Touch of the Clown

by Glen Huser

  Across the aisle and a couple of rows down, I see Cosmo’s sister. She is wearing a deep sea-green suit, her movie-star hair falling like Marilyn Monroe’s to the collar. Cosmo’s color– green. I can see only the side of her face, but the weariness from the hospital seems to be gone from it. She watches J. J. with a half-smile on her lips. An older woman sits beside her, cheeks moist with tears. Cosmo’s mother?

  “Cosmo and I used to talk about his funeral,” J. J. is saying. “I guess he was always fascinated by the reasons people choose to get together. ‘Yeah,’ he would say in that terrible imitation of the Dead End Kids lingo that he would use when he was trying to make you laugh instead of cry. ‘I tink a funereal ain’t such a bad idea. People can get together and do a little remembering, a little eating, a little crying, listen to a little music, and–who knows–maybe a couple of people who don’t even know each other might fall in love. Dat would be kinda nice, eh?’”

  Nathan squeezes my hand.

  “Cosmo was not a perfect person. You only had to listen to his Dead End Kids impression to know that, but God, he was pretty close to it.” J.J. pauses and she bows her head for a moment, as if she is gathering her strength. “He had the gift that only certain special people have, an ability to change us in ways that we would never have thought possible.”

  As I watch J.J., I feel as if Cosmo is some-where close by. I feel like a spotlight might suddenly come on and pick him out of the dark and he’ll turn and look at all of us with a little look of surprise and a tip of the head. Maybe he will pluck a rose out of nowhere and he’ll hold it out toward us. A gift.

  Thank you, I want to say. I think of the cup of tea on the watermelon placemat on Cosmo’s kitchen table. Thank you for the magic and the tea and being there for Livvy and me. Thank you for Jane Eyre and gingerbread.

  Someone has taken J. J.’s place at the front of the auditorium. A young man with no hair, a shy smile, and a guitar. He begins to sing, so softly the words seem like something written on tissue paper. It is the song that the lady with the sad, gravelly voice sang on Cosmo’s CD. God Bless the Child. As he sings, his voice gets louder and fills the church, but at the end, his voice falls again to a near whisper: “God bless the child that’s got his own. That’s got his own.”

  It is what Cosmo told us at the start of the clown workshop. Get your own. Make your own. Find something to hold onto.

  When the service is over, Jim and Nathan and I go to say hello to Cosmo’s sister.

  Annette introduces their mother to us. I notice a trace of Cosmo’s grin in her wide smile. “It’s nice to meet some of Cosmo’s students,” she says. “He worked with so many over the years.”

  “Barbara was a neighbor, too, I think,” says Annette. “He left a box of stuff for you and your little sister. He had packages of things for about twenty different people in his closets, all labeled, with little notes. I thought you might be here today so I put your box of stuff in the trunk of my car.”

  “Do you want to open it now?” Jim Beresford says when he hefts the box out of her trunk. “Feels like it’s filled with bricks.”

  “No, I think I’ll wait.” I want to be by myself when I open it.

  There is only Uncle Hal at home when I am dropped back at the house.

  “Why don’t you give me a hand putting together this station house for my new line?” he calls out to me from across the basement, where he stands like a giant in the middle of a maze of miniature trains. “I could use some help.”

  “Sure,” I say. “In a little while if that’s okay. I’ve got just a little headache and I thought I might lie down for a half hour or so.”

  “Good idea. Nip it in the bud. You want an aspirin? I’m sure we’ve got aspirins around here somewhere.”

  “No, I’ll be fine if I just close my eyes for a little.”

  I place Cosmo’s box on the bed. There is an index card taped to the outside saying “For Barbara and Olivia Kobleimer.” When I pull the flaps open, there’s a letter inside. It’s what I was hoping there would be.

  “Dear Barbara Stanwyck and Olivia de Havilland,” Cosmo has scripted his note in green ink with a calligraphy pen. “I have put these books aside for you just in case we don’t have enough visits to get them to your house a few at a time in grocery bags. It has been a delight getting to know the two of you. I feel you have become special friends, and that is why I feel especially comfortable leaving you the books. There is something about picking up a book and knowing that someone who has meant something to you has rested his fingers on each page, has savored the lines, thought about what the book has to say. I guess there is a kind of engagement of soul and spirit in the act of reading that maybe leaves the tiniest traces on the paper, like infinitesimal bits of stardust. So, know I am there, on these pages, reading along with you. Lots of love, Cosmo.”

  Savored. Engagement. Infinitesimal. The words are like exotic animals. I look at them again and again, pick up each of the books in turn, opening them, running my fingers along the endpapers, reading a line here and there. A Traveller in Time. Treasure Island. The Sword in the Stone. David Copperfield. Wind in the Willows. Some of the volumes are inscribed. Love to Garson on his twelfth birthday–Aunt Charity. Merry Christmas Garson–Mommy and Daddy.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  September is the best time, when summer holidays are over and school begins again. I am going to a large junior high school a few blocks from where the Hetheringtons live, and Livvy and I walk together to her elementary school on the way. Livvy dances along in her new back-to-school clothes. She knows that Auntie Sophie will be over to the school in a minute if she has an accident, but it’s only happened once since school started.

