The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)

by Robert Hough

  That night, after the show, I got dolled up in my evening finery, including my fox stole and my drop-waisted dress and my evening gloves stretched to the elbows. Albert put on a suit that positioned him near the handsome end of the spectrum. Then we all met out by the ticket wagons and tipped some workingmen to take us into town, we being Bird Millman, the wire-walking sensation, who never went anywhere without her pet parrot on her shoulder; May Wirth, the Australian trick rider; the Spanish wire walker Con Colleano; the acrobatic clown Poodles Hannaford; the bear trainer Emil Pallenberg; and that bossy little plange-turner Lillian Leitzel, who of course brought along her insane husband, the trapeze artist Alfred Cadona.

  We pulled up in front of the classiest of the nightspots that'd opened in Boston since prohibition. You had to be either famous or mob or a high-ranking police officer to get in, and since we classified under the first category the red velvet rope was withdrawn and we were welcomed inside. The doorman wore white gloves and a tuxedo, and seeing Leitzel his eyes lit up and he led us to a big round table right in front of the bandstand, where a group of black musicians was playing a new kind of music on piano, drums and an assortment of horns. To me, it sounded like bedsprings getting a workout.

  This was my introduction to the Roaring Twenties. I can't say I liked it much, for it was loud and there was smoke everywhere and I was uncomfortable around people as haughty as Leitzel. Plus they were all chattering away in different languages, switching from French to German to Spanish to weird East European tongues with even a little of that Hungarian Esperanto tossed in for good measure. I, on the other hand, was that rarity of rarities among circus performers: Americanborn, and therefore burdened with a curse common to all Americans. No matter how many different languages I heard, the only one that ever made any sense to me was English. Leitzel, on the other hand, knew eight or nine. Mostly she used them to curse more dramatically when she wanted something.

  So as I sat at that big table amid all that smoke and laughter and music, I mostly felt alone and yearned for our Pullman. Frankly, with all that noise and all those different languages it wasn't that different from being deaf, my only meaningful conversation coming when Leitzel leaned over and said, "You had better keep an eye on zat hussband off yours. It seems he has vondered off. You know vat they say, Mabel dear. The quiet ones are the ones you have to watch out for."

  She was trying to get a rise out of me, not because she had anything against me but because she was the type of person who just plain enjoyed doing it. It worked, too, but not because I had any concerns over Albert; was more my feeling that someone ought to cut Leitzel down to size. Luckily, I was smart enough not to act on that feeling, so in a voice rich with fake appreciation I said, "Yes, of course you're right, Lillian. Perhaps I'll go find out where he is."

  So I excused myself. If the others noticed, they didn't care enough to stop yammering and smoking and laughing. I walked past tables peopled with chiefs of police and chiefs of the waterfront, jumping out of the way of cigarette girls wearing flapper dresses, dodging black musicians smoking a tobacco sweeter than any I'd smelled previously. Found Albert over by one of the wheels of fortune. I stood beside him. At first he didn't notice me for he was concentrating hard on that little white ball, his face having gone all pursed, the way it did whenever he was concentrating on his ledger books. After a bit, he leaned over and kissed my cheek, but he still didn't say anything.

  Not particularly wanting to go back and join the others, I watched him watch the others place bets on that spinning little ball, wondering what on earth the interest could possibly be. Albert, meanwhile, couldn't look away; riveted, he was, jaw muscles clenched and eyes burning holes.

  Finally, and I do mean finally, for I'd been standing beside him for the better part of twenty minutes, he leaned over and whispered loud in my ear, "Do you see that, darling?"

  "Do I see what?"

  "The wheel. I've watched every hand for the past hour and I've noticed it has tendencies. It favours certain numbers. Look. It did it again. The wheel likes high, odd numbers. Colour red. I am sure of it."

  "Really?"

  "Yes ... look."

  I looked and the ball hopped into a slot showing a low even black number, though when I pointed this out to Albert, he said, "Tendencies, Mabel. Observe." I did, and his theory failed again, though the third time it worked. He told me it'd worked seven out of the last twelve times, though before that it hadn't worked for ten times in a row, which was another part of his theory, for apparently there were stretches when the wheel tendency worked and stretches when it didn't.

