The Flying Circus

by Susan Crandall

  “Well. Hell.” If there was one thing Henry understood, it was the lengths a lonely soul would go to in order to hold on to family. In his own desire to do that, he’d probably just ensured that Gil would go away and never come back.

  And if he did come back?

  Henry had demanded trust. Families and friendships were based on it. Gil’s own story proved it.

  “Did you tell Cora all of this?”

  “Only that I’m married. That’s all she needs to know.”

  Henry nodded. Gil was a more honorable man than he. Preventing Cora from learning the hopeless truth about Gil’s marriage kept her from throwing convention out the window and justifying a relationship that was guaranteed to go nowhere.

  Henry finally took a drink of the moonshine, welcoming the pain of the burn. He punished himself by holding his breath, not allowing himself to cough, to gasp. Hold it in. Suffer.

  Gil had told Henry his secret, laid his pain naked for Henry to judge. He’d proven his worth as a friend. And Henry could never, never, do the same.

  He sat there in the dark long after Gil got up and went into the house. Long after the lights went out.

  After quite a while, it struck him. He never even asked Gil about the child. Son or daughter?

  When had he become such a selfish hypocrite?

  18

  The sun sat high, hot on the top of Henry’s head, even though it was December 12. This, he supposed, made Southern California a perfect place for Northern-born people who didn’t want to be reminded it was the holiday season. He stood with his pants legs rolled up, the cold water of the Pacific breaking against his shins, Point Dume’s craggy rise behind him. He’d been prepared for the size of the water, but not its constant motion, its power, or the blindingly white sand that fought against the greedy waves. The water surged and receded, each pass trying to knock him off his feet while simultaneously burying them deeper in the sand. He wondered how long he’d have to stand here before his entire body would be buried. A year? A decade? A lifetime? The wind blew steady against his face. He tasted the salt of the ocean on his lips. He was standing in the Pacific Ocean. Impossible.

  His life was offering wonders he’d never dared to dream of. All because of the death of a girl. As he watched the hypnotic rolling of the water, he thought on that for a while. It was an ugly truth, but one he couldn’t ignore. Time had passed. He’d traveled far. But the reality was, he was a wanted man. He was managing to stay inconspicuous with the circus. If movie stunt flying was in his future, anonymity would be easy to maintain. No one ever saw the stunt pilot’s face on-screen, or in the newspapers—until he killed himself during a stunt. In that case, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

  How would Cora and Gil feel if Henry’s death exposed his deception?

  He had betrayed the trust of the people he cared about most on this earth—Cora, Gil, and Mr. Dahlgren. But another issue was taking chunks out of his insides with razor teeth. He needed to go back. To face the consequences. But it would be worse now. Now that he’d run. Now that so many months had passed. If he returned, his story would be even less credible than the day it happened. The jail door would slam. The sentence would be read. And he’d be dead.

  “Henry!”

  He turned. Cora was headed back his way, her hands clasped at her waist. The wind blew her short hair across her face, even though she had a scarf tied as a headband. The long ends of silk whipped like banners behind her.

  When she got close, she held out her cupped hands. Several shells, swirls and ridges of tans and pinks and grays, were in them. “Almost all of them are broken.”

  When Henry looked into her eyes, he suddenly felt as tumbled and broken as those sea-tossed shells. He’d been a fool to convince himself he could come out here with her and not be drawn deeper in love. Neither of them had spoken of Gil, not since they’d left Mississippi—not of her anger over his disappearance, or why he’d left, or if he’d come back. Without the shadow of his presence, Henry and Cora had grown closer—but he had no idea how deep her affection might run. They never spoke of feelings or futures. They just lived. He had fallen harder and more deeply than he’d imagined a man could. Watching her talk to the movie people inside studios so new they still smelled of fresh paint, Henry’s heart had actually ached—he’d always thought that was just a silly phrase, but it happened.

