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

by Robert Hough

  Seemed my husband was living in a hotel above a betting parlour in Cincinnati, Ohio. He no longer had anything to do with circuses, and was now going by the name Al Driven.

  (Me: So how's the little bastard?

  The Pinkerton's agent, a small mountain of a man with tiny eyes and a nose flattened to one side and ears like flaps of romaine lettuce and a chin as big as a lunchpail: Hmmmmmmm.... Not so hot.)

  There was one other critical piece of information. Albert would grant me a divorce if I gave him a cheque for $1,000. Hearing this, my thought was no blessed way, Albert Ewing being a sneaky little cheat, and if anyone was going to get a thousand dollars it by all rights should be me, considering all the grief and embarrassment his shenanigans had caused me. Truth be known, I was getting all worked up, though when I looked over at Art he gave me a soft, raised-eyebrow expression that could've only meant one thing.

  Consider it sideways, darling.

  With that finally settled, Art sat down and got a nib and ink and drew himself up an invitation, one festooned with curlicues and hearts and cupids firing arrows at one another.

  "Art," I said, "who're we going to send the invitations to? Neither one of us has much in the way of family, and we're not exactly crawling with friends here on the show."

  This made him puzzle. But you could tell he was looking for solutions instead of reasons to have a drink or a hand of cards, and if you want a reason for my loving Art Rooney that could be it right there. After a few seconds, his eyes brightened.

  "The workingmen," he said, and it was the sort of thought that makes you recoil before the reasonableness of it sinks in.

  I said, "Well, they're thieving and unwashed and most of them are on the run from something, but it's true they're the only ones I seem to see eye to eye with these days. Plus you're an ex-workingman so it seems fitting. We'll give them a ham-and-potato-salad buffet. They'll like that."

  It was settled. I'd become Mrs. Art Rooney on Friday, November 20, in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the guests in rented suits and too-tight shoes and no doubt trying to control their shakes. No one had ever had a wedding like that, which I suppose is why the idea had occurred to Art. There'd be lilies of the valley and streamers and spruce garlands. Sounded perfect. I couldn't wait. I went down to the menage and told Rajah, who took the news about as well as could be expected from a cat gone irascible with age and jealousy.

  That fall, the circus wound its way up through the southern states toward the last dates in Virginia. By the time we hit the Carolinas it was getting cool during the evenings, the flyers warming their hands over Bunsen heaters so they wouldn't miss a pass due to numbness. I started working my tigers again, letting them in the ring and practising their old tricks, which should tell you something about my mood in general. Seems life travels in ups and in downs and this was an up, for way down south in Florida, in the basement of a mansion called House of John, one of the richest men in America was opening himself a package.

  It's true I wasn't there. It's also true I didn't know the man well, except to say whenever he came in contact with yours truly my life either got a hundred times better or a hundred times worse. But with his riches came fame, and with fame came a general broadcasting of the way he lived. So I can imagine. I can picture how it happened.

  His day starts at ten in the evening. He has a breakfast of cornedbeef hash and eggs washed down with tumblers of Old Curio. Then he takes his meetings, which goes to show if you're one of the ten richest men in America you can schedule a meeting for midnight in a town didn't exist ten years earlier and still expect people to show up. While his wife sleeps his servants stay up, for someone has to serve him sherry glasses filled with the German schnapps he has bootleggers drop in the bay outside his home.

  Throughout the night, he works and he broods and he wishes, vaguely, with no real conviction, that he could take a vacation from being John Ringling. Decisions, are the root of it. Decisions, decisions, decisions-if only they'd stop coming for one blessed minute. Railroads, oil fields, stocks and bonds, real estate, an art collection worth millions, the circus-all of it needs tending. While it's true he'd once felt energized every time he dashed off his signature, that was back when there'd been five of them and an empire a fraction of the size.

