Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Hortense was well along in her pregnancy. She and Edward had made a decision to stay put in Hermosillo until the baby was born.

  Hummingbirds were everywhere in this place, more than were to be found anywhere else in the world, or so the locals boasted. That was especially true in the fall, and it was the fall now. Wherever in the town there were patches of flowers, there were also hummingbirds. They were all the colors of a jewelry maker’s stones and metals: lapis lazuli, sapphire, ruby, opal, turquoise, platinum, silver, and gold.

  Edward marveled at how, as though they were fastened to invisible strings, the birds could hover in one place in thin air for what seemed just as long as they pleased. He could not believe his eyes as the birds sipped nectar from the blossoms with their long beaks, then backed out of the flowers and flew away backward. Backward!

  The locals did not call the tiny birds hummingbirds. They called them by their Spanish name, colibríes. Edward and Hortense called them colibríes, too, though neither was of Mexican descent. Both had been born in Mexico, but Edward’s forebears were from Scotland; Hortense’s were from France.

  Always when Edward watched the hummingbirds, Victoria was on his lap. She had auburn hair and eyes the color of violets.

  “Oh, if any man could do what these birds can do,” Edward would say to little Victoria, “there would be no place on earth where his name was not revered.”

  But, of course, no man had ever been born that could defy gravity the way the colibríes did. Not yet anyway.

  The spectacles the hummingbirds staged at dusk may have put Edward in mind of a circus where all the performers were costumed in richly colored satins and sequins. Circuses were something he knew about. He himself was the operator of a traveling, tented show.

  Like a mother who buys an oversize suit for a young son in a belief the boy will get two or three years of churchgoing out of it, Edward, from the start, gave his circus a title that he was sure it would eventually grow into: “Gran Circo Codona—Primero en Su Clase.”

  It was a fine circus. It really was. But at its start, the Gran Circo Codona—Primero en Su Clase had just three performers: Edward, Hortense, and a horse. The circus just never grew, though. After rolling up and down through Mexico for six or eight years, it was still just Edward, Hortense, and a horse. The Gran Circo honorific that Edward had given the tiny show hung on it as baggily as a fat man’s suit drapes on a schoolboy.

  Edward arranged with the operators of small freight trains to move his circus from one stand to another. The entire show—the tent, its props and bench seating, the horse, and Edward and Hortense, along with Victoria—could easily be packed in a single, small railroad-baggage car.

  Though the show had no printed programs to sell or hand out to its patrons, this is the lineup that the audience saw after taking their seats on the benches inside the tent:

  Horizontal Bars. Senor Eduardo Codona

  Wire Walking. Senora Hortense Buislay

  Single Trapeze. Senor Eduardo Codona

  Trick Horseback Riding. Senor Eduardo Codona

  “Los Cometas” (The Comets), flying trapeze act.

  Senor Eduardo Codona and Senora Hortense Buislay

  “Equilibrium Act” (ground acrobatics). Senora Hortense Buislay

  Horizontal Bars. Senor Eduardo Codona

  “Spiral Mountain.” Senor Eduardo Codona

  The Spiral Mountain was by far the most spectacular of the Gran Circo Codona’s attractions. Edward performed the act on an ascending wooden ramp that curled like a corkscrew from the bottom to the top of a towering wooden pole that was at its center. Wearing slippers, he balanced himself atop a large wooden globe that was positioned at the bottom of the ramp. Then, by moving his feet in a shuffling motion over the globe, he started making his slow ascent. It took him minutes to reach the “mountain’s” summit. Then, by resuming the shuffling motion of his feet atop the globe, he made his way back to the ground.

  Victoria Codona would remember the Spiral Mountain as being “as high as a church steeple, one hundred feet, at least.” But the eyes of children have magnifiers, and she was very young when she saw her father perform on the queer-looking wooden Matterhorn. Probably the Spiral Mountain was not more than thirty or thirty-five feet high. It was, though, far too towering to be installed inside the small tent of the Gran Circo Codona. Edward always presented the act outside as the finale of the little circus that, at least in his view, was primero en su clase.

