The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)

by Robert Hough

  Also: in the hospital I had a place to go to when I needed to be alone. On walk mornings, when the lunatics began to wander in different directions, I'd drift off to a big old live-oak with a U-shaped limb that grazed the lawn before ricocheting back skyward. That's where I'd take up. If I was facing away from the hospital, I'd study the gaps in the forests or the knots in the fence or the types of birds scooping up worms after a nighttime rain. If I was facing toward the hospital, I'd watch those big-armed orderlies, ex-farm boys mostly, corral the lunatics. This was a difficulty in and of itself, for when a patient was led back to the middle of the lawn she'd often as not wander off as soon as the orderly went to grab another, so that after a while the orderlies got impatient and resorted to foul language and throwing the lunatics over their shoulders, like bags of sorghum, just to keep them in one place for a minute.

  (More advice? In life you take your laughs where you can get them.)

  Same thing on a show, and by this I mean people finding a quiet place to go off to. Otherwise the constant din and people were liable to drive you nuts, the consequences of which I've already related. It's called "finding a corner" and eventually others get to know where yours is and they respect it.

  Mine was off the midway, in the Wild Animal exhibit, next to the cage filled with a big old Siberian tiger named Royal. Was the first tiger I'd ever seen in my life, which doesn't explain the attraction because I also'd never seen elephants, lions, zebras, camels, leopards, Friesian horses, Sicilian burros, brown bears, anacondas, tapirs, mandrills, cockatoos, bald eagles, dalmations, yaks, gila monsters or pygmy hippos. And if it sounds strange that a person could reach twenty-two years of age without laying eyes on a wild animal, remember there were hardly any zoos back then. Only travelling menageries, and if any had come to Princeton when I was little, my parents were too busy catching TB or getting torn to bits in farming accidents to take me.

  Now, you take a Siberian with good bones and round paws, like a Bengal, and you've got the most magnificent creature you've ever seen, as they can weigh as much as eight hundred pounds with fur as orange as New Mexican soil. But most aren't like that. Most are leaning toward the scrawny end of the spectrum, with a tall arching backbone that adds a sway to the stomach when they walk. Long-limbed and a little dim, describes most Siberians, which is why they usually warm seats during cat acts. Royal was no exception, a moving bag of bones he was, though with eyes the green of jewellery and the dignified nature all tigers have. I'd come at day's end, when the crowds were gone, and keep him company, reading a book or doing my knitting or having a sandwich from the cookhouse while that lonely old tiger gnawed on a horse hock. Or sometimes I'd deliberately not bring anything, so as to force myself to do some thinking, my not yet understanding that the best pondering tends to get done when your mind's occupied with small, repetitive tasks.

  After a while I'd get frustrated and say out loud, "What do you think's gonna happen to me, Royal? Something good, maybe? Something worth sticking around for? just how is it a person's supposed to know?" To this he'd arf, or do nothing, or chew louder, or give me a low rasping grrrrrrrrrrr which in feline talk always means the same thing.

  I'm a tiger. Don't take me lightly.

  All of which I'm telling you because my fondness for Royal was the reason I got to know the guy who ran the Wild Animal Show. I'd seen him working before we met, a well-proportioned man in a donkey jacket and strawboater, ordering the groomers to clean out this tent or that, or give extra feed to such-and-such an animal, or scrub the mange off of this-or-that elephant. For the longest time we never talked, he being a boss and me a dancing girl and the line not being mine to cross. Yet one day, after I'd been with the show maybe a month, he seemed keenly interested on doing just that, for he came up and smiled and plunked himself beside me. With him was an older Negro, who sort of hung back to one side, looking fidgety.

  "Now, you tell me. When you were a child and you went to the circus what was it you remembered afterwards? The clowns? The acrobats? The sideshow? Maybe. Maybe not. I'll tell you the thing I remembered the most. I remembered the animals. The elephants, the roar of the lions, the dog and pony, the dancing bears. Am I right?"

  Was such a bald introduction I could do nothing but answer the question seriously.

