Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

Cato got down.

  “I could play this once,” Madame Soulie said, playing a little faster.

  Cato lifted up his long skinny arms and swayed.

  “I will miss you, Cato,” Julia said.

  Duende, she thought. Goblin. I’m the loup-garou. Jonsy’s a ghost. Arm in arm against a full moon sky, walking with the devil baby. “Dear little duende,” she said, and was struck with a momentary sense of belonging.

  Rose was reading about an island in Mexico, the last resting place of hundreds of dolls.

  “Trouble is,” said Laurie, “for you it’d be like going to Battersea Dogs’ Home. You’d want to bring them all home with you.”

  Adam, hovering uneasily about with a slightly sneery look on his face, was wondering if he should leave. He’d been drinking tea and talking to her about M. R. James when Laurie just walked in and slobbed down with her on the sofa, taking over. Laurie wore an emerald green velvet waistcoat over a naked brown torso, and his shoulders and arms, packed with veiny muscle, were tattooed to the wrist with swirly vines and plants and birds. There was an unsavory reek about him, a whiff of the lower echelons of the entertainment industry, of amusement arcade backrooms.

  “No,” said Rose, “I’d leave them there. They’re happy.”

  “Rose,” said Laurie, “believes a lost sock misses its partner and weeps bitter tears for it.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Of course I don’t believe it literally,” she said. “Don’t try and make me look like an idiot.”

  “Don’t try and make her look like an idiot, Laurie,” Adam repeated. He didn’t know why. It came out sounding nasty.

  “Will you all stop taking the piss?” she said, sitting up and throwing the magazine down onto the rug. “Anyone wants to take the piss has to get out of my room.”

  “It’s OK, Rose,” Laurie said, “we all know you’re mad, but we forgive you.”

  Adam picked up the magazine. “Obviously this is where Tattoo should be,” he said, looking at the pictures. The dolls were weirdly beautiful. Rose lay back against Laurie, whose large gnarly-knuckled hand slid ’round under her waist and began lazily kneading her stomach under her crumpled blue shirt.

  “Catch you later,” Adam mumbled, went downstairs and grabbed his ancient Nikon, wandered out into the street and roamed about in the direction of the park. Every now and then he’d stop to take a moody shot of a pigeon or an empty bench. It was a sunny day, dust from the traffic got in his throat. He ambled along, going nowhere in particular, got bored and went back home, lay down with closed eyes listening to the radio still playing the same random pop music it had been playing to his empty room all afternoon. He lived in a mess of squashed paint tubes and discarded rags. Some days he’d get up and dressed and lie back down on his bed, doing nothing fiercely and tremulously till it was time to go to sleep again. After a while he drifted to sleep, drifted out again, drifted back upstairs. Laurie had gone. She was sitting in the middle of all her things. It was getting worse; the stuff was making the room too small.

  “Grab yourself a glass,” she said. She’d opened a bottle of wine. He lay down on the floor. She fiddled about with some embroidery for one of her frames. A J. J. Cale album played softly. For a long time he stared at the ceiling.

  “You don’t really like him, do you?” he said.

  “Let it go, Ad.”

  “His breath stinks.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “He’s an ugly fucker.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rose put down the embroidery, picked up her glass, took a long drink and poured herself another. Closed her eyes. God, it was tiring. Living. Knocking about the world alone, bloody men, always wanting more. She didn’t want an us. Family stuff. Her own was far-flung and had never been demonstrative. She’d spent her teens and twenties falling in and out of love with a series of boys and men. Sometimes she counted them off in her head. They all ended. Feelings changed, nothing was certain, everything was threatened.

  “He’s got lumps on his face,” said Adam.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “OK, OK, OK.” Long-suffering, he got up and walked ’round the room looking at stuff. The whole of the fireplace wall was now covered halfway to the ceiling with shelves she’d made out of bricks and breeze-blocks and planks of wood. You could imagine a little lift man going up and down. First floor: shells, plectrums, combs with missing teeth. Second floor: twigs and branches, random bits of wood. Third floor: odd playing cards, buckles, matchboxes, bobbins of colored cotton. Fourth: things babies throw out of buggies and prams—a little cloth star, a rattle, a mouse with a baby-gnawed nose. Fifth, top: bottles—Tiger Sauce, La Fée Absinthe, Stone’s Ginger Wine, blue, green and brown bottles all standing together, a Manhattan of differing heights. Everything had been touched a million times.

