Coralie was the monster that had been sighted from the shoreline, the mysterious creature men wished to either rescue or trap. All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York. Seventeen sightings had been recorded in the papers. Each one corresponded to a time when Coralie swam farther north in the cold, gray river, drifting among the eels, just now arising from the sediment after a winter’s sleep, and keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides. In the mornings she would sit in a pool of sunlight on the back porch so she might read about herself in the Sun or the Times, a huge beast with teeth not unlike a shark’s and green scales, who was in reality nothing more than a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl who favored simple black dresses and leather-buttoned shoes and was never seen without her gloves.
Coralie knew her father was in desperate need of an exhibit that would compete with Dreamland and Luna Park and the other grand amusements in Coney Island. Two years earlier the famous Sigmund Freud had come to Brooklyn, to try to understand the American point of view; among the few things that were said to have impressed him were the magnificent amusement parks. Imagination was all in Brooklyn, and this was what Sardie had to sell; it was his gift, one he thanked his maker for each and every day. He always insisted that his establishment was not a freak show, like the well-known Huber’s Dime Museum on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, which had been a purveyor of the strange and unique for many years until finis was posted on its door in 1910, or the dozens of dreadful little entertainments that lined lower Surf Avenue, exhibitions that debased and degraded their human skeletons and amputees, their conjoined twins and the men who allowed fleas to suck the blood from their bodies, along with the wrestling rings and vaudeville halls, the worst and most exploitive of them having moved northward, to an area known as the Gut. The Museum of Extraordinary Things was a true museum, a place of edification, wherein natural curiosities were displayed along with human marvels. Now, however, they needed more, and, when more could not be found, it must be invented. If there was anyone who might be able to succeed in such an act of trickery, it was the Professor, who had been a magician in France, quite famous in his time, known for acts of wonder so astounding they had made people doubt their own eyes. He understood that not only could a man’s eyes mislead him but his mind could deceive him as well.
Coralie followed her father’s instructions, as she had all her life, though her heart sank at the nature of her obligation, a trick to be played upon all of New York. The headlines called her the Hudson Mystery, for no one had managed to spy her features. Two fellows in a canoe had caught sight of her tonight as she’d raced past so these witnesses wouldn’t be able to make out her womanly form. Instead they saw only what they imagined, exactly as the Professor had predicted, and men’s imaginings were dark in these dark times. It was a season of great and terrible clashes in the streets, of bosses and politicians and police pitting themselves against working men and women. Debates became free-for-alls, with arrests of workers wanting nothing more than their fair share. The gap between the immigrant populations relegated to the overcrowded tenements of the Lower East Side and those who lived in brownstone mansions surrounding Madison Park had created a tinderbox of hatred.
And yet despite the news of labor troubles—strikes of ship workers on the docks of Brooklyn and garment workers in Manhattan gathering in near riots—there was always a story in the Sun and in the Times on the day following a swim, for the Hudson Mystery had caught their readers’ attention. The creature of the deep had become a riddle discussed on street corners and in shops. In the morning, the eighteenth news story would appear, a fortuitous number, as it was Coralie’s age, her birthday having been celebrated two days earlier with a ginger-apple cake Maureen had baked, rich with sugar icing and dotted with candles that sparked when Coralie tried to blow them out.
Once she’d left the river, Coralie walked through the newly unfolding swamp cabbages and fiddlehead ferns that grew in wild profusion in the boggy woods. Freedom was a treasure, even for a scant few hours. The chance to become a heedless wraith wandering through the chill landscape was a gift. No one could command her here. She might easily be a water nymph who had clambered onto the shore of a new and tender land. The world looked aglow, as if a door had opened and there, on the other side, was a vivid haze. She imagined it was the future that awaited, the unexpected life she might lay claim to if she never again returned home. Shadows threaded through the locust trees. The night’s dark color washed over the landscape in a mist of blue. She removed the mask she wore to make her seem inhuman, one fashioned by the same woodworker who made the museum signs.