Brother Carnival

by Dennis Must

  “How did you know?” I asked, surprised by more than just her odd pronunciation.

  “Men ogle you from where they squirrel their conscience. Where’s yours?”

  I shrugged. “I guess in here,” I said, pointing to my heart. “Ain’t where a man packs his.”

  As hard as I tried, I could never get Billy’s swagger down, even when I felt as hard as nails.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Before long, I was talking to her as if we’d met long ago in the notchery back on DeForest Road. She kept nodding as if nothing I said was the least unfamiliar.

  “Well, I seen you eyeing me when you came in earlier. There must be something you want from me, honey . . . or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  I told her.

  Within moments she was up and alerting the man behind the cage. “Solly, if one of them comes in looking for me, tell ’em to wait right over there. I’ll only be a minute.”

  Her room, at the end of the shadowy hall on the first floor, consisted of a narrow bed, a full-body mirror on wheels, and one rust-stained porcelain sink mounted on a wall. The window was covered with a poster of a nude Marilyn Monroe posing on red velvet.

  Then her closet, half the size of the cell-like room.

  What surprised me was how meticulously ordered it was. There were compartments for socks, scarves, blouses, sweaters, panties and bras. Dresses of all colors and fabrics were neatly hung with the hangers all hooking in one direction. There were hats, too, maybe a dozen stacked neatly on top of each other.

  “It’s the costume shop. The naughty stuff’s in there.” A tall metal locker stood at one end.

  “Don’t take too long, sweetheart. Say, what is your name?”

  “Honor,” I said.

  “Oh Jesus, honey, they’d pay you extra for that,” she sighed, closing the door behind her.

  I knew exactly what to do. There was something very arousing about undressing before her mirror. Standing across from Marilyn staring at me . . . seeing what kind of wemen I was going to be. When I slipped on her panties, they had a fragrance of violet sachet about them . . . I immediately saw Alsada smiling at me from over by the door. Nodding, she was. Like Yes, do it, Honor. We all got to do it at some point. And don’t you feel wonderful? Don’t you feel like a woman? Ain’t it something, girl, to feel like a woman?

  I slipped on the brassiere and again stood this way then that in front of the mirror. And placed my hands on my now-covered breasts and began sobbing as if someone had returned to me, as if these were hers and not Honor’s. The woman looked out of the mirror at me, extending her arms, and pulled me to her and kissed me softly.

  Oh Christ, yes, I was holding myself and crying like a damn baby in Alsada’s arms, Miss Emma’s arms, and my absent mother’s arms—wherever she was—coming home to me; this woman, rising up inside me, and now I reached out and saw a black dress that somehow I felt I’d once worn. Don’t know where. But once a long time ago I’d had it on and a man came over to me, called me by my name, holding out his hand, and asked me to dance.

  “You look so fine in that pretty little dress,” he said. “Why, it barely covers your dimpled knees.”

  And I started laughing.

  “Oh yes,” I said, and spun coquettishly around and said, “Will you zip up the back, sir?” Like he was actually there.

  Then slipped back onto the bed and rolled her black hose up my white legs and prayed to God that those shoes with the rhinestone stars, the ones with the shiny black heels, would fit.

  And yes, they did, a bit tight.

  But that was no problem.

  ’Cause I no longer had to walk like a man.

  Then I heard her softly knocking, whispering, “I’ll be needing the room in a minute or two, Honor. Hurry.”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  I opened the door and my friend stood there, admiring me. “Praise Lazarus,” she sang. “If I wasn’t the kind of lady I am, I’d take you over any old damn man. What a stunner!”

  She spun me about and zipped up the dress.

  “Are my seams straight?” I asked.

  On my initial reading I’d never given much thought to the narrator’s recounting outfitting herself in a scarlet woman’s garments. But that person was Westley. And it speaks of a yearning, the quality of which I couldn’t recall encountering in any of his stories.

  Now it was past midnight and I was fully awake.

  Was there a message about myself in these particular passages?

  Was Westley revealing even a darker truth to me? I again began poring over my notes and the manuscripts. And then remembered . . .

