The Museum of Extraordinary Things

^FIVE THE ORIGINAL LIAR

I BEGAN to defy my father the year I turned fifteen. They were minor infractions to begin with, secret transgressions no one would notice. But each time I broke the smallest rule, I felt I had committed a crime. In truth, nothing much had changed except the way I felt, but in time I have come to wonder if that isn’t everything after all. Perhaps my conversion from dutiful daughter had begun on the night I went into my father’s workroom and read the first few pages of his handbook. Often I wished I had continued reading, but I’d been too frightened to go on. Was it because I feared being caught red-handed? Or was it that I dreaded what I might find in those pages? At those times when I worked up the courage to go down the cellar steps, the locks were always bolted. I put my ear to the heavy wooden door but heard nothing, only the beating of my own pulse at the base of my throat.

I passed a locksmith’s shop on my route to the fish market, and one day I veered from my usual path and stepped inside. I said I had lost a key to a cellar storeroom where jars of jams and jellies were kept cool. I thought I must certainly look like a liar—my cheeks were flushed and hot, and I stammered over my words. I wondered if the sheriff’s office would be called and I would be arrested on the spot, but the locksmith treated me as if I were any other customer. When I said I could not afford to have him come to change the bolts, he assured me he had a skeleton key that would work on any lock. He took my money, but as it turned out what he gave me was a worthless loop of metal. When I reached home I slipped the skeleton key into the first lock, where it twisted and stuck fast. For a few panicky moments I feared I wouldn’t be able to remove it, and would be found out when my father returned to his workroom. At last I managed to retrieve the key, pulling it out with all my might. I then ran to toss it into the heap at the rear of our yard, where we burned our trash once a week.

That experience didn’t stop me from puzzling over my father’s past. My curiosity became a stone in my shoe. Whenever I had the house to myself I examined the volumes in my father’s library as if they might reveal his secrets. I read all manner of medical texts and books about the natural world. I went through the cabinet where he stored whiskey and aperitifs, and tasted a green liquid that reminded me of the mint that grew in our garden. I took a spade so I might dig in the earth beside the back door, where the liveryman dragged specimens through the weeds. There I searched for bones or pieces of gold but discovered nothing more than a hill of stinging ants. And then, one evening, I found the keys. My father had gone out and forgotten his waistcoat jacket. I randomly searched the pockets. There were some coins and hard candy in one pocket. In the other, the keys.

They were small, one fashioned of iron, the other of brass. They burned in my hand. I stood at the cellar stairs thinking over what to do next. I admit I was afraid. I wasn’t prepared to go against my father’s wishes to this extent. But perhaps there was more. Perhaps I knew if I opened the door and discovered the truth, I would have to flee. I had no idea where I could go if I left my father. Another museum or theater, if they would have me. I understood why Maureen reported in for work each day. We did not have many choices.

I returned the keys to their rightful place.

And hated myself for doing so.

Still, I could not go back to being the good girl I’d been before. When I was on display in my tank, my quiet defiance rose up more frequently. I sometimes made faces at those in the audience who came too close, pressing their noses to the glass. Once I showed my teeth as if I were a dog, and two young women fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts. Few noticed my small rebellions, not even Maureen, for I practiced humility on a daily basis. I washed dishes and helped to hang laundry on the line. I brushed my hair a hundred strokes a day and faithfully bleached my nails with a mixture of soap and lye to dissolve the blue dye from the tank that stained my fingers. In the evenings I didn’t stray from the routine my father set forth for me. I read the great classics he chose and went to bed early. But with each year that passed, I found that my curious nature had a stronger hold. It rattled around inside me even when I tried my best to be good. Each time I opened the window in my bedroom I smelled salt and fish and human desire. I knew what I wanted: my own place in the world, not a path I took because I was under my father’s command but one I had chosen for myself. I wanted to know how other girls my age wore their hair, for mine was still in braids as if I were a child. How had they learned to dance, choose silk dresses from the shops, form friendships? I was jealous of the girls I saw on the streets; they seemed to know so much about the world and I’d had access to only odd bits and pieces. Was anyone else in Brooklyn aware that a hummingbird’s heart beat so quickly all you could hear was a dizzying whir when it perched on your finger to drink sugar water from a dropper? Did anyone care that a tortoise needed to have its shell rubbed with olive oil in cold winter months to prevent cracks from forming, or that when the creature slept it pulled in its limbs and head and rocked back and forth for comfort, like a baby in his cradle?

