by Lisa Fiedler
Just speaking the words to her will make up for not having said them to James.
I will go to the cemetery on Brooksvale Avenue to give my mother this last gift of letting her be the first to know that I am safe, and happy, and carrying James’s child.
It’s a risk, of course. Brooksvale is a small, gossipy place and if anyone were to catch sight of me . . .
But I’ve become very good at taking risks—when they’re for the right reasons.
* * *
• • •
The cabbie drops me on the corner, where the tidy, picturesque little cemetery sits. It is as exclusive as the rest of this town; only the remains of the well-to-do are welcome.
I am wearing the sunglasses I bought at Woolworth’s, and I’ve wrapped the pretty, faux-silk kerchief à la Grace Kelly over my hair to prevent the neighbors—or more likely, their domestics—from recognizing me. As I make my way toward the filigree iron gate, I see the Gleasons’ maid, Clothilde, shaking a bath mat over the side of the front porch. Twilly, the Mancusos’ gardener, is raking the first drizzle of leaves into a pile. We have not had a domestic in our house since the abrupt departure of my jitterbugging namesake nearly ten years ago.
As I unlatch the gate and slip onto hallowed ground, I hear the Murphy family’s screen door creak open. Lucy, the housekeeper, comes thumping down the kitchen steps with a basket of laundry for the line. She doesn’t see me; she’s preoccupied with making sure the sheets don’t drag in the grass.
I make my way along the winding path, reading the blue-blooded names etched into the tombstones until I find my mother’s. The stone is lovely, the engraving impeccable: Meredith Quinn Hastings. Devoted Wife and Mother. 1932–1965.
As epitaphs go, it falls horribly short. They left out Victim, Captive, Hero.
Lowering my scarf, I push the cheap sunglasses upward into my hair.
“Hello, Mom,” I say, surprised to hear that my voice is clear, as clear as the fall sky billowing overhead. “You were right about the circus.” A tiny explosion of joy rises up from my heart when I add, “I’m pregnant.”
I reach out to run my fingertip along the smooth stone of her memorial, which is warm from the sun, and suddenly I’m talking a mile a minute—about Sharon and Cornelius and poor Boo, asking if perhaps the lion is there with her in heaven, then feeling silly about it, then not silly at all. I describe how it feels to dance on a wire stories above an astonished crowd, and I tell her how the world looks rushing past outside the window of a speeding train.
My stomach swirls when I tell her about James, things I think I might have been embarrassed to tell her when she was alive, but which I need to tell her now—like what a sweet and gentle kisser he is, and how his muscles feel against me when we’re sleeping. I choke up when I tell her how much I miss him, now that he is away. “In Paris!” I cry out. “Remember how much we loved Paris?” And then I’m laughing and crying at the same time, recalling a zillion little things I’d thought I’d forgotten about that trip—the handsome waiter who brought her a rose every morning with her café au lait, infuriating the other society ladies in our hotel; my first bottle of Chanel N°5, which she secretly bought for me even after my father forbade it, and which I spilled in my suitcase when I was trying to hide it from him. More memories present themselves, memories of our mad dash to Maine where we ate nothing but lobster for three days straight, and the first cotillion dress I tried on, which made me look as if I’d been swallowed by a wedding cake, and the second one, which made us both weep for how beautiful it was and how beautiful I looked in it, and because we knew that the sleeves would hide any bruises I might incur in the days leading up to the coming-out ball.
When a wind rustles through the trees lining the outer edge of the cemetery, I tell myself she’s laughing and crying, too.
Mothers and daughters.
I am so engrossed in my reminiscing that I don’t immediately notice the noise.
It’s not a big noise, not a circus type of noise, just the small ordinary sound of footsteps on a stone walk.
I glance over my shoulder, instinctively re-donning my scarf and sunglasses. A disheveled figure is shambling in my direction. I peer at him, this elderly, grieving widower, through the green-black plastic of the lenses, and I feel a tug of sympathy. But it doesn’t last.