  The junior high is kind of scary, but it’s easy to fade into the background when there are hundreds and hundreds of teenagers, and there are safe corners, like the library. At first I wasn’t able to get into drama as an option, but Jim Beresford phoned the school counselor and my schedule was changed around. The drama teacher, Miss Eccles, has us doing a lot of improvising. Sometimes it seems as if Cosmo is at the back of the room watching, giving me hints about bits of business that will work. Eat chocolates that are soft and keep getting stuck to your fingers. Think of the color red, let it bathe you, wash inside you. Make little chirping noises, like a bird. “You have a natural talent,” Miss Eccles says. I haven’t told her what my middle name is.

  The first time Livvy and I saw Daddy after he got out of the treatment center, Jim Beresford drove us to the house. Daddy met us at the door and it seemed that in the weeks since we had seen him he had shrunk, and the gray at the edges of his hair had spread into the rest of it.

  “I’ll come back in an hour,” Jim Beresford said.

  The living room looked strange with the blinds open and sunlight showing all the raveled corners of the furniture, the worn patches of carpet, the cigarette burns around Grandma’s chair. The TV sat silent, dead. Livvy sat still for about one and a half minutes before she bounded off to check all the parts of the house.

  “I’m sorry,” Daddy said when Livvy had gone upstairs. I looked at him. The word seemed strange coming from him, just as everything else was strange. He looked down at his hands folded over his stomach. “It should have been better. Your mama would have wanted it better.”

  I wandered across the room and stared out the window. Crispy Dan’s panel truck was parked in front of the Perths with a flat tire, giving it a sad, drunken look.

  “It will be better.” Daddy’s voice was soft, the kind of voice you use in a library. “In awhile you’ll be able to come back. I just have to…”

  “Hey,” Livvy shouted from the top of the stairs, “guess what!”

  “What?” Daddy said.

  “I found my Pocahontas coloring book.” She pounded downstairs and bounced like Tigger into the living room. “I’m going to stay here now so I can color.”

  “You leave it here,” Daddy said, his voice a little stronger, “and you can color
in it whenever you come over.”

  “But I want to stay. I don’t want to go.” Livvy folded her arms and turned her back on us. “Where’s Grandma?”

  “She’s in the hospital for awhile.” Daddy tried to force a cheerfulness to his voice. “She’ll be home before too long.”

  “I want her home now.” Livvy began to cry and she was still weeping when Jim Beresford came to pick us up.

  “It’s okay,” Daddy said. “You take the coloring book with you.”

  Since Daddy came over to the Hetheringtons for my birthday supper a week ago, Livvy has convinced herself that it is only a matter of time until he can come and live here, too.

  Daddy was very quiet all through the supper, complimenting Auntie Sophie on her roast ham and scalloped potatoes, the birthday cake covered with icing-sugar flowers.

  “Just one of my little hobbies.” Auntie Sophie seemed reluctant to spoil the perfection of the top of the cake by lighting the fourteen twirly pink candles. “Cake decorating.”

  “Hardly just a hobby,” Uncle Harold beamed at us. “Sophie’s won prizes. What was that last trophy for?”

  A little spark came into Daddy’s eye when I opened my gift from him, a video copy of The Lady Eve starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck.

  “Now there’s a cake decorating scene in this movie that’ll leave you rolling on the floor. I thought your mama was going to choke, she laughed so hard. We went to see it two nights in a row when they did that Henry Fonda retrospective at the Varscona.”

  “I want to see it,” Livvy announced, her mouth full of cake. “Daddy, you can stay and watch it.”

  But he couldn’t. And the next day, Jim Beresford dropped by to see me after school and told me Daddy was drinking again, by himself at the house, shored up with bottles of sherry and piles of videos.

  Grandma Kobleimer is still in the nursing home. At the end of August, she stumbled and fell and broke her hip. The Hetheringtons took Livvy and me to see her when she got out of the hospital and back into the home, but she kept going to sleep so we didn’t stay very long. Since then, we have been back to see her once, but she didn’t recognize Livvy or me. “Mildred.” She grabbed my sleeve. “I don’t want you seeing him anymore. There’s going to be nothing but trouble.” We didn’t stay long that time, either.

  Nathan is going to a junior high in the west end. He hates the school and has been missing a lot of classes. Drama and music are the only subjects he likes. The Hetheringtons let Livvy and me go to the downtown library on Saturdays, and Nathan meets us there. Sometimes we go across the street into the theater with its little indoor park and waterfall. Livvy likes to hop around the trails through the shrubbery and flowers, and it gives Nathan and me a minute to sit together. When he is really down about how things are going at school and at home, I try to think of what Cosmo might say.

  “Yeah, Mary S-Sunshine,” he says. “I know. Go see my counselor. Tell him I need a different family. T-Tell him to make my life good.”

  “No,” I say. “You’re the only one who can make your life good. Cosmo said…”

  “Cosmo, Cosmo, Cosmo…”

  “Cosmo said we need to fight sometimes when the people around us are harming us. He said…”

  “Yeah, if I say that to my m-mom, she’ll smack me across the room, and her b-boyfriend’ll crack a rib or two for good measure.”

  “Sometimes we get hurt getting into the lifeboats,” I say.

  Nathan shakes his head, but he’s smiling.

  “Hey, look at me,” Livvy calls from a catwalk far above us. She’s on top of the world.