  "Can't say for sure," I told him. "I never went to the circus as a kid."

  "Jesus," he said, laughing. "That twang. You really are from Kentucky, aren't you?"

  "I am."

  "I'll try not to hold that against you."

  "I'd appreciate that."

  "My name is Al G. Barnes. People call me Lucky Barnes. This is my educated valet, Dan."

  I was feeling chagrined, for I've never taken well to teasing, which I realize is a fault but one I suffer from nonetheless. So I just said, "I know who you are."

  Al G. was still grinning and looking into a place neither near nor distant. Seemed to me he enjoyed my being a little difficult, which is a trait common to men born for success: they look at problems as games instead of hindrances, as though they were nothing more than crosswords in a newspaper. After a time, he wiggled himself a little closer to me and resumed talking in a voice that'd lowered itself considerably. This hushing of tone signalled something to Dan, exactly what I wasn't sure, though within a few seconds Al G.'s educated valet was backing away and backing away until he just plain wasn't there anymore. Even Royal turned and lay down and farted.

  "In that case," Al G. Barnes said, "I won't beat around the bush. I saw the Superba show again last night. Exquisite. There's something about you, Kentucky. Something I can't quite put my finger on, and that's what this show needs. Performers with mystique. Intrigue. Appeal with a capital A. Plus that stomach of yours-flatter than Iowa, especially considering what's above it and what's below it. I think I'll have a little meeting with Con T. about you. Maybe get you on to something better. Something that'll earn you a little more."

  "You'd do that?"

  "Sure I'd do that. I will do that. I'll do it tomorrow. So. How's about puckering up?"

  Now there are two types of philanderers. There're those who do it because they never got past the age of sixteen and those who do it to scare. Al G. was the least objectionable of the two, so I let him kiss me a minute, mostly because I'd been feeling lonely and didn't mind the attention. His lips were warm and gentle, and like all handsome men he concentrated on his kissing technique rather than the person he was kissing. Still, I didn't mind, human closeness being human closeness, until I felt his right hand slip inside my blouse and squeeze my nipple between his second and third fingers. This I let continue for two or three seconds only, just long enough for it to feel silly, as I knew for a fact Al G. Barnes had at least one wife everyone knew about and another they pretended not to know about. So I pushed his hand away, saying, "There's a bit of my first husband in you" by means of explanation.

  "Is that bad?" he asked.

  "About as bad as bad gets," I answered, pretending to be more amused than I really was.

  Without missing a beat he peered into the middle distance and said, "If all goes well I'll be out on my own again next year. A threering with nothing but animal acts. I've had a few setbacks but you just watch. What do you think of this: `The Show That's Different'? It's got a ring to it, don't you think?"

  I told him I thought it was fine, despite the real thought in my head: heavens to Betsy it's like his lips weren't just pressed against mine and his hands all over my chest. It's as though nothing like that even happened. At that moment I knew Al G. was going to do anything he set his mind to, the ability to recast history being rare and wondrous and one central to the art of crowd pleasing.

  Naturally, I never really expected him to talk to Con T., the I'm gonna tell the boss about you being a tried-and-true way of getting young impressionables to open their hearts and, more to the point, their knees. Miracle of miracles, the next day I spotted Con T. Kennedy, manager of the Great Parker Carnival number-two unit and brother-in-l
aw of C. W. Parker himself, sitting smack in the middle of the first stringer. He was eating midway peanuts and keeping a keen eye on what my belly was doing. Later that day he sent someone to fetch me. I went to his tent. He was smoking a cigar the size of a cucumber while eating a similiarly sized frank and bun; back then circus and carny managers did everything they could to be like John Ringling, and that included growing fat and impulsive.

  "Mary," he said, "take a seat."

  I did.

  "Gonna make this quick"-here he took his cigar out of his mouth and pointed the soggy end in my direction-"I saw the show today and Al G.'s right. You got yourself an attitude that's interesting to the opposite sex. There's a bitterness in you and I'd bet my bottom dollar it's been hard won. Am I right? Don't bother answering, I don't need to know. I only know it's there and it makes the rubes think there'd be trouble were they to mess with you so naturally that's the one idea get's planted in their head and won't go away. Messing with you. Not the other girls. You."