  "Is the tendency working now?" I asked him.

  "Yes."

  "Then why not put some money down?"

  He looked at me, eyebrows arching. "Really?"

  "You might get lucky." Course, I was joking, for like most people I didn't really believe luck was the reason things happen. What I figured was Albert would bet, the ball would spin, we'd get all excited, he'd lose some money and we'd rejoin the others. "Live a little," I even said, and it was this encouragement Albert had a tough time turning down, accountants being people who go through life having to prove they're neither boring nor cheap. So he turned and bought some betting markers from a flapper chewing gum so loudly you could hear it over the music.

  Just before the "All bets in," Albert dropped the markers on a single number. The little white ball spun around and around before slowing and hitting the number-slot edges and bouncing and hopping and finally settling into the very number Albert had bet on. The ball spinner acknowledged the win with a nod, and he pushed a pile of markers in Albert's direction. Albert, looking flustered and pleased, picked them up and I followed him to one of the cashier windows. He pushed his dominos through the window. A stack of twenties was pushed back at him. Trying to look nonchalant, he took them and folded them in two the way gangsters did. A few seconds later, in a corner of the speakeasy, he counted it. Seven hundred dollars and change.

  When I heard the amount I gave a little hop with an accompanying shriek that embarrassed Albert but at the same time made him beam with pleasure. His win seemed to give the evening a totally new complexion, for it suddenly felt to me like the people we'd come with were my best friends and needed to share in this windfall. So I rushed over and leaned my head into their circle, making sure I was right beside Leitzel.

  "You wouldn't believe what just happened! Albert won $700 at the wheel game!"

  At this a cheer went up, Colleano yelling "Ole!" and Millman's parrot squawking. Though Albert continued playing he held on to most of his winnings so at the end of the night we all went to another speakeasy Poodles Hannaford knew, one where they served champagne and salmon breakfasts on white linen, which of course Albert paid for. We both came home feeling flushed and happy, and before putting Rajah into his shelter I scrunched my cat's face up and kissed him and said, "He's a genius, that daddy of yours, a natural-born genius!"

  It was eight o'clock in the morning. I took myself a nap that lasted a couple of hours before the parade bugle. Was no jump that night, so Albert and I took it easy and stayed in and played cribbage. Around ten o'clock I said good-night to Rajah and put him in his shelter, and when his sides were rising and falling in a way that was wave-like Albert and I had ourselves some time together, after which I turned myself upside down so the seed might go where it might do some good. By then he'd guessed why I'd become so interested in handstands and yoga, it being a relief he supported my plan. In fact, he held my hand during my inversions, after which he held me. We chatted some, mostly about places we'd like to visit and people we'd like to meet and things we'd like to accomplish. In other words: future stuff. Hopeful stuff. After a bit, my thoughts drifted into nonsense.

  In the middle of the night I woke up with a thirst and reached for the glass of water I kept on my bedside table. I took a sip and looked over at Rajah. Moonlight was sneaking in through the Pullman windows, and some of it caught Rajah's coat and made it gleam a ghostly
orange. Was then I felt it, in that way you feel the presence of something different: taking hold at the back of the neck, tickling hairs, a quiet too quiet.

  I spun around. Albert's side of the bed was empty.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE EX-POLAR BEAR MAN

  Now. THE PROBLEM WITH TELLING THE STORY THIS WAY AND not an old person's way? With telling the story as if time was a straight line, with a beginning and a middle and an end? As if time has itself some sort of plan? As if it has a purpose?

  I'll spell it out for you. You look at that line and you think, Hmmmmm. Needs sprucing up. Hmmmmmmm. Needs decorating. Next thing you know, you're drawing in peaks and valleys so as to give time a meaning it probably doesn't deserve. You're picking out moments on that line and assigning them importance, based solely on what came before or after. Worse yet, you start looking for significance, for an overall reason, and if anything will drive you crazy it's that. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying it's not something you'll ever find.

