Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  Leitzel and Alfred traded the dreams each had of La Belle Nellie like precious stones. Their dreams differed, of course, but mostly only in details. On one night, either of them might see La Belle Nellie floating down from the sky, her arms outstretched, like some wingless angel. On another night, one or the other might see her surrounded by a great throng in an unfamiliar city, or on the floor of a hippodrome inside a great circus amphitheater. A slit would always open in the madding crowds, an opening wide enough so that she could see her children in the distance, and then the princess would tear herself away from her adorers and come running to Leitzel or Alfred or both of them. Always the dreams ended the same way. They would find La Belle Nellie, or she, them, and then the three would be together forever. Neither Leitzel nor Alfred knew if that day would ever come, but if it did, they were sure, it would be the happiest of their lives.

  And the day did come.

  Late in 1901, Nellie and Edward Leamy called upon the Pelikan family to leave Breslau and come to London to live with them. During all the years she was traveling, first with Dosta and then with Leamy, Nellie yearned to be reconnected with her family, especially with Leitzel and Alfred. It was the main reason why she arranged to have them come to London to live with her. But there was another reason, too.

  Nellie and Leamy had decided to reconstitute the Leamy troupe. Nellie wanted the act to be entirely a family affair. She wanted her sisters, Tina and Toni, to be a part of the troupe. Most of all, she wanted Leitzel to be in the act. That way, wherever she traveled, they would always be together.

  It was a day in February or March when Leitzel and Alfred, along with Julia and Eduard, aunts Toni and Tina, and uncles Adolph and Horace, steamed into the Southampton port in England. The family was still on the ship’s deck, waiting for the gangplank to be lowered, when Julia, looking over the rail, saw Nellie and Edward Leamy in the crowd below waiting to receive the passengers. Nellie and Leamy were waving. Julia drew the attention of Leitzel and Alfred to their mother.

  Nellie was easy to pick out in any crowd. This day her head was topped with a hat as big as a bird cage, and her waist, as always, was corseted to the circumference of a wasp’s. She was always the most fashionable lady in any setting.

  Alfred studied the woman blowing kisses up to him, and then started whimpering. He turned his back to her, and then his knees crumpled, and he dropped to the ship’s steel floor. He was sure he had been tricked.

  “It’s not her,” he bawled. “It’s not her. It’s not my mother. I won’t go to her.”

  Julia tried to calm him; Leitzel did, too.

  Alfred was four or five the last time he had seen Nellie, and now he was nine. Any memory he had of her from then had become bleached out to blankness, like a photograph exposed too long to sunlight. The only mother he recognized now was the one who regularly visited him in his dreams.

  Julia stayed behind on the deck with Alfred after the ship’s footway was lowered to the pier, but the other members of the Pelikan clan, including Leitzel, rushed down the ramp. Some several minutes went by before Julia was able to convince Alfred to leave the ship. They were the last passengers to do so.

  Nellie tried to engage Alfred in talk, but his head was down, and he hid behind Julia. Finally, he emerged. At first, all he saw was an outrageously large hat that was swathed in ribbons and had feathers sticking up from it. He lowered his eyes to the face of the woman. She was smiling, and her eyes were both imploring and filled with tears.

  Alfred recognized her now. She was the princess he had seen in hundreds of dreams. He took the hand that she had extended to him.

  The reunion in the harbor was an occasion for joy and tears. After kissing Alfred and Leitzel and embracing her mother and brothers and sisters, Nellie even hugged her father. It was the first time in more than a dozen years that they embraced.

  Leitzel wanted to lock her arms around La Belle Nellie and never let go, but, she apparently knew, you do not do that with princesses. Nellie covered her with kisses this day and told her how pretty she was, but Leitzel seemed shy about showing her feelings.

  Leitzel’s round face was only partially visible through a surrounding wreath of ringlets. Her hair was no longer the pumpkin orange of her toddler years but something closer in color to butterscotch. Her eyes, big and lustrous, were those of a fawn. They took in everything around her, but mostly she stared at the beautiful woman under the great hat.

