Coralie now noticed that the drowned girl’s head rested on weeds that had been arranged to form a pillow; her hands were crossed one upon the other on her chest. Coralie had not left the young woman in this tender position, as if waiting for the world to come. She gazed into the woods to try to spy whoever might have tended to the drowned girl, but she saw nothing but locust trees and reeds that stood nearly ten feet tall along the bank. The liveryman lifted the body over his shoulder. As he did so, the girl’s clutched hands were jostled, and what appeared to be two black stones fell from her grasp. Coralie bent to retrieve them. Once in her hands she realized these weren’t stones at all but buttons, cold as water, made of black glass.
They went back the way they had come, only now rays of sunlight glinted through the leaves and the waking songbirds trilled. They tramped along for a time, wordless, until they came upon the carriage. The Professor embraced Coralie in a rare show of affection. “You found the Hudson Mystery,” he informed her.
“Father.” Coralie paled. “How is that possible? She’s only a woman.”
“She’s that now. But when I’m finished with her, she’ll be far more.”
Coralie thought of the baby’s skeleton she’d once found upon his desk and the surgery tools set out on the white table. She thought, too, of the specimens in the glass bottles, creatures not made by God but sewn and hammered together.
“We have no choice but to create what we need,” her father assured her when he spied her worried expression. “There was a mermaid in the Hudson River who died in the cold currents, the Mystery that has haunted New York. It is our duty to preserve her so that she might remain intact for all eternity.”
The liveryman had carried the body up to the carriage; he stored the drowned girl beneath the bench. Water pooled on the floor, and there was a wet, green odor that was impossible to ignore. When she took her seat, Coralie did not look at her father but instead gazed out the window as he came to sit beside her. The horse began its easy pace through the woods.
“We have our miracle,” the Professor said, satisfied.
An outrage arose within Coralie, a distaste for her father’s business so strong it felt like a flicker of hatred. She would never again listen to his words as if they were gospel. No matter what he intended to do in the future or what deeds he had committed in the past, Coralie was certain that in good time every secret would be shared. Every miracle would be called into question.
FOUR
THE MAN WHO FELT NO PAIN
**********
I PLANNED to sell the watch I’d stolen as a boy to pay for Moses Levy’s funeral, but, as if it knew of my intent, it broke that very day. I wound the crown, and still it would not tell time. And so I kept it and instead sold the camera I had learned my craft upon, an American Optical. Moses had left me several other cameras, including his own ancient large-format wooden bellows camera whose images were developed as eighteen-by-twenty-four glass dry plates, and a Leica held together with tape that had an exquisite Petzval lens. From then on, I used these as my own. Moses’s favorite camera was the old battered one, oversized and heavy to carry around town. Someone else might have thought the camera I sold was the best of the bunch, but it wasn’t. A camera has its own eye, my mentor had told me. He insisted his could see the truth even when he’d begun to grow blind. I hoped it would do the same for me, for I was blind to much in this world.
Certainly I’d been blind when it came to Levy’s poor health and age. He’d told me of his bouts with pneumonia, which had weakened him, but he had such passion for his work I forgot how ill he was and ignored his labored breathing. I often accompanied him to meetings at 291, the gallery where Stieglitz showed photographs alongside paintings that seemed to come from a far-off universe, each unique and haunting. I stood in the back, an awkward apprentice, listening to the real photographers argue and talk. Once Moses went to shake Stieglitz’s hand and introduce himself. Stieglitz of course knew of him, although the rumors were that Moses Levy was dead. He had disappeared from the art world and from his compatriots. Perhaps he preferred these stories to the truth, and wished to keep secret the fact he made a living photographing brides and grooms at the marriage halls of the Lower East Side. His great work had been destroyed by officials in the Ukraine, who felt that Jewish artists were dangerous, rebels by nature, untrustworthy at best, demons at worst. He could not bring himself to think, let alone speak, about his lifetime’s lost work.
“Here’s one of the originals,” Stieglitz called out to those in the gallery. “One of our forefathers!”