Do as they say, Rowan. I heard Father’s voice as clearly as if he were standing next to me. A Collier fears nothing.
I lowered my right leg toward the floor.
“Excellent,” said Dr. Friedlander. “Now slide your foot, toes first, into this shoe.” He pushed a black shoe, its laces loosened, under my foot. I slid my right foot into it. My left leg hung limp as a hank of seaweed.
Dr. Friedlander bent and slid my left foot into its shoe. Deftly he pulled the laces of both shoes tight and tied them.
“Take care of the feet, and the rest will follow,” he said to the nurse who looked disapproving.
“It’s my job to tie their shoes, Doctor,” she said.
“Of course, it is.” Dr. Friedlander beamed at her. “But I find the element of surprise to be therapeutic.”
He offered me his arm. “Now, Rowan, lean on me for two steps over to the wheelchair and we’re off to the chamber of miracles.”
Safely in the wheelchair, I leaned against its high wicker back.
“Sit up straight,” said Dr. Friedlander. “Nothing wrong with your back muscles.”
The nurse bent down and arranged my feet on the broad footrests.
As Dr. Friedlander pushed me through the ward, whistling “Daisy, Daisy,” children called from their beds, “Dr. Freedom! Dr. Freedom!” He waved and kept moving.
In a long, sunny room, boys and girls in braces and on crutches followed directions from white-coated men and women. Dr. Friedlander pushed me past them and parked the wheelchair behind a flowered curtain. Honey-colored sunlight flooded through a tall window. He switched on the phonograph resting on a white metal table and positioned the needle on a record.
“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” warbled the tenor voice. My heart leaped. Father and I used sing along with this record.
“Stand up, Rowan,” Dr. Friedlander said.
“Yankee Doodle do or die.” I leaned forward in the chair. “Did my father give you that?”
“No, it’s one of my favorites.” He lifted me up.
“A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam…”
“Stand on your right leg and put your hands on my shoulders. That’s it.”
“…born on the Fourth of July!”
“Now we’ll encourage your left leg,” said Dr. Friedlander. “Let’s dance!”
“I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart…”
Hopping on my right foot, dragging the left. I stayed upright for a full minute, all the way to the final line, “I am the Yankee Doodle Boy!”
Dr. Friedlander settled me back in the wheelchair. “Day one is a terrific success. Now”—he lowered his voice—“I’ll tell you a secret. My ideas are different from the ones popular out there.” He jerked his thumb at the curtain. “Polio is a powerful opponent. We fight it on multiple fronts—music, laughter, exercise, and massage. For massage I yield to the nurses. They will massage your left leg and right leg in equal measure after every session with me.” He put the record back in its paper cover. “Why both legs, do you suppose?”
I shook my head.
“Are your legs alike or different?”
“Different. Of course.”
“Do they look different?”
I looked down at my black stockings and shoes. “Yes, the left one looks…”
“Alive and well,” he interrupted. “Affected by polio, but capable of walking again. Believe that and we’ll do wonders. You’ll see.”
He sounded so sure. Maybe I wouldn’t be crippled forever.
“It will get stronger?”
“If you work at it.” He held out his hand for me to shake. “You have my word on that.”
I shook his hand. Father judged people by their handshakes. Dr. Friedlander was worthy.
Chapter 9
We stop to buy sausage rolls with a dime from a leather pouch Dorchy wears on a cord around her neck. She holds the pouch out to show me. “Rubes can’t hang on to anything,” she says. “They all have holes in their pockets.”
Three giggling girls in pale linen dresses and wide hats pass us, followed closely by Farm Boy and Townie.
“Look,” Dorchy says, handing me my sausage. “Those idiots are chasing bigger fish now. Good luck to ’em.”
I forget the boys because with my first bite I’m back in New York having pancakes and sausages with Father. He whistles “You Are My Sunshine” as sunlight pours through the tall dining room window, turning the syrup in the glass pitcher to gold.
Homesickness is a physical ache so intense that I can’t swallow. For five years I’ve kept my life before locked away. Now memories ambush me at every turn. I squeeze my free arm against my stomach, dropping the sausage roll in the dirt.
