by Lynn Austin
The elephant’s head looked like a snake. I felt afraid. ‘‘Will it eat me?’’
‘‘Why no, Sugar. It’ll make you laugh. And see these clowns? They’ll make y’all laugh, too. And you’ll see men swinging from little bitty swings, way up high in the air like monkeys, and...Ijust know y’all will love it.’’ She took two more swallows of her medicine, draining the glass. When she set it down and crushed out her cigarette, I snuggled up to her. Mama drew me very close, holding me tighter than I ever remembered her holding me before, as if something awful might happen to both of us if she let go.
‘‘You know I love you, don’t you, Sugar?’’ she whispered. ‘‘You know I want to be a better mama, but...y’all understand that I’m...I’m not well?’’
‘‘Yes, Mama.’’ In fact, she sometimes got so weak and wobbly she could hardly walk to the corner store for food or more medicine. The week before, she’d fallen coming up the stairs to our room and the lady who ran the boardinghouse had yelled and yelled at her. Said she would have thrown Mama out in the gutter where she belonged a long time ago if it weren’t for me. I tried real hard to get Mama on her feet again but I couldn’t do it alone. Finally one of the other boarders, a friend of Mama’s, came and helped her up to our room. I didn’t like that man. He had a lot of dark, coarse hair and spoke in a strange language with Mama, and he smelled like fish. But he helped her into bed that day and she slept for a long, long time.
Yes, I knew my mama was very sick. The medicine would make her better, stronger, for a little while. She would laugh and sometimes even sing, just like an angel, but when the bottle of amber liquid was gone, Mama would be sleepy and weak and scarcely able to talk again.
‘‘You know I love you, don’t you, Sugarbaby?’’ she whispered again. ‘‘If I didn’t love you so much I wouldn’t be taking y’all to the circus this afternoon, now, would I?’’
We both got dressed in our Sunday clothes, and Mama put the little crown on my head, fastening it real tight to my golden curls with hairpins so it wouldn’t fall off. I felt like a princess. Mama drank one last dose of medicine for strength, then poured the rest of it into the little silver flask that she carried in her purse. We walked hand-in-hand to the corner where the streetcar stopped, then rode on it for a long, long way. When we finally got off, we walked some more until I saw a huge striped tent up ahead and heard the warble of the calliope and the excited rumble of voices.
The next few hours were the most wonderful ones I’d ever spent with my mama. I’d rarely seen her so happy and full of life, laughing and pointing to all the strange sights along the midway and in the side shows. When she saw how the cotton candy fascinated me, she gave me a nickel to buy some. It was sticky and sweet on my lips, but just when I expected to feel cotton in my mouth, it disappeared. I cried, thinking I must have done something wrong.
‘‘Where did it go, Mama?’’
‘‘Oh, Sugarbaby, I’m so sorry. I should have warned y’all. It’s supposed to melt in your mouth. That’s what cotton candy does.’’ She knelt in front of me to wipe away my tears with her handkerchief. Her smile faded and she got that scary, faraway look in her eyes for a moment. ‘‘And when y’all get a little older, you’ll find out that’s what love is like, too—just like cotton candy. Your mouth will water for it, and it will promise so many things, but when you try and take your fill of love, there’ll be nothing there at all. Only a sweet, lingering taste—if you’re one of the lucky ones.’’
I remember that the circus amazed me that day, but I can’t honestly recall the magic of it anymore. In later years I saw the reality behind the false front—the clowns’ painted-on smiles, the thrills that weren’t thrilling at all once you knew how they were done—and after that, everything about the circus seemed phony and cheap. Even the man-eating tiger, which had frightened me so badly on that first day, proved to be as harmless as Queen Esther and Arabella.
What I do remember about that first trip to the circus was that there was so much going on all at once in those three rings that I didn’t know where to look first. I didn’t want to miss anything so I kept asking, ‘‘What are you watching now, Mama? Which one are you looking at?’’
I remember the brassy music and the relentless excitement and my mama’s beautiful laughter. I remember how she gasped when it seemed that one of the aerialists might fall, and how we both covered our eyes, then peeked between our fingers to discover that he hadn’t really fallen after all. But what remains most vivid in my mind is the eerie way my mama kept looking at me with her sad, gray eyes, and touching my hair or my cheek with her ice-cold hands and saying, ‘‘You know that I love you, don’t you, Sugar?’’
