The Museum of Extraordinary Things (35 page)

Eddie turned to the young woman who had come to collect her dogs. She was dressed in an indigo silk and wool dress and wore a large fashionable felt hat, decorated with an assortment of blue feathers in a range from aqua to navy. She had dark blue eyes and a clear, pale face with fine features. “I know you as well,” she said. “You were at the library gala.”

Eddie realized he was in the presence of Harry Block’s sister. He wished he hadn’t the complication of being recognized.

“Perhaps you’re thinking of someone else,” he said politely, keeping his attention on the town house steps, so as not to lose sight of Block’s thug if he appeared.

“No,” Block’s sister said with assurance. “I’m not. You were there.”

“Only as a hired hand,” Eddie granted.

“Except that no one hired you, I checked into it. And now it seems”—she paused to observe his splint—“you no longer have a free hand to hire. We’ve never been introduced. I’m Juliet Block, and you’re the man who has my brother’s watch.”

Eddie searched her face and saw the intelligence there. She gazed back at him critically, but not without interest.

“Were you never taught not to speak to strange men on the street?” he asked.

Miss Block laughed. “I was taught all manner of things concerning what a woman should and should not do, and how the world should be run. Unlike the members of my family, I believe that all people have the right to speak, including women and workers.” The poodles were standing beside Eddie, nosing around. Miss Block clipped on their leashes. “They seem to fancy you. I, however, don’t know how I feel about you.” She had quite a serious expression as she recalled their initial meeting as children. “I was terrified you’d steal my coat on the day you found us playing in the office. My father had just given it to me.”

Eddie smiled. Pretense wouldn’t work with this outspoken young woman. “I thought of it. But I didn’t want to make you cry.”

“Well, I cried all the same as soon as you left. I cried because my coat cost more than most children my age had to live on for a month. I was embarrassed even before you shamed us. I took a pair of scissors to the horrid coat myself. Made quite a mess. Still, I managed to cut it to shreds.”

Eddie found he was at a loss for words. They stared at each other, each surprised at who the other had become. When Miss Block began to speak of her activities, it became clear she was an ardent feminist, involved in securing rights for workers and demonstrating for the women’s vote. Her family, she revealed, was not pleased with what they referred to as her “antics,” and had taken away her yearly stipend of twenty thousand dollars as punishment when she had protested at the Opera House and outside City Hall and had briefly been interned in the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island. That was when her funds were cut off. Her brother was set to inherit everything from their father, since Miss Block was not deemed responsible by her father and his attorneys. Harry was the one who insisted that she take the dogs for protection when she went out walking. He’d chosen them for her, and had them trained by an expert. Perhaps the dogs knew Juliet would have preferred to have left them at home. Indeed, she thought of them as an extension of her brother, more or less employees meant to keep her in check.

“That’s why they prefer you, sir,” she told Eddie. “Not that I share their sentiments. If you don’t mind, I’d like to know why you’re here.”

“I’m not sure you’d really like that, miss.” Eddie had felt a certain compassion for her on the day he stole the watch. As it turned out, he felt an unexpected concern for her even now.

“Women shouldn’t know too much? I take it that’s your point. It might affect their brains or, worse, their reproductive organs? You spoke to me once as if I were an equal when you told me to shut up, please do me the same courtesy now. And call me Juliet.”

Eddie was won over by her candor. Still, he hesitated. He had come for justice, and justice didn’t always resolve as people wished. He’d brought along the photograph he’d taken at the gala, which he now withdrew from within his coat. “The man behind your brother. What do you know of him?”

“Frank Herbert?” Miss Block said. “He’s my brother’s employee.”

“Does your family have anything to do with the Triangle Shirtwaist Company?”

“My brother is an attorney. He may have done some work for them. I believe he did.” She gazed deeply at Eddie. “And the work was questionable, I presume.”

“What if it was murder?”

