Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  When Rory emerged from Gürls trailer—scrupulously neat, but redolent of a tobacco heartbreakingly similar to Dzubas’s brand and of secondhand horsy sweat—he ambled over to the Baroness’s portable corral.

  Gürl was currying the horse with a matched set of ivory-inlaid Austro-Serbian hand brushes. He acknowledged Rory’s presence with a grunt that seemed to convey that Rory had best not do anything to upset his precious charge.

  Rory moved to stand beside the Baroness’s big head. He gently patted her neck, and the horse whickered quietly. Her snowy thrusting nose quickly found the sugar cubes from breakfast which Rory had secreted in a jacket pocket. Munching these treats with sovereign dignity, she seemed to say, Very good, Jeeves. Your presence is tolerable.

  When Gürl had finished, Rory vaulted bareback astride the Baroness. She never trembled, faltered or bucked. Rory had not ridden a horse in fifteen years, since Axel had plunged into the Wapsipinicon, yet all his old instincts seemed intact. Gürl silently bridled the horse, and Rory spent the next hour cantering about the fairgrounds. Gürl did not appear jealous—his bond with the Baroness extended back firmly through long years of mutuality, and he had never been much of a rider himself—and things could not have fallen into place more swimmingly among the threesome.

  Well before showtime Rory and the Baroness had formed a coordinated partnership.

  Late in the afternoon the tempo of the Pantechnicon, heretofore slow and relaxed, began to speed up. Excitement became palpable; splendor seemed to descend from the heavens onto the tired lines of the show and its citizens. Conversations became both animated and fragmented, words seeming to convey both more and less than in normal speech.

  Lispenard called Rory into his office around six.

  “One small matter yet undiscussed, Honeyman. We use circus scrip here as pay. The ducats are redeemable at the commissary for a variety of goods at reasonable prices.” Lispenard displayed a handful of multicolored coupons, as blurrily printed as the Pantechnicon’s posters. “You draw these chits against your recorded earnings as you need them. Room and board are free, of course. I faithfully keep the books on your accumulated wages, using Canadian dollars as my benchmark. This system, while not initially obvious, simplifies life incredibly. Performers do not piss away their money in the local fleshpots and then approach the much put-upon owner for loans they will never repay. Nor, since the commissary sells only beer—and that only after the show ends—do my hirelings become elaborately stewed prior to the performance. I hope this time-tested system agrees with you,”

  Rory had never heard of the like. But he was too excited to quibble.

  “Good,” Lispenard replied to his agreement, “since otherwise we could not have entered you on the payroll. Now, I assume you own some attire suitable for your act.”

  “I’ve still got my lucky Olympic swim trunks.”

  “If circumspect, those will do nicely. Much as I argue against smutty costuming, our staff seamstress would undoubtedly chose to cobble together an outfit that only enhanced your natural male endowments.” Lispenard sighed sadly and shook his head. “I must strive even in this relative Arcadia of my own making to battle the decay of morals so prevalent in the outer world. So! What are you waiting for? Get into your costume!”

  Rory hurried off.

  Watching the show from the wings, a towel draped over his bare shoulders, as gaudy men and women rushed in and out of the big tent, Rory experienced a curious type of disorientation, as if his still-burning memory of last night’s show was now unreeled again from a mirror-world perspective. By the time Jacky Ray left the tent and the roustabouts began to push the diving tower forward, Rory couldn’t tell what side of the looking glass he inhabited.

  Gürl had arrived punctually with the Baroness. Putting a hand dazedly on her neck, Rory entered the bigtop. The lights blinded him, and the roaring audience remained in darkness. Thank God he had had some experience with performing before!

  Lispenard was still spieling. “Never since Phaeton plunged to earth with Apollo’s horse-drawn chariot has such an aerial yoking of man and steed offered such thrills. Tonight, for the first time anywhere, you will witness a brave rider risking life and limb, testing his mettle against the implacable forces of gravity, as he and horse, conjoined in centaurish union, plummet toward a tiny pool.’”

  This colorful yet technically accurate description made Rory’s stomach churn. Diving solo from this height held no terrors for him. But helplessly to ride —

  “Gentlefolk, I now present the Baroness Von Hammer-Purgstall and her intrepid flight jockey, Olympic gold-medallist Rory Honeyman!”