What I wanted to know had both nothing and everything to do with the natural world.

I wished to know love.

I began to sneak off to Dreamland in the summer months, though my father had told me often enough that the owners of that park were our enemies. He said we were like nations at war. All wars must be won or lost, he told me, and in time we would go to battle. I didn’t want battle, however, just lovely summer nights. I knew Coney Island could be dangerous, and it was definitely changing. There was the Brighton Beach Racetrack near an area called the Gut and two others in Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend. The sport had begun on Coney Island, with the Brighton Beach Fairgrounds and the Brooklyn Jockey Club. But racetracks brought in a criminal element, and the clientele that frequented them could be rowdy. That thuggish group of horsemen and gamblers mixed with men and women looking for a good time at Dreamland and Luna Park in a world made of steel and papier-mâché. I began to climb out my window after I had finished my chores and bade my father good night. The evenings were inky, with banks of clouds and a pink-tinted fog that rolled in from the Atlantic. At first I merely sat on the roof gazing down at the rush of life on Surf Avenue, but I soon wanted more. My father had always told me that my heart and lungs were larger than an average person’s, and this was the reason I could remain underwater for so long without air. Perhaps my desires were larger as well. What I wanted haunted me and wouldn’t let me go. At night I tossed and turned, and usually rose from my bed without the benefit of sleep. I yearned for a different life.

I always made certain to pile clothes beneath my quilt in the form of a sleeping body when I crept out of our house, so that my absence wouldn’t be noticed if my father decided to check on me. Not that he ever would. He was busy in his workroom after supper, and when he was done he went out on his own to the taverns of Brooklyn, of which there were more than a dozen on Surf Avenue alone. I was not uppermost in his mind.

“Men will be men,” Maureen told me when I wondered aloud where my father went in the evenings. “Don’t complain,” she advised. “That’s how women find their freedom. When there’s no one else at home.”

Maureen’s words rang true enough. With my father gone I could read whatever I wanted, making myself comfortable in the overstuffed horsehair chair he most preferred. The cereus plant loomed on the oak side table, but I ignored it. I didn’t believe that it would ever bloom, and that on some magical night it would change before my eyes. To me, it was a malevolent specimen, more likely to swallow spiders and flies than to flower miraculously. I immersed myself in Poe’s chilling tales, though my father had often called Poe a perverted individual, a drunkard and a deviant. I dared to look through volumes from the East in which men and women performed sexual acts I tried my best to understand. I ate buttered toast and rice pudding for dinner rather than the daily routine of fish my father insisted upon, and tasted red wine for the first time. I unbraided my hair and stared at myself in the mirror so that I could consider who I might be when I became a woman. Someone with long dark hair who possessed a pale complexion and a quiet nature, who let no emotion show, yet was inwardly excited by the idea of the future, whose eyes burned with desire.

Before long, I was so sure of myself I stopped climbing out the window and simply walked out the front door. As soon as I left the museum, I felt myself become another person. If anyone had asked my name, I would have called myself Jane, the name of the character in the novel Raymond Morris had always spoken of with such reverence, the book that had set him free. It was a common enough name, yet somehow stately and independent. I was impressed by the character’s statement: I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die. Those words made me feel I was not the only one who was at odds with who I was expected to be, and that angels were meant for another world, not for ours.

The night watchman at the park’s gate grew to know me so well he allowed me to sneak in without payment. The watchman seemed kindly, and he always told me to enjoy myself and stay out of trouble, but he once asked for a kiss in exchange for this favor.

“Come on, Jane,” he urged, for that was the name I’d given him. His job was not to be the guardian of wayward girls but to ensure that the crowds did not get too unruly. At night, after the gates were locked, he circled the eastern arena, where the animals were kept, watching over the leopards and tigers, alongside the horses and Shetland ponies children paid to ride, keeping a special eye on the pride of lions, which included a great creature called Black Prince, who was said to behave like a dog when around his trainer and like a beast from hell should anyone else dare to approach his cage. “I’ve got to have my fair share,” the watchman told me. When I grew flustered and tears sprung to my eyes, he waved me on. I thought it over, then went back to him. Perhaps there was a part of me that still felt I had to do as I was told, or perhaps I wanted to test myself and see what I was worth. I stood on tiptoes and pecked the watchman’s cheek. In that instant I knew the power a young girl can have over a man, although I did not yet know that ability could also be a curse. The watchman always let me into the park after that. Sometimes he gave me a few dimes to spend on myself. All for the sake of a kiss.