  So he wanders. Thinks. Broods. Admires his art. Watches the sun rise from the cliffs outside his mansion. If he comes across a servant, his manner changes and he's John Ringling again, smiling and saying good-evening and maybe having a little conversation about nothing. The evening wears on. The whole time he fights the urge to get on a boat bound for Europe in the morning, a place where demands and decisions have a tougher time finding him, though in the end he doesn't, for he's smart enough to know the thing that's chasing him is the same thing chasing all successful men, that being the fear that in some elementary way he isn't good enough. So he drinks. He sighs. He wishes the world weren't so damn beautiful all the time. In his spare moments he attends to business matters in the same way a gun treats a scatter of shot-without order, reason or even a care about the results. When something occurs to him, he scribbles his wishes on a little flip-over notepad he keeps in the breast pocket of his robe. Come 9:00 a.m. he hands off the day's pages to a handler, whose job it is to make sense of the scrawl and dispose of the more lunatic ideas.

  Then, to his private room in the cellar, where John Ringling pours the first of twelve pints of German lager he has every morning. His mail is brought there, in a pile next to his desk, thousands of letters and bills and demands and decisions. Much of it he ignores, some of it he answers, the bulk he sends straight to lawyers or accountants. This morning there's a package, wrapped in string and brown paper, near the top of the mound, tweaking his curiosity. The big man tries to unwrap the package with his fat, jointless fingers, in his drunkenness finding it hard to manage the tightly wrapped string. A flash of frustration. He grabs a letter opener, the one with the handle made from Kenyan ebony and finely honed Pennsylvanian steel, and jerkily rips the package open.

  It is: an album of some kind. Mabel Stark. Hmmmm, name sounds familiar, though he can't remember from where. Opens the pages. A tiger woman of some sort and not a bad-looking one at that, what with those schoolgirl locks and those tight leather bodysuits. Got to keep the fathers interested though what I wouldn't give for a good old-fashioned flat-out cooch. Hmmmmmmmm. Stark. Stark, Stark, Stark. Of course! Mabel Stark-little blond wisp of a thing, backwoods way of talking, had a good wrestling act and if I'm not mistaken a bit with a jaguar. Hmmmmmmm. Where did I see her? What show was that? Broke the cats herself, if I'm not mistaken. Jesus, Mabel Stark. Now there's a name from the past.

  Wonder whatever happened to her?

  Seems John Ringling got on the telephone and had a conversation with his circus manager, Charles Curley. It also seems John Ringling flew into a rage when told I already belonged to his circus and that I'd been demoted to riding High School, despite it being a decision he himself had made. By the time Charles Curley called me to the ticket office, he looked tired and fed up, a way people often looked when dealing with John Ringling.

  "Mabel," he said, "have a seat."

  Curley rubbed his temples. "I've been on the phone all morning, making some arrangements."

  Here he paused, giving no indication whether those arrangements were for my benefit or detriment. Could've been either. His fingertips moved to his eyes, and they had a good pressing as well. He spoke through his hands.

  "Next season you'll switch to the Robinson show. He's got eight tigers that are going to need a new trainer come July. Rajah gone rogue yet?"

  "Uhhhh ... no. No sir. Not at all."

  "Then he's going with you. The Ringling cats, too."

  I left feeling tingly. Found Art in the menage, where he was singing a lullaby to a chimp who'd taken to tearing at sleeves through the cage bars. Art noticed me and nodded, still in mid-song.

  I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around him, settling the
side of my face into flannel. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and a picture came and what I saw was ...

  Well.

  Was pleasing.

  One week prior to season end, on a day off, with the trains parked in a rail yard outside Columbia, Art returned, whistling, to our Pullman suite. He had with him a cardboard box, which he plopped on our fold-down table. Then he handed me a pair of scissors and said, "Take a look, Mabel."

  I snipped the string holding the box flaps and pulled out one of the invitations. Art's fancy writing was printed, embossed and silver, on linen paper the colour of creme fraiche. The envelope closed by slipping the pointed tip of the upper flap into a little silver sleeve built into the lower flap.