  Still, you keep looking. You just do. Fact is, you'll do anything to spot it. I look back on the moment I found Albert's side of the bed empty and I can't help but see a peak, everything sloping upward before it and downward from then on. One second prior, I had the best animal act in America. One second after, I was on my way to burning my bridges with the Ringlings and spending five years stuck in a contract saying I was to be "generally useful" and not much else. So you think to yourself, How could so much have happened between those two seconds? How could so much misfortune squeeze itself in? And then, because you're a human being, and you're cursed with a brain the size of a toaster, your mind gets around to the only question that's really worth asking.

  Just whose decision was that?

  Quite frankly, it's enough to make you dizzy. Besides that it's an invitation to gloominess, for the other tendency is to look at that line and see that high mark and paint everything that happened afterwards with the same dark brush. Course, this is inaccurate, for though my star did fall after that one crammed-full space between seconds, there were still plenty of good times after that. There were still plenty of starry nights and warm days and waterhole swims. There were still plenty of real circus days. Moment or no moment, I remained a trouper, and though the hours are long and the conditions miserable, the one thing you can say about circus work is it's long on giddy moments. Hell, Art came along after that moment, and he was the best thing ever happened to me.

  Ooops. There I go again. Nothing like that man's name to get me off track. Fact is, we're still on the topic of Albert Ewing, Ringling accountant, a topic I usually work hard at forgetting. The sad truth is, it didn't take long before Albert burned through his money and my money and money that didn't belong to either one of us until one night in Bridgeport I'd had about enough.

  "Uh-uh," I told him, "no more, the well's gone dry, the bank's closed, your loan officer's retired, you want to gamble till all hours, go ahead. You just aren't doing it with my money."

  "Please, Mabel, be reasonable. The game's with rubes. I'll triple our stake in two hours. Believe me, Mabel, it's the end of our problems. Two hours and I'll get us back in the black, Mabel. My luck's changing I can feel it. Two hours, I promise."

  "I've heard that one before."

  "Mabel, I mean it."

  "No."

  "Mabel, it's for us."

  For a second I looked at him, tempted, for there were nights he'd go out and do what he was promising, coming back flushed with triumph (the only problem being those nights were few and far between). Plus the phrase it's for us was put on earth to make women lose their sense; appeals to our yearning for safety, I suppose, something men learn right around the time their voices deepen.

  "Albert," I finally said, "it's for you and you only."

  With that, he stormed out, slamming the door to make his point. In the middle of the night he finally came back, creeping in, making as little noise as possible, getting in bed all considerate and sheepish. Had he won, he would've come bounding in, waking me and Rajah and recounting every hand and just generally basking in it.

  He didn't ask me for money after that. God knows where he was getting it; I only knew he'd get it and then he'd go out and then he'd lose it. Made me mad as an orangutan, this did, and for a time this contributed to some mightily frenzied nighttime activity, the kind that can take the place of jogging or shadow-boxing. Course, it couldn't last. One night, with Albert slack-lipped and humping, he looked into my eyes and I looked into his eyes and what we saw was enough to make blood ice over. He pulled off and we went to either side of our big bed and that's pretty much where we stayed. I even got in the habit of taking Rajah out of his shelter and letting him lie between us, something Albert didn't object to so long as I washed the sheets.

  Talking went too. I couldn't so much as look at the man without feeling spiteful so I figured it was foolish trying to communicate with him. It even got so I'd take my food out of the Hotel (which was what the Ringlings called their cookhouse) and eat it with Rajah in the Pullman so others wouldn't have their appetites ruined by our frostiness. And if you're wondering why we didn't break it off right then and there its because it was winter and troupers have a long tradition of going a little squirrelly between seasons. All that motionlessness makes us ornery. Though I can't speak for Albert, my game plan was to wait for the next season and see if things improved.