When the show ended we sat on the bleachers listening to the band play until the tent was nearly empty. Mama’s bottle of medicine was empty, too. I had seen her tip the little silver flask up real high so she could get the very last drop of it. Then she pulled out her compact and a tube of lipstick and she painted her lips scarlet, blotting them on a square of toilet tissue from her purse.
‘‘Here’s a kiss for you to keep, Sugarbaby.’’ I tucked the fragile square into my pocket and kept that imprint of her lips for a long, long time—until it finally fell apart.
As soon as the music stopped, the roustabouts streamed into the tent, causing a great ruckus as they began dismantling the bleachers and circus rings. Mama stood and took my hand in hers.
‘‘Eliza Rose Gerard, it’s time for y’all to meet your daddy.’’
We walked across the empty circus rings, and when we stepped outside I was surprised to see everything stripped down already. The sideshow tents, the cotton candy booth, the tent with the animals, even the ticket booths had vanished leaving a bare, trampled field where all the magic had been. Mama led me around the back of the Big Top to a smaller tent where a group of circus performers talked and laughed as they changed out of their costumes into ordinary clothes.
Then Mama pointed to the man who was my daddy.
He had bright red hair that stuck out in all directions and a bulbous red nose to match. He wore baggy plaid trousers with polka dot suspenders and a pair of shoes that seemed a mile long. He was a clown. A foolish buffoon with the Bennett Brothers Circus.
Daddy sat on a little stool in front of a mirror, talking quietly to another man as he wiped the white makeup and exaggerated smile off his face. But he stopped—froze is really the right word for it—when he looked up and saw my mother.
‘‘Hello, Henri,’’ she said. Mama was the only person I’ve ever heard pronounce Daddy’s name the French way. Everyone else called him Henry.
‘‘Yvette?’’ He sounded astonished and not at all sure it was really her. I remembered how different Mama had looked when she was called the Singing Angel, before she got so sick and needed bottles and bottles of medicine. No wonder Daddy didn’t recognize her, thin as she was now.
Mama poked at her hair as if she could push it around and make it beautiful again, as if she wished she still wore it piled high on her head like in the picture. ‘‘Don’t you know your own wife, Henri?’’ she said with a tiny laugh. ‘‘Or your baby daughter?’’
Daddy glanced at the other man, then back at Mama before looking away. His cheeks turned nearly as scarlet as his hair. The other man quickly stuffed his costume into a trunk and disappeared like some kind of magic act. Daddy fumbled to pull off his nose and wig, then wiped off the last of his makeup with a towel before finally looking up at me. He tried to smile.
‘‘She...she’s grown since I saw her last.’’
‘‘I should think so. Y’all have been gone more than two years, Henri. She’ll be five years old on her next birthday, won’t you, Sugarbaby?’’
I didn’t answer. I simply stared and stared at this stranger who was my daddy. Now that he’d taken his makeup off, I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen—so different from all the men who came to our boardinghouse to visit Mama and bring her medicine. He had shiny black hair that he wore sl
icked back beneath his wig, and his shoulders looked very wide, his torso ramrod straight and muscular beneath his outlandish outfit. He still hadn’t moved from where he sat when we first approached.
‘‘What do you want, Yvette?’’ he asked. ‘‘Didn’t you get the money I sent?’’ For a reason I couldn’t understand, he seemed afraid of us.
‘‘Is there someplace we could go and talk, Henri? I could use a cigarette.’’
Daddy stood and stripped off his costume and funny shoes, stuffing everything into one of the wardrobe trunks. He wore an undershirt and a normal pair of trousers beneath it. He never said one word as he put on his jacket and street shoes and led us across the trampled grass to a long line of rail cars, parked on a sidetrack at the edge of the field. Night had fallen and it was way past my bedtime. I don’t remember much that happened after that because I was so worn out from all the excitement of the circus that I curled up on Daddy’s tousled bunk and fell sound asleep while Mama and Daddy smoked cigarettes and talked and shared a bottle of her medicine.
