by Steve Stern
He watched the girl in the air, haloed in limelight, and saw an angel; watched the clown hanging on to the tail of a liberty horse while the goat rode the tails of his coat, and saw a devil that needed harrying back to the pit. “If I can’t have her,” he was heard to say to his cats, whose baritone growling may have echoed the Lord’s own approval, “can’t nobody else.” Then on a windy night somewhere between Wabasha and Winona, he came upon the two of them on the afterdeck; he heard the girl scream as the clown threw his coat over her head as if to abduct her, and something in him snapped.
They’d been reading a slender volume of poetry together, or rather Bonkers had been reading to Jenny in French. The book was an en face edition and the clown, in his absorption, seemed less concerned with seducing the equilibrist than refining her sensibilities. Bending over her chair, he invited her to follow on the left-hand in English the despondent lyric he was reading in the original on the right-hand page. Jenny, however, was paying scant attention to either the written or spoken words. She was fatigued after a trying week that had involved her oversight of the repair of the flying frame and the dead man’s rigging; she’d done double-duty, performing her matinee and evening turns then reappearing in the Babylonian-themed blow-off. So it was good to be voyaging again between stands; the brisk weather at this northernmost extremity of the Carnival of Fun’s circuit suited her. She enjoyed the rhythmic rocking of the packet over the choppy river, the way clouds slid across the face of the moon like gauzy tights pulled from the globe of a lamp. And the drone of the clown’s lugubrious voice in a foreign tongue was a fitting antithesis to the martial air of the brass band rehearsing “Billy Barlow” in the saloon.
Their evening ritual was something that, in truth, the girl had come to look forward to, and even Madame Hortense had learned to live with it—especially since Bonkers seemed to have decided it suited him better to languish for want of Jenny than to actually have her. (He was anyway consoled by a bevy of others.) Though lanterns abounded on board the Wen, he preferred to read by the light of a votary candle, but the wind tonight was too whipped up for the candle to hold a flame. So he kept striking matches, one after another.
“Votre âme est un paysage choisi,” he read, signally twitching the rubber nose he’d yet to remove. Then noting Jenny’s inattention, he construed, “It means you’re a blowzy baggage.”
Jarred momentarily out of her reverie, Jenny leaned her head toward the book to verify the translation, and as a consequence a loose strand of her hair was ignited by the match in the clown’s cupped hand.
“O for a muse of fire!” cried Bonkers as he tore off his ragpicker’s tailcoat and threw it over Jenny’s flailing head.
It was then that the lion tamer, having just emerged from a hatch, was unhinged by what he saw and charged blindly forward onto the deck. With a roar that rivaled the window-rattling vibrato of his cats, the Captain locked his arms around the clown’s midsection, and lifting him bodily, dragged the kicking Bonkers across the afterdeck and flung him over the railing into the foaming turbulence of the revolving paddle wheel. He turned around triumphantly, perhaps expecting the girl he’d rescued to run gratefully into the safety of his arms, but was met instead by Medea the goat who gored him in the calf with her single horn. As he bent to clutch at the searing pain of his injured leg, the Captain was further battered by Madame Hortense, who hammered him to the deck with a closed fist on her way to save the clown. Fresh from an assignation with Professor Hotspur, she was wearing her marquee-sized kimono, which billowed to reveal her ambiguous anatomy as she climbed over the rail.
Risen from her chair with her still smoking hair in wild disarray, Jenny Bashrig looked on with a sinking heart. But distressed as she was on behalf of Bonkers, she was more aggrieved by the realization that, despite his peril, the forlorn clown had never seemed to her entirely real.