  Nellie studied her daughter with wonder, too. She was instantly smitten with this stranger who had come to live with her. She may have seen in her something of herself half her lifetime ago. Leitzel was tiny, just inches over four feet, but she had the manner of a child who had spent her formative years in the company of classics professors, piano pedagogues, ballet masters, and the children of aristocrats and the elite. Without her having a hand in her daughter’s development—without even having a chance to witness her changes—her girl had bloomed into a lady-child of poise and refinement. It was a good thing. Leitzel would no longer have the time now for additional schooling or the cultivation of new friendships with other children.

  If it meant it would give her a chance to get closer to La Belle Nellie, Leitzel would climb partway to the moon. She would, if she had to, fly in thin air, swim in it, put her neck at risk, do almost anything.

  And she would have to.

  Nellie and Leamy lived in a gracious home on Old Kent Road in the Kensington district of southeast London. It was understood by their neighbors that Nellie, twenty-four, and he, fifty-seven, were wife and husband, but the couple had never wed.

  Leitzel was overjoyed on learning of Professor Leamy’s plan for a new aerial troupe, one made up entirely of family members, including her. Daughter and mother had always been almost strangers to each other, separated not just by being in different places most of the time but also by a lack of any real emotional connection. Now, maybe, Leitzel could find La Belle Nellie in the element she seemed most comfortable inhabiting—the air.

  Leamy had already rented a large barn near the family home, in which he had installed the trapezone rotaire, and before another week or two went by, he and Nellie began their training of Leitzel, Tina, and Toni. Tina, about twenty-three at the time, may have been resentful that she had to take part in the classes. For several years before leaving Breslau, she had been making regular appearances in the city’s Zirkus Renz, performing on both the trapeze and Roman rings.

  Before a month or two of strength training and practice on a low trapeze had gone by, Leamy decided that the day had come when his pupils were ready to join Nellie on the trapezone rotaire.

  Toni was wide of girth and bosom and had thick thighs. It had already been determined that she would pedal the bicycle that propelled the trapezone rotaire. Because of her beefiness, it took exceptional will for her to move her body up the ladder, but from the instant she settled on the bicycle’s seat, she was able to keep Leamy’s marvel revolving at the even speed of a merry-go-round.

  As installed in the practice barn, the trapezone rotaire was some forty feet in the air, a more rarefied elevation than that at which Tina had usually performed. The new condition had little effect on her artistry. She went through the same routines she had essayed hundreds of times at the circus in Breslau and elsewhere. While adroit, her trapeze and rings work lacked much bravura, though. That was fine with Leamy. Nellie, of course, would be maintaining her position as the troupe’s true star.

  So anxious was Leitzel to put on a show for La Belle Nellie and Professor Leamy that she did not so much climb as scamper up the rope ladder to the contrivance.

  From the time she was three or four, Leitzel had practiced every day on a miniature trapeze and a pair of Roman rings that had been gifts from Nellie. Now, when she ascended to her place near to the barn’s rafters, she seemed as much at ease as if she were back in the Pelikans’ Breslau apartment, flying on her Roman rings. With Nellie and Leamy crying out “Brava, Brava,” she reprised all the feats she h
ad seen her auntie Tina perform minutes earlier.

  Then she tried something new. She stood on the bar of her trapeze and, with her legs pumping, began driving her swing farther and farther into space. Soon her trapeze ropes were exactly parallel with the floor four or five stories below. She drove the trapeze still higher. Leamy was on the ground, watching through a telescope as she continued on her joyride. He was becoming increasingly uneasy. He worried that if her pendulum lifted even a foot or so higher, she would crash into the trapezone rotaire’s undercarriage.

  “Stop! Stop!” he shouted up to her. “Stop this instant!”

  Leitzel may have been enjoying her ride so much that she did not hear him. Her legs continued pumping the trapeze bar.

  Then, at the point when her trapeze had swung out to the farthermost distance in space, her slippered feet lost their grounding beneath her. In another instant, unaccountably, she surrendered her grip on the trapeze ropes at her sides. Her body started falling backward.