  “Sit down, Ad,” she said. “You’re like a kid with worms.”

  He sat down, picked up the magazine and looked at the pictures of the island. “Look at us, we’re wasting time,” he said. “Me and you, Rosie. Let’s go mad. Let’s go to Mexico. Let’s go to your weird island.”

  She looked up and smiled. “One day,” she said, “if you’re very, very good.”

  Is This the Ugliest Woman in the World?

  Miss Julia Pastrana is surely the most remarkable creature ever to have graced a stage in this city of excess, far surpassing any of the attractions currently on show at Mr. Barnum’s American Museum just a couple of blocks away. She has the appearance of an ape but dances like Lola Montez and sings pretty Spanish folk songs in a very pleasant mezzo-soprano while sometimes accompanying herself on the guitar.

  The newspaper lay open on a pouf by her feet. It’s not that I have a particularly beautiful voice, she thought. It’s that they’re surprised I have any voice at all that isn’t a grunt or a howl.

  Wearing scarlet boots, a tight-fitting skirt, and silk panty hose, Pastrana sang an Irish melody—“The Last Rose of Summer”—and danced a bolero, looking every bit like the famed ballerina Fanny Elssler and displaying “a symmetry” that would make the most successful ballet dancers envious.

  Three nights on Broadway at the Gothic Hall, a big old palace covered in tarpaulin, the canvas a riotous mishmash of color. Sea monsters, a man with two heads, a boy pierced with pins, serpents and Cyclops and a scorpion with a woman’s face. In the corners, scenes from cannibal life. And now her picture was up there too, the head wild and fierce, the body a ballerina.

  The front stoop of the rooming house was full all day with people waiting, hoping for a glimpse. She heard them, laughing and fooling around, crossing the road to the coffee booth, but she didn’t dare look out. “Think about it, Julia,” Rates said. “Who’s fool enough to pay good money if he can just run down here and take a look for nothing? Guard your mystery.”

  When this was over, they were for Philadelphia.

  “Or we are for Philadelphia,” Myrtle said, laying out the cards for solitaire. “I don’t know about you, Julia. You know he’s had an offer?”

  “Delia told me.”

  They were in the pink parlor on the third floor, a room full of faded brocade and walls crammed with pictures and playbills of all the show people who’d ever stayed there. Julia was at the window, behind the curtain so she couldn’t be seen, looking down at the coffee booth across the street. A young man leaned against it with a bored air. Myrtle tossed one of her endless thin cigars into the air with her foot and caught it between her lips. “Look out for yourself,” she said.

  “I’m not a slave,” said Julia. “He can’t sell me.”

  Myrtle looked thoughtfully at her, the cigar drooping on her lip. “Can’t he?”

  “Not unless I want to be sold.” Julia turned from the window and sat down opposite Myrtle. “Can I have one of those?” she said.

  “Sure.” Myrtle gave her a cigar. “Mine’s gone out. Pass me a spill.”

  “I want to travel,” Julia said, pluck
ing a spill from a pot on the mantelpiece and lighting it at the fire.

  “Well, you’ll surely do that. They’re all out there, waving their big bucks, you could have your pick of them.”

  “I don’t want to stay with Rates,” Julia said. “Do you?” She lit both their cigars.

  “For a time, I suppose.” Myrtle drew on the cigar, opened her lips and held the smoke in the bowl of her mouth. “He’s not too bad,” she said, letting it out slowly, “wears thin, travel, believe me. I’ve been on the road since I was nine,” leaning down, passing the cigar to her toes. “Been all over the West, up to Alaska, up in the snows, all over the place.”