Other members of the troupe, responding to Madame Hortense’s “Hey Rube!,” vaulted over the rail from the texas deck and tumbled out of the galleries. Apprised of the situation, they clambered out along timbers and spars, though whether they meant to save the clown or simply get a better view of his plight was uncertain. Kinkers and joeys, Hector the globe-of-death rider, Dainty Nell the Elastic Incomprehensible—all perched in the blustering winds on either side of the turning wheel, waiting along with the stronglady for the blades to complete their revolution and end the clown’s forced baptism. The gibbous moon spilled mercury like a burst thermometer, the band in the saloon played “Over the Waves,” and up popped the sodden Bonkers seated on a wooden bucket at the height of the paddle wheel. He was reciting verses above the churning propulsion: “Let him mark well who laughs at my despair,” he cried, pulling a catfish from the bosom of his shirt, sniffing it with his rubber nose before tossing it over a shoulder, “with no fraternal shudder in reply.” From a capacious pocket he extracted an apple that squirted him in the eye before he could take a bite. “Every moon is atrocious, every sun bitter; the flesh, alas, is sad, and I have read …”
As the clown was swallowed up again by the moiling waters, Jenny silently ended the refrain, “… all the books.”
Stupefied by Bonkers’s recital, the onlookers had made no attempt to grab him, though surely they would not allow him to make a second pass without releasing him from the wheel. Then the boat pitched violently as it clattered over some river monster or submerged tree, an object that could smash the rudders and fracture the keelson. Alerted to the crisis on board and off, the pilot had already killed the engines, though the stern-wheel continued its final rotation. This time, however, when the clown came back around, he was no longer speaking, his body hanging in a mangled configuration from a paddle blade.
Madame Hortense later claimed that the Wheel of Fortune card from her pack, which was always promising some type of categorical change, had foretold everything, though the circus had no need of referring to any laws beyond fate. Marmaduke Armbrewster’s remains were shipped back to his family in Iowa with condolences: he had sadly fallen victim to an unnamed occupational hazard. He was mourned briefly by the handful of ladies he’d dallied with, but beyond them there was little love to spare among his fellow performers for the clown-maudit. Reduced thereafter to the status of untouchable, Captain Cumberbund was otherwise left to carry on as before, but Lem Kelso’s festering conscience found its physical corollary in the leg wound inflicted by the goat.
“The tip of your unicorn’s horn is commonly known to be full of p’ison,” pronounced Madame H., offering a morsel from her dubious store of occult wisdom.
The goat itself had vanished since the death of her master. Jenny Bashrig had looked high and low, but nothing remained of Medea beyond her abandoned tether. A shame, thought Jenny, who’d imagined the goat becoming her own steadfast familiar, like in that story about the Gypsy girl the clown had read her. She missed others of his stories, such as the one about the doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde, and the wirewalker Elvira Madigan and her officer in their (what did Bonkers call it?) liebestod. There was yet another story that Medea’s disappearance had put her in mind of, about the goat who wandered into a cave that led to the Promised Land. But that one had been told to her in the top of a tree by Muni Pinsker, the scribe of North Main Street, before he left her to snuff out their unborn child on her own.
She missed the clown like she missed her original infatuation with all the circus ballyhoo. It was an earthbound sadness, however, that never reached the height of the tightrope, which more than ever she lived to mount. She relied less on props, disdained the parasol and the balance pole, performing increasingly risky somersaults and running leaps. She pirouetted high above the war in Europe and the champagne tastes of the absentee owners Forepaugh and Broadway, who were regularly cheating their employees out of their contracted wages. Beyond distraction, Jenny scarcely flinched when the human blowtorch accidentally inhaled, incinerating his innards; or when the lion tamer entered the cage with his suppurating leg, whose infection incite
d in his cats a lust for carrion, and as instinct trumped affection they mauled their trainer. He bled to death, despite the ringmaster’s best efforts to four-flush the horror away, before an audience of twelve hundred strong.
But when Jenny descended from on high, she was often made aware that she wasn’t the only one who’d grown disenchanted with the Carnival of Fun. There was talk in several quarters that the circus was hexed. It was a notion Madame Hortense corroborated in her readings, assuring La Funambula that the Hanged Man card lay athwart her immediate future.
“The hanged man I saw already yesterday!” Jenny snapped at the stronglady, who had, come to think of it, not one womanly feature and was maybe, she surmised aloud, “what they call a morphodite?”
As she spoke Professor Hotspur, having come to their cabin door holding flowers, turned turkey red and beat a retreat. Then seeing a bangle-sized tear stream down the cheek of Madame Hortense, Jenny relented. Nevertheless, she threw the cards overboard, though they blew back in her face like in that story she’d read under Bonkers’s tutelage, the one in which the little girl falls down a rabbit hole.