This was before Dreamland was closed for renovations last year, in the autumn of 1910. All the same, the park was astounding even before the new attractions were added and all of the elegant icy white buildings were painted. I remember passing through the massive gate for the first time, stunned to see the gigantic biblical sculpture called Creation, an enormous winged angel. I couldn’t take my eyes from her. It was as if a goddess had fallen from the sky onto the shores of Brooklyn. Though I knew it was a betrayal to be so in awe of our competitor, I had never seen anything so beautiful.

There was a tower in which thousands of lightbulbs had been installed, and the night above the park was so lit up that I sometimes feared my father would be coming home from his evening out and spy me walking along. I took to wearing a black shawl to cover my head so I might fade into the dark. But underneath the shawl my hair was unbraided, and I let it fall down my back.

Our museum was tiny and old-fashioned, a minor diversion, not a grand, heart-stopping display. I awoke each day to the scent of formaldehyde and mothballs and a schedule of dull housework as I helped Maureen with the ironing and cooking before the museum opened for business. I helped to feed the birds and watered the neglected cereus plant.

My hours in the tank had become a chore. I often curled up at the bottom dozing until my father rapped on the glass. I knew I was meant to turn this way and that, posing, and to smile through the waves I created when I splashed my tail. I was not to show my teeth or make rude faces. Each morning I coated myself with olive oil as Maureen suggested, so that my skin would not dry out and crack, as if I were another tortoise kept in the hall of science. Each night I dreamed I wandered the streets of our neighborhood until I found myself at the fish market. I was there buying haddock and clams when I realized people were laughing at me. I looked down to find I had no legs. I had not forgotten the entertainment my father had been most famous for before he came to this country, the display of cutting a woman in half. The trick haunted me. I knew I would be a far better fish if I didn’t have legs. Then I would be caught in the net of my life, unable to climb out the window at night, unable ever to run away, fated never to see the true wonders of the world.

There were such huge crowds on summer evenings in the streets of Coney Island that no one noticed me, a plain girl in a black dress and gloves, my hair the color of ink. I visited Luna Park and the other, smaller entertainments. But I preferred Dreamland, perhaps because I could see its brilliant tower from my bedroom window. The park had become a part of my dreams before I ever walked through the gate. I went to every attraction and still couldn’t get enough. The one entertainment I avoided was the sideshow that fronted the park, for it reminded me too greatly of my father’s museum, though he called our human oddities scientific entertainments and living wonders and the sideshow’s term was freaks of nature. The Queen of Fatland was one of the star acts at the Dreamland sideshow, and was said to weight 685 pounds though her height was not more than five foot two. I had seen the Queen off-season, shopping at the same fish market I frequented on Neptune Avenue. Her real name was Josephine, and she once gave me a recipe for bluefish fillet boiled with rosemary and sliced potatoes. The Queen was originally from Minnesota and now lived with two sisters in Brighton Beach, a very respectable neighborhood. She told me that my father had once offered her a position at the museum, but she was paid far more by the owners of Dreamland and, more important, she was treated with respect.

“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 Brontë. 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.

I expected Maureen to laugh, for she was a rebel and abhorred rules and regulations. She often groused and complained about my father when we were alone, making jokes about his stern manner and his attention to detail, especially when it came to his clothes. In fact he was a dandy and preferred cashmere and silk. Maureen could imitate him perfectly, mimicking his accent and his harsh way of speaking. She could give such a good impression of the cold, chalky glare of his anger it seemed she was possessed by his spirit. I thought she might give a performance now, copying the way he bowed formally when he greeted an audience. Instead, she was angry. She told me in no uncertain terms I was never to sneak out to Dreamland again.

“You don’t know the sort of trouble you can get into. You take a step too far, and you’ll find there’s no coming back. Promise me you’ll stop sneaking around.”

I was surprised by the worry in Maureen’s expression. We could hear my father in the museum, making the last announcements before he closed the doors for the day. There were very few people in attendance. The crowds were already waning, and evening shows had been canceled. We knew autumn not from the change of color in the foliage but by the empty streets and the thinning crowds, who would not return until the following season.

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll stop.”

Maureen did not appear convinced. “I’ll be the one keeping a watch on you now.” She studied me carefully, lifting my chin so she could stare into my eyes. “Have you had your monthly bleeding?”

