The Museum of Extraordinary Things(53)
“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 Bront?. 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.