This New and Poisonous Air Read Online Free PDF Page A

There is only fear and surprise in the girl’s clouded eyes. It appears as if something has eaten away a portion of her lower lip.
    When Madame is allowed to return to her museum, which was only partially destroyed by fire, she will make a secret figure in wax that will never be displayed, a copy of herself as she looked in prison, head shaved and without eyeglasses. She deepens the eyeholes until they are caverns, elongates the jaw into a wolflike muzzle. And when she is finished with the monster—while the wax is still warm—she pounds her fist against the thing, weeping and wishing more than anything else that she had taught the queen to make the foolish dolls for her children.

London, 1802
    WHEN MADAME ARRIVES in London, both she and her figures are broken. The models have not travelled well, despite the packing straw. Severed hands, pieces of leg and, unbearably, a head or two are lifted carefully from their crates by her new staff and placed in the laboratory for reattachment. But she does not know if she can put all of history back together again. The line of sense is broken.
    “Tussauds House of Wax” will open in the Baker Street Bazaar between the Punch’s Theater and the House of Mystery—as if Herr Curtius’s grand museum is some carnival joke. Madame has removed the apostrophe from her surname on the placard. She no longer wants to claim
the wax museum, and she does not speak of her past nor of the husband and aged mother she left in France. She will never go back to that country again, never see Paris. Not after what they have done. The head of Marie Antoinette, of Louis XVI, and finally even of Robespierre himself haunts her hands. She cannot forget. Her husband will write letters, imploring her to return, but he will never come looking. Perhaps he is afraid he could no longer distinguish Madame Tussaud from her figures. He will be halfway home before he realizes he has pulled the wrong woman from the wax museum. What he took for his wife will be melting in the sun.
    She does not often visit the garish museum. Instead, she takes walks in the city. Imagine a woman dressed in gathered French silk, standing on the planks of London Bridge. Her graying hair is pinned carefully beneath her fashionable hat; a new pair of eyeglasses rests upon her nose. She studies the tall wooden houses that recede in every direction beneath a pall of black soot in the sky. She has made few acquaintances in this city. Unlike Paris, London is a business arrangement. Looking down into the rushing current of the Thames, she rests one hand on the bridge railing while the other hangs limply at her side. Water, she thinks, is nothing like wax. It is impermanent. It does not glorify. She wishes she could have carved her famous figures out of water, so they immediately fell from their pedestals, splashing into puddles on the floor. Such a display might have provided a more accurate depiction. For if there are saints, Madame knows they are few, and none of them are remembered for long.

Fall, Orpheum
    DAVID MILLER AND HIS SISTER, Kitty, almost didn’t go to the theater on the night she disappeared. After getting into a fight with a boy at school, Kitty lay on the leather sofa at the Miller house, staring at the shadows of moths caught in the beveled globe of the ceiling fan, whispering oaths about how she’d never again make another mistake with her heart. David sat rocking in the corner chair, still dressed in his grassy baseball jersey and wearing cleats in the house despite his mother’s wishes. He felt restless from an evening of pitching drills and tried reasoning with his sister, saying the movie wasn’t a love story—it was about men looking for a diamond in the jungles of Peru. Cheeks flushed and a pillow clutched to her chest, Kitty said that looking for diamonds in the jungle was just like looking for love, and if the stupid king of baseball was too dense to understand metaphor, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him