Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  “Please,” said Julia, “really, it’s nothing. This kind of thing happens sometimes.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” Mrs. Dellow fussed, “I can’t apologize enough…”

  Theo took control. “No harm done,” he said smoothly, ushering the woman before him toward the dithering girl in the corridor, “none at all. Let’s all just calm down, shall we?”

  “You never enter a room without knocking.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  Theo closed the door on them but they could still be heard.

  “It’s your own fault!”

  “I know.”

  “Making such a fuss! She’s a guest!”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry—”

  They faded away down the stairs.

  Julia grabbed a yellow shawl, threw it ’round her shoulders and sat down on the bed. “That’s made me feel quite strange,” she said. “Shaky.”

  “You must not, you must not let yourself get upset,” he said. “Remember what I told you. Step back. Look on.” He sat down beside her, smiling smugly, but she stood up again immediately and paced up and down the room.

  “I hate it,” she said in a strangled voice, standing by the window. “Hate it!”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t! No one knows.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What a stupid thing for me to say.”

  Her eyes were dry, but she stared at him with a hard look he’d never seen before. Don’t you talk down to me, she thought. The long white curtain, sprigged with violets and pansies, was behind her. Very deliberately, hot and shaking with fury, she turned her face into it, opened her mouth, sank her crazy teeth in and tore with all the clenched might of her jaw. It was thin stuff and ripped loudly. A long ragged rent appeared.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Julia! Oh, no!”

  She burst into tears. “Yes, yes, you always know what to do,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like to frighten people.”

  “Of course not.” Theo got up and stood about uselessly. “Damn it, look at this curtain,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  “You were doing some sewing and your scissors fell against it.”

  “Sometimes I just…” She wiped her face and pulled her shawl close. “I feel horrible,” she said. “Horrible, horrible.”

  “I’ll have to pay her for it,” he said.

  “HORRIBLE.”

  He flinched. “Julia, please, sit down,” he said. “Take it easy this morning. Go back to bed, if you like.”

  “I will,” she said shortly, turning her back on him.

  “Good.”

  He worked on his smile.

  “I’ll tell them to bring you your breakfast.”

  She brushed her hair, embarrassed now, keeping her face vacant. She didn’t know him well enough to lose control.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re not the only one who needs armor sometimes.”

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t know him well enough for this either. “Let me tell you,” he said, speaking quietly, as if someone else was in the room. “If it was possible to die of ridicule, I would have died in childhood.”

  She wanted him to leave. She wanted to go back to bed and have a good long cry, then have breakfast. “It’s not the same,” she said, laying down her brush, turning and eyeing the slightly tousled bed, calling there like a womb.

  “I didn’t say it was.” Theo was at the door, his hand on the handle. “But think, Julia, if every word that came out of your mouth, every move you made, every time you made a point or ventured an opinion or asked a question, you were greeted with absolute and utter ridicule, with laughter. Would you not need armor?”

  “Your cousins,” she said, getting sick of waiting for him to go and climbing into bed anyway, still with the yellow shawl wrapped tightly ’round her shoulders.

  His smile had not faltered.

  “Why were you staying at your uncle’s, Theo?” She closed her eyes and all was calming.

  “I was at school up there,” he said, opening the door, “after my mother died. My uncle thought I needed an education.” His smile lost its glibness.

  “You’re falling asleep,” he said. “It’s been a long journey.”

  But as soon as she was alone, the restlessness returned, and she got up and sat down in front of the mirror and looked at herself. Same old face, following her through life. Now that it was over, she was more sorry for the girl than for herself. Hope she doesn’t get the sack, she thought. She wasn’t like those others, she didn’t mean harm. It must have been a shock. First, she’d have seen the back of my head. Pretty white nightie, black hair. Then the eyes, suddenly, so big and black, and the ape jaw. If they saw more of it, no one would notice, no one would stare or scream or faint. When you see it every day it’s nothing, you’re just Julia, always there, as you were in the Sanchez house. You face them. Hold the head up, meet it all straight on.

  He wasn’t angry, she thought. Rates and Beach would have gone mad about a thing like this.

  She took down the show dress and held it against herself in front of the mirror. Broad brown hairy shoulders. Short thick hairy neck. Full womanly breasts, covered in jet-black down. Why should they not wear pearls?

  She got her sewing kit out of the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  “You won’t stop me,” she told the children gathering in the shadows.

  “What are you doing?” asked Theo, coming in with her chocolate.

  “What I need, Theo,” she said, wide awake, cutting away at the hem, “is something to lie just here,” touching herself on the chest, “something very graceful, of the same color as the bodice.”

  “This is the most wonderful chocolate,” Theo said. “Where do you want it?” He sat down. “Sorry, you were saying?”

  “Just here on the hollow. Something terribly elegant.”

  “Absolutely,” he said, “I’ll sniff something out.”

  “Not just anything,” she said, “I know what I want.”

  “Of course.” Theo had a smile in the way that other people had an eye color. “Isn’t that your show dress?” he asked, realizing what it was she was cutting.

  “I’m making it better.”

