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.