  I sat there, blinking.

  "We need someone to do a Serpentine at the end of the evening show. Something to give it a real kick. As of now, you'll be getting $6 a week."

  He looked down, puffed on his cigar and started scribbling in a ledger. I waited for his not-talking to extend past a few seconds and signal the meeting was over. Finally, I figured we were through, so I got myself up and I walked myself out.

  That night. Little Miss Mary Haynie of Princeton slash Mary Aganosticus of Louisville, hair dyed black and eyes festooned with fake lashes long as matchsticks, walks onto a stage gone completely dark. In front of me's a screen made of a fibre fine enough you could half way see through it when a light was shone. I drop my robe and, hidden from view by the screen, I'm naked as the day I was born, my body enfolded by hot beery tent air. I can practically feel it against my unclothed skin, and it's a feeling makes me scared and tingly at the same time. Behind me, Ned Stoughton lights a candle and magnifies it through glass so my silhouette is cast on the screen in front of me, and when he does I close my eyes and picture the languid way Royal moves when he has a bead on something, practically flow it is, more music than movement, and I impersonate that motion, writhing and moving in such a stimulating manner a roomful of men turn into a roomful of silent boys. They don't make a peep-in fact, they do nothing but sit and gape, like they were in church instead of a tent rank with cigar smoke and paraffin fumes and the perspiration produced by men who've just finished losing a week's feed money. I keep my eyes closed the whole time, feeling heady and warm and in control, which is a weird way to feel when naked in front of a tentful of men, a goodly percentage of whom have put their hats on their laps for fear of embarrassment. After exactly seven minutes, Stoughton snuffs the candle and I put my robe on and sneak out before the kerosene lanterns are lit and the rubes look at themselves, red-eyed and disbelieving and wishing they had different wives to go home to.

  Soon I became one of the better known Little Egypts in a circuit full of Little Egypts, the Great Parker Carnival posters all stating I was 110 per cent authentic and that you shouldn't be fooled by imitators. My first taste of stardom, it was, and not in any way disagreeable. I started getting compliments, fan mail, boxes of chocolates, invitations to dinner and articles written about me in the local papers, some saying I was an artistic addition to the burlesque tradition and some saying I was the square root of all things evil and some even tracing my act back to the divan shows of the ancient Silk Road. And, oh, the flowers. Rhododendrons in St. Louis. Daffodils in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Gladioli in Albuquerque. Roses in Bismarck (though how they got them up there I'll never know). Lilies of the valley, bunches and bunches of them, from an industrialist in Jefferson City, Missouri. And those're just the ones I remember. I'd finish a show and if it was an evening performance and we were in a town where times were good they'd be there, bouquets as big as yours truly, usually with a love note from some rich guy smitten not with me but the idea of me.

  They'd ask to meet me. Stoughton, in that rich larnyx-bobbing voice of his, would tell them to beat it. I wasn't supposed to talk to anyone as Little Egypt, or admit to strangers I was none other, or otherwise display any intimate awarenesses of the Serpentine dance, the reason being it wouldn't take much more than my opening my mouth for people to figure out the famous Little Egypt was a pint-sized hick from the flat end of Kentucky. Your job, Stoughton would say, is guarding the mystique. My job is helping you do that.

  Unless of course money was involved.

  Here's how it worked. The interested gentlemen would pay Stoughton whatever Stoughton thought he could get from him, which would be anywhere from six bits in a state like Mississipi to upwards of $6 in a high-rolling state like California. Later on we'd split it. Was our extra little bonus, what troupers call cherry pie. For the first time, I started saving money.