  Edward may have acquired the Spiral Mountain from Etienne Buislay, an uncle to Hortense. Etienne was a member of The Buislays, a large family of French circus daredevils. The troupe immigrated to the United States in 1865 when Hortense was eight. There were a dozen or fourteen performers in The Buislays—wire walkers, trapeze flyers, bareback riders—and the Spiral Mountain act was always a feature of the spectacles the troupe presented. Usually it was Etienne, the originator of the Spiral Mountain act, or Stephan Buislay, Hortense’s father, who made the trips up and down the mountain.

  The Buislays appeared with numerous large circuses in America and were a sensation with all of them. In time, the troupe started its own circus, one that toured year after year in Cuba, South and Central America, and Mexico. The Buislay Family Circus eventually combined with another gypsy show meandering in the same territory, a one-ring enterprise operated by Edward’s father, Edward Codona Sr., a former shipyard worker in Glasgow. Edward and Hortense began appearing in the newly merged Buislay-Codona circus as a flying trapeze duo, Los Cometas. They married in 1878 when the circus traveled to Colon, Panama. He was twenty-four, she fourteen.

  Not long after, the newlyweds broke from their families to start their own show, the Gran Circo Codona. Edward proudly had handbills printed up to advertise the new circus. The small posters, in black ink and printed from wooden type, were illustrated with features from the new circus—a horse galloping around a ring, a woman on a tightrope, the Spiral Mountain. The posters also bore a small portrait of Edward, although he had altered his name to “Eduardo” on the advertisements. He must have believed that the circus would draw greater patronage in Latin America if the people thought the show was operated by one of their countrymen.

  The babies started coming along fast after Edward and Hortense married, the first of them when she was fifteen, and others every year or two. All of the first children were stillborn or died in the sand and rocks of Mexico’s desert early in infancy. Hortense was half the Gran Circo Codona, and without her there could be no show, so she continued to perform on the trapeze and tightrope until the seventh or eighth month of each pregnancy.

  Victoria was the first of Edward and Hortense’s children to survive. She was born in Veracruz, Mexico, on March 6, 1891.

  Weeks went by in Hermosillo for Edward, Hortense, and Victoria, and then a month, and then almost two months. As a circus nomad, there had hardly been a day in Edward’s life when he was not moving on to some new place somewhere. Now he felt like a butterfly that a child places inside a lidded glass jar. He knew the freedom of the world out there, but now he could only move a little way before being stopped. He had never been immobilized anywhere for so long, but he made the decision to rest his circus from its travels for a while. This would be best for Hortense, and maybe it would be for the baby, too.

  Did Edward, though, maybe for the first time in his life, now start dreaming in reverse? He was thirty-three. In its six or eight years, his Gran Circo Codona traveled north and south and east and west in Mexico, but it still remained where it started, with just him, Hortense, and a single horse. Did he now start wondering whether there might be some other life for him, for Hortense? She had been born a circus gypsy, too. She was never complaining. But their life had been harsh and, way too often for both of them, so heartbreaking.

  When they started the Gran Circo Codona—Primero en Su Clase, he and Hortense had dreamed that there would be a lot of Codonas, more than enough so that the show would live up to its advertised promise as a gra
nd circus, one that was first in its class. The children came but did not stay long. Until Victoria arrived, he and Hortense themselves buried them one after another in places that had never been given names because they were nothing more than rocks, dust, tumbleweeds, and scattered cattle bones. Certainly Edward must have wondered whether those babies might have lived if they had been born into some life other than that of a tiny, traveling desert circus.

  And what about little Victoria? Edward must have asked himself. Because he had a crazy dream that year after year he could not, or just would not, give up, was he being fair to her? He could not have failed to see the yearning in her light blue, almost purple eyes when, after each of the performances, she watched other children leaving the tent with their mothers and fathers to go to real homes. She was still a toddler. She did not have the words then to wrap around her feelings, but they would come.