  I NEED A WOMAN

  She hadn’t been gone but two days. One might have expected a whimper of grief, like “Christ, I miss her. What am I going to do alone?” I climbed out of bed and opened the door. He was standing naked in our hallway.

  “Go back to bed.” I pulled the blind so the neighbors wouldn’t see.

  “You don’t understand,” he cried. “Her dresses. Her shoes. The toiletries on the bureau. Her undergarments in our chiffonier.”

  Now, at the fall interval of his life, his dam had ruptured—brought on by Mother’s death. Here’s my father unable to sleep because he’s blubbering, “I need a woman!” What the hell was I going to tell him?

  “Do you understand what I’m talking about, son?”

  “Well . . .” I said.

  “You just don’t get it. Come here.” We stood outside their bedroom. “Go in there and pull open the top drawer of the chiffonier.”

  The room was dark save for the streetlight laying an amber puddle across the bed—one side slept-in.

  “Go on, open it.”

  Inside, neatly piled, were panties, camisoles and slips, and—bunched in one corner—a cluster of brassieres. The drawer let loose a breath of sachet.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “Now, open the closet door. Go on, do it, James.”

  Plaid knife-pleated skirts, georgette shifts, crêpe de chine empire dresses, blazers, all draped on wire hangers; mules, espadrilles, and spaghetti-strap heels assembled underneath. On the upper shelf—black pillbox hats whose veils she’d let fall at weddings or funerals. On his side, prosaic two-piece suits in summer and winter blends. The closet was redolent of gardenia.

  “Do you get it yet, boy?”

  He ambled down the stairs.

  “No damn way are we ever going to get rid of her presence. You can throw all that shit outside, clean every nook and cranny of her belongings, toss out the creams and face lotions, the prescription bottles, her Bible, her photograph, you name it. Scour her out of every board and plaster in this house, and she still won’t leave.”

  I poured us coffee.

  “I need a woman,” he whispered, his face a hairbreadth from mine.

  “I don’t get it, Pap. What are you telling me?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “This isn’t like you.”

  “Do you grasp why she wore those things up there? That smoky sundress with jasmine flowers, for instance? She’d stand there admiring herself in the mirror, watching me button it up her backside. Those peekaboo nets she’d drop over her china-blue eyes? Undergarments the shade of her blush?”

  “Why?”

  “So I wouldn’t have to wear them”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said. The damn whiskey was blubbering.

  “Listen to what I’m telling you. It’s your mother’s stain . . .”

  “Finish your coffee so we can go back to bed.”

  “No. You don’t get it!” he bellowed, bounding out of his chair. A gingham napkin from the buffet drawer was tied under his chin—a babushka. Like she might have done, he pressed his face on mine, and, sotto voce, mewled again, “I need a woman.”

  I followed him up the stairs.

  We entered the darkened room, and in a fury Father snatched her garments out of the closet, the chiffonier, the bureau
drawer—heaping everything onto the bed they had shared for decades. With each item, his frenzy accelerated. The last garment on the clothes pole, a navy-blue button-down-the-front frock with a stiff sailor’s collar, he held up to his torso. “How about this, Junior, with my patent leather please-fuck-me shoes? Are my seams straight?” He turned as I’d witnessed her do many times, bending a calf up toward his derriere while staring over a bare shoulder.

  The streetlight’s corrugated shade serrated the room’s shadows. With one swipe he pitched the bureau’s opaque perfume bottles and pearly emollient jars across the floor and under the bed, a chromium lipstick tube the lone survivor. He opened it and studied himself in the mirror, my face his double.

  Was he going to paint both our lips?

  “Pap, please, stop this absurdity.”

  “I’ve no bosom!” he cried. “My chest is a goddamned void. Look at me!” A salmon brassiere dangled from his neck. The circle he’d drawn around his mouth exaggerated our pathos.

  “What’s left for me, James? Will she ever come home?”

  Father lay down upon her wrappings, burying himself.

  Grief.

  Causes people to do the strangest things. His was implacable. I still had him. Her departure hurt, but I could abide it. Yet a piece of him was half gone. It was as if the heart was now eating itself in some kind of bizarre, comical remorse.