  Once the introductory fee was paid, Stoughton would lead the man into a feed tent we'd emptied of sacks and festooned with divans and veils and huge silken pillows and other store-bought items made up to look Arab. I'd be lying on a bunch of cushions, in harem pants and a veil, eating grapes straight from the bunch, and the man would stammer something like "Why yes Miss Egypt I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your performance and how much I enjoyed your dancing and if you were free for dinner this evening I was just wondering...." Meanwhile I'd be doing nothing but pouting, head supported by my right hand, left hip jutting suggestively in the air, and it was the sight of this hip up close that usually caused the rube to get so short of breath he could barely get through what it was he wanted to get through. (Amazing, how easy it was to rile a man back in 1911.) After a minute I'd ease one of my eyebrows upward, as if to say, Me? With you?

  This was Stoughton's idea and the result of Stoughton's understanding of John Q. Public: not once did a man react poorly to my rudeness, or do anything but bow his head and thank me for my time and back out muttering apologies. Stoughton explained this was because the rubes actually wanted me to do this, for it was in keeping with the general aura of Little Egypt. If I'd accepted an invitation, they'd know the great siren of Cairo didn't really exist, so in fact I was doing them a favour treating them like yesterday's breakfast.

  After slipping into the state of Texas via Louisiana and doing our first show in Port Arthur, I heard from Stoughton a man wanted to meet me. We quickly threw together the Egypt tent. A few minutes later the flap lifted and in came none other than the Texan. We stood looking at each other. (Well, he stood and I lay, but given the air of superiority I generated while dressed as Little Egypt it felt like the other way around.) He had flowers with him, a dozen roses, and all he did was put them down and nod and leave. Didn't say a word. I guess he thought it was more dignified that way.

  He came back the next day, his act more or less the same: he put the flowers down and took a good long look at me, only this time before tipping his hat and leaving he said, "I sure do enjoy the way you move up there, Miss Egypt," to which I fluttered my eyelashes and sent him on his way. The next time he came it was exactly the same routine, only he said, "I sure do enjoy watching you dance, Miss Egypt," and the time after that it was, "I sure do wish I could get to know you a bit better, Miss Egypt," (though with that one he dropped his dimpled chin, like a man guilty of strong emotion). I looked at him haughtily, raising my eyebrows and saying with my whole expression, Well, no kidding.

  He left, only to show up the next night, wearing one of his expensive suits and a bolo tie and handing over another bouquet of flowers. We moved on to Baytown, and he kept coming, the jump to Houston doing little to dissuade him either, which is saying something seeing as travel between cities wasn't nearly what it is today.

  His first proposition was something along the lines of "I was wondering, Miss Egypt, if you and I could get together, outside the circus I mean," a suggestion that was moulded the next night into "I was thinking, Miss Egypt, if you'd like to visit me in Beaumont, I own a real nice home and I know lots of nice
people...." And then, near the middle of our Houston stand, he hit me with it in that slow solid Texan way of his.

  "Might as well out with it, Miss Egypt. I'm here to declare my intentions."

  Now I could only game-play for so long, especially once I started considering how much money that poor man was spending for the privilege of watching me eat grapes for a minute at a time. Fact is, he was wearing me down (or setting me up, he being a man) and on the night he actually got down on one knee and proposed, what could I do but break out laughing and say, "Lookit, mister. First off my name's not Miss Egypt. It's Haynie, Mary Haynie, from the ugly end of Kentucky no less. This is all just getup, a costume. There is no Little Egypt-she doesn't exist. I'm something they dreamed up. Oh, and by the way, we met last year but you just can't tell on account of this veil."

  Well. You know what that big dummy did? He looked at me with those somber Texan eyes-like grey skies, they were-and he rotated his hat in those big leathery hands and he said, "I understand that, ma'am."

  I won't claim this didn't have an effect on me, for it did, the ability to surprise being something women have trouble ignoring. At the same time I had no intention of running off and marrying, no matter how rich the suitor, given my general lack of interest in men and the bad taste I had in my mouth concerning the holy state of matrimony. So instead I thought, What the hell, and walked over and got up on my tiptoes. This got me high enough to give his cheek a quick, dry kiss, like one a sister might dole out at a wedding.