The boy made a little “so what” shrug and folded his arms tight across his chest.
“Fair enough. They’re fine people but that doesn’t help you out any. Well, let’s try this on: there’s people here that care about you, and that makes this a good place for you if only we can figure out how to make it work right. And there’s another feature of this outfit that should help us out.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re in a place where there’s people, at least one I’m sure of, that knows what you’re feeling right now, that understands everything that’s happening inside you because it happened to him.”
The boy wrinkled his nose. “Who?”
Lewis sighed and pointed a thumb at his own chest. “Lewis Arthur Tully. And I won’t lie to you and tell you that there’s anything can substitute for a ma and a pa and a home, but if you got somebody that understands your troubles, well, that’s a pretty important thing.”
The boy turned suddenly and looked at him for a long time.
“You didn’t have a family.”
“I lost mine, like you. My parents both died, my ma first, and then my pa less than a year later. And that left me with Alma, and Alma wasn’t but twelve years old.”
“How old were you?”
“I was eight. For about a year, Alma took care of the both of us, and her not much more than a little girl herself. Then people put us in an orphanage. Eventually we got sent out West, on that train ride I told you about. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“A whole train full of us, it was. A whole train full of Charlie Barths, if you want to think of it that way. Anyhow, I got sent to live with a family, a big house full of people I didn’t know…and Alma went somewhere else.” Lewis paused for a moment, remembering.
“They split us up,” he said, and never heard the note of wonder in his voice. “And the place I was at wasn’t a good place, they weren’t happy people, and the woman died, which left me to the mercies of her husband.”
“Was he bad?”
“He was a violent, drunken son of a bitch—don’t tell Mrs. Larsen I used such language—and one day I took off and never looked over my shoulder. But I remember every minute of it and everything about how I felt, and I swear to you I think I know a little bit about how you’re feeling. In some ways this should be the best place on the good green earth for a boy to grow up and in others it’s the worst because we’re all busy every minute of the day. Putting a circus together is a hard thing. I think you got a little feeling for that now. Anyhow, none of this is about sending you away. Helen thinks you should move into her tent.”
“I won’t go.”
“I don’t think there’s much point in forcing you to do another thing you don’t want to, but you need some looking after.”
“I want to stay here. With you.” The boy gave Lewis his fierce wide-eyed stare but his mouth was beginning to tremble.
“Maybe we can work something out. She thinks you need to spend time with an adult during the day—won’t hurt you to spend a little time with her.”
The boy made a little shrug that was good enough to be a concession.
“That’s what we’ll do then. You’ll stay here, with me, but she’ll look after you, and what she says goes.”
“All right.”
“And you won’t steal from these good folks anymore.”
“No,” the boy said and looked down quickly.
“I’ll go and talk to Helen.”
“I don’t like her,” the boy grumbled, and realized there was no truth to his words.
“You will. There’s been times I didn’t like her much either, but over all the years I’ve known her, she grew on me some.”
The child looked down, the corners of his mouth trembling, and Lewis bit back the impulse to say he was sorry for all this. Then he sighed and went out to find Helen Larsen, who would argue that the boy belonged with her but might accept the compromise anyway.
The next morning Charlie went to each hut or tent where he’d taken something and made a halting, painful apology. The occupants reacted with a mixture of surprise and curiosity, although the old Russian, Ivanov, was visibly angry at this violation of the sanctity of his quarters. He spouted irritably in Russian until Irina silenced him. She gave Charlie a tolerant look, told him, “Be nice boy,” and sent him on his way.
The hardest meeting was with Lucy Brown. At first she was genuinely hurt that he would steal from her. She listened patiently to his apology, made him sit down, and then asked a few questions.
Under the steady gaze of the bright brown eyes, he was mortified. He sat on a little camp stool, holding grimly to it with both hands, and shifted his weight every five seconds. He was conscious of his dirty clothes and his unruly hair and he felt unfit to be in her tent. When it was clear that he hadn’t singled her out, her face relaxed. He wanted to tell her it hadn’t been done to hurt her, that he thought she was nice, in fact, wonderful, that she was beautiful, but he bit his tongue.