Dorchy picks it up, dusts it off, and stuffs it in her apron pocket. “Wait here,” she says. The ache fades as I look around and disappears as I watch people strolling past.
The crowd slows and jostles around an obstacle. I crane my neck to see what’s blocking the pathway and gasp.
Mr. Ogilvie and his camera.
He is photographing a little girl holding a teddy bear.
Fear roots me to the spot. He’ll send me back to Boston if he finds out I left the tent.
I lower my head, wishing I had a hat to shadow my face.
Did he follow us? But how? And why isn’t he with Aunt Fan at the dentist?
He still has his back to me when I spot Dorchy coming toward me, carrying two green bottles with straws. I wave and point to Mr. Ogilvie. She holds a bottle up to hide her face as she passes.
She hands me one, and bubbles tickle my nose as the first sip of lukewarm sugary liquid slides down my throat. We stand with our backs to the walkway, pretending to admire a booth selling fried clams.
My voice shakes. “You said he took Aunt Fan to the dentist.”
“He did.” She looks at me, her eyes narrow. “You think I told him we were coming out here? I wouldn’t tell him the time of day, but if you don’t trust me, we’ll go back now.”
I make up my mind. “No. I was just surprised to see him.”
“Me too.” She takes a long drink. “I have an idea,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “Let’s follow him. I want to see what he does when the Ogress isn’t around. She tucks her top lip over her teeth. “The dentith ith thuppothed to take a couple of hourth.” She goes on in her own voice, “He must have dumped her there and raced back here for some reason we are going to discover.”
“But what if he sees us?” The thought makes my skin crawl.
“He won’t recognize us with our hair down.”
“And our aprons turned around.”
Dorchy grabs my hand. “Hurry up, he’s way ahead of us and I think he’s going to the midway.” Excitement makes her voice tremble.
So we follow him. Past animal barns reeking of manure, out onto the midway.
Dorchy stops in front of a tent hung with life-size colored posters: “Teddy the Dancing Bear,” “Thirsty Thorsten the Sword Swallower,” “Gilda, Half Snake, Half Woman, All Wild.” On a platform in front stands a short man in a red jacket and blue-and-white-striped pants.
“The talker,” Dorchy says with a flourish as if she conjured him up just for me.
The man shouts into a megaphone at people walking past. “Hurry-a, hurry-a, hurry-a!” he says. “Come-a one, come-a all to our electrifying, death-defying, high-flying show.”
Dorchy snorts. “My dad was a lot better than him.”
“Faint of heart? Move right on by,” the man booms. “What’s inside will chill you, thrill you, and nearly kill you!”
Some people in the surging crowd have stopped to listen.
“Dorchy, look!” Mr. Ogilvie stands on the outer fringe of listeners, looking hypnotized. “What if he goes inside?”
“We sneak in. But first I wa
nt to show you something.” A man in a gray suit, standing in front of us, pushes his straw hat back and laughs at something the talker says. “Now watch,” Dorchy says. Faster than a blink, she slides her hand up under the man’s jacket and pulls out a wallet. The man goes on laughing; he doesn’t know. If she hadn’t told me to watch, I wouldn’t either.
She sidles quickly away into the crowd. I follow and grab her arm. “Give that back!”
She pats her pocket. “Carny code: ‘If you take a mark’s money without him noticing, he’s got no beef.’”
“Well, I noticed. Give it back. Do you want to get arrested?”
She grins. “I’m not going to keep it. I just wanted to show you how easy it is.” She winks and moves back through the crowd. I follow and watch her slip the wallet into the man’s pocket.
“You were so fast he didn’t even know it was gone.” Now that she’s returned the wallet, I can compliment her.
“It’s all part of my plan.” She sucks in a breath. “Hey, there he is. Come on!”
Mr. Ogilvie is disappearing through the front entrance.