  “I only wanted a home,” she would say later. “I used to look at the lighted windows of houses in every new town, and wonder why those people would ever leave their homes to go to the circus.”

  The event for which Edward and Hortense had been waiting finally occurred. It took place in the Hermosillo boardinghouse on October 7, 1893. That is when she delivered another child, a boy.

  Not long after, maybe another month, maybe two, the Gran Circo Codona was rolling again. When the show stopped now, it was again to raise its tent.

  The newest member of the family—he was christened Alfredo Codona—made his professional debut at seven months. At every show, Papa Codona held him aloft in his right hand and paraded around and around the sawdust ring as though his new son was some grand prize, which, of course, he was.

  By the time Alfredo was a year and a half, Edward started placing him into a leather pouch that was belted around his waist. Papa Codona then climbed a rope ladder to the trapeze. While sitting on the bar of his trapeze or hanging from it with his muscular arms, he glided back and forth in space, and young Alfredo did, too.

  The people on the benches below applauded and laughed and laughed. Only the small, curly-topped head of Alfredo appeared outside the pouch. He looked like a young kangaroo peering out of its mother’s marsupium. There was not a trace of fear on Alfredo’s face, only wonder, only curiosity.

  Edward Codona was pretty sure even then that his boy would amount to somebody in the circus someday, maybe even do things like those hummingbirds of Hermosillo could do, things that no man had ever done before.

  The impresario of the Gran Circo Codona—Primero en Su Clase—was no longer dreaming backward. Papa Codona’s dreams again were only of tomorrows.

  CHAPTER 3

  Eduard Pelikan must have known Nellie would hate him for it, hate him until the day clumps of dirt were shoveled over his coffin.

  He did not feel that he had any other choice, though.

  His arthritis and rheumatic fever were becoming more and more debilitating. He was broken, unable to turn out enough work in the wood shop anymore to support his family. The only chance of keeping it together was his thirteen-year-old daughter and whatever meager earnings she could gather as a circus performer.

  So when Willy Dosta again came to the Pelikan apartment in Breslau in January 1891, just a week or two after Nellie gave birth to the baby, Eduard said yes. Yes, he would apprentice Nellie to him for a second time, he said, but this time things would have to be different.

  Eduard gave his assent after Willy placed a sack of money before him on the kitchen table, after he said he would swear on a stack of Bibles he would never assault Nellie again.

  A smile likely formed on Willy’s lips upon winning Eduard’s agreement. If so, Eduard could not have seen it. Dosta’s mouth had not been visible for years. It was still hidden somewhere beneath the bushy, wide-spreading, tomato-colored mustache that covered his lower face.

  Before Dosta left the apartment, he had another request. Because of Eduard’s skills as a woodworker, he wanted him to help design and build a structure for a portable trapeze, one he could carry atop his horse-drawn wagon, one that could be quickly assembled and disassembled as the Willy Dosta Circus again moved through the Carpathian Mountains.

  He was going to turn his daughter into a trapeze artist, Willy told Eduard. Just you wait, he said. She would rise and fall like an eagle riding the wind, he promised. He would train her himself.

  Even though Eduard and Nellie lived in the same cramped apartment and sat at the same table, they never looked at each other anymore. Both made sure their gazes were always zoned inches to one side of the other. They no longer spoke to each other either.

  It was left to Julia to tell Nellie of the arrangements that had been made for her to be indentured once again with Willy Dosta’s circus when spring arrived. It may have been the hardest thing she ever had to do.

  There had been nights when she had to go to her daughter’s bed to calm her after Nellie woke up shrieking from nightmares that were inhabited by Willy Dosta. Nellie was as much in terror of him as she was of Beelzebub, whom the nuns in school had also told her about.

  Julia tried to make Nellie understand just how desperate things had become in the family. Because of Eduard’s patchy work in his wood shop, there was no longer enough money to feed and clothe everybody. Without her earnings as a performer in Willy Dosta’s circus, baby Leitzel, along with the youngest of Nellie’s brothers and sisters, would have to be placed into poorhouses.

