Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

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.