  “I want to go everywhere,” Julia said. “I want to go all over the world.” She shivered. “I’m cold. I’m getting a shawl. Do you want yours?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been in one place,” said Julia, “all my life.”

  “Just look out for yourself, that’s all I’m saying.” Myrtle shifted a card from one line to the next.

  “I’m going to get my shawl.” Julia ran down quickly. Coming back with the shawl around her shoulders she saw Rates’s door at the end of the passage and thought, I’ll go there now and talk to him, no more of this drifting, put her hand in the pocket of her dress and closed it on the gris-gris bag. Courage and luck, the Doctor said. Be brave.

  “Julia!” said Rates, as if delighted, “I was just about to…”

  “Mr. Rates,” she said, with no idea what to say, “what are your plans?”

  “My plans, Julia?”

  “Someone wants to buy me.”

  “Everyone wants you!” Rates laughed, came out into the passage and pulled his door behind him. “Barnum! Barnum sent someone! Soon sent him packing. Didn’t come himself, you note. Sent someone.”

  “So,” she said, “am I to come to Philadelphia with the others?”

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Rates,” she said, “I haven’t really thought any further ahead than this moment. And now suddenly, I don’t know why, but I’m feeling nervous.”

  “No need for that!” Rates smiled down at her. “No need to rush into anything. Have the girls been talking?” His face took on concern. “I’m sorry, Julia, perhaps I should have mentioned it, but I didn’t want to bother you with the details.”

  “But Mr. Rates,” she said, “I need to know what’s happening.”

  “The truth is,” said Rates, all business, “I’ve had three or four offers and I’m weighing them up, settling in my mind which is the best for everybody all ’round. But, more to the point…”

  “I don’t want to go with just anyone,” she said.

  “Of course not!” Rates was shocked. “What are you worrying about, Julia?”

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “Associates. I don’t deal with anyone shady, as you know.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “I promise,” Rates said firmly. “I’ll tell you everything from now on. The truth is there’s nothing to tell right now, at least not as far as that’s concerned. But,” and he bounced eagerly on the balls of his feet, “there is something very interesting, very interesting indeed. I’ve had a request from one of the most distinguished medical men of the age.”

  Julia’s eyes went blank.

  “Desperate to see you. Desperate.”

  She’d seen a few medical men as a child. They’d studied her teeth, peered down her throat and down her ears, made her lie down and close her eyes and sing a little song to try and make her forget where they were poking their fingers. But that had been a long time ago. “I suppose I’ll have to see him,” she said, dully resigned, “him or someone else. I know. They’ll say I’m a fake otherwise, won’t they?”

  “You must realize, Julia,” he said. “Oh, it’s a bore, I know, but the medical establishment will inevitably take an interest.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyway, I’ve spoken to this Dr. Mott. He’s the best. Very top of the tree. Extremely hard to get to see him normally but he’s made a space for us. Tomorrow, three sharp.”

  She must have looked worried because he patted her on the shoulder encouragingly. “Sooner the better!” he said briskly. “Get it over with.”

  When she returned to the pink parlor, Delia was there, doing Myrtle’s hair. “How much is he paying Rates?” she asked when Julia told them about the doctor.

  “I’ve told her,” said Myrtle, “time and again. You get something out of it for yourself. You ask how much he’s getting for it. You want your cut.”

  “He’s not getting anything,” said Julia.

  “Ha!” Delia gave a little shriek. “He says!”

  Myrtle just snorted.

  They drove from the Bowery to Madison Avenue, where Dr. Mott lived and had his practice. Through the veil, through the coach window, she watched the great show of the streets. New York made New Orleans seem quaint. It was like an ant’s nest nudged by a foot, the clanging of the omnibuses endless and deafening, the noise of children, beggars, hawkers. This was really The World, whatever that was. Slap center of the Big Adventure. By night, coming and going between the theater and the rooming house, the city had seemed smaller, enclosed by darkness. Daytime revealed its colors, somber for the most part, slashed with brightness here and there. The farther they traveled, the grander it got. Great buildings rose up like mammoths.