After another silence, she leaned forward. “Did you take something from Lewis?”
“No,” he said, and in the boy’s brief puzzled silence, it was clear to Lucy that this omission had not occurred to him. Charlie shrugged his bony shoulders. “Lewis don’t have nothing to take except his whiskey bottle and it wouldn’t fit in my bag.” Lucy had to laugh, and the boy thought it was the most wonderful laugh he had ever heard.
When he was done making his restitution, he reported to Helen Larsen’s tent with a few of his things. In the compromise Lewis and Helen had worked out, Charlie would remain in Lewis’s hut but he would be under Helen’s supervision during the day and would spend at least part of his time on schoolwork. On this first morning, however, she let him draw. Standing a few feet from him and busying herself with an inventory of costumes, she shot a glance over her shoulder as he opened his pad. The first sheets were covered with small sketches of animals, nothing signaling genius but fairly accomplished pictures for the boy’s age.
Once again she was surprised, and wondered what else about this troubled boy she would learn. As she turned back to her work she heard the scratch of pencil on paper, the restless, rustling sounds of a small boy unused to sitting in a chair for any length of time, and remembered other times in her life when these sounds had been a constant presence in her home. She looked at him again.
Somebody else’s child, she thought, and me with the costumes and the props, and Lewis’ll have me keeping his books. No, it will be no lark for me this time around with Mr. Lewis Tully’s Circus. Looking after of a small boy at my age. She sighed as she shook out one of Lucy Brown’s riding costumes.
A few minutes later, the boy paused in the middle of his picture of Jupiter, aware that Helen Larsen was humming.
TWENTY
Miss Lucy Brown
Lucy Brown studied herself in the mirror. She wasn’t entirely pleased with what she saw but had grown to accept it as one accepts bad qualities in a loyal pet: a round face with a somewhat darker complexion than was fashionable, a gradual thickening of the body as she sped dizzily toward thirty. High cheekbones, large, luminous brown eyes, and a wide mouth, nearly perfect teeth if you didn’t count the half-dozen gold ones along the sides, and auburn hair—her one great vanity—that hung unfashionably down below her waist. Lucy admitted she was no beauty, though men had always liked her, and the ones in the hundreds of small towns she’d played had always seemed to think she was Helen of Troy. She smiled, remembering her mother contentedly combing the young Lucy’s long, soft hair and telling her what a lovely figure she’d cut in her act.
Many times they had fought, always over the young Lucy’s notions of respectability and how to achieve it. Lucy had wanted to be free of the circus life and its barnyard smells, its horrors of travel, its lack of what a young girl took for dignity. And her mother had fought to ke
ep her in it.
“I know what you want,” her mother had said, “what you think you want, anyways: you want a little stone house with a garden, and church on Sundays and a man that’s gonna treat you like some kinda Vestal Virgin. And maybe there’s women that got that, but I never met one. Town people are not like us. You leave this life and there’s a job for you in a stable, or in a factory or a knitting mill or a tannery. And a man that’ll think you’re his damn slave and he’s the Crown Prince.”
“And what am I gonna find here that’s different?”
“Here you’re somebody special. Maybe you’ll find somebody that knows you’re his equal—if not more.”
Lucy sighed, remembering her mother, still lovely at fifty-five, straddling a pair of handsome roans, her mama’s long dark hair flowing behind her. She’d looked like a queen.
“Was a queen,” Lucy said. And she would be happy to know that I came back, Lucy thought.
