marble slabs, one so covered with blue-tinged bruises Coralie quickly turned from the sight. Another section was filled with children, unclaimed and unknown, their still, pale forms veined with cold, but, like ice, they appeared to be melting, their features pulled into expressions of sorrow. “None of these will do,” her father muttered. Back in the street, Coralie felt faint. She no longer thought she would have to pinch herself if she were again commanded to cry today.

  They went on to an area called Frenchtown, where women and children were sold by the hour for sexual use and pleasure. There were evenings when only clients in formal evening clothes were allowed in and the whores were trained to speak with men of the upper classes and wore the most elegant and revealing gowns. Some of the houses were fitted with velvet couches and beds covered with silk duvets; others were filthy, dimly lit, tragic storehouses of sorrow and flesh. Within such places, some of those on sale were considered more desirable if they possessed abnormalities, exactly what the Professor wished to find. Coralie waited in the carriage while her father visited two of these wretched houses, one where boys were clothed in dresses, wearing rouge and color on their lips, the other a grim tenement filled with girls dolled up in oversized gowns, costumes that only served to show how very young they were. Neither house was the least bit interesting to the Professor, and he left both quickly enough. But at the second house he was followed by a heavyset man who had with him a child no older than six. The man did his best to get the Professor’s attention as he toted the girl in a rope sling, for she had neither arms nor legs.

  “Here’s what you’re looking for,” the man shouted. “She’ll be to your liking. You can have her for a fair price.”

  The child had begun to wail, but one smack from her caretaker and she hushed quickly enough. She appeared too stunned to cry any more. The Professor shook his head and stalked away. Still, the brutal man called after him. “You said you wanted a monster. She’s right here! Look no further.”

  “What will happen to the child?” Coralie asked after they had climbed into the carriage, escaping the stranger’s escalating rage.

  “Go on,” the Professor told the liveryman.

  Coralie cast a swift backward glance to watch the child dragged away to what was surely a dreadful fate. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had tried to stop children from being allowed to beg, or solicit alms, or be in shows of acrobatics or be included in any immoral or indecent exhibition, especially those presenting an unnatural physical formation. But, in truth, such laws were rarely enforced. Children were not recognized as having rights.

  “It’s not our business,” the Professor remarked, sure of himself. “We are here on behalf of science.”

  “Perhaps it should be,” Coralie protested. “I could take care of her. It would be no trouble.” The tears that had refused to fall before came freely to her now, though she was quick to wipe them away.

  “If you tried to right all the wrongs in the world you’d exhaust yourself in under an hour. This is God’s business.”

  “Is it?” Coralie wondered aloud. “Is it not our business to help in God’s work?”

  “Our business is to acquire a creature that will draw a crowd, and thereby pay for food and coal and the shoes upon your feet.”

  When Coralie strained to see behind them now, the street was empty. The man and his charge had vanished, engulfed by the darkness. It seemed as though they had left God’s sight in this part of the city where human beings were bought and sold as if they were sheep ready for market. “It should be against the law for men to be so cruel,” Coralie pronounced.

  “That man is her father.” The Professor turned to his daughter, so that he would not be misunderstood. “And to all the world, he’s well within his rights.”

  The Professor had already set in motion his plan for their
renewed success. In the first months of 1911 a rumor had begun, one that had been formed inside the Professor’s mind. A monster had settled in the Hudson River, and if a man stood on the banks he might spy it swimming in the dark. Or perhaps it could be sighted at the first light of daybreak, when the water was silver and still. The first to take up the story were two boys fishing for their families’ suppers. They vowed a strange river creature had stolen the catch from their lines; when questioned by the police, each swore it wasn’t a shark, which were abundant in New York Harbor, some reaching fourteen feet long. True, they’d seen a flash of scales set upon the creature’s spine, but it was something entirely different, a being that was dark and unfathomable, almost human in its countenance, with fleet, watery movements. A panic went up. Constables in rowboats patrolled the shores, from the docks downtown all the way up to the Bronx. Several men on the ferries on the four lines which ran from Twenty-third Street to New Jersey leapt into the frigid depths as if they could walk on water, insisting they had heard a woman’s voice call to them, convinced someone had been drowning.

  Coralie was the monster that had been sighted from the shoreline, the mysterious creature men wished to either rescue or trap. All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York. Seventeen sightings had been recorded in the papers. Each one corresponded to a time when Coralie swam farther north in the cold, gray river, drifting among the eels, just now arising from the sediment after a winter’s sleep, and keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides. In the mornings she would sit in a pool of sunlight on the back porch so she might read about herself in the Sun or the Times, a huge beast with teeth not unlike a shark’s and green scales, who was in reality nothing more than a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl who favored simple black dresses and leather-buttoned shoes and was never seen without her gloves.

  Coralie knew her father was in desperate need of an exhibit that would compete with Dreamland and Luna Park and the other grand amusements in Coney Island. Two years earlier the famous Sigmund Freud had come to Brooklyn, to try to understand the American point of view; among the few things that were said to have impressed him were the magnificent amusement parks. Imagination was all in Brooklyn, and this was what Sardie had to sell; it was his gift, one he thanked his maker for each and every day. He always insisted that his establishment was not a freak show, like the well-known Huber’s Dime Museum on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, which had been a purveyor of the strange and unique for many years until finis was posted on its door in 1910, or the dozens of dreadful little entertainments that lined lower Surf Avenue, exhibitions that debased and degraded their human skeletons and amputees, their conjoined twins and the men who allowed fleas to suck the blood from their bodies, along with the wrestling rings and vaudeville halls, the worst and most exploitive of them having moved northward, to an area known as the Gut. The Museum of Extraordinary Things was a true museum, a place of edification, wherein natural curiosities were displayed along with human marvels. Now, however, they needed more, and, when more could not be found, it must be invented. If there was anyone who might be able to succeed in such an act of trickery, it was the Professor, who had been a magician in France, quite famous in his time, known for acts of wonder so astounding they had made people doubt their own eyes. He understood that not only could a man’s eyes mislead him but his mind could deceive him as well.

