WHEN I TURNED ten my father called me to him. My birthday was in March, and I never knew what to expect from that month. Sometimes it snowed on my birthday, other times there’d be the green haze of spring. I don’t remember the weather on this particular occasion, during the year of 1903. I was too excited at having my father focus on me, a circumstance that was rare due to the hold his work had over him. Sometimes he labored in the cellar all night long and didn’t get to his bed until dawn. And so it was a special event for him to turn his attentions to me. When I approached him shyly, he told me that in good time every secret must be shared and every miracle called into question. He made a grand event of my entrance into the museum. We went onto the path outside so we might go through the front door, as customers did. My father wore a black coat with tails, very formal, and a top hat he’d brought from France. He had sharp all-seeing blue eyes and white hair and he spoke with an accent. He had set globes of electric lights outside the entranceway to the museum. Sphinx moths floated near, drawn to the bright flares, and I ignored an urge to catch one in my cupped hands. I was wearing my black dress and a strand of pearls my mother had left me. I treasured them, but now my father told me to remove the necklace. He said I should leave off my gloves as well, which surprised me. I didn’t like to look at my hands.
It was midnight, an hour when the neighborhood was quiet, as it was the off-season. In the summers there were crowds all night long, and great waves of excitement and noise in the air. But those hordes of pleasure seekers would not arrive until the end of May and would continue on until the new Mardi Gras celebration to be held in September, a wild gathering that would become a yearly event where those celebrating lost all control, and the police Strong-arm Squad would have to be called out to beat them back to their senses. The construction in Dreamland was going ahead full steam as the owners built more and more rides and exhibitions that would rival any entertainment palace in the world and be even more impressive than Luna Park. Unlike the other amusement parks, which some of the wealthier residents of the island called vulgar and pandering, this one would be as splendid as any entertainment found in the capitals of Europe, the buildings all starkly white, as if made for the angels. Because it would be west of us on Surf Avenue, my father feared it would put us out of business. At night we could hear the roaring of the lions and tigers in their cages, attractions being trained to be more like dogs or house cats than wild beasts. In this quiet time of the year, seagulls and terns gathered at twilight in huge calling flocks above the park. The steel skeletons of the rides still being constructed were silver in the dark. I imagined they shivered in anticipation of all they would become.
My father opened the curtains made of heavy plum-colored damask that hung across the entranceway to the Museum of Extraordinary Things. He said I was the evening’s only guest, then bowed and gestured for me to step over the threshold. I went inside for the first time. Though I had managed to spy a few rows of the exhibits from occasionally sneaking a look, the contents of most had been a bit cloudy from my vantage point and I could never distinguish a green viper from a poisonous tree frog. Tonight the glass jars glittered. There was the sweet scent of camphor. I had looked forward to this day for so long, but now I was faint with nerves and could hardly take it all in.
There was a hired man who often came to care for the living beasts. I’d observed him arriving in a horse-drawn hansom carriage delivering crates of food for the mysterious inhabitants of the museum. A whirl of incredible creatures was before me as I stood there: a dragon lizard who flared his scarlet throat, an enormous tortoise who seemed like a monster of the deep, red-throated hummingbirds that were let out of their cages on leashes made of string. When I looked past this dizzying array, I spied my father’s birthday surprise decorated with blue silk ribbons and garlands of paper stars. It stood in a place of honor: a large tank of water. On the bottom there were shells gathered from all over the world, from the Indian Ocean to the China Sea. I did not need my father to tell me what would be displayed, for there was the sign he’d commissioned an expert craftsman to fashion out of chestnut wood and hand-paint in gold leaf.
THE HUMAN MERMAID
Beneath that title was carved one word alone, my name, Coralie.
I did not need further instructions. I understood that all of my life had been mere practice for this very moment. Without being asked, I slipped off my shoes.
I knew how to swim.