  Yesterday they’d been at Warner Brothers Studios on Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest buildings Henry had ever set eyes on, gleaming white with a soldier’s rank of tall columns across the second story. The man they met with wasn’t overly interested in adding stunt pilots to his roster. Instead, he’d taken them to watch a picture being filmed on one of their massive sets in an attempt to convince Cora to try her hand at acting. Henry’s heart had nearly stopped when the man made his proposal. Everything about Hollywood was shiny and new and exciting—and on such a massive scale. And Cora was a woman who admitted she was searching for her place. She needed excitement. How could she resist?

  “I’m not an actress.” She’d laughed lightly. “Wouldn’t have the patience for the tedium. I’m a stuntwoman. Let me know when you need one and we can talk.”

  After they’d left, Henry had made himself ask, “Are you sure you don’t want to take a stab at acting?” She could easily be more famous than Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, two women this town seemed wild over. Cora needed to think about it and not be blinded by her single-minded stubbornness.

  She’d shaken her head. “Really, Henry. Why would I contract my life over to a movie studio so they could tell me what to do? Might as well have gone ahead and gotten married.”

  The tone in her voice set off a flash of memory. “Those trunks, the ones you kicked on your uncle’s back porch, were yours. Packed to leave. You were that close to getting married?”

  “It wasn’t like the wedding was supposed to be the next week, or that I broke anyone’s heart. I’m sure he just moved on to the next lady in line to marry his money. Besides, what does it matter now?”

  “I suppose it doesn’t.” But it had given him pause. She’d given her word to the man she was going to marry. Didn’t that mean anything to her?

  She’d looked him in the eyes. “Henry. I see what you’re thinking. Let me ask you—if you were about to be locked up for the rest of your life just because of the misfortune of your birth, wouldn’t you stop it any way you could? And for the record, I wasn’t involved in any of the negotiations, so I didn’t break any promises.”

  Her choice of words had given him a little shiver, and not just because of the mention of being locked up, jail. He’d had the bad luck of being born with the wrong name at the wrong time. Seems they’d both run from their misfortune of circumstance. At least Cora admitted it.

  Right then and there he’d decided he wasn’t ever going to ask her about the marriage or her mother again. He had no right whatsoever.

  Now, under the shining sun of this windswept beach, looking at her smile as she stared down at the shells she’d spent the better part of an hour gathering, Henry’s heart got the better of him and he reached out to touch her face.

  When she looked up at him with surprise, his panic nearly choked him. “Sand on your cheek.” He made a show of brushing his hand on his pant leg. “All gone.” Then he looked at the shells. “Do you know what any of them are?”

  “No. I’ve always just liked them for their artistry. If I think of them as houses for now-dead sea creatures, it kind of takes away the pleasure.”

  “Reality has a way of doing that.”

  Her eyes met his again. “What’s wrong, Henry? You’ve been moody all day.”

  The flood of emotions nearly fell out of his mouth. Had they, they would have been incomprehensible, broken as the fragments of shells in her hand. The only one perfect in its wholeness would have been I’m in love with you.

  He had no right t
o love her. He was just as unavailable as Gil. At least the reason Gil couldn’t marry her wasn’t because he was an impostor hiding a brand of murderer under his shirt.

  He shrugged. “Guess it’s Christmas coming. Always makes me a little sad.”

  She gave a soft smile that squeezed his heart so tightly he had to look away. Then she said, “Maybe the picture show will cheer you up.”

  Cheer? They were going to the Egyptian Theatre to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Cheer hardly came to mind. But it would be Henry’s first moving-picture show, so that was something. He forced a smile. “I’m sure it will.”

  She tossed all of the shells back into the waves, brushed her hands against each other, then slipped her arm through his.

  Every step Henry took back toward the stop for the bus that would take them through the Cahuenga Pass and back to the Hollywood Hotel was filled with the certainty that he was going to have to stop running—and not just from the law.