The very morning Lewis’s letter had arrived, she had been in the act of turning down a marriage proposal. The scion of a prosperous brewer—still producing a great river of lager despite Prohibition—her caller was well-meaning, unconsciously pompous, and unutterably dull. He was also awash in money and connections, things at one time fascinating to Lucy Brown, access to fine people, to high society—what she’d wanted for so many years, the chance to know fine ladies, “women of quality,” she’d heard them called. To know these women, to learn whether there was in them some secret worth beyond what a normal woman had. In part, this quest was what had caused her to leave the circus life, to have the things no one in her family had ever had, to be what no one in her family could have been.
It caused her embarrassment now to recall why she had left, that she had actually aspired to become a “lady.” And now after three years of retirement, she could admit to herself that she had never been truly happy since she had left the circus.
Lucy gave her reflection a rueful look and went out to the corral. Sam Jeanette had the perfect pair of black mares waiting for her.
“Good morning, Sam.”
“Morning, Lucy. They’re anxious. Need some work.”
“Oh, I’ll give them work, all right.” Lucy Brown spread resin across the broad backs of her mounts, took the reins of the pair, and vaulted easily onto the back of the nearer one. Then she braced herself, one foot on each mare’s back, whispered, “Git up, sugar,” and started the pair on their circuit of the little oval track.
Lucy held them back at first, then let them go. After the first turn she sensed their exultation as she felt them building speed. She was conscious of the sun on her face and hair, of the old, reassuring horse smell and the thrill of risk. She thought of her quiet life in the small stone house in Cincinnati, the young beer baron’s dumbfounded look when she told him she was going back to the circus, and laughed aloud at the oddness of it all.
Who was I fooling? Lucy asked herself. This is where I belong till I’m too old to ride. And maybe I won’t quit even then.
She dropped the reins, vaulted backwards and landed on both horses, and somewhere at the corral fence someone was clapping. From the corner of her eye she saw Mr. Jeanette, and a few feet from him, Jem Foley, and she knew Foley was studying her.
At the far end of a water trough, Foley coiled rope and hung it on a post, his eyes riveted on the spectacle of Lucy Brown on horseback. For her practices she favored overalls and a loose-fitting flannel shirt, and as she rode the bareback pair around the track, the wind wrapped the shirt tight against her, whipped her hair back. Foley opened his mouth and shut it again.
Sam Jeanette looked at him. “Great rider, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is,” Foley said.
“You used to ride, didn’t you, son?”
Foley looked at Sam to see if there were any malice in the question but found none. “Yes, sir. I was pretty fair, too. Pretty fair.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Oh, too old,” Foley said breezily. Then he saw Jeanette watching him and looked away. “No, I wasn’t too old, just finished. I was awful fond of the bottle. Drank myself out of three shows and God knows what else. My reflexes went, and my reputation. Nobody would hire me.” He looked up at Lucy Brown. “She’s real good. They say May Wirth is the best, but Lu…Miss Brown is real good.”
“Not a bad-looking girl, either,” Jeanette said quietly.
Foley turned and now saw amusement in Sam Jeanette’s face.
“No. Not bad. If that type—if that’s a man’s taste.”
“Exactly right.”
If your taste runs to goddesses, Foley thought.
The next morning Foley crept to the corral and laughed silently at the pounding of his heart.
Is embarrassment stronger than fear? he wondered. It is in Jem Foley’s case.
For once he had the chance he wanted, with a camp dead asleep except for the crew starting work in the cook tent. He sensed rather than saw the rising sun, but the light was still too weak for him to make out the individual horses. They clung together at the far end of the corral and slept, almost touching one another. Lucy’s big gray raised her head suddenly and looked straight at him. The gray snorted and another head came up, a sorrel mare. They both watched him clamber over the top rail but made no further noise because they knew him.
Foley kicked off his heavy shoes, crossed the corral quickly, bridle behind his back, walked confidently up to the sorrel, and had the bridle over her before she could blink twice. He led her out a few paces from the others, and she waited submissively for the saddle. Foley just stroked her.
“No saddle today, darlin’. Just a little exercise,” and he vaulted onto her, gave her a quick heel, and she moved off.
