Magruder's Curiosity Cabinet (32 page)

“What do you suggest?” Whitey asks. “I'd like to see him in Brooklyn Hospital too, but we're under a goddamned quarantine.”

Nazan steps forward. “I think I can get across.” Everyone turns to look at her, mystified as to what this Dozen could possibly know that they don't. “But someone should come with me. Miss Hayward, if you don't mind. I do think you're better at this sort of thing than I.”

“Anything for Enzo, but I don't understand. What do I do?”

“We'll need to tell someone a convincing story. Perhaps I can explain on the way? It involves three belly dancers and a bishop.”

• • •

As dusk arrives, Whitey grants Zeph permission to reenter the museum. At the entrance, he roots around the shelves until he finds P-Ray's dog-eared copy of
The Wizard of Oz
. He slides the book into the back of his trousers.

The museum is pitch-black and eerily quiet. Many of the cabinets have toppled over—whether from the force of the explosions or from the pumper trucks, Zeph can't say. As he picks his way through the soggy debris and ruined artifacts, Zeph takes a quick inventory in his head. The two-faced baby pig is smashed on the floor, its yellow liquid oozing. The saber-toothed tiger jaw is broken, the shrunken head shattered, the peacock boots melted, but the Tibetan thigh trumpet lost only a few of its jewels. The boxing kangaroo kinetoscope is knocked over on its side but is probably fixable. Maisy and Daisy, the skeleton Siamese twins, stand unscathed. Zeph nods, proud of the girls for making it through.
Still
, he thinks,
Whatshisname Gruber's gonna have his work cut out for certain.

In the back room, he climbs on the bed and looks at Goo-Goo, his poked-out eye a perfect complement to his missing nose. “Got what you deserved, didn't you?”

Beside Goo-Goo is Archie, now cold and gray, his silk cravat torn and soggy with blood. “And you.” Zeph shakes his head. “Gonna miss you stealing from me, you old bastard.”

Ding!

The sound startles Zeph, but of course it shouldn't. Chio.

“Hey, brother, told you I'd be back.” Zeph hustles over to check Chio's clockwork. “Let's see here. Smoke didn't do you too bad, huh? Let me give your insides a look-see, though. Some of them gears are a little fussy.” He opens the door on the bottom of Chio's cabinet, and a leather satchel falls out, spilling its contents on the floor. Thousands of dollars in cash, wrapped in thick rubber bands printed with one word: Dreamland.

Zeph looks up at Chio, down at the money. He laughs. “Well now, what do you say to that, Herr Gruber?”

Ding!

As the sun drops low, Zeph, Kitty, Nazan, Rosalind, P-Ray, and Timur walk a few steps into the tide. Zeph hands each of them a carnation. “Anybody wanna say something?”

Kitty says, “Thank you, Archie. For everything you taught me. For everything you gave me by bringing me to Magruder's. I suppose you saw something of yourself in me.” She smiles sadly. “Only time will tell if that's good news or no.”

“Good-bye, Archie,” Zeph says quietly.

“Good-bye, you terrible man,” Rosalind says. “You were a bastard, but no one could insult me quite like you did.”

“Yes.” Timur nods. “Safe travels, old criminal.”

One by one, they toss their flowers into the tide. Then they sit together on the sand, staring out at the sea, thinking of the past. Of Maggie and Bernard. Spencer. Mrs. Hayward. Archie. And of course, of beloved Enzo, now ensconced in a private room in Brooklyn Hospital, thanks to Spencer's money and Archie's skill at blackmail.

Kitty gives P-Ray a kiss on the head and walks up the beach to greet her old enemy, the bench. Nazan sees her sitting there, looking so very young and alone. She goes to the bench and joins her.

“Miss Hayward—”

“Kitty. Please, I'm Kitty.”

“Kitty. I just… I'm so sorry I couldn't save your mother. I can't even say how sorry I am. I used to think I knew a lot of words, but I don't know those.”

“Didn't we discuss this already? No apologies from you, please. Not after all you've done.” She sighs. “I was just sitting here thinking. Mum would want to be sent back to England, put to rest next to Father. And my brother's body is still out there somewhere. I'll have to…I don't know exactly. Speak to the city? Find the
Arundale
? Someone must know something.”