  It was quite easy to get around. The Pacific Red Cars, electric trains like the interurbans back home, got them most places. Buses did the rest. Henry and Cora had been working through her list of things “we ab-so-lute-ly must see.” They’d taken a bus up to see the fancy houses being built in Hollywoodland. Cora said most of them were influenced by European or Mediterranean architecture. Whatever kind they were, they were unlike any Henry had ever seen, with exposed timbers, irregular bricks and stone, stucco, and steep roofs with sharp peaks. They were built on steep hillsides where the winding road had been cut in and shored up with twenty-foot-high stone walls. A string of giant letters up on the top of the far hills spelled the Hollywoodland name. Advertising that could be seen for miles and miles. The promoter in Henry applauded the ingenuity.

  One town pretty much led right into the next. Cora said the area around most big cities were like that nowadays. Hollywood and its surrounds gave Henry the impression that it had only recently sprung up out of the orange groves. Everything was gleaming white. Steam shovels rumbled everywhere, taking chunks out of dry, rocky hills, carving new roads and leveling areas for new buildings. Red-tile roofs, towers, and arched windows and doorways were everywhere—Cora told him that was the Spanish influence. Even the trees looked as if they’d come from faraway lands—tall, naked trunks topped with huge, fanlike leaves. Palm trees. Now they walked into the courtyard of Grauman’s Hollywood Egyptian Theatre. It was like entering another country—which he supposed was the whole point. Wide columns lined the sides, etched with lines of pictures and symbols, which Cora explained were Egyptian hieroglyphs, an ancient form of writing. On the walls around them were primitive-looking paintings of brown men with funny headdresses and white cloths wrapped around their waists. Giant pots filled with strange-looking plants sat around the concrete courtyard. There was a statue with a man’s body and a dog’s head twice as tall as Henry. They entered the wide doors to the lobby. The open air overhead became a ceiling. He was suddenly part of a herd funneled into the slaughterhouse. So many perfumes and hair oils. So little air. The Egyptian decorations inside this confined space felt oppressive.

  Then the usherette led them into the auditorium. Henry stopped dead. A man bumped into him from behind.

  “Sorry,” Henry and the man both said at once.

  Cora took Henry’s hand and led him down the aisle and into a row of seats. When she stopped in the center, she said, “Now you can look. Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  She said magnificent, not monkey’s eyebrows or cat’s pajamas or bee’s knees. Magnificent. Even Cora was impressed.

  She said, “It’s like being inside a pharaoh’s tomb.”

  If this is what a pharaoh’s tomb looked like, no wonder Cora had wanted to discover one. Four giant, decorated columns flanked the draped stage, supporting a pair of overhead beams with layered step backs, each crowded with hieroglyphs. More people were on the side walls, looking like statues just emerging from the stone.

  But the ceiling amazed most. In the center of the first header over the stage was a large gold beetle sprouting wide, eaglelike wings with a circle between its antennae. Above the beetle on the ceiling was a shiny gold half circle that bloomed line after incredible line of carved intricacy, each detail outlined in gold, the inner details painted in yellows, oranges, and bright blues until the arc reached a point where it looked to explode in spikes and shafts of gleaming gold.

  Henry leaned close and whispered, “So beautiful. Why ruin it with a giant bug?”

  She giggled and leaned close to whisper back, her breath sending tickling shivers across his body. “It’s a scarab. Has something to do with Egyptian gods pushing the sun across the sky, or something like that. See”—she looked up and pointed—“it holds the sun in its antennae.” Then her hand swept across the graduating arc. “Sunrise.”

  “Sunrise,” he repeated, but he was looking at her. He realized she was still holding his hand.

  People had taken seats on both sides of them. When Henry looked around, he and Cora were the only two still standing in the middle of the theater. He sat and tugged her down beside him.