  I slept downstairs that evening.

  At first light, I softly opened his door. Their room had been restored. He was sound asleep. His frozen magenta “O” faintly smudged.

  “So I wouldn’t have to wear them.”

  Westley’s narratives actually spoke to his yearning for a single identity and had no more to do with finding that place in a woman’s body or her clothes than in the various male characters in which the narrator found life. The father in “I Need a Woman” aches for that which has been taken from him—his opposite, the woman who each day confirmed his identity as a male. Now, only her garments testify to that and are powerless to alleviate his loss; and so, as if to bury himself, he puts them on.

  Once again it harked back to “Going Dark.”

  This was my eureka moment.

  Quiet out in the hallway now. Even the lights from the street had muted on my ceiling, their movement lethargic now, not erratic.

  I gathered the manuscripts, placing them at the foot of my bed.

  In a strange way, it felt as if at least the penumbra of my brother had joined me in the room, for earlier, I’d truly had no notion of who he was.

  Now, I’d begun to comprehend that he hadn’t either.

  I, too, had been somebody once. I thought about the tale of a man too cowardly to kill himself, so he believed he was dead.

  Was that what Westley was up to?

  Fading off to sleep, I even speculated he’d become Proteus-like out of necessity, as no single persona is adequate for any one of us.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHIFTING IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER

  Unable to rid my mind of ceiling pie, the next morning I slipped two quarters into an automat’s glass window display and sat down to eat in the crowded dining area with other menfolk looking just like me—a vagrant.

  Except now I didn’t feel as lost.

  Westley Mueller was many people, moving in and out of characters either by will or because of the circumstances of the narrative forcing him there. And it dawned on me that the information I was piecing together wasn’t so much to inform me where he was but why we should meet. That why, I chanced, is that our lives were bound by an inextricable fate.

  In effect, we had met on the bridge of acid-green lights in jelly jars.

  My quest would succeed only if I was able to discern that the why of our impending meeting was for each of our sakes . . . and not mine alone.

  I looked around, curious whether he’d caught my eye.

  I’ll find you, brother, I mouthed. Watch me. I will find you.

  And this time the meringue pie will be on me . . . and not the ceiling.

  Exiting the automat, I eyed the tops of fabled buildings—the Chrysler and Empire State—and women, their nails polished cinnabar, passing sylph-like in spiked heels, a breath of an alien perfume in their path.

  It was now our quest. As if I were the fabled brother, Jeremiah, about whom he had written so much and whom he’d slept alongside all those boyhood years. Except I knew I wasn’t.

  Did it matter?

  If he had been shadowing me back in the automat, he was now at its window, grinning wide.

  Perhaps I overstate Westley’s conflicting identities. But to consider his principal characters as a means of finding him made more sense than, say, searching for him in Gotham.

  What immediately came to mind was Papa’s brothers: the priest and the clown.

  SHE’S A LITTLE STORE INSIDE (excerpt)

  My father, Jacob Müller, had three siblings. Stephen, the monsignor; Felix, who doubled as a clown and lion trainer for the Mills Brothers Circus; and sister Eva, who sold her body until it shook too much.

  When it came time in Jacob’s life to sum it all up, to prepare himself for what might or might not occur after death, he didn’t knock on the sacristy door. Instead he sought out Eva and Felix, who lived in rundown bungalows on the outskirts of our town.

  As a boy I couldn’t understand why.

  I loved frequenting Uncle Stephen’s cathedral with its flying buttresses, its west and east stone towers, one carrying the great bell, the other housing more than one thousand pipes for the electro-pneumatic organ in the baptistery. Monsignor ascended the grand circular staircase in his polychromatic chasuble at high mass while racks of ruby-red, ink-blue, and clear votive jars bearing flame and melted wax illuminated wooden saints, and morning sunlight filtered through stained glass clerestory windows. And there on the rood screen separating the choir from the nave, a crucifix larger than the statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on our village green—Christ’s gold-leafed body, mirroring the votive flames. Alive.