“And then? Will you go home too?”

Kitty looks out at the water, watching the little birds as they
flap-flap-flap-drop
their way across the surf. “You know, when Archie found me, I'd been sitting on this bench for days, just watching those birds. They make no sense at all. They do everything the hard way. But they keep on going, no matter what.” She smiles at her new friend. “Will I go home? Do
you
intend to go home?”

Nazan looks over at their little group. At Zeph. She smiles back at Kitty. “I'm pretty sure I already am home.”

“Well, there you are.” Kitty takes her hand and squeezes it. “There's your answer.”

Every sideshow talker assures his audience that the marvels lurking just behind that tent are
absolutely, completely, 101 percent gen-u-ine and for real
…and I'm no different.

Every sideshow talker is a big ol' liar…and I'm no different there either.

Still, I want to say something about aspects of this book that really are 101 percent gen-u-ine, and I should start by hat-tipping my source material. My favorite resources for all matters Coney were the primary ones. For example, the Brooklyn Public Library has a fantastic site called Brooklyn Newsstand (
http://bklyn.newspapers.com
), which makes papers like the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
searchable online, with articles dating well back into the nineteenth century. I also leaned heavily on the 1905 publication
Souvenir Guide to Coney Island
by W. J. Ennisson. Ennisson's descriptions of Coney's many spectacles are spectacular in their own right. Significantly, the foldout map indicated a spot for me to place Kitty's park. This was a great gift because so much of the shoreline was held privately in this era—specifically, owned by businesses that might not have appreciated a Tibetan-style funeral on their property.

Among secondary sources, I have to mention the indispensable
Coney Island: Lost and Found
by historian Charles Denson. Denson runs the Coney Island History Project and hosts walking tours throughout the summer season. (If you are interested enough in Coney Island to pick up this book, you will thoroughly enjoy touring the real place.) The extensive website of Jeffrey Staunton (
http://www.westland.net/coneyisland/
) was another vital resource. So was the book
Secrets of the Sideshows
by Joe Nickell and back issues of the journal
Shocked and Amazed! On and Off the Midway
, which is helmed by the inimitable James Taylor.

Now a quick trip into the real/not real…

• • •

I'm not aware of any major outbreaks of plague on the East Coast. However, Honolulu and San Francisco both had quite dramatic experiences with the disease in the early 1900s. This was part of the “third pandemic” of the plague, which impacted parts of China, India, central Africa, and Australia.

At this point in history, knowledge of plague transmission was a bit sketchy. The idea that plague was caused by bacteria was not unheard of at the time—in fact, the guilty party,
Yersinia pestis
, had been discovered in 1894. But the discovery was controversial; many doctors had yet to be convinced that
Yersinia pestis
was to blame.

Consequently, plague-fighting efforts in the 1900s were a mixed bag. Some steps were taken that still seem logical—a greater emphasis on hygiene, for example—and some seem like madness now, like burning an apartment building to the ground because one resident died of the plague. (I'm sure the fact that many of these buildings were taking up valuable shorefront property never entered into the minds of city planners.) Fumigation with sulfur was used occasionally too; it was an old-school, yellow-fever-fighting technique in New Orleans, as described by Archie.

As for the symptoms and course of the illness, I based my version of the plague mainly on texts like Giovanni Boccaccio's
The Decameron
(1351) and Daniel Defoe's
A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722)
.
Those works and others portray a disease horrorscape in which healthy, young Europeans enjoyed breakfast in the sunshine only to die in agony before dinner. Modern scientists would say that although pneumonic plague
is
highly contagious, the actual course of the illness is probably not quite as swift as I've suggested here. It may be that people back then were in poorer health generally, which perhaps allowed the disease to work its terrible magic more quickly. Or maybe that strain was more virulent than the one existing today. Or maybe Boccaccio and Defoe were big ol' fibbers. In any case, I hope readers will forgive my adoption of the more romantic (if more dire!) scenario outlined by writers who came before me.

