The Museum of Extraordinary Things

  “I should have known I had a thief in my own kitchen,” Sardie shouted. “How many times do I have to teach you the same lesson? How stupid can you actually be? I thought I taught you your rightful place long ago.”

  “You have no right to speak to me so anymore. I’m no longer your employee.”

  Coralie came to stand outside the kitchen door. When she peered inside she saw that Maureen held a frying pan up for protection as the Professor beat her. He’d cornered her beside the stove and now grabbed the frying pan to use it against her. Maureen could do nothing more than bury her face in her hands. Coralie ran and threw herself against the Professor. He nearly turned on her, the cast-iron pan raised high, before realizing it was his daughter who grasped his arm. “Please,” she begged. “It was my idea to leave. Maureen has nothing to do with it.”

  “Are you conspiring to leave?” His anger had been entirely directed at the housekeeper; now he realized Coralie’s intentions. “What other conspiracies have you been a party to? Why would I believe anything about you? Was the report about your physical condition a lie as well?”

  “You need to go,” Coralie urged the housekeeper, doing her best to hold Maureen’s gaze with her own, all but pleading with her to run off before the Professor did any more damage.

  The housekeeper’s complexion was so chalk white that the random burns stood out in bunches, as if rose petals had been scattered across her skin. There was a fresh gash in her scalp, and dark butterfly-shaped bruises were forming on her chin and cheek. Still, she stood her ground until the Professor grabbed her, pulling her to the door. He locked it after he’d cast her out, pleased with himself. The housekeeper didn’t give up but came to bang upon the window glass, calling for Coralie to be set free. Their eyes locked, and in their glance was an attachment that could not be broken, even though the Professor was already guiding his daughter down the cellar stairs.

  “I had no plan to leave,” Coralie protested. “I misspoke.”

  “That’s what every liar says,” the Professor told her. “I no longer have faith in you.”

  Coralie looked at him coldly. “Nor I in you.”

  “Silence will be the best teacher.” Sardie opened his workshop door. Once Coralie was inside, he closed the door in one swift move. The room was dark, but Coralie found candles and a lantern, along with a box of wooden matches. She searched and found water in a jug; though it smelled rusty, she washed her face and cupped her hands so she might drink. She felt a shiver of pleasure knowing Maureen had gotten away, and that she had helped in her escape.

  That night Coralie slept on the floor. The boards set over the windows made the room exceptionally dark, but she could hear the crowds on the pier. A shimmer of excitement was rising, for the new and improved Dreamland was set to open on Saturday. In the morning Coralie’s eyes adjusted to the pale light that filtered around the planks of wood nailed across the windows. She found some dried fruit and seeds to eat, and relieved herself in an enamel pot. Then she gathered tools that might prove useful—a small shovel, an awl, and a hammer. At last, she opened the drawer where her father kept his journal. She grasped the book with a sense of rebellion, then sat upon the earthen floor with the book in hand.

  She read for some time, coming to a section in which he listed all of his purchases, where he had discovered them, what their cost had been. The Professor mixed English and French in his writings and created a sort of code, reversing letters of the alphabet and often utilizing numbers in their place to ensure that his secrets would not be divined. Magicians did not share, and Sardie was particularly mistrustful, perhaps because he judged all other men by the measure of his own character.

  He kept a list of obituary notices. If the deceased individual was a scientist or an explorer, he went to that person’s home address at the time of the funeral, letting himself in by breaking open any locked doors, sifting through belongings, taking any interesting finds. In surgeries at hospitals throughout the city he was well known as a collector, and, in his younger days, he had traveled to Mexico and Brazil. It was there he had found Malia’s mother begging on the street in a town where her daughter was thought to be cursed. The Durante brothers had been discovered in an orphanage in New Jersey, where they entertained the matrons with their acrobatics in the hope of a decent dinner. He’d paid twenty dollars for the two of them, and they’d begun their performances at the age of twelve, for there were no laws to protect children from theatrical exhibitions in the city of New York, and anyone could place them on display.

  The tortoise was brought to him in the year Coralie was born. A very old sailor from the Canary Islands had owned the creature for eighty years, which meant the tortoise was now nearly a hundred. Its enclosure was above the workshop, and, as she read, Coralie could hear it moving slowly from one section of its confinement to the other. Grains of sand fell down between the floorboards. That was when Coralie wept, when she thought of a century of capture. She read on.

  Sword, Hat, Mouse, Snake, Two of a Kind, Three Faces, Half a Woman, Fire in the Palm of My Hand, Cards, Aces, Deuces, Scarves, Doves.

  The elements of each illusion were written in code, which Coralie had not yet completely deciphered. But there were other secrets as well. She came to one notation that was puzzling. Baby in a Cradle. The notation was set off by itself, and there was a blue image of a fish sketched below the letters. Coralie hurriedly turned the pages until she found another small fish inked in the margin. Before she could begin to read, however, she heard a disturbance above her, a pounding at the door and a man calling out. Coralie recognized the voice as Eddie’s. She could hear her father’s response soon enough, and the tone of the men rising into shouts. There was a clattering, as if pots and pans were falling. She could hear her father yelling that Eddie would never find Coralie. She had run off, the Professor said, leaving behind a note for the photographer, so he might know the truth. She wanted nothing to do with him.