A week or so later, just south of Herculaneum, the boiler blew on the Yellow Wen. In the hope of reaching Cape Girardeau before morning, the rousters had allowed the pressure to rise beyond what the safety valves could contain. The needles on the gauges spun like teetotums and the middle boiler exploded, launching the pilot house like a missile over the wooded shore. The packet was blasted to splinters amidships, sparks from the resulting fire raining like phoenix feathers over the midnight river. There was no time to lower the lifeboats, leaky at best, and performers and crew alike jumped overboard from the decks just ahead of the flames. Some, already alight, sizzled in the current, while those that weren’t pulled under by the suction from the sinking vessel clung to crates and tea chests amid the burning debris. Set adrift, the Floating Palace continued careering downstream with the menagerie scow wallowing behind it until it ran aground on a sandbar. The scow plowed into the rear of the Palace, causing the cages and stalls on board to be smashed apart, releasing in turn a stampede of terrified animals, many of whom promptly drowned. But in the years following the disaster, hardshell religionists from the nearby towns might spot in the surrounding scrub a camel or rhinoceros, a Barbary horse or a Nubian lion with a nettle-snarled mane, and believe that Noah had unloaded his cargo thereabouts.
Jenny, who’d started life in America after having been fished from the wreckage of a steamboat, realized that she’d come full circle. But that didn’t mean it was time to go home. Instead, she thanked Madame H. for saving her life, as she had the lives of a dozen others, and parted company with her for good. (The stronglady had elected to join what remained of Professor Hotspur’s pachyderm act on the vaudeville circuit, where she became known as “the Human Bridge” over whose chest the elephants routinely paraded.) Along with a clutch of survivors from the Carnival of Fun, who’d clung to one another since the calamity, Jenny took up with the Great Southern Circus, which was no more than a flivver-drawn mud show. Tracked down by a scout from the Sells-Floto Spectacular, however, she was offered a contract and once more given a spot above the center ring. The sadness that dogged her in the back lot and the pie car and invaded her Pullman berth still couldn’t touch her on the wire. But the dreams that seemed to belong to someone else continued to disrupt her equilibrium during her more death-defying stunts. Especially the dream in which the earth is propelled through space by means of a paddle wheel: when its blades are sideswiped by the wheel of heaven, which turns in the opposite direction, they interlock and both wheels come to a grinding halt.
14
Artist in Clover
Mine is a wild and savage heart that cannot be confined by this airless dungeon, was what I was thinking, as I sat ensconced among the soiled cushions in Avrom’s office chair. Still dopey from having read late into the previous night, I was hidden from view of the customers (of whom there were as usual none) by the books stacked on top of the broad metal desk. Outside was Main Street, whose heyday had come and gone, its commerce bled by suburban shopping centers to which the white citizens collectively flocked. They’d abandoned downtown Memphis, leaving it in its decline to the poor colored populace whose prophet had come to the city to lead a march. The march would be composed of the persecuted and dispossessed, and shouldn’t I—who paid such lip service to championing the underdog—be in their number? But that would involve leaving Avrom’s deep-cushioned chair where I was nestled so comfortably, and despite my wild and savage, et cetera, I was at peace for a change.
I’d read last night with that intensity that obliterated the distinction between being inside and outside the book. I attended the marriage of Twinkl Saltzman and Firpo Belzer under a canopy fashioned from the giant Og of Bashan’s foreskin. I inspected Jakie Epstein’s scrapbook in which the revenants in his group portraits, photographed with a Buster Brown box camera, figured more prominently than the living subjects. I kibitzed a debate between Doc Seligman and the pharmacist Mendel Blen concerning the virtues of natural versus unnatural miracles, and the means of measuring the half-life of love. It broke my heart when Katie and Pinchas Pin pulverized one another in their erotomania, though after that I confess the narrative began to sputter a bit. At the point where the municipal workers come with their crosscut saws to level the upstanding roots of the inverted oak, the story seemed to limp to a standstill; it receded from eyewitness experience back into a fable I could scarcely believe, and released from credulity, I fell asleep. I woke in the morning at the rear of the shop with a sense of tranquility I hadn’t known since my pill-popping days. When had I stopped popping pills?