I admitted I had.

“I thought as much! And you never said a word.” She was clearly disappointed to find I hadn’t confided in her. “Then you’re a woman and must act like one.” Our heads were close together, but she lowered her voice further due to the intimate nature of our discussion. “When you leave here against the Professor’s wishes, you’d better do so with no thought of returning. We’re not like other people, Cora. They would never understand us.”

As evening fell I sat alone in my room, gazing out my window, thinking over Maureen’s advice. I saw Malia the Butterfly Girl making her way down Surf Avenue, her mother’s arm drawn protectively around her. They passed by the tintype photo gallery on the corner, where an individual could be photographed against cardboard cutouts of the seashore. Malia had left behind her orange costume. Her face was no longer decorated with makeup. The kohl eyeliner and rouge painted into the pattern of a monarch’s wing had been washed off at the pump in our yard, and her face was pretty and plump. She wore a plaid cloak that hid the fact that she’d been born without arms. From my vantage point, both mother and daughter looked ordinary as they disappeared into the crowd.

I could not have been more envious.

One night the door to my bedroom opened. There was my father. He’d been at a tavern, and he carried the smell of rum, which reminded me of formaldehyde. It was not a pleasant odor, and afterward I could never drink rum, even when it was disguised as buttered toddy in the holiday season. I had been reading by candlelight, and I quickly hid the volume under my quilt when I heard his footfall upon the stairs. I couldn’t trick my father however. He reached beneath the bedcovers and brought forth the book. Fortunately it wasn’t Poe or Brontë but the tragedies of Shakespeare, great literature of which my father approved. That is not to say he wasn’t angry with me. He told me he had been walking down the street and had seen a light in my room. He’d run the rest of the way. He quickly snuffed out the flame of the candle between his fingers. When he told me I must never burn a candle while in bed, I thought and hoped his speed in coming home was because he feared for my safety. But that wasn’t his worry. He scolded me terribly, telling me I would burn down the museum if I weren’t careful. I could destroy everything just by being a selfish, thoughtless girl. I needed to pull my weight, to work harder, otherwise the museum would not survive the onslaught of newer, more modern entertainments. He took my wrists in his hands as he berated me. I couldn’t help but think of the trick for which he was most famous. In my thoughts I gave thanks to Maureen for her warning to stay at home. I was grateful it was not a bundle of clothes my father had discovered in my bed. As it was, there were bruises on my wrists the next morning.

I stopped going to Dreamland. It was the end of the season anyway, and the crowds at the hotels and the parks were beginning to disappear, leaving behind the local residents to get through the dreary autumn and the winter, isolated from the rest of the world. But at night I still dreamed I was walking along Surf Avenue. I walked through the gate of that wondrous park my father feared would make us poor, and once I did the whole world was before me, strung with a thousand lights. In my dreams I took off my black shawl and my gloves. I stood in the center of the ballroom and listened to music. There was no one to tell me everything I did was wrong. When I woke from these dreams I lay in bed in the dark. I told myself only foolish girls cried. Sometimes I crept downstairs, hoping to catch the night-blooming cactus in our parlor in flower. I thought I would then believe in miracles and find some sort of faith. I sat in the dark in an overstuffed chair, but nothing marvelous happened. There was nothing but sticks before me.

I had already begun to doubt the truth of my father’s tales.

OUR FORTUNES continued to fade. Last summer was the worst any of us could remember. Some days we had only eight or ten customers, some days no one appeared at the museum. My father had not yet come up with his plan for a monster that would galvanize New York, but he was planning all the same. That fall was cold and dark. The leaves in November clung to the trees, then shivered into the streets. One evening after supper, after Maureen had left for the day, everything changed. Perhaps I lost my faith that night. Certainly I lost my innocence. The Professor told me to bathe, not in the tub upstairs where I usually took my baths, but in my tank.

We were forced to close two weeks early, for we couldn’t afford to pay the living wonders. They needed to retreat to their off-season lives. Some would travel with circuses in Florida, others moved in with family members in Queens County or New Jersey, some remained in their cramped quarters in Coney Island, where they did their best to survive the winter. Once the season was officially over and our windows were shuttered, we only went past the velvet curtains that divided our home from the museum in order to feed the animals and birds in their cages. At the time we had a small baby goat with two faces that was billed as the Devil’s Pet. We kept him outside tied with a rope to the pear tree until there was ice on his hooves. Then we brought him inside, tied to the kitchen sink during the day, in the cellar in the evenings. But he lasted only a few weeks, and the liveryman buried him out in the yard.