Juliet suggested they walk around the corner, to the park, so they might find privacy and speak more freely. They did so, and the dogs were overjoyed to find they were not being dragged in the direction of home. They took a path that led to the reservoir. There were many starlings and sparrows on the branches of the trees. “Welcome to the petting zoo of the wealthy,” Miss Block said bitterly. Once they had found a bench hidden by bushes, she took out a French cigarette and lit it, which surprised Eddie.

“Oh, stop looking at me that way.” She laughed. “You can’t be that easily shocked. I’ll do my part to help you get Herbert, and in exchange you’ll forget about my brother. In all honesty, Harry probably has no idea of his henchman’s methods. He says make it so, and it’s done.”

“It was a young woman that was killed, if that makes a difference to your opinions regarding your brother’s responsibility in the matter. She worked on the ninth floor at the factory, but it wasn’t the fire that did her in. She never made it to work that day because somebody murdered her. They sewed up her mouth with blue thread, then tossed her into the river.”

Juliet stared at him long and hard. “It matters to me very much, whether you believe me or not. But he’s my brother. My offer stands. I’ll give you Herbert, and in return, you’ll leave Harry alone.”

JULIET BLOCK
was to inform Frank Herbert that her brother had given instructions for him to bring a file of information to a meeting in the alleyway behind Greene Street. Eddie would see to the rest. The hour was late, after workers in the nearby factories had gone home. Dusk was settling. It was murky enough so that Herbert could not see clearly when he turned off the street, yet he spied the slim figure of a young woman who found her way into the alley. He likely gritted his teeth, annoyed to see an interloper in the very place where he was to make a delivery of important papers to his employer. He didn’t like taking orders from a woman, and had felt humiliated being told what to do by Miss Block, who, in his opinion, thought much too highly of herself, as if she was a man’s equal. He had his bully stick with him, and he didn’t mind issuing a threat or two to a stranger, then acting on those threats if need be. But before he could chase off the figure before him, Herbert took note of something odd. The girl in the alleyway looked familiar. Her pale hair plaited into braids, her girlish blue coat. It was the dimness surely, only a trick of the shadows, yet Frank Herbert hesitated, unsure. Quite possibly, the thing before him was not human in nature. Then, thinking himself ridiculous, he moved toward her. “Go on,” he said with menace in his tone. “This is no place for ladies.”

She looked at him fully. “Neither is the river.” The young woman opened her hands. There were the buttons she’d pulled from his coat when she struggled with him.

“Get on with you,” he said, confused. He took her now to be the girl he’d had to get rid of. Somehow she had returned from the river and found him. She had torn the blue thread from her lips to speak to him.

“I have your buttons,” she told him. “From when you killed me.”

He stepped forward, his club at the ready. “If you’re a ghost, then you won’t die again, though it was easy enough to kill you the first time.”

It was then the wolf came from behind her, the one who’d been on the porch when he’d seen to the prying old hermit who’d been on the hill the day he dumped the girl’s body. It seemed the wolf had died and returned as a ghost as well, and yet he was real enough that he had to be restrained with a chain, so intent was he on lunging at the man he recognized as his master’s killer.

“Hold on to him,” Herbert shouted. “He’ll be after me!”

“Because you killed the old man?”

“I did him a service putting him out of the misery he lived in. Now go away, the both of you! Vanish from here! There’s real business of the living to be going on in this place, and we don’t need the likes of you.”

Herbert did not hear the men from the Workmen’s Circle as they circled him, then leapt upon him. They were indeed the living, who beat him down and shackled him with a length of rope, then slipped on iron cuffs. Isaac Rosenfeld got a black eye in the process, of which he was quite proud. There had been six witnesses to Herbert’s confession; most Eddie had known as boys in the factories. Eddie took a photograph of the men who gathered around Frank Herbert, a memento they could show their mothers and girlfriends. Eddie had promised Juliet he would not pursue her brother, but that didn’t mean others wouldn’t take up the cause and do their best to connect him to the events that had led to Hannah’s death.

Rosenfeld took the buttons as further proof against Herbert. Ella, who had so bravely consented to play the part of her sister’s ghost, was asked if she would accompany them to the Tenth Precinct and make her statement as well.