MARCH 1911
IF CORALIE SARDIE had lived another life, in another time and place, she might have become a champion swimmer, a lauded athlete with garlands crowning her head, surrounded by crowds who pleaded for her autograph after she crossed the Channel from England to France or circled Manhattan Island. Instead, she swam in the Hudson as dusk crossed the horizon, making certain to keep to the shadows. If she were a fish, she would have been an eel, a dark flash secreted within the even darker water, a lone creature set on a journey northward, unable to stop or rest until her destination had been reached. On this raw night, she stepped out of the river when she could swim no more, shaking from exertion. The relay swimming title had just been granted to a fellow from the New York Athletic Club who’d been dubbed the Human Fish, but Coralie could have beat his time with ease. She climbed onto a deserted bank under a sky swirling with stars and stood ankle deep in the mud. She wrung out her hair, a smile playing at her blue lips. This had been her longest swim thus far. She’d lasted ninety minutes in the frigid river, a personal record. A wind had picked up and the weather was raw; few swimmers would have been able to tolerate the cold rushing water. All the same, Coralie was no champion; she had no clock and no admirers. She wore men’s clothes, which made her movements easier, fitted trousers and a white shirt tucked into her waistband. Before dressing she coated her limbs with bear grease mixed with digitalis, a concoction meant to act as a stimulant and keep her warm. Still, despite this elixir and her training to withstand inhuman circumstances, she shuddered with the cold.
As she forged her way through a tangle of reeds, Coralie realized the rising spring tide had carried her off course. She was much farther north than she’d anticipated and had arrived in the no-man’s-land of upper Manhattan, where the Dutch had once farmed enormous tracts in the wetlands. Not far to the east, there were still small villages along the Harlem River, inhabited by communities of black Americans and Irish immigrants who had settled on that river’s sandy coves, their houses hidden from view by enormous beech and tulip trees that were more than three hundred years old.
Unlike most rivers, the current in the Hudson ran in two directions, pushed north by the Atlantic Ocean, turning into rivulets and streams and meeting with the Harlem River before the combined waterways receded south to the harbor. After a winter of heavy squalls and snowfalls, the Hudson was moving much faster than expected. Coralie’s father’s calculations had therefore proved wrong. The Professor was waiting nearly three miles to the south, alongside the liveryman and his carriage, ready to greet Coralie with a wool blanket and the flask of whiskey he vowed would keep her from catching a chill in her lungs.
After eight years of performances, Coralie’s fame had waned. The public’s hunger was for curiosities that had never been seen before, not for creatures they’d become accustomed to. Barnum and Bailey’s circus was opening in Madison Square Garden. It was the same location where Barnum had first exhibited his spectacles when the area was occupied by the Great Roman Hippodrome, an arena without a roof or heat. People were entranced by the prancing steeds, the spectacle and wonder of acrobats and trained seals, the thundering Roman chariot race that drove dust into the air. Barnum had begun his career with a museum in lower Manhattan, showing off taxidermy and fossils, along with questionable exhibits such as the Feejee Mermaid, a monkey’s torso with a fish tail attached. It was that swindler Barnum whom Professor Sardie wished to surpass, for he felt himself to be a true man of science, whereas Barnum was nothing more than a charlatan. Yet Barnum was an American hero, and the Professor’s fortunes were failing.
Coralie had been a star attraction as a child in Coney Island, but she was a child no more. The tail she wore was made of thin strips of bamboo that were flexible, covered by silk that had been treated with paraffin and copper sulfate so they would be waterproof. The breathing tube attached to the side of the tank could not be seen by onlookers. When she turned to flash her blue tail, she gulped in air from the tube. Her father suspected that the crowds had caught on to their tricks and asked that she use the tube as infrequently as possible. Her childhood training of remaining underwater in a tub had increased her breathing capacity far beyond the abilities of a normal woman. Sometimes she felt she barely needed air. At night she slipped into the tub in the washroom for comfort, settling beneath the warm, soapy water, a balm to her cold flesh and pale hands, which were dipped into blue dye every morning.