The tiny train compartment was dark when I awoke. I didn’t know where I was. I cried out in fright and Mama came out of the darkness and scooped me up in her arms. ‘‘You know I love you more than anything in the whole wide world, don’t you, Sugarbaby?’’ she whispered.
I nodded and laid my head on her bare shoulder. She wrapped a blanket around me, then laid me down on the little banquette seat by the fold-down table where she and Daddy had sat earlier. ‘‘Go back to sleep now, Sugar.’’ Her breath smelled like medicine as she kissed me. I went back to sleep.
The scream of a train whistle woke me next. I sat up and looked around the moonlit room. Instead of the familiar, crackedplaster walls of the boardinghouse I saw the dark, wood-paneled walls of the train compartment. An overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle of Mama’s medicine sat on the table alongside two sticky glasses. My daddy’s jacket hung on a hook on the back of the door, but the rest of his clothes lay in a heap on the floor. The rail car lurched suddenly, then slowly began to move.
I looked around for my mother, but only my daddy lay sprawled on the rumpled bed. His head and one out-flung arm were all that showed above the sheet. The bottle and glasses on the table began to clink and rattle, then the entire room began rocking from side to side as the train gathered speed.
‘‘Mama? Mama, where are you?’’ I called. Whenever I would wake up alone in our room at the boardinghouse, Mama always came running from somewhere down the hall as soon as I called her. This time she didn’t come. The whistle shrieked again, a lonesome, mournful sound.
‘‘Mama!’’ I wailed.
My daddy groaned and slowly sat up. He looked around groggily, then stared in disbelief when he saw me. ‘‘What the—! What are you doing here? Where’s Yvette? Yvette!’’
But it was useless for either one of us to call her. Mama had no place to hide in the tiny cubicle. I saw fear in Daddy’s eyes, like I had seen the night before. He tried to climb out of bed, winding the sheet around himself, but the movement of the train, racing at full speed now, made him unsteady on his feet. He fell back onto the bed again.
‘‘Oh, God...’’ he moaned. ‘‘Yvette, how could you?’’
‘‘Where’s my mama?’’ I cried.
Daddy scrubbed his face with his hands, then slowly lifted his head. ‘‘She left us. She’s gone.’’
I was too young to understand death at the time, but a year or so later when Carlo fell off the high wire and died, and I heard his wife Bianca moaning and weeping, ‘‘He’s gone...he’s gone...how could he leave me,’’ and crying out to God just like my daddy had that first morning, I finally understood that my mama had died of her terrible illness. She had vanished, never to be seen again, just like Carlo. The circus train had moved on to the next town leaving no trace of either of them.
Later still, when I learned all about heaven in a Lutheran church in Lima, Ohio, I knew that Jesus held my mama safe in His arms. I felt relieved that she would never be sick or wobbly-legged again. But on that first terrible morning as my daddy sat with his face in his hands, weeping for her, all I could do was cry along with him and hold on tight to Mama’s silver tiara, which had fallen from my head during the night.
Daddy had no idea what to do with me. For the first three days he barely looked at me, let alone held me or consoled me. ‘‘Here...eat this,’’ he would say, and he’d slide a plate of food across the table to me, pushing it with one finger. He took his own plate outside to eat on the rail car step with his back to me. I slept on the banquette seat as the train rattled and swayed through the night, then knelt on that same seat and watched out the window as farms and woods and towns streamed past in the early dawn light. I didn’t leave the car for three days, still wearing the clothes Mama had dressed me in.
When the train stopped I would watch the city of tents go up in a vacant lot somewhere or in a farmer’s field. ‘‘Stay here,’’ Daddy said in his mad voice each morning as he left for clown alley to put on his costume and makeup. I knew there were probably tigers outside and elephants with heads that looked like snakes and I was too terrified to leave the car. Thank goodness Aunt Peanut finally took pity on me, or I don’t know what might have become of me. She happened to walk by and see me looking out the window just as Daddy was leaving one morning.
‘‘For crying out loud, Henry!’’ she said in her squeaky, midget voice. ‘‘You can’t keep the kid cooped up in here for the rest of her life! She’s a living, breathing human being! And your own flesh-and-blood, to boot!’’