  The crowd bellowed. Rory winced at this deliberate misstatement of his accomplishments. On his way out of the tent, squeezing past Rory, Lispenard whispered, “Just remember—guts for garters!”

  Somehow Rory found himself squashed into the elevator cage with the Baroness as the box made its rattling ascent. On the lofty platform, mindful of his proximity to empty space, he boosted himself atop the horse. The world had contracted to the feel of her mane-draped shoulder muscles and her clean scent.

  Without any hesitation at this novel amendment to her act, the Baroness launched herself. Rory experienced no sensation of falling. Instead he impossibly enjoyed the delusion that the was going up, up, up, straight into the empyrean. The rush had no equal in his old life, which dropped away in pallid pieces.

  Too soon an ear-blasting splash and an Old Faithful geyser signaled the end of his flight.

  He never knew whether he rode or walked from the tent that night. There next came a transitionless moment backstage, with Rory the center of a congratulatory crowd, a tornado of backslaps and handshakes and kisses. One minute Katie Stearn was hugging him—a sensation nearly as delightful as his enhorsed dive—and the next minute Lispenard was pumping his arm off. Only Gürl’s wordless assistance insured that Rory found his proper trailer in the darkness that night.

  A week later, while Rory could not say that the unique sensations associated with dropping through twenty-five feet of space toward an oversized bucket with one’s legs and arms wrapped around nineteen hundred pounds of horseflesh in front of an audience of several hundred people had paled, Rory had somehow managed to accept the notion as a regular part of his life. What he was doing now represented his only possible vocation. He was immensely grateful to Lispenard for rescuing him from the prospect of becoming an indigent illegal alien, and he had determined to do his best by the circus and its owner. He held no thoughts for his future. For the first time in over a year, since the debacle in Mexico and its Iowa fallout, Rory felt at peace.

  All of Rory’s fellow performers had accepted him into their fraternity. He became particularly friendly with Frankie “Third Degree” Burnes, the bantam sword-swallower. Together they would play horseshoes during the day. If Burnes won a match he would cap the game by the peculiar ritual of yanking the scoring pole from the earth and victoriously swallowing it. Luckily, no one expected Rory to do likewise.

  Jacky Ray constituted the only burr under Rory’s nonexistent saddle. The Enterologist had inexplicably conceived a violent dislike for Rory ever since their first meeting, when Rory had circled back to spot him peeping. Ray would go out of his way to leer at Rory and make snide remarks about his lack of real skills and talent. Rory tried not to let the taunts get under his skin, and generally ignored the man.

  Early one morning soon after his hiring, Rory woke to find his new world being dismantled around his ears. They were moving north, to their next gig. No performance tonight.

  Not possessing a Canadian driver’s license, Rory could not helm one of the many circus vehicles. Once the circus had been fully struck and packed, Rory found himself climbing into the passenger’s seat of the cab of the truck pulling the Baroness’s trailer. Behind the wheel sat Hugo Gürl, another iffy non-Canadian to be sure, but one whose papers had been expertly falsified by Lispenard some time ago.

  The cavalcade set off.

>   After six hours of silence with the hermetic Gürl, Rory thought he would kill for some human speech. When the circus stopped at a roadside rest area to allow the lunch wagon to dispense sandwiches and drinks, Rory clapped Gürl on the shoulder in a no-hard-feelings gesture and said, “Hugo, I’ve enjoyed your company, but I need a change. See you at the next stop, okay?”

  The enigmatic Gürl made no protest at losing his passenger, and Rory strode off with a muted sigh of relief. Once he had scored a ham sandwich and a beer—Lispenard relaxed his daytime alcohol prohibitions during travel days—Rory wandered through the crowd searching for Frankie Burnes.

  “Tough luck, Honeyman, but I already got a full load. You shoulda spoke up sooner.”

  André the Woodsman’s car was packed with restive beavers. Lispenard’s Caddy carried clowns. Lothar drove an automobile equipped with special flipper controls, and beckoned eagerly for Rory to join him. Rory declined politely, retreating with a nervous grin. Horny-handed roustabouts filled the back of a pickup. Jacky Ray rode in the rumble seat of an antique car, his knees comfortably cupping his ears.

