When Alfredo turned up in the Garden, accompanied by Clara and Lalo and Lalo’s wife, Anita, one performer and show executive after another kept approaching him, shaking his hand, and telling him how excited everyone was to learn that The Flying Codonas would be the headline attraction of the new show.
He was now regarded as a mythic figure by the circus’s other nomads. The fates had been good to him. Perhaps because of some Faustian bargain Alfredo had made with them six years earlier in a fair park building in Shreveport, they finally presented him with the most zenithal of the big top’s prizes, The Triple. And, furthermore, they had given him exclusive possession of the treasure, although, for a brief time, he had to share it with another leaper.
Ernie Lane, the flyer who had been competing with him to be the second man after Ernie Clarke to perform The Triple, finally gained the feat, too, but the gods apparently intended for their gift to him to be a short and temporary one. On a spring day in 1921 while Lane was rehearsing his trapeze act, he lost all control while trying to revolve in space. With his arms and legs flailing crazily, he fell from the air and tumbled face-first into a net. He was pronounced dead of a fractured skull and neck injuries upon his arrival at Chicago’s St. Bernard Hospital.
Alfredo was the foremost male circus artist in the world at the time Mister John signed The Flying Codonas to appear as headliners for the 1927 edition of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He and his troupe had been abroad for much of the past four years where, night after night, in months-long engagements, they appeared at such major venues as Berlin’s Wintergarten and Paris’s Cirque d’Hiver and Cirque Medrano. Not only was Alfredo revered as the only artist on the planet performing The Triple, but he was also esteemed because of his role in Varieté, a motion picture by the brilliant German director E. A. Dupont. The photoplay, starring Emil Jannings and largely filmed in the Wintergarten, was released in Europe in 1925 and became an international hit. Alfredo had performed all of the movie’s stunning trapeze sequences, including The Triple, or the Salto Mortale, as the sometimes lethal feat was known to Europeans.
Alfredo was still inside the Garden, receiving welcomes from his new Ringling colleagues, when it happened.
He saw Leitzel across the floor, and, at the same time, she spotted him.
She started making her way to him. Her eyes were kindled, and she was beaming.
Then she was before him, and extending her hand.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “Just look at you.”
And that is what she did. She looked him up and down for several moments without saying anything. She may have been trying to unite the figure standing before her with her memory of the sixteen-year-old boy she had kissed good-bye seventeen years before outside a pool hall in Chicago.
At thirty-three Alfredo was still as trim and boyish-looking as ever, but now, differently, he could have passed for a movie idol. He looked as though he might have stepped outside a tailor shop five or ten minutes earlier with a completely new set of expensive clothes. He wore a sport coat whose shoulders were two times the width of its waist. His trousers were so sharply creased they looked like they could cut bread. There was a fedora on his head, and, on his feet, shoes waxed to a high polish.
Alfredo had thought for years about what their reunion might be like if one should ever occur. He had even had dreams about it.
Now his feelings came rushing back, the same ones he had the first time he ever saw her.
Clara was at Alfredo’s side when he and Leitzel reunited in the Garden. He may have resented her presence there. She did not belong there, he must have felt. She had never been present in any of the dreams he had of reuniting with Leitzel.
Alfredo was transfixed by the sight of Leitzel. He had not seen her face-to-face in a dozen and a half years. He was tongue-tied at first. Finally it occurred to him that he had subjected Leitzel, as well as his wife, to a social gaffe. It was not until then that he introduced the two women.
Leitzel took Clara’s hand and welcomed her to the show. She told her that if there was anything at all that she could do to make her more at ease in her travels with the circus she should feel free to call on her at any time. She told Alfredo she had seen him in Varieté so often that she had lost count of how many times she had taken in the movie. She told him how glad she was that The Flying Codonas were now a part of the Ringling circus. She inquired about Victoria and his father, and asked him to remember her to them.
And then the moment that Alfredo had been thinking about for so many years was over. It had been so perfunctory, so businesslike. He looked sad as Leitzel drifted away.