  She told Nellie that Willy had promised her father that he would never again be cruel to her. “Willy assured him he will treat you only with respect and kindness, as though you were a daughter of his own,” Julia said. “He said he would swear this to God.”

  Nellie sobbed uncontrollably and quivered like a rabbit cornered by a fox. Julia held her daughter’s hand and told her how sorry she was for her fright. She was a gentle woman. She was crying, too, and asked Nellie to be brave. But Julia was so ashamed. How could she hurt her own child so deeply? She may have wondered not only whether Nellie would ever forgive her, but also whether God would.

  Nellie’s trapeze training with Dosta started just days after he and Eduard had come to an agreement. The sessions were carried out in a barn in Breslau in which Willy had strung up a swing bar, Roman rings, and a net. Nellie took Leitzel to the barn in a basket each day so she could continue nursing her.

  Dosta showed little sympathy for his pupil when she complained of aching muscles and the scrapes and burns she suffered when she tumbled from her rigging into the net. He was a demanding coach, but he was also an able teacher. A quarter century earlier, while traveling with wagon shows in Scotland, he himself had performed as a boy trapeze artist.

  Within just weeks after she began her training with Dosta on the swinging bar and trapeze, Nellie was already moving through the air like a swallow, rising and falling, and pinwheeling. She so loved soaring in the barn’s heavens that sometimes it was hard for Dosta to get her to return to the ground. She had never felt as free. By the time the new spring arrived and Dosta was making final plans to return to the road, Nellie’s performances were as polished as those of the artists appearing with the big circuses.

  When Willy Dosta called at the Pelikan apartment on an early evening in March or April of 1891, Nellie was already waiting for him. Her coat and mittens were nearby, and a small trunk was at the door. She was rocking Leitzel in her arms, and huddled around her were her sisters and brothers. Julia was close by, too. She was holding a ragdoll that she had made from scraps and ends. The doll, fashioned in the likeness of a baby girl, was a good-bye present for Nellie.

  Dosta took no notice of the infant in Nellie’s arms. He was fidgety. He kept his coat and cap on and had seemed to be anxious to leave the apartment from the moment he stepped into it.

  Eduard Pelikan appeared to be emotionally adrift, disengaged from the drama playing out near the door. He sat in a chair, smoking his pipe, and staring blankly into space.

  Tears were rolling down Nellie’s cheeks and drizzling ont
o her baby’s face. Finally she gave Leitzel a last kiss on the forehead and placed her into Julia’s arms. Nellie kissed each of her siblings, and then she and her mother embraced for a long time, both of them crying. Without saying anything to her father, or even looking back at him, Nellie walked out of the apartment and, with Willy, descended the tenement’s stairs. He was carrying a trunk with her clothes and costumes, and she was clutching the doll her mother had presented to her. Clearly Julia had intended for the humble gift to signify love, but it seemed a strange present nonetheless. Nellie was leaving her baby behind. In exchange, she received a doll.

  Lashed to the roof of Willy’s wagon and extending beyond its back end a few feet into the air was a stack of large wooden beams, the components of the portable trapeze that, with Willy’s help, Eduard had cobbled together in his wood shop.

  When Nellie moved to the wagon’s front to see Reiter and nuzzle the massive white horse, she was momentarily startled. Cocooned in a quilt against the cold, seated atop the wagon on its driver’s bench, was a woman whom Nellie had never seen before. It was then she learned that Willy had a wife. Some of her anxiety about starting a new tour with him may have eased. Because Willy’s wife would be traveling with the circus this time, maybe Willy would not resume his attacks on her.

  Nellie opened the door at the rear of the wagon, and this time, without any shoving from Willy, entered the wooden cabin on her own. There were two boys inside, both of whom appeared to be two or three years younger than she was. They sat on the wagon’s plank flooring before a small iron stove through whose grate a fire glowed.

  In a moment, the wagon started rolling. It moved between block after block of dour and decaying tenements that, like drunkards, leaned on one another this way and that, as if to stay upright. It would be at least two or three days before the Willy Dosta Circus reached the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, 125 miles away.