  He frowned and smiled at the same time. “I very much hope so.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Will it be ready in time?” He nodded at the heap of cloth on her lap.

  “I think so,” she said, “and if not, I’ll wear the blue.”

  “Ah, yes, the blue,” he said, as if he had the slightest inkling what she was talking about.

  London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, the hairy, the legless, the armless, the noseless, London had seen it all. In the Hall of Ugliness the competition was stiff. But no one had ever seen anything quite like Julia.

  She was the Baboon Lady now, appearing apart from the mass in high style, at a gallery. She was the Grand and Novel Attraction, the Nondescript, the Wonder of the World, a scientific marvel. The little book with the drawing of her on the cover, the one done in New York, showed her poised and carefree, her wondrous, wild hairy head adorned with a headdress of feathers and white roses. Inside, Theo had quoted in full from her certificates: “ ‘Pronounced by the most eminent Naturalists and Physicians to be a true hybrid wherein the nature of woman presides over that of the brute.” He had added: “She is a perfect woman—a rational creature, endowed with speech which no monster has ever possessed.’ ”

  He’d done a marvelous job; the place was mobbed. Like a clerk he’d gathered all the information handed on to him by Rates and Beach, pored over dates, questioned her again about her early memories, which were so vague. The papers had blazoned the story he’d put together, and the
crowds caused hold-ups on Regent Street to get a glimpse of the mysterious veiled figure, as small as a child, who was rushed from the carriage to a side door by her manager while the bobbing hordes were kept at a distance. She had a small dressing room with oak walls and a smell of polish, where she got herself ready, following a practiced routine. First she stripped down to her corset and jewelry, then lightly dusted the cleavage of her large dusky breasts with orris root, so that the heady iris scent would rise into her nostrils as she danced. She put a drop of lemon juice in each eye for the brightness, then dressed. She’d cut her show dress to just below the knee so that she felt like a ballerina. When she’d showed Theo he’d laughed and clapped his hands.

  “Wonderful!” he’d said. “This is exactly what they want. As much of you as possible, Julia.” Her pearl cross lay at the hollow of her throat, and pearls twined through her hair, gleaming on the tight bodice. The dress was cut very wide and low, and she wasn’t sure if she trembled from nerves or the cold on her shoulders. It didn’t matter, because as soon as she stepped out onto the raised platform and the pianist began to play, she knew it would all be fine. A sixth sense told her. She sang “Ah, Perdona al Primo Affetto” and “Voi Che Sapete,” and at the end of each, the audience first drew in a tiny collective breath, held it for a silent moment, then exploded in a riot of applause that needed only fireworks to complete the sense of occasion. She danced the solo from La Sylphide, then went down among them, letting them shake her hand and stroke her whiskers.

  “Miss Pastrana,” they asked her, “are you happy?”

  “I am very happy,” she replied.

  “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “A long time ago, when I was a child in Mexico. That is also where I learned to speak French.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “I’m waiting for the right man.”

  That brought a laugh, with which she went along.

  “None of them were rich enough,” she said.

  Another laugh. And she laughed when a toddler stretched out his arm to her, saying, “Dadda!”

  “Can I touch your hand?”

  “What a beautiful dress!”

  “Miss Pastrana, you’re a lovely singer.”

  “Do you mind being different?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  She returned to the platform and sang one more song, this time with her guitar.

  Good God, this is it, thought Theo, standing with folded arms at the back because he liked to see things from the audience’s perspective, blinking rapidly and smiling like an imbecile. Sweet little thing, a true artiste, the real thing. He could have cried. She was the most extraordinary being that had ever existed on the face of this ridiculous earth. The papers said so. Everyone said so. They wanted to see her, they wanted to meet her, everyone came, the great, the good, the scared, bewitched, bewildered, the willing and unwilling. And they paid.

  Please God, now, let this be my golden coach at last, whispered Theo, raising his eyes to heaven as smiling, clutching the flowers they gave her, she took her third bow.

  Please, this time.

  His career had been down snakes, up ladders, all those years on the road, the dwarfs, the strongman, the knife thrower, the magicians and mind readers, the man with the parakeet orchestra. A hazardous life, hanging around on the fringes of the business while the other side of the family made killings as far west as Iowa. God, wouldn’t he just love to pass them by now, those Westchester cousins, not bother to call, say, sorry, too busy, far too many important people waiting. Tossing him their crumbs. Uncle Ben put in a word with Barnum, and the upshot was the trip to Europe, where he met the Gatti Twins, two brothers from Swansea who juggled with knives and did ridiculous feats of balancing. Up the ladder he’d gone, his big chance, four years, four European tours, till one morning in Leipzig when he woke up with a splitting hangover and there were no Gatti Twins and no money, and he realized with a start that he had no idea what day it was, only that he must have been drinking for a very long time. A period of dream and illness followed. He was imprisoned as a vagrant. He stuck it for a week, then got a letter to his father in New York, and after another couple of weeks funds had been sent, and he went back to the States in shame on his uncle’s money, back to the old house on the Bowery.

