The Museum of Extraordinary Things

MAY 1911

LATE IN the afternoon, Maureen knocked at the door. By then the day was warm and Coralie’s room was stifling. When there was no answer, the housekeeper cracked the door open and peered inside.

“Even if you’re ill, you have no choice but to face the day,” she called.

Maureen bustled into the room, convinced she had a cure for anything that might plague her ailing charge. Coralie wished that for once the housekeeper had left her alone. She was in no mood for human interaction, and in no condition to face anyone, least of all Maureen, who had a talent for reading her emotions. Coralie shrank beneath her blanket, mute and withdrawn, as a tray of tea and biscuits was placed on her bedside table. She sank down further when Maureen went to open the curtains.

“Don’t,” Coralie pleaded. When Maureen threw a worried look over her shoulder, Coralie said, “My eyes burn with the light.”

She did not wish Maureen to spy the marks that had been left on her. There were two scarlet circles, fading in color but still quite evident on her wrists.

“Are your eyes the only problem?” Maureen knew her charge’s temperament so well she quickly guessed there was more at hand. She sat at the edge of the bed, then pulled the quilt down and spied the bruises on Coralie’s arms. She drew in a breath, then grasped Coralie’s wrist and traced a finger over the red impression left by the fishing wire. “What happened to you?” she asked, distraught. “Some man, I’ll wager. Don’t tell me it’s the photographer, for I told him I’d make him pay if he wronged you.”

“No. Not him.”

Maureen’s expression was fierce. She rose to her feet, frantic, as if she intended to find justice. “If it wasn’t him, then who? Where is this man who’s treated you so badly?”

“Far from here, I hope.”

Maureen and Coralie held hands and kept their voices low.

“Did he have his way with you?”

Coralie shook her head.

Maureen went to the kitchen and in a short time returned with a poultice of madder root and a thorny thistle, which she insisted would heal Coralie’s bruises. The thistle was common enough, but it often caused the death of stray dogs when they carried off stalks growing wild in the fields. “Your father needs to know,” Maureen put forth once the bruises had been treated.

“Do not speak to him of this! Do you hear me?”

Coralie was so firm in her assertion, and so grim, that Maureen grew ashen as a glimmer of understanding took hold. “Did he have a part in this?”

“It was a doctor he employed to see if I was still pure. The gentleman thought he might take it upon himself to ruin me.” Coralie was so emotional, she held nothing back. It was a relief to be truthful with Maureen as she now admitted to the night viewings she had always kept secret. “It was to be mere theater. A show like any other. And yet it ruined me in some way, more so than what this horrid man tried to do to me.”

Tears flooded the housekeeper’s eyes. “I haven’t allowed myself to believe it, but now I know you should never have grown up in this house. I wanted more for you,” Maureen said with yearning. “And you’ll have it.” She appeared resolved, though her face was wet with tears. “You’ll have a proper life, and when you do, you’ll see that love has nothing to do with what you’ve found under your father’s roof.”

Coralie could not help but think of the tattooed woman who had thought her to be a whore. “I doubt that any man who really knew me would have me after all I’ve done.”

“That’s not true, Cora. Look at me! Would you think a man of any worth would ever want me? Would he travel from Virginia and wait outside my door even though I have been ruined a hundred times over? Mr. Morris doesn’t see me from the outside. Men are men, with all their flaws, as we have ours, that’s true, but the best among them manage to discover who we really are.” The housekeeper lifted Coralie’s chin so they might look into one another’s eyes. “If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we’d be angels, and angels can’t love the way men and women do.”

“And what of monsters?” Coralie wished to know. By then her face was streaked with tears; her emotions were raw. “Can they love?”

Maureen tenderly ran a hand over her charge’s dark hair. “We know quite well they can,” she murmured. “For we know that they do.”