No, it can’t be.
This is impossible. It’s a Tuesday for God’s sake, a business day, and he is a businessman.
I can’t breathe. Just seeing him has me on the verge of suffocating. I know I should run before he spots me, but he is on the only path to the exit. I could skitter my escape through the maze of tombstones, but even with the terror prickling at the back of my neck, I just can’t bring myself to tread on the grass, knowing what—who—lies beneath it.
He draws steadily closer, his eyes fixed on the brick pavers of the walkway. I, on the other hand, am struck motionless, like one of the life-size granite angels adorning some of the more extravagant gravestones.
When my father finally looks up, his mouth immediately drops open and his brows arc upward. It is a cartoon expression, yet perfectly appropriate to this most uncomical of moments. For a long time, he just stares at me, confused. Disoriented. It is as if he is asking himself, What in the world is Catherine doing here in the cemetery on the one Tuesday morning of my life that I’ve decided not to go to work?
I, too, am trying to process the situation. A few months ago I hid in a trailer full of elephant shit just to keep from being dragged back to this man, and now here I am standing mere yards away from him while he blinks at me across my mother’s final resting place, as if I’m part of some nightmare he can’t stop having.
Then a thought floats into my mind as clearly as an autumn leaf: The minute he snaps out of his daze, he’s going to kill me.
I spring onto the path, my white Keds scuffing the paving stones as I bolt past him. Had he been slightly less bewildered, he probably would have stretched out his leg to trip me, just as he’s done a hundred—a thousand—times before. But he doesn’t, and I run, heading for the iron gate.
“Stop, Catherine!”
My heart slams on the sound of my father’s voice, because for once it is not a shout or a growl; rather it’s a rasp, a croak. A plea.
“Catherine, please . . . stop.”
Unwillingly, I stumble to a halt. Part of me knows I should keep running, but I have never heard weakness in his voice before, and I am both shocked and intrigued by it. I turn back slowly, and see that his eyes are less steely than I remember. His skin is paler and his shoulders are not his shoulders at all. They are hunched, so deeply hunched, as though his center of gravity has abandoned him.
Suddenly I can think only of the child curled inside me, whose tiny heart, just by beating, connects me to James, to the circus, to everything I love. It is as if my baby is reminding me of something James said on the night we became its parents.
When in the lion’s cage . . .
Show.
No.
Fear.
So I stand straighter and meet his gaze. “What do you want?”
He opens his mouth. He closes it. He turns up his hands and shakes his head. “I just . . .” He sighs heavily, as though he’s expelling his entire soul into the cool September air. “Catherine, I’m just so . . .” He shakes his head and lowers his face into his hands.
I back up a step on the chance that this is some cruel trick. “You’re just so what?” I demand.
And when his shoulders begin to shake, I sway on my feet. He’s crying.
My father is crying. I swear I can feel the earth tilting further on its axis.
As I gape at him, it slowly begins to register how loosely his suit hangs on him, as though he’s borrowed it from someone taller, stronger. His hair, which was always perfectly combed and oiled, is in desperate need of a trim.
/> With a jolt I realize that the man I thought my father was—the man he thought he was—no longer exists because he can’t exist without my mother. As dark and powerful a presence as he was in our home, it was always her job to ensure that he’d shine brightly outside of it. It was she who oversaw his wardrobe, who kept tabs on his grooming. Even when the illness was nearly all that there was of her, my mother still managed to curate his precious Davis Hastings–ness by choosing the right barber, the best shoe polish, the appropriate lapels. And before that, it was she who orchestrated their enviable social life, cultivating a stunning circle of friends to host at lavish sit-down dinners or smart cocktail parties where she would deftly, unfailingly find ways to steer the conversation toward topics on which he could speak with the most confidence and authority. Not because she took any pleasure in helping him feel important, but because if she didn’t, she would be made to pay.