My father’s demand on this evening was so strange that I faced him, and, with all the courage I had, I asked why he wanted me to go to my tank. He ignored me and told me to hurry. As always, I did as he requested. That is not to say I did not hesitate. When the museum was closed to the public, there was an eerie cast to the rooms. I made my way through the curtains into the chilly exhibition hall. The tank where I was displayed had been uncovered, and in the gloom the water appeared murky. When my father came to check on me, I was standing in my long muslin undergarments, shivering, so puzzled by his request I had not yet obeyed. I could hear the tortoise slowly pacing in its pen, as well as the chatter of parrots and cooing doves. There was the soft fluttering sound of the wings of the many tropical birds we kept. Some would die of the cold in the winter months, and the most delicate ones would be taken into the parlor, their cages set near the fireplace so that they might manage to survive. Maureen always complained there were too many feathers to sweep up, but when no one was looking she fed the birds nuts and seeds that she bought at the market with her own shopping money.

My father told me I must quickly remove every stitch and get into the tank. I noticed he had recently poured a few thimbles of India ink into the water so that it might look fresh, and that my breathing tube, usually packed in cotton batting for the winter, had been reinserted.

“Do you understand all we do is theater?” he said. “What is real to our audience is mere show for us, and what is done here is no different than what actors do upon a stage. Remember that tonight.”

When he left the room, I did as I was told, dropping into the water.

I had an inkling that the events about to unfold would change my current outlook and my life, and yet I would have to pretend as if they had never happened. I had a fleeting thought that because of our failing finances my father might wish to drown me and be rid of me. As it turned out, that was not the case.

When my father returned he had three gentlemen with him, although gentlemen was clearly not the correct term. These three wore bowler hats and black coats, and one of them carried a cane. I dove to the bottom of the tank and wrapped my arms around myself to hide my nakedness. I was so mortified I thought I might pass out. I nearly forgot to take a gulp of air from the breathing tube and was close to fainting, but my father tapped on the glass and gestured for me to swim and pose. I told myself I was in a dream, and the men in the room were figments of my imagination. They began to cheer when I moved through the water, exposing myself, and soon enough they grew rowdy. I heard the echo of their delight, and I could see one of them make a rude motion to me. The men were drinking, and my father pulled up chairs so they could make themselves comfortable during their viewing. They were so close to the glass I imagined I could feel the heat of their cravings. I hadn’t known it was possible to cry while underwater, but it was. Still, it was a dream. The men in the room weren’t real to me.

When they had gone, my father rapped again on the glass to indicate that he was leaving the room as well. It was a signal that I would now have privacy so that I might exit the tank and cover myself once more. After such a violation, I did not know how to proceed with my modest life. I thought for a moment of not rising to the surface. It occurred to me that it might be best to leave my existence, and all the woes to come. But I learned it was not so easy to drown oneself. My spirit revealed its desire to live. I came up gasping, wanting air. I climbed out of the tank, my breathing ragged. I was still sopping as I pulled on my undergarments. I felt so alone that I went to the tortoise’s enclosure and stepped over the low wall to sit in the sand beside my old friend. I was no different than this beast, a captive. I wondered if on cold nights in Brooklyn the tortoise wept and hungered for another world, if it didn’t view its long life as a curse.

After the events of that night, I did not dare to look for the keys to my father’s workroom again. I was afraid to know any more of his past or his intentions for the future. At every turn, I held my breath. I knew I was on a precipice, and sooner or later I would have to make a leap. I did not tell Maureen about the nights when the Professor brought in men, and I certainly never confided any of the disgusting things they did while they watched me, nor did I disclose that several of them offered my father cash for me. In the echo of the water I had overheard nasty snippets of conversation, and I was aware of what they wished to do to me, how they would like to take me by force if need be, dragging me onto the couch my father had recently brought in so that they might be even more comfortable during their viewing.

None of what they did or said mattered; their boasts and vile notions turned to air, for these men did not exist. I always entered a dream when I was submerged in the tank. My dream was blue and I was alone in it. Still I did as my father said on those nights. When he left me a list of how he wished me to behave underwater, touching myself so that the men might become even more excited, acting in a variety of coarse, immodest ways, I did this as well. I continued to follow his directions.

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.