The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  Before bedtime, Ania set the circus tickets on her dresser among a clutter of hairpins, buttons, and unread letters from Charlie, then knelt before the Black Madonna. With candle flames undisturbed, with the neighborhood noises of boys roughhousing, screen doors slamming, dogs barking to scare the world, Ania tried to explain why she took the tickets, how she so wanted Teddy to spend a day laughing, his eyes opened to a place beyond his imagining in the way her eyes had been opened the day she and Charlie arrived in America.

  “For the sake of the boy,” she prayed, “bless my sin.”

  Teddy appeared then at her door, his cheeks flushed and eyes struggling against sleep not quite broken. “I had a nightmare,” he said. He crawled onto the mattress, and Ania blew out the candles. She bunched the sheet at the foot of the bed because it was too stifling even for that, then lay beside her boy. She held him as she would a doll, felt him expand with each whistling breath, and she knew that anything done for him was, yes, for the good.

  Though Ania had never seen a circus, a carnival had passed through Królik Polski after each Easter, and the performers sometimes roomed with families. One year, following a difficult winter, Papa rented the children’s room to a snake charmer. The man wore a glass-bead necklace and bracelets that rattled, and his skin looked gray as spent ashes. Ania pretended to mind her chores when he was around, but all the while watched him—how he walked with a hop, how he smoothed his eyebrows with fingers dampened by the tip of his tongue—and as she listened to him sing to his serpents in some alien language, something in her grew giddy at his strangeness. When the carnival left the village, he sneaked away, leaving for his room and board only a snakeskin tacked to the wall over Ania’s bed. Papa wanted to burn it, but Ania begged to keep it. That day, and for years after, she would lose herself in the patterns of the skin.

  The morning of the circus was hot and damp; the afternoon worse. Teddy led her by the hand along crowded Barbour Street, past vendors selling orange slices, past accordion players, tumblers, and jugglers—Teddy tugging because she never walked fast enough—and finally to the circus grounds, where one enormous tent rose amidst smaller tents and railroad cars. A red-faced man in a lime-colored coat waved people forward, promising “Mysteries, Magic, and Amazement! The Greatest Gathering since the Heavenly Host!” and Ania thought he looked beautiful, and she believed him.

  Dizzy with faces and sounds, she pulled Teddy to her and pushed toward the big top, inhaling the musky air, welcoming the jumble of color, amazed at the pictures painted on boards that showed how men could swallow fire, how women could grow beards, how boys Teddy’s age could live joined at the hip. Teddy pointed at a clown—“Look!”—and at a pony—“Look!”—and each time Ania looked not with her own eyes but with his, sharing his awe.

  At the big-top entrance, while she and Teddy waited to show their tickets, Ania noticed a clown, sitting away from the crowd on a trunk, nearly hidden by a fold in the tent. The clown had placed his hat and a frizzy yellow wig in his lap, and he cupped a cigarette in his hand, pinching it between his forefinger and thumb, its long ash drooping. Elbows on knees, he patted his brow with a handkerchief, then looked at the damp spot on the cloth. Ania thought of Charlie home from work, in his rocking chair, his hat on the table beside it, forehead pink where the hatband had pressed.

  The clown raised his face, noticed her. Past the painted grin, past the white face that ended at his thin hair, Ania saw in his eyes the same look Charlie had brought home from the factory each evening, the same vacant weariness she saw in the mirror after a day spent on Walbridge Road. A line of sweat slid the length of the clown’s cheek, and Ania recalled soiled bathrooms in expensive houses and fine dust settled on crystal bowls. The circus music became noise. The air stank with animal droppings. She offered her tickets to a man who tore them, mumbling, “Grandstand, ma’am.”

  Teddy begged for peanuts, so they stopped at a vendor who scooped a bagful from a barrel drum that spun over a coal fire. Then Teddy led Ania to folding chairs near the top of the crowded grandstand, so high they could almost touch the sagging canvas above. She held Teddy’s hand, warm as a biscuit from the oven, then wrapped her arms around him. He felt so small, so easy to surround and swallow into her body. She rested her chin on the delicate bone of his shoulder so they touched cheek to soft cheek, and she smelled the tang of his skin.