He lost his hat on her first turn, but it didn’t matter. He felt the wind in his hair and smelled the horse smell and experienced the unearthly pleasure of riding. For several minutes, he gave her head and she galloped gladly around the corral, joined for a time by two of her mates. Then Foley pulled his feet under him, and when she was running on the longer leg of the little circuit, he stood on her bare back. He slipped the reins into his mouth, straightened his back and flung his arms out to embrace the imaginary crowd. As the mare made her circuit, he felt the impulse, let go the reins, and did a somersault. His landing was clumsy, but he stayed on.
Foley grinned. No resin on her back, and him in his stockings, and he could still do it, and for just a whisper in time he was twenty years old. This one thing still remained his, after all the trouble, all his foolish mistakes, and if he could still ride, perhaps there was yet hope that he wouldn’t finish his days as somebody’s stableboy. He dropped down onto the mare and picked up the reins, letting her run.
When he finished, he brushed her and patted her and spoke quietly as had always been his way, and he told himself the mare had enjoyed the ride nearly as much as he had. When she had been dried and relaxed, Foley climbed back over the rail and left the corral without looking back.
When he was gone, Lucy Brown came out from behind a big elm tree and looked off the way he had gone.
***
An air of excitement, of finality, seemed to settle on the circus, and the performers went through their practices in costume, then brought them to Helen Larsen for last-minute alterations and repairs. In the mornings she worked alone, in the afternoons she was assisted by Lucy Brown.
“What do you think of Foley?” Lucy was asking.
Helen hesitated, then said, “I think he’s a man that’s seen the elephant. But he has kind eyes. Handsome man, too,” she said with a wry look at Lucy.
“I don’t know about all that.”
She felt herself blushing slightly and shifted so that her face was partly turned away from Helen.
They had begun to speak, just a quiet greeting at first and then small conversations about the horses. Several times these m
eetings took place in Sam Jeanette’s company, and then one afternoon the older man had excused himself “to keep my zebras from killing one another.” Though she couldn’t have said why, Lucy was certain Sam had withdrawn so she and Foley could be alone.
Am I so obvious as that? she wondered.
But she felt an odd calm in James Foley’s presence, and she sensed something similar in him when they were together.
Another broken-down circus man, she said to herself. And I’m getting attached to this one.
She wasn’t certain what her mother would make of James Foley, but she knew what her mother would tell her, for she’d heard it more than once.
“Every one of them has his story,” she heard her mother telling her, “and you need to know it before you get yourself into something.”
Lucy remembered the morning ride and the somersault: a clumsy one, nothing clean or smooth about it, but in the half-dark and on someone else’s mount. She understood what she’d seen and she wondered what James Foley’s story was.
“I don’t think Lewis likes him,” Lucy said after a while.
“Foley did something once that cost Lewis some money and aggravation. But it was a long time ago, and if Lewis didn’t like him at all, he wouldn’t be with the show. Besides, Miss Lucy ‘Nobody-tells-me-what-to-do’ Brown, when did you start worrying about what Lewis Tully thinks? Or anybody else, for that matter.”
Lucy laughed, and Helen joined her.
On the far side of the tent, Charlie worked on a school lesson Helen had assigned him and listened eagerly, as he did to all their conversations. He was baffled by this arrangement: for reasons he couldn’t have explained, he had expected Helen and Lucy to dislike each other.
“You like Lucy,” he said one afternoon when Lucy had retired to her tent.
“Sure I do. Why?” Helen studied him, then nodded, smiling. “You’re surprised. You think an old lady like me would be jealous of a pretty young thing like Lucy. Well, I’m not. There’s something special about Lucy—as I expect you’ve already figured out. Lucy and I go back a long ways. We worked together when she was just a girl, in a couple of Lewis’s first shows. Other shows as well. She helped me, and I made some of these costumes she squeezes herself into.”
The Blue Moon Circus Page 18