  Parishioners rising and crossing themselves, kneeling, rising again . . . their solemn incantation echoing Uncle’s Latin liturgy.

  And Christ on fire.

  Why a whore and a clown? I wondered, when Monsignor Stephen owned a golden ring with a giant ruby that his congregants kissed.

  “I’m off to the whiskey bar,” Father said. I clandestinely followed to see if the monsignor would embrace him in an alleyway minus his surplice and the two of them would stroll into the backdoor of the parish house.

  Instead I watched Father walk wide of the large shadows that the basilica towers, Temperance and Perseverance, cast across Main Street like an ominous embrace.

  Aunt Eva sat in the shadows of her porch on summer afternoons. A Kewpie doll with rouged cheeks, and henna-dyed hair that haloed a china face. Her dress dropped inches above her bony knees. She wore spiked heels painted with fuchsia nail polish and dreamily stared onto the dirt street, her slight body jerking as if a motor oscillated under its bottom. Waiting. Waiting for a blanket of darkness to eclipse the bungalow.

  I asked Father what Aunt Eva was selling, since so many men stopped by after dusk.

  “She’s a little store inside,” he said.

  Once, as I was passing her house, she signaled me over.

  “I’m your Aunt Eva,” she said. “You look exactly like Jacob.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “Your father chooses to ignore I’m his sister.”

  I nodded as if I understood.

  “You must come by and visit me sometime. We’ll get to know each other better.” She grinned.

  In time I learned what she’d been selling inside her bungalow. That she took off her gaudy doll clothes for strange men. Then I dreamed of paying her a call. I envisioned her standing disrobed in her bedroom, arms outstretched to the door jambs, one foot touching the other, and the henna triangle burning like the bush in the Bible. A smoke of yearning curling out of Uncle Stephen’s c
enser.

  Her image provoking the ache I bore for the gold-leafed crucifix.

  But as Aunt Eva’s tremors grew more conspicuous over time and the traffic upon her walkway diminished . . . so did my ardor and contrition.

  Her house was no longer freshly painted a periwinkle blue. Its front steps fell into disrepair. Like a plaster-of-Paris palmist inside a cloudy glass arcade box, she sat staring out her window. You place a nickel into a slot, her wooden hand overturns a queen of spades, and a cardboard fortune drops out—somewhere, you imagine, below her skirts.

  Except a house fly had died on her forehead. Flesh-tinted plaster exposed chalky stigmata. These women in arcade boxes are saints too, I thought. Lesser saints than those mutely lining St. Margaret’s side aisles. Or Christ pinioned against the rood screen—He was the master saint, the biggest and best of all the arcade ones, and of those who lived on dirt streets like Aunt Eva, waiting, waiting, for acolytes with jingle in their trousers.

  Uncle Felix lived one street over from Eva’s place. He kept a palomino in a shed behind his modest one-story house. On Independence Day, he dressed like Tom Mix and headed a parade down Main Street with paper American flags attached to his steed’s halter. He’d painted stars on its hooves and braided its flaxen tail with red and blue ribbon. A large, barrel-chested man with chiseled features, Uncle Felix resembled an American Indian.

  “He could whup lions!” a bystander exclaimed. “Make ’em lie down docile before him like house tabbies.”

  Felix Müller swept his Stetson against the sweaty flanks of his golden horse.

  “I seen him standin’ on the back of a galloping Arabian once,” said another, “a pair a six-shooters blasting crockery out of the sky that clowns spiraled aloft like barn swallows.”

  “Was he a trapeze artist too?”

  “If one of those spangled dames dangled by her gams—you bet! He didn’t join the circus to get away from ’em.”

  As the parishioners glowed, watching Monsignor Stephen’s vestments sweep the basilica’s cobbled floor, the Eucharist chalice ascending to the giant rood, so, too, did the town’s women in Uncle Felix’s wake. Always he’d spot a comely bystander, dismount, and, like the gentleman I think he never was, boost her onto the horse’s backside. The pair would clop up the pavers past Hutton’s Hardware, the Episcopal church, and the post office, halting before the viewing stand, where Uncle Stephen officiated alongside the mayor and chief of police.