‘‘You’ve got to help me, Peanut,’’ Daddy begged. ‘‘I don’t know what to do with her...or what she needs.’’
‘‘Well, first of all she needs a little lovin’ now and then, just like we all do.’’ Aunt Peanut climbed up on the seat beside me and gathered me into her stubby arms. She was not much bigger than I was, a tiny creature with a woman’s body and lipstick and rouge on her face. Such a grotesque stranger would have frightened me if I hadn’t been so lonely for my mama. Longing for comfort, I hugged Peanut tightly and wept.
‘‘See, Henry?’’ she said. ‘‘See? That’s all the kid needs...just a little lovin’.’’
‘‘Her mother’s gone, Peanut, and I don’t know what to do with her. Will you take her for me?’’
‘‘Take her? She’s your daughter!’’
‘‘I know she’s my daughter,’’ Daddy said angrily, ‘‘but there’s no room for her here, no place for her in my life.’’
‘‘There’s more room in here with you than there is in my sleeping car. You want her crowded in there with no light or air and bunks full of women stacked clear to the ceiling?’’
‘‘I don’t want her here at all,’’ he said, pacing in the tiny space.
‘‘A circus is no place to raise a child.’’
‘‘Lazlo and Sylvia have children, and so do—’’
‘‘That’s not what I mean. I know there are children here, but they’ll all grow up to perform in the circus—they’ll marry other performers. I don’t want her to have a life like her mother’s or mine. I want a real life for her, not one spent on the road ten months a year, living out of a steamer trunk.’’
Aunt Peanut stroked my hair. ‘‘That kind of life isn’t going to fall out of the sky, Henry. You have to give it to her.’’
‘‘I can’t! Thisis what I do! I’m a circus clown, not a shopkeeper or a clerk in a bank. I had no intention of becoming a father. It happened by accident...so I married Yvette, and now she’s gone and—’’
‘‘And you’re a father,’’ she said sharply. ‘‘And unless you’re planning on leaving your kid in an orphanage somewhere, you’re going to have to be a father to her, Henry.’’
‘‘I don’t know how!’’ he shouted. The sound made my skin prickle. It was one of only half a dozen times in my life that I ever recall my daddy shouting. Aunt Peanut released me and hopped off the banquette to go to him, laying her hand on his
arm to soothe him.
‘‘Didn’t you have a father of your own?’’ she asked gently.
‘‘He died when I was eight.’’ Daddy snatched his derby off the table and jammed it onto his head. ‘‘I don’t have time for this, Peanut. I’m going to be late for the parade, and I’m not even in costume yet.’’ He yanked the door open.
‘‘Just be the daddy you always wished you’d had, Henry.’’
Daddy froze in the doorway, then slowly turned to stare at her. He looked as though he’d been slapped. ‘‘What did you say?’’
‘‘That’s really all there is to it. If you wished your daddy had tucked you into bed at night, then tuck her in. If you wished your daddy had taken you on his knee and told you stories, then tell her stories.’’
He took his hat off, raked his fingers through his glossy hair a few times, then jammed it back on his head again. He seemed unable to speak.
‘‘Teach her right from wrong, Henry. The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule. You haveheard of those, haven’t you?’’
‘‘Yes...my mother was a good Christian woman.’’ He spoke so softly I barely heard him. ‘‘She raised us by the Good Book. That’s why I married Yvette after...when I found out she was in a family way.’’
‘‘Then you’ll do just fine,’’ Aunt Peanut said, patting his arm. ‘‘Go on now, before you miss your wagon. I can probably skip the parade for once. I’ll take the kid around with me today.’’
‘‘No! Not to the freak show—’’ ‘‘Why not?’’ She was suddenly angry. ‘‘If the circus is going to be her home, then she needs to learn that freaks like me are people, too. Or are you ashamed to have her meet your ‘family,’ Henry?’’
‘‘I’m sorry...Ididn’t mean—’’ ‘‘Get out of here before I lose my temper.’’
She pointed her stubby finger at the door. Daddy left. Aunt Peanut packed an awful lot of explosive for a tiny little woman. But she also had a heart that was twice as big as most other people’s. She reached for my hand.