THE MUSEUM OF EXTRAORDINARY THINGS failed to reopen. One or two customers rapped at the door, and, when their knocking went unanswered, they went away, puzzled but ready enough to find another entertainment. Professor Sardie’s announcement that he would allow free entrance into the museum if he were unable to produce the Hudson Mystery was a promise he couldn’t keep. At the present time he hadn’t the ready cash to pay his players or his bills. He had been drinking heavily ever since finding his workshop door ajar, the coffin containing the body of his fabulous creature vanished. He held the liveryman responsible; that unsavory character had never dared to return, and the Professor could be heard cursing his missing employee late into the night.

The last weekend in May was fast approaching, the beginning of the season marked by streets swelling with crowds, all searching for relief from the hot city and the brittle confines of their own lives. Soon enough Dreamland would reopen in all its revamped glory and beaches would be blanketed with visitors from Manhattan. All of the bathing pavilions, including Lentz’s and Taunton’s Baths, would be overflowing with customers. The New Iron Pier walk was busier each day, as all of the summer establishments prepared for the onslaught of visitors. The wooden horses at Johnson’s carousel were freshly painted. The steel skeleton of the Giant Racer Roller Coaster, that heart-stopping ride, was readied as well, with the empty cars sent up on practice runs that rattled the street below.

No announcements were made concerning the closing of the museum. The door was simply barred and padlocked from the inside. The Professor was already humiliated among his peers, many of whom said they’d never trusted him or expected to see anything resembling the Hudson Mystery. He was a known con man who relied on the naïveté of the masses, those inexperienced customers who might be convinced to believe in such things as mermaids and butterfly girls, when they were in fact being offered freaks of nature, harmless individuals dressed up to resemble the inhabitants of their nightmares or dreams. But if there was no Hudson Mystery, there would be no reversal of their downward fortunes. That was not fantasy but fact. Already the tortoise was being fed weeds rather than lettuce and fresh greens. The caged birds were pecking at crumbs.

When the living wonders arrived in the yard on what they had thought was opening day, they were greeted by the stench of the rotten fish, for the giant striped bass had been lugged onto the trash pile and set on fire. Bits of scales rose into the air, and it seemed that silver wasps were soaring into the clear May sky. Maureen spoke to the employees through the screen door, too embarrassed to tell them face-to-face that they were no longer needed. She made her voice as stern as she could, for, given the circumstances, no one would benefit from sentiment. Malia, who had been a feature since the age of seven, wept in her mother’s arms, and the others clustered together in disbelief, for they were suddenly without the means to support themselves. The season was about to begin, staff had been hired everywhere else, and it would be difficult to find work in even the lowliest museums and entertainment halls.

“Is this any way to treat us?” one of the Durante brothers called. “After so many years?”

“No,” Maureen said. “But it’s his way.”

“Let him rot in hell,” Malia’s mother cried, surprising those who hadn’t expected she knew any language other than her native Portuguese. “For hell is where he belongs.”

Coralie wanted to apologize, but Maureen stopped her.

“This is your father’s decision. Next season he may hire them back. The world is unpredictable.”

“And when he no longer has any need of you, will he do the same?”

“He has already.” Maureen dropped her voice to a hush. “I’ve been dismissed.”

Coralie was confused. “And yet you’re here.”

The housekeeper admitted she was there only as long as it took for Coralie to pack her belongings. She insisted there was no way that Coralie could stay in this house, and suggested she take as little as possible, for haste was the most important aspect of their departure.

Coralie understood the danger and therefore rushed upstairs to fill her cowhide satchel with her most precious possessions, clothes and books, along with the strand of pearls left to her by her mother. She hurried downstairs, but once in the parlor she suffered pangs of regret for all she was leaving behind. She had the urge to take the cereus plant, whose woody stalks had suddenly turned a ripening green, to liberate the tortoise, whose shell she rubbed with oil in the winter months, to free the hummingbirds from their cages. Perhaps it was this moment when she tarried that allowed her father to discover Maureen lingering in the kitchen. She’d been told to vacate the premises, yet she had disobeyed him. His dreadful mood was intensified by a good portion of rum. Coralie heard her father’s raised voice and then the murmur of Maureen’s rational tone as the housekeeper did her best to assuage his anger. The Professor refused to listen to her excuses; he began thrashing her mercilessly. Coralie could hear the rising tide of their emotions as they struggled.

“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.