  Rory had resigned himself to returning to Gürl’s company when he came upon Katie Stearn. Today the diminutive ropewalker wore sandals, cuffed Western-cut jeans, and a white, man-tailored Oxford shirt, tails out. Her thick amber hair, although partially constrained with an elastic, framed her face in wavy strands. Sitting alone in a lawn chair, she was finishing the last bite of her sandwich.

  “Bee Man, what’s shaking?”

  Rory took a moment to realize the woman was addressing him. He found his attention fixed on Katie’s toes: she had painted her nails the color of lemon gumdrops. When he finally raised his eyes to her face, he encountered a large smile.

  “I recognize that shell-shocked attitude. You’ve been riding with Hugo.”

  “Um, yeah. What’s with him?”

  “Nothing complicated. He’s ashamed of his English. It’s practically nonexistent.”

  Rory had been conjuring up elaborate scenarios that evaporated upon this simple answer. “Oh. Well, he sure knows horses, whatever language he speaks.”

  Katie cocked her head. “You do too, I’d say, judging by your act.”

  “Well, a little. Not like Hugo though.”

  “Say, want to ride the rest of the way with me?”

  “Oh, gosh, I— That would be swell.”

  Katie laughed, and jumped to her feet. She clapped the aluminum chair shut, grabbed Rory’s hand and pulled him along toward her car, a Lifesaver-green Impala convertible towing a toy-like trailer.

  They passed Jacky Ray in his rumble seat, a rude stringbean half out of its shell. Face between his shanks, he frowned with frightening malevolence at both of them. Katie stuck out her tongue in reply.

  Behind the wheel of her car, Katie kicked off her sandals and flexed her feet against the pedals.

  “I hate wearing shoes. I need to feel everything. If my cable didn’t spit wire slivers I’d do my act barefoot instead of with slippers.”

  Rory grew hotly conscious of his own sneakers, big as personal flotation devices on his feet. “Boy, that act of yours— I nearly died the first time I saw you up there.”

  “It’s nothing special. Everything’s always under control. But what you do with the Baroness, that takes real nerve. What if she ever landed on top of you?”

  Rory had never even considered such a possibility. “Well, she just wouldn’t, I can sense it. Anyway, the whole thing’s a Cakewalk. Diving on your own requires a lot more talent.”

  The caravan was reforming for further travel. Katie started her engine. “What’s the story about that? Is Lispenard full of shit as usual, or were you really in the Olympics? The rumor-mill claims you got the boot for some kind of political shit.”

  Rory had never heard a woman utter the word “shit” before, and now he had heard it twice from the lips of an attractive gamin. Over and over, life with the Pantechnicon threatened to reconfigure his sense of reality.

  Trying to appear nonchalant, Rory explained a bit about his past to Katie.

  “Far out!” she said, shifting gears and nosing forward into the slow-moving procession.

  “What about yourself?” asked Rory. “How did you end up here?”

  “Since you’re my captive audience now, and since you foolishly asked, and since we’ve got to pass the time somehow, you’ll get the full nine yards.”

  “I’m happy to listen to you talk,” Rory said. And he was.

  New York City during the winter of 1888. A stumbling woman, hugely pregnant beneath layers of shabby clothing, hands concealed in a ratty muff, boarded a ferry-boat at the Hudson River pier at 23rd Street. She coughed with a deep rattle. Her worn high-laced shoes threatened to split with every step. From time to time she would groan and bend over, clasping her swollen womb.

  Having secured this rude shelter with the last of her money, she rode the ferry back and forth across the chilly river a dozen times. Finally she bestirred herself to disembark. The ferry had docked at its western terminus, in a city called Hoboken.

  Snow, having threatened all day, now made good its assault. The woman wandered the waterfront streets in a growing storm. She passed single blocks that contained fifty saloons. She received catcalls and whistles to which she seemed oblivious. The snowfall thickened. She continued to wander.