  Nellie, Tina, and Toni shrieked. Leitzel was going to plummet to the floor.

  Then she did something surprising. While tumbling backward, she neatly caught the trapeze bar, as it swung back toward her, by the back of one knee. She hung in this position for what seemed a half minute until the trapeze came to a stop. Next, still hanging upside down, she reached for the bar, drew herself up, and resumed her seat on the perch.

  She pushed her hair away from her face and was beaming. She had just taken the ride of her life.

  Her expression was still bright when, at Leamy’s insistence, she returned to the ground. Nellie, who followed her down the rope ladder, was quick to peel it away.

  “Show off!” she scoffed. “Peacock! And just eleven years old. You could have broken yourself into a thousand pieces. You’re not expected to do anything up there but sit pretty. I’ll be the star a while longer if you don’t mind.”

  Leitzel’s lower lip started to quiver. She clamped her hands between her knees and bowed her head. She had so hoped to make a great impression on La Belle Nellie in her first appearance on the trapezone rotaire.

  In the days that followed in the barn, Leitzel toned down some of her skylarking, but over time, as Leamy gained more confidence in her, her performances became ever more daring.

  “She was just having too much fun whenever she was up there,” Alfred said. “And from the start, she had made up her mind that, like our mother, she was going to be a star. No one was going to stop her. From her first time that she performed on the rotating trapeze, she had already outshone Tina.”

  Alfred was present for the rehearsals every day. He had feelings of envy as he sat alone on the ground and watched his sister treading in air like some Icarian figure. He, too, wanted to follow in the family tradition and become a performer.

  “I was circus crazy,” he said. “I had become pretty good at juggling and had learned some fancy bicycle riding from my uncles. But there was no place in the Leamy act for a boy. Over my protests, my mother insisted I was to continue in school. She wanted me to be a doctor.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Leitzel and Alfred moved through the terminal as part of a torrent of bodies that included the other passengers who had ridden the crowded train with them on the two-hundred-mile trip from London to Blackpool in northwest England. The human rapids rushing to the exit door appeared to be about equally divided between single men and women in their middle teens to early twenties. Many of the day-trippers were running through the station as though they could not wait another minute to get outside.

  As children who had grown up in a bleak ghetto, Leitzel and Alfred could not believe their eyes at the sight of the place that was revealed to them when they pushed through the door. They emerged into a sparkling town that seemed dream-borne, a wonderland where every desire of the heart was available. They were wonderstruck.

  It was May of 1902, and Leitzel and Alfred had traveled to this magical place with Nellie and Professor Leamy, along with their aunts Tina and Toni. The hearts of Tina and Toni were likely pounding as furiously as those of Leitzel and Alfred. They had never been to the holiday town before either, although Nellie had visited at least two or three times before for appearances at the Blackpool Circus. The old Leamy Sisters troupe had always been received as a sensation here.

  Up and down the streets, everywhere they walked outside the terminal, they saw public houses, shooting galleries, wax museums, and theaters offering both movies and live entertainment. There were organ grinders with dancing monkeys that pushed tin cups out at passersby, and kohl-eyed fortune readers with rings on all their fingers. Vendors were selling pastries, devils on horseback, crumpets, whitebait, and saltwater taffy, and electric tram cars, the first in any city in the world and flashily painted in gold and green, clattered over the streets, ringing their bells.

  By far the grandest sight of all, though, one easily visible even fifteen or twenty miles away on clear days from both the sea and countryside, was the soaring tower of open latticed steel that rose above the stone Blackpool circus and entertainment center.

  Blackpool was the most popular resort in all of England by the turn of the twentieth century. The city itself had a population of fifty thousand, but the resort drew ten or twelve million guests each summer, most of them arriving by trains at one of the city’s three stations. Most of the vacationers were factory workers, miners, shop clerks, and knitting mill employees from north England and Scotland, and the majority of them were young, single, and on the make.