Clara tried talking to him. She told him that she found Leitzel to be “absolutely charming.” Alfredo probably did not hear a word of what his wife said. He appeared to be lost in his thoughts and had a look in his eyes that Clara had seen before, a faraway gaze.
He was indistinguishable from the anonymous and faceless drones who shuffled behind the elephants, camels, and horses with shovels. He wore the same baggy coveralls as the drudges who mopped up the urine and droppings of the animals.
He strode out onto the oval floor fifteen or twenty minutes before each of Leitzel’s performances and climbed her web hand-over-hand until he was near the ceiling. There, in near darkness, he went about his tasks swiftly. He sat on Leitzel’s trapeze bar, bouncing on it to make sure its ropes were not frayed and could hold her weight. He swung from her steel rings, testing them to make sure they were securely fastened. Few sitting in the stands took notice of him. The crowd’s attention was focused on the forty elephants that trainer George Denman was presenting in five rings on the great oval floor. After two or three minutes, the workman finished his checks on the rigging, and then, expertly and quickly, descended Leitzel’s web and disappeared, but only for a short time.
Still in his outsize coveralls, he was back in the hippodrome five or ten minutes later as Leitzel was beginning her routines fifty or sixty feet in the air. He was inside the center ring, exactly below her, with his head thrown back and his gaze fixed on the sprite suffused in silvery light. If, heaven forbid, she should ever fall from her trapeze or Roman rings, he would be there to catch her, or die trying.
Everyone traveling with the circus, performers and workers alike, knew the identity of the figure in the too-big work clothes who made the twice-daily ascents to Leitzel’s ropes, and then, just minutes later, warily watched her every move from the ground as she flew and spun. It was Alfredo Codona, the circus’s newest marvel and highest-paid male performer.
Why was the show’s beau ideal carrying out the menial assignment of checking another artist’s equipment, especially since Leitzel already had a property manager, Frank McCloskey, who was meticulous in carrying out the same work? Alfredo’s preoccupation with the trustworthiness of Leitzel’s ropes and swivels struck others as the behavior of a man who believed his own life depended on the equipment.
In a way, that may have been true.
If Leitzel’s equipment should ever fail, causing her to plunge through the dark chasm to the floor, it would be all over not only for her but for him, too, he now believed. He would not be able to live without her. Not again.
He had lost her before, when, at the close of a Barnum & Bailey Circus’s spring visit to Madison Square Garden half their lifetimes earlier, Leitzel returned to Europe with the Leamy Ladies, and he stayed on with the show as a minor trapeze flyer. So much had happened since then.
Alfredo’s feelings toward Clara seemed to have soured to detestation almost overnight. She started seeing changes taking place in him almost from the instant of his reunion with Leitzel in the Garden.
Clara was stung with humiliation before the other troupers each time Alfredo drew himself up Leitzel’s web to inspect her rigging. What tortured her even more, though, were the visits he made to Leitzel’s private car after the evening show.
Up on the trapeze perch, Clara had always appeared to be fully in control, a confi
dent and proud eagle at the edge of a high cliff, waiting to throw herself into the next current of wind. It was different now when she and Alfredo were alone together in their train compartment. There, she was weepy.
What happened to the plan they often discussed about having children and training them to become members of the act? she asked Alfredo over and over. It was not too late to bring back the dream, she said. Alfredo was thirty-four, she, thirty-three. He refused to engage in any discussions with Clara about any future they could have together. Now there was someone else.
Inwardly, Alfredo seemed sure that Clara would eventually agree to a divorce, and that she could be removed as an impediment to his taking Leitzel as his bride. But a greater obstacle was still in the way.
Regularly, if unpredictably, Colonel H. Maxwell Howard, Leitzel’s longtime admirer, continued turning up on the circus’s lots, usually staying just two, three, or four days at a time, but sometimes remaining with the show for a week or more.