  A man wearing a red coat and a black stovepipe hat leapt into the center ring. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he yelled into a megaphone. “Children of all ages! Welcome to the big top! Welcome to the Ring-ling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus!”

  A brass band played a rump-de-diddly fanfare while horses, clowns, and dogs filled the rings. Ania’s hands fell lightly on Teddy’s shoulders and she watched, surprised, as the light in his face disappeared, replaced by fear. It seemed too much for him, all at once.

  Then the rings emptied—animals scampering back to their cages, clowns disappearing in folds of the tent—and trapeze artists appeared on platforms high above the rings. Teddy turned in her lap to hide his face in her side. Ania recognized a song the band played: “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

  At that moment, a flash of orange appeared on the other side of the big top, then rose up the wall of the tent. Ania thought it must be part of the performance, it seemed such a miraculous thing. But the crowd fell quiet, and then a thunder rumbled from all around and someone yelled “Fire!” and the thunder exploded, flames charging up and across the billowing roof of the tent, people rushing from the bleachers, knocking chairs underfoot. A trapeze artist jumped from his platform, and Ania watched him twist through air to the sudden ground. She grabbed Teddy and chased the crowd, but at the bottom of the bleachers her foot twisted in a chair and she fell, her face scraping dirt, Teddy tumbling beneath her. Someone stepped on her; her ribs cracked, her breath shot away. “Mama!” Teddy cried, but heat struck the back of Ania’s neck and she curled into a ball, screaming in answer to the screams in her ears, kicking her legs as people trampled them. “Let me up!” she shouted as she sucked and coughed black smoke. The heat wrapped round her, wave after wave sinking deeper until it was underneath her skin and invading her muscles and bone. She managed to stand, but with knifing pain her legs gave way and she fell again. Teddy, in a tantrum, his distorted face unfamiliar through soot and fear, slapped at the ground now strewn with peanuts from the empty bag he yet gripped with a tiny fist. Overhead, flames crept from the blackness like sluggish lightning. Fire rained as a flap of the tent collapsed, swatches of fiery canvas falling on the scrambling crowd and the panicked animals snarling and chattering in cages. A tent pole crashed near Ania, and flaming ropes lashed her face and legs. She beat her arms against her burning skirt as a boy tumbled past, his shirt gone except the buttoned cuffs, the skin of his arms and chest turned black and puddled, and Ania reached for him, but the boy was too fast. And now even the ground burned, and bodies red and black writhed among the fractured chairs. “Mother!” Ania wailed to heaven, praying and cursing in two languages, defying everything, “Mother!” She wrapped her arms around Teddy and, though the muscles of her legs ripped with each step, she limped first one way and then another, forward then back, the heat so massive she couldn’t breathe, her arms tingling as hair evaporated and skin blistered, a stink in the air worse than any she had known.

  And then she stopped. She stopped.

  Above her in the flames she saw a haloed face, shimmering through the smoke, and Ania squinted against the ash dust in her eyes to see more clearly the two scars, the placid mouth, the wide-set and beatific eyes of the Black Madonna. Teddy wailed, but she heard him only at a great distance, his noise baffled by another sound that glided through her—a rising, resonating chime. Ania closed her eyes, touched her dry tongue to her lips. When she looked again through tears, all her panic disappeared, and in its place Ania felt overcome by an exhilarating serenity, and she stepped toward the face, forward into the flames, reaching out to the hellish sky.

&nb
sp; Ania floated in warmth as if in a pond of summer water, or maybe in the air, her heart marking a gentle rhythm as she breathed the sweetness of wildflowers, and then it was gone, only a memory of pleasure that receded as if the thing remembered never was. In its place, Ania had the sense that patches of her skin were peeled away, raw and naked and hot, and thirst emptied her throat of anything but the need for water. She gasped, and the air she breathed seemed barely enough, but each breath—no matter how slight—racked her from bone to flesh. Her heart raced. From all sides she heard groans and shrieks and shouts, and she smelled an odor like rotting bark and then the stench of something burned, and she knew that stench came from her.

  She cried Teddy’s name.