We walk over to the side of the tent, pretending to admire the posters flapping above us. Dorchy suddenly pushes me down next to an open space where the tent wall doesn’t quite reach the ground. A heavy smell of sweat and hot canvas hits my face as I crawl inside. Dorchy follows, pushing my crutch ahead of her. The only light comes from electric spotlights shining on the stages. No one pays any attention to us as we stand up and brush off our clothes.
In the dim light I realize it will be almost impossible to see Mr. Ogilvie, and that means he won’t see us either. I begin looking around as we weave through the crowd of men and a few women who shuffle along, stopping at each roped-off stage to gape and applaud. We pass a dusty-coated dancing bear who looks sleepy and hot. The smell of “Ferdinand the Formidable Fire Eater’s” torch makes me feel sick.
But “Gilda, Half Woman, Half Snake, All Wild!” brings me to a halt. She rises slowly from behind fake boulders, waving her bare arms over her head while her body sways side to side. Her green and yellow scarf ripples, and the rubes shout and whistle. Gilda arches her back and smiles at her audience. In the spotlight I see specks of red lipstick on her crooked teeth. People in the crowd shout comments that she ignores. She doesn’t speak.
Dorchy grabs my arm. “There’s something we have to see,” she says in a low voice. “I’ve heard people talking about it.”
Without taking my eyes off Gilda, I whisper back, “Not before I see her tail.”
“You can’t stand here for long, or someone will notice and kick us out. You have to be twenty-one to get in.”
The rubes start clapping and shouting, “Gil-da! Gil-da!”
Slowly Gilda pushes aside the boulders and reveals her narrow waist above a scaly green and yellow snake’s tail, as wide as her hips at the top, tapering to a narrow point.
I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.
Gilda bends to the side and comes up with a live brown and gold snake wrapped around her arms. The crowd cheers as the snake’s head lashes back and forth, tongue flickering. Gilda raises the snake above her head and rocks faster as the recorded music switches to a thundering drumbeat—ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-ba-ba-boom.
Dorchy says, “My mother’s snake act would leave her in the dust.”
Gilda’s upper body is in constant motion, but she’s pinned to that spot behind the rocks. I’m pinned to my crutch. I’ll never run again, climb rocks in Central Park, ride the waves. I forget that she’s a performer who can move wherever she wants to. Tears for both of us sting my eyes.
I move closer to the stage. Too close. Gilda’s eyes widen. “Shove off, missy,” she hisses. “This is no place for little girls.”
Chapter 10
I hurry after Dorchy, deeper into the dim tent. She stops in front of a curtained stage where a poster announces, “Narda, the Nearly Departed: Can your love bring her back from the Pearly Gates?” From a poster, Narda, a golden-haired angel, arms and wings outstretched, stares down at us with mournful eyes.
A crowd of mostly men surrounds us. I don’t see Mr. Ogilvie. Maybe we lost him. What if he goes back to the tent and finds out I’m gone?
“I think we should go back now,” I whisper. Dorchy shakes her head.
The curtain opens and in front of us gapes a white coffin. It’s tilted up so we can see the chalky-faced blond girl dressed in white lying inside. Her hands are folded, eyes closed.
A chorus of gasps rises from the crowd. One man calls out, “If she ain’t the image of my poor Pru.”
I step back onto someone’s foot. I can’t stop looking. Is she breathing? Her chest under the white lace doesn’t move. I grip Dorchy’s wrist. “Is she dead?”
“Of course not,” she says, but she sounds unsure.
The talker steps onstage. “Sad to say, ladies and gents, Narda has taken a turn for the worse,” he says. “Maybe she’ll rise from the coffin this afternoon and maybe she won’t. It’s up to you. If you call out words of love, she might come around. No promises, but it’s worth a try.”
A man shouts, “Narda, darling, I love you. Please wake up.” He starts to laugh.
The talker shakes his finger at the man. “Death is a serious matter,” he says. “Especially to one as close to it as Narda. A little respect, please, and we might get a song from her today.”
Another man coaxes, “Narda, please, please, pretty please, wake up. I paid a dime to see you.”
Laughter gusts through the crowd. The talker looks annoyed.
A woman calls out, “Narda, Mama loves you. Oren loves you. Jake loves you. Milly May forgives you. Now open your eyes!”