  “Shall we walk a little coming back?” she suggested.

  Rates raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “Oh, I don’t think so, Julia.”

  “It was fine in New Orleans. With my veil.”

  “This is a rough city,” Rates said. “Now, if my memory serves me—yes—it’s just along here…”

  She kept her veil on till she was in the inner room, which was almost filled by the doctor’s enormous desk. Dr. Mott, still holding a white towel, emerged from a side room where he’d been washing his hands. “Miss Pastrana,” he said, tossing it aside onto a windowsill and coming toward her with his hand outstretched. “I am delighted.” He showed no surprise, having seen her twice already on the stage.

  “How do you do,” said Julia, taking his hand and smiling. Rates returned to the waiting room to read the newspaper he’d brought with him, and Julia took off her coat. She’d rather have seen someone older and plainer. Mott was handsome, young but already distinguished. On his desk was a framed picture of himself with his wife and little boy.

  “Come,” he said, ushering her deferentially before him into the room next door. There was a high narrow bed, a chair, a screen and a sideboard laid out neatly with medical implements she didn’t dare look at.

  “You’ll find a gown behind the screen,” he said.

  He was thorough. He got the nasty bits out of the way first. She closed her eyes and did what she always did, what Solana had told her to do. Said a prayer. Sang a song in her head. After that he paid particular attention to her teeth and ears, turned her eyelids inside out, lifted her tongue and looked under it, measured every part of her meticulously from her toes to the circumference of her head, inspected the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet closely, rang bells behind her head and asked if she could hear them.

  “I’m told you know your letters,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “That’s excellent.” His eyebrows went up. “Mr. Rates tells me you enjoy reading novels?”

  “I do,” she said, “very much so.”

  “Good, very good. Now—starting with the top line, if you please—”

  She could read all but the bottom line.

  “Very good indeed,” Dr. Mott said. “And tell me—what do you like to read?”

  “Oh,” she said, “whatever I can get hold of. I like The Linwoods, The Wide, Wide World. And The Curse of…”

  The doctor smiled and scratched his whiskers. “Very, very good indeed,” he said, more to himself than her.

  Then it was over and they were back in the carriage, a
nd it was only when she saw the next show pamphlet that she read what Dr. Mott had said about her: “She is a Semi-Human Indian, a perfect woman, a rational creature endowed with speech which no monster has ever possessed, yet she is Hybrid, wherein the nature of woman predominates over the brute—the Ourang Outang.”

  Ourang-outang? In Mexico?

  A long time ago, the big boys talking over her head as if she couldn’t understand:

  “Jonas Ochoa said she isn’t human.”

  “What does Jonas Ochoa know? Did you tell him?”

  “Of course I did. She’s Indian, I said. She’s a Digger. He says he’s never seen a Digger like that before.”

  “You tell him what Papá says. She’s just like us only with hair.”

  “Then he says that’s what I mean, the hair, he says, human beings don’t have hair. Not like that, they don’t. Monkeys do. Bears do. Wolves do, dogs do. But not human beings. Not like that.”

  “He has a point.”

  Rates read aloud from a newspaper article to the man sitting across from him in the pink parlor.

  “ ‘This mysterious animal is one of the most extraordinary beings of the present day…’—you see, he knows what he’s about, the man’s a giant in his field,” gesturing toward a large folder that lay on the low table between them, “and his examination was completely thorough. I have it here, in writing—” Rates peered down short-sightedly at the newspaper. “His medical opinion is that she is the result of the pairing of a human being with a simian. See! ‘She has features in common with the ourang-outang…’ ”

  “Better make your mind up,” the other man said, a big-boned, yellow-haired showman with a broken nose. “You’re calling her the Bear Woman, and he’s saying she’s a monkey. She can’t be both.”

  “Let’s keep it just this side of credibility, shall we?” said Rates with a lofty smile. “There are bears in those mountains but I never heard of an ape in Mexico.”

  “Of course there are,” said the blond man. “There’s monkeys.”

  “But no large apes.”