As a child, I would creep out of bed and watch these parties from the stairs, peering over the handrail in my pink flannel nightgown. Perhaps, on some level that was distinctly female, I understood that Meredith Quinn Hastings was the best thing a woman in her world could be—a proper wife, the woman behind the man . . . when she wasn’t the woman cowering at the feet of the man, that is.
And that was why he hated her. Because he knew that she knew how very much he needed her. And I suppose, by extension, it was why he hated me as well: because he feared one day I would know it too.
Well, this is that day! This day, when I’ve unintentionally ambushed him in a quiet cemetery on a Tuesday morning, only to catch him with his suit wrinkled and his shoes unpolished. No tie clip, no haircut. Not even his trademark pocket square.
Nothing.
For all his physical might, for all his money, status, and power, that is exactly what he’s always been—nothing. Without us to be bigger than, meaner than, in charge of, he’s shrunk down to something even less than nothing. We left him alone with that bottomless hatred and all that need, but no one to use it on—no faces to slap, no spirits to trounce—and in the wake of losing whatever it was about hurting us that he loved so much, he cannot even bring himself to visit the barbershop.
We’ve won, I think. By dying, by leaving . . . we’ve won.
Sadly, I can’t imagine a more hollow victory.
“I’m so—” He grips his face with his hands and wails, “Sorry.” The word comes wet and muffled through the spaces between his fingers. He is speaking in a foreign tongue—a language of apology and tears that does not come naturally to him. I almost don’t understand it at first. And when I do, I feel sick to my stomach. I could gag on his remorse, his contrition. In truth, I don’t actually believe he means it. And even if he did, he couldn’t possibly be sorry enough.
“Forgive me, Catherine,” he pleads.
I glare at him so long that the shadows thrown by the gravestones actually shift. Then I hear myself say this: “I forgive you.”
He looks up from his hands. I hate that my eyes are his eyes. Worse, I hate that my mother isn’t here to witness this moment.
Or maybe she is.
“I forgive you,” I repeat. “But not for you. And not for me. I’m neither strong enough nor good nor merciful enough for that.” I bend a smirk at him. “I suppose, in that regard, I take after you.”
He flinches, and I know the insult has hit its mark.
“But I can forgive you for her,” I tell him. “That’s the best I can do.”
“So . . . you’ll come home.” Not a question.
Never.
“Catherine?”
I shake my head, rejecting the name as well as the request. “I’ve found a new home, where I have a family—a real family—who will do whatever it takes to protect me.” I pause to unravel my scarf, freeing my hair, which glints in the sunshine. “On the chance that anyone should try to come between us,” I add pointedly.
I can tell by the way he crumples deeper into his slouch that he knows exactly what I mean. Automatically, his trembling fingers move to his breast pocket in search of the silk handkerchief that isn’t there. Despite my indifference, it’s hard to watch.
So I turn to leave, but on a hunch, I turn back. “When you realized I was gone, after that newspaper article, exactly how long and how hard did you look for me?”
His answer is the scarlet flush of shame that colors his pale cheeks.
It would be funny if it weren’t so completely appalling; I spent the last six months hiding from someone who wasn’t even trying to find me. I take a deep breath, walk toward him, and lean close. To anyone who happens to be watching, I imagine I look like an ordinary daughter giving her ordinary father a kiss goodbye.
But there is no kiss, no embrace, no sense of connection at all, just a useful piece of information, delivered in a whisper, partially out of respect to my mother’s sense of what the world told her was her duty, but mostly out of good old-fashioned pity.
“She kept the pocket squares in the top drawer of the dressing room armoire.”
If he remembers me for anything, I hope it will be for that.
And then I do something that would have been unthinkably reckless when I lived under his roof.
I turn my back on him, on the wild animal that was once my father, and I walk away.
And for the first time, I am not afraid.
* * *
• • •
The cab drops me at the fairgrounds.
As I make my way across the grass, I sense a strangeness, a quiet that is quieter even than Brooksvale, but it’s a darker kind of quiet.