  "Art," I said, "how many of these things have you made?"

  "How many workingmen are there?"

  "About six hundred."

  He grinned, and I had my answer. We spent the rest of that afternoon slipping invitations inside envelopes, which at first was giggly work but after a bit became chore-like, and a bit later still downright onerous: I remember my hand muscles getting sore and my finger joints feeling like they'd been tromped on. Throughout, Art kept me entertained with songs from that time, like "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and "I Found a Million-Dollar Baby in the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store," which he sang in a voice more than capable of carrying a tune. Finally we finished, and I asked when he planned on handing them all out.

  "No time like the present. Got to strike when the iron's hot. Never leave for tomorrow what you can do today. Carpe diem, as the Romans said."

  In other words, we headed off to the sections of train containing the workingmen cars. They were at the rear of the fourth section, meaning it was a bit of a walk, and throughout I couldn't help smiling at the ridiculousness of it all. "I know you suggested we have a hamand-potato salad buffet," Art was saying, "but I think maybe we better get some chicken slices as well. Not everyone likes ham because of the salt. And macaroni salad. Lord love a duck but sometimes I like a nice helping of macaroni salad. Of course, if you're going to have macaroni salad there's no point going without a vat of gherkins...."

  On and on he went, regaling me with the finer points of buffet eating, and I was just about to impart my feelings on devilled eggs when we reached the workingmen compartments. As always, most were sitting around outside, playing cards on overturned trunks, the makeup of their foursomes indicating the division that existed within their trains. There were the Negro workingmen, most of whom drove stakes or otherwise helped with the big top. These were the ones I felt the most sorry for, seeing as how their only problem was the fact they were poor and southern and saddled with the wrong skin colour for that particular time in America. The rest were white workingmen, who were groomers or train builders or maintenance men or cookhouse help. Unlike the Negro workingmen, who were beaten down more than anything, the white workingmen seemed to suffer from a smorgasbord of afflictions, the most common ones being alcoholism, craziness, syphlitic diseases or criminal obsession, a good many of them suffering from all four.

  When fights broke out, it was generally between these two groups, for when misery wells up and makes men hunt for an excuse to fight, a difference in skin tone works about as well as anything. The one thing they all had in common was the fact they were taken advantage of. Because circus workingmen weren't generally allowed in local bars, and wouldn't've had the time to go drinking if they were, management sold them beers in the blue car against future wages. The theory here was by the time payday rolled around, their money would already be spent, and a broke workingman was far less likely to run off than a workingman with two weeks' worth of breathing room jangling in his pockets. On top of it all, they were looked down upon, the common wisdom being they deserved their lot seeing as how they were lacking in imagination. Course, this was something I never held against them, for it's always been my belief that when your imagination can't so much as picture a way out it's probably better just to shut the damn thing off altogether.

  So.

  Art took four envelopes out of our box of invitations and headed toward the nearest group of card players. All shuffling and dealing and betting immediately halted, for if a boss or performer approached a workingmen it generally meant one of two things. Either the workingman in question was going to have to do something hard and distasteful-hosing the latrine cars, for example-or he'd been caught out doing something wrong, and believe me when I say that damn Mabel Ringling had rules forbidding every last workingman pleasure, from fighting right on down to stealing shirts off townie clotheslines. Even gambling was technically against the rules, though seeing as the workingmen bosses all partook themselves, the rule generally went unenforced. Still, every once in a while Mr. John's wife would come down and there'd be a sacrificial lamb, which explained why all four card players went wide-eyed and stiff when the menage boss approached. Their body language would've even been funny had it not indicated their defeated stations in life the closer he got, the more they angled their shoulders away from his general direction, so that by the time he reached their overturned crate at least two of them looked like they were leaning into a curve.

  "Good morning, fellas," Art said, beaming.