Just then the telephone rang, which came as a surprise; I couldn’t remember ever having heard a phone ring in the Book Asylum and wasn’t even sure where the thing resided. As the ringing continued, I located a jack in the wall and followed a wire that trailed under a bale of sheet music and led to a dusty pedestal atop which sat an ancient ebony instrument. Lifting the receiver as gingerly as you’d defuse a bomb, I heard a voice it took me a second or two to identify. “So you found me,” I conceded, because I’d assumed that in Avrom’s shop I was as good as incommunicado.
It had after all been some thirty-six hours since I’d spoken with Rachel, whom I admittedly hadn’t tried to contact, since after sending me packing it was up to her to make the next move: I had my pride. And while I didn’t realize how much I’d missed her till that moment, I nevertheless perceived the call as an interruption.
“Were you lost?” she inquired, only slightly sardonic.
“Since the Creation.”
“Listen,” ignoring my emphasis, “can you meet me at the B’nai B’rith Home across from the park in an hour? There’s something I want to show you.”
Ordinarily a summons from Rachel would have spurred me to immediate action, but her peremptory tone—she spoke as if nothing was altered between us—left me feeling frankly mutinous. Moreover, the shop itself seemed to hedge me in, its shelves quiescent as a library at the bottom of the sea: Prospero’s drowned library which you had to dive fathoms to read. Above the surface all bets were off; uncertainty was the order of the day. But there in the depths of Avrom’s shop I’d developed the knack of breathing the submarine atmosphere.
Still I spritzed my face and armpits in the sink, locked the shop, and caught a bus down Poplar Avenue as far as Overton Park, whose lion-crowned gates were the end of the streetcar line back in the day. I got off the bus at Tucker Street and walked up a short semicircular drive, where I was met by Rachel standing in front of the B’nai B’rith Home for the Aged. It was a low, bunker-like building bordered by acacias, its entrance flanked by potted nasturtiums beside which, looking equally vegetable, were parked a pair of seniors in wheelchairs. There was a hint of chloroform on the breeze, a setting designed to accent Rachel’s vivacity. In the brief time since I’d seen her she’d trimmed her bangs, which made her look like Cleopatra or Grace Slic
k; she wore a short suede jacket over a corduroy smock and, despite the balmy morning, her leather boots.
I flung my arms about her.
“He’s not here,” she stated flatly, patting my back as if to encourage a burp.
“Marry me,” I heard myself saying, squeezing harder, but when she failed to return the pressure I relaxed my embrace. “Who’s not here?”
“Tyrone.”
Concealing my disappointment at her lack of enthusiasm, I took a breath: “Let me guess,” I said, my thoughts leaping ahead of themselves. “You got him transferred from the state asylum and now he’s run away …” Phrases like “dragnet” and “all-points bulletin” came to mind.
Released from my hold, Rachel gave me a look. “Earth to Lenny,” she said patiently. “He goes to the park to paint.”
You might have thought that after so long a confinement he’d be in dread of the out-of-doors, but there, across the way, sat the artist in a folding chair behind an easel in the shade of the bronze doughboy statue. An attendant stood at his shoulder, a stout woman with a plum-colored face wearing scrubs, the flesh hanging like wineskins from her folded arms. Scattered in the grass about the easel was a murmuration of flower children seated in lotus positions, playing penny whistles and weaving clover chains. The month of March, having run the scales of the seasons, had settled this morning on picture perfect: yellow daffodils and forsythia, pink dogwoods, azalea, crab apple, redbud, and tulip trees, all seemed to have burst into blossom only moments ago. Despite the warmth, however, Tyrone was bundled into a duffle coat, a watchcap pulled nearly to the hooded lids of his soft shamrock eyes. His attendant, who seemed to recognize Rachel—this was evidently not her first visit—announced somewhat skeptically, “The chirren have ’dopted him.”