  The Great Blizzard of 1888 would immobilize the entire metropolitan area for a week under literal feet of snow. Horse-drawn traffic would be exiled from the blocked streets. Pedestrians would move through blue-tinted tunnels and chutes carved through the drifts. No business would be conducted for days.

  By midnight an accumulation of several inches already cloaked the city. At least a single inch covered the form of the pregnant woman as she lay unconscious in a doorway.

  At one in the morning a Salvation Army squad searching for drunkards chanced upon her. With much travail they secured her conveyance to a hospital, where after no long interval she gave birth to robust twin boys, then expired,

  A locket around her neck bore the inscription “To Amelia Stearn.” A charitable nurse saw to it that the infants received christening, as Douglas and Diederick Stearn, these Christian names deriving from two of the Salvation Army rescuers.

  Once Douglas and Diederick had earned a clean bill of health they were transported to a Hoboken orphanage known as Elysian Fields, named after the adjacent big public park that bordered the river and where the very first baseball games in America were played. There the twins grew up in a rough-and-tumble fashion typical of such Victorian institutions.

  At the age of twelve, as if in commemoration of the birth of a hard-nosed new century, the pair were both apprenticed to the same local businessman.

  Hoboken claimed a signal honor: the first commercial brewery in America was built in Hoboken in 1642. The original structure, of course, had long vanished. In its place stood a distant ancestor, the Old Vault Brewery.

  Owen Maltby had founded the Old Vault in 1838. A failed but resourceful banker who had lost nearly everything in the Panic of 1837, Maltby had gone more or less arbitrarily into brewing, influenced perhaps by nominative determinism as much as by rational prospects. In the year 1900, his son Owen Junior ran the firm.

  The Stearn twins started work on the bottling line. As the years passed, finding the work congenial, they moved from one job to another, quickly mastering each aspect of the trade. They seemed to possess a natural bent for fermenting. In fifteen years they were practically running the brewery as Maltby’s assistants.

  Secure in their profession, the Stearns—formerly content to rely on their own close company alone—decided they should now marry. Plotting their pursuit of brides logically, they began to frequent the beer gardens and amusement parks that lined the Hudson and which attracted gay crowds from across the river. In one such pleasure park on a lush June night they experienced a start. Two unescorted identical females occupied a nearby table. The Stearn twins quickly capitali
zed on this fortuitous proximity. They ambled nervously over and introduced themselves.

  The women responded with giggles and their names: Dora and Dolores Schnackenberg. Over glasses of birch beer (ironically, given the Stearns’ profession, the women had taken The Pledge), the foursome chatted. At night’s close, they resolved to meet again. After a period of courtship—involving some small difficulties concerning the means whereby the Stearns earned their livelihood—the two couples set a wedding date. The days ahead seemed bright.

  Then Prohibition arrived as the law of the land.

  Despondent, an aging Owen Maltby Junior sold the Old Vault Brewery to the Stearns. They switched over to the production of birch beer and other sodapops and made a precarious living.

  The Hoboken of this era had a reputation as a wild town. Bootlegging flourished. Twenty theaters of varying levels of legitimacy contributed to the raucous atmosphere. Waterfront dives offered to supply any vice the customer demanded. Temptations to earn a quick illegitimate dollar abounded, but Dora and Dolores kept Doug and Diederick on the straight and narrow.

  In 1929 both of the Stearn wives became simultaneously pregnant.

  Defying a potent combination of paternal and maternal genetics, Dora gave birth to a lone boy soon named Francis; Dolores delivered an unaccompanied girl christened Claire.

  All the Stearns lived in the same big house on 12th Street, near the famous mansion of Hetty Green, “The Witch of Wall Street.” The new generation of first cousins were thus raised together.

  In 1933, upon the repeal of Prohibition, the Stearns eagerly switched back to brewing. With cruel irony, this move signaled the start of their decline. They held out bravely for five of the worst years of the Depression until, finally, flagging sales forced them under. They padlocked the Old Vault in 1938 and chiseled the sad date above the door, next to the foundation year. In the depressed economy, no buyers for the building manifested. The middle-aged and stolid Stearns knew no other trade. They sold their mansion at a loss, moved to smaller quarters where their accumulated savings would stretch longer, and began a long retreat from the world.