  A masked nurse with gloved hands forced her back down on the hospital bed. Half of Ania’s face hurt beyond screaming, and her right hand did, too, and her legs throbbed, and she shivered but could think only about Teddy and the fire and his face marked with ash and smoke and clean lines where tears had washed the skin. Where was her boy? Was he all right? Was he alive?

  How long this lasted she never could recall. In years to come, she remembered only her fear, a commotion, hands everywhere, faces masked except for their frightened eyes, voices shouting, everything white and shiny, and she remembered, too, a need to have Teddy curled beside her, and then a whisper at her ear that Teddy was alive and that a doctor would explain everything. After that, only the pain bothered her.

  But all that day, no doctor spoke of Teddy. Though she pleaded to see him, the nurses said no, she couldn’t leave her bed and neither could he. When a nurse came to cut and peel and scrub away the dead skin around her face and on her hand, Ania asked again. She whimpered his name even as the skin came away, exposing patches of pink nerves that bolted at the touch of air so that other nurses had to hold Ania’s kicking legs and flailing arms. A nurse shaved Ania’s head, and another smeared cream on Ania’s face, then covered her right eye with bandages. A few hours later, when those bandages came off, Ania screamed curses in Polish and in English because her deep, dead skin came off with them.

  When the nurses and doctors left her alone to rest, when the pain, though never gone, rested too, she worked to understand the pleasure she had felt, the singing joy of body and soul that began in the fury of the tent when she had looked up and seen the scarred, sooted face of her Blessed Mother. But she could recall only a dim picture, and the sensations remained impossible to re-create. She remembered stumbling forward—Teddy in her arms—toward that face, toward the fire, too. Others had passed her, hurrying the other way, but she headed deeper into the tent, past empty cages and burning chairs and an up-ended peanut cart. Now, amidst other patients who cried and moaned, the cruelty of the tent seemed the thing most real, and she wondered whether she had been delivered or betrayed.

  “Ania?” Mrs. Patterson said, and Ania awoke, ending a dream of Mass in the small church back home; Father Petrykowski’s face had been painted like a clown’s, and he had refused her the Host, holding a lit candle to her lips instead.

  Mrs. Patterson wore a surgical mask, and her hands were gloved; a moment passed before Ania recognized the eyes, before she realized they belonged not to a nurse come to cause pain but to someone else. For the first time in days Ania felt relief, but that lasted no longer than a breath, because she remembered her theft and what had come of it.

  “Don’t cry, Ania. Everything’s all right now.”

  Ania listened to that early-morning voice full of promise and light, and she wanted to confess to her, relieve the guilt, but who then would be left to visit her when Mrs. Patterson, betrayed and disgusted, walked away?

  “I brought Teddy into the fire.” Ania’s voice broke, and she clutched the collar of her paper-thin gown. “The nurses still won’t let me see him. Bacteria, they say. He’s my son, I say. But they’re hard-hearted.”

  “Oh, I know. The weeks can seem forever, but you’ll see him soon. I know you will.”

  With a finger from her good hand Ania traced circles on the bed-sheet, the circles becoming an oval, the oval becoming a face, and Ania added two straight lines as scars. “Teddy and I, we send messages through a priest,” Ania said. “He writes them for us, carries them back and forth.”

  “I’ll visit Teddy, too. I’ll tell him that you miss him.” Mrs. Patterson pointed at the burn on Ania’s face. “That looks like it’s healing,” she said. “Here. I brought some things from your apartment. Clothes for when you leave, some mail. There’s a cablegram from Charlie.” She held up an envelope.

  Ania shivered. “Will you take off your mask?” she said. “I have to see a face.”

  “They told me not to,” Mrs. Patterson said, but then she reached behind her head and unknotted the strings. The mask fell around her neck, and with obvious effort Mrs. Patterson smiled, her lips daubed rose, a copper shadow over her eyes and rouge on her cheeks, her brown hair rolled into a bun that leaned down the back of her neck. It seemed to Ania a perfect face, a face Mr. Patterson must miss.

  “Shall I read the cable from Charlie? I can leave it for you to open later.”

  He would blame her. Ania imagined words of anger and accusation, how she had hurt him. Though afraid, she said, “Please.”