  Blackpool’s beach stretched for seven miles before the blue Irish Sea. Small yellow-and-red-striped tents rose here and there, offering such attractions as Punch and Judy shows, mind readers, and a five-legged cow. Almost everywhere else on the beach, the golden sands were carpeted with sunbathers, and day and night, the promenades and stilted piers swarmed with tourists. The fun seekers shopped for romance, fed coins into the peep shows, and haggled with stall operators over the prices for seashell necklaces, saltwater taffy, and steamed clams.

  With their mother or one or the other of their aunts, Leitzel and Alfred spent much of their days exploring Blackpool. As clotted with people as the seafront was, Alfred said, he and Leitzel were less impressed by the hordes of sunbathers than by the buskers from exotic lands.

  “There were Indians with their heads wrapped in turbans lying on beds of nails or charming snakes,” he said. “There were Chinese acrobats who stood atop one another four or five high. There were Congolese fire dancers. Neither of us had seen Hindus, Asians, or black people before arriving in Blackpool.”

  The Blackpool Tower and Circus had lined up the usual array of clowns, equestriennes, jugglers, and acrobats for its summer season of 1902, but the reconstituted Leamy troupe, its name now changed from the Leamy Sisters to the Leamy Ladies, was given billing as the premier attraction.

  Nellie, Tina, Toni, and Leitzel spent long hours in rehearsals in the days leading up to the opening. Leamy expected all their routines to have the precision of an expensive watch. He repeatedly tried impressing on the four that with their appearances in Blackpool, they would be performing before some of the most critical circus audiences anywhere.

  None in the quartet took the practice sessions more seriously than Leitzel. Like her mother and aunts, she felt honored to be a member of an attraction headlining the Blackpool summer circus. But there was even more at stake for her. She would be making her professional debut as a circus performer. She continued practicing her routines on the trapeze and rings even when her mother and aunts took breaks for naps and tea.

  The summer edition of the 1902 Blackpool Tower Circus opened on a night in mid-May. Backstage, in the minutes before the Leamy Ladies were to appear, Nellie instructed Leitzel not to attempt anything rash on the trapezone rotaire. Leitzel nodded her assent.

  Nellie, Tina, and Toni were identically costumed in violet leotards when they emerged through the curtained performers’ entryway onto the hippodrome floor. Many of the men seated on th
e ground floor and in the hall’s two balconies put opera glasses up to their eyes. The leotards looked like they might have been watercolored onto their flesh, and their bosoms partially gushed from their scooped necklines.

  The sisters were well on their way up their rope ladder and the orchestra had already started playing when Leitzel, similarly attired in a violet leotard, appeared. The crowd oohed at her smallness. She was twelve but looked no older than seven or eight. She waved gleefully to every section of the house. Next, as though trying to catch a train just pulling out from a station, she bounded over the floor to the trapezone rotaire’s rope ladder, throwing cartwheels and feet-over-head flip-flops on the way.

  As choreographed by Leamy, La Belle Nellie was to be the act’s nova, its brightest star. Toni had the job of serving as the revolving trapeze’s human engine, and Leamy had intended for Leitzel and Tina to function more or less as mere supernumeraries, swaying gently back and forth on their trapezes while gesturing with outstretched hands to Nellie as she executed two- and one-armed handstands on the trapeze bar or sailed on it upside down.

  At first Leitzel kept her promise not to try anything on her trapeze that might deflect the audience’s attention from La Belle Nellie. After her mother had concluded her turn, though, and was drinking in ringing applause and cheers, Leitzel stood up on her bar and, with legs pumping, drove her trapeze ever farther out into space. When she had her conveyance moving backward and forward in the air, 180 degrees, she crouched down on her bar and, like a bat, hung upside down from it, holding on by nothing more than the upper sides of her slippered feet. She was just at the start of another of her joyrides. She did a headstand on the oscillating bar. She turned herself into a propeller, revolving around and around, heels over head, while gripping the bar. Everyone peering up from the seats seemed to have stopped breathing.