  The arena shows in New York City came a little earlier that year, the beginning of April, if memory serves, most of the stars showing off acts they'd been working up over the winter. That first night, May Wirth did a forward somersault, pretty much a miracle on a cantering mare. Poodles Hannaford somehow got a saddle on the belly of a horse and, arms flailing like a drunkard, rode around at full gallop while clinging to the horse's underbelly (though how he did this without taking a hoof to the head is anybody's guess). Con Colleano did a onearmed stand on a slack wire, once again making the rubes question what is and what is not possible, something people trapped in townie lives need once in a while. Not to be outdone, Lillian Leitzel turned 160 left-arm planges, the rubes starting to count off each one by the time she'd reached 50. To top it all off Alfred Cadona debuted the first quadruple somersault in the history of the trapeze, a feat that wouldn't be copied for decades.

  And what of me? What of Miss Haynie slash Mrs. Aganosticus slash Mrs. Williams slash Mrs. Roth slash Mrs. Ewing? The next night, lying beneath my roaring and rubbing Bengal, I realized the one drawback of working on the greatest circus show ever assembled was that acts went stale fast. When I finally rolled out from under Rajah, my leathers as sticky as midway floss, there was applause you could call mighty. But there weren't screams and there weren't ladies fainting and there weren't children crying.

  A week later we pulled out of Grand Central station, the Ringling show so big it needed a total of four trains to pull all the cars. A giddiness took hold, for each year the routing changed, meaning different towns, different scenery, different people. Different surprises, too: that year a Jack Londoner demonstration was waiting for us in Philadelphia, a lot of angry men, women and children waving placards and shouting. It was something I didn't take too seriously, the idea that circus life is hard on an animal being nothing but dreamt-up bunk and the result of a certain overly privileged segment of society having too much time on its hands. We had a straw house anyway, and when we pulled out of Philadelphia it was like those placards had never been there.

  But the best thing was Albert seemed to settle down and take his job more seriously. He started getting up on time, and he avoided the poker games that went on nonstop outside the workingmen's cars. Instead, he played solitaire, betting against imaginary banks with wooden matches as markers, which I figured wasn't the greatest state of affairs but a damn sight better than losing real money. As a show of thanks I veered closer to the civil end of the spectrum. We started eating together again, and since we were on opposite sides of the table I guess we both figured we might as
well start communicating again.

  At first the conversations were light. Weather, cat talk, gossip about who was screwing who. Then one morning, in Baltimore, my husband slash manager looked up over his coffee and broached the subject needed broaching the most.

  "Mabel. I know things have been rotten but I think I've got this thing under control, I really do, and I know I deserve the way you've been treating me but now that I'm getting better I think we should work on liking each other again."

  I looked at him, letting my eyes say I was unconvinced but willing to hear him out anyway. He spread some marmalade on toast and said, "I have a proposition. The Hagenbeck show is routed an hour away in Annapolis, and I thought we could go see that new mixed act everyone's raving about. Clyde Beatty, I believe, is his name. I thought maybe we could go tonight. Maybe we'd get some ideas for how to steer your act. What do you say?"

  "That's all well and good, Albert, but you might remember I work nights."

  He produced a slight grin. "I spoke with Curley and told him you needed the night off. Professional development. The Argentine will run your Bengals through their act. You've got those cats trained so well I could probably do it. So the only thing the crowd won't see is Rajah but I figure Rajah could use a rest once in a while as well."

  I looked at him, wondering whether I'd be able to tolerate my husband's company for a stretch of several hours, at the same time weighing this against the fact I really was curious to see what kind of an act an ex-polar bear man could come up with and why everyone was yammering about it so. After the matinee, Albert and I got in one of the Ringling automobiles and so we'd be alone Albert did the driving instead of a workingman. We talked most of the way there, Albert saying he'd come to the conclusion his gambling had been caused by work stress and the fact it appealed to his mathematical side and the nervousness caused by us not being able to get in the family way. You have to imagine how Albert talked: laying everything out in such a precise, logical way that after a while you started to feel irrational for not agreeing with everything that came out his mouth. Three-quarters of the way there we stopped at a diner. Over a plate of smothered chicken and peas, I told him if he kept on the straight and narrow maybe we could start acting like husband and wife, the key word being if. Just saying that cheered him so much he whistled and tapped the steering wheel all the way to Annapolis.