Between her fingers there was a birth defect, a thin webbing that the indigo tint emphasized. This was the reason she wore gloves in public, though her abnormality rarely hindered her in practical matters. Still, she despised herself because of this single flaw. She had often imagined taking a pair of scissors to her flesh so she might snip through the pale skin. The one time she’d attempted to rid herself of the webbing with a sharp knife used for coring apples, beads of blood began to fall onto her lap after she nicked the first bit of skin. Each drop was so brightly crimson, she had startled and quickly dropped the knife.
Even when the crowds faded, there were still a handful of faithful admirers who continued to gather beside Coralie’s tank, men whose sexual interest was evident in every fevered glance. No man had ever possessed her, although several had offered the Professor extravagant sums in exchange for her virginity, one going so far as to include a proposal of marriage. All advances were denied with an edge of fury from her father. Coralie was certain these same suitors would have not even glanced at her in her daily life, when she was nothing more than her father’s pale, ungainly daughter dressed in black, stopping at the market stalls on Neptune Avenue to choose turnips and spinach and fish. The men who were her greatest admirers were looking for the depraved and wicked thrill of possessing a freak of nature. They would be shocked to discover how ordinary she was, for her greatest pleasure was to read one of the novels she found in her father’s library, or to sit with Maureen on the back steps to plan a spring garden. She was no man’s dark dream, only a girl forced to swim half-clothed.
This past January, when Coney Island had been dotted with snow and the waves in the murky Atlantic had kept even the most experienced fishermen at home, Coralie had entered the museum to discover that her tank was no longer in the center of the exhibition hall. It had been lifted onto rollers by the liveryman and hauled to a corner, then covered with a tarp. Coralie had always imagined she would be grateful to be released from her obligations, but suddenly she was nothing, not even a fictitious mermaid. Who was she then? A quiet girl no one noticed, invisible to most men’s eyes. She realized that she had formed an attachment to her false persona, for a mermaid was a one-of-a-kind creature that commanded attention, whereas she was nothing of any worth.
Her father, however, was a man of the future. He had no difficulty moving on. He was quick to dismiss employees who no longer drew a crowd; tears and pleading were insufficient once a curiosity was of no further interest to the paying public. Many of the living wonders Coralie had known since childhood had been let go as soon as their popularity began to diminish, never to be spoken of again. The woman covered by bees had refused to change her act to include wasps, for their stings could be deadly. After a heated conversation with the Professor, she was forced to go. Her employer would not even allow her the time to collect her hive of bees, which were left in the garden in a wooden box. Later in the season, when Coralie tried to set them free, it did no good. The bees huddled together in the only home they had known, where they sickened as the weather grew raw, and soon enough died.
There were other wonders who disappeared without a good-bye. The crowds quickly tired of the goat boy with hooves instead of feet and the bird woman who dressed all in feathers and could whistle any song, from an oriole’s trill to a magpie’s fierce cry. The tiny lady who could fit into a set of child’s clothes, Marie de Montague, alternately drank from a baby’s bottle (filled not with milk but with weak Red Rose Ceylon tea laced with gin) and smoked a cigar. But she was soon viewed as old hat, for there were wonders many inches smaller than she. In the end she was employed by a second-rate theater on Neptune Avenue, where the raucous crowd called out insulting names, tossing pennies at her as they urged her to show her small bottom or breasts, which she was known to do on wicked nights when there were no ladies in attendance.
If Coralie had been anyone else, a hired act like any other, she would have already been turned out of her father’s house. She wondered if she might have preferred a life as a housemaid or as a clerk in a nearby shop, but her father drew her close and told her he would never let her go.
“What we do not have, we will create,” he assured her.
He had already fashioned his clever plan. The new creature might be an alligator or a snake, or some strange combination of the two, wrought by thread and nails and ingenuity, a being far superior to Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid. There was a workshop in the cellar, a space Coralie had never been allowed to enter, not even after she’d passed the age of ten. Two locks bolted upon the door, one made of iron, the other of brass. The keys were kept on the Professor’s watch chain.
“Our creature will be whatever people imagine it to be,” he’d confided to Coralie. “For what men believe in, they will pay to see.”