  Coralie followed her father’s instructions, as she had all her life, though her heart sank at the nature of her obligation, a trick to be played upon all of New York. The headlines called her the Hudson Mystery, for no one had managed to spy her features. Two fellows in a canoe had caught sight of her tonight as she’d raced past so these witnesses wouldn’t be able to make out her womanly form. Instead they saw only what they imagined, exactly as the Professor had predicted, and men’s imaginings were dark in these dark times. It was a season of great and terrible clashes in the streets, of bosses and politicians and police pitting themselves against working men and women. Debates became free-for-alls, with arrests of workers wanting nothing more than their fair share. The gap between the immigrant populations relegated to the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side and those who lived in brownstone mansions surrounding Madison Park had created a tinderbox of hatred.

  And yet despite the news of labor troubles—strikes of ship workers on the docks of Brooklyn and garment workers in Manhattan gathering in near riots—there was always a story in the Sun and in the Times on the day following a swim, for the Hudson Mystery had caught their readers’ attention. The creature of the deep had become a riddle discussed on street corners and in shops. In the morning, the eighteenth news story would appear, a fortuitous number, as it was Coralie’s age, her birthday having been celebrated two days earlier with a ginger-apple cake Maureen had baked, rich with sugar icing and dotted with candles that sparked when Coralie tried to blow them out.

  Once she’d left the river, Coralie walked through the newly unfolding swamp cabbages and fiddlehead ferns that grew in wild profusion in the boggy woods. Freedom was a treasure, even for a scant few hours. The chance to become a heedless wraith wandering through the chill landscape was a gift. No one could command her here. She might easily be a water nymph who had clambered onto the shore of a new and tender land. The world looked aglow, as if a door had opened and there, on the other side, was a vivid haze. She imagined it was the future that awaited, the unexpected life she might lay claim to if she never again returned home. Shadows threaded through the locust trees. The night’s dark color washed over the landscape in a mist of blue. She removed the mask she wore to make her seem inhuman, one fashioned by the same woodworker who made the museum signs.

  Coralie gazed across the river at a shore she did not recognize, unaware that the white cliffs shining in the dark were called the Palisades. She was not far from the last wild land to the north, but she had no idea of where north was, as she had no idea that the Bronx itself was being remade after the building of the Grand Concourse, modeled on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Monsters did not carry maps, and when they were lost they had no recourse but to rely on human kindness. Coralie peered through the thickets before her. In secluded patches of Manhattan that had once belonged to the original Dutch landowners, the acreage was still overgrown with ancient stands of hickory, chestnut trees, and black-green elms. Through the shadows, she caught sight of a curl of smoke rising into the dark. She followed it as if it were a beacon, hoping for a hot cup of coffee and a blanket to throw around her shivering body.

  Her clothes clung to her as she went on; but even when she was weighed down by her sopping trousers and shirt, she had a swimmer’s easy gait. She swiftly made her way up the slippery bank. Brambles clung to her, but she managed to untangle herself from the stickers. The silence of the night was intoxicating. There were no crickets yet, for the season was still too cold, no peepers, and no birds sang at night. The swamp cabbage that was everywhere had a pungent stink, green and sharp. Just then a dog barked, the sound echoing. All at once Coralie had a rush of panic. What had she been thinking to look for company? What questions might be asked of a young woman swimming in the river in this harsh season? And who was to say there were not criminals camping in these woods, homeless men who would think nothing of attacking her?

  Coralie crouched down and narrowed her eyes, peering past the shadows. Through the locust trees she spied the form of a young man at a bonfire, fixing a late supper over the flames. She darted behind the nearly heart-shaped leaves of a linden tree, the better to see who she had come upon. She thought of Whitman. Stranger! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you? And yet, as she watched this stranger, she was mute. He was dark, with handsome features, rangy and more than six feet tall. He was sunburnt from his day at the rive
r, and he whistled to himself as he cleaned the fish he’d caught. Something about him moved Coralie in a way she didn’t understand, an almost magnetic pull. She felt alarmed by the thrum of her own pulse. The dog beside the young man was the sort used for fighting. It spied her in the woods and began to bark in earnest.

  “Quiet, Mitts,” she heard the man say.

  The pit bull terrier looked at his master and considered, but was clearly too high-spirited to obey. The creature bounded into the woods, in her direction. The man let out a shout, but the dog continued on.

  Coralie took off running, her breath coming in bursts. She felt a sharp pain below her breastbone as her heart thudded against her ribs. Her father had kept her separate from the public, except for those hours when she was on exhibit. He believed that living wonders could be made common by their association with outsiders, who could not possibly understand them and would most likely take advantage of them and ruin them. “Once you are ruined,” her father had warned, “there’s no way back.”

  The dog crashed through the underbrush. Coralie could hear him racing behind her. She did her best to outpace him as she tore through the brambles, but in no time the creature was at her heels. She turned, afraid she might be attacked from behind. Her blood felt hot within her chilled flesh as she steeled herself, ready to be bitten. She knew how red her blood was, how on fire despite how waterlogged she was. The pit bull’s ears and tail were cut to nubs, and he had a compact, muscular body. Coralie expected him to leap at her, foaming at the mouth; instead he wagged his rear end and gazed up at her, utterly foolish and friendly. This was no vicious beast, only man’s best friend.