• • •

Historically, half-and-half performers like Rosalind Butler tended to sell themselves as hermaphrodites. As with most sideshow advertisements, this was largely untrue. That being said, Josephine Joseph, who appeared in the classic film
Freaks
, strongly insisted on the identity of hermaphrodite, even when arrested for fraud after a performance in Blackpool, England. In any case, whatever
else
the half-and-half performance might have been, it certainly was an embodied threat to the binary gender system.

With Rosalind, I tried to imagine a character who is not merely a threat to that system but is consciously at war with it. The character was inspired by real historical figures like the Chevalier d'Éon de Beaumont, a French spy who switched gender presentations multiple times throughout life until being forced to choose and stick with one by Louis XVI. I was also thinking about Civil War surgeon Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. The first (and so far only) cis-female Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Dr. Walker nonetheless suffered multiple arrests and indignities for her lifelong insistence on dressing “like a man.”

In contrast to Walker's time, recent years have seen a welcome—if slow and stuttering—movement toward acceptance of people with nontraditional gender presentations. While I have never considered the character to be transgender, I'm certain that
gender fluid
is a term Rosalind would have adored and embraced. Given the period setting of this story, however, I didn't feel like it was plausible for me to use here.

• • •

Zeph's Race to Death show is a fictional Frankenstein monster assembled from real parts. The road race did indeed occur in 1903, with events unspooling
kinda sorta
as Zeph describes. In turning a real-life tragedy into a spectacle, Zeph is making his own contribution to a type of performance that was very much in vogue at the time. Reenactments of disasters such as the Galveston Flood and the Boer War drew huge audiences. Meanwhile, both Luna Park
and
Dreamland had their own versions of the tenement fire show witnessed by Kitty and Archie.

Another precursor of Zeph's show is, of course, the flea circus, and to that, I've added the tradition of
pulgas vestidas
, or “dressed fleas.” The folk art of creating teeny-tiny costumes for fleas was practiced in Mexico a hundred or so years ago. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has some examples in their collection, should you care to get out your magnifying glass.

• • •

Despite her mystical claims, the character of Yeshi Lowenstein is more truth-based than one might expect. The Tibetan practice of sky burials still continues to this day, more or less as described in the book. A lot of that scene is based on descriptions in the online
Travel China Guide
and in Pamela Logan's “Witness to a Tibetan Sky-Burial: A Field Report for the China Exploration and Research Society.” Logan's essay is available online, as are many photographs of the sky burials—they are not for the faint of heart.

As for Yeshi's other “miracle,” levitation… Well, it wouldn't be proper of me to ruin that. But if you are a truth-seeker with an Internet connection, just plug “levitation” into YouTube, and all will be revealed. Be warned—the truth, once known, can't be unknown.

• • •

Speaking of YouTube, Robonocchio was inspired by a real automaton created by Henri Maillardet in the eighteenth century, and you can see it in action online. Even better would be to visit Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, where the automaton resides. Maillardet's machine can draw only four pictures, but it made me think,
Wouldn't it be great if…
And Chio was born.

If Maillardet's robot were the father of Chio, then his mother would surely be the fortune-telling machine called Grandma's Predictions, which dates back to the 1920s. Grandma is still in working order, and you can seek her counsel anytime at Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park in Coney Island. Grandma also tweets (@ConeyIslGrandma), because of course she does.

• • •

William Reynolds was a real person who served a single term as a New York state senator but found more success in real estate. He and his consortium shepherded Dreamland into existence, and Reynolds was also involved in developing the Chrysler Building. According to Charles Denson, Reynolds was a “slightly shady, larger-than-life character.” In
Coney Island: Lost and Found
, Charles Denson alludes to a story about Reynolds being “‘accidentally' shot in the groin by New York mayor John Mitchell.” A story published in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in 1909 mentions Reynolds returning from a sojourn in Europe “accompanied by his friend W. J. Urchs and his Negro mandolin quartet.” Sure, why not?

All that being said, I have no knowledge of his children—Spencer and Charlie are entirely fictional.

• • •

Finally, no historical evidence supports the idea that Teddy Roosevelt was a poor hand washer. I'd like to extend my sincere apologies to all surviving Roosevelts for any insult to their ancestor's personal hygiene.

—H. P. Wood

P.S. A bibliography and more information about these topics and much more can be found on my website: hpwood.net.