It appeared to some of the other performers that Leitzel always demoted Alfredo to nonentity status whenever the colonel was visiting the show. When she was not in the big top performing, she spent all her time with Howard, either entertaining him in her private tent and train stateroom, or traveling into town with him for movies and dinners.
Alfredo was wounded by the slights from Leitzel over another man. He was not accustomed to assuming the position of a second-stringer, whether as a performer or as a lover. He told Leitzel of the hurt he suffered when she ignored him.
Leitzel took Alfredo’s hands in hers. She told him that she was growing fonder of him every day, but that maybe he was trying to move too fast in their relationship. Besides, she reminded him, he was married to Clara.
As heartsick as Alfredo was during the times Leitzel shunned him to dote on the colonel, he did not receive any sympathy from his family. “Because he treated Clara so shamefully, we all thought he was just getting what he deserved,” said Anita Codona, Alfredo’s sister-in-law and Lalo’s wife. “Clara was a saint, absolutely the sweetest girl you could ever meet. Papa and Mama Codona couldn’t have loved her more if she was their own daughter. Lalo and I loved her, too. She could not have been more devoted to Alfredo. How could he throw her out of his life after ten years of marriage? And for Leitzel of all people? Yes, she was the big star, but she liked to bounce from man to man even when she was married.”
Alfredo’s sister, Victoria, was similarly disapproving of Leitzel.
“No married woman would trust her with her husband,” she said.
When Alfredo revealed to family members that he planned to seek a divorce from Clara, no one was angrier than Lalo.
“When he and Alfredo were arguing about it, Lalo would become so mad that I was afraid he was going to take his brother’s head in his hands and squeeze it like a lemon until the pulp came out,” Anita said.
A show of such fury would have been out of character for her husband. Lalo made his living by snagging his 155-pound brother out of the air and then flinging him back into space. His arms had become muscled enough to drop an ox. While he may have had the might of Samson, though, Lalo was almost always gentle. The show’s other male performers passed the time between their big top appearances by pitching horseshoes and playing softball, but he usually kept to himself during free times, knitting woolen sweaters and socks or pink and blue booties, which he gifted to the circus’s expectant mothers.
Although his own family withheld sympathy from Alfredo when he was suffering because Leitzel seemed to favor the colonel’s company over his, ultimately he did find a friend in whom he could confide. When his misery became unbearable, he went to the sideshow tent of Clyde Ingalls, Leitzel’s ex-husband.
Ingalls’s expression became condolent and rueful as Alfredo poured out his heart. In a response that was automatic, the sideshow manager started playing with the stub of the finger on his right hand, remembering the night when Leitzel lopped off the missing half with a butcher knife.
“Worst thing I ever did in my life was taking up with that woman,” Ingalls would say. “Best thing I ever did in my life was getting the divorce from her, getting her out of my life.”
As for Clyde himself, he may never have been happier in life than he was then. He and his new wife, Kathleen Baines, continued to operate in separate, but side-by-side, tents, with Ingalls still exhibiting giants and dwarfs and tattooed and bearded ladies, and she still serving as caretaker to John Daniel II, the circus’s stupendous-size gorilla whose daily consumption of bananas seemed so prodigious that, all on his own, the primate may have had a salutary effect on the economies of Honduras, Panama, and Ecuador.
Leitzel had reigned for two decades as the circus’s most widely beloved, most pampered, and most highly paid female star. Could she give all that up?
She was thirty-six, and increasingly now, there was a matter that caused her anguish. She began to wonder just how much longer she would be able to continue as a performer. Her body was starting to wear out. For more than twenty years, in twice-a-day shows, she subjected it to the most brutalizing physical punishment. An ache had settled permanently into her shoulder from the years of throwing the dislocations and stretching the tendons at her clavicle. More worrisome to her was an ugly, often infected gorge that was carved into her flesh just above the right wrist, where the loop of her rope chewed at each performance.
