FIVE
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THE ORIGINAL LIAR
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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-maché. 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.