The roustabouts move slowly, which is something they never do, and their heads are bent. There are dancers huddled in a small knot; there are tears—the dancers are crying. Clowns in half makeup and incomplete costumes stand around with their arms at their sides. No juggling clubs, no unicycles, no laughter.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Hopscotch. Her white face paint is streaked with tears and the effect gives me gooseflesh. She is holding Arthur, who is weeping soundlessly in her arms. “What happened?”
She can’t speak, or won’t speak—she just shakes her head at me.
The Ringmaster. Where is the Ringmaster? My chest goes hollow and electric, pulsing with waves of panic. I walk on, and grab hold of Rick, who is pale and mopping his face with a handkerchief.
“Is he all right? Is Cornelius all right?”
Rick, too, merely shakes his head.
Cornelius. Oh, God. Cornelius . . .
I run for the Big Top, and see a small crowd at the entrance. Vince is there, and Hank. Myrtle is doubled over at the waist, sobbing, and Duncan looks small and lost and angry. Gideon is there, crouched beside a folding chair that someone has pulled up . . . for Cornelius.
Cornelius is sitting in the chair, and at first I am relieved that he is here, but as I get closer I can see that something is very wrong.
Has he had a bad spell of some sort, a heart attack, maybe? He is slumped in the chair with his chin on his chest. I can’t suppress the flash of an image, a recent one: my father slumped on the cemetery path, beaten. And while I shudder to compare that father to this one, there is no way to deny that Cornelius looks beaten, too. His face is not ruddy with excitement, with magic. And his velvet coat is uneven, bunched up on one shoulder and sliding off the other. His tie has been loosened.
And his hat . . .
His hat!
Is on the ground. In the dirt.
As if the silky emptiness of it was suddenly too heavy for his head to hold, so there it lies, abandoned in the dust.
Gideon looks up and sees me standing there.
My eyes ask, What is it? A stroke? Another animal lost to a bullet? It can’t be money. Cornelius solved the problem of the money.
So it isn’t money.
It’s worse. Much worse. Unfixable, whatever i
t is.
The baby inside me says, Mama, be strong, and I open my hand to accept the thing that Gideon is now holding out to me. It is an oddly sized piece of paper, not quite square, and it is a yellowish golden color, the color of lions.
Across the upper margin are the words WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM, and it’s dated September 23, 1965.
And as I read the message printed on it, something inside me—everything inside me—shatters.
THIRTY-ONE
CALLIE HAD A FLEETING moment of cold feet right before selling the brooch. It was a family heirloom, after all. But like the lesson Victoria had written on the cotton candy cone, this pin had a job to do.
She knew from the letter that Meredith’s whole purpose for giving it to Catherine (Catherine! she still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around that) over half a century ago was to fund a new life for her daughter, and Callie decided that such a generous impulse should not go unrealized a moment longer. She would use her great-grandmother’s gift of the Cartier brooch to do the most possible and most immediate good.
Along with her letter to her daughter, Victoria had enclosed a telegram—the telegram announcing James VanDrexel’s tragic and untimely death. On the back, she’d written what everyone who’s ever been associated with the circus has long considered its most important rule: The Show Must Go On.
What Callie realized the night her mother read Gram’s letter aloud to her and Jenna, pausing to weep, stopping to laugh, her eyes twinkling as only a VanDrexel’s could, was that the rule itself was unfinished, incomplete. There was more to the lesson, and it had nothing to do with not disappointing the spectators who paid for their tickets and came for the show. That was the business part; what Callie now understood was the life lesson part, and it was this:
The show must go on, even when it’s not the show you expected to be in.
And it doesn’t just go on for one night, it goes on for infinity, like the rings on the floor of the Big Top. The show gets passed down from those who lived it to those who are living it, to the ones yet to live it, with all its surprises, and changes, the catches made high above the crowd and the falls into the safety of a waiting net.