  This was where he’d been born, in the back room downstairs, where his mother had been alive, and every room had been full of the show people who came to board. It was in a dire state. Dogs still roamed the stairs and yard, but these were leaner and wilder than those old ones he remembered, and the whole place stank of them. He remembered when the house had always smelled of cooking and drying laundry, when the lobster girls and dog boys had come down for breakfast in the parlor. And he remembered it later when the lobster girls and dog boys had given way to card sharps and fortune-tellers, and it was just him and the old man, and everything was going downhill.

  Now the rooms were empty, and his father was sitting in his vest in the kitchen drinking alternately from a Knickerbocker soda bottle and a bottle of whisky. He’d been addicted to both for years. A massive collection of empties gathered dust on a shelf above the dresser.

  “What the hell have you done to this place?” Theo demanded, summoning all that he’d learned in the years away from home, the voice, the smile, the suave man he’d groomed himself into. “You’ve let the whole thing go.”

  “Look who’s talking,” his father said. “Look at you.”

  A failure.

  Bailed out again. He looked with despair at the filthy walls and the spit in the corners of the old man’s mouth and vowed again: I will not go down. He’d vowed before. No more pillar-to-post up and down the West Coast, he’d said, no more being small and slight and looking young and being overlooked and disrespected and always getting the shitty jobs, roustabout, lackey, ticket man. He’d vowed it and look where he’d ended up. In jail. But not this time. He’d worked too hard for that. No more poor Theo. I’m as good as the lot of you. I’ll show them.

  I showed them, he thought, applauding wildly in the wings. I did, I showed them.

  Barnum was in town with Tom Thumb. Theo met him in the lobby of Arthur’s, where he’d been buttering up a contact about a possible German tour.

  “Theo!” came the moneyed voice, though the money wasn’t flowing so well these days, or so he’d heard.

  “Hello, Taylor.” Looking his age, thought Theo. Jowls resting on his collar.

  Barnum lodged his thumbs behind his wide lapels. “Have I or have I not been hearing things about you?”

  “I’m damn sure you have,” said Theo.

  “And the hairy maiden? She’s well, I hope?”

  “Very well.”

  “Have you met Van Hare, Lent?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  Van Hare was a craggy circus man with long hair and a huge mustache. “Horses,” he said lugubriously, as if it were his first name. “Are you the Lent who’s in the elephant line?”

  “That’s his namesake,” Barnum said. “Damn inconvenient, two Lents in one business. You should change your name, Theo.”

  Theo scowled. “Damned if I’m changing my name,” he said.

  “It’s business,” Barnum said, “not a test of family pride. You don’t need people confusing you with someone else.”

  Theo smiled, slightly strained. “I’m not elephants,” he told Van Hare. “That’s another branch of the family.”

  “The successful branch,” added Barnum with a laugh and a hand placed on Theo’s shoulder to show it was all in fun. “Theo was a twig somewhere down the tree. Isn’t that so, Lent? But not anymore.”

  Theo blushed. “I manage Miss Julia Pastrana,” he said.

  Van Hare was impressed. You could see it in his eyes, that look they got when they had to meet her. But he merely nodded. Jealous. Ha! Theo’s smile widened. A feeling of madcap joy rose in his breast. They have nothing I want, he realized. But they
want to see her. They’re desperate to. So he asked after General Tom Thumb, and scarcely waiting for an answer, graciously invited both Barnum and Van Hare to call upon Miss Julia the next afternoon at the hotel, and they happily accepted and all parted on good terms.

  Mrs. Dellow led them to the lounge. “Mr. Lent will be along in a moment,” she said, “if you would care to wait. Miss Pastrana will receive you. Oh, sir, she’s such a nice lady! Very sweet-natured.”

  Julia was by the window, a small woman in an elegant gray gown with lace at the throat and wrists, and a lace cap trimmed with pale blue ribbons. Her veil was blue as well, multilayered and shaded and very pretty, covering her entire face so that no more than a hint of eyeshine could be discerned through it. She came forward and offered a small gloved hand.

  “Mr. Barnum, I’m delighted,” she said.

  Barnum beamed, took her hand and held onto it. She has a big head, he thought. “The pleasure is all mine, my dear Miss Pastrana. May I introduce my good friend and colleague, Mr. Van Hare.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Van Hare.”

  “I am well, thank you, miss. And you?”

  “I’m very well too. Thank you.”

  Gently, she disengaged her hand from Barnum’s hold and gave it to Van Hare, who shook it solemnly. “Do sit down, gentlemen,” she said. But then Theo came in all smiles, and there were more pleasantries and the brisk opening of a bottle of bourbon.

  “No, no,” said Barnum, with a wave of the hand.

  “Will you take lemonade, sir?” asked Julia.

  “Lemonade would be most welcome.”

  “Of course!” Theo yanked on the bell pull.

  She sat very still and straight in her chair with her hands crossed in her lap studying her visitors from beneath the veil. Barnum was a grand sort of man with an air of gravitas, richly dressed, with curly hair receding from his face. Van Hare looked like an artist. She could see him in a smock in front of an easel. A maid appeared, the one who’d screamed.

  “Lemonade please, Marjorie,” Theo said. He got on first-name terms with everyone, fast. “Lemonade for Mr. Barnum.”