“I need to go with them,” Ella said when Eddie wanted to walk her home safely. “My father will understand. And it’s you he’ll want to hear from. You’re the one he’s trusted.”

Mr. Weiss was waiting on the concrete steps outside his building, wearing a winter coat, though it would be summer in a matter of days. Eddie sat beside him, the wolf at their feet. When Eddie confirmed that the murderer had been caught, Weiss nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d find him.”

“Yet I feel I’ve failed.” Hannah was still dead. Harry Block was still in the mansion on Sixty-second Street.

“Every good man feels that he’s failed.”

Eddie grimaced. He shook his head. “That’s not me.
Good
would never be a proper term.”

“Your father told me that you were. That was why I came to you.” Weiss seemed extremely sure of himself. “You know why I believed him?”

Eddie shrugged. “Because you pray with him each morning and a man you pray with is one you believe?”

“God is the only one I pray with,” Weiss corrected him.

“So maybe you trust my father because you grew up in the same town and you worked together.”

“Those things are true, but they have nothing to do with my faith in your father. In the town where we grew up, one boy slit his brother’s throat and another stole from his own grandmother so that he could flee to Paris. Coming from the same town means nothing. I’ve worked with many men I wouldn’t even speak to if I passed them on the street. Mules work together, so do men, it means nothing as well. I have faith in your father because he’s a good man, and like every good man, he, too, has failed. But I can tell you this, he knows what it means to be a human being.”

“To be a failure?”

Weiss sputtered out a laugh. His beard had turned white in a matter of months. He clapped Eddie on the back. “To forgive,” he said. “As he’s forgiven you.”

NINE

THE GIRL WHO COULD FLY

**********

M
Y FATHER
locked me in my room. When he discovered that the coffin had been stolen he informed me that he had never been as disappointed in his life, or as betrayed. He found me in the yard and confronted me, but I blamed the liveryman, as I was meant to do. Perhaps I wasn’t convincing, for my father seemed to know I was no longer under his command. He may have noticed my expression of longing as I watched Eddie disappear with the liveryman. He tricked me into admitting I had gone to Manhattan without his permission by saying he’d had me followed. He was a liar, but he knew how to get the truth out of people. When I stumbled over my words, stating I had indeed traveled to Manhattan because I thought I needed to return the camera the photographer had left behind, my father shouted that I was a woman of deceit. He changed in a moment, before my eyes, his face filling with rage. Was this my thanks to him, for raising and caring for me? I promised him that nothing had happened, but he shook his head. Why should he believe me now? How could he know whether or not I’d been ruined by this man in Manhattan, and if I’d given myself freely to a worthless individual?

He did not speak to me all the next day, but in the evening he told me to bathe in cold water, which I did, using the lye soap he left out for me. He put out my robe for me, which I slipped on. He waited in the corridor and had me follow him downstairs. In the parlor the cereus plant looked ghostly and green in the evening light. I’d always thought of it as a bundle of sticks, but now it seemed possessed with life, and I could have sworn it moved toward me, as if in warning. I had lived with it my whole life and had never once seen it bloom. I had thought the plant to be a burden, and yet I felt a certain connection to this wretched specimen, for I’d cared for it for so long. Perhaps plants knew gratitude, as humans did, and remembered kindness as well as cruelty.

My father led me through his library, into the museum. I thought of how I had so longed to enter it and know its secrets when I was a child. How intrigued I’d been when I’d been made to sit upon the stair where I could only peer through the dark to glimpse the many curiosities displayed inside. I had thought my father could make miracles, but I was wrong. He could only possess them.

My father gestured that I should go on without him. “We’ll see if you’re a liar or if you’re still my daughter,” he said in a cold tone.

When I went inside the exhibition hall, the Professor closed the door behind me. I heard the click of a lock. A man was waiting there. This was most unusual. I paled when I saw him. He rose from his chair to greet me.