  He thought of her comment that the movie would take his mind off his melancholy. Now she sat with happy eagerness on her face. It struck him that she didn’t know the story. It had been one of the more tedious books Henry had borrowed from Mr. Dahlgren’s library, and parts of it were lost on him entirely as he had no clear frame of understanding, but Henry had pushed through until the horribly depressing end. He looked at her, sitting there with innocent anticipation on her face. All of her fancy education, and he’d read a book that she had not.

  He leaned close and whispered, “You do know this doesn’t end well?”

  She turned to him, eyes wide and mouth a questioning O. “You said you’ve never seen a moving picture. It was just released this year.”

  “I read the book.”

  She raised a brow. “Really?”

  “I can read.”

  She reached across and put a hand on his forearm. “I didn’t mean I didn’t think you can read—”

  At that moment the lights went out, the curtain opened, and the Fox newsreel came on the screen. Henry sat, unblinking for fear of missing something, as the words Here’s the great ball-game giant himself in action! gave way to Babe Ruth running the bases. Babe Ruth! And that crowd! Yankee Stadium was rows and rows of people packed like pickles in a barrel. The next pictures showed “the Bambino” visiting the children’s ward of a New York hospital. It was incredible to see the man, moving in real life.

  The credits for The Hunchback of Notre Dame passed and the cathedral and its square came on-screen. The people moved about the Festival of Fools just as if he were watching them in life, although drained of color and sound. For over an hour and a half the orchestra accompanied the photoplay. The words between the moving pictures were brief and used much simpler language than the book. Henry watched, enthralled most by the miracle of mechanics, science, and light that moved on the screen.

  Then the end was upon them. The moment when Esmeralda would hang. Only she didn’t.

  When the lights came up, he shook his head. “That wasn’t the story I read.”

  “Well, things have to be adapted for the moving pictures, I’m sure.”

  “If they could make a man look like Quasimodo and a cathedral look like Notre Dame, they could darn well tell the story right.”

  As they walked out into the cool evening air, he explained the changes that had been made: the lustful priest Claude Frollo turned from villain into kind protector, his youthful drunkard of a brother into the villain; Esmeralda’s hanging turned into a happy ending with Captain Phoebus.

  “Did Quasimodo die in the book?”

  “Yes, but he starved to death, grieving at the side of Esmeralda’s body.”

  “Good golly. No wonder they changed the ending.”

  He looked over his shoulder. �
��Now you can say you’ve been to Egypt.”

  She laughed. “Egypt was not the point. Adventure was the point.”

  He stopped. She took another step and stopped, too, and turned to look at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “Have you fulfilled that desire? Adventure?”

  She reached back and took his hand, pulling him back to walk at her side. “I have a good start.”

  “Where do you go from here, then?”

  “Who knows? Isn’t that part of the adventure, the surprising turns—” She stopped and pointed to a poster in a storefront window. “Look! Maybe that’s what’s next.”

  They stepped closer to the window. An aerobatic competition and air race at Clover Field in Santa Monica on Saturday was advertised.

  “That must be it!” she said. “More speed. Why else would fate have put that there, right now, when we’re talking about it?”

  “Fate didn’t put it there. Fate doesn’t use cloth adhesive tape.”

  She swatted his arm. “Stop being so literal.”

  He shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. He didn’t like where this was heading.

  “How many women fly racers?” she asked.

  “You don’t even like piloting.”

  “Well, racing would make it interesting! We have to go.”

  “We can go. But don’t get your heart set on it. To be competitive you have to have the best machine. And that means money. Probably lots of it.”

  “We’ll see, Henry. We’ll see.”

  This city had plenty of movie houses to choose from. Why had they come here?

  Maybe Fate did use adhesive tape.

  19

  “I miss Mercury,” Cora said as she and Henry sat on the broad porch that wrapped two sides of the original section of the Hollywood Hotel. Henry was getting increasingly restless himself, and not just because he missed the dog, or the airplanes. He was worried about Gil, how things were going in Ohio. Henry didn’t think the man could take one more blow. Every day Henry prayed that Gil’s wife received him kindly, that the child gave him reason to live.