  Mrs. Patterson tugged the envelope open and unfolded the tissue-thin paper. “Good news,” she said. “The army’s granted him emergency leave. He’s coming home.”

  He walked in on Sunday afternoon a week later, dressed in a starched uniform, a khaki-colored necktie tucked inside his shirt above the chest button, a double-stripe chevron on each sleeve. His hair was trimmed short, and he wore a surgical mask. One gloved hand held his cap, folded flat; in the other he carried a box wrapped in silver paper and red ribbon. When he sat beside her, he set the box on the floor and reached toward her elbow.

  “The nurses say no,” she said.

  He pulled his hand away. His eyes softened as if distressed by how she had changed, and it was only then she knew how badly her face must be burned. The nurses, the doctors, the priest—none had brought her a mirror.

  “I wish I had been there,” he said, and she heard in his voice that he relived the fire, too, imagined her there, her and Teddy, and she felt embarrassed by his weakness: She deserved scorn, not sympathy. Ania turned her face away. Three beds down, a doctor and nurses worked on another survivor whose moans sometimes rose into screams.

  “They wouldn’t let me bring flowers,” he said. She heard him unwrap the package, the tape snapping, the paper crumpling. “It’s a picture,” he said.

  She looked and saw the three of them together: Teddy, an infant in his christening gown, on her lap; Charlie with his arm around the back of her chair. Ania had insisted on sending a print to her father in Poland, though Charlie told her the Germans controlled everything and would never deliver it. Charlie, always so practical.

  He set the happy family on her bedside.

  She knew why he had brought the portrait, and she feared a reunion would create a household even worse than what they had shared before; it was worse now for his kindness. More than ever, she wanted the flames and the punishment, wanted the heat to burn away her shame, her guilt, her remorse, leave all of it ashes and her, too, if purging the rest required it. Perhaps she was meant for the fire; perhaps that had been why Our Lady appeared in the smoke. She was a mother, after all, and didn’t all mothers understand that miracles—even the forgiveness of Ania’s sins—required pain and suffering? Ania had escaped the fire too soon. A mistake. For if she had remained in the presence of the Black Madonna, all that was wrong and sinful would have been engulfed, purified, erased in the passion, and Ania would lie now in her hospital bed bathed in grace.

  “You can’t come home,” she said to Charlie. “You left. You left.”

  His face—the parts she could see—changed: the eyes widened, the ears reddened. “You can’t come home,” she said again. “And you can’t have Teddy. You can’t …”

  When Charlie walked out
, he took the photograph.

  On the day Ania left the hospital, the nurses gave her permission to visit Teddy. They made her wear a white gown over her clothes, as if she were still a patient, and a white mask over her face. She changed in a lavatory. A month had passed since the fire, and for the first time she saw her scar, the skin raised in a purple patch over the right half of her forehead, along her scalp, covering her right eye, ending in a line that ran across her cheekbone to her ear. With her good hand, she touched the rubbery new flesh that intrigued and horrified her. To cover her shaved head, Ania tied a brilliant blue scarf the nurses gave her as a farewell.

  He lay with other boys in a room made for them, the walls painted blue and all the beds small. Teddy’s bed, with bars around it, made Ania think of the cages around the circus rings. But wires and tubes snaked into this cage, and in the midst of it her baby lay swaddled in white sheets.

  A nurse lowered the bars on one side, and Ania sat in a chair beside the bed. Looking at Teddy frightened her, even more because he was asleep. Wrapped in gauze, forehead sweaty and head shaved bald—Teddy looked less like her boy than some mistake the doctors made while building a child from scratch. Tubes ran to his foot and his groin. The skin on his face, the only skin that had been spared, had lost its softness. His arms and legs were tied with cloth strips to the bars, so he was spread like a bird over the sheets.

  “He’ll scratch his burns,” the nurse said. “Even with his toes if he can reach. If he does that, the grafts might not take, or the infections might get worse.”

  Ania asked to touch him, but the nurse shook her head.

  “Teddy,” Ania whispered, “it’s Mama.”

  He opened his eyes, but she could tell he didn’t recognize her. Not with the mask.