“You needn’t worry,” he assured me. “I’m a physician.” There was an urgency in his tone that caused me to worry. “Doctors are privy to all sorts of secrets hidden from other men.”

He came forward, and there was that same urgency in his step. I hoped he didn’t take note of the scent of my fear, for they say that terror makes a person weaker, and I did not wish to be at anyone’s mercy.

“Your father has called upon me to judge your physical well-being.”

“I’m quite well,” I informed him. “I don’t need a physician.” There was the beat of my pulse at the base of my throat, the same throb of panic I’d felt when I stepped into the cage at Dreamland.

“I’m afraid that you do. Your father is worried. He reports that you’ve made the acquaintance of a man in an improper way.”

I felt burning hot, even though the room was chilly. “There was nothing improper.” I began to understand what my father had meant when he declared I was ruined. He believed I’d given myself to Eddie, and, in every sense but the physical act, I had.

“An examination is required. If you’ve been with a man, your father needs to know.” The doctor came closer. When he reached to remove my robe, I stepped back. But he took hold of my arm and told me in no uncertain terms that my father had the legal right to ascertain whether I had cast away my virginity, and it would be his pleasure to assist in examining me.

He told me he had seen me swim in the tank on nights when I had performed, and this was how he had made my father’s acquaintance. He had enjoyed himself immensely, and now he had an opportunity to see what I was made of without the tank between us. Immediately, I doubted the worth of his medical claims and wondered what sort of expert he was.

Now that my father had turned to him, the doctor hoped to do some research of his own interest, for I was such a rare specimen. He hoped to discover if I was a fish or a woman or both. His actions, he said, were purely motivated by research. In matters of my sex, would I be slippery and cold, as fish were known to be, or hot as a ruined woman? He took out a black leather notebook and a fountain pen so that he might record the details. He said he would like to examine every part of me, including my bones, for a fish’s bones are often hollow, like a bird’s, and because of this they are light in the water, as birds are weightless in air. His words were like glass, cutting through me. I had never felt more wretched.

He went on to tell me that after the examination he could eliminate my deformity if I wished him to do so. He brought forth a scalpel, which he placed on a table, alongside his journal and fountain pen. The webbing could easily be done away with, and no one would ever have to know who I’d been. To all who saw me I would be a normal person, except to those who knew me intimately, fortunate men, such as himself. I moved to hide my hands behind me, fearing he might take it upon himself to begin an operation. He was amused by my response.

“I, of course, prefer you the way you are,” the doctor said. “But if you ever wish to be normal, I’m always here for you as your surgeon.”

I leapt away, thinking I would run from the room, and in doing so knocked over the table on which he’d carefully laid out his equipment.

He grabbed me and held fast, and as I struggled he secured me by wrapping fishing wire around my wrists. He was clearly practiced in such matters, for, however much I tried, I couldn’t slip out of the knots. I cursed him, but he didn’t care. He pushed me onto the floor.

Before I knew what was happening he swiftly moved a hand between my legs. I tried my best to get away and scramble toward the door to the street. The doctor, however, held fast. When he pawed at me he was real enough, a demon perhaps, but not a dream. Perhaps that was a monster’s fate, and the fortune my father said I had brought onto myself.

The tortoise was scratching in the sand, and I felt embarrassed that this ancient creature bore witness to my degradation.

“This is what I’m here for,” the doctor murmured as he reached his fingers inside my most private area. The man whom I wanted had refused to take me when I offered myself to him. He believed I was an innocent, and now I realized that, until this very day, I had been.

I fought against my horrid inquisitor, but my actions seemed to arouse him more. The fishing wire was cutting into me and drew lines of blood at my wrists. Some pooled on the floor.

“It’s red,” the doctor said, delighted. “I thought you might have the clear blood of an icefish, or the blue blood of a horseshoe crab.”

He brought out a glass tube and swiftly dashed some of my blood into it, so that he might study it, comparing it to the blood of bluefish and sturgeon, perhaps alongside the blood of his wife so that he might see which species I most resembled. I now understood how it was possible to stop thinking of a man as a human being, enough so that you might wish to take his life. Seeing the scalpel that had fallen to the floor nearby, I grasped for it, but he kicked it from my reach.