Narda puts her left hand on her forehead and starts to sit up.
The crowd claps and calls out encouragement.
Mr. Ogilvie pushes through the crowd in front of us, moving away from Narda. His face is wet with tears. He doesn’t see us.
Dorchy’s eyes shine in the light from the stage. “We can’t follow him out the front. We have to crawl under the tent.”
“Let’s go then.”
Back outside, with no sign of Mr. Ogilvie, we move slowly along the walkway, past food stalls and games of chance. Part of me is still back there with Narda.
“Why do you think Mr. Ogilvie was there?”
She shrugs, “No idea. But I guess sometimes he likes to get as far away from Aunt Fan as he can.”
My right leg throbs, and my arm aches from the single crutch jammed in my armpit. I slow down, wanting to rest.
Dorchy says, “You poor kid, you look about to faint. Sit down here.” She glares at a boy eating an ice cream cone on a wooden bench. “Scram. This lady is sick.”
He takes one look at me and runs.
I sit on the edge of the bench. Where is Mr. Ogilvie going now? Did he see us?
Dorchy seems distracted. “The Ogress has it in her head that I should work for them permanently, not just these ten days of the Exposition.” She chews her thumbnail. “It makes me puke to think of it. I need to get back to the carny world, working on a midway like this. It was home to me until two years ago.”
“What happened then?” Stupid question. She already said her parents were dead.
“My parents died of influenza just as we started working this Expo. I got sent to an orphanage. The people there said they couldn’t reach my uncle in Coney Island. He’s a carny too. I don’t think they even tried. Last year I didn’t get anywhere near the midway, but this year, here I am. And I want to stay. Travel south with them, hit the road.”
I nod. “So why don’t you run away?”
“I’m thinking about taking what I’m owed and doing just that.”
For a while we sit in silence, watching people stroll past. I feast on the varieties of shapes and sizes and ages. A boy on crutch
es catches my eye. He’s walking with two younger girls and a man and woman. A family. The man waits for him to catch up and puts his hand on the boy’s head, smiling.
“Mr. Ogilvie takes pictures of me when he thinks I’m not looking,” I say, trusting Dorchy with my secret. “And last night I found a rose from him when I changed backstage.”
Dorchy leans forward. “Was there a card?”
“No, but he asked me about it this morning and said he wants to take me to his ‘favorite place in all the world.’ And he doesn’t want anyone, especially Aunt Fan, to know. It’s ‘our secret.’ It makes me sick.” I shiver at the memory. “He didn’t leave me another rose today, thanks to Aunt Fan’s bad teeth.”
Dorchy runs her hand through her hair. “Maybe,”—she looks down—“we could both go with him.”
“No! Why would you even think such a thing? I hate him.” I stand up. “I’m feeling better. I want to go.”
She stands up too. “First we’re going to ride the Ferris wheel.”
“But he might be waiting for us back at our tent.”
“Come on.” She starts walking. “I guarantee he’s not there. He has to pick up the Ogress at the dentist on the other side of Springfield. Then he has to take her home.” She waits for me to catch up. “It will be quite a while before he comes back. I’m just glad she didn’t drag me along to hold her hand at the dentist’s.”
“OK, then slow down.”
We pass talkers and food stalls, “Test Your Strength” games, and the red-and-black tent of “The Great Zurena, Foreteller of Futures.”
“Why do you hate the Ogilvies?”
“Because they—” She makes a face. “All their talk about sterilizing ‘unfit’ people makes me sick. When we were at Coney Island, before we came up here, some nosy people from someplace on Long Island came poking around the freak show asking about ‘family histories.’”
“The investigators don’t go to carnivals,” I say, thinking of Julia and her note cards. “They go to prisons and insane asylums to interview inmates.”
“Well, they asked a lot of questions about ‘heredity.’ Like when a woman in a blue suit with a notepad asked Flo, the bearded lady, if her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother had beards. Flo was in tears afterward. ‘How do I know if my mother had a beard? I never knew her. I’m an orphan.’”
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