  "Morning," a few of them grumbled, fearing the worst, those fears half confirmed and half not when Art dropped those funnylooking envelopes in front of each one of them. For a time the cards just stayed there, untouched, the four men in a clear state of agitation tinged with curiosity. I watched them mull over possibilities. Meanwhile, Art confused them by smiling and not offering up any clues. Finally, and I mean finally, one of the workingmen reached out. I remember his nails were dirty, and a scar ran crossways over the tendons and veins on the back of his hand. He took the envelope, opened it and pulled out what was inside. He turned it over a few times before narrowing his eyes and spelling out the words. Judging by the movement of his eyes and lips, he read it a second time and then a third time for good measure. Was then a look of relief passed over his features, though you could tell he didn't want to surrender to it totally in case he'd somehow gotten the meaning wrong during all those read-throughs.

  "What is it?" said one of the others.

  The workingman looked up at Art, and then back to the card, and then up at Art again, before letting the corners of his mouth creep up toward his eyes. Then he looked at the others.

  "I think," he said, "we're going to a damn weddin'!"

  On November 17, 1926, the Ringling Brothers show pulled out of its last date, in Richmond, Virginia. Art and I skipped the last-night party, preferring to stay in, reading books and talking. The next day, the trains pulled into winter quarters. While normally the workingmen would've scattered to all four corners of the country, this time they hung around, camping down by the rail tracks, sleeping under railway bridges, having three-day-long games of poker, scurrying about parts of the city the clean and respectable citizenry of Bridgeport probably didn't know existed.

  Three days later, on November 20, I woke up in my Pullman suite, where I'd spent the night not with my fiance but with my grumpy old cat, Rajah. Upon waking, I rubbed his muzzle and tickled his underbelly, which normally would've brought him awake happy to be alive. Instead, he burped a cloud of meat-smelling air in my face and growled and moved closer to the edge of the bed, all of which I took to mean he was not in any way pleased with what I was about to do that day.

  The wedding was at eleven. I spent the morning relaxing and sipping coffee and getting into my wedding suit, gowns being something I'd never been a fan of, seeing as they're fussy and expensive and not even comfortable to sit down in. Still, was a lovely few hours, for it was the first of my five weddings in which I hadn't misgivings beforehand, something I'd always made the mistake of attributing to nerves. Around 10:30 my cage boy, Bailey, knocked; he was wearing a brown suit that strained at the buttons, and his hair was slicked back over the top of his head.

  "Morning, Bailey," I said, to which he smiled and backed away and proudly ges
tured at a car he'd gotten somewhere. I got in, and he drove me to a community hall Art had rented downtown, Art's dream of being married in a church having died when we found out how much it cost to rent a church large enough to seat every workingman on the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. Instead we were being married in a windowless cube of a building, with clapboard walls and a flat roof, the words Polish Welders Association Hall splashed across the front.

  I was about to open my car door when Bailey barked, "I'll do it!"

  I leaned back and smiled and said, "All right, Bailey. You just go ahead." He turned the car off, staying put while it rocked and jiggled, after which he hustled over to my side of the car as fast as he was able. Beaming, he took my arm, and walked me to the front door of the hall, where we stood waiting till we heard organ music, though in this case it wasn't organ music but the groaning breathiness of a calliope.

  "Are you ready?" he asked.

  "I am at that," I answered, after which we walked on in, causing six hundred heads to turn. Jesus, I muttered under my breath, and if I'm not mistaken I heard Bailey mutter something similiar, for each and every one of those poor workingmen had somehow managed to get himself into a jacket and tie. As I scanned the room, I saw jackets with frayed lapels, with unravelled stitching, with buttons missing, with stains as big as squirrels, with pockets torn clear off. I saw jackets straining over shoulders clearly too big, and I saw jackets draping off shoulders way too spindly. I even saw nice jackets, for there was one table with workingmen dressed in fine wool suits, meaning a men's clothing store had probably been broken into the night before.