“We kill our fish, and slit them open,” the doctor said. “You had better act like a woman if you want what’s best.”

He held me round the waist as he spoke these horrid sentiments. He acted as if he owned me, and I cried out, with shock and humiliation. The doctor held fast. He felt inside me and was pleased. “I can take you now and tell your father that I found you a ruined woman. He’d never know the difference.”

The doctor wore a fine linen jacket that he tore off and left crumpled beside us, as well as tweed pants that he began to unbutton. I could feel his sex against me, and I knew what he intended. But I did not turn into rain or dew as I had during the nighttime shows. I was not an actress on a stage, and I did not disappear, leaving my body there for him to do with whatever he wished. I reached behind me, inching my clasped hands along until I grasped the scalpel. He might think I was only a woman or a fish, but I was nothing of the kind. I was a monster’s daughter. I cut the fishing wire from my wrists, so quickly I nicked myself. I drew more blood, but I no longer cared. I pierced his forearm, admittedly with some pleasure, for the stab had immediate effects. He yowled and let go as if he had had fire in his embrace rather than flesh and blood.

“You little bitch,” the doctor said as he rose to his feet. There was blood staining his shirt from the fresh wound. “Your father will punish you for this. I’ll tell him what a demoness he has for a daughter.”

I grabbed the shovel we used to clean the tortoise’s pen. Before the doctor could walk away and find the Professor and tell him lies, I hit him squarely on the back. When he fell, he covered his face with his hands. Just as I suspected. A coward. He appeared related to the horseshoe crab as he hunched over, and between the two of us he was more likely to be the one with blue blood. I could not help but wonder if a well-placed shovel could break his spine, if it would then shatter like a black, hardened shell, bits flying everywhere. But I then imagined who he went home to—a wife, daughters, a faithful dog, a nurse who did his every bidding, a line of patients, each hoping for a cure. I did not strike again, though I kept the shovel in my hand.

I pushed the notebook and pen toward him.

“Write your review of me,” I said. “Tell my father I am not ruined.”

He did so as I stood over him. He did not dare look at me as he scrawled his testimony that I was indeed a virgin. He tore the page from his journal and left it for me.

I unlocked the door to the street that our customers came through. The doctor grabbed for his coat, but I stood upon it. I wanted the world to see the blood on him.

“Leave as you are,” I told him.

When he’d gone, I locked the door. I folded his coat, which I would later throw on the trash pile in our yard. I still felt tainted by the doctor’s intent and by his touch. I yearned for a cleansing, and so I went to my tank and climbed inside. I felt a sort of relief as soon as I was in the water, as if
I was destroying everything that had been done to me. I was still bleeding around my wrists, and a thread of crimson circled in the water. So that this evening would not claim me, I imagined the Hudson River, the woods at dusk. I was the rain, pouring down onto the streets of Brooklyn, into the yards where gardens grew, onto the cobblestone alleyways behind the fish markets. For a thousand nights I would not think of what had happened, nor would I remember the physician, a fool who thought it acceptable to defile a creature he wanted only for its rare qualities, like the shark is wanted for its skin, said to be the most beautiful in all the world.

When I climbed out of the tank, I put on my robe, then went to lie upon the floor beside the tortoise’s pen. I had no idea whether or not the tortoise slept or dreamed or remembered. Sunlight streamed in beneath the closed curtains, causing patterns of dark and light on the floor. There was a rabbit, a hat, a bird in flight. I would not let this incident make me forget I knew what love was like. Outside the window, sparrows were singing in the milky light. On every branch of the pear tree in the yard there was a new leaf unfolding, a vivid green. Spring had truly arrived, a season that had always been my favorite but was so no more. Now I wanted winter, a time when snow covered everything, even though my hands would be cold in such weather, for I had decided I would never wear a pair of gloves again, not for warmth, not for protection, and never to hide who I was.