  Coralie pushed hard against the locked door. She called out until she was hoarse, but it did no good. Eddie had already slammed out of the house, and she could feel her future with him disappearing. By now Eddie would have crossed the yard and slipped into the crowded street, too hurt and disappointed to stay a moment longer. He could not know that, although Coralie was an avid reader, she had never learned to write. Her father had said her hands were too clumsy. She was better at household chores.

  When it was too dark to see, Coralie lit the lantern, though there was precious little oil to waste. She found a blanket to wrap around her shoulders. The night was chill, and her spirits were cold as well. The paper of her father’s journal was of a fine grade but delicate, tearing along the edges. Coralie came to the sign of the fish, and there she began to read again. The entry was made in the month of March, eighteen years earlier. A clear blue ending to the winter, Sardie wrote. Brooklyn was still dusted with snow even though the leaves of the lilacs had begun to unfold. He had been in New York for two years and practiced his English late into the night. He wished to be considered a New Yorker, and his accent was all that stood in his way. He heated the house with a single coal stove and ate simple meals of bread and fish and wine. He had bought the house in Brooklyn with money he’d earned from a concoction he made, an opium-like substance consisting more of acidic chemicals than of pricey raw poppy, using a stolen recipe from another magician in France, a man so addicted to his own mixture he hadn’t noticed Sardie riffling through his papers.

  The Professor used the winter months to travel and search for specimens. Animal, mineral, human. He wrote that he was a savior to many; he lifted them from lives of poverty and horror, though they didn’t always appreciate his efforts on their behalf. His first stars, the conjoined twins Helen and Helena, pretty young women, were with the museum for the first season. They lived as servants to earn their keep, and were forced to sleep in his bed each night, but soon enough they ran away, leaving the Professor with no household help and no major attraction. Still, he intended
to stay and would find other entertainments. He was in his early forties by then. He had seen a great deal of the world and was ready to settle down in Brooklyn. He’d had enough of magic in France. In New York he turned to science with a cold eye. But even a man of science could not control circumstance, and, as Coralie read on, she learned the unexpected had occurred in that same month of March.

  On a Tuesday, after I made my way home from New Jersey, where I bought the jaw of a mastodon discovered in a swamp, I took note of something moving beneath the porch stairs. I thought it was a skunk, for there are many in Brooklyn. I myself had seen an albino specimen some weeks earlier, which I wished to capture, for I had taught myself the skills of taxidermy and was eager to put them to use. I left the bones I’d carried from New Jersey on the grass and went to see what fate had brought me. Surely it was fate that had driven me from France, and brought me to New York, and now made me cross the lawn on this day.

  The creature made a wailing sound, and carried the odor of sour milk. Rather than discovering a skunk, I came upon a baby, a tiny pitiful creature. I left it where it was, tucked beneath the stair, thinking someone would soon come to retrieve it, for a kindly person had wrapped it in a clean woolen blanket and left it with some care. I saw to the mastodon jaw, and washed it off at the well. The baby wailed until it grew exhausted, then, at last, fell quiet. I had assumed the wretched mother would return for it, but when the dark fell, it was still there. I brought the baby inside and examined it on the kitchen table. It was an uninteresting female, and I thought it good for nothing until I unwrapped its bunting. To my joy I discovered it had a deformity, as if it had been created by the mating of a fish and a human being, its hands like flippers, its little body perfect in all other aspects. In order to test its aptitude, I filled a bucket and held it under the water to see if it could exist in this element. The child flailed and fought and came up sputtering, wailing even more pitifully. If worse came to worse, I saw that I could drown it and be rid of it.

  While I considered what I might do with the creature, I had one of my wonders take it home, a fat woman known as Darling, who lived with a normal fellow in Brighton Beach. She brought it back in two days complaining it had howled so piteously her husband had told her to take it and not return till she was rid of it. That was when I came to understand that freaks of nature and ordinary people had no business being together. Normal individuals would never be true to someone they considered beneath them. I fired Darling before the next season started. Soon after I came up with a list of instructions for those I employed. No marriages, that was the first rule. No children was the next. Brief alliances and love affairs would have to do, for commitments made for bad employees.

  I sat on the porch and set the baby in a cradle that had been used by a wonder who had a monkey “child” that had escaped and disappeared into the woods of Queens, ruining his master’s livelihood. I tried to decide if I should sell the thing or, if there were no buyers, bring it to an orphanage, though I doubted any would take on an abnormal child. There was a hospital where I sometimes looked for specimens that kept such oddities under lock and key. I could most assuredly deposit the child there. Because the March air was chill, the baby had begun to cough. There was an old pear tree in the yard under which I buried animals and specimens. I thought that might be the final resting place for this thin, wailing creature. Certainly the fruit from this tree was sweet and the ground beneath it easy enough to excavate.