She had started engaging in a nightly ritual, a last act before slipping into bed. She brought out a hypodermic needle and shot caffeine into the flesh around the socket joint at the shoulder and near the open wound on her wrist. The procedure helped “quiet” the pulsating, and some nights hammering, pain.
Some physicians had already told her there was a danger the cankering sore on her lower arm might ultimately result in blood poisoning that could kill her. She lived in dread that when she had to see a doctor the next time, she might be told the flesh on her lower arm had finally become so badly putrefied that her right arm would have to be amputated below the elbow. She would rather be dead than allow that to happen, she told her closest friends, including Fanny McCloskey. That would be better than losing the arm. She tried to blank out any thoughts of ever becoming a cripple, a sorrowful woman, once the queen of the big top, whose appearance frightened young children because of a grotesque stump she had left for an arm.
Over and over in the past, doctors had pleaded with her to quit her planges and replace the feat with some new stunt that was perhaps equally sensational but less battering to her body. Leitzel remained adamant on the subject. She could not eliminate the throw-overs from her ring appearances. The planges—she regularly did one hundred of them at every show, and sometimes, when the crowds kept cheering her on, even more—were her signature.
Fanny McCloskey’s husband, Frank, still serving as Leitzel’s property manager at the time, said he believed that Leitzel suffered more for her audiences than any prizefighter ever did.
“A fighter steps into the ring maybe a few times a year, and, now and then, gets badly bloodied or knocked out,” he observed. “Leitzel, though, appeared before the crowds twice a day, every day, and was badly mauled every time she did her act.”
Besides the fear Leitzel had of her body one day finally giving out on her totally, stopping her from ever ascending to her ropes and rings again, she was becoming haunted with another terror. Often when she was performing her planges now, with the rope feeding at her wrist like a ravenous wild animal, she heard a disembodied voice:
“Why don’t you let go? You’re tired. It’s foolish to hang on to a rope way up here in the air. The audience won’t care. There’s plenty more for them to look at. Let go! Let go!”
Alfredo told of sometimes being bedeviled by a similar voice when he left his trapeze and was hurtling through space. The unseen exhorter may have been the same one who hissed in Leitzel’s ear, he believed. He may have been the Grim Reaper.
Alfredo used the term “casting” in talking about a change
in his mental state that sometimes occurred while performing. He never fully described what he meant, but apparently he was trying to suggest that often when he was somersaulting through space, rolling like a powerfully exploded cannonball through nothingness, he was accompanied by some dark spirit trying to “cast” a spell on him. Most times, ninety-nine out of one hundred, he could ignore the spirit. Sometimes, though, the demon’s plea was so insistent that he lost all concentration, lost any sense of who he was and where he was. Then, after turning the last of his somersaults, he would veer in an erratic way, miss his connection with Lalo, and plummet into the net.
He described the altering in his consciousness this way:
“The mind seems to let go, to refuse any longer to hold to the terrific burden of concentration placed on it. It’s like a sharp knife stuck suddenly against a set of tightly drawn strings. The parting comes in a dozen directions. The performer sprawls hopelessly, all thought of his trick departed. And, of course, he fails. Why it happens, or how it happens, a performer rarely knows.”
Alone in her bed at night, her body aching everywhere, hoping to be overtaken by sleep, Leitzel must have imagined how different her life could be as Mrs. H. Maxwell Howard. Fanny McCloskey believed that for all the differences between the worlds that the colonel and Leitzel inhabited, she would have quit the circus the next day if he had been in a position to propose marriage to her.
“She could have had the life of a southern belle like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby,” Fanny said. “A hilltop castle with maids and servants everywhere, a stable filled with Thoroughbreds, more money than she could ever spend. The colonel, a multimillionaire, could have given her all that, and more.”
CHAPTER 17
The party started in the midafternoon on a Sunday and was still going strong into the night. By then a big, orange, full October moon hung in the black sky. It looked like a child’s vagrant balloon. It seemed close enough to Earth to ping with an aggie-loaded slingshot.
Queen of the Air Page 18
