The Museum of Extraordinary Things(56)
Soon after, he hatched his new plan and I began to swim in the Hudson. It was there that I had the freedom to be truly alone. I fell in love with the Hudson; because of the nights I swam there, I no longer was forced to perform, and so I began to think of the river as my savior. I longed for it, as I soon longed for the man I had spied in the woods. I thought of him as a sort of savior as well, someone to whom I might reveal my truest self. I had felt the first pangs of love, and because of this I found my faith in the world, despite my current situation.
This changed after my last swim in the Hudson. The river that had always offered me solace had brought me grief in the form of the drowned girl. As we traveled back across the bridge to the museum, I thought again of the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre. The imprisoned Mrs. Rochester had burned to death before she could manage to flee. Wait too long, and you might be tethered forever, leaping when it was too late. On the night we returned to Brooklyn with the body of the young woman in the carriage, I was told to go directly to my room, and I did so. I looked out the window into the yard. I was shivering in my sodden clothes, my damp hair hanging down my back. But inside, my blood felt hot. I was burning up. It wasn’t fever but a slow-burning hatred. I saw my father and the liveryman carry the body down the cellar steps. In the morning the floor would still be wet with pools of dank river water that I would mop up without a word of complaint. All the same, on that night I was able to see the truth about my future and my fate.
I was born to disobey him.
APRIL 1911
THE QUIET of the off-season persisted, despite the emerging bloom of lilacs and the haze of green in the gardens of Brooklyn. Small leaves had begun to unfold on the plane trees, but the truest sign of spring was the mud seeping in between the slats of the wooden sidewalks. Even the wild area known as the Gut was quieter than usual, for all racetracks on the island had been closed down and gambling had been outlawed in the hope of lessening crime and vice, though certainly there were still illegal races along Ocean Parkway, often held by lantern light.
Fleets of fishing ships filled Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay, and before long wooden docks were strewn with catches of mussels from Coney Island Creek, along with bass and clams from the bays. The air was blue enough to glimpse the approach of warmer weather, yet the Museum of Extraordinary Things remained closed. A heron circled and considered nesting in the chimney, but when the wind blew cold from the sea, the ungainly creature was frightened off by the slap of a loose shutter banging against a window frame, and it heaved itself into the air. In any other year, carpenters would have been hired to unclasp the shutters, nailed closed in the winter to protect the exhibitions from light. They would have been at work repairing the broken stairs, and begun installing the wooden signs that invited customers to step inside. This spring the Professor had no time to order renovations. He locked himself in the cellar as soon as he awoke and rarely emerged. He refused proper meals and hadn’t bothered to change his clothes in days, though the fabric reeked of chemicals. When the stench was impossible to ignore, Maureen presented him with a clean, starched white shirt, which he grudgingly pulled on. He was distracted, and his gaze was fiery, as though he saw something beyond the confines of their house.
“He’s up to something,” Maureen worried. Though she knew nothing of her employer’s plans, she recognized the fever that marked an obsession. Clearly, some dark dream had taken hold of him. “The next thing you know we’ll have a bear sitting at the dining room table or a giant in one of our best chairs. I only hope there won’t be a snake in the kitchen sink.”
While Maureen went to hang laundry on the line, Coralie crept on her hands and knees, pressing her ear to the wide planks of pine flooring in an attempt to eavesdrop. Her thoughts were consumed by the drowned girl, but there were no telltale sounds rising from the cellar. Still, she knew her father’s urgency to present a monster to the world. He’d insisted this was the only way he could turn their fortunes around. “Do you think I’d have you swim for those fools if we weren’t desperate for the money?” he’d said to her, as if that explained the dreadful things he’d had her do. “We need a real success!”
Coralie would have preferred to live like a mouse, on crumbs and crusts, rather than be subjected to those evenings. “Is there nothing else we might do to change our fortune?” she pleaded.
“There’s worse,” he said darkly, and left it at that.
They had grown poorer, left with only soup and bread for their meals. Maureen complained she could hardly buy groceries with her slim allowance. Coralie wished she could tell the housekeeper about her father’s intentions, but it was as if those wicked evenings in the museum had left her bewitched and mute. She made certain to dispose of liquor bottles and cigar stubs in the mornings that followed her humiliations, tossing bits of evidence into the trash pile. Once a week, it was set on fire. Maureen always encouraged Coralie to come inside on these occasions, for bright cinders snapped up into the branches of the pear tree and smoke swooped above them. But Coralie sat on the porch steps, unmoving. She watched it all burn.
IN TIME, Coralie had come to wonder if the housekeeper had just as many secrets as she did. A house of secrets is like a house of cards, falling in on itself. The more you knew, the more you had to know, and Maureen’s private life nagged at Coralie. The housekeeper had never spoken of where she came from, nor had she mentioned a family.