  I gazed up to spy a pretty red-haired woman watching from beyond the yard. My blood raced at the sight of her.

  “Your baby’s crying,” she said, the poor dumb thing.

  Indeed it was. “Perhaps you can comfort it,” I suggested. “Lord knows I have no business with children.”

  The lovely girl came forward and, after looking around a bit, lifted up the baby and hushed her.

  “Be careful,” I said. “It’s a monster.”

  The woman laughed. “This beautiful girl? Don’t be silly.”

  I pointed out the child’s hands. “Look at the webbing. It may be a seal for all I know.”

  The red-haired girl shook her head. She seemed quite sure of herself. “That’s God’s mark of how special she is.”

  If I believed in God I would have thought this woman had been sent to me, for the baby seemed to wish to suckle at her breast and I got an eyeful that pleased me.

  “I had a child but lost her,” the woman said simply as a way of explanation.

  “Perhaps you’d like to take care of this one, and take care of me as well.”

  She looked at me with a steady, even gaze, and I saw she wasn’t so dim. She knew I was referring to my bed.

  I told her I would take no nonsense from any employee.

  I won’t disappoint you, the girl told me.

  Don’t, I told her, or you’ll live to regret it.

  The mother from France who dressed in black, who always wore gloves and was so beautiful and gracious and had left Coralie her pearls, had never existed. She was nothing more than an orphan abandoned on the porch. Had Maureen not come along, she would have been given over to a hospital ward, or perhaps been drowned in a bucket, then buried beneath the pear tree. People say some facts are best left unknown, but those people have never had their own histories kept from them. As Coralie read on, it was as if she was moving backward through time. Everything that had ever happened shifted from the realm of black and white and was infused with color, the gray turning to red and indigo and a wavering spring green seen only in the month of March. All that she’d known and all she had ever been had turned to ashes. From those ashes, emerging through the earthen floor that the roots of the pear tree twisted through, she saw the truth. It was 1893, the year in which a serious man took in a baby and a red-haired woman and claimed them as his own.

  TEN

  * * *

  the rules of love

  i CAME upon the Wizard of the Lower East Side exactly as I had the morning I first met him. As I turned the corner onto Ludlow Street suddenly there he was, in the very same spot where I’d first spied him all those years ago, when I was just a boy. Perhaps he could tell the future, as people said, and therefore knew where he might find me, or perhaps it was the way New York City worked—it was a huge teeming place of strangers, until you stumbled into what seemed to be a village made up of people you’d known in your youth whom you couldn’t seem to avoid. Hochman wore fashionable clothing, perfect for the season, a white linen waistcoat, a straw hat, white trousers, and cream-colored leather boots. He was on his way to a luncheon, he told me, given in his honor by the Workmen’s Circle. He had recently helped them find a boy of twelve who had come to New York from the Ukraine on his own, only to be trapped into near slavery by a sly, unscrupulous businessman who made a practice of selling the services of young immigrants to farms in New Jersey, where they labored in the fields with nothing more than a roof over their heads in return.

  “You’re a union man?” I said, surprised.

  “I’m a man of my people,” he said. “Wherever that brings me. If the Workmen’s Circle wants to recognize my good deeds and call me a hero, who am I to disagree? They may honor you one day as well. You’re quite famous at the moment. I heard about the girl you found.”

  “As of today, I’m not in that business anymore.”

  Hochman studied me. “No,” he agreed. “It was never for you. There was only one thing you were searching for.”

  I admit I was curious as to his psychic powers, in which I’d never had any real faith. Now I tested him. “And what was that?”

  I imagined he would say love, as I’d recently found the woman of my dreams and could think of little other than Coralie. Unfortunately, the feeling was not mutual, as she had fled and disappeared. Could I have found her? Probably. But if she had no wish to be found, I saw little point in doing so.

  Hochman motioned me to follow him, and I surprised myself by accompanying him. I wished to hear what he had to say. We went in t
he direction of Essex Street, not far from the funeral home, to a saloon frequented by men of our faith. We went inside and sat at a rear table where we might be afforded some privacy. After ordering our drinks, Hochman continued.

  “You were looking for the truth about your father, something I happen to have. But maybe so much time has passed, you don’t want to know. The truth frightens people because it isn’t stable. It shifts every day. If you’d prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.”

  Our drinks were delivered, and I gulped mine down. Perhaps that gave me the courage to say, “Go ahead. Tell me your great secret. Let’s have it.”

  “You’ve resented your father all this time for running away and attempting to drown himself. You judged him as a coward. Am I correct?”

  I shrugged, but my answer was clear.

  “That day on the dock, there were other men who’d been let go from the factory. They had arranged to meet to plan what action they should take. A member of the Workmen’s Circle had been sent to meet with them.”

  I laughed and thought the Wizard’s report preposterous. How could Hochman know this information when he wasn’t there? “And you divined these facts out of thin air?”